Even in death, the girl still looked somewhat alive.
As his eyes wandered over her remains, she looked like she should be sleeping; but her innocent face was painted with her own blood, and her spine was bending in places it shouldn't be.
They always had such undignified deaths, he mused. They were ripped and crushed and eaten, distorted, mutilated, broken.
Sliced, bitten, kicked. Shattered.
They never last though, the soldiers. It was almost pitiful to watch them try, try to fight, with courage, with the "Wings of Freedom" on their backs. All that bravery was reduced to nothing in their last moments; screaming, writhing, crying, only relaxing with the last squeeze, or bite. He was glad he didn't have to watch their fall, their death.
"The Wings of Freedom." Did such things exist? If they did, wasn't it more a sign of death, rather than life? "Freedom in Death" might be a more accurate way of looking at it. It was a shame though, as even the "Wings of Freedom" emblazoned on her back were smothered in blood now.
He forced his gaze away from her. Trying to remember their faces was hopeless, but he always liked to get one last look before they were wrapped up in thick, scratchy canvas and rope to be tossed onto the ever-growing pile of people who's names were soon be carved into a gravestone.
Releasing the grapple hooks of his gear, he winded through the dense forest, away from the scattered remnants of his squad, casting his mind to the sounds of a certain titan's roars, pain echoing in every strangled sound coming from its throat.
The bodies were lined up like a bad omen, perfectly uniform, and he wouldn't have known which of the bloodied corpses used to be her, if he didn't recognise that short, child-like stature of her body that stood out among the rest.
His throat tightened ever so slightly as he saw the silky auburn hair peeping out of the mass of cloth.
Reaching down, he knelt next to the body. He lifted up the crimson-stained fabric and slid his hand under it, carefully removing the badge that lay over her chest.
He stood up again, badge in hand, and as he did so, his hand brushed over her hand, lingering for a spilt second, lingering on the warmth that was ebbing away.
Even when her vacant body rolled off into the abyss, he felt nothing, as a corpse was a corpse. Even so, he dreaded the next time he would see that body. In five years? Ten? Perhaps one day in the future he would see it again, perhaps at the end of another death-strewn expedition. A pile of bones, lovely bones, deformed and twisted and shattered bones.
Did hair rot away? He hoped it did. No mere corpse would deserve that shade of fire, those blood-blackened strands.
"...She's still so young, with so much left to experience..."
He wondered who would tell this man where she was.
An abandoned body, lying in a line of abandoned, broken bodies, a makeshift Hansel and Gretel trail from a nightmare, a petite body swathed in heavy fabric that in no way could compete with the likes of the wedding dress she so desperately wanted to wear.
Even now, he thought of them occasionally. A memory simulated by a laugh, an old duster, an overgrown vegetable patch behind a castle used as a military base. A cup of coffee, red hair.
There wasn't much left of them in his memory: it had faded over time, but the feelings were still there, the conversations, the arguments, the laughter. Their faces, though, they had faded away. Their images had been so distorted, too twisted in his memory with their horrific ends, a smile amongst a mutilated shadow, framed with shining, sun-like hair.
Funnily enough, even after ten years he didn't regret the choice he made to leave them there, to turn away from the faces that still looked somewhat alive, frozen in the shock of their gruesome end.
Or even the choice he made to give away that badge, the last essence he had of her, his last connection to that smiling girl who died too soon.
The choice he made to let her body hit the ground a second time, the choice to let someone else tell that father of her demise, the one job he was unable to do.
No, he didn't regret any of that.
In fact, if there was one thing Levi regretted, it was that he wasn't able to escape this nightmare with them.