I do not own Shingeki no Kyojin.
Armin wasn't sure when he figured it out exactly, how the transition from friend to traitor had occurred, just that he woke up one morning knowing—some irrefutable fact hanging clear and solid in the air. It was a sword, pointed directly at the crown of her head, ready to fall and split her in half. A catalyst to something wrong and disastrous and partially painful, a war leaned toward the end of everything that never was and never would be.
And he would watch it all fall apart.
Annie was some sort of puzzle, both unfinished and yet somehow complete. He had no way of solving her or breaking her down—something broken cannot be shattered any more after all, he knew that. There was a part of him that didn't want to solve her as it was.
There was this feeling he kept getting, perhaps that there would be something terrible waiting at the end of it all that he should never see or that he knew this empty image he'd created in her place would, too, be shattered.
About the time her eyes lingered a split second too long with Reiner or Bertholdt's, or her words had seemed too pointed at the edges, or her gaze cut across too sharp when they moved too quickly out of her periphery—that was about the time he realized it. It was a contradiction to her deviance, the mere thought Annie held even a shred of compassion or empathy for another living being; it was a misplaced step, a slip-up, a small mistake that played too greatly in the grander scheme of things.
In the split seconds between her confession and the retaliation, he realized this might have been a mistake.
Her eyes had glinted like a blade and her fingers had opened up like a pair of wings—he wondered if, somewhere inside of her strange mind, she wished to fly away from there. Seeing her bound up in a dozen pair of arms, her figure dwarfed between their scrambling bodies, made something wrench within him. And when she twisted, every bit as unwilling to be taken down as they were to release her—some bird, some caged beast ready to snap and destroy everything—he knew there would be no going back.
Running, away from her or away from the situation entirely, until his heart pounded hard against his ribs, quelling some hope there would be some way to take it all back. He knew the moment he spoke at all that there wouldn't be. They'd told him themselves, "When you speak, everyone listens," and Armin would never get used to that much power.
When their eyes had tightened just so, he knew it might have been a mistake.
He knew there would be no going back—like the exact moments between her twisting body and the spilled blood, there will never be a way back from this.
"Annie!" his voice tore out from his throat, a cry of shock and regret. Chunks of stone and brick and glass flew everywhere, her thundering feet shaking the entire world beneath him. She did not hear him.
Or she did not want to hear him.
And in the moments between Eren's fall and Jean's shouts, time froze for him to capture the transition from good to bad—a cruel lapse catching the ticks of a clock in its place just to drive him past the point of soundness.
Annie's eyes glistened, and he wondered if titan's could cry.
He didn't know if the lump in his throat was from fear or guilt.
~~...~~X~~...~~