Chapter Text
They arrived in the dead hours after midnight when nothing else in the world seemed to be moving. There was no electric fanfare, no red-blue-red-blue regalia to announce their passage up the narrow lane. One crooked mailbox promised them a house, but little else. Rusted out and overgrown, the wooden post spotted with mildew, it was the kind of mailbox a person would use if they didn’t mind reading damp, insect-nibbled letters. Last week's rain still had not drained from the deep ruts along the driveway and it stank of stagnation, flashing like veins of fool's gold beneath each set of dimmed-down running lights.
A sane person in non-emergency circumstances would find little reason to venture to the end of such a drive. In that sense, Marty Branch did an exceptionally good job with the property.
"I will be billing your department with the charges for treating my coccydynia, Erwin," Hanji announced from the back seat. "Expect it within the next few weeks."
"That sounds expensive," the detective replied. "You might better get out and walk before we break the department's budget."
Habit kept Mike's eyes on the road, not any real ability to see what was in front of him. The windshield was as black as a scrying mirror and Mike was using the SUV's tires to feel carefully along the ruts in the road. "I broke the bone in my ass once," he told them gruffly. "They took x-rays and ran tests and ultimately gave me an ice pack and told me to just move from one ass half to the other. That was the most expensive bag of ice I ever bought."
"Some diagnostic procedures are completely baffling to me," Hanji agreed. "They did something similar with my knees." The doctor paused, though, and looked over at their neighbor. "Are you alright, Nanaba? We're discussing Mike's ass. I'm surprised you don't have anything to add."
"It doesn't need anything." Nanaba’s reply was immediate, but it lacked her usual energy.
Mike attempted to glance back, but he managed very little apart from banging their tires into the side of a rut. "Nana?"
"I'm okay," she replied slowly. "It's just a bit of nausea."
They allowed the silence to stretch along the final yards of driveway, broken only by the background hum of Erwin’s reliable engine and the uneasy sloshing of heavy tires through standing water. “Mike, cut the lights,” said Erwin at last. “We’re running out of cover.”
“Yeah.”
The other detective reached up and turned the little dial until Erwin’s SUV went out like a candle, its rear view mirror darkening. One by one, the officers behind them followed suit. Only the lights from the tired farmhouse remained, guiding the short convoy forward by the off-yellow glow of its gritty windows.
Nanaba shuddered in the dark, releasing a shaky breath. "I smell death."
Hanji fell back in their seat, forgetting completely about the world outside their window as they reached down and yanked their mobile phone from a bag at their feet. "You're experiencing the flight instinct?” They breathed. “Jesus. Pardon me." Hanji turned the lit screen so it illuminated Nanaba's pinched face, where the color was draining rapidly from her cheeks. The dragon turned away, but Hanji had seen all they needed. "Your pupils have dilated. What about your heart rate? Respiration?"
"I'm ... fine."
"The pheromone has a compounding effect that will get worse as you breathe more of it in,” Hanji insisted quickly. “I'm concerned about your blood pressure, Nanaba. Trying to resist the flight response has been known to cause heart failure in susceptible genetic lines."
"I can flag candidates for the preserve on my own.” Mike raised his eyebrows in the rear view. “You’re too young to be developing heart problems.”
"Exactly," Nanaba told them stubbornly. "I’m too young. I’ll acclimate to it before I keel over."
“Have you ever gone through this before?” Hanji asked doubtfully. “We can't really know how it will effect--”
“My bloodline is fine,” Nanaba snapped, flexing her feet like she wanted to draw her knees up to her chest. “They’d talk and talk about it, how brilliant my breeder was. They didn’t shut up.” By the time she finished, she was gasping, and Hanji was eyeing her with more than a little concern.
Mike's lips pressed thin, his movements stilted when he reached forward to flip the AC over to recirculate. "Take slow breaths," he said tightly. "Don't hyperventilate. Breathe through your mouth."
"Won't work. Pheromones aren’t like smells,” Hanji supplied quickly. “It all depends upon the Jacobson’s organ. Humans only have ducts in their nasal cavities, whereas snakes and lizards only have them in the roofs of their mouths. Dragons, however, have both connections, so they can detect pheromones whether they’re breathing through their nose or their mouth."
"Fuck you, Darwin," the dragon muttered.
"Here." Hanji bent to reach back into their bag, coming up with the respirator that the police station had equipped them with. "Try this. It should filter out the worst of it."
"Dragons can’t tolerate the scent of their dead?” Erwin asked, surprised to discover that he knew very little on the subject in spite of his varied friend group.
“The pheromones,” Hanji corrected. “The pheromones of their dead. Many creatures use chemical alarms, you see. Ants, wasps, sharks, dragons. When one dragon dies it warns others away from the site of its death for up to several weeks following the event. In that way, one death can prevent many others. It’s powerful and basic and right now it’s sending a message straight to Nanaba’s hypothalamus, which processes fear, telling her to run as fast and as far as she can from here.”
“I see,” Erwin said. “So the stress could kill her.”
“Something like that. Is the respirator working?”
Nanaba paused. She hadn’t even bothered looping the straps around her skull, just pressed the mask over her nose and mouth and sucked in a deep breath, her eyes sliding shut. She didn’t bother opening them to respond, only offering them a tentative nod, then a shake of the head and a hand motion that indicated so-so.
"We should have had you in one of those before we started down the driveway," Erwin said. "It stands to reason there would be bodies on site."
“I apologize for my part,” Hanji sighed. “I didn’t think about it. The flight response isn’t a common problem in civilized society.”
"Is she alright, Hanji?" Mike asked, unable to get a good look at Nanaba from the driver seat.
“It’s hard to tell in this light,” Hanji answered honestly, ignoring Nanaba’s furtive nod. “She isn’t shaking as badly.” They reached the end of the drive and Mike applied his foot to the break, rolling them to a very careful stop at the mouth of the dark lane. He tried turning in his seat, but didn’t get far. Nanaba reached out and found his stubbled jaw with the backs of her fingers, but Erwin’s attention was on the tableau in front of them.
The property was like something out of a country song--a quaint little farmhouse set amongst perfect, rolling fields, pastures divided by lengths of simple fencing. The U-shaped stable loomed farther back, blending with the dark outline of its smaller outbuilding, which was almost invisible at this distance. The scene looked almost cozy. At night there was no sickly cast to the house, its peeling paint and rotten siding receding into the hazy darkness, the splintering wooden fences appearing whole and unblemished. The grounds were silent, unassuming.
Erwin reached for the switch on his portable radio. "Nanaba has verified that there are deceased dragons in the area.”
"I may have visual confirmation of living ones," Mikasa announced from the car immediately behind theirs. "Thermal is picking up readings in all three buildings. One on the second floor of the house and many in the other two. I can't tell how many individuals total. One of the cars parked by the outbuilding is still hot, but the driver is not outside."
"Anything else?" Erwin asked.
"The exterior is clear, sir."
“The signature in the house probably belongs to Mrs. Branch. Jean, don’t abandon your wits, but make sure your team isn’t rough with her either. She probably doesn’t understand what her son has been up to.”
“Yes, sir.”
"The outbuilding you showed me will be their breeding facility," Hanji predicted, leaning back around Erwin to look in that direction despite there being little to see. It was the faintest assembly of shadows and barely that. "They'd keep their breeding females away from all the aggression. Stress hormones are linked to high rates of miscarriage. It could be a medical facility as well if they bother with such things, or maybe some combination of the two. That's where you'll find the dragons that can be saved."
"That was what we anticipated." Erwin waved his partner forward, as sure as he could be that everyone on the grounds was settled and accounted for. "We're moving," he warned the others. "Team leaders take command of your units."
Erwin had split their operation into three separate subtasks, assigning one team to each of the buildings. His own, larger unit would clear the stable, leaving Jean responsible for the house and Mikasa for the outbuilding. Both radioed their affirmatives and changed over to their team's frequencies to deliver their own instructions. Mike sped up once they broke the treeline, exchanging stealth for speed as soon as they were out in the open. With a bone-jarring lurch, Mike jumped the ruts and turned them off the driveway completely, cutting straight across an open field towards the stable--it's long, weathered side pale and vulnerable like the belly of a beached whale.
Sasha and Connie followed Mike closely--perhaps a bit too closely--bumping and jerking over the uneven terrain somewhere just off their right bumper. It was a violent experience even in Erwin's dark SUV with its four-wheel drive engaged. Erwin couldn't guess how the others were faring in their squad cars, skipping across the field like stones on a lake.
Mike turned in his seat the instant he threw the SUV into park. "Nana? How's the smell?"
"It's pretty fuckin ripe."
Hanji opened their mouth--probably to remind them that it was a pheromone and not a smell--but they closed it again with a sigh, rubbing their shoulder where the seat belt had not been kind to their bony frame.
"Stay in the car with Hanji until all of the arrests are made," Mike ordered gruffly. "If you hear gunfire, slide down and stay low."
Nanaba snorted softly, leaning her clammy forehead against the shoulder of Mike's seat. "I may need to get out and puke."
Mike reached up and pushed his fingers into her damp hair, his expression pinched and unhappy. "Just stay behind the door so you don't get shot, okay?"
"Not a problem."
Erwin and Mike left their doors cracked rather than slamming them shut, approaching the stable quickly once they were out in the open. They’d put a little distance between the SUV and the building in case there was someone inside to overhear their arrival, but despite the tension prickling along Erwin's spine, they were neither shot at nor called out. Down by the outbuilding, Mikasa was already moving her team. Erwin let their radio chatter slide harmlessly into the back of his awareness, focusing on his own immediate responsibilities.
"We're in position," Sasha reported quietly from the other end of the barn.
"Braun?"
"Almost ... Yeah. Now we are."
Erwin glanced sideways at Mike, who tipped his chin agreeably. That was everyone. He leaned forward, peering cautiously around the corner where he found one of the large double doors standing partially open, casting both light and smell into the hazy night. Even from this distance, Erwin's nose could detect organic waste--ammonia and decay, something reminiscent of raw sewage, of bodies living on top of each other. The detective drew his head back quickly.
"Respirators on," Erwin told them, reaching up for the device around his neck. "And then we begin." He slipped around the corner like a shadow, knowing that Mike would be right there behind him. When he eased his head around the open door to look down the long, empty aisle, he frowned. "Clear." This end of the stable appeared to be abandoned all the way up to the corner where it bent sharply into the next aisle.
"Maybe we picked a slow night," Mike offered doubtfully.
"I hope not." What they needed was information--enough to track down the heads of this operation so they could cut them off. Erwin was willing to bet this wasn’t the only property they were keeping. He wanted as many perpetrators as he could take.
The detectives moved so quickly through their half of the building that Erwin only registered no humans, no humans, poking the barrel of his gun into each stall and meeting each set of startled, elliptical pupils before moving swiftly along. A tack room, no humans, a feed room, no humans. Office, closet, clear.
"We have Mrs. Branch in custody," Jean reported from the house. "Marty Branch is still unaccounted for."
"Understood. Join us at the stable when you have a chance."
"Roger that, sir."
Erwin and Mike met Sasha and Connie somewhere in the middle of the stable, all four of them empty-handed and uneasy, their stinging eyes watering as they rejected the potent chemical cocktail in the air. The four of them looked around at each other until Erwin pointed the younger pair up a narrow flight of stairs to the top floor. Erwin and Mike lingered at the bottom with their weapons drawn, listening to the radio chatter they'd been ignoring up until that point. They had multiple arrests down at the outbuilding, but Erwin wouldn't radio in until they were ready to report, unwilling to distract anyone if the situation down there was tense.
"Looks like everyone was down the hill," Mike murmured. "Hanji, how is Nana?"
"She's ah ..." there was a brief, hesitant pause. "She's vomiting, but she's also threatening to put me on a spit if I tell you she's unwell, so I don't believe she's about to go into cardiac arrest."
"If she were, I don't think we'd know it until it happened," Mike sighed.
"Mm. Moblit is that way too."
"Detective," Mikasa reported after a few more moments. "We have three arrests down here--three employees and one client."
"Is Marty Branch among them?" Erwin wanted to know. He was keen on getting the son, who would have to interact with the ringleader on a regular basis seeing as one of his operations was being housed on Marty's property. A great deal of planning and coordination had gone into this setup--continued to go into it. There was no way the head wouldn’t want to supervise that directly.
"Affirmative, sir. The other two are nobodies as far as we can tell. Just the night shift."
"And the client?"
"He won’t say why he’s here,” Mikasa answered. “He clammed up as soon as we asked.”
“The females down here seem off,” Armin added. “They aren’t very responsive to us. They’re all in their dragon forms and they’re lethargic like they’ve been sedated.”
“The gravid females are sedated?” Hanji asked, barely waiting for Armin to confirm it before they continued. "That is astronomical risk to the developing young!"
"They may be offsetting that risk with numbers," Armin guessed. "There are more females here than they need to supply one fighting ring, even a large one."
"Second floor is clear!" Sasha shouted down to them. "The stable is ours!"
Connie poked his head around the corner, though when he spoke, it was through the radio. "Add an illegal drug charge to that list you got going, Detective. There's enough up here to ride out a nuclear war. I can't even identify some of this stuff."
"Leave it alone for now. Call Doctor Jaeger and let him know that we're ready for him," Erwin said, waving for Mike to follow him as he turned and headed back towards the door. "Ackerman, have your team start documenting the outbuilding. Arlert, contact forensics. I want everyone on my team photographing up here. The stable needs to be ready for Doctor Jaeger when he arrives."
As soon as they left the barn, Mike's eyes were moving, seeking Nanaba in the dark. He tore the respirator from his face as he strode across the patchy lawn towards the ailing dragon, who leaned heavily against the hood of Erwin's SUV. The vomiting seemed to have passed, though Hanji still hovered close, speaking in an undertone without touching Nanaba. They stepped away when they caught sight of Mike, visibly relieved to see him.
"Kirchstein," Erwin called out as Jean's team arrived. "Run your group around the perimeter of the trees and look for any sign of foot traffic. There should be an arena hidden farther in. Radio immediately once you find it and I'll send more officers down to help you."
The boy nodded agreeably, though it was Marco’s eager, "Yes, Sir!" that Erwin heard as the team moved out.
"Arlert, how does it look down there?" Erwin asked. “Are there any bodies?” Nanaba's eyes turned to him and the stubbornness in them was clear, though the size of her pupils belied her bravery.
"The front of the building is in fair condition," the boy answered promptly. "It's females only up here, no young. They seem to be moving mothers to the back when they're close to term. We have a few dead hatchlings and several broken eggs that look like they were inadvertently crushed. One of the adults in the back is also dead and looks to have been for some time. The body is ... falling apart."
“They’re raising the young right next to other dead dragons?" Hanji murmured softly. "The trauma they must have developed ..."
“It would make them capable of withstanding it in the ring,” Erwin guessed grimly. He looked over at Nanaba, who was not wearing a headset but was probably close enough to Mike's to hear what was being described. "Would you be able to go in there?"
"The hatchlings are my first priority," Nanaba assured them. "They'll be confused and wary. They haven't seen much of the world and all they've seen of humans are the shitty ones. You'll need a dragon telling them it's okay."
"If you think you can do it I'm not going to object," Erwin promised, aiming to ease the defensive cast to Nanaba's expression. "But if you have to leave, then go immediately. Mike is great with kids." Mike snorted, but Erwin waited for the dragon to nod her reluctant agreement before he spoke again to Armin. "Nanaba and Mike will be down in a moment. Defer to any of their orders." He motioned to Hanji to follow and turned back towards the stable, raising both his eyebrows at Mike as he passed.
Erwin hadn't been given much opportunity to look closely at the stalls or their occupants on his first walk through, intent as he'd been on securing the building. He hadn't been thinking much about the dragons themselves, only about ensuring that each one was in fact a dragon and not a stray human ducked into a stall and hoping to be overlooked. Erwin had been looking for elliptical pupils--the only feature that was certain to identify a dragon in their human form. Now, as he set his respirator grimly back in place, there was nothing to distract him from the rest of it, from the horror in the details.
"What are these?" he asked, though in essence he already knew. The unusual assembly of metal plates and lengths of chain could only be some form of restraint, but Erwin thought they looked more like a first grader’s interpretation of what armor might look like if it had been invented by apes. "Do these hold the dragons in their human forms?"
"It's a titanium harness," Hanji said, looking through the bars at the first dragon they came to. His slender frame sagged beneath the strange-looking contraption like the portrait of a broken knight. "It physically prevents the initial stages of a dragon's transformation by restricting movement while their form is still at its weakest. I've never seen this method of restraint in person before. It's too expensive, thank heavens, for the average piece of shit to afford."
"Does it hurt them?" Erwin guessed. The dragon didn't appear to be in any immediate pain, though the scrutiny obviously made him nervous.
"Only if they attempt the transformation. It isn't meant to be reversed partway along. The shock to their system can kill them. Obviously, the titanium harness is banned, which is why you haven't seen anyone decent using it." They swiped the clipboard from its hook by his door and took a look at it. "They've been keeping records at least," they said, waving the clipboard at Erwin to indicate what they meant. "That should save you some time. There's a lot here, though the organization is a mess. I can use these to pick out your strongest candidates for questioning. Do you know how many you'll have space for?"
"Not yet," Erwin admitted. "If we can take the breeding females I want them all, so that won't leave much room for the ones we keep for questioning. Armin will be getting a headcount for us."
Hanji nodded slowly. "Until then, I'll go through and eliminate the sick and the injured. If their clipboard is on the floor, they're healthy. Once you decide how many you need, we'll go back and prioritize the oldest. The older ones will have had more opportunities to see something useful. How does that sound?"
"Solid," Erwin agreed.
The doctor looked back into the stall, seeking to make eye contact that the dragon was clearly trying to avoid. He was pressed firmly into the back corner of the stall, his long limbs folded close to his body where he tried to keep himself seated on the one small lump of hay that rose above the stinking mire at the bottom of his stall. "Derik," Hanji called softly, using the name at the top of his records. "We're here to help you." But the dragon was disengaged, tense under their eyes. Hanji deliberated over the clipboard for a moment before kneeling to set it quietly on the floor in front of his door, something like relief in their face.
The next stall was much the same as the first--filth and submission. The next, filth and submission, filth and submission. Filth and submission. All of the dragons were banged up, covered in scar tissue, bearing injuries in various stages of healing. Hanji left the clipboards for each injured dragon on the pegs they found them on, each one adding to the shadows beneath their eyes. Some of the dragons were worse off than others. Few of the injuries had been tended to, or maintained once they had been tended to. There was more than one soiled bandage, more than one festering wound. A shivering female lay curled in the sludge at the bottom of her stall, motionless except for the faint rise and fall of her bare side, which was shot through with severe septicemia. Hanji looked at her for a long time before they told Erwin, "Doctor Jaeger will need to prioritize this one. She’s in a lot of pain."
The dragon did not react at all to the sound of Hanji's voice, though it was almost directly over her head. Erwin might have presumed her dead if he hadn't paused to look very closely for movement around her narrow ribcage. "Turn the documents around," he suggested. "We need a different designation for the ones that need urgent attention."
Hanji shook their head, but it was slow--not a denial. They snatched the glasses from their face and began working at the lenses with the tail of their shirt, turning to lean back against the stall door. Erwin could understand the doctor's anger. It was the same anger he would feel much later when he was alone and there was nothing left for him to do. It was the same profound disappointment.
"Do you need a break?" the detective asked.
"No," Hanji snapped, though they paused as the question really sank in, their eyes drifting up the long aisle ahead of them. "Only for a second. I want to do this all at once." The doctor pushed their glasses back onto their nose, carefully lifting each respirator strap to hook the arms over their ears. "It's such a waste, Erwin. Legally speaking, every dragon in here will be considered a danger to the public. They won't risk rehabilitation for any of them--not with records like these. Look at this garbage." Hanji grabbed the septicemic dragon's clipboard roughly from its nail and yanked up on the first sheet. "Geneveve. Fought May 10th, fought June 6th, fought July 8th." Another page roughly flipped. "A fucking injury log. Antibiotic ointment. That's what they put on that." The doctor pointed with the corner of the clipboard to the ruined dragon, her ugly wound almost certainly fatal whether it was attended to or not. As far as it had spread, it had to be in the blood. "Have you seen anything this sick, Erwin?"
The detective sighed. He could feel Reiner and Bertholdt moving up the aisle behind him, their camera shutter sliding softly in its housing as they committed each act of inhumanity to film. They'd gone silent as they worked, the easy, triumphant smiles falling from their faces. They hadn't laughed in a long time, murmuring when they spoke like the mood of the place had settled over them. The boys were deferential in the way they maneuvered their camera, quiet and careful like they were documenting a funeral.
"I've been involved in a couple of dog fighting busts," Erwin said finally. "It was similar to this. Not quite so bad."
Hanji nodded solemnly. They looked as though they wanted to say something else, but a sharp cry from directly behind Erwin had Hanji's eyes jumping sideways and widening. The detective turned just in time to catch sight of a skeletal hand withdrawing into the stall opposite Geneveve's, of Reiner leaping back more nimbly than a person his size should have been capable of doing, shouting, "Jesus fuck!" as he clutched the digital camera protectively to his broad chest.
"Did he get you?" Bertholdt leaned over to get a better look at Reiner's wrist and forearm, both of which appeared to be unscathed. The dragons shifted anxiously in their stalls, startled by the commotion.
"Almost." The boy took another step back, bewildered. "Shit, I guess that one didn't want his picture taken."
"Be careful, Reiner," the other boy chided. "You're letting your guard down.”
“I sure as hell was. Jesus, is this one rabid?” He looked over his shoulder at Erwin in expectation of some kind of answer, but the detective only stepped around Hanji to cross the aisle.
This drake was not timid like the others. Erwin could see that right away. This one did not avert his eyes from Reiner until Erwin moved, and then his focus slid from one to the other as quickly as a cruise missile retargeting, his eye contact direct and hostile. That was a stay the fuck away from me look if Erwin had ever seen one. Instead of backing away, he moved closer to the stall door as Erwin approached, ready to draw blood if the detective got close enough to his tiny kingdom. Erwin stopped. He wasn't going to get that dragon's clipboard without a painful souvenir of the attempt.
But Hanji was quick. Their hand appeared like a fork of lightning and snagged the clipboard from its nail, whipping it off and twisting out of the dragon's reach before he could lash out with his overgrown nails.
"Well done," Erwin thought to say, though he was about as surprised by the development as the drake himself looked.
"His name is Levi," Hanji reported briskly, their eyes skimming the thick stack of documents in front of them with growing interest. "Well damn. These numbers are significantly larger than the others."
"How significant?" Erwin moved to look over Hanji's shoulder at the record. Even Reiner craned his neck to catch a subtle glance, though the elbow Bertholdt applied to his rib cage for the attempt was less so.
"Well, he's older for one. Much older. His injury log is longer, his fight log goes back years rather than months. He's got a little nick across the back of his shoulder, but he's the oldest one here by far. It would be a mistake not to take him. I'm not sure what this notation here means, but I think he might be their reigning champion." Hanji glanced up at the dragon then, prompting Erwin to do the same.
Levi hadn't taken his eyes off of either of them. He seemed particularly keen on letting Erwin know with the sheer force of his stare that he would like nothing more than to sink those dark nails into the detective's jugular. Once Erwin broke eye contact, though, and took in the rest of him, he did note that the small body in front of him bore a much longer record of violence than most of the others, criss-crossed by marks that varied in age from pale white to scabbed to angry and red. Considering the kind of medical care available here, it was a wonder Levi had survived all of those injuries. His immune system must have been as vigorous as the rest of him.
"Ha. They've written a note here about his temperament." A friendly glimmer had returned to Hanji's eyes as they looked up again at Levi. "I see you put somebody in the hospital."
Levi didn't seem to know what to do with that. Erwin had been watching for indications that the dragons here spoke English, but while he was fairly certain that this one had at least a basic foundation, Levi could just as easily have been responding to body language or vocal pitch. "We would prefer not to take anyone to the hospital this morning, if you don't mind," Erwin said, watching carefully for comprehension.
When Levi lowered his chin like he intended to do just that, Erwin smiled. "My name is Erwin and this is Hanji. I'm hoping you might tell us about the people who put you here.” Levi was listening, his eyes narrow with suspicion, but Erwin was certain that he understood. “They're in a lot of trouble."
The drake’s thin lips curled into a sneer--the kind of expression that normally preceded some form of agreement, some desire for retribution. But Levi turned away, lifting himself effortlessly into the empty hayrack and tucking his filthy toes beneath him.
"Set his clipboard down," Erwin told Hanji. "We're taking him with us."
Levi was something unique. He occupied that rusty old hayrack as haughtily as a prince on his throne, glowering down at his would-be rescuers like they had tracked filth into his throne room. His gray eyes dared them to try their best, to come in after him if they thought they could. Levi smoldered. He was impressive--something the owner of this enterprise could hardly resist looking at in person. He'd seen the ringleader's face. Erwin was certain of it.
If there was information to be had, Levi was the one who had it.