Eren watched as the beautiful monster stood motionless in front of his cell.
That was the only mercy that he was granted now - he'd been here for so long that now almost everyone forgot about the shadow that he'd become, lingering in the same corner of his cell with hollow eyes and a dead personality. The girl stood proud and tall on the other side of the bars, so clean and dainty in comparison to the dark mess that was his home.
He remembered her. He couldn't remember the colour of his own eyes, but god, did he remember her.
H/L H/C hair still managed to have a shine in the absence of light and he knew that if she turned around, he'd be looking into cutting E/C eyes. They had always struck a chord with him every time that she had looked at him - ever since she'd broken into that wagon and grinned a wolf's smile at them, proud and fierce and strong.
But if Armin asked who she was, that meant that he was as aware as Eren was about the fact that she was no longer the girl that he'd once loved as much as he'd loved his siblings. And yet... Though Eren knew as well as anyone what had happened, what the girl was... He still waited with a bated breath, watching for the slightest inclination of the girl's head, needing her to still be there, to still remember who she was to them.
The silence stretched out - too long. The girl was stationary, and although her back was facing Eren, he just knew that there was no expression on that sinfully beautiful face. His suspicions were only proven as a cool, dull voice rang out. "Did you really think that this would work?"
Eren ignored the voice; words meant little to him now. He continued to watch as Mikasa's face altered into one of shock, and the girl turned on her heel to suddenly face him.
She hadn't meant to face him; she just scanned the corridor – both ways. And then her eyes landed on him, and Eren forgot everything else.
Because although her head was not nodding, she was crying.
And Eren could see that with perfect clarity, the tears of grey filling those eyes and then dancing their way down her stone face. And maybe he imagined it – but her head dipped the slightest amount.
By the littlest breath – in fact, the dip could have been her own breathing. But Eren was not a fool; he knew that the girl could have chosen to be a statue, had she wished.
Mikasa sighed from behind Y/N, drawing Eren's attention to her. Mikasa's eyes were already on him, demanding an answer to her question - if he could see anything human within her titan face. Eren took a breath and then did what he knew Y/N was probably trying so hard to do.
He nodded.
And it was Armin - Armin - that smiled a sadistic smile and stepped forwards to the cell gate, silently opening it with ease. They'd picked the lock earlier. Eren didn't move, didn't give Y/N one hint that behind her, her prisoners were opening their gate. Mikasa had only said three words to him as she had passed his cell earlier, and so Eren Yeager was no longer afraid.
As Mikasa swung her fist at the back of Y/N's head, he finally stood up on wobbling legs, his unused knees complaining at the foreign movement. Eren straightened up and stretched, his muscles screaming in pain as he watched his brother rush to his cell to unlock its gate, Mikasa dragging an unconscious Y/N onto her back behind him.
Eren Yeager watched as his cell door finally opened and Mikasa's words to him echoed around his skull.
'Get ready, Eren.'
*
Eren took one step, and then another.
His legs shook so badly that he highly doubted that he would be able to take another.
But he knew that if he failed now, he'd be stuck in this endless hell forever; he was not going to give that future one inch of a possibility. With Mikasa silently creeping away from him and Armin watching him with almost predatory focus, Eren didn't let himself think about the agony in his unused legs as they were suddenly forced to move at a fast pace. Instead, he looked at Y/N's head, which dangled upside down due to her body being slung over Mikasa's shoulder.
One foot in front of the other. Over and over again.
Armin kept himself close, his arm never far from Eren's side. The blond boy's eyes were shimmering with rage and concern and love for the broken boy beside him, but at this moment he merely bottled up his rage behind his gaze. Rage came with noise and screams and yells. Those things simply could not exist at this time, where silence was needed at every moment.
Eren paled slowly as he realized that they were not heading towards the exit, high up on the stairs. Mikasa lead their party through a matrix of twisting corridors, bordered by empty cells. Then, in a heart-stopping moment, she began murmuring.
"Please... Why don't you just nod... Why do you just stand there?"
Eren could have sworn that his heart had stopped in his chest, and it was only Armin's hard-eyed gaze that kept him from stumbling. Mikasa twisted her voice in a strange way, making it echo on the walls over and over again even as they crept on with silent footing. Suddenly, he understood - if anyone heard the absence of sound, they'd come to investigate. Silence was as loud as a scream, sometimes. Mikasa knew this, and so she kept whispering broken sentences of a girl who missed her friend.
He had no idea where they were going, just that it was so far from his cell that he could probably never find his way back. This revelation only brought him into a stunned state, one that glimmered with relief around the edges of his doubts. But that cell had been his for weeks. It had been the only thing that had tethered him to this damned world, the only space that he'd been permitted to stay.
But now that safe space was gone.
There was a possibility for new connections - unstable, unreliable tethers - but connections none the less. Mikasa and Armin were leading him back to a world that would hurt, and scar, and bleed. He was going back to a land that was being ripped apart by war, a land that was confined in fear...
Eren didn't have a chance to finish his thoughts as Armin full on slapped him in the face, the sound only masked by Mikasa's growl, her voice doing a wickedly accurate version of Y/N's own voice. Anyone who had listened would think that Y/N had just slapped someone, not thinking that Armin had just slapped the boy that they'd kept prisoner in the dark for ages. Blue eyes met the dulled green with a silent order - to save panic for later.
Just as Eren was about to raise an eyebrow, asking for when later would be, Mikasa suddenly turned into a cell. Shoving down the instinctual panic that rose through Eren's gut at entering a cell willingly, he followed her into the surprisingly large space with Armin at his back. They stayed silent as Mikasa dumped Y/N on the floor slowly, every sound echoing slightly louder than what was normal. Eren knew that they were now on borrowed time - it was only so long until Y/N's guards figured out their princess was missing.
Armin kept his eyes on the corridor on the other side of the bars, watching for incomers, as Mikasa started prowling the length of the cell. Eren didn't ask anything, watching his siblings move in a harmony that was impossibly in sync, wondering what they were doing, until Mikasa blew out a breath sharply through her nose, attracting both boy's attention. She motioned above her head to where a large stone had a slightly different colouring to the rest of the ceiling stones that was surrounding that one.
He understood a split second before yells tore apart the silence that they'd tried so hard to maintain.
The yells echoed and scared him stupid, making him freeze in terror even as he watched Armin rush over to Mikasa and dig his fingers into the cracks surrounding that one stone. The blond boy shoved with all his might as Mikasa gathered up the fallen princess yet again. The stone groaned as it slid upwards, revealing a cold afternoon sky that was above the mansion's dungeons. No dust fell down – the notion itself making Eren pause and consider. No dust meant that the stone had been moved before.
Before he had time to ponder on that bit of information, real air graced Eren's nose. Before he allowed himself to feel more afraid of the titans that were now coming for them, he heaved himself awkwardly on top of Armin, his desperation making him even more clumsy than his limbs already were. Armin, to his credit, didn't make a single sound of pain even as Eren's bare foot suddenly found itself shoved into his cheek.
Eren stopped caring about the titans the moment that he found himself outside.
His fingers were intertwined with grass, the cool damp adding to his already chilled flesh. His chest - woefully caved inwards and covered in bruises and grazes - was bare, and the only clothing that he had on his frail body were some grey, ratty trousers that looked as though they had been rolled in dirt and worse. But Eren couldn't care as he was suddenly surrounded by air and light and grass.
He suddenly realized that he had been crying - his cheeks damp and his eyes aching at the foreign amount of light. Maybe he'd been crying since he'd seen Mikasa and Armin from his cell but hadn't realized it. He didn't have long to muse on it as he turned and grabbed Armin's hand, pulling desperately to get his brother up through the narrow space. He knew he wasn't making much of a difference, and that Armin was probably doing all of the work, but his muscles were too wrecked to be much help at all.
He sat back on his haunches as Armin then turned to heave Y/N to the surface, and then finally Mikasa. Armin replaced the stone back to where it had been, the outline of it blurred by moss and weeds, and Mikasa hastily hauled Y/N onto a more comfortable position on her back. Eren cast his gaze around - the stone had let them out literally five meters away from the tall walls of the mansion. He hastily looked for windows, but it seemed that this was the back of the mansion - there were no windows except those on the first floor, and they were close enough to the wall that Eren doubted they could see them unless the titans hung themselves out of the window.
"We have to go," Mikasa said to him, and started jogging into the barren forest that surrounded the mansion that had housed Eren for a year. "We have to go right now."
"The titans aren't that stupid," Armin added, "they'll know that we've gotten totally out before long." He fell into pace beside Mikasa. Eren tried to move his legs, but they were weak and trembling. His lungs weren't used to this; they soon began screaming for air as Eren dragged himself at Mikasa's pace. He felt humiliated - he could tell that she was slowing herself down especially for him, even though she had an extra person on her back. But after a year in darkness, Eren supposed that it was only natural that the darkness had become deeply ingrained within him as well.
"Eren, please hurry," Mikasa murmured, her eyes flitting between him and the mansion behind them. Due to the lack of leaves, they were still painfully in view if the titans got through the hole that they had. "We just need to go a bit farther."
Eren wanted to snap at her, something cruel and mean and biting. He would have, if his lungs weren't desperately trying to drag air back into his body, and his throat wasn't calling out for water. He kept quiet except his gasps for air, his ears listening for any pursuers.
"We've been planning this for weeks, since the titans settled here," Armin said to him quietly, as though he were some scared animal. Eren was grateful for the distraction of his brother's voice. "We've had to track the titans across each house they've chosen, since Y/N only led us to the first one. Once they got to this one, we had to find a way in and saw a titan use it by pure luck. We've taken huge risks, camping around. Some days, we'd open the stone and creep around, trying to find where we were and how we could get to it. We've been in that dungeon more times than I can remember, just us, sneaking around in utter terror. I memorized when the titans went on hunting parties - looking for us, for the tracks that we left behind deliberately to lead them away - and it was those days that we got in."
Eren didn't say anything - he had sometimes dreamed that he'd heard people sneaking around the dungeons, their breaths low and threatening. He'd thought he'd been imagining things. "And today?" He gasped, hating himself for the cost to his breathing that merely uttering two words had caused.
"We'd had enough of waiting around," Mikasa answered. "We'd memorized everything. We knew where you were. So, we had to get ourselves caught - and that wasn't hard. We only needed Y/N to come as well, otherwise we'd have been killed on the spot. But of course, Y/N was there, in the hunting party. She's never anywhere else than where she wants to be, right?"
Eren wasn't stupid - he knew that they were trying to distract him from something, to keep him focused on running. And if they were trying to keep him focussed on running, he knew that titans had seen them, somewhere along the way. If he strained his ears, he could have sworn that he could hear sets of very fast legs, probably gaining on them very fast.
His blood thickened in his veins, and he begged his legs to go faster. He didn't miss Armin's face as his friend looked back at him with a silent plea to hurry, to flee faster. "Please," Mikasa begged him, her knuckled tightening from where they were holding onto Y/N's thighs.
And then Eren did a stupid thing.
He tripped.
It had been coming for quite some time now. His legs were spindly little things that looked like they could snap at any moment, and they simply were not used to this much movement. Eren didn't even realize that he'd tripped until the frozen ground suddenly loomed in front of his face, and he blindly threw out his hands to catch himself.
He looked up from the floor almost in slow motion. Mikasa and Armin were looking at him in absolute horror, and he felt sick to his stomach knowing that this had been his one chance, and he'd wasted it. He was then actually sick as he saw his sibling's hesitation.
They were hesitating to stop for him. They knew that he was half-dead and would only fall again if he could get up now. They knew that if they stopped, they had wasted their one chance at salvaging the plan that they'd spent the entire year making, carefully and carefully building it until they were sure they could accomplish it. Eren watched as they looked at him with the same evaluating expression.
The expression that said, as clear as day, 'should we leave him?'
He sobbed in the dirt, his arms failing to lift himself. He started to drag himself towards them, probably looking like a half-crazed lunatic, not caring at the desperation that was surely etched on every line of his body. Mikasa jerked her head at Armin, and Eren nearly gave up right then and there as he watched the boy nod at Mikasa and sprint away, proving Eren's theory that they had been hanging back to account for him. Mikasa's lips tightened as she hoisted Y/N further up her back and stalked over to Eren, standing over him and glaring at someone that Eren could not see.
He decided that he very much did not want to see who it was – not as the simmering, low voice spoke. "Hello, lovely."
"You have no right to touch this boy," Mikasa said, her black eye looking worse in the dying sunlight than they had in the shadows of the dungeon.
"You have no right to take my princess," another female voice snarled, and Eren twisted his head around to watch Annie Leonhardt, Reiner Braun and Bertoldt Hoover surround one of the most attractive males he'd ever seen in his life. Eren could tell that he was a titan immediately, even if his dark curls seemed childlike and innocent. It was etched into his core, that beast in front of him – the monster whose eyes never seemed to leave Mikasa or the girl that she bore.
"She is mine by right," the brown-eyed male said with a sickening smile. "You've seen our rings."
"A bit of metal doesn't mean anything," Mikasa said, placing herself in front of Eren. "You will leave us now and return to your mansion like the good beasties that you are."
A laugh ripped its way through all of the titan's throats. The brown haired one laughed especially loudly, the light gleaming on his pointed teeth. "Ah, lovely human thing," he purred, "you do know how to amuse me."
Eren saw Mikasa's mouth open, but it wasn't with her voice that words were suddenly formed. "Too bad that it wasn't a joke." Eren swore and looked behind him, to where the voice had come from.
And then he fainted.
Because what he had seen had been a small army of humans, wielding swords and bows and flaming torches. Armin stood by the leader, an enormous man with eyes that looked just the same as Armin's, his large eyebrows scrunched in displeasure as he surveyed the little number of titans that was before him.
Armin had come back, and he'd brought reinforcements.
And the relief at that fact brought Eren into a soft, cool world of blackness where he felt everything, and then nothing at all.