For Unattainable Dreams' prompt exchange challenge. Prompt: "She says it hurts too much, I say it doesn't hurt enough." —The Receiving End of It All by Streetlight Manifesto [Sent by siqwithaQ]
She seems impervious to pain.
I had a really hard time thinking up how I was going to work with the prompt, but eventually I came to this, because I've recently become obsessed with Attack on Titan and it was really only a matter of time before I started a fanfiction. I'm not really sure what this IS, per say, just a bit of a drabble... You decide wether or no these two are a couple or just friends here, I don't mind ether way. (Though I ship them like you would not believe.) Enjoy!
For a scientist, she was a bit of a dreamer. With her head in the clouds she thought she could put some sort of formula to dreams of beasts and the carnage of the man. She walked around with her dirty, filthy hair shinning with grease and her uniform rumpled and most likely at least hinting at BO. But she was something of a star in an endless see of black, though he loathed admitting it. She seemed to be the one girl without dead eyes who'd seen dead men and dead things.
He wonders why everyone who knows him thinks that he is the one with hurt seeping from his pores- he's not the one who carves things up with a smile.
Hanji likes to accept those things that would love them better eaten than as masters. She treated them like pets- her precious little lab rats. And she did love them, in her own Hanji way, and she did take care of them, even though it was by her hand and her hand alone that they dripped crimson red.
It's sort of odd to see her with any titan outside of combat. The most he sees of her is in the field, and it's then that she smiles wide as she swoops around calling to the titans before taking them down without flinching. In her lab, however, he watches as she sobs when she takes a spear to the eye or one titan, screaming of the pain even though she's experiencing none of it...
"She says it hurts too much." He mutters to thin air. And then, stubbornly, because he can; "I say it doesn't hurt enough."
His voice seeps with hatred and bitterness, because though there are those who would say he is an emotionless creature, he's seen too many of his friends fall to those things. What difference does it make that these ones are caged? In these walls she praises them for snapping at her legs, but outside the walls she looks delighted with her clean cuts deep in the backs of their necks. She never looks back to make sure that they fall…
And even though it is a matter of pain they disagree on, even a fool would notice it was something they shared. A cloudy sort of pain that made them something outside of the normal human spectrum- an agony that never really left, but was better buried. And so it is a matter of pain that they come to agree on, as well, when they speak quietly after everyone else at the dinner table has gone to bed and it's just the two of them whispering about how much potential the ones in their wake could have had if-
They never say it. They never say it, because for her it hurts too much. And for him it doesn't hurt enough. It's never enough, never has been and never will be. What sort of torture, after all, could be enough to make up for all the deaths he's caused?
She's the rock that drown in the sea and wanted to float, and he's the sails that lead a ship into the horror of the storm. Two broken things that are very different from each other; two things that silently depend on each other even if it doesn't make that much sense.
It is in pain they find their differences.
And it is in pain they find their way.