Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Spring

A really terrible day. Beginning to end.

The first thing is the arm.

The recruits are seated on long benches around a table in the Survey Corps mess hall, and Bertolt is trying with every shred of his mental fortitude to participate in the conversation. It's like trying to keep his head from sinking into quicksand when the rest of him's already gone under. He's tearing his bread roll into tiny pieces and then dividing those pieces into neat rows across his plate. A nervous, compulsive habit he's been cultivating since kicking a hole in the wall at Trost.

Reiner, his blonde, square-jawed counterpart, sits across the table talking, laughing, and having no issues whatsoever. He's a solid, reassuring presence. Gets along with everyone. Which is a problem all its own.

Bertolt's mind is drifting towards hissing jets of steam spewing out between his teeth as tiny people scatter far below him like ants in the rain. Something brushes his shoulder. He turns to look. A charred and flaking stump with bloody-ended finger bones is digging grooves into his skin. He tracks it up past the elbow and he recoils with a strangled gasp because there's nothing there but the telltale breadknife serration of a titan's bite, and threads of dangling red sinew where the arm's been ripped from the root.

He's standing with wild eyes and a hammering heart, sweat beading his brow and one long leg already over the back of the bench when he realizes where he is and that everybody at the table has stopped talking. Connie's mouth is a frozen O, one hand drawn back in surprise.

Bertolt, mortified, looks at all of his comrades and all of their totally normal arms. Their mouths are hanging open, stopped mid-word and mid-bite. You can't be Bertolt-sized and not attract attention when you explode off of a bench in the middle of breakfast and make a noise like a strangled rooster over a friendly touch on the shoulder.

Reiner comes to his rescue. He lobs a booming laugh like a boulder into the awkward silence, shattering it. "Damn Bert. You fall asleep there, buddy?"

Laughter ripples down both sides of the table. Everyone relaxes.

Reiner's mouth is grinning but above it his eyes are sharp, and their message is clear: keep it together. Bertolt anchors himself to the glare and lets it pull him into the present. The world shuffles back to alignment and he puts his hand behind his head with a sheepish smile.

"Oi. Sorry Connie...sorry."

"You weren't sleeping though.” How about shut the fuck up, Connie.

"Daydreaming." A smile of understanding from Krista. O angel. O creature of mercy.

“Oh, then? Who is it?" Jean turns his expert asshole energy away from his regularly scheduled morning slap-fight with Eren. He seamlessly redirects resources towards Bertolt's humiliation. "Why don't you go ahead and tell the class, Bert?"

"Huh? Tell ush what?? Ish there a girl?" Sasha talks through a mouthful of dry toast.

Mikasa regards her with placid disgust. "Can you not spit crumbs."

"Shorry." says Sasha, spitting crumbs.

Mikasa chooses violence. "I know who it is. You were staring at Annie. When she showed up with the MPs yesterday on the VIP escort team."

Since he's already standing, it'd be easy to announce to the table that he, Bertolt Hoover, is the Colossal Titan. He would let himself be dragged away by the Military Police to an underground Hange lab to undergo dissection. He would endure it. It'd be less agonizing than this public evisceration. It'd change the subject.

But since this would condemn fellow traitors Reiner and Annie to the same fate, he just blushes harder and sinks back into his seat, stammering a denial, playing it up a little, being convincingly unconvincing. He's saved again when there's an explosion at the other end of the table. Eren, probably pushed to the limits of endurance by not being the center of attention for nearly sixty seconds, has totally-by-accident kicked Jean's boot with his own while getting up to clear away his plate. It's left a scuff. The ensuing melee takes over as the morning's entertainment.

Reiner activates big brother mode and jumps up to broker peace, shoving two brawny arms under Eren's armpits to haul him back from Jean's throat, laughing the entire time. "C'mon guys, cut it out. Stop. Hey, Jean, I've got some leather polish in my bunk. We'll go get it after lunch" He is so good at this. Bertolt enjoys the show.

When he takes the tin plate and tumbler to deposit them in the wash bins at the end of the room, Reiner is right behind him. He throws an arm around his shoulder. Bertolt, half-smiling, half-serious, because Reiner is squeezing just a little bit too hard, bats it away.

***

A guy that big doesn't have any business moving that easily through the air. It's unnatural. Like an elephant on ice skates.

That's what Bertolt thinks as he waits for his turn in the 3DMG practice run, watching Reiner bounce from tree to tree.

Bertolt is up. He sends his hooks towards a nearby, high up branch without thinking about his next move, because he doesn't need to.

He loves this feeling. Everyone who's good at it does, and Bertolt is, if he's honest, very good at it. It’s so good to careen through the trees with his mind absorbed in the three dimensional puzzle of it and the wind blowing his hair back, looking for plywood titans. He slices a deep notch into the first dummy he runs across, flying by without stopping. There are a few other shallow notches, but there's also one as deep as his, and he knows it must be Reiner's.

He wants a challenge. He chooses a too-skinny branch coming up ahead and sends his hooks towards it, accounting for the wind and his own momentum. One hits its mark, the other misses—a little too low—sending him wheeling in a giant circle on one wire, but he repurposes the circular momentum to spiral up and over a thick bough, free-falling down on the other side with his sword extended to slice the second dummy's neck. Someone's painted it with blue hair and lipstick. Authentic. 

He shoots his hooks out again at the very last second to catch himself when he’s just a hands-width away from hitting the forest floor and slingshots up into the treetops, where he creates a foliage explosion by bursting through the canopy and landing hard on a particularly lush branch, just for fun, so he can watch all the leaves he's knocked off of it shower down to the ground. Satisfying.

So it's either a cruel coincidence, or psychic self-sabotage, that when he comes across a third dummy, a good 10 meters tall, the thing has been painted with little black eyes, a stringy mane of hair, and a gaping jagged-toothed maw. The closer he gets, the more it looks exactly like the monster that came out of the ground all those years ago and ate his friend Marcel alive while he and his companions fled.

Has somebody done this on purpose?! No. How could they. That doesn't make sense. But it IS that titan. It IS. He plants his feet on the dummy's back and slices through it's plywood jaws, wrenching them apart. He really could've pulled Marcel out, back then. There's no blood, so... wait. Is he alive? Where is he? Inside it's belly? 

His teeth are bared. He flings himself into orbit around the monster, cutting through its middle. No. It's flat. Wait. Right. It isn’t...it doesn't matter. He's still gotta kill it. Bertolt throws himself up to an irresponsible altitude so he can plunge sword first with maximum violence and behead the titan in one blow. Break its ugly face, break its neck, break it into smoking pieces of greasy ash.

And inevitably, like a rookie, because he has forfeited all control, he misaims and falls at an angle, realizing that he's acting unhinged exactly one second before he lands ribs-first across the dummy's wooden edge with the whole weight of his body. He flexes his abdominals in time to avoid internal injuries but the collision knocks the wind out of his lungs and he plummets thirty feet to the ground. It's only thanks to a lifetime of training that he knows how to diffuse the force of his landing, and merely twists his ankle instead of dislocating both of his legs. 

Bertolt sits down on the forest floor, surrounded by splintered chunks of painted wood, trying to breathe. He tests the ankle. It's not great. At least his ribs aren't broken.

Captain Levi, in his usual supernatural way, appears out of the canopy like he's managed to be everywhere in the world at once. He drops silently next to Bertolt, looks up at the defaced practice dummy, then back at him.

"Get your ass on the wires, go back to headquarters, ice your ankle, and show up ready to be less incompetent tomorrow."

Bertolt wordlessly stands and salutes, wiping his wet face on his sleeve with his other arm.

Levi's heavy-lidded eyes, looking up at the towering recruit, are not completely devoid of sympathy.

"The landing was decent."

Bertolt nods in thanks and shoots off into the air back towards the headquarters, pretending not to see Reiner standing in a nearby tree, eyes locked on him and tracking his flight. Bertolt's going too fast to read his expression. Wasn't he way ahead of him? Why is he even there?

Bertolt lands, grimacing as his foot hits the ground. He drags his gear back to the drop-off for maintenance and passes by his comrades, who are stretched out on the grass in the sun waiting for their turns on the course.

Connie is lounging with his boots off and his arms behind his head, a strand of grass sticking out of his mouth like a country bumpkin. Sasha's laying with her head on his stomach, looking unwell. Lunch was almost two hours ago so she's probably dying of malnutrition.

Next to them, Armin is drawing lines onto a diagram inside a huge, leather-jacketed book. The sun gleams off of his dumb blonde haircut like a halo. And right now he looks all the dumber because while he's been absorbed in his studies and oblivious to the world around him, Ymir and Krista have been taking turns sticking leaves and flowers into the back of his hair, falling to the ground in silent, hysterical, laughter every time one of them succeeds in adding a new ornament without getting caught. It looks like they've been at it for a while. The back of Armin's head blooms like a bridal bouquet.

Bertolt smiles softly at this scene, lets it hurt his heart a little, and waves as he passes but doesn't stop to talk. He doesn't ice his ankle either, he can heal it himself later when nobody's looking. He limps to the common room to find something to read.

***

The literary options available to recruits in the Survey Corps HQ are... limited. There are just too many things that Eldians inside the walls don't know about. Some examples: pirates; elephants and tigers; telephones; ice cream; moving pictures; tropical jungles; planes, trains, dirigibles, and automobiles; ballerinas; pyramids; bicycles. And probably a lot of other things, but Bertolt's mental library is largely limited to literature that's interesting to boys twelve-and-under, since after that he was here. He feels physically sick when he thinks about it. A whole world's worth of books about everything imaginable is sitting right there, just across the water, and he'll probably never get to read any of them. It's like starving to death in front of a bakery.

But anyway, imaginations on the island are also constrained to the scope of their experience, and for almost everyone here that scope ends where Wall Maria begins. The shelf in the common room that pretends to be a library is a jumble of dog-eared sword-based adventure novels, pulpy romances, training guides, and religious pamphlets. He's read almost all of them.

Books belonging to dead comrades find their way to shelves like these, swept up in the routine collection of possessions from their bunks and footlockers. Bertolt is morbidly obsessed with reading the names and messages inscribed in these orphaned books:

"If found return to Griffin Hauser"

"To dearest Ilse on her 17th birthday. Your proud and loving parents."

"Anna M. Adalgild, Cadet Barracks East"

He takes the book ("A Knight, A King, A Concubine") that once belonged to Anna. He's read it. It's an unsatisfying adventure/romance filled with bodices, bloodline feuds, and convenient coincidences.

He remembers Anna. Here's what he's heard: a titan's fat hand had come down behind her, caving in the section of the roof where she stood. She'd tried to make the jump to another roof across the street but her wire got tangled on a high-up metal awning, and she dangled there helplessly as the titan ripped her to bloody chunks, one bite at a time, like that apple-on-a-string game that kids play at autumn festivals. Dead on her first real mission during the battle to retake Trost.

It's his fault, at the end of the day. Every death-by-titan that happens inside the walls is his fault.

He wonders if she'd gotten to finish this stupid book. Maybe she would've liked the ending. The good guys don their plot armor and live to see a sequel. The bad guys get their just comeuppance in dungeons or at the ends of righteous swords.

He doesn't know why he takes this copy of the book back to his bunk, but he does, and some time later he makes a record of himself underneath Anna's inscription inside the front cover in permanent ink.

Anna M. Adalgild,
Cadet Barracks East

I was here.
- Bertolt

***

That night Bertolt washes his face in cold water in the a long metal trough that serves as a communal wash basin and unwisely leans forward to gaze at himself in the dirty mirror. There's a grey sheen under his usually warm, olive skin, and his eyes are a little bloodshot. That fall really took it out of him. The hair is ok—the cut Reiner's been giving him since they were 12 years old holds itself together surprisingly well. Even so, he looks wrecked. 

He still hasn't fixed his ankle and there are too many people around to do it now so he limps back down the hall to the sleeping quarters, pulls on his standard-issue grey wool pajamas, and is still trying to push the puzzle of that errant bloodied arm out of his brain when he climbs into the two-person bunk he shares with Reiner. He'll heal the sprain when everyone's asleep.

The others trickle in.

"Man I saw it too, somebody really did a number on that thing."

"Ymir says she's going to track down whoever trashed it and make them eat the pieces." Armin says in a grim and shivery voice.

"It looked exploded. Like with a cannon. I dunno why she's pissed though. It's a practice dummy, it's job in life is to get chopped up."

"I don't know why we decorate those things anyway." Jean yawns his whole face open, and throws himself onto his bunk. "It breaks the immersion."

Only one thing they could be talking about. But.. that doesn't... it still doesn't explain it. It was uncanny, wasn't it? Reiner must have seen it. He'll ask him, and find out if he'd imagined what he thought he saw.

But the memory of Reiner lurking in that nearby tree comes back to him. Maybe not. It might make him think about Marcel, and then other bloody things. No point upsetting him over a practice dummy that Bertolt had probably just imagined, like that desiccated arm at breakfast.

Scouts work hard, and sleep heavy. Chatter dies down as people pass out one by one.

Bertolt lights one small oil lamp and half-closes the curtain that provides a little privacy. He spreads out on his stomach, propped up with his elbows on the pillow. He flips through Anna's book. Reading trash before bed is strategic. If he reads himself to the ass-edge of exhaustion and passes out with his face flattened onto a page, then the stories sometimes bleed into his dreams. Dreams that are filled with pouting maidens, idiot kings, and one-dimensional heroes who bellow bravely across plains are so, so much better than the dreams he has if he makes the mistake of falling asleep still thinking about anything real.

Reiner comes quietly into the room a few minutes later, climbing the bunk ladder and pausing at the top to peer over the edge at Bertolt. Bertolt pretends not to notice. Best to not interact until he knows who he's talking to.

Once he hears his bunkmate haul himself over the top, and the curtain close the rest of the way. Bert raises a hand without taking his eyes off the page—a casual apology for his outburst at breakfast and the day's other catastrophes. When he does finally look back over his shoulder, he's startled to see Reiner looming above him. One knee comes down against his left side, the other thumps down on his right. Reiner is straddling a prone and baffled Bertolt.

Bertolt pushes himself up on one arm to ask Reiner what the hell exactly he thinks he's doing. “Stop messing around” dies on his lips when he meets Reiner's gaze—his eyes sit deep in shadowed sockets, just a sliver of amber around huge black pupils. His face is a pale stone under cropped blond hair.

Not good.

Bertolt's hands are long, tanned, and slender. Reiner's are huge and tough, all muscle, and combat-fast like the rest of his body. One shoots forward and locks Bertolt's wrist in a manacle grip, yanking his arm out from under him and sending him face-first into his pillow. Really?! The arm is twisted painfully behind his back. Bertolt's shoulder screams, but Bertolt can't, because the rest of the scouts cannot, CANNOT know that this is happening.

The powerful body above him is tense. Reiner curls himself forward, bringing his mouth alongside Bertolt's ear, hot breath on his neck—the arm twists harder. His voice is an even, low hiss.

"Get your head together. You cannot keep pulling this shit. I can't watch out for you every fucking second of the day. I CAN'T."

Great, it's the Warrior. Bertolt lies still, in some pain but mostly just feeling tired and depressed. Reiner's scared, probably more scared than he is, and he's turning fear into anger, and then turning anger into whatever the fuck this is that's happening right now, and he can't help him because usually when Reiner's scared he's scared for Bertolt.

Reiner's free hand spreads itself over his shoulder blade. It runs up along the hollow between scapula and spine, and finds the place where the muscles gather at the base of Bertolt's long neck. WHAT? A prickling feeling, like beer bubbles, sends goosebumps across Bertolt's skin. He's swallowed whole against his will by this rare, startling sensation—intimate touch. Skin touching skin. He shuts his eyes to feel it better. His mind swings in a direction that's pretty deranged, given the circumstances: If Reiner runs his hand through his hair... if he drags his thumb across his face towards his mouth... if he lets it slide between Bertolt's parted lips... if-

But Reiner lurches forward, dropping hard onto Bertolt's lower back and forcing the air from his diaphragm. He releases Bertolt's arm and instead clamps his hand to his face, covering his mouth and nose. The other arm coils around Bertolt's head in a kind of modified sleeper hold. It's not playful. It's not even bullying. It's a frantic, delusional silencing.

Bertolt wants to scream, swear, plead but there's no air to take in and the sound that comes out is a strangled "hnng."

Reiner sits back on his heels, dragging him up and back along with him, ignoring Bertolt's terrible spasm and muffled yelp when his weight lands on his ankle. He pressing a body against his that's now losing its ability to suppress its struggle. Bertolt is strong, but Reiner is stronger, and Reiner's not moving, and Bertolt can't breathe.

All of the Warrior confidence falls out of of the bottom of Reiner's act. He drops his forehead onto Bertolt's shoulder. "I have to protect you. If anything happens to you, it'll kill me before they get the chance." How will you protect me if you KILL ME right here in our bunk??

Reiner doesn't know what he's doing. He's reeling between his discordant personas. He's a soldier who desperately wants to help his friend, fighting a Warrior who wants to kill him for jeopardizing the mission. He's frozen like a rabbit in front of an oncoming carriage.

Bertolt's wrist hurts. His mouth hurts. His lungs and ankle shriek. His head is being crushed in Reiner's arms and his vision is starting to pulse around the edges. He clutches at huge, immovable biceps, fighting to drag them away from his head, but Reiner is made of muscle and stone. His drive to fight starts to give way to real horror and disbelief. He tears up. Oh my god...I might actually die here...Reiner...

"Please, Bertl," whispers Reiner, a little break in his voice "we can't both go crazy."

Bertolt exploits this moment of vulnerability and wrenches both of them forward onto his belly. He fumbles blindly. His fingers make contact with Anna's book. It's all he has, so in a truly pathetic and desperate last gambit he whips it backwards. "A Knight, A King, A Concubine" bounces spine-first off the side of Reiner's face and falls.

The stone arms release. Bertolt gasps air into his screaming lungs and drags himself out from under Reiner's weight. A long moment passes. To Bertolt's relief, the shadow hanging over Reiner's face lifts, first softening the hard line of his mouth into his familiar smile, then returning life to his eyes, and now Reiner looks a different person entirely. Kind, affectionate, laughing Reiner. Reiner, who's losing his mind.

"The hell, Bertl?" Reiner scoops up the book from where it's landed beside him, reads the title, snorts, and playfully tosses it back "Who throws a book?" How, HOW, does he not see Bertolt scrambling away from him, breathing raggedly with wide eyes and flushed face smeared with his own spit? Oh, because Reiner sees what he can handle. That's how. Such BULLSHIT. Reiner bounces a friendly punch off of his suffering friend's thigh and wriggles down under his wool blanket. "'Night, idiot. Go to sleep."

Bertolt slides backwards all the way to the wall, wedges himself into the corner, and pulls his legs up to his chest, hugging his knees. He drops his head and slows his breath, staring into the black hole he's made with the circle of his arms. He lets himself fall further and further down into it until his eyes droop shut. He dreams of titan-sized hands that fight to drag him in a hundred different directions. They tear him limb from limb like a bread roll.

—

The next morning Bertolt wakes up with a bubbling sound in his ears that gets progressively louder, like he's being sucked upwards towards the surface of a deep pond. When he breaks through, the sound resolves itself into voices. Other recruits—Connie, Eren, Armin, Jean, Reiner—are chattering next to his bunk in the grey morning light that filters through dusty windows on the far wall. Reiner has pulled the curtain all the way back, just to be a dick. It's unpleasant to wake up with a crowd of people's eyes already on you.

"No, it's snow. He's all rolled up like a snowball." Connie is pulling his pants on. He has one leg through before he notices they're backwards and has to start over.

"Connie, you don't think these things through. It's April. How about a raindrop? Sort of blowing in the wind because he's leaned sideways." Armin pipes up. A creative, sophisticated answer.

Jean snaps the clasps on his harness shut with practiced efficiency. "Legs up the wall is SUNNY. So balled-up like that has to be CLOUDS. Obviously."

Bertolt is still curled in on himself, stuffed into the back corner of the bunk. At some point during the night he's toppled over and his neck is bent at a terrible angle where it meets the wall. They're doing that dumbass bit they do, predicting the weather based on whatever bizarre sleeping position they find him in when everybody wakes up. Bertolt thinks that it's too early to be this embarrassing. It doesn't bode well for the day.

On the other hand, it kind of makes him feel good to be part of a joke that everyone knows. It feels like belonging. He uncoils himself one long, stiff limb at a time and rubs his eyes, trying and failing to stretch away the cramp in his neck and shoulders. "You're all perverts. Let a man wake up in peace." He smiles. Reiner is grinning up at him, tousling the place where Connie's hair would be if he had any and effortlessly foiling his attempts to escape, like he's battling an angry kitten.

At this sight the memory of the previous night resurfaces and Bertolt's guts lurch. But he breathes, holds himself together, and smacks the recollection away. He keeps smiling. Nobody notices a thing.

Chapter Text

Summer

Reiner is diligent about his exercises, and the entire Survey Corps is envious of his build. He looks like a soldier is supposed to. Like those marble statues where a bearded warrior, naked except for a helmet, is slaying a giant serpent. You look at Reiner and wonder where he's left his battle axe.

He's always helping people who want to know his secrets. Bertolt knows there are no secrets. Reiner's been like this since...well, probably since the beginning of being Reiner. He imagines the planet's most muscular newborn, punching his way through the bars of his cradle with tiny cannonball fists.

Teaching the other scouts new ways to get strong is technically aiding the enemy, but Bertolt lets this one go because it's always fun to watch. Right now everyone's taking turns trying to lift a bar that has a huge iron kettlebell tied securely to each end. They stand in a circle in the practice yard, raising dry clouds of dirt into the orange summer heat. It's foul. It sticks to everyone's sweaty faces and soils their clothes. Everything smells like horses. Summer is just the worst, especially without an ocean.

Jean looks like he's suffering, but he struggles valiantly because Eren is watching, and he will not be defeated in front of him without a fight. Wrong stance, thinks Bertolt. Jean gets the bar almost an inch off the ground, and even from afar Bertolt can see the exact moment something pops in his back. There it is. Jean goes "Hurk" and lies where he falls, wriggling weakly like a dying bug.

"Good effort!" beams Reiner the liar. "You're getting better, keep working at it." He helps Jean up and slaps him on the back. The smaller recruit blanches in agony.

"Hey Bertl!" yells Reiner. "Get over here. Let's see what you've got."

Bertolt is strong, but he does NOT look like a serpent-slaying statue. A statue outside of a bathhouse, maybe. Holding a little bowl with fountain water coming out, or playing a flute made out of an antler to a talking stag, maybe some leaves in his hair. All the correct muscles are there but the way they're laid out on his long frame, politely declining to bulk, results in a build that screams "I will get you that very heavy jar of pickles from the very top shelf, but I will also cry if I drop it."

Perspiring more than usual, which is really saying something, Bertolt ambles over and stands in front of the bar, sliding one foot underneath it to check the resistance. It doesn't budge. Ok. He's not happy about all the eyes on him, but Reiner asked, and this is a nice, easy, Hi-there-I'm-a-totally-normal-soldier thing to do.

He rubs his damp palms on his pants, sets his feet hip-width apart and squats. He grabs the bar and lifts from his knees, driving the weight into his heels. It takes an effort, but it's not insurmountable. The bar rises smoothly off the ground and he unfurls himself upwards to full height, paying attention to all of the little muscles in his sides, back, and stomach so they engage and release in the right order. He pauses to savor the work of using his core to hold his back straight instead of letting the bar roll his shoulders forward. Makes sure there's a little bend in his elbows and knees. He carefully brings the weight back down. There's a smattering of whoops and applause.

"Damn. And you have to lift it like, two feet further than the rest of us," says a scout he doesn't know from the edge of the circle.

"I always forget that you're good at everything," says Connie. "I dunno why that is."

"Ah. Reiner's been teaching me this for years."

Connie throws a little kick at Bertolt's shin as he walks by, which he evades. "Nah Bertato. Not just weights. Everything. You're like some kinda secret weapon.'

Bertato bites his lip and his eyes flick over to Reiner to see if he's heard. Every once in a while, by total freak accident, Connie lands somewhere unsettlingly close to the truth.

***

The first time ten-year-old Bertolt Hoover transformed into the Colossal Titan he blew away everything around him, vaporizing humans, animals, plants, and buildings alike. The base of operations, meant to serve as a central hub for research and other matters pertaining to the Colossal, had been constructed at a distance deemed safe in accordance with the maximum blast circumference of the previous Colossal. It was reduced to ashes in an instant, taking along with it years of research materials, vital samples, and every single one of the 127 personnel who'd been on duty there at the time. But Bertolt wouldn't find that out until later.

Willing his transformation had been so easy. He'd just looked at the cut on his finger and decided he'd like to shift. A little heart-shaped spark sprung from his blood, and the spark exploded into a ground-shaking bolt of lighting, and a roaring tornado of flesh spooled out of the light and wrapped itself snugly around him, and when he opened his eyes they were titan eyes and he was an entirely new being waking up into its first experience of the world.

He felt how a body without skin could still understand coolness and warmth, and the air shifting around it. 

He lifted one giant hand to explore his new face. As he'd been told to expect, lifting limbs was slow and cumbersome, like moving his regular human arm through water. Skinless fingers explored a row of teeth that stretched from ear to ear. He struggled to understand the shape of a strange bony cage that encased his head like a helmet. 

He opened the giant maw, felt his head split almost all the way across like the flip-top of a cigarette lighter, and tested his voice. What he'd intended to be a tentative call roared out of his steamship-funnel throat like... like nothing. There's nothing you can compare to the Colossal Titan's roar.

He'd learnt all about the Colossal's baseline abilities over the course of a grueling and terrifying year of preparatory lessons following his elevation to the program. He spent that whole year feeling that there was something not quite right about learning about your future powers under the tutelage of the person you'd have to eat to obtain them. Maybe people felt less scared if they were being eaten by someone they knew, instead of a stranger?

His dad had been so proud of him, and immediately upon being told that he was to be the next Colossal, Bertolt had exploited his privileges. The military sent a full-time caregiver to his father's house with a bag full of shiny brown bottles—medicines of a caliber almost never seen in the ghettoes where Eldian families were segregated from decent Marleyans by chain link fences. His father sold any medicines past expiration at a reasonable price to his neighbors. He'd been told to dispose of them anyway. 

Bertolt was told the prognosis was good. His father would never be all the way healthy again, but as long as his liver received no further abuse, he could expect a comfortable, nearly-normal, lifespan.

Now, lifting one giant leg (why were his toes so short? It looked like the skinned leg of an elephant) and bringing it down again with a boom that shook the earth beneath him, Bertolt dutifully ran through his baseline abilities checklist. Normal movement of limbs, check. Roar, Check. He tried to emit steam—and it came! It felt good! It released some of the pressure from the enormous well of power stored inside him. That was the biggest thing. THE thing. An electric inferno in his belly. Furious. Intoxicating. Euphoric. Self-replenishing and craving explosive release. Like he'd eaten the sun.

This new revelation about the nature of his titan was something he'd never expected. The Colossal, no matter what else it might be doing, always actively, ravenously, WANTS to explode.

He decided to try a small, highly localized explosion, but when he turned his meteor-sized head to the horizon to find a decent spot for it inside the boundaries of the testing zone, he wasn't greeted by the tops of buildings and trees, and couldn't locate the armored container that had housed the observation team on a hill in the near distance. Instead, he was standing at the center of a vast, scorched, smoking crater of devastation that stretched away from him in all directions.

Nobody had taught him to collapse the Colossal in progressive tiers so that it crumpled like an accordion, letting you ride it down so you could safely jump to the ground. It just made sense to do it that way. Once he was at a safe elevation he emerged from the Titan's nape. He found the process of snapping the sinewy strips that connected him to the Colossal surprisingly uncomfortable, and a little disgusting.

He stood for a long time on blackened ground, feeling lingering heat under his boots, mesmerized by the spectacle of his titan evaporating into ashes. Maybe it wasn't as bad as it looked, he thought hopefully. Couldn't be. Eventually a military vehicle from a more fortunate and distant base arrived to pick him up.

The drive offered a scenic view of what he'd done. Torched trees. Burnt, broken, buildings. Unrecognizable, steaming piles of rubble. The charred carcass of a horse still wearing its saddle. It felt like forever before he started to see green again.

He was still weeping when he was brought to the debriefing room, where a row of ecstatic, red-faced generals congratulated him on the unprecedented scale of his first mass murder.

THAT is what happens when you get too drunk on the nectar of your own potential.

***

This lesson is seared like a brand onto Bertolt's soul:

IF he hadn't done everything within his childish power to stand out from the other Eldian children;

IF he hadn't dutifully poured every ounce of his being and natural ability into his training;

IF he hadn't craved the approval of his instructors, and hung his sense of self on the frequency of their praise;

IF he hadn't outshone everyone else at the Warrior trials;

and,

IF he hadn't stupidly believed vicious grownup lies about how IF he was the BEST, then he could play a part in healing the suffering and cruelty woven right through fabric of the world...

THEN he wouldn't have ever become the Colossal Titan, and 127 people would still be alive.

***

The circle starts to break up and Reiner, because he's Reiner, hoists the giant barbell onto his shoulders like a milkmaid and drops it against a storage shed.

Bertolt does a quick scan of the soldiers around him. No Eren. He hadn't noticed him leave. Reiner's supposed to be keeping an eye, but since Reiner the Soldier has no reason to do that, he isn't. Probably fine. Eren's probably just standing in the middle of a courtyard somewhere screaming his feelings and life goals at someone who hadn't asked, Mikasa circling him like a pet vampire bat. Nothing to be done.

Reiner's been the Soldier all day today, and Bertolt's not doing his job, because he hasn't been trying to snap him out of it. It's a godawful thing, snapping him out of it. Reiner the Soldier. Big brother to all, a friend and a mentor, loved and trusted and looked up to, always asked for help and always happy to give it. Who he'd wished he was back in Marley while he was being treated like the least and lowest of them by the other Warriors. 

Reiner is everything he wants to be when he's the Soldier, and it's Bertolt's torturous duty to take it all away from him by reminding him about Marley, and missions, and murders. He watches the light leave Reiner's eyes like water down a drain. Watches his heart break as all of his friendships are snapped off of him like branches. Watches him pale as his sins come rushing back into his body all at once. And then watches him become the Warrior, because to be just Reiner after something like that is unbearable. And then usually the Warrior finds something to snarl at him about.

So, some days Bertolt just doesn't have the heart, and doesn't do his job, even if letting Reiner be the Soldier means being a little lonelier and fucking up the mission.

It's not that Reiner's two different people. It's not straightforward like that.

The analogy Bertolt finally lands on comes from a book that discusses the novel use of telescopes in long-range scouting. The text is wildly boring, something Armin would love. Perfect material to fall asleep on face-first, or to throw at Reiner's head in self-defense. He polishes and refines his idea while he observes his best friend like a wild animal, to be studied from a detached and sensible distance.

Reiner's two personas, the Warrior and the Soldier, are like lenses with different focal lengths. Look through one. The trees in the foreground are clear but the mountains in the background are vague, purple masses. Look through the other lens and everything's the other way round: there are the mountains, but who cares about long green blob of the trees. The trees are now unimportant. But there's still just one person using the telescope, and still just one landscape in front of them. And sometimes, there's no lens at all, and you just get Reiner, which is the best.

The gift of Reiner's insanity is that he can pull things in and out of focus. He can shrink memories like murdering Marco (and almost murdering Bertolt) down to the size of half-remembered dreams. The Soldier only knows that he's friends with both Marco and Bertolt, and sincerely cares for both of them, and that he felt bad when Marco died. Sadness.

All of those things are also true of the Warrior, but "felt bad" refers to something different. Guilt.

But every version of Reiner has always been driven by an unrelenting compulsion to protect Bertolt. Which makes it that much more horrifying that he-No. Not going there. Bertolt cuts the thought off at the root.

As 12 year-olds trekking across unfamiliar land on their way to the wall, mourning Marcel and scared of everything, Bertolt would wake up with Reiner wrapped around him, like two puppies piled up in a box by the road. And he was grateful for it because Annie refused to be touched or to sleep close together to share warmth. Since the boys couldn't stand to see their tiny compatriot shivering in a thin bag on the ground, they'd pile everything warm on top of her as soon as she fell asleep, and replace their blankets with each other.

Bertolt knew that Reiner slept lightly for his and Annie's sake, rising at every sound to investigate, hand to his mouth ready to bite down in case he needed to be the Armored Titan. He'd spend the rest of his life ready to die if it meant not living with the guilt of losing another Warrior.

Now they're two gigantic traitorous grownups who fight titans for a living, but sometimes when they wake up they still find themselves huddled around each other, and if the curtains are cracked it's highly embarrassing for all involved. Reiner might be curled against Bertolt's back like a bearskin cloak. Or Bertolt might have included Reiner in his artistic overnight contortions—one leg thrown over his chest, or his head upside down tucked against Reiner's neck, impossibly long legs running up the wall like ivy.

People make fun, but you get into habits when you're two lonely, cold, kids on the run. That's nobody's business but theirs.

Anyway, Bertolt doesn't want to be a hero, or a Warrior, or a Soldier. He just wants to go home. And if that's too much to ask he'd let fate bargain him down to Reiner wrapped around him like a bearskin cloak and a permanent moratorium on dreams.

Chapter Text

Autumn

Once in a while there are really good days too. And Bertolt doesn't second guess them.

Today, he's walking briskly with Reiner through the forest, carrying full packs and their 3DMG. They won't need any of it, but it supports their alibi: extra training in a more challenging and diverse environment. They've left early to avoid the risk of anyone else asking to come along.

The sun is only just starting to rise, and there's grey mist all around, and the sounds of frogs, birds, bugs (enjoying their last days before winter kills them dead), everything softly singing the world awake. Their heavy footsteps and the jangle of buckles, swords, and hooks on wires feel like sacrilege.

"Bert, take a damn breath. I'm just sayin' you gotta keep your head on straight."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just stay sharp, and remember what we're doing here."

"I know. I will. I do. Don't give me the speech. Lying just makes me tired. That's all."

"Lying's how we get by, Bertl."

"I've always thought you were handsome."

"What?!"

"Just getting by."

"You're a bastard."

"You're one to talk. Your daddy issues are not mine to bear."

“Hah! Low blow."

"Gotta keep ‘em low or they'll sail over your head, shrimp."

"Careful, nobody here's ever heard of shrimp."

"I miss shrimp."

"Gross. They're ocean roaches. Be a good giraffe and grab some apples."

"Careful, they don't know about giraffes."

Bertolt pulls his pack around to the front and reaches up one long arm as they pass under a tree in a little clearing, heavy with fruit. He knocks a few red apples off their branches in quick succession, catching them in his pack as they fall. He shines a good one on the bottom of his shirt and passes it over to Reiner.

"If you accidentally mention giraffes, you just tell them they're fairy tale animals, like mermaids or ghosts," Reiner suggests helpfully.

They weave their way between bars of morning sunlight, just starting to pierce the canopy. If the person in front chooses to walk along the top of a fallen tree like a balance beam, to see if he can make it all the way to the end without letting his clunky gear pull him off balance, then the one behind has to do the same, in case he can do it better. If one of them decides to jump a puddle instead of going around it, then the other prepares himself to gamble on wet boots. It's the rules. They can talk about home, their parents, and giraffes, without lowering their voices. It's an easy, peaceful back-and-forth between friends who are fluent in their own shared language.

A twig snaps behind them.

Bertolt and Reiner are instantly back to back—defensive coordination, eyes scanning the a combined 360-degree view of the forest around him. It happens without thought, like blood moving through their veins.

"Careful, they don't know about mermaids."

A shadow peels itself away from a dark spot between the trees. Annie calmly pulls back the hood of her cloak and catches up to them.

"Holy shit. Annie." Bertolt groans, and folds in half with his hands on his thighs and his head hanging upside down while the adrenaline surge works its way out of his body "Don't sneak up like that, I almost brained you with an apple."

"I forgot that you're a sniper."

Reiner almost chokes "Was that... almost a joke? From Annie? Annie, are you sick? Is it a fever?"

"Yeah." She frowns and kicks a pebble off the path with the toe of her boot. "To be honest, my eyes have been bothering me."

Bertolt, concerned, returns himself to the upright position. "What's going on with your eyes?"

"They're looking at Reiner."

Reiner barks. The three walk on. Bertolt tries to remember the last time he saw Annie laugh. Marcel had had some kind of magic formula that could steal laughs out of her, and Marcel is dead, and that was years ago. So, at least that long. She's not exactly smiling right now, but her cheeks are glowing ever-so-slightly from the cool air, the effort of catching up with the rest of her team, and he thinks, a little bit of pride at having said something almost funny. A familiar thought sidles into the spotlight of his mind. His icy, taciturn comrade would immediately knee him in the balls if he said it out loud: Annie's really beautiful.

Bertolt grabs an apple from his pack and tosses it backwards over his shoulder. Annie catches it one-handed without breaking stride.

The three Warriors step out of the trees onto the grassy bluff that serves as their ad hoc war room. It overlooks a nameless lake that sparkles in a huge bowl created by sheer green cliffs that rise out of it on all sides. Reiner always means to bring a fishing pole, and always forgets. They sit in the grass, eating apples and drinking cold water from canteens. Just like the old days, Bertolt thinks wistfully, even though the old days had been consistently horrible.

The conversation turns to serious matters. Their mission, which has dragged on far too long and yielded too few results has started to fray everyone's edges. Reiner reminds them how essential it is, especially now, to keep their eyes on achievement of their objectives. NOW they know who the Attack Titan is, and there's hope, because Eren Yeager is a reckless and volatile idiot (Reiner's one to talk) which might give them an opening.

Returning to Marley with Eren in hand may be the success that saves them from being fed to some pissant preteen as soon as they step off the boat. Annie, as the Female Titan, will have to take on the more difficult role of chasing him down and brute-forcing him into their custody. The MP is lax. She can slip away without arousing suspicion. Reiner will keep her in his sights on horseback and relay any new information. Bertolt will stay with the main formation, both to smooth over any suspicions and to somehow execute an emergency extraction for Annie if things go sideways, even if that means stuffing her into a saddle bag.

Decisions made, Annie stands up and turns back to the path. She pauses to fling the remains of her apple into the woods. It sails in an elegant arc, whizzing just over the top of a lone holdout leaf clinging to an otherwise bare branch, a good twenty meters away. The boys observe this with interest.

Reiner steps up beside her, tossing his own apple core up and down thoughtfully in one hand. He squints, winds up, and heaves it like a shot-put. The apple core shoots past edge of the leaf, just barely clipping it, and explodes on a nearby tree trunk.

Bertolt nods in approval at the effort. Without stepping forward he flings his own apple core. One easy, languid, careless motion. He puts a little spin on it. His apple collides with its target, dead center. The leaf shoots backwards and hangs in the air, then drifts gently down to join a million zillion others on the forest floor.

***

Autumn: One Month Later

That day in the woods had been a special one, and Bertolt wonders what had put Annie in the most approachable mood he'd seen her in for years. She'd almost treated him and Reiner like friends.

Highly abnormal. The next time she appears at Survey Corps HQ (escorting a VIP to a meeting with Commander Erwin) she's right back to completely ignoring him. Why? What could he possibly have done since the last time he saw her to piss her off. Nothing. It's inexplicable. And it's hurtful. She's standing in the courtyard, looking bored and unapproachable.

Bertolt is trying desperately to signal to her by turning his eyes into gigantic searchlights she shouldn't be able to miss, from just inside the door of one of the equipment storage sheds. Come over here and talk to me pleeeeeeeeaase Anniiiieeee. She can walk through the crowd of recruits without being seen, a head below everyone else. But if he walks over to her his head will stick up a foot above the crowd and Reiner will see and then he'll come join them.

He needs to talk to her without Reiner, because he needs to talk to her about Reiner, and he just doesn't understand at all why she won't cooperate. He tries to beam a psychic message from his eyes. Pleaaaaaase Annie.

"If you're trying to pick up girls, you're doing it in the creepiest possible way, bud."

Bertolt jumps and hits his head on the doorjamb.

"Fuck! Ow. What the fuck, Reiner.”

"Why're you staring at her behind a door like some pervert math teacher. If you want her go talk to her."

Bertolt despises this feature of Soldier Reiner— his weird, almost defensive, crudeness about women. Bertolt hates it to his core when he forgets who Annie is to them and joins the other scouts to rib him about a crush that he knows isn't real. And then Bertolt has to suck it up and bury his genuine hurt under a facade of bashful infatuation, because that's his job. His staring at Annie probably does look ridiculous. It’s embarrassing. What is he supposed to do about it, though? What is he supposed to say?

I used to have three people, then one died, so now I only have two people. The one I love most is losing his mind, and the other has become a scowling glacier who never stops leaving the room. She was never warm, but she wasn't like THIS, and I don't know what happened, or what I did. If I try to reach out to her, she leaves. Haven't you noticed (probably not, because most of you are jackasses) that pretty much every single time you've caught me staring at Annie, it was while she was leaving without saying goodbye?

I'm not staring at Annie because I'm in love with her (although I do love her) I'm staring at her because if she would just talk to me for one minute without Reiner, I could ask her what I did to make her hate me, and then I could fix it. And then she could help me fix HIM.

Chapter Text

It's December, when all the scouts take their traditional two weeks' holiday leave. Most go home to their families, but the corps is full of orphans who sometimes stick around. This year a group of noble families have generously donated holiday lodging at a hot springs out in the countryside. Bertolt wonders what shady machinations the higher-ups have been engaged in, to warrant such an opulent bribe.

When Reiner Braun and Bertolt Hoover, two of the corps' most reliable and promising young recruits, volunteer to stay at Headquarters over the break (they've got plans in town, they say, but nowhere to stay, since they too are orphans), the two officers who'd drawn short straws and been saddled with holiday caretaker duties are delighted to accept and head off to the hot springs.

Two weeks of having an entire HQ to themselves will let them rendezvous with Annie without having to venture into frozen forests. She’s been out of contact for a while, which is worrying, but they assume that she’s laying low after their disastrous attempt to capture Eren in the giant forest. Outmaneuvered at every turn, Bertolt and Reiner had created a window for her escape by the skin of their teeth, slaughtering soldiers from the shadows in the trees around her and scrambling to reappear in formation before their absence could be noticed in the chaos. 

The whole thing had been a harrowing clusterfuck. Bertolt’s gratitude for this respite from the continual strain of social interaction and keeping his lies organized is immeasurable. A forced pause on the mission. Two whole weeks without lying.

Reiner, having expertly compartmentalized any anxiety, seems unfazed. Downright chipper, even. He’s always weirdly enthusiastic about this winter holiday that doesn't even exist on Marley's calendar. It means cider, pie, getting drunk in pubs festooned with festive decorations and singing songs with other people who are drunk. Who cares if it's not a real holiday?

Just as Bertolt is settling in for this first night of glorious solitude, Reiner decides that he wants to go out and that Bertolt is coming with him. Bertolt demurs. Reiner cajoles. Bertolt refuses. Reiner insists. Bertolt starts to get shouty, and Reiner drags him off the bunk by one leg, tosses gray slacks and a wool sweater into his face, and kicks him down the hallway, barking like a drill sergeant every step of the way.

So, okay, fine, they'll go to a bar. Bertolt follows Reiner into town, a little pissed off and half a step behind.

He's ready for this night to be terrible, but when they step out of the cold into the pub, knocking snow off their boots, he pauses in unexpected wonder, because the way it's decked out for the holidays is really beautiful. The lanterns that hang from the ceiling have been draped in gauzy fabric, blue, green, yellow, and red, so that when the light shines through them it throws waterfalls of color all around the otherwise low-lit room. There is not one single inch of the room that isn't awash with color, and the way that contrasts with the dark blue snowy winter night outside the windows...the effect is magic.

Bertolt doesn't drink often, but when he does drink he can knock back a really dumbfounding amount of alcohol before he's too trashed to function. On those rare nights where Reiner succeeds in dragging him out on the town, the quietest cadet in the Survey Corps drinks everyone under the table, including Reiner.

Bertolt sticks close to Reiner, letting him infiltrate groups to mingle in. He affectionately watches him bounce around the room making new friends like a big yellow dog, confidently trotting up to strangers, never doubting for a second that they'll all be happy to meet him, because he knows they can tell, he's a good boy! So what does that make him? Oh. The guy with a big yellow dog, using it as a way to meet people.

Once they've polished off the two drinks each that they can afford, they set a tried and true strategy into motion. They stage a mock arm-wrestling match between the two of them at a table near the center of the bar. They make it exciting. They play up the drama. Inevitably other men gather, drawn from everywhere around the room by primal instinct, like moths rushing to self-immolate in a gas lamp. And reluctantly, just to be good sports, Reiner and Bertolt accept challenges from the new arrivals.

From there, it's child's play to beat optimistic, doomed opponents in quick succession. They keep the bets very small, just coins, everything just for fun and friendlies. Here and there, they let somebody beat them—it's good for morale. They walk away every once in a while to let their victims win coins from each other, turning themselves into mere participants instead of the obvious architects of this ridiculously roundabout plot to scam people out of their pocket change. They keep an eye on who's winning a lot, and then they win it away from them. Reiner masterfully smooths over any hurt feelings. 

They rack up a nice little cache of money and use it to buy more alcohol. They get drunk. The bartender rolls her eyes, because she knows exactly what they're doing. They grin up at her from their seats like gigantic, unrepentant children, and tip her generously with a pile of pennies.

Except for a group of retired soldiers drinking quietly at a booth in a corner, the room is mostly full of young, healthy, non-military faces. It's so different from the Corps, where nobody talks about anything besides titans, breakfast, and who's dead as of yesterday's roll call.

These are the kinds of people who work in their parents' bakeries until they're ready to take over the business. Just...baking bread. For a whole entire lifetime, baking bread. Driving a cart around town moving other peoples' things from one place to another. Repairing shoes and roof tiles. Sending the kids to the store for milk. Having a bad back. Or a new baby. Getting old. Dying old.

Imagine.

He'd be happy for them, even envious, if he was ever allowed to forget for one merciful second that soon it's all going to be stolen away from them. The way things are going, he and Reiner might outlive them. It's perverse.

Bertolt watches this series of thoughts float by and responsibly acknowledges the signal that his friendly, social drunkenness is about to give way to something uglier. He goes looking for Reiner. He easily spots the familiar blonde head at the opposite corner of the bar, and he's just about to call out his name when he realizes that Reiner's talking to a pretty, brown-haired girl.

Reiner's allowed to talk to a girl. Obviously. This is normal. This is fine. So why is Bertolt suddenly very, very afraid that if he doesn't pull himself together with all his strength he's going to explode? He blatantly stares.

It's not so much the girl, or the flirting, or her stupid, boiled egg of a face. It's the way Reiner's got his arm up against the wall, leaning down to hear her talk, instinctively creating a protective barrier by placing his powerful body between her and the rowdy patrons seated at the bar behind him. Fuck her. Who is she? How dare she use his shield without asking. How dare Reiner let her.

He stalks back to his seat and buys another round with his winnings.

Many drinks later he's embroiled himself in spirited argument, taking out his bad mood on a sore loser. He's got his arm around a girl. Who is she? Where did she come from? How long has she been there?

"Really? You dunno shit. Who are you, you of all people, Gus, to say that there AREN'T monsters at the bottom of the s... at the bottom of deep lakes. There're monsters outside the walls. Am I right? No, excuse me, AM I RIGHT. Okay. Thank you."

He has never, ever heard his own voice sound like this. Like a regular, everyday asshole. He can't tell if he likes it. He turns to the girl, he thinks her hair might be red but it's impossible to tell under the colored light. "You see what I deal with?" He makes his face match his words. Playfully doleful, green puppy-dog eyes. She giggles and touches his chest. Okay. So he's doing fine then. Does she have a name? It's too late to ask. Whatever. He turns back to his punching bag.

"As I was saying, GUS. if there are TITANS of people, why are you so certain, why are you so very confident, that there aren't TITANS of fish as well? Or of birds? What if there are TITANS of CITIES, out there?"

This would be playing with fire if everyone else wasn't too drunk to remember that the fantastical pictures he's painting are probably illegal. But right on cue Reiner has materialized behind him, summoned by whatever secret titan ability always lets him know that Bertolt is somewhere just out of sight, fucking up.

He's just about to ask everyone whether they've ever heard of mermaids, when Reiner cuts in. “Ahaha! Alright Bert. I shouldn't let this dummy drink. Don’t hold it against him, eh?" He pointedly dislodges the redhead(?) from Bertolt's shoulder like a barnacle, and pinches his cheek. He says something obscene that makes everyone erupt in drunken laughter and seems to wipe Bertolt's dangerous words right out of their minds. How does he always manage to do that? Another power? Why doesn't the Colossal come packaged with anything socially useful?

As soon as enough time passes for their departure to look natural instead of like an escape, Reiner drags Bertolt out. Bertolt resists, childishly digging his heels in and holding on to the bar, long enough to drain the glass of whiskey he's already paid for.

Reiner's mad.

Reiner is BIG mad. And also big drunk. And something else.

Reiner pulls Bertolt around the corner into a piss-smelling alley next to the bar and pushes him against the wall, a little too hard. He pins him there by slamming his hands against the bricks by his wrists and leaning on them. He gets right up in his face so he can yell without yelling.

"You are goddamn lucky I was right there, and that everyone's too drunk to turn you in tomorrow morning for heresy. And Bertolt, you know exactly what you're doing."

The reaction is over the top. Reiner's being ridiculous. Titans of Cities is stupid, not a death sentence. Why is the Warrior even here right now? Why is Bertolt against a wall?

"Lemme talk to the Soldier," Bertolt demands coolly, like he's asking to see the proprietor.

"What soldier??"

Bertolt doesn't have a response, it's too complicated. He shrugs with theatrical indifference.

"We're going back. Now."

"No. Go back inside. Make out with your boiled egg."

"What does that even mean, Bert?!" Reiner's almost shouting.

"It means: No. I am not going with you."

Reiner looks like he wants to strangle him but he's still got Bertolt's hands pinned, so he can't. Bertolt doesn't even bother to resist. He feels shitty. This is shitty.

"Whatcha gonna do now, Reiner? Hmm?" He tilts his head back, looking at a spot on the opposite wall higher than Reiner's head, furious at the pricking he feels at the corners of his eyes. He's not giving Reiner the satisfaction. "Gonna put your hand over my face? Drag me around? You wanna shut me up by confiscating my AIR? Again? And then forget all about it? Fine. Lessgo. Try."

Huh.

He hadn't actually known he was still mad about that until this very second. He'd just let it go, to keep Reiner on an even keel and not destabilize him further by reminding him about another terrible thing he'd done while he was all distorted, stuck between two versions of himself. But maybe when your best friend almost strangles you to death in your bed, a discussion should be had.

Reiner lets go. Bertolt peels himself away from the alley wall and sees blood where the bricks have scratched up the backs of his hands. The sight enrages him. Making him bleed while he's drunk and angry is one thousand trillion times more irresponsible than Titans of Cities. If Bertolt wasn't the best, that's right, the very best, at keeping his titan contained in a tiny burning ball inside him, everyone they'd spent the night talking to, everyone in this little town, would be ashes.

Which they'll be soon anyway. So does it matter. Yes, because Reiner'd be ashes too.

"Reiner. You domin..." His mouth isn't cooperating, he can't get it to make the word. He rallies and tries again. "You domineerin..." Ugh. He gives up. "you CRAZY FUCK. I got nothing to say to you. Happy fucking holidays! I am so happy, I'm just so very happy, that you, whichever version of you I'm talking to right now, dragged me out tonight to drink with the DEAD."

Reiner stares at Bertolt, taking short, quick breaths that send puffs of vapor on into the cold air, and Bertolt glares right back, spitefully holding his hands up next to his face so Reiner can watch him steam away the bloody scrapes across their backs and on his knuckles. These are your fault.

Reiner's voice takes on a low, careful quality. "Bertolt. You need to stop. You're right. I'm so sorry. Please. I need you to come back to HQ with me."

"NO!" He roars. Reiner shoots an arm out to grab him, but Bertolt's made of rubber, he can't be gotten, he evades. He laughs with triumph, because when Bertolt isn't carefully containing himself inside his own body like an overfilled gas cylinder, he's almost as strong as Reiner. And he's ALWAYS been faster. He pivots all the way back on one foot, and whirls around again throwing a roundhouse punch that lands with prize-worthy precision. Reiner grunts and falls back into a pile of gray, fetid snow.

Now strapping, brawny Reiner looks like a lost little boy, sitting there in the snow where he's fallen. He puts a hand to his nose and seems bewildered to find blood on his fingers. He looks right and left, and seeing only a 6'4 shadowy pillar of pure drunken malice looming over him, stares up in disbelief.

"Bertl... I... what? Did you just hit me? What just happened? Did I do something?"

"Go to hell."

He doesn't follow Reiner back to HQ. He stalks off in the opposite direction to find another bar.

Chapter Text

When the pub closes and the barkeep kicks him out into the street, Bertolt considers just passing out on the hay in a nearby stable instead of walking all the way back to the headquarters, where he'll have to see Reiner. But it's too cold, and he's lost his scarf and gloves. So he sets off, stumbling down blocks and blocks and blocks of uneven stone cobbles that are impossible to walk on, out to edge of town where row houses give way to small homes with gardens out front, and then finally to the road that will take him through a stretch of forest and back to HQ. 

It's really not that far, but it feels like a journey across Antarctica. They don't know about Antarctica. He laughs at the absurdity. He'll never get used to it. He falls a few times, scraping his knees and forearms, using his Titan powers to heal the gashes and forgetting to hide the steam that rises from each wound as it knits itself back together. It'll still hurt for days. Why does healing fix the wounds but let the pain hang around for a while? S'bullshit. All those houses. All of those people asleep, warm in their homes. Oblivious. He laughs again, bitterly, and it brings up bile. He vomits into a snow bank.

Anna. And soon Connie and Jean and Sasha and that pretty bartender, and probably all the horses, and the street kids that Captain Levi feeds like stray cats when he thinks nobody's looking. All the stray cats. Marco.

All dead, or soon to be dead. All his fault.

After one thousand years of travel he finally makes it to HQ and passes through the gate into the deserted courtyard. Reiner is just coming out of the building, stepping quickly and pulling on a pair of woolen gloves. When he sees the lanky silhouette swaying towards him, he races over and throws his arms around Bertolt, holding him upright.

"Where did you go?! I went to a bunch of bars looking for you, and then I thought maybe you came back, and I waited and... I was worried... I was just about to go back along the road looking for you. Are you alright? What happened?"

Bertolt almost lets himself sink into Reiner. He's so tired. But this conversation, and the feeling of strong arms circled around him, are beyond his current capacities.

"Gedout my way." He pushes past. He's almost there. His bed is right there.

Reiner walks back around, trying to get in front of him. "Talk to me. Tell me what's wrong."

Bertolt bites his lip, not stopping.

What Bertolt wants to say is something like:

"We're mass murderers and monsters and traitors and you get to forget all about it whenever you need to, even in your dreams, but I never get to forget, not for one single second. And Annie hates us and I don't know why. That's if she's alive, and we don't know that she is. And who knows maybe my dad is dead too back in Marley but I'll never find out because when, WHEN, I open my mouth someday to the wrong person I'll be captured and dissected in an underground Hange lab, and fed alive to someone who isn't a mass murderer, monster, and traitor. It's exactly what I deserve and I hope that everyone in the 104th throws rocks at me and laughs while it happens, but if I'm being totally honest, I'm really scared it'll hurt. 

I'm scared I'll cut myself shaving while I have the wrong thought in my head and that I'll literally explode and kill everyone right now, by accident, instead of later, on purpose. And everything we've been told, everything we've killed all these people for, is bald-faced bullshit, because it turns out that people are just people, even here, but let's be honest, we already kind of knew that all along, or at least I did, deep down, even if I didn't know that I knew. I'm worse than you because I sit there every day eating breakfast with them knowing we're going to kill them all, either directly or by helping Marley do it. You at least had enough of a conscience to let it drive you insane. I wish I was insane so I didn't have to know that Anna got eaten like an apple on a string because of me, and then her book in our bunk saved me from you. I see her and Marco in my dreams all gnawed to pieces. 

I don't want to kill anyone. If anyone asks me to kick a hole in a wall ever again you better be willing to step up as my best friend and kick a hole straight through my head so that I don't have to. Then again I'd probably do almost anything if it means going home and that's the absolute most selfish and disgusting thing about me. 

I don't want to hurt anyone. I like all of these people, and I'm lonely because I'm trying so hard to not connect with them too deeply, so that when I kill them it hurts less. So I watch them from outside, and I watch you from outside, because when you forget who you are, you get to be one of them. 

I want to go home. I miss phonographs and giraffes and ice cream and the ocean, and I never got to read any grown up books from the real world because we left when we were 12 years old. I hate thinking how many things I'll probably die never knowing about, and all the books I'll never get to read. I miss music. We go months and months at a time without hearing any real music because they don't have phonographs or radios or orchestras. I wish I could remember what an orchestra sounds like. I never want to see another potato as long as I live. 

Speaking of childhood, do you remember the very first time I shifted and accidentally vaporized 127 innocent people, and who knows how many horses and cats and dogs, and birds, boiled in their nests, and everyone was so busy sticking medals into me and dreaming about all of the other people I'd be able to vaporize for them, and nobody, not even you, not even once, thought to ask me how I felt about it? I would've told you, if you asked. Bad. I feel very fucking bad about it. I wish I'd never become the Colossal. I wish I'd been a nobody who bakes bread. You're the only person whose opinion I still care about and you spend a whole lotta time barking at me about "initiative" and "courage" and maybe I am a coward but guess what, I don't care, because I swore right then and there on 127 people's burnt bodies that I would never, ever, EVER do anything on purpose again that might put me in danger of being extraordinary. It's more work than you'd think, compressing myself like an overfilled gas cylinder to make absolutely sure I don't accidentally stand out. 

You made us stay here after we lost Marcel. YOU. Which I did, because I didn't want you to die, because I loved you. I love you. I miss Marcel. 

I felt like I was going to die in a ball of jealousy and fear tonight watching you use your body to shield that boiled egg in a wig, and I didn't know why at the time but over the course of this speech I've figured it out. Our lives are going to be so short, and they've been really miserable, and I've spent all of mine standing next to you. So I guess that it just somehow never even occurred to me until tonight that along with worrying about losing you to death or insanity, I also have to be terrified about losing you to love. I have no space whatsoever left inside of me to store a new thing to be terrified of. I'm overflowing. I'm cracking around the edges and everything's leaking out, and I'm crying too much for a person my size and it's embarrassing. 

You're my best friend and my shield and you'll never know how grateful I am to you (because we never say the things that matter out loud) but Reiner, I'm so tired of not knowing who you're going to be on any given day, and if you disappear completely into your role here on Paradis, if you finally choose them and forgetting, instead of me and remembering, I'll be the most absolutely alone person on this entire godforsaken island. 

You really hurt me—no, you SCARED the SHIT out of me—on the night that some part of you decided that the best way to handle YOUR feelings was to come down on top of me and choke the air out of my lungs in the place where we sleep. And you hurt me again when you forgot it ever happened. But that's my fault too because I decided to bury it in my heart next to all other things you don't know I'm protecting you from. SO when you talk like you're the one holding this nightmare of a mission together, and I'm an unreliable, wheedling toddler, I want to punch you right in the middle of your beautiful fucking face, because actually it's ME holding us together because I have to hold YOU together by carrying the weight of all these unbearable things (aforementioned) for both of us, all by myself. And tonight I finally did punch you, right in your beautiful fucking face, and I'm sorry, or maybe I'm not, I don't know, because I'm too drunk to be having this conversation."

"...nothin' to talk about." Bertolt struggles grimly onward.

Reiner steps back helplessly. He looks so confused standing there in his overcoat and his pajamas tucked into his boots. That one deep furrow in his brow is all worry and underneath it a purple bruise is starting to bloom across the ridge of his nose and around his eye. Bertolt lurches forward, aiming for the door, but somehow he bounces off of one of the wooden beams that frames the entryway and falls backwards with an expletive, and then he can't get up. He's fastened to the ground by kettlebells. He's an overturned tortoise. He lets out a near shriek of frustration and gives up, letting himself fall flat on his back into the muddy slush. He stares at the sky and can't get his eyes to focus. It looks exactly like the slush.

"Bertl..."

One part of Bertolt's addled brain stumbles heroically towards another and together they manage to assemble a coherent thought: I will die here, never reaching my bed, unless I let him help me.

So he reaches out one listless arm.

Reiner throws the arm over one big shoulder and lifts, easily supporting his friend's weight even when Bertolt's legs turn to jelly. To Reiner, who has single-handedly pulled loaded carts out of the mud and who carries cannonballs like they're loaves of bread, Bertolt might as well be a cat.

The holiday caretaker position at HQ offers one extra, magnificent privilege, which is this: there's nobody around to stop you from using the Officers' Washroom on the second floor, which is reserved for top brass, nobles, and other VIP visitors. While this does means lugging Bertolt up the stairs, it also means hot running water. HOT. RUNNING. WATER. In all their years of exile, and as lowly trainees, they've only ever washed cold.

Reiner helps Bertolt shed his overcoat and boots, and drags him to the shower, holding both his hands to slow the long descent as he slides down the tiled wall to the floor.

"Drink this"

Bertolt chokes down the glass of water Reiner brings to his lips.

He refills it. "Again."

How incredible is water? Do people know about this?? He's never tasted anything so perfect and delicious, trickling through his insides. Bertolt begins to feel a little more kindly towards Reiner, so when his friend moves to pull his cardigan up over his head, he lets him.

The little buttons on Bertolt's shirt are a pain in the ass, so Reiner undoes the top two and pulls the shirt off over his head the same way. He unbuckles his belt, undoes the buttons on his slacks, and has to take several steps backwards to pull them all the way off, because Bertolt's legs go on forever. Bertolt helps, minimally, by pulling his legs towards himself, one, then the other.

"Shut your eyes," says Reiner. Obediently, he does.

When the water hits he lets out an involuntary gasp of surprise and then a moan at the unprecedented amazingness of luxurious streams of warm water streaming through his hair, chasing the cold out of his body and warming the tiles underneath him. He tilts his head back and lets it run over his throat, trickle down his shoulders, down his chest. He catches some in his mouth.

After his night of bars, falling into slush, booze, mayhem, barf, and general wallowing, this warm, clean waterfall is a religious experience. He scoots away from the wall to center himself under the shower, unselfconsciously letting one knee drop open and leaning back onto his hands, arching his back, searching again for that shivery feeling. He finds it—warm water streaming over his closed eyes, and through his hair. All the way down the front of his body. Bliss.

Reiner has seen him naked thousands of times, in rivers, lakes, and barracks showers. Their whole adolescent lives. But if Bertolt could see the view he's offering Reiner right now, even crumpled on the shower floor like a demolished clock tower, he'd know that he is making a real spectacle of himself. It's really a thing to behold.

Reiner lets this all go on for some time, maybe a little longer than necessary. He lathers some soap between his hands, and passes the bubbles to Bertolt, who massages it into his hair. He tilts his head back again, and rinses it all away.

Thus baptized, Bertolt pushes his soggy hair out of his eyes.

Reiner squats down in front of him, determinedly focusing his eyes on Bertolt's face.

"Hey bud. You feel okay now?"

Bertolt does an audit and finds that he does. The room isn't spinning. He doesn't feel sick anymore. He nods.

"Can you stand up?"

"Yeah, I'm okay."

"Alright. Lemme go find something for you to put on."

Once Reiner's gone Bertolt stands shakily and finishes washing himself everywhere, creating tons of bubbles with scented soap, holding his hands up close to the water, enjoying the feel of it raining on his palms. He feels incredibly clean. He turns off the shower, and he drinks another full glass of water. Can he burn away alcohol, like cuts? He tries. Not really. Maybe a little. It's hard to locate it, inside his body, it's not really an injury. Wait, does that mean you can poison shifters? Isn't alcohol a poison? We get stabbed all the time, how come we never get tetanus? Tetanus isn't an injury. He swishes out his mouth a few times with a powdery, minty paste he finds by the sink, assuming that's its purpose because the jar has a picture of a tooth on it. He's leaning against the sink with one hand, washing the last of the paste down the drain, when Reiner returns.

In the mirror, Bertolt sees Reiner pause in the doorway behind him, his mouth falling open as he's confronted with the tall, dripping body before him. Bertolt, shivering a little in the draft that follows Reiner in, turns around to meet him, and Reiner snaps his head to the side, averting his gaze. He positively hurls a towel and pajama bottoms at Bertolt.

"Bed."

Guess he's mad, thinks a now much more sober and reasonable Bertolt, penitently following him to bed with the towel wrapped around his shoulders. He didn't do anything wrong and I hit him.

Instead of attempting the climb to the top bunk they find an empty bottom bunk with clean unused bedrolls, and Reiner brings down their lamp and an extra blanket. Bertolt climbs in and falls into his usual, protective pose, drawing his knees up and sleepily dropping his head onto them. Through closed eyes he sees the light go out and a warm, soft towel is dropped over his head. Reiner is sitting beside him, quietly drying his hair.

Bertolt lies back, weary. It's been a lot. He's been a lot. He's been a pain in the ass.

Reiner stretches himself beside him. His strong, reassuring body feels so safe, and the familiar hand he places on the bare skin of Bertolt's chest is so comforting, and he feels cleaner than he's ever felt, and for some reason it's the last one that finally twists Bertolt's heart into a knot, and puts a lump in his throat.

Oh god. no. thinks Bertolt, don't cry.

He'll hate you. Don't cry.

He throws an arm up over his eyes. He counts to ten. Tears well painfully in his eyes. The corners of his mouth wobble. DON'T DO IT.

He loses. He chokes painfully on a sob. The hand on his chest stays.

"I can't do it. I'm so tired. I want to go home." He pauses to let out another sob. "And also thank you and I'm sorry. Don't look at me."

Reiner reaches over and gently pulls Bertolt's arm away from his face. Great. Sorry Reiner, but these are the two things Bertolt is best at. Killing people and crying about it.

Reiner interlaces their fingers and uses their linked hands to pull him up, and then puts his arms around him.

Being crushed like this so good. Reiner's smell mixed with clean soap. His arms, his shoulders, the sculpted muscles of his back. They could probably hold up the world.

Reiner presses his lips against Bertolt's temple, tasting salt. He brings his hand to Bertolt's forehead and smooths his hair back. The two pull back and look into each other's faces for a breathless, frightened moment that trembles right at the edge of a precipice at whose bottom lies... what? Bertolt is the one who decides they'll fall.

He brings his forehead to Reiner's, his hand to his face, and finally, his lips to his lips. They part for him.

One perfect, soft, pink place between the plates of Reiner's armor.

Reiner leans into the kiss. His tongue finds its way past Bertolt's lips and into the warm wetness of his mouth. Bertolt's mouth tastes like mint, as clean and new as the rest of him. The mint makes their lips tingle. Reiner takes Bertolt's bottom lip between his teeth, and bites, gentle, and Bertolt shivers, finding out that he likes it.

Bertolt's kissed people before. At parties. At bars. It was fine. He's been doing it all wrong.

Reiner pulls him onto his lap to face him and pauses, looking up at him with a little bit of a smile, happy that Bertolt's sitting in his lap, being held by him and liking it. He presses a kiss in the middle of his sternum, then all over his neck, his shoulders. Comes back up to his lips. It all gets more frantic. Reiner is going deeper, pulling his head back gently by his hair to expose his throat, putting his mouth there, running it along the curve of his jaw and around to his ear. Bertolt's surprised to hear himself gasp.

Bertolt wraps his legs around, to get closer. He traces the lines of that perfect back with his fingers. Reiner's hands move all around Bertolt where they can reach, smoothing a path down his sides, holding his waist, feeling the place where abdomen ends and his hips begin. Sliding down his thighs. Circling around and sending one up between the muscles of his back to the nape of his neck, and one down, past the waistband of his shorts. When they come up for air and Bertolt's no longer hypnotized by by the feeling of having his body stroked by those big, unquestionably masculine, but very gentle, hands, he glances down.

Oh.

Bertolt feels himself blush.

So, okay. He's hard. From mostly kissing.

Reiner looks up at him and even in the low light sees the pink blooming over his face. Another thing that seems to make him happy.

"I like kissing you."

His voice, the way it says that, sounding so deep, and sweet, and honest, puts a little glow in Bertolt's stomach and chest. He wants to keep pulling that feeling from Reiner's mouth into himself, so he does.

He decides that he'd like to see more of him.

He has no idea what he's doing, but it's Reiner, so it's fine. He pushes his chest, telling him where he wants him to go, and their mouths and tongues keep exploring each other, the whole way down. Bertolt straddles him. Reiner's been looking at him all night. It's his turn.

Reiner's body really is so different from his—solid, strength in ridge and curve— even more so from Bertolt's new vantage point, sitting on those incredible abdominals. He bends forward and, having learned something from Reiner, kisses his neck, opening his mouth to feel it with his tongue. Reiner sighs. Bertolt likes hearing it. He can't resist bending down, bringing his mouth down to suck one nipple, ringed with soft blonde hair, feeling goosebumps bloom from this epicenter outwards across Reiner's skin. He moves over to the other one and takes it between his teeth, biting ever so lightly. Just feels right. Reiner jerks and Bertolt feels his cock twitch against his backside. So he's hard too. That's a relief. Also, wow.

He keeps moving down Reiner's body feeling muscles move against his open mouth until he hits clothing, and once again not believing what's coming out of that same mouth asks, "Can I?"

"Yes."

What confronts him is an object perfectly proportionate to its owner—that is to say, formidable. He's seen it many times before, pretending of course not to look, but never erect. It's unexpected. It's been dick Titan-ized. Bertolt stares down at it blankly.

"Has this.. always been like this?"

"That would be terrifying." True.

Bertolt wants to touch it, so he does.

He runs the palm of his hand softly up from the base, follows the ridge underneath all the way up to the very top, makes a circle with his finger and thumb to see if they go all the way around. Just learning the geography of it. Reiner, up on his elbows, watches, closes his eyes to feel this, the first time Bertolt's touched him, sits up to kiss him again.

"Hey Bertl?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I touch you more?"

"Yes..." Bertolt pauses, then chooses honesty. "...please."

Reiner puts his hand behind Bertolt's head and rolls him over onto his back. He smooths a path down the middle of Bertolt's body and slides his fingers under fabric and stroking with his palm. Bertolt shivers, hardening under Reiner's hand. Another first time.

Reiner sits up and produces a tiny bottle from under the blankets. Bertolt regards it with suspicion.

"What's that."
"The right kind of oil."
"Why do you have it"
"In case."
"Where did you get it."
"Bunch of them are hidden behind a drawer in the Officers' Washroom."

Bertolt stores away this tantalizing and important information for later. And—wait, so has Reiner been planning this? Or just hoping? Waiting to see? When did he put it under the pillow? Since w-

"BERTOLT!" barks Reiner, pulling his pajamas down and off.
"Mm?"
"Stop thinking."

Drops of cold, clear oil fall on his belly and trickle down between Bertolt's legs. His knees slam shut reflexively. Reiner pulls them apart again.

"Hold your legs open. No closing your knees. 'Kay?"

Bertolt nods.

Using the oil that's on his fingers and running between Bertolt's legs, he massages, makes circles. Then Reiner starts to slide slowly in and out with Bertolt tight around him. And Bertolt doesn't stop thinking, because the thought that Reiner is doing this to him, wants to do it to him, wants to break in his body like this, and that he's going to let him do it, is so right and so wrong that it makes Bertolt harder. The two sensations, Reiner's touch and his arousal, somehow link up in the middle and he feels something open up inside him and gasps.

Like opening a door in a house you've lived in your whole life, and finding yourself standing in an entirely new room.

Reiner must feel it happen because he plunges in deeper, and feeling Bertolt opening up to him, adds another finger.

Bertolt closes his eyes and gives his full attention to this new sensation. The stretching feels so good. It feels so good to let another person touch you and stretch you open and stroke you on the inside.

He breathes, and it comes out as a moan.

Reiner watches him. "Feel good?"

“Yes," Bertolt moans again, his hips are moving a little on their own, trying to meet Reiner's touch, looking for something. What? There's nothing he can do about it "Don't stop."

His next moan is interrupted by a gasp, because Reiner has just found some kind of magical ridge inside of him, and when his fingers slide past and press into that ridge it sends a jolt up through his stomach, up through his shaft, down into his balls.

It's so unexpected that his knees slam shut again and he tries to sit up, Reiner pushes him back down, sliding his fingers in deeper as he does. He pulls his fingers down again, firmly pressing against that same spot and watching Bertolt's face, just to make sure.

"AGHr!!" isn't a dignified sound, but it's the one Bertolt makes. His whole body jerks.

“Legs," says Reiner. Bertolt lets them fall open.

When he's moaning again, hips moving, easily taking two fingers, Reiner adds one more. It starts to get maddening. He grinds himself into Reiner's hand, trying to push harder against the fingers. He's being stretched, and stroked, and the longer it goes on the more he thinks he'd like be filled. Needs to be filled. Needs Reiner to fill him.

"I...I think—AGH!" That spot again. Bertolt jerks.

"What? What do you do you think, B?" Reiner whispers into his ear.

"I th—oooooh." He keeps trying to get the words out but Reiner makes sure to time the moment where he hits that one ridge just right, so it always lands right in the middle of a sentence. Fuckin' typical.

"REINER! AH! Wait! I think... ah..."

This game is too hard. He waits for one more jolt to pass and then says very, very, quickly in one breath

"Reiner I think I want you to fuck me AH!!"

Reiner's mouth opens and he shudders, but he endures, and keeps stroking. Bertolt whimpers.

"Please?"

"No."

"Why?"

"'Cause you're gonna cum for me first."

Bertolt thinks that this may be the hottest thing that one human being has ever said to another in the entire history of planet earth, and the way Reiner purrs it out, looking straight into his eyes, decimates him utterly. He responds with a desperate, shameless moan, and starts frantically, pathetically writhing, trying to fuck Reiner's fingers harder. Reiner keeps his steady, firm rhythm, not giving in, making Bertolt work for it. Just when he thinks he's going to start crying or pass out from frustration or maybe punch him in the face again, Reiner wraps his other hand around the base of his shaft, slick with oil, and strokes upwards it with his whole fist. Every time the fingers slide over that spot it sends out a jolt of pleasure and Reiner catches in his fist and brings with him all the way up to the top. It only takes a few strokes. Bertolt's body gathers itself together and the pressure builds and builds and he says AHH as the floor falls out from under him and everything spasms in a quaking, throbbing release. Bertolt cums like he's falling down the fucking stairs. His hands grasp wildly at nothing. His back arches. His hips come up off the bed. His legs shake. His eyes roll back in his head. He makes unintelligible noises. His insides convulse around Reiner's fingers and he explodes onto his stomach all the way up to his chest, and what's left runs down Reiner's huge fist. The whole thing is obscene.

Bertolt collapses back onto the pillow and makes a noise somewhere between a laugh, a scream, and a sob, bringing the back of his hand up over his eyes. There's a deep pink flush across his face and lips. He's covered in his own cum. Shivery breaths still ending in gasps are interrupted by little aftershocks that make him jerk and go "nnng". His stomach quivers. His dick quivers. He's wrecked. He's demolished. He's jelly.

“Hehe," says Reiner, watching him be a mess, and pouring a little more oil into the palm of his hand. He doesn't pull out his fingers, he just holds them there and lets the last ripples flutter around them.

Bertolt moans brokenly, "Guh. Oh my god. Nnngg. When did you-"

"Don't worry about it." Without waiting for Bertolt to recover, while he's still open and soft inside, Reiner slides his dick into the palm of his hand, right up against the space where his fingers are holding him open. He slides the fingers out, and slides the head seamlessly into Bertolt.

And just like that, before he even realizes it's happening, already weak and gasping and still wrapped up in the end of his orgasm—Bertolt is no longer a virgin.

He looks down in astonishment at Reiner's cock only just starting to be inside of him, and back up. He breaks into a bleary smile.

"You got me..."

"You got me too, B. Is this okay?"

"Fuck yes it's okay," Bertolt groans, weakly.

“You sure?" Reiner is barely holding himself together, every muscle tense, barely inside, quivering and dying to move but waiting for Bertolt's permission like a very good boy.

"Yes. I'll say stop if I can't—"

Reiner pushes another inch of himself inside.

Bertolt yelps. Every iota of his attention is fixed on where he's being entered. His body is fighting itself, wanting Reiner but not knowing what it's supposed to do to take him in. It hurts, but it hurts beautifully.

Reiner somehow finds the little bottle with one hand and pours more oil onto himself right where he's pressed against Bertolt. He starts to move in and out, fucking him gently with just the first third. The oil is helping. Bertolt feels his muscles begin to relax. He keeps breathing into them. He focuses on finding and releasing them one by one. He closes his eyes.

Very determined, very focused, and a little worried, he whispers, "More."

Reiner gives a huge, delirious groan and pushes hard. Bertolt tells everything to open up, his body gives in and relaxes, and he takes the rest of Reiner's insurmountable cock.

Reiner is looking down with his eyes wide and mouth open with awed disbelief. A bead of sweat drips down his face and lands on Bertolt's stomach.

"Holy shit."

Bertolt is quivering, impaled like a butterfly on a pin.

Reiner's still holding his knees wide apart, staring at the place where their bodies are connected. His eyes track up over Bertolt's twitching stomach muscles, up to his face turned sideways on the pillow, eyes closed, biting his lip, aching, feeling fuller than he's ever been, and still focusing all his will and his breath on keeping himself open.

"Look at you, you're amazing. I wish you could see how amazing you look right now, lying there shaking, being so good and taking all of me."

Bertolt flushes and lets the praise wash over him, it puts a little flutter in his stomach. 

Slowly, carefully, Reiner moves a little bit out, then a little bit in. He looks up at Bertolt.

Bertolt hears himself say "Yes..."

Reiner tries some gentle, slow thrusts, and Bertolt lets out little gasps with each thrust.

"That feels amazing. I feel so full."

"Does it hurt?"

"Of course it hurts," he moans, "I love it. Keep going."

This is such a good answer that it pulls a tortured sound out of Reiner, already using every last ounce of his self-control to not thrust as hard as he possibly can, just to make Bertolt scream. He grits his teeth and endures. Long. Sweet. Slow.

Bertolt can see that he's suffering, and he enjoys it.

"You're dying to fuck me harder, huh?" He starts moving his hips gently and puts his legs around him, meeting his thrusts.

Reiner just responds with another anguished groan, still desperately trying not to break Bertolt, who takes advantage of his decency.

"Just like that, that feels amazing." A stronger thrust makes him throw his head back. He grabs Reiner's shoulders and squeezes tight. He digs his nails in. Reiner jerks.

Bertolt speaks in a low, breathy voice, interrupted by gasps or yelps, "I can't wait AH til I can take all of you and let you fuck my brains out. I want you to make me scream."

Reiner is shaking, sweating, biting his lip, being gorgeous. He's still fucking so carefully, slowly, holding himself back. Dying.

Bertold pauses.

"Just, not yet."

Reiner lets out a real, honest to god whimper and his arms almost collapse. It's adorable.

"You're being so good to me," Bertolt gasps, "that feels so good. I love that you're the first person to touch me..."

He's completely aware that he's playing with fire. He decides to add oil to it. He brings his hand down and smears what's still on his stomach onto his palm and touches himself. Reiner stares down at him, watching him gyrate, watching him stroke his own shaft.

"You can go a little harder." Reiner immediately complies, and Bertolt arches his back, showing Reiner his waist, chest, hips, all moving, all wanting him.

"Reiner, tell me what you want."

"I want to fuck your fucking brains out what the fuck are you kidding me I'm dying right now holding myself back trying not to break you in half." All of Reiner's words tumble out through gritted teeth.

"I want you to do that so bad. I'm touching myself right now with you inside me thinking about it. It feels so good to fuck myself while you're fucking me."

Reiner's brain temporarily shuts down. Bertolt lets out a full chested cry as Reiner slams into him. Two fast, hard, deep thrusts.

Reiner opens his eyes, looking nervous, and stops to put his hand on Bertolt's stomach. "Oh god... are you ok, that was pretty hard."

"I win," says Bertolt, shivering around his cock, in a little bit of pain, but happy, pink spreading across his face. He takes Reiner's thumb between his lips and holds it in his teeth. Reiner, looking up at him, gasps.

"Fuck I can't take it anymore please you look so beautiful and I'm gonna actually die right here right now inside you if you don't let me fuck you a little harder, if you tell me to stop I will. Please baby. You can take it for me now, can't you?"

"No." says Bertolt.

Shuddering with his whole body, Reiner yells, "BERTOLT. BABY. FUCK. WHY. PLEASE."

Reiner frantically and pleadingly calling him baby is pretty fucking sexy, and Bertolt feels like it deserves a reward. Plus he's already won. Plus he doesn't want to get murdered in the middle of his first time. He puts his arms around Reiner's shoulders and looks at him, struggling and trembling inside him, going slower than he wants to, trying not to hurt him, and says very sweetly,

"Yes. Reiner, you can fuck me harder."

Reiner, a monster released from its shackles, almost roars and thrusts hard enough to move Bertolt up the mattress. Bertolt yells "YES"

After all that time being opened up by his those slow, patient strokes, it feels incredible to let Reiner take him exactly how he needs to.

"Fuck yes! Agh do it again. Keep doing it. You're so good. That feels so good"

Reiner does it again. He slams Bertolt farther and farther up the bed. The monster groans all the way up from his stomach. He grabs one of Bertolt's legs, takes a soft part of it into his mouth, and bites hard.

Bertolt screams. REALLY screams. He says a quick "YES" just so Reiner doesn't stop. The bite and Reiner fucking him way harder than he should, while he fucks his own fist, which he'd almost forgotten to keep doing in the euphoria of being fucked all the way up the bed... it's a level of stimulation that really should not be attempted by rookies, but Bertolt's always been a quick study.

Reiner grabs him by the waist to pull him back down the bed, and holds him tight against his hips so he can thrust deep. Crazy deep. Bertolt stretches his legs open as wide as they'll go, gripping the sheets above his head, mouth open, eyes closed, feeling everything, helplessly loud. 

"Oh god, I fucking love it," gasps Reiner, "Your voice. I love how hard you’re letting me fuck you."

Bertolt starts to clench up, and it pushes Reiner to the edge. “B, I'm sorry, I'm gonna cum.”

"Me too, let's cum together."

The waves are rolling up. Bertolt feels Reiner seize, hang suspended for a second, and then with a long moan and a hard thrust, he comes, and Bertolt feels something else entirely new as he's flooded with heat so deep inside that it seems impossible. It makes him gasp in amazement, and for the second time that night he comes all over himself.

They both shudder. Reiner collapses on Bertolt, straight into a long, slow, epilogue kiss. When they finally separate, they lay side by side, catching their breath.

Reiner is still shaky. "You're insane. Hell of a first time."

"You too. When were you ever even away from me for long enough to learn how to do all that?"

"I learned a lot from a book."

That makes Bertolt, all blissed-out and glowing, laugh.

Reiner loves the sound of Bertolt laughing. It makes his heart ache. He pushes himself up so he can watch.

Bertolt is smiling, his sweet green eyes filled with total triumph, flushed from laughing and sex, hair spread all over the pillow in every direction, with early morning sunlight throwing warm shapes onto the angles of his face. He's a mess. Reiner just looks. He smooths Bertolt's hair back off of his forehead.

"You know what, B?"

B's eyes shine up at him.

"You're the most beautiful idiot I've ever seen."

Chapter Text

When Bertolt wakes up, it's shockingly late. He looks around groggily. No dreams? He should drink more often. Then he sits up, every possible variety of pain explodes across his body, and it all comes flooding back.

Oh, right.

Wait.

Oh no.

WHAT.

Ohhhhh noooooooooooo.

Where's Reiner?

He throws on a soft cotton shirt and shorts, and since the room is freezing he finds a big loop-buttoned cardigan. He piles up the soiled towels and bedding, and pokes his head tentatively out into the corridor. He looks both ways. No Reiner.

He decides to bring the bedding over to the laundry. It hurts to walk. His hip joints are aching. His abs and lower back hate him. His legs feel wobbly and unfamiliar. The noises he'd made. He said all those unhinged things. And oh god of course he also cried again. Of course he did. And he got fucked in... He feels his face get red, and cringes all the way down to his soul. He wants to bury his face in the laundry and muffle a scream, but the laundry's gross.

But, then again... he bites his lip and takes the blush along for the ride as he swings wildly from one emotion to another...wasn't it also kind of the best?

He drops the laundry into one of the big washtubs and leaves everything to soak.

He realizes he's sticky. Worse than the sheets. So he heads back upstairs and takes a hedonistic shower. He tries to heal various aches and pains but his Titan doesn't cooperate. He wonders how long it would take to become an officer and have his own private bathroom with heated plumbing. He takes his time, testing the various creams and shampoos that are strewn around the room in colorful bottles. Are all officers this fancy? Captain Levi, sure. Erwin, maybe, secretly... but—oh. Right. Guests. VIPs. mistresses, nobles etc. Still, he imagines ex-Commander Shadis delicately massaging lavender-scented oil into his great bald dome of a head.

When he gets back from the Officers' Washroom, drying his hair with an Officers' Towel, Reiner is sitting on the bottom bunk, with two mugs of tea next to him, half dressed and looking worried. For some reason, Reiner's worry dissipates Bertolt's own.

Relief blooms across Reiner's face when Bertolt comes into the room. He visibly relaxes.

“Hi," Bertolt says, smiling from under his towel and ambling over to the bed.

A soon as he's close enough, Reiner throws his arms around Bertolt's waist and pulls him all the way in. He buries his head in Bertolt's stomach. Doesn't his bruise hurt? Bertolt hears a deep, shaky sigh and instinctively strokes his hair, looking down, a little concerned.

"Hey...you okay?"

Reiner does a thing that would be a nod if his face wasn't pressed so hard into Bertolt's stomach. He mumbles something unintelligible.

"Huh?"

Reiner turns his face to the side, and hugs him tighter.

"I know that this is a ridiculous thing to say but I was really scared for a minute that you weren't gonna come back."

Bertolt snorts at that. "What? Where would I go?"

"I don't know."

"Why would I go?"

"Couldn't say."

Bertolt keeps stroking his hair.

"Well, I'm here."

"Good."

"Anyway, It's cold, and if I try to escape on a horse I'll die."

Reiner laughs into his stomach and squeezes his waist.

Once released, Bertolt sits down on the edge of the bed next to him, wincing slightly. Reiner passes him his tea, holding the hot mug from the top, the same weird way that Captain Levi holds his teacups, so Bertolt can take it by the handle.

Reiner leans his head on his Bertolt's shoulder, just like he used to do when they were kids. Bertolt drinks his tea. It's delicious. There's a little bit of honey as he gets closer to the bottom. They sit side by side and think about things.

"Hey, B?"

"Mm?"

"Let's lay low for a few days. I'm sure no one remembers whatever you said, but I think it's better not to risk it. You didn't tell them we're Survey Corps, right?"

"I didn't. I never do. And yeah. You're right. And I like it better here, anyway."

All set. Easy.

Still resting on Bertolt's shoulder, Reiner idly takes the hand closest to him and holds it, letting it lie soft and open. He's fascinated by the way it bends gently backwards. The vulnerability of Bertolt's wrist, veins right there, just under the skin, open to him like a trusting throat. Fingers that are longer than his, and so much more sensuous, slender, flexible, beautiful—especially against the brawny indelicacy of his own hand. He draws two fingers into his mouth to suck them gently and plants a kiss reverently into Bertolt's palm. He tastes the translucent skin below it. Bertolt watches quietly, letting him.

"Hey, B?" He follows the vein down the inside of his arm with his lips.

"Yeah?"

"Why do you smell like fake strawberries."

Bertolt admits, with dignity, "I tried a bunch of things in bottles from the Officers' Washroom, and I couldn't get it to go away."

Reiner takes Bertolt's tea away from him and puts it on a footlocker.

Still holding his wrist, he uses a kiss to lower him down, and they stay like that for a while, just kissing, tasting honey, Reiner resting his knee between Bertolt's legs and gently pinning his arm to the blanket beside his head.

Bertolt knows that he's blushing.

Whatever. It's Reiner. He's heard much worse. It's gotta be said.

"Reiner...I'm sorry. I can't-"

"Can't what?" Reiner interrupts, kissing the dip behind his ear, drawing the earlobe into his mouth and sucking it. Blowing lightly, making Bertolt shiver.

Bertolt's eyes are closed. "Don't be a dick. You know what."

"No I don't. Tell me." He kisses along Bertolt's jawline. Kisses his throat. Puts his teeth around the delicate skin there but doesn't bite.

Bertolt groans, sensing the battle to come. Reiner kisses the side of his neck.

"I really want to..."

"Yeah?" Reiner suddenly sinks his teeth into the band between neck and shoulder, and Bertolt flinches with a sharp inhale. "Why's that?"

"...because it was so good."

"How good? What part was good," asks Reiner, kissing the place where his teeth have left marks. He leaves a trail of love bites across his collarbone, and moves down his chest, not looking sorry at all.

"All of it was good. Kissing. Being fucked by you. Falling asleep."

Bertolt gives up for a while and lets himself enjoy the minor thrill of not knowing whether a kiss or a bite is coming next. Reiner travels down the soft skin of his side, biting when he wants to hear a gasp or yelp.

"What else?"

"That first time, with your fingers inside me, and you found that one place. Shut up, you know what I mean. I came so hard. When it was over, everything was so blurry that I was afraid I'd blown out my corneas"

"And just right then, I fucked you."

Bertolt shivers, remembering it. Watching it play out inside his eyelids.

"What were you saying B?"

"Mmm... that you can't fuck me today. Even though I want you to."

"Why? Did I break you?"

Bertolt throws both arms over his face and groans, defeated. "You might've killed me. I'm still deciding."

"Why didn't you heal yourself?"

"DO YOU THINK I DIDN'T TRY?"

Reiner's laughs. Evil undertones.

"My ass hurts so fucking much right now. My face hurts. Reiner. Laughing hurts. Stop laughing. I hate you. I hate you and your Titanized dick."

Bertolt uses the last remaining shreds of his strength to wrestle Reiner off of him and onto his back. Reiner could probably stop him, but doesn't. He throws one leg over and straddles him. "Ow." He says. Reiner needs to take responsibility. He glares down in judgement.

"I'll make you sorry."

"Oh? How?"

Bertolt gazes straight into Reiner's amber eyes, raises his arm, and points one dramatic finger towards the heavens. The finger descends and pokes the darkest part of the purple and yellow bruise across Reiner's nose. It goes "crunch".

Reiner makes a noise like air leaking out of a balloon. Like a pig stuck in a fence. Sweet nectar to Bertolt's ears.

"Reiner." He tilts his head in wide-eyed, angelic, concern for his squirming companion. "Why didn't you heal yourself?"

"Because..." cries Reiner, all the self-satisfaction drained from his face, "so much was going on, and I kept meaning to, but then I kept forgetting that it was there. And it hurts way more today than yesterday because we did all this messing around, but it doesn't really hurt if I'm not touching it, and you didn't say anything about it, so I still forgot."

He focuses through tears, and steam rises from his face. Bertolt watches the bruise melt away. Reiner's always been good at the healing thing.

Reiner looks up at him. "That was evil."

"Yes."

Bertolt likes this seat, on top of Reiner's stomach, leaning back against his bent knees so they can see each other. Reiner's hands rest comfortably on his thighs. He puts his own on Reiner's stomach between his legs. Reiner sighs.

"What?"

"You've always been so pretty."

Bertolt laughs. "The fuck? I'm pretty?"

"Pretty. I don't know. You're just so long, and tall, and smooth and like... elegant. Precise with everything. I don't know the right word."

"I'm a soldier who fights titans for a living and sometimes explodes and I'm three inches taller than you."

"So?"

Bertolt tries to find a flaw in this argument, but can't.

***

By nightfall, Bertolt's feeling less decimated, but definitely still not fuckable. It feels like a waste since they don't have many nights to fit a lot in and he doesn't like the idea of losing one. It's a thinker. He's lying on has back on the sofa in the common room with one arm behind his head and the other playing with Reiner's hair, considering.

Reiner is on the floor, leaning against the sofa. He opens a bottle of wine. Bertolt sits up and almost throws it across the room.

"Are you trying to kill me?"

“Sorry." Reiner placidly pours some into a mug. “You sure?"

"If you taste like wine, or smell like wine, I'll cry, and then I'll barf, and then I'll cry again. I swear on my life and yours. I'll never drink again. The smell is killing me from here."

"I don't mind. When you cry it makes me feel like a big strong guy."

"Bitch, I'm a big strong guy."

"Then maybe it takes a strong man, to cry." Reiner swishes the wine in the mug meditatively, delivering this wisdom, wafting the smell all over the room.

Since the bottle's in Reiner's possession and out of play, Bertolt looks around for something else to kill him with. He waits patiently until Reiner finishes his mug of wine, so as not to have spills. Then he casually walks across the room, pulls a thick stack of books off the library shelf and goes on the offensive, pelting Reiner with trash paperbacks, bouncing around the room, evading all efforts to restrain him, showcasing his truly remarkable aim and agility, until Reiner acquiesces and puts the rest of the bottle away.

***

When they head to bed, after long, hot showers. it's obvious that Reiner intends to be a gentleman, kissing, holding, talking, making no demands... while still being an absolute menace.

They're sitting quietly, Reiner's head on Bertolt's shoulder, looking through a picture book. It's just depressing. The lack of fairytale creatures in the Paradisian canon should constitute child abuse. No wonder they all grow up to write such terrible books.

They're looking incredulously at a drab illustration of a doll made of hay. The doll is on fire, its tiny face contorted with agony. In the story, it gives the young girl her wish, which is a pair of cows all her own, but then her house burns down, along with the doll, and the cows disappear. That's it. That's the story. They're trying to figure out the moral. Bertolt can't see how the girl did anything wrong. If someone offers you free cows, you take them—right? Is it about dreams being futile? Handouts being a trap? Fire safety?

Reiner turns his head and puts his lips up to Bertolt's ear.

"I can't believe you took all of me last night..."

The thing that Reiner does—whispering something profane right into Bertolt's ear, biting his neck and coming back to whisper more—is cheating. It's like he's run a telegraph wire that has a direct line to his dick, straight through the center of his body. It makes him hard in like five seconds flat. It shouldn't be that easy. With a fucking children's book on his lap.

"Wanna know what you looked like all opened up like that? Want me to tell you?"

Bertolt groans and puts his hands over his face, immediately bright pink.

"You wanted me to put—"

"AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH" says Bertolt, cringing so hard in embarrassment that his body acts for him, and he shoves Reiner down on his back, straddling his chest.

Reiner looks smug. "I thought you couldn't."

"I can't! Shut up! Stop talking!" His face is still bright red, he kisses Reiner as hard as he can.

Reiner laughs into his mouth and kisses back. As a desperate measure, Bertolt sticks his fingers in Reiner's mouth, and because he is very, very long, he's able to keep them there while he makes his way down Reiner's body. He yanks his shorts down with very little ceremony. The titan looms. Whatever it takes.

He takes his fingers back. Reiner pops up on his elbows, watching, and starts to say "You don't have t—" but can't finish the sentence, because Bertolt already is.

He draws his tongue in soft little circles around the very tip of Reiner's cock, then takes the head into his mouth, sucking while he runs his tongue up and down its ridge. Reiner, somewhere above him, makes a noise that could be good or bad, but probably good because he lets himself collapse backwards onto the pillow. Bertolt wraps his hand around the base of his cock.

He keeps working with just the head, sucking, swirling, exploring ridges. He takes it deeper. He thinks about what would feel good to him, and since it's his only frame of reference, he does that.

He goes down a little further, gently plays with one ball in his mouth then the other, liking the moans it produces. Then he flattens his tongue against the shaft, follows its ridge all the way up, crests the top, takes a moment to draw a breath, and plunges back down taking Reiner's cock as far into his mouth and throat as it can go.

"Bertolt!!" Gasps Reiner, dumbfounded, popping back up onto his elbows.

Bertolt ignores him. Keeps sucking, moving slowly up and down, using his fist to extend the movements of his mouth to the parts of the shaft that are too thick for him take in his mouth. He puts his other hand flat against the front of Reiner's pelvis, just above his cock, and he massages, extending the movement all the way there too.

Bertolt slides off the bed onto his knees between Reiner's legs. Reiner sits up and drags his fingers through Bertolt's hair, then grips it lightly. He pulls. Bertolt hopes Reiner will do it again. Reiner does. He guides Bertolt by the hair, finding a rhythm he likes, staring down and breathing fast. Bertolt brings a hand to his own shaft, and he's hard. Really hard. He can't help it, he takes himself in his fist and matches the rhythm of Reiner fucking his mouth. The face above him is filled with wonder.

"I love watching you do this."

And then Bertolt looks up at him with his big green eyes full of tears, letting his mouth and throat be soft, open and willing, letting Reiner pull his hair, letting him set the rhythm, letting him fuck his face as hard as he wants while he moans vibrations around his cock, stroking its base with one hand, fucking himself with the other. Down on his knees between Reiner's legs.

Reiner looks like he's having a heart attack.

"Look at your face. Look at you. Oh my god. You look fucking incredible, On your knees touching yourself with your mouth full of my cock. Keep touching yourself. Keep looking at me."

Bertolt moans obediently and tries to comply with this list of demands, looking up into Reiner's wild eyes. His jaw is starting to really ache, but Reiner is now using BOTH hands to hold his head, fucking his face like an inanimate object, which seems like an endgame thing, so Bertolt decides to see it through. Reiner's tensing up, moaning loader, swearing, saying his name. Please cum please cum please cum please cum he beams psychically at Reiner with tears running down his face, and Reiner lets out a strangled "GAH", flooding Bertolt's mouth and throat.

It just keeps coming. And Reiner's still got his hands around his head, gripped into his hair. He's trapped. On Reiner's dick. IT'S A BIT MUCH.

Bertolt says "MMMMMPH!!!!!" and beats Reiner's thighs with his fists.

Reiner comes out of his cum trance and his eyes turn into dinner plates and he gasps. He dislodges Bertolt from his cock, and to his apparent horror, a last spasm shoots out a jet of cum that explodes straight across his face.

Bertolt sits back on his heels feeling a little disoriented and very, very messy. Oh. Right. His mouth still full of cum. So. What is he supposed to do with it? Where does it go? The floor? Gross. On himself? Grosser. Connie's bed? Heh. No. Nothing seems right. He's about to start gagging so he shuts his eyes, claps his hand over his mouth, groans and forces himself to swallow it all. Blech.

Relieved that at least the cum is now gone from the world, he wipes his mouth with his arm.

"Oh my god. Oh my god. B." Apparently Reiner has been staring at him aghast throughout this whole performance, with a towel held out. For him to spit into? Thanks.

Bertolt limply and unhelpfully lets Reiner pull him up onto the bed

"That is not how I meant that to go. I am SO sorry. It was just so good, and you're so fucking pretty. And you were moaning and being so, so sweet and looking up at me. It's gonna haunt my dreams, the way you looked. I got carried away. Are you mad? Come here."

"Huh? It's fine. I wanted to." Bertolt goes to rub his jaw and remembers he has cum all over his face when his fingers come away sticky. He stares at them. "...Oh."

"Ohhh god," Reiner groans. He finds the damp towel, and gently wipes everything away. "I am so sorry. You've never done that before? Why am I asking. Of course you haven't. I'd know. So it's like everything else in the world and you're just a fuckin' prodigy."

Bertolt appreciates the sentiment but doesn't like the word. "Don't say that. I don't know. I put you through all kinds of bullshit last night, and then you spent hours and hours spoiling me and fucking me. And then I couldn't do anything all day because I was all messed up. I just wanted to make you feel good."

"What?" Reiner looks worried. "It's not...you shouldn't feel like you have to-"

"Well, you say that now."

Reiner throws himself onto his back and covers his face with both hands.

"I can't believe I just did that to you."

"But I did it to you."

"I'm sorry."

"Why do you keep saying that? I could've pushed you off at literally any time."

"No, Bertolt, you just don't know enough to know how fucked up that was. I'm so-"

"And you do know? You were a blushing virgin less than 24 hours ago. Was it in your book? I'm gonna wash my face and gag into the sink. If you say sorry again you're sleeping in the common room."

The regular bathroom down the hall feels like an outhouse compared to the washroom upstairs, but it's fine for a spot job. He doesn't gag. Bertolt brings back two giant glasses of water. Reiner reaches for one.

"What? No. Get your own. Fuck off, these are both for me. I just don't wanna get up again."

For some reason this completely earnest statement of fact makes Reiner collapse into hysterics until he can't breathe. He rolls over and puts his face in Bertolt's lap, wheezing. Bertolt smiles down at him and strokes his hair, not sharing his water.

They go to sleep, and the next morning Reiner's got tea and toast ready when Bertolt wakes up. He's docile and repentant for the rest of the day, which is stupid, but Bertolt takes advantage and lets him shovel the courtyard even though it's not his turn.

Chapter Text

Annie never reaches out or shows up, and with all the other Scouts gone they have no vector for investigation. So, the way it turns out, they get ten whole golden, perfect days of having the whole HQ complex to themselves. Time that's theirs alone, separate and hidden from the entire world, like a bubble suspended in amber.

They take turns feeding and tending to the horses and doing other necessary chores like clearing snow, but other than that Bertolt settles happily into total, unrepentant lassitude. He declines to run a single lap around the courtyard, lift a single weight, or eat anything that's been near a potato. He reads the stupidest books he can find, stretched out in front of the fire in the common room. He also raids the Officers' Food Storage, pilfering anything that won't be conspicuous in its absence, and feels justified, because he now sees that these assholes have been hoarding all the good stuff while letting the recruits live off of grainy bread, thin, bland stews, and breakfast gruel. They've amassed so much good food that some of it's gone bad in the crates. The spices are especially infuriating. They're only good for a year, and they go a long way. To not share them is greed verging on malice.

Finally getting the chance to try out the skills he's absorbed via falling asleep face-first on many a cookbook, he slices onions, carrots, mushrooms, parsnips, and— a one-time-only extravagant expense that he sends Reiner into town with a thick scarf wrapped around his face to buy— a fat slab of beef that he cuts into cubes and sears in butter before adding it all together, covering it in water, and dumping in the remains of an (also stolen) bottle of red wine. He leaves it simmering in a giant iron pot for hours and hours. When they're done knocking snow off the roof of the stables and shoveling it off of walkways, they come in from the cold and the smell of it cooking is enough to make you cry, or enough at least to make Bertolt cry, because that's his thing. They feast on it for days, dipping toasted bread rolls into their bowls. Reiner secretly thinks it'd be better if it had a few potatoes, but he doesn't complain.

***

On the third night, one of them realizes the obvious and shares the revelation with the other, and it changes everything.

If there's an Officers' Washroom, and that washroom is intended for guests and VIPs, who presumably sometimes stay overnight, because otherwise why would they need a washroom... then there must be, somewhere nearby, one or more guest bedrooms for the guests and VIPs to stay overnight in.

So they open one of the two doors on either side, which they'd refrained from doing thus far because there is a line, and and invading someone else's bed is well beyond it. On the other side of that door is a room with a full bed with fresh linens, a stack of clean towels, two bedstands, an armoire with a giant mirror, a fireplace, a few faded watercolors framed and hung on the wall...a real, actual, honest-to-god bedroom. THEIR bedroom. They annex it immediately, and for the first time since they'd left Marley at 12 years old, they sleep in a big, soft bed, on a mattress, with pillows filled with real, actual feathers.

***

Bertolt's daily luxuriant showers become twice-daily visits to the Washroom when he realizes that the bath, too, is equipped with hot water. He opens all the bottles and jars. He tries out smelling like a melon. Like a peach. Like rosewater. Like a manly, smoky aftershave.

Reiner (using much smaller words), theorizes that Bertolt's enthusiasm for this new semi-aquatic lifestyle might be due to a mitigating effect that continual immersion in water has on the combustion-fueled titan that shares his cells and continually heats his body from the inside out. Bertolt theorizes that baths feel fucking great, especially when you put salts, oils, and bubbles in them. He sinks up to his chin, topping off the hot water whenever he wants, letting Reiner harass him by piling bubbles onto his head while he reads a book, getting the corners wet.

The tub's too small for two people their size to share, but Reiner likes to come sit beside it, leaning on the edge, drawing lines in the water, or making a perfect imprint of his hand in bubbles while Bertolt reads him the dumbest most asinine passages he comes across so he can laugh at them too. He traces a path from the arch of one foot where it's propped on the rim by the faucet, follows the endless curve of a calf all the way up to the knee, slides his hand down a bubble-covered inner thigh, and then plunges it deep underwater, making Bertolt gasp and almost drop his book. Reiner takes it away from him and tosses it into the hallway. He kneels behind so B can throw his head back against his shoulder, and leaves dark marks on his neck while he brings him to climax. He pulls incredible sounds out of him that echo off the bathroom tiles.

Bertolt bakes his first apple crumble with stolen sugar, scrupulously following the instructions. He eats a slice of it off of an Officers' China Saucer while lazing in the bath just to see what it feels like. The verdict: if he had a little cup of coffee to go with it (they don't know about coffee) his life would be complete. Everyone should try it.

With nobody around to perform for, no guilt-inducing faces around the breakfast table, nothing to fight, and nothing to protect Bertolt from, Reiner is neither a Soldier nor a Warrior. When he feels the nagging call of the mission, a mantra of guilt that's lived inside him so long he'll never silence it completely, he stares it down and forces it into a corner. Let Bertolt have this handful of days and let him forget. We can give him this much. There may never be another chance.

Bertolt, for his part, falls into a bath-drowsy, fucked-out coma in Reiner's arms every night, and doesn't dream about anything.

They don't outright say they're in love, but, really. Come on.

***

Their last day is actually the day before the last day, but they know that people might start trickling in early, and they don't take any chances. It's mostly spent cleaning, washing Officers' Towels and sheets and replacing them, assiduously searching rooms to make sure they haven't left anything incriminating lying around. They air everything out. They burn the garbage. Bertolt finds all the stupid books he's scattered around the HQ and puts them back on the shelf. They wistfully clean the Officers' Washroom, and use various subterfuges to top off the bottles of things they've used too much of, so that they look full again. Oil is oil. As long as smells like lavender, who'll know?

Bertolt steals a few last choice items from the Officers' Food Storage to squirrel away somewhere safe, for special occasions, and scoots everything around to make sure the shelves look full and it doesn’t feel like anything's missing. Reiner shovels the courtyard for the last time, and goes to visit the horses. They keep busy. They touch every chance they get, Reiner's hand on Bertolt’s waist while he scrubs pots and pans that they probably weren't supposed to use, Bertolt throwing his arms around Reiner and kissing his cold lips when he comes in from shoveling, like he's been gone for a week. They suck every drop of happiness and comfort out of the time they have left. They sit in the common room by the fire, Bertolt stretched out across the sofa with a book, and Reiner on the floor beside him enjoying a drink and the warmth, with Bertolt's hand moving through his hair.

They return to their old home base, the bunk up at the top of the ladder in the cadet sleeping quarters. It's not a gigantic bed with feather pillows, but it's nice, in its own way. Like sleeping in your childhood bedroom. And that's also true because they both feel like they've grown up a bit since last sleeping there, although that's just a feeling, and it was only just over a week ago, so maybe that's over the top.

They try very, very, very hard to be happy.

That night, in their bunk, already nostalgic for the guest room with its fireplace, they do what they've always done, and use each other's bodies to stay warm.

They're kneeling, Bertolt with his back against Reiner's chest. Reiner behind, with his hands all over Bertolt's beautiful, perfect body, moving up and down against him.

It feels so good, Bertolt thinks, and he loves being held like this but isn't there something…?

He freezes.

For just one second, on his knees with his back against Reiner's wide, strong chest, being held tight in his arms, and also because the wooden bunk walls with the bedroll underneath them and the pillow at the other end are all laid out in front of him exactly the same, he's sucked out of the present and back into that night almost a year ago when Reiner, lost inside himself, furious and frightening and immovable, had dragged him up onto his twisted ankle with his hand clamped over his mouth, and stopped him from breathing.

It's just a flash. He leans his head back onto Reiner's shoulder, shuts his eyes and shoves the memory back into its box. He doesn't want Reiner to stop and he doesn't want to think about this, on their last night. He raises himself and comes down again hard on Reiner's cock. He'll fuck his way through this and come out the other end.

Reiner feels it when Bertolt tightens around him, hears the quick intake of air, feels a new tension in the tall body he's holding against his own. He looks up at him and catches the very last flicker of a strange, frightened expression before Bertolt closes his eyes and throws his head back over his shoulder and determinedly starts moving again. If Bertolt's eyes were still open, he'd see a quick, sad, shadow of recognition pass over Reiner's face.

Reiner stops moving.

"Hey B? Put your weight on me."

He helps Bertolt sink down so that he's deep, deep inside him. He encircles his body with his arms. He brings one hand up and spreads it wide over Bertolt's chest, and spreads the other one over the lowest part of his belly. He turns his head, and brings his lips close to Bertolt's ear. In his calmest, softest, most loving voice he says:

”Breathe."

Bertolt realizes he hasn't been. He lets out the air he's been holding for who knows how long. He takes a deep, shaky breath, fills his lungs, holds at the top, and lets it out slowly. He lets his full weight rest against Reiner's body. Reiner keeps holding him, watching him, filling him up. He waits for the end of Bertolt's exhale.

"Breathe."

Bertolt takes another long breath. Reiner does it with him, matches his pace, their chests rising together. Kisses his shoulder, his neck. He breathes out when Bertolt does.

They stay like that, locked together, breathing in and out, until the heartbeat under Reiner's hand slows.

Bertolt leans his head against Reiner's, temple to temple, feeling sort of teary, being held and being filled, and they give each other permission to overwrite a bad memory with a good one.

***

There aren't a lot of words. They know how to read consent in the movements of each other's bodies and the sound of their names in each other's mouths.

Bertolt is on his back, crooning.

He's hot now. He's so hot. He's burning from the inside out. They're both hot beyond reason, and thank god nobody's in the room for a lot of reasons but mostly because it is so very hot that he thinks steam is rising from friction in places where their bodies are rubbing together.

Reiner hoists one of Bertolt's long legs over his shoulder, holding it behind the knee, pressing the other into the bed, opening him up as much as he wants, listening for "Yes" and then taking what he wants, making Bertolt moan and shake and grab at the bedding, clinging on for dear life. There's that amazing, breathtaking contraction of their bodies and Reiner gasps B. I'm coming and Bertolt hears him making those helpless, ecstatic sounds as he comes. It's not Reiner's body, but his voice, that sends him up and over the crest of his own orgasm. It covers him in waves.

Reiner, spent, collapses on top of him. They feel each other move with little ripples that get farther and farther apart, and they lay joined together waiting for their heartbeats and breath to slow down. Reiner raises himself onto his forearms for a slow, weary kiss, and carefully withdraws, earning a last moan from Bertolt, who always feels relieved but also incomplete with Reiner no longer inside him.

They float in that heavy, half dreaming, post-fuck trance, letting the sweat on their bodies evaporate in the cool draft that seeps through the imperfectly-hung window across the room. Reiner throws his arm over Bertolt and rests his head on his chest, and sleepily reaches up to bite his neck one last time, a little signature on something that's his. Bertolt holds him in the circle of his arms until he's asleep.

All these days later, he's still amazed by the feeling of Reiner's body sprawled against his own, skin against skin. He kisses the top of his head, and buries his face in disheveled blonde hair. It smells like soap, salt, and home, which makes tears well up in his eyes for literally no reason whatsoever. For every reason.

I really am a giant crybaby, he thinks, before he drifts away.

***

So, nothing's forever. The holiday comes to a close and the other recruits filter back into the Survey Corps headquarters, pent up and rowdy from their time away from training, filled with gossip about clandestine flings at the hot springs and news from hometowns spread all across Paradis.

Reiner and Bertolt treasure their small, stolen piece of heaven. To have had ten whole perfect days is a gift more exquisite and merciful than two murderous traitors could ever have hoped to receive from the universe.

Their comrades don't pick up on the lighter, more affectionate tone to Bertolt and Reiner's model friendship. They don't wonder why they always sit next to each other now at the table, instead of across, why Reiner is suddenly interested in what book Bertolt's reading even if it isn't about gear maintenance or horses, or why Bertolt sometimes lets Reiner win at chess. Young people are mostly wrapped up in themselves.

Connie alone is pretty sure that something's up. There are things he's seen them do a thousand times—helping each other with the straps of their harnesses, practicing kicks, or hanging things on the line when they're on laundry duty together—and he puzzles over why these things look so different, make him blush, even maybe make him feel sort of envious. He can't pin the idea down in a way that makes any sense, and nobody ever listens to Connie even though he's actually always at least a little bit right, so he mostly minds his business.

If anyone notices the oils missing from the Officers' Washroom, they choose not to publicize the theft.

Chapter Text

Spring, again.

On their last morning camped at the top of Wall Maria, Bertolt wakes up with nobody beside him.

He feels a little hurt, drinking his last cup of coffee by the fire, listening to Zeke's pompous and transparently manipulative pseudo-intellectual ramblings while Reiner avoids his gaze. But he understands. Reiner has even more to lose than he does. Zeke has dangled the threat of taking away his armor if this doesn't go to plan, which means death. Reiner needs to prepare himself to win what's going to be a grueling and deathly dangerous fight. It isn't about Bertolt.

They see the trails of colored smoke from flare guns in the distance, and hear the thudding of hundreds of horses, not far off now, coming for them. Time to go. They kick the coffee mugs and camping stove off the edge of Wall Maria where, as a little boy inside a monster, he'd kicked in the wall, let the titans in, and set all the events in motion that had led them in a great big stupid meaningless circle all the way back to the place where it started.

But HIS Reiner had come back to him for just one night. Not the Warrior. Not the Soldier. Just Reiner. Maybe out of love, maybe out of pity, maybe just because one of them might die today and you might as well squeeze some comfort out of your last night alive. They talked about bathtubs, and books, and their ten days suspended in amber, and how Connie had definitely known but nobody listened, and those times that they scammed people out of their pocket change. And Reiner had kissed his wrist, and kissed his neck, and held him, and told him he was beautiful. He'd gone to sleep with Reiner curled around him. How it's supposed to be. How it's always been. And he'd woken up to a cold bed, and a cold Reiner, wondering if he'd dreamt it.

He hadn't been kissed in so long. The last few months have been the loneliest of his life.

***

As it became clear that events were reaching a crisis point, the frequency of Reiner's persona swings had become really dangerous. If he started a sentence, and didn't like how it was going to end, he'd change into someone else halfway through.

He'd retreated further and further into the Soldier, forgetting what Bertolt was to him, and Bertolt had held on with both hands, trying to keep him tethered to reality.

Bertolt had settled into a miserable, but stable, daily routine:

Step 1: Wake up.

Step 2: Figure out who Reiner is today.

Step 3: If Reiner = Warrior: Follow directives re: the mission. Accept that you have been replaced by the mission. Reaffirm commitment to the mission, while not giving a single raw fuck about the mission if completing the mission doesn't give you back Reiner.

Step 4: If Reiner = Soldier: Be the reason that his face falls over and over again as you remind him that everything that makes him happy is a delusion. Be the bringer of bad, forgotten memories. Monitor for signs of insanity. Do all of this in order to turn him back into the Warrior. Return to Step 3. Bonus: Participate in conversation about Krista being pretty.

Step 5: Worry about Annie.

Step 6: Dissociate during dinner with soon-to-be murdered friends.

Step 7: Cry into book.

Step 8: Fall asleep on wet book.

Step 9: Return to Step 1.

***

He saved Reiner by driving a pitchfork into a titan's eye. They promised each other they'd go home together. There was a precious twenty seconds before Reiner retreated into the Soldier again and sat there pie-eyed, simpering over Krista, while Bertolt and Ymir stood next to each other glowering and understanding exactly how the other felt.

He wishes that he and Ymir had found each other sooner. They would have been friends. Two tired misfits with secrets, consumed to the point of debilitation by doomed love for their respective blondes. He wonders if she's dead yet.

Then Reiner had his mental break, exposing them too early and too abruptly, and he'd almost gotten them killed.

Then, waiting in the forest for the right time to escape, he'd asked Reiner who he was, and Reiner said he was a Warrior, and batted Bertolt's hand off of his arm, like he was swatting a fly.

Then Bertolt had his own mental break, and he exposed his weakness to the enemy, and he let Armin bait him about Annie being tortured, and they lost Eren because of it, which is why Ymir had to die instead, so that he and Reiner could live. His fault.

***

They run off down the wall.

"Bertolt."

"Hm?"

"I don't know how many times I've said this already, but...the two of us are going to be in separate positions."

It's okay. They have been before. It's how they work best—Bertolt destroying, Reiner defending.

What comes next is truly incomprehensible. Something from a long-past version of them, from that terrible time when Reiner was furthest away from himself, channeling fear into orders, and Bertolt was barely holding himself together inside a shell of lonely cowardice.

Reiner's tone fills him with the old, familiar dread.

"You're supposed to be the strongest of all, but you always leave the job to others when it matters."

They stop running. Bertolt is stunned. He reaches out his hand, then lets it drop. Reiner's not turning around. He continues to berate him and his words are like needles sliding over old, healed scars. Bertolt feels them reopen, one by one.

"Honestly, you've never done anything to make me think of you as reliable."

Reiner still won't face him.

He knows it's true. Especially lately. All the crying. His lack of commitment to the mission. Showing weakness to the enemy. Holding himself back out of selfish ideology, instead of being brave enough to be the best. Losing Eren. Losing his mind over a plywood dummy. Failing to help Reiner keep the integrity of his mind, because it was easier to let him be a soldier. Drunkenly risking both their lives out of pure spite. Crying more. All while using Reiner as a shield and a crutch.

It’s sickening, thinking back on it. Shame washes over him. He drops his head.

"...I know."

Reiner speaks in the same distant, authoritative voice. "We're going to end this, right? Here and now." He throws a quick glance backwards.

Not the time. Keep it together. Bertolt rallies himself. "That's right. We'll win here and put an end to it," and go home.

Reiner smiles over his shoulder, but it's a strained, bleak smile that Bertolt's never seen before.

He seems to come to a decision, and takes a breath.

"Now keep it up until your loving reunion with Annie."

Bertolt recoils like he's been slapped.

"You know it's not like th—“ He hears that old, feeble, mess hall voice and stops talking.

Is this some braindead tactic? Why? This might be it. Forever. It's possible, likely even, that today one or both of them will die. They're supposed to throw their arms around each other, kiss, say I love you, and stay safe, and I'll see you later, and even if I don't... this thought makes him desperate, if I don't, and he almost reaches out again. Why won't you touch me? He bites back the question. It takes everything in him to lock his arms to his sides.

Reiner holds his gaze for a moment and starts to say something. He stops. He turns his eyes away from Bertolt for the very last time and deals the finishing blow.

"and... Krista..."

Something tears itself loose from the inner walls of Bertolt’s body. It tries to claw its way out of his throat. He doesn't let it. He forces it back down.

Reiner is still saying things. Meaningless things. Vague shapes behind a thick fog that floats by Bertolt's head.

"Yeah..." he says dully, not knowing what he's responding to "No matter what..."

Reiner doesn't look at him. He turns his back.

So Bertolt does the same.

And there's a thud in the center of his back, a fist. He doesn't try to turn around. There's no light between the hard plate armor of Reiner's voice.

"See ya. I'm counting on you, buddy."

Buddy. He feels his face harden. Buddy. Fuck you. How could you. He pounds his fist into Reiner's shoulder behind him. He completes their ritual. He wants to spit the words in his face. "Leave it to me." Not even my name.

They charge away from each other towards opposite edges of the wall. He could still turn around. He could still...why is…but there's no more time.

I spent my whole life next to you.

Numbness seeps out of the chasm inside him like nitrogen gas. It coats his throat, turns his mind and his heart into perfect spheres of ice. He doesn't feel anything. He can't think about feeling anything. He breaks into a sprint and launches himself without looking back as far as he can over the wall's sheer edge. The ground bellows towards him. He lets himself fall much farther than he should before he deploys his hooks and lets them fling him through the air. 

Chapter Text

The metallic tapping gets closer to the recessed chamber where Reiner is hiding, crouched in wait like a starving trapdoor spider. They're coming, testing the wall, looking for hollow places. His pulse pounds in his ears. He tastes iron in his mouth and grips his sword with steady hands. He's ready to kill. He hopes they give him the chance. Bertolt's face at the top of the wall, wounded and hollow.

A crack of sunlight breaks through and reveals the startled eyes of a scout he's probably met before. Who cares. He slices him almost in half. Lets him fall. He stalks out of his hole, stands angled against the wall and there's Armin. Pathetic, conceited little Armin who'd tried to trick Bertolt when he was at his most vulnerable and honest, using his care for Annie against him. That little blonde fuck, trembling at the end of his tether. Disbelief in his eyes when I said Annie, devastation when I said Krista.

How dare both of us. I'll kill you if you get in my way.

Captain Levi comes thundering out of the sky like a bird of prey, and in a flash of fire and steel and blood he thrusts his sword through Reiner's neck. Good! Another sword buries itself in the center of his chest. Bertolt's heart, given in perfect trust, slashed to pieces in my hands.

He lets himself slide off the sword. and plummets towards the ground, baring his teeth at Levi the whole way down. Would it be better to just...? No. They'll feed him to some asshole and use their new Armored Titan to hurt Bertolt. And he has to live, so that when they're together again he can explain why he's done this disgusting thing, and he can beg Bertolt to forgive him, and spend the rest of his life repairing the damage he's done to Bertolt's soul.

He focuses his thoughts on stomping Shiganshina to the ground, to clear his mind for transformation, and pours his intent into the blood that's filling his mouth from the wound to his neck. An explosion of light. Bertolt's beautiful hands, balled into fists, to stop them from reaching out to me.

Ropes of flesh spin themselves out of his body, but also out of nothing, twisting into the shapes of giant limbs and lifting him high into the air as his titan congeals around him.

The first problem is that Bertolt loves him. If Reiner gets hurt, Bertolt will try to save him, because that's who he is. And if Bertolt tries to save him, or acts out of love instead of cold practicality, he might let his guard down, lose his advantage, and get himself sliced open or captured. Or worse. For shifters there's a worse.

So he'd assiduously worked to create distance between them, little by little. And a couple of times he'd legitimately lost his mind, which worked towards the same end. He'd mooned over Krista in front of him. Rejected his touch. Played the Soldier so he would think he was forgotten. He'd done absolutely everything in his power to make Bertolt hate him. He'd watched Bertolt grimly hang on, doing the thankless job of bringing him back to reality. Sharing his bunk, pretending not to cry into a book, and wordlessly going to sleep, untouched.

He needs Bertolt to not care about killing their friends. Even better if he's angry enough to enjoy it.

He needs Bertolt to think he's alone, so that he only acts in his own interest.

He needs Bertolt to hate him, so he doesn't try to save him.

He needs Bertolt to run from him, because he’s losing his mind.

But those are nothing compared to what he has to do to save him from Marley.

He needs Bertolt cold, cruel, indifferent, immoral, and willing to explode on request. Because if he's not all of those things, Marley is going to murder him.

Zeke (that shitzu-faced, self-satisfied prick) had taken him aside to let him know that Bertolt was in more danger than they seemed to understand.

"Bertolt is the best and strongest Colossal who has ever been. Nobody disputes it. But he has shown himself to be soft, and hesitant to act, and there is no point having the best bomb in the world, if that bomb refuses to explode at the crucial moment."

"The brass will be paying a great deal of attention to what happens here," said Zeke (that smug slimebag murderous fuck) "If Bertolt can't execute, if there are doubts regarding his commitment to the mission, if he can't reconcile psychologically with the necessity for collateral damage after the fact, then it's certain that they'll choose to pass the torch...there are several promising young candidates. And if you'll pardon my reading between the lines, I've gathered that he allowed his concern for Annie to override his professional clarity, and as a result we lost the coordinate. Which illustrates my point, no?"

"As an aside, Reiner, it's clear that the two of you have become close. Closer than is, perhaps, professionally appropriate. I won't pry. But you should consider how this might count against you both. Marley may question the wisdom of sending Warriors into the field who may be emotionally compromised, and inclined to prioritize each other's well-being over the greater good."

And while you can never all-the-way believe Zeke (because he's a lying, limpdicked, sociopathic ideologue, who probably jacks off to his own reflection in those pretentious glasses) what he said made sense, because having a titan chew you to shreds for being too loving, kind, or careful is exactly the sort of thing that the top brass of Marley would do.

Reiner is the Armored Titan. His life's sole vocation is to protect Bertolt. The only way he can protect Bertolt from Marley is by ripping out his heart.

But last night, holding him safe inside the curve of his own body to shield him against the cold wind whistling over the top of Wall Maria—like he's done always—he'd cracked, and undone all his work. They hadn't made love. Just held each other, kissed, laughed quietly about things that didn't matter.

He'd just wanted one more night for them to be soft together. Today they'll make impossible choices and bring death down on all of their friends. They'll be different when they're finally together again. All scarred up. How could he not touch THIS Bertolt one last time, before he's gone and all his most beautiful parts are frozen away? If he dies today with his heart broken, believing he's unloved, I will blow my fucking brains out with a shotgun.

So selfish. Worst thing he could have done. Made everything so much harder.

He'd left the tent silently, so Bertolt would wake up alone.

But now with Bertolt's hurt, brave, numb voice still thudding in his mind, it seems like the stupidest, cruelest thing in the world. It would have been kinder to cut him in half. I could have just trusted him. I was afraid he'd choose to die. I should have let him decide. What was I thinking.

If Bertolt had cried, asked him why, asked him to stop, he might have broken. But Bertolt hadn't cried. Hadn't asked. He'd stood there, holding the pieces of himself together, being abused, absorbing Reiner's blows as they landed one after the other. Bertolt has always been stronger than him.

He remembers coming across that dummy in the woods last year. The Titan that ate Marcel. Ymir's morbid self-portrait, he now knows, just a shitty coincidence. The sight of it stopped him dead, and glued him to a tree branch with his heart in his throat, too terrified to move into its line of sight. But Bertolt hadn't stopped. He hadn't even slowed down, he'd hurtled out of the trees, landed right on the thing's back, and, screaming, he'd gone to war. He'd slain it, ripped its hideous jaw from its body, hacked it to pieces, hurt himself in the process, stared his terror right in the face and prevailed, all while Reiner quaked in a tree and watched. And he couldn't face him, so he'd left him alone on the forest floor with a sprained ankle. He'd never been so in awe of Bertolt, and so ashamed. And then he'd lost his mind, and taken that shame and fear out on Bertolt in the most unforgivable way, but Bertolt had forgiven him.

Reiner stares up at the wall one last time with his glowing, white, titan eyes, but of course Bertolt's long gone. Bertolt falling through the air.

Deep inside the nape of the Armored Titan, he sends him a message, hoping it'll echo across the paths and find him.

I'm sorry. I love you, and stay safe, and I'll see you later, and even if I don't...

Reiner goes to war.