Long one!
Disclaimer: SnK is not mineeeeeee.
Note: GAH I GOTTA DO HOMEWORK
gonna play mixed doubles with my coach
and win the Open. Yes. Gotta do it.
SIE SIND DAS ESSEN UND WIR SIND DIE JAEGER.
Note 2: this one was fun...? XD
Three Warriors
xxx. falsity .xxx
Warmth seeped from his fingers, leaving his skin an alarmingly pale shade of icy white. A thin blanket was draped over his shoulders, but it hardly sufficed. If he squinted hard enough, he could detect a fine layer of frost accumulated on the windowpane.
He had the loveliest dream, but he couldn't remember it.
He crawled out of the creaking bunk, which sank under his weight and meant for a child, it seemed, because his feet would stick out over the edge. Deciding it was late enough, he wrestled Reiner from the tightly-gripped sleep that he wished he still had. The other simply buried his face into the dusty pillow and rolled away.
A knock at the door interrupted his efforts to rouse the sleeping soldier, and Bertholdt padded over to it. When the door swung ajar, he found himself chest to face with Connie, the shorter boy's hand poised to knock again.
"Squad Leader Mike told me to tell you that breakfast will be over if you don't get up," said Connie. Bertholdt thought two things: the first, was that Connie's familiar voice, half raspy, half nasally, with a pinch of sarcasm, was eerily reassuring. The second, however, was a slow-registering shock at the time.
"What time is it?"
"Late." Connie flashed a trademark grin, despite the dark circles under his eyes and the bedraggled ruffle to his uniform collar. Bertholdt wouldn't be surprised if Springer had donned his shirt backwards that day.
A second question: "Squad Leader Mike told you?"
More often than not, Bertholdt's attempts at humor ended in vain, for he was hardly the ideal comedian. But Connie laughed, because it was a ray of sun shining through that bleak —snowy?— day.
"He didn't sniff me, if that's what you're asking." A pause. "Just kidding, Nanaba told me. The odds of Squad Leader Mike choosing to talk rather than sniff is less likely than holding a conversation with you. You sure are talkative today."
Bertholdt shrugged.
Then, a certain Sasha Braus chose that very moment to bound down the hallway and grab Connie's shoulders with the utmost seriousness.
"Connie, there's no bread left."
Without further explanation, she snatched Connie's arm and proceeded to drag him down the corridor.
"What was that?"
Reiner strode up to the door and slammed it shut, very nearly catching Bertholdt's toe.
"What time is it?" snapped the fair-haired soldier, tugging his uniform jacket on and plopping back down on the bed unceremoniously. Bertholdt, supposing that his silence would serve more than enough, pulled the door open once more and strode out. A surprised Reiner watched after him, wide-eyed, as the taller warrior took a brisk stride out into the hall.
The squelch of snow underfoot was jarring; Bertholdt stepped outside cautiously, contemplating the crispness of the fluffy white before him. Once accustomed to the sharp sounds — a morning birdcall, the crunch of ice, and the eternal chirp of a cricket, even in the morning — and filled to the core with a lungful of chilled air, Bertholdt ventured out around the perimeter of the series of cabins they stayed in. Cabins didn't seem like the word, in all honesty.
A small lodge, owned by a modest former farmer and his pleasant wife. A temporary haven of sorts for the Scouting Legion, where, for a night, they could spare the time to play cards like the Military Police would do on a daily basis.
The wind bites his ears, and he feels his nose reddening.
The horses are blanketed and huddled in a small shed, where they'd been turned out the night before. Oddly enough, Bertholdt can't help but wonder why they weren't stabled down at the farmer's more than adequate barn. Wasn't there a snowstorm last night? He couldn't seem the remember, only recalling the fact that he'd slept more soundly than he had in a long time.
Was there snow on the ground yesterday?
He couldn't think of the day before.
The more his mind delved into the hours, rolling back along a list of events, he began to forget them. Had he had corn soup or a buttered roll for dinner yesterday? Had he dreamed of the precious slab of meat on his plate or had he seriously devoured such a rarity last night? Bertholdt supposed the former.
No, he had not had either. Didn't the farmer serve a fine meal of mashed potatoes, bland as they were, that delighted Sasha so greatly that she'd attempted to wipe the table clean with her tongue? He vividly recalled a thousand bread rolls stacked in a sweetly scented wicker basket, its handle dyed in spring blues and pinks, with—
"They're out of bread."
His own voice startled him.
Why couldn't he remember?
The snow grew thinner and thinner as he trudged onwards, his feet growing increasingly laboriously into the forest. Under a canopy of heavy, evergreen pines, their needled arms stretching so far as to block out the cold morning sun, the snow faltered till there was none left. The white world hung at the lips of the forest, frosting across the edges of underbrush, but lingered as if an invisible boundary had sprung from the earth.
His toes dug into twigs and leaves and soil, so comforting and familiar that Bertholdt fell into a nearly forgotten habit of inspecting every inch of land around him. He overturned a thick, mossy slab of bark with his boot to find a large beetle living beneath. He thought of leaping over logs, but they were hardly big enough to warrant his effort. Back then, he would've scrambled over the top as Reiner struggled to even get a foothold on the humongous thing, and the nimble Annie somehow discovered a detour.
Curiously enough, Bertholdt spied a glint in the forest floor. He knelt, brushed away the layer of leaves and twigs. He nearly choked, for as he gingerly scooped the shining item into his palm, he realized that it was a jarringly nostalgic item — Annie's bracelet.
How Annie must be disheartened, to have lost her necklace again. He felt the urge to find her, but she couldn't possibly be there, in the forest, with him. Nonetheless, Bertholdt veered deeper into the forest, as if she would appear as a mockingbird and transform into a human.
Naturally, he checked and double checked the footing whenever he ventured into the underbrush. Reiner's childhood incident with a hidden trap that clamped into his foot was a horrendously clear memory, fresh in his mind like the scent of blood and the tug at his gut.
Hunger. He realized he was hungry.
Bertholdt pictured Annie perched in a tree, silently aiming, silently killing. An unfortunate rabbit, the skinny and stringy kind, might fall to her arrow of fate.
She held a finger to her lips — quiet, she beckoned.
The arrow was pulled back, but evergreens rustled and — no, those weren't evergreen, those were great, leafy monstrosities whose dark oak arms shook under the weight of his confusion.
Right then and there, his eyes had not deceived him. Annie was not his imagination, Annie was there. She hissed; her prey escaped. But as soon as she leapt down to the ground, the grating crunch of branches shook him from his trance.
"A-Annie," he began, holding out her necklace. "What are you—"
But it was devastatingly cold, so, so cold, and the trees were gone and all the snow that he'd tormented came whirling back with a vengeance. How angry the snow was, for tempting it as it waited beyond an invisible fence at the edge of the forest. As soon as Annie's feet hit the ground, the fence toppled and the fearsome white overtook them like a storm of retaliation.
"Annie, your bracelet!"
He thrust it into her hands, then, clasping her delicate fingers within his larger ones. Her skin radiated warmth, and she showed no sign of being affected by the snow — only a slight widening of her eyes when he pressed the trinket into her hands, a trickle of appreciation.
She was small and warm and he simply wanted to draw her into the circle of his arms but before he could even move a muscle, the snow engulfed him in all its blinding fury and he couldn't help but fear the fact that he couldn't shake off the weight hanging from every fiber of his being. As if he couldn't get up, as if he never rose from the forlornly plain bunk.
But the trace outline of Annie's hand, burned into his own skin, told him that she had been more real than anything.
Warmth seeps from his fingers, leaving his skin an alarmingly pale shade of icy white. A thin blanket is draped across his broad shoulders, but it serves no purpose. He sees, from the corner of his eye, a slab of light through the window, and a grassy knoll just outside. It's cloudy, but the nonchalant sheep in the sky float by as they graze on air, and their shadows shade the rise and fall of green hills, wind riffling through a sea of emerald.
He contemplates.
He's had the worst dream, but he can't seem to remember it.
An echo of warmth on his hands, and that is all that remains.
/chapter
SnKception.
lol.
I remember I did an animeception once, and it went on and on and on and on and ONNNNNNNN.