Mikasa
The dining hall is large, plenty large for the lot of them. But the profound meaningless noise of twenty people multiplies into two-hundred, the mouths and the tongues and all the micro-articulations of speech springing upon four walls, and shooting across the dining hall again in those massive invisible waves of sound, multiplying each one person by the exponent of ten, inducing a sense of tight quarters and claustrophobia. One person grows louder, then the next person grows louder, then the next person grows louder too, each person's voice spinning through the thick exponential growth of meaningless noise.
There is a lot of talking, a lot of tin clashing. A dull phantom-pressure builds behind the middle of Mikasa's forehead, as though she's losing streams of blood from a small invisible incision at the center of her skull, feeling like she's floating, just outside her own body: her arms like deflated shirt sleeves, unfilled, and all she must do is thrust her arms forward through her body's empty, uninhabited arm-sleeves to dress herself again in her own envelope of skin and muscle.
It is too loud. It is too early. She can't remember the last time she ate.
Hitch is talking. She hasn't stopped talking since they've started to eat. "—shy. Goes all the way to the back of the showers. Isn't that funny?"
Jean is blushing. "Why are you talking about what girls do in the showers, Hitch?"
"I think it's funny because Mikasa's so—" Hitch curls her arm.
"Shut up," says Jean. "She's—she's—she's the complete opposite of you. That's the kind of woman she is."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Mikasa's right there, you know." Connie points. Their heads turn. They see the concealing drape of her black hair, the muffler falling from her throat. Her hands are motionless in her lap.
"Oh," says Hitch. "She's not listening anyway."
Mikasa looks at her, sidelong, not looking angry, not looking annoyed either. But her pupils have constricted quite small. Hitch sits back a little. Mikasa doesn't look angry, but something very calm and very dark brews beneath her face, her hands relaxed and unfolded against her legs.
"Aren't you all growing a little too relaxed?" she says. Her voice is unmoving, more tones than it is volume. "I can't help hearing the conversations that are going on around me; how inconsequential your worries are. Have you forgotten our situation?" Their faces go taut as the situation confronts them all over again. "Historia is being coerced into a corner. And Eren is across the ocean, on the mainland. Alone. How can you gossip so lightly right now?" Still, her voice doesn't move, doesn't give anything away other than the calmness and the dark brewing self-containment.
Jean is the first to speak. "One, don't associate me with Hitch; she's the one gossiping. Two, we're all worried about Historia. She's our friend too. And three . . . Eren left us, Mikasa. He ran away. The pressure was too much for him."
"You're wrong." Mikasa remains still self-contained, still brewing darkly. Her hands begin to move now. She puts them on the table. "That doesn't sound anything like Eren. He left because he's going to find a way to—"
"Hey—" Next to Mikasa, a heavy military boot drops against the bench. The table rattles. It vibrates with a force communicated through a compact leg, through the wood, and finally onto them, jolting through Squad Levi. Mikasa's spine is erect, her eyes widened fractionally.
The captain's strong shin bone extends up into his knee, bent with the indomitable heaving force of his compactness. His arms are crossed. He's not wearing the compression bandages anymore. He speaks with less viciousness, less force and punctuation than his boot: "I can see that my precious subordinates are enjoying their continental breakfast. Especially this foul-tempered girl, here. How is it, Mikasa, the food Nicolo thoughtfully prepared for us this morning?" The tray sits untouched in front of her. The captain bends his face, pulling the tray into the crux of his attention. "Oh . . . " he says, and he says it with slow, mocking irony, but there is no added force, no viciousness either, still quieter than his military boot. Mikasa doesn't look at him.
"That's right, Mikasa." Across the table, Sasha shoves a pastry in her mouth. "Nicolo made this meal with us in mind. It's his ingenious creation."
The captain continues: "Have you become so comfortable with the Survey Corps' new cushy lifestyle that you'll waste food like a spoiled brat?" and even now, speaking without the viciousness or the force of his military boot.
"That won't be necessary, Captain." With all the grave immutable sincerity of a child, Sasha presses her fist to her heart. "I'll selflessly take it upon myself, sir, to finish her leftovers. They won't go to waste."
Levi cuts his eyes at Sasha without moving his face, his eyes following her hand as it reaches graspingly across the table. Captain Levi's bad leg, still extended from the military boot planted on the bench, seems to hum next to Mikasa's arm, prickling her with the hyperarousal responses of her most primal intuitions.
Armin seizes Sasha's elbow, retracting her reach, guiding it back down under the table. The captain's eyes flick back to Mikasa. He hasn't moved his face at all. She hasn't moved hers either, looking at him, without facing him, from the corner of her eye.
"Let me ask you, do you want to bring Eren back home in one piece?"
Mikasa says nothing. She knows that he knows, and he knows that she knows that he knows; so there is no need for any exchanged words, no need for answers. Without looking away, arched tall above her, he takes up the apple from her breakfast tray. And still, without looking away, he snaps his wrist, the apple spinning into the air, dropping into his palm a split-second later.
Before she knows he's moved again, the apple claps against her teeth, thrust suddenly between her lips. The skin breaks with a sweet, juicy crunch as her front teeth pierce the fruit by secondhand force. The taut faces of the squad emerge behind the captain now. They stare. Captain Levi is looking at her, hasn't looked away since the beginning. His hand rests passively on his knee, as if it hasn't moved a centimeter. A little more white shows in Mikasa's eyes, her lips jammed open around the apple. Her teeth scrape out a piece. The apple falls into her palms. A deep bite mark is gouged from its meat.
"I'll be the one to bring him home," she says coldly, chewing, sitting very calmly, very straight and still.
"Is that right?"
"Yes sir." Her teeth drag through the apple again.
"Your muscle mass has been deteriorating," he says. "If you don't keep up your strength, I'll have to be the one to drag him all the way back here on my own."
"It's my responsibility. I'll be the one to carry him home."
"Take your responsibilities seriously, then. I don't have the time to chase around a rebellious little shit who's run away."
She doesn't look at him. "Focus on your own objective, Captain. I'll focus on mine." She bites from the apple again. The juice spreads, lukewarm, tasteless, in her mouth.
"Good, then."
"By the way, your leg seems to be feeling better." Her prickled arm hair has begun to puncture her shirt sleeve. She sits rigidly on her spine.
"Yeah," he says. "It looks like you knew what you were doing." He removes his boot from the bench. The hyperarousal subsides, the hair wilting sideways against her arm. The captain leaves. Mikasa watches his back. As he goes, his gait is evenly distributed among both legs. The woodenness of yesterday has ebbed back into the tide.
Jean's face swings around toward Mikasa. "What did he mean, muscle mass? Why was he looking at your muscle mass? What kind of guy is the captain?"
"Huh?" Food crumbs drop from Connie's mouth, his fingers poising a biscuit in buttery suspense a few inches from his lips. "What are you talking about? You're the one who's always looking at Mikasa's—"
Jean closes his right hand and brings it down on top of Connie's head.
Mikasa clicks her teeth. "How annoying," she says flatly, speaking too low, almost out of pitch. "Does he think he's my mother?"
Sasha points, a little hesitant, maybe even a little reluctant. "That seemed familiar, though. Didn't it? Like—like—de la vie?"
"I think you mean déjà vu, Sasha," Armin says. "And it seemed familiar because it's a scene we've seen before. It's ironic. Eren didn't like to be overbearingly mothered either, Mikasa."
Two pink splotches burn into Mikasa's cheeks.
Jean says, "Are you saying Captain Levi and Mikasa are the same? Because that's not true, Armin."
"I don't know," says Sasha. "They both have scary faces."
The pink splotches grow hotter on Mikasa's cheekbones. She puts down the apple core.
"Don't listen to her." Jean's oatmeal slips from his spoon before he can dispatch it onto his palate. "Your face isn't scary."
"Pervert," says Connie.
Jean boils.
Across from her, Armin looks at Mikasa without judgment, his hands thrust below the table. She can see him above the chest, sitting a bit stiff-shouldered. "The captain has a point, Mikasa. You should eat. You've been dropping weight ever since Eren left. I was beginning to worry. It seems the captain is worried too." She may not remember the last time she's eaten, but since the day Eren left, neither her appetite nor her stomach has confronted her body with hunger or pain. "And you've been a bit short-tempered these past couple days. Are you okay?"
"I'm sorry to have worried you, Armin. But I'm fine." She looks at her half-eaten apple, her idle breakfast tray. Armin's hands remain beneath the table, his shoulders stiff. "You don't need to worry about me anymore."
Mikasa
Pain swims inside her head again. Her vision darkens. It returns a moment later. She doesn't even pause, walking down the hall, paying no mind to the tiny bleeding incision at the epicenter of her skull.
As she goes, she hears the skirts and the clicking heels in front of her before seeing the two women. They don't walk; they insinuate their presences with a flourish of hips. One is a woman with a largeness about her, with pink skin like a cherub, wearing velvet. The other woman has a long fall of perfect black hair, younger, thinner, with eyes that seem to have never thought beyond what she's already seen, what she's always known, thinking only of the past. Mikasa stops. The women speak to each other in soft, birdlike murmurings.
"Why are there so many hallways? How can anyone find their way around here?"
"At night, too."
"Ridiculous. That's why we have only three floors."
The one in velvet sees Mikasa first. She rushes over on her hard, swift heels, the dress rippling liquidly where her overflowing figure strains and swells against the velvet. Her hands clasp Mikasa's shoulders. Mikasa tenses, holding perfectly still.
"My girl," she says. Her round forearms seem to flap with opulence. "What are you wearing? This won't do. This won't do at all. Take off that hideous thing around your neck. It's not even winter. These are men of war. If they find you like this, I won't be able to stop them from—"
"Madam," the other woman says. "She isn't one of us. She's a soldier. She's wearing their emblem. See?"
"A soldier?" The woman's hands jerk away. "A soldier?" The cherubic skin of her face grows hotter, spreading all the way into her bosom. She speaks in raspy feminine sighs, panting: "Of course, she's not one of mine. I knew that. Of course, I knew that. I know all my girls. I handpicked every single one. That black hair, though. Are you certain she's not—No, no, of course not. You're not one of mine. What am I saying? But that hue of hair is—"
Mikasa feels herself divide down the middle, half of herself weakening into the farthest distance, thinning into something flat and purposeless, the reversion again, back to when she was a dead girl on the floor, her hands succumbing to the acquiescence. And the other half of herself feels the old memory of her muffler hanging, passively, around her neck. Red, soft, full of remembering. She hears the flesh of her fists, not yet moving, not yet getting ready, but thrumming somehow with the power, the biology, remembering what Eren had told her at the crises of the dead girlish vanquishment.
"I think it's this way, Madam."
"Yes, yes. Let's hurry, now."
The hard, crisp sound of high-heels diminishes down the hall. The muffler lays passive on Mikasa's chest. Beneath it resides the weight of the breath, of the blood, and of the name, balancing on a pin at the very top of her sternum.
Levi
The woman's black hair falls down her back. All the way down her back. Her calves hush through layers of fabric, and they listen, they strain to hear it. She doesn't speak, but her legs are long, and they listen, they strain to hear the flesh of her thighs moving against the dress and against each other. Her eyes are sleepy, dreamless liquid. Women's perfume gushes behind her. Her lips are fixed up at the corners, latched, gridlocked in certain mirthful concealment. She grins very hard at them.
She turns her head, her black hair falling and falling until their eyes stop on the lowest curves of her back. She grins very hard at Levi. Off to the side, he stands alone; and solitary men are their own kind of terror. A gang is a physical, recycled menace. A man by himself is individual and unpredictable. His arms are closed, insulated, folded over his chest.
Her lips stretch all the way back over her molars.
"Now, don't damage her. She's one of my best girls. You got that, boys?"
"Don't worry, Madam. Old man Pyxis will take good care of her. Isn't that right?" They laugh.
Pyxis is sitting in the armchair, his crinkling eyes folded into sightless humored half-moons. "What perverse things do you want this poor girl thinking about me, exactly?" He smiles without canines, without gums. Just a benign gesture of his papery, un-predatory mouth because he's an honest man who's woken up alive on the anniversary of conception. "Thank you for coming all the way here, Madam. But there seems to be a misunderstanding. I'm only a penniless old man who's trying to keep his bare ass covered for a couple more years."
He sits in his armchair with his hands on his knees. His eyes look quietly out at the girl from inside his bare-headed, paper-wrinkled face. "I'm truly sorry about the confusion, young lady. To think I call these shameless men my comrades." His hands don't move at all. "Why don't you tell me your name, and I'll get you two something to drink?"
She tells him her name. And Pyxis smiles, his hands motionless on his knees. The tub of ice rattles, giving up a bottle of booze when Levi reaches in. He pops the top. He drinks. Blue cigar smoke wreathes the smutty atmosphere of alcohol, tobacco, and the cryptic duplicity of female perfume. He leaves, hearing the hard, punctuated heels behind him, smelling the path where she's passed through, infecting the air with her sharp synthetic scent. The young woman watches him go out the door, grinning too hard to be smiling.
"Again, Madam," says Pyxis, his hands never moving. "I'm truly sorry for the misunderstanding."
The laughs of twenty men roar out the open door. It closes. The laughs cease. Going down the hall, Levi raises his wrist, not watching where he's going, not needing to watch where he's going, walking straight without going anywhere. Behind him the roar of their voices fade. Booze funnels down his throat. As he continues, intervals of wall lamps puddle somber yellow light on the floor.
He knows he shouldn't have come here. He had known it before they involved the women. He had known it since last night when he'd opened his eyes and the fire was still going. He keeps drinking until he's done. Lowering his wrist, walking straight, going nowhere, he hasn't even begun to feel halfway full.
Now, he starts to remember his own name.
Eren
The door has not been closed, and so Eren can see their outlines, their bodies darker than shadow. The man has her bent over his knee. The teeth in his face spit swears and filthy slanderous epithets. When it finally happens, Eren flinches at the sound, coiling in his arms, coiling in his legs, the regenerative flesh hissing in his leg-stump. He hears his own wounds, ready to burn, to re-thread with quantum blood and heat. Through the door, he watches, the skin cells hissing faintly inside his tourniquet.
Bent, childlike, over the man's leg, the nurse is crying. Drool runs over her red engorged lips. She sobs and kicks her legs out behind her, the white uniform lifted over the swells of smooth round skin bristling with five scarlet finger welts. She calls him daddy. She screams it. She writhes like a dying burning body, sobbing, Daddy Daddy I'm sorry sir please—
Eren can feel the blood slowing in his face, can feel himself going numb. The leg-stump goes quiet and cold. Slowly and rigidly, he thumps his crutch back to his room. The sobs fade. He thumps inside his room and closes the door and sits on the edge of his bed. Inside his face the blood is frozen dead. He turns up his hands and looks at them. They're bleached yellow, bloodless, tinged a little blue, as if. As if.
He looks in the mirror. His one good eye is mostly black with just a sliver of colored ring.
Mikasa
"It's Commander Pyxis's birthday," Historia says. "It was a joke the Garrison played."
Mikasa says nothing.
Historia smiles. It's a lipless, impersonal smile. "There are some things you and I won't humor in, things we won't understand, because of our upbringing. We've had a difficult time. But don't blame them too much, Mikasa. They're still our comrades." Historia wears a casual country dress. Her hair flows straight down her neck. "Thank you for agreeing to meet me here."
They've agreed to meet in an empty conference room that bulges out, in a windowed semi-circle, from the main building. Again Mikasa says nothing. She's not thinking about Pyxis anymore or the Garrison or the pretty high-heeled women, or the contrasting horizons and the ocean between them. The warmth in her palms has receded, leaving them gray and without feeling. She closes her eyes. She opens them. She touches the center of her forehead.
Outside the sun is a dim red circle. As the sun sinks, the flat red squares of window-frames slowly stretch across the floor.
"I know it must sound silly to you, but Yelena thought it'd be a good idea to hold a military ball to raise morale."
"You're right," Mikasa says, without feeling herself speaking, her lips numb. "It sounds silly to me. And Yelena is wasting our time with pointless distractions."
"I'm going to trust Yelena's judgment on this. Keeping up the morale of my armies in a time of war, after all, isn't pointless. You would agree, wouldn't you, Mikasa?"
Mikasa's head is immobile and stiff on her neck. She says nothing. Historia walks over to the corner of the room. There stands a metal four-legged machine with a cone of brass expanding out like a great metal esophagus.
"It's called a phonograph." She slants a horizontal bar over a grooved black disc. "It plays music." Beneath a needle, the disc begins to rotate. From the hollow channel and brass mouth swells the symphony of vast nonexistent instruments. Mikasa goes bone-still with listening, her eyes glowing with the sunset.
"Somewhere—and it could've been miles away from here, years ago—somebody produced this song and it etched into this disc and preserved itself there. Now we can listen to it whenever we want."
It's as though the machine has undermined time, has reversed the sad evanescent failing of human memory.
Mikasa turns her head. An extravagant mirror hangs on the wall. Inversely suspended in the glass, there she is, standing in the forlorn captured eternal otherworld of a dim red room, wearing her Survey Corps coat. She watches herself listening to the music, feeling displaced and multiplied at once—and more than that—reiterated.
Historia negotiates the empty room. She puts out her hand, saying: "Take my hand." Mikasa takes it. "As the royal head, I must be visible. Yelena says I'll be the one to lead the first dance. That's the reason I've asked you here, so I can practice."
Their feet fix at that elusive junction between distance and proximity, becoming neither distant nor proximate, both at the same time.
They begin to dance.
The flat red window-frames stretch over their moving feet.
Historia says, "Thank you for helping me. You're a good person, Mikasa."
"You're—" Mikasa's complexion warms. Suddenly her arms have begun to fill, thrust forward into her skin again, just now arriving; she feels her heart thudding—"You are too." She licks her lips and doesn't see Historia's eyes; how they've changed depths, bending inward, blind and concave, vague and evocative.
Mikasa continues stepping with the music, stepping in and out of her own legs, feeling at once here and not here, framing Historia with her arms as the room drops into a red dreamlike sunset-sea, plunging them along with it as they dance in red.
Inside the mirror, they spin in miniature, highlighted by the slanted light coming through the windows, empty, bereft, orphaned, widowed: Mikasa, of the innocence: Historia, of the selfishness. They follow the waves of the music, dissolving into the dying percussions of sacrificed queens and their sad incestuous histories.
Historia elongates onto her toes. The small muscle of her calf slides up into a round knot, her face opening up like a compact. She begins to strain, her throat turned back. Where the royal crown would usually rest, the scent of Historia's hair emanates from her scalp, warmed by the rise in body temperature. A soft, powdery odor, like a little girl.
Mikasa doesn't pull away. She watches through her black unreadable eyes. On Mikasa's end, it is out of the curiosity and the inexperience, not out of the reciprocation. On Historia's end, it is out of the inexperience and the loss, not out of the initiation.
In the oval framed glass, a single red shadow floats in the sunken red room.
Historia's calves relax, her feet soften. Her face is still slanted back, small again, smiling with just her lips. Mikasa starts to speak. Historia's touches Mikasa's mouth. She's still smiling with only her lips. Wordlessly she turns.
Without looking at Mikasa, she goes across the room and turns off the music. Her lips stay fixed up at the corners as the sound of the music being off fills the room. They stand in it, feeling everything go quiet and still, the red darkening to a somber black scarlet. Mikasa realizes then that the mouth which continues to smile is that of Krista Lenz and not of Historia Reiss: a smiling mouth with a rigid, porcelain, doll-like purposelessness. The lips never change as Historia begins to tremble.
She is still smiling when the thin nostalgic tears of remembered bereavement start to roll down her cheeks and the scarlet room turns black.
Eren
"What's the matter, Mr. Kruger? You're staring."
He's sitting up in his hospital bed, his back against the headboard. He looks at his hands. The pale undersides of his palms lay, face-up, in his lap. "Are you all right?" he says.
"Yes, of course," she says. "Why wouldn't I be?"
His head falls back against the headboard. He shudders. He doesn't answer. Although Miss Mary herself shows no outward sign of the aftermath, the echoing claps spin down Eren's ear canals. Punched into his retina flashes the indelible image of her engorged pink lips, sobbing, glistening, wet with saliva.
"Are you hungry, sweetheart?"
"No, I'm all right."
"From my experiences, I've learned men are always hungry."
"I'm not hungry." He shudders again, looking at his palms.
"You sweet, sweet boy." She comes to him, stepping right out of her nurse's slippers. Her eyes are warm and bright with compassion, her lips rouged in vicious red.
Eren already knows what she's going to say, bracing himself, transmuting into something stiff and wooden, without a pulse, without teeth, completely immune to anything like hunger.
"Men have special appetites, especially war-ridden men—and I'm a woman of infinite sympathy." Outside, light emits dim and sourceless through an impregnated gray sky. Next to his window, leaves flaring from an adolescent tree dip with invisible sporadic smatterings of weight.
"Would you like to see my tits?"
He removes his eyes from the window and puts them on her now. His legs are wooden out in front of him, under the sheets. She smiles. Her hands reach for her throat. His eyes turn away.
"Oh, Mr. Kruger." She croons at him with a sly, girlish lilt. "You're a blusher."
His color deepens. His teeth grate on one another.
She puts her hands on the bed. His eyes drop to her perfect square fingernails.
"Here. Open my top." She caresses his fingers, cajolingly, drawing them to her buttons. "Go on, honey. I'm telling you to." He starts to cringe within himself, turning inside out. "Are you afraid? There's no reason to be. I won't hurt you."
"You remind me of someone," he says, finally. "She looks a bit like you. But her hair is . . ." Something behind the woman's face closes, though nothing on the surface changes. "It's not that," Eren says. "She's still alive."
Miss Mary wraps Eren's palm over her breast, sinking his hand into the soft clothed mound of her grown-woman flesh. Eren feels the blood emptying from his legs. Not as though he is bleeding out, but as though the blood itself is evaporating straight from his veins. "Does this woman have nice tits too?"
The blush thickens in Eren's face, all over again.
"What's the matter, honey? Why don't you to tell me about her? Is she Asian like me, is that why? I'm only half, you know."
Eren says nothing and his fingers rise and begin to undo the pearl-glass buttons. His fingers move without him having to think about the nurse at all, thinking only that he doesn't want to talk about Mikasa.
His fingers work down the front buttons. He hasn't undressed a woman before, but his fingers act and know how to do the unbuttoning anyway. He's only given a woman something without ever doing the undoing, like the jacket he put around Mikasa's shoulders, or the red muffler he put around Mikasa's neck. He's never had to do the undoing; he's never even wanted to do the undoing. He's just had to give something up. But this is a woman here, older than himself by a decade at least. Grown women want to be undone, he supposes, especially those who are at least a decade older. And somehow his fingers know how to do the undoing without ever having done it before.
When the fourth button comes free, the tension pinning the fabric closed gives way. Her skin breathes out, cupped by something lacy and black. She nestles her arms together and her chest quivers inside the black lace, divulging a generous fleshy view to him, and he thinks nothing other than: He's never once thought about Mikasa and the parts of her he hasn't seen—and even now he doesn't think about that, only thinking about how he's never thought about it while looking down the nurse's dress, not thinking about the nurse at all, still wooden and still immune to anything like hunger.
Rain starts to tap the window pane.
"It's all right, Mr. Kruger," she says. "I'll take good care of you."
