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Ymir feels the cold air lose its clutch on her the moment she finally spots the girl’s slight figure walking determinedly through the snow. No, not the girl anymore, or the heir, or the target. Krista. And even that isn’t quite right.
Not yet, Ymir assures herself, but not much longer to wait.
She huddles down farther, curls her fingers into her parka and bites down on her tongue to jump start the healing process again, bring the heat back. Waiting outside had been a terrible idea but she hadn’t been able to help herself. The medical staff had been so concerned about that idiot, Daz, that they hadn’t even thought to stop her from returning to the perimeter of the camp.
But now she can see Krista, walking hunched and tired, but alive. And Ymir finally feels like she can breathe again, deep gulps of icy air that soothe the fire in the back of her throat. It’s just relief. The girl is her best chance. That’s all it is.
“Ymir,” she hears called out, and pushes herself to her feet. Not much longer, she reminds herself, and feels the blood under her skin beat like a clock counting down borrowed seconds.
“Krista,” she forces herself to say, and ignores how the word tastes like heat and blood.
*
Krista fusses over her when they’re finally indoors in their quarters for the night. The medical staff had been unwilling to do more than pass on dry rations and a kettle for tea, lethargic as they were and hunkered down against the cold. The older ones had refused to even make eye contact, probably to minimize any recognition if they ever met again, forced by circumstance to evaluate muscle and bone and see if they could hold someone’s insides together long enough to race further into the cities. The younger ones had run their eyes like greedy fingers along the muscled strength of her brown arms, the shining curve of Krista’s head, before they made themselves look away and forget. Cowards, to be so willing to live like mice.
But Ymir is far too canny to see and not take. She runs her eyes freely over Krista’s head and the curve of her neck, the way the push of her shoulder blades forces a hollow in the material of her shirt, and the way Krista turns her knees so her toes can curve awkwardly in under the blanket of the bunk bed.
When Krista looks up to meet her eyes, she stares back and refuses to be forced away by convention. Recognize me, she wants to say, see what your secrets have led me to do.
Krista smiles, though this grows smaller as the silence between them lengthens. She’s the first to look away, hunches herself smaller. It’s enough to make Ymir want to claw at her; such a poor, frightened mouse with all the potential to be a cat if she would just take it.
Ymir wants to shake her until she fights back, until Krista digs her nails in and holds on, hits and rages and does all the things Ymir learned how to do before she could think or breathe or speak.
“I saved him for you, you know?” The reminder is unnecessary; Krista should know well enough that she is in Ymir’s debt.
“I know,” Krista murmurs. “Thank you.” Her eyes stay on her knees.
“I saved you as well.”
“Yes.”
“You’d have died on that mountain with him.”
“Yes.”
“So you owe me.”
This finally gets Krista to look up, eyes shading towards annoyance. “I didn’t ask for your help. I didn’t ask you to save me or Daz.”
“But I did. And now you owe me a gift.” Ymir can feel Krista withdrawing, hiding behind whatever makes her willing to drag the weight of a dead man on her back. She moves from her own bed to Krista’s so she can pull her chin up and force the girl to meet her eyes. “You cannot die before you do as you said,” she insists.
“I won’t die.” Krista’s mouth sets in a stubborn line.
“So then, tell me your name.” Ymir feels as though she could take this name and drink it down, put it somewhere safe behind the edges of her skin and her dark hair. Somewhere forbidden like the nape of her neck, or maybe in the cradle of her throat where she could scream 'til it emerged. “Tell me who you really are.”
“I –” Krista pulls her chin away, “I can’t do it yet. Not right now.” Her eyes are wet.
“You owe me.” Ymir pushes her, and Krista’s back thumps against the rails of the bed. “You promised.”
When Krista surges up, Ymir almost fights her, arms coming up as her instinct to protect her throat rises to the fore. But Krista just pushes her arm aside, says, “no, no” and repeats Ymir’s name over and over. Her voice is hoarse and plaintive until Ymir lowers her arm far enough for Krista to kiss her, wet and firm.
Ymir has never kissed anyone before. She’s never had to struggle to breathe or had her tongue seem too big for her own mouth. She’s suddenly caught between the smooth slide of the inside of her mouth and the sharpness of her own teeth, like she could swallow herself down. Krista’s lips and teeth are practically an afterthought to the sudden unfamiliarity of her own.
But Krista is practiced where Ymir is not. She knows how to angle her head so their noses don’t bump and lips gently at Ymir's lower lip until Ymir imitates her, starts to kiss back. Krista’s mouth is hot like Ymir’s is, like she could change at any minute as well and become someone new, something new.
Her fingers push into the skin of Ymir’s neck and her shoulders, leaving short crescent ridges. And Ymir almost wishes her grip were tighter, could push and punish whatever it is inside of Ymir that longs to dig her way into Krista’s body and stay there, sated and warm on Krista’s blood.
It would kill something inside of her to break this girl, to kill Krista; but the thought of eating Krista and making her part of Ymir forever, making them something new all over again...
Ymir buries the thought inside herself. Instead she lets Krista strip off their clothes, lets her stroke her stomach and her breasts and marvel at the differences in their skin tone. Lets her kiss her way down to where Ymir opens again, stroke her clit and push two fingers deep; shocking Ymir because this is so unlike her titan form and everything she knew before.
Ymir doesn’t cry out, she doesn’t. But she arches her back and bears down, and tries not to think about having Krista in her, around her, wrapped inside of her skin. Tries to console herself that the name would be enough.
“Your – your name,” she grits out, and Krista kisses her quiet, salty gentle and warm.
“Not yet,” she whispers, and Ymir pushes her back. “I can’t,” and Ymir kisses her silent. “I want to,” and Ymir touches her sides and her arms and nuzzles between the small mounds of her breasts.
“You lie and you lie,” Ymir murmurs, and covers Krista’s indignant response with one hand as she uses the other to explore the folds of Krista’s cunt.
Krista arches her back and whimpers behind Ymir’s hand. Ymir watches, remembers to change the patterns she traces on Krista’s clit, occasionally scratches down her thighs, rougher each time until Krista is trembling under her. Until she’s screwing her eyes up and shoving herself down on Ymir’s fingers, wet and again, and clenching around them over and over.
Krista is silent after, and Ymir moves away from her form, crouches at the foot of the bed and pushes the same wet fingers into her cunt. She tries to mimic the way Krista moved, ovals and back and forths, until she can feel herself getting wetter; uses her other hand to rub at the hood around her clit until she's clenching hard around where she’s got three fingers buried deep.
“Ymir,” she hears Krista whisper, and in the moment it almost feels like enough. She pulls her fingers out now that her body feels flush and loose and wet, and tastes them.
They taste nothing like blood.
She looks over and meets Krista’s stunned eyes, drops her gaze to follow the blood as it pools in the flushed curve of Krista's cheeks and under the glistening smears on the curves of her thighs.
“Fine,” she finds herself saying, moving to curl into the curve of Krista’s body and trailing her fingers back over the smears before pushing them into Krista’s cunt. “Not yet.”
She can feel Krista’s relieved breath from under her, the kiss that’s dropped on her own head. “Thank you,” Krista says, and Ymir takes it as her due.
“Just remember your promise,” Ymir warns, and leans over to place her ear over Krista’s heart and listens to its speedy thumping. It struggles like it counts the seconds, faster and faster, while the room fills with the smell of salt and iron.