Likeness (Attack on Titan One-Shot)

Untitled Part 1

There was something about the girl that made her seem oddly out-of-place in the neat classroom. Coralline Jade Smith worked diligently, her head bent over her desk, solving her arithmetic and occasionally using a small red rubber to oust any mistakes. That was supposed to be normal, wasn’t it?

No, it wasn’t. While the other children’s faces were screwed up in concentration, Professor Dawk saw Coralline completely at peace with her still math opponent. She thought she was finished at first, but then saw her pencil rhythmically tapping her forehead. She bent over to check on her paper, and, instead of looking up at her expectantly, waiting for Professor Dawk to praise her flawless work, only inched away for her to see. “Well done, dear- solve that last one-“she pointed at a vertical sum at the end of the second page. Then she immediately felt silly. She was solving it- there were the rubber marks. But Coralline didn’t protest: she only nodded obediently and proceeded to solving it again.

Nearly half an hour later she collected her students’ papers and began correcting them with her special red-ink quill, a gift from a friend in the military. She gave passive orders to a chubby-cheeked redhead, telling him to fetch the art supplies from the overhead cupboard above his desk. Professor Dawk was so caught up with her thoughts, staring at Sarah’s –sigh- mortifying papers that she didn’t hear the class go noticeably silent. At first she thought that they were just in the ‘Art Spirit’ and that they were in separate trances, but at the back of her mind she sensed something wrong.

She nearly spilled red ink from her inkwell when she heard the sudden uproar of laughter. She looked up abruptly, catching the inkwell in time and looking like she had blood on her palm. “What’s going o- AUGH!”

Professor Dawk got up, running towards Coralline Jade Smith’s desk.

The girl’s eyes at that moment were the widest that Professor Dawk had ever seen in her entire teaching career- no, her life. But her carmine-coloured lips were firmly shut. Her shaky fingers traveled back to touch the back of her loose, long maroon hair, and found the ends of it sticky with grimy glue and bits of paper.

Even when her hand wrapped around the mess, Coralline did not say anything. If anything, her eyelids went back to their usual pose. But her hand squirmed over the mess and Coralline grabbed hold of the area above the glue, bringing the lock of hair back over her shoulder and examining it.

Professor Dawk stared in horror at the sniggering children behind her, their hands smeared with sticking paste. “Augustus!” she yelled. “How dare you do this to your friend’s-“

She was cut off with a huge collective gasp from the class, whose students were all pointing at a desk in the front row.

Professor Dawk followed their shocked gazes to see Coralline, who held a huge yank of sticky brown hair in one hand and a pair of safety scissors in another.

“Oh, darling, it was terrible,” whimpered Professor Dawk later that night to her husband over supper. “They stuck glue up her hair and she just cut it off...”

“Hmm,” mused Nile, his mouth filled with gravy and stew. Swallowing, he replied: “well, that was pretty brave of her, don’t you think, Marie?”

“Brave?” thought aloud a horrified Marie. “It was the scariest thing I have ever seen in my life! Girls her age would have cried, they would have begged me to wash it out for them, would have at least gotten angry- no, livid- but Coralline only went all wide-eyed and- and-“

“Calm down, dear, you’ll get your blood pressure high,” Nile tried in vain to reassure his wife. But she was beyond reason.

“She didn’t even open her mouth,” she sobbed. “What am I going to tell her parents?”