Archive of Our Own

i.

It’s strange to think that she’s somehow become accustomed to this, warm things, gentle things, the absence of tension and fight, paranoia and danger. Odd, that the cycle of days now also includes sitting at a small table by the open window of a local café, a secret, hidden spot tucked inside the weaving alleys branching off choked, metropolitan roads. The honking, screeching and yelling of weekend traffic is muted here, and it’s in spaces like this, deceptively safe, that she feels solitude most acutely. Soothing woods of all colors patchwork the top half of the walls, and creamy yellow stucco textures the bottom half, strips of carved, wooden trim separating the two. The tables are made of salvaged wood, the seats more like benches than chairs, and clay, stone, and metal of all sorts—aluminum, tin, iron, steel, even copper—act as the accents. The blooms in the small glazed vases on every table enliven the cafe with spots of color. A large, white stargazer lily sits at her elbow today. She closes her eyes and drowses a little, feeling spare tendrils of hair brush her face. It’s a well-lit, breezy Sunday.

People nowadays might call this kind of place rustic, vintage, industrial chic, but for people like them, this is a reminder. If they don’t look too hard, the sturdy, no-nonsense silverware could easily be the same mass-produced utensils they threw carelessly into the washbins at the end of each meal; the highly polished alloyed plates, all different sheens of silver, green and blue swirling on their surfaces, could be dull, beaten, aluminum. Long wooden benches, wooden tables, and a familiar face sitting across the way—it could take them back, if they let it.

It’s bullshit. She knows it, he knows it. The mess hall was never so pleasant looking, could never call itself anywhere close to upscale. Instead of the roar of sweaty, rowdy teenagers fresh from combat and maneuvering exercises, the café is populated by the cooing of couples, the pregnant silence of tense family meetings, and the swell and ebb of young adults chattering away, shopping bags piled up all around them. It’s a shop meticulously planned for comfort and relaxation, open and bright where the mess hall had been shadowed and dark, lit only by candles and the colorful personalities of the recruits. But this kind of torture, this kind of self-infliction, is something that she knows better than anyone else. There was a time when the dark spaces of the mess hall made her think of other places, dark kitchens, dark rooms, places with no light and no way out, stilted places she had wanted, desperately, to return to because even if they were dark, those were intimate shadows, the ones she knew from birth.

She doesn’t know what this place reminds him of.

The sweater is soft on her skin, loose and comfortable, easy to move in. Pants, practical as always, a butter-smooth pair of skinny jeans that had always felt to her almost too indulgent to wear, the most comfortable pair of pants she owns. A small cross-body purse hangs off the back of her chair, because the world has become one so frivolous and nonsensical that no pair of women’s pants will ever have enough pockets. It’s a well-loved thing, made with brown leather, sensible and made to last. Comfort and ostentation like this wasn’t possible before.

He too prefers simple clothing, doesn’t find much meaning in bedecking himself in status symbols, indulges in small comforts, just as she does. They focus on looking neat and tidy, if only because their lifestyles and jobs demand it. Appearances, skills, and prestige matter more than ever, in this world. There is little escape for the violence that wells in their bodies. He looks older than her now, and the waitress who comes to their table with their order gives her an encouraging smile. They’ve been coming here regularly since they moved, and the waitress must think that they’re dating. Sometimes it’s easier to keep up appearances than to object, and besides, this way, they get discounts.

He never eats anything on Sundays with her, can’t stand the feeling of sweetness going sour on his tongue when there’s no work to distract him, so he only ever drinks a pot of black tea. Tea is one of his favorite luxuries, one of the few, and he buys it one bag at a time, measuring the contents out slowly day by day, as if  he would have no way of getting more in this global day and age. She doesn’t remember him drinking tea in their trainee days. She wonders who got him to start.

She used to know him, inside and out. Used to be able to read his every move, every wrinkle in his brow, every minute shift of his mouth. He was so expressive and so transparent, so eager and vital and alive, and when she touched him she could feel the indomitable energy that thrummed through his limbs, the same energy that drove him and made him restless. She still can, sees the echoes of his younger, softer face in this version of him, but even after all this time, there are still faces that she doesn’t know, histories that she’s never been told, not for lack of interest, but because he hoards them. But neither has he ever asked for the tales that she could tell, nor has she offered them. He’s never demanded stories of her before, even when he knows almost everything, even if secondhand, of the after. They are secret keepers now.   

Metal plate, paper doily, clean-cut triangle of cake, and she’s seen them wet the knives before they use them so that the cut is sharp and neat, sanitized. She can appreciate that, like she can appreciate a good punch, a body slam done with elegant finesse. Layers of tissue-thin, butter-yellow layers of pancake, alternated with a thin spread of white cream. She could eat without her fork, peel the slice apart bit by bit, savage it, spread it out like a pack of cards, dig out the innards and leave behind the ripped strips of yellow cake, white stains left behind like drops of blood. But she is all about control, all about finesse and elegance, about containment and a good, slow, simmer of emotion. This is familiar, even if nothing else is. This is something she will always know.

When she puts her fork to the cake, she slices through all the layers in a single, quick stroke. There’s a sharp clink as metal hits metal.

Tea again, for him, loose-leaf, no sugar, no milk. He doesn’t offer her a cup; he never does on Sundays. He drinks right away, as if he relishes the burn, the heat and the fire and the smokiness of the leaf, fermented, wrinkled and cringing until forcibly swollen and turgid with water. He doesn’t speak to her either. Sometimes, they don’t get to say anything to each other on weekends, aside from the cursory greetings. Vanilla and citrus on her tongue. Sweetness.

For some of those new religions, new to them anyway, Sundays are a holy day, a day of rest and worship. They know better than to think of a higher power, they know better than to think of blind worship and faith. Sunday is a mark of passage, of weeks done, weeks lost. They are cursed days, cherished, silent, but they can never come too soon. And yet there is also something painfully pleasurable in Sundays, in the excavation of sorrow and grief, the willing dissection of dissatisfaction and loneliness, in the creation and participation in new types of barrenness, new brands of exhaustion. This is indulgence of another kind, these Sunday vigils.

There is no cleansing. So cake on Sundays. Reminders of all the strong tastes of this new world that still overwhelm, that still induce nausea because there are times when they lapse and lose resistance, can’t stand the sharp, bold flavors of the food of this time, can only eat bread because all that fills their mouths is the malty taste of yeast, the taste that all food bore in that time. The bite of cake melts away in her mouth, dissolving to nothing. Cakes like this, delicate things with delicate skins, easily shattered and ruined, and their perfume all the more potent for it, those are things for people like her. They aren’t for people like him. She never offers a bite. He never asks for one.

This cake would have been unforgivably expensive back then. No sugar, no salt, no spice, no flavor, not in the outer walls. A cake would have only been for those who could afford it, only for those with the highest status. She’d had a slice, on her first day on the job, a lure, just a sliver of what could be promised to them if they obeyed their superiors, didn’t protest, did what they were told. The texture crumbled to ash in her mouth. Behind the cloying taste of sugar still lingered the sour note of yeast. The cakes nowadays are infinitely more complicated, elevated to art forms in the delicacy of their conception, creation and decoration. In this era, there are cakes that don’t make them gag, spongy and light, gentle. None of them taste anything like yeast.

Another bite. The tang of lemon, the fragrance of vanilla, tantalizing, nauseating. She tastes malt too, smoke, the smell of his tea as the breeze wafts the scent of it under her nose. He drinks steadily, like he’s been given a mission, like he’s been ordered to. Maybe he was, a long, long time ago, once upon a time, when monsters roamed the earth and people fought for their survival instead of just living day to day in this dull, meaningless haze of convenience. Maybe that’s how he got his first taste of it, after all, tea was a luxury back then, too.  

He likes green teas the most, she knows, wears this strange, almost teary looking smile whenever he gets a whiff of his first cup in the mornings. There’s always one bag of that particular kind of green tea, the one that smells almost acrid, grassy and bright, almost floral. With the steam rising in his face, with the fragrance of it permeating throughout the apartment, it smells a little like sunlit meadows.

Clink.

Merciless, savage slice, the cake in horizontal halves. Control in violence, control in emotion. Sweet, sweet, disgustingly sweet vanilla lemon cream, the slightly sour aftertaste lingering in the corners of her mouth. Evisceration. He holds her gaze from across the table. Green.

Green means go, she thinks, that’s just one of the many things that they’ve learned. Shoulders loose, head up, cradling the simple but clean lines of one of the café’s tea sets, fragile, paper-thin, bone-cream china. If she were inclined towards being artistic, she might have said something about how it reminds her of how he fights, how he should fight, with his body relaxed and rolling with the hits, but how more often he shatters not unlike porcelain in critical situations, like the teacup gently held in his fingers.

The breeze filters in through the window. He takes a silent sip of his tea.

ii.

Sometimes he remembers, with startling clarity, that the titans have never gone anywhere. They just stay inside now, seething under human skin. But the killing of a person, a family, a town, is as easy as ever. Plumes of smoke rise over the steppes in the direction of the settlement they left from three days ago—there were many children among the tents, he remembers, in each of the enormous lodgings composed of cloth and hide flung over short wooden masts, hosting several generations and branches of families. The children begged for tales and songs, herded the crowds of goats through combined, earnest effort, made sport of finding cacti with the brightest, nicest blooms, the juiciest, most succulent fruit.

“Don’t,” Annie says behind him, unyielding, and the white horse she’s riding whinnies softly, nudges the nose of his own roan mount. Times like these he wants to spit at her. She’s had plenty of experience leaving people behind. But she’s right, and he knows it too. Turning back won’t undo what’s already been done.

Later, he’ll regret it, resenting Annie like he always does, because it tires him and it’s been years. He’s justified in his anger, no one would argue with him over that, but Annie has always been sensible and level-headed where he has not, and sometimes he feels like he needs someone to blame, someone to snap at when he doesn’t get his way. By the time he woke her from her self-imposed exile he was older than her, and he had spent the years in between thinking of Annie’s tutelage and whip-sharp tactics every time he fought, always wondering why she’d taught him to defend himself if she was just going to betray him in the end, remembering how the candles used to highlight her small, but genuine smile whenever the trainees talked late into the night. He would think about Annie, think about Bertholdt and Reiner, and he would seethe, he would stoke his anger and keep it close to him in the times he felt lost, killing not titans, but human beings when the Operations Squad was on the run.

“Do you think we chose this,” he remembers Bertholdt screaming, “Do you think it was easy?!”

Did it matter what they chose, if they still did it? Did their regret and remorse really make up for anything at all, for killing his mother, or for the thousands of lives that were lost in the aftermath, in the refugee camps and the reclamation campaigns? Or for the people who died in the streets as a result of the social tensions rising from a lack of space and resources?

And it makes him angry, because even despite that, he still cares. If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t be angry. But he remembers how Reiner used to look after them, nudging them along to the nurse’s station when someone got hurt during training, how they used to wake Bertholdt with their snickers when they tried to guess the weather from his sleep contortions. And when the two of them had first told him of their intentions, he spent hours, limbless, strapped to their backs, wondering how he could have ever depended on them, ever trusted them, frantically re-examining every interaction he’d ever had with them in the past, abruptly recalling how Bertholdt seemed to be a little wary of him, or how Reiner sometimes would say the most random things like there was a hidden punchline.

Logically, he knows that Reiner and Bertholt probably didn’t have a choice, that they had been chosen and sent out by others, by adults, to do adult’s work. And already, he knows he gives Annie more benefit of the doubt than he ever gave them. Her frankness, her resignation, her tiredness—they are things that speak to him, things that he remembers in the slump of Armin’s back after his third kill, or the stiffness of Captain Levi’s shoulders in the midnight darkness of the kitchen.

His anger at Bertholdt and Reiner is different. It’s the deception that enrages him, the inability and unwillingness to be able to accept and own up to their actions. That Reiner asked him to leave with them despite knowing his feelings, his history, was a personal slight, an indication that he probably hadn’t ever listened to a single word Eren said, or tried to digest and understand it. And Bertholdt, Bertholdt had been dangerous because his unraveling was cold, was borne of a seeming complacency and the nervousness and anxiety that had underlined the duration of his time as a trainee.

He wanted them to be bad. He wanted them to be evil. But they were all children then, all desperate, and Eren remembers wondering how different things really were if he himself was so hellbent on destroying the titans, made friends with a couple shifters anyway, and found out he was one himself. How different were things really, if they could go out and wipe out an entire village, Bertholdt and Reiner’s home?

“We’re almost home,” the two of them had kept saying, when they ran away from the walls. “We’ll be back, soon."

Home, they wanted desperately to go home, fought hard and frantic for it. Bertholdt at the end of his rope, screaming until Commander Erwin sliced him deep in the chest, and carried on his back, Eren had heard the abrupt stop of his voice, felt the sudden slackness of his body as he crumpled. If his mother was still alive, if his home was still there, would he be like that too? Infiltrating the enemy camp, killing thousands of people, ruining lives, but still making connections and friends—and then getting to have the luxury of running away? Of leaving destruction behind, and taking just the guilt and the evidence of the crime with them, getting to go back to a home, a village that still existed, and forgetting, cleansing the dirt and the filth away?

Childish. And they were children then. But not all of them got to be children, not all of them got lucky enough to be able to hide and put a timeline on things, to say that when the plan was over and done, they could pack up and go back to a mother’s warm embrace, to idle days of helping out around the house.

The longer the war had drawn out, the more difficult it was to make distinctions. They were child soldiers, and Eren was a human and a titan, and he’d spent days disoriented in the infirmary, quietly reeling from the gaps in his memory, unsure of what had happened, and when. Fighting to survive in the walls, fighting for survival outside of them, and wasn’t it ironic that in the end, Eren was the one who broke the walls down, and ran away, just like them.

iii.

People often think that they’re an eloped couple. Annie rolls her eyes but doesn’t protest. It’s easier, she says, to let people come up with their explanations than to keep your own story straight all the time.

Eren doesn’t understand it, she can tell. It’s only been a couple years since they went on the run, and even though they sleep in the same room for convenience and to stretch what money they have, they try to stay as far apart as possible. On days like this, tension thickens when they’re in a room together, because even when Eren’s lips are pressed into a thin, impatient line, he won’t say anything about how he feels.

“If you’ve got something to say, then say it,” Annie snaps more than once.

But he doesn’t. He just looks at her with that face, drained of color, mouth pinched, and says nothing. He’s become good at keeping secrets. He’s become good at being silent, and it surprises her some days when she suddenly sees him moving from the corner of her eyes, his footsteps near undetectable, only the slight rustle of his clothing a sign of his approach.

She tries to force it out of him. Back then, his face when he’d pleaded with her, denying, taking her side, had sent a bolt of pleasure up her spine, because it meant that he trusted her, looked up to her, still valued what she had taught him. But students outgrow their teachers, and she had smiled, wide, unnerving, because that was what she amounted to, relationships intentionally made, intentionally broken. Even though she became so many meters of inhuman strength and glistening muscle, she hurt, she hurt, wanted to find a way out like nothing else, wanted to go home, wanted to talk to her father because he was right, he was right, she should have held them all at arms’ length, should have all regarded them with suspicion.

“I liked it,” she spits, angry, and the thrum of her blood is strong in her ears. “Is that what you wanted to hear? I liked killing them. I got to be creative. I got to be strong. I got to be in control.” Big green eyes, but they don’t look up at her anymore, now they look down, and his face has changed, his jaw grown out of childish roundness, the line of his throat muscled and smooth. He looks at her with something dark lurking behind his gaze.

“Talk,” she hisses.

He won’t. He stands and walks out of the room.

iv.

The city is cold and grey, lined with soot and powered by gas and grease, built on extreme class disparities, exploitative labor, and rigid social structure. There’s electricity here, but only in sparing amounts; only the upper classes can afford to have the wires and cables installed in their homes. The streetlamps that light her way to work and mark the way home still run on oil, and what little light sparks inside them is dulled by an untold amount of smoke layered onto the glass panes.

It’s not in her nature to hide her displeasure, but they don’t have the funds to continue moving. So she adjusts and adapts as she does with all things. She’s no stranger to laying low, or to hiding behind a bland face. Full skirts and petticoats quickly become the norm for her, but she allows no corset to bind her waist and restrict her breathing, and she wears shorts and boots under her plain, patched dresses. She won’t let herself be bound by the silly perceptions of women they have here, and he almost seems to take it worse than she does, the muscles in his jaw jumping at the dismissive language, at the public spats, at the way the newspapers talk about fallen women, hysterical women, women and marriages, but not women on their own.

“All the women I knew were strong,” he says, when he looks up to meet her level gaze. “All of them.”

But he doesn’t say anything when she takes a little longer in front of the mirror than she used to, because he knows just as well as she does that no matter how strong she is, how easily she could kill a man, in a place like this, the strongest weapon a woman can have is her appearance. Even if he had something to say about it, he knows better than to judge her frivolously—she lectured and beat that into him long ago, instilled that lesson with her own actions and betrayal. She doesn’t do anything she doesn’t mean to do, and she doesn’t do much anyway, aside from ensuring that her face and clothes are neat and clean, gathering her hair in a severe knot at the base of her head.

She manages to get onto the staff of a small ladies’ shop in the center of town, so she supposes she’s decent looking enough. Perfumes, gloves, hats, little useful trinkets, some rouges and powders, tins of sweets that can easily be fit into a purse or a breast pocket—they’re a small but well-rounded shop, and they’re careful to stock seasonal specialties to draw clientele. If she were to put words to it, she’d call its inventory practical and decently priced.

That’s the reason the shop is a sure visit whenever the boarding school girls are in town. Sent away into the country several miles outside the city, they’re taught the necessary skills of a well-bred woman, among which are etiquette, posture, embroidery, literature, and rhetoric, according to the flyers she’d seen distributed around town. Sounds like a load of horseshit to her, but that’s why she’s a store clerk. Not like they won’t be getting the hell out of this thrice-damned city as soon as they can.

But that’s how she meets her again. Clad in the boarding school uniform, a somber grey and dull blue number with matching gloves, she’s a lively, but soft-spoken girl with a quiet kind of beauty, rich auburn hair tied in a low ponytail. Annie can’t figure out for the life of her just what makes her so familiar until the girl tucks a piece of hair behind her right ear, and Annie sees the thin, faded, line of an old scar, small and almost unnoticeable, snaking across her cheek.

Her feet are moving before she knows it, until she’s standing before the auburn-haired girl. “Welcome,” she says. She’s only retreated once in her life. Never again. “How can I help you?”

Sterile. Polite. Just as any store helper would speak to a customer. It feels like ages before the girl responds. With a strange and sudden desperation, Annie wants to see her eyes. She wants to call her name, see if she remembers her voice or her face. She wants to see if there’s anything left of that time in her, if she remembers cutting away Annie’s fingers, the cold, black eyes that looked down upon her in steel condemnation, and sent the same message as her words—

“Fall, Annie.”

The girl turns. Her face is long and angular, her eyes are a shade of muddied brown. All similarity begins and ends with the scar, that small imperfection teasing Annie behind the fall of long hair. She smiles timidly, toys with the handkerchief clenched in one fist. There’s no hint of red anywhere on her person, save for the natural warmth of skin.

“Ah, my underclassman, her birthday’s in a couple weeks,” she says, voice high and sweet, instead of mellow and measured. Her face is open and unguarded, and the girl bites at her lower lip in indecision. “She’s younger than I am, so I was thinking of getting her her first rougebox.”

“Honestly, Melissa,” titters the girl’s friend, “You’re too kind to your dorm sisters! Rouge, of all things!”

The girl—Melissa, apparently—flushes a little. “She’ll be a woman soon,” she murmurs, whispers something into her friend’s ear, and they launch into a flurried, animated discussion, voices low and heads bent toward each other intimately.

Younger brothers, precious underclassmen—always taking care of others, this one. It made Annie angry sometimes, how much this girl had let herself care.

“We have a good selection of rougeboxes, as well as rouges,” Annie replies calmly, and leads them to the back of the store, where the boxes are kept. They’re pretty little things, some of them slender, porcelain medallions with simple latticework and fleur-de-lis for decoration, some of them porcelain boxes with delicate embossing on the small, clawed feet, miniature scenes of gardens, forests or lakes painted on the top. The higher end ones in the inventory bear cloisonné, fine, detailed wire and enamel work. The upper classes often have ones made of metals, silver of gold, encrusted with jewels and semiprecious stones.

“There are so many,” the girl says, hushed in surprise, nudges open the top of one gingerly.

“Maybe this one?” her friend suggests, brow scrunched in helpful concentration, pointing to a small, cute medallion with a ribbon design.

“Mm, I think it’s a little plain,” Melissa says. “It’s a momentous occasion, for a young woman. It should be something nicer…”

“This one, then?”

“I feel if I gave her something like that, it would be patronizing…”

“If you are having trouble deciding, perhaps let me suggest this one,” Annie murmurs, reaching into the back of the display case. The rouge container she withdraws is one of the only ones in the shape of a small pot. The rouge box is made of frosted glass, an unusual choice of materials. Even more strangely, the glass has been tinted a dull, rich, sierra color, translucent where Annie holds it up to the store light, giving the pot a small glow.

“It might be bold, but I believe you’ve mentioned that it’s for some kind of milestone,” Annie says, and she can tell by the look on her face that the girl is already quite taken with the trinket. “Things like that need big reminders. They shouldn’t be forgotten.”

When she places the pot in the girl’s open hand, their hands brush. The heart of the girl’s palm is soft, uncalloused, white and vulnerable, and her eyes dart up to meet Annie’s, wondrous, searching.

In training, they had recognized each other, acknowledged each other’s strengths. Annie had been proud of her skill, even when she had to hide it, luxuriated in the violence and viciousness that she and Eren had shared in their practices together, the smack of skin on skin, the sting of punches and kicks that drew blood. Combat was always demonstration, always statement, and she knew that even if she had nothing else she could have this, this satisfaction, this sheer self-gratification of having control over one’s own body, the veneer and momentary ability to pretend strength and pride, mask fear, mask uncertainty. And she, she had been proud, too, in her own way, knowing that she would go unbeaten, unmatched, that she could outstrip any of their fellow trainees easily. But for her, things were different because she was not sustained on her strength alone. She reveled in her power because of what it meant to her—the ability to protect, to be able to back up her words and make her hopes of survival, of her family’s survival, a reality.

It always came back to family, with her. And even though she didn’t seem to understand brutality and vitality the same way Eren did, she sought out Annie in the girls’ dorm sometimes to stretch together, or to be silent together, when she felt she needed the company. It was for that reason that Annie always saw something of an innocent in her. Curled up in a heap with Armin and Eren in the midst of green meadows, ducking her face into the ever-present red muffler in her melancholy and disappointment, or sitting by herself in the cafeteria, her open palm grasping at nothing, lost, Mikasa was sleek power and steel strength overlaid on a horribly soft center. Weaknesses were worn for all to see, practically daring some poor unfortunate fool to test her deadly combat effectiveness. She was pure in that, shining, aware of the cruelty and suffering in the world but refusing to compromise herself in any way, clinging all the fiercer to that which mattered. That took bravery too, and mettle different from Eren’s brand of stubborn idealism and righteousness. In this, the two of them were much like true siblings, bullheaded and determined, unwilling to submit to fear or reasonable dissent.

Aside from the scuffle that had been broken up by Shadis on the day Eren had first asked Annie to teach him, they only genuinely fought once. A week before graduation saw them grappling and dealing vicious blows to each other in the damp earth of the forests behind the girls’ dorm. A taste of what was to come, Annie had thought cynically to herself with no small amount of bitterness, as she took a jarring blow to her forearm with a hiss. Mikasa would certainly be one of the largest obstacles, with her close ties to Eren. The sour taste of bile lingered in the back of her mouth as she cushioned another hit. Desperation maybe, fueled her movements, nausea, indescribable franticness, and a wave of sweeping hysteria lodging in her throat, in the pit of her stomach. This wasn’t finesse, this wasn’t perfect, precise viciousness, this was a red flag, this was the feeling of fate and certainty and inevitability running deep in her bones. She fell, hit the earth, but Mikasa never went for the killing or pinning blow, stood and looked down at Annie’s body where she’d toppled it, as if she knew Annie had wanted her to prove that she could pin her down, choke her out, kill her if she needed to.

In the moonlight, Annie could see why Mikasa was thought of as beautiful, a collage of contrasts. Mikasa, a confirmation of things that Annie hurt herself with, of strong women who kept their ties to home, to family, to friends, women who were strong and weak simultaneously, except Mikasa sustained herself with those connections, where Annie willfully tore herself to pieces.

“Why are you holding back?” Mikasa had asked, demanded.

“I’m not,” Annie had replied, and she hadn’t. She didn’t and doesn’t pull punches, not for others, not on herself. 

The fine line of Mikasa’s brow wrinkled, her mouth very slightly pursed. Dissatisfaction, Annie decided, was the emotion there.

“Thank you,” Mikasa had said finally, and somehow it didn’t seem like it cost much for her to say it, even though she and Annie had a relationship predominately grown off mutual introversion and competitiveness. But Annie didn’t know what she was being thanked for. There was nothing constructive in going down that road.

Annie had walked away empty-handed that night, having gained nothing, lost nothing. She felt all the worse for it, threw up in the morning, and she carried the sour tang of vomit into the Military Police with her in the pockets of her cheeks, never stopped tasting that bitterness in her mouth when she woke.

The next time she had seen Mikasa, the girl had been screaming, sweeping through the trees, and she’d cut out Annie’s eyes, severed tendons and jaw as Annie fell, cut down, this time for real. Mikasa was always making her fall, looking down from her lofty perch, and sometimes Annie wondered what she had to do to have that, and hated her. But in shadowed silence, leaning close, scant space between their bodies, Annie admired her, and Mikasa smiled, sometimes, at the snatches of conversation that filtered between the bunks, and shuffled closer.

More than one thousand years into the future, Melissa shakes her head.

“That isn’t what I’m looking for, I’m afraid. Though, it is beautiful.” She smiles placatingly, no recognition on her face.

Annie blinks, and puts the pot back.

“I suppose it wasn’t a good fit,” she says, and her hands do not shake.

Melissa buys her rouge box; Annie doesn’t watch her leave.

They do not meet again.

v.

On every continent, in every country, everywhere that people are, there is war, violence, and conflict.

Annie and Eren land in a neighborhood where they are painfully conspicuous, a mismatched couple with foreign features among a sea of black, tan, and brown faces, all of them regarding them with suspicion and hostility, and there are several nasty encounters with shouting groups of townspeople, watching Eren and Annie by firelight warily when they bump into each other on the roads at night. But the rent in the enclaves is cheap, and Eren and Annie do their best to keep to themselves. Their papers are not real.

In the third month, riots begin to break out. The conflict is clearly divided in the streets beneath their small, dingy apartment, and the local militia is there, white faces, pink arms, wielding bats and guns, and there’s screaming coming from below. Clouds of smoke, people staggering about, howling for the pain in their eyes, being dragged away, and Annie gives Eren’s pinched face a warning glance.

The man who lives two floors down, who started waving to them in greeting on the evenings and offering them friendly smiles, takes a club to the head, falls to the ground, and lies still.

Annie just watches Eren as he grabs his jacket and wraps a scarf around the bottom of his face, watches from the window as he begins to herd around the edges of the panicked mass of people, starts dragging the injured aside, and fills their flat with terrified, bleeding people.

Annie goes to put the coffee on, and Eren coaxes them into showing him their injuries, one by one, and their first aid supplies are all gone by the end of it. Broken bones, internal injuries, they can do nothing about, nor can they do anything about the anguished, crying faces scattered about the living room.

It’s obvious. In the store where Eren works, the white owner directs nasty glances and sharp words to anyone of color who sets a foot inside, so at odds with the sweet smile on his face when the well-to-do families come in. Eren himself gets the treatment more than once, and he gets the feeling that he gets laughed at behind a lot of closed doors. He understands enough to know what is being said—that he is too stupid to be paid at proper wage, that his warbling accent and broken speech are clear sign of his mental capabilities. It’s a good thing that Eren has learned to withstand humiliation, and that he doesn’t mind what work he gets as long as he gets paid. Their object isn’t to stay, but to make enough to move on, after all.

The docks where Annie works are filled with colored men, some from other enclaves, and she is one of few women, and the only one with fair skin, who work there. The dock supervisors had tried to convince her, at first, to look for something else, saying that the work was unsafe and not fit for a woman, but Annie likes the cleansing feeling of working up a sweat, and this is at least more useful than working in a kitchen, or a church, where Annie wouldn’t have the first idea of what to do. Each enclave’s workers have a different twang in their language, and Annie learns them all, learns how to greet the people in the neighborhood properly, respectfully, eats lunch with them and learns their working songs, even if she doesn’t sing along. Annie and Eren learn new words every day—monkeys, savages, unclean, beasts, traitor, other, always Other. Once they learn the vocabulary, they find that the newspaper is full of careful phrasings and unsubtle biases, cementing dehumanization. Funny that, Eren thinks with no small amount of bitterness, humanity has not changed at all.

On the streets, Annie gets yelled at sometimes, asked why she hangs out with someone like Eren, why she lives where she lives, or works where she works. The neighbors mumble about them, how they cavort around together so publicly. She gets dragged to the side of the street by the well-meaning mothers, cornered by the well-dressed folk on the street when she sometimes gets off early and waits for Eren outside of the general store. She brushes them off, most days, because it’s really none of their business why she and Eren travel together. Anyone who tries to get physical is warned off by steady, strong fists and a glacial stare.

“That girl is too good for you,” she hears the store owner grumble, as she waits at the back door, “What’d you do to get her so attached to you, eh, brownie?”

Eren lets it go, water sliding off a duck’s back, smiles sweetly at the mother who glances hesitantly between him and his boss, who’s muttering something insulting about the size of Eren’s penis, offering her the paper bag containing her purchases. Lies and slander are not new things to Eren, not by any means, and he’s learned a lot of patience in the ten years Annie didn’t see him.

The truth is, none of it is surprising.  There were lands where people thought he was a slave, countries where Annie’s blue eyes marked her as a devil. And back then, people had thought Mikasa beautiful because of her pale skin, her long, straight hair, and the arrangement of her features. “Exotic” they said, “rare” and he knew they were talking about Mikasa like some kind of prize, some kind of thing to possess. Once upon a time, two dead men walking had thought that kind of difference was worth killing for, ruining lives for, and Eren had been sure that they were not the only ones. He broke a lot of noses during their trainee years. This isn’t anything different. This is just the same ugly thing, revealed and moved into the open, fat on ingrained, accepted hatred.

They used to say that the humans set aside their petty conflicts to unite against the titans, but the Wall Society hadn’t needed much reason to start civil unrest. People are not good. People are not kind. People scramble over each other, smash each other down, to reach their goals, to feel good about themselves, to have that small edge of power over others, no matter how miniscule. Eren has watched the way his neighbors deride and complain about the Western enclave, full of families with small statures, bulky features, straight, black hair, and a range of brown and tan skin, about competition for jobs. And that enclave, he knows, from the gossip that filters in through the back door on his breaks, is dismissive of his neighbors, and they have run-ins on the street sometimes while the well-off pale-skinned gentlemen, who are sometimes tinted with something darker, sometimes not, titter off to the side, laughing at the insipidness of the inferior groups, all the while grasping at their handkerchiefs with sweaty hands. These are not the same well-dressed gentlemen who deliberately come to the church in Eren’s neighborhood to speak their Sunday prayers, slip checks into the donation boxes, bring sumptuous but rarely-seen dishes to the potlucks, who make sure the people around them are comfortable because they remember the communities from which they grew up, remember and still face similar challenges everyday, even if more well hidden.  

“There’s a lot of history,” one of his neighbors says on a house visit, once Eren has learnt to speak in broken chains of sentences. “About who was here first, who was forced to be here. About old wars and massacres and grudges. Being misplaced. Those things don’t go away so easily.”

Things that dig under your skin, build up layer by layer, things that people tell you until it makes a blister of you, until you hear it and believe them. Eren is not a person of color, not really, but he is inhuman, and that idea of inhumanity he understands intimately well. History, he also knows, is not easily forgotten.

He doesn’t know what Annie would say. He beheads the fish wriggling weakly on his cutting board, watches the blood drain into the sink.

“The world is cruel,” he says simply. “People are cruel. So you have to fight back.” He drops handfuls of fish innards into the garbage bin, pale, slimy, muddled things. It’s a simple dish, just spring onions, garlic and oil sautéed lightly, then placed with the fish for steaming. Simple but good, and a dish that he still remembers his mother used to make. He’s carried it with him all these years, and it’s become a staple of their travels, Eren making this dish whenever they settle in a place for any sort of longer period.

The fish, his neighbor says later, clasping Eren’s hand between her own, smiling gently, was very good. She had lost her brother to the riots a month and a half ago. He’d bled out on the tiles in this kitchen. She’d had to be forcibly held back when they dragged away the body. Eren doesn’t know if the body’s been cremated, buried, or dumped. Cemeteries are not places where Annie and Eren belong.

Fish swim, people walk. When he feels the tide rising in his blood, Eren makes fish, reminds himself of what he left behind, reminds himself that he needs to move and survive. They’ve been saving, quietly, living frugally and honestly, and they almost have enough. They will leave this town.

vi.

The settlements near the border of where Wall Maria used to stand are still too small for Eren and Annie to hide in, and there’s nowhere else in the world they know. They release their horses, turn them back in the direction of the walls, having no resources with which to care for them. They live off the land, digging for root vegetables, pulling out edible weeds and plants, washing them in rivers and eating them raw, getting by on rabbits and small rodents, snakes and insects. And every day, they walk, they walk and walk, wandering, aimless. Sometimes they’re on grassy plains, walking as fast as they can and sticking close to the smatterings of brush that are few and far between, wary of the titans they’ve seen wandering around, here and there. Sometimes they’re in dense forest, the trees woven so closely together almost no sunlight reaches the floor, and the damp earth beneath their boots moves, layered with dead leaves, bark, mushrooms and writhing piles of worms. Eren wishes he could talk to Armin, wishes he could tell him that the world really is so big, so endlessly large and vast that he loses himself in it every day. He wonders what the end of the world might look like, if he could find it.

In the beginning, Annie asks, “Why did you take me with you?” As always, Eren searches her face, but he never really knows what she’s thinking.

“I couldn’t very well have left you behind, could I?”

Annie huffs, the same, small, sneering, spiteful snicker she used to give whenever Eren tried to argue with her.

“Don’t be obtuse. ‘I should have left you here’,” she parrots mockingly. “So why didn’t you?”

She’s not arguing with him now. She’s got no ammunition, no weapon that he doesn’t know, not anymore. Hysteria, creeping with slow fingers, edging at her throat and at the slightly wild corners of her eyes, panic, sinking into her bones, into the bleeding rips in her dry, cracked lips, into the thin, pale strip of skin on her index finger where her ring used to sit. She is stripped thin and bare, bending, weak. A weak, little girl, just like she had always told Eren, not because she pitied herself but because that was what she was, tired,  hungry for things that she found in the worst places. She had had a duty, a responsibility, but in the end she was sent scrambling for home, for a precious kind of love and caring that pressed blows and attacks against her, cupped her face with worn, gentle hands, and knelt in front of her and told her not to trust anyone, not to give any bit of herself away. Tears had streaked down an age-spotted, wrinkled, battered face, and a well-known mouth, one so similar to her own she felt as if she recognized every movement of lips and tongue , begged her, begged, for her to come home.

She woke up to a changed world, to a familiar stranger. This Eren doesn’t move how she remembers, doesn’t speak or look at her like he used to—whenever she feels his eyes on her and looks up to meet his gaze, he looks away where he would have stood fast and fearless before. She used to admire him, for his idealism, his fire, but she sees precious little of it in him now. Even so, Eren is just as useless at letting things go as he used to be. They don’t have much in the way of clothing, just the few extra shirts and pants they were able to salvage from the wreckage of Maria, some of it already worn from insects or weathered by the elements. But buried at the bottom of Eren’s repurposed pack is the shirt he first met her in, and she’s seen him washing it, trying to get the stains out.

He’d told her they failed, but the walls are gone. He’d told her they failed, but he  is out here, with her, of his own volition, like perhaps he would have been if she hadn’t let herself get tired, get exhausted in the forest, if she’d made it out with Eren in her jaws, taken him home. He’d told her they failed, but he didn’t say how. He didn’t say if her home was still standing, didn’t tell her if Reiner and Bertholdt were alive, didn’t ask her questions. Just looked at her with those murky eyes, green and opaque like the algae atop the sewers that ran near the western Rose refugee camp she had been herded into with Reiner and Bertholdt. He didn’t tell her anything, and she bore it silently, the weight he invested in her. The burden on her shoulders, even now, was increasing, and she needed to know why.

“Warriors”, Reiner and Bertholdt had called themselves. How valiant, how courageous, how self-sacrificing—Annie preferred the terms that were actually true. She would have called them fools. Violence was the tool she used, not as a blunt brutal force like Reiner did, but honed to sharp, thin precision, strong enough and deft enough that she could use it even on herself, could slide in close and secret to the walls of bone and crystal that protected her.

Eren just presses his lips together, tightly. She wonder if he himself understands it, the reason why he brought her with him.

“Closure, maybe,” he murmurs, and for a moment he looks startling vulnerable, long lashes dusting = ruddy cheeks as he averts his eyes from her gaze.

“Closure?” she presses.

“You aren’t pure,” he says, finally, and it hurts to hear it somehow, especially from him. His face looks a little pained, as if she were pulling every word from his throat forcibly. “But it’s something like that. You’re…undiluted. I think you’ve always been that way. And even….even in Stoess, you weren’t anything aside from what you were.” He scrapes several strands of curling hair back from his face, sweeps them behind an ear. It leaves his cheek bare. It’s disconcerting.

“I used to sit in front of your crystal sometimes,” he says, brings his legs up to his chest to cross his arms over them loosely. Suddenly, he looks like he did when she first sealed herself away, a little young, a little unsure, as if what he’s telling her is not quite a thing a shame, not quite a secret either. “I wondered why you did what you did. Why you attacked us. Why you taught me. And you know, I thought, even if she wakes up, she’d probably never tell me. But I also thought that maybe it didn’t matter how I felt or how you felt because things had already happened.

“Captain Levi used to say something,” Eren says, taps a slow, idle beat on his knees. “’Make the choice that leaves you with no regrets,’ he said. He wasn’t a particularly good or kind man, but that saying of his stuck with me for a long, long time. It never really worked, honestly. I always wonder if I could have done something different. The regrets never really go away.”

He’s silent for a little, leans in and nuzzles his cheeks against his knees.

“I still have so many questions,” he says. “And I used to think that you were an answer.”

She heaves another dry snort. “You still talk too much. I betrayed you. I’m a traitor. You heard Mikasa. I fell.”

“But you never went away,” Eren says, his words coming faster, tumbling over one another. “When we got stuck someone would suggest trying to crack open the crystal again. Whenever I fought someone I couldn’t help but wonder, sometimes, what you would do in my place. And after you, Armin started changing, thinking. I know you don’t, care, or anything, but you never went away. Sometimes it felt like you were shadowing everything we did.”

“So what do you want me to do about it,” she drawls, but the thin, virulent resentment worms its way in, a hiss underneath the words.

“Nothing,” he says, licks dry lips, and his eyes trail away from her face, to the distant tree line. “I don’t expect anything from you. Leave if you want. Shift and try to kill me, if you want.”

She wants to punch him. Madness creeps in, lights her limbs on fire, and she clenches her trembling hands.  She wants to lose it, unrestrainedly, wholly, rip her precious control to shreds, lunge at his neck, slam his head against the ground until it splits like an overripe melon, crisp and not so clean. Clean break. Neat cuts. Line the soldiers up by their pendulums, swing them around until their spines snap, wet crunch, giving way like a crisp apple in between her teeth.

Control, power, weakness, and Annie was fifteen, she is still fifteen. I’m just a weak, little girl, she said, but Eren told her she was the strongest girl he knew, and when she raised an eyebrow at him he looked away with an embarrassed flush and grumbled that Mikasa didn’t count. She wants to dig her fingers into his face and rip the skin off, wants to demand how he can do this to her, bring her out of dreams and stillness and peace to this confusing world, wants to bloody him good, bloody him dead, shake and scream and unravel, because he told her they failed but wouldn’t tell her what they lost.

Annie knew, back then, that she was condemning, killing herself. She relished it, the slow, guilty burn that spread through her limbs when she couldn’t stop her lips from turning up at Mina’s antics, the triumph that built in her chest when she saw Eren using her techniques properly, teaching him to kill just like her father had taught her, a beautiful executioner of her own. Accepting her fall, embracing it in the most beautiful way, because she wasn’t like Reiner and Bertholdt, she was a fool, a fool, but fools saw simply and truthfully. She saw her father’s clumsy, terrible love in broken bones and bleeding skin, read loving lines into the bruises she set just under Eren’s skin with all the precision she could muster, accepted Mina’s easy friendship and generosity, settled into the line of Mikasa’s body and her effortless strength and faith. She warmed herself by their hearths, a temporary lodger, but in the dark she thought of sunken cheeks and a lonely kitchen, quiet, plodding footsteps in the worn hallways outside as she rubbed at her eyes in the dark and clambered out of bed to latch onto a pant leg. She had been small then, and her father’s hand at the back of her head was so gentle, so delicate, and he’d smiled, sad and wavering and told her never to trust anyone.

Betrayer, traitor, clambering up the wall and forgetting that of course she’d slip right off because there was nothing there to hold onto, no base, no foundation for her to start building from. Eren’s grip around her wrists was gentle and firm, but when the soldiers cut her out, luminous green eyes showed no recognition. Helpful, quiet, kind giant, and Eren’s docility and her own failure brought her to tears. Closing her eyes, she wanted to sleep, slip away, and she was back in that hallway, her father’s hand slipping to the back of her neck, gripping her there. She clutched his memory close, remembering the promises she’d been given in the forest, when Captain Levi had told her exactly they would do to her if she was ever captured.

“Why did you take me with you?” she says again.

He just blinks at her, inscrutable. “Closure,” he repeats. “I’m not done talking to you.”

He won’t say it all. There’s more to that than just talking, just closure. He talks about her like she’s a symbol, but talks to her like he would any casual acquaintance.

“How old are you?” she asks, after several minutes of silence.

“Twenty-five,” he says, leans back on his hands, stretches his legs out, drums his heels on the ground like he’s a kid. “Surprised I’m still alive, really.”

“And of the others…who isn’t?” she asks, fists clenched on her knees. Bodies broken on the cobblestone, Mina’s face missing from the final roster of soldiers after Trost. The smell of rot, as they counted the dead, heaved them into carts to be burned by the tens and hundreds.

“You mean who isn’t alive? A lot of people,” Eren replies offhandedly, picking at the grass beside his hip. “I don’t really think it matters though,” he says, “They don’t mean anything to you, do they?”

It’s not even a pointed comment. He just says it, nonchalant, inflectionless, blinks at her with those large, murky green eyes, moss and pond scum. The urge towards violence drains from her limbs as the disorientation, the eeriness sets in, because she doesn’t really know what could have happened in ten years that would let Eren say that so easily.

“That’s alright,” he continues, closing his eyes and shifting to his side, pack cushioning his head, ready to drift off. He blinks again, slow and heavy. “Sometimes I don’t know if it means anything to me either,” he murmurs faintly, and closes his eyes.

vii.

When he wakes from dreams, wakes from memory, he wonders how he still remembers anything at all, tens upon hundreds of years’ worth of useless information and experience flooding his mind. He can’t keep track of birthdays, of work anniversaries, but he can remember things like how Historia smelled when they slept in the same bed for comfort, similar to the smell his father’s patients often gave off. And Historia, she wasn’t sick, but she was afflicted. Something stronger than lovesickness or homesickness, nothing so banal, so trivial as missing a home because most of them did, most of them had seen their homes destroyed, smashed and razed to the ground. Historia was like him, yawning wide open, gaping, like a black hole. They were hungry creatures, starving, sustaining themselves on fumes, desperate but empty, sinkholes. Others could immerse themselves in them, in passion or beauty, in role models and muses, but he and Historia, they were the type of people who had never been taught to let go, because they had been taught to grab and hold on to whatever they could.

Not much of that here. Flickering, moving images, flashing by in the blink of an eye. Movies, cell phones, computers, televisions, radios, cars, trains and trams, the speed of the modern world sweeping him up in its clutches. He spends hours negotiating that transience, spends hours smiling at people and greeting them, spends hours speaking, saccharine and dripping syrup, into the phone, organizes schedules and arranges meetings. Endless streams of information, new editions of newspapers, magazines on a daily or monthly basis, new articles on websites, on blogs.

Annie likes reality shows, variety shows. Likes to watch the human condition, likes to watch the human struggle. It’s unfair, but he sometimes wonders what she thinks about humans, truly. How she categorizes herself, human or inhuman. It’s been years, centuries, and sometimes he still can’t help but look at her and think Other, look at her and wonder when she’ll leave.

He wonders if they would fight. He wonders if he would care. He wonders if the anger and burden of history might swallow them, might force them to shift. He wonders if they could flatten the city like that, if they could destroy the world, plunge it back into fire and walls and underground hideouts.

Laughable. There are other things more dangerous than them now.

But this is malaise talking. This is the exhaustion, the frustration speaking, because he knows he is still here because Annie is still here. Her steady presence, her immovable object to his unstoppable force, the unspoken history and the silences on Sunday nights when the anger and guilt leak away, spent. All these things root him and force him to engage beyond the trap his mind has become.

The other day, she asked him if she was normal, and he saw the girl who stood above him at the top of the stairs, standing tall, as close to hopeful as he’d ever seen her. Annie is all of these things: mentor, sometimes-friend, betrayer, foil. She’s cold-blooded and merciless, she’s lonely and frustrated, she’s proud and small. When she first smashed in that underground corridor in Stoess, he wanted to be angry, he wanted to understand, and it’s taken him a long time to realize that his feelings of betrayal and confusion are really one in the same—he just wanted to believe in her, put faith in her like he used to.

Annie’s never apologized, and Eren doubts she ever will.  But there are other things too. Animals like her, and she likes cakes and coffee. She prefers pants over dresses, likes organic materials over synthetic ones, likes cold beer, and physical work. She sleeps face down in her pillow; Eren never figures out how she doesn’t suffocate in her sleep. As always, Annie is wiser than he, and sometimes he feels like she’s still schooling him everyday.

She’s still asleep next to him, her fine blonde hair is tossed into bedhead of epic proportions, and there’s drool smeared on her cheek. She’s prone to falling off the bed, so he always takes the outside edge. He tosses on the undershirt he threw on the bedpost after his shower yesterday, and heads to the kitchen for breakfast. There’s still so much for him to do, so much for him to work on. There’s no reason to stop now.

viii.

The world is large and people are tenacious. They stumble upon village after village, two months, three months, six months, ten months separating each brief brush they have with human culture. There are villages that remember, faintly, what the world used to be like, miles and miles of tattered, moth-eaten books and age-yellowed maps packed and hidden in cold, stone rooms, there are villages that hide themselves underground, the people freezing whenever they hear rumbling above their heads, waiting for the day that the titans crash through their fragile defenses. They all fight the titans in their own ways, using incendiary, handthrown devices a little like bombs, precision launchers aimed at the back of the neck, chemicals that eat flesh away to nothing, even grappling systems that are unnervingly close to the 3D maneuver gear. Some villages are even able to stand tall, unlimited by walls or caves or shields, sprawling out with large fields and extensive mines, chariots powered on steam and gas dodging nimbly between titan feet to slice tendons in the ankle, the heel, shooting out the nape in neat, coordinated formations when the body falls, motions so smooth and practiced that the attacks seem like a dance.

They get thrown in a lot of prisons, shoved to their knees in front of many kings and councils. Language, clothing, and custom are completely foreign to them, and sometimes, in places where the shades of their skin or the color of their eyes makes them stand out, the villagers will come close, peering at Eren’s eyes in wonder, touching Annie’s hair softly and murmuring to each other in awe. Other times, the villagers will flinch and turn away, glancing uneasily at Annie’s eyes, making gestures over their heads or chests. Her body stiff, she makes sure never to look at Eren during these times. There are times too, where the sight of people led by chains and carelessly beaten in the street makes Eren’s blood boil, when the villagers speak only to Annie, and dismiss him with a single glance for his darker, tan skin. Sometimes, it’s the other way around. When in doubt, they nod along, learn to read the tilt and sway of people’s bodies, even if they can’t understand the words spoken to them.

Once, they’re shown a precious local monument. Towering, opaque, crystalline sentinels, arranged in a large, stilted circle, and their guide chatters away enthusiastically in a hard-and-soft language, the sounds from their throat harsh and guttural, the short, soft jumble in between each throat-sound charming and lyrical. They sketch out the legend of how the monument came to be in the soft soil at their feet, but Eren and Annie recognize the pillars for what they are. Eren makes barely a peep throughout the trip, bearing Annie’s sharp stares with a bare minimum of grace on the walk back to the village.

Titans are still a constant. As one might suspect, they change along with the humans. Long and lean in warm temperatures, short and squat in cold temperatures, sometimes more active or more lethargic, sometimes moving individually or in swarms. Not all of them are sensitive to shifters either; Eren has walked among some without trouble several times, Annie carefully cupped in his hands. For whatever reason, she refuses to shift now, hasn’t transformed since Stoess. In extreme temperatures, stumbling wearily through the deserts feeling their bones bleach even while still in their skins, or huddling together against fierce wind and snow, the titans are entirely absent, unable to sustain themselves in overwhelming heat, and absolute cold.

More than anything, Eren wishes he could talk to Armin. He’s seeing them all, lands of ice and fire, snow and sand, lands where the forest stretches on for miles, and he can watch odd, four-handed, tailed creatures swing from one tree to another, some of them approaching him curiously if he and Annie stay in one area long enough. While gathering roots and berries and hunting for meat, he and Annie freeze when a large catlike animal lopes by their bush, strong muscles rippling over the black fur. There are huge snakes, forests that are more water than forest, the shouts of birds and the buzz of insects louder than anything Eren could have ever dreamed of, and he and Annie stay awake all through the night, too wary to sleep, until they manage to bump into a group of men and women with harpoons propped on their shoulders and nets in their hands.

The world is endless, truly, and the people they meet are all so drastically different. An entire village with faces resembling Mikasa’s, and while he’s there he searches every single person for her face, without knowing why. There are people with Annie’s coloring, Reiner’s strong bone structure, the sweeping delicacy of Historia’s eyes and mouth, and the harsh, crass humor of Captain Levi, there are people like Ymir and Eren, dark skinned, freckled, but they smile, laugh, argue, and scream with abandon, lean arms flexing in the sunlight as they grind the meal for their flatbread. On the road Annie and Eren eat anything and everything, watching the animals and villagers carefully to see what might be fit to put in their bellies. New flavors and textures, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, savory, creamy richness, heat bursting on the tongue, the unexpected numbness of the mouth, delicate floral fragrances, gelatinously chewy substances. It’s beyond anything they’ve ever had, beyond the potatoes and tough meat, and the hardened, yeasty bread that came with every mess meal is a sure contrast from the bouncy, crusty breads that they’ve had in the villages, from the pan-fried breads they’ve devoured eagerly, grease on their fingers and lips, to the pillowy softness of steamed cakes and buns.

It’s quite funny actually—Eren and Annie first see the ocean living with the villagers of a land covered in snow and ice, so cold that the wind reddens their faces and makes them cry, only for the saltwater to freeze to their cheeks. They grow used to seeing each other inflated, bulked and padded by furs and warm knits, thick boots to the knees, walking silently side by side through flurries of snow. On group trips, Annie always walks ahead, surrounded by large, yipping, leaping sled dogs who run circles around her, prop their paws on her thighs and reach up to nuzzle her face, while Eren hangs behind and learns the language piece by piece from the locals, who laugh at his clumsy tongue and earnest, but lousy pronunciation.

One day, Annie and Eren’s host family, more like their neighbors since they have their own tent to sleep in, takes them to see the lights. Eren already thinks the sky here is unimaginably beautiful. The moon turns black shadow to deep, royal blue, and he is entirely captivated by the way the dark, endless pool of the sky is gutted and ripped into brilliant shreds of purples and blues, lit with an impossible amount of shining stars. He sits and listens patiently to the children that clamber all over him, tugging at his sleeves, his hair, telling him about the stories their mothers and fathers and grandparents whispered to them at bedtime, about how the stars and constellations came into being, fantastical tales of sentient animals, heroes, petty gods and goddesses. But Eren couldn’t have anticipated the shimmering columns of light that ripple and spiral down across the indigo sky, the dapple and shine of vibrant, luminous color reflecting off the dark, churning waters that lap lightly, quietly at the edges of the ice shelf, dark and unfathomable, the expanse of it stretching out to the horizon. Even the pieces of ice that float, lonesome, independent, on the water are outlined in color, the pristine ice and snow all around them layered with a prismatic, glowing wealth of greens, blues and purples, shifting to and fro, somehow warm and welcoming despite the cold.

Eren’s grip on Annie’s wrist is painfully tight. She bears it in silence, glances at him for a brief, brief moment with glacial eyes, only to turn away and pay him no mind, busying herself with the shifting hues of the sky. He doesn’t cry.

“Annie,” he whispers, trembling all over, and he is fifteen again and just graduated and still optimistic, with Armin and Mikasa at his side, he is ten and precocious, crouching in candlelight in between stacks of Armin’s forbidden books, the three of them arranging an escape plan and travel route. He is fifteen, again, standing dazedly before a beautiful sunset with Captain Levi’s corpse lying near his feet, the cold limbs long locked into rigor mortis, thinking, I suppose I’ll have to live after all. “It’s the sea.”

She stares at him, licks dry lips, captivated by the play of light on his face. Glancing up, she watches the colors shift, the organic changes in form.  She is well acquainted with shadows, so she has likewise always been a lover of light, studying it in all its forms and states, but she has never seen something like this, lively and playful, a good kind of change.

“The lights?” she asks, hoarse. She’s lying. She knows what this is. Eren, Armin, even Mikasa mentioned it time and time again, and she learned to love the way they spoke about it, their voices excited and tender and renewed with energy. It gave her a good feeling, and sometimes she felt she could understand why they sought freedom, boundlessness, the beauty of flying high.

“No,” he replies, and he sounds young, sounds the way she remembers. When he speaks, his voice takes on a foreign cadence, a strange enunciation, Armin’s, Eren’s voice a familiar, friendly thing to her ear. Had he always been able to emulate Armin like this? “I mean the water. Three quarters of the world is supposed to be covered in it, this huge, huge body of water deeper than any lake, longer and wider than any river or pond, and it just stretches out and out….”

Color, floating on this “sea” surface, ice and endless horizon, mysterious and inexplicable. When Annie closes her eyes, she can almost imagine the color dancing inside her too, strong and steady.

“The world is large,” she says, opening her eyes, and reaches over to grab Eren’s wrist before his hand loosens and slips away, squeezes briefly. He looks at her with startled blue eyes. His eyes are always blue here, reflecting the howling emptiness of the blizzards that so often plague them, but under the colors that split the sky, his eyes are once again mercurial, their usual odd blend of hues sampled from verdant forest, clear rivers, and overburdened clouds, a mélange of bright iridescent hues and stormy, moody shades that always remind her of him.

“You think so?” he replies, tracing the shapes of the lights with his gaze. His hand slips away anyway, dangles limply at his side. She withdraws, because her hand on his wrist suddenly feels obtrusive, unwanted.

“Yeah,” she replies, grasps the hem of her thick coat instead, pretending that her palms don’t feel empty.

“In places like this,” he says subdued and quiet, “Big places, like those huge plains and, and those winding rock formations that drop off really steeply…I wonder where the world ends, you know. Like, maybe if we walked far enough, we’d just reach the end of it one day. It would just stop. You’d walk toward this skyline but it wouldn’t move away from you, and you end up standing at this edge and beyond it there would just be emptiness. Like sky, maybe, just blue. Or like this, ocean…and water’s blue too, isn’t it?”

“That’s not very empty,” Annie says, watching the sinuous waves of color, their lazy sway matching the ocean currents, the way they disperse into cloudy ether, brief and beautiful. “Blue, I mean.”

“Is it supposed to be empty?”

He vacillates, most days. Goes from shockingly disenchanted to guilelessly, naively, desperately hopeful. He’s fighting, holding on, like he always does. Always fighting himself, fighting his memories, his history, whether he remembers it or not. It seems like even now, he’s outpacing her in his own way.

“I don’t know,” she says, thinking of nothingness, of stillness so absolute it feels like sleep, like complete lack. Her fair hair and pale skin fade straight into the cold, winter landscape, but the footprints that trail behind her are clear and distinct. Her feet are warm and dry inside her boots. “But if it’s the end of something, it shouldn’t be clean.”

“…you’re right,” he bites out, the words weighted, his mouth curling around them delicately and letting them roll off his tongue like something luxurious. Ten years, the time in-between, and blood all over his front when she saw him next, splattering down from his collar. 

He’s finally seen the sea, and so has she. They wave goodbye to their host family when they return, pausing by the mouth of their small, low tent, much smaller than the ones owned by the rest of the villagers, since they don’t have to house multiple family units. Their host family had taken them under their wing, even gently offered their own tent as a place to say, but Annie and Eren needed their own space, where they could talk as they wished. Hot milk around the fire to chase away the lingering chill, and neither of them choose to break the silence until they’re tucked into their pallets, covered in blankets made with the furs of Annie’s first kills. 

For the first time, Annie turns over so they’re lying face to face. The hearth’s dying embers  only just trace the outlines of their forms, the shadow of Eren’s lips, the sweep of Annie’s fragile eyelashes, the edge of an earlobe, the arch of a foot. She can’t see his eyes, but she can feel his gaze, just as loud as it was when they first met.

“Why did you have bloodstains on you when you kidnapped me?” she asks.

“Why did you stay?” he retorts, but his voice is quiet and languorous. “And it wasn’t a kidnapping.”

“It was a kidnapping. How did you wake me up?”

“It wasn’t. Why did you run away?”

“Don’t kid yourself. Why do you still have your key?”

“I don’t kid. Why did you teach me?”

It feels good, somehow, to just ask the questions, even if there are no answers. An acknowledgement of the rift, the time passed, the unresolved and unsolvable. The unspoken is not secret by any means; there have always, and will always, be things that they won’t tell each other, can’t tell each other. But theirs isn’t a relationship built on disclosure or the intimacy that comes with it. A fixed seam there, a new boot lace here, candid discussion of when to leave and where to go. Not easy, but practical, not comfort or pleasure, something more like regularity and habit. Used to each other, a little bit attuned to each other, like they used to be when they sparred.

When they fall asleep they don’t hold hands, but they’re curled close enough that their pinkies almost touch.

ix.

Annie asks him questions sometimes, demands the answers, but he never responds. Mostly, it’s because he doesn’t know them. He doesn’t know a damn thing.

Bertholdt and Reiner are dead. This he does know, because after Ragako Village, Connie was never quite the same. Friendly, steadfast, loyal Connie, who kept his finger on the emotional pulse of their group, had probably taken Bertholdt and Reiner’s betrayal the worst out of them all, especially after his family had been destroyed. He had sought Eren then, in the cabin, looked for him in the kitchens, in the rooms that still had to be cleaned, perhaps out of a misplaced feeling that Eren could understand him, sympathize with him and help him sublimate his anger into something else, something less toxic.

But Eren didn’t know how to do that. Anger had always been toxic to him, boiled in his limbs inside out until he burst open, a flood of words, a flurry of feelings, too big for his body to contain. On particularly quiet nights in the Scouting Legion dungeons, he had wondered if something was wrong with him, that he felt so acutely, so strongly, in a way that felt so beyond the capacity of words. How to describe the absolute anguish, the feeling of being cheated, of being ruined? The regret, the survivor’s guilt, the darkness of the human condition, but also the boundless optimism, dreams of oceans and stars and mountains buoying him to sleep in the squalid refugee camps when he curled around rough, bleeding fingers, a bruised body and an empty belly after a hard day’s work. How to describe powerlessness, inadequacy, a need for strength, the desperate grasp towards competency, because mistakes were all he ever made? How to describe feeling resentful toward a sibling and loving her in the same breath, knowing that he hurt her, but also feeling hurt? How to describe the thrill in brutality, in violence, in the rush of power and control that he never had?

He listened, deflected questions, said a word here and there, but it never seemed to be quite what Connie was looking for. And Connie couldn’t figure it out, so in the end, when the time came, he signed on for the Southern squad in a two-pronged attack against the shifter village and the odd, ape-like titan. Eren had been assigned to the Eastern squad.

On both ends, it had been a slaughter. The eastern battleground turned into a Coordinate chessfight, Eren desperately learning how to use a skill he had never practiced, or been allowed to practice, on the battlefield while hoards of titans easily devastated the frozen ranks. The soldiers couldn’t run, couldn’t scream, had to let themselves be bitten and swallowed. They’d been pushed back, back, into old Wall Maria territory, until the walls were in sight again. At that point, Eren had abandoned his attempts at using his power, and shifted, defending what soldiers remained. Eren had been beyond desperate, had known he would probably die on that field and the ape titan and the endlessly swarming titans herding about it would punch through Wall Rose effortlessly, plough on to Wall Sina. He couldn’t be the Coordinate unless he was human, but unless he shifted, there wouldn’t even be a human force left to fight.

In the end, the walls came down anyway. A boy god, sitting in the throne of his monstrous avatar, screaming, screaming, as if all the rage and anguish in the world could be distilled in a single voice. And how to describe the feeling of impending death, of grasping for things out of reach? How to describe complete, utter futility, and the denial of it? Giants, rising up to block out the sun, shaking off their thousand year old coffins, lumbering slowly towards them like gargantuan sentinels, because even if Eren’s puny human body was helpless against the titans, theirs were not. Their hands were his hands, their feet his feet, and so were the soldiers’, everyone on the battlefield was his and all of them were him, and he felt the vibrations, distantly under his (their) feet, the world shaking apart, distant screaming from terrified townspeople as their defenses came alive, and the walls crumbled.

Fight, he had screamed, almost unrecognizable, so sunk into his titan form, the gravel of his voice both quiet and deafening at the same time, reverberating through their (his) ears. Fight, he demanded from them, and fight they gave, the order pounding through their veins as the titans turned on each other and age-old titans wandered about them once again, squashing titans carelessly under their giant paws, and even the ape titan couldn’t defeat the tide of Eren’s anger and despair, his exhaustion and desperation, because these were toxic things, these were things that stained you and never left your body, ruining you, destroying you, chipping away until there was nothing but the core of you, but Eren had always been good at lying to himself, had always been focused and blind, because he wanted to be.

And Connie? Connie became part of a massacre. The entire town, hunted down and killed, slaughtered, because they wouldn’t stay down, wouldn’t give up, and the things they said about humans were disconcertingly familiar; it was the same thing that the soldiers said about titans. Even then, the soldiers were angry, vengeful, and wanted retribution, wanted to know more than defeat and survival. It didn’t take long for the Armored Titan and the Colossal Titan to appear, hailed by miniature storms of smoke and lightning.

But Ymir was small, nimble and fast, and she swung up in between the plates of Reiner’s chest easily, Historia perched on her back, dodging grabbing hands. Close up, it was easy to find the soft spots in between Reiner’s armor, and it was with a hardened expression and a too-tight grip on her blades that Historia cut his fingers away from where they’d wrapped over his nape. She didn’t close her eyes when she thrust her blade down into flesh that felt much too soft, too fragile, working quickly. But Reiner was different from Eren, met them wide awake and snarling, and this Reiner was not brotherly or supportive, this Reiner stared at them with such a dark look of hatred that Historia almost felt sick to her stomach. He lunged at her, hands reaching for her throat, but Ymir was there, faster than the eye could blink, fighting him back, slashing bloody gouges across his face and torso, and it wasn’t until Historia looped around and took a slice out the back of his neck that his snarls and feral shouts ceased.

“I felt relieved that he was dead,” she had told Eren, closing her eyes carefully, just so. The shorn edge of her hair lingered at her cheek, like spiderweb.

In comparison, the Colossal Titan was larger, but also slower, and Connie was small and just fast enough. With soldiers swarming all around, and Bertholdt’s name and face known, there was nowhere for him to run, for him to hide. Connie was used to working with Eren now, knew just where to stab and where to cut to get to Bertholdt’s comparatively frail human body. But Bertholdt, like Reiner, came out shouting and flailing in useless rage, having watched from far above as the soldiers killed his fellow townspeople in the streets. But Connie was armed and he was not, and Connie had nurtured and stoked his anger for a long time. It seemed easy, effortless even, to cut away the hand that Bertholdt tried to raise to his mouth, and to swing in and lunge, and cleave off his head.

“I don’t feel anything about it,” he said woodenly, eyes bruised from lack of sleep, hair oily and unkempt. He had grown it out after they had left the cabin once and for all. “I’m just…numb. And then at night, I have dreams of him talking to me. But there’s no head. Bertholdt’s there, but not his head.” He took an edge of Eren’s blanket and drew it up, patted it into place absently. “I remember watching it roll away, like it was just one of the hay bales we used to roll for the farm. I don’t think we buried any of the bodies.” He rubbed the fabric of the blanket between his fingers distractedly. “I guess we should have.”

Eren heard all of it, but he doesn’t know, because he wasn’t there. He didn’t see Bertholdt or Reiner die, didn’t see the village descend into an absolute bloodbath of kill or be killed, couldn’t even remember anything about how the eastern battle had ended, just remembered the moment before he sank teeth into his hand, the gesture bizarrely comforting for all its familiarity, and the dazed end, the battlefield stretching out before him as the titans wiped each other out.

He never found out what happened to his father, doesn’t know if he’s dead, or merely living on the margin. He doesn’t know what’s in his basement, because in the end, they never went there. He doesn’t know why he can turn into a titan, what kind cursed operation turned him into this. He doesn’t know what happened to the flesh samples they took from him when they strapped him down onto a table and took a scalpel to him for the umpteenth time, carving chunks from his arms and thighs, his cheek and his back. He doesn’t know how he lived to twenty-five, and even if they were able to gut Kenny Ackerman and his network of corrupt nobles and merchants, they sparked off a civil war, incited the riots, created political upheaval, and all Eren remembers is how the curve of Historia’s brow smoothed when she heard that the people wanted a council instead of a king. He doesn’t know if she survived the “purging” the Sina nobles and Military Police had embarked upon, doesn’t know if Marlo or Hitch made it out alive either, if they were ever weeded out.

The only thing he knows, is that two days after he had properly recovered, and was still in the infirmary on bed rest, soldiers had stormed his room, chained him, and dragged him outside in front of crowds of yelling townspeople. A line of Military Police shoved the tide back, menacing the rioters with bayonets gleaming at the top of their rifles. A rough hand grabbed him by the hair, and his legs were kicked out from underneath him, and he was forced to his knees, snarling, hands still bound behind him in chains. It took him a minute for him to register the weight of cold metal pressed against his left temple, but there was no way to miss the explosive sound of the bullet that was fired, point blank, into his head.

x.

Eren goes to the convenience store, mind muzzy from another day of pointless work. Sweat lines the inside of his clothing, and irritates his skin. Discomfited, he rubs at the back of his neck. He went for a haircut a couple days ago, and it’s a little disconcerting to not feel anything against his nape. His hair hasn’t been so short in a long time.

The parking lot is mostly full, not that it means anything to Eren, who commutes through a combination of public transportation and walking. It’s almost the end of the month; he’ll have to buy another bus pass soon.

At night, he dreams of flying. Just flying, the hiss of gas trailing behind him, the metallic creak of wires as he’s propelled through dense forests, flung high into the air. When he reaches the apex of his flight, he’s in front of the moon, and it’s beautiful, larger and yellower than he could ever imagine, and it looks like it could swallow him. But he falls instead, falls, hits the ground.

The strange part is, after he hits the ground, he doesn’t wake up. He doesn’t feel pain either. After he falls, he just sinks into darkness, void, and it’s peaceful there, quiet and singular. It’s when he decides to stay there, mired in blissful obliteration, that he wakes.

He asked Annie once, if she dreamed of falling. She said instead, with that hollow, twisted grin of hers, that she dreamed of being buried alive. He hadn’t said anything, but at the time, he had thought it both ironic and strangely understandable. Shifting felt like that for him sometimes, wet and suffocating, but it was odd to dream of burial—everyone was cremated in the walls, to save space.  Perhaps she dreamt of burial because of decomposition, the flesh falling away, skin, defense, dissolving, because of the struggle and the inevitability of the fall. And he’s been falling too, he’s been falling for a long time. He’s been waiting for impact, but it never comes. Maybe one day he’ll be left on the earth too, left for his flesh to rot and fall off his bones, left abandoned until his skeleton is exposed and brittle. That’s only if he’s lucky.

You don’t open doors these days; doors open for you. A short jingle of electronic notes sounds as he walks into the store, canvas sneakers squeaking on the tiles. He gets strange looks for wearing rubber sandals or flip-flops with his work clothing, even if they’re more comfortable to go home in. He still gets stunned by supermarkets sometimes, the sheer extravagance of it, the abundance and the wastefulness, the multitude of products, unnatural and natural alike. Rows of candy, of packaged breads, things he was lucky to even get a taste of at home, much less in the landfills, and it’s so common nowadays, down to a couple coins to get the cheap chocolate wafers, up to stacks of bills for the expensive bars and truffles he remembers buying on behalf of his boss once or twice on Lovers’ Day. Aches in his stomach on the weeks he only got a meal a day, or when they were unlucky enough to have no food at all, remembering the angry despair and pained resignation when he threw up what little he had in his belly in the first weeks of training because his body couldn’t remember what real, regular sustenance was like.  He looks at the seemingly endless rack of chips, crackers, and snacks. People starve now, too.

As he rounds the corner to the frozen section, he spots an unmistakable silhouette sitting on the curb outside the back door of the shop. Cold air blows into his face as he opens the freezer, takes two bottles of beer and brings them to the register.

“Hey,” he says, as he sits down next to her. A truck purrs one parking space away, the car door open, generic pop hits drifting from the radio turned up high, because of course she would.

She glances at him from the corner of her eye, smirks. “Fancy meeting you here,” she snorts. “You gonna hand over that beer or what?”

Palming his bottle opener, he twists the top off, and the foam bubbles over and rushes down his hand. She doesn’t complain, just takes the bottle.

“Feels like you always have the same amount of freckles whenever I see you,” Eren says, pops the top off his own bottle and takes a hearty swig. Next to him, Ymir smacks her lips noisily, and makes a face.

“Figures you’d go for the fruity shit, Number Five,” she leers and chuckles. “And that’s one of the stupidest things you’ve ever said to me. And you’ve said a lot of fuckin’ stupid things.”

“Well, you would know, wouldn’t you? You’ve probably kept a list of them somewhere.”

Ymir laughs again, obnoxious and loud, and she’s consistent, barely any change between the times he sees her, and her laugh sounds the same way it used to when she cackled in the mess hall, hand slung over Historia’s shoulder.

“Wow, check that ego before you hurt yourself,” she sniggers. “Your rack isn’t nearly nice enough for me to pay any attention to you.” She takes another drink, gives him a brief once over, pops an eyebrow. “You’re dressed fancy. Sure you wanna sit on this dirty curb with little old me, when you’ve got a hot date?”

“I’m a receptionist,” Eren replies drily, ignores her when she shrieks with laughter and rolls to the side of the curb, “and an executive assistant. I have to wear this every day, even if my only job is to do coffee runs.”

“Eren Jaeger, social liaison?!” she guffaws. “Are you kidding me? Shit, that’s the best joke anyone’s ever told me, except it’s not even a joke, it’s true!”

“Fuck you, Freckled Satan,” Eren hums, flicks a bottle cap at her.

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” she says, flicks it back and hits him straight in the forehead. When she rolls upright, a chain falls out of the collar of her bright purple shirt, the copper rings on the end glinting in the sun. If she turned them all the way around, Eren knows he’d find one small stone each embedded in the bands, one bright blue, one dark red. The ceremony had been unofficial, but even that acknowledgement, that brief day of celebration, had seemed enough of a blessing back then.

They gravitate to each other, Eren thinks, because this is something like the seventh time that he’s bumped into Ymir, even though, logically, they shouldn’t have met each other again at all. The first time they had met, Eren hadn’t even known that Ymir was still alive.

“Meet anyone interesting?” she asks casually. Her fingers are stiff on the neck of the beer bottle, wet from condensation. He knows what she means.

“I saw the bookstore keeper, you know, the one Armin always visited when we went into town.”

Ymi scoffs. “That’s not interesting.”

“Well I also spotted one of my old room guards, but I figured that would be even more boring,” Eren sighs, knocks his bottle against the curb idly, focusing on the quiet tink of glass on concrete. “What about you?”

“Hannah, a couple decades back,” Ymir says, bobbing her head to the truck radio. “It was weird seeing her on her own. Otherwise, nothing.” 

“Where are you heading then, after this?”

Ymir doesn’t reply right away, takes two rapid gulps of beer one after the other. Eren’s is beginning to grow warm in his hand.

“Back to the warehouse, of course. I’ve got a job too, though it doesn’t involve dancing around in a monkey suit,” she murmurs. “I’m not normally assigned to this region, but the driver got sick today, and I get overtime pay.”

Eren can read between the lines on that one. “Better get going then,” he says, deceptively light, loosening his tie and doing the topmost buttons of his shirt. “Outbound traffic is gonna get you stuck for three hours, at least, if you don’t hurry.”

Ymir heaves a sigh from deep in her abdomen, rolls to her feet, and leans over to clink bottles with Eren. “Thanks for the tip. I probably should head out then.”

He watches her clamber into the truck and restart the engine, watches her back out.

“Hey, Ymir!” he shouts, and she rolls the window down, propping an elbow up on the sill. “What do you dream about!”

“Stupid as ever, Number Five!” she shouts back with her daredevil grin, a spiteful, white slash across her face. “I’ve only ever dreamed of one person!”

He is stupid. He should have known that, and he waves after her, wonders if she’s even watching him in her mirrors. Probably not. Eren’s never known much about love stories, especially not ones about romantic love, but he thinks Ymir’s and Historia’s could’ve been one. Ymir has always been brave, oddly fearless, wears her burdens and shadows proudly around her neck.

Eren rests his hand on his sternum, where a key used to sit.

He stopped wearing it long ago.

xi.

Sound.

Assailing her on all sides, sound, screaming, shouting, the muffled boom of an explosion, the distant rumble of collapsing buildings, and loudest of all, the voice that shrieks through her head, piercing, demanding attention, shaking through all the corners of her mind until she feels like her head will just break apart into pieces.

Her eyes fly open, and she breathes sharply, a gasp, and there’s the sound of shattering glass, crystals falling from her body, from her hands, and she doesn’t even have time to blink or say a thing because someone curses in her ear, loud and brash, grabs her limp wrists to haul her bulk over their shoulders as if she were a potato sack.

She doesn’t take it lying down because she’s never let anything in her life go easy, but it’s like the crystal still clings to her eyelashes, still freezes her limbs on the inside, because her vision is blurry, just close enough to see a glimpse of white, coarsely woven cotton rough against her cheek, and she can’t do much aside from wriggle uselessly like a newborn kitten. A few short murmurs, somehow familiar, and they’re running, the kidnapper, and her body jostles against them limply. The jerky movements bounce her head off the firm muscle of their shoulder, and briefly, she closes her eyes, nauseous, the blood rushing to her head, fair blonde hair falling about her face. She kicks at them weakly, but they’ve got a firm grip on her legs and she feels like throwing up, hasn’t had shifting sickness this bad since she was a child. It feels like they can hear the sharp, fearful pitter-patter of her heart, and she tries to shove it down, to erase the fear and panic, because even though she might have fallen, might have been brought down to the earth, she is still a fighter.

She hears the sound of cannon fire, the screams and the rat-tat-tat of gunfire that follows, and she swears she could feel the vibrations straight to her bones.

“Leggo,” she slurs, bucking against the firm hold on her ankles, trying to leverage her upper torso up to sling an arm around their neck and choke them out, but her kidnapper tips her even further back, and she drops, body yanking painfully, and reels against the vertigo. They don’t make a sound, don’t say a thing, just keep running, and she can hear them panting, their ribs expanding in and out against her belly. She struggles harder, more frenzied, until her captor slings her off their back and slams her against the side of the building.

“Stop fighting me,” Eren Jaeger hisses, and she would have thought him a stranger if it weren’t for the familiar voice that crawled from his throat, because his face is longer, his jaw stronger, and there’s blood splashed all over his front, a rifle against his shoulder, and he looks wild, wilder than when she saw him last, when she betrayed him.

He doesn’t offer any other explanations, just grabs her roughly by the wrist and tries to start running, but she pulls him back, tries to whip her wrist out of his grip with strength she no longer seems to possess, black spots floating in front of her vision, because of all people, she did not expect to see him here. She didn’t expect to see anyone, anything, ever again.

“What’s going on, Eren,” she says, purring his name the way she used to after flinging him onto his back, goading him, toying with him.

The look he gives her next is full of violence, full of such wrath and loathing, so potent with disappointment that it hits her in the gut worse than the time he fought her in the Forest of Giant Trees, when he lost all the careful control and strength she had drilled into him, because of her.

“I should have left you here,” he says, and his voice carries perfectly well even though it’s no louder than whisper. His eyes are feral in the shadow of the building, green and luminous, his mouth curled back in a vicious snarl. “I shouldn’t even have tried.”

He searches her eyes a little longer as they stay in the shadows, a strange moment of silence and stillness even against the sharp retort of guns from nearby, the sounds of shouts and screams, meaty thwacks and thuds, the smell of smoke and floating in the air. He presses his lips together, mouth thinning. There’s blood on his pants, too. She always thought it was stupid of the military to issue all their uniform items in light colors.

“If you still want to leave here,” he bites out delicately, in a deliberately enunciated way that reminds her of the rare instances where Armin got angry and felt, acutely, that he was too intelligent for the people of this world, “Then follow me. Or you can stay here and get killed.”

When he turns, hefting the rifle in his hands, carefully observing the roads before darting out and running into the network of alleyways running alongside the streets, she follows on somewhat clumsy feet, her steps growing more confident with every second.

But it’s bright, unbelievably bright, and it’s all she can do to keep track of Eren’s all-white silhouette, because the light funneling between the buildings just makes him harder to see, makes her think it’s all a dream, a hallucination, the vengeful regrets of her first and only student haunting her through the too-bright pathways of her own nightmares. Only the light smattering of dull red on his shirt helps her mark him as he moves relentlessly forward. There are corpses lying across the cobbles here and there, bullet holes in their chests, legs, arms, in their heads, brain matter and blood splashed up on the opposite walls, still wet, but Eren doesn’t spare them even so much as a glance, leaps over their bodies as if they were just hurdles. Rumbling, again, shouting and the metallic ringing of the pins of gas canisters dropping to the ground, and people are shrieking and howling, running by them, screaming in terror, trying to get away, and Eren just runs harder, jumps high to grab a black cloth off a clothesline, and wraps it around his head and shoulders.

Her lungs are burning, and her legs feel like they’ll give out any second, and she’s so tired, more tired than she’s ever been, and there’s a sudden influx of people, a tide of pushing and screeching bodies buoying her along as she tries to run, tries to keep up, grits her teeth and she’s so angry, she’s so angry that she doesn’t know what’s going on, that she keeps trying to follow Eren’s too bright back because she’s aimless, when soldiers beginning to squeeze into the small alleys, Military Police going by their emblems. Eren just runs faster, faster, shoves people out of his way without mercy, barrels through like he always does, and it’s so ridiculous and so like him, and briefly, briefly, she sees him check behind himself to see if she’s still there, and his eyes widen as if he didn’t expect her to be.

The Military Police are beginning to throw smoke bombs, and Eren jerks his head to the left, holding the black cloth over his nose and mouth, and they push themselves out from the crowd into the main streets.

Chaos, dead bodies strewn about the ground, main shops and establishments bombed-out shells, their foundations torn up and reduced to splinters, shattered glass, and the candy that used to go to well-behaved children scattered all over the floor. Men and women, beating back the Military Police with clubs, rusted spades, rakes and pitchforks, screaming, shouting, voices twisted with hate, faces contorted into monstrous rictus grins, vengeful, bloodthirsty snarls, and she sees the wired strength in their arms, the gauntness of their faces.

Eren’s back, white, black, and the crimson staining even the back of his collar, charges toward a group of three officers milling apprehensively on the edge of a pulsing, raging crowd, and a fresh spray of blood splashes onto on his harsh, unforgiving face as he spins his rifle around and clubs a horse-borne military officer right in the head, doesn’t react or stop as the officer falls and his body collides with the pavement. His partner cries out, and she can see the blood that spurts from Eren’s neck as the other soldier shoots him. Eren barely stumbles, bodily hooks an arm around the guy’s waist while he shakes in fear and tosses him onto the ground mercilessly. Annie catches up just as Eren seats himself in the saddle, only just manages to summon enough strength to swing herself onto the back of her own mount, and it’s when they ride into a wide strip of land with no houses, no buildings, just a deep, deep furrow carved into the earth, studded with dully reflective shards of what looks like tinted, opaque glass, that Annie realizes why everything has been so bright.

The walls are gone. There is no tall shadow looming over the edge of the town, there is no gate patrol or inspection process, because there is nothing to protect here anymore. The buildings they pass are rotted, sagging in over on top of another, dull and sad where chipped and faded paint gave hints of how vibrant and cheerful the shops might have been, once upon a time, tattered flags and posters beating weakly in the slight breeze. Here and there, the bleached white of bone, scattered, incomplete skeletons, and even the destruction of the buildings is incomplete, some of them completely smashed to rubble, others still standing tall, sometimes daubed with russet stains. But among the bones are living creatures, small grubs and maggots that crawl and feast on the putrid, stinking bodies that lie among the ruins, and these, these are the freshly dead, still decomposing, some of them with mottled yellow, purple and red bellies bulging obscenely with the gases they produce as they break down. More often though, there are just limbs, or smears of organs left behind, torsos, abdomens and legs playing peekaboo, a single person spread over ten feet of ground.

She feels Eren staring a hole into the side of her head, and cold sweat trickles down her neck, arms tingling.

“You failed,” he says shortly, words almost whipped away by the wind. He smells like iron, and the blood that splashed on his face is still wet. “You, Bertholdt and Reiner. All of you failed.” He doesn’t smile, or laugh, or sound anywhere close to triumphant.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” she says. She doesn’t know why she’s here. She doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

Eren just laughs, loudly, devoid of mirth. “Killing titans was much, much easier,” he says. The rifle swings snug against his back, sunlight glinting off the well-oiled mouth. She wonders if he puts names on his bullets, or if there are any bullets inside at all.

xii.

It’s not that love is for children, because love is everyday, simple as two sisters hugging in the street, complicated as a trio of two men and a woman screaming at each other drunk in a bar, or the smile a friend gives in greeting on the way to the train station. Love, maybe, just isn’t for them.

Eren’s got his head pillowed atop folded arms, peering lazily over the recessed open sill of the sole window in their miniscule room, a makeshift nook. The studio’s shoved right under the sloping edge of the townhouse roof, and there’s a neat stack of buckets and pails near the door because they’ve learned to deal with the shitty insulation; it always rains, ergo, the roof always leaks. But it’s an unusual day today, calm and mild without the typical barrage of unpleasant humidity and soul-sucking rainstorms. The window is actually pretty large, and the light that streams in bathes the entire room in soft, warm hues, casting gentle shadows on the walls, brightening the stifling space.

Annie pauses to look over Eren’s shoulder into the street below. A comforting breeze sweeps in, barely stirs the heavy fabric of the curtains that’ve been swept to the side and tied off. They shut out the light completely when closed, made of leftover materials from the family’s commission of new hangings for their summer and spring vacation homes, of which this townhome is one. Caught between late morning and early noon, several carts mingle in the street below, hawkers shouting their wares, ringing bells to get attention. She takes a slow, deep breath—the hearty aroma of roasting nuts and cheap coffee, the sizzling greasiness of fried sweets and savories, the fragrance of brown sugar and rose water rising from the fluffy, steamed cakes so common in this part of the country. The streets are much busier than usual, people milling about in odd, flowing patterns, trying to take advantage of the good weather.

She follows Eren’s gaze to the shop on the ground floor of the building across the street. It’s a decently sized tea shop and café, a kiosk outside selling sausages, to-go sandwiches, and the sweet griddle pastries that Eren is sometimes sent out to get for the children, though he’s never gone to this particular store for them. Business seems brisk, indistinct figures moving behind every window. A small crowd waits for tables, many of them clumped in groups and couples. A girl offers the boy at her side a red trench coat, and he takes it gratefully, without hesitation, shrugs it on over his narrow shoulders and strikes a pose to make her laugh. The couple behind them is more discreet, two girls, one head of wild, shocked, gravity defying black hair bent towards her companion, her hand stroking through the wavy, brown locks of her lover. Quietly, fleetingly, they kiss, just a simple turn of the head to press lips to cheeks, to slide their faces against each other, to rub noses and blink slowly, butterfly kiss, slow smiles spreading on their faces.

“Did you ever have something like that?” Eren asks, pointing at them. He’s not maudlin, or depressed or anything. Just exhausted and curious.

“Did you think I’d just talk about it?” she responds coolly, leaning her shoulder against the wall.

“Do you ever just talk about anything?” he huffs, flops over the nook and sill, arms outstretched and hanging over thin air. Turning to rest his cheek on an arm, he blinks at her in interest. He looks ridiculous with his face squished up like that, and his voice is slightly muffled when he speaks. “So? Did you?”

“No,” she says. She wonders why he even bothers asking her these things when he should already know the answer. She had never really been interested in those types of relationships, but even if she was, that would have been a risk too big for her to take. She hadn’t had the time, or the heart to spare.

“Hm,” he says noncommittally, folds his arms on the sill again, tapping his fingers on the metal frame. “Me neither. I wonder what it’s like.”

“Do you want that?” she asks, takes a couple steps into the kitchen to retrieve a glass of water. The water is good, cool and crisp with an edge of sweetness to it. It’s unfiltered, straight from the tap, since this city gets its water from a reservoir.

Eren hums in thought, tilting his head and letting brown hair pool over his shoulder. He’s grown his hair long, to his shoulders, since that’s what’s proper for a manservant. Unexpectedly, at this length, it’s curly near the ends. He cuts it himself. Even at twenty-five Eren had something of a baby face, and the ponytail he pulls his hair into for work makes him look older for once.

“I don’t think so,” he says at long last. “I didn’t want it when I was a trainee, and I still don’t. I don’t need it.”

“Then why ask about it?” Annie says, slides onto the stool at the small, wheeled kitchen island.

“Because people talk about it all the time,” Eren says, blinking. “Everyone makes such a big deal about it. All the books have a romance; over half the songs are about love. Or sex.”

Annie dips a finger into her glass, draws wet circles on the rim, until a pure, ringing tone rises tremulously. “Do you wonder what you’re missing?”

“No. I mean, I get it. You do too, right? Being close to people. Touching somebody. You were like that with Mikasa, sometimes, at least that’s what I thought.”

Annie stares at him wordlessly, and the ringing stops. She ducks her head, wipes her finger dry on a checkered kitchen towel.

“You aren’t wrong,” she says, sweeps a strand of hair behind her ear.

Slowly, he smiles at her. It’s been a long time since she’s seen that smile, one not of triumph or accomplishment, but a small, private curl of the mouth that he used to have just for himself, when he was happy, or feeling good. It has always looked a little fragile, a little shy and tentative, but that’s why she’s fond of it.

He turns back to the window. “It’s silly to say, ‘You can have all of me’, or ‘I’ll be yours’, and I don’t think people should make promises like that if they can’t keep them. I don’t need to be one with someone else, or to belong with someone else. I just…”

Annie watches patterns form on the surface of the island as light streams through her transparent glass, morphing, impermanent, rippling shadows. She feels a little bitter, maybe, knowing what he means, and not being able to take it for granted.

“…it’s having a place for yourself. Being comfortable. Being close.”

Not Love, not torrid passion and consuming desire, but something quieter than that, something subtle and small and warm, easy and intimate. Annie had seen glimpses of it on peaceful nights in the women’s bunk, lulled into meditation with the steady awareness of Mikasa sitting beside her, breathing in every time she breathed out, drinking in the smooth moments of her hands as she mended her scarf, or folded laundry, or turned the page of a book, the simmering energy that sat tantalizingly close underneath her skin. Eren was lucky to have had that with Armin and Mikasa both. She was envious, but not jealous—her path had been determined long ago, and she had selfishly gathered what scraps of gentleness and affection she could, afforded herself that small glow because she had wanted it, wanted to feel it, to receive it, even maybe to give it, just the slightest bit before she was called upon to do what she had to do.

In some cases, Eren had been the one to give her that warmth, that mere glimpse of happiness and pride. When he used her moves in training he would look to her for a reaction, for approval, when he had something to say about the structure of society or the military hierarchy, he sought her out, and listened intently to her when she spoke. Once, he had even managed to make use of his slippery fingers to slide a small, intricate, finely carved wooden barrette into her pocket for her birthday, a useless, impractical thing that she nevertheless found captivating. On the nights where exhaustion pierced so deeply she felt the listlessness in her bones, she would trace the carvings slowly with a gentle finger, as if trying to absorb some measure of his energy, his relentlessness, to lighten the gravity that pulled at her shoulders.

“That sounds nice,” she says quietly. Look at her, making small talk in a cramped kitchen on a Saturday morning. After traveling with Eren so long, frivolous chats like these can hardly be avoided, she supposes, since he never really stops talking. She wonders if this is progress at all, if by now, she’s become a normal girl, as far as normal can apply to her and Eren. Progress might be the wrong word. Progress is positive, progress implies improvement, but progress has also been irrelevant for quite some time. There is no responsibility, no duty for her to perform now. The loss of her home, her father with his small, thin shadow, was acute at first, sharp and slow and simmering. She wandered because she had nowhere to go, no one to see. But those feelings were tempered by a sense of some kind of defeat, some sort of heavy expectation—having played a part in the fall of the walls, and the deaths of innumerable people, soldiers and civilians alike, the ruin of her own village seemed like retribution, the echoes of her own guilt and complacency catching up to her.

“Running away” was the way Eren had framed it when they first met Ymir. Survivor’s guilt of a kind, maybe, and he never mentions Armin and Mikasa except in an oblique, sly sort of way. But he sees them everywhere, lingers a little when he sees red out of the corner of his eye, likes to visit the libraries of the cities they stay in, spends time ducking into little antique shops and cracking open the dusty tomes out for display, smoothing his hands over the pages as if he could find Armin’s words there. She had liked Armin, because he was a man who knew the value of cleverness, who used his speech and intelligence like a weapon. He understood nuance, complexity, grappled with shifting shades of morality, and those things were enough to endear him to her.

“Armin was killed,” Eren says, sunlight dappling his face. He says it like it’s nothing. “He was too smart, too good at what he did. So Sina took him out, four years before I woke you up.”

The surprise is distant. Sometimes, she doesn’t feel like she knows any of the people Eren talks to her about. Sometimes, it feels like it’s been too long. Eren doesn’t cry, doesn’t wince, doesn’t give away anything. Just stares at the couples waiting for tea on the street below, and the way light hits his brow and shadows his eyes brings out the grey in them.

“And Mikasa?”

He sighs, rolling his shoulders, and finally turns away from the window. “I don’t know,” he says heavily, mouth tense. “She was with me when we broke you out, and stayed behind to fight off whoever followed us. But I haven’t seen her since.” His smile is almost cruel. “At this point, I guess it doesn’t matter. She’s dead either way.”

Annie places her empty glass in the sink, watches dirty water swirl in greasy patterns atop the dishes already there. She didn’t know that Mikasa had seen her awakening. It feels like eons’ worth of missed chances, knowing that she was there.

“I guess you’re right,” Annie says, thinks of auburn hair and the rouge box that was still unsold, scars on a young woman’s cheeks. “It doesn’t matter.”

xii.

Humanity reinvents the wheel, and the carriage, and the boat, and eventually Annie and Eren take a ship and move to an entirely different land, Eren altogether too cheerful about being able to travel across the ocean, even despite his initial seasickness. It’s kind of disgusting, all things considered, how cheerful he is. That’s not all they do either, they take bicycles, trains, planes, cars, and of course, they also walk. The new cities that await them are not always pleasant, and they’re careful not to draw attention to themselves.

They never meet another shifter, strangely enough, though they seem to bump into titan crystals every so often. It’s not until Annie lands herself a job at a printing press, and Eren as a local stable boy in their latest town that they bump into Ymir for the first time, who’s working with the post in delivery.

Eren doesn’t ask her about what happened. “You haven’t asked me any questions,” Ymir says bluntly, slurping loudly at her soup.

“Wasn’t sure if I deserved any answers,” Eren replies, scrubbing out the pot at the sink. “I did pretty much just up and leave.”

“They shot you and cut off your head,” Ymir snorts, “If I were you I would’ve skipped town too.” She catches the slight widening of Annie’s eyes, guffaws. “What, you didn’t know? This boy is unbelievable. Head grew back like a fungus. Should’ve seen his face when he woke back up, looked worse than the time Jean put laxatives in his food.”

“You were in the crowds?” Eren asks distractedly, grabbing a spoon and bowl of soup.

“Nope, with Historia, I watched from the tower cell,” she says flippantly, devil-may-care grin faltering. “They got her a day after she visited you. I was getting her out.”

“She means Krista,” Eren murmurs in answer to Annie’s flat stare, settling down at the table with his own meal, resigned.

“Her name is Historia,” Ymir hisses, slamming her hands down on the table, chair screeching, bends in to tower over Eren menacingly. He just raises his eyebrows, glances pointedly at Annie, raises his spoon to his mouth and takes a long, loud slurp. Ymir groans in disgust and throws herself back into her chair, muttering all manner of unintelligible, but no doubt insulting, words. Annie just eats quietly, lips twisted in displeasure, hand gripping her spoon tightly. It seems insulting somehow, to have her lack of knowledge be fought over like that, like she isn’t there sitting in front of them, like she’s just an excuse to fight. It isn’t her fault that she doesn’t know anything, or that they’re decades and an entire continent away from anyone who could have brought her up to speed. All she has is Eren, and he never really talks about it to her. She isn’t sure if it’s because he doesn’t care, or if it’s because he cares too much. It’s that carelessness that keeps her here, that distant comfort, and the fact that Annie has nowhere to return to, and doesn’t know anyone else like she knows Eren.

“Have you seen anyone?” Annie asks in weak morning light the next day, a pale ghost perched on the small, ratty sofa, a cup of shitty coffee in her hand. Her hair is a scrambled mess. Curled up near her legs, Eren slumbers on like the dead. Annie remembers looking him over, under different roofs, different tents, different skies, starlight, candlelight, the weak flicker of a naked electric bulb, and she wonders now, knowing what she knows, if she wrapped her small, calloused hands around his neck, whether or not she’d be able to feel the impression of the executioner’s axe, the line where his head grew from his body.

Eren used to be a pretty light sleeper, and the boys liked to play pranks on him until it became clear that even if they were playing, Eren was not, waking up with frightened screams and throwing two boys against the walls and floor of the boys’ dorm so roughly that they came away concussed. Now he sleeps quiet and still, chest barely rising, hands curled loosely, held close to his face to protect him even in slumber.

“You too?” Ymir says, yawning and careless. “They don’t look right, do they, but somehow, you can tell.”

A newsboy on the road, long-limbed and healthy, shouting headlines with a small lisp because of his two missing front teeth, skin tanned, a little pigeon-toed with a mop of wild ginger hair and hazel eyes, and Annie had looked at him and thought of the boy who’d been beaten to death in the western Maria camp for trying to steal from the ration stores. He was a brunet then, with grey eyes. The body had gone unclaimed.

“D’you think Eren’s seen anybody?” Ymir asks, slumps into a chair with legs splayed wide.

Annie knows he has, remembers the way she saw him staring at the boy waiting outside the public school gates with all the other children from the orphanage, remembers asking him snidely if there was anything he needed to tell Annie about.

“It’s not like that, okay,” he had sighed. “He just reminds me of a boy who used to bully me and Armin, that’s all…it’s been so long that I just…” he had made a helpless bursting motion with his hands, had blinked, had tilted his head just so, to shield his gaze from her.

So Annie nods lightly in response, flicks her eyes towards the cup on the table, a wordless offer.  Ymir reaches her body towards it with a contented groan, relishing the stretch. Hooking the handle on her finger, she saunters towards the coffee kettle on the dilapidated stove, helping herself to the sugar and the small carton of chilled cream that Annie and Eren dilute to make last longer.

“Have to say, didn’t think I’d bump into you guys again,” she hums, curling up on her chair like she used to in the mess hall, licking away the froth that gathers on the top of her upper lip.

Annie fixes Ymir with her usual, flat no-nonsense stare, the crunch of dry toast being ground to pulp between her teeth a bizarrely eloquent response. She raises a single, delicate eyebrow, stuffs the rest of the toast into her mouth serenely. We didn’t exactly look for you either, is what she doesn’t say, but when she turns to wash out her cup in the kitchen sink, her small but broad back is sturdy and powerful, and she stands with her shoulders aligned over her hips, her head held high.  She and Eren don’t plan anything. They wander, make money, find lodging, make more money and wander again. On weekends they mill around their living space like ghosts. Eren flips through books just to feel the slip and slide of the paper grain on his fingers, just to remember the smell of ink on a page. Annie sets out into the city and gets herself hopelessly lost, walks and walks until she finds her way out of the maze of alleyways.

“Hey, why’re you traveling with him?” Ymir asks, because she’s never been much concerned about the effect her words might have on people. “Not like I was around when you two had your little showdown in Stoess, but I definitely heard about it later on.”

Because I am weak, is the answer that leaps to her, just like it used to, but that doesn’t feel right this time. Annie knows she is a bad person faking goodness, that she is a horrible, flawed human being, selfish and looking for any and all opportunities she might have to keep herself alive. The core of her is made of that terrifying humanity, the fear of loneliness, the fear of fear, regardless of what shape her body might take. The walls all fallen down but Eren’s voice waking her, his back leading her through the bloodied streets like a red and white beacon, and she knew from the start that the mission had failed, because Eren was still there. If the plan had worked like it was supposed to, Eren would be gone, Eren would be back in the village, and she’d likely be busy sleeping the years away, left to rot underground.

Eternity is a long time, and even though humanity has reinvented the wheel, the carriage, and the boat, it hasn’t reinvented titan shifters. Or maybe it has, and they just don’t know it. But in all their travels, Eren and Annie have never reencountered stories and tales of people turning into monsters and giants the way shifters do. There is never another village, an enemy village, no big damn heroes or cackling villain masterminds. It makes her think there was a sickness, there, in her village and within the walls, one that erased history and the people who lived that history, a sickness that made them monsters in disguise, not for inhumanity, but for the brutality that crawled and boiled out of human skin, the ugliness and greediness of it.

“Maybe we were the Origin,” Eren had quietly suggested one night, voice diffusing into open air, tucked tightly into his threadbare bedroll. “Titans were all humans once. Shifters are the midpoint, aren’t they? And no one else has a wall, much less one made of titan crystal. No one else seems to have banned information on the outside world, of the olden histories.”

No one else has Eren either—Eren is a manmade monster, the kind that myths used to warn people about, and if he were at all interested in fulfilling that karmic duty, he’d burn down the entire world, eat the heroes and spit out the bones. And she supposes that he did destroy the world, certainly a world, if he was part of the reason why the walls had collapsed. Coordinate, they had called him, but Eren did not guide, did not facilitate, he attacked, he bit and tore and disrupted.

Closure, he had said, was why he took her along. But she thought the real reason must be simple – he was a shifter, and she was a shifter, she knew the back of his fists against her arms like a brand, he knew the squeeze of her arms around his neck, and neither of them knew how to let go. Running out of the defenseless territories he had once protected, lighting the way for her, who had once helped tear them down, and how long would it take for a society like that to rip itself apart, gut and rework itself? The reason must have been simple – the world was foreign, and the society was continually reinventing itself, continually changing in violent ways when he had left, and she, no matter how dangerous, how questionable, was something familiar and expendable. She shared three years’ worth of memories and experience with him, and she was both indirectly and directly the cause of some of the most momentous occasions of his life, of his military career. And even that feeling, she understood, because she had tried it too, cried in that forest because she couldn’t make it out, because she had him in her grasp but knew she had already failed, knew that the future she had seen for herself was becoming true.

“I’m used to him,” she says, and that, that rings true to her.

xiv.

Touch, the acknowledgement of space. Aside from the rare moments when they feel the need for comfort, they sustain themselves with minimal points of contact, the barely detectable spot of heat where their backs touch in sleep, the brush of fingers when Annie hands him a knife over the cutting board, the pressure of her hand on his back when he walks or move too slowly for her taste. It’s not that difficult to live this way. It makes it easier to cope, to deal with things a little bit at time. But there’s ten years’ and a lifetime’s worth of baggage and bile building at the back of Eren’s throat, and sometimes his hands shake when he washes his face in the morning, sometimes he’ll cut himself on the scissors in the office just to see if he’ll still heal. He sees familiar faces everywhere, inexplicably, even though he’s never seen those faces before, and he’ll remember them on corpses, on comrades.

There’s no rhyme or reason to it, who they see, when they see them. He and Annie only know that there’s a set of rules that seem to be in place. They only meet familiar faces one on one; sometimes it’s Eren who sees them, sometimes it’s Annie. Only one person shows up at a time, and never anyone that they’re particularly hoping to see, somebody from Garrison, townspeople who frequented the Trost markets the training squads visited on their days off, or people from Annie, Reiner and Bertholdt’s village. The one exception is the time that Eren sees Commander Erwin once in the supermarket, a broadshouldered brunette woman in a comfy looking set of sweats, looking over the cake displays. He doesn’t tell Annie about it. Unless they’re outside together, they generally keep their individual meetings to themselves, since they value different people. Eren almost never recognizes any of the people Annie does, and sometimes, the opposite is true, when it happens to be to be Eren’s childhood neighbor who lived three doors down, or the owner of Shiganshina Tavern. They can go two days to two centuries before meeting anybody again, but it’s always unpredictable, uncertain.

Work is a balm on bad days, when a single reminder can set him into flashbacks. It’s numbing work, greeting people with a bland smile, answering phones with a polite, professional voice, making adjustments to the schedule, booking airplane tickets and conference rooms, sending out administrative reminders and ordering extra office supplies.

The door to the conference room swings open, and Cassidy, one of their account managers, leads four young faces into the office proper to greet the other employees. He’s forgotten; with the start of college, they’ve acquired four new interns, each of them attached to a separate department. He locks eyes with one of them, a boy with dark skin, long hair tied back in a small, jaunty tail at the back of his head and a well groomed beard, dressed in a long sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled to the crook of his elbows, a patterned vest, straight jeans and a practical pair of boots.

It’s Sasha. Eren’s fingers unconsciously slow on the keyboard, neither of them able to look away as the intern group passes by. In the end, Eren simply smiles and dips his head in greeting, but when he turns back to his work he doesn’t move for a good couple minutes, mind in chaos.

Sasha had been one of the last people he had seen before he left. She had been the one to witness his execution, swamped and stifled in the crowd, and she had been the one to swoop in and haul him away while he was stock-still and frozen, watching his own detached head evaporating away into nothing, the eyes the first to cave in and disintegrate, cavernous pits of slick skin left behind, lined with tiny red and blue vessels that seemed obscene when viewed so closely.  Those days she didn’t go anywhere without her bow, and the string of tough sinew dug into his back as she hissed expletives in his ear, inflected with the country accent she no longer tried to hide, set him down in a shadowed alleyway and swatted his cheek to get him to pay attention.

“We need to get you out of here,” she told him. But her eyes were large and wet and dark; she knew as well as he did that there was really nowhere for him to go. After the coup failed, the Scouting Legion was able to survive due to its status as a de facto representative of the discontented lower classes, refugees, outer wall folk, and the underground populations, instigating and cultivating grassroots rebellions and civil unrest. Newspaper efforts, engineered through Hanji’s subtle machinations and threats, painted the Scouting Legion soldiers as victims, blamed a lack of success on the unwieldy politics that did not allow them better opportunities for research, or adequate funding for better equipment. The Scouting Legion, the newspapers reminded the people, had played a major role in reducing damages during the invasion of Wall Maria, and the succeeding Battle of Trost, and had the highest battle efficiency quotient of all military squads, based on the kill count per soldier. And if they had not gone through with the Stoess Plan, what would the government have done, an enemy having infiltrated so far into the ranks, into the inner city walls? Disbanding the Scouting Legion would have meant immediate civil war, and the explosion of riots all over the walls. As a result, the Scouting Legion was instead forcibly integrated into the Garrison, Eren handed to the Military Police for safekeeping. Marlo, Hitch, and Nile Dawk had all done their best to ensure he wasn’t treated too badly, though there was not much that could be done.

“Annie,” Eren had slurred, coughing, as Marlo and Hitch dragged his bruised and beaten body back down to his dungeon room, clutching at the Y cut into the trunk of his body, feeling the blood and organs straining against the sutures, his fingers slick and slippery, a slow haze surrounding him, his body too worn to heal immediately. He felt them stiffen at his sides. “Y’knew her, right. Did she say ‘nything, wh’n she was with you?“

“No,” Marlo said lowly. Marlo was always the kind one, lowering him gently to his cot, the sheets smelling like sunshine and lavender. Eren’s bloodied fingers smeared new filth on them, streaks of rust. Marlo was a sure contrast to Hitch, who was afraid, out for her own interests, tentative, always approaching him with shaking hands and trembling words. But in the end, she was the one to speak.

“Annie was a freak,” she said, gingerly pressing a roll of bandages in his hands, backing away quickly. “She never said anything. Not really. But she told Marlo once that she admired people who stood for what they believed in, because she was a normal person who could only go along with the status quo.” Her eyes, when they met his, were not unfriendly, though the set of her mouth was uneasy. “But, I thought she was untouchable, somehow. She seemed so…self-assured.” She laughed, a little bitterly. “It made me jealous, sometimes. She didn’t need perks. She didn’t want them. She didn’t even want to be safe. I thought to myself, ‘What the hell is this bitch doing in the Military Police?’”

Hitch lingered, sometimes, asked questions about what Annie was like as a trainee, or what training with Annie had been like. She sat with him, still too apprehensive and wary of her position to help him with his medicines and bandages unless he explicitly requested it, but she distracted him from his aches and pains by asking for those stories, and she listened to them eagerly, hands clenched and lips pressed tight as if she had something to lock away. There were days where the words spilled out of her helplessly, and she would tell him about Annie’s bedhead, how she always seemed to be saying something even when she was silent, or maybe how she was clever in the smallest ways, maneuvering herself so that the superiors didn’t notice her at all, didn’t get her involved in things she didn’t want. There was a kind of fascination and wonder in her voice, born of the interest of a personality completely opposite her own. But watching how animated she became when she spoke, how confused and irritated she was, having found out who Annie was and what she had done and not having understood it at all, Eren wondered if Hitch had been nursing an ill-timed crush.

He asked Annie about it once. She simply stared at him, eyes a little wide. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said, somewhat stunned.

A third attack from the shifter village came. A titan shifter, an unknown one, cut down in battle, attempted to break through Wall Rose with the assistance of an odd ape titan, resulting in a record amount of civilian and militant deaths and casualties. In the midst of it all, some stray Scouting Legion horses that had managed to survive were found with messages tucked into their trailing saddles and bridles. The handwriting was quickly found to be Ymir’s, the messages the coordinates of Reiner and Bertholdt’s village; evidently she had somehow snuck herself into the attacking force. The incident cemented the reformation of the Scouting Legion specifically for the eradication and investigation of the outside shifters. However, the new version of the division included members from Garrison and Military Police as well, to keep an eye out on all the reinstated members of the old Scouting Squads. Marlo and Hitch, having been Eren’s guards and caretakers, had been placed on the squad as a matter of course, along with some other unfamiliar faces.

“Marlo’s a lot like how you used to be, Walls help us all,” Jean had said with a rueful grin, pale morning light catching the scar slashing down from his hairline, crossing the contour of one aristocratic cheekbone. “And Hitch is a piece of work.”

“Won’t they be fun for you deal with, Squad Leader?” Eren goaded in response.

Jean huffed and swatted at the back of his head before settling onto the headquarters’ steps, tugging the woolen throw back around his shoulders, hands curling around a cup of coffee, watching the sky change from inky darkness to deep purples and lighter blues. Eren watched him silently In turn, in the way he had learned to track faces and minute gestures while lying face up on cold steel, iron on his tongue, too far gone and too used to the sensations to really register the bright, frigid slice of scalpel into the soft, vulnerable meat of his belly, his arm, his leg.

“You’re different,” Jean said suddenly, because Jean had always been an asshole and just because they were a little older didn’t mean that he still wasn’t one. “They weren’t kind to you, were they?”

Eren stared at him the way he stared at everyone these days, a little wild and a little haunted, eyes like lanterns. “No,” he said. “They weren’t very kind at all.”

Jean patted the space next to him, and it took a short exchange of exasperated glances and insistent hand motions to get Eren to take him up on the offer. Settling in next to him, Eren copped a face full of wool when Jean unfolded the throw and flung one half of it haphazardly over Eren’s head.

“Take better care of yourself, fuckin’ idiot,” Jean grumbled, grunting as Eren slapped his arm and tugged the fabric down around his shoulders. “Armin’s worried.”

Eren and Armin didn’t talk much anymore, by then. Armin didn’t have time for Eren’s antics, and Eren couldn’t swallow Armin’s perspectives. Time under Levi’s command had changed him, and in Eren’s opinion, not for the better.

So Eren drank quietly from his own cup of coffee, huddling small and silent with Jean. He thought of catching Marlo and Hitch’s eyes in the corridors, thought of the glint of the scalpel, wicked and thin, and the potatoes he had skinned for dinner the night before.

“What did they do to you?” Jean asked.

“They cut me open,” Eren said, reached out to trace the shapes of the incisions on Jean’s chest absently. Things like that didn’t seem to be as a big a deal as they used to. There were times when his body didn’t seem like it belonged to him anymore. “They took bits, sometimes, waited for them to grow back before sealing me up. I think I’m lucky I didn’t get an infection. But it’s kinda weird to think that there are pieces of me floating around out there, in jars or something.”

Jean hastily took another drink of his coffee, trying to mask the sickened twist of his frown. “You fought back?”

“Of course I did,” Eren said, scowling, trying to lay claim for a larger section of throw. Jean scowled back, and didn’t give an inch. “Not like they cared. They’d just shackle me the next time, or put me under. Sometimes I woke up in the middle. Sometimes I didn’t.”

"Hell,” Jean murmured. Setting his coffee down, he tugged Eren into an awkward, one armed hug, wrapping the throw more snugly around them.

Eren let himself lean, let himself soak in the warmth, let his head droop into the crook of Jean’s neck, because the bastard had still managed to grow taller than him. It felt like it had been ages since someone had touched him like this, soft and unhurried.

“Getting soft, huh, Kirstein?” he said.

“Shut up, asshole,” Jean mumbled, but his hand squeezed gently around Eren’s shoulder anyway.

He died later, on the mission where they retrieved Ymir. When they got back to headquarters, Eren had taken the throw, and in the sleepless mornings soon afterward he still huddled into it, feeling a little childlike, feeling a little bereft. He couldn’t remember what Jean’s dead body had looked like, just remembered the after, the ashes, the mass cremation, the black, hellish smoke billowing into the sky.

Seeing people like Sasha makes him feel that all over again. Like he’s breathing poison into his lungs, like he’s small and left behind, like he’s lived years in seconds,  never really met or talked or touched anyone at all. And sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s him who remembers, but them. Sometimes it feels like he is just a figment of their collective imaginations, that he’s a ghost that only exists because they are there, only visible, recognizable, if the light hits him in the right way, under the right circumstances.

He boards the train, walks home lost in thought, and wanders into the living room where Annie sits on the floor in front of the couch, scratching away at her tablet as usual. That’s right, they’re having leftovers for dinner tonight. 

“Did you get the toilet paper?” she asks him, eying him with a distrustful blue eye. “I bet you didn’t.”

He stops, frozen. He did forget. He hadn’t gone to the store at all.

“Useless,” Annie grouses, ending her current penstroke with a flourish, as if to demonstrate just how superfluous his existence is.

He collapses into laughter, laughs so hard he can’t even stand up straight, falls to his knees  and sags against the couch cushions, laughs even harder when Annie glares at him like a he’s a piece of dog shit smeared on her nice leather boots.

“Leave,” she says, shoving him away with a socked foot. “I don’t want to catch your stupid.”

He laughs again, because he can’t help it. They’re a pair, the two of them, a pair of the stupidest fools he’s ever seen.

xv.

It isn’t hard to get used to technology; they have been around for a long time after all. They have learned to be adaptable, though adapting hasn’t been easy, by any means. But it has quickly become apparent that adopting technology has nothing to do with their ability to live without electronics, and everything to do with the fact that everybody else can’t. People are always stunned and surprised to hear that they only have a landline, or that there is no email with which to reach them, that they don’t watch cable television or play video games. They had learned, eventually, to drive cars, set up modems, use computers, but it was slow going and took time. Nowadays, it isn’t uncommon for them to take lower-paying jobs as mall employees, cashiers, fast food workers, and settle for several years at a time to catch up with what they have missed—to stop hopping from place to place and really focus on current events, reorient themselves in a new era. Truthfully, they have money enough, a good amount of cash tucked away in various vaults and deposit boxes gained through unlawful work, but their jobs keep them busy, make it seem like their lives are regulated and ordinary.  But it’s odd to think of how all the separate cities they’ve visited are all linked together through invisible networks, social media, Internet. They have to be careful about connections, about being traced, or tracked down. And Rule Number One, above all others: do not transform. For a long time now, shifting has been impossible for fear of public reaction and media attention. Photos and alerts could travel halfway across the world in a second, and they have no interest in spending the improbably long, more like infinite, remainder of their lives as people of suspicion, hunted and followed from place to place.

But the nice thing about technology is that it lets Annie work from home. She’s a freelance graphic designer, has a decent, cheap tablet from some bargain, second-hand website, has a hardy laptop that’s easy to take with her wherever she goes. Eren’s laptop is of the same make, but it’s marked with scratches and stains, so Annie always knows which one is hers.  She and Eren have long figured out how to weave themselves protected digital networks, to route their IP addresses through other countries’ servers, learned to block themselves and make themselves invisible, a necessity for them as they go from city to city, country to country. They try not to toe the line; it’s so different from their lives back then, when their jobs were to ruin, to destroy and rebel. Now they have to be sneaky.

It’s a little odd to work like this, since she’s really only had a couple years at it. A cracked program, some online research, and she had started putting together promotional posters, coupons, and website banners for her last job at an animal shelter. On a whim, she had sent out her new resume to a designer’s position on a job site, with links to an online portfolio. Surprisingly, she had gotten the job.

The apartment is silent until Eren comes home, because Annie doesn’t really listen to music, and the motion of her hands is soothing enough for her to draw by. Noise from the neighbors filters through the walls anyway, as well as the rumble of garbage cans and car and motorcycle engines from outside. She usually looks for physical work because it’s easy and enjoyable when in the right mindset, but there’s a joy in creating things too, the sensation she’s learned to love while working in a woodcarver’s shop, under a baker’s wing, at the wheel of a potter. She gets frustrated sometimes, takes breaks to walk around town and search for colors and shapes that might give her guidance, picks up groceries while she’s at it.

She starts dinner, and Eren usually comes back when she’s halfway through, changes and takes over so she can take her shower. He’s not bad company, really. He’s neat and good at cleaning, but he’s still horrible at dropping uncomfortable conversation topics, and they’re just as liable to get into heated debates as they used to. Then again, Eren also does incomprehensible things like drink black tea after dinner. Annie gave him this look the first time she saw it and he immediately bristled in response. But she leaves it alone because honestly, what does she really care about Eren’s weird eating habits?

And aside from her odd glee at reality shows, she and Eren have similar taste in television, so they never have fights over what to watch after dinner. But that’s the only good thing about it, because there are days when Eren says something like, “What a shitty finale”, and Annie will shoot back with, “What, did you want the hero to actually live?” and then they sound just like they did when they weren’t feeling their goddamn age, weren’t feeling left behind by the world and its advancements. Occasionally, they give in and wonder if there’s an ending out there for them, or if this odd limbo means they’ll be alive until the end of the world comes.

Eren sleeps later than her, because he takes showers before he sleeps instead of when he comes home from work. Another one of his odd quirks. She always burrows into her covers to the sound of falling water, Eren’s strangely pleasant, hummed version of the week’s top ten best pop list, a constantly reinvented lullaby. They have two rooms but they don’t always use them; they’ve fallen into a pattern of sneaking into each other’s beds when they need closeness and comfort, the heat of skin to skin, waking up tangled in another person’s legs, feeling well-rested and refreshed.

That’s what her days are like, now. Maybe it’s a little strange, but in between the bouts of melancholy and despair, the restlessness and need for anonymity, she feels close to satisfied, content. Sometimes, she even feels happy.

No obligations, really, aside from bills, no duty, aside from paying taxes and taking out the trash. Limits set – weekdays for work, for living, Sundays for remembering, for guilt. Two thousand years down the line, and she’s finally beginning to feel like she’s a normal girl.

It’s unbelievable. She’s a warrior. A soldier, a sleeper agent, a killer, murderer. She’s reveled in the methods of it, felt the horror of the results, hauled the bodies out of the cobblestone streets of Trost onto carts that would take them to be burned pile by pile, all their ashes inseparable. Merciless, leaving for the Military Police, abandoning Jean’s grief and Eren’s shocking absence, and the sensation of her stomach lurching when she saw Eren howling into the streets, savage in his anger.

She had waited for those inevitable moments: the draining glee of competency, triumph, and the utter defeat of her opponents, the terror of the threats that Captain Levi whispered virulently into her ears, fear sinking into her every pore, the vindictiveness with which she crushed and slaughtered his team, and the sudden, shocking force with which Eren turned all his grief and fury onto her for the first time. When she pried him out of the steaming, broken titan body, she couldn’t help the trembling of her heart. His fragile, human body was so still and quiet in her mouth, warm and tasting vaguely of salt. Perhaps he had been crying again. She thought futilely that this was a mission, a purpose, a prophecy she had waited all her life to fulfill, but when the deadly figure of affection and warmth swung before her, scarlet scarf whipping behind her like a warning flag with the small, but tenacious shape of fear behind her in sharp pursuit, Annie stumbled, fell. And near the basement in Stoess, she fell again with Armin’s stare on the nape of her neck, watched Mikasa grow cold and shuttered and Eren grow desperate with every word she spoke.

After that, the guns, the stabbings, they don’t bother her as much as they should. Such distant methods. These gangsters only know the kick of the gun, the shriek of the bullet, but they’ve never known the squelching crunch of bones and organs giving way, they’ve likely never felt the fragility of the human body in the palm of their hands like she has. She hasn’t killed much of anyone since she last shifted, two thousand years ago, but she has no compunctions about using violence, and there are times where she, and Eren too, have had to kill to survive—in wartime, in hostile areas, in self-defense, and as part of their work. Eren, he knows how to defend himself, and they still spar sometimes, but he does his best to stay out of the way. It’s another one of the “new” things about him, this oddly unassuming, everyman’s nature, but that’s what makes him a little terrifying now, the sudden shift from being just another man on the street, to a living weapon with emotion and strength coiling in every muscle, body trained to kill.

There are days where she wonders why she didn’t try harder, why she didn’t try to fight so-called faith. Normal people were weak, she was weak. Weak and frail, and now she’s lived longer than anyone else, seen more than anyone else. The thought of it drives her mad, and she stomps to the kitchen to scoop out two teaspoons of Eren’s green tea the way she always sees him do it, forces herself to drink down the entire, scalding cup,  even though she hates how it burns on the way down, how it makes her throat dry and her stomach hurt.  She washes the cup with soapy water, puts it in the dishwasher to air dry, throws the dishrag in the sink, and slams her back against the lower cabinets as she slides down to the floor, teeth grit in pointless anger, hands wrapped around her knees like the child she never got to be.

“You’re strong Annie, and very controlled, but this isn’t about that. You can have something sweet if you want,” Mina had once told her, offering a piece of the rock candy she had saved up for months to buy.

She feels like something got stolen from her, but she doesn’t know if it’s true, or if it’s a force of her imagination. She gave it up, she thinks, rain washing down the windows, alone at home, watching the thunder and lightning crash against dark sky, all the lights off. She gave it up, didn’t she? She didn’t fight.

Was it for love? she wonders, thinking of love’s thin, cracked shadow,  and wonders if love died when she didn’t return. Was it for love? she wonders, and remember when love struck her down so hard she locked herself away so she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

She gave it up, didn’t she?

“Do you think I’m normal?” she asks Eren, as a test.

“Define normal,” he says, “You tea-hating asshole.” He never seems to mind the unwarranted borrowing of his tea, doesn’t say much about it aside from snide remarks like this.

"Shut up, you won’t eat anything that moves like gelatin,” she snaps back, jiggles her not-so-healthy cup of morning pudding in his face.

“Urgh,” he says, shoving at her arm. “Stoppit.”

“Do you think I’m normal?” she asks again, raising a brow, shakes the pudding menacingly in his face.

“You’ve never been normal,” he says, wrinkling his nose. “Not to me. But that’s not weird, either. You’ve always been like that. So maybe being not normal is your normal.”

As she pops a spoonful of pudding in her mouth, and kicks his ankle for his crappy phrasing, she mulls over his words.

“Do you think I’m good?” she asks, and feels a burn on her neck even though there is no one behind her to stare, not now.

Eren’s eyes are large, they always have been, bright and luminous. She’s found that his eyes aren’t actually green or blue, they’re a misty grey that reflect whatever color on the spectrum they feel like that day. Outside, at work, under a clear sky, they’re green. Under the lights in the kitchen, they’re grey. Near the ocean, they’re blue, so blue it makes her remember the ice and the crystal, things that are still and unmoving.

“Define good,” he says.

xvi.

There’s a whole area of study surrounding what people nowadays call the Colossus Era, focusing exclusively on the period when titans roamed the earth. Modern archaeology has made little inroads into discovering how exactly the huge, man-eating giants came to be, or why they disappeared. Even Annie and Eren don’t quite know, aside from the knowledge that titans used to be human, but even now there are no tales about titan shifters, not a single mention of them in the programs on the television. The Wall Society is a mystery still, three rings of deep trenches dug into the ground, molten lumps of metal found buried in the layers of soil. Archaeologists are puzzled about why they’re there, but Annie and Eren recognize the beaten, misshapen lumps as the alloy used to make the components of the maneuver gear. One or two of the distinct, misshapen handles of the 3DMG have been found as well, and speculation over their potential usage is rife. Mostly, the archaeologists are surprised by the lack of bodies, maybe also of physical historical documentation, of which they only have a couple scraps of indistinct writing on paper. They don’t know that all the bodies and a good number of books were burnt, back then, and the ashes scattered.

Since they left, Eren and Annie have gone back a couple times. The first time they returned, a hundred or so years down the line, there had been nothing left but empty buildings, streets burnt and blackened, weapons stabbed into the ground and scattered about, rusting next to moldering skeletons.

“No one lives in that place,” the innkeeper in the closest village says. “I heard the entire city fell apart in a night. We had one or two people from there end up staying in this village permanently, but no one’s really gone back. Most people think of that place as cursed, or unlucky, since it got attacked by abnormal titans so much back in the day.”

The titans began to dwindle, in the end, though Eren and Annie hadn’t expected them to have a lifespan. Eren had thought that maybe it had something to do with shifting, with the way bodies seemed to merge, dissolve, come undone in the connective tissue in the neck. With the growing disappearance of titans, people abandoned the old villages underground, aboveground, settled on the land and spread out, growing rapidly from villages to towns to cities. New resources were available, and technology increased at a steady pace, but other conflicts began to emerge. Villages fought each other for river territory, for mines, for land, and it was during these times that Annie and Eren slipped seamlessly into new towns and cities. They were indistinguishable from the other refugees and drifters, and it was natural for records to be lost and missing during times of unrest. They avoided war where they could, left when they saw the signs, maybe let themselves get shot to make it easier. Death didn’t seem like anything new, and it seemed increasingly difficult to link the bodies in the streets with the numbers that were listed in the newspapers and by their fellow refugees in the mornings.

But in more recent times, things had become difficult. Long-term documentation, tax files, digital trails, birth certificates, National Citizenship numbers, licenses, test results, university degrees, all of these were part of a paper trail that Annie and Eren had to have to survive in the modern world. And sometimes, undocumented and unable to seek legitimate work, Eren and Annie held other types of jobs that were high risk, but paid well. Annie ran the drugs from syndicate to syndicate, and was soon known for her quick, efficient work, and for never getting caught. Her colleagues didn’t dare to cross her because she was quick with a gun, and even quicker with the trigger. She had come home with blood on her knuckles and red splashed down her worn tanktops more than once. In comparison, Eren found himself working with the brothels, doing collection work. It reminded him of the bordellos in Rose that fed off the Maria refugees, the scantily clad girls who waved in greeting to Eren, Armin, and Mikasa as they rushed back to the camps from a hard days’ work in the fields, who sometimes gave them bandages or taught them how to treat bruises and cuts, even when their arms were littered with small circular burns or mottled purple and yellow skin. Some of the girls had only been several years older than they were, and their ranks often changed. While he was out doing the rounds in the red light districts, he looked for the contacts they needed.

In the end, it was Annie’s connections that they used. The higher-ups liked her because she was fast, discreet, and didn’t ask questions. She didn’t make things difficult, didn’t ask for more than what she got, and she kept her cool. So they started giving her more jobs, more drop-offs, work less related to pills and powders and more to do with passports and papers and important personnel. As a result, Annie got access to those resources too.

It wasn’t so easy every time. Getting out was always the hardest part because sometimes the organizations didn’t like to let people go. Sometimes it ended with playing possum, letting Eren take the fall, letting his body get pumped full of bullet holes, because they knew he wouldn’t die. Sometimes they ran, close to untraceable, kept all their money in cash, all their identification falsified. But they hadn’t lived so long for nothing; they started picking up the skills, the forging, the hacking, and soon people started coming to them for papers. So it is that a small, battered box sits underneath their kitchen sink, shoved behind all the spare detergent bottles and cleaning solutions. It’s secured by a rubber band, and inside are passports and driver’s licenses and birth certificates with a dozen different names on them, from at least thirty different countries.

They lay them out on the coffee table carefully, like puzzle pieces. They can’t even read some of the languages their papers are printed in; they aren’t much for polyglots. They’re only conversationally proficient in the languages used in the cities that they’ve stayed in for longer stretches of time, and they only know bits and snatches of all the others. Sometimes, when they circle back in several decades, the local languages have already changed, and they trip over their own tongues in effort to catch up, learning new sets of idioms, new ways to string their words together. Eren takes longer than Annie to adjust, but when he starts speaking he catches on fast. Annie learns quickly, but in segments, so her sentences tend to be disjointed and simple, but she starts speaking and learning much faster than Eren, and her vocabulary is almost always wider.

“This one was a good one, wasn’t it?” Eren says, sipping on the strangely flavored soda he’s gotten a taste for. Elderflower soda, the wizened owner of their favorite convenience store had told him, with a wrinkled, gap-filled smile.

“The café was nice,” Annie says, and her voice rings strangely as she says the words around the mouth of her beer bottle. “Nostalgic.”

“It was,” Eren hums, straightens out a dogeared corner with a wince. “Let’s go again this weekend. And then again when we resign.”

“I’m making you eat the cake,” Annie says firmly. “It’s good.”

“Fine,” Eren says. “You’re having tea then.”

“I’m having coffee,” she snorts, draining the rest of her beer, slaps down another five passports, all in a row. “Some of these are expired.”

“Toss them out, then,” Eren grumbles, tosses another stack of rolled up birth certificates on the table.

Annie pointedly does nothing, raising a haughty eyebrow at him with a faint sneer on her face, and starts putting the certificates where they ought to be. Eren groans, knocks the expired passports back into the box with a careless sweep of the arm, takes them into the next room so he can shred them all to unrecognizable bits.

It’s kind of amazing, to have all their papers splayed on the table like this. Some of them spill over to the floor, all of them in pairs, one set for Eren, one set for Annie.

“Wanna go somewhere new?” Eren asks idly, flicking his fingers against the glass soda bottle.

“Don’t really care,” Annie says shortly, draining her bottle dry. “Not really feeling anything this time.”

“Me neither,” Eren says.

They sit, musing in silence.  Sometimes there’s an urge, to go places, specific places, to run away and go somewhere new and see buildings, cultures, foods and sights that they’ve never seen before, but sometimes there’s also an urge to go back, to revisit, to see and feel things that are familiar and friendly. But sometimes, there’s nothing at all, nothing but the odd feeling of overstaying their welcome; that it’s time to move on.

“Let’s do it this way,” Annie says.

They arrange one passport from each country into a large circle on the floor, scoot the sofa back to get some more space, move the coffee table so that it’s out of the way. Annie sets her empty beer bottle in the middle of the circle, and with one, confident, definitive snap of the wrist, she sets it to spinning.

Seconds later, the bottle stops.