What Do the Skies See?
They brought him home slumped over the back of his own horse with his remaining limbs dangling over its sides. There hadn't been time to cover his body and preserve his dignity. A horde of titans had destroyed their ranks and chased them back to the walls – and many quietly considered it was fortune enough that his body had not fallen from the horse.
He was declared dead on arrival. His body was slid from his horse onto the dirt ground.
Another young man came over to sit by his body. His uniform was dusty and torn in places, and the wire frame of his red-rimmed glasses was bent so they hung askew on his blood-drained face. He tucked his knees under his chin and stared blankly ahead.
He remained that way, a silent sentinel by his friend's lifeless body, for the remainder of the day.
"Nagisa! Nagisa!"
He had seen it himself. The titan had been incapacitated, brought to its knees, and Nagisa had swung around for the finishing blow to the back of its neck. It was standard procedure; it was what they had done numerous times on their excursions outside the walls. It had always been tricky on the flat lands, but when a titan was felled, its leg tendons sliced to ribbons…
"Nagisa, please! Open your eyes! Please open them!"
He saw it happen over and over again – Nagisa spinning across the air, steel blades flashing in the sun; the titan stilled, unmoving; all it should take was two cuts into its nape, one meter long and ten centimetres wide…
The titan jerking suddenly around, snapping at Nagisa; the crunch of bones as Nagisa stopped spinning, stopped moving…
He pumped on Nagisa's chest, the heel of one hand over his breastbone and the palm of the other pressed over it, fingers interlocked. With his shoulders above his hands, he used his whole body weight to pump, pressing down by five to six centimetres at a steady rate, at a hundred to a hundred and twenty chest compressions per minute.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation from training. He scrabbled desperately to recall enough of the lesson to implement it. Two breaths after thirty chest compressions; gently tilt back his head, pinch his nose, seal his mouth over his and blow steadily, firmly; two breaths. Check that his chest rises. Another thirty chest compressions. Another two breaths. Check that his chest rises again. Repeat the cycle until help arrives.
"Nagisa isn't opening his eyes!"
"…Ryugazaki, that's enough."
"Nagisa still isn't breathing! Please help!"
"Ryugazaki!"
Someone grabbed his shoulder and tore him away from the body. He spun around, furious, to see it was the medic from the rearguard. Yamazaki, he recalled, from when the register was read aloud.
"…That's enough," Yamazaki said, softly.
And with those words, he felt his anger melt from his shoulders as grief wracked through him. Yamazaki must have held him, because all he could remember was heaving into someone's shoulder as they took away Nagisa's body.
"You got me to join the Survey Corps. We were going to see the ocean, the saltwater you said covered two-thirds of the world, and we were going to swim in it, remember, Nagisa?"
For the first time, Nagisa did not reply.