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She is determined to love him, and that is his downfall.
He's had feelings for people before; it's not unusual to grow attached to other soldiers in the Survey Corps. It makes sense: there aren't very many soldiers to begin with, so attachments form quickly and seamlessly.
And then they are ripped apart.
It's inevitable. It always happens eventually.
For Mike Zacharias, the first death was in training; a cute girl whose face he remembers, but whose name does not come to him no matter how hard he thinks, no matter how many drinks he's downed. It startles him when she dies in a training exercise, but not enough, and when he joins the Survey Corps alongside Erwin Smith, he falls for someone else. The second girl dies two expeditions later.
Erwin locks himself away before he even enters the Corps. He's always been more outgoing than Mike has, and never overly shy or awkward, but Erwin packs up his heart, the one that he would have offered to Marie had things gone differently, and he shoves it so far away that he never ever looks very close at anyone ever again.
Mike can't do that. He's not that strong. He wants to be, sometimes, but he likes people: the uniqueness of them. He's relieved when Zoë Hange joins the Survey Corps, because they have two very important things in common: they're both weird, and they are both very aware of it.
He never does develop feelings for Zoë. Maybe it's because, like Erwin, she's managed to lock herself away. She spends most of her time discussing work, and when she's not working she's reading. He grows to care about her the way he cares for Erwin, and it happens because she keeps living.
He tries not to care overmuch about anyone ever again, though, because he's a team leader, and he's in too high of a position to be considering romance, however one-sided it is.
He fails again, and this time it's someone in his own team. The feelings are surface at best, and very quiet. He doesn't let them affect his job, but it's hard sometimes, because she's really pretty and he really likes what he knows of her, which isn't much. It's for the best that he's shy, because he never does work up the nerve to say anything, and a year later she's torn into three pieces right in front of his eyes and he decides he's never going to let himself actually care about anyone in that hopeless, reckless way, ever again.
Erwin sympathizes, but he doesn't really understand. He's able to lock his heart away and Mike just can't.
He tries, though and he does well for a while. He avoids socialization, avoids sniffing new people, avoids a lot of things.
But then they're out on an expedition and he sees Nanaba in action. She's one of the newer recruits, and he's never really looked at her before, because he spends much of his free time alone. But there's something about the way Nanaba moves, the way she looks, that stirs his blood a little too much. She's good—really good. She's not a fighter of Levi's caliber, or even his own, but her concentration is unmatched and he keeps an eye on her after that: because that's what a good soldier does, he tells himself. A good soldier knows who his best allies are, and he knows who is going to fight 'til death whisks them away.
When he's promoted to the rank of squad leader, he requests that Nanaba be added to his personal squad. Maybe it's selfish of him, but he knows what she's capable of, how deep her cuts are despite her thin frame, and that's what he wants. Someone like that.
And at first, everything is wonderful.
But Nanaba's determination manifests itself in everything she does, not just on the battlefield.
He falls for her first; he knows because he catches himself watching her when he really shouldn't be: from the window of his office, in the mess hall, when he passes her in the corridors, when they're practicing with the rest of the squad. He tries to keep his feelings hidden, but Erwin notices right away; he's always been astute, the bastard, and maybe it's a godsend, because Erwin tries to talk him around to more intelligent things: like not falling in love with someone in his personal squad.
Or better yet, not falling in love with anyone at all.
Because the only things people do in the Survey Corps are live and die. (Predictably, not many people keep on living.)
Oh, sure, there are nice moments, sometimes. But is it a risk worth gambling on? Mike finds himself feeling very uncertain about it, but due to past experiences, he leans toward it being a bad idea. It'll just hurt more in the end to act on something, and it's not as if she returns his feelings. He'll just make things awkward between them, and then, on the battlefield, that awkwardness will get someone—or a lot of people—killed.
Nanaba makes an effort to be friendly. She stops by his office and asks him what he's doing, once, and he says he's writing a letter to his parents, and then she's asking about his parents and laughing at his stupid stories and he falls so far in love with the sound of her laugh and the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes that he knows he's almost done for right then and there.
After that he limits his time with her—or tries to.
But Nanaba is determined to love him. To care about him. And to make sure that he knows it.
It takes him a year to catch onto it; a full year of believing that everything he feels is completely one-sided and inappropriate besides. In the past he cursed his shyness, but with Nanaba he's grateful for it. He may say stupid shit and he may look like an idiot in her presence, sometimes, but he won't kiss her when she's a little drunk and her face is too close—not even on the cheek—and he won't let himself lean down to sniff at her neck even though some days it's just about all he can think about.
Instead he relishes the little things, like what makes her smile and the way she walks and how she keeps that ridiculously cute expression on her face when she's killing titans and when her left arm is dangling uselessly at her side and she's apologizing to him for getting herself hurt.
He knows that when she dies it'll absolutely destroy him. It won't be like the others, whose names he can't remember and whose faces only occasionally haunt his dreams, now. He never did learn much about those girls, but Nanaba—he's had time to learn the names of her family members and how she takes her tea, what kinds of books she reads (when she has the time) and what sorts of things she does in her spare time. He's memorized the sound of her laughter and he's heard her crying; he knows what she smells like immediately after a shower and after a week without one.
But he's okay with that, because it's one-sided.
Because he's never said anything, because he's refused to allow himself to even touch her hair (though he desperately wants to when she's sitting down and he's standing and it's right there and he knows what it smells like but he also wants to know what it feels like), she won't be hurt when he dies, if he happens to go first.
But she doesn't die, and neither does he, and when that first year is over and they're both still alive, he starts slipping.
He lets her in.
It's not intentional, not at first. She comes to his room to check on him because nobody's seen him for two days and the rest of the squad is worried for him. She brings tea with her, and she refuses to leave until he takes a break and drinks it with her. They don't talk about anything in particular. But she comes back regularly after that. She asks him how he's doing and smiles at him and then, one day, she kisses him.
She thinks he's asleep at his desk and he doesn't do anything to let her think otherwise. It's all rather chaste, anyway; she smoothes down his hair and then kisses the top of his head. There's a moment when nothing at all happens—she just lingers there—and then she's gone, closing his door behind her, and somehow he manages to wait until the door clicks shut before his face turns red.
She tries harder after that, but he manages to avoid most of her affection, too afraid to ever really let her do anything that matters. But her smile undoes him and the determination on her face when she corners him after she's had a couple of drinks leaves him conflicted.
The fact that he's backed himself into a literal corner while trying to avoid standing too close to her speaks volumes to both of them, he's sure of it.
She grabs his face, standing on her toes, but she doesn't pull it down to meet hers; she just tries to make him look at her, and he can't. He flinches away like it hurts, and it doesn't, not really; it hurts in a really nice way, but that's what's terrifying about it.
When you're in the Corps for years and years, when you've lost all of your trainee class to titans and 3DMG accidents and infections from wounds sustained on expeditions, you start to feel pain and not-pain; good things are too wonderful to be real.
They're too wonderful to last.
And that makes them frightening to consider dabbling in.
So when she asks, sounding hurt, what his problem is, when she asks, "What are you so afraid of, Mike?" his response is something unintelligible.
It's scattered syllables and fragments of words and he sounds like a pre-teen all over again, stumbling around with his gangly limbs trying to feel like he belongs in his own body.
He wants to say that he's afraid of her because he's let himself fall in love with her against his better judgment and he knows someday he's going to pay for it, but he doesn't want to take her down with him—
Except that he does. He really does.
A huge part of him wants to flip off the unspoken rules, wants to bury his fingers in her short hair, wants to pick her up and hold her close to him. The smallest things seem satisfying to him: little kisses goodnight, the feel of her curled up against his side on his bed, the steady beat of her pulse. For a fleeting moment, he's positive that he would be happy with those little things for the rest of his existence, as short as it may be.
His confliction shows on his face, surely, because she brushes her thumb against the corner of his mouth—making even his nose turn red—and says, "Sometimes you have to let yourself care."
"But caring hurts," he blurts out like an idiot.
"Sometimes," she says. "But sometimes it hurts more not to care, doesn't it?"
And he thinks of Erwin all locked up in his office by himself, and wonders if maybe she's right. Maybe she'll die on the next expedition, or maybe he will; if he doesn't kiss her now he'll never know what it's like, and he doesn't think he wants his most prominent memory of her to be the fact that he couldn't let himself care enough.
She deserves better than that.
His shoulders slump a little, in resignation or defeat or maybe even embarrassment, because he's spent all this time completely wasted, time that he could have spent with her, because she'd brought him tea and played cards with him and smiled at him a million times and he'd played it off like it was nothing in the hopes that—what? His feelings would go away? That he could just love every little thing about her but never fall too deeply?
But it's obvious now, what she was trying to do. She was determined, all those months, to win him over.
And it worked, maybe too well. He doesn't think she realizes just how much he likes her, how often he thinks about her, how many days and nights he's thought idly about the dumbest things involving her.
Maybe it's stupid for a man his age to daydream at all, least of all about holding hands with a woman he's foolishly in love with, but they are nice thoughts and that they could actually happen—that she's trying to force open a door to make it happen, no matter how hard she has to push—well. He's not used to having his feelings noticed, let alone reciprocated. It's touching and it's kind of sweet and he's pretty sure that her trying so hard means that she feels more for him than just friendly affection.
So he lets her pull him down into a kiss, and it's awkward and unsure because that's just who he is, who he's always been, and he's especially nervous, now, because there's nothing about Nanaba that he doesn't love in this moment, nothing at all. It's so easy to mess up and it only takes a heartbeat to lose someone; when they break apart and she's smiling at him, he knows that he wants every single moment they have together to be memorable and perfect because he may wake up one day soon and she just won't be there, and the thought of their last interaction being negative makes him feel awful.
So he ignores the fact that his face is hot to the touch and tries to smile back at her. It's shy and he almost can't meet her eyes, but he makes himself do it because he does love her eyes, and the little crease between her brows when she's thinking, and the way her hair sort of curls at the ends.
"See?" she asks. "That was nice." And then, before he can speak, she's saying, "Good night, Mike."
And his mind races and his throat closes up, and it takes him a second longer than it ought to for him to say, "W-Wait!"
But she does stop. She turns around. She tilts her head to the side and smiles and him and she looks kind of dopey, like deep down she's feeling as giddy and nervous as he is. "Yeah?"
He feels like he has to do better, like she deserves the best from him, not some awkward shaky kiss with his big nose bumping into her cheek. So he takes her hand and tugs her back to him and she's still smiling up at him when he kisses her. It's not much: it's simple and soft and it only lasts for a long heartbeat. But it's nice, and he doesn't mess it up, and when he pulls away he touches her hair and says, "Good night," so softly even he's not sure he managed to get it all out.
They are nearly inseparable afterward. Nanaba's bunkmates don't say anything when she starts sneaking out at night, and Levi and Hange keep their blessed mouths shut when they notice Nanaba creeping about in the officers' quarters.
Sometimes she showers just for him. Afterward she makes her way to his room and gets into his bed—climbs on top of him and then gives him a million little kisses until he wakes up or kisses her back or rolls her beneath him. They barely fit in his stupid bed, and as beautiful as she is, as much as he loves her, sometimes when she takes a nice shower for him, all he wants to do is just look at her and touch her hair and hold her for hours and hours. He's not sure if that's normal or if it's weird, but Nanaba knows he's weird and it doesn't ever seem to bother her.
It's not always perfect, of course; Mike supposes relationships aren't meant to be a smooth road, not even for soldiers who may die at any moment. But they learn to communicate and their differences are always settled quickly.
Which is nice, because Mike grows used to the smell of her in his blankets, the restless way she sleeps, and the way she crinkles her nose at him when she's trying not to laugh. And he relies on it, on her warmth and the sound of her voice after expeditions or a long day doing paperwork.
Erwin takes to calling him a sentimental old fool when a few years pass and they're still all alive.
It's true, so he doesn't deny it.
He just smiles a little and wishes Erwin knew a fraction of the happiness he feels some days. He wishes Zoë knew that feeling, too—wishes she'd open herself up a little bit. The years have sent her down the same path as Erwin; Levi is her closest friend, and she speaks to him, but Mike knows she never says much. Not the real stuff, anyway. It's all about titans and strategies and maps and Levi tries, sometimes, to pull her back to herself, but he's never completely successful. That he still tries… Surely that means something.
It makes him sad, sometimes, that he's so happy and his friends are—well, they've all built walls and cages around their hearts. He wonders if any of them will ever feel as happy as he does on the mornings when he wakes up and Nanba turns around in his arms and pets his messy hair and kisses his face and says hello.
It's nice; he doesn't regret anything, and he knows that when or if she leaves him he'll never fully recover from it, because somehow she's become the most important person in his life.
Nanaba still brings him tea. She also goes for walks with him and runs her fingers through his hair and wakes him gently from troubling dreams.
He's so in love with her, even after the handful of years they've spent together, that he can't imagine things between them ever being different. And Mike—well, he's greedy. He wants to wake up to see her every morning, not just after the nights she can get to his room discreetly.
However long forever is, he wants to spend it with her.
When he buys the ring he blushes like an idiot and he's told that he has a month to return it, just in case things don't work out. There is sympathy in the shopkeeper's eyes, and he's looking at Mike's jacket and Mike just shakes his head as if he's certain that won't happen to him, as if he has all the time in the world to put the ring on Nanaba's finger and to marry her and live the rest of their lives killing titans and holding each other at night after a bad expedition.
The ring is wrapped up in a tiny box, safe and sound, and he puts it in the left side breast pocket of his jacket so that it will always be on hand. He'll ask her the moment it's the right time, and not a second before. She deserves the best and he refuses to allow himself to mess it up. He usually thinks before he speaks, but Nanaba has a way of drawing him out of his shell, at least in private. He doesn't want his marriage proposal to be a stream of stammered words; he doesn't want it to be rushed. He doesn't want to blurt it out when she's laughing because his mustache tickles or just because she looks beautiful wearing just one of his shirts.
So he waits.
They've been together five years and they've known each other even longer. What's another few days? Another month, even?
So every now and then he touches his right hand to his left pocket, feels the embroidered wings of freedom there and the lump beneath it that tells him the ring is still safe, and he smiles to himself.
He's on a roof watching Nanaba lose herself when he first regrets not proposing earlier. He feels nervous not seeing the ring he picked out on her finger; the wavering in her voice unsettles him. It's the first time he's seen her determination falter, and it unseats him, rocks his world, and he speaks, not just because he believes the words, but because he needs her to believe them. He needs her solid and together and strong again, because that's the only thing that allows them to keep holding each other at night, it's the only thing that lets them make it back alive.
And he needs her alive and well, beautiful always, with sleep-tousled hair or that mischievous little glint in her eye.
He considers slipping the box to her up on that roof before they leave. He wants her to put the ring on now so that he can see it, just in case he can't later, just in case she doesn't come back or he doesn't come back or—well.
But it's all wrong and the thought of proposing marriage to her right now with titans running at them and her looking frantic and anxious, with unarmed children under their care…it frightens him. It wouldn't be fair. Not to Nanaba. She deserves so much better than that.
So he doesn't ask. He links pinkies with her for just a moment there before she slips out of his grasp and hits the ground running, her expression determined again, her lips drawn together and that crease between her brow.
And God he loves her for that, loves her so much in that moment that he touches the breast pocket of his jacket again, savors the feeling of the box beneath his fingers, and promises himself and her that the moment they're next alone, he'll kiss her senseless and then beg her to marry him because nothing else could possibly make him happier.
He thinks he's going to die twice before he actually does. The knowledge after the relief—over and over again—frightens him more than anything. He's never been afraid of death before, but now he is.
There's something he hasn't done, yet, something he needs to do, and he really is a sentimental old fool, because as the titans are tearing him to shreds, he still tries to touch that stupid ring in his pocket.
As if it will bring him some kind of comfort.
As if Nanaba will know, somehow, that he loves her enough to want to marry her and spend the rest of his forever with her.
But deep down, Mike's a realist. He knows he's never going home again. He'll never feel her curled up against his side at night, or her fingers in his hair.
His end is painful and he's crying, but he's not sure if he's crying because it hurts, or because he's going to die and nobody will ever find the ring and Nanaba will never ever know that in the end her determination was his glorious downfall. He will always love her for it.
Before everything turns black, he thinks he can feel it against his calloused fingers: the ring, beneath the wings of freedom, resting right over his heart.