A Farewell for a Beginning

Chapter 4

Sleep ends reluctantly for Gabi; the exposition of a nightmare so frightfully familiar still ebbing at the forefronts of her mind. It’s a receding haze of stampeding colossals, screaming crowds, a surge of power she’s never known before, and then…
She starts awake, her curled body jolting against her heavy confines as her eyes snap open. Where in the hell? She thinks, though already knowing the answer.

It hadn’t been a dream at all, but a hibernation, one from which she would very much have preferred never to wake.
Through the scant shards of light that filter in through the dark, a feeling of shame courses through her.
So I’m a devil now, she realises. And waking is no second chance at all. It’s a sentence; the very same one for which other nations have feared her people for centuries.
A curse.
Her jaw clenches in rage. With the world now rendered to ash by now for all she knows, what point was there to waking?
Anger boils in her at the realisation not for the first time that subservience has ruled her life since childhood. First, in the well-meaning motives of her parents, then her teachers, and finally her officers and generals of a war in which there was no other choice for them to escape unless one offered themselves as a living weapon. She had wanted to give her parents and Aunt Carina a better life with better privileges by consuming her cousin Reiner and becoming the vessel of the Armoured Titan when the time came.

But irony had a funny way of sneaking up on you. This subservience eventually led to committing her life to a higher power who only transformed her into a mindless creature in return. Legends had always said that the sins of Ymir were to blame, but even so, Gabi knows that the true enemy has never really been their founding lady at all. No. It’s this cursed vessel; the scorn of every living and breathing non-Eldian. And what power could Ymir hold from the depths of her grave when there was Eren Jaeger; the Eldian who carried the Founding Titan within himself and who enforced his power over the rest of the world. Not even Devil himself could compare.

Eren Jaeger… the man she hates more than anything in the world. It was he who was responsible for the attack on her hometown, Liberio, and she had sworn revenge for this. Zofia…Udo.... so many died that day because of him. His ruthlessness didn’t even stop at his old friends. He had crushed them, too, before her eyes and she was nothing she could have done about it. Oh, the fear she had carried since Liberio.

Even now, she can recall that her last thoughts and hopes before her transformation were directed to her best friend Falco, to meet again at some point, somewhere. It had all really felt like a dream; a thick swirling soup in which she notices everything, but is not allowed to make independent decisions and has to obey again and again. She saw how exhausted and tired Annie was, no longer able to transform, then so quickly eaten by a mindless person. She tore Pieck from her neck and was about to eat her, but another mindless tore her away and Pieck was torn in two. She saw Reiner try to fight so many. Even in his last moments, she felt his determination to protect her.

It was a bloody mess, and overhead she’d seen Falco fly to Eren Jaeger with the last soldiers of the alliance: Commander Arlert, and both Ackermann members. The female Ackermann was supposedly family to Eren Jaeger, but she didn’t get the impression that she could or wanted to stop him. Everything seemed hopeless...
Then, she woke up in Paths next to a man she knew. Eren Jaeger, the instigator himself…
—
"Come with me, Gabi Braun," he said quietly, moving ahead of her without a single glance at her face.
Her treacherous fear made her all but vulnerable towards him. “Where to?” She’d stuttered to ask.
"Back again,” he replied. “To where you were before you came here.” Only then did Gabi finally notice that she was no longer on the desert field, her eyes widening when they soon land on a glowing tree in the distance.