singillatim | open | i'll never die, i am a freak

Eren learned to lock his door after the Forest Talkers broke in and ruined everything. Before that, he just hadn't really thought about it. Turns out it's a good thing he learned, though, since there's some guy here apparently trying to open the door.

Eren comes up to the porch as Dorian is trying to get that door open and stops.

"Can I help you?" he asks. His voice is mostly monotone, but everything about Eren oozes threat, even with his neutral stance, hands in his coat pockets. It's just who he is, really.

Whoops.

Dorian gives Eren a sheepish little 'yeah, I fucked up and I knew it' sort of smile. "Sorry!" he says, apologetic tone in his voice. "I know some of these houses aren't inhabited and really, I need clothing that isn't Armani."

It's said like obviously Eren will know what Armani is. Everybody knows what it is.

"You wouldn't happen to know if any of these houses might have anything in...mmm, a men's medium or a size 10 shoe?"

Eren's brow furrows a little. He understands some of what Dorian says, sure, but there are too many modern things going on there for him to really follow it all.

"I don't know what Armani is," he says. "There's some extra warm stuff at the community center." He isn't really the helpful type, but leaving someone to freeze isn't his style unless he has to.

"Some of the houses have things leftover. Whatever happened to these people, they didn't take any of their shit with them. Dunno what size ten is, but I have an extra pair of boots upstairs you can try."

Surely there won't be any other communication issues here whatsoever.

"What do you mean you don't know what Armani is?"

That's not the first question that Dorian should be asking, nor the most important thing he should take from the conversation, but here we are anyway. There's a moment before he realizes wait, that doesn't matter, and he continues,

"That being said, I wouldn't mind trying the boots. May I come in?"

Eren just kind of frowns at the question.

"There are a lot of things people here know about that I don't," he says, which annoys him. He knows it's a difference in worlds, in access. He hates feeling behind for several reasons. One is his everlasting fury about the fact that his hometown was isolated on purpose, everyone's memories altered so they knew nothing of the world. Paradis couldn't progress for a hundred years, but the world outside the island went on. The other is that he just got used to knowing too much.

"…Yeah. Come on," he answers the second question. He unlocks the door and shoves it open. He keeps his house clean, thanks to old habits. Not that he'd bother being embarrassed for someone else to see anyway. They're all just making do here.

"I'm Eren," he says, by way of introduction.

Dorian happily follows Eren inside. And look, he wasn't raised in a barn. If there's a mat of some kind, he'll wipe his shoes off. He's civilized.

"Dorian," he responds, with a little nod. "I arrived here only a few days ago. Getting the lay of the land, so to speak." There's a pause and a frown before, "Have any tips for a new arrival?"

Eren is probably less civilised in general, but he also does use the mat for wiping shoes, automatic and without thought. He spent way too long having to live up to Levi's impossible standards to go tracking dirt into the house. Not that Levi ever comes here, but that's not the point. It's just ingrained into him by now.

He considers the question for a second before answering, "If you can find a weapon, you'll be better off. There are guns. Some people can use bows, I think. I can't. So I stick to guns."

Is he going to immediately say why? Nope! Doesn't even occur to him.

He turns toward the stairs, figuring he'll go get the boots he was thinking about, but stops for a moment.

"You know we're not from the same world, right? You and I?"

Someone probably explained that whole other worlds thing, right? Eren is a little shaky on it, but he grasps it as well as he can.

Dorian blinks a little, obviously surprised by Eren's statement. He frowns a little, debating what to say, before he continues with,

"I had heard about things like that. Hadn't encountered any situation like that. I've met people here who were from my past but were from the same Earth that I was. It's...interesting."

A diplomatic way of phrasing it. Based on the slight hesitance in Dorian's tone, it's obvious what he wants to say is 'fucking weird,' but we're sticking with 'interesting' for the moment.

"It makes you wonder more about just what exactly brought us here...how powerful they must be."

Eren's social skills leave a lot to be desired, but he's making some attempt.

The corner of his mouth twitches. He also finds this place fucking weird. He notes the diplomatic choice, not that it matters much to him. Eren himself never picks the diplomatic choice for anything.

"All I can seem to figure out is people think this Darkwalker thing brought us here. It's the thing you heard speak to you when you woke up. I haven't seen it, but other people are scared shitless of it."

Eren has no reason to be scared of a creature he hasn't actually encountered.

"I don't know if that's really the whole story or not, though. The old man, the lady in the woods, they're probably hiding things."

"Oh, they're absolutely hiding something," Dorian points out, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. He gives Eren a little shrug before continuing the conversation.

"Why would they tell us in the first place? Keep information to yourself about who you are, who the Darkwalker is, what all they can do, it's easier to sway people for or against certain causes. That Enola woman I keep hearing people talk about—we know nothing about her. As far as I can tell, people only trust her because she's nice to them."

Which is suspicious in and of itself. She's secretive. Not forthright. This has to be for a reason.

"I don't trust her any more than I trust the old man," Eren says. He's never met Enola, hasn't (yet) heard her voice in his dreams. Plenty of people are nice and still dangerous. Eren barely trusts anyone, no matter what they act like.

"There are people who worship that Darkwalker thing," he says. "They tried to kill us, but we won. Don't know if they'll come back or not."

He shakes his head. "One sec."

He finds the boots — standard hiking boots, not too scuffed — that he saw in the closet upstairs and brings them back down. They're definitely not Armani.

"What was it like where you came from?" he asks. He isn't the best conversationalist, but he has been trying to learn about other people's worlds from time to time.

They're not Armani, but they'll do. Dorian bends down to start removing his shoes, untying the laces but continuing conversation all the while.

"It was far more industrialized than this. London 2014, if that means anything to you. And if it doesn't? A quaint little town like this with no electricity, no central heating, not that much in the way of running water, is a relic. It would be...mmm, I'd say close to a hundred years in my past? Maybe a hundred and thirty?"

He slips out of his shoes and steps in the boots, tying them up as he continues the conversation. "Needless to say, I am horribly out of my element. I'm trying my best, though. One must simply make do."

Eren watches and listens. Of course London doesn't mean anything to him. 2014 sounds like a nonsense number, almost 1500 years in the future, going by the ways years are numbered where he comes from. What impossible things could they do in 1500 years?

But technologically, Eren isn't that far behind Dorian. He can't make the calculation, having no actual frame of reference. He can only think about this town.

"I didn't know what photographs were until I was 15," he says, "but I grew up in a place that was…kept away from most of the world. So we were behind. The outside world had…not everything this place must have had before things stopped working. But electricity some places, and trains, and cars. We built a train on the island, but we're still behind compared to everywhere else."

Not that it will matter too much in the end, since Eren's horrors will crush so much into nothing. Whatever is left will rebuild.

"I don't know what or where London is. But I'm guessing you don't know what titans are, so we're even."

As if that sentence is just a ho-hum nothing of a sentence, he continues right on and asks, "Boots okay?"

"I've only heard of titans in the mythological sense," he says, as he starts walking a little bit, just in a circle, to test the fit and feel of the boots. "But if you don't know London, you probably don't know Greece, so your titans would be different from mine."

In the sense that at least for Eren, his titans actually exist.

"But the boots feel marvelous. A smidge loose, but I'll be wearing multiple pairs of socks anyway. Thank you."

"Mythological," Eren repeats, slowly like he doesn't know the word. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't, but it's not one that he's really ever said. What matters to him is that titan isn't a word that Dorian's never heard, but from his reaction, they really must be different things.

Interesting. Instead of chasing that further, he files it away for later.

"Sure. Glad they work. Less chance of frostbite or whatever," he says. "The community center sometimes gets supplies. Or sometimes things just…kind of show up. I got a nice coat once out of nowhere. Maybe whatever it is that sucks people in can…create objects, or something."

open | i'll never die, i am a freak

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