♱ red swan — fanfic
♱ pairing. vampire!eren + hunter!reader
♱ cross-posted on. ao3 | wattpad
♱ playlist ✧ visuals
♱ wc. +20,000
The person standing in front of you burst into loud laughter as they pulled their hand away from your mouth.
It was an open, unfiltered laugh, the kind that did not care who it bothered or how inappropriate it was for the moment. They bent forward slightly with the effort, bringing their fingers to the corner of one eye to wipe away a tear that had escaped without permission.
"You should have seen your terrified face," they said, catching their breath between laughs. "Oh my God."
You could recognize it anywhere. There was something completely unique about its tone, that mixture of lightness and boldness that very few people managed to carry with such consistency.
She wiped away the last tear with the back of her hand and held your gaze, still wearing that crooked smile. There was something deliberate in her expression, as though every gesture had been measured and yet still came across as natural. Clearly, she had gotten exactly the reaction she wanted.
"What are you doing lurking around the streets?" she asked, glancing down both sides of the alley with genuine curiosity. "The festival is in the square, in case you didn't know."
You stepped out of the alley, brushing past her without stopping, leaving her comment behind as though it did not deserve a response. Once you reached the street, you searched for the place where the two figures had disappeared into the crowd. Your eyes swept over the surroundings: one side, the other, farther ahead, among the few passersby still moving beneath the dim yellow glow of the lanterns.
The figures had dissolved into the night as though they had never been there. The glint of the pendants, that metallic shine the rotating torchlight had caught, no longer existed. There was no trace. Nothing to follow.
You processed it silently, standing on the sidewalk, your eyes still scanning the street even though you already knew perfectly well that it was useless.
"Are you looking for someone?"
Hitch appeared beside you without making a sound, staring in the same direction with her hands tucked into the pockets of her jacket, carrying that effortless way she had of settling into spaces without anyone inviting her to.
She did not reply. She simply stayed there beside you, waiting. You knew that silence of hers, the one she used whenever she knew the answer she had just received was not the complete one and she had all the patience in the world to wait for the real one.
"I just saw two hooded figures," you finally said, without taking your eyes off the street. "They caught my attention."
Hitch arched a brow and answered in the tone of someone who had just reached a conclusion she found enormously entertaining.
"I thought you were a one-boy type of girl. Now I know more things about you than I expected."
You turned toward her with a look that would have stopped most people. Hitch held it without the slightest sign of intimidation, wearing that smile of hers that was half mischief and half shield.
"Idiot, they seemed strange," you said, with a clarity that left no room for further interpretation. "That's all. Have you seen anyone like that tonight? Hooded, with dark pendants?"
Hitch's smile lingered for another second before something shifted in her expression. It did not disappear entirely, but it settled into something more serious, more attentive. She looked at you differently.
"Tonight, no," she said. "I haven't seen anyone like that."
She paused. A slight frown crossed her face, as though she were searching through her memory.
"But Marlowe mentioned something a few weeks ago." She crossed her arms over her chest. "He was in the square one night, drinking with some friends, and a man approached them. Alone, hooded. Told them they should go home, that if they stayed, something bad might happen to them."
You stayed still, listening to her.
"You know how Marlowe is," Hitch continued, using that tone balanced between affectionate and mocking that she always used when speaking about him. "A coward. He was one of the first to leave. But before he went, he noticed the man was wearing a strange pendant."
"Did he tell you what it looked like?"
Hitch shook her head slowly.
"No. He was a little drunk that night and couldn't remember it clearly." She looked at you with a curiosity that did not pretend to be casual. "Why are you so interested?"
"I'll explain later," you said, and you meant it. "But I need you to investigate who they are. Whatever you can find out. If Marlowe remembers anything else about the pendant, any detail, I need to know."
Hitch studied you in silence for a moment, with that look of hers that sometimes caught people off guard because it was far sharper than she let others believe at first glance. "Does this have something to do with the clan?" she asked.
You kept your serious gaze fixed on her face.
"Yes," you said. "With Erwin."
Something crossed Hitch's face. It was not exactly guilt, but it was genuine discomfort. She lowered her eyes for a moment, as though she needed to look away from yours, and lifted a hand to her hair, absentmindedly twirling a strand between her fingers.
"Oh..." she murmured, almost to herself. "Right. I completely forgot."
She stayed silent another second, letting go of the strand and rubbing the back of her neck before looking at you again, this time with less lightness in her expression.
"I'm sorry," she added. "The last time I saw you, he was still alive. My condolences." hearing those words coming out of her mouth was a little strange, knowing her personality.
"Thank you," you replied quietly. Whether the apology was sincere or not hardly mattered. The fact that she had stepped out of her usual self-centered indifference long enough to say it was enough for you, and you preferred to leave it at that.
"I'll talk to Marlowe," she said. "We'll see what we can do." Hitch let go of her hair and stepped closer to you, seeming to weigh whether or not to hug you. In the end, she decided against it.
The two of you left the alley together. The sound of the festival drifted from the main street in the distance, that constant murmur a city carried when it was full of people gathered for the same purpose. Hitch walked beside you, once again with her hands in her pockets, matching your pace without either of you deciding it aloud.
"So, how's the festival?" she asked after a moment. "Tell me."
"Good," you said genuinely. "Entertaining. Although the level of condescension toward women still hits me every time we come here." You thought of the three men at the knife game, of their mocking tones, of the way they made it clear your words were not even worth listening to. "The magical world isn't like that. Men and women are seen as equals. Here, we still have to earn the space we deserve."
Hitch let out a sound of agreement that came from deep in her stomach, from that place where things are felt before they are named.
"It's unbearable," she said, with a frankness that had nothing theatrical about it. "I'd love to live with you in the forest. Seriously. To be somewhere you're seen as an equal, where nobody talks to you as if listening to your opinion is doing you a favor." Her tone sharpened with an edge that rarely appeared, but when it did, it was entirely real. "I'm tired. Tired of men flirting with me like that's supposed to be a compliment. Tired of the ones who speak slowly to me, as if big words might hurt me. Tired of my worth being measured by how I look instead of what I do."
She meant every word. Hitch was speaking from something that had been building inside her for a long time. And this time, there was not a trace of irony softening it.
You watched her for a moment without interrupting. There was something uncomfortable about hearing her like this, not because she was wrong, she was not, but because that frustration had no easy outlet.
You could not help thinking it: you would not trade your freedom for anything that world offered. Not for the spacious houses in the city center, nor the shop windows full of jewelry, nor the dresses imported from other countries, nor the tables overflowing with food that never ran out. All of it glittered, yes, but there was something fragile about it, something conditional.
It only took an instant. One wrong word, an argument, the wrong gesture in front of the right man—father, husband, tutor—and everything could collapse. You had seen it before: women who had seemed untouchable, suddenly reduced to nothing, cast out of their own lives as though they had never belonged to them in the first place.
All that abundance stopped seeming enviable when it was not truly theirs, when it depended on someone else's will and could disappear without warning. Luxury lost its shine once you realized it was borrowed, conditional, always on the verge of being taken away by another person's decision.
Respect should not depend on anyone else. And freedom was not negotiable. It was the only thing that, once lost, could never be replaced by anything.
As you walked, your companion glanced downward. Her eyes stopped on your hands.
"Hey," she said, and her tone changed completely, becoming more direct, stripped of everything else. "What happened to you?"
The bandages were visible even in the dim streetlight, white against your skin, reaching all the way to your wrists.
"A mission," you said. "A Shadowbone touched me. I was left with its mark." You turned your hands over and looked at your palms. At this point, with the festival and everything else, you had almost forgotten you had been injured.
Hitch stared at you for a long second, with an expression that was genuinely difficult to read because it mixed things that rarely went together on her face: something close to concern, and something that was clearly relief that she had not been there.
"Good thing I live on this side of the forest," she said.
The two of you kept walking.
The square appeared before you fully saw it, announced first by the noise. As you drew closer, the murmur you had heard from the side street gradually turned into something more distinct: overlapping voices, waves of applause, the specific sound of a crowd that had found a common point of attention and was holding onto it.
The number of people had not decreased much since earlier, but something had changed. The children had almost completely disappeared from the streets. Where they had once run between the adults' legs, now only grown-ups remained. It was a gradual change that happened at every festival after nightfall: dusk was the unspoken signal that the best hour for wine and beer had arrived, and families preferred to take their children home before that second half of the celebration began teaching lessons they would rather not explain the next day.
You crossed the entrance to the square and the noise hit you full force.
The crowd had gathered in front of a wooden stage set up at the northern end of the square, directly before the town hall façade. It was a simple but sturdy structure, raised high enough for whoever stood upon it to be visible from every corner of the space. And on that stage, with the posture of someone for whom being watched was the natural state of things, stood a man.
He was extraordinarily elegant.
Not with the discreet elegance of someone who simply had good taste, but the kind that required effort, money, and the willingness for both to be noticed. His suit was a shade of gold that seemed almost impossible for a festival night in a provincial town, impeccably tailored and fastened with buttons that caught the torchlight in a way that suggested they had been chosen specifically for that purpose. He wore an elaborate jabot at his throat, its folds carefully arranged, and several rings gleamed on the fingers of both hands, some set with stones that flashed whenever he moved them to emphasize his words, which he did often, and with studied grace.
"Citizens of Velmyra," he was saying, with a voice that filled the plaza with the ease of someone who had spent years learning how to occupy spaces with it, "today we gather beneath generous skies, witnesses to a land that, once again, has answered our efforts with abundance. The fields have spoken, and their voice is clear: perseverance, labor, and faith have borne fruit."
The applause came immediately. Men raised their mugs and plates in a spontaneous gesture of celebration, mixing the sound of clapping with the clatter of dishes striking together.
"Who is he?" you asked, without taking your eyes off the stage.
"The new burgomaster," Hitch said beside you. "He's been in office for about a month. He was a nobleman from the city, but the appointment came directly from Sângrvia. The capital chose him for the position."
On the stage, the man continued.
"I do not ignore the fact that this past year has brought changes and losses that still weigh upon our memory. Velmyra has risen before, and it shall rise again. As long as this city breathes, as long as its streets are filled with life as they are tonight, no misfortune shall ever break it."
"Someone with a lot of money and influence," you said quietly, more to yourself than to Hitch. "To be appointed from the capital without going through a local election, you need both."
Hitch made a vague sound of agreement without elaborating, her gaze fixed on the stage.
"But tonight," the man continued, and his voice shifted into something different, warmer, closer, as though he were speaking to each individual person rather than to an entire square. "Let us set aside our worries. Let bread be broken without restraint, let the wine flow freely, and let the music drown out every concern you carry."
"Celebrate, Velmyra. Because as long as we remember who we are, we will never truly be in the darkness."
The square answered with a collective shout that shook the air. Mugs were raised, and from somewhere nearby, someone lit a powder charge that shot upward with a whistle before bursting over the rooftops into a shower of golden sparks. Several torches were lifted as well, and tambourines and clapping began to echo through the crowd, marking the rhythm of the celebration. The music, which until then had remained in the background, grew louder, more intense, as though the musicians had been waiting for that exact moment to throw themselves completely into the uproar.
The burgomaster stepped back on the stage, smiling with the satisfaction of someone who had just accomplished exactly what he knew would work. Then he extended a hand to one side, and a woman who had been waiting discreetly near the edge of the stage stepped forward and took it.
She was blonde, her hair gathered into a high bun decorated with seasonal flowers, small daisies and stalks of wheat that matched the golden tone of her dress. The bun had been styled with such care that it almost compensated for the width of her forehead, though not entirely. She was considerably taller than he was, a difference that became obvious the moment they stood together, drawing a short laugh from someone in the crowd that quickly disappeared into the surrounding noise.
"Want something to drink?" Hitch asked, turning toward you with her hands in her pockets and an expression that suggested the answer she expected was yes.
You thought about it for a second.
"Wouldn't be a bad idea," you said with a smile.
The two of you walked toward one of the drink stalls along the western side of the square, where a line of barrels balanced on trestles and a man in a dark apron was serving a queue of four people with the kind of efficiency that suggested he had been doing it for hours and had no intention whatsoever of getting tired. You ordered two mugs. You paid before Hitch could take anything out.
She looked at you with something between surprise and amusement.
"Consider it advance payment," you said, handing her hers. "For the work you're going to do gathering information."
Hitch took the mug with a smile that was almost admiration.
You found an empty table near the edge of the square, far enough from the stage that you could speak without competing with the music, and sat across from one another. The wood was slightly damp from the night dew, but not enough to matter.
You brought the mug to your lips.
The beer was thick and frothy, carrying that specific richness of seasonal brews, and the first sip brought something you had not entirely expected: cinnamon. A distinct note, perfectly blended, transforming the taste into something closer to the celebration itself.
Above you, the sky had fully darkened. The stars were visible now with the particular clarity they only had on countryside nights after the wind had swept the clouds away, and the waxing crescent moon hung slightly tilted above the roof of the town hall as though someone had placed it there deliberately to complete the picture.
It was a beautiful night.
"It's been days since you last came into the city," she said, resting her elbows on the table while absentmindedly spinning her mug between her hands, letting foam slide over the rim.
You took another small sip before answering, then rested your own elbow against the rough wood, mirroring her posture.
"Things have been busy at the castle," you replied. "And the supplies still haven't run out, so there hasn't been any need to come."
Hitch lifted her mug and took a long drink, never taking her eyes off you over the rim, as though measuring how much you truly knew. Then she set it back down on the table with a soft thud.
"Then you probably don't know yet."
She let the sentence linger between the two of you, tracing absentminded circles across the wood with her fingertips as though she enjoyed stretching out the small silence. You frowned faintly, leaning forward slightly as you waited.
Hitch glanced briefly toward the square, where the music and laughter still rose without pause. When she looked back at you, her expression had changed. She was still herself, direct and without detours, but there was something heavier beneath the surface now.
"A few nights ago, there was chaos in the city," she said. "And deaths."
The noise of the festival continued unchanged around you. The music, the voices, the applause. Everything carried on exactly the same while Hitch spoke, and there was something unreal about that continuity, as though the world had not received the news yet. Or was simply choosing to ignore it.
"In the northern district of the city, they found a young woman dead in her home," she said. "Her throat completely torn apart. Her neighbors say they didn't hear anything unusual the night before. No screams. No fighting. They only found her in the morning."
"In the west," she continued, "they found the body of an older man behind his house. His family explained what happened. Someone knocked on the door during the middle of the night, saying he was hungry, that he needed help. The father opened the door." Hitch paused briefly. "One man came in. Three others entered behind him. The family decided to escape through the back door, the parents, the children, and the grandfather."
"What happened to him?" you asked, because something in the story had already foreshadowed it.
"A few meters away, they realized he wasn't with them anymore. They heard noise coming from the street, something that sounded like a fight, blows, things breaking. They decided not to go back until it stopped. They were afraid something would happen to the children."
Hitch took a slow sip of beer.
"When they went to get the guards, half of them were asleep and the other half drunk, as usual. None of them had heard anything. By dawn, they finally decided to return to the house and they found the grandfather's body." She looked at you. "His neck was shredded. It wasn't a weapon wound. It looked like someone had dug their fingers straight into the flesh with enough force to pierce through it." Hitch fell silent for a moment, searching for the perfect phrase to make it clearer. "They played with his throat like it was clay."
You made an involuntary movement, a brief flinch that never became a full expression but was enough. Sometimes Hitch reminded you of Ymir in the way she described things, without softening them, without searching for euphemisms that might make the impact easier for the listener. It was a quality you could respect even when it made your stomach shift uneasily.
"People in the south reported noise that same night too," Hitch continued. "Everyone locked themselves inside their homes waiting for the guard to arrive. But when everything finally stopped and they went outside to look, the streets were empty. As if whoever had been fighting had evaporated."
The word came on its own, without you needing to search for it.
"Did anything happen in the center?" you asked.
"Nothing," Hitch said quickly, as though she had been expecting your question. "The guards in the center were at their posts, awake, reporting nothing. They were too far away to hear what happened in the outskirts."
She looked at you. It was not a long or dramatic look, but it was firm, held just enough to make it clear there was no need to explain further. There was seriousness in her eyes, but also something quieter: a shared understanding, almost unspoken.
"Are you thinking the same thing I am?"
You gave a slight nod, your fingers resting around the mug without drinking.
"That the threat came from the edges of the city," you said. "Not the center. Someone who knows the layout of the guard patrols, where the blind spots are, at what times the shifts are more careless."
"Yes." Hitch lowered her voice and cast a quick glance toward the neighboring tables before continuing, a gesture so unusual for her that its rarity alone drew attention. She leaned forward slightly. "And there's more. Something nobody's been able to explain properly. The murdered woman's daughter wasn't in the house when they found the body."
Your brows drew together in curiosity, and you leaned in as well, as though that somehow helped hold the conversation within the small space between you.
"At the orphanage." She paused briefly. "As if someone had taken her there, or she had known to go there herself, before anyone even knew her mother was dead."
You processed that in silence, lowering your gaze to the table for a second, following the grain of the wood with your eyes.
"Have the authorities spoken to her?"
"Yes." Hitch's tone was flat now, more restrained than usual. She straightened slightly on the bench. "But the girl doesn't speak. Whenever they ask about that night, she says nothing. She keeps to herself, away from the other children at the orphanage."
"Poor little thing," you said softly.
The words left your mouth before you could think them through. You looked away toward the square, as though you needed a second to compose yourself, raising the mug to your lips without drinking from it.
When you looked back at her, Hitch was watching you, her head tilted slightly and her expression softer, as though she had noticed that exact small shift in you.
"How have the vampires in the forest been behaving?" she asked, and this time her tone was different. This was not conversation anymore. It was a direct question.
You narrowed your eyes, trying to understand the abrupt turn in the discussion.
"Normal, for now," you said, shrugging faintly as you slid the mug a few inches across the table. You did not understand where she was going with this.
She let out a brief sound that was not laughter, more like a dry exhale. Her gaze drifted toward the crowd for a moment before locking onto you again.
"So normal that they've started attacking here."
You felt the impact of her words. Attacked. You straightened your back slightly, tightening your fingers around the edge of the wooden table, as though the gesture might help you keep your composure.
"It's been months since anything like this happened in the city," you replied, trying to keep your voice even.
"And that makes it less serious?" She crossed her arms, watching you with one brow faintly raised. "Is The Dawnguard lowering their guard in Velmyra because they're too busy with the forest?"
You shook your head, a little faster than you would have liked, and leaned forward.
"That's not it," you said, more firmly than you intended. "We've been occupied with Erwin's death. With everything that comes with it." You paused briefly, lowering your gaze for a second before meeting hers again. "It's not intentional. There are just too many things happening at once."
Hitch did not look away. She listened without interrupting, drumming her fingers once against her own arm before stopping. Then she spoke, as always, without softening the blow.
"The guards in this city are not an obstacle for vampires. They never have been and they never will be. You are." She leaned slightly forward, resting her forearms on the table. "Whoever could have defended those people that night, driven those killers away or destroyed them, had to be strong. Not guards with decorative swords who fall asleep during their shifts." Her fingers tightened around her mug without lifting it. "Someone with training."
And there was the question she never asked aloud but left hanging between the two of you.
Who could they have been.
The guards of Velmyra were not capable of that level of combat. You knew exactly where the limit of their abilities stood when faced with something supernatural. They did not even come close.
So the doubt forced its way forward inevitably: who had been fighting in the streets that night, and how had they vanished without a trace once it was over. The idea of a group of humans specifically trained to face that kind of threat, operating in secret, was not impossible but it did not entirely fit with what you knew.
The other possibility was even more unsettling. Vampires fighting each other over the same prey.
Or vampires who, instead of surrendering to the most basic impulse, chose to protect. It was not an easy idea to hold onto, but once it appeared, it became difficult to dismiss.
You thought about what Armin's historical index had described regarding the Bloodveil Schism, the Conservatives and the Conquerors, the fragile balance some chose to defend because without it, everything collapsed.
You said none of that aloud.
Hitch struck the table with the base of her mug, a dry, satisfied sound announcing that she had emptied it, and looked at you with an expression that shifted from serious to conversational with the ease only she possessed.
"Well. I've fulfilled my informational duties for the day." She rested her chin in her hand. "How about you?"
You tried to organize your thoughts quickly, to push everything you had just processed into some compartment where it could wait without spilling over.
"Well," you said, taking a deep breath, "things have been pretty chaotic at the castle. I found out some things that surprised me quite a bit."
Hitch's eyes widened with the very specific kind of interest of someone who had just received exactly the type of information she loved most.
"Ooooh. What?" She leaned forward again. "Did they finally figure out what happened that night Jean, Connie, Marco, and Armin came back to the castle with nothing but their weapons, shoes, and underwear after going exploring?"
It was short and involuntary, the kind of laugh that escaped before you could decide whether you wanted to let it out.
"No," you said, tucking your hair behind your ears, clearing it away from your face as though preparing yourself to speak. "Not that."
"Well then, what could possibly be more interesting? Because that story still keeps me awake at night."
You took a moment. Your gaze dropped to the table, tracing the veins in the wood, those irregular curves swirling into almost spiral-like patterns. Then you looked back at her.
"I found out I'm not just some orphan found at the entrance of the castle," you said. "My mother was a hunter, just like me."
Hitch went still for a second. The entertained expression she had been wearing for the last several minutes did not disappear entirely, but it paused, as though someone had stopped playing a song halfway through a line.
"What?" she said. "What do you mean, a hunter?"
You crossed your arms in front of you on the table, holding her gaze.
"A hunter. A member of The Dawnguard." Your voice remained steady. "Her name was Selene. She was part of the veterans' generation."
Hitch looked genuinely speechless for a moment. She parted her lips, hesitated, then finally lifted a hand to her ear, massaging it as she tried to process what she had just heard.
"And what happened to her? Do you know where she is?"
You shook your head, glancing away for a moment toward some indistinct point in the crowd.
"All I know is that one night she arrived at the castle and placed me in Erwin's arms. Then she disappeared."
"Disappeared?" Hitch repeated, leaning forward slightly as though it might help her understand you better. "She wasn't at the castle when you were born?"
"No." You rested your hands on your legs, intertwining your fingers. "I don't know where she lived during that time. Nobody knows for sure. From what I was told, she used to leave the castle frequently. She started distancing herself from the clan, got involved with someone. She left The Dawnguard to be with him." You paused briefly, breathing before continuing. "But I think things went wrong in the end, because eventually she decided to bring me to the castle and leave."
Hitch stared at you for a second that stretched longer than usual for her, listening without interrupting, weighing every word.
"How the hell did they let her leave?" she finally said, with that trademark lack of softness that belonged to her alone. "Knowing everything she knows about the vampire world, the forest, the clan." She shook her head faintly. "That's dangerous for her and for everyone else."
"Erwin let her go," you said with a slight shrug. "He respected her decision. He let her search for the life she wanted, outside of hunting, in normality."
She exhaled through her nose, her jaw tightening slightly before she spoke.
"So normal," she said slowly, "that she had to run away." She tilted her head faintly, studying you more carefully. "And your father?"
You felt the question settle into the silence between you. You blinked once, and your hands began moving almost automatically: you intertwined your fingers and cracked them softly one by one, as though you needed to anchor yourself to something.
"I have no idea." The words came out on their own, with a calmness you had learned without realizing it. "I don't know who he is. His name, where he is, whether he's still alive. I know nothing about him."
When you finished, you sighed as though the entire conversation exhausted you, despite the fact that you had been the one who wanted to bring it up. Hitch no longer carried the same firmness in her gaze as before.
She rested an elbow on the table, bringing her fingers to her temple thoughtfully. Then she spoke, her tone more careful than usual for her.
"And do you believe them?" she asked, one brow raised. "Do you believe the veterans' words?"
You held her gaze for a moment longer than usual, your expression stiffening slightly, as though the question had tightened something inside you before you could answer.
She continued, lowering her hand slowly and tracing the lines in the wood of the table. Tiny splinters dug into her fingertips. She paid them no attention, as though the faint pain kept her grounded there with you.
"If they lied to you your whole life, why would you believe whatever they tell you now?"
Your hands slowly came apart. The echo of your knuckles cracking still seemed to linger in your joints, a faint, persistent tension that refused to disappear. You flexed your fingers once, as though testing that lingering discomfort, before pressing your palms against the table.
"What do you mean?" you asked.
"I don't know." Her finger continued its slow, absent movement. "What if everything they've told you as 'the truth' is just another lie covering up something even worse?"
The noise of the festival carried on around you. The music, the voices, the sound of mugs striking together. Everything exactly the same.
But something inside you shifted, slowly, like a certainty moving just enough to stop fitting into place. Your body noticed it before your mind could give it a name.
You questioned things. Not in an orderly way, not with arguments or a list of evidence, but from somewhere more primal, more uncomfortable. A suspicion that settled into the body before taking shape in the mind, spreading like a dull pressure. It began seeping into everything you had taken for granted: what you had been told, what you had accepted without stopping to examine too closely.
Suddenly, Selene's story no longer felt solid. Not because it was impossible, but because it was beginning to feel incomplete. Too clean around certain edges, too vague around others. The figure of your father, nonexistent until now, acquired a different kind of weight, almost irritating in his absence. And behind it all lingered something rougher: the possibility that you had been guided, that you had grown up inside a carefully measured version of events.
And now that same thing persisted, disguised as honesty.
The discomfort sharpened into something more piercing. There was anger there, mixed with uncertainty. Anger at not knowing, at not having asked sooner, at the idea that others might have decided which parts of your own story you deserved to know. And alongside it, a deeper unease, harder to bear: the possibility that even now, you still were not seeing the full picture.
You buried your head in your hands, elbows resting on the table. The smell of the beer left in your mug hit you all at once, dense and spiced, and your stomach answered with a wave of nausea you had not expected. You pushed the mug away from yourself with a quick movement.
"What, you don't want any more?"
"No," you said flatly. You held your breath, but the smell of alcohol still reached your nose. Stronger than usual.
"Well, I'm not about to let your money go to waste," Hitch said, taking your mug with the same natural ease with which she would have taken her own, and emptied it in one long uninterrupted swallow.
She slammed it back down on the table with satisfaction.
You remained with your head in your hands, staring at the wood without truly seeing it, letting the thoughts pile together without order. The idea persisted, growing harder and harder to ignore: that the truth you knew might only be one layer, and that beneath it there was more.
The feeling did not fade. It only settled deeper, heavier.
A sudden warmth and weight covered you.
"Hey, Onyankopon," Hitch greeted the boy standing behind you.
"Hey, Hitch. How are you?" he asked, smiling at her with that warmth of his that existed effortlessly. He had placed his hand on your shoulder.
"Nobody can feel bad at a festival surrounded by food and good drinks," she replied.
Onyankopon let out a short laugh. Then he turned his head toward you, who had lowered your gaze back to the table.
"Did something happen, y/n?"
"No. I just got a little dizzy from the alcohol." You gestured vaguely toward the mug.
"Dizzy?" Hitch repeated loudly, in the tone of someone who had just heard something completely absurd. "You only drank half a mug!"
"I don't have the same tolerance you do."
"Ymir and Jean clearly failed to train you properly," she said, leaning back on the bench with carefree confidence, forgetting for a second that it had no backrest. The movement threw her off balance just enough that she had to catch herself abruptly, awkwardly planting one foot on the ground before regaining it. "There are obvious flaws in your education."
"Do you want to leave?" Onyankopon asked you, with that tone of his that was both a question and an offer, without pressure or urgency. "I saw you sitting here and told the others to wait for me in front of the town hall."
"Yeah." You stood from the bench before fully answering. "Let's go."
Hitch rose to her feet as well. They waited while she returned the mugs to the man at the drink stall, and then the three of you began weaving through the crowd toward the exit of the square.
"So, how's life been in the city?" Onyankopon asked Hitch, walking with his hands tucked into the pockets of his vest. You walked between the two of them, letting the conversation pass around you without truly trying to follow it.
Hitch answered immediately. She began recounting, with the same ease she had used when telling you, the news about the murders from the previous nights. The details. The northern district, the young woman, the torn throat. The west, the elderly man, the family escaping through the back door. And she reached the part about the state in which they had found the man's neck.
Onyankopon did not answer immediately. He walked several more steps in silence, processing it, with that habit of his of taking exactly the amount of time he needed before speaking.
"It's incredible they still decided to hold the festival," he finally said, "knowing the danger there was only a few days ago."
"People need to believe they're safe even when they aren't," Hitch said, not maliciously, simply as someone stating something she had observed many times before. "Besides," she added, throwing an arm over your shoulders with the casual familiarity of someone who never measured that sort of gesture, "thank goodness you're here. If they attack again, we've got you to protect us."
The weight of her arm around you was more than your mind was capable of handling in that moment. You felt it physically, that uncomfortable warmth across your shoulders when what you wanted was air, space, and silence.
"We'll have to talk about this with the veterans," Onyankopon said, in a tone that was no longer conversational but the sound of a decision being spoken aloud. "We're not giving one hundred percent to the city. If it hadn't been for whoever stopped those vampires that night, far more people would have died."
"They already know that if they need reinforcements, they can always take Marlowe," Hitch said with a laugh that was half joke and half genuine offer.
You did not answer either of them.
Your eyes stayed fixed on the crowd stretching before you as you all made your way toward the edge of the square. Most people were drunk, or on their way to becoming so. People shouting over each other, spilling beer without caring where it landed, using the volume of their voices as though it were an argument. Men turning toward much younger women with smiles that never bothered asking permission to exist.
You were about to look away when, among the mass of bodies and heads and constant movement, something stood out.
A raised hand. Steady, direct, without flourish.
She stood around twenty meters away beside Armin, who was craning his neck in your direction with that methodical, unapologetic way he had of searching for someone in a crowd. The moment he spotted you, he stopped stretching upward.
You slipped out from beneath Hitch's arm without a word and walked toward them.
"We were looking for you," Armin said the moment you reached him, with that restrained relief in his tone he always had whenever something had worried him more than he wanted to admit.
"I was by the stalls, getting something to drink," you said.
Mikasa did not respond to that. Instead, she pulled the new dagger from her belt in one clean motion and held it out to you carefully in her open palm so you could see it properly.
Carved into the wood was a circle containing a triangle made of three crossed swords, the lines forming the shape of a letter within them. An A.
The same symbol Mikasa had scarred into her right wrist since before you could remember.
The emblem of her mother's family.
"It looks amazing," you said, examining it closely, carefully brushing your thumb over the carved relief. "Your mother would be proud of you."
Mikasa looked at you. It was one of those looks of hers that did not need much time to say a great deal. Then she smiled. Small, brief, completely genuine.
"Just like yours would be of you," she said.
The words arrived without warning and settled somewhere inside you that was not prepared to be touched by anything emotional in that moment. It did not hurt exactly. It felt more like accidentally pressing against a bruise already tender beneath the surface, the body reacting before you could decide whether it actually hurt or not.
You smiled back at her. Weaker than hers, but the most honest thing you could manage in that instant. You handed the dagger back and turned so they could see the people coming up behind you.
"Wow, Mikasa, you look great," Hitch said as she approached, studying her with the quick, appraising glance she reserved for these sorts of things. "Armin," she added, turning toward him, "are you using something new on your face? Your skin looks incredible."
The blond turned red in a way that started at his ears and spread down his cheeks so quickly it would have been comical if it had not been so obvious.
"No, just water," he said, in the tone of someone actively suppressing the memory of something he would prefer never to think about again.
"So?" Hitch continued, looking around the group with genuine curiosity. "Has the festival convinced you all to leave the forest and come live in the city?"
"We have a duty to protect these people," Mikasa answered with the calm certainty of someone who did not need to think about it because the answer had long ago been decided. "We would never abandon everything just to live here."
"You're right," Hitch said, though there was something in her tone that was not entirely admiration, more the uncomfortable acknowledgment of someone who knew she would never make the same choice. "Although I don't know what's worse: living among bloodsucking monsters or among rich people who steal all your money." She glanced toward the balconies lining the square, where wide dresses and golden suits still watched the festival from above with goblets in hand.
You kept walking without slowing.
"One kills you quickly," you said without looking back. "The other empties you little by little."
There was a second of silence. Then the others exchanged brief looks before following after you.
You all walked away from the square along the side avenue that ran beside the town hall façade, where the noise of the festival began softening slightly with every meter you gained.
"I heard about the Blouse family," Hitch said after a moment, changing the subject with that effortless ease of hers that never needed warning. "A few days ago I was flirting with a guy at the market and everything was going great until I heard his last name." She grimaced as though reliving the moment. "All the charm vanished instantly. He was Sasha's cousin. And on top of that, the guy recognized me. He said, 'Hey, you're the one helping the Dawnguard from the city, right?'" She twisted her mouth uncomfortably. "Then he ended up telling me Sasha's parents and siblings are moving to Velmyra."
"Do they already have somewhere to stay?" Onyankopon asked, with the genuine interest of someone who processed logistical implications before anything else.
"Yeah," Hitch answered. "The relatives provided the money, and Pixis handled the paperwork so they could be assigned a house."
"And nobody asked questions?" Armin asked, frowning faintly.
"Obviously they did," Hitch replied. "But Pixis made up some story about them being a known family arriving from another city. You know how our bald man is. He always has a story ready, and it always sounds boring enough that nobody wants to investigate further."
"It's good to have him backing us up," Mikasa said, her calm tone carrying quiet approval.
Dot Pixis, Marlowe, and Hitch formed the core of the Liaison Unit in Velmyra. None of the three fought in the forest or faced the creatures of the vampire world directly. It was neither their role nor their skill set. But their work was just as crucial, perhaps even harder in some ways, because it required operating within the city, out in plain sight, without anyone around them truly understanding what they were doing or why. They gathered information. Managed contacts. Secured supplies whenever the castle's provisions began running low. Prepared routes and safehouses in case something went wrong in the magical world and someone needed a place to return to quickly and without questions. They were the ones who translated the mortal world for the clan, and the ones who ensured it never became completely isolated from other humans it claimed to protect.
It was quiet work. And precisely because of that, indispensable.
You were walking without paying much attention to the sidewalk, your eyes fixed at mid-height and your thoughts still trapped in the same place they had been since leaving the table in the square.
It was not a hard collision, barely a brush of shoulders, the kind of impact that happened when you failed to notice another person walking in the opposite direction. But it was enough to stop you and make you turn.
The girl facing you had brown hair and wide brown eyes, large and startled with genuine surprise. She looked younger than you, though not by much.
"Sorry," both of you said at the exact same time.
You smiled at her. She smiled back, the kind of spontaneous gesture that appeared when a situation was just silly and innocent enough that embarrassment never had time to settle in. Then she turned and looped her arm through that of the blond boy accompanying her, resting her head lightly against his shoulder as they resumed weaving through the crowd.
You watched them walk away for a second before continuing on yourself.
Sasha and Connie were sitting on the raised stone ledge running beside the sidewalk, where the building left a strip of stone before giving way to the cobbled street. From there, the avenue stretched broad before them, wide enough for carriages and riders to move in both directions without interfering with one another.
The noise had not faded with the distance from the square. Wheels against stone, hooves striking rhythmically, voices dissolving before reaching anywhere at all. At that hour, the city seemed bottomless, as though it could keep producing movement indefinitely and nobody inside it would ever grow tired.
And still, the two of them remained there, legs stretched toward the street, watching the flow of traffic with the calm of people who had somehow found the only still point inside something that never stopped moving.
Every now and then, a carriage passed too close and forced them to pull their legs back instinctively. Then they would stretch them out again, as though even the motion itself cost them more effort than necessary and they had no energy for anything except maintaining that posture of comfortable half-defeat.
"That's the seventh one," Sasha said, leaning forward slightly as she followed a carriage moving close to the curb.
"You skipped one," Connie replied, frowning with the concentration of someone who had been keeping his own parallel count for quite a while. "It's eight."
"I didn't skip it. That one was empty. It doesn't count."
"Why would an empty carriage count?"
"Because it's still a carriage!"
"That one doesn't count either," Sasha insisted, pointing toward the street. "It's too small."
"Then none of them count!" Connie shot back, dropping his hands onto his knees with the frustration of someone who had spent several minutes losing an argument that should have been simple.
They did not notice you had arrived.
You sat down between them without announcing yourself, with the same naturalness you might have sat on any available surface in that moment. Then you let your head fall onto Connie's shoulder.
"Wow," Sasha said, looking at you with a grin. "If we'd known you were going off to get drunk, we would've followed you way sooner instead of letting you disappear."
You squeezed your eyes shut tightly, the corners crinkling. The noise was beginning to bother you too much.
"I didn't run off to drink," you said in the voice of someone who no longer had the energy to defend anything convincingly. "I just went to get some air and ran into Hitch."
Said person, who had arrived with the others, greeted the group with a lazy wave of her hand.
"Yeah, and we only had one beer each," she added. "I would've had more if y/n hadn't gotten dizzy from hers."
Connie laughed. It was that short, effortless laugh of his whenever something amused him naturally. His shoulders shook, carrying you along with the slight movement. Then he leaned toward you and rested his head against yours, with that unthinking weight gestures had when nobody stopped to consider them first.
"We're gonna have to come here more often so you can build up your tolerance," he said.
The others exchanged glances, and more than one of them smiled with that sort of restrained amusement that needed no explanation.
"For that, she'd need to come with Mike," Mikasa replied with the same calm tone she might have used while delivering a tactical report.
The laughter that followed was unanimous, breaking out from several places at once and scattering through the noise of the street without anyone making the slightest effort to contain it.
From the plaza, still distant, came music. Laughter. Someone shouting in celebration of something specific with far more enthusiasm than the situation probably required. It was completely different from the street where you were, which carried that relative calm of places that had stopped being the center of something.
Sasha grabbed her stomach with both hands and let herself fall backward, lying flat on the stone curb with her eyes fixed on the night sky. Ignoring the dirt gathered on the ground.
"God. I'm still starving," she said with a guttural groan.
"You could hunt a rat here in the street and eat it," Hitch said.
The others laughed. Sasha did not bother sitting back up to answer.
Everyone's voices still echoed around you, blending with the sound of the street, with the distant and constant noise Velmyra produced effortlessly and without pause. But inside your head there was something different. A dull, persistent vibration lodged just behind your eyes, part headache and part something else you still did not want to name.
Hitch's words had not left your mind since she said them.
What if everything they've told you as "the truth" is just another lie covering something even worse?
You carried it the way one carries something heavier than it first seemed when picked up, but impossible to put down once you've walked too far away from where you found it.
"I should go," Hitch said suddenly, in that flat, tired tone of someone who had already gotten bored and had no intention of dragging things out any longer.
She stretched backward, lacing her fingers together and arching her back until her spine cracked softly, as though releasing all the tension she had accumulated at once.
"I promised Pixis I'd help him finish some records early tomorrow morning. Names, origins, making sure everything matches up." She waved a hand with the specific disdain she reserved for paperwork. "You know how it is."
"Come on," Onyankopon said, standing up. "We'll walk you home."
And so, with the same lack of ceremony with which the gathering had begun, the group started moving. Onyankopon, Mikasa, and Armin walked beside Hitch toward the streets on the eastern side, where the house facades became more continuous and the lanterns more sparse.
Connie pinched your nose between two fingers.
The gesture was so unexpected that you blinked before reacting.
Sasha, already standing, held both hands out to you with an expression of anticipated effort. You took them. She pulled harder and hauled you up from the stone ledge with a tug that worked.
You walked through the streets in silence.
It was a different kind of silence than before, more comfortable, more tired, the kind that appears when people have already said everything they needed to say and all that remains is simply getting there. Footsteps against the cobblestones set an uneven rhythm because no one was matching their pace to anyone else's. The weapons hidden beneath your clothes made that soft metallic sound you no longer consciously registered after so many years.
The house Hitch shared with the others stood near the center, only a few streets away from the administrative buildings, in one of those blocks where the houses shared side walls and formed a continuous line of pale stone barely interrupted by tall narrow windows and dark wooden doors distinguished only by their numbers and the state of the paint.
When Hitch pulled out her key and started unlocking the door, a sound came from the opposite side of the street that was impossible to mistake.
Laughter. Loud, open laughter, the kind produced when two people have spent enough time talking about something amusing that they've completely lost track of whether they're being noisy.
"Look," Armin said, discreetly pointing across the street. "It's Jean and Ymir."
And indeed it was. Leaning against the outer wall of the tavern, close enough to the entrance that they had either just come out or were considering going back in, stood the two of them. Jean, with a posture slightly less steady than usual and laughter several decibels louder than normal. Ymir, with that laugh of hers that sounded genuine precisely because she never bothered softening it, shoving Jean in the shoulder only for him to shove her back, both of them swaying slightly from the impact as if it were part of the game.
That drunken noise must have been part of the everyday landscape for the people living nearby. Laughter too loud, clumsy footsteps, voices that did not know when to stop. Thinking about it, it probably was not a coincidence that Pixis had chosen a house so close to the tavern. He only had to cross the street, a few steps at most, to have chaos within reach and return to it whenever he pleased.
"You all go," Hitch said, already with the door half open, not even looking toward where you had pointed. "I don't want to see Ymir. I owe her some money and I have no intention of paying her tonight."
She pushed the door open and went inside. Before closing it completely, her voice came from within in that concluding tone she used whenever she finished processing something and blurted it out without warning.
"Just my luck. Being born into a family tangled up in all this magical world business."
The door shut without even giving anyone the chance to say goodbye.
You all stared at the door for a second before turning toward the tavern.
Jean spotted you before any of you could say anything.
"Oh, guys!" he exclaimed, with that voice of his that alcohol somehow made both louder and warmer at the same time. "How's it going?"
"Did you actually go to the festival or have you been hiding in here this whole time?" Onyankopon asked, in a tone that sounded almost like a supervisor reviewing a report.
"We did go!" Ymir answered immediately, with the speed of someone preempting an accusation because she already knew it was coming. "We ran into each other there and then came here to keep celebrating somewhere quieter."
"Exactly!" Jean laughed, gesturing grandly toward the tavern door. "And we're going to keep celebrating! The beer is incredible, you have to try it."
He took one step too many while speaking, briefly losing his balance before correcting himself with a laugh, as if it were all part of the enthusiasm.
"I think it'd be better if we left," Armin said, with that calm tone of his that sounded like a suggestion but never really was.
"Nonsense!" Jean did not let him finish. He turned around and, with the specific determination of someone who had decided everyone was going to have fun even if they needed to be shoved into it, placed his hands against the group's backs and started steering you toward the entrance. "The beer is half price! We can't pass that up!"
Ymir had already thrown the door wide open.
The tavern was spacious, more than the exterior suggested, with that specific effect interior spaces gain when they have expanded through additions over the years, a room here, an alcove there, until the final result has more depth than width and the light does not reach every corner equally.
The lighting came from candles and oil lanterns spread generously across tables, shelves, and ceiling beams, compensating for the low ceiling in some places. The light they cast was yellow and flickering, the kind that made faces appear warmer and shadows sharper, turning every conversation into something that felt more intimate than it really was. The air was hot, almost suffocating near the bar, where the body heat of the crowd and the warmth from the kitchen stoves drifting beneath the back door made the atmosphere feel heavy against the skin.
Almost every table was occupied. Men gathered in groups of four or five with mugs in hand and voices competing for volume. Some played games with tokens across the wooden surfaces. Others simply drank and talked with the specific concentration of people who had decided tonight's conversation was the most important thing in existence.
At the back, at a long table slightly removed from the center of the noise, sat Historia and Marco.
The blonde had her elbows resting on the table and an expression that was not exactly worry but close to it, with that slight furrow of her brow she got whenever something troubled her and she had not yet figured out how to solve it. Marco spoke to her quietly, leaning slightly toward her, carrying that attitude of someone who had decided what he had to say deserved to be said carefully.
"Don't worry," you heard as you approached. "We could come back another day and investigate everything more calmly."
You sat beside them. Marco looked up.
"Hey, guys. Get thirsty?"
"Jean and Ymir dragged us in," Mikasa said as she sat down, her eyes roaming across the room with that attentiveness of hers that never fully rested even when her body did.
"And besides, we can't leave unless we're all together," Armin added, sitting carefully and adjusting himself in the chair before looking at Jean and Ymir. "You know how that ends."
"We'll be trapped here until sunrise!" Sasha complained, throwing her head dramatically against the back of her chair and stretching her neck.
"Sasha!" Jean called from the bar, where he was already leaning against it talking to the woman working there. "They've got lamb stew. Want a plate?"
The girl looked at him with an expression that made it clear she considered the question stupid.
"One plate, Jean? Don't insult me."
Jean turned back toward the woman at the bar with the seriousness of someone making a strategic decision.
"Give me two. Better safe than sorry."
"If I'm going to be trapped here, I might as well be well-fed," Sasha said, shrugging with the satisfied resignation of someone who had found the bright side of the situation.
Within minutes, the table filled up. Mugs of beer placed down one after another, steaming bowls of stew arriving from the kitchen, bread in a wicker basket that Connie pushed toward the center without anyone asking him to. Jean had declared he was paying for everyone, and that alone had been enough for nobody to ask further questions.
The others drank. It was an occasion that justified it in multiple ways: finally leaving the castle after days, surviving the festival without major incidents, and the fact that Jean was in a generous enough mood to pay for everyone, something that did not happen often enough to be taken lightly.
Your mug sat in front of you untouched since it had been set down. Your stomach still was not in any condition to take in more, and your head throbbed with that dull rhythm that settled in when exhaustion and discomfort found the same spot and made themselves at home together.
Ymir watched you from across the table with that expression of hers that mixed shamelessness with something that might have been genuine curiosity if she had ever bothered softening it.
"Drink," she ordered. "Don't be the kind of person who wastes other people's generosity."
"I'm fine," you said without looking at her.
The freckled girl narrowed her eyes and leaned slightly forward, as though evaluating how much resistance you were really going to put up.
"You drink, or I'll make you drink."
Connie let out a quiet laugh, propping an elbow against the table.
"I wouldn't get involved in that fight," he muttered, clearly enjoying the scene.
You sighed faintly and picked up the mug. You would rather endure a little more stomach pain than your companion's insistence.
You took three sips. Slow, mechanical, tasting nothing.
Then you set the mug back in the middle of the table. Someone, you did not even see who, took it less than a minute later. You did not care.
"I'm telling you, this one is better," Jean insisted from the other side of the table, holding his mug with exaggerated concentration as though he were genuinely on the verge of discovering something important.
"You've been saying that since the first one," Marco replied, slowly turning his own mug between his hands while watching him with resigned patience.
"No. Because you can't tell the difference anymore."
"I can," Sasha interrupted, lifting her head from her second bowl of stew with a faint spark of determination and stretching an arm out to snatch Jean's mug before he could react. "This one has more... uh..."
She froze for a second with the tankard halfway raised, sniffing it with absurd seriousness. Her nose wrinkled. Her brow furrowed intensely, as if the answer were about to appear if she concentrated hard enough.
"Amazing analysis." Ymir muttered, resting her cheek against her hand, clearly entertained.
"Here, give it to me," Jean said, leaning forward to take it back, though in the process he grabbed Marco's mug too, making the liquid slosh and spill lightly onto the table. "I'm going to compare them properly."
"That's not comparing," Marco replied, staring at the small stain spreading in front of him. "That's stealing."
Jean narrowed his eyes after taking a long sip from each mug, alternating between them with almost absurd seriousness, as though conducting a delicate experiment under clearly unsuitable conditions.
"There is a difference," he declared at last, giving a slight nod while clicking his tongue thoughtfully after tasting them, as if that confirmed his conclusion.
Ymir let out a short laugh.
"Look at him. Trying to think while drinking."
"I'm not trying anything."
"It shows," Sasha said without lifting her eyes from her plate, already back to eating as though the argument had completely stopped interesting her.
The comment hit you at exactly the moment you needed something like that, and it pulled a laugh out of you that you had not planned. The movement immediately made your head answer with a sharp pain that forced a groan out of you before you could suppress the sound.
Historia turned toward you.
You closed your eyes for a moment; the warm light of the tavern seemed to press the pain a little further in. You brought your fingers to your temple, applying gentle pressure.
"A beer I drank earlier at the festival with Hitch," you said. "It didn't sit well with me. It'll pass."
"Did you say Hitch?" Ymir asked, straightening slightly in her seat with the tone of someone who recognized a name and was already prepared to have an opinion.
"That little bitch owes me money."
"What did you lend her?" Mikasa asked with genuine curiosity.
"Who do you take me for?" Ymir said, placing a hand against her chest in mock offense. "I didn't lend her anything. She owes me from a bet."
"What bet?" Connie asked, suddenly leaning forward with both elbows on the table like someone who had just smelled drama.
Ymir smiled sideways, clearly enjoying the moment before finally saying it.
"That she couldn't steal one of Pixis's cigars without him noticing."
Historia blinked, processing it.
Ymir did not answer immediately. She leaned back and started laughing, quietly at first, then completely losing control, a scandalous laugh that made several people at the table turn toward her.
Everyone exchanged glances, waiting.
"Well," she tried to say, bringing a hand to her face as if that would help her compose herself, "she did it."
Another laugh escaped her. She shook her head, still trying to regain control.
"And when she was about to light it in front of me... boom!"She made a sudden exploding gesture with her hand. "It blew up in her face. She ended up covered in ash." Another burst of laughter. "I think it even singed her eyebrows a little."
She laughed again, even harder this time, as if the image kept replaying by itself inside her head.
The others looked at one another, some smiling, others still trying to fully picture it.
Connie raised a brow, intrigued.
Ymir shrugged, traces of laughter still clinging to her voice.
"Pixis had a box of altered cigars. Instead of tobacco, they had a little gunpowder inside." She grinned sideways. "His way of stopping her and Marlowe from stealing them."
The laughter came all at once, loud and disorderly; someone slammed a palm against the wood, someone else bent forward unable to hold it in. Sasha sat there with her mouth open in the middle of laughing, food still half-chewed, completely unconcerned with any attempt at composure.
The noise rose so much that, little by little, the other tables began quieting down. Several heads turned toward you all, the murmur of the tavern fading briefly, leaving your outburst of laughter suspended in the middle of everyone else's silence.
But the attention did not last long. Someone at another table resumed their conversation, a chair scraped against the floor, and the tavern's usual noise eventually swallowed everything again. The mugs kept emptying, the stories shifted topics over and over, and time began slipping by without anyone bothering to keep track of it.
Two in the morning arrived with the indifferent punctuality hours have when nobody is waiting for them.
Armin was the first to say it out loud, looking at the tavern's wall clock with the expression of someone who had known for a while that it was late and had finally decided to act accordingly. The table did not put up much resistance. The alcohol had done its work efficiently enough that the argument for going to sleep sounded reasonable even to Jean.
Stepping outside felt like changing worlds.
The night air hit all at once, cool and clean compared to the accumulated heat of the tavern, and for a moment no one spoke; they simply walked in the same direction without needing anyone to set the pace. Music still drifted faintly from the plaza, but it was more scattered now, more diluted, with those stretches of silence between songs that only appear when the night is truly advancing and the musicians are beginning to feel the weight of the hours. Most of the food stalls had already packed up. A few lingered with their tarps lowered but their frames still standing, and among them wandered the hopelessly drunk and the figures searching in other people's carelessness for what they did not possess themselves.
It was not an exaggeration or some performative display of exhaustion. Your legs simply were not cooperating completely, and lifting them from the ground in the correct order required more attention than it normally did. One hand rested against your stomach, pressing lightly but constantly, like someone aware that the balance between what they had eaten and drunk was far more fragile than desirable and preferred not to tempt gravity.
After crossing the boundary between both worlds, everyone reclaimed their larger weapons at the Shadow Bastion, each person taking their own without needing words or signals, the familiar weight of metal and leather settling back into place as the forest began closing in on both sides of the path.
Onyankopon was carrying Jean. Not literally, but close enough: the taller man's arm rested over his shoulders with all the extra weight alcohol seemed to magically add to a body that was already enormous to begin with, and Onyankopon walked with the resigned expression of someone who understood fighting the situation would not change anything. Every few steps Jean leaned too far to one side, dragging him along in a clumsy zigzag that forced Onyankopon to correct their balance before both of them ended up on the ground.
"Try walking straight," Onyankopon muttered after they nearly collided with a tree.
"The ground's moving," Jean answered with complete conviction.
Historia walked beside Ymir, whose steps were far steadier than the amount of beer she had consumed should have allowed, though not steady enough to leave unsupervised. More than once she tripped over nonexistent rocks or suddenly lost balance, grabbing the first thing she could hold onto, which almost always ended up being her girlfriend. At one point she outright grabbed a fistful of Historia's hair to stop herself from falling.
"Ymir!" Historia protested, smacking her hand away while Ymir laughed without the slightest remorse. "You're going to make me bald."
"That hair will help birds build their nests," Ymir declared, shaking her hand to free the strands of blonde hair tangled around her fingers.
Connie and Marco walked together shoulder to shoulder, with that sideways contact that appears when two people are drunk enough that shared balance becomes more effective than individual. Their conversations wandered erratically, changing topics without warning and following a logic that probably only made sense to them.
"One time a horse kicked me right here in Velmyra," Marco was saying, vaguely pointing at his thigh while he walked. "It was huge. I thought it broke something."
Connie let out a nasal laugh. "Horses hate you because you smell weird."
Marco was about to respond when Connie spoke again, as if his brain had switched directions halfway through.
"One time I had to stay in Velmyra and shared a room with Pixis."
Marco glanced sideways at him. "And how was that?"
"I would've rather slept outside covered with a rag."
"Why?" the dark-haired boy asked.
Connie grimaced with genuine suffering. "Because Pixis sleeps naked."
Marco slowly turned his head toward him, processing that. "What? You saw him?"
"No," Connie said immediately. "I didn't see him... I felt him."
Ahead walked Armin and Sasha. He set the pace with the sobriety of someone who had known how to moderate himself throughout the night, while she moved with that incomprehensible energy she still had even after eating and drinking enough to incapacitate people three times her size. Together they guided the group without ever explicitly deciding to, simply because they were the ones who could still see the path most clearly.
And behind them all, alone, there was you.
With Mikasa bringing up the rear behind you.
You could feel her there even without looking, that specific presence of hers that differed from everyone else's because it always carried an attentiveness that never fully rested, even when her body could. Her eyes swept through the forest on either side of the path with that methodical regularity that had become completely automatic for her, scanning the trunks, the shadows between the trees, any movement that did not belong to the natural rhythm of the wind through the branches.
"How can you be such an idiot?" Ymir suddenly asked, her voice slurred but the sharpness untouched. "Believing any random girl in a tavern."
"She told me she was a waitress," Jean replied through a hiccup, with the reasonable dignity of someone convinced he had a valid argument. "And her clothes looked like someone who worked there."
"And just because of the clothes you believed her when she said the alcohol was discounted?" Sasha asked, barely containing laughter because she already knew where the story was going. "She took one look at your stupid face and decided to mess with you."
Armin spoke without turning around, directing his words toward the road ahead.
"How did it not seem suspicious that the 'waitress'" he pronounced the word with a clarity that left no room for interpretation "disappeared right after offering you that deal?"
Jean considered this in a silence that was partly processing and partly hiccups.
"Now that you say it, yeah," he admitted with the calm resignation of someone who had reached the conclusion far too late for it to matter. "But at the time I was only thinking about drinking."
He let his full weight sag backward, forcing Onyankopon to visibly struggle to absorb the movement without losing step.
"I'll pay you back everything I owe you, y/n," Jean said, turning his head toward you with the seriousness of someone making a solemn promise under conditions far from an ideal one.
The tavern owner had counted every mug, every plate, every extra thing anyone had ordered throughout the night with the meticulousness expected of someone running that kind of business. The final number produced by that tally could have bought the castle's provisions for an entire month. Considering those provisions included Connie and Sasha's, that was saying something.
But you did, thanks to the solaris left from what you had won in the knife game, which until a few hours ago had weighed pleasantly in your pouch with that specific satisfaction money earned through more than mere luck carries.
The pouch now hung empty from your belt, swaying from side to side with the movement of your hips, the limp leather unsupported by anything inside it, producing a soft and slightly pathetic sound.
You had been almost rich for exactly one night.
"Don't worry about it," you said. "You have your whole life to pay me back."
Jean sighed. It was a long, dramatic sigh, carrying all the weight alcohol adds to gestures once it lowers the defenses that normally moderate them. He placed a hand over his chest.
"I thought since I'm your favorite brother you'd let it slide."
You glanced sideways at him and let out a short laugh that made your stomach hurt a little more.
Jean let even more of his weight collapse onto his companion, wearing the expression of someone who had received the final blow and decided there was no longer any point resisting gravity.
"Not cold," you answered smiling. "Fair. You practically drank half the kingdom."
Onyankopon let out a quiet laugh, adjusting his grip without breaking stride. Jean clicked his tongue and looked up at the sky with the resignation of someone evaluating his options and discovering they were limited.
The walk continued with that disordered, particular rhythm groups of exhausted people moving together always develop when no one sets the pace with authority. The sounds accompanying them were the usual ones: branches cracking, boots brushing against the dirt path, the soft metallic noise of weapons shifting with every step, the breathing of ten people spread across the road like notes on a musical staff.
A groan echoed through the forest.
The sentence was never finished.
Ymir stopped abruptly, doubling over with both hands clutching her stomach, and what followed was immediate and unmistakable. Historia grabbed her hair back with the speed only possible for someone who had known her long enough to anticipate that sort of thing, holding it away from her face with both hands while Ymir emptied the contents of the entire night onto the forest floor. It was a thick and thoroughly disgusting mixture of everything she had eaten and drunk over the past several hours, and the sound accompanying it left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
"Jesus Christ, Ymir, that's disgu—" Jean did not get to finish either.
The direction his body chose to vomit in was, with a precision attributable only to the cruelest luck imaginable, directly onto Onyankopon's shoes.
"Jean!" Onyankopon shouted, jumping backward and staring down with an expression mixing disgust, disbelief, and fury. "They're new!"
Onyankopon's shoes, which had started the night black and polished, were now neither of those things.
Still bent forward, Jean weakly lifted a hand in a gesture attempting to be an apology and succeeding mostly as a survival instinct.
Connie and Marco covered their mouths at the exact same time. It was not surprise, but containment, the automatic reaction of two people whose stomachs had registered those sounds and smells.
It was a gesture everyone in the group recognized, and one the others liked to use against him at particularly opportune moments, because Armin had an unusual sensitivity to the sound of retching whenever someone looked close to vomiting. They found it endlessly entertaining, especially when they wanted him to stop talking, stop giving orders, or simply go away for a while.
In this case, though, the gesture was completely genuine and completely useless, because the problem was not only auditory.
Sasha watched the entire scene with wide eyes and a smile she made absolutely no effort to hide. For her, after spending the entire night consuming quantities of food that would have alarmed any doctor and possessing a body that seemed to have a fundamentally different relationship with food and alcohol than the rest of humanity, the spectacle was purely observational.
Mikasa, behind you, had not said a word.
But she was not watching the scene. She was watching the forest on both sides of the path with the same attentiveness as always, the same methodical rhythm of her eyes scanning the darkness between the trunks, the spaces moonlight could not reach, the places where the silence felt too dense to be only silence.
Because if something intended to use this moment of chaos and distraction to get closer, the forest would not warn them.
The road back to the castle was still long, and your stomach pain intensified with the entire spectacle.
It was not a conscious decision. Your body simply took over before you could think about it, and you bolted toward the trees with one hand pressed over your mouth and the other clutching your abdomen, fleeing the path, the sounds, the smell, everything.
You stopped with one hand braced against the nearest trunk and the other still covering your mouth, trying to hold yourself together. Running had been a mistake. You understood it the moment you stopped and the motion ceased, because your stomach took less than two seconds to remind you that you were in no condition to run.
You tried to breathe. Deeply. Slowly. Searching for that rhythm that steadies things when the body is at its limit.
But the smell of the boys' vomit seemed to have lodged itself inside your nose with completely unfair permanence, following you even from several meters away, as if the entire night had absorbed it and now returned it with every breath you took.
The pain was stronger than any attempt at control.
You ended up vomiting at the foot of the tree.
With force, almost instinctively, you wrapped your arms around your own abdomen while the retching came one after another without pause, without mercy, with that specific cruelty the body has when it decides to empty itself completely. The mixture coming out only disgusted you more, which triggered more retching, which caused more vomiting, a cycle that had no intention of stopping quickly. Your legs began to tremble from the force of it. Your abdomen hurt. Your knees threatened to give out.
You had not eaten that much. You had not drunk that much. Something you had consumed tonight had simply not been a good idea, or had gone bad, or the combination had been unfortunate enough for your stomach to make the decision it considered most responsible.
When the retching finally began to space out, only bile came up. There was nothing left.
You closed your mouth. Covered it with the palm of your hand. Took one step forward, then another, moving far enough from the tree for the smell of what you had left behind to stop reaching you.
Your legs hurt. Your abdomen too, with that specific pain of muscles that had been contracted and working against their will and were now protesting the effort. You leaned your back against the trunk of a different tree, letting the rough bark support the weight your legs no longer wanted to carry alone.
Your eyes were watery, not from sadness but from strain, and your face burned with that damp heat that settles in after something like this. You spat to the side, clearing the taste from your mouth, and then stayed there, still, letting your body do the work of becoming functional again.
Crickets sang around you, creating a melody that helped calm you and focus on something other than the nausea. You lifted your gaze toward the sky between the branches. It was completely clear, with that specific sharpness cloudless nights had when the moon let the stars do the work alone. Tiny points of light scattered without apparent order across the absolute black, doing what they always did: illuminating just enough to remind you the world was still bigger than what you could see from where you stood.
It was a stupid, involuntary smile, the kind that appeared when the body found something funny in its own situation once the worst had passed.
Levi was going to kill all of you. Or something equivalent. He was going to wake everyone at dawn with double training, assign the most tedious missions of the month, look at you all with that expression of his that was more effective than any physical punishment because it communicated, without words, the exact level of disappointment he felt and exactly how long he intended to remember it.
If it was for going into the city, for spending the day with the others, for laughing in the plaza and winning money with a knife game and eating pastries and meat, for existing for a few hours as something close to a normal person simply being in the world without the world demanding anything in return.
Even if you had ended up sick, irritated, and with your stomach somewhere outside its usual location.
The sound of leaves accompanied the insects' song.
At first, you paid it no more attention than any other noise in the forest at night: a small animal, a branch bending beneath the weight of something passing over it. The kind of sound the forest constantly produced and that, after enough time, you stopped consciously registering.
And this time you recognized the difference. It was not the continuous sound of something moving, of paws on dry leaves or a body brushing through undergrowth. It was measured. Deliberate. With the specific intervals footsteps had when whoever was walking chose where to place their foot before doing so.
"Guys?" you asked the air.
The sounds of the others vomiting, of Sasha laughing, of overlapping voices from the path no longer reached where you were. You had wandered farther than you realized.
The leaves crunched again.
Quickly and silently, you unsheathed your dagger.
The movement was automatic, without deliberation, years of training taking control before conscious thought could intervene. You held it firmly in front of you, your arm slightly bent, gaining the extra inches of reaction time you might need if something emerged from between the trees in the next second. Your breathing changed immediately: slower, more controlled, the rhythm you used when you needed your body to function without emotions interfering.
Without lowering your guard, you reached your free hand toward your back, feeling for the hilt of your sword. If this was not something you could resolve quickly, you would need more than speed and a short blade.
Not the gradual silence of night settling in, but the other kind. The sudden kind. The one that happened when something animal instinct recognized as danger entered a space and every other living thing in the forest decided, simultaneously and without communicating, that remaining still was safer.
The crickets had stopped.
A footstep sounded behind you.
On the other side of the trunk.
You sighed. Tightened your grip on the dagger.
In one quick, clean movement, you rounded half the trunk, your arm already in motion, prepared to drive the blade into whatever was waiting on the other side.
Your wrist stopped abruptly against something solid.
The dagger sank halfway into the tree trunk. You were gripping it with a strength that did not feel entirely yours, because the impact had carried all the force of the movement directly into the wood, and the wood had not moved.
"I wasn't expecting our reunion to go like this."
Standing in front of you, tall and completely calm, was Eren, wearing that half-smile of his that appeared whenever he found something genuinely entertaining but did not want to fully laugh yet. Your hand hurt. Your palm burned from the impact transmitted through the hilt. The dagger remained embedded in the tree, vibrating faintly with the echo of the blow.
"If I'd been a few inches closer," he said, lowering his gaze to the weapon before looking back at you, "I would've become a double-dead vampire."
It was not the pain in your hand keeping you frozen, processing slower than you should. It was him. Eren, standing in the middle of the forest at almost three in the morning, so present and still as if spending hours there were the most natural thing he had done all day.
"Aren't you happy to see me?" he asked, tilting his head slightly. That calm smile was still there.
You shook your head, finally letting go of the dagger. It stayed lodged in the tree, the faint tremor afterward the only evidence of how much force you had used to drive it there, especially considering less than five minutes ago you had been on your knees with an empty stomach.
"I am," you answered, exhaling slowly, trying to force your thoughts back into place. "I just wasn't expecting to see you now."
He did not look away from you.
You looked at him in confusion, tilting your head.
He let out a soft, brief laugh.
"I smelled perfume," he said. A faint glimmer appeared in his eyes, as though the memory had crossed his mind that very second. "Mint and lavender." He paused slightly. "Like the cloth you wore that day at the Skamien. I knew it was you."
He remembered it. Not vaguely, not as something that sounded familiar, but with the precision of someone who had unconsciously kept a detail and retrieved it effortlessly when it appeared again.
A scent you had only just started using yourself, one that brought you closer to the memory of your mother in a way you were still learning to carry without letting it weigh too heavily on you. And the fact that he recognized it like that, without hesitation, without needing you to explain it, made it feel bigger than it already was. As though it were not just perfume, but a part of you someone else had decided not to forget.
"It was my mother's cloth," you said. "Today I decided to use the scent as perfume."
Eren's smile softened slightly. He tilted his head a little as he watched you, as if your comment had only made him more interested.
"You should wear it more often," he said. "It suits you."
You looked away, embarrassed. "That would be a problem," you replied. "It would attract vampires."
Eren let out a low laugh, leaning slightly closer with that effortless confidence that always seemed to appear whenever he wanted to provoke you.
"I don't think other vampires are much of a problem for you," he said, glancing briefly toward the dagger still embedded in the tree before looking back at you. "Though it would be convenient for me."
His eyes lingered on yours a second longer than necessary.
"That way I could find you easily."
There was a short pause. Then he cleared his throat and looked away slightly, as though only then realizing he might have sounded too direct.
"To help you if you're in trouble," he added. "Obviously."
You lowered your head. Your cheeks burned with an intensity you were grateful the darkness of the forest helped conceal. Why the hell did he have to say things like that now, at this exact moment, after the kind of night you had had?
You felt him move closer. Slowly, without abruptness, filling the space between you with that calmness of his that never seemed calculated and yet always arrived exactly where it needed to.
A hand settled beneath your chin.
Instinctively, you lifted your gaze and met his. His green eyes caught the little light filtering through the branches and reflected it back with an intensity that made it difficult to look away. You felt something stir in the center of your stomach, that soft trembling that appeared when a pretty boy looked at you like that, directly, without looking away, as though what stood before him deserved sustained attention. Now it only happened with him.
But his own smile had disappeared, replaced by a faintly furrowed brow.
"What do you have under your lip?" he asked, without removing his hand from your face.
You passed your fingers over your mouth, searching for whatever had caught his attention. Your fingers found something that stuck to your fingertip, and when you held it up beneath what little light there was, you could see exactly what it was.
"Oh," you said, immediately covering your mouth with your hand and turning away so your breath would not reach him. "It's food."
At this exact moment, you would have given anything, absolutely anything, for a mint leaf.
Eren laughed softly. Not the laugh of someone mocking you, but of someone genuinely caught off guard by something and unable to stop the reaction.
Then he took your other hand, the one hanging at your side, with careful gentleness. He felt something different from the softness of your skin and lifted it higher so he could see it better beneath the starlight.
"What happened to you?" he asked, and there was no trace of laughter left in his voice. "Did you get hurt? Who did this to you?"
You turned to look at him, still covering your mouth with your hand. He had noticed the bandages on that hand, and when he lifted his gaze to you, he noticed the ones on the other as well. He did not let go of the hand he was holding.
"Tell me. Who did this to you?"
"No one," you answered. You noticed something tighten in his expression, a minimal but visible shift in someone whose calmness was usually so constant. "I just got into a fight. I ended up injured."
"You can't fight no one," he said in a tone that was not a shout, but carried the kind of firmness that did not need volume to make it clear he was serious.
"Was it another vampire?"
"No," you replied quickly, too quickly, and you realized it the moment the word left your mouth. "I was just in the forest and a Shadowbone attacked me."
It was half true. The half you could give without involving the others, without explaining why you had been in the forest at night with a group of trained hunters, without opening any of the doors you were in no condition to open tonight.
You did not want to lie to him. Not to him, who had been so honest with you. But there was no other option available right now.
You nodded without saying anything else, your hand still covering your mouth.
"Do you still have the mark?" he asked, lifting his free hand toward your bandages with the clear intention of removing them.
"Eren!" You pulled your hand away from his and hid it behind your back before he could reach it. The other one too. "My hands are already healed," you said. "I don't have the mark anymore."
The silence that followed was the heavy kind.
He was looking at you. Without looking away. With that concern on his face that was not dramatic or exaggerated, but the quiet, steady kind that was harder to ignore precisely because it did not demand attention, it simply existed.
"Let me see," he said, stepping closer.
Eren's eyes widened slightly in surprise.
You covered your eyes with your hands for a second, exhaling tiredly before sliding them to the sides and brushing your hair away from your face.
"Nothing," you said. "I'm fine."
Eren did not answer right away. He watched you in silence, resting his weight on one leg while his eyes followed every little movement you made with far too much attention.
"But you keep backing away," he said at last, softer this time. "You lower your gaze. You don't want to show me whether you're really okay."
You clenched your jaw slightly. You turned your face a little to the side, as if looking at the forest was easier than holding his gaze right now.
He took a short step toward you, enough to close the distance without completely invading it. His voice lowered slightly.
The words landed directly and without warning, settling exactly where he probably knew they would.
"Yes," you said. The tension in your body eased slightly; your shoulders sank a little and something in your posture lost its firmness, as if stopping your resistance made you suddenly look more vulnerable. "Yes, I trust you."
"Then?" he insisted, never taking his eyes off you.
You sighed. In the end, you leaned your back against the tree trunk and closed your eyes for a moment, gathering the air and courage needed to say it all at once.
"I was in Velmyra. I went to the festival, ate, drank, and ended up getting sick. On the way back, I had to stop and throw up absolutely everything." You opened your eyes and looked at him. "And I don't want you near me because I don't want my disgusting breath reaching your nose."
The words all came out together, without pause, the way you had learned was sometimes more efficient than trying to build an explanation carefully.
And then, slowly, the smile appeared.
"So that was the smell I picked up a few trees back," he said, and there was something in his tone completely incapable of hiding how much more entertaining he found this than the situation deserved.
"Don't look at me like that," you said.
"Relax," he said, stepping closer. "The smell doesn't bother me." Another step. "And your perfume covers it pretty well for my super nose."
He stopped in front of you. The tree was at your back and he stood less than a step away, and the combination of both things made the space between you considerably smaller than it had been a moment ago. You turned your face to the side, staring toward the distant trees, refusing to meet his gaze while your face still burned with embarrassment and your stomach continued protesting with its final objections.
Carefully, with that gentleness of his that never announced itself before arriving, he lifted a hand to your face and lightly brushed your cheek with the tips of his fingers. He removed a small eyelash that had stuck to your damp skin after the tears and vomiting, in such a soft and natural gesture that for a second it left you without reaction. As if taking care of you were automatic to him.
"I could never be disgusted by anything about you," he said.
The forest was completely still. Not the ordinary stillness of night, but something more absolute, as if the trees and animals and wind had all reached a silent agreement not to interrupt. Even the crickets from before had gone quiet. Only his presence in front of you, without audible breathing, without the bodily weight anyone else would have carried standing this close.
Your white blouse had slipped lower during the night, and now the wide neckline barely fulfilled its purpose: the upper half of your breasts showed above the edge of the mieder, which pressed and shaped them with a firmness that contrasted with the softness of the fabric. The corset outlined every curve, pushing upward what the blouse no longer had the strength to contain. Higher up, the bones of your collarbone broke through that fullness with an almost cruel fragility. Sweat made your skin glisten faintly, sticking the fabric to certain edges, reminding him that this body, now so still against the tree, had been very much alive only minutes ago.
Years of training had turned self-control into something so deeply ingrained that it no longer required conscious effort, it simply functioned, processing, channeling, redirecting every impulse before it could become action. It was part of what distinguished him from the rebels, that ability to think before acting, to choose instead of react.
But now, with the tiny distance between the two of you and the way the light touched what stood before him, something in that perfectly calibrated mechanism found a point of resistance it had not expected.
His eyes moved slowly. From one of your breasts to the other, and then to the space between them. Somehow, unforgivably, the shine of your skin was what cost him the most effort to ignore.
On an almost masochistic impulse, just to test himself, he did not look away.
He allowed himself a few more seconds.
As if staying were a challenge. As if resisting while feeling everything were harder, and therefore more inevitable, than simply giving in.
A thousand thoughts involving both of you crossed his mind in those seconds, and every single one of them made him ignore the rise and fall of your chest with each breath. Focusing only on what he had in front of him. On the way it looked.
He lifted his gaze immediately.
"Why do I feel heat coming from you?"
Something crossed his expression before he could stop it. A brief, almost imperceptible tension that settled back into calm before you could be sure you had even seen it.
"Heat?" he repeated quietly.
He looked away toward the trees. He studied them for a moment, as if reading something in the darkness between the trunks that needed to be processed before answering.
"This forest isn't stable," he said at last. "It holds onto the energy of everything that has happened here. Battles, magic, blood. Everything remains. Sometimes it releases it in currents that aren't always visible. Heat, cold, they can feel different depending on where you are."
He looked back at you, but this time there was more distance in his eyes than in his body.
"It's not strange," he added, with convincing calm.
But the step he took backward was real.
And it said more than everything he had spoken aloud.
"What did you eat at the festival?" he asked, changing the subject with a naturalness that might have worked if you had not been so aware of the distance he had just put between you.
"Cake, alcohol, and meat," you answered, shrugging faintly.
"Why would you mix all that together?"
You frowned, as if the answer were obvious.
"Because I had to take advantage of it. I don't go into the city often."
He shook his head gently, that trace of laughter still visible.
"You should be more careful next time."
There was a brief silence. Comfortable, somehow, despite everything.
"And you?" you asked, curious about his nature. "What do you do when you go into the city? Do you eat?"
Eren looked away almost immediately, too quickly for it to seem casual. He ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek before answering, as if he had spoken before deciding how much he truly wanted to say.
"I go more at night," he said. "I don't usually eat."
His eyes landed on the dagger still embedded in the tree. He stepped close enough to reach it, wrapping his fingers around the hilt.
"And when someone offers," He pulled the dagger free from the trunk with a smooth, effortless motion, as if the wood had given way before even trying to resist. "I refuse." He tossed it lightly into the air, catching it by the blade with careless precision before extending the handle toward you. "But if they insist, I eat anyway. And endure the discomfort."
A faint grimace of distaste crossed his face before he shrugged.
"It's nothing serious. Just enough to remind you that you don't need it." His eyes flicked back to you for a second. "It's better than raising suspicions."
You took the dagger and slowly spun it between your fingers, watching the blade catch isolated flashes of light between the branches.
"And if you raise suspicion anyway?" you asked, lifting your eyes to him. "Do you get rid of them?"
Eren let out a low, brief laugh, more incredulous than amused.
Then he turned his face slightly, looking into the darkness of the forest as if the answer existed much farther away than the two of you.
"I'm not that kind of monster."
The silence that followed carried its own weight.
You kept staring at him in silence. Slowly, almost without noticing, the image you had built of him began to unravel inside your head.
The vampires had always been described in only one way: violent, savage, creatures incapable of restraining their hunger or cruelty. The world was easy to understand when everything could be divided that simply.
But Eren did not fit comfortably into any of those ideas. He had taken care of you, and now he spoke about avoiding killing even when it would have been easier to do so. And that difference, however small it might have seemed from the outside, changed too many things at once.
You also could not forget something else: the people who had murdered his parents had been human. Humans who had hunted down and destroyed his family with a cruelty that left no room for misunderstanding. And even so, he still spoke about people without absolute hatred, without the blind violence you would have expected after something like that. You could not fully understand that contradiction. Maybe because it did not seem like a contradiction to him.
It made you wonder what kind of vampires he and his family really were. How they lived. What rules they followed. What parts of themselves they chose to preserve and how many of the stories you had heard your entire life had been built precisely to stop anyone from asking those questions.
You had so many questions. You felt like he could answer many of them, that he carried those answers with the same calmness he carried everything else. But every question you asked was also information you gave, a thread connecting what you knew to what he might deduce, and that fragile balance between what you wanted to know and what you could not reveal made every conversation with him an exercise in precision that exhausted you in a way entirely different from any mission.
You did not know what to wish for.
To remain in The Dawnguard with the simple clarity of someone who has a purpose and does not question it. Or to be an immortal being, strong, freer and less bound by limits, still standing here in this forest in front of this man who became harder to categorize and more impossible to ignore with every passing moment.
Eren suddenly frowned. His attention shifted toward some point between the trees and he turned his head slightly, going still for a second as if listening to something very far away.
"Is someone looking for you?"
You blinked, confused, not understanding the question.
He kept staring into the forest for a few more moments before answering.
You pushed yourself away from the trunk and stepped up beside him. Instinctively, you followed the direction of his gaze, trying to find something among the darkness and the motionless branches.
You narrowed your eyes slightly and focused. The wind. The leaves. The distant friction of insects and branches brushing against each other. You separated the sounds one by one, filtering them into layers, until after a few seconds, you finally heard it.
Faint. Far away still. But unmistakable.
Someone was shouting it between the trees.
"I have to go," you said, sliding the dagger back into your belt.
"Who are they?" he asked.
You wished Eren were not so curious. Or maybe not so concerned. With him, both things led to exactly the same result.
"A friend," you said quickly. "The one I went to the festival with."
"It's not just one person," he replied, his brows drawing together.
And before you could contradict him, another voice reached from the distance, louder and far more dramatic, shouting your name with an urgency that was ninety percent theatrics and ten percent genuine concern.
"Well," you said at last, "it's just a couple of friends."
"I figured from the voices." He wrinkled his nose slightly, almost annoyed at himself because his vampiric senses were apparently not as strong as he wished they were. "They're still pretty far away. I can't tell how many."
You gave a small nod. You adjusted the belt holding your dagger and took half a step forward, preparing to leave before this became impossible to explain.
"See you another day," you said, ready to go.
The movement was gentle, barely a soft tug at your wrist, but enough to stop you before you could even take the first step. His fingers stayed wrapped around your skin a second longer than necessary, cold against your warmth.
"Aren't you going to introduce me to them?" he asked. There was a spark of amusement in his voice, barely restrained. "I want to know who you spend time with out here in the forest."
Your heart sped up in a way that was not remotely convenient. What the hell had you gotten yourself into?
The shouting drifted through the distance now, mixed with insults the others were throwing at each other with the specific energy of people who had spent too long searching for something in the dark and had moved from panic into irritation.
You slowly shook your head, trying to keep your voice completely calm.
"This isn't a good time."
Eren stayed still for a moment, watching you with that attention of his that sometimes felt far too precise. His gaze traveled over your expression as if trying to find the part you were leaving out.
The question made you hesitate for just a second.
"They're not doing great," you said, not wanting to elaborate.
He waited in silence, clearly unconvinced by how short your answer had been.
You glanced toward the path where the voices were coming from. Between the trees, laughter too loud and clumsy footsteps crushing dry branches could already be heard.
"You know. The festival. The food."
Eren stayed quiet. He turned his face slightly toward the distant sounds and remained attentive for a few more seconds, concentrating on something you could still barely distinguish. Then he looked back at you slowly, as if he had been evaluating something in the meantime.
"Are you safe with them?"
The seriousness in the question made your eyes snap back to his immediately. There was no jealousy there. No mockery. Just a concern so simple it was difficult to avoid.
"If I weren't, I wouldn't be here with you."
Something in his expression softened after hearing that. His fingers loosened around your wrist before finally slipping away from your skin.
You began stepping backward, one step, then another. The shouting was close enough now that you could distinguish individual voices between the laughter.
His voice cut through the noise before you could leave completely.
You stopped and turned toward him again.
Eren still stood beneath the uneven shadows of the trees, motionless, looking at you as if he still had not gotten used to the idea of letting you leave.
"Don't leave me like that again," he said at last. "Without knowing where to find you."
You had not expected that. You blinked once, processing it, and then smiled almost involuntarily. You lifted your fingers toward your neck, pointing at it with a calmness you did not know where you had found.
"You have to follow my essence."
Eren let out a short, low laugh, as though he had not been able to stop it. He looked at you in a way that made it difficult to hold his gaze, so you did not.
"I'd confuse you with all the flowers in the forest," he said, and the pause that followed was deliberate, you knew it. "Not just because of the scent."
You frowned. You smiled without entirely understanding, or perhaps understanding perfectly and choosing not to say anything about it. You turned around before your face could betray you.
"I'll see you at the lake," you said with an almost teasing lightness, letting the smile barely color your voice as you started backing away between the trees.
His reaction was immediate.
There was something faintly frustrated in how quickly he answered, as if he had understood far too well that you were doing it on purpose. You kept walking.
"When the forest wants to," you said without raising your voice too much. "Or when you get lucky."
You did not look back. Even though part of you wanted to.
Eren did not move. He remained staring at the place where you had disappeared even after the shadows of the forest swallowed you completely.
"You better be on my side," he murmured quietly.
The words disappeared among the trees, directed not at any specific person but at the entire forest itself: at the branches creaking overhead, at the flowers already closed, at the animals hidden within the undergrowth, at every small creature that shared that place and had witnessed the last few minutes.
You walked quickly toward the shouting, which became clearer with every meter. In the distance, between the trunks, a small golden light appeared moving through the shadows, Armin's oil lamp swaying with his steps.
"y/n!" Jean's voice was still shouting your name. He was no longer slurring his words like before. The fright, or the cold forest air, or both, had done the work time had not yet finished.
"What if a group of squirrels attacked her and ate her?" Connie asked from somewhere behind Jean.
"Idiot!" Ymir replied. "Squirrels only eat seeds and fruit."
"Actually," Armin's calm voice came from beside the lamp, "there are species of squirrels that feed on remains from corpses."
"Amen," Connie said, ending the argument.
The blond raised the lamp toward you the moment he heard your footsteps, and the light struck you all at once, suddenly making your presence visible between the trees.
A sharp cry from Armin made everyone turn at the same time.
You stood between two trunks, smiling at them with all the normalcy you could gather in that moment.
"We've been looking for you for an hour," Jean exclaimed, striding toward you, no longer staggering, using that habit of his where relief transformed into scolding because it was easier to hold onto. "What the hell happened to you?"
"Calm down, Jean," Historia's calm voice said from behind. "It's been fifteen minutes."
Jean reached you and immediately started looking you up and down, lifting your arms, checking for visible injuries with the specific energy of someone who had been scared and was now processing it through movement.
"The sound of you guys vomiting made me start gagging," you said calmly, as though you were merely describing a chain of events. "I had to get away. I ended up throwing up farther in."
You gestured vaguely into the distance.
"And you just run off like that without saying anything?" Jean asked, hands on his hips.
"How was I supposed to warn you?" you replied, raising your hands. "If I'd opened my mouth, I would've thrown up right there next to all of you."
"You didn't need to go that far."
"Jean." Mikasa stepped between the two of you with the same movement she would have used to separate two opponents during training, efficient and without drama. "Leave her alone. I was standing guard while you were vomiting and arguing, and I didn't see where she went."
"You don't have to take responsibility for her, Mikasa," Ymir's voice came from behind, carrying that tone of hers that never needed to rise in volume to cut sharply enough. "She's not a child. She should take responsibility for her own actions."
She looked back seriously, without blinking.
"Ymir, don't say that," Marco said with the patience of someone who had known everyone in this group long enough to recognize when a spark could become something worse. "We all look after each other here."
"Then she should be more considerate next time," Ymir said, crossing her arms. "If it weren't for her, we'd already be closer to the castle."
"Oh my God." You dragged your hands over your face, completely exhausted, feeling the little patience you had left shrink into something no longer large enough to remain reasonable. "If you guys hadn't gotten drunk, we'd already be at the castle sleeping." You emphasized the last word with every ounce of energy you had left. "Stop blaming me and making passive-aggressive comments, Ymir. If you have something against me, just say it directly already. Enough with your bullshit."
"What bullshit?" Ymir frowned, and a weak anger that usually stayed beneath the surface rose a little. "You're the only one in the clan who has complete freedom. No limitations, no restrictions, all because of your past and your mother's history." She pointed at you. "Meanwhile, the rest of us stay locked up in that castle, working, training, going out on missions at night that could kill us, and now you want to blame us for getting back late?"
The silence that followed was the kind that settles in when something left unsaid for too long finally finds its way out and there is no longer any way to put it back.
"It's not my fault your life was different from mine," you said after a moment.
Ymir scoffed. It was not quite a laugh.
"You want me to pity you?" she asked, stepping toward you with an anger that threatened violence. "I grew up on the edge of the forest. Alone. Hunting, surviving everything that place has to offer, and you know damn well that's not little." She paused. "Until they found me a couple years ago."
Historia slowly placed a hand on Ymir's shoulder, trying to calm her.
"You grew up with a family," Ymir continued harshly. "Adoptive, sure. But surrounded by people. Don't try to make me pity you now just because you're only now learning who the hell your mother is."
Her words landed and stayed there.
They did not leave room for an immediate response because they carried the kind of truth that needs a moment before you can decide what to do with it.
You felt stupid. And guilty, for saying what you had in front of her, in front of all of them who had lost parents and family in ways they had never chosen or wanted.
"There's no need to compare ourselves," Onyankopon said in that voice of his that was neither soft nor harsh, only balanced. "We all have different stories. Different problems. And the way we process them is different too."
Most lowered their heads. Some out of sadness, others with the specific discomfort of someone who has just seen a crack in something they would rather believe is solid. And you, with that mixture of guilt and exhaustion.
"Let's just be grateful everyone's alright," Armin added, checking the lamp with a gesture that was partly practical and partly his way of regaining control whenever things drifted off balance. "Despite everything that happened today." He sighed. "A few minutes more or less won't change the punishment the veterans give us when we get back, but it will give us a few more minutes to rest first."
"That's if Levi lets us sleep," Sasha said, ending the discussion with unintentional precision. It was good to have someone that spontaneous in the group, especially when things became tense.
A completely different silence from the initial trip, when voices overlapped and jokes interrupted each other and the forest had seemed narrower because no one paid attention to it. Now the silence had shape, occupying the space between each of you with a presence as tangible as anything else you had carried tonight. Only footsteps against the dirt path, breathing, the soft metallic sound of weapons, and every so often a sigh someone let escape without intending for anyone to hear it.
The others were no longer drunk. The fright, the forest air, the tension from the argument, and time itself had all worked together to dull the effects of the alcohol, and now they walked upright and alert, with that awareness of their surroundings that training turns automatic and which never entirely shuts off, even when the rest of the body is functioning at half strength.
You walked with your arms crossed.
Meeting Eren had been sudden, brief, embarrassing in ways you still had not fully processed. So fleeting it felt almost like an accident of fate, and yet intense enough that you still carried it with you more heavily than something that had lasted barely ten minutes should.
You would have given something to repeat it. The way he held your hand. The way you had been trapped between him and the tree while the forest stood completely still around you. But not after vomiting. Please. Any other circumstance would have been better than that one.
And yet he had not stepped away.
You felt like you were beginning to see a part of Eren you had not known before. The worried part. The overprotective part. That constant attention leaning toward you as though every small gesture mattered more than it should, as though he noticed details most people discarded before fully seeing them.
It was a kind of closeness you had always been used to, among the others in the clan, among everyone who had known you long enough that taking care of you had become something they did without thinking about it.
But with Eren, it was not the same.
It did not make you pull away. It did not make you uncomfortable. It was something different, something you did not quite have the vocabulary to name properly, but that you recognized anyway because the body understands it before the mind has the words prepared.
The forest night became cold, slow, enveloping, as if it wanted to erase any trace of what had happened only minutes ago. You wrapped your arms around yourself as you walked, searching for warmth in your own embrace in a useless attempt to recover something that was no longer there.
The one you had believed without questioning too much when Eren said it belonged to the forest. To the humid night air, to that strange place surrounding you both, heavy with something difficult to explain.
But it had not been warmth like any other.
It had come from him. Something that made his body feel warmer, different from what you were used to. A warmth that appeared at the exact moment he stopped being entirely detached from another person. Something awakened through closeness, through barely implied touches, through that tiny distance that slowly became impossible to ignore.
It did not truly belong to the forest.
It belonged to something older. Something silent and restrained that existed just within pure-blood vampires. A subtle change, almost imperceptible, that emerged when someone began to matter too much to a being incapable of experiencing human emotions in an ordinary way.
And afterward it disappeared, almost cruelly, at the exact instant the two separated. As though the body remembered too quickly that it was not made to preserve that kind of warmth on its own.
Eren did not know that sensation from personal experience. He had only seen it before in others. In his parents, when he was little, in the way their cold bodies seemed to turn warm whenever they drew near one another. His father had once explained that it was one of the oldest signs among pureblood vampires. Something deep, exquisite, addictive. The only sensation capable of making an immortal understand in an entirely physical way what it meant to be alive.
And for him, it was slowly ceasing to be someone else's story.
It was becoming his own sensation. Something silent and gentle that awakened and grew inevitably every time you were near.
Forelsket: the intense, euphoric feeling of falling in love with someone for the first time, capturing the very beginning of romantic affection, when everything about them feels exciting, magical, and constantly on your mind.
