A/N: Review answers!
To reviewer Rawrforandall: Did you mean Eren NOT regenerating? x D And you know, it's not because of Levi biting him that Eren isn't regenerating anymore! ; D haha x D
To reviewer HarmonyBenderFreak: thanks. x D *ducks head and blushes* No seriously, thank you! : D
To my still-most-faithful reviewer 9haharharley1, who hasn't missed a single Chapter since I first started this: Thank you! : D That's the way I always tend to see Levi. He can be brash and unthinking, but at his core he is a wise and intensely passionate man. 3
To reviewer rastannana: What's 'pwp'? : P Thanks! : D
~Tenshi
Chapter 5: In The Darkest Places
"The second arc, the second arc," Jean muttered, pulling the trigger to his Gear. The thread shot out to his left, burying itself into a tree, and Jean was pulled to the left as he pulled out a blade and slashed right across the neck of the Titan blocking his path. The creature tumbled, freeing the path, and to his right he saw Armin edging forward with his own gear, a determined look on his face. "Damn it," Jean gritted out again, gear kicking into action and pulling him back towards the middle of the path. "Armin!" he called finally at the boy to his right. "We passed the second arc ages ago! We should be seeing Jaeger by now!"
"Shut up Jean!" Armin snapped, surprising him. "Just keep going! He could be anywhere along the length of the arc! Just keep to your side and I'll keep to mine, and between the six of us we'll find- There!" Armin shot off to the left suddenly, cutting across Jean's path as quickly as Jean had ever seen the blond use the Manoeuver Gear. Jean stalled, swore, and managed to right himself just before crashing into the other boy. He looked off to where Armin was now headed, and in the distance saw a column of bright white smoke rising and slowly fading in the wind against the night sky – the sign that one of their team had found Eren.
He swore again and veered off-course to follow Armin, who was by now well ahead of him. He'd missed the detonation somehow, probably because he'd had Armin talking his ear off when it went, he thought bitterly. He caught up with the other boy quickly enough, pulling ahead but not too far, in case the blond encountered a Titan and needed his help to finish it off. Now that Eren had been sighted, they weren't supposed to get delayed – for example by fighting Titans – but Jean figured that they weren't necessarily going to get a choice. With their luck, if a Titan was to attack them before they'd reached the others, it would be an Abnormal, and they'd have no other choice but to take it down lest it follow them all the way to Eren.
But for once, they were lucky.
Or at least, right up until they'd reached the Titan shifter. From there, everything went downhill.
When they reached him, the first thing they saw was that there were other Titans, crowded around him, backing him up against a massive tree with a trunk twenty times Jean's width and fifty times his height. At first neither him nor Armin actually realized that Eren was there. All they saw was a group of Titans clustered around a tree. Then suddenly, just as they were about to keep moving, they heard two simultaneous things.
One, the roar of a Titan that could only be Eren, a roar that told of unbearable pain if he wasn't already dying.
And two, Mikasa's echoing scream, coming straight from among the clustered Titans.
The Titans staggered back in a close circle near the center of their group, like a ripple of surprise originating from a fixed point. Several of the staggering Titans fell back and into others around them, dragging them to the ground and creating a domino effect made even more impressive to watch by the sheer size of the falling bodies. As both Jean and Armin stopped their course and settled on a nearby tree, not understanding what was happening, a ridge was cut in the Titans, heading straight for the place where Eren was very obviously cornered.
Then Armin understood. "It's Mikasa!" he shouted at Jean, readying his Gear. "She's down there with Eren! We've got to help her!"
But Jean grabbed his arm and turned him around to look at him. "Are you stupid? I know it's Mikasa, and that's why I'm just sitting here idle and letting her do whatever it is she's trying to do! She stronger than both of us put together, you idiot! What were you gonna do, besides jump in there and get yourself killed for nothing?"
Armin held back, his head swivelling back to look at Mikasa's tiny moving figure amongst the collapsing Titans. She was cutting off their Achilles tendons so that they couldn't stay standing, expertly dodging both still-moving feet and gigantic flailing and falling bodies as she ran, her blades out and trailing behind her in both hands. He was conflicted, was still considering going down there to do something – anything – but Jean's strong grip on his arm intensified.
"Stay here Armin," he said, his voice softer now that he'd managed to get the blonde boy's attention. "I wasn't there for the Corporal's little inspirational speech earlier, but you told me enough of it that even I know what we're supposed to do now. Trust her, Armin. You're her best friend; you more than anyone should know what that girl is capable of. We'd only get ourselves killed, and knowing her she'd probably feel like it was her fault for the rest of her life after that. Right?" Jean shook Armin's arm a little, and those blue eyes settled on him. "Stay here. Watch her. Trust her, Armin. She can do it." He stopped; nodded towards Mikasa. "Look."
And the Titans were falling. One after the other, in an inevitable, rippling, unstoppable wave of pain, and soon there were none left standing, and the Titan shifter Eren Jaeger was left in full view of them.
Jean swore, stepped forward and off the tree, shooting his Gear into the tree that the Titan had been crowded against.
Left behind, Armin was slower to react. He stared and swayed, only avoiding a fall to his death by crouching on the branch. He couldn't move, couldn't react, couldn't even make a sound as he watched his childhood best friend's mutilated body.
The Titan shifter's arms had been bitten off, left down to stumps that just about protruded from his body like an unfinished doll's cut shoulders. The muscles in his thighs had been ripped out and left hanging, leaving him to sit against the tree as they buried their hands into his stomach and cleaved out his intestines. His bottom half was covered in guts, in blood, in other unidentifiable things that made Armin want to vomit in horror and pain for Eren. The Titan's head had drooped, and Armin felt instantly, straight into his soul, that something was wrong. Horribly wrong.
Well, besides the fact that his best friend was sitting there with his guts hanging out and half his face smashed in beyond recognition.
Now perched on Eren's shoulder, Jean watched as Mikasa, having cut the skin of the Titan open just above where she knew Eren's head to be, grabbed her cousin by the shoulders and desperately tried to pull him out of the stinking flesh. It hit Jean then that there was something missing from this perfect picture. Something that should have been there, that he was used to seeing when it came to Titans, but that for some reason wasn't here. He stalled. Froze for a few seconds as the gears in his mind worked. And then he saw it.
Eren gave off none of the regenerating vapours that the other Titans were.
"He's not regenerating," he whispered, shell-shocked. He looked up at Mikasa, said, louder, "Mikasa – he's not regenerating!"
The black-haired girl didn't answer, only groaned and pulled harder on her cousin. She panted, once, and looked up wildly at him. "He's stuck! I can't get him out! Jean – his arms, his legs! They've fused with the Titan! Jean – I can't – get him – out!"
There was a sudden shout behind them, and the zip of 3D Manoeuver Gear, and Armin screamed again, and this time his words were perfectly clear to both of them.
"Abnormals!"
Oh shit was all Jean had time to think. Jean looked at Mikasa's desperate face, at Armin who was launching himself straight at the incoming Titans in a desperate effort to slow them before they reached Eren's carcass, and resolved that the world was a desperate place one way or the other and that he might as well give being desperate a try. He jumped.
As soon as Levi heard and saw the white fuse go off, he knew that problems were coming. The fuse had gone off from just beyond the fourth arc. That meant more Titans. And that was nowhere near an optimistic resolution.
Levi bolted. Jumped from the ground, shot his gear out, and headed straight for the mid-fourth arc. Luckily, he wasn't too far from the fourth arc – only just past the third arc, but at the far end of it, near the cliff that rose steeply behind the castle. It took him just under a minute to travel the mile that separated him from the arc, but even then it felt too long, and what he saw when he arrived only made him confirm that.
Three Cadets of the search party – Ackerman, Arlert and Kirstein. About twenty Titans collapsed and smoking on the ground in front of Eren's carcass. And a horde of incoming Abnormals.
Not good.
Levi embraced the situation with a glance. Ackerman, trying to peal Eren away from the half-eaten carcass of his Titan, and failing; the smoking Titans on the ground at their feet, slowly regenerating from the cut Achilles tendons, which Levi had no doubt had been slashed by Mikasa; and Kirstein and Arlert, keeping a group of five Abnormals away from Mikasa, Eren and the rest of the Titans. However long it had been since she'd cut their tendons, Levi knew by their state of healing that they all had about thirty seconds before the Titans rose and started wreaking havoc. Some of the ones closer to Eren's Titan were clawing forward with just their hands already in an attempt to get closer to him.
He shot forward, and a heartbeat later was running along what was left of Eren's shoulder and collarbone. He shouted Mikasa's name, and she looked up, still pulling at her cousin's body. Levi could see that the boy was stuck, had begun fusing with his Titan just as he'd started fusing with Annie Leonhardt's Titan a week earlier; he could also see that, contrary to the rest of the fallen Titans, Eren Jaeger was not regenerating. For now, he blamed it on the colossal extent of the damage that his Titan body had endured, but Levi knew better. If she didn't show up now to see it for herself, he'd have to ask Hanji about this later.
"Get out of the way, Mikasa!" he barked at the black-haired girl. She jumped aside, and Levi knelt to take a look at Eren. There were tendrils, growing straight out from the Titan's flesh, coiling around the places that had been damaged on the Titan – his arms, his thighs, the half of his face that was visible, the rest turned downward and bearing right down into the Titan's flesh, and around his waist and stomach. Eren Jaeger had been ensnared by his own Titan's body, and though now the sinuous tentacles of sanguinary flesh were unmoving, so then was the boy trapped within them.
There was no getting him out of there alive.
Or at least not in one piece.
Levi sighed. It couldn't be avoided. He closed his eyes, remembering the plan that he himself had devised and shared with Eren on the younger boy's first week in the Recon Corps. He had to do it. It was the only way. If he could only just cut his arms off, then he could haul him out and drag his legs, face and torso out forcefully. With a bit of luck, his arms would be the only things Eren lost in this fight.
Except that now he wasn't regenerating.
Levi's eyes snapped open. He stood, poised his feet on either side of Eren's body, and lifted his two blades to cross above his head. There was no time to think. If they couldn't get Eren out of there, he would die. If they got him out, no matter the cost, there was a chance, no matter how small, that he would survive. He had to try.
His arms tensed, and he prepared to strike down and seal Eren Jaeger's quickly shortening future.
His arms refused to move.
Levi gritted his teeth. Beside him, Ackerman held her breath.
But he couldn't do it. He couldn't.
He panted shortly, just once, as frustration and guilt and exasperation at his inability to act flooded him. A startled, humourless snort of laughter escaped him, cruel and unforgiving. He couldn't do it, but at the same time he knew he'd never forgive himself for not being able to do it.
But he could not. Do it.
No matter how hard he tried to move then, he knew that he had failed.
He knew that he had the right to do it. He owned the boy, just like he owned every one of the Cadets, simply because he was their competent hierarchical superior. He knew without a doubt that, had Eren had a choice, he would have asked his Corporal to just do it, cut his arms off and to hell with the consequences, because he wouldn't have wanted to stay there, trapped within that rotting, stinking flesh, for the Titans to come along and eat him bit by bit – like livestock, he would have said.
But even knowing this, he could not do it. All he could think about was the way those strong hands had carved bloody gouges into his back just the day before, how he still had so many things to enjoy in life, and how all this would be ruined if his arms were cut off by his superior and were never to regenerate.
If this was it, if this was what guilt felt like, then he never wanted it again. Petra's death had already shaken a nerve in him, but this was different, because there wouldn't be anyone else to blame. He would be the one carrying the blades this time. And no matter how many times he'd prided himself on his absence of emotions, he couldn't bear the guilt alone.
His blades fell.
He breathed in. Once, twice. Staring at the broken boy laying face down in blood-red flesh. Breathed out.
And wasn't surprised when a new, deep, rumbling said in his ear, "Step aside, Levi."
And he did.
The 13th Commander of the Recon Corps stepped forward, brought his blades up above his head, and in one swift and powerful movement, bit the blades down – into the Titan's flesh.
Levi sucked in a breath.
What?
Erwin Smith hadn't cut the boy's arms off. He'd severed the Titan's head – effectively disconnecting his nerve endings.
That wasn't a move that normally worked on Titans; usually they'd just grow another one in a few minutes and in the meantime run around like headless chickens, making them just as dangerous as Abnormals. But Eren wasn't regenerating. And of course the Commander had seen this straight away, and used the dysfunction to his advantage, had seen what Levi, in his hurry, had failed to think of.
And now, with nerves severed, the flesh that had previously kept Eren's body ensnared had loosened. Erwin Smith took another step forward, sheathing his blades before grabbing the younger boy by the armpits and hauling him up and back against his chest. He turned, and even as Mikasa hurried forward to take her cousin, he shook his head and looked at Levi. The two men looked at each other. Erwin wanted him to pay the price of his incompetence. He wanted him to both see his failure of not having thought about it himself, and to imagine what would have happened if he'd cut his arms off. His hesitation had given Eren back his arms, but it had also cost him his reputation and distinction in the eyes of the Commander.
Levi took Eren's burden onto himself, turned, and launched himself into the air while behind him, Erwin shot up the yellow fuse that told the search party that the Titan shifter had been recovered. The night was far from over, but at least Eren Jaeger had been found and saved.
A/N: Chapter 5! :D You know, in the word document that I'm writing this one, it sums up to 31 pages so far. : 3
I hope you liked it! Thanks to all the new reviews and follows and favourites, and keep going like that guyz! : D I'm really really happy with the response this is getting! : D
Don't forget to go vote on the poll on my profile for Burning as your favourite of my fanfics if it is! : D
~Tenshi