ʟɪɢʜᴛ ꜱᴘᴇᴇᴅ | 𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣 𝙟𝙖𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙧

7. 𝙒𝙄𝙍𝙀𝙎

007, 𝙒𝙄𝙍𝙀𝙎

.⋆𐙚 🍒

THERE ARE MOMENTS IN YOUR LIFE WHERE YOU CAN FEEL THE SHIFT BEFORE IT EVEN HAPPENS. 

Before the words are spoken.

Before the doors close.

Before the ground crumbles quietly beneath your feet.

The air gets thinner. Sharper. Your body knows before your mind does, some deep, ancient part of you bracing for impact without even knowing what you're bracing for. A moment you won't be able to walk away from once you step into it.

Standing there in the cracked parking lot, wrapped in the heavy weight of Eren's jacket, the night pressing thick and close against my skin, I felt it settle into my bones. A slow, sinking certainty. This wasn't just reckless fun anymore. This wasn't just a stupid night I could laugh about later, brush off with a joke and bury somewhere deep inside the hazy archive of my teenage mistakes.

This was a line. Thin, invisible, but razor sharp.

And somehow, without even realizing it, I had already stepped over it. 

Curiosity really did kill the cat.

I shifted where I stood, the worn leather of Eren's jacket creaking softly with the movement, the sound almost too loud in the heavy dark. The sleeves hung long past my hands, the collar brushing against my chin, and it grounded me and suffocated me all at once. Like armor that didn't quite fit. Like a promise that wasn't mine to wear.

Around us, the lot buzzed with a strange, fractured energy—familiar faces weaving through the broken asphalt, easy laughter and casual bickering floating on the cold air like everything was fine, like nothing was about to change. But underneath it all, I could feel it: a low hum, an undercurrent of tension threading through every glance, every movement, every too-casual shrug. A wire pulled taut, waiting for the wrong word or the wrong look to snap it clean in half.

Maybe it was the way Levi stood at the center of it all—carved from stone, unmoving and unimpressed, his arms crossed tight over his chest and his mouth drawn into a line of permanent disapproval. His nose crinkled slightly, like even breathing the same air as the rest of us was an inconvenience he hadn't agreed to.

Maybe it was the way Eren—who had been so loose, so casual just minutes ago—now stood straighter, sharper. His posture rigid, his eyes cutting through the dark like twin blades. The smirk he always wore like armor was gone, replaced by something harder. Quieter. A grim line that made him look older than he should have. Older than I wanted him to be.

Or maybe—
Maybe it was me.

Maybe it was the part of me that had always known. The part that understood, instinctively, that some choices slip under your skin before you even realize you've made them. That some nights brand themselves into your bones whether you want them to or not.

Maybe it was the part of me that recognized this feeling because I had felt it before. The day I packed my entire life into a suitcase and watched my old house get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. The night my mother looked at me like she didn't know me anymore. The moment I realized not every goodbye comes with warning signs. Some of them are just silence and doorways you can't walk back through.

I swallowed hard, the cold biting at my lungs as I pulled Eren's jacket tighter around myself, as if it could shield me from whatever was coming.

It couldn't. I knew that already.