![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ansemaru titan shifters are something approximate to but not entirely demons in this setting? they still look pretty human, but they grow horns at adolescence and are way stronger/have ritual magic stuff? idk there might be other elements of their appearance that change as they get older, but either way they're capable of using magic to mask their non-human features to the eyes of people. something like a bone or a piece of wood on a cord around their neck, which will reveal their true form if it gets broken. IDK IDK IDK. i use the term "demon" b/c that's what humans refer to them as, but they don't have any actual connection to hell or anything like that, they're just weird magic non-human things with horns that don't live among humans or share their cultural values, so demon is the designation they get.
reiner, bertolt, berik, and annie all come from a small-ish community of demons who live in a village on the side of a mountain, which is ostensibly in ?europe?. somewhere foresty and mountainous and cold. it's a little close to a human settlement for comfort, and over time it's p. clear that the humans and demons are in conflict over a variety of things- they hunt the same prey in the woods, log the same trees, and kind of compete over resources, but the demons are also super not at ease with the humans mining and overusing the resources in the region, since they've got a connection to the land there that's generally more. spiritual. and the humans see demons as, well, demons. they attack on sight, out of fear.
the whole community is basically a cult? they worship a god, not monotheistically but in greater priority to the others in their pantheon, who supposedly slumbers beneath the earth and who will someday awaken and lead them to a promised world with no humans. ostensibly, this is going to happen by way of said god manifesting in the body of bertolt, their chosen messiah, once the time is right. there are sort of vague and ominous village elders who interpret signs regarding this and who direct life in the village/carry out and teach rituals/are the closest thing to a liaison to their god. there are a whole lot of rituals that involve the forest/things in it, the seasons, sacrifices, weird sex stuff. I AM MAKING THIS UP AS I GO ALONG I SHOULD PROBABLY DO MORE RESEARCH INTO ACTUAL CULTS AND PAGAN RELIGIONS.
like other than the messiah thing they're all pretty normal kids for their community. well, tbf annie still hates everyone who isn't her dad and lives on the edge of town and bullies everyone. they grow up and it's pretty chill until they're 12 and everything goes to shit.
b/c when they're twelve, the whole "someday bertolt will fulfill the prophecies and be our messiah and lead us to a world w/o strife with the humans" thing kind of runs into a problem when the humans find out where the demons are living, thanks to a careless mistake, and the village gets attacked and burnt to the ground, scattering the whole demon community. a lot of them die. bertolt, reiner, and berik are told to flee and head for the human village, disguised as humans, by the elders, but their attempt to flee gets really fucked up when a stranger who's not a human but not from their village shows up and kills berik. they find annie and give her his disguise charm so she can be safe. things get additionally fucked up when bertolt's weird messiah/demon puberty magic powers start to work and they end up burning half the human village as well when they arrive.
they spend about five years living there, pretending to be humans, without any contact from any of the elders or their families. they want to return home, but w/o knowing whether or not anybody's alive, it's kind of a moot point. (so the promise becomes less "we'll return to our home together" and more "we'll go to the promised land together" in this setting). the other 104th kids are among the humans of the village, but there's also eren and ymir, who they don't realize are demons like them yet. ymir because she's actually good at hiding it, eren because he's a late bloomer.
things kind of get fucked up in that interval, b/c they have to go through demon puberty, their horns grow in and they start to appear obviously not human, the disguise charms become actually important. also awkward sexual awakenings. this coincides with the horns because they are a metaphor. reiberts have awkward teen handjobs. this becomes a regular occurrence. like they probably learn more about sex from each other than they do from the human adults, to be honest. (nobody knows how annie's dealing with it. is she dealing with it? is she angrily making out with mikasa out behind the wood shed? probably.) then lol human culture and heteronormativity and oh-right-we-might-be-the-last-of-our-species and this blossoming awkward relationship gets interspersed with reiner trying to convince bertolt to have kids with annie so they don't go extinct, and reiner trying to convince himself he likes krista. (they are both monumentally Not Interested, since she's busy having a thing with ymir that nobody's supposed to know about, and he's so remarkably homosexual and into bertolt that he will never stop failing at showing genuine interest in her). this is kind of compounded by reiner feeling weird and guilty and internalizing the shit humans say about demons (and in particular the demons who burned down half their village) and starting to delude himself into thinking that he's really a human, and one who's going to help hunt out the demons in their midst once he gets older. this is really fucking upsetting for bertolt, who hears all the same stuff, but remains aware and guilty for his actions.
it starts to come to a head when they find out that eren is a demon, too, since he's having demon puberty problems, and nearly gets killed for his trouble until they can help disguise him. well tbh only annie reveals that she's one too, since he trusts her more than the other two. this is approx when they get a message from the surviving elders.
the plan now is. promised land=kind of bringing about the apocalypse by way of demon messiah ritual stuff that will let their god exterminate the humans of the world and make the land as it Should Be. this involves eren, as it turns out, b/c he's. idk. a secondary messiah? basically a figure who represents another important figure in their religion. and reiner and annie are supposed to help bertolt prepare for his role in the coming ritual. their first reaction to 'oh hey we're still alive' from the elders is to try and return home, but they get turned away from the village and warned that if they try to come back without exterminating the humans, they'll be killed. they get to have a home when they fulfill their role for the cult.
so in the coming spring, they're supposed to set up a huge terrible ritual in the village, with a bunch of smaller ones to prepare bertolt in the meantime. the final one definitely involves bertolt and eren boning. bertolt doesn't really want that. reiner doesn't want that either. he's also kind of afraid that he may have screwed up the magic by his involvement with bertolt. whoops. they spend a lot of time trying to get reiner through his delusions and reminding themselves of their mission and roles, and it's really painful and uncomfortable b/c on one hand, they want nothing more than to return to their old life, but on the other hand, they don't hate the humans and fear them like they used to, and they seem them as friends now. it's horrible and complicated. they really just want to be happy together and not hurt anybody.
and ofc it's getting harder because as time passes and they start to do these secondary rituals, bertolt's symptoms of being the messiah make it harder for him to hide that he's a demon, and eventually it comes to a head. eren almost finds out the secret, annie takes one for the team and almost gets captured by the humans and ends up turning herself to stone so she isn't killed or interrogated, this is approximately when ymir figures out that eren isn't the only other one who's a demon. she confronts the dumb boyfriends and yells at them for trying to bring about the apocalypse with their stupid god, don't they know there are other demons out there who don't want that, don't you have any idea what that'll do to the worthwhile humans, you'd better not kill krista. and. yup. as it turns out ymir is sort of a chosen leader of a different community of demons that live in the opposite direction from them, and who worship a different god. she ran away b/c she was going to be sacrificed (she gets reborn intermittently, but the results are so unpleasant that she chose to avoid doing it again). she still cares about her people tho, and more importantly she cares about krista. she is also the stranger who killed berik five years ago, so it's kind of awkward.
as it turns out, though, she's willing to help the stupid boyfriends come up with a solution to their messiah problem- intentionally screwing up the ritual. she's also surprisingly willing to help kick reiner's ass until he stops being quite as delusional.
so this sort of all comes to a head on the night when the ritual is supposed to take place, and reiner fucks it all up (intentionally!) by joining bertolt and eren in the ceremonial messiah-boning thing. the gods don't like that. the apocalypse doesn't happen, but things go completely insane nonetheless, they get exposed as demons and have to go on the run w/ ymir and krista, everyone assumes they were just trying to do something wicked and non-con with eren (this is not actually the case, as he would attest), but now they kind of. can't return to their village b/c the elders hate them for failing to apocalypse, and the humans now know them as demons.
so they decide to set out on their own, to live a life where reiner doesn't go mad w/ guilt and bertolt's status as a god's chosen doesn't turn him into a monster or a tool, and so they can find a home to call their own. meanwhile ymir and krista elope. ymir is totally chill with pretending to be a human for her, but krista is also totally chill living among ymir's demons and convincing them not to periodically sacrifice her to their god.
this might be the weirdest au i've ever written. but ahahhaaha yay reiner and bertolt are definitely married and way less emotionally unstable by the end of this fic than they otherwise would be.
reiner, bertolt, berik, and annie all come from a small-ish community of demons who live in a village on the side of a mountain, which is ostensibly in ?europe?. somewhere foresty and mountainous and cold. it's a little close to a human settlement for comfort, and over time it's p. clear that the humans and demons are in conflict over a variety of things- they hunt the same prey in the woods, log the same trees, and kind of compete over resources, but the demons are also super not at ease with the humans mining and overusing the resources in the region, since they've got a connection to the land there that's generally more. spiritual. and the humans see demons as, well, demons. they attack on sight, out of fear.
the whole community is basically a cult? they worship a god, not monotheistically but in greater priority to the others in their pantheon, who supposedly slumbers beneath the earth and who will someday awaken and lead them to a promised world with no humans. ostensibly, this is going to happen by way of said god manifesting in the body of bertolt, their chosen messiah, once the time is right. there are sort of vague and ominous village elders who interpret signs regarding this and who direct life in the village/carry out and teach rituals/are the closest thing to a liaison to their god. there are a whole lot of rituals that involve the forest/things in it, the seasons, sacrifices, weird sex stuff. I AM MAKING THIS UP AS I GO ALONG I SHOULD PROBABLY DO MORE RESEARCH INTO ACTUAL CULTS AND PAGAN RELIGIONS.
like other than the messiah thing they're all pretty normal kids for their community. well, tbf annie still hates everyone who isn't her dad and lives on the edge of town and bullies everyone. they grow up and it's pretty chill until they're 12 and everything goes to shit.
b/c when they're twelve, the whole "someday bertolt will fulfill the prophecies and be our messiah and lead us to a world w/o strife with the humans" thing kind of runs into a problem when the humans find out where the demons are living, thanks to a careless mistake, and the village gets attacked and burnt to the ground, scattering the whole demon community. a lot of them die. bertolt, reiner, and berik are told to flee and head for the human village, disguised as humans, by the elders, but their attempt to flee gets really fucked up when a stranger who's not a human but not from their village shows up and kills berik. they find annie and give her his disguise charm so she can be safe. things get additionally fucked up when bertolt's weird messiah/demon puberty magic powers start to work and they end up burning half the human village as well when they arrive.
they spend about five years living there, pretending to be humans, without any contact from any of the elders or their families. they want to return home, but w/o knowing whether or not anybody's alive, it's kind of a moot point. (so the promise becomes less "we'll return to our home together" and more "we'll go to the promised land together" in this setting). the other 104th kids are among the humans of the village, but there's also eren and ymir, who they don't realize are demons like them yet. ymir because she's actually good at hiding it, eren because he's a late bloomer.
things kind of get fucked up in that interval, b/c they have to go through demon puberty, their horns grow in and they start to appear obviously not human, the disguise charms become actually important. also awkward sexual awakenings. this coincides with the horns because they are a metaphor. reiberts have awkward teen handjobs. this becomes a regular occurrence. like they probably learn more about sex from each other than they do from the human adults, to be honest. (nobody knows how annie's dealing with it. is she dealing with it? is she angrily making out with mikasa out behind the wood shed? probably.) then lol human culture and heteronormativity and oh-right-we-might-be-the-last-of-our-species and this blossoming awkward relationship gets interspersed with reiner trying to convince bertolt to have kids with annie so they don't go extinct, and reiner trying to convince himself he likes krista. (they are both monumentally Not Interested, since she's busy having a thing with ymir that nobody's supposed to know about, and he's so remarkably homosexual and into bertolt that he will never stop failing at showing genuine interest in her). this is kind of compounded by reiner feeling weird and guilty and internalizing the shit humans say about demons (and in particular the demons who burned down half their village) and starting to delude himself into thinking that he's really a human, and one who's going to help hunt out the demons in their midst once he gets older. this is really fucking upsetting for bertolt, who hears all the same stuff, but remains aware and guilty for his actions.
it starts to come to a head when they find out that eren is a demon, too, since he's having demon puberty problems, and nearly gets killed for his trouble until they can help disguise him. well tbh only annie reveals that she's one too, since he trusts her more than the other two. this is approx when they get a message from the surviving elders.
the plan now is. promised land=kind of bringing about the apocalypse by way of demon messiah ritual stuff that will let their god exterminate the humans of the world and make the land as it Should Be. this involves eren, as it turns out, b/c he's. idk. a secondary messiah? basically a figure who represents another important figure in their religion. and reiner and annie are supposed to help bertolt prepare for his role in the coming ritual. their first reaction to 'oh hey we're still alive' from the elders is to try and return home, but they get turned away from the village and warned that if they try to come back without exterminating the humans, they'll be killed. they get to have a home when they fulfill their role for the cult.
so in the coming spring, they're supposed to set up a huge terrible ritual in the village, with a bunch of smaller ones to prepare bertolt in the meantime. the final one definitely involves bertolt and eren boning. bertolt doesn't really want that. reiner doesn't want that either. he's also kind of afraid that he may have screwed up the magic by his involvement with bertolt. whoops. they spend a lot of time trying to get reiner through his delusions and reminding themselves of their mission and roles, and it's really painful and uncomfortable b/c on one hand, they want nothing more than to return to their old life, but on the other hand, they don't hate the humans and fear them like they used to, and they seem them as friends now. it's horrible and complicated. they really just want to be happy together and not hurt anybody.
and ofc it's getting harder because as time passes and they start to do these secondary rituals, bertolt's symptoms of being the messiah make it harder for him to hide that he's a demon, and eventually it comes to a head. eren almost finds out the secret, annie takes one for the team and almost gets captured by the humans and ends up turning herself to stone so she isn't killed or interrogated, this is approximately when ymir figures out that eren isn't the only other one who's a demon. she confronts the dumb boyfriends and yells at them for trying to bring about the apocalypse with their stupid god, don't they know there are other demons out there who don't want that, don't you have any idea what that'll do to the worthwhile humans, you'd better not kill krista. and. yup. as it turns out ymir is sort of a chosen leader of a different community of demons that live in the opposite direction from them, and who worship a different god. she ran away b/c she was going to be sacrificed (she gets reborn intermittently, but the results are so unpleasant that she chose to avoid doing it again). she still cares about her people tho, and more importantly she cares about krista. she is also the stranger who killed berik five years ago, so it's kind of awkward.
as it turns out, though, she's willing to help the stupid boyfriends come up with a solution to their messiah problem- intentionally screwing up the ritual. she's also surprisingly willing to help kick reiner's ass until he stops being quite as delusional.
so this sort of all comes to a head on the night when the ritual is supposed to take place, and reiner fucks it all up (intentionally!) by joining bertolt and eren in the ceremonial messiah-boning thing. the gods don't like that. the apocalypse doesn't happen, but things go completely insane nonetheless, they get exposed as demons and have to go on the run w/ ymir and krista, everyone assumes they were just trying to do something wicked and non-con with eren (this is not actually the case, as he would attest), but now they kind of. can't return to their village b/c the elders hate them for failing to apocalypse, and the humans now know them as demons.
so they decide to set out on their own, to live a life where reiner doesn't go mad w/ guilt and bertolt's status as a god's chosen doesn't turn him into a monster or a tool, and so they can find a home to call their own. meanwhile ymir and krista elope. ymir is totally chill with pretending to be a human for her, but krista is also totally chill living among ymir's demons and convincing them not to periodically sacrifice her to their god.
this might be the weirdest au i've ever written. but ahahhaaha yay reiner and bertolt are definitely married and way less emotionally unstable by the end of this fic than they otherwise would be.
