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I.
Gryffindor lost by sixty points.
He'd known before he landed. He'd watched the Slytherin Seeker pull up with the Snitch already closed in his fist and the roar from the green and silver section of the stands had done the rest. He brought his broom down without looking at anyone and walked off the pitch with the specific silence of someone who had nothing left to say.
The team filtered into the changing corridor in pieces. Sasha said something encouraging that landed on no one. Connie was quiet. Mikasa walked beside Eren without speaking, which he appreciated, because he didn't want words right now. He wanted to get back to the common room and sit with it alone for a while.
They were almost at the castle when Porco found them.
He was with two other Slytherins, still in his Quidditch robes, and he had the looseness of someone who'd won and knew it. He looked at Eren and smiled.
"Tough match, Yeager." The kind of tone that meant the opposite. "Though I suppose it's harder when you've only got half the blood for it."
The people nearby went still.
Eren didn't think. He pulled his wand and cast before he'd finished the thought and Porco hit the ground hard, robes twisted, wand skittering across the stone. The crowd lurched back. Someone shouted. One of the Slytherins grabbed Porco's arm and there were footsteps behind Eren that he recognized as a professor before he'd even turned around.
Professor Ackerman's voice was very quiet, which was worse than if he'd shouted.
"Mr. Yeager. Come with me."
He went. He didn't look back at Mikasa.
She was there when he came out of Levi's office an hour later. Sitting on the bench in the corridor outside, hands in her lap, still in her Quidditch robes. She looked up when the door opened.
Two weeks of detention. Twenty points from Gryffindor. On top of the loss it felt like a comprehensive defeat.
He stood in the corridor and looked at her and waited for her to say something.
She didn't. She just stood up and walked with him.
That was almost worse.
II.
She waited until they were in the empty corridor off the third floor before she said anything.
"He wanted you to do that."
Eren kept walking. "I know."
"You gave him exactly what he came for."
"I know, Mikasa."
"Levi took twenty points. You have two weeks of detention. And Porco gets to tell everyone he got inside your head with four words."
Eren stopped walking. "I heard you."
"I don't think you did." She stopped beside him. "This isn't the first time, Eren. The thing with the Hufflepuff prefect last month. The argument with Reiner in the library. You just... you don't think. Something gets at you and you react and then everyone else deals with the consequences."
He turned to look at her. "So I should have stood there and taken it."
"I'm saying you handed him a weapon."
"He already had a weapon. He said it in front of everyone."
"And now everyone saw you lose control." Her voice stayed even. "That's what he wanted."
"We can't all be perfect like you, Mikasa." The words came out harder than he meant them. "Must be nice, having everything under control all the time. Never putting a foot wrong."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" Something had cracked open now and he couldn't seem to stop it. "You just stand there and watch and nothing ever touches you and then you tell me how I should have handled it better. Like you're my..." He stopped.
She looked at him. Waiting.
"I already have a mother who smothers me," he said. "I don't need another one."
The corridor went very quiet.
Mikasa looked at him for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes and then closed off, the way a door closed, quietly and completely.
"Maybe this was a bad idea," he said. He didn't entirely know why he said it. It came from the same place as the rest of it, the loss and the detention and Porco's face and the humiliation of all of it.
"Fine," she said. Her voice was very calm. "Then we're done."
She turned and walked away.
He stood in the empty corridor and listened to her footsteps until there was nothing left to listen to.
III.
The week that followed had a quality to it that settled over the entire friend group like bad weather.
They sat at the same table. They were in the same classes. They existed in the same spaces and did not speak to each other and the careful architecture of it, the way they managed never to be addressed at the same time, never to be left alone together, took a kind of constant low-level effort that exhausted everyone around them.
Armin stopped trying to broker anything after the second day. He'd said something careful and neutral to Eren on Tuesday morning and gotten a look that ended the conversation before it started.
Connie just looked miserable.
Sasha lasted until Friday.
She sat down next to Eren at breakfast while Mikasa was at the other end of the table and put her fork down with a deliberateness that meant she had something to say and had decided to say it.
"She's not eating properly," Sasha said.
Eren looked at his plate.
"I'm not telling you that to make you feel bad. I'm telling you because I've sat next to her every meal for six years and I know what she eats and she's not eating." She picked her fork back up. "Also Connie cried a little on Wednesday and said it was allergies but it wasn't allergies. Also I can't enjoy my food when the atmosphere is like this and food is very important to me, so." She speared a piece of sausage. "Whatever you said, just go and fix it."
Eren was quiet for a moment. "It's not that simple."
"It never is," Sasha said. "Go anyway."
IV.
He found her that evening in the courtyard, sitting on the stone bench by the far wall with a book she wasn't reading. The sky was going dark and cold and she had her scarf pulled up and her hair loose and she looked up when she heard his footsteps and then looked back down at the book.
He sat down beside her. Not close. She didn't move away.
For a moment neither of them said anything.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That was... I know what you do for me. I've always known. That was wrong and I knew it when I said it."
She was quiet.
"And the other thing I said." He exhaled. "I didn't mean that either. I was angry and humiliated and I said the worst thing I could think of and I didn't mean any of it."
She closed the book in her lap. Looked at the darkening courtyard.
"I was too hard on you," she said finally. "After the match. You'd just lost and Levi had just..." She paused. "I wasn't wrong about what I said. But the timing was wrong. And I know I can be like that. Watching. Correcting. I don't mean it as criticism. It doesn't always land that way."
"I know you don't mean it badly."
"I know Porco's comment hurt." She looked at him then. "It hurt me too. Standing there hearing it."
He hadn't thought about that. He'd been so inside his own reaction he hadn't thought about what it had been like for her, standing there, hearing it said about someone she...
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked back at the courtyard and said, very quietly, "We're horrible at this."
He almost laughed. It came out as something close to it. "We're still learning."
She looked at him again. The last of the light was going and in the near dark her expression was open in a way it rarely was, something tired and honest and entirely herself.
He leaned in and kissed her, soft and careful, and she kissed him back the same way, and when they broke apart she was still looking at him with that open expression.
"Don't say things like that again," she said. "About us being a mistake."
"I won't," he said. "I promise."
She nodded. Looked back at the courtyard. Then she shifted on the bench, just slightly, closing the distance between them.
Above them the sky finished going dark and the first stars came through and neither of them moved to go inside.
fin.