Blue and White - Levi Fanfiction

Ch. 34 - Of Hope and Despair

The Female Titan was gaining on us. The distance between our unit and her was rapidly diminishing. Yet another soldier was dead, by her hand. Blood surely pooled in the recesses of her palms, stained the barks of the trees we passed, and was stomped into the dirt below her feet. My proud, devoted, strong comrades were bested by a force they were never meant to beat, but to stall. 

It was a massacre of our own doing, a genocide of Erwin's making. We were damn well lining these poor souls up for the Female Titan to kill with all the ease I had once known. To think, I was once so skilled at fighting humans, too. It was a horrible display, it was.

...But at the very least, Eren had made up his mind. He decided to put faith in his leaders, and stock in his comrades. He trusted us. If Eren hadn't learned it yet, he very soon would: in this regiment, people lived by the mantra Erwin chanted with pride - we lived only to dedicate our hearts. It was what we were told to do, yet also what we wanted to do. It's what we chose.

That meant we fought with all we had, even if it meant our death, and in some cases, especially so. Every single scout that donned their cloak today and bore the Wings of Freedom on their back was prepared to die to protect Eren if so ordered to.

Death was not the goal, but it was a probable outcome of fighting a Titan like the one chasing us. But we were scouts through and through, and we were, as the public liked to say, stupid and brave.

Horribly stupid, yet horribly brave all the same. It was the simple truth of being a scout. Any soldier who wasn't either or both would instead go for the Garrison, unless they qualified for the Military Police. Every scout who bore the wings on their back knew what they were getting into when they signed up. If ordered to die... ask not why.

This was the burden of the Survey Corps – you could either act on your own instinct, by what you believed was right, or you could follow orders, no matter how much you questioned them. That was the gamble. Would you risk your life to potentially save another?

We were all giving our lives to this. It was likely that everyone I had met here would die through making the ultimate sacrifice. We were all prepared for it. Even I was. Should Erwin give me the order to throw myself into an impossible situation...

The question then was this: would you risk dying prematurely, to save someone else? Even if you hadn't given it your all yet, would you die in place of someone who had? Even if you didn't want to die, if told to sacrifice for another - to give them even the slightest bit more of a chance of surviving - would you?

It was never an easy answer to give, and it was unfair of us to expect Eren and the other young ones to. But this was the choice they had made, and so they had to deal with the consequences, no matter how dire.

These soldiers fighting the Titan did not know she was intelligent. They had not been told as such when given the order from Erwin and the advance team to do what they could to slow her down. But it did not matter; they had to do as ordered.

I knew all of this, but it didn't make it any easier to listen to the pained, panicked cries of soldiers so bravely fighting, and consequently falling to, the Female Titan.

"Target is accelerating!"

The pounding of the horses' hooves into the dirt was thunderous, but that of the Titan's footsteps that drew ever nearer amplified that tenfold. They all fell into an inharmonious, unfollowable melody of hellish proportions.

"Just keep moving," Levi said above the noise. "We'll outrun the bitch!"

With each stride the horses paced, we lost ground. But this close to the trap, we could not falter. I dared not glance back anymore, dared not even look at Levi to try to even attempt to gauge how he was feeling.