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Pieck comes dripping wet, smelling slightly of seaweed and salt, black hair glued to her face and neck and arms in its usual tangle of mats. There is sand stuck to her legs all the way up to her knees.
“You’re ruining my reference,” Jean accuses with his paintbrush when she grins at them, stopping just shy of the linen towel, one hand on her hip and the other outstretched, wiggling her fingers at Jean’s face. Mikasa, with her chin rested on her knees, watches him lift a brow, tilts his head slightly to the left. He points his little palette knife at her, the red stain on the brown handle hidden under his grip, inquiring: “Already?”
“Been long enough,” Pieck rolls her eyes, impatient. Her fingers don’t stop their wiggling until Jean pushes a cigarette between them, but she keeps her hand extended, palm upturned. Mikasa distractedly notices the purple-blue veins beneath the paleness of her inner wrist like the roots of a tree. There are little patches of sand scattered there, as well, trailing up her arm and faintly reflecting the soft sunlight. It makes her think of little pearls, or tiny shattered mirrors, or glass-dust that carves into your flesh in the aftermath of an explosion and must be brushed away carefully lest they tear further into your skin. Mikasa would know. She’s seen it a hundred, a thousand times over. But it is only harmless, fair white sand—of course—and some of it falls off easily when Pieck shakes her hand once again. “Just light me up quick and I’ll go back to the formation.”
“You better,” Jean says, pointedly, with a cigarette for himself between his teeth. He strikes a match, cups the tip to help it ignite. The flame makes his palm shine golden, for a moment. He does Pieck’s first, and then his own. Jean waves the stick in the air to extinguish the fire, leans back on his arm to throw the matchbox back inside the satchel. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows; the cool sea breeze makes the little hairs on his forearms stand up slightly. The tips of his fingers and nails are blue and white with dried pigments.
Pieck breathes smoke out through her nose, plucks the thing from her mouth, holds it between her forefinger and thumb. The motion holds no air of inspection, though. “Good, good,” she says, to no one in particular, frowning slightly at nothing, one hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sunlight. Pieck’s skin glistens with the water; soft, pale, and disturbingly unmarked. Mikasa’s never been one to be too preoccupied with her own physical appearance, but her fingers suddenly, stubbornly, itch to touch the crescent shaped scar on her cheek and feel the roughness of it. She does not. Mikasa looks away.
In the distance, some emotion, shifting, under Annie’s features. She’s building sandcastles with Armin just far enough from the water that the tide won’t destroy it. A blur of laughter? Mikasa tilts her head at it. She can’t make out the words they’re saying. She once saw Annie crack a joke with rebar jutting through her shoulder. Annie’s blood had slowed until it was almost black. Mikasa had pressed the heel of her hand on the wound, stupidly, before Annie had started to heal. In her sleeveless sundress, there is no evidence that it had ever happened. That was another life, of course. They had not been entirely human then. If Mikasa were to jam a palette knife in Annie’s bicep, right now, she thinks, and feels appropriately sick for it, she knows it would leave a deep scar behind.
They had all been stripped of it, after—Pieck, Reiner, Armin, Annie. They had been—set free from it, the burden, the curse. There’s no trail left of it on their bodies. It makes her think, distantly, of rebirth. It makes her think of sweeping glass and fine sand. It makes her think of forgetting, how the shore holds no memory of their stomping feet, how it all gets blown away with the wind and the water and allowed a clean slate again and again. Of course, Mikasa herself had been relieved of her own power, whatever it had been, but she supposes if they are like sand, she would be something more like the earth; wearing every scar and unhealed wound on its skin, holding on to it, carrying it like a reminder on its back. That’s the reason they come here, really. The mainland is still scattered with deep crevices shaped like titan’s heels, but sand is quick to erode, and by the ocean they can all pretend to forget for a moment.
Mikasa rolls her shoulders, pushes the image of it away from her mind, turns her focus back to the gray swirling of the smoke in the air. She struggles with pretending, sometimes. She thinks, distantly, that there might be one too many reminders on her back. She only realises she’s staring when Pieck turns to meet her gaze, presenting the cigarette as if offering for her to take it. “Mikasa?”
“I don’t smoke,” Mikasa says, curtly, then remembers to be polite, “but thank you.”
“Ah, s’alright.” A beat. “You want to come in the water with us?”
“No,” she says again. Pieck deflates a little, and this is the part where Mikasa feels like a freak, because Pieck asks her every time and every time she refuses the invitation. It always feels like she’s saying no to something other than coming into the water, but she doesn’t know the right way to say yes. What exactly to say yes to. “Maybe later,” Mikasa offers. “When it’s a little warmer.”
“Mikasa is helping me out with the painting. Unlike you,” Jean complements, a bit snidely, but apparently it’s the right thing to say because Pieck perks up, shaking her head exasperatedly and sending droplets of saltwater flying in every direction. Her smoke comes out her nostrils with her laugh.
“Fine. You’re such a bore,” she rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling again. “I’m going to drown Connie real good for your picture. Get your models nice and bloated.”
“Yeah, you three have fun,” Jean shouts at her back as Pieck sprints her way back into the ocean and all but throws herself at Reiner’s back, taking him down face-first in the water, while Connie evades the attack, yelps echoing in the distance and filling the silence around them. Above, a flock of seagulls cuts through the sky in a V-shaped formation. She counts them: one, two, three four five, eight, nine. Eleven seagulls.
“She’s funny,” Mikasa comments, watching the scene unfold. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jean swiftly paint the birds onto his own sky. “I like her,” she says, and means, I didn’t want to upset her, it’s not like that. She doesn’t know if she should say it, how else to say it.
Mikasa thinks she might be stunted, sometimes, at times like this. When it feels like there’s a party, somewhere, and she has not been invited. Like she’s intruding on some sort of private ritual, a voyeur to the lives of people she knows-but-doesn’t. Maybe it’s something to be expected; for the loneliness to linger in her bones after so long with nothing alive for miles around her, only her body, and nothing else, nothing human. Maybe she had forgotten how to be human then. It’s a strange thought, that her own humanity is an underused muscle, something atrophied and repressed. This is another life, too.
“She’s a pain in the ass,” he lets out an absent half-laugh, adjusting the easel, and Mikasa tries to make it mean, it’s fine, it’s not so serious. Jean turns to her. “Could you pass the white brush? That one,” he jerks his chin, her awkwardness mercifully ignored. “Thank you. You want to do the grass? Left side,” he instructs, pointing to the spot in the canvas where he’d dotted the green marks earlier. “I’ll start on the right so we can finish this while there’s still sunlight.”
“Okay,” Mikasa agrees, aware that he does not really need her help. In fact, she’s been doing more damage than progress, and it’s frustrating that he would keep encouraging her to embarrass herself like this, but holding the brushes gives her something else to do with her fingers besides clench. He’s awfully considerate for that, truthfully, because it would be another worse kind of embarrassment for her to be sitting on her own and staring at everyone else having fun like she used to before he’d started inviting her to paint. She’s thought about getting herself some tools and paints so she could stop troubling him, but not enough for her to actually ask Jean to help her look for them. Besides, she thinks Jean knows she needs the excuse to get close. It hurts a little, to be always watching, but it hurts her more to be alone.
The reference is long and tall and thin, wheat-like, blowing slightly in the breeze all around their linen towel. Jean captures it almost perfectly on his side of the canvas. On hers, it looks more like short green tree-trunks. It feels wrong, the way the paint streaks and blotches in her wake. Mikasa’s hands don’t seem to have the sort of dexterity—or rather, of gentleness—it takes to make something so beautiful. Maybe this is something to be expected, too. She was so young when she first picked up a knife. She had spent so long holding on to a blade; Mikasa thinks maybe she never really learned how to let it go. Even after so much time. She keeps trying, but her hands don’t know how to bring the picture to life. She’d only ever needed them to kill.
“Try to use a lighter wrist,” Jean suggests, wincing slightly and trying to hide it with a nod. He doesn’t do a good enough job with that, but she thinks he’s awfully considerate for not outright pointing out her incompetence, either. He doesn’t touch her to show her how to do it properly. Jean extends his hand, adjusts his own grip on the brush, relaxing his fingers around it, and drags the tip of it across the canvas so delicately that Mikasa could almost forget that he’d had a lifetime of handling swords, too.
Mikasa nods, wordlessly, mimics his movements, connecting the dots together into a line. She steals a glance at him, looking for signs of approval, and turns her gaze back to the canvas the second their eyes meet. “It’s—good. Nice. Just like that,” Jean says, earnest, slightly strained, and actually gets a begrudging smile out of her.
It’s a pretty picture, Mikasa’s clumsy brushstrokes notwithstanding. The burnt orange of the sky, the deep blue of the sea, the waves lapping at the shore, and three little figures out in the distance, arms wide open, and two more a bit closer, kneeled down and scooping mounds of sand, and the both of them as well—Jean is a mixture of whites and beiges, and Mikasa by his side black-red-pink. They seem to be placed closer to the others than in reality; it’s a matter of aesthetics, she thinks, using up all the space, or establishing some sort of harmony. Or maybe that’s just how Jean sees things. When Mikasa looks at the others, splashing and chasing each other in the distance, she feels as though she might be an island, apart.
“Everyone seems to be doing so well,” Mikasa ponders out loud, not really meaning to, not really meaning anything by it—but there’s this underlying jealousy to her tone, some veiled envy that leaves a faint bitter aftertaste in her mouth and is obvious enough that she can barely convince herself that Jean wouldn’t pick up on it.
Jean frowns, squinting a bit at the sun. There’s a sudden gust of wind, an invisible hand kneading fingers through his hair. “Yes,” he murmurs. “Well—” he starts, and then stops himself. “No, sorry—nevermind. Today is a good day.”
“You can’t just start a sentence and stop half-way through,” Mikasa purses her lips, annoyed. Jean doesn’t respond. “Hey,” she demands, half-afraid she’s said something wrong; she’s so tired of getting things wrong, but when he turns his head to look at her he has a slight grin stretched across his face, placating, conciliatory. Jean has grown to be agreeable, all yes ma’am and no sir and please and thank you and easy, bright, charmingly practised smiles. It’s a fitting skill for a diplomat, Mikasa thinks. She doesn’t remember him being charming, back then, but then again it's hard for her to remember exactly how he used to be. She figures it fair, though, because he forgets things about her too. “Don’t hide things from me. Please. I can handle the truth.”
“It’s not exactly the most appropriate beach-day talk,” Jean says blithely, easy-going, but his expression falters. Mikasa waits. He sighs, holding up his cigarette with one hand and the paintbrush with the other and shrugging slightly, as if to say but you insisted. Mikasa nods to confirm his unspoken statement, encouraging him to continue. “Well. It’s… I guess things seem a little different when you’ve been looking at them up close and personal for so long,” he says, running his index along his nose bridge. “We used to hole up together in—wherever we could, after. All the ones who were left, and then just us six before we came hom—came back,” Jean corrects, blinking. “Even now, in our most luxurious quarters,” he attempts a joke, the corners of his lips briefly twitching up as if trying to slip back into the grin once more, “we don’t really need to huddle for warmth anymore, but… you get used to noticing things. Mostly the bad things, maybe.”
“Oh,” Mikasa says. “I suppose that’s…” to be expected. Jean nods, quickly, as if he might have heard her.
“You know how it goes. Soldier dreams, the shakes. There’s always someone who doesn’t sleep at night. Even now. It’s almost like being fifteen,” he jokes again, and Mikasa knows he’s trying to soften it for her still, and isn’t sure how to feel about it. “Sorry. It’s morbid.” Jean tips ash onto the sand. Mikasa watches it scatter, disappear into the wind. Gone. She thinks of power, and sand and earth. Of clean slates and reminders. There are other kinds of burdens, and there are other kinds of scars.
“What else?” She asks, despite herself. She’s almost ashamed of how much she wants to know, of the enormity of her desire to be part of it, to belong. What right do you have, whispers some voice in the shell of her ear. You left them behind. You were the one to walk away. What right do I have, Mikasa thinks, and asks, “What about you?”
“Me?” Jean raises his eyebrows. Mikasa watches his nostrils flare, his throat working as he swallows. His lips part for a moment, and she watches them press shut once more. He takes a moment to consider. “There’s this—one thing. It’s kind of funny. Ironic,” he half-shrugs. “I can’t eat meat anymore,” he says, and lets it sit there for a moment. “Too many bodies,” Jean explains, and he sounds embarrassed of it, like he’s confessing.
Mikasa tries to understand. Before, she would have thought it foolish, maybe. There was no point dwelling on the dead. It could be you later in the day; it would, if you weren’t careful, if you weren’t ready, if you weren’t strong. Thinking about their fallen could have gotten them killed at any moment. They were very young, then. That always seemed to be the worst that could happen; no way of knowing what true hell would have looked like. Now, Mikasa thinks, too many bodies. She thinks: mountains of them, red and wet, with the bone showing white through the torn flesh. Mountains of them, trailing the way to Paradis. Jean would have seen them, walked among them, too.
“Although a doctor would disagree,” he says, suddenly, “an analyst, actually. You know how they had doctors for all kinds of things outside. Eyes, ears, hands, mind. There’s doctors for brain sickness. They say the problem is one body, like. One body, again and again, one body I can’t seem to bury,” Jean says, more to himself than to her. “Maybe all the bodies become the body, after some time. It’s strange. I don’t really know how it works.”
Mikasa thinks she understands this, if nothing else—a body you cannot truly bury. No matter you killed him, no matter you washed your fingers of his blood and guts, no matter you cleaned his bones and dug him a grave with your bare hands and wept over it again and again. Again and again. And again. All the corpses in that death infested wasteland, red and wet and white showing through, the splinters of bones and teeth, all of them becoming the body you cradle in your hands, the body you hold until it is no longer a body but a purpose, no longer a body but the entire world around you, no longer a body but a thing that haunts you after you’ve pried yourself away from it, but you cannot get away from it, no matter—no matter. One body, again and again.
But those countless bodies cannot become one body, Mikasa thinks. She had buried her One Body. She could never hope to bury them all. She could never hope to wash all the blood off her hands.
“No more meat,” she says, quietly. “Sasha would have found it absurd.”
Jean’s eyes flicker to her. She’s surprised him, she thinks. Jean smiles, then. A real smile. It’s a warm smile. His eyes are very warm. A dimple caves his left cheek. Slowly, he nods. “Yeah, she would.”
And painting, again. Light wrist, careful brushstrokes. They work in silence. Jean seems to lose himself in it, after some time. The patterns, the colors, the details. He stops only for a moment to light himself another cigarette, blowing away the flame absently before turning back to his work. He’s so focused he barely notices whatever horrors Mikasa is committing to his masterpiece, seldom looking away from the canvas anymore. He’s started making up things—more birds in the sky, more colors reflecting in the sea. It’s always interesting to watch when he gets like this, tucked away, somewhere. She wonders what the brain doctors would have to say about this.
“This is nice,” Mikasa says. “Painting. I don’t think I’ve ever said. I like it.”
“It’s good, isn’t it? I used to do this when I was a kid, except I’d use chalk or charcoal. But I think this is more fun. The whole process,” he says, scratching his temple with a knuckle, “more complicated. Gets the mind off things. Though I have other shittier habits for that,” he adds, and brings the cigarette to his lips again, balancing it between his teeth before taking a hit.
“Yeah,” Mikasa agrees, scrunching her nose slightly, “shitty.”
“Sorry,” he grins, sheepish, but only slightly, “I’ll put it out.”
“No need—it’s fine,” she shakes her head to emphasize it, but he’s already grinding it against the heel of his shoe. “Do you have other non-shitty ways to get your mind off things?” She asks, filling the silence, and it’s more genuine curiosity than an attempt at politeness.
There’s a brief pause. He twirls the brush between his index and middle fingers, passing through his thumb. “Connie,” he says, finally. “And everyone else, of course. But… I have Connie. I’ve always had Connie. We talk, or we don’t. It helps. It’s been like this forever,” Jean nods to himself, frowning a little. Like he’s first putting to words something he’s only ever thought about. “And it’s good for him too. He’ll never say it, but he can’t stand being by himself. Gets him all twitchy-like,” Jean rolls his shoulders. He’s looking at the water. The shrieks and laughter have died down. The sandcastle’s tower is being rebuilt. He stops spinning the brush. Mikasa watches him, and waits.
“But you were right, earlier, you know,” Jean turns to her. His eyes are still smiling. “Today is a good day. We’ve been on a streak of good days, lately, I feel. Even if things don’t always go exactly well, it’s…”
“Better?” Mikasa supplies, and he looks as surprised as she feels that she found the word before he managed to—pleasantly so.
“Yes,” he nods. “Yes. We’re better. And we… I hope you are, too.”
Mikasa looks away. Yes, she is better, isn’t she? Of course, anything would be better than how she’d been, After. Anything other than being that hollowed out shell, curled up with so many of those redwetwhite bodies and people so battered and bloody they might as well have been dead. Mikasa supposes she’s better. But she isn’t better like them. Isn’t better with them, not yet, though she so desperately wants to be.
“Or at least that you’ll be, now that we’re all together,” Jean says, and quickly clarifies: “Having people helps.” Mikasa thinks he means, we’re your people, if you let us be. She’s still unsure of how to begin to be better like that. How to allow herself to be better like that. But… Mikasa would like to. Despite all her guilt and scars, she wants to be better—to belong. Distantly, she feels as though it might be all she ever wanted, and how very ancient is this want of hers, she thinks. She must have been holding on to it for much longer than her blades.
“I brought something,” Jean announces suddenly, snapping her out of her dreadful reverie. He pats down his thighs, seems to remember he hasn’t got pockets, rummages through the pile of rumpled clothes and finally looks inside his satchel. In his hand comes out a glass jar, a little cracked on the side, but not enough for it to come undone. Jean holds it carefully, eagerly, but it’s not because it’s fragile.
“Strawberries? ” Mikasa gapes, incredulously. It’s nearly a squeal, but she’s too startled to even consider being embarrassed of it. Fruit of any kind is still so very rare to get a hold of, but Mikasa has not seen strawberries in years. They’re small, only slightly larger than the pad of her thumb, faded in color, more green and yellow than red. They cover the bottom of the jar perfectly, tightly arranged against each other.
“There’s only six,” Jean says, his tone like an apology. One for each. He takes out the ones that look the ripest. “You can have mine. I had one this morning.”
Mikasa feels her refusal begin to slip past her lips, but she stops herself. It’s a kindness. Friends are kind to each other. She is not certain on whether it would be kinder of her to insist on him having it, but he presses the fruit to her palms and curls his fingers ever so slightly over hers, holding her hand with the same gentleness he applies to his brush before letting go. Mikasa decides to allow it—accept it. Maybe she can begin like this.
“Thank you,” she says, and Jean smiles that smile, and she knows she made the right choice. It’s good, getting things right.
Mikasa bites the berry, and tries to keep her grimace contained when the acidity of it takes her by surprise. The taste is not at all like she remembers, though she supposes she should be used to things not being what she expected them to be. It’s sour, less juicy, slightly cottony and firm. The tiny seeds scrape against the roof of her mouth, prickly. But it’s a strawberry, and Jean had gone through the trouble of finding it for them. She takes another bite, swallows. “How did you get them?”
“Working with the grand embassy has to have some perks other than watered down champagne, no?” Jean teases, quirking his eyebrow. “I’m sorry they suck, though.”
“They don’t. They’re just a little green,” she attempts a smile. Her cheeks feel tight, heavy. Atrophied muscles. Mikasa thinks she must look freakish, so she lets it drop. She thinks about saying something like, I didn’t know they were already planting again, but she doesn’t want to reveal just how out of touch she had remained for so long, so she keeps silent.
“Eh. Really not the worst I’ve ever had, if I’m honest. But, you know, can’t rush nature. These things take time. There won’t be another harvest this side of the new year, but I’m holding out hope for the next. We’ll be eating ripe fruit this time next year, hopefully,” he declares.
“Hopefully,” she echoes. Mikasa brings the strawberry to her lips. Jean turns his eyes to the sea again, squinting. The summer air is blue and golden, turning grainy and violet as the sun rolls down.
Jean sighs, after a moment, makes a sound like clearing his throat. “I think I’ll get in the water for a bit, before we have to go back. Give you guys a moment to yourselves,” he jerks his head at the second berry still cradled in her hand.
Mikasa flexes her fingers around it reflexively, “Okay.”
“You can go ahead and do the clouds for me if you want,” he says, putting his palette down next to her on the towel and handing her the brush jar, “I trust you with my sky.”
“Okay,” she says again, refrains from pointing out what a terrible idea that is. “I’ll do that.”
Jean tugs on his neckline and quickly discards his shirt on the pile behind them; Mikasa catches a glimpse of the scars on his exposed skin, healed and thick like train tracks trailing all the way to the small of his back and disappearing beneath his trunks, before he sprints down to join the others in the sea. He shouts something she can’t quite make out when he passes Armin and Annie, the two laying side by side on the sand now, and she hears Pieck and Reiner cheer him on as he flings himself at Connie, and then their laughter fills all the space around them. It’s a lovely sight.
Mikasa watches them as she holds the fruit in these bloodstained hands of hers, bites the sour part of the strawberry and works her way around it, slowly, to the sweeter bits. The flavor is really only a shadow, a mere echo of what it could be, had it been planted on more fertile soil. Had it been planted on land that wasn’t pounded mercilessly into flatness. Had it had more room to grow, more people to care for the blossoms.
But next year will bring sweeter fruits. Jean had said it with such certainty, and Mikasa chooses to believe him. They might still be a little hard, a little sour, a little smaller and greener than they should be. It’ll take time; they must wait until the ground heals and the rain comes stronger so the fields can bloom and flourish, but—the earth will heal, and the fruit will grow sweet and ripe and tender once more. Next year, or the next. And they will too, Mikasa thinks, a little optimistic. Surely they will, all of them. Time, she thinks again. Surely, with time. It’s a nice feeling; optimism. Hope. She hasn’t felt like this in so long, too long, and Mikasa tucks it in her breast safely, cherishing it hungrily, desperately. These things take time, he’d said. They are things worth waiting for.
For now, she’ll settle for listening to her people roll in the sand and splash around in the water. She will join them, eventually, someday. Maybe next week, maybe next year. She will figure out where she fits, eventually, some day, learn how to be in this new world they’ve witnessed come to life at the highest of prices. For now, Mikasa will watch, and let the sight warm her from the inside. For now, she’ll finish her tart fruit, and paint some clouds in Jean’s skies, to make the waiting a little easier on her; as a way to pass the time.
She picks up her brush, traces a line on the canvas. It looks quite terrible, like a child’s scribbles: the cloud is blocky, hard-edged, with no nuance to the color. It clashes with the carefully drawn sea-foam and the subtle ripples of the waves. Jean won’t be too bothered, though. He never complains that she ruins his pieces with her heavy wrists and graceless brushstrokes. He’ll say something like it looks special or very… interesting, or you’re getting better at this, stifling his laugh, fighting his grimace. She paints a couple more, each more distorted and odd than the last, filling up the space and wondering just how much he’ll let her get away with in this harmless little joke, grinning at her ugly craft.
It’s a nice way to spend her time, Mikasa decides.