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Grey.
Grey was all that she could see.
Miles and miles, near and far.
Everything.
She could hear the grey calling out to her, whispering his name.
She could taste the grey. It tasted salty, sweaty, like his lips.
The grey brushed against her skin enveloping her in its emptiness.
Why did he have to go? Why was he always so reckless? No. No, he wasn’t reckless. He was smart. It was the others who were reckless, the others who were –
But then, the others were dead too.
Dead. The word tasted so funny on her lips, the same way that his name had tasted when she had said it. Sobbed it.
Of course, she wasn’t the only one who had lost someone. To be honest, she wasn’t the only person who had lost him. In fact, she was likely the least important on the list of all of the people who had lost him.
“Hey!” Someone called out. Probably not to her. “Hey, you! Hange!” A voice called. His voice. She turned around eagerly, but she couldn’t see anything through the grey. Suddenly, a shadow appeared. His shadow? No. Not his. Not his, never his anymore. Two eyes, two lips. Two arms, two hands, two legs, two feet. But not his.
“Hange?” the lips said. She looked up at the eyes. Grey eyes. Like his. Not his. “Hange, are you okay? I need you to tell me that you’re okay.”
Okay? What did it mean? Why did that simple, stupid word have so much power? But still, at the end, it had no power at all. So yes. She was okay. As okay as she would get.
“Goddamn, you’re cold.” The voice said. The hands gripped her shoulders. Hard. Too hard. Not hard enough. “Mike, come help me with her!”
The eyes were grey. Grey like dew. Grey like rain. Grey like her shirt. The grey that filled her entire mind.
A grey voice permeated the grey darkness. No eyes, no lips, no hands, no face. Just a voice. “Oh my god! Hange! You’re alive!”
No point in being alive and so desperately alone.
The eyes looked at her again. “Hange, we need to get you somewhere safe. Can you walk?” Safe? Why? She was never going to be as safe as she was when she was with him. Fighting off the demons. Fighting the darkness.
“Mike, she’s not responding!” The voice sounded close to falling apart. “She’s in shock. We need to get her warm. Can you carry her?” The other voice, the grey voice, spoke in short, rushed clips. Both voices sounded pained, like they were about to break. Of course they were about to break, they had both lost him too.
“Yeah, I probably can.” The eyes looked at her in concern. “Hange, I need you to stay with us. I know it’s difficult –” Difficult? What was difficult? Finding him was difficult. Getting to know him was difficult. Losing him wasn’t difficult. It was easy. She didn’t have do anything. She just had to be still. She just had to wait until she disappeared.
She felt two arms lift her up. Strong arms. Not like his, though. The rest of the world was still grey. Had there ever been any other color? Maybe. She didn’t remember. He carried her through the grey, with a purpose. Finally, he stopped, and she felt the ground beneath her feet. How she wished that the ground could swallow her, and she could float into its grey oblivion. Maybe she could find him there. Maybe they could be happy. Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of grey voices shouted, each trying to cut through the grey, each trying and failing.
“Hange!” One shouted.
“Is she alright?” Another made itself known.
“Is she even alive?” A third sighed.
“Of course she’s alive, you idiots! She’s in shock, and I can’t tell if she’s injured, so I need some help!” The eyes shouted at the crowd, and the crowd was silenced. The eyes held some kind of power over the crowd, they commanded some kind of respect. She felt something warm and soft cover her. A blanket. A grey one, of course. Two hands appeared, but no eyes and no voice. The hands bandaged her wrist, her battered, bruised wrist. She never wanted that wrist to heal. She never wanted those bruises to go away. After the hands finished, the voices went away. But the eyes, the eyes stayed. They watched her, they waited. Finally, they could wait no longer. They sat down roughly by her head, and the lips opened. Then they closed. Then opened again.
“Is he…” They stopped, closed, and opened again. “Is he alive?”
A phantasmagoria of him surged through her mind. All she could see was him. His eyes. Grey like early-morning clouds. His face. A thin mask of uncaring that she could see right through. His lips. Soft and pink. His hands, always warm and dry, but still rough and calloused. The way his nose wrinkled when he was stressed or unhappy. The way he looked at her, always half amused and half distressed, as if he was thinking ‘What in the world am I going to do with you?’ His hunched over form, angrily scrubbing at some mark on the ground, trying to make everything perfect, everything clean. His face, right before he fell. The terror, the fear, and the thing that scared her the most: the peace. The smile that came to his lips right before he died.
No, he was most certainly not alive.
“Hange, you have to tell me!” The eyes were becoming hysterical. “You have to –”
And suddenly, silence. The voice had run out of breath, of steam, of energy, of hope. Then she felt it, on her right arm. One drop of water, then two. The eyes were broken. They were leaking. Why weren’t her eyes leaking? She felt like they should be. Her entire body was broken, so why were her eyes so calm?
Her mind ached. It yearned to forget. To forget him completely. Of course, that would never happen. She would never let that happen. Not in a million years.
Not while Levi Ackerman was dead.