Chapter 19

Christa pokes my neck, tilting her head and assessing the damage. "It's not as bad as last time."

I roll my eyes and tug my hood up. The rain gives me an excuse to obscure Jean's nasty habit of leaving marks wherever his mouth lands. Today our gear has been swapped for packs and cloaks, our normal routines discarded in favor of trekking through the rain. Officers flock around us on horseback, supervising our progress and finally beginning to take note of us as individuals.

Soon, they'll begin to keep score.

Christa and I trudge forward, matching each other stride for stride. The comfortable ease of our walks makes her proximity an accustomed sensation, the kind I can let myself relax within. I make no effort to stifle the sounds of my exhaling chest as we climb the rain-slicked slopes.

When I begin to lag, Christa stays at my side until I reassure her I'll be fine on my own. I let my pace slow down, trainees passing around me like a stream around a rock. My chest feels flared, my breath spiced inside my lungs. I hook my hands under the straps of my pack, contemplating whether it's worth it to pretend that I lost my pack in the woods and trek on without it.

Only when I glance behind me to see if anyone's watching, I'm confronted suddenly by a scene I didn't expect to see. It's exactly as I described it in the book: Armin, lagging farther down the path. Reiner plucking the pack straight off the shorter boy's back. I'm too far ahead of them to hear what's being said, but this has confirmed something for me: the scenes I wrote down before forgetting about them do exist. They do intend to come true.

Reiner raises a hand to shield his eyes from the rain as he tilts his head back, scanning the ground between where he stands and where I am. Our eyes meet; I'm too far away to tell what kind of expression he's making.

I let my pack fall back down into place on my shoulders. Pivoting on the trail, I huff my way back towards the group, my thoughts a mess. Seeing one thing unfold doesn't really confirm that everything else I once wrote about will come to pass. What I need is more evidence, more instances that can either confirm or deny whether or not I truly prophesied the future. What's the next instance I wrote about? There's still time between now and when the other potential events of trainee life are supposed to unfold. Those are probably the closest ones, the easiest ways for me to confirm whether or not what's written in my textbook is some odd stroke of madness and luck, or…

Rain trickles into my eye and I wipe it away hastily, rubbing for longer than necessary. The toe of my boot strikes against the trail in front of me. I peel my hand away from my face, eyes widening when I see the person in front of me gazing down at the heel of their boot. "Sorry," I fumble, immediately pulling my foot back from where it'd clipped theirs. "I wasn't–"

"It's fine."

Oh. I know that voice. It'd drift down from the top of my bunk in the middle of the night, in soft murmurs that were somehow still guarded even in her sleep. Annie, sleep talker, distant as the day she and I first met and as daunting as ever.

I peer around the edge of her hood. She's carefully avoiding my eyes. So she knows, then, who clipped her heel. She knows and she's deliberately choosing not to notice me.

"You're avoiding me," I murmur.

The trainee hiking next to Annie whirls around. I'm half expecting it to be Bertholdt, except when I catch a flash of green under the hood I'm too stunned to do anything. Eren scowls. "So? I have no reason to approach you to begin with."

I stifle a sigh. The last thing I want to do is argue with Eren. "I was speaking with Annie."

Eren glances at the blonde, who stays unhelpfully silent. I've somehow managed to find myself alongside the two trainees in the entire 107th division that don't care about helping me out in the slightest. Almost as if catching on my agitation, Eren scoffs. "Right. I'm sure."

Maybe it's the irritation of having my arm twisted behind my back for weeks, only for the warriors to act as if nothing happened and vanish from my immediate life. Maybe it's the buried irritation I have towards Eren, the grudge of a child that begs to say, I tried to save Carla! Isn't that enough? Why can't that be enough? What more do I have to prove to you? What more must I atone for?

Either way, my fist curls when it shouldn't. My scowl deepens when it never should've popped up in the first place. "You're being rude, Eren."

He looks at me like he just swallowed a bug. A bit bewildered, disgusted, and upset all at once. I've set fire to a short wick–either I deescalate immediately, or it bursts into a full-fledged bonfire. "Me. Rude. To you?"

His eyes are as green as ever, yet they've taken on a kind of wildness I've never seen before. It's the sharpness of a polished emerald, cut and clean. The vivid luminance of oxygen and luciferin, the lively bioluminescence of their mingling. He's warning me to back down. Even Annie is paying attention now, in the way that she always does whenever she's interested but doesn't want to show it. Her head has tilted just slightly–almost imperceptibly so–towards Eren and I.

It almost makes me upset, that realization that I know both Annie and Eren's little habits so well. Yet they will never know me. They will never know Aliva Moreau, because they have branded her as an enemy and pushed her away.

I am tired of being pushed.

"Surely you're not that obtuse." Eren's spine goes rigid. I imagine it shucking itself into place, stacking vertebrae one atop the other until his posture is as sturdy and upright as a mountain. "Our fathers didn't get along, but, our mothers–"

"You have no right to mention them."

My fingers move on instinct, thumb rubbing the band of my mother's wedding ring. My whole body feels tense. Somehow, Annie stays walking next to us, miraculously unfazed. "Efa and Carla were friends–"

"Don't–"

"And they were kind–"

"Don't–"

"And they would weep to know what has become of the children they died for–"

"I SAID STOP!"

I flinch and freeze, hands curling around my face, a habit from the singular memory I possess, haunting every interaction I have with the young Yeager. My heartbeat thuds like crazy in my ears. My breath feels wild and erratic, a caged animal cornered. I catch a glimpse of Annie's expression when I open my eyes.

Eren wasn't going to hit me. His hands are gripping my shoulders, like he was prepared to shake me into silence. The three of us have stopped walking entirely. Why Annie stays is beyond me; but the expression on her face makes my ears heat with shame. It's not pity, entirely, but it's almost as if she stays out of charity. As if settling some debt, appeasing some guilt.

He falls quiet. Everything falls quiet. It's still raining, slipping down our faces like tears. Since when did our hoods fall off our heads? Eren's hands slip off of me.

"Aliva…I wasn't going to…"

I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed to even acknowledge the way that I feel. It's a weakness. I shove both hands against Eren's chest, pushing him away. Rejecting him, rejecting the world, rejecting every awful emotion swelling up inside of me. "Hit me? Why? You've done it before. Just–get it out of your system. Go on. You hate me, don't you?" My voice starts to climb higher. I'm losing it. I can't help it. "You don't have to like me. You don't have to be amicable. But–at least be indifferent. At least–"

"Aliva." Annie's hand on my shoulder shocks me to silence. "Let go."

I blink, glance down at my hands. I've got Eren's cloak balled up in my fists, just beneath his collar. It's probably pinching his neck. It can't be comfortable.

I thought I pushed him away. So why do I cling to human contact so desperately? Why am I unable to relinquish this?

No–why did Eren let my hands linger?

I hear thick footsteps from behind. Glancing over my shoulder, I notice an out-of-breath Armin and a stoic Reiner rounding the corner. I notice Reiner's gaze flit towards Annie; Armin's, towards Eren.

No one glances my way.

I swallow, nearly choking on the effort of burying everything back down deep inside me, and shoulder my way past the trainees. I run forward until I feel sick. At the end of the trail, I excuse myself from the officer's watchful eyes, and then vomit my unease and overexertion at the base of a sickly elm.

Back in the cabin, everything makes sense again. Curled up under the covers, one hand on my lower abdomen and the other under my pillow, the dull ache inside me makes it easier to accept the way I acted earlier.

The pillow next to mine shifts, Mina chuckling faintly. "Poor Aliva," she laments, reaching over to carefully stroke my hair.

I groan, wriggling myself into a tighter ball. "Not funny."

Mina's bell-like laughter rings out again. "Such awful cramps, huh? To render even the great, stoic Aliva, to a frustrated girl her age."

I swat Mina's hand away, but instead of laughing, she just smiles warmly and relocates her caress to my cheek. "I hate womanhood."

Mina nods. "Yes, yes," she agrees, rubbing her thumb against my jaw.

The rain dripping down the window panes reminds me of the hike yesterday. Embarrassment flocks to me in earnest all over again. "Oh, Mina," I groan, burying my face in my pillow. "I made such a big fuss yesterday."

"So I hear," she laughs, and I feel her light fingers tucking stray hairs behind my ear. She falls strangely quiet, something I'm not quite used to her doing. We haven't known each other for all that long, but there's something about her silence that makes me wish for its absence. That, and when she's not talking, it's easier to focus on the aches stemming from my gut.

"What're you thinking about?" I sneak a peek at her from the side of my pillow as Mina readjusts, laying flat on her back with her hands resting on her stomach. She stares up at the base of the top bunk.

"It's not exactly polite of me to say," she smiles, glancing my way and grinning even wider when she realizes she's caught my eye.

"Say it."

"You sure?"

"I wouldn't encourage you if I wasn't."

She gives me a mock-skeptical look. "You seem to be prone to acts that you regret of late, though."

Against myself, I laugh. Then wince. "Say it, before I change my mind."

My bunkmate's expression dims, morphing into something a little less jovial. She takes her time, collecting the way she wants to speak. "I heard some rumors."

The corner of my mouth juts up. "Rumors, already?"

She rolls her head, letting it fall towards me. "One of the gossipy trainees overheard what happened yesterday. Or so the story goes." I make a noncommittal sound. The people that were there at the end–Eren, Annie, Armin and Reiner–aren't the types to gossip. So someone else must have been nearby. And I know I definitely wasn't in the right mind to pay attention to our surroundings. Mina sits up a little, leaning over me. She doesn't touch me like before; I kind of wish she would. "And the rumor…I mean, what people are saying is, that Eren might have h–"

"He didn't," I interject, because Eren and Jean get into it all the time. Why is it that it only becomes a sensitive matter when it involves a woman? A frail one, at that? The lines of the textbook appear in my head, the admonition of murder in another world, another lifetime. If they are real–oh god, if they're real–then whoever I was before I became Aliva had the guts and gall to murder her own mother. I have more blood on my hands than Eren does. Why does it matter who hit who, years ago? My own negligence killed Hannes and Carla.

Mina's lips purse. She looks like she's about to question me further, about to interject, until knocks on the cabin door ring out in the space. She glances at me in my fetal-like state and slips out of the covers. "I'll answer it."

I bury my head against the pillow, basking in the blackness.

Everything is so peaceful, so calm within its embrace. I am nothing. I am everything. No end, no beginning. No aches and unsolved mysteries. No questioning who I am and who I was.

But humans cannot exist in darkness. We are not organisms of chaos: we demand order, observation to confirm our causality.

"…Aliva, Armin is at the door. He says you have an appointment with him."

I drag myself out from the darkness. The cabin is illuminated once again, wood and cloth and downy fur and silky black hair done in two pigtails. "Right. It seems I forgot."

Mina sits down gingerly on the edge of the bed, tilting her head as she examines me. "Should I tell him to go away? You're not exactly in the keenest shape right now."

True. But how else will I learn to understand the language of this land, if not by regular instruction? Sighing, I push myself into a seated position. I dress grimly, like a woman off to the gallows, primed for execution.

"I'll be back," I reassure Mina. My tongue feels like lead behind my teeth. I march towards the door, the guillotine, the electric chair.

My own thoughts puzzle me. Electric…chair? Where do these synonyms come from?

Armin appears in front of me before I can question myself further.

His expression is almost quizzical. I smile thinly—it feels more like a grimace—and step out of the cabin and onto the porch. "Sorry to keep you waiting. I forgot about our lesson today."

Armin gives me an amiable smile. "All good. Do you want to take a rain check?"

Yes. "No," I lie. "It's alright. I'll be ready in a second." I dart back into the cabin, heading for my bunk and the belongings next to it. After grabbing my textbook and darting back to the door, I follow Armin to the empty mess hall and try to ignore the way my skin crawls all the sudden and my feet itch to retreat back down to the safety of my bed.

Armin and I squeeze into one of the empty benches. My thoughts are immediately wrenched from the present situation: the legs on this bench aren't level. If I lean forward, the bench lurches with me. I rock silently as Armin cracks open the book he brought. He leafs through the pages, hunting for the place we ended our previous lesson on.

And then passes it.

"Um…" I raise a hand, pointer finger aimed and ready to make note of his oversight.

Armin looks up at me for a moment. Waits, almost. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the thing he was waiting for was exactly what I was just about to point out. "Yes?"

I swallow. "It's nothing."

Armin's head bows down a little, bangs obscuring his eyes from view. Slowly, almost deliberately, his fingers retrace the pages he'd already flipped over. I watch the familiar illustrations dance by, page after page. I blink with surprise when he stops at the spot we were on last time.

"Mm. So you do recognize where we were."

For a moment, I'm not even sure I heard him correctly. "Sorry?"

It's gone as soon as it comes. Armin's bright blue eyes light up in the candlelight as he tilts them upwards just so, smiling innocently. "I'm glad you remembered. I'd already forgotten, you see."

"Right." It feels weird to return his smile. The one stretched onto my face feels spider-silk thin and just as sticky.

I open my own book to distract myself, pretending to study the lines while I wait for Armin to pick up where we left off. The candlelight between us flickers. The rain drums on outside. And still he offers no voice to fill the silence.

He clears his throat. When he speaks, his voice is auspicious, clear. "Can I ask you something?"

No. "Sure."

Armin's fingers still against the grain of the table. Then, slowly, the nail of his thumb drags itself against the curls of the wood. Scratching the finish in slow, deliberate, patient strokes. Scratching away the thin veneer of its polish. The false color of its construction. "Why literacy? You were never interested in learning how to read before."

I tilt my head, cupping my jaw with my hand, using the motion to smother my unease. "Oh? And why's that?"

"…Because you already knew how to."

A/N: I'M BACK

miss me? :)