Chapter Text
Ymir watches them come, trembling with rage.
No, she thinks, no no no no! They’re going to ruin it! She wants to see what they’ll do, what Mikasa will do, but not yet! She still has so much anger in her heart, and they can’t make her let it go. She won’t, she won’t, she won’t. Eren’s march is a parade of her power, how she’s not helpless, not anymore, she never was. It’s the funeral procession of her husband’s world, the world that made her baby girls eat her corpse, the world her husband built through their daughters and their daughters and their sons, and she won’t be robbed of this show.
The little boy who almost has two titans—very and also not so very different from the little boy who had two and now three—is soaring here on wings. Wings. She’s jealous, jealous, jealous; she never got to fly. All of Eren’s friends, they can fly, and that’s not fair.
She wants to see what Mikasa will do, she wants to see if she can do it, if she can show her, but she also wants to see the bloody end. Either one or the other will satisfy her.
So she sends her Titans.
Children and grandchildren, people’s babies, people’s mothers and fathers, people’s lovers, people’s monsters. All of them hers. She stands on a spire of bone, the wind in her hair, and hears how the Colossal Titan will muse to the Beast that maybe he was born just to feel the wind on his face as he ran up a hill with his friends. Maybe that’s why she was born, too. To be here, now, perched on Eren Jaeger, watching everything, everything, everything collapse in on itself.
I’m going to put an end to this world.
They jump out of the crashing plane and fly to meet her soldiers. The Colossal boy poses the closest thing to a threat, so she has a cute little thing like the pigs she’d freed snatch him away. The others scramble, everything falling to pieces without their greatest weapon. She watches.
They fall apart so quickly. It’s a little disappointing. If they’re tearing her attention away from the march, they could at least be a little more of a challenge.
Sweet, sweet, beautiful, graceful, Mikasa is taking on her army nearly single-handedly. Her awe and her jealousy mix together. I want, she thinks when she looks at her, and she hears the echo of Eren’s own, very different, I want when he looks at her. Mikasa whirls and spins and cuts, swords silver blurs. She’s beautiful, Ymir thinks, imagining her own hollow cheeks and puddle-blue bug-eyes, hair brittle and the color of dirty straw. She’s beautiful, Eren thinks, thought, will think, imagining they’re back on the fringes of a camp of refugees, imagining she’d said something else, imagining he’d done something else, imagining they were something else, somewhere else.
Ymir wants.
And then the little boy with two titans appears, and the little girl that he loves, and the Girl. Flying. And they catch the other Ackerman and the boys, and they’re trying to ruin it! Them, flying, together, friends even though they were enemies, united, together, flying, loved and loved and in love and in love and in love, trying to ruin it!
Ymir stamps her foot: a childish expression of anger that she hasn’t been allowed to do in a very, very long time. She’s mad and she’s jealous—of Mikasa, of the way she’s loved, loved back, and the way they all get to fly when even now Ymir has to stand on her bruised feet in her threadbare slippers—and she wants to see what will happen, but she allows herself just one more childish gesture.
It’s nothing, really. Mikasa is so strong and graceful and beautiful that she should be able to handle it just fine, and she’ll be loved no matter what, so Eren won’t mind. It won’t matter. It shouldn’t.
Like puppetting a doll, Ymir yanks the little boy’s head straight up as Mikasa drops to land on him, so fast and so violent the bones of his neck snap and muscles tear. The jagged tip of his steel-strong jaw catches her right in the back of the calf. A bright splash of blood flashes the air, glittering like rubies. It’s pretty. Mikasa’s voice, when she screams, is pretty.
‘Cause: she’s beautiful.
Eren’s friends all cry out and crowd around her, and the little boy wobbles on his wings, overwhelmed with pain for a brief moment before he’s able to right himself, already healing, his pain temporary and forgotten fast.
And you’re welcome! Ymir stamps her foot again, and then blows away with the wind to watch the front lines as the march rolls over Carboda’s plains. The golden grain glows before it burns. Then it flattens, and she thinks of when she had to do the flattening, and how she doesn’t have to anymore, she doesn’t, she doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, and the wind that churns her straw-brittle hair smells sharp and sweet and smokey . She can’t wait to see what the next few hours will bring; if Mikasa will do it, if she won’t; if Eren will, or if he won’t.
She tips her head back, feeling savage, and hardy, and free.
***
The silence after the end of the world is in itself a scream.
Armin’s ears are ringing. The concussive footfalls have been in his head for hours, and the glaring lack of them now just makes them echo in his spinning head. He can even feel phantom vibrations rattling through his bones, getting into the spaces between his teeth. If he lets the fuzz of darkness take a firmer hold of him, he imagines the screaming.
That jolts him out of it every time.
It’s a small coastal town. This part of the world had trees like he’d never seen before, stocky and dark green. They’re just splinters, now, smashed and steam-cooked. There had been small houses built along the hill, white stone and domed roofs. They were crushed, too; the dust hangs heavy in the ocean air still.
It’s hazy. Hard to see, almost like they’re in a thick fog. Not, he thinks blearily, steam.
When he pushes himself onto his elbows and looks up, he’s met with the nauseating sight of the Wall Titans standing in their loose formation, widely-spaced but still looming inescapable. He can’t see all the way to their heads except for in brief flashes, but that’s enough. When he squints, he can make out muscles flaking away from faces, bone seeming to crumble away in the wind. But he knows what to look for, and there it is. The Titans are dissolving from the top down. Unusual, but convenient. In the interest of them living a few extra minutes before they’re all cooked.
If anyone else is alive.
Armin swallows, struggling to gather the will to stand. His head feels like a struck bell, and the phantom sensation of the bone-shaking footfalls has left his limbs and spine feeling fragile. He feels fragile, in a way that he struggles to place but finds familiar.
He’s bruised, too, along his legs and chest. His wrist may be broken. He’d fallen hard and rolled when they crashed out of the sky, Falco’s wings vanishing out from under them. He recalls little Gabi’s shrill scream, the tear-tracks on Reiner’s face as he cradled her against his chest. Annie’s lips pressed so tightly together. Connie and Jean had choked out goodbyes—what had they said exactly? Had those been their last words? Do I not remember their last words?—but everyone else had been quiet. Defeated. Nothing left to say.
Mikasa, Armin thinks, finding the will to stand. She’d been so pale. The gash on her leg was horrible, tearing through the muscle, making it hard for her to use her ODM gear. He’d changed her makeshift bandage twice in the past God-know-how-many hours, using strips of clothing. She kept bleeding through it. He doesn’t think he’d done a good enough job tying them. The thought that it might have come undone in the fall is what shoots through his body like a lightning strike—Mikasa might need him, the only person alive he’s absolutely certain he truly loves, this girl who’s like a sister to him. He can’t fail her, too. As he failed everyone else. Everyone, everyone, everyone else.
There’s only one reason why the Colossals would have stopped, but he can’t—think about that.
He rolls to his feet, boiling hot self-loathing festering in his gut. If I hadn’t been swallowed the damn second we reached the Attack Titan, he thinks for the thousandth time. But. As he begins to stagger toward where he hopes Mikasa is, he can’t help himself. He has to spin around and look, far in the distance, to see the skeletal face of the Attack Titan. Caged by its own ribs, perfectly still but for the meters and meters of stringy hair that sway in the wind.
Armin feels his heart nearly split in half with hate at the sight. The violence of it surprises him. Are you finally satisfied? he thinks, face contorting into a snarl. It’s not for Eren, exactly. It’s for the thing he became, which is not the boy from his childhood.
His desperation to find Mikasa only grows. It can’t be that he’s here while she’s gone. Armin has long since learned that there’s no justice in the world, but he just can’t handle the notion that she might be gone while the pair of them still live. That was never how it was supposed to go. He grits his teeth and gets moving, clutching his bruised ribs.
The town is rubble and splinters. It isn’t quite as annihilated as some places; didn’t have the full force sweep through it. Didn’t need that amount of force to kill everyone in it. Every building is completely destroyed, but at least the streets are relatively intact. They’re cracked and uneven, the indents of massive, overlapping footprints creating miniature craters, and strewn with broken bricks and rocks and bits of wood, and…
There aren’t bodies. There are red, pulpy smears that must have once been people. Big and small. Some of them are so large they must have been groups. Families. Parents carrying their children. Children carrying their pets, skinny arms wrapped around furry bellies, crying into fluffy necks. This town hadn’t been close to a city from what he could tell from the flight; Armin guesses that they hadn’t gotten much word. Everything smells like cooked meat and the metallic tang of blood.
He finds traces of the others soon enough. There’s a clear trajectory of where Falco had crashed, it’s not hard to track. He spots Captain Levi sitting up against a broken piece of a column, staring into nothing. Armin isn’t sure if he’s alive or not and can’t bear to check, not without Mikasa. He hears masculine coughing from a hundred meters away—Jean, probably—and farther off, frantic calls of Falco’s name. Gabi sounds terribly, terribly young. He wonders if she’s the youngest person alive outside of Paradis.
The thought makes him double over, sick. She probably is. The voice in his head is hysterical. Unless Falco is the younger of the two, but he might not have survived the crash. How many newborns had been alive in this town just an hour ago? Gabi Braun is twelve years old and probably the youngest living creature on the continent. He thinks, almost nonsensically, baby birds can’t fly.
Before he can straighten up, he hears the racing footfalls of a man in boots. Armin sucks in a breath and lurches upright, in time to see Eren coming at him in a dead sprint. The movement, Eren’s presence, him as a human man, all of it is so jarring that Armin can’t do more than gape at him as he rushes past. Eren doesn’t spare so much as a glance at him.
Armin stares after him. There’s something wrong with the way he’s moving, but he can’t quite place it; doesn’t have enough time to before Eren stumbles to a stop, dropping to his knees and skidding the final few feet before he halts in front of a pile of rubble.
He casts aside the splintered remains of a wooden support beam. The motion stirs the grit-choked air and the dust disperses in a swirl—and there’s Mikasa. Lying there, still as death. She’s on her back, limbs awkwardly askew. Heart a bloody pulp in his throat, for that endless second where nobody moves, all he can think of is a doll that a little girl got frustrated with and dropped.
There’s a thin red line on her abdomen. No, he thinks, no, no. She can’t lose any more blood—
Eren lifts her up against his chest, so, so carefully. Armin can see even from here that he’s shaking. But the horror and the pain haven’t left his head, and when he sees the monster that killed the world reaching for Mikasa, he cries out and tries to run. He doesn’t make it far before he freezes. His feet won’t move.
They won’t move.
This isn’t like when he was a child in his first battle, unable to bring himself to do anything while his squad died around him. He tries, he strains to pick his useless fucking foot up, but he can’t. His muscles just won’t obey him.
He looks back at Eren and Mikasa, and words die on his tongue.
The strangest sense of déjà vu grips him. A dozen paces from him, Eren has his arms gently folded around Mikasa, cradling her back and her head where she’s curved over him, and his ear is pressed over her heart. Armin sees his wide eyes and the red lines drawing them wider, the blind terror in them; feels it just as keenly. He sees Eren swallow, his eyes slamming shut, and—
He sags with relief.
Eren rocks back on his haunches, gently pulling Mikasa onto his lap, settling her head on his shoulder. If he could, Armin would drop to his knees. The relief overwhelms him like drowning.
Eren’s eyes squeeze shut, his expression crumbling as he tilts his head to press his nose into Mikasa’s hair. The black strands are thinly coated in white. Ash and dust.
Eren releases a shaky sigh, then chokes out, “Thank God.” He shifts his arms around Mikasa, one cinching across her back, his other palm lifting to cradle her head, fingers roaming through her hair and causing dust to sift down like a gentle snowfall. He leans his face further into her and repeats, “Thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God . . .”
The unsteady mantra replaces the ringing in Armin’s ears. He stares for a long moment, a mixture of horror, awe, and pity, swelling in his chest. And then the rage descends.
“You,” Armin cuts him off, voice trembling with fury. “Have a lot of nerve to be acting like you care about her now, Eren.”
His eyes open, cutting to Armin as if startled. Like he’d forgotten he was there. He doesn’t even open his mouth for a word in his defense. A few days ago, even after everything he’d said in the restaurant, he wouldn’t have needed to. But right now, looking at his best friend bloody and broken, Armin just can’t believe that Eren’s love for her actually counts for anything.
Eren just stares at him, the dark red marks on his cheeks like tears of blood. Armin can’t place the emotion in his eyes except to think that he looks like a lost child clinging to a favorite toy.
“Are you going to say anything?!” His fists curl into balls. “You don’t get to act like you care if she survived or not after you did this to her—”
“Do you think I thought—?!” Eren snaps. His fingers tighten in her hair. He looks back and forth between Armin and Mikasa, confusion furrowing his brow. “She was supposed to—she was going to, I thought she was going to—I was going to let her kill me.” He says it like it’s nothing, like it doesn’t leave Armin reeling. “I’d never,” he continues, focusing on Mikasa’s unconscious face, tracing her cheek with a finger, “ever, ever hurt her, never let her get this hurt. I don’t understand what happened— ” He breaks off, biting his tongue. His eyes shut again, and he whispers, “I wasn’t supposed to live.”
A bark of laughter rises out of Armin’s stomach like it’s pulled on a reel. “Is this inconvenient for you, Eren?!” He looks wildly around at the town reduced to rubble, Colossal Titans scattered like some sick version of the Forest of Giant Trees. “You did let her get this hurt! You—!”
“What happened to her?” Eren places his hands on either of Mikasa’s cheeks and gently lifts her face. She’s so limp. Total deadweight. Her head lolls forward, and Eren presses their foreheads together. Tenderness is bleeding off him, but it just makes the anger in Armin’s gut coil tighter.
“You mean that wasn’t you who pulled Falco’s jaw up? She was about to singlehandedly beat the army on your back. Figured you wanted to prevent that.”
“No. No, I’ve been dreaming,” he says vacantly. “I was waiting for her. She was there, I know she was, but she, she was in the house. I was gutting the fish outside.” His tone goes soft and desperate, the muttering of a madman. “Why didn’t I go in and check on her?”
“What the fuck are you talking about. No, actually, don’t bother. She could have died,” Armin says coldly. “She could still die, I don’t know how much blood she’s lost—”
Eren moans like a dying animal; pulls her tighter against himself. “She can’t.” He shakes his head and it turns Mikasa’s, too. The sight is unnerving. “She can’t, she can’t, she was the one person I knew would be okay. Ymir loved her.” His shoulders spasm. His eyes snap open, gone wide with shock and a more vibrant green than they’ve ever been. “Oh,” he says blankly. His jaw works. He inhales shakily through his nose. “Oh.”
“‘Oh?’” Armin spits. “What are you fucking talking about?”
Eren blows out a breath. “Fucking—” he says. “God. Why would she—”
He doesn’t go on. Armin stares in mute fury as he lowers Mikasa’s head back onto his shoulder, then lets his hand creep down to her calf. White and gray dust is clinging to the fabric of her pants, making the red of fresh blood that much more apparent.
“Her leg,” Armin says after a long moment. “Let me do something about her leg or she’ll bleed out on top of you.”
Eren flinches with his entire body, making a sound like he’d been punched in the gut. He deserves worse, Armin thinks. He deserves to feel the girl he loves die and know that he did it, like he killed so many girls so many people loved, but Armin’s mind can’t approach the notion of anyone else dying, let alone Mikasa. It’s been too close for comfort for hours now, and the longer he stays here frozen, the more the notion looms.
“What are you waiting for, then?” Eren snaps. “What have you—?”
“For you to let me move.”
Eren looks at him like he’s gone crazy, and then down at Armin’s feet. Understanding lights in his eyes, and then panic. He stammers something for a long moment, but when he blinks, Armin feels his feet listen to him again. He scrambles forward and drops down next to them, gripping the sleeve of his shirt and tugging. There’s a tearing sound, but it doesn’t give way. Armin frowns, twists his fingers in tighter, and tries to tear it again. A small split opens, and he pulls it with all his might. It finally gives way, and he tears a long strip up and around his arm, leaving his forearm bare. The pink flesh is marred by a patchwork of dark red abrasions, and there’s an irregular swelling that he thinks is a break. He grunts, irritated, and then, very suddenly, realization slides the world out from under him.
He’s not strong. He’s not healing.
He’s powerless.
His hands shake as he pulls Mikasa’s leg out, so carefully, and unwinds the loosened fabric bound over her wound. It had been white, a strip cut from the thick fleece of Annie’s jacket, but now it’s crusted brown with dried blood, and stained red with a torrent of new. He tosses it aside as Eren whimpers, a pathetic sound in the back of his throat.
“Should,” he says, strangled, “shouldn’t you cut away her pants under the knee? They’re ruined, too, and you should have—”
Armin doesn’t think he’s ever felt anger like this before. “We weren’t,” he seethes, “at a fucking hospital, Eren. Even if we could have stopped, where were we supposed to have taken her? How should we have sewn her up? We did the best we could, and don’t you dare tell me how I should have done better for her when this is your fault.”
Eren’s mouth trembles. “Armin— ”
“Don’t.”
He shuts up, which Armin counts as a goddamn blessing. He can acknowledge that he’s had a good point, though, and he isn’t spiteful enough to half-ass treating Mikasa. He peels away the dark fabric, soggy with blood that stains his fingers, and flings it aside.
The cut is nasty. He’d known that much from the second he saw her, how she was moving. But he hadn’t seen the initial injury or bandaging, and Mikasa had refused to let them spend any significant time getting her fixed up, just keeping her from bleeding out. As he looks now, he can see better how acute of a danger that was. It must have stopped bleeding at some point and reopened in the fall, because if she’d been gushing blood like this for all these hours, she’d have been long dead. Most of her lower leg is coated in red. Around seven inches of skin is torn raggedly open, and—Armin’s not a doctor, but he can see how deep it goes. She shouldn’t have been fighting with this. But they’d needed her.
Not that it had done any good.
“Tie it above the cut,” Eren says hoarsely. Armin glares at him. “Like a tourniquet,” he clarifies. “Obviously get the rest, too.”
He doesn’t respond, but follows his direction. After it’s tied, when silence and stillness descend, Eren speaks again. He asks, “Is it—Why hasn’t she woken up?”
“How should I know,” he says blankly. Armin settles next to Eren just so he can peer at Mikasa’s face. The bangs over her nose are moving, barely, with her shallow breathing. “Do you—she didn’t hit her head?”
“It doesn’t feel like it,” Eren says. “Is she… is she just exhausted? Between. You know. Her leg, and—you guys have been traveling for a while. And…”
“Fighting,” he supplies numbly. “We’d better hope so.”
“She’s fine.” Eren brings a hand up to ghost over her cheek, thumb smoothing over the scar he’d given her four years ago. As his hand blocks it from his sight, Armin can’t help but think, it’s far too late for that, Eren. “She’ll be fine. She has to be fine.”
Armin’s heart spasms in his chest. Bitter, he just says, “If you say so.”
There’s nothing else to say.
Where do they go from here? Everything is gone. Everything, everything. When he looks up, the ranks of Colossal Titans are continuing their slow drift away, steam hissing lowly, blocking out the sky. They’ll need to leave soon, or risk the heat. Armin has no clear memories of how that’d gone for him last time, but he has no desire to give it a second go with no convenient ex-comrades to eat. But the idea of just… walking away from this town is unthinkable. Leaving it here, in ruins, empty except for the bodies, until the birds return and leave only the bones. If they will. Is there enough left for anything to survive?
They don’t even know the name of the town. There’s no way to learn. Nobody will ever remember the name of the outside world’s final homestead. There will be no graves for her inhabitants. No memoirs. All their names are already gone, nobody left to remember them. This is far enough away that they probably didn’t speak Eldian here. It may be that nobody will ever share their names again.
And Armin is just sitting next to the man who killed them. Letting him hold his best friend, touch her cheek like he loves her, like it matters if he does. How is he just sitting next to him?
His fingers twitch, itching, for a moment, to pick up a chunk of rubble. If he beat Eren’s head in, would it kill him? Probably not. Little Gabi had shot his head off, and he seems to have recovered from that just fine.
He hears sounds that can only be the others. Footsteps rushing about, coughing, hoarse shouts of names. Armin’s chest aches, bruised ribs crying to find Annie, but he just can’t make himself leave Mikasa with Eren. He doesn’t trust him with her anymore, and—and he doesn’t want to take his eyes off her. Eren is keeping her against his chest, he can feel her breathing and the warmth of her body and know that she’s fine. Armin can’t. Selfish, he thinks, fingers curling into fists. Selfish, selfish, selfish.
And then she whimpers.
A jolt like the lava-rush of transformation sends Armin a foot in the air, and he lurches closer to Mikasa. Under her, Eren jerks similarly. He rocks forward and then holds Mikasa there as he pulls back, her body resting on his knees, her head cradled in his palms. His hands smush her cheeks, and maybe it's that discomfort that causes her eyes to flutter.
“Mikasa,” Eren gasps, drowning out Armin’s own cry of her name. “God, Mikasa, can you—it’s me, I’m here, my—Mikasa.”
Armin can’t describe the desperation in his voice. He sounds like a frightened child, terror and reverence warring in between the tremors. He can’t pay him any mind though; all his attention is on the girl in his arms. His hands come up, hovering awkwardly, looking for something to do, some way to help, or reassure himself that she’s okay. But his fingers are slippery with her blood, and her eyes aren’t opening all the way.
Her brow is pinched with pain and confusion. Set in the bloodless pale of her face, her eyes, when they settle open, look black as pitch. Just slivers— he can’t even see the full of her iris, which makes it all the more unsettling. She’s dazed, unfocused, mouth falling slightly open. When she looks at him, Armin isn’t even sure she knows him.
When Eren begs, “Mikasa,” though, her gaze shifts back to him and softens. She sighs through her nose and her lips silently form his name. Armin can’t block out the way Eren’s expression absolutely dissolves, tears brimming in his eyes, and again he says, “Mikasa. Mikasa, my love, my Mikasa, I’ve got you, are you alright, what do you need— ”
Mikasa blinks slowly. Her head tips further into Eren’s hand, closer to Armin. His heart rattles like there’s something angry inside his chest, desperate to get out. “Mikasa,” he says. “Do you know me? Can you understand me?”
She breathes out what could have been a hummed affirmative if it had more substance. Armin’s face splits into a broken smile, small joy sparking in the ruin inside him, tiny fireworks going off behind his bruised ribs. She continues to melt into Eren, sliding further down his knees, face pressing further into his hand. Her fingers twitch, and then her hands manage to lift from limp at her sides to her lap. Eren takes the hand not supporting her head away and uses it to clutch both of her hands into his own, folding them in so tightly that his knuckles go white. She sighs again, her eyes fluttering back closed, and Armin can see Eren’s panic.
“No,” he says, “Mikasa, no, please stay awake, please—please tell me that you’re okay, Mikasa.”
Her voice is very faint when she says, “‘m fine.” Her neck is bent in a way that makes her carotid artery stand out; Armin sees how fast her pulse is racing. Her eyes wander over to him again. “‘re you…?”
Armin chokes out a laugh. “Don’t worry about me.” He glances at Eren for a split-second and adds, “Either of us.”
“What do you need?” Eren asks her again. “Please, just tell me, I’ll make it better.”
Armin feels his face twist into a snarl briefly, but when he looks at Eren, his eyes catch on his and Mikasa’s tangled hands. Hers are squirming under his grip, and then pull against her stomach in a gesture that makes Armin dizzy for a moment. He sees again that line of red, but—it’s not blood.
When he sees what it actually is, he almost wishes it was.
“‘M fine,” Mikasa says. Her breath is coming too fast, too shallow. “Just—cold…”
Eren’s eyes shine with wonder, locked on their joint hands and what’s below them; the red spilling out from the gaps in her buttons. “It’s okay,” he croons. “It’s okay. My Mikasa, it’s okay.”
Armin’s blood runs cold as he watches Eren pull that goddamn fucking scarf out from her shirt; he feels nauseous, dizzy. The utter wrongness of the image drives horror so deep into his gut that he has to look away when Eren drapes it over her shoulder.
That is not right, he thinks, gut churning. That shouldn’t be happening.
But at the same time, isn’t that just the same old story?
He shoves that thought away violently. He’s always thought of the pair of them as that, a pair, but now he can’t stand to watch Eren bind them back together. Not now. Not now.
When he looks back at them, Mikasa’s eyes have slid closed again. Her breath is still too fast and shallow to be reassuring, but it’s slowed some with the calm of sleep. Unconsciousness. Eren is slowly settling her back onto his shoulder. When she is, he takes the long tail of her scarf over her back and gently tuck it around her neck. He presses his face gently into her hair, and then goes very still.
It’s a long time before Armin is able to string thoughts back together. His mind spins in a tight circle that grows wider and wider. It starts with Mikasa, broken and bloody, and the way Eren says her name; rotates out to Annie, where is she and will he be able to hold her warm body the way Eren is holding Mikasa; to Annie’s father, who’d meant everything to her, her only family left in the world; to everyone in Liberio; everyone in Marley; everyone everywhere.
The words burst out of them before he decides to say them. “What was even the point?” He presses his knuckles to his lips. “Why make us bear witness to our failure? Why do this at all?”
Eren exhales, pained. “I didn’t… Don’t ask me to explain it again, Armin.”
“Again?”
“I wanted to,” he mumbles. He has the decency to look ashamed. Armin wants to peel the expression right off his face. Eren drops his head onto Mikasa’s shoulder, and Armin wants to knock it off. “I wanted to give our island a fighting chance, so that the rest of the world couldn’t—and I thought, by the time it started, I thought that you were going to stop me. I had suspicions even before it started, but when I was with Ymir… You all would get to be the heroes, and the rest of the surviving world would adore you, and you, you were going to shepherd everyone to peace… and she loved Mikasa. I thought she did. She admired her, and.” His expression crumples. “She related to her, I think. Or she wanted to. I don’t know. She wanted Mikasa to show her something. How to move on. And I saw that happening, it was going to. It was going to be Mikasa’s choice, but… something changed. I don’t know what. Or when. Or why. But it all went wrong.”
Armin turns away from the tangle of limbs that they are, toward the churning dust. Almost none of that made sense, and he doesn’t care to hear Eren sort it out anymore. “Does it matter?”
The little choked sound that escapes Eren’s throat might be a laugh. “No,” he says. “I guess not.”
From the corner of his eye, Armin watches Eren sag back against the broken bricks, reclining like he might—fucking—take a nap, or something. Like they’re kids under that tree on the hill again. Like he’s tired, after his long march. Which he may well be, but here among the trampled bodies and destroyed homes, after that meager explanation, Armin can’t scrounge up any pity for this monster of a boy. Eren hasn’t been his best friend in a long time.
Armin sighs, and pain lances through his chest. When he pushes his fingers through his hair, the ash of who-knows-how-many nations flakes down on his shoulders. He can’t even say that Eren has changed, exactly. He doesn’t have that excuse. Armin remembers being ten, twelve, fifteen years old, listening to Eren swear that he would end the Titans bloody and claim the world he felt was his birthright. And he guesses that Eren’s mind didn’t change when he found out that people were the real monsters, and that monsters are people.
They weren’t people, Eren had hissed ten years ago, a week or so after bringing Mikasa home. She’d still been shut inside their house, baking with Mom or something, Eren said, she’s still real shook up. When Armin dared ask why there was a skittish girl in his house, Eren had been all too eager to tell him, almost daring him to rebuke him. I put down some rabid animals.
He had been so fiercely proud of himself, both telling the story and then later when he’d finally introduced him to Mikasa. Armin had had an inkling right from the first, of what she meant to him. He’s not sure what he thinks now, except that maybe he never quite got him. Maybe he never wanted to. Maybe he’s always known what lurked under Eren’s skin, but he never let himself see, too eager to have a friend, and then too loyal to him.
And maybe his feelings for Mikasa have always been tangled up in that.
I was going to let her kill me.
Looking back to them, Armin can’t shake the panic that grips him. Eren looks entirely too peaceful. His long fingers are absently stroking Mikasa’s neck. He may be monitoring her pulse. Is he waiting for it to fade, Armin thinks, and he knows the answer is no, but he can’t— “Where do we go from here?”
Eren’s eyes crack open, but he doesn’t look at him. For the first time, he seems to take notice of the army of Colossals dissolving around them. The heat is beginning to radiate down to them, the air growing heavy and wet. Hissing is beginning to take the place of the near-silence, though there are still sounds of life from the others in the distance. They’re quieting down now, but Armin hopes that means they’re all alright and finding each other. It doesn’t sound like anyone’s been found dead, at least.
At last, Eren says, “I guess we go home.”
Armin’s heart clenches. “There’s nowhere else.”
“No,” he says, and he has the nerve to sound mournful.
Armin lurches to his feet. “I,” he says. Takes a deep breath of the dusty, humid air, and blows it out through his mouth. “I’m going to find Annie.”
He storms away before Eren responds.
He walks back down the gentle hill, dodging wreckage and bloodstains and the worst of the craters. Without anything as immediate to focus on, the echoing rattle in his bones seems to come back. He keeps thinking he can hear more Colossal footsteps, but everything remains perfectly, eerily still. His chest hurts, and his arm, and his bloody fingers begin to shake when a minute passes and he’s all alone.
It doesn’t take too long to find her after that. He hears low murmuring coming from a street off the side, and: there she is. Leaning on Reiner’s bulky shoulder as his arms are wrapped around the children. Her ice-blue eyes flit to him as soon as she spots movement, the deep circles of her Titan marks making her seem ghoulish. She snaps up straight, one hand lifting to reach out for him. Armin crosses the distance between them and crashes into her, folding her against his chest tightly.
Everything else seems to drain away. His insides hollow out, and a soft, cool sweetness rolls through him. Annie’s fists clench under the straps of his ODM gear, and she presses her face into his neck. He can feel her lips wobble against the skin of his throat, and for a fleeting moment he can pretend they’re back on the boat—Annie trembling under him, impossibly precious, so small and fragile and warm that it felt like he’d been chosen to bear witness to a miracle. Like miracles were possible. Annie had been the focal point of his hopes for so long. If there were a world where he could have her, he’d thought, it would be a world where everything is alright. There would be peace, a brave new world that rejected war for them to make their life in. For a shining moment on the boat, he’d really believed that something like that was waiting for them.
That foolishness is long gone now, and Armin doesn’t believe in miracles. But she is here, and that’s something.
“Annie,” he says. “You’re alright?”
She nods against him. “Fall wasn’t too bad,” she croaks. “You?”
“Fine.” He swallows, looks up at the Titan nearest to them. The steam is thicker now, but he makes out that its head is gone, now the meat of its shoulders is flaking away. I guess we go home, Eren said, and Armin clutches Annie tighter. “I’m fine.” He turns his head to the three others here with them.
Deep lines are carved into Reiner’s face. Some of them are jagged Titan marks; only a few of them are actual scrapes. He looks far older than his twenty-one years, especially with the children huddled against him. Falco is pale underneath vicious, sweeping Titan marks; limp, sagged against Reiner like a sack of flour. One of his hands is clutched in Reiner’s shirt and the other gripping Gabi’s. The little girl’s hair has come unbound, and her flushed face is mostly buried in her cousin’s chest, turned just toward him enough that he can see tears gathered in her eye. The youngest living creature on the continent.
Armin is the only Paradis native here. Everyone else here had families on the mainland. Annie had her father, Reiner his mother, and Gabi and Faclo had parents. Armin remembers the pain of being freshly orphaned, and can’t imagine how it’s been compounded for them here, now. And he just let the man who orphaned them be.
Reiner lifts his eyes from the dusty heads of the children. Armin winces from the absolute bleakness in them. “The others,” he says. “Did you see Pieck and them? Connie and Jean? And…”
“I heard Jean, I think.” He doesn’t want to answer where he left Mikasa, and who with. He wonders if anybody else knows that Eren has come down. Become human again, though it's strange to think it. It seems wrong that there’s any physical undoing of what he became. “He sounded alright. And I saw Levi, though I wasn’t sure if…” He swallows. “And. I found Mikasa. First thing I did. She’s fine!” he hurries to say, seeing the looks on their faces. Reiner and Gabi squeeze their eyes shut with relief in the exact same way. “She’s just passed out. Her head seemed fine, just exhaustion and blood loss. I changed her bandage and.” He takes a fortifying breath. “Eren is with her.”
Annie jerks back. Gabi flinches so hard she moves Reiner and Falco both, and Reiner’s eyebrows raise. The stunned: “You left her with him?” comes from Falco, who whips around with wild eyes.
He feels awful about her injury, Armin knows, even if they’d all known immediately it wasn’t his doing. Eren, they had assumed, but Armin doesn’t think he believes that anymore. If he did that, it wasn’t consciously.
“I would’ve had a hard time getting him to let go of her,” he says gently. Armin runs his fingers through his hair again, sighing heavily. “I don’t… if he’d wanted to hurt her he would have. He, he made me… freeze. I don’t know how to describe it. She woke up for a second and he freaked out making sure she was alright. And then I just couldn’t be there with him anymore.”
“Small wonder,” Annie says, her voice shaking with anger. “But Mikasa’s fine?”
He presses his lips together. “I hope so. There’s nothing else that we can do for her here.”
It’s then that a small, lumpy form looms from behind the dust. Armin squints and makes out two distinct figures. Pieck, half-dragging Levi, who’s got one arm slung around her shoulder. Their boots are red and shiny with blood and viscera, and he looks like absolute hell, but Pieck’s face lights up when she sees them, fracturing into bright, watery joy. “Reiner!” she calls, hobbling faster. “Gabi! Falco!”
Gabi’s mouth wobbles, tears leaking from her eyes. “Miss Pieck!” She detaches from Reiner and Falco and sprints to her mentor, though all four of them hurry after her. She ducks under Peick’s arm to crush both adults into a hug. Armin’s jog comes to a stop close by enough for him to hear Levi’s pained groan.
Gabi pulls back, fingers spread wide. “Sorry!” she says. “I didn’t—Are you alright?!”
Levi groans again, head dropping. He mumbles something impossible to make out, which Pieck, breathing hard, translates as, “He feels like he got blown up, had his legs broken, and fell out of the sky.”
Falco winces, but Gabi immediately sinches herself to his side, leaning her head on the crook of his neck. Something about the gesture shoots pain through Armin’s chest. Eyes on Peick, she just prompts, “But he’s alright though, right?”
Pieck nods. “I’ve seen death, and he doesn’t look like it.” She looks her countrymen over, and then, to Armin’s surprise, himself. “And you all?” she says. “Nobody is too badly off? Where are Jean, and Mikasa and, um, and Connie?”
“We’re okay, Pieck,” Annie says. “Have to find the boys. And Armin says that Eren’s got Mikasa.”
Levi lurches upright at that, grabbing Reiner for additional stability as he pulls himself up. “What?” he hisses. “Where’s he—” he coughs, and blood splatters on the ground. “Keeping her?”
“Oh, no, she’s fine, she’s fine,” Armin rushes to say. “She’s just—”
“Where?” His one visible eye has narrowed to a slit, and there’s more venom in that glance than Armin’s ever seen from him. “He destroyed that girl, he’s done enough—”
“Captain,” Armin says, “please, Eren yelled at me about not doing her bandages right, she’s fine—”
“He what?” This from Annie.
“He flew at her like a bat out of hell,” Armin says. As much as he doesn’t like defending Eren, trusting him, the thing is that Armin doesn’t think he’ll hurt her any further. Any of them, really. If Eren wanted them dead, they would be. It’s as simple as that. “Checked her all over and didn’t move even after he was sure she was okay. She woke up for a moment and he about lost his head making sure she was alright. He said—Look, I wasn’t any more eager to leave him with her and any of you, and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t think she was safe.”
“I don’t care,” Levi snaps. “Take me over there.”
The prospect makes Armin uneasy, but a quick glance up shows an even thicker cloud of steam. Time is running down. They’re far away from being dire yet, but still…
He leads them back the way he came, weaving around the same blocks. Reiner takes the burden of Levi off of Pieck, leaving little Falco and Gabi to cling to each other, alone. God, but the sight of them is nagging at him. Something about the way they’re shuffling along, hands clutching at each other’s clothes, knees knocking and heads leaned together but never tripping each other up. There are bloodstains on Gabi’s dress, and her bangs are falling over her nose. He watches her press her face to Falco’s shoulder and roll her head, effectively wiping tears on his clean shirt. She’s going to have an epic breakdown later, he’s sure, but hopefully she’ll have the privacy of only Reiner and Falco to witness it.
They don’t make it far before two pairs of jogging footsteps start echoing through the street. For a fleeting moment, Armin thinks it must be Eren and Mikasa — then he comes back to his senses as Jean and Connie stumble out from around the remains of a house.
“God!” Connie shouts, half a whoop, half a curse. Armin blinks, and suddenly Connie’s in front of him, throwing his arms out wide enough to catch him and Annie and Gabi and Falco in a crushing embrace. Armin coughs, his ribs screaming, but he’s too relieved to see his old friends alive to protest.
“Connie,” he sighs. He thumps his back awkwardly. “Alright?”
Jean barrels into all of them as well, dragging Pieck and Reiner, and by extension Levi, into the hug.
“Could be worse!” Connie shouts, far too loud. Armin winces, then thinks that there’s no one else to hear them anyway, and winces again. Connie pulls out of the awkward gap between Armin’s shoulder and Gabi’s head and checks each of them over, his eyes falling to Falco. “Little man,” he bellows. “You okay, kid?!”
Falco cringes back, wobbling on his feet. He’s still pale and exhausted, having borne far too much weight on his fragile shoulders. “Yes, sir,” he says. “Uh, are you…”
“Tinnitus,” Jean offers. “Give him a few hours.” He disengages as well, visibly doing a headcount. When he comes up short, he pales. He swallows roughly and says, “Where’s Mikasa?”
“With me.”
That dull, deep voice rings across the quiet street, and nine heads snap to the right in perfect unison.
Eren is some fifty feet away, just far enough to be hazed out in the dust. He stands in a pocket of relative peace, the road under him cracked but not shattered. When Armin looks up at him, he can see the Attack Titan still hanging in the distance, and the Wall Titans stretched out behind him. His army, even still. Would they pull themselves to attention and begin to reform if he gave the order?
It’s hard to say if Eren looks like a commander. His gaze is steady on them, dead-eyed and weary; his feet sure, his dark jacket swaying in the churning air. Any image he might have made as a victorious conqueror, though, is altered by the addition of Mikasa clutched tight in his arms. He holds her almost like a bride, if the groom thought someone might try to rip her away. Her unconscious body is turned fully into him, her arms laying against herself instead of around his neck, her head cradled against his shoulder. Her face is still pale and pinched, but she looks peaceful enough.
Her scarf is scarlet around her throat.
The reaction of the others to the sight of them is instant. Gabi screams, a choked, bitten-off thing, and yanks Falco backward. Falco spins her behind himself and they both stumble back, her knuckles white where she’s gripped his elbow and his opposite side. Reiner nearly drops Levi to throw his arm in front of the children, and Peick does the same. Levi stiffens, but he’s nearly wobbling on his feet, and even keeping his eye open seems to cost him greatly. Annie tenses beside him, half-dropping into a meager fighting stance, and Armin’s hand shoots out to grab her wrist. Connie sucks in a breath, all his levity vanishing, and jerks as if to rush at Eren, just Jean stops him with a firm grasp on the shoulder.
“Jean,” Connie snarls. “What are you—”
“Connie,” he says, pained. In Jean’s gaze, Armin reads a clear: what would be the point?
“Eren,” Levi says. It sounded like it was meant to be a low growl, but just comes out as a weak exhale. Armin hasn’t ever heard him sound so fragile. His one good eye, locked on Eren, is dark like a thunderstorm. “You,” he wheezes. “Fucking piece of… shit kid. Are you… happy with yourself?”
Eren’s vacant expression doesn’t change, but his chin presses closer against Mikasa’s forehead. “Would it help if I said that I’m not, especially?”
Beside him, Pieck bares her teeth. Gabi pulls Falco another step away, tugging over and over at his shirt in tiny little fits, even after he’s stepped back. Both of the children are trembling like newborn foals. Falco’s Titan marks look like an eagle’s spread wings, and his posture makes him look like a puffed-up chick. Again, the phrase baby birds can’t fly rings through his head.
“Sorry,” Connie says. “Sorry, sorry—do you mean to tell us now that you regret it?”
“Not what I said.” Eren’s mouth tightens, surveying the group of them. Armin’s jaw clenches. He doesn’t want to hear another word of Eren’s feeble attempt at justification. But all he says is, “We can’t stay here.”
Connie’s hands ball into fists. “Finally gonna kill us, then? Like you killed Sasha?”
“Connie,” Jean says again.
“I—I know it might be hard to believe me,” Eren says, finally cracking with some emotion. He pulls Mikasa’s body even tighter against himself, the thumb under her knee pressing an upset little rhythm. “But I don’t want to hurt any of you.”
“Funny way of showing it,” Annie says.
“I know,” he says. “I know, but I didn’t think—”
“What did you think, Eren?” Reiner’s voice is almost gentle. He sounds too exhausted to be anything else, but he’s got the kids shielded behind him. He’s still prepared to defend them.
Eren opens his mouth as if to snap something back, but cuts himself off before it can form. “Doesn’t really matter,” he says. “What does matter is that we need to go.” He glances up at the nearest steaming Colossal. When Armin follows his gaze, he sees a small fire has started by its massive foot. Their clock is running down fast. “We shouldn’t stay here long.”
“Do you think we’re going anywhere with you?” Pieck hisses.
“I think you haven’t exactly got a choice. You’re free to stay, of course, but even if you survived the fire and the steam, it’s not like you’ll have much to eat.” He looks each of them over before his eyes lock with Armin, and there’s true distress in them.
Levi stares him down. “Maybe we’d rather die… than go with you. Think… of that?”
“Okay,” Eren says. “I’m not going to kidnap you back to Paradis, but—we have to go. If you don’t want to die, we’ve got—maybe ten, fifteen minutes before the heat gets dangerous. We need to be out to sea by then.”
“I’m surprised,” Armin says, cold and unable to help himself. “I really am, by your compassion and forethought, Eren.”
“I just want to get Mikasa to a fucking doctor,” he snaps.
“Really,” Connie spits. “Real fucking rich from the guy who broke her heart and tried to kill her—”
“Levi,” Eren says, “clearly needs one, too. All of you. And beds and water and something to eat—”
Connie bursts into sharp, broken laughter. If it was in any other circumstance, Armin would call it cruel. “You trying to be the jokester now, Eren?! Acting like you give a fuck —”
“Connie,” Jean shouts. He shoves lightly at his chest, and Connie whips to glare at him. “What do you think you’re going to accomplish?”
Eren looks truly hurt. The fucking audacity. “You know that I care about you. All of you—”
“You know, I believed that right up until I had to stop the girl I had literal money on you having a hard-on for from dying of shock or bleeding out while flying on a twelve-year-old kid’s back, on the way to try and stop you from wiping out the entire fucking planet!”
“Don’t —” Eren starts. He squeezes his eyes shut and swallows. “Believe what you want, Connie, I don’t care, but I don’t want to leave you all here to die.”
And Armin knows that’s true.
“Guys,” he says. The others look to him, some of the hostility melting away. Armin bites his lip and looks at Annie, gaunt, pale, so recently returned to him. Alive, out of the stasis of her crystal. Breathing. He looks at the rest—the familiar faces that he’s loved; the unbent strength in Peick’s back; the way that Gabi and Falco pull directly at old heartstrings. Mikasa, too pale and still, cradled in Eren’s arms. He blows out a breath and says, “We really should go.”
Connie’s eyes go wide. “You, too, Armin? What are you—?”
“I don’t want you to die here,” he says. “Any of us.”
There’s a long beat of silence. Then Reiner looks over his shoulder to the wide-eyed children and says, “I don’t want you two to die here, either.”
Gabi’s face crumbles. “You’re coming too, then, Reiner, don’t say that like you’re not!”
“I’m not leaving you,” he swears. “It’s my job to take care of you kids.” He looks back to Eren, some of his defensiveness bleeding away. “You want us to go where, to Paradis?”
Eren nods. “I promise you’ll be safe there. All of you. I meant for—well, I, I promise, on whatever you’ll believe, that nobody will hurt you there. I won’t let them. I swear. His eyes drop down to Mikasa’s pinched face, and his mouth twists into a grim line. “I swear it on Mikasa’s life.”
It’s Jean who speaks next. “Okay,” he says. “You—we do need medical attention. Some of us more than others.” He looks to the ground, and his jaw begins to tremble. “That—we did what we could. We tried.”
Armin’s heart slices open, grief bubbling out in a rush. “We tried.” He squeezes Annie’s hand. “I think… I think we should live with that. We… we need to go.”
After a moment, Levi rasps, “Is that… an order, Commander?”
Armin blinks. He’d nearly forgotten. “I think it might be.”
He sighs and looks to the broken pavement. “That’s it, then,” he says, and then his eye rolls to the back of his head and he collapses, like a puppet with the strings cut.
“Woah,” Reiner says, sinching him to his side before he can hit the ground. “Hang on, Cap.”
“Sina,” Jean mutters. “Is he alright?”
“He’s breathing,” he says. “Think his body finally gave out. He needs a nap more than any of us.”
Armin shoves a hand into his hair. “Mother of Maria,” he says. “Eren, how exactly did you plan on getting back?”
“I can make something,” he says. He takes a few steps toward them, and nobody recoils or jumps to fight. “With the War Hammer. Or—whatever it is now. And I know the way back to Paradis. It shouldn’t take more than a day.”
“Okay,” Armin says. He drags his hand down his face. “Okay. To the sea, then. That, that’s an order.”
“Motherfuck,” Connie says, then turns on his heel and begins to march down toward the beach. Armin will take that as a win.
He looks at Annie. “I can’t order you.”
She says, “You can ask.”
Armin’s lips tremble. He laces their fingers together and says, “Please.”
Annie gives him a tight-lipped smile and squeezes his hand, and it’s enough for hot tears to slide from his eyes.
Jean steps next to Reiner and helps him with Levi. The captain is so much shorter than both of them that it’s a bit ridiculous, but at least it makes it easy. Reiner looks at Pieck imploringly. With shining eyes, she says, “Oh, fine. If you’d leave me alone here otherwise.” She stretches her hands out to Gabi and Falco, who both reach for the same one so as to not let go of each other.
“Wait,” Gabi says, before they follow the men down. “Wait, wait, I need to—”
She lets go of Pieck, dropping to her knees and picking up a fragment of pavement, shoving it in the pocket of her dress. She gathers up as much as she can with her free hand, two big pocketfuls, and then stands on shaky legs. She looks all around, taking it all in; looks at Eren, the man she looks so much like, the man she’d reminded him of just a week ago in the restaurant, and then throws herself into Pieck’s open arms and bursts into sobs.
Eren watches the six of them head to the beach like there’s a splinter being driven into his skin. When he meets Armin’s eyes, he opens his mouth to speak.
“Don’t,” Armin says, shaking his head. The sight of the youngest living creature on the continent stuffing the pockets of her borrowed, bloodstained dress with the broken streets of the outside world's last homestead—that was just too much. “Please don’t, Eren.”
He shuts his mouth and nods. Armin steps backward and Annie follows. Before he turns his back, he sees Eren hide his face in Mikasa’s hair and take a step forward.
He tries to ignore the churning in his stomach.