✧ @gepanzrt said: ❛ a kiss with tears. ❜ // a fucked up kissing meme
Born asleep, she had heard it called.
It implied a certain peace, a tranquility that demanded tear-choked eyes to look past the blood stains – smearing the bedding, pooling on the floor, painting Reiner’s hands – to ignore the buckets and bowls of tepid, crimson-tinted water. To pretend the room was not cursed with unnatural silence, with impossible stillness. No piercing newborn wail, no congested and crackling lungs – save for Reiner’s own. Periodically, the quiet was slain by a racking, painful cough heaved from deep in his broad chest. A death knell.
Their soundless, sightless child did not stir at the disturbance, could not be roused from her slumber. Annie stared at the infant in her arms, seeing nothing of herself – of Reiner, of Bertholdt – in those babyish features. In places, their daughter’s hairless skin was translucent, her violent rose-flush complexion that of a newly hatched robin. Delicate, beautifully made, born far too soon.
“She’s perfect, isn’t she? There isn’t a mark on her…” Annie didn’t look up as she carefully adjusted the rag that passed for a swaddle blanket, rearranging it around their daughter’s downy head. Rake-thin limbs were motionless, unprotesting even in their growing rigidity. There was no obvious deformity, nothing to explain what had triggered such an early labour.
When Annie felt something displace deep inside, her waters breaking in a bloody tide, it was to the burrow she shared with Reiner and Bertholdt that she had retreated – not to her father. Instinct diluted fear as she laboured where she felt safest, pacing quietly, sinking into deep, shameless squats. Going into herself, Annie was compelled to push, to evict her tenant, her passenger, her parasite. It was Reiner who remained with her, who spoke to her in his low, steady timbre, who communicated in gentle touches, who wiped her sweat-slick brow, and it was into his outstretched hands that their silent daughter was delivered.
Annie imagined she saw the baby gasp – once, only once – as her heavy head lolled back, rosebud lips parting to reveal a ridge of toothless gums. A mere glimpse, before the newborn was swallowed by her fathers’ war-torn hands. While Reiner and Bertholdt rubbed vigorously, as though friction and heat alone could compel undeveloped lungs to breathe, Annie had begun to howl disconsolately.
All was quiet now. Bertholdt had slipped away, escaping the leaden atmosphere poisoned with grief. He was a man of practicalities, one ill-equipped for offering comfort. Likely, he had gone to fetch a shovel, to dig a hole for the tiny bundle of flesh. These days, he lived to bury the dead.
“It’s cold in the ground. We’ll have to wrap her up warm.” Annie’s voice creaked and, with it, something in her psyche splintered. Nonsensically, she could not bear the thought of earth and frost consuming their baby, who had only known warmth and darkness. She recoiled to imagine delicate lips and tiny fingers blackening, the promise of new life surrendered to a cradle of rot, her brittle ribcage and button-sized heart a palace for the worms. In another time and place, Annie might have been convinced it was better to be dead than to be born a girl, to emerge into a dying world, to have her for a mother – but Reiner more than made up for the shortfalls. He was a man built for fatherhood. This truth compounded her anguish.
“Would you like to hold her?”
Reiner stirred, his handsome face pinched with sorrow, and he slowly took his place at Annie’s side in their tattered bed. Even though she reeked like an open wound, like a butcher shop floor, he did not recoil. Instead, they nestled together beneath blankets that stiffened with drying blood, two thirds of a broken family. Annie leaned her hollow, softened body against his, the bundle passing carefully between them.
How small their daughter seemed in Reiner’s thinning arms. How raw and unguarded his grief, amber eyes brimming with tears that spilled to cut tracks over his careworn cheeks. Loss like this was not unique to them. All over the camp, babies were born asleep, their mothers left to languish in the childbed. Annie rather hoped to be eaten up with fever or infection, to join her daughter in the dirt. That miserable fate was preferable to the guilt, to being burdened by the sense of failure, to living with the emptiness of her aching arms. In the beginning, she had been hesitant, had wished the pregnancy away, and now the baby was gone. Born and unborn, wanted and unwanted, willed into nonexistence.
Tears had found her again, burning in bloodshot eyes, blurring the image of Reiner – he who had gently circled an arm around her, while his dead daughter nestled in the crook of the other. Clinging to each other in this well of sorrow, Annie’s lips pressed to his damp cheek, to the scruff of his jaw, before catching his mouth in a cautious, grief-stricken kiss. One that was laced with gratitude, that dripped with unspoken apology, that tasted of the saline tang of tears.
“I want you to be the one to name her.”
