places we won't walk
A LEAP YEAR signifies one of two things. One, it is the way in which the human calendar synchronises with the Earth's orbit. Two, it is the loss of a day every three years. Either one is correct. Either one holds a multitude of feelings: hope, epiphanies, grief.
Armin sat against the large tree, the one he visited in his childhood. His back was pressed against the hollow bark, fleeting memories drifting through his mind. He stared down at the stained parchment papers in his hands.
Droplets of tears were long dried now, and the inked words were smudged with love and helplessness.
His own ocean blue eyes watered.
"Wow," breathed Annie, sitting beside him, her body pressed against his arm. "I never knew he fell in love with someone else. I always thought he was smitten with Mikasa."
"Me too," Armin admitted. His voice was barely a whisper. Emotions roared through him like the tides of a tsunami. He didn't know what to make of these letters.
"Twenty eight and twenty nine are really unfortunate numbers, huh?" Annie felt her lips dry, cracked with the pressure of recoiling feelings. She glanced towards her husband, careful with her words. "Isn't it a leap year now?"
Armin nodded. "It is."
"Do you think she's still alive?"
"I guess there's only one way to find out."
Packing their bags, the married couple ventured to Marley, a former enemy of Paradise. The two countries were allies now, all thanks to the hardships of the 'heroes' of the world: Armin Arlet, Mikasa Ackerman, Jean Kristen, Connie Springer, Levi Ackerman, Reiner Braun, Annie Leonhart, and Historia Reiss. Of course, Gabi Braun and Falco Grice were congratulated on their efforts, but they were just children. They did not understand the politics of the world just yet. Therefore, they were not part of the heroic group the world rejoiced in.
The husband-wife duo entered the developing country, echoes of war returning to their minds. Annie and Armin began their exploration, heading for people and asking about a young female nurse.
Answers never came.
"Are you sure you haven't heard of her?" Armin tried, desperation in his tone. He stood in front of a woman, a purple shall donned around her head. She held a child close to her chest, rocking the infant in her arms gently.
"I'm sure, sir."
"If she's a nurse, why don't you head to the hospital?" inquired her husband, his arm wrapped around her waist. He pointed to their left. "There's one of there."
Armin's eyes lit up. "Thank you!"
He intertwined his fingers with Annie's and dragged her over to the rundown hospital. Its wooden panels were slowly cracking, logged with water and horrors. The couple came across an injured man leaning on a cane.
He pointed them in the direction of a cottage, where they came across a girl with brown hair and brown eyes. She had a brush in her hands, sweeping the fallen leaves from the front garden. Hope filled their chests.
"That must be her," Armin muttered.
"And it might not be," Annie reminded, her thumb tracing over the curves of Armin's knuckles. "There are lots of people with brown hair and brown eyes. Eren wasn't exactly detailed with his description."
"We won't know unless we ask."
In the soft light of dawn, where the harshness of the days mellowed out after the war, Annie and Armin walked up to an unfamiliar girl with the desire and expectancy of millions churning through their veins.
"Hello," greeted Armin tentatively. His voice caught the attention of the damp-eyed girl. She paused in her sweeping. "This may seem a bit strange, but do you work as a nurse?"
"No," the girl answered.
And just like that, everything came crumbling down in their chests. Their muscles sagged, twinkling gazes dimming. Armin sighed. Annie placed a hand on her husband's shoulder, a comforting hold and a promise that she would continue searching with him.
Armin glanced to her, attempting a smile that never once reached his eyes.
The unknown girl pursed her lips.
"But my sister was."
Their heads snapped upwards.
"Really?!"
The girl nodded. Her eyes narrowed, piercing through their souls like a sharp knife slowly sliding through their ribcage.
Annie took a moment to register the girl's words. "Wait, what do you mean 'was'?"
"Follow me."
The broom fell to the ground, an echo of hollowed emotions. The fallen leaves bristled with the impact, trembling above the vibrations. Turning on her heel, the girl moved away from the cottage. Annie and Armin followed her, daunting pain striking their chests. They knew why.
The world seemed to dim as they walked through the rebuilding town. The sun's glow mellowed as time ticked forward, watching the group of three forlornly.
As the bodies of the rumbling's victims returned their matter to the earth, their souls, ageless since birth, returned to humanity's marker. Armin and Annie followed the girl, letting their feet tread lightly over the soils that supported new spring growth, white-bells and green wands of grass. The trees branched forward; birds sat atop them.
They remained with their companion, never drifting too far— even in death.
"How do you know my sister?" was the first question the girl asked.
"I think...I think I know a person who loves her."
Notice the present tense? Armin held no shred of doubt that Eren still loved her.
Even if he was long gone.
"Oh," the girl sounded, lips forming a verbal 'o'. The scenery of the world blurred as they entered a graveyard. Armin's worst fears came true. "She's dead. It's a lost cause."
Her hand motioned the gravestone.
Silence waltzed around them in an uncomfortable propagation. Brown eyes reflected stories of pain and misery.
Annie and Armin's eyes laid upon the name on the grave.
Nozomi Masako,
a loving daughter, sister and nurse.
"Hope," murmured Armin under his breath, reading the translation of the deceased's first name. "How fitting."
Annie looked to the young girl.
"Can you tell us about her?" she asked softly.
"My sister was...one of a kind," the girl answered. "She never wanted to be so easily defined; she was content floating through people's minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable." Her brown eyes flitted to the sky, a luminescent smile appearing before her gaze, memories of the past linking them together in an inescapable bond. "More like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person."
"She sounds interesting. Intelligent."
"She was."
Grief surfaced to old wounds, opening the poorly done stitches. It encompassed the remaining living and breathing individuals, cooping them in a warm, permanent hug.
"She worked as a nurse, following our father's footsteps."
"Did she work at the hospital nearby?" Armin wondered. His strange, incessant tendency to know about the past and the present grew in his chest. He wanted to learn more about the girl who had captured his best friend's heart.
Every tiny detail— if only to find some sort of solace in the fact that, whilst Armin and their friends could not provide Eren with peace, someone else did.
"She did," the girl replied. "She used to go and sit at a particular wooden bench every day, talking to a patient."
The couple was directed to the said bench, the bark weathering away with age and dust.
Ocean eyes peered at two names engraved on the surface, scratchy yet clear as dusk.
Eren and Nozomi were here :)
"She fell in love with him. That Eren."
Thunderstorms awoke in their chest.
There it was.
That piece of information they so desperately needed to hear. Albeit, more so Armin than his wife. His heart erupted with a plethora of emotions: satisfaction, pain, amiability.
"They would sit and talk until twilight had far since arrived. They'd feed the birds together, laugh together, smile together." The young girl exhaled, her breath a fatal tremble. Her lips threatened to quiver with unspoken emotions condensing. "I think that was the happiest I had ever seen my sister."
It took her a while to realise that.
To realise that, sometimes, the smile her sister showed her was not always genuine.
She turned towards them.
"Do you know this Eren?" Nozomi's sister questioned. "Did he survive?"
Armin shook his head, slow and filled with pain and loss. The sister sighed.
They stared in the comfort of their solitude. Their thoughts rampaged in their heads, attempting to connect the dots of a story that they had not lived. That they would only know from sources of ink and memories.
"You know," started the girl, standing beside Armin and Annie, "a few days before the world came to an end, my sister told me about Eren— she called him her strange patient. She told me how she would always visit him and, somewhere along the way, had fallen in love with him."
"Did she know he loved her?" Armin couldn't help but ask.
"She did. That's why it didn't break her heart when he left."
"I don't understand."
"When he left, she told me she knew why." Death sat upon the limbo of life. He watched from the shadows, kicking his legs in a gentle, child-like swing. "She said it was because she felt his death coming for months, the way someone could be under fluorescent candles in a library with no windows, reading some bright page, and gradually feeling the sky outside invisibly cloud over."
Fiery eyes peered at the world, watching humanity rebuild itself after the majority had been rendered to ashes by the feet of giant beasts, the consequence of the foolish.
"She said that, at the time, she could remember those last few times before his fall, how they would sit at their bench and bid each other goodnight when the sun rose from the horizon. How they would light up for a moment, suddenly not old but themselves, her fingers in his hair, his lips on her fingers— Nozomi said that her patient knew she was insecure about her scars, and she said she knew how he was insecure about his mind. That's why he kissed her fingers, and she rambled to let him forget his thoughts."
Rendered speechless, any words died at the tip of Armin's tongue. Annie pressed herself closer to her husband, her chest aching with the waves of empathy.
Oh, how the irony hurt.
Eren, who had loved Nozomi so much, ended her life.
Armin wished hopelessly that they were together now. He could picture it in his head: Eren sitting beside his lover, happy.
If only he had seen the signs beforehand.
If only he had seen how miserable his best friend—his brother— had become.
And yet, the realisation that he and his loved ones were no longer at war with the world—that they were, rather, able to love it wholeheartedly, though their attempts to show this love were sometimes muddled— was an indescribable relief.
The group of traumatised individuals no longer lunged into each day fighting as they had for years. They simply got up and went out into the world, did as much right as they could, fix all the things they did wrong as soon as they were able, and feel an overwhelming gratitude that the war they were fighting was finally over.
Blond hair shifted with the breeze.
A head tilted back, and ocean blue eyes stared at the firmaments above.
They tracked the sky, spotting two birds flying free.