author's note: this takes place in the time that Eren spends on the Mid-East Front and in Marley. it's canon divergence, where Mikasa went with Eren.

Someone had gotten hurt, as Mikasa had predicted. The boys had been playing with the thing for over an hour into late morning, and now someone had gotten hurt. Mikasa's canvas shoe heels tracked a bland insignia behind her as she weaved through the dug-out labyrinth of the Mid-Eastern Front. The sun was sporadic today, an occasional beacon through the patchy sky; like an omen in drifting tea leaves. Her arms were alert with goosebumps. She had heard the sounds of injury before seeing them. Her ears guided her to a sunken bog, eased by a narrow passageway of floating wood, structurally unsound enough to submerge her to her ankles when she stepped on it.

The boys turned to her when she arrived.

"Hey, Sister, this dick's been bitten!"

"Why were you playing with that snake?" Mikasa said quietly. "I told you to leave it alone."

One of the three boys was gray in the face and blue in the mouth. Mikasa kneeled and the others drew back. A needle fumbled from her threadbare coat. She fed its beak into a sleeve of gray skin, and the liquid sleep eased the boy into Neverland.

"Let's get rid of this fucker," one of the awake boys said. He gummed his shoe into the mud, trapping the snake in between him and a barbed-wire bushel. That's why it bit in the first place, Mikasa thought. It had no place to go. Nothing to do except—

The snake moved, and Mikasa's hand moved. She saw the bright green eyes growing large, like emerald stone baked by fire, widening as it prepared for more violence. A trapezoid of soft pink gaped, slit by two clear needles, like the ones in Mikasa's coat, dripping with liquid catatonia. Its brown body darted. Mikasa's hand was a flesh-colored blur in front of her, then her fist was there, around the snake's neck, wringing it at a millimeter before the boy's boot.

"Whoa!" The boys screamed.

The bones stood in Mikasa's knuckles as she bore her strength into her fist. The snake went limp. It dangled in her hand.

"Goddamn, Sis, I've never seen anything like that—"

"Please bring that boy to the tents for treatment," Mikasa said.

She watched them heave the sleeping body away, knowing that he would be dead by lunchtime. The tents didn't have antivenom in their meager stock. Her gaze turned back to her hand. She flung the snake above the trench wall. The rats would come if she buried it inside.

When Mikasa stood, she was confronted by a generous white bosom, blazed by a red-stitched cross emblem. The woman who called herself Mikasa's mother smiled impassively down at her.

"Sister Mikasa," she said.

Mikasa knew what she was going to say before she said it. Her arms were budding again, and not because of the foggy morning cold.

"Mother Agatha," Mikasa said, bowing her head slightly.

It's him, isn't it?

"Kruger's wounds need redressing. He sent for you specifically," Mother Agatha said.

"Yes, ma'am," Mikasa said.

"What did I tell you about being so stiff, girl?" Mother Agatha pinched Mikasa's cheeks, making her lips a dolly pucker. "Soldiers aren't looking for burly farm-whores to manhandle them. We sisters replace these boys' wives and girlfriends and mothers. Be soft, be sweet, don't be stiff."

Mikasa had watched the other nurses in the sisterhood, studying their slender birch arms and hip motions and willowy waistlines, not understanding how they came and went like ethereal sylphs among the hordes of men. She nodded to Mother Agatha, and the lady let go of her face.

"Get going, dear."

"Yes, ma'am," Mikasa said, this time with a smile that was as sweet as the snake's.

She made her way to the tents. Soldiers and sisters trickled down the trenches like sands in a sieve. The sisters were pearlescent white little beads in the flow, and the soldiers were rough brown granules, shifting and scurrying in a constant hourglass turn of charge and retreat. The desert storms of the Mid-Eastern Front. The tents fluttered and breathed inside a fortified radius. Mikasa flagged a sister at the checkpoint and located Kruger's tent.

She stood at the entrance and removed her paper cap and pressed it to her chest. It rose with a cold breath. The canvas flap billowed over her as she ducked inside.

Eren Yeager lay on the gurney like a long, rumpled piece of cloth, or a skein of dead skin. A kerosene lamp sat on a crate next to the gurney. It burned a sickly oil flame. He made a shuddering noise, an ivory breath, and the movement of his flank allowed Mikasa to better discern his form, his shape. As she approached the bedside, she realized that he had been stripped of his belt and trousers and underwear. Her eyes carved away from where they'd been heading. She left and returned with a bundle of sheets, which she cast over Eren's lower torso with her head and eyes turned to the side. When they turned back to him, he was made half-decent, sprawled around the sheets in such a way that he gave the impression of a dark shadow-based organ system that had been flayed of its seraphic white flesh, and left to die naked and tangled in the angelic, baptizing linens of its own peeled epidermis.

"Oh, Eren," Mikasa said breathlessly.

She pasted her palm on his forehead, which caused him to stir again. His good eye opened, hazy with delirium, green and scummy like algae in a pond.

"Mikasa," he mumbled. "Where's Mom? I want my mom."

Hesitance. The fever had burned away his older self, leaving the recessive child behind.

"Mrs. Yeager's not here right now."

"Where is she?"

"I'll take care of you, Eren."

"I want her. Not you."

"Eren—"

"Where is she?"

"I'll take care of you," Mikasa repeated.

Eren relaxed. His eye shut. Mikasa went to dress his wounds. She unwound the moist, fouling gauze at the apex of his knee. The—

Just do it Mikasa don't think about it get it over with it's one clean slice like we learned just one slice like chopping wood, Eren's eyes were sealed, his teeth were braced around a fold of horse-leather, he was talking without seeing her hesitance, knowing that she was hesitating because the strike hadn't come, he would stop talking when she started cutting, her wrist was shaking, her blade was quivering, she steeled the blade against the pant hem with her other palm, and then Eren shouted, wait! Stop! Not yet please gimme a minute hold on, so she waited and he said, okay okay I'm okay just do it just get it over with—

And then the blade sliced through in a meaty heft and the severance thrashed in the dirt, then it was still and Eren was screaming into the leather, so hard that the scream went back into him and reverberated through the hollows of his chest and in the bowels of the earth, and the wound was a perfect round cross-section, ringed with arteries and breached by fat cutlets, like a citrus fruit cut in half, and Mikasa mopped the blood and Eren sagged against the trench wall, she heard his notched breathing, and then he leaned and picked a brass bullet from his standard-issue magazine and held it to his face.

Eren, what are you doing?

The eye too. It has to be the eye too.

—wound had not healed. She treated and redressed the amputation site, then she was back to his face. A crimson rose bloomed at the center of the gauze over his socket. His hair webbed that side of his face. Unconscious? Mikasa made sure. Then she swept a strand to his ear, feeling the grime grease her fingertips.

Too far, Eren, she thought. You went too far this time.

He claimed the filth was his disguise. He had cloaked himself in mud and blood and put a star on his sleeve. Tomorrow, the tracks would clatter and heave the rumbling carapaces of the passenger locomotives to the stations, and Eren would board as the trains unloaded of more able-bodied men to switch places with him, slipping in seamlessly, warding scrutiny with his crippled stance and bandage-wrapped face. That was the plan, anyway.

Was it really a disguise? Mikasa thought as she brushed his roughened cheek with her thumb. In the putrid light of the lamp, Eren's linens glowed on his body like a divine weave, sewing the disparate portions of him into one abomination of light and shadow.

"Hey," Eren croaked, and Mikasa withdrew her hand as though the fever had scalded her. His eye was slitted.

"Eren?" Mikasa said testingly. "It's me."

"Sister Mikasa," he said. His voice was flat and toneless.

"Mr. Kruger."

"Can I— I'm very thirsty."

Mikasa fetched him some water. She held a canteen to his lips and the—

Is this good can you drink lying down don't move okay? Hey I said don't move why can't you let me take care of you Mikasa do you not trust me is that it? It's my fault I should be the one to make it right, he said and his eyes trickled to the scarlet sailing warmth around her neck as they tended to do now, in that mysterious unreadable glance, and Mikasa grew self-conscious under his eyes, thinking that he didn't want her wearing it, and she shifted, uncomfortable, and red vices clamped her ribcage again, wrapping around her body like the scarf on her neck, she winced, teeth gritted together, Eren exclaimed, sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Are you okay are you hurt—

—water was shoved down his throat like swallowing a solid object. He gasped and opened his mouth, steam rising from his nostrils.

"Thank you, nurse."

"You're welcome," Mikasa said softly. "Please rest now."

Eren shook his head. "I can't. Not yet."

Mikasa drew herself up as she imagined a mother would, making herself big and all-encompassing as the soft flapping white vanguard of Carla Yeager's apron.

"You will. Or I'll take you back home myself."

"I don't have a home to go back to. You'd have better luck relocating a rat from its hole."

"You have a home."

Eren roiled on the gurney, writhing without coming even a centimeter off the bed, as though pikes had been driven up through the frame and penetrated his back and hands. His torso moved like a serpent underbelly across wet grass. Lost lipids had rendered him all musculature; water damage had blistered his skin to scales. Mikasa swooped a bucket beneath his mouth, knowing what would happen before it happened. Her rudimentary medical experience served her well. Eren vomited a fiery stream of acid, spiced by his soldier's rations. His head fell. He panted. The fever frosted his sweat glands. As the bucket clattered back down, Eren seized Mikasa's wrist. Mikasa looked at him. His eye was the window into a green hell. Mouth-sap dangled from his lips.

"I can't. I can't go back. Not now. Now, I just have to keep—"

An efficient movement of Mikasa's hand. She found Eren's bold arm vein and the needle drained into him, floating him far away from her, across a misty veil of restless sleep. Maybe he wasn't at war there.

"Sleep well, Eren," Mikasa said.

Mother Agatha had a slew of partial wisdoms for her daughters. One such saying was this: Weak men break more bones than fevers. Do not pray for their recovery; rather, pray for the Lord to take them into His heart, as they were made weak for His reasons, and His alone. The sisterhood pruned their girls with many pearls like these, shaping them into ladies, nipping the buds of wilderness from them, maintaining a beautiful garden of identical white flowers standing in rows.

Mikasa didn't know how to pray. Her faith lay in Eren. His fever would break tonight, she thought.

The night was punctuated by siren acoustics in the distance, machine banshees wailing at the cold stars. Eren's tent housed folded layers of darkness, unraveling around the lamplight. Mikasa sat beside Eren's bed on a crate she'd found, thinking, thinking, sitting, closing her eyes, was that how to pray? She opened them. Eren's body was swamped by his shadow, swaddled in it, a clownish, circus canopy outfit, ten, twenty sizes too large on him. A monstrous thing of dark that enclosed him in its nape. The shadows were on the canvas wall, too. Periodic spotlights backlit the wall, turning it into a puppet stage. On the wall, a girl flatly hunched on a flat square, wearing an origami hat. The other shadows loomed before her, threatening to swallow her up.

Eren was shivering in his sleep. The days were shortening. The nights were colder. An adaptive evolutionary response was beginning to sting his upper lip and chin. Mikasa had never seen facial hair on Eren. It aged his face. She wondered what the hair would feel like brushing her lips.

Mikasa blinked and sent those thoughts scurrying. She turned away from Eren. When she blinked again, she saw his image on the backs of her eyelids. She must have been watching him in her vigil for over an hour now.

A strange sound greeted her ears. Mikasa's head roved, a canine appearance. Goosebumps frightened on her arms again. The nurse's sense. The instinct of the nurturer in her, the woman, according to Mother Agatha, although Mikasa was not a mother, that was a saint's promotion. She was only a sister. Listen to your instincts, Mother Agatha said. She heard it again, and let her ears guide her. She dropped into a crouch from the crate and stealthily crept around the side of the gurney. Strands of shadow slipped over her until she was covered completely. Eren's legs hung. She pinpointed the sound. It was coming from the amputated one. The bandages were hissing. Mikasa's fingers undid them. An invasion on her nostrils; the smell of infection and raw bone. The bandages loosened. They fell. Mikasa opened the wound.

A snake jumped from the opening she'd made, hissing, green-ember eyes seething. Its needles sank into her face. She remembered that there was no antivenom in the medical supplies.

Mikasa startled awake. She heard the echo of her gasp as she awoke. A siren began to wail, as though her distress had been noted, and a platoon was marching from one side of the country to the other to wage war on the nightmares.

She took in more breath. Looked down at the jangling indigo veins in her hands. Put her hands to her face, palpating, feeling for fang marks. She put them down.

She turned to Eren. His—

Shush, please don't wake him he's still asleep it's been three days and he's still asleep but I don't want him awake not if they'll make him fight again I'll sit here by his side as long as he's comatose, Mikasa felt the warm strip of scarf in her lap, stroked it, ran her fingers along the lining, the tears, the stitch scars, Eren was cocooned gently in the sheets, hibernating, she could see the sunlight band his chest and face like an animal's toxicity warning, the sunlight falling softly over him from the window, turning the dust around him to flecks of gold, percolating through his pores, turning his skin to gold, waxing his health, poor little Eren, weak little Eren-

And that was what he needed, Mikasa thought, after Stohess, after Annie, that prettily made-up corpse face, that sickly sweet little flower, poor little Annie, weak little Annie, what did you see in her? What was there to see in her? A girl? The fatal Female, the rampaging monster, yes a break would be nice, after the flying stones and the flying people, Eren's burning the whole city down, he's anger, he's rage, he's hellfire, he really saved the day that suicidal bastard—

—face was in a state of wartime, even asleep. He was shivering badly. The sirens were wailing. Mikasa didn't want him freezing to death. She leaned forward and felt his temperature again. The fever had broken. She sagged. Her breath pooled quietly on his forehead.

But Eren was only covered by a thin sheet and his loose unbuttoned shirt. There was no light to touch him now; the hypothermic darkness was killing him. If she'd had her scarf, she would have wrapped his neck, returned the warmth.

Mother Agatha said, a sister's job is to comfort.

Mikasa stood from the crate again. She walked around to the other side of the gurney. A moribund whisper slunk from between Eren's lips, and he tossed his head, muttering into his pillow. Mikasa flinched and froze. Eren grew still again. His hair slashed halfway over his face like a black veil shredded to strips of wind-stirred fabric. Mikasa made sure that the sheet covered everything, then she tenderly climbed into bed with him. His face was turned towards her as she lay like a cold sardine in a can. Her—

Mikasa why is it that you care so much about me is it because I saved you as a kid? Or is it because I'm family? What am I to you? Eren's eyes were innocent, innocent as they always were, the innocence of curiosity, but his voice was hoarse from what Mikasa didn't know, and his cheeks had been damp before she'd arrived to scold him, but now she stood in front of him in a shock, a daze, the pinkish taint of blood warming her face, and she opened her mouth to answer the question as he waited almost expectantly, waiting for nothing and then nothing—

—face was hot. She felt like she was balancing on a cumulus cloud cover, about to dissolve to rain and fall right through. Her arm shook as she put it over Eren's shoulder, shaking like she was drawing the cold from his marrow and putting it into herself, numbing with the deep freeze, the subzero shadows.

Eren was a gruesome half-face in the lamplight. Over the dark side, his facial bandages were a masquerade. Mikasa drew in close. Heat began to pound over them. Their shadows were indiscernible from one another. The sirens wailed. Their whines tunneled through the flag-adorned hills and mole-mound bunkers and earthen scar tissues, waking the silent slouched bodies inside, flicking flame into lanterns and rousing the slacking sentries of the night watch, rippling the canvas tents of the sleeping dead inside, an infinite robotic scream of quivering metal, wailing, screaming into the cold night.

Mikasa kept Eren warm until morning. Then she was gone before he could wake up and instinctively search for a face next to his pillow, a bodily impression in his bed. There was nothing.

The afternoon dampened as a shadow passed overhead. Mikasa and Eren craned their necks to the sky.

"Airships have been coming in since this morning," Eren commented. "Our battalion's been talking about the end of the Mid-East War. Have they said anything in your sisterhood?"

"Yes. We've been told that we'll be redeployed soon, at the hospitals in Liberio."

"Look," Eren said, pointing. "That one might have the Armored Titan in it."

"Do you think we'll see Reiner again when we arrive at his hometown?"

Eren paused. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure we will."

They sat back-to-back on a shipment of crates and ate lunch. The airships hummed through the sky in single-file lines. Mikasa split a rind of cheese between her fingers and handed a half to Eren. He took it and chewed.

"You're feeling better," Mikasa said to him.

"Eh, I guess."

"I wish you'd used your titan powers to heal yourself just a little, to prevent that infection."

Eren stiffened. He turned over his shoulder, so she saw the side-profile of his frowning face.

"Mikasa—"

"Sorry."

"There are enemies everywhere," Eren warned. "Please don't forget that."

Mikasa looked downward. "I know. Sorry."

Eren sighed. "I wish you hadn't followed me here. It's made things difficult."

"..."

"We can't change what's already been set in motion, though."

"Still," Mikasa persisted. "I'm the only one who's been in to dress your wounds. You shouldn't have gone that far."

Eren's hair curtained his face. "I thought you were with me last night."

"Yes, the fever made you delirious when you were awake."

"Ah," Eren said. His hand rose to tug at his collar. It rested at the back of his neck, sheepish. "Did— did I say anything out of the ordinary?"

Mikasa sat still for a long time. The airships were at the far-off fort now, in miniature, toy models poised for a tiny toy action battle.

"You called out for your mother," Mikasa said finally.

Eren breathed another sigh. He took another bite of cheese. Mikasa saw his jaw work and his throat contract. He sat forward. "Dammit," he whispered.

They finished lunch. Mikasa handed Eren his crutches, and they parted ways, Eren to the barracks for the wounded, Mikasa to the barracks for the sisters.

Far in the distance, a succession of nuclear fissions split the sky, and Mikasa's molecules jittered at the atomic familiarity.

The trains settled into the stations with great gasps of steam and furnace-fire smoke signals. The tracks were swarmed by boys, clamoring for a homeward-bound ticket. Their faces were all brown, artificial tans in the sunset. The sisters were muscling them into orderly ranks. Men listened to pretty girls, Mother Agatha said, but this was counterproductive from what Mikasa was seeing. The pretty girls in white were only riling them up; they all thought that souvenirs were deserved. Everybody wanted a woman to take back to their families. This was the only established organizational front at the tracks. That, and the cry, we're going home!

Home. Mikasa looked around from her elevated position atop the steel platform. She looked for a dark-haired, slim figure, thrust upright by a wooden stick. The shouting faces were swimming in the dying light. They were spinning her. Face to face she scanned. None of them were Eren's.

"Please, gentlemen! Gentlemen!" Mother Agatha's shrill voice was rising against the commotion.

Mikasa's heart thumped as she imagined boarding the train without Eren. The devastating force upon her heart as it stretched along the track, drawn into a taut red string. Then— snap! She'd collapse from her seat, clutching at the abandonment in her chest.

The train's brazen whistle howled. Mikasa knew that they were feeding coal into the infernal belly now. She jumped from the platform and landed in the crowd. The boys sifted her through, surprised.

"I need to find—"

"Missus, you need any help? Need a strong fella to lift you back up there?"

"I need to find—"

"Hey sister, you still got your flower? Ha-ha!"

"I need to find—"

"Let the lady be! Let the lady be! Here, miss, grab my hand and we'll—"

Mikasa's weight broke the first ranks, and then she was breaking all of them, an oceanic tide pushing against her as she ran. The faces swam around her. There were brown paper-bag uniforms, rustling, shoving back, dead leaves blown from the branching boughs of trenches. White halos of the commonality circled their scarecrow arms. There were bodies and there was the orange sky. Mikasa ran, searching, her nurse's cap clutched to her head.

The train's whistle went off again. A conductor's voice boomed. Mikasa looked behind her. Standing atop the steel platform, her fellow sisters were a choir of white angels in the sun. Then the red-striped gates cut skyward, and the masses surged to the platform.

As she whipped her head back, Mikasa's shoulder collided with someone's. Another collision, and she stepped back. Her footing slid. A boy crashed directly into her and she was thrown from her feet. Hard. She crouched. Legs churned the dust thick at ground-level, hammering the pasteurized dirt. Mikasa smelled the rank, masculine odor of sweat and grunge. An elbow struck her head. She reeled. She saw a figure, floating in the sea. Through the frantic boys, she recognized the languid balanced limp of—

What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here you should be back with the others please go please I have to do this Mikasa, Eren stood in the crowd, dark and sharp and fine-edged in his tailored suit, like a stationary raven, and in his eyes was a brooding desperation, and he implored, he pleaded for her to let him go, I'm sorry Eren I can't let you go, Mikasa said, and he closed his eyes, his brow furrowed, as though he was thinking, thinking, praying to some deity, verifying her presence here, now, and when he opened them, they were bright power wells of borrowed all-sight, all-here, all-now, and his chin inclined slightly, and he said, come with me then—

—Eren on his crutch. The world swam around him as he stooped, burrowing his crutch into the dirt, arranging his equilibrium on it so he could brace himself in a crouch. His ragged coat piled behind him, making him look like a moldered revenant. The sunset bloodied his complexion.

"Are you all right, sister?" Eren said, extending a hand.

"I found you," Mikasa breathed.

Eren blinked. "I didn't know you were looking."

Mikasa took his hand and they helped each other up. The train whistled its last call for passengers. The boys had drained away, nestled like animals in the cars, compacted together in one monogamous many-faced flesh heap, as many as could feasibly be fitted into each car. Eren angled his head towards the train, his hair falling over his eye.

"Let's not miss our train."

So the train left the station and took the soldiers home, where there was no war. But, of course, there was always war. So came Eren. And he always carried hurt. So came Mikasa.