Mikasa's days are strange since he's away.
They are even longer.
She's not used to all that tranquility, which weighs more than usual considering that, in the temporary accommodation, she even sleeps alone.
She spends most of the day in solitude, not really feeling like doing anything else but training - since working at the railroad is impossible due to snow.
For those days, she leaves the training room only at sunset; lunches and dinners, albeit in company, seem nothing but routine. Sure, Sasha and the others were trying hard to reduce her moments of loneliness, but behold, the very fact that Armin and Eren weren't there to have lunch and dinner with her… made everything so new and empty at the same time.
The only one who seemed to understand what was going on for her head, was Jean, who at the umpteenth moment of silence during the lunch of that same day, had commented with the same words that were repeated, but silently, in her head incessantly:
"Don't you think everything gets too quiet when Eren isn't there?"
In a certain way that's really like that. It seems that everything is silent, even though people are talking. The world continues to turn, undisturbed, but the wind doesn't blow, everything looks black and white, and the silence is deafening.
In those days when he is away with Armin, sometimes she dreams and other times she doesn't dream at all, especially the day after their departure.
When the anxiety is strong enough to drive away every symptom of fatigue, Mikasa spends the night observing from the windowsill of her window how the Moon shines solitary in the sky, bright enough to obscure the stars.
She can't sleep knowing they're outside.
Sleep comes only when the sun's rays are strong enough to enter her room.
But with the first three days going by, the questions that she askes herself by night take a different path, as if she wasn't one of the most reliable soldiers in Eldia's army, with a number of career victories, some responsibility on her shoulders, and a medal of value around her neck... But... perhaps, what everyone would define as a simple girl close to her eighteen years.
Because when she walks for the streets of the districts, she can't help but notice how different the life of her peers is compared to her own.
Mikasa is an honorary soldier, her name is part of the upper ranks of the army at only eighteen years old, the defense of almost all districts bears her name and the one of her comrades. But... if she had never chosen the military life, what would she do?
Would her life be like the one of those girls? Would she have worn skirts instead of trousers? Would she be... married, maybe?
She shakes her head before that thought even ends, feeling... uneasy, in thinking that her questions refer to something like that. She knows, they're pretty stupid, but they rose in her head in a completely spontaneous way every time she compared her reality to what was ordinarily... common.
That's why, when she is alone in her room, sometimes the questions she asks herself are more specific.
She bites her bottom lip and wonders something really stupid (again), but...
'what's the tast of a kiss on the lips?'
It's a very simple question, which she'd like to know for a while. It's one of those questions that arises, and she regrets, a few seconds later.
Sasha says kissing is 'kissing is like flying, sometimes it can be dangerous (... dangerous?) but it makes you feel free, it makes you feel less alone, it makes you feel like you're made specifically for that thing, and that person.'
Mikasa rolls her eyes in a panic, feels her cheeks blushing furiously and brings her hands to her eyes in shame.
But... why do certain things come back to her mind in the middle of the night? When she should sleep, and rest her body for the upcoming day tomorrow?
In general, the questions that she asks herself always have to do with the concept of 'tomorrow'. In fact, she knows that she should live her life day by day, not asking certain questions (very often not to hurt herself) yet she wonders... if, the other part of her bed, will be empty, one day
... or not.
…
She blushes again.
(Oh, dear. Why now? Why she has to think about these things now?)
In these moments, she forces herself to regain composure, adverting her thoughts to something different, something more serious.
She removes the bandages around her tattoo. She massage her wrist, and checks its contours, shapes and color by tracing each sword, from the handle to the tip, with her fingertips, and counts in her head how many of them she had handled - and how many she will have to hold - before finding an answer to those questions.
And so, she looks at the ceiling.
She brings the same tattoo in front of her eyes, scrutinizes it again, the sign of her clan, the land of Hizuru and its traditions, she wonders who the Azumabito are - if they really have anything to do with her, apart from the shape of her eyes and that indelible mark on her body. Then she closes her eyes, makes a great sigh and, as moved by a genuine curiosity, she carries her hand from her forehead to the heart, and from her heart to her belly.
It's stupid to ask, maybe. Again. It's a stupid question to ask, when you're one of humanity's strongest soldiers, with a medal of value around your neck, and so many victories behind you,
But Mikasa wonders if she'll ever be a mom.
If that gift is given to her too - to someone like her.
If a soldier can allow himself/herlself to say "stop" in order to build a house, a garden, and children bedrooms.
She wonders how would feel to have a life in her belly.
Would her heart still beat just for her, of for two? How beautiful it is, to imagine two hearts beating inside one same body?
With her eyes open, she imagines three children running around them.
(With whom? You would ask. But please... don't!)
She imagines them playing with toys in a wooden small dining room, decorated with flowers and plants. Or she imagine them running for Shiganshina, coming back with wounds on their knees, and she imagines if her touch to the wounds will hurt or she will be delicate enough to medicate them with care (who knows if they will inherit her strength?).
"Aren't there too many, three children?" a small voice in her brain asks her. And the answer, selfishly, is no. It's in that way that she imagines how her life will go, until the first light of dawn illuminates her room.
Other times, when she is tired, but not enough to fall asleep immediately, the scent of Eren's jacket, still present on the garment, comes to her nostrils and evokes memories, sweet enough to lull her in the blankets. Like when, for the first three nights after that terrible day, when her bed wasn't ready yet, Eren had shared his own without objecting a word.
He even gave her his pillow, telling her that he was old enough to even sleep without it, and asked her what were her favorite foods – they were exactly what he didn't like, but he wouldn't have complained when his mum would cook them for all of them.
To think of all these things, Mikasa's heart fills with love, and tears begin silently to describe paths down her cheeks. Thank heaven no one can see her, when she is so weak that she cannot even bear the weight of a memory. And then she closes his eyes, and as if tears had consumed the strength to think and think again, she falls asleep. For once the mind is silent, and tomorrow is behind the door.
She wonders if he is fine.
_
Everything started exactly when it didn't have to.
Or perhaps, it's better to say that... there was no precise moment when he felt, for the first time, that something was different.
Maybe the reason he can't remember is because things have always been this way, but he never noticed.
He just knows that if it never happened, now that he sits alone and thinks about it, obviously things wouldn't be that difficult - for him, for her, for everyone.
It's like the days when the only feeling he could sense was hate, were far away. As if hatred wasn't the feeling that burned his veins in those years, as if it wasn't the same reason that brought him there.
And then ... what happens when you learn the truth?
What happens when you learn that no one can be blamed for the hatred you feel?
It happens that hate is no longer a good reason to move forward,
because it's not enough.
Hatred no longer cures anything, neither your weakness nor your determination - suddenly it seems an unnecessary reason. It is as if his heart had grown with him too, and hatred is not enough to fill it.
He feels room for other things, others... feelings, of which Eren was unaware of its existence simply because he believed he had no time for those things.
And now that he really doesn't have time, everything seems to have started to make fun of him.
Yet, it's precisely through cruelty, and the "sense of the opposite," that Eren has discovered for what it would be worth not dying.
It's the fact that he is always angry that allowed him to rejoice in the apparent calm of those years
It is the loneliness he is feeling now that allowes him to understand that he is not alone at all. And it's the thought of having to die in a few years that makes him aware of his undisclosed desires.
He feels them when he looks at his house. He fees them when Mikasa walks next to him.
He feels them those rare times he dreams on his own will, and not for his father's memories.
And the absurd thing is that what he dreams on his own will consumes him even more.
Maybe this is the price you pay when you decide to be honest with yourself too late? Or when you're stupid enough to believe the whole world is rotten?
And if he has to be honest with himself,
though it's nice to sit on the sand, watching in the moonlight as the waves recede,
Eren wouldn't want to be there so alone.
Armin doesn't take long to get there.
His steps are silent in the sand, and what they both hear are the waves of the sea.
With a smile he hands him a mug of something, and sits next to him.
They don't say anything for a while. They only sip from their respective mugs, and then look at the Moon.
The signs of their transformations under their eyes never quite fade, even in the night.
"I'm sad that we're not with her," Armin says, looking straight ahead.
"But I'm sure she'll be fine."
His voice is apprehensive and worried, just like the one Eren would have if he was able to speak.
Mikasa will turn eighteen this morning, and they are far away.
But instead, he prefers to bury his worries in his heart, deciding not to say anything, except barely nodding his head. Then a whistle sounds, and Eren moves out to sea.
Blood drips from his finger, and an instant later, the lightning bolts light up the sky.
Four days become seven, without a warning, without a reason.
The desire to see them and the fear that something has happened to them, becomes stronger than her own rationality.
There is certainly something different that she feels the moment she gets out of bed that day: something that tells her that she can finally calm down- because the wind has started to blow again, in the hallway outside her room she can hear the echo of steps again, and because the moment she opens the window, the sun is strong enough to have partially melted the snow.
If anxiety could be represented by something, then it would her heartbeat right now; because now all the apprehension she tried to bury in those days, when they were away from her sight and protection, seems to have jumped out.. Her hands are sweating, her senses are amplified, she's almost afraid to kick instinctively if someone tried to touch her.
However, they're just sensations,becauseatsee because she spots some recruits return to the atrium, and at lunch, ,
but there's no sign of Eren and Armin.
For this reason, heris day goes on more or less like this, until the training ends. In the sky there are already stars, again;; maybe that one will be another night in whichwhen she won't sleep, another day when nexoven will know how to tell themwithout news from them. Her stomach closes again in disappointment, and her steps are heavy when she goes to the canteen.
She walks. ShHe doesn't even know why she's there – it's like hiser feet have moved automatically.. She is not guideddriven by hunger, or thirst, or routine, but only by the desire to see her certainties crumble, and to convince herself that her expectations, even today, were useless.
It's exactly the moment when her heart lacks a beat.
Almost as if it wereere an illusion, heris eyes catch his blonde hhair, and finally she sees the blue eyes,, unmistakable. Her The muscles freeze, hertheir eyes become dry for how as much as they are opened in surprise and hopegrainy, and shethey finally feels hertheir heart beating them for something different, :something that was n'ot anxiety.
Armin only notices her when she's close enough to hear how she was holding breaththe sigh. On his lips appears a smile, a smile that finally illuminates those black days, and that she feels to reciprocate from the bottom of ther heart; her cheeks hurt, but they are finally there, and when Armin gestures to her to sit, Mikasa doesn't hesitate. She hugs him.
"Are you okay?", he asks.
He puts his hands on her forearms, learning her concern by the simple touch she gave his blonde hair a few moments before - and by the way she shrugs while sitting.
He has no difficulty imagining that in those days she didn't sleep at all: he deduces it from the dark circles under the stormy irises, from the way she suddenly tightens her lips, from some questions that he reads in her eyes - and that perhaps Mikasa doesn't ask for fear.
Or shame?
"Yes," she replies, hesitantly. Her gaze is fixed on his. She wants to know, she wants to ask.
"Don't worry, everything went well," he reassures her, her bestfriend, reading all her worries as he used to do.
'He always had this power,' Mikasa thinks for a second, unaware that the reality of the facts was that everything that passed through her heart was read on her face. Even at this moment, when for a second, she doubts him.
"Our intentions didn't want to be bad," Armin says, trying to justify and calm her down at the same time. "We thought... we thought your help wasn't necessary! That's all."
"Okay," says Jean, rather annoyed, meddling in the conversation.
Connie and Sasha also divert their attention from food to his demand.
"But why... no one knew where you were?" - his tone of voice is discreet, and Mikasa sits composed, because all of a sudden she forgot why she felt her stomach so sore, which has precisely to do with the question just posed by Jean.
"Mikasa said you'd be back three days ago."
Armin nods,sinking the spoon into the stew.
"Yes. But the snow made it hard to get back. The snowfall these days has been very strong. Someone's leaving tomorrow. "
"And where is Eren?" , asks Connie; a piece of bread is still in his mouth.
It's strangely surprising that this question doesn't come from Mikasa's mouth.
"He's here. I told him to sleep, but I think he's going to catch up with us soon. "
She sighs in relief – even if there is something she thinks about, at that moment... which is that, perhaps all her worries, however absurd they might seem, maybe they had a foundation.
"Why? Didn't he sleep enough?" she asks, without hesitation. Her instincts tell her to hold her hands on his shoulders, but she doesn't want to miss all the self-control she's had these days. Not in front of the others.
Armin leaves her hand to stroke her forearm, as if to calm her down, even though what he was about to tell her didn't seem to promise anything good.
"Well," he says thoughtfully, "bec- "
"Oh, for the love of God," Jean snorts, rolling his eyes.
Mikasa stiffens. She turns to Jean, quite annoyed by another interruption of speech. Perhaps she is looking at him, when she notices that the boy's gaze, the moment she asks him "What?", moves from something that is behind her to... her.
"I wasn't talking to you," Jean asserts. Then he looks behind her again, and continues.
"Shave that beard, because it sucks."
Eren's steps become audible seconds later. They get closer and closer, closer and closer, and he snorts in response. She barely turns to make sure that's not another illusion, she turns enough to feel her heart not to miss a beat, but two.
Then Eren sits down. Beside her.
"Yo."
She stiffens at the exact moment when his shoulder touches hers,
and then panics.
Total. Panic.
She doesn't even have her hands on the table anymore, prefers instead to bring them on her skirt, because, oh dear they're so sweaty!
But why?
All of sudden?
Ba-bump
Ba-bump
Ba-bump
Her heart beats so much that when she takes the mug to her mouth to drink, the water is almost going sideways; she barely coughs, and recedes, eyes wide open the moment she sees his hand about to pat her on the back.
Eren thinks the blush on her cheeks is due to the small accident.
He arches an eyebrow in question.
"Is…everything okay?"
Mikasa forces her instinct to open her mouth in embarassment down suppressing the strange chills that run through her back,
Without! A! Valid! Reason!
For all heavens.
"Yes. I-I'm fine," she says, assuming the previous position: eyes fixed on her hands on the skirt, shoulders slightly lowered, her eyes pointed in the opposite direction to Eren's.
Why?
She has no idea.
(Was a week really enough to throw away all the progress she had made?)
"Mikasa was asking why you couldn't sleep these days," Jean resumes, and she opens her eyes wide. She hopes no one will notice the smile that she is shutting down for the embarassment. She hopes no one will notice how she shrugs.
"Uh?" He asks, staring at her.
'UH?', She thinks, while looking at him.
Eren raises an eyebrow in question, and as nothing happened, he takes Jean's glass and brings it to his mouth - under his appalled and disgusted expression.
'Say something!' at that moment a voice in her brain tells her.
Okay, but what?
She has no idea where to start, and honestly, she doesn't think it's appropriate to ask him all the questions she'd like at the time:
Where have you been? What did you do? If you need to sleep, why are you here?
She is still thinking of a way to justify her (now obvious) silence. For this reason the redness on the cheeks increases even more.
But Eren says nothing - in his heart he actually finds it amusing that she isn't, as usual, giving him a lecture.
Wow.
And Mikasa hears him stretch his hands on the bench, until the fingers of his left hand touch hers.
She stiffens.
"You look horrible", Sasha states, without regret.
Eren doesn't seem to have given the slightest weight to that thing.
In fact, he yawns in response to Sasha.
"I thought you were so tired to sleep for the next three days," says Armin, stifling a laugh by holding a hand to his mouth.
"I wish I could do that" she hears him say, his voice sounds so tired. At that point, Mikasa decides to put aside all those ridiculous thoughts that for some reason haunt her head. She turns to his side, one arm resting on the table, the other beside his, and watches him.
The dark circles under his eyes are so scary that Mikasa just wants that conversation to end. She doesn't know why he's there, if he's reduced to this state. Still, she remembers all the worries that plagued her in those days, and the bad feeling that accompanied her on those nights, and Armin's speech interrupted a few minutes ago.
She forgets for a moment the shame, the embarrassment, and the fact that until a few seconds ago, her heart beated in her throat. Taking advantage of the fact that no one was being silent, she takes courage, and pulls the sleeve of his shirt.
When Eren turns in her direction, with his eyes shining though tired, he seems to read clearly the question she is asking.
'Are you ok?' she seems to ask.
'Go to sleep, please,' is what her eyes beg.
Eren blinks.
'It's all right,' he seems to reply, with a slight nod.
But then he notices the black dark circles under her eyes, and her face slightly discarded compared to a few days ago. His eyes open in surprise, and his voice changes slightly in tone – almost imperceptibly, but Mikasa knows.
"Have you lost weight?" he asks her, aloud, regardless of whatever was the subject of conversation at the table, to the point where the others stop speaking. When Armin sees Mikasa opening her eyes in surprise, looking away for a few seconds, maybe trying to find the right justification, Sasha interrupts the flow of their thoughts to defend her.
"She ate. Lunch and dinner. But... you know her. You know her perfectly. You can't disappear without telling her anything, and leave her here pretending she's going to be quiet. Band of idiots."
In an instant, the silence resumes, and Sasha continues to comment in unpleasant words their gesture, even as she lays down a piece of roast.
Eren knows he's right. Just like Armin knows.
They only look at each other for a moment, before Armin nods encouragement, and Eren puffs. He has to apologize and he has to apologize now.
Both he and Mikasa have only one hand on the table: the ones which fingers aren't touching. This time it's Eren pulling her sleeve, and she just turns around. His eyes are inherent concern.
'I'm sorry,' he tells her, but not in words.
His fingers falls off her sleeve, and stop again beside hers.
She's quiet for a while, the weariness visible even on her face. Eren learns that maybe she hasn't slept at least as much as he did.
She bends her lips in a small smile, rests her chin on her unoccupied hand in their strange conversation, while with the other she takes his, and gives a squeeze.
'Don't apologize, you only did what you had to do.'
Oh.
Is everything okay then?
…
... Hold on.
His expression becomes neutral. Because... it can't be. It's too easy. He arches an eyebrow.
Where's the trap?
She's blushing.
Why?
Armin almost finished the speech – a speech of which Eren didn't listen to a single word.
He takes a look at the clock, and he knows the canteen is going to close in a few minutes. He just has time to go back to his room, take... that thing, and come back.
Then he can sleep for three days in a row.
He pulls her up for the last time, and whispers "we'll talk about this later."
That's why he gets up, in the middle of the conversation, nods to Armin and leaves.
When he comes out of the dormitory to go to the predetermined point, her figure becomes clearer and clearer, and he finds her sitting on the wooden stairs, with her legs clenched to her chest.
Armin is sitting next to her – maybe he's talking to her about the conversation they didn't listen to at the table, he has no idea. The fact is that Eren scrapes the last forces to lead up there, on those wooden stairs under the moon and the stars.
It's so cold it feels your lungs freeze.
'It's really the best idea ever,' he would like to tell Armin.
Face to face, even if he is backlight, he sees how her expression mutes from fatigue to total, complete confusion, the moment she stretches the rectangular box that he and his best friend made up a few days ago.
"This is for you," Armin says.
She blinks, catches off more than surprise, and observes the packet. It's quite big, has a big bow on it, and it seems to be fluffy.
"Hey, it's yours. Take it," Eren retorts, perhaps aware of Mikasa's hesitation.
"and... We hope that... you like it."
The realization of what was about to happen makes her eyes thin.
"But I don't-"
"Don't say 'no,'" Eren blurts out, putting his hands back in his pockets.
"Just open it."
And although her hands are shaking because, well, she wouldn't want to, because they shouldn't have, with her fingers she unties the bow, straighten the folds of the package,
and opens her mouth in amazement.
"…Oh."
Amazement becomes emotion.
It's pink.
It's a pink cardigan, like the flowers of spring, like the ones she likes, like the ones he saw her collect as a child every time they went to collect wood.
Perhaps his mother also understood that she liked this color. And maybe that's exactly why she had given her that cardigan, as a child. Finding a similar cardigan with the same colour seemed almost impossible.
But she seems happy, moved and happy.
Eren notices how she twistes her fingers into the fabric - something she has been doing since she was a child when she really likes something.
"Happy birthday," he says.
"... even if late" Armin adds.
So he extends a hand in her direction to help her get up, for some reason he feels her throat become dry; her hand is so small in his, so small that his medium and thumb almost touch as he takes her hand in his, and it's freezing, frosty from the cold. The next instant, she is slingshot into their arms. She hugs them, and cries, cries and cries.
He is half crushed in her embrace, and snorts in laughter. He has his nose pointed at her hair involuntarily, and this embarrasses him too – damn, he feels his cheeks redden.
(But no moment will be as embarrassing as what he experienced in that damn shop.)
"It suits her" Armin says, when Mikasa walks away to wipe away tears with the sleeve of her shirt. "You were right," he moves so that they are side by side, "maybe the length of our shoulders is the same."
"Told you. If you had listened to me from the first moment, we would have spared those embarrassing questions of that lady."
Armin brings a hand to his mouth to stifle a laugh. She has no idea what they are referring to, only wipes the rest of the tears from her face, and opens her mouth with difficulty to ask
"what questions?"
And Eren curses, but thanks heaven that Mikasa is so naive, sometimes.
Fortunately, she doesn't notice the impassive expression that has placed itself on his face at that moment, or how Armin's cheeks are flushed trying to stifle laughter, or the look that both are exchanging, before Eren pulled the air out in snort.
"Armin," he says. "Shut up."
It's a strange and cold night, none of them really can stop laughing.
In those moments, Eren wished he didn't have to leave. He looks at the Moon with nostalgia, and wonders if it's really the same one as that night on the beach, when in his heart there wasn't this strange feeling, but only solitude.
Mikasa approaches him when Armin leaves.
Eren pretends he doesn't know why he wants to stay just a minute longer. His legs almost give way from exhaustion, and he feels his eyelids heavy, and tomorrow they will probably have to train for the whole day – when to regain his strength he would probably need three more days. Assuming he can forget for a moment everything he sees in his father's memories, and that those memories don't devour him while he tries to sleep.
And despite everything, he feels that all this is easier than going away right now.
"You didn't have to," she says, as she wraps her arms around her own waist, to provide more warmth. She isn't looking at him, even if she gets closer to him, step by step.
"Why not?" he asks, naively. With his shoulders resting against the wooden railing, he lets a foot fall on the step of the stairs – a way to say that he really has to go away.
"You reached mayor age. It's an important goal," he says.
'At eighteen you are one of humanity's strongest soldiers. You can aspire to higher charges. You can drink in bars without anyone telling you anything.
And you're the strongest person I know', he thinks, genuinely.
"So, just take it."
He looks at her in the eyes, and then adverts his gaze.
"Good night", he wants to say,
but his words remain incomplete in the air, or perhaps in her hair,
because she has wrapped her arms around his waist,
and she's embracing him.
It's the first, real time she's embraced him.
She sinks his head into his chest, and squeezes him even more to herself, and Eren needs a few minutes – more than the seconds it takes Mikasa to hug him – to realize that, all his muscles are tense, that his mouth is still open , and that she has her ear pressed against his chest for some reason.
And that she's crying again, but now he doesn't know why.
The darkness of the night only covers half her face, her eyes twinkle in the dark, and some eyelashes are still wet with tears.
It's her birthday, albeit late.
They're probably never going to hug each other again.
For this, he carries a hand behind her nape. And he pushes, so that she is pressed, firmly, against his chest again.
This will be one of his biggest mistakes, and someone's looking at them, but who cares?
They have everything their hearts need, but their words don't say.
Each other.