The World She Saw | Attack on Titan x Reader Fanfiction |

Ilse Langer's Notebook: The Survey Corps (8)

~Your PoV~

In the evening you toss and turn in your bed as you often do.

You couldn't get Hanji's story about the soldier with the notebook out of your head. During the day you didn't have much time to think about it, since Eren kept you in check through your joint training, but now your thoughts were only on this subject. Something in the back of your mind tells you that there's more to all of this than meets the eye.

Of course, no one would deny that it was an interesting and at the same time disturbing incident that you couldn't make sense of even with the hardest effort, but something else was holding you to it. You just didn't know exactly what it was. The only thing that can help you now, is to take a look at the aforementioned notebook.

But since Hanji returned it to Ilse Langer's parents out of respect, there was no way for you to read the notebook. No matter how much you wanted to. Unless you asked her parents to let you look at it... But then, maybe it was all a bit too much. It had been a few years since Ilse Langer passed away, but her parents certainly did not recover from it. How could they? After all, it was always the worst fate for parents when they had to bury their own children because they had gone before them.

Therefore, it was certainly inappropriate for a stranger to knock on their door one day and ask if you could take a look at the diary of their deceased daughter.

However, you wanted to read it, by all means. You finally wanted at least a small answer to all the questions you had. Surely her parents can understand that. After all, Ilse Langer's notebook is a valuable clue for mankind, and you didn't want to keep or take it with you. Just a tiny glance was enough for you...

Your decision is made. Tomorrow morning, you will visit Ilse Langer's parents and ask for permission to look into her notebook. They could not do more than refuse. You would rather take this small chance than regret it later. Otherwise, you would never be able to think clearly again. And all you wanted was to prevent the same incident from happening as it did then, just because you were unfocused.

The next morning, you take the chance that you and Petra were still in your room to ask her if she knows anything about the incident.

"If I know anything about Ilse Langer's notebook?" she repeats.

"Yes, you've been a part of the survey corps for a while, so I thought you might know something about it."

"It was a while ago. It was one of my first expeditions back then," she begins, "We found the notebook inside a hollow tree, where Ilse's half-decomposed body was also lying. Her head was bitten off, and a 6-meter titan seemed to be guarding her. Its behavior was strange even for an abnormal. It was really creepy."

"Hanji mentioned that, too. Ilse Langer is said to have claimed in her notebook that she encountered a talking Titan. From what I've heard about this titan, that was with her corpse, I imagine that might have been the talking titan she met."

"You could be right about that. I never thought about it that hard," she countered, "Section commander Hanji told us what she read in the notebook back then. That's also what led to the permission for the first titan-capture mission. But I never read it myself."

"That's too bad. I was hoping you might know more," you said with a sigh. Besides Hanji, only the commander seemed to have read it, but you can hardly approach someone of high rank like him about something like that. 

"Are you interested in this? I thought Hanji told you all about it?" Petra asks with a somewhat puzzled look on her face.

"She did, but I'd like to read over it myself. I know she gave it back to her parents, though."