DEVILMAKER
II. Back to Death

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          The truth sat lodged in Elke's throat like a bite badly swallowed. She supposed it should have surprised her in some paralyzing way, but after what she'd seen it was hard for anything to do that. Worse things could be said about her than what sins a woman and her children had set in motion two thousand years ago—selfishness and betrayal and killing that was singularly hers. The Marleyans, so the doctor called them, didn't care so much about that as much as they considered it a natural extension of that eons-old sin. Elke was selfish and treasonous and murderous because of the devil Ymir. Choice was an illusion. The evil rotted inside her like it rotted inside Poldi, like it rotted in the womb of every child who had once been Ymir's daughters. It was a nicer thing to think than that she'd done it on her own, a strange pardon to offer an enemy.

"And so the Devil of All Earth was slain," said the doctor, "but lived on in her subjects. All those who carry the ability to transform must be treated as the threats that they are."

Elke scoffed. "But you transform them."

"For the greater good, Miss Haase."

"Do they get it from you?" she asked. "The serum those soldiers injected in the... Eldians. Us. Does that come from your lab?"

"I am merely one contributor to Marley's scientific advancements. Titans existed many eons before I did, and our study of them has been ongoing as long as we've had the sovereignty to explore it."

"Why haven't you injected me?"

The doctor cleared her throat, flicking an errant strand of hair behind her ear. "You may yet have purpose elsewhere."

"Purpose," Elke laughed, but something they'd done to her throat wedged a cough out instead.

"He's your half-brother, is he not?"

She was immediately parched of amusement. "Poldi told you that?"

"Leopold gave us more answers in days than you did in months."

"Don't call him that."

"It's the name you gave him," the doctor said plainly.

Oh, Poldi. He'd told them everything.

"If I'm so useless," Elke snapped, "why not kill me?"

"Useless is such a conclusive word. As I said, your use has yet to be determined. After all, you made your brother."

So much for changing the subject. "I didn't make—what do you want? I told you about... Paradis. You told me about Marley. You won the war, I get it. And now you think you can torture an entire people because of it. My brother—"

"Your brother possesses a titan unwritten in our histories, Miss Haase; not in a single iteration, across hundreds of texts, by an even greater number of scholars. Unless Ymir herself connected with him through the Founding Titan, I maintain disbelief that your people are as innocent as you claim."

"How is Poldi proof of anything?"

"How is a thirteen year old boy a three-headed aberrant? How did he maintain such a degree of awareness after transforming as to recognize his own kin?" she countered. "Something was either done to him to alter his genetic response to the serum, or he was able to achieve metaphysical contact none of our own have managed in a hundred years. In either case, there is more residing on your island than we were let know."

But nothing had been done to Poldi. Elke had made sure of that. "Well maybe he was just born that way. Genetic diversity, o-or..."

The doctor sat up and clicked her pen. "Or?"

"I'm not telling you anything else until... I need to think."

"About what you can say that won't bring harm to your homeland?" She shook her head pitifully, placed a hand over one that had no choice but to accept its touch. Elke recoiled as much as she could. "Believe me, Miss Haase, there is no power in the world that can stop history from being righted. Nature always mends itself."

And was the cost of mending always slaughter? Liesel had died for a routine mission. A man on Hange Squad gave his life for an expedition to observe an abnormal. Elke couldn't begin to guess how many had died to protect Shiganshina the day the wall came down—they'd count her among the toll, no doubt, write the name she stole on the board in the barracks. They wouldn't give her a grave if she had a corpse for it.

"I might—might—consider helping you if you let me see him," she tried, chest thrust against her restraints, tongue darting across dry lips.

The doctor tutted like one might at a dog succumbing to sedation. The only bargain Elke had was one where she was free; the only advantage she could glean was one through violence. And she was without it now. She had nothing. The doctor was right to look at her that way, a limp animal, softly whining.

"I wouldn't consider that offer if you'd promised it outright, Miss Haase," she said with a pout. "Unfortunately, all that we need from you until a parliamentary decision is ruled, is for you to stay right here."

"I—just give me time—"

"No, Miss Haase—" She flicked the cap off the next clean needle— "Give me time."

Elke thrashed fruitlessly against the table. "No, no, I can't—my body can't—no more, please—"

"What your body can do is miraculous," the doctor cooed, and the syringe found the raw bruise of Elke's neck again.

So the cycle went. It was impossible to tell how long. Experimentation grew... experimental. There were all of these drugs they'd cart in in vial racks, eight at a time, unique iterations of the same chemical compounds altered to yield apparently different results Elke did not at all understand. That could have been her lack of scientific knowledge in a technological landscape beyond her scope of reference, but more likely it was the drugs themselves. Elke found herself understanding less and less of most things. Pain was not so much a factor anymore; she couldn't feel enough for that. Her limbs were spasmic, gelatinous extensions of the parts that made her breathe, and blink, sleep, wake, digest, defecate, exist—if that was still what she was doing. They'd strip her naked some days, chart her like a novel constellation, examine her in humbling proximity. She hadn't put much thought into her body when she'd let hands touch it voluntarily, giggling through inexpert kisses, but it was a different thing to guide them where she liked than feel them with the same scrapes and pricks as scalpels.

Did they do this to animals? Was she even an animal? What was less than an animal? They'd made her that.

It was months later, when she had forgotten what sunlight looked like, that she had reason to use her voice again. The doctor ran the sort of tests Elke remembered from the pediatrician in Mitras: sit straight, arms up, eyes this way, now that, how does that feel?

"Fine," she would say.

"Sore," she'd wince.

"Better," she'd answer more reluctantly than anything. This would be when the doctor let her rest, or stretch, or offer her some kindness that animals weren't allowed. Elke didn't want her to think that she wasn't treating her like an animal. That wasn't fair.

It could have been a year into the ordeal—maybe, if Elke knew what a year was anymore—that new faces began to appear with the carts. Mostly they'd peer in a moment, the doctor would engage in some short, private conversation wherein they rubbed their chins most fascinatedly through whispers, and then they'd leave, indeterminably satisfied or not. Elke got the sense that they weren't scientists on account of their manner of dress, but honing her focus to a point was a hideously onerous task. There was no reading between lines like this; all her edges had gone soft.

She hardly even thought of her brother anymore. That was the worst thing they'd done to her.

Something interesting did happen—and what a word! Interesting. She'd forgotten anything could be that but her, pinnacle of rapt attention she'd become.

One of the new faces was not new at all, or maybe his face was but his symbols weren't. In her blurry gaze she found the familiar reflection of the lab lights in his glasses, the many badges on his chest, the strip of red around his arm more colourful than anything else in the room. Elke tried to lift her head to see him properly. It was a rekindled humiliation to lay flat on display like some vegetative husk for someone who had last seen her so full of fight, strapped down and dressed in nothing but a flimsy sheet.

"Has she been violent since arrival?" he asked.

Strange. This conversation wasn't private. It wasn't hers, but she was allowed to hear it.

"No," said the doctor. "I wouldn't call her compliant per se, but she understands her circumstances."

"Meyer needed six stitches for the bite she gave her."

"Oh! My, yes, I... that was so long ago, I nearly forgot. I've made her rather pliant, and she hasn't made any attempt to escape since then."

"Could she?" He canted his head. "If she tried?"

Elke wrestled a headache that the lights did not help. She fell back against the table.

"No," the doctor decided. "No, I don't imagine she could."

"Give me your detail then. Calvi approved her clearance this morning."

"I—he did what? F-for the sake of the trial, it could alter her—"

"Volke." The man handed off a paper.

Volke. Elke could not stand to humanize her with a name after so long.

The doctor scanned it a while before huffing and handing it back. "I suppose the results have been static for a while now, but I had hoped consistency might nurture a baseline for... ugh. All right. I'll relent my guard, but only for a day."

"A day's all I'm asking for."

And then the man was coming closer, and his hands ran callused over her flinching wrists to find the locks on her cuffs, and as if it was nothing at all he was turning them open. Elke writhed against the straps over her chest, then those were gone too. He freed her ankles. Oh—instinct came back to her so quickly—she tested the stretch of her feet and found they still functioned, atrophied as her muscles were. She took a long inhale and found she was breathing. She wasn't dead. It seemed odd that she wasn't dead. The man held out his hand. Elke knew nothing else to do after being shocked and cut and drugged into submission but to take it.

The doctor called in her guards, and they followed behind as the red-banded man guided her down the hall, past the doors of failed human experiments and up a staircase she'd forgotten coming down. It was hard to believe her legs could carry her to the top, gelatinous as they felt even with the man's support. Elke squeezed his callused hand. He didn't stop her. She wondered what he'd done in his life to make them feel like that.

Her breath was reduced to a humiliating pant as they ascended the stairs. Beyond exertion, Elke dreaded what order had been given to allow her this new range. It broke her more to find they'd broken her sufficiently enough to instill fear through freedom. What could be worse than this place? She'd thought the same thing of the walls. Once, she hadn't been able to conceive of anything worse than titans. Once she might have heard of the sea and imagined something beautiful.

The door opened. Elke staggered against the archway at the onslaught of light. It was like one of the drugs they'd given her a few weeks in and never tried again, blazing and hungry and disorienting in a way that felt nothing like any intoxication she'd known before. This was not the weightless flight of a body drunk on stolen wine. To see the sun after months without it sank prisoner and soldier alike. Elke had in a strange turn become both. She collapsed with only the man's hand to steady her, overwhelmed by the existence of something so organically bright and the taste of air unfiltered by vents and mildew. She hit the ground with liquid knees. What a miracle to feel the blood pearl on her fingertips. The stain of dirt commingling. She clutched her chest, free of restraints, and took a long, full breath for the first time in months.

It took a long while to move again. The man at her side didn't hoist her up or shove her forward—wherever it was he intended to take her, for whatever it was he intended to do—he just stood there, holding her hand with a pressure to match hers, and let her re-acclimate to being human.

Elke didn't think she'd do that very well. Her mind was vacant of all reality but the one in her immediate periphery, like a child who had not yet developed the reason to understand things didn't stop existing when they weren't in front of them. She remembered hiding wooden blocks behind her back when Poldi was a baby, how he'd laugh at the mystery of it, then cry when some thought spun too far along for his age, his dough-soft skin, the sweet smell of his hair, which Elke pressed to her chin and kissed and cooed—Kuzum, you'll never have to look too long for me. I'll come back, okay? I'll always come back.

That old language was a wooden block itself, just out of view of her glossary's eye. Kuzum she knew because it had in the years beyond Mitras become Tilki. My lamb, when Poldi was just hers. Fox, when she began to fear he would need to be more.

"Come on," the man said, and foisted her patiently from the ground.

Elke nodded the way a drunk nodded to convince themselves they were sober. Yes, fine, she didn't need his hand. Ignore the bile she was swallowing and the sting in her eyes, the odd coolness prickling her neck. There was curl at the back of her neck that always took such perfect shape—like a corkscrew—and once she'd made a habit of twirling it for comfort. She tried now, mollified by the reminder of a time before this, hair that was like a mother's she'd never known. But the coolness was not odd at all, as it turned out; her fingers found nothing but the buzzed ends of a shaved scalp.

There was another hollow ringing she couldn't pin to a particular feeling. A spoonful of self scooped out of her. She trudged along the cobble river that bordered the sea with fists opening and closing to recall the animacy of her hands. The water blinked like the doctor's metal light. What if she jumped? What would her captors do? She had no desire to jump but to know how much her life was worth to them.

Poldi, Poldi, Poldi, she thought. He'd jumped with her from the wall. That kind of faith Elke could not abandon on a whim.

A midday sun baked her chalky skin, if she could assume a midday sun on the other side of the sea looked the same as hers. Maybe it moved differently here and this was evening. The heat was different, but time had passed, and it could've otherwise been conducive of any manner of funny little tricks they'd played on her body in her time underground. She was disgustingly pale like the finest nobility, sapped of all olive and pink and freckled tan, and her eyelids could barely keep open.

The man stopped at a small old dock Elke hesitated to join him on. Dry rot infested the wood. Shiny little flies picked away at the skeletons of fish on the shore. The man's heavy boots made the planks moan, though they could not commit even to the timbre of a sinking ship. The sound was wet and cottony, like a rung-out cloth.

"Are you going to kill me?" Elke asked, even as she recognized the stupidity of the question. Worse, her voice was slurred, stuck on the roof of her mouth, tacked on the new shape of her teeth like plaque. She licked them as if to clean the strange voice off.

His apparent boredum bothered her deeply, his audacity to be unmoved by her—and yet she'd never thought of herself as very interesting until being studied for months. Shouldn't she have been interesting, at least?

"I don't have the authority," was all he said, and then nodded. A proper nod, unlike hers, and not for her at all. A sharp motion whipped the wind behind her. Only in turning to see the unanimous retreat of her guard detail did she deduce that they had all saluted him.

Well, he had some authority.

The guards went far enough to be removed from earshot, but not eyesight. Elke bit her tongue. A trace of something she'd been given that morning kept it slightly numb. She felt around at her mouth, expecting the chapped skin but not the map of scars. Her finger brushed her halved tooth, right through a gash in her upper lip. Stitches weren't surgery, but she had thought... she had hoped she would look in a mirror one day and find herself looking back.

She came reluctantly onto the dock and peered into the water. Nothing. Her shadow rippled shapelessly under the beaming sun.

Elke didn't want to ask another question, but she was out of threats. A hostage had little else to offer. She might try her hand at ill-fitted wisdom, an air of mystery, but she was no actor. The man beside her gave her the impression he would not believe anything but what she was.

He spared her the predicament. "Your name is Elke Haase. Your brother, the three-headed titan, is Leopold Haase. You're twenty-eight years old—"

"I'm twenty-seven."

"Twenty-eight," he corrected tonelessly, and fixed her with a sidelong glance before turning back to the water. His arms were crossed on the dock rail. "Happy birthday."

A new question: What if she pushed him over?

"How long have I been here?" she asked through broken, gritted teeth.

"Solitude did nothing for your patience." He pulled a little white box from his chest pocket, a brown print at the lid where his thumb flicked it open. So he wasn't always this clean, then. His beard was trimmed, his uniform ironed, not a chip on his glasses, but Elke saw threads of silver in his blond hair beyond the years on his face, darkness under his eyes like pale new bruises. "You see now why I was cautious with Volke. She had you on that table for four months, and you still have the same look in your eyes as the night they pulled you from the ship. That's your nature, Elke. I understand, it's my nature too."

"You're—?"

"Zeke."

Eldian. And yet a rainbow of military badges decorated his coat. Guards obeyed him. It made no sense in the world the doctor had described to her—the ghettos and refugee camps, the broad stroke of continental destitution—no subject of Ymir would have what he had, a little white box with only a thumbprint to stain it.

Unless he was like Poldi.

"You're one of their titans," Elke said dumbly. The creaking dock unnerved her again. It would crumble to dust with a drop of his blood if he willed it so.

Zeke wriggled a stick from the box, so fine and neat it took Elke a moment to realize it was a cigarette. They were hard to come by in Shiganshina, woody and thinly folded, strung at the end to hold together in a town with no factories to adhere them properly. You'd be lucky for a box at all. Most were sold on roadsides in suspicious paper bags. Once, Elke had seen a cadet discharged for the crumpling revelation of one such bag on an early morning search of the barracks.

But this was Marley, and Zeke was an honorary Marleyan; all the finest, whitest cigarettes for their best behaved devils.

"Want one?" he asked, and lit the white end at the corner of his mouth. It was a relief at least to see a proper flame again.

"No, I don't want... No."

He shrugged. Every inhale seemed to take a weight off his shoulders. "I'm going to tell you what comes next. You're hard for choice, so you'll listen."

"Fine, give me one."

She wasn't sure why she thought he'd be bluffing—recollection of some theory her captors had posited a month ago, maybe; testing her resolve with fragrance and taste, a lick of salt and sugar, the smell of roses, a blindfold, hallucinogens, a soft touch. How long it would take her to writhe for a good thing rather than bad. The difference was humbling; there was no torture worse than the reminder that she still wanted.

Zeke handed her the cigarette. It was feather-light, and the scent of tobacco was foreign, but not unwelcome. She twirled it curiously in her fingers before sticking it between her lips as she'd seen him do. It fit funnily in the gap of her shattered tooth. Zeke slowly held the lighter to her mouth, as if waiting for her to withdraw like a frightened animal. She had every right to. She had every right to bite his finger off, but then imagined it growing suddenly gargantuan, stuck in her teeth, her skull burst like a crushed grape as he transformed.

No time for pleasantness. The warmth of his flame kissed her without any mind for her scars, but she relished only a moment's light-headed buzz before the smoke caught in her throat and she burst into a coughing fit. The cigarette fell sizzling to the ground, the wood too frail and wet to hold the heat.

"Tastes—like—shit," Elke wheezed.

Zeke's lips curved, then settled to a line again. He snuffed the cigarette out with his heel. "A nice meal is for taste. This is medicine."

She should have asked him if he had any liquor.

"Fine," she said, catching her breath. "Go on, then. But skip your reminders of why I have to do whatever you say—you have my brother. You people like your politics, I get it. Just tell me what you want from me."

"Volke told you about the Warrior Program," Zeke said with a drag of smoke.

Elke straightened as best as she could. If he was going to suggest that Poldi join them—

"We have no contact with those we sent to Paradis," he continued. "That was part of the plan, a risk we accepted because the risk in leaving the island alone would be far greater. This, of course, was before we had you."

I don't get it, she wanted to say, but felt stupid enough without admitting it. She wanted to card her hand through hair she no longer had. Uncrush the cigarette on the dock to pin it between her fingers, dangle it just so, play at elegance or apathy if she could. She leaned over the railing with crossed arms and waited, tried not to tap her foot.

"You're a soldier," Zeke said plainly, "but if you want your brother to live, you're going to be a spy."

Stupid, stupid, she couldn't keep herself from gaping. "What?"

"You haven't been trained for it, but they'll train you. That means a few things, Elke; I suggest you listen to them carefully." He turned to her, suddenly severe. "There's the matter of our warriors. At least two breached Wall Maria, by your brother's description of events. I assume Volke also informed you of the Founding Titan?"

Elke must have been staring in some vacant way, because Zeke tossed the butt of his cigarette aside and took her by the shoulder. "Nod if you understand."

"I don't," she said. "I don't..."

"I think you do. You know what the warriors are there for—just as well as they know what they're there for. But you know more."

She snapped out of his hold. "I told her everything I know."

"You made a point of telling her what you withheld," he countered. "I read your file. You held out a bargaining chip without knowing your brother had already handed it over. Not that it would matter, his existence is reason enough."

"Reason for what?"

"What good is the Founder to us if there are more shifter titans on Paradis? If we could be ambushed? Your family alone—"

"They weren't—" Elke swallowed, then pulled herself together and lied through her teeth. "There were no others in my family. That's why I... I took everything when I found out what they were doing. I burned the lab. They made Poldi to experiment on—my sister and her mother, they didn't survive it. I read all the files. There are no others but Poldi."

"Fine." Zeke started down the dock again, and his detail began to approach. "Then I'll inform Volke to continue her experiments. Clearly you're best serviced there."

"No! No—please."

She was in front of him without registering her own movement. A bead of sweat trickled down her hairline. She was so thoroughly changed in ways she'd never considered mattering before. The air prickled her scalp. She felt wind on her teeth like a suckled mint. She had no hair to blow in her eyes, to hide her crying from him.

"There was another name," Elke said, sniffling pathetically. "A family—their blood was used in the experiments. I don't know how many there are, the whole thing was a secret, but... one of them was a captain in my regiment. Th-the Ackermans. Their blood is special. That's all I know."

Zeke went unnervingly quiet. Elke's throat bobbed. She had played her hand too carelessly, and he would see through it.

"What about you?" he asked after a long time. "Are you special, Elke?"

"Maybe," she muttered honestly, mouth dry. "But you'll only find out one way, and I think if you could take that chance, I would still be on that table. You need me to go back."

There was a gleam in his glasses that didn't reflect in his eyes. "As much as you need us."

The Elke on the rampart four months ago would have pinned him to the ledge of the dock and slit his throat with the spine of a fish. This Elke was afraid, with nothing left to concede, and stood in the humid beat of the sun without looking away, without shrinking, reduced as she'd been already, chin slanted to meet Zeke's gaze. It was the most she could do.

His eyes gleamed at last. "Come with me."

AUTHOR'S NOTE ✶ tw: there is a line which describes the doctors testing how elke responds to physical touch under the influence of drugs. it is written to be uncomfortable and invasive but not sexual in nature, however i understand it could be triggering so be aware!

Okay so . SO. well. listen. excuse the very redundant chapter so long after the last that i could have had a baby in that time. i kind of got irrationally caught up on the elke/zeke dynamic (+ forgetting aot lore and not properly organizing my fic notes) and just let this draft collect dust out of my aversion to creative difficulty. there was a lot more i, once again, intended to include after their conversation, but it's been so long that i feel bad and will just write that separately 😭 levi continues to be pushed back into the plot, oopsi!

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