Dangerous Territory

Sunday Drive

The following morning burst into existence as the sound of trucks, tanks, and singing filled the forest. Levi bolted up and looked around in paranoia. Eren was already awake, stomping out the last embers of the fire.

"Verdammt! I hope they didn't see the smoke."

"Americans or Germans?" Levi asked, his throat clenched.

"I can't hear the words, but it's not a march I know."

"The doctor told me, Americans are heading to Saint-Avold."

"Then why are they here?" Eren hissed, glaring into the dark dawn forest.

"They're probably heading to the Maginot Line. There are forts nearby: Bambesch, Ouvrage du Buchwald, Teting, Laudrefang ... they're probably heading to Bambesch. I think that's on the other end of these woods." He glanced at Eren, looking up and down at his Wehrmacht uniform. "We won't get far with you wearing swastikas all over you like a giant target sign for every sniper in a hundred kilometers."

Eren understood the danger. He immediately removed his hat, shoved it into a bag, and took off the uniform tunic. He began to shiver in the icy morning chill.

Levi brought his blanket over and wrapped it around Eren's shoulders. Eren looked over to thank him, only to gasp and pull away. He looked at Levi's face in horror.

"What?" Levi asked, and he reached up. "Do I have mud on me?"

Eren turned aside, breathing hard. He shook his head. "I must still be dreaming."

Levi felt around until he realized his eye patch was off. "Ah. You haven't seen it yet. It's okay to look, you know."

Gulping hard, Eren braced himself and turned back around to gaze at him.

With the eye patch off, what greeted him was not the hollow, gory abyss of an eye socket he had witnessed when he broke Levi out of Feste Göben. Instead, it was a blue eye.

"How?" he breathed.

"We need to pack up and get out of here. I'll explain on the road." Levi walked back over to where he had been sleeping, picked up his fallen eye patch, and pulled it back on.

"But you don't need that!"

"Actually, I do. Pack up. If the army is heading east, we'll head west. We'll stick to the woods for as long as we can."

They packed away what few things they brought out and trekked onward through the early morning mist. Their feet sounded suddenly loud to them, and to their right they sometimes heard the noise of the army on the move.

"I lost my entire eye," Levi explained as they hiked.

"I know," he whispered. Eren felt a surge in his stomach as he recalled Magath delivering Levi's severed eyeball to him in a pouch.

"When I was at the hospital, they managed to salvage what little they could and inserted a prosthetic. Do you know what that is?"

"Ein Glasauge?"

"Sure. Basically, it's just a giant ball shoved into the socket and covered with—I don't know the English word, but the doctor called it tissu oculaire. Basically, that pink part around your eye."

"Augengewebe," Eren muttered. "My father was a doctor, remember?" Then he scoffed and grumbled, "A Jewish doctor."

Levi decided not to make any comments about the animosity in Eren's voice. He hoped it was more an issue of being angry about his father lying to him, and not the fact that he was Jewish.