adjustment-disorder

Yellow sky wriggles through the leaves.

She clenches her bones, bleeds her mind, drinks the dead air. Wants to trace the tree roots home but home is where the heart is. Her heart is bone and coagulating plasma and crevices that dust a shape she cannot see. Oh yes she remembers. Most days terrible green eyes, other days blood in her eyes their eyes your eyes. She walks among the drowning and drowns among the dead.

Little men linger in her mind between memory and fear. Sasha and Connie and Jean and Armin and Historia and Annie and Reiner and Berthold and Hannes and Carla and Mama and Papa and. Eren. Waiting for her. She moves faster and chokes on her scarf. Her bones ache to turn back, to chase the blood drop trail and the screams, but she is not stronger than circumstance. Mikasa Ackerman can kill ten men in ten but a contaminated sewer rat could do better. (And she is so tired.)

"Stop here," says her Captain. He drops by a tree and lays his gear to rest. "The hideout is ahead. We will take cover for the night and think of a plan."

She can't think.

"We will do something, Mikasa. Rest."

She can't. She can't rest and it disturbs her so much that she coils her arm and punches the tree. Her mind drowns her ears with guilty guilty guilty guilty guilty and she shakes and screams like thundersky and he smothers her with his gut-stench hand but she screams and screams and screams, wants to bite him, scratch out his eyes (STOP LOOKING AT ME), hollow her scalp puncture her ears ("—calm down—") break her finger-bones ("—calm down—") tear out her tongue tie it into a little braid—

"MIKASA."

She pushes against the tree the sky the him. Wants cold and quiet but it's hot and the leaves speak. Pushes and pushes until it comes down like earth from her eyes. Begs to stop but her blood beats against the bones of her heart.

He combs the fraying edge of her rootlessness. "Mikasa. Do you trust me?"

She trembles.

"Do you hate me?"

All at once she sees the color of his eyes. "I hate me," she whispers. He takes over and lays her by his broken blade. Wraps around her shaking form like a small dark cell and corners the little men in her mind.

"Rest," he promises. The sky will not wash away just so. (Her mind on the other hand.)

In the distance, a roar breaks. She rises and falls with his chest and learns to breathe. The air is yellow and dark.