I don't know exactly when he died.
All I remember is him hitting the ground. His eyes were firmly shut – he'd kept them that way when the guns were lifted and their cannons pointed at him – and his hands were tied in front of him with rope that burned our skin.
When I heard the shot that killed him, he'd already hit the ground with a finality that left room for no doubt.
He was gone. He was well and truly gone, and I'd never be able to recall it in exact details, like you ought to when someone as close to you as he was to me dies.
It was eerie. It was a point fixed in time. And yet I was forced to move on.
I took a step towards him – towards what was left of him. I don't know exactly why I did it, because I knew without having to think about it, with a sort of instinctual reflex, that I would never be allowed to take more than that single step. Instantly, soldiers blocked my view of him, pushing me and the line of those I'd pulled with me backward, and when they receded there was nothing left to see. He was gone.
For good.
Soon his body would be thrown into mile-deep ditches of rotting and decaying corpses, and burnt, weeks or months or years later, along with thousands of other unfortunate souls. There would be nothing left of him.
I refused to accept it.
In front of me, a soldier's eyes burned into mine, measuring my determination. Rage, desperation, loss, fear, and something that was quite the opposite of resignation, all rose up within me to meet his gaze. My inner beast fought his, and for the shortest of eternities I doubted humanity's future. Then he stepped aside, and the road was clear – the road was dear.
Without knowing how or when I found that my shackles had been undone, and with this realization came the determination I'd lacked. My sense of time, my sense of place, my sense of the here and now, had suddenly never been so close to verity, and yet was warped. I looked back up, and ran.
The ditch behind the extermination poles opened its arms to me. Bodies without limbs and skulls without skin gurgled their silent encouragements. Sightless eyes and touchless fingers ached to reach me, to know me, to drag me. But his eyes – his eyes were open where they hadn't been before, and their stormy depths burned right through me.
Screams and shouts and foreign exclamations were deaf to my ears. I registered the click of a gun being loaded – then two, then three – and terror lost its grip on me.
I ran even faster, ran faster than this wind I'd never known, but still I was not fast enough. Months of near starvation and constant exhaustion took their merciless tolls on me. One, two shots whizzed past me. The third got my right shoulder; the fourth, my right leg. I lost speed – but still he called to me. The dead were clamouring my name.
In one desperate impulse, I jumped, the ditch within my reach, their bodies arching up to meet mine-
And the fifth shot got my head.
A/N:...I'm sorry. I have no excuse. This is horrible. This is absolutely horrific.
As to who is Eren and who is Levi - that is for you to decide. I have my own ideas on that, but ultimately it is something that is left up to the reader's interpretation. Same for the setting (AU, cannon, future, whichever).
Other than me being sorry, I don't have much to say about this. In my mind, it's probably one of my best oneshots ever, along with Razor Sharp, my BellaMort oneshot. Do leave a review - questions, critics, tears, or even a smile if you manage to scrape one up after that. I'll be happy to answer you on anything - more than happy, in fact.
Thank you for reading me.
~Tenshi