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~
By the third spar Annie has decided Eren has a body like a finely tuned machine, probably a secondhand typewriter that at some point regurgitated all its metal innards and had them jimmied back together with chicken wire and spit. The analogy gains traction when he convulses from the abdomen and voices an agonized opinion that comes out “kshhhgnngnnkk.”
She looks at him laid out like a sloppily cracked egg. She nudges his jugular with the toe of her boot.
The thought of the imminent conversation puts her at the threshhold of extreme mental pain; she works a hand into her hair and considers feigning sleep. Eren, lolling in the dirt, makes the kind of grandiose inhalation that can only precede hysterical speechmaking.
“Annie,” he begins conspiratorially, “did you see, that was, I almost—“
She cuts him off. “No. You did not almost win. My foot should not be able to get near your torso, let alone your throat, let alone your jugular vein, let alone any part of your body that feels like testicular tissue and not defensible meat. This was—”
“I was going to say I almost got almost not thrown,” he corrects, then with great earnestness continues, “but it’s just so great that you thought that. That I almost, wow. Won.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s thanks to you, you know. I don’t even think I’ve improved that much, but if you think so, I’m not going to argue. I thought my recoil was particularly good, maybe that’s what you’re referring to. I adjusted for your reaction speed—kind of preemptive, I know it’s the kind of thing you pick up with advanced practice but there’s no reason not to try it, overextending yourself is the only way to improve, and we only have a few minutes!”
It’s too early in the morning to shore up the volume of scatological disdain needed to convey how shit his recoil actually was. Taking advantage of the caesura induced by his crushing incompetence, she motions Eren to his feet and ushers him to the shed at the end of the yard to gather his wits, an endeavor which, she reasons dismally, shouldn’t take long enough to merit the trouble taken. She puts her hands up in a t-square and says, “Explain to me what’s wrong with this angle of incidence.”
“I’ll break my ankle if I do it again!”
“You will break your ankle if you do it again, not that that would deter you from doing it, so just—keep my delicate feminine sensibilities in mind, don’t fucking do it again. I don’t need to see that.”
He glowers at her and unhooks his water bottle. “You’ll make a good policeman, you know—you really don’t want anyone to get hurt. Is that why you’re signing up?”
“The military police is too busy running blitzkrieg competitive napping drills to care if some dumbass snaps his foot off in a training manuever, that’s why I’m signing up. Drink your water, don’t get dehydrated—why do I even have to tell you these things?”
He upends the bottle over his head, sluicing his hair and drenching her by proxy. As he does this his face locks into a rictus of effort, because making epidermal contact with every last drop of liquid is apparently a task that mandates superlative exertion, the same attitude he brings to things like wiping down his meal tray and making sure he selects the best possible kicking target for their drills, ONE THAT WILL LET YOU BEND YOUR KNEE, YOU’RE VERY TINY SO THAT’S HARD, YOU’RE ONE OF THE TINIEST TEENAGERS I’VE EVER SEEN, DON’T LOOK ANNOYED, COMING TO TERMS WITH LIMITATIONS IS A SOLDIER’S DUTY, ANNIE.
The fact that she can catalogue the subtle gradations of homicidal concentration in these expressions is one of the most depressing realizations she’s ever come to about herself. She should give up on this entire endeavor. Perhaps cultivate a mutually beneficial sparring arrangement of not giving a fuck with someone like Jean Kirschstein or her barracks pillow, her relationship with which has been emotionally compromised for the past few weeks. Instead of indulging this train of thought, she unfurls a palm under the skein of water and says “What if I’d wanted some of that?”
“It’s my water bottle!”
“They’re my techniques. What if I’d been thirsty too? Compassion is something that you, as a human being, are supposed to have?”
He seizes up in his usual frenetic contrition before realizing she’s fucking with him and shaking the knot of discomfort out of his body just as quickly, all of him smoothing out into repose, a confluence of still-growing limbs. The haze of greenery at the horizon line seems like an extension of his energy.
Annie tangles her fingers in the grass and feels sap stamped down by countless boots, all the small violences of a training ground codified and stored here in the dirt under her fingers. It would be easy to get steamrolled into a sense of grand purpose here. The aesthetics could rope you into that somnolent lull if you weren’t careful. She shuts her eyes all the way and then it’s just red and purple sunbursts behind her eyelids, Eren’s winded breathing next to her.
“You really have no idea what anyone is talking about, do you,” she says.
“Well. Most of the time I ignore what’s not useful, I guess you would know.”
A point of fact: she hasn’t been teaching him her spinning roundhouse correctly. It’s not intended to function as a throwing move the way she’s repurposed it. The actual move is a disabler, and with about nine square inches on the shin hardened to crystal can sever a man’s leg at the cruciate ligament under the kneecap. Her father had removed the target from his leg and showed her his own skin there, the welt from the straps scoring a ladder across his tricep and fittingly from there there was nothing to do but ascend. I’ll heal, he’d said. I’ll heal, just do it. Alarmed by the bruises, she’d gotten sloppy, and the leg had ruptured in an explosion of arterial spray so that they’d had to collect the flaps of skin from around the yard. The next time she’d diverted her eyes from those worn-down wounds, been more sterile with her follow-through. “That’s true,” she says to Eren now, and applies that same sterility like gauze to her thoughts, turning carefully numb as the sunlight swabs them out. “You’re right, I guess I would.”
~
Eren Jaeger is not a natural fit with the 104th regiment, or in fact with anything. He has the sense of self-preservation of a concussed owl at high noon and once socked a punching pole so hard and with such awful technique he split open two knuckles, not even the ones which should logically have split. She expected him to ape Mikasa’s absentminded chivalry on the field but it turns out that the more brutal a technique is, the more he admires it, fingers clenching in unconscious excited anemone movements as he listens to her describe the proper way to hamstring a calf muscle, puncture an eyeball, uproot a scalp by a hairline grip. Diverted at the wrong moment and age he could have easily been one of the deviants the military police pulls in from time to time like the scouting legion’s star soldier she saw once, the dead-eyed monomaniac; he has a disposition that would have had him locked up in a different time. Here in the training grounds he charges so viciously it’s only his ineptitude that saves his partners from being gored, but in backwater Shiganshina he was probably just the type of boy neighbors described to his parents as Spirited over the tops of pointedly reinforced fences. The Wall Maria districts are full of lunatics. Annie supposes, in a random charitable spasm, that the capacity for suicidal optimism is a defense mechanism to inure yourself against the view.
It’s just a thing, a physical diversion thing. Categorized mentally on the same wavelength as a warm-up stretch. Eren is a lit match and unlike her he has chosen to generate heat rather than denotate explosives. Whether this is worthwhile is ultimately irrelevant; something in him came loose at some point and he’s still trying his best to do the difficult thing with it where she couldn’t, so it’s not as if she has any spare yards of moral high ground to make her bed and sleep in it, or whatever the mixed metaphor is.
In the nights, walking from the girls’ barracks out to the grounds to fill her bucket with water, she usually sees him out by the kicking targets trying to replicate the spinning roundhouse, the first manuever she taught him. Her own movements backshifted into versions of what they were when she was a child, broken down into their component parts so she can map, as though squinting across time as well as space, her own vulnerabilities transposed onto his body.
Hands up, she thinks then, not consciously. Hands up, elbows tucked in, don’t expose your face.
She doesn’t know who she’s addressing but always sets her bucket down, ratchets the pump to fill it, and shades her eyes for better visibility. She thinks of Bertholdt’s lanky form folded up in its too-small regulation cot, Reiner’s dreamless violent sleeps, and she thinks: you cowards. She awards herself the designation as well, seeking out her own honesty like a pulse, one of the few things left to her body that will never be corrupted.
By the time she looks back down her bucket is always filled to the brim with rust-flecked water, balanced just at the point of overflowing.
~
They’re suspended in their harnesses next to each other off a portentious rock face that is smooth as a buttered weasel and so steeply vertical she has to pitch her anchor using someone else as an aiming marker (Mikasa Ackerman, who naturally found the single geological anomaly on the terrain that can take an anchor, or maybe summoned it from the earth using esoteric rituals). Annie’s anchor is threaded through the nook between Mikasa’s blade set and her gear cylinder, centimeters from Mikasa’s own. Cuttingly brilliant shooting, in that Mikasa is probably going to glare straight through her wire if the instructor doesn’t get there and approve her suspension stance within the next five minutes. Mikasa is as good as Annie at managing her body, better actually, and for this reason Annie can put her finger with pinpoint certainty on what exactly Mikasa doesn’t like: for Mikasa talent is like natural grace. To take pride in it is gauche. To use it as pageantry is tasteless. Annie wouldn't necessarily say she finds this attitude sustainable, but she can respect it.
At any rate, whatever recklessness led her to court this imminent painful demise also leads her to engage with the outright lunacy that is Eren oscillating wildly in her general vicinity and calling, “Annie, hey Annie, I meant it, what I said to you about the police—you’ll be good at it,” in a horrible foghorn roar.
“For fuck’s sake,” Annie says.
“It’s true, that’s what I think! Are you annoyed?”
“I don’t,” she says, then “what? No.”
“I mean it! You take good care of m—“ He frowns. “Of…random people, I mean. Why would it even matter if I broke my ankle?”
“Because then you wouldn’t be able to train for five weeks,” she says flatly. “And I would cry into my pillow every night, which would ruin my complexion.”
“Sometimes I think you’re trying to make a joke but then decide just saying something weird would be less work. Also I heal really fast.”
So do I, she doesn’t say, and I will never be done with being afraid of the pain. “Is that why you never give me shit about the police?”
“Huh?”
“Like with Jean, in the mess hall.” She fingers her wire. “You think I have a better reason. But I never said I didn’t agree with him.”
“Oh—“ Eren grinds his teeth and pushes off the rock face, rotating until he is folded into an upside-down butterfly stance, the downward-facing spiderlike position intended to take a 3-D gear user safely from complete motion to complete stillness. In a feat of gracelessness surprising to exactly no one, Eren is fucking it up, bearing the weight of his harness incorrectly on his thighs. She raps his left hip with two knuckles and feels him shift the load-bearing tension obediently to the point under her hand. “You know a lot more than I do, that’s for sure.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I didn’t think about it before you said it, about how our best people end up inland. After you did, I thought—I don’t know. If everything’s so fucked up, I can believe people need protection from things that aren’t titans.”
As he says this his eyes narrow, slanting up towards Mikasa, traced in sun glare about twenty feet above them and more nonchalant in her harness than Annie has ever seen her on the training field, where she tenses imperceptibly at so much as someone bandaging her knuckles. Eren’s mouth makes a downward moue. The fondness there understated but real.
“Maybe if someone like you had been in Shiganshina when—well. It’s a large world, I guess. I’ve never seen anything like your techniques before. It makes me think there’s a lot I don’t know.”
“The last bit is true.”
“Yeah, obviously. You didn’t show me that amazing throw either, but I picked it up—“ She smiles a little and he scowls. “I’m just trying to learn. You don’t—you’ve been making sure I don’t get hurt. I trust the stuff that comes out of your mouth, even the weird shit. What are you going to do?”
“Say more of the weird shit, then,” she says, "probably," and is aware all at once of the sun on the side of her face, amost too hot. A tattoo of warmth laid along her cheek.
She puts her hood up. “You look like you’re having trouble with that stance. It’s called the butterfly, not the dungbeetle. I’m embarrassed just being next to you. Straighten your spine. Spread your knees, they’ll keep you balanced so you don’t pendulum around.”
“Will you do it with me?”
“No. That would require effort.”
“Come on,” he says, and braces his feet against the rock face so determinedly Jean, who is trying to commando-crawl to the top of the ridge without gas, is nearly knocked out of his perch from the tremor. Amid the cacophony of expletives Eren looks back over at Annie with a brilliant upside-down gaze, eyes huge and glassy, every bit of exposed skin an arterial map of angry red blushes like welts, and says, shaky but pointed, “You don’t have to hold back at all.”
He has very soft-looking skin—totally unforeseeable. Its aura of talcum powder, despite the irresponsibility with which he approaches the existence of his body.
She thinks okay again, this time with some emphasis, and worries the rock face with a fingernail. She splays her palm flat, matching her veins to the veins of granite under the stone. Not as hard as the surface of crystal, but for now her skin is soft too; her body halted in its breakable incarnation, and the fact that it still will not break is quietly exhilarating. She feels it rising in her chest now, a feeling rolling up the side of the cliff with the momentum of their classmates, suspended, buoyant, weightless. That surge of people caught in sun-soaked, determined upward motion, and for now, here she is among them.
“All right, neophyte,” she tells Eren, and slides her hand under her shirt, unbuckling her safety harness. “Give me your hand, and get schooled.”
He gives her his hand without hesitation. I have, she realizes. I have been making sure you don’t get hurt.
“What are you—augh! Fuck! Annie—ANNIE—”
In truth, she hadn’t expected to flip so fast either, but now that she’s in free fall it’s too late to lament the fact that terminal stupidity is apparently contagious, so she reorients herself on three axes instead of two and pulls her arms and legs in close to her body, curling into a cannonball, keeping her eyes closed until she becomes accustomed to how quickly she’s flipping. Her wire, released to spool out, makes a screaming keening noise and sparks against her gear cylinder; she compensates for the recoil with her abdominal muscles, glances at the approaching ground, and when she is at the upward point of her head-over-heels flips slams down her hand brake, folds herself in half in the same motion, and claps her heels together on her wire, mitigating how quickly the line snaps taut between the soles of her boots. The tang of burning rubber floods her nostrils. Momentum broken, she drops herself to the upside-down position and lets out a slow exhale, and then folds her knees out into a textbook butterfly stance.
From above her there is an explosion of sound; she wonders if she’s dislodged her anchor and brought the cliff down, but it’s only Eren, letting out a series of inarticulate whoops. She squints up her own body to where he is, waving her discarded safety harness wildly in the air.
She wipes the sweat out of her face and lets herself hang, limp and winded. There is a laceration along the side of her arm and she pulls her shirt down over it, hiding the sight of the skin knitting itself together. In another life, she would have been able to keep the scar. The sentimentality of the idea compresses the heat out of the day so quickly she wouldn’t be surprised to see cloud cover all of a sudden. The warm rust-colored rock shifted to the blue-grey of crystal under her feet. She pushes the heel of her hand into her eyes.
Forces of nature all around them but here they are, in defiance. Annie is diligent of her own honesty, maintains it as comprehensively as her gear, but is aware that for these moments she almost lost it completely. Almost fooled herself into believing this is all there is. When her feet touch ground again, she is still shaking.
~
Mina Carolina had technically noticed that Annie didn’t eat by the fifth week of training but didn’t bring it up until the seventh, during which she’d put down a tiny glass vial of rock candy, the cheap outer-wall kind made by dipping string into sugar water and leaving it overnight. “Sugar helps my appetite,” she’d said, “maybe it’ll tempt yours.”
Never given to the ums and ers of their peers, her sentences emerged sweetly whole and calcified the way the candy felt when Annie put it in her mouth. It was a shock. She hadn’t eaten recreationally since she was a child. Mina had slid her own tray into the space across from her on the table. Annie looked at the tray, at the girl’s gaze trained on her as simply as a blanket tossed over a sleeping child. Mina’s hair in its pigtails exposing the white tender meat of her neck. She’d moved her own tray back, ceding five inches. She’d taken another piece of candy.
Now she still spends most of her mess hall sojourns turning her spoon over back to front, skin siphoning up the prisms of sunlight that glance off the shaft, and Mina still pretends not to notice although she can’t be aware of what is actually going on and likely just nurses Christa-like concerns about something Annie doesn’t want to know about like eating disorders or some horrible form of pining. Mina pushes her own food around her plate with a workmanlike air. She still brings sugar candy occasionally, and Annie takes the routine two pieces. Like Annie herself, she isn’t given to talking except when she is.
“You know, when I first started making these, I used to make too much extra,” she says today, and laughs, just a hum in her throat. Summer makes everything softer and she is no exception. Annie rolls the sugar on her tongue, says nothing. “You never have much, but I always thought if you liked it, you’d take more eventually. You always looked at it—it’s very pretty, isn’t it? It does turn out fancy, like crystal. That’s a gemstone, I saw it once, and you will too, when you’re in the police.”
“Thanks,” says Annie. “Thank you.”
Mina stops stirring her beans; in the same motion she reaches out and steadies Annie’s hand worrying the spoon. “Hey,” she says. The gentleness in her voice. “You can have things you like, sometimes. You’re worth that much. Give yourself a reprieve.”
How can you do this? Annie wants to say. How can you think this is anything but a reprieve?
Instead she rolls the spoon between her fingers again, glancing at the rock candy. A metronomic motion, her fingers tracing out a rosary reminder: this secondhand sunlight is the only sustenance she needs, and hence what she deserves.
“Exactly like crystal,” she agrees.
~
Another thing she has never lied about: she is tired all the time. Sleep is the only indulgence she routinely allows herself because it doesn’t induce pleasure, only blankness, but this too backfires as her body gluts itself on it, seeking a more visceral satisfaction. In the mornings when Mina swings a hand down from the bunk above her, prodding her awake, she looks at the crossbeams of the barracks roof and thinks with total clarity that if she moves she will die, the same glassy exhaustion that used to envelop her opening the gate to her father’s practice field, before anyone had thrown a punch. She is tired while putting bread into her mouth and forcing herself to masticate it. She is tired while replacing the shaft on her 3-D manuever gear with a welding torch and no gloves, watching the charred skin on her knuckles renew itself to be burned once more. She is tired when Bertholdt glances at her across the mess hall the way a person worries a misbalanced figure in an account book, his gaze blank as sky, the sensation of looking into forgiving distance while actually experiencing a lethal vertigo.
The fuse sparkling down to the conflagration at the end of her training grows shorter every day, as does the distinction between what she needs to survive and what is so much useless ballast. She isn't Reiner, she isn't Bertholdt. She understands that she will hurt a thousand times more before this is over. She is ready to move through the pain, not to invite it, not to avoid it. Steeling herself on open ground, hands up protecting herself as she waits for the signal to initiate the capsizing of her own life. Tired of the waiting and tired of the fact that she now dreads its end. There is no end to being tired. She doesn't think she will ever stop being tired again.
~
Eren breaks his nose at the same time she tells him she doesn’t have time to practice with him anymore. The two events are not related, and the injury doesn’t follow logically from any of the manuevers she used. The only explanation that is definitely plausible is that it occurs because he possesses a nose and it has the potential to be broken, which is an occupational hazard of being Eren and doesn’t deserve further expenditure of grey matter.
It’s raining so stupidly hard they’re both soaked when they get to the hospital building and he’s still screaming, at what she doesn’t know. Her fist, possibly. Dodgy-looking leaves. The existence of water. The anaesthetic she dabs on after sluicing the blood off, which she privately hopes will send him straight to lights-out but instead has the effect of making him stare unnervingly at inoffensive medical instruments in wordless rage, periodically attempting to murder a tongue depressor.
“I’M OKAY,” he screams at her when she lines up one of these next to his—quickly healing, he was right—nose and breaks the stick off at the correct length. “I’M A SOLDIER AND I DON’T NEED A SPLINTOWWW MOTHERFUCKING—“
“Your fortitude is inspiring,” she deadpans, and slaps the splint on a little more emphatically than is probably recommended. “Thank you for your contribution to humanity’s victory, cadet Jaeger. I am now discharging you due to wounds sustained in the heat of battle with a truly vicious and unique titan, never before seen.”
She licks a stripe of blood from her finger and doesn’t think too hard about what’s coming out of her mouth. This is the last time, anyway. She’s stopping these training sessions before they get any more farcical. The thought makes the levity unfunny, but then, this is a failing built into most of her humor.
The truth, such as it is, has limited entertainment value.
Outside the rain unleashes a volley, and Eren, operating at heightened anxiety thanks to the anaesthetic, works a knuckle into his eye socket and threatens the weather with something graphic and unfeasible. Annie suspects that if she leaves him alone he will perish in some kind of dramatic honor duel with the stethoscope, which has strangulation potential he probably doesn’t like the look of, so she kicks the door shut and waits for him to stop acting like a wronged martyr so she can give him shit about his injury, which is objectively a stupid injury.
This devolves rapidly into her having to explain the difference between cartilage and bone for the eighth time in a row because Shiganshina seems to have skimped on luxuries like “school” and “basic anatomical knowledge.” Eren’s stare over the cheesecloth handful of ice she gives him is so eerily blank she despairs of making progress at all, tweaks his hair back to get at his ear and illustrate her point, and promptly gets a faceful of bloody teenage boy for her trouble.
In surprise, she tightens her grip on his earlobe, which Eren takes as a signal to drop the ice down her shirt and wind an arm around her waist, still demonstrating his incompetent management of cartilaginous zones by pummeling her nose with his own injured one in the throes of—she can’t even call it a kiss, it’s just aggressive labial proximity.
“—Eren,” she says, when he’s knocked flat on the cot again, wincing. “Eren, what. What are you—what’s your endgame.”
“Sorry!” he yells. “Sorry! I don’t know either. I was just doing—something.”
“It failed,” she says. “I can say that conclusively, whatever it was. I’m not mad, I don’t particularly care, just—get up.”
“You didn’t tell me why you don’t want to train.”
“Get up.”
“I—fuck! No, I didn’t want—” This is all Eren, this helplessness in the face of others’ disequilibrium masquerading as an apology. You can’t kill everything better, she’d seen Mikasa tell him the first time he’d slipped a disc doing something inadvisable and probably anatomically impossible, and to her surprise the remark hadn’t catalyzed any type of adolescent identity crisis but a mullish silence, not like a new piece of information but something he’d already internalized and had become proficient at ignoring. Usually she empathizes; now it only presses down on her as an extra layer of exhaustion.
She puts a hand on her temple. Her hair falls into her eyes. She isn’t—she’s not like him; she doesn’t keep her face exposed all the damn time. She doesn’t parade her softnesses, and most of all she doesn’t assume they don’t exist just because she is fluent in the same type of brutality he is. The white medical room goes all filamented in a tracery of gold, and she is suddenly so exhausted she can barely stand, has to brace herself against his cot with one splayed hand. On autopilot her feet move.
She gets out the door into a training ground made incoherent by rain. Her body is slapped instantly with a full-length wall of water and she staggers before making it down the steps, out into the madness. This is the same rain girls track into the dormitory in their boots, the creases of their jackets, folded into the long wet ropes of their hair when they wring it out into troughs set up at the entrances, but quantified like that, interwoven into the minutiae of their everyday life it seems manageable; so easy to forget that it is in fact a force of nature. Her hood drips water into her eyes and her hand goes up on instinct, wicking it away. She is all instinct. She is a creature of inertia; she has known since Eren’s chair ricocheted backward in the dining hall, knocking over Jean’s, that she won’t be growing anymore, but now there is water in her eyes, she can’t see two feet in front of her, and there isn’t a handhold in sight.
The door bursts open behind her.
“Annie! Hey, ANNIE!“
“Get back inside!”
“Are you ang—“
“I said no, don’t goad me, don’t—does anything even penetrate that pustule of adrenaline you call a brain—”
“Cartilage doesn’t heal right!” he yells into the rain, misinterpreting. The fractaling water buffets him a little, making him strain, but the way he keeps himself upright she would recognize anywhere. “That’s what you said! It’s not that it’s soft, it’s that if it ruptures it’s difficult to knit it back together. There’s no point even giving it a chance to break. I—look, I listened then, I’m listening now! Why don’t you believe me? I want to understand!”
There are twenty points on his torso alone she could use to kill him. Soft nerves and softer skin, and the eyes he trains on her now are the eyes he has knocked flat from a throw, exultant, temporarily exhilarated. She’s told him time and time again to get up immediately, never even to run the risk of teaching your body that being knocked on your back meant a hand pulling you back up and a drag from a water bottle still wet with someone else’s saliva. You could tell yourself you’d be braver in combat, and that you’d be capable of dealing with the incomprehensible lack of trust when it came, but the body had its own ways of conditioning that instinct out of you, this a proof more than anything that the human form was built for peace. In theory, Annie treats the whole world as her enemy, and when she goes outside the walls, she will harden the skin on the side of her shin on instinct, and her kicks will sever legs at the knee. In actuality, she gets up early in the mornings to let Eren take a few shots before hand-to-hand training, she soaks up all that inchoate energy, lets it thrum into her skin that is always questing and lusting for sunlight, takes more than she needs of Mina’s rock candy, contemplates without her knowledge or permission the idea of a good policeman, the kind of person who can flip off a cliff face with eyes shut, fierce in the wind and open air and that sense of the widening world and all of nature as her ally when she knows this to be a terrible lie. In actuality, Annie has cut her tether, and Eren—Eren who still treats the idea of combat like some sort of sacramental rite, who listens to her with the same vicious concentration he applies to refusing to listen in the rest of his life—how can he hope to understand the damage that’s been done?
The rain cores her to the bone, flaying open the flesh that is also an act of subterfuge. She understands now that she has been prevaricating under the aegis of a mistake so immense she can’t allow it cognitive space, the kind of irrecoupable strategic disaster that demands blame. She has initiated the disintegration of a superlative instinct for self-preservation it took her sixteen years to cultivate, and now if she looks her own catastrophic failure in the face she knows she will have no way left to survive but to stop thinking entirely, freezing her own life around her, making her glittering and ice-sharp terror into a shroud for whatever is left. She is in free fall. The keen of the world plummeting down around her is too loud now. She will be tired forever, but she will never be able to sleep.
The horror comes down like a guillotine and her hands go up against nothing. Against five thousand arrows of water. She steps back.
“I—“ she says. “This wasn’t. I don’t want this.”
“Annie—“
“I didn’t want this. I thought you were just a hair-trigger psychopath but you don’t know a thing about keeping yourself safe, or about keeping anyone safe. You know you’re never going to use hand-to-hand, and you still—you can’t even control your own body, I don’t know what gives you the right to believe what you do. You don’t even protect your face, I have told you a hundred goddamn times to keep your hands up and you forget so casually as if your instincts are going to keep you alive, it’s like you never even learned anything, it’s like you’ve forgotten how bad things are outside, like you don’t even understand how much harder you’re making things for yourself—how much you’re going to hurt—”
Her hands are over her eyes now and Eren doesn’t move, just reflects back at her the force of his anger, which is her own. They have been so similar in the way they tug at each other’s boundaries, and that fatal similarity, she realizes now, is what has impelled her to peer across the vertiginous distances where they are different, and run the risk of dashing herself open on the rocks.
She’s already said too much. She could have lived aeons without knowing what she knows now: that someone can have the disposition that she does, can face what she faces, and still choose what she couldn’t.
“I can’t do anything you can’t,” Eren shouts. “Look, you—I don’t know what your obsession is with acting like you’re this breakable waif, but you’re different on the field. You play with moves, you talk shit, you make really terrible jokes that no one understands and that aren’t funny to anyone except you. I don’t get it and I don’t need to, but I get that if I’m going to be a good scout, it’s going to be because I learned from a fucking good policeman. And that makes you a shitty liar.”
She stares at him. “That’s fine.”
“No! You drone on and on about how weak and frail you are, and then you pretend to slack off while showing off more than anyone on the field, and then somebody kicks somebody else in the stomach and you get all philosophical about some random thing I don’t even remember how we start talking about, half the time!”
This is a disturbingly accurate summary, enough that it jolts her from her own thoughts. She blinks. “I don’t get philosophical.”
“Listen closely, Eren, this grass is dry and horrible—like human nature! This punching pole is rotten—like the military!”
“What?” She shakes water out of her ear, sure she’s missed something, but then she realizes the corners of his mouth are actually turned up in a foreign expression that does not appear to be murderous rage, and the drops skidding on his hair are actually being tossed like confetti as he works a hand into it, laughs himself sick. She pushes her hair out of her eyes, stares at him, is struck by the idea: Eren Jaeger, mirthful.
“Did I say you could laugh?” she marvels. “Since when are you even capable?”
Brutality and cartilage, the softness that breaks easier than bone and heals nowhere near as quickly. The things he can be.
“I’m a person!” he grinds out, belligerent. “I’m human, I can laugh if I want to!”
Her eyes narrow. Although he has no way of knowing he’s slipped, he notes the tension, puts up his hands showing her his open palms. The apology looks like it might even pass muster, and then he fucks it up in classic style by sallying forth with, “I’m sorry I, uh. Sort of kissed you. Tried! Whatever.”
Like the stunt with the butterfly stance, she doesn’t feel herself coming to the decision; it just slips free. She takes a step forward. She could slip on the wet cobblestones so easily—crack her head open. The rain separates into drifts, pummeling the ground, exhilaration in its own energy and this is something she has, for better or worse, come to understand. She takes another step.
“Shut up,” she says, and seizes him by the front of his shirt. Wet, repeatedly washed cotton, worn threadbare. Wall Maria made. Land of lunatics and idealists. “Your face convulsed arbitrarily in the general vicinity of my mouth. If you’d wanted to kiss me, you might have used your strengths more wisely, like I’m always telling you to do. One way to do that might have been to tip your head at a forty-five degree slant, exactly the same as the grip I showed you, the decapitation hold. Since you were injured and couldn’t aim worth shit, it would have been to your advantage to manuever my head by the base of my neck, back near the brainstem. And then, if you were listening to anything I’ve told you in any of these sessions ever, you’d have kept your mouth on mine after making contact, because a technique isn’t landing a hit, it’s the follow-through. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“NO—oww, my nose, ow—are we going to train again. That’s what I want to know about!”
“I’m not going to repeat myself,” she says. “We’re only doing this once. I mean it. Were you listening?”
He scowls at her, drenched, probably bleeding, thoroughly unattractive. Still she sees the potential for an equilibrium.
The butterfly stance is an act of slowing from complete motion to complete stillness, and the manuever is difficult; you can break your neck trying to bridge a gap between two incompatible extremes, or. You can find a point of balance.
“I TOLD YOU,” Eren shouts at her. “I LISTEN TO YOU, I CAN’T HELP IT, THAT’S JUST HOW IT IS,” and then he tilts his face to a forty-five degree slant, cups the back of her head, and with a care she had no way to anticipate presses his lips to her own. She can’t tell if it’s the blood or the water or his mouth that tastes so much like iron, or in fact if either of them have closed their eyes or it’s just the rain amplifying her vision to a white and sparkling blindness. All she can discern is the wet slide of tongue, wet slip of uncombed hair under her fingers, the negligible distance between them humming with body heat she already knows but is made unfamiliar by the invasion of rain.
I never needed this to know you, she thinks. And I never will again, but for now—for only now. I want something more than secondhand sunlight.
Behind his teeth, a taste like rock candy. A blood-sweet and whole heat. Her eyes slide shut. She skims a hand along his shoulderblades, the so-called wings of freedom in foreshadowing miniature, presses a thumb to the agitated vein in his throat. Opens her mouth for his tongue. Follows through.
~
There is a series of muffled bangs down the cliff face, and then a crash and a profusion of implausible threats. She kneels at the top and shades her eyes to squint towards where it is apparent that Eren is still inept at the butterfly stance and has tangled himself into what appears to be a moebius strip.
“Are you concussed?”
“NO—MY HARNESS WILL BE, THOUGH, AS SOON AS I—AUGH—“
She studies him briefly for a moment more and goes back to belaying out her line. She tests Eren’s anchor with two fingers ensuring it’s still stable. Then she unhooks her grip from her belt and shoots her own into the rock near it. She looks over the edge and it’s a long way down.
She has never reneged on her own honesty, and she knows the life she is living now to be a lie and a betrayal, possibly of everything she knows, almost certainly of herself. But she is also a gambler, and now she makes her bets, casts a die with the motion of her wire snaking down the cliff face, disappearing into the greenery that signals where the private world of the training grounds begins. From here deep in the mountains she can see no walls at all. This too is a manner of testing herself against the limits of what she can do, and maybe in this manner there is some bravery in her, too. The things you learn.
From the bottom of the slope she sees Eren now relaxing in the stance, pistoning his arms a little to call her down to correct it. The fall takes so long, the recovery into the stance no time at all.
She takes the wire and drops it. She unhooks her safety harness and leaves it there, shrugging out of it like a skin she’s outgrown. She flexes a hand checking her belt, her tethers, the unhardened skin at her shins, which will harden one day—she knows, of course she knows—but for now is soft, and waiting for her to rise above its limitations.
Annie turns her back. She closes her eyes, and then she falls, and then she flies.
~
the end