Lena sat on a random cot, one of the many that had been set up in a large room at Trost's headquarters, so the soldiers could have a place to rest for a few hours during the night. She was hunched over, elbows resting on her knees slightly apart, staring at her blood-stained boots. Next to her, Sasha had laid down on another cot and was staring blankly at the ceiling. Nearby were also Krista and Ymir.
Lena reached a hand down to one of her boots to scratch a dried stain, wondering whose blood it was. By now it was probably too late to want to remove it. She remembered her uncle, who whenever he got splashed while gutting an animal would always run to rub the garment with water. If you don't clean the blood right away, there's no way to get it off, he used to tell her. Well, there went her boots. Hopefully she could request new ones if she said she had outgrown them, although she was already on her second pair.
As she sat up again, she realized how constricting her harness felt, after having spent most of the day flying. With a little groan, she tugged at the heel of her boots until they were off, and then unhooked the harness, leaving it all at the foot of her cot, ready to put it back on in a few hours.
At last she stretched out on the mattress, and the first thing she noticed was the crushing exhaustion that immediately overcame her. The second thing was the deafening silence that flooded the room, broken only by a few soft sobs. Third, the overwhelming wave of memories. She covered her eyes with a forearm and let her mind recreate the events of that day.
__
The nearby officers had ordered them to meet at headquarters shortly after the Colossal's appearance, where a senior Garrison officer instructed them to resupply with gas so they could begin the defense plan. There she met with Sasha and the others.
"Lena!"
Lena ran to her as soon as she heard her name and the two merged in a trembling embrace.
"The titan... We saw... Right above, the titan... A lightning bolt..."
Lena stroked her back to reassure her. "Ssh. Breathe, Sash... You can tell me later..."
Immediately they were separated into squads and set to fight. The order was for the Garrison soldiers to take the vanguard, and the most skilled were called upon to ensure the evacuation of the civilians. In the middle were the green cadets, freshly graduated, who had not even chosen yet which branch they would devote their lives to. Which for many ended that day.
The first big blow for Lena was Mina.
Hours after the chaos began, when the retreat bells finally rang, the cadets gathered at the top of several buildings, from where they could see the immense advance that the titans had already made. The collective mood was disheartening, for to top it all off, they were running out of gas and could not get over the wall.
Lena overheard Connie talking to Jean about how to get to the supply building. They were discussing who would dare lead such a plan, when Mikasa arrived asking for Eren. That's when Lena became aware of Armin's presence, as Reiner pointed out to Mikasa where she could find him. He was kneeling behind a wall, and seemed to want to melt into the ground.
Mikasa approached him and said something, most likely asking him about Eren's whereabouts, though Lena couldn't hear it. What she did hear was the boy's response, who shouted out the names of the members of his squad, killed in the fight.
"Mina Carolina...!"
Lena was petrified in her place. It couldn't be true. She couldn't have died. Earlier that morning they had eaten breakfast together and admired Commander Smith. They were going to the Garrison together. And now... she'd been... eaten?
__
Lena felt her eyes sting as they slowly filled with tears in her cot, and she rubbed them with her forearm. She couldn't cry. She was surrounded by people.
He thought about the last name that had come out of Armin's mouth. Eren Jaeger. He'd been the second shock of the day. Eren was... a titan? Eren was a goddamn titan.
Lena remembered feeling deep grief when Armin announced his friend's death in front of Mikasa. The three of them were inseparable, and she couldn't even imagine the pain they had to be feeling. However, only a couple of hours later, Commander Dott Pixis of the Garrison was announcing that Eren was not only alive, but the subject of a military experiment, and therefore, a titan.
Lena lowered her arm to the side of her body and focused on the ceiling, thinking, looking for a way in which that could be possible. How? Her fellow cadet who kept talking about the Survey Corps, about killing all the titans, was one of them! That opened up a whole world of possibilities. Could normal people become titans? Could they be used as a weapon from then on? That would be a huge step forward in dealing with them, as the young man had proved by killing about twenty of them and plugging the hole created by the Colossal.
Lena brought her hands to her head and scratched hard, her brain almost aching with the illogic of what she had witnessed.
The third blow was towards the end of the day, after Eren had already placed the boulder in the wall.
__
Lena had separated from her group, and was trying to return to the meeting point when, from the roof of a building, she saw two bodies that caught her attention. Among all the jackets with embroidered roses, the emblem of the Garrison, that were scattered in the streets covering bloodied bodies, she saw two with swords, the emblem of the Training Corps. One covered a stocky legless body, and as she approached it she recognized Franz's shaven head.
Near him, a dismembered body, copper hair pulled back in a ponytail, and the face covered with small freckles. Hannah. Hannah and Franz, so inseparable in life, had been together until the last moment.
Lena fell to her knees and puked on the cobblestones. She remembered with pain how close they had been throughout the Training, always denying that they felt anything for each other, and she wished with all her heart that in private they could've shared some tender, honest moment, that they had confessed their love for each other before it had ended that way. She wondered who'd died first, who'd had to watch their special person be torn to pieces like that.
__
Lena heard a small snore nearby. She looked over to the cot next to her and saw Sasha asleep, illuminated by the faint moonlight streaming through the windows. She stared at her for a few seconds and sighed, relieved to still have her in her life. After witnessing death so closely, she didn't even want to imagine such pain.
However...
Her mind wandered to a thought she'd been trying to keep deep in her subconscious for hours. She didn't want it to resurface, didn't want to face it. But the more she fought against it, the sharper the image of her freckled friend became in her head.
For she hadn't heard from Marco for hours.
Since the afternoon, after Eren had blocked the hole and the Survey Corps forces had arrived, no one had seen him. She didn't want to jump to conclusions, but she'd seen everyone else before they retired for the night, even if only from afar. Connie, Armin, Bertholdt, Jean, Annie, Reiner, Mikasa, Krista, Ymir... They had all made it to the night.
Lena had been next to Marco when he'd led them in shooting out the eyes of the titans that had invaded the basement of the supply building. She remembered seeing him during Pixis' speech and at some point when they had to fight the titans again. But then she lost track of him. And she was scared to ask.
Lena felt the lump in her throat close with fury and panic and her eyes fill with tears. Silently, she sat up, put on her boots and went out to find somewhere she could be alone. She walked down torchlit corridors, climbed stairs and opened doors until she came to one that led to a small terrace at the top of the building. She settled on the floor against the cold wall, missing her father's jacket, and began to sob. She allowed herself to cry and wail like she couldn't remember doing since she was a little kid, at her parents' house. She thought of Mina, Thomas, Hannah and Franz, and begged the heavens that Marco was alive.
Clouds of mist came out of her open mouth every time she heaved, due to the chill of the spring night, but she hugged her knees and stayed there until she felt her eyes close with sleep. Then she returned to her cot, where she could no longer hear anything but the deep breaths of the female soldiers. She lay down and fell asleep almost instantly.
* * *
"Lena... Hey, Carrots... Wake up..."
Lena jerked awake as she was lightly jolted, and found Sasha's sleeping face looking at her closely. She pushed herself up and sat on the edge of the cot, rubbing the palm of one hand over her eyes. "Have I overslept?"
"Yes, you didn't wake up with the bells or the noise of everyone getting up," the brunette told her without taking her eyes off her. "I was getting a little worried."
"I'm okay, it's just... it took me a while to fall asleep last night."
Sasha looked at her as if she understood perfectly why she had slept so poorly. "Right.. Come on, they said we can wash up and get a clean uniform."
To Lena, those words sounded like glory. The night before they hadn't even had time to wash and had had to sleep in their dirty, sweaty uniforms after spending the whole day in hell. She grabbed her boots and harness and headed for the bathrooms with her friend.
Due to the atypical number of soldiers who'd had to spend the night in the building, there was a long line to get into the bathrooms, and when it was finally their turn they had an officer yelling at them to hurry up. Still, being able to at least run cold water over her face and sore limbs, to get even a layer of grime off, helped her feel better.
Then they went to the mess hall, where they were handed rations to take with them, having no time to sit down to breakfast. In the queue they met several of their fellow cadets from 104th, but no one had time or energy to talk. They grabbed their rations and quickly made their way to where they'd be given their orders.
They were divided into small squadrons, along with veteran Garrison soldiers, and told the tasks for the day. There were still a few titans left around the city, but they were to be taken care of by the elite. The task for Lena and the rest was to 'clean up'. She didn't understand at first, but soon realized what it meant.
They had to clean up the dead. Leave the city free of corpses, which were to be piled up and then burned on pyres, to prevent the spread of disease.
If Lena had thought she'd been in hell the day before, this was beyond it. By far. They had nothing but gloves and a handkerchief to cover their noses. So they had to dedicate themselves to the task of collecting mutilated bodies and scattered limbs all day long.
Trost was engulfed in a sepulchral silence, except for the cannons that continued to sound all day to support the Scouts in finishing off the last titans. Lena was put in a squad with soldiers she didn't know, so she had no one to talk to. She gritted her teeth, put her brain on automatic mode and tried to control the retching and shaking of her hands as she went about her duty.
They paused for lunch, but she couldn't manage to eat. It wasn't until the evening that her stomach complained of hunger, and at dinner she ventured to try a few bites. She met up with the rest of the cadets in the mess hall, with the exception of Armin, Mikasa and Eren, who had been taken to the Interior, and she didn't see Jean either. Still, no one said a word. They all ate in silence, those who could afford to keep food in their stomachs, and then retired to the rooms where they had slept the night before.
Marco was still missing.
* * *
The next day was the same as the previous one, with the exception of a novelty about the titans that made the stomachs of those present turn. Lena didn't think she'd see anything so gruesome after seeing people being literally mutilated. But she was wrong.
What they found was some sort of huge regurgitated balls, inside of which were the soldiers the titans had eaten. Lena wasn't the only one to throw up the little food she'd put in her body those two days.
That night she went to the bathroom before dinner, although she had no intention of putting anything in her mouth after what her eyes had witnessed that morning. She needed to freshen up a bit before going to bed. She didn't know when they would return to their barracks, when they would leave for their next destinations, when she would be able to have a proper bath.
After washing up as best she could, she left the bathroom and headed for the mess hall. As she rounded a corner, her eyes unfocused and her mind elsewhere, she almost ran straight into a soldier, who was just as lost as she was. She raised her eyes momentarily to apologize, then saw that it was Jean. The boy looked at her with some confusion until he realized it was her. Immediately his expression changed, his eyebrows tensed, his eyes widened, showing a deep sorrow that Lena had never seen on his face. His lips parted slightly as he took a breath, as if he wanted to say something, but he remained silent. And so Lena knew.
The two stared at each other for several seconds, silently sharing understanding and grief, Jean's eyes wide in shock, Lena's filled with sorrow. Then Jean averted his gaze and went on his way, and Lena stood there, her brain too affected to give any commands to her limbs.
Lena felt her heart pound violently and painfully in her chest, so much so that she felt it in her ears, her breathing quickened and she felt tears flood her eyes. She forced her feet to move, took trembling steps to nowhere in particular and minutes later found herself on the terrace where she'd cried the night before. And there she repeated the process. She cried, wailed and heaved, this time with the certainty that Marco was never coming back.
After a couple of hours, she returned to the room where they slept, the building already plunged into the silence of the night. She zigzagged between the cots where her fellow female soldiers slept until she got to her own.
"Lena?," Sasha whispered when she saw her. She sat up quickly and walked over to her bed. "I didn't know you weren't going to dinner, I brought you-"
She lost her train of thought when she sat down next to her and saw her friend's face, which Lena had tried to hide by keeping her head down.
"What happened?," she asked softly, resting a hand on Lena's leg.
She tried to control her trembling voice as she spoke. "I ran into Jean..."
Sasha let out a long, deep sigh. "Did he tell you...?"
Lena shook her head, fighting the lump in her throat caused by the obvious confirmation in her friend's question. "He didn't have to."
Lena watched her friend nodding out of the corner of her eye, then she leaned against her shoulder, drew in a shaky breath and began to sob. Lena shifted so she could hug her and clenched her eyes and jaw tight, fighting back the flood of tears that threatened to fall like waterfalls down her cheeks if she didn't control herself. Soon enough, she lost the fight and the two shared the weeping and the pain for the friend they'd lost.
"How could everything change so quickly?," Lena asked in a mushy voice.
"This is the world we live in. That's why we must stick together," Sasha answered in a whisper.
Lena pulled away slightly so she could look at her face, her brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"
"Just before the Colossal appeared...," she explained as she wiped her cheeks with her fingers, "several of us mentioned the possibility of joining the Scouts."
What...?
Lena shook her head, alarmed at her friend. "Sasha, you... you have to go with the Military Police! The Interior is the only safe place."
"For how long though? Today was... At any moment they can come back and tear down Wall Rose. Then the only habitable place will be the Interior. Do you know how much trouble there will be among the citizens alone? The Military Police won't be able to contain it all. And not only that, if titans keep coming in, at some point the MPs will have to fight too."
Lena thought of the amount of bloody roses she saw in the streets of Trost those two days, embroidered on jackets covering corpses of Garrison soldiers. She imagined them transforming into unicorns, and among the corpses she saw a brown head of hair pulled back in a ponytail.
"Sasha..."
"I'm not saying I've decided, it's just... I'm trying to put it in perspective. In the Survey Corps we'd be trained by specialist titan slayers. We'd have the best training."
She wasn't wrong, as scary as it was for Lena to admit it. She let out a long sigh, unable to continue the conversation that way. Sasha moved forward the hand she'd had behind her back as she hugged her, then Lena saw that she was holding a small package.
"What's that?"
"Oh," she said as if she'd forgotten, "I brought you something to eat. You must be famished, and even if you're not, eating is important."
Lena took the package she offered and opened it, revealing one of the typical, rather bland but protein-packed military rations they were given when sitting down to eat wasn't an option.
She ran the back of her hand over her nose, wet from crying. "Right..."
"I know it doesn't look the best, but you should eat," Sasha urged her. "A full belly makes the pain go away better."
"Thank you, Sash," said Lena, touched by her friend's gesture. She felt a sudden surge of appreciation for her and needed to say it out loud. "Hey... You know you're my best friend, right?"
Sasha gave her a soft grin, her eyes still moist. "And you're mine."
"Things have changed so much these two days that... I want you to know that I love you." She looked down, a little nervous as it was the first time she said it out loud. "And I appreciate everything you've done for me."
Sasha stared at her with wide eyes, then looked down and giggled. "I love you too, Carrots. Oh, how lucky I was to find you that day on the road, like a beautiful orange stray kitten."
Lena smiled softly and put the ration in her mouth. It was tasteless, as she expected.
"I'm going to try to sleep," said Sasha while getting up, glad to see her friend eating. "We have another long day tomorrow."
"Get some rest, Sash."
"Good night."
* * *
The next day the tedious reconstruction work began, starting with clearing the rubble. It was a physically hard task, but Lena would have gladly taken it a thousand times before having to keep picking up mutilated bodies. Meanwhile, a large group of soldiers were called to prepare the pyres where that night they would burn the remains of those who had fallen in battle.
When evening came, after supper, Lena gathered with her friends around one of the pyres, which were about to be lit. She noticed that Jean had straggled behind, and looking around she found him sitting against the wall, his chin resting on his forearms. This time Lena didn't need any internal dialogue to know that the right thing to do was to go show him support. She knew there were no words that could comfort him, but at least she could be present and let him know he was not alone.
So she headed toward him. When she was a few steps away, he raised his head slightly to see who was approaching, but his expression didn't change, and he looked down again. Lena leaned her back against the wall beside him, thinking what would be the best course of action. She lowered a hand to rest on his shoulder and squeezed lightly, checking his reaction. As he didn't reject her, she bent her knees and lowered herself to the ground until she ended up sitting like him, hugging her knees, close enough to feel his warmth, but not quite touching.
Jean sighed after a few seconds of silence and rubbed his nose slowly against his knuckles.
"You wouldn't happen to know how it happened?," he asked in a barely audible murmur.
Lena shook her head slightly and spoke softly. "I lost track of him. I was hoping you could tell me."
This time it was he who shook his head. "I just found..."
Jean sighed, unable to finish the sentence. There was no need, Lena understood, and her heart broke again. Finding the corpse of one of her friends had been her greatest fear when the cleanup began. The fact that Jean had to go through that caused her immense grief for him.
"I'm so sorry, Jean..."
He didn't say anything, he kept his gaze on the floor and his mouth resting on his hands.
After a while, the pyre-lighting ceremony began.
"Come on, it's starting," said Lena standing up.
After walking a few steps, she realized that he wasn't following her. When she turned around she found that the boy hadn't moved, he'd only hidden his face a little more between his hands. Lena went back to him, leaned down and carefully took one of his hands, as if to give him time once again to reject her show of support if he didn't feel comfortable. But he made no resistance. He looked up at her and let her tug on his wrist, giving up to her.
"Come with me," Lena said softly, her eyes fixed on his as she took a few steps back so she could lift him up, forcing him back to reality, but silently reassuring him that he didn't have to face it alone.
When he was up, Lena let go of his wrist and instead grabbed his hand, warm and rough. She gave it a little squeeze and tugged on it again until he began to walk beside her, and he responded by slowly curling his fingers around hers. Lena guided him to the pyre where the others were, already lit. Only then did she let go.
Lena watched her fellow cadets. They were serious, exhausted and frightened. Connie was crying on the ground, and Jean soon bent down, picked up a handful of bones and whispered something. Then he stood up and announced that he'd made his decision. With tears in his eyes and his voice stricken, he declared that he was going to join the Survey Corps.
Lena felt her heart skip a beat.
No one else said anything. They all silently watched the flames, their hearts aching for the comrades they were saying farewell to, their minds divided by the decision they had to make.