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“What am I to you?”
The words hung heavy over the two. The air felt stagnant, weighing them down as they stared at each other with confusion, curiosity, and too much history to ever forget.
She weighed her words in her mind, what was he? Family? Sure, a friend? Always. But there was always more, wasn’t there? Haunting at the corners of her daydreams, infiltrating her secret thoughts. She looked in his eyes and heartbreakingly saw her future.
“You’re... Everything.” She murmured, hands dangling limply at her sides. It looked as if the words pulled the last of her strength out, and she was no longer humanity’s strongest. Just a heartbroken woman.
“Am I?” Eren mumbled, a subtle edge to his tone. She could feel him growing angry, but this time she grew angry too.
“Is it too much to believe my love is my own?” Her fists clenched, “That not everything I have and feel and want is molded by my trauma and my blood?”
Eren’s mouth fell open for a brief moment before she continued on,
“I existed before you. Odds are, I’ll continue existing after you’re gone. Although, I don’t think… it would only be survival. Is that living?” She pondered, resolute in her tone.
“I feel alive with you. Like I felt with my parents, how I feel in the garden, when I look at the stars, when Armin tells stories.” She sought his eyes, emotion swirling fiercely behind her own. “Are all those moments forced programming too? Why do you insist on taking the few things that give me something to hold onto away?” Her voice began to rise, letting way for several solitary tears to leak from her eyes. He looks up from her shoes, and Mikasa is surprised by his visible turmoil. The enemy of humanity brought to humility by a “slave”.
She scoffed, “I thought you were a masochist. Then I thought you were a sadist,” every word punctuated with venom as she came closer and closer to him. Years of pain and mistreatment boiling over into a point of no return, as if they hadn’t had several of those already. “Now I see that you’re hurt. You’re afraid.” Mikasa’s voice softens as she intertwines her fingers lightly with his. He doesn’t pull away.
“It doesn’t excuse what you did, but it makes it easier to swallow.” He gave her fingers a light squeeze and opened his mouth as if to say something, but the apology died in his throat. Eren searched her eyes, she wasn’t sure what for.
“I know that you still care for me. I know what we had wasn’t one-sided,” she pulled her fingers out of his feather-like grasp. “You felt for me as I did for you, it just manifested differently.” Mikasa clutched her hand to her chest. “I look at you- and I still… You’re still everything, Eren. But not in the same way.” It was as if she could see his heart sink, the light dull in his eyes. What did he expect after before? What did he even want? She sighed once more, “You aren’t who you were, I can see that now.”
They let a few beats of silence sit between them. Both hearts coming undone with the first honest conversation they may have had since that fateful, cold night that they met. Mikasa was the first to break it.
“The mission comes first, and I’ll see it with you to the end. Afterward…” Mikasa closed her eyes, opening them a beat later with resolve. “Afterwards, come find me… If you want. But I won’t be waiting anymore.”
Eren stayed silent. She thought he looked more tired than he ever has, more distraught, more confused. He sighed and sat down- facing over the refugee camp.
“Do you remember the tree? The one we’d sit by in Shiganshina?” He sounded wistful, in her shock Mikasa carefully sat next to him and nodded. “We would lay in the sun, you’d play with my hair. We’d collect sticks and stones and make mosaics on the creekside.” Mikasa watched his eyes fill with a dim light, invigorated by the memory of what was.
“I didn’t lie.” His voice began to take on an air of resentment, but she had the intuition to know it was directed inward. “As we got older, part of me hated you.” Mikasa flinched, he set his hand down on the grass next to her, glancing through his long hair at her profile.
“You were strong, you kept me going, but I had so much hate for the world that it started to spill over. You reminded me of what could’ve been, of what I wanted. Then, when the bond came up, I thought… It was all in my head. I thought that you, the only constant in my life had been the culmination of years of brainwashing through generations, I… didn’t know what to do. I want you to live, and be okay, and have children, and not go through your life on the whim of a hot-headed kid with a death sentence.” He had dug one hand into his hair and another into the earth, teared pricked his eyes as his voice began to crack. “I’m dying, Mikasa. Don’t let me take you with me.”
It was her turn to remain still. Her lips curled down in a thin line, eyes downcast. “Eren…” She said with such gentleness, he felt a shock run through his system.
She turned and faced him, taking his face in her hand. “I make my own decisions, whether you believe it or not.” She leaned in and gently kissed his forehead, leaving a light dusting of red along his cheeks and ears. She pressed her cheek against his forehead and whispered: “You’ll always be everything, no matter what you do, no matter how much I don’t want you to be.”
She removed her body from his tentatively, Mikasa observed his trembling. With a sigh, she began to turn around and head back to the fire, when Eren clutched at her wrist and spun her back to him. He had stood up and pinned her to him with strong arms, head buried in the crook of her neck. She heard him mumble into her skin, but couldn’t make out the words. Hesitantly, she placed her arms around him, rubbing small circles on his spine. “Eren, I can’t hear what you’re saying,” she murmured, getting lost in the smell of him.
He peeled away from her slightly, not loosening his grasp. His face full of fury and resolve, he placed his forehead against hers, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die and so will Armin and you will be alone.” He gritted his teeth, “I can’t protect you when I’m dead, so I’m going to rip every root of evil out of this world. I’ll set the world on fire if it means you’re safe.”
Mikasa began to tremble as he continued, “I wish it could’ve been different. I wouldn’t be a good husband, probably not a good father either.” He began to play with the ends of her hair, “But I wish I had the chance to try.”
With a fluid motion, he ducked down and captured her lips with his own. They could feel each other’s heartbeat pounding in their ears, harmonizing sounds singing an angel’s gospel as they found solace in each other. He pulled away and whispered into her ear, “You won’t just survive without me, Mikasa. You’ll live.” As the sun fell quietly behind the hillside, they remained there. Holding each other, wrapping themselves around each other as many times as they needed to.