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I remember when your head caught flame
It kissed your scalp and caressed your brain
Well, you laughed, baby, it's okay
It's buzzcut season anyway
Lorde
Mikasa’s hands have been shaking for so long that a frightened, childlike part of her is afraid that this is just how they’re going to be now.
She’s okay, really. Her hair is free from where it became stuck in her ODM gear and a wet washcloth is resting against the side of her neck where she felt something—a muscle, maybe, or a tendon—pull when it happened. Everybody else has resumed their training out in the courtyard and Mikasa, now sitting in bed back in the room she shares with Sasha—her pleas to keep training cruelly dismissed by Captain Levi—feels her heartbeat slowing back down to something resembling its usual rate.
But still—the shaking.
It feels disproportionate to react this way. This isn’t the first time someone in her team suffers an accident during training, or the first time the ODM gear malfunctions. But it is the first time Mikasa feels it’s her fault. Her heart, tiny in her chest since the incident happened, grows tighter at the thought. Maybe it’s excessive to believe it her fault—she hadn’t been distracted, or misusing the gear, or being generally incautious with it. But it had been her choice—nobody else’s—to have let her hair become this long.
She knows why she kept postponing getting it cut, despite having helped Sasha and even Armin chop a few inches off of their own hair just a couple of weeks back. Knows it is probably irrational, childish, naïve, stupid–
A knock sounds at her door, in time to stop the tears forming in her eyes, and she’s grateful for the interruption. She opens it to find a sight as familiar as the palms of her calloused hands, twice as welcomed.
Mikasa steps aside to let Eren in the room. After so many years of sharing each other’s space, their bodies have naturally found a synchronization of their own, so accustomed to one another that most tasks are carried unobservantly. The motion of entering the room, closing the door and sitting together on the floor by the bed is entirely wordless.
Once sat, Mikasa finally chances a look back at him, just in time to watch him unfurrow his brow to feign nonchalance. He speaks his first words to her, then. “Feel better?”
Mikasa reaches for a tone as steady as his when she speaks—and feels absolutely defeated when what instead comes out is the voice of a child. “I’m alright.” She clears her throat and again tries for firmness. “I feel fine. Just caught off guard, is all.”
Eren studies her expression, trying to decide whether he believes her or not, and Mikasa knows she’s failed at convincing him when his eyes fall on the trembling hand that’s caressing the patch of bluntly chopped hair above the nape of her neck. She hastily brings it back down to her lap, but it’s too late. She really can’t seem to get anything right today.
“Hm.”
After a few beats, Eren reaches for her other hand, the one she’s pressing against her neck, and takes the washcloth carefully folded inside of it, leaving Mikasa to absentmindedly thumb at the droplets of water dripping down her fingertips. She hears him step into the washroom and turn on the tap, and in another moment he’s back at her side, placing the freshly wet washcloth back in her hand, the fabric so icy it makes the tips of her fingers numb. She nods at him in appreciation.
“So,” he begins, nervously, unsure of how to approach the topic. “Your hair.”
Again she senses the prickling of tears behind her eyelids, feeling first miserable and then ridiculous for feeling miserable. It’s just hair. It is. There’s no reason for her to get sentimental about it—no reason that anyone would understand, at least. So she gulps down the whimper stubbornly trying to escape her throat and replies with a tone as close to normalcy as she can muster. “Yeah. Might be time for a cut.”
Eren doesn’t reply right away, and Mikasa knows that he knows something is wrong, hates how well he can read her, then, senses him approaching her as he would a wounded animal—treading lightly, breathing soundlessly, weighing his words before he addresses her again. “Is that– would that be a problem for you?”
And it makes her even more miserable, how cautious he’s being, how kind, makes her feel like a whimpering child in search of a motherly caress after a bad dream. She despises the feeling, welcomes his gentleness, and wonders how the two can coexist.
“I should’ve done it a long time ago, really. It’s fine.”
He’s still gentle when he speaks again, but Mikasa recognises a hint of childlike curiosity in his voice. “Is there a reason you didn’t?”
She scoffs—it’s the only thing, she thinks, she can do not to burst into tears.
“What?” He asks, wide-eyed.
Her free hand searches for something to occupy itself with, at last settling on her uniform, where it begins to pull aggressively at the frayed strands of fabric. “It’s nothing. It’s just– It’s stupid. It’s stupid.”
Without warning, he takes her fidgety hand in his, halting its obsessive motion, and gives her a look that’s as stern as it is doting. “Mikasa.” Heat immediately rises to the apples of her cheeks, tinting them the same shade of pink they always assume whenever Eren’s attention is too closely on her. “What is it?”
She needs to avert her eyes to be able to continue. “It’s silly, but– I sort of– You know I’ve always preferred it long. And– last time I had it long was– what, before we enlisted in the corps? Last time I had it long, everything was– everything was different, and things were kind of normal. As normal as they could be, at the time.” She looks back at him then, nervously scanning his face for any traces of humour in it, relieved when she finds none. “So having it long again– It’s stupid, but I just– It felt nice. It felt like things could be sort of—normal, again.”
For a few painful seconds, the room is so quiet that Mikasa swears she can hear the thump of her heart against her ribcage, weaker and quieter with every passing second of silence, and again she’s feeling so irrational, so childish, so naïve, so–
“I don’t think it’s stupid.”
Mikasa accepts that she’s lost the battle against tears and finally lets them flow freely now. “You don’t?”
“Mikasa.” He calls again, and smiles at her, so much gentleness in his eyes she feels foolish for asking. “Do you know how much from that time I wish I could bring back? How much– How much of it I hold on to?”
His words are in equal measure comforting and sobering. It’s exactly what she needed—the reminder that they’ve lost more—that Eren has lost more—to this war than a few inches of hair. She’s grateful for his kindness, but she knows at once that it’s misplaced. So she gives one last sniffle and grits the next words out in a tone that, while shaky, begins to resemble the stoic one she always uses. “Yeah, well. It’s just hair. And I’m a soldier. So I’ll just have to do what I need to do to be able to fight. And deal with it.”
When her eyes meet Eren’s again, he’s still smiling, eyes bright, if a little sad, as if they’re saying, You don’t have to do that, I see through you. “Tell you what,” he says, after a few seconds—and Mikasa can tell he was measuring his words again, searching his brain for the nicest thing to say, and she doesn’t know when her short-fused, hot-tempered boy became this sweet, affectionate man, and she’s so full of love for him that she feels the newly controlled beat of her heart begin to jumble out of rhythm again. “I bet this is the last time you have to cut it short.”
Something in his voice lets Mikasa know he believes it.
He startles her when he gets up and dusts his hands off on the trousers of his uniform. “Right.” A smile is still poised on his lips, but it has an edge to it now, a sort of mischief. “Should we begin?”
Mikasa gapes. “What?”
“On your haircut.”
She’s dumbfounded, and Eren must find it hilarious, because he’s laughing, really laughing, and Mikasa doesn’t know how long it’s been since she last heard that melody—must be years now—, doesn’t remember the power Eren holds in a single chuckle, how the sound somehow finds a way to work itself into her insides, and it can’t be normal—can’t be human—because now she’s on her feet, mouth still open in a little ‘o’, hands holding the ones he reaches out to her, doing whatever it is he wants her to do, a doll at the hands of a puppeteer, a mouse drawn to the sound of a flute, a princess under a spell.
He’s beaming at her, pearly white teeth against pink lips, and Mikasa feels so lightheaded at the sight that she might just faint. He wouldn’t let her, though—what with how tightly he’s holding her hands, directing her into the washroom and tumbling over his own words as he explains that this is a good idea, that it’s going to be fun, that it’s like we’re kids again. She barely listens to a word of it, yet finds herself nodding, and she’s absolutely sure then that Eren is some sort of magician—and she, his ever selfless volunteer.
Eren lets go of Mikasa’s hands to go fetch whatever it is he needs—a chair, a hairbrush, a pair of shears—and she carefully chooses this moment away from him to let out a few uncontrolled breaths, brisk and hot. She fastens her hands on either side of the sink, afraid she’ll plummet to the ground if she has nothing to hold on to, and looks in the mirror to find a stranger looking back at her—one with wild eyes, mouth open in an idiotic pout, cheeks at least a dozen shades redder than the rest of her skin. She brings a cold hand to her face, hoping to bring it back down to a normal, human temperature, but she knows better than that—knows nothing she does can possibly tone down this feeling, can stop the smile starting to creep up on her lips.
Eren is back from his mission, so Mikasa drops her hands and coughs the embarrassment out of her voice. She sits down, picks up the comb Eren grabbed from her room and begins to sort through her raven locks.
His eyes meet hers in the mirror. “So. How should we cut it?”
She takes a few seconds to sober up and gather her thoughts, and then she’s smiling at him, playing into his game. “Last time I’m cutting it short, right?” When he hums in approval, a glint in his eye that she thinks for a millisecond is sadness, she settles on an answer. “Let’s really go for it, then.”
Eren smiles back at her and begins.
For all of his erratic behaviour in the last few minutes, Eren is now controlled, his movements cautious and precise, the clumsy boy Mikasa met when she was nine years old nowhere in sight. But she knows him, knows that this is just how he is—that he has nursed a spark in his core for all of his life and that all it takes for it to spread into a blazing fire is for him to want it to, his determination as powerful a fuel as gasoline.
They’re both silent now, the only sound echoing in the walls of her washroom the subdued snip of shears every time Eren cuts another strand of hair. Mikasa unabashedly watches him—so absorbed in the task at hand that he couldn’t possibly notice it—, the furrow of his brow whenever he finds a section of hair he’s not sure how to cut, his long fingers working the shears so masterfully you’d never guess he’s done this only a handful of times before, the way his mouth goes agape every once in a while, when he’s really concentrating. She’s known him for a decade, has made peace with the adoration she feels towards him long ago. And yet sometimes it’s so overwhelming to just look at him. To watch him, and to realise that he’s here—in the same plane of existence as her, living and breathing and walking around (and cutting her hair for her). Every so often, a thought will creep up on her so furtively that it knocks the wind out of her—that she is so lucky to know him, that she ought to make of the most of the life she shares with him, that she mustn’t forget that this is everything she’s ever wanted and everything she never thought she could have. Sometimes the thought has an urgency to it Mikasa still hasn’t deciphered, and it’s just too much.
It creeps on her now, and she’s grateful when Eren interrupts it to announce that he’s nearly finished.
He looks at the back of her head triumphantly; the expression etched on his features mirroring the one she had seen so many times as a child, when Eren finally won at a game of cards against her or succeeded at chasing away the town bullies. And there he is again, the clumsy boy that has lived in a nook inside of her chest since the moment she first laid eyes on him—the one she had lost sight of just minutes prior.
“You know,” Mikasa offers, nostalgia in her voice, “this really is like being kids again.”
His eyes meet hers in the mirror once again, and the upwards tug at the corner of his lips tells her that he’s reminiscing on the same memories. She thought he might have forgotten about it—about the handful of haircuts they’ve given each other over the years. His mouth denies as much. “Remember that time?” he asks. “With the fringe?”
It’s Mikasa’s turn to laugh now, a hearty chuckle, when she remembers the time Eren tried to cut her hair for the first time, back in their shared home in Shiganshina, only months after they first met.
They were not to touch aunt Carla’s shears, or any of the tools she kept in her and uncle Grisha’s room—she remembers that much. The rule had been made unbreakable to Mikasa the second she saw where aunt Carla kept the shears—a small wooden box adorned with carvings of lilies and butterflies, identical to the one her mother had kept her home remedies in. Eren, though—ever the rebel and the bad influence—, had managed to convince her. “It’ll be fine.” He’d said. “Besides, you said it yourself. It’s getting way too hot for long hair.”
He’d actually made a decent job of the haircut, up until he started working on her fringe. Restless, clumsy, fidgety little Eren had made one wrong move then and Mikasa was left with a close-cropped strand of hair right above the middle of her forehead. She remembers trying so hard to be brave, to fight back the tears making her vision blurry, even managing to offer a compliment to Eren’s skills through gritted teeth. But as soon as aunt Carla made it home from the market and gave Mikasa a pained grimace, so out of place in her beautiful features, she fell apart.
“How did you know?!” She remembers Eren asking, stupidly, adorably, as if the all the evidence needed wasn’t plastered across Mikasa’s scalp. It had been alright in the end, manifestly, with aunt Carla working magic with her hands as she did with everything she touched. But after that, the wooden box with the lilies and the butterflies was kept in a closed cabinet neither of them were remotely tall enough to reach.
Mikasa wears a fond smile as she remembers the couple of other haircuts they’d given each other over the years. Once, a few months after arriving in Wall Rose, when Eren was all grief and anger and could not summon the compassion to take care of himself—so Mikasa took it upon herself to do it for him. Another time not long after enrolling in the training corps—this time at Eren’s request, as he had become– concerned that Mikasa’s long hair could become a nuisance during training, and had urged her to let him cut it shorter. He’d requested that she do the same for him, claiming it was an entirely logical decision, but then behaving so apprehensively during the process that Mikasa knew he still wanted her to make him look good. The final time their hair had been cut at each other’s hands had been a few weeks into graduating from boot camp and enlisting in the Survey Corps. Mikasa suspects some of their team mates had poked fun at Eren when they learned the pair of them always cut each other’s hair—because he never asked her for a haircut again, and every time she brought it up, he’d conveniently show up the next morning with a choppy fringe and his beautiful brown locks a couple of inches shorter. Mikasa had been a little saddened by it, of course—one more ritual between the two of them that she had had to let go of—but she knew better than to give in to it, choosing instead to start asking Sasha to be the one to cut her hair after that—not in defiance, but in acceptance that some things are just bound to change.
She’s learning now, though, that some things are bound to come back around.
Eren’s put down the shears and is smiling down at her, the softness in his eyes making the space between her heart and her ribcage feel unbearably tight. It translates over to his voice when he speaks, tucking a strand of his chin length hair behind his ear. “I think we might have switched haircuts along the way, though.”
She looks in the mirror then, and immediately knows what he means. Her hair is– it’s short, shorter than she’s ever had it, and not much longer than Eren used to keep his. Her fringe essentially looks the same, choppy strands of hair brushing against her cheeks and her nose, but the back of her head feels unnaturally light, no longer weighed down by the small ponytail she’s been keeping her hair in for the past couple of months. She caresses her bare nape, feels goosebumps arise at the novelty of the sensation, and wonders how the girl in the mirror is at once so different from her and so entirely like herself.
“Thank you.” The weight of emotion in Mikasa’s voice takes even her by surprise, and Eren responds with a nod and a smile as overflowing with affection as her voice was. After a few moments of silence, she asks him, matter-of-factly—not pressuring him in any way, fully just wanting to repay his kindness—, “Should we do something about your hair, too?”
He shakes his head gently, never dropping the smile. “I’m alright, thank you.”
A thought pops into her head, then, of how she can thank him. She jumps to her feet, suddenly understanding the giddy temperament Eren had found himself in just minutes earlier, when he was practically stumbling over himself to start on her haircut. “Sit down for a moment.”
It’s his turn to be dumbfounded now, but he obliges. Once he’s sat, Mikasa starts untangling his hair, too focused on the task at hand to register the way Eren shudders when her skin comes into contact with his or the tinge of red that’s now started to adorn his cheeks.
She puts down the brush and starts combing the top of his hair back with her hands, the silky soft strands tickling the spaces between her fingers, leaving the bottom half of his hair down. Once she’s pleased with the bundle of hair she’s holding, she begins explaining the process to him. “Alright, so– Your hair is still too short for you to be able to tie the whole thing. But,” her reflection finally meets his. “If you want to keep growing it out, I figure you should know how to do it.”
Carefully, Mikasa smooths the top of Eren’s head one final time, picking up the few stray pieces of hair that have escaped her grip, and pulls forth the navy blue tie from where it rests on her wrist, tying it around the little bun once, twice, three times, until she’s certain it’s secure. She absentmindedly picks here and there at any strands she isn’t satisfied with before dropping her hands on the back of the chair.
Eren’s watching himself in his reflection, tilting his head in every which direction to take in her handiwork, and then he’s looking back at Mikasa and she is again met with that gentle smile of his. Electrified, she brings her hands back up to his hair to untie it, then reaches for Eren’s hand and transfers the tie to his wrist. “You do it, now.”
Eren, her bright and attentive pupil, practises the movements Mikasa taught him in earnest, and ends up devising—and Mikasa takes pride in admitting this—an even nicer hairdo than the one she’s just given him. The smile on her lips is so wide it threatens to split her face in half. “Let me see.”
Eren gets up, steps in front of her to show her the result of his endeavour, as good an excuse as Mikasa needs to openly look at him. She’s watching him, studying so intently the features she knows by heart by now, and she knows the adoration must be practically seeping out of her pores. He looks– He is– So, so beautiful. Her beautiful boy.
She catches up to what she’s doing halfway through the movement, her hand already making its way to Eren’s hair—not for the purpose of teaching him, now, but in a caress—and a voice in the back of her mind questions whether she ought to stop.
(There had been a time when it would’ve been Eren to stop her, restless under her touch, exasperated by her attention, evading, calling it coddling—a word that had so many times pierced through Mikasa’s fond little heart. But there had also been a time, Mikasa remembers, when it would have been Eren to pursue her, to yearn for her touch, to search for it where words couldn’t reach and let himself be unashamedly soothed by it. And just as some things are meant to come around—her once soft hands now calloused, her once long hair now short, his once hot temper now a controlled simmer—he’s back at her side now, has been for a while, indulging in her adoration, reciprocating it, even, and Mikasa doesn’t know if he’s doing it for her or for himself, but she quiets the voice that asks this because all she wants to do is to revel in it.)
Her hand lands on a piece of hair that’s fallen out from the knot at the top of his head, and it tucks it behind his ear before resting against the side of his face. Eren closes his eyes at the touch, leans into it, and Mikasa’s heart beats out of tune inside her chest, an unnatural melody composed for him—composed by him. He looks so content, so peaceful, a smile creeping up on his lips once again and a barely audible thank you escaping them in a sigh. His hand comes up to rest against hers, tan fingers twining with ivory ones, and Mikasa knows she won’t be the first to pull away.
(In a corner of Mikasa’s mind, a thought arises, not yet grand enough to steal her attention from this moment — Her hands have finally stopped shaking.)