Chapter Text
The crystal hardening had been what Hitch would have called a Hail Maria.
She hadn’t expected it to last, though she had expected the island devils to take longer cracking the hard shell of the halo she had created for herself to avoid being eaten by a mad titan. If they ever even managed it. Eren’s titan did not have the capability of growing crystals at all. Which was really the only reason Annie had a chance of surviving a protracted fight with Eren. Had the playing field been even, Eren might have overpowered her, learning her moves in a way she could not have predicted another fighter—a soft boy who’d actually grown up with loving parents before Wall Maria fell, at that—ever would. Then he had been enraged and blood-mad enough that he probably would not have thought twice about swallowing her whole, if only to ensure she stayed down. And dead.
There was no way he, or that crazy scientist the Survey Corps had, would have figured out that consuming another titan holder of the 9 would earn him her powers.
But she had the crystal hardening, and she had used it in a way no Marleyan scientist ever thought possible: to fashion a glass coffin for herself.
Oh, in hindsight, it hadn’t been exactly her finest moment. What would have happened had she been trapped longer in the crystal cocoon and the island devils had not broken it open this fast? Life was no fairy tale, where a girl in a glass coffin would not die of suffocation or starvation. Not even a Warrior could hold out against human frailty, and Annie was already the best the program could offer. Especially now Marcel was dead.
Gods, why hadn’t that idiot thought to do as she did? Would have at least saved him from that feral titan that ate him, and Annie would not have been stuck with a besotted idiot like Bertolt, or a rabid Marleyan aspirant like Reiner. Marcel would have let her be. He would have understood when she wanted to remain on the devils’ island to eke out what remaining years she had as the Female Titan. It hadn’t been a bad life. Not when what was waiting in Liberio were only her father’s fists and the weight of his expectations.
She should stop thinking about them, Marcel or her father. The devils had broken her hardening and she needed to find a way out from—
She groaned as her body was fully ejected out of the cradle of the broken crystal and her legs screamed pins and needles and her muscles wouldn’t work as her face quickly met the ground. It took her too long to get her elbows beneath her to lift herself up from the dirt, and even longer to get her knees to work.
Only for her to realize that what she was looking down upon was not dirt.
Her fingers curled, twitching before obeying her scattered brain’s command. They bit into firm, but ultimately yielding material that seemed to pulse and warm beneath her fingertips.
Flesh?
She shook off the horrific thought and waited for her mind to clear long enough for her to power through the rank disobedience of legs that tottered like a helpless newborn foal’s, and pushed herself to her feet. Surveying the pulsing, pink walls and ground, dimly lit with a garish red hue as if she were looking through a kaleidoscope lens did not improve that terrified swooping she felt in her stomach from the moment she realized she was not lying on dirt but on organic matter.
So crystal hardening had nothing on a titan’s stomach acids. Eren had swallowed her whole after all, and the island devils hadn’t cracked so much as melted her cocoon, and soon that would happen to her too.
The stomach acids explained the strange dream she’d had, then. Of a wriggling worm-like something crawling behind her eye. That hadn’t been a dream after all. That would be the—how did the War Chief put it during their anatomy lessons?—microscopic flora found in animal guts. Humans had them too, Zeke had explained in that pedantic lecturer’s voice he often adopted when tutoring the younger Warrior aspirants, and it was only natural that titans would too, being that they were organic matter extending out of infected Eldians’ bodies. And that those stomach flora would not be microscopic at all inside a live titan’s gut.
Annie shuddered at the faint memory of the titan’s stomach worms having rows upon rows of thin, needle-like teeth in their mouths, all salivating to eat her eyes. Something wriggled behind her left eye at the thought, and she shuddered again.
Best not to think of the fact that one such parasite had managed to worm its way around her eyeball and was, even now, quite possibly eating her brain.
No, what she needed was to figure out which part of the titan’s stomach she was in and… well, she was too weak for now to gather her strength and transform again, but there had to be some way for her to get out. If not by punching her way out of the titan’s gut, then at least by finding the creature’s spine and seeking out the island devil piloting this behemoth.
Eren.
It always came down to Eren.
What a pain and a pity it was that he had to be a devil himself. Annie quite liked him. Certainly better than she liked Reiner or Bertolt, or anyone else from the Warrior Program, save perhaps Marcel. He hadn’t been snooty like Reiner, whiny like Porco, or an unthinking follower like Bertolt. He was smart and dedicated—a bit of a buffoon, but really, could the island’s Military Corps have expected anything from such a soft child who’d grown up in an idyllic town like Shiganshina? The Fall had hardened Eren into a budding young soldier, and Annie thought she maybe even identified with him and his two little friends. Perhaps in another life, she might have been his third.
But no. He had to be an island devil, and an unexpected titan shifter at that. Probably not the Founder, and since the only other of the nine Marley did not control was the Attack Titan, that had to be what he was, since he couldn’t have been the wild titan that had eaten Marcel. Eren had been born within the walls, and the one that had gotten Marcel had no doubt been some unsuspecting Eldian from Marley, sentenced to a life of savagery and wandering on the island.
She shut her eyes and rubbed her temples tiredly. She should stop thinking about the devils being her friends. They weren’t. At best, they had been a means to an end: provide her with a suitable community within which she could hide with her fellow Warriors until they located the Founder. When she made the selection of the Military Police, she’d decided they were, perhaps not better than Liberio and Marley, but at least peaceable enough that she could live out her remaining years in secrecy in clean, upscale, cosmopolitan Stohess. Perhaps she may have even corresponded occasionally with Eren while he worked for the Scouts in faraway, rural Trost.
Reiner ruined that, of course, and now the island devils weren’t just the enemy. They were actively killing her with every moment she spent trapped inside this titan’s gut. Eren’s titan’s gut.
She looked around for the remnants of her crystal cocoon to ascertain how long it had been since she’d been swallowed. The Warriors had no clue how long it would take for titan stomach acids to melt crystal; they hadn’t even known that it would. But surely there would be some indication of how long Annie had left before she was just another melted puddle of human goo against the walls of Eren’s intestines.
But the broken organic pod behind her wasn’t made of crystal, nor was it melted.
It was a strange contraption. For that was what it was: a contraption, not a cracked or broken diamond from which Annie had emerged. It was made of some hard, organic material, shaped with weird, sharp flourishes. It had some type of hidden, steam-powered mechanism that explained the hiss she thought she’d heard when the glass-paned cover popped open and the tongue-like organic bed inside ejected her out. Organic but mechanical. And nothing like she’d ever seen before.
Curious.
The rest of the strange oval hall of firm but ultimately yielding organic material had many other such pods around, all of them either opened or had the glass viewing pane broken. Most of them were empty, save for one where the bloodied remnants of some unsuspecting Stohess citizen lay dead against the cooling tongue-like bed inside.
Annie didn’t care about the citizens of Stohess—they were island devils and deserved neither scorn nor pity—but she did reach into the pod to check the woman for any vital signs.
Dead.
Well, considering the rampage Eren had gone through in Stohess, it shouldn’t surprise her that he’d cannibalized his own fellow island devils. By the turning point of their fight when he’d gotten the upper hand, she hadn’t even been sure he was there mentally at all. His titan had been savage and feral, the animal gleam in the creature’s eyes and the wild rictus of a grin of the titan’s lipless mouth making Eren seem more monster than human.
Explained then that he would eat other people he’d find in his path. That was what wild titans did anyway, wasn’t it? Eat through whatever humans they found in the hopes they’d find another titan shifter that would revert them back into their thinking brains?
Didn’t matter. What mattered was getting out. And there was no way Annie was doing that being weaker than a freshly whelped kitten. She had to find another way.
The chamber was vaguely circular, with two levels. The ground level, where she’d woken on, had four empty pods. There was a mezzanine with more pods, either empty or with dead people in them. At the far end of the hall was a sort of blue efflorescence growing out of a conch-like protuberance from walls. It looked like some kind of sea anemone, the short glowing blue tentacles waving in the strangely whooshing hot air in an otherwise air-tight chamber.
Beyond the efflorescence was a portal of some sort resembling a sphincter. She had to keep the near hysterical laugh that threatened to bubble out of her at the idea that she might just be sitting right at the tip of Eren’s arse hole, and that in order for her to get out, she’d have to tickle his titan’s prostate and get it to shit her out.
There was a dead creature, vaguely humanoid in size and shape, but with a head resembling some type of giant purple-gray squid with four long tentacles in place of a jaw and mouth. Those nightmarish creatures had been in Annie’s dreams too, though she had thought it was the more fanciful, macabre part of her subconscious that had conjured such things. Certainly, there wasn’t a creature on heaven and earth that should look like such a monster—like one of the War Chief’s titan experiments, except this was some mad aquatic life scientist’s idea of a human-squid hybrid. Silvery fluid puddled around the crack on its bulbous head.
Annie didn’t even want to know whether the creature’s blood was corrosive. If she had the luck she’d had in this entrapment the Survey Corps had laid around her, that silvery fluid would be mercury. She was probably already seeing delusions, having inhaled the vapors for gods only knew how long.
Skirting around the dead creature and its puddle of mercury-blood put her right into the reach of the efflorescent blue tentacles, one of which brushed against her cheek. Annie yelped at the slimy-cold touch, and would have backed away—she’d take the mercury vapors over tentacles—but the touch seemed to trigger something in her blood. A sizzle of heat and a dizzying sense of… relief?
If it wasn’t relief she was feeling, it was at least invigorating enough that whatever muscle pains plaguing her weakened body disappeared and she felt as if could manage a titan transformation strong enough to explode Eren’s innards and blast him out of existence entirely. She was sorely tempted to do just that as she stepped away from the embrace of the tentacle things, except she wasn’t sure if she’d be surrounded by Scouts when she finally broke out of Eren’s guts. She had no weapon beyond her titan transformation, and a lone titan could still be swarmed by the hundreds of Survey Corps Scouts just waiting to trap her and crack her open like a nut.
She’d heard about the sorts of things the Scouts’ mad scientist did to Eren to discover the secret of his titan-spawning ability, and while Annie had never thought her life worth much of anything, she valued her skin enough not to put herself in the tender mercies of that bit of crazy.
No, she’d have to find some way of discreetly escaping the prison of Eren’s gut—even if she had to be shat out like all the other people he’d inevitably cannibalized—and then find some way to… what? Escape? She was at the heart of the devils’ island. Trapped behind thick walls as hard as titan crystal. She’d get caught like it was nothing unless she broke another wall again and let the wild titans outside the fortress city overrun the devils.
For that she needed the Colossal Titan and Bertolt. Reiner she could take or leave.
In fact, if she managed to get out of Eren’s arse hole alive, she’d find some way to cram Reiner up his own arse hole for not only getting Marcel killed, but cocking up the entire mission they’d spent three painstaking years to enact.
But first, escape.
The sphincter door was all kinds of disgusting. The chamber walls and floor were clearly made of organic matter, undoubtedly the walls of Eren’s large intestine or colon, but at least they weren’t slimy and gross. They pulsed and were almost unbearably warm, but they weren’t moist .
The portal was moist and Annie hated moist things.
Thankfully, the portal did not need more than a faint nudge from her trouser-covered knee to swirl open, and when it did, it fairly gaped. There had to be some juvenile fart-related joke Colt could tell about this thing. If Annie managed to spirit herself back to Liberio, she was going to let him buy her a pint in her favorite public house, and let him tell her as many fart jokes as he could think of.
She thought perhaps she would be seeing the destroyed streets of Stohess from the vantage point of a titan’s nether hole and readied herself to drop and roll onto the hard stone ground, but that was too optimistic even for her. No, beyond the arse hole door was another chamber, another room, this time looking almost like it’s been occupied by people.
There was a table with a misshapen dead baby or toddler, bald and with pointy ears, mottled green skin and the strange bloat of an alcoholic or a drowning victim. If she wasn’t sure she was walking around in the sacs of a rampaging titan’s stomach, she’d almost say the child had been experimented on. Did Eren somehow swallow the mad scientist and that loud, greasy creature was here? Conducting experiments on all the other doomed souls within Eren’s eldritch stomach?
The child was clothed in rags, but not such that Annie had seen among the wretched poor of Liberio. This creature wore crude, beaten leather, the sort where the animal fat had not even been properly excised from whatever cow or goat the hide had been peeled from before the skin was tanned. The fine hilt of a well-made dagger protruded like an incongruous appendage from between the haphazard stitches of the rags the body wore.
Annie wasn’t above looting corpses of dead children to arm herself, and as she had evidently lost her own Military Police-issued swords and omni-directional gear during her fight with Eren, she deftly lifted the dagger from the cadaver, callously wiped any residue of dead flesh onto the creature’s hide rags, and tucked it into her belt. She would have to find a sheath at some point, because she wasn’t divesting the corpse of its rags to fashion one for herself.
Next to the dead mutant child was a tablet made of a similar organic material as the walls, floor and even the bloody table. Annie wasn’t interested in whatever primitive knowledge these island devils possessed, but there was writing on the tablet, and if Eren had sentient stomach bacteria, then she was damn well going to benefit from it.
Except the writing etched into the tablet was in some eldritch script entirely unreadable for her but for the twitch and wriggle behind her left eye. And suddenly, her mind was flooded with images of a myriad of these misshapen child-sized creatures, the knowledge of what they were—goblins—their alien customs and community suffusing her like she’d been injected with a serum containing the knowledge of good and evil.
What the hell…?
Hastily, she dropped the tablet. There were a few others on more of the organic tables, each one imprinting strange images and unknowable knowledge into her mind despite the fact she could read no character in the strange script. The tentacled squid things, an empire of them traversing an immaterial state of being known only as the Astral Plane. They rode the cosmos on ships shaped like nautilus shells with phasing tentacles that propelled them through the ether, helping them conquer realms. Entire worlds falling into enslavement of their hive mind, creatures both human and not, stripped of their will and subservient only to a massive brain controlling everything, as if they were all merely firing synapses in an inhumanly complex nervous system.
And through it all, a lone thought rebelling: a twitch behind her eye, a wriggle of something organic burrowing down into her sinuses as if telling her not to be lured into the grandness of such a scheme.
Caution .
Annie blinked and realized the word wasn’t just an echo in her hindbrain, but an actual sound. She left the tablet on the table along with the others she hadn’t bothered to explore and looked around the cavernous chamber.
This was larger than the one she’d woken in, the mezzanine wider, and reachable by a curious-looking elevator. Curious because there was nothing in the organic platform and the glowing stand of controls on it that suggested steam power and pulleys and cables that would bring the platform up to the second level where the voice, a child-like croon calling incongruous words to be saved, came from.
Well, if the elevator mechanism was hidden behind the walls of Eren’s belly, she wasn’t going to question how his titan stomach was constructed, only that it was convenient for her to find some other survivor, even if that survivor was a child. She’d just as well save only her own skin, but perhaps another person living through being swallowed by a mad titan increased her odds of surviving this place.
On the mezzanine was a doctor’s chair, occupied by a bloodied, half-naked man clearly in his death throes but not entirely dead yet considering his cranium had been sawed open and his brain was exposed into the hot dry air. Annie wondered how the man was even able to call out to her when she realized the sound, the voice didn’t come from the man’s mouth but from his brain, quivering in place as if gray matter wasn’t supposed to splatter on the floor with one’s head split open the way this man’s was.
“ You’ve come to save us from this place! From this place you’ll free us! ” the brain exclaimed, wriggling in excitement as it recognized Annie’s approach. How, she didn’t want to know. Not like the brain had eyes or anything, and the man’s eyes were clearly clouded with pain enough that he wouldn’t be able to see her.
“What in the hell…?” she breathed, scarcely able to contain the morbid fascination springing from her chest at the sight of the brain addressing her directly. As if it were not just some part of a whole human—was the man in the chair even human? He had the same mutated pointy ears as the dead misshapen child below—but a being all unto itself. “What are you ?”
“ A newborn,” the brain answered. “ Born new from this husk.”
She stared. By husk , did it mean… its host? The dying man on the chair?
“I—why am I even entertaining a talking brain? This…” She had to stifle another hysterical laugh. “This shouldn’t be happening!”
The brain paused from its quivering, its still demeanor somehow contemplative, before it said, apropos of nothing, “ Do you not hear it? We will not survive in this place. ”
“ I will not survive in this place,” Annie said. “You should already be dead.”
The brain didn’t answer, though its expectant air didn’t recede. It seemed it was waiting for her to do something.
Annie didn’t know whether she was indeed suffering from mercury-induced delusions. She must be if she was considering liberating a talking brain from a dying island devil.
“What must I do?”
“ Free us from this husk ,” the brain instructed, a lulling sound that tugged at some long-forgotten recess of her mind where buried memories of her true parents lurked. “ Then we must go to the helm. ”
“The what?” Annie grunted as she dug her fingers around the cranial cavity of the dying man. She half-expected her fingers to sink into the slimy wrinkly gray matter, but it was strangely solid to her touch, and it was firmly attached to the man’s brain stem. She grit her teeth and twisted, severing the brain’s connection to the man’s spinal cord. The man gave a final twitch and shudder and then finally went limp as the brain came away into her hands.
She wondered at first if she was expected to just carry the brain in her hands and secrete it away as she made her escape—if that was what it wanted her to do, she’d just as well stomp it into oblivion. But the thing wriggled again and she had to consciously pull her mouth shut to keep from gawking as four slimy, bony little legs with clawed feet erupted out of it. A little tail that might have been a severed artery twirled in the air as if scenting it, before the creature quite literally jumped out of her hands and crawled tentatively on the floor.
“ To the helm we go!” the brain said. “ We are going to the helm! ”
Annie stowed her horrific fascination with the crawling brain with its artery-tail wagging as if it were a dog or a particularly curious feline and tried to be pragmatic about things. She was stuck inside Eren’s stomach, and she’d just rescued a walking, talking brain from an island devil that mad man had swallowed. And now the thing seemed to know where the helm—where the titan shifter—was.
That was… good. Yes, it was good. She hadn’t been the best in her anatomy studies; she knew all the pressure points one might hit to kill an opponent, as well as how to do basic field medicine to treat war injuries. But the finer details of the human—and by extension, titan—body, wasn’t something she cared to remember. Colt was the one who liked anatomy lessons; he’d always been the one more interested in medical studies, like the War Chief. All Annie cared about was that the titan shifter, the helm as the brain kept calling Eren, would be in the titan’s nape. And the brain thing knew how to get there from the stomach.
“Wait, what should I call you?”
The brain paused and wriggled, and she had the sense that it was looking up at her rather curiously, its tail wagging languidly. “ Us. We are Us.”
Alright. A brain thing called Us. This was perhaps even stranger than the penny dreadfuls Pieck loved to read on their down time. At the very least, if she survived this sojourn into a titan’s body and the island devils’ territory, if she managed to return, she could give the other girl the wildest ideas to write her own penny dreadful.
She expelled a breath, and with it, the disbelief she’d held since she woke up inside Eren’s Attack Titan stomach.
“Lead the way, then.”