The bone sticking out of her leg wasn't the worst injury he'd seen but it still made him nauseous.
Propped up on a tree, Mikasa's face was a determined grimace as she stared blankly in front of her. Glancing sideways at him, she grit her teeth and spoke quietly.
"I'll be fine."
He was sure of that. She'd recovered from broken ribs in a matter of days, but it was getting dark and the flare he'd sent up a while ago was still unanswered which was a concern on its own. No answer to the flare meant no one to answer it and he loathed the implications of that.
They were on their own for the time being.
Without acknowledgment of her statement he began to look around for something to splint her leg. It had to be set quickly so it could heal properly. He wasn't looking forward to it.
"Captain, you should go try to find the others. The flare… you should make sure they're okay."
Frowning, voice steely and cold, he spoke to her without turning around.
"I'm out of gas."
Cursing himself in his head, he grudgingly acknowledged that it was his own damn fault he was empty. He had known it was foolish and risky when he'd made the decision to go searching for her. He'd lost sight of her half way through the forest, focused on taking down the Titan ahead of him and when he had finally had a moment to check on his team, she was gone and his chest had constricted.
It shouldn't have mattered. She wasn't supposed to be any more important than his other subordinates. He tried to convince himself it had been Jean or Armin he would have come back, wasting the last of his gas searching as the sun was setting low and danger grew exponentially.
He was fooling himself.
They never spoke of the incident that night. Two, then three weeks elapsed and somehow the tension lessened, never fully going away but not as oppressive as it had been in the beginning. They did not, however, go back to sparring together. It was somehow an unspoken acknowledgment that things would not return to the way they were but that they were moving forward.
She kept her composure at all times, falling into the safety of their respective ranks and titles so he did the same. It seemed to help during the day but evening and night would inevitably fall and he would retreat to his quarters. His defense would slip just the slightest as he watched her quietly assume her nightly position against the fence of the property, staring at the stars. He'd been tempted more than once in the last few weeks to tell her he knew she was breaking curfew and to knock it off, if only so he could stop this habit he was forming.
He didn't. He simply began to take his nightly tea to his quarters instead of the dining area, watch her from afar, and wonder what the hell was going on in her mind. She was indiscernible most of the time, her eyes flat except when talking with Eren and Armin, and he can't say that he's ever seen her smile. He'd seen her cry, angry and outraged, desperate, but he'd never seen her smile. Perhaps because he was his superior, perhaps because she didn't like him altogether, or maybe perhaps because she was just like him: scarred, broken in some way, violent, grave. The sole thing that made her different than him, a little more human, was that she still had hope. When she looked at Armin, Eren, even Sasha and Jean, there was the faintest spark of hope.
He did not have hope. He had given up on hope many deaths ago. He secretly willed her hope not to disappear when she watched her friends die, because that was the likely outcome, but age and wisdom told him she would eventually become a shadow of a person, like him.
It was at this point that he would scrub a hand over his face and turn from his window.
"Oh."
Her voice was pained, the strain of her physical condition expressing itself in the small word. He turned his head back, eyeing her suspiciously. She was no longer holding her head up, resting it against the massive tree trunk with her eyes closed.
"Oi. Don't fall asleep."
Cracking an eye open, eyebrows scrunching together, she pursed her lip in annoyance but lifted her head. A fissure of something ran through him watching how long it took her to work up the strength to lift her head. He returned his attention back to the task at hand and rummaged around for a few more seconds before giving up on finding the perfect splint and just grabbed the first damn one he could find so he could stop wasting time. Making his way back to Mikasa, he looked at her leg, bone protruding and bleeding. Frowning for the hundredth time since he'd found her, he knew this was going to take a lot of bandages.
Sighing, he relieved himself of the heavy 3DM gear- it was pointless now anyways - and removed his cloak. Gripping the fabric, he ripped it into similar sized pieces.
"That's a shame." Mikasa's voice was soft, tired. He raised an eyebrow but didn't look at her.
"It's replaceable." Her only response was a soft mmm and he knew he had to get this taken care of.
"Okay. This is going to hurt like hell but if you scream, you'll give away our location to anything in this god forsaken forest." Mikasa's eyes widened slightly and she swallowed, staring at her leg and glancing up at him. Taking a deep breath, she nodded.
"Here. Bite down on this." He handed her a strap from his 3DM gear, the leather strong and sturdy. She weakly reached for it, gripping it way too gently for his liking, and placed it immediately in her mouth. He knew she wasn't for delaying what needed to be done and neither was he so he gripped her leg on each side of the break, made the best assessment of where he could set the bone, gave a fleeting glance to her face, and pulled-shoved the bones into place.
Mikasa's scream would have pierced the entire forest if not for the leather strap in her mouth. Her whole body jerked, tensing and shivering from the pain. He grimaced at the sound but kept his attention on the leg, quickly placing the measly splint and bandaged it to her leg. She'd bleed through the bandages in short time but he could replace it when the time came. Looking up at her, he paused.
She was out cold, head flopped painfully against the tree and her shoulder, her arms limp at her side.