#soulmate things

And how Colin was always too soft and too sensitive for his own good but Pen always loved him anyway.

And thinking about how they will always have each other's back and how no one can come for them anymore now that their bond is stronger than ever cause they just get each other and truly that's all that matters in the end!

They really are each other's person and I just think that's so so beautiful

The biography of Petra Ral is a story of a life lived in a hurry—a brief, brilliant flame that chose the storm over the safety of the hearth.

As the daughter of a florist, Petra spent her early years surrounded by the fragrance of damp earth and the quiet labor of arranging bouquets. It was a life of soft edges, yet Petra was a girl burdened by a deep, unshakeable empathy. To her, the "stagnant air" of her father’s shop felt heavy with the unspoken debt of the walls. She felt that her physical agility and sharp mind were a waste if they weren't being used for the hardest job available. She was tired of hearing about the world through the filtered stories of returning soldiers; she wanted to map the truth for herself.

A few years before the Fall of Shiganshina, when Petra was only fifteen, the reality of that desire finally took root.

She was standing at the back of a restless crowd, carrying a heavy wicker basket of fresh flower deliveries. As the gates groaned open for the return of the 23rd Expedition, the bright petals in her arms felt like a mockery. The Scouts didn't bring home glory; they brought a literal storm. Their green capes were heavy with the dust of the outside world, and their eyes were fixed on a horizon no one else could see.

It was then that she saw him. He was a small soldier boy—scarcely taller than she was—with a face that looked young but moved with the weary, jagged precision of an adult who had survived the end of the world. As his horse plodded past the crowd, their eyes locked for a heartbeat.

It wasn't the kind of look that sparks a romance, it was a cold, violent awakening.

His gaze was particularly indifferent and detached, yet there was something else beneath the surface that Petra couldn't name. It wasn't the standard exhaustion she saw in the other soldiers. Was it a simmering hatred for the world? A bottomless, quiet anguish? She couldn't tell. All she knew was that his silver eyes were a hollowed-out void that made every other soldier look like an amateur.

To fifteen-year-old Petra, that unforgettable gaze was a revelation. It stripped away her romanticized views and replaced them with a stark truth: the Survey Corps was a dying flame, and if people like her didn't go out to feed it, the darkness would eventually take everyone she loved.

That night, Petra didn't sleep. She sat in the dark of her room, the scent of the shop's lilies thick in the air, listening to the quiet settling of the house. Around 11:00 PM, knowing her father was still awake downstairs, she finally stood up. She didn't go to him to seek permission or to plead. She went to tell him.

At 20, her impeccable record caught the attention of the legendary "Humanity's Strongest Soldier." She was handpicked by Captain Levi to join his elite Special Operations Squad—the highest honor a soldier could receive.

The most tragic part of her story is that she never once realized who he was.

To Petra, Captain Levi was a force of nature—a man whose strength was as terrifying as it was reassuring. She spent every day at his side, memorizing his tea preferences, his cleaning standards, and the subtle shifts in his mood. She respected him, trusted him, and grew to love him with a fierce, quiet devotion.

But she had completely filed away the "small soldier boy" from the gate as a separate person. To her, that boy was a ghost from a past life, a nameless spark that had started her engine. She never made the connection that the jagged, grieving "boy" from the 23rd Expedition had grown into the scarred, stoic man she now followed into battle.

She lived her final year in a state of tragic, beautiful ignorance, never knowing that the loop of her life had closed the moment she stepped into his squad. When she died at 21 in the Forest of Giant Trees, she did so for the man she knew as her Captain, never realizing that the very reason she was standing in that forest in the first place was because of the indifferent, hollow look he had given her years prior.

She left behind a grieving father and an unfinished story, remaining a girl of the storm, a daughter of the flowers, and a soldier known as: