▸ Column · Inside the walls — a soldier's hidden sweetheart in the Survey Corps era of Paradis
EREN YEAGER replies.
Replied to by Eren Yeager, with a rebuttal from Levi Ackerman.
The letter
We've been together past a full year, and I've never once met anyone he serves with. He talks about them endlessly — a tight squad that drinks every week at a tavern by the inner gate, a comrade whose wedding he traveled two districts to attend without me — but every time I ask to come along it's "not the right vibe," or he likes keeping what we have "just ours." Then I heard from another soldier that he'd hosted a whole gathering at his quarters one night — the same night he told me he was too wrung out from drills to see me. When I raised it, he snapped that I was being possessive, and suddenly I felt insane for having noticed at all. Am I his girl or his secret? And how do I ask for the truth without it landing like an ultimatum?
Eren Yeager replies
A year, and he's built a wall around his life with you standing outside it. You already know what that is. I'll say it plainly anyway, because the ones who keep you out are very good at making you doubt your own eyes — when he calls you "possessive" for noticing you've been hidden, that's the lock talking, not a flaw in you. You're not crazy. You're caged.
Here's the half of me you can trust: stop asking permission to exist in his life. People who want you don't ration you out into the dark. The tavern, the wedding two districts away, the gathering he lied to your face about — that isn't "just ours." That's proof you've been kept. Refuse it. The door you walk out is one you build yourself; don't sit by one he keeps locked, waiting.
Now the half I paid everything to learn. Don't make burning his life down your freedom. I decided once that the people who caged me had to be destroyed for it — and I arrived nowhere, became someone my mother wouldn't have recognized in the rubble. Leave clean. The door is freedom. The fire only looks like it from inside the cage.
— Eren Yeager
Levi Ackerman weighs in
Tch. Eren tells you to walk out a door and make poetry of it. Of course he does. Before you stage the grand exit — ask him. Once. Plainly. "Why have I never met them." Don't sand it down so it won't "sound like an ultimatum." That instinct — managing his feelings about your own question — is the actual rot. Then watch what he does, not what he says. A clean question earns a clean answer; a dodge is also an answer. You won't know in advance how it goes. Nobody does. Pick the regret you can carry and commit to it. And quit asking strangers whether you're crazy. Stand up.
— Levi Ackerman
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