The months between winter and the Training Corps enrollment blurred together faster than Eren expected, the way time always seemed to speed up once a person stopped dreading it and started using it instead.
They trained through the thaw and into spring — sword drills in the barn until their arms shook, cross-country runs along the district’s edge until even Mikasa admitted to being winded, hours spent poring over Grisha’s hidden journals with Armin cataloguing every scrap of usable information into notebooks that had, by now, multiplied to five. Kessler sent two more letters, each shorter and more urgent than the last, until the day finally arrived that made all of it feel suddenly, terribly real.
"Training Corps enrollment opens next month," Hannes said, dropping the notice on the Yeager kitchen table like it weighed more than paper had any right to. "Thought you three would want to know before the whole district starts talking about it."
Eren stared at the paper — the official seal, the list of requirements, the quiet promise of exactly the future he’d spent two lifetimes either running toward or trying to prevent.
"We’re going," he said. Not a question.
"I assumed as much." Mikasa didn’t even look up from the knife she was sharpening, calm as ever, like the decision had been settled in her mind long before the notice ever arrived. "All three of us."
Armin, for once, didn’t immediately protest the physical demands of the idea. He just looked at the notice for a long moment, something steady and determined settling over his usual nervous energy. "I’ve spent a year reading about the world beyond the walls. I think it’s time I actually did something about it instead of just taking notes."
"You say that," Eren said, "like the notes weren’t useful."
"The notes were extremely useful. I’m simply saying they’re not sufficient. There’s a difference between knowing the theory of a thing and surviving the practice of it." Armin closed his current notebook with a decisive snap. "Besides. If I stay home taking notes while you two run off to become legends, I’ll never hear the end of it from myself, let alone either of you."
Carla’s hand, when she read the notice over Eren’s shoulder, trembled slightly before she steadied it. She didn’t argue. She’d had a year to prepare for this moment, ever since the night of the Titan, and whatever fear she carried, she’d learned to carry it alongside them instead of trying to block their path.
"Then we have a month," she said quietly, "to make sure you’re as ready as three years of preparation can make you. Let’s not waste a single day of it."
The month that followed felt, in Eren’s memory afterward, like the fullest month of either of his lives.
Grisha drilled them on Titan anatomy every evening after supper, using diagrams he’d apparently been keeping hidden for years, cross-referencing them against the fragments the system had already handed Eren until the two sources of knowledge — one earned through violence in a world none of them had seen, one granted through a mysterious voice in Eren’s head — lined up with unsettling precision.
"The nape," Grisha said, tapping the diagram for what felt like the hundredth time, "and nowhere else. Everything else is wasted motion, wasted steel, wasted time you won’t have in the field. Drill it until it’s instinct, not memory."
"I already know this."
"Knowing it and having it survive the moment your hands are shaking is not the same thing, Eren. Drill it anyway."
Mikasa, watching from across the room with her own blade balanced across her knees, caught Eren’s eye and mouthed something that looked suspiciously like he’s not wrong, which earned her a mock-wounded look he couldn’t quite maintain past the fondness underneath it.
The physical conditioning, meanwhile, fell largely to Hannes, who took obvious, if gruff, pride in personally overseeing what he called "the least embarrassing recruits Shiganshina’s produced in a decade," which he insisted wasn’t a compliment even though everyone present understood perfectly well that it was.
"Faster," he barked, timing Armin’s sprint across the training field with a stopwatch that had clearly seen better decades. "You run like a man who’s still deciding whether running is a good idea."
"I’m conserving energy—"
"You’re stalling, which is different, and considerably less useful when something with teeth is deciding whether to eat you." Hannes clicked the stopwatch, unimpressed. "Again."
"I’ve run this same field four times already—"
"Then you’ll be excellent at it by the fifth."
Armin’s answering groan carried clear across the field, which didn’t stop him from lining up to run it a fifth time anyway, some new determination steadying his usually anxious shoulders — the same determination, Eren noted, that had been growing in him steadily since the night he’d learned the true size of what they were all preparing for.
The evenings, at least, still belonged to something softer.
Eren found Mikasa on the roof most nights that month — their roof, by now, more theirs than anyone else’s, worn smooth in the spots where they always sat — and some nights they talked about the Training Corps, about Marley, about Kessler’s letters and what they might mean. Other nights they didn’t talk about any of it at all, content instead to simply exist beside each other for an hour before exhaustion pulled them both toward sleep.
"You’ve gotten faster," Mikasa observed one such evening, her head resting against his shoulder, the spring air finally warm enough to sit out comfortably past dark. "Even without the system’s help. I watched you today. You anticipated Hannes’s drill pattern before he called it."
"I had a good teacher."
"Flattery."
"Accurate observation," he said, echoing words she’d once used on him, and felt her huff a small laugh against his shoulder.
"I’m serious, though. You’re not just relying on the reflexes anymore. You’re actually thinking your way through the drills now, the way I’ve been trying to teach you since the barn." She tilted her head up to look at him, something warm and proud in her expression that he still, months later, hadn’t gotten fully used to receiving. "That matters more than anything the system’s given you. Systems can be taken away, or run out, or change their rules without warning. What you’ve actually learned to do with your own hands and your own mind — that’s yours. No one can take that from you."
"When did you get so wise about training philosophy?"
"I’ve always been wise. You’ve just started noticing." The old joke, worn smooth now from repetition, still pulled a real laugh out of him every time.
He wrapped an arm around her, pulling her closer against the cooling evening air, and for a while neither of them said anything else — just sat together, watching the last of the spring light fade over Shiganshina’s rooftops, the countdown in his chest quieter than it had been in months, not because the danger had lessened, but because he’d stopped facing it as a number ticking down toward an ending, and started treating it instead as a stretch of time worth living fully, one evening at a time, with her beside him.
"I love you," he said, quiet, into the top of her head.
"I know." A smile in her voice. "You tell me constantly now. I think you’re making up for the whole first year you didn’t."
"Is it working?"
"It’s working." She turned her face up to his, and the kiss that followed was slow and unhurried, the kind that came from certainty rather than urgency, from a year of proving to each other, in fire and snow and quiet mornings, that the promise underneath it was real. "Keep making up for it. I don’t mind at all."
The morning they finally left for the Training Corps grounds outside Trost arrived gray and cool, spring not quite ready to give way to summer, the whole family walking them to the district gate in a procession that felt, to Eren, both like an ending and a beginning at once.
Carla held herself together through sheer determination, packing an absurd amount of preserved food into each of their bags despite Grisha’s gentle reminders that the Training Corps provided meals. "I don’t care," she said, tucking one more wrapped loaf into Eren’s pack. "You’ll eat better with backup. That’s not negotiable."
"Mom, I don’t think they’ll let me keep bread in the barracks—"
"Then you’ll find somewhere to hide it. You’ve had a year of practice hiding things in that warehouse, I’m sure a loaf of bread won’t strain your skills."
Despite the tension of the morning, Eren laughed, and Carla’s answering smile wobbled at the edges before she pulled him into a hug fierce enough to nearly knock the breath from him.
"Come back," she whispered against his ear, quiet enough that only he could hear it. "Whatever you know that you haven’t told me — whatever’s coming — you come back to me. That’s the only thing I’m asking."
"I will," he promised, and meant it with the full weight of two lifetimes’ worth of trying.
Grisha’s goodbye was quieter, a hand on Eren’s shoulder and a long look that carried more than words could have managed. "You’re better prepared than I ever was," he said finally. "Not because of the system. Because of them." His eyes moved to Mikasa and Armin, both waiting a respectful distance away. "Don’t forget that, out there. Whatever the system gives you, it’s not the reason you’ll survive this. They are."
"I know."
"Good." Grisha pulled him into a brief, firm embrace. "Then go. And Eren — when you learn more about Marley, about what’s really out there, come back and tell me. I’d like to finally understand the ending of a story I’ve been carrying alone for far too long."
Hannes, predictably, made the goodbye considerably less solemn than either parent had managed.
"Try not to become legendary too fast," he said, ruffling Eren’s hair one last time despite Eren’s half-hearted attempt to dodge it. "Leave some glory for the rest of us poor Garrison saps."
"No promises."
"Course not. You’ve never made an easy promise in your life." Hannes’s grin faltered, just slightly, real feeling breaking through the humor in a way that surprised Eren more than any of the morning’s other goodbyes. "Take care of each other out there. All three of you. That’s the only instruction that actually matters, whatever fancy training the Corps tries to drill into you instead."
"We will," Mikasa said, answering for all three of them with the same steady certainty she brought to everything.
At the gate itself, the three of them paused, looking back one last time at the district that had raised them — the market square where Armin had nearly fallen off a climbing wall, the river where Eren had shoved his best friend into the water over a betting pool, the well where he and Mikasa had hidden contraband maps from a suspicious soldier, the porch and the roof where a year’s worth of quiet promises had slowly built into something neither of them was willing to lose.
"Second thoughts?" Mikasa asked, watching him look back.
"No." He took her hand, and reached his other one out for Armin, who took it without hesitation despite his usual teasing about physical affection between friends. "Just — making sure I remember all of it properly. In case I need something to fight for, later, when things get hard."
"You’ll have plenty to fight for," Armin said quietly. "You’ll have us."
Mikasa’s hand tightened around his. "A hundred and three days," she said, the countdown that had once belonged only to Eren now something they carried together, shared and lighter for the sharing, "until the number in your head stops being a warning and starts being a deadline we’re finally prepared to meet."
"Together," Eren said, echoing the promise that had carried them this far, through boars and Titans and secrets finally spoken aloud, through a whole quiet year of small gifts and stolen moments and a truth too big for one person to carry alone.
"Together," she agreed, and the three of them walked through the gate side by side — Armin already scribbling excited, nervous theories into his newest notebook, Mikasa’s hand steady in Eren’s, the wristband on his wrist and the compass in his pocket and a year of hard-won trust anchoring every step — toward a future Eren had once faced entirely alone, and would now, finally, face with everyone who mattered most standing beside him.
Behind them, Shiganshina settled back into its ordinary spring morning, unaware of how little time it had left, and ahead of them, the Training Corps grounds waited — the true beginning, at last, of the fight Eren had spent two lifetimes preparing for.
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