The day Wall Maria fell to the Titans, soldier Arden Keiser selfishly chose to save herself. She disobeyed direct orders and abandoned her role within the Garrison Regiment, taking the life of another as she did so. She made an attempt to escape fro...
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After so many years, Arden's secret was out.
It was inevitable, she supposed, that someone would learn that her documents were faked. It had been fourteen years after all. Someone was bound to discover, and in this case, it was Erwin Smith who found the truth.
He was an intelligent man; if Arden gave him credit for anything, it was for his intelligence.
Arden was now laying awake in her makeshift bed, fully convinced that she'd return to prison. Sleep seemed impossible. She had too many regrets, too many choices that she wished she had never made—particularly those made in Shiganshina.
If only that day had never happened. If only she had the courage to listen to her officers and protect those civilians.
She missed drinking with Winfield, Dutch, and Johanna, playing card games with them... She missed it all.
To go back further, she missed her father.
He was a bad man. She wasn't going to defend his actions, as kidnapping and selling innocents was unforgivable, but beneath his disgusting career and his filthy hands, Arden recalled her father being a genuine and an honest man when alone with her. Was he harsh? Cold? Certainly, but he was Arden's father, and he was the only person she had known who truly cared for her. He was the one person who served her dinner and put a roof over her head. He was the one person who never left her.
And then she left him.
Arden wished she could say she knew why she came to the surface, but she didn't. She was practically kidnapped and forced to live with the Hahns, but in some way, it seemed like Mr. Keiser chose to send her there. It was his men who took her away after all. It must've been his money that paid for all of those forged documents. Even her citizenship allowing her on the surface was faked. What would Erwin do with her when he discovered that? Or did he already know that part?
Well, what could he do other than return her to Zachary?
Arden never admitted to Levi that about her citizenship was fake—just her military documents—but she bet it wouldn't take long for Erwin to somehow piece together that her citizenship wasn't real either.
Time never did seem to be on Arden's side.
Eventually her thoughts circled back to Levi, to some of the things he had told her just hours prior, and she couldn't help but to think just a bit differently of him. Yes, she still despised his presence and his awful training sessions among other things, but there was something else she felt that she couldn't quite place. Knowing that he had once worked for her father, that he and that dead friend of his were once one of Mr. Keiser's goons, it left an odd feeling within Arden. To know that Levi had taken a child from his home before, that he had probably killed another person... And it was all probably just for some money.
Arden hadn't seen much death in her life. She left the Underground city when she was young, so she didn't remember much, and even so, her father had kept her prying eyes from his work at all times. The one death she had witness, the one that she had truly experienced, was Johanna's.
