▸ Column · Attack on Titan — walled-city domestic setting, within the walls
LEVI ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Levi Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Mikasa Ackerman.
The letter
Otto used to barely make it through one mug of ale all evening — I'm not exaggerating, that was just how he was. But the last eight months something has shifted. Now he's going through most of a bottle before dinner, and there's a jug he refills when he thinks I've left the room. Last week he slurred his way through our daughter's bedtime story. She's barely six. When I took the book away he looked at me like I was being unreasonable and said he was just tired.
This morning I found three empties behind the feed sacks in the cellar. Which means he knows. He's hiding them.
I've poured out what I found. I've cried. I've sat him down — calmly, I thought — and told him we should talk to someone, and every time he promises to slow down and by the end of the week it's worse than before. I still love this man. I can see who he is when it's not like this, and I want that back. But I'm exhausted, and I'm scared, because I can see our daughter starting to understand that something is wrong at home. How do I reach him before this swallows everything we have?
— Worn Down in Stohess
Levi Ackerman replies
Tch. You're asking how to get through to him. That's the wrong question. You can't — not the way you've been trying — and somewhere you already know it.
Look at what you've done: poured out the bottles, he got more. You cried, he promised, he didn't keep it. You sat him down and asked him to get help, nothing changed. You've been trying to control a result that was never in your hands, and it's grinding you down.
In the underground I came up in, men drank until they were nothing. The ones who stopped weren't talked out of it. They stopped when the cost got real — not sad, not desperate. Real. Right now the cost for Otto hasn't landed anywhere that matters. You pour out a bottle, he gets another. He promises when you're both wrecked about it, the promise is gone by Thursday.
Stop trying to reach him. Figure out your line. Not the next conversation — your actual line. What are you willing to do if this doesn't change? What won't you walk back no matter what he says?
Your daughter is already watching. You wrote that yourself. This isn't a future problem.
I won't promise your line will work. Nobody gets that. But what you've been doing is failing, and your decision about what you'll keep accepting — that part is yours. Make it clean. Whatever it is, mean it.
— Levi Ackerman
Mikasa Ackerman weighs in
He didn't name one thing.
You said you see the good husband underneath. I know that feeling. I spent years organizing my whole life around someone beneath their worst behavior — waiting for who I knew to come back. Here is what that taught me: the man who slurred through your daughter's story and hid empties in the cellar is the man right now. That is his conduct under pressure. I don't judge people by what they promise when they're caught. I watch what they do when it costs them something. He has shown you. Repeatedly.
Captain Levi is right that the line matters. What I'd add: you are not drawing it in advance of something. You are already standing on it. Your daughter has already noticed. Stop waiting for the man beneath to resurface and look clearly at what is in front of you.
— Mikasa Ackerman
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