Makes Me Feel Like I'm Falling Down

Chapter Two

II.

They watched the tall creature, the most proportionate titan Hanji had ever seen. It had pointed teeth, and long and thin eyes, and instead of going around trying to kill them it sat on the ground with its legs pulled up, embracing its knees with its arms.

It wasn't moving, and so they prepared for what they'd hoped would be an easy kill. As the other three people with her readied themselves in case she failed, Hanji jumped from the tree she'd been standing on and sliced the titan's neck. As soon as they were sure she'd killed it, they started moving, no point in standing over the corpse to gloat when there were so many others out there.

Hanji was getting ready to leave when a small movement out the corner of her eye caught her attention, and when she turned she saw a boy trying to crawl out of the slice of titan neck she'd just cut.

Her first instinct told her to kill it. No matter how young he looked, the brat had come out of the neck of a fucking titan, and they couldn't take chances. As many of those things that died, the better.

Her second instinct was to run over to the kid, because he'd collapsed on the ground and one of his legs was missing, and he was shaking as he cried and called out to a mother who wasn't there.

Hanji wrapped her arms around the kid and held him tight, and watched as his leg started to grow back. He fainted as that happened, and she felt it was probably for the best.

She looked at the boy. How old could he have been? How had he gotten there? He'd made a hundred questions appear in her mind, but the most relevant was, what am I supposed to do with him?

Hanji was nineteen years old when she cleaned the titan flesh off the kid and wrapped him in her cloak, and wondered if she'd just found the source of humanity's problems, or just the source of all the problems she'd have for the rest of her life.

It didn't matter. In that moment, the only relevant thing was finding a way to get the kid to the headquarters without anyone noticing his regenerating leg.