Dedicated to those who are lost and know that they can find the hope only in themselves.
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Persephone had never seen such a beautiful flower.
The soft grass welcomed her, when she approached to study it better: the smooth voices of the Nymphs and the lake were unable to distract her from that vision.
What Flower was it? And why, did her mother never talk to her about that?
Even its perfume seemed to make disoriented the bees
Unique in its kind, it laid there, in the sunlight, which now warmed her skin.
She stretched out her hand, skiming the petals with her delicate fingers. She hadn't noticed that the nymphs had abandoned her, but how could she escape from such a gentle vision?
It was like it was calling her. As if it was born there, for her, to grace her with that vision.
Then she seized it, took it to the nose to sniffed it, and at that instant a chasm opened on the grass lawn.
She sank, the sunlight vanished and with it the scent of the flowers and the lake in the distance.
She sank until she found herself between two mighty arms.
The cold of that place made her shudder: where was the sun?
However she was not afraid, her heart was longing for curiosity.
It was thus that she looked up, with the same attraction with which she remarked the flower that had deceived her.
She recognized him by his helmet, by the coldness of his gaze, by his harsh and severe traits.
She was in the arms of Hades, the God of the Underworld.
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Ackerman's bar.
Chapter 1
Ruinenlust.
At twenty-five, to be in prison without having the faintest idea of how, is a luxury for a few.
Especially when, in front of you, a couple of policemen were laughing at your frowning eyebrows and your – perpetually - nervous expression.
Eren noticed only after a few seconds that the handcuffs were so tight, that were making his hands of a strange purple colour, but he had to restrain himself not to risk an additional conviction for insulting a public official.
Or maybe not.
"Hey you, ass-face."
He was addressing to the one who didn't stop laughing , bycomparing the photo on the identity card with the actual person present between those bars. The provocative smile with which he insulted him, took effect. Because now, the agent was preparing to open the cell.
Perhaps to kick him straight in the mouth.
"To be a doctor, you're a dickhead."
Eren smirked.
He could read the name on the identification tag:
Mike Zacharias.
"Oh, Miki. Here we go. Explain what the hell I'm doing here. »
He didn't like that cell at all, it smelled of urine and the next day he had to be at work.
He had to escape, somehow.
"To be a doctor, you're a dickhead," he repeated.
He smiled again.
The officer raised an eyebrow and wondered if all the young men were really stupid like the one in front of him.
He hoped with all his heart no.
He approached the boy, looking at him from above, then he stood at the same height and cleared his throat.
Eren wasn't a very caring person of aesthetics, but he couldn't help but notice how disgusting his mustaches were.
"Tell me something, brat."
The truth was that Mike wanted to fill his face with his fists.
But sadly, that guy could be his son.
"Do you want to make fun of me?"
Here it is.
Eren adored, adored people who did not use half terms.
Those who spoke his own language, in short.
"No. Why was I on a bench this morning? And why am I here? "
They seemed legitimate questions, to him. Even if he was disinterested about his life, he could not hide his curiosity about how the fuck he ended up sleeping on a bench and then being thrown into jail.
Let's clarify a concept: everything could be simply solved by answering questions.
It's that besides being a doctor, his job was to make his own life complicated.
By attacking a policeman, for example.
"You almost smashed my friend's nose, do you know?"
"Your friend was making fun of me."
"I told you that you'll soon know why."
"I want to know it now. "
"You only had to answer to some questions, dickhead."
"Is this the reason you handcuffed me and slammed me in here?"
His tone was anything but calm now. Yes he laughed enough, observing that the agent was pissing off just like him, but now his hands were starting to hurt him and his patience was leaving him.
"You had to testify in favor of a certain Reiner Braun."
"Reiner?"
"Oh, now all of a sudden your memory comes back to you?" He asked, ironically surprised, with the ass-face of someone suspicious of him.
Eren only opened his eyes.
What the hell did Reiner have to do with it?!
"Someone broke his arm last night. Tonight he reported the incident. It seems that the person was with you, but he doesn't know the name. »
Eren was almost having an heart attack.
Emptiness.
He remembered nothing of the night before.
He had no idea who he was talking about because he was so drunk he could not even remember where he was. Alcohol has also erased memories from sober?
Think, Eren, think!
No.
No, he remembered something.
Ackerman's bar.
Yes, they had gone there because Jean wanted to see a striptease - convinced that the bar offered uhm, let's say, that kind of services - remaining a little disappointed by realizing it was just poledance.
Although Eren liked it.
Then, emptiness again.
"Agent, I don't remember anything about the night before," Eren added, now quite calmly, "my friends and I were a little ... drunk. But let me out of here. I'll talk to Reiner Braun personally. "
"You've been here insulting me for ten minutes now, you've almost smashed the nose at a colleague of mine and you expect to be able to get away with it?"
"Actually not," he thought. But it would have been ... fun?
He became serious. He had to get out of that place. The hangover headache didn't make the situation better, and he had to find a way to make is reputation better - the young doctor of Stohess in jail? - and he found no other alternative, if not the only trump card he had.
He asked permission for a phone call, he was granted. He dialed a phone number, the only person who could have saved him from that place with smell of piss.
"Hello?"
"Armin, it's me. Eren. "
"EREN! But where the hell did you hunt? Why haven't you come back yet? And what number is this? "
Calm down, Eren. Do not devour him for too many questions in a row.
Breathe.
"Armin, I'm at-" he read the lip of the agent who had kindly given him the phone "Hermina Police Station. "
Armin remained silent for a few seconds.
"... What the fuck are you doing in a police station forty minutes far from our house?"
So even Armin did not know what had happened.
Great.
"I don't know. Therefore, hurry up and come here. You have to get me out of trouble. »
On the other side of the phone the boy was driven by an almost murderous impulse as well as by the desire to close the phone call.
How many times had he heard that phrase?
If it wasn't for his problems at work, it was for the girl of the moment. If it wasn't for the girl, it was for his mother or the new arrivals in the hospital to subordinate him for a while.
"Eren. Grow up. "
He closed the call and looked for his clothes, scattered between his room and the living room.
He hurriedly dressed, noticing that he had badly buttoned his shirt, cursed and freshened his face with icy water to calm his anger.
Only God knew what he would have done at his face with his fists.
He took his coat and put it in a hurry, took a look in the mirror before taking the car keys.
"Where are you going?" a voice asked from far.
The only source of calm.
Armin turned, smiled slightly, watching the girl stand at the door of her bedroom, with a sleepy face. He saw her bring a hand to her eyes to rub them, drop her arms, and wear a rebellious lock behind her ear.
"Sorry, I did not want to wake you up."
Everything was postponed for a minute.
In that white room, illuminated by the rays of the sun, the vision of his girl covered by nothing but the sheets, the red lips and scarlet marks on her neck, her sleepy look and the way she tried to keep her eyes open only to greet him, they made him miss a few heartbeats.
What a strange effect.
He watched the long eyelashes of her eyes, closed, the moment he came back and leaned forward to kiss her hair.
"Take your time. Jean will be back late. »
He did not want to scare her with his alarmed tone. His voice sounded like a soft whisper, the voice of Morpheus, inviting her to cradle in his arms for a while longer.
The girl smiled, sinking her face into the folds of Armin's brown coat. Her presence made her feel desired, safe, at home. She looked at his blue eyes for a few seconds and at the smile on his pink lips.
Armin had beautiful lips.
So beautiful she could not resist taking them, kissing them, mixing them with hers.
The lawyer had to breathe deeply, somehow he had to resist at the temptation not to restart what had kept them busy most of the night.
"You're sexy," the girl murmured, as she watched him take the briefcase and open the front door.
She was ironic, of course.
"Your hair look like a hayball. It looks like you have been very, very busy, last night. "
Annie blushed furiously, looking away, looking out the window.
Don't punch his face, don't punch his face.
"Idiot."
He smiled pleased: he had breached.
"I love you too. »
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Eren only hoped that the boiling water of the shower, would help him get rid of the feeling of germs and dirt.
He was going crazy. If he closed his eyes he could smell the piss of that damned cell;
No, no, no, no.
He threw his clothes directly into the laundry basket: he would have burned them, thrown or perhaps washed at seven hundred degrees.
There was a scream when the hot water almost scalded the skin; he loosened the hair from the rubber band and looked up to look at the ceiling.
But were they all serious?
He did not have the strength to break an arm, so how the fuck could he break an arm to Reiner Braun?
He tried to justify himself.
Regardless, twelve years of swimming certainly could not compete with ten years of boxing.
It was obvious, damn obvious, that it couldn't have been him, because he was good enough to smash nasal septa - and put them back - but ten punches would not have been enough to break the one of Reiner Braun.
Who could have been so strong to break an arm and he repeated, to break an arm to Reiner Braun?
Or maybe it was better first to wonder, how did he end up sleeping on a bench?
He remembered little and nothing. He remembered Jean, Reiner, Berthold.
Ackerman's bar.
Jean had tried to seduce one of the dancers, perhaps.
Ah yes, the shortest one. He had said something like "you're a stripper, it's your job, is not it?" and she, in response, had kicked him straight in the balls – instinctively Eren made to protect himself in remembering the scene - adding a dry "I'm a poledancer".
And ouch.
Then he remembered he'd been woken up by that agent, Mike. The clock in the square marked eight o'clock in the morning, a crowd of people had gathered to fix it before one of those agents began to make fun of him.
The moment he tried to go beyond those memories, the headache got worse: it had happened only once, on his birthday, when he had drained nine bottles of beer and everyone had to tell him the rest.
Like that he tried to wear Annie's underwear and tried to make a sensual dance to Armin, who laughed and then vomited.
Talking about Armin, now he did not even remember how he had made his best friend get him out of there.
But there was something he noticed when he stepped out of the shower and took his bathrobe, looking at his reflection in the mirror out of the corner of his eye.
A sign on the right wrist.
"Armin."
Oh, God.
"Armin. Armin, Armin, Armin, Armin, Armin."
"Eren, what is it?!"
Soon he would have killed him, he would have killed him for real.
"What ... what the hell is this?"
"Where the heck are you?"
When he passed the corner to meet him, he found an immobilized Eren, his gaze fixed on a spot on his wrist.
A black sign, quite evident.
Illegal.
A tattoo.
Eren fainted.
When he awoke, Armin was sitting on a chair beside his bed, reading the newspaper.
They looked at each other.
The blond guy put the object on the night table next to Eren's bed.
He didn't want to know how he was: it was known that idiots had a long life.
"Next time, before you faint," he said, "put at least your pants on."
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However, if someone asked him if he was satisfied with his life at just twenty-five, Eren Jaeger would have said no.
He thought of it as he smoked a Ruinenlust out of that ridiculous window of his room, observing the new sign –unknown – on his right wrist.
"It's a fairly unusual punctuation mark in our books," Armin had said.
"It indicates something not completely disconnected from the previous period, a pause but not too long."
Despite everything, his life wasn't going so – so – bad. It's only that, by nature, he seemed condemned never to be satisfied.
Observing the lights of the city, he inhaled the cigarette and tighten the filter between his lips, holding it between the index and the middle. Then, when the heat of the smoke seemed to warm him, he exhaled, watching the small cloud that had formed. He brought the thumb to the lips - Impulsive signal of his body, a sign that he was thinking too much - and he bit it.
Who knows why, when he smoked a cigarette, what he had in my lungs all of a sudden smelled like shit?
It was the smoke trapped between the lungs, the taste he had on his tongue what he liked most. That's why he burnt another cigarette, after turning off the last one under his classic shoes, watching the black ashes scatter on the floor.
Then he expired it.
And it disgusted him.
About the ashes ... yes, he would have cleaned them up tomorrow.
No, he didn't want to empty the ashtray.
And much less to realize that the cigarette which he was smoking was the last of that damn pack.
He inhaled deeper almost in frustration: it was clear that he didn't want to go out in order to buy pack of cigarettes, at two a.m.
But he did it.
Because Eren was addicted to cigarettes. No matter how disgusting they were, he could not hold a whole day without them. And so he went down the street, looking for Ruinenlust, at two in the morning.
Those in the condominium might have looked at him curiously, because he was wearing a white turtleneck, under a gray jacket, and classic black shoes. He would not have explained that he was dressed that way, instead of his usual dark jeans and t-shirts, for a dinner among colleagues.
He would pass in front of the three stores he knew but knew he would find closed. Because who do you think would still sells cigarettes at two in the morning?
Yet he didn't seem to ask so much.
Was it possible to have just another Ruinenlust?
Then he would have realized that maybe, as Jean told him, some wheel was really missing.
He walked back home, hands in pockets, fiddling with that old-fashioned lighter (he would never change it, but that's another story) as he watched the long drive in front of him.
He would never have known that on the other side of the road someone was asking more or less his own questions.
It was not particularly cold, or perhaps it was better to say that he did not notice it. So he went back home, where he would find Armin, and the expression of his eyebrows would have spoken for him.
"Are you already back?" He asked. " Hitch called on your phone, I answered at the fifth time. It seems she would talk to you. She waits for you in her apartment, and says not to worry about the time. "
He threw his gray jacket over the chair just after the door, and sighed, expressing all his disappointment.
"Yes, Armin. I'm already here."
When Eren was angry or nervous even for the most stupid of reasons, his tone of voice lost melody and became rather serious and aggressive.
Ed Eren was pissed off most of the time.
"... on the other hand, who the fuck do you want to sell cigarettes at two in the morning?"
Author's Corner: Hello everyone! This fanfiction had been on my mind for months and finally came to life. I wanted to say two things:
1) What you read at the beginning is my vision of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Yes, Persephone was kidnapped and forced to marry against his will. But I like to think of it in another way.
2) Ruinenlust is the cigarette brand that Eren smokes. - It's a German word, I bring the meaning found on the site : this term describes that particular pleasure that some feel, at the sight of the ruins and expresses that post-romantic and decadent fetishism that often binds to a melancholy reflection on the past and on the passage of time. See you in the next chapters. If you liked it or want a constructive criticism, leave a review.