Requested by Anonymous on AO3: If you accept prompts, how about Mikasa telling Eren about her childhood? I understand, given how little we know about it from canon, that it could easily be 'jossed', but I always found it curious she didn't seem to have any friends aside from Eren and Armin. That must have had some impact on her, and it'd be cool to see it explored a little in fic.

A/N: Hey there, Anon, I have to apologize for this one...I seem to have focused more on the friend aspect of your request rather than Mikasa and Eren actually having a conversation about her childhood...sorry about that ( `_ ` ;)

Takes place after Mikasa arrives at the Yeager house.

25. Friend

For a long time after, Mikasa doesn't speak. She can't. It's as if the words are caught in her throat, locked away the moment she entered this strange place where the buildings, not trees, tower overhead, where so far she's seen more people than ants.

It was panic that set in first when Mikasa found that she couldn't utter a 'thank you' to Auntie Carla after she gave her a change of clothes, swaddling her in a blanket and setting her in front of the fire with a hot cup of cocoa. Her hands had flown to her throat, mind reeling as she tries to remember where she might've misplaced her voice, if she could've dropped it, or if she'd left it back at the house with the rest of her clothes and things. Second comes the anxiety: what would her mother think if she knew that she'd neglected her manners? And her father will be disappointed too—surely, she'll get a scolding. Sadness comes third when she realizes that she'll never be scolded by her parents again. And tears follow.

She cries a lot these days. She cries herself to sleep and wakes bleary-eyed and puffy in the mornings, she cries whenever someone tries to speak to her, she cries whenever she thinks about the little things like how it's so much more crowded here than it was back home, how the card she made for her father's birthday still lies unread beneath her bed at the cabin.

But the boy, Eren, he doesn't seem to mind—or, at least, if he does, he pretends not to. He doesn't complain about the fact that she clings to his side every waking moment—he encourages it, even: tugging her around by the sleeve, beckoning her over to his side in the few moments she's not already there. And when she cries, he gives her a hardened look, but he never yells at her for it, instead taking the ends of her scarf and wiping her tears—though sometimes his touch is rough to her cheeks. And Mikasa wishes with all her heart that her voice would return so that she could say something, anything, because she's never had anyone in her life besides from her parents who's looked out for her like this—and even then, the way they cared for her, they way they held her hand, is different from the way Eren leads her through the crowded streets of Shiganshina, her fingers locked tightly in his grasp. How she longs to reciprocate—to take care of him the way he does her.

Gradually, gradually, little by little, she works on finding her voice again, her lips practice forming the shape of the two little words into the softness of her pillow at night, and into the safety of the scarf that now hangs around her neck each and every day, until one day she summons the courage and says it: "Thank you," she tells him one day as they collect water from the well.

He looks at her without speaking for a long while, and for a moment she worries that he hadn't heard her. "For what?" Eren asks. "Oh," he says when he realizes, the moments from the past two weeks replaying through his mind. And then he shrugs. "That's what friends are supposed to do."

"I've never had a friend before," Mikasa whispers, voice shaking; tears beginning to fall again.

"Well," Eren says. He shuffles from foot to foot. "You do now."

A/N: I kind of like to imagine that Eren didn't mind Mikasa's clinginess in the early days.

Once again, sorry, Nonnie, that I kind of failed at your request.