Work Text:
The knives in Marley were something else, Eren thought: Light, almost airy, as he tossed the one he’d stolen from Azumabito estate between his hands, catching it with longer and longer delays each time. Titanium, they’d said. As capable of rending flesh as carbon steel, but far more efficient for daily use. He tried to concentrate on the sensation of the lacquered handle skittering over his fingertips with each pass, but it was dull—drawn into a bubble of derealization where the edges of his vision were bleeding crimson fractals and smelled like carbon steel and smelled like titanium smelled like burning hair like s̴̞͋i̵̱͌n̷̨͠g̶͉͗è̷̘ď̷̠ ̶̭͊c̵͈̕l̶̮̓o̴̥̓t̸͓̅ḫ̷͋e̷̖͛ś̴̨ l̴͎̽i̵̥̦͐ͅk̵̪̲̔̑e̵̼͊̌̊ͅ ̷̭̆͝b̸̢̓̇̕ǫ̶͈͗͆̈́i̴̫͆̓̍l̶͔̪̝̂ì̸̤͓̮̅n̶̳͂͐̎g̵̞͉͑ f̴̦̺̽́ȇ̴̖̖́͋c̵̢̛̙̠̮̻͕̼̜̈́̀͛̀͒̂͐̃̕͘͜e̵̼͙̋̍́̎̈́͘ş̸̐́̈́͊͝ ̴̢͕͎̪͓̲͚̮̯̝̝̓̐̃̇̊̈̚ḽ̵̛̃̄́̕̕ǐ̵͚̜͕͕̣̣͉͋̏̎̈́͗̅̑̈́̓͝k̷̢̻͇̞̞̦̈̑̄͛͋͜ȩ̷̪͚͉͔̰̱̖̈̄͐̾̉̐̋͜
He screwed his eyes shut. What he’d stolen wasn’t a knife meant to be used in self-defense, but a stout one, meant for peeling vegetables. Potatoes. The scent of death en masse—the end of days, the Rapture, Ragnarok, whatever the fuck you wanted to call it—was replaced with blurry images of an airship he’d not yet boarded and garnished with the blood on his hands.
shick!
And fuck, it barely hurt, didn’t it? Now there really was blood on his hands.
Sasha hadn’t died yet. He was almost positive she hadn’t, anyway. His hair was too short. He had a matching pair of shoes. Oxfords, in fact. Polished ones. Clean trousers. Check, check, check, he ticked off internally. There was still time. He resisted the urge to march back into the manor just to confirm Sasha and the others were still breathing, clinging to a single stray observation: For whatever reason, his socks had always been soaked when he was undercover leading up to the festival. They were dry right now. Proof enough, he supposed.
Maybe he’d been in hell all along, come to think of it. Wet socks, or 2,000 years wasting away in purgatory? Maybe if he waited long enough, he’d become hypothermic and they’d have to cut his feet off. A plan over two millennia in the making thwarted because he was an utter fucking dumbass and couldn’t march without feet. It was a pathetic and borderline humorless cosmic joke, but really, wasn’t that his entire life at this point? If he was truly lucky, someone would cart him back to the hospital and his grandfather would do the deed with a hacksaw. Maybe then, he’d finally feel something. File it away as yet another ludicrous and cyclical scheme brought about by the Attack Titan for the sake of irony.
Eren closed his eyes, running the blade of the knife over his thumb. Each serrated tooth brought with it sparks of adrenaline and green fire. If a brain was capable of itching, his would be, covered in tumorous welts, like egg sacs. He’d be digging feverishly-bitten nails into his gray matter and cackling as all the cacophonous bullshit in his head ballooned before rupturing. Alternatively, if he managed to leave them alone—“Don’t pick at those, Eren!” came his mother’s well-meaning voice as she swatted his hands away from several angry mosquito bites—the pustules would burst and he’d finally be a father. A shitload of larvae would look right at home crawling around his skull, actually.
He was losing his fucking mind. Another course correction:
shick!
The static finally dissipated, and as he shook out any remaining vestiges of madness in his capsized head, he shuddered. All of this was an exclusive performance for an audience of one, and when he flexed his fingers, feeling the tackiness of his handiwork as it dried in the webbing between them, he found himself dissatisfied. Almost bored. He needed more everything. More pain. More erratic behavior. Louder and stupider justifications for every ridiculous decision he’d made and would continue to make on his self-centered freefall into the annals of infamy.
Deeper, then. Down the wrist. Skim a vein and slough off a layer of skin. Eat it for shits and giggles.
“Fuck,” he growled. His wrist was freshly peeled, raw and pink. He chased a wayward drop of blood down his forearm and kissed it like it would love him in all the places his friends couldn’t reach. His mouth was dry. He licked his lips and worried them between his teeth until copper welled in the cracks. He popped his knuckles and envisioned some Marleyan child’s leg snapping like a wishbone. Willy Tybur’s marrow had tasted—would taste—like liquid gold.
His teeth weren’t sharp enough to dig as deep as he needed them to. Not enough of a monster after all, it seemed. He’d need to work on sharpening his fangs if he was ever going to hurt anyone but himself.
shick! shick!
He tore off the remaining skin hanging from his arm and tried to swallow it, but he wretched. The skin itself was almost flavorless, reminiscent of a light, mildly gamey fish he’d been served in a restaurant a few weeks prior. It had to be something about the texture, then: There was a mealiness to it beyond the first bite—a grit, like the oil near his follicles. He thought about the momentary euphoria he felt when he ripped out clumps of his hair and imagined feeding the stringy flesh through his canines to strip it free of its gristle. Was that even how human bodies worked?
He swallowed again, and this time, it went down, leaving behind a phantom lump in his throat. He coughed a few times, wet and loud and full-bodied. Then, silence.
Finally.
In the past several months, he’d turned toward a lot of things to keep himself grounded, each one pushing the envelope a bit more than the last. He had easy access to alcohol through the Volunteers and had wasted no time in familiarizing himself with every variety of hard liquor at his disposal. It did disappointingly little for his state of mind, unfortunately, but if nothing else, it did help him get some sleep—something that he’d been lacking on a consistent basis for several months now.
Then there were the opiates and other illicit shit that circulated in the Underground. Those were harder for him to get his hands on, but he was stubborn and relatively resourceful. He knew people and could keep his mouth shut when it mattered. The real challenge was getting anything past Armin, Mikasa, and Levi, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t found ways to masturbate while bunking with the cadets. Perhaps one of the most useful skills he’d ever learned in training was how to sneak around with the other kids and stay off Shadis’ radar.
Ultimately, the reason he kept searching for things to get the job done was because nothing really helped. When he’d landed on harming himself, it was initially because little cuts and sharp pinches to the forearm had helped him think on stressful missions. He was never supposed to pick up a razor, or a kitchen knife, or even a rifle. The only reason he did is because injuring himself left no “footprint,” so-to-speak. There were no consequences for trying different weapons in the same way there were when alcohol had to be bartered for or drugs had to be smuggled into the port.
The Azumabitos might miss their knife, he supposed. Not that they couldn’t buy a thousand more with the money they intended to wring Paradis dry for.
He rubbed a calloused thumb over his tender wrist. It was slow to heal. The gentle motion against it felt nice. He pulled his knees close to his chest and propped his chin on top of them, sighing. He desperately needed a bath.
“Eren?”
Armin was coming to interrupt him, because of course he was. Eren couldn’t look at him. Footsteps drew closer, and he clutched his knees even tighter, white-knuckling his trousers. The coil of steam around his forearm was subtle, but probably not subtle enough.
“Hey, you disappeared on us,” Armin said gently, and Eren felt his eyes slithering around the scene he’d walked in on, taking in every last detail. “Hange and Mikasa sent me to get you, but…why do you have a knife?”
Eren glanced up at him, trying his best not to appear like a kicked dog despite feeling like one. He remembered that the knife still had traces of his blood on it and pushed it away, realizing belatedly that his response only looked more suspicious.
“I’m—don’t worry about it.”
Armin frowned. “There’s steam.”
“Yup.”
“Eren,” he said exasperatedly.
Eren got to his feet and kicked the knife even further away from them both, shoving his hands in his pockets. “It’s nothing,” he insisted, his eyes flashing. “Listen, sorry, I’m on my way back in now, so don’t bother stopping the fucking presses just because I—!”
Armin reached out to grab his wrist as he stalked off, and predictably, Eren winced. Armin’s expression turned even more dismal. Eren’s line of sight was trained on the door.
“Come on, let me go,” Eren said, his voice eerily soft. “I want to go back inside. I’m missing out on everything.”
Eren had always been stronger than Armin and they both knew it. If he really wanted to get away, he could, and back in the manor, Armin couldn’t exactly confront him without disrupting a bunch of bureaucratic BS. He had an out. Now if he could just take it—
“…Will you come talk to me about it eventually?”
Eren swallowed and glanced over his shoulder. Armin looked drained, and he knew that he did, too. The slender fingers wrapped around him were warm. He curled his hand into a fist and licked his lower lip, still crusted with blood, before turning to face him. His height made him feel imposing.
“Talk to you about what?”
They maintained eye contact for what felt like an eternity, Armin silently pleading Eren to confide in him and Eren betraying nothing but deep-seated malaise and a general air of irritability.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Eren murmured in confirmation, shaking him off. He walked toward the knife and scooped it up, letting the last few plumes of steam curl around his fingers. “Gonna put this back first.”
Armin stood there with his lips parted, seemingly at a loss.
“Or did you want to follow me back to the kitchens to make sure I don’t do anything stupid?” he asked scathingly. “Gonna wipe my ass for me when I stop by the bathroom, too?”
He wasn’t being fair to Armin and he knew it. He was a loose canon; Hange and Mikasa and whoever the fuck else had every right to monitor him constantly. Even now, he was plotting something far bigger than himself or the Survey Corps or even the island, but he still wanted the space and privacy to self-destruct at his own leisure. Maybe staying on the Azumabito property was a poor choice if that’s what he was after, but still.
Armin took a deep breath. “You’re not stupid, Eren. Or a kid.” He rubbed his own wrist and a chill crept down Eren’s spine. Armin was far too intuitive for his own good. “Do what you want.”
shick!
“Hold on,” Eren said as Armin started toward the door. Armin slowed to a stop and gave him a baleful look.
“Since I know you won't let it go, just… listen to me, okay?" He took a cautious step closer to Armin, laying the groundwork for furious backpedaling. "I've been using this and other things to hurt myself lately. It hasn't been bad or too extreme, obviously. Not that I can really do much anyway. Guess I could just let it fester or whatever, but…"
He shook his head. The hypotheticals didn't matter.
“I just… I needed something to stop all the noise. The things I’ve been seeing are driving me crazy. All of this future memories shit? I can’t think, I can’t—“
He ran his fingers through his hair furiously, yanking at the roots to stop himself from crying. Armin’s eyes were wide, glittering aquamarines set into a pale, slightly pockmarked face. Eren wanted to devour him, or at the very least, let him absorb all of his repressed emotions through osmosis. He couldn’t take it anymore.
“It’s getting worse,” he confessed miserably, his own green eyes murky and red-rimmed. “If I can’t get it to stop, I might do something really stupid, Min. I can’t live another few years like this.”
Armin didn’t seem to process the implication that he was going to die young.
“It’s okay. We’ll fix it,” he said with an overabundance of both kindness and resolve, far too accepting of the things he’d just heard. “There’s nothing the two of us can’t do together. It’s always been like that, hasn’t it?”
Eren looked at his best friend like he was his salvation, warmth pooling in his belly while something popped in his ears. He bridged the distance between them and clung to Armin’s lapels while the world turned white, the popping noise evolving into a nonsensical jumble of words and whistling.
“Armin, please…!” Eren begged him, whiny and high-pitched. Tears were flowing freely down his cheeks now, and even though he was a head taller than the boy he was using as his crutch, he’d never felt so small.
Something crawled out of his ears. Armin was frozen beneath him, a placid smile permanently affixed to his face.
“Get me far away from here,” Eren hissed, each and every word mired in agony. More of whatever had burrowed in his ear canal fell to the ground, wriggling on the concrete. Some sort of tiny membrane hit the ground with it. When Eren reached up to pull another worm and the remains of a fresh sac from his ear, he realized the back of his head had been blown clean off. He could still taste the gunpowder.
Oh, that. Right.
Jolted from his reverie, Eren blinked away the beginnings of tears, taking long, deep breaths to ensure his nose didn’t start running. The ever-present static had returned in full force—like the sound of grating cartilage or sanding down bone. As soon as Eren had privacy again, he knew he’d find some new, equally terrifying method to drive it out: Maybe strangulation this time, or mad dash into a busy street. Armin’s back was already facing him; The kitchen knife still glinted in his hand.
shick!
“Hey, Eren?”
“Hey, Armin.”
Eren didn’t respond, but Armin turned to look at him anyway. He wore a complex expression—one that Eren couldn’t make heads or tails of. Back in his little facsimile of a world, they were kissing. Eren had his hand down Armin’s pants and Armin didn’t even care that Eren’s snot was dribbling into his mouth.
“You know we still l̴̛͎̺̱̲̪͉͐͐̈́͒́̍͗͗̄̏̉̋̉́͗̒̌̈͆̿̀̅̎̌̃͂́̕̕͘͝͝͝͝o̵̢̧̢̧̧̢͙̦̜̤̜̻̻̩̭̰̫̩͚̻̮̞͚̝̝͕̯͍̥̲͍̼̖͙̞̞̫̱͛͒̐͌̄͑̀͒̾̊̈́͑͂͌͛̾̀̚͘͠ͅv̸̧̨̛̪͕̝̮̣̭͉̼̠͎͇̯͈͎͚͓͔͐̍̽̏̓̑͒̌̓͐̌́̾̿͂͌̒̊͋̆̌͛͊̂́͠͝͠é̵̡̡͈͝ you, right?”
shick!
“It’s too late for any of that,” he replied with a grisly, albeit pained smile. He sagged under Armin’s weight as the latter collapsed in his arms, a knife with a lacquered handle protruding from his back. “I’m already dead and buried.”