A/N: I hardly ever get requests for EreMika anymore, but I get really happy when I do get one.


It doesn't matter where he goes. He knows in the end, she'll follow him. He could walk to hell and she would be right behind him, perhaps even helping him make his way there even if it meant the end for them both. She's even here now, visiting him in his dark and dusty dungeon cell. Perhaps he shouldn't be so surprised. After all, they had been here once together before, but this time they are on opposite sides of the prison bars – he looks at her while she stares back, outside looking in.

"You didn't have to come," Eren says to her quietly.

"I know," she replies, "but I wanted to." Isn't that always her reasoning for following him? It was that way when they were children and it's the same now. Except now he doesn't want her to stand beside him like he did when they were younger. It's not that he had grown tired of her or came to hate her presence. It's that he can't stand the way she looks at him – eyes filled with concern, hands held back because she knows if she reaches out he'd only slap them away, and her lips pressed together in a straight line to stop the flood of words asking him if he's alright and if he knows how dangerous he's being. It's even worse after times like these because the expression she looks at him with is no longer one filled with only worry. He sees flashes of different emotions – sadness, anger, exhaustion, and – worst of all – hurt.

When they were younger, he had promised his mother that he would protect Mikasa. He thought it was only obvious that he would do so, but Mikasa was the one protecting him all along. If his mother could see him know, he's sure she'd be ashamed.

What's worse: he only ends up hurting her no matter what he does. The silver scar on her cheek is a constant reminder of the pain he's given her and the pain yet to come. He wishes that he can touch it sometimes, cupping her cheek in his hand and rubbing at the scar with his thumb as if doing so will somehow make it disappear. It's impossible though, so he always keeps his hands at his sides, fists clenched as he tries to look anywhere but the scar he had given her so long ago.

"Why," he asks bitterly, "when all I ever do is hurt you?"

"I hurt you too," Mikasa tells him, but he knows she's thinking of times in their trainee days when she had thrown him on the ground too hard, making him see stars for the rest of the night. Or perhaps another time when she had punched him a little harder than she meant to after scolding him. Or even the one time she had really hurt him, cutting his face off in order to remove him from his Titan form during experiments. But those times are nothing compared to the hurt he's inflicted upon her over the years.

He doesn't even have a single scratch on his body. If he did, it would only heal itself over. She could hack his limbs off, burn him, or make him bleed. He could simply regenerate his limbs and skin, come back good as new. But even if he were unable to heal himself, he knows she would never hold a blade against him. If he were able to become bruised or wounded, it would never be because of her. Even if she did, it would probably hurt her more than it hurt him. It's already how that works whenever he does get injured even though she's never the one inflicting pain on him.

"It's not the same," Eren says finally. "You know that."

She averts her gaze, not responding because she knows he's right.

He approaches her, gripping the cold steel bars of his prison cell. "You shouldn't be here, Mikasa. After everything I've done, don't you understand? I'm not worth following. I'm not worth saving."

She must be surprised. It's the first time he's gotten so close to her ever since the attack on Marley. Even before he had left Paradis, he had kept his distance, planning and plotting his attack by himself because he didn't want to involve her in it until he absolutely had to. If she had known about it earlier, she would have informed Hanji and Levi or tried to talk him out of it. Or worse: follow him there when she found that she couldn't stop him. But in the end, she had followed him anyway, hadn't she?

She finally takes a step forward. Only a short distance separates them now, that and the prison bars that Eren had put between them. "You know," Mikasa says quietly, "I would die for you, Eren."

He knows, he knows. It's something that he's always known. It's just not something he wants to hear from her lips because it makes it all the more real and it makes everything worse. Because even though he knows this, even though he wants to say the same for her, it's not something he can say out loud because he knows he'll never have to. That's how it works, after all. She sacrifices everything for him while he walks away unscathed every time.

Ah, he thinks. Is this how she means to wound him? By piercing him with these sharp truths? But when he looks at her, he sees that she looks at him with that concerned gaze of hers and he knows that she didn't say those things out of cruelty. She meant every word. And besides, the fact that he won't say the same for her, he thinks, is probably killing her more than it will ever hurt him.

"Why?" he whispers, voice broken.

She says nothing. She doesn't have to. He already knows the answer. All she does is close the distance between them, reaching out and covering his hand with hers as he holds onto the prison bar. He holds onto the bars because if he doesn't, everything might fall apart. She holds onto him for the same reason.


A/N: I was going to title this "Die For You" but decided it was too much. I think this one is much better ^^

Word Count: 1034