They are seven years old when Bertolt tells Annie, "you have very pretty eyes." And it's true; her eyes are blue like the sky on a clear day, very different from the common amber of Reiner and Berik's eyes.
"They're my father's eyes," Annie says.
He hums a sound of agreement. Annie is very much her father's child, Bertolt thinks, in the way that her nose slopes and how her blond hair catches the sunlight. Sometimes he wonders if she's a schemer too, if she will grow up to be as casually meticulous. He brings his hands to cusp Annie's small face, his touch gentle and intimate. "Let me have one of them," he says.
"No."
He smiles, slowly and deliberately. He traces the skin around her right eye, feeling the ridge of bone. "I will give you one of my eyes in exchange." His eyes are pretty too, green like tree leaves in the summer waving to blue sky. "It can be the proof… of our friendship."
Annie closes her eyes, nose scrunching for a moment before relaxing. "We aren't friends," she says, quiet and still.
We will be, though, eventually, he thinks. It's hard to keep his face from scrunching and contorting, but his lips stretch and his smile only grows wider. It hurts when he slips his index and middle fingers underneath his eyelid, thumb tracing his waterline as he scoops out his right eye. His left arm is trembling and he feels faint, black patches flooding his vision, optic nerve severed cleanly and face messy with blood and tears.
"Here," he whisper groans. He uncurls her fists and she's vibrating with feeling the way that he's shaking, trembling too. His eye fits perfectly in her palm, he thinks. He brings his palm to her face, fingers circling her right eye again.
She flinches this time and swats his hand away with a fist, squishing her gifted eyeball. "No," Annie repeats. "Stop."
And he does, if only because it's nice to listen to what friends say, ask, demand. His hand had left an ugly smear of evaporating crimson.
He tells her goodbye for now and walks home alone, his eye socket stinging and hissing. Red doesn't suit her face, no, Bertolt thinks, the way that blue does. The way that maybe the green of his eye would if she would only let him try. Before reaching home, Bertolt stops to sit on Reiner's front steps, breathing and waiting for his eye to regenerate, collecting together disappointment that she didn't appreciate his eye the way he would have appreciated her eye, her father's eyes.