Work Text:
Why did it come back now? That summer there was such boiling hot weather that 'the stone melted'. That's what Uncle Hannes said. Uncle Hannes always said strange things. Because he drank too much, perhaps. The stone couldn't melt, even the kids knew this.
So why did it come back right now?
Eren was five. Morning, kitchen, all windows were wide open. Something smelled from the forest side. A sort of smoke.
"Mom, what does it smell like? Seems like the meat dad burned last week."
Karla, who was busy at the stove, turned around and flashed her eyes:
"A hole opened up in the wall. Go there with Armin and the devils will take you."
Eren's eyes rounded. He forgot that he was chewing the gingerbread and it was better to swallow it.
"And your dad..."
But Eren already blew away.
"Eren! " The boy was no longer to catch up. Flushed, he was already rushing down the street, excitedly finishing his gingerbread. Great day! Finally, he and Armin were to find out what was behind the wall! Why everyone around was not excited by the news, he would think later. And about the fact that you could not break into your best friend’s house, opening the door with a roar, he also would think later. Eren stood dead in his tracks, puffing from the heat and running. At the doorway, he came face to face with Armin. His blond friend, apparently, was about to leave himself.
"Eren…" Armin uttered timidly. Surprise and horror froze on his face. The boy clearly did not expect such sharp intrusion. However, he soon perked up, because Eren, trying to catch his breath and cope with emotions, did not say a word.
"I saw a ladybug eating aphids today." Armin's eyes flashed.
"The devils will take us!.." Eren took so much air into his chest that he could not continue the phrase.
Armin flinched, it looked like he was about to cry.
"For aphids?.. "
Eren butted the air, shaking his head in denial. He could not manage to cope with the hot air in his lungs.
"For a ladybug? .." With every second, the blond boy became more and more unhappy.
"Mom said a hole opened in the wall. And the devils are taking people away. But we're still going to watch!" Eren vigorously pulled his friend's hand and dragged him outside.
"Eren, why isn't anyone going to look at the hole?" They walked for a long time. Armin surely did not take the hat. Now he squinted. The sun seemed to flood the whole space. When they reached the nearest farm, all objects seemed to lose their shadows. There was no sound, as if they had entered another world.
"They're afraid of the devils!" Eren's voice boomed like thunder. And, with a second delay, some voices from the farm joined him.
"Ugh!" Eren turned around to Armin, who had taken a couple of steps back.
"Is that what the devils smells like?" Armin stood, holding his nose, looking somewhere to the side.
"Look!"
Eren returned and looked where his friend had pointed. Beetles swarmed on the ground. Black, dull, inconspicuous. But there was something unsettling about their amount. And the smell. Looking up, Eren saw something in the tall grass. It was a goat's leg. It stuck out of the grass, as if pointing at the sun. And then the wind blew. The smell of smoke and roasted meat added to the suffocating, unnatural stench. Without even expecting it, Eren bent over. He did not understand what had happened: the world seemed to be flooded with the enveloping stench, and slimy brown mass covered the mess of beetles. Time stopped; a wet, crumpled piece was touched with legs of a black, dull, inconspicuous beetle.
Eren felt he was pulled to the side.
"Run!" Armin dragged him towards the forest.
"Well, get out of here!" Apparently a farmer noticed them. Eren didn't see who it was. Behind his and Armin's backs, a verbal skirmish was breaking out. Something about how certain Eric could not find the cattle right behind the fence, and now everyone would drop dead.
Eren's head span. There was a taste of gingerbread in his mouth. And something else, bitter sour and so disgusting that he wanted to sob.
"Eren, was that the devil?" The shadow from the trees mercifully took them under after the blinding sun and tall grass with its nightmarish foot idol. Eren seemed to have gone blind for a few seconds. Maybe it was tears, he didn't know.
"Maybe we'll go home..." For some reason, Armin wasn't feeling bad. And Eren got angry at that. This immediately cheered him up.
"No! We have to!"
They made their way through the forest in silence. Eren was shaking, he began to understand that they would not reach the wall, it was too far. And the smell. Everything smelled of smoke, raw meat and rotten meat: grass, trees, Eren himself. The sore stomach was slowly rising to the throat. Mouth was filling with saliva that tasted like vomit. And gingerbread.
"Eren, is everything behind the walls of such kind?" Weakly said the blond boy. Armin seemed to be somehow incorporeal, transparent in the solar column, oozing through the crown of the tree. It was as if Eren had forgotten him, the real one, in the tall grass, followed by some other Armin, his disembodied spirit. The boy didn't know what to answer, he just wandered on. Towards the unbearable stench.
Their way didn't last long: a huge embankment blocked their path. It was enveloped in fetid smoke. As if it was an abscess that oozed not with pus, but with whitish swirling puffs of smoke. The boys pinched their noses with their hands. That mound was the rotten abscess indeed: how unbearably it stank! Obviously, they couldn't go any further. But Eren's stubbornness drove him at least to try to see what was behind the embankment.
Without opening his nose, he extended his hand to Armin, who was standing to his left. He weakly shook it, the boy looked unhappy, his eyes watered either from the stench, or from fear. However, he was accustomed to trusting his friend, so, enveloped in the creeping smoke, they climbed.
Already at the very top, Eren was ready to burst into tears himself from the vile suffocation, but the picture that opened up to him discouraged him so much that he forgot how to breathe. A pit, gigantic, without edge. That's how Eren remembered it. Although, being older, when he was again in these parts, Eren found only a small ravine in the clearing. However, then, in childhood, the pit seemed unthinkable in scale as a hecatomb. But it was not its volume that horrified: the whole pit was mounded with the carcasses of cattle. Bloated, swollen. There was a cow lying on its back, its straightened legs stuck out unnaturally straight. It looked like a huge brown bedside table. A goat with peeling, moving from larvae hair. Blue-spotted pigs, so fat that they looked ready to burst.
Also the pit smoldered from the far edge. Some carcasses turned black completely, some only half. In their jumble there was another cow, white. It had only one leg burnt, which became thin like a match. Someone was walking there behind the smoke. He weared something looked like a sack on his head.
"Who was this? Who did it?" Either Armin's hoarse voice, or Eren's own. Exactly under the boys, right on the slope, laid a pig covered with blue spots. His small mouth seemed to be smiling. A puddle spilled from under the jaw. Dull black beetles swarmed in it. A fly sat on a whitish eye. And then, finally, Eren heard the sound. The near edge of the pit hummed. The fly rushed from the corpse and in the blink of an eye was on Armin's face. A scream came.
Uncle Hannes took them home. He went after the boys as soon as he saw them near the farm. Then there was a long conversation with dad: about the epidemic of cattle, about the fact that farmers didn't have time to burn carcasses, about reasons why it was impossible to approach such pits. Eren missed everything while he was listening. But he didn't eat meat for a long time. Neither gingerbread.
So, why did it come back now?
They just left the basement. Into the heat. Why was there no relief? There was no semblance of joy. After all, they learnt what was there, behind the walls. And Armin? Where was Armin? Captain Levi lowered his eyes in a strange way as they left. As if apologizing. For what? Eren wanted to apologize himself. The captain bought Armin's life at the terrible cost. Everyone knew about him and the commander.
Fuss was in the barracks. The bodies moved around. They rushed about in slanting rays of light from high windows, like disembodied ghosts. Eren took a step across the threshold and glanced at the nearest wall. A ladybug sat on the wall, under it - aphids. As if aphids were eating a ladybug. The smoke pulled from somewhere.
Some kind of anxiety rose from Eren's stomach right up to his throat. To Armin, to Armin - it was necessary.
Towards him, as if out of nowhere, Mikasa went out with heavy steps. Her head was pressed into her shoulders, as if ready to rush. Her eyes were red.
Probably from the smoke.
"Where are you going?" It sounded somehow quiet.
"I'm going to sit on the roof." She swept past, wrapping herself in a cloak.
In such heat…
And why was she so flustered? It ended well though. For us. Why did Eren himself want to run away so much?
It was necessary to find Armin, he had to be in their shared room. Eren took a step into the slanting rays of light oozing from the high windows, as if he had crossed the line into another world.
They lived together. Capitan Levi allowed. He knew all about them too. At the moment the door to the room was ajar, probably from the hot draft. The storey smelled of smoke, the room smelled of something else. Something sweet. Eren stood motionless for few seconds, listening to the curtains swaying behind the door, a fly buzzing. Finally entered.
Heart skipped a beat. The spectacle that opened up to him was somehow completely wrong. Wrong and mesmerizing. Armin sat naked on the edge of the bed and devoured fruit from a large plate, which he placed on the bedside table by the window. His chin was covered with juice, and wasps flocked to that juice. Either to the bit of a pear, which a thin, with a huge bruise, wrist brought to full, luscious lips. Wasps also sat on the fruit in the plate.
For some reason, heart ached, and tears welled in eyes. Armin blew a wasp off a piece of the pear and turned to him, smiling.
" Do you not to go to dinner too? Join."
Eren slowly approached. The long curtain swayed in the hot wind. The fly buzzed, the wasps buzzed.
"What are you? " Armin chewed on his fruit, a wasp was crawling on his lip.
"Min, you'll be stung."
"Well, anyway it doesn't matter already, " Armin smiled. Eren only at that moment noticed that his ankles also had blue spots.
"Why don't you regenerate?" Eren's voice sounded so weak.
"For what? Do you think if something happens at the coronation tomorrow, they'll stop me from transforming? I don't know anything about it yet."
"At the coronation?!" Eren's heart beat so hard that it drowned out everything: the creaking of the door, the rustling of the curtains, and the buzzing of insects. We have just left the basement! Nothing is ready yet...
"Eren, I have the same feeling, like we left the basement an hour ago. And entered the cadet corps about a month ago." Armin threw a grape into his mouth. It seemed it was little bit spoiled.
It was all wrong. He couldn't have been so lost in time. He was overwhelmed by a sense of the meaninglessness of everything that was happening. Tears shed. He sank onto the floor and buried himself in Armin's knees. For some reason, they were icy.
"I'm sorry, this is my fault. If I hadn't gone to the reconnaissance squad, you wouldn't have followed me. None of this would have happened." Eren himself didn't believe in what he was saying. No one could escape from trouble. It was like an epidemic, like bad luck.
Armin silently squeezed Eren's shoulder with his sticky from the juice hand, Eren pulled away from the cold knees and straightened up, looking at eyes opposite him, which were somewhat frozen, motionless. Armin put his hands on Eren's cheeks and leaned on for a kiss. Lips were also cold. Eren felt a fly landed on the corner of his mouth. Armin's tongue had a bittersweet taste. Armin pulled away and put his feet up on the bed as he laid down. He looked at Eren, inviting him to join. It turned out that the bare side was also all blue. Wasps buzzed over fruit.
For some reason, Eren felt no longer hot. He got rid of his clothes and leaned his whole body on his lover. Armin's muscles seemed to be cramped up, and the skin somehow was either parchment, or, on the contrary, soapy. Everything happened quickly, fussy, anxiously. Inside, Armin, in contrast, was overly relaxed, and Eren rushed in. Wrong. Armin didn't make a sound and it looked like his cock was still soft. There was emptiness inside Eren, there were no emotions, even after the release coming. He lay on the shoulder of Armin, whose legs were still clutching his sides, as if frozen. There was smoke pulling from the window, and the room smelled of something else. Disgusting.
Eren's eyes began to close, Armin's hand laid on the back of his head and stroked. It was probably still sticky.
"It's over, Eren."
Eren's eyelids were relentlessly to shut. A beetle crawled across Armin's chest - black, dull, inconspicuous. The room smelled. Wasps and flies buzzed. Even wind was heard in the curtain.
Eren dreamed of a big plate of fruit. Rotten fruits: shriveled, brown. Mold and fungus - like a forest. The pear oozed juices, its darkened skin peeled off. A black beetle crawled over soft, wet pear flesh with its legs. Dead wasps lay in fetid juice.
Eren hung on the very edge of the bed, but he couldn't move in his sleep. He was pushed by tight swollen flesh with burnt, frozen in post-mortem limbs, thin as matches. Live meat didn't burn completely for a short time: somewhere on this carcass there was skin left, not subjected to temperature - blue-crimson, turning green. In his sleep, Eren felt the bed soaked with a stinking goo. So stinky, like the whole world was rotten. He couldn't move, but he knew that the body behind him was frozen in such an unnatural position that one foot pointed to the ceiling like an idol. It seemed to Eren that the devils were dragging him to the cattle grave, and he woke up.
Window was wide open. No more smoke from the street. He turned on the bed. Not a trace of the nightmare. Armin was not there. There was no plate on the bedside table either. He must have already been ready and left. And Eren, as usual, overslept.
That was it. But Eren's head was too heavy to worry about all the fuss that followed. After he arrived at the formation, everything seemed to be a kaleidoscope of preparations, a long journey to Mitras with a jumble of horses, people, carriages; the architecture was ridiculously beautiful, the interiors had absurdly high ceilings; solemn words, ceremony. Heat. Suffocation. Need to see Armin.
Eren was the first to take the oath. Such was the honour. Historia's eyes flickered with compassion for a second. The way to the queen seemed somehow too long. Long and as if passing through the water column. He got down on one knee. And then, as if from a nightmare, a voice read out his name, the name of a warrior, who was honored to take the oath first. As if the devil himself was caustically calling his name. Erwin Smith's voice. At that moment Eren understood. House, street, farm, forest, wasps, summer, fruit, curtain. But he had already touched Historia's hand.
Eren looked down: the whole world was a cattle grave. Burning, rotting, stinking, teeming with black, dull, inconspicuous beetles.
Who was this?
Who did it?
I. I did. I brought him...
A tear rolled down his cheek.