Work Text:
For a short while, Annie sincerely believes that Mikasa might be the Founder.
She has the unnatural strength that comes hand-in-hand with possessing a Titan, and the extended durability of someone who wields the hidden weapon of healing. Ackermann is also a significant name. Before their migration to Paradis, the family had close ties to Eldian royalty, though relationships are said to have been at the brink of collapsing when the King fled from the world. Within the Walls, Annie unearths sufficient evidence of the attendance of a Kenny Ackermann at royal political meetings two decades ago, meaning a compromise must have been eventually reached between the two families.
It's a reasonable assumption, that Mikasa holds the Founder. There's practically no questioning it. In fact, the only question is if Mikasa herself is royalty or not.
Mikasa takes some amount of pride in talking to the other cadets about her family before Eren. She was a born and bred country girl before moving to the much more densely populated Shiganshina, which is an upbringing Sasha in particular greatly admires, being from the sticks herself. Her father's name was Luis Ackermann, a cousin to the auspicious Kenny — the surname, Mikasa willingly shared, but the relation, Annie dug up herself. For a family as significant as the Ackermanns, who you'd think would be kept under wraps, the government does not do a good job of disguising their birth records.
She's also the only Asian person Annie has so much as seen in passing on the island — and given her mother's maiden name was Tanaka, that will have come from the maternal side. Liberio was not a very racially diverse city, but Annie is well-read. Her father considered mental prowess just as important as physical, so she can easily identify that Mikasa is a name typical of Hizuru. Annie has to wonder, when every person on this island is so unaware of the past it's as if they've lost hundreds of years of technological and linguistic progression, how the Hizurians managed to cling to their identity, if only in the names they give their children? When everybody else had their culture wiped, what made the Hizurians so special?
The people of modern Hizuru... are not well-liked. Annie doesn't have to have seen much outside of Liberio to know that. For standing by Eldia until the very last moment, their relations with the rest of the world remain uncertain to this day. To add royalty into the mix of Mikasa's heritage is almost overkill, isn't it? It would make for a lot of persecuted bloodlines brought together in one small child. An Ackermann, Hizuru, Royal, and not even aware that she's Eldian before everything else.
Annie's complete theory is relatively simple. The Royals passed their Titan on to the Kenny Ackermann who made contact with them, and a few years before the Wall fell, it was subsequently passed to a young Mikasa. It's perfectly feasible that she was even born for the express purpose of eventually taking the Founder. God knows enough children in Liberio are born for the express purpose of becoming Warriors. Assuming every holder of the Titan kept it for their full thirteen years, then Mikasa must have inherited it around the year 842.
That would put her five years into her term. In comparison, Annie is four years into hers.
Bertholdt surmises that Mikasa's strength is a combination of Titan enhancement and lifelong training. If she received the Founder in 842, then that would give her just as long to learn to master it as the Warriors had with theirs... so, say Mikasa spent her entire childhood being prepared for the burden of the Founder, and only had a few years to refine it before her world came crashing down. Say Annie spent her entire childhood being prepared for the honour of a Titan, and only had a few years to refine it before being shipped off to Paradis.
Their situations would be closer than Annie is comfortable admitting.
Annie does not feel guilty for plotting against Mikasa. They've never been friends. They never even exchanged a word until enlisting, though Annie met Eren and Armin before that, and she watched Mikasa from the far side of the south-western Wall Maria refugee camp. Eren was loud and irritating. Armin was quiet, but bold, and though she feels no fondness for any of the three, Armin is at least the one she dislikes the least. It's strange. When they first met, she thought she hated him.
Ten-year-old Armin Arlert was a tiny boy who looked years younger than he actually was. He wore a tattered blue cardigan and was permanently caked in dirt, with hair that looked like it had never been washed. The only neat part of him was a circle on his face wiped relatively clean by wet hands. That always intrigued Annie when she lined up behind him to claim her rations of bread and barley porridge. Somebody was trying to take care of him. The older man who used to sit with his trio of similarly tiny children disappeared with the rest of the sacrificial reclamation effort, so it couldn't have been him. No; it was the little girl with dark hair and a small voice, who always seemed to have her hands pressed against her ears, huddled in the darkest spot of the hall with her scarf over her eyes, and who rarely queued for her own rations, forcing Armin to do it in her place.
That's what made Annie hate him to start with, she thinks. He'd always pitch such a fight when told he'd only receive food for one person — "Well, I'm sorry, sir, but you can see my friend in the corner over there. She's sick, so she can't line up, and she needs to eat just as much as the rest of us."
It's not as if he didn't have a completely valid point. But it frustrated Annie. Why be so headstrong? Once you've gone through week after week of the same argument every day, half of the time losing it and being refused Mikasa's rations anyway, what is the point in carrying on? If Eren and Armin had any sense, they'd have dragged Mikasa into the queue. At least then, they wouldn't have gone hungry, splitting two half-loaves of bread among three ravenous children. They let their pride or moral high ground get the better of them and suffered for it.
But that was their agreement, Annie supposes. Armin would fight for Mikasa's food every morning. She would hold her hands in the rain to wipe his face and comb through his greasy hair. They'd take care of each other in the ultimately pointless ways they could.
Well. Armin will have to make it without her from now on.
Annie and Bertholdt plan it out alone. Reiner, Marcel, the boy masquerading as the both of them, whoever he believes he might be, is too much of a security risk to involve in planning. They've been on the island for two years and cadets in the Paradis military going on five months now. Reiner slips further away every day.
They'll lace Mikasa's food so Annie can subdue and restrain her in the middle of the night, Reiner nearby to transform and carry them to Wall Rose, since the Colossal is too slow-moving. The hour will mean nobody's prepared to give chase; horses will be locked in their stables, uniforms will be haphazardly tossed under beds, and ODM equipment will be locked away until someone with the right clearance comes along to approve its usage. Bertholdt will lift Annie and Reiner over Wall Rose using the Colossal, and only then will she transform and take over. Even sedated, Mikasa's strength controls many aspects of their plan. It's debatable whether they should leave Wall Maria via Shiganshina or not, seeing as Mikasa grew up there and certainly knows the area better then they do, so Bertholdt can use his Titan again if it comes down to it. The five to fifteen metre Titans that populate the island can't do much but claw at his ankles. Once they're beyond the Walls, they're home free. Annie can at last make good on her promise to her father.
But when they finally get Reiner involved in the conversation, he brings it all crashing down with a hushed, "Annie, Bertholdt... are you idiots?"
An Ackermann cannot inherit a Titan.
They're Eldians, even Subjects of Ymir, but there's something in their ancestry that renders them immune. Mikasa is a Devil who doesn't have the Devil's blood. Reiner's only so certain because his mother was up there with some of the most loyal Eldians in the nation — that is, loyal to Marley, not her own people. The Ackermanns were an experiment, says Reiner. That's what his mother told him. That the cruel Eldians of the past experimented on even their closest allies to create super soldiers, and in doing so ironically left them immune to Titan influence.
And Mikasa was technically adopted before the Fall, yes; Reiner uncovered that in casual conversation with Eren within weeks of enlisting. Adopted children sometimes take their new family's name, or even a new one entirely, unrelated to the names of their first or second families. Mikasa's parents were murdered and she was taken into Eren's household. Could it be possible that by birthright, she's neither an Ackermann or a Jaeger but something else completely?
But no. Ackermann is the name that Mikasa was born with, scrawled onto the birth record Annie digs up in the Capital, so it's not as if she was illegitimately brought into the immune bloodline, crushing Annie's hopes of grasping at straws for proof that Mikasa maybe, just maybe, could still be the Founder.
The final nail in the coffin is the revelation that Kenny Ackermann is alive. If he didn't inherit the Founder from the Royals, then she has no idea who did, but it's impossible that Mikasa could hold it. Annie has been chasing a dead lead for weeks. Months.
In all honesty, Annie should probably count herself lucky that the entire Ackermann clan fled to the Walls. If they're unaffected by Titan spinal fluid and truly have such a history with Eldian royalty, then any Ackermann discovered alive in Marley would have faced public execution as opposed to Paradise, and a public execution is exactly the sort of thing that her father would have taken her to see. It's the sort of message he'd want her to grasp. Look at this blood traitor, hanging before us. You are better than this. You are stronger. It's also the sort of thing that would leave Annie even more conflicted than she already is about strength, morality, and the significance — or lack thereof — of one human body among millions.
The Warriors are back where they begun.
Though, thinks Annie, what this really means... what this really means is that Mikasa is a monster among men.
There's no thirteen year cap on Mikasa's life, and with what's now likely to be only a few months of training, she's by far at the top of the class and only climbing higher. Annie's heard the things that people say about her. Worth twenty adult soldiers, they say. A twelve-year-old girl that they could probably kick off the top of Wall Rose and expect to climb back up alive.
Maybe it's something to do with her experimental biology. Is that cheating, in a way? Could Mikasa really call herself the strongest if she's been genetically engineered to be just that? Is it right, to train among peers who can never surpass her, and is it her fault when people blame themselves for failing in comparison? If she isn't aware of the fact, does that change things? Mikasa doesn't seem to think she's special. She tells every struggling cadet that they have the potential to reach her level as well, but is that strictly correct?
For the first time in Annie's life, she has come face-to-face with someone who doesn't mean to be strong, yet still is. The Marleyan officers above her were strong because it was their right to be. Her father was strong because he had to work her hard for a better life. She became strong because she was told to.
Mikasa is strong because she was born that way. Annie overhears her one day, confiding in Hanna that she only learnt to fight for herself because of Eren, which sounds absurd until Annie reflects on it and realises that Eren is just as much of an engima as Mikasa. He isn't strong — not yet — but he sure as hell wants to be, and it's not because anybody is telling him to be. Nobody thinks it's impressive that the suicidal maniac had decided he's going to slaughter the Titans and free the people of the Walls, but that's just the thing. Eren decided that. All by himself, he decided, and not because he had pure blood or dirty blood or any superiority to the next person, that he was going to be strong.
Humble Mikasa, who doesn't intend to be strong, righteous Eren, who is going to be, and inseparable from them when you look at the big picture, Armin. There's nothing strong about Armin at all except for his defiant words.
It's insane. It's fascinating.
They really do just seem like the kind of people who fight, and who win, no matter what, simply because it is what they want to do. Because it's what they decided for themselves. Maybe that's true strength, regardless of where it comes from.
Annie does not hate them, but she wants to fight them all. She wants to find out if she can be bigger.
It really is a shame that Mikasa wasn't the Founder.