( The last four years for Annie were a surreal blur of dreams and not-quite waking, hearing Hitch or Armin's voices winding their way into her consciousness. They weren't the only ones, at least not early on, but they had been the only consistent ones: the people who didn't stop visiting her shitty basement containment room despite no reaction, day after day, year after year.
Being kept abreast of the world in Armin's words meant she didn't emerge into the world again clueless. It also meant she heard Armin's confessions to the particulars of his understanding the impossibility of choosing non-violence, in keeping hands clean, when the pressures all around you push and push for the same responses with the same hellish resolutions as what the Warriors had faced, years earlier and years younger.
None of that is what matters. Annie knows she's... changed, ironic for a woman who'd been trapped in her own hardened crystal for years. The vicious pressure that'd kept her small and focused and hopeless but for the deep, driving desire to get home to her father had fractured and fallen away with the world's near ending. She'd forgiven Reiner, if not necessarily herself. She'd turned away from the war ending their world at the assumption of her father's death, only to come back to it riding on the back of their successive generation. She doesn't just live shut down anymore.
Annie is not a person who's comfortable with the easy contact she knows her peers can accept and give so much more easily. She was raised on violence. She was asked for violence. She lived on anger and cynicism as a coping mechanism so she wouldn't bend and break under the despair of that etched future. What's the point in that anymore? It didn't save her, didn't spare her. Didn't stop her from caring for all the people she tried to tell herself she didn't care about. Changed nothing in the end but for how long it took for her to face what'd always been there, beyond the bullshit. She could have a heart and it wouldn't kill her. Not any faster than the world would anyway.
Bertholdt kneels, and Annie shifts, drawing her leg partway onto the bench, awkward and aware of it as much as she ignores it for the sake of moving at all. There's a very good chance those burning eyes are about to start shedding tears. In relief? In postponed and unprocessed grief? In some mix of both and anything else? It's suddenly just as important that Bertholdt doesn't see the exact moment that happens. He'll still know, probably, but he doesn't need to see it.
It's utterly graceless when Annie throws her arms around his shoulders, or at least attempts to — any lower and she'd have ended up needing to use a hand to brace herself against his bent knee to prevent herself from falling onto it. It's still painfully awkward to see, that angled distance and the tension in her form: her hug count might be up to a grand total of three and a half, but only her father had been about her size, and only the older, not-present Reiner would know how she'd let that barrier crumble down on the heels of admitting just how often she'd wanted to kill him when they were younger. And that she wished him to survive.
Equally graceless, her face turns into her own shoulder, presenting him with nothing more than a head of hair to even see if he was looking. )
We were all such stupid kids.
( Which isn't exactly an answer, but she follows it up with the muffled: )
You weren't supposed to get killed. ( Is it that hard to say something nice? Apparently. She breathes in, ignoring any hitch in the process, or any heat tracing its way down her face from her eyes. It's quiet, these kinds of tears, versus the gasping ones that'd brought her to her knees at the news of Liberio's eradication. ) I'm glad you're okay here.
no subject
Being kept abreast of the world in Armin's words meant she didn't emerge into the world again clueless. It also meant she heard Armin's confessions to the particulars of his understanding the impossibility of choosing non-violence, in keeping hands clean, when the pressures all around you push and push for the same responses with the same hellish resolutions as what the Warriors had faced, years earlier and years younger.
None of that is what matters. Annie knows she's... changed, ironic for a woman who'd been trapped in her own hardened crystal for years. The vicious pressure that'd kept her small and focused and hopeless but for the deep, driving desire to get home to her father had fractured and fallen away with the world's near ending. She'd forgiven Reiner, if not necessarily herself. She'd turned away from the war ending their world at the assumption of her father's death, only to come back to it riding on the back of their successive generation. She doesn't just live shut down anymore.
Annie is not a person who's comfortable with the easy contact she knows her peers can accept and give so much more easily. She was raised on violence. She was asked for violence. She lived on anger and cynicism as a coping mechanism so she wouldn't bend and break under the despair of that etched future. What's the point in that anymore? It didn't save her, didn't spare her. Didn't stop her from caring for all the people she tried to tell herself she didn't care about. Changed nothing in the end but for how long it took for her to face what'd always been there, beyond the bullshit. She could have a heart and it wouldn't kill her. Not any faster than the world would anyway.
Bertholdt kneels, and Annie shifts, drawing her leg partway onto the bench, awkward and aware of it as much as she ignores it for the sake of moving at all. There's a very good chance those burning eyes are about to start shedding tears. In relief? In postponed and unprocessed grief? In some mix of both and anything else? It's suddenly just as important that Bertholdt doesn't see the exact moment that happens. He'll still know, probably, but he doesn't need to see it.
It's utterly graceless when Annie throws her arms around his shoulders, or at least attempts to — any lower and she'd have ended up needing to use a hand to brace herself against his bent knee to prevent herself from falling onto it. It's still painfully awkward to see, that angled distance and the tension in her form: her hug count might be up to a grand total of three and a half, but only her father had been about her size, and only the older, not-present Reiner would know how she'd let that barrier crumble down on the heels of admitting just how often she'd wanted to kill him when they were younger. And that she wished him to survive.
Equally graceless, her face turns into her own shoulder, presenting him with nothing more than a head of hair to even see if he was looking. )
We were all such stupid kids.
( Which isn't exactly an answer, but she follows it up with the muffled: )
You weren't supposed to get killed. ( Is it that hard to say something nice? Apparently. She breathes in, ignoring any hitch in the process, or any heat tracing its way down her face from her eyes. It's quiet, these kinds of tears, versus the gasping ones that'd brought her to her knees at the news of Liberio's eradication. ) I'm glad you're okay here.