Chapter Text
Some children grow into adults and some adults never grow old.
Erwin knows.
Erwin discovers truth in fiction, and vice-versa, from a young age.
He learns through encounters while listless and waiting for his mothers’ courtyard parties to be over so he can have the back gardens to himself again with the boys and girls and their brothers and sisters, starstruck and spellbound by his excitable orations on fairytales and folklore, buried in his grandfather’s study for hours some nights while he reads away the silence of a too-quiet home.
He learns through his tutor’s lessons on the ins and outs of tables manners and the fundamentals of mathematics (he’ll need to manage, after all, his own finances) and science (if he’s to oversee the machinations of the Garrison like his father) ringing in his ear all the while as he stares out the window and sighs, sighs, sighs at distant skies and the envisions horizons freer than the avowal of "someday."
He learns through persistence, in experiencing why and how the world around him worked, his father’s weary forbearance and his mother’s irrevocable indulgence when they sweep in from traveling district to district to meet not with contractors or officers but their own son, sitting him down with the vague rules and detached chastisement though parenthood is far from a business contract.
Erwin learns.
Erwin hears, sees – knows – before he can understand.
At five, six, and seven years old, his earliest recollections from his younger days shaped by life and death’s pianissimo waltz around one another.
His grandparents, their passing quiet and strange and sudden.
His bedchamber attendants, several chambermaids in a three-month period, the eldest housemaid who nursed him since he was an infant, leaving behind a tiny little girl in her wake who the Smiths took in as their own.
His cousin Edward, two years older and two heads shorter but ever-gracious and free-spirited, an eager playmate for games of chase and hide-and-seek around the backyard, sent for medical care at a private establishment never to return because, skilled as the doctors were in the upper-crust division of the Capital, he was deemed an unfortunate incurable case by the experts of modern medicine.
Erwin doesn’t understand.
But he learns, accepts it much faster than his peers.
His mother, who walks forward and gives her rousing speeches at social gatherings and diplomat visits, moving mountains with her words yet cannot bring herself to do more than frown and furrow her brow when the man whose surname she has taken on takes her compliance to trust in him for granted.
His father, who walks forward and gives his counsel to those who warrant praise and those who bite their thumbs at him in muted tones when he turns a corner toward a new plan of action but who always tells his son (his imprudent, responsibly irresponsible, ankle-kicking son) that people will talk more, Erwin, if you let your heart rule over your head.
His father and mother – despite their grief, their shortcomings, their lapses in judgment in the arrangement of their marriage – who always tell their son, their only son, whom they birthed together and guide well-intentioned down a road of inheritance and inquisition, that they cherish and want nothing but the best for him.
It is a life both lived and not lived nearly enough – but Erwin is nothing if not grateful.
Perhaps, he will think back on those years much later in life, children never grow old and adults never grow up.
Their bodies may grow bigger, longer, stronger and then weaker.
Their minds and their impatience for adulthood grow, but they do not.