Hello everyone! Just to clarify this chapter could be read as a continuation of the previews one, so I recommend reading that one first if you still haven't.

That's all, hope you enjoy!

...

Eren can't sleep. So, he thinks about his mother.

And even if he's been doing it since he last saw her (the words appearing in his brain without him noticing: before she was killed, before she was eaten) this time Eren knows it's a bad idea.

Because the expected anger, betrayal, nostalgia, and sadness he normally feels are tinted with something else, something terrifying Eren really doesn't want to face at the moment. Not when graduation is only a few hours away. Not when he so desperately needs to become the embodiment of the word will.

The will to fight.

He can't lose that. Not now, and not ever.

But the questions do come up, and the voice that asks them over and over in the middle of the night is not his own. It's one that's been dropping these cryptic messages since he first politely asked her to train him.

Annie's voice demands to be heard when he is on the ground, with his hands behind his back or with her foot on his face. Even in his sleep. Always demanding attention. But even if he pretends to give in, Eren knows how to fight it, and how to make it, her, go away.

He just has to think about his dead mother. Or about his people, the walls, and the titans. Of everything that was taken away from him.

Only that and the sightless glimpse of doubt disappears from his mind completely.

Her voice buried until it resurfaces as a shadow, or a different kind of monster than the one he is preparing to fight, in his dreams. And thankfully, when he wakes up, Eren forgets.

But not this time.

With sudden adrenaline traveling down his body, Eren gets up. He needs fresh air, the cold of the night to help him come to his senses. To stop the poison running through his mind, the troubled thoughts that Eren knows in the long run just do not matter.

So what if the most capable soldiers end up only protecting themselves? So what if it's unfair?

Life was never fair, Eren's been aware of that since the age of nine. When Armin was being bullied for having ideas, when he saw less than half the soldiers that went outside the walls return with missing members.

He knows.

And still.

Eren doesn't want to be alone, but he keeps walking anyway. Armin is sound asleep, as he should be. So he accepts the silence, and how somber and different this anger feels. It's the kind that only appears when he remembers Annie's comments, or when he thinks about his father, the key hanging from his neck like a burdensome rock.

He enters the forest and has to blink a few times to accept the fact that they are actually here. Before he can say anything, his body moves, stepping over a branch and causing the three heads to turn around in unison.

Eren would have laughed if the situation wasn't so bizarre.

"Hey, Eren." Reiner says. He is the first one to talk. "What are you doing here?"

A part of Eren wants to believe he sounds different, suspicious even (of what?) but Reiner's just his good old self; casual and self-assuring.

Eren wants to punch him in the face.

"Same as you, I guess." he doesn't recognize his own voice, so he clears his throat. "Couldn't sleep."

Reiner nods. And just like that, anything the three of them had going on is over. Reiner glances at Eren as Bertolt starts walking, and after Eren nods Reiner squeezes his shoulder in a comforting way that pisses him off even more. Then, he leaves.

Eren shouldn't be angry at Reiner, he doesn't want to be, but he can't help it. He is angry at everyone, at everything. The heat of his own body becoming unbearable even in the cold of the night.

He glances at Annie, who doesn't look at him. Her neutral expression present as always. Eren thinks about telling her a joke, maybe something that Jean would say, and almost slaps himself for even thinking about it. He doesn't know what to do, but he doesn't want to leave either, so he stays put, hands in his pocket and his body still burning with something he just can't place.

"Don't you have your personal guards to talk to?" she asks, sarcastically, and Eren wonders why she even stayed. Why is she talking to him?

What was she talking about with Berthold and Reiner?

He lets that thought fall with all the others he is purposefully deciding to ignore, and instead admits: "Armin's asleep." Annie offers nothing. "Mikasa might be too, I-I didn't check."

"Wouldn't look too good if you entered the girl's cabin unannounced." She says, with such composure that, for someone who didn't know her, it may look like she's serious.

But Eren knows better. A fuzzy kind of flashback forming in his mind, of one of the last times they trained together. When she taught him a move, and out of nowhere Mikasa threw Reiner at them. Didn't she tease him back then too? Said something about "talking to girls"? It felt like it had happened so long ago. Eren stays quiet, so Annie, incredibly, keeps talking.

"You better go back Yeager, or you're going to miss your own graduation."

He tenses up, can't help but ask her, almost in an inquisitorial way. She never really told him, Eren actually heard it from Bertolt two weeks ago.

"Is it true… are you joining the military police?"

She looks at him like he just asked the most stupid question in the world, and replies, "I am in the top ten."

"Why?"

He knows what's coming, another attempt at a joke or the answer he got back then: "I can't even pretend to be stupid enough to play soldier in this insane world",but Annie surprises him:

"Because I don't want to die."

Eren looks at his feet, not embarrassed but also not ready to hear her answer either.

"Are we… do you think we will see each other again?"

She chuckles, but she doesn't reply the way Eren had prepared himself for. Again.

"Do you want to?"

He feels the need to grab the key, but doesn't.

"…Yeah"

At this she reacts, an Annie way of reaction, squinting her eyes and whispering with gritted teeth, "Why? We don't train together anymore, so what does it matter to you anyway?"

Eren wants to laugh, at her words and tone, and as a way to cut the tension he feels between them and within himself. He replies, almost smiling.

"We are friends", he declares, even if he hears how fake it sounds for both of them. He is trying his best, giving the circumstances. "I would like to see you, sometime."

And then it escapes from him, without thinking or wishing or trying, as if his brain knew better, a cry for help or the release he needed screaming in a whisper:

"If I don't die."

Annie doesn't look at him when she murmurs.

"If you don't die."

He follows whatever intuition is guiding him in the most vivid dream he ever had, and sits on the log next to her. Without invitation and expecting the worst, living up to his unwelcomed nickname, Eren holds her hand.

Annie doesn't say anything but he feels her tense up. Her hands are not cold, which is what surprises him the most. Even if he's touched her before, this kind of… intimacy was beyond his imagination. It just wasn't supposed to happen.

But it does. And he only lets her go once she gets up. Without looking at him or saying a word, Annie leaves. And Eren does too, a few minutes later.

The heat leaves him as his fatigue returns.

Eren sleeps but doesn't dream. Luckily, Armin wakes him up just in time for graduation.

...

Thanks for reading!

-vigigraz