Daisy | Levi Ackerman

Chapter 1 - A Way Out

Growing up, I was a short kid. I always had to cling on to my taller friends' bags so I wouldn't be trampled by the school stampede. In formations and lines, I always stood out front, the teachers making sure I wasn't cut or blocked from the scene. In the middle of conversations at the mess hall or the park or even in the corridors, I'd be disregarded due to my height not imposing enough space to establish a mutual heeding with my peers. I didn't have a problem with it at first, but when my classmates started jeering me on about it, I started to look at the mirror and think of what was wrong with me. I didn't understand what satisfaction my peers obtained from seeing me run away from their insults.

For that reason, I always stood at the head of the staircase where I was above the dozens of heads of my classmates scurrying out onto the grassy schoolyard to find their parents during dismissal. The gates of the campus out front glowed in the amber of the setting sun, but nothing quite outshone the smile of my mother when she'd wave at me wide and happily from the pavement.

Mirroring that pearly expression in my face, I scanned the crowds in expectation of my mother. But moments have passed, the heads have thinned out, and sooner I lost the shallow power I felt when I stood at the head of the stairs. Because there were no more heads I was above of. It was almost only me, if not for the gardener sweeping the grounds.

When my thoughts began to clear out that I should walk home alone that day, in the distance, a black horse came galloping towards the gate, ridden by a black-haired man.

I seemed to have known him well, because I approached him, and he received me with a stern, straight look. He brought me home. He brought me home when my mom, or dad, or uncle could not. And that fond memory somehow concludes there.

[Celine]

This is really sapphire, I thought, as I sat there in the dining hall, enjoying the aroma of Freya's cooking; the bright pendant of the necklace Mr. Fischer gave me the other day hanging from my soft palms. I looked at it closely with my magnifying glass and jotted down on my journal how I confirmed the mineral's composition, in neat scribbles under my lovely sketch of the pretty jewelry.

"Well, Hanji never really thought about it that way. She thinks they're animals and treats them like lab rats." An ice-cold voice came down the hallway, nearing my once peaceful location. I prepared myself for the end of it all. "I'm not risking my ass to catch her one of those."

"I suppose we must let her do her own work. She's eccentric, but it might pay off in the end. Though we mustn't engage when the hazards are high." Erwin replied, as the two of them arrived to the door just by my right. My uncle seemed to remember something by the jerk in his eyebrow, and stepped behind Levi.

"Stay here. I have to get something from my study." He said, before leaving the scene. I immediately whisked my attention back into my necklace, studying it with a newfound enthusiasm, but more to get myself out of this situation than to actually learn about it.

"Say, Freya," I called the old lady, as she stood there against the stove, chopping vegetables. "What do you think is this worth in the shop?"

Freya, a stout, gray-haired woman who cooked for us, and was my most motherly figure, looked back and regarded my cute trinket for a bit. "That does look expensive, dearest. How do you have it?"

She looked back into her boiling pot, knowing full-well I did not have enough money to buy myself one of these pretty things. I always had to receive my allowance from my uncle, and he only ever gave me enough to last me through the whole week. He said it was frugal discipline they went through as children.