They wheel her to Shiganshina wrapped in the Reebs Company's best black tarpaulin. They dye the cloth with enough ink to print a library, and six soldiers escort the cart. In the brief interval where an improperly tucked corner lets sunbeams graze her leg, Annie hears Erwin remark on their resemblance to pallbearers.
Hanji mentions something about cocoons. Annie lies in her coffin and contemplates running. But metamorphosis tires one out, and requires fuel she doesn't have; she has spent every torch-ray the Corps allowed her, in the dungeon, on healing cells and blood not designed for anaerobic existence. The secondhand glint from Mikasa's eyes as she notices the exposed crystal is deliciously unfilling, more energy to process and enjoy than it provides. But: the worst thing she can do for the scouts is to refuse them access, and she has pledged to deny the whole world all it wants from her. She sleeps.
She doesn't wake when they saw open the basement door. She doesn't get the satisfaction of watching Eren, that belligerent lovely pain in the ass, slide into silence, too delphically burdened for one Jaeger or even two to stand. She receives delayed notifications of her declining status, from Humanity's Worst Enemy to mere intellectual exercise, and she doesn't blink when Hanji, no longer distracted by survival, breaches the crystal—not until its devitrified planes slough from her face, exposing her baby blues, and she's introduced to Grisha's de-titanizing serum by its injection in her neck.
Was that really necessary? she thinks, as the last lightning of her life subsides, her sweater and hair hissing in its wake like fried grits. Thousands will vie for a pound of my flesh. How unsporting of you to diminish me first.
The masses never find her. Hanji wrangles her into temporary barracks; humanity now has so many ex-titans that Annie can be shunted through standard procedures. Whole colonies of doctors and grifters mushroom where once stood walls.
"You're lucky, you know," Hanji says, seemingly as eager to sweep Annie out of her civilian life as she had toiled toward capture. "It was deemed, or rather, I deemed it too dangerous to experiment on you when we have—" she waves a hand, fingers as gently outspread on the upper bunk railing as Annie's limbs on the lower bed. "Too many other unfortunates without your particular abilities. You're the only one we've found who could harden the air around you. Wrap crystal around yourself like a lantern. I'm sorry you can't stay—"
Hanji's developed crow's-feet and is short three fingers, and yet her hands around Annie's, palm to palm and palm over knuckles, threaten no pain. Hanji served as a torturer during the war, Annie's been told, but Hanji was unlike her fully formed before she ever split anyone's shin, and her savagery was lightly learned. She talks to Annie as if Annie were only another in Hanji's orbit of unusual individuals, to be allowed into undemanding acquaintanceship. Annie gets restless without demands to counter. "I'm not sorry," she says. "Can I go? Or am I gonnastay somewhere else as long as I'm an impenitent little girl?"
Hanji loosens her hold, pushes her glasses up with her thumb. "I've explained your situation to a few of the 104th. You have a offer."
"Really."
"Mikasa," Hanji says, and Annie, resigned, crawls up and stands and looks.
In a half-moment she's glad she was already facing the door. Mikasa marches through and tries to throw her. Annie, who had steeled herself to confront Mikasa verbally and not for Mikasa's thigh rippling into her stomach, tries to follow her movement. Fucking height difference. Fucking muscular atrophy. Her father's techniques cannot be adapted to a body recovering from a year lying flat. She can only fall sideways and back, cushioning their jerk into the bed frame. Mikasa's fingers slam into her chest. "I'll rip them off," Annie snarls, recalling weightlessness, the Wall unfurling before her where before she'd only viewed it crack by crack, the rush of spring air into her severed bones; but Mikasa has fastened her down like a nail, Mikasa's hands are safe. She casts a critical eye over the frame's wooden joints. Her gaze shifts, minutely, to Annie, who snaps her head up but can't command cooperation from any muscles below her diaphragm, and who ends up biting on nothing but air.
Hanji calls out, in the ensuing silence: "I think I can leave you to it!" Tuneless whistling, receding.
"I couldn't believe your condition was as bad as they said."
"You could have asked me."
"Annie," Mikasa says, "you spent four years telling us how frail and weak you were."
"And human in contrast to you and your hangers-on, don't forget that," says Annie. She shows Mikasa most of her incisors. In response Mikasa curves her wrist, slowly, so that Annie's heart may return to its usual position: the gesture nearly vulnerable. In the ordinary course of things one doesn't see Mikasa releasing anyone, only the gauntly elegant speed of her second attack, all the harder. But Mikasa is matching her expression tooth for tooth. "Where are your hangers-on?"
"The queen needed Eren. Armin... he wanted me to come to court with them, but they put up paintings of me in the halls. You'd have to see it every day on the way to the bathroom."
"Mikasa Ackerman, subject of myth, subject of a thousand longing stares, killer of titans. Defeated by canvas and pigment."
"You're still a dick," Mikasa mutters, sitting by her side. Annie is not much hurt. Mikasa last called her names in a bunk kin to this one, her mouth damp on Annie's thigh, and had chosen weapons more cutting when they'd fallen apart. "He said no one would chase me through the streets in a few years, and we'd see each other again..."
Annie absorbs these. Reiss taking her throne is expected, but Eren needed in peacetime, in a place with no use for his unbridled fury or fists—she would not have thought it any more likely of him than of herself. Armin she can imagine more easily—Mikasa would be clutched close, eye contact made nearly as fervently as when he lies, and he'd explain to her why any royal court, however well-meaning its head, must value paintings of people like Mikasa over their less sociable subjects. "Well. Say, am I gonna see you again?"
"Annie," Mikasa says, "do you have anywhere to go?"
Home was a village tucked into a high mountain crease. The village is now, according to Hanji, notable for its excellent exhibits of titan footprints. If her father is alive he doesn't care for her to know. Annie considers telling Mikasa this, and then Mikasa lifts her head. No cracks in the coolly set expression, but Annie would bet every one of the police back payments left to her that Mikasa is extending her own hearth, offering up her throat. Not a rhetorical question. It is obvious, also, to someone who has murdered anyone who begged her, that Mikasa does not mean to condescend. Only: we might be good for each other, again. I have time to spare for you, if you think it right.
"You can come home with me," Mikasa says, "maybe you'll scare off the tourists," and Annie—eyes closed, pulse jumping—reaches for what is offered.
They're chopping dinner in what is, besides the crisp sound of vegetables splitting, a mutually appreciated silence. Mikasa's bladework writ small in stalks of celery and chicory roots. The Ackermans had planted the same weary Shiganshina plot, Annie remembers, for longer than Annie has known Mikasa, and when Mikasa orders her—knife never stopping—to move soil here and uproot the weeds there, that's where the seeds go, her experience shines through. Coaxing delicate green things out of the dirt is an awfully quaint tradition, compared to the fifteen meters of trained sinew the Leonharts could draw up, but it has endured.
Annie refuses to interpret this as a lesson. Even dying arts deserve loyalty. "You received a letter," she says. Sliding her fingers under the keen edge of Mikasa's knife effectively halts her work. "You have a permanent pension."
Mikasa's face expresses amusement. "I thought your creed was to do whatever you enjoy." The chopping picks up again, downstrokes ducking around Annie's flesh.
"Here—" Annie opens a shelf and extracts a loaf. "I don't mind eating these. But you remember what we once used these for? You complained the texture didn't match titans at all, you were so ridiculously intent on getting it right. I thought I wouldn't mind. If I'd fought you, and you spilled my blood. Will you be excited by this forever? Hiding your skills, hiding your talent, holding yourself back so you can slice your food without damaging the counter?"
"Doesn't sound like a bad idea," says Mikasa.
A warm afternoon and Annie can almost taste the sun. Her cheeks prickle, flushed with light she can't absorb.
She's arranged herself in the fields face to the wind, knees bent, arms lifted. Turn it ninety degrees and her position could be mistaken for a fighting stance, but Annie can bear this pose for hours. A wedge of pale hair will occasionally blow into her eyes, and she'll wait for the breeze to move it elsewhere; she suspends herself in place and cleaves her consciousness from her physical form, her thoughts so carefully isolated that her hands feel like the possessions of another. While encased in rocks one has nothing but opportunities to practice skills of this sort. Mikasa is barely ten meters away, but she too is absorbed in her own world, soaking herself in the role of the dutiful farmer.
An hour, two hours. The sky stretches up forever over Annie's head, and not a single songbird is making a horizontal crossing: even if she could transform—into what she'd lost—the size of it would prove her inconsequential. You could never be everyone's antagonist. Your crimes and gifts are petty, Annie Leonhart, measured on the scale of horizons and stars.
"I know exactly how ordinary I am," Annie says, as lazily as she can, and sprawls herself wider for good measure.
Some years ago she'd almost died, Mikasa tells Annie, her face entirely enclosed between pillow and tiered spills of black hair. Because she hadn't been careful. Had, for a moment, released the tension that builds itself within every soldier who has come within a body's length of a titan and lived, a gate unwittingly left ajar. She'd almost lost her hand to the correction of her mistake. "So I don't let my guard down. My family's survival depends on my vigilance."
"I stay away from war memorials," Annie offers. "Hundreds of trigger-happy idiots who want to kill me on every stone."
Perhaps it's too much. Mikasa has trained up a tolerance to match the depth of Annie's barbs, as if consuming her cruelty would also gild their house and partnership in proportion to that which Mikasa accepts; but now she's swiveled to face her, like the old silver spoons promised to spin toward poison. "You were hiding, safe. Considering the rest of us through your looking-glass."
"I pledged my father I'd live!"
"Why does everything you pledge to your family always agree with your convenience," Mikasa says, and hides her face under the blanket.
No good replacement, that, Annie thinks, and settles her hand over Mikasa's nose instead, under the cloth. Consciously she does not pinch off her breath, a note that she could, and has not: an acknowledgement that Mikasa came to her because of all people Annie most reliably pins her to her limits. "You know, if you think you're better, that's fine. But convenient? To extend yourself to your utmost and feel only the walls you yourself made when the Scouts around you are painfully dull, uncreative humans beyond your imagining—to know you're cut off from the rest of the earth, to have no one to throw yourself against—do you understand? I wouldn't have said a thing if they'd ripped me apart if I hadn't made the pledge—"
Mikasa touches her lips to Annie's palm. Annie shrugs back. "You're never one to avoid a metaphysical argument."
"Neither contested nor relevant. Did you not notice, I wasn't angry in the slightest when the first action you took toward me, seeing me, was to ram me into the mattress. Conscious of my genuine frailty."
"I'm not sorry," Mikasa says, and the words would inflame some, but the mixture of callousness and urgent assurance running through it steady Annie and then exhilarate her. I'm not sorry to have wished you death, she thinks, I'm not sorry to have moved heaven and earth toward it, but I am not sorry to have known you or to have undergone your scrutiny. "We're not rivals. For god's sake, you live in my house. I don't think I'm—better or worse—"
"Better, or worse," Annie repeats, softly, and un-props herself on her own pillow, her cheek and Mikasa's close enough to conserve heat. "Do you think we're the same?"
Silence, in which Annie turns her head. Witnessing Mikasa uncertain is a rare gift, and she would rather save her esteem for whatever Mikasa is considering. She suspects she knows. She was a spy once, they recognize such things. Annie has seen Mikasa a hundred ways, a hundred places, has touched every dart of skin there is to touch, has scratched through to the knobs of her spine and once—an axe blade unbolted from its handle and tumbled into the shrubbery, a flap from Mikasa's deltoid gone with it—sewn her up. Mikasa no longer wears her scarf, yet there remain things to uncover. Annie instinctively raises her arms and forces them back down. It is like sparring, there's a moment you move, and before it, the long gathering of your reserve—warmth arriving in your stillness, defying the textbooks, thermal without the kinetic, you cannot be sure whether light shifts to heat or the reverse—and then you burn.
Mikasa's laying a bandage on Annie's knees with her left hand. Her right's empty, but below the lifelines, at the folds of the wrist, not all the troughs and crests of skin were given to her at birth. The scar and the ink flower in shapes Annie doesn't know, but she has some sense of the intent, of its likeness to the elms in the village and her shin cracked against their trunks for practice, and the great granite tors on which she'd drunk her sun: but her inheritance had healed invisible, and then healed half away.
After a minute—"I thought you'd bite it," Mikasa says.
"Ha," says Annie, "is that really what you think of me," and this is what she sees when she thinks of them: her world shrunk to the size of their yard, and Mikasa barely holds the downturn of her lips as she offers up the classic Leonhart fighting stance, dressed in shirt and sunhat and trousers but neither glove or armband. Come so far.
"Maybe," says Annie, "I can teach you more?"
A/N: All feedback deeply appreciated! Written for the beyondpanels exchange, April 2014.