#pieckannie
pieck/annie, things that weigh on your mind. T rating.
they’re laying side by side, faces turned towards each other, with half-worn bedsheets bunched up around their bodies, the night an overhanging veil of gloom. they’ve been here before, many times, always the ritual of annie slipping into pieck’s bed at night when she can’t sleep. she says as much every time she walks in when the moon has dwindled to a fleeing silver, gives the same explanation: it’s too hard to sleep in my room. the real reason, which pieck begins discerning soon after the first ten times it happens, is: i’m frightened, and i can’t stand to be alone with my thoughts. she sees it in the trembling palms of her ambivalent hands, the way her fingers dig into the side of her long sleeves, the penitential gloom annie always falls into. each time, pieck simply nods and lays there in the dark, peering at her through diaphanous eyelashes, and lets her warmth and breathing lull her into a better escape. she never probes, simply gives her a safe space away from prying questions.
tonight annie looks different. she usually feels a hundred times older, her world-weariness cavitating itself into her shoulders. but now she peers at pieck with so much blue in her eyes, such a far cry from her usual dreamless stare, that she looks for a moment like the world’s most young and vulnerable girl. as pieck brushes a stray strand of hair behind annie’s ears, she feels a question working its way into the shape of annie’s voice.
do you think people like us can ever be forgiven? annie asks, her voice coming out choked and ensnared in the stale midnight air.
pieck’s face is calm, but she feels a vise settling itself into her throat as she replies. she’s thought too often about the same thing. she lets a hard truth fall from her lips. it’s alright if we can’t, annie. nobody leaves this world with their hands clean.
and annie, understanding that this is the only lifeline available to monsters like her— a necessary one if she wants to avoid tormenting herself to madness— curls her fingers around pieck’s soft hands.
sooooo i put up a bunch of stickers on my redbubble in case anyone wants to check them out!! it’s mostly aot + some other stuff
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