Thank you for the support!

#

Eren was sitting with the white-haired man. Armin was drinking some tea that the man had made for them. The white-haired man pulled an axe from beneath the table and chopped off Eren's head. It took several swings. Armin choked, paralyzed by the tea, then the white-haired man came after him.

Reset.

The white-haired man transformed into a Titan and bit both of the boys' heads off.

Reset.

The area became infested with Titans that had grown in the ground like carrots, defying all logic, burst out, and all three of the males were torn to pieces.

Reset.

By the time Mikasa reached the group in the forest, she could have screamed at them for wasting her time and practically getting Eren killed (well, or so she imagined). But Mikasa did not scream. Mikasa was an iceberg floating in an ocean of calm. So she landed next to the men and their horses noiselessly, letting her cloak settle over her gear like a consummate professional. Despite her silent entry, Levi seemed to sense her approach and utterly failed to look surprised when she approached. He was riding one horse and leading Ruther's. Ruther himself was jackknifed over the back of Dange's horse, making no noise nor movement.

"Can't wake him up," Levi said when he noticed her attention. Then: "Don't look at me like that, he fell. A branch broke. I haven't touched him other than moving him onto the horse– anyway, what are you doing here." When Levi asked things, they didn't sound like questions, except when he knew the answers and wanted to see if you knew it too.

"Armin found the man he was looking for," Mikasa said.

Levi made no response, just kept the horse moving forward. Mikasa kept pace at his side. From behind them, Dange groaned.

"Oh come on! Stop playing conversational chicken!" he said. Then, as Levi shot a look at him. "Sorry, heichou. Sir."

The corporal didn't even have to look mad. He didn't have to look anything and still he could put the fear of God into strangers. To that tiny extent, Mikasa was jealous. But asking for information from her made Levi appear the supplicant and volunteering information suggested that Mikasa wanted to make him happy with her.

Levi said, "Where did the kid take them."

"The edge of the forest to the north. There's a ruined city. No Titans."

"Good." He held out the reins of Ruther's horse to her and pointed his horse north. "Take those two back to the bigger group and stay there until I get back."

Mikasa didn't move to take the reins.

"It was an order," Levi said evenly, hand still outstretched. She didn't move and his expression grew tight around the edges. "I am more than capable of protecting your childhood friend." He hesitated as the sentence died away, waiting for her to bite back a sharp rebuttal. When it didn't come, he looked up at the trees as if assessing their worth.

"Armin, though, I might have to kill him. I haven't had a bath in two days because of him."

"The man Armin found might be able to save Ruther," Mikasa said.

"I don't put a lot of stock in 'mights'," Levi said. She could tell by his tense stance that he wanted her to get going on what he had asked her to do. The reins dangled like an invitation. Eren was waiting for her though. She had to say something that would make Levi forget that he wanted her, Dange, and Ruther back with the bigger group, something to make him want what Armin had found.

"More stock than having to tell his family he died in the woods?" she said.

She got a glimpse of pain on the corporal's face. It was unlike any of the other scouts' expressions of pain. Armin telegraphed his pain like a train whistle but, equally like a train, rode on through it - damaged but not decreased in resolve.

Eren wore his pain like a flaring cape, something no one could miss seeing if they came in contact with him; he would use it to make entrances and exits and sometimes he would just wrap it around him and hide – which made it all the more noticeable as it was all anyone could see of him.

Mikasa didn't know how she wore her pain.

Levi's was like the sudden prominence of an expression that was always there, lurking in his eyes and the set of his mouth, and then it faded until looking at him, you couldn't tell where the pain had been. If the grief had been stored in his eyes or the lines of his forehead. You were just certain that it was still there, still staring at you, and yet Levi looked like Levi and nothing else.

"It wouldn't be the first time someone died in the woods," he said. Reaching to his pack, he began readying a flare.

"Away from Titans, I mean," Mikasa said. Levi spun the chamber and fired – green, for a change in route.

"Lead on then. I hate telling people—" Levi began, then stopped himself and jogged the horse onward. Mikasa could finish the rest of the sentence on her own anyway.

Hate telling people that their deaths achieved nothing.

She took to the trees and they had a silent ride to the edge of the woods.

#

When they got to the hut where she had been imagining a slaughter for the past hour, the door was still down. Armin was vainly trying to tell the man that he could just will the Titans away and that would be a miracle wouldn't it, and the man, who was trying to put the door back in place, said he only worked with dead people.

Levi slid off his horse and, with a casual gesture, pulled Ruther off of Dange's horse and headed for the door. The bigger boy dwarfed him, yet Levi appeared not to notice.

"Then we need a miracle," he told the miracle man.

"What, him?" the white-haired man looked at Ruther, slung over Levi's shoulder. As the scout went by, he lifted and dropped the scout's wrist. "He's not even dead yet!"

"I could kill him, if that's easier," Levi said.

The white-haired man looked at the captain, striding into his hut, and Mikasa could feel a change in the tempo. The man was serious now, angry. Dange had dismounted and was jogging inside to clear the table for Levi, probably trying to even the score from the 'conversational chicken' comment hours before. The miracle man followed them inside, eyes narrowed.

"Then you're not the kind of guy I do miracles for," the miracle man said.

"It was a joke," Levi said. Silence.

"Maybe you should make your jokes in a more joking tone of voice," Dange said, still not having figured out that opening his mouth was a bad idea. An awkward silence had set up shop between the white-haired miracle man and Levi. Armin stepped into the fray as Levi slung Ruther onto the newly-cleared table.

"R-Ruther climbed one of the trees to give me time to find you," he told the miracle-man. Mikasa felt the killing aura around Levi shoot up like a thermometer in a Titan's mouth, then cool.

"And you were successful, which is the only thing that makes that fine, kid," Levi said, then turned to the miracle man. "Fix him, and we'll be on our way."

"I don't remember setting up a charity for half-dead tree climbers!" the miracle man snapped. "And don't touch that!"

Eren had wandered over to a four-colored dial on the wall near the right side of the door and was about to turn it. Currently, the red shape was at the top, but there were black, blue, and green in alternating shapes around the dial. There was also a little black cord that ran to the doorframe which seemed to serve no purpose now that the door was down. Perhaps it was some kind of special bell? The black-haired teen looked up in surprise at being caught.

"What does it—" Eren began to ask.

"None of your business!"

Levi ignored this conversation altogether and addressed Armin.

"Your show, kid. You have ten minutes."

#

Ten minutes, Armin thought. That would be a reference to how long it would take the rest of the group to skirt the perimeter of the forest and catch up with them. Ten minutes to be really really persuasive. Armin steadied his nerves and took a breath. The white-haired miracle man looked sharply at him at this noise and leaned back on his heels, folding his arms in a skeptical posture.

"Sir, we are defending humanity against the Titans. Ruther is an integral part of that design," Armin said. "It-it is the highest of causes, at the risk of our lives."

"You got money?"

"Er." Armin tried not to look expectantly at Levi, who as the oldest in their company and the leader, would probably be the only one with money. It wasn't like the Scouting Legion doled out wages on the road. Even back at the outpost, there probably wasn't a lot of cash. They would have to return to a major town first…

"How much?" Levi asked, his tone resigned to being the traveling wallet.

"How much you got?" the miracle man asked back, tone wily.

"A man is going to die on the table while you argue about price!" Armin said. He knew people and money and this type of discussion could go on for a long time. "And that's no good for anyone."

Levi said nothing. He had retreated to the doorway after dropping Ruther off on the table and was now staring at something in the distance with enough intensity that it seemed he was there, not here. Everything here was bickering and inconsequential. Then—

"Fix Ruther. You'll have whatever your price is if he's up by the time I'm back. Ackerman, Jaeger, with me. Dange, get the door up. Armin, eight minutes." Levi fired his gear and launched into the trees, heading west towards their company and whatever he had seen on the horizon that worried him. Mikasa leaned out of the doorway after him and readied her gear.

"Titans," she said by way of explanation.

"Shouldn't the group—" Armin began, but she fixed him with a glare.

"You're not following orders, Armin," she said, gently admonishing him. She and Eren jetted off, leaving Dange to start trying, with plenty of grunts and heaving, to lift the door back into place. Armin turned to the white-haired miracle man.

This is for Ruther's life, he told himself. If he's still alive anyway. This shouldn't be hard.

"Can I—know your name, sir?" Armin asked.

"Max," the man replied.

"If we have Ruther functioning, we'll be better able to defend you from the Titans."

"He won't be able to move for at least fifteen minutes," the miracle man said shrewdly. "I've seen the Titans and you don't have that kind of time."

"The rest of our group will be here in less time than that," Armin said, praying that this would be the case. "They'll protect you."

Behind him, the door fell inwards with a bang. Though the noise made Armin jump, he didn't look until Dange yelped in surprise, fear- and then pain. For a terrible second, Armin couldn't turn around. It couldn't—they couldn't be here! The group was fighting the Titans! They should be at least a mile off. They couldn't be here, not in such a ruined area.

Max was staring at whatever was happening in the doorway. His expression made Armin turn, readying his blades to defend an utterly indefensible area to the best of his ability. Ready, in other words, to die.

A Titan, bent, smiling, and grasping with its man-size fingers, was pulling Dange out the door and towards its waiting mouth.

Armin fumbled to get his blades into position and he was slow, so slow! The Titan put its gaping maw up to the door as it maneuvered its massive wrist back towards its mouth. It had bashed out the left half of the door-frame on its way in but it was still angling for the hole, not tearing the walls and roof out. Dange was screaming for Armin, arms pinned by the Titan's fingers.

Armin had been eaten once before.

It wasn't an empathy one forgot, or could ever ignore afterwards.

Launching off the table, he slashed at the Titan's wrist with his blades. The spring carried him into the bookshelf on the far side of the room, where he gathered recoil from the crash and leapt again. Slashing—

The wrist was spouting blood, muscles losing their grip, but Dange wasn't free yet. Rebounding off the other side of the wall, Armin launched himself straight at the wrist in the doorway, slashing down as hard as he possibly could. The blade went through the wrist, caught on the floor, broke, and Armin's momentum was carrying him out the damaged door.

As he passed through the doorframe, curled tight in a ball as if to push himself away from the threat, he felt the air change. Sudden moistness.

I'm already in its mouth.

There would be no Eren to save him. He crashed hard onto what he thought was its tongue (swallowed alive?!) and felt it splatter around him like mud. Tongues didn't do that. The Titan shouldn't have even fed yet, if it was an Aberrant. Armin opened one eye. Then the other.

There was grass beneath him. A muddy meadow. Rain. Trembling, he turned and looked up behind him, expecting to see either the Titan in battle with a scout or the Titan inexplicably having stood up to eat him.

Nothing. There was nothing but a cloudy sky and some distant treetops. Look lower... a town, down the hill. Lights were on in window. He was still trembling. Rain fell on his head and he looked back at the hut.

Still there.

"Uh… uh… hunuh..?" he tried, panting. The rain was driving and getting in his eyes.

"Welcome to Wales!" Max called from the open doorway.

"I-I… uh?" Armin tried for words again, shakily getting to his feet in the slick mud. "W-where's the Titan?"

Miracles. The man was in the business of miracles.

"Part of it is still in here," Max said. "Get back inside before you catch your death."

"Max!" There was a shrill female voice from inside the hut now. Armin stared in new bafflement and said "er?" on the grounds that maybe Max would explain things. Instead, the female voice cut in and Max went inside.

"Max, you said you would tell me whenever we moved, you great blinkin'—why is there a corpse in my kitchen?"

"Be quiet, witch!"

"You been mucking about with that wizard's stuff again, don't go calling me a witch!"

-and Armin, utterly lost, went back into the dry and noisy house. It felt like entering a dream. He still didn't know what they were doing in a whale. Did the inside of whales look like a small town? Did it rain in whales? He decided to try this last on the woman who Max called 'Val' when he wasn't calling her 'witch.'

"Does it rain in whales?" Armin asked her.

The white-haired elderly woman, who looked as if she had spent years with Max and took all intimacies as her due. She was currently bending over Ruther with an inquisitive eye.

"Yes, it rains all the time. Now, who broke my bookshelf?" she asked, glancing up at Armin. "It certainly wasn't your friend. Max, what do we have for a coma?"

"There-there was a Titan—ma'am," he said brokenly. Would it be out of place to mention that he had just saved their lives, which meant they should save Ruther's? Max was already thinking along those lines.

"We'll fix 'im," Max said grudgingly. "Val, check the cabinet for that magic elixir you got in the market, we'll coat it with St. Johns and dewdrops."

"Hershey's sweet?"

"To cover THAT taste? Yeeesh, gimme some Ghiradelli."

"Humanity thanks you, sir," Armin said with a polite salute. He wanted to ask what Max had done to make the Titan vanish. The miracle man was leaning over Ruther with 'Val' now though – hardly open to questions. Dange was in the corner furthest from the door, breathing heavily as he tried to calm down from an even closer near-death experience than Armin. Armin approached him.

"Dange—"

"I'm fine. Thanks- thanks to you." The boy didn't move, legs pulled into his chest as he tried to work through his emotions. If Armin remembered his own experiences correctly, Dange probably just wanted to scream and scream and scream until his eardrums burst and then the world would just pass by in a nice, quiet glide of concerned people, deep in the kingdom away from the Titans.

Armin took a seat next to him on the ground. He wasn't sure why Dange had ignored the chairs around the table, but he had a pretty good idea it had something to do with being much more defensible in a corner, on the ground.

"If not for whatever Max did, I would be dead too. Did you see what happened?"

Dange looked at the still-open doorway, where rain poured over the soggy open field. Very slowly, he nodded.

"The dial."

There it was, intact on the right side of the door, with the black side pointing up now. Before, it had been red.

"When you were jumping for the door, he turned it and the doorway changed. Like a window or something. And you were out in the rain and the Titan was gone."

So whales was a place, not a thing. They had moved places. It explained how the house had been occupied one moment and hollow the next, back at the edge of the wood. Max and Val simply hadn't been living here when they first arrived. Maybe it was luck of the draw that they had come at all.

The corporal, Armin thought suddenly. The group!

If they were fighting Titans right now, they would need refueling soon. They would need to go home, which meant they needed to collect Armin, Dange, and Ruther or give them up for dead. Without gas, the trees would be impossible and on the ground, they would be sheep for the slaughter.

It was no good just thinking 'Levi will figure something out,' because that wasn't fair to Levi, who wouldn't expect them to teleport somewhere else. Armin sat back, thought about this, and fretted as the miracle man and his wife worked to save (or resurrect) Ruther.

#

This fic will go on for a while yet (though more will happen than just sitting in the hut). Hope you enjoy it, and kudos to any of you who've caught the references. I know some people are a bit out of character, apologies.