the hilt | eren jaeger

f o r t y o n e

His skin crawled in the dim light of the medical center. 

He wasn't anyone to anybody here. He was nothing to the girl he loved, he was nothing to the comrades he had left back home, he was nothing at all. Just a sad man who took his equally sad life and mauled it into something unforgivable. And he knows, he knows, and he knows even more that his tantalizing desires to hide from it all will never be prayers, meant to receive answers.

He peers into the mirror across from his spot on the hospital bed, and he hates the man he sees looking back. The bandaged spot where his eye once was, and will someday come back, and all the agony along with it. 

If anything, one would think that being a titan shifter would mean more of a pain tolerance, but the agony is real. The agony never subsides. There is no magic to regrowing entire limbs. There are only nerves being crushed under their own weight as the structure re-mends itself. 

And that was pain that he knew fondly. Every single time, it hurt. No matter when, no matter where. But the thing that always hurt him most of all, was so beyond in his grasp that he just needed to squeeze his fingers inward for his hold to secure. He could have her back. 

Here in this foreign land, Eren Jaeger could just be the boy with a childish crush on the prettiest person he's ever seen. Everything about her drew him closer. The slight gestures she made throughout their conversation in her apartment told him one thing; she would never truly be able to change. No amount of memory loss would ever deconstruct the beauty of her soul. 

He longed to part the hairs on her scalp with a careful palm, to whisper sweet nothings to her forehead as she fell asleep in his arms. To be there when she woke up, to be someone she could have her sights on at all times. 

He knew he was whipped for her, but her absence only made him love her with an agony so harsh it nearly ballooned out of his chest. Palms would search the bed every morning when he'd wake up, looking for warmth in a place where sheets had been cold for a very, very long time. Even if he knew it was fruitless, he'd still stop by her dorm every morning, the small, slight, nearly one to a billion chance that she'd be sleeping softly in his wake was enough. The odds didn't matter to him. They never could. 

Every time he pulled out the keys to his own dorm, he'd smile softly at the clink clink of her key clanging against his. Knowing that the places they called home were one and the same, even if split into two halves. 

Even as Jo drifted from him, even as he drifted from her, they kept each other in tight palms, in warm embraces. It didn't matter how far they wandered from one another, the red string of fate that connected them never once pulled taut to the brink of snapping. Their distance couldn't have ever snipped at it. They were connected, the way their fingers slotted into each other's, the way they knew every detail and every mannerism the other had.

He knew that she would trace the rim of a glass when she held her own truths to her chest, expelling out distractions and grievances for others to part through.

She was a sea and he was a sailor, lost in her, but never truly wanting to be found. He'd let her swallow him whole, and let her figure out what to do with the pieces when he breaks outward into a million different parts. 

He wanted to hold her hair back when she cried, he wanted to be the only one she could ever truly love, and he wanted to be the thing she knew she would always have, even though he knew his time was limited. The years were passing. Even without the ticking time clock his father so graciously gifted him- by way of mauling and cannibalism- Eren knew his time wandering this shallow land was ticking away. Sometimes, when rooms got too quiet, and when the fevers started to rise, he could hear the melodic ticks, the sound whirring through his ears as he'd stare off into the distance.