a/n: Snk characters aren't the same as their canon selves since it's a different setting.
Warning again: suicide
Also, Eren is dating an OC
The Aftermath
It was like dreaming. Floating close. Just outside her body. Among the rest of the student body, Mikasa sat vague on the bleachers, floating just above herself. AC wailed through the vents, blasting their heat-saturated skin. Their clothes fell cold. She shook. It wasn't from the AC. Her left eardrum was throbbing. It was Monday, February 20th, 8:23 AM. The principal's voice came from very far away: a woman with black pants, short hair; a microphone planted at the center of the gymnasium, miniscule, being stared at by every student present, pinned under scrutiny like a shiny seed in a petri dish.
"Each individual has been affected, and each individual has been affected differently. At our school, we have experienced, well-qualified counselors. Please, if you feel the need to speak to someone, about anything at all, don't hesitate to—"
Mikasa cupped a palm over her ear and heard the ocean. The throb continued as blood wormed through her cochlea. It felt like dreaming. An invisible eye of attention bore down on her. Like a downward flare of hot, exposing light. Chasing her back into the very farthest distance of herself. She was the one inside the petri dish now. She shook. It was from the AC this time.
Grief had infected Lake Valley High School. They were all struck by varying degrees of it, different versions even. Some were stunned, merely, by association, passersby of sudden mortality, passively moving through a rural community of grief and loss. Someone around them was now unexpectedly and inconceivably dead. Someone who, by all accounts, should not be dead. No matter where their age fell, fourteen, nineteen, somewhere in between, death was only a myth, a shelved manifest destiny that none of them needed to reconcile with their delusions of grandeur because people didn't die in high school, and it was easy not to. But here it was. Confronting them. And they were utterly unprepared and ill-equipped.
How did it happen?
The mother had found him hanging inside his closet.
Why did it happen?
Not even the mother could say. For all they knew, he was smart, sociable, athletic. And to the mundane platitudes of how are you?: he always responded impeccably, always said he was good, doing just fine. He seemed a little tired, but everyone was a little tired. He never expressed such—illness. He had had a girlfriend whom he broke up with, when was it?, barely two months ago, about. A cordial agreement, everybody thought. A pretty girl, with a gush of kinky black curls. Bright-skinned, like he was. She didn't come to school today, and she — You don't reckon she'd . . .? No, no, I don't think so. She's just mourning. Give her some time. — still had his hoodie, which she sobbed into. A pair of his gym shorts, which she slept in.
He was loved.
So, then—
School went on. Students funneled out of the gymnasium, carrying a host of phone numbers they'd never use. The bell rang. They sifted away, distilling, recalibrated to the normal. Their footsteps trundled down the invisible iron rails of everydayness. Gossip still circulated. The talking, of course, would never change; speech was undeviating and machinelike in its homing quality. —she cheated on —ortion pills? did he — i heard that — getting dick from — you're an ass — why should we care? he chose— they're idolizing him.— little bitch, selfish coward —everybody wants to die sometimes. did he think he was special? — fuck him. fuck this school —
Life shifted horizontally. Less of an earthquake and more of a transformative slide without the drama of natural disasters. It was quieter. Had more subtlety. The days were a flexible river, bending around and filling in where he once was, where he once had been, that evacuated role of student, of friend, of boyfriend, of classmate, etc. to continue its track, undiverted, straight into tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Earth adapted that way. Didn't even pause. Barely resisted. That's how the world adjusted to dead people, too.
His lack of presence was most patent in English class. Right when Mrs. Ral's tears would stop, they would start flowing again. After sinking into her chair, she let her face flow while the class sat and waited for time and the iron rails to carry them into sixth period. 3:00 PM came. Swim practice was cancelled and they went home and the sun went away and they ate dinner and washed up and went to bed. Varying degrees of anxiety and grief deterred sleep that night. The moon shined high. Lights dulled some stars. They all lied in bed thinking about it. It didn't matter if they knew him or not.
In the gated suburban neighborhood where golf courses sprawled and people in their sixties, their seventies, wheeled around in their electric carts, the Jaeger household rose in its two stories and red brick and red door. Carla and Grisha couldn't sleep, they couldn't even eat because their house was empty, desolate in all of its two stories. There was nothing but vast echoes and the immutable silence of bereavement because Eren Jaeger, their son, was dead. It left the mother and the father in agonizing unanswerable perpetual suspense: He was loved. So, then—
Why?
The Beginning
Sitting in the seat in front of her, Eren had his head down again. Mikasa Ackerman could see the thick elastic band of his underwear bunching out his jeans. They slung loose, below his 'natural' waist, as the teachers would say. Visible too: a stripe of his back and the lowest bulging knob of his spine where his shirt had hiked up when his arms drew over the desk to pillow his head. For fifteen minutes now, he had been sitting, face-down.
"Will someone wake Eren up?"
Mikasa reached her pencil forward. She rapped him on the shoulder. The cords in his neck stirred. He lifted his head and twisted his face. Violated sleep pulsed through his eyes. With the end of her pencil, Mikasa pinpointed the teacher. He turned back around.
He was still slouched over his desk with the stringy muscles of his neck flexing and unflexing, holding his head up. Beneath his thatch of dark hair, those strings continued to rise and sink, even though his head didn't move at all. It was as if a lot of movement was happening inside of Eren without it happening outside of him. The teacher finished scraping her pen. She pattered over in her chunky rubber shoes and slid the detention slip onto his desk.
"I don't imagine Coach Hannes will be very happy to hear about your conduct, Eren." Eren took the slip. He read over it through myopic watery eyes. "You can go see the dean now too while you're at it and get those sagging pants sorted out."
"Yes ma'am," he said. He came from a Southern family and in Southern families, 'yes ma'am' and 'yes sir' were drummed into the lexicon at the beginning of a child's first language acquisition.
Another Southern thing: At the time of his eighth birthday, Mikasa first saw the way Eren cowered at the leathered clap of men's belts. A lot of Southern fathers, she'd been told, whipped their sons with belts. A generationally recycled conditioning which imposed fear and humiliation to train boys what not to do and maybe it was the boyhood fear that seeded the adult aggression, which then perpetuated the conditioning, recycling it into the next generations forward. Except in the Jaeger family, it had skipped a generation because Eren was the first boy on the maternal side since Raymond, and so it wasn't the father who ripped the belt from his jeans and popped it between the rippling jerk of his wrists. Sorry, PawPaw, sir. And Mikasa had learned that day that in some families, boys were whipped with leather belts, and so she felt bad for them.
Eren rose and fished up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder, doing all three motions in one, and walked in a shuffling drowse to the front of the class. Thirty-two pairs of eyes watched him. Another office visit. The third since last Tuesday. His shoes had peeling flakes of deterioration and a gray smear of dirt. Since when? Mikasa thought. He used to neurotically doctor his shoes at even the faintest squint of an insult.
Maybe that was the first sign.
At lunch, the regulars occupied their habituated picnic table. Company included: Mikasa, Armin, Jean, Connie, and Sasha. They ate outside, under the flaring Florida sun.
It wasn't pleasant coastal Florida, but the brown midline of peninsula choked by cow pastures and orange groves, where heat dazzled sidewalks and asphalt roads warbled under an illusion of water puddles. Oak trees put shade over them, but the atmosphere was still stifling with landlocked heat and no breeze to assuage it. While they ate, black birds ruffled over their heads and flapped by.
Freshman year, Eren had been the one to make this picnic table their lunchtime habitat. Most people respected each other's habits and didn't impose. But it was senior year now. And Eren sat with his girlfriend, Noralis. A cheerleader. Short, but not small, with a soft tummy and robust thighs. They had claimed a purple diamond-latticed bench. Side-by-side they sat. Eren's arms sprawled the length of the backrest, his face uplifted. The sun fell on his eyebrows, his shut eyelids. His throat curved. Next to him, Noralis sat, stroking his leg—the tips of her fingernails were painted gold—talking, not caring whether he listened.
"Hey, Armin," Mikasa said. "Do you want to come over this weekend and watch a movie with me?"
"Sure."
"I think I'll ask Eren, too."
"Really? When's the last time you even talked to him?"
"I don't know. But I miss him. Don't you?"
"Yeah, I guess?"
"You guess?"
"I'm not sure if we're really friends anymore. I don't know if I know who he is anymore."
"What?" Mikasa stared across the table. "No matter what, we're still friends. We could go without seeing each other for years. We're still going to be friends."
Armin looked at her. "I don't know if he feels the same."
"He does. We've been friends since third grade."
"He has a girlfriend."
"Yeah, so?"
Armin shrugged. "I don't have anything against Eren. It just feels distant, that's all. Like he's moved on."
"It sounds like you've moved on."
"I don't think about it much."
"You don't care about him anymore, is that what you're saying?"
"No, that's not what I'm saying."
"If he disappeared right now—"
"That's not what I'm saying." They were quiet, looking across the table. Armin flicked his glasses up his nose. "You're getting a little carried away. I didn't mean it like that. I was just saying. Sometimes people grow apart. It happens. It's normal. It doesn't mean I've stopped caring, or that I'll ever stop caring."
The bell was to ring soon. Sasha and Connie annihilated Mikasa's leftovers with the nuclear stomach fortitude of teamwork. Armin asked why she bought school lunches every day if she wasn't going to eat them. She said that each day she thought she might. —What about bringing your lunch? —No, thanks. —You're going to starve yourself.
They threw out their Styrofoam trays. Her milk box tumbled down a black plastic garbage abyss, hitting bottom with a blunt sound. Armin and other company disassembled. Mikasa went to the south side of school. All students began to drift down their respective arteries in a trooping undead slumber. The Lake Valley High circulatory system. They had four and a half minutes to get to class.
Down one of the main sidewalks, on the West side of school, past the two vestibules of Buildings 3 and 4, and between two metal pillars that braced an outdoor awning, Mikasa's circuit converged where it almost always did at approx. 1:13 Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with Eren Jaeger's. Some days they waved to each other. Some days they didn't. Some days they actively ignored each other. This was happening more lately.
At some point, a point that couldn't be identified, in an indistinct overlay of changing phases, Eren began to float like a speck of spotty vision, drifting illusorily after rubbing your eyes. Manifesting, not once he'd been seen, but appearing sometime after you remembered you were looking directly at him. He slowly floated up to the retina that way, concentrating the more time and effort you spent trying to remember to see him, materializing minutes after your eyes had already fallen on him posted against the background like a life-size cut-out of a cardboard persona. By that time, though, he would begin to submerge again. Sink away. Mikasa had to catch him before he disappeared.
His messy thatch of dark hair nodded in the nodding surf of heads. He was going south too, toward Building 1, integrated in the flow ahead of her. Mikasa kicked up her heels and upped her pace. When she trickled through the gaps, pouring in behind him, she couldn't stop her eyes from dropping to the seat of his pants. A plastic zip-tie clamped any denim slackage nonexistent, the thick denim seam jammed up his butt.
She lifted her fingers, saying, "Why didn't you just wear a belt?" and clasped him by the bicep. The muscle was warm, sun-bathed when it filled her hand. He turned.
"Mikasa." He sounded surprised. He looked surprised. He smelled like hot, outdoor hair.
"Hi."
"How you been?" he said, and she wondered how, when, why, their friendship had declined to this surface-level shallowness, where they asked each other platitudes.
"I've been thinking about you," she said. "Reminiscing."
"Oh, yeah?" His mouth got ready to smile.
"Yeah." She wanted to know if he reminisced too. She looked at his face for it. She could see his mouth still getting ready. "Anyway, do you want to come over this weekend and watch a movie with me and Armin? I'll make buffalo dip. We can even talk trash about Jean if you want."
Eren's mouth was ready to smile but not ready to laugh. It wasn't until that moment, when his eyes suddenly gained more depths, that Mikasa realized those depths had been flattened; that they'd been absent; that they'd been artificial. She hadn't noticed when she first approached. It had gone by her undetected and so now she knew that it'd been much too long since they'd last spoken. "You have good timing," he said.
"Really?"
"Yeah. And I don't know how you do it."
"Do what?"
"It's hard to explain. But you're good at it." Then he opened his arms. "I know you don't like hugs but," and Yes, she didn't like hugs, but she put herself inside his arms and they closed around her and his palms contained her lower back. He drew her in, comprehensively, into a time reversal, and she reverted, growing out of age, then growing back into it.
Eren Jaeger. Her best friend. Her first friend. The beginning of childhood — and the end of it.
End? she thought. Then she wondered why she thought what she just thought, and then she wondered why she wondered about why she thought her own thoughts. Then she stopped thinking the thoughts altogether, letting Eren hold her comprehensively in his arms.
His hands were wide and he buried her in his chest. She could feel his heartbeat.
It wasn't that she hated hugs. It was that she never knew what boys wanted. They'd crowd her up into the cups of their bodies, mold her out of shape so she felt like she was pouring out, being unpacked outside herself. But with Eren it was different. She trusted his sincerity. She suspected hugs from boys. She did not suspect Eren.
The hug evolved into an embrace—then it prolonged. This was not distrust. This was not paranoia. Eren's arms were wrapped around her with too much weight, too much pull, encompassing her too thoroughly, his face resting on her shoulder. And still she didn't suspect him because Eren was Eren was Eren. Time went on. It was too long. They were going to be late to class. A transformation was occurring. The heartbeat began to march like a line of combat-outfitted soldiers. Mikasa's eardrum wormed with blood.
"Are you okay?" Mikasa lifted her face.
"Yeah?" Eren said it like a question and sank his neck back to look down at her where her head was.
"Are you sure?" she said.
"Yeah, definitely. Are you okay?" He let go. She tugged her earlobe, massaging the little knotted cartilage where her piercings were.
"Yeah," she said.
"This weekend. If you make the dip, I'll bring the Tostitos." He smiled. "I'll text you, okay?"
"Okay."
"And also . . ." His eyes contained some depth still. "Thanks."
"For what?"
"For being you."
She cringed. She was embarrassed.
"Nerd," he added. Then Mikasa felt better. He palmed the door to Building 1 open and, letting her pass, they went together inside the hall and walked down streaked linoleum.
Mrs. Ral stood up against her classroom door, propping it open with the little rubber heels of her crocodile-skin shoes. Fluorescence blew across the shiny toes. When she saw Eren approaching, she jabbed her index finger and summoned him with a stringent finger-curl. Eren grabbed his backpack straps. He shut his eyes. He opened them.
As if he'd fallen asleep standing upright, his eyeballs had turned to glass. Mikasa went through the door and took her seat and watched Mrs. Ral walk to her desk with Eren trailing, slow and sleeping with his opened glass eyes, behind her.
The teacher desk rattled with a shutting drawer. When Mrs. Ral's hand lifted, her fingers were knuckled through a pair of blue polka-dot scissors. She leaned in, Eren didn't move, and she speared the scissors through the zip-tie loop. At six foot two, Eren towered over Mrs. Ral.
"I don't know why they have to do it like this. It's, it's," she said, and huffed, and lost what she was going to say: "And I won't have any of my students being uncomfortable in my classroom." The scissor blades cracked the zip-tie open. His jeans breathed again. From her rattling metal desk drawer, Mrs. Ral procured another plastic tie. "Fix it. Make it comfortable but corrective. Understand? And don't you go getting me into trouble for this, now, Mr. Jaeger."
"Yes ma'am. Thank you."
The bell rang. Mrs. Ral patted Eren's back when he turned. Her puffy sleeve fell, sheer, off her arm. Then she faced the rows of desks and ejected her teacher voice down the lines of students.
Off to the side, Eren applied the zip-tie. Once it was fastened, he slid down into his seat and for about ten minutes, he even devoted some polite attention to Mrs. Ral. Then he blinked his sleeping-glass eyes, drew his arms over the desk, and dropped his face upon them.