Chapter 73: The Long Way Home
Getting into Marley had taken four days of careful movement. Getting out, with a rescued fourteen-year-old and Marleyan patrols now actively searching the coastline, took nine — nine days of hidden camps, stolen supplies, and the particular exhausting vigilance of people who understood that a single mistake could cost everyone their lives.
"Patrol boat," Reiner murmured, flat against the ridge overlooking their planned extraction point, watching the vessel cut slow, deliberate patterns along the coast below. "They’ve doubled coverage since the camp breach. This wasn’t here three days ago."
"Can we still reach the fishing boat?" Eren asked.
"If we time it right. If we’re fast. If we’re lucky." Reiner’s jaw tightened. "That’s a lot of ifs for something this important."
Ymir, curled small against a nearby rock, spoke up with a steadiness that belied her age. "I can help. I know these waters — my father used to fish this coast before the camps took everything. I know where the currents run strongest, where a small boat could slip through faster than a patrol vessel could follow."
Mikasa studied her for a long moment, something like respect settling into her assessment. "You’ve survived a lot, for someone so young."
"You learn fast, in a labor camp, or you don’t survive it at all." Ymir’s voice carried no self-pity, just plain, hard-won fact. "I want to help get us out. Please. Let me be useful instead of just being the reason you’re all in danger."
The extraction went wrong within minutes of beginning.
"Movement, north ridge!" one of the scouts hissed, and Eren’s flicker fired half a second before the first shout reached his ears — soldiers, more than a dozen, closing in from a direction Reiner’s careful planning hadn’t accounted for.
"They found the camp," Reiner breathed, horror dawning. "Someone must have tracked our supply theft back to this position—"
"Move!" Mikasa was already pulling Ymir toward the tree line, blade drawn, the same fierce efficiency she’d shown against every threat this year had thrown at them. "Eren, cover our retreat. Armin, get the boat ready!"
Eren’s gear fired, launching him toward the ridge as gunfire cracked through the trees behind him — not the crude Titan-fighting blades he was trained for, but actual firearms, Marleyan military hardware that turned the desperate flight into something far deadlier than any fight he’d faced inside the walls.
A bullet tore through his shoulder before the flicker could warn him fully, pain blooming hot and immediate, and he stumbled through the underbrush with blood already soaking his sleeve.
"Eren!" Mikasa’s scream, raw with terror, cutting through the chaos.
"I’m okay—" He wasn’t, not really, but there wasn’t time to properly assess the damage, not with soldiers closing fast and the boat still two hundred meters distant through dense, unforgiving terrain.
They broke from the treeline together, the small fishing boat rocking in the shallows exactly where Ymir had promised, and Eren felt every instinct scream danger as more gunfire erupted behind them, closer now, close enough that splinters of wood exploded from the boat’s hull as they scrambled aboard.
"Go, go, GO!" Armin shouted, already working the sail with hands that shook despite his obvious effort at composure.
Reiner was last aboard, having covered their retreat with a brief, brutal partial transformation that sent pursuing soldiers scattering, and the boat finally, blessedly pulled away from shore as the coastline erupted in chaos behind them.
They sailed through the night, exhausted and bleeding and disbelieving of their own survival, until the coastline of Marley finally faded entirely into darkness behind them and the open sea stretched empty and vast in every direction.
"Let me see your shoulder," Mikasa said, voice tight with barely restrained fear, already working to clean and bind the wound with hands that trembled despite her outward composure.
"It’s not as bad as it looks."
"It’s exactly as bad as it looks, Eren, don’t you dare minimize this." Her voice cracked, fear finally breaking through the careful control she’d maintained through the entire desperate escape. "I watched you take a bullet meant to kill you. Don’t ask me to pretend that’s nothing."
He caught her hands, stilling their frantic work for a moment, meeting her eyes with as much steadiness as the pain allowed. "I’m here. We’re all here. Ymir’s safe, we got out, and I’m going to heal from this." He pulled her closer despite the ache in his shoulder. "You don’t have to hold it together perfectly right now. I’ve got you too."
Something in her finally broke, tears cutting silent tracks down her exhausted face as she pressed her forehead against his uninjured shoulder, the accumulated terror of nine desperate days finally, fully surfacing.
"I thought I was going to lose you," she whispered. "On that ridge. I thought—"
"You didn’t. I’m here." He held her as best his injury allowed, the boat rocking gently beneath them, exhaustion and relief and fierce, desperate love all tangling together in the quiet dark. "We did something impossible together, Mikasa. We’re allowed to fall apart a little, now that it’s actually over."
She laughed, watery and broken and real, and pressed a fierce, desperate kiss to his lips that spoke more clearly than any words could of everything the past nine days had cost and everything they’d somehow, impossibly, managed to save.
Dawn found them still on the open water, the coast of the walls finally, distantly visible on the horizon, Ymir asleep against Armin’s shoulder, Reiner keeping watch at the boat’s edge with an exhaustion that had settled into something almost peaceful.
"We’re actually going to make it," Armin said quietly, disbelief still coloring his voice. "All of us. Including her."
"We are." Eren, shoulder aching but steady, watched the distant walls slowly grow larger against the horizon. "I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful to see those walls in my life, and that includes the first time I ever saw them as a baby, in whatever memory of that first life I still carry."
Mikasa, curled against his uninjured side, huffed a tired laugh. "That’s a strange thing to be nostalgic about."
"Everything about my life has been strange, if you think about it long enough." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, watching the walls grow steadily closer, carrying with them the promise of safety, of rest, of a fight temporarily won against impossible odds. "But I wouldn’t trade a single strange, terrifying, impossible piece of it. Not if it means ending up exactly here, with exactly you."
She tilted her face up to his, exhaustion and love and fierce, hard-won triumph all mixing together in her expression. "Neither would I."
The boat sailed on toward the distant walls, carrying six exhausted travelers and one rescued girl toward a home that had never felt more precious, more fragile, or more worth every impossible risk they’d taken to protect it.
Behind them, Marley’s shores faded into memory. Ahead, the walls rose slowly against the dawn — battered, rebuilding, but standing still, exactly as they’d promised each other, together, they’d make certain it would.