Chapter 16

I don't bother to follow him out. If Reiner wants to freeze to death, that's his own business. Instead I stoop down and grab his coat, shoving it on over my own. I'm lucky his feels several sizes larger, otherwise it never would've worked. I shuffle around like a bloated snowman, puffy arms reorganizing the cave floor as I see fit. I drag the packs into the corner and return my attention to the miscellaneous twigs and branches Reiner had collected to make a fire.

It occurs to me, kneeling in front of what looks like maybe a clump of tinder, that I don't have the slightest clue how to start a fire. I'd watched random nature survivalist shows every now and then on television, but the actual memories of what I'd watched escapes me. I fumble around, reorganizing the pile of twigs like a nesting hen, grumbling as I do. My head hurts like hell. And if Reiner is right—if I'm sick—then keeping warm will be even more important for me.

I struggle to maintain accurate dexterity through my gloves, so I yank them off and cast them to the side. I grab a decent-looking branch, and another spindly one, and try to set the thinner one's end into a divot on the larger one. I clap it between my palms, set the base branch pinned between my knees, and start twisting.

It's exhaustive, arduous work, and I manage to make no progress despite my efforts. Every pulse of my head now makes me outrageously fatigued and weary. I sway slightly.

Maybe a nap will help.

Hannes and I are swimming again, though this time, we are diving down into the heart of the lake. He grips my wrist firmly, and with every foot we plunge, I feel myself reverting into a child's body. My breasts shrink and flatten. My hips narrow. My legs shorten. It should be painful, this antithesis of a growth spurt, but it's not. All I can feel is the dread stitching itself into the space between my ribs, lacing them together like spider webs made of tendons and terror.

"Aliva Moreau died choking on her own selflessness," he hisses at me, bubbles frothing out of his mouth. "Convulsing in the woods, gurgling her last words, fully believing that she was sparing her parents the hardship of supporting her. How very unlike your own death it was. How very selfish and petty you are in contrast."

How do you know this? I question silently, and just like before, it is as if Hannes can hear my thoughts. He sneers; one of his arms plops off with a wet pop, sinking right along with us. I look with open horror at the jagged, severed limb.

"I know more about you than you think."

I'm sorry for killing you.

Hannes laughs. I watch his lower jaw creak and snap, jutting out of his chin at an awkward angle. The muscles in his cheeks fray, leaving his mouth crooked, permanently open. Still he speaks to me, pasty white tongue caked in yellow deluge wagging past his lips like a dog's tongue would. "No, you're not. You've no true remorse."

I know you weren't supposed to die so soon. It was an honest mistake. I thought you wouldn't fight Dina's Titan. I'll pay whatever penance I have to.

Hannes stops swimming to glance at me. His eyes leak decaying mucus. "Have you ever considered that your time in this world is your penance?"

I wake with a startled gasp wedged in my throat and panic in my chest. It's pitch black outside. No fire blazes to life around me. My fingers fumble blindly against the cave floor to orient myself, shivering for their gloves only to find with some surprise that they're already covered. I don't remember putting them on before falling asleep. But I must have. Why else would they be on?

I get my answer shortly after my eyes adjust to the darkness.

Reiner sits across from me, looking almost startled to see me awake. I rub my eyes and check again, but sure enough, he's there. "You came back."

He glances at me incredulously. At least I think he does. In the dark, it's kind of hard to tell. "I was going back out to look for drier wood."

Upon reinspecting the ground, sure enough, I see a few branches and logs that weren't there before. But still, no fire. "It looked more like you were storming off, though."

Silence slips between the two of us for a moment. I imagine the crackle of a toasty fire punctuating the air, with little sparks churning eddies up from the wood and into the atmosphere. Instead, only the sound of the wind howling outside blankets the wilderness. "I was," Reiner finally admits. "I thought a fire would be a good apology."

I laugh, softly. "It would've been. Sorry for giving you shit for it earlier."

I see one of his eyebrows raise. "Oh?"

"Turns out it's harder than it looks."

When he smiles gently, I feel like I've won some sort of prize. I'm bolstered by the reaction; suddenly, this is do-able. I can play nice with the warriors. I can show them that I am someone they can trust. I'll be a person they can confide in, a person they don't have to worry about blackmailing and betraying.

I can do it.

Reiner shivers—only faintly, so subtly that I wouldn't have noticed if I wasn't already so focused on him. It dawns on me that he's not wearing his thick coat. I am. "Oh. You can have this back," I tell him hastily, shrugging his jacket off and then shuffling over to him to deliver it. He stays warily still, almost like he's trying to figure out if the hand I offer is safe or steeped in poison. I feel more in control of myself than I did earlier, at least, but I understand his caution nonetheless.

"You need it more," he says, with the sort of reluctance that only convinces me further of how cold he really is.

"Take it." I shove it into his arms with little force before letting go of it. He takes it tentatively, as if I have handed him a bomb, and carefully puts it back on. While he does, I tug the packs closer and start rifling through them for something to eat. I grab the water bottle out and set it down between Reiner and I; wordlessly, he unscrews the cap and sets it back down without drinking from it. I find a wrapped bar in his bag and take it out, handing it to him before finding a matching bar in mine.

We munch silently, punctuating every other swallow with a small sip of water. I manage to eat about half of my own granola before I start to feel weary and nauseous. Setting the food back into my bag and sitting back against the wall next to Reiner, I wrap my arms around my legs and make myself small and compact to keep warm.

Before I close my eyes, though, I press the inside of my wrist to my forehead. It feels hot still, but I can't really judge how hot it actually is. "Let me," Reiner murmurs softly. I turn my head towards him and watch as he leans forward slightly and replaces my wrist with his.

"Mm. Still burning up."

"Bummer." I sigh, yank my jacket tighter around me, and glance out into the dark. "How long will we be stuck here?"

Reiner sighs. "Until dawn. Then we can go trekking up to the base."

The bottle scrapes against the cave floor as Reiner picks it up again. I listen silently and mull over what he said, until I can't help but ask the obvious question floating around in my head. "You could transform. Go to the base yourself."

He makes a little grunt; the bottle clacks against the ground again. "I'd be leaving you behind, you know."

"Unless you carried me?"

He chuckles, and with my head tucked down against my knees, I almost smile at the sound. I lament the fact that we cannot be friends who pretend not to know what the other one truly is. Wolves playing at being sheep.

"It's too dark out. The transformation flash will be too visible."

I sneak a peek at him from the corner of my eye. "You could've gone earlier, though. Back when you stormed off."

"I know," he says, and for a long time we say nothing else. I don't expect there to be more: this is one of the people who will one day leave Marco high and dry, at the mercy of the titan who will eat him alive.

Then again—this is also the boy who will witness that event and be so deeply disturbed by his own actions that he will develop a split personality.

"You seem like a good person," he murmurs softly, just when I think he's fallen asleep. "And…you have a home to return to. Just like us."

I swallow thickly. "Right. In Marley."

I hear him shift, wrapper crinkling, his bag opening and closing. "Would you tell me about it?"

Another dry, crawling cough rasps its way out of my throat. When it subsides, I'm surprised to see that Reiner is holding the water out to me. I take it and sip thinly before handing it back, closing my eyes, and bidding myself to remember.

"It's hard to say. Is it possible to say you miss a place that wasn't always good to you?" I realize that's a dumb thing to ask one of the warriors. Of course I already know what their answers would be.

Reiner shocks me, though, by answering differently. "I guess it depends. Tell me more."

So I do. I tell him about the orchard, the trees. The olive presses and barrels and the car that got stuck in the potholes whenever it rained excessively. My heart skips a beat when I remember how few people even own vehicles in the world outside of Eldia, but Reiner takes it in a way I don't expect him to. It's not the vehicle that shocks him, but the wealth it implies. The life it suggests I once lived—the one I discarded in favor of being on this island.

"Why are you here, then?" I press my lips together. My silence only serves to egg him on. "You told us that there were others from Marley on this island. Yet you wouldn't say how many, or who, or why."

I think of Dr. Yeager and suddenly I wonder if I can still speak my lie with conviction now that Eren has eaten his father alive. "I meant every word I said. And you're right. It's not for you to know. You three have your mission; I have mine. They do not align."

I think back to the day I first arrived here, years ago now. I think of that fierce, determined version of myself that was willing to kill the warriors with my own bare hands to stop the fall of Shiganshina. What would that tiny girl me think now, to see me hunched up in a cave next to the Armored Titan?

"Are you saying you'll get in our way, then?"

The challenge in his voice, the implication, is left perfectly clear. He is dangerous. They all are. And I would be a damn fool if I didn't show him, immediately, that I pose as much of a threat to their mission as a field mouse might to an elephant.

So I lie. It's an outrageously stupid, slightly true and slightly incomprehensible thing, but it's too late to stop now. I pull my head up and rest it against the wall, scooting closer, taking full advantage of the way he gets defensively distracted whenever I'm too close. I stop when my arm touches his. I feel his eyes on me, as we sit side by side, and I tell him something equally vulnerable and equally vicious. "I'm…banished, almost. I've been cast out here as a kind of punishment. I guess in a way all of us were." Although Grisha certainly found a way to turn his purgatory into his paradise. I sigh. Reiner stays eerily quiet, and so I continue. "I'm still trying to work on my purpose. I have my mission, sure—but there's another part, about how I'm supposed to learn to live with myself. The longer I spend on this island, the longer I doubt my ability to do it."

"That's war," he tells me, quietly. I think that I agree, but for entirely different reasons. There is a war going on within me: the girl I once was, the girl I became, and the girl who I will be are all fighting. With my memory vanishing, little by little, I fear that I know who will win. And I don't know how long I'll survive after that happens. Almost like he can read my mind, Reiner clears his throat and says, "I—earlier you said you were forgetting who you were. Was that just fever taking, or…?"

"No," I shake my head, deflating for nothing more than admitting the truth. "That's real. I'm losing my memories of my—Marley."

He nods, passively. "You were young, then, when…?"

I shrug. "No younger than I am now." I can feel his palpable confusion, but it's the truth. I am near the age I was when I died the first time. I'm, what, sixteen now? Seventeen when next year's heat crawls away from its peak? And Reiner is eighteen, as of the fall. I swallow. I'm half a year out from the age I was when my mother shot me. The mother I can no longer recall with clarity.

In half a year's time, what if I don't remember that I've died at all?

"But I wish I could remember. It was not the kindest place, that villa, but it made me sharper. Harder." I scowl down at my legs. "Forgetting is weakness. It would make me soft, in a world that demands calluses in order to cling onto it."

Reiner sighs. "My mother would agree."

My heart clenches at that. Suddenly I'm bristling, defensive of my own distrustful nature. "And you wouldn't?"

For a second I swear that I see him: that boy with wondrously wide, star-bright eyes, splitting his cheeks in half because his face wasn't made to accommodate such a joyful grin. I see him as he was, hopeful, daring to believe there was a horizon he could reach where the world loved and accepted him as he was if he only ran faster towards it.

Then the man that he's become hardens his gaze. "No," he corrects me, deliberately slow, as if he needs to hear himself say it, too. "I agree with you."

And that is that.

A/N: SO SORRY ABOUT GOING MIA

you literally won't believe what happened. A glass bottle fucking SHATTERED while I was holding it at work and I had to UBER to the hospital because there was only one other person at work LMFAO. Anyways so they gave me five shots, pumped two of my fingers, gave me four stitches and then used tissue glue for everything else to patch my hand back together. It was literally my write hand so this chapter is brought to you exclusively by my left hand. If you see any dumb typos, kindly ignore them lol. I'm still recovering so I don't know how long it'll be until I can write regularly again, but here's this in the meantime!