Between life and death, there is hope. But every ending has the same outcome: the Rumbling razes the earth, taking the person you love with it.
After you die, you reawake in the day you met your best friend, Eren Jaeger. In every life you relive, y...
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Morning sunlight broke through the patina panes of your curtain-lined windows, and when you sat up and stretched, finding yourself to be a child again, you could easily pretend that everything had merely been a bad dream. For all you knew, it was.
"[Name]?" you heard your mother call. "Are you up already? Your father has already gone out for work."
"Yes, Mama," you replied dutifully, and it comforted you to be able to say those words and talk to your mother again. "I'll water the plants."
It was natural, how easily you remembered your morning routine from being a child in Shiganshina. You smoothened the worn-out dress you so often had to sew tears in, and rubbed your cheek when an itch arose, unknowingly spreading the rusty watering tin's dust on yourself.
You opened the door to step into your garden. The flower garden you took care of as a child was astonishingly beautiful, and you never knew why you hadn't appreciated its blooms before until now.
But deep inside, you knew why.
This was the last time.
You swallowed your dread and filled the watering tin before heading to your flowers by the wooden fence. Surely enough, you heard shuffling from the other side, and a little boy with brunette hair and the most beautiful green eyes you had ever seen in all your lives peeked out to take a good look at you.
The boy used to puzzle you. You noticed the little kid with the apathetic look and the red scarf he wrapped around his neck almost every day. You had waved hello out of politeness a few times, but he only ever stared at you. You noticed him, you always did.
You hummed to yourself as you watered one of your mother's plants. It was the same flower that Eren had given to you in the alternate universe in the previous loop. In past lives, this flower always died, and you had always mooned over it every time you came back to this day. This time the flower was not dying. It was blooming and alive like you had been taking care of it all this time.
After some scuffling, the boy's face properly appeared above the fence separating your houses. He blinked at you several times, then pointed his finger at your cheekbone.
"You have dirt on your face."
Six words, you have now heard thirteen times.
You raised your brows. "Excuse me?"
"Eren!" his mother called. The kitchen door swung open and Carla marched out with a stern front. "Hard-headed child, what did I say about bothering our neighbors?"
"But Mom," he complained, gesturing to you. "She was just watering plants, you see? I'm not even talking!"
She pinched his ear, ignoring his complaints and smiling at you apologetically. His older teen self looked so much just like her it sent a cold shock down your spine to look at a grown woman and see his face staring back at you. Carla was beautiful; you loved her like she was your mother-in-law, and you knew that she would have wanted you as her daughter by marrying Eren.
