I wanted to try a more...Literature(?) approach in this chapter because I'm going to draw in emotions from that aspect. The whole point of this chapter is to make you wonder why and question the little bits of detail you're being given. This chapter is a little longer than most since I did want to include a flashback which ended up being longer than I thought. You are allowed to hate me for a good reason in this chapter but what fun is there if there is no drama, dullness is not amusing enough. The hating me will come to an end soon. I'm also debating if I should upload two chapters today, this and another.
To the little boy in her village who smiled everyday when she walked by, she'd speak a small thank you because no one had smiled at her that much for no reason. To the man she had grown to replace as her father she'd like to look at him once more but he was hidden. To the man who confused her and made her see things in a new light; Never change who you are.
Dear past, present, and future; screw you and thank you.
Abstracted glory; given description to the scattered and fallen trees around the clearing. To be called strangely beautiful yet hauntingly frightening; fears warning. Her lips tasted a bitter coal when she licked them clear of their dry state. Alais' body fell flat to the ground, her back hitting the soft grass crushed by large foot prints. A single cough of pain left her lips when her lungs began to contract and her ribs mended themselves back together.
They'd often said that the most simplistic tasks made their days brighter-her village. Children would run around the streets, feet picking up the mud that their bootless feet couldn't miss. She longed for that feeling of simply running around the street without a care in the world as the wind tickled your skin and the sound of laughter burned away any exhaustion. In a fleeting glance, she turned her head and watch the golden mane run off into the distance. In the inside she felt herself scowl as she tried to think of anyway to get out of this-situation.
She was horseless. Alais felt the wind shift under her feet when she tried to stand again, tried and tried till her bones had finally shifted back into place and she could properly find her footing on the ground. When her body stumbled upright she swayed and felt for her gear only to feel nothing where something use to lay. Appearing unaffected, Alais moved to get away and almost fell into a large footprint when she didn't watch where she was going.
"Levi?" She called out hopelessly in a sense at the baron and empty land, no human in sight, "Levi?" Her voice wavered.
He wouldn't come. It took her longer than normal to figure out that she could call all she wanted but he'd never come. For a single moment, as her feet began to pad softly on the ground, she wondered if he was thinking about her. She tried to think of a way back but all that did was make her head hurt and her splutter coughing. Her lungs burned with the feeling of repulsed dread when her palm was coated in a layer of thick red.
It was calm, strangely. She couldn't recall any moment of her life when it was this calm, when it had only been her and her breathing. She liked it yet she hated it. She tried to shake off her worries replacing it with thoughts of the past but all that came to her mind was a sneering child calling her a murderer. She felt herself flinch and wondered why, brushing it off as a reaction, a simple reaction that instincts gave birth to.
Alais let her mind go blank for a second as she looked up to the sky, peaceful and contempt. Somehow, finding answers to things that she wanted escaped her. For a second she saw a cloud take the shape of a small plane and jolted out of her state of silence. Her eyes widened, of course. She broke off into a run reaching the dense forest as she peeled and plucked everything she could grabbing stems of grass and decaying flowers; pieces of broken wood. She ran back to where she had been. She hadn't seen the severed head on the floor of a girl with wide eyes and tanned skin.
Her shortened intakes of air were nothing on her mind as she coughed coming to a stop. Collapsing down to the ground, she quickly put together the object designing it as she saw fit...
She was so close when a scream whipped through the air, and a giant body threw itself into the clearing, setting its sights on her.
"Not yet," She voiced tumbling to her feet, holding the object as close to her as possible. Her deep breaths nicked the tips of her fallen scarf making her shake her head to breathe clearer.
She wondered if he'd notice.
She broke out into a run, stumbling over her own two feet as she made her way across the clearing, trying to get into the dense forest filled with tall trees so she could hide herself. For some strange reason she didn't care anymore. The feeling of dread she had always carried wherever she went disappeared the more she ran but the more she ran, the farther she couldn't help but feel. She gulped a little and looked down to the ground with an invisible smile, her mouth open slightly.
A large shadow crossed her vision and shielded herself from the sun. When she looked up she could only see a single foot come crashing down towards her. In the last-minute she sprung to the side and leaped out-of-the-way. Holding her ground she glanced once more at the Titan and turned back around, feet pounding against the ground again.
Like a deer in the headlights, she was meeting her fate. Head-on.
She could feel his eyes on hers, watching her wherever she went, "What am I feeling?" She wondered out loud. He couldn't actually see her. With a single shake of the head, the past became present to her and everything that she had ever known molded itself together, creating one large jumble of scattered thoughts and obscured memories.
"Mother?" She saw her mother at the edge of the forest of tall trees, staring at her with a gentle smile. Alais ran faster now, her hand trying to stretch out and grab the mother who she had killed in blind anger. Her eyes told a story that couldn't be read, maybe the pages had been burned or maybe they drowned themselves in water. Bitterly maybe she held the second call she would make to her imagining a man by her side. He was a faceless man of black and white, gold charm hanging on the wrist he held out to her and the grey smile that held warmth and security. She had made a horrible decision.
She had acted for the first time in her life, no thought, just actions.
Just when her hand was a millisecond from holding onto the faceless mans undoubtable soft and warm hands, a piece of herself was torn away the moment a hand swung and snatched her from the ground. With wide, frozen eyes she watched the ground become farther away from her, she watched her mother sneer at her and cackle watching her now helpless daughter, she watched the envisioned man stare blankly with soulless dead eyes, that charm on his hand that she couldn't look away from dangling lifelessly.
He never believed her.
She couldn't turn now. She just couldn't. If she did the plan would come crashing to the ground, the woman blinked and squirmed in the hold of the grinning Titan. Alais shook around before she felt another hand wrap itself around her torso crushing it even more. Struggling to breathe, Alais pushed her way upwards trying to free her lungs.
For some strange reason she was brought back to a moment not long ago when the shifter Eren couldn't turn into his titan form, she hadn't known what was wrong with him. Usually titan-shifters didn't need a purpose to shift but then she remembered, long ago in her crueller times when she gave two people her modified blood, had it worked? Was he not a pure shifter?
Fascination coursed through her body the second she glanced over at his hands, bandages wrapped around his hands courtesy of Petra yet they were not healing. The wounds had of course stopped bleeding but the absence of stem was foreign. Eren fidgeted under her gaze and adverted his eyes, fiddling with his hands.
"Eren?" Alais found herself calling out to him eyes boring into his evenly even when the shocked expression covered his features, "Has this happened before?"
He nodded with hesitance and spoke, eyes remaining on his bandaged hands, "It's happened but," His voice trailed on, "Not like this."
She stared for a while at his wide green irises not even caring if it could be called strange.
"Alais," Eld called out since no one knew her last name. Said girl didn't spar him a glance, "You're scaring the boy."
"No I'm not," She retorted brushing him off. In a moment of thought she bounced to her feet and stretched out her back with a silent sigh of content before placing another one of her lollipops into her mouth fingering the object with two fingers.
"Interesting," She murmured moving towards Levi, "The hand doesn't heal..."
Levi clenched the mug in his hand tighter at the rim and turned towards Eren, eyebrows scrunched, "If you can't turn into a Titan, your great deed of sealing Wall Maria will mean jack shit."
Alais fiddled with her fingers in thought as Petra casted her a glance of worry, "Alais?" She called out, "Are you alright?"
"I am," Came her short response when she gazed down to her own hands and turned them around, "Doesn't heal," She repeated thoughtfully.
"I'm giving you an order. Do something about it," Levi commanded the wide eyed boy as his eyes narrowed.
"Could it be something else?" Alais murmured to herself not knowing that Levi had heard.
"Stop talking to yourself you'll just make yourself sound stupid," He spoke in agitation.
Alais blankly gazed at him with some sort of look plastered in her eyes alone till she turned around and walked away from the table, Levi, unconsciously following-not her though, he wasn't a pack mule.
"What if the serum wasn't in full effect?" Alais questioned herself staring off into the distance feeling the lollipop get crushed between the grip of her teeth.
Gnawing on her lips she fingered the scarf around her mouth remembering something her mother had told her long ago, 'If a shifter has a wound that is either slow in healing or in the process of healing make sure not to touch metal, metal is a shifters worst enemy when healing it'll cause the titan blood to go into a craze because the heat of the skin is exposed to something that can conduct heat in a flash.'
Turning on her heel, she faced Eren for a millisecond finding her eyes widen when he reached for the fallen metal spoon on the ground. Her heart pumped loudly as she raised her hand up to stop him but was too late when an explosion of greyish smoke busted out from where Eren had stood and pushed Levi's squad back. At first Alais didn't see anything wrong with it until she watched Levi's squad's eyes harden and their teeth clench together. Briefly she wondered if this was teamwork.
"Stop," She raised her arms up and spread them out to block the squad as they prepared to attack Eren. Mentally Alais found herself chastising them, they didn't think before acting.
"Calm down," Alais turned towards Eren knowing that Levi would stop them, "I said to calm down," He repeated watching as their bodies stiffened when he held his hand up and stopped them, "All of you."
"Don't look Eren," Alais commanded him but he looked anyways catching the stiff forms of his teammates, "I said don't look," Alais blinked twice and shifted, throwing the finished lollipop away.
"Eren..." Eld growled between clenched teeth, "What just happened?!" Alais was ready to open her mouth and speak when a hand stopped her.
"I..." He stumbled slightly on his words, "Don't..."
"Why'd you do that without permission?" He questioned and didn't wait long before impatiently yelling out an, "Answer me!"
It wasn't long before it escalated and the others spat out their demands while Levi called out for them to wait but not even he could get them to stop.
"He couldn't help it," Alais spoke blandly when Oluo made the comment of decapitating Eren if he moved, "It's-"
"What do you-" Oluo belched out only to get cut off by Levi.
"Let her talk."
"It's the titan blood and skin," She dropped her hands back down to her sides, "Because of the abnormal temperature of a titans skin it can easily conduct heat, and because Eren had touched a spoon, something that easily conducts heat he caused a spark to ignite fueling his titan blood."
Frantically, a typical human reaction, she tried to think of a way out when she remembered tucking something into the pockets of her pants. The vile.
Spluttering she sucked in a breath and stuffed her hand between herself and the Titans grasp. Stuffing her hands into her pocket, she pulled out the small vial and made sure it couldn't get on herself. Hastily she lifted the vial to her mouth and bit down on the cork, yanking it off and spilling the vile on the titans hands.
Tides will bring me back to you, right?
The Titan roared, its hand steaming and red as it struggled to repair itself but taking longer than normal it couldn't hold onto the girl who was dropping to the ground at an alarming rate. Desperate, the Titan substituted its hands for its mouth as it tried snapping at Alais only to have her swish her body to the side and crash to the ground.
The woman held in the grunt of pain she had built up in the back of her throat and instead shielded the plane, ripping a piece of her shirt-a white shirt and tied it onto the rear end of the plane, stumbling as her bones and skin repaired itself. The titan began to slowly burn away as the acid she produced traveled into his skin and bubbled the unique blood it held.
She was ashamed of herself.
She positioned the plane and leaped into the air; a flare coal-black going off. Throwing it into the sky as her body crashed to the ground and she was forced to lie down on her back.
She was forced to view the sky above her as her neck stiffly laid itself on the ground and her head pounded louder than normal. She couldn't think properly, had the outcome of it all simply been the call of a blind man? She didn't want to disappear. Her breath began to shorten, eyes straining to stay open as the roaring Titan remained on the ground, fallen and immobile as it waited on its hands. She couldn't move. Stickily thick blood was running down her face making its way into her mouth choking her through blind rage, so fierce that she had to stop for a second and think, why? Why, why, why, why now? Why did her muscles bleed like a thousand kisses from the sun; like a mother who wouldn't stop doting on her child?
This couldn't be her deathbed, she refused to believe it. Her heart couldn't stop, she forced it to beat for him. Him. But her heart hurt, her head hurt. Why did it hurt? She hadn't felt physical pain this bad, not in a long time. It didn't make sense, the whys and the how's.
Infatuation; people thinking they are in love but when indeed it is just a deep lust or like for another person.
Why was she thinking of that word? She didn't feel infatuation, she wasn't attracted to him in a physical sense. Many before her wouldn't help but think of the same thing, yet if she told them it was for him, and him only not that thing that coated him called skin they'd just laugh and call her stupid. Stupid. Never, she wouldn't fall into that class, she was smart, she is smart and nothing would stop that not even the isolation she had driven herself into. If she had a second chance, a moment to come back again she'd try, try to know people other than him. Then, just maybe, could the fact of infatuation be whipped out of her mind.
She placed her fingers weakly to her lips and felt something shiver inside of her releasing a stuttering laugh. She remembered an insignificant moment so long ago but she couldn't remember the name of her own mother, "Pathetic."
She lifted her hand in the air hearing the thumps of loud feet come back at her and breathed one last breath, hand and body coated in blood, blood that refused to evaporate as the laugh of a figure laying on the ground died with the wind, stopped blowing and let the last memory of a standing titan engrave itself;
Burn itself in a blonde swirl.
I like to think of Alais throwing that plane as her last minute resort to get help yet we all know that it was futile because no one came to help (Sarcasm)
Blonde swirl, what could that be? :) I love screwing around with peoples minds. Who do you think was the blonde titan? Have you started hating me yet? I don't care but I am curious. You won't hate me for long but you will until we start getting into the revealing of the other titans shifters (Bertolt and Renier + Ymir).
Cheers.