Creation began on 01-29-24
Creation ended on 02-12-24
Attack on Titan
The Dark Titan: Minus One
A/N: When we push people to try and do what we want, we may end up asking for more than we are willing to bargain for, and for the wrong reasons.
There were many things that he wished he could've redone to change the outcome of, but when it came to certain choices that he made, there were a few that he refused to even admit were his fault for causing to happen. And he was warned, repeatedly, by his own mother, that his actions had consequences. Some consequences of his actions were more than simply vile than others, but there was one that would be forever a reminder that not everyone was sympathetic to his behavior. And on a day like this, his failure was one that left him in utter disgrace.
Eren Yeager had always desired to join the Survey Corps, to venture out into the lands outside the Walls, and he thought that once he came of eligible age, he could get his chance…only to find his ability to remain balanced when using the ODM Gear was an issue that he couldn't resolve. At first, it was thought because of the harness portion of the gear being damaged, but it was, in reality, due to his inability to stay balanced while wearing any gear, whether it was damaged or functional. It rendered his chances of passing the Cadet Corps impossible. He'd be lucky if he could find employment elsewhere within the military.
"…Hey, I heard another guy from the Garrison tried to ask out that gray-haired girl again," Eren hears a member from the Cadet Corps say to someone.
"What gray-haired girl?" Another corps member asks.
"That teenage girl with the gray hair that stands out. Whatever her name is."
"Kaede Sogen," Eren states, and they look at him.
"You know her?" They ask him.
"Not exactly," he answers them.
"Eren has a strike against him by the Sogen family for harassment," Armin Arlert reveals.
"Hold on, the little girl that nearly killed a misbehaving boy for provoking her into conflict," one of the corps members expressed. "That was Yeager? Damn, you pissed her off something fierce if you have a strike on your public record. Wait a minute. Yeager… You're the kid whose house was smashed up by that Dark Titan that appeared after it saved your mother from being eaten by another Titan that tried to kill her."
Oh, Eren was never going to live that fact down. It had been five years since that dreadful day the Colossal Titan attacked Shiganshina District of Wall Maria, creating a breach in the outer gate, and letting in the lesser Titans. His mother had almost been killed by a Titan with a twisted smile that day, were it not for the untimely intervention of a large, dark-skinned Titan that saved her life…but then, as it was massacring the other Titans that came near it, it smashed up the Yeager family home. Not just smashing it up like it was unpredictably enraged by something, but demolishing its fury like there was to be no hope of ever rebuilding where it once stood in the process. And it was the way it looked while doing so; those that saw the Dark Titan destroy the house that day had sworn that it actually looked enraged, like it was angry about something that had been done to it.
While it was a day of potential hope because very few Titans were able to get in once the Armored Titan smashed through the inner gate, it was also a day of extreme grief because most of the people from Shiganshina District were forced to relocate to other districts…and Eren's mother felt that it was his fault that the Dark Titan had destroyed their home.
"Name one other Titan that takes the time to personally destroy one's home, Eren," Carla told him once when they made it to Trost District. "That Titan never laid a hand on any other homes. It was like it singled ours out just to punish us. To punish you! Because you harassed that Sogen girl I told you to stay away from!"
It was one thing to assume that it was Eren's fault the Dark Titan effectively rendered the Yeagers homeless by destroying their house in Shiganshina, but it was another to have his mother tell him that if he joined the Survey Corps, despite knowing that they were often most likely to get killed because of the Titans, she wouldn't be around waiting for news of his status if he went out there just to throw his life away. And now Eren had no such future if he couldn't pass a test that made using ODM Gear a requisite for joining the Survey Corps or Garrison.
"I doubt Sogen is your kind of girl," Eren tells them, changing the subject to the girl they had heard a Garrison soldier tried to hook up with turning them down.
"It's not like she's got eyes for you, Yeager," one of them retorts. "Although, if she's sworn off men because of you, that's gonna come back to kick your ass in the form of some pissed-off men that couldn't get the girl to give them the time of day taking their frustrations out on you."
"Most people probably only wanna go out with her because they want to ask about her hair!"
"She's a natural gray head," went Armin; he basically knew a little about Kaede Sogen to know that she came from a family that had a long history of people inheriting the gray hair that was from the moment of their birth. "Her father had gray hair when he was our age."
"We saw her with a man that was with her mother, and he didn't have gray hair."
"That's her stepfather; her father died prior to the attack on Shiganshina and her mother remarried his best friend."
"Is she seeing anyone?" The two cadets wanted to know from Armin.
"I don't know," he defends. "She's been cut off from people ever since the breach. She's like… I don't know, it's like she's damaged or something."
"She didn't look harmed or scarred or anything," one of them expresses.
-x-
She stood out a mile a minute because of her hair, but that wasn't what had her down. No, for Kaede Sogen, it was…all of these men that were nothing like her father, either trying to hassle her like that Yeager boy that pushed her over her edge…or trying to hit on her because they thought she was attractive enough to their eyes. But she wasn't like that…and wasn't looking for relationships based on…these trivial things that people took for granted. She had much on her mind that she was trying to deal with, but whenever these men tried to get too close to her, she felt like she was suffocating on bad air, burning up in a fire, drowning in water, and being dragged someplace she didn't want to be, all at once.
"Are you alright, Kaede?" Her stepfather had asked her upon finding during a secondary search party for stragglers left behind in the Titan invasion of Shiganshina.
Oh, how there were times she wanted to say to him what was wrong, but feared what would befall herself if anyone knew. She was once this happy girl that enjoyed life and had this smile that could melt through the daily concerns of most adults like how a knife could cut through bread and butter, but ever since the invasion and abandonment of Shiganshina, she wasn't the same girl, anymore. Every day, it was like she was constantly in a struggle just to get out and be among the people. The only time she ever became emotional about something in a negative manner…was when others her age tried to suggest that she enlist in the Cadet Corps to join one of the three military branches…and she nearly threw a fit because of the suggestion.
"Why does everyone think that that's the only option when there are other ways to live one's life?!" She had asked. "There's being a teacher or a craftsman or a…a simple florist! Why does anyone want to join the Military Police or the Garrison or that…that stupid group that goes beyond the Walls and comes back with fewer people every time?! There are other ways to live!"
Needless to say, Kaede was not a believer of conflict, necessary or unnecessary, and was not a supporter of the military when it came to either enlistment or facing the Titans. While she had nothing against exploring the world, she was against throwing one's life away when there was danger in the pursuit of exploration. It was probably among the reasons why she disliked Eren Yeager so much; people like him were always in a rush to throw their lives away and drag others along with them, whereas she was set on living hers on her terms rather than someone else's. But even with that drive to avoid conflict, she always had this look on her face that seemed…almost pleading in a way, like she was begging for some kind of absolution from a darkness that had crept into her life.
If any adult in her life were to suspect something, it would be that it was a combination of her past issues with Eren Yeager, the attack on Shiganshina and its aftermath…had left the girl with gray hair under some sort of stress…and it was causing her an inner pain that she tried to keep from spilling out.
Sitting outside of a café, Kaede felt like she was spiraling in the world, stuck in a whirlwind of bad thoughts and recurring nightmares she couldn't make heads or tails of. Her head in her left hand, she stared at her beverage with half-open eyes, thinking back to the day before the Colossal Titan had appeared and… At first, she thought everything was nothing but a crazy dream she was having difficulty waking up from, but there were these moments where she felt her sense of imagination and her grip on her sanity were not as stable as they used to be. There was this darkness she was lost in, either looking for a light source or…just trying to find someone that could take the darkness away from her.
"Day or night," a voice would say, "you will carry this darkness for the rest of your life, Kaede Sogen. You didn't choose this burden. The darkness chose you. Either embrace it or lose yourself to it. Use it or lose to it."
She didn't understand, and she felt hands grabbing her from all sides, reaching into her, pulling at her, with voices screaming at her.
"Miss?" She hears a lady's voice say to her, and she looks up at one holding a platter in her arms. "Is there something wrong with your drink?"
Kaede looks down at her cup and responds, "No, ma'am. It's fine."
"Are you alright? You look a little…under the weather."
"I…I don't know what to do," Kaede tells her.
SMASH! What felt like a series of small explosions rattled the streets, covering the buildings in dust and debris.
The woman that spoke to Kaede had been sent flying against a wall whilst the gray-haired girl was on the ground, looking up at the sky with half-open eyes. Her right arm missing from her torso, along with her left leg, with her waist torn open and exposing her innards.
"Oh, my God!" She hears some people yelling.
"What…what happened?"
"Where are the Garrison?!"
"Quick! Run to the inner gate!"
"Mommy…" Kaede cries as she tries to raise her head up. What is…going on? Why can't I move my body?
-x-
If it wasn't the fact that he wasn't able to fulfill his goal of joining the Survey Corps, it was the fact that, just less than an hour after packing his bag and leaving the training grounds, Eren was met with the brutality of civilian life all over again when the Colossal Titan appeared for the first time in five years since the last time it appeared in Shiganshina, except now it was in front of Trost, and it kicked another hole into the wall, allowing for Titans to get in. As people ran from where the breach had been made, his first thought was to rally people to make a stand, but he found that feat easier said than done when he was nothing but a civilian, a regular person with no means or influence.
"Run away and live," he heard someone say once, "or stay and die. Which choice seems to promise that at least you still have breath in your body?"
If he had to die today, he would rather die trying to live to see the next day, and that meant fighting back any way he could when the Titans appeared. But there was a report made two years ago when the Survey Corps had done an expedition that yielded some hope. The number of Titans that they had encountered were in the double digits, less than fifteen meters in height and mostly concentrated on the southern side of the Walls instead of widespread. This made it possible for the rest of Wall Maria to remain where in their districts, but Shiganshina couldn't be reclaimed so long as the gates were destroyed, making travel between the remaining three districts restricted. Still, it gave the people some hope because there weren't as many Titans as they initially believed.
"No!" Eren yells to the people that were fleeing. "Stand and fight!"
But his words fell on deaf ears. Nobody wanted to listen to the ranting of a young man that didn't know his place in a world where death was just around the corner and possessed the means to end your life if you stayed around long enough for it to get you.
The Colossal Titan disappeared in a body of steam that enveloped its body soon after, and Eren saw smaller Titans entering through the outer gate breach.
"Not again," he whines as he sees only a dozen or so of them, each one less than fifteen meters, their faces horribly distorted and like the stuff of nightmares.
All he could do was run and find his mother and escape from the Titans until help arrived to resolve the matter. If help was even coming in a situation where, even with few Titans around, the current state of mankind was more or less zero because of the lack of manpower and ineffective firepower. But the Titans, they were going to send them to a state of minus one, and things were already bad as they were right now.
-x-
She was in the dark again, lost, alone and afraid of what was out there, waiting to snatch her up off her feet.
"Hello?" She calls out as she walks around the obscured terrain. "Hello?! Is anyone out there?!"
Kaede felt like she was the only one around…but didn't want to be. Her clothes were ruined…and she had no idea of how she even ended up where she was right now. The presence of a stranger was even welcomed to her sense of loneliness; at least the voice of another person would be a change to the silence of the present.
"If you don't fight, you don't deserve to live," her eyes reacted tensely to that voice, that wretched, awful, awful voice, and she turned around to see a dimly lit Eren Yeager standing in front of her, his eyes dark with circles, as if he hadn't been able to sleep. "If you fight, you live."
Anyone. Anyone but him. He wasn't welcomed anywhere around her. She really despised him. There was no denying that they would never be friends, in life or death; he was stubborn to the point of obsessed with freedom and conflict in a world where order and stability were a must, and she was just a girl that preferred simplicity and order in a chaotic world.
"Go away," she tells him as she walks away.
"Where are you going to go?" He asks her.
"Anywhere you can't," she states.
"Fight. Fight and live."
"I'm not talking to you now!"
"What do you have against fighting?"
"Once you start, you refuse to stop."
"Fighting helps you to survive."
"Maybe where you want to be, but not for me."
"So, you're a coward, then?"
Kaede just walked away from him, hoping that someone else would appear and she could enjoy their company over Eren's uninvited presence. He was always this unwanted guest in her life that would make a scene or do something to turn a pleasant experience into a sour one. And if this was Hell, the netherworld she was told where bad people go to suffer for their sins, she wondered what she could've done to deserve being sent here when all she tried to do was be a good person. If this place was Hell, what had she done to deserve being here?
"Whoever said this was Hell, Kaede Sogen?" A different voice, similar to hers, but full of…something she wasn't sure of, spoke to her, in front of her. "Some view Hell as a place for children that can not choose between the path of assurance and the path of deceptions. You're a maiden that seeks the path of salvation and redemption from the agony you have been forced to endure. Paradise is your eternal reward for when your time truly comes and where your days have impacted the souls of any that seek the comfort of a different kind of serenity. Tell me now…what is it you pray for, Kaede Sogen?"
A light shined in front of Kaede, and she saw a woman. Or at least, what she thought was a woman, obscured by the outline of light and their darkness-shrouded form, slender and muscular, with long hair that reached down to her legs. She couldn't see her face or anything else.
"What is it that you pray for, Kaede Sogen?" They asked her again.
"An end to my pain," she finally answers. "My father died shortly after my dispute with Eren Yeager. My mother marries his best friend, but that wasn't what bothered me. It was my step-grandfather, Grausam Zanki, because he did something to me…and I'm afraid of hurting people because of what he did to me."
"What did he do you?"
"He…he tied me down…and had these needles. He stuck them in me, in my arms and legs. I don't know what he did to me, but I haven't felt the same ever since, and there's this chunk of time I've lost. I can't remember what happened earlier in the day the Colossal Titan, a big monster without skin, appeared and caused the people of Shiganshina District to leave."
"What do you recall? From before you lost this…chunk of time?"
"I saw the Titan kick a hole in the wall…and then I…I fall down. The next time I wake up, I'm surrounded by ruins…and my stepfather and some other people find me. He tells me that it had been over eight hours since Shiganshina had been abandoned…and I was one of a dozen survivors left behind when a handful of Titans came through the breach. I was considered lucky among the survivors, as the only child alive; most other children found had been killed by the Titans when the boats all departed."
"That's terrible. Based on what you were told, there's a total of eight hours or so from your life that you can't recall."
"But…there's something I've been seeing lately that might just be my imagination."
"Which is?"
"I see myself…breaking this house in front of somebody. I don't even know why I'm doing that, I just…feel this rush of anger."
"Do you feel this anger is…because of whatever your step-grandfather did to you?"
"Yes…and no."
"Elaborate, please."
"I feel anger at what my step-grandfather did to me, but…I feel angrier at whoever lived in that house that was being smashed up by me. I heard gossip about a Titan smashing up the Yeager house, but I could never make sense of why a Titan would do such a thing."
"What else, if anything, did you feel when you heard that the house was destroyed by the Titan?"
"What did I feel?"
"Yes. How did you feel, knowing that his home was destroyed by a Titan?"
"I felt… Well, I…"
"Go on."
"I felt…like he deserved it in the end."
"Who?"
"Eren Yeager. I felt like he got exactly what he deserved when the Titan took his home from him. He kept making trouble for people, so a Titan destroying his home would feel like an act of the gods, punishing him for his bad behavior. I did feel sorry for his parents losing their home, but I felt that Eren deserved to know that suffering, that everything he did would have repercussions. That's how I felt."
"And this Eren Yeager…do you despise him?"
"I don't like him."
"But do you despise him? Do you hate him to the point of wanting him to never be around you for the rest of your life?"
"Yes…but not enough to want him dead. People die too soon when they should from sickness or old age, not this carnage that stems from violence being sought after by other people that can't see another way to live."
"You prefer life over death."
"Yes."
"Peace over conflict."
"Yes."
"Love over hate."
"Yes!"
"What do you want?"
"To be free from the darkness I'm trapped in."
"To be free from the darkness, you must embrace it."
"What?"
"Embrace the darkness, Kaede Sogen. It chose you. It's not going anywhere. It has a life because of you. A form that is held back by your fear, your restraint, your desperation to keep your dread from harming others, but you can only hold it all back for so long before it kills you, turning you into a monster that has no conscience, remorse…or any sense of morality. What your step-grandfather did to you cannot be undone, but it does not have to be your undoing. You have the power to decide for yourself whether or not this darkness will become your doom…or your path back to the light that represents your future. Your future, nobody else's. Take back your life and live it under your own terms…or die from your fear of being consumed by it when it should be the other way around."
Kaede didn't understand any of this. What did this person want her to do?
"What I want…is for you to accept and embrace all that you are and can be," they told her. "By accepting all that you are…and embracing all that you can be…you will find peace in your future. You will be free. Accept what you have become. Embrace what you can be. Release yourself from your dread."
The person then disappeared from her perception.
"No!" Kaede gasps. "Please, wait!"
But they were gone.
I'll be here for you…should you need me again, Kaede Sogen, she hears their voice in her head. Accept what you have become. Embrace what you can be. You will find peace.
But in the darkness, Kaede felt alone, uncertain of what the person truly meant…until she noticed something off about where she was. While she was in the darkness, even though the light had faded, she could still see as clear as day. She could see herself as she was, her clothing a wreck and her hair a mess because it was neat as it had been when she put it in a ponytail this morning, and despite looking around for some sort of light, she was the only thing visible.
"So long as you hold onto hope, Kaede," her father's voice had told her once, "you'll never lose the light you carry inside your heart. Let that light be your guide. People can talk about the future all they want, day in and day out, but the future isn't something you can truly grasp. The future…has to be what you yourself want of it to be. You…are just a part of the future. Each and every day as it becomes clearer. Never lose the light inside your heart."
Despite her dread having been a constant source of hindrance in the last five years of her life since the attack on Shiganshina, Kaede still held on to that hope that what had happened to her was nothing more than a nightmare. And yet, even after what had to be an attack on Trost, the same attack she was certain that had resulted in her being in this dark place, she still clung to the hope that she was alive, that someone would come and save her, even if they knew it was impossible, simply because they held onto hope. That symbol used by the Survey Corps, the Wings of Freedom; Kaede wouldn't deny that out of the three military branches, she only like that symbol because it represented a sense of escape that most couldn't imagine without running their mouths about, and the symbol was just another sliver of hope for some.
"Release yourself from your dread."
With a renewed sense of hope, Kaede raised her head up to the darkness around her, her eyes holding a new light.
-x-
The cadets were completely unprepared for the Titans when they came into the district. While there might've been only a few of them, the mere fact that they kept missing their mark made them feel helpless against their advance.
"We can't do this," Connie Springer expresses.
"It's hard to hit them when they keep moving," Sasha Blouse adds in.
"This is Hell," Armin admits.
Flash-Boom! An explosion of some kind got their attention from the other side of the district…and they could see something rising from the smoke.
"Rrrrrraaaurgh!" A Titan roared, and the teenage soldiers bore witness to the living rumor that had been around for five years.
A Titan with dark skin and long hair, standing much larger than any of the Titans under the Colossal, androgynous, muscular and lithe, and was believed to have killed over a large number of Titans before disappearing. This was the Dark Titan, the Titan that had saved Eren's mother from being killed, and the same Titan that destroyed the Yeager home.
"No way," went Jean Kirstein as they watched from the rooftop of a building. "It really does exist. The Dark Titan."
"It's huge!" Sasha reacted.
It was exactly as Armin remembered seeing it, and then it started moving down the street it was on, which led towards the breach that was once the outer gate of Trost.
"But…there are people moving towards the inner gate," went Krista Lenz as she pointed out a fact. "Why is it going the other way instead?"
The Dark Titan walked over to an open space, away from the buildings, but close to a large rock.
"Rrrraaurgh!" It roared, much louder than previously heard, and the Titans, scattered across the city, looking for human flesh to sink their teeth into, all stopped and turned to face it. "Rrrraaurgh! Rrrrraaurgh!"
Then, against all that people thought they knew about the Titans, which wasn't really much, the Titans moved towards the Dark Titan, which started moving its arms and legs in motions that were unusual to those that could see it because it made no sense to those without a sense of being open-minded or creative. Even the way it was moving its head, letting its long hair shift in the air…was somewhat unusual.
"What is it doing?" Ymir questions.
"It looks like it's…dancing," Armin suggests, recognizing some of those motions because he remembers how the girls of Shiganshina would perform them, something Eren had found to be ridiculous because he was accused by one of them to have no passion for it. "It is dancing."
The Dark Titan swayed around, causing the other Titans to begin mirroring its motions. Then, after performing a body gesture that was lost to most young people, reminiscent of a woman offering herself up (A/N: I had to look at a clip of American Dad where Francine Smith had cornrows and was dressed scantily on YouTube), the Dark Titan swung its head…and its hair went and decapitated each of the sixteen Titans that had come through the breach in one swift move, like a knife through butter, causing their bodies to drop to the ground and evaporate. It was a move that was beyond imagination, something only a creative mind could come up with. And the worst part of witnessing it…was that those that would live to tell anything about it would have difficulty trying to explain it because it was so unusual.
"Dammit!" Connie says as the Dark Titan then moved towards the breach. "It killed all the Titans…with its hair!"
"After putting on quite a performance," added Jean, seeing the Dark Titan sit on the right side of the breach, looking in their direction. "Oh, Lord."
Out of the three kills they had, all of which were committed by Mikasa Ackerman, they paled in comparison to the spectacular kill of this seventeen-eighteen-meter Dark Titan. It then laid its head back against the breach, its hair covering its arms and chest as it closed its eyes.
-x-
"…Sixteen Titans," went Reiner Braun as he, Annie Leonhart and Bertolt Hoover had witnessed this mysterious Titan kill the other Titans that came through the breach. "What is this thing? How is it able to do what it can do?"
"We should try capturing it," suggests Annie, "bring it back with us."
"That may not be easy," Bertolt says. "We don't know what else it can do."
"It's not difficult to see that it appears to ignore humans," Reiner explains. "It kills the Titans and then it sits down. Maybe it's asleep."
"Or it's just trying to lure other Titans into a false sense of security by feigning vulnerability," Annie tells him. "It's just as Bertolt said, we don't know what else it can do, and the fact that we don't know is why it should still be considered dangerous to get near it. Until we know for certain what else it's capable of from a distance, we should stay away from it."
"Uh, I think someone just beat us to it," Bertolt states, pointing over to some of their cadets propelling themselves over to where the Dark Titan sat.
-x-
Eren was fortunate to survive this Titan attack along with his mother, but the mere fact that this was the same Titan that had rendered his family homeless in Shiganshina didn't excuse it from being a subject of his rage.
"You're alive," he hears Armin say to him as he and Mikasa saw him slowly approach the Titan. "Can you believe this?"
"I can," Eren responds. "I don't like it."
Just being this close to it felt like being close to a dangerous animal that was just sleeping; it could attack as soon as it was provoked and that would be the end of you.
"How'd you get away from the Colossal Titan?" Eren asks Mikasa.
"It appeared," she explains, "and it attacked the cannons before kicking a hole in the wall."
"It just destroyed the cannons? It didn't try to eat any on you?"
"No. It ignored us completely. It probably viewed the cannons as a threat, however."
But Eren suspected that the Colossal Titan was actually intelligent; if it ignored humans in favor of destroying the cannons, it had to be capable of intelligence, which would imply that these monsters were not as dumb as they seemed. This also applied to the Dark Titan if it was able to kill its own and even destroy a house that it singled out.
"We gotta kill it," he tells them all.
"Kill it?" Armin reacts. "But it just saved the people from sixteen of them. It never even went after any of them. Even right now, it's not even trying to hurt us."
"It doesn't matter. A Titan is still the enemy, no matter what it does. The sooner we kill this one, the better off we'll be."
Suddenly, everyone except Eren backed away from the Titan.
"What?" He asks them.
"It's looking at you," Armin reveals, and Eren slowly turns around to look up at it, seeing that it was looking down at him, its face expressing contempt towards him.
"Grr," it growled as it slowly raised its right hand up to point at him, further demonstrating its own intelligence.
Then, it used its finger to etch into the ground, forming, to their surprise, letters, forming words.
"My God," went Jean in disbelief. "Oh."
The Titan removed its finger from the words it etched into the ground, and they were as intelligent as one could demonstrate to someone.
"Heh," went Krista as she turns to face Eren. "This Titan has an opinion of you that is not far from reasonability."
But just seeing the message made Eren angrier with the Titan that destroyed his home.
"YOU SUCK YEAGER" was etched by the Dark Titan, which surprised the people that this behemoth was smart enough to spell names. There was no doubting that this particular Titan disliked the young man.
"Uh, are you a man-eater?!" Connie yells to the Dark Titan, which then nods its head in the negative, indicating that it was capable of communication. "Whoa!"
"Okay, that makes me feel a little safer," went Sasha; if this Titan was smart enough to communicate with, then it had to be smart enough to try and understand more. "Excuse me! Are there other Titans like you?!"
The Dark Titan looked to its left and etched something into the ground, causing them to run over to its other side and see the words it dug into the ground. "NOTHING LIKE ME" was its response to the small group, indicating that it was unique.
"This is beyond intense," went Armin. "Beyond…beyond."
Despite this, and this was something that was going to get out, it didn't change these crucial facts that they did understand so far: This Titan was far different from the ones they had encountered in the past, it demonstrated intelligence and communication with them, it was able to murder other Titans, ignored humans to the point of not eating them at all…and, for some unknown reason, it knew who Eren Yeager was, expressing a dislike towards him of all known people.
What are you? Eren wonders, really wishing that the cadets would just kill this thing while it made no action to defend itself.
The Dark Titan turned its head to look through the breach, seeing no other Titans nearby, but so long as the breach was present and accessible, the city was still at risk of being swarmed by Titans in the future. It sighs as it continues to sit where it was. The vestiges of humanity were still at a state of zero, even with the loss of just one district from Wall Maria, and any further devastation caused by the Titans to Trost would push them to minus one and beyond. Tilting its head back, it faced the sky above, seeing the sunlight bathe its dark-skinned body in a dull-golden sheen. Its eyes showing only one emotion that was unknown to the young people that gathered in front of it: Longing.
Armin looked at the Titan's face…and saw a tear escape its right eye.
Who are you down there? He wonders.
To be continued…
A/N: Kaede has to embrace what she has become to accept what she can be later on, but there is further difficulty in her future. The presence of the Dark Titan is just a sliver of hope like in every other incarnation of the story featuring it; it appears, saves some people in the city that is attacked, but in this incarnation, it serves as a representation of Kaede's fears and anger over what has been done to her or around her. In this case, it's more towards the two people that give her dread and disharmony that she wants to escape. What do you think so far and what do you expect to see in the future?