reupload: i deleted this once because ppl were confused about the nature and purpose of this fic. I didn't dislike the ending of aot, nor do i think i can write better than a published author that's sold millions of manga volumes. so with that in mind, my only purpose for writing any of my fics is to appreciate something I love

this is not an ending rewrite or a fix-it

thank you

When we waded in the water, looking out at the horizon where another world lay, behind me I could hear the ocean's waves coming up and falling down, in a strangely elegant self-obliteration. Despite the sun's warmth and the moist clouds overhead, there was a feeling of emptiness and anxiety. The wind blew very softly on my ears, the way it passes by pink conch shells half-buried in the beach, whistling them with sorrowful murmurs. But it wasn't the shells I could hear. I heard the lost dying voices from a faraway place across the sea like an echo moving backward in time. The foaming cascade of waves eroded the shore. A little more disappeared — and a little more. I felt that whatever I thought could be real. And I don't believe I was wrong, even though I'm desperately alone inside my memories.

There's nothing I can do to avoid those futures looming ahead of me. But if I could choose to be the sea or the sand, I would choose to be the sand.

# # #

There was a stirring of microscopic eye muscles and finger muscles in the catatonic body. At the movement, low voices began to murmur in the room. Each one was so very quiet like scattered pieces of a dream.

"He's waking up—" "Eren, are you—" "He's confused. We should—" "Maybe if you loosened the restraints—" "We can't take any chances."

A total darkness engulfed Eren and in that total darkness, the urgent sound of talking started to swell like a small light expanding, growing brighter, brighter. Loosened drowsy muscles gathered up under inert flesh. Eren tried to move. He found he couldn't. Not because his body had failed, but because he'd been secured to a chair with leather straps. "Where am I?" He flexed his eyelids. The total darkness remained.

"You're several stories underground."

"That's right. So if you even think about changing into your titan—"

"Titan?" Eren said. "I'm sorry. I'm not sure what that means."

The blindfold fell away. A source of light exploded on his retina. Carefully Eren lifted the skin of his eyelids. Eyesight soaked back into his freshly born eyes. Four people stood in front of him. Eren saw their necks. He gazed higher. Above him, the faces blurred, as if Eren were staring through a sheet of rain. Eren's arms strained against the leather straps. His head was heavy again, falling limp.

"Eren Jaeger." A voice behind him spoke into his ear. "For the past four years, your behavior has grown increasingly erratic. You acted on your own and defied direct orders. You withheld critical information about titans and their connection to the royal bloodline. You refused to speak out against dangerous extremist ideologies. And you snuck away to meet secretly with foreign enemies while lying to your superior officers about your location. Due to their gross oversight, the authority of the Survey Corps was revoked, and you were put in the hands of the Military Police. With our approval, you were given a newly engineered drug designed to inhibit the effects of trauma on a person's psyche. It was our hypothesis that your behavior was a result of disturbing memories that suddenly surfaced four years ago."

Thoughts moved in Eren's head in sluggish laboring revolutions. Pieces of his mind were missing. He couldn't imagine what pieces could be lost from him. He couldn't even feel them gone. Leather held him down.

"What is your name?"

"Eren Jaeger."

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"Do you recognize the people in front of you?"

"I—" Eren drudged at his neck. He managed to raise his face at a slight angle and search the faces in front of him. It was like looking through a rapid stream of water, the blank surfaces rippling and blurring, never taking form. A broad hand grabbed his face, turning his neck back. Two fingers rolled up his eyelids. The eyeballs started to dry and evaporate in the open.

"Look at them."

Tear ducts pumped out a protective cover of salt-water. "I—" The blurring illusion slowed. The rippling began to settle. The impatient hand pinning back Eren's eyelids jerked on Eren's hair. Another hand gripped him around the mouth. The fingers dug into his cheeks and pried his teeth apart.

"Oi." This was a new voice. It came from someone standing in front of Eren. "He's delirious. Cut him some slack."

"Please, understand—" A third voice, then. "He just woke out of a drugged sleep that you put him under. Give him a second."

"Answer me," the first voice said in Eren's ear, ignoring the others. "Do you know these people?"

Eren strained to see the faces under his peeled eyelids. Cold sweat beaded on his flesh. His vision quaked and shivered. Then everything became still. Slowly, two eyes congealed on the blank surfaces. Mouths took shape. The four faces cleared and distilled and assumed separate known individualities. Familiarity returned.

"Yes," Eren said, through the fingers jammed in his cheeks. He could see the faces at last. "Captain Levi, Commander Hanji, Armin, and . . ." With his head fixed in the invisible grasp, the two burly fingers pulling back his eyelids, Eren's eyeballs moved in the sockets, whitening to the one side of his skull. Through a pink glaze of tears, he saw the last completed individual face.

"What about the girl?"

"I — don't know."

"You don't know?" The voice lowered behind Eren, at his ear again. Eren's head was forced back against the chair. "What if I use that scalpel over there to remove your eyelids?" The voice was a whisper now. "Do you figure that might improve your memory?"

# # #

The four sat around in a military lounge area. There was a tense waiting silence. Levi and Hanji had taken one of the sofas. Armin and Mikasa had taken the other. Daylight poured in from a window. They sat around a coffee table, silent. They thought and turned over the image of Eren inside their minds. It was the first time they'd been permitted to see him since the Survey Corp lost custody. As four of Eren's closest comrades, they'd been asked to be present when he wakened from taking the first dose of memory suppressant.

"Eren's currently under examination," Hanji said. "I doubt the Military Police will let us see him for the rest of the day."

"They're torturing him," Mikasa said.

"The Military Police is bound by law to abide by a code of ethics. It was the order of the High General that Eren should be protected from inhumane treatment or cruelty. Nile Dok is the assigned overseer of the examination, and he's required to keep us informed of his daily progress. If there are signs that there's been a violation, we reassume our authority over all decisions concerning Eren."

"And we're supposed to just take their word?" Mikasa demanded. "Those sadistic creeps probably already cut off Eren's ears — or worse."

"Won't they just grow back?" Levi said, and Mikasa glared across the coffee table into his motionless serene eyes. Armin put a hand on Mikasa's shoulder. Levi continued: "We have no jurisdiction. Eren made sure of that when he went behind our backs to meet with Yelena. There's nothing we can do about it now."

Voices came into their field of hearing. The four fell silent. On the other side of the shut door, the voices snapped past and faded. Levi leaned forward on his elbows.

"It's my fault," he said. "I've been too lenient. Now my ability to control Eren has been thrown into doubt."

"You weren't the only one who's been too lenient," said Hanji. "It seems we let our personal attachment influence how we dealt with any rebellious behavior from him. When did we stop acting as his superior officers, I wonder?"

A tense silence descended the room again. They put together a narrative, linking a hundred different reasons and a hundred different blames that created the circumstance of their present. No noises or movements went on beyond the room, in the hallways or outside the building.

Armin said: "Do they have any ideas about why Eren has no recollection of Mikasa?"

"Scientists believe Eren had a traumatic memory connected to her," Hanji said. "So when the suppressant began to alter his neurobiology, the elevated self-protective instinct identified those feelings of distress and forcibly buried all his memories of her." Hanji folded her hands under her chin. "In other words, Mikasa is one of Eren's traumas."

They looked at Mikasa sitting on the couch, her hands folded in her lap, her face a little down. They saw her lips softly move. "But — that can't be true."

"Don't dwell on it yet. There's another possibility." The light in the room changed as clouds blew across the sky. A shadow eclipsed the building and grayed the room. Hanji explained: "Before now, the Military Police has never expressed concern about Eren's state of mind. It seems unlikely they would suddenly begin to act on their humanity. It could be that the medicine isn't suppressing only Eren's traumatic experiences. It's erasing anything that might motivate him to challenge the military's command. I suspect they may be trying to force him into obedience by stealing his memories."

They thought about it and dreaded each thought that followed the first.

"Then we have to stop them," Mikasa said.

"It's too soon to do anything. It's only a theory, Mikasa. Eren retained his memories of Armin, after all. If my suspicion is correct, then Eren should've forgotten him as well as you. One way or another, we haven't ruled out either theory. That means," Hanji said, and pressed Mikasa under her one good eye, "it's not impossible for there to be something you unknowingly did that heavily damaged Eren's psyche."

# # #

It was the day after the four had met with Eren for the first time since he'd been placed under the command of the Military Police. Breakfast had already been served. A last wave of stragglers hustled to the cafeteria. On her way to catch a late breakfast, Mikasa heard the familiar voices of Squad Levi blowing backward from further down the hall.

"So, that's what a person with partial amnesia is like."

"He acted the same as always, didn't he?"

"Really, Sasha? That's what you thought?"

"He still likes eating his breakfast. That hasn't changed."

"I can't believe that bastard had the nerve to forget about Mikasa."

Mikasa hurried after the voices, seeing their three backs moving away from her. She soundlessly rushed forward and clasped Jean, spinning him by the arm. "You saw Eren?"

Connie and Sasha reeled around.

"Yeah," Jean said, after a moment. "He's allowed to roam HQ freely. The Military Police aren't even monitoring him."

"What did he look like? How did he seem?"

"Well, he—"

"Where is he now?"

"Uh, well, hmm . . ." Jean narrowed his eyes. He scrutinized Mikasa's face. "You don't look like you got enough sleep, Mikasa. Are you okay?"

Once Jean told her where Eren was, Mikasa navigated the labyrinth of HQ, allowing the needle of intuition guide her farther and farther, where less voices reached and less bodies crowded. A sensation of calm and quiet replaced the urgency and commotion of the main building. All of it lay behind her in a dizzying whirl. The muted pad of her shoes on the laminate floor was the only sound. At the end of the hall jutted a greenhouse room. Mikasa gripped the doorknob. She opened it. Behind it was another screened door. She opened that one, too. She entered.

It was bright and sweltering. Through the greenhouse windows, heavy tongues of sunlight writhed and trembled the air with a magnified heat. The earthly aroma of plant life channeled toward her. Mikasa searched the rich lively garden. Among the branches and bulbs and blossoms of a thousand different species, Eren roamed a winding path. His eyes touched each new marvel, each new bloom with an insatiable curiosity, looking this way and that.

"Eren."

He turned. His face was moist, his hair bright and wet-looking. He watched her with an open unabashed curiosity as she made her way through the lonely green paradise. Soon they stood facing each other, her a stranger to him.

"Has the Military Police been treating you fairly?" Mikasa inspected Eren's face, ears, and limbs. "They didn't do anything— strange to you, did they?"

"Other than altering my memories?"

"I mean, were you hurt by them?"

"No," Eren said quickly, "they haven't done anything like that. I know how it probably seemed to you yesterday. But they were only testing the effects of intimidation and scare tactics. It looks like it doesn't make a difference. My memories are locked up tight. There's no way for me to pry them out. Even if I'm feeling desperate."

"Experimenting with your mind that way isn't right."

Eren felt at his temple as if it were only by touch that he could know what he was thinking. "It doesn't feel right or wrong to me. It doesn't feel like anything. How can I miss what I don't even feel gone?"

Mikasa set her teeth.

"Anyway," Eren said, and removed his hand from his head, putting it down by his side, "they want me to take it easy for a while. The doctor said I should try to avoid stressors and surround myself with peaceful wildlife for at least an hour every day. The Military Police haven't authorized me to go outdoors yet. That's why I came to this botanical garden."

He started walking down the winding path again, deeper into the imitation jungle. Mikasa followed a bit hesitantly. "It's quiet enough here." Eren wiped his sweaty forehead. "But it's too warm for comfort."

Mikasa could tell he'd been in the greenhouse for some time. His flowy white t-shirt, two sizes too big, was splashed with perspiration. He smelled of salty steamy skin.

Without saying a word, they explored the garden and paused every now and again to admire some new exotic species of flower or hanging vine. A stone fountain ran a constant cascade at the heart of the garden. Their shoes were light on the dirt path. They walked and brushed and accidentally touched bodies. A damp smear on Mikasa's wrist cooled and dried. Eren peered at her inquisitively.

"Mikasa . . . right?"

"Yes."

"Were you and I very close?"

"We fought many battles together."

Eren looked at Mikasa and Mikasa felt as though he were picking her apart, holding each piece to the light, seeing the way it shined through her. "Is that all?" He probed even more deeply, and Mikasa looked at him too. They studied each other, learning from expression and inference about the stranger standing in front of them. "Jean said you're someone special to me."

"I'm not sure what it was Jean tried to tell you," Mikasa said. "But for a short time when we were children, you and I lived together. Your family opened your home to me when I had nowhere to go."

Eren put a hand on his head again, trying to feel where the holes in his brain were. Lines on his face tautened as he pulled at some internal thread that might unravel and disclose. "Why did I forget something like that?" He stopped walking, holding to his head. He shut his eyes and made a wince, diving down into his own mind matter. "I don't even know where to look," he said quietly. She saw his eyes moving, closed, searching.

"Eren."

Eren opened his eyes. She could see him coming up out of his mind, a dull vagueness draining from his expression. His awareness came back. His eyes were illuminated again and the little sinews and rod receptors constricted and relaxed, constricted and relaxed, seeing and then processing and then understanding, only to see more and process more and understand more. He perceived a motion of Mikasa's fingers. Instantaneously his attention moved to her throat.

"Do you see this scarf?" Mikasa showed him the scarf.

"The two times I've seen you, you were wearing it."

"It's something you gave to me the day we first met."

Mikasa watched Eren see, and process, and understand. But there was no sign of recollection or remembering. His attention was so fixed, he missed no detail.

"It looks pretty worn out."

"It's grown a bit thin," Mikasa said. "I've carried it through the many years of hardship we share."

Something like a steel wire tied Eren's gaze to the scarf. Then he blinked and the wire snapped. He turned his head. The bright early sun from the east wall hit his face as he felt the wide landscape with his tireless wondering. When a new thought entered his head, Mikasa sensed it by the way his irises seemed to spin and rotate and orbit around it.

"I was told the outside world wants to destroy Paradis," Eren said, "and I have to remember how to use my titan as soon as I can because I'm expected to defend this island and all of its inhabitants." Mikasa watched the spin of his irises accelerate as one thought after another flew into his mind and rapidly crowd his brain. He grimaced and bit down on his teeth. "Why did the military erase my memory if I'm needed protect everyone? Why would they take such a reckless gamble? What kind of person was I that they needed to change me so badly?"

"Eren." Mikasa took him by the shoulders. He faced her. The east sun burned one half of his damp face. "For you to be consumed by questions is natural. But you won't get the answers to those questions all at once. You're going to have to learn to accept that there are some things you don't understand right now. If there's something you need to know, then you'll be told what it is. For now, all you need to do is listen to your doctor."

Eren turned completely away from the outdoor landscape and opened back up to the protected tranquil garden surrounding them. "You're probably right." His legs took him over to a patch of vibrant blue flowers. He crouched on his heels. "Even though my memories are sealed off from me, it feels like I can trust what you say."

Mikasa sighed. She clasped her hands in front of her and thought: I wish you could've trusted me enough back then to tell me when I hurt you.

Even though Mikasa hadn't mumbled a single word out loud, it was as if Eren had caught the small whisper of her thoughts, replying: "It's an experimental drug, right? My suppressed memories are probably just an unpredicted side-effect that has nothing to do with you." He bent his head toward a blue flower. He wondered at it. He thought and reached out a hand. He never touched it directly, just poising his hand as though feeling the comforting waves a small candle might radiate. "In my opinion, there's no reason for you to feel guilty."

# # #

It was a clear night with a mild temperature. With her legs pulled to her chest, Mikasa sat on the open rooftop overlooking the rest of the military base. Faint lights glowed below in wan pulsations. The stars were high and there was a lack of activity and life, with only the lonely shadows of silent motionless nightguards, caps drawn down over their eyebrows, more like stone and nothing than they were of flesh and mind. Not even the nocturnal crickets and owls exhaled a breath.

The door to the rooftop opened. A pair of shoes stepped out and carried a person across the concrete ground and Mikasa knew, by only the imprint of the footfalls and the weight of each step, that Armin had found her.

"So, you were up here," he said. He moved to sit beside Mikasa. "You seem to be in a lower mood than usual. Are you still worrying about Eren?"

"Yes."

"It'll be okay. We'll get his memories back."

Mikasa clenched her arms around her legs. She rested her chin on her knees. "Why did he forget about me, though?"

"It's the first time this type of drug has been used. It's not surprising for there to be side-effects. The formula is an imperfect compound that needs further study."

Mikasa pulled her scarf over the lower half of her face. "Or maybe there was a part of Eren that wished he'd never met me."

"No." Armin turned his head across his shoulder. "There's no way Eren wanted that." Armin leaned into Mikasa's view and pulled her eyes to him. "Trust me."

The rooftop was lightless and covered by more silence. They imagined they could hear the stars rotating in the sky above them, ticking like the minute hands on a clock.

Mikasa said, "With no memories to haunt him, Eren is . . . ."

"Gentle?" Armin said.

"Healthy."

"It's hard to say how much of it was in his nature and how much of it was the environment that shaped Eren into the person he is, a person who relies on violence to get his way," Armin said. "There's no anger inside him anymore because he can't remember the reason for those feelings."

"Should we quit interfering? Eren is in a stabler emotional state. Even the dark circles under his eyes have faded. I don't want to drag him back into a nightmare."

"The way Eren is now won't do us any good against a coordinated global attack on Paradis. Without the real Eren, we're left defenseless."

"What are you saying? You're the Colossal Titan, and Captain Levi and I are Ackermans. Why should we depend on Eren all the time?"

"That's the way it is. That's the way it always has been. Besides, he's still the holder of the Founding Titan's power. If Marley forces our hand, Eren gives us an advantage that no other nation can match. Even a world alliance pales in comparison. They could send a hundred thousand enemies, and Eren would lay waste to a hundred million. It doesn't matter the number, Eren can crush every single one ten times over."

Mikasa's eyes went a little wide. "But, Armin, you said you didn't want to use the Rumbling."

Hunching over, Armin put his hands in his lap, staring off into the dark, miles away into a future Mikasa couldn't envision. "I don't. I never want that hell seeing the light of day." Armin kept his eyes fastened ahead but now saw something else that was, once again, unknown to Mikasa. "Appealing to foreign nations and avoiding bloodshed is still an ideal I want to believe in. But if we're blown off the face of the earth before we can hold out a proper olive branch, then everything we've worked hard to achieve so far will all be for nothing." His eyes were blackened and bleak, and without moving at all, he seemed to fold into himself. "Commander Erwin's death, too, will have been for nothing."

The stars were so high. A hundred silent swarms of keen cold points, turning. The night grew darker and fell, fold over fold, on top of them. At their solitary posts, the nightguards' shadows never moved, getting blacker and solider with each minute that passed. Armin spoke again and the silence pulled away, startled at being violated.

"Maybe we can let Eren live in peaceful ignorance for a little while. Marley is struggling to join the other nations together under one treaty. It'll take time for them to reach a compromise. And we're still developing our own strategy, too. Once we're ready to initiate a military response, that's when we'll jumpstart Eren's memory. If his memories are recovered too soon, he'll revert into that erratic vigilante who answers to no one. We'll have to wait for the right time, so he'll be coerced into a corner with no choice but to do what we say."

The wind picked up abruptly and blew at their faces. Then it stormed away, dying down in the dark niches of the building behind them.

"Until then," Armin said, "we don't need to bother Eren about anything."