A Merciless Road
[Major spoilers for Chapter 62]
It is the perfect time.
Pale skin and cold, taste of metal, all wrapped around his body in a soft white light. On his wrists, the chains weigh enough to keep his balance still. He kneels, awake, in a surreal dream; he feels dead, yet breathes, watching a small world of schemes happen in front of his eyes.
The betrayal of chance, the unaltered course of fatality; all opposites erase themselves in Eren's mind, in the sorcery of events that keeps him prisoner. That, mirrored by every action and word, is the moment when he truly sees it — how he is the knot that connects every thread, the exact center to stand between hunter and prey. Vaguely aware of how many chase after him, made forgetful by pain, he gives in to the ruthlessness of doubt.
He comes to wonder what exactly he is striving for. He knows the answer is as far as it is close — swimming in the depths, so impossible, so easy to bring to the surface. Whatever he finds, at the end of the long journey, will be the measure of his worth.
The moment when he sees it, they lay their hands on him.
Images split his eyes — in the eyes of another, both alien and familiar — images from a past that never, and always, was his own. Stairs lead him to the earth, shadows in the woods; and as he floats, torn between what he sees and what he cannot understand, the return begins.
The safety of amnesia slips from Eren like molten snow.
The memories stain his mind, fat drops of rain, icy fingers on his back. He senses it in the dark outline of the stones — along with unfamiliar faces, which he shouldn't remember, which he has known for ages. It is their turn to bring back the first echo of terror.
Eren should be confused. Too smoothly, too soon, he stops being so. The desperate creature fidgeting in his — his hands? — is but the last link of an ancestral chain; still seconds tick by, and his horrified mouth tastes flesh and iron and raw power. He wants to vomit, he needs to scream, to get all that crushing disgust out of his tongue.
But that is not him. The current of images must flow on.
The part of the nightmare comes when he sees himself. He feels himself, through a warm touch he has forgotten; itis another step of remembrance, the swell of tears in his heart.
Like that, his heart stops. It cannot be.
His whole being reacts in fright. Since that day, it has always been the same; what he does not want to believe always happens, always finds a way to be. And the deepest awareness splits his memory like lightning — there is nothing he can do, not now, not from here.
It is not happening. It is happening again.
Eren must remember. He lets himself recognize that token, the symbol to all he ever was after, since the very beginning. His eyes follow the shape of the key, the string so eagerly tied to his fingers, so that he never —
And the pounding fear tells him he is about to lose control, and rejection shoots fiercely through his veins.
Powerless, Eren watches himself become a monster, and devour his point of view with animal hunger. With the stillness of a corpse he falls to the ground, to witness his own slow return without a hint of life left in his body. It is natural, his hammering heart tells him, to understand whom those frightened eyes belong to. Those glasses, that arm, the face he has lost.
It is so easy to remember. To accept — never.
Never, he silently repeats, as the full force of his inhuman scream hits what is left of Grisha. Never — the oath is carved in his tongue.
And all he ever believed in, with the last few things he hoped for, collapses.