Chapter Text
Over the course of his career as a scout, Erwin had seen many horrifying things. He’d seen comrades swallowed whole and bodies splattered against the ground. In his dreams he could hear the screams of the dying, their pleases for mercy where none was ever granted. Still, after enduring the horror that were the titans, there was something incomprehensible about seeing a child drenched in blood with dull, dead eyes sitting next to a corpse in the dark.
He held up his lantern higher to cast a wider range of light. Maybe 20 meters beyond, he saw a cart on the side of the road, one wheel stuck in a shallow ditch. The girl, maybe 10-years-old, sat still with the hand of the dead woman clutched in her tiny hands. He didn’t know if she was refusing to acknowledge him and Mike or, more likely if she was in shock.
“Erwin,” Mike said in a low voice next to him, their horses shifting underneath them to move closer to each other. “This might be the mother and daughter the Military Police told us to be on the lookout for.”
He’d all but forgot about it nearly immediately after they’d passed by that MP outpost. What had they said? Bandits had kidnapped a mother and daughter after killing the husband. That’s right, a local doctor had raised the alarm after he’d found the husband’s body when he was making a house call.
“Mikasa?” He called out to her and not entirely certain he had the name right. It had been a name he’d never heard before, something foreign. “Is your name Mikasa? My name is Erwin Smith, this is my friend, Mike Zacharias. We’re soldiers here to help.”
Her reaction to him was delayed. He’d seen it in soldiers outside the walls after a run-in with titans. Shock. But eventually, she did tilt her head up, though she still refused to make eye contact with him.
Erwin handed his lantern over to Mike and swung one leg up and over as he got down from his horse. With slow steps, he approached the girl. “Mikasa,” he knelt down on one knee so he was eye level with her. “Can you tell me what happened?”
This close, he could see that the mother wasn’t dead but would be very soon. Her breaths were ragged and shallow, her eyes, dim and directed at her daughter. She’d been stabbed what looked like a dozen times in the gut which must have made every weak breath she took painful.
The daughter was so covered in blood he couldn’t tell if any of it belonged to her. The only thing off that Erwin could see was that her tiny form was wrecked in shivers, from cold or shock, he didn’t know. Probably both.
For a long moment, it seemed like she wasn’t going to answer. “They-“ she paused, trying to find the words. “Those men killed my papa.”
She shifted her weight closer to her mother. “They tied us up and put us in the back of papa’s cart. They said they were going to sell us in the interior.”
So they weren’t bandits at all but traffickers.
The mother, finally sensing that someone else was there turned her head. She was so pale, even in the dim light that the lantern provided. “My name is Luteninent Erwin Smith with the Survey Corps. Can you-“
He stopped abruptly when she opened her mouth and coughed, blood dribbling down her chin. “Take care…” her struggle with just those two words was painful.
“You’re daughter’s safe now.” He assured her, reaching out to take her other hand. It was sticky with drying blood but he wouldn’t have lasted this long in the scouts if a little blood bothered him.
Her fingers twitched weakly in his hands. “Promise me… I told her..” her breathing was so shallow at this point Erwin could barely perceive it.
Erwin glanced up to Mikasa but she hadn’t moved a muscle and continued to stare at her mother emotionlessly. When he looked back to her mother it was to see that she had finally succumbed to her wounds.
Behind him. He could hear Mike dismount his horse, the light from the lantern bobbing and creating deep shadows along the faces of the daughter. Mike set the lantern down next to Erwin before walking down the road to where the cart had been left.
He laid the woman’s hand down before looking back to her daughter. “Your mother said she told you something” he started after a moment of silence, “what was it?”
Mikasa mirrored his actions and finally released her mother’s hand, laying it gently on her shredded abdomen. She clasped her hands together and rested them in her lap and finally lifted her gaze to meet his. And for a moment, Erwin was rendered breathless.
In her dark eyes was a fire so hot he could almost feel its heat. “She told me I had to fight to live.”
Mike returned to them and Erwin struggled to tear his eyes away from the fierce little girl before him. “Three men dead,” he said, his face grim. “Killed with this.” In his open hand was a knife with the wood on the grip splintered. It looked like it had been crushed in a small fist.
He didn’t have to look at her hands to know that Mikasa was the one who killed the bandits. Still, when he looked down to where they rested in her lap he could see a sliver of wood sticking out of the heel of her palm. Any other splinters she may have hidden by the drying blood.
Erwin stared at her tiny hands for a long moment. The reality of what must have happened maybe half an hour before he and Mike happened upon the scene sinking in. Would they have been able to save her mother and her innocence had they just rode a little faster?
“Erwin?”
Erwin drew himself from his thoughts. It never did any good to get stuck in what-ifs. “Let’s wrap the bodies and take everything back to the MPs.” Mike nodded and got to work. This was hardly the first time either of them had had to prepare the dead for transport.
Erwin stood and held his hand out to Mikasa who took it and allowed herself to be pulled into a standing position. “Where are you going to take me?”
He pulled her away from the body of her mother toward his horse. “There’s a Military Police outpost by the Shiganshina gate of Wall Maria, we’ll go there.”
He stopped beside his horse and gave its side a pat. “Have you ever ridden a horse before?” She shook her head no. Erwin gave Mikasa a crash course in horse riding to distract her while Mike loaded all the bodies on the wagon. By the time he’d settled her side saddle with him seated behind, Mike had hitched the cart to his horse and was ready to leave.
“Now just remember, hold on to the horn.” She tightened her grip on the horn and he turned his horse around back in the direction of Wall Maria.
For the most part, they rode in silence, with Erwin pulling her closer so she was under his cloak when he noticed her teeth chattering. For the first time in a long time, he found himself not thinking about formations and titans. Instead, he thought about the little girl in his arms who was very stubbornly not giving in to her need to sleep though she had to be exhausted. He wondered what would happen to her once they turned her over to the MPs. Did she have a family she could go to? And the doctor, who was he to her family to be so concerned about their welfare.
They finally reached the MP outpost sometime after midnight. Most of the ride had been spent in silence, only he and Mike quietly discussing the likely ass-chewing they’d be receiving from Shadis come morning. Mikasa had remained awake and eerily still against him the entire ride.
When he walked through the office door, it was to see a man harassing four very irritated MPs. From what he could hear, Erwin deduced he was the doctor he’d heard about before.
“Look, we’ve got men out looking for them, as soon as we know something, you’ll know something.” An officer was telling the irate man.
“I think I can help with that,” Erwin interrupted before the situation could escalate. The doctor looked seconds away from throwing a punch.
All the men turned to him and then moved their gaze down to the little girl holding his hand and caked in dried blood. There was a long pause, taking in the horror of the situation.
“Mikasa!” And then the doctor was moving forward to crouch before her. “Do you remember me, we’ve met a few times when you were just a little thing.” His tone was steady but he was pale as his eye roamed over her form looking for injuries.
She didn’t move away from him, but she did move closer to Erwin, her grip on his hand tightening.
“Lieutenant Smith,” one of the MP’s called, moving closer. “Can you tell us what happened?”
Erwin gave the man a nod before kneeling until he was on Mikasa’s level. “Let the doctor pull the splinters from your hand and treat any injuries.”
Mikasa didn’t look at either of them but gave a reluctant nod. She had angled her body away from the doctor and released Erwin’s hand. The doctor led her over to a bench and had her sit on it. A good call because she was swaying on her feet from exhaustion.
“There’s four bodies in a cart outside with Lance Corporal Mike Zacharias.” He said, causing two of the MPs to head outside.
It took the better part of an hour to give statements and write reports. In that time, the local mortician had been called to take the bodies of the dead for storage. The doctor had pulled the splinters from her hand proclaiming them the worst of the injuries. Mikasa had been cleaned up and had her blood-stained dress replaced with a spare button-down shirt that came to just below her knees. She’d also hung on to his Scout cloak and had it wrapped around her tightly.
And still, she didn’t give in to sleep.
Erwin had noticed that Mikasa had some sort of aversion to Doctor Yeager and mentioned it to Mike under his breath. “Maybe it’s a baby duck situation.” He suggested, much to Erwin’s confusion.
“Baby duck?”
Mike crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against one of the desks in the office. “Baby ducks latch onto the first thing they see after they hatch, thinking it’s their mother.” He nodded toward Mikasa who was turning her head away from the doctor again. “Losing her family in such a traumatic way, she needs someone to look after her.”
Mike clapped his hand on Erwin’s shoulder with a grin. “You’re the mother now.”
Erwin wasn’t entirely sure this was true until Mikasa glanced up at him. When she saw that he was looking at her she moved away from the doctor, her tiny bare feet padding silently across the office floor until she stood in front of him. Mike muttered a soft quack beside him.
“I’m tired,” she said, her voice just as soft as when she’d first spoken to him. “Can you take me home?”
Erwin felt his stomach drop as a heavy silence filled the air. Eventually, he found his voice, “Home?”
She pulled the cloak tighter around her shoulders. “There’s really nowhere else for me to go.”
Erwin looked up to Doctor Yeager who was staring at Mikasa sadly. There was always something sad about an orphan, after all, he’d been an orphan once. “Does Mikasa have any family in the area? Grandparents, aunts or uncles?”
The doctor shook his head. “No, none that I’m aware of.” He turned to one of the officers. “Though maybe you can investigate for other relatives in the area?”
The man looked like that was the last thing he wanted to do. “Protocol is children go to the orphanage and if no family claims them within a year then the assets of the family are liquidated for the orphanage to hold on to until the child turns 16.”
Erwin wondered how many children received their inheritance and how much slipped into greedy pockets. He looked back down to Mikasa who seemed to have shrunken in on herself. He’d never seen someone look so miserable.
“The orphanage in Shiganshina is overcrowded. I was there just last week and they had two children to a bed with many sleeping on the floor.” The doctor cut in.
The MP shrugged. “So we’ll send her to Trost.”
Being an orphan once upon a time gave Erwin a certain insider's knowledge of loopholes. “I request emergency custody of Mikasa.” Beside him, he could feel Mike tense.
The MP sneered, “That’s not a thing-,”
“It is,” cut off one of his comrades and pulled some paperwork from a filing drawer at the back of the office. He slapped it on the desk beside Erwin with a pen. “Though why a Scout would adopt a kid is beyond me.”
The man had a point. It was why he didn’t pursue Maria. He could die any day. There were no guarantees in the Scouts. He might only be able to give Mikasa a home until the next expedition and then what would happen to her? But he couldn’t leave her, she was his baby duck now.
Erwin glanced at Mike feeling the other man's eyes on him. There was a question in his friend's eyes but he had no answers to give. Instead, he filled out the paperwork and made arrangements with Doctor Yeager to employ a local lawyer to track down any remaining family. In case that none existed, the lawyer was to liquidate the family's assets and put the money in a trust for Mikasa when she became of age.
By the time he, Mikasa, and Mike were back on their horses and heading toward the Scouting legion's headquarters, he, Erwin Smith, was the legal guardian to a little girl he’d met less than four hours ago.
Shadis was going to kill him.