This was not how it started.
This was not how it ended.
Four people sat around a table.
Within the next ten years, one of them was going to die.
"He didn't do it," Armin said. On the table, his eye glasses sat, upturned. Hanji held his shoulders protectively. Hanji was almost like Armin's mother, but they were not related by blood. Armin didn't have a mother. Or a father, for that matter. And he was never the child of any figurative mother or father. He was never the child of anybody, ever, in all his life. This was true even before he'd been put into foster care.
Also: Hanji had biologically been born male.
Mikasa laid out seven cards in front of her. Nobody interrupted or stared or questioned it. The fourth person at the table, Levi Ackerman, Mikasa's cousin, who did not have a deck of cards like Mikasa or cat-black fingernails or rosary beads hanging around his neck, sat on the other side of Armin and guzzled black tea like water. Thirty-three years ago, his mother had never even considered exterminating the fetus inside her. Now he was an antisocial plagued by insomnia who had never been in love.
"Eren had blood on him," Levi said. "Case closed."
"They're framing him," Armin said. "Nothing's changed since we were kids."
"That boy was whaling on you," Hanji said.
"Eren didn't murder the guy," Armin said.
"Five of them are saying the exact opposite."
Mikasa took up a card and turned it over. Something of profound cosmic significance was printed on it. "Eren didn't do it." She showed them the image.
"Good news," Levi said. But he didn't know what it meant.
"All we need to do is find the evidence he needs. This is where we'll begin—" Mikasa held up a different card and displayed it to them. The three sets of eyes stared.
"Oh, wow," Levi said. "Great."
He guzzled his black tea like water.
MIKASA
Almost two years earlier, Mikasa didn't know the mystical ways of clairvoyants yet. At sixteen years old, Mikasa had had a psychic snap. It happened like the break of an umbilical cord. Similar to the one that had been attached to her cousin Levi's navel about thirty years earlier. Like a child being ejected into the world, experiencing excruciating existence for the very first time, Mikasa wanted to scream for the sake of screaming, which she would do in the parking lot of a rural high school after a varsity volleyball game.
The score was 15 to 15.
"Lightning," said the setter, and the girls ran their offense. Hitters rushed to the net, leaping, whacking imaginary volleyballs out of the air, hoping to fool the other team. Mikasa went in for a slide and flew up, swinging. The setter tossed the ball. It struck Mikasa's hand — and smashed the court, hot.
One point to the Home team.
The girls grouped in the middle. They clapped—once—like a single point of detonation.
"Nice hit."
"Nice set."
"Let's do it again."
"Here we go."
On court, personal rivalries were pushed aside. Off court, rivalries were dealt with accordingly. Only yesterday, a little over twenty-four hours ago, a fistfight had almost occurred. All day, Mikasa had been warned. She's going to fight you after school in the courtyard, and so Mikasa showed up to the courtyard like she was apparently supposed to do. In the courtyard, a mob of people swarmed with excitement. The volleyball setter was there, along with a boy on the school's JV baseball team. This boy was crucial to the fistfight.
As it happened, this baseball player was sexually attracted to Mikasa and this made his girlfriend, the setter, awfully upset.
Mikasa blankly stared at the baseball player. The boy blushed fiercely, and she said: "I don't even know who you are."
Now the score was 16 to 15.
"Thunder."
The girls flashed to their new positions. Mikasa dashed out to the left side. The ball shot across the tape of the net. Mikasa exploded off the court, drew strength from her core, and unloaded kinetic energy onto the ball. It crashed into a trap of arms and hands. Then the ball died — and laid dead at her feet.
The coach flung her clipboard. It spun across the sidelines like a pinwheel. "Stop hitting into the goddamn block. How many times do I got to say it?"
Mikasa hung her head. She was embarrassed. "Yes ma'am."
The girls returned to their original positions.
In the next play, they got the point back. Now it was Mikasa's turn to serve. She went to the backline. She slapped the ball and meditated. Vibrations sang in the ball like a thousand little chimes. She looked up — and there they were: Eren and Armin, standing in the bleachers, front row. They beat their hands together repeatedly. Their hands went still when the whistle blew. The up ref signaled. Mikasa tossed the ball. Her hand connected. The ball blazed over the net, scorching the other side, untouched.
People in the bleachers reverberated their applause like a cult.
Eren and Armin cupped their hands around their mouths. Voids opened in their faces, their voices lost in meaningless stadium noise.
"Nice serve."
"Do it again."
"Here we go."
The team reset. They got ready.
Mikasa served again. This time, the other team scooped up the ball and sent it over, flying backcourt. A blur spun past Mikasa.
The whistle blew.
The line judge signaled.
They lost the point.
The coach saw red. "You better hit that floor before you let any ball get past you," she said.
"Yes ma'am."
"Hit that floor."
"Yes ma'am."
"You hit that floor," said the coach. "Right now."
"Now?"
"Now!"
Mikasa dove. She rose. She straightened.
"Again."
Mikasa collapsed. She rolled. She got to her feet.
"Get on the floor!"
Mikasa crashed and rattled. A hundred eyes stared.
"Do that in the game," said the coach.
"Yes ma'am." Mikasa slid her thumbs under her spandex. She tugged it back down over her buttocks.
The girls reset. They got ready. Their atoms trembled with their readiness. "Do or die," said the setter.
"Do or die," said the libero.
"Do or die," they all said.
They shifted slightly forward, ready.
When the ball came over, they returned it and watched what the other team would do. The other side attacked and smashed the ball cross-court. Mikasa leapt for it. The front right player sprang back for it. There was the sound of bone and muscle and skin and court. The two girls scrambled on the floor, hurting where they'd collided. The ball bounded off one of their fists and got up into the air by nothing short of chance. The libero swooped it up and the ball trickled, barely, over the net. The other side did not return the ball. The play ended.
"Are you okay?" The setter fretted over the right front player. The right front player felt at her elbow, grimacing. The setter turned to Mikasa. "You need to communicate."
"It was back row's ball," Mikasa said.
"Syd had it."
"It was back row's ball," Mikasa said.
"We got the point," said the libero. "That's all that matters. Shake it off." She encouraged Mikasa with a light smack on the behind.
The team rotated.
In the stands, Mikasa's friends, Armin and Eren, talked to each other privately, yelling into each other's ears.
"It's painful to watch," Eren said, shouting directly into Armin's auditory nerve. Armin winced. "They're not meshing at all."
"Our side's dead," Armin said.
"Mikasa's getting inside her own head. Look at her face." Eren cupped his hands. "Shake it off!"
They watched as Mikasa's face emptied more and more each second. She moved like a jittery street cat.
The ball hit their side. Another play ended. The girls sweated and huffed and grit their teeth.
"Time."
The girls ran off court.
On the sidelines, the coach fumed.
"What the hell are you doing out there? It's like y'all never played volleyball a day in your lives. Do you see that scoreboard?"
They saw the scoreboard.
"Are you even listening to me?" The coach wasn't addressing the team anymore. "Everything I say goes in one ear and out the other." She seized Mikasa by the wrists and flung her arms down. Mikasa's arms slapped around her sides, slabs of sweaty meat. "Don't you ever cross your arms when I'm talking to you."
"Yes ma'am."
"Unless I see blood spurting out your head, you're digging up everything that comes your way. Protect that court with your life. Now get out there."
"Yes ma'am."
Time was almost up. The girls ran back onto the court. Mikasa thought to move. She sent electric signals to her feet. Her body didn't budge.
"Do or die." The coach's palms drove Mikasa forward. Mikasa's head sloshed over. She thought to lift her head.
Her neck didn't budge.
There was a horrible ringing; her spinal column wouldn't hold her up.
"I don't want to do this anymore," Mikasa said.
She never thought to say that.
"What?"
"I hate this." Again, her mouth moved on its own. "I want to quit."
"You want to quit?"
"I want to quit."
A pink freckled hand gripped Mikasa's wrist. "Your team is out there fighting. You want to walk out on them?"
At that moment, the electrical signals scrambled, totally out of control. Her legs received a sign. The startled leg muscles took up her feet and sprinted her out the door. Without any warning, Mikasa fled the game.
The gym's door banged opened and shut. The screaming drone of the crowd sucked away behind her. The outside laid a raw quiet on the air.
Panting with intense emotions, Mikasa moved down the sidewalk and tore off her jersey and jammed it into a trashcan. She wandered like a blind man into the parking lot, hearing her own blood whirring, roaring, going into her heart and coming out of it. The cerebral umbilical cord had finally snapped and a version of death was born, bloody and soft, inside her psychology.
High school volleyball made her insane.
Somehow. For some reason. Volleyball was war.
Already chasing after her, Eren saw the jersey sleeve hanging out of the trash. He flicked up his feet. He ran now.
In the parking lot, Eren caught a senseless, sightless Mikasa by the waist. She babbled uselessly. He toddled her to his car. He tried to soothe her with low tones and no meaning while she stumbled, blind and useless with tears.
Soon they were driving through the night. Yellow streetlights flushed by. Mikasa put on Eren's hoodie and drew the hood over her face. Eren didn't make her take her feet off the dash. She was curled in a wet fetal mass. Soaked in sweat. Soaked in sadness. Eren was the one who would, two years from now, be accused of murder.
He spoke on the phone with the other boy, Armin. They talked about getting Mikasa's belongings from the locker room; they talked about what to do with her car in the parking lot. They were going to take care of her and everything, and it'd be okay. Mikasa floated, hot and wet, in the black womb of Eren's hoodie, catatonic. His clothing was a soft, slow, purposeless space, and she sank.
Minutes passed. Hours passed, it felt like, before she snuck a sly peek at Eren. Behind his profile, the neighborhood was dank and yellow with grim streetlight. The swings and pulls of the car oriented her and she knew her position in town without ever having to look. She knew Eren had parked in the Ackerman driveway when they stopped.
He sat back in his seat. Then he twisted to look at her.
"What happened?"
Mikasa was silent. She barely breathed.
"It's okay." This was supposed to comfort Mikasa. Eren didn't know what else to say. "Take your time."
Mikasa covered her face in her hands. It didn't matter what Eren said. Eren himself was a comfort. They sat in silence for a while longer. Then she felt Eren's tentative fingers on her leg.
"What's that?"
He lifted the hem of her spandex. Mikasa held her breath.
"Mikasa," Eren said.
Mikasa removed her hands from her face. Eren stretched over the console, touching her with cautious, probing fingers.
"Stop." Mikasa took his wrist.
"What is it?"
"No."
"I want to see."
"No."
"Mikasa."
Mikasa let him see. Eren put a hand over his mouth. He looked, covering his open mouth.
"It's not that bad," she said, unsure because of his expression.
His hand moved so he could speak. "That's not okay."
"Don't tell anyone."
She would've kept it a secret, but Mikasa kept no secrets from Eren except THE SECRET, which was the secret that she was deeply in love with him and had been deeply in love with him since the beginning of time.
They were both rocking on an ocean, growing seasick with dread.
"That coach should be fired," Eren said, suddenly furious.
"It's not her fault. It's my fault."
"How could she make you throw yourself on the ground like that?"
"That's volleyball."
"How could she make you hate yourself so much?"
"That was me."
Eren grabbed Mikasa's shoulders. "Don't listen to what your head is telling you. Listen to what I'm telling you."
"Don't tell anyone."
He wrinkled his mouth, and his eyes were clean water. "Turn out your lip. It's puffed up."
She turned out her lip.
"Let's go ice it down."
They went inside.
A week later, Mikasa would have a psychic vision in her sleep. The vision foretold Eren would confess he'd always been in love with her and give her her very first kiss. The kiss was heartbreakingly sweet and full of tenderness.
This never happened, though, because her vision was not an event of sudden clairvoyance. It was only an ordinary dream.
EREN
Eren knew that your head thought things wrong sometimes. And he knew it was hard not to listen to your head. Your head took the world and converted it into what you saw, what you heard, what you felt, and what you thought.
This too: Everything was lost in translation.
Eren was masterful at thinking things wrong. He was breathtaking at it. He was so good at thinking things wrong that other people lost their breath, gasping at it. The teacher had lost her breath, speechless, when eight-year-old Eren had screamed in earsplitting torment: "God damn fucking shit!"
There were too many commotions, too many chaoses, too much of everything all around, everywhere, all the time.
In the second-grade classroom, the majority's reality didn't match Eren's reality. It was only Eren's brain telling him there was a lot to see and a lot to hear and a lot to feel. When the teacher found her breath again, she was horrified that her class of second graders had been violated by such language. She made a phone call. Soon a handler came into the class and handled Eren, removing him from his seat, guiding him from the class of violated second graders.
The handler pointed and lulled, "Look at the colors, Eren. Look at all the pretty colors."
"God damn fucking shit," he said, knotting his little ears in his hands. "Vacuum."
Doctors had not yet found a medication to successfully inhibit his psychotic episodes.
At the next PTA meeting, many concerns were raised.
"He shouldn't be in the regular classroom," a middle-class white woman said. "He needs to be in a special school for kids with special needs."
"Our children have a right to be educated in a safe learning environment. This is an infringement of their rights."
"Just keep him in a self-contained class. Don't sit him next to other children that he could bring harm to."
Horrified, Carla and Grisha Jaeger held to each other's arms.
"He doesn't want to bring harm to anyone," Carla Jaeger said. "He's just a little boy. Not a monster."
Coincidentally, another woman, almost fifteen years earlier had said the very same thing. "He's just a little boy. Not a monster." Her name was Kuchel Ackerman and she was talking about her son Levi, who was once the fetus she never even considered exterminating despite her brother's urging.
"Boys grow into monsters," her brother said. "They become men who murder and rape. Men are monsters."
A man was saying this about men because he was a man who hated men because of what they had done to his sister.
"But look at his cute face," Kuchel Ackerman said.
This was also said almost fifteen years later by Carla Jaeger, the mother of the boy who saw too much and felt too much.
"Look at his cute face," she said, cupping Eren's elastic eight-year-old cheeks. She almost began to cry, loving him so much it could make her well up at any moment with crushing sentimentality. "He's my baby boy," she said. "I'll always love him."
"I'll always love him," said Kuchel.
"I love him to death," they each declared in their respective times about their respective sons.
This was, in fact, the beginning of a death sentence.
ARMIN
The second friend from the varsity volleyball game, Armin, knew what it was like to be sentenced to death. Other boys thought he should die because he made the fatal mistake of wearing the wrong hairstyle. He was also effeminate and myopic and awkward with his skinny, reptilian limbs.
This too: He liked to read.
This meant other boys liked to break him with their fists. They liked it the most when Armin would cry.
A few generations ago, an effeminate, myopic, unathletic adolescent with literary interests was, too, broken by the fists of bigger stronger boys who hated and beat things for the pleasure of hating and beating things. Their object to break was Hanji Zoe, the trans woman, who would become quite protective of Armin, almost like a mother from her view, but nothing like a mother from Armin's view because he had no concept of what mothers were or what they were supposed to be.
The world changed in November of 2002 when Armin's second-grade class combined with another second-grade class for P.E. It was a cool morning. The day hadn't been boiled by the sun yet. A pale fog still clung to the treetops. The lingering fog seemed to shudder with the shrill violence of an eight-year-old boy's screaming. At the kickball field, two kickball teams had formed with an equal number of players, leaving an odd man out. The one boy who'd been left out was so antagonized at being left out that he screamed and thrashed his arms wildly, thumping his little wild fists into his little wild body, pummeling himself to a pulp.
The other children observed him with cool indifference. A few wicked giggles goaded him on.
A teacher hurried over and hustled the screaming thrashing boy off the field. The rest of the children happily dispersed and, without further commotion, began their kickball game.
At a loss by such a violent tantrum, the teacher sat the odd little boy on a bench for a time-out.
— You can join in once you've calmed down. Have you calmed down? No? then keep on sitting there all by yourself until you've calmed down.
Sitting all alone, the boy trembled and convulsed, fried on the inside by a devastation of irrational passions. He blubbered miserably. Armin, who'd witnessed the whole drama, crept hesitantly over.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"Huh?" The boy blubbered and twitched spasmodically, zapped by his own big senseless emotions.
"Are you okay?"
The boy was zapped again, feeling everything in big, senseless, convulsive waves. "They never let me play," he said, miserably. "I just want to play. But they never let me."
Tears and sweat sheeted him. Bulbs of snot dribbled from his nose.
"Me either." Armin stuck his hand in his pocket. He took out a packet of tissues that he carried for his allergies. He gave the boy a handful. "What's your name?"
"Huh?"
"What's your name? I'm Armin."
The boy buried his face in the handful of tissues. Two clear trails of slime dribbled over his lips. He blew his nose with a huge expelling force. The effort made his nostrils shiny and raw.
"Eren."
Eren oozed more trails of saline and slime. The convulsing faded. His tears fell in quiet resignation now. He stuffed the used tissues in his pocket.
"Here." Armin gave Eren what he had left of the tissue pack.
"You're giving them to me?"
"Yeah."
Timidly Eren took the pack of tissues. He pressed his wet, slimy lips together.
A very important friendship began.
The next day Eren brought Armin a 6-pack of Kleenex. He was embarrassed and self-effacing, and offered the 6-pack of tissues to Armin with a cringing self-denial.
"My mom said I wasn't supposed to take your tissues," he said. When Armin asked why he wasn't supposed to take the tissues, Eren replied: "I just wasn't supposed to."
When they were older and Eren had become rather introspective and thoughtful about the Big Questions in life, he told Armin that Mrs. Jaeger was probably too much of a cynic to allow him to make friends. The insular rural town had taught Mrs. Jaeger to resent everyone proactively because everyone proactively resented her son. But despite that motherly resentment, the two boys managed to make friends anyway. And making friends with the school's maniac had its perks, besides.
For some time, the boys who liked to beat Armin to a pulp left him alone. This peace lasted a good nine years until Eren was accused of murder and suspended from school. While a criminal investigation went on to prove Eren's guilt, Armin found himself alone and helpless, fighting for his life, when the baseball team took a baseball belt, strung it around his neck, and gleefully attempted to lynch him in the boys' locker room.