Word Count: 2,499
A chilly winter breeze nipped painfully at Mikasa's bare face and arms. Her teeth chattered, her arms were covered in goosebumps as she shivered, and it was difficult to blink at times. Large, soft flakes of snow fell delicately down from the pale, grey clouds above, landing gently on her hair, nose, and eyelashes. She sniffled loudly, trying to keep her nose from running too terribly.
"Eren!" she called, her voice resounding sharply through the crisp winter air. She was all alone, which wasn't particularly unusual for her personally, but to the average onlooker, it certainly was. After all, it's not usual to see a fourteen-year-old girl walking alone, let alone one that clearly wasn't from the area or in the snow.
A brown furred and green eyed wolf bounded through the snow with a bloody brown rabbit hanging limply from his jaws. As he approached Mikasa, he slowed down to a walk before dropping the rabbit's corpse at her feet and sitting down, cocking his head at her and whining softly.
Mikasa's mouth tasted like bile as she looked at the dead animal in front of her. She shook her head at Eren. "I don't need it. I'm not hungry, Eren."
"You need to eat," the wolf hoarsely replied.
"I'll be fine," Mikasa insisted, rubbing her arms to keep the blood circulating in them. The wind briefly picked up the moment she said those words, however, the previously small and harmless snowflakes suddenly feeling like little knives digging painfully into her numbed skin and whipping her ebony black hair into her face. Hot tears squeezed themselves out of the corner of her eyes, but she wiped them fiercely away.
The wolf gave her a peculiar look, but began to eat the rabbit himself anyway. Mikasa shivered and took inventory of their surroundings; they were sitting ducks at mealtimes, and considering how young and naïve they still were, the two of them would make easy prey for any predator desperate enough in the harsh winter.
"It's cold…" She surprised herself with her own words; she hadn't intended to let her true thoughts out.
"There's a village nearby," Eren told her between ravenous bites of raw rabbit.
Mikasa dug around in her basket, practically empty after the weeks on the road, and pulled out two frosty coins. "I don't think we can buy anything, though," she dubiously told him, holding out her hand to show him the money. "Not much you can get with just a cen. Particularly so in the wintertime."
The wolf pawed at the snow and glanced behind him, assumedly the direction of the village he spoke of. "I'll be right back," he promised, and before Mikasa could object, he ran off, leaving her staring after the snow being thrown up by his paws and the cold, white fog.
She stood there, silent, watching her breath fog up in her face for several stunned moments.
The last two years had been hard on them. Eren's father left for a medical emergency in Trost Kingdom just a few days prior to Eren's transformation. He still hadn't returned by the time Mrs. Jaeger vanished.
It was frankly a miracle when she hadn't been run out of town when the town discovered that she was what they considered to be a bastard child, even though, legally speaking, she wasn't.
The area they lived in was also known for being superstitious, and after they found that Eren had not died and had instead been transformed into the wolf living with the (at that point believed to be) widowed Mrs. Jaeger, it was made well known that their household was not at all liked.
So the choice was obvious when Eren's mother vanished without a trace one day. Staying any longer without a guardian would have been suicide. Already facing ridicule and exile for hosting an enchanted creature, had they remained where they were, it was likely that Mikasa would have been burnt at the stake.
Strangely enough, it wasn't so much Mikasa that needed caring for, since she seemed so rarely hungry or tired since her own parents vanished.
Depression, she had heard Mrs. Jaeger tell her son once, in a very hushed voice. For some reason that moment stuck out in Mikasa's mind. It wasn't as though there was anything particularly significant about it, either: she was lying in bed, a blanket laid lovingly over her, as she stared at the blank wall for hours.
Yet still, the memory stuck out like a stray thorn.
She brought her stiff fingers up to her mouth and breathed on them, trying desperately to keep them from catching frostbite. If being homeless was hard for the last nine months, then it was impossible for the next three. She took a step in the direction Eren had run off in. He said he'd be back soon, but Mikasa was sure she'd die if she stayed put. At least he had a fur coat and physical adaptations to the cold to keep him from freezing.
Every muscle she moved cried out in protest. The snow, while soft to the touch, felt like blades of knives shattering into countless pieces beneath her skin when the wind whipped them in her direction. Her hair no longer blew wildly around her head; instead, locks of it were frosted together and prickled her face, neck, and upper back with their icy points. She'd have to either comb it out or cut it off when she got the opportunity.
She squinted. For some reason, her vision was fading to black around the edges. Her legs seemed like they were made of lead. Her mind muddled, she could feel her senses failing her, and she reached out for something– anything– as her vision faded to black and her unfeeling legs buckled beneath her.
"She's stirring."
Everything felt heavy. Her arms, her legs, her eyelids, everything. It wasn't so much as though weights were attached to them, bringing her down, but rather, as if she was the weight.
She twitched her finger, pins and needles firing up her arm as she did so. Ignoring it, she flexed her hand, opening and closing it to gauge her muscle control. After she felt she had a good grasp on her controls again, she shifted her arm out from where it was pinned beneath her side. It prickled painfully, but it died down soon enough. And the moment it did, she heaved herself into an upright position.
Stars danced before her eyes, and she tried to blink them away. She felt lightheaded, but she felt something push against her back, keeping her from fainting until her thoughts and vision cleared.
The first thing she noticed was that her front felt chilled, yet her back felt just fine. As she lifted up her arm so that she could feel her shoulders, something red slipped off of them and onto the wooden floor. At first, she froze, terrified that it was blood, but relaxed when she realized it was far too bright a red to be blood.
"It's a cloak."
Her head shot up in surprise. She knew the voice; it was Eren's, but its abruptness startled her. She grabbed a handful of the material and pulled it over her legs. She said nothing.
"I'm sorry I ran off without you," he continued, plodding over so that he could sit in front of her. His feet dragged with every step.
There was about half a minute of silence, punctuated by the frequent crackles and snaps of a hearth.
"What happened?"
"I thought I could find something you'd eat in the village and come back fast, but you fainted, and the cold kept you unconscious until she found you."
He jerked his head over to her left, guiding her gaze to a young woman with dark hair in a short ponytail and dozens of freckles. She was sitting poker-faced in a wicker chair, steadily sewing together a shirt. She paused her work when Eren gestured towards her, stared back at Mikasa for a few seconds, then returned to stitching.
"She brought you back here. I just followed her tracks, and she let me in." He paused again. "You should eat."
"I'm just fine."
He suddenly leapt up and headbutted her. "You're not fine. You fainted."
She pushed him off her lap and rubbed her hurting jaw. She frowned as they glared at one another, neither one of them willing to back down.
Her stomach abruptly growled. Mikasa's face went from a glare straight to shock when her stomach betrayed her as Eren's expression became smug.
"You can't argue with that," he said.
Mikasa sighed in defeat. She really couldn't argue with her own body telling her she needed food. "Well, I don't suppose you have any."
The woman in the wicker chair stood up, changing out her stitching for a slate on a side table, and crouched down next to the kids' eye level. She hastily scribbled something out on the slate with a slate pencil and handed it to Mikasa.
"The blizzard cleared up while you were asleep. You could go to the inn in the nearby village; they'll give you a cheap meal. They might not let your wolf in, though," she read aloud. She frowned as the freckled lady took the slate back and erased it. Sure, she understood the reasoning behind the statement, but she still didn't like it.
Their host handed back the slate with something new scribbled on it:
Or, if you prefer, I can make you some nettle soup, and you can rest and recover afterwards.
"Oh," Mikasa said. She felt rather shy quite suddenly, because she knew the only thing she could logically ask for was to stay for soup, but she hadn't asked anything from a stranger before. But she swallowed her fear and asked for it.
The older woman smiled warmly as she got up. She paused for a moment, then offered her hand to Mikasa, still sitting on the floor, to help her up. She accepted and was led over to the bed. Their host left the slate back on the side table as she plodded out of the room, effectively leaving them alone.
For what felt like hours, neither one looked at or said anything to each other.
"Hey Eren?" Mikasa tentatively began, looking up at him. "I'm sorry that I didn't listen to you."
"'S fine."
"I'm always asking for you to do this, for you to do that, and you always do them for me eventually. And never have you ever asked anything else of me–"
"Except for you to just leave me alone sometimes."
"–And I always refuse," she said over him. She paused and closed her eyes, taking a deep and somewhat ragged breath before continuing on. "In truth, I'm not sure what I'd do without you. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from running off and leaving me without anyone. But here we are, still together after all these god-awful months of being homeless. And as much as I didn't like you when we first me, I depend on you now."
She lowered her gaze again. "I don't appreciate you enough for what you do for me." She pulled the red cloak over her shoulders, keeping it close to stay warm.
"Thank you for the cloak," she mumbled, feeling hot tears of embarrassment and shame prickling at her eyes.
Eren got up from his seat by the fire and hopped onto the bed next to her, where he rested his head and front legs on her lap. "It's just a piece of cloth," he nearly scoffed, just barely reining in the mock distaste. "There's no need to get so sentimental over it." He closed his eyes. "I'll always be here to keep you warm for as long as you need."
It was at this moment that their host decided to enter the room carrying an earthenware bowl full of a dark green soup on a tray and presenting the meal to the younger girl. She affectionately patted both kids on the head and picked up her stitching before leaving again.
The watery soup, while mildly flavored, was just what Mikasa needed. Her eyelids grew heavy as her belly felt full for the first time in ages and unable to keep it in anymore, she reached over and pushed the bowl onto the side table with the slate before drifting off to sleep.
The bright mid-morning sun glared harshly down on the pure, fresh snow, forcing Mikasa to squint in order to see properly. They were entering a village that Eren had spotted earlier.
All around them, they could hear snippets of rumors surrounding a young woman who lived in a tower just outside the outskirts of town, and that she had short, dark brown hair, and that her face was covered in freckles. She never spoke, only wrote, and in the day gathered nettles but by night brewed them into dangerous potions. They said that she was a witch, whose name was Ilse.
Ilse.
The name and description sounded familiar to Mikasa, as though she heard it before. Yet she struggled to attach any sentiment to it, feeling only distrust and disgust to this faceless stranger who practiced strange magic.
Perhaps she had known Ilse in a dream on time gone by, but life was not that dream, and now was not that time gone by.
She and Eren walked through the town, keeping a wary eye out for the young woman they never met.
Mikasa opened her eyes to see a room full of screeching, twittering birds of all the colors of the rainbow. She blinked several times, trying to orient herself while simultaneously make sense of the dream that was already fading quickly from her mind.
It had been so strangely vivid, yet also so realistic and familiar, almost as if it had truly happened at some point in their past.
Ilse.
Perhaps she had one or two hazy memories of her besides what they had seen in the village before they decided to burn her. But she couldn't be sure. The faces of both women were hazy in her mind, and even if her dream truly had happened before, they had been locked deep within the recesses of her consciousness for the last few years so that she couldn't access them.
Her head ached, disrupting her train of thought and breaking her focus. Distracted by all the birds, she struggled to recall what she was thinking about.
Unable to do so, Mikasa sighed and tried to fall asleep again.
Author's Note xxvii. *Les Miserables in* I dreamed a dream on time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living.
I think the funny bit about "*Les Miserables in*" is that you'd have to purposely mispronounce it from 'miserab' to how it's literally spelled for it to sound even remotely like a verb.
Also wow I'm on a roll with these chapters. I'm finally getting back in the groove of things after that Winter Depression or w/e. According to my Super Important Chapter Outline, there should be only six chapters left, plus an epilogue. Kind of hard to believe, tbh. Anyway, hope you all enjoyed this flashback chapter highlighting the off screen development of Eren and Mikasa as characters because I felt it was necessary in order both to the story (because I DID hint at it in like. The first chapter. So, payoff for that!) and put off the reveal as to ~*what happened to Mikasa*~. Who knows. (i know)
Anyway, hope you all are having fun with the ride! Feel free to leave a follow or favorite if you are, or a review, if that's what you're into. And as always, have a greaaat daaaay~
