Eren has left Paradis Island, and Mikasa feels lonely, but she's able to grow in ways she couldn't with Eren always at her side. Meanwhile, Eren is on the mainland at the Marleyian hospital, and he's having hallucinations about Mikasa, but he's also taken advantage of by an aggressive older woman, which only exacerbates his confusion and mental deterioration. Last, Levi is sharing a similar psychic space with Eren; he sees images of Mikasa too, while he gradually opens up a friendship with her.
Mikasa
Her boots slosh heavily forward. Her feet sink into the sand. Air funnels up her leg, boiling through her clothes. Her hands dig into the water again as she fumbles on. The ship sails into the horizon, churning up a wake of smooth, clear glass. Mikasa's instinct of self-preservation clenches against the cold abrupt sense of solitude: He's not looking back, he's not looking back, he's not—
The ship sails away without stopping, with Eren aboard it, without her; he isn't looking back. The weight of water fills Mikasa's boots and her clothes. Through the thick of waves and sea salt she trudges on, pulling her hands through the ocean, propelled forward, compelled toward the ship.
He's not looking back . . .
"Cover your ears."
Waist-deep in the water stands Captain Levi. She covers her ears. His arm lifts, a flare gun bulging from his grasp. The trigger releases. A pillar of smoke spews into the air, a bright red flame punctures the sky. Mikasa lets down her hands, looking at the ship. She sees him then, small with distance, shrunken away. He goes to the bow, his black pullover flapping in the wind. He grips the rail. She cups her hands around her mouth.
"Eren."
"You're not loud enough."
"Eren."
"He can't hear you."
"Eren—"
Eren doesn't move, gripping the rail, growing smaller with distance. Panic heaves through Mikasa in a sudden surge of dead cold blood. She's lurched forward, as if a steel wire has been anchored in her sternum at one end, nailed in Eren at the other—and now it's reeling her in, dragging her after him by the chest. The captain catches her around the waist.
"What do you think you're doing?" he says.
"I have something to tell him," she says. Her chest lurches after Eren. The captain's forecep thickens.
"You can tell him when he returns."
"I don't know if I—" All the breath and all the blood in her body rises to the very top of her sternum, sitting there on the point of a pin. She starts to gasp through the escalating pressure of the breath, the blood, and of the name.
"You've been holding it for much longer." The captain's voice is steady. His eyes are cold and steady too. "Isn't that right?"
She inhales, her mouth snapping open. All the escalation has built-up, bursting out. She doesn't hear her voice when she calls his name, only feels the hot, dry, voiceless rub of vocal cords, her vision going white, thinking: He can't hear me and I don't know if I can do it anymore, going blind with the labor, the diaphragm squeezing long after the air has already been gone and emptied. She shrinks, her knees failing, shouting, her mouth snapped open, with all of the voice shouted out of her, the captain's forecep strained hard and steady against her stomach.
Her face starts to dissolve. The ship smudges against the high empty sky. Eren is a shapeless nothing now; it is only the rudder and behind it the peaceful stir of serene glass.
She sags like a purposeless boneless sack on Levi's arm. With his hand alone, his fingers fanned across her chest, Levi holds her above the water. Her head hangs. She stares into the faint, lonely eyes that the ocean reflects at her.
The captain says, "He can't afford to look back when he's moving forward. Do you understand? Don't take it personally."
The faint eyes blink. Coruscations glint in a hot, flashing brilliance as the eyes warble under a mask of emptying rings. The rings expand, fading as they grow.
A moment later the eyes reappear on the water, still faint, still lonely, her head still hanging.
"Take your hand away," she says.
Levi doesn't move.
"Take your hand away," she says.
He takes his hand away. It's the black hair that vanishes last, sucked below in a black swirling plip. The surface boils with her breath. It grows still. Levi waits. Under his eyes, the sun wrinkles fiercely on the water. The fierce horizon, too, has compressed the ship into a black gash upon the red wavering glare of the setting sun. Waves ruffle against Levi's ribcage. He waits. He watches the water.
It's her black hair that emerges first, sticking to her scalp. She rises and pinches salt from her eyes, beginning to walk toward the shore. Her hair clings close to her skull like a spill of tacky black oil. Levi turns his head. As she walks past, he turns his shoulders, pivoting at the waist with her passage. He watches her go.
On the beach, the rubber tread of her boots impress in perfect replica, disintegrating into glittering white sugar-sand when she reaches the backshore. The dunes rise, white, insurmountable, the reeds and grass thinning at the peaks. The horse lifts its head. Its ears flick. Mikasa mounts. Turning away now, Levi watches the sky close like a stitched wound as the black gash of the ship sinks away into the orange unfathomable eternal tranquility.
Levi
He puts a food platter on the mattress. Displaced soup spatters in the cup. He picks up the tray, putting it on the nightstand. Mikasa, sitting straight-backed, doesn't look at him, staring at the opposite wall, her eyes shallow in her face, as if they've been impressed by a round, blank stamp. She wears an old flimsy nightgown.
Levi takes up the knitted throw blanket, which lays folded on the foot of the bed, and flourishes it around her shoulders. She bears its weight, her face emerging from of its plaited shroud like a dial without ticks, a clock without hands, so that the passing can't be calculated by the second, the minute, the hour; and therefore time feels indefinite without the hands to inform you of its calculable finite value.
Levi takes the apple from the food tray and flicks out his pocket knife.
"You should eat," he says.
Her eyes are dim, mere indents. "Armin and Eren," she says. "They've begun to slip away from me. I'm going to lose them."
Levi looks at her a moment. The bedside sinks when he sits down. "You're only just now realizing this?" In his hand, the pocketknife shines like a silver minnow in the stream of daylight pouring from the window.
"It hasn't been long since Eren uncovered the memories of his father."
"That's not what I mean." Levi looks at his hands: One holds the apple, the other carves out an oblong slice. Juice dribbles over his thumb. When he remains silent, Mikasa removes her eyes from the wall and puts them on his cheekbone. He feels her but doesn't face her, slicing the apple in the cup of his hand.
"In this world," he says, "it's the strongest who survive. And those two were never as strong as you."
"I thought I could protect them. I thought—"
"I know very well what you thought. You care only about Eren and Armin, and you thought if you committed all your strength to them, and to them alone, you could guarantee their survival." Levi turns the knife toward Mikasa, a piece of cut apple stuck to the blade. He leans back a bit, looking at her without moving his head. "Your fidelity is remarkable, I'll give you that."
She says: "If you're trying to make me feel better," and stops.
"You're seeking consolation from me?" The knife is still turned out toward Mikasa, glistening with pale juice. "I wasn't aware that's what you were doing. Have my sympathetic sensibilities on any occasion been reliable?"
"No," she says without resentment, without sharpness even. "You'll only pour salt onto the wound."
His tongue clicks savagely in his mouth. "It's as I thought." He teethes off the piece of apple and digs the blade into the skin again. "The soup will go cold if you don't eat it soon. It's the recipe that helped Eren feel better when he was in a fugue."
"I remember. I recognized the smell. You always made it when he was having an episode." They say nothing then and don't look at each other. From above, the window sheds light in the interval between them, warming the air in a yellow thin bar.
"I don't feel well enough for food," Mikasa says. "I feel like there's tin in my stomach."
"Tin?" he says.
"That's how it feels."
When she inhales against the front of her nightgown, he can almost hear the small sound of the fabric expanding. When she exhales, the nightgown sags in flimsy white scallops, and he can see inside the folds, flicking his eyes away. He feels vague, as though he isn't here at all; as if he's somewhere else, doing something else. He runs his thumb along the blade's threshold. There's a faint ring of flesh-contact and steel.
"At this point, it isn't about saving your friends," he says, but he doesn't feel himself speaking, just hears the knife vibrating on the pad of his thumb. "It's less concrete than that."
Levi extends the knife again, another apple slice fixed to the tip. Hunger and saliva inundate Mikasa's mouth. "What meaning will Eren's life have if the choice comes to you?" he says. "Are you going to let Eren become a demon or will he fall a hero?" His eyes steadily hold hers. Without looking away, she opens her mouth, clamps her lips around the slice, and drags it off the blade. Fresh apple juice furls cool over her taste buds. She closes her eyes and chews.
In his lap, his hands continue carving the apple. Levi thumbs a slice into his mouth. When he speaks, he still sits turned away from her. "Tell me, do you trust my judgment?"
"Yes."
"Listen closely, then." His teeth make a fresh crisp sound. His earlobes move infinitesimally when he chews. "Eren will return home alive. You can lay your anxieties to rest, now."
Mikasa
Over the back of the wooden armchair, the old red muffler lays folded, thick with a fresh, fluffed quality. Mikasa goes to it. The fabric nearly dissolves under her fingertips, not old and not worn-out either, just soft and significant. She takes it up, the folds dropping apart, and brings it to her face, feeling it with her cheek, her lips. A perfume of soap suffuses its threads.
Who, she wonders, washed her muffler while she was sleeping?
She wraps it around her neck and caresses her palms over its scarlet tail. The door opens. The captain's shoulder slants against the frame, his hands in his pockets, his posture leaning in a kind of motionless, obdurate detachment. He's wearing a plain black shirt and plain black pants; his black hair is neat, and plain too.
"So . . . you're finally awake."
He looks at her through the front of his black hair, never lifting his chin. She spreads her fingers nostalgically across the muffler and closes her eyes and pulls the smell of clean cotton deep inside her belly. It spins within her gut like a deep-sea constellation of weightless shimmering memory-dust. When she blows it out, opening her eyes, her door is empty.
Nurse 4
Men bide their time in the recreation hall with board games, cards, and talk of war. It is an atmosphere of old, beaten, bullet-torn flesh; antiseptics; and the melancholic bitterness of undiluted whiskey. The nurses flutter about, fairylike, in their buttoned white dresses and their shiny pantyhose. They speak to each other when they pass, carrying conversation between each brief contact, ongoing communication, without end and without beginning.
Nurse 1: Can't someone else cover 18? I'm begging you.
Nurse 2: What's got you so unsettled, hon? 18 doesn't seem— All right, I'm coming, dear.
Nurse 3: It's not like he's Crazy Eyes, remember him? ha ha ha— God, that dickless bastard—
Nurse 1: I'm telling you, there's something— Mr. Shephard needs assistance getting back into his chair, please.
Nurse 3: Yes, I'll take care of it.
Nurse 2: And Mr. Habar soiled his sheets again.
Nurse 1: All right.
Nurse 2: 18 doesn't even sh—t himself, for goodness sake. If you cover Habar, I'll take 18.
Nurse 3: Darling, sometimes washing out a man's blistering asshole is preferable to—
Nurse 2: Then you get Habar.
Nurse 1: Please, ladies. I just— I can't go in that room anymore. You don't understand.
Nurse 4: Hush, now. He's only a hobbled man. Not even a whole man. Quit that hideous begging, darling. Don't you worry, I'll take 18.
The fourth nurse has cunning feline eyes and long black hair. The hair is important. Because Captain Levi was born from a woman who had thick black hair that fell luxuriously down her back, and it was the long black hair for which the mother had perished in indignity and anonymity and had left behind the child, alone and without a name. And once the child had grown into an adult, he remembered, still alone and still without a name, that it was the long black hair which had killed the mother.
The fourth nurse, who has long black hair and a rare subversive disposition of dominant female, agrees to take on Room 18 inhabited by the patient the other nurses do not want without knowing the reason for why they do not want him, simply knowing that he is not a patient to be wanted through some subconscious unspeakable antipathy.
Nurse 4: Good evening, sir. My name is Mary. I'll be taking care of you from now on. It's a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Kruger.