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Chapter Text

Ymir watches them come, trembling with rage. 

No, she thinks, no no no no! They’re going to ruin it! She wants to see what they’ll do, what Mikasa will do, but not yet! She still has so much anger in her heart, and they can’t make her let it go. She won’t, she won’t, she won’t. Eren’s march is a parade of her power, how she’s not helpless, not anymore, she never was. It’s the funeral procession of her husband’s world, the world that made her baby girls eat her corpse, the world her husband built through their daughters and their daughters and their sons, and she won’t be robbed of this show. 

The little boy who almost has two titans—very and also not so very different from the little boy who had two and now three—is soaring here on wings. Wings. She’s jealous, jealous, jealous; she never got to fly. All of Eren’s friends, they can fly, and that’s not fair.

She wants to see what Mikasa will do, she wants to see if she can do it, if she can show her, but she also wants to see the bloody end. Either one or the other will satisfy her. 

So she sends her Titans. 

Children and grandchildren, people’s babies, people’s mothers and fathers, people’s lovers, people’s monsters. All of them hers. She stands on a spire of bone, the wind in her hair, and hears how the Colossal Titan will muse to the Beast that maybe he was born just to feel the wind on his face as he ran up a hill with his friends. Maybe that’s why she was born, too. To be here, now, perched on Eren Jaeger, watching everything, everything, everything collapse in on itself. 

I’m going to put an end to this world. 

They jump out of the crashing plane and fly to meet her soldiers. The Colossal boy poses the closest thing to a threat, so she has a cute little thing like the pigs she’d freed snatch him away. The others scramble, everything falling to pieces without their greatest weapon. She watches. 

They fall apart so quickly. It’s a little disappointing. If they’re tearing her attention away from the march, they could at least be a little more of a challenge. 

Sweet, sweet, beautiful, graceful, Mikasa is taking on her army nearly single-handedly. Her awe and her jealousy mix together. I want, she thinks when she looks at her, and she hears the echo of Eren’s own, very different, I want when he looks at her. Mikasa whirls and spins and cuts, swords silver blurs. She’s beautiful, Ymir thinks, imagining her own hollow cheeks and puddle-blue bug-eyes, hair brittle and the color of dirty straw. She’s beautiful, Eren thinks, thought, will think, imagining they’re back on the fringes of a camp of refugees, imagining she’d said something else, imagining he’d done something else, imagining they were something else, somewhere else. 

Ymir wants. 

And then the little boy with two titans appears, and the little girl that he loves, and the Girl. Flying. And they catch the other Ackerman and the boys, and they’re trying to ruin it! Them, flying, together, friends even though they were enemies, united, together, flying, loved and loved and in love and in love and in love, trying to ruin it!

Ymir stamps her foot: a childish expression of anger that she hasn’t been allowed to do in a very, very long time. She’s mad and she’s jealous—of Mikasa, of the way she’s loved, loved back, and the way they all get to fly when even now Ymir has to stand on her bruised feet in her threadbare slippers—and she wants to see what will happen, but she allows herself just one more childish gesture.

It’s nothing, really. Mikasa is so strong and graceful and beautiful that she should be able to handle it just fine, and she’ll be loved no matter what, so Eren won’t mind. It won’t matter. It shouldn’t.

Like puppetting a doll, Ymir yanks the little boy’s head straight up as Mikasa drops to land on him, so fast and so violent the bones of his neck snap and muscles tear. The jagged tip of his steel-strong jaw catches her right in the back of the calf. A bright splash of blood flashes the air, glittering like rubies. It’s pretty. Mikasa’s voice, when she screams, is pretty. 

‘Cause: she’s beautiful. 

Eren’s friends all cry out and crowd around her, and the little boy wobbles on his wings, overwhelmed with pain for a brief moment before he’s able to right himself, already healing, his pain temporary and forgotten fast.

And you’re welcome! Ymir stamps her foot again, and then blows away with the wind to watch the front lines as the march rolls over Carboda’s plains. The golden grain glows before it burns. Then it flattens, and she thinks of when she had to do the flattening, and how she doesn’t have to anymore, she doesn’t, she doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, and the wind that churns her straw-brittle hair smells sharp and sweet and smokey . She can’t wait to see what the next few hours will bring; if Mikasa will do it, if she won’t; if Eren will, or if he won’t. 

She tips her head back, feeling savage, and hardy, and free. 

***

The silence after the end of the world is in itself a scream.

Armin’s ears are ringing. The concussive footfalls have been in his head for hours, and the glaring lack of them now just makes them echo in his spinning head. He can even feel phantom vibrations rattling through his bones, getting into the spaces between his teeth. If he lets the fuzz of darkness take a firmer hold of him, he imagines the screaming.

That jolts him out of it every time. 

It’s a small coastal town. This part of the world had trees like he’d never seen before, stocky and dark green. They’re just splinters, now, smashed and steam-cooked. There had been small houses built along the hill, white stone and domed roofs. They were crushed, too; the dust hangs heavy in the ocean air still. 

It’s hazy. Hard to see, almost like they’re in a thick fog. Not, he thinks blearily, steam. 

When he pushes himself onto his elbows and looks up, he’s met with the nauseating sight of the Wall Titans standing in their loose formation, widely-spaced but still looming inescapable. He can’t see all the way to their heads except for in brief flashes, but that’s enough. When he squints, he can make out muscles flaking away from faces, bone seeming to crumble away in the wind. But he knows what to look for, and there it is. The Titans are dissolving from the top down. Unusual, but convenient. In the interest of them living a few extra minutes before they’re all cooked. 

If anyone else is alive. 

Armin swallows, struggling to gather the will to stand. His head feels like a struck bell, and the phantom sensation of the bone-shaking footfalls has left his limbs and spine feeling fragile. He feels fragile, in a way that he struggles to place but finds familiar. 

He’s bruised, too, along his legs and chest. His wrist may be broken. He’d fallen hard and rolled when they crashed out of the sky, Falco’s wings vanishing out from under them. He recalls little Gabi’s shrill scream, the tear-tracks on Reiner’s face as he cradled her against his chest. Annie’s lips pressed so tightly together. Connie and Jean had choked out goodbyes—what had they said exactly? Had those been their last words? Do I not remember their last words?—but everyone else had been quiet. Defeated. Nothing left to say.

Mikasa, Armin thinks, finding the will to stand. She’d been so pale. The gash on her leg was horrible, tearing through the muscle, making it hard for her to use her ODM gear. He’d changed her makeshift bandage twice in the past God-know-how-many hours, using strips of clothing. She kept bleeding through it. He doesn’t think he’d done a good enough job tying them. The thought that it might have come undone in the fall is what shoots through his body like a lightning strike—Mikasa might need him, the only person alive he’s absolutely certain he truly loves, this girl who’s like a sister to him. He can’t fail her, too. As he failed everyone else. Everyone, everyone, everyone else. 

There’s only one reason why the Colossals would have stopped, but he can’t—think about that.

He rolls to his feet, boiling hot self-loathing festering in his gut. If I hadn’t been swallowed the damn second we reached the Attack Titan, he thinks for the thousandth time. But. As he begins to stagger toward where he hopes Mikasa is, he can’t help himself. He has to spin around and look, far in the distance, to see the skeletal face of the Attack Titan. Caged by its own ribs, perfectly still but for the meters and meters of stringy hair that sway in the wind. 

Armin feels his heart nearly split in half with hate at the sight. The violence of it surprises him. Are you finally satisfied? he thinks, face contorting into a snarl. It’s not for Eren, exactly. It’s for the thing he became, which is not the boy from his childhood. 

His desperation to find Mikasa only grows. It can’t be that he’s here while she’s gone. Armin has long since learned that there’s no justice in the world, but he just can’t handle the notion that she might be gone while the pair of them still live. That was never how it was supposed to go. He grits his teeth and gets moving, clutching his bruised ribs.

The town is rubble and splinters. It isn’t quite as annihilated as some places; didn’t have the full force sweep through it. Didn’t need that amount of force to kill everyone in it. Every building is completely destroyed, but at least the streets are relatively intact. They’re cracked and uneven, the indents of massive, overlapping footprints creating miniature craters, and strewn with broken bricks and rocks and bits of wood, and…

There aren’t bodies. There are red, pulpy smears that must have once been people. Big and small. Some of them are so large they must have been groups. Families. Parents carrying their children. Children carrying their pets, skinny arms wrapped around furry bellies, crying into fluffy necks. This town hadn’t been close to a city from what he could tell from the flight; Armin guesses that they hadn’t gotten much word. Everything smells like cooked meat and the metallic tang of blood.

He finds traces of the others soon enough. There’s a clear trajectory of where Falco had crashed, it’s not hard to track. He spots Captain Levi sitting up against a broken piece of a column, staring into nothing. Armin isn’t sure if he’s alive or not and can’t bear to check, not without Mikasa. He hears masculine coughing from a hundred meters away—Jean, probably—and farther off, frantic calls of Falco’s name. Gabi sounds terribly, terribly young. He wonders if she’s the youngest person alive outside of Paradis. 

The thought makes him double over, sick. She probably is. The voice in his head is hysterical. Unless Falco is the younger of the two, but he might not have survived the crash. How many newborns had been alive in this town just an hour ago? Gabi Braun is twelve years old and probably the youngest living creature on the continent. He thinks, almost nonsensically, baby birds can’t fly. 

Before he can straighten up, he hears the racing footfalls of a man in boots. Armin sucks in a breath and lurches upright, in time to see Eren coming at him in a dead sprint. The movement, Eren’s presence, him as a human man, all of it is so jarring that Armin can’t do more than gape at him as he rushes past. Eren doesn’t spare so much as a glance at him. 

Armin stares after him. There’s something wrong with the way he’s moving, but he can’t quite place it; doesn’t have enough time to before Eren stumbles to a stop, dropping to his knees and skidding the final few feet before he halts in front of a pile of rubble.

He casts aside the splintered remains of a wooden support beam. The motion stirs the grit-choked air and the dust disperses in a swirl—and there’s Mikasa. Lying there, still as death. She’s on her back, limbs awkwardly askew. Heart a bloody pulp in his throat, for that endless second where nobody moves, all he can think of is a doll that a little girl got frustrated with and dropped. 

There’s a thin red line on her abdomen. No, he thinks, no, no. She can’t lose any more blood—

Eren lifts her up against his chest, so, so carefully. Armin can see even from here that he’s shaking. But the horror and the pain haven’t left his head, and when he sees the monster that killed the world reaching for Mikasa, he cries out and tries to run. He doesn’t make it far before he freezes. His feet won’t move. 

They won’t move.

This isn’t like when he was a child in his first battle, unable to bring himself to do anything while his squad died around him. He tries, he strains to pick his useless fucking foot up, but he can’t. His muscles just won’t obey him. 

He looks back at Eren and Mikasa, and words die on his tongue. 

The strangest sense of déjà vu grips him. A dozen paces from him, Eren has his arms gently folded around Mikasa, cradling her back and her head where she’s curved over him, and his ear is pressed over her heart. Armin sees his wide eyes and the red lines drawing them wider, the blind terror in them; feels it just as keenly. He sees Eren swallow, his eyes slamming shut, and—

He sags with relief.

Eren rocks back on his haunches, gently pulling Mikasa onto his lap, settling her head on his shoulder. If he could, Armin would drop to his knees. The relief overwhelms him like drowning. 

Eren’s eyes squeeze shut, his expression crumbling as he tilts his head to press his nose into Mikasa’s hair. The black strands are thinly coated in white. Ash and dust. 

Eren releases a shaky sigh, then chokes out, “Thank God.” He shifts his arms around Mikasa, one cinching across her back, his other palm lifting to cradle her head, fingers roaming through her hair and causing dust to sift down like a gentle snowfall. He leans his face further into her and repeats, “Thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God . . .”

The unsteady mantra replaces the ringing in Armin’s ears. He stares for a long moment, a mixture of horror, awe, and pity, swelling in his chest. And then the rage descends. 

“You,” Armin cuts him off, voice trembling with fury. “Have a lot of nerve to be acting like you care about her now, Eren.”

His eyes open, cutting to Armin as if startled. Like he’d forgotten he was there. He doesn’t even open his mouth for a word in his defense. A few days ago, even after everything he’d said in the restaurant, he wouldn’t have needed to. But right now, looking at his best friend bloody and broken, Armin just can’t believe that Eren’s love for her actually counts for anything. 

Eren just stares at him, the dark red marks on his cheeks like tears of blood. Armin can’t place the emotion in his eyes except to think that he looks like a lost child clinging to a favorite toy. 

“Are you going to say anything?!” His fists curl into balls. “You don’t get to act like you care if she survived or not after you did this to her—”

“Do you think I thought—?!” Eren snaps. His fingers tighten in her hair. He looks back and forth between Armin and Mikasa, confusion furrowing his brow. “She was supposed to—she was going to, I thought she was going to—I was going to let her kill me.” He says it like it’s nothing, like it doesn’t leave Armin reeling. “I’d never,” he continues, focusing on Mikasa’s unconscious face, tracing her cheek with a finger, “ever, ever hurt her, never let her get this hurt. I don’t understand what happened— ” He breaks off, biting his tongue. His eyes shut again, and he whispers, “I wasn’t supposed to live.”

A bark of laughter rises out of Armin’s stomach like it’s pulled on a reel. “Is this inconvenient for you, Eren?!” He looks wildly around at the town reduced to rubble, Colossal Titans scattered like some sick version of the Forest of Giant Trees. “You did let her get this hurt! You—!”

“What happened to her?” Eren places his hands on either of Mikasa’s cheeks and gently lifts her face. She’s so limp. Total deadweight. Her head lolls forward, and Eren presses their foreheads together. Tenderness is bleeding off him, but it just makes the anger in Armin’s gut coil tighter. 

“You mean that wasn’t you who pulled Falco’s jaw up? She was about to singlehandedly beat the army on your back. Figured you wanted to prevent that.” 

“No. No, I’ve been dreaming,” he says vacantly. “I was waiting for her. She was there, I know she was, but she, she was in the house. I was gutting the fish outside.” His tone goes soft and desperate, the muttering of a madman. “Why didn’t I go in and check on her?”

“What the fuck are you talking about. No, actually, don’t bother. She could have died,” Armin says coldly. “She could still die, I don’t know how much blood she’s lost—”

Eren moans like a dying animal; pulls her tighter against himself. “She can’t.” He shakes his head and it turns Mikasa’s, too. The sight is unnerving. “She can’t, she can’t, she was the one person I knew would be okay. Ymir loved her.” His shoulders spasm. His eyes snap open, gone wide with shock and a more vibrant green than they’ve ever been. “Oh,” he says blankly. His jaw works. He inhales shakily through his nose. “Oh.”  

“‘Oh?’” Armin spits. “What are you fucking talking about?”

Eren blows out a breath. “Fucking—” he says. “God. Why would she—” 

He doesn’t go on. Armin stares in mute fury as he lowers Mikasa’s head back onto his shoulder, then lets his hand creep down to her calf. White and gray dust is clinging to the fabric of her pants, making the red of fresh blood that much more apparent. 

“Her leg,” Armin says after a long moment. “Let me do something about her leg or she’ll bleed out on top of you.”

Eren flinches with his entire body, making a sound like he’d been punched in the gut. He deserves worse, Armin thinks. He deserves to feel the girl he loves die and know that he did it, like he killed so many girls so many people loved, but Armin’s mind can’t approach the notion of anyone else dying, let alone Mikasa. It’s been too close for comfort for hours now, and the longer he stays here frozen, the more the notion looms.

“What are you waiting for, then?” Eren snaps. “What have you—?”

“For you to let me move.”

Eren looks at him like he’s gone crazy, and then down at Armin’s feet. Understanding lights in his eyes, and then panic. He stammers something for a long moment, but when he blinks, Armin feels his feet listen to him again. He scrambles forward and drops down next to them, gripping the sleeve of his shirt and tugging. There’s a tearing sound, but it doesn’t give way. Armin frowns, twists his fingers in tighter, and tries to tear it again. A small split opens, and he pulls it with all his might. It finally gives way, and he tears a long strip up and around his arm, leaving his forearm bare. The pink flesh is marred by a patchwork of dark red abrasions, and there’s an irregular swelling that he thinks is a break. He grunts, irritated, and then, very suddenly, realization slides the world out from under him. 

He’s not strong. He’s not healing. 

He’s powerless.

His hands shake as he pulls Mikasa’s leg out, so carefully, and unwinds the loosened fabric bound over her wound. It had been white, a strip cut from the thick fleece of Annie’s jacket, but now it’s crusted brown with dried blood, and stained red with a torrent of new. He tosses it aside as Eren whimpers, a pathetic sound in the back of his throat. 

“Should,” he says, strangled, “shouldn’t you cut away her pants under the knee? They’re ruined, too, and you should have—”

Armin doesn’t think he’s ever felt anger like this before. “We weren’t,” he seethes, “at a fucking hospital, Eren. Even if we could have stopped, where were we supposed to have taken her? How should we have sewn her up? We did the best we could, and don’t you dare tell me how I should have done better for her when this is your fault.”

Eren’s mouth trembles. “Armin— ”

“Don’t.”

He shuts up, which Armin counts as a goddamn blessing. He can acknowledge that he’s had a good point, though, and he isn’t spiteful enough to half-ass treating Mikasa. He peels away the dark fabric, soggy with blood that stains his fingers, and flings it aside. 

The cut is nasty. He’d known that much from the second he saw her, how she was moving. But he hadn’t seen the initial injury or bandaging, and Mikasa had refused to let them spend any significant time getting her fixed up, just keeping her from bleeding out. As he looks now, he can see better how acute of a danger that was. It must have stopped bleeding at some point and reopened in the fall, because if she’d been gushing blood like this for all these hours, she’d have been long dead. Most of her lower leg is coated in red.  Around seven inches of skin is torn raggedly open, and—Armin’s not a doctor, but he can see how deep it goes. She shouldn’t have been fighting with this. But they’d needed her.

Not that it had done any good.

“Tie it above the cut,” Eren says hoarsely. Armin glares at him. “Like a tourniquet,” he clarifies. “Obviously get the rest, too.”

He doesn’t respond, but follows his direction. After it’s tied, when silence and stillness descend, Eren speaks again. He asks, “Is it—Why hasn’t she woken up?”

“How should I know,” he says blankly. Armin settles next to Eren just so he can peer at Mikasa’s face. The bangs over her nose are moving, barely, with her shallow breathing. “Do you—she didn’t hit her head?” 

“It doesn’t feel like it,” Eren says. “Is she… is she just exhausted? Between. You know. Her leg, and—you guys have been traveling for a while. And…” 

“Fighting,” he supplies numbly. “We’d better hope so.”

“She’s fine.” Eren brings a hand up to ghost over her cheek, thumb smoothing over the scar he’d given her four years ago. As his hand blocks it from his sight, Armin can’t help but think, it’s far too late for that, Eren. “She’ll be fine. She has to be fine.”

Armin’s heart spasms in his chest. Bitter, he just says, “If you say so.”

There’s nothing else to say.

Where do they go from here? Everything is gone. Everything, everything. When he looks up, the ranks of Colossal Titans are continuing their slow drift away, steam hissing lowly, blocking out the sky. They’ll need to leave soon, or risk the heat. Armin has no clear memories of how that’d gone for him last time, but he has no desire to give it a second go with no convenient ex-comrades to eat. But the idea of just… walking away from this town is unthinkable. Leaving it here, in ruins, empty except for the bodies, until the birds return and leave only the bones. If they will. Is there enough left for anything to survive? 

They don’t even know the name of the town. There’s no way to learn. Nobody will ever remember the name of the outside world’s final homestead. There will be no graves for her inhabitants. No memoirs. All their names are already gone, nobody left to remember them. This is far enough away that they probably didn’t speak Eldian here. It may be that nobody will ever share their names again. 

And Armin is just sitting next to the man who killed them. Letting him hold his best friend, touch her cheek like he loves her, like it matters if he does. How is he just sitting next to him?  

His fingers twitch, itching, for a moment, to pick up a chunk of rubble. If he beat Eren’s head in, would it kill him? Probably not. Little Gabi had shot his head off, and he seems to have recovered from that just fine. 

He hears sounds that can only be the others. Footsteps rushing about, coughing, hoarse shouts of names. Armin’s chest aches, bruised ribs crying to find Annie, but he just can’t make himself leave Mikasa with Eren. He doesn’t trust him with her anymore, and—and he doesn’t want to take his eyes off her. Eren is keeping her against his chest, he can feel her breathing and the warmth of her body and know that she’s fine. Armin can’t. Selfish, he thinks, fingers curling into fists. Selfish, selfish, selfish. 

And then she whimpers.

A jolt like the lava-rush of transformation sends Armin a foot in the air, and he lurches closer to Mikasa. Under her, Eren jerks similarly. He rocks forward and then holds Mikasa there as he pulls back, her body resting on his knees, her head cradled in his palms. His hands smush her cheeks, and maybe it's that discomfort that causes her eyes to flutter.  

“Mikasa,” Eren gasps, drowning out Armin’s own cry of her name. “God, Mikasa, can you—it’s me, I’m here, my—Mikasa.”  

Armin can’t describe the desperation in his voice. He sounds like a frightened child, terror and reverence warring in between the tremors. He can’t pay him any mind though; all his attention is on the girl in his arms. His hands come up, hovering awkwardly, looking for something to do, some way to help, or reassure himself that she’s okay. But his fingers are slippery with her blood, and her eyes aren’t opening all the way.

Her brow is pinched with pain and confusion. Set in the bloodless pale of her face, her eyes, when they settle open, look black as pitch. Just slivers— he can’t even see the full of her iris, which makes it all the more unsettling. She’s dazed, unfocused, mouth falling slightly open. When she looks at him, Armin isn’t even sure she knows him. 

When Eren begs, “Mikasa,” though, her gaze shifts back to him and softens. She sighs through her nose and her lips silently form his name. Armin can’t block out the way Eren’s expression absolutely dissolves, tears brimming in his eyes, and again he says, “Mikasa. Mikasa, my love, my Mikasa, I’ve got you, are you alright, what do you need— ”

Mikasa blinks slowly. Her head tips further into Eren’s hand, closer to Armin. His heart rattles like there’s something angry inside his chest, desperate to get out. “Mikasa,” he says. “Do you know me? Can you understand me?”

She breathes out what could have been a hummed affirmative if it had more substance. Armin’s face splits into a broken smile, small joy sparking in the ruin inside him, tiny fireworks going off behind his bruised ribs. She continues to melt into Eren, sliding further down his knees, face pressing further into his hand. Her fingers twitch, and then her hands manage to lift from limp at her sides to her lap. Eren takes the hand not supporting her head away and uses it to clutch both of her hands into his own, folding them in so tightly that his knuckles go white. She sighs again, her eyes fluttering back closed, and Armin can see Eren’s panic.

“No,” he says, “Mikasa, no, please stay awake, please—please tell me that you’re okay, Mikasa.”

Her voice is very faint when she says, “‘m fine.” Her neck is bent in a way that makes her carotid artery stand out; Armin sees how fast her pulse is racing. Her eyes wander over to him again. “‘re you…?” 

Armin chokes out a laugh. “Don’t worry about me.” He glances at Eren for a split-second and adds, “Either of us.”

“What do you need?” Eren asks her again. “Please, just tell me, I’ll make it better.”

Armin feels his face twist into a snarl briefly, but when he looks at Eren, his eyes catch on his and Mikasa’s tangled hands. Hers are squirming under his grip, and then pull against her stomach in a gesture that makes Armin dizzy for a moment. He sees again that line of red, but—it’s not blood. 

When he sees what it actually is, he almost wishes it was. 

“‘M fine,” Mikasa says. Her breath is coming too fast, too shallow. “Just—cold…”

Eren’s eyes shine with wonder, locked on their joint hands and what’s below them; the red spilling out from the gaps in her buttons. “It’s okay,” he croons. “It’s okay. My Mikasa, it’s okay.”

Armin’s blood runs cold as he watches Eren pull that goddamn fucking scarf out from her shirt; he feels nauseous, dizzy. The utter wrongness of the image drives horror so deep into his gut that he has to look away when Eren drapes it over her shoulder.  

That is not right, he thinks, gut churning. That shouldn’t be happening. 

But at the same time, isn’t that just the same old story?

He shoves that thought away violently. He’s always thought of the pair of them as that, a pair, but now he can’t stand to watch Eren bind them back together. Not now. Not now.

When he looks back at them, Mikasa’s eyes have slid closed again. Her breath is still too fast and shallow to be reassuring, but it’s slowed some with the calm of sleep. Unconsciousness. Eren is slowly settling her back onto his shoulder. When she is, he takes the long tail of her scarf over her back and gently tuck it around her neck. He presses his face gently into her hair, and then goes very still. 

It’s a long time before Armin is able to string thoughts back together. His mind spins in a tight circle that grows wider and wider. It starts with Mikasa, broken and bloody, and the way Eren says her name; rotates out to Annie, where is she and will he be able to hold her warm body the way Eren is holding Mikasa; to Annie’s father, who’d meant everything to her, her only family left in the world; to everyone in Liberio; everyone in Marley; everyone everywhere.

The words burst out of them before he decides to say them. “What was even the point?” He presses his knuckles to his lips. “Why make us bear witness to our failure? Why do this at all?”

Eren exhales, pained. “I didn’t… Don’t ask me to explain it again, Armin.”

“Again?”

“I wanted to,” he mumbles. He has the decency to look ashamed. Armin wants to peel the expression right off his face. Eren drops his head onto Mikasa’s shoulder, and Armin wants to knock it off. “I wanted to give our island a fighting chance, so that the rest of the world couldn’t—and I thought, by the time it started, I thought that you were going to stop me. I had suspicions even before it started, but when I was with Ymir… You all would get to be the heroes, and the rest of the surviving world would adore you, and you, you were going to shepherd everyone to peace… and she loved Mikasa. I thought she did. She admired her, and.” His expression crumples. “She related to her, I think. Or she wanted to. I don’t know. She wanted Mikasa to show her something. How to move on. And I saw that happening, it was going to. It was going to be Mikasa’s choice, but… something changed. I don’t know what. Or when. Or why. But it all went wrong.”

Armin turns away from the tangle of limbs that they are, toward the churning dust. Almost none of that made sense, and he doesn’t care to hear Eren sort it out anymore. “Does it matter?”

The little choked sound that escapes Eren’s throat might be a laugh. “No,” he says. “I guess not.”

From the corner of his eye, Armin watches Eren sag back against the broken bricks, reclining like he might—fucking—take a nap, or something. Like they’re kids under that tree on the hill again. Like he’s tired, after his long march. Which he may well be, but here among the trampled bodies and destroyed homes, after that meager explanation, Armin can’t scrounge up any pity for this monster of a boy. Eren hasn’t been his best friend in a long time. 

Armin sighs, and pain lances through his chest. When he pushes his fingers through his hair, the ash of who-knows-how-many nations flakes down on his shoulders. He can’t even say that Eren has changed, exactly. He doesn’t have that excuse. Armin remembers being ten, twelve, fifteen years old, listening to Eren swear that he would end the Titans bloody and claim the world he felt was his birthright. And he guesses that Eren’s mind didn’t change when he found out that people were the real monsters, and that monsters are people. 

They weren’t people, Eren had hissed ten years ago, a week or so after bringing Mikasa home. She’d still been shut inside their house, baking with Mom or something, Eren said, she’s still real shook up. When Armin dared ask why there was a skittish girl in his house, Eren had been all too eager to tell him, almost daring him to rebuke him. I put down some rabid animals.

He had been so fiercely proud of himself, both telling the story and then later when he’d finally introduced him to Mikasa. Armin had had an inkling right from the first, of what she meant to him. He’s not sure what he thinks now, except that maybe he never quite got him. Maybe he never wanted to. Maybe he’s always known what lurked under Eren’s skin, but he never let himself see, too eager to have a friend, and then too loyal to him.

And maybe his feelings for Mikasa have always been tangled up in that.

I was going to let her kill me.  

Looking back to them, Armin can’t shake the panic that grips him. Eren looks entirely too peaceful. His long fingers are absently stroking Mikasa’s neck. He may be monitoring her pulse. Is he waiting for it to fade, Armin thinks, and he knows the answer is no, but he can’t— “Where do we go from here?”

Eren’s eyes crack open, but he doesn’t look at him. For the first time, he seems to take notice of the army of Colossals dissolving around them. The heat is beginning to radiate down to them, the air growing heavy and wet. Hissing is beginning to take the place of the near-silence, though there are still sounds of life from the others in the distance. They’re quieting down now, but Armin hopes that means they’re all alright and finding each other. It doesn’t sound like anyone’s been found dead, at least. 

At last, Eren says, “I guess we go home.”

Armin’s heart clenches. “There’s nowhere else.”

“No,” he says, and he has the nerve to sound mournful. 

Armin lurches to his feet. “I,” he says. Takes a deep breath of the dusty, humid air, and blows it out through his mouth. “I’m going to find Annie.”

He storms away before Eren responds. 

He walks back down the gentle hill, dodging wreckage and bloodstains and the worst of the craters. Without anything as immediate to focus on, the echoing rattle in his bones seems to come back. He keeps thinking he can hear more Colossal footsteps, but everything remains perfectly, eerily still. His chest hurts, and his arm, and his bloody fingers begin to shake when a minute passes and he’s all alone. 

It doesn’t take too long to find her after that. He hears low murmuring coming from a street off the side, and: there she is. Leaning on Reiner’s bulky shoulder as his arms are wrapped around the children. Her ice-blue eyes flit to him as soon as she spots movement, the deep circles of her Titan marks making her seem ghoulish. She snaps up straight, one hand lifting to reach out for him. Armin crosses the distance between them and crashes into her, folding her against his chest tightly. 

Everything else seems to drain away. His insides hollow out, and a soft, cool sweetness rolls through him. Annie’s fists clench under the straps of his ODM gear, and she presses her face into his neck. He can feel her lips wobble against the skin of his throat, and for a fleeting moment he can pretend they’re back on the boat—Annie trembling under him, impossibly precious, so small and fragile and warm that it felt like he’d been chosen to bear witness to a miracle. Like miracles were possible. Annie had been the focal point of his hopes for so long. If there were a world where he could have her, he’d thought, it would be a world where everything is alright. There would be peace, a brave new world that rejected war for them to make their life in. For a shining moment on the boat, he’d really believed that something like that was waiting for them.  

That foolishness is long gone now, and Armin doesn’t believe in miracles. But she is here, and that’s something. 

“Annie,” he says. “You’re alright?”

She nods against him. “Fall wasn’t too bad,” she croaks. “You?”

“Fine.” He swallows, looks up at the Titan nearest to them. The steam is thicker now, but he makes out that its head is gone, now the meat of its shoulders is flaking away. I guess we go home, Eren said, and Armin clutches Annie tighter. “I’m fine.” He turns his head to the three others here with them. 

Deep lines are carved into Reiner’s face. Some of them are jagged Titan marks; only a few of them are actual scrapes. He looks far older than his twenty-one years, especially with the children huddled against him. Falco is pale underneath vicious, sweeping Titan marks; limp, sagged against Reiner like a sack of flour. One of his hands is clutched in Reiner’s shirt and the other gripping Gabi’s. The little girl’s hair has come unbound, and her flushed face is mostly buried in her cousin’s chest, turned just toward him enough that he can see tears gathered in her eye. The youngest living creature on the continent.  

Armin is the only Paradis native here. Everyone else here had families on the mainland. Annie had her father, Reiner his mother, and Gabi and Faclo had parents. Armin remembers the pain of being freshly orphaned, and can’t imagine how it’s been compounded for them here, now. And he just let the man who orphaned them be.

Reiner lifts his eyes from the dusty heads of the children. Armin winces from the absolute bleakness in them. “The others,” he says. “Did you see Pieck and them? Connie and Jean? And…” 

“I heard Jean, I think.” He doesn’t want to answer where he left Mikasa, and who with. He wonders if anybody else knows that Eren has come down. Become human again, though it's strange to think it. It seems wrong that there’s any physical undoing of what he became. “He sounded alright. And I saw Levi, though I wasn’t sure if…” He swallows. “And. I found Mikasa. First thing I did. She’s fine!” he hurries to say, seeing the looks on their faces. Reiner and Gabi squeeze their eyes shut with relief in the exact same way. “She’s just passed out. Her head seemed fine, just exhaustion and blood loss. I changed her bandage and.” He takes a fortifying breath. “Eren is with her.”

Annie jerks back. Gabi flinches so hard she moves Reiner and Falco both, and Reiner’s eyebrows raise. The stunned: “You left her with him?” comes from Falco, who whips around with wild eyes. 

He feels awful about her injury, Armin knows, even if they’d all known immediately it wasn’t his doing. Eren, they had assumed, but Armin doesn’t think he believes that anymore. If he did that, it wasn’t consciously. 

“I would’ve had a hard time getting him to let go of her,” he says gently. Armin runs his fingers through his hair again, sighing heavily. “I don’t… if he’d wanted to hurt her he would have. He, he made me… freeze. I don’t know how to describe it. She woke up for a second and he freaked out making sure she was alright. And then I just couldn’t be there with him anymore.”

“Small wonder,” Annie says, her voice shaking with anger. “But Mikasa’s fine?”

He presses his lips together. “I hope so. There’s nothing else that we can do for her here.”

It’s then that a small, lumpy form looms from behind the dust. Armin squints and makes out two distinct figures. Pieck, half-dragging Levi, who’s got one arm slung around her shoulder. Their boots are red and shiny with blood and viscera, and he looks like absolute hell, but Pieck’s face lights up when she sees them, fracturing into bright, watery joy. “Reiner!” she calls, hobbling faster. “Gabi! Falco!”

Gabi’s mouth wobbles, tears leaking from her eyes. “Miss Pieck!” She detaches from Reiner and Falco and sprints to her mentor, though all four of them hurry after her. She ducks under Peick’s arm to crush both adults into a hug. Armin’s jog comes to a stop close by enough for him to hear Levi’s pained groan. 

Gabi pulls back, fingers spread wide. “Sorry!” she says. “I didn’t—Are you alright?!”

Levi groans again, head dropping. He mumbles something impossible to make out, which Pieck, breathing hard, translates as, “He feels like he got blown up, had his legs broken, and fell out of the sky.”

Falco winces, but Gabi immediately sinches herself to his side, leaning her head on the crook of his neck. Something about the gesture shoots pain through Armin’s chest. Eyes on Peick, she just prompts, “But he’s alright though, right?”

Pieck nods. “I’ve seen death, and he doesn’t look like it.” She looks her countrymen over, and then, to Armin’s surprise, himself. “And you all?” she says. “Nobody is too badly off? Where are Jean, and Mikasa and, um, and Connie?”

“We’re okay, Pieck,” Annie says. “Have to find the boys. And Armin says that Eren’s got Mikasa.”

Levi lurches upright at that, grabbing Reiner for additional stability as he pulls himself up. “What?” he hisses. “Where’s he—” he coughs, and blood splatters on the ground. “Keeping her?”

“Oh, no, she’s fine, she’s fine,” Armin rushes to say. “She’s just—”

“Where?” His one visible eye has narrowed to a slit, and there’s more venom in that glance than Armin’s ever seen from him. “He destroyed that girl, he’s done enough—”

“Captain,” Armin says, “please, Eren yelled at me about not doing her bandages right, she’s fine—”

“He what?” This from Annie. 

“He flew at her like a bat out of hell,” Armin says. As much as he doesn’t like defending Eren, trusting him, the thing is that Armin doesn’t think he’ll hurt her any further. Any of them, really. If Eren wanted them dead, they would be. It’s as simple as that. “Checked her all over and didn’t move even after he was sure she was okay. She woke up for a moment and he about lost his head making sure she was alright. He said—Look, I wasn’t any more eager to leave him with her and any of you, and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t think she was safe.”

“I don’t care,” Levi snaps. “Take me over there.”

The prospect makes Armin uneasy, but a quick glance up shows an even thicker cloud of steam. Time is running down. They’re far away from being dire yet, but still… 

He leads them back the way he came, weaving around the same blocks. Reiner takes the burden of Levi off of Pieck, leaving little Falco and Gabi to cling to each other, alone. God, but the sight of them is nagging at him. Something about the way they’re shuffling along, hands clutching at each other’s clothes, knees knocking and heads leaned together but never tripping each other up. There are bloodstains on Gabi’s dress, and her bangs are falling over her nose. He watches her press her face to Falco’s shoulder and roll her head, effectively wiping tears on his clean shirt. She’s going to have an epic breakdown later, he’s sure, but hopefully she’ll have the privacy of only Reiner and Falco to witness it. 

They don’t make it far before two pairs of jogging footsteps start echoing through the street. For a fleeting moment, Armin thinks it must be Eren and Mikasa — then he comes back to his senses as Jean and Connie stumble out from around the remains of a house. 

“God!” Connie shouts, half a whoop, half a curse. Armin blinks, and suddenly Connie’s in front of him, throwing his arms out wide enough to catch him and Annie and Gabi and Falco in a crushing embrace. Armin coughs, his ribs screaming, but he’s too relieved to see his old friends alive to protest. 

“Connie,” he sighs. He thumps his back awkwardly. “Alright?”

Jean barrels into all of them as well, dragging Pieck and Reiner, and by extension Levi, into the hug. 

“Could be worse!” Connie shouts, far too loud. Armin winces, then thinks that there’s no one else to hear them anyway, and winces again. Connie pulls out of the awkward gap between Armin’s shoulder and Gabi’s head and checks each of them over, his eyes falling to Falco. “Little man,” he bellows. “You okay, kid?!”

Falco cringes back, wobbling on his feet. He’s still pale and exhausted, having borne far too much weight on his fragile shoulders. “Yes, sir,” he says. “Uh, are you…”

“Tinnitus,” Jean offers. “Give him a few hours.” He disengages as well, visibly doing a headcount. When he comes up short, he pales. He swallows roughly and says, “Where’s Mikasa?” 

“With me.”

That dull, deep voice rings across the quiet street, and nine heads snap to the right in perfect unison. 

Eren is some fifty feet away, just far enough to be hazed out in the dust. He stands in a pocket of relative peace, the road under him cracked but not shattered. When Armin looks up at him, he can see the Attack Titan still hanging in the distance, and the Wall Titans stretched out behind him. His army, even still. Would they pull themselves to attention and begin to reform if he gave the order?

It’s hard to say if Eren looks like a commander. His gaze is steady on them, dead-eyed and weary; his feet sure, his dark jacket swaying in the churning air. Any image he might have made as a victorious conqueror, though, is altered by the addition of Mikasa clutched tight in his arms. He holds her almost like a bride, if the groom thought someone might try to rip her away. Her unconscious body is turned fully into him, her arms laying against herself instead of around his neck, her head cradled against his shoulder. Her face is still pale and pinched, but she looks peaceful enough. 

Her scarf is scarlet around her throat. 

The reaction of the others to the sight of them is instant. Gabi screams, a choked, bitten-off thing, and yanks Falco backward. Falco spins her behind himself and they both stumble back, her knuckles white where she’s gripped his elbow and his opposite side. Reiner nearly drops Levi to throw his arm in front of the children, and Peick does the same. Levi stiffens, but he’s nearly wobbling on his feet, and even keeping his eye open seems to cost him greatly. Annie tenses beside him, half-dropping into a meager fighting stance, and Armin’s hand shoots out to grab her wrist. Connie sucks in a breath, all his levity vanishing, and jerks as if to rush at Eren, just Jean stops him with a firm grasp on the shoulder. 

“Jean,” Connie snarls. “What are you—”

“Connie,” he says, pained. In Jean’s gaze, Armin reads a clear: what would be the point?

“Eren,” Levi says. It sounded like it was meant to be a low growl, but just comes out as a weak exhale. Armin hasn’t ever heard him sound so fragile. His one good eye, locked on Eren, is dark like a thunderstorm. “You,” he wheezes. “Fucking piece of… shit kid. Are you… happy with yourself?”

Eren’s vacant expression doesn’t change, but his chin presses closer against Mikasa’s forehead. “Would it help if I said that I’m not, especially?”

Beside him, Pieck bares her teeth. Gabi pulls Falco another step away, tugging over and over at his shirt in tiny little fits, even after he’s stepped back. Both of the children are trembling like newborn foals. Falco’s Titan marks look like an eagle’s spread wings, and his posture makes him look like a puffed-up chick. Again, the phrase baby birds can’t fly rings through his head. 

“Sorry,” Connie says. “Sorry, sorry—do you mean to tell us now that you regret it?”

“Not what I said.” Eren’s mouth tightens, surveying the group of them. Armin’s jaw clenches. He doesn’t want to hear another word of Eren’s feeble attempt at justification. But all he says is, “We can’t stay here.”

Connie’s hands ball into fists. “Finally gonna kill us, then? Like you killed Sasha?”

“Connie,” Jean says again.

“I—I know it might be hard to believe me,” Eren says, finally cracking with some emotion. He pulls Mikasa’s body even tighter against himself, the thumb under her knee pressing an upset little rhythm. “But I don’t want to hurt any of you.”

“Funny way of showing it,” Annie says.

“I know,” he says. “I know, but I didn’t think—”

“What did you think, Eren?” Reiner’s voice is almost gentle. He sounds too exhausted to be anything else, but he’s got the kids shielded behind him. He’s still prepared to defend them.

Eren opens his mouth as if to snap something back, but cuts himself off before it can form. “Doesn’t really matter,” he says. “What does matter is that we need to go.” He glances up at the nearest steaming Colossal. When Armin follows his gaze, he sees a small fire has started by its massive foot. Their clock is running down fast. “We shouldn’t stay here long.”

“Do you think we’re going anywhere with you?” Pieck hisses.

“I think you haven’t exactly got a choice. You’re free to stay, of course, but even if you survived the fire and the steam, it’s not like you’ll have much to eat.” He looks each of them over before his eyes lock with Armin, and there’s true distress in them. 

Levi stares him down. “Maybe we’d rather die… than go with you. Think… of that?”

“Okay,” Eren says. “I’m not going to kidnap you back to Paradis, but—we have to go. If you don’t want to die, we’ve got—maybe ten, fifteen minutes before the heat gets dangerous. We need to be out to sea by then.”

“I’m surprised,” Armin says, cold and unable to help himself. “I really am, by your compassion and forethought, Eren.”

“I just want to get Mikasa to a fucking doctor,” he snaps. 

“Really,” Connie spits. “Real fucking rich from the guy who broke her heart and tried to kill her—”

“Levi,” Eren says, “clearly needs one, too. All of you. And beds and water and something to eat—”

Connie bursts into sharp, broken laughter. If it was in any other circumstance, Armin would call it cruel. “You trying to be the jokester now, Eren?! Acting like you give a fuck —”

“Connie,” Jean shouts. He shoves lightly at his chest, and Connie whips to glare at him. “What do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

Eren looks truly hurt. The fucking audacity. “You know that I care about you. All of you—”

“You know, I believed that right up until I had to stop the girl I had literal money on you having a hard-on for from dying of shock or bleeding out while flying on a twelve-year-old kid’s back, on the way to try and stop you from wiping out the entire fucking planet!”

“Don’t —” Eren starts. He squeezes his eyes shut and swallows. “Believe what you want, Connie, I don’t care, but I don’t want to leave you all here to die.”

And Armin knows that’s true. 

“Guys,” he says. The others look to him, some of the hostility melting away. Armin bites his lip and looks at Annie, gaunt, pale, so recently returned to him. Alive, out of the stasis of her crystal. Breathing. He looks at the rest—the familiar faces that he’s loved; the unbent strength in Peick’s back; the way that Gabi and Falco pull directly at old heartstrings. Mikasa, too pale and still, cradled in Eren’s arms. He blows out a breath and says, “We really should go.”

Connie’s eyes go wide. “You, too, Armin? What are you—?”

“I don’t want you to die here,” he says. “Any of us.”

There’s a long beat of silence. Then Reiner looks over his shoulder to the wide-eyed children and says, “I don’t want you two to die here, either.”

Gabi’s face crumbles. “You’re coming too, then, Reiner, don’t say that like you’re not!”

“I’m not leaving you,” he swears. “It’s my job to take care of you kids.” He looks back to Eren, some of his defensiveness bleeding away. “You want us to go where, to Paradis?”

Eren nods. “I promise you’ll be safe there. All of you. I meant for—well, I, I promise, on whatever you’ll believe, that nobody will hurt you there. I won’t let them. I swear. His eyes drop down to Mikasa’s pinched face, and his mouth twists into a grim line. “I swear it on Mikasa’s life.”

It’s Jean who speaks next. “Okay,” he says. “You—we do need medical attention. Some of us more than others.” He looks to the ground, and his jaw begins to tremble. “That—we did what we could. We tried.”

Armin’s heart slices open, grief bubbling out in a rush. “We tried.” He squeezes Annie’s hand. “I think… I think we should live with that. We… we need to go.”

After a moment, Levi rasps, “Is that… an order, Commander?”

Armin blinks. He’d nearly forgotten. “I think it might be.”

He sighs and looks to the broken pavement. “That’s it, then,” he says, and then his eye rolls to the back of his head and he collapses, like a puppet with the strings cut.

“Woah,” Reiner says, sinching him to his side before he can hit the ground. “Hang on, Cap.”

“Sina,” Jean mutters. “Is he alright?”

“He’s breathing,” he says. “Think his body finally gave out. He needs a nap more than any of us.”

Armin shoves a hand into his hair. “Mother of Maria,” he says. “Eren, how exactly did you plan on getting back?”

“I can make something,” he says. He takes a few steps toward them, and nobody recoils or jumps to fight. “With the War Hammer. Or—whatever it is now. And I know the way back to Paradis. It shouldn’t take more than a day.”

“Okay,” Armin says. He drags his hand down his face. “Okay. To the sea, then. That, that’s an order.”

“Motherfuck,” Connie says, then turns on his heel and begins to march down toward the beach. Armin will take that as a win.

He looks at Annie. “I can’t order you.”

She says, “You can ask.”

Armin’s lips tremble. He laces their fingers together and says, “Please.”

Annie gives him a tight-lipped smile and squeezes his hand, and it’s enough for hot tears to slide from his eyes. 

Jean steps next to Reiner and helps him with Levi. The captain is so much shorter than both of them that it’s a bit ridiculous, but at least it makes it easy. Reiner looks at Pieck imploringly. With shining eyes, she says, “Oh, fine. If you’d leave me alone here otherwise.” She stretches her hands out to Gabi and Falco, who both reach for the same one so as to not let go of each other. 

“Wait,” Gabi says, before they follow the men down. “Wait, wait, I need to—”

She lets go of Pieck, dropping to her knees and picking up a fragment of pavement, shoving it in the pocket of her dress. She gathers up as much as she can with her free hand, two big pocketfuls, and then stands on shaky legs. She looks all around, taking it all in; looks at Eren, the man she looks so much like, the man she’d reminded him of just a week ago in the restaurant, and then throws herself into Pieck’s open arms and bursts into sobs.

Eren watches the six of them head to the beach like there’s a splinter being driven into his skin. When he meets Armin’s eyes, he opens his mouth to speak.

“Don’t,” Armin says, shaking his head. The sight of the youngest living creature on the continent stuffing the pockets of her borrowed, bloodstained dress with the broken streets of the outside world's last homestead—that was just too much. “Please don’t, Eren.”

He shuts his mouth and nods. Armin steps backward and Annie follows. Before he turns his back, he sees Eren hide his face in Mikasa’s hair and take a step forward. 

He tries to ignore the churning in his stomach.

Chapter Text

I’m full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry. 

***

The last foot lands.

Ymir breathes in—

It’s very quiet now. Everywhere. The Paths have always been quiet, but it's different now. It doesn’t quite hurt the way it always did. And the rest of the world, well. 

“Eldia shall rule this world with its Titans,” Karl had said. Karl, Karl, Karl. It’s a stupid name. She was under the thumb of a man named Karl for all these years. Her chest hurts, indignation and shame and betrayal and hurt blending together. He wanted me to hurt, she thinks. She presses her lips together, but before she remembers that she’s allowed to cry, that she can do whatever she wants, anger takes sadness’s place. 

And now this world is gone, she thinks. She kicks the sand and it goes flying up, a cloud that catches the light and falls. She could laugh—she does. Time goes sideways and she laughs before she can exhale, giggling into her swirling little eddy of time. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. 

It feels good. She’s free. She doesn’t have to stay. She can go—

time goes diagonal and she’s on Eren’s shoulder, then inside his mouth. His overlong spine extends behind his teeth, and it’s dark and sticky in here, but that’s alright. There’s his head. His eyes are closed, and he’s perfectly still. He could be dead, but he’s not. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. They did it. She thinks of his big brother, who tried to order her around. He’s dead, the little man killed him, like how the little girl tried to kill Eren. But Eren kept his head, and Eren isn’t dead, so it didn’t matter all that much. She didn’t need him anymore—Eren is hers, too, and he got through to her already. He doesn’t have her king’s—Karl’s—blood, but he does have hers. 

And Karl’s, she thinks indignantly. He’s from Rose’s line, her baby boy, and Rose never was a queen, or even a real princess, but she was a king’s daughter, too. And there are no kings anymore, no kings anywhere anymore. So she and Eren can do what they want.

And they did. But Eren’s army has finally ceased its march, and it’s quiet. The air hisses like a frightened cat, but it’s warm. The seaside town where it finally ended is all gone. There’s nothing else. 

She goes back, tips her head to the sky to see the streaks of light. There are a lot of ones cut short, all her people off the island, and many of them on it as well, but there are a couple new ones. Her great-great-very-great-granddaughter has a daughter, now, though Ymir doesn’t bother to check. The thought of a baby reminds her of her grandchildren, especially the little boy with wings.

She takes a step and sees him, and all the others on his back. Their defeated gazes make her feel… bad. But they’re all fine, she tells herself, twisting one foot back and forth on the toes. She didn’t hurt her daughters’ children. Or—or Mikasa. 

In the frozen slice of time she’s in, the space between breaths, she crosses over to Eren’s love. She’s very pale, but Ymir has felt and seen so many people die. Her drained face is bent in a mask of pain and guilt and fear, but she’s okay. She’ll be fine. It wasn’t a big deal. Ymir clasps her hands together and rocks back and forth on her bruised feet. It’s okay. She’s gonna be okay, really, and Eren won’t be mad at her. She didn’t hurt her that badly, and she was just—she was upset, and Eren knows what it’s like to lash out. To lash out at her, even, and because she was jealous. He won’t be mad at her. 

She looks over her shoulder and space skips; taking her back inside Eren’s mouth. His dangling head looks very tired. She knows he split himself into little pieces, and that most of those pieces had gathered, by the end, in his incomplete dream. He’d been waiting for Mikasa, but she’d never crossed into a place where he could call her. 

Ymir is sorry for that. She’d so hoped that Mikasa could be the answer. She’d thought—since she loves someone bad, too, that she could show her what to do about it. She’s stronger. And prettier. And Eren loves her back. Ymir just knows that they could’ve been the answer, but… they weren’t. She’s not sure why. 

But it doesn’t matter. There’s more than one way to skin a cat—though she’s never liked that phrase. She likes cats. 

Eren and Mikasa couldn’t finish any lesson they might’ve had for her. That’s alright. Karl said that his tribe would rule “this” world through their Titans, and Eren said he’d put an end to this world. And he did. So, so it’s all over, now. The end. Close the back cover and put it on the shelf. Tuck the covers ‘round the children and kiss their foreheads and blow out the light.

Ymir curls her shoulders in, and she’s back in the Paths. The spray of sand still hangs in the air, and her laughter still echos. She’s not laughing now, though. 

It’s all over. And there’s nothing left to be mad at, anymore. Karl is dead. He’s been dead for oh so very long, and she and Eren trampled over the world he built, smashed it to kindling, so… 

What now?

She looks up. The column of light still thrums, not frozen like everything else. When she traces it back to the beginning, she can see the three central beams. Maria, and Rose, and Sina. Their Paths are too short, and that’s her fault. They didn’t even live as long as she did, because Ymir chose to die for their father instead of live for them. 

She wants her babies. 

Ymir’s chest aches worse than ever. Her muscles are so tired, and her dirty feet are so sore. Her shoes pinch. They didn’t give her new ones. She feels as small as she did the day of the raid, when she watched all that pain and violence, and… she didn’t like it, then. 

She doesn’t like it now. 

Karl’s world is all done. She and Eren put an end to it, and she’s grateful to him for that, she is. But—she can’t be angry like she was during the march for any longer. Eren’s rage had fueled her, but that’s not who she is. It’s already fled, and while victory is sweet, the aftertaste is foul. She doesn’t want it. She’s pulled back to Eren’s friends, and when she sees their faces, she remembers the faces and the screams of people running away and—and—

She covers her ears, trying to block out the screams ringing in her head, and the echo of her own laughter. It’s not funny. She’s back in the Paths, and the lights are thrumming faster, in time with her frantic heartbeat. It’s not funny. The Paths don’t hurt anymore but she still does, and the sound of her laugh makes her feel ill.

It’s over. The future can be changed but not the past, and she can’t go back. She can’t go back to her babies and chose to live for them. She can’t go back to five days ago and chose to not listen to Eren. She can’t go back to yesterday and chose to not hurt Mikasa. 

She falls to her knees in the sand, hitting hard, dull pain bursting, more bruises blooming under her skin, but then it's a tongue. She looks up and she’s back in Eren’s mouth, looking up at his head. And—he knows what to do, though. He knows how to be free, what to do with the world at his feet. She doesn’t. She is free, and she’s grateful, but look what she did. She wanted to help him, but—but, she doesn’t want to stay here. To face it.

And… she doesn’t have to. 

Ymir wipes her nose with bony fingers and scrambles to her feet. She skitters over to Eren’s head, takes his raw cheeks into her hands; feels the warmth in them still. He knows what to do, and, and they won, so, he can be the one to live with it. He told her that she got to choose, and she did, and she is again now. Eren set her free, and he knows what to do, so… 

The monster that’d found her is safely tucked inside his spine, now. Not hers. She yanks Eren back into the Paths with her, still cupping his cheeks. His eyes fly open and he’s on his knees before her, looking up at her in bewilderment. His mouth opens but he doesn’t speak, just looks at her with wide eyes and an open mouth. His boots dig gouges into the sand, ‘cause he’s heavier than her, more than her. Ymir just thinks how his feet probably don’t ache. 

She swallows. Her throat is dry, has been forever. She holds his face as they flicker back and forth between his world and hers, and Eren’s hands come up to grab at her wrists. They are so hot against her bare, fragile skin. She thinks she ought to like it but she doesn’t. It hurts. She hurts all over, but the thing is she knows now that she doesn’t have to, doesn’t owe it to anybody to put herself through that for another second. She looks deep into Eren’s eyes and sees that fire that has always burned in him. She doesn’t know if this is the right choice, but it is hers. 

The world she was bound to is gone. Eren’s world is what’s left. 

Ymir breathes out—

It’s a little like when she died. It’s not peaceful or relaxed, just the knowledge that she can’t be here anymore. That she can choose something else, and hope to find peace there. 

The bright light of the Paths flares, touching her skin. It feels like nothing at all. It wipes away the hurt. She closes her eyes and lets go of Eren’s face, and he reaches for her, but—

—she’s already gone. 

The dull boom of the last footfall reaches him. And Eren is left gaping, astonished, alive, and alone, with lights still dancing behind his eyes.

***

The hurricanes aren’t so bad in the capital, at least. 

They’d run into one before they’d made it even halfway back to Paradis. It had been good fortune—they’d have risked dehydration otherwise—but it had made the actual crossing that much more complicated. 

Eren can hardly remember it. The entire time, he’d just been focused on Mikasa and the steady, too-shallow rhythm of her breathing. The other option was facing the others. The way they looked at him—or avoided looking at him—the disgust and the tears. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have brought himself to pay real attention to them. All he could focus on was Mikasa’s fluttering heartbeat.

Not Armin, his gaze averted, his fingers laced with Annie. Not Jean’s anguish or Connie’s fury. Not Reiner and Pieck, murmuring softly, eyes cutting to him in broken, suspicious flashes. Not Falco, with wings slowly fading off his face, or Gabi with her pockets full of pavement; the way they’d clung to each other even in their restless sleep. 

All of that stung, but it never could be more than skin deep. He’d earned far worse than that, he knows. 

But it hadn’t come.

Eren inhales.

The rain hammering against the old windows is heavy enough to smear the outside world to abstraction. The blue rooftop tiles run into the white bricks; the overfull river sloshes into the green trees. Statues that normally shine in sunlight are now somber. If he were to look closer, they’d be weeping. The cultural capital of Paradis is normally vibrant and glittering, but the rain has washed everything gray and miserable. 

Bleakly, Eren thinks that that about fits. 

He’s not going to pretend to understand what the Nyemetskan volunteer who’d once been a meteorology professor had stammered out on the way to the infirmary—something about the amount of heat and water vapor released fucking with the ocean, and now there are storms rolling inland from every coast. Paradis hasn’t ever seen weather like this. The winds aren’t strong enough in Mitras to level buildings—Eren hardly needs any more of that—but there’s been a few trees ripped up, anything that took structural damage when the Walls unhardened was worsened by the weather. 

Among other things. 

The eleven of them only made it to the capital something like three hours ago. They’re all still gathered in the old palace’s infirmary, which. Well, he thinks it’s funny. Those who are still conscious are probably sick to death with the sight of him. Eren certainly would be. Is. Didn’t count on.

The matron had taken one look at their sorry band and sent for chicken broth and ice water. While the other two nurses checked everyone over, setting breaks and cleaning scrapes, she’d made everyone eat, drink, and take a bed. 

Annie had fallen into fitful dozes on and off when they were going home, and now she sits against her pillows in the corner, tiredly sipping her soup. Armin is curled on his side on the bed next to her, one arm in a sling, facing the only door. Eren’s not sure if he’s asleep or not. Connie pulled the curtains around his bed closed. Jean is winding and unwinding a strip of bandage around his fingers, but his eyes seem heavy. Falco and Gabi are piled like puppies on a single bed; her drooling on his shoulder. The sound of the rain drowns out anything else, and it’s making Eren tired.

Reiner had fallen asleep as soon as he’d sat down to have his scratches and road-burns treated, and slept right through the cleaning. Pieck followed soon after. Eren doesn’t think either of them so much as blinked on the way home, afraid to let him out of their sight when the children were there, but that had been a bad strategy. 

They’re in far more danger here. 

Eren’s not going to let anything happen to them. He’s not, they’ll be fine. All of them. In the six days since the Walls came down, the Jaegerists have been busy. Securing the capital and other government buildings. From the way they’ve been talking, it sounds like most of the military has been absorbed into his fanatics. When Eren’s fucking water-bus of a Titan form had reached the port, a few men had been waiting there already. For him to return? The idea is so far beyond his ability to comprehend. 

That hour is a blur, but he remembers the way they’d eyed the others. For a minute, Eren had feared he’d have to hand Mikasa off to someone else and transform to protect them. But the men who’ve gathered under his name had taken his word, and so far nobody has said treason or enemy soldiers to his face a second time. 

You’ll probably be the most respected beings in the world, he’d said to Armin. Ten years ago, four years ago, three days ago, now, he doesn’t—can’t—it doesn’t matter. He’d promised him that and it hadn’t come true, and now Armin doesn’t even remember it. Probably won’t ever. Eren could give the memory back to him, but wouldn’t it just seem like he’d been lying, then? He can’t imagine that Armin would want to hear it. 

You did this for our sakes, his oldest, best friend had said, tears in his eyes. I promise I won’t let this error go to waste. 

Eren had counted on Armin to raise something new and worthwhile from the ashes he left behind. And that’s not going to happen now. It wouldn’t be fair to him to give him back that glimpse. Eren has hurt him enough. 

The infirmary is empty except for the eleven of them, lit only by a few flickering candles and the dull grey light from the windows. Armin had locked the door from the inside before he retired, and wedged a chair under the knob. Everyone had been deemed well enough that they just needed rest for now. The only ones who haven't followed that advice are Falco, absently fiddling with Gabi’s hair, and Eren, who doubts he’ll sleep until Mikasa wakes up. 

Nothing wrong with her head, the doctor had proclaimed. Eren hadn’t been able to watch him open her unseeing eyes to check for dilation; the sight might have shattered what’s left of his composure. Just let her sleep it off, sir. Same with Capt—Mr. Ackerman. The pair of them seem to have taken the worst of it. 

Levi is across the room somewhere. Eren assumes he’s still breathing. 

He and Mikasa are in the back corner, far apart from the others. The big room is dark. The candles are small pools of orange light that don’t reach them, and Mikasa’s face, still too pale but at least there’s color in her lips now, is cast in the weak light from the window. She looks like porcelain, Eren thinks. He remembers the first night they met, ten years ago—fourteen years ago—six days ago—when he’d thought how she looked like one of the dolls on the top shelf of the toy shop in Shiganshina. She hasn’t stirred in hours, but her pulse is steady against his fingers where they’re folded under her wrist. Her hand is warm, now. Eren thinks that might just be his own body heat seeping into her skin, but—that must be good, right? He can keep her warm. He can keep her warm. 

The rain is loud enough to drown out his soft murmur, but he doesn’t care if anyone else hears, anyway. “I’ll keep you warm,” Eren promises.

She doesn’t respond, but he didn’t really expect her to. He just wants her to know. He wants to make that promise. He broke most of the ones he made to the others, but…

I’ll wrap that around you as many times as you want. Now and forever, as much as you want.

That’s one that he can keep, now. 

That shouldn’t make him so bright and tentatively hopeful. He hasn’t got the right to feelings like that. But he’s alive, and Mikasa had that scarf on her even as she was part of the party trying to kill him. He knows, he knows, he knows that he doesn’t deserve it, and he doesn’t want to expect anything from her, God knows that he’s unforgivable, but… he wants her. 

There’s a loud creak from across the room. For a moment, Eren fears it’s the door and jerks to attention, but it remains firmly locked, the chair in place. The sound came from uncoiling bedsprings, and when Eren’s eyes track it, he sees a very sheepish Falco, his hands raised and eyes wide. Gabi, who he’s slid out from under, tosses in her sleep but doesn’t wake. After a long moment, Falco backs away on tiptoe, and then blows out a breath. 

When Eren looks around, the other stragglers clinging to consciousness have tapped out. Annie’s cup of soup is still in her lap. As Falco makes his way across the room, he carefully takes it and places it on the bedside table. Despite everything, it makes Eren’s mouth twitch into a smile, just for a moment. 

The kid walks over to them, big hazel eyes catching in the candlelight so that, just for a moment, he looks like an animal. The winglike marks haven’t quite faded yet. Poor kid had been in his Titan for something like two days straight, as far as Eren knows. Long enough that the extraction would have been excruciating if not impossible if his power hadn’t been stripped from him. Maybe it had been, anyway.

Eren can still recall those final moments in the Paths, watching the endless efforts of Ymir crumble like kicked sandcastles. That ragged, frantic little girl, trembling like a lamb, her hands frigid on his cheeks before she was swallowed by the light and he was left alone.

Falco perches—ha—on the corner of Mikasa’s bed opposite Eren, crossing his legs like a schoolboy. Which he is, Eren considers. It’s a Wednesday afternoon. By all rights, he ought to be in school.

Maybe he can be, now, Eren thinks wildly. Maybe Falco and Gabi can go to school and hold hands under the table. Eren hadn’t been able to go to normal school past age ten, but he remembers the older kids racing crickets down the aisle and tacking up notices on the corkboard. Terral and Ursula are going steady. He’s not sure if kids in the interior do it like that, but he can imagine Falco writing his and Gabi’s names in a heart.

“Is she gonna be okay?” Falco says quietly, jolting Eren out of his reverie. He draws his knees up to his chin—no longer a schoolboy—and folds his elbows on them. The bed isn’t very big, but he’s careful not to touch Mikasa. 

“Yes,” Eren says shortly. “Why?”

Falco’s shoulders draw in. “It wasn’t my fault,” he says. “I know that, but I was still the weapon you used. Again.” 

“That wasn’t me,” Eren snaps. “Who hurt her. That was Ymir.”

Falco’s eyes narrow. “Okay. Mr. Krueger.” Eren opens his mouth, but Falco cuts him off. “What’s gonna happen to us?”

Eren pushes his tongue against his teeth before answering. He’d just been thinking about this, after all. He shouldn’t be irritated at Falco for not understanding something that he can’t explain. “Dunno. Do you want to go to school? Have you and Gabi ever been to proper school?”

Those big hazel eyes scan him reproachfully. “Do you think Gabi and I would be welcome to a school here? We tried to kill you.”

“I didn’t exactly mind.”

“Okay. Try telling them that.” Falco jerks his head at the window. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to… do anything anymore.” His lower lip wobbles; he bites it. After a long moment, he says, “Reiner, Miss Pieck, Miss Annie, Gabi, and me, are all members of the Marleyan military. I mean, we were. And all of us are terrorists and attempted assassins, I think.”

“Those’re crimes against me,” Eren says. “I’ll dismiss them.”

“You don’t know much about how politics work,” Falco comments. “I might not’ve been to ‘proper school,’ but I was definitely taught what happens to revolutionaries who fail.” 

Eren remembers the way the soldiers at the port had looked at them, the suspicious eyes of everyone in the palace so far. The fact that Armin needed to lock the door to fall asleep. The fact that Eren doesn’t feel like he can take his eyes off any of them. His hand tightens on Mikasa’s limp one.

“Maybe Gabi and I get off easy, ‘cause we’re kids,” he says. “That happened last time, when she shot Mr. Braus’s daughter. If we’d been adults, I’m sure we’d have been executed. And we took that mercy, crushed our guard’s skull with a brick, escaped, and helped try to kill the—president? high general? of Paradis. And,” he says, on a roll now, “Reiner and Annie and Pieck have charges against Paradis from before they tried to stop the Rumbling. Even if you excused them for your attempted murder, do you have the authority to grant them complete amnesty for all of that? Would you?”

Eren swallows against his suddenly dry throat. “Yeah,” he says, but God fucking knows what his position of authority is. He’s only been back for three hours, and when he’d left, the Jaegerists had been mostly cadets and foreigners. Floch had done the bulk of the recruiting, Eren hasn’t met most of them. Under his fingers, Mikasa’s pulse drums. Eren feels it reverberating in his skull. “I would,” he swears. “I will. You remember when I called you into the Paths, and the others tried to—to reason with me?” A jumble of words sits on his tongue, we’re all sinners, and I won’t stop you and I don’t want to hurt any of you, but that’s not the answer Falco is looking for. “None of you deserve to be punished for it.”

“And do you think everyone else is gonna see it that way?” Falco presses. “Do you think that nobody who supported you using the whole,” his voice trembles, “Rumbling is going to take matters into their own hands?”

“I won’t let them,” Eren grits out. 

“How?” Falco says. He sets his little chin and glares. “You used me, Eren. To orchestrate an attack on my home. I don’t even know if my parents lived to die in the Rumbling, or if they died like my friends. You used me to hurt Miss Mikasa, who saved Gabi’s life even after she learned that she killed her friend. So I think you owe it to me to tell me how you’re going to keep Gabi safe.”

As soon as the final word leaves his mouth, Falco seems to shrink into himself. He tucks his shoulders in and shifts his bare feet, but he doesn’t look away.

Eren’s chest hurts, a double-layered pain. The sting of being scolded so thoroughly by a wide-eyed child, and a deeper ache that he’d first felt on that bench in Liberio. Falco, trying his hardest to earn a death sentence to spare the girl he loved. He’s seen the pair of them now, and he knows that Gabi’s resemblance to himself doesn’t end at the surface, that Falco’s devotion is nothing at all like his own, but… Eren can’t help but see some of himself in the kid.

And he remembers walking into the dining room and seeing Mikasa fussing over the little girl who looked like him. For a fraction of a second, his mind had split; imagined a daughter he and Mikasa could have had. 

Could have; could have had; could have. 

“Maybe not school, then,” Eren says lowly. He looks out the window. “I don’t know. You… the two of you stayed with Sasha’s family, right? Do you think you’d want to go to them? They’re pretty far out of the way.”

Falco frowns, considering. “They were good to us. I haven’t seen them since the restaurant—” Eren flinches, “—but Gabi said that Mr. and Mrs. Braus weren’t—mad, at her. And Kaya and Irina and Georgie and Stephan weren’t, either, or at least they got over it.”

“I’ll see if somebody can get a message to them through this weather. I’m sure they’d be glad to have you back.”

“Yeah,” he says, hard. His nostrils flare and his eyes close. “That’s a start, I guess. I hope Miss Mikasa feels better.” 

Falco unwinds and jogs back to Gabi. Eren watches him crawl onto the single bed and settle down, turning onto his side to take up less space. He flops for a moment, trying to get comfortable, and when he finally does, Gabi’s tan little arm fumbles about to grip his shoulder. Even from across the room, Eren can tell how that saps the tension from his frame. 

He wishes Mikasa would wake up, so he could feel that same relief. 

***

Dazed and dismayed, Eren says, “Why the fuck weren’t you in the infirmary?”

Floch Forster stands before him, pale and short of breath, the bulk of his bandages visible even under his formal overcoat, but smiling. “I was never in the palace, Eren. They sewed me up at the port—against my orders, mind—and then when I came back to the capital, I only needed a bit of patchwork at the Bettlehiem House. That brat with the itchy trigger finger didn’t hit anything vital.” He sighs. “I just regret that I wasn’t able to halt their attack. It doesn’t look like you needed the help, but still. I’m sorry for that failure.”

It’s about his luck that Floch managed to be the one person who ever legitimately survived Gabi with a gun. She came so close, Eren thinks longingly. Just a few inches to the left… though he shouldn’t blame the kid. She probably could’ve hit him dead between the eyes and he still wouldn’t have died. If it were anyone else, Eren would probably be impressed by his sheer elasticity. Shot in the chest less than a week ago and he’s still able to drag himself around giving orders.

Eren stands just outside the door to the infirmary, and he can’t stop his foot from tapping anxiously. He doesn’t like that Mikasa is out of his sight, but he wasn’t going to let Floch into the room with her. Any of them. He’d promised Falco he wouldn’t let anyone hurt Gabi not two hours ago, and he definitely owes the kid that much.

“It’s whatever,” Eren says. “Is… what’s…”

He doesn’t know what to ask. He didn’t anticipate having to face the fallout of what he’d done to Paradis. He looks to his left, out the window. It only looks down on a courtyard, but even that’s taken damage from the rain. The whole thing is flooded, flowers have been beaten off their stems, and the neat beds of dirt are runny puddles of mud. There’s an apple tree in the corner that’s had nearly all its autumn leaves ripped off. 

He remembers Frieda Reiss’s and Uri Reiss’s and Ezra’s and Miriam’s and Amshel’s and Clarimonde’s and Friedrich’s and Bastian’s and Maria’s and Judith Reiss’s and Karl Fritz XI’s memories of that courtyard. None of them had ever lived in the palace for more than a brief stretch of time, but every one of them had come at some point for some reason or other. Judith had seen that apple tree as a sapling when she was a child. After she died, her nephew Friedrich would climb it and bring back the very best apples for the Fritz princess, and—

That torrent of memory rushes through and leaves in an instant, and Eren is still staring out at the flooded courtyard. The nearly-bare tree in the corner looks like the light of the Paths, and Eren knows they’re still there. If he closed his eyes and let that quiet rhythm in the back of his head get louder…

“Everything is in decent enough order.” Floch’s voice jolts him. Eren blinks and looks back.

Floch. Palace. Paradis. Eren lived to come back and face it, and he has people to protect. 

“The storm has hampered some communication and transportation, but the takeover and cleanup has been remarkably seamless. Most of the old blood was cleared out, and everyone who opposed us either joined or was removed.” Floch’s smile grows wider. Eren doesn’t feel anything, though he thinks he ought to feel some sort of disgust. “There was some unrest with some of the civilians, mostly in what were once the outlying districts—they took the heaviest damage when the Walls came down—but nothing serious. You have more supporters than not. There were festivals, even, in plenty of the more out-of-the-way towns.”

That probably shouldn’t make Eren feel like he’s swallowed a leech. 

“The Wallists have even gotten involved, if you can credit it. Most of them are very impressed with you. Oh, and,” he adds. “You’ll be happy to hear that Queen Historia has had the baby. A healthy little princess, last we heard. She’s still on the ranch, but there’s a doctor and three nurses with her.”

“Good for her,” Eren says. He cranes his neck back to the infirmary. He can’t feel the impression of Mikasa’s hand anymore, and he wants to break something. She’s not defenseless in there; Annie and Armin are both awake again, and the matron—Elise, he knows her from Frieda’s childhood skinned knees and Uri’s teenage wax burns—is a nice woman, but God. “Does she need three nurses? Weren’t there a fuckton of casualties when the Walls came down?”

“There were some minor complications. Nothing serious, but Historia’s hardly built for childbirth.” 

“She’s got a big head,” he agrees. “Kid probably came out the same. And Whatshisname is tall, right?” He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. Did you just come to let me know you’re alive and everything’s fine?” Can I go back now?

“Uh,” Floch says. He seems mildly disarmed for some reason. Eren does not want to know why. “Well, I also came to ask what you want to do with the traitors and enemy soldiers.”

“Don’t call them that,” he snarls.

“Eren,” Floch says. “I know Jean and Mikasa and them were our comrades, but they killed our—your—men. Samuel and Daz were in our graduating class, too, and they killed them without hesitation.”

“I don’t know who they were,” Eren says, hackles rising, “and I don’t care. I expected and allowed everyone in that room to come after me. They were doing what they thought was right, as I was doing what I thought was right, and they’re not to be punished for that.”

Floch’s eyebrows raise. “I know they’re your friends—”

“Then don’t fucking talk about them like—”

“But what do you suggest we do with them? Forget the Paradisians for now, what about the Marleyans? Do you intend to spare them, too?”

“Yes,” Eren grits out. He feels tense enough to snap in half. His shoulders have rolled back, his elbows pushing away from his sides. “They attacked me, I should be able to make that—”

“Not just you,” Floch says, incredulous. “Gabriella Braun killed Lobov and Rolfe and Sasha. Falco Grice caused a dozen casualties at the port. The Cart Titan has the blood of hundreds of Scouts on her hands. Annie Leonhardt killed well over a hundred people. Reiner is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians.”

“Not more than me.”

Floch stares. “Paradisan civilians, Eren. Eldian civilians. This is our land. It’s not a matter of ethics, it’s a matter of law.”

Eren’s jaw is clenched so tight that his teeth are creaking. He doesn’t give a fuck about that. He never has. His hands are clenched in white-knuckled fists, and he wants to drive them into Floch’s bullet wound almost as bad as he wants to go back to Mikasa’s bedside. He’s had his fingers on her pulse since he found her, and he doesn’t know that it won’t vanish without him there. He has to be there to protect her.

“What kind of government would you be running,” Floch continues, “if you let people get away with shit like that?”

“Mine,” Eren growls. “You’re talking like I’m the head of state, right? Then they’re pardoned, all of them. They can make whatever life for themselves they want. Give me something to sign about it.”

“Even if I could, what sort of life do you imagine that’ll be?”

Eren throws his hands out. “I don’t know! I didn’t think any of them, except maybe Mikasa, would come back here, let alone like this. I don’t—” He dissolves, for a moment, into grumbled sputtering. He inhales deeply. “Falco already told me he and Gabi might want to go to the Brauses.”

After a moment, Floch blows out a breath. “They’re twelve, so that could go over alright. Niccolo is already staying with them.”

“Great,” Eren says. “Sasha’s mom and dad and siblings and boyfriend and her killer and her boyfriend. I’m sure that’ll work out just fine.”

“Niccolo nearly killed Falco,” Floch remembers. 

“He what?”

Floch rolls his eyes. “Okay, fine. The girl’s only got three casualties on her hands, and Falco sent the letters for you. I don’t think it would be too hard to ship them off to Daupur quietly. I can have someone write to Artur Braus.”

“Do,” Eren snaps. 

“‘Political exile,’” Floch muses, turning the phrase over. “That’s an official sentence, too. That should be very tidy, really.”

“Great. Perfect! Are we done?”

“Eren,” Floch says. 

“What?”

“What is wrong with you?” he asks. “Do you need to get checked out? Have you bathed? You’re all bloody—”

“Not my blood, you fucking idiot.” Eren feels like he’s about to explode. He’s one giant heartbeat, and he’s only half of one, he needs to feel Mikasa’s. “I need to make sure that Mikasa’s alright, but you’re keeping me here talking about political exile, so can we hurry up.”

“Alright,” Floch says. He raises his hands. “God, Eren, I knew you had a thing for her—or used to, at least—”

“Don’t tell me you fucking believed what I said at the restaurant.” His ears are ringing. His head is spinning. He sees the tears in Mikasa’s eyes and the way she’d looked at him after she gathered Armin’s beaten form off the floor. That cannot, cannot, cannot be the last time they actually spoke. He never even got to take her home, to the world he’d built for her. There’d never come a moment, and by the time he realized why, it was too late. I have to take her home, he thinks, and he hears his mother screaming at him to take Mikasa and run, and it's through his own child-ears and through the massive uncomprehending ones of Dina Jaeger, and he needs Mikasa to come back to him. 

“To be honest, I didn’t give it too much thought,” Floch says. “I didn’t think it was that important.”

“It wasn’t.” None of it was necessary, because he didn’t die, and Mikasa is hurt, and what the fuck was the point of making her cry? 

“Okay,” Floch says. “Sure. But that does bring us to the topic of Jean, Connie, Levi, Armin, and her.”

“Why can’t they walk around free?” His heart is beating too hard against his chest, like the rain against the window, like the Colossal Titans against the ground, like boulders against houses. Take Mikasa and run, take Mikasa and run, take Mikasa and run.

“They stole from us and killed our men.” Floch speaks slowly, lowly, as if to a child or a cornered animal. “They’re traitors and terrorists.”

“So are we!” Eren bursts. “We killed fucking how many members of the old military—”

“And won,” Floch says. His mouth is open, his brows are furrowed. “That’s how this works. History is written by the victors, and to them the spoils, and all that. We’re the ones in power. Crimes against your regime are the ones that count.”

“My regime,” he repeats, almost incredulous. Your regime. He hears: most of the old blood was cleared out and some unrest with the civilians and matter of law and political exile. Eren presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. His head is throbbing. Drawing in a shaky breath, he says, “I let them do it. It shouldn’t count as a crime.”

“Eren…”

“This might be a non-issue, anyway,” Eren says. “I’ll ask them what they want to do. I doubt they want anything to do with me.”

A harsh gust of wind slams a sheet of rain against the window, and the garden below shudders. Eren remembers when they’d get storms back in Shiganshina, the way his whole house would groan, and the way that Mikasa would crawl into his bed. She’s never liked storms.

“It’s their own fault if they can’t accept what needed to be done,” Floch says. “Alright. There’s not much of a rush to process them yet, anyway. If you’re set on sparing them execution, though, you’ll need to find someplace to put them. Prison, off-island exile, if you want to turn Dauper into a penal colony, something.”

“Fine.” His palms slide down his face. “Fine. But you promised to stand with me. I expect your support on this, too.”

Floch straightens, light in his eyes. “If that’s what you want. I have faith in you, Eren. Everyone here does.” He puts his fist to his heart, and says, “Just don’t throw it away. We still need you.”

It’s Floch who stands before him, but Eren just sees the lumps of his bandages and thinks of little Gabi with her big brown eyes and pockets full of pavement. In the wreckage of that seaside town, her tiny, delicate face among the crowd of the only people in the world he cared about, all of them looking at him with vitriol, betrayal, fear. All except Mikasa, who couldn’t wake enough to look at him with anything, cold and limp in his arms. 

We still need you. 

“I know,” Eren says. He forces himself to inhale, a task he didn’t think he’d ever have to do again. “I know.” In the Paths, little Ymir held his face while her thoughts echoed in his head, desperation and guilt twirling together as she justified to herself why she could pass on her power. She still thought in her first language, something that never was Eldian and was wiped out within her lifetime, except for in her head. Eren still can’t pull apart what was going on inside her, or what went wrong. He probably needs to take a fucking nap, but— we still need you. 

He knows what to do, Ymir had thought, trying to pile hope over horror. He can be the one to live with it. 

Eren looks back at the infirmary, where the nine people left alive that he cares about—and Pieck Finger—are, their only protection him and a wooden door. 

“Okay,” Eren says. “What do I need to do?”

The rain batters the world; even the air in the palace is cool and damp. The ghostly light of the iceburst stone lantern casts their shadows long down the wide hallway. When a furious blast of wind shakes the ceiling, it makes them stretch and shrink in time with its creaks, and as Floch smiles widely and drops the salute, Eren wonders which of them just made a deal with the devil. 

“First,” Floch says, mild as spring, almost teasing, “You might want to bathe and sleep. And change clothes. You’re not fighting a war anymore, Eren. The hard part is over.”

“Right.” He probably should get out of this shirt that’s streaked with Mikasa’s blood. It’s definitely not doing wonders for his peace of mind, and for her, he needs to be thinking clearly. For all of them. Falco and Gabi, who he needs to see safely to their foster family. Murkily, Eren thinks he can get away with sending Reiner and Pieck there too. Annie as well, though he thinks she’ll want to stay with Armin—but Armin might want to go, too. He hasn’t spoken to him since they left the town where it’d ended, and Eren doesn’t really expect him to. 

Maybe they’ll all head to Braus Stables, he thinks. Connie and Jean had practically been Sasha’s brothers, anyway. One big fucking family. That just leaves Levi, who Eren sincerely doubts will want to stick around, and… and Mikasa.

His thoughts jerk from the idea of saying goodbye to her; seizing his heart and sending it running. He did say goodbye to everyone he had anything to say to, and—that’s probably the best closure he could ever get. It may be better for everyone that their stories end more or less where he’d been so sure they would. But Mikasa—he has a lifetime’s worth of things to say to Mikasa. 

And now he has a lifetime to say them with. 

“Right,” he says again. Mikasa is just behind that door, his old scarf wrapped around her throat. She’d kept it, through everything. “And then?”

Floch raises his arms in what would have been a grand gesture were his injury not limiting his movement. “We build a new world.”

“God,” Eren says. That was supposed to be Armin. “I guess so.”

“I’ll gather some things,” Floch says. “There hasn’t really been time to set up roles and such—and I’m sure you don’t want to model the new regime entirely after the old—but I have a few men in mind for necessary positions. In the meantime… you’ve been marching for six days, Eren. You should take a day to rest.”

The drumbeat in his head slows. “Maybe,” he says. “You… keep people out of the way.”

“Are you going to rest in there?” he asks.

I’m not leaving them alone. “Yes.” 

“You don’t want to take a proper room? You could even,” he adds, before Eren has the chance to cut him off again, “Take a wing and have the—others—moved, too. I’m sure they’d also appreciate real beds and baths.”

His heart leaps. “You think?”

Floch shrugs. “For now, at least, no one will stop you. I can say—honestly, even—that they’re in custody.”

The Paths. The light. Ymir standing beside him as they ran to him, and his vow: But I won’t take yours. Eren bites his lip, fighting the urge to cry. He promised them… 

It’s just for now, he swears. They’ll be safe, and he will let them choose for themselves. If Pieck would rather face execution, if Jean wants to try and find a place for himself here, if Armin wants to build a home for himself and Annie by the sea and never speak to him again… if Mikasa wakes up and never wants to see him again…

But she has her scarf, he reminds himself. She had his old scarf. He’d never thought he would see it again. Even in the world he’d meant for her, they’d left it behind. He’s pretty sure. She hadn’t had it on her when they’d run—would have run, should have run—so… but if she’d wanted it, he’d have given it to her. He’d give her fucking anything she wanted. I will, he corrects himself. I can. 

“Alright. Do you know where we should go?”

“I actually already took the liberty of having your things moved to a room. I didn’t think Historia would mind.”

“She barely lives here, anyway.” Eren frowns. “My things?”

Floch nods. “From your old room in Trost, mostly, and your clothes from Marley and prison. Wasn’t sure you’d have a lot from your old closet that would really fit, and it’ll probably take a few days to have new clothes made for you.”

Oh, God. With a dull jolt, Eren remembers the outfit given to him by the Liberio Military Asylum. It had slipped his mind, but—it had been Whatsherface who’d brought the new clothes and taken his old ones away. Louise. She’d brought him a meal after—after the restaurant; she’s one of his. “Marley?” he asks. “My clothes from Marley?”

“Mm,” Floch says. “Why?”

“Um,” Eren says. “Nothing, just. Didn’t expect that.” 

“Louise thought maybe you’d want to keep them.” He shrugs. “She’s an odd little bird, but she means well. Did you want them burned?”

“No,” he says. “No, nope. Might be, you know, worth having to analyze foreign textiles or whatever. And they kind of smelled nice.” On whatever God there might be, Onyonkapon’s Creator or Marley’s ancient sky king or Ymir’s clans of giants or Ymir’s monster or Ymir, which—he absolutely isn’t thinking any further than that—Eren really, really fucking hopes nobody had gone through the pockets. He’d had the bunch of them all tucked into his uniform for the fight against the War Hammer, and when they’d been taken away, he’d sort of thought it fitting that they burned with the clothes. At least, he’d told himself that. Nobody was ever supposed to read them anyway, so it’s not like there was any real reason to mourn their loss. He’d assumed that he’d be too dead to miss what they’d meant to him, but…

He’s glad they survived, but if anyone has read those unsent letters, he will have to kill them. Holy fuck.

“Glad to hear it,” Floch says. “Do you want me to show you—”

“No,” Eren says. “I need to ask the others. I’m sure Elise knows the way to wherever you left my shit.”

“Alright,” Floch says. He reaches up and clasps Eren’s shoulder tightly. “Take a breath, Eren. You’ve earned it.”

No, I haven’t. Eren shrugs away from Floch’s hand and shoves his fists in his pockets. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess. Make sure someone writes to Sasha’s dad.”

“I will,” he says. He salutes him again, fist over his heart, and Eren turns on his heel and leaves. 

When he sags back against the closed infirmary door, the closest people to him are the kids. Gabi is awake now, tiredly unwrapping a butterscotch candy that Elise just handed her. She’s so enchanted that it takes Falco nudging her to notice him standing there. She shrinks against her little boyfriend when she sees him, but doesn’t look away. Brave girl. 

Eren raises his hand, holding his thumb and index finger about five inches apart. “This close,” he tells her. Gabi’s face screws up in confusion, and he clarifies, “You were this close. The one person for you to not kill with one shot.”

She cocks her head, hair getting caught on Falco’s blond spikes. 

“Doesn’t matter,” he sighs. He straightens his back, but doesn’t push away from the door yet. “You want to wash that dress of yours? I expect you’ll be giving it back to its original owner soon, and she might prefer it not be as filthy as it is.”

“What?” Gabi says, straightening. She curls her legs under herself, eyes shining. “Kaya?”

“A message is being sent to the Brauses. Falco,” he nods to him, “said that you might want to go back to them, since staying here…”

Gabi’s eyes go huge, and her mouth starts trembling. “They want us back?”

“I haven’t actually talked to him,” he says, “so you’re the better judge of that.”

“Oh my God,” she says, clutching Falco’s hands. She scrambles out of bed, tugging Falco with her—Eren’s heart pangs—and, keeping as far away from him as possible, she skampers to Reiner’s bed to shake him awake. As she clambers on his bed, setting the springs screaming, Eren notices that most everyone else is awake again, too. Elise had lit more candles and is making enough noise to wake people still wired for battlefields. Everyone except Mikasa and Levi, he notes, and drums his fingers against the door anxiously. 

Reiner comes to with a loud gasp, lurching upright as Gabi clambers onto his bed. “Reiner,” she says, gripping his shoulders. “Reiner, we’re gonna—we’re gonna be okay. Mr. and Mrs. Braus are gonna take us. You can meet Kaya and Irina and Georgie and Stephan, and Reiner, they’ve got horses, Reiner, and Sasha was the girl who didn’t share the potato right, right? Did you ever meet her dad?”

“What,” he says, bleary. He puts his hand on the top of Gabi’s head and looks over at Falco, who shrugs and points to Eren. “What?” Reiner asks again. 

“We’re gonna go back to Braus Stables,” Gabi says. She smiles, then, wobbly and watery. “Kaya, Kaya said that we were one family that lived in the stables, and you c’n meet ‘em, too, now, and—I think you’ll really like Mr. Braus, he’s—and you—I’m sure he’ll let you come, too, ‘cause if I’m part of their family, and he said he wanted me to be safe and—well, you’re my family, so—!”

“Sasha’s dad?” he repeats. He is not awake enough for this, Eren thinks dryly, finally pushing off the door. He stalks to Mikasa’s bed at the end of the room, and finds her unchanged: breathing and beautiful and pale and perfect. He settles back into the chair next to her, resuming his hold on her wrist. He cracks his neck and looks back across the room to them, but Gabi’s being so loud that he can hear her perfectly clearly. 

“Yeah!” she says. Her voice is thick with tears, but they sound at least partly happy. “Falco knew them too, and—Falco, did I tell you? He wanted me to find you, he wanted both of us to be safe, and Mrs. Lisa and him both hugged me, and—Reiner, we can go to them. We’ll be safe there. We can—we can—”

“Miss Braun,” the hospital matron says. Eren’s eyes cut to her: she’s doing something to Levi’s leg that Eren can’t make sense of. Kindly, she says, “Dear, you’re being rather loud. Use your inside voice, especially when people are trying to sleep.”

“Actually,” Eren says loudly. “If you want to be loud, it was just suggested to me that we move to actual bedrooms.”

Reiner says, “What?”

“Private bedrooms,” Pieck says dully, staring at the ceiling. “In a palace, no less. Fancy, fancy.”

Eren shrugs tightly. “Pretty sure they’ve all got their own bathrooms, if you want to shower.”

“Mm,” she says. “Now that I’m not a Titan, my blood doesn’t clean itself, which is very,” she hisses, “inconvenient.” 

Everyone pauses at that. Armin and Annie cease their murmuring, and Gabi stops rocking on her knees like some sort of rabbit. She looks between Reiner, with bandages on his face, and Falco, who still bears the faint impression of wings around his eyes, and shrinks into herself. Eren watches Armin look around at everyone who used to be one of the Nine, taking in their various states of disrepair. Peick’d broken five ribs and fractured her ankle. Reiner’s abrasion burns have all been washed and bandaged, but Eren still recalls the sight of all that torn skin. Annie had broken her collarbone and done something to her elbow, and Armin had bruised all the ribs on his left side and broken that wrist. None of them have had to actually deal with an injury in years, and obviously no one is happy about it. 

Eren’s fingers tighten around Mikasa’s wrist. He’d hobbled around Marley for weeks with one leg and one eye, and the constant double-pain of suppressing the automatic response to heal and the actual pain of pieces of himself being gone had been one more thing edging him towards madness. 

He hadn’t missed his eye or his leg as much as he’d missed Mikasa, though. You’re family, she’d said, and that might’ve been the first nail in the coffin he’d already built for himself. It’s impossible to say when things had been truly cemented—they always had been, really; it never could have happened any other way, and he made sure of that—but he’s always going to think of that night on the brink of the refugee camp as his final, most wild hope turning her back on him. 

Eren feels the hard press of bone on the sides of his fingers and immediately slackens his grip. He didn’t seem to leave a bruise, which is good. If he’s caused her more pain then… he’s already never going to forgive himself, but he doesn’t want to have to add to the list. 

He looks back at the others. Jean and Connie are fucked up, too. Connie’d knocked his head and Jean’d punctured something in his shoulder. Everyone is bruised and scraped all over; Eren watched the mottled purple patchwork of skin bloom on everyone on the way back to Paradis. The only ones who came through relatively unscathed are Gabi—who Eren understands Falco had wrapped a wing around and let it fall off of him—and Falco, who hadn’t fully lost his healing until after he crashed.

That just leaves Mikasa and Levi. Their powers must have been stripped from them, too, and what that’s done to them… Eren doesn’t want to think about. 

Eventually, it’s Annie who fills the silence. She asks weakly, “You do want a bath, then? I could stand one myself. I feel about as sticky as I did when I came out of my crystal.”

“Butterfly,” Armin says fondly. He tugs at her hair gently, and Annie bats his hand away. 

“I’d like a bath,” Pieck says. “I’d like my ribs to be unbroken and my dad to be alive as well, but I guess I’ll settle for the bath.”

“Can y’all shut up?” Connie groans, flopping onto his side. He tucks his pillow over his ear. “The lady said, we’re trying to sleep.”

“That makes four of us in favor of switching rooms, then,” Annie comments. Eren assumes the other two in that count to be her and Armin and wrinkles his nose. He’s got half a mind to tell her to mind his goddamn ribs, but—Eren can guess how Armin would respond to that. He wouldn’t really be wrong, either. 

Jean groans from where he’s lying down, which morphs into a yawn as he pushes his palms against his forehead. “‘Til Sasha’s dad comes to pick us all up, or…?” 

Gabi perks back up, wiping her sleeve across her eyes. “You knew Mr. Braus, right? Do you—he’ll really come for us?”

“Anyone would come to rescue you, Gabi,” Jean reassures, a smile creeping into his voice.

Pieck pushes up on her elbows. “‘Course they will, honey,” she says. “Who could say no to that face? You’re a miniature Helena of Troja.”

Reiner scowls. “She’s twelve, Pieck.”

“Calm down.” She rolls her eyes. “Most of her rescuers were her father’s men. That’s us. Which would make Falco Menelaus, and this Mr. Braus is Tyndareus—”

“The airship is Paris,” Jean adds. “Paradis, you could say.” 

“You two have completely lost the plot of l’Illiade,” Reiner mumbles.

“I get it,” Gabi says earnestly. She turns back to Reiner. “I told ya. We—we’re gonna be okay.”

Reiner blows out a breath, patting her head. “That’s all I can ask for.”

“That,” Annie says, “and another ten hours of sleep and a bath.”

“Yes,” he agrees wearily. “Also that.”

“Do you want the fucking bedrooms or not?” Eren asks loudly. 

Reiner closes his eyes. For a long moment, nobody answers him, which strikes Eren as kind of childish—and he knows he’s not one to talk, but still—until Reiner says, “Are those safe?”

“The doors lock from the inside,” he says. Freidrich Reiss had had an affair with his Fritz princess: a lot had depended on the integrity of those locks. “They’re pretty solid.”

Reiner takes his hand off Gabi’s head to scrub it down his face. “Yeah, actually, I think I really would. You two’re with me,” he says to the kids, “but I think we’d all benefit from baths and decent beds.”

“If I can stop hearing y’all fucking talking,” Connie says, rolling out of bed with a screech of bedsprings. “Where’re they, then?”

Eren shrugs, though nobody is looking at him. “Elise,” he says, and the woman looks up, her hospital habbit swaying as she straightens. “I figured you knew where my stuff had been put?” She nods, and Eren continues, “Are the bedrooms around there all free?”

“Yes, sir,” she says. “That area is very empty, recently.”

“Great.” Eren stands and gathers Mikasa in his arms, making sure that her scarf doesn’t pull tight against her throat. Her head lolls against his shoulder and she sighs, a soft, high-pitched sound that sinks into his chest and curls up there, making a home. He noses her bangs out of her eye, and tries not to wince at how cold she still feels. She’s always run cold, he tells himself, and it’s true. When they were kids she used to stick her feet against his legs, and they were like blocks of ice. “These rooms better have fucking fireplaces,” he says. “Show us the way.”

***

To Jean’s pleasant surprise, the rooms do, in fact, have fireplaces. By the time he comes back from a long soak, the fire is crackling nicely, doing its best to drive away the damp chill the rain has brought. It soothes some of the ache that’s taken a deep root in his body, and certainly the warm bath helped, too. He feels almost alright, which passes as glorious after the past few days.

The room is made out of dark wood and is about as big as his apartment. There’s a vanity and a writing desk and a tea table and a few other tables pushed against the walls laden with golden candlesticks and empty vases and other gaudy baubles. There’s a damn chandelier, and four massive paintings. The diamond pattern of the polished wood glimmers in the light of the fireplace and the candles, but it’s cold under his socked feet.

“Historia’s been holding out on us,” he mumbles, flopping onto the bed, which is tucked into a small alcove, half-closed off by rich brown curtains. His shoulder screams for a moment, and then fades back underneath the lull of painkillers. The bed is huge, large enough for multiple people easily. Which is just perfect for Connie, himself, and Armin.

Not that they’re sharing, to be clear. Connie’d claimed his own temporary bedroom, and Armin and Annie had taken one for themselves, too. But she’s taking a bath, and Armin hadn’t wanted to disturb her. Connie’s room connects to Jean’s through a door in the wall—which he suspects means these are meant for married couples, but can’t find the energy to be annoyed—and Armin and Annie are across the hall. Reiner’s herded the children into the one at the very back of the hall and Pieck had taken the adjoining room to that. Levi, still completely unconscious, had been placed in a spotless room draped in green, three nurses going in to tend to his bath. Jean’s sure he’ll appreciate waking up clean. 

And Eren, he couldn’t help himself from noticing, had taken Mikasa into the room across from Reiner’s, and he hadn’t come out. 

“To be fair,” Armin says, upright against the pillows. “Historia hasn’t lived in the palace full-time ever, and not at all for at least a year. This is her equivalent of a townhouse.”

“Do we know anything about how she is? And the baby?” Jean says. The canopy over this four-poster bed is the same brown as the curtains over the alcove, embroidered with gold thread like fish scales. He swallows and says, “You don’t think Eren had her killed, right?”

“I doubt it,” Armin says dully. “I really don’t think he wanted to hurt any of us. You saw how he’s been with Mikasa.”

“That’s Mikasa, though,” Jean says. 

Armin snorts. 

“How much does that count for?” Connie wonders. He’s lying on his stomach, face squished against the pillows. “He went after her specifically, with the leg. Literally every other one of us came through the fights against the Titans fine. He maimed her.”

Hot anger pulses in Jean’s belly. He’d been the one to catch Mikasa when she crumpled, been the one to hold her steady as Connie and Annie worked to stop the bleeding. The only time he’d seen her anywhere close to that level of pain was when they were fifteen and a Titan had broken her ribs. She’d nearly broken his hand when she tried to stand back up, and the scream she caught between her teeth and broken his heart. 

“I don’t know if he did,” Armin says, though his voice is tight. “When it was just the three of us, he didn’t seem to have any idea what’d happened to her. He…” He purses his lips. “He seemed to be expecting her to kill him.”

”She would have,” Jean says. He’d said they needed to not long after her injury. The light in her eyes had vanished, but she hadn’t disagreed. And by the end…

“Maybe she will do,” Connie says lowly. 

“I know she would’ve, too,” Armin says. He presses his chin against his knee. “By the time we caught up… after we had to watch Fort Slava fall…” He sounds sick. Jean feels the same: the sounds of screaming and artillery and Mikasa’s bitten-back whimpers are, in that moment, louder to him than the drumming rain. 

Jean closes his eyes, trying not to feel the wind in his hair. “If we could’ve…” He’s not even sure where to go with that. If they could’ve what? If Armin hadn’t been captured, if Mikasa hadn’t been injured, if, if, if. They’d had little enough plan, and no chance. The fully-realized Founder was, for all intents and purposes, a god. What chance had the ten of them had, in their sorry state? 

“It doesn’t matter,” Armin sighs. “I just… I wanted to ask you two what you wanted to do next.”

“We can’t stay here,” Jean says instantly. “You saw the way the Jaegerists were looking at us. There’s a reason that Eren hasn’t blinked since we got here.”

“How heroic,” Connie spits. 

“Oh, I’m not staying here,” Armin says. “Even if I thought it were safe, I don’t have anything to fucking say to Eren.” His hands, clasped around his knees, tighten. “If it wouldn’t just wreck the fucking island even worse, and leave Floch in charge, I’d probably kill him. I’d try, at least.”

“Are you sure that would be worse?” Connie asks. He rolls over and sits up just to scowl. “You don’t want to resist? Try and take down the nutcases that’ve taken over?”

Armin presses his lips together. “I really don’t see a point. The number of people on his side…” He closes his eyes. “I don’t want to cause any more death. I really don’t. If we start a civil war on the island, what’ll be left?”

“Maybe that’s the end,” Connie says. “Humanity completely wipes itself out, and that’s the happy ending.”

“That’s bleak from you, Springer,” Jean says. With bruises and a mild stab wound all pulsing with his heartbeat, though, he can’t quite be surprised. 

“I don’t know about that,” Armin says. “I still think that… life is worth living? I’ve got you guys.”

Jean closes his eyes and smiles. “Thank you, Armin.”

“You’ve got Annie, is what you mean. Rockin’ that boat,” Connie says, making an effort at a joke. 

“Thank you, Connie,” Armin sighs. “I don’t want her to die, yes. I want to be there for her. All of you.”

“It’s insane to me that you can think like that, really,” Jean says. He swallows. “I close my eyes and try to imagine a future and it’s just…”

“I don’t have any real ideas, either,” Armin says. He leans back against the pillows. “The kids will be going to Sasha’s family. Jean, you said something about going, too. Was that serious?”

“I don’t know,” he groans. “My apartment in Trost is probably no good. And I keep thinking about my mother. I think going to be with her is too dangerous for her. And I don’t know where else. The port? You like the beach, Armin.”

“If it hasn’t been destroyed by the storms?” He clicks his tongue. “Honestly? I think the sea might be a little ruined for me. And I’m sure Annie wouldn’t want that.”

Jean winces. “Yeah. So… you’re thinking about Dauper too, then?”

“The thing is,” Armin says, raising a hand to trail along the pillowcase. “Wherever we go, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be labeled exile. Eren can do his best—and I do think he will—but there’s no way it will be safe for any of us to be in wider society. Even if he gives us full pardons, I’m positive that some fanatic kid will take a shot at us. And none of us can survive that, anymore. Exile is both legal punishment and a sort of “keep-out” sign. Nobody would be allowed to interact with us in any capacity, from, you know, murder, to being our grocer. So if we can go somewhere self-sufficient…” 

“Sasha was always so proud of how they managed for themselves in Dauper,” Connie sighs. “Freak.” He exhales tremblingly, chin wobbling. “Does this mean we’re not gonna be able to visit her grave, anymore?”

Jean flinches from that thought like a punch to the gut. God, Sasha. She’s been like a sister to him for seven years. Her stupid antics and ever-grumbling stomach. She should be here. She shouldn’t have died in an airship over foreign soil, bleeding out from a bullet a little girl put in her, from a battle Eren forced her into, from a war that none of them could have stopped. She should have gone home to be doted on by Niccolo and adored by her parents, to little siblings who clung to her skirts and begged her to stay longer. 

“Maybe.” He thinks of her funeral, the rain blending with tears. How at the end of the day, Mikasa had refused to leave; to go back alone to the room they’d shared. When he’d seen her the next morning, her eyes had been red, and she hadn’t touched a bite of her breakfast. “But she’d rather we not remember her there, anyway.”

Connie snorts and wipes his eyes. “Yeah. Dumb idiot would rather we remember her anytime we take a bite of sausage. Or potato.”

Jean laughs. “She was a freak for that.” He inhales sharply through his nose. “Sasha, wherever you are, at some great buffet in the sky: I will always set aside… fifteen percent? Of my potato helpings for you.”

Connie cackles wetly. “And then eat them anyway. It’s what she’d want. Good food being wasted? She’d slap you.”

Jean’s stomach twists as he thinks of all the people who will never get to eat again. When he swallows, his throat constricts with a sharp pain like burning. “You’re right.”

“That’s not something I hear every day.”

“You think country folk will find you more learned?”

“Sasha never did.”

“If Sasha is the standard, though…”

Connie fumbles for a pillow and smacks Jean across the face with it. Time was, Jean would have hit him back, but right now all he can find the energy to do is bat it off and resume his study of the canopy. I could’ve had this, he thinks distantly. It’s not bitter. He can’t regret what they’d tried to do. But the fact remains that if he had simply stood with Floch, maybe Hange would still be alive, and he wouldn’t be facing a life in exile as the best possible outcome.

If you’d told him five years ago that he wouldn’t regret the choices that led to him facing a future of living disgraced in the woods while fucking Eren was the one living in the palace, running the fucking world, he’d have laughed in your face. He’d thought himself the better man between them, and maybe he’d been wrong, then. Maybe not, though. Jean can trace the path from the skeletal face of the Founder back to the flashing eyes and chubby cheeks of that twelve-year-old kid in the dining hall. That rage that had been almost funny when they were boys is now just frightening. 

It’s not fair, but life never is. And Jean can’t regret who he’s become.

“She’d want us to go,” he tells the stupid golden-brown fish-scale canopy. “She would say it’s good for us, even.”

“Think she’d be right,” Connie says. “Soft city boy like you? Country oughta toughen you right up.”

“What about me?” Armin asks, a hint of a smile in his voice.

Connie hisses. “You? Yooooou might get eaten alive. Then again, I’m pretty sure Annie could do that on her own—I mean, not literally, anymore—”

“Yes,” Armin says, “thank you, Connie.”

“I think you’ll like it,” he says sincerely. “It’s pretty out there. Plenty of squirrels for you to feed. I mean, you’ll have to eat them, too, but…”

Dry as tinder, Armin says, “I’ve eaten worse.”

Connie cackles, but it turns into a yawn halfway through. “You sure have. So. You gonna talk about country life with the missus?”

Armin yawns as well, which sets Jean off. “I will. If Reiner is already going, then I think she’ll want to. He’s the closest thing to family she’s got.”

“I didn’t think she even liked him all that much,” Jean says. 

“I don’t know that she does? But that doesn’t mean he’s not one of the only people she’s got left.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a conversation to have, then,” Jean says. “Think she’s out of the bath?”

Connie says, “Think she wants company?”

Armin rolls his eyes. “We have like, ten broken bones between us. And neither of us have had a proper night’s sleep in over a week. We’re not gonna do anything except nap. ”

“Certainly not with that attitude you’re not.”

Calmly, Armin takes the pillow and whacks Connie across the face with it. Connie sputters while Armin asks, “Can you stop with the jokes?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. Connie grimaces and tries to turn it into a smile. “I don’t mean to make fun. I really do… I think it’s great that you’ve got each other, man. I really do.”

Armin blows out a breath. “Yeah,” he says. “So do I.”

He swings off the bed, hissing as contact with the floor jolts his bruises. “Ouch. Okay,” he says. Jean lifts his head, wincing as his shoulder shrieks in agony, but he sees the way Armin’s eyes are drooping. “You know where to find me. For real this time, though, if you wake me for anything other than a second apocalypse, I’ll sic Annie on you.”

Connie groans and pushes himself up, too. “Even that’s too much,” he says. “Like we accomplished anything against the last one. Look where it fucking got us.”

“Yeah,” Jean says, turning back to the canopy: a glimpse of luxury that he’s never going to see again. “Look at us now.”

***

Eren doesn’t think he’s had a good night’s sleep in four years. 

He’s had nightmares since he was ten. Bertholdt’s face, and Dina’s. His mother’s. He was able to have peaceful nights, though, sometimes. Especially once he and Mikasa and Armin were out of the refugee camps and into the security of the army. But in the years after the medal ceremony, Eren can’t recall a night where he hasn’t been haunted by some ghost or another—most of them just himself. What he’d done and what he would do. His father’s sins and terrors and even the Owl’s, and his own. Faye. Zeke. His mom. The Reiss children, the crunch of bones and wet pop of their bodies. 

And now—

He could almost laugh, into the darkness of this grand bedroom. What horror isn’t in his head?

The chapel. The Rumbling. The desert. Ymir’s hellish life and the hell she’d faced after. Ramzi’s face as he died, clinging to the hand of his dead baby brother. The Eldians not on Paradis—he’d felt each and every one of their Paths sever as their lives were stomped out, as their screams cut off so suddenly, the chorus of crowds not drown out by the footsteps until near the end. The slow tilt of scales from thousands of people screaming, to hundreds, to dozens, until it was back to just the march—and then it’d start again, when they came across a new mass of fleeing families and strangers, pushing each other forward and shoving each other down and pulling each other up and passing their children along in the vain, vain hope that there was any salvation ahead.

Until there were no more crowds left. 

Eren feels himself tightening, coiling like a cornered snake. He stands up from the blue and gold upholstered chair he’d dragged away from the desk to the side of Mikasa’s bed and paces to the fireplace. His breath is coming unevenly, and he has to move. Especially since Mikasa hasn’t, yet. 

The ornate clock on the mantle of the fireplace reads half-past eleven. Eren hasn’t slept in something like forty hours, if you count the state he’d been in for the Rumbling as sleeping, which he isn’t sure he can. He’d broken himself into pieces that he hadn’t thought he’d have to put back together. He’d been aware of the slaughter, and he’d given Ymir what she needed, his friends what he’d thought they would want, and he’d selfishly made a little home for himself, hiding by pretending he was hiding. 

But if he closed his eyes now, he wouldn’t see that little cabin he’d dreamt he built. He wouldn’t hear birdsong and a distant waterfall; feel clean air against his bare neck; smell wet earth and spring vegetables and wildflowers, the soap he’d dreamt Mikasa’d made. 

Thinking of that world makes his head hurt. It cost him to build it, the foreign power of the Founder, and Mikasa had never even really entered it with him, which made it almost pointless—but there’d never come a point where it was possible. Safe, even. He’d been waiting for the end to begin before dragging her in to really dream of peace, but by the time he realized the end wasn’t coming, it was already over.

As best he can figure, he’d spent days in a single hour in that dream. He fished in the river, caught something big enough to feed them both for lunch and supper. He walked back to their house and set the fish down on the picnic table, still strewn with their dishes from breakfast. As he set to work scaling and gutting it, getting his hands all dirty, he’d just… he’d known he was waiting for Mikasa, on every level. In the dream, he’d known she wasn’t with him yet; had known both that he was the only one actually, actually there, and known that she was just inside the house, taking a midday nap after a night of little sleep. 

He has memories, months’, maybe years’ worth of memories of her. But they’re… fuzzy. He can’t remember what she hadn’t said to him on the outskirts of the refugee camp. He knows her hair had been longer, but he doesn’t know if it’d been past her chin or short of it. He remembers exactly what the inside of that cabin had looked like, down to the shine of the copper cookware in the sunlight and the patterns of the quilt on their bed, but he doesn’t know where Mikasa had preferred to sit while she sewed. 

He knows that he’d spent the nights in her arms, there, and slept peacefully. He knows he can’t do that here.

Eren bends suddenly, almost lunging for the stack of neatly-cut bits of wood and throws one onto the fire. By their picnic table, there’d been scattered bits of firewood, and a stack against the side of that house, but he doesn’t remember which of them had cut it. (Neither of them actually had.) 

The fire catches the log and lights it up, making the room brighter for just a moment before it settles. Sparks drift up into the chimney shoot, swirling merrily, and Eren slams the wire gate shut. The screech and the bang and the rattle are all loud, in the stuffy quiet of the room; far louder than the crackle of the fire or the constant drone of the rain. Before the sound has even died, Eren is halfway across the room back to Mikasa, hoping that the sound caused her to stir, but there’s no change on her face.

She looks better than she had earlier, at least. Two nurses had washed her some, and swapped out her filthy clothes for a shapeless white dress. Levi’d gotten the same treatment, which had weirded Eren out but the nurses had looked at him like he was an idiot when he’d asked. So the fact that she’s not filthy anymore makes her look less—dire. Less like a battlefield casualty. She’s curled onto her side, both hands in loose fists near her chest, relaxed. And she’s regained much of her color, in her lips and cheeks. There’s no way to accurately guess how much blood she’d lost, but the doctor had said that it must have been a dangerous amount for her to still be out. 

But nothing else is wrong with her, he reminds himself. She is going to wake up. It’s just—fuck, her body must be—realigning itself. It’s only her and Levi who’re passed out, so it must be something about their Ackerman powers. There had been a few times when Eren had come out of his Titan, back when Hange—God, Hange—was experimenting with him, when he’d crashed for days. This is just the same as that. She’ll wake up and she’ll be fine, because she has to be.

God—

The wind shrieks against the huge window on the westward wall, making it shudder. Eren’s head shrieks; and he’s back in the darkness of the desert, the darkness of the cabin, the darkness of his fucking mouth. He needs to fucking sleep, but he can’t—

Eren crumples back into his chair, clutching his head. He leans his elbows against the bed, which is soft and twice the size of their bed in the cabin. The bedspread is dark blue, criss-crossed with gold, like most everything in the goddamn room. He hates it, really. It’s flashy and loud and all the goddamn gold—fucking—leaf, spiral things on the walls, are glimmering slightly in the firelight. Which probably isn’t helping his headache. 

“I’ll fix the fucking room,” he moans, pressing his fingers to his temples. “Or we can go somewhere else, I just couldn’t think where… I have to make it safe for you. For all of you, so I have to be here, for now, at least, but I promise I’ll fix the fucking room.” 

He flattens his hands against his face, digging his nails into his scalp. Mikasa’s always kept her room tidy and spartan, from the time they were kids. Even his half of the room she’d insisted on straightening up, neatly packing away his toys and making his bed. She’d always brought in flowers, too, and there’d been a slowly-growing collection of handmade dolls on her bed, always arranged neatly. She probably won’t hate this room as much as he does—when has she ever hated anything as much as him, when has anyone—but still. She’s always liked things cozy. 

“Our house was better.” He swallows and takes his hands out of his hair, folding them on the covers. They’re heavy, but soft. The golden threads are in patterns of leaves and flowers, but they’re too grand. “It was…” He struggles to find what he means to say. “I don’t know. It was for us, in a way this isn’t. This isn’t a home, and our house was, it was… I mean, it was warm.”

Something about that makes him want to cry. Eren takes a deep breath. Useless crybaby, a voice in his head says. Himself, Hannes, Historia, and others, others, others. He closes his eyes, and he sees the little bedroom with the big bed that he’d dreamed about knowing. A red blanket and a fat patchwork quilt. The quilt had been so pretty. A childish, geometric depiction of a sun setting behind a mountain, and then rising, and then the moon. Two great birds had flown in a blue sky above the three images, and rest was all trees and stars. It’d been soft, and colorful, and warm. 

He sniffs, like a child, and bows his head. “Everything was warm there.” His voice is like sandpaper. “It wasn’t even real, it was hollow, but I was imagining you, and waiting for you, and I was so sure that any moment, you were going to walk out of the house and—” 

He can’t tell her where he thought it would go from there. That’s not fair. “But you didn’t. I knew you were inside. Taking a nap. And I didn’t want to wake you.” His hand lifts toward her head, aching to trace the line of her brow, the slope of her cheek. He doesn’t. He doesn’t have that right, here. “So I was just outside. Taking care of things. I was gutting a fish, Mikasa, isn’t that dumb? Scaling it and all. I don’t even know how to do that. I had to borrow someone else’s memories.” When he looks at his hands, he sees the odd slime that coats the insides of fish, vomit-green scales that glint with gold in the low light—and when he flips them over, it all turns to blood. Thicker than is reasonable, and it’s not actually there, but—oh, it is, it is. 

He rips his hands away from Mikasa before any of it can drip onto her. He can’t let any of it stain her. 

If it does—

The thought lands; shatters. Goes skittering in different directions. 

I can’t let it. I already failed her, in so many ways, more than I’ll ever be able to explain or understand—  

I can’t touch her with bloody hands — how can I ever expect to touch her again—

If it touches her, then that’s it—

In the back of his head, the most feral, desperate part of himself hisses, it’s on her hands, too, and Eren drowns the thought but it won’t die. 

If it touches her, a louder, more frantic part of himself thinks, and the rest of that thought follows:

“The thing is,” he breathes out. His voice is shaking too much, but there’s no point in buffing it up. She can’t hear him. If it touches her, that’s it. And he just can’t shake the terror that’s gripped him since everything ended. He’s convinced that if proof of his crime touches her, then the sentence he was—spared? denied?—will vanish entirely, and a harsher punishment will fall upon him. “I think this is my fault, Mikasa. I mean, I know it’s my fault, but—I’d never hurt you, my love, never, never, and I put you in the position to be hurt but I didn’t do it, I’d never—I mean that you’re still sleeping.” 

He closes his bloody hand into a fist and scrubs it across his face, under one eye and then the other, trying to push back tears. He doesn’t deserve to cry before her, he can’t make her bear that burden. When he exhales, his whole body shudders, and it doesn’t stop. He just keeps shivering like some wild, damaged thing, and he has to dig his knuckles into his eyes to stop from reaching out to her. He needs grounding, and she’s the only thing that can keep him tethered to the earth, but he can’t touch her right now. 

Eren doesn’t believe in high powers. How could he? But there is such a thing as fate, and he knows that ‘cause he’s fucked around with it plenty. What he’d done to his father and himself, what he’s done for Ymir; what she’d done to him—and he knows that he and Mikasa are tied together. He’d done that even before Ymir had taken notice of them. When he tied her kitchen knife to a broomstick with the shoelace he’d pulled from the boot on her father’s corpse, he’d tied them together and sealed them with blood. And Eren was supposed to die.

So maybe something is still waiting for its pound of flesh, and maybe it wants her. 

Eren won’t let that happen. There’s such a thing as fate, and he proved that he can bend it to his will, and that he can escape its claws. He can rip his thumbs out of manacles and burrow his way out of a cell. He can live. He has never let anything stand in his way, and he won’t now, and—and—and there’s every chance he’s just making this up ‘cause he’s scared. It wouldn’t be the first time. 

He groans, pressing his forehead into the edge of the bed. “I need you to wake up,” he mumbles. He’s still shaking. “I’ve really got to talk to you, Mikasa.”

He wonders, head swimming, if he would be able to force her out of it. He’d done something to Armin, at the very beginning there. He’s not sure what or how, but he’d—done something. He hadn’t meant to, but it’s hardly the worst thing he’s ever done, even the worst thing he hadn’t meant to do. 

Bertholdt’s panicked little face but he turns away, and—

Eren whimpers. Nobody else knows about that, now. Ymir had watched him do it, wide-eyed, and she’s gone. He’d told Armin and been granted something like understanding, but Armin’s forgotten, and anyway had no right to absolve him of that. If anyone alive could forgive that, it would be Mikasa. 

If he could get her to wake, would she forgive him for that? For anything? For what he’d said?

He’ll have the chance to apologize, at least. No matter what happens, no matter if she never wants to see him again, he’ll be able to tell her that he’s sorry, that he hadn’t meant it. That he loves her. And he will. He owes her that much and more. And… and he’s alive. He’s going to live; doesn’t see why the curse would be here anymore. He’s alive, and he’s going to live, and they’re not at war. No excuses now, he thinks dryly. Be a fucking man about it. 

And that—that’s a nice thought. 

The rain is really loud. He can hear Mikasa’s breathing, though. It’s only gotten steadier over the hours; it sounds like she’s actually just sleeping. 

He pulls away from the bed, and the low light of the fire across the room is enough to see that there’s no blood on the covers. Of course there isn’t. So it’s safe, then, when he takes her hand again, fingertips resting on her pulse. 

Her heartbeat is steady, and there’s color in her lips. She’s tucked under the covers— warm, he’s sure—and curled onto her side, towards him. Her bangs are swaying over her nose. 

The sight of her really does soothe his headache. He swallows, leaning back against the chair, and tries to match his breathing to hers. He doesn’t try to count sheep or think happy thoughts. He focuses on the way the weak glow of the fire touches her face gently, and on keeping their breathing in synch. 

Eventually, his eyes slide shut. 

In his dreams, everything bleeds. 

***

The grass is green and the mountains are grey.

Her limbs feel like they’re made of ivory—heavy and fragile at the same time. She feels fuzzy; hazy. There’s an ache probing at her temples, and something in her stomach is twisting slowly. She hurts, in a sort of removed way, like the pain is separate from her body. She wants… something. Her mother, maybe, or Auntie Carla. She wants someone to hold her and make her feel better. Curled on her side, snuggled into a warm nest of blankets, she wishes she could fall into the comforting embrace of sleep, cooing to her just out of reach. But even if she could find the energy to turn her face into the soft, sweet-smelling pillow and block out the overbright sky, the birds would make it too loud to return to the peace of sleep. 

Hundreds, thousands of birds are crying overhead. As Mikasa stares, eyes half-lidded, out the window, the sky is dark with them, blue-white light piercing through fleeting gaps. They fly furiously, all headed in one direction. She can’t know which. She can’t see the sun, and she doesn’t recognize the mountains. They seem too tall, too jagged; like a shattered ribcage jutting out from the earth. 

Something scratches, sharp, at the back of her skull. She doesn’t know what, but the absence makes her feel small. 

Stranger in a strange land, she thinks faintly. I should not be here. 

Mikasa doesn’t move, as she watches the scene outside her window. She’s too exhausted to even try, for one, and for another, she… doesn’t want them to see her. The looming mountains, stark grey against the ice-blue sky, feel threatening; the birds in their mad frenzy… she half-fears they might devour her. 

She hasn’t been still like this since she was a little girl. She thinks of the fawns she used to spot with her father, curled under the cover of bushes and tangled wildflowers, their only defense their invisibility.

The window is six panes in two threes, set into a wall made of sturdy logs, like her home with her parents had been. The bed she’s tucked into is soft, cradling her like something precious. She’s warm and weary and she doesn’t want to move, and this place doesn’t want her to, either. Below the chaos in the sky, before the darkness of the wall of mountains, lies a stretch of green grass, wildflowers dotting every once in a while. Sunrise-reds and daylight-yellows, and clumps of violet bellflowers that go all the way to the base of those gunmetal-grey mountains. They seem to curve towards her. 

Stranger in a strange land. They are very much not the mountains she knew in her childhood. I should not be here. 

The soft, whip-fast drone of thousands of wingbeats and discordant cacophony of shrieking birds seems to go on forever. Mikasa watches them race overhead, frantic, singing and squawking, for a small eternity. The buzzing undercurrent gets into her bones after a while, another strange sort of almost-pain; it echoes in the hollowness inside her. The birds go on as if pulled on a reel, until eventually they begin to thin. Slow at first, just more gaps in the black mass of them, but very soon she’s watching the very last of them retreat, the unified flock soaring over the too-close ridge of mountains together. The last of them are so small they must be simple songbirds, but they, she notes, are silent. 

Yet the thrumming inside her does not stop. 

The warmth surrounding her intensifies, and the base-boom sound grows louder. The cold blue of the sky is empty now, and the mountains look that much sharper against it. The sun is still missing—where is the sun?—but the sky gets ever brighter, until the blue is overtaken by white. 

And then, slowly, it turns to red. 

The thrumming is close enough now that she hears it for what it is. Pounding footsteps. An army on the march. 

The twisting in her stomach grows rougher. Dread grows inside her, dread and fear and guilt and shame, but still she does not move. Can’t. But even when the army has come so close that the world outside her window seems to be coming apart, the grass blowing flat, trees shaking like a rattle in a baby’s fist, not a hair on her head is touched. Her bed doesn’t so much as tremble. Even when the grass begins to burn so that she’s staring at a field of fire, all she feels is a soothing warmth, like afternoon sunlight. 

Before she can see the exposed flesh of his soldiers, Mikasa closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to watch. 

Inside this unfamiliar bed, the uneven rhythm of the march sounds like an ugly lullaby.  

Chapter Text

Better creatures could love you, I know. 

But now they’ll have to get through me. 

***

Through the bitingly cold ironwork and the glass, smooth but uneven, Eren watches daylight try to bleed through the clouds. Dawn has come and gone, the sun has taken its place in the sky, but grey rainclouds still hang heavy in the air. The downpour has gentled into a slightly softer patter, but nature hasn’t yet settled after what he did to it. 

It hasn’t thundered, not once since they hit the storm in the Seradskoye Sea, which Eren still wants to find strange. He’s used to heavy rainfall being accompanied by lightning and its echo, but that’s not what these storms are. They’re a regular summer phenomenon on the western shore of Marley’s landmass. Eren—Grisha, and Eren through him—remembers hearing about them a few times as a child—but they normally form in the middle of the oceans and blow westward. The continent has always shielded Paradis from them until now. But these storms didn’t form in the middle of the ocean; they formed here, when Eren released half a million giants each burning hot enough to boil water three times over. 

And no thunder.

Eren likes thunder. It breaks up the monotony of the drone. His mom used to tell him that it was the sound of angels rolling down the hills in heaven. She’d told Mikasa that, too, though it hadn’t done much to comfort her. Before Maria fell—its gate, anyway—she’d always spent thunderstorms pressing her head into his shoulder, face scrunched in that way of hers that he’s always found so fascinating. She’d clutch his sleeve and bite back whimpers when the sound came. Eren remembers how he’d felt proud to the point of bursting —paint her and the walls red with viscera— for being her point of safety. 

He can’t decide if that’s fitting or ironic, now.

He’s trailing his fingers along the edges of the iron diamonds when the door creaks open. Eren tears himself off the wall, about to lurch forward—but it’s just the same two nurses from yesterday. He relaxes, some. 

“Good morning, sir,” one whispers, seeing that Mikasa’s still asleep. Which is fine. Eren—his heart kicks unhappily—she’s going to tell him why it’s perfectly normal that she’s still asleep; expected, encouraged, even. “You’re looking better.”

He grunts, shoving a hand into his loose hair. The double-vision headache he’d felt while brushing it here, in this room, not even very much like Frieda’s but closer to it than anywhere else he’d even been, had been so disorienting that he’d abandoned the effort entirely. He had scrubbed the grime and seasalt off himself though, and stepped into one of the outfits left in the adjoining red-and-gold room to this one. It’s from last year, and his shirt and for some reason his shoes feel too small. Floch’d said something about having new clothes made, and Eren admits there’s a point in that. 

They both come in, and Eren drifts back over to the bed. The nurse who’d spoken, a woman with a lined face and greying pale hair, hums as she makes it in, eyeing the roaring fire. “Nice and toasty in here,” she comments. 

Eren bites the inside of his cheek. “That’s okay, right? She’s always run cold and been prone to colds, and we got soaked a couple times, so I—”

“It’s all very well, sir,” she assures. She marches over, leaving her companion and the cart she’s pushing by a random table—a card table, his memory offers. When she comes to stand next to him, over Mikasa’s limp body, Eren becomes very aware of all of his skin, every movement everyone makes. She reaches out towards the bedspread, and Eren—doesn’t quite think before he reacts, catching her wrist and turning it away from its target. 

She doesn’t gasp, to her credit. Just looks up at him with wariness and says, “I need to check her, sir. I’m going to have to touch her.”

Eren knows that, he knows that, but it’s still an effort to release her. 

He hovers, as she peels back the covers. That stupid blue-and-gold blanket; it would be better suited as a curtain. Mikasa is still curled onto her side, and the nightgown has ridden up to her knees, leaving her calf and the miles of bandages wrapped around it perfectly visible. The sight makes Eren dizzy. 

I didn’t do that, he reminds himself, sickness swooping in his gut. That wasn’t me, that wasn’t me, that wasn’t me. He’d gotten an echo of what Ymir had felt when she did it, and then after. She’d been so scared that he would be mad at her for it, and… she wasn’t entirely wrong to be. He can’t pretend he doesn’t understand, lashing out like that against Mikasa, but her targeting her so specifically… he hasn’t forgiven it, but… But she’s gone now, and it’s harder to be angry at someone who’s dead. 

“Sir,” the nurse says, all business now, “I won’t be able to do this properly unless you give me space. Greta there has breakfast for you.”

Eren looks over at the cart, which does have, aside from medical supplies, a large tray of what looks to be mostly eggs, sausage, and apfelkuchen, which the other nurse lays on the table. The other nurse—Greta, she said—pushes the rest of the cart over, very clearly trying to butt him out of the way. Reluctantly, Eren steps back. He’s aware that he’s being handled, but he really ought to let them tend to her. Greta puts a pitcher of water on the bedside table, next to where Eren had laid Mikasa’s scarf, fearing that she’d overheat in the night. He backs up to the table and grabs a link of goetta, downing half of it in a single bite, eyes still fixed on the bed. 

The first nurse takes a pair of scissors and slides them under the first layer of bandages. She cuts through them with a practiced hand and peels them off, handing them to Greta. The second layer comes off as well, as a thick white towel is placed under her leg. So blood doesn’t stain the sheets, Eren realizes, and his heart twists. 

“Sir,” the nurse says, turning back to him. “Commander Forster is ready when you are. He’s been marching around since dawn, but he didn’t want to wake you.”

“I’ve been up since dawn, too,” Eren says. He bites the inside of his cheek again; tastes blood. “I don’t want to leave her if she’s gonna—what’s, what’s, what’s going on, with her? Is it okay that she’s asleep?”

“She’s very stable, sir,” she says patiently. She’s not even looking at him; she’s entirely focused on the now-exposed gash on her leg, which—is—

Eren pales looking at it. There’s too much red. And it’s—bleeding, it’s bleeding, it’s started bleeding again, blood trickling from three different places, and—

Not-Greta tuts, then gives a short nod. “Stitches it is, then,” she says lightly. “Greta, dear—”

Greta is already holding a tiny, curved needle in a candle. Neither one of them seem nearly as alarmed as they should be. 

“She’s bleeding,” Eren points out loudly, then begins marching over. “Hey. She’s—”

“Eren Jaeger, sir,” Greta says, looking at him with stern eyes. “She’s perfectly fine. She didn’t start bleeding until the bandages were removed; that just tells us we need to sew up the wound. It’s nothing,” she stresses, “to be alarmed about.” 

“She’s not healing up on her own, then?” he asks. His nails are biting into his palms. “Why didn’t you put stitches in yesterday? She—”

“Yesterday we sanitized it and let it rest,” she says. “It was days old at that point, and she was hardly going to reopen it. There was no reason to do so. We don’t want to put any more stress on her.”

“But it’s okay now?!” 

“Sir,” Not-Greta says, sharp. “Your distractions aren’t going to be of any use to anybody.” She opens her hand for the needle, now threaded. She places the tip against the ragged edge of the cut, which is slippery with blood by now, and pushes it in. At the foot of the bed, Eren grips the carved spruce post that supports the canopy. The arched shape of the needle glides through her skin and comes out on the opposite side. She pulls, and the skin winches together. 

Eren has so many memories of Grisha doing this exact same thing. If things were different—very, very different—he’d have likely grown to be a doctor himself. And more than a doctor, he’s been a soldier, in battle against everything from the visceral horror of Titans eating his classmates alive to the men in his Eldian unit trying to cross no-man’s-land, holding in intestines that’d been ripped out by artillery. He cut his own leg off and drove a bullet through his eye. Blood hasn’t phased him from the day he was born, and at this point, it’s nearly comforting in its familiarity. 

But Mikasa isn’t meant to be this fragile. 

She shouldn’t be lying silent while a stranger works a needle through her skin. She shouldn’t need stitches at all; Eren doesn’t think she’d ever even skinned her knees when they were kids. He can count on his fingers the number of times he’s seen her hurt. She shouldn’t—she shouldn’t— “Be gentle,” he snaps, when Not-Greta pulls the needle through again. She sighs and pulls the thread tight, narrowing the dark red line of the wound. “Be—”

“Sir,” Greta says. She turns to him with a tight smile. “I think it would be better for everyone if you saw what business Commander Forster had for you.”

“But—”

“I’m afraid I’m going to insist,” she says. “You’re only going to delay and distract us. If you’d rather wait outside…”

Eren grits his teeth. Fine. Fine. He’s always had the weight of the world to deal with, why should now be any different? There’s always been fucking something he had to do other than hover over Mikasa. 

He leaves, grabbing another sausage on his way out, and slams the door behind him. 

The sound draws the attention of two men at the mouth of the corridor. Both are in the black anti-personnel maneuvering gear; both have rifles in their hands. Mother fuck ing God, Eren thinks, angrily chewing. Another thing I’ve got to—from there his thoughts spiral into a prickly tangle of annoyance, and he marches over to them and asks, “What are you doing here?”

Both of them stood at attention and saluted as soon as they saw him storming over; now their expressions are some mix of awe, joy, and fear. Eren’s own sours. He raises his eyebrows at their silence, and the one on the right yelps, “Sir! We were ordered to stand guard at the end of this hallway sir! Since yourself and—” he falters, tripping over the word. “Since this wing needed guarding.”

“Right,” Eren says. Inhale. Exhale. “Where’s Floch?”

“Oh,” the kid says. He can’t be older than sixteen. “I’ll go get him, sir! Uh, by your leave, sir—”

“Just go.”

He punches his fist against his heart again, turns on his heel, and scurries off around the corner. Eren fixes his glare on the remaining one. He’s older, early thirties maybe. Eren briefly wonders if someone set up a sort of buddy system: cadets with their enthusiasm and old brass with their experience to keep each other in check.

“Sir,” the man says cautiously. “Is there anything I can—”

“Give me that gun,” Eren snaps. Blinking, the man does; Eren takes it and turns it over. The fucking safety is off, Eren notes, head swimming. He’s expecting to use it. His breathing goes shaky. Does he think he’s going to have to use it for Mikasa and Armin and everyone else, or on them? 

Eren clicks the safety on and opens the lever. A bullet falls out, and when he tips it down, five more follow, hitting the floor with little plinks. He closes the lever and shoves the body of the rifle back into the soldier’s chest. With a ragged breath, Eren says, “Go be somewhere else.”

“Sir…”

“Just fucking find somewhere,” he says lowly. “I can guard them. Go.”

Whatever he sees on Eren’s face is enough to make him salute clumsily and back away, leaving from the opposite direction that the kid went. Both sides are open, Eren notes. That actually works out just fine. If it comes to it, he can block both ends of the hallway with the War Hammer—or whatever it is now—and use just one to shepherd the others through.

He can protect them all. As long as he keeps his eyes on them. 

Eren steps out of the wing of bedrooms to see what he hadn’t paid much attention to last night. They’re firmly in the residential wing of the palace; on a landing that wraps around a gallery two stories below. The dark wood of the railing matches the walls, carved into decorative arches where they’re not laden with artwork. Paintings and portraits hang all over; a few statues are scattered across the floor. The creamy couches and chairs are draped with quilts and furs and patterned silks and covered with throw pillows. Above the blazing fireplace, there’s a likeness of Karl XI. Eren would kind of like to see it burned. 

From his position above it all, Eren can see two figures enter by a door in the corner. Floch and the kid. The kid points him out, and Floch nods, claps him on the shoulder, and begins making his way toward him. The kid salutes them both, turning on his heels, and then backs out and closes the door. 

It’s clear that Floch struggles a bit with the stairs, still lagged down by the shot to the chest. The room does have ridiculously high ceilings—probably seventeen meters. Why anyone would ever need this many paintings and tapestries, Eren cannot fathom. He slouches into an arch and waits.

Floch is more than a little out of breath when he says, “Eren. You’re looking much better. You slept well, then?”

Eren scoffs. Ha. “I got a few hours, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, that’s a start. And you’re… put together.” He eyes him up and down, then sniffs imperiously. “I knew we’d have to get new clothes made for you. It works for now, though. You’re not making any speeches yet.”

Or ever, if I can help it. Which he doubts he’ll be able to manage. “The nurses said you had something to talk to me about?”

“Mm,” he hums. “A few things. Most pressingly: Artur Braus arrived in Mitras just an hour ago.”

Eren’s eyes go wide. “Seriously?”

“Our messenger road through the night to Daupur, and Braus just saddled rested horse for them and turned right around. Poor Katz was on horseback for seven hours.”

I’ll give them this, Eren thinks, they’re a driven bunch. 

Which, of course, only makes them more dangerous. 

“I sent Lambert—the cadet who was up here—to go fetch him. He’s been waiting in an audience room; he wants to take the children and leave as soon as he can.”

Eren nods. That shouldn’t make him feel so… he shouldn’t fear the idea as much as he does. But getting everyone out as soon as possible, especially the Marleyans, is a priority. His only priority, as of now. Making sure they’re safe. “All of them.” he reminds Floch. “Any of them who want it.”

“Eren…”

“It’s a good solution,” he insists. “I’ll—it’s like, out of sight, out of mind. This is going to be good for everyone.”

Floch heaves a long sigh. “I’m glad to hear you say that, at least. We’ll make it work. Do you want help convincing him to take in an additional eight people, knowing it’ll put targets on the backs of him and his family?”

Eren looks at him incredulously. “Not from you. You wanted to throw the kids off the airship.”

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll go when he gets here. For the rest of the day, I’d planned to head out to Ehrmich. I’ve been inspecting all the outlying districts, since they were the most heavily impacted by the Walls coming down, and it’s next on the list. I was actually going to head out by ten, unless you want to come with me?”

Eren blinks. “No.”

“Then I’ll be back in the afternoon. If you’re feeling up to it,” Floch says, “I figured we could sit down and flesh some things out. Until now we’ve been operating without much of a chain of command since I wasn’t sure how you’d like to establish things. And the major issues we’re facing, for now, are mostly public health and infrastructure. Though there is the question of how we want to reorganize the distribution of iceburst crystal, since weapons development…” His mouth ticks into a smile. “Has been lowered on the list of priorities.”

Eren’s stomach sinks; a lead weight settling in his gut. “Mm,” is all he can say. He’s glad all he’s had is the two sausages. He wonders: if the fucking pigs Ymir freed had been slaughtered before she took the chance, would he be in this mess now? 

Probably.

The same door swings open, and there stand Artur and the kid. 

Eren has met Artur Braus a few times. The few days when parents were allowed to visit their children in the cadet corps, he’d seen him or spoken to him briefly. A few more times when they were older and he came to visit Sasha; usually bumping into him when he was hunting for Mikasa. Last year, Sasha had invited them all to celebrate Modranicht at her house. He’d met her parents again, and her four adoptive siblings. Been strong-armed into a piggy-back race with one of the boys on his back. Sasha’d taken Kaya, Jean had Irina, and Mikasa had the other boy. She’d won, obviously, and he can recall with perfect clarity the way she’d smiled at the grinning kid, long hair brushing her shoulders. He can recall the hot spike of pain in his chest that the sight had elicited. Eren pushes off the wall and stands up straight, watching him intensely. The kid steps out and shuts the door, and Mr. Braus starts walking toward the stairs.

Floch clasps Eren’s bicep. Lowly, he says, “You need to make sure he understands what this is going to mean for his family if he chooses to do it.”

“He’ll understand,” Eren says, staring at him. “Go. Give me, like, a list of things to look over while you’re gone.”

“I’ll have it sent to your rooms,” he says. “And if you need anyone, I’d speak to Surma; he’s been in charge of the 109th. Or Brzenka, she’s been very useful.”

Eren glances at him incredulously. “Rico?” he hisses. “With gray hair?”

“It’s definitely blonde, but yes. I think you know her; she told me she was with you in Trost when you closed the gate.”

“Yeah.” Eren hadn’t realized she was… still alive. All he really remembers of her is that she’d kept calling Mikasa his girlfriend. “Alright. Bye.”

Floch snorts quietly. “See you this afternoon.” He gives a light salute and turns away, walking down the opposite staircase to avoid Mr. Braus. It means he and his injury are going the long way, which Eren enjoys. He’s on the first landing when Mr. Braus draws to a stop in front of Eren. 

The sight of Artur Braus now reminds him of the pain he’d felt watching Mikasa playing with a little kid. Sasha’s father has aged visibly since Modranicht, hair greying at the temples and new lines around his mouth. Grief, grief, grief. His hat is in his hands, clutched tight; his whole frame tense with anxiety as he makes his way to the stairs.

There’s silence for a long moment, and then he rasps, with that thick drawl, “He said you’ve got Mia ‘n Ben?”

Eren blinks, and then nods. “Yeah. They need somewhere to go, now, since—”

“Since their parents were killed,” he finishes. He scans him up and down, and Eren feels about two inches tall. 

“Yeah,” he says wearily. “Among other things.”

“Lisa an’ I’ll take them back, of course. We’ve been worried sick. And Kaya too. She and Mia got along real—real well. They bring out the best in each other. Like sisters oughta.” His voice is choked. Eren wonders where he gets all that compassion. Sasha was his daughter. Eren’s blinding, burning fury for the death of his mother had been—

He wrenches his thoughts off that path before they can go any further. Taking a shaky breath, he says, “Well, the kids feel the same. They were very hopeful that you’d—”

“They’re alright?” he says. “Not hurt?”

Eren waves the notion aside. “They’re fine. Couple scrapes and bruises, but they’re fine.”

“We’d heard that Ben drank the wine, though, and he got—”

“He’s fine,” Eren says. “I’m sure he’ll fill you in.”

“Where are they, then? Can I see them?”

“Just in there,” Eren inclines his head to the wing of bedrooms behind him. “Might still be asleep. If you want to wake them—”

“No,” he says, “no, let them sleep. I’ll be here when they wake.”

“They’ll be glad of it.” Eren bites his lip. “And, I wanted to ask you—”

“Boy,” Artur says tiredly. “Do you think I’m inclined to do you any favors?”

“It’s not for me,” Eren swears. “The kids, you’re taking them—I wondered if you could take a few more people. I don’t know who all is going to want to go, but they need a place to stay. It’s not safe for them here.”

Artur eyes him cautiously. “These folks, they helped Ben and Mia try to stop you?”

“Yeah.”

He raises his brows. “And you’re protecting them?”

The desert flashes before his eyes, and the town. “Yeah.” 

The fire crackles into the silence. “Well,” Artur says eventually. “Big of you.”

Ha. “Mia’s— Gabi’s, you know her name is Gabi, right? Her older cousin. You’ve met Reiner and Annie. Their comrade, girl called Pieck, and… and maybe Connie and Jean. And Armin.”

Artur relaxes with the last three names. “Those good boys…” he says, shaking his head. A faint smile twitches his lips for a moment. “Of course we’ll take those boys. Them and Sasha were about joined by the hips. And the others, too. Any kin of Mia’s is ours, and that Annie was a polite thing.” 

Eren could use a lot of words to describe Annie, and he doubts that polite would be anywhere near the top. That’s not the main thing, though. “Thank you.” His hands are curled into nervous fists, the ragged edges of his nails biting into his palms. “You understand what that’s going to mean, right? I want them safe, and sending them away is the best I can do, but it’s going to mean that your whole family are—untouchables. I’m going to do what I can to keep all of you safe, but—”

“We can handle ourselves, boy,” he says. “We want nothin’ to do with your soldiers anyway.” He tilts his head to the side. “Soldiers are supposed to protect. My Sasha knew that, for a time. Then she got lost, and then she got buried.” When Artur looks him over, head to toe, he shakes his head. “Did you ever know that?”

Eren’s temper flares. His jaw works; his fingers itch. He knows that very well. The first time he ever drew blood was to save Mikasa—If you want to save Mikasa, Armin, and everyone else—You’re a man, aren’t you? Try protecting Mikasa!—If you want to save Mikasa, and Armin—You protected me—If you want to save Mikasa—and he’d had to. If he hadn’t killed those men, she would have—

Eren doesn’t care what came after that. If that was the moment that cemented things, if that was the moment that set him down the path he’s walked, the moment that the spark of bloodlust in him whipped into an inferno that would burn everything he ever touched, he’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. 

Try protecting Mikasa! His mother said. She said, Eren. No matter how cruel someone is, or how much you hate them, you can’t always charge at them head on! Show some restraint. 

Eren hadn’t charged head-on. He’d planned and plotted and conspired, and he had shown no restraint. 

“I know what I did,” he settles on eventually. “And I know why.” 

I wanted to, he thinks viciously. I wanted the world I saw in Armin’s book; I wanted to protect my home, and my friends. And I could, and I didn’t let anyone stop me—

But he would have. 

But Mikasa wasn’t able to. 

“I’m glad that you do,” Mr. Braus says, voice acid. “‘Cause I don’t think I’ll ever understand.”

“That,” Eren says, “was part of the point.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “If that’s all then, Mr. Braus, then maybe you want to sit down there,” he nods to the gallery, “and I’ll see if there’s any breakfast for you.”

***

By the time their wing of the palace has returned to stillness—the nurses gone, Artur settled in a grand armchair by the fire with his breakfast, a pair of fresh-faced cadets with an armful of papers for Eren to read marching back out to the greater palace—Eren is all too glad to all but run back to his room. He doesn’t need their wariness; his radiating, cold disdain; their wide-eyed awe. He doesn’t want it. 

(Not from them, a voice in his head spits.)

Eren clenches his jaw, grinds his palm into his temple, and ignores the thought.

The room his stuff is in is the adjoining one to Mikasa’s. Both bedrooms are bigger than the first floor of their house in Shiganshina had been; both have weird antechambers he doesn’t yet know the purpose of and private bathrooms off to the side. They’re connected by yet another antechamber that opens into a sort of sitting room that exists between them. Dark wood and white furniture. Looking into it for a brief moment early this morning, Eren had gotten a flash from someone, of a room something like that, full of children chasing each other and laughing. 

The hall he storms through is silent. He’s not sure if the walls are thick enough to mute all sound, or if everyone is still just dead quiet. 

He pushes open the door at the end of the hall. The chambers that lie within are largely a mirror of the room he’d put Mikasa in, only the fabrics are a dark red instead of royal blue. The huge four-poster bed in the back corner, the fireplace, the vanity, the massive windows with their crisscrossed ironwork, the smaller room off to the side for clothes. The walls are carved in arches, but along the westward wall, there’s gold metalwork in shapes like ferns and sculpted waves, just like what’s on her walls. No candles or fires are lit in here; the only light is the cloud-filtered daylight coming through the rain-smeared windows. 

Eren crosses to the writing desk near the vanity and wrenches open the drawer. He can’t make himself act like a governor or a general right now, not while the others are here. He thinks of the soldier with the safety off. 

The desk is the only thing in this room that he’s already touched. Lying innocently in the otherwise empty drawer, there they are. All folded into each other, smudged from fingerprints and ink bleed: five letters pulled from the inside pocket of his Eldian inpatient uniform. He’d put them there as he’d written them, unwilling to risk a caretaker or fellow patient finding them, and he’d just… not taken them out when he’s snuck away. He hadn’t been willing to. 

The back of the youngest one meets his gaze, guileless. He’d written it at dawn the day of Tybur’s announcement. His own heavy, hectic handwriting covers back and front, and in the margin of the hospital stationary, there’s a frantic little scribble of Mikasa from the day they docked in Marley. He remembers the feeling of being kicked in the fucking teeth when she came out of her and Sasha’s room dressed all in white—her pleated skirt that danced around her calves, the baby blue of her button-up shirt and the ribbon on her hat. Something blue, he’d thought then, dazed and aching. The rest of the old rhyme followed: and a sixpence in her shoe. 

A silver sixpence. An old superstition says they ward brides against evils done by frustrated suitors. 

Next to the blotted sketch of her face, it says, I don’t want to die. It says, There’s no way I won’t. I don’t deserve to live, and I don’t know what’ll do it in the end, but it has to be you. It just has—

He slams the door shut so forcefully the desk hits the wall and rattles. 

Eren braces his hands on the flat, polished wood, and hangs his head. He’s shaking again. He’s—that was—

Breathe, he thinks, breathe. Don’t think about that—

He can’t think about that right now. There isn’t anywhere safe for his friends, so he has to make a safe place. And then—and then—

Don’t think about it. 

Eren stumbles back, turns, and slumps against the wall. Does he want to die? He’d denied it in Liberio; he’d denied it to Armin, even after the Rumbling had begun. He’d planned on dying. Even if he hadn’t known, he had known. And by the time they caught up, he’d been waiting for Mikasa. This he knows for certain: he would have let her kill him. He’d been anticipating it. Longing for it—though that ache was tangled with the desire to pull her into his dream, and he quite can’t tell wanting her to kill him from wanting her with him.  

That was then. Now… 

He hadn’t healed. When it was over, Ymir had just ripped him out of the Paths and left him alone in the mouth of his Founder form. Coming back hadn’t been by any will of his own, and he’d been so out of his mind that he’d just gone running to Mikasa, following a path carved deep into his mind without even deciding to do it. 

“Don’t,” he hisses, digging his nails into his scalp, “think about it.” He has bigger problems than—

And that’s when the ground jolts. 

It’s sudden, and enough that he can’t mistake it for his own shaking. He freezes, going still, and… then the world begins to tremble. 

Eren braces his hands into the shallow divots of the arch he’s in. The ground jumps violently underneath, as if he’s on the stretched skin of Ramzi’s father’s drum, beating out an apala. The chandelier swings wildly, chains shrieking, hundreds of individual crystals vibrating to blurs. Across the room, the clock falls off the mantle, and the fire poker rattles out of its grip, clattering to the floor, clang lost in the deep, bone-shaking groan of the earth as it shifts underfoot. 

The windows bangbangbang against the ironwork. One of the chairs at the tea table is knocked onto its side. A small ceramic statue topples off a table on the opposite wall and shatters, its head bouncing across the wood and then rolling backforthbackforthbackforth, and then—

It’s over. 

Eren is tearing towards Mikasa’s room before the fire poker is laying flat. When he reaches the door that will open to their connecting chamber, it’s closed, and locked. A cursory glance doesn’t reveal the key, and these doors are thick enough to serve as a layer of defense against possible attacks. Breaking it down would take longer than going around. Cursing, everything loose still rocking, Eren whirls around and races out the main entrance to his room and into the hall. 

That eerie stillness is long gone now. Jean’s door bursts open as soon as Eren steps out; Reiner’s follows a second later, both of them with wild eyes and panic in their voices. Armin and Annie’s door is already open, and as Eren rushes towards Mikasa’s door, he sees Annie stumble out, looking faintly green. 

When he crashes into Mikasa’s room, Eren finds Armin already checking her over protectively, one hand on her cheek, the other bound in a sling. The light streaming through the still-quaking windows, bouncing off the still-rocking chandelier, is pale enough that it catches in Armin’s hair, in his eyes. He looks up after hearing the thud Eren made, and when he sees him, his expression sours. His body shifts, angling in front of Mikasa. 

Something dark twists in Eren’s stomach. 

Before he can do more than step forward and open his mouth, there’s a dull bang from down in the gallery, and several heavy sets of running footsteps. Eren grits his teeth, spits, “Watch her,” and steps back into the hallway. 

Everyone is out of their rooms, in various states of dress and distress. Connie is in full pajamas; Jean is hastily buttoning an ill-fitting blue shirt; Peick is back in the dress Scout uniform. Everyone is exclaiming, chattering, but Eren is most concerned about Reiner’s form sprinting around the corner and the notable absence of Gabi and Falco. And the shouting coming from the gallery. 

Eren spits out “Fuck,” and follows after them.

He rounds the corner to see Reiner and Falco on the first landing of the staircase; Reiner in a clean white shirt and khakis, holding onto a barefoot Falco in dark pants and a green pullover shirt. Gabi, frozen a few meters from the steps, is in a billowy white dress—the sort that all Paradisan little girls have somewhere in their wardrobe; the sort that Mikasa had been wearing the day Reiner kicked in Wall Maria—and she’s wearing Falco’s little blazer over it. 

She’s got her hands by her head though, face pale, eyes big and round and locked on the rifles pointed at her. 

Anger floods Eren’s system, already primed with adrenaline. “Stand down,” he shouts, and the five men with guns trained on Gabi glance away from her to meet Eren’s eyes. 

“Sir!” one says. Eren blows down the stairs, past Reiner and Falco, reaches Gabi, and shoves her toward Artur Braus, hovering a few meters away by a toppled statue, still rocking side-to-side. Gabi flinches back from his touch and scrambles the rest of the way over to Artur, grabbing his coat and pressing her cheek into it as Artur covers her head, her unbound hair bunching under his fingers. Two of the guns point away as soon as she touches a civilian. Three don’t.

“What,” Eren growls, “are you doing?”

“We came in to check, Sir, to make sure none of the prisoners had transformed or tried anything,” the one up front says, weathered face furrowed. He’s older, mid-thirties maybe; not a starry-eyed unblooded kid high off Eren’s power and promise. Eren thinks he might’ve been with them in Liberio; he’s wearing the formal Scout uniform where the others are in Garrison garb or the cadets’ cropped jackets. 

“They haven’t,” he snaps. 

“The Warrior candidate was making an attempt to escape,” he says, jerking his head at Gabi.

“I wasn’t,” she says, voice joining with Artur, Falco, and Reiner as they all protest that. She straightens, keeping one hand bunched in Mr. Braus’s flannel shirt, and says, “I just wanted—I just wanted to hug him.”

“Or,” the speaker says lowly—Suter, Schererr, something— “You wanted to kill him like you killed his daughter.”

“Now, hold on—” Mr. Braus says, just as Falco says, “That wasn’t her f—” and Reiner says, “Look at her, does she look like—” Gabi flinches as harshly as if she’d been struck. 

Eren flips his hand wildly to gesture at her. “She’s not hiding a gun in her fucking ballet flats there. What’s she gonna—”

“She killed Rolfe with a rock,” Schererr says. His gun is still pointed at her, despite that any bullet he fired at this range would likely tear into Artur, too. “There’s no telling what the mainlander bitch has up her sleeve.”

“I’m not,” Gabi says, anger and upset swirling together in her voice. “I didn’t—I don’t—”

“You don’t get to speak,” Schererr spits, jutting his rifle forward. With the motion, everything seems to crystalize. This man wants to kill her, Eren thinks. He’s going to. 

Falco must have the same realization because he jerks his wrist out of Reiner’s hand and darts down the stairs, quick as a driving raptor. The three rifles that’d been turned skyward snap to him, one of the ex-Garrison members barking at him to stop. He collides with Gabi and Mr. Braus, covering Gabi’s body with his own before the command to halt is even out of the boy’s mouth; maintaining eye contact with the Jaegerists. Scherrer must see something in his bright eyes, because his body jerks. Eren sees his thumb shift on the trigger guard, tightening by a fraction of a millimeter.

In the split second before he fires, Eren is able to throw his hand up, knocking the muzzle up just enough so that the shot flies over Mr. Braus’s head. The bullet rips off the top of Eren’s middle and ring fingers—blood pulses out in a hot gush, sharp, white-hot agony seizing his entire hand as the force breaks the remaining bones in those fingers and below them, spidering out in a web of pain. 

Everyone screams. Mr. Braus drops to the ground, shielding both children under himself. Reiner roars and begins to charge. The sharp crack of the bullet plowing into the wood behind them pierces their ears while the bang of the shot still rings loud, and through the blood-thrum of black anger, Eren sees, very clearly, how this will end.

As splinters burst outward from the shot, Eren grabs the boiling-hot barrel of the gun with his uninjured hand, flips it around, and drives the butt into Schererr’s temple. Another sharp crack, and he drops to the ground with a jagged cry. The other four exclaim and Eren isn’t sure what to do with the gun.

Time seems to run very slow. 

He wants—to point it at the Jaegerists. He wants to fire it into Scherrer’s head. But—he doesn’t know how they’ll react. He doesn’t know how much loyalty they hold to him; if killing one wouldn’t escalate this situation irreparably. Four guns, four people who can’t heal from bullet wounds. If he transformed, everyone would be caught in the blast, and given that a fucking earthquake just happened, he can’t be sure he wouldn’t bring the entire ceiling down around them. 

Yesterday, Floch said, I have faith in you, Eren. Everyone here does. Just don’t throw it away. We still need you. 

I can’t throw it away, he thinks. They still need me. 

Eren grips the gun by the burning muzzle and throws his hand over Scherrer’s head, blocking him from Reiner’s charge. Reiner collides with his bloody, three-fingered hand, jarring it and sending a shockwave of pain up Eren’s arm, but it’s nothing new. Pain is part of his heartbeat. “Reiner,” he snaps, “Take them upstairs.”

Reiner meets his gaze. Under the weariness, the dull, low-burning anger, there’s that tether of understanding. 

“Gabi,” Reiner says. “Falco. Braus. Come here.”

“Sir—!” the Garrison-uniformed man protests. He’s of an age with Eren, and quakes once under his glare. “Sir,” he says again. “They can’t just—”

There’s a muffled crash from above, then Pieck’s voice cries, “Oh my God,” and thudding footsteps follow. He hears her rushing down the stairs, and then a host of others following her, but he can’t turn around and check who. Not with the way the Jaegerists point their guns at the stairs, at the balcony. Eren’s gut tightens, a steel fist gripping his insides. The ex-Garrison soldier shouts, “Stop,” as Scherrer groans, pained, and Eren says, “Stand down.”

“Sir,” he says, one eye pinched shut. “The Cart Titan—” 

“She hasn’t got in anymore!” he says. His hand is blistering where it’s gripped around the muzzle. He can smell the rough tang of gunpowder and the metallic scent of his own blood.

“The mainlander animals—” 

Their eyes are glaring, narrow with hate.

“Stand down.”

“Kirschtien—”

Their hands are steady on their rifles, barrels reflecting the lamplight of the chandelier that hasn’t yet stopped swaying. “Put the fucking guns down,” Eren roars. “That is an order.”

There’s a long, long second where nobody moves. The cluster behind him, the soldiers before him, his friends on the stairs. Eren’s bloody hands twitch, and he can feel electricity jumping under his skin, sharper and more biting than it ever has before. I want, he thinks, uncertain. I want—

The ex-Garrison man shoulders his rifle. The other three follow suit. 

“Get out of here,” Eren spits. “Just—go. I can handle them. Go get a read on what the earthquake did to the city. You—” he points to a baby-faced boy in the cadet jacket. “Find that Nyemetskan professor and see if there’s likely to be another earthquake. And you,” he says to the Garrison man, “take him,” he jerks his chin at Scherrer, who’s pushed up to his knees and clutching his head, “To the—” he almost says infirmary, but he shot his superior officer. The tips of Eren’s fingers lie on the ivory carpet like discarded dice, blood seeping into the fibers. “Dungeon. All of you, now. You’ve got orders.”

With uncertain eyes and slow voices, they accept his words. They gather up Scherrer, a red welt already blossoming on his temple, blood dribbling, and depart. The seconds before they finally retreat are long. Each questioning glance to him, every hostile glare that lands on one of the others, feels like the shadow of Dina Jaeger falling over him. Finally, though, they’re out the door, and shut it firmly. Eren marches over, snagging a heavy armchair on his way. It screams as he drags it across the floor and wedges it under the door, then he turns the lock under the iron knob.

Should’ve done that in the first place, he thinks. Lesson learned. 

He pulls his left hand back, and looks down at his mangled right. It’s not healing on its own. Grow, he tells it, annoyed. A feeble bout of steam puffs up, skin slowly beginning to knit over the jagged ends of bone and bleeding red flesh. Eren nods once, satisfied. Wryly, he thinks, that answers that, then.

***

Everyone has already retreated to the wing of bedrooms by the time Eren makes it up. Jean, Connie, Mr. Braus, Annie, and Pieck are hovering in a ring around Falco and Gabi. Reiner is closer to the mouth of the hall, in a more defensive position; Armin is leaning against Mikasa’s doorway. A brief second of eye contact is all it takes to let Eren know that she’s still out.

“‘M sorry,” Gabi is saying, hands fluttering nervously, tears lurking in her eyes. “I just wanted to see what all had been knocked over down there, and when I saw you, I just…”

“Don’t you worry, Mia—Gabi,” Mr. Braus says, patting her hair. She’s not tied it back, and strands of her bangs have escaped where they were shoved behind her ears, falling over her nose and cheeks. “No harm done. And you, Ben.” He looks to Falco, and the boy shoots to attention. “You’re a brave boy, but don’t go making a habit of throwin’ yourself into danger like that. That’s two, three times you’ve done that now. You’re a good boy, takin’ care of your little sister like that, but—”

“Mr. Braus,” Gabi whines. She sniffs, wiping her nose with his sleeve, and says, “His name’s Falco. And he’s my fiancé, not my brother.”

Eren, hovering at the mouth of the hall, raises his eyebrows. Go Falco. Didn’t know the kid had it in him. 

From the choked wheeze that comes out of his mouth, neither, it seems, did Falco. He reddens into a tomato, sputtering in a voice so high Eren is mildly concerned he might break glass. Standing just a few paces ahead of him at the end of the hall, Reiner says, “What.”

Gabi grabs his hand, defensive. Falco looks at their joined fingers and squeaks, nearly cross-eyed with embarrassment. “You wanted him to get the Armor and marry me, right?”

Reiner looks baffled. “I wanted him to get the Armor over you,” he says. “Never heard about the marriage part.”

Eren had. He’d gotten it out of Falco eventually, that his grand plan was to marry his girl after inheriting the Armor so that she’d be provided for as a first-class citizen for life. Smart, brave, bold little boy. He’d told him as much, on that bench in Liberio, and just felt hollow when Falco blushed with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. 

“Well!” she says, and stomps her foot. “He proposed.”

A muffled sound comes from somewhere. Not Mikasa’s room, Eren can tell by Armin’s lack of reaction, and when he looks over his shoulder, the door to the gallery is still locked and barricaded. Must’ve been something leftover from the earthquake: not as interesting as Gabi’s little declaration. Nobody else pays it any mind, either.

“He did?” Pieck says, delighted. 

“When?” Reiner asks.

Gabi pouts. “He said he wanted to marry me so I could be happy forever.”

“You,” Falco manages, barely. “Didn’t say anything back?”

“I’m saying it now!” She glares at him, brown eyes blazing. “What, do you not want to marry me anymore all of the sudden?!”

“Of course I do!” he says. “I just—you didn’t mention it until now?”

“Did you think I was holding your hand for no reason?!”

The sound comes again. Eren ignores it. 

“No?” Falco says. Gabi’s glare intensifies. “I!” he says, scrambling to please his fiancée, “I thought, maybe it meant you liked me back? I didn’t want to assume!”

Gabi’s little jaw works, then she sniffs imperiously. “You were a lot less of a scaredy-cat in the birdcage room.”

“I can be—I’m not a scaredy-cat!”

Loud enough that it can’t be ignored this time, there comes a definite “Hey!” from the closed door to the right. Everyone turns to look. 

“Oh my God,” Gabi says, forgetting her indignation. “Mr. Levi!”

“Oh my God,” Jean says, and lurches for the door. The entire lot of them floods in through the door—except for Armin who remains in Mikasa’s doorframe, arms crossed, head down. 

Eren pushes his tongue against the back of his teeth, sensing nothing good. 

He crosses the long distance to him anyway, tucking his hands in his pockets. “She’s still asleep, then?” he asks blankly. 

Armin inhales through his nose. “Mm. She woke up for a couple of seconds, but as soon as she tried moving her leg, she passed out again. She might need some pain medicine.”

Eren groans, pressing his uninjured fingers into the bridge of his nose. “God,” he says, stomach churning like snakes are in his belly. “Her stitches—did the earthquake…?”

“Didn’t look like it ripped them. Nice job with that one, by the way.”

Eren looks to the floor, straightening his hand against his nose and forehead like a visor. Yes, he can connect the dots from sending the Wall Titans on their stampede to the minor earthquake that just rocked them. He remembers Professor Ilyanitch explaining how Paradis came to be separate from the main continent; about tectonic plates and fault lines. “I didn’t think…”

“No,” Armin says. “You didn’t. Just like with the hurricane. Or our chances of stopping you, or what would be waiting for us all in the aftermath.” He tilts his head to the side. “For how long you’ve been planning this, you didn’t think much about it at all, did you?”

“I’m not,” Eren sighs, “doing this again, Armin.”

“Really?” He raises his eyebrows. “First time I’ve ever seen you back down.”

“There’s a first time for everything.” Armin looks so small. He’s barefoot like Falco, and the plain white pullover shirt is too big. His broken arm is in a sling cradled to his chest. In the dim light, his eyes look greyish and lifeless, not the gleaming blue they’d been when they talked in the Paths. Eren had so envied the look in Armin’s eyes when he found something he loved: his book, the sea, sunrises and the stars. It’s been enough for him to simply see; he knows how to love something without possessing it. Just look at Annie. 

Now, Eren wonders if he’d killed that sense of wonder forever. (If that’s what he’d wanted. No, he wants to think, no. But—was it?)

Eren pulls his hand off his face. “Are you alright?”

“No,” Armin says, harsh as the arctic winds that he can’t remember feeling. “No,” he says, “We’re not gonna do that like we’re friends, Eren.”

Sharp pain bursts behind Eren’s teeth, traveling down his throat and taking up the space in his lungs, so crushing that he feels like he could collapse—but that’s no less than he expected. And it might make it easier for Armin, to have something to be angry at. God knows Eren’s always been that way. 

“Sure,” he says. He swallows, and the pain in his throat doesn’t abate. “Straight to it then. What’s your plan?”

“We’re going with Sasha’s dad, right?”

Eren lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “If that’s what you want. He agreed to take all of you, and I haven’t thought of a better place yet.”

Armin blows out a breath. “Good. We need to get going soon. Now.”

“By midday, definitely,” he agrees. “Before, if you can. I imagine that the earthquake is gonna bring more forces to the capital for a bit.”

“It isn’t like we’ve got much to pack.” He gestures down to himself. “The nurses came by with new clothes for us all. I’ve got a spare shirt, but that’s it.”

“You can take whatever you want from your rooms,” Eren says, turning slightly to look at Levi’s door. “And I’ll send you all with money. Set up a trust for Mr. Braus, if I can.” There’s chatter drifting from within the room, the captain’s voice threadbare and weak but definitely there. 

In the back of his mind, a clock begins to wind down. 

“Are you going to pass Sasha’s house off as a government-funded penitentiary?” 

“If I can.”

“Hm,” he says. “That might be a feat. Your soldiers tried to shoot a twelve-year-old girl three minutes ago.”

Eren raises his fingertips from his pocket, still slowly steaming. “I stopped them, didn’t I?”

“Do you want a fucking medal for that one, Eren?”

“You know,” he says, “I’ve never heard you swear this much in your entire life.”

With a hard sort of brightness, Armin says, “I’ve never been this angry.”

“Right.” Eren heaves another breath. “Do you know who’s taking his offer of sanctuary?”

“I talked about it with Jean and Connie, and Annie. We’re going. For now, at least. We have to get out of the city.” Armin looks down the hall to Levi’s room. Gabi is arguing loudly about her engagement. Eren thinks of Friedrich Reiss’s memories, listening to his princess’s children and siblings fill these halls with noise. “Gabi and Falco, obviously. I don’t think they’re thinking of it as a temporary safe house. Reiner will go with them, and I didn’t talk to her, but I think Pieck will, too. And I doubt that Levi is going anywhere else.”

Eren acknowledges this with a hum. “That’s all of you, then. Good.”

“Mm,” Armin says. “All of us. Are you going to give us the horses, or will Mr. Braus have to ride them back?”

“I think,” he says blandly, “that we recently downsized the military. We’ve got horses to spare.”

“God.” Armin looks to the ceiling and smiles bitterly. “Didn’t think you could surprise me, at this point.”

“Think you’ll need a carriage?”

“Yes?” Armin’s tone implies obviously. “At least two of us can’t ride. Probably more.”

Eren nods. Levi only just woke up, and the state he’d been in as of yesterday did not seem like someone who could handle several hours on horseback. Armin and Peick both have fucked up ribs, and Reiner’s legs might be too blistered and bloody from the abrasion burns to be safe. If they got rubbed raw and infected, it could kill him. “I’d argue that the captain’s not fit for any sort of travel.”

“Well, I would truly enjoy watching you try to talk him into staying.”

“Ha,” Eren says. 

“I’m not sure any of us are, Eren,” Armin says. “But we’re not safe here. You saw that.”

“I know.” Eren flexes his broken hand. It’s nearly healed now. The others can’t do that. “I know.” He swallows. “I’ll have them send medical supplies, too. Do you want to see if they’re ready to start packing?”

He looks like he wants to make some remark, but chooses not to. “Yeah. You… hm. Are you gonna carry Mikasa down to the carriage yourself?”

A white-hot spike of absolute terror spears through Eren’s gut, his spine snapping straight. The pain in his lungs clamps down viciously, making it impossible to breathe. “What are you talking about?”

Armin raises an eyebrow. “She can’t ride. We just covered that. She can’t walk, so—”

“She can’t leave,” Eren says. It’s an effort to keep his voice steady, and the words still come out in a rush. What the fuck is Armin saying? “They just put stitches in her half an hour ago. That wound was open for days, she got wet, and she’s still unconscious.” Eren’s heart is beating fast-fast-fast against his chest, each contraction of muscle piercing-painful like an arrow burying into tender flesh. 

Armin’s face is stony. “Eren,” he says, low, like he’s talking to a cornered animal. “It’s not safe for us here. You just saw—”

“That’s different,” Eren insists. Panic is making his voice jagged. Now he’s breathing—too fast, and each breath hurts. “It’s not safe for her to go, she can’t be away from doctors. Armin,” he says, and the word wobbles, “She’s been out for nearly two days now. She has to stay.”

“You’re going to get her killed,” Armin says. He’s gone very, very still; his eyes very, very wide. “Eren, your men want to kill us.”

“I won’t let them,” he swears. His voice is trembling like a child’s, but that’s never stopped him from being able to protect Mikasa. Does he think he’d ever let them hurt Mikasa? Why would he ever think that? He’s always, always kept her safe. Kept her warm. The only thing that’s ever put her in true danger since he met her was Ymir in her anger, but that’s not an issue now. “I haven’t let them—”

“We’ve been here for less than a day and we’ve already had rifles pointed at us,” Armin says. He’s paling now, like he’s the one with something to fear, like he’s the one with something to lose. “Eren, you can’t keep her safe from an army that wants to see her hang in its capital.”

“Yes, I can,” he snaps. His breath is uneven. The ground feels uneven. His heartbeat is pounding in his head like an alarm bell, like the drumskin in the tent where Mikasa’d been barefoot and dressed in white, like how now she’s barefoot and dressed in white. “Ten of you is different from one of you. And she’s not a Warrior or an ex-officer like you all. And she’s—they know what she is to me.”

“What she…” Armin’s voice is so faint it’s nearly a whisper. “Do they?”

“Yes.” Floch’d said, I knew you had a thing for her. “I’ll make them know.”

Armin is faintly horrified. He whispers, “I’m not leaving her alone here.”

“Alone?” Eren echoes, genuinely confused. “I’ll be here.”

“I’m not leaving her here.” He shakes his head vigorously, limp hair flying off his forehead. “I won’t.”

“I’m not going to force you to go, Armin,” he says. “But you were the one who just said—”

“You just said that you could keep her safe!”

“Mikasa’s not the Commander of the fucking Survey Corps,” he says. Why doesn’t he understand? “I can—and she hasn’t chosen to leave, Armin, you can’t make that choice for her.”

“Oh, what, and you can?”

“I’m not,” he says. Eren looks in through the open door; the angle doesn’t let him see Mikasa. For a vicious moment, he hates the walls for keeping her from his sight. He grits his teeth and looks back to Armin. “She can’t choose anything right now.”

“She can’t choose you, is what you mean.”

“And are you sure she wouldn’t?” Eren snaps. 

That draws Armin up short. Eren stands to his full height and crosses his arms, zeroing in on that thought. The doorframe, though wide, suddenly seems a much smaller space. “Is that what you’re trying to do?” he asks, and suddenly he’s so hot it’s like he’s been bathed in flames. “Take her away from me before she can choose to stay? She had her scarf,” he says, and he feels like he had when he was a little boy climbing off a corpse, Mikasa’s shining eyes wide with emotion as she gawked up at him. When he pushes again, “That’s it, isn’t it?” he feels like he’s won. 

Armin swallows, his face slowly bending into a mask of disgust. “I could ask you the same thing,” he chokes out. “This is it, then, for you? You get everything you’ve ever wanted, wrapped up with a nice red bow. After what you did.”

“That’s up to Mikasa.” The only thing I knew for sure was the result of Mikasa’s choice. All of it was for the sake of coming to that result. God, if Armin would just remember that conversation— “And you’re not sure that she won’t.”

Armin’s mouth trembles angrily. “Won’t what, Eren?”

“Choose me.” Eren’s voice is steady now. There’s nothing he’s ever had faith in, except the love that exists between him and Mikasa. Maybe he did destroy it, as he’d tried to before it started, to make it easy for her—but he doesn’t think so. Not entirely. She had her scarf. 

Armin’s face finally crumbles, and he looks away, towards Mikasa’s bed. “No,” he says, strangled. “God help me, I don’t know that. God help her. ”

“She will be fine,” Eren says. “Armin, I told you—I’d never, ever let anyone hurt her. Ymir was a deity, and she’s gone now, and—”

“You’re in her place?”

He bites his cheek, uncomfortable. “Something like that.”

Armin looks to the ceiling. Even in the weak light of the hallway, Eren can see tears gleaming in his eyes. “God fucking help us all, then.” He wipes his eyes across his sleeve and shakes his head. “I just—I can’t do this with you, Eren. I can’t .”

He walks away, then. Eren feels loss, and pain, and the cold touch of finality. 

And something like victory. 

***

While they pack (and mildly ransack, he hopes), Eren retrieves the stack of reports the cadets had given him. He’s still unwilling to leave this wing, and absolutely unwilling to interact with the Jaegerists again, so he sits on the very edge of Mikasa’s bed, back against the wall, elbow pressing against the wooden post. The golden fern details bite into his skin through his too-small shirt, and the discomfort gives him one more distraction. 

He doesn’t want to think about Armin leaving, about Armin’s eyes, about Armin’s words. He doesn’t want to think about that. So he scowls down at this itemized report of damaged governmental property, thinking what kind of asshole sets up a farm longways like that, and tries to ignore the quiet sounds of everyone preparing to leave him. 

It’s not very long before they’re ready. 

It’s Jean who raps his knuckles against the door. Eren looks up and sets aside the description of the ten-mile-long, twenty-meter-wide flattened swath through a barley field, sliding off the bed and standing. 

“We’re ready to go,” Jean says. His eyes drift from Eren over to Mikasa. When he swallows, Eren tenses. 

He crosses the room slowly, stopping at the card table and laying a sheet of paper down. “That’s…” Jean says, hesitantly. “Armin wrote that for Mikasa, for when she wakes up. You’ll give it to her.”

He didn’t phrase it like a question, but Eren acknowledges it anyway. “I will. I’m not—she’s not going to be a prisoner here. It’s—”

“Not safe,” Jean fills in. “Yeah. I heard. Not sure if you know that we let the nurses back in. They came to check on us after, and are absolutely horrified that any of us are traveling.”

Eren leans against the wall. He doubts Jean could manage the same, with the puncture in his shoulder. “Better greenstick fractures than bullet wounds.” 

“Really? I didn’t think you shared that opinion, considering.” He nods to Mikasa’s sleeping form. 

Something about that makes Eren’s mouth twitch; he smothers a snarl. He wonders if Jean has ever seen Mikasa asleep before now. He must’ve, really—in the seven years he’s been watching her, he must’ve seen her asleep once. 

Eren had seen her asleep just hours after they met; both of them squished together in his little twin bed, clasped hands sticky from the jelly-filled cookies his mother had stress-baked as night fell and her family didn’t return. Mikasa’d fallen asleep holding his hand, his arm and his scarf wrapped around her while he kept watch for the both of them. 

As it was, as it will be. 

Last time they’d really spoken—what was supposed to be the last time—Eren had taken him here, to Mitras, to the widow’s walk on top of the courthouse, mostly in a weak attempt to poke fun at him. 

Ha, ha, he might’ve said. You wanted this sort of view, huh? 

Not a bad view, Jean had actually said immediately after, and Eren had snickered. 

Yeah, he said. Figured you’d like it. Sort of thing you had in mind when we were kids, yeah?

Shut up, he said, but it was fond. What are we doing here?

A bird cawed overhead.

Saying goodbye. 

“Do I need to see you off?” Eren asks. 

Jean stared out across the city: the neat white streets and the gleaming river. “Why?”

Eren bit his lip, knowing Jean was asking more than the single word entailed. “Because the world wasn’t what I wanted,” he said eventually. “And I think you all are going to build a better one.”

“Yeah,” Jean says. “We’re not exactly eager to walk through this place unescorted.”

“Good call,” Eren says. Jean doesn’t move, though, so neither does Eren. 

There was pain in his voice when he said, “Why can’t you build it with us?”

Eren shrugged; smiled tightly. “I’m too far gone. I can’t… there’s no coming back for me.”

“That can’t be true,” Jean said. “You can’t…God, you’re so full of—”

“Shit? I could say the same of you, goatee.”

“Life, I was going to say.” His voice was sincere, goddamnit. “You’ve always been so full of life. You can’t just…”

“Thank you, Jean. But no.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked at the baluster. “I’m glad you’ll remember me that way,” he said, “but I’ve been carrying death, all of this death, as long as you’ve known me.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Do you want to hear the short version?”

“What,” Eren grinds out. 

Jean draws in a long breath. “I don’t know. I was just wondering if you had anything to say for yourself.”

After, Jean stared across the city and said, “You know? Back when this what what I wanted, I wouldn’t have put it past you.”

“You’re more perceptive than I give you credit for, then,” Eren said lightly. He was half-perched on the balustrade, one foot on the wood of the roof, the other swinging a few inches above it. “Should’ve trusted your instincts.”

“Stop it,” Jean said weakly. “You’re more than just what you’ve done.”

Eren shrugged again. “I really am glad you’ll remember me like that.” His voice was too scratchy.

“No, you weren’t,” Eren says shortly. The context is different, but there’s none of that desire to understand that’d been in his eyes when they spoke on the widow’s walk.

“Fine,” Jean says. “Then maybe I came to say goodbye to Mikasa. Since I figure I’m probably never going to see her again.”

“Don’t…” Jean faltered, and then, mustering up a gentle version of his adolescent cocksurity, said, “You’re really just gonna die like that? After everything? You’re just roll over and let me steal Mikasa?”

“Ha.” Eren scowled, kicking the baluster again, harder, trying to ignore the starburst of anger and jealousy burning in his chest. He clenched his jaw and kicked it once more. The balustrade shook under him. He took a deep breath and said, “Look, if you want to spend the rest of your life playing second-fiddle to my memory, that’s your call.”

“I know,” Jean said. He looked at him and gave a sheepish smile. For a moment, they just stared out at the city. Eren wondered if Jean, too, was thinking of the day they docked in Marley. They’d both drawn a breath when Mikasa emerged in her white suit, elbow linked with Sasha; Eren had elbowed him violently when he’d realized, a long moment later, that he still existed. 

Jean loves her, too. Eren knew that, and didn’t mind it much, anymore. Most days.

Anger burns in Eren’s chest now. “What does that mean.”

Jean sets his jaw. He’s angry, Eren sees, and right now, that almost thrills him. “You’re not ever going to let her go now, are you?”

If Jean grew to be an old man, lived well past his hundredth birthday, and spent every day of the rest of his life loving Mikasa—and Eren could acknowledge, right now, distantly, that that was a real possibility—the culmination of his love wouldn’t measure up to half of what Eren felt in the ten years he got with her.

Jean said, “You know that was a—”

“Yep,” Eren said. He inhaled and blew it out again. “Appreciate the effort at reigniting my will to live, Jeanbo, but that just kind of made me angrier.”

“If she wants to go,” he says, dark, “to you, and the rest. I won’t stop her.”

“Oh, yes,” Jean says, and the controlled burn in his voice just nearly matches Eren’s. “Because promises from you are very reassuring.”

Eren crosses his arms. Jean is taller than him, always has been, but Eren is broader. “I’d think they were. I promised myself I’d kill all my enemies. I promised Armin we’d see the ocean. I promised Mikasa I’d always wrap her scarf around her.” He nods to where it rests on the nightstand. 

Jean rolled his eyes with a snort. “You’re a headcase.”

“You were the first to call it.”

“There’s no way that’s true.”

Eren reached over and whacked him across the ear. “Dick.”

Jean shakes his head, just bleeding abhorrence. “I really, really, can’t believe you, Eren.”

“Believe what you want.”

“I don’t know what you want from me here, Eren,” Jean said, exasperated but fond. “You don’t let me say nice things, and then—”

“I’m just trying to stop you from embarrassing yourself.”

“You are the last person I would take advice from on that.”

Eren hit him again.

Jean laughed it off, though, and looked out at the city. Eren followed his gaze. A bird was riding an updraft over a grand row of townhouses; the sort that Jean would’ve chosen to live in when they were boys. Eren swallowed against his pride and said, “You’ve grown into yourself, Jean. I’m proud of who you are.”

Jean is tall and broad and handsome, with tawny hair and kind eyes and the hands of an artist. He’s one of their oldest, best friends—his and Mikasa’s both—and whatever there is now, Eren knows that Jean had loved and respected him as well, as something not too far from a brother. 

It was a nagging, constant thought, before. In Marley, after the refugee camp. You’re—family—

She’d move on, after he was dead. He’d been sure of it. Mikasa always had that capacity for growth, the ability to find new and fulfilling meaning after everything had been taken from her. That she’d find someone someday, that someone else would have her heart one day—have her—had been a neat little knife to drive under his skin, to pick his insides apart with. More bearable, in its way, than torturing himself with the knowledge of what he would do: the knowledge of what he wouldn’t.

He’d never get to live alone with her, in a house that belonged to them only. They’d never again prepare a meal together. Never spend lazy mornings in bed—unlazy nights in bed. Never have children. He’d never get to so much as kiss her, because he was going to die—

Jean nodded. His eyes were rimmed with red. He opened and closed his mouth, and said, “I’m gonna fuckin’ miss you.”

But he’s alive. Fate was flung off its axis, and here he stands. 

“Are you going to say anything?” Eren doesn’t mean for it to come off as much of a taunt as it does, but it lies there, ugly, in the distance between him.

Jean’s lip twitches. “No,” he says. “Not to you. Not if you’re here.”

Eren bit the inside of his cheek; tasted blood. Better than tears, he wanted to think. “Yeah.” His breath was ragged. “Same here.”

“Fine then.” Eren pushes off the wall. “Let’s get you all gone.”

Jean sniffed and wiped his sleeve across his eyes. He turned and grabbed Eren’s wrist, pulling him down and into a crushing embrace. Eren pressed his chin into his shoulder and stared at the sun, at the bird that’s making its way nearer, and forced back the tears.

Jean turns. Eren follows, even as his heart twists painfully at leaving Mikasa in here alone. Five minutes, he tells himself, trying to settle. I’ll see her again in five minutes. 

When Jean reaches the door, he slows and then stops. He grabs the frame and looks over his shoulder to the bed; to Mikasa’s sleeping form. There’s pain in the set of his jaw, pain in the line of his mouth, pain in the shine of his eyes, pain in his knuckles curled around the doorframe. Eren runs his tongue across his teeth, but he finds that he’s not unsympathetic. Can’t entirely resent Jean this final indulgence. He’d tried something like the same thing for himself, after all.

In the hall, the whole party waits with half-full bags. Reiner and Connie are murmuring lowly with Mr. Braus. Pieck is gripping the handles of a wheelchair that holds Levi. Though it’s hard to tell through the bandages, Eren thinks he might have fallen right back to sleep, which he doesn’t think is a good sign. Falco is holding a small bronze statue of a lion that’s been wrapped in heavy cloth to keep it safe during the journey; Gabi is up on her tiptoes, arms folded on his shoulder, peering at what Eren guesses is their makeshift toy. Armin is slouched against the wall, head against Annie’s.

When they look up and see him, it’s like an arctic wind blows through the hall. Any warmth vanishes. 

Eren swallows. “Come on,” he says, inclining his head. “I’ll take you to the stables.”

***

It’s the pain that finally tells her she’s no longer dreaming. 

It comes so gradually that she doesn’t notice the subtle changes. The low, far-off hum drifts away. The air slowly seems to grow heavier against her skin, the warmth somehow more fragile. She’s still curled on her side on an impossibly soft mattress—though it doesn’t seem to cradle her as protectively as the one she… she…

It’s already fading to a blur. 

But what finally makes it click is that she hurts. 

The vague aching all across her body intensifies, digging into her muscles and clamping in hard. Her bones feel like they’re empty; incapable of supporting her flesh, where she can feel the blood-bloom of ferocious bruises up and down her body. There’s a strange not-pressure on her head, like her skull is too big for her brain suddenly, but each heartbeat sends a spike of pain through the back of her skull. And the worst of it: a vicious, biting sort of pain all through her right leg, like her heartbeat is sending molten arrows flying into her skin. 

It hurts. Mikasa whimpers. Her eyes have drifted open; she can see her own pale hands in loose fists on clean white sheets and a flat blue wall with golden ornamentations. The light glinting off the metalwork is the red-orange of a sunset; it fades between blinks like a cloud has stolen the light.

Mama, she thinks, wanting to cry for her. The room she’s in is very warm, but she still feels cold. Aunt Carla… Uncle Grisha…

… Eren.

The thought tears into her like a bullet to the heart. Eren. 

Everything comes back in a rush. The town, the fort, the wind, the blood. The screams. Mikasa jolts, and that hurts, too, but the pain in her body is nothing to the glacier of horror that feels like it's burying her. Guilt tumbles down the path it left, like a mountain river overflowing. She thinks, trying to breathe, squeezing her eyes shut to keep herself from sobbing, we failed, we failed, we failed—everybody outside the Walls, they all—we all—

Where are we?

She pushes her elbows into the mattress, which is soft like the down of Falco’s neck. Where is he, she thinks, panic stirring her heart—which only makes her head and her leg hurt more. Still, she tries to get herself upright. Armin and Jean and Connie and Levi bounce into her head in time with the driving pains. Where, she thinks, biting back a sob, are they—am I—we’re not—

A hand closes around her elbow. Gentle and firm and burning hot and familiar; she knows those long, broad fingers.

“Woah,” Eren says in a low, trembling voice. “Easy, ea—”

Before she can decide what to do about it, Mikasa rips her arm out of his grasp and rolls away. Every part of her body feels like knives are gliding through her, the blood in her veins feels like it’s made of fragments of glass, but she’s able to get her elbows behind her, push her weight onto her left leg, and scramble away. She keeps her eyes closed. She doesn’t want to see him, she—she—she just, she can’t—

“Wait a—!” Eren says, and she can’t see him, but she can feel the way the mattress sinks with his weight as he lunges forward. “Fuck!” he says, sharp, and just as one scrambling elbow meets nothing, Eren has that same shoulder and is yanking her back from the edge. His fingers dig so hard into her skin that she’s certain there will be bruises. 

His other hand closes around her side, just for a moment. He moves her, almost tossing her back towards the center of the bed, with enough force that she bounces slightly. It doesn’t really hurt—less than falling to the floor backward on her head would have, certainly—but she still does, and she says, “Ow.”

Her throat burns, too; her voice is scratchy from disuse and barely audible. It registers that she’s thirsty. The headache, she realizes. Her heart is beating fast enough now that her head feels like someone is beating her head like a drum. Her hand flies up and presses against the side of her head to keep it from splitting in half.  

“Oh,” Eren says, and she can hear panic crowding at the edges of his voice. “Hey, here, here, you need—Mikasa, let me get you some water—”

The mattress shifts as his weight does, and there’s the sound of papers shifting. Mikasa can tell when he crawls off, his feet hitting the floor; can tell that he doesn’t go far. He settles on the edge of the bed and takes her free hand. Before she can jerk it back, he presses a glass into it and draws back himself. “Drink slow,” he says, full of nervous energy. “Or you’ll throw up.”

She was in the same survival training classes he was. She knows… 

Her hand is shaking badly as she brings the glass to her lips and swallows. But the water is cold and clean, and even the single sip she takes feels like it rinses away a mouthful of ashes. 

“There you go,” Eren says on a sigh. “There you go, just—take a few minutes, my… just give it a few.”

Mikasa can’t quite get her breathing to steady. The fight-or-flight that’d seized her when she heard Eren’s voice is ebbing, but she’s left flooded with adrenaline, jittering. She rests the glass against her sternum to keep the water from sloshing out—and, too, because it’s heavy in a way she doesn’t recognize. 

With effort, she settles. Eren had thrown her against the pillows, and there are enough of them that she can lean her back against them and still be mostly sitting up, which is a relief. Her headache isn’t abating one bit, and her entire body still throbs. If she couldn’t sit back, she thinks she might have to lie down. 

After a long moment, she takes another sip of water. She forces herself to breathe through her nose, a long, deep breath, and blow it out through her mouth; does this once, twice more. Gingerly, she takes her palm away from her head. “Where—” she says, and her voice isn’t as broken but it’s still too small. She sniffs and rasps, “Where is everyone? Armin, and—”

“They’re fine!” Eren says, overeager. “They’re fine, they’re fine, everyone is fine. We’re in Mitras. In the, uh, in the palace, actually; I knew I needed to get you to a hospital and—be somewhere where I could—just, I needed to make sure I could make it safe for you. All of you.”

Mikasa gives a shallow nod and takes another sip of water. They’re fine. 

According to Eren. 

“Where…?” she croaks. “Can I see them?”

He hesitates. She opens her eyes; registers him in her periphery. It sets her heart racing all over again, another surge of panic and dread and—and anger, she thinks. 

The coldness bubbles up inside her, warring with the bloody heat of hurt. She thinks, how could he, how could he, how could he, how could he?

Tears well in her eyes, blurring her vision. She shouldn’t be wasting the water, but—

Carefully, Eren says, “Armin and the others are all fine. He wrote you a letter, you can read it, if you want, but… They left the city about eight hours ago.”

Mikasa’s stomach plummets. It’s like ice washes over her, stealing her breath. “They,” she gasps, “they left me?”

“No,” he says, “no, not—Mikasa, you’re not… you’re not well. It wasn’t safe for you to travel, you hadn’t woken up, and they weren’t sure what would—when you—we had to be safe. And you were still out, so I—we—didn’t think it was right to send you off against medical advice if you couldn’t make that choice yourself. And everyone else, there was an incident this morning, and they’re all fine, but Sa—Mr. Braus had already come to take Gabi and Falco back to his family, and it just—it was safer for everyone to go with him. It’s not that they left you, sweetheart, it’s, it’s that they had to go, and you couldn’t.”

There’s a sort of distance between herself and his words. She hears what he said, registers it, but it’s hard to connect to proper meaning. They left her. 

She’s staring at her legs, covered in a white dress not unlike what she’d worn when she was imprisoned. The fabric has ridden up to her knees, and she can see that her calves are littered with purple bruises and neat, shallow cuts—and on her right leg, on the back where she can’t see, she feels the tight pull of stitches. 

He hurt me, she thinks, and she can’t stop the tears from falling, now. Hastily, she takes another small swallow to try and stop her face from contorting, her lungs from spasming. She remembers clearly enough that it had been Falco’s Jaw that’d ripped her open; his head snapping at such an angle that it absolutely couldn’t have been natural. When she was fighting, she’d pushed it away—there was more to focus on than why she’d been hurt—but now—there’s nothing to fight, anymore, because Eren is right here, sitting at the edge of this bed that isn’t hers, instead of scraping after his army of monsters, himself the worst of them. 

They left me here, she thinks. She has to press her hand over her mouth to keep from sobbing. We lost, follows that thought, and she feels like she’s back over Fort Slava, hearing the screaming under the footsteps—and then not. Not, not, not, only hearing their own ragged breathing. And then that ravine where a massive throng of people had been huddled, who couldn’t be crushed so they were cooked, the heat of the Colossals burning them alive. At nightfall, they’d flown ahead to a nearly-abandoned town and had them pass up their children, flown them back behind the line of Titans, only to watch in horror as—

Mikasa can’t make herself think about it. She can’t, she can’t, she can’t. She clutches the glass of water with both hands, letting the hard edge of it press into her skin through her dress. It’s cold, but in a nice way. 

“Mikasa…” Eren says, uncertain. “Are you… how do you feel? What do you last…?”

She swallows, pressing further back against the pillows. She still can’t make herself look at him. What will she see? Will she look at him and only be able to see the skeletal face of his Titan? Will she see the man he’d been in the restaurant—in the restaurant, and she can hear him saying, ever since we were kids, Mikasa, I’ve always hated you, and curls into herself even more—or will she see the boy he’d once been? The round-cheeked, wide-eyed little boy who she’d looked over while he napped under a tree; the boy with blazing eyes and bloody hands who killed two men for a girl he hadn’t known existed at the start of the day. 

Or will she look at him and just hear screaming?

She draws in a long breath. “What do I last remember?” she asks. It hurts to talk. She takes another sip of water. Suddenly, she remembers how Aunt Carla would make her tea with honey when she had a sore throat. It hurts like her heart is a bruise. “I… the crash. The Wall Titans… stopped…” She can’t make herself go on.

“Okay,” Eren says. His voice is gentle. When was the last time she heard his voice like that? It, it must’ve been—it must’ve been outside the refugee camp. The memory makes her feel like a struck bell. It could almost have been funny to think about that, if it didn’t make her feel so stupid. When she’d watched the Walls crumble, Eren’s monstrous form leading them, she’d been naive enough to wonder if she could’ve stopped him, if she’d given him a different answer that day. If she’d told him she loved him.

Stupid, she thinks now. Stupid, stupid, stupid little girl. Eren never would’ve let her stop him. The bright, biting pain of stitches on her leg is proof enough of that. She never could’ve been enough to hold back his rage. She feels useless, and embarrassed, and small.

“Mikasa,” he says again. It sounds like he bites his tongue after that, to keep something back. She can’t fathom what. “Mikasa, are you… are you alright? What do you need? Are you—are you cold?”

She flinches. She tries to shake her head, but it just makes her headache spike worse, so she manages a weak, “No.” She is, but not in any way Eren could help her with. She wants her mom, or Aunt Carla, or Armin… “What happened?”

The mattress shifts as his weight does. “After—you all crashed, I… Long story short, I took everyone back to Paradis. You couldn’t stay there, so. And Mitras was the only place I could think of where I was certain I’d be able to enforce everyone’s safety. But it was still a near thing. This morning, there was a minor earthquake. Gabi ran into the gallery to see what it had done, and some soldiers burst in and tried to shoot at her. She’s fine, but after that—well, it was just… once they were even a little bit patched up, it was—and Gabi and Falco wanted to go back to their foster family anyway, and of course Reiner and Pieck were going to go with them, and… everyone just followed.” He swallows audibly. “And. You can too, of course, if that’s. If that’s what you want, Mikasa. I just—it’s really not a good idea for you to travel by horse, not for a little while, at least.”

That’s what finally makes her look at him, glancing through her lashes.

Eren doesn’t look like the monster he’d been across the sea, or the man he’d been at the restaurant. His long hair is tied back haphazardly again, and again he’s in a grey shirt and wearing a long jacket, but. There’s a light in his eyes that she hasn’t seen in a long, long time; wide and wild, and green. He’s turned toward her, sitting with one leg folded on top of the rumpled covers and the other planted on the floor, hands clenched in tight fists on his thighs. His expression cracks when he sees her looking at him, but she can’t name the emotion he slips into. Only that there’s enough of it that he’s nearly unrecognizable from the man who’d looked her in the eyes, unblinking, and told her he’d always hated her. 

Nearly. 

Eren swallows, and his right hand clenches tighter. His expression mends itself, almost. He digs his thumbnail into the flesh of his finger and says, “And you’re going to be safe here, Mikasa. You more than anyone. You weren’t an officer or a foreigner, and you’re.” He goes quiet, except for his slow, heavy breathing, and his knuckles go white. After a few moments, she can see a trickle of blood dribbling down to his wrist. For a fraction of a fleeting second, the instinct to fuss over him, scold him for his carelessness, rises. But it evaporates like rain on hot coals. 

Eren looks away from her. Even in the cloud-filtered light coming through the window, she can tell that he’s paling rapidly. He says, “You’re going to be safe here, for as long as you choose to stay here. I’ll keep you safe.” He glances back at her once; back away just as quickly. She can see his pulse hammering in his throat, even as he’s now gone almost white. Before she can so much as wonder why, Eren says, “I need you to know that I love you.” 

Mikasa blinks.

“That I’m in love with you, I mean,” he says, the words spilling out in a tumbling rush. “I have been since we were kids, probably since the night I met you. You’re—you’re just—I love you, more than anything, and everything, and I…” He looks down at the floor, his stare unblinking. When he exhales, his entire body shudders. He licks his lips and doesn’t look at her.

Her head is ringing. Her heart is bleeding. Her whole body hurts, broken and bruised from a battle fighting him. She can feel her heartbeat in her temples and against the back of her skull and in her leg, pulsing hot and painful along a wound he caused that nearly killed her, because she was trying to stop him from killing the world.

Mikasa looks at him, and she doesn’t believe him. 

After a few seconds of silence, Eren stands. He pushes his fists against his thighs and turns away. “Okay,” he says, voice thin. “I’m—I just, I needed you to know that. I thought you deserved to know that.” She hears him sniff, and then he turns back around, crossing to the lower corner of her bed against the wall, where a couple of sheets of paper are. Distantly, Mikasa recalls that he’d been sitting there before she woke up. He gathers them up. He’s ghostly pale and his fingers are shaking, but Mikasa focuses most on the blood wicking down them. “I’ll let you get some rest,” he says. “And tell the doctor you’re up. I’ll—I’m right—okay, Mikasa.”

She watches him go. Her racing heartbeat just makes her hurt worse, everywhere, but it's only when the door clicks shut that she bursts into tears.

***

He’s not breathing when he closes her door. There’s blood on his palms, on his wrists, and his fingers, stuck under his nails. He’s getting it on the papers crumpled in his fist, on the iron door knob, on the inside of his jacket. It’s warm like bathwater. His vision is swimming.

His hands are trembling too much to hold the papers. They fall to the floor of the antechamber and scatter. It doesn’t matter. He couldn’t read them if he tried. He doesn’t want to. 

He tries curling his hands back into fists, but he can’t. He’s shaking too much, and his fingers and palms are now slippery. Black spots are dancing across his eyes, and his aching, burning lungs suck in air without his permission, and he just starts shaking more. More blood pulses out of the gouges he dug in his palms. Crescents of flesh are exposed, tiny piles of flesh where he’d ripped away his skin.

It’s the sort of thing Mikasa would have wrung his neck out for when they were children. She’d have held his hands steady while she bandaged them, scolding him for being careless, worrying over why he’d hurt himself. Eren looks at the blood on his hands and thinks, Mikasa.

She’s awake, thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God. She’s fine, fine fine fine fine fine, aware and alive and she’s alive and the blood on his hands isn’t hers. Eren has to press his knuckles to his lips to keep from crying out. 

It’s not from joy, though. Not entirely.

Eren leans his back against the door between them—from there, he can’t stop himself from sliding down, dragged as if by weights until he’s sitting on the floor, back on the hard wood. Faintly, he thinks it’s a wonder that the door doesn’t start rattling behind him, he’s trembling so intensely, like a starving wild animal. She didn’t, he thinks, hating himself for it, but—she didn’t say it—

He knew she wasn’t gonna fucking tell him she loved him. Not after everything. He hadn’t expected it, doesn’t want to expect it, counts it as a miracle that she didn’t spit on him. But—he still—

She’s the only person left who might love him. And—it’s her. 

For all his bravado with Armin, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen with them. She didn’t say it back and he knows he doesn’t have any right to hear it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

It’s like everything seizes him all at once. His friends are gone. The world is flattened. Everyone hates him, except people he hates. He is going to have to wake up every day and face the world he made—he is going to have to find the strength to do it, because he can’t abandon Mikasa, and Armin, and everyone else. But he is going to be more alone than he’s ever been. There’s no Ymir in his head, only millennias' worth of ghosts and more horror than he could have fathomed. There is no Jean or Connie or Sasha to laugh at, no Levi and Hange to look to, no Armin to hope with, and Mikasa—Mikasa—

Mikasa might not love him anymore.

Eren closes his eyes as the tears leak out and presses his fingers over his mouth to stop from sobbing aloud. 

He tastes iron. 

Chapter Text

"I am talking about evil. It blooms. It eats. It grins."

***

By the time the sun is setting, Armin can admit that the mud might be a blessing. It’s soupy enough to splatter from the ground to hit his pants and thick enough to stick, but the softened earth is much easier on their breaks and bruises than the packed ground would be.

Armin had declined the carriage to let Reiner, Pieck, and unconscious Captain Levi take it, empty space for anyone who needed a break or a nap. They’re all of them soldiers, though, and used to hardship. They endure the misery of the ride with gritted teeth and white knuckles, uncomplaining. Before the rain cleared up, Armin was reminded of the labored hikes in their cadet days—remembering how Reiner had taken his pack for him. He’s come a long way from the boy he’d been then. They all have. 

As the crow flies, it’s not more than a hundred miles from Mitras to Dauper. Mr. Braus had made the trip in five hours, through the dark and driving rain. But it’s taken them more than twice that, and they’ve not yet reached the stables. They have to go this slow—for the sake of their bones and the horses, though none of them are easy about being out in the open. Gabi keeps circling the party on her chestnut filly, armed with the rifle and the pistol Eren had seen fit to give her before they departed. Staring blankly at the pistol on his own hip, Armin keeps thinking about how she would have made an excellent Scout.

The sun is nearly set before them, turning the bellies of lingering clouds red and pink, the sky orange. Set against the dirty, blown-over fields and bare, broken trees, Armin thinks it looks rather ugly. 

He wonders if Mikasa can see it. Her windows face west. 

‘Her’ windows. Armin closes his eyes. 

He left her there. Nothing is going to change that. Even if that sinking feeling in his chest, that nagging whisper in his ear, is right, and Mikasa would have chosen to stay, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t let her wake up alone, surrounded and wounded. His best friend, the girl who has been like a sister to him for over half his life, who has always, always been there for him when he needed her. 

But he’s not sure that she needs him. 

She’s going to—the thought flows down a well-worn path. He’s been justifying it to himself for the better part of ten hours, now. Was I right to do it?

The thing is: it isn’t safe to move her. She’d lost enough blood that it nearly killed her. Her leg is bad enough that any infection—all too easy to get traveling through the damp and dirt like this—would finish the job. God knows what the loss of Titan magic did to her—Armin himself feels weak and stripped-down, and his power wasn’t something he was born into and grew up with. The earthquake had shaken Levi awake for long enough for him to demand a place in their caravan, but Mikasa hadn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to take her away from doctors and nurses if she couldn’t make an informed decision and weigh the consequences for herself. There’s no guarantee that they’ll ever be able to show their faces in any major city again, able to get to a hospital without getting gunned down. He’s not willing to risk Mikasa dying because he couldn’t care for her when Eren could’ve. 

The thing is: Eren will take care of her. Armin wishes he had enough spite to believe he wouldn’t, but he doesn’t. He saw how Eren was, he felt what he can do. Eren’s power isn’t absolute, and he can’t protect all of them all of the time, but he won’t let anyone hurt Mikasa. Eren loves her. No matter what he is or has done, Armin can’t unknow that Eren loves her and has always tried to protect her. 

The thing is: Eren won’t be able to protect Armin the same way. Armin was an officer even before Hange promoted him. (What a mistake that had been.) He’d immediately fled Shiganshina with a Warrior candidate, unlike Mikasa who existed in seeming peace with the Jaegerists for even a short time. Eren’s soldiers will accept Mikasa staying in a way they wouldn’t for Armin. Because Armin was the Commander, because Armin was the Colossal—because Armin is a man. Because it will be much easier to understand their grand leader choosing her to keep at his side as his hostage against the rest of them, because…

So if Armin stayed with her until she woke, he would just be making the target on her head so much bigger. Eren could try to protect them both—and he would—but it would be so much harder. To say nothing of the fact that Armin doubts he could stomach watching Eren hover over her. And…

He can’t even tell how much of that is just justification. If the reasoning holds up. Because the thing is: 

Armin cannot bear to watch her fall back into him. 

Armin knows how much she loves him, and understands why. He’d saved her when she was a child; showed her there was still goodness in the world—however misplaced that view was. But even more than that, they’ve always just fit. He remembers being nine years old and mystified at the something thick in the air between them, right from when Eren finally introduced her. The way they were like magnets, the way Eren kept himself turned towards her, the way Mikasa leaned into him. There’s just always been something. She loves him so much. And if Eren is finally letting himself reflect that back to her—more than matching the care she’s always shown—he just, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what Mikasa will do. 

Armin will be waiting here for her. If she needs him, he’ll go to her. If that’s now or if that’s ten years from now, however long to pull herself free of the gravity of him, if ever she does. 

Because Armin remembers the town. Melted on Eren’s lap, she’d reached for her scarf—his scarf, their scarf. She’d hid it under her shirt for days like a shameful secret, and Eren had pulled it free and wrapped it around her neck.

Maybe he’s wrong. He hopes he is. But he just isn’t sure. 

Armin looks across from him, to Annie. Her horse is taller, and he has to look up at her just a bit. It makes him think of a different field, a million years ago, when she’d picked his hood off his head and chosen to spare him. If she hadn’t, he thinks, things would’ve been different. Better. Fondness and bitterness twine together. 

Annie feels his eyes on her and looks over. He likes her hair down like this. It makes her look softer. “What?” she asks, suspicious. Two pink spots are beginning to burn on her cheeks, in a way that makes Armin smile, even if it’s thin. 

“Nothing,” he says. “Still doing alright?”

She shrugs, looking back ahead. “I’m ready to get there.”

“We’re real close, now,” Mr. Braus says from the head of the carriage. They look over at him. “Just another few minutes.”

Gabi’s horse canters up to them from another wide circle. She pulls the reins, pats her filly’s neck, and says, “I recognize this area from when Falco and I broke out. You’re just on the other side of that lake there, right?” She points to a glimmer at the edge of the forest. 

“That’s it, pumpkin,” Mr. Braus says. For a moment, Gabi glows like a candle at the praise, but then her face pales, stricken. She must’ve been reminded of her actual parents. 

“We are close, then,” Annie says, voice light. “Gabi, can you tell us what we’ve got to look forward to?”

“Um,” she says. She looks across to Falco, on the other side of the carriage, in deep conversation with Jean. Tears are welling in her eyes. “I—Um, Mrs. Lisa is a really good cook. And there are more horses. And I liked the, um, the pitchfork…”

Armin loses focus, letting himself fall behind so they can talk. The details of Braus Stables, which he’s only been to once, make the whole thing feel more real. More permanent. He’s gonna put down roots here, even if only tiny ones, far away from Mikasa—

The thought continues automatically: and Eren. Armin winces.

When he was little, the future he’d envisioned for himself was living by the beach next-door to Eren and Mikasa. As young as nine, he’d automatically pictured them being married. By fifteen, sixteen, he’d dared to imagine that perfect world as having Annie with him in the way those two had each other. And they could all live close by, and go exploring together, travel the globe but always have a home by the sea. 

But the world isn’t that kind. Eren isn’t that kind. 

Did I do the right thing? he thinks again. Staring at the lake ahead, his mind’s eye conjures the last glimpse he’d had of Mikasa, crumpled on her side, hair a black halo against the white pillows. He remembers being surprised that Eren had set aside the decorative ones, like he knew what to do in a place like that. Eren, who’d been standing across from him in the doorway, arms crossed, all but snarling, heat radiating off his body like his Wall Titans. Did I have any choice?

Was that the last time I’m ever going to see her? 

The thought makes him feel queasy, empty stomach twisting. It can’t be. It just can’t be. 

But when he’d written her that letter, he’d felt like he was saying goodbye. Like the ink on the page was draining something from him, leaving him slightly hollow. Like he was trying to give her grace, give her some measure of forgiveness if she did chose to stay. He doesn’t know if he actually feels it—if time won’t turn him into something less understanding—but for right now, he really only wants her to be safe and happy. And—he thinks she’ll need Eren for that. At least for now, at least for some of it. 

He looks up at Annie, tears now shining in her blue eyes now as she murmurs to Gabi, who’s doing her best to hiccup back sobs. They both lost their parents just days ago. This might be the first time they’ve been able to let themselves feel it, no longer fighting, no longer under Eren’s eye, or his roof. Armin sees Annie’s throat bob with a swallow, and Gabi scrubs her elbow across her eye. 

From his place behind the carriage, Armin watches Falco snap straight and excuse himself to Jean, urging his horse ahead of and around the carriage to pull up beside Gabi. She reaches for him instantly, both arms out like a baby. Baby birds can’t fly. Falco takes her hands, stands, feet in the stirrups, and swings his far leg up in a wide arc, over his horse and across hers. His momentum carries him forward and then he’s sitting behind Gabi and pulling her into an awkward hug. She presses her face against his chest and begins to cry in earnest. Falco starts shaking. 

When Annie looks back at him, Armin is already urging his horse to a trot beside her. She pulls away from the kids to give them all some privacy, and when he reaches her, offering the hand of his unbroken arm, she takes it and holds it over her heart. “Sorry,” she says, voice threadbare. “I shouldn’t—”

“It’s fine,” he soothes. “Sorry I can’t pull that move Falco just did. I’m pretty sure I’d fall and break my other wrist.”

Annie laughs, a wet, surprised hahaha. It makes Armin’s heart ache sweetly. She looks ahead at the sinking sun and says, “How are you, Armin?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he says. “And do you want to talk about this now?”

“No.” Her eyes flit to Mr. Braus at the head of the carriage, watching the children with a tortured expression. “Gabi said there’s enough space that we could probably have our own bedroom. Then said that Mr. Braus might make me share with Pieck instead, actually, since it could be improper, what with us being unmarried.”

Armin’s mouth ticks into a small smile. “We’ll build enough bedrooms for all of us.” He peers ahead to the lake, slowly growing closer. Lowly, he adds, “Do you think Gabi and Falco will get away with sharing a room, since they’re engaged to be married?”

Annie snorts—another startled, precious sound that makes Armin feel something good. “I think they’ll try.”

Out of habit, he opens his mouth to say that Eren and Mikasa shared a bedroom when they were not too much younger—

He inhales sharply, biting his tongue. But Annie seems to pick up on it anyway, her face softening with concern. “Armin…”

“I couldn’t—” he says, and stops. Suddenly desperate, he asks, “Did I do the right thing?”

Before she even answers, he knows the answer is no. Old insecurities bubble fast to the surface. If I were smarter, if I were faster, if I were stronger, if I were more decisive. If I were better I wouldn’t have left her — wouldn’t have needed to leave her —did I need to leave her? Did I really need to leave or was I lying to myself, and to her?

“You did the best you could,” Annie says softly. Still clutching his hand to her heart, she rubs her thumb over his knuckles. “You know you couldn’t stay any longer. And you know he never would’ve let you take her. Not like that.”

“I know,” he says, “but—If I’d protected her better, she wouldn’t be too unconscious to—too hurt to make that choice. If I’d protected her then—” His voice drops to a whisper. “If she hadn’t been hurt, Annie, I think she’d have been able to kill him. He would’ve let her, and some part of the world would still be around—and—”

“Then maybe I should’ve come with you from the start,” Annie says, fierce. “Maybe Falco and Gabi should’ve thought up his bird form faster. Maybe Mikasa shouldn’t have been fighting so recklessly. We all could’ve done things differently, Armin, but that doesn’t change where we are now. We can’t do things over again. And we have to make our choices now, in the world we live in.”

“But—”

“You know she’s safest there, and you aren’t,” Annie reminds. “And you know she’d want you as safe as you can be.”

“I know…” 

“Then stop beating yourself up over it,” she says. That’s his Annie: cold and hard and practical. “If you got yourself killed trying to stick by her, she’d be furious.”

“She’s not that mean,” he says lightly, “but I know. I know. Thank you, Annie.”

“Yes, well,” she says, those pink spots on her cheeks again. “I’m stuck with you, so.”

“You bet you are.” He squeezes her fingers. 

The sun has finally disappeared below the horizon. There’s a new wall of angry grey clouds blooming far away in the north and east, promising more rain. Honestly, Armin doesn’t mind the prospect of spending a long few days curled in front of a fireplace, fighting the damp and the chill with Annie, Jean, Connie, and everyone. 

Mikasa, his mind protests, already fretting if she’ll be cold all alone in that stone palace. But—

Like Eren said. She had her scarf. 

Armin swallows and hopes it brings her comfort. 

***

Dear Mikasa,

Whenever you wake up

I’m so sorry

I hope you’re

We’re at Braus Stables with Sasha’s father. He came to get us personally. We’re all alive. Nobody is too badly hurt. Captain Levi got the worst of it, and I expect you’re suffering some of what he is, too. Which means I’m really not sure when you’re going to wake up. I would have stayed with you every moment, if I didn’t think I might just make it worse, and if the spot at your side wasn’t already filled. I’m positive that when you do wake up, Eren is going to be right there with you, which is the only reason I’m willing to let you out of my sight. Despite it all, I trust him with you I don’t think he I know he won’t let anyone hurt you. If there’s one thing I still know about him, it’s that. If I were there, honey, I would only draw more attention to you and put you in more danger. Eren’s right about not wrong about that much, at least. I was the Commander of the Survey Corps. And I’m awake, and I’m not the girl that Eren Jaeger is in love with. It’ll be easier for his soldiers to accept. He can keep you safe more easily than he can keep both of us safe. 

And, too, it really wasn’t a good idea to take you into the country, away from doctors, when we don’t know if we’d be able to get back to the city safely without Eren as an escort. You’ve been out for around forty-seven hours as of me writing this. I can fix stitches in a barn, but I don’t know what to do if much more than that is broken. Eren wasn’t wrong about that. It wouldn’t have been fair to take you away from medical professionals with no guarantee you could be taken back to them, if you couldn’t give consent for it.

When you’re up, and when it’s safe for you to travel, I’ll be waiting for you here at the Brauses’. All of us will. Annie wanted me to wish you well. Her exact words were to, “Hurry up and get kicking, because your boys are all twitchy.” Reiner and Pieck give their regards and best wishes. Gabi says to thank you for everything you did, for trying so hard to help. Falco wants you to know that he’s so sorry for being the thing that hurt you. Jean and Connie give their love. 

I love you so, so much, Mikasa. More than anybody else in the world. You are the best sister I ever could have asked for, and I am so, so sorry that it looks like keeping you safe means leaving you alone. You can shout me deaf and beat me black and blue when next you see me, if that’s what you want, honey. If you need me, I’ll be there for you—for always, for ever. 

I hope I’ll see you soon.

Yours, Armin

***

Mikasa holds Armin’s letter like a child would a doll. She folds it in quarters and presses it against her heart, and tries to feel any warmth from his words travel into her. 

It doesn’t work. 

It takes much longer than she would have thought for anyone to come to her. When the far door finally opens, Mikasa has already cried herself out. She had pushed herself painstakingly to the edge of the monstrously huge bed so that she was sitting by the nightstand. She’d wanted to refill her glass of water from the pitcher—just that. But the effort had her arms shaking; made her so dizzy that she had to spend several long minutes with her eyes closed, forehead pressed against the wood of the headboard. When she’d pulled away, whimpering, to drink, she’d seen the other two things on the nightstand: a letter and her scarf.

As the door pushes open, blue light bleeds in from the hallway, illuminating Mikasa. She sits, bare feet dangling over the floor, the letter pressed over her heart, staring at the scarf. She looks at it and thinks that it’s coiled like a snake waiting to strike. 

“There you are,” an unfamiliar voice calls, soft. Mikasa tears her glistening eyes away from it and looks toward the door. Three women hurry over to her, all murmuring concern. Mikasa doesn’t recognize a single one of them. She wonders if the only person left for a hundred miles that she knows is Eren, and her eyes sting. 

“Poor dear,” says an aging woman, her habit the grandest. “How are you feeling, child?”

Mikasa gives a tiny shrug, looking away from her. She doesn’t have words for this awful, gaping emptiness all inside her. There are bruises and aches and sharp pains, but what’s hurting the most is this scarped-bare hollowness that she’s not even sure is real. 

The matron takes her hand off her chest and holds her fingers over her wrist for a moment. She nods. “Doing much better there, at least. What’s hurting you? Drink your water now. We’ve got tea coming for you, but keep with your water.” She presses the glass back into her hand. 

Mikasa drinks. The cup feels like a lead weight. 

The other two nurses are setting up an array of salves and unrolling bandages. Mikasa watches them, upset for no reason she could name. She keeps Armin’s letter folded in her hand.

“Tell me how you’re feeling,” the matron says. “I’m Matron Elise Beck; that’s Agatha and Rosina. We’ve been taking care of you this past day and a half. Thank you for waking up when you did—if we’d had to start force-feeding you, I don’t like to think how that’d have gone over.” She looks over her shoulder. “Get me that light.”

The younger nurse—likely not too much older than Mikasa herself—passes a small cylinder over. Matron Beck takes it, slides the top off, and shines a blue iceburst crystal light in Mikasa’s eye. She frowns, pulling back, but Matron just nods. “Still responding. I’d say you’re well past the danger of any undiagnosed cranial damage. Now tell me plain, can you speak or not?”

Mikasa swallows. “I can.”

“Hm. Barely. Good enough though. Let’s lie you back down, now.” She gently presses Mikasa’s shoulder, prompting her to turn against the pillows, and then very, very carefully, takes both of her legs in her hands. She lifts them back onto the bed, sparing Mikasa from inadvertently hurting herself. 

“You were tough to sew up, I heard,” she says mildly. “But that just kept you from tearing the outside open again. We want to avoid using this muscle, yes? You’ll only delay how long it takes for your body to heal itself. You did quite enough damage before you came.” She pats Mikasa’s cheek gently. Her eyes are a dark brown, set in a broad lined face. She looks kind. 

Something about her, about the way she’s looking at her, makes Mikasa want to hide. 

“Tell me,” she says, “how you’re feeling.”

Mikasa sniffs. “I’m… my head hurts. And my leg. And I feel…” Sapped. Drained. Hollow. Empty. Torn in half. “Tired.”

“That’s the blood loss,” she says with a nod. “We came as soon as we were fetched, but we sent someone to get tea and soup. Got to get some sugar and substance back into you. What about all the bruising? How does that feel?”

She looks down. “It’s fine.”

“Fine, she says!” Matron Beck hmphs. “Fine my hat. Scale of one to ten, dear, how much does the bruising hurt?”

“...Three?”

“Six it is. Rosina.”

The younger woman steps forward with a couple of blue pills in one hand and a pot full of a yellow-green mixture in the other. She hands the pills to the matron and then pauses. “Uh,” she says, looking uncertain. “If I may…?”

It takes Mikasa a moment to realize she’s asking her. After a beat, she nods hesitantly, and the woman dips her fingers in. She slathers the salve onto a cluster of bruises under her knee. It’s cold against the tender flesh, making her wince. 

Matron Beck notices and sends the other woman to go build the fire back up. “Take this,” she says to Mikasa, offering the pills. “Diluted morphine, for the pain. Hurry, hurry.”

She’s wary, but… what exactly would be the point of not taking them? The worst thing it could do is kill her.

It’s been a long time since she’s thought like that. It brings no comfort. But Mikasa’s fingers unclench from the letter. She brings them to her mouth and swallows.

“Keep drinking,” she says, even once they’re down. Obediently, Mikasa does. The glass still feels like a weight, even as she’s slowly draining it. “That’s it,” she says. “We’re going to get you steady. All you need to do is rest. You put yourself through something frightful.”

I didn’t put myself through it, Mikasa thinks distantly, hand clutching Armin’s letter again. The nurse pushes the white dress she’s in up some, exposing a horrible blue-purple mark in the loose shape of a crescent moon. She spreads more of the salve across it. The cold is beginning to sink into her. 

The door swings open again. Another woman comes in, carrying a covered tray. The image is somehow surreal. Faintly, as if a sourceless echo, she thinks, what am I…

“There’s Greta with your meal,” Matron Beck says. “Come here, come here, do you want her to starve?” 

She scurries over and plucks long legs out of the side of the tray, placing it over Mikasa’s lap. She whisks the cover off, and a swirl of steam rises from a teapot and a soup tureen. Before Mikasa can so much as lift her hands, Greta is pouring her tea. The pot is made of delicate china and painted into a scene of a meadow—a waterfall and a rainbow, a family of deer, lush green trees and golden yellow flowers. The cup she pours into has a mother bird sitting on a nest full of eggs, her mate presenting her with a fat, squirming red worm. 

Four spoons of sugar are added before Mikasa can protest. When Greta catches her look, she says, “It’s to thicken your blood. Um, m—”

“And the soup as well,” Matron Beck says. “Beef broth and boiled spinach. Got to get some iron into you. That’ll help with that dizziness. Don’t bother to eat the leaves if you don’t want, the last thing we need is you throwing it up. Shoo, Greta, shoo, I’ve got to check the stitches.”

Greta steps back dutifully. Matron Beck moves down and once more gingerly picks up her ankle. Mikasa winces, biting her lip to keep back a strangled whimper, hands tightening around the glass and the letter. Her elbows dig into her sides. The matron tilts her head, and Mikasa’s leg, gingerly runs her fingers over the stitches, and nods. “Very good. You’ll want to stay still, but it looks just fine for now. I was thinking you’d like to eat while we ran a bath, and after, we can see what else needs doing, hm?”

Mikasa’s mouth is still pressed together. Bright, stabbing pains are shooting up from her calf, lighting like arrows all along her leg and up to her spine. She doesn’t know these women. She wants Hange, suddenly—all manic cheer and cool wisdom and soft words, the closest approximation of a mother that Mikasa has known since she was ten years old. Hange always patched them up and tried to keep their spirits up. Levi, too, in his way—Levi would brew them tea. Levi would know that Mikasa only likes half a spoon of sugar. But Hange is dead—burned like Armin had been on the rooftops of Shiganshina—and Levi is gone. And Armin isn’t here, either—he went to Sasha’s house—and Sasha is dead, too. And Jean is gone, and Connie. Mikasa even finds herself wanting Annie. It had been Annie who’d torn her first bandage, on Falco’s back, their flight still wobbly as the little boy reeled from the torn muscles. Gabi’s voice had gone shrill worrying over him—and she remembers Gabi’s voice going shrill again when they started to fall, when the Colossals stopped, Reiner holding her protectively—and Mikasa remembers jumping, and then—

Greta takes the glass out of Mikasa’s hand and sets it on the tray, swapping it for the teacup. 

—And Mikasa is alone here, with only these strangers.

She looks up, focusing. She feels like a pinned bug, all these eyes on her. She asked something, Mikasa remembers with a jolt. She asked— “Okay,” she says. Her fingers curl around the handle of the teacup. Her knuckles sting where they’re pressed against the body of the cup—it’s still scalding hot—but she lets them. 

The nurse who’d gone to the fireplace is back now. Mikasa hears without listening as she’s ordered to draw a bath. Make sure there are sweet-smelling soaps . She takes one sip of the tea and has to swallow a gag—the cloying sugar overwhelming the simple black tea. She sets the cup down on the little tray. Liver-spotted hands are ladling soup into a silver bowl, and Mikasa watches blankly until she hears, “Is there anything else we can do for you, my lady?”

The words hit her like a slap across the face. A hard fist seizes around her heart, some wild emotion ringing through her head as the words do. She feels like she’s made of ice, cold and fragile, when she says, “I’m not—Please don’t call me that.”

All of them, all four of the nurses, exchange a glance over her. Greta opens her mouth, hesitating, looking nervously at the matron. “Uh,” she says.

“Nevermind, Greta,” Matron Beck says. She looks back to Mikasa. “What would you prefer to be called then?”

Mikasa blinks in rapid succession. “I—nothing. I’m… I’m not anything.”

Four sets of eyebrows raise. “I think “my lady” would be the most appropriate, if you’re not terribly opposed,” Matron Beck says carefully. “It would make us here more comfortable, I do believe.”

Her head is spinning. For some reason, this seems very, very wrong. “But I’m not,” she insists. Her voice shakes. The only thing that would’ve made her— that —is a distant tie to Hizuru, an island she’d never seen and never, ever would, because it’s gone. The rice fields full of people working in the bamboo hats that Kiyomi told her about are gone. The glorious sunrises that her mom’s name had come from won’t ever be seen by anybody else ever again. Ever, ever. Nor the gulfs and bays the sun rose over, nor the temples built to honor them, nor forests of baby-pink petals that bloomed in spring. Kiyomi had begged her to go see it, two years ago. She’d showed her photos and illustrations of canals choked by cherry blossoms, still more clinging to the trees and dancing through the air; told her about how they symbolized the fleetingness of life, and why it should be cherished—about how Hizuran soldiers paint them on their armor so that they might fall with grace—beauty and violence tangled up in one.

Those forests would’ve been broken and burned, like so many other forests. Every other forest, probably. Mikasa’s heart is pounding hard against her chest, and she can still feel it in her skull, in her leg, in her throbbing bruises and hollow bones. “I’m not,” she insists. 

“Well,” Matron Beck says. Careful, careful, her tone of voice. It makes Mikasa want to run. She tenses, and then has to bite back a whimper as the ripped muscle in her leg screams. “Nobody is much of anything, right now,” she says. “Everything is in such a state of disarray. We’re only just beginning to pull together. Establish the nation’s head. Until told otherwise, my lady seems the… best.”

What did she want to say? Mikasa thinks, clutching at the sleeve of her dress, at Armin’s letter. But she doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to ask. “I’m…” not, she wants to say again, but…

She’s in the royal palace, in a private chamber bigger than either of her childhood homes or her shared apartment with Sasha. There’s fine food before her, set up on her soft bed, in her pretty, grand room. Her wounds are being treated. The women are talking in low, soothing voices— just like Eren did, she thinks half-hysterically—as if not to frighten her. She’s being cared for like… like a skittish, wounded animal. 

Mikasa hears blood rushing in her ears. Oh, she thinks. She presses her lips together, trying to fight off a new round of tears— and stupid, stupid, stupid girl, is this why you’re crying? —as it all clicks into place. 

That’s why Eren’s doing this. Keeping her here, keeping her well cared for, trying to make her happy by—by saying that. Because—because that’s what they do, him and her, they take care of each other—and she does know that Eren cares about her—or at least he did, once. He probably still does. He didn’t kill her. He isn’t letting her die. And—and what else is left for him, really, except the stupid little girl who used to chase after him, because she never had anywhere better to go? Because everyone else was able to leave—and they left her, and—and maybe they left her because she failed, because she’d been reckless enough to get herself hurt, and she wasn’t able to do what needed doing—and nothing else is left, everything and everybody outside their tiny, tiny island is gone, because he —and everyone else must blame her for—and now he’s putting on this show of taking care of her, out of leftover childhood affection, out of duty, out of pity—

“...a lady,” Matron Beck says, like she’s finishing Mikasa’s spoken sentence. She’s not, she’s not, she’s not. “The only one I’m certain of.” She looks to her subordinate nurses. “I think we’ve overwhelmed you. Let’s get out of your way, then. There’s a bell there, do you see? Ring it when you have any need of us, and we’ll come. Until then, my lady, you just rest, yes? Yes. Drink your tea and eat your soup, and you’ll feel better soon.” She presses her hand over her forehead, checking her temperature, nods, and steps back. All four of them file out, glancing back nervously, and they start whispering before the door even closes.

Mikasa is left breathing heavily, staring at the tray. Her vision has gone blurry, black spots swimming across her eyes. Like the spinach, she thinks, and even the voice in her head is high-pitched and shaky; careening toward fully hysterical. In the soup. 

She has to close her eyes. She wants to roll over, back away, but the stupid tray is on either side of her legs, and she can’t, not without knocking it over. Determined, she lays aside Armin’s letter. Carefully, practicing calm, she picks up the tray—and why is everything so heavy that it makes her arms tremble—and moves it aside. Nothing spills—small portions for her, for the girl who can’t even fill up her own glass of water without nearly fainting—but when she’s out from under it, she’s almost hyperventilating. 

What do I do, she thinks, what do I do, what do I do, what do I do? Is she just supposed to eat supper, like—like there’s nothing better to do? She doesn’t—and last time she’d properly sat down for a meal it had been Hange’s potato soup, around the campfire with everybody else. Armin and Jean and Connie, and Levi had been wrapped up like a mummy, Hange trying to get them ready—Annie, the only one willing to come out and ask what she’d do if they couldn’t talk Eren down—Reiner, who she best remembers as the 104th’s big brother with a booming laugh, who she’d watched force himself past every limit in the fight—little Gabi and Falco, who fell asleep clutching each other’s clothes—even Pieck, relentless even after they’d known there was no point. Even Magath, who’s more to blame for the fall of Maria than Bertholdt and Reiner, had been there. It had been tense, and more than once she’d thought they’d fall at each other’s throats, but they hadn’t. There’d been communion and togetherness—a strange, strained one, yes, but it had been a mesh of old and new friends and enemies, all gathered ‘round a single hearth. And, back then—she’d still thought they could talk to Eren. Make him see… or that, at least, they could stop him some other way, without killing him—

I’m sorry, Aunt Carla, she thinks wildly, thoughts skipping ahead. She thinks, I protected him, like you said, and that was the wrong thing to do—I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry, I should have protected him from himself, I should have protected who he was—but Aunt Carla, he’s always been like this—Aunt Carla, is that what you meant? Did I not protect him from that awfulness inside of him? Did I fail you, too, like I failed everyone else?

Even if she hadn’t, even if Aunt Carla had just meant keep Eren alive—and it’s been so long now that she can’t remember the words themselves, just the spirit she’d taken them in—she’d have failed her in that way, too. She’d been trying to kill Eren. She’d… she’d never wanted to, exactly, but she had been more than prepared to. The unending march, the destruction in his wake, the people he was to kill, all of it had been too much to bear. 

From on high, she’d watched the Titans take Fort Slava. She’d seen enough of the crowd to know that civilians had fled there, seeking safety. Families from who-knows-where. No one will ever know where they’d come from, how far they’d traveled, just to die there, the same as they would have at home. She’d seen worse, too. That mass of people huddled under the ravine, too far back to be crushed, but not enough to not be burned. Their screams had echoed, and the Titans hadn’t been marching, then. They were so loud, as they died—and then so, so quiet. She’d literally, literally seen a river run red with blood, a mess of raw and charred meat and the odd bit of identifiable remains floating along the surface like ice—Like the spinach! she thinks again. The age-spotted forearm, the half-smashed face, floating in a river of blood. 

Mikasa twists over the edge of the bed and vomits. 

A mixture of bile and water claws its way up her throat and splatters on the floor, making a horrible wet splashing sound. It hurts—and her head throbs, and now she’s gone and thrown up most of the water she’d gotten down and probably the painkillers, too. Not that she wants them, not that she needs them. The people in the fort, in the ravine, in the river, hadn’t gotten any. 

She’s shivering all over now, whole body wracked by spasms. Her stomach clenches, trying to heave again, but there’s nothing left in her to purge. There’s nothing in her, and no one around her, and she hurts. The sound of her own frantic gasps of breath is loud in her ears, driving hard walls of pain into her head; her chest burns like she’s inhaling ash. She’d know. Not as well as some, but she knows. 

Mikasa fumbles blindly for Armin’s letter. Her clumsy fingers find it after a long moment. She has to wait until her body has calmed, some—at least until it’s bearable to open her eyes. When she tries to slow her breathing, she only starts trembling worse. Lying on her side, shaking like a newborn animal—like an injured, starving, terrified little bird—she unfolds the crinkled paper. 

Between the tears in her eyes and her unsteady fingers, she can’t read a word. 

***

Dawn finds Eren staring blankly at the arched, carved ceiling of his bedroom.

His bed, red and unused, is more than wide enough for him to lay across it longways. The whole ceiling is built in an octagon of terraces, one whittled wooden beam over and above the next, with hollows full of paintings. The long spaces are dreamlike landscapes of farmlands and forests. Most of the rest are just depictions of Maria, Rose, and Sina. Together, separate. Full-bodied or just featureless profiles. In the very center, they’re gathered together, holding hands around an apple tree bearing golden fruit. They’re really too high up to make out details, but Eren keeps finding himself thinking, that’s not what they looked like. 

He remembers them in flashes. Through Ymir’s eyes best of all, the girls as babies and little children, but he can sift through the memories and get glimpses of Maria in a mirror, Rose and Sina with their white dresses and pale faces smeared with Mamma’s blood; Mamma and his aunties looking so tired, and he’s only nine years old, he doesn’t understand— 

Eren wonders what, in two thousand years, will be the legacy of him. He wonders what they’ll say, now that it’s only his people who can speak. 

He’d thought about it plenty, before. The survivors would call him the Devil of Paradis, the worst monster humanity had ever known. They’d ban his name from the history books until there was no trace of Eren Jaeger or his mad cult, only The Attack Titan and the unspeakable damage it caused. The shining heroes who saved the world would be the only ones remembered as something like who they were. That was something, at least. Mikasa’s face would never be lost to time. 

His friends would talk about him quietly, once in a while. Regret and rancor and old affection would mix, inextricable. Maybe, one day, Mikasa would tell her children about a boy who’d saved her, when she was just their age. Maybe she would tell them that she’d loved him. And then maybe she’d look over their heads of black hair and smile at their father, a tall, handsome man with kind eyes and a soft smile, and she would smile back—

Eren grinds his teeth together and forces slow breaths. 

I never was going to have a life with her, anyway, he tells himself. That’s never changed what I have to do for her. 

(Because she hasn’t, his thoughts whisper, chosen to leave. Not yet.)

Shut, he hisses back, the fuck up. 

It takes three repetitions for him to realize the knocks on his door aren’t in his head. He rolls onto his stomach and swings his socked feet onto the hard floor, squinting at the door before he decides to cross the room and open it.

When he does, it’s Floch. Eren closes his eyes, but he’d expected nothing less.

“You’re up early,” he says brightly. 

Eren sighs. “If you’re surprised I’m awake, why did you knock.”

“I assumed you hadn’t lost all your military discipline.”

“I didn’t sleep at all, actually.” 

“Ah,” Floch says, delicate. “You do look a little haggard.” Eren will take that as a polite way of saying like you spent a long time crying. “Would coffee help?”

“We’ve still got some?”

“Plenty. And plenty of beans, too. What to do with them is actually something we’re going to need to decide eventually.”

Something about the way he says that makes Eren wary. “Plant them?”

“And the question is how, where, and who. We’ll get it covered. It’s on the agenda.” He taps a folder nested in his elbow. “Do you want to get dressed and eat? There’s a meal already laid out off the gallery.” 

Eren scratches the side of his neck, tired and irritated. His loose hair brushes against his fingers. “What, they’re not bringing me breakfast today?”

Floch shrugs. “I’m sure they would if you asked, but as I understand it, that’s usually just for… women.”

Eren steps back into his room, heading for the dresser. He’s not yet subjected himself to being fitted for clothing, but someone had come by around noon yesterday and dropped off a bunch of shit generally his size. Including a couple pairs of shoes. He steps into one while asking, “Why the hesitation there, Forster?”

“Well,” he says, “breakfast in bed is usually reserved for married women. Married noblewomen . But with Mikasa being so injured, I’m sure they’re happy to make an exception.”

Eren’s mouth twists, and something stirs angrily in his chest. “Watch your tone.”

“She did wake up, then?” he says, idle. “I saw the team of nurses scurrying around yesterday evening, but I wasn’t sure. They didn’t tell me anything.”

Eren breathes in through his teeth. He’s very aware that Floch thought everyone who’d come after him deserved execution, and that Mikasa is one door away, unable to fight. His hands—eight crescent-shaped divots scabbed over on his palms—itch. “Why would you need to know?”

It’s Floch’s turn to sigh. “You signed the rest of them into exile yesterday,” —and the ink smudged his fingers had been black and cold, not blood, not blood, their blood is not on his hands and it never will be. “Now that she’s awake, especially now that everyone else is gone, you’ve got to give some reason for her being here, Eren.”

“She’s here because I’m in love with her,” Eren snaps, turning to glare at him. Floch’s eyebrows shoot up. “And she hasn’t asked to leave me yet.”

Slowly, Floch nods. “Al-right. And is that the answer you want to give your men?”

Eren stalks toward him and pushes past, out the door and into the hallway. Floch follows as if caught in his wake. Eren very, very determinedly does not look at Mikasa’s door as he walks past. “The way you say that makes it seem like you think that would be the wrong answer.”

“Well,” Floch says, struggling to keep pace. He presses his hand over the spot where Gabi’d shot him. “You said you thought giving the others a nominal punishment and sending them somewhere remote would keep them safe. It’s only us and a few others who even know they’re in Dauper. If you’re only keeping Mikasa around just ‘cause, don’t you think—”

“No,” Eren growls. They reach the balcony above the gallery, and he heads for the stairs. The shattered statues have been swept away, the crooked paintings straightened. “I can keep her safe. Do you really think anyone would try something with her?”

“Frankly, Eren, yes.”

“Why?”

“If you’re careless about it, it’s kind of like you’re asking —”

“Careless?” Eren repeats, spinning to face him. His hands are curled in fists, nails digging into the scabs. His breathing is labored. “What the fuck makes you think I’m being careless?”

Floch takes a step back, raising his free hand slightly. “I just mean,” he says, “that you had a well-thought-out idea about how to spare the rest of… them, from suffering any consequences. The sentence and the removal. I understand that you want to protect Mikasa—I do,” he stresses, seeing Eren’s face— “but I’m not sure that sheer stubbornness is actually enough.”

Eren almost laughs. Everything in his life he’s done mostly with sheer stubbornness. But he’s had to get smarter, too—for everything important, like reclaiming Shiganshina, and planning the Rumbling, and saving Mikasa the night they met. “Fine. Any ideas?”

“I’m not sure you’ll like it.”

It’s like his blood has been set to boiling. Red is creeping into his periphery. “Are you going to suggest sending Mikasa away?”

“No.” Floch levels eye contact at him. “I was going to say you could call her a… a hostage. To ensure the behavior of the others.”

Eren bites his tongue, hard, for three seconds. “Fine.”

Disbelief bends Floch’s pale face. “Really?”

Eren forces himself to exhale and drop his shoulders. “She knows she can leave if she wants. If you think some meaningless label will do that much, then whatever. I really don’t give a fuck.” 

“Okay, then,” Floch says. “If you’re sure you’re alright with it.”

Eren doesn’t like it, but it doesn’t actually matter. A nominal sentence, like he’d given the others, for protection. They know it was for their own safety—and everyone with half a brain will be able to put it together, too. But he made them untouchable and put them out of easy reach. It is better than a simple pardon; he can see that now. 

I judged their crimes and found them worth a peaceful life in the country. That was the message he’d sent in sentencing exile. Where they won’t have to face their failure every day; and can live unbothered by the likes of us.

If Floch wants to call Mikasa a hostage against the rest of them, fine. Fine. Mikasa knows better, and that’s all that matters. 

I judged her and found her worthy of a life at my side. 

Unless she decides otherwise. 

Eren bites the inside of his cheek, glaring hard at the carpet. She hadn’t asked to leave, and she hadn’t said it back, so. Where does that leave them?

He’s not a fucking idiot. He knew she wasn’t going to just fall into his arms like nothing happened. He doesn’t even really want her to. Not really. He wants her, is incapable of not wanting her, but Mikasa isn’t—she’s not some—she wouldn’t be herself if she just accepted what he did like it was nothing. He wouldn’t want that; he doesn’t deserve that. Bad enough that he’s going to see awe and admiration in the eyes of everyone around him; he certainly doesn’t want any of that from Mikasa. 

Heart panging, he remembers the way she’d looked at him in that hunting shack when they were children. Blood splattered on his face, splinters biting into his soft palms from how hard he’d gripped the knife he’d taken from her kitchen. When he was young, he’d thought it was wonder and gratitude that shone in her grey eyes as she looked up at him. Now he can recognize it for what it was. She’d been scared. Of him. 

She’d forgotten that. At least for a long time. She’d glossed it over in her mind and let their story start when he gave her that scarf. She thinks—or she thought—of it as two actions that could be separated. It couldn’t. Not really. Maybe she could have thought as much, for a while, and it wouldn’t have mattered that she was wrong, but that’s not possible, anymore. No more chance of her seeing him as better than he is, and Eren mourns that loss. 

He left the possibility of anything easy for them behind a long, long time ago, on the edge of the refugee camp. If he’d told her he loved her then, maybe she’d have leaped to meet him. It would have been sudden, and she’d have been confused, but he doesn’t think it’s too crazy to think that—they could’ve. They could’ve run, that night. 

They couldn’t have, of course. If they’d run, Eren would have been dead four years before they had the chance to. He might not have even been born. He and Mikasa might not have ever met. Or maybe their first meeting would have ended with him dead and her worse than. But—still. If you took that night and ripped it out of reality—maybe they would’ve said fuck it all and chosen each other. 

But you can’t. Not outside of his dreams. And even that didn’t even fully come to fruition, he thinks bitterly. Because of the way the battle had gone, because Ymir had thrown a tantrum, because he’d never been able to draw Mikasa to him. He’d been waiting patiently, gutting that fucking fish, aware that she was inside napping; aware that she wasn’t. That she was fighting the ongoing battle. But his eyes were closed, and the sound of his march drowned out anything else. 

He’d seen it through Ymir’s eyes, though. The broken bodies, the shattered cities, the fires that were stomped out in the same motion they were set. She’d been feeding off his anger and riding out the shockwave of two thousand years’ of suppressed emotion finally breaking free, but she’d seen. And once the foreign fury fled her system, she hadn’t been able to face it. She’d passed her great burden onto him before he could realize what was happening. 

And facing it…

Eren’s heartrate picks up even thinking about it. It’s why he hadn’t dared sleep last night; spent hours focusing on Mikasa’s silence and sifting through anyone else’s memories—because he can’t face his own. If he dwells on it, alone, without Mikasa’s hand to hold or Armin’s fingers on his shoulder, or—anyone else—he’ll go mad. He’ll slide back into the state he’d been in in the Paths, before he had to force himself to hold it together or else Mikasa and Armin would die. And now Armin’s gone, and Mikasa isn’t going to want to hear it. If he were to try to talk to fucking Floch about it, he’d only praise him; tell him he’d only done what was necessary for the nation. He doesn’t want admiration for it—for killing those people—for killing his mom. 

I didn’t know, he wants to protest. I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know—Armin’s voice echoes in his head, two sets of words overlapping. No, you didn’t, he’d said, cold and brittle, and, Let’s go, Eren, gentle but weary. Armin doesn’t remember what he’d done; his understanding for that wasn’t worth anything, anyway. 

Armin is better than him, so, so much better than him; Armin is—was—is his best friend and Eren would gladly put the world in his hands, but—Armin wasn’t—isn’t a part of their family. He isn’t a part of him, not the same basic, vital way that Mikasa is. Armin had his own stories, his own dreams, his own love, that had never been a part of Eren-and-Mikasa and the home that has always been each other. Armin has been like Eren’s hand—something to reach with, something that would be devastating to lose—but not his heart. 

That’s always been Mikasa. 

Eren and Armin had gone to school together for nearly three years before Eren ever spoke to him. He’d seen him around, watched the too-small boy carry too-big books. Watched them get knocked out of his hands and watched him cry about it. It took until they were eight for him to peer out of the alley he’d been lurking in and ask, hey, how come you never defend yourself? And it was only after Eren was impressed with his reasoning, by how he saw the world, that Eren began to care. Armin had loved him for it, for trying to be his defender, but he’d always had an understanding of Eren’s default state. He’d already known what it was like to be unloved by Eren Jaeger.

Mikasa never had. The first time she ever saw him, he was already prepared to die for her, eager to kill for her. That made her think that he was selfless, kind-hearted, good. And it’s not that he can’t be; it’s that she was the only, only one who really thought that was his base nature.

And now she won’t.

He shattered that image… when? When was that point of no return? He would have thought Liberio—the soft sadness in her voice when she asked do you know what you’ve done? He would’ve thought every awful word he’d thrown at her in the restaurant—the way she’d looked at him with wet grey eyes as she gathered Armin’s beaten body off the floor. He would’ve thought when he brought down Wall Maria, when she must’ve realized the full extent of his plan. But even then, after all of that, when he took them into the Paths, she’d begged him to come back. To come home. She’d had his scarf tied under her shirt. So when was it that she’d finally broken? What was that final straw?

Was it when she was hurt? That was his fault, even if it wasn’t him. Was it Fort Slava? That’s when they’d caught up to him. Was it that grand ravine? The river? How much had been left by nightfall? By dawn? Had any semblance of faith in him been left by the time it was finally over?

His heart is racing again; his vision swimming. A distant cacophony echoes in his ears: thousands of small, small voices screaming, thousands of heavy footfalls, the roar of fires and rivers, churning winds—and now, again, that soft drumbeat is thrumming inside him. Along the back of his skull, in the insides of his wrists, through the cavity of his chest. He can feel the branches winding through his head and out—he can feel just how many of them he’d severed in his march. The jagged, broken ends are bleeding in his mind, and it hurts. 

Fort Slava. It had been packed full of Eldian refugees, all the way from Liberio. They’d been some of the last that he’d felt die in that way. Annie’s father, Reiner’s mother. Falco and Gabi’s real parents. Do they know how far their families traveled, just to die anyway?

His breathing has gone erratic; his jaw is clenched so tightly it aches. Eren—didn’t think—he doesn’t know how to think like this—his feet itch, like he wants to back away from his own thoughts— hide, and he’s never wanted to hide from what scares him even once in his life—except for with Mikasa, on the outskirts of that refugee camp, and if she’d just fucking told him—

“Eren.” 

Floch’s voice comes, low, and jolts him out of the violent whirlwind of his own thoughts. Eren’s eyes snap to him. His vision is still blurry. 

“Are you…” Floch’s voice wavers. His hand hovers like he wants to rest it on Eren’s shoulder but isn’t sure if it’s safe. It might not be. Eren’s not sure he wouldn’t bite. “Is it the sentencing? If you hate it that much, we can come up with something else—”

The sentence. That had as good as gone in one ear and out the other.  Whatever empty “punishment” is to be pinned on Mikasa is, very literally, the least of his worries right now. “I’m fine,” Eren lies. His voice is a tight rasp, like he’s suppressing tears. Bad. He swallows, and his voice is steadier when he says, “I care more about the coffee.” Not a lie, really. 

“Well, good,” Floch says. He relaxes some, concern fading out of his expression. “Let’s go get some, then, yeah?”

Eren turns away, looking down the stairs. The room under the stairs is where that meal he was told of was laid out; he can smell it. He’s still not very hungry, but he would swear Zeke had told him something about caffeine helping with headaches. “Yeah,” he agrees. He closes his eyes, forcing back the whirling storm of memory and emotion. “And you can catch me up on what’s been going on.”

“Good,” Floch says. He sighs, satisfied. “It’s good to see you’re yourself enough to be asking. You’re all here now, right?”

Eren opens his eyes. His sight catches on a painting in the gallery below, of some landscape he takes a long moment to place as the Norden mountains. Mine were better, he thinks, recalling the snow-capped peaks in the world he’d dreamt up. They’re gone now though, and the Norden mountains still stand on the north coast of Paradis. So which was really better. “I’m here,” he says. He forces his shoulders into a roll, trying to shake off the tension. We still need you. “Tell me about this agenda of yours.”

***

Floch has very legible handwriting, which Eren imagines is good for his headache. 

Papers are strewn across the dark lacquered wood of the table, haphazard notes about the concerns the island is facing. While the nation is functioning thus far, it’s an equilibrium that can’t stand for long. It’s only been nine days since his soldiers killed Priemer Zachary. Eight since most of the military brass was wiped out, and just minutes after that, the Walls came down. 

Eight days, the voice in his head chimes, since you looked her in the eyes and lied until you saw her heart break. 

Four days since the Rumbling came to its end; three since Eren arrived back in Paradis. Before and despite the storm, it’s been communicated that on the twenty-first of October, there will be a summit in Mitras. Any military man interested and every officer and lord invited is expected to come as the laws of their infant land are laid down. 

Noon. Today. 

“And you’re sure you’re feeling up to it?” Floch says, pushing crumbs around with his fork. Grey daylight has begun to bleed in through the wall of divided windows, not yet enough to justify putting out the iceburst light. Another storm is rolling in. Not a hurricane this time, it looks like, and still to the east of them. The rain hasn’t yet begun, and when it does, it won’t be as intense. Won’t flood their fields and drown what little of their crops remained unharvested; won’t tear down buildings and rip up trees. “If you’re still tired, everyone would understand. And certainly no one would protest. If you want to wait—”

Eren stabs his fork into what remains of a honeyed roll, irritated. “I said I’m fine with it.” 

“Well, good. The sooner we get everything sorted out, the better.” 

The fork shrieks against the porcelain as Eren twists it in. He remembers ten years ago, or eight days ago, or both, when he twisted the Ackermans’ steak knife into the chest of a trafficker. Old anger sparks and then simmers into a kind of satisfaction. That was the only thing he did in the Paths that he doesn’t feel even one ounce of regret for. “So you’ve said.”

Floch hums. “Very nearly everyone is in the capital for the summit. By now, we’re probably just waiting on Historia.”

Eren smushes a hunk of bread he’s torn off. “You’re sure she’s coming? Isn’t her kid is, what, five days old?”

“She said she’d be here by no later than ten in the morning. The mud from all the rain makes travel on unpaved roads more forgiving. And the princess ought to have been born in the castle, anyway.”

Eren doesn’t think this is a particularly nice place for children to grow up, but whatever. “And we’re just handing out titles and laying out objectives for right now, right? Yeah, I’ll be able to handle it.”

“I don’t doubt you, Eren,” Floch says, eyes boring into him. 

“Obviously.” He stands, and as he does, the stairs above him creak. His head snaps up; counting the sets of footsteps. Four. Some wild bout of emotion twists in his chest, but he doesn’t know why. Obviously Mikasa isn’t going to be walking around, coming down with the nurses and doctor who’d gone up to tend to her some forty-five minutes ago. It’d been a team of five, which means someone is still up there with her. But there’s no rushing panic, so it’s fine. It’s fine. 

Floch’d had to grab him by the arm and remind him how they’d kicked him out yesterday to keep him from chasing after them, when they went up to see to her. They hadn’t noticed him and Floch, hadn’t seen them through the wide-open door under the stairs, and which Eren had both appreciated for its own sake and wondered, for a moment, if it meant they’re not on high enough alert. 

Now, Eren tries to remind himself that they don’t need to be on alert. His eyes track the sound of weight shifting on the stairs. He thinks, We’re not at war. There’s no danger here for Mikasa.

Well. There won’t be, by the end of the day. If nothing else is accomplished by this fucking meeting, that at least will be made perfectly clear. 

Eren exits the small dining room, ignoring Floch’s huffed protest and catching the medical personnel as they reach the bottom of the stairs. The doctor meets his gaze and the matron is digging the brass key to the gallery out of her apron, but the two nurses keep their eyes on the floor. 

“Ah,” the doctor says. A short, fat man with a ruddy face and greying brown hair. He’d been at the university hospital last night, doing what he could for the people injured when the Walls fell; Eren is only a little irritated about that. He curls one sweaty hand into a fist to place over his heart and says, “Sir.”

“Doctor.” Eren digs his fingernails into the scabs still left in his palms from last night. He doesn’t like his voice when he says, “She’s fine?” It comes out sounding too close to nervous, and in his gut Eren knows that’s not a good thing for him to be. 

He nods, nearly eager, and his salute falls. “Yes, yes. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. No signs of infection or head trauma; all her remaining symptoms are consistant with how long she was unconscious and how bad that leg of hers is. The, ah, the main thing is that she gets plenty of rest. No need for total bedrest unless things get worse, but if it pains her, she really oughn’t be doing it at this stage. She should have help if she’s walking if there’s a distance of more than a meter or two. I’ll be in and around to keep tabs, and Matron Beck is more than capable of managing everything from here. We can discuss recovery more in-depth later, but for now…” He trails off, flipping the top of his palms up in a broad gesture. “And,” he says, “of course, I gave, ah…” He looks to the side briefly, carefully, sweat glistening at his temples, and then carries on with, “And of course I gave Lady Mikasa a more in-depth run-down than I gave you, sir.”

At the words Lady Mikasa, half the anxiety evaporates from within Eren’s chest, the space it occupied filled instead with an unexpected burst of bright, glowing satisfaction. A smile pulls at his mouth before he’s even realized it. For a single moment, he’s warmed by the closest approximation of happiness that he’s felt in… in a while. 

The sheer foreignness of the feeling is enough to pull him out of it—the reasons why he’s caught off-guard by happiness ringing loudly in his ears—but he’s still left with pride that borders on smugness curling up and settling down near his heart. He can’t help it. 

“Alright,” Eren says. He opens his mouth to say more, but the words get caught behind his teeth. Dread and worry are playing tug-of-war with his insides—his need to see Mikasa, check with his own eyes that she’s breathing, against the fear of what will happen when he does. Last night she’d had little more than silence for him. As awful as that had felt, like his heart had been grated against uncut stone, he knows it could have been much, much worse. 

Like what I gave her, he thinks, pained. It’s been eight days. 

He—told her. She knows he’d been lying, then. She must’ve known soon after, anyway—the way she’d asked him to stop. His memories of all their pleading are water-colored and echoey, much of him having already broken away, but they’d all known—she knew. And he told her. She’s smart enough to put together the why. 

As he thinks it, Eren knows he’s just letting his dread trying to lull him toward a simple path. Just because she knows doesn’t mean he doesn’t owe her explanations. If she wants to hear them. 

It’s just—how the fuck is he supposed to give her anything? Nobody else had wanted to hear what he had to say. They’re not even very good explanations. He knows that few enough people would find what he did justifiable; even he knows that it wasn’t. He found the blood price for his freedom, for her safety, for the well-being of their friends, for his vengeance and their island and the vision of that scenery, to be worth paying—but he didn’t think he’d have to live on after it was paid. It wouldn’t matter what anyone else made of his reasons. It wouldn’t matter if he lost them, because—because they’d lose him first. 

But he’s the one who’s lost, now. He won, he got what he wanted—and there’s that pride still sitting warm by his heart, for more than just Mikasa’s title—but he doesn’t know where to go from here, and has no one’s hand to hold. He’s been following a well-paved path for the past four years, but the destination he’s reached is not the one he’d envisioned. 

Everything you ever wanted, Armin spat yesterday, wrapped up in a nice red bow. 

And Eren did want this. It’s hard to reconcile sometimes, but he did. He does. The outside world wiped away. It will take a long time, but it will become the place he’d envisioned from Armin’s story book. He didn’t want to die, and he’s not sure that’s still true, but he does have to live. He wanted his friends safe, so he’ll live to make sure they are. So maybe he wants to live. And if Mikasa is right there, and they love each other, then why shouldn’t—

He exhales hard, bringing one hand up under his hair to grip the back of his neck. He knows why. He knows. 

He doesn’t really think that Mikasa doesn’t—

Eren still thinks that Mikasa loves him. He does. He’s almost sure that he does. She always has, and he’s never made that very easy for her; never really been worthy of it. He tried to be, when he was younger; doesn’t think he’d ever quite succeeded. He’s not even sure when he really gave up on that. But—he does know that even if he’s not worth it, and never was, that Mikasa had never required that from him. She’d never asked that he earn her—even if he’d demanded that of himself from before he ever laid eyes on her; hunting for a prize that he grabbed with greedy, bloody hands. 

That wasn’t what’d gotten him her love. Not really. She wouldn’t love him without the blood on his hands, couldn’t, but she’s loved him despite it and because of it and entirely separate from it. This has always been part of him, and part of them. It’s just that now it’s too big for her to easily ignore. Those rose-colored glasses she saw him through have been shattered. But.

In the cold air and ghostly light of the Paths, she’d begged, I want to share the burden of your sins with you. 

Eren wouldn’t ever, ever let her. Of course not. She’s far, far better than that; so much of the point to all of this was that so she wouldn’t have to. But the Rumbling had been well under way by then, and still she’d asked. 

The burden of his sins. She still loved him, then. 

He knows he’s made this very, very hard for her. He knows that the sheer gravity of his crimes was impossible for her to really understand—his own mind shrinks from it even now—before she saw it with her own eyes. If he has gone too far, he can—he will accept that. He won’t ever, ever, trap or force her. If she truly needs to leave him, he won’t stop her. It’s the least he would deserve. 

But that doesn’t mean he’s going to give up.

He does think that Mikasa still loves him. In the way that he wants her to. And if she doesn’t—if she doesn’t—if she—she didn’t when they were nine. And then she did. He won her then. He can win her again. 

Don’t even have to kill anyone else, he thinks. An odd stillness is settling over him. A hushed, razor-sharp focus. He looks up. She’s just there. Up the stairs and down the hall, in a bedroom they’ve already shared. 

“Can I go and see her,” he says. The tone of his voice doesn’t pose it as a question. 

“Oh, ah, by all means, sir,” the doctor says, waving his hand. 

“See yourselves out,” Eren says. A drawn breath from the corner, and Eren adds, “All of you.”

Floch’s protest dies. Eren hears, as if from the end of a tunnel, the five of them all shuffling out, the low creak of the door, the click of the lock as its turned back into place. His hand falls down to his side, fingers drumming against his thigh once, twice. 

Then he walks, with a practiced calm that’s as cold and as brittle as ice, up the stairs, to find his raw and bloody heart.

Her door is open, when he reaches it. That makes it easier. He doesn’t have to take that extra action. 

Mikasa is leaned against the card table, her hands curled over the edges, one foot dangling a few inches above the floor. She looks okay. She’s in a long white dress; her face, turned to the floor and viewed in profile, is expressionless. For a long moment, in which Eren’s head is pleasantly empty, he thinks she must be shining.

She’s not, he realizes eventually. Strands of her hair are stuck to her neck and face like stray lines of ink, and her dress—different than the hospital garb of yesterday; longer, finer, and hanging off her in drapes—has gone slightly transparent below the lace neckline around her shoulders, where her damp skin is clinging to it. She’s not shining. Just wet. 

Eren leans against the doorframe, hair brushing his shoulder as he rests his head against the cold wood. She’s so pretty, he thinks, detached. He’s always liked looking at her. 

Vaguely, he’s aware of the figure in hospital-uniform grey puttering around, fussing with the sheets of the bed and putting strewn-about supplies back in the bag off her shoulder. He pays it little mind, though; more focused on Mikasa’s creamy white dress against her creamy pale skin; the way water has clumped her long eyelashes and overlong bangs together; her white knuckles and, as he watches, the trembling that takes hold of her. 

With a sudden stab of irritation and worry, the spell breaks. Eren lifts his head straight, thinking why the fuck isn’t she fucking sitting down properly , but before he can move any further, the nurse looks up from her satchel, eyes aimed for Mikasa but landing instead on him. She goes rigid all over, paling; her reaction is enough to pull Mikasa’s attention from the floor and, following the other woman’s line of sight, land on him.

Her face does something complicated, then, without changing much. Eren’s standing some ten meters away, and though always been good at noticing changes in Mikasa’s face, he’s never claimed to be very good at guessing what she’s actually feeling. 

Her eyes flare wide for a half of a second, her bottom lip trembling once, as if she were about to bite it. Her entire body stiffens—shoulders seizing, knuckles tightening on the beveled edge of the table, her lifted leg swaying with the sudden tension. Mikasa looks away as quickly as she’d seen him, shaking visibly now, but Eren can’t make himself move faster than the nurse in grey does. 

“Sir!” she says, dropping into a lightning-fast curtsey and scurrying forward until she’s next to Mikasa, her brown satchel banging against her hip. “I was just going—”

Mikasa makes a tiny noise of alarm, trapped in her throat. Eren’s jaw works; frustration and fear tangling together in his chest, simmering heat clashing with bitter cold. He’s left feeling murky; disquieted. Restless. The nurse’s gaze flits to Mikasa, then back and forth between them, clearly unsure whose lead to follow—or where either of them are even going. 

The quiet of the room keeps them all suspended for a long, long moment, as if they’re within a snowglobe. Everything is perfectly still; dim and shadowed; hollow—but for the drops of water slowly dripping from Mikasa’s bare foot; the feeble fire sputtering in the hearth. It’s a fragile, false peace, and the longer it drags on, the uglier the shattering will be. 

“I’m just checking on you,” he says flatly. Doesn’t want to scare her. The idea that she’s scared of him hurts, hurts like he’s blunting a serrated knife with his own bones, but it’s not undeserved. In some ways, it’s almost a comfort. It hurts, but it’s hers. 

She cares enough for that much.

“I’m fine,” Mikasa whispers. She’s still shaking. 

The nurse says, “Doctor Kallenbrach found you, yes?”

“I’d rather see with my own eyes than hear it from strangers,” Eren says. A drop of water loses its grip on a dark lock of Mikasa’s hair and falls, running over her mouth before striking the ground like a missile. He remembers the military prepared to meet him in Odiha; how futile all their guns and bombs had been against his army. There is a very small puddle under Mikasa’s feet. “Especially considering I'm just in the next room,” he says. “Seems stupid not to.”

“Well,” the nurse says, awkward. “We’ve had a fine twenty minutes without him. Um, I was just making the bed, and she, um, well, she said she was fine until I could help—”

Without thinking, Eren says, “I’ve got it.”

She blinks rapidly. “Um,” she says, “I don’t—”

“It’s fine,” he says, straightening. He looks properly at the nurse for the first time. She’s half a foot shorter than Mikasa and plump like a stuffed pheasant; he’ll do a much better job. “You can go.”

She looks back at Mikasa, who hasn’t reacted one bit, and back at him. Her mouth pinches, and she says, “Of course. Um, my lady,” she turns to Mikasa and gives a quick curtsey, and back to him, salutes with a fist over her heart, says, “Sir,” flaps her hands uncertainly, clasps them under her neck, and then dashes out of the room. 

Eren steps out of the door frame before she reaches it, uncrossing his arms. The chill seems to deepen as soon as she’s gone; the air pressing heavy against him. But the only way forward is to keep going. 

Mikasa doesn’t tense any further when he’s standing next to her, which he chooses to see as a good sign. He isn’t sure she could, but Eren is going to take what he can get. 

“Hey,” he says, careful, soft. He doesn’t want her to be scared of him. He doesn’t need her to be, in the way he needs everyone else to be. For her sake, and the others’. And there’s not much point in putting up that sort of mask with her, anymore. So he tries to be gentle when he says, “Do you want to sit down?”

Mikasa’s eyes drift from the spot of the floor she’s found so fascinating, but only make their way to his boots. “I can walk by myself.”

Her voice is much less scratchy today, and has a little of its iron strength back, Eren notes, pleased. She looks… fine. Pretty. The real nightgown and the luster of being fresh out of a bath help, make her look put-together in a sleepy sort of way. He’s close enough now that he can smell her, too—rose soap and clean silk and sugar and strawberries. She always smells like strawberries. She’s nearly as pale as she was across the sea, though, and her shaking has only gotten worse. Too much stress on muscles so recently overworked, adrenaline, emotion, and—and she might be cold. She must be. On her lifted foot, closest to him, her thin toes are bordering on blue. He swallows. “I know,” he allows, “but—you did hear them say that you shouldn’t, right?”

Mikasa says, “I don’t need you to carry me.”

“I carried you halfway across the world,” Eren says mildly, “but I was offering my arm.” He reaches his hand out tentatively, unsurprised when she doesn’t take it. He breathes in and says, “Mikasa, come on...”

She closes her eyes and swallows. Eren—maybe stupidly—takes that as her say-so, and wraps his fingers around her wrist, giving a gentle tug to urge her to standing. Mikasa reacts like she’s been electrocuted.

“Don’t —” she gasps, and wrenches her arm against her chest, but doesn’t twist out of his grip. Her yanking back her arm twists her so that her torso is facing him, and her jerking back now has her nearly sliding off the table. Eren—panics, a bit. Her other hand snaps up—to strike him or grab him for balance he doesn’t know—and he snatches that wrist as well. In one motion, he shifts her—her arms are tense enough that he can move her whole body with a solid hold on them—back onto the table, stepping in front of her to get her properly sitting, instead of the half-standing lean that’d been straining her. 

He’s closer than he meant to be. He takes half a step back, still holding her wrists, and, without really considering why, tucks them against his chest. Because—he doesn’t want to let go. He likes the feeling of her cool little hands over his heart. It’s already in her hands. And she’s too cold. And he doesn’t quite trust her not to fling herself onto the floor just because she’s been startled. She did the same fucking thing last night. 

Eren bats that thought away. “God, Mikasa,” he says, “it’s fine. Calm down.”

She just sets her jaw, breathing hard through her nose. “Please let go of me.”

His heart twists painfully; he bites the inside of his cheek. “Just let me help you—”

“Please,” she says, “let go of me—”

“Mikasa —”

She twists her wrists inside his grip suddenly, and Eren looks down, unsure what she’s trying to do. Her hands are bunched into fists, her pale knuckles pressing into his shirt. She twists again, the tendons in her wrists straining under his fingertips, and Eren realizes with a start that she’s trying to pry away and can’t. 

It takes a moment to click in his head—a quiet sizzle climbing up from his toes—but when the thought slots into meaning— he’s stronger than her —it’s like a firework going off in his chest. 

I’m stronger than her, he thinks, buzzing. Syrupy satisfaction floods through him, crashing against his edges like waves against a storm wall. Without any input from him, Eren’s mouth ticks into a grin. He can’t help it. He’d grown past his childhood frustrations years ago, enough that he could appreciate every bit of her strength, but he’s always wanted to be the protector between them. He is, now, has been for a long time but never so much as the past few days, and this very physical reflection of that just—makes him smile.

All that in a fraction of a second, and then guilt tears through him. His smile drops and he swallows, something cold and slimy sliding down his throat. When he looks from Mikasa’s hands to her pale, wide-eyed face, his guilt and shame shatter, sending shards flying all across his insides. 

She’s looking up at him. Up at him—as close as they are, the few inches between them would’ve been more obvious anyway, but she’s sitting on the table. Most of her height is in her legs. She’s looking up at him, into his face, which means she saw him smile. 

Eren drops her wrists and backs away as if burned. One, two, three steps doesn’t seem far enough, but—he can’t leave. “Mikasa,” he says, panic resuming its vice-grip around his throat. She’s always had the power to terrify him more than anyone else, but he’s never been as scared for her—and of her—as he has been these past few days. “Sorry. I’m—I didn’t mean—”

She’s clasped her hands together over the hollow of her throat. Where her scarf would’ve been nine days ago. Her eyes are huge and glossy. Her mouth trembles once. Very abruptly, Eren wants to die with more vehemence than he’s wanted for days. 

He knows what her strength means to her. It’s something she’s built herself around from the moment she gained it, something she defines herself by. And he took that from her. 

He hadn’t actually put that together until just now. He’d suspected that her and the captain’s loss of consciousness had something to do with their Ackerman powers responding to the recalling of Titan magic, but he hadn’t thought how deep or how permanent that change might go. He didn’t think—

He didn’t think. Armin’s voice echoes in his head again, and Eren feels very small. 

“Mikasa,” he chokes out, “I’m sorry.” 

It’s the first time he’s said that since Ramzi. 

Her eyes drop from him down to her fingertips, staring at them like they’re unfamiliar. She’s shaking again. Maybe she never stopped. 

Then she closes her eyes and folds her hands tightly against her chest. She breathes in, out, in—controlled, steady, the way she’s always done to try and keep herself from crying—and then she says, tightly, “I’m cold.”

Eren digs his fingers into his palms, his own version of forcing control. “Okay,” he says, “okay. I’ll—”

“Just,” she says, and shakes her head once. “Please—”

“Okay,” he says again. He isn’t sure what she wants him to do, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll do it. He can and he will. 

It’s an effort to cross back to her. His body feels as heavy as it did when he was scraping across the deserts of Marley, because—he knows Mikasa doesn’t want him touching her. He understands that. There are flashes where he doesn’t want to touch her, either, convinced he’ll sear the dirt and blood on his hands into her. But it’s necessary for them. 

Mikasa doesn’t move when he’s before her. Doesn’t try to stand, doesn’t hold out her arms. The lace on her neckline is patterned like butterflies. Eren swallows, says, “Tell me if this is wrong, okay?” and waits a moment, before hooking one arm under her knees and the other across her back.

She says nothing, keeps her eyes pinches tight, but leans her head away from him. 

On the way back from that seaside town where it ended, Eren had held her close enough that  he could always feel her heartbeat. He’d been terrified that without him to monitor it, it would just fade away. Even now, he can’t shake the feeling that that hadn’t been entirely unfounded. He’d held her close to keep her warm, to keep her breathing; to press his lips against her forehead whenever he needed to ground himself. He’d held her like a child with a favorite blanket, jealous and protective and never stopping to question his right to do so.

In the ten steps it takes to get to the bed, Eren minimizes contact as much as possible. He’s less cradling her than carrying her in a deadlift, her body away from his, the hand under her knee not even holding her steady, fingers curled into a fist. He drops her gracelessly, glad that the nurse left the covers turned down, and backs away with his fingers splayed before his back hits the bedpost. Once he’s out of easy reach, he thinks they both breathe easier. 

Eren exhales with a shudder, running his fingers through his hair. He feels jittery, like a live current is going through him. On the bed, Mikasa looks worse than he feels. 

Her nightgown is stuck to the underside of her knees, from where his forearm was. From where he’s standing, he can see blue bruises peeking out from under the lace of the hem. Her hands have fallen to cup her elbows in a way that makes him flinch away to look at.

She’s freezing, Eren thinks, and then, I can fix that much, at least. There’s a robe—a dressing gown, his brain supplies—folded at the foot of the bed near him; he tosses it at her without looking back. The next step is the fireplace across the room. He marches over and wrenches open the gate, grabs a few of the cut logs, and spends longer than he needs to building the fire up so it will burn long and hot. When he glances out the windows, the sky is only getting darker. More rain is coming from the north and east; it’ll bring cold. 

When it’s done, fresh blisters burning on his hands from where he didn’t care enough to pull away from the flames, he stands and turns back around. 

Mikasa is watching him, arms threaded through the baby blue sleeves, the long sides pulled on her lap like a blanket. She’s reaching for something on the table—for an electrifying moment he thinks she’s reaching for their scarf—but her fingers close around a folded sheet of paper. Armin’s letter. Of course. 

She presses it to the silk of her robe, over her heart, and Eren finds himself nodding once. He curls his fingernails into his palms and asks, “Are you… what else do you—” He cuts himself off, sucks his teeth. “Have you eaten this morning?”

She nods. “Oatmeal,” she says. “With strawberries.”

“Good.” Eren looks back out the window. “Do you want anything else?”

“Mm-mn,” she says, like a kid. 

“Okay.” He sighs through his nose. “I’ve got—Mikasa, I’ve got—stuff. Today. I have a thing at noon, and Historia’s gonna be here in an hour or two and I think I’ve got to be there. But you—you’re my priority, okay? If you need me, or anything, I’ll be right here.”

“Okay.” She says that easier than he would’ve expected. He doesn’t quite trust it. 

“Okay,” he repeats. “Do you want a book, or something?”

She shakes her head slowly. “I just want to rest.”

“Good. Yes. You need rest. I—You know I’m just in that room.” He nods at the door connecting their apartments. “I was—I don’t have anywhere to—do you want me to leave the door open?” There’s a full sitting room between their bedrooms, meant for God knows what, and it’s more distance than he’d like. But she’ll probably appreciate it. 

Mikasa closes her eyes, dropping her head against the pillows. “Do what you want.” Her fingers smooth over the letter. Eren wonders what it says. “You always do.”

His eyes sting. She’s sitting in bed, lit by a fire he built, dressed in white and blue. He thinks of the refugee camp, of the mountain cabin in his dreams. He remembers the wild desire that had seized him in those moments between when she found him and the others showing up, when he’d just wanted to take her and go. He thinks about how hard he’d tried to pull her into that dream, how badly it had hurt, because he wanted to know what peace with her could have felt like. “Not always.”

He’s not even sure if she heard it. She doesn’t react, if she did. He clears his throat. “Alright. Sorry. I—Mikasa, I am sorry—”

“Eren,” she says, and his breath freezes in his lungs because that’s the first time she’s said his name since he didn’t die. She sounds very strained and very weary when she says, “I want to rest.”

He nods, though she can’t see it, and leaves her in peace. 

Chapter Text

”As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.”

***

The rain starts just a few minutes after Eren leaves. A slow, heavy pattering that gives way to sheets blanketing the world in waves. She hears them falling against the windows and the roof, the wind carrying the rain like ships out to sea. 

If our boat had been faster, Mikasa thinks, running her fingers over Armin’s letter, would that have made a difference? 

Wind rattles the windows, old glass banging against iron, and she knows that, no, it wouldn’t have. They’d caught up to Eren, and maybe they could’ve caught up to him faster, but all that would’ve happened then is that they’d have been forced to see even more of his march. 

Mikasa sniffs, wipes her nose, and tries to focus on anything else. 

The sound of the rain: she’s never liked storms. Armin told her that he found them relaxing, but heavy rain always makes her feel smothered. When she was a little girl, she’d been scared of thunder. Even now she finds it hard to sleep when the sky is groaning. 

The sound of the fire: she loves fireplaces. The inherent sense of home. The warmth, the way they make her think of cooking outside with her dad or her friends. The fire is blazing golden, now, chasing away the chill of the rain; snapping loudly; greedily eating the logs Eren fed to it, and that’s why it’s setting her on edge. 

She squeezes her eyes shut tighter. 

Eren built a fire for her the night they met. She remembers standing in the center of that room full of corpses and Eren, voice harsh and jagged from near-asphyxiation, asking are you okay? She’d been breathing shallowly, splinters embedded on her soft palms, lips trembling and tongue heavy when she whispered, I… I’m cold. Eren had nodded. Said, yeah. You don’t have any socks or shoes on. 

The fire he’d built for her then had been… he’d made it from the wood inside the hunting shack’s meager chimney. It had been drizzling all day, so any sticks he’d found outside would’ve been too wet to burn easily. He’d taken the flint and steel from inside the shack, too, she thinks, and set up the fire in a star shape. And he’d… talked to her. She remembers that. She doesn’t remember what about. Just that the sound of his voice had been a mellow, far-off little reassurance as she stared into the fire and thought about how very, very cold she was. 

She hasn’t thought about that in… maybe ever. Her clearest memories of that day are the way her father had crumpled; the way her mother had sounded as her scream cut off as the axe split her throat open, blood spinning out like a whirling skirt as she turned; and Eren’s intense gaze as he wrapped the scarf around her; his fever-hot fingers brushing her wrist through her sleeve. 

And the way the knife handle had felt as she crushed it in her grip. Her own shrill scream as her foot broke the floorboard. How easy it was to drive a blade into a man’s heart through his back. She’d had to jump to get the angle right, she’d been so small, but she’d known to do it just as well as she’d known to weave flower crowns.

Mikasa rolls onto her side. It’s more of a physical effort than her first kill had been. 

She lets the hand holding Armin’s letter flop onto the blankets, the paper unfolding like a flower blooming. She reads it once again, eyes roaming over the last two paragraphs especially. …waiting for you here at the Brauses’. …Jean and Connie give their love. …for always, for ever. I hope I’ll see you soon. 

One phrase in particular keeps getting caught in her mind. Gabi says to thank you for everything you did, for trying so hard to help. The ink is blotted on those words, scratched in deep like Armin had needed to pause and take deep breaths while writing it. 

That little girl. She’s even smaller at twelve than Mikasa has been at nine; no special powers, nothing besides her flashing brown eyes and her tiny calloused hands, steady on a gun far too big for her. And she’d managed to take Eren’s head. From what they’d put together, it had been sheer, blind luck that saved Eren from dying by her shot. (At the time, Mikasa had been breathlessly relieved about that. Now…) His blown-off head was able to connect with Zeke before life truly left him, and that fraction of a second was all he needed for his will to overtake the Founder.

Mikasa sniffs again and bites the inside of her cheek. She feels the ghosts of that rattling, bone-shaking groan as the Walls tumbled down and the Titans shook free. He must’ve wanted it so badly. 

But I tried, she reminds herself. I tried. 

I didn’t try hard enough. 

If she’d seen reason from the beginning… if she’d let everyone go after Eren in the way that needed doing… if she hadn’t been so naive, if she hadn’t been so pathetically attached, then maybe Gabi wouldn’t have to thank her for trying, like Mikasa is a child to be consoled. Maybe Gabi would still have her parents. Maybe hundreds and thousands and millions of children wouldn’t be trampled flat. How many of them had to watch their parents die, first? Like she did? 

Mikasa shudders violently, though she’s not cold anymore. 

Maybe, she thinks, if I’d tried harder, I wouldn’t be as useless as I am right now. Too fragile to risk moving. Not worth the care it’d take to keep her safe. She wonders if they’d even asked if they could take her with them. 

She—they did. She’s sure they did. Armin and Jean and Connie all would’ve wanted her safe, she knows that, and wanted her with them. And Armin wouldn’t have lied to her. He’s always been a good liar, but he wouldn’t lie to her. Not about this. He wouldn’t.

But she still feels—

Mikasa presses the side of her face into the pillow, trying to breathe slowly. Her chest feels wind-burned from fighting back tears, but she hates crying. She hates that Eren would hear her crying through the open door between them, and she hates that she doesn’t know if he would come or not. 

She hates that can’t be sure that she wouldn’t want him to. 

Stupid, her brain hisses. Stupid, stupid, stupid little girl. His smile flashes in front of her eyes, bright and true. He’d been happy to see her strength stripped away. 

She’ll be less trouble this way. Though, she thinks, mouth twisting, that implies I’d have been any trouble anyway. Maybe her strength could have mattered, but… the fight is over. Eren doesn’t need her. Maybe he never did. And what good would her strength do, now? If she were to find some cause to throw her sword behind, what could they hope to do except kill some of the precious few humans that remain?  

Mikasa flops onto her other side. 

She didn’t sleep well last night. Waking every hour sick and sweating and biting back sobs, unable to stop seeing the horrors she’d witnessed as they chased after the Rumbling. She’s trying, now. Ostensibly. She’s tired, and sleep is pulling at her slowly but insistently, trying to stick her in one place on this featherbed. But she doesn’t want to dream again. 

She doesn’t want to think, and she doesn’t want to dream, and she doesn’t want to talk. Not to Eren or any of the strangers in his palace. She wants to… she wants Armin. She wants him here. 

Suddenly restless, she tries turning over again—has to bite her tongue to stop from crying out. Wrong! she thinks, vision swimming. Wrong, wrong, she moved her leg wrong. She exhales shakily and lies still until hot, needling pain stops burrowing into her calf. 

When it abates, Mikasa pushes herself upright. Slow and careful, she twists until her feet are dangling over the floor. Out from under the heavy covers, the chill catches her toes easily, pressing into the arch of her foot. The room isn’t even cold, and neither is she, really. Eren’s fire is doing its job.

She shivers and pulls the robe tighter around her. Still. Mikasa’s always run cold, and she’s always preferred to have her feet covered up. When she was small, her mother had told her that if your head and your toes are warm, all of you will be. 

She’s a long way from reaching for her scarf, still folded and docile on the bedside table, but— socks, she thinks. I can get myself some socks. 

She doesn’t even know if there are any socks in any of these drawers, but suddenly, she’s determined to find out. By herself. She can do this much. She’s just let her uninjured leg slide onto the floor when three soft little raps sound from her door. 

She looks up, blinking. The nurses haven’t knocked on her door either time they’ve been by, and she knows Eren isn’t going to be knocking. She can’t think of anyone else it would be, but she also can’t imagine she can actually turn anyone away. “Come in?” she calls, wary. 

The door swings open, and Mikasa’s eyes go wide as they take in Historia. 

“Mikasa!” the little queen cries, somewhere between delighted and relieved. Mikasa stands out of habit, wincing as her nerves scream, but before she can so much as take a step, Historia has crossed half the room in a rushed waddle. 

With a stark jolt, Mikasa realizes that she’s not pregnant anymore. Her stomach isn’t perfectly flat underneath her dull green dress, but on someone as slight as Historia, the difference between seven months along and a few days postpartum is easy to spot. Mikasa gasps, suddenly terrified for her friend, but almost as soon as she does, Historia half-collides with her, beaming, and Mikasa has to think that it can’t have all gone terribly wrong if she’s smiling so wide, hugging her so tightly. It comes out nearly a giggle when Historia says, “You’re really here!”

“Hi,” she says faintly, and then her own arms snap up to enfold Historia. “Hi. What are you doing here?” 

“Me?” she asks, happy. “This is my palace.” Historia pulls away, beaming up at her with shining blue eyes. Her wide, watery grin is sweet and genuine enough that it could almost be infectious. She swaps her hands from Mikasa’s back to her elbows, trailing down to take her hands, and she plops down on the bed, tugging Mikasa to do the same. 

Historia is barely bigger than Gabi, and she hasn’t been a soldier in a long time, but Mikasa follows her down easy, relieved to have the excuse. 

Mikasa’s eyes scour over her friend eagerly, taking her in. There are purple bruises under her eyes, and under her flushed cheeks, a sickly pallor is still clinging to her skin. But she looks alright. “You had the baby?”

Historia nods, beaming. “Yes! Yeah, she’s with her dad—”

Mikasa’s mouth parts. “She?”

“Yes!” Historia squeals. “Yes, yes, a baby girl. Oh, Mikasa, she’s beautiful—”

“Of course she is,” she says. She feels like she’s floating, that’s how surreal this is. She’d just wished for Armin, and Historia is more than good enough. She remembers Armin thinking that she might be in danger from Eren’s military takeover, and she’s overwhelmingly relieved to see, with her own eyes, that one of her friends is alive and well. And she’s had a baby. It’s such a pure, shining moment of goodness and joy that Mikasa feels like she’s been stolen out of the real world—what little is left of it—and folded into someplace magical. Mikasa latches on to it with a ferocity that almost startles her. “She’s yours.”

“Hush,” she says, but she’s still smiling. “She looks like her dad, to be honest—you remember Will?”

“Yes,” Mikasa says. She’d met Wilhelm once or twice when she was visiting Historia, though she honestly can’t remember what he looks like with much clarity. “Of course.”

A baby. Her friend had her baby. Mikasa knows how fiercely she’d wanted to start her own family, and she’s always been good with children. Her orphanage means so much to her—to give those children some of what she’d been denied in her own childhood—and now to have her own daughter must be so healing. She’ll get to be the mother she never had. Have the family she’s always wanted. 

Historia nods. “She’s got his flat chin. It’s the cutest thing in the whole world. And I think she has his nose, too—I mean, she’s so young that it’s a little hard to tell who she gets what from. She’s big enough though that I think she’ll take after him in height. But she’s got these tiny little tufts of white-blonde hair—can’t say if she gets that from me or Will—his hair was much lighter when he was little—and she’s got blue eyes, but so do most new babies. Can’t be sure if it’ll stick. She’s got my eyelashes for sure, though.” She laughs, breathless, and brushes her hair behind her ear. It’s more gold than white-blonde, but Mikasa can imagine a baby girl with fair hair and a flat chin, making Historia glow like this. 

Mikasa can’t stop worrying, though. Historia’s baby—her daughter—wasn’t due for another two months. Mikasa can imagine that the events of the past few days triggered early labor in her friend, and that she thinks her daughter is big is a good sign, surely, but a baby born that early can have trouble breathing and keeping warm and many, many other ill effects. “Is she healthy?”

“She’s plenty healthy, believe me. The lungs that girl has on her. She’s got no trouble waking me up when she’s hungry.”

“Good,” Mikasa says. “I’m so glad. Not that you’re tired, of course—”

“I know what you meant,” Historia says fondly. “How are you, Mika? I had no idea you’d be here. Might’ve made the trip faster if I had.”

“Then I’m glad you didn’t,” she says. “How many days ago did you give birth?”

“Five,” she smiles, “and I’m fine. Bleeding and cramping and my boobs hurt, but it’s fine. You’re right, though.” Historia sighs, slumping. “The little miss was perhaps a little overeager . I’m totally fine, before you start fussing over me—I get plenty of that from Wilhelm, thank you—but, yeah. Wouldn’t have actually minded a few more days before I went anywhere.” She sighs again, and Mikasa runs her eyes over her once again, taking in the way her breasts are swollen under her dress, the careful way she’s sitting; the tension in her shoulders. Mikasa’s lips flatten, wishing she could do something for her. 

Historia matches her, examining her closely. Her brows furrow, all gentle concern, and there’s a note of a new mother’s worry in her voice when she says, “How are you, Mikasa? You’re not hurt too badly, are you?”

“I’m okay,” Mikasa says, looking to the side. She hates being treated like a feeble child. Especially by Historia, who has a premature newborn. “It’s just a torn muscle. I’ll be fine. Tell me more about your daughter.”

Historia smiles indulgently. “Well, I’m—her christening is tomorrow. Can you believe that? The church has been fussier than she has, going on about how she should’ve been born in the palace. They sent a reverend down to my ranch to frown at me about it. It’s not like they actually have the power to insist, but, whatever. I don’t mind. I want to get her christened like a proper princess. I’m going to call her Ymir. After my Ymir.” 

Mikasa’s heart melts. “That’s beautiful,” she says. “She would have loved that.”

“Yeah. She would’ve.” Historia’s smile goes solemn, and her eyes slide onto the floor. “She taught me to live with pride. And to be brave and strong. And she was my great love. My only love. I want my daughter to have all of that.”

“She will,” Mikasa assures. “You’re going to be a wonderful mother, Historia.”

“I’m going to try,” she says. She shrugs, helpless. “I don’t know what I’m doing, really, but neither does any parent, I guess. And no matter why she was born, I love her. I love her. I’m going to do right by her.” She looks back to Mikasa and beams. “And you’re going to be a wonderful aunt. I can’t wait for you to meet her.”

Mikasa’s eyes fill with tears, heart full to bursting, and for once, it’s a good emotion. She’s not quite happy, but she’s so overcome with sweetness that for a moment, she remembers there’s beauty in the world. 

Then her gut twists. She can’t shake the knowledge that it’s wrong for her to be glad. For anything. How can she find joy in her friend’s healthy baby when it’s her fault that millions of babies and children—

She won’t think of that here, now. She won’t let that grief muddy Historia’s joy. But her mind still casts about for something to feel guilty about—finds it easily. “Oh,” she says, a much smaller, more personal wave of disappointment in herself rolling through her chest, “Historia. I meant to have a gift ready.” 

Historia tilts her head. “You did?”

“I was embroidering a blanket,” she says, fretting. The baby is two months early, and Mikasa doesn’t even have a blanket for her. If there’s one thing an early baby can’t have enough of, it’s blankets. “I wasn’t able to get very far. But I had it all planned out. I wanted to stitch little flowers on. Baby’s breath and daffodils, and lilies of the valley.”

“Oh my God,” Historia says, sniffing. “Mikasa. You didn’t have to.”

“I wanted to,” she says. “You wanted her so badly, and none of us were able to be there for you as much as we would’ve liked during the pregnancy.” Her fingers twist, anxiety opening a pit in her stomach. She wonders what’s become of that blanket, tucked into the drawer of her bedroom back in Trost, the apartment that’s felt haunted and empty since Sasha died. She hadn’t been able to work on it in more than fits and bursts, never more than ten minutes at a time before she had to move; never able to bring something as personal as embroidery outside of her home. Her mom taught her most of what she knows. Her mind skitters away from memories of her mother. She swallows and says, “Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t have much of it done, I guess. All I’d gotten finished was a bunch of holly flowers. Since I thought she was going to be born in December.” She draws in a deep breath. “I can start over with marigolds. Or cosmos might be better. Marigolds have a lot of connections to death and mourning, and I’m sure…” Mikasa trials off as Historia’s face shudders off. “What is it?”

Historia’s smile is gone. She looks every inch the Queen of the Walls—Walls that went and marched away to trample the world, leaving them defenseless but without enemies—as she straightens, inhales deeply, and says, “She wasn’t due in December.”

Mikasa blinks. A sliver of ice enters her heart, though she couldn’t say why. “She wasn’t? That’s… good, isn’t it? Did you—did you just get the date wrong?” She wonders how she could’ve miscalculated her own pregnancy by two whole months, but the knot of anxiety in her chest loosens, just for a second. That means the baby isn’t so early; means she’s a good deal healthier than Mikasa had feared. 

But the look on Historia’s face is grave. Determined. As if she’s steeling herself to admit something that she rather wouldn’t say. 

Mikasa thinks that she would rather not hear it. The ice in her heart grows, spidering out painfully. “Historia—”

“I got pregnant in February,” she says. “Not long after you all left for Marley. And I lied about when so that the Military Police wouldn’t suspect what was going on. That I was purposefully buying time so that Eren and Zeke could make contact—” Mikasa’s heart slams against her ribs frantically, and she doesn’t want to hear this, she doesn’t want to hear this, she wanted to be with her friend, her friend who just brought a sweet, helpless baby into the world because she wanted a home and a family for herself, something that was pure and good all the way to the core, but Historia finishes her sentence with, “—and Eren could start the Rumbling.”

Mikasa inhales sharply. Without meaning to, she snatches her hands out of Historia’s, clasping them over her chest. Historia lets her go easily, curling her own hands into loose fists and pressing them over her stomach. Where her daughter would’ve been six days ago. 

No matter why she was born, she’d said. Mikasa thought—she hadn’t thought anything of it, but if questioned, she would’ve assumed that Historia was talking about the act of getting pregnant, which she would’ve found at best to be a necessary chore. Not… she never would’ve imagined… 

The fire, still snapping in its iron cage, has lost all its warmth. Mikasa is bitterly cold, from her bare feet to the tips of her fingers, and very, very still, but for the heartbeat throbbing in chest, in her temples, in her wrists, in her leg. She wants it to stop hurting. She wants to go back to thirty seconds ago when she didn’t know Historia’s lies. She wants to—she wishes there was one person that she knew who was here who didn’t have anything to do with the nightmare she lived and the pain she’s in.

Historia sets her jaw and says, “I’m not gonna make excuses. I got pregnant to save myself from having to eat Zeke and become the Beast Titan, but I knew what I was doing. I knew what it would mean.” Gingerly, she pulls her leg up onto the bed. “And I did it anyway.” She swallows tightly. “So that’s who my daughter has for a mother. But I am going to do right by her. And—Mikasa, I’m sorry about what you’ve been put through. I had no idea—I should have known, I absolutely should have known that you would take a stand against it and get so far, so close—but even then, I wouldn’t have imagined that Eren would hurt you.”

Mikasa flinches, throat going tight. She wishes she could say that I wouldn’t, either, and she would have, she would have, she would have. But the scar on her cheek suddenly feels as new and raw as the wound on her leg, and Mikasa doesn’t think she ever really knew Eren at all. 

“But,” Historia says, “it’s gonna be… it’s all going to be okay, right? You’re gonna be fine. We’re all gonna be fine. Once the dust settles… right?”

Mikasa tries to imagine things being okay ever again. Once the dust settles. All Mikasa can think of is the dust the Wall Titans kicked up as they marched across Marley. This isn’t the pain she’d felt when her parents were taken from her, or Aunt Carla, or in those horrible hours in Trost when she’d thought Eren had been. This isn’t just pain. It’s regret, and a lostness so profound and complete that Mikasa can’t recognize anything that she’s relied on for most of her life. Armin is gone. Eren is worse than. And she doesn’t even know herself. 

Sasha is dead and the little girl who shot her is an orphan of Eren’s making. All she has of Armin is a letter that feels too much like a goodbye. Mikasa can’t walk by herself, so much for the girl worth a thousand soldiers, and Eren is happy about that. Historia had a baby so that Eren could flatten the world. 

The pressure of tears is welling up behind her eyes. Mikasa bites her lip and squeezes her fingers and refuses to cry in front of Historia. She takes one, two deep breaths, and manages to ask, “Marigolds or cosmos?”

Historia turns back to look at her. “What?” 

“For the blanket.” In through the nose, out through the mouth, and slow. She’s breathing too fast. She needs to calm down. She has to calm down. “Both are birth flowers for October. What do you want on the blanket?”

She has to do something. She has to do something, and Historia isn’t going to be the companion Mikasa had blindly hoped for in the minutes before her revelation, but her baby, her perfectly full-term baby, isn’t to blame for that. And Mikasa thinks it might be good for her to stitch something. It’ll be better than nothing, at least, just sitting here and waiting for whatever the next pitying face to come by is.

“Oh,” Historia says softly. “Um. I don’t mind either. Marigolds, maybe. They… I know you said they have a lot of connections to death and mourning, but that’s because they’re supposed to be a guiding light. I’ve always liked them.”

“Okay,” Mikasa says, nodding once. “Marigolds, then. And daffodils and baby’s breath and lilies of the valley. Do you know where I could find a sewing kit? And a new blanket.”

Historia blinks, tears spilling over her lashline. “I can send for them,” she says, hoarse. “Mikasa—”

“It’s okay,” she rushes to say, not wanting to hear anymore. “I’ll make the blanket. I’d be happy to. Of course I would.”

“I don’t want you to feel—”

“I want to,” she insists, loudly. “I—can we—can you just let me make the blanket?”

 Historia wipes her nose and says, voice thick, “Yeah.”

The queen stands and limps the few steps to the bell built into the wall by the bedpost. Its soft chime rings loud in the pressing quiet. Mikasa closes her eyes and tries to forget what it sounds like. 

***

His full dress uniform was mass-produced and last tailored when he was seventeen. Too snug in the arms and the shoulders, and someone had had to scramble to find the knee-high boots in the next size up, but Eren knows it’ll serve for now. 

Privately, he thinks he could’ve just put on his jacket and called it a day. He sincerely doubts that anyone is going to nitpick his outfit. But getting ready gave him something to do, which he’s able to recognize is good. His primary occupation of hovering over Mikasa is harder now that she’s awake. 

It’s strange. He keeps expecting to look over and see her—which is ridiculous, since she hasn’t been glued to his side in nearly a year now. He can’t tell what it is that’s tricking him. If it’s the familiar comfort of his old uniform, the fact that when they were last in the palace they were never apart, or just that he spent three days convinced that if he let her out of his sight for too long, she’d stop breathing. Or that, despite himself, he still hasn’t fully let go of that cabin in his dreams. Still hasn’t made himself know that it wasn’t real. 

It was, he thinks, and kicks at the floor. The brown patterned tiles don’t flinch. Eren envisions them shattering to dust under the weight of a Wall Titan; pushes his tongue against his teeth and looks away. 

There’s almost no light coming through the tall windows he’s leaning against. The chill of the rain has seeped through the glass and into his skin, and the muted sharpness of the raindrops striking the window panes is something of a salve on the constant itching in his mind. 

The room is lit by a gloomy pair of iceburst crystal lights by the door. It’s a humble office that belonged to a Major General Claude Larenz, who is, Floch assured him, dead now and won’t mind Eren waiting here. Apparently, he can’t be too early. The fact that this meeting is at noon meant that Eren had to be in the room at least five minutes early, ready a full half-hour before, and have his thoughts together about what was going to unfold at least a week before. 

Eren, fiddling with his brass cufflink under his overcoat, thinks that they’re just going to have to deal. He didn’t know he’d be alive a week prior, much less that he ought to have organized notes about his thoughts on land taxes. And still, he can’t imagine that he’s going to walk into that war chamber drenched in the blood of billions and meet much resistance. 

Who are they to stop me? he thinks idly, hooking the edge of the cufflink under his thumbnail and running it in a circle. If Mikasa, the only light bright enough that could’ve possibly banished his darkness, couldn’t, then this jumbled group of old men with soft hands certainly won’t. 

The door creaks open, and Eren’s gaze snaps to find Historia, hanging onto the arm of her kid’s father. The baby is cradled against her chest, making upset mewling sounds, and Historia’s eyes are soft, solely focused on her daughter. 

“Eren Jaeger,” Historia’s… sperm donor says, nodding as he helps the queen to the chair in front of the desk Eren’s standing behind. 

“Hey.” Maybe he’d give a more complete greeting if he remembered his name. “What are you doing in here?”

He shrugs, hapless. He’s been dressed to pass as a royal consort in casual wear, but the man’s a farmhand to the bone and clearly has no idea what’s going on. “Same as you, I’d guess?”

“I also have to be ready early,” Historia says, settling into the green upholstered cushion. Her voice is light, eyes still fixed on her daughter’s scrunched red face, but her tone is flat. If her baby were asleep, Eren knows she’d be as frosted-over as she was when they greeted each other when she arrived. She rocks her back and forth, trying to soothe what sounds like the beginnings of a tantrum. “And I didn’t want to walk all the way around to my waiting room behind the parliament chamber.” 

Eren just grunts. He has enough grace not to ask a woman half-recovered from postpartum hemorrhaging to find a different room to wait in, but he’s also not going to leave this room like he’s got something to be ashamed of. 

Histoira is complicit. The baby in her arms is proof enough of that. 

The child’s father runs his hands over Historia’s head and shoulders, trailing down to the little hand poking out of the yellow blanket. Five impossibly tiny fingers close around his own, and his face shatters into a joy more potent than Eren’s ever seen. Still grinning, he directs his question to the baby’s mother when he asks, “Are you alright?”

Historia looks up at him, and the soft look on her face shifts but doesn’t weaken. “I’m fine, Will. Thank you.”

The baby gives a mighty wail, waving her dad’s finger around. Ruefully, he says, “I think it’s time for me to put her down for a nap.”

“I know,” Historia sighs, lifting her arms so he can take the fussing little bundle. Before he does, she kisses the baby’s wrinkly red forehead and says, “Mamma will see you so soon, my darling.” 

“She’ll be missing you,” Will says, and gathers her up. He waves the finger clutched in the baby’s grasp and says, “Bye-bye, Mamma.”

Historia smiles, choked, and says, “Bye-bye.”

With that, he tucks the squalling little girl against his chest, bouncing slightly, and exists the room. The door shuts with a click, but the baby’s crying isn’t out of earshot for another few seconds. 

When it’s quiet again, but for the rain, Historia slumps into her chair and grimaces. Eren stays silent, glad of the barrier of the desk between them, aware that he was an unwelcome observer in her family’s moment of tenderness. He can’t even take any credit for its formation. Historia came up with the idea to get pregnant all on her own.

As if she senses the turn his thoughts took, her eyes slit open and land on him. As he’d known, her voice is cold and hard, laced with a subtle venom that would’ve burned if it weren’t his own kind biting back when she asks, “So how are you finding your new place?”

“I’m managing,” he says shortly. “Didn’t break any of your stuff, don’t worry, Your Grace.”

He doesn’t mean it as an insult, exactly, but the lack of respect is clearer than he perhaps meant it to be when he uses her royal style. 

She’s unaffected. The way she’d failed to make him feel any shame must only be stronger for her. She’s complicit, but it is still Eren’s crime. “You actually,” she says, “broke quite a few of my things.”

Queen of the Walls. Two thousand six hundred and ninety-two casualties when he tore them down. “Then maybe you shouldn’t have given me free rein to play with them.”

She huffs, turning her face to the side. A bookshelf rests against the wall, a small, yellowed globe laying on its side. It must’ve been knocked over in the earthquake yesterday, and nobody picked up old dead Claude’s office. Eren, tapping his fingers on his sleeve, thinks it’s just about fitting. 

It’s not exactly that he lacks affection for Historia. He’d call her a friend. Sometimes he still looks at her and sees a little girl with scraggly hair and a perpetually runny nose, the faint impression of a dead woman’s fondness skimming across his mind. He still can’t quite help feeling responsible for her, and somewhere deep inside he’s probably grateful to her for the part she played. 

But he hates himself for what he did, so it’s hard to like anyone who helped him with it.

That might be unfair to her, but Eren doesn’t think so. She could have said something. Told someone. He couldn’t have stopped her from talking if he was in Marley or in prison. But she kept her mouth shut, and here they are now. 

“Be honest with me,” she says, eyes fixed on the globe. “How’s Mikasa doing? You know her, she never wants—”

He cuts her off. “I do know her. Better than you. She’s—I mean, fuck, how do you think she’s doing? She’s hurt and exhausted and she feels—goddamn—alone here, and she—” the breath in his lungs twists into a laugh, bitter and hurt, “—she doesn’t want to see me—”

“And Armin and the rest are back at Sasha’s farm,” she finishes. “She said.”

Panic seizes Eren’s heart. “She didn’t—she didn’t say anything about—” He can’t make himself get the rest of that thought out, afraid that if he gives life to it, it will come true.

Historia understands, though. “We really didn’t talk too much,” she says. “And most of what we said was about the baby. She’s embroidering a blanket for her. I got to watch her work. She’s determined that she get it done by tomorrow afternoon, so Ymir can be christened in it. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Sweet.” Eren nods, flattening his lips together. “Yeah. That’s her. Was she terribly concerned? You weren’t due for another two months, after all—”

“You’re not funny.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

“No.” She tips her head against the tall base of the chair, weary. “You weren’t, were you?”

Eren doesn’t answer, and the moment draws out long enough that it crosses into uncomfortable. The rain continues to drone against the windows. Winds carry sheets of water and lay them down on the grass and mud and pavement, and against the palace walls. It feels like the weather has drawn a curtain in front of the rest of the world; Eren wonders what he’ll do when it falls, as all things must. 

Ymir, she said. He could’ve guessed that’s what she’d call her daughter. He doesn’t like it. It makes his thumbs ache where he’d ripped them off in the Paths to get to their foremother; makes his face cold where she’s held his cheeks and dragged him back into the land of the living. Makes the ever-present siren-song thrum of something-more inside him, pulsing in tune with his heartbeat, that much more present. He remembers Ymir’s fury and pain and helplessness; her sorrow and loneliness and horror; remembers that it’s her fault Mikasa is in pain right now. 

He says, “You did tell her that the kid wasn’t premature, right? If she’s gonna see her for the christening you’d better mention that before she does.”

“I did, in fact. Pretty much immediately.”

A cold, heavy feeling twists sharply in his gut. And they were together for long enough that she watched her embroider. So Mikasa can stand her presence fine, then. Eren wants to kick the floor again, fighting the childish insistence bubbling up in him that that’s not fair. 

“If it’s of any interest,” she adds, “she was about a week early. The Rumbling kickstarted my labor. When you pulled us all into the Paths for your announcement.”

“Not sure why it would’ve,” he sneers. Her hair is twisted back neatly, her fingernails are tidy; the long skirt of her jacket doesn’t cover that she’s not in uniform boots. They’d probably be too much on her swollen feet. “Considering that you knew it was happening, it can’t have been that big of a shock.” 

She purses her lips. “And the magic desert didn’t faze you at all?”

“I woke up there after my head got blown off. I was expecting worse, to be honest.” 

“You’ll find it one day,” she says, dry as dust.

Eren lifts his eyebrows and his shoulders in a single challenging gesture. “Maybe.” More likely, he’ll end up stuck as Ymir had, but—he isn’t going to think about that now, or ever. 

He looks Historia over once again. She looks much like their foremother had, especially when Frieda Reiss’s memories whirl through his head. He blinks, and—

—he’s on the ranch, boots on the soft grass, arm held high, watching a skinny little girl in a dirty brown skirt skip across the field—

—he’s in the Paths, boots in the shifting sand, arm extended, watching a scrawny little girl in filthy undyed rags walk steadily toward him—

—his sister beams up at him, snuggled against a hay bale, snot shining under her nose—

—his sister beams up at him, elbows knocking as they race after the airship—

—he is trapped behind his teeth; daylight fights to shine through the muscles of his cheeks and the shaking child before him is bathed in dark red—

—in the cold desert that’s empty and broken now, the light behind her flaring fast with frantic energy, and he can see clearly, see how her blue eyes are full of tears—

—the polished steel of a shield reflects back a face that could be carved from marble, will be carved in marble, tears sliding down red-marked cheeks—

—her face flickers in time with the scenery, shadowed in the blood-darkness of a monster’s mouth and then illuminated by the blue-white light of the thing that is so much more than a tree, back and forth too fast for him to process, his body half-rebuilt and half-dragged out of unreality and it’s strange and it hurts —

—he blinks, and there is a girl with puddle-blue bug-eyes and straw-colored hair looking up at him—

He blinks, and it’s just Historia. As she is. Slumped in a chair, giving him a strange look. Nobody’s sister. Somebody’s mother. 

He presses his fist against his temple, closing his eyes against a wave of dizziness. He’s tired. He hasn’t gotten more than six hours of sleep in the past four days. He’ll have to tonight if he wants to manage any coherency, but he doesn’t want to face what lurks in his dreams.

He wants to go back to that red blanket and patchwork quilt that he’d dreamt up, curl himself around the watercolor specter of Mikasa and wish this all away. He wants to go back to that gigantic blue-and-gold bed in her room and just—he knows she doesn’t want him touching her, but he wants to just—be with her. He misses her. He misses their cabin. He misses his home. 

Please come back to us, she’d said. She hadn’t been shouting like the others, but her voice had burrowed into his chest and burned. Why didn’t I listen? Why didn’t I go back? I wanted to—

But he’s not one for turning back.

The throbbing in his ears quiets slowly, folding under the lull of the rain. An ache still probes against his skull, but Eren has never minded pain as much as he should. He opens his eyes slowly, gaze finding the clock on the desk. 11:53. 

He rubs his knuckles into his skin, mashing the temporal artery. He could just go now. He could just turn around and go back to his bedroom, or Mikasa’s. Watch her embroider a baby’s blanket. What the fuck would anyone do about it? He’s halfway here just because he’s following the momentum. He doesn’t know what else to do, and he can’t stop; has to keep moving forward. But he’s pretty sure that he could fuck off right now and nobody would say a thing about it. He could just take Mikasa and go—like how he’d wanted to in Marley, like how his mother had told him to do nine years ago— Mom—

But, he thinks, very deliberately, and sighs through his nose. I won’t. He could, and there’s a sugary sweetness in knowing that. A ringing thrill. He can do what he wants. There’s nothing that could stop him, except the obligations he’s shouldered for himself. 

He has to keep Armin safe. Armin and the girl he might love; Falco and the girl he does; Jean and Connie and Sasha’s family and the others gathered at that sleepy horse farm. To do that, to keep that order standing, Eren has to be a figure that no one will risk disobeying. 

And of course, Mikasa needs to stay in the city. 

He drags his hand down his face. “Okay. I’m gonna head in.”

He pushes off the windows and grabs the folder he’d left on the desk. He’s stepping out from behind it when Historia asks, tired, “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

“Are you?” he asks, fixing his sleeve. Tight as it is around his upper arms now, it keeps riding up around his wrist. “You can’t even walk.”

She snorts, and says, with that same, familiar venom, “Neither can your wife.”

It stings this time, though. Eren’s head snaps up. “What the fuck?” he spits, anger lighting all through his chest and shoulders. “Mikasa and I aren’t—” he sputters, incredulous. Heat is racing all through him, furious and hurt that she threw that in his face and for what. 

She just gives a little shrug, the crown of her head resting against the back of her chair, narrowed eyes catching the blue-white gleam of the iceburst lights. “For her sake, I would change that as soon as you can.”

His lip curls. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Don’t play dumb, Eren; it doesn’t suit you anymore. You know what people are going to think of her, and what they’ll want to do about it.”

“Shut up,” he bites out. “She’s gonna be fine. I don’t need to—” He breaks off, unable to finish. 

He wants to. Obviously. Historia knows that. Everyone knows that, or at least he’ll make sure they do very soon. But Mikasa doesn’t want the same thing, at least not now, so there’s no point in dwelling on it. He’s not sure that she isn’t going to run to the Brauses’ as soon as she’s able, back to Armin and Jean and the rest. He’s not going to scare her off by fucking proposing.

He says, “I’m not gonna fucking tie her to me unless she knows it’s what she wants. And it’s not necessary. Do you really think I’d let anyone take her from me?”

“I was just saying,” Historia says, “that maybe it’d be better for her.”

“It won’t.” He flicks his wrist hard. “I’m not doing that to her. Marrying her like it’s a fucking protection racket .”

“It wouldn’t be like that,” she says gently. 

“No? What, then, some sort of domestic diplomatic immunity? I don’t think she’d be interested.”

“Alright. Just something to keep in mind.” 

Eren grits his teeth. “I don’t need to. Why does everyone keep bringing this up?”

“Okay.” Historia brings her hand under her cheek, like how she did when she curled up against her sister’s side to nap in the fields. “Fix your tie, though.”

Fucking God. “Why do you care?”

“Because your authority is the only thing keeping my friend safe,” she says. “So you need to look the part.”

His hands flex, curling into fists, before flying up to the bolo tie. He pushes it up tight against his collar and snaps, “Better?”

She shrugs. “You’ll do. But be careful, okay?”

“I think I’m past that,” he says. He remembers, again, the wave of missiles launched at him in the bay of Odiha. There’s good sense in aiming one with precision, same with a bullet or an arrow, but not when you can shoot a thousand of them at once. He’s a volcanic eruption, not a controlled burn, and he’s done with this conversation. He walks to the door, the sound of his boots sharp against the tile, and says, “See you in a few, Your Grace.”

He slams the door before she has a chance to respond. 

Major General Claude Larenz kept a modest office, but it’s a short twenty paces from the door to the grand parliament chamber. The door is already open, voices drifting up the hall. Eren thinks nothing of it as he strides through the oak double doors, the burgundy folder brushing his leg where it’s dangling from his hand. Eren’s read everything in it—damage reports and expenses projections and notes about the noble house who’ve best held on to their vestiges of power—but he doubts any of it will be very useful. 

The room is large but not quite cavernous, ceilings three stories high, big enough that the hundred-and-fifty-odd people gathered can fit in easily. The floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the room look over the palace walls out to the city, smeared into a greyscale watercolor by the droning rain—washed-out blues and creams set against a near-black sky. Four massive chandeliers hang from the ceilings, candleflames reflected by the bands of diamonds strung between the brass spokes. The warmth of the light does nothing to drive away the rain-blown cold that’s settled into the marble hall, or to make the quiet sweeping the room feel like anything less than the way rabbits freeze in the shadow of a hawk. 

Eren walks through the triple-level of blue-upholstered benches toward the long desk on a platform at the head of the room. Conversations falter as he passes, and then heads before him begin to turn. Within moments, the whole room is holding its breath and staring at him. Eren wonders what they see. 

He’s no stranger to the upper rings of Paradis. He’s been uniquely positioned in the military since he was a fifteen-year-old boy; a loose cannon, an unknown element. In those hectic months between the Battle of Trost and the reclamation of Shiganshina he’d proven himself as worthy of the trust they bestowed upon him; in the years since he’s shredded it.

Floch stands behind one chair on the high table, a true, pleased smile growing on his face. When Eren reaches him, he extends his arm to gesture at the seat in the middle; Eren crosses behind him and throws his folder down; watches it spin. 

“Eren,” Floch says, hushed. “Are you ready?”

He keeps his face closed off as he pulls out the chair. There’s a pattern of yellow loops stitched around the edges of the cushion. It makes him think of Mikasa’s bedroom. “As I’ve ever been.”

Floch sits as he does. He’s grinning like a child at a carnival. “This is the new beginning.” There’s a note of pride in his voice that threatens to choke him. “Page one of volume two of so many history books. All that we’ve lost and sacrificed—everything that you have lost and sacrificed—all so we could gather here, today, and build humanity anew. There’s glory in it, isn’t there?”

Eren nods, surveying the sea of faces before him. Five dozen lords; the remnants of the feudal system that pretends it still holds any real power in the actions of the government. Some major merchants in the crowd to discuss lost profits and rebuilding—there, in the second row, is Flegel Reeves, forehead sweaty and mouth agape. He counts three men in the black robes and golden collars of Wall-worshipers, whispering between themselves as they stare at him. The rest of the crowd is military. Old-timers who survived the initial coup and days of purging afterward; people wearing roses or wings—and a few green horses; Hitch is sitting with a small cluster of women on the second row—and more cadets in cropped jackets than Eren particularly wants to see. 

Every head is turned toward him, and on every face, wrinkled or round-cheeked, lips parted or hidden behind cupped hands, eyes narrowed and wary or wide and shining, there is a look of naked awe. 

Fear, on many. Fear, and suspicion, and some measure of revulsion. Fear, and admiration, and pride. Fear and gladness. Fear and hope. The sort of fear that reminds the true meaning of awful—reminds Eren why stories of the divine on earth begin with be not afraid. 

Eren stares back; lets a sense of déjà vu wash over him. It’s not the violent pull into memory that’s wracked him for years, not the jarring displacement when, between blinks, he finds himself somewhere else, someone else. Just that for a long moment, he feels like he’s flipped the scene of that courthouse when he was a child. 

No doubt some of the older members of this crowd are remembering that day, too. When he was chained on the floor, forced to beg for his life, listen while they called him a monster, while they talked over dissecting him. Looking back, Eren is proud of how well he’d held himself together. 

And then they dragged Mikasa into it. 

He recalls, with perfect clarity, the terrified rage that’d swallowed him whole. We should dissect her too, just in case. Even now, he has to close his eyes and take a slow breath. Then, stricken and panicked, he’d thrown himself against his chains and screamed that maybe he was a monster they wanted dead, but she had nothing to do with it. He’d been more angry and afraid than he could properly recall, the two mixing in a way they didn’t usually. He never has felt as ferocious or as helpless as he does when it comes to Mikasa. When she’s crying—and he hates seeing her cry—or when she’s scared, or upset. When she’s threatened. 

Eren is no longer a child.

There are no chains that could keep him down. There is no Levi to beat him like a dog. No Nile Dok to politely petition for his murder and mutilation; no Dharius Zachary to calmly hear him out. Now Eren is the one in power. The one looking down. 

Now there is no question that he is a monster. 

He wonders if the people under him can see blood on his hands, in his hair, caked onto the soles of his boots. He wonders what they make of it. 

Do you think it was for you? His eyes rest on a scrawny, tow-headed cadet, mouth parted and cheeks flushed with revere. It was, in part. Eren would not let the world bury his homeland and snuff out his people. The new generations of this island will grow up free. The kids in this hall, grouped in nervous clumps; the children the parents here left at home, pouting out their windows; Historia’s baby upstairs in her father’s arms, being rocked to sleep. Eren did what he did so that they will not be bred to live like cattle, to break the relentless churning wheel that crushed him.

Tapping a jaunty tune at his right, Floch believes that Eren did it for their motherland. That for glory, for salvation, Eren took on the weight of the world’s hatred, turned it around, and used it as a weapon against them. That he dreams of a single shining nation ruling over the idyllic empty world until they grow to fill it. They’ll build a new order that will never allow hatred to grow again; one people gathered under one banner, without outside forces to push them to fight. As if this was as simple as a revenge story. As if it were as neat and tidy as when Eren killed the traffickers who stole Mikasa—kill the nameless, unthinking, unquestionably vile animals and save the day; get the girl and return home victorious to sleep untroubled.  

He blinks back into focus; sees a Wall priest in his dark robe. He’s perfectly still, staring up at Eren with a raw wonder and deathly solemnity that Eren doesn’t want to read too closely into. The profiles of Maria, Rose, and Sina are cast in gold around his neck, looking older than the girls ever got to be. Their deaths were fixed as soon as their mother chose her own. Everything was. This was all part of some grand design, set in stone from the moment a slave child looked at pigs and thought I want— 

Over the priest’s shoulder, there’s a man with a grey beard and a silver pin over the Garrison roses on his breast pocket. He’s calm, at least outwardly, and the light reflects off his glasses in such a way that makes his expression unclear. And you, Eren thinks, latching onto him. Why do you think I did it? Because he couldn’t play nice with other kids? Because he picked fights and ended them, too, even if he was beaten so badly that he had to wait until the next day to come to school with a rock closed in his fist? Because he didn’t get to find the picture-perfect world from an old storybook and threw a temper tantrum? 

Eren twists his thumbnail into the desk. It’s for the best that nobody guesses that. 

He’s already too young for too many of these people. Not most, maybe, but to the experienced leaders here, he’s not too far removed from the shouting fifteen-year-old chained to the floor demanding they put their faith in him. He doubts anyone will think of him as little more than a petulant child with an alarming proclivity for violence, but he will need to keep his head here. Unraveling around Floch is one thing; easily brushed aside in a way that mistakes here will not be. 

Eren thinks of Mikasa’s eyes filling with tears; Armin’s mouth unfurling into a snarl. He’s lied his way through worse things than this, for worse reasons.

He flattens his hands and spreads his fingers. Lets the prickling, deadened patter of the rain wash away the grit in his head. Turns to Floch and says, “How’s that bullet wound?”

His face brightens. “I can’t complain. Not the worst anyone’s suffered for the New Eldian Empire.”

Eren grimaces in agreement. He remembers catching sight of Gabi with an anti-Titan rifle, an endless half-second of gaping dread between his racing footfalls, and then— He’d honestly thought that he was back under the tree in Shiganshina with Mikasa. Things got murky from there, but it had been nice to have that perfect glimpse of peace before it all crumbled. He remembers the underground cathedral—the biting steel of manacles around his wrists and the press of metal behind his teeth and the line of heat Kenny Ackerman’s knife drew across his forehead, blood wicking down his face and stinging his eyes; his father’s haggard panting as Eren coaxed him to pick up his scalpel and the way the Reiss children had splattered the polished crystal floor with viscera. “We’ve all bled on some altar or another.”

“Oh,” Floch says, as if charmed. “That’s a nice way of thinking about it.”

Eren’s head tilts. “Is it?”

“We’ve sacrificed a lot.” He nods out at the crowd, which is slowly settling, hushed conversations starting up again under the lull of the storm. “All of us. There’s nobody here who hasn’t lost a parent or a child or a sibling or a friend. It’s good to think it was for something. Maybe we had to hit a critical mass before it was enough. For you to say that it was enough, and take it all upon yourself.”

Guilt rocks through his stomach. Eren takes a deep breath and lets it roll across his insides, and then away. He can’t— do that here. His thumbnail presses into the side of his finger. Control. 

Eren thinks he should be better at it by now. 

“If it helps people to think that…” he trails off. Eren never saw any good in pretty lies. Not until he spent so much of the Rumbling pretending he wasn’t there. The mountains around our cabin were pretty, he recalls. The river, and the stars at night. 

“It’s been a tumultuous time, Eren,” Floch says. He shrugs his uninjured shoulder. “Sometimes it’s best to let people have their comforts. I’m sure you understand.”

 “Mhm.” His eyes, once again, drift down to the trio of priests near the front row. After Wall Maria fell, in those first scrambling weeks in the makeshift refugee camps, the Wall Cultists had gone around wailing and beating their heads, crying that it was a lack of faith that brought this on them. Eren watched them flagellate themselves, vision blurring, so angry that Mikasa had needed to grasp his hands and beg him please don’t.

Eren has never had much time for faith. Not in any traditional way. 

“Speaking of, Historia told you the princess’s christening is tomorrow, right?” Floch asks. 

Vacantly, Eren says, “She mentioned it. Mikasa’s making a blanket for her.”

After a long beat, Floch says, “Ah.” He clears his throat. “Are you… planning on going?”

Eren grimaces again, shrugging. He’d rather not. “She didn’t say anything about wanting me there.”

“I’m sure she would. For the politics of it, if nothing else.” Floch taps the table. “We need to be a united front, Eren. Historia’s a figurehead, but a popular one.”

“How many goddamn people are gonna be at her six-day-old’s ceremonial dunking?”

“A lot.” Floch gives him an odd look. “It’s a state event. Members of the military and nobility alike.”

Eren resists sighing. It’s been nearly a year since he’s had things to do every day the way one does when there’s any weight to it. For months, all he filled his days with was the straightforward blood and grit of trench warfare, and later chatting with Falco and trying to avoid the pitiful group therapy sessions. “Fine,” he says. “If Historia asks, I’ll go.”

“She’ll expect it.”

Eren tips his head to the door. “Let’s ask her, then, when we’re done here.”

Floch’s head snaps forward, following his gaze, and lands on Historia’s small, stately figure as she crosses through the door. They stand in unison, as they must; the rest of the room takes the cue and stands before their heads even turn to see her. 

What stiffness in her gait she can’t hide can pass for courtly proprietary. The soft yellow light glimmering from the chandeliers catches on the smooth sapphire of her tie. She walks down through the rows of benches and then ascends the platform to the desk. There are five seats; Eren has taken the center and Floch the seat at his right hand. Eren wonders for a flash if he’s meant to move, but Historia stops at the chair to his left without batting an eye. 

Eren inclines his head to her. She purses her lips and does the same. 

“Eldians.”

Floch’s voice rings out across the hall, sharp and clear. Eren glances over, wary. He didn’t know there’d be a speech. 

“My brothers and sisters in the Blood of Ymir. We stand here today facing the dawn of a new age. For a hundred years, the outside world sent wave after wave of walking death to our shores—our fellow patriots, damned to an endless nightmare for fighting back against the unjust persecution our people faced. And for generations, without ever knowing why, Eldia offered up her sons and daughters in pursuit of understanding and freedom.”

The crowd watches, eyes flickering around the room and amongst each other, frozen with bated breath. 

Floch continues, arms slightly spread. “No one in this room is untouched by the war that the world forced upon us. No one on this island. We have lost mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers. But their sacrifices were not in vain. Eldia has bled and bled on the sacrificial altar—” he glances over for a fraction of a second, and Eren regrets ever asking him about his shoulder, “—and we have been granted our due. Freedom. Security. We can rest easy at night with the knowledge that from now until the end of time, the Blood of Ymir will never again be used to justify the murder of our innocents. The world is ours to take, now, thanks to the men and women who offered their lives, or had them stolen, and we owe it to them to build a new, greater civilization that is worth all that was given for it.”

The westward window shudders with a sudden onslaught of rain, heavy enough that the sound of water falling against the courtyard stones is heard even through the iron-encased glass. There are nods; balding and lustrous heads alike catching the candlelight. The wind presses a torrent of air against the walls; Eren remembers how late it is in the year. Thinks that, if it weren’t for the havoc he wreaked on the ocean, this rain might be an early snow. 

I’m going to see snow again, he realizes, far-off, like churchbells chiming across the city when the Scouts came riding back and he would drag Mikasa to watch the dreary parade. He didn’t think he’d ever get to see snow past that too-short visit with Armin in the Paths. 

“And,” Floch says, dropping his right arm and half turning into him. “We owe an unfathomable debt and we owe our thanks to our honorable leader, our liberator: Eren Jaeger. He shouldered the full weight of the world’s hatred and bore it for us all, cleared the way and guided us into this brave, new, glorious world. And we dedicate our hearts!”

He slams his fist over his heart, and the mass of people before them does the same in such perfect unison that an audible impact sounds. As one, they chant, “Dedicate our hearts!”

The cry echoes, once, through the hall. Eren feels as detached from this moment as if he was watching a scene in a play. He’s cold like he’s back out in the dream of the Arctic snow, underdressed, talking with Armin through chattering teeth. Looking at the Northern Lights and longing for Mikasa’s smile. 

“We dedicate our hearts to him,” Floch cries, “and to our beautiful, newly-freed motherland! From her shores, we will build the New Eldian Empire. Will you dedicate your hearts?”

The thud of a hundred-and-a-half fists connecting to chests. “We dedicate our hearts! We dedicate our hearts!”

Floch looks to Eren, eyes shining, expectant. 

The Arctic is a desert, he thinks. His throat is nearly as dry as little Ymir’s had been—except it isn’t, of course, and never will be. But it takes him a long moment to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. He has nothing to say to these people. No rallying cry, no sermon of glory. What he has is a girl that he loves more than anything, and a best friend who will likely never speak to him again; people he has to protect who cannot speak for themselves here, like this, because Eren never thought they’d have to. What Eren has is damage that he must control. 

He draws in a deep breath. The heavy, bitter air sticks in his chest. 

“Let’s begin.”

***

Mikasa winces and drops the needle. 

“Ow,” she says, not because it hurts much, but because there’s nobody around to hear her. She pulls her hand out from under the large square of white linen in time to see a fat drop of blood beading up on the pad of her index finger. It’s a bright red against her skin, smarting quietly like she’s touched a candle flame, and Mikasa does not know what to make of it. 

When she was too little to help with whatever her parents were doing, she’d sit at the table, or in her little attic loft, or on the floor in front of the fireplace, and hum to herself as she sewed anything she could get her hands on. Her pillows and dolls and dresses were covered in neat stitches; the backs of her hands and the tips of her fingers were covered in pinprick scabs. Any scars she might’ve had have long since faded now, and after her parents died, she’d never jabbed herself with a needle again. 

Mikasa sets aside the blanket. A simple thing of combed linen fetched from the nursery, with a tiny strip of lace around the edges. It’s soft and light and warm, holds the embroidery well, and it’s plain enough that the flowers slowly taking shape along the edges won’t be overwhelming. 

Blood would be, though. 

She simply looks at the red dot, not quite comprehending. It sits on the tip of her finger, just above the rough, raised skin of the callus where her fingers bend. She recognizes that much. She’s had those calluses since she was twelve years old, after the blisters burst. They’ve faded some since she was fifteen and a day didn’t pass without her using her swords. Thickest on her index finger, where she squeezes a rifle’s trigger, but on the rest of her hand, they’re nearly flat. Closer to blisters, perhaps, now. She’d been holding her swords for so long that they’d rubbed the skin red. Not enough to bleed, but she remembers the dull burning pain whenever she gripped her swords. 

She’d been happy when she noticed the calluses beginning to soften. Never enough that she didn’t have the hands of a soldier, she’d never let up that much, but—she liked what she’d felt like it meant. Like the world was becoming a place where she didn’t have to have hands roughened by war. Dirty and bloodied and hard to the touch.

The word careless rings through her head. She shivers, the cold that’s burrowed into her bones swelling into her skin for a moment. You were getting careless. 

Her ponytail had been caught in her ODM gear a few days before they left for Marley. Exactly like the instructors in cadet training had always warned would happen if you weren’t careful. Exactly like Eren had told her to be careful of. He’d told her to cut her hair when they were twelve, and then he’d been the one to cut her hair free not quite a year ago. 

She’d been so stupidly upset. A vain, frivolous little girl—but it hadn’t just been about liking her hair longer. It’s just, she’d said, staring hard at the ground to chase off tears, It meant that we were moving toward peace. I didn’t have to wear my hair short anymore. I liked it long, and I liked what it meant. And now I—can’t help but feel like it means that peace is being taken away.

Eren had nodded. His broad hand hot on the newly-bare back of her neck. Said, in a low, soothing voice, It was just an accident. There’s plenty of time for you to grow your hair back out.

Five days later, he walked out of the audience hall. She didn’t see him again until he was half-out of his Titan, teeth and hands and belly wet with viscera, a city falling around them. 

Mikasa stares at the blood on her finger.

If I hadn’t let my hands go soft, she thinks. Would that have made a difference? 

If I hadn’t let my heart—

She couldn’t have stopped him. She couldn’t have. He was so committed to his act of violence that nothing could’ve shaken him from it. The only way to stop me is by taking my life, he’d said. All his talk of not taking anything from them, of them being free, it could only have been a taunt. He had never planned on letting them. 

She always knew Eren could be mean, but she’d never thought him so cruel. 

There’s nothing to use for a bandage here. No cut-away bits of cloth in the sewing kit by her hip, no bits of quilting fluff. (There hadn’t been anything for bandages when they flying on Falco, either. The wind whipped through her hair as blood seeped out of her body, into her boots, staining her socks red and then brown.) After a long, long moment, Mikasa simply wipes the gleaming red bead onto the side of her thumb and down her palm. She holds perfectly still, waiting for the scarlet streak to dry, listening to the wind howl outside. Once or twice, it’s been enough to rattle the whole of this strange, too-big room; the furious storm seems unending. Eternal. It only began this morning—eight hours ago now, the clock tells—but Mikasa has the idea that it simply must last forever, that this is the way things will always be. That time can’t go on as it always has, as if the order of the world wasn’t so monumentally offset. 

A warm pulse throbs in her finger as more blood pushes up from under her skin. Compared to every other type of hurt she’s feeling, her leg and her bruises and her chest, it seems almost cheerful. And she’s cold everywhere else, cold to where she can’t fathom her breaths aren’t clouding the air before her. 

It doesn’t feel like it can even be her blood. Not really. How could she be bleeding, stabbed by her own needle? It’s such a silly mistake, and Mikasa doesn’t make those. 

But her hair. But her hands. But her heart. 

She smears the new drop of blood across her hand, too. 

She doesn’t want to ruin the nightgown or the robe. Silk stains so easily, and this isn’t her dress, not her robe. She’s just in it, just like she’s in this bed, in this room, in this palace and city and nation, and none of it is hers. She can’t think of it like that. She won’t. It isn’t. This is just where she is, what she’s in, and she doesn’t want to make someone else wash blood out of white silk because she went and stabbed herself with a needle trying to stitch lilies onto a baby blanket. 

It only takes a few minutes for the bleeding to stop and the blood to dry. It’s a silly, trivial wound, and even the drumming heat of her heartbeat in her finger is nearly a comfort. That one part of her isn’t still and silent as snowfall.

When she’s certain she won’t ruin the pure white of the blanket by touching it, she picks the needle back up and resumes. 

She’s made good progress. On opposite corners, there are clumps of three sunrise-colored marigolds, red-orange-yellow threads laced through each other to form the petals that surround the centers of tiny golden loops. Five short green stalks with short green leaves spread out from under the flowers themselves, quick work with dark, thin stems and small teardrop leaves. It’s pretty, though, and smooth to the touch. She thinks the princess might like it, when she’s a little older. 

Historia had, at least. She’d stayed with Mikasa for the better part of two hours, dozing intermediately while she watched her work, occasionally voicing some thought or other. Mostly it had been silent. There hadn’t been much to say. 

That had probably been the first true peace and quiet Historia had gotten since her baby came. When the clock told half-past ten, though, she’d needed to go—see to her daughter, get ready for the “thing at noon.” 

Mikasa hadn’t been too sorry when she left, and that made her unspeakably, echoingly sad. 

Seven hours have gone by, and the marigolds are done. She wonders, before she can stop herself, about the thing at noon. If Historia is still in there, her baby must be hungry. 

The lilies of the valley are taking shape, now. The lattice of pale pink, bell-shaped flowers are going on the yet-unadorned corners, though she’s only got the first started. She would have liked to stitch a row of them up and down the sides to form a pretty border, but she won’t have time for that if she’s to get it done before tomorrow afternoon. And maybe it’s stupid to be so determined of that, but she is. She has to. She just—she hasn’t been able to get anything worthwhile at all done, lately, and she needs this. She needs to get this much right. 

The act of embroidery is a sort of meditation. The lulling back-and-forth motion; your mind still firmly rooted in the present, making sure no stitches are crooked. There’s care in every stroke of her needle, and real beauty slowly coming to fruition under her careful eye. 

When she was twelve years old, early enough that she was still getting used to moving her head without the weight of her long hair, her teachers talked to them about glory. About how there can be beauty found in the glint of gunmetal and the song of swords, about smoke against a sunset and the blood of your enemies. Mikasa had never understood that; let it slide off her skin without bothering to try. She’d seen awful men bleed—men who punched a knife through her father and split her mother open with an axe, who wanted to do worse to her—enough of their blood that she could’ve slipped in the puddle of it, staining the creaky, brittle wood floor of that old cabin—and she had just thought how very similar it looked to her mother’s pool of blood. 

She didn’t understand it then, when the enemies they spoke of were monsters, human or Titan. She doesn’t understand it now. 

But she does understand this: Lilies of the valley are for purity. They grow wild in the southern part of Wall Maria, and since the reclamation, they’ve come to mean a return to peace. To happiness. So she tries to focus on what she hopes they’ll mean for her friend’s baby girl, and not on how, when the jumbled hysteria creep past the edges of her focus, it feels wrong to be doing something like this. 

Even as singular as her attention is, it takes her far too long to notice Eren standing in the doorway between their rooms. 

He leans against it as he did the other door this morning: arms crossed, shoulder and head resting against the wood, an easy, unbothered posture. It makes her heart stutter. Like someone has ripped away a layer of protection under her skin, leaving her insides raw and vulnerable. Her eyes drop away from him almost as soon as they land on him, but not fast enough that she can’t see his expression. A flat, empty look, bordering on lazy, on sleepy. It unnerves her like static electricity crawling across her skin. She’s not sure she’s ever seen him wear that face, and—she’s not sure if it’s better or worse, but it still feels wrong. 

Better than that smile, though. 

For a flash, she feels almost guilty for thinking it—for not wanting him to smile, when she hasn’t seen him do so in so long—but like thunder after lightning, her own upset rolls over her, a murky tide of biting hurt and a bleak, frustrated sort of anger. 

She’s never really been good at being angry at Eren. Even now, when she tries to dredge it up, it only stings for a moment before wilting into that pathetic, cloying ache. Like she’s no bigger than the girl she’d been ten years ago in the hunting shack, as wide-eyed and trembling as a lamb, wishing desperately for her daddy to take the knife out of her hands and make it all not so scary anymore. 

“Mikasa,” Eren says. 

Has his voice changed? Her thoughts flit about like songbirds. Her leg throbs. She doesn’t want to focus. Is it deeper, now, really, than it had been before—before? Before when? Is it rougher, now? She doesn’t remember him sounding like this; as though, as soft as his tone is, his voice still scrapes against her bones. Maybe it did, though—maybe she just listened to him and heard the little boy who gave her a scarf.

She doesn’t respond, really. She nods, eyes in her lap, tracing over the sunset colors of the marigolds. Behind the rainclouds, is the sun setting? It’s more than half-past five now. The sun would be low in the sky, at least, maybe not properly setting quite yet. If it is—does it look the same? Can it? How could it possibly?

Eren doesn’t say anything for a long time. She gets the feeling that he doesn’t quite know how to handle the way things are between them now, either. It’s not to say that it’s always been easy, exactly, between them, but there’s never been too much room for doubt. Even for her—she sometimes thought, especially when they were younger, that Eren took her for granted. There’d been a kind of comfort in that, then. But now…

She has no idea what Eren thinks of her anymore. 

(She doesn’t want to know.)

Eventually, the silence stretches too thin. Eren never has been very patient. 

(Except. She doesn’t know how long he’s spent planning this, only that it was the better part of a year at the very, very least. When he cut her hair out of the snare of her gear and told her sweetly that she had plenty of time to grow back it out, he’d already had a coup simmering.)

“You’re okay?”

His voice is deeper, she thinks, and it sounds less like a question than a command. You’re okay, like she has to be.

She nods again, ducking her head once. After a moment’s pause, she flexes life back into her fingers and keeps working at the half-finished flower. Guides the needle through the cloth and out again, creating a neat line of soft pink. Her automatic responses want her to ask, are you? But she doesn’t think she’ll be doing that for quite some time. 

He’s just fine. He looks as strong and healthy as he ever has—tired, maybe; there is a haunted pallor to his skin and dark hollows under his eyes, but she doesn’t want to know what’s keeping him up at night. 

He shouldn’t be sleeping easy, she thinks, but the spite fueling the thought sputters into sadness. He shouldn’t—

She swallows, unsure where that was going. “How long have you… been…?” Back? Out? Standing there? 

She doesn’t know her own thoughts. She doesn’t think she knows anything, anymore. 

Eren sighs, long and loud. “Couple minutes. Just got out. If I have to do that again, I’m—” He cuts himself off, which is probably wise. He weighs his words, then restarts with, “Your fire has pretty much died.”

The hearth across the room is flickering with low, red flames, lurking in the cracks of the kindling. Mikasa hadn’t noticed. She’d been cold before it, and she’s cold now. It has nothing to do with the real temperature of the room. “It’s fine.”

Eren groans low in his throat. “Mikasa. You have to—don’t do that.”

She chances a look at him, eyes sticking on his shoulder. It’s safer than his face, though she can see that, too; she focuses on the Wings of Freedom emblazoned on his breast pocket, the same as they’ve ever been and incongruous for it. “Do what?”

“That thing you do, when you insist you don’t need anything.” He straightens, pushing off the door. His tie is gone and his hair is down. He stalks across the floor, heavy, angry steps, the thick soles of his boots loud against the patterned wood. It looks darker now than it did this morning; no longer reflecting the happy glow of the firelight. “It’s obviously not true,” he continues, reaching the fireplace and wrenching it open with a high, cutting creak that rings through her ears like a scream, “and you need to—” 

He breaks off as he places the quartered logs into the flames, a careful configuration. It’s not the way they were taught to do it in their wilderness survival classes when they were cadets or the way his parents did it. Wherever he learned that, it was without her. 

She wonders if this unfamiliar fire is how he kept himself warm in the trenches that spiderwebbed through the desert by Fort Slava. She wonders if it’s some of the last remaining fragments of some other culture’s know-how. Did Ramzi’s family build their fires like that? She can’t remember. For all that she’s thought of that night in the past few days, on the ship or the plane or Falco’s feathered back, she’d been focused on what she could have changed, instead of what she should have cherished. 

Mikasa looks down at her hands, clutching the blanket. Her ragged old bandage is still wrapped around her wrist, covering her mother’s family crest. She’s embroidering this blanket the way her mother taught her how for a baby whose mother had some small part in the eradication of that knowledge everywhere else in the world. 

Her mom used to tell her how important it was that they keep the traditions of their ancestors alive, since they were the last. Mikasa had never felt any kinship with Hizuru, never longed to make a place for herself there, but it had meant something that her mother needn’t have worried. They weren’t the last. They never were. 

But now she is. 

The pale pink thread looped through her needle fills in the shape of flowers native to Paradis. She imagines the same shade being used to trace the delicate shapes of the cherry blossoms Kiyomi had told her so much about. Silk instead of linen. A red or gold blanket instead of white. 

Heavy, clotted red soaking into it as a shadow falls, crushing the helpless, squalling thing inside like a bug underfoot and setting the fabric aflame in one brutal motion.

Eren stands upright and turns to her, backlit by the warm yellow-orange of the fire. The shadows obscure his face, given an unfamiliar shape by the thick, dark curtain of his hair. He looks more like a stranger than he did even in Liberio, despite his faded old uniform—or perhaps because of it. Because it doesn’t fit quite right anymore: the shine of brand-new boots; the sleeves too short around his wrists and straining around his shoulders and upper arms. There’s something else under Eren’s skin, something unknown. 

It’s not something new. She’s not naive enough to think that, anymore. Look what happened when last she tried to insist on it? He told her she was nothing more than a slave bound to his will, and that he couldn’t stand the sight of her.

That wasn’t true. She knows that. At least—at least, parts of it aren’t. Eren cares about her in whatever fractured, gnarled, wrong way he’s capable of. She knows that. She thinks she does. He’s staring at her with a singular focus now, and she can’t read his expression, but he’s certainly not about to be sick with rage. And she is—she does—she would have—she fought against him. She did. She tried. 

Did she?

Is that another reason why he’s taking care of her in this twisted, stunted mimicry of care? Because he’s responsible for her, like a bird whose wings he clipped? 

Broke?

Eren is staring at her with a fixed intensity; a man studying a butterfly pinned to a board. It’s too much, just too, too much, nearly as pressing as the weight of Titans on the march, squeezing her lungs, and she’s about to ask him to please go away when he cuts off her drawn breath and demands, “What happened to your hand?”

Her breath leaves her in a shuddering exhale. Her hand? “What?”

His open hand snaps forward as if to lob a ball at her underhanded. “Your hand. There’s blood on your thumb.”

“Oh.” Mikasa glances down at the faint red smear. How in the world did he see that? Her heartbeat is pounding in the pinprick again; not enough of a grounding comfort to provide any warmth. It aches in tune with her leg. “It’s nothing.” After a beat of tense silence, Eren’s dissatisfaction ringing loud, she says, “I jabbed myself with a needle.”

“Why?” The single syllable is a bite. 

Mikasa blinks. Despite her apprehension and confusion, the words fall from her lips like a spoonful of honey into over-steeped tea, slow and even. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

Eren’s jaw works, words pushing against his teeth. He inhales once, sharply, opens his mouth; cuts himself off before his breath can take shape. Does it again; once more, before finally saying, “Historia said you’re making that for her daughter?”

Mikasa nods, at once immensely relieved. The baby. An easy topic. Little Ymir Reiss. Flat chin and dandelion tufts of hair and newborn-blue eyes. She wonders if Historia will bring her by so she can meet her. Maybe not tonight—if they only just got out of the meeting, surely she’ll want to be with her daughter and then go straight to sleep. 

Mikasa could stand to sleep herself. Her head feels watery, thoughts running together, but—she wants to get this blanket closer to done. At least finish up the lilies on both sides. 

Keep away her dreams for a while longer. 

She takes a long, grounding breath, and resumes her sewing. But her fingers are clumsy, now, heavy under the weight of Eren’s gaze, and she can’t—she’s on the far edge of panicking, somehow. Eren is there, just there, and it’s Eren, it’s Eren, and that’s the beginning and the end of it, as it always has been, but—not right now. 

It’s as if she’s always been looking at him in profile, seeing the noble line of his nose and the angle of his cheekbone and the pretty lashes framing his emerald eye, but suddenly he’s turned to face her fully, revealing something bone-white and bloodstained and burning. It’s always been there, and she feels so stupid for not knowing about it, empty-headed and slow for not sensing something so close she could feel its heat. 

She’s been warming her hands by a forest fire, and now she’s shocked to find herself surrounded by ash. 

“Can I—” Eren says, and takes half a step toward her. She looks at him through her eyelashes, trying to steady her breathing, refusing, refusing to let the stinging in her eyes become true tears. Nevermind that her heart feels pulled to ribbons, leaving her unspooled and barely held together. 

Eren swallows and says, “Can I—sit down? With you?”

Anything, if it means he’ll stop facing her like a boar about to charge. She nods, and Eren moves to the bed as if a rope around his middle was severed; the only thing stopping him from stumbling downhill. 

He sticks by the foot of the bed, so near the edge she half-worries he’ll fall off, uncoordinated as he is. But he just crawls over the covers, too similar to how he did when he was little, and settles with his back against the wall, as far away from her as he could manage. 

For that, she’s almost as grateful to him as she has ever been. 

She can breathe easier with him sitting. There’s nothing burning behind him, no shifting light creeping around the edges of him, accentuating the strange new shape of him, all the ways the last ten months have molded him into someone she doesn’t know. His boots are still on, too—spotless, even the soles—but he never took his shoes off to get in bed when they were children, either. She scolded him endlessly for it, and his mother, too, but he never remembered. He would take them off, though, when she asked. 

She doesn’t try, now.

Eren sags against the wall, face pulled into a grimace. Tension leeches out of him like blood pooling, until he’s half-lying down, hands folded on his stomach. He keeps his eyes shut tight for long enough that she wonders if he’s simply fallen asleep, and what in God’s name she should do if he has, but then he heaves a sigh. When his eyes do open, they’re fixed on her. 

All of that sleepiness from earlier is gone—and now, she thinks he must have been guarded in some way. Against what, she doesn’t know—but Eren always has found threats when there were none. He’s tired, still, she can see, weariness sunken into his bones, but the unmoving, half-lidded stare is replaced by wide-eyed scanning. His eyes trace every inch of her face, every curve and hollow; the sweep of them is every bit as warm and present as his hand on the back of her neck, ten months ago when he cut her hair free. 

Mikasa’s breathing brushes against the shallows of her, that same, strange new panic bleeding in around the edges of her.

“Sorry,” Eren says, rough. “I… I’m—” He huffs, frustrated; looks away from her and bites his lip.

He never has been good with words, Mikasa thinks. The thought feels far-off. What is he even apologizing for? He said it like sorry for bothering you. As if he’s ever needed to apologize for that. As if he doesn’t have an empty, barren world full of apologies to plant before he can dream about such meager ones as that. 

Mikasa just shakes her head minutely and gets to sewing. 

They pass a long time without talking, from there. 

Mikasa is almost able to slide back into that half-meditation she’d had before, thinking only about the mechanical motions and keeping it pretty. Lilies of the valley mean purity, she keeps thinking, like a sweet, blameless newborn. Lilies of the valley mean a return to happiness; may Historia’s daughter always find her way back to it. 

She feels the weight of Eren’s eyes on her, though, and she can’t ever forget; can’t manage a second where she doesn’t feel pinned in place. He watches, graveyard-quiet and perfectly still. If he’s trying to make her forget he’s there, it isn’t working. 

She finishes three more flowers, and the meager grey light from the window has faded completely by the time the frayed ribbon in her chest tears. 

“You’ve never been okay with just sitting and watching me sew before,” she says, words toppling out on top of each other, all in one breath. 

Evenly, he says, “Yes, I have.” 

“You haven’t.” She stabs the needle into the pincushion, pulling out the pink cotton floss thread. “You would—grouch—until I played a real game with you.”

“Because before, I wanted your attention on me, not that hoop thing.” He sounds as worn-out as he’d looked; an abandoned reluctance lurks over his words. Like he didn’t want to tell her that but sees no point in not. “Now, I figure I’ll take what I can get.”

If this was before, I might’ve snapped this needle in two. As it is, she tenses so fast it looks like a shudder. Eren sits up straight, she sees out of the corner of her eye, and he asks, “Are you still cold? What’s wrong?”

“Stop it,” she mutters, and Eren halts. Mikasa closes her eyes and shakes her head, bangs untucking from behind her ears. “You… you don’t need to do that.”

“Do what,” he grits out. “Fuss over you? You never listened when I told you to—”

His mouth shuts so hard she hears his teeth clack together, and that’s all the noise there is for one long, tremulous moment. She knows that he’s thinking of the restaurant, too. Awful, bitter cold washes through her; she feels as stripped-bare as she would naked in a blizzard. Ice crystals cut across her skin, burrow into her blood, crystalize in her veins; the dream of warmth is so, so far away she can scarcely remember it.

Then the fire snaps; a log collapses and sparks whirl up the chimney, and Eren says, with a gentle urgency, “You know that I was lying about that, too, don’t you, Mikasa?”

“Sure,” she says, and to her horror, there are tears in her voice. 

“No,” he says, a sharp crack of a word. “No, no no no, Mikasa, listen to me, that wasn’t true, okay? At all. Not—not one single fucking word I said there was true, okay? You know it’s not true, you know you’ve never done a goddamn thing that you didn’t want to—you threw me around like a ragdoll when we were kids, you think that was my will? You remember how mad I would get? And that—that was why, this morning, Mikasa, I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to—”

“Stop,” she begs. She drops the needle and curls her hands into fists; bunches them over her sternum, blood-streaked thumb digging into the space between her clavicles. 

“Mikasa.” He shifts forward onto his knees, still so very far away from her. She’s watching him now, jittery, and his wide with urgency and hard with determination. “Mikasa, my love, I was lying —”

“Please don’t call me that.” All her air flees with those words, as surely as if she’d been punched—as if she’d been thrown off horseback—as if she’d been shot, a bullet ripping through her right where her hands are clasped. Why would he— why would he—he doesn’t— he can’t, he can’t, because if he does, then—then—

Eren goes motionless. 

Very, very slowly, his jaw tightens. He swallows. He stays as he was, knees spread wide, hands on his thighs, shoulders rolled forward, eyes locked on hers. She’s crying, now. She promised herself she wouldn’t, but now her vision is going blurry, warmth sliding down her cheeks. Eren watches, eyes tracking a tear’s path like a raptor tracing a mouse; not doing anything about it—he didn’t do anything about it at the restaurant, either. Just made her cry and watched, that cold, unaffected look on his face—and she’d thrown Armin down, why had she thrown Armin down, unless—unless—and now barely a week has passed and Armin has left her, and Eren’s calling her his love instead of his slave, and told her that he loves her instead of he’s always hated her, and Armin left her for the first time in all her life, isn’t here to defend her, and if he were, she wouldn’t throw him down again because she wouldn’t be able to, because the strength that’s defined her for ten years is gone and Eren had smiled about it, and he can’t love her, not in any real, decent way, because this isn’t what love looks like, because he isn’t capable of it, because she doesn’t deserve that, not now; because if he does, then what if she could’ve stopped him?

She shakes her head, no no no no no. The gravity of him is inescapable, as if he carried the hulking mass of his Founding Titan form back. His eyes sear as surely as the heat of his army that roasted Hange; the press of the air in his presence weighing heavier the longer there’s no sound to detract from it. There’s a terrible intensity to him now, stronger than it ever, ever was, and its full force focused on her is enough to crush her flat. 

Somewhere in the hall, a grandfather clock strikes six. It doesn’t startle either of them out of this staring match, but each low, echoing toll is one less four-count of heartbeats before this moment has to end. 

When the sixth chime fades, Mikasa swallows back bile. Her throat is thick, her lips are trembling. She opens her mouth, unsure quite where she’s going, and says, “But I do get headaches.” 

“Everyone gets headaches, Mikasa.” His voice comes from deep in his throat, unhewn, as if coming from between broken teeth. It’s not. He’s as handsome as he’s ever been, perfect as a prince in a storybook. “I get them all the fucking time.”

“But I get—memories,” she protests. She wants him to prove it. “Of that night, mostly. My parents dying, and you. Killing those men. And, and once we caught up to the Rumbling, when I was trying to fight you, my head was pounding. I was trying to go against your will, then—was that why my head was hurting? Because the bond was trying to stop me?” She wants him to give her irrefutable proof that there’s no such thing as an Ackerman bond; wants it more than empty comfort. And she wants him to not lie. 

He closes his eyes. Doesn’t speak for a long time. 

“What did I even tell you, Mikasa?” he asks finally. “That the headaches were the ‘real—’” the words is drenched in venom “—you trying to break free? That wouldn’t be happening in the Rumbling.”

“Then what was it?” If she is just a puppet of his. Just the last in the long, long line of his broken toys. She’d rather know. 

Another long pause drags by. His jaw works, like he’s trying to dredge up the correct words. She doesn’t care if he dresses it up, as long as it’s the truth. 

“Dehydration, maybe,” he offers. “Or the altitude. Or the pressure. Stress. Or it could’ve been the Founder. Ymir Fritz. She was looking through everyone’s eyes, but if she tried to look through yours, your blood would have resisted. Maybe it would’ve hurt.” His eyes open: green and guarded, and guileless. “That’s what being an Ackerman is, Mikasa. You’re free of the Founder’s influence. Free of anything.”

“Was,” she says. “That’s what being an Ackerman was.” She looks toward the canopy over the bed; the same royal blue, the same floral patterns of golden thread. She exhales, and it comes out half a sob. “If that’s all they were. Then why did you use them as proof? How did you know about the bond?”

“I made it up,” he says, nearly gritting his teeth, “because I was scared. That that was the only reason you cared about me the way you did. When I was in Marley, I had nothing but time and nothing to do but think, and I just—couldn’t make sense of the idea that you cared about me for me. So I made up that nonsense story to torture myself with. I was the one who brought it up to Zeke, and, Mikasa, he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. He told me I was being ridiculous. And I was so relieved, because if I had done that, to you—if what you were to me wasn’t real, then I’d have nothing. Okay? I made it up to hurt myself with it, and I used whatever unrelated thing I could to build it up, and then I used it on you because—I thought it would work.”

Mikasa keens like a wounded animal. “Why?” Her voice is in splinters. She licks her lips; tastes the salt of tears. “Why would you lie like that?”

There’s a strange shine in Eren’s eyes; something harder than unshed tears. “I thought it was for the best,” he says. “I wanted to keep you out of the fight. You and Armin both. And the rest. And—I thought it would make it easier if… the battle went wrong.”

She sobs, chest shuddering. You wanted those to be your last words to me? “How—how would that have made it easier?”

He shrugs, lips pressed in a tight line. When they were young, it was always easy to tell when Eren was near tears. He’s outgrown that, now, and she’s proven to be useless at reading him, but—his breathing has gone uneven. She doesn’t want him to cry. She doesn’t. She wants—

“Less to mourn,” he says. “And I thought—I thought you might. Fight me. Like you did. I thought that would spare you some time deliberating, if you hated me.”

A gaping, sucking pit opens in her stomach. That makes her feel so much worse. She sounds like a child when she says, “You thought that would make me hate you?”

He gives a small, wordless whine, and shakes his head. “I know. I know.” One of his hands drifts up to grip his hair. “I couldn’t think straight. I don’t know what I was thinking, what I was telling myself—I didn’t even go in there knowing what I was going to say, it just all came out. It was stupid of me, I see that now, I promise, and—I know it was beyond awful of me, and it was fucking unnecessary, and not one thing I said was true, and I am sorry about it, Mikasa.” He grimaces some mockery of a smile, bitter, bitter, like the laughter that drifted through the airship when he heard Sasha was dead. “Talking about headaches. I had a rotten one myself, then.” His fingers loosen in his hair, dragging down to his temple. An acidic laugh ghosts past his lips now as he adds, “Still got it now.”

Mikasa swipes her fist across her eye. Eren has grown to be such a good liar, but she wants to believe that whatever else she is to him, she isn’t some blood-puppeted marionette.

But she loses the fight against the urge to ask, “Still?”

He closes his eyes and nods, rubbing his fingers in a paltry attempt to massage it away. “Honestly, I’ve had it pretty consistently for, oh, six months now? Certainly hasn’t let up in the last week and change. Now there’s a headache with some ingrained magical cause for you.” He looks back to her, and his half-smile softens into something real, though no bitterness melts away. “That’s why I keep barging in here, you know. I know you would prefer me gone, but, God, you’re the only thing that makes my head stop hurting.”

She picks at the sleeve of her robe. 

Her head isn’t clear enough for this. She’s thinking in wobbly circles, words and ideas bleeding into each other. Her myriad of aches takes up too much space in her head. She can’t sort it all into sense. She’s exhausted and sad and she hurts, everywhere, all through her. Eren told her he hated her for no reason at all, and now he’s telling her not, but he ripped her open and tore out her strength and he’d smiled about it. But he’s smiling at her now, too. 

He doesn’t love her. He doesn’t. He’s just trying to make her happy, when he said that, like indulging a child. He did that much when they were kids, didn’t he? Played dolls with her without complaining, even when he would have rather been outside? Eren indulges her. 

She doesn’t want indulgence. She doesn’t want anything from him, let alone a half-resigned might as well and a game of play-pretend. She doesn’t want to be treated like a helpless, wide-eyed child, less even than the girl in the hunting shack all those years ago.

And— the torn ribbon scraps of her heart offer, pitiful, I don’t want his head to hurt.

Mikasa turns her gaze to the fire. Its foreign shape. Its marigold-glow. It’s filled the room with warmth by now, but she really doesn’t feel it. 

Eren is indulging her in that much, but she doesn’t think he was lying about the rest of it. If he was, he would—he’d—he’d do it differently. She can’t define how, but she just—she thinks he would. 

Or maybe she’s lying to herself about that. 

A tight, tangled knot sits behind her ribs, the frayed edges rasping against her lungs. She can’t quite breathe right. It stings to try, but the alternative is bursting into tears, and she won’t. 

“Mikasa,” Eren says. He hesitates, and then carries on carefully with, “Mikasa, you’re shaking again.”

“I’m crying,” she gasps. As if taking a cue, her body shudders again, vision blurring anew. The fire swims in salt water— the Rumbling reaching the ocean. 

“I know.” His voice is threadbare. “So tell me how to fix it. Tell me to get you a mountain of quilts, or whatever you want, or want me to say, just—”

“I want—” Armin, she thinks. I want my mom. I want my leg not to hurt. I want to not be alone. I want Sasha not to be dead. I want Armin not to have left me. I want Historia not to have helped you. I want you to not have done this. I want something good to exist—

Her voice breaks on another half-sob. “I want—to finish this stupid blanket for baby Ymir.”

“Okay.” He nods, head bobbing, overeager. “I can… I—I can’t help with that. I don’t know anything, but…” He looks her over, then clears his throat and asks, “Do you want me to—stay?”

I want not to be alone. 

She can’t ask for him. She can’t—take comfort like that from him, she can’t. She failed the people of the outside world so fantastically—even if she never could have stopped him, she never could have, but—she can’t ask their murderer to stroke her hair with his bloodstained hands. 

She turns her face from him. He makes her nervous, now, in a way she’s never once felt around him. He’s always made her feel strong—so of course, he doesn’t anymore—but the undefinable sensation that falls over her around him—like electricity crackling over her skin and ice in her veins and a heavy weight dangling over her, prepared to pin her in place—is a sort of ghost of pain. Not there, but not gone. And her heart shredded to scraps in her chest, and the rubbed-raw feeling under her skin, and the biting ache of her leg and the hollowness of her bones—she hurts. 

And she doesn’t want to be alone. 

She can’t make herself say yes, please stay with me. Please don’t leave me behind, again. 

But she can give the smallest of nods. So imperceptible that he couldn’t have seen it if he weren’t watching her with a predator’s intensity, he wouldn’t have seen it—but he does, and it’s enough. 

“Okay,” he says, the words both rough with emotion and gentle with intended comfort. He settles; shifts his legs so they’re curled under him, elbows on his knees, like a little kid. He says, “Thank you, Mikasa,” like he means it, and the knot in her chest pulls tighter. 

She draws in a breath; her constricting throat cuts it in half. “Can you—can we please not talk anymore?”

Eren regards her with wide eyes, like he’s trying to take in as much of her as he possibly can. “If that’s what you want.”

It is. So she grabs the dark green thread from the sewing kit, twists the end, and doubles it over. It won’t fray as she tries to guide it through the eye of the needle, that way. 

It’s the same shade as Eren’s eyes, she realizes, and she cannot name the feeling that rises in her then. Whatever untamed emotion spreads over her face makes Eren seize up, lean forward—but not speak. 

Indulging, whispers a voice in her head. 

Mikasa bites her lip; waits for her tears to dissipate. Then she secures the thread and begins to etch the base of the lilies of the valley. 

***

Eventually, he knows he has to go. 

Mikasa is being very kind to him, letting him stay. He tries to make it up to her—staying silent, building up the fire, nodding yes when she asks if the pretty little flowers she’s stitching look nice. He realizes that she hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast and calls for a meal. Pork ragout made with lemons and parsley and black trufles; potatoes pan-fried in bacon fat, spiced with black pepper and caraway seed; buttered rolls and roasted brussle sprouts. They even sent up a single slice of chocolate pie, covered in sugared strawberries that made Mikasa’s eyes go wide. 

They won’t have this, a voice in his mind sing-songed, at Braus Stables.

He didn’t say it, shoving the thought firmly into a lockbox, but he didn’t disagree. 

They ate on the bed like children left to their own devices, but their plates are clean now, stacked on the corner of the tray they’d been brought on. Mikasa didn’t eat as much as she should’ve, but she won’t wilt away from hunger, and that will have to satisfy him for now.

It should be better than that. She’s—She is what she is to him, and he is what he is. She should have better than what barely satisfies him.

That’s a foolish line of thought to play at, though. Miles and miles from where, and what, they are now; so very far off that it’s more than pointless to think of it, it’s actively detrimental. 

Given how she reacted to him accidentally using an endearment, he can only imagine what her response would be to him voicing any thoughts like that. 

He sighs and fights a scowl. That had been a fuck-up. He’d not thought about it, he just—he’d dreamed of calling her that, and as washed-out and weary as he is, he’d half-slipped back into their cabin. 

The cabin Mikasa had never been to. 

Her headaches. Talking it over, Eren could see how badly she wanted the truth, but his heart is unburdened by any guilt for not giving it to her. It wouldn’t be fair to her to explain that it had been him, his efforts at taking her home. Because then he’d have to explain it with clumsy words, and he doesn’t trust himself to do it in a way that she would understand. Better to let her have her pretty lies. She’s always preferred them. 

Eren wards off a wave of spite. That’s unfair to her. 

Mikasa is being very kind to him—far, far kinder than he deserves—but he’s keeping her on edge. There’s a coltish energy in the way she’s working on that fucking blanket, the movements of her arms quick and snappish. Her shoulders are drawn with tension in a way that reminds him of the minutes and months after his Attack Titan powers finally made themselves known, but she’s not protecting him, now. She’s being very kind to him, but she’s never going to rest while he’s here. He thinks that he could—despite her restlessness, just being near her smoothes the sawtooth edges of him—but he won’t. It’s been enough, just these hours spent in silence, and he won’t ask her for more.

He doesn’t want to spook her. 

With reluctance, Eren pushes onto his elbows. Mikasa’s eyes snap to him, rabbit-fast, and flit all over him as he sits up and shifts to the edge of her bed. He’s closer than he was when he first joined her, but not enough that he can’t simply throw his legs out and have his feet meet the floor. 

He braces his hands, turning away from her. If he’s looking, he doesn’t know that he can make himself leave. 

“It’s getting late,” he says, closing his eyes. “You need to sleep.”

He can feel her put her work down. “Is that what you’re…?”

“Yeah.” He gathers his courage and stands. Instantly, the ache in back of his skull protests, and one of his hands flies up to hold weakly onto his hair. “Is there anything else you need?’

Me, he wants to beg. Say you need me—

“No.” She gives a small shake of her head. “I’m fine.”

Eren nods. He grabs the tray their plates and leftovers are on. “Don’t stay up all night on that thing.”

She hums noncommittally. 

It occurs to Eren to ask, “Are you going to the christening?”

“What?”

“Tomorrow. Historia said you were making the blanket so she could have it for then. Are you going?”

Mikasa stares. “I don’t think I’d be welcome—”

“What? Why?” Eren scowls. “You’re Historia’s best friend. Or the closest thing she’s got to one.”

She blinks at him, pretty mouth parted. “I killed at least eight of, of your men at the port. More, if any died of their injuries. And I tried—I was with—we attacked you.”

“Sure.” He waves dismissively. “But you’re my—” love. That’s the best label for her there is. Every bit of love he could ever feel, focused to a single point and given shape, his beating heart outside of him. But he grits his teeth and says, “Family, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t care, and if anyone else does, they’re not gonna say anything about it.” He recalls, with satisfaction, that brief conversation in the parliament hall; how very quickly it was wrapped up.

But Mikasa looks dubious. 

The doubt in her eyes, the lack of faith that he’ll be able to keep her safe, it rankles like a bloody sore. But he’s so far from having the energy to fight with her—which is apparently what his attempts at reassurance inevitably lead to. He gets it, but, God, this would be a lot easier on both of them if she didn’t freak out every time he so much as—

Every time he even hints at loving her. 

Why is that what troubles her? It can be a terrible weight to bear, he imagines, but it’s a great deal better than the alternative. 

“Sleep on it, I guess,” he says. “Sleep well.”

“Goodnight,” she murmurs faintly. 

Eren shuts her door behind him.

He crosses through the adjoining chamber between their rooms and half-flings the tray of empty plates onto one of the staggering number of tables in this room, next to his tie. Why are there so many? Most are just tucked against the wall to just hold baubles, but there are three separate ones in various places across the floor. The desk that’s growing a collection of strewn-about papers like fungus on other dead trees, the low card table flanked by sofas, and the tall, polished one with clawed bronze feet. 

Eren scrubs his face. He knows, vaguely, that he ought to bathe and change before bed. At least, he ought to build up the fire. It’s cutting-cold in here. Worse than the winds of Mid-Eastern desert by night, sleeping in the hard-packed earth of the trench, under the star-strewn sky. Nearly as bad as any Paradisan winter when he’d been an underfed child in shoddy refuge housing. He doesn’t remember ever minding too much, then. But then, he’d had Mikasa sleeping next to him. His rage has always been a furnace within him, hot enough to keep him warm. And Mikasa, too, curled into him in sleep. 

His skin feels the cold, but it doesn’t touch any further than that. He’s feverish, if anything. Burning up inside. 

Eren crosses to the bed, which still bears last night’s indent of his body. He sits on the edge long enough to pull off his boots and throw them across the room with smacking thuds. He unbuttons his overcoat and strips off his shirt, lets them crumple on the ground, and grabs the covers. He yanks them down, tucks his feet under the blanket, and puts his head on the pillow. 

The dark of sleep drags him under as soon as his eyes close. 

***

He’s shaken awake by the earth. 

Eren groans, burying his face into the pillow. He feels as though a mountain is pinning him in place, and the shaking isn’t that bad. He’s been half-expecting another earthquake, anyway—minor tremors every few hours since the first one yesterday morning, small enough you could almost convince yourself you didn’t feel them. This isn’t much bigger than those. I could have slept through this, he thinks, and almost wants to cry. Cracking his eyes open tells him that it’s still full-dark outside, even under the heavy clouds. He wanted more sleep than this. 

The low groan and weak rattle don’t let up. After a minute, Eren shoves up, head spinning, brain fragile from being pulled so roughly from so little sleep. Couldn’t this have waited until morning? 

He strides across his room, the chill banished—scared away by the noise, maybe. It grates in Eren’s ears, nails-on-a-chalkboard skreek-ing but only in the way it burrows into the skin. It’s the shadow of sound, nearly so low the ear can’t catch it, as deep and dark as the earth it pours from. 

Half out of his head, rubbing a fist across his eye, Eren pushes open the wooden door and crosses into Mikasa’s room. The blue-and-gold of it is cast with red again. The fire is dying. 

“Mikasa?” Eren calls, voice piercing through the din. A glance—her bed is empty, made neat, hospital-corners. Her nightstand is empty, too. No sewing kit, no baby blanket. No letter from Armin, full of poison and promises. Only a swath of red cloth. Her scarf. 

She left it? Fear lances through his chest, traveling through his veins. And then— where did she go? How far from me is she?

“Mikasa?”

No answer. The groan of failing earth grows louder; seems to swallow up his voice. 

The world begins to come undone. The shaking knocks splinters free from the rafters; topples chairs and sends the bronze statues and crystal vases crashing to the ground, shattering with a ringing harmony in the pitch of a woman’s voice. Unthinking, Eren darts to the nightstand and grabs the scarf, keeping it clenched in his fist as he turns in circles, looking for her. Looking—

The fire has gone out, not even embers glowing through the white ash. But still the red light paints the room. Brighter, now. Like sunrise. 

Eren marches to the windows. 

There’s a line of red on the horizon. Eren marches to it.

A blink and he’s on the street, through the warped old glass and the diamond-pattern of ironwork. The black underbellies of the clouds catch the red light on low angles; deep wells of high shadows remain untouched, rendering the sky into a lunar-landscape. It’s not stopped raining, a warm, heavy torrent like a summer storm soaking into his skin. There’s thunder, now, too, where there wasn’t before, and lightning. The hiss and the crack before the sky rumbles—and the earth hasn’t stopped its pained cry either, yet, groaning like a tortured bear. The crimson light on the horizon grows brighter, grows bigger, and a haunting, skeletal shadow looms behind it, only visible as the clouds of mist shift and swirl, floating up to the sky with lazy intent. 

Eren marches forward, and the streets buckle under his feet. 

The gray-white cobblestones fracture, cracking as easily as dropped pottery. Dust rises up from the fissures. Eren breathes it in and it chokes his lungs, sticks in his throat, stings his eyes, but it doesn’t obscure his vision. He can see it all. The light and the shadow; the panicked crowds shoving past him; the way buildings and homes shake apart even before he reaches them, spelling out their entrails of bookshelves and notched doorframes where children grew, of hand-sewn quilts and carefully preserved newspaper clippings and dried wedding bouquets and small socks, of children’s drawings and mothers’ aprons and fathers’ overcoats hung by the door. The children grab for their drawings as the churning wind snatches them away, the red-tinted rain smearing the colors to nonsense. Their parents snatch them away. A chorus of screams rises above even the soul-stealing rumble; the footsteps of half a million giants coming, coming close, and Eren is behind them—and Eren is before them—and somewhere far-off, churchbells are ringing—

It’s an act of violence by itself, the sound of it. An earth-shaking boom, low enough to make the ears ache and set birds flying, multiplied hundreds of thousands of times over, one-and-one-and-one after another, never letting up for even a moment, only ever growing louder. Only ever growing nearer. 

Eren marches. He marches after his army—he marches to meet his army. 

His ribs scrape againt the scorched earth, breaking and burning, catching on bits of stone and smothering little fires. Fragments break off and regrow as he scuttles forward, like a bug, as filthy as any crawling insect. He feels it in the cavity of his chest, too—his own twelve pairs of ribs fracturing at the ends and regrowing; trapped within his unbroken body, the shards of bone nowhere to go but into his soft insides. Like bits of glass, they shred his lungs from without. They slice against his muscles. They pierce into his heart. 

Eren holds up his hands against the blinding-bright of his army come to him. In his right hand, he clutches Mikasa’s scarf. It bleeds all over his hand. He clutches it tighter, lest the blood make him lose his grip. 

The heat is searing. It tries to melt him away like candlewax, but Eren was forged in these fires before he was ever born. It hurts him, hurts him as bad as anything ever has, but it isn’t enough to kill him. 

He pulls Mikasa’s scarf tight across his throat. Blood gushes down over his bare, broken chest, as it was meant to. 

Where is she? He wonders, split between impatience and unease. Where is she?

Finally, the Rumbling reaches him. The blistering raw flesh of a misshapen foot lands some dozen feet away; the shockwave launches him straight into the air. He’s thrown like pigskin ball bounced off smooth pavement, tumbling end over end; the world becomes flashes of red and a whirling song of screams and thudding. He spins, burning. Thrill and horror dance circles through his mind. He continues to rise, moving closer to the scuttling skeleton that is himself as his army continues sweeping forward, as the rain continues pelting down, warm and red and thick and smelling of iron. The tails of Mikasa’s scarf flutter after him like companion birds. 

Eren’s vision shifts: he’s looking down, down, down at the shining heads of his monsters—scarlet skin and white bone. Far ahead of them, he can see the city they’re crushing. He’s never seen it before now. Houses with blue-domed rooves, the sea in the distance. Unease is pulsing through him in hot, frantic surges, because he knows its drawing close—but it still isn’t over, and that’s what scares him. 

He opens his eyes—his eyes—and sees only the insides of his teeth. When a ragged little girl appears in front of him, he gasps and jerks back, and when she reaches for him, she grabs the bloody cloth around his throat and tries to pull—

***

A rattle wakes him up, and terror has him moving before he can think. 

He tries to shoot out of bed. Fails. He’s tangled in the sweat-soaked covers, caught in a trap of his own making, and it takes too long for his panic-blind thrashing to get him free. His heart pounds-pounds-pounds, like the Wall Titans’ footsteps, one one top of another on top of another without any reprieve, drumming louder in his ears than even the rain, coming down with a new fury. When he gets his feet on the ground, one catches on the wadded pile of his shirt on the already-settling-but-not-yet-still ground and nearly sends him to the floor. He straightens, all but sprints across the antechamber, wrenches open the door so hard it slams into the wall with a sharp crack, and—

Mikasa is in her bed, curled onto her side, hands curled by her cheeks, her form rising and falling with even breaths. 

Eren shudders, hard, and then he just keeps shuddering. A ragged sob escapes his throat, and he bites his knuckles to keep from making any more sound. He won’t wake her. He won’t. 

He shifts his hand so its flat over his mouth, grips the doorframe with the other. His knees are failing him. His lungs are failing him.

Her bedroom is ill-lit by the fire, but it still burns orange-gold and merry, and bright enough to get a picture by. He can see the blanket still resting beside her, needle stabbed half-through it as if she fell asleep mid-stroke. That’s probably exactly what she did, he thinks, trying to find it funny. It would be—it would be endearing and annoying, it would frustrate him that she’s working herself to bits over a blanket for Historia’s goddamn kid, and it would make his heart swell with adoration so potent it hurt, but—he’s still riding the coattails of panicked horror, and he can’t feel anything but a relief as sweet as death that she’s okay. Here. That nothing has taken her from him.

Not yet, the voices in his head chime, all together. Armin and Jean and Historia and himself; his mother and his father and sisters that aren’t his, and sons, and people who died before he ever lived. 

Nothing has taken her from you yet.

***

Mikasa is not asleep. 

She heard the doorway slam open, and she’s aware of Eren’s presence. The rain is pounding too hard to hear anything from him, almost oppressive in its driving force now, but she’s grateful. That’s why I keep barging in here, you know, he said. You’re the only thing that makes my head stop hurting. 

She can’t shoulder whatever Eren is struggling with, right now. She can’t. Not after another nightmare—a longer one. She hasn’t opened her eyes to look, but she can feel that she got a few hours of sleep before she woke up crying. 

The pain and the wind and the screaming and the dust and the heat and the running and she wasn’t enough wasn’t enough wasn’t enough she couldn’t do it couldn’t do it couldn’t do it—

Her breathing is controlled in an attempt at calming down, but tears still trail down her cheeks, and if Eren could hear her, he would be able to tell the gasping, hitching sobs from the untroubled breath of sleep. 

He’s watching her now; she can feel his eyes. But the room must be dark enough that he can’t make out her face, and that’s as great a blessing as she’s ever been given. Except—

Mikasa silently presses her lips together, warding off a sob. But—when they were little kids, when she was crying, Eren used to just crawl into her bed. She could be in full hysterics or still asleep, but without fail, he’d roll out of his bed, barely able to see for the sleep in his eyes, and clamber onto hers; throw his arm and leg over her and knock their small, soft faces together; nose to nose, cheek to chubby cheek. She never could figure out how he always knew, when she’s always been as quiet as a churchmouse. Half the time he didn’t even say anything, learning fast that nothing quite worked at calming her. But he would always pet her hair, and he never fell asleep first. 

He’d never even asked. Not even that first time. But it had soothed her tears and her fears better than anything else ever could have, and she’d loved him for it with every fiber of the heart he had healed. 

She wonders if he’s going to do the same thing now. Ten years later and a lifetime ago. 

How many children will never see their tenth birthday because of him? she thinks, wretched. And then, doubly so: I saw mine because of him. 

She turns her face into her pillow, and stops breathing entirely to keep herself from sobbing aloud. She wants Armin, her ocean-eyed dreamer. She wants Sasha, who never did wake up on the rare occasions when she cried, but brushed her hair and brought her buttered bread if she was awake anyway. She wants—

Did Sasha learn that from her father? Is, even now, Artur Braus doling out buttered bread to tiny Gabi and Falco, to Armin and Annie and Jean and Connie? 

Mikasa can’t bear the thought. 

She can’t hear Eren, can’t see him, but she still feels that he’s there. And she wonders, wonders, wonders, for minutes that unravel into eternities, if he’ll come. If he’ll starfish-out over her, on this bed that’s finally big enough for him to do that. Or if he’ll—and she hates herself with a violence for the even thinking it but she can’t stop in time—lay down behind her like she’d imagined when she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, his knees brushing her calves, his arms around her waist, his nose in her hair. Wonders what she would do. If she would shove him away or roll away herself; if she’d clutch his shirt and curl into him and wait for him to pet her hair; if she would simply take the coward’s way out and continue to feign sleep. If he would be able to tell. If he’d say a thing about it. 

In the end, she doesn’t find out.

Some immeasurable amount of time later, she feels him step away. The door creaks shut. The room grows colder.

Mikasa curls her arms around her pillow and hugs it to her chest, praying that, if she can hold it tight enough against her heart, it might make some of the ache go away. She presses her cheek into the silk-covered down and cries.  

Chapter Text

"And within the delusions of love I find you, kneeling, praying. Pious at my feet."

***

Armin is coming to regret Gabi ever getting her hands on the spoons more than getting her hands on a gun. 

She’s carried them around everywhere this past day, in her pockets, with her collection of broken pavement stones, if they’re not in her hand. She’s fallen into banging them against her knee in a constant, low-boiling fit of anxiety. Click-click-a-click-click. It’s not entirely that it’s an unpleasant sound—at least she’s got no aspirations for the fiddle—but it’s unending, and a constant reminder to them all of their own disquiet. 

Nobody has the heart to take them away from her, though—not when Kaya pressing them into her hand was what finally got her to stop fingering the jagged shards that bit into her skin. She was always so careful not to get any blood on them, though.

She’s tapping out the tune now, on the floor by the fire, her and Falco sharing a quilt. Her dark hair is dripping a puddle on his shoulder, curled and stringy from the rain, and their bruised, knobby knees are pressed together. He taps his foot in time with the rattle of her spoons. Armin wonders if it’s a real song from the other side of the sea. He’ll ask Annie when they go back to bed. 

He heaves the last chair up. It’s an old, rickety thing, made out of splinters and hay, drawn out of the barn this morning. He’s half-surprised this most recent tremor didn’t crumble it to dust.

The aftershocks are worse out here, a hundred miles out from Mitras. Not bad enough to cause any real damage, just the occasional broken beam, and this is the second time they’ve had to reset the furniture. Armin isn’t even sure this was the worst of them; it’s just that it was bad enough to wake them—and for some more than others, being pulled from a nightmare by the earth shaking summons an even more potent terror.

They’re all of them gathered around the hearth in the Brauses’ kitchen. Falco and Gabi are in the huddle around Mrs. Braus, same as the four siblings, the children all waiting silent and patient as she minds the teapot hung over the fire. The scent of magnolia flowers wafts out and over them, soothing. Across the room, Jean is in the pantry fishing out the pot of honey, and Reiner is helping Mr. Braus spread home-churned butter over fresh bread. 

The butter was made with sea salt, Mr. Braus told them over dinner. A treat, he said later, privately, to Armin. To cheer up the children after Sasha’s death. 

His own children seem well enough, now. Groggy from clinging sleep, but they’re all hovering, concerned, around the girl who killed their sister. 

Armin collapses into the rickety chair, pondering the Braus children. None of them are blood-related. None of them are even from the same village. They’re a family by virtue of the Brauses’ fostering—so what is it that sets Gabi apart? Is it only time? 

Watching Irina begin to comb through Gabi’s hair with her fingers, Armin wonders if there’s anything at all. Have Artur and Lisa truly raised these children so they already see Gabi as nothing more or less than the newest, most freshly-wounded orphan in their group? From where Armin is sitting, it looks like it. 

“Here we are,” Mr. Braus says, arriving with a tray. He’s barefoot after stripping off his soaked, muddy socks, thoroughly dirtied from his rush out into the storm to collect Gabi. “Something hearty and salty. This’ll help ya sleep, pumpkin.”

“Thanks,” Gabi murmurs, taking the offered plate. Her eyes are red-rimmed from crying, and everything about her seems waterlogged and washed out. That has little enough to do with the rain, but she still gives the overwhelming impression of a half-drowned kitten. 

Not that Armin can say any of them who came from Mitras are feeling much better. 

Jean collapses on a moth-eaten old rocking chair, also pulled from the barn attic. Reiner crouches down by the huddle of children, himself muddied and soaked from chasing Gabi down and pulling her from her terror-stricken flight out into a hurricane during an earthquake. Both of their eyes close immediately, and Armin is sure they could fall asleep now despite their uncomfortable seats. Annie is leaning on Pieck, who’s curled onto the soft, quilt-covered sofa, toes brushing Connie’s knees. Connie is slumped against the back cushion, one hand still on the handle of Levi’s wheelchair.

Levi.

He’s awake. Alert, even. Grumbling through his sewn-up face, turning his head constantly to make up for his blind, bandaged eye; his deafened ear on the same side. He’s already learning to compensate for what he lost, after just one day.

One full day. 

It’s been—Armin looks at the clock on the wall—thirty-one hours now since Levi woke up. And there’s been no word from Mitras. 

From Mikasa.

It’s occurred to Armin that he might never, ever know what happens to her. Fear gnaws in the pit of his stomach, but it’s shame that burns. 

Surely she’s awake by now. Levi woke earlier, just for a few minutes after the first earthquake, but even if Mikasa lagged behind, thirty-one hours must have been enough. She’s awake, she’s alert, and she’s alone. 

Armin numbly takes the bread Mr. Braus offers. 

She’s alone—but she has Eren. Wearily, he thinks, that’s always been enough for her, hasn’t it?

Gabi is knocking her spoons against her thigh again— click-click-a-click-click, click-click-a-click-click, bang! Click-click-a-bang!-bang! Armin wonders if she’s going to give herself a new bruise. Wonders if that’ll put her off the damn clacking.

“That’s… nice,” Kaya offers, voice hushed as if not to wake a baby. “Does the song have words?”

Gabi huffs in frustration. “Not this part. I can’t—play it right.”

“I can tell what it is,” Falco assures. 

“Tell us the words,” Levi orders. His voice is still something of a stilted rasp, but Armin thinks most of that is leftover from sleep. 

“No-oo,” Gabi says, squirming. “It’s dumb.”

“All the better,” Levi says.

Gabi presses her forehead into Falco’s neck. She looks miserable. “I don’t wanna,” she says. Half-drowned kitten. Baby birds can’t fly. 

“After tea, maybe,” says Mrs. Lisa. “It’s ready. Does everyone have their cups?”

A chorus of yes, ma’am-s ring out, and for a moment, Armin feels like he’s back in the schoolhouse. As his eyes flutter closed, he can almost imagine that Gabi and Falco are Eren and Mikasa. 

He’s not quite sure which is which, though. 

He’s so tired he’s not thinking clearly. The racket of the aftershock, and of the screams coming from Gabi and Kaya and Irina’s room, had woken the whole house; pulling him from a dream so quiet and still it could have almost passed for peaceful. 

The tree-topped hill in Shiganshina as Eren and Mikasa raced ahead of him, but the hill was a sand dune, and ocean waves lapped in the sky above them. When they reached the tree, suddenly they were standing in the water, the moon overhead, pulling the tides and the three of them. Armin had woken before he saw where they ended up. 

It was not a bad dream, but it’s lingering under his skin in a way few dreams ever have. 

Thirty-one hours, he thinks. Mikasa has been awake for thirty-one hours. He’s guessing. She must be. If she were—if things had gone bad, Armin knows that, despite everything, Eren would have sent for him. So she’s fine. She’s recovering. 

If she’s going to come to them, it’s going to be soon. 

Maybe as soon as the sun rises. Maybe closer to dinnertime. Maybe not until tomorrow, or next week—whenever it really is safe for her to travel—but beyond that…

The tide is coming in. However slow its pull, it’s carrying them to their final shores. Armin looks at Braus Stables, full of orphans and splinters, and knows that he won’t be leaving here for a long, long time. Eren is tied down in Mitras, shouldering burdens he created for himself and took for their sakes. And Mikasa will drift to one or the other of them. The choice is creeping up on her, and it will be a permanent thing. 

And, he thinks, if she doesn’t choose at all, it will be the same as choosing him. Because Eren chose that for her. Eren chose her. It doesn’t really count for much, Armin thinks, bitter, coming only after what he did. But hasn’t Mikasa always wanted him to choose her? Really, truly, make an active choice, a bold stance that yes, of course he wants her, of course he sees her, of course she’s more to him than something he’s grown used to. 

Sleep-addled, Armin’s mind skips ahead; lands on the thought: He’s a dragon guarding a tower. He’s hoarding her away, as jealous as he ever was as a child and twice as fearful; infinitely more wrathful. It would be a mighty thing for him to be any bolder. 

Armin’s eyes open again as Lisa Braus stops in front of him. He lifts his teacup and lets her fill it; inhales the sweet, summery scent of magnolia. He murmurs thanks and she smiles, kind and tired. His gaze drifts to Levi, stiffly sipping his tea, and then again to the clock.

It’s counting down. 

Armin can only pray that it won’t simply, slowly, wind to a stop one day.

***

Lurking in the window alcove, Eren gouges a knife into a piece of firewood and listens in on Historia and Mikasa. 

There’s a stilted, suffocated air between the girls, even as they coo over Historia’s infant. When she shuffled in, holding a baby and a picnic basket, Mikasa had looked up from her embroidering, brightening but not smiling. Eren isn’t entirely proud of the grim satisfaction he takes in that, but neither can he dredge up the energy for shame. 

That much he can blame on the lack of sleep, surely. He barely managed six hours before the nightmare and the aftershock woke him, and he wasn’t willing to even try going back to sleep after. It was enough. The only thing he has to do today is the princess’s fucking christening. Historia will be the star of that; he can just fade into the background as he’s doing now. He’s not looking forward to it; nor is he dreading it. Especially since—

“Why not?” Historia whines. It’s half put-on, Eren knows, but only half. She’s never been above wheedling. The breakfast basket she brought was likely a bribe, too, now that he thinks about it. “I want you to come. Ymir needs her aunt. Wilhelm’s parents and his brothers and his sister-in-law are coming, but I’ve got no family—”

Eren exhales, hard, through his nose, the distant cousin of a laugh. No, she does not. The carving knife in his hand glimmers; for a moment, it’s a scalpel. Nine years ago; nine days ago—Eren perfectly remembers both his own black, controlled fury and his father’s half-blind mania; and the Reiss children smeared across his hands— his hands. 

“—for her. Please, Mikasa, won’t you come?”

“Historia…” Mikasa says carefully. “I…don’t think it’s a very good idea…”

Eren drags the knife across the quarter-log. A curl of wood peels away, falling to the floor next to the pile of other shavings. Ostensibly, he’s carving a rattle for the baby. He knows vaguely what he’s doing—woodcarving: another thing he’d picked up in the fucking endless drag of hours in the trenches—but he’s still expecting it to be shit if he gets it done at all. He’d just picked it up and moved over here because he could tell he was freaking out Mikasa. 

Expression unchanged, Historia says, “I do.”

At that, Eren looks up. Change of tune from her attitude yesterday. 

Mikasa blinks, too, looking up from the baby in her arms. She’s in the same white nightgown and blue robe from yesterday. When Eren looks at her like this, his hands go cold and his chest goes hot. He can’t help himself from thinking I want —

—and he has to dig his nails into his flesh to rein those thoughts in. 

“Historia,” Mikasa says. “I’m… I can’t imagine anyone who would be there would be happy to see me.” 

“Well, I would.” Historia is brazen, cheerful; pretending there’s nothing between them that ought to keep them from being friends. Respectful when Mikasa shrinks away, not pushing her, but never withdrawing, either. Eren guesses her part was small enough that she can get away with it. “But regardless, I meant more along the lines of: it would set a good precedent.”

Mikasa shifts her elbow; the dozing princess snuffles. “What do you mean?”

Only now does her put-upon playfulness begin to dim. Eren recognizes the edges of her politicizing face; knows that Mikasa will, too. Delicately, she says, “Eren explained the situation with everyone, right? Armin and Connie and everyone, I mean?”

Eren stiffens. If Historia fucking—

Mikasa nods shallowly. Eren—isn’t actually sure how true that is. They’ve only really talked, what, fucking three times since she woke up, and he doesn’t think he’d explained much beyond the fact that the others had to leave the city and she couldn’t. He assumes Armin explained better in his letter, but Eren hasn’t read it himself.

“Okay, good,” Historia says. “It came up at the meeting yesterday—very briefly, Eren was very clear—and nobody is in danger, of course not, but as long as you’re here, I think it would be very good for all of you, and for every other foreigner who’s left on our shores, if it didn’t seem like you were… some dirty secret to be kept under lock and key.” She shifts forward, beseeching. “Whatever’s going on legally, the message is meant to be that you did nothing wrong, right? Or at least not enough to warrant actual punishment. So why would you be hiding?”

Mikasa bites her lip. “You’re only saying that because you want me to come.”

“I do,” she admits, “Of course I do. It’s a big deal for me and for my daughter, and I want my best friend to be there. But I’m not exaggerating. I promise.” She looks over to him, then. “Am I wrong, Eren?”

“No.” He’s honestly surprised by this argument from Historia, but he doesn’t disagree with it. “I told you, it’s… everyone else left for their safety, and it was a pretty transparent protection order on my part.” Mikasa turns to look at him. He can’t read her face; has to look down at the roughly tapered lump of wood in his hand. He sets his mouth and drags the knife through again. “Since you’re here, it would add another layer to that if you were…” he waves his hand back and forth in a vague gesture. “Around. But you don’t have to be. Obviously. You’re still recovering. There’s no reason to push that when everything is well under control—”

“But you think it would help?” Mikasa looks back to Historia, which Eren resents and is grateful for in equal measure. 

She nods. “I do. It’s not just all of you, right? It’s also every surviving Marleyan prisoner or anti-Marleyan volunteer. It’s—”

“Historia,” Eren snaps. She looks at him, defiant, and he squints at her. “What the hell are you doing? It’s fine. Don’t make this into a political thing.”

Historia gives him an incredibly flat look, then tosses up her hands and sighs. “Fine! I wasn’t trying —”

“It’s okay,” Mikasa says. She looks down at the baby, and then nods decisively. “I’ll come.”

Historia gasps. “Really?”

Mikasa nods again. “For you. And because it might do some good—”

“Yay!” Historia squeals, throwing her arms in the air. She knocks into Mikasa for a hug. A cord in Eren’s chest winds tight. “Thank you thank you thank you, Mika! Oh I’ve missed you so much!”

“Historia,” she protests, voice muffled by the queen’s shoulder. “Your baby.”

Historia pulls back, grinning, and shrugs. “She’s fine. I wasn’t squishing her.” She settles onto her knees and gently pokes her daughter’s puffy cheek. “Even if I was,” she says, voice gone sugary, “it’d only be fair, wouldn’t it, hm? Hm, my baby darling? My tiny small Ymir-girl? All the squishing you did on Mamma’s insides, hm?” 

Mikasa looks at her flatly. “Historia.”

“Oh, get back to me once you have one, Mikasa.” Her finger goes from resting on the baby’s cheekbone to stroking her forehead, feather-soft; besotted. “All the squishy-squishing. Worth every moment, little one.”

“I’m sure,” Mikasa murmurs. She tilts her head and examines the baby, still not quite smiling, but her expression has gone soft and awed. 

Inhaling sharply, Eren has to look away again.

His chest cracks open with furious, starving want, and in the same instant his head splits open, dozens of images gushing out in a tumult—Ymir—

—Mariarosesina crying and alive, covered in womb water and blood—

—blankets full of blood and wet meat crushed and cooking—

—flashing backforthbackforth, healthy babies with their newborn-blue eyes and the lamb-bleat frightened wail of babies outside their mothers’ arms, too young to know what they’re dying for and—

—Mikasa, hands gentle on a little girl’s bloody nose—

The memories rip through him like paper, leaving him torn, frayed. And still, that savage, pacing, animal fucking want. It gets tangled up in his horror, drowns in the bile rising up his throat, snags on the shame that now finds him easily, searchlights a sear of white that burns him blind, but it still—

“It’ll be fun,” Historia promises. He hears her voice as if from underwater. Eren stabs the carving knife into the lump of wood and drives his palm into his temple. Bright, ringing pain shoots through his skull; his vision is swimming. Closing his eyes only makes the flood of memories worse—the stray thought of Mikasa was enough to snap him back into his own mind, as it always is, but he’s not yet out of the undertow. 

They passed the children forward. Ymir had seen that—watched with a detached curiosity. There’d been no point. The thrum in the back of his head grows louder, coming from all sides, now, and he remembers her cold disdain for the mothers who let their children die outside their arms, praying for a chance for them, instead of comforting and quieting them, as good mothers should. That’s what she would have done. What her husband would have thought was proper. 

Eren sways on his feet, sick. 

Some of them prayed to her, he thinks, knows, heard their dying devotions as clearly as their screams, ancient prayers woven into foreign cultures. They fucking prayed. Móðir, hlifa, hefjaminn kind. Hundreds and thousands of voices echoing in his head, and he could hear every one. The desert was silent; it was so very, very loud. He could hear it all, and so could she. But the only person Ymir had listened to was him—even though she still heard—

On the edges of itself, on the very brink of breaking into a thousand jagged fragments and scattering like flower petals in the wind, in the violent, city-shaking storms roaming the planet that are his fault hisfaulthisfault , Eren’s mind replaces the end of that thought with another. She still heard —

Mikasa, in tears, sitting across a table as mid-morning sunlight filled the room, listening to him while he lies, lies, lies, until he finally sees something shatter. 

Relief crashes over him, inextricable from regret. I shouldn’t have told her that, he knows, he knows, he knows knows knows, latches onto, digs his nails into, refuses to let go of. There’d been no point. None at all, at all, at all. She’d looked pretty, at least—she always has been so pretty when she cries—she’s always, always so pretty, so simply, perfectly, achingly beautiful that sometimes it hurts to look at her; he always wishes she would just be the last thing he ever had to fucking see—he’s never been able to stomach watching her cry, never at all, except he had, then, how had he managed? Armin, it must’ve been—must’ve been because Armin was there for her, to stick up for her, and he’d been able to beat his helpless, burning, childish rage into Armin’s face until she asked him to stop—if she had just fucking asked him to stop, asked him when it mattered, in the way that mattered, he would have, doesn’t she know that? Doesn’t she—

— No, she doesn’t, and she can’t, ever. 

Eren is breathing hard; Eren is breathing slow. She, he thinks, driving the thought under his skin, letting this single, pointed sliver of agony work its way through his heart. She still heard —

She heard him say everything. All of it. He broke her heart for no reason, no reason at all. He always would have, she never would have come through loving him in one piece, but he didn’t have to go as far as he did. Wicked boy, his mother used to call him, endlessly frustrated by the fights he picked, by the insults he hurled at Military Policemen, by the way he would snap at Mikasa until she backed off trying to help him, shrinking and sad, hiding in her scarf. Wicked boy.

His mother doesn’t love him anymore, does she? Because of what he is, because of what he did. Because she’s not around to love him anymore, yes, but how much does that count for? Nothing at all. 

She still heard —

And Mikasa heard him say everything he’s said since then. Not his call to her, not enough for it to do anything but cause her pain—and isn’t that fitting—but she heard him say that he loves her, and she didn’t say a fucking thing back. Just stared at him like he was a stranger. Like he wasn’t even human. 

It hurts. It hurts so bad he can barely stand it, can barely breathe through the ache of it, not necessarily even less than larger things, but it’s a pain he can fathom. A pain that he brought on himself, his own pain, nobody else’s, and it’s not even entirely his own fault. He doesn’t blame Mikasa, of course, of course, of course, but it is because of her. She could even end it one day. One day, it might not hurt so bad—one day, he might have made up for it. 

So he savors that pain, croons to it, brings it close against him and holds it gentle. 

The girls are still talking. That awkward stilt is back, now that Historia isn’t bothering to pretend at charm, but the words themselves float through his head without connecting into meaning. 

The windows in Mikasa’s room overlook the western guesthouse and the opening section of the gardens. Nothing about it is a pretty view. The white marble stones with ridges cast in bronze; the lapis lazuli tiles of the roof. The gardens reduced to fields of mud cut through with wide grey pathways. There’s never been more than a sparse scatter of manicured hedges that grow in that yard, empty and gaping like a gouged-out eye socket. That’s one thing the fucking weather is good for. The rain smears to abstraction what the cold doesn’t mist away, pressing itself against the warmth inside the room. He doesn’t have to look. 

Once again, he wonders what he’ll do when the earth has ridden out its panic response. Settled into the new order he laid for it. 

He wonders how long Mikasa will be able to stand watching by his side. 

“I don’t know…” she’s saying. There’s a pensive frown in her voice. His mind’s eye conjures an image of her—two. As she looks now; as she looked at the restaurant. “I can’t wear this, or borrow anything of yours…”

Historia hums. “No. But, you know what? Even though my family never lived here, they were still in the city a fair bit. Society season, and Frieda sometimes had business that couldn’t be taken care of from the country estate. She had her own apartment here in the palace that my father, and then I, didn’t let anyone disturb.”

A pause. Eren’s heartbeat is beginning to settle, barely. It punches against his ribs—unbroken, no jagged splinters and bits of bone piercing into the red warmth of him. “Okay…?”

“So, Frieda was about your height. Their mom was tall. And she had black hair and greyish eyes. I bet there’s a dress left in her closet that’ll suit you.” Historia gives a mock wince. “Might be a couple of years out of fashion. But somehow I don’t think that’ll matter for you.”

Eren would scoff if he were breathing properly. The idea that Mikasa might need to worry about a dress is so ridiculous it nearly grounds him. She could wear rags and she’d still outshine the moon. 

Again, he remembers standing in that perfect, icy stillness, watching the crisp green-blue-purple lights dance through the sky and wishing, aching and impatient, that he could see Mikasa smile up at him. Nothing in the world has ever, will ever, could ever, hold a candle to her. 

A piece of scripture from across the sea drifts through his head. …kveldsǫngr enda bjallir fyrir Sinn. 

As the thrumming behind his ears quiets, Eren thinks, Ymir probably wouldn’t mind that going to Mikasa. She’d had enough worshipful, desperate faith in Mikasa herself. 

She’d been the wrathful god, though. 

Eren grits his teeth. 

Mikasa’s response was lost to the frantic chiming of churchbells as their towers crumbled; now it seems the girls are talking about whatever the fuck stays are.

The sky continues to weep out its fury at him. 

He leans his temple against the cool stone of the alcove. He’s unsteady. Lost at sea. He’d wrecked the oceans, too, hadn’t he? Land and sea and sky—not one thing in the world is free of his bloody fingerprints. Even Historia and her baby—even Mikasa, in a different way. Œðri hon, en allr þiauþ ór Allrheimar. 

The thought makes his mouth twitch, and his breath come out as half a laugh. The Móðiramál was put to verse some five hundred years after Ymir died; it’s a wildly inaccurate depiction of her life. It had made her sad, as much as anything made her feel anything when she was stuck in the Paths. But plenty of her descendants had memorized it cover-to-cover, and now it winds, serpentine, through Eren’s head. 

“If all else fails: shawls,” Historia is saying. “You can definitely borrow one of those from me, and it’ll revitalize the dress. Oh, you know? I brought that periwinkle one!” 

“The one with the butterflies?”

Eren listens, just to hear something real. 

***

Small Ymir begins to cry, and Historia almost finds it a relief. 

It’s not that she doesn’t relish time with Mikasa, even now. Especially now. Mikasa is her closest friend; probably her only real friend. She doesn’t work for her, didn’t get her pregnant out of a sense of obligation, didn’t rope her into a scheme to trample the world. Historia doesn’t begrudge Mikasa any of the resentment she bears, and it fills her heart with warmth that Mikasa is even trying at all, but—it’s still there. And it prickles, just a little, to have her attempts at sisterly camaraderie met with a distance beyond Mikasa’s typical reserve. 

Historia had given birth in a room full of nurses whose names she’d forgotten as labor set in. They’d let Wilhelm into the room, which was something, but he didn’t even hold her hand. She’d squeezed a rope rig while her body ripped into pieces, and she had wished, wished, wished—for a mother who could have loved her half as much as she loved the creature splitting her apart, for the ghost of a presence her grandmother had been, with her rough hands and stern mouth, for Frieda, for Ymir. 

She doesn’t begrudge Mikasa her distance, but—Historia so desperately wants a friend. Another woman. She’s fond of Wilhelm, fonder by the day as she watches him dote on his daughter, but he has no scope to imagine the ways she’s hurting. Mikasa is her best friend: a constant, soothing presence in everything, starkly maternal in how she looks after those around her. She’d taught her how to braid her own hair when they were twelve, helped her in hand-to-hand classes when Shadis just couldn’t work with her on how to fight someone that much bigger than her, let her cry on her shoulder in the weeks after she got Ymir’s letter, let her rant and rave about the social politics of Paradis’s high society, been the only one who could even sort of understand what it was like to be made into a figurehead. Over the past few years, there’s been little that Historia has felt she couldn’t discuss with Mikasa, and now that the worst of that is out in the open, she wants her friend back. But that easy fondness that had existed is locked away now, and Historia had had to fumble through their conversations.

Of course, she has the feeling they could talk easier if Eren wasn’t lurking in the shadows like a monster under the bed. 

Small Ymir screws up her face and keens her high-pitched hunger cry; Historia and Mikasa coo in unison, all sympathy for her poor baby. Mikasa hands her over and Historia settles her onto her shoulder, rubbing a circle on her back. “Darling,” she murmurs. “Darling, darling, baby. Oh, my baby.”

Mikasa reaches over to trace the shell of her ear, sleeve slipping down to reveal the bandage she wears over the Azumabito crest. She says, “Poor thing. It’s so confusing, isn’t it?”

“God knows I get crabby when I’m hungry,” Historia says, “and at least I didn’t just learn what the feeling was a week ago.” She gives a rueful smile. “I need to go feed her. How about I come back in a bit with any dresses I can find for you, yeah?”

Mikasa just nods. She pulls her hand back, fingers curling over the hem of her robe. 

“See you soon,” she promises, standing. Mikasa nods again. Eren is leaning against the window alcove he’s been in since before Historia even came by, looking somehow worse than he had an hour ago; he doesn’t even look away from Mikasa as Historia takes her daughter and goes. 

The air gets much lighter when she closes their door behind her. 

Historia inhales, catching the sweet, indefinable baby-smell coming from Small Ymir. She smiles helplessly and presses her lips to her fine blonde hair. “I know, baby, I know it’s hard. Just another couple minutes, hm?”

Small Ymir’s crying slows some, which buoys her heart. Her little girl is so impossibly precious. She’s her whole world. Her whole world is in her arms. 

Shame pangs, but it’s far away. 

Historia slowly picks her way down the hall, down the stairs. Dryly, she wonders if Eren is aware that he set himself and Mikasa up in the wing meant for the crown prince’s family. If things had been very, very different, her brother Urklyn would have lived here with his wife and children. It’s always strange to think things along that line. Her family had never lived here in the palace. They’d visited from time to time, like she told Mikasa, but Historia is the first person of royal blood to call this place home. 

For whatever royal blood even counts for anymore. 

As she exits the gallery, she runs into an entering gaggle of nurses. Matron Elise she knows; the rest she can’t put names to. They blink to see her, and then immediately descend like a flock of geese. 

“Your Grace!” Matron Elise cries. “What in the world are you doing up and about?”

“I just went to visit Mikasa.” She dodges the hand aimed at her forehead. “I’m fine, thank you, Matron.”

“Your child is hungry,” she says. 

Irritation flares in her sore chest. She can tell. “Yes,” Historia says, smiling tightly. “I know. I was just taking her back to my room to feed her.” 

“Very good. Some new mothers take quite a while to learn what different sorts of cries mean—”

“Not this one.” Historia gives a sunny smile. She knows what her daughter needs, and could be giving it to her faster if the old nurse would let her get on with it. 

She’s a good mother. Small Ymir will never be hungry, never be afraid of monsters in the dark. She will never, ever, doubt that she is loved and wanted. 

“I’ll be going, then,” she says. “Eren Jaeger is in her room, just so you’re aware.”

The matron blows out a sigh. “I would have expected nothing less. Such devotion from our honorable leader.”

“Indeed. On your way.” Historia turns her back, dismissing them, and crosses the long stretch of hallway to her own set of apartments. 

This section of the palace is meant for public sight, and it shows. The shining tile of the floor, perfectly uniformed quartz bricks between the marble columns, the gleaning wood panels at waist-height set in gold, the ceiling-high windows with stained glass icons in their centers, streaked with rain, under the alabaster chandeliers dripping diamonds. It’s a sharp contrast from the homey oakwood and furs that fill the royal apartments. 

Historia hip-checks the door to her own gallery. She doesn’t take in the paintings and tapestries, the silks and statues. All of it is old and familiar to her; not worth a glance compared to her baby.

Small Ymir is hiccuping sobs, long and wailing. Her blue eyes are teary with frustration, her tiny hand fisted and stuck in her mouth. “Shhh,” Historia says, settling on the couch. “Shh, shh, shh, it’s okay, darling, Mamma’s here, Mamma’s here.” She hooks her chin over Ymir’s head and holds her tight with one arm, using her other hand to undo the tie of her dress. Small Ymir quiets as soon as the fabric falls away, already leaning forward as Historia brings her down to her breast. 

Historia has to laugh at how quickly she silences, her face smoothing as soon as she latches. “Hi,” she says. “That was so hard, wasn’t it, darling? My brave baby. You did good.” 

She sighs. It’s a relief for her, too, and more than that, she just loves this time with her daughter. The warm, solid weight of her in her arms, the warmth in her chest, the way Small Ymir’s eyes fix, best they can, on her face as she nurses. It makes her feel a part of something bigger than she can comprehend—something she can’t put into words.

She wonders, tracing Small Ymir’s cheek, if her own mother had ever fed her. Even once. 

She doubts it. 

She wonders if Ymir’s mother ever got to. 

She thinks she did. Something about Ymir had simply screamed that yes, she had been loved, been wanted. Historia doesn’t know what happened to put her where she ended up, but she feels in her bones that the goodness in the core of her was what she was made from. 

She bets she’d been an easy baby, too. She was a girl made of many layers, most kept carefully hidden. Proud, perceptive, fierce, funny, awful—but her most authentic self was kind, compassionate, and unselfish to a fault. Historia doesn’t think she’s ever quite forgiven her for that. 

She hums, slowly swaying back and forth. Wilhelm has warm brown eyes, she thinks. He has freckles that stand out stark in the summer. His three brothers and his mother, too. She hopes their daughter will take after him in that. 

When Wilhelm stumbles down the stairs, bleary-eyed in a spit-up-stained shirt, he finds her with tears in her eyes. 

“Hey,” he says, and the word sounds punched-out. He lays a hand over his heart and says, “Woah. Okay. Sorry. Woke up and couldn’t find either of you.”

Historia shrugs and smiles. “I figured you deserved a good few hours of sleep. You had her all day yesterday and most of last night. Thank you, again, for that.”

He shakes his head, catching his breath. “Anytime. ‘S what I’m here for.” He crosses over to them and perches on the arm of the sofa. “Where’d you go?”

“Visited Mikasa. And Eren, too, I guess. He was there.”

“Was he in any better a mood than yesterday?”

“Hm, nope. He's shifted from ‘bristling hostility’ to ‘ominous lurking,’ but I don’t think that’s an improvement.”

Wilhelm nods. “Those do seem to be his default states, from what I’ve seen of him.”

Historia laughs. “That’s about it.” She peers up at him. “Did you get enough sleep?”

“Well, that’s my line, I should think.”

She waves it away. “You’re hoarding the night shift. Come on, the christening today is gonna be your formal introduction to the upper-crust. Are you ready for it?”

He gives a single, pained laugh, pulled long like an accordion’s moan. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” 

She grimaces sympathetically. Her poor brave farmhand, facing the masses. “Not really. Don’t worry, though, you can hide behind the baby. It won’t be too awful. At least you finally married me, right?” He nods, as though he hadn’t asked before she even got pregnant. She’d been the one who’d delayed it, refusing to face reality as long as she could. She didn’t want her daughter to be another bastard. “And Mikasa is coming, too, so you won’t be the only shocker of a date.”

Gentle, mild Wilhelm raises his eyebrows high. “That’s… a surprise.”

Historia shrugs. “Yes, well. If she’s going to stay in the capital, I thought the sooner Eren shows her off, the better it’ll be for her. And the less people are used to how scary he is now.”

He frowns. “You think she’s gonna stay?”

Historia blows out a long breath. “I couldn’t tell you, really. I hope so. I’d really, really miss her otherwise. And I honestly don’t want to imagine what a wreck Eren would be if she left.”

“That is a horrifying thought,” Wilhelm says. “That he might be any worse than he is now.”

“Right?” 

From there, they fall into silence. Will isn’t much of a talker, and Historia isn’t in the mood for carrying a conversation after trying all that time with Mikasa. It’s a comfortable silence now, though. When you spend three months trying for a baby with someone, no matter the circumstance, there’s a level of familiarity you just can’t stave off. And she likes Will just fine. He walks the line between attentive and respectful, and he’s just easy. It’s easy, being around him, and he makes things easy, and… all things told, she’s glad he’s her partner in this. 

Small Ymir finishes eating. Historia burps her, hands her to her father, and fixes her dress. 

“When should we start getting ready?” he asks, settling the baby into a cradle-carry. 

“Actually, I was going to go hunting for a dress right now, if you wanted to come.”

He pulls a face, “Not sure how much good I’ll be. Didn’t you pick it out anyway?”

“For Mikasa,” she clarifies. “Frieda’s old room has been left untouched. I figure there’s something there that’ll work.”

“You’re the authority on that.”

“I’m the authority on everything,” she says, with an imperious sniff. “I’m the queen.”

Will smiles, fond and unimpressed. “Alright, Your Magnificence.” His gaze drops to Small Ymir, and he grabs her foot and squeezes. “Ready for a field trip, little miss?”

Historia giggles—she finds the nickname hilarious for some reason—and accepts the hand he offers. 

Frieda’s apartment isn’t a far walk, but it still leaves Historia limping. When they arrive at the mouth of a shining hallway of marble and mahogany, she has to bat away Wilhelm’s efforts to sit her down. She shrugs off his arm and ignores the raw aching in her thighs as she hobbles into this familiar room, where her sister had spent so much time.

Her memories of Frieda are still hazy in many ways. She was ten the last time she saw her—what had she known? And the Frieda who visited her had been different from the Frieda who visited the capital, but—still. She likes to think that being in here helps her to remember. 

The room is set up in much the same manner the royal apartments are—ornate woodwork, a four-poster bed with a canopy, bits and baubles on the surfaces and paintings set into the wall. Smaller, humbler, but still familiar. The covers and curtains are silver, as is the three-fold mirror of the vanity, and the brush laying on the drawers that still has long black hairs caught in its bristles. The air smells like dust and pine needles. It’s very easy to feel the ghost of her sister in here. 

The wardrobe opens easy: no whine of hinges, no fluttering of moths. The shadows cling to a small collection of long gowns. Grey, gold, green; embroidered with suns or patterned with flowers or trimmed with lace. They’re all beautiful pieces, clearly fit for a queen even if Frieda never claimed the title publicly. 

Historia hums, thumbing through them. She’d dragged Mikasa and Sasha along with her to the tailor more than once, most often just for moral support. But before they left for Marley, she’d made certain that their clothes for across the sea would be just perfect. She’d been trying to get pregnant by then, and her skin felt all sorts of wrong all of the time, and she’d been worried for her friends and terrified of what Eren meant to do, still queasy with guilt and she’d—just wanted to spoil them. Her friends, the only other surviving members of that cabin where they’d gone from girls to women.  

And she remembered Mikasa’s measurements. She just… had a hunch she’d find that useful, one day. 

Mikasa is a little taller than Frieda had been, but the fashion ten years ago had called for crinolines under petticoats. Take away the cage and it should be just about right. She didn’t think about shoes, but if none of Frieda’s fit Mikasa, they’ll just find some leather slippers and be done with it. She’d like to say nobody will notice at all, but the fact is that everyone is going to be staring at Mikasa. Gaping. Gawking. 

Better now than later, though. If she’s simply a facet of the new world order from its beginning, it’ll be better for her. 

Still, Historia thinks, pushing a red dress to the side. Mikasa never has been happy when she’s the center of attention. Nothing too bold. 

She hasn’t looked through Frieda’s old clothes in years. Not since she first discovered her room. It gives her a double pang of nostalgia—for the lonely little girl she’d been when she’d had a sister, and for the girl she’d been when her crown was new. Would Frieda, she wonders, running her fingers down a rose-patterned sleeve, have understood what I did?

Not the Founder, of course. Not the Queen of the Walls. But Frieda? 

But Frieda and the Founder were inseparable. Historia had never known her sister before the Founder’s influence, and there are some places where it’s impossible to tell the girl from the goddess. 

And maybe that’s what it means to be a queen, she muses. Frieda had given herself over to something bigger than her. Historia has done the same, in her own ways. They’re different sorts of queens—Frieda never claimed the title, but she had power enough to make up for it. Historia wears the crown, but the entire island, all that’s left of the world, knows she’s little more than a figurehead, the blood in her veins just a relic of a freshly-dead era. The crowned queens of that age, on the arms of their false kings, had been another sort, but still they’d surrendered some part of themselves to take their place.

Titles, bloodlines, power. Only one really matters anymore.

She pulls on a fold of a heavy, deep blue skirt. 

The fabric glimmers slightly, starlight on the ocean. It’s a simple gown: long sleeves and a full, gathered skirt, embroidered with silver thread in patterns of teardrops and sharp-petaled flowers. The neckline will show the hollows of her collarbones and the slope of her shoulders, which will suit Mikasa fine. Historia goes up on tiptoe to remove it from the hanger.  

The total volume of the skirts was meant to be smoothed out by a narrow crinoline, but it isn’t so much that it’ll hang awkwardly without one. And if the dress itself lacks some small amount, Mikasa herself will make up for it with her own dancer’s grace. Historia turns it back and forth, letting the weak light in the room highlight the subtle shifts in the indigo fabric and the shine of silver. Understated but pretty, and unmistakably expensive. The dye for this alone…

The color is a richer, deeper version of the blue feathers on the Wings of Freedom.

“What do you think?” she asks softly. 

Wilhelm answers a vague affirmative, as she knew he would. 

“I’ll come back if she doesn’t like it,” she says. She grabs a thin petticoat from the neatly folded pile in the bottom, Frieda’s least ambitious pair of shoes, and pushes the wardrobe shut. “Let’s head back to our rooms for a while. Mikasa is getting her stitches tended to, and we need to pamper Ymir. I’m hoping to put off her next nap until the ceremony, so she’ll just sleep through it.”

“‘S a good call,” he says. “Here, let’s trade. That’s a lotta fabric.”

She swaps her bundle for her daughter. Small Ymir mewls, a glad little sound, and Historia cradles her against her heart. She takes another look around this room, inhaling the scent of pine needles, observing how the gray daylight plays on all her sister’s silver, and then straightens her spine. 

An era has ended. She may yet keep this shrine to her sister for a while longer, but a new day has dawned. 

***

The check-up goes fine.

Eren has nearly two decades of being a doctor floating around somewhere in the murky depths of his memory; enough of it accessible that it’s been useful. When he was sawing off his leg, he knew just where to bear down so it would be believable. When he gouged out his eye, he knew the shape of the nerves he had to sever. When they were in the wreckage of that seaside town where it ended, he knew to check Mikasa’s heartbeat and head and tell Armin to tie a tourniquet, even if he hadn’t trusted his own trembling hands to do it. 

He hadn’t known what exactly was wrong with her, what was keeping her under for so long, but it didn’t take a doctor to know that she’d been in danger. It’s passed now, but that doesn’t mean he can’t still taste the metallic tang of fear. 

But she’s fine. 

Eren hovers by the foot of her bed, watching and listening. One woman is smearing a salve over the bloom of bruises up and down her legs. Another is unrolling a spool of bandages. Elise is quizzing Mikasa, who looks pinched and miserable. She never has been comfortable with strangers. 

“Well, that’s all well and good, child,” Elise is saying. “But you’re white as a ghost. Did you sleep at all last night?”

“I got about five hours, I think,” Mikasa says. Her hands are curled into tight fists, eyes fixed on her lap. Eren’s mouth twists, unhappy. 

Elise tsks. “What was keeping you up?”

Mikasa shrugs, unwilling to answer. 

Eren asks, “Was it nightmares?” She doesn’t deny it, doesn’t deny it, and Eren bites the inside of his cheek so hard tastes metal. “Mikasa—”

“We can see if chamomile tea will help with that any,” Elise says. “And maybe more painkillers before bed. Your mind will be at peace when your body is, hm? Does that sound alright?”

“It’s fine,” Mikasa says. She doesn’t look like she has any more hope for a quiet night than he does. 

Horribly, Eren wonders if he’d woken her up last night, bursting into her room the way he did. He doesn’t think he had—he hadn’t seen her react any—but he’d not been quite in his right mind, and Mikasa has never been one to come awake with a lurch and a scream. After everything he’s done to her, he couldn’t stand it if he was robbing her of even that small peace. 

“Alright,” Elise says grandly. “Now it’s time to change those bandages. Rosina, scissors.”

The woman unrolling the bandages drops them and fumbles to pick up a small, shining pair of scissors. She passes them to Elise, who grabs Mikasa’s bad leg and slides one blade underneath the white cloth, pulling it through and cutting the bandage away. They fall away on either side, are gathered up and put away, and Eren has to dig his nails into his hands and take deep, measured breaths. He knows they’re not going to hurt her. They’re doing well by her.

But Mikasa is miserable, and it makes Eren want to set something on fire.

He’s reminded of that field in Wall Maria, both of them kneeling in a patch of bellflowers. Her broken ribs aching under her beautiful smile. It’s not pain that’s drawn her mouth into a small, flat line, that’s scrunched her eyebrows. She just hates this. 

She’d hated being taken care of when her ribs were broken, too. She’d brushed off doctors and refused to rest, to let anyone else take what could be perceived as any extra burdens for her. And she’d still been able to spring back within a week, then. 

Elise has gotten a soapy washcloth, dripping water from a shallow porcelain bowl onto the mattress, and she’s drawing it gently over the underside of Mikasa’s bent leg. She’s unaffected by the tiny, bitten-back little keens of pain, but they make Eren nauseous. The way Mikasa’s hands have twisted into her bedsheets, the way her eyes have screwed shut like she’s fighting back tears, the way shame is burning bright spots on her cheeks—

Something in Eren’s chest snaps. 

“Out,” he says, half a snarl. “Get out.”

Three heads turn to him, grey habits swinging, faces blank with confusion. Eren doesn’t have the patience for it. “Go away. Just go. We can take it from here— go.”

Whatever they see on his face, they don’t need to be told a third time. 

Eren watches them gather up their things in record time, leaving, without being told, the bowl of soapy water, the washcloth, and the unwound clean bandages all on the bed. He keeps his eyes on their shapeless grey skirts until they disappear, the door shutting with a click. Even then, he doesn’t look away. 

He doesn’t like when Mikasa is in pain. He doesn’t mind his own, that’s well-deserved and always serves a purpose, but Mikasa shouldn’t ever have to hurt. He doesn’t want to see that on her face. And… he knows, now that the frayed edges of calm are knitting back together, that he overstepped just now. He doesn’t have the right to speak for her like he just did, or to make calls for her based on how he imagines she feels.

After a long moment, Mikasa says, “I…” Eren’s shoulders tense, and he hears her exhale hard. She says, “I wanted them to go away.”

She’s trying to avoid saying thank you to him. His stomach untwists and his mouth curls into a grim half-smile. “Good. Got that much right, at least.”

“You weren’t wrong,” she corrects, so quietly she’s almost saying it to herself. 

Eren can understand that particular word choice, too. He crosses his arms, leans against the post of the bed, and sighs. His eyes close and he lets them, already feeling more steady. Mikasa’s disapproval is cutting-cold, but it’s hers, and it soothes the raw, ragged wound of everyone else’s opinion of him. He’d rather face a hundred years of her careful distance than a minute of applause from a hall full of people cheering his name. Whatever she gives him is no worse than he deserves.

If she was gone from him, if he lost the only thing he cares at all for that he really has left, that would be what he deserves. Everyone else is lost to him already, but those were clean breaks, and he got his own closure. And they weren’t Mikasa. He knows that if she left, it would gut him. Worse. She’d rip his heart out of his chest and take it with her. And he’d have to carry on anyway, for her sake and everyone else’s. 

He deserves that much, he knows. But the notion still terrifies him.

He hears Mikasa’s weight shift, and then the sound of water sloshing. When he glances back at her, she’s pulled her leg closer to her chest and is scrubbing her stitches clean herself. 

“Be careful,” Eren says, before he can bite it back. 

Mikasa just presses down harder, not looking at him. He can see her cheek shift as she bites her tongue. “Mikasa. Don’t rip out your fucking stitches for sheer stubbornness.”

“They’re sturdier than that,” she mutters. Her voice is strained, but she scrubs viciously. Probably just to spite him. Eren digs his nails into his palms. She drags the cloth over the length of her wound once, twice, and then a bitten-back whimper catches in her throat. 

“Give me that,” Eren says. He reaches out, taking the few steps to stand next to her. Mikasa’s eyes skew to the side; she makes no move to hand it over. “If you fuck up your stitches, we don’t have surgical thread in here. God forbid they get infected —”

Another wounded sound escapes Mikasa’s throat, and Eren goes still, primed to attack something imaginary. It would be easier, he thinks wildly, if I had something to fight— Pained, she says, “You’re not going to let this go, are you?” 

The ache is ghosting against his temples again. “Not if you do it wrong.” He gestures to the position she’s in, her bad leg curled in and lying flat, making a narrow angle. “That’s tricky for you to clean properly, let alone rebandage. And don’t try to pretend you aren’t in enough pain already.”

“I’m fine,” she insists. “I can handle myself. I’m not a child that needs coddling.”

Eren’s mouth pulls into another mirthless smile. “Now I feel like we’ve swapped lines from when we were actually kids.” Mikasa scowls; the most life in her expression that Eren has seen in days, which gives him some minuscule measure of real happiness. “Mikasa,” he says. “You know I don’t think that. I told you: you’re my first priority. I need—I want to make sure you’re alright. If—” he breaks off; looks away. She spooks every time he alludes to loving her; he certainly doesn’t want to give voice to anything about how he would feel if something happened to her. He tongues his teeth, careful, and then says, “I just want to make sure you don’t risk infection. You were lucky to avoid it when we were getting back here, and if you’re going to the christening today—”

“I said I’d go,” she cuts him off. Her mouth twists. She draws the soapy cloth over the stretch of her stitches one final time, gently, and then places it back into the porcelain bowl. “There. It’s good enough for now.”

Eren drums his fingers against his thigh. Good enough isn’t good enough, but—he can’t push. “Are you sure about the christening? Even I’m not sure I want to go—”

“I’m going.” She pulls down the sleeves of her robe; runs her fingers over the thick black thread keeping her skin together. “She said it would do some good, and I believe her. And Historia is still my friend.”

“Alright.” Slowly, carefully, Eren sinks down onto the mattress, just past the bandages. She’s less skittish when he’s not looming over her. “You’ve never been to a Wallist ceremony, right?”

Mikasa shakes her head. “Not unless Historia’s coronation counts.”

“I don’t think it does.” He sets his jaw and faces straight ahead, thinking. “I know it’s changed some since then. Since the truth about our history came out. You remember that from a few years ago? The church always knew the original teachings; they had the old holy books and whatever, so they were able to guide people through it better than the brass.” 

“At least we found out from your dad,” Mikasa says softly. “His notes, I mean. Learning all that in a newspaper would be… alarming. I remember how near it came to riots.” 

The few days between the Battle of Shiganshina—the first one, maybe, hell if he knows if the bloody couple of minutes that preceded the beginning of the Rumbling has been given a name—and the medal ceremony are a blur of stunned dread and other men’s memories. He and Mikasa had been locked up in separate cells, both reeling from the revelation that he’d been dying all these years. Mikasa had refused to believe it for as long as she could, but Eren had felt it click into place easily. He’d always known death was brewing inside of him. 

That doesn’t mean it hadn’t hurt. Especially immediately after reclaiming their home. He’d had hopes… plans, even, the beginnings of an idea of what to say to Mikasa… he’d been debating it still, if it was worth talking to her, and then the medal ceremony happened, and even his tentative hopes with their expiration dates attached had curdled and died. 

Except they hadn’t, of course. They’d been kicking around in his chest, needling against his heart, roaring back to life just to be crushed again on the outskirts of that refugee camp.  

And he’s a fucking idiot, because even now, he’s still hoping. 

“People have been out in the streets again,” he offers. “But it was… less angry. Apparently.”

“Of course it would be,” Mikasa says, stiff. Eren braces himself, but she doesn’t say anything else. 

He wishes she would. He wishes she would—that she’d— get it over with. Shout and scream and cry at him, just not hold back, and then they can move forward. In whatever way, but this stilted, painful in-between is awful for them both. 

But what is he supposed to do— provoke Mikasa? He’s not convinced that one wrong move wouldn’t send her skittering off to the Brauses’. He’s not convinced she hasn’t decided to go already and just hasn’t told him. 

The thought drives his nails into the soft flesh of his palms, his thumbnails biting into the sides of his fingers. He draws in a deep breath—two, three; swallows, and says, “Can I get your bandages?”

“What?”

He forces his hands to relax. When he lets them fall open, he can see dark red crescents pressed deep into the skin, and tiny pinpricks of brightness where the skin just began to tear. He shakes them out and presses them against his thighs, letting them steam closed. “Unless you want to do them yourself. But there’s less risk of fucking it up if you let me.” 

Mikasa is quiet for a long, long moment. He feels her eyes on his face, searching—for what he can’t imagine—and then she says, “Okay.”

Eren slaps his hand over the long swath of bandage and stands. Without looking at her, without letting himself think about it, he hooks his fingers under her knees and drags her legs over the edge of the bed. Her skin is firm and cool. His little finger presses into a bruise. He can feel the dull throb of one single pulse before he pulls his hands away. 

There’s a doctor in you somewhere, he tells himself, studiously not watching her face. You know how to be clinical. 

Mikasa makes a small noise of alarm— not protest . Eren sees her hands fly to grip her sheets again, and she says, quietly, “Ow.”

“Sorry,” he says automatically. He tries not to think about how stupid it is for him to say that, how laughably inadequate, and gets on his knees. 

The skirt of her nightgown was ridden up over her injury already, and is now spread over her good leg and the sheets, like a comet’s tail. Showing where she was. That’s good, he thinks, flat. He doesn’t think he could push it aside himself.

He holds the strip of cloth just under the hollow of her knee, that smooth, pale divot; wraps it once around and folds it in tight. He tucks the fabric—undyed linen, boiled in honey, the sort of luxury they didn’t give out to common soldiers—over the end, tight, tight, tight, and then begins the slow process of winding it down Mikasa’s leg. 

He can feel the heat of her wound. She’s feverish and raw along the back of her calf, blood beating against her skin. Trying to spill out over his fingers. Eren thinks, again and again, of sitting against a pile of rubble, dust filling his burning lungs and steam wafting down around them as he cradled Mikasa on his lap and willed her not to die. It was a near thing. Far, far, far too near a thing. He still can’t shake the belief that he was what kept her tied to the earth. It was meant to be him that died, so maybe something out there would take Mikasa instead, trade one half of the whole for the other, and only his refusal to let go saved her. It was meant to be the other way around. 

His fingers brush against the thick black thread keeping her together. The skin is red, raised; inelegant. It’s going to scar. Badly. Mikasa doesn’t scar easily—Eren eyes the front of her knee, bare of any reminders of childhood scrapes; knows that their years in the army hardly left a mark on her. He’s almost sure that the only other scar she has is on her cheek, and that’s his fault, too.

She bites back another whimper. Eren grimaces, wishing he could take all her hurts onto himself. He wishes—

“Mikasa,” he says, sudden, thrumming urgency seizing him. He freezes. Swallows. Says, “You know that I didn’t do this, right?”

She’s breathless, distracted. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I didn’t do this.” He turns his face up to look at her. She knows that, doesn’t she? She has to know that. Her expression is furrowed; guarded. He has to make sure she knows that. “It wasn’t me—who hurt you. It’s my fault, I know that, because it’s my fault you were there to be hurt, but I didn’t—I’d never —I didn’t know she was going to—do that. I would have stopped her. You know that I never would’ve let anyone hurt you, right?”

Mikasa shakes her head slowly. She looks—lips parted, bangs brushing her cheeks, a feeble light in her eyes—she looks lost. She sounds lost, sounds alone, when she asks again, “What do you mean?

Eren hates it. 

He fights to keep from ripping the bandage. He has to say this correctly. He won’t let her blame herself any more for any of this than she already does. Carefully, keeping still, he says, “It was Ymir. The Founder. I told you last night, didn’t I, that she was watching? Looking through everyone’s eyes?” 

Mikasa nods. With her face tilted down to look at him, Eren can see how her hair sways over the button of her nose. How each exhale stirs the very ends of the very longest strands. The darkness of the room doesn’t quite touch her; Eren could swear she shines. 

When he was in that starless desert, the pulsing glow of that barren tree felt hostile, cold. On his knees, in the sinking sand, when he clutched a trembling God against his chest and asked, aching, tired, were you the one who led me here? —he had been thinking of the way Armin’s eyes shone reading from his book, and the look on Mikasa’s face as bellflower petals caught in her hair.

The polished wooden floor is hard under his legs. More solid than the sand. His fingertips rest against the seam of her wound, now; a warm reminder that she’s still alive. Eren inhales, catches the scent of honey and strawberries, clean linen and blood, and says, “It was Ymir who was in control of the Titans.” His voice comes out low and raw. That’s how he feels. He hates that she’s hurting, he hates it hates it hates it. “I was… I was marching. I freed her—not well enough, because she was still— angry, and she.” He breaks off hard, biting his tongue, eyes dropping back to Mikasa’s knees.

How the fuck is he supposed to explain Ymir’s fixation without her finding out what she—what both of them—had wanted her to do?

“Eren,” Mikasa begs. He can see her hands in his periphery vision, knuckles white where they’re bunched in the sheets. “Please just tell me. Don’t give me some story—”

“I’m not. Okay?” He brushes the backs of his fingers against the smoothness of her skin. Eren has gotten very good at lying to her. And, he’s realizing, he doesn’t even have to lie here. What she needs to know can be neatly separated from what she doesn’t. “I’m just trying to think how best to explain it. Ymir was—she was almost impossible to understand, Mikasa. She never spoke because her tongue was cut out when she was taken as a slave. She thought in a language that died before she did. Everything I got from her was a jumble of broken glass. I was just able to get some of what was going on in her head because she was so deep in mine. I could—” Eren sighs, swaying closer to Mikasa to ground himself. Her socked toes brush against his thighs, and she doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t want to remember everything Ymir saw, everything she heard, the prayers she perfectly understood and didn’t care about at all. 

Ragged, Eren says, “I could see what she was seeing. I could figure out what was she was thinking, sort of, but it was… distorted. I couldn’t control what she was doing, and anyway, I was… I wasn’t… All there. I didn’t get any of this until after everything was over. But the point is—she saw you, and she saw how I see you, and she was—Mikasa, will you believe me when I tell you that she was jealous of you?” He shakes his head. It’s almost funny. “You’re everything she wished she could be. I told you last night, being an Ackerman meant you couldn’t be controlled by the Founder—or by anything. She wanted to be free like that. You’re true royalty. However distant, it’s in your blood. She never was a real queen. Even her daughter only got a crown because she married her half-brother. But she wanted to be as free as you, as strong as you, as pretty and as loved as you, and—she was angry, and about eight, so— She was controlling the Titans. She just… grabbed Falco’s Jaw, and…” He trails off, unwilling to finish. He doesn’t want to think about what that must have been like for her. “It wasn’t me,” he says eventually. He doesn’t know what else there is to say. 

Mikasa doesn’t, either. He can see on her face that she doesn’t know what to make of any of that. Her dark eyes search his, looking for any hint that he’s lying. There’s none to be found, and she wouldn’t, even if there was. Sweet all the way down to her bones, his Mikasa—so much so that she can’t see even the most obvious of his lies. 

She has to know that he’d never have hurt her. She’s learned better than to keep her precious blind faith in him, but she knows that he loves her. She knows what that means.

Softly, Mikasa says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Eren repeats. “Does that mean you believe me?”

Her eyes lift toward the ceiling, filled with something sadder than frustration, eyelashes fluttering. “How much does it matter, Eren?”

“It matters,” he says, low, “as much as you want to let it.”

Her gaze falls to rest on her nightstand. Her scarf is still wound up on the corner there, untouched, next to Armin’s half-folded letter. She stares hard at them as he stares hard at her, and then her eyes squeeze shut. “I believe you,” she says. “For whatever that’s worth.”

That’s all I’m asking, he thinks. It’s a long way from all that he wants, but it’s the only thing he’ll ask of her. 

He resumes winding the bandage down her leg. He focuses all his attention on that—on the creamy pale of her skin, how it shifts from cold to burning and back again, how the fine hairs look nearly white in this light, the knob of her narrow ankle and how he can see blue veins tracing over the fragile bone. 

He’s not used to thinking of Mikasa as fragile. Delicate, in her way, but—again he thinks of the field in Wall Maria and the week following. As much as he’s always wanted to be the one she leaned on and turned to, he never quite connected that with her actually needing protection. He’s never wanted that for her. 

Fingers restless, Eren ties off the bandage. Some of the tightness in his chest loosens to see her injury hidden away by soft, sweet-smelling linen, but it’s painful like dissolving. Talking about Ymir, remembering what it was like in her head—it isn’t easy to separate her feelings for Mikasa in that one moment of anger from the overarching vision of her she’d had. That Mikasa would be the one to truly set her free. But something went wrong, and now Eren’s living through the aftermath of it, and his head never quite does stop hurting. 

With a weak groan, he slumps forward, brow landing hard against Mikasa’s knees, hands coming up to hold her ankles. The cool smoothness of her helps— she helps—and she doesn’t even freeze up, doesn’t jerk back, doesn’t kick him away. She startles—he can tell that her hands flit up to her chest, knows that she’s clasped them together where the loop of her scarf should be, but she doesn’t push him away.

She is so much better, Eren thinks, thoughts swimming, than anything I deserve. 

All the thoughts he’s had this morning, everything he wants for her and from her and with her, none of those watercolor daydreams hold a candle to just this. Just this. That aching, bittersweet dream only left him hollow. The memory of it is still loosely connected, as if by rotting strings of dead tissue, to everything else about the Rumbling. If Mikasa had come, she’d have cut it free so they could have some peace—cut him free so he could— She’s always had his heart, but she should have taken his hand—she was meant to his hand, she was meant to take his head. 

Eren thinks, I wanted to give you my life. 

Eren thinks, I want to give you my life. 

He bites back another groan. 

He doesn’t really want Mikasa to kill him now—doesn’t quite know how much he ever did. If she wanted to, he can’t image he'd stop her, as long as it was safe for her, but—he can—they can—he has much more to give her if he stays —and if she stays—

He takes a deep, grounding breath. She smells like strawberries and honey and the strong medicinal balm on her bruises. He doesn’t even need to dig his nails into his flesh; his fingers gently wrapped around Mikasa’s ankles is enough. He can feel her heartbeat fluttering against his fingertips. After a moment, that rhythm replaces the one throbbing through his skull. 

One more breath, two, and then he’s able to pull away. Enough to look up at her. Eren has never liked feeling like a child, but even though he knows how he must look, hiding his face against her skirt, he can’t find enough energy to care. 

Mikasa is wide-eyed and pale, nothing more than stark alarm on her face—on top of that lonely, lost weariness —she looks so much like she did the very first night they met. 

Eren thinks, God —

“Sorry.” He’s going to have to find something else to say. 

Mikasa’s mouth parts; clearly weighing her words. Her hands are clasped loosely over her heart. “Is it…” she says, cautious, “Is it your head again?”

“Always is.” He takes his hands off her ankles and stands, jerkily. “It’s fine. I’ll get used to it.”

“You said it’s been like this for months.”

Eren shrugs. It’s hopelessly endearing that she remembers that. It’s hopelessly endearing that she’s concerned about him at all. “Guess it’ll take a little longer, then. It doesn’t matter, Mikasa.”

She peers up at him, head tilting slightly in a sweet, birdlike little gesture. “It matters as much as you’ll let it.”

He smiles at her, then—really smiles. Before he can catch himself, he reaches out and brushes his fingers against her hair. She startles again, pulls back by an inch, but still. His Mikasa. He guesses she doesn’t quite know how to break the habit of wanting to care for him. 

She seems to catch herself though, ducking her head and looking away. Her mouth draws pinched and her hands fall away, spreading wide as if to search for something. She finds it; curls her fingers around the baby blanket, pushed to the side this morning when the child it was meant for was actually present. Something almost like flustered, she says, “I’m going to try to finish this. I still have—I need to finish the last daffodil, and then the baby’s breath—”

“Alright, Mikasa,” Eren says, dropping his hand. He pauses, hesitating, caught between not wanting to push and still not quite feeling like he could leave her. The latter wins out, and he asks, “Could I work on the rattle here, too?”

She shrugs, already pulling the blanket over her lap. She tosses her skirt back over both knees as she does, and picks up the needle stuck through the cloth. 

That’s as close to permission as she’ll give, Eren knows, but he’ll take it. He’ll take anything she gives him, and everything—her coldness and her warmth, her disgust, her hatred, her disappointment, and her love, her love, her love, whatever tattered scraps of it slip through her fingers, he’ll be there to catch. He wants her, wants every single bit of her, everything she has, but all that he will ever ask of her is what she’s willing to give. 

Chapter Text

“Give me a few days of peace in your arms—I need it terribly. I’m ragged, worn, exhausted. After that I can face the world.”

***

She can still feel his hands. 

Under her knees, ghosting against her injury, on her ankles. She can feel the hard press of his forehead, too, against her knees, and the long, ragged draw of his breath, hot against her skin even through the silk of the skirt. His hands had been hot, too—and that’s familiar. The shape of his long fingers, the breadth of his palms, the swells of his knuckles, the thudding of his veins just under his skin, she knows all of it better than her own hands. But—

They’re smoother now than they were. Her own are, too, but his calluses are completely gone. It’s his healing, she knows, but… it just feels so wrong. That his hands should be so clean and soft and unmarked. 

She remembers his hands bleeding, his fingers digging into his palms, blood wicking down his wrists when he told her he loved her. 

Heat lights all through her veins, rougher than simple embarrassment, and then cold chases after it. Neither quite sticks. Mikasa feels the way she imagines the sky must in a lightning storm: restless, and ready to ignite. 

Eren’s closeness doesn’t help. He’s right there, right there. Feet planted on the floor, elbows on his knees as he half-heartedly whittles away at what’s meant to be a rattle. He’s not looking at her, but she knows he’s just as hyperaware of her presence as she is of his. 

She could reach out her arm and touch him. The thought alone sends another mad rush through her—heart racing, body tensing—and fire tears along the back of her calf, pushing against the seam of her stitches. Mikasa has to bite back a whimper, and that just makes her think of Eren wrapping her cut, and—

It’s all just going around and around in a loop. She can't banish the thoughts but she won’t let herself actually think about any of it; doubts she could even if she made an effort. She hasn’t slept in ages. Her mind feels even less strung-together than it did yesterday, but even as aching and exhausted as she is, the thought of sleep fills her with dread. She doesn’t want to dream.

Maybe the tea will help, her thoughts offer, but it’s bleak.

Mikasa is glad that baby’s breath flowers are simple puffs. They’re hardly more complex than a knot, which is about all she can manage for now. She couldn’t bear to ruin this, too. 

Time passes slowly, grating against her nerves. How long is it until the christening? She could ask Eren, but they haven’t spoken a word since he asked to stay. Even the thought of speaking to him makes her tongue go cold and clumsy. The weight of everything he said is heavy between them, and she doesn’t want to know what will happen if she offsets it. 

What he said. 

She believes him. She thinks that she does. Doesn’t she? She believed that he wasn’t lying last night. He wasn’t lying then, so it stands to reason that he wouldn’t lie later. He does care about her—she’s almost certain of that, or at least he did once. Enough that the memory of it now means he wouldn’t hurt her, physically hurt her, on purpose. 

And, to be quite frank, she doesn’t think Eren would be as bold as to say God was jealous of you unless he meant it.  

He’s a better liar than that. 

She doesn’t know how this man before her now is the same Eren from her childhood, who lied with averted eyes and flushed ears. Unless, she thinks, pulling the needle far, that itself was a lie to lower our guards, and I just never realized until now. Why not? She can’t say it would surprise her at this point. 

The flower is done. Mikasa ties the soft blue thread off close to the fabric and reaches for the tiny pair of scissors next to her, snipping the thread and coiling the remainder around her fingers to put it back in the sewing kit. She smooths the blanket out over her legs to examine it critically: three marigolds on opposite corners, two daffodils on the remaining ones. A line of pale pink lilies of the valley between them, and two spiderweb-stalks of soft blue baby’s breath sprouting out from the corners. It’s all balanced, pretty. No slipped stitches to fix. She thinks she might be finished. 

The notion sends a weak jolt of panic through her. Once she’s done with this, she doesn’t have anything else to do. No distractions, no duties. She hasn’t had nothing to do like this… ever. Even when she was a little girl, she was always helping her parents keep the house running. From the time she was ten, she had hard labor every day: farming, training, missions. She’s never had the option to do nothing. 

Blessedly, then, the door opens. 

Mikasa looks up, catching Eren’s face shutter off into a scowl, but she brightens with relief to see Historia’s head poking in, long hair swinging after her. “I’m back!” she says. She steps all the way in and lifts her arms to show the heap of fabric clutched to her chest. Mikasa straightens, setting aside the blanket. Historia’s presence forces some of the tension in the air to dissipate, and for that, Mikasa is deeply grateful. 

She crosses the room in a hurry and dumps the mass of indigo cashmere and white tulle on the mattress. She slings a bag off her shoulder and sings, “Got your dress! It’s time to get ready.”

“Already?” Eren asks. He puts down the decidedly-unfinished rattle and stands. “I thought the service didn’t start until four.”

“It does,” Historia agrees. She smooths her long white skirt. “But I have to be there early, and I figured you’d want to arrive before anyone else did.”

Mikasa envisions limping down an aisle while hundreds of eyes pick her apart. “Yes,” she agrees, swallowing. “Thank you. I would.”

“Which means we’ve got to start getting ready now. You,” she turns to Eren and flaps her hand. “Shoo. You have to get out of your pajamas.”

“These aren’t pajamas.” He picks at his grey shirt. “I just have to put my boots and jacket on and then I’m good to go.”

“Oh, my God.” Historia rolls her eyes, half disgusted. “Are those your pants from yesterday?”

“Eren,” Mikasa murmurs. “You have to look nice. This is important.” She feels like she’s scolding him, which is absurd.

Eren stares at her, eyes running over her from head to toes, mouth twitching—and then heaves a sigh. “Fine.” Whip-fast, his hand lifts from his side to ghost over her hair again, just enough to feel against her temple, and then he’s pulled away and turned, walking to his own bedroom and closing the door after him. 

Mikasa can feel Historia’s eyes on her. Her face heats. 

But the queen just says, “Finally.” With a huff, she extends her hand. “C’mon, you. We’re getting dolled up.”

A moment’s hesitation, and then Mikasa takes her hands. 

She stands by herself. Heat pulses from her leg and her litany of aches groan, but Mikasa has endured worse. And if she hasn’t, it still doesn’t matter. She’s going to do this. To be there for her friend, to help make things safe for her other friends, and—and—

Mikasa thinks, again, of Eren’s hands on her ankles and his forehead against her knees. Something scratches at the back of her mind, but she lets herself leave it behind as Historia pulls her to the bathroom. 

To be dressed by the queen is a strange thing. She’s helped Historia get ready for state events before, but Mikasa has never been on the other end. She’s brushed rose water through Historia’s hair and dragged matchsticks over her eyelids, but for herself, she’s only ever had to iron her dress uniform. She was a soldier, then.

Mikasa left her Scout overcoat behind in the underground cell Eren had put them all in, left her wings of freedom behind. Her boots, pants, and shirt had been gone when she woke up. They must’ve been burned, she thinks. They would’ve been torn and bloody past the point of saving. The idea makes her sad. 

She’s not a soldier anymore. Beyond not being Eren’s soldier, she isn’t one at all. She’s not quite sure what’s left of her without that.

The dress Historia picked out for her is a pretty thing, dark blue and finely made. Mikasa steps into it, clutching the side of the tall copper tub to keep her balance, feeling naked and silly in a slip and underskirt, but the heavy weight of the dress reassures her as she pulls it on. The wool is warm and soft, but sturdy, and snug when Historia laces the back up tight. Mikasa can close her eyes and imagine it’s armor.  

“It fits!” Historia claps her hands. “It’s practically perfect. Oh, I’m so glad.”

“Me, too,” Mikasa says, running her hands over the sleeves. They extend over her wrist and onto her hand, and she can clasp the end in her fingers. The fabric is ever-so-slightly worn there, like someone had done as much before, and Mikasa remembers with a chill that this once belonged to Historia’s sister. A girl who died younger than Mikasa is now, murdered and devoured by the man who had welcomed Mikasa into his home. 

It doesn’t feel so warm once she remembers that. 

If it bothers Historia at all, she doesn’t show it. The queen sizes her up, hands folded under her cheek, and then nods once, satisfied, before tugging her into the main room. They limp their way over to the vanity, sharing the single large cushion. Historia swipes beeswax over their lips and lashes, pinches their cheeks, bemoans Mikasa’s luck at having black hair while she darkens her own eyelashes with kohl. Mikasa listens to her absently, picking at the silver embroidery on the skirt. Spirals and spades. Spikes around suns. 

She only comes back into herself when Historia rummages for a brush. Mikasa shifts behind her and brushes out her hair, long and loose and shining. It’s a familiar, soothing action, something she did nearly every night for years—but it’s the wrong girl. 

Mikasa misses Sasha so much it hurts, a cold stone sitting in her stomach. She can’t believe that she’s here, now, doing this, without her. She wonders if Historia is thinking of her too. Most often when Mikasa was helping Historia get ready, Sasha was there with them. Her ghost joins Frieda’s, choking the room with their silence. 

Plaiting and twisting Historia’s hair, Mikasa wonders if that’s something Frieda ever got to do for her. More likely it was something she did for her other sisters, the ones who would have spent early summers at court with her. Their names had been Abel and Florian. Maybe their mother had done it for all three of them. She knows Historia’s own mother had never so much as touched her, but maybe her father’s wife had been different.

Once, Eren had described the memory of the chapel to her. Pale, sweating, shaken from a nightmare, clutching her wrist so tightly she’d had bruises the next day, he’d spoken of a little girl holding her mother for comfort; another hiding behind her father.

When Historia takes the brush from her, Mikasa is thinking of her own mom, and Aunt Carla after her. Aunt Carla would brush her hair in the kitchen every night before bed and every morning before school, cooing over how smooth and shiny it was. Historia is brushing it through with macassar oil, now, and the thick, sweet smell of it clogs Mikasa’s nose. 

“You know,” Historia says, breaking the long silence, “your hair’s gotten longer.”

Mikasa blinks back into focus, and the ghosts of their mothers and sisters vanish. “Hm?”

Behind her, Historia leans forward. Mikasa tilts her head to meet her eye. “Your hair,” Historia says again. She runs the brush through it one more time, the bristles soft against the nape of her neck. “It’s gotten a lot longer since you left for Marley. Doesn’t quite show yet, it’s mostly all filling out, but this time next year and it’ll be back to how you kept it before, I bet.”

Her fingers find the edge of the embroidery again, picking incessantly. The thread is stiff enough to catch under her nails, and the controlled bite of it is grounding. The idea that her hair will grow back out to how she’s always liked it just doesn’t quite make sense. The world can’t possibly keep on turning like that, now that so little of it is left . 

Historia half-rolls out in front of her, legs crossed, and resumes her task. She pulls hairpins out of her bag, elaborate silver things with sapphires clustered in the shapes of flowers. Lip between her teeth, Historia tucks strands back, so precise Mikasa wouldn’t be surprised if she were counting the individual hairs, before pinning part of her bangs behind her ears. She pulls back to examine her, head to toe, and after a long moment, a sweet smile pulls across her face. 

“C’mere,” Historia says, reaching for her hands again. “Oh, you’re freezing.” She tugs her up to look into the vanity’s three-way mirror.

Historia is as regal as she’s ever been. In her modest white gown patterned with pale pink flowers and rubies around her neck, she looks like a perfect royal mother. She’s grown into herself from the scrawny child who slept in the top bunk next to her own. Mikasa can’t say she’s proud of who she’s grown to be, but Historia is her friend. She’s choosing to let things be good between them. She needs her right now—and Historia needs her, so—she’s going to let it be easy. She knows how to pick her battles. 

The other girl in the mirror is a dark inverse of the queen. Tall where she’s small, black hair choppy and hanging in her face where she’s golden and tidy, pale where she’s sun-kissed, in a gown like the night sky to her clean white—and yet looking no less regal. The deep blues of the gown and the sapphire pins make her eyes shine bright. Light catches in the black of her hair, even in the dim of the room. Her face is expressionless, maybe even cold. She doesn’t look so out of place in these royal chambers, clutching hands with the queen herself. Mikasa can’t say that she knows her. 

Historia lays her head on her shoulder, smiling wider. “You’re so gorgeous, Mikasa,” she says. She sighs, then wraps her arms around her waist, never taking her eyes off the mirror. Her eyes are heavy and her voice is thick when she whispers, “I’m really glad you’re here.”

Mikasa lets herself lean against Historia. The girl in the mirror leans against the queen, too, and moves her hand to her back. “So are you.” Historia presses her cheek to Mikasa’s shoulder, and Mikasa bites her lip. In a rush, she says, “Historia, are you sure this is a good idea? Do you really think it will help?”

“I really do,” she promises. “There’s over a thousand foreigners left on the island, and given… well, everything, it would only do good if you’re seen, you know, out like this. Especially you.”

Mikasa regards her reflection; imagines it in a silk robe like Kiyomi’s. “Because I’m half-Hizuran?”

Historia, to her credit, acknowledges this with a nod. “That’s part of it. Mostly, though, because you’re you. It would make it very hard for anyone to push for more executions if one of the most recognizable faces of your merry band of rebels is brushing elbows with the queen and… well, with Eren looking at you the way he does.”

Mikasa stiffens, but Historia just bites back a grin. “It sets a favorable precedent, is what I’m saying. Nobody is very eager to question Eren, so to have his thoughts made so clear… it would just be useful.” She swallows, and looks up at her seriously. “But Mikasa, if you don’t want to come, you don’t have to. I hope I haven’t made you feel pressured.”

“You haven’t,” she assures. Mikasa takes in a deep breath. “I am glad that I can be here for you, for this.”

“You’re the best.” Historia tips her forehead into her shoulder for a moment, very much like a child ducking against her older sister, and then pulls back. “Okay,” she says. “Okay! I have to collect the princess, and you need to get—Eren, and then we’ll meet down by the carriages, okay?”

“Alright, Historia,” Mikasa says. 

The queen detangles herself and smooths her hands over her dress. “Okay,” she repeats, to herself. She looks up to meet Mikasa’s eye and says, “I’ll see you in twenty minutes. Don’t be late.”

Mikasa promises, and then watches her go. She sits on the cushion before the vanity, picking at the stitches on her skirt, waiting for a door to open.

***

“You’ve never been here, right?”

Across from him, Mikasa peels her eyes off the blanket, which apparently even finished needs the fucking entirety of her attention, and shakes her head no. “You know that I haven’t.”

Eren nods. He likes the way she said that; admitting that he still knows her. He tugs the green curtain over the window back further to get a better sight of uptown as it rolls by. Raindrops streak along the glass pane as surely as they’re soaking the tall, white-bricked buildings with their shining tiled rooves, and the world remains as grey and lifeless as it has been for days now. 

It can’t last forever, Eren thinks, annoyed, and tilts his head. “It’s the oldest church on the island,” he offers. “Supposed to be the prettiest, too, since it was the only one built before we lost all trade and the memory wipe.” Karl Fritz XI’s memory of approving sketches for icons flashes behind Eren’s eyes. He shudders, and chooses to blame it on the early winter chill bleeding through the glass. 

Mikasa makes a soft sighing sound that tells Eren she knows what she’d like to say but has chosen against it. He likes that he can still tell what that means from her. He likes that she’s responding to him, he likes that she’s here with him, and he likes the way she looks in her pretty dress. She hasn’t been able to have an actual nice dress since they were ten; he likes seeing her dressed up in a way she’s never been able to. Nobody would ever be able to give her what she deserves, but— as the sapphires behind her ear twinkle, Eren can’t help but think that this isn’t a bad start. 

As a joke, his father used to offer his mother the moon. Eren tracks the patterns hand-embroidered onto her indigo gown now, thinking how there isn’t a single thing left in the world that Mikasa would be denied if she asked.

He drums his fingers against his thigh. He’s sure that it's wrong for him to be so satisfied with that thought. Maybe he’ll have the energy to feel shame for it when he’s not so fucking tired.

The carriage turns, and Eren catches sight of the cathedral’s entryway courtyard. He leans forward to peer out the window, trying to find the peaks of the three looming bell towers, but they’re lost to the wood of the door. As they slow and then stop, Eren drops the curtain and grabs for Mikasa’s hand. 

She snatches it away instantly, looking anywhere but him. It’s her first reaction now, and no matter what deeper instinct might’ve been stripped from her, she’s still been a soldier for most of her life. Eren doesn’t let it bother him. When the carriage door opens he takes her hand again, and this time she lets it happen. 

They’re close enough to the cathedral’s doors that he disregards the umbrella the driver offers, choosing instead to fasten an arm around Mikasa’s waist and half-carry her out of the tiny carriage door, and then simply—not set her down. It’s fucking pouring, raindrops hammering into his hair and his shoulders; it’s easy as anything for him to buoy her up the two steps and cross the few meters until they’re under the arced pediment. No good reason for them to spend any longer than a few seconds in the rain, and anyway, he knows she doesn’t want to have to limp in front of anyone; it’s the entire reason they’re here a fucking hour early. 

He sets her down gently behind one of the towering silvery columns, near enough to where Historia’s farmhand is wrestling with his umbrella. Eren doesn’t unwrap his arm from Mikasa’s waist, and to his mild surprise, she doesn’t step away. One of her hands is clutching the material of his uniform sleeve, the other holding the baby’s blanket secure against her breasts, fist between her bare collarbones where her scarf would be. Raindrops are caught in her hair, on her cheeks, in her eyelashes. In the golden candlelight coming through the massive door, they glitter—but underneath the shine, he can see the bruises under her eyes. 

His heart aches. 

“Inside,” he murmurs. Even out of the direct downpour, the pale grey bricks under them are slick from the rain, and her feet falter when he takes a step. He doesn’t lift her up again purely to spare her, but he tightens his arm around her waist and clutches her close, aware that his arm is what’s keeping her standing. 

Her knuckles are nearly as white as her cheeks by the time they’re into the vestibule, dripping onto the rich carpet. Historia is there, kid heaved on her shoulder, talking to a priest; Eren winces and hauls Mikasa the final meters past the double doors and into the main chamber. Only once they’re surrounded by gleaming white marble does he actually slacken his hold enough to where she’s truly standing on her own two feet. His bicep, clutched in her ever-tightening raptor’s grip, doesn’t quite thank him for it. 

Mikasa would, though, if she were of the mind to thank him for anything at all, so he doesn’t care. He knows what it means to her, so he pretends he doesn’t notice the shallowness of her breathing. 

He pauses for a moment, giving her a moment to gather her strength under the guise of admiring the architecture. It is a nice building, like he’d told her, and entirely unlike any other Church of the Walls place of worship. As far as he’d ever seen, those were spartan hexadecagal buildings made of plain grey brick, three tiers of circles laid into the ground so that devotees could link arms in a mimicry of the Walls. A single set of doors, fifteen gaping windows, and an elevated slab where the speaking priest could lecture.

This is not that. 

The aisle stretches out some hundred meters, flanked by half a dozen pairs of massive blocky columns. Some thirty rows of maple pews march up until the grand cavern of the altar, poppyheads oiled to a shine and gleaming in the light of a hundred candles. Atop the columns are painstakingly carved Old Eldian warriors, the men that Ymir would’ve led into battle. Each is uniquely perched, sitting slope-shouldered or frozen mid-charge or somewhere in between, swords drawn, shields secured to arms. 

Along the wall, circles of stained glass depict scenes of Eldian history. Battles won, accords signed, the crownings of particularly great kings. The light from outside is barely enough to spill the colors onto the floor along the western side, but the candles mounted along the wall and on the columns are sufficient to view them by. Unfiltered grey light pours through a grand dome where the transept splits, under which is a golden basin. An imagined, glorified likeness of Ymir is carved into the side of the dome directly before the altar—thick waves of hair falling to her knees, long chiton billowing forward, her arms upheld with palms offered to the heavens, her face smooth with an expression of beatific solemnity. 

It is without a doubt the most beautiful building Eren has ever been in, and nearly everything about it has cloudy memories swelling against his skull. The perfectly opulent scene is overlaid by half-seen visions of this church half-built, open to the sky; of other churches half-destroyed, burning and breaking; he hears distant clamoring bells and desperate prayers, verses of a holy book weaving through the din as clearly as if someone were whispering it in his ear—but Mikasa’s fingers are clawing into his bicep. 

He blinks hard; inhales deeply. She’s put something in her hair that smells like seaside flowers, sweet as cake. When he looks down to where she’s half-slumped against him, breath still coming quick, her fist is tight against her sternum, pressing the globes of her breasts against the straining neckline of her old, borrowed, blue dress. 

Something blue. 

After a moment, the echo drifts through his head from a lifetime ago, on the docks of Odiha. He fights a weary smile. The baby blanket she’s clutching is brand-new, finished hardly an hour ago. He wonders, madly, what Mikasa would do if someone gave her a sixpence. 

“You alright?” he asks, low. Sound carries easily in here, and he so badly doesn’t want anyone coming to them.

Mikasa nods without meeting his eyes. She says, “I’m fine,” but her voice is small, and she’s not even trying to lean away from him. 

We don’t have to do this, he wants to tell her, unsure what he’d even be referring to. Any of it. All of it. They could just go back to her room and fucking nap. 

Eren lifts his chin to rest it on her head, his eyes falling half-closed. Somewhere in the back of his mind, it’s striking him as funny: the pair of them have held the world in their hands twice now, and look where it’s left them. Unable to stand up straight without leaning on each other for support, nearly keeled over at the effort of standing in a church. He knows Mikasa well enough to know that her injury isn’t what’s drained her this much—like him, she’s just goddamn tired. 

He wonders, would she be sleeping easier if she had killed him?

He presses his cheek into her rain-damp hair, smothering the beginning of a morbid smile. He doubts it. 

Mikasa doesn’t pull away, and Eren has nowhere better to be. Her sweet-smelling hair tickles his nose, and her dress is soft under his fingers. The press of her body against his is firm and comforting, and when he looks down he can see how long her eyelashes are. The drone of the rain against all sides of the cathedral is different than it is in the palace. As much as this place unnerves him, he finds that he likes the sound. He realizes he can hear soft dripping as their clothes dry, and he likes the idea that they’re messing up the marble halls of this cathedral.

Before he can sink too far into how simple and nice this moment is, he’s jolted out of it by the sound of footsteps. His hand seizes on Mikasa’s waist, enough to make her gasp as he turns both of them, but it’s just Historia.

“Hi,” she says, hushed. “So we—” she points behind them, “—are going to be sitting in the left wing there, okay? You two are with us. Will and I are going to wait for his family to get here—his older brother and sister-in-law are the godparents, so we’ve got to go over what to do with them, but you two can go sit down. Mikasa, though—is the blanket ready? Can we use it?”

“Oh,” Mikasa says. “Of course.” She pulls her hand off her chest and holds the blanket out, and Historia grabs it with a near-silent squeal. Almost instantly, tears well in her eyes. 

“Oh,” she says, lip wobbling. “Mikasa, it’s so —I can’t believe you did this in one day. Look at it!” She holds it up, as if they might not know what it looks like, and then clutches it against her chest. With a strange sort of wriggle, she beams up at Mikasa and says, “I’ll make this up to you, Mikasa. I promise.” 

Mikasa nods softly. “You don’t have to,” she says, “but I appreciate that.”

Historia grins. She wipes her eyes with a hand, and then her gaze shifts to Eren. Her glee fades; half-wry and half-ragging, she asks, “I don’t suppose you finished that rattle?”

“Do you have any idea how long it takes to carve something like that?” he snaps. He never intended to have it done, he just needed something to do with his hands to justify being in the room. It’s not like the kid can lift anything, she’s six days old. 

“That’s about what I thought.” Historia rolls her eyes. “Okay. You two sit against the wall so Will and I can come and go easy. People’ll start arriving in half an hour or so, just so you’re aware. We’ll join you in maybe—”

Annoyed, Eren turns, pulling Mikasa with him as he makes for their assigned seats. “…fifteen,” Historia trails off, then scoffs. Mikasa, a nearly stricken expression on her face, waves over her shoulder as Eren drags her away. 

“Eren,” she says, half-stumbling. He slows and looks down at her, worry spiking in his chest, but she just looks straight ahead and whispers, “you… know you’re really not supposed to turn your back on the queen like that, right? Not in public.”

He snorts. 

“Eren.”

“Sorry,” he says—he’s got to find something better to say— “But I think we’re a little past that.”

Her pretty mouth is pursed in a frown. Quietly, she says, “I’m not.”

“Yes.” His tone leaves no room for argument. “You are.”

The left semitransept is as private a spot as they’d be able to find without outright hiding. The pew they shuffle into is out of sight to all but the two closest perpendicular rows. With Mikasa sitting closest to the wall, she might very well pass the whole service out of sight. 

Without her blanket to focus on, she’s picking at the embroidery of her skirt again. She’s pensive, and he can read the way anxiety wars with weariness in the slope of her bare shoulders. Her collarbones are sharp under her skin, and her heartbeat pounds visibly. It’s too fast. Eren wishes he could hold her hand. He wishes it would make her feel better if he did. 

Mindful that it would not, Eren pulls his eyes away from where her heart beats against her chest, resisting the urge to cough. His throat has gone tight.

Other than her, there isn’t anything else he wants to look at, though. From where they’re sitting, he has an uninterrupted view of the vaulted dome and all its brilliant carvings, or the stained glass behind the pews on the other side of the transept, but he has no interest in risking a headache for the sake of old artwork. It’s not, he thinks, resisting the urge to kick the kneeler, as pretty as her.

Eventually, he focuses on the copy of the Móðiramál—Modramir, says the cover, Mother’s Tome —that stands propped against the pew screen. It’s a small book, crisp and blue and decorated with gold leaf. New. It must’ve been printed and bound within the past four years. It won’t be in the original Old Eldian; will have glossed over and cut and embellished wherever it served the narrative the Church wanted to feed the people. Five hundred years down the line, the story of Ymir’s life had been so warped out of shape it was unrecognizable; he can only imagine what the story is like now. 

Eren wonders what the priests here would say if he told them what actually happened. If they would keep up the statues of a shining goddess, queen of the heavens and mother of all that remained of humanity, if they really knew how she’d lived, why she’d died, and how the prayers of an entire world fell on deaf ears. That the divine reckoning he knows they’re making his war out to be was a temper tantrum thrown by greedy, jealous children. 

He pulls it out. The book falls open to a painted icon of that false Ymir, golden and glorious, towering serene over a battlefield. The swords of the Eldian soldiers are red while the goddess’s hands are clean, and white flowers dot the field in between bronze-armored corpses. It’s a nice picture. Ymir would’ve liked if there had been flowers left in her wake, and clean hands, and if she had been as pretty as the artists make her. 

The calligraphy on the opposite page reads, I love you, God, my strength; She is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold —and Eren almost bursts out fucking laughing. 

Kveldsǫngr enda bjallir fyrir Sinn echoes through his head. Who wrote that? Had they really meant it for a goddess who died centuries before they lived? You can’t have that kind of devotion for someone you don’t know, someone you don’t love —can’t mean it, at least. Eren grits his teeth. They shouldn’t have — he thinks, the pads of his fingers pressing hard into the illustration of Ymir. The calligraphy is done by hand. He imagines a room full of scribes bent over their desks, copying a watered-down translation of something someone else wrote. They shouldn’t have done that. 

Eren remembers the dingy parlor room in the Liberio Military Asylum that reeked of antiseptic and nicotine, the coughs and groans of the other patients as they waited for the hour to be up and the pathetic attempt at a group therapy exercise to be over. He remembers how fucking annoyed he’d been when the nurses told them they were to try writing a letter to someone they loved— or as best you can imagine, the one with fat fingers had said, for those of you who can’t recall . She’d said, address it to ‘your dearest.’

There are ten pages of stationary sitting in the bottom drawer of the desk in his room, covered front-to-back in chickenscratch ramblings that he never, ever intended for anyone else to read—and thinks that that is the right way to write to someone you have absolute faith in. 

Fortress and deliverer. Sure. Fine. It fits. But when he wrote you’re my home and you’re my heart, that was actually something he was capable of meaning. 

He slams the book shut hard enough that it echoes. 

Mikasa looks at him sharply. The sapphires behind her ears glitter, and her expression is a question of what was that? Her eyes are wide and her mouth closed, and Eren wants to—

She tilts her head meaningfully directly in front of them; again when he doesn’t follow her gaze. When he looks away from her mouth, chest burning, he sees a priest in violet vestments standing before the golden basin, Historia and a gaggle of sheepish farmfolk listening to his murmuring. He barely has enough time to register the mild glare Historia is shooting him before he’s returned his attention to Mikasa. “What?”

“Quiet.” She barely more than mouths the word. 

He drops his voice some, but only to whisper, “They’re not gonna excommunicate us because I closed a book too loud, Mikasa.”

Mikasa’s look is despairing, and could’ve been lifted straight off her ten-year-old face when he was causing a scene in the schoolhouse. It chases away most of the anger simmering in his chest. “Eren,” she begs, “please, this is important. For Historia and—and for me, and for—” her voice falters, and Eren’s blood freezes. She licks her lips, pained, and says, “for—the others.” Her hands come up to cup her elbows, her fingers picking, picking, picking at the embroidery there.

The rain drones on. Eren swallows and nods, not trusting his voice, and clasps his hands together on his knees to keep himself from grabbing onto Mikasa, to keep her there. Here, where he can see her, touch her, know that she’s okay . 

Above the priest in his vestments, the statue of a girl made into a god watches. Snakes eat their own tails in Eren’s belly, jagged and painful, and he considers that, for all that it must be shallower, it must also be safer to worship a god made of stone. You don’t have to worry about her leaving.

***

The church fills up slowly, and Mikasa wishes she had asked Historia for a shawl after all. She doesn’t mind the chill so much, but her bare neck is prickling with the awareness of eyes on her. She wishes her hair was long enough to hide behind. She wishes she had—

She’s pressed as far into the corner as she can be, all but invisible with the wall and the nearest column blocking her from the sight of the gathering congregation. Historia and Wilhelm have taken their seats; his brother and sister-in-law taking the rest of the space on the pew and his parents and other brothers sit on the other side of the little aisle. Eren is close enough to her that she can feel the heat of his body even through his rumpled uniform, warm enough to be tempting. Her head feels floaty, and some small, feeble part of her misses the security of being completely tucked against Eren. 

His sleeves are too tight, she keeps noticing. Same for the fabric around his shoulders. It wasn’t like that before they left for Marley. It still hurts to look at Eren, but she hasn’t yet found the energy that she would need to risk meeting anyone else’s eyes.

Eren is tense beside her, switching back and forth between perfect predator stillness and anxious restlessness, shifting and drumming his fingers. He hasn’t reached for the book again, but his reaction was enough to make Mikasa wary of it. She doesn’t have much room in her for boredom, anyway. If her heart wasn’t thudding so loud in her ears, she could fall asleep right now. 

Soon enough, the organ begins to play. The music comes from the front of the cathedral, traveling through the walls and the floor as much as the air so that Mikasa can feel it in her teeth. Dust shakes loose from the ceiling and she looks up— up, and up —automatically. A garrison of ancient soldiers look down on her, stone eyes cold. Her hand floats to her throat, futilely seeking comfort. 

Her other hand comes up to her wrist, fingering the sleeve. There’s a statue high above her of a man with his sword held high, far from his body; Mikasa recognizes the stance of a soldier rallying their comrades. The detail in his marble face is perfect: she can see by the set of his colorless eyes that he truly believes in what he’s fighting for. And of course he would. 

Something flickers inside her. 

Mikasa knows what it’s like to fight with pride. She may have lost her reason, and she may have lost, but she hasn’t lost that. Not that memory nor that feeling. Mikasa may be lost in the world right now, unsure where to turn or what to hold on to, nearly as helpless as Historia’s slumbering infant—but she knows with perfect clarity that the strangers filling up this cathedral don’t matter at all to her. Be they spineless cowards who hid behind Eren, or hate-filled monsters who supported him, even those who merely shook their heads and averted their eyes—they can say what they will of her. They can call her a traitor, a foreigner, a dangerous enemy, worse; she doesn’t care one whit what they think.

Mikasa may have lost, may be lost, but she knows this much remains true: she was right to fight Eren. No matter that they failed, even as hot shame throbs through her chest at the thought of how pointless and painful their effort was, she was right to try. Maybe she didn’t try hard enough, but she tried harder than everyone else here, and that’s something. 

The soldier with the raised sword remains steady. When she lowers her eyes—and she knows it’s just that her head feels distant from her body, her vision swimmy around the very edges from pain and a lack of sleep, but—she would almost swear he nods.

Mikasa straightens her spine and sets her shoulders, and looks directly forward. 

Historia said that Mikasa was here to send a message, to protect their friends and anyone else who might need it, and Mikasa can do that. Can be that. For today, for these next few hours—for now, at least. Until… until… 

Mikasa blinks rapidly, mouth falling open. 

Eren presses his shoulder into hers with concern. “What?” he says, hushed. “Do you need—”

“I didn’t realize,” she whispers, nodding to the pew perpendicular to them, where the only face she can see is the profile of a familiar redhead sitting at attention. “Floch was…” she hesitates, feeling that it’s impolite, but she doesn’t have a better word than, “...alive?”

Eren blinks, then chokes on a startled laugh. He presses his knuckles to his lips hard, trying to smother a smile—a real one, bright and true. “I know,” he says, equal parts chagrined and amused. He shakes his head and leans closer to her, like they’re ten years old again and sharing secrets at the dinner table, to say, “The one time that kid missed a kill shot…”

Mikasa finds herself nodding, astounded. Gabi shot him out of the sky, and his body fell into the harbor. She could never have imagined that he’d survived that. 

Before she has any more time to dwell on it, the organ’s song fades. A hush falls over the church; Mikasa examines the people in the two pews she can see as they turn to face the back. The women have their long hair curled and done up in braids, jewels around their necks, arms linked with who Mikasa guesses their husbands. The men mostly have grey hair and crow’s feet, silver tie pins and watchchains in their pockets. Of the people she can see, only Eren, Floch, and the unfamiliar boy next to him are wearing military uniforms. 

From high above, three sets of bells ring. Deep, echoing chimes come in three sets of three, the sheer force of them rattling Mikasa’s teeth. Churchbells can be heard all across the city; to be inside the building as the sound rings through it brings her back, for an awful moment, to the concussive footsteps of the Wall Titans. Her fingers curl into her collarbone, nails biting down. 

The organ launches into a new hymn, and Mikasa is able to breathe again.

There’s a lurch as the whole congregation stands. Half a beat behind them, Mikasa braces her hands against the pew screen before her and makes to levy herself up, but Eren stands and takes her elbow before she can. Mikasa sways on her feet, calf going molten-hot and shaky, knuckles going white—but she bears her weight by herself. Eren’s hand on her is just decoration. 

Mikasa doesn’t know the words, but few enough people seem to. A choir slowly proceeds down the main aisle, older men in grey robes, two single-file columns moving step by careful step. The song that pours from their mouth is in a language she doesn’t recognize, strange words pulled long and solemn. The organ wails, mournful notes rising and falling to the rhythm of waves on a shore. 

When the first set of choir members reaches the baptismal font end of the aisle, they part ways: one to the right, one to the left. The lines cross in front of the benches and to the aisles along the walls. They pass right in front of the seven of them; not one singer is able to keep their attention ahead. Though the song goes unbroken, their eyes flicker to the side, taking in the strange group tucked away here in the corner. The queen and newborn princess, the princess’s father, uncle, and aunt… and Eren, and Mikasa. She couldn’t say to whom their gazes stick longest. 

She folds her hands loosely over her stomach, meeting their eyes with an even expression and a straight spine. Eren’s fingers wrap tighter around her elbow. He’s being protective, and that much she understands, though he needn’t be. I don’t fear these people, she could tell him. They’re not worth fearing. 

At the end of the procession, three little boys flank the violet-robed priest. When they reach the end of the aisle, the two children carrying gilded candles openly turn their heads to gawk; the one lifting a large, thin book high over his head only darts his eyes over. After a beat, strange music unceasing, the priest and the altar boys climb up the steps to the dais, then the angle takes them out of her line of sight. 

The song goes on. 

As the minutes stretch on, pain laces along Mikasa’s wound, vice-tight and burning. She shifts her weight onto her uninjured leg, but even that effort has her biting her lip to suppress a gasp. Her vision goes watery, mouth wobbling, uneven lines of fire shooting up to her hips and into her chest so that, hazily, she worries she’ll collapse—

And then Eren sinches his arm around her waist. 

Eyes screwing shut, she sags against him without even a token effort at resistance. Eren is warm and solid as he presses her against her side, though her skin is uncomfortably alive everywhere she feels him, even through this dead girl’s dress, she prefers the uncanny feeling to the notion of keeling over like a felled tree. 

Surely, she thinks distantly, this is something like what Historia had in mind. 

As wounded and weary as she is, Mikasa doesn’t let her head loll against his shoulder; forces her eyes open again and fixes her gaze on what little of the altar she can see. Eren, in all his warmth and solidity, makes her feel as though a low current is running through her. The sensation tangles with the bright agony climbing her body, invaders scaling a city wall, so dizzyingly awful that she can’t think past the static in her ears, doesn’t notice that the processional hymns have ended and the congregation is responding to the priest’s call. She barely registers when they sit; only follows suit because Eren guides her down. 

“Mikasa.” The word is barely more than breath; none of the hundreds of people here will even know he spoke. “We can go if you want, there’s no reason—”

“I’m staying,” she hisses. She shifts away from him, and Eren’s hand flies off her waist like a spooked bird. Nevermind that there are tears pricking her eyes from the pain, Mikasa isn’t going to run. She exhales shakily, her fingers crushing her own hand. 

She licks her lips, tasting berries and beeswax. Her throat is dry and her head hurts, and agony is still shooting up her leg; she wants, more than anything, to lie down and close her eyes. But she’s here, and she doesn’t care if she catches her death of cold or fever or anything else Eren’s imagined could go wrong; she refuses to be weak in front of these people. 

I am strong, she tells herself, breathing very deliberately. Maybe I can’t fight the way I used to, but I’m stronger than this. 

She swallows, straightens, and shifts her attention to the speaker.

She tries to, at least—tries to look as though she’s paying attention, for the sake of being polite. But between the fog in her head and the ache in her body, nothing the disembodied voice of the priest says manages to connect itself into meaning. His rasping voice carries a rhythm, a weight to his words that speaks of rich history and deep devotion, but Mikasa is entirely unfamiliar with the church’s dogmas and entirely uninterested in learning.

Time passes slowly. The heavy words flow through the air, loud and clear over the drone of the rain and the sounds of hundreds of people packed into an echoing room, over the thumping sound of her own heartbeat in her ears.

Beside her, Eren is warm, and solid, and tense as a bowstring. Even as she keeps her gaze forward, watching grey-robed acolytes come forward to read from their holy book, Eren blazes in her periphery. He grits his teeth and drums his fingers, digs them into his palms. More than once, she imagines that his hand twitches, as if to reach for her—but he never does. More than once, she imagines letting gravity, wicked, inevitable gravity, pull her down until her head finds his shoulder. 

She never does. 

One of the altar boys gives a reading. From her seat, she can’t see the child for a second look, but from his voice she would guess that he can’t be more than ten years old. Mikasa tries to imagine being that young, performing for so many people—and then shudders, cold washing over her. The blurry shape of a fate too horrible to imagine skims across her mind, leaving her cold, and her hand darts up to her throat as her chin ducks. 

Eren saved her from that. 

It’s so strange to think of that now. These past days, she’s questioned everything she ever thought she knew about Eren, but that much is still undeniable. He saved her then. She’d been a stranger to him, but he’d still risked death to save her from something worse.

She can remember that night more clearly, now. More honestly. Eren, blood on his hands and in his teeth, the animal howl of his voice and he brought the knife down again and again, how terribly, terribly scared of him she had been. For a very long moment, as unmoored and terrified as she had been, she’d thought he was going to kill her, too—like the men had killed her mama and papa, like he had killed them. 

He hadn’t, though. And even if what she suspects now is true, that he’d come after them in no small part just because he wanted to kill someone, craved blood on his hands, she’ll never be able to unknow that what came after that was true, too. He built a fire for her. Talked to her for ages until his dad and the policemen came, defended himself by saying they would have been too late; he just wanted to save her. He wrapped his scarf around her. He’d brought her home.

Mikasa brushes her fingers across her bare neck, lips pressed together. 

She’d had such perfect, unshakable faith in him. For so long. Her throat goes tight, eyes stinging with tears. When she was nine years old, everything she knew and everyone she loved had been stripped from her in a matter of moments, and Eren had saved her. He’d made her see that there was still goodness and beauty in the world, still warmth—and love. She had loved Eren so purely, not understanding the boundless depths of it, how far she would go and how much she would do; she had believed, for so, so long, that Eren was worth it. 

She holds the image of her first-ever friend in her mind and places it next to the memory of the Founding Titan. When she looks at Eren’s profile, pain laces through her heart, because all three of them have the same eyes. 

Her head throbs. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with that. 

It takes so much to not bury her face in his shoulder.

He’d let me, Mikasa thinks, biting her lip and turning back to the altar. He’d let me, and maybe he’d just be indulging me, but maybe I don’t care right now. Maybe she just wants a moment of comfort, now that her world— the world—has been flipped upside-down again. 

She’s not even angry at him, not really. She doesn’t understand how . For a flash, she tries to recall if she was ever really angry at the traffickers, beyond just afraid and hurt, and then the utter horror of comparing Eren to those men nearly blinds her. 

After a long, stunned moment, Mikasa forces her eyes down to her lap. Horror washes over her. She can’t think about this any longer, not if she doesn’t want to burst into tears in public—and she’d rather burst open her stitches than that. 

Deep, slow breaths. It had been Aunt Carla who taught her that. Her own mother had never had cause to: Mikasa had never known that fear could grip her tight enough to choke until after she’d come to live with the Jaegers. The light slanting through the dome hits a thin stretch of Freida’s dress in such a way that the embroidery is distractingly bright. Mikasa lets the line of it burn into her vision, and then she imagines building—not a wall, but a dam. A barrier between herself and the murky, treacherous waters of her thoughts. Piece by piece, tree by tree. She can’t escape the sight of the wooden screen in front of her, so she adds that to the dam, too. 

The river, her mind tries to remind her. Red with blood, clogged with bodies —

Mikasa shoves the firewood Eren had taken from the chimney in the hunting shack over the leak. 

Not here. Her eyes flutter closed for a minute, and the organ starts to play again. Not here. I can keep this at bay for long enough. 

She’s strong enough for that. 

The body of the church stands again, and she forces herself to her feet with them. The priest and the altar boys proceed down while the choir sings, and on Eren’s other side, Historia runs a hand down her skirt. 

Mikasa peers around Eren to share a glance with her. Historia shoots her a quicksilver smile, cradling her daughter close. Ymir is still sleeping peacefully, as sweet as any angel, and one of her impossibly small fists is clutching the lace edge of the blanket Mikasa had so carefully embroidered. Her tiny, pudgy fingers are just brushing the edge of a blue puff of baby’s breath, flexing in her sleep.

It’s time! Historia mouths, flashing her eyes and lifting her shoulders. She looks ahead to where the small procession has stopped at the baptismal font; the priest gives a nod to signal her forward. 

Eyes are on them. Mikasa feels Floch Forster’s most keenly, sharp against her neck. 

As Wilhelm’s brother and sister-in-law shuffle out, Historia reaches out, extending her hand to Mikasa’s for just a moment. Mikasa brushes their fingers together easily, letting herself be soft for her friend—letting herself be bold for everyone to see. Historia squeezes her hand tight for a moment, beaming, and then follows after Wilhelm. 

Mikasa folds her hands over her stomach again and sighs. There. There. That had to be something. That, by itself, was worth dragging herself here— being half-dragged by Eren—worth the tireless circles spinning in her mind. Some of the tightness in her chest dispels, and she keeps her chin held high. 

The song slices through the air, organ nearly overpowered by the voices of the choir. They’re not singing in Eldian, at least not any recognizable version of it. The shape of some words is nearly familiar, but the pull of the vowels is richer than she knows, and the clash of consonants rings like steel on steel. 

As Historia stands next to the priest, dwarfed by his stature and made nearly plain by the ornamentation on his purple vestments, the music crests. Dozens of voices cry, “ Kveldsǫngr enda bjallir, bjallir!”

The organ jumps to a higher octave, filling the air until it nearly crushes out anything else. Mikasa’s fears of her own thoughts vanish, replaced by the deafening crescendo. The stone walls traps the sound so that it echoes, words and chords building upon themselves, but still the choir cuts through clearly with the final verse:

“Kveldsǫngr heita fyrir Sinn.”

***

Historia glows with pride as the princess is gently dipped in holy water, golden paint shining on her forehead, the icon of Sina’s Helm drawn carefully by thumb. The princess startles awake then, gives a loud wail, but the Pave speaks over her when he says, in a voice like crumbling sand, “Let us welcome Her Highness, the Princess Ymir Mariena Reiss, the firstborn child of Her Grace Queen Historia and her Prince Consort Wilhelm Reiss, into the light and body of the Church!”

Floch joins his voice with the rest of the congregation, a syllable behind the avid churchgoers who know the words by heart. 

One day in the very near future, he suspects, he’ll be right along with them. 

Pave Gideon passes the crying princess back to her mother. Historia settles her on her shoulder with practiced ease, soothing her sobs with a gentle hand on her back and tucking the flowery blanket tight around her. Prince Wilhelm clasps a hand on the queen’s other shoulder and squeezes in a gesture of support that Historia clearly doesn’t need. She’s smiling down at the princess with all the radiance of the sun, a perfect madonna and child. A good tiding.

The Pave clears his throat and turns to address the parishioners. “In the name of Most Holy Ymir Móðir,” he says, age evident in the unsteady wobble of his words, “in the words of High Queen Maria Líknsamr: Let us send our heralds to the hearts of our neighbors, that by good faith, we may share with them the glory and unity of my sainted Mother’s people.” He raises his hands. “May the peace of the Mother be always with you!” 

As one, the congregation says, “And also with you.”

“Peace,” says Surma, turning to the side and offering his hand. 

“Peace.” Floch finds a smile warming his face. He shakes the boy’s hand firmly and says, “At last, hm?”

“Yes, sir.” Surma nods, but the boy is too serious to smile. He’ll make a fine officer in the near future, which is largely why Floch persuaded him to come today. This service is the first matter of state that isn’t purely business, and bolstering their relationship with the church can only serve them well. 

Floch claps him on the shoulder. “Make friends. I’ll be greeting the queen.”

“Yes, sir.”

Floch steps out of the pew, fighting the burning sting in his shoulder as he walks briskly to the crowd gathering to pay their respects to Historia and the princess. In this situation specifically, Floch does have to interact with her before Eren. 

When casts a glance at where Eren is standing, he’s disappointed but unsurprised to see that he’s made no move to step out and greet his people. Instead, he’s crushing Mikasa Ackerman’s fingers in something that only barely resembles a handshake, face carved in an expression of deadly intensity. 

Floch’s eye twitches. 

Predictably, the pair of them pay no attention as the princess’s grandparents and uncles slip from the aisle and rush over to the royal family. Floch follows after, powering through the ache in his chest where that feral mainlander runt shot him. 

The prince consort’s family seems to serve as a temporary buffer. The gathered lords and ladies are unsure of how to approach farmfolk, keeping in conversations with their neighbors longer than they otherwise might have. Lacking such doubts, Floch joins the large, newly-forged family as they exchange handshakes and hugs. The princess’s grandparents—one Dorian and Lina Wyss, if he’s not wrong—step aside easily to make room for him. Meek as sheep, these farmfolk are, and completely out of their depth. Floch isn’t entirely unsympathetic—God knows it took him long enough to find his own spine—but he doesn’t have any reason to pander to their timidity now. 

“Peace.” He offers his hand to Mr. Wyss and then his wife, accepting their own utterances with polite nods. They step back, into the space of Pave Gideon on his own way towards the larger congregation and fall in with him; while the prince consort endures pats on the back from his brothers, Floch faces Historia. 

With as decent a bow as he can manage, biting through the discomfort, he says, “Peace be with you, Your Grace.” 

“And also with you, Mr. Forster.” Historia doesn’t offer her hand, but then she’s bouncing her newborn gently, trying to hush her feeble cries. 

It’s the first time he’s seen the child himself, so he adds, “She’s a beautiful little girl.”

“I know.” She smacks a kiss on the princess’s head. “How’s your shoulder treating you?”

He shrugs the uninjured one. “I can’t complain. I’m sure you had it worse with the birthing.”

She gives one flat laugh. “I’m sure. Well, I won’t complain either.”

“And how could you?” he says. “With a bundle of joy like that?”

She hums an affirmative, beginning to sway back and forth. The princess is calming, worming her scrunched little face deeper into her mother’s neck. “I’d do it all again,” she says, looking at her daughter with unfiltered adoration. “I’m sure we all would. What you said yesterday about sacrifice—I think we all understood that.”

“Some more than others.” Floch takes a half-step to turn, looking again to where the corner where Eren remains. He’s let go of Ackerman’s fingers only to wrap his arm around her waist again, which is infinitely worse. Floch takes in a measured breath and says, “Truthfully, I was borrowing Eren’s words there.”

Historia raises her eyebrows. “Poetic of him,” she says, somewhere between amused and impressed. “You know, he really is a good speaker, but it always catches me by surprise when he does. It’s hard for me to make that fit with the rest of his personality.”

Deep, fervent admiration swirls in Floch’s chest, just beside his bullet wound. “He’s a man of many talents.”

“Hm. Indeed.” The queen has followed his gaze over to the errant couple in the corner, but she looks on them with soft eyes. 

Mikasa has the grace to at least pretend at decency, observing the peace calmly. It’s a moot point as her mere presence here is obscene, but other than the vibrant, bloody stain of her treachery, Ackerman is mostly one to mind her manners. Eren, on the other hand, isn’t making any effort at all to pretend he’s paying attention to his own court and cabinet other than to cast dark glances up, the air of a soldier scanning for threats thick about him, before returning his focus to fairer sights. 

His eyes slide from her profile down to her tits, again . After a beat, he seems to catch himself, looking away with a tense jaw, following the same pattern he’s been in for the last hour.

Quietly, Historia says, “Look at them. Does it look like either of them got any sleep last night?”

A biting remark bubbles on the tip of Floch’s tongue, but he won’t voice it to the queen—certainly not in front of a child, and certainly not in a church. He knows she was referring to the fact that both of them still look… ill, and that the first thing that came to his mind was bawdy barrack japes is a poor reflection of himself. Instead, he shakes his head and says, “I imagine they’re both overreached. In different ways. I think the whole of the island has been in for a string of sleepless nights, but things are settling, now. That should help.”

“I hope so.” Her tone is mournful. “Poor Mikasa’s been through enough this past week without adding sleep deprivation on top of it.”

Mikasa, his thoughts echo, incredulous; his bad shoulder throbs hotly. Struggling to find anything polite, he manages to say, “She’ll pull through, I’m sure.”

“Oh, so am I.” Historia strokes the princess’s wispy tufts of hair. “She’s tough as anything, but still.” She shrugs. “Maybe it’s just my new mother hormones, but…” Her face goes through a flurry of emotions, then, and Floch won’t pretend to understand what rapidly shifting line of thought leads her to say, “She’s wearing my sister’s dress, you know?”

He did not, though he had wondered how in the world a gown certainly worth more than his taxes had cost had wound up on Eren’s—paramour. 

They are still in a church.

But that does make sense. Before her death, Historia’s oldest half-sister had been the true Queen of the Walls, and while the current queen is the first Reiss to rule openly, the family has always had resources. Freida Reiss would have been able to have a dress soaked in indigo with spun silver embroidering; if Queen Historia wants to honor her memory by throwing her clothes at Mikasa Ackerman, Floch supposes nobody can stop her. 

Unsure how to respond to her non sequitur, Floch tries, “It suits her.”

Historia gives a small, unreadable smile. She presses her cheek to the princess’s head and says, “Doesn’t it just?”

It’s then that a bony hand reaches between them. “Peace be with you, Your Grace,” says the reedy voice of an elderly lady he can’t put a name to, and Floch steps back, aware that his time with the queen is up. He extricates himself from the flock of nobles and officers surrounding the royal family, and crosses the distance to the actual power at the heart of their nation. 

Of the world, he amends. Privately, he lets himself be dazzled by it. The only power in all the world. He really did it. 

“Peace be with you,” he says, thrusting out his hand for Eren.

“Yeah.” Eren grasps his fingers, squeezes once, and lets go. “And you.” 

There’s simply no way to avoid greeting her, so Floch keeps a cool smile on his face as he extends his hand to Mikasa. “Peace.”

“Peace,” she returns faintly, shaking his hand up and down, her slim fingers dainty and cold. Carefully, she says, “It’s good to see that you’re well.” 

Ah. Rather than get creative and try to dance around like they weren’t actively trying to kill each other last they met, she just stops there, after that outright lie. “And you, of course,” he says, equally sincere. “You had us all worried for a few days there.”

Eren’s hand visibly tightens on her waist. Ackerman is clutched against his side in a way that suggests Eren is partially holding her up, which makes satisfaction and frustration tangle hopelessly in Floch’s chest. 

Mikasa doesn’t respond, so Floch considers his diligence done. To Eren, he says, “I told you this wouldn’t be so bad, didn’t I?”

“Something like that.” His broad thumb strokes up and down over Ackerman’s ribs. “You also said it should’ve stopped raining by now.”

“Between evening today and tomorrow morning, I said. I’m hoping for earlier; I hate riding through mud.”

“You could always postpone the trip,” he points out. 

Floch shrugs. “No need. The weather won’t hinder us terribly, and we’ve all gone through worse than three nights camping in the rain. The faster we get the damage surveyed, the faster we can assess how to fix it and put the land to use. Find out if there’s a place for those coffee beans to grow, eh?”

Eren raises one eyebrow. “In the ditch left where Wall Maria was?”

He shrugs again—even not moving his bad shoulder causes it to sting, and he has to suppress a wince. “You never know. Might have uncovered a hot spring, up in the mountains. We’ll report back. Unless,” he says, “you’ve given any more thought to coming along—”

“No.”

“Then you’ll just have to take our word for it.”

“You haven’t let me down yet,” Eren says drily. Pride lights up all along his insides, and Floch preens. “I’ve got stuff to do here, and I’m tired of traveling. You understand.”

“Of course I do,” he assures. “We won’t suffer too terribly without you.”

“God forbid.” Eren draws a breath as though to continue, but his attention catches on something over Floch’s shoulder. He turns to follow his gaze, and ducks his head respectfully for Pave Gideon, who must have finally freed himself from the parishioners.

“Gentlemen,” he says. He raises one wrinkled, liver-spotted hand like a pledge. “The Mother’s peace be upon you.”

“And you, Pave.”

Eren briefly lifts his free hand in a wave and sighs.

“It’s been a lovely service,” Floch tells him. “Especially on such short notice.”

“Thank you, lad,” the Pave says. “You’ll have to return. The next regular service is Wednesday evening. We’d be glad to see you.”

“Ah,” Floch says. “I’ll be on a surveying trip of the outer districts then; we don’t get back until Thursday morning. Next week, though, and perhaps after that.”

“Do try.” With that, he turns to Eren. “Sir,” he says carefully. “I wondered if I might have a moment with you?”

“That’s fine,” Eren says. His thumb is stroking over Mikasa’s ribs. Ackerman, meanwhile, still looks remarkably blank-faced. She’s always been a stoic one.

A long beat, and then the Pave adds, “Alone, sir. If you wouldn’t mind.”

Eren’s mouth twitches—for just an instant, it almost resembles a snarl—and then cold imperiousness smoothes over his features. “Is that necessary? I consider both Mr. Forster and Mikasa confidants of mine.”

“Eren.” Mikasa’s voice is lilting soft, unique backwater accent never more present than when she says his name. “Go on. I’m sure he has questions for you.”

“Mikasa—”

“I’m not six years old,” she says firmly. They’re standing so close together that she has little choice but to look at him through her lashes. There’s a sapphire pin twinkling behind her ear, doing nothing to keep her choppy bangs out of her face; Floch wonders whose grave was robbed for that. For this girl, out of every woman in the world. “I’ll be fine, Eren.”

For an uncomfortable moment, Floch and the Pave watch their intense eye contact. Eren’s jaw tightens to the point of breaking—and then he says, “Fine.” He pulls his hand off her waist and balls both of his hands into white-knuckled fists, an expression of intense consideration crossing his face, and then, with steely determination and a pointed deliberateness, he leans forward, cups the back of her head, and kisses her temple.

He’s out of the pew and stalking away in the next second, leaving the baffled Pave to rush after in him a flap of purple. Floch’s head swings after both of them, blinking and incredulous. Mikasa, for her part, looks outright stricken. 

Her eyes are enormous, void black in the candlelight, face gone white as a ghost. Her hands—small and fine, at the ends of bony wrists; unfitting, given how much his own men’s blood is on them—jerk up to clasp over heart, knuckles pulling tight. Her shoulders are drawn in, the lines of her neck and collarbone standing out starkly. She stares after Eren’s retreating form as though he’d just gutted her. 

A poor start, he thinks, fighting a sneer.

Eren and Pave Gideon come to a stop near the reader’s lectern some meters away, in a rectangle of light falling through the windows. There’s the same raw awe on the Pave’s face that Floch felt when he saw, through the window of the train to port, the rosy-gold light of dawn illuminating the Wall Titans marching off to war. It’s nothing less than what Eren has earned, and Floch is glad to see it. For all the respect Eren commands, so much of it, especially by civilians, is fueled by fear. Not that that’s undeserved either—his wrath is famous, and his power is nothing short of godlike. But the light in the eyes of the Church’s high priest is wholly born of devotion, and that’s good to see. 

The bulk of the churchgoers are still gathered around the royal family. He can barely pick out the top of Prince Wilhelm’s head, and Historia, of course, has been completely swallowed. Despite all the chattering and the grumbling and the attention paid to the family at the center of this sunset service, eyes still wander. Over to Eren; over to them. Curious, curious eyes, straining to see the convicted traitor come to mass on Eren Jaeger’s arm.

Mikasa isn’t paying the cautious stares of the crowd any attention. Her dark eyes are wide and fixed on Eren, luminous with tears. Looking back to him, Eren is stiff as a board, the fingers that had cupped her hair moving restlessly by his leg. 

Floch nearly sighs. Nearly screams. For a brief second, he nearly wants to rip out his hair. Then he says, calmly, to Mikasa, “I hope you’ve been comfortable.” His mouth twists. “My lady.”

It takes another beat for Mikasa to look at him. She blinks rapidly, dispelling the unshed tears, and shudders violently. She shakes tension out of her frame like a wet dog drying off. It only half-works. She swallows, but her voice is still faint when she says, “I’m fine.” She inhales deeply and drops her hands, pulling her fingers over the ends of her sleeves. “And you don’t have to call me that, Floch.”

“Hm.” He glances sharply in Eren’s direction. “We do, though. Eren made that clear.”

Mikasa doesn’t respond, eyes wandering to the Wings of Freedom on his back. She’s gathering herself well enough. If Floch wasn’t so familiar with her—they were never really friends, but he saw her around plenty, always trailing after Eren—he wouldn’t be able to see through the show she’s putting on with this much clarity. Under her mask, the girl is exhausted and in pain, and for frigid Mikasa to be this close to tears, she must be deeply miserable.

She killed fourteen of his men at the port. Let her weep.

“Thoughtful of him, isn’t it?” he prods. “I doubt there’s ever been a hostage as well-kept as you.”

That catches her attention. She blinks; actually focuses on him for the first time when she says, “Excuse me?”

“It’s hollow enough, of course,” he goes on. “Just a convenient label for now. I’m sure you don’t need me to go over it again.”

“No,” she says, in such a way that tells him this is the first she’s heard of this. And why wouldn’t it be? Of course it would simply slip Eren’s mind to mention. Truly, the label doesn’t mean anything. They’re calling her a hostage, but everyone knows what she really is. 

The silence is tense; Floch lets it be. He feels no need to try and put her at ease. To her credit, Mikasa doesn’t flinch. Her face has yet to regain any color, from effort now, not emotion, but her expression doesn’t crack. “What about you, though?” she says. “Was it comfortable where you recovered, after they fished your body out of the ocean?”

His smile goes brittle. “It served. I’m a soldier. I don’t need the luxuries of a palace.”

Mikasa’s eyebrows raise. “So was I.”

“Of course,” he says. “And I’m sure you’d be just as comfortable at Braus Stables with Jean and Armin and the rest.”

Her gaze flickers down to her hands, now folded loosely and resting low on her stomach. “I’m sure,” she echoes. 

***

“I had—questions for you. Sir. If that’s quite alright with you.”

“Let’s do this fast,” Eren says, words running over each other. His mouth burns, and his hand, and his heartbeat pounds violently through his chest. That, he’s thinking, blood rushing loud in his ears, was a mistake. That was too far. 

Guilt rocks through him, twisting his stomach in knots. For the—for that, and, too, because—he didn’t even really do it for her. He knew that she would tolerate it at best, but he did it anyway to make a point. To Floch, to the priest, to all the people in the crowd watching them. And that’s not a good enough reason to cross that line. 

“Well,” says the priest, hesitant. “I have, ah, rather an exhaustive list, sir. I was hoping to request a time to speak, that we could make this a longer discussion—”

“Ask,” Eren says, “your questions.”

“Ah…”

The priest is an elderly man, a head shorter than Eren with a shock of neatly-combed white hair. His face is lined with years, and the weight of the gold and tassels thrown around his shoulders has bowed them to a permanent stoop. There’s Maria, Rose, and Sina on his collar, crowned like empresses or war goddesses, looking absolutely nothing like they actually did, and twice as old. Sina died younger than Eren is now, her children babes in arms. That much is standard, but there’s a new addition of a pendant of Ymir’s Founding form, as imagined by the church, and a woven depiction of a great tree. This man, thinks Eren, knows something of the truth. 

He straightens. “Very well. To speak plainly: did you ever speak to Our Lady Ymir Móðir?”

“She didn’t really talk much,” Eren says flatly. Just carried her bucket endlessly, wishing, wishing, wishing, waiting two thousand years for a girl only to ruin her grand design to indulge a moment of jealousy. And hurt Mikasa. 

The priest looks bowled over, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. “You… you did, then?”

“I spoke to her. She listened. Never said anything back.”

“Then…” His voice is faint and tremulous. “You… our great mother… what was she… like? ”

An eight-year-old girl in rags, who thought mothers giving away their children for the hope of survival were worth scorn. Eren grits his teeth. “Hurt and angry. I was the one controlling the Wall Titans’ march, and she was the one fighting.”

“So she did want it, then?” The words come out with a great heave of relief. “It was her will?”

“It was mine.” He rubs his fingers against themselves, wondering if they’d carry the smell of whatever Mikasa put in her hair. His back is turned to her, and even though the hairs on his neck stand tall with alarm, that’s probably for the best. He’s not sure he could stand to see her expression. “She went along happily. I gave her a choice, and she chose that.”

The priest puts a hand over his heart, trembling faintly. “It’s a relief to hear that, my lord.”

Eugh. 

“We had suspected,” he continues, “But, by God, it’s beyond a miracle that you can answer for her definitively. Could you… would you be able to speak with her again?”

A shadow crosses in front of the window. “No.” Eren’s mouth twists. “No, she moved on somewhere else.” The poor old man looks like he might have a heart attack at that. It doesn’t make a difference at this point, but Eren would really rather he doesn’t drop dead at his feet. To placate, he says, “She wanted to be with her children. Her covenant with her husband was fulfilled, and—” he swallows, “—her people were safe. She slaved away for an eternity in the Paths. I think she earned her rest.”

There are tears in the old man’s eyes. “Of course she did,” he says. “And—she’s with us still, always. Somewhere new, maybe; without the same line of contact, but I have faith. She wouldn’t leave us wholesale.” He smiles tremulously. “And she left us in good hands, did she not?”

Eren thinks of her final moments, her ghostly hands freezing on his raw cheeks as they flickered between the mouth of his Founding form and the Paths, as all her creatures made of sand crumbled to nothing. He had been so, so confused, wondering why this was happening, why it hadn’t ended —the thought that finally pierced through the haze was that something must have happened to Mikasa, and he had to find her and make sure she was safe. It was only later, during the crossing of the ocean, Mikasa’s shallow, even breathes fanning warm across his neck, that he was able to try and sort through what her final thoughts had been. 

She had left the world they’d made in his hands, and she’d done that knowingly. 

Hlýðir. 

“She made her choice,” Eren says. “I’m doing my best with it.”

“And bless you for it, boy.” He licks his lips. “Mothers make hard choices, to protect their children—”

“I know,” Eren says. He thinks of his mother, kicking and beating her fists against Dina Jaeger—of how it had felt. Awful, awful, awful, awful. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I’m telling you,” he says, “That you should take some comfort in that. Sleep easy knowing that you were only carrying out our mother’s will to keep her children safe.” He reaches out to pat Eren’s hand. “A dutiful son, hm?”

That’s too much. Eren recoils, nausea sweeping through him. “I—” he chokes. “I need to get back to Mikasa.” 

He’s already stepping back as the priest says, “Of course, my lord.” His voice is heavy like drowning when he says, “It’s been a great honor to speak to you.”

***

Eren reappears after another moment, looking agitated. He halts at the front of the pew and grips the poppyhead, looking anywhere but at Mikasa. Her gaze is suddenly fixed on the floor, fingers twisting with each other. 

“Was that productive?” Floch asks. He means the talk with the Pave, but he’s sure it applies to nearly everything about Eren’s behavior as it relates to Mikasa. 

“It was fine,” he bites out. “I’m pretty sure the peace is over now. Start elbowing your way through the crowd.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Alright, then. Eren.” He salutes. He tips his head to Mikasa and says, “My lady,” with as much sarcasm as he dares, and turns on his heel. 

Pave Gideon is working back through the crowd, highly visible in his violet robes and golden necklaces. The congregation catches the sign and beings shuffling back to their seats. When Floch takes his, he notes that Surma is absent; can’t spot the boy anywhere. On the opposite side of where he ought to be, there’s a skinny man in a slate grey suit that speaks of status, and shadows under his eyes that speak of sorrow. Floch vaguely recognizes him from the summit yesterday. With a long way to go yet until the body of the church is settled, he extends his hand. “Peace.”

“Peace,” the man chuffs. His hands are sweaty; Floch very deliberately doesn’t wipe his palm when he retracts it. “Mr. Forster, is it?”

“The same,” he says, pleased to be recognized. “And if I’m not mistaken you would be—” 

“Earl of Nedlay,” he fills in. “Ernst. It’s good to meet you. My grandson wrote very highly of you.”

“Oh.” Floch straightens. “I wasn’t aware we had nobility in our ranks.”

“My daughter’s youngest,” the earl says. “He had military aspirations. Found them after the reclamation of Shiganshina. His mother was aghast, but I told her it’d be good for the boy.” He shakes his head. “He was a good boy as it was. I didn’t need to push him towards it, but he was so inspired…”

The weight of his words lets Floch know that this good, inspired boy is now dead. “I’m sorry for your loss.” 

Ernst waves his hand. “There’s no reason for you to be. He followed you with pride, and his mother and I carry that with us to honor him.”

“That warms my heart, sir. Still, do let me know if there’s anything that I could do to help your family—”

“There is one thing, actually.” The earl’s voice grows colder. “I was wondering if you could explain to me what, exactly, Mikasa Ackerman is doing here, on the arm of our leader, in the house of our God, instead of swinging from a gibbet?”

Floch tenses, inhaling slowly. “I take it your grandson was killed at the port.”

“He died in hospice. It took him three days to go.” His mouth trembles. “All that time, he only seemed to be sorry that he was hurting his mother, and that he wouldn’t see the shape the new nation took.”

Floch runs his tongue over his teeth. He’d fucking warned him. He had told Eren this would come up. Just because nobody is going to say it to his face doesn’t mean nobody is questioning the logic of keeping a convicted traitor as a pet, and Floch is the one who’s going to have to deal with this, because if word of anything like this gets to Eren, Floch is going to have to puzzle out whether or not to go to the funerals of men his leader bit in half.

“A worthy regret,” he says, weighing his words carefully. “And we’ll do our best to make his sacrifice count. But, with all due respect,” Floch’s voice grows stony, “It is very far above your place to question Eren Jaeger. You were present yesterday, I’m sure you remember his stance on this issue, and I sincerely doubt you want him to explain it to you for a second time.”

The matter of the survivors of the effort to kill Eren had been raised exactly once, and the discussion had been over in less than a minute. 

“I have no desire to continue a war I’ve already won,” he’d said. “The surviving Marleyans and members of the Survey Corps have had their Titans stripped from them and laid down their arms; they’re no threat. They’re being detained outside the city, and that will be enough.”

And when some brave soul questioned the rumor that Mikasa was still in the city, Eren had all but grown fangs. The ice in his voice had been enough to freeze the room over, sharp enough to cut them all to the bone. “Mikasa Ackerman remains in the capital as a hostage against Commander Arlert and those who followed him, to ensure their continued good behavior. She’s dearly beloved by them and infinitely more by me, and she’ll be afforded the same respect that I am. Is that,” he said, finally breaking on a snarl, “quite clear?” 

It had been. Very. The chill in the air had never quite cleared after that, and few enough were easy looking Eren in the eye. The sheer menace radiating off him had been more than enough to send the discussion careening back to the topic of the state taking ownership of damaged farmland.

“No,” Ernst says, “But I would hear your thoughts on it, Mr. Forster. You were injured in the same battle, weren’t you?”

His bullet wound throbs. “My thoughts,” he says, “are that Eren Jaeger has earned our faith over and over again. I trust his judgment and his ability to keep the situation level, and you should do the same.” When he casts a glance to the corner, they’re sat down, avoiding each other’s eyes—but the angle of their arms is such that he wouldn’t be surprised if they were holding hands. Even if they aren’t, the tension between them is thick enough to carve, and it isn’t animosity. 

“Jaeger is fond of her,” Floch says. “They’ve known each other nearly all their lives. He’s given everything he has to bring about this new world where our people are safe, and I certainly don’t begrudge him the desire for something familiar amidst all this tumult.”

Ernst still looks unhappy. It would be so inconvenient, he thinks, for this christening to turn into a funeral. 

At best.

“Once again,” Floch says, “it isn’t your place to question him, is that understood? For all the years he’s worked and the pains he’s suffered, I think we can overlook it if he wants a girl to warm his bed, hm?” 

The earl blinks stupidly, just as the opening words of a prayer hush the murmuring churchfolk. Floch hopes that the message has sunk in; hopes this old man will spread the word to his friends.

He leans his back against the bench, letting his shoulder sting. The opening chords of another hymn drift down from the choir loft. 

“Don’t,” Floch hisses, reaching for that same deadly tone that Eren commands so well, “question him again.”

***

The door swings outward, meager light sweeping into the complete darkness of the bedroom. The polished wood reflects the cold glow of the iceburst lanterns that sparsely line the hallway, and the edges of the gold tracery on the wall by Mikasa’s bed glint.

“Fucking freezing in here,” Eren mutters. He leaves Mikasa to lean against the door, both of them pretending she’s not shaking, and kneels by the fireplace. He’s almost glad that it’s out, though. It gives him something to do—and privately, he enjoys being responsible for keeping Mikasa warm. He’s considered that his job since the very first night they met, and it’s something uncomplicated he can do for her. 

He stacks fresh logs over the embers, musing that he remembers doing this in the house he’d dreamed they had. As he fumbles with the matches, his vision is overlaid by a scene of the same thing in a warm wooden cabin, the mountain air thick with the smell of baking bread and sugared strawberries, his bare arms streaked with black soil. For the first time, the doubled vision doesn’t cause him pain. 

He keeps his back turned as she makes her way across the room, not wanting to seem overbearing. He releases a sigh when he hears a muffled thump as she drops on the bed, relieved. When the fire is leaping up the chimney, heat seeping into the air, Eren closes the wire gate and stands.

Mikasa looks like a fairytale princess, ready to sleep for a hundred years. After the service, in the long minutes spent waiting for the church to empty out, Historia had persuaded Mikasa to join her with her in-laws for supper; when that intensely strange meal was wrapped up, she’d dragged her off to ready for bed. Eren had been left to half-listen to the nervous chatter of farmers for, like, forty minutes before the girls came back down, scrubbed clean and wrapped in nightgowns. 

Sitting on the edge of her bed now, Mikasa is pale and lovely in stockings and the same sort of long, loose dress as the one she’d been in this morning, this one with sleeves that cuff at her wrists and a ribbon around the neckline. That double-vision fades in around the edges of his sight again, half-remembering her in something similar, on their bed piled high with quilts from his dream, but still, it doesn’t cause pain to spike along his temples. If anything, it’s like a cool compress—the sort of thing his mom gave him when he was small to soothe fevers. He thinks of the autumn air in the mountains and a girl he was permitted to call sweetheart.

In the orange glow of the hearth, the room looks… warmer, now, than it did. He’d hated this room when he first laid Mikasa down here, sick with terror that she wouldn’t ever wake, but it feels nicer now. He knows it’s only because Mikasa is here, awake , but—is it his fault that she makes everything into a pretty picture? Makes everything feel like home? Eren trails his fingers along the tea table, snagging her pretty robe off the back of the chair and folding it over his arm so it doesn’t drag. When he comes to a stop in front of her and presents it like an offering, Mikasa takes it mutely, without protest. 

She pushes her arms through the sleeves, pulling the sides tight around her. She crosses her arms and buries her fingers into the pale blue silk, but she doesn’t look nervous, at least. Just cold. 

“Is that any good at all?” he asks, casting his voice low so as not to shatter the quiet. The rain patters and the fire rushes, but everything has a hushed quality to it that seems almost peaceful. Mikasa gives him a questioning look, blinking slow, and he clarifies, “For warmth, I mean. It’s pretty thin.”

She shrugs; Eren sits down next to her. It’s time for bed, he knows, and he knows he ought to take a shower and actually change out of these old clothes, but… it’s nicer here. Less risk of falling down the sucking void of terrors and memories when he’s not alone, and Mikasa is the only person who doesn’t annoy him. He should leave her alone to sleep, should spare her having to ask, but—

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m almost always cold anyway. It doesn’t make much difference.”

“We’ve got to get you more blankets,” he mutters. His eyes flit to the scarf on her nightstand, then drags his hand over his jaw. “Do you want me to call for some—”

“No,” she blurts. “I don’t.” She runs her hand over the covers where they’ve been pulled back. Someone, he’s realizing, had been in her room while they were gone and straightened things up. It’s disquieting, but at the same time, he’s glad she has a small army determined to take care of her. It takes a small army to keep her safe from her own stubbornness. 

“Easy,” he says, mild. He casts his eyes up to the ceiling, more or less the same as his own. Terraces and paintings. “The fire should warm up the room soon enough. This place was built with Midland winters in mind, but it translates over.”

Mikasa hums, blinking heavily. God knows she’s too good to just kick him out so she can sleep. Eren is going to have to pry himself out of her bedroom, away from the sweet, sleepy vision she makes now. It should be nothing compared to walking out of that assembly hall in Marley. 

It is not.

He drums his fingers on the bed. “You’re—okay, right? After today? It wasn’t too bad?”

She hums again, nodding. “It was okay. I liked the ceremony, once I started paying attention.” Her fingers tangle together. “And the songs.”

“Hm,” he says. “Good. Glad one of us did.” 

That was meant to be an undertone, but Mikasa catches it. Her head tilts to the side, and she says, “You did seem… angry. At that book.”

He snorts—how very typical of him, really, to be visibly angry at a book —but even now, ire sparks in his chest. His inhale comes sharp and stinging, and he says, “Yeah, well. Every single thing in it is wrong.” His mouth twists. “It’s all about the glory of this loving, benevolent mother goddess, leading her children into righteous battle— God it’s bullshit. It’s—” he cuts himself off. “You don’t want to hear me talking about it.”

Worry has pulled lines around her pretty eyes, confusion bends her brows. It’s a sweet look on her. “And…” she says, puzzling, “how… how do you know that?”

“Told you I could sort of see what Ymir saw, didn’t I? Her life. Bits and pieces of history through her eyes, and through the eyes of every past Founder. Enough to know that nearly everything they’re singing about isn’t true.”

“Oh.” Mikasa’s eyes fall to the floor. Her feet dangle a little; her foot would just brush the hardwood if she pointed her toes. She bites her lip, her white teeth flushing red blood to the surface of her skin. “And… and all that has been in your head? For how long?”

Electricity shoots up his spine, a sort of wild excitement licking at his insides. She’s as good as sunk a hook into his heart and pulled it tight. Eren has never, not once, been able to talk about this with anyone. Even with Armin and Jean, when they’d spoken in the Paths, he hadn’t ever bothered going in depth about it. All of this has been festering inside him for years now, years and years; here and now, when he opens his mouth to speak, the words fall with the weight of boulders. 

“It depends on what you mean,” he says. His fingers tap-tap-tap along the covers. “I’ve had flashes of my father’s memories, and Frieda Reiss’s, and Eren Krueger’s, since around Shiganshina. After the basement. It’s…” For a flash he hesitates, then thinks, oh, fuck it. “The Attack Titan, it was—all nine of them are aspects of what Ymir was or wanted to be. The Attack Titan was the part of her that wanted to be free. Since it was meant to fight against the king, the extra power that it had was that you could see the memories of the inheritors who’d come after you, not just before you. So—” he blazes forward, ignoring the startled look that crosses her face. “I’ve had—a lot—of memories of my own, that hadn’t happened yet. It’s—I don’t know if I can explain it, really, but it’s, it’s made my head a mess, these past four years. There was stuff from the future and stuff from the past, and sometimes I couldn’t tell which was which. A lot of the time. Sometimes I would dream something and I couldn’t tell if it was real and had just gotten lost in the shuffle, or just a nightmare, and I’d be losing it for days trying to figure out which. It got worse when I was in Marley, worse when I came back, and now, it’s…” He bites the inside of his cheek. Thick, hot emotion is bubbling in his chest, but he couldn’t put a name to it. “It’s just a big mess, Mikasa.”

And she’s kind to him. The confusion writ on her face bleeds away to pure sympathy—her glossy eyes, her bitten lip. She says, “That sounds painful,” in a voice as soft and sweet as spun sugar, honey in her eyes. Eren loves her, and he loves her for it. 

That hook she’s sunk into his heart—she sunk it in the very first night they met; he wonders if she knows that—pulls tight, painful , but it’s good. It’s good. It’s a relief to hear someone say that. To acknowledge that yes, this has been painful. It’s been hard to carry all this. It’s hurt, but he did it anyway. He doesn’t expect her to thank him for it, but her just knowing is enough. 

He won’t ever let her carry his burdens, that’s been the whole point, but—he doesn’t have much left that he’s bothering to hide from her. It hasn’t been like that since they were children. God, but she always makes him feel better, these days. If he could—if he could— he doesn’t know. It’s late, and they’re both tired.

Hlýðir. He lifts one shoulder as casually as he can. “‘One endures.’” 

Neither of them had ever set foot in a church before today, but it’s a lesson they know to their bones.

“Anyway.” He clears his throat. “All that to say that—I know a lot about that book. I could probably recite it if I had to. And I know that everything they wrote about a girl chosen by God to lead her people to glory through righteous conquest is a lie. So it was just— incongruous —to hear a lot of what was said in church today.”

“And that’s why your head hurts,” she finishes. 

“Part of it.” He’s in no mood to bring them any closer to the subject of Rumbling than they are. “Most of it.” She still looks worried, sweet girl, so he adds, “It’s been settling the past couple of days. You were lucky you were out for a lot of that; I was plain incoherent most of the time. Today just happened to press on the bruise.”

Mikasa nods. She’s pulling on her fingertips as if fiddling with a ring; her habit of toying with the end of her scarf translated over. Of its own volition, his hand floats up to the side of her face, fingertips touching the soft hair just above her ear. Mikasa stills but doesn’t quite stiffen, and doesn’t pull away. 

Eren doesn’t bother trying to combat the warm satisfaction that comes from that. It’s the fault of the firelight, he’s sure—he spent so long looking at her in the church that it feels novel in here again. Be it the burnt golden glow or the way she’s sitting half-turned toward him, or just the way she’s dressed, something about her is reminding him of those yellowed photos the men in the infantry used to carry, tucked into lockets and watches. Pictures of their girlfriends and wives; a couple of brides who rushed to the altar just hours before their husbands’ deployment. 

Eren would have liked to have a picture of Mikasa for himself. He would have liked keeping it in the breast pocket of his undershirt, warm and secure over his heart. He could have told the men in his unit about his childhood sweetheart, about how he proposed to her before he had to leave.

Wouldn’t have needed to tell them she said no.  

His gut twists at the reminder, but his eyelids are heavy, half-lidded. The room has warmed now, and Mikasa’s skin is warming up under his touch. She doesn’t blush, which he finds himself mourning, but the glow from the fireplace kisses her cheeks and ghosts over the bruises under her shining eyes. Dark shadows dance along her throat, in the hollows of her collarbones, on the skin under her hair. If he could have had any image of her preserved in a photograph to carry with him into hell, he would’ve picked this one. It would’ve belonged in museums and storybooks; in the stained glass of a thousand cathedrals.

When she speaks, her voice has crept down to a whisper. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”

“I’ll be alright,” he says, idle. He is sure that it will come easy enough; maybe if he keeps this vision of her in his mind, he’ll even be able to stave off nightmares. His thumb slides over the purple skin beneath her eyes, her long eyelashes brushing against his nail. Her blinks are coming heavier, her breath coming slow. He knows it’s time for him to go, so he pets at her hair and says, “And you look ready to sleep for a century.”

Mikasa blinks; raises her eyebrows. He can feel the skin of her temple shift with the movement. “Do I?”

Without thinking, he says, “You look beautiful.”

The shadows flicker. The air grows cold once more. 

Mikasa turns away from him then, his hand falling away. Her hands drop limp in her lap, eyes on the floor, all of their shine gone. Ropes of dread snake around Eren’s heart, beginning already to squeeze when Mikasa says, with a voice like a dull blade, “You don’t have to do that, you know.”

It’s much worse to be cut with a dull knife. Everyone knows that. Eren’s blood pulses heavily through his veins, crying danger, danger, danger, and his own words come out flat: “Do what.”

“Say things like that.” 

“That wasn’t even affectionate,” he says. “That was objective.”

Mikasa’s mouth works tremulously. “You,” she says, “have never called me pretty. Not once in my life. Unless,” she swallows, “you count the, I don’t know, the second night after I moved in with you, when you climbed into my bed and woke me up from a nightmare and told me I was pretty when I cried.”

“You are,” he says. She flinches with her entire body; he hears the whimper caught in her throat when she tenses her leg. Why is that — “I don’t usually comment on the sky being up, Mikasa.”

“You’ve never said anything like that before,” she says. “You don’t need to start now. With—with any of that.”

“Any of what?” he says, bewildered. “Mikasa, I’m sorry, I’m trying not to—waterboard you here, but what are you talking about?”

She turns back to him, and now there’s a flush on her cheeks, but it doesn’t spell anything good. “You have never felt that way about me,” she says. “This—how you’re acting, what you’re saying—you don’t need to.”

Is another fucking earthquake happening? Is he having a stroke? Is she? What the fuck is she going on about? “Acting like what?” he demands. “Felt what?”

With a jerky motion, she gestures to her temple. “You’re not—” she says, and her breath hitches, “you’re not—in love with me. I don’t need you to pretend to be.”

“Pretend to be,” he echoes. A manic laugh rises in his throat, horrible and bitter, hahaha —before he cuts himself off. He didn’t hear her right, surely—not with how his head is suddenly ringing, like he’s inside a belltower at noon. “Sorry— fucking pretend to be?”

“I’m not—”

“I’m,” he snaps, “not goddamn —Mikasa, what the fuck are you fucking talking about. I’ve been pretty fucking obvious about it.”

“When?” Her hands clasp together under her ribs again, pulling at her fingertips. She really ought to be wearing his fucking scarf—clearly a chill has addled her fucking brain. “Before the past couple of days, now that I’m alone here, everyone else left me —”

His insides wrench violently at the sight of tears glimmering in her eyes; very little of his sudden anger clears. It’s only that raw, bloody hurt has joined the churning in his gut. He has to reach for gentleness when he says, “Mikasa, I told you, they didn’t leave you, they just had to leave. I—Didn’t Armin write you a letter? What the hell did he say?”

“This isn’t about Armin!” she cries.

Fucking no it is not, he agrees. Still—the way she said that, he has to ask— “You know that they all love you too, right?”

“Don’t —” she breaks off. She inhales shakily—in pain. He cannot believe, for anything at all, that this is an argument they’re having. 

“Come on,” he says. He does not succeed entirely in keeping the venom out of his voice; he really can’t help it. He has laid the world at her feet three times over now—how is it his fault she hasn’t noticed? “Mikasa, I fucking asked to marry you when we were nine. I promised you forever when we were fifteen. When I—” he sputters; takes a deep breath. He presses his tongue against the sharp edges of his teeth, his heartbeat kicking faster, and says, “Mikasa, what do you think you are to me?”

“A hostage, apparently.” Her voice trembles, and she won’t meet his eyes. 

“A—” Eren scrambles to place where in the fuck she could have gotten that idea. Where —? Oh. He bats the word away. “You’re not a hostage,” he says. “Or a prisoner. You—you know that you can—that I wouldn’t—” His teeth stick together. He can’t make himself say it again. He told her once already that she could leave if she wanted, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to fucking remind her. He wouldn’t stop her, but he isn’t going to put that idea in her head. “It’s the same as saying the others are in exile. It wasn’t safe for you to travel, so we had to—it’s a meaningless label, Mikasa, it’s just so people can’t say—anything.”

He won’t remind her that there were people calling for her execution, either. 

Her hands, covered by the loose sleeves of her robe, drag across her eyes. Eren would saw his leg off again right now if she’d let him be the one to do that. She’d allowed his touch moments before, but that was when it was for him, when he was the one taking comfort from that, and she was half-asleep then, before he frightened her awake. 

“Okay,” she sniffs. Something in her chest sounds shattered. “Okay. Fine.”

“Tell me you believe that, Mikasa.”

She shakes her head, hiding behind her sleeves, but Eren knows the gesture doesn’t automatically mean no when she’s upset like this. Whatever she’s feeling right now, she doesn’t yet want to put it into words. Eren has to take a breath and remember that time to collect herself is the least of what she deserves. 

Still, though. Fire licks at his chest. Mikasa is fucking smart enough to know all this, and if she doesn’t understand, it’s because she’s choosing not to. 

Eventually, her hands drop; her eyes follow them doen to her lap. “You… you care about me,” she says. “I know that. As much as you’re able to. But that’s not—it’s never been —like that. I’ve never asked you for anything more than letting me be around. Don’t try to give it now.”

A blunt pain bites at his palms, nearly imperceptible for the roaring in his ears. “As much,” he repeats, the words muffled under a suffocating wave of barbed-wire feelings , “as I’m able to?”

She shakes her head, hair swaying. “After what you did —” Her voice breaks. “After—everything I saw, when I was following your army—I just can’t believe that you— you’re —” 

Tears roll down her cheeks, fat and shining. Eren tracks their progression, dragging his tongue over his teeth until he tastes blood. “What.” From far away, he thinks, I was right. She is pretty when she cries. “I’m not capable of love?”

She presses her hand over her mouth, shaking her head. No, again— no, no, and it sounds like family. “Please—” she sobs, “—get out of my room—”

“Gladly,” he spits, lurching away as if possessed. He understands not being able to bear what his love for her has done, understands if she never wants to look at him again, but denying it outright — fucking everything he’s done, all their lives, from the moment they met —

And because he loves her, he won’t risk staying. He might say something he’d regret, like the fact that what he did —in no small part for her —only happened because she couldn’t take her fucking foot out of her mouth in time to stop him. Just because she’s being unfair to him doesn’t mean he’ll repay that in kind. “Get some sleep,” he tells her. “Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning.”

He slams the door behind him. Mikasa, ever reserved, ever considerate, same as the stupid little girl she’d been a decade and a lifetime ago, is crying quietly enough that he can’t hear, and Eren counts himself lucky for it.

***

Mikasa presses her eyes into the sweet-smelling pillow that must, by now, know the taste of her tears. She clutches it against her chest as if it could relieve the pressure, which loosens but never lifts, makes her feel pinned, trapped. Stupid, she thinks, stupid stupid stupid stupid little girl, why is this what you’re crying over? Eren killed more people than the mind can fathom, and she’s upset about—about—she—she doesn’t even know. Not that. Not in the way she should be, not right now. She can’t begin to untangle today—yesterday—the past week, everything, everything she saw and felt and did, she just can’t. It’s all too new, too sharp, and her mind simply can’t process it all with any rationality. Words won’t form, let alone reason, just a storm that builds and builds, bearing her away. 

Slowly, she drifts farther and farther from her body; from this bed. She never does quite stop crying. Her battered heart rattles in her chest with each shudder, but it doesn’t take long until exhaustion catches her. She’s such easy prey, after all. 

Soon enough, it all slips away, tucked under the skirts of dreamless sleep.

And then:

***

She can feel his hands. 

Mikasa sits with a spine of military-grade steel. The air is cold through her borrowed nightgown and robe, cold enough to sting despite the sunlight streaming through the windows, tinted by the buttercream curtains. It smells of dust and salt and candlewax, and blood.

In her periphery, there is a boy with golden hair, joints creaking as pressure mounts. There is a little girl shaking so badly her knees knock with pitifully small sounds. Mikasa cannot turn her head to look at either of them. 

This scene, this room, this moment, has trailed her since it happened. A haunting. The ghost rakes cold nails down her back and shrieks death in her ears when she’s found quiet; strikes when she’s weighed down by other, bloodier memories, to kick her while she’s down. 

“Mikasa.”

Her name comes as a blow. She’s unable to so much as brace for it, let alone try to deflect. Her legs, swallowed by the heavy white fabric of the tablecloth, are caught in terrible jaws, being gnawed at with thousands of tiny teeth. This room is a beast, this memory is; it eats her slowly, carefully. 

At the head, Eren sits across from her, sharklike, apathetic. Both of his hands are seeping blood. His mouth shapes words that rattle through her head and bury themselves deep into her. Her mind stumbles over the familiarity of his voice — surely he can’t be talking to her this coldly, not about her. “Ever since we were kids…”

She shakes her head —no, no, please don’t— but she cannot move. 

Eren is sitting in front of her, his hands flat on the table, rivulets of blood trickling from either palm, flowing towards her like rivers. But, too, his hands are on her, gentle, and smooth, and as red-hot as cattle brands. Keeping her in place. Making her watch.

He stands behind her chair, near enough that she can feel the heat and solidity of him, though she can’t see any part of him, not even where she can make out the shape of his nails. One of his hands is knotted in her hair; holding her in such a way that it doesn’t hurt, but that tender touch will bite if she turns her head. The other is gripping her waist, fingers slotted between her ribs, the pressure mild but precise. 

She can’t turn away. 

There is so much venom in his voice, so much disgust and contempt. It’s easy to believe him when he says, “I’ve always hated you.”

A knife twists, splitting her open. Her heart slips out with a sobbing gasp, and Mikasa begins to dissolve.

Just out of sight, Armin erupts. He leaps over the table, and Mikasa tries to surge after him, the instinct to stop them from hurting each other etched into her bones, but Eren’s hands tighten, quicksilver-fast and careful. His knuckles run absently over her hair in tiny back-and-forth movements, just enough to feel. Mikasa shrinks into the touch despite herself, trying, as best she can, to take shelter from this storm.

The sounds of Eren hitting Armin, beating her dearest friend to the floor, are too awful to bear. Blood splatters — on Eren’s balled hands, blurred with speed, on the fine white tablecloth, on Mikasa’s fine white nightgown. 

Armin’s shout echoes, but it’s Eren’s words she hears. 

I’ve always hated you,

The pools he bled onto the table continue to spread, rushing at her with the speed of an army on the march. She can’t move, pull her hands back, and within a blink, Eren’s blood is warm on her fingertips. Coating her hands.

I’ve always hated you,

The words twist around like constricting vines, and they pin her in place, too. They cut her open, cut her through, and she would be falling apart in ribbons if Eren wasn’t keeping her secure.

I’ve always hated you.

The room grows ever colder. Teeth drag along her legs as blood seeps into her hands. The sound of fists on flesh fills this sunlit room, and the echoing ugly words, all of it swirling to a blur as tears warp her vision. Everything is trapped in her head, no escape. Eren’s hands singe her skin, and his blood on her hands is thick and warm, but she’s still — so cold. 

***

Eren wakes up angry. At the world, at Mikasa, at himself. 

He lays on his back, head on pillows stuffed with down, in a bed that is far, far too big for one person. His hands tremble and his chest blazes, and his breathing comes with difficulty. The gate over his fireplace keeps most of the light out, so it’s the window that allows him to see. Sickly moonlight makes it through the dispersing clouds. The rain has finally stopped. 

It does not seem a good omen. 

He knows what he did. Mikasa might be the person on earth who suffered the most for the Rumbling. Not counting the oceans of dead—or himself, if he ever would. What he put her through in Liberio and in that restaurant, what Ymir had done to her, the world she’s found herself in, all of it. He’s the last person who needs all the ways he’s been awful to her laid out.

And because of that, he’s sure that it’s unfair to be angry with her; keeps trying to tell himself that, but—she’s one of the smartest fucking people he knows. For her not to believe something as obvious as that, it’s just willful ignorance. Playing dumb. 

Darkness churns in his gut. He’s in no position to demand anything of her, but some honesty with herself wouldn’t go amiss. 

When he glances over at the clock in his room, it tells midnight. He got maybe two hours of sleep before waking, and while his head feels no clearer, sleep feels far away. 

And for what, he thinks, chest rising and falling hard. He can’t believe that Mikasa doesn’t think he’s capable of — He’s not even human to her anymore—

His legs swing out of bed. There’s a thrumming in his blood, urgent emotion, and he needs to move. He cannot stand this fucking room.

Eren grabs his own robe off of one of the eight hundred thousand tables , shoving his bare arms through the sleeves. He built a fire for himself; it’s not cold, it’s just—this isn’t his house. It is , he guesses, at least for now, but—this isn’t his home. He’s restless, and he’s not going to wander shirtless through these strange halls like an idiot.

He shoves open his door and storms into the hallway, gone dark now. The iceburst lights only give off a faint glow, just enough to see by, as Eren stalks down to the end of the hall, one hand gripping at his own hair, the polished wood cold against his bare feet.

He’s not even fucking human to her anymore, and can he blame her for it? That had been his fucking goal. He was meant to die as that skeletal Titan, barely recognizable at all. He wanted to become an inhuman monster—unleash his rage upon the world; set the people he loved up as heroes who put down a mad dog. And still—he’s the only person left on the planet who has anything at all that might qualify him as less than human, or more than. How could he be mad at her for buying into that? 

But —Mikasa isn’t some fucking stranger, only hearing of him through horror stories carried over the ocean. She knows him. Better than anybody else. She’s seen the very best of him, because she has always, always inspired the best of him. If there’s anything human left of him, it’s her.

His hand pulls at his hair until the roots sting. Mikasa is his only remaining connection to the world. He’ll do what he can for Armin and the rest—of his friends, of his people—but he said his goodbyes, and he can, he can, accept that they will never want to see him again. But he didn’t get that with Mikasa, and—she’s the only one who might ever be able to move past what he did. 

He won’t be able to ever put down new roots. Wouldn't even want to try. What he’s done to himself so that he could unleash the Rumbling, and the shape of the world he made, there’s nothing and no one here for him. Mikasa is his only connection, and his only chance. 

And she hasn’t put her scarf back on. Won’t even touch it. 

This is why he didn’t plan on fucking surviving. Eren comes to a stop at the end of the hallway, where the walkway over the gallery begins, and grabs the railing tightly. This—it all—it hurts. 

If Mikasa couldn’t have the decency to kill him, she could at least—

Eren shakes the thought away, inhaling deeply. It’s cold and blue out here. Ghostly. He shivers, remembering, remembering, remembering—the Paths, as could be expected. Its thrum had been his dream; somehow at once more peaceful than his nightmares and more unsettling. The emptiness and the aching, straining urgency —he doesn’t like it. 

God knows he doesn’t like being alone. 

He digs his nails into the wood of the railing. The single iceburst light that glows downstairs casts strange shadows, turning the gallery into a labyrinth. Dim grey light spills through the windows around the landing. Eren can pick out his own hunched-shouldered shadow looming over a grand rug, blacking out what the moon would have illuminated. 

He can’t believe she doesn’t believe he loves her. It’s maybe the purest, simplest truth there is to him. 

Ten years ago, there was another dark night in late autumn. The moon was high in the sky and the clouds were slowly shooed away by early winter winds, and Eren was wandering the Paths. He’d loved her then, as a child with stolen knives in his small fists listening to urges he didn’t understand; he’d loved her before then—he had existed long before he was born, shaped the world as a surge of will in the minds of others, long, long ago, and he’d loved her then—his feelings for her reach as far back as the moment a slave child’s hand tightened on the gate of a pig pen. 

Again, he thinks that Mikasa’s likeness ought to be shining in the windows of churches. If it’s an honor for the high priest to be meeting him, it ought to be beyond that to meet the girl who’s kept him here. And, he thinks, that’s what fucking Ymir would have wanted, too. She hated those things. 

Eren grimaces, remembering this morning when he’d been stupid enough to think that it would be easier on both of them if they could just get the inevitable fight out of the way and move on. 

You fucking idiot . He scrubs one hand over his eyes, pressing his fingers in. How many times did he tell himself he didn’t expect her to roll over instantly and be glad to be around him? That he would accept whatever she gave him? This is what that looks like. And of all the things he has to explain himself for, this ought to be the fucking easiest.

But —

Again and again, he comes up against a tangled, thorny wall of emotion that just won’t listen to reason. Anger and bitterness and brutal hurt, and something like incredulity. Everything he’s done for her, and she still wants to deny it? 

He forces an exhale, and it’s cold enough outside that he can see the ghost of his breath for a moment. The rain must have been blown away by a cold front. Once again, he thinks, it’s a good thing that harvest is over and done with. It’s not like there’s any hope of trade. 

It isn’t her fault, of course. Doesn’t he love that about her, that she’s so gentle-hearted she could never fathom anyone doing what he did—let alone her beloved rescuer? She can’t make the image of that boy fit with the thing he’s become, and whose fault is that but his own? He takes a measured breath and reminds himself that he has always made an effort to keep her seeing nothing but the best of him. 

Apparently she doesn’t believe that boy had ever loved her, either, but—well, she certainly isn’t thinking much clearer than he is. Some sleep will do her good. 

And me, he thinks, flexing his hands, trying to make them loosen on the railing. Vaguely, he wonders if he could die of sleep deprivation. Probably not, but his healing has yet to shield him from the ill effects. He’s rapidly running out of composure, and he doesn’t want to think about what will happen if he completely loses it and fucking kills someone. 

And he needs Mikasa to sleep well, too. Her well-being is his own—his fractured state while she was unconscious is testament enough to that. 

He drums his fingers on the railing.

He’d just left her in there to cry herself to sleep. The hook tugs painfully at his heart, and shame slowly overtakes his anger. His poor, sweet girl, injured and alone in this unfamiliar place—after the mountains of bullshit he’s put her through, he could stand to have a little more patience with her. 

When has he ever left her alone to face her nightmares? From the time he was nine years old, he knew it was his job to drive them off for her; doesn’t think he’s ever slacked in that until now. She’d woken from them last night, and probably the night before, and where has he been? Gnawing at self-inflicted wounds. 

Before he’s even rationalized it to himself, he’s turning around. 

She can tell him to go again, if that’s what she needs. But he just—he has to make sure that she’s okay. That she’s not trapped in a nightmare—or worse, that she’s still crying. He doesn’t know what he’ll do, can’t imagine how he’ll be able to fix this for her, but he’s promised her that he would. Just because he can’t doesn’t mean he won’t try.

***

Back against the pillows, covers bunched on her lap, Mikasa holds one hand over her throat. The other is clasped over her wrist, covering her tattoo; her fingers chill her bare, fragile skin as she mindlessly shifts them back and forth, back and forth. Even as they move, they can’t seem to stop trembling. Cold and fear and exhaustion have allied to shake her to pieces. Her breath comes labored, and though she can feel the heave of her chest against her arms, she can’t hear it. Her ears still echo with Eren’s voice, drowning out anything else. 

With perfect clarity, Mikasa understands that she cannot do this for any longer. She’s going to come apart. 

She needs—she needs—she needs—somebody. She needs Aunt Carla, she needs her mother, she needs Armin or Sasha or even Jean or Connie, she needs—

—her family. 

Why, she thinks, skimming her thumb over the tense line of her jugular, reaching desperately for a steady breath, does everybody always leave?

I’ve always, Eren hisses, hated you. 

A wall of tears swells, and she presses her face into her hands. Her exhale catches in her palms, warm and ragged—the edges of sobs. It’s the only part of her that’s warm.

She slides her hands off her eyes, smearing tear tracks. Her palms stay covering her mouth, her hair falling away from her fingers as she presses them against her cheeks. Tears warp her vision, the deep blue of the blanket blurring with the crisp white of the sheets, darkness swallowing the golden stitching. Her chest shudders with another jagged breath and she pushes her chin free so she can inhale shakily.

Mikasa doesn’t know how to do this. She doesn’t know how to be this. This aching emptiness inside her, like her very bones were stolen away from her; the way her heart feels flayed open. There’s nothing for her to do—nothing for her, and she’s all alone. She’s never been alone before. She’s a fighter, a protector, living for the people she loves, and there’s no place for her in the world that Eren made. 

She can’t—stop shaking. Her hands tremble with a violence, pushing lightly at her ears. Where her elbows are tucked against her stomach, she can feel her insides shuddering as she tries, and tries, and tries, to get just one good breath. Forget sleep for now—for ever, she never wants to dream like that ever again—she just wants to breathe. Her body has never failed her like this. She doesn’t know what to do, and as her fingers shiver over her ears, playing tricks with her hearing, she remembers holding onto Armin as Wall Maria shook apart. 

It’s the Rumbling still, inside her. It’s going to destroy her, too. 

A surge of hysteria swells alongside her throat. She can’t do this. She just can’t do this. Not like this, and not alone. She’s fast hurtling towards an edge that, she knows, will shatter her when she goes over, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to piece herself back together. She doesn’t think she’ll ever again believe there’s a reason to. 

Mikasa curls her fingers against her jaw, brushing the soft ends of her hair. Her sobbing gasps come loud, heavy, in three sharp jolts—in, in, out; in, in, out—and her thumbs press hard into the clammy skin over her pulse, and she’s so lost in the spinning of her thoughts that she doesn’t hear the door creak open. It’s the movement that has her trained eyes flitting over—automatic, without thought. 

Light, bleak and terrible, spills into her room, and Eren is standing in her doorway.

There’s a long, still moment of quiet. Not silence—her breath won’t calm enough for that, her shaking won’t abate—but even through her tears, even in the darkness, she can see the look on Eren’s face plain as day. A war plays out over his features, emotions vying for control, visible in the faintest tremor in his mouth, in the infinitesimal movements of his jaw. 

There has always been a war in him. A slow tide pulls at Mikasa’s heart. 

There’s something savage in the set of his shoulders, one hand still holding open the door, all of him prepared to fly into action. She can see how very, very, very tense he is, how very close to snapping clean in two, but he manages perfect stillness for her sake. Because there is something untamed in the line of his mouth, yes, and something unfamiliar in the way his long hair casts shadows over the planes of his face—but in his eyes, all she sees is fearful, anguished, precious hesitation. 

And that’s the final blow.

Mikasa cracks open. All her walls finally crumble to dust and revealing the ugly, awful truth that she’s been hiding from these past days: that she wants him with her. 

She peels both tear-damp hands away from her face and reaches for him. 

Time seems to stutter. 

Eren moves like a sprung trap. Between heartbeats, he’s crossed the room; by the time the door is banging shut, he’s collided with her. His arms hook under hers, one crooking behind her as he knocks her onto her back. Momentum tosses them over as their arms lock around each others’ bodies, her legs pulling at the blankets as she’s rolled onto her side, back to the shuddering door before the sound of its slam is dead. Eren’s side hits the mattress a fraction of a second after hers does, and she feels his quiet grunt as a puff of warmth against her neck.

The moment happens nearly too fast to process, and for that, Mikasa is grateful. 

She clings to him, as she’s spent her life doing; it’s Eren who arranges them. Keeping her clutched fast to his chest, he shoves his way up the bed, rucking the covers even further. Mikasa bunches her hands and presses them against his spine; hides her wet face in his shoulder. The grey fabric of his robe is soft against her brow; tickles at her nose. Eren binds his arms so tightly around her, crushes her so close against him, that she has to fight for breath, but it’s good, it’s good, it’s good. His arms are keeping her together, keeping her from falling. 

There’s another moment of squirming, kicking at the covers and arranging limbs. Mikasa doesn’t care what he does so long as he doesn’t let go. His knee slots between hers, careful, ever mindful of her injury. One of his hands lifts from her back to pull the blankets back over them, dragging over her side and her hip and her leg, but still the loss makes her shiver and press her hands harder against him. He rolls half on top of her in a wordless effort at comfort— not going anywhere —and yanks the blankets up, wraps his arm back around her middle.

When they’re settled, Eren has her head tucked under his chin, his arm acting as her pillow. His elbow digs into her back while his fingers burrow into her hair, and it makes her think of her nightmare, but it’s okay. None of those poisonous words echo through her anymore; there’s no room for it. There’s no room between them. His heartbeat pounds close to her ear, as old and dear a lullaby as any she knows, and finally, her breathing begins to slow. 

He cares about me. The thought rises easily. He doesn’t hate me follows, riding a surge of relief. See, she could tell herself. See? He cares. 

Mikasa turns her head to dry her tears on his robe, wondering if he still thinks she’s pretty when she cries. 

He draws his fingers through her hair, petting at her skull obsessively. It’s too fast to really be soothing, but she doesn’t care; doubts it’s meant for her, anyway. That only makes it easier. She sighs, nosing closer into him, and Eren’s arms tighten. She couldn’t possibly fall apart like this. He’s so warm, burning, burning, that she’s melting back together, the cracks in her foundation glossing shut.

“Oh, Mikasa,” he murmurs, lips moving on the crown of her head. “You’re okay, aren’t you? Tell me that you’re okay.” She presses her cheek further into his chest, feeling the heat radiate off him. She imagines her tears evaporating away like rain in sunshine. 

Eren takes her movement as a nod and guides her head up—just slightly, just so he can brush aside her bangs and press his lips to her forehead. She shudders, almost wanting to recoil, but—she couldn’t even if she tried. Eren is holding her so close, and that’s all she needs to know right now. He’s keeping her with him, and that’s all she’s ever wanted from him; it’s the only place she’s ever wanted to be.

He repeats her name, hushed and achingly soft. His hand resumes its motion in her hair, slower now, and he says, “Mikasa, Mikasa, you know, don’t you? You have to know, you have to. Sweet girl, my sweet girl, my own sweet heart, you don’t need me to say it again, do you?”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t know anything except that she’s here, and Eren must care about her enough to want her here, and she isn’t so cold anymore. It’s nice, and good, and she can’t think any further than that at all. She’s safe here, secure, and that’s all she can stand to be. 

Eren sighs, warm breath stirring her hair. He lets her press her face into his shoulder, even now taking care not to let herself touch his bare skin. He lifts his head over her own again, crushing her closer, and slowly tension begins to bleed out of him. His breathing evens out, and Mikasa matches her own to his pace. His heartbeat slows, sure and steady. His arm, under her head, is firm and wide. His fingers in her hair is a comforting weight, and he smells like soap and heat.

Sleep finds her easily, once again; this time, she surrenders gladly. 

***

For all her silent, desperate wishing, the sun still rises. 

Mikasa fights waking as hard as she can, but knowing why only hastens it. She can hide her face in his elbow to pretend there’s darkness, she can let his weight keep her still, she can let the exquisite heat, so lovely next to the cold air of the room, keep her drowsy, but the minutes fall away, sand in an hourglass, until Mikasa’s eyes open.

She’d turned around in her sleep, and finds herself now in the position she’d wished, when she was younger, red-cheeked and starry-eyed, that she would be in. Eren’s knees are brushing her calves; his nose is in her hair. He’s still nearly half on top of her, the weight of his body pressing heavy, and she can feel his deep, even breaths as they warm her neck. One of his arms is still pillowing her head, crooked around so that his hand is curled over her shoulder; the other keeps a firm grasp on one of her wrists, binding it against her sternum. Her free hand is gripping the fabric of his sleeve. It takes her a long moment to become aware of this, and a longer moment to let go. 

She’s breathing easier now, and her head is clearer than it’s been in days. She finally feels like she can think. 

She tries flexing her bad leg; winces when her stitches pull. Still a no there, then. The thought of just walking makes her cringe into Eren. He squeezes her wrist tighter and sighs in his sleep, a happy sound, and Mikasa fights a shudder. 

It’s a habit to want to take care of him, ground into her bones by the weight of a decade. It’s been so easy to backslide into over these past two days, but… God, she can’t just be here to make him feel better. Maybe it is what she wants for him, maybe she’ll never shake that urge, but she knows that isn’t what he deserves. 

Eren’s exhales puff hotly against her neck, but she can feel them with her whole body. His chest rises and falls, pressed so tightly against her back that she can tell where his bare skin stops and his robe begins, that sliver of molten heat aligned with her spine.

It is a comfort to her, and that’s dangerous. She can’t spend her nights crying until the monster in her nightmares comes to pet her hair with his blood-stained hands, with his drumming heartbeat to lull her to sleep. She can’t. She won’t. 

She tilts her chin up—once again, any movement of hers has Eren crushing her closer—to examine the room beyond what she can see over the foot of the bed. 

The sun is high enough outside that its light filters into the westward-facing windows, lighting the room in a way she’s yet to see. It’s pretty like this, all glinting and golden, and doesn’t seem nearly as cold and foreboding. This bed is as soft as anything she’s ever known, and bigger than she’d known beds could be. In this light, there’s something that could almost be homey about this scene. 

On the tea table, barely five meters from where she’s caged by Eren’s arms, there’s a steaming tray. Someone had been in here, so close to where she slept, and she hadn’t woken. They had seen her like this, in bed with Eren, and left without a word.

To them. She imagines that half the palace knows by now.

Well-kept. She shuts her eyes again, not wanting to see it. 

These cowards, who have never been beyond the Walls in their lives, who could never begin to fathom the enormity of what Eren did, can think of her what they will, call her what they like—but let it be about how she’s a traitor. A vicious murderer and a violent insurrectionist, an empty-headed, rotten-hearted Marleyan sympathizer—call her a treacherous foreigner outright. Why not? She remembers being fifteen years old, kept on the side while Eren was chained on the floor, while self-important old men shouted that she must be some sort of outer-Wall witch, for Eren to be defending her.

Not that, she thinks, running her fingers over the white sheets. It would be different now, if they said that last. Not that. Let them talk about her treason, her ferocity, her audacity—her blasphemy . Not about how she’s a weeping little girl who can’t stand to sleep by herself. Not that she’s letting Eren Jaeger into her bed.

Her stomach turns at the thought. 

The broken corpse of the world isn’t even cold yet, and she’s already falling to pieces, needing Eren to hold her together? No. No, she won’t do that. No matter what he took from her, no matter if he meant to or not, she’s stronger than that. She will be. 

It takes Eren a long while to wake. Mikasa watches the room grow ever brighter; watches steam float into the air above the tray, trying to think what to say. She bites her lip and focuses, willing herself to keep ahold of that anger licking at her gut, but every time she tries to pull it forth, it slips away. 

She knows this will hurt him; she can’t quite make herself want it to. She knows he deserves it; she knows she should want to, but she can’t. 

Slowly, his breathing shallows. His head shifts; his arms flex. His legs stretch. He leans closer into her, nosing deeper into her hair. Mikasa can tell the exact moment he finally surfaces to consciousness by the way tension seizes his arms, and his head jerks back. She can feel his heart speed up over her shoulder blade, can hear his pulse where it drums in his arm. She flexes her shoulder, and Eren takes the signal to roll off of her and onto his back. He lets go of her wrist but doesn’t remove his arm from under her head. 

It’s quiet for a very long time. There’s no drone of rain, no crackle of the fire. Only their steady breathing and the drumming of his heartbeat. 

They’ve never woken up like this before. When they were children, they woke with the city as carts began clanging and Aunt Carla was beginning breakfast. Mikasa was almost always awake first, rushing out of bed to make tea for Doctor Jaeger—he always said she made the best tea in the whole world. On the rare occasions when Eren woke first, he would either fake it until she dragged him out of bed or leave to start playing with his marbles in the corner. 

Now, there’s no excuse to separate. She’s going to have to do this all on her own, and she doesn’t know how to. 

Before she can try, Eren inhales sharply. His voice is gravelly with sleep in a way that scrapes warmly at her insides, making her shiver when he says, “Morning.”

She rolls onto her back, uses her elbow to push a way away from him, giving them some space. “Morning.” Her hands float up over her stomach so she can run her fingers over the silk sleeves. They don't feel at all like her scarf does. 

He sighs through his nose. “How’d you sleep?”

“Fine.” Her head turns out toward the room. “Someone brought breakfast.”

He grunts a questioning sound. Under her head, his elbow sinks into the mattress as he levers his weight up, peering over her. Grimacing, he says, “Did we both sleep through that?”

“Must have.”

He groans. “I should’ve locked the door.” He lets his weight drop, rocking the mattress. She feels more than sees his opposite arm scrub over his face, pinching at the bridge of his nose. With his sleep-roughened voice, he asks, “Did you want anything?”

She shakes her head. Her ear presses into his arm when she does. “Not very hungry.”

He groans again. Mumbles, “You need to be eating more.”

“I haven’t been doing anything.”

“You’re healing,” he says. “That’s a lot.”  

Mikasa huffs. His arm falls back down to his side, and both of them turn over, flexing blood into sleep-stiff limbs. Eren yawns and says, “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Nine or so.”

“Oh.” He swallows. “It’s late. We must’ve gotten a full eight hours.” He tips back his head and inhales. “I haven’t slept like that in… a long time. God. Four years, probably.” 

Her heart wrenches brutally. She’s given him his first good night’s sleep since he got those memories he mentioned—and she isn’t stupid; just because she doesn’t know what he’s talking about doesn’t mean she can’t guess: the future he’s spoken of was the Rumbling. How, how, how is she making things better for him after that?

Biting her lip to keep silent, Mikasa pushes up to sitting. Eren shoots upright next to her, but she isn’t touching him anymore, and that’s both a loss and a relief. His hand hovers by her shoulder without settling, and she’s desperately glad that he’s awake enough to read her. Eren knows her, even if she never knew him. 

“Are you alright?” he asks. 

“‘M fine.” She clutches at the ties of the robe and pulls them tighter, closing herself off. It’s thin and breezy, not at all like Frieda’s dress, but she still tries to imagine that it feels like armor. She draws in sharp, heavy breaths, hoping she’ll be able to get the words out—but every time she opens her mouth, nothing happens. She feels almost afraid. Of what? That he’ll say no?

That he won’t?

Minutes pass, and eventually, Eren says, “...Okay.” He shifts onto his knees and shoves himself off the bed. His feet are bare, she realizes as he walks to the table and lifts the cover off the tray. He sorts through the contents with a critical eye, and Mikasa watches him, fists curled over her ribs. 

This looks natural on him. Eren, in a royal palace, casually picking over food. His robe is grey, she can see now, fuzzy and furred as opposed to the one she’s in, and he still hasn’t tied it. She can see his chest where the sides don’t close, muscles tensed. It’s how the lot of them were taught to move, learning their ODM-gear. He hasn’t used it in much longer than a year, but he hasn’t unlearned that habit—and doesn’t that make perfect sense? His body is his weapon, no need for swords or mechanics, and he looks even more like it, these days. 

Those months in Marley changed him. Their last night in Odiha, he’d been all sinew and soft cheeks—at least, that was how she had seen him. A boy on the cusp of manhood, but a long way to go yet. But the shape of his face has since changed: jaw sharpening, eyes deepening. He’s as tan as he’s ever been, even now as winter draws near, months in the desert burned onto his skin. His hair is long enough that it falls over his shoulders. She would swear he’s taller, and whatever they’d fed him in Marley, it had added breadth to his shoulders and bulk in his arms. He looks so much stronger now. He looks like the sort of man who could do what he’s done.

He’s so, so beautiful. The morning sun moves over his skin like a dance, glinting in his eyes and catching in his hair. He’s beautiful and terrible and she loves him, and that’s why she has to go.

“Here.” He holds out a hunk of bread he’s ripped off a larger loaf and drops it into her open hand. “You need to eat, Mikasa.”

She picks at it, taking a bite when it’s clear that’s what Eren is waiting for. It tastes like cinnamon and apples, and turns to ashes in her mouth. It’s too rich. She can’t believe she’s eating this. 

Eren is satisfied, though. He rips a biscuit in half and stuffs a sausage in it, downing the entire thing in three bites. He smears the grease and butter on his sleeves, pours a glass of water to wash it down. 

A nervous energy creeps over him as she continues to stare. She’s only dragging this out—and she doesn’t want to hurt him more than she has to. That’s why she has to say this. She inhales, closes her eyes, and says, “Eren—”

“Do you want anything else?” he asks, not looking at her. His fingers drum along the side of the tray, ringing against the silver. “I know you don’t much like red meat, but you need some, with all the blood you lost—”

“Eren,” she says. 

“Yeah?” 

She puts the piece of bread on the nightstand. Next to the water, next to the scarf, next to Armin’s letter. Her fingers itch. When she draws her hand back to her lap, Eren moves in time, skirting back to the bed and clambering onto the edge of it just in front of her, sitting on his knees. She tries to look in his eyes, but—she can’t. She just can’t. Her heart thumps restlessly against her ribs, and her gaze falls instead to his shoulders, then down to her own lap. Her throat is dry. Her eyes sting. Twisting her fingers, she makes herself say, “I’ve been thinking. I… When it’s safe for me to travel. I want to go.”

Her hands pull and crush at each other, running over each other like a stampede. Blood courses through her ears, waves of it seeming to tumble over on top of each other in their eagerness to go. To get away, before the heart that pumps it can betray her again. She strains her ears for Eren’s reaction, even though she doesn’t want to hear it at all, just—he did hear her, didn’t he?

An endless, breathless moment passes, and then his much longer fingers close over her hands. He stops her from pulling at herself, folds his hands over hers with all the tenderness in the world, as surely as if he’d stolen it away from each person he murdered. The air is searing and painful around them, and Mikasa feels like she could throw up, pass out, die. With caution, with care, Eren draws her hands up and presses his lips to her knuckles. 

His mouth sends sparks through her arm, up into her spine. It hurts, but for a brief moment, her arms feel like they’re her own again. 

“Okay, Mikasa,” he says, quiet and gutted. She can hear his ragged inhale, cool as it sucks air away from the backs of her fingers, and she can’t look at him. She’s too afraid of what she’ll see on his face—of what she’d do if she saw it. 

He moves his mouth from her index and middle fingers over to her ring finger, her pinkie. He leaves the softest, kindest kisses, burning as he goes, and then he drops her hands. Before she can so much as gasp, he’s pulling her head forward with both hands and kissing her forehead, hard and desperate. His hands tremble in her hair; she hopes, faintly, that he can’t distinguish her own. 

“Okay,” he murmurs against her skin. “Okay. If that’s what you need.” 

She does. She does, she does, she does, because she can’t stay here. Eren can’t be her place of safety, and she can’t be his source of comfort. She won’t do it. Not anymore. 

She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t reach for him. But she lets him draw this moment out for as long as he can, because she knows that, as much as she’ll hate herself for it, this is a memory she’ll turn over and over in her mind when she’s cold and alone at Braus Stables. 

***

A hand collides with his arm, but it’s not until someone shakes him that hears his own name. 

His throat burns like he swallowed acid; his eyes are frozen wide open, unseeing. Eren blinks back into focus slowly, finding himself in some hallway he doesn’t recognize. He’s wandered far. 

Not that it matters. It’s not like he has a home to return to. 

“Eren?” Floch says, expression warped with concern. “What are you doing out here?”

Eren stares blankly. Everything coming out of Floch’s mouth is muffled and meaningless. Everything is. His breath comes evenly through his nose, but he’s still dizzy, the earth swooping around him. 

From far below, Floch eyes him over. “Are you alright?”

His hands burn. When he presses his fingers in his eyes, his palms smell like her hair. 

Yes. Yes, he’s alright, because he’ll have to be. He was expecting this. Of course he wouldn’t get to keep her. This is his punishment, and it’s nothing less than he deserves. 

There’s nothing inside him anymore, but the nothing howls.

It’s not fair, it protests. Baseless, groundless, just a windstorm over barren land—as is surely happening all across the world he razed at this very moment. It is, he knows that it is. This is the justice Mikasa has served him, and he’s promised to accept it. This is his punishment; this is his penance. He knew this was coming. 

“Eren,” Floch says, truly worried now. “What happened? You look like you’ve been shot.”

I would much, much rather take a firing squad. He shakes his head. “It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?” Floch pushes against his arm. “Eren, you really don’t look…”

“It’s nothing.” 

“Alright,” he says, clearly disbelieving. Eren couldn’t give a fuck what he thinks—except that he has to maintain his authority. With Mikasa gone—from him, if not from the city, not yet—it’s all the more desperate. He won’t be able to see her—hear her breathing, smell her hair, touch her skin—so he will have to know, down to his bones, that she’s safe. 

With the same force of will it had taken him to rip off his thumbs or gouge out his eye, Eren reaches for clarity. He scrubs his eyes and says, “I’m fine. I was—looking for you.”

“Oh.” Floch nods dumbly. “Got lost in thought? It must have been urgent.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

His head tilts. “How urgent is it? We’re about to leave—not that I can’t make time, of course, but we’re already on a tight schedule, and I’m sure Surma or Brzenka or someone would be sufficient.”

What? Eren stares, and then it hits him with a flash. The fucking surveying trip—yeah, yes, that works. “I changed my mind,” he blurts, without even thinking about it. 

Floch’s face lights up. “About coming with us?”

“Yeah.” He scrambles to remember the point of this. Of anything. “I’ve rested enough, and you’re right, this is important work to be done—it’s important I get to know my men, and the state of my nation.”

“Absolutely,” Floch agrees, beaming. “I’m so glad to hear you say that. Let’s—ha—let’s get a bag packed for you. It’s three nights, you remember? We’ll be back Thursday.”

“I remember,” he says, thinking only of Mikasa’s bowed face. She’d been asleep in his arms not ten minutes prior, the same morning she had wept for hours without him and reached for him like a child, but fine. Fine. If she can’t stand to be around him, he won’t make her suffer his presence. Easy as that. He can give her what she asks for. 

“Well, shit, Eren,” Floch grins. “It’s so good to see you taking an interest.” He shakes his head. “There’s your color back—you really were just lost in thought, hm? Okay. Let’s find you a shirt and get on the road.”

Twenty minutes later, Eren is dressed in a clean uniform, in a jacket that doesn’t bite into his shoulders, slinging his leg over a horse. He’s at the head of the party, Floch an arm’s reach behind him, and then they’re riding out of the palace gates. 

His heart stretches impossibly thin; maddeningly painful—but this is what she needs. He’s given her the world; he can give her some space, and she can do what she will with it. 

In his mind, an old tree, stretching up into the starless sky, shakes and flares, twisting with the shrieking wind inside of him. 

Chapter Text

“This love that takes us from bloodsport to slaughterhouse — I’ve had nightmares that end more gently than that.”

i.

There is a stack of folded quilts waiting for her when she opens the door, and the sight of them nearly buckles her knees. 

Wide-eyed and ashen, Mikasa stares at them. Thick and creamy white, cut with patterns like apple blossoms, innocent, innocuous. On the sides of the second one down, she makes out triangles of blue; the third is a buttery yellow crisscrossed with pink squares. When she kneels to touch them, they’re fleecy and smooth under her fingers; cool from the air but thick and well-made. It would, she knows, be very hard to feel cold under them.

Eren must’ve had someone bring them. 

She looks at the quilts for a very long time. 

It’ll be noon soon. He’d left the room ages ago, and she’s only just gathered herself up enough to where she felt able to move. She had some vague idea of finding Historia, checking in on her and the baby, just doing something to move, but for some reason, in one smooth motion, the sight of the blankets stripped away all resolve she’s spent these past hours cultivating. 

He must’ve had someone bring them.

Sunlight streams through the windows behind her, and at the end of the hall. The circular window has left a golden puddle at the end of the hallway, just visible from where she’s sitting. 

It’s a long hallway. She’s nearly at the end of it, only one room past her—Eren’s—but she counts six more doors. The varnished hardwood is broken by a long white roll of carpet, and the walls split at waist height from the same diamonds of wood to pale, seamless stone. It’s lovely, really, in the daylight. It was designed to be. This wing of bedrooms is right next to Historia’s; it’s meant for royalty. 

Mikasa pulls her legs under herself, biting her lips to muffle her wince even though there’s nobody around to hear her. Eren hasn’t come back yet—she doesn’t know what she’ll do when he does—and the world is silent and desolate. 

Absently, she runs her thumb over her knuckles. They’re still warm from the heat of his mouth. 

It won’t be like that when she’s at Braus Stables. She leans her head on the doorframe and counts the people she’ll find there. Sasha’s parents, who brought them a housewarming gift of a gorgeous ceramic gravy boat and invited them back to spend every holiday with them. Her little brothers and sisters, Georgie and Stephan and Irina and darling Kaya, who thought Sasha just ordered the stars. Poor, poor little Gabi, and Falco. Mikasa can’t remember ever being that small, and the loss they’ve suffered is worse than any she ever did. They still have Reiner, at least. And Pieck. Annie. Captain Levi. Jean and Connie, those dear sweet boys, and Armin. Though she’s committed it to memory by now, she wishes his letter was in her hands. 

It will be so good to see them all. Her comrades-in-arms. Maybe the only people left alive who have any memory of the outside world. After she moved in with the Jaegers, she’d been so desperate to commit everything about her home with her parents to memory. So much of it she’d written down, on pale pink stationary Uncle Grisha brought her from the inner circles; the loss of those notes when their house had been destroyed had been a wound that stung, even amongst all the rest she’d lost that day.

The Marleyans will have each other to use as mirrors. They can keep their memories alive in each other, and surely they’ll know to write it down. She already knows that Armin will want to. He’ll put it in writing, and in a hundred years it will be a storybook, just like the one he showed her a lifetime ago. 

She swallows, tipping her head against the wooden frame. 

She’ll have to be there for that, too. She has to make sure, for her mother’s sake, that everything she and Kiyomi told her about Hizuru is written down. The loss of that island nation doesn’t feel so different from the loss of the rest of the world. In a way, it’s almost familiar—she thought she was the last person with her blood left alive once. Now she is again, in truth this time. Those traditions had meant so much to her mother, and now the burden of remembrance falls to Mikasa. 

And… and she and Captain Levi can puzzle out their heritage, too. Something hot pulses in her throat as she realizes that he’ll be able to understand what she’s going through. He had their clan’s strength for much longer than she did; he’ll know. Maybe together they’ll be able to put it into words.

She has a family waiting for her. Not quite her own, but… Armin is as good as a brother. He’s a few months older, but she thinks of herself as the older sibling—and knows that he does, too. Levi is her father’s kin, somehow, and that means something. Sasha had been as close to a sister as she could imagine, and she used to roll her eyes and say that Jean and Connie were worse than her actual little brothers. There’s a family there, she’s sure. She can find one again.

And… as for Eren… 

As for Eren…

Her stomach churns uncomfortably. It feels so… disloyal, to be thinking about a new family when the one she has is still living. But they would never be able to be what they once were. Eren isn’t dead, but in some horrible way, it might be worse that he isn’t. She just doesn’t know what to do with that. They can’t be what they were. He never could have been what once upon a time she’d dreamed he would. She won’t be what he needs her to be, and so she has to go. 

She has to.

ii.

They’re aiming to make Wall Maria before nightfall. 

Someone told him that before they were fully galloping and conversation was impossible. But they’re riding breakneck, and he’s not sure that even these horses can get them there by then. 

It doesn’t matter. The horses will either survive it or they won’t, and he honestly can’t bring himself to care one way or the other. 

When Eren was a child, twelve years old and half-starved, he’d been taken sorely by surprise at how much work goes into horseback riding. He’d fallen or been thrown more times than he cares to remember before he’d learned how to move his thighs, his shoulders, his core. By sheer force of determination, he’s a skilled rider now, and even if horses are ever uneasy around him, he’s capable of riding without thought behind the movement.

Today, though, that’s the only place he’ll let his thoughts dwell. 

The past beckons. It nips at his heels, trying to drag him down into that twisting, sucking hole— just like Ymir —and it sings to him always, louder now than ever—wind cutting through empty, blinding branches in a song like howling.

The future looms like a pyroclastic cloud. Darkness and death and hellfire, and no hope. But he rides on anyway, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. As ever, he’ll keep moving forward. This is the life he’s made for himself, and these are the consequences of his actions. 

He’s not sure he ever really understood that until now. For all that he’s spent his life chasing freedom, an abstract concept he defined by physical barriers, it’s only settling in now that freedom to make his own choices doesn’t mean freedom from the fallout. And he knew that, he did, he always knew what the result of his choices would be. But knowing something is very different from living it.

And he didn’t expect to live. And—

He tightens his grip on his horse’s reins, gritting his teeth. 

— and that is why I’m not fucking thinking about anything. 

His hands are cold. The undersides of his fingers, the center of his palm—no matter how hard he holds the reins, he can’t feel anything except Mikasa’s small, cold fingers, clutched in his. 

The stallion whinnies, and Eren realizes he’s flicked the reins again. He’s driving the beast harder than it’s meant to be, no doubt frightening the thing. 

Which makes them a matched pair. His heartbeat is wild, careening and crashing like the flaming debris of a Colossal Titan strike. His breathing won’t come evenly. There is a vice around his insides, and every inch he moves clamps it tighter. It’s sliced into his skin. It’s broken his ribs. He—he can’t—he can’t breathe, and he can’t think. He can’t think beyond the real, physical pain and the effort it takes to keep upright. 

The countryside crawls by. The rain that finally stopped sometime last night—at some point while Mikasa was pressing her ear over his heartbeat, whimpering in her sleep if his hold on her slackened even for a second—seems to have been the last of it. The sky is the deep blue of winter, scattered with paper-thin white clouds and lit by the sun where it’s stamped high above, cold and colorless. The air is still choked with humidity, the chill caught in his lungs and seeping into his bones, into his marrow, where the phantom breaks have exposed them. When he exhales hard, he can see his breath for a split second. The mud, when it manages to splatter up past his boots, is cold and watery like tiny chips of ice. Everything he sees is dirty and broken and washed out. 

They’re riding due east along the River Esen. At this rate, if the horses don’t drop dead beforehand, they ought to make it to the abandoned district of Quinta long before dark. Already, he can see the smokestacks and rooftops of Yalkel rising over the horizon, growing larger by the minute. 

There are no Walls to judge the distance by. 

The wind howls louder in his mind, threatening to bear him away. Eren looks down at his knuckles and breathes, forcing his focus on the clouds of his breath before they’re left behind. Pulled apart. 

The countryside crawls by. Every inch, meter, mile, has Eren’s chest aching worse and worse: a burning, crushing sort of pain that he isn’t even sure is psychosomatic. He left his heart behind in Mitras, torn out and bloody. It’s only sheer force of will that’s keeping him up. Will, and focus, and no small amount of denial. If he doesn’t think about it, it can’t hurt him. He just can’t let himself think past the hurt. 

Because that strategy has worked so well for him in the past. 

The sound of hoofbeats has gotten into his skull. With every thuthuthud-thuthuthud —every sharp little click of the horseshoe before the weight of the animal forces a deeper sound from the earth, he’s reminded that he’s here. In the once-lush farmland inside what was once Wall Sina, leading a group of riders on—of all fucking things—a scouting mission. 

If he were to take his eyes off the horizon—ignore the stretching, searing, crushing pain in his chest—maybe he could pretend he was sixteen again. Maybe he’d try, if that would have made any difference at all. By the time he was sixteen, those Walls were as good as gone already, and that knowledge cast its shadow over every thought and dream he had. There’d never been any escaping it. 

The pointed click of the horseshoe really is his saving grace. It would be far too easy to think of the pounding footfalls of the Colossals if it weren’t for that tiny sound, nearly drowned out by the rest of it. 

He shifts forward in the saddle and tightens his heels. The stallion pushes itself faster, and Eren breathes in the fresh rush of air. 

iii.

Knuckles white in the pelt of some poor bear, Mikasa exhales hard and focuses on the grand ceiling of the gallery. 

She’s laid out on one of the couches, propped against the side while Matron Beck sits on a cushion and smears the same yellow-green salve over the same bruises. It’s only her, this kind, stern woman with her grey hair and broad face. Mikasa didn’t ask where Greta and Rosina and the fourth nurse are. She didn’t ask who it was who brought her breakfast and saw her folded into Eren’s arms, didn’t ask if the matron had heard a thing about it. She doesn’t want to know. 

Her bruises are beginning to fade. Blue is lightening to green. Soon enough they’ll be gone, and the thought makes her sick. Suddenly, then, she’s fiercely glad that the wound along her calf will scar. She’ll have the reminder of the fight embedded into her body for the rest of her days, and she will treasure it always. 

The matron doesn’t keep up the stream of chatter that Mikasa has come to expect from her, instead humming under her breath as she treats her. For all her gentleness and care, she’s as thorough as one ought to be, and when she wraps both hands around Mikasa’s calf, she has to stifle a scream. 

She doesn’t need to bite it back. Apart from Matron Beck, who knows better than anyone how bad it is, she’s all alone in this empty wing. Eren is still off God knows where. But—it’s for her. She would be witness to her own weakness, and that’s shameful enough. 

So, as Matron Beck begins to unwind the bandages Eren has so tenderly wrapped the day before, Mikasa grips the bearskin draped on the sedan and tips her watery eyes up. 

The convex ceiling is tiered and painted, just like the one in the blue-and-gold room she’s been sleeping in. Some master artist had painted a cavalry charging from all sides, as if Mikasa was in the bottom of a deep valley basin watching her death ride down on armored horses. Ymir is up there, too—the first Ymir, shining golden and glorious behind her troops, looking down from on high. The crown of her head reaches into the clouds, and light pours from a war horn grasped in her hand. 

Mikasa shivers. She much prefers the little Ymir Historia let her hold yesterday. She’ll resume her effort at visiting her as soon as this check-up is over and done with. 

“These seem to be healing very well,” the matron says, tilting Mikasa’s leg this way and that to examine the stitches. 

Eyes squinched shut, Mikasa licks her lips and hums in tremulous agreement. Mh-hm. 

“How’s the pain?”

“B-better than it was. I think—a good night’s sleep helped.”

Mikasa flinches as soon as the words are out of her mouth, hating to imagine that the matron has even the vaguest idea why she’d finally slept soundly. Shame bends her shoulders inwards—but if the woman has heard even a whisper, she doesn’t let it show. 

“That’s lovely to hear, child,” she says. “That’s all you need to be doing right now: resting and getting your strength back. How’s your appetite been?”

“It’s fine,” she murmurs. That’s a lie. She’s picked at whatever they put in front of her, but all too often, even the thought of food makes her think of the millions upon millions of people who will never eat again. Of the carrion birds and insects gorging themselves on the charred, pulped remains of families that she’d seen flying over it all. 

From the sharp tsk she makes, Mikasa doubts Matron Beck believes her, but she doesn’t press any further than that. “As long as you’re keeping it all down, that’s a good sign. More liquids, though, I think, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“Hmm.” 

Matron Beck produces a small basin of soapy water and a rag. Without pausing to ask, she gets to work washing the stitches. Mikasa flinches again, fingernails digging into the bearskin, but she sucks in air and reminds herself this is good. The sooner she’s all taken care of, the sooner she can leave. 

“Ma’am?” Mikasa asks. 

“Yes, dear?”

“When would it be safe for me to travel?”

The matron looks to Mikasa’s face and raises her eyebrows. “You have somewhere to be?”

She frowns. “Yes.”

“Hmm.” She scrubs the rag over the front of Mikasa’s leg, as if polishing a shoe, then tosses it back into the bowl. “I’d say it’s safe to remove these stitches in another three days. If you’re planning on joining those friends of yours, I’d wait to be absolutely certain. If this were to tear open, with how much blood you lost and how little you’ve regained—you’re pale as a ghost; I don’t need to have a blood cell count run on you to know that your blood is still dreadfully thin—you’d most likely just slip away before anyone was even sure what was wrong.” She pulls out a new swath of bandages, soft and smelling of honey like the ones Eren had used yesterday. “You’re not invulnerable anymore. My lady.”

Mikasa grimaces to hear the title—it doesn’t, and will never, belong to her—but her attention catches on what came just before that. “How do you…”

“The capital has always had its secrets,” she dismisses, beginning to rewrap her calf. “I sewed up that hoodlum uncle of yours—or grandfather, or whatever he was, Lord Uri’s pet murderer—a time or two. If you still had whatever it was beating in your blood, you would’ve been right as rain days ago.”

Something shatters, very quietly, in Mikasa’s chest. With a very, very small voice, she says, “I know.”

And she did. She knew that it was gone, stripped away with all of the Titan magic, all of it converging back inside Eren, but—it just pierces her to hear it laid out so plainly. 

She takes a deep breath, willing away tears. She’s shed quite enough of those these past few days. “Three days?”

“Three days.” Matron Beck nods. The bandages are tight, compacting Mikasa’s leg. Her stitches feel feverish, and she’d like to let them breathe, if she could, but—whatever gets her away fastest. “If there are no complications in the meantime. And after that, you’d better take it very, very slow for a very, very long while. Do you understand?”

Mikasa nods so vigorously her bangs escape from behind her ears. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good.” Matron Beck ties off the bandage under the arc of Mikasa’s foot and stands. Kindly, she pats her knee, and says, “Well then. That said, you are healing nicely. I’m very glad to see that you’re doing well.”

iv.

“Yes,” Eren answers, cold. “I’m great.”

“Come on, Eren,” Floch says, grin thick in his voice. “Didn’t you like to watch the heroes of war ride through town when you were a boy?”

“Sure,” he says. His fingers burn. The phantom sensation of ten-year-old Mikasa’s wrist is stuck to them, superimposed over the recent reality of her trembling hands from this morning. Her skin felt paper-thin and ice cold, and Eren still can’t breathe. “We’re an even merrier band. None of us are dismembered.”

Floch laughs like that was a joke, and Eren runs his tongue over his teeth. 

They’ve slowed all the way down to a trot, clip-clopping their way through Yalkel’s choked streets. It looks to Eren like every single townsperson has crammed their way onto the main avenue through the city, cheering and waving and blowing kisses. Children sit on their father’s shoulders or their mother’s hips; young men push and shove each other to get better looks; women lean out of second-story windows and wave handkerchiefs. 

Eren is immensely uncomfortable, which is low on the list of things he needed to be right now.

Trying his hardest just to get a steady breath as he eyes a father pointing him out to his son, he asks Floch, “Did they know we were coming?”

“I sent word that we’d be coming through here to swap out the horses,” he answers, “but I didn’t say anything about wanting a welcoming party. Like I said, I’m sure the people are just happy to see you.”

Eren looks overhead, catching sight of another strand of pennant banners strewn between two houses. Another dozen-odd are stretched out along the rest of the street, not counting all those that came before. The air is fragrant with spices and oils as people cook pretzels and sausages and krapfen. The brisk, early winter wind carries the sounds of a band strumming a tune—something lively, made for dancing. It reminds him of festivals in Shiganshina when he was a child, even if he’d never much liked them. 

It’s absolutely the sort of thing he would have said soldiers deserved to be greeted with, but that was then. 

Granted, he and his are a fair bit more successful than the Scouts of old had ever been—nobody is riding back in a cart full of body parts to be given to grieving kin, nobody leading riderless horses—but Eren isn’t the brave, selfless soul that those soldiers had been. That he’s even wearing their arms is a perversion. If these were the sort of soldiers who went riding through Shiganshina, Eren would never have dragged Mikasa to watch them at his side—he would have hidden her away so she didn’t have to see the blood on their hands—

Except, of course, that he wouldn’t have. 

“I’m surprised they’re this happy,” Eren says, half-suspicious. His voice is solid to his own ears, which he would count as a wonder if not for all the goddamn practice he’s had at keeping his fucking composure all these years. 

That sounds painful.

She would know. 

He bites the back of his tongue and peers around, but this deep in the center of town, he can’t see any recent wreckage like he’d seen as they rode in. “There were casualties here when I brought the Walls down, weren’t there?”

“Yes.” Floch shrugs. “But even here, Eren, people have been living with a threat over their heads for so long. Every outlying district was afraid they’d be the next Shiganshina, and after we found out about Marley and whatnot… We were all prepared to make a few sacrifices. It ended up being much less than we feared.”

“The few for the many,” Eren says. When Floch nods, pleased, Eren adds, “That is absolutely not what happened with the Rumbling.”

He snorts. “No, I suppose not. Still—nobody here is complaining.” He reaches over to grasp Eren’s shoulder and shakes it once. “Your people love you Eren. You saved us all.”

Eren shrugs his hand off, fighting nausea. It sweeps through him like fire—like hundreds of thousands of Colossals swimming across the ocean, killing everything in their path. The force of the steam flipping ironclad navy vessels and stripping the skin straight off the sailors’ bones. Like the searing red light of the sun reflecting off their skin as they made landfall, turning noon or nightfall to a bloody, bloody dusk. Regardless of the time they caught you, it was a ghost-story-sunset on your life. It didn’t have the mercy to be quick or painless— he didn’t have the mercy to be quick or painless. Every single person had enough time to see and understand, from the elders who could faintly recall the Great Titan War and Eldian exodus all the way down to the babies left in baskets that would become their coffins. Every single one of them had enough time to feel the helpless terror and the burning pain that Eren inflicted on them.

Saved us all. 

He has no response to that, and he doesn’t bother to try for one. 

Floch accepts it, though—God only knows what he reads it as—and their trot through the city continues without any further conversation. Though with nothing to distract from the hero’s welcome Yalkel is throwing him, Eren isn’t sure that’s a good thing. He keeps thinking, again and again, of himself as a child watching the Scouts ride through, and how he would drag Mikasa to them thoughtlessly because she was always right there, and—

And about how he would have dragged her out here to watch the Jaegerists. Even if he had known. God, she would’ve turned her face away, pressed her forehead into his shoulder so she didn’t have to see, and he still would’ve made her bear it. 

A pair of kids detach from the crowd and jog along with Eren’s pace. Boys—brothers, Eren would guess—one older and one younger, tow-headed, missing baby teeth showing in their wide smiles. They shriek joyously and grin up at him, waving so fast their little hands are blurs. They’re shouting something, but between the speed and pitch of their voices and the racket of the rest of the crowd, Eren can’t make it out. He forces a tired smile down at them—a lifeless twitch of the lips—but still their freckled little faces explode with excitement at his acknowledgment.

And—it is something to know that these children won’t be cattle. Eren can’t say with any certainty that they’ll never come to harm, that they’ll never have enemies, but—it won’t be for the blood in their veins. They’ll grow into manhood free of the shadow of the Walls, the way Eren had done. It’s something. 

A moment later, though, Ramzi and Halil take their places. Their crushed corpses stain the feet of Wall Titans that might have come from right here in Yalkel—stain the streets of Yalkel. 

Eren shoves the image away, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s trying to break it. 

He does his best to let the rest of the city pass him by without sticking. He tries to breathe and tries to let the coldness in his hands seep down and wash over the rest of his restless, feverish skin. Eventually, they come to what used to be the Military Police offices, their stables still intact. There are the fresh horses—the plan never was to ride them to death, which does make more sense. 

Their party comes to a stop in the courtyard. Already, a dozen horses are groomed and saddled, freshly washed and fully provisioned. Ignoring the way the noise of the crowd has the horses skittering nervously, Eren grabs his pack and unhooks his feet from the stirrups. 

Halfway there, he thinks, devoid of emotion, and slings one leg over, sliding down to hit the cobblestone, his boots connecting with a sharp clack —

v.

“Oof,” Mikasa says, falling hard onto the chaise. 

“What are you doing?” Historia demands, running her hands over Mikasa’s arms, holding her elbows firmly as if to keep her in place. “Mikasa! You are not supposed to be walking around by yourself!”

“I was doing fine,” she says, laying her fingers on her forearms, “until you tackled me.”

Historia scoffs, but it’s tinged with some genuine, wild frustration. “Oh my God!” she says. “You’re— ridiculous. Oh my God. I should ground you.”

Mikasa knows it’s well-meant, but her lips purse, and she twists her arms out of Historia’s grip. “I’m not your child, Historia,” she says, some mild force behind the words. 

Historia’s eyes soften. “I know,” she says, and pushes away, no longer looming over her. She sits beside her, throwing her head back on the firm back of the navy blue chaise. “Sorry, I don’t mean to—just. Oh, my God. Sorry. You surprised me.” She twists her whole body in a single, dramatic flop to face Mikasa. “You must be feeling better, though, if you made it here.”

Historia is in as much of a state of disarray as Mikasa has seen her since they were cadets. She’s in a nightgown very similar to the one she is herself, with the addition of an off-white, crusty splotch on her shoulder that must be baby vomit. Her feet are bare and her hair is unbound and unbrushed, tangled and wild over her shoulders. There are bruises under her bright eyes, and her face is flushed red from where she’d nearly ran down the stairs to tackle her.

“I’m fine,” Mikasa says, mostly truthful. “I just got my stitches checked.”

“Oh! Good. You’re—all good, then?”

She nods. “The matron said they ought to be able to take them out in about three days.”

“Lovely,” Historia says. She blows some hair out of her face and says, “Just in time for Eren to get back.”

“What?” Mikasa blinks—two, three, four times—blinks in a flurry, trying to see Historia’s meaning. Her blood sticks to her veins. “What?”

Historia nods cautiously. “Yes?” She eyes Mikasa up and down. “You know he went on that surveying trip, right? For Wall Maria’s territories? He should be back Thursday morning.”

Oh. 

Mikasa’s mouth forms the word, but no sound comes out. 

She swallows. 

Her stomach rolls. 

Her hands float up, clasping each other under her chin. She trembles once, exhales, and says, “Oh.” 

The air in her lungs is sharp.

That’s. That’s good. She knows that’s good. It takes a long moment, but slowly relief begins to roll in on a tide. Relief. It’s cold, but the cold is purifying. 

“Oh,” she says again—once more with substance. She licks her lips. “No. He didn’t tell me that. But that’s good.”

Historia tilts her head to the side, analyzing Mikasa’s expression with extraordinary care. Eyes narrowed but glowing with sympathy, she says, “I suppose so. He said over and over that he wasn’t going to go, but apparently he changed his mind this morning. Rode out of the city at half-past nine.” She gives a delicate shrug. Something about her manner puts Mikasa in mind of a woman trying not to scare off an injured animal, and her throat grows tight with impatience. 

“You know I’m not staying, either, right?” she asks. 

Mikasa regrets the bite in her voice instantly. Historia deflates, expression crumpling, and Mikasa’s heart pangs. One hand detaches from her throat to clutch Historia’s, and her friend laces their fingers together tightly. 

“I know,” she mutters. “I always kind of figured. But I’m very glad I got to see you these last few days. Thank you. For the blanket, for being there for me for the christening—for everything.”

Mikasa nods. Her bare throat bobs under her knuckles, still warm from the memory of Eren’s mouth, and she says, “I’m glad I got to see you, too. And meet the baby. It’s not you, Historia. You’re… probably the only reason I was able to stomach being here for as long as I did. But…”

“I get it,” she assures. She smiles, thin, and squeezes her fingers. “It’s not really the sort of thing you can just overlook, is it?”

Mikasa shakes her head no. There aren’t words for what he did. For all the things she saw. The river, the ravine, a whole world broken and burned. There will never be any recovery from that.

Historia slumps deeper into the chaise, drawing up her knees and wrapping her arms around them. Mikasa’s gets tangled in there, but she lets it be. Soon enough, she’ll be saying goodbye to Historia forever. Of the many things she’s learned these past weeks—ever since Liberio—one is that she’ll regret every second not spent with her friend. 

She’ll always be sorry that she didn’t bid Sasha a proper goodbye. Soldiers aren’t supposed to tempt fate by saying it, but she will regret every day that Sasha’s last memory of her wasn’t a rib-crushing hug and words of love. They never were her strong suit, but she would have tried. 

If I had given him a different answer —

No. She crushes that thought before it can go any further. Even the echo of it is enough to make her head throb. She tortured herself enough with it, and she knows the answer. Eren cares about her—maybe he even does believe that he loves her, not like that, but in whatever way he’s able to—but whatever goodness in him he would have been able to scrounge up for her sake would never, ever, ever have been enough to stop him. 

Will she have to say goodbye to him? Her knuckles spasm over Historia’s, flashing white. 

No, she thinks again. No. That’s what this is, surely. He’s gone away from her—gone away from the city—and he won’t be back for days. He probably expects her to slip away quietly in this window he’s given her, so that’s what she’ll do. It will be easier for both of them. She’ll be gone by the time he returns, and the last words she will ever speak to him will always be that nervous, anguished, I want to go. Those will always be the last words he ever heard her say. 

It’s no less than he deserves, she knows that. But it still aches to think it. 

Why, though? He’s never extended the courtesy of a goodbye to her. He’d vanished without a word for nine months in Odiha, and when they reunited in Liberio he treated her as brusquely as a stranger. In Shiganshina, before he set all hell loose, he’d planned for his last words ever to her to be that he’d always hated her. Even when they were cadets and children, he’d take off without a word, chasing whatever harebrained idea came to him, leaving her behind at seemingly every chance he could. She’d given him her heart the very first night they met, and he’s never treated it very gently.

Mikasa feels a dampness on the side of her little finger. She pulls it forward, surprised to find that her hand had climbed from her throat to under her eye, until her fingertips were ghosting across the scar there. 

Another goodbye he didn’t give me, she thinks, bitter. Soldiers aren’t supposed to say it, but if he hadn’t had his Titan, he would have died that day, and his last words to her would have been barked harshly, her last sight of him an angry glower as he ripped away from her hand. 

She wipes her little finger against her shoulder, and no more tears well. 

Eventually, Historia breaks the silence. “Well,” she says, straightening. “Can I give you presents and you promise not to think they’re meant as bribes?”

Mikasa’s eyes flit to her. She takes a moment to ground herself, here and now, with Historia. Her friend the queen, her friend the mother of a newborn, who clearly had a long night, and says, “They were, though?” 

Historia shoots her a mock-glare, but doesn’t deny it. “They’re upstairs,” she says, “if you’re up for it?”

Mikasa pushes herself up. “If you are, Your Grace. You’re feeling better?”

“Every day.” Historia waves the question away. “We’re designed to be up and kicking almost immediately after birth, or so I’m told. Not sure if I actually believe it. I’m still bleeding like a stuck pig. Anyway, Small Ymir is upstairs, too—I left her with her dad when I heard the door in case it was you, which it was, because you hate doctors, apparently, and are determined to spite them.”

“Historia.” 

The queen smirks. “Up and at ‘em.”

They link elbows and hobble along together, limping in distinctly different ways. It’s really not so terrible to walk. Mikasa is slowly getting the hang of not using the muscle, relying on her thigh for movement and bracing on the railing or against Historia when she has to put weight on her bad leg. Historia, though, does her best to keep her thighs as still as possible, swinging her legs out and hardly moving her hips.  

Mikasa is sure that from the outside, they look absurd. But she’s glad for the camaraderie. She clutches her hand tightly, trying to cancel out any other warmth she still feels.

Eventually, they do manage to drag themselves and each other into Historia’s massive bedchamber. If Mikasa thought the one she’s been in is large, it has nothing on this, which seems half a palace in its own right. The ceilings arc into the heavens, an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the garden and guesthouses. The natural light makes the air feel warmer than it is, and there’s a fire sputtering merrily in the center of the northern-facing wall. The four-poster bed, swathed in purple and gold, is tucked into the corner nearest the fireplace. On the cushioned hope chest lying at the foot, there’s Wilhelm, sitting vigil over the sleeping princess in her cradle. 

“Oh,” Historia whispers, slumping with relief. “You got her down.”

Wilhelm stands, lifting his hand to indicate higher. At a regular volume, he says, “I’m telling you, my mother says you’ve got to get them used to noise early on, or they’ll wake up every time you drop a pin.”

“Will,” Historia snaps, but he just gestures to the baby—still sleeping peacefully. 

“See?” He ducks his head to Mikasa, hand twitching as if he’d like to tip a nonexistent hat. “Nice seeing you again, m’lady.”

“Oh, you don’t need to—” Mikasa says; her voice twinning with Historia’s as she says, “Now don’t frighten her.”

Mikasa chooses not to take offense. 

Historia sets her shoulders. “Thank you for getting her to sleep, Will. Do you want to grab a nap while you can?” He opens his mouth, but she cuts off his answer with, “I was going to give Mikasa her stuff.”

“Ah.” He nods with understanding. “All right, then, I’ll get out of your hair. Holler if you need me.”

“Your daughter will holler if she needs you,” she corrects. Wilhelm flashes her a tired smile and, on his way out, ruffles her hair. He shuts the door with a quiet click and is gone. Easy as that. 

Mikasa’s chest pangs.

Historia groans, covering her face with her hands. Mikasa hovers, unsure what to say or do, quite sure she’s crossed over the line into Historia’s family’s space and so is unable to comment. But after a long minute, the queen sniffs and lifts her face, pushing back her hair. “Okay,” she says. “You sit. Watch the baby. I’ll get your stuff. Ah,” she warns, cutting off Mikasa’s protest before she’s even given it breath. “It’s a surprise.”

Mikasa acquiesces. Watching the baby is far from a chore.

She sits on the hope chest where Wilhelm had just been, taking in the clear view to the bassinet while Historia flits around. Baby Ymir is asleep, her tiny hand clutching the corner of her blanket. Her eyes move restlessly behind paper-thin eyelids, sweet baby dreams filling her little head. Mikasa melts. If she weren’t afraid she would wake her, she would trace her fat little cheek and feel her tiny puffs of breath. 

She’s distracted enough for the soft, heavy weight that Historia drops on her lap to take her by surprise. 

Mikasa cocks her head, staring down at the pile of clothes Historia dropped onto her. She has to dart her hand out to stop it from toppling over, and Historia yelps. 

“Oops,” she says, brushing her hair out of her face. “Sorry. But—ta-da!”

Mikasa blinks up at her. “What’s all this?”

“They’re clothes!” she says. “For you! Not that you don’t look great in my dead sister’s stuff or the nightgowns we keep on hand for guests, but I figured since all your stuff was, ah, destroyed, you might want some things to wear.”

“Oh.” Mikasa nods dumbly. Destroyed? she wonders, and then decides she doesn’t want to hear any more. “Yes. I… Thank you, Historia.”

Historia beams, then tucks the grin into her cheek. She says, “It’s not weird that I remembered your measurements from last year.” 

“Of course not.” Mikasa lifts the garment from the top of the pile—a simple pink blouse, the sort of thing she’s seen Historia wear since her coronation, but not so far beyond what Mikasa would’ve bought for herself. If she’d had the money for it. The sleeves and hems are stitched with a darker pink braid, and when she runs her fingers over it, it’s soft as down. “Where did you get this?”

Historia flings herself down beside her. “I had someone run to a tailor yesterday, after I got Frieda’s dress for you. I just figured that I ought to. It’s not a lot, and it’s really nonspecific stuff, just a couple skirts and blouses, and I’m not even sure they’ll really fit right, but—I did ask for them in pinks and lilacs and neutrals. Those are your colors. I—hope you like them.”

Mikasa looks over to her—her only friend within arm’s reach, this girl she helped set up as queen. “Historia.” She has to swallow—clear her throat of the thickness choking it. “Thank you. I mean it. This is very sweet.”

She shrugs, bright with happiness. “Well. I told you I’d pay you back for the blanket.” She drops her head on Mikasa’s shoulder, and drags it along like a cat seeking attention. “Do you want to try anything on?”

Mikasa hums. She would—like a minute, honestly. She would like another moment of sitting down. Her stitches pulse hotly against the bandages, which seem to sting in a way they didn’t yesterday. “We’re doing alright in our pajamas for now,” she says. “I’m glad you’ve been taking it easy.”

“Hm!” Historia bobs her head back and forth, as if to say so-so. “Newborns: the definition of ease.” She blows out a breath. “I really do have it easy, I know—Will is a huge help, and it’s not like I have a real job that I have to get back to or a house to run, but—oh my God, Mikasa, she needs to eat every three hours. And then if I don’t feed her, because I am busy, like I was at the summit thing, or if I’m trying to sleep, then I feel like someone has set my tits on fire and they’re going to explode. And—I have mentioned the bleeding, right?” She chuckles, just toeing the border of hysterical. “It’s kind of a horror show. And I would do it all again, of course, but—I didn’t—and it’s—just—” She shudders. “It’s just—kind of a lot? And Will is wonderful, he’s a great partner in all of this, but…” She trails off, and then flops dramatically backward against the bed with a wince, eyes shut tight.

After a beat, she says, “I’m sorry. I know you haven’t had it easy, either.”

Carefully, Mikasa sets aside the stack of folded clothes. “All I’ve been doing the past couple of days is sitting around embroidering. That is the definition of ease.”

Historia scoffs. “And the past couple of days before that, you were fighting across continents trying to save the world.”

“For all the good it did.”

“More than anyone else.”

“I know.” Mikasa plants her hands on the hope chest and tips her head toward the ceiling. Her fingers stroke over the shiny smoothness of the fish scale pattern of the cushion, and she thinks of Eren’s thumb on her ribs yesterday—of his knuckles moving on her scalp in her nightmare, rooting her in place. She shakes her head and asks, “Did you have a rough night?”

“Mmm. The little miss was unhappy. I think the coronatio—the fucking christening, ugh—was too much excitement for her. And then we had that big dinner… yeah, I think she’s overtired. Was, hopefully, if this nap sticks. She just ate, so hopefully she’s down for the count.”

“Hopefully,” she agrees. “Not to—take sides—but I have heard that it’s good to let babies get used to noise. That’s what Uncle Gri…” She falters to a stop, remembering who she’s talking to.

Historia’s eyes open to slits. “Ah, yes. Because he would know all about what is and isn’t good for children.”

“I’m sorry,” Mikasa says, wishing she could vanish.

Historia waves her off. “Not your fault. Like father, like son—men who can wear many faces. Literally. Anyway. I see the logic in it, right? I think I’m just… defensive. I’m so worried that I’m going to be a horrible mother that the second someone tells me I’m doing something wrong, I just… it feels like they’re telling me I don’t love her enough.”

“Historia,” Mikasa says. “That’s not true at all. You adore her, anyone can see that—we all know it. Nobody would ever think that.”

“I know.” She covers her eyes with her palms, elbows sticking in the air. “I know, but it’s still—I’m just not used to any of this. I will get it, but for right now, it’s just…”

“She’s a week old.” Mikasa reaches over to pat her forehead. “You’re both new at this. She’s not going to fault you.”

Historia smiles wanly. “You are good at this,” she says, and levers herself up onto her elbows. “Bleh.” She picks at the fabric over her shoulder, crusted with baby vomit. “Will’s mom told me I really should just get used to being kind of gross for the next couple of years, but I’m going to put up a fight. And I think getting dressed will make me feel productive.” Her tone makes it clear how little she’s enthused by the idea. 

“You are being productive,” Mikasa says. “And you could just get into a new nightgown.”

“Oh. That’s brilliant. I think I might. You could, too, if you like. It’ll be like a sleepover in the afternoon.”

Mikasa peers at the stack of clothes, tamping down her reaction to sleepover. Last night with Eren— the last night with Eren, the last she’ll ever, ever have—wasn’t that, not in the sense Mikasa knows it as. But she can’t bear to imagine what else it might be called. With an uneven breath, she asks, “Is there a nightgown in here?”

“There ought to be.” Historia groans as she stands. “If there’s not, I’ll be sending for heads.” She laces her fingers together and reaches her hands high over her head, leaning one way and then the other to crack her back. After shaking out her small frame, she reaches into the pile of crisply folded clothes, rooting until she frees a swath of cream and subtle lace from the bottom. She hums, satisfied, and then, with bright eyes, tosses it over Mikasa’s head. 

vi.

“Mother fucker,” Eren spits, ducking away from another low-hanging branch that’s managed to hit him squarely in the face. He bats it away with his forearm, but a twig snags in his hair and he has to rip it out. 

At his right, Floch masks a laugh as a cough. They’ve slowed enough that talking doesn’t mean risking your tongue, but it’s mostly quiet as they navigate these woods. They were originally to cut through the mountains entirely, but the Esen had flooded the valleys and basins badly enough that the horses couldn’t manage it. An officer called Helving had stepped forward to offer a way he’d known as a child, and while it’ll get them through, it’s slowed them down. Instead of a galloping unit, they’re following after Helving, riding two abreast along a game trail. The ground is trickier in these parts, rocks and roots buried under a thick layer of rotting leaves, and they’ve checked their pace with caution. 

Helving’s accent, as he calls out the occasional warning, bears traces of Sasha’s. Eren is excruciatingly aware that Dauper is barely seventy miles away. It’s almost too close to bear. 

“Take her easy, Eren,” Floch laughs. He is entirely too cheerful for—fucking— anyone, ever. “That’s the fifth time that’s happened.”

He swats another barren branch away from his head. “Not my fault.”

“You could have stayed shorter.”

Eren’s lip twitches, and he looks up at the sky through the canopy of quivering branches and dead leaves. “I’ll take the trade-off.”

The only time he’s ever been in these woods before was some fourteen months ago when everyone spent Modranicht with Sasha’s family. There’d been snow on the ground and a bite in the air, but it hadn’t mattered. Connie got his tongue frozen to the metal end of a pitchfork, Jean cried the flu and spent nearly the entire week inside drinking cider, and Mrs. Braus had to chase Sasha out of the kitchen what seemed like every hour. One night, Armin had roused him and Mikasa sometime after midnight and dragged them into the cold to look at the stars. They were brighter and more numerous than he’d ever seen in the crisp country air. He laid on his back, Armin’s arm brushing his and Mikasa’s head by his shoulder, her perfect profile shining faintly in the starlight, and he’d known with all the certainty of gravity that this would be the last holiday he ever spent with them. 

And he was right. 

He’ll never see Armin again. He knows that. The last word he’ll ever hear him say was that bitten-out goodbye before he rode out of the palace gates. Eren remembers the venom in his voice, and more than that, the utter lack of emotion in his eyes. For that brief second, he imagines that Armin’s old affection had canceled out his newborn abhorrence, rendering him, for at least that final moment, perfectly indifferent to Eren. He’d snapped his reins and turned away, not once looking back, and Eren knows that he never will. 

That is not the case with Mikasa. She still loves him. 

He always knew that if anyone would be able to still feel anything warm for him by the end, it would be her—and he always knew that wouldn’t matter. He knew Mikasa would never be able to see past what he did, what he became. He’s only been fooling himself these past few days.

She loves him. Some part of her wants him—some part of her needs him. The look in her eyes last night, when he opened her door—the sheer, staggering relief and the surrender, and the love, always the love—Eren knows that that look will live in his mind until the day he dies. It’s entirely too likely that that will be the last time he saw her expression with any real clarity. The last time she ever looked him in the eyes.

She loves him. In a way, it’s almost worse that she still does. To know that he went so far beyond the pale that even the enormity of her feelings for him isn’t enough to keep her around. It was only days ago that all in the world she wanted was to be near him.

And now here they are. Miles and miles apart. They’ve been farther from each other, but the distance between them that had, during his months wandering Marley, seemed to swallow him whole now seems like nothing. If they’d found their way back to each other then, she’d have been overjoyed to see him. And it had been a finite thing, then. Always, in his mind, a clock had been running down, every second bringing him closer to war and fire and death but also to her. 

He doesn’t know if he’s ever going to see her again. If she’ll take the opportunity he gave her to slip away quietly—vanish into the wind like so many flower petals. Like the dead leaves barely clinging to the branches, ready to rip away at their first chance. 

God, is he really —

He can’t think about it. He won’t, he won’t, he won’t. He tucks Mikasa into the corner of his mind where his mother resides—the pair of them glowing in the sunset as it reaches through the lace curtains over the kitchen sink, rainbow-edged soap suds floating up over the basin carrying up the faint scent of nettle leaves—and slams a door over it. He won’t think about any sort of forever in this world without her. He can’t.

The past—his mother crushed under the beams of their house, crying, mouth covered, alone—the future—Mikasa curled under the covers in Sasha’s old bedroom, crying, mouth covered, alone—

— or —and his gut twists violently — or —

He can’t think about it. Red bleeds into his vision at the shadow of the thought of it, and he has to fight hard to keep the rest of that sentence from forming. 

Eren focuses. He’s still gazing skyward. The cover of the dieback branches isn’t enough to obscure the grey that’s beginning to overtake the sky—a smooth, ghostly grey that warns only of cold, not snow. It makes sense. He’s a hundred miles closer to the coast now than he was this morning, and the mountains catch the chill. He wouldn’t be surprised if they do end up getting snowed on at some point, especially once they turn north. 

Eren has no fucking idea what’s in his pack. Floch might’ve told him—who the fuck knows, he does his best to block him out if it’s not necessary, and God knows he wasn’t in any sort of state to hear it this morning—but now he’s wondering if anyone has any firewood. After a week of torrential rain, damp still clings to the forests, and what wood they can find may not burn. He’s not cold—nowhere except for his palms—but it’s still a concern. 

He decides to ask. “Are we going to be able to find firewood?”

“Guerry has an axe,” Floch says. “We can find some saplings to cut down.”

“Or,” someone else offers from somewhere behind him, “you could rip a tree or two out of the ground.”

Light laughter kicks off. Eren, scowling, fights the urge to snap at them. 

“It’s not quite the season for it yet,” Floch comments, “but maybe we’re feeling especially festive…”

“If we feel like burning down the forest, you mean.” Eren looks off the trail, scanning for any signs of life, and nearly gets caught on another branch. He smacks it away and dead lichens crumble all over his hand. “ Fucking,” he says, exasperated. “You know what, maybe the forest fucking deserves it.”

Floch snorts. So do some of the others. “You’re the only one having this bad of luck with that,” he says. “What’d you do to this poor place, Eren?”

He wipes his icy palm on his lapel. Wry, he says, “It is my fault she’s half-drowned.”

“Tsk. It’s your fault her people will live. That she wasn’t firebombed to ashes.”

Helving looks over his shoulder and says, “The rain won’t hurt the forest, sir, don’t worry.”

Eren pointedly nods to a fallen tree some meters off the trail. The broken ends are still buttery-brown and jaggedly splintered: a victim of the hurricanes. 

Floch scoffs again. “Clearing out the weak won’t do anything any harm. We all know that, eh boys?”

Ten voices call out, “Yes, sir!”  

Eren keeps his face turned to the forest and rolls his eyes. Define weak. Define harm. What lesson have these people taken from Eren’s actions? 

Considering the reception he’d gotten in Yalkel, Eren will assume that by now the vast majority of the island is happy to support him. Surely, young men across the nation are moaning to anyone who will listen that if only they had known, they would have taken up arms and fought behind him. Mothers are telling their children not to be afraid—telling themselves they’ve nothing to fear, for their children will grow up never knowing war. Grandparents will weep that maybe, maybe, after all they’ve seen and suffered, they really have found themselves in a safe haven. Just as surely, there must be little girls who cried thinking of all the kittens who lived across the ocean, fathers who paled as numbers ran through their heads, sun-toughened elders who thought about not-so-distant cousins they’d never met dying in agony for the crime of being born on the wrong shore. 

They’ll all of them live with the discomforting knowledge that their survival was paid for with enough blood to drown them all. Day after day until the weight becomes familiar, and then begins to slip off. It will be a shadow, maybe one they’ll never shake off—but not one of them will ever really know. So what could they have learned? 

That monsters have their place in the world, as long as they’re your monsters? That it’s weak not to throw your support behind the slaughter of billions? To dare to object? Is that what the Rumbling was to them—to these men with him right now, was it as simple as a culling?

There are hunters here. They should know. 

Eren scrubs his knuckle into his eye. He’s not sure how much he trusts himself to continue this conversation. His hands are cold and his heart was left behind in Mitras—maybe already on her way to Dauper, how the fuck would he know—and he can’t help but imagine how disappointed she would be to know he’s even in the company of men making jokes about what she gave every last ounce of herself trying to stop, and he still can’t breathe, and his head aches for the fucking windsong and he wants, he wants, he wants all of it to just stop. 

This is what I chose, he reminds himself, and trembles. This is what I deserve. 

“Let’s pick it up,” Eren says. He orders. The weight of command sinks into his voice, as natural as his own flesh. Again, that chorus of yes, sir! Reins snap and hooves click, sounds muffled by the layer of rotting leaves. Eren looks to the horizon and says, “It’s—

vii.

“—getting dark fast,” Mikasa comments.

“Hm?”

Historia levers up on her elbows, pushing a section of hair aside. Mikasa has been combing through her hair with her fingers, braiding and unbraiding pieces of it for a long while in silence now. She had changed nightgowns, and washed her face and brushed her teeth as well, and between all of it, she’d seemed to be able to find some measure of peace. Awake, but eyes closed and breath even.

Mikasa had found some scraps of it, too. Braiding her hair was easier than navigating the minefield that is a conversation between them, and Mikasa feels like she’s doing something when she’s minding Historia. Historia isn’t weak and weary from lack of sleep because she’s haunted by nightmares of a world she killed, it’s because she has a newborn… who was born for her part in killing the world, yes, but—

She’s focusing on her baby. And on braiding her hair. And there’s really nothing else she could be doing. 

“The sun is almost set already,” she says, nodding out the window. Historia’s glass wall has a clear view of the western sky, but if the sun is indeed setting, it’s already hidden behind the thick screen of clouds that have crept over the sky. No brilliant display of colors, no marigold glow. Just plain grey slowly darkening to starless black. 

At that moment, Ymir startles awake with a drawn-out sob, and the first thing Mikasa feels is a pang of sorrow for the baby. In her short life, has there been a single sunset for her to see?

Historia sits up in a panic and shoves herself off the bed, scrambling over to the cradle. “Hi, darling,” she says, carefully lifting her daughter up to her shoulder. “Hi, hi, hi, hi, darling, oh, honeybunches. Are you hungry, darling?” To Mikasa, she adds, “She sounds hungry, when she’s like this—do you care if I feed her here?” 

Mikasa shakes her head. “Of course not.” What else would she do? And it’s not as if Mikasa has never seen her undressed before. 

Historia gives her a thumbs up. She collapses onto the hope chest and pulls the neckline of her nightgown down, but it takes Ymir several long moments to latch. “C’mon,” Historia croons, guiding her with a gentle hand to her cheek. “You know how to do it, come on, help Mamma out, hmm?” When at last she does, Historia hisses. She tips her head back, and Mikasa hears bones pop in her neck. 

Mikasa shifts, slowly, around until she’s sitting at her side. Historia rotates one shoulder and blinks down at the baby, weariness settling back in. She makes no effort at conversation, so Mikasa breathes in the calm air. 

Historia looks pensive, staring at her daughter. Ymir looks up at her with startlingly similar eyes, full of such a perfect trust. Mikasa wishes she could know what was going on in that little baby head of hers. Such a pure little bundle of goodness. Nothing about the circumstances of her birth could change that. All she knows is that someone loves her, and would never let anything bad happen to her. She has a mother, and that’s all she needs. 

It occurs to Mikasa to ask, “Are you always going to feed her yourself?”

“Yes,” Historia answers immediately. “I know I could get a wet nurse—that’s what everybody seemed to think I’d do; the nurses at my ranch were handing her to some other woman almost as soon as she was born, assuming I’d be too queenly to nurse my own child—but she’s mine. She’s my daughter, and I’m not letting anyone else touch her.” 

Mikasa nods. “I understand. I didn’t mean anything by asking.”

Historia glances up at her. “It’s fine. I know you didn’t.” She blows some hair out of her face. “We should probably eat, too. Is there anything you want?”

“Oh, no. I’m not very hungry.”

“Hmm.” Historia eyes her critically. “Not buying it. You didn’t sleep at all, either.”

“I slept well last night,” Mikasa says, and regrets it instantly. She drops her eyes and tucks her hands under her thighs, praying Historia doesn’t press. 

She doesn’t. If she heard any rumors, she’s keeping them to herself. “Maybe,” she says, “but you’re not dying in my house, thanks. Stay here for dinner.”

Mikasa fights not to bristle, though she knows Historia is only putting on a show. “Is that a command, Your Grace?”

She softens. “It’s a request. Please.” 

Mikasa sighs, gentling to match. She shouldn’t let herself be frustrated by Historia. She’s doing the best she knows how, and Mikasa does truly appreciate her efforts at caring for her. It’s not Historia’s fault she doesn’t like this position, and it’s not her fault she’s in it. “If you insist.” 

“I do,” she says. “Will’ll be along any minute, I bet—he has ears like a bat when it comes to the baby—and I’ll send him out to get something to eat. Something with strawberries?”

Mikasa nods absently. She can’t bring herself to look forward to it. She likely would’ve ended up not eating at all if not for Historia—she can’t fathom ringing the bell to summon servants as if she had any place doing so—but she can’t deny that she needs to get as much of her strength back as she can. She needs to be well out of the way of danger by the time she leaves here forever. 

Of course, she’ll be in danger in Dauper, too. A different sort—but then, even discarding her health, it’s not like she’s safe here. The only reason she hasn’t been executed for treason is on Eren’s behalf, and it’s not like he’s here to enforce it. 

Mikasa’s mouth sets itself into a hard line, and she flips her hands over, pressing her knuckles into the mattress. 

viii.

Eren’s thumb rubs a circle into the center of his palm, his jaw set and eyes fixed ahead. He keeps his face expressionless. He doesn’t want to share this moment with anyone.

The scenery is lit by iceburst flashlights. When the world is dark like this, it could almost be moonlight. This could almost be the moon, for how utterly foreign it feels in this moment. 

Wall Maria’s shadow was the canopy of his childhood. Within Shiganshina, it was impossible to not feel caged. There were few enough times in his early life that he’d been out of sight of the Walls. Even if he was turned away, they were still there. An eyesore. A stain. Even when the ugly thing was kicked in, his life destroyed along with the gates, he’d never missed the Wall. He’d missed his house, missed his parents, missed the life he’d had—but not the Wall itself. Reclaiming it was necessary, it was work he was glad to do, but when he finally did, he had to face that the cage had never even been meant to keep them safe. He was right. It was never anything more than a pen for cattle, keeping them in one place until the slaughter. 

Eren cannot regret turning that weapon on itself. It’s not in him.

He’s passed the trenches left by Sina and Rose already today, but those hadn’t resonated with him. He’d passed through Shiganshina itself a few days ago, but he hadn’t looked outside once, still unable to think beyond where Mikasa’s pulse fluttered feebly under his hand. But now…

Wall Maria is gone.

The indent where it once stood looks to be some five meters deep. The edge of the trench on both sides—the exit wound—is a mound of mud stacked half a meter high and sloping downward slowly, mushed down by the days of rain and littered with jagged chunks of rubble. The debris extends evenly outward some twenty meters in both directions— both directions, he can see the other side, and that’s enough to stop his breathing—the worst of it in and around the crater. In the darkness, the broken stone looks almost black. It looks almost beautiful. 

His thumbnail digs into his palm. 

On the other side of the ditch, the district of Quinta lies empty. A ghost town. She’s been safe for some three years now, but the resettling of Wall Maria has been a piecemeal effort. Most of the adult population of Wall Maria had been culled in the name of a reclamation mission, and the vast majority of the children who survived all these long, hard years since the Fall remain in the military or the mechanical corps. Shiganshina has been restored to something very like the thriving market town it had been in its day, but other than that, the focus has always been on the farmland. The southern parts of Maria are scattered with half-full villages, enough people taking the initiative that the whole island was finally off starvation rations just two years ago, but the resettlement efforts haven’t yet made their way to the rest of the outlying districts, and there’s been no pressing reason to. There just aren’t enough survivors to fill it all out. 

Eren’s party should’ve been here hours ago. They were meant to finish a thorough survey of the city and be on their way out by dark, but the sun is long gone now and they’ve only just arrived. He needs to make a call—he’s sure the rest of them are waiting for his orders—but he can’t stop staring at the scenery. 

The world is so dark that his own light is the only thing he has to illuminate it. That and the moon, a sickly pale crescent left behind on the western horizon nearly swallowed by dark clouds. But it’s enough to get the shape of the land. A shallow downward slope. Forests off in the distance, crawling over the same sort of low mountains that push up all throughout central Paradis. The River Esen cuts through the earth like a long black serpent, winding languidly through the plains. The starless night gives it nothing to reflect, and it seems instead to eat light. 

The world is quiet and still for as far as he can see. The world is quiet and still everywhere, but here, at least, it’s peace. 

He stares for a long moment, and then finally gives up on naming the feeling in his mangled, bloody chest. He swallows, separates his hands, and nudges his horse to turn and face the group. 

Nobody disagrees when he says the light is insufficient to get anything meaningful done, that they’re all more likely to break an ankle than to accurately record any damage. Nobody objects when he says they’ve had a long, hard day of riding and should make camp for the night. 

The place where the gate once stood is still crossable, and the old Garrison barracks are just on the other side. The building is worse for the wear—thinly carpeted with vines and partially collapsed from neglect before the Wall even came down—but it’s a roof over their heads when they expected they’d be in tents, and that’s enough to cheer the rest of them. It makes little difference for Eren. Whether or not he manages to sleep will have nothing to do with where he rests his head. 

He’s tired. Ten hours of hard riding ought to be easy next to some of the marches he’d been on with his infantry unit, but Eren doubts there’s a man alive who wouldn’t ache after the day he’s had. 

— Not anymore, certainly —

His body is craving sleep—and supper, too, he hasn’t eaten anything since this morning, and it’s possible he threw that up somewhere along the line—but Eren isn’t sure if it’s worth trying. He slept better last night than he has in years. No nightmares at all, barring that first, and then eight full hours afterwards. He flexes his hands, dry and empty and cold, and considers that at least he’s trained himself out of waking up screaming. He doesn’t care about inconveniencing anyone here, but he doesn’t think it would instill much faith in him as a leader if he woke them up with his sobbing. 

The horses are put away in the stables. The kitchen is blocked off by debris, so someone starts a cookfire in the common room. There are actual bedrooms left here, the size of shoeboxes and infested with mice undoubtedly, but still individual rooms with doors that close. Eren wonders how many of them have had that in the past few years. There’s the upbeat murmur of a content camp, and soon enough the smell of toasting barley and burning bacon. The fire is yellow and warm enough, and so too is the conversation. Eventually, Eren admits that he doesn’t see any real way to avoid it, or much reason. His own distaste doesn’t count for much, and he has to be sure these people will listen to him. They’ve yet to show any signs of free thinking, but he’s not willing to risk it in case there is any cleverness waiting to peek through.

When he steps forward, Floch’s face brightens, and the others straighten their backs and shut their mouths. Like a bunch of trained dogs. Eren clenches his jaw. He presses his thumb into the center of his palm, trying to break the skin, walks the final few paces to the empty spot by the fire, and drops to sit on the ground. He reaches out his cold hand, grabbing for—

ix.

—the stack of clothing, the soft fabric rasping against her warm knuckles.

“You’re sure you don’t need help with that?” Historia asks. “I’ll make Will, no problem.”

“No problem,” echoes Wilhelm from the table, where he’s clearing away the remains of their supper before the servants who’ll be summoned by the bell can. It had been a lovely, hot meal of sausage and potatoes with a nut-filled pastry for dessert. Mikasa had managed about four bites altogether, and had pretended not to notice Historia’s worried looks. 

“I’ll be alright,” she tells her. 

Historia is skeptical. “And you’re really sure you don’t just want to crash in one of the rooms in this wing?”

“I’m sure you want your space to yourself.”

Historia screws up her face. “Not really, but fine.” She glances down at Ymir in her arms. The baby is fussing but not quite crying, tiny fingers gripping her mother’s thumb. Historia adds, “You can just say if you’re trying to escape the little miss, you know.”

Mikasa shakes her head. “No, no, I don’t mind her at all. She’s precious. But my things are there—” she thinks of Armin’s letter, and the sewing kit, and of the stack of blankets she’d dropped on the bed, “—and I don’t want you to feel like I’m another thing you have to watch over.”

She hums noncommittally. “I don’t feel like that, and you’re my friend —and my subject, mind. But I trust that you won’t collapse. Do you want any help with carrying your clothes?”

She shakes her head no again. “Thank you, again, for them.”

“Of course.” Historia runs a hand through her hair. “Do you need any more? I can rush another order.”

“Historia, please, you’ve done enough. And I’m sure the Brauses—”

Historia fixes her with a knowing stare. “You will not fit into any of Sasha’s old shirts. Not decently.” She flushes, and Historia laughs. “I think I’ll go ahead and send someone down. It’s literally no effort at all. What the hell is the point of being queen if I don’t get to spoil my friends?”

“Governing?” 

“Oh, please, you and I both know I don’t govern anything.” She rolls her eyes. “I have my little charities and my little stack of bills to sign into law and people ask me my opinions sometimes, but the monarchy was dying fast even before Eren took over.” She shrugs. “It’s alright by me. Imagine if I actually had to run the country right now. It’d be like having two newborns at once.”

Mikasa nods. Her hands drift over her stomach, and she pinches a fingertip between her thumb and the knuckle of her pointer finger. 

Historia sighs. “Okay, hon. G’night. I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”

“I’ll be here until they can take out my stitches,” she confirms. 

“Mhm.” She pushes up to stand, hissing with pain, and waves off Mikasa’s concerned hand. She reaches for her daughter’s hand, taking her little fist and making her wave goodbye. “Say night-night to Auntie Mikasa, darling. Night-night, night-night.”

“Night-night,” Mikasa obliges, leaning over to kiss the baby’s sweet head. She straightens, nods to the small, happy little family, ignoring the sudden throb of—surely it isn’t bitterness —and takes her leave.

Her leg is screaming by the time she makes it back to that blue-and-gold room. When the door clicks shut, she has to lean her full weight against it for long minutes while the room swings in wobbly arcs under her. Colors bleed away, brown turning to green turning to black, and her ears ring so fiercely that she can’t even hear her own hard breathing. 

There’s nothing to be done for it. She’s sure it does her good to work the muscle, anyway. She’s done nothing all day except two careful, short walks, and she won’t get better if she doesn’t work at it. It will be slower than she’s used to, but considering everything, she doesn’t have any room to complain. 

She breathes in, holds it for a count of three, and breathes out. She does this until the world is quiet again. 

Someone had been in her room again recently. The bed has been made, tighter and neater than Mikasa had left it, and there’s a fire going. Her heart jolts to see it, but the logs are laid in the way she recognizes. Not the foreign way Eren has been doing it. She shudders, and can’t blame it entirely on a chill. 

With some uncertainty, she lays the clothes Historia had made for her on the card table. She’ll find something to do with them in the morning. A bag to put them in. She can take out what she finds herself using, but there’s no sense in putting away what she’ll be packing up as soon as she can. She runs her fingers over her knuckles. 

Coldness creeps over her when she’s in the washroom. She washes her face and cleans her teeth—the palace has something very similar to the sort of toothpaste used in Marley, made with chemicals instead of soap, and the luxury of it is disconcerting. It’s just—she’s just—she failed them. And she’s here, instead of dead or in chains or hiding in the forest. She shouldn’t be. It just doesn’t make sense to her that, after everything, she still gets to clean her teeth twice a day. Scrub away the fine food she’d forked down. Wash her face with soap that smells like roses, and fall asleep on a mattress stuffed with goosedown and covered with silk sheets. 

When she leans back against the pillows, they still smell like Eren. 

Mikasa covers her eyes with her palms and muffles a small, pained moan. 

Why, why, why did she reach for him? Why did she do that? She should have known that would only make everything worse.

A nasty little voice inside her points out that Eren makes everything worse. She has to smother a sob. 

How did she not see that, for so, so long? And how, now that she has, did she forget for long enough to let him into her bed? And why was his presence still enough to draw her back from that terrible brink?

Mikasa shakes, once, and pulls her hands away from her eyes. She sniffs, swallows, and smoothes her hands down her neck. 

So she still—she still—she—loves Eren. Okay. But she’s identified it now, acknowledged it, and now she can—she can correct it. 

Correct? a different voice, panicked and feeble, asks. Despite everything, the thought feels like a burn. Like a betrayal. 

This is why she has to go. 

She won’t do this. She won’t be this. 

And, she reminds herself, Eren left. He doesn’t need you anymore, no matter what he’s been playing at. And he’s never really wanted her. This will be easier on them both. Kinder and cleaner. Clearly he doesn’t want to have to see her again, since he left her here, like everyone else, the second she said the word. He cares about her, she’s sure, enough to want her safe and happy, but it’s—he’s not—

It’s better for everyone like this. It will be easier for all of them. 

Mikasa reaches across the nightstand and takes Armin’s letter. She’s got it memorized by now, but it’s so sweet to see his handwriting. Those neatly, narrowly spaced words made of small, pointed letters. She can tell the places where he’d had to pause and fight back emotion, can see the frustration in the lines he scratched through words he didn’t like, can read his hope and his uncomplicated affection for her in each stroke of the pen. 

Unbidden, her eyes catch on: It’ll be easier—

… and I’m not the girl Eren Jaeger is in love with. It’ll be easier for his soldiers to accept. 

Mikasa folds the paper closed fast, looking sharply away. 

Armin—is the smartest person she’s ever met, and she will always have faith in that. But it’s turned out that Armin didn’t know Eren all that well either, and anyway, everything in this letter was written to try and make her feel better about being left behind. 

It speaks to how pathetic she’s been that everyone knew to give her that same, stupid platitude, but she can hardly blame them. 

Mikasa pulls at her fingers, forcing calm. It’s okay. She’s going. The country air will clear her head, and she’ll get better soon enough. 

There’s nothing else for her to do but sleep. The sooner she’s healthy, the sooner she can go, the sooner she can fix this. Mikasa places the letter back on the nightstand and squirms under the covers. She’s still in her same long-sleeved nightgown and robe, and the covers are thick and soft. Her body heat will warm them up soon enough. 

She curls up on her side, tucking her hands under her cheeks. Her knuckles are still warm. She closes her eyes and counts sheep, like Aunt Carla taught her to, and wonders if, somewhere, Eren is doing the same thing. 

She finds herself distantly surprised by how quickly drowsiness takes her. She’s not done anything all day, and she slept well last night. Mikasa hasn’t slept easily without a hard day of labor since she was ten years old, and she’s already dreading nightmares, but for all that, her body feels heavy and her head feels light. Her breathing evens out quickly. Her heartbeat slows. She has the fleeting but distinct impression that she’s being dragged underwater. Stolen out to sea. But it’s done with care, and she’s grateful that sleep is finding her so easily. She hadn’t expected that at all. 

If only she wasn’t so cold… 

After long minutes spent curling her toes in and shoving her head deeper into the pillows, she finally sits up. Blinded by her iron eyelids, she fumbles around by her feet, finally locating the satin edge of one of the quilts left there—sent there. 

It’s not because of who they’re from, she tells herself. It’s just that it’s cold in this drafty old castle. 

Mikasa pulls it up over her body, and within seconds, sleep succeeds in pulling—

x.

—the threadbare blanket over his legs. It’s paper thin, roughspun wool— nothing, he thinks, acidic, like Mikasa’s dress —and it smells like a fucking horse, which grates against the ache in his legs. 

But for all that, and ten years of neglect, the captain’s quarters are still miles better than anywhere he’d slept while he was in Marley—and better than the cot in his jail cell below Mitras, too. His sleeping roll is dry and cool, and his arm serves as a fine pillow. 

It’d certainly been enough for Mikasa last night. 

Anger fights to churn in his gut, but he forces it down. Something wild and wounded scrambles up on top of it, and he beats that back, too. He doesn’t hold out much hope that it’ll stay away for long, but—what the fuck else can he do?

He’d spent enough time trying to be angry at her when he was alone in Marley. He’d managed for as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, and then when he’d seen her, perched on his shoulder like an angel come to sway him back to goodness, it’d all slipped away. He doesn’t want to resent her for this, and when he reminds himself of that, his anger slinks back into the shadows. 

He is angry, though. He always is—no change there—but if it’s not at her, and he refuses to let it be, then all that’s left is himself. And he just can’t dig himself into that pit right now. 

This is the first time he’s actually, really interacted with his Jaegerists, more than just barking orders to men he doesn’t know. He can’t lose it here. Not when he needs to be some fucking paragon of authority that everyone is too afraid to disobey. These people can’t catch him crying like a child. He just has to deal with it. 

He rolls onto his back and moves his arm aside. He doesn’t need a pillow that badly, and he’s not used to lying on his side. It occurs to him to be glad that Mikasa gave him that one peaceful night of sleep. It had grounded him more securely than he’d been in years. If she’d told him she was leaving the night before, he’d—

He doesn’t even know. It’s not worth contemplating right now. 

Eren is tired. The mattress doesn’t smell bad, exactly, and his supper sits warmly in his stomach. The muscles of his legs and back and chest ache pleasantly, and his mind is weary. It’ll be useless at fighting off nightmares tonight, he’s sure, but oh fucking well. They’re practically a bedtime story at this point, and now they’ll come to the tune of the wind. He never did quite catch his breath, moreso the shock of the scenery stunned him entirely, but his chest is aching worse than ever now that he can’t move, now that there’s nothing to do. His ribs feel splintered and he held very still and very calm and let Mikasa slice her cold little fingers into his chest and rip his heart out, and he left it with her in Mitras.

His hands are still cold from clutching hers. His palms and the undersides of his fingers ache bitterly. Nothing to be done for it, and nothing he would do if he could. He hopes it hurts like that for the rest of his fucking life. 

He holds them up over his heart, and lets the weariness in his body bear him away. 

I.

Far away, wind rushes through a canyon. Mikasa imagines the lash of it against her skin—

—hair—

—and pressing into her shut-tight eyes, slicing around her—

—bones—

The air is warm, but it’s so fast that it wouldn’t matter. It cut like a whip. Cold burrows under her flesh, and she doesn’t remember it being so cold—

—But she was moving around so much. Her injury had made it painful, not impossible, and it wasn’t an option to stop. And in the moments when they were still, grief-choked beats between increasingly desperate strategies, she could duck down against Falco and feel the feverish warmth radiating from under his downy feathers. And she could press herself against Armin or Annie or Jean or Connie. Where—?

Mikasa opens her eyes and finds that the world is dark, and she is alone. 

She turns, and the world pitches. She’s thrown down. She catches herself against a low, broken jut of stone that bites into her forearms. Her knees slam into the ground to find it tacky and clinging. 

And warm. 

The world is dark around her, but when she turns her head back and forth, she sees that it is not all black. Far ahead, there’s a light. Red and dim, but light all the same. It could be—

—but when she looks around, all she sees is how alone she is.

She can hardly make out her own hands in front of her, see the bloodied cuffs of her sleeves, the rubbed-raw calluses on her palms from where she—and where are her swords—and where is Armin—

The stone digs deeper into her arm. She pulls away, but it rips the fabric of her shirt. 

Her hands pull into fists. The raw skin of her palms stings, and she bites her lip to keep from hissing. 

Hot air sticks to her skin, gluing her hair to the back of her neck. There’s no prickle, no sensation of being watched, because no one else is here with her. 

Warm and viscid against her knees, the ground throws her forward again. The wall of grey stone catches her, and she scrambles upright, digging her fingers into crooks and fractures to pull herself up. At shoulder height, she finds a crack to wedge her fingers into, and she secures herself as best she can with her back braced against the wall. 

She’s in a low, narrow cave. Above her, she can only just see gouged-out crevices in the dark surface of the ceiling. Behind her, the space blackens into unguessable depths, and when she listens, she can hear the low snarls of monsters lying in wait. Her fingers tremble as her heartbeat spikes, stomach swooping, but—she knows she cannot run, because—

Where is she?

The light from the mouth of the cave is still too faint to see much of anything by, but Mikasa watches as it shifts from grit-choked red-grey to a more vivid red, and when the world lurches underfoot again, she realizes what she’s seeing.

The Rumbling is coming for her. 

The walls of the shallow cave press in around her, the cramped ceiling buckling under the weight of Eren’s army, and the cave floor, she realizes, is washed with blood.

A scream echoes through the cave—her own, her own, her own—and suddenly the air writhes with a thousand voices, a hundred thousand voices, screaming in terror—

A wave of heat blasts through the caves, and it hurts, and the screams pitch up and waver as fear shifts to agony—and she can hear the screams, and weeping and begging and praying, and all of it burns, all of it makes her ears bleed—

i.

Dawn finds Eren awake and alert, brushing his horse for lack of anything else to do. The rest of his party find him like that shortly thereafter, and whatever traces of sleep clung to them vanish under his eye. Their steps falter and their eyes dart around wildly, yet unsure what to make of him. He joined their fireside last night and broke their bread, listened to their end-of-the-day gripes and groans—but he didn’t say much himself. These men don’t know him, and the uncertainty blurs into uneasiness. 

It’s Floch who whips them into order. Eren half-listens to him yip about, pairing everyone off and shooing them away with reminders to note only the recent damages. “Be back here by no later than eight,” he shouts to their backs. “We need to be riding south well before midmorning.”

That snatches Eren’s attention. His pulse kicks into a drumbeat. “South?”

Floch waits until the clatter of hoofbeats fades to respond. “South,” he repeats. He looks over with a wry expression. “The plan was Shiganshina next—were you paying any attention at all?”

“No.” He digs his nails into his palms, fighting down a surge of panic. “Why are—hasn’t Shiganshina been surveyed? Most of you were in Shiganshina when the Walls came down.”

“And most of us were traveling down to the port by the time the last of the Titans marched away. We couldn’t take the train after the tracks and the locomotive were blown, and then the rains beat us back to the city. Weren’t able to get any decent surveying done in those conditions.”

Eren’s hand moves of its own accord, driving his knuckles hard into his upper lip. It’s not quite a full punch, but it is the only thing that could stop him from screaming aloud. 

Shiganshina. Shiganshina. Of fucking course they would be going to Shiganshina—why hadn’t he thought at all that a scouting mission to the outer districts would include fucking Shiganshina?

Eren had thought—he hadn’t thought, but the idea that he could go back —

“Hey!” Floch bends forward, concerned. “Woah, what’s that? What’s wrong?”

The taste of iron fills his mouth, though no actual blood. An ache rolls out slowly over the uneven line of his gums, and heat throbs against his knuckles where he keeps them mashed to his skin. Shiganshina. It echoes with his heartbeat. Shiganshina. 

All of that simmers— Shiganshina, Shiganshina —and then he lets it drop away. 

Shiganshina. 

“Nothing,” he says. “I didn’t sleep well last night.” Eren shakes out his knuckles. “Where are we looking?”

“The eastern quarter of the Wall.” Floch squints at him, as if trying to get a clear read of his mind. “What changed? I thought you were sleeping better.”

“Me, too.” He grits his teeth and mounts his horse. “Come on. Are we really expecting to get this whole city surveyed by eight?”

Floch purses his lips, but swings himself into his own saddle. He does so without bothering to hide his grimace or the careful way he holds his shoulder. Eren imagines that in Floch’s mind, they’re close friends who can trust each other with their vulnerabilities—and fuck it all, but he is the closest thing Eren’s got to that anymore. Fuck it all. 

Shiganshina. 

“I expect we can be riding before eight,” he says. “If we want to be back by Thursday morning, we’d better be.”

“We can fuck that, honestly,” Eren says. “I’m not in any rush to get back.”

Floch pauses midway through the motion of flicking his reins. His horse gives a confused whinny and trots in place without moving forward. Eren eyes him over, annoyed, and Floch asks, “You’re not?”

Eren does not like the expression on his face. “No,” he bites out, and spurs his horse forward. 

He’s not in any rush to get back to the capital. Why would he be? Nothing he wants will be there. And at least moving— scouting —will give him something to fucking do.

It’s not—he doesn’t—he could go back. So much of him wants to race back there now, wishes he’d never left. He should be spending every second he can with Mikasa, hoarding them away like a miser, to get him through the next—the rest of—until—

Hoarding them.

But he doesn’t think he can stomach any more of a goodbye with her. One night in her arms wasn’t enough— years in her arms wouldn’t have been, but he wouldn’t have known any difference once she’d killed him. How much difference would a couple of stolen days make, and how much could he bear knowing it was ending? If she’d let him see her at all. She might not have been able to stomach it, either. And Eren can’t imagine that anything would break his heart the way that a real, deliberate goodbye forever from her would. 

So maybe he’s taking the coward’s way out. Maybe he’s denying her closure—denying both of them closure. So be it. He’d rather leave this wound open anyway. If she won’t kill him, then whatever she does to him should fester for the rest of his life. 

And she’s just fine. She’ll be okay. If she says she doesn’t need him, then fine. Fine. She’s a big girl, she can decide for herself. If she decides she prefers crying herself to sleep over not, fine. That’s what she’s asked for, and Eren had already resolved to give her that. 

Dawn is grey, covered up by clouds. They don’t need iceburst lights when there’s a clear view to the east, and the sky grows lighter by the second. By the time Floch’s watch tells half-past seven, they’ve put the flashlights away. 

“Looks like it’ll be grey all day,” Floch comments.

“That fits.”

“The storms ought to be completely behind us by now,” he continues. “The month will finish out dry, and then the snows will come.”

“God,” Eren says. “Snows.” Will Braus Stables have enough firewood? Enough food? They’ve made it through every winter thus far, but even with so many able bodies to work, hunting for six people is entirely different from hunting for sixteen. With winter so close around the corner, and Mikasa still so—fragile—and so stubborn—he doesn’t trust any of them to keep her safe. To make sure she gets everything she needs. If she doesn’t want to be with—be around him, fine, but he could—she should be somewhere else, not in the fucking wilderness, not if he isn’t there to provide for—

Eren bites his tongue until blood bursts forth, coating his teeth. Now his mouth tastes of iron. 

Floch continues to talk about fucking something while Eren forces his tongue to heal. Blood turns to steam, and it blisters the roof of his mouth. It hurts for a long minute, but when it’s all gone, some of the tension has vanished with it. 

It would be a bad habit to form were he anyone else alive. As it is, there’s no harm done.

He cuts Floch off mid-sentence to ask, “If we’re going south anyway, why did we come to Quinta first? The way to Shiganshina has better roads.”

“Eh. Better-traveled ones, maybe. But we needed the river.” Floch doesn’t seem to care that he was interrupted. “The hardest riding is straight out and straight back. It’s best to have it available for the horses both ways.”

“That can’t be right. There’s more distance between Maria’s outer districts than there is between Maria and Mitras.”

“Yeah.” Floch scowls at a shattered church as if it’s offended him, and makes a quick note. “Someone’ll need to come back and scavenge what can be scavenged from there, if it hasn’t been already.”

“That bell is silver,” Eren points out. It is, but from the look of it, it could be made of aluminum. A piece of the Wall has flattened it to resemble a child’s squashed toy.

“Oh!” Floch says, and then picks up his original train of thought. “The original plan was to be halfway to Shiganshina by now, but we lost so much time because of the flooding yesterday… It was supposed to be a lot more hard riding than it was. Didn’t account for any detours we might need to take when we were plotting this out.”

Eren raises his eyebrows. “And you still think we’ve got any hope of making it back by Thursday?”

“I’ve got to hope, don’t I? And don’t you?”

“Not really.” He sighs through his nose. “Is there anything we’ve missed? Everything else I can see looks like it’s just abandonment.”

“... I think we’ve got it all.” Floch tucks his notepad into his bag. “You know—”

“I’ve been thinking about what the fuck to do with all the debris,” Eren cuts him off. If Floch tries to begin any sort of conversation about Eren’s emotions, he can’t be held responsible for what he’ll do. “I remember, when we were younger, that we weren’t allowed to ask where the stone for the Walls was mined, since we don’t have any quarries of this scale within the Walls—but now we’ve got… what, a couple hundred thousand tons of rock literally just lying around?”

“Good question.” He shrugs one shoulder. “I’ve not given it any thought yet, other than obviously we’ll have to move it all somewhere.”

“If we can make them into bricks or something—who would know anything about that?”

Floch shrugs again. “Stonemasons?”

“Are there any of those in the anti-Marleyan volunteers?”

“Uh, maybe. But none of them are exactly eager to make themselves useful to us.”

“They’ll want something to do eventually. We’ll have to find something for them to do.” He nods to where the church bell lies, squashed like a bug. “Trying to kill two birds with one stone here.”

Floch barks a laugh. “I take your point. Alright, sure, fine. We’ll see. I’ll warn you of this now, though—a lot more of those mainlanders have some spine to them than I would’ve given them credit for. Even with guns to their heads, plenty of them didn’t see reason.”

“We’re not threatening them with guns, we’re threatening them with boredom.” He runs his tongue over his teeth. In his dream, his mouth had been full of blood, and he’d been woken by the sensation of it dribbling down his chin. It hadn’t been awful, as far as nightmares went—the one he’d woken from before crawling into Mikasa’s bed had been far more upsetting—but he’d felt so keenly the isolation.

And the screams had been so loud. 

“I don’t want to have to kill any more of them, Floch,” he says. “Not if we can help it.”

Floch heaves a sigh to the tune of oh, well. “I suppose so. This is something we’ll need to discuss with Brzenka and the prisoners themselves.”

Eren recalls that the volunteers that still live are all imprisoned. Those that weren’t in Shiganshina have been detained at their base camp near Stohess, under heavy guard from men hand-picked by Floch. They are not gentle men, and there have been more than a few examples made. Paradis is not a safe place for outsiders, these days. “We’ll do that, then,” he says. “When we get back.”

When he gets back. It might suit him better to take off as soon as they make it to Shiganshina and ride straight into the ocean.

He presses his thumb into his palm. His nail digs into the lines there, digging a new one in. The skin is cold and smooth, and underneath, the fragile little bones and tricky map of muscles give and groan under the pressure he applies. Eren closes his eyes. 

No ocean. Not for him. Not for anyone, anymore. He made sure of that. 

“But for now—” His voice threatens to break. He swallows down a barbed lump in his throat. “I guess I’m—”

ii.

“—going home?”

Historia nods. “They’ve got their farm to tend to,” she says, “and the boys work around the ranch…” She huffs, blowing hair out of her face. “They’ve got real jobs, so I’ve been reminded. And I have a small army of servants if I need any help, so…”

Mikasa gapes. “And Wilhelm is going with them?”

“Oh, no. He’s just riding them out of the city, he won’t be very long. They’ll ring the bell when he gets back. Yay.”

Mikasa relaxes, mollified that the father of Historia’s daughter isn’t abandoning her, and then frowns. She’s still ever-so-slightly winded from her walk to Historia’s apartments, but she thinks her heartbeat is picking up now out of indignation. She hadn’t even seen Wilhelm’s family yesterday, and they’re already leaving behind their grandchild and her mother? That seems so… callous. 

She rubs Historia’s shoulder. “I don’t want to overstep…”

“Oh, but I want you to.” Historia pastes on a grin and bats her eyelashes. “You’ve been a better aunt the past few days than Will’s brothers have been uncles. Look at her—she never lets go of that blanket.”

Ymir is awake in her cradle, gazing at the mobile that spins over her head. Her tiny, toothless little mouth is agape, and her free hand is thumping near her head. Her other hand is clutching the blanket Mikasa embroidered for her. 

She blows out a breath. “Well, I think it’s… unfeeling of them to leave the mother of their own flesh and blood alone.” 

“Isn’t it?” Historia scowls. “Leon’s been married for three years, and has Viviana given them a grandkid? Noooo.”

Gently, Mikasa swats her. 

Historia pouts. Then she huffs, and says, “I thought grandparents were supposed to dote on their grandkids. When they’re wanted, at least.”

“They will,” Mikasa assures. “Once you’re back on the ranch, I’m sure you’ll all have plenty of time to spend together.”

“Ugh. And that’ll be in…” She tosses her hands up, palms to the sky. “A month? Two, three, six…”

Mikasa blinks. “I thought you were just coming in for the ceremony?”

“Mm, yeah, so did I, initially, but I think that basically, if I want to have any clue what’s happening, or use whatever influence I do have, I have to be here. So until then…”

“Oh,” Mikasa says. “I’m sorry. I thought… but your orphanage will be okay?”

“I can do the paperwork and whatever from here.” She scrubs the side of her palm over her eye. “And frankly, I assume that there’ll be a bit of an influx to the orphanages. And fixing up everything that got ruined when the Walls fell. Lot of charity for me to be doing, and I ought to be here for it.” She grimaces. “A little jealous of you, actually. Braus Stables will be nice and peaceful.”

“Yes,” Mikasa says. To her own ears, her voice sounds taut and thorny. “Very peaceful. As we cut ourselves off from society to avoid execution and spend the rest of our lives trying to reconcile watching the world burn.”

Historia doesn’t respond, shocked into silence. Mikasa presses her lips together, and her face is hot and stretched tight. She keeps her gaze fixed on the floor, counting patterns on the rug to keep her seeing it and nothing else. 

The moment passes, and Mikasa shudders, tension falling out of her frame. “I’m sorry,” she moans, her hands coming up to cover her face. “None of this is your fault, I didn’t meant to—”

“Well. There is a tiny bit that’s my fault.” Mikasa hears the grimace in her voice. “Just a little, if we’re counting. I didn’t mean to imply that you’re having an easy time, or that you would there. I was just… bitching thoughtlessly. Sorry.”

Mikasa shakes her head, pressing her fingers against her eyes. “You’re fine. I just… I didn’t sleep well last night.”

It’s worse for having gotten a long, dreamless night. It’s worse for knowing that Eren did that for her. That some significant, shameless part of her still needs him. It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable that she woke up with her heart in her throat and a pit in her stomach and, for a split-second, wished he’d been there so that she didn’t have to see that—until her brain caught up and reminded her that he is the only reason she saw that. 

“I’m sorry,” Historia says, mournful. “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t, either.” Mikasa huffs, and there’s a smile lurking somewhere in Historia’s when she continues, “Probably for cuter reasons, but… I mean, you’ve been listening to me complain. I could listen, if you want to talk about it.” 

Does she? It was horrible enough to hear those screams again. The ghosts. To be thrown by the force of Eren’s army onto ground slick with blood. To be so alone.

She pulls her hands down to her throat, fingers slotting behind her ears. She tries to open her mouth. To say, there was this ravine. To say, hundreds of people were hiding there. To say, for a long moment, when we saw that they were out of reach of the Wall Titans, we thought they were safe. And then we heard them burn. We couldn’t do anything.

No. No, she can’t talk about this with Historia. 

“It’s okay.” She sniffs thickly. “I… I won’t bother you with it.”

“‘Bother?’ Mikasa, it won’t be a bother.”

“Historia,” she says. “Please trust me. You don’t want to hear about it.”

“But would it make you feel better?” she prods. “I’m telling you, I can handle it. And—it’s only fair that I should hear about it.”

Mikasa doesn’t have the energy to argue about this. Her whole body aches, and she regrets bringing this up. She slides her fingers back over her eyes and says, “It wouldn’t make me feel better.”

Will it, at Braus Stables? Or will she find herself in a hall of mirrors, all of them reflecting each others’ fears and regrets? Will she look at Armin and see him as he was once Annie finally rescued him from the strange Beast Titan, pale and devastated? Hear Jean speak and, over and over, listen to his words as it finally sunk in that they had to kill Eren? Will Levi—broken even more thoroughly than she had been—just be a horrible reflection?  

(Do they already blame her as much as she blames herself? Or will that only come later?)

How closely will Braus Stables resemble the bottom drawer of Eren’s childhood wardrobe—full of all his broken toys? 

She shudders. But, she reminds herself. There’s a community there. The only other people in the world who saw—who—who she won’t have to explain her nightmares to. They saw them, heard them, lived them with her. They were there. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. Mikasa draws in a deep breath and drops her hands into her lap. “I’d rather keep listening to you about your in-laws, if that’s okay.”

Like magic, Historia snaps back into a huffy flounce. She throws herself backwards onto the bed and says, “Ugh. I have in-laws!” She wrinkles her nose. “That makes me sound so old. Like a real grown-up.”

Mikasa exhales. Historia has always been skilled in the art of chattering. Her years as queen have only refined that. When she chooses to, she can dance around topics as easily as if she had ODM gear. So Mikasa swallows and asks, “Didn’t the baby do that?”

She flaps her hand. “No. I’m a teen mom. Plenty of people are, it still sounds young. But in-laws… that I’m complaining about! Bleh.”

“They’ll come around,” she says. She props her chin on one hand, letting her knuckles warm her cheek. She’s tired again, and that just makes her sad. “Certainly for the baby.”

In her cradle, Ymir fusses. 

“Oh, what’s wrong, you silly thing?” Historia asks. She stands and retrieves her daughter, fixing her with a gentle mock-scowl. “I know you’re not hungry, I just fed you. Do you just need to be held? Do you want your Auntie Mikasa?” She looks up at her. “Do you want—?”

Mikasa shakes her head. “I’m sure she wants you.”

Historia hums, something like doubtful, but shifts the baby to cradle her in her elbow. “She probably wants her dad. She likes him better so far. But Mamma will do, yeah? Daddy’s out right now. Shh, shh, he’ll be back within the hour, ‘kay? They’ll ring the bell, and we’ll know your dad’s back, mhm?” To Mikasa, she adds, “Can’t believe they couldn’t stay for a few more days—the harvest is over, isn’t it?”

She shrugs. Then wonders, “Is he the youngest?”

Historia looks up. “Of his brothers? I’m pretty sure.”

“Maybe that’s part of it,” she offers. “If he’s their baby, it might be hard for them to wrap their heads around the idea that he has a baby of his own.”

“Hm. Maybe so. Still. They’re adults. They could handle this better. They barely even said goodbye.”  

Unbidden, Mikasa thinks, Better than what I got. 

Eren couldn’t even give her that. Just left her in bed without a word, like—like some sort of—

—Floch Forster’s contemptuous smile flickers in her mind—

Mikasa sighs sharply, trying to dislodge a sharpness bubbling up in her lungs. 

She’s being stupid. Isn’t she? 

Eren left. He left without telling her goodbye. Without explaining where he was going or when he’d return. Without explaining why. He’s apologized for the things he’s done that have hurt her, but not for the thing itself. Why should he? He isn’t sorry for it. 

Her knuckles, pressed against her cheek, still burn. 

He left. He left, but not before he’d kissed each one of her knuckles as if they were something unspeakably precious, kissed her forehead like she was holy, and held onto her for as long, she thinks, as he could bear it. 

He was the one who walked away. But she couldn’t, so he’d had to. He’d walked away, left her alone, forever, without another word, because he was thinking it would be best for her. Kindest.  Not at all because he’d been straining at the leash he’d tied around himself, waiting for her to release him from his playacting—

She slides her knuckles over an inch, pressing the fever-hot skin over her lips to keep them from trembling. To keep the worries of a silly, frivolous, stupid, stupid, stupid little girl in love well and trapped behind her teeth. 

Historia is talking, but Mikasa isn’t really listening. She hears Eren’s gentle okay and she feels it against her skin where he’d nosed a space though her hair—hears the low sound of his unsteady breathing as it ghosted over her forehead, carrying his words: if that’s what you need.

He didn’t leave without a goodbye callously. He didn’t mean it like that. 

I want to go.

If that’s what you need. 

It is. She knows she needs to go. She’s counting the minutes until she can see Armin again, but—

But would it have killed him to say goodbye?

iii.

Eren is going to kill fucking something if this conversation continues dragging on. 

“I don’t give a shit about keeping to the original time table,” he’s saying. He gestures to his stallion’s labored breathing, even as its head remains in the grass. “You’re gonna fucking kill the horses at this rate.” If I don’t kill you or myself to get this over with. 

The health of the horses is not why he’s advocating for scrapping the schedule that Floch is so goddamn attached to. But the animals grazing at their sides make for a more compelling argument than I just don’t want to. 

Most things do. 

Floch nearly fucking pouts, which Eren finds un-fucking-becoming. He’s a grown man. Eren knows that he’s hardly the pinnacle of maturity himself, but he hasn’t pulled that expression since he was seven. Nine, maximum. He definitely wouldn’t have done it once Mikasa was around to see. 

“But there’s so much we can’t get done out here,” he complains. “Four days was already pushing it…”

“If it was worth four days, it’s worth five, so that it’s not a full week of walking once the horses start dropping. We’d probably be up north when that happened, and it’s cold.” 

Floch huffs. “We’ll see.”

Eren rolls his eyes. “Also,” he says, “we can get stuff done here. Pretty much everything so far has been you and me hashing shit out. We can do that now.”

Now is a grey noon, stopped in a damp field nearly halfway to Shiganshina. They stopped on the advice of Helving to let the horses graze, and it’s fine by Eren. He’s committed himself to this and he can’t back out now—which is the story of his fucking life—but he’s not in any rush. 

Helving and the rest—there’s a Sauer and a Liechti and he’s pretty sure one of the cadets is called Hesse, that much he’d been unable to not pick up around the campfire last night—are a few paces away, stretching and chatting while their horses eat. Some are snacking themselves, but Eren can’t muster an appetite. 

Shiganshina. 

It didn’t really all start there, he knows. But didn’t it? He was born there. He always would have been born there. Armin was born there. Mikasa was born in the foothills. They won’t be riding through the area where she and her parents had lived, thank every god that’s ever been prayed to, but her father had rushed into the city to get his when Mrs. Ackerman’s labor started. Yes, it started nearly two thousand years ago and an ocean over, but it also started in Shiganshina when Bertholtd’s face peered over the Wall. It started in the foothills, when Eren slit a man’s throat and thought his blood was like a burst of sunlight as it spilled over his hands. It started when he was born, when he’d done so much damage to his mother that she’d never be able to have that big family she’d wanted—and Mikasa had done so much to fill that void for her, God but his mother had loved her, she had begged through crushed lungs for him to take her and run —and what he’d done to her then doesn’t compare at all to what he’d do to her later, in Shiganshina, in almost exactly the same spot. 

Maybe this whole bloody story started in Shiganshina. Maybe it didn’t. But he did, and to be going back there alone —

He’s not quite sure what it’s going to do to him. 

Floch hums, tugging Eren back to the present. “I guess,” he says, still distinctly unhappy. Eren really did think he’d gotten over his reluctance to deal with dirt and shit. “Here we are with… well, alright, that’s one thing we can sort out. What’s your title?”

He nearly gags. “God,” he says, but before he can finish with I don’t give a fuck, Floch smirks and says:

“I’m sure we could make that work—”

“Fuck off.” Mild panic kicks in his chest, Eren reaches over and shoves him in the shoulder, pressing where Gabi’d shot him. The one time she ever missed. Fucking kids. Mikasa should’ve given her some pointers. 

Floch gasps, staggering back, and Eren scowls. “Don’t even fucking joke about that, Forster. What is wrong with you?”

“Okay,” he says, “Mother of Maria, Eren, not that shoulder.” He bends at the waist, breathing hard for a moment. His horse blocks him from the sight of the rest of the party, which—Eren knows that Floch is the leader they’re familiar with, and they need to have faith in him, too, but also he doesn’t mind if they see him like that. 

But he pulls upright after a moment, hand pressed to his bullet wound and orange hair askew. At least he got rid of the bird’s nest thing. He wouldn’t have been able to rally soldiers to a goddamn bake sale with it. 

“Alright,” he says, winded. “But we do need to settle that, honestly. We’ve gotten by with just calling you sir thus far, but your position affects all of ours. Like, am I your vice… whatever?”

Eren fights not to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Sure.” 

“Okay, but what, Eren. Are you the Chairman of the New Eldian Empire? Minister? Marshal? Honestly, you can just pick.”

“Chairman sounds stupid.”

“You’ve got to pick something.”

“We’re not a party of bureaucrats,” Eren snaps. “We are a fucking insurrectionist sect of military fanatics that seized power. For what part of this entire process have I been sitting in a chair?”

“Then pick something else, Eren, oh my God.”

“Clearly, you’re the one who cares about this. What’s your heart set on, Vice-fucker Forster?”

“Well, not that.”

“Floch.”

He hesitates. This is, Eren can tell, a very big deal to him. It probably deserves to be. Eren will hold this office for longer than he wants to think about, but he can’t imagine the label will affect the level of his authority. Finally, Floch puts forth, “We are a militaristic organization. By all rights, that makes you our generalissimus.”

“Done. General Jaeger sounds passably respectable.”

“It’s a start.”

Eren sighs, short and brief. “You can pick out whatever preceding adjectives you like. And go ahead and take vice for yourself, if it’s what you like.”

Floch stands up a little straighter at that. No doubt he’s envisioning that shining on a wooden plaque. 

“Okay,” Eren says, “if that’s sorted, there are—”

“Well!” Floch interrupts. “There’s still the matter of what we’d address you as.”

“Sir has been working perfectly well.”

“You’re not at all drawn to my lord? Or—”

“I hate that.”

“Well, you’re making people call Mikasa lady, and you said—”

“Mikasa,” Eren says, and it fucking burns, “is a lot better than I am.”

Overhead, in the south and west, the sky is beginning to fracture. The even grey dips into shadowed basins, churning slowly in the atmospheric winds. At their darkest, they approach the color of Mikasa’s eyes. He can hear the wind in the distance, a low whisper, and he can feel the beginnings of it tugging faintly at his hair. Layered over it, there’s the others’ murmuring, never spent much time with horses? no, really? you’ve got a knack for ‘em — and the sound of his own breathing. It’s still too unsteady. He can’t catch it. He’s fucking pinned in place and he can’t catch it, and when he can’t think about something else, it hurts so fucking bad it could break him. With every inhale, it feels like he has to force down a hurricane.

He does like that people are calling Mikasa that. She deserves it. She’s a fucking lost princess, and doesn’t that make just perfect sense? If you’d told that to the nine-year-old idiot who threw a fit when she was sewing because it meant she wasn’t paying attention to him, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised. He likes that people have to be deferential and kind to her, and he likes that it comes from him. Because of what she is to him, she’s been put high above the rest of them. In his head, that’s good and right and the way things should be. 

But she can do what she wants with it. 

“It’s very generous of you to say that,” Floch says eventually. “I hope she appreciates all you’ve done for her.”

Eren’s mouth twitches with grim humor. It might be more accurate to say, what he’s done to her. “Yeah,” he says. “She’s perfect.” 

And she is. Even now— especially now. She’s giving him exactly what he deserves. Someone has to. And he’s glad it’s her. He wants it to be her. It could only ever be her.

“Eren…” Floch hedges. “I can tell something is bothering you. I’m not blind. If—”

He cuts him off. “No? Try being mute. I’m not talking about this. We can talk shop or shut up, but you don’t get to talk about her, do you understand?”

After a long moment, Floch nods. Wariness is creeping over him, and Eren likes that, too. 

He draws in a long breath. The cool, musky air hits the back of his throat, doing its best to chase away any traces of bile. Eren turns his eyes skyward, willing away the threat of tears. He wishes— 

iv.

—that the sun was out. The massive wall of windows shows the grey sky, and lets in far too much of the the late autumn chill.

Mikasa, having already lost the mood for conversation, has awkwardly retreated against the wall, folded into the rocking chair. Wilhelm’s return had done little to comfort the princess, and she’s letting the new parents have their space to soothe their daughter. She had tried to excuse herself entirely, but Historia had flashed her a look so thick with pleading that she’d relented, and now finds herself silent and uncertain as she watches the scene before her. A book rests in her lap, something leather-bound and yellowed by age that Historia shoved into her hands, but she can’t make herself focus on it. 

Wilhelm has Ymir resting on his chest, bouncing her gently and pacing back and forth. Historia is stuck to his side, one hand on the baby’s back, worrying her lip. They’re on the third run-through of the same hushed argument—she’s fed and changed and just needs to be rocked to sleep— no, clearly there’s something else, she doesn’t sound like that when she’s tired—her cries are going to sound different as she grows—she hasn’t grown that much; am I not feeding her enough? let me try and feed her—you’re only gonna work her up—

And on, and on. Mikasa wishes she wasn’t in this room. She tries to wish that she was on the road to Braus Stables. That she was there already. 

The baby wails. On and on. The sound doesn’t bother Mikasa by itself, it’s just that it makes her think about other babies whose parents couldn’t stop them from crying. There are only two children left alive who were born off of this tiny island, and Mikasa wants to think she’d be more use at helping them. It had been her arm little Gabi gripped when it was just the Warriors fighting, her that she had asked, crying quietly, if they were going to be okay, if Eren Jaeger wanted to kill them or if he was just throwing them off. 

“Will,” Historia, now, is on the verge of tears. “She sounds hungry, don’t you think?”

“I’m telling you,” he says, firm but gentle, “you’re just gonna upset the rhythm. She ate while I was out, you said?”

“Yes,” she stresses, “but I’m not sure it was enough, and—”

“Then she’s fine. Respectfully, I think you’re the one stressing her out.”

“I’m—?!”

They turn in their pacing. They take care not to let their voices raise over the volume of Ymir’s wails, but Mikasa isn’t sure if that’s a good thing or not. If Historia had asked her to stay because she wanted support, or a third-party opinion, that would be one thing, but Mikasa is just sitting here, aching and sorely out of place, picking at the golden lettering of the book cover. She wants to go home. 

Unbidden, she thinks of the room she’s been sleeping in. Of the blankets Eren must have had someone bring. 

It had to have been him. Historia would have mentioned it, and there’s nobody else who would care. He’s been so careful about keeping her fire built up. It was the first thing he did whenever he came by. 

It was so sweet of him.

Historia’s room is colder. The one wall is made entirely of windows, and it must be letting in the chill of the outdoors. Mikasa wants to escape the utter uselessness she feels pricking at her neck here, and she wants a moment of quiet for her aching head, and she wants that apple-blossom blanket that was waiting for her in place of Eren.

She’s already got the book clutched to her chest and her body braced to stand when someone knocks on the door. 

She lurches to her feet, grateful for this chance. Fire shoots up her leg, but if it takes her another long moment to brace herself, she ignores it. She’s well used to pain by now. 

Wilhelm and Historia didn’t seem to hear the knock. They’re so caught up in their argument now that they’ve stopped their pacing, and don’t take any notice as she crosses to the door. She needs out of this room. 

Mikasa pushes open the door to the anxious face of a red-headed young woman, who blinks with evident shock to see her. 

“Oh!” she says, blue eyes going wide, and she drops into a hasty curtsey. “Um, I’m so sorry, um, ma’a—my—”

She cuts her off. “It’s fine.” She doesn’t want to hear that. Her nails sink into the leather corner. “I was…”

The words halt on her tongue when she sees the second figure in the hallway. 

It’s a Wall priest. Not the one from yesterday who’d spoken to Eren, but she recognizes the robes. I wonder, she thinks, disconnected from herself, what they’ll be called now. 

The man, grey and weathered, eyes her over. There’s no nervous air about him, as there is with the young woman, but there’s a shade of the same surprise to see her… that falls away in a blink, replaced by an expression Mikasa doesn’t know she can name. 

She roots herself to the spot. The sting in her leg goes hand-in-hand with the chill. 

His eyes on her are sharp. Assessing. He looks her up and down, head to toe, from the tips of Frieda Reisse’s old shoes and to the frilled hems of her new shirtsleeves. The look unnerves her, but she can’t see anything calculating in his gaze. Not exactly. He could almost just be curious. 

After a long moment, he inclines his head to her. “My lady,” he says, and the timbre of his voice is deep. 

Mikasa doesn’t protest this time. She’s no happier to hear them, but she’s not a fool. With Eren gone, those words he’s placed on her are a better shield than anything else. 

“I’m so sorry to intrude,” he says. His eyes flit to the room behind her, but then back to her immediately. “And to transgress into the queen’s private apartments, but she requested that this,” he lifts a stack of papers in his arms, “be brought to her as soon as it was available. I felt the need to deliver it personally.”

Mikasa glances down. The papers in the crook of his elbow are white and neatly printed. His pendant rests above them: a gnarled tree woven from reeds. It’s an old thing, sun-bleached and frayed, but Mikasa can’t recall ever seeing anything like it on the Wall priests before. 

She doesn’t know what to say to him. The rapt look on him hasn’t faded one bit, and all she wants to do is turn to stone so that he’ll stop. It’s nothing so caustic as hateful, nothing lecherous, but he makes her feel as though she’s some strange ornament he hasn’t yet figured out the significance of. 

She inhales. “Now isn’t a good time,” she settles on. “Historia has her hands full.”

An understatement. She’s certain they could hear the baby from all the way down in the gallery. 

The red-headed woman’s eyes jump from her to the priest to the inside of the room, and she’s picking at a scab on her thumb. 

“Well,” the priest says. “Would you be good enough to pass these along to her?”

A lick of indignation rises up in Mikasa, then falls away. She’s not Historia’s secretary —but she does want this man gone. She reaches out wordlessly. The papers, when she takes them, are warm and clammy from his hands. She asks, “Is that all?”

“It needn’t be.” His head tips to one side, and Mikasa holds herself frozen. “I wouldn’t turn down a chat. You,” he says, “are a fascinating girl, Lady Mikasa. If that’s… ah, yes, for now. Well, soon enough. Regardless, I—any one of us, but I confess I would be thrilled to be the first—would be delighted to hear anything you’ve got to say. I’m sure you have some interesting stories.”

“Stories?” she echoes, stilted.

“You’ve known Eren Jaeger longer than anyone else,” he says, and that’s not true. Armin had known Eren for years before she’d met him, even if they’d only been friends for a few months. “You know him better than anyone else.” That isn’t true either. Her gut twists, and even he must know it, because he corrects himself with, “Or at least, you’re familiar with a part of him that he isn’t willing to show to anyone else. It’s… very, very, very interesting.” His eyes rove over her once again, catching on her hair, on her nose, her eyes. Mikasa does not squirm, but the urge to duck her chin swells up within her. 

I wish I had — 

Before the thought can finish—before she could cut it down—Historia’s voice slices through the tension, high and clipped as she demands, “What?”

Mikasa’s eyes dart to the side, and she catches Historia marching to the door, arms full of the baby she must’ve wrestled free from her husband. She halts at Mikasa’s side, head level with her shoulder, bouncing in a way that adds ups and downs to Ymir’s crying. 

“Queen Historia,” the priest says. He nods. The young woman drops into another deep curtsey, eyes averted. “Pardon me for intruding. You asked for a definitive list of casualties and who the deceased were survived by. Lady Mikasa was kind enough to take it.” He looks back to Mikasa, that air of consideration gathering around him once more. “We’ve included our estimates, whenever you care to take a look.”

“Great.” Ymir is thumping her little fist against Historia’s cheek. She shifts her arms to grab the tiny hand, craning her neck, and says, “Well then, if that’s all, on your way.”

He opens his mouth. Mikasa, who had so wanted to get out of this room just a minute ago, now angles herself towards Historia and sets her mouth in a line. 

The priest sighs. “Very well. Blessings upon you, Queen Historia. And Lady Mikasa, perhaps sometime when you’re feeling better, you’ll indulge me with a conversation. Later, later, of course. We know you’re still recovering from all that unpleasantness, and I don’t think some more time to reflect would go amiss.” He tips his head. “You keep on healing, girl, for Jaeger’s sake and all of ours. I do look forward to getting to know you.” 

Historia makes an incredulous sound in her throat, waves, and slams the door. Mikasa shudders. 

“You know,” Historia says, blowing a section of her hair out of her face, “you didn’t have to get that. They probably would’ve just left this outside.”

Mikasa leans against the door and brings her fingers up to her temples. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Here,” Historia continues, “C’mere, set those down, I’ll look at them, oh, after this one’s birthday?” She gives her daughter a smile that borders on crazed. “Or once she calms down? Whichever is first, hm?”

Striding over, Wilhelm picks their argument right back up. “Historia, I’m telling you, she’s stressed. She’s picking up on your mood, and it’s—”

“This is my fault?” Historia all but shrieks. The baby wails. “I’m doing the best I can, Will—”

Head still bowed into her probing fingers, Mikasa slinks away. Every step has her gritting her teeth against a hiss, her stitches pulling tight, and when her hip bangs into a chair at the tea table, she crumples into it without thought. I just wanted, she thinks, mind going watery, to get out of this room. I just wanted the blanket Eren sent for me. 

“I know,” Wilhelm placates. “Historia, you’re doing so good, it’s ‘cause you care so much, yeah? I know you just want everything to be perfect—”

“I just want her not to starve!”

Mikasa presses her fingers into her eyes. She wishes for quiet. She wishes she could go home. Wherever that even is anymore. She takes deep, slow breaths the way Aunt Carla taught her and tries to forget the things that priest said to her. 

She drags her fingers back over her temples, trying to rub away the tension. The world has gone swimmy. She can’t make sense of the argument, and she doesn’t need to be here. She needs to go home. 

But where is that? Where is it? 

After her first home was lost to her, gone dark and cold with her parents’ bodies, she’d called Shiganshina home. Eren had called it her home. He had done that for her from the very first instant, like it was his choice to make, like he was the man of the house. Looking back now, she can see the traces of arrogance, but more than that he’d been gentle. He had never acted as if there was any other option, forceful in a way, but—he’d been kind. Sweet. He’d been so excited to show her his town, his house, his favorite spots and the way he could toss blankets over the low posts of his bed to make a fortress. 

Shiganshina had been her home. The marketplace and the schoolyard and the field just beyond the city, with the hill and the tree. The two-story house built over a basement that smelled like ink and old tea. Red tiles and dark wooden beams and a small room with two beds sitting above the kitchen. Uncle Grisha and Aunt Carla and Eren, and Eren, and Eren. 

When Shiganshina fell, she held even faster to him. Eren had been swallowed by rage, and he would’ve gotten himself killed if not for her. She followed him into the military and into the Scouts, despite all his protesting, but for all those long years, none of the refugee camps or military barracks she’d slept in had ever been a home to her. Never the temporary housing. Not her apartment with Sasha. Not that island nation across the sea she’d never seen before and now never would. For as long as she’s known him, home has meant Eren. Even when he was away from her. 

How is she supposed to run from him? The only thing she’s ever wanted has been Eren safe and near, that’s all she’s ever asked from him, and—

And he’s not near, is he? He ran off and left her again, without even saying goodbye. 

And, she thinks wearily, I should have asked more of him than that. 

If I had given him a different answer…

He’s nobody’s home now. He’s a graveyard, a funeral pyre, the rocks that crushed their house. He can’t be home, and he never could have been. There was nothing she could have done to change that. Him. She never could have stopped him. She needs to believe that. She needs to go home. She needs a moment of quiet—

“Give her to me,” Wilhelms snaps. “You need to breathe, and you’re not going to be able to do that if you can hear her screaming.”

Historia glares up at him, lower lip jutting out… and then thrusts her arms forward, all but shoving the baby back to Wilhelm. “Fine,” she spits. 

Wilhelm fumbles to cradle her, and Ymir does seem to calm some once she’s secure in his arms. Historia’s eye twitches, but Wilhelm only shifts his arms, reaches over to ruffle her hair, and leaves. As soon as the door clicks shut, Historia sticks a knuckle between her teeth and lets loose a muffled, drawn-out scream. 

Mikasa inhales. She wraps her hands around her elbows and levels a look at Historia, wondering how long it’ll be until she can excuse herself. She loves Historia, wants to help her, but… there’s been nothing she could do to help all day, and she doesn’t think her mere presence is enough to make anything better. And Historia isn’t Armin. As dear as she is, Mikasa isn’t relaxing from simply being near her, right now. 

Maybe if she’d slept better. Maybe if she felt like she was doing anything at all worthwhile. But she just isn’t. The screams from the ravine echo in her head, and she feels like she’s all alone and covered in blood. 

Historia removes her finger from her mouth. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a nightmare today,” she groans. “I mean, I’m sure the crying grates on you, too, but—and I still—”

“Breathe,” Mikasa reminds. “Just take five minutes until you can hear yourself think again.”

Historia looks over at her with huge eyes. Her chin wobbles once, and then she rolls back her shoulders and throws herself in a chair opposite Mikasa, arms flung wide and head on the bare wood. 

Mikasa is glad for the quiet. She rests her weight on the back of the chair and closes her eyes. 

For Jaeger’s sake and all of ours. What did that mean? 

She won’t find out. I do look forward to getting to know you. If she feels guilty for leaving Historia, for leaving—for leaving —she doesn’t regret that she won’t be getting any more looks like that. There wasn’t even hostility there, which she would have known how to handle. Floch’s attitude the other day was nothing. Well-kept had taken her by surprise, though now, frankly, she’s not sure why, especially after Eren kissed her, even if only a chaste peck on the temple, but in front of everyone, what was he thinking?—and it was meant as a barb, but now that the shock has worn off, she doesn’t care. The opinions, or whispers, of Floch Forster and his ilk are hardly of any consequence to her. But the look on that priest’s face wasn’t any of that, and for some reason, that unnerves her much more. 

At the sound of another groan, Mikasa opens her eyes, and watches Historia rise up out of her chair and fumbles for the stack of papers still in front of her. 

“Are you sure you want to get into that right now?” Mikasa asks. “You should try and decompress.”

“Mhm. But my brain,” she gestures at the side of her head, “won’t stop telling me that my daughter is either crying because she needs me or she’s stopped crying because she hates me, so I’ll take a distraction. Even if it is paperwork.” She lifts her eyes and looks at Mikasa. “Have you gotten started on that book yet? It’s good, but the thing is it started off as a literary hoax that everyone bought at first, so even though that was like fifty years ago, still nobody wants to do anything but rag on it. But I want someone to talk to about it, and Will says he can’t get into it because it’s about deviltry. Whatever that means.”

Mikasa sighs. It’s not like she has anything better to do. How is it possible that she has nothing better to do? “Alright.” 

The leather of the cover, as she cracks it open, is soft and supple. Dead skin. Nothing left across the ocean will become leather. Be of some value after death. All of it is just broken and burned. Mikasa stares, ears ringing, at the yellowed paper for a long minute before she’s able to blink the words into meaning. 

She only makes it halfway down the first page—“ I have sought for that name in all sources of information accessible to me, in vain —” before the quiet breaks. 

“I can’t read this right now!” Historia exclaims. She tears her hands away from her desk as if it might bite, pushes away, and stands with a lurch. “Ah,” she groans, gripping her abdomen. 

Mikasa leans forward, concern furrowing her brow. “Are you okay?” she asks. “Is it—?”

“It’s nothing,” she grinds out, but her face is pinched and her knuckles are white. “Ugh, fucking hemmorhaging. It’s fine, I’m just stupid.”

“You are not,” Mikasa insists. “Historia, you’re exhausted and stressed out of your mind. You don’t need to be trying to run a country.”

“Well, I’m not trying to—do anything with my baby, am I?” She huffs, a wobbly smile finding its way to her face. “So I’ve got to do something. Only I can’t, because I can’t read.”

“Breathe.” Mikasa shuts the book and stands, crossing over to her side and putting her hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Historia, nobody is going to be hurt if you don’t sign off on this immediately.”

“Well, they might be!” Historia flings an arm out to the report. “It’s about how many orphans I’m going to need to make room for, and that is something I’m actually in charge of, like, the one thing that I actually have to be good about, and I can’t —” She bites her lip, too upset to continue. She looks very much like her infant daughter, and Mikasa’s heart throbs. 

She rubs her shoulder again. “Are you sure you don’t just want to rest?”

“Yes. But I don’t…”

“Okay. How about this? You close your eyes for two minutes, okay? Right here at the table. Just two minutes, and then you and I will look that over together.”

Historia’s lip wobbles. “Really?”

This is eerily like how it was when they were children in the cadet program. Little Krista, so small but so determined, tough as nails but soft as down; she’d needed help more often than she was willing to admit, and was always so surprised when anyone offered it. “Really,” Mikasa affirms, and has already braced herself when Historia throws her arms around her in a hug. 

“Thank you,” she says, muffled into Mikasa’s shirt. 

Mikasa pats her back. “You’re welcome.”

Historia sniffles, and she sounds so like her daughter. She pulls away and drags her sleeve across her eyes. “Two minutes does sound good.”

Mikasa nods. Her calf throbs with every heartbeat. “As long as you want.” With warm fingers, she pulls the chair out and drops—

v.

—to the cobblestone street, squeezing the reins of his horse between his cold fingers. 

A different chill has taken hold of the rest of his body. It’s not the faint, imagined impression of Mikasa’s cold little fingers—he would be more worried about blood loss if she hasn’t always run about as warm as an icebox—and it’s not from the weather. The sun is only just beginning to bleed onto the horizon; it isn’t so cold out yet. If anything, he feels something like the way he did in the Paths. Not exactly hollow, a vessel for something great and terrible and the weight of it nearly enough to flatten him; something subtler than electrified. 

It’s not from the weather. The sun is only just beginning to bleed onto the horizon; he can see it. From within the city limits of Shiganshina, feet planted on these familiar, worn streets, Eren can see the sun as it goes molten and murky, painting the sky red—like the Rumbling had done. The Walls are gone. The Walls are gone. Eren is standing on the cobblestone streets of Shiganshina, and there are no Walls to impede his view. 

Wind stirs through the streets, catching in Eren’s hair, and he turns his head, opens his mouth to say, hey, Armin —

But the space on his right is empty. 

His hand flexes—empty, too—and his bitten-off nails bite into his palm. 

Shiganshina isn’t the ghost town that Quinta was. Even when he was returning with Mikasa and Armin and the Scouts, it hadn’t been as broken. And that makes sense—even without the battle, the Wall Titans shaking loose had wrought much more damage than the single blow to the gate Bertholdt had delivered—and right there, it had been right there where there’s no gate anymore, no hardened shell of himself to mark the spot where he’d grabbed Dina Jaeger by the spine and turned her away from exhausted, defenseless little Bertholtd so that Armin would be able to get his teeth in him five years later, turned her away from Bertholdt, turned her toward his house, towards his mom —

You have to get out of here! Eren, what are you doing?! Take Mikasa and run!

He should have. He should’ve kissed her on the brink of that refugee camp and dragged her away from everything—she would’ve gone, would’ve held his hand and gathered her skirt and run every bit as fast as him—and then none of this would’ve ever happened. His mom would still be alive if he had—and he knows that he couldn’t have, that she wouldn’t be, but she’d have been proud of him, at least, she would be able to look at him and be willing to call him her son—his dad had thought of him as a fucking monster by the end, and Mikasa thinks he’s so far beyond humanity he’s not even capable of loving her.

Eren, what are you doing?! Take Mikasa and run!

The sunset glints in his eyes. He’d made prettier ones in the world he’d built where he’d taken Mikasa and run, but they weren’t fucking real, were they? And Mikasa never saw them, so all that effort he’d spent creating that world and calling for her had been for fucking nothing. 

Take Mikasa and run!

Run where, Mom? he wonders, tired. There was never any safety within these Walls. There’s nowhere safe enough for her unless I make it—unless I’m there—and if I had, I couldn’t have been. Where should we have gone?

The sunset glints in his eyes. 

Shiganshina isn’t the ghost town that Quinta was. 

The streets are full of people—not the choked parade he’d faced in Yalkel; not the panicked stampedes he’d caused across the ocean. Eren has caught more than a few glances, but they slide off. The people here are busy, wrapping up their business in time to go home for supper—go home —and is Eren home? Is he supposed to be home right now? He doesn’t know what he’s feeling, only that it’s less secure than he was in Mikasa’s bed. If he’d come here with her—but then, he wouldn’t want her to see this, would he—but she did, she was in Shiganshina, too, he’d brought her here, she’d watched him bring the Walls down and explode into that awful, painful thing that his Founding Titan had been.

His ribs fucking hurt. It had started in that strange new Titan form, more than he was meant to have and many scraping against the burning, ravaged ground his army left in its wake, and now this fucking phantom vice has reminded him of that pain. The ends of his ribs are curled deep inside of him, and they burn. 

The streets are full of people, wrapping up their business. It’s suppertime soon. Eren slid off his horse when nobody else had, and he clutches the reins like a child fisting his mother’s skirts. He wants—he wants—he wants to go home. 

Eren swallows. Without taking his eyes off the sunset, he turns his head towards the others and gives some empty-sounding excuse, and then he drops his hands from the reins and detaches, heading south, heading east. 

He catches Floch swearing under his breath, then raise his voice to order the others to the stables, tell them that they’ll be meeting the hastily-appointed captain of the unit left in Shiganshina. He hears the sharp, muted sounds of horses being led away and more distinct footprints, but Eren doesn’t turn. He’s already—

— marching —

—walking, passing the spot where Hannes and the other Garrison soldiers used to spend their shifts drinking and gambling. 

This walk should feel more familiar, he thinks. He knows the route as well as he ever did. On that measure, it could’ve been yesterday that he and Mikasa ambled back from the meadow, weighed down by firewood. God, but they’d been small, then. He hadn’t seen it at the time, thinking himself as good as grown, but seeing the pair of them from the outside, through his own eyes and his father’s, they’d been tiny. Children. As small as Ramzi; somehow not as small as Halil. Bigger than what was left of either of them.

When he and Mikasa had led the way back to their old house from the newly-sealed Wall, the city had been perfectly preserved in the moment the gates fell. Trampled grocery baskets, open shop windows. His mother’s shoe, fallen where her kicking and thrashing had shaken it loose—she’d never broken her legs at all, she’d just been trying to get her children away— what are you doing?! Take Mikasa and run!

He’s been in Shiganshina plenty of times these past four years. Escorting civilians, staying here as a base as the port and railway were under construction, just spending the odd day off here, haunting these familiar streets with Mikasa and Armin in tow. It’s not strange to see his city alive again. But this isn’t quite the town he’d grown up in—the town he’d torn down and scraped away from twelve days ago. 

The spires he’d formed with the War Hammer still stand, jutting up from Hauptstrausse like broken ribs out of a carcass. He passes one house speared neatly through, where a pair of kids at the base of the spike have made a game of bouncing a ball off it. A woman in a heavy skirt and long apron keeps half an eye on them as she beats a rug against the corner of her house. At her feet, discarded bullet cartridges gleam a brilliant gold in the sunset, and when Eren follows the line of the gutter up to the roof, he sees more glittering shells wedged between the red tiles, and a huge splatter pattern that the rain hadn’t been able to wash away completely.  

Eren wonders if it had been a Paradisan or a Marleyan soldier who’d died on that family’s roof—and then almost laughs, because there’s no fucking difference, is there? Doesn’t he know that? Just one more fucking casualty of his war. 

He veers off Hauptstrausse before it opens into the marketplace, turning into the alleyways he doesn’t think even have proper names. If they do, he’d never learned them—but he remembers this house on the corner, that always had the windows open—and they are still, now, if you can count the windows shattered, blasted in from something—a Titan transformation, maybe—as open.

Off the paved streets, the packed earth of the allies is still muddy. There’s a cluster of houses that seems perfectly untouched, except for the one in the center, which must have been either hit by debris from an airship or been the unfortunate landing site of the Jaw Titan one of the times Eren tossed him across the city. Drowned-out tufts of grass are flattened into the mud, and broken glass crunches under his boots, and Eren can see the setting sun from the backroads and alleys of Shiganshina. 

He reaches the turn onto Herkheimer Weg, once again on paved streets. The street follows the canal, and Eren reaches for memories of being a kid dangling his feet over the edge, watching Mikasa and Armin skip rocks better than he ever could, but the memory of being so carefree is tainted now. The River Renne has an orange tint from the light, like it’s glowing, but that doesn’t distract from the fact that it’s sloshing along the edges of the canal, runoff pooled along the sides of the street. A teenage girl walks along the raised edge, holding hands with a boy walking below her on the street. 

The people of Shiganshina are mostly young families. Survivors of the Fall, too young to have been sent on the massacre of the reclamation mission but old enough to have served long enough for an honorable discharge, opportunistic young men looking to carve out a name of their own in the space left behind, teenagers escaping their families for the offer of a plot of farmland and seven years of labor. 

If this was a different world, Eren thinks, I might’ve been one of them. He could have moved back after the city was sealed and safe again, could have taken Mikasa back home and married her as soon as they turned sixteen. If he’d been a few years older. If he hadn’t been his father’s son. If he hadn’t been himself. 

If this was a different world. If I was a different man. 

And what then? Would Marley have attacked even without his and Zeke’s interference? Would the world really have been safe enough for her without his ensuring it? Would he have ever been able to be content with her in a city that was a fucking cattle pen?

Something warm runs down his fingers, and it takes him a beat to realize he’s dug his nails into his palms again. He shakes his hands loose, forcing the wound to steam shut, and shuts his eyes tight. 

Shiganshina is not the ghost town that Quinta was. He can hear footsteps all around him—the kids on the canal, men trudging home to their families, women rushing back from last-minute dashes out to the market, children darting around, eager for supper but trying to steal a few more minutes of play. The longer he stands still, not quite ready to pick up his feet and go on, the quieter his surroundings seem to grow. He’s sure he’s attracting stares. Who’s that freak, they’re thinking, frozen in the middle of the road?

Not quite everyone goes still, of course, because he never, ever gets a fucking break. The uneven footfalls of Floch Forster catch up to him eventually, and Eren can’t even scrounge up annoyance. He opens his eyes again, inhaling deeply, just to see a woman carrying a wicker basket on one elbow and a baby on her hip. The kid is old enough to hold sit up and fix its wide blue eyes on whatever catches its fancy—old enough that it would be around the same age as the baby he’d seen that evening in Odiha, then still in its mother’s womb.  

Floch is careful to come around and stand on Eren’s right. Slightly winded, he tries, “Not quite the reception you got in Yalkel, huh?” 

Eren tracks the movement of the mother and child. The baby grabs her braid and stuffs it in its mouth, gumming happily, not a care in the world. An old passage floats through Eren’s head, and he translates, “There is not an auger who is received in his hometown.”

“What?”

Still vacant, he clicks his tongue. “You want a relationship with the church, right? Need to study up on your scripture, Forster.” 

“I… you talk like a crazy person sometimes, Eren.”

“How else would you expect me to talk?” He unsticks his feet, continuing on. 

“... Yeah, case in point.” Floch shakes his head and follows after him. “What’re you doing?”

“What the hell do you think? I’m going to check on my house.”

“Oh.”

At this point, most people would have asked him if he wanted some privacy for this deeply personal moment. Floch, on the other hand, no doubt thinks he’s being supportive by trailing after him, and Eren simply doesn’t have the energy to frighten him off right now. It doesn’t fucking matter. He’s alone either way. 

Eren doesn’t pick up the conversation again, and Floch takes the fucking hint. The rest of the walk is quiet—not silent, Shiganshina isn’t a ghost town—and he catches sounds drifting out of houses, of which maybe one in ten is occupied. The sun sinks closer and closer to the horizon, clouds stained red. The closer he gets to the city limit, the more extensive the damage is. Ash-darkened roof tiles. Buildings torn open with no obvious cause. Chunks of debris not so different from the ruins of the gate that crushed his house littered here and there. There’s been some effort at restoring order, but if this is Shiganshina after nearly two weeks of cleanup, Eren doesn’t want to think about what the city had looked like in the immediate aftermath. 

And his house wasn’t spared, either. 

They’d never removed the stone that had crushed it. It hadn’t been necessary to get to the basement, and afterwards, it had been the last thing on his mind. He could have, at any point in these years since, as he helped clear up the rest of the district, but—somehow it had felt disrespectful. As if disturbing the scene of her death would somehow lessen the memory of his mother. He and Mikasa had never spoken about it, but she’d never asked him, and—he likes to imagine she feels the same way. 

Isn’t that like him. 

A fucking pointless effort at remembrance. At respect for the dead. What fucking right did he have to try and preserve his mother’s memory, as if he hadn’t spat on it, become a monster she wouldn’t have been able to stomach the sight of—as if it’s not his fucking fault she’s dead, in need of remembering, like he didn’t as good as murder his own mother —

— Mikasa can remember, though. Like a train switching tracks, his mind automatically jumps to the thought, a fine trick, a necessary tactic for self-preservation. Eren quakes with relief for it, nails biting into his palms again. Mikasa can remember, he tells himself. Mikasa can remember. Mikasa is alive and fine to remember. Mom would want to be remembered by her. Mikasa is worthy of carrying Mom’s memory — Mom’s memory is worthy of Mikasa. Mom would want to be remembered by her. God, she loved her so much — Eren, what are you doing?! Take Mikasa and run! 

And Mikasa deserves to have a monument for her foster-mother. They’ve come back here over the years—once or twice with everyone, Armin and Jean and Sasha and Connie, a few more times with just Armin, but most often by themselves. A few weeks before they left for Marley, they’d sat on top of the ledge where his mother would hang laundry up to dry, sharing leftovers, letting their fingers brush. 

If Mikasa was with him, she would recognize what’s left of even the remains of his house; he doubts anyone else would. 

It looks like some part of an airship had crashed on it—something that had been on fire, at least. The old oak support beams have been burned mostly away, and the pale stone of his old walls is blackened by soot—as if, he thinks wildly, the whole thing was the inside of a chimney. Where there used to be splintered wood and rubble, there are now embers and ashes. It’s barely recognizable as a house. 

Which—yeah, that just about fits. He’s broken and burned everything else beyond recognition—everything that’s ever meant anything to him—the outside world, his friendships, his relationship with Mikasa, his home— sorry about the mess, Mom —

A kaleidoscope of images swirls across his vision. The kitchen sink. The muslin curtains on the window over it. The set of good dishes that had been a wedding gift. His mother’s wedding dress, carefully folded and kept in a wirebound box under her bed—but she’d taken it out to show to Mikasa, said she could have it for herself when she was older. Mikasa’s collection of handmade dolls—Eren’s set of marbles—the playing jacks they’d set out in front of the fireplace—the stack of old newspapers his father kept from days that meant something, birthdays and first steps and lost teeth, the reason inked on the corner in his chickenscratch handwriting—the copper cookware hanging over the counters—the candle holders his parents would set the table with on their anniversary—the patchwork quilts in the linen closet—that one that Mom had made from his old baby clothes—the scented hand soaps she was always so pleased to bring home, the ones she kept in the leaf-shaped dish Dad bought in Trost because it made him think of her—every tiny, insignificant, precious thing that had filled his childhood home, and now—now Eren wonders if the reason he never disturbed it is because he didn’t want to shatter the illusion that those things were gone forever. Maybe they hadn’t been. Maybe some of them had survived nine long years, just to be crushed again and burned because of a war Eren brought to the shattered doorstep—

Where is his home? It doesn’t feel like it’s here. Not his old, emptied apartment, which had felt like a bone sucked dry of marrow from the second he’d moved in. It isn’t back in Mitras. For a precious handful of hours there in Mikasa’s bed, he’d thought— but he was being a fucking idiot. So where does that leave him? For all the world, he thinks the closest thing he’s had to a home in a long, long time, maybe since this house was crushed, had been that watercolor dream world he’d tried to make for Mikasa. 

He’d both known and hadn’t known that it wasn’t real—both believed and hadn’t believed he was a deserter who spent his days building and keeping a home for his bride—both had and hadn’t had months of memories in his head coloring the world, fractions of fantasies that would have fallen into place if only he’d gotten her beside him. 

He had thought she would have wanted that. He’d meant to give her closure, as he’d done with the others, but—he owed her more than a conversation. He owed her a lifetime—happiness, peace, love—and he’d craved all those things, only survived because he’d focused on them, but—he’d tried to give it to her, too. Now—he wonders how right that assumption had been. He’d spent hours and hours—and time had gone funny there at the end for him, but he’d spent ages calling to her, trying to pull her in, and all it had done was hurt her. 

Which. Yeah. That just about fits.

His quiet, ragged breathing hitches. It’s—not funny. It so deeply is not funny. But fuck, even the one fucking good thing he’d been trying to do—of course that would only hurt her. Why had he even fucking bothered? He should have known. 

Eren laughs. He ducks his eyes and shakes his head and laughs, shoulders shaking, tongue pushing into his molars. 

His boots are filthy. All the mud and dirt and dust of two days of hard travel is stuck to them, and with his eyes squinted, in the light of the sunset without the Walls to block it, it could be blood—it should be blood. Absurdly, he thinks of how his mother would scold him for even thinking about tracking that into her house.

Sorry, Mom, he thinks—laughing, laughing. About the mess! Sorry, Mom — sorry, Mom — sorry, Mom, I’m sorry, Mom — Mom, I didn’t mean to — Sorry, Mom —

Eren laughs. It’s so fucking pointless to apologize. To dare to feel remorse, to let it twist his insides, let it bite and bite like— bedbugs, like Sasha when she got her hands on food—like he has any right to hurt over people he hurt worse. Isn’t that an insult to their memories? His hand comes up to grip at his hair, and the sting at his scalp feels pure. Everything he ever did, all the lies, all the betrayals, every string he ever pulled, everything he ever did to Mikasa, to his mother, to his friends, to his father and his brother and himself, to the world, all the violence and the hatred and the praying and the screaming and the burning and the dying, and now Eren is standing on the cobblestone streets of Shiganshina, and there are no Walls to impede his view as the sun bleeds out on the horizon—

Eren laughs, Eren laughs, Eren laughs. 

vi.

She stares, she stares, she stares, not quite able to focus—not quite able to look away from the faded, familiar piece of fabric.  

The mattress beneath her is soft enough to feel like nothing, and the blanket Eren sent for her doesn’t manage to trap any warmth.

Her head is still buzzing. The final tally has finally been recorded from all districts. So many categories. So many causes of death. The people killed when the Walls came down, the people killed in Shiganshina in Marley’s assault, the people who have gone missing from Shiganshina, presumed to have been devoured, the people the Jaegerists turned into Titans, and those they outright executed. The people who died at or on their way to the port. 

At least eight of those were her kills. Maybe more. After the guns were drawn and pointed at the people she had to protect, she hadn’t much discerned between death and dismemberment and simply kicking someone unconscious, doing whatever was quickest to win the fight and move along. Keep her comrades and the Azumabito safe. She doesn’t regret what she’d done in the effort of getting to Eren, but she doesn’t relish the numbers, either. There’s been so much death in the world lately. 

‘Getting’ to Eren, she thinks again, and closes her eyes. She’d been trying to kill him, too. Not at that point, but…

She doesn’t have the stomach for all this death. So much death.

Mikasa thinks of her father, then. The first person she ever saw die. A dribble of blood. A stagger; a fall. She hadn’t understood what had happened for too long, and… she spent her day today scanning over reports of how many other little girls lost their fathers, their mothers. Their own lives. 

Outside of Shiganshina, there were nine hundred and twelve civilian deaths from the Walls crumbling. Outlying districts are crowded, populated cities, and the debris flew far. In the near fortnight since it happened, those who were critically injured have made the turn one way or the other. One way or another, hospital wings are empty again. 

In Shiganshina… 

There’d been so much chaos. Looking back, the battle against Marley, before the Rumbling shook loose, had only been… ten minutes? Maybe half of which she hadn’t even been fighting in, locked underground with Armin and the rest. So many soldiers had died, so many civilian deaths… And then when Zeke activated the Titans… all the people who had died because of them. And then, when the Titans were cleared away, the executions started. 

Seventeen-hundred-seventy-one dead under the rubble in Shiganshina. A hundred and ninety missing, presumed dead. Three hundred and eighty-eight soldiers who drank Zeke’s spinal fluid and were transformed into mindless Titans, all of them put out of their misery. Another three dozen soldiers dead in that fight. 

There are a lot of fatherless children. 

More than there are on the other side of the ocean. 

Mikasa shudders. 

And then the port. They didn’t exactly compare notes, on the boat, but she knows that none of them made it on with clean hands—except for Armin, of course, her sweet boy, so sure they could talk their way through it. Hange had been next to her for much of it, so Mikasa imagines they were around even, and Connie had been in tatters over killing two of their old classmates. That would have put their death toll at nineteen, minimum, and she knows it was more than that. Then the people Magath and Annie and Reiner took out, and the reinforcements on the train that was blown up. The report had lumped all those deaths together, and Mikasa doesn’t want to dig further. 

All that death, in just a few short days. Most of the dying done on the island was over in less than fifteen hours, but there were plenty of people who were slow to go, taking days to finally succumb to their injuries. 

And now Paradis island has a hundred and twenty-three new orphans, and it’s Historia’s responsibility to ensure they have new homes. It’s mindful, tedious work, and Mikasa understands why Historia had needed a second pair of eyes to make sense of it. She didn’t much mind helping her… but she minded finally getting out and away even less. 

The room Mikasa has been sleeping in is quiet and peaceful. The numbers swirl around in her head, heavy, but at least she can hear her own thoughts. She doesn’t mind doing what she can for Historia one bit, but Historia doesn’t need her. She has handmaidens and assistants aplenty who will step up as soon as Mikasa is out of the city, and no doubt do a much better job.

She flushes, feeling guilty. Even in her thoughts, she doesn’t mean to sound dismissive or cold towards Historia, especially not when the poor little queen is so overwhelmed. She loves Historia, really she does. She doesn’t at all mind taking care of her in what little ways she can, and—she hopes she’ll be able to write. Maybe, even, she’ll be able to visit Historia’s ranch eventually. But none of that changes the fact that she still has to go.

She’s all packed up. The clothes that Historia had been so kind to commission for her are folded up neatly into a bag that rests at the foot of the nightstand. She’s changed into a fresh nightgown and left her clothes from today folded over the bathtub, knowing but trying not to think about how someone will certainly come along to launder them, and her outfits for tomorrow and the next day are rolled together at the top of the bag so that she needn’t rummage around and mess it all up. She’s pressed Armin’s letter into the book Historia gave her, to ensure it isn’t ruined as she travels, and for right now, it’s still resting on the table.

The only thing left to do is to decide whether or not she’s bringing her scarf. 

The apple-blossom blanket is soft beneath her fingers.

She is. Of course she is. How could she ever not? 

She can’t. Of course she can’t. She can’t make herself touch it. She can’t imagine Armin’s face—imagine Jean or Connie’s face, Levi’s, Reiner’s, Annie’s, little Gabi and Falco’s faces—if she were to put it on—if they were ever to see it. 

She can’t leave it behind. How could she possibly leave it behind? It’s a part of her. It’s been a part of her since the night her parents died. She’s carried it with her for every significant part of her life. It’s been the only thing she was able to keep from her home with the Jaegers. Other than the odd day when the heat was too much, she’s always had it, and even then, it was always safe somewhere, waiting for her to wrap its warmth and comfort and feeling of safety around her. 

(Mikasa wonders, if she’d worn it that day in Odiha, on the outskirts of the refugee camp, would she have answered differently? Would the sight of it have prompted a different question from him?)

She isn’t. Obviously she isn’t. It isn’t hers, it’s Eren’s. She thought it was warmth and comfort and the feeling of safety. A reminder that there was goodness to be found in the world, enough to rival the cruelty. And she can’t believe that anymore. When she remembers that night, now all she can see is the blood on his face and the look in his eyes. 

Why did he save her? It wasn’t just the simple act of kindness she’d believed in for so long. Even though she does believe he was lying at the restaurant, she’s not forgotten the whipcrack sound of his voice when he’d disabused her of that. But still, it wasn’t just for the sake of bloodthirst. If it was, he would have just wandered off—walked away, as he did across the sea, leaving devastation behind him without a backwards glance. But he didn’t. He was so sweet to her in the minutes, days, weeks afterward. He didn’t always get it right, but he always tried. 

She doesn’t understand. 

The scarf lies on the nightstand, as if it’s perfectly innocuous. Mikasa knows every single detail of it, every neatly-sewn repair and every loose stitch. It hadn’t been good-as-new even the night she got it. It had been Eren’s for months, he wore it everywhere, and he never did take very good care of his things. 

She has to bring it. She had it with her all throughout the flight across the wrecked world. By the end, they had all known, even if they weren’t admitting it, that they couldn’t stop him, but they’d still felt the duty to try—and if they couldn’t even manage that, then they should at least pay the people they were failing the respect of bearing witness. The rest of her clothes were burned. Even her boots are gone, and she has no idea what became of her ODM gear. It just—it feels wrong to throw away one of the last things that was ever in the outside world. 

The ends are more worn than the rest, yarn loose from a decade of absorbing Mikasa’s anxious handling. Two-thirds of the way up, there’s a snagged thread from catching on a doorknob. There are dozens of invisible stitches that Mikasa has made over the years. She was always so careful to match the color of thread to the color of the yarn.

How many hours had Aunt Carla spent knitting it? Had she poured over colors and tested every skein of yarn to judge the softness, the durability? She’d made it for her son, knowing how careless he’d be with it—though she must have been surprised when her surly, snappish boy gave it to a stranger. 

It occurs to her now, nine years after the fact, to wonder that Eren never asked for it back. It was the only physical trace of his mother left in the world, but he’d never once breathed a word. 

But then, Eren has always had funny ways of mourning. Of keeping her memory close. 

She can’t bring her scarf. But—she has to. She can’t, but she has to. She will. She just… has to make herself reach out and touch it. 

Mikasa’s hand lifts off the quilt, and then recoils back against her stomach, fisting between her ribs. 

She can’t do it. Not yet. It’s too soon; it feels like she’s picking a scab. Like she’s ripping out her stitches. Stitches that are holding her together from an injury she sustained in the fight against the boy who gave her that scarf, ten minutes and a lifetime after he killed two people while screaming how they were filthy animals, ten years and a lifetime before he killed over two billion people.

She feels like she’s lost her mind. 

That’s the number Reiner gave them. Two billion and change. He didn’t know the exact number—nobody ever, ever would—but from his testament, there were over two billion people living beyond the island—and on the scale of billions, the change that he couldn’t recall the details of would have been millions. Hundreds of millions. There aren’t one million people alive on Paradis right now.

Her hand comes up around her throat, the other gripping her wrist, curled protectively over her mother’s clan marking—the Azumabito crest, another last remaining scrap of a thing—except this isn’t the only thing left of a woman, of a house, no, it’s all there is of a people, of a nation. She can’t bring her scarf, how could she ever —

—how could she ever leave it behind?

It’s not for Eren, she tries to tell herself. But then what is it for? For who he was? That boy had never existed—not quite the way she thought he had, at least. For who she was? She can’t find much in the way of sympathy for that blind, naive little girl who chose not to see the blood on his hands, on his face, splattered on his shirt. 

For what we were, a meek voice whispers, and Mikasa’s hand spasms on her throat. 

If I had —

No, no, no no no. 

Mikasa, finally, turns her head away. She looks to the fireplace, the logs stacked in the familiar Paradis way, and doesn’t feel any warmer at all. 

vii. 

It’s warm in the sunlight.

Once his fit of laughter—of madness—has run its course, Eren is left pressing his thumbs into his temples, sagged against the stone ledge where they used to dry their laundry. His ears ring, and his head is full of the seductive siren-song winds ghosting through the branches of an old oak tree made of light. 

It’s all lopsided. Well— lopsided. That makes it sound like it’s one side that’s uneven. The Paths of nearly every Eldian alive led away from the island, and all those have been cut short. No more branching out, just—all severed, and none too neatly. 

The music is strange, now. The steady thrum has gone uneven. Eren brings his hand up and presses his palm to his throat, idly measuring his pulse. 

The rock ledge is cool and rough against his shoulders, even through the uniform. It’s good. Grounding. It had been warmer, heated by the sun that’s bright in his eyes, but Eren leeched that away. He wonders if the fires have died, in the outside world. Probably. How much could there be left to burn? 

Eren considers voicing the question to Floch, hovering in his periphery. He’s treated the Rumbling like a joke a few too many times these past days, and Eren would like to see him draw up short. 

I killed more than two billion people, he could say. You helped me. Do the math. A billion women — five hundred million children. What do you have to say about that?

He doesn’t. Doesn’t want to risk seeing blank apathy, or some facsimile of contrition, or just pity for himself. He just can’t fucking deal with it today. 

Floch hovers, clearly very worried that he’s lost his fucking mind. It’s the best read on him he’s had since he got back to the island. He’s leaned against the wall, too, mimicking Eren’s posture as best he can. Eren can feel his eyes on him, can feel the sweat on his forehead and crease in his brows. He doesn’t have any goddamn clue what to do with this version of Eren. He’s been volatile enough these past few days, but he hasn’t actually lost it like that in front of him. 

You don’t know me as well as you think you do, he wishes he could spit. He wishes he could throw a rock at him and scare him off, like he’d had to do with stray dogs in the refugee camps when he was a child. He wishes Mikasa were here. She’d know what to say to pull him back from the crumbling ledge, so, so close to the angry, churning waters; it would be so easy to let himself be swallowed up by them and dashed against the rocks, but she’d be able to pull him back—

Or she’d just make it worse. 

You’re — family —

Eren… I’ve been thinking —

He doesn’t let that memory finish. That’s still too raw. Much, much, much too raw—he doesn’t even get anything out of hurting himself with it. The knowledge is one thing, but the memory of her voice, nervous —he always thought her hand would be steadier, when she killed him—is quite, quite, quite another. 

Still. He still wants her here. Anywhere. He wants her with him to look at their old house—at his house. 

It is his house. Not just his old house, not just his childhood home. He owns it outright; has paid a slim fraction of his slim soldier’s wages on a property tax the past two years. His father had paid it off when Eren was very young, and Grisha had been getting his affairs in order in preparation for his time to run out. The house at 7249 Salvatorgasse was to go to his son, under the custodianship of his wife until his legal majority. Eren saw the will a few years back, the copy that’d been sent to a lawyer in Trost. There was a condition that Eren could never deny his mother her right to live there, and that Mikasa was not to be turned out unless she was married and provided for by her husband. As if his father had imagined they would have just gone on sharing a bedroom right up until she married some other man. Eren had never thought of his father as a stupid man, not exactly, and he does know, intellectually, that he’d only been doing all that he could to legally ensure that his ward—his only little girl, the child he certainly liked best and probably loved best—would always be taken care of—but still, it had made Eren sneer. 

The memory now pulls another low peal of laughter from him. He shakes his head, because it isn’t funny fucking at all. Hadn’t they just shared a bedroom—a bed? And now she’s—

His mouth closes with a vicious clack of his teeth, setting into a snarl. 

Floch finally breaks. “Eren—” he starts. 

Eren cuts him off. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to slip further than I already have.”

“That’s not… I think we need to get you out of the city,” he says. He’s smoothed over his voice, coaxing, and Eren’s mouth twists, his tongue pressing against his molars. He imagines digging the sole of his boot into his bullet wound. Putting his whole weight into it and twisting. “I should have anticipated that this would… that there’d be a lot of reminders here for you. Come on. You were right, the city is well-manned already. It’s not even six yet; we can get out and be well on our way to Faerth before we lose the light entirely—”

“No.” Eren flexes his hand where it rests on his pulse. His heartbeat is steady, but the drumbeat in his head isn’t. “We’re staying here tonight.”

“We are?”

“Yes.” 

Floch opens his mouth. Eren isn’t looking at him, but he can hear the way he struggles to find words. Eventually, he just has to come the fuck out and ask, “Are you specifically trying to keep us out of the capital for as long as possible?”

“Now,” he drawls, biting. “Why would I do that?”

“You tell me, Eren. Every time I’ve asked, you’ve shut me down.”

“Mh. Would have thought you’d have gotten the fucking hint by now.” 

“Fine. But whatever—” He cuts himself off. Eren can tell that was smart. He goes over whatever he’d wanted to say, rewords it as: “I would think that whatever you’re avoiding in Mitras, you’ll only be able to fix if you’re actually there.” 

Eren scoffs. Fix it.

If it was just what he did to her, that would be one thing. He’s not even sure how much she actually holds all that against him. That’s so much of why he’s fixated on her—she’s the only person in the world he could ever even possibly fix anything for. He can make things up to her in a way he can’t with anyone else. His friends don’t want to fucking hear it, and he doesn’t blame them at all. If it’s best for them that he’s just a monster who duped them that they never want to see again—alright. Fine. Everyone else he’s hurt is too dead for him to do a thing about. But Mikasa—Mikasa is alive and okay and she still fucking loves him. It means something to her that he’s trying, that he’s explaining bit-by-bit his goddamn stupid reasons for hurting her. 

But not enough. Because it’s not about what he did to her. It’s about everything else. 

Would it kill her, he wonders, to be a little more self-conceited? Couldn’t she let her pride swallow up some of her compassion?

He’d never want that, obviously. He would never change a thing about her. But—would it kill her? 

… to care less about the people I killed. Yes, actually. It probably would. In a certain sense.

He doesn’t want her to care less, not by a mile. He’s glad she cares as much as she does, because she wouldn’t be herself if she didn’t, he just—he wishes she cared about him more. 

He groans and shakes his head. That’s not it, either. He doesn’t know how to articulate it, even in his own thoughts. He’d never change a thing about her—except maybe her location. She’d managed to be disgusted with and disappointed in him from the circle of his arms, hadn’t she? He wants her there. Here. With him. 

He knows that much, at least. It fits that she’s not, it’s nothing less than he deserves, but—he’d earned her revulsion, too. The way she looks sick whenever she looks at him—he deserves that. 

But she doesn’t deserve to feel sick like that every day. 

He’s hurt her enough, and if she can’t stand it—he won’t demand anything more of her. He’s already taken more than he has any right to. Right now, in the wake of his fit, the thought mostly just makes him tired. He’s hurt her enough, and he doesn’t want anything she doesn’t want to give. 

Floch sighs, mouth pulled into a grimace. “Well. If you’re not gonna tell me, I don’t have anything else to offer. Except,” he adds, “maybe a cigarette? Might help you calm do—”

“Fuck yes,” he’s already saying. “Give it to me.”

Floch snorts, but he goes rifling through his pockets. He pulls out a large pack—a good pack. Eren raises his eyebrows and whistles lowly when he recognizes the brand. “You didn’t break those out ‘round the campfire last night.”

Floch’s mouth ticks up in half a grin. “Nah. Birthday present for myself.” 

Eren has no idea when his birthday was, but the pack is only half-empty, so he says, “Very restrained of you.”

He’s still eyeing him carefully, doing his best to gauge his reactions, but his smile smoothes over some. “Let myself have a few this week. Not doing the greatest job of making them last, but…” He shrugs. 

“You’ve had a very stressful couple of weeks,” Eren says dryly, and takes the proffered cigarette. Floch pulls out a match and strikes it against the side. After three tries and barely a wisp of smoke, Eren rolls his eyes and grabs it from him, lighting it himself. He tosses the box back to Floch, who fumbles to catch it, and puts the cigarette in his mouth. 

He’d never had much taste for them before Marley. They’re harder to come by on the island, slightly less so in recent years, but Marley didn’t lack for farmland or working hands. Plenty of the men in his unit kept boxes on them—they used to gamble with them, passing the hours in the trenches—and Zeke had slipped him the good shit the Marleyan brass saved for themselves while he was in the military asylum—always indulging his little fantasies of being the cool older brother, as if Eren wasn’t an adult himself. 

Eren appreciates the way the smoke scalds his mouth, down his throat and into his lungs. It makes his head buzz. The thrumming under his skull goes watery for a moment, and Eren remembers the feeling of Mikasa’s delicate ankles under his hands, of her knees against his forehead—of her arms wound tight around him, her little hands bunched into fists and pressed against his spine. 

He opens his eyes, looking out over Shiganshina. It isn’t the ghost town Quinta had been. The activity has mostly shuffled its way indoors by now, though, as the sun slinks ever lower. Eren tilts his head and considers the way the low angle of light stretches shadows across the city. He’s never seen it like this. He likes the way they paint themselves in the cracks of the cobblestone and spread, like ink in water. He likes the way the tufts of grass have turned golden, and the way their razor-thin shadows look like the legs of some spindly monster. He likes the way everything looks crisp and sharp in the light. The gold suits the scenery.

He wonders if Mikasa would get any happiness at all out of seeing their street like this. 

As Eren stares vacantly out, Floch gets a handle on his own light. He exhales raggedly, blowing a cloud of smoke, swallows, and asks, “What’re you staring at?”

Eren nods ahead. There’s a lone figure that’s slowed almost to a stop, head turning to stare back at him. A young man in civilian garb with a toddler on his hip. At his side, Floch’s eyes narrow, but there’s no need. There’s nothing hostile in his posture, and anyway, it’s not like there’s a single thing the man could do. Eren doubts even the nape of his neck is a weak point anymore. 

After a minute, and another drag of smoke, the figure veers slightly, adjusting course enough to come within speaking range. His face gets more defined with every step, but Eren can’t find anything familiar there. He watches with detached curiosity, amused as Floch tenses, until the man pauses some ten paces away. 

“Ah…” he says. His voice doesn’t ring a bell. “Is that… Eren, is that you? Or—shoot, it’s, it’d be Jaeger, wouldn’t it? Uh, l—”

His amusement twists. If this is someone who even for a second thought he could get away with calling him Eren, this is bound to go somewhere interesting. “Just Eren’s alright for now,” he calls. Floch’s eye twitches. 

The man just nods. “I don’t know if—I’m Terral Winter, do you remember me?”

Oh. Eren does, actually—he remembers the name, at least. It was written in the tack-up notices on the corkboard every week in school, a fresh report every Monday that Terral and Ursula are going steady. When he squints his eyes and tilts his head, he does recall the older boy from the old days of Shiganshina. He’d been four years older and lived four houses down. Judging the direction, he was probably walking back to the same damn house. 

“Sure,” Eren says. He straightens up and stretches out his free hand, and Terral blinks, nearly looses his grip on the kid, and then stumbles forward to shake it. His hands are calloused, dirt embedded under his fingernails—farmer’s hands. Floch’s eyes have gone wide, his face gone slack. Eren pulls back and gestures to the little boy—brown-haired and freckle-faced, maybe two years old wearing a deep frown, and asks, “He yours?”

“Yeah,” Terral answers. He seems dazed. There’s a furrow between his brows. “Uh, this is Walter. Walter, say hi.”

The kid screws up his face and turns away. Good judge of character. 

“You named him Walter Winter?” Eren asks.

Terral shrugs, half-apologetic. “Ursula did.” 

Something curls in Eren’s stomach. “You two are still going steady, then?”

“Ha. Tied the knot a long while back—I’m sorry, I’m—” He shifts his arms and offers a hand to Floch. “Terral Winter. I, ah, I live just a few houses down. Did before the Fall, too—Eren and I were neighbors. Way back when.”

Floch has banished his slack, disbelieving look and moved into pinched displeasure. Meeting the handshake, he says, “Floch Forster. I’m Eren’s right hand.”

In an impressive feat of will, Eren does not roll his eyes. 

“Oh. Uh. Wow.” Terral looks back and forth between them. He seems faintly queasy. Eren has to smother a smile. This is funny. “So you…”

“Got us to thank for the shit state the city is in,” Eren finishes. He brings his cigarette back to his mouth and inhales. “Sorry about that.”

“What?” Terral does a double take. “No, no, that isn’t what I was thinking, I was just—”

“It’s not our fault,” Floch says, defensive. “We didn’t ask Marley to attack.”

Eren eyes him, unimpressed. I basically did. “Whatever. Terral. Hope your house came through.” 

“Oh, it’s alright. Part of the roof got smashed, but—uh, you know, that’s not so bad. It’s… well, I just—I hope I’m not bothering you, I just thought I recognized you, and I thought… I felt like I had to thank you.”

“Thank me?” Eren repeats. He half-attempts to bite back a bitter smile. 

Terral doesn’t look too sure of it himself. But he clutches his son closer and says, “Well… I mean, you did something, you know? You guaranteed the island’s safety better than anything else could have. And I think… that I have to be grateful for that.”

Eren shrugs. “Not if you don’t want to.”

Floch lets out a choked sound. 

“I didn’t do it for gratitude,” he says, cutting his eyes over to Floch. “He’s allowed to have his own feelings about it, especially when the process destroyed his house.” 

“Not destroyed, really,” Terral says, but he does seem to be relaxing some. The boy in his arms shifts, pressing his head against his father’s neck, but cracks his eyes open so he can see what’s going on. “Just the roof of the nursery. Walter’s been having sleepovers with Ma and Pa, isn’t that right, bud?”

The kid shakes his head. 

“... Well, we’ve been managing. We’ll be fine. Looks like we can use our cellar as more than just a panic room now, so that’s nice.”

Floch nods. “Bet it came in handy, though.”

“Yeah! As soon as we heard the airships, we grabbed the baby and bolted ourselves down. Stayed underground for about twenty-four hours. We… we figured, soon enough, that it must’ve been the Rumbling, because what the heck else would be shaking the ground like that for so long, but…” 

“Good instincts,” Floch says. “And you’re right—that’s the last time you’ll ever face a threat like that. You can use the extra space as a pottery workshop now. No more world-shaking threats.”

“Except me,” Eren corrects. “But Terral wasn’t a bad neighbor. Never tried to fight him, as far as I remember.”

“... Aha.” Terral chooses to take that as a joke after a moment. “Well, you certainly had your fair share of fights, up and down this street. I actually—I wanted to ask, too, about… well, it’s just that we’d heard something about Armin and Mikasa following you?”

Static rings in Eren’s ears.

“Something about stealing supplies and bombing the port,” he continues, “but I thought, ‘surely not, not little Mikasa, all she ever did was trail after him and try to keep him out of harm’s way.’ And then the other day when we heard the lot of you had all come through town on the way to Mitras, and Ursula was talking to some soldier’s wife, and… oh I didn’t follow too closely, but is—are—and not that it matters, I suppose, but—”

“It matters,” he snaps. “They’re fine. I’d never hurt them.”

“Oh,” he says—but it isn’t surprise, exactly, it just seems like honest interest. “So then, they did—they went after you?”

“Of course they did,” Eren sneers. “If you remember them at all, you should know that they would never just sit back and let me—” He cuts himself off, biting his tongue. The inside of his mouth still stings and tastes like smoke. He chews on his tongue a moment, and then says, “Thanks for your concern about them. They’re fine. Mikasa’s in Mitras for right now. Armin’s somewhere else.”

Terral has paled some. He nods, licks his lips, and then says, “Well, good. That’s good to hear. I’m, ah, sorry to have bugged you, I just… well. I’ll let you go. Got to get home. Can’t keep the old ball and chain waiting, you know?”

Eren’s mouth twists, a spike of anger spearing up from his stomach. His voice cuts like an old hunting knife when he says, “You should be kinder when you’re talking about your wife.”

Terral stammers, fumbling for some hollow explanation that he didn’t mean it like that, but Eren doesn’t listen. He doesn’t know a thing about Ursula Winter or her relationship with her husband, but he does know that this man is back living in the home he had before the island changed forever, married to the girl he used to fawn over in the Shiganshina schoolhouse, with the son she gave him in his arms. He should be more fucking grateful. 

Floch, then, is the one to put him out of his misery. “We got it. Alright. It was nice meeting you, Winter. Enjoy your evening.”

Terral backs away, holding tightly to his son, and walks home briskly. 

Eren leans back against the ledge and brings his cigarette back to his mouth. 

Floch has thoughts about all of that, Eren can tell. He’s sorting through them all, trying to find the biggest problem and the best way to bring it up that won’t have Eren biting his head off. Terral’s footsteps have long since faded when he asks, simply, “‘For right now?’”

Eren’s jaw trembles. He brings up his hand and forces it still. He feels feverish. Pyretic. Molten. He feels like the sun itself. Spastic heat courses through his veins, burning him from the inside. “Suppose she could have left already,” he admits. 

He sighs. There’s some sympathy there, softening the exasperation. “Eren…”

“She said she wanted to go.” His hand tightens, pressing against his throat, his short nails digging into the skin behind his ear. “She said—she wanted to go.”

A bird caws overhead. The thrumming in Eren’s head gets louder, less canorous, and the ground feels less steady under him, as if he was standing on sand. 

“... And,” Floch says, delicate, “you’re going to let her?”

Eren doesn’t understand the question. “She said she wanted to go.”

Floch does look sympathetic, truly. His mouth is bent into a little grimace, eyebrows tipped inwards. “Alright.” He speaks slowly. “Is that a good idea, though? You’ve announced to the entire government that she’s a hostage. Turning her loose isn’t exactly a great way to establish your—”

“Do you think I give a fuck about that?” Eren turns to him with wild eyes, and Floch stumbles back a step. “Do you think that matters at all to me compared to her?”

“But… doesn’t that—”

“I would never do that to her!” He sounds like a child. “Do you think I would ever lock her up and keep her somewhere she doesn’t want to be? I would never. I’d never. I would—”  

He bites his tongue and looks away. The only thing in front of him is the shattered remains of his house— their house. 

He has to get a grip. Laughing was one thing—if he starts fucking crying—

Deep, measured breaths. His mother used to make him do that to calm himself down; he rarely remembers to, but—it does help. 

If he’d done it more often, would he be here? 

Eren’s breath catches in a laugh. His whole frame shakes, but only a little. There’s something like a smile on his face when he closes his eyes and says, “I don’t think anyone bought the hostage thing anyway. I told you it was a meaningless label.”

“... Alright. You’re right about that.” Floch chews on the inside of his cheek. “We’ll make it work. If the fate of one girl was enough to crumble your authority, it wouldn’t have been much to begin with.”

Eren snorts; it sputters into a short, sharp cackle. Did he mean it like that? He isn’t sure, but Floch can see the fucking state he’s in. 

He turns his head away from the setting sun and thinks, one girl. Not just, not by a mile, but sure. But when she is what she is to me, how much more does she become?

viii.

Sunset has turned the glass panes of the window into diamonds of amber, quietly molten against her shoulders. The sun has painted Mikasa’s shadow long and dark across the room, slicing neatly through the red and gold radiance that’s swallowed her whole. 

She’s leaned against the protruding glass, head turned to look due west. The sky is the clearest she’s seen in days. Clouds still hang heavy above her, but the horizon is clear, giving her a view of the sunset. It’s pretty in a way that feels wrong for her to observe, but still she’s drawn to it. The glass is warm and the air is cold, and even though it’s unfair that she gets to witness anything lovely, it makes her feel calmer—more complete—to watch the sun, even as it sets. It’s given her no clarity, but… she has some time yet, to decide. She doesn’t get her stitches out until the day after tomorrow. Maybe she can sleep on it. 

Mikasa shivers. She’s not eager to face her dreams. 

But she’s tired. Her head’s buzzing has only gotten worse, and her body is heavy and achy, and still cold and damp from her brief bath. She wants to sleep, curled up under the stack of quilts from Eren. She turns her face from the sun for a minute to glance at the bed, eyes passing over her long shadow and the halo that enfolds her, glowing like a corona. 

The crosshatching ironwork has been pulled long by the angle and thin by the distance of the light. The arch of the window comes to a point high over her head, tapering like a bastard wing. 

Mikasa pulls at her ring finger, worrying her flesh between her fingers, her thumb swiping over the knuckle. Her hands are clutched loosely over her breasts, her other thumb and first knuckle grazing her heart as she mindlessly pulls. She’s… she’s tired. And anxious, for no reason she could name. Oh, there are dozens of reasons—she’s worried about Armin and Jean and Levi and the rest, about Historia, about the freshly-fatherless children of Paradis, about the weather and the heavens and her own soul, but—she’s not thinking about any of those things, not really. Her mind is a high-pitched drone, not focused on any one thing, only straining for—something. 

She turns back to watch the sun fully set. As a little girl, her father told her that, if you looked just the right way at just the right moment, when the sun finally disappeared, you would see a flash of green. 

Mikasa wants to see that flash of green. She doesn’t think too hard about it. 

She doesn’t manage it. She never has. The sun slips below the horizon, leaving the sky a deep orange for another few minutes until the last of the light fades, the world washing out to grey. All she can see is one of the palace’s secondary structures, empty and desolate for now, the rain-ravaged sparse garden, and a sliver of the city beyond the palace walls. Lights flicker in windows, twinkling and domestic, and the sight just makes Mikasa homesick. Heartsick. Tired. She lifts a hand to her bare throat, grazing her knuckles over her thready pulse. 

Slowly, the glass grows cold against her back. The ironwork nips at her skin through the silk of her nightgown. This one, at least, is hers—Historia had it made as a gift, and Mikasa won’t snub it. She shivers, tucking her arms against her torso, feeling her heartbeat speed up in her throat. She has to grit her teeth, but she pushes herself off the window and makes her way to the bed. She collapses easily onto covers she’d already rucked back, and crawls under the pretty bedspread and the apple-blossom quilt she’d already pulled up. The bed, sheets and blankets and all, is sinfully soft, granting some easy relief from her more physical pains. 

It does nothing much for her dread, though. 

Running her fingers over the paper-thin bustles that represent the flowers, Mikasa tries to swallow back the welling tide of fear. She doesn’t want to dream. She doesn’t want to relive a single part of the Rumbling alone—or anything else. If she could, she’d stop sleeping entirely until she was surrounded by her friends at Braus Stables. Armin has been there for every event of her life that would encroach in her nightmares now; he’ll understand. It won’t be like with Historia—poor, dear Historia, whose head she would have to fill with horror to even try and speak about it, when even the thought of having to provide context made Mikasa feel ill. 

It won’t be like it was with Eren. 

She screws her eyes shut, but it’s true—Eren had made her feel better the other night… and then she’d only felt a different kind of worse in the morning. 

She shakes her head, pressing her face into the pillow. Nothing good down that road.

She’s tired. Her head is buzzing. The extra blankets keep her from freezing, and even if she’s still in pain, she’s comfortable. It isn’t so bad. At this point, her calf mostly just feels hot. It’s a pointed heat, to be sure, but if she focuses on the warmth alone, it isn’t so bad. She paces her breath and counts the motion of her fingers over the apple blossoms—but for all that, it takes sleep a while yet to find her. 

II.

In a soft bed with heavy blankets, Eren wakes alone.

He groans, flailing his arm out. The sheets are cold. He shoves his face into the pillow, inhaling the smell of strawberries and rock jasmine. Where’d she steal off to? He smells the river, smells lingering rain and woodsmoke, but there’s nothing—no frying butter, no rising bread—coming from the kitchen, so she’s not there. The sheets are cold, so she didn’t just sneak off to get a glass of water. He would’ve woken if she’d opened the front door — it always creaks, no matter what they try — so she can’t be out for something silly like a stroll to the waterfall — she would have taken him along for that, anyway. So where did that little wife of his wander off to? What dragged her out of bed?

Eren huffs and shoves upright, aiming to find out. He hasn’t slept alone in months—what passes as months here, anyway—what passes as sleep—and he holds no illusions of being able to do so now. When she’s not with him, all his dreams are blood and blood and blood and it hurts when she tells him they’re just dreams, because no, Mikasa, they’re not, but he can’t tell her that.  

As he clambers up, his hair brushes his bare shoulders. That’s strange, he thinks. Didn’t she cut it when they moved out here? 

He shoves it out of his eyes and hauls himself standing. His heel catches on the delicate little wirebound box that they keep under the bed, and he nudges it gently back into place. Mikasa’s lovely white skirt and jacket from Odiha are kept in there, a more lovely wedding dress than he had ever dared imagine. Not exactly what she’d imagined, she’d confessed once, red-cheeked, but it had been enough for her, too. 

The hardwood floor of their bedroom squeals under his bare feet, aged and creaky. The bed isn’t, which is the main thing, but Mikasa has always liked when places have “character,” whatever that means, so Eren lets the floorboards creak. 

He pads into the hallway, noting that the washroom door is open, and the room is empty. He’s pleased with himself for that one, at least—and Mikasa has never thought to wonder how an isolated cabin in the middle of nowhere manages to have running water, heated water. The calico curtain isn’t drawn all the way, and moonlight glints off the edge of the leaf-shaped soap dish he bought down in the village, cradling the rock jasmine soap Mikasa loves so much. 

It’s a short hallway. Just the bedroom and the bathroom and the linen closet, full of patchwork quilts for winter, and the rest of the house is a single large room, kitchen and den in one. Blue-white moonlight streams through the windows, reflecting in the copper cookware hanging over the counters that he keeps polished to a shine, and the familiar scene is bright enough. 

Mikasa sits on the low seat before the hearth, face turned away from him, backlit by a warm orange glow that dances along the edges of her hair and shoulders. He can tell from the motion of her arms that she’s sewing something—embroidering another pillow for their bed, maybe, or else— 

—just mending a worn sock—

—and the familiarity of it—

—of the lulling back-and-forth motion—

—the domesticity of it—loosens the grip of unease that’d tightened when he woke up alone. He sighs, contented; crosses his arms and leans his head and arm against the doorframe. She must’ve been caught by a random surge of energy and is spending it with her sewing kit. She wouldn’t have wanted to wake him, sweet thing.

She should have.

Eren’s eyes don’t drift from the perfectly-shaped, perfectly-smooth, sweet-smelling top of her head, but his focus isn’t quite so singular that he doesn’t take in the rest of the room. He likes looking at her, but he likes their house, too, which is why he’d made it.

Over the fireplace she’s sat before, the mantle is covered with random mementos of their life here—since they left everything behind. The grass rings he’d made for them as they ran. The stubs of their train tickets, and the newspaper he stole from the rack, just so they’d always have the date. Perfectly-preserved flowers, picked from the meadow. An assortment of interesting rocks he’s found, or ones that she has and presented to him, pink on her cheeks and stars in her eyes. He wouldn’t trade them for anything. Sometimes, when they’re feeling especially young, they do their best to play jacks or marbles with them. 

Watching the steady, rhythmic movement of Mikasa’s arm, breathing in the cool, damp smells of the mountain at night, Eren does not feel like a child. Energy thrums through his veins—but for this moment, he’s content. He likes to look at her. 

The kitchen gleams in his periphery. Moonlight spills through the muslin curtains over the kitchen sink, ghostly and cold. The table is still set with the pretty candle holders and the set of dishes—the bright blue flower on the butter cover winks at him. They hadn’t gotten around to clearing the table after supper, which he doesn’t regret at all. Eren eyes Mikasa’s outline over once, just to ensure she won’t notice, and then, between blinks, the dishes are washed and dried, put back in the cabinets. No need to trouble her—and if he’d left them until the morning, she might have fretted, and he wouldn’t want that. So much of the point of being here is so that she won’t—never here, and not at all for as long as he can manage it. 

His hands seize. He keeps his nails neatly trimmed out here, but they still bite into his palms, and he doesn’t relish the sting—not when Mikasa is right there. 

Agitated, he shoves off the wall. There’s no point in feeling like this in here—the point of being in here is to not, to have some peace, and anyway, if Mikasa knew he was working himself up like this, she’d be sad. Look up at him with her shining eyes and fold her little hands against his chest and let him cradle her cheek in his palm while she asks what she can do to make him feel better. Eren wants that. He wants her. He wants his bride. He picks up his feet and the floorboards creak under him, under the oppressive weight of him, and he marches.

The walls lurch. The low fire in the hearth lunges, sputters, casts strange new shadows along the wall; grabs at the edges of Mikasa’s silhouette in possessive ways that seem to taunt him. Eren snarls, walking faster, and the floorboards groan louder—groan longer—as the world elongates, warping, and this isn’t his doing. He should have reached her by now, but the house he’s built—the world he’s built—defies him. The room pulls long. The shadows swallow up the corners, the crevices, the copper cookware hanging over the counters; the moonlight vanishes all at once like a candle blown out by some great ravenous mouth, and the fire in the hearth burns red. 

Eren grits his teeth. He can burn red, too. 

Still fighting to move forward, he lifts his cold palm to his mouth and tears the heel open with his teeth. It hurts, and he welcomes it, because it sets him loose. He shifts. His bones twist, and his blood splatters down from his wrist, down from his chin, onto his bare feet, onto the floorboards that scream like pigs at the slaughter. There’s screaming in his ears and blood in his mouth, but he’s closing the distance, now, Mikasa is drawing closer, her movements unbothered, as strong and steady as ever, and the floorboards break and splinter and dig into his feet and pop like berries—like bodies—hot and wet and red, and he stretches out his bloody hand out towards Mikasa’s shoulder, but she’s out of his reach—he stretches out his bloody hand out towards Mikasa’s shoulder, but she’s out of his reach—he stretches out his bloody hand out towards Mikasa’s shoulder, but she’s out of his reach—

i.

Mikasa wakes with a start as the door bangs into the wall. 

“What?” she blurts, sitting upright, hair caught in her mouth. “What, what?”

She scrubs her hands over her eyes, wincing, only opening them a sliver to see—barely, it’s almost completely dark in the room—Historia barging in, worked into a tizzy. 

“What?” Mikasa repeats, squinting. Her mouth is dry. Her limbs feel funny. She tips her head in bewilderment at the sight of the queen, trying to make sense of what just happened. 

“Sorry!” Historia moans, leaning against the door to shut it. Her arms are full of her gurgling baby, and the mother and daughter cross the room in a flash of white nightgown, climbing onto the bed. 

Mikasa opens her mouth. What? She shakes her head and asks, “Why are you acting like a kidnapper?”

“Ooh,” she says. “I’m pretty sure that taking a kid away from her father is kidnapping, even if you are the mom. I hope I’ll get around that because I’m the queen. Sorry, Mikasa, I thought you’d be awake by now, I—what time is it?”

Dazed, Mikasa points to the clock on the mantle, ticking mutely on beneath the portrait of some long-ago queen. The hands tell 6:32, and Historia cringes. 

“Sorry,” she says. “I just—Wilhelm was driving me insane. I wanted to hide here.”

Mikasa shakes her head and brushes her hair out of her eyes. “I… no, it’s fine. What.” She swallows, then reaches to the nightstand to fumble for the glass of water. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s perfect, is the thing.” She smiles, strained. “I like him so much, I really do, he’s an amazing  father and he’s so nice to me, but the fact that Small Ymir only calms down for him makes me a little insane. I thought—maybe if I brought her somewhere that doesn’t smell like him, ‘cause he’s never been in this room, maybe…”

Mikasa nods. She’s got her glass of water and is swallowing it down. “That. Makes sense.”

“Thank you.” She relaxes some, and settles the baby on her knees so she can hold her tiny hands and observe as she kicks. “Glad somebody thinks I have a clue what I’m doing.”

Mikasa hopes Historia does, because she herself doesn’t. She blinks at the two little invaders, feeling mildly slapped. Her head is staticy, thoughts flying about like a spooked flock of birds. In the end, she just takes another drink of water and shakes her head; tries to get her hair smooth. 

Historia hums distractedly, bouncing one knee in a way that Mikasa isn’t sure the baby appreciates. Ymir is gripping her mother’s fingers and squirming, tiny face screwed up in what looks like unhappiness. Mikasa would like to hold her, but then surely she’d begin to cry in earnest, and she’d like to avoid that. 

“So,” Historia says, looking around the room. She’s jittery: looking for a distraction. “Have I told you this is called the Adalinda suite?”

Mikasa shakes her head. 

“Hmm. Part of the original palace’s blueprints, named for the wife of King Marius II, but redecorated most recently for Princess Heidemarie some thirty years ago. Isn’t that right?” she asks the baby, jostling her little fist. “Is this room retro?”

Mikasa eyes her all over, still dazed. “Historia…”

“I remember how often I was drilled on this dumb building’s history when I was first crowned—which is ridiculous here, because this room literally never has guests put in it, why would I need to know the history of which future queens slept in here and who their favorite artists were? Just to have some silly nonsense to say to try and get the baby asleep? Hm, is that it?”

“Historia…”

She hauls the baby up in a cradle-carry and rocks her. Ymir is still vocalizing feebly, flailing her little arms. “That’s supposed to help, right? You’re supposed to like the sound of your own mother’s voice? Hm? If it’s so so boring, will you go to sleep, my baby darling? Heidemarie moved out when she became queen and moved into your daddy’s rooms, took most of her fine paintings with her, and then she died of influenza when she was fifty-two, and boop! No more Heidemarie. Boring, boring, boring—she didn’t even live until your mamma could steal back our throne, hm? Nothing interesting at all there, hm? Not like your mom, no, your mom is pretty cool, shouldn’t you think so?”

Mikasa keeps her voice measured so as not to disturb the baby. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Ugh,” Historia hums, words bright even if her face is drawn. “I got like, two minutes, ‘cause this one only wants to nurse for ten seconds at a time and then go back to her dad. Not very considerate of you at all, hm, missy?” She shakes her head. “I had the weirdest dream about, like, putting her down in her crib, but I’d turn around and she would have crawled out, so I’d have to put her back, and over and over again. She’s leagues away from crawling. I have other things to worry about. Bleh.” She wrinkles her nose, then turns to face her. “What about you? Again, I’m sorry.”

Mikasa waves her off. “It’s okay. I… it was okay. I think I was dreaming about… my parents…?” She shakes her head, uncertain. She’d been… it had been warm, and it had smelled familiar. Seemed familiar. It hadn’t been a good dream, even if she hadn’t quite been able to place what was wrong. She doesn’t want to dwell on it. “It’s not important. I’m sorry about your stress dream.”

She smiles, wan. “Do you think I’m wrecking her with how stressed I am, too?”

“It’s not your fault,” she says. “I do know… well, I’ve heard, that… if a woman is stressed during her pregnancy, it can sometimes make the baby more colicky. So maybe that’s…”

Historia makes a strangled noise. “Oh, yeah, for sure. I was just getting eaten the hell up because I was complicit in…” She stumbles to a stop, staring down at the baby’s pinched face. “That’s probably why she hates me, right? Because she knows who she’s got for a mom?”

“What?” Mikasa says, horrified. “Historia, Ymir doesn’t hate you! How could you say that?”

“Because she’s been crying every time I touch her for the past two and a half days!” Her outburst startles Ymir—startles a sob out of her, and that makes Historia flush crimson, and then burst into tears. 

“Oh, no,” Mikasa says. She shoves her blankets aside, ignoring the ringing protests from her calf, and pulls Historia into her arms. 

  “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” she gasps. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know how to keep her happy, and I’m too fucking selfish to let anyone else try, even Will, because she’s mine, but I can’t even keep her happy, and I didn’t, I didn’t even want her at first, and I’m so—so scared that she knows somehow and, and, and—”

Mikasa hushes her gently, stroking her fingertips down Historia’s hair. “That’s nonsense. Historia, I’ve never met a woman who loves her baby so fiercely. She’s a baby, they cry, it doesn’t mean anything. Of course she knows you love her, Historia.”

“B-b-but,” she says, “She’s been crying all morning, even though she’s fed and changed and she was able to sleep—and I’ve barely gotten any sleep, and, and, and—I’m upset about that, like it’s her fault she’s just a baby and she needs to eat, but I’m just—I’m a horrible mother, I don’t know why I ever thought—”

“You stop that right now,” Mikasa says firmly. “Hush. Historia, I promise, every mother on the—” she falters, swallows, and resumes with, “—every mother has felt the exact same way. You’re not doing anything wrong. You’re holding her, you’re feeding her, you’re totally devoted to taking care of her. What else could you possibly be doing?”

“Better,” she cries. She’s still got Ymir held to her chest, and the baby is still crying, but she’s buried her head in Mikasa’s shoulder. “I could have been better. I only got pregnant to help facilitate genocide, and what if she knows that? What happens when she finds out? She can’t go through what I did, she has to grow up loved, loved by her mother, but she doesn’t even want me —”

Ymir wails, and Historia descends into full hysterics. None of her words come out clearly, and she gives up on trying after a minute. Mikasa just strokes her back and shushes her, trying not to feel relieved. It makes her feel sick with herself—it makes her a horrible person, she’s sure, but—comforting Historia? Taking care of her friend? This is something she can do. 

“Shh,” she soothes. “Shh, shh.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” she sobs, shaking her head. “I don’t know how to be a mom. I know that I’m stressed, and that I’m stressing her out, but—I’m so worried that if I do let anyone else take her, I just won’t—I won’t take her back again. Mikasa, I don’t know if my own mother ever held me, if she ever fed me, if she ever did think maybe she loved me and then she just, she just, put me down and never—never— never —”

Historia dissolves into tears once more, and the baby is howling, too. Mikasa hushes her friend and strokes down her back, staring up at the ceiling. Historia trembles and sobs, and Mikasa makes herself into an anchor.

“It’s alright,” she promises. She has to raise her voice to be heard over all the crying. “It’s alright. Historia, you aren’t anything like your mother, or you wouldn’t be so worried about it. You’re terrified of the thought of her going through an ounce of what you did. Do you think your mother ever could have thought that? And of course Ymir has no idea about why she was born, nor does it matter. She doesn’t hate you for it. She doesn’t hate you at all.”

Historia moans, the sound coming out smothered and ruptured by tears. “She does,” she insists. She peels off Mikasa’s shoulder and presses the baby into her arms. “Watch,” she says. “Watch, she’s going to calm down for you, I bet.”

Mikasa takes the princess automatically, cradling her head and pulling her up over her breast. She’s a solid, warm, sturdy little thing, but even though she is full term, she still feels as fragile as a teacup. Ymir is crying is a series of short, roundish little wails, one after the other. Her tiny arms wave around, still vaguely purplish on the undersides, occasionally trying to grab at her own white wisps of hair. Mikasa shifts her hands to give her a finger to hold, and she clutches it with surprising strength. 

Mikasa isn’t sure if it’s the finger or the change of position, but Ymir does begin to calm down. Not much, but enough that she can tell the difference… and Historia is so sensitive to her baby’s cries…

She throws up her hands and says, tearful, “See? She prefers literally anyone over me.”

“Hush,” Mikasa says, scrambling for an explanation. “It’s probably just my heartbeat. I think you’ve been having an anxiety attack for about thirty-six straight hours. It’s not,” she says, “your fault, or even a bad thing. You’ve just got to calm down.”

Historia sobs a laugh. “But why are you so calm?” she asks. “I’d think if one of the two of us would be in hysterics…”

“I’ve done plenty of crying,” she says. She bounces Ymir gently, less of a jerking motion than she’s seen Historia making, and then takes the long train of the baby’s dress, winds it, and tucks it tightly under her legs. Mikasa takes the tiny arm not attached to her finger and tucks it under her own elbow, swaddling the baby as best as she can without any blankets to do so. 

Historia uses both hands to push her hair behind her ears and keeps them flattened against her neck. She’s calming down as the baby does, but instead of seeming happier, she just seems defeated. “What’re you doing?”

“Swaddling?” Mikasa shrugs, and prays she isn’t overstepping. If Historia gets angry with her… well, she only has one more day here. “It’s supposed to make babies calmer…”

She grimaces. “I’d heard that too, but I thought it sounded like the sort of stuff childless old men came up with because it sounded like a good way to keep them from—oh, I don’t know. Causing trouble?”

“I understand that,” she says, “but…”

Ymir’s cries are tapering away. Her little face is paling, and she’s gulping in air. Mikasa wiggles her finger where it’s caught in her fist, and Ymir squeezes it tighter. 

“Oh, you sweet thing,” Mikasa says. “You just don’t know what to do with yourself, hm? I know it must still all be so strange… You know what, Historia, I bet that’s what it is.”

She wipes her eyes and screws up her face. “She spent nine months inside of me. I should be the least strange thing in the world to her.”

“But that’s just it,” she says. “Maybe it’s weird for her to be on the opposite side of you. What if your entire world was suddenly flipped inside out? If it smelled the same but looked and sounded and felt completely different?”

“Maybe,” she concedes. 

“Don’t sound hopeless like that.”

“It’s a little hard, Mikasa,” she says, “when I’m watching my child, who I’ve been holding for hours, calm down for another woman.”

“Here.” She leans forward, trying to hand the princess back over, but though Historia raises her arms, she doesn’t take her back. 

She swallows, looking down. “I don’t want her to cry again. I don’t want to make her unhappy.”

“She’s still crying,” Mikasa points out. “Historia, what if we try it like this, okay? Remember the other day before the christening? She was calm then, wasn’t she?”

“And you were holding her.”

“... Well, you were talking, and I think you were a fair bit more relaxed,” she says. “Just try talking some, alright? Your voice will calm her down if you are calm, I know it. Just… tell me about the paintings in here. If that’s what you were talking about earlier?”

Historia sniffs, and a soundless sob escapes her. “Whatever. Fine. That—” she points up at the lowest tier of the ceiling, to the landscapes painted between the ornately-carved beams, “was done by Bossard. He did most of the royal wing landscapes, and I don’t think it ever occurred to him that fields have other seasons besides ‘harvest.’ His patron was Princess Liesl, who died in childbirth two months before her father-in-law kicked the bucket, and her husband never remarried.” She takes a shuddering breath and brings her palms to her cheeks, squishing her mouth a bit. “The religious stuff, like the portraits of Maria, Rose, and Sina, were all done by, whatshisface, Anton Marti, way back when the palace was being built.”

She is calming down. Mikasa takes careful stock of her slowing breathing and her drying eyes. 

“The Church commissioned them,” she continues, “sometime before the memory-wipe, but I think it must’ve been completed afterwards, because he loses the plot with some of the symbolism. Which I have also been drilled on. Those old Wall guys can be so weird, ugh.” She sighs. “See how the one of Rose in the portrait there has the background of apple blossoms? Well, that makes sense for Wall Rose, because a lot of apple orchards are in her fields, but in all the old stuff, Sina’s the one with apple blossoms, because she ran around sowing a lot of fields after the Eldians wrecked them.”

Historia goes on for a while longer, tension slowly draining from her frame. The baby’s cries slow to a wobbling whimper, and Mikasa very slowly nudges closer. She presses Ymir into Historia’s chest, and her arms come up to collect her. Ymir whimpers at the transfer, and Mikasa is deathly afraid that Historia will start weeping again, and that the whole cycle will start over.

“Who is that portrait of?” Mikasa rushes to ask. “Over the fireplace?”

“Hm?” Historia says. But she turns her head, and some of the tension seeps out of her arms as she glances over at the painting: a sweet-faced, brown-eyed woman in a powdered wig, smiling softly and holding a small white dog. “Oh, um. That’s Queen Jeanne. The first one. Her, um,” she sniffs, “her step-daughter actually named her daughter after her, and then that Jeanne married her cousin, so she was the second Queen Jeanne.”

“Step-daughter?” Mikasa prompts. “She must have been very beloved.”

Historia blows out a breath. “Ooh, I don’t know about that. Her husband loved her, definitely, and her step-kids. She was more a mother to them than their own mother was.” Historia’s arms bounce distractedly, gently, and Ymir has finally fallen silent. She’s curling into her mother like she’s trying to sink back inside of her. “‘Cause,” Historia says, giving Mikasa a sidelong glance. There’s a glint in her eye that Mikasa associates firmly with gossip, which seems out of place given that this woman must be at least seventy years dead. Mikasa has never looked much into the history of the royal family—in the Shiganshina schoolhouse, she’d memorized a song naming the “Fritz” kings, but no one had ever bothered much with their queens, and it hasn’t been relevant at any point since. 

“Jeanne von Baur,” Historia whispers, delighted by scandal, “was their governess. For years before she was queen.” She giggles, even if it is nearly silent. The motion moves the baby, but Ymir doesn’t seem to mind at all. “She was the daughter of a tailor, actually, and rumor has it she was a prostitute for a time, but she was so beautiful that she worked her way up and up until she was in the king’s bed.” Historia’s eyes are still red, cheeks still blotchy, but she grins and gives a tiny one-shouldered shrug. “Probably not. He never would have married her if that was the case. But she did end up in the palace, ostensibly to be the governess of the royal children, and when Queen Ermengarde died—in mysterious circumstances, mind you—Jeanne was at the altar as soon as the mourning period was over.”

Mikasa hums and rubs Historia’s shoulder. “Suspicious.”

“Super suspicious. Which is why she was not exactly beloved by anyone other than her family. The court hated her, even if they couldn’t do anything about it.” She sighs once more, and shudders. Tension rolls off her in waves, and Mikasa focuses on reading her body language. She tips her head back, blows out a breath, and says, “Hey ho. Look, you were right. She hasn’t started screaming again.”

Mikasa shakes her head. Silly little thing. 

She is relieved, though. She doesn’t hold the crying baby against anyone, but she’s very glad to not hear it. If they can get her down for a good nap… And, too, she’s so… she’s… 

She can’t say that she’s happy. Or anywhere near it. That feeling eludes her still. But it makes her feel… a little bit more grounded. To have made something better. To have fixed something for her friend—for one helpless baby of the… are there even hundreds left?

Mikasa swallows, shutting her eyes. She’s fully awake, and she doesn’t exactly have a regimented schedule to follow, but… she’ll dress and wash. Get her leg tended to—only one more day until her stitches come out—and pass a few hours until it’s once again time for bed. And then she’ll race the sun. Tomorrow night, she could be in Braus Stables.

The thought sends a white-hot spike spearing through her belly. 

Tomorrow? a voice inside her calls, frantic. Tomorrowtomorrowtomorrow? But, but, but—

Mikasa inhales, and she catches the smells of her childhood. Lingering woodsmoke and rain. A river. They’re so strong in her mind she almost feels dizzy, like strong fingers are knotted in her hair, pulling her back. 

She remembers that there’s a river at the Braus’s ranch. There had been snow on the ground when she visited, and snow and rain don’t smell quite the same, but it’s close enough. 

The sense of her dream ghosts over her mind—vague images, strange sounds, the sort that mountain woods made in the dark. They’d had a sow when Mikasa was very small, and she’d dreamt she heard it screaming. It had… she’d felt like she was back home, breathing the mountain air she had breathed as a child, but she had not felt like a child. So could she have been home? Does she even really remember the feeling?

Yes, the voice insists. I remember Eren. 

She sighs and forces her eyes open. 

Her bare throat is dry, and her bones feel hollow. There’s no good that’ll come from thinking like that. 

And she’ll be in the mountains once again soon enough. The sooner she’s gone, the better. 

—tomorrowtomorrowtomorrow—?

“I won’t offer your own room for you to hide in,” she tells Historia, “but you know you’re welcome here as long as you like. It’ll do you good to be out of the same four walls.”

Historia nods absently, still wide-eyed and staring at the baby like she doesn’t trust that she won’t cry again. Then, with a spark entering her eyes, she whispers, “I could say the same of you. The sunrise is in like an hour, we should go up to the cupola and watch!”

That sounds exhausting. Mikasa scratches her nails against the apple blossom quilt, already worn out, but… that’s all well and good. The sooner she’s able to return to sleep, the sooner she’ll be able to wake up, get her stitches taken out, and leave this place behind forever. 

Eren will be back tomorrow. And he didn’t want a goodbye between them. 

If she wears herself out today, she’ll have less time to think about that. Less time to spend willing herself not to cry about that. 

The sooner I’m gone, she reminds herself—

ii.

“—the better,” Eren says, and his voice is unreadable even to his own ears. “We’ve got ground to cover.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Eren sees Floch looking him over carefully, but if he has any thoughts on Eren ordering his men to leave when last night he demanded they stay, he keeps them off his face.

Which is as far as Eren cares. 

They’re heading out of the city within minutes, fresh horses carrying them steadily east and north, for now following the road to Faerth. Someone had surveyed a mile or so out, just so they can get easily away from Shiganshina, where they can’t quite trust the ground to be steady. 

Eren keeps his eyes closed. They’re riding along the edge of the field he and Mikasa and Armin used to play in, the place he always took Mikasa to gather sticks, the place Mikasa would sit and weave flowers into crowns for the three of them, for him, for her. She’d sit there and let the wind scatter bellflower blossoms in her hair, watching with huge dark eyes, solemn and fond, while he strongarmed Armin into a race that Eren only wanted to do because he knew he’d win, and she’d have flowers in her hair and flowers in her hands and sometimes she would carry them home and they’d play at being a prince and a princess, a king and a queen, and—there’s every chance that there had been a pair of those magnificent flower crowns tucked in a drawer of their bedroom wardrobe when Maria fell, and that they’d stayed there, miraculously sheltered and drying into paper as fragile as spun glass until last week when a fireball that Eren called into the city finally, finally ruined everything left behind. 

Eren cannot fucking stomach the sight of that fucking tree on that fucking hill, not now, not now, not now, so he keeps his eyes closed. He doesn’t turn to watch Shiganshina shrink and be swallowed up by the predawn darkness, though he thinks abstractly there’s a decent chance he’ll never return. 

Being in Shiganshina made it worse. Better. More. Whatever the fuck it was, it broke him, bled him, burned him—and he thinks he might want to drown himself in it. If he’d only been able to get to her—

His dream last night was so much more vivid than the watercolor fantasies he’d sustained himself on during the Rumbling. The house was the same, all the little details he’d remembered, perhaps more solid under his feet—he’d woken mildly surprised to find himself without splinters—but for all the effort he’d spent making the house, it was an echo of an afterthought to its lady. 

Mikasa had been—she’d been— so — 

He doesn’t know if it was kinder or crueler that she was turned away and out of reach. It was maddening and terrifying that he couldn’t get to her, hold her in his arms, but—being in Shiganshina had made everything feel more… more… 

He hadn’t even really seen her, during the Rumbling. Within the dream, he’d had memories of their life together, but in all those days, he’d only actively lived at most an hour, outside and alone, butchering a fish. The memories have been vivid in his mind since he was spat out of the Paths, warm and pleasant and easy for him to slide back into, but—they’d felt like a dream. A good dream, a powerful one, one that he’d clawed open his heart and mind to create, but a dream all the same. Lacking something. 

And it wasn’t like that, in Shiganshina. Not the least because it was a nightmare. 

Eren isn’t sure if he’s glad for it or not. What he would give to fall back into the pretty mountain scenery he’d built so carefully—but what it would’ve done to him to wake up alone. 

He doesn’t open his eyes until the sun has well and risen. It’s low on the horizon above a peachy smear, near enough dead in front of them. Eren doesn’t think he’d really sustain any lasting damage to his eyes, but there’s no point in looking at the sunrise—and when he tilts his head back some, a crescent of a waning moon sits primly in the sky, alone now that the sun has banished the stars. 

There’s little warmth to be felt through the cold morning air, but Eren doesn’t want for any. He feels feverish and hazy, and only half within his own body. Even thinking of it makes him uncomfortably aware of all the places his clothes touch his skin and the physical exertion of hard riding. For all that, though, when he eyes once again find the moon, he shivers—

iii.

—violently and pulls the sides of her cardigan closer around her. 

The water is frigid, and even if it feels nice against the feverish skin of her wound, along with the chill of the gallery and the simple fact that she’s been cold for days now, Mikasa feels as if she’s been deposited in a snowstorm. 

Matron Beck doesn’t say a word, just keeps on humming while she cleans the stitches. 

Mikasa sits in a patch of sun, at least, which gives her a little more warmth. The small pool of light doesn’t extend to where the matron sits at the other end of the couch, but her grey uniform covers her head-to-toe and seems warm enough. Mikasa curls her shoulders in and ducks her chin, mildly envious. She longs for the blankets. 

It only takes a few minutes to clean the stitches. When that’s done, the matron asks after the bruising, and her sleeping, and her appetite, and whether she’s been as easy on herself as she ought to be. “Remember,” she chides, “at this point, if it causes you pain, you really shouldn’t try it. If I could, I’d have one of my girls with you at all times, to help you around. But I know better.”

Relieved she hasn’t had to deal with that but curious as to her meaning, Mikasa echoes, “Know better?” 

“I’d rather not make you miserable, girl,” she says wryly. “Last time, I wasn’t so sure that Eren Jaeger wouldn’t have me hanged for it.”

Mikasa flinches so hard her back hits the couch cushions. 

“Oh, dear.” Matron Beck furrows her brows. “Child, that was a joke.”

Her heartbeat throbs in her ears, speeding to a rabbit-fast beat that nearly drowns out thought. Incredulity hits her like a wall, watered down with a sort of blank horror. 

A joke. Her eyes are so wide they sting. A joke.

Matron Beck sighs. “My apologies, my lady. That was thoughtless of me to say to you.”

Mikasa would be less shaken if the matron had struck her across the face… but not, she thinks numbly, horror creeping forth from around the edges, more surprised. 

For all her doubts, that’s one thing she has little trouble believing. Whatever he does or doesn’t feel for her, Eren would kill for her. 

Her fingers curl, fever-warm knuckles pressing into her thighs. She looks up and away, to the windows on the second story, where the sun peers back at her, light split by the wooden dividers. 

In all their years together, she’s never quite relished in the knowledge of how far Eren would go to protect her. It couldn’t be escaped, not when the very, very first thing she ever saw him do was slit a man’s throat with perfect composure, but she’d done her best to gloss over that. Those men had killed her parents. They’d intended to sell her into a fate worse than death, even if she hadn’t fully understood that for a little while longer yet. And besides, she’d killed one for him, too. She didn’t like to remember any of that. 

So Eren would kill for her. So he did. But it was easy to brush aside when they were children, because she didn’t need Eren to do much of anything for her. She could protect herself, be it from schoolyard bullies or the sharp-eyed men in the refugee camps. She could protect all of them. So while it meant something that Eren would shout and snarl and shove her behind himself, she never had to think much about it. Never had to confront it. She’d known, of course, that he wouldn’t hesitate to take the knife out of his shoe and use it, but it was easier not to think about it. 

But they’re not children anymore. He’s not a little boy with a kitchen knife. 

When the sunlight has drawn tears, she squeezes her eyes shut and lets her head fall back against the cushions. Green and red flashes pulse under her eyelids.

Once they were in the military, it hadn’t mattered that Eren would kill for her. She would do the same for him, for Armin, for a crowd of evacuating civilians. She understood that in their world, there were choices to be made and lives to be saved, and you couldn’t hesitate or hold back if you wanted to protect the people you’d chosen. She’d made that mistake against Bertholdt and Reiner that day on the Wall Rose and had learned from it. And then—

She thinks of that field in Wall Maria, later that same day. Her ribs broken into neat pressure fractures, her heart and eyes brimming and full even as death seemed certain, and the dumbstruck look on Eren’s face as she thanked him for everything. The complete simplicity in the way he’d closed his eyes and stood up, the gravelly sound of his voice when he’d made her that promise. How he’d roared and thrown his whole body into punching a fifteen-meter Titan, and in the single moment between that contact and the reaction, the sweet, piercing sorrow she’d felt believing that he would die trying to save her. And how, later, it seemed to have been sheer force of will. Nothing else could bring forth the same power in him, and people hadn’t been pleased, but neither had they been surprised. 

So Eren would kill for her. 

Armin’s voice floats through her ears. I’m sorry, Eren! We’re the ones who drove you this far! 

Then Jean’s. You don’t have to keep committing genocide for our sake! 

(Oh, her dear, sweet boys. Armin and Jean, those clever, brave leaders. She misses them.) 

And what had Eren said to all that? To all their begging, to her pleas that he just come home? It was all about freedom. Taking the world’s to ensure his own—what a way to describe what the Rumbling was—and refusing to take anything from them, except their hope. And it was true that he didn’t stop them from chasing him, even from attacking him, but look at the state of the world now. They hadn’t had a prayer, and he’d known that. He’d let them come and see and fight, he’s always been so hungry for a fight, and she doesn’t pretend she understands why or what he got from it, but one thing that had been made very clear was Eren’s regard for human life. 

Maybe it hadn’t at all been about protecting them, and certainly not her, specifically, in any special way. But he afforded them a level of respect he hadn’t given anyone else. He was fine taking the world’s freedom, but he wouldn’t touch theirs. The loop her thoughts get caught in makes her head sore, but at the end of the line is the fact that Eren does care about them. 

So Eren would kill for her. 

She can’t deny it. Whatever she is to him, she’s a cut above what strangers would be. And he’s killed children and babies for the crime of being born on the wrong shore. Would he kill a grown woman for bruising Mikasa’s pride? For making tears of humiliation burn in her eyes? 

Mikasa is so nauseous she’s glad she hasn’t yet eaten. There’s not a doubt in her mind that she’d throw it up. 

Her voice is flat and dead when she says, “It was your joke to make.”

Matron Beck sighs, and doesn’t respond. 

Mikasa doesn’t know what Eren would or wouldn’t do anymore. She’s not sure anyone does. But it feels much too dangerous to joke about. 

She breathes a tremulous inhale. “So I should rest and eat and not walk or do anything that hurts. Is there anything else? Will I be able to get my stitches out tomorrow?”

“As long as you don’t bust them open today,” Matron Beck confirms. “So take it easy; you still look exhausted. Do you ever have much more color than the moon?”

She shakes her head, wary. 

“Hm. And you’re still thinking of heading off to wherever those friends of yours went?”

“Yes.”

She heaves another sigh. “Well, maybe you’ll be able to get yourself some real rest, wherever you end up.” 

Weariness crashes over her, and for a moment Mikasa wishes Historia hadn’t woken her up so abruptly… but then she has to wonder how much rest she really would have been getting. Her dream wasn’t exactly peaceful. “Maybe,” she hopes. 

She wonders if, for the rest of her life, the last good night of sleep came when she was folded in Eren’s arms. Her hands drift into her lap, and she tugs thoughtlessly at her fingers. 

She wonders how he’s been sleeping. 

iv.

If I throw myself off the horse right now— he wonders, head first—would that be enough to knock myself unconscious right now—and would that be enough to get back?

The Forest of Giant Trees can be navigated mindlessly. The space between the trees is easily wide enough for an entire squad of men on horseback, and there’s a path, wide but overgrown, that was once used to transport goods back and forth between the districts. It sticks none too closely to the Wall, but when they came upon the choice, Eren had ordered two riders to stick to the ditch and meet them in Faerth, citing the fact that if there were any bad fires they’d reach the road as well as a need to make up for lost time, and promptly got back to daydreaming. 

It has to just be a matter of will, right? he thinks. I had perfect control over it during the Rumbling, and I meant to go there then. Last night was—something else—because of Shiganshina? maybe, but now that I know, I should be able to actually take command of it—

But he has to ask himself if that’s not inviting disaster. 

Say he can get back to the cabin at his own will. What then? If he does find any version of Mikasa more solid than her silhouette, face hidden from him, what the fuck will he do when he wakes up alone? 

It’s a good thing she wasn’t actually there the first time, he admits, digging his fingernails into his palm. Mikasa’s reactions to him have already wrecked him, if he had to deal with them after months of complete, full-color memories of being her husband… he doesn’t even know. It would have been beyond bad, it would’ve been embarrassing. He can handle being a monster and a madman, but he wouldn’t have enjoyed looking stupid. 

He also probably would’ve made her cry. He’s done enough of that regardless, but she wouldn’t have been able to not understand that he would have let her stop him, would’ve let her prevent everything— would have, never could have, but would have. And because she didn’t, that would have been beyond horrible for her to know. She doesn’t deserve that. 

If he’d made her cry, after months of living together, perfectly alone, he would have learned how best to soothe her tears, calm her down—but she probably wouldn’t have let him. And where would that have left him? What would that have done to him?

Again, he thinks, kicking his foot in the stirrup. This is why I didn’t plan on fucking surviving. It’s a fucking mess. He doesn’t have any interest in any of this, and he remembers his reasons, but they’re a lot harder to fucking hold on to if they’re the only things he can hold on to. 

I’m going to go insane. The statement comes to him plainly. Then he snorts. He passed that threshold a long time ago. He’s rolled out a welcome mat and is chasing pests out with a broom.

Trees roll by, and Eren twists his thumbnail against his index finger, wondering if he’d get anything out of hastening it. If he goes to sleep tonight and dreams her up, gets to hold her in his arms—isn’t that worth whatever it’ll do to him in the morning? In simple words like that, it should be easy—there’s nothing he wouldn’t give for that. His sanity? He’d be giving away something he barely has. Fate, or the universe, or just his own damn will, can fucking take it. It would be more or less the same bargain he’d made his last night in Mitras, and he knows he’s got to be grateful for that. 

… But that had been with the real girl.

Not the bedtime-story bride he’d fashioned for himself, however close to reality his powers had scraped. Mikasa. Solid and breathing in his arms, as familiar as his own heartbeat. She’d reached for him, teary-eyed and achingly lovely, and cool, and smooth, and his, and she’d reached for him, and that’s something that won’t count if it’s in a dream.

And that matters. 

It’s hard to judge time in the forest. The canopy obscures the sun, making it necessary to focus if you want to guess the time. Eren doesn’t have a watch to check it himself, and even if he were curious, which he is not, he certainly wouldn’t ask anyone else. He’s too deep in his own thoughts, listening not to the clatter of hooves but the distant, howling music of the wind through the glowing branches of a near-dead tree, to have much real awareness of the world around him. 

Which is why he’s so surprised when the forest opens up and deposits them barely a league outside of Faerth, the sun only just beginning to slip towards the horizon. 

Without deciding to, Eren loosens his grip on the stallion, which it takes as a cue to slow. He scowls at the city’s nearness, and then his expression cements itself when Floch rears his own horse and slows to match him. Everyone else follows suit, but Eren directs his question to Floch when he says, “What the fuck, how did we get here so fast?”

Floch sounds cheery when he answers, “Cutting out some distance must’ve saved us some time. Excellent call, milord general!”

Ugh. 

Eren wrinkles his nose, annoyed. His thoughts return sharply to reality, and the sombers quiet. Eyeing the angle of the sun, he estimates it to be close to five in the afternoon. The sun will set within another hour and change, but it’ll be another two until it’s too dark to safely ride. That’s plenty of time to get the city surveyed and get a few miles away.  

They’re riding at a trot now, slowed so that Floch can go on like a goddamn tour guide. “There’s not likely to be many valuables,” he says, “not like Quinta, but keep an eye out still. Their main industry was forestry and related things like trapping, so if you see anything that looks like a factory for either of those sort of things, and it isn’t too structurally unstable, take a look and see if the machinery is stable. Again, send up a flare if you think it’s urgent enough that it needs extra hands instead of just marking it down.”

“There was also a printing press,” Eren volunteers blankly. Amshel Reiss’s memory flares in his mind, pale hands and the echoes of pinched cheeks. He closes his eyes and shakes himself. 

“Interesting.” Floch sounds genuine about it, freak. “Should we look for it?”

“No. It got burned down by an angry mob half a century ago. Printed a hoax that got way out of hand.”

“... Hm. Okay. Anything else?”

“No.” There’s a beat of silence, and then Eren says, “We’ve made up some lost time today. Let’s not lose it now. Keep going.”

He spurs his horse, picking back up to a gallop. He hears the rest fall in after him, and does his best to get a few moments of—certainly not fucking peace, he actually laughs at the thought—but just a bit more privacy in his madness, before the survey begins. He reaches for his own memory, but Amshel’s gets in the way for a moment, the words of that old scandal Bernsteinhexe clouding his ears—

v.

“See, young maid, thou wouldest not come to me, and here thou art nevertheless!”

Mikasa turns the page as she worries her lower lip between her teeth. She’s been hidden away reading most of the day, but she’s only halfway through the book Historia’s given her, unable to get herself to focus. 

It’s a good book; she enjoys it. That’s not the issue. Her thoughts just keep wandering away from the Schweidlers’ plights, and she can’t quite corral them. 

Her stitches itch. Her head aches in a soft, insistent way, buzzing at her temples. She still feels a bit sick to her stomach, and like her skin isn’t wrapped right around her bones, and… and most of all, she misses… she misses Armin and Jean and Connie and Captain Levi, little Gabi and Falco, Annie and Reiner. She misses Sasha so intensely she could cry. She misses Hange. She misses her mother and her father and Aunt Carla and Uncle Grisha. 

She’s curled up on the bench against the window of the blue-and-gold bedroom. It’s as close as she can get to feeling warm, nestled in the sunlight and wrapped in the apple-blossom quilt. Tonight is the last night she’ll ever spend here, and the thought sends her heart racing, which only makes her feel worse, so she tries not to think too hard on it. The quilt is warm, and the sun is warm, and her knuckles are warm, so. 

Her eyes scan down the page, and she forces the words to stick to their meanings. The poor Schweidlers really are in dire straits. Mikasa is invested, and not just for Historia’s sake… which is good, seeing as after tomorrow morning it’s likely she’ll never see her again. She tips her head against the glass, cool despite the sun’s heat, and that makes her feel a bit better. 

“Seeing,” she reads, “that he had many witnesses to prove that she had played wanton with the Devil, and had suffered him to kiss her. Hereupon she was silent, and only sobbed, which the arch-rouge took as a good sign and went on: “If you have had the Devil himself for a suitor, you may surely love me.”

Mikasa’s head throbs. Her face crumples, and she looks westward to the sun.

Her bones have felt hollow for days now, but this isn’t just that. It feels like something has been ripped out of her, and her blood is leaving in swift, swirling eddies. She feels unmoored, a wind driving into her heart, tearing her away, cold and unknown and terrifying.

She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She’s lifted them up to press her knuckles against her lips, and they’re still warm, but it isn’t enough. She needs something to crush them. Something tender, sweet, soft, sad—but it could be brutal, too. As long as it was there, if he could just pick up her hands again—

Mikasa feels skittish; panicky. 

She doesn’t have a picture of Eren. She doesn’t have a line of his handwriting or a lock of his hair—the only thing she’ll have is his scarf, and it doesn’t even smell like him or anything; he hasn’t worn it in a decade. That can’t be it, that can’t be it, that can’t, can’t, can’t be it. 

Now that the prospect is staring her in the face, less than twenty-four hours until she leaves, it’s terrifying. How many hours had it taken her to accept that they had to kill Eren? And now—it wouldn’t do anyone any good now, wouldn’t save anybody, probably it would just make everything worse—what, leave Floch in charge of all that’s left of the world?—and vengeance does nothing for the dead. It was one thing to lose Eren, it’s something else entirely to leave him. To make that choice when he’s alive and he wants her. Around, in his arms, she doesn’t know, or care; this is about her. Eren isn’t telling her that he hates her, that he wants her gone, to get lost; he—he—he said he hasn’t slept as well in four years as he did when they were together. 

Has he been sleeping alright?

Her skin feels wrong. She feels this piercing emptiness hollowing her out from every corner of herself. In her limbs, in her bones, in every beat of her aching heart. 

She misses him, so much. 

vi.

They lose the light just before eight, and have their camp mostly set up just after. Faerth is completely lost within the forest’s monstrous shadow, and the light of the moon is barely enough to see your fingers in front of your face. 

It’s just a sliver of a crescent tonight, though the dark shadow of the whole body can be made out if you squint. Eren had considered not pitching a tent—he’d like to fall asleep with the moon kissing his skin, and breathing in the cold night air—but he doesn’t need anyone seeing any face he might make while sleeping. Again, he considers his luck at having outgrown waking up screaming. 

The campfire is sputtering to life some twenty-odd feet away—more bacon and barley—but Eren can’t make out much in the way of chatter. Maybe everyone’s finally too tired. That would be lucky. If no one bugs him, he’ll be able to get to sleep that much faster. 

He stands by his horse, fingers tapping restlessly against his thigh as he watches it feed from the bag on its head. His head is crowded, words running over and into each other, all following the discordant beat of the wind-whistle thrum. If he listens hard enough, he can almost imagine he hears a distant waterfall. He starts tapping his foot, facing the absurd impression that he’s about to—wait at the head of an aisle, or something ridiculous like that. How’s he ever going to fall asleep when he’s got this much fucking energy? 

When they were little—children sharing that single bedroom in the house in Shiganshina that’s burnt beyond all recognition now, no chance anymore that the dolls and marbles and playing jacks and matching flower crowns survived—and he’d get like this, too keyed-up to sleep, he’d keep Mikasa up. He couldn’t stand it if she was able to find some peace without him—and that makes Eren’s mouth pull into a mirthless grin, makes him snort a laugh and press his hand over his heart and the music in his head twangs sharply—and he’d whisper to her from his bed on the other side of the room, or throw the dolls she gave him at her, or anything else he could do to get her attention. Always, without fail—and usually without all that much effort—she’d roll out of her bed in a huff, clutching to her blanket and pouting at him, and crawl into his. She’d nudge him toward the wall with her bony fucking little knees and hold both his hands, which even then were nearly twice the size of hers, stare at him with her eyes that ate moonlight and say, go to sleep. 

And he could, then. She didn’t mind if he toyed with her fingers or her hair, if he stared at her face from far too close. She’d fall asleep first, even if he was still twisting their fingers together or flicking the ends of her hair over his nose. But eventually, he’d match the pace of her breathing and follow her into sleep. In the morning, he’d wake to her squirming out from underneath where he’d thrown his limbs over her, scowl and complain that she’d woken him, and she’d touch his hair and say that he shouldn’t have kept her up, then. 

The habit hadn’t lasted long past the fall of Maria. Their life in the refugee camps was too full of hard labor for him to struggle finding sleep, and in the cadet corps, as well as being sentenced to different dormitories, was much the same. And by then of course they were too old for it—they’d been too old for it at ten, really—but still. 

His hands are still cold. He can still feel the impression of her fingers as he closed his own over them. He can imagine, easily enough, that he’s playing with her. 

His mouth twists again. He bites his tongue hard, and looks east, where the moon is low and sickly pale in the sky. Eren feels something rupture in his chest, setting loose something molten and leaden. 

His bones have felt heavy for years now, but this isn’t just that. It feels like something has been ripped out of him, and his blood is pooling in thick, angry eddies. He feels nailed down, a stake driven into his heart, burying him in a grave, sweltering and claustrophobic and terrifying. 

He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He’s crushed them together until his knuckles are white, and his palms and the undersides of his fingers are still cold, but it isn’t enough. He needs to crush something. The urge is brutal, and so is he—but he could be tender, be sweet, be soft, whatever she needed, if she was just here —

Eren feels wild; angry. 

He doesn’t have a picture of Mikasa. He doesn’t have a line of her handwriting or a lock of her hair—he’s not even as lucky as she is, she’s got that fucking scarf that she’s clung to for a decade. This can’t be it. This cannot fucking be it. 

He’s facing down the barrel of the gun— ha, he has done that, and it hadn’t phased him a bit—he’s faced down eternity and his own death and a hundred thousand fates worse than that pale specter, and how much had any of that ever frightened him?—but it’s terrifying now. He’s had to leave Mikasa in the past, and that was agony, but to be left by her is another dimension entirely. For her to make that choice, to leave him alive and loving her, like he isn’t bleeding out without her. So she can’t say she loves him—fucking fine, he doesn’t need that, he can survive on just her in his arms, just around —she can tell him how awful he is, he wants to hear it, she can cry and not let him touch her, just tell him about the nightmares he’s the star of and he won’t even touch her if that’s what she says she wants, but—she couldn’t fall asleep until they were together. 

Has she been sleeping alright?

His skin feels wrong. He feels this leaden heaviness weighing him down in every corner of himself. In his limbs, in his bones, in every beat of his aching heart. 

He misses her so— fucking —much. 

Chapter Text

III.

Mikasa sits with her ankles crossed and dangling, her hands tucked under her thighs. Despite the early morning sunshine peering through the lace-edged curtains, the air is still heavy with the night time chill, enough so that she feels it even through her nightgown and borrowed jacket. She’s wearing his socks, too. His clothes are much too big on her, slipping down her ankles and off her shoulder, but she’s grateful for them. They’re warm, and she is not.

She lifts one hand to pull the jacket back snugly around her — it’s long like their uniform jackets once were, and there’s far too much space in the shoulders to stay on her easily — but as soon as she moves, without turning to look at her, Eren orders, “Keep your hands on the table.”

Mikasa obeys. 

The table is hard and smooth under her, and cold. The rich linen tablecloth is the same crisp, impersonal white as her nightgown. She curls her fingers inside Eren’s sleeves, which are at least soft. Her feet sway back and forth to some slow rhythm she can’t quite hear, but the whole world trembles to it.

She wonders, a little despairingly, how Eren always manages to wear holes into the heels of his socks. It must be how he walks, she muses. 

Something bites cruelly at the inside of her chest, taking her heart between its teeth and ripping. Her head pangs and she winces, but she doesn’t try to take her hands off the table. 

At her wince, Eren does turn around. His hair slips over his shoulder, and his brows are drawn into a frown. He asks, “What is it?”

She shakes her head. She’s not supposed to… 

She forgets. 

“I…” she says, and swings her feet to the slow tune. “It’s nothing…”

Eren scowls at her. “Don’t say that,” he scolds. “Is it your headache?”

At his word, the vague echo of pain clamps down. She bites her lip and nods, and Eren sets down what he was holding to come and stand before her. 

“My girl,” he says, bleeding sympathy. He cups her cheeks with both his hands, combing her hair behind her ears. It clears up her vision some. It makes it easier for her to see how the room really is very bright, between the sunlight and the shining, how it’s difficult to fix her eyes on any one thing when Eren is there to devour her attention. His head is cocked slightly to the side, considering, and his eyes are soft.  

“This poor, pretty head,” he murmurs. His hands fall still, and she leans into the heat and solidity of his touch. “My Mikasa.”

Her temples throb again, in time with a brutal wrench of her heart, but she presses her face deeper into his hands. 

“It’s probably the weather,” he continues. “The altitude, remember? Or maybe you just need to be eating more. Like I said. And getting more sleep.” For a moment, some of his concern slips away into smugness. “My Mikasa. You must be exhausted.” He smiles: a small but genuine expression, half amused and half contrite. “I don’t know that I’ve been taking the best care of you, my love.” His thumb slides down her hairline. “And you know you’re mine to take care of.”

Mikasa swallows. The sensation of something thrashing in her chest intensifies, but she doesn’t know why. It feels as though it might rip free. Leave her empty and unmoored. She doesn’t understand it, but she feels that, if this moment shattered, it would leave her completely untethered; leave her with nothing to hold onto. 

She lifts her hands up to Eren’s chest. Her fingertips curl over the edge of his shirt. His skin is fever-warm — a sharp contrast to his voice when he speaks. 

“I said,” he reminds her, firm and expectant, with the beginning of a biting iciness to it that feels more foreign and more dangerous than the Marleyan warships he broke in half, “keep your hands on the table.”

Mikasa pulls back, but Eren is still holding her. 

She puts her hands on the table, his sleeves heavy and warm around her wrists. 

She doesn’t want to. She wants to hold onto Eren, to make sure that she’s got him, that he’s here, because something doesn’t feel right, and her head hurts, and he’s beginning to scare her, just a little. She wants to hold onto him because she loves him, and all she’s ever wanted is to be close to him. She doesn’t want to follow his order. 

But she does. 

Pressure tugs at her temples, so fiercely it almost blinds her. She squints against it, but she can still see Eren just fine. It’s the rest of the overbright room that begins to waver. 

With her hands back on the table; with his still tenderly cradling her face, Eren begins to speak. 

—

Mikasa looks beautiful.

Her eyes are bright and glossy, shot with silver in the sunlight. Her hair smells like rock jasmine and strawberries, and he steps closer to her, letting her sweetness overcome the scent of toast and burnt bacon. Fire and ash and cooking meat.

We need more strawberries, he thinks, making a note. Absently, he knows he could just will them here, but it’s fun to hike up to the waterfall and take their pick. Mikasa can have her basket for gathering, and Eren will bring his fishing pole to catch their dinner, and they can spend the crisp autumn day out-of-doors. They’ll come back home to watch the sun set over the valley, make supper, and go back to bed.

Though, he considers, eyeing her over, breathing her in, tracing his thumbs down her temples, maybe we should go back now.

She looks beautiful, but she doesn’t quite look well. She’s pale and drawn, and she isn’t smiling at him. 

Eren’s heart punches against his ribs with something akin to panic. He wants her smiling at him. He opens his mouth to make it happen, make her smile, tell her that it’s fine and he’ll fix it, that this place wasn’t built for them to suffer. He opens his mouth to tell her that they should go back to bed, surely she’s just tired and this is nothing that can’t be slept off.

He opens his mouth and tells her, “When I was in Liberio, I spoke with Zeke. Brother to brother. Learned a lot — Zeke knows more than Marley does.”

Mikasa’s eyes are wide, and her mouth is just slightly parted. Her hair glimmers in the light like water, black as ink around her moon-pale face. His poor, tired little love. His beautiful girl. He cards his fingers through her water-smooth hair, watching the way her eyelids and lashes move as she blinks, watches the pulse as it beats in her lovely white throat, watches her breasts rise and fall with her breathing.

He lets his focus widen to take the whole scene in: the cluttered table, set and ready, fresh flowers centerstage along with the candle holders and the butter dish and a jar of strawberry jam — the sturdy, dark wood of the wall, the door on its too-big hinges — the crisp green grass visible outside the distorted window panes, the red and gold of the trees and the snow that creeps further and further down the mountain. And Mikasa, his Mikasa, the belle of the ball, the Queen of May, the life-giving star this whole reality adoringly orbits, on their table, in their kitchen, in their house, in their world. She’s good to him, with her small hands pressed to the homespun tablecloth. She’s good to him. She always is, but it’s especially good here, since there’s no one else. It’s just the two of them. 

It’s just the two of them.

It’s just the two of them, so he steps closer. His thighs brush her bony knees, and his thumbs stroke her cheeks, and he says, “I learned about the Ackermans, there.” He tilts his head, studying her. The scar under her eye is the same warm, rosy pink as her lips. “The reason you’re strong, Mikasa.”

He sighs at the reminder. He’s gotten over the jealousy, the insecurity, the fucking embarrasing constant sense of emasculation, but he never has loved dwelling on it. There’s a reason he insists on doing the hunting out here. That, and of course, she just doesn’t enjoy it the same way he does. She’s happy to let him handle the killing, and he’s always happy to do it for her. For his girl. 

“For all their efforts, Marley’s scholars barely know a thing about the Titans,” he goes on. “But they did discover there was an accidental byproduct of Eldia’s experiments over the centuries. A bloodline that could partially manifest the strength of a Titan while in a human form. The Ackerman clan.”

‘Ackerman.’ Farmer, plowman. It’s not a good name for her. Or — yes, it is, she does help things grow — God knows she inspired things in him that never would have seen the light of day otherwise — but she’s not meant to be some common laborer. She’s meant for better than that.

Of course, she’s not meant to be much of a hunter, either, but he still thinks his name suits her better.

“The Ackerman clan was designed to protect Eldia’s king. Traces of that instinct still remain, so when Ackermans sense the presence of a certain host, traits that are inherent in their blood will activate.”

Mikasa still looks miserable, his poor girl. She looks sad. Quietly, she says, “Eren…” and he knows he ought to shut up and take her back to bed. 

But he can’t stop himself from talking. 

“The only reason you cling to me is because of your Ackerman instincts. In that moment —” he brushes his thumb over her scar and feels her eyelash whisper against his fingerprint, and in a blink, he’s back in another cabin in the mountains — smaller, shabbier, and he was smaller and shabbier, and she was smaller, all dainty and bruised, his fair princess in a high tower, the bodies of slain dragons cooling on the floor, “ — when you were facing death, you obeyed my order. To fight.” And oh, she’d done so well. She’d severed its spine and stabbed through its heart in one blow. She’d been so quiet afterwards, but she’d done it.

Eren has millennia of history in his head. He’s ever so fond of the knowledge that in some cultures, old and dark and gruesome and heretical, their very first meeting could count as a wedding. The spilled blood. The binding cloth. He’d built her a fire and brought her into his house. What more was there?

He slumps against her, letting his weight fall against her knees and shoving his nose in her hair. She smells amazing. He rests his forehead against hers as he mutters, “All the conditions were met to awaken the instincts in your Ackerman blood. It didn’t just heighten your physical abilities to an extreme, you also gained the battle experiences of all past Ackermans by way of the Paths. All because your blood mistakenly thought I was the host you needed to protect.”

He feels Mikasa shudder. They’re close enough that he can feel her ragged exhale against his own lips, and he keeps his eyes wide open to see what he can of her delicate, pretty features. It’s unfair that he can’t see her clearly and be this close to her at the same time.

“That’s not true,” Mikasa says, quiet but strong, in that precious way of hers. She’s looking into his eyes, and it could just break his heart.

“No?” Eren asks, nosing deeper into her hair. “Why not?”

“Eren,” she begs. Oh, she begs so prettily. “You said. Eren, you said that wasn’t true.” 

“According to the research,” he says, and he isn’t really answering her, is he? Why not? He just says, “Once an Ackerman awakens, they often suffer from sudden headaches. It’s ‘cause the true self is trying to resist being forced to protect the host.” He moves his hands so that he’s cradling the back of her head, as if she was made of glass. “Sound familiar?”

“Eren.” Her eyes are closed now. She isn’t looking at him. “Stop it.”

She isn’t looking at him. She isn’t smiling at him, she isn’t looking at him — it makes him antsy; jittery and uncoordinated like a child who had too much sugar. The slow rhythm that this world spins to stutters, and then begins to drum louder — faster — falling out of the melody.

What’s he doing?

“What I’m saying is that the real Mikasa Ackerman died in that mountain cabin at nine years old,” and no, what the fuck, why is he saying that? That isn’t — she didn’t — she can’t have. She can’t have, she didn’t, he’d never, ever do that to her. He’d never — never — never —

If he’d killed her then, then what’s left for him?

(But — she’s loved him, hasn’t she?)

His heart hammers against his ribs. No, no, no no no. That isn’t true, like Mikasa said — like Zeke said, when he asked. He’d looked at him like he was a ridiculous, amusing child, and Eren never takes that well, but it had been a relief, then. Because it had to be stupid, and absurd, and a complete nonsense product of his scrambled, brutalized mind. Mikasa Ackerman has to be who she has always been, and have loved him all on her own. 

But —

But how could she possibly? How could she possibly, when he’s standing here and saying, “Leaving only you behind, ever faithful to your Ackerman instincts.”

She just shakes her head, eyes still closed. He’s close enough to feel her short, measured breathing; he feels her shaking her head because his hands are buried in her hair, and he’s leaned his face against her forehead.

If her breathing is harsh but steady, his has gone completely wild. He’s swallowing air as if he’d been drowning — as if he’d been running — as if he’d crawled across the whole world at the speed of a galloping horse. Sudden pain ignites in his ribs, and he would do anything, break any law or code, if she’d just put her hands over his heart. He can feel the trampled remains of a hundred cities scraping against his bones, splintered and burning hot. He wants —

— to shut the fuck up—

“A clan created to follow orders at the cost of their true selves. In other words — slaves.”

Mikasa keeps her eyes closed, and her hands on the table. Why won’t she take her hands off the table? Why won’t she touch him? He brings one hand back to her face, brushing his fingertips over her scar, and a neat line of pain slices along his palm. It’s an easy, clean cut, but it burns. 

His blood slides away in thick, heavy pulses, streaming down his wrist in rivulets. He presses his palm along her cheek, praying she’ll stop the bleeding, but all that happens is he smears his blood all over her. The red is dark and viscid against her porcelain skin.

“Do you know what I hate most in this world?” he asks — he can’t stop himself from asking. “Anyone who isn’t free.”

That’s honest, more or less. And doesn’t it apply to him? — right now, at the very least, right now — he doesn’t want this. He feels heavy and broken and trapped, like a cornered animal, like a flightless bird.

“Just looking at her made me so angry. Now I understand why. Ever since I was a kid —”

He cannot stop himself. He’s telling her she’s not free, but he’s as helpless as a puppet on a string now, as powerless as the prisoners of war Old Eldia would tie to stones and throw into the sea, as damned as he has ever been; as he has always been. 

“Mikasa —”

Her eyes open. Eren could cry for it. Her eyes open, dark and lovely, and the look in them is reproachful and betrayed, and he’s staining her pretty face with blood, and he still can’t — he can’t — he can’t— stop himself from saying, “I’ve always hated you.”

It is just the two of them.

The words hang there, heavy and ugly and irretrievable. He can’t take them back. That’s not how the script goes. He can’t deviate from it. 

Not when he wrote it himself.

It’s only the two of them.

Mikasa’s breath hitches in a quiet sob, and her eyes close again. Twin tears slip down her cheeks, gleaming in the sunlight. Eren wants to catch them. He wants to kiss them. He wants to get on his knees and tell her he’s sorry, he’s so sorry, he didn’t mean it, never meant it, no matter how angry or bitter or resentful he’d been, not a single heartbeat has passed since he was nine years old that hasn’t been hers. That he’s rotten and wrong and he knows, he knows, he knows, but he only ever feels even a little bit human when she’s with him, and she doesn’t have to forgive him, really she doesn’t, but if she could just —touch him— just please, please, please reach out for him, hold onto him, it used to be all that she did, and he knows why that changed and that it’s only and all his fault, but he can’t bear it, he just can’t bear it for any longer, please, please, please —

But all she does is shake her head.

The savage drumming matches his frantic heartbeat, and Eren feels his ankles sink into sand.

i. 

The sun, it seems, refuses to rise. Mikasa can’t blame it. 

She lays curled on her side for endless quiet minutes, head on the pillow, hands in loose fists in front of her like a pair of limp ghosts. Her eyes are open so narrowly that her eyelashes obscure her vision; it’s already blessedly too dark to see much of anything. The room is a blur of muted grey shades and deep shadows. The only burst of color in the whole room is the scarf coiled on the nightstand. 

Mikasa sniffs tiredly. She’s too weary to cry, but she still feels the cool kiss of the tear tracks she’d woken with. 

He’d said. 

He’d said that everything he told her at that restaurant wasn’t true, and she does believe him. At least enough that the question of whether he was lying in the restaurant or lying in this bedroom isn’t what’s chewing at her heart right now. 

The truth of it makes her feel like a ribbon unraveling, because she doesn’t even care right now about when he was or wasn’t lying. The only thing she’s able to dwell on is the fact that the last time she dreamt that awful memory, Eren had come to burn it away. She’d woken crying, and he’d appeared in the doorway just as he had a decade ago, to rescue her from a different nightmare. 

And she wants him to do it again now.

She wants him. 

She feels so incredibly stupid. She wants comforting from a nightmare from the man who starred in it. But she just… she just can’t help it. Even if she could, would she? For so much of her life, she’d cherished any confirmation that Eren wanted her around. After reliving that memory, it had been like the return of life itself when Eren came to her. And now it’s come to haunt her again, in a way so complete and confusing that her heart is freshly broken, and he isn’t here. 

Mikasa lays perfectly still, feeling the barren cold. It isn’t fair.

He’s the one who hurt her like this. He should be the one to heal her. 

The room is dark like a shroud has been thrown over it. The fire has burned out again, and it isn’t the way Eren had done it, and she’s hollow and cold. The only reason she’s not shaking for it is because of the extra quilts she’s pulled up to her bare throat. 

She can’t stop herself from thinking that Eren must have told someone to bring them. Mustn’t he have? Had that been the last thing he did for her? Had he been worried that she’d be cold without him, and in the minutes before he left, told someone to bring half a dozen extra blankets to her? He must have. Why else would they have appeared? Eren had been tending her fire and asking if she was cold for days. He cared enough about her to know, and to notice, and do what he could to keep her warm. She knows he doesn’t hate her. She just wants him here to tell her that. 

How can she still want that?

But the words still echo in her head and she can’t forget the sound of them, so harsh and cold. 

The only reason you cling to me is because of your Ackerman instincts. In that moment, when you faced death, you obeyed my order. 

Do you know what I hate most in the world? Anyone who isn’t free.

Does he know that was the cruelest, most terrifying thing he could have said? 

She had been nine years old and facing a life as a sex slave. She’d laid on the dirty floor of that shack for hours, listening numbly as the traffickers waited out the rain and talked over all the ways she was and wasn’t pretty enough and foreign enough to be worth a good price, about the length of her legs and the angle of her eyes, about all the people and establishments they thought would be interested, and whether there would be a public auction or not. She hadn’t understood for years—she’d been nine —but she had never forgotten. Even now she can feel phantom burning in her elbows where they were bent awkwardly behind her, and in her wrists where the rope bit too deep. 

She flexes her wrists in front of her to prove that she can. Her hands move freely, but the power behind the movement that has accompanied her since that night has been ripped away. 

Eren had pulled her upright and freed her wrists, and Eren had given her the provocation she needed to free herself. Barely half a day earlier, she’d watched both her parents die violently. As far as she could remember, she’d never in her life spoken to another person aside from them. They were her entire world, and she’d latched so fiercely onto Eren because… what other choice did she have? He’d brought light and warmth and beauty back into her life—brought back reason and purpose. How could she not have adored him? He was her first friend, her savior. She loved him because he was kind to her and brash and brave, and she’d believed that he was good enough that he would have risked his life for anyone the way he did for her. 

For him to tell her that all of that was nothing. That the only reason she’d been strong enough to free herself from being forced into slavery by the men who’d murdered her parents was because she’d instead been made a slave by her own blood and the only boy she’s ever loved—

Does he know that he couldn’t have said anything worse? Did he know, when he first said it? He told her that he’d invented the idea while he was alone in Marley, unable to fathom that she just cared about him. 

Mikasa’s stomach twists. Her heart aches and her head throbs, and she has to wonder, If I had given him a different answer, would we be as we are now? Would I be alone here? 

He said he made that lie up to hurt himself, and turned it against her because he thought it would work. Had he known why it would work so well?

And she can’t even ask? 

She gets her stitches out today. Eventually the nurses will come in, and then she’s gone. She has her clothes laid out, and everything else packed neatly away in the leather satchel, and she’ll dredge up the strength to stuff her scarf into the outside pocket eventually. 

And Eren will be back today, too. But he didn’t want a goodbye. He probably won’t be back until later in the morning, given the distance, so by the time he’s returned, she’ll be gone. 

And she’ll never see him again. 

How will she never see him again? How could he —?

Mikasa pulls her hands against her chest, squinting against a sudden pressure in her temples. The idea causes her real, physical pain. She would close her eyes if she wasn’t too wary of sleep—if it wouldn’t mean losing sight of the scarf. She can’t take her eyes off it. 

He wants me to be warm, she thinks. She presses her fingers against the knob of her wrist, and the tip of her pinkie brushes the bandage over her tattoo. He wants me. 

She wants to hear him say that again. She wants to believe it again, down to her marrow, the way she had when he’d held her. She wants, she wants, she wants— his hands on her cheeks, his lips on her forehead. He owes her that much. 

The room is dark. All shadows and shades of grey. It’s dark because the sky is dark, because in this new, surreal chapter of her life, she’s not a soldier, not a laborer, and her day doesn’t begin before dawn. She still refuses to ring the bell and call one of the castle’s servants, and they’re accustomed to tending to noblewomen, so no one will come until it’s well and bright out, lest they risk disturbing her sleep. The way they might have the other day, if she and Eren hadn’t been so wrapped up in each other they were dead to the world. 

The world is dark, yet. 

But the sun must rise, and so must she, and when she does—when they do together—she’ll be heading for Braus Stables. 

Mikasa wishes, desperately, for the sky to stay dark. 

ii. 

The sun insists on rising. Eren wants to strike it from the sky. 

His canvas tent is lightweight and easily set-up, the easiest option for camping when traveling by horseback. There’s a leather cover under his horse’s saddle that’s meant to be thrown over the tarp in case of rain, and that’s all the extra cover there is. The yellowed fabric does precious little to keep the slow bleed of sunrise from lighting up the inside, leaving Eren staring blankly at the ceiling.

I was so awful, he’s thinking, over and over, twisting his thumbnail into his palm, warm blood seeping down his bare wrist and along the underside of his thumb. I was so awful, and for what? There’d been no fucking point. 

He hadn’t even meant to, exactly. He’d just been—he’d been—a fucking wreck. More than that—he’d been the storm that caused the wreck, the chaos and the damage both. He’s been terrified and desperate and impatient and hurt and angry, all the bitterness and scorn of a jilted lover he’d kept simmering for months in Marley finally boiling over. He’d needed to put distance between them, and he’d told her the worst thing he could imagine that he thought she might believe.

I’ve always hated you. 

But really. How the fuck has she believed that?

He’d died for her — tried to, fucking at least. The goddamn night they met. He’d been prepared to kill and die for her, already in love, a child unable to comprehend what exactly was happening but knowing well enough why. Every rough encounter in the two years before they were old enough to join the army, every time he’d shoved himself in between her and whatever fuckhead was looking at her funny. The courthouse when they were fifteen, when he’d thrown himself forward and screamed maybe I’m a monster you want dead, but you leave her out of this! The field in Wall Maria, with Dina. When he asked her, in the glow of starlight, what he was to her, offering his heart raw on a platter, and let her blush and stammer and rip it to shreds. 

He’d killed for her. Eren is well enough aware of himself to know that isn’t as meaningful as it could be—isn’t the same as the fact that she was willing to kill for him—but still. His first kills—something sacred—were all for her. Not an hour has passed since those first sacrosanct two that he would hesitate to murder anyone who threatened her. 

Mikasa isn’t fucking stupid. How could she possibly have believed him —?!

Because, he remembers, pressing down on his palm until a new tide of blood spills forth, I was so awful. 

Eren has had a long time to become comfortable with the notion that he’s just not a good person. Even disregarding the big things, like, oh, two billion murdered innocents, he’s just unpleasant. He’s rude and disagreeable and mean and manipulative and ruthless. He’s bad-tempered and quick to anger and very, very slow to forgive. He lashes out and he’s too proud to apologize and he doesn’t play well with others. He’s not a very good friend. He sacrificed the world for his selected handful, sure, but only in part. He’d done it because he wanted to, and he’d betrayed them for it. He was an awful, ungrateful son even before he killed both his parents. Zeke doesn’t really count as a brother, but Eren had played into that role to manipulate him—and frankly, the fact that he doesn’t feel a thing about him probably isn’t any good sign. 

If he was a good man for Mikasa, she wouldn’t have bought it, even for a second. But he spent so much of their childhood mad at both of them because she was able to beat him at arm-wrestling, and then too much of their adolescence carefully keeping his distance so that he’d have the strength to pull away completely and murder the planet. 

And of course, so she could kill him. 

Eren sighs, flexing his bloody hands. 

He’d been so sure it would happen. Even before the Rumbling began and he came into contact with Ymir, saw her hopeful vision of Mikasa, Eren had never been able to fathom that he’d just go on living afterwards, and he had known that he’d never allow anyone else to do it. Mikasa had to be the end of his story. If she couldn’t be his happily-ever-after, she had to at least be the final line. If he couldn’t live to hold her hands, then at least his blood should stain them. She couldn’t live with him, but let her live with that. 

He wouldn’t have let it be anyone else. 

She would have been the last thing he ever got to see, and he’d have counted himself blessed for it. God knows she’s the closest he could ever have gotten to heaven, anyway. 

The walls of his tent have grown lighter by a fraction, and Eren wants to snarl and sink his teeth into something. He wants it to stop. He wants it all to stop.  

A wave of frustration crests over him, and he shuts his eyes and reaches for the cabin. He can only scrounge up a specter of the sense of peace he’d had, but it’s fine. Better than nothing. 

If he could have stayed in that first handful of moments, his hands on her cheeks, his nose in her hair, he would have stayed there forever. 

Briefly, he has to acknowledge that it might’ve been a good thing the dream had turned to a nightmare. If waking had ripped him away from her without him ruining it beforehand, he thinks he might be sobbing. 

Eren swallows against a sharp pain in his throat. He still can’t touch the image of her last he’d really seen her, that’s still too raw; instead, he remembers her as she’d been after church. In that long white nightgown, all gauzy and ethereal, a ribbon under her neck and sleeves that pinched in on her fine, delicate wrists. The image hurts and helps him all at once, and every part of that is a relief.

Has she left the capital already?

She must’ve. It’s been a week since her stitches were put in; if nothing has gone wrong—and nothing has —then there’s been plenty of time to give her the all-clear. Had she been desperately eager to leave? To leave him, and run to Armin and the others? His gut churns at the thought of it. 

When Eren opens his eyes, he briefly sees red.

His vision clears. He watches sluggish capillary blood run down his arm, dark red like that goddamn scarf. 

God, he thinks, panic spiking, did she take it with her? She needs it. He needs her to have. She’d had it with her across the sea—she can’t have left it. She can’t have. What if she gets cold? She’s been freezing since she woke up, nothing he did other than lay half on top of her had seemed to do much good, and she’s not used to not wearing it. The skin of her neck is ivory white and fucking sensitive. He already doesn’t trust that troupe of hippophiles down at Braus Ranch not to let her starve or freeze, to keep her safe from her own stubbornness and pride, and what if she’s literally just baring her throat for the elements? It’s fucking cold.

Eren hadn’t even realized that until just now. He still feels like he’s swallowed a flame, but it is cold. His breath steams slightly in the frigid morning air. From what he remembers, Sasha’s house had been properly insulated, but there are sixteen people there. She’s arriving late—what if they stick her in the attic or something? She won’t ever complain, and she’ll just spend the winter suffering the cold, thinking she deserves it for failing to save anyone, as if she could have possibly ever done anything to earn an ounce of hurt in all her life. 

If she’d just stay. He feels his face crumple with the force of the emotion that wracks him, and has to ward off a wall of tears. If she would just stay, I could fix it.