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I.
He'd gotten there early for once, which almost never happened, and he'd saved her a seat without thinking about it the way he always did without thinking about it.
She came in twenty minutes later, saw him across the Hall, and sat at the other end of the table.
He looked back down at his plate. The argument last night had been about something stupid. He couldn't even remember what it was now, only the shape of it, her voice going quiet the way it did when she was actually angry, the way she'd turned and walked away before he'd finished his sentence. He'd told himself it didn't matter. Most of their arguments didn't.
But she'd sat at the other end of the table.
He ate without tasting anything. Sasha dropped in across from him with a full plate and Connie at her elbow, and the Hall filled up around him, and he kept not looking down to where Mikasa was sitting.
"Did you hear about Mikasa?" Sasha said, between bites.
"What about her."
"Jean asked her to the Winter Formal." She said it the way she said most things, straightforwardly, without apparent awareness of what it might do. "She said yes."
Eren looked across the Hall. Mikasa was at the far end of the table, now head down over a book, dark hair falling forward. Jean was nowhere near her. That was the only thing that made sense right now, that Jean was not sitting next to her, because if Jean had been sitting next to her Eren thought he might have walked over and said something he couldn't take back.
"Who told you that."
"Annie," Connie said. "Who heard it from Bertholdt, who was there."
"She said yes," he said again.
Sasha glanced at Connie. "Yeah. She said yes."
He pushed back from the table and left his plate untouched.
He found her in the corridor outside Charms, alone, bag over one shoulder, waiting for the classroom to clear. She looked up when he came around the corner and something in her expression shifted, just slightly. She could always read him. He'd never decided if that was a comfort or not.
"Jean," he said.
Mikasa looked at him for a moment. "What about him."
"You're going with Jean. To the Formal."
"Yes."
The word was flat and even and it hit him somewhere just below the sternum. He'd been half-hoping it was wrong, that Bertholdt had misheard, that the story had mutated the way stories did. But she said it like it was already settled, like there was nothing to discuss.
"Jean," he said again, because apparently that was the only word he had. "Jean Kirstein. That horse-faced—"
"Eren."
"Seriously? Out of everyone you could—"
"He asked me." Her voice didn't rise. It never did. That was somehow worse. "That's all. He asked, and I said yes."
"Why didn't you just say no?"
She looked at him then, really looked at him, and the expression on her face was something he didn't have a name for. Not anger. Something quieter and more tired than anger.
"Why would I say no," she said.
"Because it's Jean."
"Jean is fine."
"He's insufferable."
"You're insufferable," she said, without heat. "I manage."
He opened his mouth and she looked away, down the corridor, like the conversation was already finished.
"You could have just..." He stopped. He didn't know what he'd been about to say.
Mikasa picked up her bag from where she'd rested it against the wall. "You didn't ask, Eren." She said it simply, like she was pointing out the weather. "I thought you weren't going. You said you weren't going."
"I'm not going."
"Alright." She moved past him toward the classroom door. "Then there's nothing to talk about."
He stood in the corridor after she'd gone in and stared at the stone wall and tried to figure out why his chest felt the way it did.
II.
She'd known, when she said yes to Jean, that it would do something. She hadn't said yes because of that.
It was about the dress.
She'd found it in Hogsmeade in September, dark red, simple, the kind of thing she'd never had occasion to wear. She'd bought it anyway, folded it into the bottom of her trunk, and told herself she'd find a reason. The Winter Formal was a reason. She wanted one evening of it, of feeling pretty and dressed up and present in her own skin in a way that Quidditch practice and Defense Against the Dark Arts and the general business of being herself didn't usually allow for. She wanted to wear the dress. She wanted to dance. She wanted to feel like a proper girl for once.
Jean had stood in front of her after Transfiguration with his jaw set and his eyes somewhere slightly to the left of her face, clearly terrified, and asked if she'd go with him. She'd thought of Eren first. He's not going to ask. She hadn't let herself finish that thought any further than that. Then she'd looked at Jean and thought: why not. He was straightforward and annoying but not entirely without kindness, and if she was going to spend an evening in the Great Hall with candles floating overhead and someone's hand at her waist, she could do worse.
She'd said yes before he'd finished asking.
What she hadn't expected was Eren's face when he found out.
She'd seen him angry before, countless times, over things large and small and mostly small. She knew the set of his jaw, the particular furrow between his brows, the way his voice went tight and clipped when he was trying not to shout. She knew all of it the way you knew anything you'd spent years watching.
This had been different.
He'd said Jean's name like it tasted bad and looked at her like she'd done something to him specifically, like she'd aimed it. And she'd kept her voice even and her face still because that was what she did, because she'd learned a long time ago that matching his temper never helped either of them. But underneath that she'd felt something she didn't particularly want to name.
You didn't ask. She'd said it as plainly as she could. A fact. Not an accusation.
She wasn't sure he'd heard it as either.
A week before the Formal, Connie told her Eren had announced he wasn't going. He said he couldn’t be bothered. She nodded and said that was his business. Connie gave her a look she ignored.
Jean found her in the library on Thursday to confirm their plans and she was perfectly pleasant to him and meant it. He was trying. She appreciated trying.
After he left, she sat for a while with her Astronomy notes open in front of her and didn't read them.
She hadn't expected him to ask. Not exactly. But somewhere in the back of her mind the possibility had been there, quiet, unexamined. When the Formal was announced and weeks passed and Jean was the one who'd asked, and not him, she understood it for what it was. Something she'd been carrying without knowing it. She put it down.
That was fine. She was good at putting things down.
Jean would be perfectly decent company. She'd wear the dark red dress and feel pretty. The evening would be what it was.
She closed her Astronomy notes and went to bed.
III.
He’s not going. That was what he'd said, and he meant it, and he spent the evening of the Winter Formal in the common room with a book he wasn't reading while the fire burned low and everyone else filtered out in their dress robes.
Armin paused by the portrait hole on his way out. "Last chance."
"I'm fine."
Armin looked at him with that particular expression that meant he was thinking several things he'd decided not to say. Then he left.
Eren read the same paragraph four times. Outside the windows, snow was coming down slow and steady, the grounds gone white and quiet. The common room emptied out. The fire crackled. He could hear nothing from the direction of the Great Hall, which was the whole castle away, which meant he was being an idiot just sitting here thinking about it.
He thought about Jean's hand at Mikasa's waist.
He put the book down.
He sat there for another ten minutes, which was long enough to feel the full weight of his own stupidity, and then he went upstairs and changed.
He got there late, which meant the dancing had already started and the room was warm and loud and golden, candles everywhere, the enchanted ceiling throwing soft light down over two hundred people in their best robes. He stood at the edge of it and felt immediately that he'd made a mistake, not in coming, in waiting so long, in not... in all of it.
He found Armin first, who widened his eyes and said nothing, which was its own kind of comment. He found Connie and Sasha tangled up in the corner by the drinks table and Sasha pointed wordlessly across the room.
He looked.
Mikasa was dancing with Jean. Dark red dress, hair half-up, the rest of it falling loose. Jean was saying something and she was listening with that patient, slightly distant expression she wore when she was being polite. She didn't look miserable. She didn't look happy either.
She looked like she was waiting for something that wasn't happening.
Eren watched for a moment longer than he should have, then crossed the room.
IV.
She noticed him before he reached her. She always did.
He was in his dress robes, which he'd clearly put on in a hurry, and his hair was doing the thing it did, and he was moving through the crowd with that particular walk of his, like he'd decided something and was going to see it through regardless. Her heart did something inconvenient.
Jean noticed her expression change. He turned to look, and then turned back to her with something complicated moving across his face, and to his credit he didn't say anything petty. He just stepped back, slightly, and said, "I'll get us something to drink," and left before Eren arrived.
She almost called after him. She didn't.
Eren stopped in front of her. Up close he looked the way he sometimes did after a bad Quidditch practice or a long row with someone, a little raw around the edges.
"You came," she said.
"Yeah."
"You said you weren't."
"I know what I said."
She waited. Around them the music kept going, slow and warm, other couples drifting past. He looked at her like he was working something out, like the answer was somewhere in her face and he was trying to read it.
"I don't know how to do this," he said. Just that. No preamble.
"Do what."
He exhaled. "You know what."
She did. She'd known for a while, maybe, what was underneath it, the way he'd say her name sometimes, the way he'd looked in the corridor when she told him Jean had asked. She'd known and she'd held it carefully at a distance because she wasn't going to be the one to name it first. She wasn't going to reach for something that hadn't been offered.
"Eren."
"I should have asked you," he said. "I know. I'm... I know."
The music shifted, something slower, and the candles above them drifted and the light caught the line of his jaw and she thought: here, then. If it's going to be anywhere.
"Ask me now," she said.
Something moved across his face. "To dance."
"Yes."
He held out his hand. She took it.
They didn't talk much. There wasn't much to say, or there was too much, and neither of them was going to start. His hand was warm at her waist and she had her hand on his shoulder and they moved slowly in the small space they'd claimed between other couples, and she was aware of everything: the pressure of his fingers, the slight tension in him, the way he was looking at her like he was trying to memorize something.
"Mikasa."
"Mm."
"I'm sorry. For how I was, in the corridor."
"You were jealous," she said, because they might as well say it.
He was quiet for a moment. "Yeah."
"I know."
He pulled back just enough to look at her face. "You knew."
"I'm not oblivious, Eren."
He laughed, short and helpless. She felt it more than heard it. He shook his head.
"Why didn't you say anything," he said.
"Why didn't you."
He didn't have an answer for that. She hadn't expected one. They kept moving, and the candles drifted overhead, and she could feel the moment settling around them, the way certain moments did, like weather changing.
"What happens now," he said. Quiet. Almost to himself.
She looked up at him. He was already looking at her.
Then he kissed her. Honestly, she’s not sure who moved first. It didn't matter. What mattered was that the distance between them closed, and his forehead came down against hers, and they stayed like that for a breath, two, the music going on around them.
Soft, careful, like he wasn't entirely sure she was real. She kissed him back to let him know she was.
When they broke apart he was looking at her with something open in his face that she'd never seen before, or maybe she'd seen it and hadn't let herself name it.
"Okay," he said. Like it was an answer to something.
"Okay," she said.
The music kept playing. They kept dancing.
fin.