▸ Column · Within the Walls of Paradis — the Survey Corps era of Attack on Titan
MIKASA ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Mikasa Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
My father died within the season, and the reading of his estate left the whole of our family's house in the interior — the good one, near the water, worth more than the rest of his holdings combined — to my younger brother Dominic alone. My sister Renata and I were each left a small purse of coin and nothing more. The will gave no reason. Dominic swears he doesn't know why either, but he goes quiet whenever it's raised. Renata wants to challenge it before the magistrate: Dominic nursed Father through his last year, held his seal, made his arrangements, and she's certain he leaned on a dying man behind closed doors. I can't honestly say Father wasn't clear-headed — he was sharp nearly to the end. But Dominic had a year of private hours with him that none of us shared. If I stand with Renata, it ends whatever's left between us and Dominic and bleeds the family through a fight that may cost more than it returns. If I don't, I'm swallowing something that feels rigged. How do I even start to choose?
Mikasa Ackerman replies
Four months. The grief is still doing your thinking for you. Be careful what you let it decide.
Here is what I keep returning to. When your father was dying — when staying cost something — Dominic was the one in the house. Renata wasn't. You weren't. I don't trust what people say about love. I trust what they do when it's hard, and the hard thing, the daily thing, the changing of bandages and the sitting up through bad nights, your brother did. That isn't proof he bent a dying man's arm. It's the opposite kind of evidence, and you're choosing to look past it because the outcome stung.
Maybe he did engineer it. You can't know, and neither can Renata. "Leaned on him" is a guess wearing the clothes of a finding.
So name what you're actually after. If it's the house, fight for the house and call it that. If it's making Dominic feel what the will made you feel — set it down. That's not justice. It hollows out the one carrying it, not the one it's aimed at. I've watched that happen up close.
Your father is gone. Your brother isn't. Don't trade the living for the dead's furniture.
— Mikasa Ackerman
Alexstrasza weighs in
Mikasa weighs the brother fairly, little one. Let me weigh the other two. Renata is not a schemer — she is grieving, and grief left untended goes hunting for someone to blame. The house is not what any of you are truly fighting over. It is your father, gone, and the unbearable fact that none of you can ask him why. Before you sign anything or refuse anything, sit with Renata inside that sorrow, not across a magistrate's table. A lawsuit is what despair builds when no one has held it. Tend the grief first, dear ones, and you may find the house was never the wound.
— Alexstrasza
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