Work Text:
If I could have been happy with anyone, it would have been with him.
He gave me dreams of stars and aurora lights and the sea, and hope for something that could be found beyond all that. In his forbidden books he showed me temptation, paintings of the horizon, and I traced over delicately drawn lines with bruised fingers. He read me stories with happy endings and his voice was a kind of conviction I could not help but believe in. I could not help but love him, another weakness of mine, but perhaps the most innocent one.
And I think we could have lived forever if only immortality wasn’t reserved for the pure-hearted saints and angels. I think we could have lived forever if only I could have kept breathing, kept my heart beating, if only I could have followed him to the ends of the earth instead of shoving him back before I free-fell to my death. I think of those halcyon, warm sunlit moments in the cold of night and it is peace that numbs, that consumes, that hurts worse than the death I am dying because it was real, but only for a lacking, infinitesimal time.
It would have destroyed me if he could have understood. If he could have understood that memories and dreams were all we ever had, and he was always the one meant to live them, while I could only clutch the broken pieces in my fists, letting them cut and wound.
He lets me go, but he holds onto me as I fade from his arms.
-
Maybe happiness is a quiet life.
Maybe happiness is not radical conquests, victory on a bloody battlefield, restless, breathless, dizzying pleasure that comes from adrenaline and a lack of self-preservation. No, maybe happiness is simple; maybe it is watching sunrises and sunsets, staying up late at night and falling asleep by accident, going into town and meandering about for no specific reason beside the fact that you can, that it is safe, it is freedom.
And maybe, just maybe, love predicates the same principle.
Love is not supposed to hurt, but it does.
And I think, in another life, I could have loved him as well, if I had been born with a different heart, a different soul, wore flesh and was made of bones that were indestructible but not inviolate. If only I had been made of different stuff, not a body made of crushed little stars.
He found me once puking up my guts. I could feel myself decaying, rotting from the inside out. My body was attempting to purge the death I was made up of, it was fruitless. I expected mockery, would have welcomed it, maybe - but he was cautious with me, kind, and it was more cruel than any of the fists or furious words we’d thrown at each other in the past because he looked at me and he knew I wasn’t fighting anymore. I was no longer fighting for a dream that wouldn’t even visit me in the night.
I was no longer fighting for a dream he always swore I’d die for.
He kneeled beside me on a cold limestone floor and stroked a hand through my overgrown hair. He muttered softly into the silence, as if the words might break me somehow further, “Eren, you’ll be the death of yourself.”
I wanted him to hit me, I wanted him to hit me until I felt something again. If this feeling could have been beaten out of me, I’d have begged to be bruised by him. Love was violence, love was blood, love was worth suffering and self-mutilating and dying for, or so I thought. For so many years I thought he was a cynicist, a coward, an arrogant and apathetic bystander but no, it wasn’t that. He simply wanted a quiet, comfortable life, and what that took was a sacrifice he secretly never wanted me to make.
He will scream as I tear us both apart.
But if it could have been, I think I would have liked a quiet life with him.
-
She is sweet and soft yet made of steel. She is pragmatic and detached but her heart isn’t bastardized and bruised like mine. She smiles, bitter and empathetic, and when I kiss it off of her lips it feels like broken shards of glass.
She tells me I don’t know what love is but I tell her I know what it isn’t, is that not good enough?
It is something I could not live with but could not live without.
It is far too late to unwreak the damage done but in stolen, safe moments we bleed together by candlelight. We trace trembling fingers over flesh that is deceptively virgin-soft and unmarred. We bite down on each other’s bottom lips and we are well aware these teeth have mauled, savaged, and devoured human life. We are monsters and we are the children that fear the monsters and we cling to each other at night even though these beasts do not lie under the bed.
She looks at me with murder in her eyes and suicide is scourged into the depths of my own. It frightens her and it makes me easier to kiss because I think if she could, she would save me. She would save me if I were not digging a mass grave.
But she cannot even save herself from digging her own. This she understands too.
She will fight until her last breath for the ones she loves most, as will I.
The only difference is in which direction we point the knife.
-
I am always looking for what will make me happy, and so I will die with my eyes open, gazing upon the one who did for as long as she could. She will not flinch when it comes down to severing my head from a neck of bones, but she will cry and she will hold me close, endlessly apologizing that she could not save the dream that kept her alive for so long in the end.
All we ever had were dreams.
And in these dreams, we construct a home that would never be ruined. It would be a home I would build, not destroy, and I would build it with human hands that would bleed and scar. In this home we would raise a family that would not be torn apart by vendettas and vengeance. There would be no basement, no nighttime visitors, nothing that could threaten the pretty picture of domesticity. There would be no brutality, no violence, the war would be over. It would be home.
We would be safe.
We would be free.
But, not really, because the walls of this house would still whisper secrets to me, and I would still be bound by the contract that marks in blood the sale of my soul - the soul that was gone before I could even feel it.
And she held it in her scarred hands, my very human soul, until it disintegrated like ash and was swept from between her fingers. The debt is paid in full. Her final act of love is to kiss the last breath from my lips.
In the end, it was a nightmare she was freed from.
And my dreams remain the only freedom I have ever known.
-
In the end, none of this ever happened, it shouldn’t ever have.
All I ever do is yearn for something I would not love if I had.