and miles to go before we sleep

by rudimentaryflair

Armin sees them, three characters in an old story that he already knows, one that he cannot influence or change and can only see through to the end. (Or, moments after reclaiming Shiganshina, Armin learns the hard truth about the dead: they're never quite as gone as you think.)

i.

The rain comes down in waves, thrashing the windows and sweeping the pavement, forming a small deluge outside the compound where the water gathers in large pools on the ground. The sky is swathed in so many storm clouds that it looks almost black, occasionally broken by a flash of lightning slicing through the atmosphere.

Eren finds him in the dining room, back pressed to the wall, a cup of Levi's black tea sitting on the floor by his feet. "Hey," he says. He rubs at his eyes and yawns. "What are you doing here?"

Armin pulls his knees closer to his chest, trying to block out the torrent. "Can't sleep," he mutters. "You?"

Eren doesn't answer right away, which means he woke up to Armin's empty bunk and came to check on him. He's been doing that a lot lately, keeping tallies on Armin's whereabouts, driven by the dregs of everything that happened in Shiganshina. It's one of those things that none of them talk about, like Eren's growing habit of lapsing into unsettling silences or how Jean will say Marco's name when he's tired and not quite there. Sasha's obsession with food rationing and Connie's jokes, dark as pitch. The way Levi's gaze sometimes loses focus when he looks at Commander Hange, as though seeing someone else in their place. These are the things that they've been reduced to, messy stitch-jobs of compulsions and impulses.

Eren wordlessly slides into the empty space beside him. Armin doesn't protest when he picks up the teacup and drains the rest of it in one swallow. They sit there, listening to the dull thuds of raindrops hitting the panes, the textured almost-quiet of a building full of people sleeping. He thinks if he closes his eyes, he can feel the walls breathing imperceptibly, drawing inwards and then expanding out.

After several minutes of silence, Eren clears his throat. "Is it the rain?" he asks.

Armin flattens his lips into a humorless smile. The rain. As though it were that simple. In some ways, he understands; Eren needs to pretend that things are easy, that the world is just as uncomplicated now as it was when they were ten, grasping for the easy explanation for why he can't sleep, as though Armin could ever sleep again, after he ate—

No. He closes his eyes briefly. Reopens them. No. That was a one-way trip to finding himself curled around one of the barrack toilets.

No.

"Do you remember training?" he asks instead of answering.

"Training?" Eren repeats. "What about it?"

There were some dark times in the 104th when Armin used to sit on his bed and wonder if his body would ever stop being so small and weak, if his classroom grades would be enough to keep him from being sent to the fields, if the friends he'd made really liked him or if they just humored him because they felt sorry for him. Little things that probably kept up every cadet, made large by the shadows of his bunk and the fear clenched between his teeth.

It feels like a lifetime ago, back when they were still young and effusive with the kind of naive hope that's run dry these days. Armin's reached a point where looking back on it all makes him both wistful and tired, simultaneously pained by recollections of trudging through the wilderness with his rucksack banging against his back, and desperately willing to give anything to go back to when the worst thing that could happen to any of them was latrine duty.

He says none of this, though. "Shadis always made us run whenever there was a storm." As though on cue, thunder cracks through the walls, the room lighting up briefly. "The rain just reminded me of it."

Eren groans, tipping his head up towards the ceiling. "I hated training in the rain," he says, with so much vehemence that Armin laughs wryly. "Running with packs was already hard enough without soggy shoes, that sadist…"

Unbidden, several memories surface in Armin's mind, like bubbles rising to the top of a water glass: boots squelching in mud, his breath scraping through his throat, the line of hooded figures in front of him growing ever more distant in the night. The jogging path shifting into a looming forest as a gale howled through the trees, the bricks in his training pack replaced by a bare-bones survival kit, a hand clasping his shoulder ("We'll be back in seven days—try not to die").

His fingers slippery around a rifle. Dread and excitement twisting in his guts. Father's bony fingers digging into his shoulders as he whispers how proud he is, the unit's cart hauling them away—

Armin blinks, and the memories dissipate, spiderweb around his fingers.

What the hell was that?

He's so lost in his confused reverie that Eren has to poke him in the arm to get his attention.

"What?"

Eren's gaze is sharp, almost probing. "I asked if you were okay."

"Oh." At some point, his hand had found its way to the Scout patch on the left sleeve of his jacket, fingers running over the places where the thread is raised. He lets it drop and presses his knuckles into the ground self-consciously. "Sorry. I guess I'm just really tired."

Eren looks at him a few seconds longer, searching, before settling back against the wall, head turned away. "Get some rest, then."

"Okay," Armin says softly.

The outside world is a gloomy sight through the windows, a page ripped straight out of those tragic story books his grandfather used to collect. Armin wonders if it would be too much to ask the universe to make it rain indefinitely, because what kind of story are they living in if not a tragedy? At least, then, the weather would be fitting.

Beside him, Eren has started to snore. Armin allows himself a fond smile, before sliding his legs straight out and attempting to get comfortable against the wall. He really should try to get some rest.

After all, Shadis had never left them behind for training, even for just a night. More importantly, his parents were dead, had died before Armin joined the Survey Corps and even before the fall of Shiganshina, faces long since replaced by his grandfather's age-worn one. And…

Armin swallows, the ghost of the patch still burning against his fingertips.

Instead of wings, he'd expected to feel a star on his arm.

ii.

As far as Armin knows, he's never lost a limb. Still, he asks to make sure.

It seems like such a silly thing; it's not like he can misplace his arms and legs the way he would a pair of glasses. But he'd woken up on Wall Maria in agony despite being unscathed, a knife's edge away from sobbing as invisible hands peeled his heart like a piece of fruit. The pain has long since faded into a dull, dry ache, but sometimes he still wonders if a part of him went missing there, if what he's feeling is a phantom limb.

There used to be such things as good days and bad days. Now, the weeks smear together, indistinguishable in their anguish and death, that bleak exhaustion making a home in their bodies as they drift through the halls like the ghosts of the people they've lost.

Some nights he stays up thinking about all the bones he's standing on. Those nights, Armin brushes his teeth until his gums bleed, scraping away the phantom slivers of flesh between them.

He goes to visit Annie sometimes, when he thinks he'll scream if he has to look at the hollow shells of his friends for another second. This time, it's because Hange and Levi want to discuss the officialization of Erwin's replacement and he can't stand it, the reminder that Erwin is just another set of bones crushed under his feet now.

Annie is unchanged as always, peacefully asleep in her crystal coffin. Through the glass, she looks serene, almost sad, body suspended in time. Armin had always thought she was beautiful in an untouchable way, ethereal and fathomless like a marble statue, or a carefully crafted blade. He raises a trembling hand and rests it on the cool surface of the crystal, right over her cheek, and wonders where things went so wrong.

He's seized the sudden urge to look back at her when he turns to go, catching one last glimpse of her still form. He thinks that he's done this before, glanced at her from the corner of his eye, and abruptly, Armin gets the distinct feeling that this will be the last time he will ever see her, unmistakable in its strength and finality. It's foolish—he can visit her whenever he likes—but this. It feels like farewell.

"Goodbye, Annie," he says softly.

He leaves her as he'd met her all those years ago: weary and grieving for lost things.

iii.

"Residual memory," Hange says. "I suspected as much."

Armin stares blankly at the space over their ear, the words barely registering in his own. Currently, they are in Hange's office, fenced in by the books lining the walls from floor to ceiling. Hange stands by the laboratory table, examining him with interest as he sits on the uncomfortable wooden chair at their desk, trying his best not to disappear into the blanket they've wrapped around him. He's too tired to be made uncomfortable by the scrutiny.

He'd woken that morning to his lungs shredding themselves with sobs, for no discernable reason other than something in him had suddenly given during the night, crumbled like Maria. Mikasa and Eren were immediately by his side, yanked from their sleep by the screaming, and the others had rushed into the room they were sharing only to stop dead at his gasps, his babbled words scraping in and out of tune.

It had been Jean's stricken face in the doorway, hovering between Sasha and Connie's, that made him realize what he was saying:

"I killed Marco!"

In the present, Hange continues, unperturbed by Armin's nonreaction. "Since Eren was able to access his father's memories, it's not a far stretch to assume the same is happening with you," they say. "Though it seems that Bertholdt's are coming through a lot stronger than Grisha's. I'm uncertain as to why, but with your permission, we could monitor the extent of the process and figure out how to mitigate the issue…" Their voice fades, overtaken by the pounding metronome of his heart in his ears.

The image of Marco on the rooftop is inescapable. He can still see his mouth open in plea, the tears running down his face and onto the shingles of the house, the blood spray in the air. The way his leg had jerked once, twice, before going deathly still. It's there, burned permanently to the inside of his eyelids, and Armin wants to scratch it out of his brain, scoop it out with a dull spoon.

His nails are still bloody from being raked across the floorboards. He digs the broken ends into the meat of his thighs and it feels like being stabbed, so he does it again harder, pain cleaving through the disorienting fog of grief and confusion in his head.

Bertholdt killed Marco. Annie, Reiner, and Bertholdt. Their friends, who sweat and bled beside them. They killed him.

He wishes that this revelation would absolve him of Bertholdt's death, but all it does is nauseate him more. How do three people, who fear and hate death just as much as he does, kill a person like that? Not just any person, but Marco—gentle, kind Marco, who had never wanted anything except to make the people around him happy and the world a better place?

He would ask these questions if he did not know the answers to them already, digested in his stomach and engraved on the insides of his skull. The terrible truth that people are made with bones that break and arms that bruise, and it's not because fate is kind. It's not because they get to choose.

This is all Armin knows, the street painting itself red over his eyes.

"What's happening to me, Hange?" he whispers, interrupting them in the middle of their sentence. Why is this happening to me?

Something like tenderness crosses Hange's expression. "I guess that depends."

"On?"

They smile at him pityingly. "Whether or not you believe in ghosts."

iv.

Most of the memories are useless, Armin finds. Glimpses of life in a gray city, cravings for foods he's never seen or had before. A flash of Mr. Hoover's wrinkled hand wrapped around the end of a wooden cane. Splitting a loaf of bread with Reiner, Annie, and an unrecognizable boy with burnished hair and an upturned nose. Marcel, he discovers when he digs for his name, and just when Armin thinks he might have uncovered something worthwhile, he finds the boy dead in the next memory, body bitten in half by Ymir's Pure Titan. It isn't so much useful as it is gut-wrenchingly horrific, a portraying reminder of his own crime.

And then, there are the slews of gruesome scenes that leave him dry heaving in the barrack toilets. Marley's training program. Trost. Shiganshina a month ago, Shiganshina five years ago—they all blend together, the same demons separated only by time, the way Armin and Bertholdt are only separated by bodies now, nightmares inherited with the Colossal Titan.

All this Armin keeps to himself, pressed between the pages of a journal tucked beneath his mattress.

If the others are troubled by these new developments, they don't hide it very well. Jean is taciturn and evasive. Sasha and Connie are more hesitant with their jokes. Eren is privately contentious, and though Mikasa tries to act as though nothing's changed, Armin sees her quietly studying him when she thinks he's not looking.

The residue of Bertholdt's feelings makes it hard for him too, regret acrid and burning in his throat whenever he looks at his friends. It would be easy to hate him for betraying them, but it's hard to match the cold, imposing figure from Shiganshina's ruined rooftops with the miserable boy that lives in his head now.

He and Reiner had been twelve when they broke through Wall Maria. Armin thinks no twelve-year-old is evil enough to do something like that on their own.

"My father used to tell me stories about spirits in the forest," Sasha says casually one night over dinner. "He said they were souls with unfinished business."

Armin pauses in the middle of taking a sip of his water, distinctly aware of everyone pointedly not looking at him. Very suddenly, he realizes why they've all been so careful around him lately, glancing over his shoulder as though expecting someone to be standing there behind him.

Ghosts, he thinks hysterically. I'm being haunted.

Across from him, Eren snorts. "Unfinished business?" he echoes. "Like what? Destroying the rest of humanity?"

"Bertholdt never wanted to destroy humanity," Armin blurts without thinking, and a hush falls over the table. He flushes, biting down on a bread roll.

"Well?" Sasha prompts, after a beat. "What did he want, then?"

And that's the question, isn't it? If not to acquire the Founding Titan, if not to usher the destruction of humanity, then what? There must be a reason, intertwined with the grim determination to accept things as they are, that would turn a person into this.

It's one that Armin already knows too well. Faintly, he says, "He just wanted to go home."

The effect is immediate. Sasha's gaze slides down to her plate. Eren stiffens as Mikasa's expression shifts to something unreadable. Jean is unmoving and quiet. He's been quiet a lot, lately.

Connie breaks the silence first, stabbing at his gruel with more ferocity than necessary.

"Don't we all," he mutters, and the rest of dinner is a grim affair.

v.

Jean slides soundlessly into his room and shuts the door with the calm press of a hand.

"Mikasa isn't here," Armin tells him reflexively, not looking up from where he's digging through his bag for some chalk. Hange had given it to him to improve his grip on his maneuver gear. "She's outside with Eren, if you want to train with her."

"I actually wanted to talk to you." Armin glances at Jean just in time to see him wring his hands, uncharacteristically awkward. "Well, not you exactly, but. Well."

He falls silent again, fidgeting. Suddenly feeling very tired, Armin sighs, sitting back in his haunches. He waits.

"Is he here?" Jean blurts. "Bertholdt, that is."

Armin's been expecting this. "I don't know."

"You don't know?" Jean repeats incredulously.

"That's what I said." He still doesn't know how he feels about everyone acting like Bertholdt is still alive. He's dead. But at the same time, what is a person if not their memories, their experiences? Bertholdt's body may be gone, but a part of him still survives in Armin. "Is this about Marco?"

Jean falters, which is answer enough. Again, Armin patiently waits for him to regain his footing.

Back when they were cadets, and even longer after that, Jean's words had always been full of acerbity and bluster, a buffer of blunt force trauma between him and the harsh reality they all lived in. It's a little disheartening to see that cocksure boy get swallowed by the withdrawn, careful soldier he sees before him now. But then, it's not like the rest of them have stayed completely themselves either.

"I suppose it doesn't matter," Jean remarks, after a lengthy pause. "This is more for me, anyway." He sits down beside the doorway, crossing his legs on the floor. "Um, is this okay?"

Armin shrugs. It doesn't matter, either way.

"Did he—" Jean swallows, meeting Armin's eyes. "Did he know what was happening?" he asks in a rush. "Was he scared? Was it quick?"

After all this time, the memories are no easier to deal with, colored in revulsion and shame, welling up in his throat and choking him from the inside. Briefly, Armin considers lying.

As though reading his thoughts, Jean says, "No."

Armin sucks in a breath. "I haven't even—"

"No," Jean says again, sharper. "Look. You have his memories, right? I want to hear what he would say, not you." His gaze cuts through Armin, intense and grave, a tinge of desperation wavering below the surface. "I need to."

And that—that's not fair, it's not fair what Jean's asking of him, to go digging up graveyards they have no right to visit. There are places he doesn't go, places that should only belong to Bertholdt and places that never should have existed in the first place and this is something that Jean should understand, how life has made mass graves of them. That's all they are now, vessels to house all the friends they've traded away.

Maybe that's the problem. They live in a world where nobody is a stranger to loss, to scraping out a cavity in their chest for all the people who died for them. Mikasa's family. Connie and Eren's mothers. Ymir, who Historia had loved with all her heart, and his grandfather, who had loved Armin with all of his.

And Marco, who Jean so desperately wants to see now, even if it's through the mouth of the one who murdered him, and Armin thinks about what he would give to see his parents again, executed for dreaming too big.

"Okay," he says finally, and Jean sags against the wall. "Okay."

"Okay," Jean echoes, hoarse.

Closing his eyes, Armin reaches out to Bertholdt's presence in the back of his mind, an oppressive and solemn weight ever since the morning he violently tore open the old wound of Marco's death. He touches fragments first, the remnants of his disgust and regret stabbing into his gut before the memory of the horrible event fully seeps into him.

"It was horrible," Armin blurts, and it barely sounds like him, the words all mangled and wrong. "I—I mean—"

"No," Jean says, even though his fists are clenched on top of his knees. "No, I want to hear it."

"It was—" He struggles to find a better word, something that would properly encapsulate how nightmarish and vile it had been, the overwhelming nausea and horror Bertholdt had felt when the Titan discarded the cold half of Marco's body on the ground.

He swallows and starts again. "We were on the rooftops in Trost…"

It had been bad luck more than anything, something that screamed of cruelty and unfairness. One of the few moments where they'd let their guard down enough to talk about their true plans, and Marco had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The worst part, as Bertholdt had spent many sleepless nights thinking, was that it had been utterly meaningless and completely avoidable. If they'd just chosen a different rooftop, kept their voice lower, or even refrained from speaking at all, it never would've happened.

It was a grim reminder that as powerful as the three of them were, they were still helpless in the face of the brutality of their existence, slaves to Marley. Cursed, all of them, to be butchers.

In Shiganshina, he'd been miles above the carnage, far away from the blood and destruction. In Trost, Marco had been right in front of him, close enough to touch, warm and alive. He'd died begging for them to stop, to explain themselves, because that was just the type of person he was—someone who, even while being murdered by his friends, refused to condemn them without understanding why first.

He hadn't deserved to die, and they'd killed him anyway.

Jean listens to all of this without changing expression, back stiff against the wall. The white of his knuckles and the tightness of his throat are the only things that betray his otherwise unaffected demeanor, and Armin wonders how he hasn't lunged across the room yet. A younger Jean would have.

When he finishes, his voice is thick with tears. "I'm sorry," he chokes, and it feels like the words are being strip-mined from his chest, agonizing and utterly pointless. "I'm sorry. It never should have happened."

For a moment, the only sounds in the room are of Armin crying.

"I won't lie and say it isn't shitty," Jean says, after what feels like an eternity of silence. "When I found out, I wanted to bring you back so I could kill you again."

"I'm sorry," Armin repeats uncontrollably, and Jean hushes him with a hand.

"It would be easier if all humans were good and all Titans were evil," he continues, slow and deliberate, "but I guess that isn't the world we live in. The one we live in is hell. It likes to hurt us and take away the people we love. We've lost so many people, Bertl, and we're going to lose more." His voice cracks on the last word, and he has to pause to recollect himself. "It happened. You did it. And you feel it, I know you do, because Armin wouldn't have freaked the fuck out otherwise."

Jean lets out a humorless chuckle, running a hand through his hair. "I'm never gonna forget it, you know. Marco was my best friend. He was the first person outside my mother to believe in me, and he made me want to be better. It's actually because of him that I'm able to talk to you like this right now." Quieter, he adds, "He was going to do good things."

"Let's be real. None of us are going to live very long. That's just the way it is. So the best we can do is keep the people we love close by as long as we can." Here, he gives a watery laugh, tilting his head towards the ceiling and breaking eye contact. "I could do it, you know," he says. "I could spend the rest of my life hating you for what you've done, what you've taken from me. All those people you killed."

Letting out a shuddering breath, he turns and looks straight at Armin. "But I don't. I don't hate you at all. So that's why I'm going to forgive you."

A sob threatens to bubble out of his chest. Armin presses the heel of his palm into one of his eyes to contain it, feeling tears slip down his wrist like blood tracks. Another wave of silence overtakes them.

Across the room, Jean scrubs his face with the back of his arm. "Well, say something, man," he grumbles, clearly uncomfortable. "You just gonna sit there, after I spilled my guts to you?"

The part of him that is Armin almost laughs, because there's the brash asshole they're all familiar with. The part of him that isn't whispers, "I don't deserve this."

"Too bad," Jean sniffs. "It's not up to you."

Another memory—Bertholdt awake in the barracks at night, feeling a piece of him die with every sleepy breath he hears from his friends, knowing he'll be responsible for snuffing them out. "But how do you love someone who's done such horrible things?"

Jean's face softens. "You just do," he says. "That's all there is to it." He pauses, as though remembering something, and then adds, "I'm sorry we weren't able to find you."

"Oh," Armin says quietly. He'd forgotten. "It's okay. It went the way it had to."

"Yeah," Jean intones, after a moment. "Shame, that."

vi.

They're taking a break from clearing the inside of Maria, eating breakfast within the cluster of broken-down buildings they'd slept in the night before.

Hange and Levi sit cross-legged on the roof of one of the smaller houses, sipping from their canteens and chattering amiably. At least, Hange is chattering and Levi is scowling and making profane comments under his breath in reply. Eren is nowhere to be found, having left earlier to wander the remains of the town in one of his bouts of quiet rumination, leaving Mikasa to watch for wayward Titans, a lone sentry perched on the steeple of what used to be an old church. Armin hopes they're both eating enough; he stows away a portion of his rations just in case.

The rest of them are gathered in a loose semicircle around a makeshift shooting rest. Bored, Sasha and Connie had dug up an old rifle from somewhere, and together they and Jean take turns firing at the cups and bottles they've managed to scrounge from the wreckage and line up on a partially collapsed wall.

Jean catches him watching them and the corner of his mouth quirks up in a fraction of a smile. "Hey," he says, lowering the rifle. "You want in?"

While he's distracted, Connie steals the last of his breakfast—half a potato—and devours it in two quick bites. Trying not to laugh, Armin replies, "Sure."

Jean passes off the rifle, then freezes at the sight of his empty plate. "Sasha," he snarls. The accused squeals out a litany of denials, taking off with Jean fast on her heels as Connie hides his snickers behind the hand he's using to wipe away the evidence of his crime.

The atmosphere is less gloomy today, their antics less empty and false. It's a pleasant surprise; they'd fallen into the pattern of wearing the wrong versions of themselves, desperate to pretend the war hadn't damaged them inside, that they were still normal. Grinning, Armin presses his cheek against the stock of the rifle. It's good to see that give way to something more genuine.

He'd never been very good at shooting as a cadet, just like he hadn't been good at anything else that wasn't taught in the classroom. However, he thinks he sees the novelty of it, the power that comes with taking something dangerous and commanding it. Without Shadis standing behind him with a scoring sheet, he might learn to enjoy it too.

Settling his elbows on the shooting rest, Armin aims at the makeshift targets. The butt of the rifle slots against his shoulder in a way that's more familiar and comfortable than he ever remembers it being, and moving on pure instinct, he fires.

The world doesn't so much fade away as it quiets, shrinks down to the crack of the bullet leaving the chamber and the breathlessness that comes with it. A beer stein spins off the wall. The metal cup after goes flying backwards, and the line of cans goes toppling down one after the other, every bullet hitting its mark as his hands move automatically: reloading, aiming, firing. The last mark—a slender glass bottle—explodes into shards, and exhilarated, Armin spins around to see if the others saw it too.

The celebration dies in his throat. He's no longer inside Wall Maria, but rather standing in the middle of a featureless desert, continuous in every direction he looks. Where the cups had been before is a single bullet-littered target, speckled with bullseyes.

Turning in a small circle, Armin tries to gauge where he is. There are no defining landmarks, only grains of sand, a million little crystals grinding under the soles of his boots. A memory, he thinks. It has to be; he doesn't know what else it could be, and yet this is different somehow, disparate from the hazy and timeworn recollections, fraught with emotional debris. The clarity of his surroundings, the cool air on his skin—it's more vivid and sharp than anything he's been shown before, as though being viewed through one of Hange's magnifying glasses.

When he looks up, all the breath leaves him at once. A plethora of stars envelopes the night sky. They form winding paths of incandescent droplets through the dark, and Armin momentarily loses himself to the sheer beauty of them, stretched endlessly past the horizon. He wonders if this is what the ocean is like: vast and eternal, enduring of the passage of time.

"That was amazing, Bertl," a voice says from right beside him. "I wish I could shoot as well as you."

A boy no older than eight or nine smiles up at him. He has small hazel eyes and a shock of blond hair, and though his face is round and his hair is parted down the middle in an old childhood design, Armin recognizes him immediately.

"Reiner," he breathes, shocked. "How did you get here?"

Reiner tilts his head to the side. "What do you mean?" he asks. "We've always been together."

Unthinkingly, Armin reaches out to touch him. Just before his fingertips can make contact, brush the fabric of his shirt or graze his skin, the desert and stars flicker out of existence and Reiner disappears, face replaced by Eren's as the ruins of Wall Maria restore themselves around him.

"I've never seen you shoot like that," Eren comments, in eerie likeness to Reiner. "Have you been practicing without me?"

Armin blinks, disoriented. The taste of dust and the press of the rifle against his cheek does little to ground him as he tries to remember when Eren got back. How much time had passed? A few minutes? Seconds? Had he been here the whole time? In the distance, he can hear Sasha laughing as Jean and Connie scuffle on the ground, shouting insults at each other.

He registers too late that his hand is still outstretched in front of him. Disconcerted, he drops it to his side and steps away from the gun rest, Eren watching him the whole time.

"I don't think that was my shooting," he says carefully, and Eren's gaze sharpens. They're both thinking the same thing: Bertholdt had been the best marksman in their class.

Then, Armin spots the dark circles under Eren's eyes, so apparent that they could easily be mistaken for bruises. Grateful for something else to focus on, he reaches into his satchel for the flask of water and baked potato he saved earlier.

"You need to eat," Armin tells him. "I know things have been hard lately, but you have to take care of yourself. And not just because humanity is counting on you," he adds, because that's something that's been at the forefront of his mind lately, the fact that they're all that remains of the Survey Corps, with its burdens and duties resting on their shoulders. "You're my friend, and I worry about you."

He's met with silence. Pausing, Armin looks up from his satchel to find Eren surveying the rifle he's propped up against the shooting rest with a strange expression.

"Eren?" Armin asks, unsure if he's offended him somehow.

"You know," Eren says apropos nothing, "you talk in your sleep sometimes."

Armin frowns. He knows that—they all know that, the nonsense ramblings of someone having dreams that don't belong to them. He wonders what Eren's getting at. "What do I say?"

"Names, mostly." There's another beat of silence. "You said his name just now."

"I don't understand."

Eren hesitates, then looks directly at him. "Us, Armin. Humanity is counting on us." He glances down at the food and water Armin had been about to give him and shakes his head. "Keep it," he says, turning to leave. "I have my own rations."

Armin watches his back retreat with a heavy sense of foreboding. He realizes, with a sinking feeling, what unfinished business might mean.

vii.

"You're distracted," Levi snaps, voice taking on the accusatory quality it does when he's concerned and trying to be flippant about it.

Armin startles out of his daze. They're back at the Survey Headquarters, where he's been relapsing into his old ways of drifting aimlessly through the halls like an apparition. He's sure the others have noticed, judging by the wide berth they've been giving him lately, but he hadn't expected Levi to confront him about it.

"I haven't been sleeping well, sir," he hazards. It's partially true, anyway.

Levi's irritated expression doesn't change. "We both know that's horseshit, Arlert."

A year ago, Armin would've cringed at the crudeness of a superior, but now the profanity is reassuring. There's some comfort to be found in the fact that the whole world could be burning down and Levi would still be the same foul-mouthed, neurotic asshole they all know.

He can feel part of his resolve crumbling under Levi's glare. "There's just been a lot going on," he admits.

"Well, when the fuck isn't there?" Levi mutters. "Look, Arlert. I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly." Armin nods. "Are you in control of yourself?"

Armin blinks, taken aback. He's not sure if he should be baffled or insulted. "Is there any reason for you to believe I'm not?"

"Not me, no," Levi says, and Armin relaxes before tensing again as he adds, "But that Jaeger brat seems to think differently."

Ice crawls up his veins, stinging him all the way down to the bones. "Eren?"

"Yeah, your little identity crisis scared the shit out of him." Levi says this like it's incredibly inconveniencing, but also remarkably boring. "And now I hear you're spacing out on expeditions and hallucinating Hoover's friends wherever you go. It's bothersome." His expression grows more serious, as he fixes Armin with a piercing stare. "I hope you understand what's at stake here. You and Jaeger are currently humanity's greatest assets, and I can't afford to have either of you compromised."

Sometimes, Armin catches Levi running his fingers over a worn, winged patch, before tucking it back into the inside of his jacket. He knows there's a responsibility, one that belongs to him and only him, that had been given when he'd been allowed to live. "I understand."

"Right. So let me ask again: whose will do you follow?"

The Captain's sharp eyes bore into him. Armin has no doubt that if he answers with any ounce of dishonesty, Levi will see it. "My own," he says.

Levi regards him for another unnerving moment, before dipping his head slightly. "Good," he says. "I chose you for a reason, Arlert. Don't fucking make me regret it."

Nodding, Armin lets out the breath he's been holding. "Yessir," he croaks. Then, "I need to talk to Eren."

Levi spins on his heel. "There'll be time for that later," he states, marching down the hall. He gestures for Armin to follow without turning around and Armin scrambles to obey, before his blood freezes for the second time that day.

"The Armored Titan's been spotted near Holst. We ride out in an hour."

viii.

They strap on their maneuver gear in short, practiced movements, silent save for the metallic scrape of blades sheathing and the sounds of buckles being fastened. The miasma of dread and resignation seeping from all their pores is suffocating, so dense and opaque that it's almost tangible. It's the same after all these months; no matter what they do, it seems they're always destined to end up back here: grimly preparing to die.

"Your only goal is to target and take down the Armored Titan," Levi tells them when they gather in the courtyard by the horses. "If the Beast Titan appears, you are to leave him to me and focus on disarming Braun." His expression darkens considerably at the mention of Zeke, but his inflection doesn't change as he continues, "You'll each be assigned two Thunder Spears to carry. Aim to kill. There's no reason to keep either of them alive now that the serum is gone."

Something like unease stirs in Armin's stomach. A horrible sense of inevitability, sending palpitations to his palms.

He recalls the bleak look in Bertholdt's eyes in Shiganshina, a dark and dull acceptance that still haunts him some nights. It disturbed him, how distant and unfeeling Bertholdt had been, a far cry from the awkward boy that slept in strange positions and nervously picked at the threads of his too-small uniform during their training days.

No, the Bertholdt on the rooftops had been ready to kill them all. He had killed Armin, incinerated him beyond recognition, and Armin doesn't need to go looking through memories that aren't his to see what happened next. He's in the unique position of knowing what it's like to be two people in a single moment: one screaming for his life, the other ending it.

I feel like any outcome would be acceptable, Bertholdt had thought, minutes before his death. That's right, no one's at fault here.

Then what, Armin wonders, are they all being punished for? Reiner, Bertholdt, and Annie, three kids caught in a bloody crossfire, pawns in a centuries-long game. The people inside the walls, unaware of their blackened heritages. Thousands of useless deaths to feed the invisible hands pulling their strings, and for what? For what?

No, Armin refuses to accept this.

"Wait," he says, cutting off Levi's brief. "Let me talk to Reiner." He pauses to comb his head for scraps of a cogent argument. "He suffered a large defeat in Shiganshina. He's lost Annie and Bertholdt, and he's shaken. We've got the Colossal Titan now; he must see that the tide of the war is turning in our favor, and if I talk to him, we might be able to take him in alive and get some information, maybe convince him—convince him to…"

Armin trails off as everyone turns to stare at him with varying expressions of disbelief. Levi's eyes have narrowed imperceptibly, mouth pressed into a terrifying flat line.

Eren is the one who breaks the silence. "I knew it," he says.

Armin frowns. "Knew what?"

"You're not yourself." Eren's fists are clenched by his sides, and he isn't looking at Armin. "You haven't been yourself since that morning."

"That morning?" Armin echoes, caught off guard. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the fact that I've been sleeping next to a traitor!" The last word is practically a scream, and Armin takes a step back, wide-eyed.

Eren doesn't think he's being haunted by Bertholdt; he thinks Armin is Bertholdt, and that's all sorts of complicated and fucked up that he doesn't even know where to begin. "They were never traitors," Armin says, focusing on the part of the sentence that doesn't threaten to give him a splitting headache. "They were pitted against us from the start."

"So you're a liar, too," Eren replies coldly. "That's good to know."

Anger flares behind his skull. "Stop talking like he's still here," Armin snaps. "Stop talking to me like I'm not!"

Mikasa steps between them. "You need to calm down," she says.

"No," Armin says, "I need the people I love not to suffer."

"So now you love him?" Eren retorts, and Armin's mouth snaps shut. "You give yourself away."

"That's not what I—"

But Eren has already seized on the implication of the word like it's all the proof he needs. He pushes past Mikasa and steps right up to Armin, their noses centimeters apart. "You never wanted to spare Reiner before," he spits. "You would've killed him, and you would've killed Bertholdt and Annie too. You never cared for them after they betrayed us. So why, Armin—if that's really you—why the hell would you care now?"

"Because I know what it's like for them now!" Armin shouts. "I know because I'm the one who lives with it, I'm the one who sees the faces of the people they've killed, I'm the one who has to feel their sins, their pain. I was their friend, so don't tell me I don't have a reason to care!"

He shoves Eren backwards, vicious, incensed by weeks of tucking every raw and private wound he found in Bertholdt behind his ribcage. "Do you think I enjoy it?" Armin hisses. "Finding out they were just like us, just trying to survive? I would've killed them without knowing any better. You're vain to think that they're devils and we're saints, and if you really believe they wanted this, then you're more blind than I thought."

"Are you even listening to yourself?" Eren demands. "Those are Bertholdt's words, not yours," and that's when Armin loses it.

"IT'S ME, YOU FUCKING IDIOT," he explodes. This time, he grabs Eren's collar and wrenches him in close, screaming in his face. "BERTHOLDT'S DEAD. HE'S DEAD BECAUSE I FUCKING KILLED HIM, I ATE HIM, WHY CAN'T YOU FUCKING ACCEPT THAT HE'S GONE—"

A fist collides with his cheek. His head snaps to the side with the force of the blow and Armin feels the bone crack as he goes down hard, pain erupting all along the side that strikes the stone floor of the courtyard. Immediately, a burst of fever heat engulfs him, Titan abilities working quickly to repair the damage.

Above him, Levi flexes his hand, looking put-upon. "You know," he says flatly, "when I said there would be time for this later, I didn't mean now." Despite the bland tone, his eyes hold a stern warning.

Armin clenches and unclenches his jaw. Levi hadn't pulled his punch. "What," he grits, "you think I'm being controlled by Bertholdt too?"

"He's dead, Arlert. And unlike the fools you call your friends, I don't believe in ghosts."

"But Reiner isn't," Armin insists. "Reiner isn't dead."

Levi says, "Get to the fucking point."

The others have been largely quiet up until this point, struck dumb by Armin's request. Thin-lipped and tense, they stand behind Eren's vengeful form, watching him with wary eyes. Armin glances across Jean, Connie, and Sasha's ashen faces and lingers on Mikasa's impassive one, before settling on Levi once more.

"You asked me earlier if I knew what was at stake," Armin says lowly. "Well, sir, this is what's at stake. The world we live in is cruel and heartless, but we shouldn't have to be. We should choose not to be."

"I wish I could tell you our friends were evil. I wish I could tell you that they made the wrong choices, but the truth is, we were just given better choices than them. But all of us—we aren't devils or saints. We're just people, born with our backs against the wall, trying our best to stay alive."

He takes a shaking breath and turns away from Levi. "Why do you think I want to see the ocean, Eren?"

His friend visibly stiffens. "It was in the book your grandfather gave you," he answers neutrally.

Armin shakes his head. "There's more to that." He licks his lips, choosing his next words carefully. "The ocean is a beautiful place," he says. "Something beautiful like that, in an ugly world like this—it should be impossible. And yet, somehow it exists, right beside all this blood and death."

"What I'm asking…" He falters. "I know it's selfish. It's absurd and impractical and, I guess it's just as likely as me finding the ocean. But I think we should be allowed to hope for things that are impossible. That's the only way to survive in this place." He looks up at Eren and the others, pleading. "I'm not saying they haven't done horrible things, and I'm certainly not asking you to forgive them. At this point, an apology would be a joke. But we can't keep doing this. We can't keep killing each other like this."

"So please," he finishes, "let me talk to Reiner. Maybe you don't understand, but you're not the one who has to feel it."

There's a moment of silence, all-encompassing and stretched so long that it threatens to undo his composure completely. Armin doesn't know why he holds his breath, but he does it anyway, heartbeat bruising the inside of his ribs.

Finally, Jean speaks up. "This is fucking terrible," he mutters. "Fuck. Fine. I'm in. I just hope you know you're insane."

"Me too," Connie says, and Sasha nods, solemn, though the both of them are pale. "I mean, not the insane part but—yeah."

Armin releases his breath, feeling his lungs compress in his chest. Picking himself off the ground, he turns to Eren and Mikasa, who regard him dispassionately. He hesitates between the two, then faces Eren.

"I don't know what I have to say to convince you I'm still myself," he tells him, "but Bertholdt's given up. He gave up when he accepted the world as it is. I refuse to." Armin shrugs, lips curling in a wry smile. "Maybe that doesn't mean anything to you, though. I guess it just depends on how much you trust me."

"I trust you," Eren says softly, after a lengthy pause. "I'd trust you with my life."

Mikasa doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to. Wherever Eren goes, she goes. Whatever he does, she will do too.

Levi's face is still unsettlingly blank when Armin meets his eyes again, studying him as though he's searching for cracks in his skin. For one hysterical moment, Armin thinks he's going to deny him and condemn Reiner to his fate, but then Levi sighs, saying, "I can't guarantee we'll be able to bring him alive."

Relief almost knocks him to his knees. "I know," Armin breathes. "I just want to try."

"Then in the event that you fail, can I trust you to kill your friend?"

Levi asks this calmly, casually, the same way he would ask someone to dust a counter or clean the inside of a cabinet. As though it's a trivial request, and Armin supposes it is here, where every day is a massacre and every person is a potential goodbye. It should be a difficult question, considering everything that came before it, but Armin finds the answer coming easy, his resolve as steady as his hands will be around his blades.

"Of course," he says.

After all, he's done it before.

ix.

The top of the wall is quiet. It's a windless day, the sky blue and clear and the sun a luminous eye peering down, drawing their shadows long on the stone.

If only it were raining, Armin thinks, just as Reiner comes to a stop a few meters away. He holds himself like he's brittle, as though one wrong step might cause him to fracture into pieces, and Armin gets the feeling that he's looking at a shade of what used to be a person, flickering and barely there.

For a moment, they just stare at each other, neither moving. Then, Reiner says, "You understand I have to kill you, right?"

Beside Armin, Eren tenses. Armin holds out an arm to stop him from doing anything rash. "You don't," he says. "It doesn't need to be this way."

Reiner gives him an empty smile. "It's always been this way," he says. "This was how it was always going to go. The Devils of Paradis and the Warriors of Marley, destined to kill each other."

"No one needs to die," Armin insists. "Not if you come with us."

Reiner laughs, raw and cracking and completely devoid of any feeling. "You think I want to live?" he asks, as though what Armin is offering is very funny but also killing him from the inside. "After everything? No, I came here to finish this."

He advances, the grip on his blades tightening, and every muscle in Armin's body goes rigid on instinct. Forcefully, he reminds himself that Jean and Connie are latched to the side of the wall out of view, with Mikasa and Sasha mirroring their position on the other. If anything goes wrong, a single word from Hange will send them soaring from their hiding places to cut off Reiner's head.

The thought is not as reassuring as it should be.

"I'm sorry I was unreliable," Armin blurts.

Reiner freezes mid-step, gravel skidding away from his boots. Voice dangerous, he growls, "What did you say?"

Armin's blades dip towards the ground as he takes a step forward towards Reiner, something unnamed and desperate welling up in his throat. Eren makes an alarmed noise, but makes no move to stop him. "I wish I could have been stronger for you," he tells Reiner. "Then maybe we both would have gotten to go home."

Reiner gapes at him—in horror or awe, Armin doesn't know. It must be one thing to hear about Bertholdt's death, but another to be confronted by it himself, and right then, even with the Titan markings still fresh on his face, he looks so painfully human, pale and just this side of distraught.

"You could have gone home," Armin repeats, and it's him speaking this time. "Why didn't you?"

Low and broken, Reiner answers, "It's not home if I'm alone."

He'd been right. They'd stripped him of everything in Shiganshina, everything except his body and the place he'd come from, until all that was left was the acidic belly of Marley, waiting to digest and craft a new warrior from his bones. But that couldn't mean anything anymore. Surely Reiner realized that now. Bertholdt had, just before his final moments.

Nothing could have made a difference. Not in a world that is this cruel.

Armin can't promise a difference, but he can offer something else. "You have a choice—"

"No," Reiner says harshly, cutting him off. He shifts the grip on his blades. "You and I both know people like me don't get to choose."

"I do," Armin says, because it's true.

His reply seems to take Reiner by surprise, because his eyes widen minutely and he makes a strangled sound, wavering for just a second. After a beat, he asks, hoarse, "Then why the hell are you bothering with this?"

Armin wonders what Reiner sees when he looks at him now, if he sees the weak, scared kid from the 104th or the Survey Corps soldier. The friend he betrayed, or his partner's killer. He exhales. "Maybe I'm tired of seeing people die, Reiner. Maybe I don't want to lose any more of my friends."

These days, when Armin allows himself to sift through the past few years like the yellowed pages of a well-loved book, he sees:

Annie alone on the training grounds with her fists in front of her face, moving with a liquid grace unmatched by anyone else. The dust around her boots rising as she sweeps invisible opponents off their feet in beautiful and precise movements, the sun turning her hair golden and her blue eyes cool in the summer heat.

Reiner in the rain with two packs thrown over his back, broad shoulders pushing through the storm and down the muddy forest path as lightning makes his teeth gleam white. His large hands clasped around Armin's own, his voice reverberating through his chest, steadfast and strong.

Bertholdt staring out at the lake behind the barracks, in nobody's shadow, the moon tracing the edges of his face in glowing white. This time he doesn't leave the light, words soft and wanting as he speaks of home.

Armin sees them, three characters in an old story that he already knows, one that he cannot influence or change and can only see through to the end.

"Come with us," he whispers, "please," and Reiner drops his blades onto the ground and cries.

x.

There are precautions. As per Hange's instructions, one of Reiner's arms is to be cut off at the elbow at all times, to prevent any unexpected transformations. Guard shifts are assigned, rotating every few hours with either Armin or Eren taking the night watch, and it's made bluntly clear that any move in the wrong direction will result in a Thunder Spear through the throat.

"You're taking this rather well," Hange had said, borderline mocking, when Reiner acquiesced to everything with a single, expressionless nod. "No negotiations? Don't want to haggle the terms?"

He'd replied, "You've already done the worst thing you can to me," and that had been the end of it.

Later that night, Armin finds him in the back of the ramshackle tavern they're staying in, leant against the wall with his head tipped back and eyes closed. Mikasa places a hand on his shoulder on her way out, squeezing warmly before disappearing to the front where the others are. Reiner doesn't acknowledge him at all, completely motionless as Armin settles on the ground across from him, watching the lone candle in the room paint the wood different shades of amber.

"It should have been me," Reiner says quietly, after a few minutes of sitting in silence. "He didn't follow the plan because I was hurt. That's why he died."

He died because I ate him, Armin almost says, but he stops himself, clenches his jaw and looks away. "He did it because he loved you," he says instead.

"He shouldn't have," Reiner says, and Armin isn't sure if he's talking about the dying or the loving. Nevertheless, he doesn't respond; after all, he's not supposed to be here either, had survived in the place of another, at the expense of another. It's the same story told over and over again, the living hollowed out to carry more bodies within them. He supposes that's just something else they'll have to live with, not getting to choose the people who love them. Not getting to choose how they die.

In the darkness, Reiner murmurs, "I promised I'd take him home."

"He got to see you," Armin replies. "I think that's close enough."

Reiner falls quiet then, looking so startlingly young and lost that Armin is briefly reminded of the boy he'd seen in that nameless desert under the glistening sky, bright paths curving into the night. In that instant, the inconsequence of his existence strikes him, as he considers the staleness of his heartbeat and how small his body is, the little impact he has on the formation of star systems.

Tomorrow, the Survey Corps will return to the capital wearing the thin face of victory. For them, there will be ceremony. For Reiner, there will be trials. He'll be imprisoned, interrogated, likely tortured. Perhaps they'll execute him too, or perhaps he'll join the Scouts instead, as Eren had; perhaps he'll die alongside the rest of them one day. Maybe that's where this all ends, with their bodies crushed and eaten by Titans.

The stars will outlive them, Armin knows. If they ever extinguish, it will be beyond a thousand lifetimes from now, long after the ground has claimed their bones.

But that's for later. Here, in this space they have carved for themselves, they are just two people, two tired kids in a war that none of them started. Neither warriors nor soldiers.

"Hey, Reiner," Armin says, watching their shadows sway gently on the floorboards. "Tell me about the sea."

Across the room, the candlelight flickers over a wan smile.