Mikasa
"You attacked him with a tube of toothpaste."
"Asshole got what was coming to him."
"A tube of toothpaste."
"I stand by what I did."
By default, I'm not an angry person. That's Eren, has and always been. Vulnerable, impulsive, explosive. Years of restraining him, years of holding him back before he storms up to someone, before he socks them in the face, have taught me what anger is in its truest form. I've seen how it plows through everything rational in its path to dominating the mind, to controlling every fiber of the body. But as I stand over Levi, watching his smug, defiant face parry each and every one of my comments, entertained by the whole fiasco, I can see why anger is so irresistible.
My conscience rebukes me, reprimanding me to keep it together, but towards this… asshole, the last thing I want to do is keep my fury to a controlled simmer. He is neither entitled nor deserving of that level of patience from me.
"Eren is my neighbor," I deadpan. "He shovels and clears driveways all the time. Yes, it was a bit of a weird time to get the snowblower going, and yes, he probably woke everyone up, but that doesn't mean you can attack him with, for God's sake, toothpaste and snow shovels!"
He sits there, in that spot at the dinner table he's been glued to the past day and a half, drinking our coffee nonstop, staring out the window as if it's the most enlightening thing to do on the planet. Even the way he sits strikes a nerve in me: leaning back in the chair, demanding it to support not only his physical weight but also his ego, arm stretched to curl around the back of another chair, claiming more than his fair share.
"You want me to send your boyfriend an apology note and a plate of condolence cookies?"
Rarely do these words come out now. While Past Mikasa was far more liberal with her tongue, the Mikasa of Now keeps utterances of this nature locked up in a box, stored in the darkest corners of my mind. But the anger, hot and boiling, sizzles up my throat, volcanic and turbulent, spewing forth in the form of three words:
Fuck you, Levi.
I want to stomp upstairs, channeling my fury into each step, pounding the ground with so much force that I'll leave in my wake a trail of splintery holes in the hardwood floor, but the way to win this battle is to hold my ground against Levi. Seize the last word, don't let him take that clincher from you.
"You didn't answer my question. We're not enemies in this, Mikasa. You're firing in the wrong direction. Shouldn't you be pissed at the boyfriend—"
"He isn't my boyfriend," I interrupt. A silence falls between us. It just occurs to me that I'm shouting. Taking a deep breath, I lower my voice, "Just remember this. You've only lived here, for what? A day? You may be my legal guardian on paper, but you don't make the rules here."
"So you do?" he questions, tilting his chin towards me dismissively.
"Absolutely. I think 'no assaulting the neighbors for no warranted reason' is a reasonable one, don't you think?"
"Agreed."
"Then don't let me see anything like this happen again."
"Me following the rules?"
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"The rule states that I can't assault the neighbors for no warranted reason. Today, my warranted reason was that he fucked-up my sleep."
"God, you are just—" I lob the Colgate at his face with as much strength as my arm can muster. He catches it with one hand, perfectly. He's persistent, this Levi. Like a determined fly that you swat and send reeling, only to have it buzz lazily back around your ear, unfazed by the affront.
"That was childish," he says, his voice dull. "At least you defrosted it for me. All red-hot and angry."
It takes an insane amount of self-restraint not to slam my bedroom door and send it flying off its hinges.
Brunch is guerrilla warfare.
After crashing for a few hours, I bustle in the kitchen, slicing tomatoes, chopping lettuce, and plopping cold-cuts onto bread, all while avoiding the courtesy of making Levi a sandwich as well. He watches me from the table, sipping that goddamned coffee, turning the pages of his book, unimpressed.
I sit at the seat furthest from him, devouring my brunch loudly, deliberately. I even put baby carrots in the sandwich—unconventional, but beautifully effective in producing resounding crunching noises that make his left bottom eyelid twitch, almost imperceptibly but evident enough for me to track my progress.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
He hasn't flipped a single page since I sat down.
Come dinnertime, I drink my orange juice with a straw, only the straw is barely coasting the surface of the juice, granting me the ability to drain it the whole way through with obnoxious, wonderfully obnoxious, slurping sounds. When there's a quarter of the original volume left, I blow bubbles. Glug, glug, glug.
"You're a literal child," he comments.
"You're my legal guardian." I shrug. "You set the bar for maturity. I'm just calibrating myself."
Glug.
When he leaves his perch temporarily to use the bathroom, I lean into his coffeepot. The addition of my saliva pushes the liquid level just a hair above the halfway mark.
But Levi is a tough opponent. When he returns, he promptly tosses the pot into the sink, along with the dishes I dumped in for him to clean, dishes that, may I add, are smeared to kingdom come with dried-up mayonnaise.
"Classy," he mutters.
I give him a quizzical look. He glares back.
"So you're back in school tomorrow, right?" he asks with something that appears to be relief in his voice. Score one for Mikasa. "Assuming that we don't get slammed by an eleventh-hour ice age?"
"Indeed," I say, bobbing a tea bag of Earl Grey up and down in my mug. "Why do you ask? Thinking about revoking my driving privilege?"
"Yeah, now that you mention it, why not? Hand over the damn keys," he says, extending his palm. "You're grounded for a month for being an obnoxious shit."
"Nice try."
"I'm serious. Keys."
I shrug. "Good luck finding them."
"Why are you such a brat?" he sighs, kneading his temples. He finally relents, "No, I won't take away your fucking Ferrari this time. I just need to know your schedule because I gotta hop around and get some paperwork figured out. Lawyer shit, hospital shit, funeral stuff, et cetera, et cetera. Also, do I need to fucking pack a lunch for you? Initial the margins of your homework?"
"You take care of your stuff. I'll take care of mine. Easy as that," I inform him.
Levi picks his battles carefully. The ones where he can deliver a good punch, he commits to. Example: this morning. The others where he just ends up exhausted and annoyed, he drops. For me, it's a matter of stamina, and I've been known to have that in spades.
"Cool, I like easy. When do you get home? Ballpark figure."
"Pre-season ends at six…" I pause. Usually, I leave immediately to pick up Dad from work, but now… "I might chill with some… friends. So seven, seven-thirty-ish."
"Do you even have friends?" he asks bluntly. "Aside from the kid from this morning, though it looks like your friendship is experiencing some kinda mid-adolescent crisis?"
Asshole. Calm down, Mikasa, relax. I match his gaze, his cold, calculating, observant gaze that scans my face for any reaction, gauging where the chinks in my armor are. He's found one—or he thinks he's found one, and he's testing it. Tossing a pebble at it, seeing whether or not I recoil, even in the slightest bit. Experimenting with a spot that he can exploit later on.
"We didn't win the state championship last year because we hate each other," I answer tersely.
"We did. My teammates were a dozen meaty chunks of pure, unabashed moron. Hated them," he says, returning to Stephen King. I can't tell if he gleaned out of me what he wanted. Verification that I'm a recluse? Evidence that all I do is avoid human interaction as much as I possibly can?
"We're the contrary," I lie. "I'll be home around 7:30. There's more casserole in the fridge if you're hungry earlier."
It's been forty-eight hours since the last time I entered Dad's room.
I'm not sure what to expect—surely not cobwebs and dust covering just about every surface as a sepulchral atmosphere hangs about—but I enter bracing for some sort of jolting impact. No ghouls, no zombies, no monsters. It's just the stuff of a man who's no longer here. A museum exhibit of a previous life.
I walk towards the huge bed, a bed meant for two, and maybe also a small child as well. Now, it holds none. The covers are messy, crumpled into an unmade lump; the pillows are strewn across the ground. He does—he did that when dreams wracked his sleep, particularly dreams about Mom. Yet he woke up earlier than usual. No morning meltdown. I found him, last Friday, chipper, flipping eggs in the kitchen the way he did for Mom as she sat at the kitchen island, watching him with that soft look in her eyes. No need for me to drag him, kicking and screaming, out of bed. No need for me to shove him, whining and crying, into the shower. No need for me to instruct him to brush his teeth, to brush that disgusting stench of Heinecken from his breath.
In the closet, a shrine to his days playing for UNC. His jerseys hang along the racks, faded and browned. His old lacrosse sticks stowed away in a barrel container. His dresser seems just about ready to explode, stuffed beyond capacity with wadded up, unfolded clothing. I find ties that he claimed that he lost, shirts that used to nicely compliment his once-lean, once-athletic frame, pants that have recently lost buttons, casualties in the war against his bulging belly.
The television is still on. It's muted, but there's a Bears game on. Before Mom died, Dad turned our home into a lively thunderdome when the Bears played the Giants. He'd spend the mornings zipping between preparing five different kinds of dip and ensuring the wings didn't char to a crisp, while he kept his phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder, on-call with Carla as she made supermarket runs. The Jaegers would come over, and occasionally, we'd get a noise complaint later in the night.
I go downstairs and return with a box of black trash bags.
After two hours, I've packed the remaining presence of my father into an armada of black, plastic lumps, lumps of garbage. The skins he wore in his life. The objects tracking his decline from gallant husband to pathetic drunkard. Everything filed away. Two by two, I trek downstairs with these trash bags, down the shoveled driveway, and by the trashcans, I dump Dad into the street, leaving him to be erased by the trash trucks coming around tomorrow.
Levi watches me from the couch. Not a word escapes his trap. He had shifted to help me, but one glare froze him to his spot. When I finally shut the garage door and head to the sink to wash my hands, he finally asks, "Shouldn't you pick out something for your father to wear at the funeral?"
"What did he say in his will?" I reply, scrubbing my hands vigorously. Erasing. Cleansing.
"Well, the only thing he mentioned was how he wanted to be buried next to your mother. Everything else, I'm guessing it's up to you."
I pause. The water still running, I turn slowly to Levi. "Everything else?"
"Flowers, funeral, who goes, who doesn't, if you want a pastor or whatever, casket design."
"Why me?"
Levi shrugs, slinging an arm over the back of the couch. "You're his closest relation. I mean, you're his daughter." He watches me for a moment before continuing, "That is, if you're up for it. Technically, if you're not too keen on sorting out these kinda things, which I totally get, all these arrangements are on me—"
"Please," I say immediately.
"Yeah?"
"Please."
"Okay."
"Wait," I say. "Where are they…"
"Keeping him?" Levi finishes for me.
"Yeah."
"Do you really want to know?"
"Just tell me."
"In a big-ass freezer, I'd imagine."
I run my soapy hands under the sink.
I finally will myself to look at my texts. More than one hundred from just about everyone. I type out "thx, appreciate it." Highlight it. Copy.
Historia, who sits next to me in chemistry, texted me about the yellow theme for tomorrow. She was the creator of #prayforAckerman. Paste. Send.
Sasha, who's also a midfielder, told me she wants to take me out for burgers sometime this week. Paste. Send.
Armin, who's editor-in-chief with me, expresses his condolences. He follows up with a "How are you holding up? Anything I can do for you?" I respond with an "i'm okay, nothing for now." And then paste. Send.
Even Annie, our senior captain whom I don't usually see eye-to-eye with, left me something, telling me it's cool if I miss some practices this week. I reply, curtly, "thx but i'll be there tomorrow."
To everyone else: Paste. Send.
I get a call from Eren midway through outlining my history textbook. I'm currently two weeks ahead of schedule.
My phone buzzes to the tune of a Maroon 5 song, "Sunday Morning," aglow with his contact picture—a selfie of the two of us when we were fifteen, brazenly taken on a roller coaster with a selfie stick he snuck onto the ride. He didn't want to cough up ten bucks for one of those photos we could buy at the end of the ride. Really, it's a wonder how his phone made it out of the park, completely unscathed. But to his credit, it was a solid shot. He got it while we were upside-down on a loop, our hair hanging downwards, well, upwards in the picture, subject to gravity. While I managed just a hint of a smile, his face was inundated in glee, huge ear-to-ear grin splayed across his features.
"I'm sorry," we both say at the exact moment I pick up. What follows is a flustered debacle, each of us trying to talk over the other, apologizing profusely throughout for interrupting the other, only to interrupt one another even more. At last, we both fall silent, locked again in that perpetual game of Who Gets to Break the Ice First?
"I think I should go first," he says quietly, always the one courageous enough to speak first. "I started this whole mess. Mikasa—"
"Wait, Eren," I cut in. "It didn't have to be a mess in the first place. I shouldn't have given you the money. That was just really… I don't know what word to use right now, but it was, well, it was weird."
Quiet on the other end. It hits me. He thinks there's more for me to say. But I don't know how to proceed, I don't know what he wants from me.
"So, yeah," I continue quickly. "That's just not… how we work."
"Is that all?" he says after a long silence.
"What?"
"Are you serious? Is that all?" he repeats, his voice tinged with a sourness that takes me by surprise.
"Eren, what are you saying?"
"You're apologizing for the money. The act of you handing me cash, paying me."
"Well, yeah. That was… weird."
I can feel him on the other end, internally processing that word weird. A lame excuse, a euphemism for something more pressing beneath the surface. It's a word encased in layers upon layers of cowardice, so insulated that it no longer captures the core message that I'm trying to convey. And he can see through the bullshit too. After all, there's no one else who can read me better than him, no doubt about that. Now the question is: will he have the patience to crack open that capsule and translate my bullshit or will he round on me for concocting bullshit in the first place?
"So the reason why things blew up the way they did was solely because you decided to pay me," he states. I can imagine that fist curling, teeth gritting, eyes flickering.
"Are you asking me or are you telling me?"
"Goddammit, you're not even scraping the tip of the iceberg here, Mikasa."
"So you called me to yell at me, huh?" I reply defensively. "I thought you were going to apologize, but it looks like you're just gonna regale me with another one of your lectures." The rest comes out in a gush, with a force that slipped from my hands, barreling forth, out of my control.
"How can I apologize if you're not even aware of the fucking problem?" he shoots back. "Actually, let me rephrase that. You know exactly what the problem is here, but you're too scared to admit it. That's what you do. When things get hard, you block everything out, you ignore that there's something fucked-up in the first place. Yeah, maybe that helps you, yeah, maybe that makes you cope on the outside, but that's not good, Mikasa. It's so toxic to bottle things up like that. You need to talk about things. Tell people. Trust people. Let your friends help you, for fuck's sake. I dunno, it seems to me that we're far from friendship right now. Like, paying me? After I've shoveled your goddamned driveway for, like, the past four winters as a friend? I get the hint: you want nothing to do with me. You can't stand to be near me, and having to spend a night in the same house with me was the worst possible hell for you, I get it. You just don't want to admit it, so I'll just put it out there for you and spare you the inconvenience of saying it: we're not friends anymore. Happy? I did the dirty work for you. Now I can stop wondering every day what exactly our relationship is because now we have a great, fucking label to put on it. We're Not Friends—"
"Eren, stop." I want to cry. I want an involuntary outpouring. But I clench my fist. I focus. I keep my voice steady. "That's not what I want. You don't understand—"
"We both know that's entirely untrue. There's no one else on this planet who knows you better than I do. Not even yourself. We both know that. Let's face it: you suck with processing your own feelings. You ignore things. You revise your own history. You omit things, hack out huge chunks of your life because, like I said, it's inconvenient."
"You wouldn't understand because you didn't have to deal with what I went through," I spit back, hotly. If not tears, then anger. "This is what I can't stand about you sometimes, Eren. You presume you can empathize with me all the time, when that's really just not true. If you had to shoulder all this baggage, you'd wanna not remember certain things too.
"I wouldn't let it eat away at me like it did to you," he says. "You're a completely different person now, Mikasa. Where the fuck did my best friend go?"
"Has it ever occurred to you that I might not be the source of this problem?"
"Trust me, I have equal fault in this too, but at least I'm owning up to my fault. Listen, all I'm saying is that just make sure you find someone you can trust. Someone on the lax team, Armin maybe, anyone. And unload some of the shit you're dealing with on them. It's actually okay to do that! You're not inconveniencing them if they're truly a friend."
Before I can respond, he hangs up, leaving me with a dead tone on the other end.
I need to run. Run away from the tears threatening to emerge from the corners of my eyes. I refuse to cry. I can't.
The sidewalk leading up to our front porch isn't shoveled.
My sneakers crunch through snow. Ice cracks against the bottoms of my feet. My toes grow numb from the cold.
Cold, numb.
Dead.
In a big-ass freezer, I'd imagine.
My heart races with each step, with each crunch. Stop it. Oh, God. Stop it. I'm running across the snow, wincing with each crunch. Each cold, numb, dead step.
Only until I reach the driveway, solid, sturdy black in the world of white, can I finally breath again.
A/N: Hope you guys enjoyed it! Lemme know what y'all thought in the comments/reviews :)