a/n: second chapter is here! comments are greatly appreciated and help me write more 3
Eren woke up and rolled over on his bed. His hand was already plunging under his pillow. He brought the knife out and stared at it. It was shiny like bright dreams. He placed his hand to it and a reflexive sweat sprang to his palms in preparation. He retracted it. He brought it back. He retracted it again.
"Eren?" Armin asked. He sounded like he had just woken up. He was in the bunk one over. He saw the knife and Eren sat there dumbly.
"What… whatcha doing?" Armin's tone was carefully light.
"Just looking in the mirror," Eren said.
Armin got out of bed, small in his pajamas. "Next thing you know, you'll have an actual mirror like Jean," he joked.
"This works fine." Eren got out of bed too, sliding the knife into his back pocket. He started to walk out of the room.
"Eren, wait," Armin said.
Eren waited.
"Are you– um– doing okay?" Armin asked. Eren rolled his shoulders and to Armin, it looked like a shrug. Armin continued, "you know, you can talk to Mikasa and I. Well– maybe just me at the moment. Mikasa's–"
"I know," Eren said. "Something's up with her."
Armin sighed. "Something's up with the both of you. It has been for the longest time. Sometimes I feel a little left out."
Eren imagined the knife in his back pocket, how it sang when he sliced, how it flashed when he turned it over. He knew the shadows that Armin saw in the two of them like the strange darkness at the heart of a flame.
"You don't have to worry about us," Eren said.
"It's my job to worry about you," Armin said. "Have you apologized to Mikasa yet?"
"I'm working on it," Eren replied. "Well, I'm going to take a walk before breakfast." Eren made to go around Armin. Armin blocked his way.
"I'll come with you!" Armin said.
"I was going to go alone."
"I don't think that's a good idea," said Armin. It was what Eren had said to Mikasa the other day. Were they all just stopping each other from going over the cliff?
"Can you get out of my way, Armin?" Eren said quietly.
"Would you give me the knife first? Please?"
Eren handed over the knife and then gave a half-smile like: see? Easy.
Armin moved but Eren could feel his gaze on him as he left.
"We'll talk later?" Armin called after him.
"Sure," Eren said.
He ran into Mikasa in the dining hall. She was picking at runny eggs and chasing the yolk around her plate.
"How'd you sleep?" he asked her.
"Fine," she said tightly.
"I feel like you're lying."
Mikasa looked up, annoyed. "Did you need something?"
Eren felt himself get defensive. He had dealt with Armin so now she had to deal with him. "I was just checking on you."
"You're the fourth person who has checked. I'm fine. If you don't mind, I wanted to eat alone today," Mikasa said. She stabbed at her eggs.
"Fine," Eren muttered. He turned away and Jean and Connie caught him.
"Did you get your head bitten off too?" Jean whispered.
"She told me to stop talking–" Connie said.
"-which is basically telling you to shut the fuck up when it comes to Mikasa," Jean said.
"She has a lot on her mind," Eren said.
"I have a theory," Jean proposed. Connie nodded twice, studiously. They looked at each other and then looked at Eren. "She's on her period," Connie said.
"That's stupid," Eren said. "She can't get a period."
"That's why we're consulting you, blood-boy," Jean said, sneering. Eren stuck his tongue out.
"She's in a terrible mood, all the other girls are on theirs– I asked Sasha– and she's bleeding!" Connie ran a finger down from under his eye: Mikasa's scar. "That's all three requirements right?" He was holding up four fingers.
"That's stupid," Eren said again. "Don't you guys have things to do?"
Jean shook his head. "I told you he wouldn't get it," he said to Connie. "Also– don't tell Mikasa about this!"
Eren got his mask and went for his walk. He was early to the group meeting so he helped Maddock set up the chairs and light the candles. The morning birds were drowned out by the endless celebrations. Taller than the house was an enormous paper mask of Eren's titan that prowled the streets, held aloft by sticks, a spinal cord tail slithering behind it. The autumn wind murmured like restless souls.
Maddock handed him a candle. His hands were like mitts. The flame burned orange like running tree sap. "For your lost loved one, if you have one. They'll be able to find their way with this."
"Thanks," Eren said, cupping it. He thought of his mother, lost, adrift.
The rest of the group came and they got started. Maddock shared a story about the offerings left out for those who died by titans; death by cannibalism meant that souls were eternally hungry and needed to be fed just like the living. Eren thought that this applied to him too, a man-eater. He was always hungry. It never ended.
Then the group shared while Eren listened. This time, however, he spoke in the midst of a silence.
"I keep hurting someone that I love," Eren said. "I don't know how to stop or what to do."
"The first step is admitting your fault," Maddock said. "The second is talking to them about it."
"I've tried apologizing." Eren kneaded his forehead. The candles wasted their lives away in the dawn lights. "She won't accept it. She just brushes me off, says it wasn't my fault."
"Is it your fault?" Maddock asked.
"Yes! Well–!" Eren tried to think. "I don't mean for it to happen. It just keeps happening. And I can't stop it and she won't talk about it but I know that she's hurting." The words spilled from him.
Maddock spread his wide, flat palms. "What about a letter? That way, she'll be forced to ruminate on it and consider both her feelings and your words."
Eren considered this. His scope of vision was partially cut off by the mask. He felt as though he was taking too much time to answer. "I'll try it. Thank you."
"You don't owe us thanks, Eren," Maddock said.
The realization came to Eren like a dizzy spell. He reached up and removed his mask, feeling ashamed for some reason. "You all knew?" Eren asked.
Maddock smiled. "From the moment you sat down. You are a lot younger than I expected you to be. The hero of Shiganshina."
Eren stared at his candle. "I'm not a hero."
"Just like your friend does not accept your apologies or her hurt, you do not accept yourself."
Eren folded his arms and kept his eyes down. He wasn't sure of anything anymore. More people shared and then the group was over. Maddock approached him afterwards.
"I would try the street near the water wheel, three blocks down." Maddock winked. "You might find what you're looking for. And keep that candle burning."
Eren got lost and had to double back a few times. He realized that Shiganshina wasn't as familiar as it once had been to him. He finally found the sluggish, churning waterwheel. Its fins stirred up silt and brine and the fine mist from the crashing water made a rainbow appear. The nervous sun skirted around this part of town, barely touching anything within a certain radius. He stepped inside the radius and his candle went out with a whisper. Eren looked into the moat and his eyes were moving like the water, his pupil was a black orb suspended in filmy gray like a tadpole egg hatching into two, four, six. Eren veered off into the Changed.
He blinked. He was in the forest by a river. Sunning on the bank was a brown training corp jacket and a tassel-cord shirt. Sitting on a rock in the river, naked from the waist up, was a boy. The boy had been changed from wolf to human but had still retained the wildness, the fangs, and the doomed, forlorn expression of a moon-howler. He was whetting his blade, making it as sharp as his silver eyes.
"Civilians aren't allowed here," said young Eren, not looking up from his blade. He did a double take. His blade clattered on the rock. He looked Eren up and down.
"Our hair is long," said young Eren disapprovingly. "I just told Mikasa to cut hers. What about ODM accidents?"
"I don't use ODM much anymore," said Eren.
This Eren only had one question. "Did we avenge mom?"
"Does it matter? It won't bring her back," Eren said.
"DOES IT MATTER!?" Young Eren leapt up and into the rushing water. He was submerged to his waist. His chest binding tautened. His face was slashed with rage. "Nothing else matters!" His expression was a plea. "You know this! I–" He found none of what he was looking for in the older Eren's face. He gripped fistfuls of his hair and ducked his head.
"You're so angry," Eren said, feeling it all.
"Not even you understand," young Eren said.
"I'm sorry," Eren said helplessly. "What– what can I do to help?"
Young Eren felt his chest. "It hurts. All the time. I can't escape it." His words fell around them like dying birds.
"I know," Eren said. He stepped into the water. The cold was a shock. "Thank you for bearing it."
"I don't have a choice." Young Eren wiped at his eyes.
"You already made your choice: to keep going," Eren said. "You saved me."
Young Eren fell against Eren. Eren embraced him. His chin was on young Eren's head. Terrible sobs wracked the boy's body. Eren held him for a long time. The river rolled on. Trees sifted like playing cards in the wind.
Young Eren's breathing settled. He broke away from the embrace, trudging to the river bank, treading water. Now it was Eren who stood in the river.
"Why can't I see mom?" Eren asked.
"The same reason I can't see her," young Eren said plainly, "she's dead." He turned away and put on his shirt.
"Anyways, you should go. There are wolves in these woods. You don't want to get lost here."
The back of Eren's neck prickled. The forest, once innocuous, now had ears and eyes.
"How do I get back?" he asked young Eren.
Young Eren smiled. "Follow the light." The wind kicked up a harsh spray of water and young Eren was washed away like a disturbed reflection.
Eren started through the forest. The trees were very close together, grim and dark sentries. He felt as though he had strayed off a bedtime fairytale path and was entering a deadly cautionary tale, where witches and wolves lived.
There was no end to these woods. He walked for as long as it took a sapling to grow into an elder graying oak.
Then he saw a light up ahead. He walked over and the light was taking him away and his eyes pulled their pieces together, collecting into a blob of mass like a reforming molten moon. He was staring at his now-lit candle, the source of the light. He was out of the Changed.
###
The rain came down hard and fast and drummed the roof like a pair of steady hands. Eren was by the fireplace in an armchair, thinking about the dousing of a thousand candles, the wandering souls lost in a black sea. There was nothing to do. The Survey Corp was still under investigation.
Mikasa came in the front door, soaked.
"Where were you?" Eren asked her.
"Training," Mikasa said, walking past him. There was the smell of rust about her. She sat by the rug next to the fire and peeled off her waterlogged boots and socks and scarf. They all sat on the warm brick like ingredients to a witch's brew.
Eren watched her. The firelight made the dew on her face shimmer. A water droplet traced her nose to the bob of her neck. Her eyes were the color of forged metal alloys; gold laced with silver. Two things happened just then: he realized he thought Mikasa was pretty and a red ooze started from her scar. She swiped at it and caught him staring.
"What?" Mikasa said.
Eren opened his mouth and what came out was: "Are you on your period?"
Mikasa's brow furrowed. "What." This time, it was less a question and more an opportunity for Eren to back out.
"Because I am," Eren said hastily. "And Sasha is. And I know sometimes they sync up–"
"I can't get one," Mikasa said.
Eren shrugged. "Stranger things have happened. If you need to talk things out, or if you need any advice, I'm here.
"If I did, I would not get it from you." Mikasa turned back to the fireplace and tucked her legs in. "You're a boy."
"Is it so hard to ask me for help?" Eren asked quietly. "Ever?"
"Its–" Mikasa paused. "Nevermind."
"What? Say it."
Mikasa shook her head.
"Please," Eren said.
"It's not fair," Mikasa said. "That I bleed from my face and you bleed elsewhere."
"Yeah, well–" Eren sighed. "Both are my fault, I guess."
"It doesn't matter," Mikasa said. "I was a girl. Now that I bleed, I am a woman. It's just not fair that it was you and not me who decided that. Do you understand?"
Eren nodded. He thought of writing his letter. He thought of Armin and he suddenly did not want to drop the conversation. He sat down next to her on the carpet.
"Are you sleeping any better?" he asked.
"I keep having strange dreams," Mikasa said.
"What were they about?"
"You were in one."
"Was I?" Eren was secretly pleased.
"In it, your eyes were… not normal."
"Are they normal now?" Eren leaned in and widened his eyes substantially. Mikasa took his chin and tilted his head, left right, and he could see his eyes in hers. Her face was close. He could feel the heat of her breath, smell the blood on her.
"They're not," Mikasa whispered. A small smile played on her lips.
"Do you know why that is?" Eren said. He couldn't tell if Mikasa wasn't blinking or if they were synchronized.
"It's because of you. I used to be a boy but after that night in the cabin, I wasn't anymore," Eren told her.
"Well–" Mikasa released his chin. "Let me make you a man, then."
She pressed her fingernail under Eren's eye. Eren shivered. She looked to him for confirmation. He nodded and closed his eyes. She sliced. Eren gasped, baring his throat. The cut under Eren's eye welled with red.
"Now we match," Mikasa said.
You deserve everything, Eren thought. Then he thought of himself, of the shining machine waiting for him: I deserve everything.
###
The words scuttled down his fingertips and onto the paper like black ants. It was late and Eren was writing. Eren wrote as long as a half a candle's worth. He folded his letter and got up and paced. He couldn't wait till morning to give it to Mikasa. It had to be now. He crept over to the girl's barracks. Mikasa's bed was empty.
He turned around, at a loss. The candle seemed to burn brighter. He turned again, testingly. The candle dimmed. He turned. Brighter. He started walking, using the candle as a compass. It took him downstairs and out the building. The sky was as black as fresh dirt and the moon was a deep hole. Candles lined the edges of streets. Whenever he passed one, it went out.
He kept walking until he saw the wall of rain. It was only raining in this part of Shiganshina, in the radius of a large circle. Eren walked into it, feeling the damp air clog his lungs, douse his candle. His vision split, and Changed. He blinked rapidly. He was outside the cabin. It was the same cabin from that night. The door was ajar. Eren pushed it open.
Inside, the men were dead, their throats slashed. Their bodies sagged like bags of meat. They bled endlessly. Eren brought his shirt over his nose. He moved to the next room, where a man was plunged into a broken window, his head open like a rotten pumpkin. Eren heard movement upstairs. He ascended the steps.
Mikasa killed the last one, he remembered.
He came to the room upstairs. In it, Mikasa stood over the fourth man. She was streaked with blood like shards of red stained broken glass and clutching a knife. Eren recognized it as the knife that Armin had confiscated. Her face was a blank paper mask. The eyes were unseeing. The man was convulsing, his slit throat like gasping lips. He was red, red, red.
In the corner, a younger Mikasa pressed herself to the wall as though trying to become a part of it. Her eyes were wide, watching the man on the floor die.
"Mikasa." Eren stepped forward.
Older Mikasa stepped forward too, but not towards him. She was stepping towards young Mikasa, the knife still clutched in her hand. Young Mikasa watched her with wild eyes, her chest rising and falling with panicked breaths. Eren stepped in between them, holding out his hand.
"Mikasa, stop," Eren said.
"Get out of the way," Mikasa said. "This has to happen." She raised her knife.
"Run," Eren said to young Mikasa, and she took off down the stairs.
"Okay," Eren breathed. "Okay, okay, okay." He raised his fists and they were sparring again and he knew he would have to be better to beat the best.
The knife hissed. Eren leaped back, his shirt cut. Mikasa pressed him and he was catching the knife on his forearms, wrists, slits of red opening up in full bloom, and Eren was backing up. The pain was like an old memory. He raised his arm to block and the knife went right through it and Eren slammed his fist into Mikasa's jaw. She careened backwards, her head snapping to the side. The knife was still stuck in his arm. He tore it out and tossed it behind him. Steam was already closing his wounds.
Mikasa rotated her jaw experimentally. Her eyes were still blank and full of nothing. Eren raised his fists again and then suddenly Mikasa went for the knife. She grabbed it and there was a wrongness, she was too close, in terrible proximity to him and the knife came down. Eren looked down and saw that Mikasa had finished the tear in his arm and there was only a stump now. The severed hand was on the floor. And as his arm began to grow a budding purple flower pod, the hand on the ground began to grow a body. Bone emerged and molten muscle strangled the bone and red meat raced along a bucking skeleton and skin unraveled over muscle and there was a naked newborn thing crouched on the ground. It was Eren but younger and older Eren watched him grow, teenager, adult, and then old man, wasting away to ashes. Eren knew he was dead the moment he was born.
Mikasa turned the knife over in her palm. Eren backed out of the room, watching her approach leisurely like a predator in a hunt that was already over.
Eren was down the stairs and past the bodies and out the door, plunging into the woods. The trees stood like tall men. He ran into the cleansing rain. He lept over roots and small rivers and stumbled through the narrow trees and kept his hurt arm close to his chest. The rain was blinding him. He was drowning. He couldn't run anymore. He fell to his knees and they were submerged in a puddle. He watched his hazy reflection like murky thoughts mourn what was lost in the cabin and what could never be found again. Not without a candle. He had no candle so he would be lost in these woods forever.
A branch broke. Eren whipped his head up. Young Mikasa had stepped out of the forest.
"You saved me," she said. Her nightgown had hypnotic purple ivy patterns on it.
"That doesn't make up for all the times I hurt you," Eren replied. "It doesn't even begin too." But still, he had to try. He reached into his back pocket and grabbed the letter. It was somehow dry. He gave it to her and watched her eyes move as she read it. The rain beat them into the ground and Eren felt like he was sprouting roots, entombing himself into the wet earth.
There was a sudden crashing in the undergrowth. They both looked up. She was coming. They were nearly out of time. Young Mikasa put her eyes back on the page and read faster. The rustling was getting closer. Rain came down harder like the sky was falling. Finally, young Mikasa looked up and smiled.
"I forgive you," she said just as the older Mikasa broke through the tree line.
The Changed was sucked into a tiny pinprick, condensed by wind, and it was a small black dot in a field of white and then it was expanding, floating upwards in a sea, emerging as a wet black blob. A ring of sickly green grew from the sides like multiplying bacteria until the round blob was surrounded. An eyelid slid over the black pupil and Eren was blinking. He was back, standing on the rainless side of the ghost circle and Mikasa was just inside the perimeter. She still had the knife.
"You took her away from me," Mikasa said, still talking as though sleepwalking.
Eren backed up– right into a soldier.
"Hey," said the night watchman. "There's a curfew being enforced–" his throat was opened by Mikasa's knife. Eren watched his tongue click a couple times, and then he fell. Eren caught him by the armpits and laid him on the ground, putting his hands over the deep mangled canyon of his throat, trying to staunch the flow. Mikasa had collapsed too. The blood reached the streets and kept going.
Red, red, red.
###
Captain Levi was sitting on a chair at the mouth of the stairs, covered in shadow like slime as though swallowed and spit back up by the gullet of the dungeon. Eren saluted.
"How is she?" Eren asked.
"She's awake and lucid, if that's what you're asking," Levi said. "The watchman, however, is dead. It seems all Ackermans kill in a similar manner."
"Can I see her?"
Levi crossed his arms. "I've had time to ponder the nature of your relationship with her."
"The nature of our relationship is private, Captain," Eren said.
"There is no privacy in the Survey Corps. Whatever secrets you have belong to your superior officers for the betterment of humanity."
Eren waited, standing stiffly at attention. He felt the same as when Armin had confiscated his knife.
"It seems to me that one of you must be in pain and the other one must feel responsible for that pain in order to bear the weight of each other's suffering."
"I am responsible, Captain." Eren smiled suddenly. His incisors felt sharp against his gums. "Do I look like I'm trying to hide it anymore? That I'm not acknowledging it?"
Levi studied him. Then he sat back in his chair. "Go see her."
Eren descended the steps and came to his old cell. Mikasa was sitting with her head in her lap, curled against the wall. Her nightgown was twisted around her. She looked younger than the Mikasa from the Changed. She looked up when his shadow passed over her.
"I remember the cabin now," she said.
"I'm sorry this happened," Eren said. "I should be the one locked up."
"Would you stop apologizing, please?" Mikasa said. "It was the Founder's power. Not you."
"That's–" Eren's mouth snapped shut but then he forced himself to keep going. "There's a part of me that is relieved that this was the outcome. I'm not alone now."
"Do you mean to say I'm irredeemable? That we're similar in that way?" Mikasa asked.
"No! No, of course not. I mean that we're both a–" Eren hesitated. "A victim of something beyond our control."
"Was your impulse something beyond your control?"
"It felt like it," Eren admitted.
"To what extent is something beyond our control? Aren't we just our impulses?"
"You might be right." The impulse to draw blood and to bleed. "What did you mean when you said, 'you took her away from me?'"
"I don't remember saying that," Mikasa said. "If I had to guess, you're an irrevocable part of my past. I suppose a part of me associates you with my losses as much as I do with finding a new family."
"Oh."
Mikasa brushed her bangs away so she could see him better.
"Are you real?" she asked.
"Yes," Eren said.
"I don't believe you," Mikasa said. She outstretched an arm that was pale like a moonlit night flower stem. Eren kneeled down, clasped his hand in hers through the bars, felt her rub at his pulse, closed her eyes as if that soothed her.
"I'm real," he told her.
Mikasa hummed. "I'm still not sure," she murmured. Eren put his forehead to her hand.
"I'll say it as many times as I need to," he promised.
"Okay," Mikasa said.
Eren lowered himself to the ground. "Mikasa?"
"Hm?"
"What would you be if not a soldier?"
Mikasa still had her eyes closed. She took so long to answer that Eren thought she had fallen asleep.
"When my parents were still alive," she finally said, "we lived off the land. We were provided for. I would not mind living that life again."
"That sounds nice."
"What about you?"
"Me? I can't imagine not being a soldier."
"I know."
Eren frowned. "Why did you ask then?"
"I wanted to see if your answer had changed," Mikasa said.
After he left the dungeon, he could feel Levi's eyes on him. His palm itched. He went upstairs and into the boy's barracks. He felt under his pillow before remembering that Armin had his knife. He tore apart Armin's side of the room before remembering that Mikasa had his knife.
###
There was a body part forest. A putrid explosion of organs decorated the trees like the entrails of a murdered god. A pair of gray lungs laid flat on a sunning rock like a flayed fish. Thick tubes of intestines wrapped a trunk. A spinal cord was scattered about like white pills. Blood soaked the soil red. Near an incline in the forest, a giant decaying body pitched sideways into the ground, hands clawing at the dirt as though trying to bury this disgrace of a corpse.
A swollen heart like a glistening pomegranate throbbed deeply. The throbbing slowed and died. A new beat started up, a tinny rapid pulsing, a miniature heart. It quickened and quickened until Eren burst out of the nape of the Attack titan. Steamed hissed. Scar tissue held him in place. He clawed his way out. Under his eyes was exposed burning muscle and his throat was tenderized meat. He gasped, exposing a row of skeletal teeth, bottom lip missing. His uniform was half burnt off. He ripped through connective strands and slid limply down the nape of the fourth body of the Attack titan.
Get up, he told himself. Get up and make another one. Get up and make things right.
But he couldn't. He lay there, staring up at the goblin mask of his titan. Suddenly, the wind picked up, carrying away eddying plumes of hot steam. Eren's pupil split and he was stuck between two planes of reality; he was stuck halfway between here and the Changed.
A wet squelching noise; Eren looked over to see a red strand trailing up to his titan's nape. A figure emerged. A boy. Twelve year-old Eren reared back and slid down the body, looking down at Eren. He was scowling, a tendril of veiny purple and red pipes emerging from the small of his back. He was a puppet.
"Get up," young Eren said. "What about all that talk of enduring it, of saving you? Did I do that for nothing?"
Another umbilical cord sprang out, dragging ten year-old Eren into the scene.
"You're being stupid," said younger Eren, "hurting yourself doesn't help Mikasa."
"Go away," Eren muttered. His throat was ruined; it was hard to talk.
"Don't we love her?" younger Eren said. "Is this what your love looks like?"
"What if it is?" Eren rasped. "What if this is all that I'm capable of?"
"I just started bleeding," young Eren said. "Does that mean I'm a girl?"
"No," Eren said.
"Then this is not all that you're capable of. Now, get up, soldier." Young Eren kicked him in the ribs and Eren rolled over, moaning.
"Get up!" younger Eren yelled. "You can't have died without doing anything with your life!"
Eren put his hands over his raw blistered ears and put his scarred face in the dirt. He stayed like this while his titan sizzled and loosed steam.
Autumn leaves fell and touched his skin. A sudden wind came in, sending shivers of leaves from the trees and carried the steam away like white cumbersome clouds. It was sweet and warm and smelled like fresh bread. It brought the sweetest ache to Eren's center, melting him. There was a light touch of his chin. Eren gasped, not daring to open his eyes. There was a press of forehead to forehead. There was the faintest kiss there like the brush of a mouse whiskers. Eren trembled. He could not open his eyes. Don't open your eyes.
Hi baby, said the touch. You're strong and you're brave and I miss you dearly.
The touch was fading. It had one last message to give him: It's not your fault. And it was gone.
Eren lay there for a long time, long after his titan had disappeared. Finally he spoke to the empty forest.
"Mom?"
And there was no answer.