Mikasa
Her thighs overcome the captain.
Blurred with his running, Captain Levi's legs pump twofold for each one of Mikasa's long strides. They look across their shoulders at each other. Puffs of dust are cranked behind the beat of their rapid shoes. Churned into the air, dust hovers above the looping path in a long chute of dirt-smoke. They run hard, looking at each other, their arms strongly thrusting, never lurching their shoulders more than a centimeter. They don't look at the path at all, moving their limbs, without moving their chests or their heads, seeming to move only by the smoothly operating ball-joints of their ankles, their shoulders, their hips. The shaft of dust swirls furiously behind them. They lunge chestfirst across the finish line, never breaking eye contact.
Mikasa jogs to a walk, putting her hands on her head, feeling the artery in her neck thudding all the way into her ear canal.
"It was too close to call," says Hanji. She touches her chin, her eyes abstracted in reflection, replaying what she's seen seconds after she's already seen it, trying to see it better in retrospect than she had in real-time. Sun flashes garishly on her glasses. She shrugs. "Sorry, guys."
Mikasa pivots. She advances on a winded Captain Levi. "I have more than a shred of self-respect, Captain."
"I'm aware," he says, and lifts his palms, threading his fingers behind his head. Blue veins thunder through the pale undersides of his biceps.
"Give me nothing short of your best effort," she says. "Anything less is an insult."
"Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?" he says coldly, a little thinly, out of breath. He seems to look down at her without sprouting inches at the knees to exceed her suddenly in length. Just looking at her with those hard, immobile eyes, looming, the top of his head barely reaching her nose. "Or perhaps you're overestimating my generosity. Either way, you're misunderstanding."
Mikasa says nothing. Their panting slows and steadies, their mouths close. Their nostrils flare with their gradual cooling breath. Levi puts his hands down at his sides, his biceps still round, still pulsing, his nose flaring. "I'm growing older, and you're only growing stronger," he says, with more voice now, less air. "It's nature's order. In any case, I'm relieved to know that if I'm unable to carry out my role, there's someone else who can close the distance."
"If you can't, then—" Mikasa's eyes slant and squint against the sun. The sprawling grass burns, bristling to a hot, withered brown. "Even I have to admit it, Captain Levi: There's nobody but you."
"That must pain you to say," he says. She only looks at him, her black eyes neither cold nor injured nor indifferent. "Are you disappointed?" And his voice is calm with the same non-injury, the same non-indifference.
"What else will I strive for if I surpass Humanity's Strongest?"
"I suppose you'll have to surpass Mikasa Ackerman, as many times as you can."
"Your sympathetic sensibilities haven't improved any. I'm still disappointed."
"Well . . ." He turns, beginning to return to HQ. "I'll try to do better, then."
Mikasa
Mikasa's mouth drains of color. She can only stare a blank, rigid stare.
"It's not only the royal bloodline that should continue to succeed," the woman Kiyomi Azumabito says. "You're still young and still healthy, still beautiful. And most importantly, the last artifact of your ancestry. You're special, Mikasa."
Mikasa feels her eardrums begin to throb slow and hard. Historia hadn't expressed wishy-washy principles or uncertainty: I'll do it, she had said with that dignified unflappability of self-sacrifice. Mikasa tugs her muffler high over her chin.
"I'm not . . ."
"Ready? Perhaps not. But you're about the right age, now." Kiyomi smiles and her eyes slit into thin upturned crescents, almost like Mikasa's but smaller, purer, untouched by Other dominant blood. "And I'm sure we can find a father of good heritage."
"I'm sorry. I'm not interested." Mikasa turns about-face, her muffler hiding the shape of her mouth. Her feet take her away.
She leaves the conference room, going down the hall. The captain turns from a small circle of people, looking at her. Jean too. Then Floch. And as she continues down the hall, other men turn to look at her, men she knows, men she doesn't know, and she grows very aware of the irreconcilable dimensions between Us and Them, which has never occurred before.
Her pupils shrink and her eyes turn inward. Vision fades and diminishes with introspection as she thinks, still walking down the hall, about the secrets lying under the envelope of her skin, now branded in red by pedigree and by legacy. Two concepts which she has only begun to learn about. She walks, visionless, introspective, feeling a strong wave of self-consciousness sweeping over her, very aware of her own body, of the flesh, and of the black black hair sweeping into her eyes.
When she steps outside, hearing the door shut behind her, she's shaking in the evening climate, realizing that the paranoia afflicting her is that of a little girl; that she's afraid in the same way a little girl is afraid, reverting back into age, chased back by interrogative eyes and the arbitrary hierarchical subservience of her own gender. She's not a little girl though, hasn't been one for some time now, dead from the day she was spread out on the floor in childish vanquished acquiescence beneath the murderers of her parents. But she hasn't forgotten the fear. She still shakes with it.
The old memory fabric brushes her mouth. She closes her eyes. Without looking, she knows the sun has dropped, feeling the slip in temperature, and she wonders if all men stand on one horizon and all women stand on the other, with all the oceans of the worlds between them, the sun blazing the water into a surface of hot white light, and if she were to step over to Eren's side, she'd be incinerated. In one jarring eye-opening instant of unretractable illumination, she finally knows what Eren is—and likewise what she herself is.
She wonders if Eren knows it too, if he'll learn it one day. She opens her eyes onto a blue twilight-sunken district, thinking about it as hot solid blood burns slowly up her neck.
Mikasa
Dust flows down the hall like the sluggish smoke of old canon fire. The captain is alone, wearing black. He is ahead of her, walking. His step is a little wooden, yet still steady and still reliable. One foot comes down too woodenly against the floor. Mikasa advances. She makes no sound. Without knowing she's there behind him, Captain Levi turns, sensing through some ability beyond knowledge, beyond logic, something beyond human faculties even, that her eyes are touching the back of his head. They stop walking.
"I understand now," she says. "You fell behind because of your leg." Levi says nothing. "All this training is aggravating old injuries. Am I right?"
"You're concerned?"
"Yes." Mikasa watches Levi. "I need you to be in top form so that I can become better than the best of you." Even though they speak in the hallway, and even though their hands are bare-knuckled, and even though neither person feels any anger or anxiety for whatever reason, they still seem to gauge each other with that calm, savage charge of anticipation.
"I see," he says calmly, quietly, a shade away from ungently.
His arms are crossed, tucked up against his pectoral plates. He is a compact man with shoulders and quads, without being bloated or thick-necked, or too wide for her to sling her arms around his chest and drop him. She always thought if she were to wrap her hands around Eren's waist, she could hold him entirely in her palms, her fingertips coming together at his back. He's tapered there. A narrow, boyish geometry. The captain doesn't cut at such a drastic inversion of width, from shoulder to hip. A little more body, a little more breadth. And maybe that's why she can spar with Captain Levi, but not with Eren. Because Eren has that small, containable waist, and the captain doesn't.
"Captain Levi," she says. He is already looking at her. They are both already looking at each other. "Let's go to the infirmary together."
When they go to the infirmary together, the room appears on the other side of the door in white, antiseptic vacancy. A row of white empty beds and starched sheets; walls of white cabinets and white drawers. Metal springs grate when Levi sits down on a bed. Mikasa opens two cabinets. She closes them. She opens a drawer, closes that one too. Sidestepping, she opens two more cabinets. They clash shut. Another drawer rolls open, unresisting on the internal metal tracks. It thuds closed a second later.
Levi points. "Look in that drawer over there." He doesn't ask what she's looking for, nor does she tell him. But Levi knows, and Mikasa knows that he knows.
Mikasa walks over a few more paces and slides the drawer out of its hatch. She reaches in. When her fingers come back, compression bandages inhabit her grasp. Length of flesh-toned tape falls from the bundled roll as she negotiates a section of it undone. She closes the drawer and goes to Levi. Her boots make soft, composed rubber sounds. He hears the soft, composed sound of her knees too when she sinks below him, the black hair falling over her eyes. He sits on the edge, his legs hanging slack over the bedside, inflating his plain black trousers with calves and quads. Grasping the bundle of tape, her hand freezes.
"Captain," she begins to say.
He lifts his palm, saying nothing, not even bothering to look at her now.
She aligns the compression bandages to the longest leg bone. "Please hold this here," she says. He does. She starts to wrap his muscle. "You can remove your hand," she says. He does. The tape overlaps where his hand lifts. "Does it feel too tight?"
"No."
Without taking her eyes off his leg, she sees him sitting above her on the bed, with his head bent forward. Not looking down on her. But looking at her. Not proud. Not dominant. Looking at her as if they were level, neither one having to lift or drop the eyes to maintain parallel. As though they're at the same altitude. The same degree. He doesn't impose. He only looks at her like they've been standing on the same ground since the beginning of the beginning—before that, even.
She fastens the bandages and removes her hands. The shape of his calf asserts itself, tautly contoured by the tape. "There." Still on her knees, she uplifts her face. "How does it feel?"
"It's not bad," he says. "But in my opinion, you'd make a strange nurse." Mikasa says nothing, doesn't even begin to disagree, her face uplifted, with black hair falling out of her eyes. "Your patients would be unsettled by that gloomy expression of yours," he continues, speaking in something like a mutter, but projected and clear without quite containing the same substance or volume as a speaking voice.
She rises. "Well, if I ever find myself at the crossroads of a career change, I could always evoke your sunny disposition. I'm sure that'd put people at ease."
"Yes. I've been told my hospitable nature is very effective."
Mikasa looks at him. He hasn't leaned experimental weight on his doctored leg yet, draping it over the bedside.
It's been years. But Captain Levi doesn't appear any older than he did years ago. He just looks like a man who doesn't sleep. Maybe people do most of their aging while they're asleep. And that's why old people are startled by their own reflections in the morning because they forget and only remember when they see their old faces in the glass again, reminding them that sixty-something years have passed while they were fast asleep. But the captain doesn't sleep, and so the aging doesn't occur. For over twenty years, he's been the very same age as he was over twenty years ago, from the night he forgot to go to sleep for the very first time while he was being alive somewhere in the underground.
"Rest it well, Captain Levi," she says. "Tomorrow, I'm going to win against you properly." She turns and starts toward the door.
"Mikasa," he says and she looks over her shoulder. He's still sitting with his leg limp and lethargic. "For how much longer, I can't be certain. But even with this bad leg, I'm still the strongest. So . . . continue to strive."
"Yes sir." Mikasa doesn't smile, but she salutes.
Levi
The fire burns steadily. Levi sits in the armchair, his cheek braced upon his knuckles. The living room is bare, with three walls, the firelight filling it, the armchair pinned at the center.
Sleep is like practicing the state of being dead and almost everybody needs to be a little dead sometimes. Even Levi needs to be a little dead sometimes, less than most, but dead long enough and dead deeply enough that his body can keep going and he can resurrect himself before the morning has begun to rise.
He sits in the armchair, looking at the fire, not being dead (he won't be even a little dead until a few hours from now), doing nothing. Not moving, without his lungs expanding, without seeming to breathe, sunken in the upholstered armchair, with his bandaged leg wooden and inert beneath him. He watches the fire, not feeling his eyes doing the watching, submerged in something like a dreamless waking sleep. His eyes are glass without focus, without thought. Light blows passively into the corneas.
The vertebrae in his neck creak when his head turns. He hasn't felt his eyes see it. But his head has turned by a pure, infallible instinct which was instilled in him at birth. Darkness is thickened in the hallway, clotted, pulsing against the residue of firelight. He knows he's seen it, though his eyes hadn't felt it. He crosses the room without remembering rising out of the chair and goes into the hallway and follows after what he hadn't felt his eyes see, but knows he must've seen because his head has turned by that pure and infallible instinct which he'd been born with.
Night floods the hallway. He goes along by intuition and memory, sightless. Soon the walls, the floor, begin to swim from out of the dark, materializing upon his view, his pupils flexing like plastic discs to funnel in the scarce refractions of phantom light. He turns. Five windows let in a thin, wan moon.
Wading through the darkness and the heatless nightwash, he sees the moon five times, huge and low-slung in the sky, the wall beneath it like a black belt cinched around the city. He reaches the fork. He goes left. The dark surges over him again. A dull gold knob bulges out from the doorway. He takes it in his hand, turning his wrist. Silently he pushes.
In the serene and complete suspense of midnight, she sleeps with that face like an indefinite, handless, incalculable clock. The sheets, tugged high over her shoulder, show no sign of fresh movement. She has been sleeping, uninterrupted, for a while now. Levi stands in the door, frozen. He begins to remember more clearly, remembering at last what he hasn't felt himself see. The images boil up to the forefront of his mind, and as he begins to remember, he begins to think that he couldn't have seen what he knows he's seen. Because what he's seen, he decides, couldn't have been seen by anyone at all.
When he steps back outside the door, pulling it shut, his eyes come open, the velvet of the armchair cupped inside his hands, his dead leg draped underneath him. The fire burns steadily, and within the hearth, among the flames swirls the lost promise of a whispering white nightgown.
Eren
Miss Mary slips out the room and spins against the wall, faint and breathless. A weak trembling hand clasps down over her heart, between her breasts. Her thighs quiver with long exhausted energies. She keeps her thighs from touching. She drags away from the wall and reaches behind her head to gather her long black hair in her hand. Perspiration glistens on her neck; little baby hairs curl with body steam. The artery in her throat bulges hot. From across the hall, Eren watches as she pins the hair up over her moist nape. Inside the hospital room, a man calls for her. His voice is mostly grunt. She inserts the pins and starts to go in again.
"You missed a piece," Eren says.
Miss Mary spins. She stares. Her eyes are unfocused, as if synaptic electricity hasn't quite communicated what she's seeing yet. Then she strokes along her neck. She finds the missed piece and fastens it on top of her head.
"Mr. Kruger, are you all right?" she says. Eren is leaning heavily on his crutch. "Do you need assistance returning to your room?"
"Thank you, but I'll make it on my own." He thinks he relaxes his face a little, just enough. "I can wipe my own ass and everything."
"That's very good, Mr. Kruger. Very good indeed." Miss Mary doesn't show her teeth, but she's smiling, and her cheeks, her lips, are shining and full with fresh color. "You're quite fortunate, you know. Some men here can't even play with their own cocks, if they still have a cock to play with. Go enjoy yourself a little, why don't you?" She smiles again, almost savagely now—she may be making fun of him—and slips back into the room. Through the closing door, the white nurse's slippers lay discarded by the institutional bed.
Mikasa
Without looking away from the punching bag, Mikasa sees in the mirror-paneled room the figure of herself, squared-up, a thick gouge of muscle channeling up her leg, her arms well-expressed in the aftermath of her athletic regimen. Against the opposite wall, very small, miniscule almost in the periphery, sits Historia dressed in her military coat.
"You've been silently watching for a while now," Mikasa says. "Is there something you want to say to me?"
"I know you must be going through a hard time," Historia says. "But you don't need to be alone. You can rely on me a little."
"I'm all right." Mikasa sees the reflected figure of herself lower her gloves. "I'm beginning to think that, maybe, it'll be good for the both of us to be separated for a short time. When I watched him set off, in that moment I felt that I had always been an attachment. Because of the way everything began between us, he and I could never be equals."
"Mikasa . . . I can't know this for sure, since I'm only a bystander. But isn't Eren the one who's always felt inferior to you?" Historia's eyes flick off Mikasa's face, flicking over to Mikasa's reflection. "You're the lost descendant of the Shogun clan. You're the woman worth more than a hundred soldiers. You're Mikasa Ackerman."
Mikasa doesn't turn to Historia, standing there, motionlessly. "I'm only beginning to learn what that means." Mikasa holds her hands out, upturned, looking at her palms, the shred and fatigue in her padded gloves. "But when the time comes, I'll be the one to carry him home."