( Bertholdt has officially caught her on attempt three at a flower crown. It's slowly improving, looking less and less like the bedraggled remains of someone else's flower crown after having a child run around wearing it all day, and more and more like a flower crown just created. Annie isn't sure how she feels about it, but is counting it as personal enrichment when she's on break from the clean-up work she's doing for financial reasons.
Such an odd thing, to be back to needing wages. Honestly, not what she expected, what with the world coming close to ending. Who had intact enough societies for wages?
(... Paradis, ironically. Did they ever officially dismiss her from the Military Police? They really should have, but who knows with how their paperwork tended to go...)
Sure, she's noticed someone standing nearby, but she noticed all the movement and stillness around her. It doesn't have any particular meaning or flow until she senses intent, and Bertholdt hadn't had the type she's most wary of: killing intent. She's pulled from fruitless ruminations by a voice she hasn't heard in a very, very long time.
Annie turns so sharply that the flower crown dangling from her fingertips ready for tossing into the basket instead goes flying off them, smacking Bertholdt somewhere around his hip. He's too tall. He always was so tall. Did he get even taller since she saw him last?
Annie's eyes are wide staring up at him. What she'll never tell Reiner, since Reiner will never ask, is about the last time she saw anything of Bertholdt. In that final battle when the Colossal Titan that had been his had defended her and the rest, the Warriors of the past given their own agency separate from Ymir's puppetry. Before they were all letting go, a final goodbye on the Paths echoing across the waking world.
Those aren't beautiful memories. They're recent, painstaking, heartbreaking ones. They're part of why the world didn't end, and part of what will never come home. )
Oh. ( Annie knew he was here, given Reiner had told her. It was logically real, but now, looking up at him, it feels real. Things like asking Reiner if Bertholdt was happy felt like they mattered when there was a choice: living in this place, all the displaced people she's known over the years, but especially them. Reiner, Bertholdt. Marcel if he ever were.
She blinks twice, fast. Her voice is softer than her usual speaking tone. ) Bertholdt, it's you.
( The fact that it is him, for reasons which are not entirely fathomable to Annie herself, has her eyes starting to burn with the precursor to unshed tears. I heard how you died. I heard far too much from the one who inherited your Titan for years on end, but it started with how you died. Crushing, how that can steal her breath away. )
why hello stranger (exaggerated wink)
Such an odd thing, to be back to needing wages. Honestly, not what she expected, what with the world coming close to ending. Who had intact enough societies for wages?
(... Paradis, ironically. Did they ever officially dismiss her from the Military Police? They really should have, but who knows with how their paperwork tended to go...)
Sure, she's noticed someone standing nearby, but she noticed all the movement and stillness around her. It doesn't have any particular meaning or flow until she senses intent, and Bertholdt hadn't had the type she's most wary of: killing intent. She's pulled from fruitless ruminations by a voice she hasn't heard in a very, very long time.
Annie turns so sharply that the flower crown dangling from her fingertips ready for tossing into the basket instead goes flying off them, smacking Bertholdt somewhere around his hip. He's too tall. He always was so tall. Did he get even taller since she saw him last?
Annie's eyes are wide staring up at him. What she'll never tell Reiner, since Reiner will never ask, is about the last time she saw anything of Bertholdt. In that final battle when the Colossal Titan that had been his had defended her and the rest, the Warriors of the past given their own agency separate from Ymir's puppetry. Before they were all letting go, a final goodbye on the Paths echoing across the waking world.
Those aren't beautiful memories. They're recent, painstaking, heartbreaking ones. They're part of why the world didn't end, and part of what will never come home. )
Oh. ( Annie knew he was here, given Reiner had told her. It was logically real, but now, looking up at him, it feels real. Things like asking Reiner if Bertholdt was happy felt like they mattered when there was a choice: living in this place, all the displaced people she's known over the years, but especially them. Reiner, Bertholdt. Marcel if he ever were.
She blinks twice, fast. Her voice is softer than her usual speaking tone. ) Bertholdt, it's you.
( The fact that it is him, for reasons which are not entirely fathomable to Annie herself, has her eyes starting to burn with the precursor to unshed tears. I heard how you died. I heard far too much from the one who inherited your Titan for years on end, but it started with how you died. Crushing, how that can steal her breath away. )