Broken Bodies, Severed Feelings (Erwin x OC)

|18| Aftermath

It was impossible. She needed electricity if she was to separate two proteins. Nathalie groaned and buried her face in her hands. If she injected herself with titan spinal fluid as it was, she'd turn into a titan and that would be disastrous. Nathalie looked down at her notes and searched the previous pages for something useful. She had tried mixing Hange's blood with the titan spinal fluid and it immediately started fuming with titan smoke. What difference would her own blood make?

Nathalie had been at it for days. Her ass was on the bench for so long, her muscles practically hurt because she hadn't moved one bit. She couldn't. She had a room in the dorms and two roommates, and she hadn't even met them yet even though it had been days since she and Levi... well. She just sighed and looked down at her notes. She didn't care about her roommates. She didn't care about getting a proper sleep. She didn't care about how terrible she was with managing relationships, and how terrible it was that she had kissed Erwin. How terrible it was that she had broken Levi's heart.

No. she had no time to think about any of this. Nathalie drowned in her work, her research. She and Hange had been experimenting on their titan test subject that the world didn't yet know they had. Erwin had made sure to not tell anyone that they had figured out where titans come from or that they had one in the very yard of the Survey Corps HQ in Trost. No one knew about it, and they wanted to keep that way for a while.

Nathalie and Hange realised that it drew energy from the sun and that the limbs were so weightless in contrast to its gigantic size, because titan bodies are an enlargement of an already existing human body. The titan weighed exactly as the human used to weigh before they turned him.

And then there was another important fact that they had discovered. When harming a titan, the skin regenerates and shoots smoke in the process. The smoke was the result of immense glucose being dissolved to produce enough energy to regenerate skin at such a fast rate, and in return, that produced carbon dioxide which was the smoke. Which meant that the titans used energy from the sun to produce glucose. They were like plants and that would sound insane if Nathalie and Hange told anybody else.

They just worked on a thesis that they were never going to publish unless they overthrew the government somehow.

"It's like... somebody tried to crossbreed plants and humans," Hange said.

"But why the hell would they do that?" Moblit asked. "What could possibly be the motive for someone to create the titans,"

"I have no idea," Nathalie shook her head. "I'm sure you've read the entire story about Ymir that I wrote down in my notebooks,"

"Yeah," Hange nodded. "Ymir the Founder. She had a parasite attached to the spine. And we have no idea what kind of organism that was,"

"It wasn't a parasite... more like a symbiont,"

So, Nathalie had been working on that. She had been trying to figure out the nature of something that they knew nothing about. The people behind the walls didn't even know its existence. It is a symbiont and it is attached to the spine. But they had found nothing on the spine of their titan test subject. They had sliced it all the down its back to find the spine beneath, but there was no symbiont attached to it.

"Take Ymir's body, find the worm! Learn everything you can about it. I need to know how to pass down those powers to my daughters,"

"The methods may not be... pleasant, your Majesty. Are you sure you want us to vandalise the Queen's dead body?"

"I said, do it!"

Nathalie's eyes widened. So, her family had already examined it? Maybe if she fumbled through their memories for a little longer, maybe she would be able to find everything she had been looking for. She had to figure this out. It would be the answers to everything. She just had to work. Work, work, work. Science. She loved science more than anything. She knew she should be trying to figure out a way to cure herself off her disease, but that looked so small and meaningless in comparison to the things that she had to discover.