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“Stop,” Annie murmurs against his chest, pushing back with the palm of her hand. He’s warm and solid beneath her fingertips and she thinks that’s at least one thing that’s changed in four years. (It’s one of many. He’s better with his eye contact now, spins effortlessly through the air in ODM gear. The straps are snug around his chest, taut against his arms and there’s something for his shirt to bunch up against when he leans against the wall.
But there are also things that remain constant. The way he fiddles with his fingers, the way his words are careful like he’s stepping on a minefield. Armin has always been smart and it seems time has only made him sharper.)
He pulls back like the gentleman he is, fingers pressed together in his lap. She still can’t get over the size difference. She got a view for four years through warped glass, but it’s nothing like this–sitting trapped in the body of a teenager and staring up at a man who’s been molded against his will.
She could press his hand to hers and it wouldn’t even take up half the size.
“Did you not like it?” he asks, lips quivering, eyes wide. Shy even after unburdening four years of pent-up emotion.
“No,” she replies, frowning instinctively. The problem was the opposite–she’d liked it too much. Pressed up against his mouth as he combed his fingers through her hair, she’d almost forgotten what it took to get here. The corpses she used as stepping stones–bruised and battered, bent limbs and broken bones. She’s drowning in their screams, bathing in their blood. They hang on her person while she’s awake and they haunt her dreams when she’s asleep.
Every smile is a mockery of their lives. Every laugh is a handful of dirt on their graves.
“We just shouldn’t be doing this right now.”
They’re headed on a boat to kill their friend turned foe, or maybe just very confused, very conflicted friend. They’ve stained the harbors in blood, killing and killing and killing in a sick and twisted crusade to save humanity. (There’s no way to justify the bloodshed though. No matter how many lies you feed yourself and no matter how many fantasies you spin, the red remains on your fingertips like a perpetual promise of your damnedness. She should know.)
“Like… making out?” Armin asks hesitantly, with all the bashfulness of a kid whose hand has been caught in the cookie jar. Annie bites down on the visceral urge to roll her eyes. This is so stupid–god, they’re both so fucking stupid.
“That wasn’t making out,” she says and Armin makes a strangled squawk as his jaw locks. “There wasn’t even tongue.”
He’s flushed bright red like a cherry tomato and that’s almost enough to make her smile. Red is a good color on him, especially dusted light across his cheeks.
But red is also the color of the damned. It’s the color of the armbands tied on them like brands, it’s the color that Annie has splashed across half a continent.
“There… could be tongue,” Armin stammers in a valiant attempt to save face. For someone so smart, his composure crumbles at an astonishingly fast speed. He’s chewing at his bottom lip like he’s trying to wear it thin.
“We don’t–I don’t deserve this,” she mumbles against her knees. She doesn’t deserve a happy ending or whatever this is–a momentary interlude, maybe–when the eyes of all the people she’s killed bore down into her skull from heaven.
Armin takes the knowledge in hand, turns it over and swallows it down. He’s always been the better one with words between them–between all of them really. He’s always had a way with his tongue, even if he can’t kiss for shit.
“Is it about deserving?” he asks and he doesn’t lift her chin but his voice is magnetic. It pulls and pulls at her gaze until she caves and she watches his mouth move, watches the syllables tumble out from his lips. There’s something captivating about the way he talks that she could listen for hours. Has and will. Even lies are sweet in his mouth. “Isn’t life about being dragged along and doing your best to hold onto the things that matter? If there’s a heaven, I’m already damned so I might as well fall with no regrets.”
The boat rocks and she falls against his side with the motion. This time, she doesn’t pull away and he lets her linger, warmth shared between the cloth.
They’re both so fucked. They’re ticking time bombs–him with a couple more years to spare–and even if their DNA wasn’t laced with Titan blood like C4, there’s still the mile-long death counts trailing behind them. She’s worn-out from living a narrative painted in blood, from being dragged around by people who keep her out of necessity rather than sincerity, from slogging through each trial and each day, chasing after a face that hovers on the horizon like a fog.
He doesn’t ask her to stay and she doesn’t want him to. She’s tired–they both are–but she’s gone out like a candle burned down to the wick. There’d never been much fight in her to begin with, the lines between nurture and nature too blurred beyond recognition. She doesn’t know if she lived to fight or fought to live.
She’s not built for this–for a grand conquest to save humanity, for a battle they’ll write about in history one day. She’s built for smaller things–a house by the sea, a pair of hands to come home to, one bed and a threadbare blanket to share.
There’s nothing more left for her to give and Armin acknowledges that, even as he drags himself to his feet to chase his best friend halfway across the globe in a rickety attempt to save his humanity.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, the words hollow. I’m sorry doesn’t even begin to cut it. I’m sorry doesn’t encapsulate I’m tired of this war and I can’t fight anymore for a cause that I can’t even pinpoint and I’m sick of losing but that’s all I can do–lose and lose and lose and lose and now I’ll lose you too .
They’re not soldiers. They’re just kids who never really had a chance to grow up. Can’t we just run away somewhere together–just the two of us? she thinks although she does not voice the words because she is stupid but not a fool. She knows it is an impossible paradox.
There is no peace in war.
He grips his hand in hers, large and firm and she wonders when Armin’s hands become so calloused and steady. He presses a kiss to her knuckles, gentle like he always is. Soft in his speech, in his actions, in the tender way he trails through her emotions and opens them up to the sun.
“Don’t be,” Armin whispers back, just as quiet and just as solemn. “You deserve to rest.”
Rest is a luxury neither of them will ever experience again and they both know it. She dredges up half-a-smile for him regardless.
Give your hearts, they said. They’ve given it all–their hearts, their souls, their abilities to sleep at night, their pasts, their futures, their childhoods, their scraps of adulthood. Isn’t that enough?
She thinks of a spot on her hand–right between her thumb and her forefinger–where the skin has grown thin and wonders if it will ever end.
“Just,” he says, squeezing her hands once. His eyes are watering but he does his best to swallow through it. He is still a little boy in a man’s body though and they both know it. “Wait for me, okay?”
It is a fool’s errand when he’s basically on a suicide mission to stop mankind’s greatest threat since the dawn of time but she is just as much of a liar as she is a fool. She’ll wait if he tells him to wait, even if the sea catching on fire has better odds, even if having him pressed up close against her chest, warmth burning into her side, cannot erase the list of faces she’s sent to their untimely deaths.
“Okay,” she replies. There’s no fucking way to even begin to atone but she thinks again of his words, of how she’s already falling down to Hell but she can at least try to grab a ledge on the way down. “Okay,” she says again, the words a little more solid. “I can wait.”
Armin smiles and that’s another thing that hasn’t changed, the way his face breaks into something breathtakingly beautiful. She cups his cheek with one hand and when he doesn’t pull away, she leans in slowly to kiss him.
He doesn’t taste like the fairy tales say he will–like sugar and spice and everything nice. Instead, he tastes like saltwater from the tears running down his face and ashes from the harbor they burned but sitting in the rocky cabin of their boat as they drift along the sea, Annie thinks that’s enough for her.