A week had passed since the Season Four premiere turned the forums upside down.
The confusion from Episode One had not settled so much as it had transformed. People were no longer asking where Eren was. They had accepted, reluctantly or otherwise, that Attack on Titan had changed the rules. The question now was what came next.
Haru had spent the week rewatching the first episode twice and reading every analysis thread he could find.
He had his snacks arranged on the table again. Phone on silent again.
Episode Two. Title: Midnight Train.
It opened not on the train but in a war council room.
Generals sitting across a long table from Commander Magath. The press coverage of the battle had not read the way Marley wanted it to. The headline from foreign newspapers: "Human ingenuity surpasses and shatters Marley's Armor at last."
The general at the head of the table read it aloud with the specific tone of a man who had been losing sleep.
"Does this sound like a victory for Marley to you?"
Magath did not dress it up.
"General, I'm afraid the time has come. That is, humanity has eclipsed the Power of the Titans."
He laid it out cleanly. While Marley had been relying on Titans and colonial expansion, other nations had been developing counter-weapons.
The strategy had come back to bite them. Titans remained unrivaled in land battles for now, but if aircraft technology kept advancing at the current rate, bombs would fall from the sky and Titans, for all their size and regeneration, could only stand on the ground and look up.
The general's response to this assessment: "Do we not have any Titans with wings?"
Haru almost laughed. The man understood the problem completely and still could not stop thinking in terms of the old solution.
Zeke spoke next. One year left in his term before Colt had to inherit the Beast Titan. He wanted to use that year to resume the Paradis Island operation and recover the Founding Titan. Buy Marley time to restructure its military completely. And the newspaper headline that needed to replace the current one:
"Marley Occupies Paradis and Wields the Power of All Titans."
He also said one other thing. Almost quietly. Almost as an aside.
"The sick exploits of Grisha Jaeger should be brought to an end by none other than me, his former son."
His former son.
Haru sat with that for a moment. Zeke calling Grisha his father in past tense. The specific weight of former. Whatever had happened between them, whatever Zeke felt about Grisha Jaeger, it had not resolved into anything clean.
The title card appeared and the episode shifted to the train.
The warriors were coming home.
Zeke and Colt sat across from each other in the train car. Colt asked why Zeke was so special, why the Beast Titan responded to him the way it did when he had no royal blood to explain it. Zeke told him he would find out when he inherited the memories.
"Oh, but when you inherit my memories, you'll find out my big secret."
Colt leaned forward.
"The special way I wipe my ass. Hope you don't tell anyone."
Commander Magath, standing nearby: "Too late. I want a report. Everything down to the hairs on your ass. Do you think Eldians get privacy?"
Haru laughed out loud at that. The absurdity of it landing inside an episode that had opened with a war council discussing the end of Titan supremacy. Attack on Titan had always done this, cut tension with something human and ridiculous, but Season Four was doing it differently. The jokes landed in darker soil.
Further down the train car, Reiner was asleep.
He woke to Galliard and Pieck sitting across from him. Pieck had been in Cart Titan form for two full months during the war and was still relearning how to walk upright. She sat slightly awkward, working out the geometry of bipedal movement like someone returning to a language they had not spoken in a long time.
Galliard did not let Reiner settle.
He had inherited the Jaw Titan from his brother Marcel. Marcel who had died on Paradis. Marcel who had died protecting Reiner, because Ymir in her Pure Titan form had eaten Marcel instead of Reiner when they first crossed the water four years ago.
Galliard had learned this from Ymir's memories when he recovered the Jaw Titan from her. He knew what Reiner had been saved by and what it had cost.
"If I inherited the Armored Titan nine years ago, this wouldn't have happened. My brother wouldn't have protected you and been eaten by a Titan, either."
Reiner thanked him anyway. For saving him during the battle. Galliard told him not to.
Pieck cut in before it could go further. "Pock, Let's not pick on people who just took cannons to the face."
"Quit calling me that, Pieck."
She asked Reiner how he was. He said he had forgotten what being human felt like after so long in Titan form. Two months.
"By the way, Reiner. You oughta see Gabi and the others. They're worried about you."
He said he would.
Liberio.
The internment zone was not what Haru had imagined when the walls had first mentioned the world outside. It was a city within a city, fenced and marked, Eldians living in a designated space within Marley's borders. Children running. Families waiting at the gate.
Gabi came through first and her family descended on her immediately.
Her mother. Her father. Cousins. Everyone talking at once. Her father holding her face in his hands telling her she was the savior of Eldia, that she had saved soldiers, that he was so proud.
Reiner's reunion was quieter.
His mother Karina pulled him close. His uncle standing nearby. The family settled into dinner and his uncle, trying to make conversation, asked about the island. Reiner's mother told him not to push it. Reiner said he could talk about it.
What came out was not what Haru expected.
"Every last one of them was a savage, heartless devil."
He described them one by one. A soldier who stole a potato during the entrance ceremony and when the instructor confronted her, offered back a piece that was not even close to half.
A soldier who forgot why he had gone to the bathroom.
An insincere jerk who only thought about himself.
A single-minded fool who charged ahead with a group of chumps who followed him into everything.
There were all sorts of people there.
Haru recognised every single one of them.
Sasha and the potato. Armin, spacey and lost in his own thoughts. Jean, selfish and sharp. Eren, reckless and pulling everyone behind him into the fire.
Reiner was calling them devils. He was also describing them with a specificity that only came from five years of living alongside someone.
"My days there were true hell."
"I've said too much. Forget it."
Gabi pushed him. Were they bad people or not. Reiner looked at her.
"That's right, Gabi. Those island devils turned our world into hell."
He said the words. He delivered them correctly. He said everything the room needed him to say.
Haru watched his face while he said it.
The warriors gathered in the war chief's room later. Just the Titan Shifters. No Marleyan military brass.
Magath addressed them plainly. Normal weapons would overtake Titans. The weaker Marley became, the more the Eldian race was threatened.
To fix this, they needed the Founding Titan and Paradis's resources. And to rally the world behind that goal, they needed a narrator. Someone the international community would listen to.
The Tybur family.
Pieck explained it before anyone else could. The Tyburs held the War Hammer Titan and had never sent it to enemy soil. They were respected abroad for supposedly driving away King Fritz during the Great Titan War.
The world would listen to them. A festival in Liberio was being planned, foreign dignitaries invited, the Tyburs would announce that Marley would control Paradis Island within a year.
Galliard complained throughout. Got the job done anyway.
Zeke said one line that landed differently from everything else.
When Magath asked if the brass would be joining them: "Not in this room."
Just that. Three words. Haru rewound it.
Not in this room.
Not because the brass wasn't welcome. Because what Zeke was about to discuss was something he did not intend the Marleyan military to hear.
The episode did not explain what that was. It moved on. Left the line sitting.
The final image was Reiner alone.
No family. No other warriors. Just him in a quiet space with the weight of everything the episode had established pressing down on whatever was left of his expression.
"Am I going back..."
A long pause.
"...to that island?"
The preview for next week appeared. The Door of Hope. Reiner's backstory. Where he came from. How he became the Armored Titan. What happened before Paradis.
Haru put his snacks aside and opened his phone.
The thread was already running.
HighSchoolThrowAw4y: "What's good about having the Armored Titan if it can't protect you from being sad."
BubbaGumpShrimp: "Everyone always asks 'who will inherit the Armored Titan?' Never 'how is the Armored Titan?'"
coolgaara: "Maybe the real Armored Titan was the friends we made along the way."
kingwhocares: "Not according to Marco."
Someone had written out the dinner scene as a script.
tehsigzorz: "Gabi: I bet you have a lot of bad memories from Paradis Island.Reiner: There was this girl that said 'I would give up half the potatoes'.But it wasn't even half!! The potatoes she offered were less than half!Gabi: They truly are monsters!!"
thecomicguybook: "Sasha's gluttony is so bad it ended up as actual propaganda abroad."
JapanPhoenix: "I loved how the worst behaviour he could come up with was eating a potato."
unlizw: "Damn, those stories Reiner was telling at dinner. How could anyone go through something like that and remain psychologically healthy?"
safinhh: "Reiner doesn't know either."
n080dy123: "Narrator: Little did he know, he was not psychologically healthy. This man had full dissociation happening back on the island. He may have partially recovered but he is still clearly destroyed beyond compare."
Someone had caught what Haru had caught during the dinner scene.
The_New_Overlord: "I think that was Reiner subtly, maybe even unconsciously, trying to tell his family that the Paradisians weren't that bad. That they were the same as them."
Silent_Shadow05: "Yeah. He was trying to show that those 'devils' are not monsters but humans who act and behave just like anyone else. There were far worse things he could have said. Instead he only chose things that humanized them. Deep down he carries enormous guilt for what he did. Gabi on the other hand has been shaped too completely to see any of it."
yaserafriend: "That is also why Reiner's mother shut the window. To protect the family from being overheard having the dangerous conversation of Eldians not being evil. And did someone fall from that window the moment it closed?"
theanimegamer: "The guy who jumped was a soldier. Probably not a rare occurrence."
Garlicbread10: "Four years later and Levi still has Zeke shook."
DadAsFuck: "That beating left a permanent mark."
Xyyzx: "Considering Reiner also seems to be having Mikasa flashbacks, the trauma runs deep on that side too."
realrimurutempest: "You know you are something when you instilled lifelong fear into your enemy."
Mundology: "I fear no Titan. But that angry spinning small man. He scares me."
Damarugaki: "Ackerman go brrr."
eepicprimee: "So Marcel was Galliard's brother. Can't blame him for holding that against Reiner."
ButtholePasta: "Marcel literally pushed Reiner out of the way and sacrificed himself. Galliard probably just sees it as: your carelessness cost my brother his life. Grudges don't need to be logical. And they were child soldiers on a terrifying mission none of them were truly prepared for."
..
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