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To the both of them it certainly feels dramatic, but the setting isn’t.
He’s walking, both hands in his pockets. He’s picking at the lint in them. He hasn’t worn these jeans in a while— maybe an entire year? He’s not sure. It doesn’t really matter, is why he doesn’t know. They’re just a pair of jeans.
She’s walking too, but her arms are by her sides, stiff, steady, and just as pointless as his. She’s not wearing gloves, and it’s cold, and she really should be wearing gloves, but she’s not. Her hands are trembling, but they would still be trembling even if it wasn’t so cold.
He sees her, and she doesn’t see him. Her eyes are glassy, and his go wide. He thinks she’s beautiful. Of course he does, because she is beautiful. The ones who caught his attention always were, but this girl? He thinks she’s beautiful and beyond. Why is she crying, though? This is what he wants to know.
After another half a second, he decides he doesn’t only want to know why she’s crying, but he wants to know her name, and what her favourite colour is, and if she likes flowers? What kind, if so? He wants to know what would make that tremulous frown turn to a smile. Something tells him she doesn’t smile enough, and that moves him from curiosity to sympathy. God knows he doesn't smile as much as he should, either.
He has another thought, when she walks a little closer, and he can see the fabric of her pale pink knit more clearly. It’s a snug fit, and the thought is, too, when it drapes itself across his mind. It’s something else he’d like to know about her, but he doesn’t let himself think it. It’s not the sort of thought he should have about an underdressed crying girl at a park in the dead of winter. Especially when he should be at work. Levi— who is his boss, of course— is going to chew him out when he shows up late.
If he’ll show up, that is. He really doesn’t feel like it today.
Her thoughts are different, and not flirting with the gutter, the way his are.
She’s thinking of dead things— of the rotting clumps of leaves on the dewy trail before her, of her pet fish who she’d flushed down the toilet just half an hour back, before she left her tiny apartment where she lived alone. She’s thinking of her parents too, of course. She can’t think of dead things and not think of them. It’s been years since they passed, and she’s mostly fine, but she gets this way sometimes. Weepy, and with the sudden urge to walk aimlessly about the trails.
It’s not just dead things that get her this way, though. Sometimes, she just feels like crying. Like letting it all out, whatever it was that weighed on her.
And there is always something, it seems.
She sighs when she wipes at her tears, stepping on a twig in her path. It’s damp, so it doesn’t crunch beneath her boot the way she would’ve liked it to. Whoever it was responsible for clearing this trail, they’d not done a great job of it. It makes her sigh again, and cry some more.
Most of the time she doesn’t allow herself to cry this way, because that’s not something a well-adjusted person gets the urge to do as often as she does. Honestly, though, she’s not sure she’d call herself well-adjusted. In public, sure. She’s usually composed, in public. She pretends in public.
That fact doesn’t make her feel like a fraud or anything like that, though— and she definitely doesn’t beat herself up over it the way he does. He hates pretending, and isn’t as good at it as she is. He still tries, though, because he can’t stand when people ask him why he’s looking so dull all the time.
Anyways, she’s already accepted that it’s damn difficult to be well adjusted when your dreams are only ever nightmares, filled with oversized man-eating monsters, gnawing on your friends and enemies alike, and your days are spent missing something— someone? — you’ve never even met.
She doesn't even have a hint to what it is she’s missing; an image, a sound, a taste. She just feels its absence deep within her heart, and no amount of crying or walking helps it.
He sees the expression on her face crumble again, and he’s alarmed. He’s not alarmed that she’s crying– because remember, she's been doing that. It’s more so that his heart fractures to painful little bits to see it this time that freaks him out.
He’s stopped walking at this point, and when she brushes past him, already a few feet away, her boots soundlessly sinking into the gravel beneath her feet, he feels something electric zing through him, something that has no place in the all-too-ordinary scene he’s in. He turns his head to look at her retreating figure, and he decides he doesn’t like the sight.
Well, that’s not completely true, of course. He likes the way her hips sway and the way her skirt billows gently in the wind, catching at her ankles– but he’d still rather see her walking towards him, not away.
He chases that thought, and it’s not just his head that’s facing toward her, but his whole body, too. His head, though, is connected to her in a special way— but that’s something that he doesn’t understand at this moment. He feels a little tickle dance across his throat, and his lips, and he brings his hands out of his pockets to scratch at the phantom sensation. It’s a peculiar one.
The scene is coming to an end, because she turns around, noticing that the stranger that was ahead of her is now behind her, and has started following her, and she’s got the mildly alarmed words already formed at her chapped lips— 'Excuse me? Are you looking for something?'— but they die, like all the other things clogging up her mind.
Something in the air surrounding her changes, is charged, is reborn, and it’s perhaps cliché, but she feels the world shift under her feet, and she feels her breath catch in her throat and her heart pounding in her chest. She hears the birds singing high and clear, even though they should be preparing to migrate to sunnier shores right about now, and she sees his eyes, and they’re as green as they should have been in her dreams, where she’d missed him all along.
“… Eren?”
She doesn’t know how she knows the name- his name- but she feels the weight of those two syllables like they’ve been there many-a-time before, and that they’ve been waiting two-thousand years to sound on her lips once more.
He’s slower on the uptake. He always was, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to know that he’s the same now.
The two of them are looking at one another, and despite that chill that you’ve been told about, the sun is high, and warm where it touches her pale, unscarred cheeks, and his hair is dark and rich, and the parting clouds in the sky are doing nothing to obscure the not-quite-comprehending wonder they see in one another's eyes. It’s a beautiful day, and her tears are drying and his are forming, and they both stand still for a moment, and then they’re both taking the tiniest, most hesitant steps of their lives, when they really should be scrambling to close that short distance that’s been between them in this— second, third, fourth? Perhaps fifth chance? — at a life together.
He opens his mouth, and she’s there, only another step further. She’s there, and he feels there, he feels present in this world again for the first time in his many lives. That cold wind stings against the moisture gathering at his eyes, and he doesn't even care to wipe at his tears because while hers are drying, they haven’t completely just quite yet.
“Mikasa…?“
‘Hello’s’, and especially ‘goodbye’s’, are not his strong suit, if you may recall, so it’s all he can think to say in the moment.
“Where is your scarf?”
She’s totally certain when she reaches out to him, and he feels whole again when he holds her tight, like his head has returned to his shoulders after a long, long, too-long time.
From here you may assume that the rest is not history, as they say, but the future— and one not quite as gloomy as their past.