"Trust is built through actions, not words."
- Chris Redfield
Resident Evil: Revelations
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The darkness is consuming. Cold. Unforgiving. A void. Much like a Titan shift, it engulfs the body, devours the humanity in the host and births a genesis of malicious instinct, and then explodes into a billowing feeling of omnipotent essence. If he knew what Death is like, what it truly, genuinely feels like, he would call this Death. He would spit on it. He would wrap his fingers around Death's throat and make it beg him for mercy.
"Why won't you wake up?"
He's tired. Everything hurts. The void is threatening to draw him in once more, into the place where it is cold and unforgiving and silent. As reticent as she has been since the day he first tried to get her to speak to him. She's never been one for many words.
All those words have been a lie.
"I… need the truth now, I need… need…"
The darkness is consuming him again, bringing with the void this abhorrent, mangled sound, something so truculent and hollowed it isn't human. A burst of lightning explodes through his chest, igniting fires through his blood, boiling, blistering, curdling him from the inside outside. When the noise bellows out again the darkness answers, binding him in the cold, unforgiving void, in the cold, unforgiving –
I HATE YOU!
The noise. The screaming. Shredding from his throat, exploding through his lips with each burst of lightning in his chest. "I hate you! I hate y– I hate you…!"
He slams into the silence that is mocking him, with its frigid surface, protecting that virulent being of Death he cannot reach. The void is drawing him into unconsciousness. He hears the sizzling several seconds before the immense burning erupts in his wrists, and he tucks his arms beneath his chest, forcing his forehead against the floor. It's as cold and unforgiving as the darkness, as his shift, as her eyes. As her. Cruelly, he surrenders his humanity, cruelly, she takes it from him.
"I hate you, Annie…"
Cold.
"I…need the…truth…"
Silent.
"Please… wake up… please…"
And then there is nothing. Nothing but the consuming void.
MALEVOLENCE
Chapter 1: Dog Day Blues
("The dog days are behind us." – Eren Jaeger, at the convocation in the royal court, regarding the re-establishment of the Scouting Legion)
Every evening in the last six months since Historia Reiss rose to power, Mikasa Ackerman finds her brother missing from the dinner table, the spot she tries to save for him between herself and Armin Arlert as vacant as the gorge sinking deep into her chest. Her blond best friend exchanges soothing words of reassurance that slither fruitlessly through her ears. Typical of him, to offer alternatives to a situation but opt out of physically applying himself to make a difference, but when she can get a hold of their now broken special operations squad, they will tell her similar bullshit so they don't have to bother with him themselves: "Eren's got a lot on his plate. Just let him be."
She wants to.
She can't. This is her brother for fuckssake.
During the daylight hours Eren Jaeger is himself. He quarrels with Jean or wipes every window in their new castle or rides into town to run errands or lets their psychotic Scouting Legion commander study his blood. That's when he's normal, some will mention to her. And they're not wrong. Unfortunately, his sudden psychedelic meltdowns have put a chokehold on every expedition date to get him to his basement in Wall Maria. Historia is patient with him, and tends to her people in the meantime. The soldiers of the legion aren't as understanding and twice as irritable towards the topic of the hiatus. Some claim they don't need Eren. They just need the key.
He's as expendable as they are. But at least they're productive.
Mikasa tells herself to scream at each and every one of them for turning away from him in his time of greatest need, after everything he's done for the ungrateful bastards. They're right though. What could she possibly offer him in place of comfort: empty apologies, foreign words of sympathy, more chores to keep him occupied? She doesn't agree with any of her friends, but it isn't like they lack empathy, nor or they blind to the truth.
It's been two years since that day, but never before has he behaved this erratically. Only over the last few weeks has the screaming started. She'll hear the resounding howls of rage and intense shrieks of melancholy reverberating through the very walls, originating from the sublevel dungeons where they're keeping the crystal now. In the beginning she used to race down every flight of steps almost four at a time with Levi or Armin or Hange close behind, and they would find him, a crumpled heap on the floor at the foot of the crystal, ranting hysterically and both wrists visibly broken from punching the seamless face of the prison with no result.
"Get out!" He would screech, the shrill noise piercing through her chest like a spear, striking fear straight into her core like no Titan ever could.
The first time she made an attempt to coax him to come with her, but he shoved her away, gave her a threatening, almost primal glare that has burned itself into her retinas. It was a horrifying, inhumane image that mirrors the grotesque grin of a Titan, predatory, like she wasn't his sister, but a human to be devoured. "I said. Get. Out."
Levi was with her. He took her arm, towed her out, and spent nearly two hours letting her cry against him, offering no verbal sympathies aside from a gentle shushing that he muffled in her hair.
Eren became unrecognizable after that.
The second time he screeched at them to leave, she was with Commander Hange Zoe who put her foot down, something Mikasa used to do until Eren became someone unrecognizable, and demanded he stop destroying himself like this. It would have worked on the old Eren. It would have snapped him back to his senses. Instead he screamed into the cobblestone floor, and the underlying tone of his voice warped with a dangerous roar of a Titan, commanding utter fear and total silence amongst them. He fell unconscious a moment later.
Mikasa vowed, as per Hange's request, to never speak of it again.
And the third time, she was with Armin. He tried to help Eren to his feet but received an acute punch directly to the face instead. It broke his nose, leaving him grounded for three weeks until the swelling went down enough that he could actually see again. Eren had apologized the following morning after the incident, but claimed he didn't remember it happening - in fact, he didn't remember most of what happened to him on those nights. Jean passed Mikasa an off-handed remark about the rising trust issues in Eren as a soldier of humanity, and where, exactly, his loyalties lied. She knows no one blames him for this.
She knows they might be starting to.
Every time after that, for the first two months, Mikasa rushed down to make sure he hadn't ended up killing himself by charging his head into the damn impenetrable crystal to free the being within, but it was always, always by herself – they didn't lack the courage to bother him, they just had more common sense than she did. One day, she stopped going altogether, finally realizing what everyone else understood that she never did.
She wants to help him.
She can't.
She wants someone, anyone, to help him, even asks Queen Historia and Hange and their team's captain.
They can't.
Every night following, after the inhuman yelling has died down for a solid hour, she watches him through the gap she leaves between her bedroom door and the frame, when he returns with blood steaming up from his hands as the fractures in his bones amend themselves and the splits in his flesh seal shut. He hasn't gotten much taller over the last twenty-nine months since she first watched him collapse into a hollowed shell of the boy he used to be, his hair grown out scruffy like his Titan form's, muscle physique comparable to that of Levi's now. But he's looking thin. He rarely eats. She's pointed that out before. He doesn't seem to care.
His days consist of chores. His nights, of screaming. His sleep… of nightmares.
Sometimes, before the crack of dawn, she hears him calling out to someone - Mother, Father, Hannes, the traitors Reiner Braun and Bertholdt Hoover, and of course, Annie Leonhardt. Tonight he wakes up shouting for Annie, at Annie, accusing her of incoherent horrors, but Mikasa promptly rolls over and pretends not to hear. She gave up comforting him months ago, when she found out he keeps his door locked at night and will never answer it for anyone. Not even her. "Please go away," he pleaded through the thick panel dividing them, and she never came back.
But he's not alone. Sometimes they all have nightmares they would prefer not to talk about.
Historia will dream of Ymir. She'll see the Dancing Titan shifter standing on the edge of Wall Maria, her face to the horizon, her back to the blonde. Historia calls out to her but she doesn't seem to hear. And then she'll step right over the edge - the queen wakes up with a start, the tears rolling silently down her cheeks.
Armin, of his grandfather. He will stand in the wreckage of the failed attempt to gather supplies from Wall Maria, walking aimlessly through the mountains of carnage and mangled, broken, faceless carcasses that appear almost like marionettes, too surreal to be factual. He'll find his grandfather in a pool blood, and when he awakens, he spends the rest of the night disorganizing and reorganizing the contents of his room for the sake of keeping himself busy through sunup.
Connie, of Reiner and Bertholdt. No one knows what he dreams about, however. When asked, he passively answers with the names of the murderous Titan duo at large. That's all they need to know.
Sasha, of fighting a Titan with only one arrow. She doesn't talk about it, like she didn't talk about it then – it's something she buried in her past, along with the nightmare of Trost and the ride in Maria that nearly got them all killed. On those days her eyes are clouded, gaze on the floor. Mikasa brushes her fingers through the girl's lengthy ponytail almost soothingly when they pass in the hall, but she doesn't stop long enough to look back and see the smile that's settled on Sasha's lips.
Jean will dream of trying to save Marco, and wonders why he never noticed Annie and Marco had split from his group together back in Trost. "Annie might not have killed him," he told Mikasa at breakfast one day almost a full year ago, "but I know the bitch had something to do with it. When she wakes up, that's the only answer I'm getting out of her, even if I need to break open every one of her bones to find it."
Annie Leonhardt torments Eren Jaeger, and subsequently, them all. The anger and confusion each of them has felt for her on any individual level has collectively transgressed into a hate so bitter and deep it rots their souls from the core out to their shell like a corrosive acid. But Mikasa will defiantly face her nightmares head-on. She will not let Annie win. She drives forward with this hate, wielding it as her swords, not her shield from reality.
In the morning she doesn't remember her dream. Eren is so, so obviously haunted by his.
"When will it end?" she asks him when she catches him by her elbow in the hall the next morning, and he turns his weary gaze to meet her own placid expression. "When will you stop hurting yourself like this?"
He laughs at that, a cruel, belittling, hollowed sound. It sends a chill down the length of her spine.
"When she wakes up, so I can hurt her as well."
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I am Annie Leonhardt.
She doesn't remember where she is, only that her body feels like it is floating, suspended in a frozen lapse of time so she does not need breath, nor food or water. All she knows is that she must remember who she is, what she is, where she's from, what she's done… because that's important. It's all important. An objective. A motive. A murder fueling the hysteria in her mind and the direness of the situation at hand.
She doesn't know how to wake up from this. She doesn't know how long she's been sleeping. She can't remember her beginning, or the full arc of time between her earliest recollection to her most recent, like puddles of coalescing thoughts and erroneous emotions and intemperate happenings that are evaporating into the dark berths of her mind.
Her memories are slipping from puddles into effervescent brines, her truth obscured by faces that are unfamiliarly familiar, by the forgotten titillation of the wind in her hair, by a forlorn sense of insecurity and falsified words searing the tip of her tongue.
She cannot recall how much she does not remember. That scares her more than what's awaiting her outside this abyss.
Like the voice. The voice is awaiting her.
I hear you, Voice. Quite often you scream at me. Anger. Hate. Bitterness. I can sense it all on you. You're so familiar to me.
In a last attempt to calm down the Romanesque heartbeat she can hear in her ears, she thinks about him, tall and slender and all work no play. Wonders about those vicious green eyes like erenite moss that consume her in raw passion. She can hear him screaming in her memories.
Why, Annie?
Why what, Voice?
Why did you do this?
Do what? I don't even know where I am anymore.
Come back to me Annie!
I am… Annie Leonhardt.
She doesn't know how long she's been sleeping.
I am… Annie…
But the more she tries to keep her mind alive, the less responsive it becomes. And all she can focus on is that strange set of green eyes that sets fire to her chest. As she falls asleep once again, it is to the shrill screaming that she hears more and more often these days, agony consigned to oblivion.
I am…
I… am…
…I…want to wake up now…
Something cracks.
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He is awake.
Eren stirs against the floor, hissing in recoil as his swollen wrists throb when he applies pressure in attempt to peel himself from the frigid stone tier. The renewed bones he had fractured strain beneath his weight, but he's accustomed to the pain by now, and the scent of burned flesh has thankfully abandoned the stale air. His throat is raw. He swallows – an immense burn, like liquid fire snaking down the length of his chest.
Awake in this cruel, ever-present world.
He utilizes his elbows to prop himself up, forcing him up to his knees. Everything is suddenly much clearer to him than before, even though he is unaware of just how long he's been consumed in the void of unconsciousness.
"Why, Annie?" he chokes out, glancing at the massive crystal to his side. He sounds coarse. Thirsty. Everything hurts. "Why won't you wake up? I need you… I need to know…"
Swallow. Burning.
"I need the truth!"
The acute sound of shattering, splintering, crumbling structure jolts a newfound alertness and clarity into his body. He knows immediately, by the chunks of diamond that crash to the floor with a deafening chorus of bangs, that Annie has heard him – that Annie Leonhardt is finally waking up. But even as the adrenaline compels him to stand his legs are threatening to give out.
He crawls towards her. "Annie."
The crystal is sliding away from her body, unveiling her preserved body, the un-aged, untouched girl. Her eyelids flicker when the translucent gem breaks away from her face, her torso – letting her fall forward – suspended by her arms, her legs.
"Annie."
And the prison releases her.
"ANNIE!"
He catches her against his chest, slamming into the floor on the jagged mass of crystals that demolish to dust beneath the impact. Diamonds cannot shatter but these ones destroy themselves, consuming their own existence, like her Titan shift. Like her.
He forces himself to sit upright, cradling her head against his chest, adjusting her in his lap. Her eyelids are still fluttering, almost like she's struggling to keep herself awake (and out of that horrible nightmare of screaming and pathetic whispers of the things she lost). "Annie?" he mutters, gently patting her cheek. "Hey… wake up. It's me. It's Eren." He leans his ear to her lips, testing her breathing. "Annie, it's me…"
"It's quiet…"
He draws back. "Ann…?"
Her eyes draw open, pupils dilating as they adjust to the first light she's seen in a long, long time. And then she gasps, pushing away from him, scooting back in panic until she hits the wall. "I did what you wanted!" she screams, curling her legs up against her chest, tucking her forehead to her knees. "You killed my mother, you lying fuck! You promised you'd let me go home! I did - I did what you told me to!"
"Annie!" He exclaims, drawing up to her quickly. She jolts in place and presses her hands to either side of her head to drown out her own wailing. He kneels down only several inches away. "Calm down! It's just me! It's just Eren!"
"You killed her! You lied to me!"
"ANNIE! It's me! It's Eren!"
After a beat of sudden silence she allows her eyes, glazed with tears, to return to looking at him, gazing through his very being. "I don't," she starts timidly, swallowing the dry lump in her throat, "I…"
"You don't what?" he presses, gently grasping her shoulders to still her.
She relaxes into his touch. It's so unfamiliarly familiar to her. "Eren… I'm sorry, I don't… I don't know that name."
Something in him breaks. Shatters. Like crystal.
"I don't know who you are."
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Tonight is like all nights before, but Mikasa cannot sleep. She lays awake for some time, admiring the dancing shadows on her walls, before she stuffs on her boots and treks silently through the castle halls. The door on the left only two corridors down is ajar, the flickering flame of candlelight casting a dancing amber glow across the floor and adjacent wall, overlaid with disruptive shadows.
Levi Ackerman has always been a man of blunt words, false façades and crude humor… if humor could even be the appropriate term for his literally shitty jokes. So after learning of his past as an orphan adopted into her family's branches by her murderous, brother-napping great-uncle, she realized that if they were going to get along, she would have to accept him and all his stoic silence.
Naturally, as if he isn't even aware of it himself, his eyes betray his actions. His emotions run deeper than his family ties and thicker than blood, boiling behind the dark films like fire. That's how Mikasa knows when to approach or steer away, by the anger or amusement in his steely gaze.
Blood relative or not, and it is not, she's seeking comfort, and with all the high-strung tension in her team now-a-days, it feels like Levi is the last man she can trust. And whether he's riddled with animosity or placidity, she's getting his council.
As she enters his office, not even bothering to alert him to her presence, she can see the anger in him as he apathetically stares down at the letters on his desk – signed by his old team, the soldiers she didn't know very well, with names she barely recalls and features as distinguishable in her mind as the flattened face of stone. She wonders if he feels the same way about Annie for doing this as she does about Annie nearly slaughtering Armin and Jean and kidnapping Eren.
(If he wants to cut Annie's pretty little head from the perch of her shoulders.)
"Haven't you ever heard of knocking?" he asks as more of a fact than a question, folding up the letter in his grasp and tucking all four back into the envelope he keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk. "And what are you doing up at such God awful hours of the night?"
"As if you don't sleep?"
Levi blows air out his nose in a way that could pass as a snort. Suddenly, they hear it – Eren's faint screaming, barely audible from this far up, blood-chilling, broken, inhuman. Mikasa visibly tenses, but they both know there is nothing either can do for him, so the man gestures to the chairs across from him. "Take a seat."
"Thank you, Levi," she utters as she occupies the right chair, because everyone knows the left emits insufferable squeaks when shifting beneath any amount of weight.
"That's General to you, Ackerman."
"General, only when on the clock."
Levi doesn't respond. Normally he would appreciate her choice of irking humor over her usual cold-shoulder personality, but tonight he's not quite in the mood to endure either and opts for changing the subject instead. "Are you worried about Eren?"
She rings her hands in the lap of her night gown. "Of course."
"Do you blame him for his turmoil?"
"No," she answers half-heartedly. "I blame her, for everything she's done to him…" She leans back in her seat, her posture pushing her chest forward and head back. Levi's eyes glimpse her lithe form once over, drawing up quickly and landing intently on the lower plush of her roseate lips. "…and to you, General."
She's mocking him. "How thoughtful."
"I'm serious."
"So am I."
Mikasa purses her lips before reaching across the desk and scooping up a stack of files, drawing back when he slaps his hand down to stop her, but subsequently meets the unforgiving surface of his desk. She briskly flips through the papers; they detail the records of the new recruits they had received this year, including those rejected from the Garrison due to filling. "These are completely out of order. One would think that a famous General of your standing would keep these organized."
"That's what I was in the middle of doing." Infuriating brat.
Mikasa shuffles the papers around, sorting them alphabetically with an almost expert precision. "I was wondering something…" She waits a moment, studying Levi's expression from over the top of the sheets, but his attention hasn't wavered: her permission to continue. "What are we going to do about Eren?"
"What does it matter?"
She fiddles absently with the pages, double checking, shuffling, rifling through to make sure they're in perfect order. "Lately his self-destructive habits have been putting a wedge between him and the rest of us. Jean's been addressing some particular concerns over Eren's liability to the Legion. Armin has developed a habit of reminding me how much time we're wasting waiting on Eren to come around. Sasha and Connie have been fighting consistently, sometimes over the dumbest things like bumping into each other in the hall, and they used to be inseparable."
"You're all insufferable little shits." He receives the sorted files and thumbs through them briefly, as if to check for mistakes, before setting them down on the ten inch thick stack to his right. "It's my job to be your captain, not your babysitter. If you can't handle the stability of your friends, let alone your own brother, all of you can get the hell off my team. I'll hire some competent soldiers to take this job."
The sudden surge of anger cleaves a gorge deep into her chest. "Like your last team?" she hisses, lacing every word with potent venom that poisons the memories of the felled soldiers, each for each, festering like an infected wound.
Levi visibly tenses.
Mikasa knows she's hit a nerve – and the familiar vexation he's always managed to irk within her takes the reigns, manifesting in her speech, in her stiffening, in her eyes, with a single snap of the belts. "Because they were so competent and did such a great job at protecting Humanity's only hope?"
"Don't you fucking-"
"At least we're all still alive."
He slams his fist down, forcing the papers to jump and scatter in fright. They sail to the floor all around him. He makes no immediate move to pick them up, and instead lets the silence blanket them in a veil of discomfort. "Don't you dare chastise me like it's your goddamn birthright," he seethes, "especially when you clearly lack a solid definition of the term team. At least my last group could operate without the ever-present urge to throw each other under a stampede."
"It's your job to keep us together!"
"It's my job, Ackerman, to get your asses to the basement in Shigashina, regardless if you're all in one piece or not. And the outcome certainly isn't dependent on which of you dies at the hands of a Titan or, in this particular case, each other. As a matter of fact, in the eyes of the government you're all expendable. My job is only to get Eren there regardless on how many of you get eaten in the process."
She's clutching her gown to the point that her knuckles are bleeding white.
Levi notices almost instantly and recollects his nerves, pressing his forefingers to the depressions of his temples. "Now call me heartless if you see it fit, but you know I'm right. I don't say these things to be crude, Mikasa, only to give you a reality check."
She cedes her misplaced rage and diverts her glare to the floor, crossing one arm across her chest to grasp her elbow. "My apologies."
"I don't want them. Just know your place."
For several minutes neither moves; they barely bother to look at each other. Levi's cleanly tendencies finally coerce him to get up and gather the spilled papers, placing them haphazardly onto his desktop. Mikasa bites down her rising urge to apologize again, properly this time, as she hardly knew Levi's original team but that did not give her the right to speak so poorly about them, but as luck would have it, Levi is the first to shatter the quiet.
"I'm not saying that I don't care about you or the rest of the group. I've just found it easier to handle this position by detaching my personal feelings from my work life. There is no room to make any other errors." He's referring to his old team, to the soldiers he let die at the hand's of Kaney Ackerman, to Erwin Smith. "You aren't children anymore. There is no more hand-holding. I must treat you as adults and as soldiers, but I cannot be your friend."
"I know," she mutters empathetically, "you are better than that. I trust you to know what's right, Levi."
He suspires his held breath to relieve himself of his frustration. "You're lucky I can never stay mad at you."
She flashes him a bemused smile from over the intrusive bulk of her scarf. "I did take a bullet to the side for you."
His gaze frisks her again, finding the stretch of her torso just above her hip that he knows harbors a massive explosion of a scar. He forces the image of Kaney Ackerman into the back of his mind but subconsciously wipes his hands across the front of his shirt like her blood is still sticking to them, even after all this time. "And you made me break my damn ankle. Save your entitled bullshit for someone you can manipulate with it."
"Levi!"
Mikasa shoots up out of her chair as the familiar voice echoes down the hallway. Levi paces passed her towards the door, but no sooner does he reach the threshold that Eren slams into the wooden frame, heaving for air, leaning on one arm to keep himself upright.
"Eren," Levi mutters, attempting to take the boy by the shoulder, but Eren slaps his gesture away. "Eren, what the Hell is wrong with you?"
"It's"—he gasps, pressing back against the lining—"fuck, I wasn't prepared for this!"
"Prepared for what? Eren, look at me."
The shifter turns his head to them weakly, and suddenly Mikasa can see him in the light she's been blind to before. His hair is untamed and more closely resembles the Rogue Titan's rather than the unkempt spikes that used to wave back and forth with passion and vigor. His light five-o-clock shadow frames his face, bringing out the dull ache of forgotten self-image in the forest of his eyes. She barely recognizes him.
"I just wanted her to wake up," he whispers, pressing his palm to the right side of his face. "I didn't expect… I didn't – didn't think, I never think!"
"Eren," Levi tries again, snapping his fingers to get the boy's attention. "Tell me what happened!"
"Annie woke up-"
A blood-curdling chill rockets through the room like a bolt of lightning.
"-and I fucked up… I fucked up…"
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A/N: Hey there reader! Thanks for checking out my new project. I've been so psyched to write this, especially since it's my first mystery (or sorts)! If you liked it for any reason or every reason, please take the time to leave me a review!
Official pairings: Eren x Annie, Levi x Mikasa, Jean x Sasha with possible implications of Jean x Marco, and some minor others I'll probably throw around.
"But Eure didn't you say" - Fuck finishing Ode to What We've Lost and Found because I'm never happy with its ending and I've rewritten it three times. It'll come eventually. And yes I'm still doing all my other stories so don't worry about them either (yes this includes Deliverance it'll happen I swear). I'm almost done with the next chapter of Inside the Red Zone anyway (speaking of unnecessary eren/annie feels) so you have that to look forward to.
Holy fuck it's hard to write Mikasa.
Alright, Eure out~