A/N: News flash—while we're sitting at home, safe and sheltered, a war rages in Syria. The Syrian conflict is something that we tend to see buried under "bigger" headlines, such as politics, especially in American newspapers. The mass media rarely gives us the whole picture, instead presenting us with a filtered, white-washed version of the horror that unfolds in Syria each day. I really hope to portray the experience of a war correspondent to the best of my ability in this fic, and if any of you wonderful readers spot a mistake/inaccuracy, please let me know! Researching this has been a heavy but important experience.

CHAPTER II | The Skeleton

Mikasa

A humming noise grows louder.

"Shit, what is that?" Jean growls, twisting backwards in his seat to peer out the back window.

We brace ourselves as our mustard-yellow taxi cab, streaked with dirt stains, rumbles down the rugged road. The driver veers around piles of rubble and dead bodies, swearing loudly in Arabic. Sasha, in shotgun, babbles in her own stilted Arabic, pleading for him to calm down.

Suddenly, it's dark, as if the sun has gone behind a thick cloud, bathing the entire world in a shadow. The humming has escalated to roar.

"Fuck, it's right over us!" Jean screams.

The driver swerves into an alley, smashing into abandoned trash cans, and we're jolted into a joyride-of-horror, yanked forward by momentum, only to be snapped backwards by the blunt force of our seatbelts. Behind us, something drops. A whistling sound. Amidst the violent roller coaster ride of the taxi, through the rearview window, I watch an object plummet to the ground in agonizingly slow motion. It's a barrel, like one of those cartoon silly explosives that you'd see in Looney Toons. Right as it makes contact with the ground, it freezes. I can feel my heart pulsing erratically, my blood screaming through my arteries.

And then there's heat. A deafening blast.

The driver swerves again. My head bashes against the side passenger window, and I'm near-positive that I hear a crack. I see fire. Reds, oranges, yellows so bright that they appear a lethal white.

All I see is white now. Is this what the entrance to heaven or hell or wherever I'm bound for after life on earth is supposed to look like? I expected a re-run of my life, a montage of all the important things from my life. Entering this world, kicking and screaming. Learning to ride a bike. Watching Mom's pulse on the heart monitor flatten out to a stagnant, unmoving line. Listening to Dad say his last word in a breathy whisper before joining Mom. Meeting him. Graduating high school. Getting accepted into college. Having my first kiss. Losing my virginity. Leaving the airport. Regretting everything. Etc., etc. The end credits roll. The audience gives me a standing ovation. The curtains close, and finally, I can rest.

But death flat-out rejects my pitch when everything fades to black. There is light. Noise. Screaming. Crying. My eyes snap open, and I'm back in the taxi.

We're alive.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," Jean is mumbling, sweat pouring down his neck. His hand is squeezing mine, choking my fingers of circulation.

In the front seats, the cab driver is hyperventilating, driving us in zigzags. Sasha is sobbing, fighting the urge to dry heave.

Everything is clear, and I can think again.

"Everyone, quiet!" I shout, clapping my hands together once.

The mumbling, swearing, and sobbing cease. All that can be heard are distant blasts echoing across the city.

"Sasha," I begin slowly. "We need to get back to the base camp. Tell Mr. Nawfal that, okay?"

"Y-yes, Mikasa," she answers, launching into a shaky Arabic request.

I squeeze Jean's hand back, and instantly, he relaxes, coaching himself to take deep, steady breaths of oxygen. The cab nervous tiptoes through Aleppo, a city that was once beautiful and busy but is now a crumbling skeleton, emaciated by toxic years of war.

He was exhausted from this battle. These endless days of campaigning to him, of convincing him that we'll be okay, that we're ready for this. Screaming matches between him and Jean could be heard from outside the building. Sasha flooded his mailbox with a rainforest's worth of letters, proposals, and essays. Shadows clung beneath his dark, piercing eyes, and his face grew gaunt from stress. But he stuck on through, digging his heels into the ground, despite how hard we tried to yank him out by the roots.

We had no choice but to play our trump card.

We hated doing this. Resorting to these measures that were killing him, inside-out. But there were stories, hidden under that war-torn moonscape, that needed to be unearthed and told to the world.

Professor Levi Ackerman knew that better than anybody.

I sat down with him, bringing him the largest cup of coffee, quadruple-shot, that could be found in Chicago. I listened to his tirade about safety, about life, about youth. I nodded as he rattled off the ever-growing list of journalists who have lost their lives in the line of reporting in Aleppo alone. I let him shout and swear and scream. And then I proposed our ultimatum.

At first, he listened, staring at his Pulitzer prize, framed, in all its glory, above his shelf. There, sandy pebbles from Iran, rugged ore from Russia, and smooth river stones from Afghanistan formed a library of horror stories. Unabridged non-fiction. Midway through my proposal, he gritted his teeth, jumped to his feet, and flung his pen, right into the center of that Pulitzer frame. We stared at that pen, lodged in the cracked glass, perfectly parallel to the ground. After an entire minute, it finally gave in to gravity, tumbling to the shelf, knocking a Libyan rock to the floor. And Levi sighed and sat down.

"You promise me something, Ackerman," Levi began, swiveling around in his chair and propping his legs up on his desk.

"Depends on what the promise is."

He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine without the cheekiness, thank you very fucking much."

He took a long swig of his coffee, wincing at the instant caffeine rush, and set the cup down carefully. He was sifting. Sifting through his mental thesaurus for the right words, tossing aside ones that were near-bull's eyes but didn't precisely fit the nuance he was going for. Upon choosing the right candidates, he rapped his knuckles against his desk.

"So listen every word that comes out of my mouth, alright?" he said wearily.

"Listening."

"My favorite time of the day was every evening at 11:00PM. I'd have a cup of chamomile, read a few chapters of whatever's on my nightstand, and go to bed. Depending on what I ate for dinner, I'd have these incredible dreams. You know that whole thing with lucid dreaming, where you can trick your brain into conjuring up any dreamscape of your choosing? I figured out how to do that, and I'd be able to do all this incredible stuff like flying and deep-sea diving without worrying about oxygen and that awful ear-popping pressure shit."

He turned to face the Chicago skyline. To the east, Lake Michigan glittered under the setting sun.

"After I went to Rwanda, my favorite part of my day became the most horrific part of my day," he continued, rising to unhook his Pulitzer from the wall. He bent down to scoop up his pen and returned with the cracked frame in his hand, setting the certificate on his desk. "I saw the most fucked up things, things that you'd never imagine a human committing to another human, things that make you anxious walking in this city, surrounded by animals. At the end of the day, that's what we are, Mikasa. When government gets the shaft and that hollow construct known as civilization finally concaves on itself, we are, at the core, animals.

"Each night, when I shut out that light, I'm reminded of that fact. I've stuffed myself full with every sleeping pill you can find on the market, but the nightmares always beat out the drugs. I used to fly. But now I plummet down, as missile, and I can see the faces of the people I'm about to obliterate. I used to dive. But now I drown in the blood of people who perished by mankind hands. Sure, I got this fucking piece of paper and that fucking slab of metal that proclaims that I can write shit. I've been sucked into this business as if it's a black hole, and before I realize it, I'm in Russia. Afghanistan. Libya. Iran. Dozens of other versions of hell. Since Rwanda, where it all began, I haven't had one good night's sleep. Not even a damn wink.

"Now sure, Erwin-fucking-Smith has hooked you guys up with a Turkish 'contact.' Sure, you guys have solid journalism degrees under your belts. Sure, you guys are some of the boldest brats that UChicago's ever coughed up. But know this," Levi Ackerman pounded his fist against the frame. "Every night, you're gonna dread going to bed."

He paused before finalizing, his voice cracking, "So promise me this: know when it's time to come home."

Running on fumes, the cab groans to a stop before the Free Syrian Army camp in a nondescript area of Aleppo. The driver, spitting a spray of obscenities towards us, shoos us out. The second I step out of the vehicle, onto the ground, stars flash across my line of sight, and the next thing I know, I'm on the ground.

Jean's instantly by my side, helping me to my feet.

"What's the matter?" he asks, brow scrunching with concern.

Gasping, I lean against him for support, clutching my spinning head. A wave of nausea hits me at full force, and I'm reeling over, retching the strange porridge we had for breakfast onto the ground. Sasha offers me some of her meager water supply, but I shake my head.

"Hit my forehead against…" Another wave of nausea leaves me jittery and gasping.

"Dammit, I think you've got a concussion. A bad one, at that," Jean mutters, helping me into the tent.

An army medic rushes to my side, spewing off a list of questions in rapid-fire Arabic, but my mind is too foggy to comprehend anything, even with Sasha stumbling through translation. The world seems to be trapped in gelatin, everything moving at a third of its normal pace. The medic wraps something around my head. Blurry, Jean's face is blurry. Sasha's face is blurry.

The only clear face I can see is his.

He's here in Aleppo.

But he's leaning over me with this look of immense hurt on his face, the same look that seared into my mind after I let go of him at O'Hare, stepping into the gate. I remember how his hand was frozen in place, grasping onto the ghost of my fingers, how his eyes, those eyes that I fell in love with, pleaded me to stay with him. The flight attendant ripped my ticket. He cried out my name in a voice jagged with desperation, thick with melancholy. I turned around, telling myself that if I met his sad, broken eyes one more time, something in me will set fire to all those dreams of traveling the world and giving people a voice in the global conversation, those dreams that I've cultivated ever since I was a little girl. Face forward, I goaded myself, fighting the tears that threatened to escape down my cheeks. Chase those dreams. Don't let them slip. Once you've got them in your hands, you'll come home, like you promised Levi.

"I love you."

Face forward. Chase those dreams. Don't let them slip.

"Mikasa, I'll love you. Always."

Face forward. Chase those dreams.

"Don't ever forget that."

Face forward. Face forward, dammit, FACE FORW—

I dropped my bags by his feet. The flight attendant's reprimanding was nothing but background noise to me as I pushed him to the side, bringing my lips to his and kissing him like there was no tomorrow. And fuck, those tears won; he was crying, I was crying, letting those salty tears mix together on our cheeks.

"I'm not going," I told him, holding his face close, pledging myself to those eyes, those eyes that I've been in love with for years. "I can't."

As he pulled me into his arms, allowing me to sob into his shirt, the memories went nuclear in my mind. Inhaling his familiar scent, I remembered the aromas of vanilla, citrus, and baking that gave the Jaeger household, my home since I was nine years-old, its identity. Tasting his lips, I remembered running back from our high school anti-homecoming at Burger King, during our senior year of high school, joking and laughing, until all of a sudden, he leaned in and kissed me—but missed by a longshot, getting me on the nose instead. Hearing his heartbeat against his chest, I remembered crying with him as eighteen-year-olds over his mother, who laid cold on the kitchen floor, pressing our ears to her sternum, begging God, Allah, Jesus, or whoever the fuck held the reins of life and death to give us a pulse. Feeling his scarf, I remembered the texture of that red garment that he gave me when we walked out of the hospital and into the cold Chicago winter as kids, his mittened hand in mine; the same scarf that I left hanging in his closet this morning as I said my final goodbyes to his apartment; the same scarf that he happens to be wearing right now, as a quiet but excruciating accusation.

And staring into those eyes—god, those beautiful, loving eyes—I remembered that night after finals during our freshman year of college, when I couldn't bottle it up any longer and told him that I've been in love with him ever since I was a kid, and he'd have to deal with it, to which he laughed and kissed me, properly this time, thanks to many months of diligent practice. And not long after, although paranoia hung over us, for fear that his roommate Armin might stumble in unexpectedly, we made love for the first time. And I remembered when we finished and laid quietly in his bed, my head nestled in the crook of his neck, he broke the silence to tell me that he loved me too, in case I didn't quite get the message.

It was sensory overload. Those journalism ambitious vaporized, too grand and too out-of-reach, and I melted into him, thinking "fuck it" to everything because above all, happiness was right there in the bubble of stability he created.

But he was also the one who popped it.

"I'm not doing this to you," he said, gently freeing me from his embrace. "I'm an idiot. I'm so sorry. You need to go."

"What?"

He shoved my bags into my arms, turning me towards the gate. "Go on," he murmured, pressing his lips to the temple, "this is what you've wanted to do for ages, right?"

Right then, it didn't make any sense anymore. My dream morphed into a delusion, and I saw that gate as the entrance to Hell while here with him was the utter opposite. Right then, I realized that I was insane in the first place, that he was insane for suddenly going along with my delusion.

"No, I'm staying—"

"No, you're going." His voice was firm. Still hurt. But firm.

"Miss?" the flight attendant stepped towards us, gesturing towards the gate to Hell. "We're going to need you to board very soon."

"She'll be there in a sec," he reassured her.

"Wait a minute," I began. "Eren—"

"Mikasa," he cut in, turning me around to kiss me one final time, long and slow, before facing me towards Syria. "Don't look back."

The haunting rhythm of call-and-response of Aleppo goes like this:

There is a whistle. I am jolted awake.

There is a distant boom. And I scream.

Sasha and Jean are on either side of me, each gripping one hand. For the first time since leaving that O'Hare terminal, I cry. My friends are startled; they've never seen me like this, not even when we saw rows upon rows of children's bodies, cold, bloodied, and lifeless, lined up in a dilapidated hut.

"Our... pr-promise," I manage between sobs. "To... L-Levi."

"Let's go home," Jean answers.

"Home," echoes Sasha.

A/N: Please leave a comment! Constructive criticism is treasured!