#queue bill

“Want to get drinks sometime?” the tall soldier asks, one afternoon after shooting practice.

She slips the invitation into Pieck’s earshot while everyone’s tidying up at the sidelines, and she’s packing up her holsters and gun-straps into a case, the ash-tinted Mauser she uses, pretending at busyness. Pieck slows her leisurely march to a crawl, angling her face in the soldier’s direction. She’s striking to look at, though not for the reasons one would immediately assume.

The soldier is tall. But there’s something else, too. Pieck roves her eyes from the soldier’s green-plastic helmet to her starched, desert-stiff boots, taking in her vertical giftedness—she towers high enough to block out the sun, to substitute for an umbrella-stand. Her uniform bears two insignias, one for her membership in Marley’s many battalions, and one for her corporal rank.

And her pistol bears the recognisable marks of a firearm that has been handed down from prior comrades and predecessors, beginning—likely—with the first corporal it saw killed-in-action, entrusting itself now to any luck she’s accumulated in avoiding the untimely and mythopoetically inadequate demises that plague soldiers on battlefields. Her words are clipped but lightweight, nonchalant, and Pieck tips her head up towards her—eyes crinkling in airy curiosity, lightly impressed by her mettle. She’s Eldian, but the Warriors outrank most Marleyan cadets, even those leagues older than them. It usually takes guts to approach her, though she tries to maintain an air of friendliness.

“Sure,” Pieck says. She smiles, waves of her midnight fringe falling away from her face. “What time sounds good?”

The soldier stares down at her, working her face like a hinge into a smile, cool friendliness. “Eight tonight, at the bottom of the old Elbe factory.”

Pieck nods and says, “I’ll see you,” and that seals their meeting.

Pieck heads there after Commander Magath’s dismissed the Warriors for the evening. The place is a speakeasy, and she first has to find a garment workshop, search behind the foreman’s desk, press a concealed lever, traverse the night-thin depths of a stairwell, then—finally, finally—produce a passcode to a cloaked man at the door to enter. A place etched into the most invisible and sinister levels of the capital’s underbelly, open to you once you blow past its guarded entrance. Well, she gets there with the same ease one has sliding into an old haunt. She’s been a regular there since she learned to listen out at daytime cafeterias for intel from patrons, and ferreted the secret for this out from an Eldian neo-Restorationist’s napkin scrawl.

She knows the reason the place is nested so deeply: it’s a meeting-place for rebels, radicals, sanguine and cynical Marleyans alike. A trading spot for anti-establishment sentiments. So going to the trouble to find it is a mark of trustworthiness for its clientele. With this piece of information, she already knows enough to blow the soldier’s cover wide open, or report her to the authorities for sedition—and also that she has enough currency to trust her by.

If the soldier’s here, she’s probably sympathetic to the Eldians’ plight. A surge of reality: Pieck isn’t entirely fond of Marley herself. As it happens, she likes the irony of her situation—a trusted weapon, close to a rotten country’s heart, turning out to be its adversary—a little too much. And there are boons to keeping downtown lifelines, like this bar, open.

After thirty minutes, the soldier finds her at a dark-corner table. Pieck learns her name about five drinks in. They’re both in plainclothes, and not in uniforms, with an understanding of shadowed norms common to those attuned to and living in a country of the unsaid, a nation staked on the circulation of secrets. Yelena, the soldier divulges. All in line with her biographical file. Pieck had checked her particulars earlier in the day back at the base. Pieck nearly tells her Porco’s nickname as a joke when it’s her turn—Pock resembles her name closely enough, like a brother to a sister would—then decides to be honest instead. Fair’s fair.

“So you’re a born and bred Marleyan,” she says to Yelena, drawing circles with her finger in a nearby ashtray. She was able to tell from Yelena’s accent. “As grey-eyed and blue-blooded as they come. Why come down to this place?”

Why play among us Eldians, she means—why risk your safety for the fires of insurrection? She expects a serious answer, because Yelena’s looked like an earnest person so far, eloquent if aloof. But she takes a deep breath—all verdict-like anticipation, like a hangman readying the switch—then says, deadpan, “I want to see posters of my face printed in history books.”

Silence ticks past for ten whole seconds over her facetious answer. Then Yelena belts out a gunshot laugh. Pieck doesn’t stir or laugh, though she smiles, in good-natured sympathy. “I’m kidding. It’s simple. I don’t agree with what the government’s doing. Depriving other states of their sovereignty—it goes against every value our modern world should rely on.”

All the same, when Pieck leans back to study her face—her strong and handsome brows, her arresting statue-gaze—only one thing comes to mind: that she's destined for the top seats. To pull Marley up by the roots, brick by holier-than-thou brick. The flair of hidden greatness lies somewhere in her, and Pieck is attentive to it, tugged to it like a seismic pull. Earlier in the day, at the shooting range, Yelena had looked at her gun like she cared not for what it actually was, but the rarefied potential it held: the ways it could, aimed properly, be a threat, a peace-maker, a flare to strike the match of a revolution.

She’s one to watch: that's the final and decisive assessment Pieck settles on.

“Well,” Pieck says, placing an especially warm hand on Yelena’s, thumbing her pulse with intent. Closing the gap. “It sounds like we can be friends.”

Yelena gives her a meaningful look, eyes darkened, corners of her mouth curling up into a smirk. “I dare say we can be more than that.”

----

She’s climbing stairwards towards the top of the castle now, above the Yeagerists’ holding cells, tasting but not feeling the whipcrack-sting of the high winds sneaking in biting into her cheek. She has filtered out all nonessential detail, leaving enough attention to deal with her surroundings—to watch out for disturbances, among Eren’s flock now gathered before her.

She’d run into Yelena while being escorted by Eren. A practical inevitability, with Yelena’s new god—sorry, “gods”—given line of work, and they both certainly knew this; there was not an inch of surprise in Yelena’s knowing face, when Pieck rounded the corner, only a professional blankness.

They said their bitter non-goodbyes ages ago, when Yelena was bound for a journey with no return on Marley's ill-fated naval convoy. Now they’re in the same castle—weaving along trajectories plotted a lifetime ago in that basement speakeasy, things Pieck saw coming, in hindsight, from the beginning.

“So, good to see you,” Pieck says wryly when she’s within Yelena’s earshot. Yelena looks cleaner without the beard, more like the person she once knew, she'll give her that. But the beard had been a decent attempt at a look.

Yelena doesn't dignify her with a response, eyes simply widening, jaw tightening ever so slightly. Her gaze skims over Pieck’s neck, chin, hands like an executioner’s blade. Pieck lifts her chin up in the ghost of an old reflex, a has-been illusion, that her neck is bared and vulnerable to Yelena. Ready for a brush of heat from her lips, begging for violence.

Yelena had wanted Paradis free too, years ago. Thought Marley’s throne an unjustified one, built on the backs of titans it requisitioned from another empire, war-torn suffering. But—their roads had forked away from each other, diverged in a messy undertow of irreconcilable political difference, and now Yelena’s fist is raised aloft on the rooftops, ready to give a signal to every one of Eren’s followers to shoot or come to heel. Their heartlines once veining uniform territory; their methods divided.

She can almost remember the way she ruffled Yelena’s hair in comfortable mornings at the cafeterias, or in stolen moments behind hidden staircases, or in Yelena’s rickety rented house. Gentleness now providing the scaffold for fresh resentment.

Yelena had been headed straight for the highest places she could dream of, after all. Just not the ones where Pieck would be around, too. But she can topple this castle, and every remnant of Yelena's power with it. No castles should exist in such a world, where they will never defend against the chains of bloodshed, the long unforgiving shadows of history they cast the same no matter who's at the helm.

A few more steps, and a relaxed walk, and she’s where she needs to be for the Warriors’ plan, an audience of enemies gathered before her. Pieck has lived through many watershed moments, not least the destruction of her hometown, squandered collateral in a bigger impersonal game. She stands far away but facing Yelena now, unrevealing gaze against unrevealing gaze, at the very edge of the ramparts’ border. Eren asking the question: where is the enemy? The direction her hand falls in will determine everything.