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It's a wild night.
Shutters rattle at the windows, and lightning lashes between darkening clouds. The people of Shinganshina village light bonfires outside this time of year to keep the ghosts and spirits distant, but no one sane would be caught outside willing on a night like this.
Armin paces the confines of his grandfather's cottage, looks to the window and the storm outside it, listening for something in the distance. The same thing everyone listens for, he supposes: the cry of horns and hounds, the eerie, wailing calls of hunters. A scream, perhaps, high and ragged, rapidly fading. It's a full moon night, harvest time and the time of summer's dying, and somewhere beyond the safety of locked doors and man-made walls, the Wild Hunt rides.
Some survive it. That boy Jean, found at dawn with hollow eyes, clutching what remained of his best friend's body to his chest. The bastard girl Christa, who walked back on her own with blood in her hair and beneath her nails, her clothing all in disarray, and was always a little cold and moonstruck since.
Armin survived it twice.
.
He was only a boy, the first time, just twelve winters to his name.
After his friends died - taken by the Hunt, they say, though no one ever says it too loudly - he turned quiet and solitary. After the last of his family passed away, during that long winter when there wasn't enough for the young and hearty, much less the old and weak, he turned strange. He tried to hide it, at first, or hide from it, the anger that took root in him and the numbness that covered it over, the certainty that there should be more to life than waiting patiently for its end. But he couldn't hide from the way the shadows seemed to dog his footsteps since Eren and Mikasa's deaths, and there were times, on nights when the wind swept wild through village streets and chased the rain before it, when something in the storm seemed to howl his name. He buried himself in books, but his eyes were drawn to the window on full moon nights, and the expanse of moorland outside the door. And one evening he lingered late outside, long past the hour when his grandfather used to call him in. He could see the sky darkening and feel the wind rise, tugging at his garments and the loose strands of his hair. He might have been able to make it back in time, but instead of racing for the safety of home, he only watched as the pale moon rose above the trees, listening and waiting.
Even now, he can remember the way he felt, standing there with his hands clenched in his pockets and thinking with a strange clarity that he would be dead before the night was over, and it hadn't bothered him half as much as it probably should have. But at the first sound of a horn's high call, he still broke for the shelter of the treeline, breath seizing in his lungs and some distant part of him marveling all the while that no matter how little the mind cared to live, the body made its own will known.
But as the trees rose before him, he forced himself to stop running and face the hunter at the head of the pack, because his mind wasn't slave to his body, and if he was going to die, he was going to do it with his head held high. He met the specter's eyes, searching for his death there, and saw instead something he recognized.
Taken by the hunt, they say, and Armin - small and sickly, heartsick with grief and rage - Armin stepped forward, and until the sun came up, he was taken too.
.
The next thing he remembers with any certainty is waking alone in a ditch surrounded by brambles, the ground about him trampled down with pawprints and hoof marks, his head aching and ringing still with the sound of thunder.
His clothes were torn, spattered with drying mud, and his hair was a tangled mess of twigs and leaves, and he was covered with scrapes and scratches so deep he could almost believe the blood crusted on his skin was his own.
He remembers pushing himself to his feet, every inch of his body groaning in protest, and then setting off down the long path back to town, and every step closer to his home was like waking a little further from a dream.
He never told anyone how he survived that night, and he doesn't think he ever will. That's never stopped his friends from speculating.
He could have outwitted the Hunt, Sasha claims, and begs him to teach her how to do it too. She's a good hunter herself, sharp instincts, quick on her feet, and if she's ever caught up in the storm herself, he thinks she might have a chance. But he always shakes his head, gently to soften the truth, and says it was only luck.
Jean asks with a flash of anger if he made a bargain, and he says no, and he's not lying. He wouldn't, he says, after Eren and Mikasa, and Jean looks at him differently than he ever has before, then lets it drop and never picks it up again.
It must have been a spirit's grace, Connie decides, a sign of some harvest god's favor. The others whisper about it when they think he isn't there to listen, and sometimes when they know he is. He's always been weak, too frail to fight off the village children or even outrun them. He shouldn't have made it through the night alive.
He knows that's what they believe. He couldn't have survived on his own, when faster, stronger men and women have been run down beneath the moonlight, torn to pieces by the teeth of beasts and hunters.
He can't deny that they're right.
.
For a long time after that, he spent full moon nights inside and didn't think of his friends any more than he had to, and when voices outside the window seemed to call out to him from the dark, he ignored them. Three harvests came and went, all of them lean, and Armin worked the fields until his muscles burned and sweat poured down his back, only to watch the grain loaded up into wagons bound for Sina or out towards the war.
The king's men came by when he was fifteen, collecting soldiers for Lord Reiss's campaigns, but they passed him over with hardly a glance. Too weak, they said, too useless to kill anything but a squealing rabbit, or a squalling babe. He listened to their japes and felt sick, and when they left they took Sasha and Connie and Jean with them at spearpoint, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
They would have wanted Eren and Mikasa too, he remembers thinking, if they weren't gone already. But Eren and Mikasa weren't gone, and Armin wasn't useless.
Shinganshina people know to take cover on autumn nights, in tents or wagons or anything that would offer it. King's men don't. And as the shadows grew longer, Armjn sat outside, watching the recruiting party trail away to the south and waiting for the moon to rise.
Armin wasn't afraid, that night. He was alive, eager for the chase and the kill. The night howled in him and he howled with it, and by the time the sun rose red over the land, there was blood on his hands to match the blood in his heart.
The people of Shinganshina watched him through averted eyes as he walked the road back to the village gates, stared after him for weeks and muttered, this time in grudging awe, that his luck would catch up to him eventually. Connie and Sasha and Jean trailed back a few days later, a little stunned and thanking their own luck, and once they were all certain that no retribution would fall on them for a fell spirit's deeds, life went on very much as it had before.
But the other kids stopped tormenting him, after that. He still doesn't know why, exactly. He's no stronger than he ever was, no taller, but he only has to look at them and they fall back, apologies spilling from them like wine from a broken cup.
There had been a time - before the wars began, before his grandfather died, before he saw Dr. Jaeger take his children by the hand one night and lead them out into the storm - when Armin would have cared about that. But he isn't sure what he cares about any longer, except the thought of wind in his hair again, mud and blood and rainwater streaming in rivulets down his upturned face, on a night when the rules of the world fall away and anything seems possible.
Except for his village. Except for his friends.
.
He's sixteen years old now, and the wars haven't ended, and whether they march beneath the Sina unicorn or the Titan's banner, soldiers are always the same. He's learned the art and the risk of hiding the village stores from the armies that come through in one direction or the other, and he's fought against bandits and deserters until he was faint and shaking from the effort, and he's as tired of waiting for this to end as he is of cowering like an animal gone to ground. But he's been reading the books the old Doctor left behind him, and as much as Armin hates the man for the choice he made, he's not sure it was the wrong one. The Hunt can't be called or bidden or bargained with, but it might be led.
He'll need Reiss's daughter, eventually, and he thinks she'll be happy to join him. But not yet. There's more he needs to learn first, and as selfish as it is, he wants one more night to keep for himself.
He makes another circuit 'round the room, along four bare walls, past the door and the window and the rickety desk piled high with books he can't focus on long enough to read. He lets his fingers skim the covers anyway, brushing over rough leather. It's enough to call up memories of flipping through those pages with Mikasa and Eren, the three of them and all the hours spent dreaming of other places and days, and for a second, tears spring up in the corner of his eyes. He brushes them away with the back of his hand, reminding himself brusquely that Eren isn't gone. Changed isn't gone. And there's a reason for it, if he could only figure out what it is, just like there's a reason for everything. But the air smells like rain and lightning, charged with potential, and he knows he's out of time for thinking.
He steps outside, into the bracing cold. The wind scatters fallen leaves around his feet, tugs at his jacket and ruffles his hair. The moon shines yellow through the clouds as he walks down the path from his door and out of the village, toward an empty field where the grass grows tall around him. The high, mournful sound of a horn in the distance raises shivers on his arms.
He looks to the sky then, seeking a rider on a black horse, and it isn't long before the beast comes cantering out of the sky toward him. It stamps at the ground where it lands, snorting, too corporeal to be entirely phantom.
Hounds swarm around the horse's flanks, baying and snapping at the air. Steam curls up from their slavering jaws, the pads of their feet where they meet the wet earth. The rider looks down at Armin, taller now than he is in Armin's memories, and he looks like a stranger with that antlered crown he wears, that mane of wild hair. His face is concealed by shadow, but there's a flash of teeth in the darkness, and searing eyes. A smile. Sharp and savage as it is now, Armin knows that smile.
He returns it, feeling his heart beat faster, weakness falling away as he stands a little straighter and steps a little closer.
At his side, another rider alights, this one lean and scarred across the face, a scrap of scarlet around her throat like spilled blood. A girl, though there aren't many who have seen her face and survived 'til morning. She lifts a thin blade in salute, and though her eyes are pools of black fire, she wears the face of an old friend returning. Then she's off, into the sky with hounds trailing her feet, lightning flickering white around her. The first rider stays.
Armin says a name - a last name, the only one he uses now - and the rider bows his horned head and holds a hand out to him. He takes it, and feels himself pulled up with unexpected gentleness to sit astride the horse's back, steadied by gauntleted hands. He doesn't need the kindness, and he isn't really sure he deserves it any longer, but there's a terrible comfort in the thought that somewhere behind the Hunter's eyes, there's still something human left.
But Armin's blood is rising now, and as the horse rears and leaps for the sky, he realizes that he's leaning into the wind and grinning through bared teeth, the echo of that horn's song urging him onward. There are bandits in the woods, the same desperate lot of them that have harried Shinganshina all year, and to the south, the king's army marches.
The Hunt begins.