Exactly how Erwin predicted, the plan for the female type worked out. I just fired one of the artillery guns with special hooks, so the blond-haired titan found itself in the web of metallic ropes, which were sticked all over its body.
Rivaille just flew to Erwin on the opposite tree and together with Mike they set off to cut out the person inside the titan of its nape. I got frightened because of the terrible sound of their blades shattering to pieces against the hardened skin on its neck.
This titan definitely looked atypically. It had no skin and its muscles were more worked out than the muscles of other titans who often had quite big abdomen and flabby limbs. This one was like some athletic type of titan. I cheered that we managed to catch it and my mind was already musing about what kind of test we should do on it at first.
The short body of black-haired captain had been standing on the titan's head. It was obvious, that the soldier is pretty angry, because I noticed how he kicked her top of the head fiercely. Inwardly I realized how childish it was of him. However, I even heard a piece of his creepy monologue, in which he asked the titan, if it was alright to cut its real human limbs.
I didn't have time to think about it much, because the deafening scream came out of the captured titan's mouth. Everybody held their ears instinctually and dropped their swords of 3DMG to the ground. As the enemy stopped shouting, everybody sighed in relief. Unfortunately, nobody noticed the incoming mass of ordinary titans, who flung on the female type and started to tear its flash alive.
"So you did something, you bitch, huh?!" I heard, how Rivaille shouted at it furiously just before he jumped off to kill some approaching titans.
Even though the titanic army had been devastating by most of our soldiers, we had no chance to defeat them all, so Erwin ordered to retreat. Everybody moved to their horses and rode after the commander.
As I caught up with Erwin, I couldn't help myself but ask: "Why did you send Rivaille to refill? There's no time to lose."
"Hanji, I did so, because I had remembered the one of your hypothesis," he answered with eyes fixed forward, "that the human inside the titan is still able to move after the dissolving, so he or she equipped himself or herself with 3DMG and with our uniform to blend with us and escape."
"Nevertheless, I also stated, that it is barely possible considering the state in which Eren finds himself after changing into his human form. On top of that his equipment was irretrievably damaged and his uniform was gone," I doubted out loud.
"The female type was able to call up the other titans with the shout. We have no idea, what more it is able to do. We have to predict the worst scenario," Erwin continued rapidly, "we cannot bet on Eren, who is just a beginner. In my opinion the person inside used the steam as a cover to sneak off."
"That makes sense," I admitted and continued riding silently.
Hopefully neither Eren nor Rivaille got harmed, I thought to myself and frowned with that idea.
The bedroom was gloom inside. The little of the remaining light just before sunset wasn't almost penetrating through the curtains. When I entered the room, I had to blink for a while till my eyes got used to the darkness and even still I almost missed him, sitting on his bed in the corner.
"What do you want!" he hewed at me instead of greeting or even looking at me.
"Erwin sent me due your injured leg," I explained trying to be nice, even though he barely deserved my kind attitude for his rude behaviour.
The past day was really tough for everyone though. We all had to except the loss of many of our friends and comrades. According to his appearance, as I came to him slowly and carefully, I was sure, that he hadn't done so yet.
"Go away, I'm okay," he tried to drive me off with his deep poisonous voice.
The small emblems of the Wings of Liberty torn from the uniforms of his deceased inferiors were pressed forcefully in his hands. The face was twisted in anger and bewilderment.
"Can I at least see it?" I asked, concerned about him.
"Then hurry up!" he retorted angrily.
He didn't bother himself to roll up his trouser leg or to even put off the carrying traps needed for hanging of 3DMG. His eyes kept piercing me. My hands shook a bit, when I noticed, that he no longer looked on the pieces of textile in his hands but me. At that moment I was suddenly very grateful for the darkness in the room.
I rolled up his grey trousers in the middle of his shin unskilfully and I didn't miss how he hissed in pain as I slowly took off the fastening of the strap from his foot. As tenderly as they could, my fingers ran over the ankle to find out, what was wrong with it. The skin was abnormally hot and beneath the joint was noticeable swelling. I tried to feel some skeletal irregularity, and as I did so, his leg flinched.
"Shit! What are you doing?!" it escaped from his mouth and in the light speed he took my forearm and pulled my hand off his ankle.
"I am sorry, I just needed to find out, what exactly was broken," I apologized hastily and I released my arm from his grip.
He remained silent and once more observed the scraps of the uniforms in his left hand.
"You cannot fight for some time," I stated, "no walking at least for a week."
No response.
"Are you listening to me, Rivaille?" I asked.
"Yeah! And now, go away," he tried to throw me out of his room.
I got up and turned to leave. However, after several steps I turned back and the words just flipped out of my mouth: "It is not your fault, don't blame yourself."
I said it with comforting voice and I smiled at him cheeringly.
"Don't blame yourself?" he repeated furiously and stabbed me with his sight, while he took of his inaccessible mask, which he used to wear all the time, and the hatred and sorrow gleamed in his eyes at the same time, "this is really easy to say, you know? Your entire squad wasn't wiped out. You didn't have to throw the corpses of your inferiors under titan feet and watch how they got crushed under them. And now you said that I fucking can't even fight. Fuck off, Hanji! And get out finally!" he shouted at me, frustrated due to his previous pretence.
I observed him, taken aback, absolutely unable to response. That was the first time he screamed at me. Actually the very first time he vented the anger on someone as I remembered. I inhaled to reply opening my mouth a bit but that I changed my mind and with sadness reflecting in my eyes I turned on my heel and quickly headed off to the door.
"Damn it," I heard him behind my back in a low voice as I had been closing the door and it sound like he actually regretted that he said anything at all.
They were not just your friends, I thought just before I walked away sadly.
For the entire following day I tried to avoid him as much as possible. I sent one my inferior to him to treat his leg and I refused to get in touch with him. Actually I shattered all my sorrow in work. Paperwork again.
After a long tiring day spent with the reports, announcements of death and supplying I was completely exhausted. When I realized, that there was dark outside again, I take off my glasses and kneaded my eyes. I had been so weary, that I didn't react for a considerable minute as someone knocked on my door.
"Eh… come in," I said monotonously and I rubbed the corner of left eye, while I turned across the chair to the door in confusion.
I was just yawning with a palm in front of my mouth, when the door opened. Just after I focused again after the yawn I got to see silhouette of a black-haired soldier. Rivaille was standing in his civilian clothing in the doorframe with deathly pale skin and the deep huge rings under the eyes.
"May I?" He asked with the voice strangely husky and silent.
I blinked in a confusion and I barely noticeably nodded. It was the first time he came to visit me. For a while he just gazed around the room, obviously thinking about the same thing, before he looked at me again.
"Today…," he pronounced almost hoarsely, leaning on the wooden stick with all his power, "today I came to their relatives…" he breathed out and his eyes shined peculiarly in the light of the oil lamp, "all four families…," he fell silent again and bended the head down slightly, while he bit his lip.
I didn't know what to say. I felt familiar pressure inside my head and the sorrow started weighing me on my breasts again. I hadn't really known why, but I stood up.
"I am so sorry," the black-haired man uttered barely audibly, with closed eyes and lightly shaking lips.
I forgave him long time before he even ended his apology and I hugged him tightly. It took a moment before he grasped my back with his free arm but then buried his head into the fabric of the shirt on my shoulder gratefully and I felt how he started silently sobbing.
I couldn't prevent the memories of my friends coming to my mind. Especially the memory of my best friend, who was always smiley, nice, friendly and hopelessly in love with the man I was just hugging and which scruff I was just stroking, and a little amount of tears ran off my cheeks.
"I heard about your infamous blackmailing of the priest," Rivaille noted, when I met him standing by the vehicles prepared for the survey beyond the walls.
Since his emotional breakdown in my bedroom we hadn't talked to each other. As he calmed down that night, he apologized to me once more and then left away silently. I stayed standing on the same spot we were so fiercely hugging each other for another while just gazing forward, rubbing my wet cheeks with the back of hand. As if the skin wanted to make it to me even worse, I still felt the familiar sensation of his body pressed against mine. Even though I wasn't exactly happy at the moment and the teardrops kept rolling down my cheeks, I couldn't help but tend to still reminding myself about his grasp.
Now, as he talked to me again, something inside my chest joyfully jumped. I couldn't prevent myself from smiling. The grin on my face almost immediately changed into sceptical sight.
"However, without success, I could have probably threw him down the wall and nothing would have really happen," I murmured.
Maybe due the sun, which was shining into my eyes and slightly dazzling me, or maybe the tiny crack in one glass of my spectacles, but for a moment a phantom of a smile flashed past Rivaille's face. As I noticed it, he had already put his annoyed mask on.
"Well, you should, now this loony is my charge," he pronounced sceptically while he was phlegmatically watching me sitting into the dust on the ground and his nose crouched.
My face screwed up in amusement as I saw his disgusted look and I moved the glasses on my nose closer to the eyes.
"Deal with it," I said in response, I was tired.
I leaned on my hands behind my back and lifted my head. The clouds started colouring into orange and bloody red as the sun was setting. They should go soon. Because the injured captain kept standing in the trajectory of my sight to heaven, I noticed, how he kept thoughtfully gazing forward.
"What's the matter?" it slipped from my mouth.
"I just… thought about Ilse Langner. Remember? How we found her corpse even with the diary," he answered still watching something in front of his eyes covered in ruminating.
"Yeah, what's with her?" I didn't understand, but I exactly remembered how he had got interested in her journal already at the day of finding it.
He shook his head.
"We should go," he said fleetingly and to my surprise he even offered me his hand to help me get up.
That was quite a miracle, considering the fact, that my palms were completely covered in dust and dirt of the ground and also some blood. I gave him astonished look but I excepted his hand. It was strange, when I realized how my skin desired to touch him again. I bit my lip fractionally and rather let the hand go as I stood up. I didn't long for my cheeks getting red, which would be pretty obvious eye-beating evidence of my embarrassment.
"Well, but what about that Ilse?" I didn't forget while I was dusting my trousers bend forward, mainly in order to cover my burning cheeks with hair.
"You have been still trying to speak to every single titan, you have met, huh?" he stated and the ironical grin was noticeable in his voice.
"Yeah, so what?" I nodded with neutral voice, finally straighten up for us to leave into the vehicle to the priest and Eren with his two friends.
He didn't answer and just silently sat by the right hand of the priest directly in front of the dark-haired girl with red scarf winded around her neck.
I sat beside the priest on the other side and to make myself comfortable on the wooden bench, I bended one of my legs, which I placed on the seat and leaned on her with my elbow, scrunching strangely shaped rock in my palm.
The three friends opposite looked at us astonished but with esteem, not daring to speak.
"By the way, I didn't know you've got new deviation in rocks," I heard his mocking voice across the priest and all four pairs of eyes except for him turned to the stone in my hand.
I was lying in the wooden cart. There was something fasten over my right eye and my body couldn't move at all. The free eyelid was pressing me and I felt the metallic aftertaste of blood on my dried chapped lips. I breathed shallowly and my eyes almost blindly looked up to the starry sky above my head.
I sensed that we were riding somewhere just imperceptibly. Like in a trance I gazed upward without noticing, that there was lying the unconscious hope of the humanity next to me with his friend worth of hundred soldiers. The black-haired girl breathed with difficulties and her chest was just temporally bandaged. A brown-haired boy with the hand hanging in the triangular scarf tied around his neck and the bandage over his forehead was sitting beside the girl, perfectly consciously looking after her with caring eyes.
My neck and vocal cords were too dried out, that I couldn't speak properly. I was terribly thirsty. Instead of the talk I was just silently opening and shutting my mouth like the fish just taken out of the river. After a while I gave it up and I just kept listening to the sounds of horses behind my head, the wheels jingling on rocks on the road or the muffled conversation between the brown-haired boy and that barely breathing girl, who I knew about just barely.
I didn't felt the tops of my fingers or toes. My body was freezing, shaking with the chill of the night. Despite my clenching jaws and painful knot in my stomach I heard how the young boy in the cart said something about us entering the wall soon.
Most likely I felt unconscious for a while, because I woke up and somebody was leaning to me. Due to the light above his head I couldn't see the face of that somebody. Until the source of the light was shadowed by another just approaching man, I recognized Rivaille with Erwin.
Erwin was covered in blood and I couldn't tell properly, because I was a bit delirious but his right arm was somehow missing. Rivaille's clothes were also bloody red but how I was observing him vaguely and almost unconsciously, it seemed, that it wasn't his own blood on the shirt. He was sayng something to me but I just blinked at him and almost not hearing a single word. Not speaking that I had no clue about what he was talking about.
"Hanji!" I heard him screaming finally, but my auditory apparatus received it just cursorily.
He caught my hand and gripped it firmly. His palm was literally burning with heat. He repeated my name several times, but in the end I only knew that by lip-reading. His face looked worried. Did he really care about me, I thought and a fleeting smile appeared on my face. Despite the weakening a little cheerful spark jumped in my chest.
For a moment he gazed at me in surprise but then the corners of his mouth slightly twisted into the smile as well. However, as my vision started dissolving and everything around him got blurred, I felt how he shook me a bit and obviously started repeating my name again.
It might have been the loss of blood or the injury on my head, which I suffered, but for a little moment his eyes appeared to me like they were gleaming with sorrow, before even he changed into a blurry silhouette and even it did into impenetrable mass of darkness.
I was lying at the sick berth inside the fortress of the Scouting legion. Immediately after regaining consciousness I recognized the room, because I often helped here with treating of injured soldiers. It never had come to my mind, that I would have been in that bad condition to be lying here myself.
The sunlight radiated inside through the windows and lighted up at some other time so dark room, that it looked very clean and clear. My eyes hurt, the light were piercing into them mercilessly. In addition I felt how the bandage and probably some stitches pressed the outer corner of my right eye. I saw the world around little bit blurry, but it was an ordinary state in my case, when I just didn't have my glasses on.
My hair were down, spread around my head all over the pillow underneath. The lips were not that chapped as before but still pretty dry and glued together. Carefully, I opened them a bit and inhaled the air deeply. In a fear, that my spine had got damaged, I tried to move my arm. As I started feeling radiating pain in it, I bit my lip convulsively but in my core a huge boulder of fear fell off, because the pain meant, that nothing happened to the spinal cord. I lifted up a little with the help of my other, healthy hand.
My legs were pretty stiff and inflexible. Just after five minutes long efforts, when I almost fell into hopeless cry, my legs managed to move. With one tear, which was flowing down my cheek, I started laughing with relief.
My laughter woke up a man, who was sleeping in a tortuous position at the wooden armchair beside my bed. To my surprise it was Rivaille. I stopped laughing immediately and just silently scrutinized him. For a little while he looked confused and even his face didn't seem that annoyed as ever despite the deep dark rings under his reddish eyes. Just a minute he was looking into the corner in the just-waking-up confusion and he straightened himself up in the chair. Then he probably realized where he just found himself.
His broken leg was stretched out while his other one was comfortably bend in the sitting position. He grasped a armrest with the palm and with the other one he knead his sleepy eyes. When he sighted, that I was awake already, he immediately came more alive and carefully stood up to not burden his injured leg, and in the process he came across to my bed lamely.
"How do you feel?" he asked with as worried and frowned expression on his face as I saw it last time, with no signs of haughtiness, arrogance or scepticism like it always had been earlier.
"Stiffened I guess? I don't know, I am pretty thirsty," I admitted and observed him with goggled eyes as he leaned above me.
He wiped a teardrop, which escaped me while I was fighting with deadened nerves in my legs, trying to move them. I didn't defend myself from embarrassment, I couldn't ran away anywhere. Just laying there I silently looked at him with cheeks covered in blush.
"Erwin told me, what had happened," he said and glanced into my eyes again after he stopped scrutinizing the place, where he had caught the tear.
His slim fingers kept touching my not bandaged side of face, though. The reddish eyes were reflecting worries. It was very strange to see him with that kind of grimace with no sign of disdain.
"I am reckless," I admitted and for a split of a second I looked away, "but I guess, I was still pretty lucky," I added and a fleeting smile found its way on my face.
"You stupid," Rivaille scolded me and pretended to be angry, still stroking the cheek with a thumb under my eye, "you could have died," he added bitterly and his eyes gleamed like they had done last time.
"Were you worried about me?" I stated with a mischievous smile.
"Hmm," Rivaille grinned, "yeah I was," he admitted after a while.
My cheeks were probably perfectly burning like fire and while looking at my blush his smile widened. It was quite weird, unnatural to sight him smiling, when I considered the fact, that from the first time I had seen him, he had been always just frowning. I bit my lip tentatively, when I realized I was probably one of a small amount of people, who had ever seen him smile.
"The smile suits you, you should wear it more often," I pronounced with laughter and stroked his cheek with the back of my left hand.
"I probably will," he replied and leaned to me to slightly kiss me on my lips.
Then he pulled away. I blinked in surprise but before he managed to straighten up, I caught the collar of his black shirt and drew him back.
"But never," he started while we were kissing, "ever," he continued a bit, too busy with kisses he was giving me, "risk like that, okay?" he finished finally.
"Yes, Captain," I responded obediently and caught his neck to pull him closer to me again.
THE END