Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

Eren didn’t tell his father about the stranger. Not directly.

He tried three times over the following week, circling the subject the way you’d circle a hole in the ice, testing how much weight it could take before it cracked. Each time, something in Grisha’s face — a flicker of tension around the eyes, gone almost before Eren caught it — made him swallow the question back down.

It was Mikasa, in the end, who forced the issue.

"You’ve been trying to ask him something for days," she said, catching Eren on the porch steps one evening, arms crossed, in the tone of someone who had run out of patience for watching him fail at it. "Just ask."

"It’s not that simple."

"It’s exactly that simple. You open your mouth. Words happen."

"You make it sound so easy."

"It is easy. You’re the one making it complicated." She sat down on the step beside him, close enough that her shoulder pressed warm against his. "Whatever you’re afraid he’ll say — you won’t know until you ask. And I’ll be right here. That’s not nothing."

He looked at her for a long moment, the steady certainty in her expression doing more to settle his nerves than any argument could have, and found, not for the first time, that her presence alone made hard things feel survivable.

"Fine," he said. "Tonight."

He found his father in the small back room he used for medical records, hunched over a ledger by lamplight, and the moment Eren stepped inside, Grisha looked up with an expression that suggested he’d been half-expecting this conversation for a while.

"Eren."

"There was a man in town. A stranger. He came to the warehouse."

Grisha’s pen stopped moving.

"He asked about the supplies. About — things I’ve been able to do lately. He said I wasn’t as unnoticed as I thought." Eren kept his voice steady, though his heart was hammering. "I need to know if you know who that was."

For a long moment, his father said nothing at all, and the silence stretched heavy enough that Eren began to think he’d get no answer whatsoever. Then Grisha set down his pen, very carefully, like a man setting down something that might otherwise shatter.

"Describe him."

Eren did — the coat, the stillness, the way he moved like someone trained rather than raised.

Grisha’s jaw tightened. "That could be any number of people. But if it’s who I think it might be—" He stopped himself, visibly reconsidering how much to say, and Eren felt a flash of frustration so sharp it startled him.

"Don’t do that. Don’t stop halfway. I’m not a child who needs protecting from every hard truth—"

"You are a child, Eren." Grisha’s voice cracked, just slightly, betraying something underneath the calm. "That’s exactly the problem. You’re nine years old, and there are people in this world who take a very particular interest in children who show the kind of instincts you’ve been showing lately. I’ve been careful. I thought I’d been careful enough."

"Careful about what?"

Grisha looked at him for a long moment — searching, weighing, the way a man decides how much weight a bridge can hold before he sends someone across it.

"There are things about this world," he said finally, "that go deeper than Titans, deeper than the walls. Things I’ve spent years trying to keep hidden, for reasons I’m not ready to explain fully — not because I don’t trust you, but because knowing too much, too soon, has gotten people killed before. I need you to trust me on that, the same way I imagine you’re asking others to trust you about things you’re not ready to share either."

Eren went very still.

His father knew. Not everything — but something. Something that rhymed uncomfortably with the secrets Eren carried himself.

"If that man comes back," Grisha continued, "you tell me immediately. Don’t engage with him. Don’t try to handle it alone. Some things are bigger than either of us being brave about it."

"That’s rich," Eren muttered, "coming from someone keeping his own secrets."

Something almost like a smile, sad and tired, crossed his father’s face. "Fair. Perhaps we’re more alike than either of us wants to admit." He reached out and gripped Eren’s shoulder, firm and warm. "Just — be careful. Please. That’s all I’m asking."

"I will."

Grisha studied him a moment longer, like he wanted to say more and was holding himself back with visible effort, then nodded once and returned to his ledger, the conversation closing the way conversations with his father always seemed to — a door left deliberately ajar, never quite opened all the way.

Eren left the room lighter and heavier at once — lighter, because at least now he knew he wasn’t imagining the wrongness in the world; heavier, because it confirmed there was more hiding beneath Shiganshina’s quiet streets than even his borrowed memories had prepared him for.

Mikasa was waiting on the porch steps exactly where he’d left her.

"Well?"

"He knows something. Not everything. But something." Eren sat back down beside her, exhaling like he’d been holding his breath the entire conversation. "He wouldn’t say what. Just told me to be careful, and to tell him if the man comes back."

"That’s something, at least."

"It’s not enough."

"It’s a start." She bumped his shoulder gently. "You didn’t expect to solve the whole mystery in one conversation, did you?"

"I was hoping."

"You’re impatient."

"I have a countdown in my head, Mikasa. Patience feels like a luxury I don’t have."

She was quiet a moment, considering that, and when she spoke again her voice had softened into something gentler than her usual dry certainty. "Then let the rest of us help carry some of the waiting. You don’t have to hold the whole clock by yourself."

He looked at her — moonlight catching the dark of her hair, the steady warmth in her eyes that never seemed to waver no matter how strange his behavior got — and felt something in his chest loosen, just slightly.

"You keep saying things like that."

"Because you keep needing to hear them."

"That’s..." He huffed a small laugh. "That’s annoyingly accurate."

"I know." The ghost of a smile. "I pay attention, remember?"

"Too much attention."

"You’ve said that before too."

"It’s still true every time."

She leaned her head lightly against his shoulder, and for a while they sat there in comfortable silence, the porch creaking faintly in the evening breeze, the weight of secrets — his father’s, his own, the stranger’s warning — settling into something that felt, for once, less crushing with someone else close enough to share the carrying.

"For what it’s worth," she said quietly, "whatever your father’s hiding, whatever you’re hiding — I meant what I said on the roof. I’m not going anywhere. Not for a stranger. Not for secrets. Not for anything."

"I know." He turned his head, close enough now that her breath was warm against his cheek. "I don’t know what I did to deserve that kind of stubbornness."

"You didn’t do anything. I just decided." Simple. Certain. Entirely her. "Some decisions don’t need a reason."

He wanted, badly, to close the last small distance between them — the same pull that had nearly won out in the woods, interrupted then by Armin’s badly timed cough. This time, no interruption came. Just the quiet porch, the warm dark, her steady breathing close enough to feel.

"Mikasa—"

"Eren! Mikasa!" Carla’s voice rang out from the kitchen window, cheerfully, catastrophically oblivious. "Dinner’s getting cold, and if you two don’t come in soon I’m eating your portions myself!"

They broke apart — not guiltily, exactly, but with the specific speed of two people who’d nearly done something neither was ready to name yet. Mikasa’s ears had gone predictably pink; Eren suspected his own face wasn’t much better.

"...We should go in," he managed.

"Probably."

Neither of them moved for a solid three seconds.

"Mikasa. Eren." Carla’s voice again, closer now, faintly suspicious. "What are you two doing out there?"

"Nothing!" they said, in perfect unison, which fooled absolutely no one, least of all Carla, who appeared in the doorway a moment later with the deeply satisfied expression of a woman who had clearly already guessed everything and intended to say nothing about it directly — which was, somehow, worse.

"Mm-hm," she said. "Dinner. Now. Both of you."

They went in, twin sets of pink ears, Armin’s inevitable interrogation waiting somewhere in their future the second he caught wind of it — which, knowing Armin, would be approximately four minutes after dinner started.

That night, alone in the warehouse, Eren sat with his father’s warning turning over in his mind, alongside something warmer he hadn’t quite let himself examine yet.

[Daily draw available.]

"Spin it."

[Result: Titan Physiology — Fragment II (Tier 3, Rare). Understanding of regenerative triggers unlocked. 2 of an unknown total fragments collected.]

Another piece. Another crack of light under a door he still couldn’t see the shape of.

He logged the result and let his hand drift to his pocket instead — the compass, steady, needle settling north the way it always did, a gift from a girl who’d very nearly let something unsaid become something said tonight, before Carla’s timing intervened.

Someday, he thought, echoing the word they kept trading back and forth like a promise neither was ready to cash in yet.

One hundred and forty-two days.

Whatever his father knew, whatever the stranger wanted, whatever the fragments were slowly building toward — for one evening, at least, none of it had managed to outweigh the warmth of a girl leaning her head against his shoulder on a quiet porch, refusing to let him carry anything alone.

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