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.

15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15

A day passes, and then another.

The winter feels as unfamiliar to me as the body I used to inhabit. It is not my first winter since becoming a part of this world—and certainly not my first with hardships—but somehow, this one feels harsher. Unsteadier. I am a bird thrown askew, a creature lacking comfort. Air patterns have changed; internal migratory maps left molding and unconsulted. Fog slips into the gaps on the geosphere, magnetic and magnanimous, hurling the compass off the chart and negating all directionality. Up is down, is left and right. North bleeds into south, breeds polar premonitions and notions that ring hollow.

I'm drifting off before I realize it.

"…Aliva," Bertholdt murmurs, and when I do not stir immediately, he places a tentative hand on my shoulder and attempts to rouse me. "Hey. Sleepyhead."

"Mmn."

"So nice of you to rejoin the living," he mocks, and the comment is enough to force a laughing jerk of my shoulders. He peels his hand off of me and thumps it against my cranium. "If my lessons are boring you to death, feel free to stop taking them. I'm not particularly inclined to do charity work."

I raise a lethargic hand and rub the spot on my head he tapped. When I crack open an eye, I find him with one hand propping up his cheek; the other, holding his textbook. "Ah. I knew your generosity came with a catch."

Bertholdt grins, his head tilting to look outside. "Not yet. But if you keep falling asleep on me, I'll cash out early."

"Hmm." With a heaving sigh I sit up, rubbing out the marks pressed into the side of my face that was imprinted against the wooden grain of the mess hall. It's late, and it's snowing again: the optimal combination to ensure no one else is at one of the tables here. Our candle has burned down to sputtering wick and wax, smoldering itself into embers. I watch the flickering flame consume itself to survive, like the snake that bites its own tail. Killing oneself to last another day. Self-cannibalizing.

I taste flesh in my mouth. Skin and honey and golden, liquid sunshine streaming out like ichor. My fingers twitch. In my head, they run through strawberry blond waves and waves of hair, undulating fields of feather-soft strands. I try to focus on those colors, that tingling warmth—honey, honey, honey—

Honey mead. Golden, sunset eyes and liquor lips. Straw blonde, dirty blonde hair. Fine strokes of stubble.

My spine zaps to attention. Heat flashes up to my cheeks. Every tender emotion my previous life's memories evoked now burns an embarrassed scarlet, the undignified heat of being caught with a taboo turn of thought. Reiner's face flashes in my mind for a split second more before disappearing.

Okay, so I'm tired. Not thinking straight.

"Annie says your form is getting sloppier lately," Bertholdt not-so-subtly adds, when I've been silent for slightly too long.

"You guys gossip about me? That's cute."

Bertholdt frowns. "She says you should go back to your basics for a few days. To recenter yourself."

I stretch out my body, yawning and arching slightly, like a lackadaisical cat. Bertholdt's eyes drift down to the lines scrawled in the margins of his book, scrawny little strokes of penmanship jotted down all in the name of getting me literate. "Fine. Anything else I should do, doc? Eat more fruit? Get more vitamin c?"

"You're only amusing yourself," he grumbles. "Focus. You're wasting candlelight." His pointer finger strikes the page, somehow at exactly the last point I remember glancing at before drifting off.

Surrendering to his teachings, I readjust my body so that I'm now sitting with my legs pointed slightly inwards, towards the book set between us. I bend forward, replacing Bertholdt's finger with my own. I drag the pad of my finger down the line of symbols, sounding them out warily, softly. Bertholdt corrects my pronunciation about once every twelve letters.

But he doesn't laugh. Doesn't smile. He did, once, but after I'd frowned involuntarily and clammed up, he'd never repeated the slip up.

Wordlessly, he hands me the pen. Beneath his handwritten notes, I scribble down duplicates for each and every symbol. Mine are so hideous it's almost comical—at a blind glance, my penmanship no doubt would look closer to a young child's than to a young woman. I'm glaring at my own performance before I realize it.

"Relax your hand, Aliva."

"It is relaxed."

"You're staring at the pen like you want it to combust." Bertholdt's free hand, the one not propped up under his chin, reaches over and starts manhandling my grip on the pen to adjust it. I'm too shocked to do anything for a second, pliable only through my failure to predict his actions. "There."

Personally, I don't think the difference in how I was holding the pen before versus how he has me holding it now has anything to do with how well the letters look. They're every bit as gangly as they were before.

But the budding cramp in my hand has receded. Slightly.

We go on like this, murmuring back and forth, until the candle finally dies out. The mess hall goes dark, silent. The sounds of the book closing shut drifts up to my ears. "No lesson tomorrow," Bertholdt says.

When I feel his hand drift towards mine in the darkness, this time, it twitches and clenches defensively. His fingers aren't hot. Aren't cold. They have temperature, sure, but mildly so. Not like Annie's ice-like skin, brushing up against mine when she gets irritated enough to tweak my form manually. Not like Reiner's heat-stained hand, when I accidentally reach for his glass a second too early in the morning before he's had a chance to let go fully. "No?"

When my eyes adjust, it's to see Bertholdt shaking his head. He's glancing outside as he does. "Word is that Shadis has organized some kind of winter trek for us."

Oh. I wince, plot flashbacks whirling to life in my head. If it's the kind of winter excursion that I'm thinking of, then that means Christa and Ymir are going to get separated from the group with…that other guy. Whose name I can't remember. Which means he wasn't all that relevant.

Right?

The pressure against my frontal lobe builds, like a hot air balloon slowly inflating and stretching just slightly past the point of comfort. I rub the space above my brows like my fingers are erasers and the headache is a sentence I can undo. "Great. Sounds lovely."

"I'll walk you to your cabin."

For some reason, that makes me smile. And laugh—almost. "How gentlemanly of you."

The bench creaks as the backs of Bertholdt's legs push it backwards from the table. I stand up as well, bending down to grab my winter trainee coat and shrug it on. Adorned and accompanied, my feet turn towards the exit and pad softly over the wood. The pressure against my skull clings firmly with each step, small and subtle, yet poignant enough to stay well within my awareness. Kind of like an itch on the foot. Or an eyelash hanging in one's periphery.

The cold smacks me like a veritable wall of frigidity the second we leave the building. I shiver and tug my jacket around me tighter, almost like I don't trust my own body to keep the chill from seeping underneath my skin. I nestle my lower face into the lip of my coat and shiver.

Bertholdt and I shuffle forward, wayward penguins braving the Arctic. I'm already dreading the thought of staying out in this weather tomorrow—worse, climbing a damn mountain in it.

I dream tonight of being shoved down a titan's gullet, escorted down its massive esophagus by pharyngeal muscles constricting and swallowing. I fall down from the esophagus straight into the sky, illuminated by those few liminal seconds of twilight where suddenly everything the horizon expounds upon lights up into a proliferated deep blue. I fall down to the earth, the discarded princess of the castle in the sky, and crash down through a lake covered in ice. The frozen water crushes the air out of my lungs and replaces it with frigid liquid instead, freezing me inside-out. I cough up a fit of bubbles and wrangle myself into swimming in the endless ocean, half-bitten bodies drifting around me. Civilians and troops alike float up towards the ice, bodies bloated and buoyant in their post-mortem inflation.

One of them twitches and grips my wrist as I pass. I try to wrangle myself free, but the dead have a grip that exceeds the living's capacity to break, and so the corpse remains locked onto me, undeterred and entirely unfazed. I try to shout, but there is no speaking underwater.

At least, not for me.

Silver words etched into every atom churning between the corpse and myself embed themselves into the very heart of my ears, festering like open infection adhered to my tympanic membrane.

"You," the corpse whispers. "You have killed me."

Light filters through the water but for the briefest of moments, and when the hair drifting around my face meanders out of my line of sight, I finally see the face of the corpse.

It's Hannes.

Yes, I nod solemnly. I know.

Hannes chuckles darkly, the water around him curdling blood red. "No," he hisses, "you don't."

I flinch awake. The world outside the window is a puffy, mournful gray. But at least it's not snowing. The girls in the bunks around me are still fast asleep. I should be warm—the cabins are insulated, the blankets thick enough—but the harsh climate of my unconscious mind does not rescind. If anything, I'm colder now. I shiver and curl further into myself, balling up like a fetus. When that doesn't work, I uncurl and shuffle around my bed to find my jacket. I toss it on and bury myself under the covers once more. This, at least, comforts me enough to assuage my weary body back to rest for a while.

No sooner have I started to drift off in full do I wake again, this time insufferably hot. The jacket comes off; the sleep resumes.

The rest of the night unfolds in a fitful, hellish cycle of sleep and wake, hot and cold. I'm exhausted by the time the cabin stirs to life. The shower can't possibly get hot enough. The clothes aren't warm enough. I trudge out into the cold and immediately every joint in my body aches.

Breakfast comes in the form of suspiciously runny eggs, toast with dark paste scratched over it that smells like rubber, and thinly sliced apples. I drop down onto an empty bench—no sign of Reiner yet, but today's a medicine day—and this time, Ymir joins me. She prods her food with a disgusted expression. "What the fuck."

I push my plate away, the smell only serving to make my stomach churn. "I think I'm going to be sick."

Ymir laughs. "You look like shit."

"Says you."

She grabs the apple slices off her platter and tries one tentatively. "At least it's edible," she finally decides. I reach a weary hand forward and grab a slice of my own from my serving, resting my forehead on the table's edge while I nibble on the fruit. It tastes about as bland as I feel, but at least the wood feels good against the pounding ache behind my eyes.

Sturdy footsteps plod up to us. The spot on the bench across from me bends. Fabric whispers as it brushes against itself, folds, tucks. A foot knocks against mine before quickly retreating.

"That spot's reserved," Ymir states.

I know our visitor the second he speaks up. "Apologies," Reiner says, sounding weirdly sincere. I continue to munch on apple slices without lifting my head. Nice, cushy forehead rest. I watch Reiner's boots shuffle a little bit over to the left.

"Sorry. That's taken too."

I snort; but, to Ymir's chagrin, Reiner scoots down the bench again. Just as she's about to say he can't sit there, either, I lift my head and interject. "She's just fucking with you, you know."

Reiner blinks owlishly and frowns. Ymir's shoulders shake with evident amusement. "It's his own fault for believing it."

Christa chooses that exact moment to drift our way, claiming the spot next to Reiner. I watch the warrior gaze down at the little not-so-secret royal. After nabbing another apple slice, I set my head back down on the table and close my eyes. Christa and Ymir's conversation becomes background noise in my head, interwoven with each crunch my mouth makes. I listen to the sounds of the mess hall as they join together in an orchestral piece of communal breakfast. For a moment, it feels like I'm about to doze off, until one of Reiner's boots knocks against my own.

I glance up at him, scowling. Every second I have to keep my head held up by my neck is suddenly the most irritating thing in the world. Wordlessly, he scoots his glass towards me. I take it and sip delicately as Christa and Ymir's conversation drifts towards our summons.

"Think it's about the rumor going around? About an expedition today?"

"Probably." Ymir shrugs. "Annoying that we have to stand at attention outside. Knowing that old bastard, we'll be out there listening to him until our ears freeze off." Christa laughs, even as she tries to chastise the brunette for calling Shadis a bastard. Reiner's expression morphs into subtle amusement.

This time, when the aftertaste sets it, it's not comforting in the way the familiar always is. This time, it's like nostalgic bile. I set the glass down half empty, grab another apple slice to flush the taste, and rest my head back down.

Reiner's foot comes back to strike mine, a pesky mosquito thirsting for blood. I scowl ruthlessly at the offending limb. "Hey." He taps the glass gently once he sees I'm glaring at him.

"Don't want it," I murmur. I shove the rest of the apple in my mouth and reach for another slice. Reiner pulls my plate just slightly out of the path of my inbounding fingers just as they're about to collect their dues.

"Doesn't matter," he says, in a way that makes me want to ignore him out of spite. "You need it."

Anger makes my skin prickle and my head pound. "Do I now?" It's petulant of me and I know it, but I can't find it within me to care enough right now. The medicine doesn't taste right; I don't want it. Simple as that. "I think Ymir was right. That seat is taken."

Reiner opens his mouth in protest, but Mikasa–bless her heart, my clueless savior–choses that exact moment to drift over to our table.

The warrior grabs his breakfast and leaves silently.

We file out into the cold just before the bell rings, Ymir and I hanging back to scrape our uneaten food into the waste bins before stacking our plates and utensils with the rest. The trainees migrate as one towards our assembly field, assuming our ranking formation that we gained on our first day at the 107th. I shiver and press my coat closer to my body. The air feels dry today, sharp and singing in its frigidity. I tuck my face against my jacket's collar and cough.

Keith Shadis rolls up at the same time a caravan of three closed top wagons trudge their way through the snow. He inspects us with a critical eye, bald head bobbing like a buoy as he wades through our ranks. "Today we're going to trek up to one of our higher-altitude posts." At that, he pauses, sneering as he looks down at Marco. "Or, you are.

"This excursion will test your ability to navigate. It'll test your ability to retain body heat and expend minimal energy traversing unfamiliar terrain in weather that is far from optimal. You will need to stay together. You will need to cooperate. You go as a group; go alone, and you may die."

On that cheery note, the wagons lurch to a stop. We're sentenced to equip and meet back here to load up in twenty. Provisions gathered, layers adorned, reluctance shed, the trainees load up and the wagons begin to fill one by one. I file in and end up sitting next to Connie, which is great for all of four seconds until Eren gets directed over to our wagon. He sees me and immediately moves to sit on the opposite bench, until he notices it's already full.

Carla's son sits down next to me. It alarms me that he doesn't say anything about it. Doesn't even cast me a disgusted, accusatory glance like somehow this is all my fault. Like I orchestrated this event to occur. Instead his face is smooth, ice-like. He ignores me entirely. I do not exist.

Connie, fortunately, does chat with me. Unfortunately he decides now is the optimal time to bring up poor Jean. "Thanks for letting Sasha and I know," he starts sincerely, even though I can already see his shoulders warbling with thinly-suppressed laughter. "I'll remember that sight for the rest of my life. You really left him in quite the state."

My head pulses. I fight the urge to groan. "Connie," I warn, fully intending to tell him off for bringing this up here, now, until to my great horror, Eren sits forward to see around me.

"What'd she do to Jean?"

"Connie–"

"Oh, you should've been there. You should ask Sasha for the full story, though; I don't remember it as well. But we're stumbling through the woods, looking for Jean, and then BAM–"

"Connie." This time, when my words slip past my throat, they're sharp and cold. I cough and suddenly lose every ounce of intimidation I might've had, but at least it seems to have done the trick. The bald kid puts his hands out in surrender and flippantly changes the subject. Eren scowls and sits back.

For most of the ride, I stay silent. I chat with Connie, and even with Marco in between the times when he dozes off. But most of our wagon seems content to fall back asleep. Everytime I think I might, exhaustion wearing me thin, I see Dina Fritz open her mouth to the frozen lake inside her and jolt back awake. The second time it happens, my jerky movements accidentally knock my shoulder against Eren. He looks over, staring down the length of his nose at me in a way that makes me feel suddenly so terribly small.

"What's your deal?"

I can't say what prompts honesty onto the tip of my tongue, but the second I open my mouth, it spills out and shocks the both of us. "Can't sleep."

He scowls. Even when he makes it so painfully clear that speaking to me must be like pulling teeth, he still stays quiet enough not to disturb the sleeping trainees all around us. "So lean forward, then. Sit with your head in between your knees."

I glance away, towards the back of the wagon as the fabric covering the upper portion of the back doors flaps for a second. The world beyond is a jarring streak of white. No doubt it started to snow again. "It's not the wagon. Just can't sleep."

Eren snorts. "Liar. There's bags under your eyes."

"It's Hannes." Finally, he falls silent. His eyes stay locked onto the floor. "I see him when I close my eyes."

When an avalanche starts at the top of a mountain, or so I am told, it snowballs. It collects all the loose powder and builds as it races down the slope, compounding both its mass and its speed. The second it starts it does not stop. It does not know how to. It only runs its course.

That is how it feels to tell Eren about my nightmare.

"He's trapped under a lake. He can't get out to the surface. So instead he swims with the other faceless corpses in the water. He swims to me. He's holding my wrist and now I can't let go, either, and he says that it's my fault that he died because I've killed him–"

"He was a drunk," Eren states firmly. His voice shocks me into silence. "He was a soldier. He was doing his job."

My lips part; I turn to look at him–to really, truly, look at him. And just then, surrounded by sleeping trainees on our way up a snowy mountain, Eren doesn't look angry. Just sad. "But I–"

And then his brows knit together. "He's not the one you killed."

Oh, Eren.

How backwards, how wrong and yet how right he is. Innocence towards one figure does not grant me a full pardon. Not when Hannes and Carla have died directly because of my actions. I cut years off of Hannes's life; granted Carla a year more. I did nothing for Dr. Yeager. Nothing for Aliva's father, or mother, or Armin's grandfather.

I glance at my hands. Each name, in my imagination, coats a single finger bloody.

Before I know it, I'm drifting off again.

The wagons lurch to a stop jarring enough to wake me from light sleep. I cough and glance around, head pulsing the instant the curtains get drawn back and the wagon's back door gets unlatched and flung open. Sure enough, snow flurries whisk around the air just outside and immediately set themselves upon us the second we file out of our transport. Shadis watches, hood finally pulled over his naked head, as we file into sleepy, sloppy ranks.

I shiver and fade in and out of his explanation. Instead I glance up at the mountain, at the indiscriminate walls of wintry trees that we're supposed to wander through. "There's a team waiting at the base for you. They'll leave the lights on. But with the storm as-is, no search parties will go out until it subsides."

Shadis's implication is left plain and clear: don't get lost.

And I don't intend to. I glance over at Christa and Ymir. The last thing I'm going to do is follow them. As long as I stick with some of the main cast, I'll make it up to the base just fine. I clear my throat and tug my jacket tighter around myself, the fur lining of my hood already collecting snow.

My pack makes light swishing sounds as it slides against my back. I walk, trudging through the veritable wall of unpacked snow, dismayed but not entirely unsurprised when my feet set against the powder only to sink up to my ankles. The trailblazers in front of me have larger boots, thankfully, but even their steps can't seem to agree on how to press the snow down in a way that makes it manageable for me. I shove my gloved hands into my pockets, keeping my head down, and lurch onwards. The hike is miserable. Every bone in my shuddering body disagrees with me being out here. One minute I'm freezing, facing the blistering cold that sears my eyelids and makes my teeth go numb, and the next I feel like I'm burning alive in my skin. Panting, I shrug out of my coat and bundle it up in my arms, sighing with relief.

"The hell are you doing?"

I look up, surprised to notice Jean walking alongside me. "I was hot."

His head shrinks backwards, like a turtle trying to duck into its shell. He shakes his head with disbelief. "Put your coat back on. You'll freeze to death if you don't."

"I'm fine," I counter, because I don't want to argue with every single man on the planet today and also because I can feel the sweat drying against the back of my neck now that I've stripped off a layer. The snowy wind feels like blissful air conditioning, coaxing my skin down to livable temperatures for a moment.

"You really should put it back on," he urges, and at that exact moment my ears start to burn with cold. I place a hand against my nose to find it icy as well. I pass underneath two intertwined trees and the chill is back into my body, seeping in so fast I start coughing at the sudden dryness in my throat. I shrug my jacket on quickly, but can't seem to get warm enough the second it's back on. My teeth start to chatter. I half expect Jean to start telling me he told me so, but instead, he places a hand on my shoulder. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Good. Just cold now."

I hear him chuckle over the howling wind. "Hang in there."

I nod. We trudge together in silence, and when I notice my steps wandering all over the place like I can't keep straight, I frown. I'm reminded in a flash of those inflatable balloon men that used to stand guard at every used car dealership we'd pass on the road, bobbing and warbling in the funny way only tube creatures do. Jean links an arm through mine before tucking his gloved hand back into his own pocket. Leaning into him shamelessly allows me to siphon off a small taste of extra warmth, so I allow him to keep me walking straight, following the rest of our miserable troops as we hurry up the mountain. Suddenly I'm outrageously thankful for Annie in pushing me to build my stamina up all these months.

When I start to lag, though, Jean does not seem eager to adjust his pace to meet mine. Instead he unlinks our arms and starts to walk slightly in front of me. I try to keep my gasping breaths quiet, but they come out jagged and inconsolable, the wailing child uncomforted by the presence of its guardian. No rational thought, no chiding my own body, gets it to calm down. I feel the stiffness of my frigid limbs, the iciness of my face, the shuddering of my shoulders and the pounding of my skull. I want to sit down. For a few seconds. That's all, I convince myself. I just need to lean against a tree. I'll keep the group within sight.

I wait until Jean shifts just right, and then I step out of line. My boots sink into the snow all the way to my calves the minute I duck out of formation. For a moment I just stand there, letting the line go without me, attempting to catch my breath. I feel dizzy. The snow is too bright, the wind too cold. The lack of decent sleep must be getting to me. Surely that's all it is.

I see Christa stop for a second before I wave her off, smiling. The last thing I need is for her and Ymir to treat me like the dude they drag around when they're lost.

I cough abruptly, the deep kind that scrapes against the pit of your stomach on the way out and then doesn't stop. I lurch forward, coughing into my gloves to minimize my throat's exposure to the harsh wind. I feel dried out and parched, lips cracked and cranky. I swing my pack off my shoulder, lurching a little as I do, staggering to accommodate the weight disposition. Hunching over, my slightly numb fingers fumble around trying to get the bag open so I can grab water.

I can't find it.

I redouble my efforts, checking each side pocket and even resorting to yanking out my extra stuff—extra socks, extra underwear—to see if the bottle slipped underneath them. I've caused a scene and a half, the sounds of shuffling feet unperturbed at my back, and still no water. Sighing, I throw everything back into my pack and swing it back onto my shoulders. The wind kicks up for a second and I hunker down, shielding my eyes from the snowflakes soaring by so fast that they sting on impact. When it dies down enough for me to open my eyes again, I dig my gloves into an untouched patch of snow, compress it into a mini snowball, and take my frigid prize up to my mouth.

The snow melts slowly, chilling the roof of my mouth and unfortunately making me shiver more. But the water feels refreshing against the dry scratch in my throat. I swipe my cooled tongue over the chapped spots on my lips as I reach down for another scoop of snow.

A hand darts out, smacking the snow off my gloves. "Stop that."

I look up, my hood falling off, to see Reiner bending over me. "It's just snow."

He sighs, looking almost baffled by me. "You have water in your pack?"

I shake my head no, brushing the excess snow off my gloves and onto my pants before reaching behind me to yank my hood back up. I stand out of my crouch; Reiner straightens himself out, too. With him standing in the way of the wind, acting like a human meat shield, suddenly it feels significantly less cold out here in the middle of this nowhere mountain. "Forgot to pack it."

At first he just blinks at me, saying nothing, until his shoulders drop slightly as if in surrender. He swings his own pack around, ruffling through it for a split second before pulling out something eerily similar to a thermos. "Here. And no more eating snow—not unless you want to die out here."

I laugh, and if anything, that makes him look more uncomfortable. The cap feels practically bolted onto the bottle; I have to relinquish it back into his control so he can twist it off for me. I glare at his gloves, his rumbling arms as they deftly screw the top off. I wonder if he knows the value of his strength; if he truly appreciates it. Or if he's just like who I used to be, heedless of the day when the virtues of my previous body would fail me.

He hands it back to me; I drink. The water is neither cold nor warm. The pounding in my head lessens while I drink, even as the itch in my throat intensifies. I grimace, swallowing and passing his bottle back. I jam my fists back into my pockets and watch as he takes a swig of his own before tossing the bottle back in his pack.

He turns around—and freezes.

When I scoot around him, curious, it dawns on me that there's no one else in sight.

"Holy shit." At first I'm too dumbfounded to think. I was keeping the group in sight, and then it was Reiner who peeled off from it to reprimand me for eating snow—not Christa, not Ymir, and so I thought—

"Come on. We need to follow the tracks before we lose them."

Alarms pierces through me, and evaporates just as quickly. "Will the tracks really vanish that fast?" There's no way we'll get separated from the group because I stopped to eat fucking snow. There's no way. Reiner is pivotal to the plot. He's a warrior, for fuck's sake. We'll be fine.

Reiner glances at me sidelong, lips drawn into a thin grim line. "People get lost faster than you'd think."

He strides forward, retreating to the snow stamped down from the 107th's footprints and immediately starts tracking them higher up the mountain.

A delayed moment later, I realize I'm supposed to follow.

And I try my best. I do. I keep my head down to shield it from most of the windchill, sending short puffs of breath into the air like a locomotive huffing its way onward. But my body feels frozen and on fire all at once. My head feels like a slab of concrete being jackhammered into. My throat feels like it's being pressed into a box of thumbtacks everytime I swallow. Or one of those Iron Maiden's.

I'm lagging before I realize it. And then Reiner's gone altogether. One second I'm staring at the heels of his boots, hurriedly marching on in a desperate race to find the group again. The next I'm blinking slowly, taking one step for his four, thinking I'll catch up in just another second.

Then I'm looking up to a field of white.

The trees around me shiver, discarding snow from their branches like shedding dogs in the peak of the summer. My body trembles: at first I think it's the cold, until my heart clenches in my chest and it finally registers as numb panic. I'm alone on a mountain during a snowstorm. I've got no stamina, no powers, no nothing.

And the worst thing is that I'm not a creature of the plot. I get that now, more intimately than I ever thought I knew that before. Christa and Ymir are searched for because they have to be found. Because there is no story without them.

Eren would not search for me.

A sob slips out of my mouth and I, mortified, slap my hand against my lips to suppress it. Panic starts to drill into me and my legs break out into a run, stumbling like an anomaly through the snowdrifts.

Without breath, though, there is no stamina. I'm too distracted to regulate my breath. My heart feels like it's going to burst; my limbs are inadequately supplied with oxygen and stiff from the temperature and clumsy from the snow boots. I trip and throw my hands out to brace my fall, but they sink into the snow up to the elbow and I end up with a face full of snow anyways. It slips into my eyes and ears and nose and immediately tears flourish on reflex as I cough and sputter and scrub my face raw.

"FUCK!" I scream, because it is easier to be angry than it is to be alone.

And that, of course, is the moment I happen to look up—just in time to see Reiner crashing back down through the foliage and skidding to a stop twenty yards away. He shouts something, but I don't process it. My only thought is to curl further into myself, as if I can hide the sight of myself so deeply vulnerable and lost simply by making myself smaller. I blink and already he's in front of me, dropping to his knees in the snow and gripping my shoulders firmly.

He's speaking. I have to focus to concentrate on the words, to define their edges and carve out sentences from sound. "…you're shaking."

"Hm?"

"You're trembling like a leaf." He frowns, scanning me from head to toe. "And covered in snow. Did you fall?"

"I'm cold," I tell him, because I think he'll find that helpful. I suppose he does, because he nods along with an expression that almost makes me wonder if I've just stated the obvious.

"Can you walk?"

"Mhm."

"Okay. Up we go." He shifts his grip on my shoulders to my biceps, half-picking me up and half-supporting me as I get back on my feet. This time, he makes me walk in front of him, pointing down at the mostly blown-over tracks still speckled into the snow. I follow them loosely, wandering and drifting with each strong gust of wind, forcing Reiner to reach forward and redirect me back onto the path every so often.

"Why are you helping me?" I shout over the wind, twisting my neck back to see him better, but Reiner shakes his head and shrugs. He taps his ear with his glove and shakes his head again.

We wander on. I feel the fatigue punctuating each step, and it's only made more obvious by the way that Reiner waits for me to shuffle forward before taking a single step over the distance I struggled to achieve. The whole thing would irk me if I had energy to spare.

I stumble, and his hand is immediately at my elbow, holding me back from getting a faceful of snow again. He looks worried, glancing between the tracks and myself. I wonder if he's deciding whether or not to abandon me in favor of finding the group before the tracks disappear entirely.

His face changes; smooths over as resignation washes his expression clean. That's it, then. All I am worth is a single moment of indecision. He's a murderer; of course it would only take him a moment to decide. But I'm angry. Angry at him and myself. I take a step towards him, intent on letting him have a piece of my mind before he abandons me to the elements. He turns his head away, only serving to infuriate me more. I laugh, bewildered and humiliated. My voice climbs to be heard over the storm. "Can't even look at me before you kill me, huh?"

He glances back quickly. "What? No." He points and I follow his finger to see what he motions at against my better judgment. "There's a cave over there."

I squint. "I don't see shit."

Perhaps he's trying to be kind. Here's a cave you can sit in so that you spend your last hours alive out of the storm! How convenient. How irksome. When I don't make any signs of heading towards that direction, Reiner reaches for my hand and practically tugs me along. "Just trust me."

"That's dumb," I mutter, but I know he can't hear me. Still, I let him lead me away from the nearly indiscriminate tracks, weaving through thick evergreen trunks towards a jagged cliff face I had all but overlooked earlier. Sure enough, there's a pocket of darkness set into its face. The second we step under the stone awning and into the cave the howling wind immediately dies down to a low growl.

The snow blows through the entrance to the cave at an angle, Reiner urging us farther inside until we reach a dry patch. "Sit. I'll be back." I do as I'm told, mostly because I was planning on sitting anyway, and watch as he sets his pack next to mine. He trudges back out into the cold, occasionally returning to the cave's entrance with large branches and stones that he sets up against it. Soon the snow begins to accumulate against the shoddy barrier he's building rather than blowing straight in, creating a secondary layer of snow to insulate the cave. The temperature inside crawls up tick by agonizing tick. I curl up as tightly as I can, arms wrapped around my legs and forehead resting on my knees. I close my eyes and listen to the occasional sounds of Reiner's footsteps coming and going.

When I finally hear him plodding into the cave, the storm has darkened in a way that makes me think the daylight is running out quickly. I peek my head up and watch him as he sits down across from me, peeling his gloves off and shaking the fir needles off of them.

"We'll wait here until the storm dies out." I set my forehead back down against my knees. In the quietness of the cave, it's only become more apparent that my head is pounding. I listen as Reiner drags his pack closer to himself, taking off his snow boots to put on dry socks. I hear the cap on his bottle squeak open and the sound of him drinking follows it a second later.

"Can we make a fire?"

"Not with the branches out there. Too wet."

I slip my tongue in between my teeth to silence their chattering. "Can you try?"

Reiner grumbles incoherently. "There's no point. We won't be here that long."

Not even shame can manage to heat my body. I raise my head, finally looking him in the eyes. "Please."

Reiner stares at me for a second. And my body chooses that moment to cough, another one of those long ones that forces me to bury my mouth in my elbow and rock slightly as each hack ricochets out along my torso. Reiner stands up slowly, tugging his gloves back on. "I make no promises."

I nod blearily. When he walks away, I press my hands to my ears to try and warm them. Shivers spasm across my body. Squeezing my eyes shut doesn't seem to help with anything, but I do it regardless.

I don't know how long Reiner works on trying to get a fire going. Sure enough, nothing starts. Eventually he curses under his breath and the sounds of wood rasping against wood falls silent.

His hand feels cold against my temple. My eyes flutter open in affronted shock, and there he is, one knee against the cave floor to keep him from toppling over into me as he crouches down.

"What are you—"

"You're burning up," he mutters, with the cadence of a trainer attempting to soothe an animal. I lean backwards to sever our contact.

"I'm freezing," I insist. That, apparently, was exactly the wrong thing to say; he groans and sits back.

"Figures. You and your damn fire."

My arms cross over my chest defensively, weaving them like tumbling roots. "That you couldn't make."

"Do you want to try?"

"No."

He huffs and backs off. "Fine." He starts shrugging out of his coat, and I watch him do it warily. A second later he's reaching over and trying to drape it over me like a blanket. "Use this then."

"You need a coat too, you know."

Reiner leans close to tuck it behind my shoulders. That same scent wafts up to my nose, liquor-stained wood and something like pine. Probably from being out here in the forest and dragging those branches up to the cave entrance. I close my eyes as another wave of involuntary shivers jives its way through me.

"I've got extra layers. You need it more, anyways."

I squint at him as he starts ruffling through his bag. "You did this last time, too. With your other jacket."

"So it seems."

"Why keep me warm? Why keep me alive at all? Aren't I a liability?"

He digs an extra shirt out of his bag and crams it on. His eyes are glassy, unfocused, staring out the cave's exit. The snow continues to fall. "Annie went back to the infirmary, the day we confiscated the medicine. Had a doctor walk her through the ingredients, the name, the reason for its consumption."

I fall still, bewildered but not entirely surprised. Reiner avoids looking at me; instead, he hunches back over his bag and resumes his search. "And?"

"And you were right. It's just medicine. Anta…"

"Antaverum."

"Right."

There it is, my vial, in his hand. And holy fuck do I want it. I want it back. It belongs to me. My body lurches without prompt, the extra coat slipping off my shoulders and pooling on the ground. I teeter to the side and throw my hands out to catch myself. And then cough.

Reiner watches the whole thing go down, looking as if he'd expected just as much from me. "You're sick, Aliva."

I glare daggers his way. "No shit. They don't give Antaverum to people just for fun."

"I meant–that's not what I meant. You're sick. Running a fever."

I push off of my hands, sitting back carefully so as not to topple over again. My eyes remain riveted on the vial he holds carefully. "So?"

"Is it because you didn't take the full dose? That's what it is, isn't it?"

"Sickness doesn't work like that, stupid." Reiner throws an exasperated look my way; I turn my head to avoid intercepting it.

"You hardly ate anything this morning. You had bags under your eyes."

"What are you, my nurse?" When I throw my gaze back his way, I'm surprised to see him carefully measuring out a small portion of liquid from the vial. "Hey. What're you doing?"

"Giving you the rest of your dosage."

"Why."

"Just…" Reiner sets the vial down and rubs the bridge of his nose with his free hand. "Take it. Quietly."

Feeling almost chastised, I carefully peel one of my gloves off to accept the cap of medicine he offers me. I sniff it; it smells exactly as it always has.

But when I toss it back and swallow, the second air hits my mouth again, I know it's not the same. The aftertaste is not familiar. No comforting trees appear in my mind; no green and black olives rolled between the fingers and dropped into wicker baskets.

My breath hitches. "It's not the same."

Reiner's head tilts fractionally, mouth pursing just-so. "Sorry?"

"It's not the same," I repeat with painstakingly deliberate emphasis punctuating each word. It only serves to make me angrier, more upset, and I don't understand why. My head starts to throb with renewed vigor. "What'd you do to it? What have you been giving me?"

Reiner's eyes widen. He speaks slowly, clearly, hastily twisting the cap back onto the vial before setting it down and holding his hands out in surrender, showing no weapons, baring no lies. "It's exactly as it's always been, I assure you. Nothing's changed."

"Everything's changed!" My throat constricts. My eyes water. I press my palms against them, rubbing furiously. Distantly I'm aware of how hot my temple feels against my fingers. "It doesn't taste right. It's supposed to taste like home. Not this. Never this."

"Home…?"

Reiner's stunned silence hardly helps. Not when I need answers. I shuffle closer, fully intent on grabbing him by the collar and shaking the answers out of him. "Well, Reiner? You're the know-it-all warrior. You and Annie and Bertholdt know what's best for me, apparently, so tell me–why doesn't it taste like it's supposed to? Is it because I'm forgetting who I was? Because I'm a bad person?"

Reiner's brows knit tightly together just as I reach him. He leans back, like he can escape whatever harm I am capable of, and his back connects with the cave wall. "I don't understand." He looks at me, then, and truly looks. "I'm sorry."

When his eyes soften, mine water.

"I am a ghost. A ghost without a name." A single tear escapes from my left eye, dribbles down from my eye in a solemn stroke of watercolor down a canvas. Reiner's eyes follow its descent. His voice comes out low, like a rumble of distant thunder.

"You're sick," he tells me once again, as if those two words have become a mantra. "Sickness can affect the taste buds."

I glance down. He's sitting, back against the rock wall, legs tossed to the side as I occupy the space where they should've been. On the other side of his waist…my vial.

I fall forward, reaching.

My chest collides with his before my arm can reach all the way over him, my breasts pressed to his body like a damn seductress, like a siren pressing her shell bra against a prow. I watch his face shift in surprise; watch his neck, just in front of my face, warble as he swallows thickly, his Adam's apple bobbing. Suddenly I'm struck by the wild urge to bite it, to pierce the fruit's skin with my teeth and taste the flesh. Is it sour, like a Granny Smith? Sweet, like a fuji apple, a pink lady? Perhaps it's more like a golden delicious, or a honeycrisp.

My mouth drifts forward, lips parted, hands sliding forward on the ground.

"Uh–"

My lips fall against his throat at the same time my fingers connect with the vial and wrap greedily around it. I yank my head back immediately. I'd be appalled by my actions if it weren't for the fact that I'd done it, the vial is mine again, I'm in control once more–

I glance over to my hand, to tuck the vial back up into my sleeve. Reiner sees my head shift and follows my gaze. His hand lashes out like lightning striking a field, seizing my wrists with one hand and pushing me down with the other.

"That's mine–"

"Cut it out, Aliva." His face scrunches up in a dark, severely annoyed scowl, as he stretches to grab the vial I'm clutching for dear life.

The second his neck looms near my mouth, I snap out and bite.

Reiner lets out a surprised grunt, and for a second, gives me just enough time to adjust my hold on the vial so that now both of my hands are entirely devoted to keeping it within my possession. "That meant nothing," I assert, still stubbornly trying to squirm out of his reach.

Reiner's scowl cuts deeper into his features, and he puts his face inches away from mine. His hand clamps tighter around my wrists; the other one pries my defiant fingers off the Antaverum and steals it back from me. "Glad we're on the same page." Then he shoves off of me, pockets the vial, and storms out into the blizzard.

---

*Clears throat*

sorry it took me so long to update! work has been an absolute shitshow with people quitting left and right, getting into fights with the customers and calling the cops and with the entire county loosing power because a bridge collapsed. the department of justice accidentally mailed my crime victim paperwork to my mother and she saw it and so that's also been insane. plus my therapist assigned me some "go climb a mountain and walk off the trail" homework so I've been busy roaming around in the mountains, peeing in bushes and having a good cry every now and then.

I pulled this chapter out of my badussy at work so hopefully it's enjoyable! And at least semi-comprehensible. OKAY UNTIL NEXT TIME XOXOXOX