Five Cups in Marley

The night Eren decided to disappear in Marley, Armin was the one who found him first, sitting on the inn's back step with his boots already laced and a stolen Marleyan coat folded on his knees. It was past midnight. The city made a noise Paradis never had, a low hum of engines and carts and voices that didn't stop just because it was dark. Somewhere down the street a gramophone was playing a song in a language Armin was still only half learning. The air smelled of coal smoke and frying fat and the sea. "You're leaving," Armin said. Eren didn't look up. "Go back to bed." "Where?" "Armin." "If you're going to walk out on all of us, the least you can do is tell me which direction." He sat down on the step beside him. The stone was cold through his trousers. "I've been watching you for three days. You stopped eating at that conference. You keep looking at the harbor like you're measuring it. And yesterday you asked Mikasa what you were to her, which is the strangest thing I've ever heard you say, and I once heard you swear to wipe every last Titan off the face of the earth." That got the smallest sound out of Eren, not quite a laugh. "I can't tell you," he said. "Why not?" "Because I've seen what you do when I tell you." He finally turned. His eyes were red-rimmed and very steady, and Armin felt something cold slide down the back of his neck. "I've seen all of it. Every version. You all try so hard, and none of it works, and then you have to stand in front of me at the end." He looked back at the street. "I'd rather you hated me from the start. It's cleaner." A light came on in the window above them. Neither of them looked up. A minute later the back door opened, and Mikasa stood there in her nightclothes with the scarf around her neck and her eyes going straight to the coat in Eren's lap. "No," she said. "Mikasa, go inside." "No." She came down the step and stood in front of him. Behind her, the door opened again, and Hange leaned out in an untied robe with her hair in a terrible knot, squinting without her glasses. "Oh good," Hange said. "A meeting. I love a meeting at one in the morning. Levi, they're out here." "I can hear them," said Levi from somewhere in the dark kitchen. "The whole street can hear them." They ended up around the little table in the inn's kitchen, because Levi refused to have the conversation outside where any Marleyan with a window could take notes. He put the kettle on. Nobody had asked for tea. He made it anyway, five cups, and set one in front of Eren with a click that meant *drink it or I'll pour it on you*. Eren didn't drink it. He sat with his hands flat on the table, staring at them, and the silence went on so long that Hange finally put her glasses on and leaned forward on her elbows. "Eren," she said gently. "I'm going to guess, and you tell me if I'm cold. The day you touched Historia's hand at the medal ceremony. You saw something." His fingers curled. "Warm, then." She nodded. "Your father's memories. And something that wasn't your father's. Something from later." "Hange," Levi said. "I'm getting there." She didn't take her eyes off Eren. "You've been carrying it alone for three years. You've been hiding it from me, which is rude, and from Armin, which is ruder, and you were about to walk off into a foreign city with a coat you stole from the gentleman in room four, which, by the way, I will be returning in the morning with an apology." Eren laughed. It was a horrible sound, cracked and wet. "You don't understand." "No," Hange agreed. "That's the whole point. Make me." He looked at Armin. Armin made himself hold his gaze. And then Eren told them. He didn't tell it well. He started in the middle and backtracked and contradicted himself, and twice he stopped completely and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He told them about the world beyond the sea, about how it would never stop coming for Paradis, about Zeke's plan and the slow, quiet ending he wanted for every Eldian alive, about the hundreds of millions of people he had seen under a mountain of feet. He told them about the walls, what was inside them, what they could be made to do. He told them, in a voice gone flat and far away, about a version of himself that walked out of this inn tonight and didn't come back for a year, and what he'd done when he came back. He told them that in every memory he'd seen of the end, Mikasa was crying. When he finished, the tea was cold. No one had touched it, not even Levi. Mikasa had not moved once. She sat with her hands knotted in the ends of her scarf and her face white, looking at Eren as if he were standing a long way off at the edge of something. "That's why you asked me," she said quietly. "What you were to me." "I needed to know if you'd let me go." "And if I'd said family? If I'd said nothing?" He swallowed. "Then it would've been easier." Mikasa stood up so fast her chair scraped. For a second Armin thought she would hit him. Instead she walked around the table, took Eren's face in both hands, and said, very clearly, "You're an idiot," and then she put her forehead against his and stayed there, and Eren's shoulders started to shake. Armin looked away, at the window, at the black glass with their reflections floating in it. His own face looked young and frightened. His hands were trembling under the table. He'd seen the inside of the Colossal Titan's memories; he knew what it was to have someone else's horror living in your head. He hadn't known Eren had been carrying something so much heavier, every day, while Armin talked to him about trade agreements and the price of iron. "A year," Levi said into the silence. Everyone looked at him. He'd picked up his cup and was examining the cold tea with distaste. "That's what you said. You leave tonight, and a year later the thing happens." He set the cup down. "So that's what happens if you leave tonight. You didn't. You're sitting in a kitchen in Marley getting snot on my clean table." He looked at Eren, and there was nothing gentle in it, but there was something that Armin, after all these years, knew to be close. "You saw what happens when you go off alone. Fine. Nobody's seen what happens when you don't." Eren lifted his head. "It doesn't change. That's what I'm telling you. I've seen it. Past and future are the same thing, it's already—" "You saw it," Hange said, "from inside a version of you who never sat at this table. Correct?" He opened his mouth. Closed it. "Then you don't know." She was already pulling a pencil out of her robe pocket, which only Hange would have in a robe pocket, and turning the inn's paper menu over to its blank side. "Memories are evidence, Eren, not prophecy. I'm a scientist; you'll have to forgive me for wanting a second sample." She drew a line down the middle of the menu. "Left column, everything you know. Every nation, every weapon, every name. Right column, everyone we haven't asked yet. Kiyomi. Onyankopon. The Anti-Marleyan Volunteers, God help us. People in this city who don't want another war any more than we do. The man in room four, possibly, once he forgives us about the coat." "Hange," Eren said helplessly. "It's the whole world." "Yes," she said. "That's why it can't just be you." Armin heard himself speak before he decided to. "You always wanted to see what was on the other side of the walls," he said. "When we were kids. You'd climb up on the riverbank and look at them like they'd personally insulted you." His voice wavered and he let it. "We're on the other side now, Eren. We made it. Don't you dare go out there without me." Eren stared at him. Then at Mikasa, still standing beside his chair with her hand on his shoulder. Then at Levi, who had gotten up and was pouring the cold tea back into the pot to reheat it, as if the matter were settled and the only remaining problem was the temperature. "I might still have to do it," Eren said, very low. "If there's no other way." "Then you'll do it in front of us," Mikasa said. "Not alone. Never alone." Hange wrote something on the menu and underlined it twice. Levi set the kettle back on the stove. Outside, the gramophone down the street had stopped, and in its place came the clatter of the first milk carts heading for the harbor, and a gull, and the long low horn of a ship coming in. Eren looked at his tea. After a moment, he picked it up, with both hands, the way he'd held cups when he was ten years old, and drank. "It's cold," he said. "I noticed," Levi said. "Wait a minute. I'm making more." They were still sitting there when the sun came up over Marley, five people and a menu covered on both sides in Hange's terrible handwriting, and the stolen coat lay forgotten across the back of the empty sixth chair.