Letting Fliers Fall

by ochreolive

There's a song sung in the olive orchards, about birds and farmers alike. It's the song that sticks with Aliva as she's dying; the song that tells her she's not yet ready to give up on living. But there is a price to getting a second chance at survival, and there are always more people ready to collect than there are to pay.

4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Carla screams.

It's a horrible sound.

I choke on dust. It scrapes the back of my throat raw, like sandpaper against wood. The world spins before my eyes. I am dizzy, dazed, confused. I can hear my mother shouting through the airborne dust and dirt. Her hands strike me like ropes, wrangling me into her grasp. I hear her only faintly. The sound of the rock falling on the house still occupies too much space in my head.

The air begins to clear. I blink away the last of the confusion as cool, clear adrenaline takes its place. I push my head up off the ground and look straight ahead of me.

Carla is lying on the ground. Her hand is still extended towards me, reaching for something we couldn't quite hold on to. Her hair is filthy, flecked with ashen brick and brown splinters. My mother sees her just a second after I do. "Carla," she exhales, and the woman groans in turn. She looks up, sees us, begins to move forward–

And stops.

Bile rises up in my throat. Immediately I'm there, launched up off the ground and in position by her side.

Carla Yaeger is stuck under the house.

At first the sight is enough to make me want to scream. Enough to make me shout and wail and rip my heart out with frustration. But the adrenaline will not let me. Instead I am focused on the one new detail, the single development I've suddenly noticed.

Carla Yaeger isn't stuck under the house–her foot is.

I nearly managed to pull her out of harm's way. Another half-second and I would've done it. The second we heard the boom I should've grabbed the other two and ran outside. But this…I could work with this. One foot versus half a body: I could certainly get her out. Right?

"Help me," I rasp. At first it doesn't look like my mom heard me. I clear my throat, narrowly avoiding the cough that threatened to burst out of my lungs. "We have to get her out."

Slowly, then with more surety, my mother bends down. She's murmuring to Carla, figuring out the extent of her awareness while I've gone to move to the foot. "Carla. Can you hear me?"

"Efa."

"Where does it hurt?"

I see her wince, forehead grinding against the gravel. "Foot."

"Anywhere else?"

She shakes her head. My mother exchanges a glance with me; I look back at the foot. She's pinned under the rubble from her right toes to a third of the way up her shin. We'll need to, what, lift it? I look back up to the house, with its center caved in and the massive stone jutting out of it. Can we even lift a portion of something that heavy?

I don't think so. But we'll try.

"Get Carla's hands, Aliva, and pull her out when I lift this off her." My mother situates herself at the beam currently crushing the foot. I do what she says, because some part of me still feels like a scared child itching to follow a parent's directions, and grab Carla's wrists. She holds onto mine in turn. Her smile does not shine through the open pain on her face.

My mother breathes once, slowly, and exhales. Breathes in again–and heaves, muscles straining, pulling for all she's worth. But the house doesn't budge. Not at all.

"Help me," she hisses through her teeth. For a moment I am no longer the sickly daughter: I am hope, a potential lifeline, a desperate helping hand. I get up and shuffle quickly to the other side of Carla's leg. "On the count of three."

I nod. Slip my hands under the beam.

"One. Two. Thr–"

I yank. She yanks.

And the beam doesn't move. We try again. Try for longer. Chests heaving, screams rolling around us like thunderous dregs. The titans haven't showed up in this particular street yet, but I have no doubt that they've already slipped into Shiganshina. My hands are starting to shake. Be it from the exertion this body is not prepared for or the sheer terror that comes with the notion of titans, here, about to come crashing down around me I cannot say. All I know is that I cannot outrun them, cannot kill them. If they find me I will die.

Carla will die, too, when the titan finds her here.

That thought is enough to renew my strength. I lock eyes with my mother; she is spiraling, slowly beginning to realize that there is no world in which a woman and her sickly daughter can lift the house up high enough to free one dingy, mangled foot. I watch her eyes as she begins to wonder how to break the news to her only child. How to break the news to her only friend.

"Aliva–"

"MOM!" The scream strikes straight through me, a bolt of electricity running straight from ear to ear. The three of us whip our heads around, trees bending in hurricane wind and lashing about like untethered flags to meet the weather's whims.

And there he is.

Eren Yaeger.

He looks so young; ten years old, nine years out from the end of the series. He's got scruffy brown hair and eyes as wide as the sky and as green as freshly mowed grass. His face is a bewildered splash of a dozen different emotions: fear and denial and grief and shock and anger and childish, childish terror. He is standing near-frozen. And to his right is Mikasa, half a step behind him but for all intents and purposes a world away from him. My breath hitches as I see her scarf. It flaps agitatedly in the wind.

Carla reaches a hand out, then thinks better of it. Something in me breaks as I watch her begin to tuck her dwindling hope away carefully in her chest. "Eren! Mikasa!"

The two of them are already in motion, running to cross the space between us and them. It's only when Eren is near enough to see why his mother still lays down on the ground that he seems to realize there are other people around. His gaze flickers to me for an instant–what a shock it is to see that he is nearly as tall as me–but it moves on to the beam. To my mother.

"We can lift her out," he decides. "The four of us."

I do not have the heart to tell him that we've already tried.

Mikasa flocks to my side and Eren goes to my mother's. She avoids my eyes, instead choosing to give the count once more. Even Carla seems determined not to let it show that the three of us have already given up hope: she grinds her palms against the dirt to push herself up slightly, bracing for the moment we set her free.

At the count of three we lift.

For a second my sight flashes back to the orchard, hoisting great barrels of olives up and into the trailer beds to carry back to the presses. But the vision vanishes in another moment and with it, so do my last fledgling hopes of getting Carla out of the wreckage.

"We have to try again," Eren states, disbelief coating his tongue like saliva. He's shaking his head and scowling at us all. Mikasa has her head downturned, but she's still in position. I look down to see that my own hands have detached themselves from the beam. I've taken a step back, too. Eren notices and immediately he's flush with anger. "What are you doing? We have to save my mom!"

My mouth opens and no sound comes out. It is my mother who speaks in my stead, placing her hand on Eren's shoulder. "We've been trying to this whole time. It won't budge."

Eren shakes off her hand and scowls even deeper. "No! We can do it. We just need to try harder. Then–"

His eyes go wide, tear-stricken and tormented by whatever he's just seen. I follow his glance and immediately suck in a sharp breath of air.

There's a titan coming down the street.

"Dina," I exhale, and immediately shut myself up before I can let anything else slip. My body is shaking; I can't help it. Seeing Dina Fritz's titan form here is horrifying, especially when I know exactly what comes next. My hands are tremors rippling through the belly of the earth. Mikasa notices the motions and immediately I seek to smother them, suppress them from her line of sight.

Better a silent coward than a blatant one.

And perhaps it is because I am thinking of cowardice that I immediately recognize the voice that rings out from down the street. Hannes, alone yet armed, is running our way. "Carla!" He's panting, a jagged rhythm that lopes out of his body like a limping wolf. Half of me envies his lack of sobriety; surely, it must dull the shock of seeing titans infiltrating the town. The other half of me hates that he is not fully present.

In my first life, one of my earliest memories was a car accident. The snow was especially heavy that season, and when spring came on too quickly, the rivers flooded. The roads grew slick with mud like oil in the presses. The forecast warned of an oncoming rainstorm; we shut down work for the day and were to head back immediately. Some of the workers did not stop planting new trees–spring is the best time for it; it is a shame to waste the golden season–and my mother was not pleased. I was in one of the groups that did not head back immediately, with my father. The truck hurried too fast on the way back. The rains came down in thick, unforgiving sheets. We took a corner too quickly. Rolled. Crashed and came to a stop upside-down.

There was a moment, after I opened my eyes again, where the world around me was a blur. All was quiet. I could see nothing but the rain that dripped down my window. It was peaceful, in that split second. I remember following the path of a single drop, wavering down the pane and collecting other raindrops as it went.

When the moment faded–when the world screamed into sound and agony and focus once more–I noticed the fluid on the window was not rain, but red, red blood.

That sensation has accosted me once again.

Dina Fritz's titan is prowling closer. Carla Yaeger is begging her child to go, begging Hannes to take the kids and run. Mikasa is next to Eren's side, a hand extended as if to reassure the protesting, shouting boy. My mother has materialized next to me and is trying to stir me into motion as well. Somewhere to our right are the sounds of the dying. I can hear the booms of titan feet thudding to the left, to the street in front of us. I can feel the stuffy air and scent the death it carries. If the wind stirs I cannot sense it. No birds fly overhead.

But the world has come back into focus. The window is not rain-stained.

It has always been red, and it always will be.

"Hannes," I say, in the kind of voice that makes people stop what they are doing. The kind that makes them pause if only for a second. There is madness in my mouth. Terror in my tongue.

And eagerness in my eyes.

"Cut off Carla's foot," I finish.

I can tell immediately that my words have divided the people before me into two groups. There are those that have reacted with shock: a predictable, potentially favorable response. And there are those that have reacted with horror. Eren looks utterly disgusted by my suggestion. There is wrath in his eyes, a deep-seated contempt that I've earned simply for having the audacity to suggest something so crude be done to his own mother. But he has not yet seen what will come. He does not yet know the sensation of a parent's blood laid bare before their child's eyes.

If I am to have my way, only I will know that feeling.

Eren's hands curl into fists. "No. No! You–you can't–"

"We can't lift the beam. It's the only way." I look to the adults as I make my case. To Hannes, the one who must do the cutting. To Carla, because without her cooperation, Eren will not step aside. I cannot manage to look at my mother. I do not want to see whether or not she has realized her daughter is not quite hers anymore.

The titan destined to eat Eren's mother draws closer. If we are to have any hope of getting Carla out in time, he must cut her soon. I must make him realize that he is a coward first and a friend second.

I point at the titan, my fingers shaking. "Either you fight that titan, or you cut her foot off and get her out of here." I do not sound my age and right now I cannot fathom the energy to care. Let them reflect on this moment in a year and realize my diction was too sharp, too poised. Let them question me for it–but only in the future. Only after I have saved Carla's life.

"I can take the titan," Hannes growls, and almost as if to emphasize his point, he steps out of the shadow of the house just to brandish his swords and face the titan. I let him do it. He is not the kind of man that can rouse up enough courage to fight Dina Fritz's creepy titan. He did it in the show, after all; and his bravado ended almost a second after it started.

I return my focus to Carla for a moment, trying to imagine the best place to strike. In my previous life I was certainly no scientist–I could hardly say I even lived long enough to study more than basic biology–so I truthfully have no idea what an effective cut would look like. Did it really matter though? Carla would be alive so long as we didn't knick an artery–where are those located at, anyways–

"HANNES!"

I freeze.

The world does not go silent. But the blood showers down all the same.

I do not see the moment he dies. All I see when I look up is the bent figure of Hannes, garrison member, one hand still holding onto one of his swords while the other clatters to the ground. Dina's lips are baked red, cherry red, summer pie in the middle of July red.

I am ashamed that I do not feel more. Ashamed that I did not remember his name, when I first saw him. Ashamed that I cannot even stop to consider what changed, what made him continue to run forward when he stopped in the original version. But I refuse to let this one fleeting, precious opportunity go to waste. Eren is screaming. My mother is trying to grab me, trying to stop me from just about the stupidest thing I could possibly attempt to do.

But I am already running.

"Aliva!" She starts to chase after me, but for the first time in my new life I am finally running like I ought to. I was closer to the street; she had to run around Carla and the other children. I have the advantage of my position and the sheer knowledge of what will happen if I fail to fuel me. I cannot breathe. My body cannot sustain this pace. I cannot function fast enough.

Though Hannes has fallen limp in the titan's grasp, she has not finished eating him yet. She is goring herself on the pleasure of the kill, unaware of the child foolishly approaching her. Even my mother's shouts have faded. She does not want to risk alerting the titan to the girl darting into her shadow.

My body is shaking terribly now. It is a miracle I have not been discovered through sound alone: I am practically gasping for breath. But I know my prize. I have not stopped looking at it since it fell.

I surge forward and claim the sword Hannes dropped.

It is heavy. Outrageously so. I begin to drag it back as fast as I can, grunting and heaving. Eventually my mother catches up. She grips me like a noose and I refuse to let the sword go, not after I have risked so much just to reclaim it, so she is forced to take it back as well.

Dina's fingers deposit the last of the body into her gaping maw. The sickening crunches of her teeth gnashing through his bones fills my head like a cacophony of guilt.

"We have to cut it now," I sputter, before I surrender my speech in favor of regaining my air. I bend over with my hands on my knees to fight the surge of vertigo and exhaustion that threatens to unravel me.

My mother's hands go bone-white around the sword. "Aliva–"

"Do it," Carla interjects. Her face is set in a grim, determined line. "Cut it. Now."

"Carla–"

"Do. It. Please, Efa."

Eren is already shaking his head. His eyes are tear-stricken and furious. Mikasa's glisten with private anguish. But my mother's have shifted. They have seen a man eaten alive. They have seen their daughter step into that monster's shadow.

We have nothing to give Carla to bite down on. When she screams, I swear the sound scrapes against the sky.

But the deed is done by my mother's hands. She quickly yanks her coat off and binds the leg. Eren speaks nothing but the word Mother, like a mantra, like a cry for help. Her face is ashen. Sweat has exploded all over her skin.

My mother drapes Carla's arm over her shoulders and helps her stand. The foot and shin stay behind.

I have done it.

"Stay with me, Carla," my mother mutters, brow set in a tight line. We are a slow procession: one adult supporting the other adult's weight. Two grief-stricken children. One chronically ill child.

And a lumbering titan just down the street.

"Eren," Carla murmurs, her head swaying on her neck, "take Mikasa and run ahead. Efa and I will catch up." She speaks with the absent cadence of a woman who doesn't have faith in her own words. Be it because of the pain or the present circumstances I'm not sure.

"No, no. We're not leaving you." Eren shakes his head furiously.

I see the moment the idea takes hold in my mother's mind, too. "Your mother's right, Eren. You three need to go ahead of us. We'll only slow you down." The look in her eyes as she gazes down at me terrifies me, because it is not the look my other mother had, the one of hatred and dissatisfaction. Instead it is the look of a woman who is terrified of what their daughter has become. "We'll meet you there."

I do not want to let Carla out of my sight. I don't trust the fact that she's still alive; some greater part of me worries that the second I turn my back on her, Eren's future decisions will come back to claim their dues. I'm fully prepared to tell them exactly how I feel about abandoning them to run ahead when more shouts ring out from the alley.

"Efa! Aliva!"

My mother looks up and practically sinks with visible relief. "Betham!" I haven't the slightest clue who is with him, but a man dressed similarly to my father has started running up towards us. My father immediately crashes into us, hands cupping his wife's cheeks and eyes turning liquidy as he sets his sights on me.

"I feared for the worst," he admits, taking in the grisly situation and casting a sympathetic glance Carla's way. "But you're all alive."

"For now," my mother responds. "Help me, Betham."

He nods. "We heard they're evacuating residents of Shiganshina at the pier. Efa, take Aliva and the others. Get a spot on a boat while you still can. We'll help the doctor's wife there."

"But–"

"No buts, Aliva," he reprimands, eyeing the figure we've only barely managed to outrun. Dina's freakishly exaggerated titan smile creeps ever-closer the longer we stay idle. It's enough to make me sick to the stomach, especially now that her mouth has been splattered ruby red.

My mother's eyebrows pinch together. "I can't lose you."

"Aldo and I can get Carla there faster than you and I would." My father offers her a small smile. "You know that."

"I know, I know. I just…come back to me. Okay?"

He gives her a tender kiss. It is not a promise. "Get going, Efa."

"Go with Aliva and her mother, you two," Carla says, her voice flickering like a candle. I wonder if she'll even be conscious by the name we reach the pier. I glance down nervously at her leg. As long as we get onto a boat we'll be safe. To the boat and then I can breathe easily.

We split into to groups, my father and the other man–what was his name, Alby?–working to get Carla to the pier. The other group, my group, surges ahead, pressed for time and nervous to make it to the boats while there's still space. I haven't said a single thing to suggest that there won't be enough room for everyone, but it seems I didn't have to. My mother witnessing Haness being eaten must've been more than enough motivation to get us out of Shiganshina quickly.

I am practically ready to collapse by the time we get to the pier. All I can think about is getting onto that boat in time. I know what happens to the people that don't land a spot on it. I know what happens just when everyone thinks the inner gate is going to seal the titans out. We've managed to make it onto the final ship, still relatively vacant. How we managed it I'm not sure. I'm slumped against the side of the ship, too exhausted to even stand up. Every beat of my heart sends daggers into my bloodstream.

Eren's kick pulls me back to earth. "This is all your fault."

At first I'm shocked by the sheer audacity of it. I blink blearily and look around, just to see that my mother and Mikasa have drifted slightly away. She's trying to talk to a garrison soldier, no doubt trying to ensure her husband and her friend get a spot on the boat.

Eren kicks me again. I have learned already that this body bruises easily; I've no doubt that the second hit will leave a mark. "Shouldn't you be keeping an eye out for your mom?"

He scowls. "Shouldn't you? It's your fault that Hannes is dead! If you'd never suggested cutting my mom's leg off, he–"

I can't help the irritation that boils up within me. "If we'd never cut your mom's foot off, then she would've been the one being eaten, Eren."

His violent green eyes flash. "You–"

Mikasa's shout cuts his sentence short. "Eren!" We both turn to look her way at the same time, to see her pointing into the crowd of people still on the pier. I'm surprised at first by how many people have filed onto the boat, and nervous suddenly because that means there's hardly any room left. I follow Mikasa's finger into the crowd and sure enough, there's the other half of our group. My mother is rushing across the board they've put down between the pier and the boat, taking the other man's spot so that she can help Carla across.

I frown.

One of the garrison troops–a different one this time, a man–has taken up my father's spot at Carla's side. His hands are like fences, erecting a clear line in the stand. I shoot up to my feet. Stumble over Eren's shoes as I push my way to the edge of the boat. "Hey!" he shouts, but he quiets when he notices what I've seen.

Carla and my mother have made it onto the boat. My father has been guided back to the pier.

And the bridge between the two is rescinding.

"Hey…" Eren trails off, his eyebrows pinching together. I ignore him entirely and start brushing my way through the crowd, intent on reaching my mother. I know he's hot on my heels simply because it's impossible not to notice someone like Eren.

By the time we reach my mother, Carla is gone. So is Mikasa. "They've taken her inside," she says the second she sees Eren. "To tend to her leg immediately. Mikasa went with her." That seems to be enough explanation for him; the boy spins on his heel and starts rushing towards the center of the boat, shouting at people to let him through.

Only I stay. Only my mother and I look at the man trying to smile bravely as the bridge between the boat and the pier breaks off. We are already in motion. Safe–but only because we are on the boat. "They said the boat can't take more people," she finally says, softly. "Your father will catch the next one."

I look down at his waving figure, at his strained expression. He is putting on a brave face for his daughter and wife. I know, then, simply by looking at him that he does not quite trust that he will be put onto the next boat.

Aliva Moreau, the dead girl in the forest, may have had a different reaction. Perhaps she would've felt lighter, watching her father grow smaller where he stood. Perhaps she would've collapsed on the deck and wailed. I cannot say what she would do.

I raise my hand. There is red spattered on the palm from when I shielded my face from my mother's amputating blow. There is blood on my hands in that Hannes has died today and Carla has not. I carry the first of my sins like luggage, like fate, like a trap in the forest. One day I will face my baggage. One day I will stand before destiny and see whether or not I've bested it. One day I will revisit my trap and see what it claimed: prey, or my own foot?

For now, though, my gore-stained skin waves goodbye to the father I'll never know.

And the Armored Titan crashes through the inner wall.