[word count: 9.5k bc i was late. have this huge chapter to compensate.]
[pls do comment and vote!! <33]
[tw: kidnapping]
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When Aurora was bedridden with a cold, she often saw a house filled with dreams behind her eyelids.
She dreamed this before she met Eren. In this house, the stars were alive. The image of the house was so vivid in her dreams that she convinced herself it was another realm that she entered while sleeping. Nobody was living in this house but it felt like there was a family in its walls; warmth seeped through every corner like the soft scent of perfume. Portraits of beautiful and handsome individuals hung in every room, all of which share similar striking features. Aurora would attempt to reach them but they were always so far away from her fingertips. Instead, she'd venture into the many rooms inside the humongous house.
There was a library with towering bookshelves, filled with complicated titles she couldn't read yet. Then, a greenhouse of blooming flowers of every kind inside their walled kingdom. Aurora would pretend to be a princess of a faraway place while skipping over each room, her sleepwear swishing on her ankles like an iridescent ball gown from her favorite storybook.
Sometimes, when she woke up from that deep slumber, Aurora would try to get herself sick just to enter that house of dreams and stars again.
But the feeling the house brought stuck to her even as she grew up; even as those fever dreams faded away.
That day when the Survey Corps observed the trainees, the nostalgia of her childhood came back a hundredfold.
After disarming and putting Sasha in a restraining hold, Aurora faced her friends. Again, Eren came to her to ask for some tips. The boy was scratching the back of his head and Aurora wondered when Eren started becoming shy around her. He usually was boisterous whenever he wanted her to be his tutor for the day, eager to please his parents and Aurora herself with the achievements only he could attain while learning with his redhead best friend. She curiously trailed her eyes over each of his meek movements. Eren? Meek? Maybe when Hell was going to freeze over. And so, she pushed that to the back of her mind and tried directing Eren's limbs in her way of physical combat.
"You always have to make sure to examine your opponent when you're fighting, Eren," Aurora instructed him, tightening her braid over her shoulder. "Don't recklessly throw a mindless punch at them." Her eyes went to the dirt and grime on Eren's face. "I see you did exactly that to receive those." She pointed a forefinger to his dirty cheeks, to which he wiped with a frown. "It's going to work best if your opponent is much stronger than you." She glanced at Eren's previous sparring partner, the tall boy named Bertholdt.
Eren scoffed, clearly miffed at the jab the oblivious girl threw at him. He crossed his arms on his chest, lifting his chin a little. "I wanted to use the element of surprise."
