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The stars were coming.
Mikasa had a routine before they did. Eggs, sweep the shop floor, get off work by afternoon. By this time, she would leave the cobblestone streets and pick flowers. Then, she would watch the sunset with Eren.
On the happy days, she’d look for any whimsical white or yellow flower, and maybe she’d bring him a collection with a hovering bee. On days when he was distracting her, she’d look for a sprig of luscious red roses. On her worst days, she would look for blue roses. Today, she brought him a blue bundle of forget-me-nots.
Mikasa laid her hand to rest on the flowers. The tree trunk offered a perfect nook for her back.
“I had a bad day,” she said to Eren. “I want to tell you all about it, but I don’t feel like talking right now.”
She looked out over the expanse of the valley. After a while, she moved her hand to caress his gravestone.
“I should talk about things. Otherwise it’ll all bottle in,” she said.
The sky was blushing. She watched birds follow the sun as it disappeared behind the mountains.
Eyes heavy, Mikasa snuggled up to her scarf.
Mikasa awoke to warm breath on her cheeks. As her eyelashes began to part, the breath picked up. It let remnants of a voice slip through—tender and familiar male keens. Her cheeks were wet. The grass beneath her was rustling.
“Love you,” whispered the male. “Mikasa.”
Though her eyes were filled with sleep, she caught glimpses of the brown hairs of his eyebrows.
It was Eren, kissing her tears away. Her vision became blurry through one new, large teardrop, and she couldn’t stop the sob that broke from her, starting from the jolt of her shoulders and ending in her hiccup.
Eren noticed. Now knowing she was awake, he pushed his arms under her and squeezed their bodies together. He breathed into her neck.
She stared up through her tears. It was afternoon again.
Their movements were something of a sensual dance—he watched her neck leave him as she began to sink down, turning her body into him, burying her face in his chest and grabbing at anything of him she could.
“Eren—” she gasped. Her voice was thick with tears. “Sometimes—I’m okay, and—sometimes I think about you—and I feel like I can’t breathe!”
Eren looked at her with pity. He rubbed circles around her back while her face clenched and her tears came in crashing waves.
The venting spilled out of her. “No one except for the small group of us really know you. Everyone else thinks you’re a monster, and you killed so many people, but that wasn’t a-always you! That’s inherently NOT you! I just want the world to know! I just want to mourn my person without hearing your name dragged through the mud, without thinking about history hating you—”
“Mikasa, slow down…” Eren tilted her head up with one hand on her jaw, the other at the back of her head.
He forced his eyes on hers. She was pacified by them. Those green eyes she dreamt about, sprightly and light-shifting—malachite in spring grass, forestial in the trees, and sometimes, they would lean blue near moonlight and water. She remembered long before the Rumbling, when he used to suck at hiding his emotions. He could never be disingenuous because, even if he wore a poker face, his eyes would melt and give him away. This was the old Eren, the one she clung to, who most of humanity would never know.
Horizontal streams of tears ran with the tilt of her face. Drops slipped into her mouth and hung as conglomerates from her cheek.
“I don’t want to wake up,” she whimpered.
Her gasps and hiccups escalated.
“Eren, I can’t breathe, I can’t—”
“Breathe.” Still holding her head up, he pressed his thumbs into her tears. He took a deep breath to show her.
She tried to do the same, pushing out her ribs. His heavy breaths and her shallow ones were erratic when put together, noises a passerby could mistake as lust, especially as they fell in slow sync. Eren’s breath grew silent. Mikasa was still letting out small pants, and Eren watched her intently, pupils hypnotic. He pulled her face and hunkered down, meeting her halfway as he pressed his lips to hers as hard as he could.
She felt dizzy. He held her as though he wouldn’t let her pass out, pressing so hard she started to feel his teeth. His mouth was warm. She whined, making his heart patter. He began to huff out his nose. This was a kiss years in the making.
Eren pulled away. She leaned toward him as he did, eyes wide, wanting more. He gave her swollen lips a peck. Then his neck went slack and he grabbed her hair, watching threads of black silk fall from his palm.
“Your hair has gotten so long,” he said.
Resting her head on his chest, her dark eyes sparkled and her face was pink.
“I’m sad,” she said with the raspy voice she had left. “I’ll die sad, I don’t care, because I can’t forget you. I don’t want to. I want to live with you.”
Eren watched another lock fall from his hand like quicksand.
“I think we’re in the paths,” he said. “I’ve been dead for a while, haven’t I? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you from the past. I guess this is the best I can do.”
Mikasa’s heart skipped. “Past?”
“Listen, Mikasa.”
She looked up.
He was a fire.
“I will not let myself be a slave to this shit future,” he snarled. “I’m going to live with you, and I’m never going to take you for granted, and I’ll do all of it without having to live with that burden of taking life…”
Her lips parted.
As he continued, his anger became fuel. “I’ll fight. I’ll fight until I’m god damn fucking burning at my funeral pyre, and beyond that I’ll fight still!”
It was the peak of afternoon just a moment ago, but all of a sudden, the sun was setting. As though the sky was under the will of his emotions. The thought covered her in goosebumps. She got the impression that they didn’t have much time.
“Please.” Mikasa hugged him. “Stay with me.”
“I’m always with you.” He could feel a knot form in his throat as he said, “Mikasa… time is messing me up. I’m dead one moment and alive the next, and most of the time I’m neither. I have you and then I can’t even hug you.”
She sniffed. She almost forgot she had been crying. “Was that you, wrapping my scarf at your grave?”
“It’s the best I could do. Sometimes I can’t do anything…”
“So, you really are by my side?” She squeezed him. Her eyes became dewy again.
He looked at the grass. He let go of her hair to pluck it.
“…Mikasa, I want you to hear me out,” he said. “I need you to keep living your life until I fix things. You can’t be held back by me, just in case I fai—”
She didn’t like that. “Just in case you what?”
“It could take years on your end,” he explained. “I don’t know if you’ll remember if the timeline does fix, anyway.”
An ant was hanging off the blade of grass he plucked. With its segmented legs, the hymenopteran decayed to grains of sand.
Eren let the wind take it. “What I’m saying is… live your life. Meet someone. Love someone, or again and again, this cycle will repeat—"
He hit his head with a light slap.
“What’s wrong? Eren?”
His eyes began to track an owl sailing in the wind.
“I don’t know, it’s like someone was talking for me, I…” Stress divots set under his eyes.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Really, though. I mean it.”
She glared.
“I won’t.” She could feel the threat to cry under her frustration. “I love you!”
He snapped, “Stop being stubborn, Mikasa!”
The half-sun reddened and raged. Their hair suffused with the burning sky.
Tears collected at the rims of her eyes as she softened. “I want you.”
The sky cooled. His eyebrows knitted together, forming a line of skin between them, and his eyes blued. Though he held himself back, she could tell in his face that he wanted her, too.
When the last of sunlight scatters away and the stars appear, Mikasa will wake up. She just knew.
“Kiss me until then,” she finished her thought. And somehow, Eren knew what she meant.
He wrapped his arms tight around her hips, craned his neck down, and kissed her in the grass. It was a dove’s kiss, less tension and more tender, noses pressed into each other. The soft sounds of lips parting ways to breathe, the desperate but gentle rejoining so as to not disappear without their lips touching. It was as though they had never been just family. Maybe they hadn’t, and it has always been this way, and from the moment he wrapped her scarf, they were soul mated.
The stars appeared.