I'm going down to the bus station
With a suitcase in my hand, yes I am
I'm gonna grab me an armful of greyhound
And ride just as close I can
And blow that thing for me, now!
It is never a pleasant thing for Mikasa to come home from church and find the house engulfed in hell.
She can hear the crashes cracking their way through the neighborhood even before she turns the pristine corner and finds herself upon their home street; their lawn is pockmarked with things, lumps of random paraphernalia ruining the glittering green carpet she knows Eren had worked so hard to keep up. That's how she knows this is a bad one. Nobody gets to touch the lawn but Eren and even he's loathe to besmirch it and give anyone a reason to think he isn't master of his own life. Of his own wife.
A steady spout of assorted items sails out the front door even as she walks up the cobbled pathway. She wends between them; a drawer, two of Eren's shirts, the heavy snake of his favorite belt, the remote to the television with its plastic grip bent and whitened with strain, half a dozen of the shrunken boxes that've moldered in the attic since they finished moving in, and that frying pan again. Mikasa's stomach turns, though maybe that's just from the feeling of entering the house with Eren in a rage. She loves him, she knows she does, what kind of Eldian wife doesn't love her husband? The kind not worth having, the kind that's a scornful sore on society's prim upper lip and blackens her throat on marijuana smoke and other women's tongues. Eren had sought everything but that when he'd brought her here, when he'd spoken so sweetly to her. But still, his fury is so . . . big. It bloats until the roof snaps, until the house's windows shatter. Where does she fit into all of that?
To deny Eren, to reject all that their marriage means . . .
Mikasa will match hate with affection. (Eren hates her)
She'll cast aside her Hizuri name and be someone else. (Eren wants someone else)
If she could, she'd take off her face. She'd grow blonde hair, pull at the dark edges of her eyes until they shone blue enough to blast away his anger, hold her breath until her skin reddened into the fresh pinkness he must so desperately need. (Mikasa is not enough)
It is a horrifying thing to acknowledge as she passes into the kitchen. He's left every drawer open that he could, a glass or two smashed on the surface of the island in the middle of the room. The sink is full of filthy spoons that she's sure she saw him wash last night. Bits and pieces of odd things from a multitude of rooms in the house litter the hallway; a few of her dresses, the vague gleam of what might be a necklace, glittering stones of glass pebbled over the floor from–
He broke her lantern.
He broke her lantern–
Hmm. That's better. Match hate with affection. She steadies her breath. Her pulse thrums in her chest with the intake of air, settling as it billows. That warm fire she knows must be for Eren (must be) returns and burns gently, naked with its honesty. Sometimes Eren hurts her, but she's rather tough for someone as young as she is. Nothing last forever and everything is fine and this, too, will pass. Only a few spoons have been put back and cleaned when she hears glass crunch under her shoes.
She's not the only one.
He stalks down the stairs quick, heavy, dangerous, his shirt dotted with blood around the buttons that makes the hairs at the back of her neck alight with lightning. Something's happened, he's hurt something or someone, did Armin have pets, a cat that wandered into their backyard, by the kami, what if he's killed someone? A mailman or a missionary knocking on the door, right when the ache for violence in him reaches its peak; it's not impossible. Mikasa glues a pleasant smile onto her face and hopes that it sticks as Eren approaches. The buttons of his shirt strain around his taut stomach, huge with the deranged rolling of his breath.
"Hello, Eren," she rehearses, leaning up to kiss him. Her body screams out at her not to, but it is a scream being married to him has taught her to ignore. She knows what she's doing. Their lips meet in exactly the same way they have before, and before, and before. His mouth is sticky, and she realizes it's bloody, too, rusted with red, dreglike ghosts of stains. "Are you well?" He looks down at his forearm strangely, with a kind of perturbed questioning in his eyes. Fingers prod at the deep gashes like they've only just noticed they existed.
"I saw him," Eren rumbles, oblivious to her fingers threading through those of his injured arm. "He was in here, Mika. That cocksucker, that– Mina's husband, that butcher-blood Marleyan fuck was in my house. I went for a drink, I was feeling low, I came back and I saw him on the roof, coming down the chimney. I tore apart the house, but he's still here somewhere. That's how I cut my arm, you see. He got into the house before I could stop him, sliced myself open on the flue."
"Bandages?" She'd taken to keeping rolls of gauze in the kitchen, just in case she slipped up when she was cooking (or said something to Eren that he did not like).
"Mikasa, I have to find him. It's bad enough he's even here where those people aren't wanted, he's trying to rob us, take our earnings for himself. That's what Marleyans do." A hand chugs through hair streaked with blood and soot. Altogether, Eren looks . . . unrecognizable. Feral, even, judging by the way his green eyes flit between every object in the room like any one of them might leap out and attack him. He's analyzing, looking for threats.
Unhinged. That's what he is. Whatever sickness it is that rips him from nightmares with a scream on his lips, it has consumed him. Eren's lost his mind.
"Aren't you going to say something?" Something in her face changes, out of her control with the realization, and he can see it. Where he seemed barely cognizant of his surroundings a few minutes ago, now he's deadly sharp, nailed to the present moment with the same painful closeness that wraps around her upper arms like a vice. "What, even after everything I've taught you, you still can't remember a word of fucking Eldian? Is that it?" Lucidity returns just in time for him to wound her with it.
"Mina's husband comes to church," Mikasa whispers. "Each Sunday. Today." Eren hates her.
"So now I'm a liar," he snarls, every bit as animalistic as he looks. "Fucking Hizuri bitch." Eren wants someone else.
"That is not what I say." Life's made of tiny miracles. The fact that she could realize these things at all. That she can survive realizing all of them at once. That she can keep from weeping and stop her world from spinning into a watercolor nothing before her. Impossibility on top of impossibility. "Eren, you are sick. You need–" and now she can't take those words back, whether she claps her hand over her mouth or not. They're present and visible and her heart races in alarm as Eren's eyes twist sourly.
"I need what?" She's been with him long enough to anticipate his instincts and withstand them most of the time. It might because she's so disturbed, unable to harden herself from the shock of finally seeing him in an honest light, or just that Eren's feeling more vicious in his deliriousness, but there is nothing she anticipates about the bouldered fist that clocks her across the face. The pain is dazzling. But there's something comforting about it, too, because it lets her understand that Paradis phrase about some people needing sense to be beat into them, and Eren has at last beaten it into her–
Mikasa is not enough. And she never was.
She tries to weep once Eren stalks away into the ruined house. She gives it her all. But any true sorrow she has inside her has gummed up. It isn't keen on coming out, maybe ever. Day evaporates slowly as she picks through the remnants of Eren's tantrum, speckling the whole neighborhood in a golden drench. As Mikasa goes, there are things she does not put back where he'd likely found them.
Her needles, crochet bars and threads. All the money in her allowance and every cent of that which she'd made today. Eight of her florals. The stained-glass, interior prism of her lantern. A picture of her mother and father. A map of Paradis. A picture of Eren and her on their wedding day. A crude lovenote he had written her when his soul had allowed him such things. A straw hat that'd come all the way from home. A hair brush and tooth brush. The only blanket that Eren hadn't pinned to their bed when he sank into a haunted sleep. The locket in the hall, wrought in the shape of Ymir's arrows from Pastor Nick.
It's these things and more that she hides in the shroud of the shrubs that girdle either side of their porch before she descends into bad dreams right beside Eren for barely seven hours. They're beyond horrific, visions of torment and cruelty that she can scarcely remember when she wakes up sometime in the dead of the morning. And thank the kami she can't.
A car engine idles out in the street, a tinny chitter so unlike Eren's own vehicle.
She gets out of bed and looks at him for the last time. The effort it takes to keep herself from at least kissing his brow is so minimal that it's terrifying; so is doused that flame that she's sure belongs to him.
The front door clicks, the shrubs rustle in the rich, black air, Armin's car door swings, and blue eyes search.
"Your face . . . solid walls, Mikasa, what did he do? We need to get you some–"
"Drive." It's not a request.
Armin screeches off into the muddy gloom of a reverse-dusk until his world and hers have both vanished forever.