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Her name is Mikasa Ackerman.
By four years old, they have already put a tentative name on her quiet nature and listless stare:
Depression.
They tell her parents not to be alarmed, that they can’t be certain until she’s old enough to be tested using more traditional methods, that it’s perfectly possible that she’ll have matured out of it by then- the development of the brain and body of a child is often an unpredictable process, the doctor tells her mother- but when she leaves, the chief remark amongst the staff is that it’s hard to believe she’s only four.
She speaks simply but intelligently, usually silent but never unaware.
She hugs her parents frequently and they hope that’s a sign of change, but even with her arms around them, she rarely smiles, and she never grows out of her aversion towards other people.
By six they have stopped putting their faith in the doctor’s insistence that they may yet have a bright, happy little girl.
She’s brilliant, in her own way.
They enroll her in dance and she improves so quickly that the instructor begins to talk about preparing her for the stage, but when they ask her if she’d like that, she simply says,
“If that’s what you want.”
They withdraw her from dance classes and do not explain why. They are hounded for months by e-mails from the instructor about how they are robbing her of a bright future; heart-wrenching We Miss You cards signed by her classmates are slipped through their mail slot.
They enroll her in gymnastics.
They enroll her in piano lessons.
They enroll her in art classes.
They enroll her in swimming.
They enroll her in horse-back riding.
She excels.
Everything she touches she infuses with an ephemeral grace and sadness.
But every time they ask her if she’d like to move forward, upward, on to bigger things, she answers,
“If that’s what you want.”
No one understands, but sometimes, when they’re bringing her home from another failed attempt to invest in her some sort of light and passion, she looks at them with a small flicker of warmth and gratitude, and they know.
They know that there’s still hope inside her, that it’s guttering away the ends of itself like a long-burned candle, but it’s there.
They love Mikasa, and they know she loves them back, because sometimes she apologizes without prompting or explanation, sad eyes penetrating and arms outstretched.
By eight they’ve accepted it as a part of her that cannot be helped.
They lie awake at night, holding hands in bed, when they first agree with words to do what they can for her but never to push or punish her for what she is, and then they make love for the first time in almost a year.
On the other side of the door, Mikasa is listening to them talk, and she turns away when they begin with a feeling of dim gladness, because she knows that the hollowness inside her keeps them apart from each other, that they sometimes feel like their love is a cruel fact in the face of her inability to feel.
She doesn’t think so.
She wants them to be happy because she doesn’t know how to.
There is a part of her that wonders if she could learn to absorb that vibrancy if her hollowness didn’t dull it in others.
When she’s younger, her classmates think she’s beautiful and shy.
And then, when she’s only young but not younger, they think she’s beautiful and mysterious.
And then, when she’s straddling the borderline between childhood and pre-adolescence, they think she’s beautiful and strange, because it becomes obvious as they get older that there isn’t a mystery hiding underneath her unsmiling features and lightless black eyes- she’s just empty.
Her depth is a black hole from which no light returns.
A boy in her class calls her a robot and she does nothing until a he pushes a well-meaning girl into the mud for coming to her defense.
This is the first time her parents are called to collect her.
Everyone is shocked.
It is the principal of the school who stammers out assurances to her parents that he’s certain this is just a fluke, because Mikasa is the shining star of the school.
She wins elementary-level art contests, plays for sports teams, acts as the understudy for the lead in the school’s rendition of A Christmas Carol- all this and more, but never because she wants to, only because they ask and she answers,
“If that’s what you want.”
And it is what they want, so she does it.
All things come effortlessly to her except emotion.
She tells them that she does not want to die,
But she doesn’t see the purpose in living.
She tells them it’s simply what she does because it’s what her parents want her to do.
She tells them that she doesn’t find it hard, but she doesn’t find it easy, either.
She tells that she just doesn’t really care.
The doctors start to whisper other, darker diagnoses to each other.
By ten her classmates think she’s beautiful and terrifying, because the doctor’s son is in their grade and he overheard his mother saying a word that he only recognizes from television shows and late-night movies he’s too young to see but watches anyway when his mother is working late and his father has fallen asleep on the couch.
It is a word he knows but doesn’t understand:
Sociopath.
He tells his friends and they tell theirs and this alien word is what they call her in whispers behind her back now, rumours mounting ever-higher on the ladder of the fantastical- today she is something like a serial killer, in that limited Hollywood way that children understand the concept of what it actually means to be a murderer, but tomorrow she will be something more like a supervillain, scary but oddly compelling like Poison Ivy or Catwoman, and the day after tomorrow, she will be something different still.
She will be a sociopath to them.
This is who she is when she sees him for the first time, a sudden burst of unanticipated energy that inserts itself between her and a boy who knows better than to antagonize her but is so desperately drawn to her beautiful face that it makes him angry every time he sees it- a boy who will grow up dating beautiful dark-haired women but marry a girl who’s only sort of prettyish but makes him far happier than they ever did.
He will wonder about her, sometimes, far in the future, when he has a wedding band on his hand and a little girl of his own in his arms, because today is the last day he will dare speak to her.
Today is the day she meets her brother, and the first time she lays eyes on him, it is because he’s looking for a fight and she’s in the middle of one.
She jumps in without meaning to- she learned her lesson long ago, amidst many tears and confused, unanswerable questions, about fighting- and together they send him off with a bleeding nose and a black eye, even though she’d never intended to hit him, and she doesn’t think he meant to hit her.
After he’s gone, after they can’t see the tears streaming down his face or the grass stains on his back anymore, they stand together silently and the boy turns to her and says,
“My name is Eren. You’re really pretty.”
He says both in the precisely the same way, as though both statements have equal factual weight and importance, and she just stares at him for a few seconds, dumbfounded.
“Are you going to tell me your name now? That’s what’s supposed to happen,” he continues, impatient, and his eyes are brighter than their colour, lit from behind with a profusion of life even as he suddenly asks her, “Do you even speak English? Uh, como estas- no, wait, that’s-”
She nods, transfixed, and he stops talking, bright eyes suddenly focused on her again. “Mikasa,” she whispers.
The smile that overtakes his face is blinding and unafraid.
She has never seen anything or anyone so beautiful.
He tells her that he just moved to her town but he doesn’t remember his address and he doesn’t know how to get home, so they sit together on the curb outside the park until his parents find them and bring her home to baffled parents who can’t stop insisting that she knows her way back, that this has never happened before.
Their separation is unimaginably painful, but her silence is less expressive than his loud objections and sullen, resentful silence as his parents bundle him into the car.
His mother turns and smiles at her before they leave, and it’s older and more guarded than Eren’s smile, but there’s an unaffected warmth to it that draws her.
She likes his mother.
She does not care as much for his father, who is a man composed entirely of watchful eyes and affected pleasantness and insincere expressions of warmth.
He is colder than she is, and she does not like him or the way he looks at his son when Eren begins to cry.
She sneaks out of her bedroom window that evening.
They find her curled up beside Eren in the morning, and they laugh about how cute it is until he does the same the following night, vanishing from his room only to reappear in hers, sleeping with his head nestled in her shoulder.
Their parents begin to worry, and measures are taken.
None of them succeed.
It is when both of them disappear, discovered later curled in the sand beneath the play structure at the local park where they’d first been found together, that their parents finally give up.
Her hair is unbrushed and her clothes sandy when her father squats down in front of her and asks if she’d like them to arrange for her to stay together with Eren whenever possible, and for the first time, she doesn’t say,
“If that’s what you want.”
She doesn’t say anything.
She just nods, fingers buried in the folds of a scarf that isn’t hers.
His father is displeased, but there’s relief buried behind his mother’s exhaustion, and the first time Mikasa stays for dinner, she’s as loving a parent to her as she is to her own child.
She’s there the night his father leaves, a development that follows close on the heels of a tense conversation about moving- Mikasa understands the weight of Carla’s refusal to separate them again, but she does not think that Eren does, because when he wakes to find his father gone, he asks his mother why.
Mikasa tells him it’s because his father was too weak to stay, that running away from obligation is a mark of cowardice.
They’re twelve when it happens.
This is the first time they fight. She wins, and it’s not because he let her- she’s stronger than he is, and by fourteen, he knows when she’s going easy on him.
He fights less at school. She fights more.
The faculty implores their parents to separate them, talks around the issue of their opinions like they don’t think Eren is dragging Mikasa down, like they don’t think he’s a threat to her potential, but Mikasa’s parents have spent long nights with Carla discussing divorce papers and the similarities and differences between the oddities of their children’s developments and it is far too late to sway them, and so they stay together.
By fourteen they’re the subject of relentless teasing- Eren toes the line of expulsion when he puts a senior in the hospital for claiming that Asian women are sexually submissive. The insinuation is too much for Eren, but the outcry of the boy’s parents is more easily understood by others.
They reconsider when Mikasa very calmly states that she, too, will cease attending if Eren does, but she’s careful not to let him do it again.
They spar in the park after class to soothe his volatile soul.
Sometimes he cries after, and he often apologizes for making her fight him, but she always says,
“It’s fine. I want to.”
He does not understand that this is something selfish for her, too, that she feels as though she can absorb the excesses of his brilliance through osmosis when they grapple, that she only feels alive when she’s fighting, because fighting is honest, and he’s more honest still, but he doesn’t need to understand for it to be true, and he accepts it.
By sixteen she has watched them erode and warp his iron confidence into something different- he is confident, now, that he is stupid, and he has accepted that.
He laughs easily at her when she tries to tell him that it isn’t true, that the measure of a person’s mind isn’t something that can be found in textbooks, but she lacks the words to make him understand.
And so she carries him, supplementing the inadequacies of his educators to better fill the otherness of his mindspace with things that mean something to other people, and he attributes the grade of his degree to her intelligence alone.
She graduates with honours.
He graduates without.
This is a paradox that he never questions- a question that he answers with, “Mikasa couldn’t write my exams for me, could she?”
By eighteen she can see the horizon looming, and it’s only after Eren tells her that he’s been accepted into a college out of state that she tells her parents that she wants to be a boxer.
They are bemused but do not protest except for the question of her separation from Eren.
She does not tell them that she tried to pursue him, claimed sudden intent to follow him to his destination, and was told not to come.
His words stung bitterly, but his eyes were warm and pleading, and she knew- knows- that it’s something different this time.
That he, too, has begun to believe that he is burdening her potential.
For the first time, it occurs to her to wonder if she is burdening his.
He leaves with a smile that she doesn’t trust on his face, and for a week afterwards, she cannot sleep, because her bed is both too big and too empty.
She calls him and he claims ignorance, but she can hear the lie, and understands its necessity.
She waits for him to call for her.
When he doesn’t, she finally surrenders.
And for the first time, she is pursuing a goal of her own.
***
It’s November when she visits him.
She doesn’t bother to warn him- she doesn’t even think to.
After years of climbing into bed together without hesitation, she doesn’t think to consider that he might not be home until his roommate opens the door and confirms that to be true.
He sounds flustered on the phone, breathless and distracted, and she knows him when he’s winded by fighting well enough to know when he’s not.
The fear of losing him to someone else- because she has never wanted him romantically, because she has never even really considered that he might want anyone in that way, because they are siblings and they are inseparable and no one has ever come between them before- is instantaneous, unprecedented, and intense.
She knows that Eren has dated and that he has done things that she has never found someone interesting enough to want to do, because she has interrupted him at strange times in the past but this, this is the first time he has been distracted enough to even start to say,
“This is kind of a bad time.”
She tells him to bring the object of offense with him with intentions that hover between appraisal and intimidation.
When he shows up alone, smile and arms just as warm as she had left them, she is both pleased and disgruntled.
She’s relieved by his calmness but hurt by its persistence in her absence.
When she finally meets the man responsible, she is determined to judge him fairly despite her numerous misgivings, because the knowledge that Eren is happy without her there affords her an unexpected sense of peace.
When she meets him- Levi- she is simultaneously over and underwhelmed.
She knows his face, somehow, in the same way that she knows the face of the principal who threatened to expel Eren- an etched-in familiarity born of dislike that she can’t explain or recall acquiring.
He’s small, somehow smaller than she thought he’d be and smaller than her mind thinks she remembers, neat, precise, and walled in.
She looks at him and sees something very honest and very afraid.
She sees Eren’s father in his fear, something skittish and animalistic and ultimately feral that can only be disguised by a degree of sophistication that Grisha had but Levi lacks, and she hates him for his nature and admires him for his honesty.
She sees herself in him, too, in the way he angles himself towards Eren, but Levi leans back in his chair like he knows he’s being drawn in and doesn’t like it, like he’s afraid to fall into the intensity of Eren’s obvious desire, and she doesn’t blame him but still thinks he’s a coward.
She wants to dislike him and does.
She wants to like him and does.
She feels both of these things at the same time, and with every word and every action, they compound, equal in intensity without cancelling each other out.
She tells him what she thinks of him.
He tells her that he doesn’t blame her, that sometimes he agrees, and she loves him for his honesty, because she can tell that it’s the truth, but she hates that it is, because she knows that he must know that he is unworthy.
“You don’t really dislike me,” he tells her, and she hates him for it because he sees more than most but not enough, hates that he seems to recognize the conflict in her and hates that she recognizes the conflict in him.
She wants him to run like the coward he is, but she doesn’t want him to abandon Eren.
She wants him to fall under Eren’s spell, to give Eren everything he desires, but she doesn’t think he’s capable.
She hates him for the problem he presents for Eren’s future and the person she can’t quite seem to remember him being in Eren’s past.
There are many reasons he’s right and many reasons he’s wrong, but all she says in response is,
“I really do. I’m sorry.”
And she is.
She truly is sorry.
***
Armin Arlert finds a place in her life surprisingly effortlessly.
He is a mirror of a boy, somebody who reflects the brightness of those who surround him, and she can see that he’s begun to retain Eren’s shine- his personality is evolving from the exposure.
He is a delicate creature, fine-featured with fine blond hair, and she wants to enclose and protect him for reasons she can’t quite express.
Her relationship with him is quite different than her relationship to Eren, and she can tell that his relationship to her is as well.
They are instantly companionable in a way that requires no negotiation, like complementary colours.
She invites him to see her matches. He requests that she meet his grandfather.
She spars with Eren on the grounds behind the Arts building and Armin renders the fluidity of her movements into equally seamless theory, brilliant with enthusiasm as he shape with words the technique of her jabs and feints, cautious at first to offer criticism or analysis but more confident with every word considered instead of dismissed.
For the first time in her life, she feels as though she has imparted brightness.
It is a strange sensation.
***
She doesn’t take her second encounter with Levi especially well.
She knows exactly what’s transpiring, and exactly what it means.
He’s falling down the rabbit hole, stepping over the line of acceptability should he decide to run- if he goes now, it will damage Eren in ways that Mikasa has never learned to fix.
He says his words like they’re a lie but his eyes are honest and she knows he just means for her to take them as a deceit that they’re not.
She laughs anyway, smiling because she’s pleased that Eren is getting what he wants even if she hates who it happens to be with, and pretends that he’s a better liar than he is.
He believes her.
She hates that, too.
She can see Armin’s mind clicking through the pieces of the puzzle he’s given as she goes through his cash, watches his eyes flicker to her and to him and to his hands and back again, and there’s an understanding there, between them, deeper than should be possible for two people who’ve known each other for less than a week.
It soothes her.
His eyes tell her that there is someone watching in her foreseeable absence, and she’s relieved, because she would not leave Eren alone on a precipice this steep.
She knows what lies at the bottom of such falls all too well, and it’s nothing so peaceful as oblivion.
There is no satisfaction to be found in giving up on hope.
There is no joy in having no aspirations or dreams.
When she boards the train home, Armin is standing beside Eren on the platform, and his eyes assure her:
Eren will never want for nothing.
That night, she sleeps soundly for the first time in weeks.