Archive of Our Own

I'm on the pursuit of happiness and I know everything that shines ain't always gonna be golden. I'll be fine once I get it. I'll be good...

- Pursuit of Happiness by Kid Cudi

There is a beginning to every story and everyone has a story.

Even monsters.

The first time Annie Leonhardt ever sees Mikasa Ackerman, it is purely by accident.

There are three refugee stations set up throughout Wall Rose for the people flooding in from Wall Maria. It is merely a coincidence, a quirk of fate, that they end up in the same one. At the time she has no idea who she is, who any of them are. Annie’s waiting as patiently as she can to get to the front of distribution line to get food. Despite not actually being involved in the fall of Wall Maria, she is tired and hungry from the trip. The walk from her village, as well as the emotional toil of leaving behind the only home she had ever known, even if it was questionable at best, weighs heavily on her shoulders.

She’s only 10 after all.

The line is long and somber; people seemed to have no qualms with trying to cut a little girl if it meant ensuring more food for themselves. Disgusting. ‘Humanity's greatest crime is their very existence’ she remembers being taught and she can see why. She may be a monster, but sometimes she can’t see how regular humans are any different.

After what seems like endless waiting she is only a few people from the front of the breadline when out of the corner of her eye she catches a blur of black, red, and pink.

There is a girl, about her age, outfitted in clothes that were visibly dirty and too big for her, speaking in soft tones as she forces an equally dirty brunet boy to eat.

Standing over this boy, the girl adjusts her scarf with one hand and twists the loaf into his mouth with the other. The boy is crying and another boy, a blond, is making apologies to onlookers. The girl is completely unrepentant however. Annie can only catch the smallest bit of the conversation, but it is enough to plunge the her into deep thought.

“You have to survive…...even if I have to feed you myself.” Her eyes, which had previously looked black, burn dark blue, and sends a jolt of something down the blonde's spine from the sheer force of her conviction.

Annie isn’t sure why but something about that statement, combined with the near brutal action that prompted it, stays with her for a long time.

It is raw and visceral, something that could only come from someone who has known hardship; who has seen and done terrible things.  It is a feeling that she knows well, that has fermented in her sour soul and reeks from her skin.

Her father has once said that only monsters were capable of understanding other monsters and he might have been right because while the girl is pretty, strangely so, her actions are not. Her words are not. Annie senses something monstrous in this girl, in her desire to save another’s life even if it meant making them miserable. She can’t decide if it’s beautiful or twisted or both.

The line moves on while she is staring. A large woman elbows her in chest and knocks her to the ground when she doesn’t keep up with the line’s pace. No one says they’re sorry, no one offers to help her up, and no one cares if she’s lost her meal for the day. People, all people, she decides, are no better than monsters.  With a stern expression she squeezes her way back into her spot and glares daggers at the woman who pushed her, daring her to say something.

Annie gets her bread, but when she looks back the girl with the scarf and her friends are gone.

She dreams about her a few times.

They are in her village; only it’s much nicer than she remembers, with wildflowers growing around the edges of every building and instead of trees caging the town in there are open hills and valleys. Despite not having particularly fond memories of her village, of her life in general, seeing the village this way makes her happy, or it would if it wasn’t so blatantly obvious that she was not apart of it. Annie is dressed in all red as she sits on a hill top, curled in on herself, watching the people move below. She thinks she sees her father smiling; a sight she’s hardly ever seen.

She instinctively knows its because she’s not there and it makes her heart tighten. The familiar doubt of wishing she had never been born blossoms in her chest like an old friend.

She wants to go down there and be happy with them, but can’t make herself move. Annie buries her head in her knees and tries to make herself wake up or disappear. Maybe both.

“Annie.” Someone calls.

When she looks up, the girl from the refugee camp is there looking down at her with a sour expression. How she knows her name is beyond her and the girl doesn’t look very much moved by her attempts at hiding. Annie feels shame tingle down her neck but doesn’t know what to say.

The girl’s black hair sways in the breeze as she reaches out towards her. Annie stares at her hand like it’s an alien appendage. “Stand up.”

She doesn’t and the girl grabs her by her shirt and hoists her up. Instinctively Annie panics and punches the girl square in the jaw. The resounding crack wakes her out of her internal pity party and she kicks the the girl’s feet out from under her.

Sprawled out flat on her ass in a field of flowers, Annie notices for the first time that barring the scarf, they are dressed exactly the same way, all deep reds and shadows. The dark haired girl doesn’t look mad or even out of breath, she just wipes the blood from her lip and stares at her, calculating her violent outburst as if it didn’t affect her.

Her indifference makes Annie mad enough to want to kick her ribs in.

But right before her foot makes contact she stops and the dark haired girl smiles a small smile. “Do it. If you don’t fight you can’t win.”

Annie doesn’t know what beating the shit out of this girl will make her win, but in the end she doesn’t get a chance to think about it because the dream fades away.

She thinks of the girl often.

In those horrible two years, spent toiling the fields of southern Wall Rose for rotten fruit and stale crumbs waiting for the day when she can carry on with her mission, the haunting memory of that girl is often the only thing that gets her through the night.

The blonde wonders if she was able to keep her friends alive this long or if she had managed to push them away with the force of her will. She wonders if she struggles with her own cruelty the same way that Annie does, if she’s unable to cope with the darkness she has known and will continue to know.

Annie wonders if the girl in the red scarf with the dark hair and even darker eyes, whose name she never caught, is able to live with herself.

On September 10th, 847, the first day of enlisting, she gets her answer.

The girl’s name is Mikasa and as it turns out she lives with herself just fine.

Annie knows nothing of love.

She has hardly ever felt it, nor received it, but she imagines that had she known the smallest amount of love in her life then she would be like Mikasa. It is a thought she is neither upset nor warmed by: it just is.

Except for one very big difference they are the same she thinks; they have known great loss, been buried under the weight of expectations, burdened with purpose though those purposes differ greatly. Annie is meant to destroy; it is what her hands were made for. It’s the only thing that has given her any illusion of freedom.

But at the end of the day it’s just that: an illusion.

Mikasa’s hands—palms rough from gripping at blade handles, fingers slim and narrow when she throws a punch into her stomach, nails short but neat when they scratch at her face—are made to save, but not just anyone.  There’s just enough good in the girl to save one person: the most important person to her. Eren.

There is not enough room in Mikasa’s heart for anything else and that is that. She knows it; they all know it save maybe Eren himself. Mikasa expects nothing of Annie and perhaps this why she finds herself thinking of the dark haired girl when her mind wanders. She thinks about the differences between them and the things that make them similar. She thinks about her face and how she’s never seen anyone who looked quite like her before. She thinks that in another life, one much removed from this terrible existence, they might have been friends or something more.

Annie knows nothing of love, but often wonders what it might be like to have just a small piece of it, enough to hide in her hands and never let anyone see.

It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before; cadets sneaking out past curfew to explore each other’s exhausted bodies under cover of musky nights. It’s not the first time such a thing has happened and it certainly won’t be the last.

Annie is annoyed beyond belief by the pair of teenagers that have chosen to feel each other up at the base of the tree she’s hiding in, of all places.

Below, one of the teenagers, a girl, lets out a noise that sounds like a cross between a hiccup and a moan at whatever her partner is doing to her. Annie cringes; it’s harder to drown them out than she thought it would be. She could be a jerk and interrupt them by jumping down, but that would mean two people eyeing her nervously for days on end, as if she had any interest in letting out their stupid secret. She didn’t want to deal with that which left her the option of waiting them out.

Lovely.

If she were the scoffing type then she would, but she isn’t so the blonde girl runs a hand through her hair instead and stares up at the starry sky. The panting and murmuring continues for many minutes, to the point where it is almost funny and Annie is able to let the sound float past her without cringing. The rhythmic breathing and sighing becomes just another part of the song of the night.

Annie closes her eyes to try and rest a bit—

Mikasa's sighs are too soft to be normal. it’s not like hows she breathes when they fight; that breathing is short, deep and crisp. This is different. It’s airy; warm. Annie had not thought the black haired girl capable of warmth.

But she is warm, so very warm, when she runs her hands down her neck which is for once unobstructed by her brother’s scarf. Annie can feel her blood thrumming through her veins as she presses her mouth there and leaves wet kisses along the column of her throat. There is both pleasure and disappointment found in the fact that Mikasa has let her guard down this much.

It is a horrible mistake: Annie doesn’t know how to take care of lovely things.

Annie sets her mind on biting into the tender flesh just to see if she would let her but when she opens her mouth to try Mikasa surprises her by snaking her hand down her body, coming to rest at the apex of her thighs. They lock eyes for only a moment, cold blue meeting cold black, before her calloused fingers find her clit and toy at it ruthlessly.

Annie doesn’t gasp as much as she screams.

She was wrong, so very wrong, to think that she had the upper hand. Mikasa never let her guard down for anyone, least of all her. Annie chokes a sob over the taller girl’s chest, her head lying on her sternum as the rest of her body arches away like an arrow pulled taunt. Annie can’t breathe from the feeling of it, the loss of control that she’s never be afforded, the sensation of spiraling out of her senses quicker than she can comprehend.

It’s horrible.

It’s wonderful.

A thin digit slips into her more than wet core and it’s all she can do to grip at Mikasa’s hips with enough force to bruise as she rides out the feeling. The taller girl uses her other hand to toy with the short hairs at the back of her neck before she grabs the skin there and pulls. Hard.

Annie is almost certain that she knows her secret; why else would she do such a thing? But no blade rips through her weak point ending her miserable existence, there is only the ever present motions of Mikasa’s fingers and the twitch of her own traitorous body.

The blonde feels like she’s trapped and drowning. No, not drowning. It feels like she’s been entombed underground, suffocated and desperate to breathe. Her lungs feel heavy with dirt. She clamps her legs around the other trainees’ merciless hand and she isn’t sure if it’s to stop her or if it’s to keep her there forever.

“Annie…” Mikasa murmurs her name into the fabric of her thin and useless skin. Annie is not in the mood to appreciate the irony of a delicate titan right now, she has other things to worry about. She needs to protect herself and keep her away from her neck, but her gut is coiling and she can’t make her body do anything other than grind down on her hand when a second finger is added. “That’s it Annie, let go.”

Annie can almost imagine that despite the rough grip on her neck and the ceaseless assault on her clit and center Mikasa’s words are said with some measure of caring.

It’s too much to ask for, but just enough to make her break.

With an inhuman cry, Annie lets go.

—And her eyes snap open at the sound of snapping twigs and hushed giggling. It all comes back to her in segments: The lovebirds. The feeling up. The that. The two cadets are never the wiser to their unwilling voyeur or the trouble their mutual feeling up of each other has caused her.

The very first moment she can she sneaks away from the tree and crawls back into the girls’ dorm. It’s only with much care and subtly that she is able to change her underwear without waking one of the other girls in the dorm. When Annie slips into bed, she wills herself to sleep dreamlessly or to at least be able to think of something that doesn't make her hyper aware of the girl sleeping two bunks over.

If she looks to her left she could just make out a tuft of black hair peeking from under the sheets. She patently doesn't look.

Annie spends most of the night staring at the ceiling, fuming.

The next day when they move to hand to hand combat training Annie forgoes beating up Bertholdt to take on the unwilling object of her wet dream. They’ve sparred before, it’s usually a draw, neither of them really winning or losing. Annie isn’t out to win today, she’s out for blood.

Mikasa is wiping the floor with Franz when Annie lays a heavy hand on her shoulder and spins her around. “Fight me.”

It’s stupid, she knows that. She’s running on precious few hours of sleep and more anger than energy. Taking on Mikasa is difficult enough at her best; she’s no match at half capacity. But for once the blonde doesn’t care about common sense, she just needs to hit something and be hit back. She needs to vent this pent up whatever it is or else she’ll burst.

Violence is in her nature after all.

Mikasa must sense that something is up with her because she relents to her challenge with only a marginally curious expression and a curt nod. "Alright then." Unlike their other brawls over the years she unwinds her red scarf from her neck and hands it to a concerned Armin.  The fact that she can't help but watch the motion only makes Annie angrier.

“Mikasa I’m not sure this a good—”

“It’s fine.” She cuts the blond teen’s advice off. He doesn’t look convinced in the slightest. “Right Annie?”

“....Right.”

Somehow Armin isn’t convinced by their poetic exclamations and in a matter of moments, as is the case with all of their fights, a small crowd forms to circle them in like walls. Annie’s never liked feeling boxed in, surrounded by people or walls, and she can’t tell if it stems from the titan parts of her or the human ones.

She’s not even sure there's a difference anymore.

The blonde raises her fists and moves into her familiar stance. Mikasa pins her down with the same penetrating stare she had dreamed up, merciless and hard. And the brief moment of surprise Annie expresses is enough of an opening for Mikasa to move in close, jetting around her with swift, deadly movements.

Annie knows she has lost the fight long before the blow hits, but that doesn’t make the collision of the earth and her skull any less painful.

The dark haired girl tilts her head the smallest of degrees in confusion; this sloppiness wasn’t like Annie at all. And she doesn’t understand, no one really understands.

Angry or not, Annie never goes down without a fight but when she rebounds and returns to her feet her concentration is no better. Her movements are jerky and nothing like the tightly coiled grace of her usual fighting style and she can hear her father shouting at her to tuck her elbows, to lead with her feet, a hundred other things he’s drilled into her since she was young enough to understand her fate. ‘This isn’t a street brawl Annie! They’re going to eat you alive if you’re this sloppy!’

Annie’s uncharacteristic growl of frustration catches even Mikasa off guard and her anger fueled movements must throw her off at least a little because she retreats for over three steps in the time it takes for her to figure out just whats going on. Ultimately in this state she is no match for Mikasa’s detached and precise strikes.

With an elbow to the shoulder that spins her around and a kick to the ribs that takes her breath away Annie is flat on her back seeing stars.

She’s often been accused of doing things in halves by her instructors but Annie can’t help but think she’s never lost so spectacularly and completely in her life.

The crowd, that she has done her best to ignore until now, has fallen silent and she is keenly aware of their stares on her dirty form before they lower their eyes in embarrassment of her behalf. Mikasa doesn't even spare her a chastisement; she simply walks away.

Somehow that stings more than her pride at being so thoroughly defeated.

‘How annoying.’ Annie closes her eyes and listens to her own blood as it pulses through the bruises that wouldn’t last the day. Somehow this confrontation that she had been craving since this morning hasn’t made her feel better at all. The pain doesn’t distract the way she wanted it to: she’s just as frustrated, just as annoyed, and now dirty.

A hand appears in her line of vision and as her eyes trace it back to it’s body; she’s unfoundedly disappointed that it belongs to the wrong sibling. Annie ignores that though and takes the help; what was one more blow to her pride after that brilliant display?

“What the hell was that all about? You’re usually much better than that Annie.”

The blonde just sighs. “Shut up Eren.”

 Life continues in an infuriating cycle after that. Annie tells herself that she’s better off without anyone, Annie ends up checking out Mikasa, Annie stews in her self-loathing, Annie challenges Mikasa and gets the shit beat out of her. Occasionally it ends with Mikasa flat on her back, but not often.

Wash, Rinse and Repeat.  

No matter how much she tries she can’t shake this: whatever this is.

It’s stupid. The blonde knows that nothing good could possibly come of this attraction; for anyone. Annie’s life has been a study in not getting what she wants. Monsters aren’t meant to be happy she reasons, but she’s just human enough to hope that there is another way.

Armin has always had this strange fixation with trying to get to know her. For the life of her Annie can’t fathom why; she’s only shown him the smallest bit of kindness, which she supposed was more than she showed most of their classmates, but that didn’t add up to the good graces the blond boy held her in.

He never failed to greet her or ask her for pointers when she handed him his ass in training. Still even a vaguely friendly face was better than none and truth be told she may have allowed herself to become somewhat fond of the boy and his seemingly weak disposition.

She had a sort of crush of Mikasa, she was sort of friends of Armin, and it probably wouldn’t be long before she was sort of skipping through flower fields with Eren at this rate.

Of course the moment she makes peace with this fact is the moment that she is proved entirely wrong and receives an unwelcome reminder that what Armin lacked in physical strength he made up for in intellect and perception.

They are on break from maneuver drilling and the summer sun is bearing down on the 104th division relentlessly. The moment that Keith gives the signal to disengage from the trees Annie uses her gear to zip to the shadiest tree she can find and claim it as her own. After a few dirty looks are sent her way she watches as the others settle themselves with cooling off in the river instead.

Armin has other plans. “Mind if I sit with you? I don’t think I’ll be able to make it through the stampede to the river.” Always with the self-depreciating humor this one. She doesn’t answer with words but she does open her eyes to regard his sweaty, hunched over form before shrugging. That’s as good an answer as any.

“Thank you.” he says with a smile and takes a seat next to her; not close enough to touch, yet close enough to be aware of his presence.

“Where are the other triplets?” She asks, her tone not betraying her meaning.

“If I had to guess Eren is probably trying to drown Jean and Mikasa is probably letting him.” He reports in a pleasant tone. Armin’s eyes dart down to the river a ways away where the forms of the others could be made out. Annie unconsciously zeroes in on the dark haired girl standing with her uniform pants pulled up to her knees; her bare feet wading in the water.

She can’t see her expression from this far off, but her countenance looks peaceful if that’s an indicator.

This, like everything else, does not go unnoticed by Armin. “Actually Annie…” he starts, tone undergoing that shift it takes when he’s about to point out something that no one wants to hear. “I was hoping I could talk to you about that.”

Annie knows that she’s been caught in a trap immediately and curses herself for being so easily manipulated. Some warrior she was. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

Armin gives her a beseeching smile. “If it makes you feel better, I don’t think anyone else has noticed.”

“Somehow it doesn’t.”

He continues as if she hasn’t spoken. “And for what it’s worth, you’re much more subtle than Jean is. If Mikasa hasn’t noticed his crush on her than I doubt she’ll pick up on yours. She doesn’t notice things like that. If you don’t tell her she’ll most likely never know.”

The blond boy is trying to be understanding, but in truth he doesn’t understand anything, not a damn thing. He has no idea just how fucked up this whole affair was, how everything could literally come crashing down on them all at any moment. And yet here she is being distracted by the tempting thought of what it would be like to have arguably the most uninterested girl in their training camp look at her with anything other than contempt; as a challenge not an obstacle.

“But I’d still know.” She responds with more emotion than either of them are used to her voicing. That’s the crux of the problem really.

Annie hates that her eyes dart back to the river where, surprisingly, Mikasa is looking back at them. They are far enough away that she isn’t able to tell if she’s looking at her or at Armin but that is of little importance. She was looking and that was all that mattered because her gaze both terrified and electrified her, laying heavy over the blond girl like a noose. Mikasa has a way of stripping one bare with her gaze, of making it seem as if she could see into the depths of your soul and wasn’t very impressed.

That made two of them.

Armin sighs deeply “I was afraid of that.”

Three of them apparently. Annie keeps her gaze trained on the girl at the river below who has gone back to making sure Eren didn’t drown himself.

The third member of the Shinganshina trio continues on with what she is sure will be nothing she wants to hear. “This may sound cruel and please don’t think I say it to be mean, toward either of you, but you must understand. What you’re asking for-”

“I’m not asking for anything.” The blonde interrupts, her gaze snapping to her companion. She isn’t asking for anything, she didn’t ask for any of this.

Armin’s smile is small and sad, as if the topic brought him much pain. “What you’d like to ask for then Annie. She can’t give it to you. Mikasa—she...she isn’t built for that. She’s had a hard life, harder than most and that’s saying something. There’s-—how do I say this politely— there’s just enough love left in her for Eren, maybe me, though I don’t want to ask for fear of finding out otherwise.”

This is nothing Annie hadn’t already known, but it makes it no easier to hear.

“Is there a point to this conversation Armin?”

“I’m sorry, I know you can’t help how you feel, no one can, but this road you’re on, it leads to nowhere. It will only end in heartbreak and I don’t want to see you hurt. I say this as a friend Annie, do yourself a favor now and let go.”

Annie nurses her wounded pride over the next few weeks, talking even less than usual and glaring at anyone who dared attempt drawing out of her shell. In training she is even more brutal than usual, to the point where even Eren has to call it quits and train with some of the other cadets. When Jean draws the short straw and has to spar with her, she hands him his ass so soundly that he wonders if he’s personally pissed her off.

Unknowingly to him of course, he has.

Annie refuses all Armin’s attempts at conversation, she turns away Mina’s well-meaning offer to braid her hair, and she ignores Bertholdt completely. All in all Annie is on a silent war path and she hates herself for it.

This is all getting so out of hand. It shouldn’t affect her this much. It’s hard to accept that she has allowed herself to become fond of anything, let alone the most unobtainable person in her peer group. Lust was one thing, she was just as much a hormonal teenager as an instrument of destruction after all, but genuine affection was another thing altogether.

Across the mess hall Mikasa watches Eren with a keen eye as he prattles on about something or another, as if the brunet had the answers to every mystery in the world. It figures, Annie thinks as she makes herself look away, that if she were going to put her mission in danger then it would be in the most masochistic way possible.

Still, some people seem to find amusement in her situation.

Reiner sits down next to her and bumps her shoulder with less force than he was capable off. He smiles that grin of his that seemed to put the others at ease. It only made Annie want to knock his lights out. “So, Mikasa huh?”

She’s not good with people; interaction has never been her forte even in the best of moods, and in the interest of not making a scene she decides to shut him out completely. “Go away Reiner.”

The blond trainee is used to her brash attitude and doesn’t seem to take offence. It annoys her deeply. Annie has never understood how Reiner could be the way he was, open, warm, jovial, brotherly, towards everyone knowing full well what he was ultimately meant to do to them. Not for the first time she thinks that he has forgotten what he is.

It must be nice.

He slings a well-meaning arm around her shoulder. “Aw, don’t be so sour Annie, a lot of people like Mikasa; it’s nothing to be ashamed of. She’s nice to look at. Not as nice as say Christa, but not bad either.”

Annie thinks otherwise and doesn’t dignify this statement with a response. Instead she goes back to eating her lentil stew with so much force she thinks she might break the spoon. Reiner either doesn’t get the message or doesn’t care and keeps digging the hole deeper. “I have to admit, I didn’t expect you of all people to have a crush.”

Annie’ grip on her spoon tightens, bending the flimsy metal a fraction. She doesn’t need Reiner to remind her, she is painfully aware of such a fact.

“Of course, I can’t imagine you’d get very far with her, she’s only got eyes for Eren.” They need not search any further than Jean, still sporting a bruise and a limp thanks to her silent temper tantrum, for an example of what happened to people that dared think they had a chance competing against Eren for the dark haired girl’s affection.

There was no competition at all.

“I’m sure you’ll be able to let it go though, find someone with less a brother complex to-”

He never finishes the statement because something in Annie snaps and with alarming force she slams her hands down on the wooden table, making the bench they are sitting on topple over, sending Reiner with it. “That’s the reason you think this can’t end well?!” Annie’s voice is shrill and laced with equal part anger and disbelief.

People hadn’t been paying attention to them before, but now they are. Annie knows that the others are staring at them, knows that if she carries on this way she could easily blow their cover, but she is furious enough to not care.

The smile is gone from Reiner’s face but the pitying look that replaces it is much worse. “Oh Annie…”

“No. Don’t.” She doesn’t need or want his sympathy. She’s already been compromised enough as it is, she’d be damned if she allowed herself to get emotional support from the armored titan as well. Even she has her limits.

The room waits with baited breath to see what will happen. Annie desperately fights the urge to look behind her to see if one of the stares boring into her belongs to Mikasa.

“Just-” Reiner starts entirely unaccustomed to seeing her in such a strange mood. “Just- be careful yeah? I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

As far as she was concerned they were creatures made for hurting and getting hurt, his concern for her emotional well-being was as backwards as it was unfathomable. It makes her see red though; it’s the absolute last thing she wants to hear.

She’s not like Reiner and Bertholdt, she can't forget what she is when it's convenient for her, and she can't separate herself from the beast that lives within her just under the surface: cold, cruel, inhuman. A lifetime of believing she is a monster makes finding out she is human after all nearly unbearable.

For once, Annie would rather be a monster.

She twists her hand in the front of the blond man’s shirt and the other is pulled back to strike but the blow never lands. The blonde girl feels calloused fingers and palms latch on to her wrist and upper arm like a vice grip, physically restraining her from taking out her frustrations on Reiner’s face. There is only one person who was strong enough and brave enough to hold her back.

“Stop.” The word is said quietly, but it holds a command to it, an order. Doubly so to her. Lipid blue meets black and Annie tries to understand why. Why, of all people, it is Mikasa who has stopped her, why she would even bother to stop her, why this is happening at all. As predicted there are no answers to be found in her gaze, only more questions.

The shorter girl swears she feels her thumb move in the tiniest motion of comfort as she lowers her arm to her side. “Annie, let go.”

She rips her arm out of her grip as if the touch burns and drops Reiner with enough force to make him see stars. Even Mikasa is startled enough by this action that she quirks her head slightly, brows furrowing in confusion. But before she is able voice the question that she, and surely the rest of the cadet onlookers are thinking, the mess hall door slams open and the grim visage of Keith Shadis storms in.

“What the hell is going on in here?” No one says a word, suddenly finding the floor or their soup very interesting. “Ackerman, what happened?”

“Nothing sir, Reiner just broke the bench.” Mikasa lies easily. A strange habit of hers seems to be tricking Shadis on a regular basis.

The instructor looks to Reiner for confirmation. “Is that true Braun?”

Annie knows he could tell him that was a crock of shit, could get revenge and hang her out to dry. She had been close to mauling him, she would understand. But for some reason the stocky teen doesn’t.

“Yeah, sorry about that sir.”

“Go fetch another one from the storage shed after you've run laps around the facility.” He orders.

Reiner cringes but salutes none the less. Keith rolls his eyes. “The rest of you finish up, its lights out in ten.”

When he is gone, Annie makes the fastest beeline to the female barracks possible.

When the other girls file in minutes later several try to coax her into talking. She feigns sleep to them all, even Mikasa.

Annie decides that if she can manage to never talk about that night it would still be too soon.

Mikasa has other ideas though.

In all honesty the blonde should have known that no assistance would come for free, that she would want answers to her strange behavior last night, the last months, eventually.

She corners her in the morning.

Annie is often the last girl out of the barrack, preferring to take her time getting dressed. She’s never been much of a morning person, today especially. The blonde is in the middle of shrugging off her sleep shirt when she hears her name called out. “Annie.” Mikasa has lagged behind.

Lovely.

“Mikasa.” She answers back blandly, tossing her sleep clothes on her bed. She is clad only her white jeans and the bottom half of her gear and if the other girl is bothered by her bare chest then she’s not saying anything about it. Annie’s not entirely sure if she’s happy or upset that Mikasa is unaffected by her being naked.

“Yesterday-”

“-isn’t important.”

Mikasa narrows her eyes, sensing that trying to talk about last night with the aloof girl would be paramount to pulling teeth. Instead she takes a different tactic. “You stare at me a lot.”

Annie shrugs and riffles through the drawer she shares with Mina, trying to find her hoodie. There is no sense denying it, they both know it’s true.

After a moment of nothing but the sound of ruffling fabric, Mikasa speaks up again. “Why?” Her tone holds just the smallest trace of annoyance. It makes the blonde want to smile despite herself. Annie is in a queer mood after the theatrics of the previous day; it makes her bold and fearless.

“Maybe I like your face.” It is the dumbest thing she has ever said, but also the truest. Annie is many things but a smooth talker is not one of them.

The dark haired girl scrunches her nose in distaste, taking the comment as mockery. She would, wouldn't she? “Very funny.”

Finding her hoodie at last, Annie turns around to face her. They are close enough to share the same air supply and she is acutely aware that their height difference makes her have to look up at her to meet her gaze. She imagines it would be easy to play if off as a joke, it is what Mikasa is expecting, it would be what’s best for everyone.

But the titanshifter is in an odd mood today after all and if she was a failure as a warrior why not fail with flying colors?

So instead of playing dumb Annie squares her shoulders and crosses her arms under her, admittedly small, breasts making them jut out just a bit. Being this close, Mikasa can’t help but notice the obvious intent behind the gesture. Ignoring the jolt that goes down her spine at the attention, Annie fixes the object of her desire with a serious stare and murmurs, “I’m not laughing am I?”

Mikasa opens and closes her mouth several times as if not knowing how to respond. She is often silent, but usually of her own volition, and the blonde relishes the thought that she has achieved such a small petty feat of oneupmanship.  Not breaking eye contact, Annie pulls her sports bra over her head with a fluid motion. Her hoodie soon follows.

This time it is Mikasa that looks away burrowing her head into her scarf and takes a step back to give her room to move. It could be the hue of said scarf in the morning light, but Annie almost thinks she sees a faint flush on the other girl’s cheeks. “Oh.” She says simply, not giving any indication of her thoughts on the matter.

“Yeah, oh.”

There isn’t anything else to say really, the truth was out there swimming between them raw and unfettered. It doesn’t feel as horrible as she had thought it would.

Annie pulls the second half of her harness over her shoulders with practice ease and buckles them as she walks out of the dorm. Mikasa doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t ask for clarification, and doesn’t ask her to stop. She simply lets her go.

That day she soundly hands both Reiner and Eren their asses and it’s so refreshing that she even offers to teach Eren some of her moves. A stupid idea if she’s ever had one, but the repetition of action that comes with both sending the brunet flat on his back and teaching is almost therapeutic. In another life Annie thinks she would have liked to be an instructor.

Eren wipes the floor with Jean and its clear to everyone where he’s learned his new skills from. Like any piece of gossip dealing with teenagers it only takes a few minutes before its all anyone is talking about.

When Christa asks her why she shrugs and says that the idiot needed some skills if he was ever going to ‘destroy them all’. It’s not often that the blonde cracks jokes and that night the girls of the 104th have a long laugh at Eren’s expense.

All save for Mikasa who glares at her for the rest of the evening.

“She’s been staring at you at lot tonight.” Mina comments on it as they are making their way from the communal bath to their shared bunk. Annie knows that the dark haired girl is listening, she was only a few steps behind them and Mina was terrible at whispering.

Annie rolls her bare shoulders and tightens her towel around her body. She can practically feel Mikasa glaring into her spine as if she’ll find answers to why she decided to teach her martial arts to Eren there.

She won’t of course and that almost makes it funny. “I don’t mind.”

At this response Mikasa storms ahead of them back to their shared room with unusually heavy footfalls. Mina puffs out her cheeks in annoyance at her flippancy. “Aww, don’t be mean Mikasa, it was just a joke! We all know that’s not the real reason Annie agreed to train Eren.”  She’s right of course, that isn't the reason, but the blonde is sure she doesn’t have a clue as to the real one.

Annie is in a good mood, or as good a mood as she can be in, and snorts. “Isn’t it?”

Ymir howls. “What's with you today sugartits? Why are you so pleasant? Did you throw a small child off the wall or something?”

“Would it kill you to be nice just once Ymir?” Christa sighs.

Twisting her towel and snapping it on Sasha’s ass, causing her to yelp and beg Mikasa to make her stop (she doesn’t), the freckled girl grins. “Probably.”

Mina clears her throat. “Of course it isn’t.” her voice is muffled by the towel she is using the dry off her hair. After a few moments, she continues. “You did it because you’re a nice person Annie.”

“Let’s not get crazy, nice might be pushing it.” Sasha quips, taking her own towel off and trying to return the favor to Ymir, uncaring if she was naked as the day she was born. Girls, Annie concludes, are just as ridiculous as boys.

“Or because she liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes him.” Hannah sing songs from her bunk, chin resting in her hand.

Annie bristles and Mikasa drops her hair brush.

“Absolutely No-”

“-t possible”

They finish the same sentence at the exact same time. The girl’s cabin is quiet for a moment and the two cadets in question meet each other’s gaze from across the room, neither saying anything but it was clear to all present that something was being transmitted between them.

Annie liking Eren, like liking him, was something that would never happen. The mere thought of it was as ridiculous as it was unbelievable. Maybe just a bit more unbelievable than the person she did carry a torch for. It’s not often that her and Mikasa see eye to eye, but this time they are on the exact same level as the other.

Annie thinks this is the first time that they’ve actually smiled at each other.

It’s...nice?

A low whistle interrupts their staring contest. “Or not. Welcome to the team sugartits.” Ymir makes a kissy sounds and the other girls snicker at the implication, even Christa.

Annie may or may not hang Ymir’s underwear from the flag post as payback for such a true comment.

After that, it’s only a matter of time before even the densest of people start noticing.

“She’s stares at you a lot.” Like Mina, Eren can’t whisper to save his life and thus everyone who is also on kitchen duty that day hears his correspondence to his sister. To her credit Annie doesn’t blink, doesn’t turn to see just how Mikasa has reacted to such a statement, though she easily feels the eyes of her peers looking at her. She carries on her task of stirring the broth as if she hasn’t heard or doesn't care.

But boy does she care.

“I know.” Her heart hammers violently in her chest. How annoying.

“Don’t you think it’s a little creepy?” Like Eren can talk, she thinks, his gaze was infinitely creepier than hers what those bug eyes of his.

And this time she hadn’t even been staring! Just when she is about to bark at Eren to get bent by a titan, she sees Mikasa shrug and say “I don’t mind” before picking up another potato to peel. Annie is surprised enough by the girl’s response that she drops the ladle into the hot soup pot.

Eren is just as incredulous. “Since when?"

“Since shut up Eren.” She flicks a potato skin at her brother. Of course it lands squarely on his forehead.

Reiner and Ymir smirk. Connie scratches his head like he doesn’t understand. Jean glares. Armin sighs. Mina starts humming what sounds an awful lot like the wedding march under her breath.

Annie doesn’t blush, that’s not something she does, but it is a close call negated only by Marco sitting down his plates loudly and sending them all disapproving looks. “If we don’t hurry up then lunch will be late and I don't think any of us want to run laps until supper.”

The threat of more manual labor is enough to stop them from laughing at Annie’s expense.

“Thank you.” she mutters when handing the freckled teen her dirty ladle.

Marco smiles sweetly. “Of course Annie. You deserve to be happy too.”

Such a thing, personal happiness, had never occurred to her before and now she can’t get it out of her head.

The weeks and months that follow are much the same as they’ve always been for Annie: training and waiting for the proverbial other shoe to fall. But sometimes Annie feels a gaze boring into her back, into her nape, sharper than any blade. She never catches her at it, Mikasa was far too quick for that, but the blonde didn’t need to be a genius to know it was her.

She can hardly call her out on such behavior because she was much guiltier of that action than she was. Annie is many things, terrible things, but she doesn’t want to add hypocrite to that list. And truth be told she didn’t mind many times, the blonde likes the thrill of danger that accompanies the razor sharp looks. It reminds her that despite what lurks under her skin she’s still susceptible to fear and danger, still capable of human desire. Still human.

The short girl only wishes she could see Mikasa’s expression when she looks at her, wishes that she was somehow privy to the girl’s thoughts on her. It had occurred to the blonde to ask Armin, but she thinks better of it. He has already made himself clear on the matter and Annie needs no sad reminders of what she already knows.

And besides for every 1 day of almost curious interest there are 10 days of cold indifference where it seemed that Mikasa was completely above and beyond her and everyone else; as if she couldn’t see them let alone be connected to them.

Annie often wonders which is worse: being ignored or being placed under a spy glass. Because a combination of both is slowly killing her. But with that push and pull attention comes the crushing realization that she’d rather a lifetime of being emotionally tugged around by Mikasa, by the world, than one where she has no choice of her own and numb.

Telling Bertholdt and Reiner her reluctance towards the plan goes about as well as expected.

That is to say not at all.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” She announces when they come creeping into the clearing she’s taken to hiding away in over the years. From her perch in the tree, the same tree where this all started, Annie can see Bertholdt trip on his own lanky feet and Reiner go rigid at her declaration.

“What are you talking about?” The blond teen asks knowing perfectly well what she meant. Annie wasn’t like them, she wasn’t close to anyone really. So when she asks to meet them in the middle of the  night away from the barracks there could only be one reason.

“The mission. I don’t want to.”

Bertholdt is doing that thing where he shakes hard enough to make even her teeth rattle and it’s not endearing him to her at all. “A-Annie, you know that none of us want to-we don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Could have fooled me.” She bites and with a smooth movement she is swinging out of the tree and hitting ground to stare up at both of them. “I just know that I don’t want to.”

“How can you be so selfish? Think about everyone who is counting on us!”

Annie is very new at wanting selfishly and figures why not go for the most selfish wish possible? Squaring her shoulders she stares him dead in the eye, blue meeting blue. “If you think they care about us as anything other than the demolition crew, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought you were.” She’s aware that she’s nothing but a tool; she’s been made aware her entire life that she was only important inasmuch as she could perform her duty. It’s never bothered her too much before; in fact it was easier to go along with the script written out for her. Accept it, internalize it, move on.

But lately she’s been replaying her father’s final words to her in her head; telling her he loved her, that he was sorry, that she could always come home if she had enough and wanted to quit.

They were the only kind words he’d ever given her in a lifetime of training and obligation and it had confused her at the time. Why waste all that training, all the toil, at the very end?

Annie wishes he had never planted that seed of doubt in her because now it’s bloomed into a full grown tree and she’s not so sure of what she wants; only that its not this.

Reiner balls his fists and nearly roars as he steps into her personal space. “It’s our duty!” She’s never been afraid of her fellow titanshifters, she’s knocked them on their asses too many times for that, but she instinctively takes a step back at the force of his anger. It’s not like him at all and it speaks volumes about how unsettled he is about her declaration. Annie doesn’t pretend to know what goes on in Reiner Braun’s head, but if she had to make a guess she’d say that her refusal had hit too close to home in his own doubts. Of all of them Reiner seemed to forget who he was, what he was, more often than not. He’s grasping at straws and they all know it. “This is all Mikasa’s fault. I knew this was a terrible idea, but no, you had to follow her around like a cat in heat.”

Annie isn’t fully aware what she’s doing until she’s doing it; climbing over Bertholdt to take a shot a Reiner. Her apathy having been moved to pure rage coursing in thick throbs through her veins. She wants to hurt him, hurt him bad, for saying that but she only gets one good scratch at his jugular before, in a rare show of spine, Bertholdt steps in and separates them. “Stop that both of you!  We’re not going to solve anything if we all start tearing out each other's throats instead of sticking together. As a team.”

Annie can’t help but laugh and it tastes and feels vile on her tongue. Reiner is still radiating anger which is only emphasized by the small burst of steam that was already healing the damage she’s done. “That's golden coming from you two.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

She’s never been good with words but she’s always been good at hitting below the belt where it hurt. “Don’t say we’re a team because we’re not. It’s always Bertl&Reiner; like you are one complete fucked up person. You two are so far up each other’s asses, figuratively and literally, that its nauseating to watch. You just feed off of each other's denial that everything is normal, like you’re normal, like you’re not going to kill or hurt all the people that believe this elaborate lie of what you are.”

She needs to shut up, she knows she’s saying too much but she can’t stop. It’s why she’s learned to bottle everything up because if it came out of her again it will have festered into something putrid and mean. She may not shift tonight but she feels every bit the monster she is.

“I can’t forget what I am. Not like you can. So we’re not a team, we’ve never been a team. And I’m tired, I’m so tired, and I just want peace.”

She doesn’t want nor need to hear their response, she’s been strung to taunt and liable to break with much more pressure, so she leaves them there stewing in her words and doesn’t look back.

Mikasa is sitting on her empty bed when she returns to the cabin, scarf still wound around her neck even over her sleep clothes. Tonight must be one of those nights where the dark haired teen was moved to interest rather than indifference, and after the night Annie’s had, why wouldn’t she be?

Though it’s clear that she’s been waiting for her to return Mikasa doesn’t ask where she’s been and for that at least Annie is grateful.

“Are you okay?” she asks blandly, as if the answer doesn’t concern her. But the fact that she’s asking at all, that she’s noticed her gone and waited while everyone else slept, undermines her apparent carelessness.

“No.” She answers honestly and flops on her bed face down. The blond girl holds her breath, feeling the heaviness in her lungs grow from lack of oxygen and waits for Mikasa’s weight to lift from her mattress. But she doesn’t move and after what seems like a long time Annie’s mind starts to spot into blackness.

It’s then that she feels Mikasa’s hand strong and cold on her back. “Annie, you have to breathe.”

But Annie refuses, she’s always been one for self flagellation after all. Her entire body shakes from the effort of not breathing and she feels all at once so very light as if she could drift away from this terrible night, this terrible existence, if she just holds on for a little longer.

Annie wills her to, just this once, go away but Mikasa refuses to be ignored. Instead she moves her hand in small circles between her scapulae and murmurs soothingly in her ear; “Breathe Annie breathe. Just let go.”

With a choked sob Annie exhales and Mikasa keeps her hand on her, weighing her down, until she's asleep.

They’re on the top of the wall and Mikasa is holding her hand as they walk along the edge. For some reason it’s much narrower than it should be, with just enough room for them to walk side by side.  But Mikasa’s rough hand is sturdy in her own, keeping her pinned on the wall as if by sheer will alone.

Annie’s never been afraid of heights, there are so many other things to be scared of, but now looking over the edge she can see her village, see the red roof of her father’s house and she’s terrified to go down.

The other girl stops and faces her with a queer expression in her black-blue eyes. “Are you scared of falling?”

“No.” the blonde lies immediately.

“Hmm” Mikasa intones and lets go of her hand. Immediately Annie feels the loss of it like the loss of a limb. Without her there to hold her down the wall under her feet feels unsteady and unsure. With rising panic the blond girl watches as her companion takes a step back; her heels hanging over the edge and her scarf billowing precariously in the wind. “And if I fell? What would you do?”

“I’d jump after you.” The truth is ripped from her like a bandage on a still healing wound and she wants to take it back because its too raw.

Mikasa’s eyes harden. “Liar.” she accuses as if the idea of the blonde saving her had been a personal insult, and raises both hands to push at Annie’s shoulders. It’s like being hit by a brick wall and it takes all she has not to trip over her own feet and tumble, down, down, down, to land back where she started, the failure they all assumed she’d be. “Monsters like you don’t care about anyone.”

“Except for monsters like you.” She finds herself spitting back and it’s almost worth it for the momentary look of surprise that crosses Mikasa’s face. It’s gone too quickly, replaced by disgust, and she pushes her one last time.

“I hate you and everything you are. It’s over Annie, now fall.”

Annie wakes up in a cold sweat, alone in her bunk once more, screaming.

Somehow graduation creeps up on them slowly, like a persistent winter giving way to a late spring.

It seems as if all that anyone is talking about it is what branch they’re going to enlist in. Understandably Annie isn’t exactly moved by this talk.

Her orders had been crystal clear: get to the military police and after the advance guard took out the first two walls take out the innermost one. In that light graduating and getting one step closer to her fate wasn’t something to be celebrated even if she was graduating in the top of her class.

She’s not sure if the plan’s changed since she’d cut out, not sure if Bertholdt and Reiner are even capable of soldiering on without her there to remind them what they are, but she knows that if nothing else something will happen tomorrow.

The post-top ten announcement celebration is in full swing in the mess hall. For once the Keith had decided to turn a blind eye and ear to the noise, the one nice thing she can ever remember him doing for them. After 3 years of training side by side it’s almost surreal to see the 104th outside their uniforms; not that anyone was particularly well dressed in whatever civilian clothes they managed to fit in or that those of them with parents could afford to send them. It was a jarring reminder that despite being on the cusp of becoming soldiers they were all just children who had been forced to grow up to fast. Knowing what was likely to happen to them tomorrow she’s reminded that this is the oldest that many of them will ever get.

The mead in her cup, smuggled in by someone somehow, now tastes extra bitter on her tongue; but she forces herself to finish it and embark on a second glass. Annie is somehow not shocked that it does nothing to take the edge off her nerves.

The room is too much, everything is too much really, and suddenly the blonde feels like if she spends another minute in it she might transform here and now. Sliding off the bench she’s plastered herself to for the last hour, Annie makes a beeline for the door outside.

Bertholdt lays a surprisingly steady hand on her shoulder, stopping her retreat. Both he and Reiner look nervous, concerned even, and when they talk its in hushed voices. “About tomorrow…”

“Is none of my business. I thought I made that clear.”

Reiner sighs. “Annie, look, I’m sorry about what I said, it was fucked up and mean. You deserve happiness too, but... you’ve gotta know—Mikasa— it’s never gonna happen.”

The supposed liquid courage in her stomach doesn’t seem to work because she doesn’t want to face that harsh truth, not tonight. So she doesn’t. And thing is, its actually not all about Mikasa. Sure she was the one that prompted this rebellion but it's grown so much bigger than her; it’s Annie wanting to make her own choices for once in her life.

“It’s okay to be scared, we all are.” the tallest of them says softly. “But you have to let that go.”

Annie is so very tired of being told to let things go. Turning a cold shoulder to the two Annie walks the final steps to the door. “No, I don’t.” She is not ignorant to looks of concern sent to her by both Reiner and Bertholdt when she walks away; she just doesn’t care.

If there is one thing that annoys her, superficially and immaturely, it is the fact that her titan powers don’t lend themselves to her when she is human. If she’s human that is, Annie isn’t entirely sure about how human she is on most days and she certainly doesn’t want to think about it now.

The point of the matter is that while she prided herself on her vigilance, she wishes she could keep the keen eyesight her titan form afforded her, that way she could see beyond the dense line of trees that surrounded the training facility or notice when someone of slightly better sneaking skills creeps up on her.

“Ah, there you are.”

Like that.

Annie is in no mood to deal with Mikasa right now, for the first time in a long time she doesn’t want to face or even be around her. She doesn’t need the fact that she had come out here looking specifically for her bouncing around in her head. Not today, not tonight.

The blonde curses herself for not ditching the celebration altogether and going to bed early. Tomorrow is a big day after all; the beginning of the end.

Annie doesn’t reply to Mikasa’s bait, because that’s what it is, they both know it, but she forgets that the other girl deals with Eren on a regular basis and knows how to out stubborn the best of them. Ignoring her ignoring of her Mikasa takes a seat to her right, her own cup of mead nestled in her hands.

Annie doesn’t look at her and instead keeps her gaze fixed on the tree line, which she still can’t see through, and waits for the dark haired girl to grow frustrated with her silence.

She doesn’t.

“It’s too loud in there.”

Annie says nothing.

“You’re joining the military police tomorrow.” Mikasa asks but not really. It’s a statement they both know the answer to. Frankly Annie wonders why she’s making the effort to talk to her at all. Its seems an awful shame to pass up on and despite her resolution to stay silent only moments ago, Annie finds herself answering.

“Obviously.” Inside she can hear chairs scraping against the floor, tables being dragged and someone singing. They were going to dance. Lovely. It’s not too often that such a thing happens, but tonight is graduation and not normal circumstances. The blonde considers going back inside to end this farce of a conversation, but being dragged into the swarm of tipsy teenagers dancing isn’t much appealing.

Mikasa presses on. “Why?”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why ask?”

“Why not answer?”

Her grip on her cup tightens. It’s a dumb question, because why does anyone go into the Military Police? For safety. For security. To never have to face them. As far as Mikasa knows Annie is no different from Jean or Marco. And besides Annie has worked hard for this, she ran herself ragged mentally and physically to claim her number four spot. Even with her extraordinary circumstances it had been a difficult three years to survive, part of her is proud of her accomplishment no matter their motivation. “I earned it. It’d be a shame to waste it.”

Even if she had not been ordered to infiltrate the innermost wall Annie would have picked the MP, people nearly killed themselves to have the remotest of chances at a better life; it seemed ungrateful to turn it down.

“I see.”

She doesn’t really. If anything she sounds disappointed in her answer.

It makes Annie’s blood boil, enough to make her finally give up staring at the unseeable forest and fix her tepid blue eyes on the girl in irritation. She didn’t know anything about her, about her life; she had no right to make her stomach lurch with her judgment. “You’re number one in the class, you could go too.” It sounds dangerously close to asking her to go with her, but they both know that’s not what she’s asking at all.

“I could.”

“But you won’t.”

“Probably not.”

“You’ll go where Eren goes.”

In a rare show of mirth, Mikasa throws her own words back at her. “Obviously.”

It’s not funny, not at all, but Annie can’t help the bitter laughter that passes through her lips. “Of course.”

Maybe the mead was a little more effective than she thought. It’s a convenient excuse.

“Eren is going to join the Scouts. It’s all he’s ever wanted.” No shit.  “I’ll join to protect him.”

Annie will never understand this obsession with protecting Eren, Eren is as fully capable of protecting himself. It seemed very much that Mikasa needed Eren more than Eren needed Mikasa. Not that anyone asked for, or wants, her opinion on the matter. Maybe Mikasa even knows it deep down and is trying to hold on a long as she can. Turning her gaze back to the mug in her hands Annie looks at her reflection, pale face, pale hair, pale eyes, pale of spirit, and asks: “Do you ever want things that have nothing to do with your brother?”

“No.”

She doesn’t know what she’s expecting, it’s what people have been telling her for years, what she’s known all along, but hearing it come from her somehow makes it that much more real. She’s a fool, nothing but an ignorant little girl hoping for the unhopeable.

“..... How unsurprising.” She drinks the rest of the mead in her mug is one fell swoop, it burns going down and she’s glad for it. “I don’t know what I see in you.”

For a moment there is only the sounds of the others dancing and laughing behind them. The air is uncomfortably warm and the titanshifter thinks she wants nothing more than to burrow under the wall and stay there until she dies.

Mikasa takes the empty cup from her hands. “Neither do I.” They don’t touch. The blonde tilts her head back to watch as the top cadet unravels the scarf from her neck and lays it in her lap, staring at it as if it will give her guidance for the turn-away she’s composing. Annie doesn’t understand why; she’s had no problem ignoring would be suitors in the past and she doesn't seriously consider herself among them.

“I think-” here the dark haired girl pauses for a moment as if collecting her thoughts and organizing them. This is easily the longest conversation they’ve ever had. “I think that this world is cruel. Very very cruel. And that at their core most people are monsters. Some are better at hiding it than others, but most aren’t. People like us-” Mikasa looks at Annie’s hands for a moment, as if deciding if she wants to grab them or not; she doesn’t and clutches into the fabric of her scarf instead.“-People like us know how terrible we are. We’re not fit for anything else other than destruction. Even if we want to be.”

Annie’s throat swells shut and it’s hard to breathe. Mikasa looks grim as if this conversation physically hurt her to have; with pale skin glowing in the lamplight, her usually dark eyes have a fire to them that she’s rarely seen outside of sparring.

Annie wants nothing more to reach out and kiss her, to see if she tastes as sullen as she seems, to know just how deep her own monstrousness went down. She is 16 and about to ruin everything; and she thinks she deserves a moment of being selfish.

So she does.

It’s nothing like she dreamed it to be and it’s probably better that way. For so long Annie had imagined Mikasa into being this foil for herself; an antithesis to everything she was, a model of what she could have been if she had chosen differently, if she had a choice. But here on this step the night before everything was going to fall apart she see’s how wrong she is. They’re not opposites; they're cut from the same cloth, and even knowing that Annie doesn’t know the first thing about what makes Mikasa Ackerman tick.

People with Mikasa’s talents aren’t prone to being caught of guard by something as easy to see coming as a kiss and the fact that she does nothing in the way of stopping her makes Annie’s stomach flop uncomfortably. It’s not an elegant thing, nor is it a particularly stimulating thing; just closed lips to closed lips. But it is soft and chaste and everything that neither of them could claim to be, what neither of them ever had the chance of being, so much so that it feels dirty in its innocence.

Annie had always expected rejection, has been told to expect rejection from everyone she knows, but Mikasa kisses her back and she can’t understand why. And she’ll never have a chance to ask because she’s out of time: tomorrow is careening towards them and she’s so stupid, so unbelievably naive, to think there ever was a chance of escaping it.

Mikasa pulls away first and she can’t sense a trace of regret in her countenance; it doesn’t make sense at all.

“Why did you let me do that?” The titanshifter whispers like an accusation. In a way it is. Life was so much easier when Mikasa ignored her.

Said girl shrugs and settles herself to face the dark forest again and Annie mirrors her. “Because I wanted to.” She winds the scarf back around her neck, as if to reconfirm something to herself. They aren’t touching anymore but the moment is too intimate, too close, regardless. “I don’t know the first thing about you, but I know that under your indifference is a respect for duty. Protecting Eren is my duty. People like us don’t get happy endings Annie. We take what we can and thats it.”

Annie thinks about her duty for a long time before answering. “Yeah, I figured that.” And she has; she always has; but accepting it is another thing.

Mikasa is right; in this life there was no escaping from duty or monsters. And Annie has both.

She corners the boys on her way to her bunk for what was definitely the last time.

“I’ll do it.”

Reiner gives her a confused look.“What happened to ‘It’s not my mission’?” his tone is bitter and she can’t really fault him for that. Had the situation been reversed she’d be bitter too but it’s been too long a night, too many revelations made, and it’s left her feeling strangely detached from her own feelings.

“You were right. I lost sight of what’s important.”

Bertholdt and Reiner share a secret look, one that under normal circumstances she’d be annoyed with, jealous of even. Today not so much. They understood each other; if she hadn’t been so wrapped up in cutting herself off from everything, in looking for any way out, she might have accepted their outstretched hands and been their friend. She might have been included in their group, it might have made this all easier.

But she hadn’t and she isn’t and it's too late to change that.

“Annie- Are you sure?” The taller of the two asks and it’s almost sweet in its concern; as if he’d fold if she changed her mind again. “Are you thinking clearly now?”

And that was what was so funny about this whole thing: no matter what her father said there had never been a different route for her. She had been so stupid, so blind, to think that there was ever a choice. Her entire life had been planned out for her from day one and nothing could change that.

“Crystal clear.”

And she is.

Today is the day that dreaming ends.

She kills Marco, who had never been anything but kind to her. She cuts him down in the streets of Trost because he had seen too much. She cuts him to pieces, not even a titan, and knows that he knew that she was the one to do it, that his last moments alive were filled with confusion and betrayal. She lays him against a broken building and moves on, adds his death to the growing list of sins she’s completed.

Annie cleans up bodies on the street in the aftermath, and leaves Marco’s corpse for Jean to find because she’s scared of facing him again; then has the nerve to say that she’s sorry.

‘I chose this.’ she tells herself like a mantra, as if that makes it better. She takes it all back; she wishes she were numb, because anything would be better than living with this guilt.

The powers that be don’t require them all to go to the pyre; it’s purely optional. With the losses so high it would be cruel to shepherd the living like cattle to watch their friends and family go up in smoke. Annie especially has no reason to attend the services. No one would fault her for not going; they would assume it was because it was too much. She had a bit of a breakdown in the clean up after all. It wouldn't be unbelievable.

Besides, she had been a huge part of why so many people, soldiers and civilians alike, were being cast to the sky. What kind of terrible person would go and soil, even unknowingly, the only bit of comfort that humanity would get from this disaster?

Annie goes anyway; an exercise in self-flagellation at its finest.

The smoke is thick in the air and it burns her lungs and eyes, though she doesn’t allow herself to close her eyes to the the fire. It’s worse when she closes her eyes because Trost always comes rushing back to her with annoyingly vivid clarity. She sees the death and carnage, all made possible by her hand. It makes her stomach churn to think about it and it never goes away; it stays just behind her eyelids, waiting for her.

One of the medics had mentioned something about her having survivor's guilt, but can your really have survivor's guilt when you have blood on your hands? She’s not sure but either way she stays at the pyre; watches as Jean vows to join the scouts in his best friend’s honor, watches as Sasha and Connie steel themselves to do the same, watches as Christa tries not to cry and Ymir coaxes her back from the edge, watches as they leave to mourn privately.  Annie watches until it's nearly dawn and there are only a handful of people left and the pyre is nearly spent.

It is then, when the new recruits are getting ready to start their trip to wherever it was that the scouts were head-cording themselves, that Mikasa finds her.

Annie hadn't been sure of where her or Armin have been all this time, assumes they’ve been doing secret Eren-related things, not that she’s supposed to know about that. But it’s the first she’s seen of either of them since the brigade assigning at Trost. Shes happy that they're alive and it stings.

She see’s them approaching from the corner of her eye, a determined blur of black and red and a shuffling splotch of yellow against the still dawn, what she doesn’t see coming is Mikasa’s hands, as rough as she dreamed, sliding through her hair, cradling her head by her ears, and her fingers angling her face up so that she can kiss her, as if this was something normal, something they did regularly.

“Mikasa-! What are you doing?” Armin squeaks somewhere to their left, but he is mostly ignored.

Annie had once thought that their difference in height would make something like this uncomfortable but the only discomfort she feels is from the sudden movement of her neck, stiff from hours of staring into the fire. The blond pushes up on her toes, closes her eyes and leans into it, presses into her shockingly welcoming mouth with a singular desperation to feel something, anything, to battle the emptiness that she's been battling since Trost.

And when Mikasa pulls away she leans her forehead against Annie’s, weighing her down, always keeping her, sometimes painfully, tethered to the earth. “What was that for?” She murmurs wetting her lips and still tasting the other girl there. She suspects she always will, like a brand, taste her in her mouth now. Or maybe that's just the teenage girl part of her supplying useless sentimentalities that will never hold up to forever.

Mikasa tightens her fingers in her hair, just shy of hurting, her black-blue eyes shining as they share this moment. “Because Marco’s dead.”

Annie’s blood runs cold and with just three words any joy, any shred of happiness or comfort, that she found in Mikasa’s kiss is ruined: stained by guilt and self-hatred. Even when she wins she loses.

Mistaking her silence as confusion Mikasa clarifies. “And you’re not.”

It seems to her now that this is what her entire life will be like, a single good moment marred by infinitely more bad: an unbreakable cycle she's helpless to stop. Annie had hoped for something good, something real, had gotten it in some warped way, but had forgotten that she could never keep it. Armin had tried to warn her, Reiner tried to change her mind, but she hadn’t listened. Annie’s never listened when it really truly mattered.

“What does that matter?” She can't help but ask, because it shouldn’t matter to her at all.

“I’m not sure, but I think-” the dark haired girl looks at the ground, her hands moving to splay across Annie’s neck softly; though to the blonde they might as well have been a noose for all their damming weight. “We’ve lost so much lately....I’m just glad you weren’t among them.”

Of course she'd never lose Annie; she’s never had her to begin with, never would. Never could.

The titanshifter wants to yell that she knows that Marco’s dead, that she killed him and watched the life drain from his eyes. She wants to tell her what she is, how she wanted to be something different but Mikasa had convinced her that people are terrible and never change; that they’re all monstrous and deserve what they get. She wants to scream and cry and burst from it all that she’s done, wants to know how glad Mikasa would be that she’s alive after she knows just what she had done, what she must do.

Annie knows that trust is hard to gain but quick to be lost and that the minute Mikasa figures it all out she’ll never forgive her; she’ll cut her down where she stands and Annie will let her.

But she doesn’t say any of that because there is still so much to be done and she’s sure that their paths will cross again. Instead she smiles slightly and says “You’re not very good with words.”

Mikasa smiles back. “Neither are you.”

It’s almost beautiful so of course it can’t last.

“Uh, I hate to interrupt what is clearly a, uh, moment-” Armin stutters and refuses to look at them lest he blush anymore than he already was, instead choosing to focus on the caravan of soldiers and horses that was coming toward them. “But I think that's our ride.”

Mikasa pulls her hands away slowly, as if letting go is the last thing she wants and steps away. It’s only a few feet but after being so close it might as well be a few miles. Annie doesn’t know what to say so she blurts the first stupid thing that come to her mind. “Be-” The blonde starts before stopping herself. Be safe?  Yeah that was laughable given what was bound to happen next. She settles on “Be careful.” instead.

Mikasa nods as if making a vow, and she wonders just what she thinks she means, but by now Annie knows that trying to understand what went on in the mind of Mikasa Ackerman was nearly impossible.

“You too Annie.”

The dark haired teen gives her one last unreadable look, the last one that will ever contain any trace of fondness or understanding or anything resembling love, and walks with Armin to the caravan.

Annie watches until there is nothing left to watch and her entire body is numb with loss.

There is an end to all stories; and all people met their end eventually.

Especially monsters.

At last it’s all out in the open; all she is, all her sins laid bare for the world to see. It’s not a pretty picture. The damage is done, her fingers are gone and everything is hazy through the titan’s eyes but she hears her father’s voice in her head telling her to come home. It’ll never happen because she’s failed. She’s failed and ruined everything, just like she always knew she would.

Mikasa cuts her down from the wall, in an eerie reminder of her greatest nightmares. She had been so mad in the tunnels; her face so betrayed as if she expected more of her. That was her first mistake. Annie was made to destroy and she wasn’t even very good at that.

Somehow she’d always known that it would end this way; but what she doesn’t expect is for Mikasa to turn around in her gear, black hair fluttering in the wind, and follow her down.

It doesn’t make sense, her job was done, Eren would be fine, he’d rip her to pieces as soon as she hit the ground and she’d know peace, or at least death.

Mikasa lands on the bridge of her nose and stares at her as they fall together. Annie doesn’t understand the look in her eyes, so full of disappointment and things she doesn’t understand; she’s never known anything of love and she doubts that this is anything of that nature, but she doesn’t look to be relishing in her imminent death, not making good on her earlier threats to cut her to pieces either.

Maybe at last Mikasa sees in Annie what Annie has always seen in Mikasa: a person with demons that complimented her own.

“Annie.” She calls her name softly like a prayer to the old gods, like it might reach her over all the destruction and yelling and pain around them. Though she can’t talk in this form she stares back at her with lipid blue eyes and now, of all times, it occurs to her at end of all things, that no matter what skin she’s in she’s still Annie.

Mikasa stays with her until the very end before she feels the gentlest push of boots giving her that final nudge to her fate and Mikasa whispers softly;

“Fall.”

And then, finally, Annie lets go.