Word Count: 2,294
She woke abruptly, in a cold sweat, breathing hard, her heart pounding away in her chest in response to some nightmare that was already fading quickly from her memory. She was sitting bolt upright, clutching a soft, fluffy comforter in the all encapsulating darkness out of which she could see nothing. Her eyes searched her seemingly empty surroundings, wild and desperate for something, anything, to latch onto.
Panicking when she found there was nothing, her racing mind tried to recall something, anything, that she could remember prior to waking up just a mere minute ago. Drawing a blank, fear consumed her, and she drew her knees up to her chest and began to cry into them. Sobs wracked her body as she grieved for a life she could no longer remember.
Something stirred beside her, and she jumped out of bed, screaming.
"...?" The bed creaked beneath the other person's shifting weight as they sat up. She dared not move out of fear, but her eyes seemed to be finally adjusting to the dark, for she could make out a vague silhouette glancing around the room.
Her beating heart lay still for just a moment.
She tiptoed backwards until she felt something solid pressing up against her back. Her hand reached back to explore it, stumbling upon a switch which she promptly flicked.
Warm, yellow light instantly bathed the room, temporarily blinding her, but when her eyesight returned, it focused on the scruffy-looking teenage boy sitting up in the one bed the room had, right next to where she had been just a minute ago. Feeling heat rising up to her cheeks, she looked decidedly away from him to observe their surroundings.
He was squinting as he also gazed around the room seemingly full of stuffed animals and nothing else. With not much to observe, their sights inevitably drifted towards one another, and they locked eyes.
The nights were awkward at first. There was but one queen-sized bed in the cabin, and while there were what felt like a zillion stuffed animals lying around the room (neither one of them had any idea why though. It wouldn't have been wrong to say they were both too old for that sort of thing, objectively speaking.), they weren't comfortable to sleep on.
So they shared.
She slept lightly, remaining perfectly still and taking tiny, shallow breaths, often times looking like a doll.
He slept like a log, though he tossed and turned throughout the night and snored like no tomorrow. He had the tendency to pull her to his side as he slept, effectively waking her as he cuddled. She was shocked and uncomfortable at first, for she found it irritating to be woken every night like that, but it was amazingly easy to fall asleep in his arms, so she eventually accepted that such was her life now and grew used to it.
He himself never seemed to realize what he did every night until she, as it seemed to him, began to cuddle him before they both fell asleep, his only hints to it being her confused and subtly hurt face when he broke away and finding himself holding her close the next morning anyway.
They found a tablet in one of the drawers, and it was in there that they discovered their names.
Eren, the boy's name seemed to be, and her own was Mikasa. Aside from their portraits above the names, that was all the information they had been given. There had been no messages in over seven years ("No messages in 2,578 days," it had read), and the only app of note on the entire device was the one labeled "paint."
So as Eren lay beside her on the bed, watching her, she opened up Paint and began to doodle.
In an instant, their entire cabin melted away, and as she drew in blocks and clouds, those same features materialized just outside. They watched in wonder as the previously blank sky filled with stormy grey clouds, as a pillar of cracked, yellowed rock shot up to meet them.
She felt a tug on her arm, and she glanced away from the outside at the boy lying beside her. He was grinning and pointing outside, his message clear: let's go outside.
So they did.
Their cuddling was also a pleasant break from the loneliness that seemed so, so prevalent inside their little cabin. It was a loneliness that neither one of them could ignore despite each other's constant presence. It was a loneliness that seemed to weigh heavily on their minds, so much so that at times, it seemed suffocating.
It was a loneliness that persisted despite company.
It seemed more often than not that night was their only solace, in which they found comfort in one another. The darkness often seemed to cultivate a sort of mutual trust, an ability to allow all walls around themselves– and one another– to fall down. It was in that dark cover of the night that they found something comforting and real in the illusions they built during the day. The night was their most treasured shelter.
Often times at night, Mikasa could hear his heartbeat, for she often found herself lying on his chest. It woke her from her peaceful slumber, pulling her into a drowsy half-consciousness, with its shocking strength. She often listened found herself listening to it, fascinated, enraptured by it. While it often woke her, it also lulled her to sleep once more.
Just that little act of intimacy helped stave away the fearful emptiness of the dark.
The worlds Mikasa created from the tablet belonged solely to herself and Eren. But it didn't bother them that there weren't any other people. They were not lonely.
Such were the things she often told herself as they lay together on the bed they shared, the sun's dusty, lazy beams dappling the room with a warm, yellow light.
Indeed, she thought, it was not the night that they found themselves fearing, for the loneliness it crushed them in was merely temporary. The dawn always dissipated it, and they always had each other.
Such were the lies she often found herself feeding upon, her eyes bored and tired as she tapped the tablet pen against her chin, an immense art block weighing her down. Perhaps if she were to go out into the world for a few moments… Augh, but she never saved them!
She stopped supporting her head so that it could fall onto the soft, cushy mattress. Turning her head to the side, she saw Eren looking curiously at her. She blew her bangs out of her face and responded to him in no way other than staring blankly back at him.
When nothing more happened, he pulled the tablet out from beneath her and pried the pen out from her already lazy grip and began to draw by himself.
Watching the walls of their cabin vanish into nothing felt oddly comforting. Out from the ashy nothingness beyond them rose a wall, thicker and taller than anything she'd ever decided to put into her world, a tree on top of a hill surrounded by little, blue flowers, and a sky, one full of fluffy, white clouds, whose colors seemed to be waning into the evening.
Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly as a bit of life returned to them.
She remembered…
It was a world full of pain and suffering. Death followed them around every corner, looming over their shoulders, musing softly to himself about who he would take next.
Who he took was but a brief flash in her mind for every one of them she knew, but the montage still lasted an uncomfortably long time.
It was a world both she and he knew and knew the other knew. Meandering among the flowers, the blossoms withered at their touch, but they both chose to pay no heed to the trail of death and destruction they left in their wake. They had more to attend to than the past.
They flew through the air with the greatest of ease, dashing through forest and flame. Mikasa found her gaze constantly drawn towards Eren. She found he was reckless, dangerous, a hothead whose very spirit was on fire. She found something deep within her gut tugging her towards him, drawing forth feelings achingly familiar, yet altogether brand new.
As she stood on the red roof of yet another achingly familiar but also brand new building, staring with great melancholy out at a solemn grey sky, her eyes widened imperceptibly. She remembered.
A great swell of feelings. A burden placed upon her shoulders. Emptiness. Disbelief. Grief. And love, love, love.
The tablet was wiped clean. She found they were returned to their little cabin. She was breathing heavily, taking deep gulps of breath as she realized she had stopped breathing.
Something between them changed after that particular escapade, but Mikasa couldn't quite place what.
She found herself staring up at the ceiling lamps from the bed for hours, unable to fall asleep as Eren slept beside her, his head resting on her lap. She leaned against the headrest and absently ran her fingers through his soft, messy hair. She felt that little bit of love, love, love swelling up in her chest again, and she had the sudden urge to plant a soft kiss on his head as he slept.
But something told her not to, to restrain herself, for he would not appreciate that sort of affection should he find out.
The urge was great, but her willpower was greater.
Something between them had changed after that particular episode, and Mikasa knew exactly what.
She glanced over at the tablet on the side table, its screen dark.
Perhaps if she hadn't let him draw her that world, their dynamics wouldn't have changed. But choices were choices. She kept quiet about it.
Everything they needed was in their little, one-room cabin, which was convenient on one hand. But on the other, it made privacy between the two, quite frankly, completely and utterly impossible. There were parts of one another that both frankly wished the other hadn't seen.
Like the time when Mikasa found a tiny stuffed teddy bear at the bottom of one of the heaps and cried because dammit, it was so small. Or the time when Eren kicked over the bedside table because a drawer got stuck and his temper just snapped.
But the day all privacy was lost between them and keeping secrets was no longer an option was when Mikasa fell asleep in the tub.
They'd been living together for what felt like forever, but if there was anything they were determined to keep private, it was their naked bodies. It was the only rule between them, one that was never spoken aloud, but never really had to be.
She hadn't realized she had fallen asleep until she woke up later, curled up on the bed with only a t-shirt on. She looked about the room, confused, and she caught sight of him just getting out of the tub.
She was a mature adult, she told herself. She was a mature adult.
She still screamed when their eyes met.
(But in her defense, so did he.)
Avoiding one another was just as impossible as having privacy in their little one room cabin, and it made stewing in their new feelings for one another all the more terrible. At times, the tensions between the two were so thick it could have been cut with a knife.
It was days before they could look one another in the eye again, weeks before they could stand to even graze the other's skin without flushing.
Mikasa found herself wading through a shallow pond in a bamboo forest, alone, during one of the nights when the tensions were still running high. White, half-wilted petals floated on the surface of the pond, creating the tiniest of ripples when they fell. The sky was mottled grey, threatening to rain on her. And since she did nothing to stop it, it did.
She let the warm, humid drops fall onto her face and arms as she stretched her hand up toward the sky.
They gave in eventually.
The night had always been a time of intimacy between the two, though before it had always been but innocent cuddling. And while they were still just as soft and gentle with one another as if they had been cuddling, after that night, they were anything but innocent.
It was strange, really. In all their days spent together, neither one of them had ever uttered a word. Perhaps incoherent mumblings in the dark, the scream that rang through the air the day Mikasa had fallen asleep in the tub, but never did they ever say anything aloud. Their only means of communication had been through meaningful looks and glances, and that had spoken volumes in their time together.
It was no surprise that she could not find her voice at first, just a simple rasp of a sound.
Eren looked at her with surprise.
She tried again to communicate her feelings aloud, for though they both knew it by now, there was nothing quite like hearing the words themselves.
"I love you," she whispered, her voice still too hoarse to produce proper sound.
His eyes widened slightly, then his expression softened. He smiled. He pulled her closer to him so that she could feel the beat of his heart through his chest. She felt him press a kiss to her head, stroking her back soothingly.
"I love you, too."
Author's Note: i was gonna upload this as a drabble series w/each little section being a tiny drabble but then i was like. nah. gift of tongues is actually a di script about a child with a misshapen jaw and therefore cannot talk properly. they go about living their life thinking their parents hate/resent them until they find out that they're adopted, and for the first time, they feel so loved because their parentschose them. my friend performed it and i'm pretty sure the script itself is a nats or state winner. i picked the title for this fic because throughout the fic neither one of them says a word until the end and like. gift of tongues. talking.
the tub thing was supposed to be she fell asleep, eren got bored, he thought he could take a bath during the duration of the nap, so he just took one as she slept in the tub. yup.
aside from being a practice in communication without dialogue, it's also technically a SHELTER AU. also wow all that implied sex. value this, dear readers. this is the closest you'll ever get to smut from me. leave a fave or smth if you enjoyed. reviews are always really nice to have. anyway, have a greaaat daaay~~