Annie, in her diamond-flesh cocoon, dreams instead of sleeps.
Enveloped in that impenetrable fortress, she dreams in faded shapes—foggy figures of people in the shape of giants, slipping like dark sand, swept up by endless ravaging waves, swallowing her body whole. When was it exactly that she ended up here? She cannot remember. Never the when, or why. Only the how, the needle-voice of unreason, some ill-founded desire for goodness. Then—nothing.
(She remembers a time of determination, a consuming dispassion for humans that needed no comprehension. Then—later—a focused rage, a wish to see them all wiped from existence.)
Somewhere trapped in the black ice of memory, Annie recalls the distortions of laughter—voices, furling in steady streams, the Warrior's chuckles, the bark of her father. War and pain presented opportunity, and opportunity presented power. And from that power had grown a new rage—cold, sharp, and diamond-hard. There had been a time when she could use that rage, that power, without a second thought. Had the capacity for caring seeped into her hard defenses slowly, like trickling water? Or had the ice all shattered, all at once?
She can't remember that, either.
Instead, Annie remembers the old world in fleeting facets. Daylights, dawning, crisp and cold. Swaths of pale sunlight barely breaching, creeping over her mouth like gauze. Beneath her, shadow-seas – swarming, swallowing the fear that pricked her. Walls. Walls. Walls. A harbor. Remnants, a world that never was hers. Here, an ancient garden; here, an antiquated building; here, the ghost of an old house abandoned. Soon to crumble, nothing left. Cities of ash; domiciles of dust. Citizens fleeing the walls like vermin. Citizens gulped up by the horde. Citizens jumping into oblivion, so as to cheat fate. Reiner, scowling. Bertholdt, smiling. Red shingles. A blanching, freckled face. The snarling jaws of Titans. Marco's jerking, writhing body. How it crumpled as it died. A woman's voice, unrested, howling. Pain, eternal pain. Pain Annie cannot comprehend. Pain Annie understands too well.
The pain is encapsulating. The ice closes in, like a vice to her throat.
(Ymir's screams echo on.)
Annie, in her diamond-flesh cocoon, dreams to stave the darkness.
In sleeping, there is only darkness, and in darkness, only sleep—black tide and the white-tip edge of insanity. In dreaming, there is purpose, and feeling, and light—no matter how fleeting or restless or painful. In dreaming Annie can remember the spaces, the faces that tether her back to her body, to the humanity that threatens to be washed away with every wave.
In dreaming memory stops up the screams, the howling of water and voices belonging to no one. Annie dreams without sleeping, and fights the forgetting – the snow and the static and deafening silence.
In dreaming, most of all, he appears. Armin appears not behind her, a figment of the stirring grass, battle-gear pressing a shuddering line to her nape. Not quivering beneath her, subdued. Instead he peers up to meet her, hood pulled from his face, caught between her forefinger and thumb. His hair is wild, a bed of straw. A clean spark of light flashes in each of his eyes, blue and bright as any star. In dreaming she chases him, closes his body in her hand, a name only partly-conceived. He turns his head away. A boy who has seen Fate. A boy who has seen her.
The rumbles.
The Forest.
The trees.
The wires.
She dreams them even as she runs, or shouts, or lets the violence fill her head. The air, pulsing with the monsters that would come at her beck and call; every cry, every moan they've ever made echoing until the sounds all meld together in one long, deafening scream. It's pure, and raw, and overwhelming: fear for self, fear for friends, fear of friends, fear of death, fear of the end, fear that all of this is, was useless; futile, no salvation, even after all the suffering had reached its fatal peak.
(And it had hardly reached its peak.)
It's Hitch of all people who first discovers that Annie's diamond-ribbed flesh can absorb offerings, in the colored shapes of sounds. Or would be, if one could discover things without knowledge, or any subjective awareness at all.
Annie snatches up those sounds – grim giggles of amusement, flippancy, breaching the all-consuming darkness with pin-pricks of light. The sounds all have color—violets and yellows, spots in Annie's hazy vision. Hitch's storm projects a rainbow in her; Hitch's laughter might just make her crumble, dissolve to silver-glass shards and diamond dust. She hates the desperation for it, for the contact, for company, for the colors that Hitch introduces each day that she visits. Hitch, who would force upon Annie all manner of unnatural grievances, who would rattle her prison with tidings of woe. Hitch, who keeps Annie from the cliff's edge of madness.
The task becomes slowly easier, the incremental melting of ice; her flesh absorbs more and more sounds. More parallels to the Hitch that once vexed her. It stirs up feelings, as if by magic—precipitated frustration, colloidal longing and joy. The feelings are loathsome, and welcome. Annie envisions Hitch's dark-green shape, mouth gawped open like a bird's, singing and screeching about battle and boys. Annie's cage shudders and creaks at the flashes of laughter, bold and brilliant ruby-pink. She strains and strains with the effort of listening.
Then, one day, Annie can hear everything.
The splinting shards shatter under the force of the spell, broken open, and Annie gasps for the first time in (how long, how long?). All the time in the world, ions and compounds and tight-binding forces as her ears open to her, devouring the awful, beautiful noise. Hitch, unaware, unwatching, laughing as the wreckage winks just past her vision, the explosive roaring in-out of time; the shrieking, what might have been Annie, might have been screaming souls, as easily as breaking glass.
"—ne, fine, have it your way, then. But you'd better talk to me tomorrow, okay?"
The words cut right to Annie's flesh in clean red letters. Annie shouts and shouts her answer; but Hitch leaves her all the same.
(Nothing beautiful can stay.)
Armin's sun in Annie's crystal is like a dam breaking, like a watershed bursting wide open.
She dredges through endless pelts of ocean and many, many words from Hitch before he appears—forest-green and fulgent, color streaking, swirling, bleeding through every open pore.
Beneath her aching translucent skin the color and light string through like a web, sharp lines to her chest and under her flesh, more and more entangled with every un-heartbeat.
He stands in the front doorway, unmoving. When he takes a breath, there is no sound. Annie is too far indisposed now. Her orbit can't pull him from here.
She takes deep breaths instead, inhale/exhale, like the rough winter sea that she'd crossed into Paradis—her blood tossing and churning with every hush and thump. Her unspoken attempts at words pitch through the storm and die, absorbed back to the glass, encircling her waist and shoulders, a receding tide. Guilt, drowned light, and a world-ending flood.
"I wanted to see you. I'm sorry that it took so long."
Suddenly Annie feels like crying, which is of course absurd, but she's still caught in contemplation for the meaning of the tears—would they be for him? Or her? Or are they simply for the chance Annie might never get to ask him now whether they were ever more than just strangers passing on a battleground?
I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to kill him. I didn't want to care at all.
The slow dark thud of footsteps, falling. Armin is leaving, and with him, the light.
The voices surge around her, between the gaps of her cage. Annie dreams to fill the spaces, quell the voices, tame the rage. She wakes from that arbitrary dreaming, a trapped bird in the pitch-darkness, cold crystal blockading her fingers as she scrapes and scrapes and scrapes. Swiping the unrelenting fog that clouds her eyes and chokes her mouth in chunks, before the calm sets in once more.
(Darkness cannot be destroyed with hands.)
The next time, the voice lashes, careens against the foggy darkness like thrashes from a switch.
"Hey."
Hitch's voice, a blade. Carving to Annie's crystal in long and angry slashes, some part clever, some part mad. Annie can't make out her tone, but the shape of her is haughty-purple through the thick and cloudy haze. Petulant, maybe. Or self-righteous. These are foreign indications. So Annie reaches, reaches, for the suspended sonic shards.
(Is it a strange thing that her consciousness would take shape, too, as her cage begins to break? Or has her contemplation of it in some small way wrenched things out of balance?)
"—Hey, Annie! I know you're there. I know you can hear me. You think I'm gonna berate you, or something? Even after all this time, you've still got nothing for me?"
Hitch's voice ignites something in her, ember to the cold-wrought center. Virtuous anger, purposed frustration. These are the colors Annie knows. Suddenly, she craves—retribution from her roommate's hands, her father's, Marco's, all the Corps'. Annie, in her prison, silently begs for consternation.
"You're so stubborn, you know?" The words come quietly; a first. "But you're fierce. I always liked that about you."
The word evokes memories, sensations, flying, soaring over sweeping grass and snapping flame, air and sky twisting to her will. Remembering her friends and reasons, and her resolve most of all. Forgetting to be human. Forgetting to be afraid.
"You know, when we all thought you were dead, I gave the Survey Corps a lot of shit. I did that, yet here you are, causing trouble for me." Hitch chuckles. "Hey. I'm teasing you, so why don't you answer? You should be here, giving me that look—you know the one. I wanted to get behind that stony look on your face. I wanted to be your friend, y'know? But you won't answer me now." She hangs her head.
The violent orange hues of Hitch's voice fade to deep-violet and gray, flowing not just from her flapping lips but from the points of her fists on her hips as well, opening up and outward toward her sides. A silver sigh.
"What am I supposed to do, then? Just stop talking? I could do it, you know. But then, you're the only one who listens to my troubles. And I'm still holding out for you to wake up so I can punch you some day. So I guess it just can't be helped, huh?"
Annoying, Annie whispers from her diamond-flesh cocoon, not-tears sluicing down her face like knives. As they bore into her endlessly, she whispers you're annoying and that's stupid and I'm sorry and don't go. Pleas, embedded in the ice.
(The ice will cross your throat like wires.)
"Annie, did you know? Did you know that it was me? That day, riding out on the Expedition? When you saved me?"
Armin speaks in brilliant blue, the next time he appears, snap-sudden washing of the warped inky mess from Annie's eyes, her cheeks, her parted lips. She hadn't even heard or sensed before his moon dispersed the tide. His words pierce through in clear, sharp points, like silent-scheming stars.
He doesn't say during the battle or when you betrayed us or when you tried to take everyone out. He says when you saved me.
"I think you must have. You were careful. Gentle, even, when you lifted up my hood."
Annie remembers his frozen face, stark-white behind the fallen hood, the clearest thing in her Titan's line of sight. Almost the same as his face at the bottom of the stairs that would trap her, choke her, paralyze them both with fear. The hurt that was there, the disappointed disbelief, flooding her veins, filling every cell. Freezing, cold and merciless.
"I guess you know already, 'cause I told you, but… I didn't want to be the one who figured it out. I'm sorry I had to put you here. I watched, and I waited. I wanted to be wrong. To be anything but right, this time." A break in the pattern; scratches of crimson. "I couldn't understand why you did it, back then. Any of it. Did you really come to meet me because you wanted to be good? Or to prove that you were good? Did you know that I knew, even back then? Did you take that risk even so?"
She waits for criticism, or subtle vitriol, something sharp to sift through the ordered arrays of scattered thought, molecules drifting into empty space. Her fingers, stilted at her sides, shake with the concentrated effort of distinguishing each phoneme, each uttered word, each underlying feeling, even as she waits for the wrath that she deserves.
"I don't know how it must have been back then, for you, or what you might have been thinking, but… I understand it a little better now. I can see a little clearer now. Those memories… they're haunting, Annie. I can see them, and feel them. I can feel the loneliness, and the pain… Everything is changing, and I don't know what to do. But I know that I hurt you. And I'm really, really sorry for that."
The words hang in the air and skim the razor-edge of a single shard, the one that cuts through Annie's cheek. It wouldn't be the first time she has submitted to the lulling motion of his voice, or the noetic notion that people can, in fact, be good. As Armin retreats into the dark, she remembers who he is. How he always did have the brightest mind of everyone. How he's always had the strongest spirit.
You know, Annie, you're actually… pretty nice.
His voice back then was blue, as well.
(Memory stings like icy shards.)
Annie learns to dream without sleeping, and to sleep without dreaming.
When no one is there, the noise is neverending. Voices unseen whir and whine, tick-ticking Annie's no-longer-beating heart (except it did, except it does, whenever anyone appears to stop the clock). Voices, never her own. Memories, sometimes her own. The sounds ebb and flow through intangible rivers, only to wither and die. Every buzz and metal pulse, every beat and bump with which Annie cannot interact. Colorless shapes in the impossible dark.
When no one is there, the darkness is all-consuming. Annie sinks into the hueless void like a swallowed stone. In loneliness' icy throat, the hurling black-and-silver sea consumes her. It bites her, blisters, dry cold like cut glass, an extension of her skin—it seeps into the spaces of her body like a caustic cloud.
It's enough to make anyone wish for death.
But when Armin or Hitch is there, the drowning sky bleeds color—light-blue and green, red and yellow and white—colors she used to dream about, colors that swipe her blind-dark cage, slice clean across her face, the tangled branches of her mind. Lucidity, like gold, like bronze. Voices, theirs and hers. Memories, like prisms, reflected in the crystal surface.
She comes to dread the chill of ice enclosing all around her when her friends' colors disappear. It creeps into her skin across the bounds of space and time, ensnaring Annie in an iron hold. Until the next time Hitch or Armin comes to paint her endless blighted sea with color. To wipe it free from sin.
(Each shard, each wave is her own fault. They might as well spell out her name.)
Armin copes with the reality of war as he does all things: practically, with rationality. He remembers each of the things about which he and Eren had once wondered—about the world, and how it worked, and how people worked—he throws himself into his endeavors as if to give it all some kind of meaning, some purpose, anything other than predestination, the irremediable cycle of hatred and death. As if to make their fucked-up world the paradise they've always dreamed, and themselves true stakeholders in it, instead of puppets diving deeper into the open maw of Fate.
Time passes. Eren leaves. Paradise is almost lost. (Armin does not succeed.)
Annie comes to know these truths, because Armin tells her so.
Armin copes with the reality of war by confiding in Annie. Annie copes by listening. The words that he gives are washed in technicolor before giving way to dark and distance. But he always leaves an after-image behind, a handful of light spread thin enough to disappear, yet brighter than any star. Guiding Annie in the darkness, in her diamond-flesh cocoon.
(The light becomes her lullaby.)
She's sleeping shades of swirling ink when next Armin comes to her. The sharp pull of his voice draws her up and awake, like blood from an open wound.
"I don't think you would have wanted to do it. All those things. It just didn't seem right. I didn't understand it, not at first. But the war—war makes everything different."
I don't understand it either, Annie thinks not says not breathes, and hopes some part of him can hear. War, or people, or even pain. In truth, she misses the lack-of-feeling, the scant need for understanding. It was simple enough to look down on people like bugs, to direct her body for physical harm. There's no technique or artform to draw the poison from heartbreak, or regret, or broken trust. No way to remove soul from body.
Annie wishes (not for the first time) that she had no soul. That she didn't, couldn't care.
"Now, so many have died. Been killed." His voice peals to the walls, a phosphorescent green. There's something unintelligible embedded in the stream – is it a hue of sadness? Sheepishness? Shame? "I thought that I understood, before. But knowing what I do now, I really don't think it could have been helped. I don't think anything that I thought I understood was right, after all. We're all just children of war, aren't we? Eren. You. And me, too."
The memories still burn her, even though she lives from dark to light to chaos to calm, trapped as she is. And yes, she's served in the name of Marley, regardless of allegiance; she knows that she shouldn't be, won't be forgiven, but guilt and shame and fear linger like smoke even here, in self-imposed captivity. There's an entire culture, a whole greater world, that Annie doesn't understand; she wonders whether any of it really matters, whether all that Armin sees is what she imagines to be true.
"Hey, Annie… Can't you tell? That I'm here? Can you see me? Can you feel me?"
And then his hands are reaching out to her, touching color to the hardened surface of her diamond skin, and her swirling thoughts snap clear like ice—his fingertips pressing sweet-silver moons, as if to burn a hole in her. Annie tries and tries to see—his hands, his eyes, anything but the looming shadow of his cape, crescent flame-tongue scratches against the crystal facets. She pants, clawing the layers of cursed glass, trying to reach Armin's face. Begs. Screams, screeches the ghosts of sounds, ghosts of words, ghosts of his name. Anything to get him to hear.
"It would be easy to just say 'you're a bad person'. I said this then, too, but I don't think really think there's any kind of thing as good or bad. There can't be. Not in war, or even in life." A pause, a touch, a still-shuddering shape. "But, I think you wanted to be good. And… I think you tried to be. I said that you were nice, before. I don't know about the difference, but my feeling hasn't changed."
She reaches for the coveted words like the edges of his hand, and their warmth startles her enough that she stops the efforts at communication and lets out a shuddering breath; escaping from her throat like a sharp bubble to the glassy surface, right where his tentative fingertips touch. Her hands shaking at her sides, warm dark water in her head. She conjures up his hopeful smile, then, allows herself to close her eyes. As she envisions him, she realizes that she had somehow memorized the contours of his lips without truly seeing his face in a very, very long time.
"I'm still hoping, you know. Hoping you'll wake up. Hoping you'll come back. Hoping that you'll join our side, when you do."
Shame, regret, is like a ship drifting—swept up and spat out, washing up wrecked to an awaiting dark shore that whirls with invisible tides. The withdrawal of his hand is like black water rushing, encircling, dragging her down, deeper still. Annie, in her diamond flesh cocoon, fights against the deluge.
She doesn't understand war, or people, or even pain. Except that the pain comes before everything, and life is bearing up beneath it, stuffing your wounds with tape and leaves and the scraps of other dead things. Except that no matter how much she battles and bleeds, the pain never really goes away, and eventually all she can hear is its churning in her ears. And even that will inevitably become still, and loneliness will return once more.
"Good night," Armin whispers. The world again dissolves to black.
(Hope is a wound that will not heal.)
This dream is different; it is not the same.
Armin, she breathes, exhales, and then tightens thighs to hips, imagines rolling slowly over, so that he would roll with her—lying supine but not suppliant, tight under and tight around him, thrusting up to meet him, mewling as he moves. She winds her hands over his shoulders and touches nail to jaw, just to see the startled pleasure that she's dreaming on his face. He's trembling. Trembling. Like the very first time someone touched her with hands, Annie trembles, too.
Armin's eyes are vivid in vision when he pulls back, not clouded like usual, more wild than bright. She'd think it dangerous, if not for already having given herself to the threat. He pushes, not rough but demanding, and Annie allows it, breathless for it, urging, pushing, straining up against her cage.
(For him her body is a cage, and Armin is breath and light—and so he cages her, damn the crystal, and sets her to open under his fingers, the fingers that so gently touch to her skin, in the impossible darkness of her diamond-flesh cocoon.)
"Annie…?"
The sound of his voice is a thunder-spear, lodged clean into Annie's neck. The lucidity of it splinters her heart, a wave of shock to the white-center. Armin is standing there before her, clear as light, something flowing like nightclothes swaddling his body, a canvas of faded edges and soft cloth. His fingertips make shadow-moons above the crystal cut that guards her heart. Not touching—just suspended there, as if to draw the tides within.
He's whispering something, but Annie can't hear. She can't make out his color at all. Instead she makes a thick cape of her not-naked body, the projection of her desire and shame, and—for the first time—prays him leave.
(There is no shelter from the Sun's rising.)
Hitch returns as always, and sings, and shouts in striking color—again, and again, and again.
She isn't decorous at all, storming right up and pitching whole paragraphs, an unending circle of folly chased with fondness, tall tales, open questions, seeking validation, indignation. Then targeted jabs, blooming points of violent color, trying so earnestly to force a response. Finally come the fists, like a pulse against the unyielding skin, and Annie surrenders her emotion, unable to resist the onslaught, punching reply after reply into the limpid crystal wall. Unheard.
Defeated, Annie curls a fist instead against the place where her heart is frozen in time—where a lifetime ago she'd buzzed with a passion that could never belong to her. Where now she almost covets the still-bleeding fuchsia of Hitch's disorganized words, the warmth of them, the beat of their cadence against her blank chest. A single point of simplicity in a world of cruel complexities.
She feels a shiver, only half like being cold, more dreading than listening, and then the tell-tale click of Hitch's boots in retreat. Bounding back through a hastily swung-and-shut door, with a promise to return tomorrow.
Though unmistakably bright and impossibly warm, Hitch's colors never last.
(Darkness returns, as always.)
Armin returns, as always. And speaks, and touches her crystal flesh—again, and again, and again.
He's tentative at first, cautious. Unsteady hands, not-quite-touching to her cage-glass form, seeking permission, information, inspiration. Then emboldened, he sketches, thin fingers shaking, scratching sentence after sentence into Annie's hardened flesh. She opens to his voice, his touch, every subtle movement of his fingers stroking the words, tiny colored-crescent letters etching to her diamond flesh, spelling (hope, desire, pain, forgiveness).
Though he can't hear, Annie whimpers; and Armin reverently writes on, pressing tales into her shoulders, stomach, and thighs until her body is a warm and pulsing tome, full of his stories, full of his secrets, full of him.
He writes his life into her mind in waking; he writes his soul into her mind in touch. He paints her world in vivid color—at least while he is near.
Darkness returns, yes, as always. But Armin's light remains.
(Desire is a white and winding river in the all-entrenching sea of black.)
Annie's cold-crystal cage is a capsule lost in time: a million billion different facets, suspended in a sea of dark. Blinded to the war raging, constant in the earth's wasting; in her self-constructed prison where nothing is and nothing grows, only internal pressures could cause her to explode. Swift and cold returns the night; but Armin and Hitch return, too.
(Their light-and-color offerings are the only things that keep her sane.)
It is inevitable, likely, that Hitch finally catches him.
As she teases and chides Armin, Annie's world fills up with color—magenta and scarlet, burnished seaglass, gleaming gold, dancing like an ion flood.
"Excuse me, sir, so sorry, but there's no touching allowed here—"
"It's not like I have any kind of improper thoughts, or—!"
Hitch's teasing is relentless, much like Hitch herself. The brilliant pink of innuendo smears with bright-red swallowed shame. Embarrassment, likely. A sentiment, a color Annie's somehow come to understand.
The crystal filling with Hitch's implications still aren't enough to quench her thirst and wake her up. But the meaning finds her even inside, sneaking through the hardened cracks like steam. Annie chokes on the humid-wet taste of love and hope, nearly suffocates with it.
"Hmph, I can't believe you," the lilac voice of Hitch lilts through, when Annie can again breathe. "All you do is sleep, so how are you so popular?"
Annie wishes she could laugh. Annie wishes Hitch could hear. Annie wishes she could rest and live and die in peace, the way she's wanted all this time.
(Loneliness will drive you mad.)
There isn't any warning when Annie returns to the world of waking.
Though her cage had been made of cold crystal, not ice, it's water that hurls her abruptly back to earth. The water floods her nose and burns, wet-cold against her face, lacing in patterns on her cheeks. Abrupter still, the voices—remnants, carried over from the rushing tide. Voices branching into parts and paths, memories masquerading as waves, with only their jagged edges and bitter taste revealing them for what they are. Like how it had been when she was inside, closing her eyes, swept up and away. Again, again, again, again.
As Annie chokes on air and freedom, the ground beneath her rumbles. The voices coalesce to one.
Eren's.
I'm going to destroy the entire world.
Hitch discovers her black tide, washed out the door. Horse-hooves map a path into destiny, the water and blood mixing with the rucked-up earth.
(Annie, finally freed from her diamond-flesh cocoon, journeys in search of the Light.)