After the dust settled, after the blood dripped from their hands they were just flesh and bone and that somehow didn't make it any easier. It should have. He needed it to. He needed to look at her and know everything they did, everything they had survived, meant something. But it didn't. Not really. All it meant was that they were witnesses to the death of their friends, to the world's end.
There they were. The victors of the war, death filled their lungs and turned their blood to ashes. Mikasa looked at him the way skin closed around a cigarette burn, the way smoke lingered long after a house had finished burning to the ground.
Fragmented and prominent, she was a scar that drew stares.
She didn't say anything. Partly due to the fact that there was nothing to say and also because her ears were still ringing from screams of her friends. Her family. She hated that word. The very idea of it. There was no home. At least not for her.
"We did it." Levi said.
His mouth was hesitant to form a shape, but settled into a small smile. It felt strange and inappropriate as if they should have lived as silently as the dead.
Her eyes said, "Did what?"
Won.
She didn't feel like they had won anything.
But they were alive. More importantly he was alive with her.