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She normally takes her morning stroll on horseback, riding up the ridge of the cliffs to overlook the village in its forested cove. But it's still dark when she steps out that morning, restless and rising before the sun even comes up over the cold spring morning on the coast, and she does not head for the stables as she usually does. Usually makes it sound so routine; her habits are not as strict as they used to be, and it's more often than not these days that she's too preoccupied to take a walk before dawn. On the days it does happen, it is a day like this one. The end of the month, the end of a long winter whose winds still billow over the bluffs in the distance with a whip that sends the loose strands of her bun flying against her face. The first light of day after a long, long night, when the sun hasn't yet risen from beneath the sea and there's something sweet and purple about the sky as the stars begin to disappear.
It's funny that they ended up by the seaside. Annie in particular had never cared much for salt water, but something in the cool breezes make her feel alive these days, whether she's riding on the grassy hills or treading down to the beach on foot, like she does this morning. Her jacket isn’t warm enough, but she folds her arms over her chest and keeps going. She's in a state of positive undress, should any of the civilized eyes of the villagers come across her, just an old nightgown and a pair of work boots beneath her coat, and the wind whips her skirt against her calves. Cold. She finds a spot in the sand, her boots sinking in, and stands there for a while, watching the waves come in.
She's gone longer than she realizes. Long enough for the sun to peek over the sea, and by then the village has started to come to life. She passes the milkman with his wagon of glasses clattering along the cobblestones, and some of the newspaper boys starting their rounds on bicycles. They'll cycle through the narrow village streets, couched in the grassy hills that shield the houses from the dripping salt winds, then up into the forests and to the hamlets beyond, pedaling back on the dirt roads just in time for brunch. For now, they wrap their scarves around their throats and take off, their heads nodding as they pedal past her. If they have anything to say about the strange woman huddling up the road with a work jacket thrown over her nightgown, they keep it to themselves. That's the way people get along around here, or at least the way people get along with her.
There are days that her past feels like a different life entirely. That young warrior was just someone she knew. Some child, fighting a foreign war. Someone she can scarcely remember now. But her hands can never forget the things she has done, no matter how hard she scrubs them raw at the spigot in the yard of the stables. Sometimes her skin bleeds, and her hands are raw for days. Days. It's the same way her husband can never sleep on one side, always shifting back and forth and wincing when he stands, ever more often these days as the weather changes. He hardly complains, and neither does she. It's just the way they were raised.
He is still asleep when Annie comes into the bedroom, but he's moved again, one knee cast over a pillow and his arms sprawled in odd directions. There's a furrow in his brow as he lies sleeping, and the palm of one hand faces up on her side of the bed, as if outstretched towards where she stands then, recovering from the cold. For a moment, she thinks about rejoining him. going back to sleep and falling away again. But footsteps begin to creak down the hall, and Armin's eyes flutter open as she's watching him. Not asleep, then. Just a liar, like always.
"Morning," Annie says.
Half-open, his eyes flick to her and he mumbles a good morning in response. She heads into the bathroom and has her face in the cool water of the sink when she hears his bare feet pad inside, then feels his hand on her shoulder.
"Happy birthday," he says, his voice lilting.
The tap squeaks as she turns off the cold water, her face dripping. "Don't remind me."
He ignores that and kisses the top of her head. Annie is only a morning person by force of habit, mostly by force, but Armin always rises with the sun. He is like the sunshine too, sometimes too bright when she would rather draw the curtains and throw the blankets over her head to never see the light again. Not today, she decides, for the thousandth day in a row. She is grateful to be alive, but sometimes she has to remind herself. Resign herself to it. She's allowed that much.
"I thought you were going to come back to bed," he says from behind her. Of course he wasn't asleep. She wipes the water from her face, peering at all the lines that stare back from the mirror as he stands over the toilet. "I didn't hear you get up."
"I went for a walk." She had to get out.
"It's cold out there." He's peeing.
"I needed to stretch." Isn't this romantic?
"Well, that's what getting old will do to you."
His back is still turned when she glares at him in the mirror, and he doesn't see. He realized a few months ago that she would cross this hill before him, and he hasn't missed one opportunity to bring it up. The toilet flushes. She gets over herself— she's grateful to be alive, she reminds herself— and puts her hair back into something more manageable, just as she hears his familiar hiss of pain from behind her. His hand is on his lower back when she turns, her slippers treading on the tile floor towards him.
She's grateful to be alive. Grateful the bullet only grazed his spine. Grateful the doctor said he would walk again, and grateful that he eventually did. Grateful for the sea air. The sun. For life. Happy to be here. Another morning, another year. Maybe if she keeps saying it, one day she will feel it.
She puts her hand on his back. Grateful for the piss poor aim of angry would-be assassins. "How is it?"
He turns to her and makes the smile that means he's hurting. "Fine. Did you sleep well?"
No. "Yeah, fine."
"Did you hear the cat fight last night?"
No. "The what?"
"You sleep like a rock," Armin quips, and Annie rolls her eyes. He never shuts up. "They were howling at each other all night.”
No, she didn't hear it. She must have been dreaming. "You mean the barn cats?"
He nods.
"Well, it's mating season. I'm afraid to tell you they probably weren't fighting."
"It sounded pretty intense."
"Mating season will do that to you."
"Oh?"
Sometimes she knows what she is doing and still walks right into her own words. She doesn’t mind though, because he’s warm when he bends to kiss her, and she’s so cold from the sea. Suddenly she wishes she had gone back to bed, that she’d said fuck the stables and the work day, she has a warm husband and it’s her birthday. She doesn’t remember the last time they had sex until his lips are on hers, feeling his smile on her mouth. New Year’s Day, while the rest of the world was sleeping off a hangover. Like she said, he’s a morning person.
She’s still making up her mind, one hand toying at the knot on his bathrobe, when she hears footsteps on the hallway floor. Then she pulls back, tasting him on her lips, and whispers, “Your daughter is outside the door.”
Her knock announces her presence.
"Occupied," Annie says.
A whine. "I have to pee."
"You know where the outhouse is," Armin answers. The footsteps patter away, Lillie's groan following her down the hall. Annie reaches down and tightens the knot on her husband’s bathrobe.
He smiles. "What, you don't want another baby?"
"At our age? Not likely."
What neither of them say is that their age is a blessing in its own right.
She is forty today. Sometimes she still feels like she is living in the future, one she never thought she would get. A future so impossible that she never even stopped to want it, never thought to grieve a life she didn’t know she could have. Marriage, children, work, a life— these are things she never longed for. She didn’t know she could.
"I'll settle for a breakfast I don't have to cook," she says, turning back to the sink.
"Alright, hint taken." he leans in once more and presses a kiss to her temple before he steps out. "See you downstairs."
Life moves like this in these parts. Simpler, slower. It's what she wanted, but she wonders if she's still not used to it. It feels like something is always hanging over her shoulder, like there must be some greater scheme that she's not seeing. But there's nothing. There's this house on the edge of the forest, and there's the sea at the end of the village road, where the hills cleave into dunes and springtime storms pass through with gentle rain. This must be what she wanted. A life of politics was not for them, at least not for her; and Armin loved her more than he wanted to take the stage. They had already saved the world. They stayed in the aftermath long enough to put the pieces back together, and by then it seemed to Annie that things were the same way they'd always been. Maybe the walls had come down, here and there, but little else had changed, as far as she could tell. She couldn't stand another hour on the parliament floor. She had never said this to Armin, but she would have left him if he had not decided to go with her. She didn’t think it needed to be said. And anyway, he came.
Now, he writes— defenses of the new laws that someone else argues for, but also articles and letters and campaigns, whatever needs to be said to get the job done. Whatever needs his name behind it for anyone to care. He's abandoned more than one book in the course of their marriage. First, a hesitant history of Paradis that he was asked to put together, one he couldn't bring himself to travel there to research from the ground up, even once it was safe to return to the island. Whatever notes he had were stuffed in an envelope and mailed to Jean, should he want to carry on the work. And then, an even more reluctant attempt at a memoir. That one never made it to the typewriter. That was the one she would have wanted to read, and the one she knew most he would never have written. Those notes vanished as well. Some of their traces still seem to linger in the fireplace, but she's always wondered if they were posted to the island too, if they’re kept now under the floorboards of a cottage where Wall Maria used to stand, if Mikasa takes them out every now and then and remembers him too.
Mikasa went back first, to Shiganshina; then Jean to Mikasa. He sailed away one day and never came back. Connie went later, last, treading the island waters with caution— first when it was allowed, that official visit they all made together; then when it was safer, then when it was friendly; then finally, for good. He was the last to step back from their postwar work, and he never married either, at least not since they last heard from him.
Annie didn’t think of the island as home, but she’s always wondered if Armin didn’t want to return too. He’s never been back since they made that first visit. Doesn’t he long for his homeland, his kinfolk, the same way she misses Liberio? It was never a place she loved, and it’s hard to imagine it now without its walls, without all the things that made it what it was. It always hurt to be in Liberio, but that is what made it home. She’s never found that anywhere else. She thinks Armin might say the same if she asked, of fallen Maria and the streets of Shiganshina. If she had ever asked. Perhaps their biggest failings as parents will be that they don’t say these things to their daughter, not even to each other, but she’s not sure she can fault them for that. There are some things more painful to remember than they were to endure. Being in the present allows one to look forward; knowing the past necessitates regret.
She still reads the letters he drafts, if he asks, though she's never been one for that sort of work. She's always preferred to use her hands. The stables keep her busy enough. Times are changing, even in the countryside, and automobiles grow more frequent in these hills since the rebuilding has become expanding, and the paved roads now stretch to this side of the sea. But most of the common folk, including the people around here, still stick to horses.
Her family keeps to themselves, more or less, though the whole village knows who they are. The whole world. They've learned to guard themselves in the wake of a world that wanted them dead, and not for the normal Eldian reasons. That she could accept. They're wanted for accountability. Centuries were flattened beneath giants' feet, and no one's going to hang? It was a hard sell for a long time, and it didn't always work. They were tried in absentia in a few countries, guilt clouding their names in places they’d never been. Armin was dismayed by that more than anything, she thinks, that there are beautiful places in the world so angry with him that he’d step right onto the gallows if he ever crossed the border.
Annie was more concerned about the pipe bombs and poison letters, but they managed to dodge those too. Not that it was ever easy, wondering when the next threat would find them. She didn't fear death so much for a while, those first few years when the world was starving and every assassin around the corner seemed increasingly justified. But she got older. She got older, for the first time in a long time, and she realized one day how much she wanted to live. How much it meant to watch the blisters on her hands heal in real time. How quickly their lives could be taken, if they weren't careful. They had to learn again how to be careful. If there'd been enough explosives left in the world for the right killer, they would have been taken out while they slept. She always thought it was strange, how Eren said he wanted to save them, and how he did, when there were no bullets or bombs left after the fight to be used against them.
There was at least one bullet left, and it found Armin on a side trip to the capital. Lillie had learned to talk by the time he could stand upright again. Annie had never asked him to quit his work, never asked him to do anything for her. He knew she would have left on her own if he hadn’t wanted to come too. But she asked him then, after that— either live with her, or without her. But don’t leave her.
They still get a death threat every now and then. They haven't had to move towns since Lillie was small, but sometimes she still finds letters in the post that don't have their names on it— can't even be bothered to remember their names— and she buries them in the woods behind the stables, out of sight. She's got a nice little stash going. She doesn't even think about telling Armin. He must get the odd one that she doesn't manage to intercept. He doesn't tell her either. But she can live without having to see him read them. She never opens the letters, but she knows that he would, sitting by the fire like he's got the day's newspaper and reading the words of a stranger threatening to take their child in the night.
Annie could still kill a man if she had to. She’s never needed a titan for that.
Lillie has crept back down the hall by the time Annie opens the bathroom door, and she stands there with her overnight braids falling out, pale blonde hair strewn across her shoulders. Annie doesn't know where the girl got hair so fair; her parents are blonde, but not that blonde. She's freckled too, from her days in the sun collecting shells and pinecones at the seaside with her father. She can do no wrong in his eyes. Nor in Annie's eyes, if she is honest. Lillie doesn't live in the kind of world where she could ever do wrong. They've taken care to make sure her biggest fears are the snail shells not yet collected for the curation she keeps on her windowsill.
"Morning,'' Annie says. Armin calls her dear, darling, sometimes puffin, since he learned what a puffin is. He talks about taking her to see the puffins someday, all the places from his dreams that he’s never been. Their house is overrun with atlases. Sometimes he waxes and whispers for hours when they lie in bed at night, murmuring as he falls asleep about all the things he wishes for her. Annie just calls her by her name.
"Morning," Lillie sings. "I've been waiting forever. Can I go now?"
"The outhouse is always free."
She ignores the eye roll she gets when Lillie steps past and lets the door slam. People have told her that eleven is a precocious age, when childhood begins to edge on the verge of adolescence. She's trying to remember that. Childhood.
"Have you watered the horses?" she calls as she parses her wardrobe. There's no answer until the toilet flushes, the sink runs, and Lillie reppears in the doorway, looking slightly sheepish.
"It's cold out," she says. "And I forgot."
"If you'd used the outhouse, that would have reminded you." She could have done it herself when she went for a walk, but well— she forgot.
"Why didn't you do it?" The girl is flopped down on her parents' bed when Annie turns around, a pair of work trousers and a flannel shirt in her hands. "I saw you leave earlier. Did you go riding?"
She steps into the trousers first. "No, I went down to the beach."
"It's sooo cold though."
"Lots of shells from the storm this weekend." Gale winds are a menace in this town. The horses still haven't gotten their nerves back after the rain, and she's been picking debris from the stable yard for days. "You and your father should go down this afternoon."
Lillie lies flat on her back, arms and legs spread out as she watches her mother dress. "Why didn't you water the horses?"
Annie slips the nightgown over her head. "I guess I forgot."
The mattress groans when she springs upright. "See! It's not just me."
"I'm old. I'm allowed to forget things." She buttons up her flannel shirt and hangs her nightgown across the end of the bed, lillie lifting her bare feet out of the way to make room. "Come on, we can do it after breakfast."
"Breakfast," Lillie echoes. She bounds off the bed, her braids swinging against her shoulders as she goes down the hall. "I smell pancakes!"
People always say she takes after her father. That's probably for the best. Maybe it's wrong to admit, but when Annie was pregnant, she had hoped for a son. She felt she'd have known what to do with a son. But a daughter— there are few things in the world that scare her as much as raising a daughter.
When she first said it out loud, Armin told her it wasn't such a bad thing, that it meant she wanted to do it right. She would have said that she hoped all parents wanted to do right by their children, but they both knew that was not true. That much was painfully obvious when Lillie was young and they used to do those visits in and out of New Liberio to see a grandfather who could never sit still. The sunrise of the new world had cast light on all the things that used to be in shadow, and little Lillie managed to bring some sunshine into their grey, but they never quite recovered, her and her dad. It was never going to be what she wanted, the only thing she had ever wanted. They could hardly stand to be in the same room together.
Sometimes she thought Armin wanted to repair the relationship more than either of them did. None of them had ever known a normal family, but for a long time, Armin tried. She can count on one hand the things she knows about her husband’s childhood, but in time she came to realize that he idolized the Jaegers above all else, a strange notion in the wake of their new world. But she could see it in his eyes, and then she could see too how it must have looked— those parents in that house with those children. From the outside, it was perfect. They were the same in that way, the things they had longed for all their lives— but his fantasy stood right in front of him: a door that was closed, but a window he could see through. One he looked into often. She’d never even come that close.
Lillie changed things for him, for both of them. Then Annie’s childhood stories were no longer tales of the past, and Armin held their daughter tighter. Liberio became her idea; all those visits he had once arranged, she had to beg him to make, to let their daughter see her grandfather one last time. To let her try again, one last time. Always one last time, always once more. Soon those days with her dad disappeared altogether. Unsettled feelings were better left untouched. Leave the old world for the old. Nothing could fix them in the end, and her father died of a heart attack, woken in the middle of the night by a burglar breaking a window. She wondered afterwards if she was cruel for thinking he might have deserved it. Armin did not have an answer for that.
Maybe it’s wrong to admit that there had been another baby once, and when it bled from between her legs before she even knew it was there, what she felt above all else was relief that they wouldn’t be guilty for bringing another life into this world.
The sun is over the hills by the time she starts downstairs. The air tastes sweet, the day getting warmer, and she stops for a moment on the landing to listen, to linger in the morning before she has to start her day. Another day. Another year. In the distance, the waves of the sea roll against the shore. She's never sure if she can actually hear them from the house, or if she's just imagining things. It's just as unclear now, as the village comes to life in the distance, bells ringing and hooves clattering on the cobblestones, as the hiss of something on the stove downstairs catches her ear, then her nose. She hears her daughter laugh and wonders if she ever laughed like that when she was eleven. It is a tender age.
It's been long enough now that sometimes Annie forgets who she used to be. Sometimes she catches sight of herself in the mirror, and she wonders why she had thought to see a young girl before she remembers who she is now. Sometimes she catches her husband staring into the distance, his fingers clenched around his pens like they could be swords in his hands. Sometimes she nicks her skin with the knife while making dinner, and seconds pass before she remembers to breathe.
"It's your mother's birthday," she hears Armin mutter to their daughter as she comes down the stairs.
The sea breeze is rattling the upstairs windows when Annie's slippers plod onto the stone floor of their kitchen, but the fireplace is lit and Lillie spins around with a grin on her face, a spatula sticky with pancake batter in one hand.
"Happy birthday!" Lillie exclaims when she sees her. She races over and throws her arms around her mother's neck. One arm, when Annie gently pushes aside the one dripping batter onto the floor. She whispers in Annie's ear: "I swear I didn't forget."
Armin hugs her again. "Happy birthday, dear."
Their warmth leaves her when they return to the stove, the griddle sizzling with sweet batter, but she takes the mug of coffee handed to her and sits by the fire, facing the window that looks out onto the stables. When the pancakes are ready, they slide in across from her, three sides on an uneven table that bobs on the stone floor as Lillie reaches for the little tin of syrup.
"How does it feel to be old?" she asks with a giggle.
Her smirk squirms. She knows she’s being a brat. Annie feels Armin shoot their daughter a look, the kind of thin frown that tells her not to talk to her mother like that, but she's too busy beaming into her pancakes, her knife and fork clacking clumsily on the plate. Annie forgives her.
"It's not bad," she says. Not bad at all.