AOT× reader

Left Behind

Its cold.

I let out one heavy breath after another, gasping for all the air I could manage.

I was awakened to the pounding rain barreling down through the air.

I glided my hand along something rough.

"Where..." My thoughts cut my own words off and my eyes clicked open. I darted my eyes around in the darkness for 30 agonizing seconds of waiting that seemed like forever. I let my eyes adjust and slid my arms up for support.

I fell back down.

"Oh"

I remembered what had brought me here though. Its going to be there forever.

I could feel my breath hitch against my balled up hands, which I had sealed to my frozen lips.

Chilled gusts of wind bat at me from all directions with no way of escape.

The sky is dark...

My hood was strewn over my head and drops of water trailing down the interior of my boots.

Nobody was any longer in sight. I lifted my hands over my hooded head and clutched the fabric delicately.

It drowns out almost my every sense.

My comrades, my friends. It had only been a little more than 10 years since training. But they lay below, as scattered corpses cleansed by the heavy rain.

Is this what they really deserve, what I deserve? Although I know I'm as much selfish as I am alive. I should be happy to be alive, I am, but that's not enough. Or is this only the effect when inaccurate planning comes to play? Some of these corpses were once people I came to like, I guess it leaves me with my other allies scattered about the survey corps. These ones bodies intact.

I sit in a tree, caged further, on a branch I flew up to before the clouds released hells ungodly wrath. My maneuver gear is shielded by my cape and yet to be drowned.

I would consider the sheets of pounding rain beautiful if I wasn't in this kind of situation. I forced my eyes to focus on something other than those who were unlucky enough to end up like they did. I could tell that I was the only survivor, something blatantly obvious.

It pierced icy needles into my skin, each drop shivering and cold.

The reason I cannot escape...? Two hours ago they were being torn apart, limb by limb, screaming for assistance. But I couldn't help them, I was surrounded as it was and there was only one path available. But now, darkness had fallen and the rain had not let up. Though some titans grow withered and sleepy after dawn, that left the other ones that remained unfazed and wide awake to roam. It was all too risky to attempt an escape in this rain almost any day. One titan that managed to spot me and began to scratch at the trunk of the tree, I'm lucky that they have no way up, but it makes it difficult if I had the thought of escaping fresh in my mind. They'd most likely end up trailing my escape to the end of the forest where plains spread and I'd be done.

So I remain curled in a ball, back surrounded, against the trunk, far up in this drenched forest canopy. Leaves spring downwards, past me to lay in the welling streams below. And to go with this darkness, the rain had it misty and foggy when it was already going to be dark. Let me tell you this; it was dark. Dark, wet, surrounded, and scarcely bearable.

It was an expedition.

We had left the gates early in the morning: The light had yet to fully rise and we knew the drill. The chances of someone dying was both possible and impossible at the same time. I guess they were at our odds, a portion of the survey corps lay below.