Chapter 22 – Reiner (Arc 3)
As Annie and himself enrolled in the Cadet corps, he allowed his mind to reform itself. Broken fragments guiding his actions and thoughts, the rage of the Armoured Titan guiding his axes as he trained for the day he would be able to take from the Titanian what they had taken from; Everything that they loved. Strands of the delicate Boy's compassion stoking fires of compassion and care for each and every recruit around him, guarding them from the wrath of drillmasters as he lifted the Artlet boy's weighted pack from him as they ran in the gruelling rain, before being very much surprised that the thinner boy merely gritted his teeth and grabbed his sack back. Impressive, no wonder Annie had taken an interest in the kid. He had fire.
As Reiner continued through the training that was, even for him, pure and unaltered torture, he began to come at peace with the thoughts in his mind; the two swirling forces that had once threatened to draw him down into a whirlpool now keeping him softly afloat.
As he reached the end of the brutal hand to hand training, passing his test as the sun dipped over the edge of the sky, he had decided to put down the axes that he had been given upon his first day of training, smiling softly as he still remembered crying over Bertholdt, now wondering if he'd be proud at how Reiner was turning out.
Reaching into the small storage case that he had managed to save up for throughout the months, wiping the dust off of its long unopened lid. Taking the key from his necklace, he inserted it into the rusty lock, hearing the small pins click as it opened. Looking into it, he felt himself physically wince as the weapon that had brought so much death lay before him. His long unused iron Mace.
Steeling himself, imagining Annie's cold stare dryly judging him to help bring him to military attention, he gingerly reached in, hands passing over that rough grip of leather and long crusted blood. As his eyes followed the line of the metal from its pommel to its shaft and finally reaching its notch covered head. After seeing Annie scratching her small crystal and understanding the meaning behind them as they walked up the windblown road that led to Berk's walls, he had decided to do the same, picking a small rock he found by the side of the path that had a fine enough edge to make a notch into the metal. Each marking took time to make, time and effort; and he knew that it would be these that he would need to put into atoning for their deaths. His fingers now tracing over those cuts as he had done after making them all, he began softly counting in remembrance 1… 2… 3… 4… 5…
It wouldn't be until the serenading calls of the Midnight Drakes, a smaller Terrible Terror that lived near their area, resonated in his ears that his calloused finger crossed over the final notch.
Pulling his fingertips away from the metal swiftly, he felt a pain budding as he saw that it had made a small nick in him. A small grin of laughter playing on his face as he thought it was as if this was the weapon's payback for all the cuts he had made on it. Hell, he probably deserved it, he thought. Quickly wrapping the open blood, he looked out the window, seeing the fire lights and lamps long blown out in the cabins around him, but the soft sound of laughter between friends, whispers between lovers and conversations of comradery still drifted through the air to his ears.
As these thoughts filled his head, he placed the metal back into its case as it had been out for long enough this night, crashing into his cot and allowing himself to drift to sleep in an ease that, for once, he actually found comforting.
He had believed that learning to use some fancy wires and ropes on a few gears couldn't be anywhere near as difficult as learning to survive with only a boot knife against 3 other fighters. He was evidentially proved wrong as he found himself suspended upside down from the practice rig, fits of snickers and giggles flitting around the crowd nearby.
Taking matters into his own hands, he took in the stupidity and absurdness of the situation; he realised how stupid he must look and letting out a deep and warm laugh that left his abdominals aching and his lungs pulling for breath even more so than the gear attached to his yak leather harness. Waiting until the short bursts of silenced laughter to subside, he eventually reached for the wires themselves, pulling himself up forcibly, blood rushing from his head quickly, the only vision he saw before blacking out was the crowd before him, and for a moment, he thought he had felt Bert shyly smiling at him from the back of the crowd. Even though he knew that Bertholdt was dead and he was just hallucinating; as his body pulled closer and closer to the unforgiving ground's surface, he felt that smile begin to spread on his lips, until he was evidently knocked out.
Surprisingly, after that incident, Reiner's evaluation rankings in the equipment began to excel as he was finally able to reach a balance between the brute strength of his body and the mental discipline which he knew he had, he was just never able to properly control his body with it before. But as he ascended into the ranks of the top 5 in the cadet corps at the time, it was pure evidence that he had improved massively alongside many of his other peers; celebrating with a great many of them on the second year's Snoggletog.
He didn't like to admit it, but at that particular year's festival he ended up getting more drunk than he would like to recall, and as a result may have done extremely embarrassing things such as wolf whistling Annie and Armin outside. He still grimaces as he remembers his drunk self, who ended up giving the smaller blonde girl Krista all the wrong messages, telling her that she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, received, in turn, a very much physical retaliation from her dance partner of the time, Ymir; All this before he crawled away to his cabin and fell asleep, tears silently streaming down his face as memories of Bert sifted up through his mangled mind.
The next morning, he had gone to Krista, with a splitting headache and apologised with every drop of genuine regret and guilt that he felt, his old wounds not quite yet healed enough for anything of that sort anyways. And the pain of that headache was even before Annie had kicked his legs from underneath him on the walk back to his hut, telling him to mind his own business.
As he stayed there, his face lying in the dirt he realised; "Yup. Definitely deserved that." Before promptly returning to his cabin, locking and barring the door, and hiding out of fear of retribution for anything else his drunk self may have done.
Yeah, he thought, looking back at the memory, definitely not after doing that again ever, before peacefully wandering back to his cabin to relax for even just a while.