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“Mikasa,” Eren whispers, “What am I to you?”
Family, he remembers her saying, her cheeks bright red and the word tripping off her tongue, You’re...You’re family, Eren.
“Everything,” she answers, her cheeks flaming and her voice trembling, staring up at him with shining, teary eyes that reflect the stars. “You’re everything to me, Eren.”
And he doesn’t…No, that’s…that’s not right. She’s…She’s supposed to reject him, to tell him she doesn’t feel the same when she really does, so he can push her away in his childish resentment he doesn’t really mean, use it as fuel for I’ve always—
“I’ve always loved you,” she looks down at her feet, her hands lifting to her neck to raise a scarf she left in their luggage because of the heat, “Ever since we were kids, actually. I thought…I thought you knew, because, well, because everyone knew, you should hear the things Sasha says sometimes-”
“Sasha?” he breathes, not comprehending. Sasha is going to die, is dead already, is bleeding out in the bowels of an airship while the little Marleyan girl who shot her cocks her rifle and aims for his jugular—
“Um,” Mikasa awkwardly transitions her hands from touching an invisible scarf into rubbing the back of her neck, her callused palms scraping against her delicate skin. She was so upset when her hair started getting caught in the new ODM gear, pouting when Levi sat her down in front of a mirror and took scissors to her knotted ends, but she lit up the next time she saw Armin and his new hair, laughing because they matched while Eren had to start tying his back. “She teases me about you, whenever I tease her about Niccolo, says I should just tell you how I feel, so I am: You’re…You’re everything to me. I love you. I-”
Eren closes the gap between them in an instant, kissing her with everything he has. She gasps against his mouth, frozen, before she kisses him back, clinging to him like she’s afraid he’s going to disappear. He tastes salt on her tongue, and pulls away for an instant to feel tears on his cheeks that match the ones spilling down hers.
“Run away with me,” he says, breathless and thinking of a cabin in the mountains. “Run away with me, we can be together-”
“Eren,” she starts to step back but he holds her close, staring into her confused eyes and trying to make it all clear.
“I only have four years left,” he begs, hating how she sobers at the reminder, desperate for her to understand, “I want to spend them with you and only you.”
“What about-” she looks back towards the Azumabito estate, where Connie’s laugh echoes through an open window. “What about Armin and the others? What about Paradis? Don’t you want to-”
“All I want is you, Mikasa,” he can’t help it, kissing her again, knowing he can do it more than just once before his end. “Please, be with me. Let’s go home.”
And that word, home, has her softening. “Home?”
“I know just the place,” he promises, half-crazed with his desire for her to follow him like she always has. “You’ll love it there, I know you will. Be with me. I love you, too.”
Mikasa stares at him, and Eren stares back, wishing he could peek inside of her head to see what she’s thinking. She looks back at the house again but doesn’t pull away.
Finally, she meets his eyes. She smiles. She kisses him.
“All right,” she agrees, “Let’s-”
He’s running before she can even finish her sentence, dragging her along and grinning at how she screech-laughs his name. They sprint right past the old foreign man carrying a tray of drinks, not hearing him ask in his language if they want to come into his tent as thanks for saving his son.
—
Mikasa dozes on his shoulder, her face smushed into the fabric of his coat as their train chugs through the night. He doesn’t blame her, squeezing her fingers where they’re loosely wrapped around his palm. They’ve been traveling all day touring Marley, had only gotten to sit down after reaching the Azumabito estate, but look where that got them.
Eren wonders how long it’ll take everyone to realize that they’re gone. Armin will notice first, because Armin is perceptive like that, but it will be Levi or Hange who figures out that they’re deserting. It’s a crime punishable by death in some cases or decades of prison in others, though he doubts if they were to find them right now that they would get anything more than a harsh kick to the shins and a scolding.
For now, though, he watches the other passengers on the train, admiring their nice clothes and their strange bags. A toddler stares at him with wide eyes from across the bench, kicking its feet, and instead of picturing its little face being crushed beneath the endless march of steaming Colossals he sticks out his tongue and crosses his eyes, hellbent on making it laugh. It giggles into its mother’s sleeve, and the tired-looking woman gives him a small, grateful smile before going back to her book.
“Mikasa,” he gently nudges his shoulder, jostling her as the train slows. “Mikasa, wake up. It’s our stop.”
“Stop?” she mumbles, blinking awake and squinting out the window into the dark. “We have a stop?”
“The end of the line,” he explains, helping her to her feet. “We have to get off, there’s nowhere else to go.”
“Oh,” she yawns, clutching his hand, letting him pull her where he wants to go. He’s almost grateful for it, reminded of when they were kids and he would drag her every which way around Shiganshina. “Where are we? Are we still in Marley?”
“Barely,” he smiles, leading her out onto the platform. The air is cold this far up north, and he remembers the snowy mountains of their winter training well, especially how she shivered in the snow. He lifts his hand to her neck to conjure her scarf out of the sand, to surprise her with his thoughtfulness, and—
Nothing happens. His fingers rest against the bare skin of her goosebump-laden throat.
“Eren?” she frowns. “What’s wrong?”
Right. Right. This is real. This isn’t the Paths Zeke was going to tell him about at the hospital. Eren is alive and Mikasa is running with him and they’re together. He’s her everything. She’s the heart pounding in his chest.
“Your scarf,” he says, feeling her shiver under his touch, “we forgot it, and it’s cold.”
She gasps, her hands flying to her neck, and she pats at the empty air that the scarf usually occupies with a rising panic on her face, her lips twisting and her eyes slowly going wide.
“What? No, I-I thought I had it, I-” she rubs her palms just below the sides of her jaw, like she’s trying to inject their warmth into her skin. Her voice trembles as she continues, “I never leave it, I have to get it, I—Oh God, Eren, what are we even doing-”
“Hey,” he hushes her gently, hugging her and rubbing his hands up and down her arms in an attempt to warm her up, “It’s okay, I’ll buy you another.”
“That’s not the point,” she insists, what feels like tears wetting where she buries her face in his neck, “It’s the-the memories, the feelings I have tied to it. I never go anywhere without it and I just left it behind like it’s nothing but a-”
“So we’ll make new memories,” he murmurs in her ear, “and you’ll feel new feelings. Armin will take care of the old one in your place, or Sasha will. He knows how to wash it and she knows how to stitch it up.”
“How are you so okay about this?” she demands, and he’s never heard her sound so hysterical over something so small in the grand scheme of things.
Eren can’t help his laugh. He tells her, “All that matters to me is that you’re here, that we’re doing this together. If you want to go back and face everyone just to get your scarf, I’ll go with you. If you want to keep moving forward, I’ll follow. But the next train back isn’t until tomorrow evening, we need to stay regardless, and I want to get you out of this cold.”
Mikasa sniffles into the collar of his shirt, her teeth chattering in his ear. He waits, letting her think it out, and is relieved when she decides, “I’ll get another one.”
“All right,” he smiles, starting to walk in the direction of the other passengers towards what looks like a map of the region, even though he already knows where he’s going. “You can even pick the color.”
“No,” she shakes her head, “I like the red.”
His smile widens. A red scarf it is, then.
—
The inn they find offers rooms for cheap, but the quality of the room they’re given is higher than anything they’ve seen on Paradis.
“I think it’s because they rarely get tourists all the way up here,” Eren says while Mikasa marvels at the softness of the sheets, running her hands over the plush material of the blanket in the bright light of the bulbs hanging from the ceiling, brought to life by the switch next to the door. He drops their coats on the chair that sits at the desk in the corner of the mid-sized room, all there is the bed in the center with end tables on either side. He inspects the attached bathroom, finding it passable aside from the spots of rust on the outside of the tub, and sits next to her on the edge of the bed. “It’s a hell of a commute from the capital. They’re desperate for business to keep the lights on, so they give high quality things for less money so we tell our friends to come visit.”
“Levi would like these crisp corners,” Mikasa tugs the blanket free from the confines of the mattress, running her fingers over the cushy underside. “Are you tired?”
“No,” he shakes his head. “Are you?”
She shakes hers, fixated on stroking against the blanket’s grain to write their names in the dark streaks her fingertips leave behind. “I might take a bath, if that’s all right.”
“Of course,” he nods, clearing his throat, “Are you hungry? I’ll find something for us to eat while you’re in there.”
She smiles, hesitating before she leans in to ghost a kiss over his cheek. When she pulls back, she ducks her head like she’s embarrassed. “That, um, that sounds great.”
Eren melts in the face of her shyness. They’ve done a lot of emotions today, more than he’s sure Mikasa is accustomed to in such a short timeframe, so he can’t hold it against her for taking time to adjust, for wanting space to process like he knows she has yet to do. He knows he’s acting different from his usual self, knows his suddenly touchy behavior is disorienting for her, especially when she doesn’t have four years of possibly false future memories rattling around in her brain.
The Mikasa he saw was affectionate, in her own way. She would always hug his arm when they walked, leaning her head on his shoulder, but she never kissed him in public unless he initiated it. She was always knitting him sweaters, fixing his shirts if there was even the slightest sign of the fabric tearing, and she made his mother’s soup whenever he got a headache from maintaining the illusion she wasn’t aware of.
The Mikasa in front of him, the one scampering into the bathroom to escape the heavy weight of his love, hasn’t been thawed from the violence of their lives just yet. She still thinks there’s a Titan around every corner, that someone is going to burst into the room to try and kill him. There’s no security like there was in the cabin, no peace, but he’s going to give it to her. For real this time. It’s what she deserves after everything he’s done.
Eren gets back on his feet and starts the hunt for food.
—
There’s a small, bustling town at the bottom of the hill that leads to where he knows their valley lies.
“It’s so peaceful here,” Mikasa says, smiling as a group of children run past them in the streets, laughing as they play tag. “This is where we’re going to live?”
“At the top of that hill, just beyond those trees,” Eren points to the thick oaks that line the crest of green. “There’s a clearing that’s a perfect place to build a house we’ll both love, nice and quiet. It’ll be just the two of us up there.”
He leans down and brushes his lips over the scar beneath her eye, laughing when she flinches away and blushes, ducking her head to hide from eyes that aren’t on them. Here, in this town in the mountains on the northern edge of Marley, there are no newspapers that speak of anything beyond who said what at the latest town hall meeting, the news that troops are finally returning home a footnote in the news that the annual harvest is meant to be bountiful.
“You’ve gotta get used to this, Mikasa,” he tells her, taking her hand, “I want everyone here to know that I’m yours.”
She bites her lip, squeezing his fingers with a fraction of her infinite strength, and motions to a building where an old woman is crocheting out front, the sign above the door labeling it a clothing store. “We need more clothes, then. All we have are the outfits we’re wearing.”
Eren lets her change the subject, following along as she tugs him into the store. The money Kiyomi Azumabito gave them will last in a town like this, where the prices of everything is low enough that they could possibly pass as rich tourists just passing through on their way to see the countryside. The woman at the register perks up at the sight of them, her eyes roving over their nice clothes, and he smiles at how she smooths a hand over her hair like she’s trying to impress them.
He glances at the different clothing offered, taking a liking to the long-sleeved shirts and thick coats, and he notices Mikasa’s eyes lingering on the long dresses and tightly-knit sweaters.
“Look,” he murmurs, getting her attention and pointing to a rack by the door, “Scarves.”
She gasps, practically running over to feel the material of the different scarves offered, sorting through the colors until she finds the array of red cloth. He sneaks the dresses she was looking at into his arms and drops them on the check-out counter before joining her, happy that it seems like she’s chosen a winner.
The red scarf in her hands looks exactly like the one she left behind. The only thing missing from the strands are all of the stitches she’s made from ten years of wear and tear, but he has every fiber of her old scarf memorized. If she wants, he can make it look exactly the same.
“Is that the one?” he asks, ready to buy it without looking at the price.
“Can you…” her eyes flick to the woman at the register, who’s acting like she isn’t watching their every move because they’re the only customers in the store. She lowers her voice and repeats, “Can you wrap it around me? I…I want to see if it feels right.”
Again and again, he had promised, shielding her from Dina Fritz’s outstretched hand. As many times as you want.
Gentle, he takes it from her hands, rubbing his thumb over the light, almost scratchy material of a scarf that’s never been worn. It’ll soften over time from rubbing against her skin, worn down until it’s nothing but a silky circle keeping her safe from the cold, and he doesn’t realize how badly he’s missed the sight of her in red until the possibility of seeing it again is staring him in the face.
“Here,” he loops it around her neck, feeling the memory of his nine year old self rise to the surface when he asks, “It’s warm, right?”
Mikasa’s eyes shine as she looks up at him, pulling the edge of her new scarf up to cover her watery smile. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
—
In his memories of the future, this place, this time, is a dream he creates to tell her his final goodbye. It is her idea to run, not his, and she doesn’t remember building this house because he is the one that conjured it from nothing, crafting it from sand like the Founder builds their Titans. He sits her on the bench and wakes her up from a nap and tells her to, Forget about me, Mikasa, be free.
Now, they build the cabin together. Eren chops the wood and Mikasa hauls it to the clearing they’ve claimed as their own, organizing it in piles based on which part of the house it’ll get used for. He promised himself he wouldn’t shift, not unless she asked him to, because he knows that the sight of him tearing into the flesh of his hand with his teeth still frightens her and that the lightning makes her flinch.
I don’t like it when you bleed, she had confessed years ago, high on the pain pills Armin had snuck into her food after she broke her ribs and refused medicine, wincing every time she breathed. Her pupils had been huge, almost eclipsing the gray of her iris, and her hand had lazily wobbled in the air before it landed on the curve between his index finger and thumb. And I hate the sound the lightning makes when it lands. Reminds me of thunder.
He couldn’t make it any easier for her, then, his transformations always loud, always violent, like him in so many ways, but now he doesn’t ever have to shift again. There is no war here, no battles, no blood. Only them and their house and the mountains.
“We should head back into town tomorrow,” Mikasa says, curled against him in the grass beneath the stars. He hasn’t held her like this, safe in his arms, since they were kids and she woke up screaming from nightmares of her parents’ killers. She pulls the edge of her new scarf up to cover her mouth. “We need to buy a bed, and things to cook with.”
“And books,” Eren kisses the top of her head, “for when Armin finds us and needs something to read.”
Because Armin is going to find them, one way or another, no matter how long it takes him. If there’s one thing the Scout Regiment can do, it’s find Eren when he’s been lost, but this time no one’s taken him. There are no tracks for Sasha to follow, no one for Levi and Hange to interrogate. He smiles at the thought of Jean mourning the loss of Mikasa’s presence, seeing her face every day, and thinks of what Connie will say to cheer him up.
Something along the lines of there being plenty of fish in the sea, he imagines, an expression that Niccolo taught them just before they left for Marley.
Jean will find someone else to pine after, will probably have women throwing themselves at him as he rises in rank, and soon he’ll forget all about his crush on Mikasa. If the Scouts can save the world and find this place before his time is up, maybe they can…what did Historia call it? ‘Double date’?.
“What do we do if Marley attacks?” Mikasa asks, her voice small. She plays with his fingers, running the tips of hers over the bones in his hand. “If we read the paper one day and see they’ve launched an invasion into Paradis?”
In the future he thought he knew, the world only ever invaded after he made a mess of Liberio. Willy Tybur might have struck the match with his play but it was Eren destroying a residential building with his shifting that tossed it onto the kindling, forcing his friends—forcing Mikasa—to save him once more. If the Founding Titan isn’t on Paradis, there’s no threat of the walls ever coming down. The only reason the world would have to strike is if Armin’s avenue of peace talks ever went sideways, but Eren has faith in his best friend’s conviction. If there’s anyone who can talk his way out of the end of the world, it’s Armin.
“We don’t know how the Eldian conference went,” he answers, thinking of the meeting they were supposed to attend in secret last week. In his memories it goes poorly, spurring on his decision to abandon everyone, but in his memories Mikasa told him he was family. He watched her get drunk and let her fall asleep on top of him, Armin snuggled into his side with rosy cheeks and something called vodka on his breath. Anything is possible now that he’s her everything. For all he knows, in this version of the story, there’s no need for Willy Tybur to put on his performance now that Eren isn’t a looming, present danger. “And it’s not like we’re cut off from them. We can go back at any time.”
He doesn’t have to look at her to know that she isn’t ready to return to the chaos of their lives just yet. He isn’t, either, and while he doesn’t intend for this to be a couple weeks of vacation, if she says she wants to go back he’ll follow her. Of course he will.
“I love you,” she says, kissing his knuckles.
“I love you, too,” he replies, staring up at the stars, and that’s that.
—
The cabin looks exactly like it did in their long dream.
It’s laid out the same, with a bench beside the door and a picnic table in the grass for them to eat outside, the living room just as you enter and the kitchen to its right, their bedroom on its left, and an outhouse in the back for bathing.
“Our home,” Mikasa breathes in awe, running her fingers over the leather of the couch she carried up the hill, “We…We have a home, Eren.”
“Yeah,” he hugs her from behind, eyeing the bookshelf he built and kissing her cheek, wondering if it’s too childish for him to ask her to read stories to him like she did when they were small and the words made his eyes glaze over. He wants to spend the next four years with his head in her lap and her voice in his ears. “Yeah, we do.”
—
He wakes to the sting of a sword biting into his neck, choking on his half-bitten tongue.
“Eren?” Mikasa is sitting up next to him in bed, fixing a tear in her new scarf by candlelight. She sets her things aside on the end-table and reaches for him, frowning when he flinches away from her touch. “What is it? What’s-”
“Sorry,” he snatches her hand back, kissing her palm. “Sorry, I…It was just a bad dream. It was nothing. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not nothing,” she coaxes him back to laying down and he pillows his head in her lap, facing her stomach to hide from the candle’s flame. “You’ve been having nightmares for weeks. Are you worried about the island?”
Yes, because he’s abandoned the future that was meant to happen, and who knows what that’s going to change about the outcome. No, because Armin and the others can handle whatever Marley throws at them. He’s already seen it for himself, the world has nothing that can take out the Colossal when it’s controlled by his best friend’s never-ending stamina and backed up by a healthy, whole Captain Levi and a Beast Titan who believes his little brother is on his side.
Tears burn his eyes and a sob claws its way out of his throat.
“In another life, I end the world,” he confesses, the words spilling out of him in desperate gasps for air, “I saw it, when I kissed Historia’s hand after Shiganshina. I was supposed to use the Rumbling and wipe out eighty percent of humanity, I was going to, but then you said that you loved me. You weren’t supposed to say that. Everything’s changed, and I don’t know what the path forward is anymore.”
Mikasa’s fingers stutter to a stop, frozen on the surface of his scalp, her eyes burning on his temple like she’s trying to see inside of his mind. He would let her if she asked, rip his head open like an axe splits wood and offer her his brain like a peasant offers God prayer.
“What do you mean?” her voice is steady but her body shakes. “What do you mean I wasn’t supposed to love you?”
“You weren’t supposed to say it,” he corrects, squeezing his eyes shut, not strong enough to look at the shattered expression he knows is on her face. “You were supposed to say that I was family. We were supposed to attend the conference with everyone, and it was going to spell the end for Paradis. I was going to disappear and then send you all letters after months of silence, asking you to come help me raid Liberio with Zeke.”
“Liberio?”
Right, she doesn’t know, has never needed to know- “The town where Reiner, Bertholdt, and Annie are from. Another place surrounded by walls.”
Mikasa swallows. Slowly, her fingers resume their dance through his hair.
“Would you do it now?” she asks, just above a whisper, “If Zeke found us and offered his hand?”
Yes, he thinks, the answer coming to him in a heartbeat, Anything to save Paradis, to keep the world out, to break the curse and ensure you and Armin and everyone else can live long, happy lives. I would die by your hand a thousand times before I let someone hurt us.
“No,” he lies into the fabric of her shirt, thinks of his father begging for answers and You started this story, didn’t you? “No, of course not.”
—
He wakes again, this time to a little girl standing at the foot of their bed.
Eren stares at her, frozen, the only sound in the room Mikasa’s breathing on the other side of the mattress. He can’t reach out to shake her awake, and he can’t open his mouth to call her name.
The little girl is dressed in filthy rags and carries a bucket full of sand in her fists. Her footsteps are silent as she rounds the bed and stands over Mikasa, placing the bucket on top of her books. Grains of sand whisper against the sleek covers as they fall from the wooden rim.
Don’t touch her, his mind screams, his Titan humming under his skin. He moves to tuck his tongue between his teeth, readying to bite, but his jaw locks the moment his brain sends the signal. Don’t you dare-
The girl’s eyes are closed, shrouded in darkness like the rest of her. She opens her mouth and shows him her missing tongue.
Who are you, he asks with his eyes, Who are you, who are you, who-
He blinks and she’s sitting between them on the sheets, hugging her knees close to her chest. Her head is still turned towards Mikasa, watching her back rise and fall in a slow, steady rhythm. His gaze catches on her small hands, the indents of the bucket’s handle reddened, raw pockets on her palms like she’s been holding it for hours, maybe even days.
She turns her head, meeting his eyes through her closed lids, and he feels a tugging in the back of his brain, like someone has lit a candle in a library to better see the pages of a forbidden picture book showing the world beyond the walls.
Centuries, Eren understands, almost hears her say through lips that never move. Two thousand years.
The Founder Ymir tilts her head. His Titan punches at the surface of his skin, buzzing, wanting out out out-
“Eren?” Mikasa’s voice is a special kind of soft when she’s just waking up. She shifts, rolling over and squinting at him through the dark, her hair sticking up in the back and bunched over her eyes. “You’re breathing hard, is everything all right?”
I can’t move, he wants to tell her, can’t tell her, I can’t move can’t you see the child in our bed-
Mikasa’s hand passes through Ymir like she’s nothing but a ghost, landing on his shoulder with the weight and warmth of someone alive alive alive-
“Oh, Eren,” she whispers, shuffling close and pulling him into her arms, “This hasn’t happened since after Annie went in her crystal.”
She thinks this is his sleep paralysis? Of course she would, he has no way to tell her that it’s the Founder restricting all of his movement, all he can do is stare at where Ymir looks at Mikasa with something like curiosity on her face and pray she doesn’t strike. Could she show her the Rumbling? Could she show her the version of this place where he was pulling the strings?
Ymir’s gaze shifts to him and his mouth is opening and he’s asking, “Would you kill me?”
Mikasa frowns, her eyebrows furrowing. “What?”
“You’re mine,” The little girl says in his voice, through his voice, his tongue forming the words against his will, “If I flattened the world, would you kill me?”
“Eren,” Mikasa pulls away, blinking down at him like he’s a complete stranger, “what are you-”
“Would you?” Ymir stares at the back of Mikasa’s head with something like desperation. It translates as a tremor in Eren’s voice when she demands, “Would you kill me if I wiped out eighty percent of humanity?”
Mikasa winces then cries out, clutching her head. Inside of himself Eren lurches, wanting to ask her what’s wrong but instead repeating, “Would you?”
What are you doing to her? he screams, What are you-
“Yes,” she sobs, fists tangled in her tousled hair, blood dripping from both of her nostrils and tears streaming down her cheeks, “If there was no other way, if you wouldn’t listen to reason, then yes.”
His teeth click as his mouth snaps shut. Mikasa curls in on herself, hunching over as she holds her head, and over the curve of her shaking shoulders the Founder Ymir is smiling, kicking her feet like she’s just been told the best news of her life.
“Thank you,” she says through Eren’s lips. “That was the answer I needed.”
His Titan stops begging for release, going silent under his skin. Ymir reaches over and strokes his cheek like he’s a friend she’s never going to see again.
“I like the original version of the story,” she says to him, and he sees the Walls coming down and the Colossals marching and a sea of red red red as Armin’s fist collides with his cheek- “but I think you’re better off with this one.”
She kisses the top of Mikasa’s head like a mother apologizing to her child and all at once Mikasa stops crying, going still as her hands lower from her head to reveal that her nose is no longer bleeding, her skin clean like it never was. Her eyes are hazy, half-lidded, and he watches as she, almost in a trance, resettles in the sheets beside him and drops back to sleep like nothing ever happened.
“She won’t remember this when she wakes,” Ymir adds, and in between blinks she’s standing by the door of their bedroom, hands empty and eyes open, glistening with unshed tears, “Thank her for me, Eren Jaeger. After two thousand years, I’m finally free.”
She fades in a gust of invisible wind, the only sign of her ever being there the bucket of sand that lingers for a moment longer before it follows suit.
—
He’s making dinner one night and cuts his finger open while slicing vegetables.
“Ow,” he hisses to himself, willing the wound to steam shut. This happens way more than it should, if not for his powers he would probably be fingerless by-
It doesn’t close. He continues bleeding onto the cutting board.
“Eren!” Mikasa gasps, picking up his hand and wrapping his finger in a towel, “You cut yourself again? Why haven’t you healed it?”
“I…can’t,” he answers, furrowing his brows in concentration, willing the lightning bottled up in his body to knit his skin back together, but there’s no rush of heat to his hand. There’s no crackle in his ears before his Titan body forms around him in a destructive shell. “I can’t heal it. I can’t shift, either.”
After two thousand years, I’m finally free.
Is that what the Founder meant? Has…Has the Power of the Titans disappeared from the world like he saw after kissing Historia’s hand? But how? He knows it was Mikasa’s choices, but-
Would you kill me if I wiped out eighty percent of humanity? Ymir asked with his tongue.
Yes, Mikasa had sobbed, If there was no other way, if you wouldn’t listen to reason, then yes.
“What do you mean?” she asks, panic in her voice, “What do you mean you can’t?”
He tries to explain it to her, the appearance of the Founder and the questions she asked and the curse that was supposed to end in his blood spilling across his own Titan’s tongue, but all that he can manage that doesn’t sound like insane babbling is, “The Titans are gone from the world, Mikasa. I’m not going to die in four years.”
He watches the information hit her, sees her process it as she stares at him only to gasp moments later, covering her mouth as tears spill from the corners of her eyes. He hugs her and doesn’t protest when she hugs him back with all of her strength, grunting at the feel of his ribs creaking under her biceps as she lifts him off his feet, promising to get him whatever he wants to eat for dessert.
—
The cover of every newspaper that reaches them is an announcement that Marley’s Warriors have lost their ability to assume their Titan forms, that the Armored, Jaw, Cart, and Beast have effectively been retired and sent home to their families. People wonder what Marley’s military is going to do now that they don’t have their Titans to back up their lack of technological advancement, and there are murmurs that the invasion of Paradis has been postponed.
Eren wishes, distantly, that he could see Hange’s face once they realize that their experiments with the Colossal are no longer an option to fill their time. He wonders, especially, what Armin is thinking.
—
They’re cuddling on the couch, Mikasa leaning back against his chest and following along as he reads a book of fairy tales, the crackling of a fire in the fireplace the only light in the room, when she places her fingers on the page to catch his attention.
“Hm?” he closes the book, looking down at where she’s tilted her head back to look him in the eye. “What is it?”
“I…” she sits up, turning around to face him, plucking the book out of his grasp and placing it on the coffee table beside them. She doesn’t meet his eyes, staring at her lap where she fiddles with her hands. “I want to…”
“What, Mikasa?” Eren prompts, gentle, curling a finger under her chin to tilt her head up so he can see her face. “What do you want to do?”
She kisses him, then, and he’s taken aback when she’s the first to offer her tongue, swiping it across his bottom lip and making him chase for more. He pulls her into his lap, holding her close as he deepens the kiss, relishing in her broken, frustrated whine before she breaks away to breathe.
Eren grins at the sight of her so thoroughly undone, having never seen her so flustered that she has to remove her scarf, which she folds and puts on top of his book. He repeats, “What do you want to do?”
Mikasa bites her lip. He wants to do it for her, to tuck it between his teeth and never let her go, to kiss her until they’re both gasping for air, lightheaded from the lack of oxygen. She’s warm and heavy on his lap, a solid weight that shifts as she tries to get comfortable but making him anything but as a familiar tightness forms between his legs.
He wants her, he always has, but now that he has forever to be with her it’s never been more of a prevalent thought. He needs her, needs to lick the sweat from her skin, to feel her nails dig into his back as he pushes inside of her, to listen to her whisper instructions in his ear as he learns how to best help her reach her climax.
“I want to be with you,” Mikasa whispers, kissing him again, settling her full weight on his lap, and it takes everything in him not to move beneath her, to see if she feels this pull, too. “I…I want to feel your hands.”
Eren gives her his hands, surrendering to her control. His breathing is heavy when he asks, “Feel my hands where?”
All of the blood in his body rushes south when she places one hand on her chest, her face a bright red that nearly matches the color of her scarf. She tries to duck her head again, to hide behind her growing hair, but again he doesn’t let her keeping her eyes on his as he kisses her a third time.
“I want to be with you, too,” he tells her, the words heavy and awkward on his tongue despite the way I love you rolls off with ease, “I…I want to make you feel as good as I feel whenever I see your smile.”
Eren has never had a way with words, can only ever get across his true meaning with his fists, but when Mikasa places his other hand over her heart and he feels it pounding against his palm all he wants to do is tell her that she isn’t dreaming, that he isn’t going anywhere, that they have the rest of their lives to be together like this. All he wants to do is hold her like she’s the most precious thing in his world and tell her that everything is going to be all right.
“Let’s go to the bedroom,” she breathes, bursting into surprised laughter when he picks her up and carries her there, her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms clinging to his neck as he kisses her again.
—
Instead of declaring war, Willy Tybur offers Paradis Island a chance to send ambassadors to speak at an international conference in Liberio.
Eren reads the news and laughs in delight at the photograph of Historia and Kiyomi Azumabito shaking hands, finally going public with the island’s connections to the world outside the walls, contrasted with one of Tybur spreading his arms with a smile at a charity banquet. It seems without the threat of the Rumbling backing them up and forcing themselves into a bloody corner, Paradis has taken a more peaceful avenue in approaching the world’s hatred of Eldians.
Armin ends two thousand years of war with a simple speech that begins with a simple question: “Have you ever had an argument with your spouse?”
They watch him, hiding in the back of the public crowd, hats pulled low on their heads to cover most of their faces as they listen to the world’s hatred dissolve in the face of their best friend’s compassion. Their friends all stand behind him, their hands behind their backs, and Eren chuckles at the sight of Levi trying to put a pleasant expression on his face, of how Hange marvels at the blimps that fly overhead and Sasha, alive and breathing and alive Sasha, elbows Jean and Connie to point out a man handing out cotton candy to bored Eldian children who will never have to know the pain of wearing an armband. He wonders for a moment where Annie is, if she’s found her father after all, and spots her on the edge of the stage with Reiner and Zeke, across from the Scouts and standing tall with her fellow Warriors. He wonders if she even means it.
“I don’t know how,” Armin lies, because over the lifetimes he’s lived Eren has learned all of Armin’s tells and knows that when he rubs the hem of his shirt between his forefinger and thumb that he’s lying out of his ass, “but the Power of the Titans has left us. Our Walls have crumbled. We are nothing more than people, have only ever been people, and we are asking to come in from the cold.”
By the end of his speech, there isn’t a dry eye in the audience. Mikasa hugs Eren’s arm, laughing happy tears into his shoulder when he lifts a hand to wipe them from her cheeks, and when he looks up at the podium where their best friend stands he isn’t surprised to be meeting his eyes.
Armin stares, wide-eyed with a smile half-frozen on his face, and Eren smiles back, waving with his free hand before he and Mikasa disappear into the chaos of the celebrating crowd that begs for the Scout Regiment’s attention as Willy Tybur takes the stage.
—
It doesn’t take long for the Scouts to find them and demand they explain. Levi sits them down at their own dining table and stands across from them with Hange, both adults crossing their arms as the rest of their friends investigate the cabin.
After, when Eren is done telling them about his memories of the future and how everything’s changed, Mikasa is the one that gets the brunt of the scolding from the Captain, while Eren sits through a speech from the Commander about responsibility and communication and, “You could have at least left a note.”
“Almost a year of silence, Eren Jaeger,” Hange tells him, their eyepatch scrunching as they narrow their eye, “We were worried.”
“Historia wanted to come,” Connie says, snooping through their kitchen cabinets, “but she’s busy leading the effort to clean up all the rubble from the Walls coming down.”
“Yeah, thanks for warning us about that one, Eren,” Jean snarks, leaning back against the stove and crossing his arms, “I was about to start training some cadets when it happened, do you know how hard it is to teach kids to fly when there’s rocks falling everywhere?”
“Please,” Levi rolls his eyes, finally taking his attention off of tearing into Mikasa to look back at Jean, “You were just fine. I keep telling you that you’re a great teacher.”
“You do?” Sasha’s eyes go wide as she pokes her head out from their chest of dried meats. “Since when?”
“Since the start of him training those brats,” Levi pulls her out of the chest and slams it shut. “What, you think I let the easy chore of sharpening our blades go to anyone?”
Jean frowns. “But I hate sharpening the blades.”
Mikasa hides a laugh behind her hand, and Eren finds himself falling back into the easiness of being surrounded by his friends when he ribs, “Seems it’s the only sharp thing about you, Horse Face.”
“Hey-”
“Can I talk to Eren?” Armin enters the kitchen, a book tucked under his arm. His expression is serious, as it has been since they arrived, and there’s nothing in his voice that says he’s happy to be here. “Preferably alone.”
The room goes quiet. All eyes go to where he and Mikasa sit at the table.
Mikasa is the first one to break that silence, nodding and telling the rest of the Scouts, “Let me give you an actual tour.”
Armin leaves, his footsteps receding to the front door which he opens and then slams shut. Eren shoots Mikasa a reassuring smile before following him outside.
—
The second they’re alone, deep into the woods surrounding the cabin and the frozen grass crunching beneath their boots, Armin says, “I’m not going to say that I don’t understand, but before I say anything at all I want you to tell me why.”
Eren has been rehearsing this conversation from the moment he dragged Mikasa onto that train.
“I’m sorry we left,” he begins, shoving his hands into his pockets, reminded of a memory of the future where he and Armin walked the Paths just like this and saw the outside world they dreamed of. “I wasn’t thinking about anything else except for getting away from what could spark the future I saw. The second Mikasa told me her feelings, that I was more than just family…I couldn’t think of a world where she loved me while I tried to end it.”
“She would love you regardless of anything you did,” Armin tells him, laying the truth that, deep down, Eren already knew at his feet. “You’re still the boy who gave her that scarf. Which I have, by the way, but it seems like she found another.”
“That one’s just a scarf,” Eren says, voice weak, “She’ll be overjoyed to have the old one again.”
“It didn’t seem like Mikasa to leave it behind in the first place.”
He remembers her panic, how she asked, What are we even doing? as he held her on the train platform. He swallows his pride and confesses, “I didn’t want us going back for anything.”
Armin closes his eyes. Eren watches as he breathes, sees the anger rise in his hunching shoulders before he blows it out into the cold, white fog spilling from his lips like Titan steam.
“I found a copy of my picture book in the Reiss’s hidden archives,” he shows Eren the book he’s holding, the familiar writing on the cover blasting him back to when . “I wanted to compare the places we saw to it, now that there’s no more war on the horizon and we’re free to travel. Part of me wanted to ask you to come with me, after I was done getting all of my anger out, but I think we saw different things in these pages. I realized that a few months ago, when I should have realized it once we saw the sea and all you could think about was killing our enemies.”
Again, Eren swallows. He tries, “It’s because all I saw was blood on my hands. The sea was freedom, Armin, it was supposed to be us going on a grand adventure to see the world outside the Walls, blank and ready for us to take it all back from the Titans. It wasn’t supposed to be filled with other people. It wasn’t supposed to hate us after everything we did just to see it.”
“You said you were going to flatten it,” Armin whispers, holding the book close to his chest, “You said you would have had Mikasa not confessed.”
“That was the future I saw,” Eren echoes, thinking of the Founder Ymir and I like the original version of the story. “I thought there was nothing I could do to stop it, I but then Mikasa did exactly that. She’s the one that stopped me. She’s the one that saved the world, and you saved the future.”
The person who saves Humanity isn’t me or the Commander, he had sobbed to Levi on a Shiganshina rooftop, begging him to use the Titan syringe to save Armin’s life over Erwin Smith’s, It’s Armin!
Would you do it now? Mikasa had asked, If Zeke found us and offered his hand?
“I didn’t know the curse would break,” he says. “I was prepared to die in this place, but now I’m going to live. So are you. We’re going to be together again, just like the old days. No one will try to hurt us anymore.”
No, Eren had lied, Of course not.
He wanted to leave a terrible scar, to make an awful mark on the world, to scream, Remember me so loud that the very foundations of reality would shake in the face of his rage. Their fight was supposed to end once they reached the sea, they were supposed to be free, but all that met them on the beach was another war. He wanted to have the world for himself, to live longer than the four years he had and stay in the dedicated hearts of his family for the rest of their long, happy lives, and the only way for that to happen was for the curse to break, was for the Walls to crumble and for the Colossals to march. Eren would gladly become the Devil if it meant saving the people he loves, for Mikasa, Armin, and everyone else-
“Thank you for running,” Armin says, like he can see the truth of it on Eren’s face, always able to read his mind when it really counts, “No matter how upset I am, I would rather this than whatever childish tantrum you saw fit to take out on the rest of us.”
The blow lands, a memory of, You and I have never fought before playing behind his eyelids as he flinches from the sting of the words. Armin doesn’t need his fists to hurt him, just like Eren doesn’t need his words.
“Let’s head back,” Eren offers, attempting an olive branch, “Mikasa and I will make you all dinner.”
—
Armin speaks with Mikasa next, walking laps around the front lawn while Eren does his best to stop Levi from checking beneath all of the furniture for dust that he knows is there while prepping ingredients for a feast fit for the Scouts. The last thing he needs is his Captain cleaning their house, tidying their things and putting them in different places that they’ve grown used to.
“Who kissed who first?” Sasha asks, stealing a bite of cheese from his cutting board.
“Shouldn’t you be asking Mikasa that?” he laughs, swatting her hand away when she reaches for another.
“She’s still with Armin,” she tells him, “and I’m impatient. I’ve been waiting for you two to finally fess up for years and I wasn’t even there for it! I had to find out this morning when Armin told us you guys were holding hands at his speech!”
“Poor baby,” Eren coos, a fierce warmth blooming in his chest because Sasha is alive alive alive and he was too busy mourning her for the years after kissing Historia’s hand that he never remembered to savor the sound of her voice, the accent she still tries to hide when they’re in public, the way she makes Mikasa laugh in a way no one else but him ever could. “I kissed her, if it’s really that important.”
“Yes!” She suddenly shouts, making him wince, throwing her hands into the air in celebration as she pokes her head into the living room and gloats, “Connie, you owe and Jean one-fifty each!”
“Damn it!” Connie’s voice responds, disappointed, “Really?”
“Really!”
Eren shakes his head. “You made a bet on us?”
“What else were we supposed to talk about with you guys gone?” Sasha defends, laughing and skirting away when he tries to elbow her in the ribs, “Annie’s in on it, too, she owes me some cash, but we’ve got a separate one going for her and Armin if you want in. We’re all going to hide behind Reiner when she finds out about it and wants to kill us again.”
“You should be more afraid of Armin,” he warns, and it’s the last thing he says before the front door creaks open and Mikasa is back, her old scarf wrapped around her neck as she steps into the kitchen to check on him.
“Everything all right in here?” she questions, kissing him on the cheek, and he ignores Sasha’s shit-eating grin to peck her lips before he goes back to preparing the food.
“Fine,” he answers, “How was Armin?”
“He likes the area,” Mikasa steals a cube of cheese and passes it to Sasha, who laughs even harder as she pops it into her mouth, waggling her eyebrows at Eren before she backs out of the kitchen to join the rest of their friends in the living room. “And he told me what you two talked about.”
“Yeah?” he leans back into her arms that wrap around his waist. “What do you think?”
She hums. “What he said, Eren. Thank you for choosing us.”
Thank you for wrapping this scarf around me, she had said.
“I’ll do it again and again,” he promises, “As many times as you want.”