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“Did you ever think that we’d end up here?”
It’s both an abrupt inquiry and certainly not one that he was expecting in the middle of gulping down a sizable amount of beer, so his initial response is to painfully swallow the liquid that’s lodged itself within his throat before spluttering and coughing like an absolute idiot for around a solid minute.
Mikasa Ackerman merely arches a single brow as she tacitly surveys him from across the table; her facial expression appears utterly unimpressed with his antics, but from their shared past he knows all too well that she’s definitely hiding an iconic sliver of a smile behind her own mug.
After he manages to rally himself at last and loudly clears his throat to outwardly mark the end of his coughing fit, Reiner Braun straightens up from his slightly slumped over position upon his barstool and attempts to regain his verbal footing.
“Never thought you’d be the one to ask that.”
There’s a brief pause during which Mikasa simply raises her other eyebrow to match the first, as if silently prompting him to continue.
“Then again, I also never would have thought that the two of us would be here drinking together after everything that happened.”
Both brows drop at once simultaneously, her entire face goes thoroughly blank, and Reiner wants to kick himself in the damn teeth because he knows all too well from his own experience exactly where her mind has already wandered.
A poignant silence falls between the two of them, and it’s not one of ease like those that they’ve grown so very used to over time; it’s heavy and thick and sharp, with edges that threaten to reopen old war wounds if they don’t proceed cautiously enough.
“Hey,” he says abruptly, and the single syllable escapes his lips before he’s even had a chance to think about whatever the hell he’s actually going to it follow up with.
But for the briefest of moments that tiny trace of life returns to her perpetually despondent eyes, and Reiner decides to capitalize on it.
“Did we ever tell you about using Bertholdt’s sleeping positions as a method of trying to predict the weather?”
A short, tense pause follows, and then the miraculous happens.
Mikasa lifts her whole head up so that he can see all of her face hovering above the edge of the mug, and a smile that’s just slightly reminiscent of their antics during the days they spent in basic training tugs gently upon both corners of her mouth.
“No,” she says, in a voice that’s quite small, yet full of tangible nostalgia. “Armin and Eren… they didn’t include me much in certain things.”
Reiner can feel a shit-eating grin unfurling upon his face at record speed, and the way that Mikasa suddenly looks so genuinely intrigued and alive somehow sparks something within deep down within himself that even he’d long thought dead.
“Oh, man— have I got some stories for you, then. Let’s start off with one involving Eren, Jean, and a little game that we liked to call ’gay chicken’.”