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“Annie should just be… Annie.”
Her first breath after the battle had pulled thick plumes of acrid smoke into her lungs, and she collapsed to her knees, choking and coughing until her eyes streamed with tears. It was suffocating, badly reminiscent of when the crystal had shattered around her, leaving her airways and eyes filled with fluid. But now, everything was dry, far too dry, her skin felt like stiff leather and her eyelids too stiff. But eventually, it stopped.
Her second breath had caught in her throat when the ominous barrel of a gun pointed at her forehead, right at the centre between her eyebrows, threatening her with death only moments after she had finally freed herself of her prison for the last four years. This is it, she thought, so I die here, even after it all. For a split second she accepted it, made peace with it even, because she’d got her wish hadn’t she? Her father was right there by her side, and she’d shared a hug, however brief. It satisfied her that finally, her mission had been successful. She’d been efficient to the end.
Her third breath was a soft gasp of shock and surprise, disbelief and muddled emotions, when a sharp, lean back put itself between her and that gun. Air expelled itself from her chest at the sight of that familiar blond undercut – however, not yet familiar enough – and then was sucked back into expanding lungs when that voice, very very familiar by now, convinced the armed garrison before them to drop their guns.
Her fourth and fifth breaths… lost to everything that happened after that.
Now she’s been breathing for five days.
Everywhere she looked, it was red dust. Red dust settling from smokes and fires, red dust billowing into the air when debris is moved. During the daytime, if she stood close to the edge of the jagged cliffs, she could see the sea stretching as far and wide as the eyes could behold, glittering under the sun. During the night, she saw the moon-glade on the water instead. In any case, there was nothing remaining of the world except them, and a few nations to the North, untouched.
While the heat sizzled off the hard, rocky ground during the day, the nights were cold, far too cold, and there weren't enough layers to protect any of them from it. Several tents, some of them proper, some of them makeshift from sheets of canvas and tarpaulin, dot the dry, red landscape; small comforts for the survivors of the Rumbling to seek refuge within, when the sun beats down too hard on dizzy heads, or the open night sky chills tired bones. Still, the tents were not enough for the populace, and some, like Reiner, have very selflessly, chosen to lay their sleeping bags out in the open.
Annie is not one of the selfless.
She shares a tent with people she doesn’t know. Her mistake, really, she hadn’t paid attention on the first night when they had chosen tents and beds. The luxury of choice did not come from an abundance of space or room, rather it came as a result of families wanting to sleep together, close, in each other’s arms. Of orphans seeking one another’s company, of friends sharing an inch of space, of lovers curled up together. As for her, there were two familiar faces in her tent, however – her father and Pieck, but neither close enough to share a bed with.
Proximity is an absurd thing.
For she longs for proximity with the one person whose tent is too far away, on the other end of their temporary settlement, along with the military officers.
He hadn’t spoken to her.
But the glances… it had become a game.
Him first, 24 hours after the battle ended, right before they retreated to the newly set up tents to rest. When she met his eyes, he hurriedly looked away.
Him second, on the morning of the second day, over their measly rationed breakfasts. Over spoonfuls of bland stew, she once again met his gaze, and then he averted his eyes to his bowl instead.
Him, also the third. His eyes had fixed themselves on her when she stepped out of a tent housing the injured. Whether it was the heat causing the flush on his face or something else, she didn't know, but he shifted his eyes away and strode off in the direction of the other boys.
Her, the fourth. Watching the unfamiliar outline of his body when he conversed with Muller and other engineers. Despite the distance between them, he caught her eyes, and she looked away.
Her, the fifth, at supper the next day.
Him, the sixth and seventh.
Her, the eighth.
And then, the both of them. And they didn't look away.
When the glances lingered into long gazes, the depth of which was impossible to feel except under the skin where she felt hot and strange, neither of them knew what to do with. Not that much could have been done anyway, there was always a distance spanning ten feet between their bodies; however, as her eyes burned and his neck itched, it was clear that the silent messages held in their shared gazes could no longer go unspoken.
He hadn’t spoken to her. But the glances… it had become a game.
But neither of them knew how to play it to the end, and it appeared they would remain stuck in this limbo, because at any given point of the day or night, there were larger matters that demanded their attention. During sun-bathed hours, it was the effort of finding a way out of Fort Salta, and during the icy night, sleep.
But sleep…
Not that it came to everyone uniformly, caressing them into dreams. No, sleep came to drag them into unconsciousness, simply a by-product of strenuous physical exertion and the fresh, but not unwelcome, loss of titan powers. For those ordinary women, men and children, sleep came as a means to forget the horrors of what they had witnessed only days ago. For Reiner, Jean, Connie and Pieck, sleep came in mere minutes and seconds.
For Armin, sleep came in the form of burning the midnight oil; she had seen.
For Annie, sleep doesn’t come at all.
Tonight, like all the other nights, she sits by the flap of the opening, drawing her knees to her chin under a threadbare blanket. In the tent that contains air rancid with the smells of sweat, exhaustion, desperation and relief, Annie can’t find a lullaby to put her to sleep. On this night, sleep doesn’t come at all, not even for a second, and she teeters somewhere on the blurred edges of wanting to drift off and remain staring at the moon, low in the horizon.
Strangely enough, or perhaps not, this funny state doesn’t bother her as much as the little yearning crawling along the length and breath of her bones.
After all, she has had too much stillness in her life, of not moving, of remaining stagnant, her throat burning with silent screams. While her mind seems to think otherwise, seeking some silence to soothe the storm of feelings and emotions raging within, it is not powerful enough for her eyes to close.
Because there is something in her tired bones, surely as white as that moon in the sky, that yearns for something else entirely.
A warmth.
A voice.
A scent.
A name.
His touch.
A noise.
Annie startles. There’s noise, low but the unmistakable scuff of shoes on rock, and she crawls out of the flap to look around the tent. There he passes by, in the distance, a ghostly shape where the midnight blue of his shirt blurs into the inky night sky, but a shape she can no longer mistake for anyone else. Unhurried, but purposeful strides by legs much longer than she remembers take him up a low hill, to where the bridge connecting the control station and the communication tower lies. There is something cradled in his right hand, but now he’s too far away to make out much of anything, and Annie stands, blanket pooling to her feet.
He’s on the bridge, far, far away, and above.
She’s on the ground, torchlit, both in the surroundings, and in her chest.
For a split second when he turns his blond head, the only bit of him properly illuminated in the moonlight, she thinks he spots her.
But this time she worries that her gaze is only solitary, and Annie can’t bear it to be.
Not now, not anymore.
So she follows him. Everywhere she looks, there’s red dust. Red dust tinted burnt orange from the dying light of campfires, red dust kicking up behind her heels when her quick pace transforms into a hurried jog. Red dust crumbling from age-old rocks when she climbs the hill, red dust sticking to her shins and knees as she grabs onto the old metal railings of the bridge and lifts herself up.
Armin sits there, at the centre of the bridge, cross legged and pensive, blue eyes trained on the moon hanging low. He's not as surprised to see her as she is, suddenly finding it somewhat hard to breathe.
"Annie," He says softly, gracing her with a gentle smile.
Finally, a voice.
She stops just short of two feet from him, suddenly at a loss on what to do with her hands and the tingles creeping up her neck. It's slipping through her fingers, a way to give him a proper greeting that doesn't contain the questions her heart has been beating with all these days.
On the boat… he said he loved her, didn't he?
She wants to know why.
She wants to know since when.
She wants to know how.
She wants to hear him say it again.
And again after that.
And again, after that, until maybe, the sun started rising from the opposite direction instead.
"Hi," Annie manages, voice coming out much smaller than she intended. “What are you…” She sees it then, sparkling beside him; water, reflecting the starry sky, in a glass bowl. “What’s that for?”
He notices the bowl of water and chuckles, almost sheepishly. “Oh, that. There’s a funny story behind it, but… first,” His fingers, long and slender, fingers she longs to touch and feel, pat the space beside him. “Want to sit?”
She does. And she does it immediately, however, careful not to display any of her eagerness that’s threatening to burst at her seams.
Finally, a warmth.
Annie waits, sharing the space with him on this lonely bridge, coloured blue and pale yellow under a sky that had witnessed their end only days prior.
“I visited the wounded, this morning,” He begins, and she notes with a fast heartbeat, the sharper lines of his face. “There was a woman there, a grandmother to a young child, who was deaf and mute. She asked me if I wasn’t sleeping well.”
“Ah…” Annie breathes. The lady wouldn’t have heard the deafening sounds of the end of the world, in that case. And then, if she was old, who knew how many of her other senses she retained… Perhaps she could be considered one of the lucky ones.
“She then told me of this old ritual,” He continues, and this time, she watches the gentle night breeze ruffle his shirt collars and soft blond hair. “Where her family would fill a bowl with water, watch the reflection of the moon in it, and then drink it. Apparently it helped to fall asleep.”
“That… sounds like rubbish,” She says first. Such tales were always strange, but not uncommon, within the heavily guarded barbed-wire walls of Liberio. Old traditions and rituals, some taken from moth-eaten books, others passed down by way of mouth, followed solely for the sake of feeling a sense of community, as their kind rotted away, or got sent to war as weapons.
But they were rubbish, just the same.
Armin laughs. “Quite possibly. But…” He sighs, with the slightest of smiles. “Nothing can be stranger than us being alive now, don’t you think? So I thought… no harm in trying.”
Annie purses her lips. Only he would think that way, only he was capable of even seeing any of this that way. But she can’t deny that it does feel surreal, sitting here like this… with him.
“Do you–uhm–” He clears his throat, looking straight ahead. “Do you want to do it with me?”
It occurs to her then, that he had let her go once, out of a desire to let her just be, at a time when nobody had ever wanted her to be anything other than Annie Leonhardt, or the Female Titan, or the first attack, or the last attack, or a backup plan.
Yes, he had let her go once, and he would let her go again, if they found a way out of the Fort.
That should be fine.
She would share a cottage with her father, and maybe grow a vegetable patch in the garden out front. She would wake before the sun rose, and sleep after the moon fell through the curve of the sky. She would spend everyday in a monotonous, dull routine of existing, until her father grew old and one day, would not get up from his favourite chair. She would either bury him, or burn him, and then continue on the same way, until she faced the same fate. Only, who would be there to bury her, or burn her? Perhaps she would just rot in the open, instead.
It would be fitting, to become a feast for the flies.
But it’s not what her heart wants.
Her heart wants this boy next to her, no longer the boy she had failed to kill twice, but now a man who had seen his chance on a tranquil boat and taken it to tell her he loved her.
“Yeah.”
If not for the relieved sag of his shoulders, Annie wouldn’t have known of his apprehension; his voice had been too level, too even, to betray any. Her face colours with pink heat.
“Okay,” Armin draws a deep breath and twists to face her. Her spine straightens, half from the incredulity that comes with taking part in a stupid ritual, if only to celebrate their new lease of lives; the other half, however, because their knees press into each other, and he’s so close she can smell his scent – a mixture of sweat, fatigue, hope, and something distinctively Armin.
Finally, a scent.
The bowl rests between the diamond shaped valley formed by their crossed legs.
“We have to… wait,” He says quietly, eyes cast down at the sparkling water and not at her. “For the moon to rise above our heads.”
Is that another condition of the silly ritual? She wonders, while glancing at the moon, now significantly higher in the sky. Silence envelops them in an invisible blanket, keeping them warm and safe from the cold air nipping at their exposed skins. It is silence neither knows how to fill and perhaps, Annie thinks, it can be filled if he would just look at her eyes, from this close distance, it would be enough, for her racing heart to stop beating, if he would just…
“They call you Commander now,” She says instead, quietly enough that he wouldn’t be able to hear it if his face wasn’t twelve inches from her own.
“... I wish they didn’t.”
It’s heavy. Full of the weight of responsibilities he doesn’t look like he wants to carry.
“You didn’t kill Eren.”
“... I wish I could tell everyone that.”
An unbearable urge to hold him fills her entire body. To cradle his head in her arms and listen to the pain in his voice ebb away until there’s nothing in it except relief, comfort, and serenity.
But she’s probably the least suited person to do something like that. She frowns, with sadness flooding her heart with too much force, becoming too much to bear.
Moonlight shadows shift slowly above their heads, once again painting their second silence with a hauntingly beautiful glow. Their eyes are fixed on the water in between them, empty without a moon in it, and just the way the light moves gently, their fingers, resting on their knees, touch. Just the fingertips.
Annie’s heart is in her throat.
When was the last time she touched someone, without the intent to forget, or kill?
Now, she really would have said Armin remains unaffected, but there’s a tension in his shoulders she can feel through their knees touching each other.
Nobody speaks, but the heartbeats – not one, but two – are too loud.
But then, he speaks, and his voice is even quieter.
“You… came back.”
“I did.” Her voice is just air.
“Thank you.”
“... Yeah.”
He swallows, and she knows only because she hears it. His index finger ghosts against her pinky, just the slightest bit, sending a rush of sparks down her spine.
“Have you… properly reconnected with your father?” It’s a question framed with curiosity and care, and she feels overwhelmed by it.
“Mhmm,” She replies, biting her lip, gaze steadfast on the softly rippling water within the bowl. “I didn’t know he was alive. So–”
Too late.
A mistake.
Armin raises his head to look at her, with eyes wide and bright, eyebrows slanted with disbelief and yet a fraction of satisfaction of someone who’s just been proven right.
Her eyes are on his know, and she can’t look away.
“I–I…” She stammers, desperately wishing to turn time back.
“Then… why did you come back?”
Of all the things she had to say, it was this, and why is he even asking, when he already knows?
Because she can see that he knows.
“I… I don’t know,” She whispers, and the moisture in her eyes, the furious blush on her cheeks, and the slight tremble her body betrays, tells him everything he wanted to hear, and more.
How unfair, when she hasn’t heard him say it again.
“Annie,” He whispers back, a blush on his own cheeks, but unlike her, all of him is firm and steady and solid; so, so unlike her, which is on the verge of crumbling to pieces under the weight of all these emotions she can now feel, bare and raw and fresh, in her veins.
Finally, a name.
But it doesn’t last long. He isn’t impatient as she is, isn’t touching her the way she wants him to, isn’t dying to kiss her like she’s oxygen and his lungs are screaming, because he straightens his spine and looks down again, at the glass bowl of water.
“The moon’s here.”
So it is, a runny reflection of luminous white on water that ripples and breaks when he lifts the bowl between them. Annie swallows, wondering how to contain herself, how to compose herself, when she’s feeling this way, on the verge of a breakdown.
“I’ll go first,” He says, and tilts the glass rim to his lips.
He drinks, but while his eyes close, all she can see is the shapely curl of his lips around the glass, and the bob of his throat when he swallows. It isn’t fair, none of this is fair, to have woken up after four years and seen nothing familiar in him; his height, his shoulders, his hair, his arms, his neck, all brand new and sending her heart fluttering to the skies above.
In the blink of an eye, it’s her turn, and if he notices her staring, he doesn’t say anything. The bowl passes into her hands, shivering and clammy, the cool glass texture strange and foreign upon her shivering, clammy palms.
Annie drinks, and this time, he watches her.
What is he looking at, she’d like to know. There had been so many cheerful girls around him, all those years ago. He was bright and easy to approach, naturally, girls had made him bouquets and embroidery. She was a shadow in the dark corner, only two boys ever came to speak to her, and both of them she was indifferent to.
Annie had never felt like a girl until Armin looked at her that way.
And now… she feels like she’s been set on fire.
Somewhere, she hopes he thinks she’s beautiful.
And then, it’s Armin’s turn again and she passes it over to him. The moon in the water reduces in size and reduces in depth as they share it, turn by turn, drinking with lips they cannot tear their eyes away from, swallowing in throats they want to touch, sharing with open hands they want to interlace.
But he isn’t impatient, the way she is, so he’ll do it by the book – or so his eyes say.
Very soon, the water is gone, and so is the moon floating in it.
Is the moment broken? She wonders bitterly, still gazing at his eyes with disappointment fast filling her face. Is that it? Is it over? She doesn’t want it to be, she wants this to last as long as the night, and the night after tonight, and then the next and the next. If it means she never leaves Fort Salta, that’s also okay – her heart wants him, she wants to live, with him, maybe she won’t rot in the open then, maybe he will bury her in soft soil over which butterflies flutter. And then, if she’s lucky, he’ll come join her in the afterlife.
It’s the first time she’s even believed in it. A tale.
But she’s safe, Annie feels safe, when Armin sets the bowl down but keeps holding her gaze. She’s relieved, she’s so relieved, when his eyes tell her he wants more too.
“What I said on the boat…” He begins, with a softness in his eyes she wants to dive into. “Do you believe me?”
Even if she said no, because no has been her refrain most of her life, he would know the truth.
“Yes.”
“And if I said I knew your answer to it… would you be okay with that?”
There are all these muddled emotions, the weight of which is too big, the depth of which she may never understand fast enough, the intensity of which she might need help with, to express, but Armin solved problems, he would solve this too, he wants to solve it – this too, she can see in his eyes.
He knows.
“... Yes.”
He smiles, a pull of his lips that looks both vulnerable and weak, both relieved and joyful, and it fills her heart with newfound pride.
She gave him this smile.
The gates of a new possibility in her life; opened.
Annie can make him smile. With happiness, joy, and more feelings she can’t name, but feelings that certainly, he’s intent to express for her.
She might not be meant for the flies, after all.
And then, a beautiful crimson blush overtakes his cheeks, and his nose which always remained perennially red, and his neck, but he still doesn’t take his eyes off her. Annie can no longer feel the chill of the night.
“There’s still some water,” He whispers.
“Where?” She whispers back.
Armin’s eyes drop to her lips. And she understands.
“You should– you should drink it,” She says, a mere breath of air rushing out of her lungs.
He swallows. The moon is bright over their heads, and she’s never seen him look so handsome before.
“Can I?”
Her response is only a nod, and it’s all he needs, anyway.
So he leans in, and touches her, in ways she couldn’t have imagined setting off sparks and fires throughout her system, when his lips press to hers. She’s stiff and unmoving, scared and worried, but he takes her upper lip between hers and coaxes her into forgetting everything but the feeling of skin on skin, nerve endings on slips of the tongue, breaths into quiet sighs, eyelashes on the cheeks. He kisses her, and she learns to kiss him back, pouring things she wants to say into the expression of love, things she can’t say for she doesn’t know the words to use. But he gets it, he gets all of it, evident in the deep slant of his head and his fingers curling around her spine.
He gets it, all of it.
Finally, his touch.
When breaths begin to run thin, and clouded vision blurs with heat, they pull apart, and gaze and gaze into each other’s eyes.
In those cobalt blue eyes, she sees.
A life she could’ve never seen for herself, in a world she didn’t believe in.
But who is she to deny the vision in his eyes when he looks at her this way?
“Are you happy?” She murmurs into his lips, arms locked around his neck.
Armin smiles wide, and it’s brighter than the moon in the sky.
“I’ve never been happier.”