#i think he became less stalwart in those sorts of values as time went on because as his own pain and his own exhaustion got worse

[all-cursed]

𝐖𝐇𝐘 𝐃𝐎 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐇𝐔𝐑𝐓 ?

DOC HOLLIDAY:

you're choking on how much you have to try

you have tried. you have carried the weight of the world on your shoulders and accepted more responsibilities than you have ever wanted, even intended to gain. it isn't crushing - you are strong enough to hold it - but you are choking. you don't know what to do with it. you don't know where it goes, how to move this weight everyone knows you can hold onto, and do you even want to get rid of it? Never. You would not give this to - force this on - anyone else. but you /can't/. but you are choking on it. your body will hold it up even when you lose all the air in your lungs, and your footing, and your courage. it does not mind choking you. it seems almost designed to do so. if you weren't wrung out you wouldn't be doing this thing properly.

[ghostmartyr]

Fic: untitled prologue of a thing

Usually I post fic segments with what amounts to a list of ingredients up top, but I don’t want too much formality getting in the way of the first post of this project (which is why that title for the post is allowed to exist).

This story is a long time coming, and I’m really excited about it. It’s a For Want of a Nail AU doubling as a Bodyguard AU, featuring Queen Ymir and Historia as the captain of her royal guard. Shippiness ensues. ...Eventually.

For the prologue, only one part of that description comes close to mattering, but hopefully it’s still its own kind of fun.

Ymir’s not really the complaining type.

On the streets, the louder you whined about how much life sucked for you, the louder the screams when a bunch of helpful people got to making it suck a lot more. That was before they started asking about your blood. If uniforms were involved, there wasn’t much of an after.

With the old man, it was even simpler. There was no way in hell she was going to complain about having a decent pair of shoes instead of counting on last week’s layer of mud to keep her feet from getting scraped up.

A few months ago, she wasn’t awake enough to consider the option.

Now is a bit different from any of those times. Locked up under a few tons of rock and dirt, hidden away from everything she never cared about, and passing the hours counting the same cracks in the stone under her feet, she’s starting to think a bit on the value of telling people where to shove it. Goddesses can’t say things like that, but maybe whatever she is now can. Maybe whatever she now wants to, even if that doesn’t make a lick of good sense. She’s had worse. Been worse, too. All it takes is closing her eyes the wrong second and the rampaging monster comes back, hunger and heaving breaths bearing down on anything stupid enough to get near her.

A real prison isn’t so bad after all that. The only people down here she has to worry about killing are the tools outside her cell who look at her like those days never really ended. She gets a fresh blanket every once in a while, and they’re good about keeping her fed. Back in her first life, the cuffs around her hands would have slipped right off by now.

Maybe that’s the point, but she’s definitely not getting on their case over that. Add a few windows, and it’s about as cozy as any home she dreamt up as a kid. Especially now that no one cares what’s inside her head. Interrogators haven’t bothered with her in a while. The weirdos who kept dragging her off for experiments haven’t, either, and it’s a bit pathetic that she’s disappointed over that. The air outside her cage isn’t any fresher, and the cuffs are even tighter.

She needed a break. She’s too young to have sixty years of problems, and every second people talk to her down here, she can feel more years piling on. Hiding away from everything isn’t the worst thing for her. Even if it means no more stars.

Or grass.

Trees.

Anything interesting at all.

The point is, complaining isn’t going to change any of it. She doesn’t know what will, and maybe she doesn’t want to care about that right now, but mouthing off could get her into a place where she doesn’t ever get a new blanket.

But it’s been months. A few weeks now with no guards. Once a day someone runs down and skids her food under the bars, then runs back to whatever more important things they’ve got going with a look like the old Ymir’s chasing down their tail.

Months and weeks and years, and now there’s this.

She can smell it, wafting down the spooky corridor. Smoked and heavy, the stench curls through the air, teasing the chance for each breath to catch the heavenly scent. Meat. Hunger has her mouth watering, and each swallow wrestles with the bile fighting its way up. Her hands are damp and limp, and her chains jangle loudly when she tries to wipe them off on her shirt.

They’re still normal hands, which is cool. Small enough that cracking a few heads open would take some work. She’s probably a bad person for thinking of which few heads she’d go for first, but they did throw her in prison.

Not that she’d usually complain about that.

Ymir rips herself up off her cot and marches the few steps she can walk over to the bars.

“Hey!” she shouts down the creepy hall with its creepy mood smells. “You want to deal with something your size, get on over here before I go for the raw food instead!”

Her teeth clack together in the echo. Because she’s pissed and gritting them. That’s rage her tiny hands are shaking with, too. She’s graduated from goddess to unholy terror, and if someone wants to mess with her, they should think twice and take their stupid cooking out of her hole.

She counts her heartbeats waiting for some sign of life outside her cell. The flicker of torchlight doesn’t count today. She gets to about twenty before her ears catch something new.

Footsteps. The same tromping kind that show up whenever the guards are around to check on her instead of sort of looking nearby the cell and running back the way they came before she gets so much as a hello. Goody.

Smoke’s following them. Ymir used up all her luck not dying when she was killed, so that’s not really a surprise. Her inconsolable rage tightens her jaw a bit more. The shadow of a person hits the bit of wall leading up to her cell. Definitely carrying something.

When color enters the scene, Ymir allows that some of the gnawing in her stomach might have something to do with dread. If the tall blond soldier notices anything, and he does, because she’s been down here long enough to know things like that about these people, he doesn’t make a noise. The platter he’s carrying hisses a little, tiny pops crackling invitingly right outside her bars. Ymir goes with ignoring it until her teeth ache.

The tromping footsteps stop in front of her cell, and the stalwart soldier spares her a brief nod before placing the stupidly shiny dish on the floor and skidding it into arm’s reach. It’s a little funny, watching him crouch down in the dirt. He almost reaches undignified, but that’s ruined when he stands back up.

Ymir doesn’t move.

He does that thing with his eyes where he’s pretending to smile without any of the muscle effort. “I thought you could use some food.”

His hands stay clasped behind his back. Ymir keeps her eyes off the plate while her nose itches. “I get food every day. You were pretty clear about that. Sir,” she adds. Because she can. The old man wouldn’t call the tone anything to do with manners, but the guy in front of her is so full of soldierly righteousness that he demands some kind of title.

Erwin Smith. He who thought up throwing her in a dungeon instead of killing her. The man who now brings secret prisoners freshly cooked food.

Once upon a time, she knew someone like that. He held out a hand to a starving street urchin, and the brat became a goddess. All because he fed her, and he asked.

Ymir can’t say she likes where this is going.

Erwin’s got a shiny new wing symbol tied around his neck, and something about him has always been a little crazy when he looks at her, but the manic light in his eyes has a power behind it that even his nutso scientist doesn’t have. He’s always walked taller than her, being about twice her size, but right now Ymir finds herself believing that he makes his living out of killing giants.

It doesn’t feel right. Not when everyone she’s seen down here for the last few weeks has looked like they’re going to hurl any second.

Ymir knows the feeling. She glances down at the plate. Her eyes skitter over the steak to the buttered bread. Hunger that belongs to her, not some shadow, drags her down to the floor, and she stuffs a roll in her mouth before bad daydreams talk her out of it.

It’s one of the best things she’s ever tasted, and if she could run, she’d be sprinting out the nearest door. Seeing as she can’t, might as well make the most of it. Warmth soothes the building nausea, and the bread is so soft that her teeth tear it apart with a gentle nudge. Despite herself, her roving eyes go back to the plate instead of watching the silent soldier.

“Aren’t you people having some kind of food crisis?” she says around the next roll. “You must really want something out of me to set yourself back like this.”

Erwin smiles with his mouth this time. “I’m glad you’re keeping some consideration of our circumstances in mind. It cost less than you might think, though.”

Ymir licks a drop of butter off her finger. “Wow. You really know how to sell a bribe.”

Erwin continues talking like he doesn’t hear her. Forget that they could probably save some time if he just went about this honestly. She’s a kid, not stupid. “You see, twenty percent of our population is now dead,” he says calmly. “Leaving the survivors to celebrate the spoils of war.”

Ymir stops in the middle of reaching for one of the berries littering the bribery spread. She looks up and stares. “Twenty—sorry, what?”

“Twenty percent of our population,” he repeats. Like he’s reciting a school lecture. “We sit here reaping the benefits of their… sacrifice.” He nods at her stilled hands. “Eat up. It would be remiss of us not to appreciate what they’ve left for us.”

Ymir rolls her eyes and takes a sip from the waterskin. There’s a hole opening up in her stomach, and that’s a feeling that’s dropped her straight into a living hell several times now.

She didn’t spend that much time inside the walls before hitting underground. She can remember enough, though. People crying. Monsters chewing off heads. Children tinier than her screaming for their parents.

She saw enough of the walls to know she didn’t even see one percent of the people trapped in them.

“You still haven’t said what you want out of me. And don’t say nothing.” Ymir plops a berry in her mouth. “People don’t share sob stories with prisoners unless they’re after something.”

“It’s hardly a sob story. Simply the facts.” Erwin takes a step closer to the cell. “Our leadership chose to send out thousands of untrained citizens to their deaths so that the rest of the population might live. That was all that was in their power to do in the current situation: encouraging the catastrophic loss of life to happen in an environment where no one would have to care.”

The dark enemy Ymir recognizes as her conscience twists into knots in her chest. She puts her next roll down. “Still nothing to do with me.”

“You said,” Erwin says, “that when our people retreated to this island, it was the king’s power that protected them.”

“I said a lot of things.” She did. Interrogations brought that out of her, apparently. Along with the absurd fun of watching the world these people thought they knew falling to pieces in a few short minutes. Fun is the last thing on her mind right now. Hitting herself for her big mouth is a frontrunner, but she’s in enough psychic torment to give herself a pass on that.

“That for generations, that power has stood between us and destruction.”

“Yeah, looks like it’s really helped you guys out.”

“No. It hasn’t,” Erwin says.

Ymir examines one of the cracks in her cell wall. “Does this place not have sarcasm, or…”

“It hasn’t,” Erwin continues, dropping the bland school teacher tone for something entirely more frightening, “because it’s missing. Our true King, as well as his Titan.” Not good. Not good at all. The whole corridor is silent, but Ymir’s own heartbeat is too deafening to care. “It is a vacancy that has cost thousands of lives.”

The crack on the wall actually starts in the floor, right next to one of the cot’s legs. Someone did a crappy job installing the thing. They’re probably dead now. Luck isn’t really a thing she sees following around someone who designs underground prisons.

Berry juice is still dripping off her teeth. With the smell right there, it doesn’t take much to imagine something thicker, with a little more tang, and the sound of crunching bones is too loud to be a real memory, but she knows it happened. Her second chance didn’t come free. It picked up with as much violence as the first left off with.

Swallowing takes a sickening effort, and she grins at Erwin.

“So what, this where you string me up for massacring the royal family?”

Erwin smiles back, and going with the rest of the terror is the sure knowledge that whatever the hell he’s selling, he believes in it. He believes in it like no one should believe in anything. That’s how you get stoned to death and turned into monsters.

“Anything you did or didn’t do is past the point, Ymir.” She never should have told them her name. “Our world is missing its key player. We need a replacement.”

Ymir closes her eyes.

She never got this conversation before.

“What do I care about your problems?”

She never got a balcony seat to how stupid she’s capable of being. She even felt smart. Food and a warm bed. You’d have to be crazy to turn all that down.

This time, she already has that.

Erwin’s voice comes at her like the last bell toll before the public gets to pick their ammunition up from the ground. “I don’t know,” he says softly. “What I do know is that you came into our custody because your refusal to take our lives left you at a disadvantage.”

She has a blanket. Food and water.

She’s not a rampaging monster.

Things have been worse.

Better, too.

“Twenty percent of our population is gone, Ymir. What I am offering you is a chance to save the other eighty.”

For that one moment, staring up at the starry sky and breathing free air, she was the happiest she’d ever been. There was a joy that nothing could touch bursting to life in her soul, and everything that had gone on, as bad as it was, had felt worth it for that perfect set of seconds.

Then she threw it all away trying to save some dumb kids from botching their exit plan.

Ymir opens her eyes.

“You’ll get me out of here?”

She sucks at second chances.