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It was maddening, trying to untangle the web of timelines that he had lived through and created each time he tried something new, each time he tried to figure things out. Without dying, Eren had lived hundreds of lives, though hardly any of them ever lasted a lifetime.
The Attack Titan’s ability to see and alter the past and present turned Eren’s life into a game of trial and error. He would see a decision be made and watch what happened with that timeline. He would see if it was a good or a bad decision, what would come of it, and he would have to decide if that was what was supposed to happen.
At first, it was confusing, figuring out what he could do. Each time, it was as though he had a “reset point", at the award ceremony with the new Queen Historia, when he would see everything that was to come. From there, he would make adjustments. Eren had seen the future to come, and each time he would try to change it. He saw where he failed each time, where he had to go back and change.
It wasn’t unusual for every large choice he had ever made to have its success or failure determined by a much smaller choice. There was a time in which Eren had managed to defeat Bertholt before Armin had been burnt to a crisp. He had fought tooth and nail to create a timeline in which Armin didn’t have to be the Colossal titan, in which Armin had a chance. It was the choice to stay in the city to bandage Armin up, rather than moving up to the wall, that brought Floch back to Levi, carrying a nearly dead Commander Erwin.
The Scouts had their Commander back, and that Commander didn’t hesitate in sending Armin and many others to their deaths. No matter how Eren tried to save Armin from the haunting fate of being the Colossal titan, either he or Mikasa ended up dead within the month.
+++
Eren was fighting on the front lines as an Eldian soldier, and he had seen what he had to do. His memories were all that prepared him for what he was about to do. He remembered the feeling of the sharp and yet too dull knife slicing through muscle and flesh, feeling the bone splintering and cracking. He looked down at his leg and knew that he would have to do it again. In his memories, something is different from what he has to do now. In his memories, his grandfather recognizes his eyes. He says that Eren carried the same look his father had.
Eren learns the bursting pain of a point going through his eye, he hopes that if he has to do it again, the memory will prepare him.
+++
After he found out that Sasha had been killed while on the mission he had sent everyone on, Eren couldn’t help but to wonder if what he was doing was truly best. He heard Connie’s screams from the other room, he felt as though all the air and been stolen out of his lungs. He could practically see his heart on the ground, crumbled up and stepped on by the death of one of his friends.
He couldn’t let that happen. He found out who killed Sasha, he kept an eye out. He knew exactly when and where to kill Gabi, before she would even have the chance to take a shot at anyone on that airship. Eren learned first hand what his father felt, the crunch of a child’s skull beneath his hand. After that, everything else played out the same. The death of one child didn’t make much difference in the immediate future, and Eren was back on the airship, chained up to his bench once more.
In his relief, he listened to their pleas. For a moment, he allowed himself a bit of relief when he saw all of them together once again, and he wasn’t greeted with their mourning faces. Armin was practically begging him to think about what he was doing, to think about whose lives he was staking. One glance at Sasha’s face, a look in her still moving eyes, and Eren let himself be pursuaded. He listened, and he knew that he only had himself to blame when, mere weeks later, just after he would have began the Rumbling, Paradis was greeting with a rain of bombs.
If it weren’t for the heat and smell of gunpowder, the blood stained dust in the air would have made Eren think he was back in Shiganshina, the first time he had met Zeke. He wondered if Commander Erwin felt the same way, having lead so many people to their deaths.
There was no choice, he realized. If Eren didn’t make everyone hate him, he wouldn’t stand a chance against their pleas. He knew himself well enough to know that he would give into them every time that he looked into their eyes and saw the care they still held for him.
He let Gabi live. He watched her run into a building a he couldn’t help but wonder if this was truly for the best.
When he faced the others just hours later, he couldn’t help but laugh. They screamed in his face, telling him that he’s the one that killed Sasha, he sent her to her death. If only they knew how right they were, if only they knew that they were living in a timeline of his own creation.
+++
Every single choice, every single action he had repeated over and over to the point of insanity was always towards one goal. Eren so desperately needed his people to survive. Eren was gifted with the power to save them and he fought for the freedom to use that power. He wasn’t going to sit back and watch the world destroy those he loved when he had the ability to change it.
When Sasha died, when Eren killed her, it made him realize something. He cared about this makeshift family more than anything else in the world, more than the rest of all humanity. However, that care hadn’t gone unreciprocated.
He sat down at the table with Armin, Mikasa, and Gabi, three people that he had changed the very flow of time to keep alive. Despite everything he had done, the people he had killed, the lives he had changed, he still saw hope and compassion in the eyes of these two people he had grown up with, and he knew what had to be done.
A little part of him was proud when Armin flew across the table at him. It made him happy to know that he would be able to stand up for Mikasa, for anyone he needed to. Knowing exactly how hard it was to throw Armin against the shelf, exactly how much strain it put on his arms, the sound of him gasping for air wasn’t something Eren would ever be able to forget.
It seemed as though he had done a good job at finding loyal followers, when two of them burst through the door at the crash. He didn’t spare them a glance, didn’t say a word to either of them, just watched as Armin stood himself up.
There were times when it felt like everything moved in slow motion, when everything went wrong. Times when Eren could see every second as though it were an hour, see exactly when something was happening and yet couldn’t move fast enough to stop it.
++This wasn’t one of those times. Everything happened in an instant, and he couldn’t tell if it was the shock or the gunshot that made everything seem to go silent. One instant, Armin had stood up enough to glare at Eren and the next, half his head was blown off. No one moved, but a glance to the side showed Mikasa with a face splattered in what Eren could only assume was a scrambled mixture of blood and brains. He had to fight to not vomit as he took in the scene. ++
Somewhere behind him he could hear Gabi gagging, and one of his two men scolding the other for pulling the trigger too soon. He watched as the carpet slowly grew stained darker, watched as the uniform Armin proudly wore carried the sign of him giving his life for what he believed, and the worst part of it all was that Eren knew it was his fault that Armin had died thinking, believing that Eren hated him.
It was then that Eren realized something. No matter what he did, no matter what path he took, nothing would be worth it if he had to watch someone he cared so deeply about die right in front of him, knowing it was his doing.
+++
Eren tried again. He got so far, and he thought he did everything right, and everything was supposed to go smoothly. He knew what to expect, he knew what he needed to change.
But something changed without him realizing it. Standing at the top of the hill one starry night, in a country he was destined to destroy, Mikasa said something different. Eren decided to let himself be selfish, to allow himself the life he wanted, even if it wasn’t permanent.
After all, Eren was human too. An emotional, complicated and sometimes impulsive human with a lack of a moral compass, but a human nonetheless. That night, while everyone else was drinking, he took Mikasa and lead her through the darkness to the dawn of a different time.
All the time Eren had spent fantasizing about escaping everything seemed to have paid off. He knew exactly where to go, he knew what he needed to buy to prepare themselves and where to find a cabin far enough that no one would ever suspect them to be.
In a small cabin with four walls and a too lumpy bed, Eren and Mikasa got to share a dream. Maybe they had both been forced to grow up too fast, and now they had the chance to slow down. Once he learned to stop thinking about all that he was leaving behind, all the deaths he was causing with his inaction, he learned to have fun.
They went on picnics, he build a garden for Mikasa and she grew flowers that decorated their home. Some nights, while they laid together and held close to one another, Mikasa would talk about the things and the people they had left behind. Each time, Eren offered to take her back, and each time she would respond the same way.
“You have given me love, Eren. Now that I’ve held it so close, I couldn’t imagine a life in which I can’t”
They only vaguely kept track of time, a simple tally of days on a board in the kitchen. Neither of them would say it, but they both knew it was because of Eren’s time limit. When they first went to the cabin, he had four years left. Around the time that they approximated two months, Eren began to prepare.
He hunted more and cured meat so that Mikasa would have plenty to get her through at least the first few months after he was gone. The leak in the roof was repaired, all of the hunting tools were sharpened and properly maintained. He dug himself a grave, one far enough from the cabin that it was out of sight but close enough that it wouldn’t be a struggle to get there and back to the cabin.
It was just a few weeks before when Eren learned that, while he was capable of a lot of things, there would never be a timeline in which he could be selfish without consequence.
++It was those same words that had been told to him time and time again that ran through his mind as he stood in the doorway of their home after fetching some water. The roof was strong, as he learned. Strong enough to hold Mikasa as she swung from a rope in the center of the small cabin. A fucked up decoration that turned this home into a grave, and Eren had no choice but to accept that this was all his fault. ++
He knew exactly what Mikasa wanted, he knew that if he asked she would agree without hesitation. He knew that it didn’t matter if it was worse for her, she would do anything to make him happy. When he offered a chance at the life she had longed for, she jumped on it without a second thought and Eren knew that she would.
Eren also knew that there was a time during which none of this had happened. He hadn’t gotten the chance to be selfish, and Mikasa didn’t get to see the life she had always wanted. Eren wouldn’t have to be the reason that the woman he loved killed herself.
He knew now that, in order for everyone he cared about to survive, he couldn’t be selfish. He had to be the cause of a timeline that caused so much pain and suffering in order to have a chance at a life during which he and his people would be able to live freely in a world without the horrific oppression he and the others had been raised under.
+++
Eren knows it's the end when he gets there. He knows, in the back of his mind, that there aren’t going to be any more redos, there aren’t going to be any more chances to try again and he felt nothing but relief when he realized that, even if that was the last thought he had as his head soared through the air and into Mikasa’s hands.
He tried, really he did, for it to end in a different way. For an ending that was even slightly more humane than what he knew had to be done.
He did the partial rumbling like he had originally agreed to, just the walls of Shiganshina. Paradis found itself under attack just weeks later, the walls and the titans within destroyed.
He wiped out all of Marley, including the remaining Titan shifters still devoted to the country. The rest of the world joined forces in memory of the fallen country.
Half the population wasn’t any better, there were still too many sources of military remaining and no possibility for Eren to learn how to do such targeted attacks.
Finally, he stops after just twenty percent of the population is left in the world. Everywhere else, combined, is finally equal to Paradis. Perhaps, in this equality, there might finally be a sense of freedom.
The world he stepped out into once he left his titan was not one that he was expecting. Rather than a world willing and ready to change, he found the soldiers of Paradis that had fought to stop him on the ground, being detained with guns to their heads. Eren realized that, even if he had wiped out the countries’ ability to do large-scale attacks, the people remaining would only ever view the people of Paradis as island demons, but now with their fears confirmed.
In that instant, he knows how to fix this. He knows how to make his people the heroes of the story, he knows exactly what he needs to do in order to give his family the life he had dreamed of for them. He just wouldn’t be there to see it.
But maybe he could leave them with the memories in which he was by their sides.