To be back in this setting brings a strange comfort to Annie.
It's not that she enjoys an ounce of the havoc around her or doesn't feel pity for the people trapped under their toppled houses. The sight of the world being catapulted into hell is nostalgic, reminds Annie of when she was a child.
Blood is nectar to the soil and ripped muscle will feed the creatures who prowl the devastation. It's a cyclical and mechanical process Annie understood at a young age and perhaps she is more messed up in the head than she thought if destruction and the wails of widows brings an odd sense of ease. She's always been morbid but being outside beats being stuck in a sea where her limbs are stiff and all the space around her is bleached black.
Annie remembers it all too clearly as she rides on the back of Hitch's horse out of Stohess. She hovered for so long and a sound which had a gurgling thickness rumbled everywhere—Annie is still unsure if the noise was her own imagination or her being pulled closer to the magma rivers of hell.
Faint voices in the distance were her only distraction.
"If you die in there, I'm going to make sure you're even more dead when I join you." Hitch seethed on a particularly bad day. "You haven't explained yourself to me yet."
"I admit, something about you being stuck in there and being forced to hear all my bitching is kind of satisfying." Hitch had snorted at her on another day. "The fact that there's nothing you can do about it is the cherry on top of it all too. Ha!" Hitch paused. "But still, sometimes I wonder if you're even alive in there. What a downer thought, huh? I must be hanging around you too much."
"Hitch…you've got something on your neck." The new voice which Annie deciphered as Armin pointed out a few days later.
"It's called a hickey, Armin." Hitch huffed all too similarly to an irritated older sister. "Do you not know what that is?"
"…You do know which regiment I came from, right?" He combated.
"Is that you admitting that you're a permanent third wheel? Or you trying to use some weirdo innuendo talk on me? Orrrr?"
"You're very street savvy, Hitch. I trust that you'll be able to figure it out."
"Exactly and my super-smart diagnosis is that you're the shy, quiet type who fakes innocence—a.k.a, you're a pervert."
"H-Hey!"
The pair's antics are always either amusing, boring, or so frustratingly irritating, Annie resents how she can't maim her ears to block out their noise. But she's connected to things outside this nighttime void where the only chatter is the whispering of past horrors. They include her, pretend she can see what they see by saying "Look!" and she hears a thump, probably them shoving what they're looking at against her crystal so she can "see". It's futile and stupid but funny, especially when Hitch uses her to act as a "two-against-one" tally when she and Armin fight to win an argument.
But their moods were never consistent.
"…. It's the anniversary today." Hitch said bleakly. "Marlowe would have been eighteen if he made it. He might have even stopped being such a brain-dead idiot and learned how to be a normal person. Might have learned how to not be an even bigger idiot around women too." Hitch stopped. A sharp hiccup and sniffle left her and Annie had wished then that her crystal had broken sooner. "You know, it was a real dick move on both of you for leaving me all by myself…"
Annie hugs her knees tighter. Hitch sleeps now and Annie worries, stares at the stars glinting outside the window. What she aims to achieve is at the end of a perilous path and Hitch doesn't belong in a battle. She's proud that her nail-polish obsessed roommate flipped her, of all people, and Annie's confident her frequent visitor can fend for herself. But Hitch has no place on the front lines.
So when Armin and Connie make their case on the urgency of stopping Eren, Annie is reluctant but agrees.
She leaves behind a note for Hitch, the human anchor who steadied Annie when the darkness and nightmares swam too close.
She joins a group which has her senses prickling her skin, tells her to keep an eye out for them—there might be ill will and lies lingering here.
But careful hope finds bravery to grow and the emptiness honeycombing Annie's chest doesn't feel so bottomless as it had before.
Annie doesn't believe this plan will work but as the cart pulls all of them to the harbor, she accepts this group is the only shot she has. Her promise is not far away from being fulfilled and if she fails—if Father dies and she's left all alone—…she's not sure what to do with herself.
Annie stares into the wood boards of the cart's floor.
Maybe—regardless of whether or not life will gift her with or strip her of Father—Annie can find Hitch again and she can say thank you to a person she didn't mean to leave behind.
Inspired by Sweet Night - V. Such a nice song ;_;
How could I know?
One day I'd wake up feeling more
But I had already reached the shore
Guess we were ships in the night, night, night