Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Yeah. I’ve never played before.” The blonde blinks up at her, blue eyes looking like the picture of innocence. “I mean, I used to hit a ball around with my sister sometimes, but that’s it.”

Ymir stares her down. The girl takes it as a sign to keep talking.

“Um, your coach told me to go find you. She had me do a couple drills earlier today. Said you’d be on the courts around this time.”

Well, fuck, Ymir thinks, wondering how she could have possibly wronged Coach enough to deserve this. Her face rearranges itself into what she’s fairly sure is an unpleasant expression. “Sure, but why’d you go to Coach in the first place?”

“I’m a transfer, so I wanted to move in early. My roommate’s a teammate of yours. Mina?” The blonde gives her a small smile, and Ymir’s frown relaxes a little. “She said you guys needed a new libero?”

That much is true. With Mina out for the entire year with a torn ACL—she’d gotten the injury during a summer beach volleyball game three days before she was due to come back, the irresponsible idiot—their only option at that position is their backup libero, Hanna. If Ymir’s being perfectly honest, there are probably several other players on the team that would do better than her at the position, but none of them want anything to do with it.

“We do,” Ymir admits, making a mental reminder to chastise Mina for airing out the team’s shortcomings. “And you think that’s gonna be you, of all people? Why?”

“I was a gymnast in high school.” Ymir takes a second look at her, and that answer makes a lot of sense. The blonde is short, really short, plus she’s got a solid pair of legs on her. “Mina said a lot of the skills are transferable. I thought it’d be fun to try and be a walk-on.”

Ymir pauses. Training a new player isn’t something that she’s done since high school. But, hey, Coach must be desperate at this point if she’s referring this random girl to her. Plus, they’ve got more than enough stone-faced stoics on the team. This girl has an energy to her that could be the difference between getting mired in frustration or escaping it.

Also, she’s cute. That could just make the headache worth it.

“Fine. What’s your name?”

“It’s Historia. Like ‘history’.”

Ymir thinks about making a joke about the name before remembering that she doesn’t have a leg to stand on, and reaches out her hand. Historia meets her for a firm handshake.

“Fuck it. Welcome to your trial period. Go and get changed, we’ve got practice in twenty minutes.”

---

Ymir stays on the sidelines as her teammates make their way, one-by-one, onto the courts. To her credit, Mina is also there, cracking a joke with Sasha on the benches and pointing to the massive brace on her right leg.

Historia reappears from the locker room wearing Ymir’s spare pair of knee pads, which are a shade too big on her. Ymir makes another mental note to remind her to buy a pair in the right size.

“So, how much do you know about the game?” Ymir asks as Historia takes a seat next to her.

“A bit, I guess. I’m definitely not a hundred percent.”

“Here. Let me introduce you to our starters.” Ymir scans the court. “See that tall girl with the short black hair by the net?” Historia nods, her eyes fixated on the subject. “That’s Mikasa. She’s the best hitter on our team, bar none, and one of the best in the country. She’s a left-wing spiker— so she comes up to the net on the left side, but she hits with her right hand. The position’s called ‘outside hitter,’ and she’s going to be the one getting most of the setter’s passes.”

As if on cue, Mikasa smashes a ball over the net with such force that the sound reverberates throughout the building. Historia’s eyes widen. “So who’s the setter?”

“That would be Annie.” Ymir points to a stern-faced blonde girl tossing a ball to Mikasa. “You’re really going to need a good rapport with her. Whenever you receive the ball, it’s supposed to go to her, and at the right height for her to set it at all angles. Ideally, she’s touching the ball every possession.”

“She looks mean,” Historia accurately points out. “She’s going to be the one yelling at me when I mess up?”

“Nope,” Ymir says, popping the ‘p’. “We’re all going to be yelling at you. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

“If you say so.” Historia shrugs.

“Moving on. The brunette with the ponytail is Sasha, our second outside. She’s got the same role as Mikasa at a different spot in the rotation.”

“How good is she?”

“Still an excellent hitter,” Ymir supplies. “Of course, no one’s coming close to Mikasa, but Sasha can still get the job done. She’s weaker on defense, though.”

“Got it.” Historia seems to run some kind of mental calculation in her head before turning back to Ymir. “Okay, so you have two left-wing spikers. I’m guessing there’s a right-wing version of the position?”

“That’s right,” Ymir says, sounding a little more congratulatory than she intends to. “You’re thinking of Hitch.” She points towards one of the players practicing serves, a taller girl with shaggy, light brown hair styled in a bob with bangs. “She’s a leftie. Nice and rare. Since she hits with her left, she plays on the right side, behind the setter— called the ‘opposite’. She’s a transfer, too. Maybe you’ll have something in common.”

“Is she a good defender?”

“Oh, much better than most. She’s usually the second-best defender on the floor.”

Historia tucks a lock of loose hair behind her ear. “I see. So, that’s four of them. Then Mina, or me, I guess. I take it…you’re the sixth?”

“Right on the money!” Ymir grins at her. “I’m a middle blocker. Mostly ‘cause I’m tall, but my job is to help out on just about all of the blocks when I’m in the front row. When Annie decides to be nice every now and then she’ll give me a quick attack. Also, y’know, it’s really more like seven starters.”

“What do you mean? I thought there were only six players on the court at once.” Historia frowns, seeming genuinely confused, and a brief wave of annoyance passes through Ymir. Coach really should’ve given the new girl some pointers before throwing her over.

Ymir takes a breath. “Technically, the libero’s not a starter, but they might as well be. The official starting lineup is me, Mikasa, Annie, Sasha, Hitch, and Nifa, our second middle blocker.” She gestures towards a girl with choppy red hair across the gym. “You’re going to come in for either me or Nifa depending on which one of us is in the back row, but you won’t have to serve since we’re both decent at it. Means you’ll be on the court for every rotation, except for the two where either one of us is serving. Make sense?”

Hearing Ymir’s explanation, Historia’s face goes blank. She opens her mouth like she’s about to say something, but she’s interrupted by the sound of the gym door opening and closing.

A hush falls over the room, almost like the charged silence of a crowd right before a tennis match’s deciding point. The players all gather in a line as a short, black-haired man makes his way to the middle of the court. He walks with a distinctive limp, and one of his eyes is scarred shut.

Ymir steps forward. “Coach Ackerman.”

“It’s Levi, Ymir. I’m not your coach.”

“Yeah, but it’s close enough.”

Levi rolls his functioning eye at her and continues, his tone flattened. “Your actual coaches aren’t going to be at practice today. I’m just here to run some basic drills to get you all warmed up and back into your rhythms. You still have a full week before classes start, so I don’t want to see you holding back on your swings. Especially you, Hitch. But, before all that, we have someone new here.”

“Everyone, this is Historia.” Ymir gestures for the girl to come and join her, which she does with reluctance. Her smile, as far as Ymir can tell, remains genuine. “She’s going to be trying out with us for a bit. Worst case, it doesn’t work out, and best case, we’ve got a new libero.”

“Coach Nanaba told me about her.” Levi reaches into his bag and pulls out a clipboard, which he tosses to Ymir. She catches it at her chest. “Ymir, you’re excused for this practice, and this practice only. Go and teach Historia everything she needs to know. Rotations, rules, expectations. Make sure you don’t miss anything. I expect both of you to participate fully in tomorrow’s drills.”

Ymir can feel Annie’s glaring eyes burning holes in the back of her head before she even turns around. “Got it. C’mon, Historia.”

The two girls leave the gym and head for the building’s common room, with Historia staying close at her heels. Shiganshina University might not have the most prestigious athletic programs in the country, but at least at some point they bothered to build a dedicated space for the student athletes.

Ymir takes a seat on one of the couches. Historia sits next to her and redoes her ponytail, gathering her hair in a tidy bun.

“Why’d everyone go quiet when that guy walked in?”

“Who, Levi?” Ymir lets out a barking laugh. “You don’t know who that is?”

“I do not,” Historia says, and this time Ymir detects just a hint of indignance in her voice. “Why? He’s pretty short, was he also a libero?”

“He’s the team’s athletic trainer.” Ymir keeps her tone softer. “Not that long ago, he was one of the best outside hitters in the world. Like, he played in the Olympics. Even though he’s short, he was just too athletic for anybody to stop him. He’s half-Japanese. It was a major controversy when he decided to play for them instead of the States.”

“Oh.” Historia pauses. “What…happened to him?”

“Motorcycle accident,” Ymir says flatly, and Historia’s face falls. “He was only thirty. Probably had another five years of peak play in him. That’s why he looks like that.”

“If he was such a good player, why isn’t he a head coach somewhere?”

The question’s a little bolder than Ymir is expecting, and it takes a beat before she answers. “That man fuckin’ hates the spotlight. He’d rather die than be head coach anywhere. He’s only here because of Mikasa.”

“Why?”

“They’re relatives. Second cousins, or something. Besides, the resemblance is uncanny. She hits almost as hard as he did, and she’s got a height advantage to boot.”

“Looks like I’ve got a lot to learn.” Historia’s voice is quieter, more subdued than it was before. Ymir knows all too well the emotion behind that voice— the all-consuming fear that she’s in over her head. Coming to Shiganshina University on a full ride, being just some girl in the foster system from a decaying industrial town, those feelings threatened to overwhelm her every time she looked at the school gates.

Ymir has no idea what Historia’s background is, but she knows she wishes she’d had someone to show her the ropes when she first made it here. Besides, it’ll be easier for everyone if the new girl isn’t constantly preoccupied with self-doubt. Annie can sense those insecurities like a shark smells blood in the water, and Ymir doesn’t have the time or energy to become anybody’s protector.

“Let’s get started, then. You ready?”

Historia nods, hands held firm at her sides.

So Ymir talks.

In what is essentially a continuous stream of information, Ymir speaks on and on about passes and bump sets and five-ones and carries and foot faults and tips and pancakes and everything else she can possibly think of, hoping dearly she hasn’t missed some crucial detail. Historia’s attention is fixed on her the entire time, except for some brief instances where she looks away to scribble something quickly onto a piece of folded notebook paper.

Eventually, long after the sun sinks below the horizon and the dining halls have all closed, Historia’s eyes begin to glaze over, and Ymir is going hoarse herself. She runs a mental inventory one last time and concludes that she’s covered just about everything she can; what they’ve talked about tonight will have to be enough.

Historia stretches her arms over her head, and Ymir twists to crack her back. Her shoulders are tense from sitting hunched over for so long. Historia shoves the folded pieces of paper into her bag and throws on a sweatshirt.

“Where do you live?”

Ymir hates this question. Whenever she gives the honest answer— “Trost Hall, and yeah, I know,” —all she gets are some simpering “sorry” remarks and maybe a pat on the back, as if there’s anything going through their minds other than gratefulness that they’re not in her position. Half of Trost’s floors are already decommissioned, and the ones that are still in use don’t seem like they’ll make it until the building’s scheduled demolition next year. Apparently, Shiganshina thinks the handful of unlucky students that manage to get assigned there should just go fuck themselves while they wait to tear the whole thing down.

“Trost Hall.”

“Huh. Never heard of it. Well, I’ve been assigned to Dauper.”

Ymir breathes a small sigh of relief. “Trust me, you’ll want to keep it that way. Why’d you ask?”

Historia gives her a smile. “If you lived somewhere far away, I could walk home with you so you wouldn’t have to go alone.”

Ymir, who is busy taking a small sip from her water bottle, nearly chokes on it. An incursion of water stings her sinuses. The idea that this girl, who surely measures below five feet and would only be able to tip the scale at a hundred pounds while soaking wet, could not only deter any troublemakers but also safely make the walk back to campus alone is more than absurd. Maybe she’s never lived in an actual city before. At least her naïveté is endearing.

“Uh, no, don’t worry,” Ymir says, trying to hide any sort of incredulity in her voice. “Like the only good thing about my housing is that it’s close by. You shouldn’t be walking too far back to your dorm, either.”

“Okay!” Historia chirps, not sounding at all like someone who’s just been lectured on the minutiae of volleyball for hours. She swings her bag over one shoulder and disappears through the exit door.

Ymir wipes off her clipboard, slots it into her duffel, and pops her earbuds in. She barely manages to get through one song before she’s at Trost’s door, the late summer humidity sticking to her skin. She slaps a mosquito that tries to make a pass at her wrist.

Stupid mosquito. Doesn’t it know she’s a D1 volleyball player? Ymir wipes the small smear of blood off with the hem of her shirt.

The hallway of Trost’s second floor is still mostly empty, with name cards scotch-taped to only a few doors. At least the building’s units are so small that the university doesn’t even bother assigning more than one person to each room— take that, people with shitty roommates. The rest of the dorm’s students will begin to arrive in a few days, close to the start of classes. The only people who are permitted to move into campus dorms two weeks before the start of the semester are varsity athletes, summer students, and, apparently, new transfers.

Ymir flicks the light switch on in her room, and the overhead light comes to life with a high-pitched hum. The yellow sticky note on her desk reminds her that she still has three chapters of a textbook to read before her first Biochem class, but right now one week feels like an endless expanse of time.

She contemplates ordering delivery before remembering that she’s got an entire pizza sitting in the frozen section of her minifridge. Her cookware still isn’t entirely unpacked—kind of hard to achieve that when there’s not enough storage space in the room for all of her stuff—so she digs a baking sheet out of the bottom of a box and makes her way into the floor’s deserted common room at the end of the hallway.

The pizza’s instructions tell Ymir to place it directly on the oven rack. Given that there are decades of mysterious charred material crusted onto it, she’d rather not. All of the marks indicating temperature on the knobs have long since faded away, worn down by overuse, and she picks a spot on the dial that looks like it could plausibly be about 450 degrees. The common room’s stained couch squeaks under her when she sits on it.

She closes her eyes.

She opens them to the sound of a blaring fire alarm and the sight of dark smoke rising up from the oven vent.

“Oh, fuck,” Ymir says, to nobody in particular.

She twists the oven knob off and strains to open the latch on the common room’s window. Only a small section of the window actually opens, just the right size to stop anybody from going through. As if a fall from the second floor would actually kill anybody. She grabs the empty pizza box and tries to waft the smoke out of the room with it.

Eventually, the fire alarm decides it’s had enough, and Ymir feels the headache at her temples beginning to subside when the noise stops. She looks at the thing that used to be a pizza sitting on the baking sheet.

She makes it through about two slices of tooth-cracking burnt dough before giving up entirely and throwing the rest of the pizza briquette into the trash can. It’s fine; she’ll just hit the dining hall first thing in the morning and scarf down some eggs and hash browns.

Ymir comes to regret this decision approximately ninety minutes later, as she rests in bed trying to fall asleep to the sound of her own stomach growling.

Perhaps her situation isn’t entirely a curse. For as Ymir lies there, tossing and turning on the creaky bed frame, her thoughts keep idly drifting back to the new girl who came to find her in an empty gym. Despite having every reason to be intimidated, the concept seemed entirely alien to Historia.

It’s not as if Ymir wants her to feel intimidated. It’s just, well, shouldn’t she feel some degree of responsibility to impress her and the rest of the team as much as possible? Shouldn’t she recognize that she’s only there for the tryout because the team is desperate, and because Ymir is just barely willing to take on the extra burden?

Ymir sighs. Outside her window, she hears a distant siren wail briefly before it fades away. Then, a soft patter of footsteps as somebody walks down the dorm hallway from the bathroom. Sleep still refuses to come to her.

She squints, and in the dim light she can make out the outlines of the room decor she’s installed. There is a poster on the wall next to her bed, a faded and wrinkled print of the 2020 U.S. women’s national volleyball team, the one that captured the first gold medal in its history. A tapestry with some drawings of plants and minerals hangs above her desk. She’s stuck two adhesive hooks to the back of her door; one holds a towel while the other holds several medals from prior competitions. Their shiny edges are visible in the dark. On one of her shelves, a modest collection of trophies is arranged.

Ymir wonders how Historia decorates her dorm room. She seems like the type of girl who plasters photos of herself and her friends all over her walls. She reminds Ymir of one of those socialite Southern Belles; hell, she probably commands a whole flock of followers in whatever probably-backwater town she’s from. Girls who are that pretty are never alone.

Mercifully, before Ymir’s mind can turn on itself and ask her what the hell she’s doing thinking about some random strange girl in this way—does she resent her? —her thoughts cloud at last with the veil of sleep, and she drifts off before they can form something coherent. She does not dream of anything.

---

Ymir’s alarm wakes her about thirty minutes earlier than she wants to be awake, but she has indeed promised her body the chance at a proper meal before practice the previous night. After making the morning trip to the dorm’s communal bathrooms, she gets dressed, noticing that she probably should have washed her athletic clothing a day or two ago.

The dining hall’s scrambled eggs are a bit too rubbery and parts of the hash browns have clearly been undercooked, not that Ymir expected anything else. She washes them down with some sharp-tasting orange juice. As she gets up to return her tray, she sees Hitch doing the same from across the room, and the two of them make their way to the practice courts together.

“What’d you think of the new girl?” Ymir asks, testing the waters.

“Who? The blonde?” Hitch readjusts the strap of her duffel bag over her shoulder. “I have no idea. I saw her for, like, two seconds.”

“Right.”

Hitch looks off into the distance for a moment or two, then turns back to Ymir. “Now that I think about it, Mina was texting me about her a few days ago. The part I find hard to believe is the part where Coach somehow agreed to this. On what grounds? What does she see?”

A small, unidentifiable piece of frustration crackles under Ymir’s skin. “You’ve been talking to Annie.”

“What, so now it’s a crime to speak to my teammate?” Hitch says airily, her smile still spread widely across her face. “We’re allowed to have doubts.”

“It’s not your job to deal with those doubts.” The words snap out of Ymir’s mouth before she can calm her tone. “It’s mine. Just let me handle it. There’s absolutely no reason for you, or Annie for that matter, to intervene. It either works out or it doesn’t.”

The message is clear—I’m captain, and you’re not—and Hitch’s expression twitches into something less pleasant for just a moment. Truth be told, Ymir doesn’t really know why Coach Hange had picked her for the job. Mikasa and Annie are more skilled than her. Hitch and Nifa are seniors, the most experienced players the roster has to offer. Her appointment, which she’d gotten through a FaceTime call with a janky connection sometime in June, was entirely a surprise. It is August now, and the reality of her burdens seems to only just be beginning.

Ymir opens the door to the practice courts. She does not need to turn on the lights, because someone else has already done it.

Historia is near the wall, contorting herself into a stretching pose that would almost certainly dislocate several of Ymir’s joints if she tried it. She’s leaning forward, but one of her legs is raised behind her and her toe is pointing towards the back of her neck. She disengages and rises to her feet when she sees the other two girls.

“Good morning, Historia.”

“Good morning to you too.” She flashes the two of them a bubbly smile. “Sorry, I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to come in, but the door was unlocked, so I figured it was fine.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Ymir says evenly. “The doors unlock automatically at eight in the morning. Any earlier, and one of the coaches needs to swipe us in.”

“How many are there? The coaches, I mean.”

Ymir hears Hitch sigh behind her. She ignores it. “Only two actual coaches. Coach Zoe, or Hange—that’s what she usually goes by—is the head coach. Nanaba is the assistant coach. I don’t think you’ve actually met her yet. And Levi, as you remember, is our athletic trainer.”

Historia shifts on her feet as she nods, and Ymir notices something: she’s wearing new knee pads, ones that actually seem to fit her, even though Ymir hasn’t reminded her to buy a pair. Maybe Mina’s doing some work behind the scenes.

The rest of the players file into the gym over the next few minutes and begin their individual warmups. Coach Hange follows suit not long after, holding an iced coffee topped with a sinful amount of whipped cream.

“Listen,” Ymir says, pulling Historia aside. “Remember what we talked about. Today is all about the fundamentals. Show me your receive posture.”

Historia extends her arms out in front of her, flattening her elbows and pressing her thumbs together. It’s more or less the same as Ymir had instructed, so she gives her approval and the two girls make their way over to the empty second practice court.

“Go and stand at the center of the back row opposite me.”

Historia takes her position. On the opposite side of the net, Ymir takes three running steps, each perfectly distanced, and lets the spinning ball fly upwards from her right hand as she becomes airborne. At the apex of her jump, her right arm reaches back around for the swing. She knows immediately from the sound of the contact that she’s gotten a good hit.

The ball rockets off her hand and slams into the side of the court a few feet back of the three-meter line. Historia does not move, rooted to her position. Her eyes widen as she looks at the spot where the ball made contact.

“...Oh.”

For a second, Ymir sees her resolve waver. It’s evident in the way Historia’s eyes drift downwards, towards her hands still fixed in the receiving position, then towards the laces of her sneakers. Then, before she can blink, Historia is speaking.

“Go again.”

Ymir understands the task at hand.

She fishes another ball out of the cart, runs at the end line, and unleashes another jump serve. Historia does not come remotely close to receiving it. But, instead of staying stuck in her position, her feet shift to cover ground, and she leans towards the impact point.

Ymir serves at her again. This time, Historia does not stay on her feet—she lunges forward, leading with her shoulders and following the direction of her pointed kneecaps. The ball smacks against the ground a few inches out of her reach.

They repeat this outcome a few times, pausing for intermittent moments so Historia can collect the balls on her side of the net while Ymir’s serving arm gets to rest.

They resume. Ymir goes into her service motion. She feels the ball come off her hand at just slightly the wrong angle, and watches as it spins over the net. It’s a little slower, but harder to follow.

Historia’s eyes lock on to the incoming ball. She shifts—then catches herself in the right direction by dropping her shoulder and rotating her arms to her side as she leans towards it. Her arms are still rising to the correct position when it arrives, and it glances off of the side of her forearm and flies off to the side well out of bounds.

“One more time.”

Ymir nods, steps back, and releases the ball into the toss. The contact she gets on it is clean, strong; it is a perfect jump serve. The impact off her hand echoes against the gym’s ceiling.

Historia moves fluidly this time. Her body rotates quickly, and when she lunges, she slides against the ground as her knee pads make contact and carry her forward. The ball lands not on the court, but squarely on the middle of her firmly linked arms. Ymir watches as the ball sails upwards, clears the net, and comes to a bouncing stop several feet in front of her.

There are several things she can say in this moment. No, you’re supposed to cushion the ball more. It needs to stay on our side of the net. Annie is going to yell at you if you keep giving the other team free balls. In another period of her life, addressing a different person, she might have spoken them aloud.

But Historia is beaming at her on the opposite side of the net, even as Ymir sees a circle of redness blossoming on her inner arms where the ball made contact, and she decides immediately that the critiques can wait a minute or two. For now, she smiles back and throws Historia a thumbs-up.

“Good job.”

Chapter Text

The rest of the morning’s practice proceeds smoothly. While Coach Hange directs the rest of the players in a simple hitting drill, Ymir teaches Historia how to (one-sidedly) pepper, and Historia receives Ymir’s routine spikes over and over again until her forearms become mottled with pinprick purple bruises.

“Should I be worried about this?”

“No, it’s normal,” Ymir explains, stepping back to get under an errantly bumped ball for an overhead toss so Historia can return it. “It’ll go away in a day or two. Might hurt for a bit, but that’s it.”

“If you say so.”

“Just put some ice on it when you get home. It’ll help—” Ymir pauses momentarily to send another spike directly into Historia’s outstretched arms, “—it go away faster.”

Off to the side, Coach Hange blows her whistle, and the players stop their practices to gather the remaining balls into the carts. Practice is over thirty minutes early today, mostly because Hitch and Nifa hit a snag in signing the lease of the off-campus apartment they share and still need to unpack an army’s worth of boxes.

“You may disperse to the locker room,” their coach says, pausing to loudly suck the last dregs of her iced coffee through the straw. Annie frowns at the sound. “Give your thanks to these two ladies for being terrible at checking their emails. Since you get out early, you can spend some more time enjoying the lovely weather outside. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the weight room later. Nothing intense. No lifting until failure, please.”

Ymir glances out the gym’s windows. Instead of a clear day, the sky is mottled gray and darkening with the promise of a late summer thunderstorm.

Very funny, Coach.

Shiganshina University’s women’s locker room is fairly standard; there is a section dedicated to storage that is lined wall-to-wall with lockers and full of benches, several bathroom stalls, a row of sinks, an open shower section, and two private shower stalls with a curtain. Ymir enters the number code for her lock and retrieves her duffel bag from the locker, sifting through it to find a towel and a clean set of clothing.

She ties her hair up into a bun. There’s no need to wash it yet, she’ll do that after she finishes up her evening lifting session, but it’s always nice to rinse off the rest of her body after practice.

The players turn away to face the locker as they change. It’s mostly for theater, since they share the open showers and Ymir knows what every single one of her teammates looks like underneath their uniforms. It strikes her as slightly strange that they have all collectively agreed to keep up the pretense of having privacy for these moments.

Well, perhaps privacy is not nonexistent for all of her teammates. Ymir watches as Historia collects her change of clothing and heads straight for one of the private shower stalls, pulling the curtain closed behind her.

Ymir frowns. She senses, dimly, a pair of blue eyes burning a hole in the back of her head. That’s the stall where…

No. Not in this setting. She shakes her head to dismiss the thought, and laughs under her breath at the memory.

She rinses off quickly, as does everyone else. Historia emerges from the stall wearing a white top with spaghetti straps and her hair down. Ymir is a little surprised when she approaches her, but it passes quickly.

“It’s around lunchtime,” Historia says expectantly. “If you’d, uh, be okay with it, did you want to get lunch? Sorry, I wasn’t sure if you were going with anybody already.”

Ymir glances at her watch; sure enough, the time has just ticked past 12:30. She has in fact been planning to enjoy her midday meal alone, but a little company can’t hurt. It’s a valuable chance to learn more about this unexpected variable in her unendingly complex equation of life. Now that it occurs to her, they’ve barely talked to each other about anything outside of volleyball.

The two of them walk to the food hall together. Shiganshina University normally has several dining options for its students to choose from, a myriad arrangement of cafés and sandwich shops and various other specialty outlets, but those are not slated to open until two days before the semester begins. For now, their only choice is the standard all-you-can-eat cafeteria.

Ymir directs the attendant behind one of the counters to throw together a brown rice bowl with some beans and sweet potatoes on top. Historia returns to their table carrying a couple slices of veggie pizza.

Ymir clears her throat and decides to get the conversation underway. “How’re you finding everything so far?”

“This place seems nice enough.” Historia wipes a smidge of tomato sauce off of her chin. “I think I’ve officially been here for…six days? A week, maybe? Have to say, that was the cleanest shower I’ve ever seen in any communal bathroom.”

Ymir swallows, hard. A crispy piece of sweet potato scrapes the back of her throat on the way down. “Ah. Right.”

Historia wastes no time picking up on her discomfort. “Wait, did I say something wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

“C’mon, it’s obviously not nothing. What is it?” The blonde’s prodding is friendly, but still assertive.

The tips of Ymir’s ears burn momentarily. “Well…the reason that shower is so clean is because people barely ever use it.”

Historia’s face blanches. “Oh, no. Don’t tell me something really awful happened in there. Did someone die? Was it explosive diar—”

“No! Nothing like that,” Ymir cuts her off, waving her hands in front of her. This is not how their first real conversation is supposed to go. If they find out that she blabbed to the new girl, who knows what they would think? Her first term of captaincy has run into a dilemma before the season’s even begun.

“What, then?”

Ymir takes a deep breath. “Pleasepleaseplease don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Or tell anyone I told you this. Even Mina. I figure you should hear it from me.”

Historia leans in, her face suddenly the picture of intrigue. “Ooh, what?”

“It happened when I was just starting as a freshman, back before I really knew anybody on the team. Almost exactly a year ago, to the day. I stayed on the court late after practice to work on my serve. I figured everyone else had left.” Ymir’s voice is a low whisper. “I went back to the locker room to shower. I heard running water, which was kind of weird. I figured someone had just forgotten to turn the faucet off.”

“Right, right.” Historia nods along.

“None of the public showers were on, so I went over to the corner where the private showers are. One of the shower curtains was half-open.” Ymir sighs and threads her fingers through her hair. “Mikasa and Annie were in there.”

“They what?” Historia’s jaw pops open in disbelief.

“I saw everything, and I mean everything. I thought Annie was going to strangle me to death with her bare hands. Or sic Mikasa on me.”

Historia blinks a few times, processing the information she’s been given. “Well, are they a couple? They would look cute together.” At least she doesn’t seem offended.

“That was the issue,” Ymir continues. “Nobody even knew they were into girls! To my knowledge, they aren’t together or dating or anything like that. It might have just been that one time.”

“Well, maybe it’s not that bad,” Historia reasons. “You just walked in on them by accident. It could’ve happened to anyone, especially since they didn’t have the curtain pulled.”

Ymir sucks in air through her teeth. “Um. About that. See, I was really new on the team. And genuinely scared Annie was going to try and rearrange my organs. So I may or may not have told Hitch what happened.”

“Oh, Ymir, you didn’t.”

“I did. Unfortunately. And then Hitch went and spread the rumor around the entire women’s varsity athlete population. Then, Annie caught someone poking around in the shower looking for ‘evidence’, whatever that means. So now nobody’s allowed to go in there without her getting royally pissed at you.”

“Well, fuck,” Historia says, and it occurs to Ymir that it’s the first time she has heard the blonde curse. “Am I in danger, then?”

“I think she gave you a pass ‘cause you’re new. But now you know. If you really want, just use the other private shower. Can’t guarantee it’ll be as clean, though.” Ymir picks through the grains in her bowl with a plastic fork.

Historia’s brows furrow, and she stares at her cooling pizza in silence. Ymir can’t quite get a read on her expression. Then, out of the blue, Historia grabs at her sides and doubles over in hysterical laughter. Heads turn in the cafeteria.

“Oh, my God,” she says, wiping a tear out of the corner of her eye as Ymir stares at her in mild shock. “What have I gotten myself into?”

Ymir’s shoulders relax, and she feels a weight lift off her chest as she lets herself join the other girl in laughter. “Jeez. You’re right. I should’ve warned you how dysfunctional this whole group was before you decided to try out.”

“Let’s, ah, let’s try to have a normal conversation, shall we?” Historia asks, shaking off the last of her giggles. “Let me start with the most standard question I can think of.” She clears her throat, sits up straight, and laces her hands together in mock-seriousness. “What’s your major?”

“Biology. Just regular Biology, I don’t have a concentration.”

“Cool!” Historia perks back up, already discarding the fake gravitas. “I’m doing Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. We might have a class or two this semester, depending on what you’re taking.”

“Mm, maybe. It depends. I assume you’re not taking Orgo.” Ymir picks at her teeth while she runs a mental inventory of her courses. “Yeah, I’m doing Organic Chemistry, Stats—the 220 section, not 210—Genetics, Biology of Global Health, and Biochem. I have no idea what your requirements are.”

“They can’t be that far off,” Historia smiles. “I’m also doing Stats and Genetics. I think they’re mandatory for everybody doing anything remotely Bio-related.”

Ymir has never shared classes with any of her teammates before, and something in her chest bristles with anticipation. “There’s only one Genetics section in the fall, so we’ll for sure be in the same class there. How about Stats? Who’s your professor?”

Historia’s eyes wander around the room. “Some older guy with a mustache. He had a strange name. Pixie, maybe?”

“You got placed into Pyxis’s section? Lucky,” Ymir huffs, “I had to wake up at seven in the morning to pre-register for it. I’m guessing you were just enrolled there by coincidence. You transfers get too many privileges, I swear.”

“Why? What’s the deal with him?”

“Dr. Pyxis—he insists you call him Dot, actually—is the head of the entire math department. He teaches the Stats course for science majors because apparently he doesn’t want to do the high-level electives or the huge general intro stats classes. He’s like this really chill grandpa-type professor, except he’s also insanely smart. Word on the street is that he writes some incredible letters of recommendation.”

“So you’re telling me I do in fact have a chance of succeeding here.”

Ymir flashes her a toothy grin. “You just might.”

The two of them polish off and return their dinner plates, each grabbing a cookie from the dessert section on the way out. Historia brushes a couple of crumbs off of her chin. When they climb the stairs back up to the building’s lobby, Ymir groans. The forebodingly gray sky has collapsed in on itself into a full-fledged storm, rain battering the glass windows of the door. Lightning flashes in the near distance.

“Shit. Did you bring your laptop with you? We can wait it out in the study center. It’s right there, across the street.”

Historia nods. “Sounds good to me.”

Ymir flings the door open, clutching her bag to her chest to protect it, and the girls are immediately doused with rainwater as they dash across the street. Her student ID card nearly slips out of her hand as she swipes it to open the door.

Safely inside, she looks at the blonde next to her. Historia’s hair is soaking wet and her clothes are plastered to her skin, and she’s shivering in a way that, when taken with everything else going on with her appearance, reminds Ymir rather potently of an anxious chihuahua.

“I, uh, think I still have my jacket from practice with me…” Ymir starts the sentence before knowing where she’s going to end it, and she doesn’t manage to come up with a conclusion by the time the words are due. Historia makes it easy for her with a smile.

“That’d be great, actually. Thank you.”

Ymir’s jacket is about three sizes too large on Historia, and she finds herself picking at her cuticles as she tries to reorient her thoughts from how endearing the sight is. This is absolutely insane. She’s only known this girl for less than twenty-four hours, so why does her chest flutter when Historia brings the oversized sleeve to her face to dry it?

Ymir bites the inside of her lip. There’s no room for this kind of thinking. As the captain, she cannot let her decisions with the team’s management be influenced by shallow feelings; if she convinces Coach to put Historia on the team because of a silly little crush and the team suffers because of it, she’s never going to forgive herself. Fuck. She tastes blood. She’s just going to have to try to remain impartial.

She clears her throat, trying to refocus her thoughts. “If you don’t mind, I have some readings to do.”

“That’s fine.” Historia reaches into her own bag to retrieve her laptop. She hums softly under her breath and relaxes back into the plush chair.

Ymir remembers that she has to send an email to her academic advisor, then another one to one of her professors after that, and before she knows it she’s been slumped over her computer for way too long and her back is beginning to hurt. If Levi were here, he would be highly displeased. I told you to stop it with the goddamn slouching.

The brunette looks out the window. A couple of hours have passed, and so has the worst of the storm. Weak rays of light peek out from behind the scattering clouds, and the downpour has been reduced to a drizzle. She yawns and twists her arm behind her head. Halfway through packing up her things, she pauses.

“I don’t have any contact info for you.”

“Let me put my number in, then,” Historia says, and Ymir swallows a rising feeling of pride as the blonde types her digits into her contact.

“I’ll add you to the team group chat when I get home.” Ymir slings her bag over her shoulder. “By the way, you’re not the only new one here. Sasha’s a freshman. Three-star recruit out of high school.”

“Good to know.”

Ymir takes a second look at her phone. “Your last name is…how do you pronounce it?”

“It’s Reiss, pronounced like ‘rice’, but you draw out the S-sound. Not ‘Reese’.”

“Interesting.” Ymir shoves her phone into her back pocket. “Before I go, I forgot to ask, but where are you from?”

She’s met girls like Historia before, well-groomed blondes that seem to ooze charm from every pore, and the answer to that question is almost always somewhere in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Lititz, Pennsylvania. Coralville, Ohio. Van Buren, Arkansas.

Historia blinks. “I’m from Irvine.”

“Wait, really?” Ymir asks, sounding far more surprised than she intends to. “The city in California?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“It’s just, I guess, you don’t really sound like someone from Southern California.” Stop talking, Ymir. “I, well, I wouldn’t know. I’m from central Michigan.”

“Cool,” Historia says, and Ymir breathes a sigh of relief. “Don’t think I’ve met too many people from the Midwest yet.”

“Well, Sasha’s from some corn village in Iowa, so there’s two,” Ymir says. “I’ll see you at practice tomorrow?”

“You will!”

Ymir goes about the rest of her day—a protein bar snack, a light lifting session, a subpar dinner meal at the cafeteria—and she tries, she really tries her best not to think about Historia. Yet her thoughts drift back to this one girl, time and time again, until Ymir finally slams the door shut by repeating one sentence in her mind.

It’s highly unlikely that Historia Reiss is attracted to women.

Ymir tells herself that Historia probably has a long-distance boyfriend somewhere waiting for her, ignores the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that results from that thought, and mashes her face into her pillow until she falls asleep.

---

Morning practice comes bright and early. The campus greenery, revitalized from the storm’s downpour yesterday, seems especially vibrant as Ymir walks over to the gym.

Historia is already there, stretching her arms over her head, knee pads on. So is Hanna, the backup libero, who is speaking to Coach Hange about something that is probably not all that important. The rest of the players arrive over the next couple of minutes, and Ymir notes happily that nobody is late.

“You know the drill,” Coach Nanaba calls out. “Warm up, get loose. Sasha, Mikasa, Ymir, and Hitch, you’re going to be doing target hitting with me. The rest of you are with Hange for butterfly passes. We’ll have a scrimmage at the end.”

The energy in the room visibly lifts at the word “scrimmage,” and the players disperse throughout the room to warm up with a partner or practice their passing against the wall. Ymir gestures for Historia to join her.

First, they stretch their muscles, with Ymir making sure that she takes care of that one annoyingly tight spot near the crook of her shoulder. She grabs a ball from one of the carts and gives Historia a light swing.

To Ymir’s surprise, Historia’s form is night and day compared to their practice yesterday. Her footwork is confident and speedy, and her receives are controlled enough to send the ball back towards Ymir at just the right height. In fact, she barely has to move at all, because the ball is staying right between the two of them instead of flying erratically off of Historia’s arms.

“How’d you improve your control so much?”

“I went and bought a volleyball after our study session yesterday.” Historia smiles as she leans over to send an effortless one-arm bump back towards Ymir. “Poor Mina. I had her sit on the bed and just pass to me over and over until my arms felt like they were going to fall off. She corrected my form, too.”

Ymir makes a mental note that she owes Mina a slice of cake from the local bakeshop for helping her out, and soon the players are being directed to their stations for the drills. Coach Nanaba acts as a setter for the hitters, sending Mikasa and Sasha to the left side of the net and feeding Ymir sets down the middle. Her swing is finally beginning to return to its full strength after the long offseason. She’s missed it beyond words, the unspeakable feeling of elation when she launches high off the ground to slam a quick set into the targets on the opposing court, the power that courses from her shoulders to her fingers upon making contact.

When it’s not Ymir’s turn to hit, she glances over at the adjacent court as the other players practice butterfly passes. Historia almost looks like she belongs, and Ymir feels a surge of pride at watching her protégée—is that what she is now?—perform the fundamentals of passing and receiving at a solid level. She’s still more hesitant than she needs to be, and her form lacks the kind of fluidity that only comes with experience, but the bedrock for success is becoming visible one chisel at a time. Her musculature and short stature clearly make getting to the ground and putting directional power on a passed ball a breeze.

After their drills, Coach Hange blows the whistle and calls the players over to begin the scrimmage. Putting Annie and Mikasa on the same team is just unfair, so as per usual, the two of them are split, and Ymir is directed towards Annie’s team. Against Ymir’s expectations, Hange tells Historia to join them. Their backup setter, a mild-mannered senior girl with black hair named Ilse, sets up the attack for Mikasa’s team.

Ymir expects a snarky comment or something akin to the cold shoulder from Annie towards Historia, but no such reaction happens. Instead, Annie gives the other blonde a businesslike nod and points her towards where to stand to receive the opponent’s serve; in this case, it is Nifa, who palms the ball with one hand as she gives a thumbs-up ready signal with her other.

The redhead sends a spinning serve over the net. It careens towards the spot in the center of the court between Sasha and Historia, but at the last moment, Historia lunges forward on one knee and digs the ball high. She scrambles to get out of the way, and Annie gets under it easily, tossing the ball behind her head to the waiting Hitch. The brunette buries the kill around Mikasa’s block with ease.

“Nice receive,” Annie says flatly. “Just remember to call out your ball every time.”

At her side, Ymir curls her hand into a triumphant fist. Somehow, someway, Historia has managed to impress Annie—or at least surpass her expectations.

This might just work out after all.

The rest of the scrimmage is equally fun. Having Annie as a setter is a treat for any attacker, and Ymir relishes the occasional times where she is rewarded with a quick set that lets her beat the opposing block with pure speed. Mikasa’s spikes are a nightmare to receive as expected, but Historia persists and manages to make some difficult plays, including one that sees her flinging herself towards the sidelines to rescue an errant dig by Sasha. She misses a few that Mina would probably have gotten to. Ymir pays it no mind. Slowly but surely, the blonde’s positioning on the court is getting more precise, and Ymir tries her best to set up blocks that make her libero’s job a lot easier.

Later, once everyone is covered head-to-toe in sweat and the game’s actual score has been lost track of ages ago, Coach Hange calls the scrimmage over. The girls head towards their bags and water bottles, but Ymir’s attention is caught by Hange whistling through her teeth at her.

“Hey. Captain. Need a private word with you.”

“You do?” Ymir sighs, hoping Coach will take it back.

“Yep. Come, let’s go to the storage room. Grab a ball cart on the way.”

Ymir does as she is told, and Hange shuts the door to the storage room behind them. “I got some unfortunate news today.”

Ymir’s heart drops to her stomach. “...What?”

Hange sighs deeply and pushes her glasses up on her face. “Hanna’s quitting the team. She lost someone in the family, and I guess she just can’t make it work. She made it official earlier today.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“That’s putting it lightly. There goes the only other libero we had. So, here’s what we’re going to do.” The coach crosses her arms. “Historia’s tryout is over, effective immediately, because we’re going to offer her a roster spot. We don’t have a choice anymore.”

Ymir’s heart comes unstuck from her stomach and leaps straight into her throat, and she finds herself nearly straining to get the next words out. “You are? Wait, actually?”

“Well, we need to make sure she accepts it, or we’re capital-F fucked. Rather, you need to make sure she accepts it.” Hange places a firm hand on her shoulder. “We don’t have a scholarship to offer her. She has to be okay with that.”

Ymir nods forcefully. “Yeah. Yeah, I can convince her.”

“Great! I’m going to bring you two into my office once you’re done changing for her to sign the offer. Be ready!” Hange claps her hands and heads out of the room, leaving Ymir to stand there in stunned silence.

It takes a moment for everything to sink in. When it does, Ymir raises her fists towards the ceiling and opens her mouth in a silent yell to nobody but the racks of equipment around her.

The only thing left to do now is to make it official.

Chapter Text

Coach’s door is already open by the time Ymir has finished changing and summoning Historia to come with her. On top of the messy pile of paperwork on her desk lie two sheets of paper, stapled together and laid flat.

“Good job at practice today, Historia,” Coach Hange says as the two girls take their seats across from her. “Did Ymir tell you why you’re here in my office?”

Historia shakes her head. Hange gives Ymir a brief frown of disapproval.

“Okay, well, let’s get right to it then. We are prepared to offer you a roster spot, effective immediately, as one has opened up unexpectedly.” Hange sweeps a messy lock of hair out of her face. “This is a very, very serious commitment. I’m going to leave it to your captain to explain.”

Historia turns to Ymir, her back stiffened, and her expression is unreadable. Ymir takes a breath and steadies herself. “If you accept, this sport is going to become your life. Practices, travel, fitness sessions, film reviews; you need to attend all of them. On busy weeks, this might be up to forty hours of your time. You need to balance the sport and school. You understand?”

“I do.”

Hange nods solemnly and pushes the sheets of paper towards Historia. “You’d better mean that. To add on to it, you won’t be on a standard recruited athlete contract. Read this.”

Historia thumbs through the papers, squinting at the small text. Ymir swallows thickly.

“What that means,” Ymir says, “is that we…um, the team can’t offer you a scholarship. You’re still going to be paying for tuition, housing, and dining. Of course, just like the rest of us, you won’t need to pay for any team travel, and we’ll give you all the equipment you need.”

Historia’s demeanor relaxes, which is certainly not the reaction Ymir is expecting. “Wait, that’s the catch? I figured that was going to be the case either way. Yeah, that part is totally fine.”

“There’s one more thing,” Hange butts in, and Ymir wishes dearly that she would stop talking. “Since you’re a walk-on, your roster spot is not permanent the same way that our recruited players have it. If a different player whom we want more comes by, you risk getting cut.” The coach stares at Historia through her thick glasses lenses. “It’s good motivation, no? Don’t worry, you won’t get cut as long as you show up when we need you.”

Hange can be downright frightening when she gets into her zone, but Ymir sees no fear in Historia as she reaches for a pen with a steady hand. “We have a deal, Coach.”

“Sign here, then.”

As the blonde finishes off her signature with a swirl, the pace of Ymir’s heartbeat threatens to go into overtime, and it’s all she can do to stop herself from jumping onto the coach’s desk in celebration. Her fingertips dance wildly on the side of the chair.

Coach Hange stands up and meets Historia with a firm handshake. “Welcome to the team, Historia. Meet me before practice tomorrow, and we’ll get you a jersey number. Oh, also, send me your personal information so I can add you to the team website, okay?” She disappears from the room in a whirl of bags and flying pieces of paper before Historia can finish saying yes.

“Holy shit,” Historia whispers.

Then, before Ymir can open her mouth, she pulls her into as big a hug as someone of her stature can give. Her arms squeeze tightly around Ymir’s ribs, taking her breath away in more ways than one.

When she pulls away, her eyes are bright and sparkling. “What a pleasant surprise!”

“Right? It’s official!” Ymir’s chest burns with a warm, comforting fire. “I think you’re gonna love it. When I get back to my dorm, I’ll send you all the other info you need, schedules and stuff like that.”

“Ooh, sounds good,” Historia says. “Wait, when’s our first game?”

“It’s in a couple weeks. Still time to prep beforehand. Don’t worry, the team we’re playing isn’t crazy good.”

“At least it’ll be a nicer introduction,” Historia muses. “If it’s okay, I’m gonna go outside and call my parents?”

Ymir nods. “Of course, go ahead. By the way, on an offhand note, you don’t happen to do steroids for fun or constantly smoke weed, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Perfect!” Ymir bids her farewell with a pat on the shoulder. “Better get used to it, because you’re going to get drug tested every now and then. Welcome to collegiate athletics.”

---

Things move quickly after that.

Historia immediately becomes a regular in practices, and on afternoons where their obligations are cleared, Ymir goes back to the gym with her and Mina. They practice positioning for hours, with Mina directing Historia where to stand on the court for each type of serve or attack, and Ymir standing in the appropriate place for a block when applicable. Historia scribbles down a series of scratchy notes after every session.

Students rush back to the campus in droves in anticipation of the school year’s beginning. Practically overnight, Trost Hall’s functioning floors are populated with dozens of unfortunate souls, and Ymir dearly misses the moments of silence she used to enjoy. The university’s walkways are overrun by students straining to push moving carts across the cobblestones.

As soon as her professors publish their syllabi, she reaches out to each one to set up a brief meeting later in the week. Juggling classes and the grueling athletic schedule is nigh-impossible without some degree of flexibility on both parties’ behalf. She sends Historia a text to remind her to do the same.

A silver lining of the sudden descent into chaos is that all of the campus facilities that were closed have reopened, including Ymir’s favorite little student-run café tucked into the corner of the library’s second floor. Avocado toast tastes better when it’s being paid for by the flex dollars on her meal plan.

Before she knows it, the first day of classes for her sophomore year is upon her. She takes a look at her schedule. Her Mondays involve an opening lecture for Organic Chemistry immediately followed by Biochem, then a nice substantial break for a meal and some downtime, and finally the mid-afternoon Stats class that she apparently shares with Historia. Having it at the end of the day is a blessing, like a reward for getting through the day.

Ymir wakes up before it is time for her alarm to go off. This, evidently, is because the asshole in the dorm unit next to her has decided to set approximately ten of their own alarms to go off back-to-back-to-back, and Trost’s thin walls are no match for the blaring klaxon of an unpressed snooze button.

She reluctantly drags herself to the already-packed dining hall, stuffs down some cornflakes and a slice of spinach quiche, and picks up an iced latte from the hall’s coffee shop on the way out. Despite it not even being nine in the morning yet, the Mid-Atlantic late summer sun is relentless. She wipes sweat off of her upper lip and uses a napkin to clean off the rapidly forming condensation on her cup.

Organic Chemistry and Biochem fly by, with the professors spending most of the class time fielding questions like “will our exams be curved?” and “how big is the curve?” Her midday break affords her plenty of time to set up shop and check her emails over some mildly overcooked chicken alfredo pasta.

Ymir’s heart rate picks up its pace slightly as she pushes open the double doors to her Stats classroom. Tiered rows of chairs with folded desks lead down to the central podium, behind which stands the reputable Dr. Pyxis. He looks almost comically short from this angle, Ymir notes.

Historia is already seated off to the side in the fifth row. Ymir steels her courage and walks to that spot, and to her relief, the blonde smiles and pats the seat next to her as an invite.

“How’s your first day of classes at Shiganshina been?”

“Oh, you know, it’s been fine,” Historia laughs, fishing a notebook from her backpack and turning it to the first page. “How come the classrooms in the Maria building don’t have windows? Would’ve been nice to enjoy the sun a little.”

Ymir smiles as she paws through her pencil case trying to find a pen that has ink in it. “See, it’s actually a coordinated plan by the university to give us all Vitamin D deficiency and make us depend on the dining hall food for artificial nutrients.”

“Oh, c’mon, the dining hall food isn’t that bad.”

“You need to raise your standards!” Ymir pokes back, but she’s interrupted by the professor clearing his throat into a small microphone clipped to his collar.

“Good afternoon, students. Unless you did your class registration blindfolded, this should come as no surprise, but I’m Dieter Pyxis, your instructor for this class.” He writes the course name on the blackboard behind him. “If you’re not here for, ahem, Statistics for Science Majors—” he jabs a thumb at the doors up the stairs— “time to leave.”

Nobody moves from their seat.

“Alright, well, I better not get any emails later about showing up to the wrong class.” There is a small pair of reading glasses tucked into his shirt, and Dr. Pyxis unfolds them and brings them to his face. “Speaking of emails— I find it terribly boring to be addressed as ‘Doctor Pyxis’, you see. Far too generic. Please address me as Dot, or ‘Doctor Dot’, if you feel so constrained by the formalities of academia.”

Ymir jabs an elbow into Historia’s side. “See? Told you,” she whispers under her breath.

“Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking,” Dr. Pyxis continues, “Why Dot? Isn’t that an old woman’s name? Is my Stats professor going senile?” A ripple of giggles spreads across the room. “And I will respond by telling you the reason is far less dramatic than that. I am originally from Germany, as you might have guessed, but I got my PhD in Italy. When you get your doctorate there, you are called Dottore, the appropriate word in the local tongue. But my Italian was too broken and accented to put the right flourish on such a word. My colleagues affectionately called me Dot, a double entendre on my pronunciation and my short height, and it has stuck with me ever since.”

Historia turns to her and pulls a face, keeping her voice low. “I am not calling one of my professors Dot.”

“You’ll happily eat the dining hall food but won’t do that? You’re a mystery to me,” Ymir says, evidently just a little too loudly, because Dr. Pyxis clears his throat into his lapel mic and stares at their general area in the classroom with a raised eyebrow.

“Anyway,” Pyxis resumes, “Hopefully we can cover at least some introductory content in the latter half of this class, but if not, we’ll live. First I want to get a sense for what this class’s experience level is like. Please, can the students who have already taken Calc II raise their hands?”

Ymir is on her way out of the classroom’s double doors before she knows it, and she and Historia walk together towards the athletic complex. Today is an off day from active practice, a generous gesture of relief to commemorate the first day of classes, but the true time commitment never stops.

Coach Hange sits at the head of the long desk in the meeting room, flanked by a clipboard-wielding Nanaba. Barely legible writing is scrawled across the whiteboard behind them in various marker colors. Ymir vaguely recognizes the distinctive numbers, circles, and arrows of various volleyball plays.

“How was everyone’s first day of classes?” Hange asks warmly, and the players collectively mumble some form of “good.” “Love the enthusiasm, folks. Hopefully you get a little more energy soon, because we are just about ten days out from our first game of the season!”

At her side, Nanaba claps her hand against her clipboard awkwardly a couple times.

Coach Hange gives her a sympathetic glance before continuing. “Let’s do a quick preview of the matchup, okay? We’ll do a much more in-depth scouting meeting at the end of this week, but we’ve got a couple of new faces with us, so a little extra can’t hurt. Take it away, Nans.”

Coach Nanaba clears her throat and looks at her clipboard before turning to the whiteboard behind her and clearing a small patch to write on with the eraser. “We will be playing against Garrison Polytechnic. Friday, five p.m. They’re not in our conference, so we can’t contribute to our conference record, but we are expected to comfortably beat them.” She pauses to write a name.

Rico Brzenska

“She’s the best player on that roster by a country mile, but the rest of them are mostly one-star recruits that chose academics over athletics. She plays oppo— so Mikasa and Sasha, you’re mostly going to be blocking her. Mikasa, you’ve faced Rico before; make sure you give Sasha some pointers.”

The rest of the meeting goes by relatively quickly, and Ymir’s mind begins to wander as the time passes. Afterwards, she goes to the massage room, where Levi guides her through a leg-stretching exercise and checks her range of motion.

She notes a twinge of tightness around her calf. Precautionary measures against injury are critical, so Ymir takes some extra time after the session with Levi to roll out a yoga mat on the gym floor and carefully stretch her muscles with resistance bands. For whatever reason, Historia decides to join her.

“Does something hurt?”

“No, but why not, right? It’ll be good to make this a habit,” Historia says, assuaging her concerns. She rolls out a mat of her own next to Ymir. “You’ve played against this team before?”

Ymir laughs lightly, pleasant memories flashing through her mind. “Garri-Poly? Yep, we whooped ‘em. That was the game that confirmed that Annie was going to be our starting setter indefinitely.”

There is a visible weight that comes off of Historia’s chest, and her shoulders relax. “Well, that’s nice to hear. Their hitters aren’t very good, I take it?”

“I mean, there’s Rico, but not apart from her,” Ymir says, leaning back to stretch her leg out. “It’s an engineering and comp sci school. Bunch of fuckin’ nerds that don’t want to play sports.” She pauses and cocks her head to the side. “Although, Rico might become more of a problem when she’s a junior or senior. She’s just a sophomore right now, like us. She’s short, but she’s got some set of legs on her.”

“Rico, Levi, and now me?” Historia leans over to nudge Ymir in the shoulder. “I got it all wrong. This sport’s full of shorties.”

“It’s just part of the fun.”

Ymir completes her circuit of stretches, and Historia is on her feet first, reaching out a hand for her to grab onto. When she does, the blonde pulls her up with ease; Ymir is reminded once more of the quiet strength hidden in her small frame.

The feeling of Historia’s firm grip ghosts over the palm of her hand as she walks back to her dorm, persisting through a shower and the act of folding laundry, staying with her even as she turns out the light and crawls into her bed. Pleasantly, as she falls into the twilight zone between consciousness and sleep, her mind conjures the image of her new libero lying right next to her.

---

The first week of classes provides a useful approximation for what the rest of Ymir’s semester will look like. She finds Historia once again in their shared Genetics class, which is taught by a young postdoc with a surprisingly deep voice and a talent for making the mundane sound fascinating. His name seems vaguely familiar. To her surprise, it is no mere coincidence, and Dr. Zeke Yeager is actually the half-brother of the latest addition to the men’s volleyball team, a freshman outside hitter named Eren.

The team spends an annoying amount of time at practice running every play Coach Hange can think to pull out of her bag of tricks. Ymir has to remind herself that later on in the year, once they’ve had more time to gel and get into a shared rhythm, there will be more time for scrimmages and queen of the court matches.

Unfortunately, most of Ymir’s very first weekend of the semester is spent trying to get ahead on her readings and assignments. Every weekend that they don’t have a game is a much-needed opportunity to stay on track. It means that she doesn’t really get a break before the next week starts, and the time seems to move inconsiderately fast.

It also means that, before she knows it, the very first game day of the semester is upon her.

It is a pleasant Friday afternoon at the end of the second week of classes, and Ymir can see the crowd of students lining up outside Tybur Coliseum as she goes in through its side entrance. Ever since Mikasa and Annie had a breakout season as freshmen, the year prior to Ymir’s arrival, they haven’t had any trouble attracting eager onlookers in droves.

The Coliseum’s locker rooms are a cut above Shiganshina’s normal gym facilities, and here, every player has a designated locker space with their name above it. From today onwards, the women’s volleyball team shares the court space for games and practices on a rotating basis with the men's volleyball team and both of the basketball teams. Ymir remembers from last year how, on the roughly one-in-four days that they practiced at the Coliseum, it seemed like the effort level on the court was clearly higher than normal.

Historia is already there. She’s pulling on her socks and sitting on her bench, and Ymir feels a surging sense of internal pride when she sees the brand-new placard hanging above her.

Sasha’s speaker is blasting music from the corner. Hange is flitting around the room like an anxious bird, spouting off reminders from the scouting meeting and various signals for plays that just go in one of Ymir’s ears and out the other. The air is charged with a palpable tension, almost thick enough to chew on.

This group has never played together before. Ymir’s foot bounces unconsciously against the vinyl floor. The captain’s armband, which she wears for the first time, feels like it weighs ten pounds. Playing an underdog team always makes her stomach churn. A win is expected— but a loss is a catastrophe.

She tries to focus on the player opposite her, the only one clad in white while the rest of them wear Shiganshina’s home green jersey. She can’t begin to imagine what Historia must be feeling right now. To be the starting libero in her first formal game of volleyball is an absurd amount of responsibility to shoulder. Just in case, the backup setter Ilse has been told to prepare to go in for her should things go sideways, but Ymir imagines that thought isn’t necessarily comforting.

Down the hallway to the court, Ymir hears the distant sound of music playing— their walk-out song. She swallows thickly, slaps her palms against her thighs, and rises to her feet.

“Scouts on three?”

Mikasa is the first to join her, placing her outstretched hand on top of Ymir’s, and then the rest of the team converges in at once. Nifa looks to her expectantly.

“One, two, three— LET’S GO, SCOUTS!”

Shiganshina’s captain leads the team down the hallway, and soon they’re beneath the Coliseum’s bright lights and standing on its shiny floors. The school’s pep band occupies one section of the bleachers, serenading them with a slightly off-key volley of trumpets.

Garrison Polytechnic’s players have already taken the other side of the court to do their warm-ups, and Ymir recognizes Rico instantly. The young woman has an unmistakable aura of confidence to her, her eyes focused behind the pair of sports glasses she’s wearing.

The game announcer lists them off one by one, accompanied by graphics on the Jumbotron of their team photos with some fire effects circling their faces. Ymir barely notices it. These exact moments, where she’s already on the court but doesn’t have the ball in her hands, never pass fast enough.

The referee beckons her over at the net, where they’re joined by Garrison’s captain, a tall blonde with pigtails. Ymir wins the coin toss, so Shiganshina will serve first.

Historia looks sharp in their pregame drills. It’s incredible how far she’s come since that very first practice, even though it’s barely been three weeks since then, but her form and footwork have been transformed thanks to her lessons with Mina. Ymir knows she’s not entirely confident with her overhand tosses yet, but that skill can wait for later. She notices the referee checking her watch and calls the team in for a quick huddle.

“Communication, communication, communication,” Ymir says, repeating the same word she’s had drilled into her for a decade. “Call for your balls, and follow up if one of us dives off the court.”

She glances at Annie, who understands the assignment and takes the helm. “Their blockers aren’t very good. We can easily play at a faster tempo than them, beat them to the shot. Don’t let them slow the game down. Nifa, make sure you’re keeping a tight block with Sasha. You have a big height advantage, so if you’re not up against Rico, try and go for the kill.”

Nifa nods, red hair bobbing over her face. Annie squares her shoulders and looks at Historia, her expression unreadable.

“Don’t fuck up, rookie.”

“I’ll try,” Historia says evenly, and Ymir’s heartbeat calms its pace. Her tone betrays no lack of confidence.

The referee blows the whistle to signal for the starting lineups to take the court. Annie stands at the back right of the court and holds the ball in her hands, ready to provide the match’s first serve. Hitch, Nifa, and Mikasa are all bunched up in the front court. Sasha rests at the back left of the court. And Ymir—whose starting position is in the middle of the back court—reluctantly makes her way to the bench, because her time in the back row is negated by the libero’s substitution. To Annie’s left, Historia stands on the court in her place.

The referee’s whistle sounds again. Ymir’s second year of collegiate volleyball officially begins.

Annie takes a deep breath and bounces the ball with both hands. The setter’s serve is a thing of beauty; what she lacks in raw power is well-compensated by craftiness, and her jump float has ridiculous movement to it. She steps back, takes two strides, releases the ball, and then makes contact at its center with a flattened palm— picture-perfect.

The ball careens over the net, sliding wildly through the air, and Garrison’s libero barely manages a one-handed diving dig to stop an ace. It’s hardly a controlled pass, which takes Rico out of the equation for the possession, and the setter has to provide a low bump towards their outside hitter.

“Free ball!” Annie calls out as Shiganshina’s players take their base positions. Historia prepares to receive the slow toss over the net, but it goes instead to Sasha, who handles the pass to Annie with ease.

On the net’s left side, Mikasa begins her approach. Her presence on the court is impossible to ignore. Annie raises her arms for the toss, and Garrison’s blockers shift.

Ymir smiles. She’s seen this enough times to know exactly what’s coming next. Even so, her breath still catches in her chest, as if nothing can disturb the moment.

Mikasa pushes off into her jump, and the blockers follow suit, arms extending above the net. At the last second where Annie’s hands make contact with the ball, her wrists flick inwards and the ball snaps backwards over her head at speed.

Hitch’s grin splits her face as she buries the kill with a resounding smack around the lone blocker remaining on the right side. In Garrison’s panicked attempt to alter Mikasa’s shot, they’d forgotten all about the attacker lurking behind the setter. The move can’t be used infinitely, but against less experienced teams, it works like a charm to establish an early gap.

The referee extends her arm towards their side of the court, and Shiganshina takes a 1-0 lead.

Annie serves again, and once more the opposing team struggles to return it, then her next serve is a no-touch ace that leaves Garrison’s setter brought to her knees. Ymir checks her shoelaces. If this keeps up for much longer, she risks being cold by the time she rotates into the game.

Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how she looks at it— that does not happen. A hit glances off of Nifa’s outstretched finger to award Garrison their first point of the game, but it’s quickly negated by a powerful spike from Mikasa to make the score 4-1.

The players rotate positions, and Mikasa takes her serve. It’s a little suboptimal, but mostly just unfair, to have their two best servers going back-to-back; it’s a consequence of their best attacking setup. Mikasa’s power proves too much to handle for two points before, at long last, Garrison’s setter delivers a well-placed toss to Rico.

The small brunette launches herself into the air and slams a cut shot around Sasha’s rising block, earning enthusiastic high fives from her teammates. Rico’s swing is a little wild, rough around the edges with inexperience, but Ymir can see her potential from the way the ball flies off of her hand. She’d be a major threat at another school with a more competent athletic program.

Shiganshina wins the next point right back. Garrison’s libero bumps a hit from Sasha towards the net, where it hangs tantalizingly over the centerline. Their middle blocker is no match for Nifa’s height and presence, and she wins the duel easily. The scoreboard flips to 7-2.

Ymir wipes her palms—they’ve grown sweaty, she realizes—on her shorts as she rises to her feet. At last, her time has come to enter the game. She takes her place in the front row alongside Hitch and Sasha. Nifa prepares to serve.

Historia, for her part, makes for the bench as one of the referees records her exit. Ymir has advised her to make the most of her meager rest periods. She’s out of the game for now, but as soon as Garrison scores their next point, she will return to the backcourt to play defense in lieu of Nifa. So far, her outing has been routine; barely any serious effort required.

Ymir laces her fingers behind her head as Nifa sends the ball over the net. A diving save allows Garrison’s setter to make a well-placed toss with controlled spin.

“Two block!” Annie yells, making three quick strides right to Ymir’s side. The two girls jump into the block simultaneously, their hands reaching the apex right as Rico swings.

The hit ricochets off of Ymir’s hand with force, stinging the reddened skin on her palm and causing her to blink twice involuntarily. Rico’s petite frame conceals serious power.

Garrison recycles the attack, and this time the setter sends the ball high for a back row attack from their captain, the tall pigtailed blonde Ymir won the coin toss against.

“One block!”

Ymir thinks she’s timed it right. The play is as routine to her as they get. She rises above the net, bracing herself for the second round of hard contact.

It does not come. Instead, Garrison’s attacker never finishes her swing. As she flies through the air, her extended fingertips softly push off on the ball, and it bobbles over Ymir’s line of sight before it deflects off her thumb and plummets to the floor behind her.

Mikasa makes a heroic dive from the back row, but the deflection off of Ymir has put it just out of her reach, and the ball hits the floor inches away from her outstretched hand. Ymir curses under her breath.

The change of possession allows Nifa to exit the game. In her place, Historia takes the spot at the court’s back right corner. It is the first time she and Ymir have been on it simultaneously.

The serve from Garrison curls towards Historia, and she sets her feet to bump it to Annie. Mikasa’s side of the net is crowded, so she sends it over to Hitch. The opposite hitter looks to have a clean strike as she swings.

Just when Ymir thinks the point is inevitable, Rico dives to put herself directly in the ball’s path and goes down hard as she sends the ball high in the air.

“Two block! Seam!” Annie shouts.

Ymir flicks her gaze to the backcourt. Historia is looking back at her. They have run this play in practice more times than she can count.

Ymir and Annie jump into their blocks, leaving a carefully calculated space between their arms. She sees the look on the opposing attacker’s face. The set is low; she has no choice but to swing into that open space to avoid the kill block.

Historia’s eyes follow the ball at every moment. The libero drops to one knee, brings her forearms together, and sends it flying back towards the net at speed.

Annie’s shoes have only just made contact with the floor once more when the ball shoots towards her. But Ymir, who is taller and needs less jump height for a block, is already pushing off the ground for a second time.

The moment seems to move in slow-motion. Ymir feels herself go briefly weightless as she rises above the net. No sooner than the ball reaches Annie’s waiting hands, the setter pushes her hands outwards with force and sends the spinning ball rocketing straight towards Ymir’s extended hand. It makes contact without her having to adjust her swing in the slightest.

Poor Garrison, Ymir thinks on the way down from her jump, they never had a chance.

The ball slams onto the opposing court and bounces so high that it clears the net once more. Ymir does not notice it. Historia jumps towards her, all smiles and congratulatory words and endearing touches on her arms, and the rest of the world falls away for one sweet second.

Chapter Text

The two teams continue trading blows for some time, and Shiganshina keeps the upper hand the entire way through, eventually winning the first set by a score of 25-14. The mood is considerably lighter when the players make their way back to the bench during the brief intermission between sets. Hange is cautious not to sound overly optimistic, but Ymir can tell that their coach is relieved, and she hasn’t had any reason to talk to the referee about calls.

She uses the wiggle room between the teams to try and make some useful observations. Annie and Mikasa are connecting well, but with noticeably less rapidity than last season, which Ymir supposes could just be due to the fact that the season has barely gotten underway. Historia seems to be executing the fundamentals of defense well. Nifa’s block positioning could be a little better. And Hitch, to her credit, appears to have undergone a major upgrade to her offensive power over the summer.

The second set proceeds in much the same way. Historia makes a couple of mistakes— a glancing blow off of the forearms that should have been a clean receive, or overcommitting to a dive— but the rest of the team gives her more than enough of an offensive cushion to render those errors inconsequential. Ymir is happy to see Mikasa help the libero back to her feet with some quiet words of encouragement.

When it is Ymir’s responsibility to block against Rico, she counts herself lucky that Garrison’s setter has a mediocre command of her tosses. With someone as accurate as Annie as her counterpart, Rico would be able to attack from almost anywhere on the court.

Once again, they arrive at set point, the margin only slightly tighter this time at a score of 24-17. It is Ymir’s turn to serve, which means it is one of the rare rotations where both middle blockers are on the floor and Historia rests on the bench.

Ymir rolls the ball over her palm as she stands behind the service line. Her jump serve is her best weapon here, and while she might go for some serious topspin against a better defensive team, there’s no reason to take the extra risk with their comfortable lead.

She inhales, leads into her serve, and slams the ball across the net, where it’s bumped to the setter for a quick attack that Mikasa easily blocks. Garrison tries again. Their setter seems to be preparing to toss to their outside hitter.

“Two—!”

Annie is interrupted when, out of nowhere, Rico sprints towards the spot right next to the setter, with the middle blocker barely stepping out of the way in time. Nifa is completely taken out of the play, leaving only Annie to desperately jump into the block. Her fingers haven’t even cleared the net when Rico contacts the ball with a fearsome cut shot that heads straight for the edge of the court.

By a stroke of luck, Ymir has only partially returned to her assigned court position after her serve, leaving her further off to the side than she usually stands. It is the only reason she even has a chance on the play. She pushes off with her left foot to send herself hurtling towards the floor on her right side, eyes barely tracking the missile of the shot, and throws out her forearm wildly as she collides with the hard court beneath her.

Ymir’s vision briefly flashes white as her ribcage hits the floor, the impact only barely mitigated by her other arm slowing the fall. Her hip bone audibly knocks against the court.

She forces herself to look at the play as she gets on all fours. The ball drifts high in the air, and Ymir sees a look of pure confusion on Nifa’s face as she follows it. Nobody calls for it, but Annie runs to get under it nonetheless, getting into the approach for a jumping overhead toss. Garrison’s blockers shift on their feet, ready to make a move.

Instead, Annie sprints underneath the flying ball without attempting to make a play. No sooner than she has run out of the floor space, Mikasa rises to her full height behind her like an orca jumping after its prey.

Garrison’s libero calls out “Second touch!”, but it’s far too late, and the opposing blockers can do nothing but stand rooted to their posts. Mikasa lets out a triumphant yell as she slams the kill over the net.

There’s no immediate celebration on the court, because Shiganshina’s players flock to their downed captain as soon as the referee’s whistle blows to end the set.

“You okay?”

“Did you break something?”

“What happened?”

“Insane dig, dude!”

“Alright, give her a break.” Levi intervenes, shoving his way through the crowd of gathered players and leaning over Ymir, who now sits on her knees. “Where’d you get hit?”

Ymir places her palm over the side of her ribs. The spot seems to hum with pain, the fresh ache still not done spreading across her torso. To make matters worse, her hip throbs from the impact, causing her to wince as she adjusts her position to sit up straight.

“My right side. My arm’s fine.”

“Well, you need more than an arm to play volleyball.” Levi sighs and snaps on a latex glove. “You planning on coming out of the game? Seems like you guys got this one in the bag.”

Ymir thinks about it for a second. She’s done it before. Last year, a few games in, she landed on her wrist wrong and exited early to be safe, and the injury never went beyond a simple strain.

Then she sees Historia, standing a few steps off of the bench, her hands worrying themselves against her chest. The libero’s eyes meet hers, then quickly dart away. Something about the minute gesture makes Ymir’s fists grow firm with resolve.

“I don’t want to.”

Levi gives her a quizzical look. “Okay, then. I have to check if anything’s broken. How much does this hurt?”

He presses three fingertips into her ribcage. Ymir sucks in air sharply through her teeth, but her protests stop there. It hurts, sure. It’s going to suck jumping into blocks for the rest of the match. She’s absolutely certain the entire right side of her body will have turned into one giant, blue-purple bruise by the end of the day. Still, it’s nothing compared to the pain of an actual break. Ymir knows this well from her time on a little-league soccer team. Some asshole, trying to look good in front of his parents, had stuck his leg out in front of her and sent her crashing into the grass, where the still-growing bone of her forearm had cracked through from the impact.

“Not that bad. I think it’s just a surface-level contusion.”

Levi’s one good eye feels like it’s staring into her soul. “Look. I need you to be absolutely, one hundred percent sure about that. And you can’t do that until I send you to get a scan.”

“Levi, I’ll be fine,” Ymir protests.

“You know what?” Levi’s eyebrows furrow into a frown. “At the end of the day, it’s not me you have to worry about. Do you have any idea how much shit you’ll be in with Hange if you go back out there and mess something up? You’d be looking at losing the captaincy.”

Instead of saying anything in response, she rises to her feet, testing her weight on her shaken-up hip. Her assessment is the same as before; it’s a bit painful, but nothing of substantial concern. Applause sounds from the rows of bleachers around her, Shiganshina’s fans happy to see their captain back on her feet.

Levi takes this as her answer. “It’s your funeral,” he leaves her with as he walks away, clearing the path for Ymir to return to the rest of the coaching staff to pass the rest of the time between sets.

“It’s not bad, is it?” Coach Hange places a concerned hand on Ymir’s shoulder.

“Nope. I can finish out the match and triple-check later, but I’ll be okay.”

“Good to hear,” Nanaba jumps in. “Just tell us any time if you want to be taken out, okay? You’ve already had a productive outing today.”

Ymir acknowledges them both with a firm nod, adjusts her knee pad, smooths out her jersey, and gets herself right back into it with a series of test jumps on the court. The energy in the arena hums with a low excitement once more.

Hitch side-eyes Ymir when she thinks she’s not looking, but other than that, the brief setback to their captain only serves to energize the team. When the referee’s whistle blows and the players take their places once more, they start swinging right out of the gates, getting out to a quick 6-0 third set lead.

Much of this can be attributed to Mikasa. Shiganshina’s outside hitter has entered something like a flow state, and Ymir knows how much that last fake-out play with Annie to end the set has driven her to streamline and focus her movements on another level. Mikasa’s connection with her setter is instinctual, guided by an impossibly sharp mutual intuition; at times, Ymir feels a twinge of jealousy that she doesn’t have that lights-out gameplay dynamic with someone else.

Still, Ymir is beyond thankful for Mikasa’s dominant play, because she’s hitting the ball with such precision and force that Ymir’s blocking duties become a lot less intense. The more she moves around the court, the more the pain on her injured side dims from a sharp sting to a dull ache, a mild inflammation setting into her tissue.

The match steamrolls onwards. Hitch manages a crafty deflection off of the opposing blockers. Annie times a setter dump to perfection. Sasha makes a defensive error in the back row. Historia deftly dives under a spinning ball to get the pancake and keep the point going. Before Ymir knows it, the score for the third set stands at 24-12, and Shiganshina has reached match point after one hour and twenty-five minutes of volleyball.

Hitch serves, sending the ball over to Garrison. The opposing setter tosses it over her head to Rico.

“Seam!” Annie calls, and Rico’s shot is forced through Ymir and Sasha’s blocks, where Historia is in place to get the receive.

“Yeah, you got me!” Sasha yells out, and Annie rewards her with a toss that sails at the perfect height for the brunette to get a hard swing on it. One of Garrison’s blockers gets up just in time, deflecting the hit and allowing their setter to start another play.

Ymir sees the plan before it happens. The setter is rehashing the exact same setup to Rico. Rico’s attacks may be excellent, but even the very best hitters will find themselves up against a wall when they’re drawn into a bad position by the toss.

“Sasha! Kill block!” Ymir commands her teammate. The two players, sophomore and freshman, push off the court together.

For a split second, Ymir’s eyes meet Rico’s as they both reach the apex of their jump. She recognizes her expression instantly. Rico’s face is contorted in frustration as she swings.

Ymir and Sasha angle their palms down towards the court, and Rico’s hit barrels into both of them, catching two of Ymir’s right-hand fingers and Sasha’s left-hand thumb.

The ball plummets to the floor before Rico even lands. The referee’s whistle sounds throughout the Coliseum as the crowd of onlookers breaks into applause.

“What a block!” Historia’s rushing to Ymir, the blonde pulling her in with a firm arm around the waist, and Ymir yelps as the tender skin on her side feels the pressure.

“Shit, sorry,” Historia says, pulling away, and Ymir curses her voice for betraying her. She quickly forgets about it when Sasha jumps up behind her.

“My first win!” Sasha beams from ear to ear.

“Congratulations.” Ymir smiles and ruffles the top of her head, earning a playful shout from the freshman. “You too, Historia. Enjoy it!”

They line up and walk under the net to shake hands with Garrison’s players. While most of them stare down at the floor and mumble their line, Rico stands firm and says “good game” in earnest.

Coach Hange congratulates them on kicking off their season with a win, though Ymir notices that she keeps throwing some questioning glances her way. Nanaba’s still writing something on that damn clipboard. And Levi, as per usual, is content to stay on the sideline and bless the team with a straight-faced look that could almost be construed as appreciation.

“Look,” Hange says, after the bleachers have emptied and most of the players have cleared out of the locker room. “You know what I’m going to say. So I’ll spare you the trouble of saying it. I need you to be honest with me, but most importantly, you need to be honest with yourself first.”

Ymir has to wait a second to respond as she tugs her hoodie over her t-shirt and wriggles her head through its opening. “I know, Coach.”

“You’d better fuckin’ mean it.”

Ymir is walking back to Trost Hall and absentmindedly scrolling through her playlists when the banner notification of a new message in their group chat pops up at the top of her screen.

hitchie d
10 PM!! our place, exclusive!! expect everyone!!

She looks up at the sky, where the pink vestiges of the sunset are beginning to drop just below the horizon. A couple of hours will give her more than enough time to grab a bite, drop off her things, and try to get some work in before giving up entirely.

As Ymir heaves her bag into the corner of her dorm room, sending a silverfish scattering under her bed, her phone screen lights up again with another notification, this time a direct message.

Historia Reiss
so there’s a party at hitch and nifa’s place bc we won, but what does she mean by “expect everyone?” should i try to bring a guest?

She smiles slightly to herself before typing her response.

no nothing like that. it means the boys team is coming too

---

The townhouse shared by Hitch and Nifa is three blocks off campus, just enough to make the walk all the way from Trost feel like a bit of a hindrance. By the time she makes it to the front steps, multicolored lights are already shining behind the home’s drawn blinds, and the vague thumping of loud music drones on inside the walls.

Ymir raps her knuckles against the door. Nobody answers, evidently deafened by the racket. She rolls her eyes and resorts to banging her fist against it instead, and she has whacked the door no more than three times when it suddenly yanks open and she has to stop her hand mid-air.

“Jeez, dude.” Nifa’s choppy red hair is swept off of her face by a headband, and she’s applied a round of eyeliner since Ymir saw her at the game. One of her hands is occupied by a can of hard seltzer. She raises her voice to be heard over the music. “You’re gonna get my deposit taken away.”

“Make Hitch’s parents pay for it, then.” Ymir examines the space as she crosses the townhouse’s threshold. The living room is modest but comfortable, a couch and two armchairs filled with party attendees, leading into a kitchen with a dining table set with all kinds of drinks. A steep flight of stairs winds up and out of sight to the second floor.

Historia, as seems to be the case more often than not, is already there, pouring some sort of liquor that definitely contains Red 40 into a solo cup. She turns around and startles for just a second when she sees Ymir behind her.

“Ever tried this stuff before?”

“Hell, no. It looks nasty. What is it?”

Historia raises the cup to her face and sniffs it, wrinkling her nose. “Gotta be a Chambord knockoff. Looks like Hitch goes for the cheap stuff.” She tips the cup back and knocks down the shot, and her face briefly contorts unpleasantly after she swallows.

Ymir snorts through her nose. “Okay, c’mon, it can’t be that bad either.”

“No, not bad.” Historia shakes her head quickly. “Just strong.”

“Well, in that case, I’m not interested in being the only sober person here.” Ymir surveys the options laid out in front of her. “You wouldn’t, like, think I’m super boring if I just go for vodka and Sprite, right?”

Historia jabs a finger at her chest playfully, and it occurs to Ymir that the drink she just had is unlikely to be her first of the night. “But that is boring.”

“Too bad.” Ymir mixes her drink in a fresh solo cup, noting with mild displeasure that someone has left the Sprite out for a bit to get flat.

Somebody whoops loudly behind them in the crowded living room. Ymir looks over her shoulder and cringes at the sight. A tall man with messy, strawberry-blonde hair is pouring the contents of a can of Natty Light into a kneeling man’s mouth, egged on by some players banging their hands on the coffee table.

Historia raises an eyebrow. “Who are those two geniuses?”

Ymir takes a sip from her cup, suppressing a grimace at the burning taste of cheap vodka. “They’re both seniors, so I don’t know them super well. The tall one’s Jean. I think he’s a middle? I know the one on the floor— Marco— is the oppo. Oh, you should know, they’re—”

As she speaks, Jean extends a hand to pull Marco up before planting a messy kiss on his lips, earning a round of raucous cheers from the surrounding crowd.

“ —They’re dating.”

“I mean, it’d be kind of weird at this point if they weren’t.”

The front door opens, bringing with it a draft of warm night air and Sasha, who breaks out into a smile when Historia goes to greet her. It gives Ymir a moment to scope out the rest of the scene.

The two new freshman additions to the boys’ team roster are doubled over with laughter on the far end of the couch. Ymir hasn’t fully spoken to either of them before, but she still recognizes them from the posts on the school’s athletics Instagram account. The one with a shaggy brown mop of hair has to be Eren, the newly introduced second outside hitter who is sure to take over the primary spot soon. Then there’s Armin, whose soft features and swept blond hair actually give him a passing resemblance to Historia; fitting, given that both of them play as liberos.

Eren’s fellow position-player is bent at the waist to reach the coffee table, a toothy grin splitting his face. Connie is the only starting sophomore on the boys’ team, and the primary outside hitter stands out in more ways than one, his dark hair shaved in a military-esque buzz cut. Ironic, Ymir thinks, considering he doesn’t know what the word “discipline” is, and probably can’t spell it either.

She recognizes a couple of other players offhandedly. Floch, the red-haired backup defensive specialist, is next to Connie and elbowing him in the side. A lanky boy with a terrible bowl cut— Marlo, a bench-warming middle— is trying to speak to a very uninterested-looking Hitch in the kitchen.

That still leaves a few people short. Jean and Marco are not the only couple on the boys’ team, but the other one is nowhere to be found— and, strangely enough, neither are Annie and Mikasa. Ymir taps Nifa on the shoulder to get her attention and shouts over the music.

“Is your back door unlocked?”

Nifa winces at the volume. “Uh— should be!”

At the back of the kitchen is a beat-up door that leads to a small patio space on the other side of the townhouse. Ymir deftly weaves around Hitch and Marlo and jiggles the doorknob a few times before it opens.

“...Oh.”

None of the boys’ team is there. At the end of the patio, there is a raised flower bed enclosed by a waist-high brick wall, and on the brick wall are Annie and Mikasa, sitting next to each other.

Ymir squints. They’re sitting a little too close. And Mikasa’s hand seems to be on Annie’s back. It’s not entirely clear in the dim evening light, but it looks like Annie has a tear on one of her cheeks.

“Can I help you?”

Mikasa’s tone has more of an edge than Ymir is used to hearing. The shower incident jumps to the forefront of her mind.

“Nope, not at all, sorry to interrupt,” Ymir babbles, jerking the doorknob sharply until it mercifully opens. The music blasts her ears again, and now that she’s left and re-entered, she notices the distinct smell of sweat and cheap perfume in the room.

A wave of oohs and ahhs spreads across the small space. Ymir thinks for a second that it’s directed at her sudden reappearance until Connie and Floch rush towards the staircase. Descending from the second floor are two men; the first has a stocky build and short blond hair, while the second is taller and leaner with a messy shock of black hair hanging over his forehead.

Out of nowhere, Historia materializes at Ymir’s side so suddenly that it causes her to jump. “I think Hitch is mad.”

Hitch has abandoned Marlo to storm over towards the two men, with Nifa in close pursuit. “You assholes! You think I’m running a hotel over here?”

Now that her eyes have fully readjusted to the low light, Ymir realizes what’s happening. The taller man’s face is flushed, the first few buttons on his shirt either undone or missing. The blond’s hair is standing up in places and flat in others. She rolls her eyes and tilts back the remaining contents of her cup.

“Reiner!” Nifa points accusingly at the blond. “Can you at least tell me whose bedroom you two idiots used?”

Reiner clears his throat and forces out a chuckle. “I don’t know what you think happened, okay? We were just chatting about, uh, something private.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit.” Hitch throws him a withering glare, then turns to the taller man that came down the stairs with Reiner. “Fine. If he’s not going to cop, then you’re going to tell me instead. Be honest, or I swear to God, I’m going to use my senior powers to get your co-captaincy revoked.”

“Can she even do that?” Historia keeps her voice low enough to avoid broadcasting it over the music.

“Of course not,” Ymir responds. “But I’d really like to see her try.”

“You better not!” Marco shouts from across the room, earning a round of laughter. “You think I can keep all of these dumbasses in line without Bertholdt? You get him demoted, I’m going to start collecting hazard pay!”

Nifa shouts back towards him. “You won’t have to worry about that if Bert here just tells us whose room they were fooling around in!”

“Alright, alright,” Bertholdt intervenes, though he looks about ready to sink all of his six-foot-nine frame through the floor. “Nobody was in the bedrooms. We— we were in the bathroom. Um, sorry?”

Next to Ymir, Historia snorts through her nose before doubling over in hysterical laughter. “Wait, am I reading this right?” She pauses to catch her breath. “So those two players, Jean and what's-his-name are dating, and so are these two? Is the men’s team just a matchmaking service?”

“Feels like it sometimes,” Ymir chuckles. “One of the middles is shacking up with the oppo, and the other middle is going out with the setter. Looks like the women's team needs to up its game.”

Historia pauses for a moment before responding. “Oh, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that for too much longer!”

Ymir nods passively as she inspects the inside of her cup before she actually processes what Historia’s words were. She whips her head towards the blonde.

“What did you say? What’d you mean by that?”

But Historia is nowhere to be seen, and Ymir loses track of her altogether until Historia resurfaces on the living room couch to introduce herself to Armin, who seems somewhat taken aback by the interaction.

Ymir returns to the drinks table in the kitchen and pours a shot of vodka, a generous portion of the offbrand raspberry liquor, and the dregs from the bottle of Sprite into her cup. She swirls the mixture together before slamming it back in one go.

By the time Nifa is politely telling people to get out of their townhouse, the first signs of a headache are beginning to creep into Ymir’s temples, like the pounding of the music has wormed its way inside her mind. Historia is still sitting on the couch and chatting about something with Hitch. For a moment, Ymir considers asking Historia if she wants to walk back to campus together, but the thought brings a painful flare behind her eyes.

She’s clearly busy. No point in making her turn me down.

When Ymir opens the front door to leave, she hears Historia pause in the middle of her sentence for no more than a second before she clears her throat and resumes talking.

Chapter Text

As Ymir wakes up the next morning, she slowly becomes aware of the fact that almost every part of her body is in discomfort.

Sometime in the middle of the night, her room’s air conditioning has decided to switch itself off, and the early September sun has turned the temperature inside up to an oppressive swelter. Her pajama shirt is damp and sticking to her skin in places, wet patches visible on the bedsheets. At some point in the night, she must have unconsciously thrown off her pants; the only item of clothing on her lower half is a pair of women’s boxers.

She frowns at the dry, cottony feeling in her mouth. There is a half-full water bottle on her bedside table. But when she twists around to reach it, the entire right side of her body screams in protest, a chorus of deep aches stretching from her shoulder to her hip. Pulling her shirt up reveals blotchy purple bruises along her torso, the worst of them already blossoming into shades of blue and black.

Eventually, after trying to ignore the pain for twenty minutes by scrolling through her phone, Ymir retrieves the water bottle and drinks enough of its lukewarm contents to be able to get out of bed. In the communal bathrooms, a splash of cold water soothes the thumping behind her eyes. She haphazardly sticks two lidocaine patches over the bruised expanse on her side.

With the worst of her discomfort over, Ymir’s mind turns back to what Historia had said to her last night. She’s certain she’d heard the other girl correctly.

Oh, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that for too much longer!

“The fuck does that mean?” Ymir wonders to herself under her breath. It’s not a mystery that she can solve on her own. She unplugs her phone from its charger and opens her texts.

down for a late lunch/coffee at 1:30? at karanes? don’t bring reiner please

She only has to wait a minute for the response.

beartoto hoover
Sure, but why though? Did you do something to piss off Hange?

Ymir snorts, and the movement brings a quick dart of pain through her side, causing her to instinctively put her hand to it.

weelllll…she might be. but i PROMISE it’s unrelated

Karanes is the name of Ymir’s favorite café, a small joint nestled in the school library’s group study floor, and thankfully Bertholdt is similarly partial to it. Their close friendship is an unlikely one, a case of happenstance after the two of them got stuck in the same elevator on the way to the gym, but she’s found that his calm demeanor lends itself well to their deeper conversations. She finds him already sitting at a table, his long arms crossed over his chest. Most of the tables around them are empty. Nobody wants to spend a pleasant Saturday stuck doing homework inside.

“I was starting to get hungry,” Bertholdt says, accepting a hand from Ymir as he rises to his feet. “What’re you getting?”

Ymir orders a toast with hummus and vegetables on it alongside an iced vanilla latte. Bertholdt picks a ham sandwich and some iced tea.

“So what’s going on?”

Ymir swallows a bite of toast. “How well do you know Historia?”

Bertholdt frowns. “Not well at all, actually. I think we’ve said ‘hi’ and that’s it. Is there something up with her?”

“I was hoping you could tell me, actually. I’m not sure if you were even paying attention, since you were busy getting chewed out by Hitch, but do you think she seems to act a bit differently around me?”

“I feel like I’m the wrong person to ask here.” Bertholdt narrows his eyes. “Why come to me?”

Ymir sighs, wiping a smidge of hummus off on her napkin. “Okay. When you first met Reiner, you thought he was straight, right?”

“Well, yeah. He told me he’d had girlfriends in the past. Took me a while longer to find out he meant, like, ‘dating’ one girl back in middle school.”

“So how’d you end up going out with him? How did you go from one step to the next?”

“I told you, he asked me out— oh, I see what’s going on.” Bertholdt giggles at her, and Ymir resists the temptation to kick his ankle under the table. “You and I have the same type, then. Blonds that look way too straight to be with us. Want me to be your wingman?”

“No! Maybe? Sort of? I don’t know,” Ymir huffs. “She said something weird to me at the party last night. I made a joke about how, y’know, with you dating Reiner and Jean dating Marco, the women’s team should be stepping it up in that respect. And she said, ‘I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that for too much longer’.”

Bertholdt pauses mid-chew and goes into a fit of coughing that quickly devolves into laughter. It’s so unlike him that Ymir puts her toast down and stares at him head-on until he manages to compose himself. “Wow, Ymir. I thought I was the oblivious one out of the two of us.”

Ymir raises an eyebrow. “So you think she’s trying to hint at something?”

“Yes. She’s hitting on you. Obviously.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because that’s just how it works.” Bertholdt washes down his food with a swig of iced tea. “I think it can be a little more overt between men. But, I’m guessing that if she’s saying that kind of thing to you, she’s also being a little overly-friendly to you, or initiating a lot of close physical contact. Right?”

Ymir mulls it over in her mind. Now that it occurs to her, Historia does hug her an awful lot, and she always seems to be closing the space between them with taps on the arm or touches to the shoulder. She’s also often the first one to progress the conversation, and just about all of their interactions have felt refreshingly genuine. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“Then what’s giving you pause?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m her team captain. Not that that’s stopped you and Marco from getting involved with your teammates.” Bertholdt blushes a little at her comment, but Ymir continues. “I basically helped her get on the team in the first place. What if I make her uncomfortable? She’s probably going to get Annie to serve my head on a platter.”

“I, for one, think you’re being paranoid,” Bertholdt says evenly, and Ymir is even more thankful that she told him not to bring Reiner, who by this point would surely be rattling off a list of ridiculous ways to confess one’s love. “Don’t overthink it. Do what feels right. Start giving her some of that same attention back, see how she reacts.”

“Why do I feel like you should be charging me for this advice?” Ymir graces him with a grin as she stirs her straw through her iced coffee. “‘Bert’s Matchmaking, for good dates and even better rates.’ You should make some flyers.”

Bertholdt waves his hand in dismissal and smiles, shy but measured. “There’s no need to rush things, Ymir. You’ll have the right moment for it eventually.”

---

Sure enough, there’s something about the knowledge that Historia is interested to some degree that allows Ymir to be patient. It feels more like a question of when rather than if. Instead of tormenting herself about what she’s heard or how the other girl feels, Ymir’s idle thoughts turn towards what a relationship between the two of them might look like, and her mental energy is freed up for use elsewhere.

It’s a damn good thing, too, since she needs every ounce of it that she can get.

It takes four maintenance requests and a heated phone call before technicians finally show up to check on Ymir’s broken AC, by which point she’s suffered through enough sweaty nights to be rapidly burning through her laundry dollars. The cause of the breakdown turns out to be even worse.

“MOLD!” Ymir shouts at her phone, watching as Historia desperately tries to stop herself from bursting into laughter. “Fucking— mold! These motherfuckers opened up the panel and, oh my god, I’ve been breathing in spores this entire time! I’m going to turn into one of those creatures from The Last of Us at this rate!”

The FaceTime connection is a bit slow, and Historia freezes on the screen for a second before her audio comes back. “Shit, Ymir, I’m so sorry!” She pans her phone camera over, showing the bed next to her covered in a lump of blankets. “If I wasn’t rooming with Mina, I’d say you’re welcome to stay the night, but I think this woman spends at least twelve hours each day in her bed.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Ymir paces through her floor’s empty common room. “I’d probably contaminate your dorm with my moldiness anyway.”

“You would never! So what’s the plan now?”

Ymir glances down the hallway towards the door into her dorm room. “They need to replace the entire unit. Apparently, since it needs to be ordered, it’ll be another three days until I have an AC unit at all. It’s September, anyway! It’s not supposed to be this fucking warm!”

Historia picks up a pencil and taps it against her head. “Good thing I’m going to become an environmental scientist and fix global warming for everyone in, like, ten years.”

“Then hurry up and start applying for PhDs already.”

“Mm, sounds like you need a distraction.” Historia sets her phone down for a second, giving Ymir an unobstructed view of her room’s ceiling. “The first Stats exam is in a week. Feel like grinding out a study sesh for the problem sets?”

“That’s never sounded better,” Ymir admits, taking a seat on the well-used common room couch. “Where? You definitely don’t want to come to Trost.”

“Mina’s got a seminar class and won’t be back for another couple hours. Also, we made a batch of chocolate chip cookies last night, but we doubled the recipe, so there’s a ton left over. How about my dorm? Room 352?”

Ymir’s stomach growls loudly enough to be heard over the phone, earning a hearty chuckle from Historia. “Fuck, dude, are you an angel or something? Of course!”

The walk to Dauper Hall is short, no more than a few minutes long. When Ymir knocks on the dorm room’s door, Historia opens it immediately, fresh-faced and happy. The room has a pleasant fragrance that wafts for a moment into the hallway. Ymir realizes it’s coming from an apple-scented candle warmer on Historia’s desk.

“Is that even allowed?”

“The warmer?” Historia throws a glance at the desk over her shoulder. “Technically it’s not, but there’s no open flame, so it’s not gonna set off any alarms. I’ll be fine as long as you don’t plan on snitching to the RA.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Ymir sets her backpack down and pulls up Mina’s desk chair so the two of them are facing each other. “Can we start with the interval estimation lectures?”

They go over the course materials together, and in the moments where they’re thinking through something on their own or working quietly through a sample problem, Ymir looks at the space around them. Unlike her room, this dorm gets plenty of natural light, the afternoon sun filtering through the large windows. Historia’s bed is covered with a puffy red comforter, two throw pillows, and several stuffed animals of various sizes. The walls are plastered with a mixture of K-pop band posters on Mina’s side and posters for Ghibli movies on Historia’s.

Despite coming out of the room’s minifridge, the cookies on the plate between them are still rich and chewy. Ymir has to actively try to pace herself with them. As their studying session wears on and the sky outside begins to dip into shades of orange, she decides to eat another one to reward herself for completing the hardest sample problem.

Historia looks up from her laptop. Then, she reaches over, and brushes her index finger against the corner of Ymir’s lips.

Ymir’s heart skips a beat.

“You had a bit of chocolate there,” Historia says, like there’s no reason for Ymir to be fazed. In the time since they first sat down, Ymir now notices that the other girl has inched her chair closer in, and their knees are less than six inches away from each other.

“Oh,” Ymir says, and her mind reboots just in time to remember Bertholdt’s advice. Do what feels right. Start giving her some of that same attention back.

Keeping her wrist steady, she lifts her hand and puts it on the edge of Historia’s chair. The invitation is received without hesitation. Historia places her hand over hers, the pad of her thumb gently tracing over Ymir’s knuckles.

The smell of apple seems to fill the room, and suddenly the space becomes entirely bathed in the honey tones of the setting sun. Ymir looks back up. Historia is even closer to her now. More than that— she’s leaning in, and so is Ymir, a flurry of butterflies swarming rapidly in her chest.

She closes her eyes, and for just one precious fraction of a second, Historia’s lips are on hers; so soft, and she has on apple-flavored chapstick—

Behind her, there is the unmistakable buzzing sound of a keycard being tapped. Both girls jump back like they’ve been struck by lightning, and Ymir instinctively wipes her mouth with the back of her arm to erase any evidence.

Mina stands still in the doorway and frowns at the two of them. “Are you guys okay? You look… alarmed.”

“You’d look like this too if you spent two hours going over Dot Pyxis’s lectures on non-parametric data,” Historia quips back, and Ymir breathes a sigh of relief. “Anyway, I think we were just finishing up.”

“Yeah, it’s all good.” Ymir shoves her notebook and laptop into her backpack. Before she walks out into the hallway, she checks over her shoulder, and finds herself meeting the knowing look in Historia’s eyes with a full smile.

---

The fall semester steamrolls onwards, waiting for no one.

Before Ymir knows it, the calendar flips to the month of October. The oppressive heat on campus calms to a pleasant fairness, dipping into a chill at night. One by one, the elm trees spanning the paths and walkways are transforming into the brilliant yellow-orange tones of autumn; every day, a couple more have made the change. Tacky fall decor spreads throughout common rooms and building lobbies.

Her Statistics exam comes and goes, as do others for her remaining slate of classes. She does better than expected. The daily rhythm of practices, meetings, reviews, and fitness sessions all begins to blur together like samples in a centrifuge. Her duties as captain continue.

The team loses a game that they probably should have won. They follow it up by winning a game they probably should have lost. When Annie is forced to sit out a game and go for a round of IV fluids thanks to the annually circulating campus flu, they struggle through a grueling five-set marathon until Ilse finally manages to give Mikasa a toss that the opponents can’t get a hand to. They go into the short mid-semester break with a record of 6-2, which is certainly not bad, but not the show of total dominance Ymir had hoped for.

Throughout all of it, Ymir’s interactions with Historia remain largely the same. Being on a volleyball team means being constantly surrounded by other players and staff, and when the two of them meet up somewhere in the campus’s myriad libraries and food outlets, the atmosphere is never tense. Neither of them feels the need to put things into words. Ymir decides she’s just fine carrying on like that for now. As Bertholdt had said, the right moment will find her eventually.

With the team’s calendar cleared for a few days, Mikasa sends an invite for a team horror movie night at her place; the timing works out, since she shares a university-owned apartment unit with a few girls that play for Shiganshina’s soccer team but are out of town for the fall break. Hitch and Nifa are also off doing God knows what somewhere else, but the rest of the team says they’ll make it.

Ymir wolf-whistles when she steps into Mikasa’s apartment. Apparently, her roommates are avid decorators, because the walls are covered in fake orange leaves and streamers with little ghost decorations. The lighting in the room is coming from several plastic jack-o-lanterns that have been affixed to the ceiling with command hooks.

“Is that legal?”

Mikasa is busy leaning over the kitchen counter and prying several cans of hard cider from the six-pack packaging; she pauses her work and turns over her shoulder to look at Ymir. “The lights? I doubt it, but I wasn’t going to ask.”

“This team really loves breaking housing codes, huh.”

Mikasa just shrugs and returns to the task at hand, leaving Ymir to flop onto the too-soft couch with a sigh.

“Want a blanket?” Sasha’s sitting on the other side of the couch, with Ilse in between the two of them. When Ymir nods, she reaches into a basket to her side and tosses her a soft blue throw blanket. It only smells slightly musty, which is a success given how unreliable the university’s washers and dryers can be.

Annie opens the door to the apartment. Historia is right behind her, hands full with two family-size bags of chips.

“Hope you saved me a seat while I was busy sacrificing my hard-earned dollars for your snacks,” Historia jabs playfully, dropping the bags unceremoniously onto the coffee table.

“You’re in luck.” Ymir slides over further to the side of the couch until its armrest is pressing up against her hip. “Can you squeeze in?”

Indeed she can, so Historia ends up wedged between Ilse and Ymir, which would probably be more of an issue if Historia wasn’t less than five feet tall. Annie takes a seat on the battered armchair next to the couch. This seems to leave Mikasa with no place in turn, until Annie silently angles her body to one side to allow Mikasa to sidle in right next to her. The setter’s bent legs rest on top of Mikasa’s in a position that looks almost intimate.

Ymir blinks away her surprise and turns to Historia, who’s managed to steal some of the throw blanket for herself in the meantime. “Do you remember what we agreed to watch?”

“Well, it has to be a horror movie. I think we agreed on Midsommar.” Historia shrugs. “I’ve already seen it. It’s been a couple years, though, so I could go for a rewatch.”

“Is it good?”

“Course it is,” Sasha chimes in from across the couch. “I haven’t seen it either, but my sister says it’s a fun one.”

As it turns out, Sasha’s sister has a very strange definition of the word “fun.”

Ymir screams as she watches an old man’s face get smashed in with a mallet. Ilse grabs one of the throw pillows behind them and covers her eyes with it as a man wearing another man’s skin over his face comes into the frame. And during one particularly disturbing scene towards the end of the movie, at which point everybody has downed at least two hard ciders, the movie’s audio can barely be heard over the groans and expressions of disgust coming from its viewers.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” Ymir shouts through laughter once the scene has switched to a different one. “You just sat there and let this happen? Evil!”

“Ban her from the locker room!” Sasha hollers, waving her can at Historia. “Ten days!”

“Objection!” Historia points her finger towards the ceiling. She leans over to look at Mikasa and Annie. “Your Honor, requesting time off of the sentence for good behavior.”

“And what would that be?” The corners of Annie’s mouth are fighting a smile.

Historia dramatically turns around and brings her pointed finger inches away from Sasha’s face. Her lips, and the tip of her nose, are smudged with the telltale orange powder from the nacho-flavor chips Historia brought as snacks. “I’ve done my community service by providing five dollars’ worth of chips. See?”

Mikasa sighs melodramatically and brings her can down onto the armrest like a gavel. “Fine. Case dismissed. But I’m watching you, Reiss.”

After the movie reaches its gory conclusion, the girls begin to file out of the apartment; when Ymir finally discards the throw blanket and steps outside, nighttime has already descended. A brisk wind blows by her and elicits a shiver.

“Are you cold?”

Ymir turns to find Historia standing behind her, staying still even though the rest of their teammates are walking off in the other direction.

“A little.” Ymir pulls the sleeves of her hoodie over her hands.

“Well, standing still isn’t going to help.” Historia gives her a smile warm enough to cut through the autumn night chill. “Want to go on a walk?”

Ymir takes her up on the offer, and the girls wander through the campus’s lamplit walkways. Leaves have begun to fall from the trees, crunching softly underfoot. The night is quieter than usual thanks to the mass exodus of students for fall break travel. There is none of the distant howling and loud music that happens during the campus’s numerous weekend frat parties. Instead, tree branches rustle with the wind, and Shiganshina’s clock tower bell tolls to mark the passing of the hour.

They’ve almost reached the stairs up to Historia’s dorm when the blonde tugs at her sleeve and nods towards a bench sitting underneath a large elm tree. “Come, have a seat with me for a second.”

Ymir nods and acquiesces wordlessly. The bench is made of metal, and she can feel the slight chill of its bars through her jeans. Historia takes a deep breath and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

“Sort of.” Historia glances around the space, and Ymir follows her lead; nobody is within sight. “You remember the first time you came to my dorm?”

Ymir’s chest burns with something that may or may not be from the hard ciders. “Uh, yeah.”

“We got interrupted.” Historia smiles shyly. “But Mina’s—”

“—Not here right now.” Ymir finishes her sentence for her, and despite the chill in the air, her palms have grown damp with sweat.

“Then what are you waiting for?”

“Nothing.”

Ymir is the first to lean in this time, and when their lips meet, there is no intruder to distract them. Historia sighs softly, her hand running up Ymir’s shoulder; she twitches for just a moment when the blonde’s finger brushes against the soft hairs on the nape of her neck. The tang of alcohol is apparent in Historia’s breath, and Ymir feels almost like it’s intoxicating her in return, her senses numb to everything other than the woman right in front of her. The apple-flavored chapstick is still there, albeit much fainter this time.

Pulling away from the kiss back into the night air is like having cold water splashed on her face. Then, Historia sighs contentedly and reaches for Ymir’s hand as they stand up from the bench, and Ymir’s heart calms its pace.

They wish each other good night, and Ymir tells Historia to text her when she gets back to her dorm safely; sure enough, she gets that text three minutes later. The air in her room’s gotten colder without the heat turned on. Her comforter and blankets feel especially cozy when she climbs under them. Instead of being haunted by the movie’s gruesome images, Ymir’s sleeping mind wanders instead to that moment on the bench, over and over and over again.