Chapter 20

Armin Arlert is smart. Freakishly so. In fact it's almost ridiculous how smart he is, given how selfishly he chooses to use his intelligence. If I can tell you anything about him, it is this: Armin does not think about anything that does not interest him. If it does not benefit him, if it does not cross his path, it will not appear in his head.

All you need to do is avoid him. Do not alert him to your existence. Do nothing to make him suspect that you are anything but ordinary. Give him no reason to see you as anything more than the neighborhood kid his friend really hated. Do that, and you'll be fine. If anyone must underestimate you, it's him.

If you somehow read everything up until this point and still failed to heed my warning, then I will also tell you this: Armin is smart, yes, but he is no genius. He is cunning and clever and calculating. He uses his intelligence optimally, rarely wasting any brainpower.

But you, my darling, are a thousand times more cutthroat and viscous than he will ever be. You are more deadly, more decisive, more adept at lying. The precious, ever-defended friend of Eren Yeager has never had to scrape his own corpse off the ground before. He is a bird of prey that doesn't yet realize he fell into the wrong nest and was raised like a dove. You are a scavenger. You have fought for every scrap and you will continue to do so. It is what you excel at.

You have two world's worth of knowledge and experience inside of your soul. You have lived two lives. You know exactly what death tastes like, more intimately so than anyone else around you. No one thirsts for survival quite like the one who already lost it. But above all else, you have the thing not even Eren truly has: the future. You have all of it, right here, in these words.

So Armin, if he is unavoidable, is nothing compared to you.

Remember that. If you don't believe me, then just become exactly what I've said you are.

Yours– A

"How old was I when we first met?"

Armin blinks, his face narrowly avoiding to conceal his surprise. The candle between us flickers anxiously, warping the table's wood. Dips and curves carve their way into the low light. "A year older than Eren, Mikasa, and I…so you were…"

"Young. Yes? And how old am I now?"

This, at least, Armin knows off the top of his head. He watches me carefully, face like polished limestone. Smooth and unyielding. "Seventeen."

The voice that crawls out of my esophagus doesn't feel like mine. Rather, it feels as if I've hosted some alien creature, some organism that has finally chosen to take over my body and force me to carry out its will. All I can think about as the words creep out into the space between us is the section of my textbook dedicated to a warning about Armin I wrote for myself. "It's been, what, five years? Six? Since the fall of Shiganshina? You know that my parents didn't have the time nor the funds to continue my education once we relocated to that place. You know what things were like for us."

Armin's gaze flickers down, and for a second, I think he's ashamed. Only then do I realize that his lips twitched into a frown for a split second before he bowed his head. "I didn't mean…"

"No, I think you did." This time, my voice is my own. My anger feels like a lover frequently sought out, a butler ever at my beck and call. Red darts into my line of sight as venom coats my tongue. "You and Eren are truly quite the pair. Never did I think I would see the day where you, too, would decide to bring up the shame I bear from losing my own literacy due to misfortune, poverty, and my reduction to an orphaned refugee."

I end our lesson there. Armin apologizes, of course. But I hardly hear him over the frenzied hammering of my heart.

I was nearly caught, this time. Will I be so lucky the next?

A girl in a tawdry dress stands before me. She is young, nothing more than a child. Her tawny blond hair is straw-like, brittle to the point of nearly breaking. It reminds me of smoked strands, the kind that curdles when too close to a flame. The first winter after the fall of Shiganshina was unbearably cold. I'd slept too close to the fire; an ember had smarted, singed a few hairs off my head. They'd curdled, paled, curled with the desperate urge to condense themselves. When my fingers reached out to recover the strands, to inspect them, they'd crumbled to dust.

That is what this child looks like to me: liable to break the second I reach out to her.

"Hello," I say, because I'm not quite sure what else I could possibly do.

She stays silent.

I use the lack of a conversation to examine my surroundings. I can't see clearly. The ground beneath my feet expands endlessly, expounding upon itself like a parable of infinity. It shifts and acquiesces to my every motion, to every minutiae of my will. The word for it appears in my head so simply, like it has been there all along, like my thoughts were waiting for it to appear. Sand. My gaze shifts, downcast; the girl has bowed down, hands and knees, to begin sculpting the ground as she sees fit.

At first, it seems as if she's doing it because she enjoys watching the sand bend to her whims. Then I notice the perspiration staining her hands, her neck, the shallow breath jerking out of her lungs and the quivering of her hips. She is an artist, bound to the product of her creation. A sculptor, a slave.

Slave?

That word makes my memory tingle vaguely, like there's something I ought to be remembering right now. But in this lucid dreamscape, I can't recall whatever it is that I left behind in the real world. My non-reality engulfs me, deluding me, dissuading me from probing my memories further. I let the unease and recognition almost forming in my mind disappear.

Instead, I bend down, offering my hand to the girl. "Would you like to make sand castles with me?"

She watches me, watches my hand. Says nothing. Her eyes are so far downcast that I can't even tell what color they are. All I see is the whites of their flesh, the shaded tone of those irises. She studies her half-formed creation and does not seem eager to avert her gaze.

In my hands, a plastic blue shovel and pail have materialized. I'm stunned by their manifestation. Some distant part of me recognizes what these objects are, what the words for them and for what I desire to create with these objects have always been, but the forefront of my recollection is puzzled by this knowledge. Why do I know what a sand castle is? Why do my hands, equipped with these brilliantly covered plastic tools, move so deftly about the ground? What has my mind forgotten that my muscles refuse to?

I am so engrossed by my own perplexion that I don't notice the girl stop her own sculpting. Instead she watches me scoop sand into the pail, packing it densely until I can dump the pail upside down and leave a shoddy, half formed tower in its wake. When I notice her observing me, I find myself grinning sheepishly. "The sand sticks better with water, I promise."

Why do I know that? Why do I know anything, really? It's like I've lost half of myself, and yet it is still there, in a place just barely beyond my reach. It's uncomfortable. Scary. I've been walking down a gravel path, and then suddenly, found myself in the middle of a dense forest.

I'm crying now. I cannot stop. My tears carve out an ocean, and the child watches me weep, indifferent to it all. It floods my towers, eradicates my progress, drowns the lower half of hers.

But the girl doesn't seem angry. She doesn't seem sad, either. Just…surprised.

Then, finally, she turns towards me. Opens her mouth.

"Can you make castles now?"

Her voice is hoarse. But oh-so-lovely. I'm grinning unabashedly; I can't help it. "Yes. Want to help me?" She shakes her head no, but she doesn't leave. My overeager grin fades into a comfortable smile. "Okay. You can watch as long as you like."

She nods, and inches closer. This time, with the wet, clumpy sand, the towers stand tall on their own.

Just when I think we've fallen into a comfortable rhythm, the mood of the scene changes. Everything is cold, distant. The castle is gone. The ocean of my tears, the calm sea of sand, is all but nonexistent. The two of us are now mud-slicked, coated in the pungent odor of livestock and fecal matter. Fleshy pink pigs snort their way through my periphery.

The child glares at me. She is so much taller than me now that I am half-submerged in the ground, and she is looming over me. "You are not of this world."

"No," I agree, because the words that expel themselves come from that place that is ever-beyond my recollection. "But you won't kill me."

"I could."

"Yes," I nod. "But you won't."

"Why?"

My body is not my own. It belongs to whatever exists inside of me, whatever demon has possessed my faculties since the exchange with Armin. Perhaps it's a survival instinct. Perhaps it's a motor function, an instruction left by the girl I no longer remember being. Either way, the words that spill out now shock me enough to expel me from whatever transcendental dream I was just having.

"Because I can give you exactly what you want. Make a deal with me, Y–"

I jerk awake. Mina moans and stirs next to me, half awake and half asleep. She looks so angelic right now, lips parted softly and face relaxed fully. One of her hands is curled close to her chest; the other, propping up her cheek like a pillow. Her hair is out of those pigtails she insists on restraining them into, letting her lovely dark hair flow free and spill out around her face.

It was never my intention to wake her, but she squirms closer towards me all the same. With her face now pressed against the hollow dip between my shoulder blades, I can feel the way her body uncoils and returns to deeper sleep. I alone remain conscious enough to witness the passing of time. I think of the way our bed is warm. The way that her soft fingers and light breaths should be enough to assuage every ache inside of me. But for some reason, it's not.

"Marco…"

I go rigid at the way she murmurs his name into my spine. How hypocritical of me, really. Even as I try to prolong my guilt and exploit it as an excuse to distance myself from yet another person who could betray me, I find myself easing further into her grip. She has a name she can call in her sleep. A person she can find comfort in. Who am I to stand between that? Who am I to scorn, to feel jealous, when I no doubt do the same?

The shock sears straight through me the second I register where my thoughts are flowing.

I do the same.

I think about the person who appears in my mind just then. The person with honey mead for eyes, with hickory ale and clean wood for a scent. The person who looks like the sun, warm and tantalizing, large and broad. Illuminating, dazzling, spectacular in every possible iteration of those words.

Warm. Warm. Warm.

I miss him. Is that fair? To realize that I've been looking his way all this time, to understand the very depth of my ache and my want and my desire. I have coveted, craved, yearned to touch and be touched.

My hand snakes its way down towards my stomach.

My body feels warm to the touch. My pulse flutters in my palm, in the pit between my thighs, in the crater I call a chest. My heart feels gouged out even as my fingers prompt my clit to engorge, rubbing gently over the little mound perched atop my vagina. Every stroke makes my breath hitch. I alleviate the pressure, opt for concise, persistent strokes, stimulating the core that craves for release. Jean dances through my mind briefly–what an abysmal frustration, what a cheap solution for us both–and vanishes almost as quickly as he appeared. Thoughts of Jean Kirstein are not what make me slick between the folds and weak in the knees.

How long have I been repressing this? How long have I been drawn into his orbit, pining for that which I can never have?

A whimpered exhale slips past my defenses, and for a second I can't breathe. I freeze, anxious about Mina finding out about what I'm doing right now. It's not shame, per se, but more of an embarrassment in acknowledging that I am lusting after something beyond my means. Or, more accurately, someone.

How far I've fallen.

Mina doesn't wake up, though, so I continue. There's a part of me that almost wishes she would wake up, so that she would see me and call me to my senses. I can't be doing this. I know I shouldn't be doing this.

So why am I…

I want to whisper his name. I want to plant it on my lips, taste the syllables, savor the way he sounds. In my head I've returned to that cave, to that bare moment where I narrowly avoided kissing him, to that feral scene where I bit his flesh and felt his skin on my tongue and teeth. Another breathless sound darts into the air. My body feels aflame, afferent flow of blood now reversing and exploding outward.

Just once—just once—

"Reiner," I pant, moaning the name into my pillow. I bite my lip senseless, hips jerking as that single iteration kicks off my climax. I ride my way through it, struggling for air, coaxing my body to calm at the same time I wish it never would. With calm comes sobriety. The awareness of what I have done and who I have harbored these thoughts for feels taboo, almost. Embarrassment heats my neck, my ears. I break away from Mina and toss the covers off my skin to cool my traitorous body down faster.

I cup my hands together, palms up and extended. I place every memory, every thought of Reiner Braun in my awaiting hands. I add this revelation, these actions, these fledgling feelings to my growing pile. Only once my hands are full with the weight of every affiliated instance of involvement with the warrior do I allow myself to linger and hesitate.

And then I mash my hands together, crushing whatever they once held so definitely that not even ash remains.

A/N: Y'all better enjoy this chapter because I skipped a meeting to post it LMFAO