idk another semi-long one?
Disclaimer: I don't own SnK because if I can't even write a decent essay (dammit) how could I possibly hope to master the beauty that is snk?
I only swim Free!.
NOTE: If you can't tell, the last few chapters have been linked (I like doing that) and all about a series of dreams. (a lot of BertlAnnie) DREAMS I TELL YOU.
Note 2: a lot of it is meant to be up to your imagination, mmkay?
uh.
here you go.
Three Warriors
xxx. impression .xxx
It occurs to her that she has forgotten when she'd stopped denying his presence. He pulls up a chair every day, without fail, for such a long time that she can't remember if she had always accepted his devoted time, or if there had occurred a period where she finally relented.
"Did you sleep well?" he asks.
Yes.
She was about to scream.
Scream to the world her anguish and pain, the only kind of suffering that a small child would understand, because here she was, at a loss, suffocating herself with tears. Her overly large sweater was splotched with teardrops, and the amount of rage in her tiny body was overwhelming. If she didn't explode first, she would shrivel into a curled up nothing of nothings, because without her mother, Annie would forget who she was and why she was here.
Annie existed, but at the same time, she did not.
Her heart pounded as if it were the training dummy she kicks away at until the wood underneath splinters and the entire thing cracks in two. It beat so loudly, pulsating through her ears, racking her body and her very core, that she didn't realize the tall, meek, ruddy-faced boy standing before her.
He very nearly blended in with the background, so much so that it was frustrating. He had long legs and long arms and an eternally frightened face, always on the verge of tears. And, not to mention, he was the victim of the gods of clumsiness, doomed forever to trip up whatever they were working on.
"Go away!" she screeched, fists clenching. He balked. "Leave me alone!"
Her voice pierced the air like nothing could, as if a boundary in the sky had had its membrane sliced through with a needle.
"I-I'm sorr—"
On a whim, she shoved him. Expecting him to shove back, she instinctively continued beating upon the poor child, and despite the fact that at five years old, he was more than a head taller than her, she still threw him around like a pitiful ragdoll. To say the least, Bertholdt ended up on his sore bottom more than once before scrambling to his feet again in a dogged attempt to relay his message.
After screaming for him to leave her alone another five times, she realized that he wouldn't leave until she let him finish his sentence. Poor things, both of them, befuddled and sore and full of tears.
Her tears, apparently, were contagious, and the moment she accidentally let loose a storm of sobs, he breaks into reckless wails.
Why are you crying too? She wanted to say, but he looks so miserable that she can't help but feel sad too, even though she was just as dejected to begin with.
"What do you want?" she snapped, sniffling.
"I, um, I-I wanted to—"
She wanted to either kick him in the shin or run away, because if he didn't stop rubbing his nose and crying and stalling and…
"—to give this back to you." He shoved something into her hands, and she noticed that he'd been holding it tightly within his fingers the whole time.
It's her mother's bracelet.
Her mother.
"You found it?"
"You, um, dropped it back where the paths cross," he said simply. "It's important to you, right?"
He was annoying, for sure. A clumsy crybaby who was so nervously jittery that she wondered if tying him to a tree would make the tree quake. But, in that moment, she knew that he was invaluable.
At least, to her five-year-old mind, he was an important person.
Important.
It occurs to her that she has forgotten when she'd stopped denying his presence. He sits on the porch next to her every day — at least, he used to — and after that he never failed to exchange a glance with her at some point before dinner. Back then, he followed her for such a long time that, after a summer of five-year-old quarrels and quiet sitting — with, perhaps, a kitten curled up between them and the moon playing with their minds — that perhaps she had always accepted his company, or maybe she'd relented from change of heart.
It's important to her, this bond.
So when Armin asks her if she sleeps well, and he disappears in the depths of an ocean crevice where all the dreams go, she whispers yes, but actually, it is the warmth and the familiarity of Bertholdt's name on her lips that awaken her.
/chapter
Note 3: adult!dream!Armin is a figment of imagination... OR IS IT?