1.
"She's such a quiet child," her mother says, watching her dark-haired baby stare off into the distance. Little Mikasa's gaze flits around the room as though she is following something. A fly, her mother thinks, or maybe a dust mote.
What she can't explain is why Mikasa keeps looking up at the ceiling and babbling at it, chattering away as though she is speaking with an old friend.
6.
He evolves over the years: first a presence, invisible but palpable; then a faint white tendril; then a man, slight and translucent but emanating a strength that seems to buzz and crackle around him like electricity. He expects her to be afraid when he finally introduces himself, but — unlike the girl he remembers — she grins at him, her front teeth missing, and asks him where he comes from.
"Somewhere very different" is all he tells her.
Mikasa runs to her parents, excitedly telling them about her new friend, but when her parents rush into her room they see nothing. They walk slowly behind her, humoring their daughter after the second time she tells them that she wants them to meet Levi. After the eighth time, when she is whining and insistent, near tears when she drags them into her bedroom, they start to consider sending her to a psychologist.
15.
Mikasa feels a bit like a spider luring him to her bedroom, trapping him like a fly within the circle of her arms. But the wild-eyed boy from down the street seems to like it when she presses her lips to his, when she breathes his breath. He groans softly between her lips. Before he was all bluster, kissing too hard, biting at her, but when she arches into him and invites him to explore, he hesitates.
"Eren," she breathes, "it's okay. I want you to."
When he finally works up the nerve to place his hand over the swell of her breast, the room somehow gets colder. Mikasa doesn't notice; it is refreshing, a bracing counterpoint to the fire being stoked in her cheeks, in her chest, between her legs. Eren's hand rehomes itself, sliding up underneath her shirt, his fingers scrabbling at the cup of her bra.
A geode on Mikasa's desk falls to the floor, its impact muffled by thick carpet.
She lets out a soft giggle against his lips. His fingers are cold, trembling against her skin. The geode lifts itself somehow, grasped in an invisible hand, and is launched across the room, striking her mirror and leaving a spiderweb crack in its wake.
"Mikasa?" her mother calls. "What's going on?" The door opens a moment later and Mikasa and Eren leap apart from each other, wide-eyed like startled deer. "Mikasa!" comes the scandalized maternal yelp.
"I gotta go!" Eren barks, grabbing his discarded hoodie to cover the tent in his pants. He scrambles off the bed and runs out of the room, pushing his way past Mikasa's mother. The front door slams shut a moment later. Mikasa groans and rolls over in her bed, facing away from the inevitable parental retribution.
"I can't believe you would disobey me like this." Her mother's voice is soft, damp with sadness. "I told you, no boys in the house."
"You're not mad, you're disappointed, right?" Mikasa asks, squeezing her eyes shut to quell the burn of threatened tears.
Her mother sighs and says nothing, just leaves and closes the door behind her.
That night, watching Mikasa shake and sob in her bed, Levi reaches down and places one hand on her shoulder. She flinches away from the invisible pressure, bats her hand at him when she knows she cannot strike him — even though she desperately wants to.
Two days later he tries again: HE'S BAD FOR YOU, written in the condensation that forms on the bathroom mirror when she takes a shower.
"I don't care," Mikasa growls, whipping the towel from her hair and wiping away his words until her reflection greets her, scowling and red-eyed.
16.
"Can I come out?"
It starts as a whisper that she hears late at night, walking home from her first party. She tells herself it is nothing, though she knows it is not. All night standing around holding a red plastic cup in one hand while yanking the hem of her too-shirt dress down with the other, trying to catch Eren's eye from across the room, and she has nothing to show for it.
He is still back at Jean's house, trying to impress everyone with his beer pong skills even though he has yet to learn that enthusiasm does not make up for his lack of aim. Mikasa waved at him and he half-nodded at her before turning back to his game, aiming to sink a shot that ended up banking off the rim of the cup and landing in the dankest corner of the basement. So she left, teetering on her mother's heels like an unsteady deer for three blocks before taking them off and dangling them from her hooked fingers.
"Can I come out?" Louder now, the sound of the wind rushing through her ears, formed into rough nearly-words.
Mikasa trudges down the side of the road, dirt caking her bare feet, not answering him even as she hears him woven into every breeze, asking for her permission. She remembers her mirror, still cracked, and says nothing.
"No," she finally mumbles when she sees him half a mile later, spectral white against her darkened bedroom window. He shakes his head, his eyes downcast, and his image fades away to nothing.
18.
The first night she moves into her dorm, it sounds as though someone is throwing pebbles at her window. It's a prank, she thinks the first time she gets up and sees no one outside. Five minutes later, the sound happens again, so she sits by the window until the third instance, peering into the well-lit night to catch the perpetrators.
The quad remains empty, and she chides herself for suspecting anyone but him. She has stonewalled him for years, has become used to his occasional requests — but it is her first night in a new place miles from home and a touch of familiarity, even him, is more than welcome.
"Fine, Levi," she whispers, hoping that her new roommate continues to snore in her bed. "You can come out."
Within moments she feels a pressure against her torso, looping around to her back, heavy against one shoulder.
"Are you hugging me?" she asks haltingly, her eyes starting to water. The pressure increases and is joined by a series of soft sounds: irregular hitching breaths, a sniffle, a sigh of relief.
25.
He follows her from home to home, across town, across the country, scaring away friends, roommates, lovers, until she finally takes the hint and finds an attic apartment, too small for anyone but herself.
"I can't get rid of you, can I?" she asks when Levi appears, perched in the rafters, looking down at her.
"I'm attached to you," he replies, deadpan and shrugging. "Literally and figuratively."
Mikasa snorts. "I should call an exorcist."
"You won't."
"You know me too well, Levi," she tells him, ripping open the tape on a cardboard box with her new key.
"Too well," he repeats in a low mumble.
Mikasa lets the remark hang in the air, turning it over in her mind as she unpacks stack after stack of hardback books with titles embossed upon them in scrollwork and gilt: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Occult, Restless Ghosts and other Paranormal Phenomena, The Invocation of Spirits.
"What's that supposed to mean?" she asks.
"Don't worry about it," he counters, looking away.
28.
Six gray hairs appear on her head, she notices, after her third straight month of fourteen-hour study days. She rises at five, meditates for an hour, reads her tarot and checks her horoscope for the day, eats a small meal, and then returns to her stack of books.
"You're going to kill yourself living like this," he tells her, but even he can't help but notice that he feels more solid, more alive each day.
"It's worth it," she tells him without looking up from the rows upon rows of text in tongues he can't understand. Mikasa ignores him while she murmurs ancient words, rocks back and forth until her eyes start to roll back in her head. When she is done — in actuality, when her overtired brain simply cannot handle any more — she closes her eyes and slumps over onto the floor, asleep. Levi sits beside her and rests his hand over her head, finding for the first time that he can feel the texture of her hair beneath his fingers. He sits there until dawn, weaving strands together, slipping his fingers down her face so he can feel the warmth of her pale cheek.
The next night he puts one hand on her shoulder before she keels over. "I think you can stop now," he tells her, leaning down to plant a kiss on top of her head; soft, warm, a hint of moisture from his lips. Mikasa shifts in her seat, turning to look up at him with crystalline eyes sparkling with tears.
For the first time in a long time, an easy smile spreads across her face. She takes him by the hand and leads him to her bedroom, where they say nothing as they make their final acquaintance, mapping each other's bodies with hands and mouths the way they've explored each other's minds over the years.
Afterward, entwined in skin and sheets, Levi asks her, "Do you remember now?"
She closes her eyes for a moment and it hits her: a dream-memory of flying, smoke and steel, the copper tang of blood in her mouth. Her eyes fly open. "Heichou," she whispers, the word familiar in her mouth even though she's never heard or said it before.
"I've missed you so much," he tells her, and kisses her again.
When she wakes in the morning, the sun streams through the windows. Her room feels different, the sun streaming in through the gauzy drapes more brightly, the room larger, airier. Mikasa opens her eyes slowly, squinting like a newborn. Levi is gone. She whispers his name, waits. Nothing. Sparrows chirp outside.
Mikasa whispers again, "Levi?" No wind against the window, no presence in the corner of her room. Her breath hitches, skitters, catches in her throat. She rolls over, weeping onto the pillow where for one night his head rested, and inhales the last of him: a hint of soap, of pine.