Between Eren Yeager and Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert and Annie Leonhart as romantic.
The twilight was gentle over the remnants of what once was a bustling town, now nothing but echoes of lost time. Eren looked across the horizon, clouds dyed in the blood-orange hues of sunset, as if the very sky mourned for the world they had lost. These moments of solitude were rare, and perilously won—a respite from the incessant conflict that defined their lives within the Walls.
"Eren, we shouldn't stay here too long," Mikasa's voice cut through the stillness, a reminder of reality's ever-tightening grip.
He turned to face her, her scarf—the one he gave her—still wrapped snugly around her neck despite the warmth of the season. "I know," he said, "just a few more minutes." He gazed back out at the ruins, a silent prayer to those who had perished in this very place. It was here, in this long-forgotten town, that they had discovered something incredible—something that could change everything.
Armin approached with his usual careful steps, clutching a worn-out leather-bound journal. The moon's rise gave his features an otherworldly glow, or perhaps it was the burden of knowledge that he carried, ever since they found the secret cache of books under the collapsed library's cellar—a beacon of understanding in a world shrouded by darkness.
"You won't believe what I found," he whispered, his eyes alight with the thrill of their clandestine quest for answers. They crowded around the journal, Eren and Mikasa leaning in, as Armin carefully turned the brittle pages to a particular passage he had marked. It spoke of an era long before Titans, of humanity flourishing, of secrets lost beneath the weight of monstrous feet. But it was the last line that caught Eren's breath, the words inked with an urgency that transcended time: 'Not all are monsters; some are merely lost, looking for a way back home.'
They knew what it implied, the hidden message that tied to their most dangerous secret—the dormant figure enshrined within the crystal: Annie Leonhart. The potential ally who might hold the answers to the truth they sought. The former enemy whose inexplicable act of self-preservation morphed into an unexpected opportunity for a potential truce, or perhaps even more.
"Eren," Mikasa's tone was laced with caution, "You know we can't trust her. Not after everything that's happened."
He felt the pull, the gravity of Mikasa's words mingling with the relentless drum of his own heart. "But what if she's the key, Mikasa? What if she can help us end this war?"
It was a dangerous hope, a foil to the grim certainty they lived in. But there, in the quiet heart of desolation, a semblance of hope was all they needed. Or so Eren wanted to believe.
They retreated from the skeletal town as the moon claimed sovereignty over the sky, their hearts burdened by the immense weight of possibilities. The path back to the Walls was fraught with the shadows of what was and what could be. The choice that lay before them, the crossroads between war and the faintest hint of peace, was a whisper that became a roar in Eren's mind.
As night fell over the trio, a crystalline figure slept within the Walls, her visage calm, a stark contrast to the tumultuous emotions she invoked in the hearts of the young soldiers. And with her, the whispers beyond the Walls lingered—a testament to the tumult of hearts in a world built on the foundations of discord and fearful anticipation. In the silence of the lost town, the lines between friend and foe, love and hatred, began to blur.