The Injury Conundrum

That's Gonna Come Back To Bite You

While the second half of her statement technically wasn't a lie, Annie wanted to keep Eren partially in the dark about the extent of what he could do.

A rage fueled titan Eren that thought he could only shift in life or death situations was dangerous enough, one that knew he could shift whenever he wanted would be catastrophic.

Although she knew that it was simply to protect herself and shouldn't lead to any major issues in the future, it didn't stop her from feeling slightly guilty as Eren stared up at her like she'd uncovered the secrets of the universe.

"So if there's a big issue I can just...become a huge ass titan and kill everything?" Eren asked throwing his hands up for emphasis.

Although having to be in a life threatening situation was certainly a handicap, he figured that worst comes to worst he could just create that himself with a knife or two. Besides, the Survey Corps are always in life-threatening situations, so it shouldn't be that big of a problem.

"Basically."

"Holy shit. Holy shit!" Eren exclaimed as he jumped to his feet. "Annie there are two of us, maybe more! Do you know what this means?"

Annie opened her mouth to respond, but was quickly cut off as he finished the sentence for her. "We can save humanity. We can go outside of the walls and just-just obliterate all the titans out there! We can go out and be free! We can go see the ocean..."

Annie smiled, as she thought. Maybe this would be much easier than she had planned after all.

"Yeah. If you want we could head out now, I could probably find it after running for a bit."

She'd expected unending enthusiasm from him at this proposal, so she was more than a little shocked when she glanced up to his face, only to see him conflicted.

"Well I mean, yeah but I promised Armin that we'd see the ocean together."

Shit, that was a problem. While Annie had no doubts that Eren would take basically any information she gave him as gospel, she wasn't so sure about Armin.

That boy was smart, too smart. She'd already been extra careful to limit any of her interaction with him, or around him, and with the extra factor of Eren being the loudmouth he was, she didn't know if she could keep her true intentions a secret or not.

Fuck, she did know. Armin would figure out the holes in story and information the second Eren gave it to him, and wouldn't stop until he figured out exactly what was going on. Neither her, Reiner, nor Bertholdt would even be able to make it out of the camp before being discovered, which would ruin everything .

"Why not just go see it now, then come back later to show it to him," She offered, "that way we can figure out the quickest path and minimize the danger of titans."

"Because I promised I'd see it with him, not see it then drag him along."

Annie frowned. Damn Eren and his stubbornness.

"Why don't we just tell him and Mikasa, then have them come with us?" Eren asked.

"No. Absolutely not."

"But why, I don't-"

"Eren, why have you been hiding your abilities from them?"

"Well that's because I don't want them to think I'm lying, or some kind of monster-"

She cut him off with a wave of the hand as she said, "Exactly. I know that you've known them for a while, but you're not even sure that they would take the news that you're a titan shifter well, so there's no guarantees for me. I'm not willing to put myself into more risk than I need to, plus the more people that know about a secret, the harder it is to keep."