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i.
She was thirteen when she knew she was merely to be used as a vessel for a dangerous weapon.
She was thirteen when she knew she was to give years of her life to continue the generational inheritance of "devils."
She was thirteen when she knew she would kill a family member.
She was just thirteen, standing still in a white robe stitched with silver, hands slightly shaking, eyes dry from crying. The ceremony was to start at early dawn.
"You will not cry," her mother had said, kneeling before her. "The world does not cry for its protectors."
She nodded, then glanced at a figure hunched beside her mother. Her brother, Willy, had not stopped crying for three days.
“It should be me,” he had whispered the morning before the ceremony, through gritted teeth, holding her hands so tightly his knuckles turned white. “I’m older. It's my responsibility to shoulder the weight of the family name. You’re my little sister.”
"No, son. You," their mother replied, patting his head, "are too precious to this family."
That silenced him.
ii.
"You are to become the head of the family one day," she heard their uncle talking to Willy through the crack in the door. "We cannot have you die early, child."
It was two days after she had inherited the War Hammer Titan. Two days after she had murdered a family member. Two measly days gone, thirteen more grueling years to go.
"But I don't understand, uncle," her brother's voice was small compared to the silence of the mansion. "Why does she only get to live for thirteen years?"
"Because," their uncle drew in a deep breath. "It's the price to pay."
"But what did Lara ever do to deserve such suffering? I don't understand, uncle. I really don't."
She heard nothing for a while but a cough. Then, the deep and coarse voice of their uncle.
"She did nothing, Willy. Except, maybe, being born second."
Willy slammed his palms unto the table.
"But that doesn't make sense! Why does she get to live such a short life while I don't? She doesn't deserve such treatment!" She heard the cracking of her brother's voice. "Why my little sister . . .?"
Silence.
"Because, Willy," their uncle enunciated quite slowly as if his patience was running out. "You are irreplaceable, and Lara is not. Many others can inherit the titan after her, but not many can have the power to lead our family. Think of it this way, child: You are the face, and she is the blade. Little Lara is playing a very important part for our family, and you are too. But you both have different parts to play."
She turned around, dragged her feet towards her bedroom, and cried herself to sleep that night.
She cried for five nights until all her tears had run out.
iii.
Her training was nothing less than perfection.
Where others screamed, she remained silent. Where others failed, she repeated until her limbs bled. She learned to summon weapons of crystal with a flick of her wrist. Spears, swords, stakes, cages.
The War Hammer Titan became second nature—not like wearing armor, but like breathing air.
It became her. She became it. A devil. The very reason other people look at her kind with contemp and hatred.
But not her, no. She was a Tybur.
She was royalty.
She was different from those stuck at internment zones.
Yet she always knew there was no difference all along. A devil is a devil, no matter its status.
"Excellent," the instructors said. "No hesitation. No remorse. No fear."
No soul.
Willy visited her once during those years.
Just once.
She sat in the garden when he arrived, barefoot, face turned toward the sun. He knelt beside her, voice barely above a whisper.
"Do you still remember your own name?"
She turned to him and smiled. Not the one she's had when she was younger; the one she's practiced using as much as her titan. The perfect smile for the perfect occasion.
"What do you mean, brother? It's Lara."
Her brother paused, looked at her, and flung his head down low.
"That’s not what I meant."
She kept smiling but said nothing. He wept again, but she no longer knew what to do with tears.
Years later when she thinks back to that afternoon, she still fails to understand what her brother had meant.
iv.
She was nineteen when their parents had died and her brother had become head of the family, as he was always made to become.
Willy had always been good with people.
Even as a boy, when their tutors spoke too quickly and their parents too rarely, he always knew what to say. He smiled easily. He cried when it was appropriate. He learned how to make people feel important—how to let them believe that he believed in them.
She watched as her brother became the very thing they needed: a symbol of the Tybur name.
He gave speeches in the heart of the capital, kissed the hands of foreign queens, held the shoulders of grieving soldiers. He let his hair grow longer and his voice grow steadier. He turned his fear into elegance, and his guilt into gold.
She watched her brother become the very man the world had needed—the very man Marley had needed.
She watched her brother fall in love without trying to. How he had softened. How he had held his wife's hand like he couldn’t believe it was real.
They had children who had their mother's eyes and their father's smile. The children instantly grew to like her, and she liked them too. However misbehaved they were, they were still her nephews and nieces, and she was still their aunt.
They made her remember the childhood she once had, and made her forget that she was to die in a couple of years.
v.
Her brother stood at the platform of the theatre stage he had specifically asked to be built at the internment zone.
Willy smiled. She knew that smile.
He had worn it once at their parent's funeral.
The crowd applauded as the brass band faded. Dignitaries in velvet coats and civilians in festival garb leaned in with anticipation, unaware they were seated atop the powder keg of the century.
They were expecting something. An ambush from the enemy. From the devils of Paradis Island.
Her brother's voice did not tremble. Not even as the wind shifted and the crowd stirred. He kept speaking, kept explaining the truth they had uncovered after inheriting the War Hammer.
The ground beneath gave the faintest tremor, not from footsteps.
From something rising.
She turned her eyes back to her brother, and then he said the words he had always been meaning to say.
"Here and now, as representative of the Marleyan government, I proclaim, to the enemy forces of Paradis, a declaration of war!"
The stage exploded. It rained wood, steel, blood, and fire. The ground cracked open like a jaw. People screamed.
A titan rose from somewhere beneath the earth whose eyes glowed like death incarnate.
Eren Jaeger.
And she watched as the monster swallowed her brother whole.
vi.
She had no knowing how it would end. To kill or to be killed—that was the situation.
The War Hammer was not to be sent to wars, as per their deal with Marley. She would have had to simply live with the power of a devil peacefully, quietly, inside the confines of the Tybur mansion.
In a few months she would have died not having done anything relevant to the family, eaten by one of her brother's children, probably, or some other person, to continue the family's hold on the titan.
But clearly fate had other plans.
Willy was killed. The father of her nephews and nieces was killed. The husband of her sister-in-law was killed. The head of their family was killed. Her big brother was killed.
And all that she could say was: "Brother, you have fulfilled your duty as a Tybur."
Because he did. He was a Tybur, right until the end. And it was her turn to fulfill hers now.
vii.
Time lost shape inside the crystal.
There was no sound, no heartbeat, no breath, no pain. Only thought. Only stillness.
Only the cold certainty that both your life and death is no longer in your hands.
She watched through blurred vision as her body was dragged like a relic. Watched the boy—no, the monster, the bigger devil—as he paced before her crystal like a child examining a puzzle.
Eren Jaeger.
She knew his name, everyone did. His file. His face. His fury.
And now she knew something else. He was thinking. She knew exactly what for.
Thinking of a way to kill her.
She had made sure to put up a fight, because Tyburs never backed down. She just didn't know if it was enough.
The devils of Paradis were there, many civilians have died, and she was not sure if there was even a future for her family.
In the midst of the battle, her thoughts went backward.
To the garden.
To the firelight.
To the little girl who once loved roses, and poetry, and listening to her big brother tell stories of ancient heroes.
A flicker of that child stirred in her chest, faint, but there nonetheless.
Would it have been different if she had been born outside the name Tybur? Would she have lived a life where someone loved her without having called her a weapon?
She doesn’t know.
She will never know.
viii.
She watched as the Jaw Titan bared its teeth.
And for the first time in her little years of living, she felt something that tasted like fear.
But not for herself. Not for the pain. Not for the dying.
For the story.
The Tybur story.
Her family's myth, written in gold and sealed in lies buried among truths.
What will be left of it, once her blood fills that bastard's throat? What becomes of a symbol once it's eaten?
She stared as a crack formed in the crystal.
She heard it. It sounded like fate giving up.
And in that final, narrow second—
as the jaws close around her coffin
and Eren leans in like a vulture hungry for salvation—she thought of that one afternoon.
The afternoon where her big brother had visited her during training.
The afternoon where he had asked that ridiculous question.
"Do you still remember your own name?"
She finally found the answer to that question.
"Yes brother," she thought, the crack in her crystal becoming bigger and bigger by the second. "I am Lara of the Tybur family, a descendant of the devil, a weapon for humanity, and your younger sister. I have fulfilled my duty now, too."
Then the world turned white.
Then red.
Then finally—
nothing.
FIN