ʟɪɢʜᴛ ꜱᴘᴇᴇᴅ | 𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣 𝙟𝙖𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙧

𝙄 𝙎𝙈𝙊𝙆𝙀𝘿 𝘼𝙒𝘼𝙔 𝙈𝙔 𝘽𝙍𝘼𝙄𝙉

016, 𝙄 𝙎𝙈𝙊𝙆𝙀𝘿 𝘼𝙒𝘼𝙔 𝙈𝙔 𝘽𝙍𝘼𝙄𝙉

.⋆𐙚 🍒

VULNERABILITY IS A SLOW DEATH.

Not the kind the announces itself. Not a scream or a shatter. It's quieter than that—an unraveling beneath the skin. A gaze that lingers too long. A silence that says more than it should. 

Vulnerability is what it feels like every time Eren Jaeger looks at me.

He sees through me.

Not through effort. Not with intent. But with ease. With that impossible quiet of someone who doesn't need to search because he already knows where everything is hidden.

It's been that way since the beginning. Since that first glance during the race—the one that stuck too long, too direct. The one that made the hairs on my arms rise before I'd ever learned his name. I should've looked away. I didn't.

Ever since, it's felt like I've been walking beside a mirror I didn't ask to hold. One that reflects things I haven't named. Thoughts I haven't spoken. Pieces I haven't granted access to.

And he doesn't ask. That's what unsettles me most. He doesn't dig, doesn't pry, doesn't pretend to coax things loose with charm or pressure. He only watches. Waits. And somehow always gets there before I do.

But I can't see him.

He stands beside me, behind me, across from me—close in all the ways that count—but I still can't tell where the edges of him begin. Every time I think I've mapped one part of him, it shifts. Every time I reach for a certainty, it folds into mist. He's clear and unreadable at once. Present and unreachable. Still, and burning underneath.

He disappears without warning. And reappears covered in blood.

Tonight, when he showed up after hours of silence—when he looked at me, jaw tight, breath uneven, and asked me to help—he didn't explain. No reason. No apology. No excuse.

He looked at me like I was already supposed to understand.

And for whatever reason, I did.

I moved before I thought. 

I don't know what I've given away. What he's already taken. What part of me he's memorizing while I'm still trying to understand why it feels like I've known him my entire life. Like he's always been there.

I don't know why he came to me.

I don't know what he sees when he looks.

I only know that he sees.

And that alone terrifies me more than blood ever has.

The elevator groans upward, slow and mechanical.

Eren hasn't moved.

He stays right in front of me—body angled between mine and the open space, hood pulled low over his head, blood smeared across his cheek, drying at the corner of his jaw. One arm remains braced above me against the wall, elbow locked tight. The other rests at my waist, steady and unmoving, his thumb gone still now against the fabric of my jacket.

We're breathing the same air.

And for a second, I forget how to move through it.

His breath has steadied—low, slow, contained. But mine hasn't. It's caught somewhere between my ribs, fractured and uneven, barely keeping pace with the drumbeat beneath my palms. His chest rises under my hands, heartbeat thudding deep and rhythmic, and I hate that mine matches it.