Chapter Text
So—so there was this prince. Once. Of this tiny little kingdom. Just a little kid with little hands and this shiny gold halo for hair. And he had big round eyes that went glossy anytime he looked out his tower window or talked about what he thought was outside of it. And he did talk about it, because—because he had friends, right? He wasn’t locked up in there alone. He had friends, and me and Mikasa were really close with him. We spent all their time together, we played together, and told each other stories and fell down the stairs and got into trouble—that’s what friends are, isn’t it?
And we were in the court, sort of. Just from a minor family though.
And he couldn’t stay a prince forever because that’s never how it goes, that’s not the point of a prince if he’s the only one, and he was. And one day his parents left the palace grounds and they didn’t come back, not ever. They’d crossed paths with a dragon, before they were everywhere, and it killed them and it cursed their whole line, and… And the prince was too young to rule and his grandfather was too old to rule so he became regent and…the country moved on. And out. They couldn’t stay in a cursed kingdom, so they had to move on. That’s what the prince told us; we all had to go. And me and Mikasa moved on, too, because the prince was too busy now trying to find some way to break a dragon curse, and it wasn’t safe to be around him.
So the prince stayed in his castle, and we went outside the palace walls. Only, I didn’t want to be outside—that was my best friend sitting on a throne that was too big for him, and I wanted to be with him. To look after him. Because the prince needed looking after. He always fell off the bannister when they were trying to slide down it, and—
No, I know, that’s not the point. That’s not the story. Fine.
So I decided that I'd become a knight, since it was only the knights who got to stay with the prince—they got to stay in the kingdom to help fight. But to become a knight you have to be a squire, first. So we went out looking for people who needed squires, but nobody wanted a couple of brats from some no-name household in some cursed kingdom. We even started small, asking the more local households, so that we wouldn’t seem arrogant. Eventually we had to start aiming higher, and higher, until eventually we came to the greatest (scariest, most intimidating ) knight in the whole court. He was never stationed at the palace, so neither were we, but we got to learn to fight.
Then the regent died. And everyone in the kingdom cried for him—everyone, right down to some measly nothing squire—and we all thought, ‘How is the prince holding up? Is he going to be alright?’ Only when the prince appeared again he wasn’t the prince anymore. He was the king.
Rumours started to spread about the king, and how he was—cold. Ruthless. Heartless, even. And we didn’t believe it! We knew better than that—we knew our prince was this sweet kid, this genuine, loving kid, and that you wouldn’t ever be like what the people were saying. You couldn’t be.
But then we won. Not against the dragons. Not yet—even though we did fight them a lot. But we trained, and we fought, and in the end we were called to court to be knighted, and…
Eren finally lifted his eyes from the blazingly blue carpet on which he’d been kneeling. He’d been staring at it for so long that when he looked at Armin, a network of vague scarlet afterimages was wreathed around and over him, separating kneeling knight from enthroned king.
Even through the crimson, Eren could make out the flat, unmodulated frigidity of Armin’s expression, the harder lines of his face, the paler cast to his skin. Eren had seen frozen streams with more warmth in them than Armin’s eyes.
He should have known. To be brought before your best friend, to smile and step forward and have your exclamation about how much you’ve missed him interrupted by a clipped command to kneel—to, upon being knighted and trying to rise, have the words again start falling from your lips only to be told that what he said in court should be said to the whole court—that was to know. The rumours were true. The prince was dead; long live the king.
“Their placement, your majesty?”
Eren let himself look at the speaker: a tall man, square-jawed and unreadable, standing just beside the throne. Erwin was his name. Levi spoke of him often, and highly. Erwin spent a great deal of time out in the wilderness where Mikasa and Eren had been off hunting for dragons, but Eren had never been in his presence for so long before. He was one of the king’s closest advisors.
Armin blinked. It was just half a second with his eyes closed, but in that half-second, with those changed eyes hidden, Eren could pretend that this was still his friend.
“Mikasa in the personal guard,” the king said, "stationed by the throne. Eren to the sixth tower of the gates.”
“Th—the gates—?!”, Eren said, nearly launching to his feet. It was the furthest position imaginable from the throne for a knight inducted to the high court—it was where the rejects, the pity promotions, the incompetent but politically expedient cousins were sent.
Mikasa was kneeling next to him, having just been knighted herself. She tilted her head just enough in his direction that he stopped himself from doing anything rash.
For the moment, anyway. As soon as they were out of the throne room and away from the stifled snickers of the courtiers who'd come to watch, Eren said, “What the hell is going on?!”, at a less than cautious volume.
Levi was leading him and Mikasa down a narrower corridor. Mikasa trailed her fingers along the rough stones. It was the first time they’d been home since they’d been children. Every stone and hall and hiding place was familiar to them after a childhood spent tearing through the place at top speed, often hiding from Armin’s guards or from each other. There were more cracks in the walls now than there used to be, and scorch marks splayed across the defenses. The kingdom had not been so rife with firebreathers when Eren had been a child, and they certainly had not been this antagonistic.
“We came here to get your assignments,” Levi said. “We got them. I’m not sure why you’re having a tantrum about it.”
“He put me as far from him as possible without actually launching me out of the castle with a fucking catapult! He’s my best friend—he isn’t supposed to be like this!”
“He has a curse to lift, Jaeger, and you have a post to maintain. There’s no room for friends in this. Report to me tonight before you go out to the gates, and I'll give you the basics of how this goes. Oh, and dress warm if you like your fingers.”
He turned into a branching hallway that would lead him to his quarters. Eren and Mikasa continued on straight until the mess hall opened out before them. It was smoky and dim and discouragingly quiet. There was a stack of bowls and spoons laid out on the counter, a large pot of stew bubbling over the fireplace, and one lonely cluster of people in the far corner with their heads bent over their food. Most of the broad, scrubbed tables were bare. Eren and the other two had snuck into this room often in earlier years, as far as three children could really sneak into a room full of trained knights. There’d always been bread to spare then, and there’d always been friendly (if scarred-up) faces willing to entertain them with a story or two.
Most of those knights were buried now.
Eren and Mikasa got their stew and were fully prepared to eat with only each other for company. The other knights present seemed to form a closed circle. There was no point intruding, especially after that resounding humiliation in the court.
Then one of the others spotted them and lifted halfway from his bench.
“Hey, shithead! And Mikasa.” The weak, rather embarrassed follow-up identified the speaker even before Eren recognized the voice. The speaker abandoned his place at the table, strode over to Eren, and pushed him back half a step. “The hell are you doing here?”, Jean demanded.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Eren said, salvaging his balance before he spilled his stew. “You here sucking up, looking for shelter? Because you went exactly the wrong direction for that. The further you get from this place, the better your odds of surviving.”
“So of course this is exactly where you turn up,” Jean said. He snatched the stew from Eren’s hands. “C’mon. You sit with us.” He looked at Mikasa. “You—um. You sit wherever you want, obviously. But also obviously we’d like you to sit with us. And.” He winced and returned to his seat. He elbowed one of his peers until he shuffled along the bench far enough to make room for Eren and Mikasa.
As Eren settled onto the bench between Jean and Mikasa, the conversation turned to where they’d all been stationed most recently, how much action they’d seen, and on along all the familiar conversational paths. Eren even started to feel a little better, despite that the stew was so much thick grey mush and despite that other than Jean’s, he knew none of these faces.
“How long’ve you been here, anyway?”, Eren asked. “We hadn’t seen you in so long we thought you were charred on some field out there somewhere.” He waved vaguely with his spoon.
“I don’t know—it’s been on and off for a few years,” Jean said. “This time it’s just been a few months so far, but I’ve got a permanent position now, so I guess I’m staying.”
“A few years?”, Mikasa asked. Both she and Eren were staring at their fellow. They had been scrambling to get back to the castle since virtually the moment they’d set foot outside it, but Levi had never been called back. He’d been assigned to seeking out dragon nests, in search of the one responsible for killing the king's parents. Armin had needed his best fighter out there fighting, not playing defend-the-castle.
“Yeah,” Jean said. “Not that I was on knight duty the whole time—I only got knighted, what, this time last year? Why do you two look so surprised, anyway? You squire for Erwin, you spend as much running around with a dragon scorching your ass in the castle as out in the middle of nowhere. Neither's really all that fun.”
“There’ve been a lot here, right?”, Eren asked.
“Fucking tons of them,” Jean said with a nod. The bantering tone had left his voice. “It’s been ridiculous, especially lately. Every couple of weeks we get hit. Sometimes it’s just one or two of the little ones, but sometimes it’s…”
“What are the casualties like?”, Mikasa asked. Jean shook his head.
“Depends on the size of the lizard, and on how good the defense strategy is that particular month. They’re always trying new things. They work well enough that we're not all digested by now, anyway.”
“Where’d he end up stationing you?”, Eren asked. He would kill for some good company out on those walls. Jean was competent enough that he shouldn’t have been out there, but Eren figured that if Armin could put him of all people there, he could do it to anyone.
The corners of Jean’s mouth sagged.
“The tower,” he said.
“What’s so bad about that?”
“Oh, just the fact that it’s the centre of all the action.” Eren and Mikasa frowned in unison.
“Why?”, she asked.
“Well he’s got this ridiculous idea in his head that it’s cleaner, or something, if he’s sort of—up above most of the castle when they attack, so that we don’t have two-hundred-foot dragons breaking through the roof of the throne room, I guess. I mean it makes some sense? I can’t say I really like him sitting up there by himself though—”
“Stop,” Eren said, “stop, you’re saying—they go for Armin specifically?”
Jean stopped with a spoonful of stew halfway to his mouth.
“You didn’t know? The court mage's been looking into it for years, and that’s still one of the only bits of the curse we knew for sure. They fly straight for him when they turn up.”
“And you put him up in the tower by himself!?”
The spoon plinked back into the bowl as Jean tossed his hands up in the air.
“Were you not listening? It’s him—it’s where he wants to be. He gets absolutely vicious when you try to take that from him, too—”
“Shut the fuck up!”, Eren snapped, shooting from the bench. “What’d you know about it?!”
“Probably more than the guy who just spent more than half the last decade riding around in the countryside,” Jean said. “I’ve been here often enough, alright? I’m not insulting him. I’m just—”
“Going on about things you know nothing about! How about you fucking don’t!?” He stormed out, leaving his dinner barely touched. Mikasa rose halfway as if to follow him, but he slammed the mess hall door shut behind him.
“Touchier than I remember,” Jean muttered.
“Did you hear where he got assigned?”, Mikasa asked.
“Nah. Food takes priority over dubbing ceremonies. I would’ve gone if I’d known it was the two of you, though.”
“He’s starting at the gates.”
Jean’s breath hissed out between his teeth.
“Ouch. That's...a bit of a distance to throw in there. Y’know, the way you two talked about Armin, I always sort of figured you’d parted on pretty good terms.”
“We did.” Mikasa glanced again towards the door. Then she picked up her bowl of stew in one hand, Eren’s in the other, and followed him. She found Eren in the first place she looked. He was stomping around one of the broad halls of the upper castle. The wind snaked into it now through the holes torn in the roof, but the room was still recognizable. It had smooth, colourful, patterned stone floors—now pitted with debris and blasted black in sections—that they’d used as the playing field for any number of made-up games. Armin had ‘held court’ here for the first time, with his lords and ladies consisting of Eren, Mikasa, and a few of the other children from the castle. Class distinction hadn’t been of any real importance in Armin’s childhood court. Really, that remained the case now, as Jean’s newfound knighthood proved; he was the son of the stablemaster from the next town over, with no noble blood whatsoever. Climbing the social ladder became a lot easier when the top rungs kept getting bitten off.
“Eren,” Mikasa said, without stepping far into the space. “You should eat.”
“No!” That was as much of an argument as he presented. She stepped forward onto a red square of tile.
“You’ll get sick.”
“I’ll get eaten! What does it matter!?”
“It does matter.”
“If I’ve got to be roasted I’d like to do it on an empty stomach, thanks—seems like the best way to spite them, now. Only real way I can, if he's not going to let me fight properly...”
Mikasa moved forward again, this time onto a pale yellow square. It had been part of one of their old games. ‘Capture the Prince,’ they’d called it. You had to move only onto certain colours, only at certain times, and Armin had been the one making the decisions. He’d always been the one standing facing the far wall, trying to remember the layout of the floor’s pattern and give orders such that the others couldn’t progress near enough to touch him.
He’d always let them win, in the end.
Through sheer persistence and unwillingness to leave, Mikasa did eventually convince Eren. Even with food in his stomach, he was perfectly cranky once it came time to take his assigned station. Later that evening Mikasa was checking over the buckles of his pauldrons. They had to be fully kitted out and prepared for an attack any moment they were on duty, and most moments they weren't. Having such complicated armour of their own was still relatively new to them, and Mikasa was fastidious about checking Eren’s over.
“If you do it wrong, you could die,” she said when he complained about how long it was taking.
“Well maybe it wouldn’t be such a problem if I wasn’t put out for dragonbait.”
“We both know that’s not the part that bothers you.”
Eren’s face burned. He hadn’t felt so much like a child since before the dragon attacks had started. Mikasa finished her inspection in silence and nudged him towards the door. Eren went out to his station without another word.
The night sky was inky by the time he climbed up onto the rampart near the sixth tower. Yellow torchlight punctuated the darkness along the top of the wall every few dozen metres, but the castle was for the most part just a hulking, formless mass in the night.
It wasn’t so dark that when Eren sighed upon seeing his new post, he couldn’t see his breath in the air. He was allotted a lit torch, a small wooden stool, two spears, a box of ammunition, and—actually, that ballista didn’t look quite right. It was a large machine like he remembered, all tensed wood and rope, but something about the overall shape was wrong.
“What’s going on with this?”, he asked his fellow guard—a young woman with her hair brown hair drawn back. She was leaning on the parapet and looking as if she wished she were asleep. She was about Eren's age, somewhere in the neighbourhood of nineteen years old.
“With what?”, she asked, once he saw that the asker was unfamiliar, and therefore someone with no higher rank than her own. Eren kicked at the base of the wooden contraption he was, apparently, to man. The whole machine creaked strangely, and now that he looked, it wasn’t even pushed up against the parapet as the ballistas he remembered had been.
“These. Did they get redesigned?” The watchwoman shrugged a little.
“This is my first turn in the castle,” she said. “I’ve only been here a few weeks; I'm not the person to ask.”
“Well what am I supposed to do with it?”
She pointed towards the tower. It was just barely visible against the night sky, and mainly because one tiny rectangle near the top of it was lit up gold.
“Protect the tower.” That explained the difference in shape. The ballista wasn’t designed to fire specifically in one direction, but rather could rotate on its base. “Is this your station? Sorry, you’re—Eren, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Our main job here’s to get them when they go after the tower. I'm told we're not too good at stopping them on the approach, so we get them mostly once they're in. You just aim and shoot. It’s simple. Scouts haven’t given us a reason to expect an attack tonight, so…” She was not actually edging towards the steps that would take her down to the courtyard, but somehow even with her feet planted most of her body mass seemed to be shifting that way.
“Yeah, yeah, go on,” Eren said. He hoped to hell someone was going to show him how to use the siege weapon at some point, because would not have the vaguest idea. He wasn’t even sure who his immediate superior officer was. He’d expected to be placed more or less right next to the throne; he’d expected to take his orders directly from the king. “Just—what’s your name?”
“Sasha,” she said. "We'll have some shifts together probably once they say an attack's more likely. Until then..." She hurried towards the steps, rubbing her arms the whole while.
Once he was alone Eren’s eyes strayed immediately to the tower, to that small splinter of light. Armin must have still been awake up there, and Eren wished he had some idea of what he was doing.
He leaned over the crenellations, peering through the darkness in search of a wing or a spiny tail. Even though he’d be absolutely lost when it came to firing the ballista, he hoped a dragon attacked. He had his sword on his hip, after all, and the spears leaning close by. If he got to heroically save the castle, maybe Armin would listen to him. Maybe in all the panic Armin would retreat to his tower, straight up to the attic room where no one would think to look for him, and when the beast smelled him in there and set its claws into the stone—Eren would know. He’d know the king was in danger. He’d go dashing up the steps of the tower, pushing his way up through crumbled masonry and scorched timbers. He’d force the fangs and the claws and the horns away from the motionless form of his best friend. Then when the dragon was nothing but a ragged, hulking corpse, Eren would kneel beside Armin, lift his shoulders gently from the floor, brush that soft gold-spun hair from in front of his face and look into a pair of eyes that were clear and warm and familiar again and—and—
Wait a second where is this going—
“That’s selfish.” Eren did his best not to yelp as he spun around. The stare that met him was unmistakable both in its flat exasperation and its actual features.
“Mikasa! Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“You’re looking for a dragon, aren’t you? If we’re attacked it will be me who has to save Armin, so don’t hope for that.”
Eren huffed noisily and leaned back against the stone.
“Didn’t Levi say you were starting early tomorrow? You should go to sleep. I’ve got things under control here.” Her gaze immediately went to the ballista. “Alright, not that exact part of it—but the signalling bit’s fine.” He indicated the torch in its bracket. Levi had gone over the very basics of the post with him before sending him out to relieve Sasha. If he spotted anything, he was to take that torch and light the fuel in the nearby tower to alert the rest of the castle. The whole circumference of the wall was studded with towers and with ballistas. All were manned at every hour of the day and night, so in theory they should have plenty of warning if they were going to be attacked.
The way Mikasa looked at him told him this wasn’t enough.
“If you see anything, light your signal and then hide,” she said. Eren set his jaw.
“No. If I see a dragon I’m going to put a spear through its eye.” Mikasa tried to respond, but Eren talked over her. “I’ll kill it, hand to hand, without this—”, he kicked the ballista, harder this time, “and he’ll have to promote me out of here!”
Mikasa's expression didn't change. She was only in soft civilian clothes, but there was no real doubt that she would be able to beat the armed, armoured Eren if it came down to wrestling for victory.
“On our way here,” she said, “you said it didn’t matter where he put you. It wasn’t just about Armin—it still shouldn’t be. This is our kingdom too. It’s our home—”
“Not if Armin’s not in it!”
Mikasa’s hands clenched with the effort of not shouting straight back.
“Armin is still in it.”
“But he’s different. He is—Mikasa, he’s not right—”
All Mikasa had to do to interrupt him was blink.
“Why do you get to decide that for him? And for the rest of us?”
“Because he gets to decide everything for the rest of us, so if he’s not right none of us can be! I always said Armin would be a great king, didn’t I? But I meant Armin, not—this. Something happened, right? Something with the curse. I bet you it’s what’s doing this to him. It emptied him out, or turned him to stone, or—come on, how many curses have we seen? You know what they can do to people!”
Their work with hunting down dragons’ nests had carried them often into the neighbouring kingdoms, and yes, there had been dozens of curses to contend with there too. The whole continent was littered with tragic orphans and cursed monarchs and court intrigues. Mikasa had hoped this experience would lessen the impact on Eren when they returned to their home, not exacerbate it.
“But we don’t know what it’s done to Armin specifically,” Mikasa said. “They’re all different. Don’t just assume things like this about people.”
“Mikasa, his entirely personality changed—”
“You’ve seen him once. He was in court, and you were babbling about your personal connection with him, and he had to distance himself from that when he was in front of all of those emissaries. Yes he stationed you at the walls, but do you really think that now, with dragons after the castle all the time, this position is as unimportant as it used to be? To Armin, Eren? He's smarter than to put people he doesn't have faith in in charge of his largest weapons. This is a critical point of defense, and he put you here. If he'd really wanted to slight you you'd be guarding the kitchens. He’ll talk to you outside of the throne room and you’ll feel better.”
Eren believed her. He spent the rest of his night out there on the walls expecting, on some level, that Armin would pop out to visit him with a plate full of food to share and an apology. Eren had just decided that he would forgive him unconditionally when footsteps rang out along parapet. Eren spun around, ready to finally really talk to his king, but found himself looking at someone he'd never met.
“Your shift’s done,” the newcomer said. "You should get some sleep."
Eren hadn’t realized he’d been smiling until he felt the expression die.
“Right,” he said. “Thanks.”
Eren had been getting used hauling armour around for much of his life, first Levi's and then his own. But when he dumped himself into his assigned bed wearing just his thin leggings and a light shirt, he thought he hadn’t felt so heavy in years.