What Goes Around, Comes Around
Summary: Months have passed since Erwin was bitten but now a new challenge appears before you.
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A long while had passed since Erwin's rushed amputation but quite frankly, time had already lost all its meaning the moment your classmate bit out the professor's jugular. The blonde man, who always looked so strong, had sweat dripping down his face as he desperately tried to cling to reality.
It had taken him longer than predicted to recover.
You see, he presented no symptoms of a zombie transformation. His heartbeat was getting stronger with each passing day and his cheeks began to turn a shade of red once again. Hanji and Moblit were able to cut it off before the virus could spread in his body but a question erupted mid surgery: Why weren't you all affected by the virus?
You realized the little amount of knowledge you actually had on the matter and getting to your mother's laboratory had never been more important. But it was hard to move silently through the night when Erwin is constantly needing his mouth to be covered to avoid drawing attention.
"It's not even there, why does it hurt so bad?" He asks, hoping to God anyone would have a satisfying answer and a way to stop it. Hanji sighs knowing she can bring him little to no comfort.
"It's phantom limb syndrome." She begins as she adjusts her glasses, "The brain continues to get messages from nerves that used to "feel" for the missing limb and it can cause severe pain."
"Usually it would be treated with medication but there is little we can do with the resources we have." Moblit says from the other side of the room, he sits by a pot of boiling water with a cloth inside, hoping that it would provide Erwin some kind of relief. "The warm towel and massaging the remaining limb is all we have."
"We've been trying this for days and it's not working!" Levi screams, kicking one of the empty pots while not caring one bit about the amount of noise he is making. Tears shine in his eyes and he turns around to face the wall, avoiding your worried gaze. "Would anything in your mom's lab help?"
"Maybe," You shrug your shoulders, "but I'm not quite sure what she kept there."
"Levi" Erwin whispers weakly, "Please don't worry about me. I will make it until I see what is in that lab."
"Erwin, it's been six months." He replies, his voice breaking halfway through his sentence.
"How far away are we?" Moblit asks as he looks over Hanji's shoulder. She sighs once again, pointing at the paper in front of her.
"At least another month or two of walking." She replies. "This detour took longer than I had previously anticipated."
All eyes rest on the three now sixteen years old teenagers on the corner of the room, or rather, the two teenagers and a decapitated head wrapped in a red scarf covered in blood. Its mouth still moves as it tries to bite the girl, who simply looks at it.
Eren's head rests in Mikasa's hands as Armin once again tries to plead with her, desperately begging to put an end to his suffering. His eyes have lost every ounce of green they once had and they are now nothing but empty, white orbs.
A Few Weeks Ago
"He lost a lot of blood but he'll survive." Moblit says and his words are received with a tight embrace from Levi. The short man's hands tremble as they touch the taller man.
Once he lets Moblit go, he rushes to Erwin's unconscious body on the wooden table. His ear is pressed against the blonde man's chest as he tries to listen to his heart, letting out a relieved sigh of his own when he hears a shallow breathing coming from him.
"We have to move him." Hanji says, her hands shaking like a leaf as she washes the blood off. You sit by her side, your fingers touching her so gently it nearly seemed like a clap of a butterfly's wing.
"Can't we wait?" You ask, rubbing the red off of her skin and she shakes her head.
"This place is too dirty for him to properly heal." She lowers her voice, "I'm surprised he survived at all."
"Four-eyes is right. We need to leave." Levi sniffles quietly, never taking his eyes off of Erwin's chest as it rises and falls. "He'll die if we don't find a cleaner place."
With a heavy sigh you nod, thinking about the best way to transport him to the car would be.It would have been a miracle if the minivan was still able to drive around but unfortunately, in the middle of a rage fit, Levi damaged the vehicle once and for all.
So you had been looking for a while, hoping to find something to replace it with until your eyes landed on a large truck not too far away from the warehouse you had been using as a shelter. It was the middle of the night but the back would be perfectly sized to fit both Erwin and one other person, probably Moblit.
Levi's complaints about not being able to sit next to the man he loved were repetitive but eventually he understood that having someone who understands the human body quite well by his side was his best chance to survive the ride.
Between Hanji's unsteady hands and Levi constantly looking back to make sure Erwin and Moblit were still alive, you ended up being the designated driver.
With the help of your sleeping bags, you are able to transport Erwin into the back of the car. You placed the material underneath his limp and unconscious body and, with the help of all the remaining people, you were able to gently place him down.
Being in this situation is quite hard seeing that the tall, blonde man is always the one to carry other injured people around. The cold sweat dripping down his forehead and the color of the remaining part of his arm tells you that he has an infection.
His body shivers in the heat and you have to come up with a fast solution to his problem. Your mother's lab is too far away for him to make it, drug stores are completely sacked at this point and you are out of antibiotics.
You have one option and one option only: find a few maggots and place them on his wound so they can eat all the unhealthy bacteria present in the area. A rather barbaric kind of treatment but quite efficient when it comes down to it.
The method has been used for hundreds of years, since medieval times. Though it is helpful, it still manages to make your stomach turn inside out, the simple thought of maggots running around his wound is enough to turn you into a gagging mess.
"And where will we find such disgusting things?" You ask, covering your mouth. Moblit uses his head to point at the trash can standing at the corner, a few boxes of pizza from the time before the apocalypse still resting inside of it.
"I'll make you a bet that there are some there." He says, heading towards that direction. You shiver and suddenly the idea of facing a small horde of zombies doesn't seem too repulsive.
Said and done, hundreds of little creatures crawled around the box hunting for any traces of human food that were left behind. That's when you decide that it is too much for your stomach to handle so you quickly get out of there, taking with you a few water bottles to fill them up in the river not too far away.
"Ironic." You think to yourself while bending down by the water, not realizing you were actually speaking out your thoughts, "Rotten corpses don't bother me but a few bugs do?"
"You've always had a problem with things that crawl." Hanji says, coming from behind the trees. She kneels by your side, a little further away so the blood from her hands wouldn't enter the water bottles you fill up.
A weird silence falls between you two, something that has never happened before. She rubs her hands together, scrubbing away the remaining of Erwin's blood that has stained her skin. A few minutes go by before she says something again.
"There's so much blood." She whispers.
"What? Sweetheart, I don't see anything." You say, concerned when you notice all the red stains are gone.
"My hands are soaked in blood" She begins, "Erwin's, Moblit's, even yours. Soaked with the blood of innocents who didn't survive the exposure to the virus, people who were turned into mindless monsters, who had their souls stolen from their bodies as they remain trapped in this earth"
You try to come up with something to say in response but words simply won't exit your lips. She continues her rant.
"We're not smart. We're not special. We're lucky. Lucky your mother prepared us for the first few months, lucky to have found Moblit. Luck has been by our side since the very first moment and I have a feeling it is running out, Y/N. We won't be lucky for much longer."
"Hanji..." Her name falls from your lips quietly, quieter than a whisper.
"We don't know anything about this virus, it's been so long and we are now a few days away from getting to your mother's lab, to figuring out the truth but Erwin won't last that long. I don't know what to do."
Tears stream down her face as she punches the small rocks at the bottom of the river. Carefully, you place down the water bottles that once rested in your hands before wrapping your arms around her and pulling her in.
She nuzzles her face in the crook of your neck and you ghost your fingers through her back.
"Hopefully those things will help Erwin." You say and she snuffles, a giggle leaving her body.
"I hope so." She says and a comforting silence now replaces the heavy atmosphere. Until you hear a crack, like a stick being stepped on, coming from ahead of you.
As an immediate reaction, you pull out one of Erwin's guns you carried in your back pocket. Lily is what he called that one, "That's Levi's favorite flower."
Once you hear the sound again, you are able to aim in between the trees, two shadows walking towards you but before you have time to pull the trigger you realize who it is.
Her hair is now shorter than the last time you saw her, a scar clearly engraved on her right cheek. Around her neck, something that seems like a baby carrier and you wonder what is in there until you hear the ungodly roars coming from Eren's zombified head.
Armin's blonde hair is now nearly brown due to the dirt and overcome with mats. His hands are burned and wrapped around in dirty clothes, his hair is also shorter and you realize the only one with long hair is now the dead boy.
Eren's eyes are cloudy, much like the sky during a stormy day. Mikasa's red scarf wrapped around his mouth as an attempt to keep him from biting her, the other option would be to rip his jaw from his face but that is too cruel.
"Hanji, Y/N?" Armin asks, tears in his eyes as he extends his arms to hug you both. In response, you run towards him and happily pull the two and a half teenagers in for a tight embrace.
Water from the river splashes on your pants but that is the least of your concerns. A hole in your heart feels like it has finally been filled up now that the children are back but the pain due to Eren's death is worse than a heart attack.
You want to ask what happened, how did it come to this but your brain betrays you and no words are able to come out of your mouth. Instead, you simply allow yourself to feel relief that the other two came back alive.
"How are you here?" Hanji asks, messing up Mikasa's already messy hair.
"We just kept heading in the direction you all did, hoping that we would eventually bump into you." Mikasa replies, a smirk on her lips.
"Let's go back to the warehouse, we have to talk." You say and they nod, following your footsteps towards the empty place.
"More teenagers?" Moblit asks, cleaning the dirt off of Erwin's wound. He doesn't sound too thrilled about it but he can tell something is off when he notices the content in the girl's hands.
You bring them around the fire and they nuzzle up against you and Hanji. Levi, who walks back from gathering wood, looks rather surprised but in a positive way. It's been so long and he still had the little presents the teenagers left behind, you all do.
"It was too foggy, we could barely see anything ahead of us." Armin says, holding the cup of water with unsteady hands. "The horde surrounding us was a little too much but we were able to kill them off thanks to the abilities you all taught us."
"We killed them all, except for one." Mikasa says, combing Eren's hair with her fingers, "A little girl, brown hair and what seemed to be brown eyes. Her hair was up on a bun and she had a small tag with her name on it. It was too smudged for us to tell what it was but the first letter was G."
"She was so small and she came out of nowhere." Armin says, a single tear streaming down the left side of his face. "She somehow managed to jump and bite his neck, ripping away his flesh. He didn't survive even two minutes after that."
"He screamed about not wanting to die and this was the only way I could find to keep him going." Mikasa says, looking down at his cloudy eyes. "Armin wants to put him out of his misery but we don't have it in us to do it."
"So we came looking for you." Armin says, pulling his boyfriend's head from the girl's hands and placing it on his lap, hoping to cling to a memory of a time too far back where they were happy together.
"We need you to kill Eren." Mikasa says and Armin nods.
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Weeks have passed since then and still, you have not mustered up the courage to do as they ask. You decide to look for wisdom straight from the source and walk up to Erwin, who holds a mirror in front of his amputated arm in hopes to trick his brain.
"Any luck?" You ask, sitting by his side and he shakes his head.
"Still hurts like a bitch."
"Between the phantom limb pain and the inflammation you must be in a shit ton of pain. Let me call Levi so he can learn how to massage it." You say and he nods, gently putting down the dirty, broken mirror.
Once you've found the shorter man, you return to where Erwin is sitting. He extends to you the remaining part of his arm and you place Levi's hand on his skin.
"You want to push the skin upwards gently." You say and he nods, closely following your instructions. "Every so often do a gentle pinch and stretch his skin upwards."
Erwin closes his eyes, the feeling of the massage relieving his pain and he can finally get a quiet rest. Levi, who wants nothing more than to see Erwin healed, decides to stay there and massage his arm until he wakes up.
You offer to switch every now and then but he declines, wanting to be the one Erwin would see when he woke up.
As you sit by the fire to make food, you feel a peck on your cheek and you smile. Hanji sits by your side and takes your free hand in hers, allowing your dominant hand to be the one doing all the cooking.
The wind rushes through the window and you realize winter is coming again. You need to reach the lab quickly because once the snow begins to fall, it will be too late and you will have to wait for months before having another chance.
It needs to happen now or never.