002 // text; username: grollschwert

[hauntedsavior]

cw: chronic illness, ruminations on death

Fun one for you tonight.

[this message comes in the middle of the night, when no one in their right mind should be awake. but that's never stopped anna. she can't sleep, and if flynn and ruby and everybody are right then she has to at least try not to keep this stuff inside her at all times. sorrow's silence we needn't bear, or whatever.]

You know a girl. Her body is breaking down and her meds are failing her.
She has years left. Maybe months, if it gets worse.
But something happens, and she gets access to amazing new technology. Things that prevent her body from attacking itself.
Things that stop her timer from ticking faster than everyone else's.
Great, right?
You get to know her better. You entertain her little crush on you. Maybe you like her back a little and maybe things aren't gonna be so bad.

But one day, you do something.
Something that sets off a chain of events that you couldn't have predicted. Not in a million years.
Small things collide into medium things collide into big huge massive things.
And after the butterfly version of you is done flapping its wings, she doesn't have access to that technology anymore.
She's back on the timer.

She doesn't know you did anything.
She never finds out.
You can't bring yourself to tell her, and she wouldn't believe it if you did.

She barely recognizes you anymore, by the end of it.
Her family finds your name on her phone and invites you to pay respects.

Do you still go to her funeral?

Did you kill her?

Comments

[hauntedsavior]

Well, you sure don't mince words.
Even when there's no record of you ever having done anything? When you suddenly turn into a non-person in their life?

[13thcommander]

Even if you are the only one who knows.

You don't want to carry that burden with you.

[hauntedsavior]

And if you can't anymore?
Say you're stuck in a Victorian town a universe away. As an example.

[13thcommander]

Would you have gone? If you were able?

[hauntedsavior]

I did go.
But I know she won't be the only one.

[13thcommander]

Good. Even if it didn't seem like it at the time.

I'm afraid that's something you'll have to carry.

[A pause before this next part.]

I won't lie to you and say it gets easier. If it did, you would stop being human.

[hauntedsavior]

Ha. Yeah.
Pushing 30, you'd think I would know this stuff by now.
But I guess you don't usually think about watching your friends die when you're this young.

Or maybe you do, I don't know your life.

[13thcommander]

I've been watching my friends die since I was fifteen.

And I've been the one sending them to their deaths for the last five years.

[Cheerful!]

I'm sorry you're in this position. Did your friends die for a good cause?

[hauntedsavior]

[yikes. she should've known better. people don't get insight like these without living it.]

This one died for no reason.
The others... I won't know.
The best I can say is that I stopped them from dying for some eugenicist's gain.
I did what I could to at least let everyone live and die on their own terms.

[13thcommander]

Sometimes, that's the best you can do. Once people have their freedom, what they do with it is their own choice.

For whatever a stranger's opinion is worth, I would rather live freely and die horribly than be a victim of a eugenic experiment.

[hauntedsavior]

Wouldn't have posted in the first place if I didn't think the opinions of strangers were worth something.
But I'd like to think the people I left behind would think the same way.

Honestly, you talk about freedom the same way my friend Eren used to.
So at least one of the people I left behind would think the same way.

[13thcommander]

I knew someone named Eren back home. Freedom was very important to him as well.

Perhaps it's something to do with the name.

[hauntedsavior]

Maybe it is. He'd do whatever it took to stay free.
And to make sure everyone else got to live freely, too.
Good thing he was called Jaeger, 'cause that guy sure could jaeg.

[this is just a little joke, surely.]

The one I helped save the city from, the eugenicist.
He wanted to use everyone whose soul was "too weak" as food for the strong.
I can't count how many different parts of that that nobody deserves.

lol I see what you did there

[13thcommander]

[wait what]

You knew an Eren Jaeger?

Was this here, or in your home world?

[Is Eren jumping through time and space oh please gods no?]

fingerguns

[hauntedsavior]

[...huh. that's interesting. and opens up a lot more questions. it also, she realizes, would be a very good idea for her not to give all the details here.]

I knew him in Recolle, where I came from.
That was his name.
I didn't know him before his soul started resonating with someone else, though.
Someone from across time and space, same as the rest of us.
Someone none of us ever got the chance to meet in person.

[13thcommander]

I apologise, you may need to walk me through this.

You knew a man named Eren Jaeger, who spoke about freedom.
You met him in a place called Recolle, where his soul resonated with someone else.

Is or was Recolle a place like this one, where people are called from different worlds?

And did your Eren Jaeger ever talk about something called titans?

[hauntedsavior]

Recolle was a normal city until it wasn't.
I lived there for about twelve years before I came here, but around... four years ago?
Things started changing. The people who lived in the city started changing. Their souls started resonating across universes. Reaching out and finding people who feel the same.
It happened to me. It happened to Eren. I think it happened to him first.

Nobody new got drawn into the city. We just had all the people who already lived there learning more about these other souls.
Memories. Thought patterns. Body parts. Abilities.

All that to say that Eren didn't just talk about titans.

[13thcommander]

[Consider Erwin shook.]

Then you and I may have known the same man.

Mine was a soldier in the Survey Corps, and I was his commander for a time.

I had no idea he was traveling to different worlds as well.

[hauntedsavior]

I don't think he went anywhere.
It's like a guitar, yeah?
You pluck a string and the strings around it start vibrating even though you're not touching them.

[she calls this her "string theory".]

Your Eren, the guy you commanded who could turn into a titan and had a hard-on for freedom.
Something in the cosmos plucked the string of his soul, and my Eren—the Shakespeare-loving drummer who met his future husband in 2010 in the city he grew up in—started vibrating with it.
It's complicated.
But it happened to a lot of people in the city.
Until the cosmos silenced their strings, at least.

[13thcommander]

[It's going to take Erwin a while to process all this. He does take note that Eren ended up with a husband in this other world. It makes more sense now why he seemed eternally oblivious to Mikasa's devotion to him. It's also a surprise that Eren liked Shakespeare. Erwin discovered Shakespeare on his own jaunt to another world, and it doesn't seem like something Eren would enjoy.]

It sounds extremely complicated.

May I ask... was Eren happy there?

[hauntedsavior]

I think he was.

He had a lot of stuff inside him, still.
A lot of complicated feelings about the Eren he was resonating with.
Your Eren, I guess.
One of the last conversations we had before he fell off the app was about how he worried he was.
That he felt like your Eren was doing the wrong things for a good cause,
And how worried my Eren was when he started thinking they weren't that wrong.

But I think despite all that, he was still happy.
I think he's still happy now. I hope he is.

[13thcommander]

I'm glad to hear that.

I didn't know Eren for long, but he was someone very important in our world. I hope that we were able to set him on the right path, and that he made the right decisions when the time came.

[The jury's still out on that one, Erwin.]

Thank you for being a friend to him. He was someone who needed friends at his side.

[hauntedsavior]

He was important in my world, too.
Maybe not to Earth, or to Recolle.
But he was important in MY world, you know?
I needed him as much as he needed me.

He was a good guy. Didn't always make the right choices, but never did anything halfway.
Always committed to things with his whole ass.

This is the first time I've ever actually heard about the actual people that my friends' souls were resonating with, though.
So thanks for telling me that they were really... real.
I just had to take all of it on faith until now.

[13thcommander]

I understand completely.

[Erwin has people like that in his own life. Not many, but a handful, and all the more precious for their small numbers.]

You are quite welcome.
Eren was, and is, very real in my world.
And he did, as you say, commit to things with his whole ass.

[Erwin, no.]

I wonder if we have anyone else in common, that we may know from our various travels.

[hauntedsavior]

I don't know if anyone else is coming to mind.
It's definitely possible. Everything's possible, you know?
Eren is a pretty colossal (lol) presence, and it's hard to think about things that aren't... you know.
Right now.
So there could have been more, but there's not even a guarantee they would've kept the same name.
I mean, A2's not a name that people have.

[hold on. this isn't a comedic pause, she seems to have just kind of figured it out for herself.]

Goddammit.
I started using my middle name as my last name and now I'm Anna Amarande.
A.A.