21

"Hey, Eren," you say to the gravestone under the tree. "It's been a year."

The wound is fresh. When you sleep at night, you're overwhelmed by freakish nightmares that aren't even far-fetched from the horrors you faced in the past decade. You still remember it all vividly, like vibrant paint splashed on an empty white canvas. It's red, the color of blood.

Without him, you feel lost. Eren had always been a constant in your life, the first best friend you'd ever made and the one who saw you through everything, and for you to live in a world where he was no longer there was difficult. Sometimes you sleep and dream of his soft eyes boring into yours. Sometimes you have nightmares and beg him to end the Rumbling so you don't have to kill him.

It's hard to explain to others why you still care for him so much, even after everything. To them, they only see a heartless killer. A powerful monster who wouldn't hesitate to slaughter billions if it meant his side could win. He was Eren Jaeger, the face of the Rumbling. That was all they saw and you couldn't blame them for that.

But you only saw the boy who was your best friend. Eren.

They will never know. The pinky promises you made as children. The way he called for time-out whenever you cornered him in tag, because you were older and a bit taller and he used to be such a bratty sore loser. Your shared grief for your mothers after Shiganshina. His warm embrace, reserved only for those he loved. His sharp glare as a teenage cadet, which would melt every time you tutted in disappointment of his behavior.

The boy who sneezed in the snow. Who gazed at the glittering ocean, eyes heavy with determination. They'd never know what it felt like to run nimble fingers through his hair, teasing him for letting it grow out. Are you trying to look like your old man? And he'd give you a deep-set look of disgust and say no. He resented his father. Well, it's a good look on you anyway. Then, for some reason, he'd look away and hide his blush. You did a good job at pretending not to notice, then.

Maybe you were scared. Scared of confronting him and seeing further than your best friend, see the parts of him that he kept hidden from you, boiling emotions that were dying to burst like a trembling geyser. Scared, because a part of you knew that to acknowledge what you had with Eren was to follow him into his pit of violence.

You knew something was going to happen. And when Eren turned into that thing people scorned him as, that devil whom everyone feared, you still saw him. You knew that you could have done something about it.

But what? You'd never know. Neither do you think it's possible to find out. If only you could turn back time and go back to the day you met him, maybe you could do something then.

But time doesn't reverse. It defies logic and laws. Even Eren used to say keep moving forward.

You lay your head beside his gravestone. The grass hasn't quite grown properly around it, yet. Dirt smears itself onto your face. You think you will keep a garden here like you used to.

You swear you can remember it. Somewhere. The garden of your childhood. Dirt.

"Where are you, Eren?"

Of course, there is no reply.

22

"Happy birthday, 'Ren. You'd be twenty-one now. I'm still a year older, though."

You place a few flowers for him. You think he'd like them. You wish you had given him flowers back when he was still alive. You didn't at the time because he was a boy and everyone said that the boys should be the ones giving girls flowers, never the other way around. Plus, you were shy. Everyone would have teased you about it.

Perhaps he'd have been embarrassed. Even so, you still wish you had, just so you'd know how he would react. You think he'd secretly like them. You know he used to watch you tend to your garden as a child.

"Look, Eren. I can even afford to buy you a chocolate cake now. There's so much sweetness."

You also like to think he would have liked chocolate, if only he had been able to live long enough to taste it. You spread a picnic blanket on the ground, take the cake out of its box, and set it on a plate. There are four forks—one for you, one for Mikasa, one for Armin, and one for Eren.

You used to celebrate his birthday like this, once, under the tree. Only there was no cake because you were all too poor to afford it. Cake is still a luxury but today is special. All his birthdays are. When you off-handedly told the baker it was for Eren, his hands shook as he delicately iced it, cold with fear.

"Armin and Mikasa are coming soon," you say. "I came here early to set it up. Just the four of us, like we used to."

You take a butter knife out and cut into the cake.

It's been a while since you last held a weapon.

The blade pushes into the soft, spongy dessert.

It's chocolate brown, like his hair.

Your heart slowly begins to pound. Your palms inexplicably begin to sweat. You feel the old terror making its way from your stomach to your throat all over again, the recurring nightmares that plague you every day. It seizes you, and sends you into a mindless panic.

You try to push the thoughts away, but you can't. It's his birthday. You can't think of anything else.

You think that this must not be so different from when he died.

Killed.

You usually avoid the word kill, but that was the cold truth. Mikasa killed Eren because you asked her to. You knew it was the only way. You told yourself it was because she was physically stronger, but sometimes, you wondered what would have happened if you hadn't been such a coward, placing the sword in her hands.

Maybe it would have been like this. His neck, sensitive from Titan transformations, must have felt as soft as this when the blade plunged through. You don't know how Mikasa managed to muster the strength to pick up his head, let alone look at it.

You imagine his eyes lifting to see you. Maybe he'd smile. If only you got to look at him, one last time.

Mikasa was always the right decision, but you just couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if you had just placed yourself in a different situation.

Maybe you'd have chickened out. You were such a coward, not even strong enough to see Eren one last time beyond the four-year universe he had created for you and him, that it was pathetic. Maybe if you'd been braver, your hands wouldn't be shaking right now.

You drop the knife. It falls into the cake. Your mind connects one thing to another, because you couldn't even do something as simple as putting the knife away like a normal person, and suddenly you're sobbing over Eren's grave, fists curling into the grass and fingers practically clawing into the dirt.

When Mikasa and Armin find you, face covered in dirt and tears running down your cheeks from all your choked sobbing, it takes a while for them to coax you back out of the battlefield, reminding you that there's nothing else you could have done. That you don't have to keep living in the past, like something is still there.

24

"Mikasa and Jean are dating," you tell him. "Are you angry?"

Silence. The only thing that stares back at you is the grave.

"You'd fume," you laugh. "You always told him to back off your 'sister'. I was so sure you liked her. But you were so protective of both of us, it pissed me off."

You chew on your bottom lip. Armin had visited you earlier, and you had tea, a gift from Levi residing in Marley. He never liked coffee. He never needed it. It's nice to know that the captain is doing well. You haven't seen him in years and you're grateful because it means that he is finally at peace.

"The others finally settled home," you say. "I don't know how the peace talks went but Armin is sure that everything's fine. It's a lie, though. I hear rumors about another war starting."

That was why Jean and Mikasa could finally be together Because he lives here now instead of sailing around trying to clean up after Eren's violent mess with the other Alliance members. You'd always suspected that she secretly harbored feelings for him, especially silent every time the ship left you all here.

When you talked to Armin about this, he gave you a quizzical look and said, "Wasn't it always obvious?"

You were slightly miffed because you genuinely had no clue.

Armin shook his head and told you that you were always a bit clueless when it came to romantic feelings. "You were always the most oblivious about love—other than Eren, of course."

"Hey..." you say to the gravestone, to Eren. "What did Armin mean... by that?"

Your voice catches, just a little. You're not that stupid. You're just afraid.

You don't want to talk about it. The tiniest thoughts of it have occurred to you but you always push them away. It would hurt. So much.

Maybe there was a reason why Eren had created that alternate timeline, where you spent four years together by the sea. Maybe it was more than just his promises. Maybe there was something else.

Maybe he didn't view you as just his best friend. He had never said anything, but maybe there was something there.

Something you just can't bring yourself to admit.

The what ifs are haunting you worse than the ghosts of your past. What if you had done something else? What if you had made a choice that could have pushed fate in a different direction? Everything is predetermined, but what if?

You want to talk about it, you do.

But the only person you can talk about it with, and ever know the answers from, is buried in the ground beneath you.

27

"'Ren," you whisper. "Mikasa is pregnant."

You lay on the grass. You like to think he's lying there with you. You remember all the times you used to nap with him under the tree on this hill. Not once did you ever think that you would be here alone.

Sometimes, you wish you were a child again.

"Oh God," you repeat, the weight of how different your life was going to be, forever. "She's pregnant. There's life growing inside her."

That was terrifying. While Mikasa had always been strong and healthy, so there was no worrying about whether she would be safe or not, you felt shaken up. Now, all your friends are mothers. Historia is a mother. Mikasa is going to be a mother. Sasha never got to be one. You can't think about it properly—it doesn't feel right for you, even though you admittedly feel left behind.

It's stupid, but it's how you feel. Everyone else seems to be slowly healing, while you're frozen in time like a shattered mirror. You can't help but feel how disgustingly unfixable you were. Something in your mind is preventing you from forgetting him; your soul still believes that his is out there.

"Armin hopes for a girl, but Connie thinks it's a boy."

You yawn, shuffling in the grass, and cross your feet. The sky is blue above you, like a calm ocean. In that moment, you dream of a boy with green eyes, his finger outstretched to the horizon, asking you if freedom exists. It still feels weird to talk about your friends to him and not hear his voice reply, or feel his finger tracing shapes on your arms or legs.

You feel his presence in everything—the wind howling with fury, the sun beating on your skin, the quiet warmth of your bed at the end of an exhausting day. You have lost your other half, so you spend your days searching for it, for someone who was gone forever.

You spend your days doing menial tasks. The Survey Corps have made sure that you can live a quiet life. You dropped out of the military; you retired at twenty. You never went with the Alliance with their peace talks. You stayed with Historia the day you, Mikasa, and Armin buried Eren, and since then, you have essentially been playing the role of governess. You are so lost: you don't know what to do, like a leaf blowing in the wind—fated to follow a gale's unpredictable course before it withered and died alone.

You lift a hand and point to the sky, too, as you can almost feel the breeze that blew his shoulder-length hair that day on the beach.

A white bird flies above you, breaking your lazy focus. It circles the tree, spreading its wings.

You stare at it, mouth moving.

"I think you wouldn't care what it was as long as it was healthy. You'd do great with a boy, and if it were a girl, it would change you."

You think of Historia, who's raising a daughter who looks just like her. She tells her daughter the sugarcoated stories of your shared youth—the adventures of the Survey Corps, who braved the outside world and fought Titans with swords. The Titans always seem absurd. It's hard for her daughter to believe they even existed at all.

And Historia always makes you all sound like heroes when you know you're anything but. She even ends the stories with a fancy fairytale line that goes 'happily ever after'. It's the destiny of noble swordsmen, honorable knights, and swooning princesses—a glittering daydream that makes the world seem prettier than what it really is.

That, you think, is the one blatant lie she tells her daughter in those stories. You are a swordsman, but you are not noble. You have fought like a knight, but genocide took your honor. And a romantic lady? Laughable. There is no happy ever after for you.

"You did it, Eren," you say. "You gave us the peaceful life you wanted for us all. You succeeded."

He would be so happy to know that his friends were happy and content with their lives. All that hell was not for nothing. But he would be dissatisfied seeing you so quietly miserable. Eren simply never knew how you felt.

You think of his face. God, that face. How many times had you gazed at that face, wishing his eyes were admiring on you? He's buried there, six feet underneath you. You wonder if he's lonely down there, in the darkness, with nothing but soil on all sides. You're sure he wants to be on the surface. Alive. With you. But he's not there.

All that's left down there is a skull. His flesh must have become one with the earth years ago. The dirt you're laying on probably contains him. You can't imagine it—in your head, you always picture Eren when he was alive.

He's not. He's gone. He's been gone for years and for some reason you still can't seem to move on. A permanent hole punctured your heart the day he died and it refuses to heal, even when all your tears have dried up and curses at the sky faded into twilight.

"But..." your voice cracks. "God, Eren. I wish you were here."

28

"Meet your niece, 'Ren," you say. "This paper in my hand is called a photograph, remember? She looks just like Mikasa!"

The image shows a baby girl on Mikasa's lap. She's seated on a chair. Jean is standing by her side, one gentle hand carefully placed on the shoulder of his wife. They are both smiling at the camera but they are not showing their teeth.

You know beneath their smiles, they're worried. Worried that the war in their minds and eyes would make its way known to their daughter. But you genuinely think they'll be alright. They are both good people who are good with children, some of the kindest friends you'll ever know despite the unspeakable horrors in their memories.

You're not sure if you'll ever recover from the bloody past. Armin helps you but every day is still a mental battle.

"I'm her godmother, of course," you say with pride. "I'll never let anything happen to her. I'll load her with gifts every time I visit, every birthday, I don't care if Jean's worried that I'll spoil the girl."

You think Eren would be quite good at that, even if it seems odd. If he had a child, he'd probably shower the kid with love, too. The thought makes you feel braver about handling children. For some reason, imagining Eren playing a fatherly role makes the idea of starting a family seem less terrifying and more loving.

But you cannot see him with the lines of a father or the stubble of middle-aged men. The last time you ever saw him, he died a boy. He was only a teenager.

You used to think you were so old and adult back then. War aged you mentally. But now you're nearing your 30s and you finally see clearly how terrible it was to be a child soldier just because you didn't know any better.

It would be great to have a real family. You've thought about this since childhood. You missed your mother and father so much, and wished you had gotten to say your final goodbyes. Love resides in you, but you reside with no one's love, and it hurts. But it would be selfish to create another human just for the sake of filling the void. You know this well, and for everyone's sake, you do not try.

It hurts to live so soullessly, waking up each day and pretending that you are not an empty shell of the person you once were. It hurts to wake up and see Armin with Annie and Mikasa with Jean, and you are alone and jealous and spiteful and grieving for Eren, but you cannot say it out loud.

You cannot bring up the idea that you liked Eren to Armin and Mikasa without them looking uncomfortable. They don't want to hurt your feelings by telling you that something was there; it would hurt you so much, you'd be scarred for life. You have to move on, have to meet someone else, let your life proceed without clinging to the past. You have to let him go.

But there, beside his grave, you smile at the idea of him in a family. You're delusional, you know. It's probably not healthy, and Armin and Mikasa are seriously concerned about how far your grief has taken you. But oh, God! Eren, a father. You imagine him holding up a baby who looks like him with so much love in his gaze, and he would make eye contact with you and smile so cheesily, "He's me and you."

Eren would be intimidated at first, thinking that he would be like his own father who burdened his sons. But you would tell him, We will be alright. And you know him so well, that you know it will be true.

Your voice falters at these thoughts, and you continue, "But of course, there's not much I can do yet... she's only an infant, all she does at the moment is cry and sleep. But when she gets older... she'll be everything we weren't."

For some reason, you imagine a child. A son who looks just like his father, with green eyes and dimples that make you collapse out of sheer adoration. Your child. Eren's child.

A white bird flies, then lands on a tree branch above you. It peers down at you like it's looking at the photograph you're trying to show Eren.

Sonewhere, he's out there, waiting for your time.

"Freedom, Eren," you say. You close your eyes, trying to imagine him with you there. You cannot, anymore. "Is this what it was supposed to be like?"

30

"It's been ten years, 'Ren," you say wistfully.

Ten years. In those ten years, you have done many things. You have taken up science, and they say you're brilliant. You have tried going on dates, but at the end of the day, you cannot push through. You have your own house, your own money, a decorated career. You are a respectable person, people in Paradis love you because you are a veteran. And still, you are not happy.

Your voice is a bit lower, now, no longer the same pitch it was when you were younger. The flowers around his grave have grown well. It reminds you of your childhood home.

"I'm thirty already. You'd be twenty-nine."

The tree is big, stretching to the sky. It had grown rapidly, like a Titan healing. It reminds you of being sixteen years old again when you thought you were going to die in that forest with the Female Titan.

You try to imagine Eren being twenty-nine, a grown man. You can't. In your mind, he's forever nineteen.

You used to think nineteen was the age of an adult, but now, you know better. He was nineteen when he took it upon himself to orchestrate that hell, even younger when you were both fighting for your lives in a hopeless world. Nineteen. A child.

It's peaceful. It's quiet. Somewhere in the ground beneath you, Eren's bones lay. You'd read somewhere that people are only fully grown when they're about twenty-four, so you'll never even know what Eren was supposed to be like, fully grown.

Everything feels so wrong. Somehow, deep inside, you feel that this is not how it is meant to be. Something greater has been calling your name in the past few years, echoing his voice.

"I wish I could talk to you again. So much has happened. I mean it's kinda lonely after all those years you spent talking off my ear, y'know?"

33

You don't remember Eren's face anymore.

Maybe some of the lines are wrong. You can't remember if his long hair reached his shoulder or further. You can't remember how his bangs fell to his forehead, or the precise shade of brunette of his soft hair. You've forgotten the sound of his laugh. He was a distant memory that was slowly fading away.

The color of his eyes, which had once been the brightest hues in the world to you, were now washed with a dull grey.

You're trying. Desperately. To remember him. But you can't.

37

When you climb the hill, you feel a small ache on back. You can't run up to the top like you did with Eren, Mikasa, and Armin when you were little. You've forgotten the magic of being a child. But you don't forget the horrors.

You're older than Hange now. It still doesn't feel real.

You have gotten older. When you look in the mirror, you see lines on your face that were not there before. You were so physically fit as a younger person that it genetically altered you to age slowly. You know you're lucky, stupid with fortune, even, to age. It haunts you, seeing yourself become older when the others have not. They're forever younger than you, the age they were when they died.

They were so young.

You realize too that you're probably older than your mother and Carla when they were brutally killed. If Eren materialized out of thin air right now, he'd have to refer to you with the honorifics of an older woman.

It's odd. And yet, life goes on. The scars for the others have healed.

Jean and Mikasa have welcomed their second child, another daughter. Their eldest is good friends with Historia's daughter, the princess. Sometimes you feel like a spinster for not having a child, but you know you can't. You're afraid that the trauma inside you will ruin your flesh and blood. You just can't do that to a child. Besides, you just can't seem to love someone enough to want to marry them.

It's different for Mikasa and Jean. Jean has a mother, a parent to rely on, who will take Mikasa in. They have their person, so it's less difficult to heal. Their beautiful daughters are so wonderful and smart anyway, with their monolid eyes and sandy brown hair, it's no wonder they're no longer occupied with the past traumas that you just can't seem to move on from.

"Hello, 'Ren," you say.

Your voice is the voice of an older woman. You're not exactly old, but you still can't believe you've lived this long. You're not exactly as young as you were, either.

You wonder if there will ever be a time when you feel like your age. Or if you'll ever stop feeling like you're still nineteen, wishing you had just told Eren how you felt that night in Marley when he asked.

The flowers around his gravestone are in full bloom. At one point, it stopped hurting to look at it. For some godforsaken reason, you still don't feel at peace when you accept that he's gone. Armin and Mikasa miss him, of course, but they know to move on with their lives eventually. You replay every memory.

What am I to you? he had asked you back then.

You're... my best friend, you had replied. Why... are you asking me this?

A shitty answer, but it was the somewhat honest one—you missed your best friend. No one could ever replace Eren. He was the other half of your soul. But what if you had said something else?

The regret is something you know you will carry for the rest of your life.

You know that you should have done something different.

You just don't know what.

Under the tree, when the white bird flies over you again, you gaze at it, wondering why it's so familiar. Your heart aches for it, the wings of freedom that used to make you fly as a child.

You hear the roar of an airplane from overhead. It releases a high note, like a whistle. You feel uneasy, then realize that it's a foreign plane. They've come to attack Shiganshina.

You know you have to find your friends. Armin is probably worried.

You cast one final look at the grave, backing slowly before retreating down the hill. You wonder if you'll ever see him again. You know you will. You have to. It's your destiny to meet him every time.

Bittersweetness paints your smile, saccharinely awful, as you bid him farewell.

You don't know it yet, but life and death are only a snake eating its own tail. It loops. Today, you will die. Tomorrow, you will wake up in a child's body, and see him again. The first loop had always been your most ignorant.

But you couldn't stay in this rewind forever. This was only a pocket of convergence, the limbo between life and death in Loops One and Twelve. Soon, you had to start again for the last time, and if you were unlucky, this exact same grief would consume you whole again.

"In another life, Eren."