What can I say, I was inspired to write this and so I did. Check out JamJackEvo's "A Cruel and Beautiful World" it's the main inspiration for this fic and probably around a million times better. Seriously, check it out. Also sorry if Mikasa seems OOC and changes her mind constantly, remember that she is under heavy mental stress. And if there's going to be Romance (not sure about that quite yet), it'll be MikaEren. There will be blood, gore, and mentions of suicide, though if you're a fan of Attack on Titan you're probably not that shocked by it at this point.
Summary: After Eren seemingly dies during the battle of Trost, Mikasa prepares to go down fighting. Just as she is facing her own death, a random occurrence fills her with resolve once more, and something left untouched for five years awakens. Titan shifter!Mikasa, AU, possible MikaEren in later chapters.
Trost district, T-Minus 10 minutes
The world was a beautiful place.
But it was also cruel.
So damnably cruel, cruel enough that it would give you a moment of respite to close your wounds before it would rip them open again, thought one Mikasa Ackerman as she sped across the rooftops of Trost.
What other explanation could there be to how it seemed to make sure Mikasa couldn't keep her promises no matter how hard she tried.
After her parents died, she had vowed to herself that she would not idly stand by and let others do it for her should it happen again- But when it did, she had been helpless.
When the debris from the Colossal Titan's attack fell on their house, without Eren there she wouldn't have even thought to go check on Carla-Mother. She had more than earned the title by taking Mikasa in and treating her as her own. When they reached the house, she would have been frozen in place by the sight of her adoptive Mom trapped under the fallen debris from the wall if not for Eren urging her to at least try and help her.
When it became clear that they could not possibly move her in time, Mikasa and Eren would both have been dead if not for Hannes interfering, still trying to futilely lift the wooden beam until the Smiling Titan would have devoured them all.
Mikasa had vowed to protect Eren, the only family she had left, but only succeeded in annoying him and driving a wedge between them. It seemed as if she could only be there for the everyday things, like making sure Eren ate enough or making sure that the bruises he acquired during training would at least heal before he charged back into the sparring ring. But when it came down to it, she had allowed herself to be placed on the rearguard, foolishly having allowed Eren's promise to stay alive to soothe her into a false sense of security.
And now Eren was dead.
Dead.
She remembered the words all too well. She remembered Armin's shaky voice as he desperately tried to hold back tears.
"Tomas Wagner. Nack Teaz. Millius Zermesky. Mina Caroline. And Eren Yeager… The aforementioned five… Bravely fell in the line of duty."
Mikasa also remembered her own words as she calmed Armin down.
"This is neither the time nor the place to be emotional."
She also remembered how even as the words left her own mouth; she knew that she was a fucking hypocrite.
What right did she have to accuse them of being emotional when she was herself barely managing to keep her finely crafted mask together, to not show weakness in front of the others?
And after that, what right did she have to accuse them of being cowards, when she was already planning her own goddamn death?
What right did she have to accuse them of incompetence, to claim that she could take on the Titans in the Headquarters when she knew that she wasn't even going to survive half of the trip there?
Not because she couldn't take the HQ back, she simply wouldn't.
Because why should she, when didn't care about it anymore? All she had cared about was her family, and it was all gone.
All that was left was for her to die, so that she could join them in whatever awaits beyond this world, if there is any. She didn't know, but what she did know was that it would be better for her to die with her family than live on without them.
And no matter how Mikasa looked at it, the 104th Trainees Squad was not her family. Even Armin had always been more Eren's friend than hers, and while she did sometimes enjoy spending time with him, she didn't have the same bond with Armin as she did with Eren.
She had already planned how she would go. It was the way she believed Eren would've wanted her to go, and certainly the only way she could imagine herself go.
By taking down as many of those damned Titans with her.
She might be a coward for it, but Mikasa knew she could never directly take her own life. She didn't have the courage to simply use one of her swords or misplace one of her 3DMG maneuvers. No, she would die fighting.
Mikasa supposed she should've asked Armin about what the Titan that eventually felled Eren looked like, but the blonde was nothing if not skilled in deduction. He would realize what she was planning and try to stop her.
Mikasa pulled her scarf to cover the whole of her lower face as she maneuvered through the broken city of Trost, towards the HQ. After seeing a Titan, a 15-meter class looking like a middle-aged blonde man with a drunken expression on the distorted face walking between the abandoned buildings in the middle of a medium-sized alleyway, she fired her hooks and closed in.
She took a quick look around her. It seemed like the remaining Trainees of the 104th had been sufficiently motivated to follow her.
Good.
They would've died for sure if they stayed there, and taking the HQ was really the only way they'd even have a fighting chance.
Approaching it from the front, Mikasa fired both of her grapple-hook at the 15-meter class Titans face and swung past it, before reeling in and using her momentum to achieve maximum force. Combined with her momentum and perfect timing, her two blades lopped off a sizable chunk from the nape of its neck.
The Titan fell with a resounding thump whilst Mikasa continued her arc through the air before hooking into a chimney and swinging around to deliver another killing blow, this time to a 7-meter.
Five minutes of rapid maneuvering, four broken swords, and a dozen dead Titans later, Mikasa landed onto a rooftop to catch her breath and look around.
Whilst she had killed many, it seemed that the tide of Titans was simply endless. The amount of Titans in Mikasa's immediate surrounding had tripled since she began killing them. She noticed Armin and Connie nearby, it looked like the rest of the Trainees had opted to continue and not get bogged down.
Good, she didn't want a large audience for what would happen next.
She used a burst of gas to leap towards a 14-meter class that had been closing in on her position, stabbing it in the eyes before it could react. She then flipped over its head as it brought its hands up to smack her.
Fortunately for her, this Titan was both clumsy and stupid, only managing to punch its own head while Mikasa took advantage of the distraction and stabbed it in the neck.
As she pressed the triggers to fire both hooks to the building on each side of her in order to swing herself over to the next Titan, only the right one triggered.
She knew that she had been using way too much gas, and that soon she would run out, but she hadn't managed to keep track of when exactly she'd run dry.
Her coordination broken, Mikasa tried to reel in with her right hook, but was sent tumbling down to the pavement as the right canister also run out mid-swing.
She had been lucky; the gas had run out when her angle of approach to the ground wasn't too steep. Mikasa dropped her swords and rolled with the blow, but it still knocked the wind out of her. She rolled along the pavement before coming to a stop when the right cable, still attached to the adjacent house, reached its maximum length.
She was bruised all over, she was pretty sure something broke internally, and she was covered in blood. Most of it was steaming Titan-blood, but there was some of her own mixed in.
Mikasa struggled back up; tapping a switch in her 3DMG harness, and the right hook disconnected and reeled in. The complex system was designed so that even with no gas left, soldiers could disconnect and reel in their hooks so that they wouldn't get stuck in place. They could always cut the cable, but then the harness would be practically useless even if resupplied with gas.
Mikasa took a quick look around her assessing her situation. She saw Armin and Connie still engaged with their own respective enemies, and more importantly, the two dozen Titans converging on her at varying distances. There were at least two 15-meters and the rest were between 12-and 4-meters.
This was finally it.
But she wouldn't go down easily.
She saw a 9-meter running at her from the front, its arms flailing and its mouth frothing, while two others, 6-and 7-meters, approached from directly her right.
Mikasa grabbed two more blades from her sheath, readjusted her scarf and darted forward with all the speed she could muster, formulating a battle plan.
If she was going to go down, she might as well try out a couple of moves she had planned but never dare to use due to their incredible riskiness.
She slid to her knees and sliced the tendons on the 9-meters legs, causing it to fall down flat on its face. She turned around, ran across its back before slashing it in the nape of its neck and leaping off as the two Titans approaching from the other direction tripped on the 9-meters body and crashed down too. She slashed their necks too, before discarding her now-useless swords and drawing a new pair.
As the Titans evaporated around her sending steam all around, Mikasa hadn't noticed the 15-meter Titan sneak up on her until it was right on top of her, reaching down and grabbing her before lifting her towards its mouth.
'Not yet!'
Without a word, Mikasa sliced the fingers off the hand just as the Titan was about to devour her, sending blood flying in all directions. She couldn't avert her trajectory with no gas left, and so she was roughly shoved towards the Titan's face; its mouth stretched wide open in a horrible grin.
'I might as well make the most out of this.'
Mikasa flew into the Titans mouth feet first as the massive jaws snapped shut. She had a plan, but the next part would require perfect timing. She heard Armin screaming something, but she ignored it and pressed on. Landing into the slimy interior, she brought her right arm down to slow her slide.
Or, at least she tried to.
Then she realized that she wasn't feeling her right arm move.
Then she realized that she wasn't feeling her right arm at all.
Then she realized that she hadn't entirely made it past the Titan's jaws.
And then, the pain hit her.
Mikasa came very close to letting go of her sword and grasping the stump of her right arm as the overwhelming pain rolled over her. Instead, she bit down on her lips hard enough to draw blood and concentrated on making this work.
With all her might, Mikasa leapt forward and rammed her remaining sword into the back of the Titans throat.
'One meter tall and 10 centimeters wide… I wonder if I managed to pierce deep enough?'
She had, during one of those long and boring theory lessons where she had already known what they were teaching, theorized that it might be possible to stab the weak spot of the Titan from the inside.
After that, she had sneaked into Instructor Shadis' office to take a look at one of the many sketches and graphs the man had about Titans. There was one that had particularly interested her, a sketch made by an artist from the witness of a Survey Corps soldier who had been devoured whole by a Titan, but had been saved when one of her comrades had killed it mere seconds later, and whatever other info they had managed to gather in the brief amounts of time they had whenever a Titan was slain.
From the sketch, Mikasa had identified the spot where the back of the neck was the closest to the digestive tract, and theorized that if one were to be devoured by a Titan, one might be able to pierce through its flesh and stab that weak spot.
Of course, considering that the ideal kill was with two blows from the back, Mikasa knew that it was basically down to luck on whether the blade managed to take out whatever it was that made that particular spot a weakness, but she also knew that she didn't really have other options.
Just as she rammed the blade as deep as she could, another wave of pain rolled from her stump of a right arm, while simultaneously the entire Titan lurched forward, and her hold on the handle slipped.
A few moments later the Titan's body had evaporated away, Mikasa was lying in the middle of the street surrounded by a pool of blood and the carcasses of the Titans previous victims.
She was covered in slime and just about hanging onto consciousness.
She barely managed to get to a sitting position to watch as the remaining Titans closed in.
'So this is it, huh?'
Mikasa knew that she had no chance here, she couldn't even move, much less fight. She managed to gather the resolve to relieve the pressure from the stump and use her remaining arm to draw her last remaining sword. In a moment of peace amidst the chaotic sounds of battle originating farther away and the slow rumble of the Titans approaching, she looked on her reflection on the side of the blade.
Her face was covered with bruises and her white shirt was nearly universally red from the amount of blood coming from the stump.
'Maybe I should just do it with the sword. It'll be over quicker than if the Titans get me.'
Mikasa began to angle the blade to plunge it into herself, but she caught another reflection on the blade.
Her scarf had, miraculously enough, managed to stay on her throughout the battle. It was splattered with blood and battered, but it was Mikasa's most valuable possession throughout the years.
'Eren…'
She took another look around herself, her gaze sweeping across the abandoned alleyway.
The Titans were leisurely walking towards her, as if to prolong her life just to snatch it away at the end.
And those damn grins on their faces…
It was as if they were mocking Mikasa, taunting her that she hadn't been able to protect Eren, smiling and confident that she was done for.
No.
They weren't mocking her…
She could take if they were, maybe she even deserved it.
But they weren't.
They were mocking him.
They were mocking Eren.
With all of the stress and guilt from her family dying, the pain from losing her arm and now this, something snapped inside her.
It was probably something important, but Mikasa couldn't bring herself to care.
Ignoring the pain from her wounds rapidly lessening, ignoring the increasingly weird feeling within her, ignoring the steam that appeared to come out from her, Mikasa slowly stood up, and for the first time since the battle began, she spoke:
"I will kill you."
"I will kill you slowly and painfully."
"I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU ALL!"
The flash of orange lighting could be seen from all corners of the city of Trost.
T-Minus Zero.