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Levi has an envelope held up in his hand when she comes in through the door.
She cocks a brow up at him. “Am I supposed to know what that is?”
Lightly, he taps the letter on her forehead before pressing it onto her palm, urging his sister to take it. “From Stohess, they want to know if you’re accepting their scholarship offer.”
Her expression makes way for mild surprise. An amused smile pulls at the corner of her lips, and in an even tone as she could manage, she replies, “you do know the whole point of email is that it’s supposed to be paperless, right?”
“You clearly don’t check your inbox if you haven’t registered yet,” he sneers. “You have no choice but to read it now that it’s in front of you.”
She sets down the letter on the console by the entrance. The stubborn child. “I’m waiting for one more announcement before I weigh all my options.”
“You’re waiting until Jaeger receives his acceptance to Trost,” he corrects.
“You know how anxious I get. If I have to be far from home, I’d rather have someone I know close by.”
He knows, but—
“If that’s all you care about, you could’ve gone to Stohess all the same. Arlert’s going to Sina, isn’t he?”
“Armin is studying oceanography. I’d hate to bother him into driving the hour from Sina to Stohess.”
“So? Jaeger’s pre-med. Even if you go to the same uni, he wouldn’t have much time to spare either,” he says, even when he knows it’s not true. The boy next door is smitten, head over heels for his sister the entire time he has known him. He would drop everything—and by that, he means everything—if it’s for her. He sighs, “look, I know you’d do well in pretty much anything, but you need to make decisions for yourself, kid. You’re the one who will have to live with it, not him.”
“I’m not following Eren to pre-med, if that is what you’re implying. I can’t, anyway.” He pauses to consider it, then quickly remembers that she is indeed squeamish when it comes to blood. “Our plans just happen to coincide—or, at least, it would be nice if everything goes to plan,” she mutters.
“Anyway, Trost’s is not until the end of the month, long past the deadline.”
She shrugs, hangs her coat by the door but keeps her red scarf on. It’s almost April. “I don’t mind losing Stohess, it’s not my first choice.”
He resists the urge to sigh. “I know I told you not to worry about money, but a scholarship is a scholarship. And it’s a good school, at least—“
“I never said I’m waiting to hear from Trost.” She meets his eyes for a split second, then walks past to sit on the couch in the living room. He follows suit, a silent demand for explanation. “My first choice is handing out admittance today. Stohess can wait out until tomorrow, I’ll know what to answer by then.”
“Huh,” he clicks his tongue, crossing his arms.
There has always been a distance between them.
They may have been born from the same parents, share the same blood, live under the same roof, eat meals together, cook dinner on the weekend, and occasionally engage in small talks out of boredom, but he doesn’t know if calling themselves ‘siblings’ would be right.
He hardly knows anything about her. He doesn’t know how many friends she has exactly, the kind of music she listens to, what clubs and societies she’s involved in at school, if she struggles with any subjects in particular, or which person in class is giving her a hard time lately.
The world she lives in remains a mystery to him.
Sometimes, she would come home late, long before curfew but still a lot later than usual, with a box of pastries from a bakery on the other side of town. Other times, he would first find out that she has been awarded for some sort of academics or non-curricular accomplishments from her best friends instead of straight from her. One time, he received a text from her, asking him to pick her up from school early. She later climbed onto the passenger seat with red-rimmed eyes and a red nose, not breathing a single word the whole journey home.
Most of the time, he doesn’t know what is going through her mind, what she is doing, and the reason for why she does things the way she does. It’s almost as if they reached a mutual agreement at one point in time, drew a line to divide their territory, and merely tolerates each other enough to coexist in the same time and space since then.
This whole college thing is no different.
Apart from asking him to sign some admin papers for application requirements, she never told him what major she’s applying for, what her top picks universities were, or what options she considers but ultimately shot down because she doesn’t think she could do it—because he is sure that she did this, she always were the only person to have such little faith in her abilities. She never discusses her future plans with him, so he has to piece it out from the small tidbits he catches from her late night conversation with friends on the phone or the tiny details the nosy missus of the household next door lets slip.
She doesn’t tell him anything, but he supposes he doesn’t either.
He never tells her how he loses sleep from questioning if she still wants him to take any part in her future plans. He doesn’t tell her that he worries she has been counting down the days to her eighteenth birthday; worries that once she reaches the legal age, she would walk out that door and never come back, that she would leave for college and he would never hear from her again. Because, at this rate, he believes these things to be a very likely possibility.
He wonders if it was his fault that they turned out this way, if it was his fault that she doesn’t feel comfortable sharing her thoughts and feelings with him, because he is too cold and uncaring, too closed off all the time. He wonders if it’s much too late, if he fails her too many time to even be given any shot at redemption, because it seems to him that he had lost her trust long before he even realizes that she is already slipping away.
But he is an Ackerman, and an Ackerman is stubborn by nature, so he stretches out his arm—
“What was your first choice again?”
—in hopes that it may reach her.
He sees her grip on the hem of her skirt tightens, like she has anticipated for this very question to come, been rehearsing the answer over and over—and perhaps that hadn’t been far from the truth. She pretends to pay attention to the lame game show playing on the television, but brushes a stray lock of midnight hair behind her ear the way she does whenever she wants people to think that she is being vulnerable; when in actuality, she is retreating further into hiding. Then, while preparing to imitate a casual airiness in her manner of speaking, she peers up at him from underneath long lashes to gauge his reaction to her answer, and he pretends to buy into her facade.
“Rosé,” she declared.
Oh.
He nods ungainly, and it is her turn to pretend to buy into his facade.
“I’m getting water, you want a glass?”
“No, I’m good.”
He deftly makes an escape to the kitchen, pretending to rummage through the drawers for a glass of water as he buys more time to collect his thoughts.
Rosé university is, by far, the most prestigious engineering school in the country. Being one of the oldest university in Paradis, second only to Sina, the university houses 9 academic faculties and 28 academic departments, hosting one of the largest academic library in the world, and serves more than 36,000 students annually. Most of all, it was notorious for its highly selective and extremely competitive admission process. Not only is it the most sought after university for engineering programs, the country's most selective university also has extremely rigorous admission standards and accepts only the best of the best. Hence, its terrifying admission rate that dips as low as 5.5%.
And, it just so happens to be where he was set to attend their civil engineering program just six years prior.
He thinks he still remembers the taste of the blueberry cheesecake his mother baked to celebrate his acceptance through early admission, the faint imprint of his father’s fingers where he clasped his shoulders as he expressed how proud he was of him, and how bright Mikasa had seemed the entire evening, looking ever so genuinely happy for him even when her eleven years old mind didn’t fully grasp how big of an opportunity it was. Their family were doing pretty alright up to that point. They had their fair share of hardships, as one does, but they always came out okay and it was enough; but at that moment, he couldn’t help but feel like things were going especially well for them.
Too well.
And he’s right, as he always is.
He hates that he always is.
Turning eighteen just few months shy before tragedy struck, he knew that he wouldn’t have to go through the system the way his twelve years old sister would. Their good-for-nothing uncle wasn’t at all reliable and even with the all too crooked system, he needn’t have to worry about keeping her away from him. But he was more so worried about the possibility of her being shipped off all the way to Hizuru to live with a distant aunt they, nor their dad, ever met after their mum cut ties with her birth family. And if that turned out to be a dead end, she would probably be bounced off multiple foster families in search of the right one that would willingly take her in; for he was without an income, which makes him ineligible to become her guardian. They were going to be separated, that’s for sure.
Truth be told, he was seriously considering letting her be taken away by a generous family who could provide for her, and was about to give up the fight. Between the six years age gap and their own state of being—both completely absorbed in their own mind, which always seemed to be worlds away from each other—they never got along that well anyway. It was not that she was unreachable. The wide eyed brat next door seemed to get her without her needing to make a single noise; and his mother seems to be taken with the sweet girl already, if them filing to be a foster family a week into inviting the newly orphaned Ackerman children over for dinners was any indication. Levi just didn’t try hard enough to get to know his sister.
It might be for the best that they were apart.
But then the day of the funeral came and to this day, he could almost feel her hand in his as the caskets were lowered to rest six feet under, make out the faint outline of her tiny fingers tightly grasping on his whenever he closes his eyes. He still remembers the fifteen eggshells, half-burnt omelette, and charred frying pan he came home to the day he met with the social worker. I’ll be good, I promise, the smudged ketchup smiley face seems to say, please don’t leave me.
That evening, he rang Erwin up to ask if his father had any open position at his construction company.
Her phone rings, disrupting his reverie.
He doesn’t even have to ask who it is after seeing the way her face lights up. “No, I haven’t opened it yet.. Yes, I’ll wait for you.. Okay, see you in a bit. The front door’s unlocked.” She hangs up, then meets his eyes as he walks back into the room, the glass of water alibi long forgotten. She ignores this fact in favor of pointing at the laptop sitting on his desk. “Can I borrow it a sec? They’ve posted the results.”
As though she isn’t already crossing the room to his home office. Typical.
She sits herself down like she owns the place, flips the screen up, but strangely doesn’t chide him about the importance of properly shutting down his laptop as usual. The house was silent, save for her typing away on the keyboards, and it brings him back to the first two weeks after the funeral.
The Jaegers had stopped staying the night and went home to resume their everyday normality—though not after a lot of resistance from the youngest son—leaving the siblings in a house that felt much bigger than they once remembered, one that felt a lot emptier. He barely recalls the few days after it happened, only glimpses and snippets here and there, but the deafening silence that permeates the house in that first two weeks they spent alone remains a noise that rings in the back of his mind.
He loathes it.
“Hey,” he calls.
She hums as sign of acknowledgement.
And the house feels a little less empty.
“I never blamed you for what happened.” You don’t have to get into Rosé to redeem anything, I’m proud of you as is, he wants to say. Alas, he is awkward with emotion, so: “I don’t regret my choice, I’ll make the same one even now.”
“I know.”
He clears his throat, “whatever the result may be—“
“Levi.”
She isn’t looking at him, but he looks at her just the same; and until then, he forgets that she just turned seventeen last month, no longer the twelve years old girl he saw in his evanescent memories. “I’m applying to Rosé out of my own free will. I didn’t let what you did or didn’t do in the past pressure me into making the choices I made—“ she tilts her head up to meet his eyes, “you’re the one who taught me that.”
Another silence settled around them, but not the kind that is unpleasant, and he remembers this is how it’s always been for them. It took many months, even years, but they eventually found a comfortable rhythm to settle into. It’s different, not the kind that is warm like the one they used to share with their parents, but so undeniably them. One filled with a lot of comfortable silence and a touch of contemplative solemnity, but feels like home regardless.
“We’re here!”
As obnoxious as ever, but he supposes he would never expect any less. She smiles, already moving to meet the uninvited guest halfway. “Hey, you’re just in time. We’re in the office.”
Eren Jaeger barrels in not a second later, immediately capturing her in a hug as if he had not seen her in years—which, given that it was a school night, he most definitely was with her the entire day prior to this. But Levi is not amused, not letting him brush over one particular detail. “Who’re ‘we’?”
A head of blonde pokes through the doorframe, all smiles and sunshine. That, too, is about as expected. Armin Arlert greets him cheerily, “Good evening, Captain.”
An old nickname, from when Zeke thought it would be funny to spread rumors that he was a retired military veteran and the brats were so terrified of him that they actually believed it, despite Levi only being in high school at the time. It’s why he rolls his eyes every time someone praises Armin on his brilliance; after all, how smart can the boy be if he bought such blatant lie? Especially when he has an actual war veteran for a grandpa. But then again, the Colonel probably purposefully kept quiet or even played into it. He is exactly the type who finds amusement in messing with ‘the youngins,’ as he calls them. The cheeky old fuck.
Eren rests his cheek on the top of her head nonchalantly. “I brought Armin for moral support.”
This one, much like his totally-not-girlfriend, acts like he owns the place too.
Said totally-not-girlfriend throws her head back to gaze up at him, eyes wide, “do I look that much of a nervous wreck?”
“Not for you, Mika, for me.”
Armin sighs dramatically, “he wouldn’t shut up about it! We didn’t get any studying done in the end.”
“Eren, you’re the one who asks Armin to help you brush up on anatomy before classes start,” she scolds, pointing an accusing finger at his chest.
“I can’t help it! Not everyone can keep their composure the way you do!” Instead of pulling away from the hug, he tightens his arm around her. “You can teach me after this. I will concentrate, promise.”
That is most definitely a lie. She will recite the materials by heart while he stares at her and zone out like the lovesick fool he is.
Levi scoffs, getting impatient listening to their antics. “We’ll never get this over with if you continue yapping away.”
That seemed to snap her back to reality, enough to reassume her position on the office chair, Eren still wrapped around her shoulders as he trails behind.
“Everything is set.” Armin scoots closer and intertwines their hands in a reassuring grip while Levi sits on the chair opposite the trio smushed cheek to cheek, the boys’ broad shoulders scrunched up with his poor sister sandwiched in the middle; but she doesn’t seem to mind. “All I have to do is hit enter.”
“Gah! Mika, can you click it for me? I’m too nervous to do it!”
“Eren, it’s her admission, of course she’ll be the one to click.”
He doesn’t miss the slight tremor on her pointer as she raises it, watches forest and ocean eyes widen while she closes stormy skies as she feels the key dips beneath her finger.
A beat.
Then another.
Eren dives for her waist, pulls her up with him, and spins her around before a smile could fully bloom on Armin’s lips. Both eyes open in surprise, she looks a little lost even after hearing the rings of happy laughters all around. He lowers her onto the ground and bends down to meet her height, gently presses their foreheads together to whisper: “You did it, Mika. I knew you could do it.”
Levi releases a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
“That would be an understatement,” Armin says suddenly, she slowly perks up, and they share a look that only the two of them knew the meaning of, “she did not just do it, she absolutely crushed it.”
Even the boy draped around her shoulder looks confused, he nudges the side of her head in askance. Her breath hitches, pulls her scarf down only to rest a hand on her lips as she shakes her head weakly, demanding: “Tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not. You got it, Miki.”
“Mimi, stop—“
“Mikasa Ackerman,” he calls, and Levi thinks she must be crying by now, “congratulations on the full-ride.”
If Eren was glowing then, he is beaming now as he looks at her like she is the universe—larger than life, infinite—and he is so, so in awe of her. And Mikasa, well, she looks like the weight of the situation had only hit her now. She squeals, tugs Armin into the group hug and squeezes the life out of her two childhood friends in excitement, burying her face on their shirts as she cries tears of joy.
Levi had never seen her this happy before. He lets the three be gross for a little longer. “You both worried for nothing, brats, this is my sister we’re talking about.”
“I’m not questioning her intellect,” Eren defends. “I was just worried we’ll get separated. We already picked out an apartment and everything.”
Once again, he finds himself questioning everything he knows about his sister: these two weren’t dating, were they?
“I’d worry about getting accepted to Trost first, if I were you.”
Eren falters, his tanned complexion loses a bit of color. “Ah,” he says, hollowly, “I forgot about that for a second.”
“Levi, you’re being mean!” Her scoldings comes without its usual edge because of the way she’s still smiling, and she knows this, so she looks to the other boy to request for his assistance. “I’m sure Eren will get accepted, right, Armin?”
“Come on, you.” He hooks his arm around the sulking boy, ruffling his head of brown. “Let’s focus on one thing at a time. Today is Mikasa’s day, we should go celebrate!”
He sobers up almost instantaneously, turning his attention back to the girl. “Right. What do you want to do, Mika?”
She smiles. “Mango ice cream sounds nice.”
“Ice cream it is!”
And he’s back in his high spirited persona, dragging Armin out to the garage next door. Mikasa lags behind, crouches down to lace her combat shoes. “Are you coming, Lev?”
“The only way you’re getting me into Jaeger’s ancient car is if I get a heart attack and all modes of transportation within a ten mile radius is out of commission.”
She chuckles. “Alright, I’ll leave you to celebrate my moving away now.”
“Don’t be surprised if you come home to a rager.”
“Save some fun for after the send off.”
With his arms crossed, he leans against the doorframe to take a proper look at her, truly looks at her. He brushes off the image of a crouching little girl who had her face buried in the sleeves of her dress and finally sees her for the seventeen years old that she has grown to be. She finishes tying her shoes into a neat bow, and their eyes meet when she rises to slip her coat on. He looks away.
“Jaeger has a long road ahead, you don’t have to wait for him.”
“He does,” she wraps her scarf tighter and untucks the inky locks trapped under, a thin smile on her lips, “it’s a good thing I’ll be in school for a long while too, then.”
An ear-splitting blasted noise pierces through the sheer tranquility veiling the night, followed by a string of embarrassed reprimand from Carla Jaeger. She stands on her front porch with a hand on her face, lamenting her son’s reckless mischief, then recovers to smile at the teenage girl as she crosses the yard to pull her into her signature bone-crushing hug; no doubt already hearing the newest update from the same bonehead of a son who is currently hitting the car horn repeatedly in jocose retaliation. Mikasa laughs another one of her bell-like laughter— she has been doing that a lot today, hasn’t she?—and waves at the beat up, old wagon parked by the curb out front.
Eren stops honking like a maniac to wave back, throws a toothy grin that dwindles into a scowl when his mother made a quick stop to pull at his ear. Armin sits quietly on the backseat, oblivious to the chaos uncovering around him, eyes glued to his phone; probably relaying the good news to their friend group, because God knows his sister won’t.
This must be how it feels, Levi concludes, to have a home.
Mikasa is almost at the porch steps, about to greet Carla and saves Eren from losing an ear in the process, but he comments a final time. “You still haven’t told me what you’re majoring in.”
She looks back at him, lips curling into a smug smirk, and he notes that this is the brightest she ever burns—she is blinding. Then, an answer:
“Architecture.”
Of course she would.