Chapter Text
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Peace and freedom are natural enemies. And I, who had loved one enough to murder the other, am still alive between them.
The bag over my head is removed. I blindly latch onto the freezing night air like a starved dog let off its leash. Cold has a taste; you forget that, until you are kept from it.
For several seconds I cannot see. The courtyard is white… I had forgotten what white was. The moon hangs above the wall, low and full enough to even throw shadows. Snow has been packed and trampled into long ridges across the yard, and the prints of many boots run between them. There is the cry of an owl somewhere above the walls, and the long groaning of the gate hinges, and farther off, too far to be inside the city, the iron sound of a bell.
A rifle butt presses into the small of my back, through the thin cloth of my shirt and against the bone.
“Move.”
My ankles are shackled close enough that I can only shuffle. My feet are bare, and the snow crunches beneath them. I grit my teeth against the cold; soon, I won’t feel anything up to my knees…
The wind comes off the plain in long, indifferent strokes. There are no walls now to subdue it, I imagine. I did unwall us. I think of that often, in the cell: that we all lived our lives behind these walls, and I tore the walls down to be free, and that the world I tore them down for is gone. We are an island looking at an empty sea… but we are free now.
I know I am being moved. You can hear a great deal through a stone wall, when you have nothing to do but listen. Given the gravity of our current political state, I understand why moving me had to happen at night. Still, I had wished desperately for a whisper of sunlight every second of being locked away… Undeserving, but still, I dream.
Through the veil of snow, I see a dark silhouette on the other side of the courtyard. As we approach, it takes the shape of a carriage. The soldier who pushes me into it follows me in, knocks twice on the floor with the heel of his boot, and the cart starts moving.
He does not look at me. His face is wrapped against the wind in a frost-stiffened cloth so that only his eyes show. Young eyes; he’s young enough that he must have been a boy when Wall Maria fell. So just at the right age to understand that his whole adult life has been altered by me.
The barrel of his rifle is resting against my chest. I can smell the gun oil; always liked the smell of it. I know he would shoot me right where I’m sitting, but for him to kill me now, he would have to want my death more than his own life. But if he has no future, then…
We move. I drag myself to the window with my hands locked behind me and put my face against the bars to look out, trying to remove some of the snow that still sticks to my feet by rubbing them together. I might have to just endure it until it eventually thaws away.
I had wondered what month it was. Now I know. The snow is too dry to be early winter, too even to be late. December, then. Late December? It has to be seven months ago that we were all repatriated under Historia’s order. I think we entered Mitras through this same road… whoever remained. Back then, it wasn’t snow that concealed the land; it was ashen dust, almost as fine as flour, rising in the air and polluting vision everywhere I looked. It went into the mouth and became a permeating flavor. Anything I ate, the water I drank, it all tasted the same.
The friends who had wanted me alive did not speak to me on that ride once.
When we arrived in Mitras, the markets were boarded shut. People came to the doors of their houses to watch us pass, and their faces were like the ones I had seen in Paths: pale moons that wait at the end of a war. Wary, hungry; curious, having just learned that the world is finite, that it has edges, that those edges have been pushed all the way to their doorsteps. I could hear murmurs of condemnation, calls for retribution.
While Paradis was never united, it also had never been so fractured at the core. People were still frightened from witnessing the Colossals leave their walled confines and commence the attack, recovering from the collateral damage of debris crushing buildings and lives. Some are happy to have lived, I imagine. Most feel immense guilt for being alive, in the grand scope of things.
Historia’s word still stood firm against the newborn military: if Eren Jaeger had been taken alive, he would be returned alive. The Queen’s first compromise with history. The military that had been born out of our emergency did not know whether I was a prisoner, an asset, some prophet, only a criminal, still a weapon… so it chose out of intuition. It was within the interests of the island to safely retrieve me back to Mitras, but I knew they wanted to put me away, and wasted no time doing it. The harbinger of their ultimate freedom in a solitary prison cell…! The same people who clamored for liberation to see me as a walking, living, breathing reminder of the destruction I wrought upon the rest of the world. I don’t think I can blame them; Paradis remains, but in a state of limbo. The people of the island want me dead and alive at the same time. And in the full scope of the state our world is in, I think they must want the same for themselves.
The wind howls outside of the carriage. I close my eyes.
There are more voices in my head than I could ever count, and they all speak at the same time, each of something different, in dialects unknown to me—but I know what they are saying—talking to people I never knew. They are saying their own names, calling for their mothers. There are so many of them that I often cannot find my own thoughts in the noise. Sometimes I think this is what is meant by inheritance: a debt that has come due, a debt I cannot repay, because the creditors are dead and I killed them.
I wish I had foreseen this outcome.
✣
Hours pass. When the cart finally stops, the bag goes back over my head before I am led blind through stone corridors and down stairs. The air thickens again soon. A door swings on its hinges. I am pushed forward, and the door closes. The locks engage one after another—three of them?—and then the boots of the men retreating up the stairs, and then nothing.
The bag is left over my head. They forgot to take it off… Or perhaps paid no mind to leaving it on. I work it off against the wall by rubbing the top of my skull against the stone, which hurts more than I expected, because the wound at my hairline opens again. Finally, the bag falls to the floor.
This cell is to be my home. It is smaller than the last one. There is no bed, no chair, no bucket to piss and shit in. A grating in one corner of the floor for that. A small grille in the door, head-height, through which a guard might look in if he chose to. The walls are of damp, with white residue of salt blooming along the seams.
A real voice comes through the grille: “You’re here until they decide what to do with you. If it was me, you’d be in the ground.” Then he spits. I hear it hit the door. His boots go away.
It sounds like there’s no one else on this floor but me. Slowly, I lean backward against the wall and slide down against it to sit.
My hands are still bound behind me, ankles still shackled also. I have taken my regeneration for granted these many years; the cuffs have dug blisters into me. I dribble some spit down on my leg to lubricate the soreness. Don’t know why I assumed I would be given any freedom at all. I had thought, in the carriage, that I might allow myself to want something. To want, for instance, a warm fire. Or to want a drink of water whenever I pleased. To want, before sleep, to know what day of the week it was.
There were paths in which I died. I have walked them all. There were paths in which Paradis fell, in which Marley triumphed, in which the world was spared and we were exterminated. I walked those too. In none of them was I supposed to be imprisoned, alive, seven months after the end. In none of them did the curse lift.
I’ve been wringing my brain dry for answers. But I have also begun to find I do not care. The greatest gift that has come since the curse lifted is a great apathy. Redemption is a foreign word now. Forgiveness, too. But suicide, like a mother, stands by, stretching its hands toward my body. She speaks to me every day.
No answer absolves me. I cannot make my body stop. It eats what is pushed under the door. It sleeps when it has to. It pisses in the grate. It heals slowly from injuries it would, last year, have closed in minutes. It has begun to remember being a boy.
Eren. Eren, your father is calling. Eren. Eren, the basement. Eren, get up. Eren, get up, get up, get up.
✣
The sudden jangle of keys against the cell’s lock startles me out of sleep.
My eyes snap up and stare at the shaking handle. Hope is a humiliating reflex. I don’t get visitors, and I barely get food. For a moment, I am afraid, and, for the first time in months, awake—like a real person. My heart goes. If they have come to kill me, at night…
Then, the door is finally pushed open. And there, in the doorway, stands Levi.
He has visited me before this, in my head. He has come into rooms like this one in many of the dreams I have had. In some of those dreams, he killed me. He never said very much in any of them.
I pull my legs closer to my body, shrinking under his presence. Truly the last person I expected to walk in. He is also the first to actually do so. In the seven months back on Paradis, no one has come to see me. Perhaps they’re not allowed to, but maybe enough time has passed now…
The lock clicks behind him, and the room feels even smaller. Levi stands with his back flat against the door, right hand firmly holding the wrist of the other. The bolstered shoulders of his black coat are dusted with melting snow, as is his dark hair, retaining drops of water onto the woolen fabric. They have put him in the new uniform, the Military Police black. He must hate it. The pale light cuts a deeper shadow into every single line on his skin, and a large, wide scar, hooking into his eye, runs down the right side of his face. He looks… nothing like himself…
Then his eyes meet mine, and he looks exactly like himself.
I sit, unmoving, as if he couldn’t see me then. I even try to breathe with my stomach to keep my shoulders from riding up. Our eyes are locked. I’m not sure if I remember how to speak; makes me wonder if I can even find a voice again. Even the voices are quiet.
“They are going to kill you,” Levi says, finally, in the same voice he has always had. “Do you know that?”
I don’t flinch, don’t break the stare we’re holding. I see the struggle in his eyes, there. I know he wrestles plenty with his own internal conflict, torn between the desire to condemn and the will to preserve. I also know which part of him always trumps the other.
“They want a stage for it. There is not much of a world left to watch the show, so they will have to settle for the island.” Levi slides down into a squat, eyes never leaving mine. Desperation settles in the lines of his face. The melting snow on his boots has formed a small puddle…
“It’s the only way,” I say. “Or have you come to do it yourself?”
“You changed the course of history,” he says, “of nations, all destroyed. Do you even know how many people you killed?”
Yes. I know… Of course I know… I want to tell him I have seen it. I want to tell him that the children born after the Rumbling will be sicker than their parents, and their children sicker still, and that in three generations the Eldian race will be a kind of ghost living in its own home; that I chose this future not because it was good but because the others were worse. I want to tell him about the path in which there was no Paradis. The path in which the walls came down and Marleyan soldiers walked through Shiganshina, and what they did to the children there. I want to tell him about Kruger smoking on a deck in the dark. I want to tell him that I am full of other men, other women, other lives and deaths in all of their equal measure…
But Levi does not have the room in him for that.
I draw a shaky breath. “It’s the only way. You have to believe me.”
“Say something else.”
“What do you want me to say? I saw the paths. All of them. I saw the path in which I did nothing. We negotiated, and the children of the children of this island were extinguished in a single afternoon by a weapon I cannot describe, because the words for it do not exist in our language yet.”
He shakes his head. “This is no one’s freedom. We are all that is left of the world now. There is nothing else. With no threat to the island, what do you think happens to a nation when there’s only one nation? You will never protect people from themselves. You destroyed Paradis.”
I firmly stare at him. “How? You are all alive.”
“For how long? You left us to a death in isolation and gave us a world stripped of any balance or diversity. An island of inbred children; was that your goal here? How long until we turn on each other? How long until there’s nothing left?”
“You don’t know what I’ve seen,” I murmur. “ But you do know what impossible choices are.”
Levi questions it with a frown.
“I lived every existing outcome of this. I asked the questions, so I also knew the answers. You have to understand that this was the only way. I would not lie to you now.”
“How do you make decisions for the entire world?”
How could I possibly convey the millennia of knowledge surging in my brain? What I say sounds too simple for what it is. “It was thrust into my hands! All I could do with that power was to ensure your survival… and protect, at least, the people I care about.”
“But none of us asked for this,” says Levi. “Did we?”
There is a part of me that still believes he can be reasoned with…
“I’ve seen paths where we perish, where Marley triumphs, where Paradis falls,” I continue, like I was pleading for understanding. “I couldn’t allow for those outcomes. There was only one flaw in all of it: I should not have come out of it alive. I knew that, going in. I built the plan on that. It needs my death to work, Levi. If I live, the cycle does not break. I need you to kill me.”
“No.” Levi covers his face with the palm of his hand and rubs his eyes using his ring finger and thumb. The missing index and middle fingers have left a wide gap, but the short stubs of those knuckles still move. I find it… off-putting. “Your death won’t bring any peace,” he says in a tired voice, muffled against his hand. “You’ve set into motion forces that won’t be easily subdued. Easily, or at all.”
“You have to do it before they make a ceremony of it. Just do it now, here, with your own hands, and walk out, and tell them whatever you want. Tell them I attacked you. Or that I begged. Tell them I was going to shift and had to be put down. They will believe anything you say. You could be out of the city before dawn. You could be anywhere…”
"If I killed you tonight," he says, slowly, "the Jaegerists would have their martyr by morning, and Historia's government would fall within the month. The country would lose the last functioning institution it has.” Levi lets his head drop back against the cell door. He closes his eyes. “Death will not absolve you. And you don’t get to die.”
He starts to slowly rise from his squat.
“No. No, wait.” I don’t know what I’m doing, shuffling toward him on my knees. “Please. Please, Levi, you have to do it now.” My hands try to jerk out of the cuffs, as if they had a mind of their own. “It’s the only way…! The only way…”
“Years ago, I swore I would kill you myself.” Slowly, he drops back down, leveling the distance between us, and whispers: “I didn’t then, and so I won’t now. You lived for a reason, whatever it may be. Your life might still be worth something here, Eren.”
My name! He says my name the same way he always has… Hearing it come from his mouth is the first thing in months that has reached the part of me that is still a person.
My head drops down and I bite back tears of defeat. “Then why did you come?”
For the first time, he hesitates. “I don’t know. To give you this.” Levi reaches his hand down the inner pocket of his coat and pulls out an indiscernible object, wrapped in a linen cloth.
“I don’t need anything,” I mumble.
“I heard they’re starving you.”
“I would have to eat it off the ground, anyway.”
Levi leans to the side and inspects the chains holding my hands together. “Don’t they take the cuffs off?”
“Not anymore.”
“How do you normally eat?”
I look up at him and reiterate: “Off the ground.”
“Treating you like an animal...” He unfolds the linen to reveal a buttered, thick loaf of rye bread, and breaks it in half. My mouth waters faster than I thought; the last time I ate anything was so long ago. “Here. Eat. Just not too fast.” Levi inches the bread closer to my mouth. “And chew.”
We are doing this like a man feeding a sick dog. But it tastes so wonderful compared to what I’ve been eating all these months that I want to cry again. I have to hold back from taking another bite before fully chewing the first. The butter is oily and salty, melting in a perfect combination with the dense dough. He allows me to eat in silence, and mostly seems to inspect my state of being—what clothes I’m wearing, and what I look like.
“You can’t even shift anymore,” Levi silently says while feeding me the last piece. “There’s no reason to bar you of so much movement.”
“There is. I tried to kill myself the second I was alone.”
“How?”
“Lift the hair from my forehead.”
He uses the right hand to do it. I don’t know whether he meant to; it is the hand that is closer to me… He may not be thinking about it. But it is the maimed hand that comes up, and the three fingers that are left of it push the hair back from my temple. The pads of the thumb and the ring finger and the little finger, cool, faint…
His breath is on my face, all over it. It is the closest he has been to me in many years now. He is also a body. He is also a body…
His eyes flash in horror. “Of course… You don’t regenerate either,” Levi murmurs, inspecting the sutured wound by my hairline. “When was this?”
“Some time… I really don’t know, a while ago.”
“What did you do?”
“Slammed my head into the wall until I couldn’t see.”
We sit with this. I find I cannot look at him. He finds, I think, that he cannot look at me either.
“It’s infected,” Levi quietly says.
I’m aware. I’ve been feeling my heart pound in my head for a couple of days now.
He lets my hair go and leans back. “That’s a miserable way to die. You already killed so many people. Don’t take the life of another, even if it’s your own.” He stands and straightens his coat, preparing to leave.
As he turns to open the door, I shuffle in place. “Levi…?”
He pauses, back still turned. For a moment I don’t even know what I meant to ask.
“How are they?” I whisper.
Levi hesitates, hand gripping the doorknob. The silence stretches out.
“Alive,” he finally answers. “Trying to rebuild. Everyone is.”
“Alright.” My breath catches at the simple confirmation I needed. “Thank you.”
“I’m not doing it for you,” Levi replies. And with that, he opens the door and steps out, leaving me alone in the cell again. The door closes behind him with a loud thud, and he locks it again, pulling at the handle to make sure I don’t find a way out.
✣