(Annie's Perspective)
Sweat ran down her jaw and struck the dry earth, leaving dark marks behind.
Annie Leonhart held a standard fighting stance, her breathing steady.
Her icy blue eyes were fixed on Reiner Braun across from her.
His attacks were broad and powerful, but they also carried the impatience of someone desperate to prove himself.
"Too slow, Braun! Your movements are telling the enemy where you intend to strike!" the instructor bellowed from the edge of the field.
Annie paid him no attention.
The instant Reiner swung a heavy punch, she sidestepped, blocked, slipped inside his guard, and drove her elbow precisely beneath his ribs.
Reiner let out a muffled grunt, and his offensive collapsed.
She did not press the attack. She merely retreated silently to her original position.
Like a machine that had completed its assigned command.
"Did you see that? Efficiency! Precision! Well done, Leonhart!" The instructor's voice held approval.
Behind that approval lay an even heavier expectation—
"Keep it up. You bear Marley's future and the honor of the Eldians."
Honor?
There was only emptiness inside Annie.
It was nothing more than bait and shackles, used to drive Eldians like them ever onward.
She caught sight of her father standing at the edge of the field.
Complex emotions intermingled in his clouded eyes—expectation, fear, and a kind of pain she could not fully understand.
That gaze suffocated her more than any training ever could.
She had to become a Warrior.
She had to inherit the power of the Titans.
She had to complete her mission.
This was the path prescribed for her, the sole meaning of her existence.
Every training session, every word of praise, bound her more tightly to this track leading toward a predetermined end.
There was nowhere to run.
-----------------
(Aeternus's Perspective)
Time passed quietly amid the scent of grass and the lowing of cattle.
Aeternus was ten years old.
His body had grown sturdier, and at times a calmness far beyond his years flickered between his brows.
His friendship with Historia deepened through their secret adventures by the stream and their everyday companionship.
Seeing more and more genuine smiles on her face was a rare comfort in his burdensome life.
Yet when night fell and his consciousness sank into that white sea of sand, Aeternus faced an entirely different world.
And an entirely different "her."
After a year together in the [Paths], the two had become considerably more familiar through their peculiar teacher-student relationship.
Aeternus had finally learned her name: Annie Leonhart.
But beyond that, she had told him nothing.
Still, judging by the way she dressed like a commoner yet knew nothing at all about the life of farmers, Aeternus suspected she might be a human from Outside the Walls.
During their most recent meetings in the [Paths], Aeternus had keenly noticed a change in Annie.
The exhaustion surrounding her was no longer merely the physical fatigue that followed training.
It carried a heavy weariness of the soul, as though her spirit had been hollowed out.
During their sparring, her attacks occasionally bore a viciousness that had not been there before, almost as though she were venting something.
At other times, she would suddenly lose herself in thought.
Complex, indecipherable emotions churned within her icy blue eyes—
Reluctance, suppressed rage, and even a trace of... deeply buried fear?
Tonight, that abnormality was especially apparent.
Annie was even quieter than usual.
She merely repeated several basic grappling and countering techniques over and over, mechanically.
She put so much force into them that Aeternus found them difficult to withstand.
As if she were confirming something through this method, or releasing pressure that had nowhere else to go.
"Annie?"
After she threw him onto the sand with a technique far harsher than usual, Aeternus did not immediately get back up.
Unable to hold it in, he spoke, genuine concern in his voice.
"Are you... all right?"
Annie froze.
She stood there, breathing faintly hard.
Though no sweat truly existed here, it seemed as if it had soaked the blond hair across her forehead.
She did not look at Aeternus.
Her empty gaze rested on the pillar of light in the distance, as though she wanted to see through the void beyond that radiance.
"I..." she began, her voice hoarse and dry, carrying a rare tremor that nearly broke through her cold shell. "...became a Warrior candidate."
The words were like a boulder cast into stagnant water.
They raised towering waves within Aeternus's heart.
A Warrior candidate!
That term was intimately connected, in his memories, to the Titan power of the Marleyan Empire!
Annie... truly was from Outside the Walls!
And she was about to set foot on a cruel, dangerous road toward inhuman power.
He suppressed his shock and did not press her for details. That would be far too dangerous.
He simply remained lying on the ground and said in a concerned tone,
"It sounds... difficult."
That simple response, nearly a meaningless platitude, seemed unexpectedly to touch some soft corner of Annie that she had never revealed.
Her taut shoulders slackened slightly.
But she said nothing.
Aeternus hesitated for a moment, then decided to take a risk.
He slowly sat up. He did not move closer, merely gazing at the same false sky.
In a slightly lost tone, as though speaking to himself, he said,
"Sometimes... I feel as though I don't entirely belong here either."
He paused, feeling his heart thump powerfully within his chest.
This was the deepest secret he had never revealed to anyone under any circumstances.
"Sometimes... strange images flash through my mind. Memories that aren't mine... fragments of a completely unfamiliar person's life, filled with things I've never seen before. It's confusing, and also... lonely."
He had said it.
His heart nearly leaped into his throat.
It was the greatest degree of honesty he could possibly offer.
He had exposed his most vulnerable, most unspeakable side before this still-uncertain "ally."
The sea of sand fell into deathly silence.
Annie abruptly turned her head.
For the first time, she looked at Aeternus not with a purely appraising or instructive gaze, but with shock and disbelief.
Her icy blue eyes flickered violently.
She seemed to be assessing the truth of his words, weighing the intentions that might be concealed behind them.
A long time passed.
So long that Aeternus thought she would be frightened away by this "strangeness," or grow even more guarded—
Yet Annie let out an exceedingly faint, almost imperceptible... sigh of relief.
It was an extraordinarily subtle resonance: So I am not the only one.
In a world filled with orders, expectations, and pretense, there was another person who also carried fragments that did not belong to them.
Another person who felt the loneliness of not fitting in with everything around them.
She did not ask about Diablo's memories, nor did she comment on how absurd they sounded.
She merely hugged her knees tighter and buried half her face in the crook of her arms again.
Her muffled voice emerged, carrying the bottomless exhaustion of someone who had let down her disguise.
"...Father says this is glory. That it is... our only way out."
Her voice was soft, as though a gust of wind could scatter it.
But the weight contained within it pressed down so heavily that Aeternus could scarcely breathe.
She was questioning it. She was lost.
And this vulnerability, which she could never speak of to anyone, she revealed only the slightest trace of here, in this strange, isolated sea of sand, to this equally "abnormal" boy from Inside the Walls.
She said nothing more about the Warriors, Marley, or her father's expectations.
But that silence itself was already an answer.
A fragile trust that surpassed words.
Aeternus said nothing more, either.
He sat quietly beside her, sharing the deathly "peace" of the sea of sand.
Between them stood the barriers of their worlds, the difference in their identities, and the uncertainty of the future.
Yet at that moment, they seemed like the two loneliest particles in the universe.
They had met because of some inexplicable error.
And within eternal nothingness, they briefly and vulnerably confirmed each other's existence.
They cast a small, warm stone into the desolate inner world of the other.
When the familiar sensation of separation came over them, Annie raised her head and shot Aeternus a quick glance.
Her gaze was no longer cold.
Instead, it held a complicated turmoil she had yet to sort through.
Back in his bed in reality, Aeternus lay awake until dawn.
The next day at the pasture, Historia easily noticed his distraction.
"Aeternus," she said, tugging worriedly at the corner of his clothes, her azure eyes full of concern, "did you... have that nightmare again last night?"
Looking into her pure, unblemished eyes, so full of trust in him—
Then recalling Annie's icy blue, exhausted eyes in the sea of sand, burdened by far too much—
Aeternus felt an indescribably complicated emotion rise within him.
He stroked Historia's head and forced a smile.
"Yes," he said softly, though his gaze seemed to pass through her and see that cruel world Outside the Walls. "A... very heavy, but very important dream."
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register