Unlike the first time Eren stood on the beach, this one feels…different. Is this what peace feels like? He's not sure. He's so bad at peace.
But this place feels reassuring, not threatening, not a cage, not the start of a war. He doesn't have the words for what "magic" feels like, though obviously he's been surrounded by it for the past year. He can use the power he gained here sometimes, which is magic, but he's not ever going to be some magician.
Like Bertolt — and like the past, always there in Eren's mind anyway — he stands in the water with his pants rolled up. Alone, he doesn't care too much about the issue of where/when he is. Those other lifetimes he lived, one of them out there on the ocean, work their way into his stream of memory nonsense.
He has such a tenuous grasp on what is real and true after the thing with the black hole, the converging of all the lives he could have had, lives where he is not a monster or a genocidal murderer, lives where there are no titans and no war (or no war he has to be part of). Maybe it would have been better to give in to that idea that nothing matters.
But in the end he couldn't accept that. Everything matters to him just as it always has. Everything matters too damn much.
He's a little way down the beach but not too far, loose hair blowing in the faint magical breeze. He hears Bertolt's words even if he's not meant to, and he's sure his heart stops.
Suddenly Bertolt specifically featuring in those other timelines makes sense. How had he missed it? How had he not realised?
First Annie, who wants to kill him. Now Bertolt, who…probably wants to kill him too.
He can feel his fist clench, nails dug into his palm as a defensive measure, as he turns towards a boy he hasn't actually seen in almost five years.
a magical day, blanket tw for talk of genocide/murder/violence/kidnapping/death
But this place feels reassuring, not threatening, not a cage, not the start of a war. He doesn't have the words for what "magic" feels like, though obviously he's been surrounded by it for the past year. He can use the power he gained here sometimes, which is magic, but he's not ever going to be some magician.
Like Bertolt — and like the past, always there in Eren's mind anyway — he stands in the water with his pants rolled up. Alone, he doesn't care too much about the issue of where/when he is. Those other lifetimes he lived, one of them out there on the ocean, work their way into his stream of memory nonsense.
He has such a tenuous grasp on what is real and true after the thing with the black hole, the converging of all the lives he could have had, lives where he is not a monster or a genocidal murderer, lives where there are no titans and no war (or no war he has to be part of). Maybe it would have been better to give in to that idea that nothing matters.
But in the end he couldn't accept that. Everything matters to him just as it always has. Everything matters too damn much.
He's a little way down the beach but not too far, loose hair blowing in the faint magical breeze. He hears Bertolt's words even if he's not meant to, and he's sure his heart stops.
Suddenly Bertolt specifically featuring in those other timelines makes sense. How had he missed it? How had he not realised?
First Annie, who wants to kill him. Now Bertolt, who…probably wants to kill him too.
He can feel his fist clench, nails dug into his palm as a defensive measure, as he turns towards a boy he hasn't actually seen in almost five years.
"Didn't go how you planned, huh?" he asks.