Shiganshina’s news of the attack reached them the next morning, delivered by an exhausted courier and confirmed, more painfully, by Carla’s tear-streaked face when Eren and Mikasa were granted emergency leave to return home and check on the family.
"We heard about Trost," Carla said, pulling Eren into a hug fierce enough to bruise the moment he walked through the door. "A courier said there were Titans, that recruits were fighting them directly— I thought—" Her voice broke. "I thought I’d already lost you, before you’d even finished training."
"I’m here, Mom. I’m okay." He held her tight, feeling the tremor still running through her shoulders. "We handled it. All of us."
Grisha’s relief, when he arrived from the clinic moments later, carried its own quiet devastation beneath the surface calm. "You transformed," he said, once Carla had finally released Eren enough to breathe. It wasn’t a question — Kessler’s network, apparently, moved information faster than official Garrison channels ever could. "Into a Titan yourself."
"Briefly. I didn’t know I could until I tried."
Grisha sat down heavily, the weight of the confirmation settling visibly onto his shoulders. "I’d hoped — foolishly, I think now — that whatever you carried would remain contained to smaller gifts. Reflexes. Fragments of knowledge." His hands, when he finally spoke again, weren’t quite steady. "A full transformation changes everything, Eren. It means Marley’s interest in you isn’t speculative anymore. It’s confirmed. Whatever they sent Reiner and Annie to find, they now have proof it exists."
"Reiner already suspected. He confirmed it himself, days before the attack."
"Then the timeline just accelerated considerably faster than any of us prepared for." Grisha rubbed at his eyes, exhaustion and old grief tangled together. "I need to tell you the rest of it now. All of it. Whatever’s left that I’ve still been protecting you from — there’s no more room left for careful pacing."
The full story took hours, delivered in Grisha’s careful, precise voice across the kitchen table while Carla sat gripping his hand, learning most of it herself for the first time alongside her son.
Marley. The Eldian internment. A stolen Titan power carried across an ocean in desperate secrecy. A woman named Dina, and the son Grisha had left behind when circumstances forced an impossible choice between the family he’d built there and the mission that had sent him inside the walls in the first place.
"You have a half-brother," Grisha said finally, voice raw. "Somewhere in Marley, if he’s survived what I fear happened after I disappeared. I don’t know his fate. I’ve spent years too afraid to find out, and too ashamed to explain any of this to you before now."
Eren sat with the revelation a long moment, the shape of his father’s guilt finally, fully visible after nearly two years of careful, incomplete confessions.
"Does he know about me?" Eren asked quietly. "This brother?"
"I don’t know. I hope not. I hope, selfishly, that whatever life he’s living remains as separate from all of this as possible." Grisha’s voice cracked. "I’ve made so many mistakes trying to protect people from truths I thought too heavy to share. I think today proved, more than anything else could, that the mistake was always in the hiding, not in the truths themselves."
Carla, quiet through most of the confession, finally spoke, her voice steadier than Eren expected given everything she’d just absorbed in a single sitting. "Thank you," she said simply, to her husband, "for finally trusting me with all of it. However long overdue." She turned to Eren, something fierce and unshaken in her expression despite the day’s revelations. "And thank you, for surviving long enough to make sure we could all finally have this conversation together."
Mikasa found Eren later that evening, sitting alone on their old rooftop, the weight of the day’s confessions settling heavy in his chest despite the familiar comfort of home around him.
"Big day," she said, settling beside him without needing an invitation.
"Understatement of the century." He leaned into her automatically, exhausted in a way that went far past physical tiredness. "A half-brother somewhere in Marley. A mother I never met, lost because of choices my father made before I was even born. And apparently, according to my own reflection in a puddle earlier, I look like I’ve aged five years overnight."
"You look like someone who’s carrying a lot." She took his hand, steady as ever. "That’s allowed, Eren. You don’t have to process all of this gracefully in a single evening."
"I keep thinking about him. This brother. Whether he’s even alive. Whether he knows anything about what his father actually was, the same way I didn’t know for most of my own life." He rubbed at his temple, the exhaustion of the day finally catching up in full. "I don’t know why it matters so much, given everything else we’re facing. But it does."
"It matters because family matters to you. That’s not a weakness, whatever else this year has demanded of you." She pressed a kiss to his temple, gentle despite the weight of the conversation. "Maybe someday, if the walls come down the way you’ve always feared, you’ll get the chance to find out what happened to him. I hope you do, Eren. I hope it’s a better answer than your father’s fears currently allow him to imagine."
He turned to look at her, something in his chest easing at the simple, steady comfort of her presence despite everything the day had revealed.
"How do you always know exactly what I need to hear?"
"Practice." The old, familiar answer, warm despite the day’s heaviness. "You’ve given me plenty of impossible things to practice comforting you through, this past year specifically."
He laughed, tired but real, and pulled her close, letting the simple fact of her presence anchor him against the mounting weight of family secrets and Titan transformations and a countdown that seemed to multiply into new, tangled threats with every single week that passed.
"Seventy-three days," he murmured into her hair.
"We’ll be ready," she said, the same unshakeable certainty that had carried them both through everything so far. "Whatever Marley sends. Whatever your brother’s fate turns out to be. Whatever the Coordinate ultimately demands of you." She squeezed his hand. "We face it together. That part isn’t changing, however large or strange the rest of it gets."
He believed her, the way he’d come to believe her about everything this past year — not because the path ahead had gotten any clearer, but because she’d never once failed to make the darkest truths feel, somehow, survivable simply by choosing to stand beside him through every single one of them.
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