Broken Hearts, Severed Limbs (Levi x OC x Erwin)

|44| Despair

Trigger Warnings: Mention of Human Torture

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Thirty-six… thirty-seven… thirty-eight…

…thirty-nine… Forty.

The lashes came one by one. The questions came loud and demanding. Where’s Johannes Burgess and Amelia Ksaver? Her father and her mother. She’d be damned if she knew. What do you know about titan biology? Do you know how to turn titans back into humans? Did you figure it out?! Her lips just wouldn’t part and say anything, no matter how harsh the pain was. No matter how much blood was running out of the split skin of her back. Whipping was the kind of torture that they would do to prisoners of high importance. She doubted they’d do it to Erwin.

Nathalie’s limp body was thrown on the hard stone floor of her cell. They had dragged her all the way there. There was no way she could walk. Not after all those burn marks and cuts and wounds and bruises. Nathalie stayed on the position that they had thrown her in. Her hands and feet, tied in chains. She couldn’t move much anyway. She was too beaten to move. Her whole body ached and bled. Her blood was making a mess on the floor, but she hardly had the energy to care.

She just stared at the iron bars of her cell. Her bruised cheek pressed painfully against the stone floor, but lying on her back wasn’t an option. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how her backside must have looked like.

Nathalie knew this was coming. She knew it when Sannes said this: How long do you think you can avoid being tortured like this? They’re going to try everything on you to make you talk. And he was right about his subordinates. It was the Interior Squad that had taken upon themselves to make her speak. No. She gritted her teeth. Fingers fisted in their restraints using the last portions of strength that she had left. She couldn’t believe humanity was doing this to her.

She had fought for humanity. She had given it all for humanity. She had risked her life, again and again. She had stayed entire nights awake either in the labs, or dealing with nightmares and the pressure as a Scout. She had lost her friends. She had lost her squad, all for the sake of humanity and for what?! To be tortured like this. To be punished just for trying to help them.

That injustice burned deep within her chest. It felt like a heated blade digging scars into her skin. If she hated her body before, now she wouldn’t even dare to look in the mirror. She couldn’t even begin to count how many new scars they had given her. But she’d never get to look again in any mirror anyway. She was going to die. After they’d be done trying to make her speak, and they would have nothing else to do, they were going to kill her, and she was never going to see Levi again.

Levi…

Tears were streaming down her cheeks before she even knew it. Levi. She remembered the look in his eyes while he screamed her name. When he told her “You promised!”. She’d never forget the betrayal in those grey pupils, filled with tears. She had hurt him. She had broken the promise that he had asked of her to make. She had promised to never leave his side, but she did, and now she was going to die, and he was going to live knowing that it was all his fault.

A sob reached her throat. She didn’t want him to live in despair. She didn’t want him to live knowing that it was all his fault, but she knew him. She knew him well enough to say, that one day, or night, when he was alone, he was going to stab a knife into his chest, and she was going to be the reason. All that time, all those years they had spent them in each other’s side, and now, they were torn apart, and it hurt so damn much, because that wasn’t the future that she wanted for him.

She wanted him to find someone that would actually keep their promises. Someone who wasn’t going to hurt him as much as she had. Someone better. He never deserved someone so undeserving of him. She wasn’t enough. She never had been.