Friction - Imagine Dragons
The Time to Run - Dexter Britain

-|somewhere around the time when they first meet, a year or more before the fall of Wall Maria|-

The Contact Call and the Ascension
I

There are more of them than what the reports had suggested.

"Ral."

The very tallest buildings in the abandoned town still do nothing to cloak the sheer magnitude of them - ten meters, fourteen meters, hulking and too large for this world and so weirdly, unnaturally fast for their size - the crowns of the heads of the smaller classes bobbing just above dilapidated shingles, so many of them -

And she wonders what it was like when the hour of reckoning for this place struck, this place where the buildings aren't quite tall enough, where all a Titan had to do was cock its head just so and it would see you whole blocks away, clear as day, nowhere to run, and Petra sees where entire buildings were smashed through long ago. Flimsy obstacles to the only beings on Earth higher than her on the food chain.

"Ral?"

And now she's shaking in her boots, because the train of death and horror before them is what's standing between her and the safety of the advance party, where fresh horses and fuel await, if anybody even survived the night -

And she's doubting, she's doubting - one misstep could put her leg clean through a rotted section of roof, and the greatest of the classes loom so high above her, could her gear tackle that kind of angle, could she even swoop down on the nape of one exposed neck without three other monsters snapping her out of the air first, had she just watched her final sunrise this morning -

A wiry hand clamps down on her shoulder, nearly jolting her into a chimney. "Petra."

With her jaws mortared shut, she looks to her right. The hand on her shoulder is thin and white-knuckled, the grip strong enough to bruise. Captain Levi's sidelong leer is blunt-force rather than piercing, icy against sunstruck skin.

"Breathe," he says.

Easy for you to say, Petra's mind spits, because it's suddenly hard to.

It's the Titans, she reminds herself. She's afraid.

She's paralyzed.

"There's more than -" Her voice cracks, she swallows down bitter bile, huffs out an equally bitter-tasting breath. "There shouldn't be this many."

And, just a bit, she cringes away from him next to her, like he's a couple heads taller than he really is, like she's fully expecting a reprimand for her fear.

When none comes, she peeks, and -

No one, she knows, is going to believe this. She scarcely believes it herself.

The barest hint of a smirk pulls at one cheek. His hand fists in her soft green cloak and he shakes her once, slow and heavy. "Not backing out on me, are you, Corporal?"

She's quick to erase the surprise from her face, and his smirk deepens infinitesimally.

He already knows.

"Of course not, sir," she says stiffly, and faces forward, hands dropping to the handles of her blades at her hip.

In his voice, she can hear how the look on his face must vanish. "Good." The hand drops from her shoulder, leaving it prickling and half-numb. "And you're right; the number of targets was unanticipated. The rest of the patrol is deliberating." With the bracing ring of metal, he draws his blades next to her, and she's quick to follow suit, stomach tightening. One of his arms appears in the edge of her line of vision, pointing with his sword at a still-distant fourteen-meter class. "See him?"

"Yes, sir."

"We get him first. Tall ones are priority, so nothing can swoop in on us from above in the middle of a maneuver."

"Understood, sir."

"The short ones are still fast, and they like to surge up on you from below. So no elevation much below the nape unless you're on a roof."

"Yes, sir." She can feel herself growing impatient now. Everything he's saying has already been drilled permanently into the grooves in her brain by her instructors since the day she'd begun her training.

Is he belittling her?

He huffs a sigh into the wind, and she watches it take his cloak and fling it over his right arm, ruffling his hair, exposing where it grows shorn and bristling along the curve of the underside of his skull. "These cowards. We're gonna give them a show, all right? We're gonna be point."

Her brows scrunch together. "Sir?"

He meets her eyes again, gaze as dull and dead as the northern icefields of legend. "Protect my flank. Do exactly as I say. And you'll be fine."

She swallows.

"Hmph. Your brain still on the moon?"

"No, sir."

"Then you're ready." He whirls the blades in his hands. "Protect my flank. Give 'em hell."

And he tilts into a full sprint, his lines bursting from their confines, and Petra rocks forward and peels off after him just as the soles of his feet part company with the roof, and -

- for a split second -

- his cloak snaps in his wake, silver wings unfurling -

- and he's gone, grappling hooks fixing in the chimney across the street, jerking his waist forward, and he curls into the pull, back arched like a springing cat, hurtling through the air. Petra's hooks find a rise in the roof meters to his left, and she leaps, then relaxes into the whipcrack yank on her hips, and she's airborne, arms out, chin tipped back.

She lets her eyes rake over the sky - pale blue, begging to be touched - and then she grits her teeth and forces her face forward to spot her landing.

Racing to meet her probable death at the jaws of Titans - she's relieved. Compared to sharing a roof with Captain Levi, she's calm as a summer's morning.