Eren

Mikasa swings her legs out the passenger door before I've even pulled into a parking spot. I almost have to sprint to catch up to her, and we barrel through the sliding automatic doors of the emergency department. She didn't say a single word during our drive here, apart from yelling at me for running a red light.

A lady with a spiky ponytail and glasses meets us in the waiting room. Her name is Hanji, and her eyes are swollen from crying. She and Mikasa hug each other, and we sit in a row of chairs, watching the clock tick. Mom shows up in her scrubs. She's been shadowing an anesthesiologist as part of her training, so she has some details on Levi's surgery, but it's mostly her firing off a string of medical terms—head CT, bradycardia, Cushing's triad, intracranial pressure—which all ultimately add up to one thing: brain injury.

Hanji turns into a puddle of emotions, and Mikasa switches into mother hen mode, rubbing her back quietly and refusing to show any sign of weakness. I stand by the window to give them some space, watching ambulances drive in and out of the unloading area. A hand pats my shoulder. It's Mom.

"Is he gonna make it?" I ask her.

"Neurosurgery is gonna be busting butt for a couple of hours, but I'm optimistic," she says, sighing. "Did you have dinner yet?"

"I had the lasagna from last night."

"Did Mikasa eat yet?"

"She had the other half of th—" I begin to say, but immediately, I shut up. But with Mom, it's useless. My ears are feeling red-hot.

"Huh, you've got a lot of, er, rashes on your neck. And so does she," Mom remarks, crossing her arms, trying to contain a smug smile. She's doing that thing again, where she obviously knows what's up, but she's purposely playing dumb, which has this bizarre effect of making me feel like the dumb one. "Did you guys face-plant into a patch of poison ivy or something?"

"Mom, you're a nurse. You damn well know that isn't it," I mutter, wishing my soccer jersey had a collar.

"Are you guys doing okay?"

"We're good."

She ruffles my hair before disappearing into the ER for another update.

It's almost midnight by the time a doctor finds us in the waiting room. Hanji springs to her feet, and Mikasa has to pull on her elbow to keep her from grabbing at the surgeon. We take the elevator up to the intensive care unit, and we're led into Levi's room.

He looks really banged up. His right leg is mummified in bandages and propped upwards, and his head is covered in white wrappings. Beneath them, two gashes run down the right side of his face, and they're cross-hatched with stitches. Wires and cords tumble from his body, hooking him up to a wall of beeping machines. The doctors don't know when Levi is supposed to regain consciousness. It can be anywhere from tomorrow—to never.

"Wakey, wakey, Levi!" Hanji sings, trying her hardest to be upbeat. She crosses over to the side of his bed and leans over his face. "You got us really good, but joke's over, buddy!"

Mikasa stands on the other side of the bed. Saying nothing, she slips her fingers between his and squeezes his hand. It's different from when her dad died. Then, she was a brick wall, and her face betrayed no emotions. But it's also different from when her mom died. I remember she'd start tearing up at random points in the day, especially if we passed by anything that reminded her of her mom. Sunflowers, white chocolate, Bob Dylan—any of those things would make her eyes watery.

Standing in this hospital room, however, she's a veteran when it comes to tragedy. But she's also struggling to keep it together. I can tell because when I wrap an arm around her shoulder, she's shaking.

Mikasa is staying in the guest bedroom again. Just like those days after her dad passed and before Levi rolled into town. Mom finds clean sheets and a comforter while I search high and low for another towel. We did a pitstop by her house beforehand so that she could grab a change of clothes. The kitchen light was still on, and there was a half-consumed beer on the dining room table, which was covered with papers and notebooks.

I knock on the doorframe. She's sitting on the floor with her back against the bed, wearing an oversized varsity lacrosse T-shirt. She has a stapled packet of paper in her lap, and she's going through it with a highlighter and a red pen. I sit next to her, and she leans her head against my shoulder.

"Hey," she says.

"How're you holding up?" I ask her.

"Knowing him, he'd wanna still be on track with beating Floch," she answers. She flips to a page with a hand-drawn calendar. "I need to call a professor at Cambridge this weekend."

She tells me about this book project, how Levi's hell-bent on writing a kickass biography of this guy named Erwin, and I watch her read through her uncle's notes, laser-focused and determined. I try to keep myself from nodding off, but it's almost 2AM, and every few minutes or so, I have to blink a few times to stay awake. Mikasa tells me to go to bed. I insist I'm fine, but she shuts me up when she kisses me.

An hour later, I wake up to the sound of a knock at my door. When I open it, she takes a step forward and buries her face into my chest. I kiss her, and her lips taste salty from the tears running down her face. She curls up next to me in bed, and I hold her in my arms, brushing a thumb against her leg until her breathing steadies and she finally dozes off.

The grapevine went batshit insane after prom. Everyone knows that I hooked up with Mikasa, but each person has their own version of events. Ymir remembers Mikasa kissing me in Jean's basement, after Sasha dared her. On the flip side, Marco remembers me kissing Mikasa. The rumor mill even churned out stupid conspiracy theories. For instance, some people think I purposely got Jean too drunk so that I could steal Mikasa for myself. Others insist that I had put Mikasa up to it as part of an evil plot to fuck over Jean.

Jean didn't address any of the rumors. In fact, he clammed up entirely—which is a good and a bad thing.

On one hand, he's trying hard not to drag on this drama between us. The morning after, we walked around his neighborhood, talking for almost three hours. At first, he shoved me, almost knocking me to the ground, but when he realized that I wasn't going to fight back, he stopped himself from swinging at me, and we had a surprisingly civil conversation. I found myself telling him everything about Mikasa and me, thinking that he was in the loop about Mikasa's mom and her dad's alcoholism, but this was all news to him. He started tearing up and sniffling, which was super awkward for both of us, and by the end of it, I got the sense that he just wanted to move on.

But on the other hand, with Jean saying nothing, the falsehoods and gossip run rampant and free. Hate to say it, but if that's his way of punishing me, then I deserve it.

To avoid all the nosy looks in the cafeteria, Connie, Armin, and I snuck off school grounds for lunch almost every single day in the week following prom. I kept my head low in the hallways, but everywhere I went, people would turn and point, pinning me as the guy who played a central role in "homewrecking" Jean's relationship. Annie came up to my locker and gave me a congratulatory pat on the back. Ymir bugged me for details every chance she got. Even Coach Shadis noticed something was up, giving Jean and me an earful over how badly we were playing. We won last week's game but only by the skin of our teeth.

Mikasa claims she doesn't give a shit. She insists on going to class, even though both Mom and I tell her there's no shame in ditching. She missed an entire week, and I thought this meant that she had dodged the post-prom gossip storm—but as we walk into the school together, the rumors, theories, and bullshit spike right back up again. Her lacrosse teammates circle us like vultures, and Jean's friends snoop on the sidelines, trying to listen in for juicy bits—but she breezes right past them, headed towards the newspaper classroom, where she asks Armin for advice on how to structure an upcoming interview.

When we both wrap up practice, she asks me if I happen to have my fake ID on me, and I pull out my counterfeit Rhode Island driver's license. She asks me to take her to the grocery store, and I follow her through the beer aisles with a shopping cart, watching her pick through the options like a connoisseur. She finds a potted sunflower at a neighboring florist, and we head to the hospital.

We get our visitors' passes and head up to Levi's room. He's still out cold, and Mikasa squeezes his hand again before putting the sunflower in the windowsill. She pulls up a chair directly next to his bed and takes a folder crammed full of documents.

"First order of business. I just finished reviewing Chapter Eight. But what were you thinking with this metaphor, Levi? Do you know anything about political correctness? I'm sorry, but it's going to have to go, unless you want to piss off all readers under the age of forty," she says, showing him a highlighted passage. Levi's wheezes through his respiratory mask in reply. She continues like that, going through all of her edits, talking to him as if he's sitting across from her at their dining table with his coffee or beer.

She talks him through her game plan this weekend. She's going to do three or four phone interviews with Erwin's colleagues in the U.K. She tells him she's nervous but assures him he can count on her.

She then pulls out her laptop, flipping it around to show him a spreadsheet and a set of graphs. "Floch has been very active on the Twitter accounts of Simon & Schuster. On his Instagram, he posted a photo of himself and some friends at a bar in NYC. I think he was in town to also secure a publishing deal," she says quickly and crisply, like a newscaster. "He's also connected with Erwin's college classmates on LinkedIn. He's hot on our trail, but we're still a couple steps ahead of him."

And we do this every single day after school. She squeezes his hand. She waters the sunflower plant from her Nalgene bottle. And she gives him the daily round-up on her proofreading efforts and her freakishly detailed observations on Floch's online whereabouts.

In the evenings, after dinner, she goes back to her house for a couple of hours. She tells me she needs to sit in her backyard alone for a while. She drinks a beer, and by the time the sun has set, she's back at my house, and we watch late-night talk shows while half-assedly doing our homework. And when Mom heads off to bed, she sneaks over to my room, and she gets under the covers with me.

Depending on the night, we might have sex. I'm personally not a fan of doing it when Mom's sleeping right down the hallway, but Mikasa's figured out how to sway me. She starts by kissing me, and she pauses every so often to whisper something dirty into my ear, which throws me off guard because I'd never imagine her to say things like this. As she does this, she straddles my lap, and she takes off her shirt and starts kneading her own breasts. At the same time, she might stick a hand down her panties and begin rubbing herself, letting out these soft, sexy sighs. When I reach out to touch her, she jerks back, and by the time I pin her onto her back, kissing her neck, she's won—partially.

She has a thing for rougher sex. She pulls at my hair and rakes her nails down my back, urging me to fuck her harder, but here, I have the upper-hand. Her moans are frustrated when I move inside of her gently, careful not to make too much noise as to wake up Mom.

But other nights, we just lay there, and we talk. We have years to catch up on.

I tell her about Mom. Mom's been trying to put on a tough face throughout all of this, but I can tell that it's been hard without Levi. At first, I honestly thought she would despise him, but sure enough, they've built the strangest friendship that revolves around beer, sarcasm, and gallows humor. They'd flip-flop between the Ackermans' place and our house, and they'd take turns sharing their favorite brews. When they split off for the night, Mom would always have a bounce in her step.

Levi's been an exhaust valve for her. She hasn't been able to talk to anyone about the shit between her and Dad. Her college friends are too gossipy, her work friends just don't get it, and Hannes has been trying to ask out, so that would be too weird. And of course, she refuses to talk to me about it, even though I tell her it's fine and that I'm Team Mom all the way.

Mikasa listens, and occasionally, she asks me a question that makes me unpack things more. It's a new habit of hers, and I wonder if her journalist uncle has something to do with it.

I'm honest with her. I tell her how guilt gnaws at me whenever I see Jean and how a part of me crumbles each time I see Mom. I tell her how I've noticed more of my dad's features on my face every time I look at my reflection. I tell her that I got off easy—too easy—and that the hurricane of BS rumors at school is a punishment far lighter than what I really deserve. Thankfully, she doesn't try to sugarcoat things or convince me otherwise. It's plain and simple: we both fucked up.

"Eren," she says one night. "Do you think what happened to Levi… do you think that it's karma for everything I've done?"

I shoot down this theory immediately. I give her a million reasons why it's dumb and impossible. But I can tell that she's still hung up on the thought. I usually fall asleep before she does, and as the days pass by with Levi making little to no progress, the circles under her eyes grow darker.

Mikasa's always been amazing at noticing the smallest things in people. She tells me how Levi is the world's hugest neat-freak. He ties one bandana into his hair and uses another one to cover his face when he cleans the house. He's an aggressive driver and won't hesitate to slam a hand over the horn. She complains about how difficult it was to work with him on the biography, but eventually, she learned how to deal with his attitude. Eye-rolls equate to him listening. A passive-aggressive silence means that you've won him over with your argument.

"I wish I told him what he meant to me," she confesses. It's 1AM on a Saturday, almost two weeks since Levi was admitted to the hospital. Neither of us can sleep. We walk down the street to her house, and she has a J rolled and lit within minutes. We sit on her patio, passing it back and forth.

"You still can, you know," I say, flicking the lighter on and off.

"If he wakes up," she says.

"When he wakes up," I correct her. "Hanji says he will. She's sure of it."

She shrugs and takes two puffs on the joint.

"What would you tell him?" I ask her.

She takes a moment to think about this. "Well," she says finally, tipping her chin upwards to look at the night sky. "I'd start by chewing him out. I'd remind him that bicycles also have to obey STOP signs."

"Fair enough."

"And then I'd complain about how I don't really know what I'm doing with his book. I'd tell him that I'm trying to follow his plans, doing the interviews that he lined up, but honestly, I'm just a seventeen-year-old girl in high school. I've only written stories about, I don't know, varsity sports. He'd look at what I've done, and he'd shit on my work, probably. Then we'd bicker, like usual." Her tone is irritated, but she has a sad smile on her face when she says this.

"Can I be honest about something?" I say.

"Shoot to kill."

"He's been rubbing off on you, I think."

She gives me a puzzled look. "What do you mean?"

"You're different, Mikasa. Like, you're still Mikasa, but I've noticed Levi's changed you in some ways. For instance, the way you talk is more… Levi. That phrase, 'shoot to kill,' I've never heard you say that before. That's one of his lines, isn't it? And you were always witty to begin with, but it's like those times sparring with him have made you even more witty."

"You think so?" she says.

"You always get the last word when we argue about stuff," I say with a mock grimace. She smiles at this. "But yeah, and other things too. You give less of a shit about what other people think—like all those rumors at school didn't even make a dent in you."

"It's nothing compared to what Levi had to deal with. Some tabloid made up a story about how he drunkenly ran buck-naked into the Tribune Tower and assaulted his editor-in-chief with a doorknob. And at one point, Levi and Hanji fed a fake story to People magazine about how they were engaged in a 'sizzling' affair," she recalls, laughing.

"Damn. What a weird guy."

"Definitely quirky. He finds entertainment in the strangest things."

"And you drink beer now, even though you swore off alcohol, didn't you? That's fuckin' huge, Mikasa. You're so stubborn about these things, but he crept up into your head, didn't he?"

"You know, he had this plan," she says with disbelief, shaking her head. "In the beginning, he never wanted to be here in the first place, but Hanji forced him to become my legal guardian. He was going to bide his time, and when we were supposed to have a court date that would put the stamp of approval on our arrangement, he was going to make us memorize a script. The goal was to paint him as this irresponsible, awful alcoholic. He was going to show up wasted."

"You're kidding."

"I don't know when that court date is supposed to happen. They keep pushing it off, and with this whole hospitalization thing, I don't know anymore. Everything's in limbo." She sighs and hands me the rest of the joint. I finish it off and crush it underfoot.

We sit there quietly, letting the high kick in. She asks me to play one of Levi's favorite Radiohead songs, "Fake Plastic Trees."

"We were supposed to go see them live," she says when the opening chords play from my iPhone. "He said he 'wouldn't be opposed'—which in Levi-speak means he was absolutely, positively down. He saw them once before in college, when he was at Columbia. He said he worked a bunch of extra shifts at his part-time job to save up for tickets, but it was totally worth it."

She starts sniffling when we hear these lines:

She lives with a broken man

A cracked polystyrene man

Who just crumbles and burns

"Dammit," she says, wiping at her eyes. "I've been crying way too much lately."

"It's okay," I tell her. I embrace her and kiss her forehead.

"Eren, I just want him to get better," she says, her voice cracking. "I don't want anybody else to be my legal guardian."

A "complication" is what the doctors called it when they rang at 4AM.

We rush into the intensive care unit in our pajamas. Mom's hair is frizzy and tangled, and Mikasa didn't bother throwing pants on, sprinting for our car in just her oversized T-shirt. I jab at the buttons, but the elevator doors won't shut fast enough. When we finally make it into Levi's room, we can only crowd near the doorway. Inside, hospital staff swarm around, and the heart monitor is beeping erratically, sounding like a ticking time-bomb.

"V-tach," Mom says, her eyes widening.

"What does that mean?" Mikasa demands, trying to poke her head into the room, but a nurse shoulders her aside to get through. "Ms. Jaeger, is he going to be okay?"

"Ventricular tachycardia," Mom says. "His heart is beating ridiculously fast right now. They're going to shock him. Hopefully, that'll restore a normal rhythm."

The nurses are charging up a defibrillator, and at a doctor's instruction, they place the electrodes on Levi's bare chest. "Clear!" a nurse yells out, and they deliver a shock. But the monitor keeps beeping like crazy.

"And if it doesn't work?" Mikasa breathes.

"This can lead to cardiac arrest," Mom says quietly.

When she hears this, Mikasa grits her teeth, and before I can grab her arm, she shoves her way into the room, ignoring shouts from the hospital workers. "Levi!" she screams. "Cut the crap, will you?!"

The doctor instructs the nurse to charge up the defibrillator again. "Can someone get her out of here?!" he hollers, pointing in Mikasa's direction.

Two workers take her by the arms and try to push her out, but she fights against them. "Levi! You're not giving up, you hear me?!" she yells. "Otherwise, Floch is going to beat you! Don't let him! You have unfinished business—"

"Miss, please!" the doctor says sharply. "We need you outside—"

"We're going to go see Radiohead, remember?!" Mikasa interrupts. The workers are struggling to hold her at bay. "You're not dying on me, Levi! Don't you fucking dare!"

When she's forced out of the room, she crumples into my arms, crying hysterically. Mom gestures at me to take her out of ICU, and I walk Mikasa into a waiting room. She feels limp and drained, and she almost collapses into the chairs.

Ten minutes later, Mom joins us.

"Gotta say," she remarks. "You really did knock some sense into him."

"Is he okay?" Mikasa asks immediately.

"They got his heart rate back to normal right after you yelled at him. Everyone's crediting you for that—even that asshole doctor who kicked you out," Mom says, rubbing Mikasa's back.

This makes Mikasa cry even harder.

A/N: This chapter was a tough one. Two more left, guys. Then, our main storyline draws to a close. Thank you all so much for the encouragement and feedback. God, it feels like we're in the home stretch of such a wild journey.