Chapter 28| Eren Jaeger

Chapter 28: Chapter 28| Eren Jaeger

The address led them off the regional road onto a track that made the farmhouse access road look like a motorway.

Single lane, unpaved, the kind of surface that had been used enough to be passable and not enough to be maintained. Hedgerows on both sides grew tall enough to meet overhead in places, creating a tunnel of green that the grey morning light filtered through in patches. The car moved through it at a speed that was more suggestion than progress and Sable navigated each rut and camber with the focused patience of someone who had not driven six hours to turn back because of a bad road.

The track ran for almost two kilometers before it opened.

The property sat in a cleared space that the surrounding landscape seemed to have agreed to leave alone. Not large, not dramatic, just a stone cottage with a low roof and a chimney that had smoke coming from it and windows that had curtains drawn on every side. A vegetable garden running along the south wall, well maintained, the kind of garden that got that way through daily attention rather than occasional effort. A woodpile stacked with the specific neatness of someone who had been stacking wood long enough to have developed opinions about it.

No vehicles. No visible security. No indication that anyone inside knew they were coming.

Sable cut the engine at the edge of the cleared space and they sat for a moment and looked at the cottage.

"Smoke from the chimney," Damian said.

"He’s probably home," Sable said. "Or someone is."

He looked at the windows. The curtains were drawn but not fully. The specific gap of someone who wanted to see out without being seen from outside. He’d been watching them for thirty seconds and hadn’t caught movement but the gap was consistent on every window which meant it was deliberate rather than incidental.

"He knows we’re here," Damian said.

"He probably knew before we turned off the regional road," Sable said. "A property this deliberately invisible doesn’t stay invisible for thirty years without early warning systems of some kind." She looked at the cottage. "He’s been waiting. He’s just waiting inside rather than outside."

Damian opened the car door.

The air outside was different from the city and different from the farmhouse. Older somehow, carrying the specific quality of a place that had been left alone long enough to develop its own atmosphere. Cold, clean, with something underneath it that he couldn’t name. He stood beside the car for a moment and let it settle around him and looked at the cottage and thought about thirty years.

[Flux: 93%]

He walked across the cleared space to the cottage door. Sable fell into step beside him without being asked. Not behind him, beside him, which was where she’d positioned herself since the loading bay and which he’d stopped noticing because it had become just the shape of how they moved.

He knocked.

Knock! Knock! Knock!

Three knocks. Even. Not aggressive, not tentative. Just present.

The silence that followed was exactly long enough to be deliberate. Not the silence of someone deciding whether to answer, the silence of someone who had already decided and was taking one last moment with whatever this moment meant to them before it changed into something else.

The door opened. A man resurfaced.

Eren Jaeger was older than the thirty year timeline made him seem and younger than the weight of it should have left him. Late sixties, lean in the way of someone who had never stopped moving, with the kind of face that had been sharp once and was now something more interesting than sharp. Weathered into specificity, every line in it the record of a particular thing rather than just the passage of time. He had white hair that was properly kept. Eyes that were a very dark grey and that did the thing that certain eyes did, registered everything in the first second and gave back only what they chose to give back.

He looked at Damian.

Not at Sable. Not at the car. Not at the track behind them.

At Damian.

And the quality of that look was something Damian hadn’t encountered before. Not the assessment of a researcher reading a Subject file, not the professional evaluation of an operative reading a threat, not even the particular look Sable had given him in the facility when she’d been deciding whether to trust him with her future.

This was something else.

The look of someone seeing a face they’d been carrying in their memory for twenty two years and finding that the reality of it was both exactly what they’d expected and something they hadn’t been fully prepared for regardless.

Eren Jaeger looked at him for a long time.

Then he stepped back from the door.

"Come in," he said. His voice was steady and unhurried and carried the specific quality of someone who had been using it carefully for a very long time. "Both of you."

They both came in and shut the door.

Bam!

The inside of the cottage was the inside of a life that had been lived entirely in service of a single purpose. Books everywhere not decoratively, functionally, stacked on every surface with the organized chaos of someone who used them rather than displayed them. Research documents in physical folders, labeled in a handwriting Damian recognized from the margin notation Sable had shown him in the car. Equipment that looked old but maintained. The kind of precision instruments that lasted decades when someone cared for them properly.

And on the wall above the fireplace, pinned with the careful deliberateness of something that had been looked at every day for a very long time. A photograph.

Damian looked at it.

A woman. She was young, probably mid to late teens, the specific quality of someone standing at the edge of adulthood and not quite arrived yet. Fair complexion, natural dark hair that fell loose around her shoulders, eyes that were the same dark brown as his own and that looked at the camera with the specific quality of someone who registered everything and gave back only what they chose to give back.