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The earth from which all life flows is built upon the crumbling bones of the dead.
As humanity's strongest soldier rode through the torn memories of the silent forest, he knew this. He knew it, surrounded by the looming, towering trees, shrouding over the terrible death that drenched the peace of daylight. Mutating that peace, that tranquil beam of brilliant sunlight, into a horrid violence, blood staining the
bitter cries, bodies littered around the vast mass of life.
Past that death, he raced on. Into another time, a worse fate, of cruel guilt and solemn sorrow, all combining into his raging fury, a harsh hatred.
All bottled up into a gory debris of his truth.
Everything happening; all at once.
But facing these brutal fears was hard, harder perhaps than looking at titans, as ugly as they were. For Captain Levi Ackerman was a soldier, a frightening man, committed to his duties, to the badge, the wings of freedom. He was as cold as the wind that lashed through the suffocating air.
Despite this, despite his commanding aura. Behind all that stoic indifference, that rotted need for revenge, that crazed determination.
What was behind all of that?
Levi stared at this, after facing the terrible death of another mission. He stared through that cold face, those frozen grey eyes, in the mirror. He saw the wounds that burdened his still figure, they were nothing serious, only small scrapes. He saw the blood, the ice, those clipped wings.
But were those wounds really his?
Or were they only the captains? Behind the uniform, was there anyone else?
He stared into the mirror, past the reflection of a soldier, a killer. Into the mist, the nebulous swarms of fallen comrades, shot down from the sky, their stolen wings were tainted in death.
What right did he have to brandish his wings with the harsh truth that lay behind the foolish bravery of the Survey Corps? The wings that had fallen from the bloodied sky, all that death, that hope.
What would it succumb too?
In those moments in the mirror, behind the cruel, inhuman eyes of a captain, of humanity's strongest soldier. He was just Levi, a sad man, mourning the death that surrounded his frozen heart.
His life had surfaced from that death.
But he was alive.
And in those seconds, of a burning life. He could see the faces in the death, swallowed over by an uneasiness, a blame.
He couldn’t save them; he couldn’t lead them to a path to freedom.
They were dead.
And he was alive.
Why?