ʟɪɢʜᴛ ꜱᴘᴇᴇᴅ | 𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣 𝙟𝙖𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙧

17. 𝘾𝙀𝙄𝙇𝙄𝙉𝙂𝙎

017, 𝘾𝙀𝙄𝙇𝙄𝙉𝙂𝙎

trigger warnings: brief mentions of suicide. please proceed with caution. you are loved.

.⋆𐙚 🍒

SOME PEOPLE ARRIVE ALREADY KNOWN.

You don't remember their name. You don't remember the first thing they said, or how their voice sounded when they said it. But you remember the feeling. The sudden stillness. The weight in your chest, like something you'd been carrying along had finally been recognized.

They walk in and the air changes. Not violently. not with a storm. But with a quiet certainty of a season shifting. A warmth you didn't realize you missed. A gravity you don't know how to explain.

You don't ask them where they've been. It doesn't feel like you need to. Because it's not about the where. Or even the when. It's about the way their presence rearranges everything inside you—as if your bones already knew the shape of their shadow. As if your skin was bracing for a touch that never quite disappeared.

You meet them and your first thought isn't who are you?

It's how did I forget you?

How did I live all this time without that voice? That gaze? That pulse flickering just beneath the silence. They say something and you're already inside the rhythm of it, like knowing all the lyrics to a song even thought you've never heard it before.

And it doesn't make sense.

Not in this lifetime. Not in this version of you.

So you start to wonder.

If maybe the reason they feel familiar is because they were yours once. In a place without names. In a life without this body. Maybe they loved you before you learned to speak. Maybe they broke you before you learnt what breaking meant.

And maybe now—they're here again. Still carrying the weight of your name in a language you forgot how to speak.

"We've met before," Eren says. "You don't remember. But I do."

I blink. Pull my head away from where it had been resting against his arm, and sit up straighter, blood rushing somewhere between my ears and my chest. My breath catches on a laugh that doesn't quite make it out.

"Jaeger," I mutter, rubbing at my eyes like maybe it'll clear the smoke in my head, "I'm really fucking high right now. Stop fucking with me."

But when I look at him again, he's not teasing. There's no smirk playing on his lips, no glint of mischief. Just eyes—red-rimmed from the high, but soft. Softer than I've ever seen them. The warm, dull glow of my desk lamp turns his skin into shadowed amber, catching on the slope of his cheek, the angry red cuts on his face, the edge of his jaw, the hollow beneath his throat. He looks still. Like a memory caught mid-frame.

He doesn't smile. Doesn't blink. Doesn't even look away.

|| 𝙉𝙊𝙒 𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔𝙄𝙉𝙂... 𝘾𝙀𝙄𝙇𝙄𝙉𝙂𝙎, 𝙇𝙄𝙕𝙕𝙔 𝙈𝘾𝘼𝙇𝙋𝙄𝙉𝙀 ||

"It was Frosh Week," he says, voice low. "A week before classes started. Middle of August. Someone threw a party at the old admin building—the one they keep locked up now. I wasn't planning to go, but... I don't know. Everyone was going. It was loud. Hot. Packed. And I started feeling like I couldn't breathe."

His gaze drops to the space between us, fingers twitching slightly where they rest near mine.

"So I left. Climbed six floors just to be alone for five minutes. Thought the rooftop would be empty. But it wasn't."