Erwin x OC | The Girl From Outside

Chapter 1 - 19 Years

I opened my eyes.

The refreshing feeling of the sun on my face and the welcoming sound of the wind rustling softly through the leaves of the huge trees woke me up.

I adjusted my position on the branch that I had chosen to sleep on the previous night, and looked around me. There were birds making their nests in the branches above, and the sky was a mixture of blue and pale orange as the sun rose into the sky.

My surroundings were breathtaking, I'd lived around here peacefully for so long but I could still never get over the beauty of the sun rise.

Everything was perfect, until I looked down.

The sound of scratching on the trunk of the tree that I was sat in tore me from my dream of a peaceful life that didn't involve constantly running and hiding. I looked down to see a group of five or six ugly titans that had spotted me and were clawing at the tree in a hopeless effort to devour my flesh. Disgusting.

I stood up and stretched out, my joints clicking and cracking in various places. Sleeping in a tree every night wasn't doing wonders for my body, I always managed to sleep in a funny position and wake up aching.

I grabbed my makeshift bow and arrows and jogged along the thick branches of the tree, having no trouble keeping my balance. After living out here my entire life, I had kind of become accustomed to climbing and running.

I ran for a while until I found a place where the branches of two overgrown trees crossed and I hopped from one tree to the next, climbing up about 15 metres into the heights of the branches until I was sure I'd lost the titans that had seen me.

"Can't let too many of em see me, or they'll pull the whole damn tree down" I muttered to myself.

I sat down on a branch that looked sturdy enough to sit on and dangled my legs off it, swinging them in the morning air.

As I looked around, I watched a few titans trundle below me , unaware of my presence. I wondered where all the other people were.

"I can't be the only one left, right?" I said under my breath.

I put my hands on either side of my head as nightmarish thoughts flashed through my mind.

I was six years old when my mother got eaten, torn apart in a frenzy of blood and flesh as she screamed at me, begging me to run and save myself. It was the first and the only time I'd seen what titans were capable of. I hadn't seen another human being for thirteen years since.

My mother used to tell me stories of huge walls that towered fifty metres into the air, protecting hundreds of houses and shops that were home to many men, women and children alike. She told me about schools where children went to learn every day, and churches where people could go to pray. She told me that she used to fight with hundreds of other people, and that they used to fly through the sky and kill titans. She managed to survive alone after getting injured and left behind on an expedition, and she didn't realize she was pregnant with me until months later. I think about her stories all the time, and wonder to myself if they were true or if they were all just lies in an effort to make me feel better.

I pulled a patch of green fabric out of my pocket and ran my fingers over it. The fabric was soft, a deep forest-green color with an emblem sewn onto it. It looked kind of like a pair of birds wings. The fabric was from a jacket that belonged to my mother before she died.

I felt an itchy sensation on my leg, and gazed down to see a fairly large beetle crawling along my skin. My stomach let out a quiet growl, and without thinking, I grabbed the beetle and shoved it into my mouth. It made an audible crunching noise before it stopped wriggling around and I swallowed it.