Attack on Titan Fanfiction – Goodbye, Hange Zoe: Chapter 2

Secrets

Their bowls empty, Asuka wipes her hands with a wet paper towel and ventures, “So, can I finally hear the story about your Hange keychain?” 

“Oh, this? There’s nothing to tell. Just a doodad I got from somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I forgot. It was years ago.”

Liar liar pants on fire, Asuka thought, sighing.

Another week passes. Since the two young women work in different departments of the same company, they don’t get to see each other every day. They meet up a week later, this time after work at an oyster bar in Tokyo. 

As expected, after the usual chit chat and gossiping about people they knew, Karina continues her whining. 

“Had a nightmare the other night. It was the Evangelion soup ending, blow by blow, except all the characters were from SnK. Can you think of any ending worse than that?”

“Honestly? I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Isayama-sensei said he wants a bittersweet ending. Your nightmare is all bitter and no sweet. Rest assured it won’t end that way. We’ll just have to have faith in Isayama-sensei’s abilities as a writer and storyteller.”

“Oh, Asuppi, what if I’ll hate the ending?” wailed Karina. “What’ll I do then? What about my manga volumes? My anime DVDs? My dozens of figurines? My t-shirts and towels and folders and badges and all that crap? What will I do with all those paraphernalia? I won’t be able to stand the sight of them!”

“Sell them on Yahoo! Auction, that’s what you should do. Besides, your apartment’s filled with stuff. Why do you keep that junk anyway? Good riddance, is what I say!”

“It’s not junk!” Karina protested. “It’s called a collection. You have a collection, too.”

“I collect collectibles,” Asuka corrected, haughtily. “I buy deluxe editions of books. Books are the mightiest. If I get tired of a collection I can always donate to the local library, or the youth center, or somewhere. There’s always a need for books, unlike the plastic shit you insist on buying.”

“They’re not shit! You’re so mean, Asuppi. I love them, they make me happy…so far, anyway.”

“Yeah, so far. What happens when you don’t find them cute anymore? Besides, aren’t we supposed to be the Marié Kondo generation? If it no longer sparks joy, then…”

Karina let out a heavy sigh. “You’re right. Rehoming my rubbish will be a chore. Books can be easily recycled, I’ll give you that.”

The other woman looked at her friend’s downcast face and was chastised for feeling superior. It is fans like Karina who support the manga industry by going to events and buying tons of official merch apart from the books themselves. It’s kind of a Catch-22: buy official shit and support the artist, plastic shit being bad for the planet in the end, however. 

“Well, if miracles can and do happen, you won’t have to get rid of your collection. You’ll want to keep them forever, because Isayama-sensei won’t kill your precious side characters. He’ll go for the bombastic, the unexpected. We’ll be pleasantly surprised. Does the possibility make you feel any better?”

“You haven’t really answered my question, though. What shall I do if I can’t stand the way SnK ends?” Karina asks once more. “Eight years of my life, Asuppi. I spend eight years going gaga over a manga whose story turns out to be unsatisfying for me in the end.”

“There’s only one thing to do when that happens. We go back to the classics that have already ended, and find comfort in them. Isn’t that what you say to people in your online book club? ‘Bored with contemporary chick lit? Go back to the classics’. I think it’s good advice, and works just as well for manga.”

“You mean Bleach and Naruto and Fist of the North Star, those ones?”

“Uh huh.”

“Sure, I guess going back to them would be fun, in that we’ll be looking at the narratives with new eyes: those of the world-weary adult.”

“Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be the best seller ones. We can go for influential ones as well,” Asuka replied, and then, watching her friend’s face closely, added, “like Akira, for instance.”

Karina threw her friend an annoyed glance, grunting but saying nothing.

But it was clear the mention of that manga triggered something negative in her. Unpleasant memories, perhaps? Asuka wondered when she’d eventually learn what happened, why the mere mention of an old cyberpunk manga elicited such a look from Karina’s expressive face. It was momentary and fleeting, but there was no mistaking: it was an anguished look. She wanted to know what happened: what’s the relationship between a mad scientist and a manga famous for its motorcycles?

Asuka could be pushy at times, but not that pushy. She’ll tell me when she’s ready, she surmised. 

But there was a streak of cruelty in her wanting to see that particular look on her friend’s face. She was annoyed about the silence regarding the Hange keychain, and besides, she deserved to be entertained, she thought, what after all the comforting and listening she’s had to do caused by Karina’s anxiety over SnK.

Karina slurped a fresh oyster and peered into the darkened interior of the oyster bar. They were sitting at the outdoor patio section of the restaurant, ostensibly to avoid the indoors because of, needless to say, COVID-19. 

Why did Asuka bring up Akira at this point in the conversation? That old manga brought back unwanted memories of her years at university, from which she graduated a couple of years ago. She got her degree and left behind the dorm and textbooks and mesh shower tote and bedside caddy. She got a job and an apartment of her own and a boyfriend, who, like her, was your run-of-the-mill office worker. But there were things she couldn’t leave behind.

One of them was the memories of Tetsuya Yamazaki, a student she once knew. Tetchan, she called him. 

---

When Karina was growing up she was mainly a shojo manga reader, but also read some shonen. One of them was Shingeki no Kyojin, which she started reading in high school. Her other favorites include The Promised Neverland, a story about orphaned children, adventures of students at a culinary school in Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma and the fantasy adventure Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic. 

It was Tetsuya, whom she met at a nomikai or drinking party organised by one of her classmate friends, who introduced her to the oldies. He was a student at a university near hers. Their common love for Shingeki no Kyojin made them click immediately. 

He’d been reading manga since he was a child and was familiar with the older ones, which both his big brother and father read. It was Tetsuya who introduced Karina to old seinen manga like Golgo 13, about a professional assassin; 20th Century Boys, about a group of friends unraveling a conspiracy; and Gantz, about semi-alive people forced to fight aliens in a do-or-die situation. 

Karina read the seinen manga volumes Tetsuya lent to her, but from his shelf her favorite turned out to be an old shonen cyberpunk story: Akira. 

Such was her interest in the manga that she memorised its popular lines the way she filled her memory bank with Isayama’s most famous dialogue.

「もはや…涙も出ぬか…。」(“So I can’t even cry now, can I?”) she’d tell Tetsuya, borrowing the character Lady Miyako’s line.

「黙れ!言葉などいらぬ走れ!」(“Be quiet! Shut yer trap and run!”) he’d tell Karina, borrowing a line from the Colonel.

Each time they spewed out dialogue from Akira they’d fall into a fit of laughter, and whatever little tiff or misunderstanding they were having seemed to evaporate into thin air. Both of them held part-time jobs separately but their friendship had developed to the point where they started scheduling their work hours so they could have free time to spend together reading and discussing manga. 

For ongoing manga their common love was Shingeki no Kyojin. Tetsuya was an Eren fanboy, Karina a Jean stan. And both of them adored the Hange Zoe character.

“It’s Hange that’s the backbone of the story,” she opined to him one day. 

“Any story with a mad scientist in it is bound to become an interesting narrative,” Tetsuya stated.

“Hange’s not just crazy, though,” Karina said. “Their inquisitive mind is a marvel. Remember in Chapter 19, at the military tribunal when Levi beat up Eren? Hange kept Eren’s broken tooth as a specimen and asked to see inside his mouth, and they found a new one was already growing back. I was strangely touched by that, the way they’d give a shit about this kid’s tooth.”

“Could never forget that look on Hange’s face when Eren mentioned he wanted to hear about her experiments,” said Tetsuya, referring to that iconic scene in Chapter 20. “She wanted so badly to have someone be interested. That one I found touching.”

“Speaking of iconic, nothing beats that moment when Eren semi-transforms and Hange comes bounding up in sheer, unfettered delight. By simply being their amazing self they managed to diffuse a very tense situation with Levi’s old squad. I just loved that scene so much!”

Tetsuya, laughing, agreed. “Who could forget her screaming ‘a skinless titan’s so fucking hot, burning hot!’? One of the best moments in the manga. Especially since so many of us readers thought of the phrase as a double entendre.”

“Oh, absolutely! That scene will go down in manga history as an iconic moment. What I loved best of all was that after Hange’s done with all the hyperventilating, they actually figured out why Eren is incapable of transforming sometimes.”

“Nothing beats the scene where Bishop Nick demands to be let down from the top of the wall and Hange grabs him by the collar and pushes him on the ledge asking, ‘Let you down like this?’ It was the coolest thing ever.”

“They looked totally amazing in that chapter. I liked that part when Hange sits down with their legs dangling from the wall and says to Moblit, ‘I’ve forgotten what it was like to be scared of titans.’ It was such a Hange thing to say.”

“They looked totally amazing in that chapter. I liked that part when Hange sits down with their legs dangling from the wall and says to Moblit they’d forgotten how scary titans could be. Hange was trembling. I found that so touching. Like they’re always putting on this super-enthusiastic front, but deep down they know it’s really serious and they’re scared like everyone else.”

“Hange’s so clever she figured out the truth before anyone else. It must be hard, knowing something no one else wants to know.”

“Ignorance is bliss, in a way.”

“True that. Sometimes people are better off not knowing.”

Every once in a while they took turns coloring the pages in the paperback volumes, using colored pencils from the dollar store. Or watch the OVAs together, a favourite being Ilse’s Notebook.

“Hange’s such a riot,” Tetsuya had remarked.

“Highly intelligent with a great sense of humour. Who could ask for more?” Karina had said.

One afternoon in his apartment she found a Hange Zoe keychain inside a shoebox filled with anime convention knicknacks.

“Aw, this is so cute!” Karina exclaimed, holding up the acrylic keyholder. It was nearly eight centimeters tall (about 3 inches) excluding the chain portion.

“You can have it,” he said, grinning at how happy this made her. She immediately attached the ornament to her school bag’s zipper pull.

Everything was hunky-dory until one fateful night when, right after Karina broke up with her then boyfriend Shinji, she found herself in a drinking spree at Tetsuya’s flat, lamenting her bad choice in boyfriends and the way she made the same mistakes over and over again. 

Tetsuya tried to comfort her with bad jokes, grunge music and lining up his manga character figures and making them have silly dialogue with one another. It must have been all that beer, because one thing led to another and they ended up sleeping together.

It was a huge mistake. Sex didn’t bring them closer to each other. Instead, it ripped their relationship apart. Karina woke up with a massive headache the following day and the look Tetsuya gave her told her that their friendship had been ruined forever. 

---

A couple of years later, Karina still couldn’t forgive herself for that mistake. When her young cousin Reika, a fresh high school graduate, messaged her to ask for advice on how not to screw up at university, on top of the list Karina gave her was “Don’t sleep with your best friend.”

That narrative doesn’t necessarily wrap up with a When Harry Met Sally kind of Hollywood romcom ending, she warned Reika.

At the oyster bar, Karina sneaked a glance at Asuka, enshrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Her friend didn’t say a word, and Karina knew she was waiting for her to open up about this Akira thing, about this Hange thing. 

But Karina couldn’t tell her. She couldn’t utter a word about it because it had been utterly messy and she had been judged to be the one in the wrong.

Thank you so much for reading! Please take a moment to share a thought or two in the comment section below. Your comments give me life and are a real source of encouragement. xoxo, hana

Next – Chapter 3: Girls Like You

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