Mikasa

A pair of fingerless gloves seat her hands. The padding is worn, molded to the knuckle ridge. For a moment, she watches Captain Levi train. Attached to the ceiling with a chain, the leather bag grows warm under the syncopated command of his hands. The metal links grind under the strain.

The captain jerks backward as Mikasa's fist plunges by him, bodiless, appearing out of nothing. Displaced air cuts by his face, blowing hair across his temple where contact would've been made. He pulls his elbows in, gloves up, watching. Under the wet skin of his throat strikes the accelerated heart rate. The gymnasium echoes with unfilled space. The bag continues swinging from the speed and weight of the captain's hands.

Mikasa says: "I've noticed you're angry," and tenses her gloves. Only now does the bag start to slow its pendular swinging. "You can hit me if you want."

"Feeling generous, are you?"

"No." She flurries. The captain doubles back. She ceases, her gloves flexed near her face. Quietly, calmly, they gauge each other. "I'm also feeling angry. You'll agree to be my punching bag, right? In return, you can take your anger out on me too. It's only fair."

"You didn't give me time to make a choice."

"Please hurry and make a choice, Captain. We don't have all day."

She swings and he swings; their fists connect with the other's chin in twin movements like converging dimensional parallels, both locked with uppercutting knuckles jammed against each other's jawbones, mirrored from where their hands connect to the immoveable stance of their legs.

Breaking apart, they fall back, teeth bared, their eyeballs rattling in fluid, jolted inside their skulls. Once again, they gauge each other in that quiet charged calm.

Mikasa presses him.

The captain slips outside Mikasa's right hand, left, backpedaling. Again— Mikasa presses him. Sweat melts from the captain's temple. Leaning weight on his toes, he parries, lunging. Mikasa's head spins right. A welt flares on her cheekbone. She re-aligns, her jaw cracking a little— She's pressed back and pressed back again. She re-aligns, hands up.

Rigid metal-like striations flex across the captain's shoulder: Mikasa knows what he's going to do before he begins to do it, already ducking her head before his arm has contracted its full strength. The left jab too she anticipates, slipping out of his reach, knowing where and how to move before she's even begun to think it; before he's even begun to implement it against her; both acting on an undeviating, machinelike, athletic unison, as if they were being fed by a symbolic umbilical cord attached, not to their stomachs, but to something fundamental and impossible to locate, extended from each other at such point, circulating each other's essences and excesses, in a biological symbiotic womblike pathway.

Suddenly, a wall of wind blows up behind her. Her hair flies in front of her face in shrouding black strips. Her legs blow off the ground, whisking her feet straight into the air, lifted in frozen free-fall. A second: her body lies in supine levitation. Her heart lifts, momentarily untethered.

She drops.

Her heart thrusts back into her ribcage and sand particles jump into the air in a shimmery cloud. She thuds hard against the mat, her eyeballs lurched deep in her skull. She lies, flat on her back, not yet realizing that her legs have been altogether swept away from her, whirling in a spell of breathless vertigo.

Her palms flatten to the mat and she starts to remember, like she's shooting straight into the sky, the continuity of yesterday and today and tomorrow doubling over in folds, the way ocean waves overcome and run over one another, translating and escalating and finally crashing. She thinks: It's always resided at the bottom of my heart, the fear. And it's floating back up again—her limbs and the fully-grown extensions of her nineteen-year-old self abbreviating into the legs and arms of a child.

Afraid for no reason at all, she begins to revert.

Vertigo churns her ear fluid.

"Hey." Poised above her, the voice is calm, steady, and fixed. The captain is the centrifuge, and there under him, Mikasa becomes displaced in sifted densities, a child again, still a grown woman. "How long are you going to lie there like that?"

Mikasa opens her eyes. The ceiling is tall, rotating above her. Bars of fluorescent lights bear down on her. The captain is crouched on the balls of his feet. She sits up. A blade of pain knifes through her. She flinches an arm around her gut. She breathes. She lets go of her stomach.

The captain's face appears, almost under her nose, peering beneath her hair. Mikasa meets his gaze. She sees herself looking into his eyes. He sinks backward again, balanced on the soft parts of his feet. Mikasa sees herself diminish into a small vague gleam.

". . ." The captain mutters in subdued undertones to himself: "Did I overdo it?"

"I'm all right," she says. "I grew too confident. I should've known better."

Levi looks at her, now with his head turned across the shoulder. His wrists sit in repose on his crouched knees. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm not feeling angry anymore," she says. "If that's what you're asking."

"Good." Levi straightens out of his crouch. He says: "You surprised me, suddenly attacking me like that. In the end, though, you've been helpful."

Mikasa stands too, looking down at him. He tilts his head back, almost in the exact manner as he had when he peered up beneath the fall of her hair.

"It's a relief to hear—" she says, unsnapping the strap around her wrist— "that our feelings are mutual."

Levi

The sun is setting, dividing the hall with openings of light beaming through the windows. The sunset catches the air in a grasp of red and flattens it against the wall, melting it onto the floor. Beyond the district, a final burst of sun shears apart at the top of the wall. Levi walks with his hands outside his pockets, passing an uncovered window. Red splitting light flares into his right eye and disappears, reappearing at the next window.

He turns, coming upon the eastern hall, windowless, darkened without the red expiring light. His feet carry him down it. The end approaches steadily, his feet steadily going ahead of him. His feet cease. He stops a second later. Mikasa appears in his view moments after his eyes have already fallen on her, looking at her, not seeing her at all.

Mikasa's hair looks almost blue against the pallor of her face. Her body drapes down straight from her collarbones like an old, limp suit on a wire hanger. Her boots are silent against the floor. When she advances, she doesn't seem to do the moving herself, as though the feet are moved for her, the body passively riding motion like a train passenger staring out a window. The rubber soles are gray, worn down as they lift and go away. Without speaking to him, without seeing him even, Mikasa passes.

Levi turns his shoulders. When his head comes to center, the hallway, as he begins to see it, cuts straight backward, extending behind him, the tiled floor and all of HQ in the sooty purple dusk of a dying day, silent, empty and endless.

Eren

Eren—

He hears her from out of the fathoms of a distant no-place. A voice travelling miles on miles (down the timeline, starting at the beginning, moving toward the end, going from east to west, in the cardinal direction they want us to believe, telling us it's that simple. But history isn't a line, it's a circle in which yesterdays eat the tails of tomorrows, and that's why clocks are dials, and that's why women bleed, but he doesn't know much about that, not at all) and it is now that he finally hears her when they've already begun to approach the end, or is it the beginning? or perhaps it is only midnight. He is going to die. There's nothing he can do about that. But that's all right. It's just—he can't hear his own name anymore.

A hand clasps down, over the panic straining his lungs, as if to repress the thundering heart muscle by physical strength. The water hisses, beating the stone floor under his foot. Behind his eyelids, he tries not to see wax dolls wearing white nightgowns. He breathes, telling himself no, it's nothing, he's fine.

Eren—

He shrinks against the shower wall. The cold abruptness of the stone shrivels his flesh—sorry, sorry, sorry—Yes, he's afraid to be alone. Loneliness grips him by the throat, and loneliness is in fact another version of dying. He doesn't want to be alone, has never been any good at it, not like the captain, and not like Mikasa. Perhaps those two are different versions of each other, like how loneliness and death are different versions of each other, and it's the same as hating yourself (which is the worst character flaw because it's the flaws of character which beget the hatred, or is it the other way around?), except you don't know it's self-hatred because you can't recognize your own reflection, because you don't know your own face.

That's right, he remembers, the image inside the glass doesn't consolidate to the face of— Eren Jaeger? Eren Kruger? There are times when Eren Jaeger doesn't have a reflection. There are times when Eren Jaeger isn't Eren Jaeger himself at all— Jaegar— Kruger—Jae— the father was— i—him—me eren?—no its nothing im fine…... or perhaps—I was bequeathed the valueless name, the anonymous non-legacy of my mother?

He opens his eyes.

The tourniquet around his leg-stump leaks blood. In a thin dark swirl, it flows down the drain.