Now I don't mean to bother you
But I'm in distress
There's danger of me losing all my happiness
For I love a girl who doesn't know I exist
—-
She'd never known that the world could be so flat.
The plains seemed to go on farther and farther the higher the morning sun climbed into the sky, vast tracts of golden farmland that glittered with morning dew like the breadbasket of every heaven there was. Here and there opulent mansions rose up from the ground like great white boils. Their gardens flourished under belching sprinklers, hemmed in by huge hedgerows their owners must've grown to hide the fences from their days as plantations some hundred years ago. And in front of them, taking up the whole of the car's front windshield, the huge Maria mountain range filled the sky. A border of familiarity to the bountiful spread of new sights. She knows mountains well.
It was unlike anything back in Hizuru, even that which she'd imagined when she slept under the cracked roof of her bedroom. Dreams could not compare to the countryside of Paradis, and with her face glued to the passenger window, she could almost forget why she was making this particular journey in the first place.
It's afternoon now. The cold glass makes her welt sting when it touches, and Mikasa remembers.
Armin's not said a word since they took flight, either out of respect for her and the life she'd just ruined or because he was too focused on the fact that he'd probably just ruined his own life, as well. She doesn't know what, but he clearly goes somewhere to work every day, just as Eren does, and as much as Paradis expects of its women, it demands different loads altogether from its men. They're supposed to be . . . well, like Eren himself, or at least the version of himself that he tries to project and she tries to make real for him; ambitious, quick-footed, unerring in their urge to control more and more every day. There were corporate ladders to climb, industries to be captained. It's just . . . what Eldian men do.
Had running with her erased all of that for Armin? Mikasa has fled terrible circumstances with a man as her lifeline before. A man who she'd never thought could be cruel and whose cruelty she'd only come to accept literally yesterday. Now she's doing it again, with no more surety that things will be okay than last time. If he realizes what he's given up for her . . .
What happens to her?
"You could have left soon," she whispers, when they're on a stretch of sun-bleached road as long as the silence is deep. "Soon . . .er. Without me."
"I could've." The sun hits one of his rearview mirrors in just the right way to shield his face from her view, standing in for that Paradis veil his people drop around their true feelings. A sphere of darkness belted in light stares back at Mikasa, but she can still tell he's smiling. There's a note in his voice that gives it away. A light smoothness. It makes her feel warm. "But who wants to be a fugitive all alone?" That's all Armin seems intent on saying about it. His knuckles pale on the steering wheel as the coupe heaves into another lane around an ogre of a concrete truck. They pass a billboard for toothpaste, or handcream or something; she still has some trouble reading the Eldian characters even without the strange way they've been painted to add to the ad's whimsy. A colossal brunette's face stares down at them with paint-chipped eyes.
The day wears on, and Armin wears out before her eyes, the sun dipping along with his awareness. Mikasa can see an overpass sprawl in the distance when another coupe, a big red one, makes a lane change directly in front of them that escapes Armin's notice completely. If anything, the car roars a little louder, his foot pressing down on the gas pedal harder.
"Armin!"
"What . . . oh, shit!"
The swerve the left almost takes them right into the highway's concrete wall, so close that the screech of the tires might just be the aluminum of the door grinding into the stone. Just before they slam into it with enough momentum to cause a real problem, he's able to right the car and they clatter back onto the main spread of the road with a spark-belching thud. Their near-victim had swung back into his original lane just as frantically, and with the danger passed, he pulls right up against them and yells a stream of curses so creative Mikasa would've blushed, if they hadn't been totally lost on the wind.
"I'm sorry, I–" Armin says. "I didn't get much sleep last night." She puts a hand on his arm and surveys the landscape blurring around them. Gone is that burnished countryside that'd fascinated her so, with its houses left over from Paradis' crueler bygone ages. Out here, there's snow falling, a gentle white peppering of it coming down over the earth, catching in the trees that corral the highway. Only intermittently does any sign of civilization break up the barrier, a gas station here, a grotesque industrial backside of some town or another hanging out.
The window is cold on Mikasa's welt. She remembers.
"Chilly out. How far from home?"
"That's hard to say. Ninety miles, a little more? Ragako's about a hundred miles further north. I figured we'd stop there for a few–" He dabs at a tired pair of eyes with the ball of his hand. "Sorry. I just don't really know what we're going to do. I haven't put enough thought into it."
"Armin, you–" and she struggles with how to put the words together, how to shape them as needed when telling the truth is an urge she's tried to ignore for a long time. "No idea how to drive. You fall asleep driving–fell. Fell asleep driving. I fear if you get hurt." A smile whose gentleness had been cultivated over years and months, a survival grin that bares itself vulnerably naked. He seems like the kind of man it should get through to, but then, so had Eren. "Without you, I am only a wife. And guilty, too. Far enough for today." He looks like he wants to protest, awareness flickering to life behind fatigued pupils, but in that same glance she can see him piecing together that yes, she is right; even if she knew how to drive and could take over for him, they need rest. Nodding, Armin heads for the next exit that presents itself with no further argument.
They pull into Smith's Landing at just past 6:00 in the evening; barely five miles across, it's little more than a huddled, chilly scab of buildings and streets carved out of the flesh of the wilderness, with a river bleeding gray and cold through its center. The Welcome To Smith's Landing sign is only half-illuminated when they drive by it, one of the fixtures damaged and flickering as thought it'd been pulled from the set of a horror movie. Even at this relatively early hour, the town seems to be steadily dozing off; traffic is low, the shrunken drive-in's screens are dark, and so is every window they pass until the lights of the cheekily-named Smith's Lodging come into view.
"There," she says, and there they go. She opts to wait in the car under Armin's suggestion, just in case the motel's concierge notices her Hizuri features and decides to cause trouble. "You've had a long enough day as it is," he says, and the quiet car feels a lot warmer for the words having been said. She's tired. Really tired. On the edge of crying, it feels like. Whether she'll sob or pass out is a question only the kami know the answer to. The latter seems to be settling in behind her eyes, prickling them closed . . .
He raps on the window with verdant, soulless eyes and an arm drenched in blood. A ghost with vengeance in its heart.
"We're good to go, Mikasa," Armin says, the real Armin. "We'll be upstairs. Why don't you go ahead and get your valuables together, I'll go find our room. The rest can stay. We'll be out of here tomorrow."
"Alright." Toothbrush. Hairbrush. What's left of her lantern. The picture of her mother and father. The clump of battered Paradis dollars.
The motel's reticent parking lot comes to be a frozen blur, going up the stairs, down the stairs, back down, lazily fumbling with her more important belongings until they're nestled in a molded, sawdusty-smelling room with stained wood panelling on the walls and a stench of nicotine that'd long ago taken up permanent squatting rights in the folds of the sheets. For all of Eren's issues, at least he isn't a smoker.
"What's that?" Armin asks. His eyes fall on her hands, moving over the sharp glass edges of the lantern's inside. An ugly white streetlight blazes like a star outside their window; even it is made beautiful when its glow spills into the room and the prism drinks it up.
"Life-light," she replies, carefully holding it up for him to inspect. "Hizuri dead get yellow ones. Life has all color, so rainbows for the living. For remembering family. Friends."
"So it's a celebration-of-life thing, huh? It's–" a yawn– "–gorgeous."
"We do–" the words stumble and fall in her mouth, unsure of their footing when buoyed with actual interest. How to speak of this with an appropriate level of pride? She is still an Eldian wife. This country has not stopped being the one that wants nothing of outsiders. "We do glass in Hizuru. Blowing, shaping. Long tradition." Armin pulls his socks off and his polo over his head. In the dark, she can't quite see him, not as he would be in daylight. There's only a suggestion of who he is, a shadow amongst shadows.
"Clearly all that time paid off. Hey, how about you take the bed?" To his credit, it is the only one in the room. Smith's is probably a step below the norm of multiple beds in more civilized places' temporary lodging. She couldn't say for certain, but it sounded like something Eren would tell her.
"We can fit."
"Well, sure, but . . ."
"What?"
"It's just that you're married, is all. I hate to be making a big stink about it, but it wouldn't feel decent."
"Oh." To hear someone else acknowledge it makes it feel . . . weird. Empty, almost. In Mikasa's head, everything can be righted, everything repaired. Eren can see the error of his ways and treat her gently and the fairytale he'd told her about so long ago might just come true. But here, Armin's saying it. Here, where things don't obey her. Here, in this place, this motel she's never seen before, in a country that is totally alien to her and part of a gritty, lonely world, running from the madness of the very man who defines her existence.
You're married.
Fucking Hizuri bitch.
"I can figure things out with the chair."
"For sure?" Armin demonstrates his seriousness by plopping himself down on the hard emerald torture-device without a second thought. It grinds with a wooden screech across the floor, creaking, creaking. If it's unpleasant to sit on (it definitely is), he doesn't appear to mind (he definitely does). Eldians and their veils.
"For sure." A few fluffed-up blankets later, and the room's quiet, a still atmosphere there in the dark that's all too implicit in its suggestion that it's time to sleep. After a few hours of the chill outside, the bed's blankets are sizzlingly comfortable, cigarette smell and all. Before long, it has Mikasa's vision wavering before her, shifting shaded playing and melting along the ceiling.
"Armin?" Her voice is awkwardly loud, a dreamed-up curtain of stars coming down over her eyes. The faces of her parents and her brother stare down from it with shining, overly-human faces. "Why bring me with you?"
But he's already asleep.