Attack on Titan Fanfiction – The Stowaway: Chapter 7

Lady Geraldine 

“You’re trying to push me away,” Jean said, unable to hide the anger in his voice. 

“Why do you stay in the first place? You know you deserve better than this!” Mikasa shot back.

She was doing it again, picking fights over the most mundane matters. These days they seemed to fight over everything under the sun, from the way he combed his hair to work-related topics. She’d pick on him, he’d try to reason with her, they’d fight, then have wild makeup sex, sleep out of exhaustion, go to work, come home and start fighting about some other banal matter that she focused on and refused to drop. Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum.

Mikasa would oscillate uncontrollably between anger and depression. It angered her that Jean refused to say he hated her, even when she was deliberately being mean and petty. It angered her that he insisted her infertility was their burden as a couple and not hers alone. He refused to blame her for what she insisted was a deal-breaking defect. 

“I will love you no matter what,” Jean told her. And for some inexplicable reason, this abiding love made her very, very angry. 

Because she felt she didn’t deserve it. Any other man would have left her by now, because she was going out of her way to be an awful person. But not Jean. 

He was perfect, really. The perfect husband. How she despised him for it! She wanted him to hate her the way she hated herself. 

Soon, she found a way to make him truly angry. While he was Mikasa’s first man, Jean had a past in Noblain. He had love affairs with other people, before the two of them entered into a relationship. The very thought of him having loved other women made Mikasa jealous, and her perceived inability to outdo these women in terms of baby-making made the jealousy extreme. She developed a new weapon against him: dredge up stuff from the past and fight about it.

“Who the fuck is ‘G’?” she screamed at him one day, shaking sheet music in his face. 

She found the music inside his treasure chest, having deliberately violated their verbal agreement not to go through each other’s treasure chests. The handwritten note on the music said simply, “with all my love, G.” Even the handwriting was very pretty. Mikasa was livid.

“I knew her back in Noblain, before you and I got engaged, before we got married, before she got married.”

“Did you shag her? You shagged her, didn’t you? Of course you did, you sleep with every pretty thing that crosses your path!” his wife screamed at him.

“That’s not fair. No, she and I never had a physical relationship. She had an entourage with her every minute of the day. We only talked, and sometimes she played the piano for me. That’s really all there was.”

“Are you still in love with her?” she couldn’t help it, she was still screaming. A woman who can write an entire symphony. I’ll bet she’s super pretty and super sweet to boot, and super clever, and most importantly, super fertile, Mikasa thought, torturing herself.

“No, babe, I’m not in love with her anymore. It was years ago!” he told her truthfully. 

“Did you get in touch with her after we got married?” 

“Mikasa, listen. ‘G’ stands for Geraldine. Lady Geraldine, Crown Princess of Noblain. You know, the one married to the future king of the Noblainian Empire. I wouldn’t want to get involved in the fucking mess that’s the Noblainian royal family.”

She stared at Jean, horrified. She found that she already knew Geraldine, the entire world knew who she was. The most beautiful woman in the world, they said. She’d seen her pictures in the magazines. An achingly lovely, astonishingly attractive woman. Her greatest tragedy was that she was married to the ugliest, most rotten man in the world: Crown Prince Stephen of Noblain. 

Lady Geraldine was tall, blonde, blue-eyed and extremely beautiful. Musically talented and well-educated, her family fortune provided her with the best that life had to offer. Thanks to her mother’s side of the family, she was a blue blood. Her mother, Lady Elizabeth Dudley-Gainsborough, was the eldest daughter of the Marquess of Dudley, the head of one of the wealthiest, oldest and most prestigious noble families in Noblain. Accomplished from a very young age, Geraldine had the exquisite grace and charming innocence of a girl who led a very pampered, sheltered life. 

Jean met Lady Geraldine through her father, Admiral Nicholas Gainsborough. The Noblainian admiral of the fleet, though born to a baron, was not from a high-status noble family. But thanks to his naval victories and military contributions to the country, he was able to marry into the Dudleys. 

It was during a party for naval officers from various countries held at the palatial home of the Marquess of Dudley that Geraldine first laid eyes on Jean. He had been discussing military affairs with other admirals and politicians. As always, Jean spoke his mind. There must have been something in the confident, intelligent, fearless manner about him that struck the young noblewoman. Soon after, she begged her father to let Jean call on her.

“I saw you and I knew I loved you,” she told him, with the touching candor of an innocent girl. 

They were taking a stroll in her family’s impeccable formal garden, her personal bodyguard following them from a few yards behind to her right. To her left, discreetly dawdling a minute away, was her scowling maidservant. The middle-aged woman was protective of Geraldine, having looked after her since she was a baby. She didn’t like seeing this tall, handsome Eldian with the rakish smile enchanting her chaste ward. 

He was among the hundreds of callers Geraldine saw each week. They came from around the world, some merely wanting to bask in her legendary beauty, others plotting to seek her hand in marriage. 

But it was Jean who caught her fancy. Unlike her other suitors, he neither flattered her nor pandered to her. She found herself looking forward to his short, weekly visits, her brilliant blue eyes lighting up when the butler announced his presence.

She sat rapt as he talked her through the insights he’s picked up in the course of an extraordinary life, in which tradition and convention have been treated with disciplined scrutiny and then ultimately rejected. In turn, she told him of her own projects and concerns. 

For a charity concert sponsored each year by herself and her sisters, she wrote an operetta, both the music and libretto. It was given a pre-release performance at one of the private soirees given by her opera buff aunt, the Duchess of Rencalle. The two music critics among the guests roundly applauded the work, calling it a mini masterpiece. But Geraldine wrote it under a male pseudonym, a typical romance spiel about undying love. It was because she was afraid, she told Jean. Had they known it was written by an eighteen-year-old inexperienced aristocrat, they’d have praised it condescendingly while tearing it apart line by line, mocking it under the guise of constructive criticism.

Had she been a coward hiding behind a false name? She’d muse out loud to him. The performing arts world was still very biased against women, she said. A friend of hers, a budding playwright, did an experiment once. She wrote and published a play, a domestic sketch, and the critics derided it as “lightweight” and “frivolous”. At the same time, she wrote a similar play under a male pseudonym, for a different publisher. This time the critics hailed it as “refreshing” and having “comedic value.” Geraldine didn’t want her first operetta to suffer the same fate, thus the nom de guerre. 

Or she’d recount the time when she met a visiting foreign diplomat from Sulati. Being multilingual, Geraldine did her best to converse in the ambassador’s own tongue. The man praised her speaking with such profuse and flowery language that she knew at once he was being insincere. It made her self-conscious of her language skills in general, including the lingua franca.

“Tell me the truth, is my Eldian so bad?” she inquired.

Jean was bewildered. What was the girl talking about? She spoke with no accent at all. “No, far from it. You speak perfectly,” he replied. Sometimes, during difficult phrases, there was a hint of an accent, but barely perceptible. Besides, there was a musical quality to her way of speaking. Accent or no, he could listen to her all day. There was an earnestness about her that he found endearing.

Because she was musical and also kind of heart, she volunteered once a week at the children’s ward of a hospital built by her Dudley grandfather. Singing, playing the piano, talking to the children, reading aloud to them, she was like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. The children adored her. 

One of the patients there, a little girl named Clara, had her hair fall out in clumps until she had to be shaved bald. There was a sickly green tinge to her skin, indicating a malignant and fast-spreading disease. Always buzzing with excitement when Geraldine visited, she sobbed pitifully the last time she saw her.

“All I ever wanted was to look like you,” sniffled the formerly blonde little girl. “Now I look like a turnip.” 

“What can I do for her?” she asked Jean his opinion. “I’ve been thinking of cutting off my hair and having it made into a wig and gifting it to her. But would that actually be an insult? I want her to think she’s a pretty little girl even without hair. Any ideas?”

Jean was touched by her idea of gifting her own hair. It fell in shiny golden waves well below her hips. It was gorgeous to look at. That she was willing to cut off such a luxurious mane for the sake of an ailing little girl made him like her even more.

He suggested she gift the child a crown made of flowers. It was one of the things he’d wanted to do for Mikasa when they were still adolescents: fashion her a crown of flowers to adorn her beautiful black hair. Unfortunately, he never did, but thought the little girl in the hospital might enjoy such a thing.

The next time he visited, the happy noblewoman shared with him some good news. The little girl loved the silk flower crown, she informed him. Along with it, Geraldine composed and played a song about a young princess named Clara, with flowers for hair and from whose fingertips rainbows sprung. The child was absolutely delighted. The following week, her mother told Geraldine that her daughter was much cheered and had become much more positive with her outlook on recovery.

“Your idea was sublime, Jean! You’re such a sweetheart!” she beamed adoringly.

One time she tested his opinion of her, without him knowing it. “I read your paper in the naval journal I found at my father’s office,” she informed him, giggling coquettishly, “but I didn’t understand a thing.” 

Jean raised an eyebrow. “Well, it’s actually pretty straightforward. If you’re interested, I can explain the basic concepts that form the building blocks of the theory. Once you have a grasp of the fundamentals, all theories of maritime strategy and sea control become readily comprehensible, even for non-military personnel.”

Geraldine looked up at him, loving him even more. 

She’d tried the same test on the other naval officers that came to call on her, and most of their responses went along the lines of “Aww, you adorable sweetheart, don’t you worry that pretty head of yours over trivial matters like that. Let us men do the warring and theorising and just concentrate on your lovely piano playing.” To her annoyance, they patronised her in supercilious tones. 

But not Jean Kirschtein. 

He recognised and respected her intelligence, and she found that indescribably alluring. 

Needless to say, she found him magnetic in his cleverness, in his tall, well-built body and long, handsome face. She was fully aware of his masculinity, enraptured by his intense hazel eyes and the way they would sweep up her body. But mostly he looked her in the eye. She loved him for it.

“I wish you and I could be together,” she told him once. “You’re the most interesting person I know.”

There was a time in his life when he thought he’d fallen in love with the young noblewoman. He couldn’t deny it: her attention and interest in him were insanely flattering. Every man seemed to want her, but she wanted him. The way she framed her attraction to him as love at first sight was new and novel to him. How could he resist? Like the other men that called on her, he would fantasise about her. If he took her in his arms, would she sigh and yield to his embrace, or would she resist?

But both of them knew the strength of their feelings for each other was partly because it was a forbidden, impossible love. They existed in completely divergent worlds, with parallel destinies. 

Yet she was so frank about her love for him. Her open adoration made him feel good about himself. There were times when he wondered the impossible: Could they ever be together? Would he dare give her hope? Tell her he loved her? Or would that be a false hope, like cruelly dangling an unreachable piece of meat to a tiger in a cage?

“I love you,” she told him, after four months of weekly visits. She swooned in his presence. Such was her attraction to him that he found himself in a bind. 

Because Jean didn’t want to lead her on, or give her false hope. He loved her, too, he was sure of it, but something kept him from saying the words. 

So he replied, “Thank you. I am deeply honored.”

He found out what had been keeping him from professing his love for her one night, in quite an innocuous manner.

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

Thank you to bobdesu_ga for encouraging me to develop Geraldine’s character! She first appeared in Chapter 6 of Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Part II of the novela).

Next – Chapter 8: The Dinner Party

Back – Chapter 6: All She Ever Wanted

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