Chapter Text

Marco sits in a small, uncomfortable chair. He’s gotten used to uncomfortable things since his time here in the Underground, but this one might take the cake. He’s too heavy, making the wood creak with every minute movement of his legs. He’s too tall, unable to even lay his shoulder blades upon the back rest. Most of all, he’s too exposed, subject to the scrutiny of who else but the commander of the Military Police himself.

Another day, another trial, it seems. Marco isn’t sure if he should look at the man across from him with respect or contempt, Nile Dok. If you had asked Marco a month ago, he would have affirmed that the man in front of him was a shining beacon of honor and loyalty towards our great king. Now he has no idea what this man is. Is he responsible for everything Marco detests about the Police? Or is what the officers said at his first trial true? Are the Military Police simply unequipped to deal with such a threat?

“It’s not worth thinking about it now. All I can do is fight for what I believe in, even if it gets me killed. That’s what you did, right Jean?”

This interrogation room is significantly less grand. Its walls are stained and cracked, a pungent odor simmers in the air, choking him without the presence of a window. It’s a great deal smaller as well, and Marco wouldn’t be so nervous about the few people that were in here, if it were not for the fact that these few people were some of the highest ranking members of his entire branch.

Nile shuffles through his papers, a disturbed quality tugging at his brows, and sharpening his lips. He doesn’t look nearly as bored as officer Tafi did when he was reviewing the events of the past few days, but that just makes Marco shrink even more.

“So… Captain Bott.” The commander finally speaks up, the word captain sounding foreign on his tongue. “Sorry to ask this of a kid, but there will be an official trial in three days to determine the legitimacy of your promotion.”

“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!”

And that’s what triggers it. That sound. The one that would forever inspire and sicken her heart. The sound of his transformation. Sparks fly, blood soars, and time floats.

In the moment, she could only see his eyes. The passion of his green flaring to otherworldly proportions. But it didn’t make her feel safe, not like when he first saved her life all those years ago.

She knows he’s spelled his own doom. Their doom. Her doom.

Before she can blink, the carriage explodes, catapulting her several feet into the air. She rockets to the ground, slamming into the stone with a grunt and dragging her skin across the jagged street with her inertia. Blood follows her involuntary movements, sticking to the ground.

Incessant ringing punctures her ears, filling the void for only a brief moment, though it feels like an eternity. Her blood has slowed everything to eternity, triggering her instincts to react to every weary blink, every shaky breath still exhaled. It was an ability that became invaluable the moment she realized how cruel this world was prepared to be. But as her bones fail her, as she feels the sharp bite in her left side, she wonders how useful her strength ever was. She could not stop Miller, she could not save Eren.

She’s just as helpless as she’s always been. Despite being an Ackerman, despite having the wisdom and experience of a twenty-two year old woman, and despite being gifted with knowledge of everything to come, she vomits. Her eyes falter, not with fear, not anymore. She’s just tired.

“Why…” she asks pitifully, voice cracked by the soreness of her throat. But her pain will not leave her. It crawls up her veins, tugging her heart with its venomous fangs and forcing her to endure the harsh hitch of her breath. “Stop!” she screams to no one in particular. She screams it to herself, for being so foolish as to ever think about joining this gang, for fleeing to this horrible place. If she had just stayed with her friends…

No. The Military would have taken him. The Scouts would have forced him along the path to find the basement, inadvertently sentencing the outside world to annihilation. The Military Police would have taken him away, tortured him, and fed him to the Reiss family, sealing the fate of the most important people in the world to her.

She curls her hands into fists, scraping her tender knuckles as she digs them into the earth. Was she right, at that moment only a month ago? When Eren turned into a titan for the first time, revealing all of her cards to the warriors and almost exposing himself to the truth… was this month’s exercise in the abyss only delaying what her selfishness, her worthlessness was bound to cause?

Is it finished?

She hears Eren scream for his life, expletives of panic, confusion, and helplessness slipping into her ears.

She put up a good fight, she thinks. It was a solid three years that she held her ground. Since the very moment she woke up again as a twelve year old self, she held every moment with her in her heart. Every stolen glance and borrowed moment to have with him, she appreciated it all. Nothing about it was deserved, nothing at all. She failed Eren, she let him leave her. She made him hate her.

Nothing about this new life made sense. She still doesn’t know if this is all a product of titan powers, the same way her incredible strength is, or if her delusions have buried her. Mikasa may be a prisoner of her own mind, doomed to repeat her life until she understands exactly how much death and pain she’s caused. To watch, as she proves everything Eren said right.

It is her fate. To struggle against death, to fight for her family until her skin blisters and peels, until bones break, until her heart is nothing but ash and wind. It is her fate to fail.

“Fight!” he would say.

She remembers being sorry. When she faced the jaws of a titan the first time she fought through Trost, when the world around her sank in the silence of Eren’s death. He defied fate that day, and she was sorry, so sorry that she almost let her short life end the moment Eren left her side. She made a promise, one of many, to find a way to move forward. And like many others she’s made, both to herself and others, it now lies in shattered fragments. She promised to Eren that she would save him—yet another lie. She was a liar to Eren and to herself.

Hundreds of thoughts afflict her at once. Shame and fear, along with the gash at her side, stifle her movements. The realizations that hit her are so obvious but so significant she can’t properly fathom them.

It’s over. It’s over.

Death chases her. The death of Eren, the death of Miller, the death of all she holds dear. But she is protected. Cursed to watch, cursed to fight. Protected by the boy’s ragged, desperate cry.

Fight.

“Fight…” her breath is hoarse. Her lives flash before her eyes, willing her forward with more strength than all her Ackerman blood could muster.

“Mikasa, I don’t hate you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“Ever since we were kids… Mikasa, I’ve always…”

“Always…”

She decides to fight. For herself she’ll fight. For Eren she’ll fight. For the world she’ll fight. If she doesn’t fight, she can’t win.

Mikasa wobbles upwards, the blast having lacerated her right side. She bites back a sore groan, taking stock of the situation around her. Blasts, screams, and clangs echo around her, muffled by the pounding of her eardrums, but there.

She doesn’t need her ears to know that Eren is screaming, traumatized by the sight of his arm latched by lines of muscle and meat to that of a titan. She doesn’t need ears to feel his terror.

Her headache is a given, and the metallic taste of her mouth forces a gasp from her exhausted windpipes.

“Don’t think. Don’t think. Win. Fight.” She pounds the words into her mind, limps quickly to Eren and catches his flailing, shivering form. The exhaustion fueled sweat coats his forehead, and she remembers all it took out of him just to conjure half a skeleton, back when he was new to shifting. She spares just a moment to wonder if she’s lucky enough for Eren to faint on her, forgetting it all.

When she feels the tremor of his shoulders as she grabs him, though, she knows he’ll never forget a sight like this.

“Eren—Eren stop, I’m here. Calm down.” She knows how to put on a show of confidence when it’s needed. Eren shakes his head, primal fear gripping him and not letting go. He pulls quickly, desperately. With each failed attempt he grows more frightened, and his face sharpens with frustration. At this rate, he’ll break his arm. Mikasa huffs, walking onto the flesh of his titan arm.

The gesture zaps Eren’s attention away from the arm, finally moving his eyes towards Mikasa’s. She tries at a calming face, she really does, but the contours of her mouth won’t budge. Settling for a determined look, she places a hand on the titan arm—the only piece of it that’s formed—to show her lack of fear.

She hopes something of it gets through to the boy, scared and confused and angry in the face of the unknown.

“M-Mikasa… Mikasa…” his voice is hiccupped and teary.

“You can pull it out, Eren,” she tells him with startling calmness.

“I-I can’t… it’s…” he sucks in a breath and yanks. Nothing. He barks out a sigh with clenched teeth. “it’s stuck! What do I do?”

She grabs a hold of his arm, looking into his trembling eyes, her charcoal blues calm as a lake. “On three.”

He takes a shuddery breath. “…Ok-ay…”

“One. Two. Three,” the whisper in unison and then pull. Mikasa digs as deep into the opening as she can and pulls firmly, grabbing near his wrist. Truthfully, she doesn’t know how easy or hard it is to pull a hand out, only that it’s possible. Avoiding a broken wrist on the way out would be preferable, but she’ll settle with not dislocating his shoulder.

Eren chokes a cry of pain, slowly but surely overcoming the connective tissue.

The two fall together. Eren looks at his arm, the fleshy vestiges of the titan still stuck to it. He’s mortified by himself as he looks at the titan, evaporating before their eyes. “Mikasa…” his voice withers off his tongue, dying before it can finish. His breaths hitch, but she hoists him up, staring at the corpse within the titan’s hand.

Corpse is a generous term. It’s practically a puddle of organs and jagged bones.

Mr. Miller. Crushed inside Eren’s hand.

The sight paints his face a ghostly white. “W-What…” Shock clearly begins to settle as Mikasa does her best to ground him, to remind him that she’s here.

But then she freezes, remembering their fourth passenger. Muttering a quick “stay here,” she dashes away from him, climbing past the titan to see Henry’s bloody, crooked figure, crawling back to the nearest alley with one working arm. Both of his legs are bent like the stem of a leaf, a gaping wound on his side, probably where the titan’s finger hit him, much like her own wound. Thankfully, though, unlike her’s, it gushes out blood.

Mikasa notices the flintlock pistol, the one he used to threaten Eren’s own life. She makes her decision, grabbing the gun and taking long steps over to the desperate figure. He turns, fear ridden eyes looking back up to meet hers. She ponders on his thoughts as she raises the gun to his head. Does he think of them as monsters? Does he think Eren a monster, compared even to himself? He shoots his hand forward in a vain attempt to stop her.

“M-Mikas-“

The gun fires, blending in with the distant booms and cries of the skirmish streets away, and placing a red hole square into his head. This isn’t the first time she’s killed, but she can’t remember the last time someone deserved it quite as much as he did.

It’s a relief to see him dead, especially in a way that isn’t likely to arouse suspicion. Back alley murders are a dime a dozen in this hellscape. But it doesn’t matter. The near liquified mass of what was once alive some feet away can’t be explained, nor would it conveniently steam itself away, like the muscly hand surrounding it.

Mikasa breaths through her mouth to avoid the stench, whipping her head in every direction and digging the gun into her belt.

“Mikasa…” he lets out upon seeing her again, emerald eyes still bewildered at the recent events as he lays there, immovable, unable to put anything more than her name into words. Her heart rattles with familiar anxiety as she watches him fight the bile rising from within him at the sight of Miller.

Good riddance, she thinks, and he probably does too. But it’s disgusting, and horrible. At least Eren has the courtesy to be afraid. She can only look at the mess and see what she’s always seen. Miller was the victim of a titan. Like the billions of others made to look like that man under the feet of the titans of the walls. Under Eren’s feet.

They are all Eren’s victims. Her victims too.

But she’s been afraid of that for years. She’s not like Eren. He’s only taken a glimpse into the future that she’s lived and breathed for so long. Because only one of them knows the future.

All he can do is say her name, ask “what… what is this…?”

Her chest blazes in controlled stress, Ackerman instincts finally kicking in. Her whole world and years of struggle collapse around her, so she focuses her mind on her eyes, on what they see and what they tell her alone. She elects to crouch and hold Eren’s hand as she looks around, teeth gritting as she lets Eren tremble beside her, as she always will “Evidence, I need to get rid of the evidence… No one can know about this…” she reminds herself, roaring within to worry about Eren another time.

“I can’t get rid of the titan, just the arm is twice my size…” she can only hope it goes away before the Military Police show up. How long would that be? No longer than five minutes, right?

How lucky can she be?

Her thoughts are interrupted with the answer; the whiz of ODM gear. She gasps, as does he, both of them sharing an urgent look as she helps usher an exhausted Eren away from the scene. She leads him by the hand, dashing into a nearby alleyway while lugging an Eren who’s unsure as to his next action in every sense, even in hiding. It’s a side of him she doesn’t often see, but it at least means one thing. “He doesn’t know anything about Grisha yet. It was a different type of transformation, just like at Trost. If I can just-“

Footsteps hit the ground as the pair sits in the shadows of a tucked away alley. It’s the Military Police.

She slaps a hand over Eren’s huffs and whines, wrapping her arm around him in one motion and crouching down with complete silence. The other hand ghosts over her gun. A dead policeman is the last thing she needs on her hands, but as she feels the pounding heart of Eren emanate through her arms and legs, giving power to all of her bones…

She’ll do what needs to be done. Eren cannot be taken. Not now. She needs to get him home. Her body moves faster than her mind. Her heart lags behind in third, refusing to accept how little her situation can be helped. Footsteps echo in the street they were once in, they echo because they’re alone, on a desolate street filled with nothing but corpses and cowards.

Mikasa shifts to a group of barrels clustered next to a window sill, hiding the pair behind them. It’s dark and empty, but an obvious hiding spot, made worse by the silence that ensues as the footsteps grow closer to Eren’s wake. They hear a slow, broken gasp, the sounds so languid it makes Mikasa’s heart squirm in anticipation. Only then does she stop to consider what the sight would be like to an outsider: a man more liquid than human, crushed inside the hand of a creature that has no right being down here. The Underground was often touted as the last place the titans would get to, a theory postulated by all of her fellow cadets during the listless hours of the night. It was a morbid thought—what would happen if every wall came crashing down. But this reality… she doesn’t need to imagine the terror. She knows the terror.

“I-Is anyone there?” a lone voice calls out, it’s familiarity ringing in her ears.

Mikasa chokes on her gasp, pressing her hand onto Eren’s mouth so hard she can feel his teeth through the skin of his lips. She holds out her hand, silently pleading, begging Eren to stay silent, to stay calm. He could shout. He could move out of her weak grasp and everything would be over. She’s hanging at a cliff’s edge, and if Eren wanted to, if he wanted to be free of it all, he could trample her feet and let her plummet. She’s exhausted and bleeding, despite the adrenaline.

“Anyone…?” The soldier’s voice is quiet, afraid, as if tearing their eyes away from the titan’s arm for one moment would bring it back to life. Despite the way his voice distorts in her ringing ears, it’s obvious. The way Eren stops dead in his musings, breath permanently hitched, she knows he hears it too.

It’s their friend.

Marco sighs. They hear him collect his blades, and echo out a realization. “What… it’s… a titan?”

Eren moves. Ever so slightly, he tugs at her hand, shifts in her grip. She doesn’t fight it. She’s too tired, too tired of the fear and the dread and the despair. Sweat and blood cling to her hands as she holds him, they make her slip. She lets them. He could leave her right now if he wanted to. She’s not strong enough to hold him back. She’s sick of holding him back. His hand is hot, still cooling off from the iron grip of his titan form. Yet it’s been plunged in ice, shivering with fear, wondering if Marco, if anyone, is friend or foe. Mikasa grips it, not to hold on, not to keep his blight from scarring the world. For once in her sad second chance of a life, she holds him because she loves him. “You are safe. You are okay.”

“A titan… did this?” Marco mutters, followed by an airy curse, high on disbelief.

She grits her teeth, prepares for Eren to dash out, to get his ticket out of here and present his new power to the world. It isn’t worth stopping, because there isn’t anything more to do. Nothing but run.

She wants to hug him goodbye.

But silence is all that follows. Marco’s footsteps shrink, followed by whizzing of the gear. Eren stays, despite his tears that drip onto her hand. He stays put, trembling in her arms.

She trembles herself, defying her blood. Out of love and gratitude she trembles with him. She squeezes her hand, burrowing her head into his shoulder, and she swears she can feel him lean back, lean on her.

She sighs. This will have to be explained to him. The truth will come out, and the only power she has within her is to pray he doesn’t leave. That he leans on her.

Marco will return, with more people. If they’re lucky, the arm will be nothing but perspiration by the time he returns. If she’s blessed, no one will believe him.

But regardless, they need to run.

Mikasa gives a gentle squeeze, lowering her hand from his mouth. He takes a shaky breath, wide eyes speaking every thought to form. “Let’s go,” she whispers urgently, hoisting him up and dashing out the other side of the alleyway. The carnage, however, isn’t restricted to the street they were just on. Debris and death litter the block. Stains of gunshots cling to houses, bruised and bloody innocents fleeing as fast as their brittle bones can carry them. She looks to her right side, where she holds up Eren. He seems too exhausted to comprehend the image around him, simply staring down and taking rugged breaths.

It takes less than a split second for Mikasa to catch a hitch in his breath. She eyes him concernedly, following the trajectory of his gaze to land on a single, bruised girl amidst the chaos. She wears raggedy red hair, clothes torn to reveal cuts. To Mikasa’s trained eye, they look like deliberate cuts, not unlike the ones Eren had before he healed.

She almost looks familiar, and her intuition is confirmed in the most bone chilling way as Eren breathes a single word. “Ingrid… the carriage… was she behind us?”

Mikasa’s heart stops. Eren, either too distracted or tired to understand the gravity of that fact, shifts to face the raven haired girl. But Mikasa is faster. “Eren,” she turns to him, gripping his shoulders and purposely removing her support under his arm. He staggers, but eventually keeps upright, looking at her with dazed eyes.

“Eren, you…” Mikasa has to follow Ingrid. There’s no other choice. If she witnessed Eren’s transformation, then that effectively steals their only stroke of luck in this sorrowful work of art. It takes Mikasa less than a second to make up her mind.

“She has to die.”

But it pains her to leave Eren here. He can’t come with her, he’s clearly in no proper state. But can he make it home on his own? Their place to hide? Will he?

She casts away Marco, the battle, the scum and unpredictability of the Underground. “He held your hand, Mikasa. He’ll… he’ll stay.”

“You have to try and make it home. Run, if you can.”

Eren’s eyes widen. “What about you! I’m not leaving you here.”

“No one can find out about your titan, Eren. I need to handle something.” Her voice is urgent. Every second she wastes gives Ingrid a hundred different possible routes. Her skin stands on end.

“My titan… it came… out of m-” Eren rasps, fighting back bile. Her heart swells, from fear of the unknown, of what he’s learning so quickly now. And from his own fear, the vulnerability that shines brightly behind his eyes. She touches her damp forehead with his own, hoping it communicates everything she cannot say.

“Please trust me. I didn’t want to lie to you. I’ll always protect you.”

She runs. If Ingrid doesn’t die, here and now, she’ll never get to say those to him. Alleyways swoop past her, voices of panic and rage whizz through her ears as she moves her feet as fast as her tired form allows. Being an Ackerman, it’s still rather fast.

Climbing to a low rooftop, she jumps across the buildings, scouring the decrepit landscape. Through the smoke and rubble and dim torchlight, Mikasa makes chase. It doesn’t take long, she knows the layout like the back of her hand. She can imagine where Ingrid would find the safest refuge, where her trail would lead.

And she’s there, dashing randomly, as if she knew Mikasa would chase her and her only priority was getting away. “If that’s true, then she already suspects us.”

Ingrid’s clumsy dashes and desperate turns give her away eventually. Mikasa hones in, making her presence known.

Nile crosses his arms, looking resigned yet dutiful. “As it is, the only grounds you stand on are Konigsmann’s insistence that you ascended to captain of the Underground MP by his permission. Anything to say about that?”

Marco gulps, eyes wide as he surveys the other officers in the room, some sitting in chairs that sit by the wall, some leaning. “N-no, sir. I won’t lie and say the other officers had any interest in making me captain.”

Nile glances to his right, giving the official standing beside him a pointed look. She scribbles down something important, Marco’s sure. His heart trips with each scratch of the pen, and in the wake of his silence he feels compelled to say more.

“But it had to happen, sir. We inflicted a devastating blow against Miller. If we don’t fight agains-” he’s halted by the lifting of Nile’s hand. The man gives Marco a sigh, a sorry look in his eyes.

“Anything you say will be used against you in the trial, and every word here is being recorded. I won’t try to argue with you about what you did was right or legal. I think we can all say that we’re grateful for the result, but unfortunately that will only get you so far.” His words are tired, his posture imperturbable, and Marco decides that it makes him feel worse. How used to these situations could he be? Or is it coming from something else?

The battle at Miller’s base was a bloody, morbid affair. Not like fighting titans, where the dread of inevitability and helplessness slows time down to a crawl, letting you feel each blink of your eyes, each ragged breath, knowing that giant abominations are constantly trotting, with each languid step, to take everything away. Getting into a gunfight was entirely different, though not less bloody. It was angrier. Louder. All it took was a single bullet, a fast jab to the chest, a quick slit of the throat, and his comrades were gone forever. A part of him wishes it could affect him more than it actually did. Strangely enough, as his ears grew used to the hail of gunfire and the screams of pain, his eyes to gushing red and the tattered brown of the MP uniform, sitting in a room full of apathetic people scares him far more. It’s a fight he wonders if any of his old friends have to contend with.

But what scares him the most is what he knows he is here for. His eyes bore witness to a sight that shouldn’t exist, the implications of which Marco has had far too much time to ponder. And as Nile speaks up again, he knows it’s time for his mind’s eye to return to that picture again.

“Besides, you’ll be free to argue your case in three days’ time. What you’re here for now is a much more private matter.”

Marco’s eyes become lost on the table, and he furrows his brows in an attempt to stifle the echo of his beating chest. “There’s no other explanation… what this means…”

Nile continues. “In your report of the attack, you saw the corpse of a titan.”

Ingrid staggers, the mud under her feet sending her sideways with her speed. She crashes to the ground as Mikasa leaps forward into the back alley. There’s nowhere else for her to go, Mikasa realizes, the clench in her gut subsiding. Ingrid’s eyes flutter in panic, rasping out a quick “shit…!” before backing away from her. Her head hits the wall with a hard clunk before she knows to stop moving. A few moments pass, and both of the women take the moment to catch their breath. Eventually, Ingrid grows tired of the space between words, letting out a resigned chuckle as she rubs the bump on her head. “Whoops.”

Mikasa frowns. This can’t be anyone other than the woman Eren talked about all the time. She’s the same age as them, maybe even a little younger by her estimation. A ragged girl with a few bad teeth and sharp red hair. Who would willingly be around Miller’s hideout at a time like this? Unless it wasn’t willingly, and she was captured. Did Miller capture everyone on that shift…?

The raven haired girl shakes. It dawns on her that they had no way of truly knowing who Eren was, who might have been important to her… who they could use against her.”No, they had to get that information somehow.”

She wonders how much they tortured him. The scene is too vivid, it comes too easily to her mind. Eren would have fought so hard to keep anything from coming out, she knows he would. But did they eventually break him? Did they beat him so hard it made even Eren give in? Or did they trick him into revealing it?

It was her fault… all of it. She sucks in a breath and grabs her knife. “No more mistakes…”

A gun would be loud. Messy, too.

“So you’re gonna kill me, huh?” Ingrid rasps out, looking up at the rocky oblivion trapping the city. Seeing her now, the bruises on her face swell, distorting much of it. Mikasa can’t tell if she’s afraid. “I knew you couldn’t be trusted. I hope Ere-” she stops, eyes widening as she slinks further back.

“What you saw…” Mikasa begins.

“Couldya at least tell me what the hell that was? If you’re gonna kill me anyways…” Mikasa rubs her thumb on the blunt edge of her knife, gripping it tighter. There’s no reason for her to explain herself to Ingrid. It’ll take enough out of her to tell Eren, let alone a witness who knows nothing about what she’s fought and bled for.

Ingrid takes her silence as an answer, letting out a shuddery breath. “Maybe you’re the one who… ahhh hell if I know.” Her voice is quiet, strained. “You probably already know what this means, whatever the fuck Eren did. It was… it was so cool…” for a moment she turns into a little girl again, laughing lightly before wheezing it right out of her, clutching her side. “I’ve never seen a titan before. It was just the arm, but… do they really get that big?”

This is a bad idea, letting her drone on. For all Mikasa knows, she’s stalling for something, or maybe she’s in the midst of losing her mind and it would be better for everyone if she just put her out of her misery.

But she tries. It’s her lack of energy, surely that’s what it is. Her legs don’t move as fast as they should, her strength only taking her so far. That can be the only explanation for staying at her feet. She tries to do something. “That wasn’t what you saw. You hit your head… you…” what little confidence in her lie she has dies with Ingrid’s unimpressed stare, and it smacks a frown onto her face. She hasn’t seen someone make that face since she was under Captain Levi, his miffed demeanor and constant “tch”-ing reminding her a time forever lost.

“I’m not gonna act like an idiot just so you’ll let me go. We moles of the Underground have more dignity than that. Not that you’d know, criminal,” Ingrid spits out the last word, and Mikasa stops, primarily wondering how she knows all of that. That she’s from the surface, that she’s resorted to murder just to keep Eren safe. “Do what you gotta do. Job’s toast, there in’t much to live for past that.”

“She already knows too much,” Mikasa thinks, dispelling the dread of silencing someone so young with thoughts of what needs to be done. “It’s either her, or the millions of children outside the walls…” she repeats to herself. She’s a horrible liar.

As Mikasa approaches her, electing to say nothing and just get it over with, she flashes the knife once again. Ingrid, despite her resigned, yet confident attitude, suddenly jolts backward with a squeal, not that she can move the brick wall behind her. Mikasa goes into a dash. She knows how to stab people. She’s better at stabbing people than she is at anything else.

Thoughts sink into blackness, as she remembers her first victim. A tall man, lanky, shoulders drooped past his head, almost like the Beast Titan. In her mind’s eye, he’s more beast than man, features distorted and exaggerated by her childlike mind.

“Wait..!” Ingrid calls out, suddenly scared for her life. Mikasa ignores her, remembering the man.

His hands were enormous, enough to choke the life out of anyone, especially her savior, with the timid figure he carried for his age.

Mikasa hears quick, adrenaline fueled cries. The cries of a wounded, dying animal.

She forces herself back into delusion.

“The one thing I remember most of all… was his back. His back was soft. It was like paper.”

No. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t his back. It was his victim. The small boy gasping for life. Croaking “fight” out of what remained of his breath. He was crying.

Mikasa shoots her knife forwards, reaching its destination. Ingrid’s gasps stutter. Neither of them move, seconds dying in the air, until eventually Mikasa leaves the grip on her knife, leaves it burrowed into the brick wall she forced it into.

Ingrid looks to her left, and then back at Mikasa, witnessing her exhaustion get the better of her as she puts her hands on her knees, head hung down low.

“W-Wha-“

“Go.” Mikasa commands, softly, but with all the authority of a silent killer. An Ackerman.

Yet, Mikasa cannot do it. She can’t kill her. The two women are not the same age, Mikasa knows that. She’s a twenty two year old. She’s seven years Ingrid’s elder. The thought of a young Eren flashes inside her mind, his life choked out of him by her gaunt captor.

She will not become that man. She will not become Miller. She cannot kill a child. So, before she has a moment to regret her decision, Mikasa commands her.

Go.

Ingrid is a bright kid. She doesn’t need to be told twice. Desperate footsteps slide on the grainy dirt under them, moving with all their strength to escape the confinement. Mikasa watches as the girl escapes into the shadows of the Underground.

“Why don’t you tell me how this started?” Nile asks.

Marco calms the rumble of his stomach, the memory giving him chills. “It wasn’t long after most of the fighting in the courtyard had died down. I ordered my squad to chase down stragglers, suspecting Miller might have tried to escape.”

He glances at the clock, grateful that he can tell the time for once down here.

“I went with them,” he’s able to keep the regret out of his voice. Regret for the outcome or his motivation, he doesn’t know. “I should have stayed with the offensive party, and led the arrests, but…” he wanted to see Miller’s face. He wanted to be the one to arrest him, stupidly. He wanted to see the one responsible for Mia’s death.

“And did you find him?” Nile interrupts.

Marco thinks of Ruth. The girl crushed in front of his eyes at Trost. Sucking in what remains of the air, he answers.

“I don’t know.” He doesn’t. What he saw… when did it all happen?

“When… did this happen…?”

Mikasa limps along the dead street. Everything lies abandoned, killed by the absence of the residents here, by the fear of the ongoing battle that’s driven them to hide in their houses. Well… not everyone has a house. In her listless stroll, she’s seen the shadows of men and women poking out of the deep alleyways, some covering their ears to shield themselves from the piercing gunfire, others soothing their shaking children. It strikes her as odd to see them so scared. Mikasa has never been scared of gunfire. In her life, it was never anything that signaled danger, it was the triumphant roar of humanity. Though they had been driven into these walls, her mother explained, “we can be prideful of our intelligence, and our dedication to find new ways to fight back.”

This always made Mikasa hopeful, but mostly because her mother always said it with a smile. Then her father would grumble, “Not that it makes much of a difference against those things. Listen here, Mikasa. Hunting game is what guns are best for. When you’re older, I’ll help you learn how to use one, I promise.”

This would always make mama frown. But the good kind of frown, one born out of loving exasperation. “Quit it, dear. You’re going to scare her.” Mikasa couldn’t help but side with her mother. She liked to garden, and hunting sounded far worse in comparison. Still, she would smile, because papa would clamor to apologize, which gave her the opportunity to forgive him.

Gunfire never scared her. When it was threatened against her for the first time, the only thing that plagued her mind was the wellbeing of the other two people who found themselves on the wrong end of the weapon. Armin and Eren.

Gunfire never scared her. In her first gunfight, it wasn’t the blaring crackle of death that scared her, and it wasn’t the frozen corpses of Hanji’s squad. It was the sight of him, Eren, so close to being taken away from her again, that sent a jolt through her blood.

Gunfire never scared her.

So why is she trembling? Why are her arms wrapped tightly around herself, longing for a warmth only he could give her?

And she realizes. The people in these alleys have homes. Mikasa has a home. But with each step closer to it, to him, that she takes, the more she wants to turn and run. She wants to run and hide but this cruel world will not let her.

“When… did this happen?” she repeats to herself.

When did Eren change? When did he decide to turn his back, to do everything within his power to push her away?

“All I wanted…” she limps. “Was for you to stay.” Her presents and past lives mesh with each other, some memories feel real, others like a dream.

She flinches at the sound of a cannon far away.

“There was a man lying on the ground. He’d been shot, but it wasn’t Miller. I can’t confirm it, but… something was in its hand.” Marco rasps out a breath, rubbing the splinter on his finger to abate the fuzziness.

“The titan’s hand?”

Marco nods. “Do you believe me…?” he asks. Commander Dok has to, right? By the time anyone else arrived, the arm was gone, but the victim remained, and a sight like that is all that’s needed. He wants to believe that, anyway. Other cadet corps haven’t seen the titans like he has. Among the ones at Trost, he’s alone.

Nile stares indifferently at the boy, making him lower his head a bit, before he hears the man sigh. “That body… it’s not out of the question that they were simply tortured beyond recognition. Miller’s gang is known for brutal methods.”

Marco shakes his head vehemently before his nervousness can catch up. “No, that wouldn’t be right! What would a high ranking member of the gang like Henry Smithson be doing transporting a corpse? How do you even carry something like that? And what else explains the carriage in pieces, and two dead horses a whole ten meters away?” He remembers every last detail of that sickening picture, grabbing each tiny inconsistency. Truthfully, even he doesn’t know why the horses were dead and so far away from the destroyed carriage. Titan’s don’t kill animals, but the blunt force wounds couldn’t have been from anything else. Why was only the arm there, too? And…

“What do you have to say about the man who was shot? Without a weapon in sight, it’s reasonable to believe it was murder. You did incite a battle, after all.” his tone is blunt as he puts a hand to his head.

Marco scoots further in his seat. “Sir,” he lets out, grabbing his attention with his grim face. “I know what a crushed human looks like,” Ruth creeps into his mind, spinning so fast he wants to vomit. “If you can’t trust me, trust my experience. A titan crushed that man. Actually, I don’t even know if it was a man. A titan did that, there’s no doubt. Ask anyone who’s actually risked their life for humanity.” He has half a mind to apologize, noticing the rebellious tone and the implications of his words, but he can’t will himself to. He doesn’t have any reason to think Commander Dok is better than the other criminals masquerading as officers. The man clearly worked hard to get where he is, by Marco’s estimation, and he hasn’t shown a complete lack of care. However, it’s his dismissive and uncurious approach as a leader that Marco suspects is the reason for a great deal of the Military Police’s situation. “How different things would be without people like them,” he dares to think.

The commander scribbles in his notebook, regarding Marco or the events of yesterday, he doesn’t know. After a silent eternity, he finally lifts his head to the anxious boy. “It’s simply too unbelievable. I don’t doubt your experiences with the titans, but I have no choice but to doubt the existence of an arm in the Underground district.”

Marco’s heart falls. He breaths an exasperated sigh as he puts a hand to his forehead. He gets it, he gets his doubt. Marco doesn’t fully believe it either.

“If it were true,” the commander continues, voice dipping down into a grave mutter. “The ramifications of what that means… a titan… in Wall Sina? It’s not that I don’t want to believe it, it’s that I can’t. It wouldn’t make any sense.”

To that point, Marco can’t disagree. He didn’t hallucinate that arm, his gut clings to that fact like a lifeline impossible to be snapped. But the pieces…

They just don’t add up.

Eren is terrified, feverish shivers gripping him as he twists on the bed in his house, watching Mikasa sit beside him. They both made it home, eventually. Though he didn’t doubt Mikasa’s resilience, he hates himself for letting her slip through his fingers. Getting home was easy. Staying home… waiting… was nearly impossible.

His own body betrays him, his thoughts stuck in an incomprehensible swirl. Some are thoughts of the future, what this means and how to move forward. Some are of the past, wondering hundreds of wonders. What happened to Miller, how he transformed, why it was only an arm, how all his wounds from the hours of torture disappeared as if every step of the day was a conjuration of his drowning mind. Some of his thoughts don’t even feel like they are his. A foreign invader, breaching in and seizing all the thoughts of his father and Mikasa and Armin for itself.

Startlingly few of his thoughts are on the present. Of what little space he has, it’s all taken up by Mikasa’s eyes. He expected love, concern, and maybe a healthy heaping of fear to be sculpted in the darkness of her irises. Yet the emotion he sees the most is resignation, and another he’s never seen before.

“Eren…” he sees her swallow. “There’s something I have to tell you. You’re… you…” she begins to lose the fight against his gaze, dropping her head down low, her voice falling to whispers. Bated breaths worm through Eren’s teeth. “You are a titan shifter.”

Gunshots echo out from miles away, sounds bouncing off the rock continuously until they catch Eren’s ears. He pauses his breaths, more confused than anything. A titan… shifter?

“What?” he peeps out, wrestling to keep his guttural panic from impacting his inquiry, trapped between innate curiosity and a frustrating, terrifying sense of unknown. It’s a fairly self-explanatory term. Fitting the puzzle pieces together isn’t difficult, but Mikasa elaborates.

“You have the power…” she lets out a shaky breath, a rare sound to hear from his stoic best friend, especially in a context that has nothing to do with how much she loves him. “…to transform…”

“Into a titan…” he finishes for her, struck by how surprising it is to his ears. Is the doubt there removed? Was this truly something he incited, rather than had happen to him? He manifested that arm? He healed his own wounds? Like… like a titan would?

It was just an arm, but… could he have turned into a full one? Would he have eaten Mikasa? Would she have had to kill him?

It’s clear that Mikasa wants no part in saying anything else, but the questions that crash onto his mind squash all other concerns, flooding his head and furrowing his brows. “Is it permanent?!” he asks, recalling the arm that felt as secure to that titan as his head does to his own neck.

Mikasa lifts her head back up, lifting her presence back into his crumbling spirit. It eases him, if only a little. Her words ease him even more. “No,” she says simply, a slight tint at the end, as if to say “of course not.”

Eren grinds his teeth, a hoarse breath constricting his throat as he pulls at his own hairs, looking down at the bed. “I don’t understand. None of this makes any damn sense at all.”

“Eren…” she doesn’t move to grab his hand, or comfort him in any way. “It’s… more like armor. Your real body is still inside, but you can control its movements from there.”

“Mikasa,” he can’t look up at her. “How do you know this? How are you not going crazy right now? What is a titan shifter even supposed to be? I don’t get it…” thirteen more questions enter his mind, and he’s prepared to shoot them all out like a cannon, but he’s cut off by her touch. Her hands are cold against his, and he lifts his head to meet her. Her lips are pursed, charcoal eyes full with regret, with years of guilt and shame as they look sincerely at his.

Eren awaits her every move, unsettled by this feeling. He’s never seen her so apologetic in her life. Even when she’s telling him how sorry she is, shaking like a sick cat in his arms, those eyes are filled with love more than anything else. This… this is what laid behind her eyes all this time, a part of him realizes. Every indecipherable gaze, every listless face, every guilty shrug of her shoulders and aversion of her eyes were hiding this pain.

“I’m sorry, Eren. I’m so sorry. It’s… you saved me.” She cannot look at him. “You saved me from that titan, back at Trost. The one that threw you to the ground.” Her head droops even lower, and after agonizing seconds of comprehension, Eren takes a long gasp, immediately sitting up.

“Back then… I didn’t faint?” The memories of that event are static in his ears, colorless glimpses of feelings are the only images he can conjure.

She shakes her head. “I don’t think you were lucid, but…” her whisper tapers off. Her face is so regretful, it almost makes Eren sick. He can’t tell if it’s truly because of his actions or her own. “What exactly happened that day?”

“I didn’t know what to do, Eren. You were—I thought you were dead, or had broken bones, or… but you transformed.” She takes a breath to compose herself. “You transformed into a fifteen meter titan. You saved my life, but… I didn’t know what to do.”

It takes a moment for Eren to accept her story. He doesn’t remember any of that. He beat that female titan? Mikasa was putting all her strength just to stand toe to toe with it, he can hardly fathom being the one to save her. He wonders how fearsome his titan really is, thinking back to the way it liquified Miller.

“You… shit… I don’t get it. I don’t remember it at all. Did I have control over myself?” Sharp panic seizes his heart for a thought. “Did I try to kill you?!”

She’s unaffected by his urgency. “No, you killed every titan near me. And you followed me, no matter where I went, but you wouldn’t touch me, and I didn’t let you near anyone else…” she’s on the precipice of speaking more, of confessing something, and for once in his life, Eren knows all he has to do is wait. If he can fight the magnitude of the truth from gripping his heart, she’ll speak. “I didn’t know what to do, Eren… I told them—I told them all you died. Everyone else… they probably think I’m dead, too. By the time I made it to Mitras, you were still out of it.”

Eren’s blood fails him, threatening to topple him over. His friends, his comrades… they all think he’s dead? Mikasa’s wanted for treason and Eren is a dead man to the world? He stands up quickly to abate the nausea, pacing around their decrepit house.

“There’s no way…” it takes all his strength to mumble.

He’s dead… the Underground, this cramped, muddy hellhole of a house, it all calls to a fact of the world, a fact that now settles in the pit of his stomach, sucking his blood like a leech.

“This place is your tomb, Eren.”

His whole body clenches, everything in his heart fighting against what dawns on him, the product a searing anger. A petulant cry against the cruel world. “Are you shitting me? Can we even escape now?! Why did you say that?”

“I had to do it, Eren. Think about what would have happened if anyone found out about your…”

Condition? Sickness? What is this? Just because Mikasa saw him transform doesn’t mean she’s privy to the actual truth behind the matter, right? She watched him become a titan and didn’t immediately try to kill him, and that’s a fact he’s taking for granted. Who else would see him transform and not think him a monster?

That’s what he is, after all. He hasn’t spared a thought for what this even means.

“They would have killed you, Eren. They would have been afraid of you and executed you like they would to me. They’d capture you… and torture you for science. No, they wouldn’t even want to learn anything.” The venom in her voice heightens as she makes things seem worse with each passing sentence. It scares Eren, it really does, but he’s able to keep Mikasa’s words from setting in his mind. It’s probably because he’s faced away from her, leaning on the nightstand, not able to see the assurance in her eyes.

“You’re acting crazy…” he wants to convince both of them of that. He looks at his left arm, the one that grew 50 times its size, and flexes his fingers. “This… this could be what humanity needs to finally fight back!”

Thoughts flash of Armin. Nack, Mina, Thomas. He wasn’t strong enough to save them. He failed them. They died by his incompetence, inspired into action by his words. But if controlling a titan is something that can be done, it would be the greatest weapon humanity would ever have.

“Mikasa… if we went back and told them about this, we could be pardoned by the King, the government, someone! We could put this hellhole behind us and join the Survey Corps!”

His heart lifts at the revelations that flash into his mind, one after another. Sure, he’d have to find a way to control this power, but any intelligent leader in the government could see his titan for the opportunity that it is. There has to be someone.

However, his heart, like the routine pull of gravity on his ODM gear, plummets with Mikasa’s words. With her wet, determined eyes.

“No.” It’s curt, and Eren looks at her in bewilderment.

She continues. “They will kill you out of fear. You don’t understand this power, and we’re already on thin ice from what Marco saw. What would you think if you saw the arm of a titan sitting right under the center of Wall Sina?” her logic is understandable, but she’s got it all wrong, Eren thinks. Looking at her eyes tells him everything he needs to know. She loves him more than anything in this world, of course she won’t want to take a risk like this.

He tries to reroute his anger as he speaks, which is easier than usual because it’s her.

“I know you’re scared, Mikasa. We’d be taking a risk, but that’s no different from now! If we take the initiative, there’s at least a greater chance we won’t be tried for our crimes. Getting caught would just make it look like we’re trying to run away!” They are running away, is what he pretends isn’t true, and he knows Mikasa won’t have the heart to insist that they are. There’s a part of her that wants to do the right thing, to save humanity from the titans. He knows there is.

“It’s too dangerous. Once you’re in the military’s hands… I don’t know if I can protect you.”

He scowls. “You can’t protect me from everything,” exasperation coats his words. “You should know that by now! Miller could have killed me, and it would have taken hours for you to realize I was gone if he didn’t lead you to me!”

But that turns out to be the complete opposite of what would have been the smart thing to say. Mikasa’s eyes soften and fall as she wraps her scarf over her mouth. Eren lets out a light sound of confusion before realizing the effect of his words. What was he thinking, putting that terrible event back into her mind? The memory of everything she put herself through just hours ago to keep him alive makes him want to vomit.

Months ago she wouldn’t have dared to let her hurt and sorrow be so plain on her face. She would have hid it from him and he would have been too dense to notice what her eyes can’t hide. But now things are different, and Eren’s heart pangs at the trust she’s giving to him.

He rushes up to her, kneeling beside the bed and taking her hand again. She averts her gaze, looking terribly shameful, and he knows she views the events of today as her failing and hers alone.

“Mikasa… it’s not your fault. The Survey Corps are even more dangerous. The titans won’t keep me alive for their own gain, they’ll eat anyone without a second thought. But still, we have to try something… please…”

The raven haired girl looks back at him with her inky pools of blue. He resists the urge to hug her, settling with squeezing her hand tighter. Her beautiful, terrified eyes make him want to take it all back and promise he’ll keep her close for the rest of his life. But for his friends, his mom, for everything he’s sought since Armin showed him that book, he stays strong.

“No…” it’s weaker, but just as determined.

“Mikasa-“

“I can’t…”

“Mikasa!”

“They won’t absolve us of anything.” Her voice gains more confidence, which turns into more pushback. “They won’t,” she insists.

“You don’t know any of that!” his frustration conquers him.

“Yes I do!” The desperation in her voice is even more palpable as she raises her volume to match his, stealing his gaze once again. She clutches her scarf tightly, pleading with him. “You’ll be tortured and killed, or worse!”

“Worse?!” he thinks for a moment that she’s just making things up now. Since when could she just make assertions like these with no reason for him to believe it? It’s risky, yes, but Eren is coming up short for alternatives. Staying here doesn’t even guarantee their safety. A more cautious, well armed Military Police joined by Marco of all people, not to mention a vindictive gang with nothing to lose and the possibility of Eren turning into a titan again because who the hell knows how he’s supposed to control that—

“I know, Eren,” she states definitively. As if her speaking with finality ever stopped either of them from arguing.

“How, Mikasa? How do you know everything…?” he asks weakly, tired of fighting a stone wall. But it’s true. “I don’t understand you,” “and now that you lied about killing the female titan and everything that happened after I fainted, what else are you not telling me?” He doesn’t say that aloud.

He wants to, though. He can’t find it within him to trust her on this.

“I’m not gonna stop until you tell me the truth, Mikasa. Please don’t keep things from me. If you trust me like I trust you, then please.” It feels wrong of him to weaponize their relationship like that, but he doesn’t know how else to get through to her.

“Eren… you…” her hands go limp in his.

“Do you trust me, Mikasa?” he asks.

She gives a spin of the head, as if shaking off her own thoughts. “I trust you, Eren,” she emphasizes, as if Eren and Eren are two different people. He can’t help but sigh, once again struggling to understand her.

“Please, you’re… you’re not telling me something. Why did you keep my power secret all this time?” He tries to keep the betrayal from seeping from his eyes, but Mikasa notices. She’ll always notice.

“I’m sorry. I don’t… have a good reason. There’s nothing I can say to justify it.”

She’s lying, he thinks. The instinct in his gut and the cloudiness of her eyes tell him she’s lying.

“You don’t have to justify it,” he implores. “I just want to know what you were thinking. I wish you would have told me this sooner…” he echoes back what he said to her not even a week ago. “I wish you didn’t keep everything from me, Mika-” he’s cut off by his own shortness of breath, the hurt and guilt of her confession rising to the surface again.

“If I had known all this sooner… all the things that would have been different…” If Mikasa told him she loved him while they were cadets, how much would have changed? If she had told him of his titan the moment it happened, rather than jumping to conclusions on her own, where would they be now? “What are you not telling me?” he finishes, eyes resolute.

But he feels tears splash onto his hands, finally taking a moment to see Mikasa wilting before him. She’s so afraid, but the love in her eyes that was there the time she confessed, or the resignation present as she told him about his titan ability, neither of them flash within her. Like a trapped, wounded animal, she’s just scared.

She hums a whine, keeping the sobs at bay as Eren scoots closer. He doesn’t shower her with concern like he wants to, knowing he’s on a precipice. Just like that moment so many years ago when she knew about his broken ODM gear and didn’t tell him. Has she been doing this all their lives?

“Mikasa…” he scrambles for words, searching for the final nail in the coffin, whatever he can say to placate her fear.

There’s only one thing he knows her to fear. She’s one of the bravest people he knows, but what she’s truly scared of couldn’t be more clear.

“I won’t leave you. No matter what happens, it won’t take me away from you. I won’t leave your side, Mikasa.” He places his head on hers, feeling her stray hairs poke at his brow. He means every word of what he says. She’s everything to him. He couldn’t dream of leaving, not anymore.

It eases her, with Eren realizing that that’s exactly what she needed to be reminded of. Her hands are revived, reciprocating his touch. Quiet sniffles remain, and he knows that they’ll stay there. Mikasa’s reluctance to talk to him frustrates his soul, but in this moment, he can feel her trust on his skin.

“The truth is… that the military isn’t the only one that’s looking for us.”

“What do you mean?”

“That Female Titan… it…” she takes one final breath. “It’s just like you.”

Eren’s head lifts up from hers. She moves away, too, expecting his reaction.

“Just… like me? It’s a human? And I killed them?!”

She looks back down, sucking up a breath. “No. You did save me, but… she didn’t die. She got away and now they know who you are and what you are. We can’t win against them, Eren. I tried and I failed.”

Eren’s brow furrows so hard it pulls at his skin. “What are you talking about? Them? Are there others? Why-“

“The Armored Titan. The Colossal Titan. The ones who broke down the walls… they’re…” she stops.

“They know who we are, Eren. And… we know who they are.”

Eren backs up further onto the bed. “How does she… how did we…” dread begins to set in. It’s inexplicable to the boy, but he knows them too. He doesn’t know how nor why, but something screams at him, telling him that he knows them too.

Mikasa looks out the window, hiding her face as the words finally leave her mouth, like dust from a book locked away for generations.

“Reiner is the Armored Titan, Bertholdt is the Colossal Titan, and Annie is the Female Titan.”

Eren’s heart rings so loud in his ears that he can’t even hear the gunfire anymore, he can’t even hear Mikasa mutter a quick “Eren” in concern.

Reiner… Bertholdt… Annie?

His friends? The ones who, all in their own way, excelled in training, excelled at killing titans?

No. None of this makes any sense. Just because he suddenly has this ability that things are capable of changing this significantly. What’s their motive? What’s their goal? This just isn’t possible.

But his gut shakes with certainty. If it were at any other moment, in any other context, he’d be inclined to believe Mikasa. But now… after everything that’s been said…

He jumps off of the bed, forcing a wave of nausea down by pacing back and forth across their tiny apartment. His face is white, memories, true experiences of Reiner and Bertholdt flashing in his mind. “There’s no…”

“Eren… calm down,” she commands, her signature hurried, serious tone echoing.

For some reason, it makes him cry. This is all wrong. Mikasa shouldn’t be saying this. There are titans, and they want to eat humans. That’s that. There’s nothing else.

“Reiner was the best trainee in the corps,” he voice trembles with the failure to assuage his beating heart. “Without his help… and Bertholdt… there’s—there’s no way that’s possible. It’s not possible. You’ve got it wrong.”

That has to be it. She has to be wrong. It could be a lie, or at least a way to disguise the truth. That’s where his heart kicks in, pushing him right back down, because “why would she lie about this?”

But why would she lie in general? She elected to keep his own power from him, to take actions that, because of how much he cares for her, forces him into a position she and she alone is comfortable with. Is she really that afraid of the unknown? Is she really that desperate to keep him alive? Where was this unyielding cautiousness when he was determined to join the Scouts? Even when they were kids, though she tossed him around and shot her disapproving glances, she never turned to these measures… Eren supposes he should be grateful Mikasa never resorted to physically stopping him. She could have simply thrown him back five feet every time he made a stride.

This somehow feels worse, though. The lies by omission and lackluster half-truths make his head spin. He couldn’t always parse her motivation for each action, and now he can’t even be sure that what she’s saying is more important than what she isn’t.

“Quit it, Eren!” he tries to shake his thoughts from collapsing in on themselves. “You know Mikasa! She may be closed off, but she’s a terrible liar!” He thinks of all the times those doe eyes gave her away. Whether it came to concealing emotion or intent, she’s just so bad at lying to him. Wasn’t it him, and only him, that she was truly genuine with?

His heart and mind and fear clash in a heated war. Thoughts of what he knows, what he thinks he knows, what he thought he knew, and what he thinks he only might know cascade down to his heart, poisoning it.

This must be how Armin feels.

Because wasn’t he the only one Mikasa showed her true self to? Or did he have it all wrong? Was he simply one layer closer compared to everyone else, still eons away from the center of her soul? He doesn’t know anymore.

If he can be stupid enough to not realize Mikasa was in love with him, then surely he can be duped.

“…Did she even mean it, when she said that?”

He doesn’t know why, but the thought makes him sob. He leans over weakly, racked with a hiccuping pain in his heart.

Mikasa seems to think his tears are from his traitorous comrades, speaking one final, “It’s the truth.”

Her voice is too curt for his liking, as if he’s just some soldier to her. “They’re our friends, Mikasa!” he shouts at her through tears, “Reiner and Bertholdt aren’t like that, they’re not slimy enough to kill thousands of people and act like they had no part in it. I know what the fall of Wall Maria was like for them!” memories of Bertholdt’s recollection emerge. He could feel the trauma in his voice, as intimately as if it had really happened. “I never really knew Annie well, but… but it just isn’t like her. She’s not a liar, she’s anything but a liar. Even Armin didn’t think…”

“Armin was wrong, Eren. They tricked us all.”

“Except you, then? What makes you think it’s them, anyways?! You really expect me to just believe it all so suddenly?!” he lets out.

Her mouth opens to say nothing, her eyes searching frantically for something to say. He can tell. “I… I overheard them a long time ago, they were talking about their plans, and… and I didn’t make the connection until-“

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Is she keeping something from me… again?!”

“Are you really telling the truth this time? Or is it another way to keep something from me again?” His head is hot. He knows he’s too emotional to be speaking right now, but her secrecy won’t stop nagging at him.

“Eren, we have to stay down here. The details aren’t important. You’re a threat to them and-“

“We can’t just hide here forever!”

“We have to!” Desperation finds its way into her voice again as she stands, and it makes Eren’s blood boil.

“Don’t be a coward, Mikasa! We’ll fight them if we have to, if what you’re saying is even true!”

“It is true. They were my friends too, I wouldn’t lie about that. This isn’t a matter of what we should do, it’s a question of what we can do if we don’t want to die.”

“If I die, I die!” he roars, shaking away his tears and doubts. “I didn’t sign up for the military thinking I wouldn’t be risking my life. If Reiner and Bertholdt really are the ones who killed my mom…” wetness floods his eyes, “then I’ll kill them myself! We have to fight!”

Mikasa’s face darkens, eyes as sharp as blades. She hones in on him with all the focus of a titan killer. It seems they’ve both reached their breaking points.

“No. No you won’t. I watch you die every night I fall asleep, I won’t let it happen in reality too. I promised Aunt Carla I’d stay by your side no matter what. That’s what I’m fighting for! Not for revenge, and not for the people in the walls. I’m not interested in entertaining a suicide mission. My gut tells me you’d have better luck in the front lines of a Survey Corps expedition than to tell the military about your power, especially while the Marl—Reiner, Bertholdt, and Annie are still there. If you can’t consider all the facts then you’ll just get yourself killed.”

She leaves not an inch for argument. Eren moves forward anyways.

“Shut up already! I don’t want to hear this from you! You’re just afraid and too sure of yourself, but you don’t know everything!”

“I know that I will not let you die.” Her eyes grow softer for a moment. “I know that I love you and I know no matter what you do that won’t change.”

His heart lurches towards her, wanting nothing more than to cry and feel her comfort. The ever-present affection of the one who cared for him so much—who he could trust to do the right thing, even if it took some insistence. It all makes him seethe at the situation. If it were anyone else, he probably would have given up on them, and made his choice no matter what they said. But he already hates himself enough for what he’s done to her. All he’s accomplished today is ensuring her suffering. The scab on her forehead and the blotches of sickly purple on her face attest to that. Miller beat her senselessly, and she let him… just so Eren would be safer.

Those actions were real. In that he can trust. In her affirmation of her love… “There’s no hint of a lie…” Eren stops to note. It’s his last rope, the final rock of a cliff’s edge, the final puff of gas of his gear, before his thoughts fizzle away, guilt and anger and confusion and memories bombarding him so heavily.

“Mikasa… this… this isn’t right!” The thick breaths that grasp his throat remind him that he’s been hyperventilating. “We have to keep moving forward,” he insists. Thoughts of Mikasa’s smile wrap around him like a bandage, images of Armin encouraging him, telling him to become a monster to defeat a monster. Pictures of a small boy, sitting by him on a bench, asking if he has a family.

“Eren…” his family breathes.

He does… doesn’t he? Mikasa… Armin… they’re everything he has.

“If you want to save Mikasa, Armin, and everyone else…” his father’s voice echoes.

“I need… the basement. The key…” as if driven by a thirst, the way one frantically looks for light in the sudden darkness, his eyes move to the nightstand, where-

Mikasa is on him in less than a second.

She grasps both his arms before he can blink, all resolve in her eyes fizzling away to reveal sickening panic. “Eren, what are you talking about?! Her face is white, attacked by distant tremors”

“My… father,” the sound of his voice feels so familiar he might as well have heard it yesterday.

“Eren…!” she takes quick, controlled breaths to collect herself. “You’re tired. You’re just tired. We can discuss this later, I promise. You’re not in the right headspace to talk-“

“What’s with that face…? Knock it off already,” he mutters petulantly, dragging his arms, flashback still dogging his mind. That is, until it finally ends, with a small, golden haired girl. Her smiles bring warmth back to his limbs, and feeling to his mind. Where has he seen her?

“Eren! Please, please, please…” tears swell in her eyes. “Stay here and rest. There’s nothing more to argue about. You’ll die if you follow this path, trust me.”

“That’s enough!” he shakes out of his grasp, blood returning to him. “I’m finished with this shit, Mikasa! What path!? What are you talking about?! Do you not trust me at all?! You always…” he hesitates, “you always have this look, like you’re keeping something important from me, something I deserve to know! Sometimes I just thought it was you being weird, but… how… how much do you know that you won’t tell me?” His head shoots downward, clenching his features together, staving off the pain. “Reiner, Bertholdt, Annie… I can’t just believe that! Tell me the truth, the whole truth! I’ll believe it when I stop seeing the guilt in your eyes! When things start making sense!”

Her face grows still, eyes wide with confusion at what had just happened. To be honest, he can hardly remember why she came up to grab him. All he can remember is rage… and hurt.

“I…” Somewhere under the resignation on her face, she looks like she needs his comfort as much as he needs hers. And Eren’s never felt more betrayed to realize that for a reason he could never understand, she keeps herself closed. “I don’t… want… to tell you…”

Eren’s stomach turns, features incredulous. “Huh!? Bullshit, Mikasa! This isn’t about me! All of humanity could be wiped out if we don’t do anything! Even if it’s true, that’s all the more reason to fight! What good is it to keep me here if I die soon anyways?”

Strangely, if there’s anything that strikes a chord with her, it’s this. “I don’t know…” she answers with glossy eyes, as if that was the first good question he asked all day.

After a moment of silence, a sigh is what leaves his lips. He’s tired.

“You’re being selfish.”

Silence.

“Are you going to leave?” it doesn’t sound like a question. It’s a death knell in the form of a quiet girl’s whisper.

“Would you let me…?” his gaze keeps away from her, looking to the bed they’ve shared for so long.

“I… can’t.”

“Mikasa…” he sinks to the floor, tears flowing down his eyes in an unending stream. Will she ever truly trust him? Trust him enough to understand that he doesn’t hate her? Trust him enough to tell him the truth?

She slowly bends her knees, sitting with him. She keeps her distance, knees drawn up to block her face where her scarf can’t.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice is small. “I don’t know what to do anymore… I… I failed.”

He sighs into his own arms, cursing venom from his breath. “I’m not your little brother…” the old phrase he used to spew so often falls from his mouth before he has time to catch himself. And yet, despite all that’s happened, all that he’s learned about her, not much has changed. Sometimes she still needs reminding.

“I know you don’t trust me. It’s not fair of me to ask anything from you now… so… if you want to leave,” he doesn’t need to look at her to tell that she’s crying. He doesn’t even need to hear it. He can feel it in his bones.

“Shut up about that already,” Eren sighs. “I’m pissed off, but I still don’t hate you.” He’s made peace with the fact that that nightmare will never leave him. The memory of her shivering figure, heart more betrayed than her reluctance could ever make him feel, is enough to make him want to gouge his own eyes out. “I’ll never hate you. And I won’t leave you here. Not in this shithole.”

Her hitches grow stronger, though they never breach into sobbing. That’s the way Mikasa always cried. Some people are silent, some roar with pain, some choke and mewl as if struck in the heart. Mikasa takes high, deep breaths. When she’s really sad, she’ll scream out to the void.

“Staying here like she wants us to…” he stares at his unblemished hand. “It’s only a matter of who finds us first. Reiner… is it true?”

“It’s just one interrogation after another…” Ashe mutters under his yellow teeth. “Pretty soon everyone in the Underground will know about this. Keeping it under wraps won’t do shit.”

Marco’s squad sits inside a candlelit waiting room, shadows twice as large as them dancing on the walls. It’s cramped, as usual, but the lack of windows is something particularly notable. It’s been like this for days. They’ve been kept in the dark in every sense, the only activity being the occasional summoning by their superiors for more questioning. It seems that every faction within Sina has taken an interest in this exciting development. Where there’s a figurehead like Marco, and a compelling story to be told, there’s money to be made and social favor to be gained. Marco considers himself lucky in that respect. His squad had led the attack, thus bearing the responsibility of it all. And among them, Marco was their leader, so if there’s anyone experiencing the least monotony, it’s probably him.

He’s amazed at the ground that has shaken under his feet, by his feet. He entered the Military Police hoping to be an important cog in a well oiled machine, the sword and shield of the King. Instead, he’s been reduced to the King’s will and his will alone, carrying out what Marco has to believe is the right course of action, standing against the corruption that would see the walls fall to ruin.

“No,” he responds to Ashe. “These interrogations aren’t doing anything. It’s just the pretense they use to keep us locked in here, and to make the public think we aren’t prisoners.”

“Don’t see the point in tricking the public,” Ludwig, the sharpshooter of their team, cuts in, voice indifferent. “We’ve been stuck in HQ all this time, who’s to say the people born and raised in this pit don’t see us as perpetrators? After all, they were getting along with their lives just fine until we showed up to take away their husbands and fathers.”

Marco sighs, eyes concerned. “You think it was a bad move?”

“I didn’t say that.” He crosses his arms, face closed in a matter-of-fact manner. “I wanted those pieces of shit gone, and I don’t gotta justify it to anyone. Just letting you know, fighting to earn the public’s favors is a different game entirely. Don’t try to play it.”

The freckled boy opens his mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. He can’t say that Ludwig is wrong in what he says, but it’s impossible for him not to lament the reality of the situation. Marco’s no leader, not like Jean. He couldn’t grip everyone’s hearts with a fierce speech, instilling them with the same devotion to the King that he has. If people like Marco exist out there, they’re few and far between, especially in a place like this. He may be a captain for going against the mold, for motivating his comrades to action, but he cannot truly lead. A shrewder man than him may have capitalized on the cadets’ rage more purposely, but Marco’s found himself in a tide he cannot stop. Trust in his friends and trust in the King is all he has left.

The silence is broken by a loud creak at the door. A burly woman enters through. “Marco Bott,” she states.

Marco rises from his chair, “Yes..” he lets exasperation mark his features, following her through a number of identical halls.

“Here we go again,” is all Marco can think, running through the story he plans to tell with practiced ease, the lines memorized in his head. He wonders how she knows where they’re going, with one hall identical to the next. They stop at a small door, with the woman half-heartedly saluting. “Capital Police,” she says, walking away, leaving Marco to gaze at the wooden door. “Capital Police? Isn’t this outside their jurisdiction? I guess I don’t know where the Underground falls, district wise.”

He takes one final sigh before opening the door, debating on the details he should share. The room is quite a bit nicer than what he would have expected to see down here, but little could have prepared him for the face he sees inside.

Marco gasps, equally stunned and elated.

“Reiner!”

His blond, burly friend offers a reassuring smile. “Hey, Marco. It’s been a while.”