Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Years ago, on a sputtering frigate bound for the Middle East with her Panzer unit, Pieck had been stewing in a crisis, neither her first nor her last one.

The commanding-powers-that-were had granted her and her men the privilege of their own compartment, situated below deck and near the prow, and they had discovered after boarding that it was a cramped affair that now proved uncomfortable for everyone involved. Right now, its matte, rivet-knuckled walls were surrounding them in elliptical enclosure, squashing them together like freight cargo and cutting off their air circulation and freedom of movement. She had the intimation that this was really the undersea brig where they normally housed prisoners, simply hastily remade to resemble the bare minimum of a living space. Outside its single clouded window, the repetitive strumming of storm-grey waves straining towards the gunwale served as the total summation of the view they had.

With hours yet to whittle away in the suffocating stasis of their thinly disguised cell, she had been in one of her brooding moods, nursing her nth spell of twisting nausea about the nonchalance with which her squad had been deployed to the Middle East again. Her starched uniform hung too-large and too-stiff upon her shoulders. It was becoming apparent that the entire enterprise of Marley’s feud with the Middle Eastern nations was simply one huge exercise in vain posturing, and the pointlessness of this trip was festering at her with the acrimony of a plum gone sour. This deployment was one time-wasting endeavour too many; the compartment one shuffle away from tipping into unbearable claustrophobia; and she was tired. This could, as she understood it, have been her mythical breaking point. A kettle is only obedient until the moment where you load too much water for its mechanism to churn, at which point it blows its top.

Why, she wondered faintly, a dim echo in her mind. Why was her squad often condemned to this? — To being shoved through nameless battles at the back of dusty trains and ships and cars. To becoming pawns in a blur of conflicts.

She could not shake the suspicion that she was responsible for leading them down this road in the first place. She was simultaneously powerful and too powerless to do anything. Marley latched onto the promise of constant war as an iron-clad doctrine, gorging itself to sclerotic bloatedness on its injunctions. To address what was wrong with it, you had to reconfigure its entire structure. And so, again and again: that coiling throb of moral nausea in her guts.

She decided then to salvage for flotsams of meaning the same way anyone in her situation would have: by playing twenty questions with her defenceless subordinates.

“So, I’m curious,” she prefaced to them, “Why join me on this mission, knowing full well you could die at any time?”

It was flippant, and she knew it. She tapped her feet in a nerveless rhythm on the ground, ignoring the sweep of bewildered looks that creased their faces. Smiled an open, honest smile, in hopes of cajoling any response that might have been thinking of making its way past the corner of their mouths. There was a tremor of uncertainty as most of her men sat up even straighter to grapple with her question. It was not over her act of asking itself that they felt unease. They had come to know her as a good-humoured but ultimately eccentric leader, and were accustomed by now to her tendency to pose strange questions at point-blank distance, exactly as she was doing here. But the question was a thorny one, and playing twenty questions with your superior was rather like gambling with the maws of a predator before you, she supposed.

“You have impunity to be honest,” she added, as one more stately reassurance that she had already checked that the compartment was safe from bugs, and waited; but she was not expecting any of them to genuinely answer, except to offer up the obvious non-response: we had no other choice. It was a provocative, difficult question, and had in fact intentionally been so. Perhaps it was simply not fated to have a solution, just like her private dilemmas.

Life still had the capacity to surprise her, apparently, because at that moment someone spoke up. Aldo, from two seats over to her left, cleared his throat and drew his hand forward into the air in a deferential gesture. “Miss Pieck, may I?“

She nodded, and turned to regard him— and was briefly caught off guard when he brought down his age-gnarled hand to clasp hers in it, gentle and without any hint of an ulterior motive. The oldest among the others, somewhere in his forties, he was the only one who had remained unperturbed when she set her ridiculous question before them. It was a fact that had not escaped her notice. His eyes were twinkling with enthusiasm, or perhaps something like avuncular understanding. The crow’s feet around his eyes now lit up in smiling ripples as he looked at her. He had once mentioned that he had a daughter of his own too, she belatedly remembered.

“I suppose what you’re really asking is… well, it’s a question every man has to answer for himself. And as for us,“ a pause, as he gave her hand a parental, reassuring squeeze, “our answer is that we trust that no matter what happens out there, you’ve tried your best, and that alone is enough for us to make peace with what fate may bring us.”

He was speaking for himself and the others, but he could very well have been speaking to her instead. There were suddenly murmurs of agreement resounding across the cabin. Her tongue felt heavy in her mouth, and she became aware of an inarticulate emotion welling up in her throat. She had the inexplicable feeling that he, with the wisdom of his years and depth of his oak-brown eyes, had discerned the truth of what she was underneath— not a titan shifter, not their composed leader, but a girl barely teetering on the edge of nineteen, forced always to be far older than what she was, who was now quietly cracking at the edges from the inhuman mantle Marley had saddled her with— and perhaps recognised, as he might have done for his own child, her cry for help.

“Thank you,” she said, voice thick, not moving her hand away. Somehow finding that, after all this time and all she had seen in Paradis, she was still capable of being a sentimental creature. She felt, for a brief moment, not like the whip-smart commander of her own squad but a chastened shadow, watery and wavering and humbled.

“Nothing to thank me for, Miss,” he insisted, and gave her hand a final squeeze before letting his arms retreat back into their former curl within his seat. “It’s as simple as this: we believe in you.”

That was what she learned that day, and carried everywhere like a talisman engraved upon her heart thereon: that the faith placed in you by others, even when you do not deserve it, even when it is the most improbable and foolish thing to do, is the most priceless thing you can be entrusted with.

Weeks later, when she came across Aldo’s body among the sundered ruins of what had once been the Tabqah base, cold and bereft of the light he had in life after meeting his end at the hands of a projectile she had failed to dodge, she stooped down to close his eyes, and ignored the way her palms trembled at this final send-off, hoping fervently instead that he was at peace. She was grateful when a sudden splatter of desert rain arrived; it disguised the patch of soil growing dark beneath her boots with her tears. She knew Magath would simply amass a new cohort of soldiers to fill his place in her unit, but her heart protested the very idea. He would never be replaceable. None of these people were replaceable.

There, underneath the weeping sky, she stood by his side for a good number of minutes, as absolute as a grief-black obelisk or someone losing her innocence to the steel-cold cruelty of the world again, and committed his face to memory, adding his name into her endless record of faces to safekeep. Then, only then, did she turn to walk away, dabbing vainly at the sudden flash of tears upon her cheek.

It was the least that she owed people like him, in what was the most impoverished attempt at reparation she could have possibly made, and yet also the only thing that mattered: the responsibility of remembering.

It’s raining by the time the alliance reaches Paradis, hours after Eren’s death.

A storm, gathered an hour before arrival, lurches into full swing as they breach the docks. A sheet of water douses Pieck and everyone else’s faces as they disembark from the ship, a cool relief that feels like a send-off or greeting. Hange’s contacts—their troupe of old friends in the newly diminished Survey Corps—are there ready and waiting in large raincoats, ushering them towards the shelter of tarp-covered walkways. 

The journey from Marley’s mainland, shortly after downing Eren, took about twelve hours in all. They’re all tired, and Hange, draped in bandages around their midsection but still indefatigably, restlessly cheerful, brings them to their quarters for the night. The Warriors— ex -Warriors—each get a separate room in the Survey Corps’s now empty offices. Pieck is unsurprised when, by midnight, they have all shunted the arrangement to sleep in the central foyer, a halo of bedrolls around the fireplace. Even Annie, who hasn’t seen any of them in years and whose loyalties are of uncertain vintage, joins by throwing her pillows with theirs in the corner. 

There are only five of them now. The room seems vastly colder without the thrum of shifter heat in their veins. But their collective company is its own kind of protection too; Pieck remembers hideaway nights in their dormitories in Marley, how Porco and Reiner and Colt would refuse to sleep under pretense of rebelling against their superiors and the true, actual motivation of avoiding their nightmares, those amnesiac memories plaguing any shifter in the deepest bowels of the night. Even Colt, free of them then, had stayed up too, in solidarity and perhaps rehearsal. Their cramped rooms always seemed warmer, livelier under cover of their raucous midnight laughter and Colt’s terrible pantry jokes. 

It’s with a delayed, detached start that she realises she will never have that again. Only this, a dead-ended longing she can neither intellectualise nor slice her way through.

The alliance had worked, in some ludicrous stretched-out sense of the word, and the surviving members here were proof insofar that was true. But there was the gulf left by all the people who might’ve sat here. All the people who should’ve sat here with her. 

In another hour she falls asleep, and dreams: of herself in a zone of deadland, white sand falling in every direction and a blurred, mystical glimmer of starlight in the distance where there should be none. 

Her boots slide easily on the grains as she walks, impossibly silk-soft, and the landscape morphs into a corridor like the ones she’s passed through countless times in the barracks, their dim, empty channels seeming to contain every injustice and fear and dashed dream ever played out among Marley’s soldiers. Lingering before a door, she sees the montage of a myriad lives filtering through her mind, ghostly afterimages creased into her eyelids: her and her fellow Warriors living and breathing and dying in these rooms, their lives now consigned to obscurity. 

She lifts a hand to pull at the door’s handle, but nothing happens in the sluggish, wavering dream-space—save for the sound of somebody’s footsteps stopping behind her. 

It’s then she feels it, like the snap of an epiphany arriving in every fibre of her body: him, standing tall and upright behind her, as if he hadn’t died just days ago within a titan’s belly. 

“Hey,” Porco says, voice as bold as it was in life, and Pieck flinches, whirling around—but already the hallway is crumbling into transient brick, hitting her with a thud until she gasps and startles herself awake, heart sick with the numb stab of loss that always precedes waking. 

“So that’s how it happened,” Pieck says.

Reiner rests his elbows upon his knees and looks down at the floor, despondent. “Yeah.”

Pieck considers the facts: Zeke’s treachery, the immediate wave of titans he unleashed, Falco’s transformation. Reiner stepping in. Porco pushing him brusquely away, and showing him up one last time. Rivals, to the very end.

Did Porco get closure, at the moment of his death? Was it what prompted him to sacrifice himself in the first place, knowing he had the answer to the lifelong mystery that dogged him?

She’d heard the bare-bone details before they took on Eren, when Reiner had said he owed her that much, an explanation for why there were suddenly only three of them left and Falco was writhing in his sleep from the same tell-take nightmares. She’d been the one to cut in and ask him to save the full story for another time. “After we finish the job,” she’d insisted, and at the time she sounded like she believed they would survive. She hadn’t known any better than any person with them, in fact; she was afraid that knowing how Porco and Colt had died would render real and final, no longer an immaterial ambiguity. Words etched into stone for posterity. She would have lost her resolve to continue then, at the precise time that she couldn't give up.

So here she is now, sitting with Reiner and Annie, only hearing the complete account days after they’d gone.

A rush of air leaves her. But she clings onto composure. If nothing, she'll stay unflappable, the one who never cracks under pressure. One look at Reiner’s face tells her he's tormenting himself in that desolate mind of his, readying himself for an outburst he's expecting from her.

“Stop it,” she says softly, “I can hear what you’re thinking.” Reiner glances up, not fearful, simply guilt-stricken. But his expression turns to surprise at the calm on her face. “I don’t blame you, not at all,” she adds on— quietly, but with the full force of her sincerity. It’s not your fault, she meant, and she truly believed it for Reiner.

“He was the one who made the choice,” she murmurs, placing her hand on Reiner’s, “not you. Not me. Him alone.”

In the distance she can hear the sounds of the waves breaking upon the ship’s hull, the push-and-pull of the sea tugging them forwards. The rise and fall of their breathing in the enclosed room.

A sharp inhale from Reiner, so quick and inaudible that she wouldn’t have heard it if her attention had been elsewhere. The tension in the room lifts. Reiner’s eyes widens with the shock of someone who'd thought himself beyond the pale of forgiveness, and then squeezes shut in gratitude. The next moment she pulls him and Annie into a huddle in the quiet shade of the room’s steel walls, pressing their heads together. Annie gives an irritated huff at first, but she soon joins in as well, leaning in towards the circle. There they remain for a while, in the safety of understanding, until they have to be called up to prepare for the work of rebuilding. They've been in Paradis for two days.

In the days after the world’s collapse, Armin lets the erstwhile Warriors and their families stay in Paradis under a special protection scheme: an olive branch in return for their help in stopping Eren, extended cautiously. After decades of repetitive fighting over the titans, nobody is keen to return to the regimes of vengeance. The world has exhausted its appetite for bloodshed. 

In Shiganshina, she watches the locals salvage the wreckage of their district; contingents of headscarfed men and women walk the streets, shovelling charred brick and debris aside. Sometimes, when she doesn’t need crutches for her residual numbness, she pitches in, a small stranger fitting in perfectly among them. Paradis wasn’t the target of Eren’s Rumbling, but inland casualties happened still, under the colossal titans’ indiscriminate path. She refuses to interpret it as a moral, or lesson. These people were collateral damage, in a way they didn’t deserve; that nobody, Eldian or Marleyan, ever did. 

Breakfasts she divides equally between her father and the Warriors now, with the incongruous freedom of someone grasping a fresh bounty of time in her hands. Some mornings she lays in bed, impassive, as if the hard cut-off of thirteen years still looms over her. Others, she savours the crisp taste of daylight air as she stretches her limbs out, realising this: that she has to fully participate in this world now, instead of dedicating herself to being a weapon, a tool fashioned for the ugly purposes of war missions and raining death. All the possibilities of life, offered up and splintering like a scattershot trajectory within her. 

She has every single day at her disposal now. Not now, she thinks—not now, but in time, she will figure out what she can do with this new largesse. 

None of their commanders were around to organise a proper memorial service for them, but they made do, gathering quietly in Annie’s room one rudderless afternoon to hold a vigil. Besides, every person they were mourning would have preferred it this way: to forgo the artless pomp of a public funeral, which would have been more about sending reassurance to the top brass that they could now pat their backs and close the book of their soldiers’ deaths, in favour of being remembered among friends. They were now sitting in a circle upon the creaky floorboards, the windows shaded and the room alight with a sombre orange candle-glow.

“You didn’t know any of them well,” Reiner remarked to Annie with a kind of wonder. “Do you want to be here?”

“My room’s the biggest one,” Annie pointed out, with an undertone of shut up. She was immediately lifting her palm, and Reiner flinched on reflex, anticipating pain. But when she brought it down she merely clapped her hand upon Reiner’s shoulder in a gesture that took Reiner by surprise, almost as if to say in her own way: I'm here with you.

Pieck huddled close to the two of them, sharing in the solidarity of having seen and suffered enough in their compressed lives for three lifetimes over. It wasn't exactly closure they were seeking— closure was faraway and impossible, not while your friends’ absences were still fresh and aching every day like a deep metaphysical scar— but the ritual of sitting with some people at least instead of shouldering the loneliness alone in your room did something. Grief was— grief was really a communal feeling, even if you were doomed to be able to make sense of it only on your own individual terms.

There in the warm seclusion of the room, she looked at the faces of Falco and Gabi, and Reiner and Annie, sad but still very much alert and alive, and could almost imagine it: the possibility that Porco and Colt would arrive any moment now, and join them. She had not truly seen the moment Porco and Colt died, and there weren’t even any bodies to cry over— so surely they would walk up to her and Reiner and Annie at any moment now, and frighten them half to death with a sudden clasp of their shoulders, wouldn’t they? Surely they would come back to the rattling doors of their shelter after all this was over, and fling them wide open with bottles of beer and the glint of mischief in their smiles, as if to say, why, did you really think we were gone? Why would you ever have thought— whatever, we’re here now, so don’t think we’re going anywhere, you silly prissies. Come drink with us. Stop scowling and looking so damned sad, it’s too early for that! Come on, we’re still alive. We’re still alive—

It was the stuff of fantasy, and it was a pipe dream she could never truly believe in, not against her mettle for the hard unvarnished truth of reality. But she allowed herself the concession, because it was the only way to make sense of the absurdity of it all.

Falco tears up halfway through, and she immediately moves over to him, ready at the helm to comfort him, aware of how keenly difficult the whole event of the past week has been for him in particular. At first all appearances suggest that she has a handle on this, knows how to do this well enough, even as she ignores the sickening rise of inevitability in her throat. But then she hears Falco’s plaintive, staccato sobs— “I— it’s all my fault— my brother and Mr Galliard would still be here if they hadn't— if I hadn’t—” and all her attempts to put on a strong front and help him break.

Before she knows it, the tears are coming out of her on reflex, free-flowing helplessly, carelessly with the hurt of how wrong it all is, and she is reminded of the injustice of living on when others have not. It should have been someone like her, and not Porco, who still had eight of his youth-years left to live. It should have been her, and not Magath, when the rules of Warrior succession meant she was supposed to have died far earlier than the indomitable commander ever would, when the laws of the world meant he ought to have outlasted her and not the other way around.

But the opposite has happened, and it is irreversible now— nothing can change it, no matter how much they bang their fists against the unyielding door of fate. She wraps Falco close to herself, feeling useless and trying all at once with all the ferocity of her watery ineffectual heart to let him know that it is not his fault. But she simply feels, in the disabling outburst of her hurt, as empty as a bird who has lost the only song it knows, and has nothing left to give.

One night, resting after a hard day’s work of helping the locals and then seeing Armin about a new treaty, she slips into slumber while sprawled out on all fours on the ground; she encounters the landscape of sand again, bone-white to its extremities, and spread out under a sea of bright stars. But something is different, this time. 

There’s a large tree in the centre, silhouette shock-cut like lightning against the dark sky. Someone reclines against its trunk, hand lifting fistfuls of sand to fling them outwards, like a glum soldier practising his throw. The gesture is so singular and familiar that she recognises, at once, who this is, pieces his identity together in a single glance

“Pock?” she calls—and there he is, still dressed in the garrison uniform he infiltrated Shiganshina’s battlements in, on the same day he died; his own self intact and unharmed, down to the trademark frown etched into his brows. Hair brushed back, a startling shock of blonde to her eyes. 

“You were supposed to stop calling me that,” he mutters, but in the next second his face resolves into the hardy smile she knows well; he’s never held his grudges long when it comes to her. “Well, it’s good to see you, Pieck. Took you long enough to get here.”

A thousand questions. A thousand things she wanted to say. So much, too much.

She asks, instead: “How— how are you here? Is this real? Are you real?”

She remembers flashes of the aftermath immediately following Eren’s downfall. A moment simultaneously so recent and so far it could have happened eons ago, a strange wrinkle in the fabric of time. The disappearance of the power of the Titans from the world, forever, and then ethereal otherworldly smoke cloaking them like a slow hurricane.

The ones from Paradis had told her afterwards about the flashes of people and comrades they knew appearing in that smoke. For Levi: the old veterans. Jean and Connie: Sasha, formerly known as the girl who’d shot one of her very own men dead, now recognised accurately by her as another casualty of the senseless geopolitical feud.

She hadn’t seen Porco in the vision of people that appeared to her, but she’d chalked it up to an unexplainable loophole in the universe that was best not to dwell upon.

Now she wants to say: is this why I didn’t see you? Isn't Paths supposed to be gone? How are you still here, standing before that great big tree?

“I have no clue, to tell you the truth,” Porco answees, holding his palms out in an indifferent shrug. “I came here one day, and I’ve been waiting in front of this tree since. You can see and touch me, can’t you? Must be real then, or maybe you’re an imaginary friend my mind’s made up because it’s finally lost it—“

Three rapid steps, and Pieck is suddenly crushing him in a hug, holding on so tightly it’s possible she could have crushed his rib cage, even in this strange not-realm, not-world where things like that probably matter little.

“Oh, Pock,” she breathes out against his shoulder, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” I never got to say goodbye.

“Okay, you’re real,” comes his response, but when he wraps his own arms around her he dipped his head down, and she can tell with the practiced familiarity of a friend that he has probably closed his eyes, throat thick with emotion.

She laughs, despite herself, despite the frenzy of questions circling in her mind this very minute, like: is this stable? Is this going to last? Will you disappear forever in a puff of smoke the moment I wake up? She wonders if something in the way of the strength of camaraderie and connection had brought them to each other again, even after death. She tells him, making sure he knew it: “I miss you, I miss you so much.”

He glances at her, without the intense scowl she associates him with, and this would feel like the prelude to a usual round of banter, both of them swapping light-hearted insults without meaning it, but something has changed; he has changed, softened his harder edges. “Yeah, we shouldn't think too hard about this. I’m here. There—kick me, if you need proof.” He extends a leg. 

“Pock, you daft thing. I won’t do that. What if I hurt you?” Unexpectedly she laughs, despite the empty hollow in her chest, and the sound ends up as a half-choked sob. She leans against the tree, to calm herself. “The Titan Research Society didn’t learn everything about Paths, then.”

“No,” he agrees. “But it’s always been mysterious. It’s Paths, and all. Huge and enormous.”

“It’s just,” she starts, in lieu of the hundred other questions she wants to ask; she is afraid that if she deconstructs this, he will splinter and disintegrate, atom by atom, never to return. “There’s so much I need to tell you. You were there, and then—by the time I reunited with the others, you weren’t any more, and none of us got to punch or say goodbye to you, one last time. Are you happy here, Pock? Have you found what you wanted?”

Overhead, the wind stirs, shirring and stilling the sand in bursts, like the tide of an endless sea. Time immemorial, recorded in the artefacts of ghostly erosion, of dreams and existence. Porco pauses and takes her hands, his skin taut but smooth against the callouses now forming on hers. She no longer has a healing factor. 

“I am,” he says, and his stormcloud eyes spear her through the chest in the next moment. “But what about you, Pieck? Are you?”

She elects to ignore that and the tell-tale shiver that runs up her spine, retaining her composure instead. “Pock. Why have you really come here? If you’re here instead of—wherever you’re meant to go?”

The tree shines spark-bright, a golden inferno sharp and radiant enough to cut into her eyes, like glass or a thunder spear. “It’s simple,” Pock says, and it’s the last thing she hears before she’s swept away from the dream, again. “You summoned me here, Pieck. You said it once: we’re friends, no matter what. I’ll always have your back. I heard you calling, so I came here.”

When she woke up, jolting upright in the same emptiness of her bed, there were tears upon her cheeks; but she wiped them away with a half-smile, feeling the warm traces of his hug still lingering gently, slowly in her palms, an otherworldly aftertouch.

On Hange’s invitation, the two of them meet in Hange’s new office within Historia’s royal halls. The room, when Pieck enters, is piled with notebooks and files in a haphazard order she cannot make sense of. Still, she finds an unexpected comfort within the chaos, something like freedom from the pressure to contort yourself into making sense against the better will of your contradictory, grieving heart. Hange regards her with a benign enthusiasm that has risen above and stayed unembittered by time, the sort that is turning out to be honest and open enough to get along easily with outside the stressful fray of life-or-death situations. Age— or the effects of war— has begun to set in for them, and she glimpses a subtle gauntness in their face, the shadow of deepened hollows beneath their eyes. They wear it well, even so; wisdom and resolute conviction shines through every word they say, and the weight of experience lends their animated gesturing a graceful heft. There, under the golden bask of age-old sunlight from the windows, Pieck thinks they look strong as ever, or even handsome, in the sunset of their life. She quickly reminds herself that Hange is only somewhere in their late thirties.

“Welcome, welcome!” Hange chirps, and beckons her to sit upon the plush, regal-red chair prepared before Hange’s desk. When they reach a hand up to hold hers, there are two fingers missing down to the knuckle-bones. An artefact of one of the alliance’s turning points in the attempt to fend off the colossal titans. Hange had not needed to sacrifice themselves in the end, though the situation looked bleak then. The two fingers were lost in an accident flying away from the colossal titans in their 3DMG gear, and that was the extent of it. Now Hange has retired from the seat of Commander, though they are peacefully living out the rest of their life in the office Historia has granted them, researching and analysing and— it is understood from the grapevine— assisting discreetly with diplomatic negotiations.

The thought strikes Pieck as distinctly unfair, when the same cannot be said for Magath, despite the fact that he would have been a moderate Marleyan voice the rest of the world might have listened to. But vengeance is a vicious and tiring emotion with no place in her life— and she is learning the gentle art of letting things go each day. She accepts the gift of Paradisian peaches Hange sets out for her on the table, marveling at how they managed to find some in the wreckage. There is no animosity between them, though Pieck is on her guard against further strange requests from Hange, and perhaps this is the point, she thinks: you and I might have been friends in another time.

“I brought you here because I thought it’d be nice for us to catch up,” Hange says by way of explanation, “and also because I have some things I believe belong rightfully to you.”

Pieck looks on, perplexed. Hange promptly produces a few items from a drawer: a steel cigarette box, a plain utilitarian compass, a rusted badge.

“We sent trawlers back there, to the site of the explosion,” Hange continues, voice soft, “just in case anything of our heroic geezers had survived on the ocean floor. It was improbable, you know, and we weren’t counting on finding anything. But— call it sentiment or something else— we thought it was worth a try, still.”

Pieck picks up the badge, fingers gently grazing its grooved surface. Its edges have corroded, but it still catches the glint of gold sunset-light coming through the curtains, and, looking at the way the letters make out a simple T. MAGATH and GENERAL upon it, she is suddenly reminded of all the times she has seen this very badge before upon Magath’s desk in this exact slant of light, and also the fact that she will never step foot into his office again, never hear his disgruntled voice calling for her attention, never have his seamless wisdom to draw on again. The way she will never be done losing him, or Porco, or Colt, in the fresh hurt of every part of herself she’s lost along with them. She’s suddenly breaking out into harsh sobs, clutching the badge in her palm as she tries in vain to restrain them, gasping with the pain of knowing she will never have these things again.

“God, I’m sorry,” she manages to get out, “It’s— I’ll be fine, just give me a moment—“

“Oh, Pieck,” she hears Hange say from somewhere in the haze of her tears, “you can let it all out. I’m here, I’m here.” They come around from behind the desk to envelope her in a hug then, and she sucks in a sharp breath in surprise, as if it is occurring to her for the first time that what she is going through is deserving of care and pity. She tightens her own arms around Hange and shelters herself in the feeling of a load being lifted off her back.

The thing about being a soldier is that you are expected to get used to death, to let it recede into the background as the world’s most banal fact with the understanding that even if you don’t, somewhere down the line something will inevitably do the trick for you and make you wish you were an emotionless automaton. But she has never quite done this, because something about the idea doesn’t sit right with her, and also because she knows her knack for understanding people and sussing out matters of the heart is her greatest strength. And so she tempers it and keeps a controlled lid in public on her feelings; but deep inside she never wants to become desensitised to the fresh wound of death in the military, because these are specific people with specific, rich lives where the matter is concerned. And she’s never been sure if it makes her a better soldier or a worse one, although evidence on the whole points towards the former, but one thing is certain: it is a creed that has shaped her life.

She tells as much to Porco one night in another one of her dreams, sitting side-by-side upon a stolid piece of logwood fashioned from the sand in Paths.

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” Porco says, eyes quirked downwards in contemplative silence.

When do you ever, she would have quipped back if this was real life, but.

It’s one small regret of hers, she thinks belatedly; that they didn’t have a chance to have more conversations like this, wedged as their lives were between ruthless missions and see-saw disposability. It wasn’t due to any sort of intentional avoidance on their parts, simply the fact that there was enough misery in their lives that it was kinder to talk about something else. She can’t help the feeling she has begun too late, even so.