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philliamwrites · 1 year

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SWYAATL 16: ətˈæk 0N tάɪtn

Pairings: Eren Jaeger x fem! Reader

Warnings: canon-typical violence and gore, angst, anxiety, flashbacks to loss childhood trauma

Summary: “Our story has just begun, right? It’s time we teach them a lesson, okay?” “Okay.” In that moment that changes the trajectory of your life, you realise three fundamental truths at the exact same time. Number one: For the first time in all your life you know you are more than what you fear. Number two: There is a truth to remember about Emil, and because you remember you are given a second chance to be with him. Number three: When you trace Eren’s name, it spells home.

Notes: [01] || [15] | [17]

Words: 4.8k

A/N: eren isn't the only one who's back. since there was SO MUCH AMAZING feedback this past week on tumblr & ao3, i decided to treat you all and upload today instead of sunday.

chapters might be shorter from now on and therefore hopefully more frequent. chpt.17 is already done, so hopefully that little headstart might help. if i manage to keep up writing despite the ridiculosu stressful time ahead at work, the next update is next sunday. if it's not, it'll DEFINITELY be in 2 weeks, promise.

16: ətˈæk 0N tάɪtn

When the break of a second passes and the gears of the world turn back into motion with a jerk, there is barely any time to draw your blades before a hot blast of steam hurls you off the Wall. Distantly, you hear screams as the world swirls by, the sky becomes the ground becomes the sky becomes the ground, until auto-pilot hijacks your muscles and you rip out your grip handles. The anchors wedge into the stone wall and you slam the handles to let the wires reel you in. The impact against the hard stone rattles from your feet all the way through your bones, snapping your jaw shut hard enough with a loud click that your teeth hurt. Shadows whirl past you—your friends. Only then do you notice the screams belong to you, tearing through your throat as you try to tell them to move move move!

Everyone’s instinct kicks in right on time and they quickly follow using their ODM gear. But one body keeps falling, falling, tumbling like a lifeless bag. In a flash, Sasha shoots past you, and saves who you recognise is an unconscious Samuel plummeting to his death. Her anchor ripping through his leg is no pretty sight, but she manages to break his fall.

“It’s the Colossal Titan!” Eren shouts a few feet above you. His blazing green eyes stand in stark contrast to his pale skin. “This is finally our chance to make him pay and end this!”

A messy, full-throated roar of memories rise. You quickly push them aside. There’s no time to break down, not here, not now, not when it could arrive at any moment—

A crack, loud like thunder. Like the earth is splitting in two, dying. Your head jerks down to the main gate of the Outer Wall and for a moment, all your horrors claw at your throat like wild animals as you wait for the Armoured Titan to march through the destroyed gate. But only boulders and debris hurl by like cannonballs and you’re weirdly amazed by how small it looks from up here.

“He’s kicked in the Gate,” you hear Connie mumble quietly. He’s manoeuvred closer; everyone has come closer to brief what to do next. Except Eren. He’s gone. An awful suspicion haunts you when you guess where to. “If we don’t stop them now, we’ll have Shiganshina all over again.”

“We have to report back to HQ!” Mina screams, her face locked in fear. “We have to find Garrison—” She falls dead silent when the watchtower’s bells go off in the distance. You’ve been drilled so often for moments like this, you know what is next: the evacuation of the citizens begins. Titans have breached the Wall.

Your gaze slides past Mina’s pinched face. The first Titan, a five-metre monster of flesh and teeth stumbles into the District, its mouth hanging open like a door hanging on broken hinges. And then another. And then another. You stare at them, throat tight, the cold sweat sensation of dread spreading slowly through your limbs. The taste of blood slowly fills your mouth, zapping your brain awake when you notice the pain in your bottom lip from how hard you are biting it. It clears the fog for a moment; it allows you to jam the emotions behind a basement door. You claw your hands into this sudden composure and drag it over your skin even though it feels all wrong and too tight.

“Get Eren back down here,” you tell Connie and Thomas. “We’ll retreat to HQ first and wait for orders.”

“B-but the Titans.” Mina points down where the first wave begins to spread out in search of people.

“Nobody should be at home at this time anyway, they’ve announced drills this morning, remember?” It’s a sobering thought, provided at the right time—you’ve always worked well under pressure. You hope your brain doesn’t stop now.

“We have to get Samuel to safety, too,” Sasha adds, casting a worried glance down to where he’s hanging upside down, passed out.

“More reason to retreat,” you insist, glad that Connie and Thomas zipped up to the top of the Wall. Right then, a group of Garrison soldiers swarms out from behind the buildings, engaging the Titans. Two aimed for you, another two continue further up, and you feel immediate relief at the sight of senior soldiers taking control of the situation.

Transporting Samuel to Headquarters at the centre of Trost is no easy task, but when you hand him to the paramedics, it’s one thing less to worry about. Good timing as well, because that is when your forced composure decides to crack like the brittle thing it is. The emotions you trapped before are clawing at the basement door, all the pictures swarming before your eyes—the Colossal Titan, the smaller Titans marching into your city, Eren vanishing into the white steam—you cackle with a shrill pitch that borders on hysteria and bend over, your hands braced on your knees, as though you can barely hold yourself upright. Your breaths come in tight, short bursts. The air won’t fit down your throat. You squeeze your eyes shut as though that stops you from engaging with reality, mumbling to yourself, “He said he’d come back. He’ll come back. He’s gotta come back. Emil—No, Eren. He said he’d come back. He’s gotta—”

The angry voice cutting across the yard is like a sunburst after a stormy cloud. The encroaching darkness dissipates with Jean’s voice, and suddenly you have no problem clawing your way out of this darkness and fear. Jean’s insistent voice is like an anchor; from childhood on you have grown to respond to it. To rise from bed when he called, to run to help him when he brawled with the other neighbourhood children.

Your body stumbles over to where he is holding someone—not just someone, Eren—by his shirt collar. You don’t even know what he’s screaming about, only that he is there; they are both there.

Jean speaks with such anger, such a tangled mixture of dread and fear and hostility that you want nothing more than to reach out and comfort him. But there is no time. Whatever he sees on your face when he notices you approaching, it immediately silences his onslaught of words—and gives Eren a chance to retaliate.

He shoves Jean against a pillar and holds him there until his struggling ceases just enough for Eren to talk. “Never forget the three years we poured our blood, sweat and tears into,” Eren hisses. “We’ve nearly died so many times over the past three years. Some people actually died … or gave up halfway. But we survived. We survived. And we’ll get through this, again. You’ll survive today, and tomorrow, you’ll head off to the Interior, right?” He shakes Jean, hard, as if to rattle all the cobbles loose that might bar the path to realising the obvious.

Jean jerks free. A muscle in his jaw clenches, as though he is chewing on his words before he speaks. Finally, he breathes, “If you kick the bucket, I will fucking kill you, Jaeger.” He shoves Eren off him, rounds the pillar catches your eye. Jean juts his chin forward—telling you to follow him. But for now, your whole attention is anchored in Eren. He answers with one of his own forceful stares that always leave your skin on fire as if he put a red-hot poker against it. As if pulled by an invisible hook, you two close the space between you.

“What he said,” you say quietly. “Try not to get yourself killed, okay?” You wonder if he notices how desperate you sound. “Or I will come after you and kick your ass.”

Eren leans over and puts his hand on your shoulder. Even through the fabric of your jacket, you feel every one of his fingers pressing into your flesh. He speaks in a low voice. “I finally get the chance to slaughter those pigs. Do you really think I’d do something stupid and just die here?”

“This isn’t dummy practice.” Your throat is dry. You feel like an animal trapped against a corner. Suddenly, everything goes blurry. “This is real.”

“It is. And that’s exactly why we can’t lose heart. We’ll show them. We’ll show them we can fight back.” He holds his head slightly lowered and looks at you with his green eyes from under thick, dark lashes. “We’ll get through this. Our story has just begun, right? It’s time we teach them a lesson, okay?”

You swallow hard as your senses return. Drop by drop, like water filling a cup, your thoughts fall back into order. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Eren releases your shoulder and raises his hand to brush his knuckles against your cheek—so lightly you think you might have imagined it. Too startled to say anything, you stand in silence as he turns and leaves, marching with straight, rigid shoulders towards Mikasa.

When you meet her eyes, you don’t know how to read her expression. Is it concern? Does she have a problem that Eren shows you this platonic affection in public when she doesn’t even get a pat on her shoulder; not even a promise that he’ll be careful and come back.

You walk backwards, barely understanding why you have to look at them for such a long time. To memorise their faces. But Mikasa is strong, and if Eren stays by her side, nothing will hurt him.

Jean is waiting at the other side of the courtyard with Connie. Some people get the shakes after an adrenaline surge. Jean gets pissed. When he helps make sure Connie’s gear and gas cylinders are in order, Jean pulls at Connie’s harness so hard as if he’s trying to mug him.

Standing right next to Jean, you want to close your eyes and lean against him, even for just a moment; you want to pretend it’s just another practice drill, that by the end of the day you will meet with everyone for dinner, and you’ll laugh because like always, Sasha and Connie stole Jean’s kills and then the boys will try and predict the next day’s weather depending on Bertholdt’s sleeping position.

Rough hands yank you back from this pipe dream, tugging at your ODM gear. Jean is checking on your equipment next, and you’re kicked back to when you two were thirteen years old and he had tugged on your clothes just like that, checking for injuries after you had given the butcher’s son a bloody nose for dunking Jean’s head into the river.

“Who’s in your squad?” he asks, his voice quiet and rough.

“Karl, Daz, and Franz.”

Jean pulls a face. His hands are restless as he double-checks your equipment. “Listen, if you see a Titan, you move your ass in the opposite direction, okay?”

“You heard Captain Weilman.” Like a well-oiled machine, you turn around, allowing Jean access to check your back. “Desertion is punished by death.”

“So you’d rather a Titan eats you?”

“I—”

He doesn’t let you finish. “I know what happens when you’re scared,” Jean says, and stops. He grabs your shoulders and spins you around, jerking his head down to glare at you. “I’ve known you all my life. If you don’t run, you freeze, and we both know what that means here. Today.”

“I can’t run from it forever,” you reply, quietly.

The breath he exhales is a quiet huff, fanning over your cheeks. His eyes are raking over your face anxiously. You can sense the tension in him, a thrum just under the skin, like the fast-beating heart of a bird. “Running means you’ll stay alive. I need you—” Jean swallows. “—alive.” He almost stumbles over the last word.

“You won’t get rid of me, don’t worry.” If you press into his side and he presses back, it’s only your business. Jean takes a reluctant step back. He catches your fingers with his and gives them a quick, hard squeeze before letting go. When he is already halfway to his squad; he turns and looks back at you. You meet his eyes for a split second. Then he is gone.

You find Karl, a guy you’ve rarely interacted with during the last three years apart from quick nods and polite smiles, and give Daz a wide berth. He’s still sickly pale and you turn away when he starts to dry-heave as though he’ll be sick all over again. Franz is fidgeting with his spare blades, but he looks up when you approach and manages a wobbly smile.

As you check that your gear is working and everything is in place for yourself, your mind is on Jean and the look you’ve shared when he left. It was the first time you’ve watched him leave, knowing you might never see him again. It is something that is hard to accept, and you aren’t sure you want it to become part of your life. To live with death as a constant companion, a cold breath down the back of your neck. But such is the life of a soldier; such will be the life of those who join the Survey Corps.

As though you have the luxury to think about it. You have a mission now: join the support squad and take the middle guard to defend Wall Rose until every citizen is behind the Wall. Stop Titans advancing further no matter the cost. Once the evacuation is done, soldiers from the rear-guard will meet you on the roofs and hand out new gas cylinders so you can all retreat on top of the Inner Wall for safety. That’s the plan.

When you head out, you try not to think about it. Just follow orders, move with your squad. All those years you’ve been talking about protecting the people, saving them so no one ever has to lose someone they love like you did. Finally, you can walk your talk, but every reasonable thought gets pushed back by sheer suffocating, overbearing emotion: you’re scared. You’re scared shitless to face the monsters of your childhood. All these years you thought you had banished them, that come time you could face them—older, different, stronger. But all this time you have deluded yourself. Still a little child, still unable to do anything. Maybe nothing ever changes.

You follow Karl towards Main Street. Captain Weilman tasked your squad to take position in the tailor’s borough, which gives you an excellent opportunity to check on the Kirschstein’s residency. Your home. You don’t allow your thoughts to spiral into what happens if you would find Ida and Felix in any status other than safe and alive. They depend on you; so many people depend on you. You force yourself to steel your fear into rage, into desperation, into resolve.

Karl lands on the roof of a copper-stone house, surveying the area through squinted eyes. “We’re taking position here,” he says. “Doesn’t look like they managed to head this far into the District yet.”

Daz stumbles a little, his foot stuck on a roof shingle. “We shouldn’t be here, we shouldn’t fucking be here, what are they thinking?” he mumbles to himself, shuddering terribly as though plagued by a done-deep cold. “We’re just canon fodder. We’re just here so they can snack on us while everybody else books it behind the Walls.”

“Daz,” Franz says. He has his blades out, and even though he’s gripping them hard enough his knuckles are white, you can see them shaking. “Shut up.”

“Don’t fucking tell me to shut up, it’s the truth!” he snaps, whirling around and whipping his blades out. Franz takes a startled step back. Too close to the roof’s edge, he barks Daz to watch out where he swings them around.

“Won’t have to worry about Titans if that maniac kills us first,” Karl mumbles, scanning the streets. He gives you a quick once-over, judges you either sane or capable enough compared to the other two, and draws closer, pointing to one end of the street.

You follow his outstretched arm. Your heart stops for a second.

Two or three bodies lie in the street already—a man, half his lower abdomen is buried under the ruins of a collapsed house. You know that corner; you’d recognise it anywhere: the seamstress’ shop behind the Kirschstein’s residency where you had worked before enlisting into the military.

“We’re too late,” you breathe. “They’ve reached the middle guard.”

“Some survivors might still be down there,” Karl offers. He does another 360, spots no Titans, and nods. “We should go and check.”

That’s all you need to hear. Using the house rows facing each other as anchor points, you zip down to the ground, hearing Karl bark to Daz and Franz to warn you two in time if they see Titans approaching.

Down on the ground, you feel like a little doll in a huge play world. Only someone has thrown a temper tantrum and kicked in houses, punched a colossal fist into stores. Broke the people as though there are nothing more than little toys.

Tentatively, you walk closer to the destroyed building, too scared to take a closer look at the man in fear it might be Felix. Something else catches your eye—red like so many things beautiful and disastrous. Who told you that red was the Gods’ favourite colour?

Her lower abdomen torn in half and lying on the other side of the road, you recognise the young woman by the colour of her blue tunic. She’d always worn it because it had made her big, round eyes stand out even more. The only moments you remember of Mirabelle, your former co-worker of the shop, are despicable and full of loathing for a person who had bullied you without any reason—and yet … seeing her like this, like a doll that’s been ripped apart, half of her intestines hanging out of her body, her vacant blue eyes staring off into the sky unblinkingly… this is a death you don’t wish on anyone. Not even someone you disliked.

“Know any of these people?” Karl asks beside you. You gather your courage. Look at the man, who is not Felix, thankfully. Look at the woman hanging out of a window, the rest of her stuck inside the collapsed building—her hair a vibrant red. Not Ida.

You exhale slowly and force the tension from your muscles. “No.”

“Then we shouldn’t hang around here too long—”

A scream echoes from the roofs—Daz’s voice. Karl and you share a short, panicked look before launching off into the sky and towards your squad members. You can hear Karl mumbling something like “He’s gonna get us killed, I swear.”

You can hardly disagree.

When you ascend over the rooftops, you see the source of Daz’s distress.

Even though it has been seven years, you recognise the Titan immediately. Black hair to its chin, big, coal-black pinpricks for eyes—nothing about it has changed. Like seven years ago when it picked up that woman and devoured her, the Titan has returned today to finish its feast. The way it stares you down, you almost get the feeling it might remember you as well. But that’s impossible. It must smell the fear radiating off you, and like a hound scenting prey, it zeroes in on you. You can taste the terror you’ve felt when you first saw a Titan. The taste is sharp and coppery on your tongue like old pennies.

Move, your mind screams, but you can’t. Your muscles have locked up; a high whine of terror fills your head. You’re trembling with the wait, the helplessness, the stillness, your thumbs pressing so hard to the buttons on your handles they go numb. Faintly, you’re aware of voices. Out of the corner of your eyes you catch movement, and then Franz moves towards the Titan.

A hand leaps at him. Franz whips his blades up and outward with an almost frightening speed; both sink into the fleshiest part of the Titan’s hand, between its fingers. The Titan hisses and strikes at him, knocking him aside the way a cat might bat aside a kitten. Franz lands on another roof, rolls and gets to his feet, but you can see from the way he’s holding his arm that he’s hurt.

That is enough for Karl. Darting forward, he lashes out at the Titan with his blades. He cuts into the Titan’s peach white skin, blood welling from two thick open folds of skin. The Titan ignores him, keeps moving towards Franz.

With his uninjured hand, Franz changes his blade. His mouth quivers as he mumbles to himself, a prayer maybe. From this distance, it looks like he’s mumbling someone’s name. A familiar name.

He raises his blade as the Titan looms up before him; he looks impossibly small in front of it, a child dwarfed by a monster. Franz starts crying as the Titan reaches for him. Karl, screaming, targets his grappling hooks at the Titan’s neck, sailing towards it but missing. Instead, his blades cut into its shoulder, sending blood in a thick spray across the air.

The Titan strikes, its trunk-thick fingers reaching down for Franz. He staggers back, but he is unharmed. Something has thrown itself between him and the Titan, a slim shadow with a gleaming blade in his hand. Karl.

The Titan whines—Karl’s blade has pierced its skin. With a snarl, it strikes again, fingers striking a vicious blow that lifts him off his feet and hurls him against the far wall of a house. He strikes it with a sickening crunch and falls to the ground—four stores down where his head hits the hard pavement, cracking open like a ripe fruit.

Franz screams Karl’s name. He doesn’t move. Lowering his blade, he starts to run along the edge of the roof towards him. The Titan, turning, catches him in a hard grip that makes Franz cough blood until its knuckles turn white and with a squeeze, his bones breaking, Franz lies limb within its grasp as the Titan closes his mouth around him, ignoring his brutal, blood-churning screams. The sound of a dying animal.

It all happens within a few minutes. Two of your teammates—one friend—dead. Just like that.

It felt like hours.

Hours where you don’t move, you don’t think, you don’t feel. You just watch the Titan bite Franz clean in half and swallow the lower part of his body. Either unsatisfied with the taste or bored with the easy game, the Titan drops the rest of Franz and turns, fixing its coal-black eyes on you. The distance between you is barely a stretch of its long arm.

Emil had been wrong, you realise. Freedom is not the ability to do as you please.

Freedom is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

The Titan closes a fist around your body, tenderly almost. As though it knows how scared you are, and that the last grace it can give you is to grant you a swift, painless death. That can’t be real. You remember how the woman seven years ago had screamed her lungs out. How Franz screamed before those razor-sharp teeth cut him in two.

The Titan cradles you in his hand, bends over your tiny doll-like body in his giant fingers. Its smile is vacant, its eyes dull like a dead fish’s. No compassion lies in those soulless orbs. No begging or praying would save you; monsters know of no mercy. They don’t know of conscience and love.

How could Emil have ever felt compassion for those beasts?

Emil. When had he shown compassion to Titans? When had he ever seen a Titan?

An image flickers before your eyes—A line of trees with thickly leaved branches breathing out cool green-scented air. There are bushes hung with glossy berries, red and purple and black, and small trees hung with oddly-shaped fruits you’ve never seen before. You exhale. “It smells like …” Springtime, you think, before the heat comes and crushes the leaves into pulp and withers the petals off the flowers. “Home,” says Emil wistfully, “to me.”—no, not this moment. After. Something happened after. Something that uprooted everything you thought you had known about Emil.

Something hot splatters onto you, the searing pain clearing the fog of memory that dulls your mind. The liquid immediately begins to evaporate. Steam rises off from the side of your face, and you realise it is the Titan’s blood from an early wound Franz or Karl had inflicted.

Blood.

A Titan’s blood.

Titans bleed.

They bleed just like you.

Men bleed and die. Therefore, it must be logical that when Titans bleed … they die.

It means you can kill them.

They are not invincible.

Only that thought matters—a truth you’ve always known, and yet it has never struck you as important as right now. They bleed, they bleed, they bleed. They hurt, they hurt, they hurt. The monsters from your childhood bleed and hurt, and therefore, you can kill them.

Through the fog of your helplessness, you can still see those cold, lifeless eyes and yellow, rotting teeth waiting for you, and all you can think is, This can’t be how it ends.

It is not what you have expected to think as you stare death in its hungry eyes. It’s not hopelessness, it’s just pure stubbornness. Not even so much a will to live as a refusal to die. Not yet, not now, not here, not when you have so much left to do. Thank Ida for the gloves she’s knitted you last Wîhe Naht. Thank Felix for the birch box he’s built for your trinkets as a graduation present. Spend a last day with Jean and Marco and the rest of your Corps before you go separate ways. Figure out the jumble of memories where Emil hides. Find Eren. Tell Eren that you can kind of, sort of, maybe imagine spending the rest of your life with him—and oh, what a thought that is. What a thought holding so much gravitas, so much everything that it is a miracle the Titan doesn’t drop you right then and there from the weight of that revelation.

“Our story has just begun, right? It’s time we teach them a lesson, okay?”

“Okay.”

In that moment that changes the trajectory of your life, you realise three fundamental truths at the exact same time.

Number one: For the first time in all your life you know you are more than what you fear.

Number two: There is a truth to remember about Emil, and because you remember you are given a second chance to be with him.

Number three: When you trace Eren’s name, it spells home.

You stop thinking.

Wedging your blades between your body and the fingers curled around you, you pull with all your strength, feeling the blades slice through flesh, cut into bone, break in the process. One edge grazes your leg, but you don’t feel anything—adrenaline pumps hot through your body, drowning fear and pain.

With its hold around you loosened, you wiggle out of the Titan’s grasp, quickly twisting your body to find a stable anchor point on another roof. You launch into the air—high, higher, so high that the world spins around you, leaving you dazed, but when your eyes land on the Titan, so much smaller from up high, your body knows what needs to be done.

As though it can’t follow what just happened, the Titan is still staring at his now empty hand. Steam rises from the clean cuts where his severed fingers remain unmoving.

As you change your blades, your hooks wedge into the soft spots in its neck. Slice through the nape, 1 meter and 10 centimetres. You’ve done it often enough during practice, you know exactly where to cut.

Soaring through the sky towards your target, you know it is finally time to rip up the flesh of your fears.

For your parents. For Karl and Franz. For Emil. For yourself.

The flesh yields to your sharp blades like butter to a warm knife. More blood spurts from the wound, running down the Titan’s back like a waterfall as a huge chunk of flesh falls and lands with a loud splat on the ground. You quickly manoeuvre up to a roof. The moment your foot lands on stable ground, your right leg buckles under the weight of your body—the gash in your skin from where your blade cut into your leg burns as though liquid fire spill from the wound.

Pushing aside the throbbing pain, you quickly turn and see the Titan fall face first onto the street, steam evaporating from his neck. It lies there, unmoving.

Dead. Just like that.

A shudder rips through you.

Ah. So that’s what it feels like.

Finally, you have become the hunter.

taglist: @arisu003, @brooki, @prttyangelbaby, @honeylmnade, @berriesandcrem, @im-just-star-dust, @rui-0836, @thefangirlhasarrive

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