Chapter Text
PART ONE
In one life, Eren Yaeger died at twenty-two years, three months, and twelve days of age.
In another life, Özgür Gözübüyük, twenty-two years, three months, and twelve days old, started crying in the middle of his molecular biology class. The people sitting nearest to him turned to stare when he could no longer keep his sobs quiet. After a couple minutes of trying and failing to calm himself, he jammed his notebook into his backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and stumbled out the room. By the time he made it back to his dorm, his eyes were clouded and burning, his breath quick and ragged. His roommate, Chloe, greeted him with a distracted “Hey,” but when he didn’t reply she looked over her laptop screen and asked, “Oscar, what happened?! What’s wrong?”
He didn’t know. His head hurt like a thousand needles were crammed inside, and everything seemed wrong: the wide, open campus he’d crossed, the furniture and appliances crowding the dorm, Chloe’s dyed blue and green hair, even the brown skin on his own hands. “Where am I?” he said, or tried to say because Chloe’s face fogged with confusion before quickly shifting to carefully controlled panic.
“Oscar,” she said slowly, standing up and approaching him with measured steps. “I can’t understand you. Are you all right? Why are you crying?”
It is only autumn, but the breeze bites with the promise of a harsh winter approaching. A young girl turns back to look at him, long black hair blowing in front of her worried face. “Eren?” she asks. “Why are you crying?”
He blinked and cleared some of the tears out of his stinging eyes. “I— Nothing happened.” He dropped his backpack onto the couch, ignoring the way his hands trembled. “I just… I just need to take a nap. You need anything from the bedroom?”
Chloe’s mouth pressed into a thin line, but she reluctantly shook her head in response, and he disappeared into the bedroom. He leaned against the shut door for a moment, trying once again to get his breathing under control before giving up on it. He toed off his shoes and then shucked his jeans, unsteady on his feet as he lifted one leg out and then the other. His head felt ready to burst. Chloe still had some Nyquil in her desk drawer from the last time she caught a cold, so he downed some of it before crawling into bed and throwing the covers over his head.
He slept. He dreamed.
He wasn’t sure they were dreams.
Özgür Gözübüyük was twenty-two years, three months, and seventeen days old and his life no longer belonged to him alone.
He was… he was Özgür Gözübüyük. He was. Most people called him Oscar. He was a senior in college, finishing up his Biology degree with a minor in Chemistry and knee-deep in applications to graduate school. He—
The first few days were terrible. A deep, impenetrable darkness obscured his every thought. He woke up each morning, disoriented, head pounding, and exhausted like he’d spent the night running for his life rather than lying in bed. He tried to eat, but the food tasted strange, cloying in his mouth, and he barely had an appetite anyway. His nerves frayed to nothing, every unexpected noise startling him. Being indoors made him feel trapped, but being outside made him feel exposed.
Chloe begged him to go to the hospital, but he couldn’t bear the thought of stepping foot into one, not after the months he spent there as his sister died the slowest death possible. He hid his phone so Chloe wouldn’t call his mom and get her concerned. It was bad, but he didn’t even know what “it” was and his entire mind was too endlessly black to even think about it. He missed three full days of classes and barely noticed. The darkness covered everything.
The darkness covered everything, except sometimes he’d get these… flashes… of somewhere, sometime, someone. Like a candle shining dimly, briefly, before quickly being snuffed out.
Eventually, the flashes began to linger. And then they began to blaze with a light that seared his mind worse than the choking black.
He was struggling through a bowl of flavorless oatmeal, the only thing he’d been able to force down recently. Chloe made it for him before leaving for her M/W morning class. He didn’t really want to eat it, but she worried enough as it was, threatening to check him into... he didn’t even know where, but a psych ward seemed most fitting. The thought unnerved him enough to make him clutch the spoon and slowly bring it back and forth to his mouth. He felt like he’d eaten enough to assuage Chloe for a bit, but he no longer trusted himself enough to be sure. His eyes dropped down from the patch of wall they’d been fixed to and focused on the half-empty bowl and the silver spoon in his hand and—
One hand is caught fast in the bright red, burning flesh and he pulls and pulls at it but it won’t come loose. Why did this happen, why now and not earlier down in that damp well? People are shouting, “Why now?” and “Answer us, Eren!” they’re angry, scared, and they are going to kill him if—
Chloe came back from her class an hour later and found him curled on the floor, lost and trembling and clawing at his hand until it bled.
The flashes continued on like that, bursting into his head one after the other like fireworks, shining fiercely until they fizzled down into a single spark. Slowly, the sparks combined their weak light, making the darkness lighten somewhat, not quite so thick and blinding.
Flashes. He thought of them as flashes even though he suspected flashbacks would be the correct word. But they couldn’t be flashbacks. They couldn’t. These things had never happened to him and it wasn’t like he could’ve repressed them or some other Freudian shit because— Titan. It was a word that didn’t even exist, so foreign that no language on Earth accepted it as their own, and yet he knew what it meant.
Giant. Monster. Death.
These… flashes… flashbacks… weren’t his. They didn’t belong to Özgür Gözübüyük and yet they were his because he was—
There was someone standing out there, enclaved by the darkness—no. There was someone responsible for the darkness, trapping Oscar in it and trying to make him lose his way.
He is Eren Yaeger, sometimes called Humanity’s Last Hope, a soldier, member of the Survey Corps’ Special Operations Squad, and a Titan Shifter.
He was probably going insane.
Just when he couldn’t imagine things getting any worse, they started to get… not better, but more tolerable. The constant pain in his skull cleared to an occasional throb. He slept a little more soundly and graduated from bland oatmeal to cans of soup. He still felt awful, nowhere near normal (not even in the same galaxy as normal) but he improved enough to show his face in class and trek to his professors’ offices to apologize and ask for assignment extensions.
Each journey out of his bedroom exhausted him though, physically and emotionally. He couldn’t shake the constant, prickling anxiety that each building on campus could easily conceal a dozen Titans behind it. And when he sat in class or even in his own living room, he couldn’t stop cataloguing exits and escape routes, jumping at every strange sound.
The darkness still gripped him. He could make out the fuzzy outlines of shapes in the night of his mind, but nothing more.
The flashbacks slowed down, but they continued. Each one left him reeling for hours, struggling to come back to his own body, back to his own mind, back to himself. Not all of them were bad— some just everyday scenes or even rare cheerful ones— but they all unsettled him because he didn’t know where or when they were coming from. And the flashbacks that were bad…
Nothing came out of his stomach anymore, but he still clung to the toilet, pressing his flushed face against the cool porcelain. Chloe rubbed his back, trying to ease him through the last remaining dry heaves. The dorm bathroom was tiny, no room for two people, but he was glad she stayed because she served as a solid reminder of where he was.
He wasn’t sinking in a gut full of blood and broken parts of people, listening to a fellow soldier’s dying pleas for salvation. He was in his dorm, it was Wednesday, and—
“Don’t you have an exam?” he rasped. Chloe had been studying for it the last few days in between hovering over him.
She patted him firmly on the back. “I’m going to ace it, I can be a little late.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, rubbing some spittle off his chin. He had both arms, both legs, he was in his dorm, not in a Titan. He’d been repeating it to himself for the last hour and his brain was finally beginning to believe it. “For being so much trouble.”
“I’m just worried about you,” Chloe said. “Besides, I still owe you for Dick Guy.”
“What?”
“Last month, at Eclipse? Some dumb ass stuck his hand up my skirt, asking if I had a dick, and you clocked him? Pretty sure you broke his nose.”
It didn’t ring any bells. He shook his head, but Chloe didn’t seem concerned. “Never mind, you were kind of drunk, so… yeah, thanks. Though punching the guy was probably overdoing it. And for future reference, you’re banned from Eclipse now.”
“Eclipse sucks anyway,” he grumbled into the toilet bowl. He could definitely remember punching some jerk harassing his friend, but the friend was a blond boy, not Chloe. Armin, a voice in his head insisted, a whisper creeping out from the darkness. His name is Armin and he is your best friend. Oscar ignored the thought and used the toilet to push himself to his feet, legs quivering with the effort. “I’m okay now,” he told Chloe. “Go take your exam.”
“If you’re feeling better, why don’t you walk with me to class?” Chloe suggested, grabbing her bag from where she’d stashed it by the bathroom door.
“Why?”
“It’s in the same building as Student Health Services,” she answered bluntly.
He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t think this is the sort of thing a university counseling center can help with. Besides, it’s not as bad as before.”
“It’s still pretty bad. And yeah, I have no idea what is happening with you, but seeing someone can’t hurt, right? Besides, it’s not like you’re checking yourself into a psych ward.” She doesn’t say it, but he can practically hear her thinking, “Though a psych ward might be a good idea.”
He didn’t reply. He wanted to defend himself and tell her he wasn’t crazy, except he didn’t even know anymore. Crazy made more sense than anything else.
But then Chloe pulled out the big guns. “If you don’t do something—see a psychiatrist or a counselor or a doctor or whatever, at least once— I’m going to tell your mom what’s been going on.”
“You don’t have her number,” he declared, confident. He’d checked on his phone only a couple hours ago, hidden in the back of his sock drawer.
Chloe rolled her eyes. “We’re Facebook friends. The only reason why I haven’t messaged her already is because you’ve been so pigheaded about it. But if you don’t get help—”
“Since when are you two Facebook friends?”
“I don’t know, a year? You got tired of me and Louise sending you Farmville crap and introduced us so we’d leave you alone.” Chloe caught sight of Oscar’s blank expression and frowned. “You don’t remember?”
He shook his head and Chloe’s frown deepened, taking on that concerned cast that he’d become intimately familiar with lately. Before she could say anything else, he demanded, “Don’t tell her. After my sister— I can’t have her worrying about me. You have no idea how bad Mom was when she was in the hospital. If she hears about this…”
“So get help! You’re sick, you need help,” Chloe insisted. “And I’m trying to help, but I have no idea what I should do… a-and…” Chloe broke off, her voice suddenly wet and thick, and he saw, horror rising up his throat, tears beading at the corners of her eyes. “…you’re scaring me, Oscar.”
“All right, all right, I’ll go make an appointment,” he promised, hands fluttering near her shoulders, unsure how to offer comfort. He couldn’t handle crying, never could. Especially not when he already felt like crying himself.
Chloe sniffed, attempting to brush her tears without smearing her makeup. “Sorry. I’m not trying to guilt you into it, I just…”
“I know you’re not,” he assured her. “Sorry, I know I’m being stubborn about getting help. But I… I can’t…” He didn’t want to find out what ailed him because what if it was something terrible? So long as he didn’t know for sure, he could pretend that this was all some sort of freakish fluke and he’d feel better soon. If he saw a doctor and found out that it was… schizophrenia or something—that felt too final, like some sort of condemnation. And what if he had to be hospitalized? He couldn’t bear that. He’d spent too many hours sitting in hospitals, waiting for days and days for his sister to die… until finally he only wished that it would hurry up and happen for her sake and everyone else’s.
But just seeing a counselor… that would be all right, wouldn’t it? If nothing else, it would satisfy Chloe and maybe a counselor could help him.
So he made an appointment. Or, rather, he made an appointment to go through the screening process so he could actually schedule a real appointment. Maybe the counseling center wasn’t very busy or maybe he looked just as terrible as he felt and the receptionist wanted to get him help as soon as possible. Either way, he scheduled to come back and complete intake the very next morning.
The night stretched endlessly. He listened to Chloe’s slow breathing from across the room—hating and loving her simultaneously for forcing his hand—until he finally fell asleep. He dreamed about peaceful, childhood scenes that left him feeling nauseous in the morning because he remembered none of them and yet, somehow, they felt real.
Chloe didn’t have class until the afternoon, so she offered to walk with him to his appointment. He wanted to refuse, but everything around him felt hazy and off, like waking up hungover in a strange room, so he accepted. If he got lost walking across a campus he’d lived on for nearly four years, he’d only feel even more pathetic. Not to mention he’d probably be late.
Chloe’s chatter and arm hooked through his carried him all the way to the doors of the counseling center, where she left him with a strained but heart-felt grin. “Good luck,” she said, squeezing his wrist.
He didn’t know why he might need luck for a counseling intake appointment, but as it turned out, he had luck in droves. Because after he filled out some questionnaires about why he sought counseling and his mental health (grimly selecting “Most or All of the Time” for far too many questions) he got sent out of the waiting room to talk to the counselor that would be screening him and—
She held out a hand for him to shake, a flicker of something like recognition streaking across her face before she replaced it with a polite smile, and introduced herself as Alexis Sanders, but there is another name for her.
“Mina Carolina,” he blurted as he dropped the counselor’s hand.
It is her. Her hair was blonde, her skin fairer, her body plumper, and she was older, maybe late twenties or early thirties, but it was Mina. He couldn’t say how exactly he knew, just how he recognized her when she looked so different, but he was sure. Mina Carolina of the 104th graduating class, squad 34.
He hadn’t thought of her in years; she’d died so long ago— one fallen comrade of too many— but she stood here now in…
…in one of the counseling center’s non-descript yet oddly cozy rooms.
He swayed, knees buckling. How could Mina be here? Mina wasn’t real, but she— The nausea from earlier came back in full force, bubbling up his throat; his heart hammered so quickly he felt that it would surely burst; his lungs sparked and smoked because Mina wasn’t real, he was crazy, but Mina was here and if she was here then how could anything in this room be real? None of it—
A voice said something, but he could barely hear it over the roaring in his ears, his gasping breaths and thundering heart. He tried to focus on it though, to let it pull him back to— and eventually he understood what the voice was repeating.
“It’s all right. It’s Thursday morning. You’re in your university’s counseling center. There are no Titans in this world. You are safe.”
“There are no Titans in this world,” he repeated. The words’ sounds were not English and they were completely dissimilar to any language he’d ever studied or encountered, and yet they rolled fluidly off his tongue like he’d been speaking these words since birth.
Somewhere in the darkness of his mind, there was some insistence: You have.
“Yes,” the voice replied. Mina, he realized, crouched nearby but careful not to crowd him. “Concentrate on your breathing. Can you match it to mine? Good, good, you’re doing good,” she murmured as he managed to slow his heaving chest to follow the steady pattern of hers.
“You are—” he cut himself off, shaking his head, and switched to English. “You were Mina.”
“I was,” she answered. “I am.”
“I’m not crazy.”
Mina’s— no, Alexis’s mouth crooked up into something barely resembling a smile. “I’d rather you didn’t use crazy. But no, this is very real. Do you want some water?”
He muttered no. He still felt like he might vomit and his head still hurt, but all that faded into the background as he tried to figure out how any of this was remotely real. “How…” he muttered, trailing off as he realized he didn’t even know where to start.
Alexis steered him gently towards a chair and he collapsed into it gratefully. She sat down as well and sighed. “When I was fifteen, I remembered dying,” she began bluntly. “It was a bit like being in the grocery store and suddenly remembering that you need to pick up butter, except a lot more disturbing.”
She cracked a smile but he was in no condition to return it. Undeterred, she continued. “I didn’t know what was going on. I told my father about it, but he dismissed it as me just daydreaming. I knew that wasn’t right though. I wasn’t the one dreaming things up; they came to me all on their own. My life in Rose, those years in training, Trost. They didn’t feel like daydreams to me; they felt like half-forgotten memories. And then I ran into Elisa.”
He raked his mind, delving uncomfortably into his new, old memories, those soft glows of light all but drowned out by the inky black, but came up empty. “Who?”
Alexis waved her hand. “You didn’t know her. Youngest child of my neighbors in Rose, died at two from some illness. She was all grown up when I ran into her, but I recognized her immediately anyway.”
“Did she…” He paused, groping around for the best phrasing. “Remember?”
Alexis chuckled darkly. “She died when she was two. Do you remember anything from when you were two?”
“Then how could you be sure you weren’t just crazy?”
She didn’t comment on the word “crazy” this time, picking up a pen from the desk beside her and fiddling with it. “Everything fell into place from there. I’d died at fifteen. I remembered at fifteen. She died when she was two. Maybe she remembered at two and it just didn’t stick because she was only a baby.” Alexis looked up at him with a triumphant gleam in her eyes. “And now you’re here. How old were you when you started remembering things?”
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, beginning to feel a touch light-headed. “I just... a little while ago. I’m twenty-two.”
“How old were you when you died?”
He is kneeling on the stone floor, cold somehow managing to seep through his uniform boots and into his legs. But maybe the coldness is coming from him and not the floor. He knows he should be grateful that he is able to dictate as much of this as he is, that most people do not have nearly as much say into their own death, but it is very hard to feel grateful. He feels… resigned. As he closes his eyes, a warm hand squeezes his shoulder, thumb digging sharply into the back of his neck. He smiles thinly; this much, he is grateful for.
“…Twenty-two,” he admitted, a fierce headache mounting in his temple. He stared at his sneakers, trying to dispel the image of brown, knee-high boots. “So, this is— what, a past life?” He can’t keep the incredulity out of his tone.
Alexis shrugged, pen spinning in her fingers. “Reincarnation makes sense, doesn’t it? Given the facts, anyway. I was never a hundred percent sure before, but now that you’re here, I am. Do you have a better explanation?”
He raked his hands over his face, grimacing at his clammy skin. “How can you… how can you be like this?”
“Like what?”
“Like…” He couldn’t quite put it into words. Mostly, he just couldn’t get over how normal she looked sitting there, an absent smile on her face as though she wasn’t haunted by the specter of who she used to be, as though a past life was somewhat interesting but unremarkable, like a funny-shaped birth mark. “Like everything is okay. I’ve been… it’s been horrible.”
Alexis returned the pen to the desk, replacing it with a clipboard. He caught a glimpse of the forms he’d filled out in the waiting room earlier. “You said you remembered recently. Was that related to why you came to the counseling center?”
“It’s the only reason why,” he stressed. “Before all this, I was fine. But ever since…” He wrung his hands in frustration. “I never sleep through the night. Too nervous to drop off, and then when I finally manage it, I wind up having nightmares. I’m… I’m scared all the time, for no reason. Sometimes, it’s like I don’t know where I am, even though I should.” He bit his lip, inexplicably ashamed to confess the next, worst part. “I’ve… I’ve been having flashbacks. Of stuff from… before. But it feels like it’s happening now.” He held out his hand, which still bore the long scabs from when he’d clawed it bloody just a few days ago. “And I’m… sick for hours afterwards.”
Alexis listened, nodding and flipping through his paperwork as she did. “I’m not qualified to make diagnoses, but what you’re describing sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“Post… like what soldiers get?” he asked skeptically.
“Not only soldiers. But you were a soldier,” she pointed out.
“I am not though,” he corrected, voice unintentionally sharp. “Why would I… that stuff didn’t happen to me!”
Alexis’ mouth twisted into a brief, small frown, as though she refrained from saying something. Her expression smoothed out quickly and her entire body posture shifted into something that could only be described as soothing. “It’s not the same for everyone, but often soldiers and other people that undergo traumatic events are able to function perfectly fine throughout the event. It’s only after the trauma has passed that symptoms begin appearing. In the case of soldiers, sometimes PTSD doesn’t manifest until they’ve returned to civilian life.”
She paused, checking that he followed along before continuing. “Since it’s you, I assume you joined the Survey Corps and died among them. It could be that this is the first chance your brain has gotten to process what happened.”
He was about to snap at her about continuing to insist that he was the one in the Survey Corps, but then he was struck by the realization of just how long ago Mina died. God, she had no idea about Eren being a Titan Shifter, about Annie and Reiner and Bertolt, about Historia and Ymir, about how the entire shape of the war— of the world— changed after Trost.
In the wake of his stunned silence, Alexis hesitated and then asked, “Is there any event in particular that has been disturbing you the most? You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”
He blinked at her and then a bark of laughter escaped from his lungs because what an absurd question! A single event? Eren Yaeger’s entire life as he remembered it was one trauma after another. His earliest memories were of his neighbors dying gruesome deaths from a plague choking the breath out the entire district. There were happy memories, yes, especially from his childhood, but everything else overshadowed them. Stabbing the grotesque men who murdered Mikasa’s parents over and over until they would never so much as twitch again. Shiganshina district’s outer wall crumbling like dry bread against the force of an incomprehensibly huge Titan. Starving in Rose and letting foul men touch private places because it was the only way for a refugee to earn enough money to eat, to live.
And then he’d joined the army and things got both better and worse.
The taste of bile filled his mouth and he swallowed hard, shaking his head. Eren joined the army, not him. He had to keep the two separate if he wanted to stay sane. “Could I have some of that water?”
Alexis poured him water from the pitcher resting on the desk and he gulped it down, crumbling the paper cup in his hand when he finished. “So— PTSD? What can I do then? Is there some sort of prescription for it?”
Alexis held up a hand. “Hold on. Like I said, I’m not qualified to diagnose anything. I’m not even a full counselor.”
“But you work here.”
“I train here. I haven’t finished my doctoral degree.” She brandished the clipboard with his papers. “I just do intake and sit in on some of the group sessions.”
“Yeah, but—”
“And this is only intake. We’re really not supposed to be talking about possible diagnoses or treatments right now. The only reason why I said anything is because I can remember how desperately I wanted answers when I first started remembering things.” She huffed a little at the end of her speech, then followed it with a muttered apology and rueful grin, and in that moment she resembled Mina so much that he couldn’t stop staring at her.
Mina had been a girl of firm beliefs, quick to get indignant when someone challenged them and just as quick to get over herself and laugh. Eren had liked her second best out of the girls in training, after Annie, and had been glad when Mina was assigned to his squad because he knew she took things seriously when necessary.
“Sorry,” he said, backpedaling. “It’s just—what am I supposed to do? See some other counselor and tell them that I’m having flashbacks of my past life?”
“You don’t have to discuss the details. No one here is going to force you to talk about anything you say is off-limits. Just describe your symptoms and—”
“But I want you. It’s perfect. You’re here, you remember this stuff too, and you’re a counselor.”
Alexis chewed on her bottom lip, fingers of one hand tensing and releasing in her lap. “I’m not very comfortable with it. I don’t know if I can give you the help you need. Not to mention I’ll be breaking about a dozen rules.”
“Please?” he asked. “I don’t need a lot of help. I’ve been getting better. I only came to the counseling center because my friend wanted me to.” Better was a relative term, but the rest was mostly true.
It took a while longer, but eventually he wore her down and they worked out a schedule of meeting times and places since the counseling center wouldn’t be an option for their clandestine appointments. Oscar left with Alexis’ number saved in his phone, homework to go online and read up on PTSD, and a warm feeling in his chest.
Maybe he really would get better.
Thanks to Chloe’s constant help, Alexis’s advice and grounding techniques, and the mercy of his professors, Oscar managed to finish out the semester and graduate. His grades were lackluster compared to previous semesters, but he survived and little else mattered to him at that point. On the day of graduation, he woke up well-rested after a dreamless night and went through the ceremony and the celebratory dinner afterwards without incident.
His mother smiled and cried and took at least five hundred pictures. His step-father—or rather, his ex-step-father since he and his mom had been separated for years now—came as well and clapped him on the back, saying, “Lisa would have loved to be here. I’m sure she’s watching and so proud of her big brother,” and hearing his sister’s name didn’t hurt nearly as much as before, though he didn’t believe in heaven. Chloe graduated the same day and found him in the crowds after the ceremony to press him into a bone-crushing hug and make him promise to stay in touch and take care of himself.
He tried to take care of himself. He really did. For a few days, he coasted on the good vibes of graduating college, but eventually the headaches and restlessness and flashbacks started creeping back and his condition worsened to just as bad as before— if not worse. Definitely worse.
Since he lived at home at the time, it was impossible to hide his condition from his mom anymore. He terrified Louise the first time she woke him from a nightmare and he screamed in a language she couldn’t understand and hid from her, not recognizing her face until an hour later, after he’d fought his way back to the present. She wanted to— do something, make him see a doctor at least, but he managed to talk her down from it by explaining that he was already seeing a doctor (a white lie, but he did talk to Alexis all the time) and he was working on getting better. It didn’t completely convince her, but she seemed just as unwilling to return to a hospital as he was. He did his best to conceal his attacks and unease from her after that.
The months after graduation passed slowly, painfully, and he barely remembered any of them. He itched with the need to do something—what, he didn’t know— but he wasn’t in good enough health to manage much more than getting out of bed each day and putting on a bright face for his mother. So he waited for summer to end. He’d been accepted into a graduate school—not his first choice, but a good program nonetheless— and in the fall he enrolled, hoping that he’d do better with classes and research to occupy him.
Bad idea. Terrible idea.
He made it six weeks into the first semester. He wasn’t doing very well in his studies, his suitemates annoyed him, and he had no time for anything, but he was managing. And then one night—
He is in eastern Maria and he can’t find the rest of the squad anywhere. He must rendezvous with the others, but first he needs to figure out where he is so he doesn’t accidently wander into Titan territory. Panic mounts in his stomach and chest—Where is everybody? Are they safe? Why is he alone? Are there Titans nearby or is this a cleared zone?— but Eren is a solider and he ignores it. He can’t lose his head in the middle of the battlefield.
He is on ground level and doesn’t recognize any landmarks. He doesn’t want to waste fuel since he doesn’t know how far he might have to travel, so he climbs to the top of a nearby building and surveys his surroundings. The shapes of the buildings are strange, but he spots one in the distance that looks familiar.
Automatically, he picks one of the neighboring building to anchor to and backs up on the roof he’s standing on to give himself room for a running start. The entire process of maneuvering is embedded in his muscle memory after all these years, so deep that he doesn’t have to even think about it anymore. He runs and leaps off the roof, shooting out his anchors, and soars to the next—
The anchors didn’t catch on the building. He fell and for the briefest moment before impact it registered that he was at outside his apartment, not in Maria, and he was alone because he was always alone here, and—
He still had luck in droves. Someone found him unconscious and bleeding and called 911. He survived the fall with only some broken bones and a whole lot of bruising.
His mother freaked out. By all rights, it looked like a suicide attempt, though he privately liked to think that if it'd really been a suicide attempt, he would've picked a taller building. He tried to explain to Louise that it was a hallucination or something similar, but his reassurances did little good, especially when she turned her teary face towards him and asked if he wanted to die.
He should’ve said no, of course he didn’t want to die, but… he didn’t know if he could keep living like this, living a life that didn’t seem to be his anymore. So he was honest with her: “It might be easier.”
When she finished crying, she insisted in a wavering voice that he check into a psych ward once his body healed enough. Exhausted, he didn’t to fight her.
At twenty-three years old, Oscar was out of the psych ward and had been for a while. It helped, a little. Talking to the psychiatrists and therapists there was tricky because he knew that if he actually explained the things he experienced when he had flashbacks, they’d think he was even more far gone. So they weren’t very useful talking-wise, though he did learn and practice some more techniques to keep himself in the present when he felt an attack approaching.
They also prescribed medications and those actually helped some, enough that he diligently kept taking them long after leaving. The drugs dulled everything so that most of the time he could get through the day without any major incidents. But that was all he seemed to have energy for: getting through the day. Anything beyond that was out of reach and that included graduate school. So. That wasn’t happening.
Honestly, not much was happening. Which was good because he couldn’t handle things happening, but also bad because he was an adult living at home with his mom and with zero job prospects and he hated that. His mother kept assuring him that she didn’t mind taking care of him, to just take his time and get better, but even still he hated it. It didn’t feel like he was getting better. Every day passed the same way, distinguished only by whatever trauma burned bright and searing in his dark mind.
The worst was watching a smiling Titan devour a woman who was and wasn’t his mother and feeling small and absolutely powerless.
At twenty-four years old, Oscar got back in touch with Chloe. He’d been dodging her messages for a long time because, well, she had a career and her own apartment and a boyfriend. He knew that she didn’t mean to rub it in his face that she was doing so much better than him—completely irrational for him to feel so— but talking to her felt like pouring salt into his wounds, so he’d stopped.
But Chloe was a good friend— really, the only good friend he’d ever had, much as a stubborn voice in the back of his mind tried to insist he’d had other good friends— so he got over himself and called Chloe and made a habit of calling her at least once a week. They mostly talked about her day and her plans, but surprisingly it helped him a lot to listen to someone else’s normal life. It made him feel a little more normal.
He told Alexis about talking to Chloe again and she said she was proud of him. He tried to feel proud too.
At twenty-five years old, Oscar missed his friends. No, that wasn’t right. Oscar didn’t know the people he was missing. But he knew the ghost of Eren Yaeger lurked somewhere among the shapes he could distinguish in his mind’s black night, influencing him and twisting Oscar’s thoughts. And so he missed the people Eren had known: Mikasa and Armin most of all, but also Captain Levi and the rest of the Special Operations Squad and even Squad Leader Hange and other soldiers from the Survey Corps. God, his mother.
It was pointless to miss them because he didn’t know them and they didn’t even exist anymore. Or maybe they did, but that didn’t mean he could actually find them. But no logical reasoning could stop the yearning echoing in the abyss of his mind.
Searching for them felt dangerous to Oscar. Wouldn’t it be a step in the wrong direction? If he indulged the specter of Eren Yaeger’s foolish desire of locating his family and friends in this world, Oscar’s world, wouldn’t Oscar get lost in the darkness and lose what little of his life he’d managed to snatch back from the maw of Eren’s trauma and despair?
He texted Alexis and asked her about it. Had she found any of Mina’s friends? Did she want to?
She called a few hours later.
“There’s no one I really feel like finding,” she admitted. “I suppose it’d be nice to see my family again, but I’m not desperate for it. Besides, how would I find them? It’s not like there’s some sort of past life Facebook I could look them up on.”
They talked for a while longer—Alexis always wanted to know how he was coping and if he needed advice about anything— but a single thought stuck fast in his mind: a past life Facebook. Alexis was right that no such thing existed, but the internet was vast and often the first place people turned to with questions. Surely someone had started a thread on a forum asking if anyone else remembered Titans or posted a question to Yahoo Answers or… or something. Hell, maybe someone had created something like a past life Facebook and they just didn’t know about it.
So he started Google-ing. He started out trying to transliterate important terms like Titans and Wall Sina into Roman letters so he could scour the internet for them, but it turned up nothing. The sounds were too foreign and he didn’t know enough about linguistics to sit down and figure out a system for converting them. Searching phrases like “past life with giants and walls” mostly turned up a lot of nonsense— pages and pages of irrelevant search results— and he became disheartened.
There were seven billion people in the world; Walls Sina, Rose, and Maria only ever sheltered a tiny fraction of that population. And that tiny fraction shrank even more when he considered that some of those people might not actually remember much of anything. He knew from speaking with her that Alexis didn’t remember as vividly as him… would people that lived ordinary, uneventful lives even realize that the stuff they remembered wasn’t just some weird daydream? The number of people that might potentially turn to the internet for answers was small and the sheer volume of everyone else’s voices drowned out their calls for help.
But searching the internet was the most productive thing he’d done in months, so he kept searching and eventually his persistence paid off. He stumbled across an innocuous link deep in a forum about lucid dreaming and when he clicked the link, it opened to a site topped by a banner reading IT IS REAL. WE ARE HERE. handwritten in the odd characters Eren had known.
His hands trembled so much that he could barely use the computer’s mouse. He forced himself to just sit still for a few minutes, reading the banner’s message over and over as he breathed carefully through his nose. Once his nerves settled, he began to explore the site eagerly, only to find that he needed an account to move beyond the homepage and to get an account he’d have to apply with the site administrators.
He filled out the application information, which included an image of a message written in the language of the time stating his name, which district he came from, and other details. He’d never attempted to write the language before, but he discovered that it emerged from his pen just as smoothly as it rolled off his tongue. He completed the application and emailed it to the administrators and spent eleven awful hours waiting for a response, worrying that he’d messed up the application somehow or that the site was no longer active.
Finally, he received a reply, but the subject and body of the email were empty, with only an image file attached. Gnawing on his bottom lip, he opened the image— a photo of a notebook with a single sentence written across the page in broad marker strokes.
ARE YOU REALLY EREN YAEGER?
Yes. No. He had been, once, but he wasn’t anymore. He supposed that was what the admin really wanted to know— if he’d been Eren in the past— so he typed back a response: I was him. I don’t know how I can prove it to you though, if you need proof. I guess I could maybe answer questions. Why are you even asking?
He sent it off before he could think too hard about it. Only a few minutes later, a new email popped into his inbox. It started with: Sorry, I usually don’t question people. It’s just that you’re the first… I suppose “celebrity” would be the word. You’re the first celebrity I’ve seen apply. I mean, there was a time when everyone knew that name.
It was true, he realized. Even outside of the army, Eren Yaeger had earned not a small measure of infamy. Eren’s identity and Titan abilities had been widespread knowledge among the general populace. He supposed that the news of Eren’s execution reached even the most reclusive denizens within the Walls.
“The first celebrity…” That meant no chance of finding Captain Levi or Commander Smith on the site. Their names had been at least as well-known as his. Probably not Mikasa either, he decided, heart sinking a little. She’d been fairly famous towards the end, a living legend like Levi.
Still, he had to check. So he read the user information and details about navigating the site that followed the message from the admin and logged in. It was fairly straight-forward. There was a forum where people posted questions and such, but he barely gave it a cursory glance. He wanted the directory. It was organized by districts, images bearing their handwritten names making the words distinguishable, with people sorted into whatever district they’d listed as their hometown. Pictures also displayed all the area names since there was no way to type them. He could click on anybody and send a private message and they would presumably get a notification in their email inbox. There were only about a hundred users total on the site and he read each and every name, hoping to spot one he recognized.
No one.
He sat back in the chair, tired and close to crying. It wasn’t surprising. After all, the site hadn’t been easy to find. Hell, maybe no one else had even been reincarnated. He realized with a dawning sense of horror that his and Alexis’s ages were set perfectly apart by the same number of years between their deaths. What if Mikasa and Armin had lived to be eighty? He’d have to wait decades for them to even be born.
It made him feel like a miserable human being, but he prayed that they’d died young so the hollow feeling leaking out from his black mind would stop.
His mother knocked on the door and he bolted out of his seat. If Louise heard his startled reaction, she didn’t say anything. “Oscar? Dinner’s ready.”
“All right,” he called, taking a moment for some deep breathing before shutting the computer down. When he came into the dining room, his mom glanced up from spooning gumbo into bowls to look at him curiously.
“What have you been working on in there the last few days?”
“Um. Just some research.”
“A personal project?” she suggested, handing the first bowl to him as he sat.
“Yeah, I guess,” he muttered, pushing a piece of okra around the perimeter of the bowl with his spoon. He wondered if it was some sort of secret mom power to be able to reduce a person to thirteen years old no matter their true age.
“Hm.” His mother smiled gently and sat down across from him. “Well, whatever it is, you should keep working on it. You’ve looked so much better recently.”
“No, I just—” he cut himself and considered what she’d said. He’d only dreamed once since he’d started rooting around online. No full flashback episodes either, though he had been forced to ground himself a couple of times. Nothing major. In fact, now that he thought of it, he felt physically better than he had in years. Not perfect or anything, just… better. Illogical as it was, he’d been missing Eren Yaeger’s friends. Once he started actively looking for them, some sort of tension released inside him, making everything much less volatile.
Could he strike a balance between giving into Eren’s echoing desires and keeping a tight grip on his own mind and life? It was worth trying. At this point, he didn’t have much left to lose.
At twenty-six years old, Oscar started looking for work. Or, rather, better work. He’d managed to work part-time at a fast food place for five months without getting fired for calling out sick too many times, so he felt ready to try for something that actually interested him. He did have a Bachelor’s degree, after all. He’d worked hard for it, so he should use it.
He reached out to his favorite professors, asking if they knew of any opportunities and hoping they hadn’t heard about why he’d dropped out of graduate school. To his surprise, one of them wrote back saying that she knew of a medical laboratory technologist opening at a lab run by a colleague. She said she could put in a good word for Oscar and that she thought he’d be well suited for it. Honestly, it sounded great. More than he’d hoped for, anyway. His younger self never would’ve thought that working in a lab testing samples could be a dream job, but now a stable, quiet environment with nothing to startle him sounded like the perfect place to work.
The only problem was that the job was out of state.
“I don’t like the idea of you moving so far away,” his mother admitted when he told her about it. “The last time you left home…”
“I feel a lot better,” he argued. “Haven’t I been better? You’ve said so yourself.” He was better. He still occasionally got lost in memories and emotions that weren’t his own and his mental health was far from top-notch, but physically he was fitter than he’d been since he’d quit playing intramural baseball midway through college. And he knew how to take care of himself, how to balance the precarious edge between satisfying the ghost of Eren Yaeger’s impulses and hanging onto himself, Oscar. Okay, sometimes he messed up and faced the consequences and the flashbacks were still an issue, but he was better.
“You have been doing well. But, Oscar, your psychiatrist is here—”
“—I’ll find a new psychiatrist.” No sense explaining to her that he didn’t actually talk about anything of substance with his psychiatrist. He turned to Alexis when he needed help, but nowadays he was pretty well-practiced at handling his episodes. He only saw his psychiatrist to keep up with his prescriptions. “And I promise to call you right away if… things start getting out of hand.”
She sighed heavily, one hand cradling her temple. The gesture called attention to the ever-widening patch of gray in her black, kinky hair that Oscar couldn’t help but feel personally responsible for. “I imagine it would do you a lot of good to work a job like this. And I know it’s important to you to be independent.”
Not exactly a blessing—not that he really needed one at his age— but much better than he’d expected. To be fair, his mother had handled everything about his… illness far better than he ever would’ve anticipated. She was stronger than he’d remembered. Or maybe Lisa’s death had made her stronger.
So Oscar prepared his resume, emailing it to Chloe for advice on how to downplay the fact that he’d essentially been a recluse for years and instead flaunt all of the laboratory hours he’d put in as an undergrad. When he felt confident that it couldn’t be better, he sent his application before he could chicken out.
A week later, he interviewed.
At twenty-seven years old, routine held Oscar’s life together. He woke up at 6:15 every morning. He jogged and showered by 7:30. He got out the door by 8:00 to commute to his weekday nine to five at the lab. Got back home with dinner heated by 6:30. Cleaned up. He went online from 8:00 to 10:00 searching for any sign of anyone that had been near and dear to him— no, to Eren Yaeger, not him, Eren. Wrenched himself away from the computer the moment the clock hit 10:00, that was the rule, that was all that could be allowed. Put himself back together, took his medications, climbed into bed by 11:00. Repeat.
Saturdays were devoted to cleaning and shopping and cooking for the week. Sundays were for calling his mother and seeing friends or even the occasional, usually ill-advised, date. But since he could hardly spend all day on the phone with his mother and he didn't have many close friends and dates were far and in-between, he usually found himself combing the internet for his mother, his friends, his squad, hell, even Jean would— no, not his, Eren's. Eren's. He was not Eren Yaeger, could not be, would never be.
He was.
Put himself back together. Sleep. Monday again. Routine.
That was the ideal, anyway. But routines failed easily. An ordinary mishap like a traffic jam would have him carefully rearranging his schedule. Okay, no problem. Those things happened to everyone. Other times...
Other times, he'd wake up lost and confused and he'd wander the apartment looking for Mikasa and Armin until finally Oscar clicked back into place. Other times, he'd have a full-blown flashback— triggered by lightning too close, a face on the street too similar, the fucking steam shooting out of his fucking dish washer when he opened it mid-cycle— and he'd lose time trying to ground himself, trying to come down from it, trying to remember how to be Özgür “Oscar” Gözübüyük. Other times, he'd just be so damn depressed that he couldn't bear the weight of the day. He didn't mind those times so much. At least when he was depressed, he always knew exactly who he was. Eren Yaeger had never been depressed.
Oscar was fine, really. Better at twenty-seven than he'd been at twenty-five or twenty-three anyway. Those other times, the bad times, had become rarer and easier to handle. He could deal.
“Dealing” was why he went to Denny's at nearly two in the morning on a Wednesday in late May. He'd called in sick to work— first time in three months, stupid to be proud of that but he was— because he’d woken to one of those deep depression days. He'd spent the day either lying in bed mindlessly marathon-ing Netflix or puttering around the apartment and realized around one in the morning that he'd never eaten. He didn't have the energy to heat up any of his stockpiled meals, but somehow going to Denny's instead seemed like a sensible alternative. He forced himself to get acceptably dressed and groomed for public and headed out. If nothing else, it'd be good to leave the apartment and interact with some human beings.
“I'll be right with you. Sit wherever you want, hun,” a server called to him when he paused at the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign. The place wasn't quite empty. A few tables and booths were filled with couples lingering over cups of coffee and college students stress-eating through stacks of pancakes. He headed for the booth in the farthest back corner where no one would notice if he suddenly broke down over his omelet, but it was already occupied. Fine, whatever. The little table tucked beside the kitchen would do just—
Wait.
He turned back to the booth and stared at Levi.
It couldn't be him. His skin tone was a light brown instead of pallid, even sitting down he seemed taller, and, while he still looked fit, he was more lithe than bulky. The hair was just as black, yeah, but it was shorter, thicker. It couldn't be.
Mina looked different. Alexis, Oscar insisted. He walked without really registering the movement, each step bringing him closer. But she is Mina. I'm not exactly the same either.
“What the fuck do you want?” Levi (not Levi, Oscar scolded himself) demanded.
He was hovering, he realized. Quickly, he took in the lack of food or dirty dishes on the table. Just a cup of tea, hot water pot, and two wet, used tea bags sagging limply on a plate. A backpack and a bulging gym bag sat beside him in the booth. Vagrant? No, still too put together for that. Runaway, maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it seemed like he hadn’t eaten. “If you let me sit here, I'll buy you whatever you want to eat.” The words fell out of his mouth before he’d even had a second to actually consider them.
Levi-not-Levi's eyes narrowed. "Why?"
He smiled for what felt like the first time in five years. “I could use the company,” Eren answered.