▸ Column · Attack on Titan, Year ~850 — Trost District garrison refugee relocation office, post-Wall Maria collapse
MIKASA ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Mikasa Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Captain America.
The letter
I'm the only aide in my section who speaks both the coastal Eldian dialect and standard Trost common — I've been doing refugee relocation casework out of the garrison since Wall Maria fell. Three years of midnight crisis calls and caseloads nobody else can cover. I finally got a transfer offer to the Interior Brigade's medical unit: actual use of my training, real pay, actual sleep. When I told my section chief, she didn't acknowledge it. She started naming the refugee families currently on my caseload — she spent three full minutes on the Ahmadis alone, whose housing reallocation I've been shepherding for eight months — and said she "couldn't in good conscience" approve my transfer until their situations resolved. I know these families are real. I also know I've been running hollow for eighteen months, answering crisis calls past midnight, and my own health is failing while command has twice turned down resource requests that could have brought in a second dialect speaker. My partner says I'm being manipulated and should give standard notice and go. My medic is more measured but keeps asking why I feel personally responsible for command's staffing failures. Is there a version of this where I take the transfer without being called a deserter? Or do I just have to accept that someone will call me selfish no matter what I decide?
Mikasa Ackerman replies
Your section chief already gave you the answer. Not when she named those families — that was designed to root you in place. When command twice declined to bring in a second dialect speaker while you ran yourself into the ground: that's the answer. That's what they do when it costs them something.
Whether you can leave without someone calling you selfish — I don't spend much time on that question. The one who calls you a deserter is usually the one who benefited from your staying.
Here's what I actually watch: you said your health is failing. That's not exhaustion you sleep off. That's the world taking you piece by piece, and I'm not going to tell you to keep allowing it. I built my entire self around protecting one person — made myself so necessary to that one purpose that I nearly disappeared into it. It looked like devotion. It was also self-erasure. Your section chief isn't the same as the person I chose. But the mechanism is identical. She is counting on you to care more about those families than about the fact that you still exist.
Take the transfer. Give proper notice. Hand the cases off as cleanly as you can. You are not the solution to command's staffing failure. You never were.
— Mikasa Ackerman
Captain America weighs in
She's right about command's failures — two declined resource requests while you ran yourself hollow tells you where their priorities actually sit. But the Ahmadi family isn't an institution. Eight months of their lives are real, and that doesn't change because your section chief is using them badly.
So here's what I'd add: before you transfer, go above her. Tell whoever outranks her exactly what was declined and why you're leaving. Not to delay your transfer — to make someone answer for it, and to protect whoever ends up filling your post next. You're not being selfish. But leaving quiet and leaving clean aren't the same thing. Do the second one.
— Captain America