Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mikasa and Eren are the only ones that see Armin off the day he leaves Paradis.

She’s known he would set out to see the world from the moment he first glimpsed the ocean and those summer-sky eyes filled up with tears at the sight. Eren had been surprised—upset, even—when he had announced it while they were having dinner in their tiny kitchen, but Mikasa had laughed, despite their situation being anything but funny. He was always going to leave.

It’s by both choice and necessity that their farewell party doesn’t have more of a crowd. Technically, what they are doing is illegal, and they don’t want any of their remaining friends to be associated with deserters or to risk being forced to come back. They’ve been on the run for a long time, but the boys still hold the most important pieces of artillery in the island, after all.

Mikasa stands very still on the rickety dock, her back so stiff it hurts, holding back tears that make her eyes sting and her vision blurry. He was always going to leave, but she never thought these would be the circumstances, as a stowaway on a fishing ship in a desperate attempt to consummate his dreams with what little life he has left.

“Take care," she says. Between her scarf and her hood, her eyes and nose are about the only parts of her face left uncovered, and she’s glad that she can keep at least some of her twisted features hidden. Armin has never needed to see them to understand her pain, and he pulls her into a too-tight embrace that feels too weak to be their last.

“I’m sorry I can’t be the flower boy at your wedding,” he says, and offers her a little laugh. Mikasa hugs him tighter, feels his cloak dampen under her cheek, and holds on to his too thin shoulders for too long and not long enough. Armin is the one to pull back, and he rises a little on his toes to press a kiss to her forehead. “I’ll send letters.”

It’s definitely just something he thought would be placating to say, because she doesn’t know how a letter would even get delivered to their ghost owned address and she’s sure he doesn’t either. 

Still, Mikasa nods, and wipes her eyes, and smiles, because if there’s anyone in the world who could figure it out, it’s Armin, considering he’s still got almost seven years left. Seven is not a lot, but it still sounds like an eternity compared to Eren’s two.

He moves on to say his last goodbye to Eren, a little quicker and a little harsher, because there’s still too much between them they can’t truly get past, but the two have matching tear patches on their faces once they part nonetheless. They whisper words that get swept away by the wind before Mikasa can try to make sense of them, and for a moment they simply stare at each other gravely before breaking contact completely.

In the end Armin sails off into the night, almost like it was always meant to be but not quite, and Mikasa can only trust he has enough supplies for the journey, enough coin to get by, enough strength to survive. 

Eren’s hand finds the spot between her shoulderblades, a comfort, and they watch the vessel drift further and further away until it disappears between the waves and the darkness.

-

They make the trip back with the sun rising quietly, almost grieving. There’s soup on the stove. They don’t eat. Nobody talks. Armin’s empty chair feels very terribly lonely, still crooked at the exact angle he had left it only hours ago. Eren pulls her into his lap at the table. It's a bit awkward; Eren is still Eren and Mikasa is still Mikasa, but Armin is gone and they don’t fit together as smoothly anymore, because no matter how much they wish the past years of terrible decisions didn’t leave jagged scars on their hearts, they did. 

But Mikasa doesn't protest, and she lets him have his way, because his hand is fisted tightly in her cloak, and his eyes are rimmed with red, and no matter how much it hurts, she still loves him as she always has. They spend the day curled up in bed, because it’s not like either of them have anything better to do, and if they did they wouldn’t want to anyway. Mikasa cries in Eren’s shoulder until she falls asleep, and then cries more once she wakes.

-

It’s pointless, she knows it, and Eren tells her so when he notices how frequently she’s perched on the windowsill watching the movement on the street, but she holds her breath every time she sees a blond head passing by their neighborhood. 

It’s pointless, he says, and Mikasa wonders if he means something else.

-

The house is small, but every room feels too big and too silent with only two people to take up space, and it makes Mikasa’s throat feel tight. Still, she can’t find it in herself to complain. They could always leave; there are safer places for them to be, but this is their hometown, and the bedroom and the couch and the kitchen already smell like them, and despite everything they have grown comfortable here after so much time.

Every meal is rationed because Eren wants their wages to be enough for her to get by after—he never says after what, but Mikasa knows what he means and it makes her sick—and they never have light after eight o’clock because they don’t have enough candles to use for heedless purposes. She doesn’t mind. She likes it when they are in the dark talking about memories from their childhood and telling each other what they read on the newspapers headlines on the street. 

They talk about Armin, speculating on where he is, where he’s been, what he could be doing right now. There are still signs that he had lived in the house—a book left face down on the couch, clothes he couldn’t fit in his travel bag, a pair of muddy boots they never brought themselves to clean—, things that prove that he was more than a fond memory and a sad bedtime story. Sometimes Mikasa wishes she had swimmed after the ship and either dragged him back or gone off to see the world with him. But she’s here with Eren, and they are together and alive and that’s enough, that’s what matters, and in spite of everything this has always been her dream.

-

They manage to be happy. Really, they do. For two years, they are as happy as they can be with fate breathing down their necks and their time running out.

They get married exactly three weeks into November, and the whole time she keeps thinking of Armin’s regret and how long ago she had dared to imagine Sasha as her bridesmaid. It’s not so much a wedding as it is signing fake names on a yellow document sheet in the Shiganshina City Office, but they do it anyway even if the clerk declares Eric and Maria husband and wife.

They consummate it by the fireplace because it’s winter and their paper thin covers just don't do the job, but his kisses are sweet from wine, and she's intoxicated with it, with him. Her husband.

“I’m sorry we can't stay stay longer,” he whispers, and she doesn't say anything in reply to that, because god with the firelight on the side of his face and his green eyes and his hair ruffled he looks oh so young, oh so fleeting, oh so doomed, and this life of theirs is so full of mortality it's a wonder they don't fade like dying stars. She takes his face in her hands, and she kisses him hard because she can’t do anything about it and she kind of hates him for reminding her of that because for now he is her husband and for now things are meant to be good, goddamnit. He kisses back and she tells herself that they are.

“Love you,” she tells him eventually, and he smiles and pulls her closer. 

“Love you too,” he says, and for the better part of a year that gets them by.

-

The problem is that Eren knows that Mikasa knows that they are playing pretend, that these moments are stolen, and that soon the curse is going to come and collect their debt. She holds him a little tighter every night, like she’s afraid he’ll slip between his fingers like sand. Like she could ever stop him from doing so.

It’s almost a weekly occurrence throughout the second—the last—year; Eren reminds her that he can’t stay longer, and that you can’t cheat fate, and that it's just a matter of time. And even though she knows he’s right, even through her growing restlessness Mikasa tells him that she loves him, that she needs him, that they can stay here as long as they want to. 

(Mikasa can’t stand the thought of letting him go. Some nights, she wonders if maybe Armin left because he couldn’t stand it either.)

She convinces herself that she convinces him, too.

-

Four days after their anniversary, he offers to fetch milk. She has eggs on the stove, and he’s at the table sipping lukewarm coffee from his cup, pretending to read some newspaper that dates several weeks ago. It's the same as any other day, and they need milk. He heads out.

For some reason, Mikasa chases after him. “Wait!” She catches him in the street, “Here. To pay for it.” She pushes the coins into his hand, and she grins, uneasy. “Hurry,” she says. “I'll need your help to put out the fire that I'm bound to start with the food.”

She wants him to smile. He manages it. Eren smiles, and he says: I love you, and he kisses her on the lips and he kisses her on the forehead and he looks at her for a little too long and he disappears down the street.

He shouldn't be gone for more than half an hour. Except he is. Gone. For an hour, a day, a week.

For good. He never comes back.

-

Mikasa waits.

-

Mikasa stands frozen in time, looking out at the street, hoping he’ll come through the door any moment, even though it’s the damned second year and this moment was always going to come and there’s no other explanation for this.

You can’t cheat fate.

-

She paces in their bedroom. She cries into her scarf. She barfs up her dinner and cooks breakfasts that she doesn’t eat. She looks for some sort of clarification between the clothes and belongings he left behind for hours, and finds nothing.

She tries looking for him in the city, but more than once she has to stop and surrender herself to pointless convulsions—there’s nothing in her stomach to purge, but still her body tries. She screams into his pillow because she’s always been so strong but now she’s useless and powerless and she can’t cheat fucking fate. 

There’s no other explanation for this, but she hates the one she’s got. 

-

Mikasa waits every night for a month by her place in the windowsill, and when it’s clear he is not coming back she stops hoping.

-

Mikasa waits alone in this big cold quiet house that feels haunted, that has been haunted for a long time, and when it’s clear he’s not coming back she packs her things and gets on the first train out of Shiganshina for good.

-

Mikasa doesn’t look back. 

She doesn’t spare a glance to this place that had brought her as much joy as it had heartache over the years as she settles in her seat. She doesn’t have a certain destination in mind; she just knows she can’t be here anymore. As the wagon starts moving on the tracks, Mikasa feels something like dread, but just not quite, nested at the bottom of her belly, something settling down. 

Something taking root.

-

Sitting cross-legged in front of Sasha’s headstone, Mikasa can’t think of any easy way to tell her why she's here. 

Her visits had dwindled some since she ran away, down to only twice a year. A third is a very uncommon occurrence—the journey is long and horses are expensive to rent in Maria, and the trainline is too risky to take most of the time. She would much rather not take her chances on the possiblity of running into past acquantainces or being recognized by border patrol officers, but Mikasa has spent so much time aimless. It's thoughtless and desperate, but the need to be somewhere familiar wins out in the end and, really, Mikasa has nowhere to go. She’d always come down with Armin, because Eren felt like his presence would desecrate their grief. It was one of the few things none of them ever disagreed on. It’s always strange to be here by herself, and she didn’t bring her customary flowers, but those are not the only things that feel wrong about the journey this time around.

Mikasa keeps her hands folded in the dip of her skirt to keep them from shaking. The air is calm and damp with morning cold, and it burns up in her lungs. She’s been staring at the sky for too long now, trying to bring up the strength from her core to her voice, but she finds that she barely has any left.

“I’m pregnant,” she announces, weaker than she would have liked, to the gray plaque and the empty fields. Predictably, nothing ensues her daunting revelation except for the sound of her own breath, too loud and unpleasant to her own ears.

“You’re the first to know,” she says, a bit more firmly this time, and is suddenly very aware she really has no one left to tell. She’s all alone now, Armin gone and Eren—gone, all her friends either dead or forsaken by her long ago. Mikasa had known this would happen the moment she made her choice to flee. She’s been aware that this was coming to her for years, and now that it has she still does not know what to do next. Somehow, with this life growing inside her when she has no will to carry on with her own, the future seems even more unknown and frightening. 

“I’m not sure how… when it happened. We were always careful, but… I guess it’s no use wondering now.” She bends her waist, plucking a brown blade of grass from the patch of green. It dissolves when she rubs it between her thumb and forefinger, one of the season’s first victims, and decidedly not the only. “I’m terrified, Sasha,” Mikasa confesses. Blinks away something stinging at her eyes. Her mouth feels very dry, and speaking produces a burning sensation in her throat. “I'm absolutely terrified. I don't think I've ever felt fear like this.” 

“It doesn’t feel real. None of this feels real.” Mikasa lets out something like a sob, but it comes out dry and cracked, and her breath comes in harsh pants, rasping in her ears. “I don’t know what to do. I wish you were here to tell me.”

But Sasha isn’t, and she doesn’t. There’s not even a slight breeze to pin her hopes on, that she might be listening from wherever the dead go. Mikasa’s knuckles go bone-white against the rosy fabric, fingernails scraping against her thighs unpleasantly, but she barely feels it. Her voice wavers when she speaks again. “I miss you, Sasha. You have no idea. I miss you so much.”

She usually stays the for the whole day, but the painfully one-sided conversation is starting to tangle up in her throat. Mikasa rises to her feet with more difficulty than ever before, wipes at the wetness on her cheeks with one swift movement, takes a deep breath to keep herself from crumbling. The time to pretend is over.

It’s just Mikasa and her own fate, now.

-

She ends up in a meadow southeast of Wall Rose, halfway between Trost and Karanes, where she had spotted an abandoned cottage years ago on an expedition back when Titans still were the biggest of her grievances.

As soon as they had deserted, she had told Eren and Armin about it, and they had entertained her plan of renovating it for a while before they found a place in Shiganshina and decided to just stay there. It’s isolated enough that she doesn’t have to worry about prying neighbors, but the town—a little village named Cintra—is so tiny she supposes no one would care for the bureaucracy of land claims anyway.

Everything inside is covered in dust, screams of disuse, but she’s spent too long on the road to do anything about it before morning. The mattress needs to be stripped. That, too, can wait. She peels off her boots and lies on her back between rubble and clutter, fully clothed, eyes wide open. Her new house is nothing more than a shell, and it seems like the perfect place for her to be.

-

There is a market in Cintra’s town square. It feels like too much effort to walk there, especially because she can hardly find anything that appeals to her, but she can’t stand smoked rabbit anymore and the frost has made it nearly impossible to go foraging in the woods. The place buzzes with life, and it feels too strange for her, after so much time in barren shelters, the people huddling together, chatting loudly about the price of apples and carrots, a stark contrast to the stilted silence of the cabin. 

The stalls are small and simple, just like everything else about this little corner of the world. Mikasa clings to her basket, old woven grass and falling apart at the seams, hunching her shoulders as if shrinking could make her go unnoticed. Mikasa circles the place twice, buys some vegetables to steam from an elderly man’s booth, and when she finally decides to leave she sees something that she swears sends the ground sliding out from under her.

A girl, young, maybe a little older than Mikasa herself. She is not very tall, not very short, her dress is plain, her hair is braided together in a simple plait. There isn’t anything particularly striking about her—except for the pronounced curve of her belly, heavy with child, and the terrible bright smile stretching across her face. A man, not very tall, not very short, follows her closely, hand in hand with a little girl pointing excitedly to the clouds. The image is lovely, taunting, mocking. Everything she always wanted, everything she will never get. She puts her hand on her own bump, so small it’s barely even there, and thinks, sickly: you will never have a family like this. Mikasa’s vision blurs at the edges, making everything gloss and shine until she’s sure it’s all a venomous fantasy.

Her stomach rolls, empty, and the old man rushes to rest a hand against her forehead. Thankfully, she had turned in time and missed the wooden cart, although the mint plants weren't so lucky. So much for blending in. “Are you well, young lady?” someone asks her.

Maybe I am cursed as well, she thinks while wiping her mouth, and the thought is so absurd and wretched she screams hoarsely, bent forward with her hands on her knees. 

She’s aware, vaguely, that the old man is looking at her with some concern—this madwoman yelling herself into near hysteria in the street, standing over a puddle of her own bile, but she can't look up, and she can't handle this, and she can't be—she can't.

Mikasa seizes her basket feebly and staggers—then walks, then runs—uphill, throat burning, lungs screaming, and she’s sure she can hear splinters of her heart spill from her chest and clatter to the dirt beneath her.

-

For a while, time passes, and Mikasa watches the days waste away, the sun and the moon taking turns to be up in the sky. She remembers thinking sunsets beautiful, breathtaking, remembers feeling overwhelmed with the colors. She doesn’t see any of that now—it just feels tired and empty and pointlessly cyclical.

-

For a while, time passes, and Mikasa lets it. That’s all she does.

-

The world, Mikasa knows, is a cruel place.

She had never bowed down to this reality. She’d always been invincible, with Eren by her side. She was dauntless, fearless, and nothing could keep her from pushing forward. She could keep going no matter how much the pain tried to keep her still.

She could keep fighting. She could keep living.

Now that he’s gone, all that’s left of that tenacity is nothing more than a memory, an echo. She’s never been so exhausted. The very thought of moving is inconceivable.

It seems it’s all catching up to her, now, like the sorrow tracked her down, wagging tail and tongue, and slipped inside the door behind her. It waits at her feet in the kitchen while she pours bitter tea down the drain, it watches in the bedroom as she throws her clothes on the mildewed floor and forgets to brush her hair again. It curls up on the pillow beside her, drools all over the sheets, wakes her with its foul breath in the morning, keeps her from getting out of bed, blocks the sunlight from coming in through the windows.

Eren was the place where she grew up, the way she learned to love, the ground she first stood tall upon, and it’s so sickening that he’s left her alone in this life with a shitty explanation she hates. And how merciless, how fitting that it is only for the lingering evidence of his existence in this world that she remains in it, too.

The world has always been cruel, and Mikasa has always known this. The difference is that now she can’t seem to find beauty no matter where she looks.

(The difference is that she doesn’t want to.)

-

Autumn dissolves fully into winter, the skies stay stormy for days at a time, and wet, sticky snow blankets the grass, hiding the world under white gauze. The coldness seeps into everything, sinks beyond her clothes, beyond her skin, deep into her bones, and makes her forget what warmth is.

-

Mikasa knows she should do something about the faulty lock on her front door. She’s been staring at it for weeks, like she’s been staring at the hole in the ceiling and the broken glass panels that used to be the windows. But she’s been just so tired, and it’s not like she’s expecting company, anyway, so she ends up forgetting about it, so much that she doesn’t even realize that the clatter in the other room could possibly be anything other than a squirrel or a hare until she hears the voices.

“... are you sure this is it? ”

“ ...’course I’m not, but the description matches damn near perfectly, and he wrote about... ”

“I don’t think there’s anyone here. Maybe they—”

Mikasa stands up, carefully, tuning her ears. Foolishly, it never occurred to her that anyone around the outskirts of Cintra could mean danger, but she did make quite a display of weakness at the marketplace not too long ago, and a wolf will always follow a blood trail. She listens for the sound, footsteps, at least two pairs of boots, heeled, leather, thudding around the place and occasionally dragging a piece of broken furniture around. Burglats, most likely, though she’s got nothing for them to steal. They should be put off by the mess, distracted. Enough for her to decide if she’ll slip out of the window or stand her ground. She doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t have the energy to, but where would she even go? Which direction would she even run to?

Don’t roll over, something whispers in the back of her mind, angry. Instinctive. Stand up. If not for you, for your child. Mikasa picks up a slab of wood from the ground, slithering out of the bedroom, and steps carefully around the spots where she knows the floorboard will creak (which is pretty much, well, everywhere). She draws strength from where she doesn’t possess it, and prepares to strike. Inhales: one, two—

“Eren?”

It’s all it takes for the fight to drain out of her. She lowers her weapon, and thinks, enough.

“Mikasa,” the other voice tries, careful, familiar. The sound of her own name shouldn’t be able to pack such a punch, but she feels breathless anyway. “Are you in here?”

The wood falls from her hands like something slippery. It lands with a soft thud that is so deafening, that makes every thought foggy in the worst way possible. Before she can think better about it, Mikasa steps into the light.

In the washed out hue of winter, Jean Kirschtein and Connie Springer seem faded as spectres, ghosts from a life she killed long ago. It's been an eternity, but they look exactly the same—except that Connie has a pair of spectacles resting atop of his nose bridge and Jean’s hair is a little longer and lighter than she remembers. She, however, is fairly sure that she looks as tired as she feels, every year gone by etched into her face, weighing down her shoulders. Her clothes are wrinkled and worn and her eyes are sunken shadows, the same dead grey as the sky over everything.

“How,” she makes a noise, weak and wheezing, so unlike her—or would be. She doesn’t know what she’s really like anymore. Maybe this cracked sound is the true reflection of what she has become. Maybe it’s exactly like her. “How did you find me?”

“Mikasa,” Jean breathes out, rigid and shocked and startled like he’s never seen her before. Not like this, he hasn’t.

Connie looks about the same, but he is quicker to recover. “We found this in Shiganshina,” he says, reaching inside the inner pocket of his green trench coat, the Wings crest getting scrunched up about his shoulder. He takes out a yellow envelope, slightly creased and stained.

I’ll send letters, Armin’s voice rings in her mind. It’s so absurd she wants to—something. Mikasa doesn’t move a muscle. When Connie realizes she won’t relieve him of it, he puts the envelope down on the table. “From—”

“Did you read it?”

“Of course we did,” he says, and she feels the anger rise up within her once again.

“That’s private,” she bites out. Mikasa looks at the letter like maybe she can read it through the envelope. It says to Eren and Mikasa in Armin’s pretty cursive on the back, and it takes her everything to keep her eyes from watering again. 

“That’s correspondence from a fugitive to two deserters,” Jean’s calm, collected tone reminds her like a slap to the face. Did you forget?  

“Yeah, about that—one found, one to go. Where’s Eren?” Connie asks, and it’s just a bit harsh. The bitterness has dimmed out with the years that passed, but Mikasa knows Connie blamed Eren for Sasha’s death, and for a while he had resented her for not doing the same. “Jaeger! You can come out now!” he shouts, and the disturbance in the stilted air rattles the entire structure of the house. 

“He’s not here.”

“Then where? ” Connie prods, and she doesn’t answer, can’t answer, and he slams his palm on the table. “It’s not that hard a question, damn it, Mika—”

Jean reaches out to touch his shoulder, “Connie—” 

“He’s dead.”

In the aftermath of her words, the entire world feels like it’s holding its breath. It’s the first time she’s said it out loud. 

“Oh.” Connie says. He shrugs away from Jean’s hand, running a hand through his shaved head. Connie blinks, and again, and loosens the bolo tie around his neck. “Oh,” pursing his lips, eyes darting anywhere but her direction. “I’m sorry,” and he turns around slowly, and he slips out the door, leaving it slightly ajar behind him.

Mikasa exhales slowly, closing her eyes. Counts to three, then to five. The moment drags on. Painful. He’s dead. There. She’s said it. Dead, not gone. Denial, anger, depression, she’s been through them all. Dead. How about that for acceptance? How about that for grieving?

“Mikasa…” The sound of Jean’s voice startles her, like she had forgotten he was still in the room with her. “I’m so sorry.”

She doesn’t have anything to say to that. Yes. Thank you. I’m fucking sorry too. None would get them anywhere. She nods. It’s years before he speaks again, or it feels like it.

“Are you going to stay here?” 

Mikasa frowns. The question sprouts in her mind again: where would she even go? She doesn’t voice it, but Jean seems to hear it anyway. “You could come back with us, you know.”

“Come back… to the military?” She frowns. She’s a deserter, like he’d said before, a criminal. For a second, she wonders if he’s trying to trick her into coming with them so she can be charged for treason and—and what? What would he get out of it? A medal? A promotion for selling her out?

“You don’t have to go through this alone, Mikasa.” He says, an attempt at reassurance. “You’re still the best soldier they’ve trained in years. A pardon shouldn’t be too hard to get. The Queen would take your side, and Connie and I...” Jean scratches the back of his neck and catches his bottom lip between his teeth as if contemplating a strategy, and she feels nauseous at her previous thoughts.

Mikasa tries to imagine herself, green uniform, lustrous boots, groomed hair, standing tall, carrying out orders. The vision is created from memories, but it feels so far-fetched that it could very well be a delusion. “I can’t come back,” she says. “Even if I wanted to.” 

Jean’s expression falls, morphing into something like… disappointment? Mikasa can’t tell. “Right,” he nods, shoulders a little hunched like he is suddenly conscious of his own size. It doesn’t feel right, but, lately, what ever does? “Don’t worry,” Jean tells her. “We won’t rat you out.”

“No—Jean. I can’t.” Mikasa doesn’t owe him an explanation, but a sudden need to give him one overcomes her. To make the rest of the nightmare real, face the agonizing truth at last. She unbuttons her jacket slowly, counting three, five, and shrugs out of it all at once. The cold makes the hair on her arms stand up in protest as the fabric pools on the floor around her ankles, revealing the pronounced curve of her stomach beneath her shirt. It’s only by a miracle that her voice does not crack. “I’m pregnant.”

Mikasa catches the moment when Jean’s entire body goes stiff and his eyes widen, an echo of the expression he’d worn the moment he first saw her after years, just moments ago. His lips part. Softly. A sharp inhale follows. She considers picking up the jacket for a shield, but decides against it, inert, eyes trained firmly on the embroidered crest on his breast. 

“How far along are you?”

Mikasa blinks. She’s not sure what reaction she had been expecting. “I don’t know,” she says, truthfully. “Maybe three months, I think. Maybe four.”

“Okay. Okay.” He starts pacing, looking up and down. A hand comes up to scratch the back of his neck, his chin, and then falls easily to his hip. The other follows suit. “So the child should be here by next autumn.”

“Yes. If I’m right,” she supplies, but it doesn’t seem like he’s listening.

“Which means that you would be by yourself with a newborn in the winter. In this place.” Jean tests his weight on the log that divides the kitchen and the living room. It creaks audibly, and for a second Mikasa is afraid he might go through it, but it holds—a miracle, really. Splinters fall at his feet from the ceiling. “That won’t do.”

Mikasa feels her cheeks burn in frustration. “You don’t have to worry about that,” she says, because it’s really none of his business. He knocks on the wall, pondering, and she crosses her arms over her chest defensively. “I’ll figure it out.”

Finally, Jean turns around to face her. Is it confusion, the crease between his eyebrows? Is it determination, in the set of his shoulders? Pity, in the downturn of his lips? Even standing right in front of her, he feels as far away and as blurry as her own image in her mind, made of memories that don’t seem to belong to her anymore.

“Mikasa, I told you,” he says, and his voice rings clear as day. Their eyes meet, and this time she holds his gaze. Compassion, Mikasa realizes. Above all else, what takes over his features is compassion. “You don’t have to go through this alone.”

-

Connie crosses his arms. "Huh." His gaze flickers to her stomach, and he eyes her critically. He tilts his head, purses his lips, and meets her eyes at last. His eyes are swollen, and his nose is a little red, but his tone is much softer this time, more like the boy she remembers from before, from long ago. "Are you sure you haven't just put on some pudge?"

(Jean smacks him in the back of his head, and the argument that follows is so surreal and at the same time so tangible Mikasa wants them to shut up and to keep talking forever, she wants to listen and join and scream and hug them so tight she can’t hold her tears back anymore.)

-

Mikasa isn’t exactly the most gracious host, but the boys don’t seem to mind. They have all slept in worse places, she supposes, or at least places with the same degree of sordidness as her grimy living room. Dinner is served at the fireplace, a thin broth made from bruised vegetables and food rations they had to spare. They eat quietly, sitting on the floor, and Mikasa pretends not to notice Connie’s disbelieving glances at her stomach, as though he’s waiting for the rest of her pregnancy to unfold before they finish their supper. The last time she’d had so much company for a meal was before Armin had left, and the realization makes the letter tucked inside her inner pocket weigh a thousand pounds. She doesn’t dare look at it, not yet.

They turn in early, because they are expected in Stohess in two days' time. But Mikasa can’t seem to keep her eyes shut, tosses and turns restlessly until she gives in to the urge to move. Maybe to see if they were really still there, she tip toes carefully out of her bedroom.

Connie is tucked safely inside his sleeping bag, facing the ceiling and snoring mildly, but the spot by his side is empty; Jean is nowhere to be found in the house. Mikasa peeks through the window-hole and finds him sitting on the grass outside, head between his knees. She approaches him quietly, and when he turns his face in her direction, ash falls from the burned out cigarette between his lips.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she says, voice too loud in the still night, and immediately realizes how stupid she sounds. Of course she didn’t know he smoked. Does she even have any right to be important to this man still, after so long apart? And Connie, to; it’s not like she knows any more about their lives than what the military section of the morning paper has been able to tell her over the years, which is close to nothing.

“I don’t,” Jean says, his face like child who knows he’s been caught out. “Not anymore. I quit, last year. It's just—Armin is gone, and, god, Eren, and you are…” He sighs, and rubs the crease between his brows. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“I know.”

Jean nudges the butt of the cigarette with his thumb once, twice. His knee is sprinkled with little flecks of grey. “Don’t tell Connie. Please. He’ll be pissed.” 

“Okay.” Mikasa says. “I won’t.” She takes a step closer. Her boot crushes a mound of frozen leaves with a crunch, and she eases down beside him, the fabric of her skirt turning cool and damp where her knees meet the ground. The night sky hangs low. There are no stars above them, and the moon is trapped behind the heavy clouds. Even the creatures of the wood seem to be hiding, the occasional cricket betraying the illusion of solitude.

"Have you thought about names?" Jean asks softly, breaking the quiet.

"No," she says. Her voice wavers pathetically. "I haven’t thought about—about anything. I can’t think about it."

“Right.”

"It’s happening, though, and I don't know what to do about it. I don't know how I’m supposed to handle it. I’m losing my mind, Jean.” She lets it all out in a breath that doesn’t quite manage to come back to her lungs.

“I’m sorry we can’t stay longer, this time. Our business in Stohess shouldn’t take too long, I’m hoping. But we’ll be back—”

“Why?” Mikasa blurts out, a little brisk.

He shakes his head, looking somewhere beyond the trees. “Diplomatic meetings can get real messy. We’ve had the damn armistice settled for a while, but you know how those guys are,” he huffs dramatically.

“No, why?” Mikasa tries again, desperation slipping through the crack in her voice, “Why come back?”

“Mikasa…” Jean sighs, his shoulders falling, as if  he can’t believe she’s asking. As if it’s obvious. As if this kind of situation has some sort of protocol to be followed. “We’ve lost too many people already. We have to stick together.”

There’s a word for how she’s feeling. For the way her chest feels like it's crushing her lungs, trapping her inside. Tears build up along her lash line but refuse to fall, blocking her vision. I left you, she thinks. I abandoned you when you were grieving and broken and I was supposed to have your back. I left you to fight this war on your own. I deserted to go live a life I thought I wanted and I don’t regret it at all. I don’t regret running away and leaving you to pick up your own pieces, can’t you see? Mikasa screams in her own mind, for once grateful that she hasn’t the strength to conjure up words. Why would you help me pick up mine?

“Mikasa,” he says, turning his body to her, propped up in one arm. The other begins to move as if to comfort her, but he seems to decide against it. She doesn’t know what she would have preferred. “Mikasa, you’re going to make it through this.”

“How?” She demands. “How can you know that? How could you ever know that? I don’t—I can’t—”

“I just know,” Jean interrupts. “Or I believe it. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.” His voice is calm, steady. He should sound insane for saying something so absurd about after seeing the state she’s in, just a shadow of a person, the rough shape of human, but Mikasa is so tired and she wants to believe him so badly. She decides that she will, just for tonight, just for right now. She lets his certainty push away the loathing and doubt that seemed to have grown inside her like useless, extra organs. She doesn’t really make sense of the words he says next, but she tries to match her raspy breathing to their rhythm. It helps. “And really, the place is a little beat up, but it’s just a bit of a fixer upper. It’ll be just like the old days. Except, well, no titans, thank fucking god. Just sweeping.”

She misses the joke, focused on her pounding heart and the smoothness of his voice, but it seems very fitting that he would try to cheer her up in a moment like this, or maybe he just could tell exactly what she needs to hear. Either way, the effect works, so much that she feels as if his words physically ground her, even though he doesn’t reach for her again.

-

They leave before morning, and Mikasa is alone again. 

It’s a strange feeling, like waking up from a dream that felt so real you can’t be sure it wasn’t, or thinking back to something that feels so distant that you can’t be sure you didn’t dream it. There is no evidence of them ever being in the house with her other than an empty can of beans forgotten by the hearth and cigarette ash scattered over the floorboards, but even that makes her doubt sometimes. Mikasa finds herself perched on the windowframe waiting for some kind of sign that it had happened, that they would come back, that they wouldn’t give up on her. It’s a wretched kind of hope, surrounded by the guilt of her own selfishness.

She looks outside and sees nothing, and it’s like she never really left Shiganshina after all.

She thinks, really, it might be just about what she deserves.

When she finally hears the sound of beating hooves, her heart threatens to escape her body as she leaps out the front door. But coming up the hill there is only one horse, and its rider is neither Jean nor Connie. Instead, Levi Ackerman comes into vision, somber and pale, every bit the fearsome Captain who had starred town gossip in her youth and who later had shaped her into something nearly as formidable.

“Long time no see, Mikasa,” he says, and the world comes to a halt. Maybe the haunted thing she wanted to leave behind had been herself all along. He probably notices the way her whole body goes stiff with his words. Levi waves a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to drag you back."

He remains mounted on his horse, waiting for some kind of reaction. Out of spite or shock or both, Mikasa does not give him one, but his stillness grows progressively unnerving. “What are you here for, then?” 

“Kirschtein and Springer got held back in Sina. It’ll be a while before they can come down again. They told me what happened,” he says. “About Arlert and Jaeger. And, well,”  he gives her swollen stomach a pointed look, and Mikasa brings her hands to it defensively before she can stop herself. 

“What’s it to you?” 

It takes him a moment to speak, like he’s choosing his words carefully, or maybe considering the question. What the hell is it to him? Why would he bother coming all the way here, personally, just to send her a message? On orders from his subordinates, of all people? The very notion is absurd—Humanity’s Strongest is no courrier.

“Erwin is dead,” he begins, and nothing betrays his steady tone. “Hange is dead. You… are the only person who’s left. Of my—family. I know we’ve never been close, but I… I’d like to be here for you. For both of you. If you'll let me.”

Levi adjusts his grip on the reins, and when he flexes his fingers Mikasa catches a glimpse of his reddened palms, angry raw patches where the leather notches the skin. He must have spent days riding alone, only to find a distant cousin he hasn’t seen in years. The only one left. We’ve lost too many people already. 

Mikasa presses her lips together, swallows, and her nod is more than understanding—it's gratitude.

-

Mikasa can tell Levi is disgusted with the state of the place as soon as she opens the door for him, and he doesn’t bother pretending for her sake. She’s lived here for months now, but the lock and the windowglass are not the only things she never found the will to fix. She finds it in herself to be the littlest bit embarrassed by it, and she’s thankful she’s at least wearing a dress that’s not stained or full of holes. 

He inspects the cluttered rooms, probably wondering how in hell they could ever possibly be related, and then he pulls a strip of white cloth from his pocket and asks:

“Do you even own a broom?”

-

There’s a lot of debris, broken pots and water damage upon closer inspection. There’s a sizable hole in the roof, charred edges like fire. They have their work cut out for them, but it’s really not as bad as Mikasa had originally thought.

They take down the torn curtains, throw out the rubble, sweep the glass from the floor and scrub it until it shines. Levi soaks the cutlery in vinegar to get rid of the rust (Mikasa doesn’t know how he knows to do that, but she doesn’t dare question him either) and leaves the place smelling like pungent acid. 

Levi works efficiently and methodically, and Mikasa does her best to keep up with his pace, throwing herself into the task and following his commands like she used to when she was fifteen and still eager to prove herself. It’s challenging at first; she hasn’t moved this much in months, but soon her body wakes, remembers, and by nightfall the place is predominantly clear of junk, and it makes her feel better, if only marginally.

-

The broken mirror over the bathroom sink. 

Mikasa has avoided it since the moment she moved into the house. Partly because it was covered in cobwebs, and though she disliked their presence, the nuisance just wasn’t enough to make her get rid of them. Mostly because she was scared of what it would show her.

She’s not afraid of what Levi will think if she just leaves it for him to clean (she figures he would actually rather she did), but Mikasa decides it’s time. She lifts her head slowly, pulls the webbing back, and there she is. It's been a very long time since she last saw herself. 

Two grey eyes gaze back at her, empty. Her mouth is small and crooked, like a child about to cry. The cracks that split the glass in the middle break her face in two. Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead. Something living that doesn’t remember it’s alive. She can’t tell which is the right one. There are purple bruises under her eyes, vein visible under pale skin. Black hair brushes her jawbone in a nest of tangles and mats, horrible knots that trap her fingers then she tries to undo them. Mikasa pulls out a shard and cuts them off.

Levi does not make a face when he sees her in the morning. He doesn’t stare at her like she’s crazy. He simply sighs, pulls out the least wobbly chair he can find, takes out a pair of silver scissors from his carrier (because apparently he had come prepared for just about anything) and he wordlessly evens out the length of the butchered strands for her. He makes tea, serves on his travel tin cup, and the faint metallic taste in the back of her throat is oddly comforting.

The rest of the day is spent sorting out the broken furniture that can be salvaged from the garbage. It’s not a lot: a pendulum clock, a bentwood rocker that’s slightly off balance, the neglected garden table. Other than that the pile of scraps is mostly a collection of knick knacks—an ugly little ragdoll, one button eye missing, a set of broken pottery figurines that would have probably been rude if pieces weren’t missing, an old game set with black paint fading and peeling at the edges.

“It’s a board,” Levi tells her when he catches her staring at it. “For chess.”

“Chess?”

“The game with the pieces. Kings and pawns,” he snorts, pausing his scavenging. “The Commander’s favorite.”

“I know what chess is.”

“Aren’t you one smart cookie,” Levi deadpans. 

Mikasa ignores the jab. “Hange liked chess?”

“Hange liked card games. Blackjack, specifically, despite them being shit at it,” he notes. “Erwin liked chess.”

“Oh,” she says. All she knows about chess is that it is a game of strategy and tactics, and all she knows about their late Commander is that he excelled in just that.

She doesn’t expect him to keep going, because he never has before, but Levi takes the board from her hands and brushes the dust from its surface. “I used to think it was stupid. Or Erwin was a pretentious asshole. I was right, but, well.” He grimaces at his own dirty palm, rubs it on his makeshift apron. “It grows on you over time.”

“You play?”

“Tch, try not to sound too surprised, kid.” His expression of displeased neutrality does not falter.

“No,” Mikasa corrects, strangely conscious of her own rusty manners, “it’s just… I never have.” 

“You’re not missing out on much.” Levi shrugs a shoulder, but he puts the board aside and kicks at something at the bottom of the pile, digging through the odds and ends with the tip of his boot. “Let’s see if we find the pieces.”

-

They do, at least the majority of the black. Pottery figurines that are too big for the square are placed in lieu of the white king and queen and bishop. She keeps the rest of them, just in case, and the rugged doll as well. It turns out that she’d been right to sound surprised that Levi knew chess, even if she hadn’t meant to at the time, because, well, he doesn’t.

“It's your go,” Levi says as he takes her rook from the board. Or she thinks it’s the rook; Levi hadn’t sounded too sure when explaining what each one was and how it could move, and the piece is really more stump than anything. Mikasa analyses her remaining possibilities.

“I thought pawns only moved one square at a time?”

“Well, sometimes they move two.” Levi puts the rook with the other pieces he’s taken from her set. He looks peeved that the tarnished wood disrupts the harmony of his carefully coordinated line, the little pieces arranged in descending order of size. 

“Why?”

“Because they feel like it,” he says, and that's that.

She decides on the horse—they call it the knight, hell if I know why, that’s a damn horse if I ever saw one—, her favorite piece because she can skip over the others, moving it in an ‘L’ pattern. Mikasa takes a sip of her tea. She looks at Levi, doing the same, but looking at the board, a little puzzled. He steals a glance at her over his cup and frowns.

“Look, maybe I’m a little rusty. Erwin was my last opponent, it’s not like I’ve got time to spare to practice this thing.”

Mikasa throws her hands up as if saying, I’m not judging, because she really isn’t. Levi must have well over ten years of service, and he isn’t exactly the kind of Captain who could take weekends off. The thought morphs into another in her mind. “Won’t they get suspicious? If they realize you three keep coming here?”

“As far as they’re concerned, Jaeger is dead. Arlert escaped,” he says, and anyone else might have tact, but Levi keeps it simple and blunt. Mikasa tries not to take offence at it. “The titans are lost, nothing they can do about it but wait until some unsuspecting bastard gets a papercut in and blows up a neighborhood in a few years,” Levi explains, and because he doesn’t smile, Mikasa can’t tell if he’s joking. “In the meantime, the military has better things to do than chase down a widow, kid.”

“I was never legally married,” she says, for no reason other than that she still can’t think of herself as a widow. Eren’s widow. It tastes wrong in her mouth. Something like ash. She puts the cup to her lips again. “It was Maria Azumabito and Eric Kruger who were united in holy matrimony according to any official certificate that matters.” Mikasa clarifies, moves a pawn thoughtlessly on the board, looks down at her tea. “Technically, she’s the abandoned wife.” 

It’s a joke on something darker. She’s still angry with him, if not for dying, for leaving her behind. Mikasa knows he did it to spare her the pain of seeing him take his last breath. Most days she's grateful. Some she wishes she'd strangled him herself. Levi, on the other side of the board, looks like he can’t decide on whether to be confused by her statement or to pity her denial. 

“You loved him, you had a life with him,” he says, his voice without inflection, even and calm, and the look he gives her is a little too understanding. “You shared his bed. You were married in every way that matters.”

It gets very quiet after that. Levi keeps his eyes fixed on her shoulder, silent. He's not looking at her, she realises. He's looking through her. Remembering something. Erwin was my last opponent, she remembers him saying, and thinks, oh. His lips part, slightly, and Mikasa doesn’t move a muscle, afraid she’ll scare him out of revealing what it is that has taken his mind hostage. Levi shakes his head, inhaling sharply, and whatever moment Mikasa was expecting passes.

He reaches for his king piece, and she does not question him any further on the subject, tucks the realization in the back of her mind. She goes back to staring at her cup of tea—it’s cool now, the steam no longer coming up in smokey waves, and she has half a mind to pour another just so she can watch it cool all over again, but she knows Levi wouldn’t tolerate that, and she’d rather not test the limits of his courtesy.

“By the way,” Levi clears his throat loudly. “The names are shit and too on the nose. It’s a miracle no one found you before.”

Mikasa laughs at that, because it’s true. It feels strange. She doesn’t remember the last time she laughed. She doesn’t think Levi realizes he’s the first one who’s made her laugh in a while.

“Your go,” he says, giving the game his undivided attention once more. She picks up her queen, and makes a move.

-

Apparently, one of the privileges of the High Ranks is that you get more free time than you’d ever know what to do with, Jean tells her when he shows up alone with a cart full of lumber attached to his horse. 

It’s really not that surprising to her that he made it to the High Ranks, as young as he is, considering that he’d been recently promoted to Commanding Officer before she left. Mikasa remembers a conversation with Armin many years ago, when he’d said that if anyone in their group could ever get to the top, it was Jean. As usual, Armin had been right.

Connie was still caught up in officer duties back in Sina, but Jean figured they should get started on renovations while the weather is still cool, lest they have to do the harder labor under the blazing summer heat. Hence, the lumber. She’s a little mortified when she thinks of how much that must have cost, but Jean assures her that it’s fine, everyone is pitching in—everyone meaning him, Levi and Connie, that is. She swears to herself that she will pay them every penny back once she’s able to. In the meantime, they’ll fix the well, change the windowglass, put up a fence.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Mikasa asks as Jean fumbles with strings and battleboards, unloading the cart. 

“‘Course I do. I mean—sort of. I, uh, supervised a housing project in Krolva District a while back. Thought it was the most boring assignment I could possibly get. Who knew it could come in handy, right?” He pauses his work to roll up the sleeves of his shirt. “And we did build that railway, all those years ago.” 

Fair enough, Mikasa decides. It’s not like she’s in a position to question his competence, anyway. “So what next?”

They’ve marked the posts with stakes surrounding the perimeter, creating a garden-like zone around the house—spacious enough that the kid will have a nice area to play out, but not so much that she could lose sight of them once they begin to walk, according to Jean. Mikasa is grateful that he had thought this through, but also mildly annoyed that she didn't think of it first.

“The next step is digging post holes,” he says, but he frowns when she goes for the shovel, as if her actions are not in line with his instructions. “Mikasa, you don’t have to—you should be resting—”

“No.” Mikasa shakes her head. “You said it yourself, we need it done before the weather gets warmer. It’s not a one person job, and I built that railway right next to you.” Jean looks about to protest, so she speaks before he has a chance to. “Besides, I’m pregnant, not crippled. If anything, I have extra limbs.”

For a second he just looks at her, a little bewildered, maybe. His laughter, when it comes, sounds strange to her ears. It’s been far too long since she’s heard it. Jean puts his hands up in surrender. “Alright, fine. But don’t overwork yourself. Stop anytime you need to.” He takes a shovel for himself, sighing, the smile lingering in the corners of his lips.

It’s not long before she feels her body tiring out. Keeping up with Levi had been somewhat of a struggle, and judging by his pace Jean seems to be determined to finish digging before nightfall. One thing she never had to worry about was her inability to catch up to anyone, and it’s so viscerally frustrating to see herself falling behind despite her best efforts. Jean did say to stop anytime, but she finds herself too embarrassed, or too prideful, to actually acknowledge her weakness.

Mikasa watches him work between the short pauses she tries to take as discreetly as possible. The moment she had first seen him, she had thought he looked the same as he did before she left, but now she finds herself noticing the subtle changes in his appearance. At some point, Jean had cast off his shirt, exposing scarred skin glistening with sweat. She recognizes some of them—even has a few of her own that match—, but there’s a considerable amount of fresher-looking marks.

He seems impossibly taller, too, she notices when he turns her way, like he’s grown over the years, filled out his then lanky frame and grown into his shoulders. Mikasa quickly grabs her shovel and tries to pretend she’d been digging the whole time. She hears his heavy breathing and the rustling of grass before he comes into her peripheral vision, running a hand through his hair, shirt slinged over his shoulder.

“Maybe,” he says, sounding as breathless as she feels, “maybe we should take a break?”

His jaw looks broader, she thinks, but can’t be really sure because of the stubble—yet another novelty. “Okay,” she nods and shrugs in one, feigning nonchalance, “If you want.”

They move their tools to the shed in her soon-to-be backyard, and take their food to the woods for shade. Mikasa leads them to the stream of running water she found so they can quench their thirst, but Jean is curious to see where it goes. She doesn’t feel like walking any further, but doesn’t feel like objecting, either, so she trails behind him until they get to the spot where the water flows into a pond, and is very glad that she did when she slumps against the willow tree by the waterbed, eyes blissfully shut.

He tells her he’ll cool off in the water for a minute, Mikasa feels her body slacking, the stiff muscles relaxing. The gurgling of the creek, the smell of dew. A very nice place to fall asleep. She’ll thank Jean for this later, she decides, content.

Her peace is interrupted suddenly by a screech, and all that serenity seems to drain from her body, jolting awake when Jean waddles desperately out of the pond, all bunched up like a threatened cat. 

“What happened?” She demands, hands reflexively bracing her stomach.

“The damn frog,” he wheezes, scowling. “It was on my shoulder. It was on my skin, goddamn, that’s disgusting, argh.” Jean shrugs frantically as if the animal is still clinging to him.

Mikasa doesn’t see what is so shocking about the whole situation. What did he expect? As a species, frogs live near water bodies. “Where is it?” 

Jean strides to sit beside her on the grass. “There,” he points.

“That’s not a frog,” Mikasa says. Jean frowns. “It’s a toad,” she explains. “Frogs have long legs. Longer than their head and body. They’re meant for hopping. Toads have shorter legs. See? They prefer to crawl.”

As if to prove her point, the toad saunters lazily out of the pond. Jean’s mouth curls down in a way that is almost comical, and he leans back so that he is slightly behind her. “How do you know that?” he asks, and someone else might have sounded irked, but his voice only betrays genuine curiosity.

Mikasa could tell him that when she was a little girl, still small and scared of her own shadow, a frog had found its way inside her new bedroom in her new house, and when she had started crying Eren had come dragging his mother through the door because he didn’t know what to do. She could tell him how Carla Jaeger had smiled, how she had smoothed Mikasa’s hair and explained how the slimy little creature was lost and just trying to hop its way back home. 

Look how it moves, Mikasa! Eren, come closer, don’t be afraid, she had said, pointing at its long limbs, and the three had watched as the frog leaped out the window and disappeared among the bushes in the garden. Where will it go? Mikasa had asked. Maybe it will hop over Wall Maria, Eren had supplied, and get eaten by titans. No, Carla had said, the little frog’s home is by the river, and it will stay safe inside the Wall with his family, just like us.

Mikasa could tell him that. 

But there are too many ghosts in the story, now, and she doesn’t trust herself not to be trapped in the memory, that grey, fogged space between the past and the present. It is always so easy to slip away, and she is so weary of being alone in phantom houses.

“It’s common knowledge,” she says instead. Her voice trembles when she does, and they both pretend it didn’t. Jean offers her his arm silently to help her up. His skin is cool when she takes it, and Mikasa has a sudden urge to grab his hand and squeeze it between her own, to feel the reality of it. She doesn’t do that, either. “Let’s get back to work.”

-

Mikasa had seen the cat lurking around the house in the first few days after she arrived. 

She had tried to approach the bedraggled, skittish creature once, and it had bolted into the wild the moment it saw her move. She never saw it again, up until the day it followed her from the woods and waltzed through the front door. Mikasa doesn’t give it much thought when it flees again, but she’s surprised to find it simply stalking a lizard by the fence. She decides to keep it, or rather, it decides to keep her, purring at her between bites of bacon and stretching to rub its head on her knee. 

The cat seems to lose interest in Mikasa as soon as it meets Levi, though, who in turn absolutely hates the poor animal. It makes him sneeze, leaves hair everywhere, and it is, as he puts it, fucking ugly. Mikasa shrugs at that. She had looked far worse when he had found her and Levi had been fine with it; she’s sure that he’ll make his peace with this, too.

Levi doesn’t talk a lot, aside from swearing at the cat whenever it comes close to him. Mikasa doesn’t really mind; she finds enough comfort in simply knowing there’s another person with her in the house, but she likes it best when he does. 

Unsurprisingly, it is not much that Levi reveals. She knows from folk-talk that he was born Underground, and that he used to be a thug or a hitman or a thief or a bandit. Mikasa is half-curious about the truth behind the stories, but she doesn’t ask more out of respect than out of politeness.

She thinks the other stories she gets are better anyway, the ones he chooses to share over tea by the fireplace; anecdotes about Hange that sound too ludicrous to be untrue, little snippets of missions with his old squad that she listens to earnestly, and some from the 104th graduates that she remembers herself, even manages to contribute to the narrative occasionally.

The stories Mikasa looks forward to the most, however, are the ones he has about Erwin. Levi looks different whenever he speaks of him—younger, maybe, despite the fact that Levi has always looked young for his age. His skin seems mostly unmarked by time, save for battle scars, but the way his face gets when he’s remembering the late Commander makes Mikasa think that he might have crows feet around his eyes, if he ever made it a habit to smile.

“Before we left for Shiganshina, I told him I would break his legs.” Levi tells her one day, feeding wood to the flame. “He kept going on with his shitty, noble excuses. Tch,” he shakes his head. “I was going to do it, hell, I knew exactly how I’d go about it. But he talked me out of it, the bastard, of course he did. He wanted to see the fucking basement too damn bad. The man could have been a novelist, the way he was with words. Or some cult leader.” As usual, he doesn’t smile when he says it, but Mikasa is getting better at telling when he makes a joke. Not many occasions, but still. “Like those preachers, from the church. Ha. Picture that.”

Mikasa scoots closer, to hear him better and to be closer to the fire, crackling and jumping like a wild thing in the grate like it wants to greet the burn tucked away behind her breastbone. Levi absently stirs it with the iron stick.

“I hated him for it, then. Hated myself,” he clicks his teeth, shakes his head. “But he made his choice, so I had to make mine.” 

Mikasa remembers that moment. The rooftop, the rubble of her hometown, fire, smoke. The sheer horror of it all. The way she had attacked him, her Captain, chain of command be damned, and forced his hand, put her blade to his throat, screamed down at his bloodstained face. At the time, she could only think of Armin and Eren. She doesn’t really have an apology for that, but she knows Levi doesn’t expect one, wouldn’t want one.

Mikasa never thought about how selfless Levi had been when he had let Erwin go. Or maybe how selfish. Would she have been able to let Eren go, had she been the one forced to make a choice? She doesn’t think she would. She thinks Eren wouldn’t think so, either. 

She wants to hate him, even thinks she might have for a while, but the best she can really manage now is resentment. Eren didn’t choose his fate, he never had a choice to begin with, and she can at least hate that. But even resentment is an ugly thing, and it breaks her in ways that would be interesting if she was one of Hange’s experiments. There’s too much of it inside her, suffocating; the sheer bitterness in her chest smothering her so that she tears at the scarf around her neck and flings it at the grate in a fit of rage.

It’s absolutely stupid of her, she knows, to be burning clothing in the winter when she barely has any to spare. She watches a fiery tongue lap at the fabric for a second before realizing what she’s done and sticking her hand among the flames to pull it back. There’s heat and a sharp, prickly pain. Pins and needles.

Mikasa cries until she can't breathe, and Levi has to push his fingers into her mouth to force her jaw open. She bites, drawing blood, and her head pounds until she is sick.

Breathe, he says.

I can’t, she tells him.

I know, his voice quiet. Try.

The hell you know? The hell you think you know? she thinks, even though she knows Levi is in truth the only person in this world who could possibly understand what she’s going through, and somehow that makes it all the worse.

“How did you survive it?” Mikasa croaks once the air is back inside her lungs.

Levi takes a long time to find his voice, and even longer to meet her eyes, the slight crease between his brows the only indication he had heard her. He lifts her wrist, moving her hand, and the next moment, the pain seems to flare unbearably. 

“Same way I always have,” he says. “Out of spite. Out of instinct. Tch,” Levi mutters, “this will help.”

He dips her hand in a pail of cool water. True to his word, a moment later the pain begins to soften. Mikasa swallows a pitiful whimper. “What if there’s none of that left inside me?”

“You’re still here, aren’t you?”

Mikasa stares at the fire. Isn’t she? Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Levi pull out the scorched bits of her scarf and fold whatever of it that can be salvaged in a neat square. After a moment, he slips his hand inside his coat, looks for something in his inner pocket. He pulls out a bolo tie, green, thoroughly polished, seeming well taken care of except for the crack on the side. Erwin’s, he doesn’t say, but she knows.

“I smashed it under the heel of my boot,” Levi explains. His nostrils flare imperceptibly. Almost. “I cried after I did it. It’s no great shame,” he says, but the words come out like a confession. Mikasa realizes then she’s not the only one who is haunted. The thought doesn’t bring her any comfort, but in that moment she feels a strange sort of... not tenderness, exactly. Kinship, is the word. 

He takes in a lungful before speaking again, tucking the broken amulet back in his breast.

“I find… these small meanings, I guess. They don’t always last. It still clings to my bones. But they get me by.” Levi purses his lips. “I like cleaning. Washing myself. Creating some order. Making tea.” His mouth twists in what could have been a grin if it weren’t so sharp, “Chess.”

“You’re terrible at chess.” Mikasa wipes her cheeks.

“Yeah, well, so are you,” he snickers, a little taunting, but there’s no real bite to it.

She snorts at that, ignoring the sharp, slicing pain crawling up her arm. “I guess it runs in the family.” 

Levi’s eyes widen just slightly. He probes at his gums with the tip of his tongue, nodding. Stunned, she'd say, if she didn't know better. The night’s turned cold, but he flings back the drapes and throws the window wide. The air is biting, stings at her cheeks and her wet eyes, but it makes the knot in her stomach dissipate, if just by a little bit, and helps lessen the feeling like an ice-cold needle had been pushed through her palm. Breathe deep, and let the wind chase the ghosts away.

-

Levi tends to her hand, but he fetches a healer from the village because the way Mikasa has been coughing is starting to freak him the fuck out. He tries blaming it on the beast—the cat—, but it turns out to be just a common cold. The healer fusses over the meat in her bones—the lack of it—and states that she only ever caught it in the first place because her body is weak and underweight. 

“It could be fatal in your condition,” the woman tells her, one eyebrow raised like it wants to greet her hairline, “both for you and for the child.”

Mikasa feels the scolding heating up her cheeks in embarrassment and guilt. Her child is not even born, and already she is a terrible mother. Mikasa had had two mothers, and both had been taken from her too soon, like too many other people. There is so much she could have learned from them. The thought makes her want to curl up in her despair all over again.

The healer inspects the injury in her hand while she’s at it, reluctantly compliments Levi on his work, sets out two vials of strange-looking ointment for the scarring and gives them instructions for its care before riding back to town. Levi packs to leave soon after. He’s set up camp in the living room, bare, save for his sleeping sack, but clean to his satisfaction.

Mikasa watches him smooth out invisible crease lines in his spare shirt. "Think it will get infected?" She asks, conversationally. He folds it into a neat square, and then a smaller one to fit inside his carrier.

"There's a high chance, especially with a burn like that."

"Thanks. You're so reassuring."

"It'll probably be fine." Levi waves a hand dismissively and looks up. "Let me see."

Mikasa hesitates for a moment, then holds her hand out, not looking at him. It's a cherry-red color, raw-looking and bloody.

"Feel sick?" he asks, grasping her wrist and turning her hand slightly.

She sighs. "Just the usual."

"Headache? Fever? Body aches?"

"No.”

"No signs of infection, then. Watch out for red streaks appearing around the burn." He lets go of her wrist. “I’ll check up on it again next time I come. Don’t stick your hand in any more fires while I’m gone.”

“Okay. Thank you.” Mikasa resists the urge to roll her eyes, but only barely. He nods at his cloak, uncharacteristically tossed on the floor behind her. She gives it to him and watches as he violently shakes the dust from the fabric. Mikasa resists her smile, without much success. “See you, then.”

Levi throws the carrier over his shoulder. “See you then.”

-

Jean cooks her a banquet the next time he comes. It is truly ridiculous, the way he guides her by the shoulders and sits her down on the single undamaged chair, then proceeds to move around the kitchen and whip out dishes like it’s all he’s there for. Even more ridiculous, maybe, is the way she lets him.

“How many people are you expecting?” Mikasa asks between slices of toasted, warm, soft homemade bread like she hasn’t seen in years. Appetizers, he’d called them, and she had actually laughed aloud. 

“The question is how many people you are expecting.” He puts down another plate of egg on the table and widens his eyes as Mikasa freezes mid-bite and pales at the possibility of there being more than one child inside her. “Sorry. Sorry, terrible joke.”

An understatement, she thinks, but swallows it away, savoring her bread. Cross that bridge then. “Have you always known how to cook like this?” 

“Hm? No. I’m still getting the hang of it, to be honest.” He crosses his arms over his chest and looks at her, and then down at the omelet. Waiting for her to try it to see her reaction, she thinks, picking up a forkful and sighing her appreciation. It’s buttery and creamy and the more she chews the better it seems to get.

“Where did you learn?”

His voice is proud. “It’s Mom’s recipe. Really good, right? It’s even got a prize. That contest with Pixy’s, remember? Beat Sasha’s roasted meat.” He beams, chest puffing up. “Wait, I should try making that for the main course…” Jean scratches his chin, “Niccolo helped me out with the rest, though.”

“Niccolo? You don’t mean…?”

“Yeah, you know Niccolo, Marleyan, little guy, always happy to help,” he snorts, shrugs. “We keep in touch.”

Mikasa frowns. She doesn’t remember Niccolo being short. Jean raises an eyebrow. “What? Niccolo likes me. Even if I can’t fold napkins the right way. Who even said there’s a right way to fold. See, he taught me all this,” he flings his arm at the table.

“Would you teach me?”

“What?”

Mikasa never worried much about her own cooking, more focused on substance than taste; eating was always simply a means to survival. But parents, they should be able to do this, she thinks, they should be able to put a meal on the table. She’s got to be ready when it comes. “Teach me,” she repeats, “to cook, I mean. Would you?”

“Oh,” he blinks, “of course.”

Jean shows her how to work the stove, and she scowls, mildly, do you think me stupid? but doesn’t say it so as to not be ungrateful, listening intently as he very thoroughly goes over the steps of preparing the meat—veal, she recognizes—and salting. Slicing it in even pieces is a familiar motion. Mikasa has a sudden vision of herself, only a wisp of a girl, sitting at the table, legs that don’t quite reach the floor dangling back and forth as a woman stirs a pot of porridge, apron tied around her waist. It could be Carla, or maybe even her own mother, before that—the morning light shines through the window, hiding her face, and Mikasa can’t be sure what she sees. The picture shatters with a jerking pain in her hand.

The burn always aches a little when she's tired, or if the temperature's a little cool, or if she's been carrying something. Anything that requires forming a fist quickly produces a dull pain—brushing her hair always seems to trigger it. But she's never had it hurt so badly before. For a moment, she was certain she had opened up the wound again. But there's no fresh injury on her palm. Just the star-shaped, raised scar.

“Mikasa?” Jean bends down a little when he realizes she’s frozen at his side, tracks her eyes all the way to her hand. “This looks new,” he says, tentatively. 

“It was an accident,” Mikasa says, looking away, unwilling to give anything else.

“Maybe you should see a doctor?”

“I have.” She dismisses, blinking the shock away. “It’s nothing, I'll have Levi take a look at it when he comes next. There’s some ointment for the scar, in the cupboard.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

Mikasa shrugs, holds out her hand. “There’s something for the scar, in the cupboard. But I keep forgetting,” she says, an afterthought.

Jean knocks over a spoon as he looks for it, the metal colliding dully with the floorboards. It’s ridiculous, how gently he lifts up her wrist and works the salve into her skin; how delicately he wraps it up in new bandages. Even more ridiculous, really, is the way her chest tightens as he does it. The moment feels oddly intimate, and it makes her mouth feel a little dry as he ties the dressing together. 

Well, of course she liked the feeling of someone holding her hand; she's barely had any physical contact with anyone since leaving Shiganshina. Levi isn't exactly an affectionate person, and the thought of him skipping around giving out hugs is so absurd it almost makes Mikasa laugh aloud.

Jean straightens up, as if remembering himself, and Mikasa is glad to be able to breathe properly again. She picks up the knife and goes back to chopping the veal.

-

Connie’s visits are shorter and fewer and farther between than Levi’s and Jean’s, but Mikasa doesn’t treasure them any less. She had never truly appreciated his company in the past, so she cherishes every moment of it now. Sometimes he has little task lists Jean prepared for them: put up window panels, change the door hinges, varnish the porch. One day he even brings an actual model for renovating the well, sketched in the back of blank official forms.

“Our Mr. Lieutenant fancies himself an architect,” he shrugs when she asks him about it, but he looks fond, rather than annoyed, “the smug bastard.”

When he doesn’t, they hunt. Or, at least, they try. Sasha had taught Connie some about tracking when they were cadets, but Mikasa finds that they are quite terrible going about it together. It’s all very careless in a way that completely defeats the purpose of hunting; Sasha would be so ashamed. Connie is too jumpy and Mikasa talks way too loud to be able to actually land any game. Mostly, they explore the forest, follow stray sheep that run away startled at the sight of them, set up traps to capture wild rabbits just to let them go. 

Everything about Connie is familiar, welcoming, youthful. Mikasa finds herself astounded with the brightness of his smile, sometimes. Connie, who had his family turned into titans, who had lost his best friend to a war, whose hometown was too far gone to salvage and had to be put back together from its very foundation. He points out birds nests hiding in the trees, picks up insects with childlike fascination. Connie, who has felt loss and grief to last a lifetime, reminds her that she is still young, too.

He follows a deer into a clearing further in the woods, but returns only with a handful of bell flowers to show for it. He doesn’t look disappointed in the slightest. “They’re coming back,” he says as he ties the stems together with leather string—his bootlace, Mikasa notices—and presents it to her with such exaggerated gallantry she clutches her belly with laughter.

“Campanula,” Mikasa recognizes as she takes the bouquet from his hands. It feels a little dumb as it comes out from her mouth, but Connie lights up. “It’ll be summer again soon.”

“Yes,” he agrees, blithely. “Anytime now.”

-

The fence takes shape quickly, despite her useless hand and Jean’s renewed insistence that she shouldn’t work, and soon they move on to building the gate. Jean makes plans to varnish it, to protect it from the weather so it will last longer, and Mikasa thinks it’s a terribly nice idea. She’s not looking forward to replacing rotten wood any time soon.

The days grow warmer. They seek refuge beneath the willow tree and Mikasa thinks about building a swing. She likes this, having company. Jean is good company, she thinks, fear of frogs notwithstanding. Even when she is silent and distant, her quiet does not seem to bother him.

Jean doesn’t push. Mikasa thinks he makes a point not to ask about things that might upset her. He sits with her in the shade, and he talks. About the superiors that give him trouble, about diplomatic affairs that are probably confidential, about the time Connie set a raccoon loose in their quarters and landed them both time in gaol. Unlike Levi, the words tumble out from his mouth like it’s all very simple, like they are eager to come out, like she deserves to know them. Mikasa is not convinced that she does, but she likes shortening the gap between the boy she knew and the man she doesn’t. 

It gets easier, with time, to talk about things, too. But—not about Carla. Not about Eren. Not about the scar on her palm.

It is Armin’s memory that comes easiest. It is a hard reality that he’s gone, but she’s had more time to deal with that, and she can still hold out hope that he is well, that he is happy; there are still years until his—time. Mikasa shares her theories and made up stories of his adventures. She still hasn’t found it in herself to open his letter, afraid that reality won’t correspond to the bright fantasy she’s conjured for him. Even though he knows the truth, Jean handles it with the same tact as he had her hand.

“Sometimes,” Mikasa works up the nerve to confess one day, “I wished I left on that boat with him.”

Jean takes a beat to answer. “Do you still?”

Mikasa takes a moment to consider it. Does she? Mikasa doesn’t know. She remembers dreaming about it, back in those first days when she could only think of how he hadn’t packed a blanket for the boat and how the sea was so terribly cold at night, how she couldn’t be sure if he would have money for food, for shelter, how she worried about someone finding out about his secret and something terrible happened. In her dreams she was always with Armin to protect him, keep him safe. She had started making up the stories, then. 

Mikasa thinks about it, every now and then, when she’s curled up alone like she had been in Shiganshina after Eren left. Hiding under the covers and wishing she was on a boat instead. When she says that, something like guilt or worry—she still can’t read him very well—crosses his face. She has the feeling he is choosing his next words. “Do you think…  you would have been happier if you had?”

Mikasa doesn't like to think about that. She thinks would have been happier if a lot of things. If her family hadn’t been killed, if the Wall hadn’t been breached, if she had never had to learn to tear apart flesh like paper, if Eren hadn’t inherited his father’s sins, if her friends never had a deadline set on their age or were sent to die in a war. If fate wasn’t so damn cruel. If they all had been allowed to live and to grow like children should, no monsters, no blood. No curses or broken dreams.

“I just wanted more time,” she says-but-doesn’t-say, and her voice sounds tight, crackly, comes so small she can barely hear herself. “I just wish I had more time. Why couldn’t I get more time?”

Panic quickly builds up, her heart being clutched by a cold fist, she can’t breathe. She’s barely aware that she’s sitting on the grass, clutching her knees and crying. She doesn’t want to cry, doesn’t want to feel it, she’s so tired. She takes note, distantly, of a gentle pressure on her back. Mikasa realizes she’s being held. She blinks back tears enough to see the mop of ash blond hair. Jean has his arms around her shoulders, pulling her tightly against his chest. Mikasa arches, bends, and wraps shaking arms around his waist.

“I’m sorry,” Jean whispers. “I’m so sorry, Mikasa. I wish I knew.”

Mikasa cannot answer. She sobs into his shoulder, his body turned a touchstone, an anchor keeping her from drifting away, and wishes she knew, too.

-

It progresses like this, Mikasa in the forest, learning the secret pathways and stock track, and Jean helps rebuild the house room after room, floors, frames, walls. It’s trial and error; they find that the logistics of assembling train tracks and fences differ significantly from building a house, but each day, the cottage nears completion.  

She chops wood for the stove and the fireplace, gathers wild berries to add to her cooking, brings back saplings of beautiful flowers for the garden and does not think about what if. She builds most of the furniture from scratch: the closet, the dinner table, the chairs. A bassinet. Her chest tightens when Levi helps her attach the side railings. 

The meadow returns on its own, bright green and scattered with weeds and wildflowers—a little smaller now, but fiercely alive. Mikasa can see the life beyond it, too, in new spring leaves and beating wings and the glow of the light over the hills. In a patch of vivid campanula, fragrant and flowering, that blooms under the sun. 

It’s a place Mikasa can be proud of, a place for her child. She thinks her parents would have raised her like this, if they’d had a chance.

She decides she wants the door bright teal blue. They make the paint themselves from powdered pigments Jean brought from Trost along with the varnish and showed her how to mix. It takes an hour of careful brushing, of getting in all the cracks and even paint control. Mikasa gets paint on her shirt, and laughs because Jean gets it absolutely everywhere too. He looks up as he finishes up the last slat.

There we are, Jean says, blue on his forehead and his arms, smiling like the sun as Mikasa coats the last slat of timber with paint. Finished.

Levi approaches them huffing, the unkempt cat trailing behind him almost gleefully, if cats can look gleeful. A loud, obvious sneeze announces his presence, and Jean pulls away from her like they are doing something wrong. “You and your boy, take the rest of the day off,” Levi says with a dismissive hand, fixing the kerchief over his nose with that typical expression of dissatisfaction like he just can’t stand the very smell of their mess. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Her boy?” Jean scoffs indignantly, the only protest he can find it in himself to make, and Mikasa does absolutely not blush. That would be ridiculous. “I’m twenty-four.”

The rest of the day is spent in their place in the woods, washing up on the creek and swimming in the pond until the sun is set—Levi did say the rest of the day—and Mikasa laughs when Jean hides behind her at the sight of a tiny amphibian hopping lilypads. She feels like she’d rescue him from a hundred, a million, frogs if she could. After, there is lamb stew for dinner, her favorite, Mikasa discovers, or maybe the baby’s favorite, because it’s all she craves lately, and they have it around the table she built with her own two hands.

-

The ruin becomes a home.

-

Mikasa bakes for breakfast with the rising sun, then eats the days away. Her first loaf is bitter and doesn't rise enough. The cat doesn’t seem to mind. By the fourth time around the dough still feels a little foreign in her hands, but the bread it makes is flaky and golden and smells like all her good memories of her father.

The cheese buns come out perfect in the first try. Levi's eyes nearly buldge out from the sockets at the sight, and Mikasa serves them as a snack for their game; they have a real chess board now, and porcelain for tea as well. She does miss the little travel tin every now and then, but Levi likes the new fancy cup so much that she can't bring herself to complain about it. They set it up on the porch—now throughly repaired, cleaned and varnished—, play several dishonest matches, steer clear of fires and eat down to the last crumbs.

She fixes up the little doll she had kept from the pile of junk months ago, gives it new buttons for eyes and stitches up its tattered little dress, and starts practicing her embroidery, too, once her belly becomes too large for her to move around too much. It’s terribly frustrating; she can’t remember the exact patterns her mother had taught her, the style that has been passed down in her family from generation to generation. After her death, and Mikasa’s enlisting in the military, Mikasa had thought she would never have a reason to try it again.

She tries to keep it as true to the original as possible, but she thinks—hopes—that her mother wouldn’t be too upset, if Mikasa makes just a few changes of her own to the design. 

The cat curls at her feet and watches her work. She’s grateful for the ugly little thing; she doesn’t enjoy being alone, but judging by the size of her she won’t have to worry about that much longer. Her stomach has grown so big; she bumps into things around the house because she’s not used to taking up so much space. 

Most of her clothes have grown snug, too, tight enough to be uncomfortable, and she’s taken to wearing Jean’s spare shirts when he’s not around because she doesn’t want to splurge in new dresses that will be too big soon enough (Connie's don't fit, and even if Levi's did she knows he wouldn't want her messing around his things). Mikasa reasons it’s fine; she’ll just give them a wash before he comes. Surely, Jean wouldn't mind.

Levi scares the cat away and claims the spot as his whenever he’s over, more and more often as the final weeks enclose on them, and raises an eyebrow at her clothing. Mikasa doesn’t say anything. Whatever he is thinking, he is both right and wrong and Mikasa doesn’t feel the need to correct him. He bears a striking resemblance to the feline, she thinks as she watches him watch her, but doesn’t say. It’s very likely that he would throttle her if she did, her condition be damned.

-

When the baby comes, Mikasa has waited so long that it feels as if she’s dreamed him up.

It happens three weeks early, but labor lasts for almost two days, and she can't help her glare when the midwife says the little boy was eager to come out—as far as Mikasa is concerned, there was nothing rushed about his arrival. He is this tiny thing with soft pink skin, downy black hair, and big, big green eyes that blink at her.

Hideki is born at midnight. Jean absolutely loves the name, Connie thinks it’s cool, and Levi likes it too. He doesn’t exactly say that, but he doesn’t say it’s shit either, so she considers it high praise.

“Mikasa,” Jean starts, and when Mikasa looks up at him he looks away. The tip of his ears are red even in the warm lighting of the room. “Even after everything, even though it was hard, even though it was too much… I’m glad you stayed.” 

“Oh,” She says. She looks down at the wriggling bundle of skin and fuzzy hair in her arms, Levi gathering dirty cloth at her feet, Connie wiping his forehead tiredly, Jean kneeled down by her bedside. Something softens in her chest, a lovely fluttering between her ribs. Mikasa smiles at him. “I’m glad I stayed too.”