The tower bells tolled five times.

Throughout the city, somber notes waned into falling echoes across barren streets. Shiganshina roused slowly from a sleeping stasis. Its arteries congested with people, awakening, reviving from the early-morning death. Men and women went about their business as usual, but it was subdued. Over Shiganshina, the hanging silence had not disappeared since last night. The townsfolk crept around one another very carefully, and winced when the intermittent sound or whisper shot a hole through the sheet of quiet that hung over their heads. Like the vast wings of a bird. A grim, ever-vigilant bird. This was the air of death. And death, for the past month in Shiganshina, was a close presence. Looming, even.

It was a little later in the day, the sun screaming louder down through the silence, when light tinkling music drew in hordes of people with intrigue. The gargantuan bird also turned a baleful eye to watch from its perch on the wall. A jovial voice rose up against the music.

"Come one, come everybody! Step right up to the illustrious Doctor Barhaus's Caravan of Good Health!"

The illustrious doctor in question (who was not a certified doctor, and would be described more frequently by acquaintances as flatulent rather than illustrious) jammed a felt top hat over his waxy bald head, thinking, it's 'come one, come all,' not 'come everybody.' I've told her that ten thousand times. Showmanship is about flow and flourish. Well, at least she pronounced my name right this time.

Then, tucking the folds of his face into a wide smile, Barhaus stepped out from his traveling caravan to wave at the crowd that had been drawn by the attraction of the mystical, magic, and the great big unknown.

Lady Josephine displayed mastery in one out of the three, and this was the unknown. Around her, glittering fabric deftly wove a border before her softest parts, her full breasts and thighs, showing just enough silken skin to fuel the imagination. This was where the magnetism of the mind was captured: not the known, but the unknown.

Josephine clapped her dainty white-gloved hands with a clumsiness nurtured by vacant brains. She spoke with a high, quavering warble. "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to introduce Doctor Barhaus!"

With his wide smile, rotund belly and crisp charcoal suit, Barhaus was an alien to the people of Shiganshina.

"Hey, folks! How're we doing today? Not good, not good, I can tell by the looks on your faces. Now, what's the matter? I'll tell you that too, 'cause I'm a doctor, so I know exactly what's troubling all you fine folks." At this, his dramatic boom of his voice became gravely hushed, sympathetic. "It's the plague. Yes, it's quite the tragedy, and I'm quite sorry about tragedies. Especially tragedies that happen to you folks, the hard-working people of Shiganshina, the pioneers that retook it after the titans were beaten back. When I heard about this nasty bout, this beautiful damsel and I hightailed over as fast as we could. See, we have just about every cure to every illness to offer, and it would be a damn shame if any more people perished before we could do something about it."

Underneath the ubiquitous presence of death, the Shiganshinans modeled saviors out of the other things they couldn't understand, magic and titan science and elixirs of Good Health. Soon, a larger crowd had amassed in the town square, clamoring for a sample of nothing more than cocaine and liquid courage. Fear, Barhaus knew, curdled rationality into superstition.

A figure navigated to the forefront of the crowd, weaving and cutting and dredging up complaints in their wake that withered away once people recognized the authority behind the straight-backed, surefooted rigidity of a soldier. Barhaus, with his sharp eyes and experience, recognized a soldier when he saw one as well.

This one was black-haired and pale-skinned like Lady Josephine, and otherwise the complete antithesis of Barhaus's assistant. She wore a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up her forearms, on account of the summer heat, he supposed, and black slacks. Her eyes were something to be concerned about; not like Josephine's at all. They were like glass or black marble, polished with intellect. That was bad. Barhaus hated soldiers, and he hated soldiers with wit even more.

Soldiers understood that death was nonnegotiable. They walked constantly underneath the shadow of those vast wings, scooping down, drawing nearer, boxing them in, blotting the sun from the sky. So most of them, even the ones with less wit, did not have any inclination to buy something that would soothe their existential darkness about as well as a wank beneath the covers in their barrack bunks. Some soldiers saw it fit to shut down Barhaus's performance and send him and Josephine packing to the next town over. With her purposeful strides, Barhaus assumed that this one was of that line of thinking. Of course, before he could signal to Josephine, the soldier girl was right in front of him, looking down to his top hat with her black marble eyes.

Barhaus smiled nervously. "Hello there, ma'am." Then he whipped off his hat to press it to his satin pocket square, and stooped in a bow. "Doctor Barhaus, at your service."

Before the soldier could say anything, Josephine noticed her and squealed, "It's Mikasa Ackerman! Ladies and gentlemen, the woman worth a hundred soldiers!"

The audience dutifully applauded and cheered. Mikasa Ackerman briefly looked behind her to see the crowd, then she looked at Josephine.

"Come to purchase an elixir, tonic or all-natural salve? We have about every cure to every illness to offer, for the right price of course," Josephine chimed out her rehearsed bit, her bosom heaving with eagerness. Barhaus cringed in his suit.

"Lady Josephine—"

"I don't see the point in wasting money on empty promises made by quacks and charlatans," Mikasa said, her eyes flitting to slice across Lady Josephine in an unimpressed manner. The glance was so piercing that Barhaus thought that it had gone straight through his assistant like a disappearing sword, and, seconds later, Josephine would collapse down the middle into two halves of soft woman-meat. Instead, Josephine's expression just quivered and her luscious curls of hair wilted a little.

"Ahem. Excuse me, I apologize for my assistant—" Barhaus shot Josephine a pointed look. "So, please, can we do anything for you, ma'am?"

"However," Mikasa Ackerman continued, seeming to speak to only herself in a sedate undertone, "This is a special circumstance, after all. Even quacks could have stumbled upon something, anything."

Barhaus craned on the toe seats of his leather wingtip boots. "I'm sorry—?"

Mikasa looked behind her at the crowd again, and this time, it was furtively, almost self-consciously. Then she drew herself up in the way that soldier-types possessed with implacable purpose tend to do.

"I'd like to browse your wares," she said. "Privately."

Inside the caravan, the light winding flute music was louder, whittling at the vibrating doors of Mikasa's ear drums. It was larger on the inside than it appeared from the outside, but clutter hid on every surface that could contain it. The music wound from a malty bronze box with a crank handle spinning on its own, as though being moved by a poltergeist. High notes fluttered around and translated onto each object for sale like flitting fairies were hovering above for each little showcase.

As Mikasa followed the fat man, she brushed her fingertips against a roll of snakeskin, then retracted them, vaguely surprised by how alive the scales felt, smooth and velvety. She could imagine the roll uncoiling to rear a flattened head at her.

"The shedding of a fine beast indeed," Doctor Barhaus said, having caught the passing touch. "And, when properly minced and sprinkled into a beverage, counteracts the symptoms of aging, wrinkles and aches and— ahem, trouble in the bedroom, so if you've got an older gentleman back at home who can't quite satisfy your needs anymore—"

"Not interested."

"That's quite alright, we have plenty more exotic and miraculous wares to peruse."

"I'm only interested in one thing," Mikasa said, feeling a little apprehensive now in the crowding of items that might have seemed trivial and harmless underneath the light of the sun, but with the flute music spinning around the shelves they sat upon, they all appeared ill at ease in the shop, just waiting to be taken home as totem charms by unsuspecting little girls.

Doctor Barhaus blinked small piggy eyes that seemed to crawl in his sockets like beetles. "And, what is that, ma'am?"

"It's—" Mikasa hesitated. "It's not for me."

"A sick mother? Dad caught the plague while working? A lover, perhaps?"

"A friend."

Barhaus's eyes were really crawling now, as he already savored the wrangling satisfaction of a done deal. "Now, what ails this… friend? Something… very serious?"

"Very serious." Mikasa nodded. "A Curse."

"Ah! A curse, of course!" Barhaus bobbed his head vigorously. "And this curse, does it afflict your friend's fortune? Bad luck? A hex from the fae, a belligerent gnome or a pixie? Or, more specifically, have they been promised a supposedly irreversible sweep of fate? Marriage with a whore? Injustice by the law?"

"It's a death Curse. Five years, that's how long he has left to live," Mikasa said.

Barhaus seemed unfazed with the caliber of the number. "Fret not, my dear. You may still have many more years to spend with your friend yet!"

Mikasa lifted her eyes from the dozen stares tracking her from a jar of amphibian eyeballs. "Really?"

"Oh, most definitely," Barhaus assured, the promise of a hefty sale turning over and over in his eyes, sparkling like two flipping gold coins. "As a preemptive recommendation, our patented elixirs of Good Health—"

This was when Mikasa began to dream. She hadn't dreamed in a sliver away from forever, and, with how sleepless of a being Mikasa was, she'd nearly forgotten was it was like to dream. When she did sleep, it was only after a tireless denial of the fatigue jerking at the fibers of her muscles as she worked and fought and worked some more, never thinking, never dwelling on anything, especially not Eren Yeager— just not sleeping until her body completely abandoned the indefatigable demands of her brain. Sleeplessness was what had gnawed at her this morning, leading her on a walk down the renovated planes of her former hometown before it woke up. Now, as Doctor Barhaus presented an assortment of mystery vials, it was as though her body had summoned revenge of sorts, a responsive control over her in the waking state. Mikasa's legs moved involuntarily, taking her past Barhaus to the very back of the shop. His voice and the flute music became a muted underwater warble.

"Excuse me, excuse me," he was saying from behind a veil of unreality. Mikasa ignored this. She began to unsettle stacks of objects, searching. She was not searching with her eyes. She looked at her fingers delicately remove objects from a diminishing pile. It seemed as though only her diligent hands knew what she was searching for in the first place.

"What are you doing back there? What are you looking for?" Barhaus's faint voice cried helplessly.

Mikasa's fist closed around something. Pinpoints of ice stabbed through her vertically. She shivered all over, her spine shooting straight. Before she could discern what it was she had picked up (it felt soft…? but inflexible?), she held it pinched between her thumb and index finger, lofting it towards Doctor Barhaus. His pudgy brow furrowed as he tried to figure out what it was at the same time that Mikasa did.

"How much for this?" Mikasa heard her lips form the words.

It was a feather. A large feather, stiffened in a glossy coating. Black as ink.

"That's not—" Barhaus blustered for a bit in befuddlement, his beetle eyes crawling over Mikasa with a wary sort of reserve, as though she were a lunatic brandishing an innocuous object with the pretense that it was a knife or a gun. "That's not a part of our inventory. I've never seen that feather before."

"How much?" Mikasa repeated.

"Er—"

With the allusion of a tease, Mikasa opened her money pouch and began to lay coins onto the tabletop, surpassing the limit of what could be considered a fair price. She wasn't sure what compelled her to do this; the feather could be worn as an aesthetic adornment, and that was about as useful a purpose it would serve. It was as though she were playing a role in a dream. The feather was something of desire, a greater consciousness seemed to say.

"That looks reasonable to me," Mikasa said.

"Yes, yes, I suppose it does," Barhaus said, a lot more complacently with his eyes fixated on the precious metal tower.

The eerie aura of the caravan eased off Mikasa as she exited into the sunlight. Behind her, Doctor Barhaus stooped in another bow, and Lady Josephine thumbed around a loose tumble of coins over a register. Mikasa saluted back out of ingrained soldier-instinct.

"You know," Barhaus said curiously. "It is believed that wearing feathers provides the wearer with supernatural manifestations of wisdom and knowledge. I do hope that this insight makes itself available to you, Miss Mikasa."

When the flute music had fallen away from earshot, Mikasa began to wonder if the entire experience had been a dream.

What a funny little shop.

Overhead, the sun throbbed in a bright sky. A feverish hemorrhage simmering in a slow broil. It glared down on all organisms that thrived under it, burning too slow to light anything ablaze, too hot to freeze the planet to death, just enough to create the atmospheric conditions of a sweltering summer. Angrily, as if aware of this fact, the sun continued to throb.

Underneath it, a field of golden wheat grew at infinitesimal speeds. Gentle breezes blew across the field, rippling it outward like a rock dropped in still water. A figure walked to its very center with the lonesome, solitary endurance of a soldier. This was where the sun funneled its glare down the hardest. It burned the soldier to a shadow outline against the harvest tides. When he reached the center, he began to dig. Methodically, the ground was beaten back. A tarnished shovel gouged out heaps of dark, rich soil, displacing it into a growing heap. The soldier-body toiled endlessly, without complaint, without respite, without atrophy. A machine could not have done the job with any more detachment.

Eren Yeager thought as he worked, the silence isn't the same out here. Out here, it's broken up by the drones of cicadas. The whispering grass. Even the sun. On a day like today, the sun screams.

By mid-afternoon, the field was pockmarked with five holes of black farmland, as though a strange rot had decimated all crops within only two-meter circumferences. Each hole was about three meters into the earth, except for the last one, which was still being dug out. Dirt sprayed up from the hole and rained onto the displaced mound. The shovel bit an edge, carved deeper, split the edge from the hole, and flung it up backwards behind Eren's back. Down in the walls of soil he'd chiseled out, it was cooler. Still, the sun glared down on his exposed neck, forearms, the backs of his hands. Spent energy rose off his skin in sizzling fumes. Eren didn't notice this; he barely noticed the heat in the first place. He was too busy thinking about that hanging silence.

So Eren thought. Three years ago he'd remembered that he was born under the guillotine of a death sentence, not destined to become a savior, like they all thought, but a martyr. Born and raised in a slaughterhouse. Like cattle, Eren thought. He'd remembered that he was going to die, and by that time he only had eight years left. Now, Eren only had five. Less than? More than? It doesn't matter, I don't think.

The numbers hung above Eren, following him wherever he went, circling like large, black birds, carrion-eaters with polished black eyes, watching, waiting until time ran out for him.

Eren Yeager told them as he worked, scram!

Bite an edge, carve deeper, split from the hole. Bite, carve, split. Bite carve split. Bitecarvesplit. Bite—

"Eren."

Eren looked up. A shadow outline stood over him. Eren overturned the shovel and leaned heavily on the shaft.

"What are you doing out here?" he panted.

"What are you doing out here?" Mikasa asked.

"Digging mass graves," Eren said simply. He was beginning to feel all the neglect to his body in the past couple hours coming down on him at once. The momentum he had built up depleted fast, leaving him exhausted and drained. He tried not to blame Mikasa for this.

"The plague is killing more people than the cemeteries can hold. The bodies are rising. Between that, and the risk of infection, they've decided that the dead can at least serve the purpose of fertilizing the soil."

"How long have you been digging? Don't you know that less essential people could perform this task?"

Eren swiped his tongue over his lips. He tasted iron in between opening cracks of skin.

"I wanted to stay in shape, anyways, so I volunteered. All this indolence is making us soft."

Mikasa kneeled to one knee by the hole, so that the sun was unveiled behind her head like a halo. She stretched her arm out.

"Here," she said.

Eren looked beneath his feet, where the shovel speared downwards.

"I'm not finished yet. The hole isn't deep enough."

"Please, Eren," Mikasa said with her arm outstretched, "Take a break. If you're so concerned with the job, I'll switch in for you."

Eren licked his lips again, grimaced, and took Mikasa's hand. Her elbow curled. To Eren, his limp-muscled arm felt weighted with every molecule of dirt he'd removed. Mikasa bore the weight with little difficulty.

Eren nearly crumpled when she let go. He held himself upright with the shovel thrust in the concave between his ribs. Only now did he notice that the sun been blistering through his skin, his healing only barely keeping up with repairing the radiation damage. Steam evaporated from his epidermis in wisps, carrying the burns off on the gentle breezes. Eren was suffocating in his own cloud of heat.

"I'm concerned about you, Eren," Mikasa was saying. "You weigh less than a thunder-spear rack."

"I wouldn't know how much that is," Eren said. "The only weapon they let me carry around is my meat-mound of a titan, and I think that weighs far more than a thunder-spear rack."

"Your titan's stamina doesn't fare too well when you've been tired or malnourished."

Mikasa's eyes were squinted against the glare. She worked them around Eren like knives over a dissection-subject. Eren let his face fall flat, hoping to disguise his crippling fatigue.

"It sounds as though you've been paying closer attention to Hange's lectures than I do," he said.

Mikasa dropped her eyes. "It's not that complicated, your declining health, so that only a titan scientist can see it. Even Armin's noticed."

"How about you, Mikasa? Have you eaten today? You look pale."

"I'm fine," Mikasa said and plucked a finger along something in her hair. "Now would you give me that shovel?"

Eren cocked his head. "Is that a feather in your hair?"

Mikasa seemed to just realize what she was doing as he said it, and retracted her hand, her eyes growing a little wider, her cheeks blanching a little more. It was only for a second, but Eren had compiled an incalculable span of seconds spent with Mikasa from childhood to the end of it and the beginning of something else. That something else had ended for Eren nearly as soon as it had begun, and now he was dying, aging backward rather than forward.

Mikasa said, "That's strange. I don't—" and stopped.

"Hm?"

"It's nothing. Would you give me that shovel?" Mikasa said. There wasn't much to her voice, especially against the screaming sun.

Eren meant to give her the shovel, but it wouldn't come out of his grasp. The constant friction had sawed away at the flesh of his hands, cementing his fingers around the wooden grip in a rigor mortis. He tried to pull away when he felt the skin peeling on the handle.

"Wait, wait—"

Mikasa wrenched the shovel free, along with a strip of skin. Eren gasped. He cupped the corpse hand in his other. Static killed it dead. Blood welled up on the blisters, then fell in tiny thin rivers, parting along the creases of his palm. Mikasa stared at the crimson handprint on the shovel shaft, her eyes even wider, her face very pale.

"I wasn't thinking," she said breathlessly.

"It's alright," Eren said, opening and closing his fingers experimentally. Feeling began to seep back into them.

"I—"

"It's fine, Mikasa."

Mikasa struggled with something. Eren could see the tension in her black marble eyes. Finally, she flipped the shovel into the divot of her shoulder.

"O-okay. The reason I came looking for you in the first place is because Hange wanted to have a talk."

She turned. The wheat whispered around her, about the ancient absolutes of the earth. Mikasa parted the tall stalks like a cleaving scythe. She looked back over her shoulder.

"Are you coming, Eren?"

"What does Hange want? Am I in trouble?"

Mikasa's shoulders hitched with a tiny spring of laughter.

"I don't think so. I think it has something to do with your father."

"Dad?"

"Yes. Though I'm not sure what that means."

"Hm."

"Eren?"

"Go on ahead. I'm right behind you."

Overhead, around the circumference of the sun, large black birds lazily spiraled. Their polished black eyes bored down onto the figures in the field. The holes yawned in the summer drowsiness, waiting to be filled with bodies wrapped in shrouds, then glutted with dirt, becoming proper graves instead of just holes in the ground.

Scram! Eren told the vultures for the umpteenth time.

Down on his knees, hammered by cold pellets of water, the summer day sloughed off of Eren. His head sagged to his chest, a shag of dark, wet hair hiding his face. His bare shoulders buckled underneath the press of days and weeks and months and years. A patina of grime and filth caked him as though he'd recently returned from a battlefield. The unreachable dirt under his torn fingernails was the only thing he took home from war. Ever since enlisting, Eren had dreamed about getting a badass scar.

In a beaten kneeling position, Eren watched the grime and the filth swirl down the drain. Then he opened his palms to a lettering of droplets. The swirl ran red. Still not healing, eh? The fingers opened and closed like unfurling pink flower petals, heavy with dewdrops. Again, and again, Eren squeezed his hands to the palpitations of his heartbeat. Heal, he commanded them. Heal.

This didn't work; it never did until Eren loosed his mind. So, in the private seclusion of the showers, Eren upturned his face into the jets, closing his eyes, dreaming about neither the future nor the past, but an in-between limbo of dishonesty. Scenarios offered themselves up to him, floating on soporific clouds. Eren recalled the deep flush of sunset on Mikasa's face. He recalled the rising muscles in her shoulder blades during combat training. He recalled the saltwater beading downy on her skin, soaking through the gauze bindings she wore around her chest and hands. The recollections unsealed in him like floodwater from a dam.

Eren loosed his mind entirely and began to masturbate.

He tried to make his face fall flat again in a mask of composure. He failed. It began to pinch tight with shame and disgust. Semi-scabbed blisters on his palm burst again, grating with more constant friction. Eren panted, suffocating in heat despite the icy shower spray.

Suddenly, Eren sensed an intrusion in his secret paradise. His momentum depleted. He looked up from the stone floor of the shower. Perched on the curtain rack were five ugly birds, watching him. Slick black feather seemed to drip off their bony wings like they were nothing but skeleton frames doused in ink. Embedded in a naked skull, round marble eyes watched with a cruel, mocking intelligence. Then the hunches of their hackles began to shudder. Grisly beaks unhinged with derisive croaks of laughter. The five birds undulated on the rack with hideous amusement. Laughing at the irony of it all.

Eren drew back, chased into the corner furthest from the birds. He gritted his teeth, and the soft languor of his body dissolved away, down the drain. He developed back into a soldier, with a tough, conditioned body. His face was pinched tight.

You stupid, stupid little boy.

Mikasa began to smell it first in Hange's office. Initially she assumed that it was the natural musk permeating the room in layers of uncleanliness and grunge. But the odor was stronger than that. It was a dank, almost wet odor, that never really left Mikasa's nostrils when she exhaled, clinging around her like humidity. Maybe, she thought, it's one of Hange's experiments. Something biological for sure, a living thing that had expired, maybe, gone bad. It was worse than the stink of fungus eating a moldy sandwich. Something had died, Mikasa deduced. Did Hange keep live tissue crammed in her drawers with her paperwork?

She sat formal and respectable in a plush chair in front of Hange's desk, barely a noticeable presence, and tried to breath through her mouth only.

Hange leaned forward behind her desk, speaking through the archway of her steepled fingers. "Isn't that interesting, you two?" Capturing the sun through the window, a bright square of light slated over her seeing eye. The other was dark, wrapped snug with the leather of her eyepatch. "According to our research department, it's likely that this strain of virus is related to the one that devastated Shiganshina before the fall of Maria."

Eren was slouching in his chair next to Mikasa, his cheek slabbed into his fist, looking like a child enduring a boring lecture from a schoolteacher.

"Interesting?" he said. "Is it useful, the information you've uncovered?"

"Considering that your mother had it," Hange continued as if uninterrupted. "Eren, you might even have gained passive immunity to it from her antibodies. Of course, we're not discussing your mother here."

Mikasa felt quite relieved at that.

"My father was the one who developed a cure," Eren guessed.

"Exactly! Of course, a great amount of records detailing things like that were lost during the fall. Really, there aren't too many people that weren't children from that era left alive. Any notes from the hospital that Grisha Yeager worked at were never recovered."

With a dramatic flourish, Hange spread her hands out to Eren, who flinched slightly, as though she'd beamed a searing spotlight directly into his face. Impaled by the spears of Mikasa and Hange's attention, Eren didn't move or chance another guess.

"Lucky for us, the good Doctor Yeager left us a very important relic before he passed."

Eren mouthed the last word Hange said, looking blank.

"His memories are kept alive in that noggin of yours, Eren. So open it up and we'll take a crack at that damn pesky epidemic."

Eren didn't move. He stared blankly at Hange's mismatched eyes for a while. In a masochistic sort of way, Eren let himself sit motionless while Mikasa and Hange waited, while the suspense ballooned around the room.

Finally, he sat up and said, "I don't remember."

A missed beat. Then— "WHAT? What do you mean, you don't remember?!" The lens of Hange's glasses shimmered then the sun wiped away, revealing her manic pupil. She stood. The legs of her chair groaned on the hardwood flooring.

Eren said again, very carefully, "I don't, remember."

"But— how?! How can you not remember?! Three years ago, you were reciting your father's life story like a kid memorizing the alphabet! We were all afraid that you'd forget who and where you were in the middle of an operation!"

Mikasa ducked her head and unconsciously stroked the black feather in her hair. The ice-pins came back, pricking down her spine.

Eren's hollow stare seemed to go straight through Hange, as though he was looking past her to something on her windowsill. He stood too. His hair was damp and heavy over either sides of his face from the showers.

"Hange, when you say my father 'passed,' it makes me think that you're misremembering the circumstances of his death. Maybe I didn't make it too clear all those years ago. But to say he 'passed' implies a peaceful death, or at the very least uneventful."

Eren's tone was far too sharp for a person addressing his superior.

"Grisha Yeager died a gruesome death, and he did not submit to it nobly. In the end, his final moments were fear. Fear and agony. Then…" Eren's eyes widened with awe. "Darkness. Comes over you like a snuffer on a candle."

Mikasa was the last to stand. She did so without violence, but not without haste. "Eren—"

"During the first plague, my old man was under a lot of stress, sure, but that year was the year he fell in love with mom. It was one of his happiest memories. Those," Eren jabbed a finger into his temple like he was holding himself at gunpoint. "Are the memories I can't access. It's just a blanket of interference. I don't know why, but the worst experiences, the darkest times, are the clearest."

"Eren." An undercurrent tugged firm in Mikasa's voice. "Don't strain yourself—"

"I'm alright," Eren said hoarsely. "It's fine." He sat down. "I was just explaining the problem to Hange, that's all."

"I see," Hange said, sitting down and speaking into her steepled fingers again. "Well, Eren, thank you for you time. You too, Mikasa. If you remember anything—"

"I'll come straight to you," Eren finished. It looked like he was bowing to Hange, his head dipped towards his chest lifelessly, nubs of vertebrae rising from his nape through his long dark hair.

The undercurrent of concern tugged in Mikasa's stomach. She reached an arm out to touch his shoulder. Then, with her head turned towards Eren, she smelled it. The dank, almost wet odor. It was Eren, she realized. She saw Eren's fingers. Underneath torn fingernails, crescents of dirt squatted. And Mikasa did not see black dirt, but instead black rot, something that grew in his body as it ate the cells keeping him alive, not fast enough or strong enough to stop the spread. Eren was dwindling, shriveling away from Mikasa's side, shrinking into himself, inside where a black rot swallowed him to the neck. He wasn't dying; he was dead. Mikasa had felt it when she pulled him up from the hole. The shrunken corpse of Eren Yeager was propped up at Hange's desk, its fingers were bloating with necrosis now. And Mikasa watched the fingers blacken, eyes bolted to them in horror. Five fingers, black, black, black, black, black—

"Mikasa? Ah—" Eren winced at the tight grip on his shoulder; a clamped squeezing vice slowly wringing the muscles of his shoulder into putty. Eren grabbed her forearm, and slipped her hand from his shoulder into his hand.

Mikasa blinked, and Eren was alive again. With his studious silver eyes, he scrutinized her and her ghost.

"Are you okay?"

Mikasa exhaled the stale air from the bottom of her lungs. She realized that her hand was conjoined with Eren's and let go hurriedly.

"Yes. Sorry."

Eren's stare came off her, and they both glanced to Hange sitting unreadable behind her desk, busying herself with tidying up her workspace, flurrying legal documents and signatures into their proper drawers. The two soldiers saluted, then their boots clacked away against the hardwood flooring in unison.

Once she was sure that Eren and Mikasa were gone, Hange immediately quit sorting meaningless files into meaningless drawers and slumped tiredly at her desk. Her fingers combed through tracks of oily hair, pushing her glasses up with the heel of her palm. Staring at the two empty chairs in front of her, afflicted with an untimely sense of grief, Hange thought, those poor kids.