Mornings were always for cleanliness in the sisterhood. They made do on the Mid-Eastern Front, sponging one another with wool pads, pouring buckets of rainwater over each other's heads. At first Mikasa would sit in an isolated corner and sponge herself, wary of the other girls. She hadn't been able to scrub her entire back, though, leaving silted streaks of grime on her nurse's uniform. So they'd take turns on her, and she felt the stories leaping from her body as she crossed her arms and hunched over and made herself small. Sister, I'd have almost taken you for a boy, with all this muscle! Looking at you makes me feel queer, it's as though a woman's parts have been stitched onto the body of a man!

Hand me the pad, please, Mikasa would say stiffly. I'll do my front.

In the city, they had proper showers, and the gleeful sisters frolicked and twirled under the water like graceful dipping swans, or songbirds diving for their reflections at the bottom of a birdbath. They twittered too, endless unbroken streams of gossip.

"Who bled all over you today?" Sister Darlene asked Mikasa as they stood underneath the luxury of steam-heated rain and let it squeal down their backs and arms.

Mikasa scratched the blood crusting on her fingers.

"Mr. Bowers. His sutures came undone," Mikasa said.

Sister Darlene made a note of sympathy. "Bowers is a pig if I've ever seen one. Rude as hell, too."

"Sister! Do not use that word so lightly!" Sister May scolded.

"Forgive me."

"You both should count yourselves lucky, anyway," Sister May said. "I've been assigned to Mr. Keller this afternoon."

"I am lucky," Sister Darlene said. "I have Mr. Kruger all to myself today. He's such a good boy. Wouldn't lay a finger on a lady, although I'd give him grace for far more than a finger."

"Sister!" May objected.

"You know, good boys are often the nastiest. Once they've been coaxed by a proper woman, they're absolute savages."

"You slut!"

"Dear, you're a child at sixteen! I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"Are you bragging?"

"Sister Mikasa would tell you. She's a riper age than you and I. How about it, Sister?"

"What would you know about that boy?" Mikasa said quietly. Her hands thrashed a little at her side before she quieted her pulse.

"You're red in the face! I don't blame you! Kruger's always on his best behavior around you, after all."

Mikasa blushed deeper, and furiously scratched her hands until the—

Die you animal die never stand up again this is what you get this is what you deserve you damn animal, lying prone, a steadfast rope itching her wrists, Mikasa watched as a boy came charging with a broomstick spear, and he'd come from the woods, or so Mikasa thought, like a demon child, a little thing like her, and the birds were screaming as they did whenever the creatures of the forest died, omens of death that must stalk this tiny vessel of death and carrion, and he delivered it to the second man with a howl and a thrust and the man fell and he was still stabbing, making a different wound each time, and a sanguinary arc of blood followed the small blade swimming minnow-like in his small hands, and the professional girl-trader was now dead, and then the boy looked up, and he said, it's okay you're safe now—

And his eyes weren't like death at all, he was a shadow against the misty light of the window, the bleak day-gloom, he was a savage and his scarf was red like a slit throat, but his eyes weren't like death at all, they were the deep, enigmatic, daunting color of the woods, they were beautiful, they were—

—blood flaked away and swirled down the drain. Mikasa finished her shower and changed into her nurse's uniform and stood straight-backed in front of her bunk as all the sisters did every morning. Mother Agatha came in to inspect each of her girls before sending them to work. When she got to Mikasa, she smiled impassively, and took the scythe of Mikasa's jaw in her large matronly hand. She waited, and Mikasa slowly imitated the smile. The falsity stretched her cheekbones.

"Good girl," Mother Agatha said. Then she continued to Sister Darlene. Wordlessly, she brought her hand back and slapped Darlene on the face.

"Impure," she said. "Impudent. Dirty little whore."

Darlene gasped and recoiled and her fingers went to explore the injury, then Mother Agatha hit her again, sending her nurse's cap fluttering, a crumpled white butterfly. She smacked her lustrous brown-gold hair and it fell undone from its pins into her eyes. Her hand moved again, and Mikasa's hand moved. A whirlwind of air and Mikasa was standing over Darlene, her arm extended, her blunted nails sinking into the tender peach skin of Mother Agatha's wrist.

They stared at each other. The bones in Mikasa's hand were loose when Mother Agatha tore her hand away.

"You're all hopeless," Mother Agatha whispered. "Godless street rats. How can you care for the men here when your immortal soul is so filthy?"

She left them, and the room was silent save for the sonorous church bells of the city cathedral. Sister Darlene was crying, and on her cheek was the swell of blood, the imprint of a large matronly hand.

The rest of the sisters kneeled to pray as they always did in the morning. Mikasa bowed her head and closed her eyes and wondered what it was she needed to repent for, in order to purify her soul.

It's him, isn't it?

Eren seemed to only eat out of courtesy. Every day in the cafeteria, he'd sit near the end of the table and stare in distaste at his entree until lunchtime was nearly over. Then he'd wolf it down begrudgingly, as though he was forcing himself to eat. Today, Mikasa gave him extra servings of chocolate pudding in hopes of enticing him.

He was thinner still. The lining of his face had begun to draw taut around his jaw and cheekbones, giving the impression of shadow where shadow wasn't, putting an unhealthy sheen beneath his skin, where his skull gleamed and smiled. This, Mikasa supposed, was also part of the disguise, but it wasn't one she would tolerate. She imagined him as he sat, emaciating away from starvation, watching his skin shrivel, yellowed bone pressing balefully to the surface, until he looked like a pile of upright sticks held together by a molt of dead snakeskin. No, Mikasa would not tolerate this behavior.

She stooped to his ear as she delivered the food tray, settling it in front of him and pushing it forward encouragingly. She stared ahead, her mouth moving from the side.

"Eat it, Eren. If you want to keep this up, then you have to eat," she urged in a whisper.

The little sensory hairs on Eren's neck stood up from the proximity. He stared at his tray, all the compromises she'd laid out for him. Carefully, he raised his hand to select an apple from the palate. Mikasa waited. Eren put it to his mouth and slunk his teeth into a measured bite.

Mikasa straightened, satisfied, and went to go serve the other patients. The sisters bustled around the cafeteria as waitresses. The boys eyed them as though they were hungry for dessert, the sweet sugary temptations clad in creamy white, with full, brimming faces like fresh pies. Mikasa could see Sister Darlene across the room unveiling the white of her teeth and the flesh from the first few undone buttons on her uniform. Isn't it pretty? She'd said when Mikasa scented a vial of flower essence among her belongings. Perfume like this drives the men here up the wall. She let Mikasa spritz some on the back of her hand, and Mikasa spent the day breathing in the aroma of dying flowers from her wrist. Now, Sister Darlene was probably wafting it all around those boys, the pretty death-musk.

Mikasa stooped again to clear an empty tray, then she heard the sound more than she felt the strike. She straightened and whirled around. One of the boys on the bench behind her had his hand still poised from the slap, clawed as though he was groping a firm roundness in the air. He leered.

"Sorry, Sister," he said. "Accident."

A fever boiled Mikasa in her clothes. She excused herself and stalked away, the tray clutched to her chest. As she left the room, she chanced a look back at Eren. His face smouldered in a dark flush. Fingernail grooves scored the shiny skin of the apple he was gripping.

"That damn pervert," he said later, dusted lightly by sunbeams as he sat on the windowsill to his hospital room. The crutch he used to get around leaned against the window next to him like a rifle. "Touching you like that on purpose."

"It doesn't matter," Mikasa said.

"Eh?"

"I said it doesn't matter."

Eren's face scrunched into something almost like a childish pout. "Yes, it does. What kind of man touches a woman like that?"

"I don't know. A man who needs somebody to comfort him?"

Men are only appetites, Mother Agatha said. Maws open and mewling for satisfaction.

Eren looked at her. He talked slowly. "What are you even saying? Don't you have any dignity?"

Mikasa glanced away. Her mouth slivered into a thin scar beneath her nose. "Eren, you would say that, after you've been stripped and bathed by all those girls?"

Eren's face ripened. "There's a difference. I know there's a difference."

But there wasn't one, Mikasa thought. She serviced the eyes in the hospital, but Eren, a handsome, lonely young veteran, serviced and bled the hearts. They didn't know the artifice behind his wounds.

Mikasa shifted. "Well, it doesn't matter. It's not as though my body is satisfactory to them, so they won't bother with me anymore."

"What? Why would you even say that? You shouldn't—" Then Eren stopped.

"Shouldn't—?" Mikasa prompted curiously.

"Nevermind. It's nothing. Forget it."

Eren's head whipped to the window, features tangled up by hair. He rested his elbow on the crook of his knee. The afternoon sun settled softly and anciently over him, copper needles threading the stray candlewick strands of hair over his face like a crown of thorns. Mikasa was reminded of the alley cats she'd seen lounging throughout the city. They sat in silence for a while, and Mikasa watched the currents move through Eren like vibrations through long spools of steel cable drawn tight, the incessant tick, the restlessness in his quarters, the pacing of an animal caged deep within, the constant need to keep—

Eren dipped his head after a while. "Thank you, nurse," he said. This was a common dismissal of his. "For the extra pudding today."

Through the church's stained glass window the light passed, falling over Mikasa's nape as she hung her head. It was as though her skin had been latticed with blue diamond scales, like a fish's shimmering through a bright stream, or the mythical glimpsing catch of a mermaid's tail. Beauty stamping a blank canvas at a fleeting angle of light and placement. As she pretended to pray, the pew woodenly creaked next to her.

"Cigarettes aren't allowed in here," she said without looking up.

"Ah! Yes, of course, of course."

"Thank you."

"Eh, you did want to meet with me, didn't you, Sister?"

"I… yes. I wanted to meet with you."

"And not about faith, or God. You're not truly a sister, are you? You came for him."

"Yes."

"It's a cunning disguise. Allows you to remain near the hospital without attracting suspicion. I do question my brother's choices, though. Were those grievous injuries necessary for his time here? He claims to be psychologically damaged, so what was the point of inflicting such physical harm?"

"He gave an eye and a leg just to find you. Why? Are you so sure in your plan?"

"… And you followed him. You are the Ackerman girl, correct?"

"How did you know that?"

"Eh? It's all in your stare! You look as though you'd like to dissect me through and through! It's rather scary, y'know."

"Oh."

"Are you so sure in him? That'd you'd follow him to the end of the world if need be?"

"I—"

Mikasa that boy is so foolhardy please you have to help him make sure he doesn't get into trouble, and Mikasa, the obedient one, the courier of one last request, of course nodded and affirmed that she would, not knowing that the promise would become Carla Yeager's dying wish, and then the day took on the quality of a dream, a disquieting calm before disaster, as they went on through the everyday events and mundanity, and then, a searing recital in her mind by now, the blast and the hand on the wall and the craning unblinking silence and the birds flying across the scene and the stratus of steam through the clouds, then the head loomed, and in the murk of its eyes were the shadows of three children—

And the daydream peace was disturbed like ripples on a pond after rocks were cast into its surface, and one of the rocks had found their home, jutting monolithic from its pulverized foundation and crushed roof like a gravestone for Carla Yeager, so it was Mikasa's responsibility now, to be Eren's mother—

"I'm here to make sure he doesn't die."

"So you're his protector. I'm sorry, then. Our plan risks his life, and costs the many lives of the civilians in this city."

"Yes. I understand how Warriors operate."

"He understood as well, when we had our talk."

"…"

"They say you can feel it in the air."

"Huh?"

"Love, that is. What is that, thickening the air like smoke? Our basic animal impulses reacting to scented hormones from the other gender? That's what we are, after all. Only godless animals. But, everywhere you look, the city's full of romance, even in these times. Was it the war? The men have all come home, and they'd like someone in their arms before the bombs fall. You know a little about this affliction, don't you, Sister Mikasa?"

"… Huh?"

"You're Eren's...?"

"Oh. Oh, n-no, I—"

The church bells interceded, gilded noise clanging through the church. Eren's half-brother excused himself and got up to leave, his sooty cigarette odor trailing behind him, the russet collar on his arm marking him as one of Marley's remaining attack dogs. His hair was nickel colored; bearded like the sculptures of saints at the nave. Mikasa stared after him, wondering what other kinds of truths that those oddly-framed glasses let him perceive so obviously.

The man with the time stop machine arrived in a car, one of those steel-hulled carriages whose wheels were turned by an inner technological miracle rather than a team of horses. He sent the sisters into an eager clamor; upon hearing the news, they'd hastened one by one into the hospital courtyard to marvel at the man's supposed miracle device. A time stop machine, that was how Sister May had described it to Mikasa. They looked curiously on as he stepped from the car, his limbs long and spidery, besuited in black silk. He held a brown box in his hands. Mother Agatha greeted him enthusiastically, all smiles and frosty warmth, sweeping a benevolent hand towards her daughters as she talked about her charities for them. They kinked their ankles in meek curtsies. Mikasa hurried to do the same. He's here to photograph us for the papers! Mother Agatha told them. Isn't that just wonderful?

So the photographer positioned the sisters as a doll collector might to a display, arranging them like a boutique of white flowers in front of the ivy-sprawled brick, with clever manipulations of his slender fingers. Mikasa, one of the tallest girls, was shuffled to the far back. She rose to her tiptoes as the photographer stood his machine on three insectoid legs and ducked underneath a piece of cloth. Mother Agatha was behind him, bobbing her palms in her universal command: Smile. Mikasa rounded her cheeks and strapped a smile across her face. She gazed into the lens, a black dollop like the eye of a spider, staring into nothingness, timelessness, a dark forever-cosmos where everything existed in an everlasting instant.

A sudden flash blinded her, and Mikasa blinked the spots from her eyes. The man's machine snapped, and whirred and fed a blank sheet from a slit in the back. The sisters broke ranks to wondrously clutter around the man as he flapped the square back and forth like it was hot. Mikasa craned to see. Eventually, the photograph began to darken with contrast, developing, as the man called it. Inky blots took shape. They swam and pooled and fringed, and soon the shadow images of the sisters smiled from the canvas. Gasps of delight. They were immortalized. This would be printed for all to see their good deeds, the sanctum of their souls.

Mother Agatha began to disperse them. The merriment died down.

"Quell your obsessions with the materialistic, sisters. Do not succumb to vanity. Let us get back to our duties."

"Ahem," the man coughed. "Excuse me, but I'd like to borrow one of your girls for a solo shoot, if that's permitted."

Smiles and niceties from Mother Agatha again. "Of course. Which one would you choose? Our prettiest face, Sister Darlene over there?" Her peach skinned finger beckoned. She snapped, "Darlene, Sister!"

"Ah— no, no," the photographer said. "No, I was thinking this girl." He pointed, and Mikasa glanced behind her, seeing only the brick hospital wall.

Mother Agatha stopped. "Her?"

"Yes, her features are quite exotic, don't you think? She must have Asian blood. I'd like to capture her, if you would be so inclined, Miss."

Mikasa stepped forward and curtsied autonomously. Her face was in full bloom, red petals fanning across her cheeks. The photographer readied his equipment. She smiled. It didn't feel like the other times. She had been chosen by the beholder this time.

Another starburst in her eyes, and the picture was taken. Mikasa watched the birthing of her photograph. The smile on the little monochrome Mikasa was different from the others. Shy, almost, self-conscious, barely straining her lips. No, she thought, that wasn't a very good smile. But she still wished that it had been Eren to flatter her as his muse, admire her in the epicenter of his view.

"For a sum, you may own the snapshot," the photographer said. "It's not something that they'll put to print."

Mikasa tore her eyes away from her photon-painted copy. She told him, feeling a small crestfallen flutter in her chest, that she couldn't afford any amount. So the man smiled his regret behind his thick horsehair mustache and slipped Mikasa's hand from her sleeve, pressing an itchy kiss to it. He did the same with Mother Agatha and then he was packing up his equipment. Mikasa scratched at her hand. She dispelled the lingering disappointment that she couldn't keep the pocketed slip of time to occasionally satiate her gaze. Soon, the man and his boxed temporal magic were gone, so Mikasa went back to her chores for the day.

She was crouched over a bucket scrubbing laundries when Sister Darlene tapped her shoulder, beaming when she turned around. The curlicue dangles of her brown-gold hair were wet with salt, as Mikasa's was from her labors. Her face was a bright swollen moon, dead glass eyes set into the craters of her sockets. Her smooth doughy flesh, too, coruscated with sweat pearls.

Mikasa tilted her head in a silent inquisition. Darlene waved something in front of Mikasa's nose. Mikasa tried to see between her own eyes.

"You're the only girl who stood up for me against that witch the other day," Darlene said. "This, wasn't a very high price."

Mikasa's eyes widened. "You— you bought this from him?"

Sister Darlene's amber eyes slanted deliciously. A feline hum tickled in her throat. "It was more of a trade. Our bodies, Sister, they fetch very handsome values if you know how to sell."

"That's not— it's not worth it," Mikasa said, shaking her head vigorously. "It wasn't worth that. Nothing's worth that." She felt cold and a little sick to her stomach. Her hand itched, her imagination in revolt, as she thought of that coarse, horsehair mustache burning the tenderest sensitivities.

Sister Darlene stroked Mikasa's hair, teasing a drowsy pleasure into her scalp. "Don't worry, darling. There's no need to talk about such nasty things, is there? Just take my gift to you."

Mikasa looked down at the photograph in her hands. Rainbows sheened on the waxed surface as though the light gathered in form had begun to lose its bonds, and was now freely bleeding down the special paper. A slice, a sliver of time, gazing right back at her with an ugly smile on its face. Mikasa gingerly put it into her coat. She turned back to her sister.

"Thank you," she said. "But you shouldn't have—"

"Hush," Sister Darlene said. "We're even now." She went to walk, her uniform a frail white gossamer, like a dragonfly nymph, leafing in the wind with the other clothes pinned on clotheslines. Then she added, "Besides. Us poor sinners have to stick together, right?"

In the privacy of his quarters, Eren sat and wrote letter after letter, using his wooden food tray as a desk. He hunched over his lap, engrossed in a frenetic concentration. Folded in his fingers, his pen jittered and rattled in broad twirling scratches across the grease-filmed paper, like a skeletal waltz. He wrote fast, as though the curtains would suddenly part at any moment to reveal that he'd blazed straight through the night and into the searing dawn.

Mikasa sat on the side of his bed and watched him write. Having known him for so long, she thought that she could read some telltales in his face. Old tics and tendencies that snuck past his outward stoicism. The currents of an inscrutable sea. His lips were trembling, and she could hear his teeth grinding sideways against each other.

"Are you in pain, Eren?" Mikasa asked.

The pen scratches paused. Eren glanced unwittingly to his knotted pant leg.

"I'm all right," he said.

"I don't believe you."

Eren set the pen down. He looked at her with his perfected face, patched with mange, eye cauterized by the lamplight flame. Now, there was nothing in it at all.

"It doesn't matter, whether or not it hurts," he said.

"Would you like some morphine?"

Eren shook his head. The lantern's warm exhalations gave his nothing-face some dimension. "I have letters to write. No sleeping until they're done."

Mikasa sighed. "No eating, no sleeping, no morphine."

Eren's jaw tightened stubbornly. He said nothing.

Mikasa said, "Let me see what you've written so far."

Eren handed her two sheaves of creased paper. She shuffled them in her hands and held them up to the light. Her eyes absorbed the words on the pages. They were unapologetic, brisk, detailing precise names and dates and places.

"You really have decided to entrust everything to that brother of yours," Mikasa said bleakly.

"Zeke's only a factor. And my decisions aren't any of your business," Eren said. There was a vacuum of coldness to his tone.

"Am I only a factor?"

The nothingness unsealed from Eren's face, and he suddenly appeared overcome with tiredness from the nighttime plans and schemes. He sagged into his pillow. "What do you want me to say, Mikasa? Would you like to be one? Whose decision was it to follow me here in the first place?"

"I just wanted to—"

Eren continued over her. "I used to hate it. I got so angry just seeing you always there, saving me again and again. I hated being that boy. I hated being useless."

Mikasa recoiled as though she'd been slapped.

"Hah," Eren laughed weakly. "What am I even saying? Look at me now." He gestured to his stump, and the crutch near his bed.

The central clock tower struck its midnight symphony, causing the stray hounds of the city to begin barking at the moon. Mikasa walked around the side of Eren's bed to the window, looking between the slack curtains. She closed her eyes, on the cusp of speech. She opened them.

"Eren," she said.

Eren turned to her, and she turned to him, into the—

That's not true Eren listen to me I need to tell you something you've always been at my side thank you you showed me how to live with purpose thank you and you wrapped this scarf around me thank you, as blood ran like dewdrops down the blue flowers of the meadow, and as Mikasa drew closer to Eren, tender, soft, sweet like the bites on his bleeding hands, the world fell away, the shadow of death forgotten for the last day of their lives, and they were together, they'd always be, they could lie down in the flower-stained meadow together with the apocalypse to warm their cold lips, boxed in the twin coffin of youth and time, Eren still only a boy forever, Mikasa a girl, and then she was close enough to take him down into an eternal kiss—

And then Eren stood, defiant of her one selfish wish, and he turned back around, loving her the only way he could, in his childish swear of infinity and eternity, I'll wrap that scarf around you now and forever, he said, his bitten hands fizzling the wounds away, the perverse blood-art of healing, and he screamed with the entirety of the human race, in defiance and rage and grief and loss and love and hate, fingers coming back just to curl into fists, and his futile blow connected, and then there was—

—light. Mikasa came to his bedside and sat down again, her hip at his unwhole thigh, her hand on her calf tucked beneath her. She wanted to unravel the bandages on his face so she could see him whole again, see every part of him that the fire would light. She leaned. Eren was immobile, his breath coming in gasps at each shift and stirring of the bed, as though afraid, frozen with fear.

"Mikasa—"

"Hush, Eren," Mikasa said. "Please, you've hurt yourself enough. Let me—"

"Mikasa—"

"Please, I want to—"

"Mikasa—"

"Please—"

"I-I can't. You can't."

"Let me take care of you, now," Mikasa whispered, leaning in close. A billion yellow flames dazzled her vision like stars. Eren's creased lips were ajar as he wet them, his eye widening. In the fever of his iris, a savagery writhed and snaked and swirled like a green inferno, a pit of vipers. He must have an appetite. He wasn't a boy anymore, and all men are only appetites. Wasn't he hungry? Would he bite into her if given the chance? Was she the proper woman to coax him? Mikasa could the tremors in Eren's hand as he gripped the thin stalk of her wrist, squeezing hard. He was shivering terribly.

She leaned forward more, and her elbow knocked over the lamp. Shattering glass and the death of a flame. She jumped backward, springing from the bed. The stench of burnt oil replaced Eren's flesh-scent in her nostrils.

Eren's face sealed again. His disguise shadowed him once more.

"Thank you, nurse," he said. "You've spoiled me tonight."

He wanted her to lie for him. She did. "You're welcome, Mr. Kruger."