"The others?"
Mikasa knows in her mind, if not her heart, that they did not survive her failure to stop Eren. They had been hanging on by a single, precarious thread, and Mikasa was meant to be their last stand against the Wall Titans' onslaught.
"Dead," she says, and the coldness in her steady voice does not betray her fractured thoughts. She empties her mind of Armin and the Scouts as best as she can. They put their faith in her dedication to her duty, her dedication to them, over her dedication to Eren.
They were wrong to do so.
The deadened expression on Eren's face doesn't change at her words. He turns away from her, gazing out of the gaping hole where his Founding Titan's teeth once were. They were still within the skeletal monstrosity's stinking jaws, Levi being long gone.
A sort of disappointed resignation filled the Captain's expression when he realized that Mikasa did not intend to carry out her mission. As though from all of the possible outcomes that could have occurred, all the ways things could have ended, this was one he had not anticipated. She could not fault Levi for this miscalculation; for she only made her decision to spare Eren when she saw him, defenseless and unaware of the events unfolding around him. For all the good all his great power did him, it was his vulnerability that saved him from herself.
She has not even the slightest of hope that Levi managed to escape the thousands of Wall Titans in his way, armed only with his lame leg and destroyed resolve. Mikasa knows that Humanity's greatest soldier is dead.
Humanity's greatest soldier.
She supposes that she had that title now, meaningless though it may be. There was no use for a soldier that couldn't follow orders; certainly not in a world that would soon enough have no humanity left to protect.
Eren's hollow voice, tinged with a muted confusion, jerks her from the bitter thoughts she promised herself she would not contemplate.
"I don't think it was supposed to go this way."
She turns towards him, his back still to her. She feels a flash of rage at these words that hold no meaning to her.
"I didn't want this to happen." He continues. If she'd thought he looked tragic before, he only looked pathetic to her now.
"What did you want then, Eren? For me to… Did you really think I could…" she is afraid her voice will crack, and takes a second before she can continue.
"That I could do that?"
Yes, hisses a voice in her head. She stifles it violently, not wanting to acknowledge the truth there.
She should have killed him. She shouldn't have let him get this far in the first place.
He turns to her, then, and his eyes a little less empty, and a little more sad.
"That's what you were meant to do. That's what I saw… I don't know. I don't know why—"
He blinks, green eyes still boyish in their shape. The titan marks only serve to enhance their beauty. The limp black hair framing his face looks like it has not been washed in weeks, and Mikasa's fingers itch to push it back.
After a few moments of sustained silence, he speaks, voice flat once more,
"It's over, Mikasa. The Rumbling is complete."
She feels nothing at these words. The Rumbling was what she had inadvertently chosen when she decided to spare Eren. The others were what she chose to sacrifice.
Despite the cruel knowledge Eren had imparted on her in their last meeting, she found herself choking on her inaction.
She didn't feel like a slave.
She felt like a monster.
In a way, the world has reverted to the same one she lived in as a child. The entirety of civilization contained within three walls named after something—or someone — people couldn't-quite-remember.
Except that the walls didn't exist any longer, and it would be a miracle if even a third of the population that had once lived within them were actually alive .
Still, though, the freedom that Eren sought was won, and Mikasa, ever the dutiful companion, stood by him in this effort. Despite her intentions, she would not forsake him.
But now, Mikasa is unsure if the hollow thing before her was still the boy who had shouted at her to fight all those years ago. His visible exhaustion causes her to feel her own keenly, and her anger melts away without finding release.
All she wants is to rest her aching body and mind, if even for a moment.
"What will you do now?"
His eyes bore into her own, the intensity in his expression at odds with the apathy she has grown to expect of him these last months. Like always, she finds herself wanting to reach for him, to force life back into his eyes, but this time she stops herself.
"I want to go home, Mikasa. Can't we?"
She thinks of Liberio, when she had begged him to " please come home" . To explain himself, why he'd left, why he'd forced them to do what they had done, what they were doing. The situation was the same now, only the death was more absolute and the scripts to this twisted performance were flipped. He extends a grasping hand to her, and she stares at it for a long, empty moment.
"You should not be alive," she said finally, looking at the chapped skin of his dirty hands. Hers were stained with blood.
"I think… I think you are the devil they said you were, Eren." She delivers these words gently, as if they were the confession of love that she never gave him in Marley.
Eren lowers his eyes at her words, and the expression in them is not anger, or shame, or even guilt.
It's relief.
"I think you're right, Mikasa." He says, but he is still there, reaching out for her.
So Mikasa takes his hand.