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Sitting under the tree, needle in hand, surrounded by the gentle and rich colors of the world, Mikasa remembers her mother.
Twenty years on, her face is blurry. Mikasa is sure her mother had long, silky hair and pale pink lips. She is sure her mother smelled like flowers and earth. But beyond that, she knows she fills in the gaps herself. Memory is strange; she tethers herself to the lilt and rhythm of her mother’s speech, but can’t recall a single word spoken in the moment.
Mikasa can’t divorce the idea of her early childhood being bloody and tragic any more than she can forget that her parents loved her more than anyone else in the world, more than Eren, more than Armin, more than any Scout or comrade in arms. She doesn’t want to think about not seeing them after death, spending the rest of her life trying to atone for the sin of killing and killing and fighting and fighting.
Usually, under the tree, she speaks to Eren, about the things she’s done that day, that week, promising to meet him at the end of decades. Today, she says, quietly, “Look, Mama, I’m making something. I’ll lay it out on the table, when I’m done.”
The cloth in her hand is unbleached linen, not quite a clean white, but the fine threads she uses to decorate it are the softest silk, purple and blue and green, so green.
The needle flashes in and out of the fabric. Between rustles of grass in a quiet breeze, the sound of silk being pulled through, over and over. Her work is precise and even and beautiful. Over the course of the afternoon, flowers bloom before her eyes.
“Spring is here,” Mikasa tells her mother, in case she’s lost track of the seasons with the long passage of time in the afterlife. “I’m going to have some friends over for dinner next week. I’d like this spread to be finished by then.”
•••
With the resilience of the ages, Shiganshina grows back, so, so rich. The richness rests in the deep, luxurious quiet of the hills, the trees, the rays of sunlight passing brightly through squared off windowpanes. Mikasa watches it all, first from the recesses of her bed in just a sliver of visible view, then from her front door, then all around her as she slowly meets her world again.
Let’s just take it easy, today.
Mikasa didn’t like to hear those words. She took it easy for far too long after the first day back — back home — her body feeling strange and exposed without the ODM harness to anchor her in. Every time she was the one holding her hand out to Armin, urging him to keep moving, to make a decision, to come up with a plan, just like how Eren had in turn forced her to be that person. A predictable variable, always at his call, always loyal, always protecting.
She spent an uncountable number of days taking it easy at first while her friends couldn’t come home. Shiganshina was still mostly deserted. What little people remained left her alone, so respectfully that when a wild animal broke in through the door one evening she cried.
Now she has a pet deer, but that’s a story for another time.
•••
Paradis has patrols everywhere now. Without the threat of titans, humans swarm the wild in their greed. The ocean, once unrestrained and melting into sandy beaches, has been sectioned off at shore and restricted by troops with guns and canons. Mikasa hasn’t seen the ocean in years. She isn’t sure she actually wants to anymore.
Armin is different. When Armin sees the ocean he sees the possibility of life teeming in the water. Mikasa, only the inevitability of a vast and empty expanse in which to get lost, towering waves and rolling storms. And Eren? Eren didn’t even see the ocean, instead gazing at the shores far out of sight.
But neither Armin nor Eren are here right now. It is just Mikasa, in her own little house, tucked away from the rest of the world, resting, and resting, and resting. Her arms hang down at her sides. When she folds them, she feels the weight and warmth of Eren’s head cradled to her body. And she looks at the small grave beneath the tree and knows he is gone far away.
The first year she spends alone is mostly from the confines of a dark room. Her body grows accustomed to the cycle of day and night; she lies down when the moon sits up above and rises when the dawn comes. She takes slow, short walks around neighborhoods that are only recognizable by certain still-standing buildings. She hunts sometimes, thinking about Sasha, and slowly wanders into the scant town markets for spices and staple foods. She sets up a garden the way her mother taught her, memories bursting forth through the veil of numb loss. Four hands in the dirt. Butterflies with their wings winking in the wind.
The second year, Historia finds her.
“What do you need?” Historia asks, a baby on her hip and the crown missing from her head. When the child laughs she looks like the freest thing in the world. “Money? Materials? Weapons? Pardons?”
Mikasa says, “I don’t know.”
“You know, Mikasa, I’m not a very good person. I’m still the worst girl in the world.” Historia doesn’t look any different as she sits with Mikasa outside her house, however, walking on unpaved ground, or helping weed the small garden. “Yet here I am, queen of the only unruined land in the world, with a husband who treats me well and a child I love.”
Mikasa says nothing.
“Isn’t it strange? How every time I could have lost something more, I didn’t?”
Mikasa says nothing.
“The devil himself did everything he could to save me.” Historia’s lips smile, but her eyes are years in the past. “If I had been my true worst self from the start maybe…”
“That’s not true.”
“I knew I should have stopped him, Mikasa.” Over the years, Historia’s speech has grown even and measured, weighted. But once in a while, the queen within the walls disappears and Mikasa sees the girl who struggled in hand to hand combat training, the girl who saved Sasha a piece of bread but got scared when it was eaten, the girl who laughed and excitedly told her it was good to work close together again. Her voice is flighty as a bird’s. “But I had no right to. I was the first person to say to hell with humanity. I wasn’t even trying to protect my friends. When everyone was dying in the world, I was receiving advanced medical care to give birth to my child.”
Suddenly, she looks up at Mikasa. Sunset flushes across her face. “Mikasa, I still want to live selfishly, even after everything that happened. Do you understand? But we’re friends, and it would make me happy to help you. Whatever it is. Work, supplies, anything.”
“What I want,” Mikasa says, and looks at the frayed hem of her pink cardigan. She wants to hide, all the way back in the days of her childhood under the shelter of her parents’ love. She wants to hide in the afternoon the kidnappers had shown up at her door, in the long stretches of peaceful and happy conversation and the oblivion of the cruelty in the world. She wants to hide in the conversations that sparked between Eren and Armin as children, the pages of the book that started it all, never knowing the story that would unfold. Her eyes close and she goes back again, into the gentle sunlight, into the sparkling fountain at the center of old Shiganshina town, into the aroma of Carla Jaeger’s cooking, into the softness of the red scarf around her neck, into the lift of Eren’s eyebrow as he asked if she’d like to go home, together, like they were supposed to do at the end of all this.
“Silk thread,” Mikasa says, finally, opening her eyes to see the brilliant colors woven all around her, rich and golden. Historia’s eyes widen in surprise and the sunset blooms there. “In every color you can spare, if you can.”
In a month she receives a package from Historia with bobbins and silk threads and shiny new needles — and a pin, with two interlocking wings.
•••
In the third year, a letter comes through Historia from Armin.
We’re coming home. Can we see you?
•••
Still avoiding the ocean, Mikasa meets them at the gate to town.
It’s Armin and Jean and Annie and Connie who come first. She only recognizes Jean for a minute: Armin’s hair shortened again; Connie’s lengthened; Annie’s trimmed neatly. Jean’s hair looks, well, like he’s full of himself, but she find she doesn’t mind too much.
“It doesn’t look the same at all as I remember,” Connie says; Annie fixes him with something like an exasperated glare.
“I still can’t believe we’re actually here,” Jean says.
“Mikasa, how have you been?” Armin says.
Mikasa’s growing her own hair out. It gets in the way, and sometimes she imagines Eren batting at the ends playfully, telling her she’s going to get it caught in her ODM gear.
“Armin,” is all she replies. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Jean dragging Connie and Annie down a different street.
The last time Mikasa saw Armin, he was broken with grief, and Eren’s head was still cradled against her body.
She’d taken his hand so many times, but that very last time, she’d turned away from him.
Mikasa smiles and reaches out, curling her fingers into Armin’s palm and smoothing her thumb over his. “Armin,” she repeats, this time an invitation.
He falls against her, straight into her arms, which she holds steady as always, and the dread that she’d carried in her stomach for the past years begins to melt away.
Through Historia, they have just the vaguest idea of what the past three years have been like for each other. Mikasa knows Armin is an ambassador. Armin knows Mikasa is tending to her house in Shiganshina. But, as she leads him and the rest of their friends up to the front door of her little home, he gasps like he’s never been to their hometown before.
It has changed. Streets are repaired, buildings reinforced (the fountain still hasn’t made it back). Some of the street names are different, not that it matters to Mikasa, who was there when it was all dirt and crushed cobblestone. She tries to answer all of Armin’s questions — what happened to so and so? where is so and so? — with midling success, having to admit that many things were destroyed, and not admitting that they were destroyed by Eren’s grand plan.
The cottage she lives in comes into view. It’s small, not even big enough for two, but the table is set for five with every last bit of cookware she scrounged up from the recesses of her kitchen cabinets, and the embroidered tablecloth is filled with campanulas, which are just starting to bloom over the fields on the hills.
“Mikasa, that’s beautiful,” Armin gasps, hardly able to sit down. But he does, next to Annie and herself; Jean and Connie on her other side. It’s a simple meal: bread with herbs baked in, a spicy vegetable stew with barely a scant few strips of dried meat cooked in for richness, but Mikasa has moved beyond the feeling of embarrassment. There are fancier restaurants in Paradis now, especially in the interior, with food that spoils quickly and easily, fragile and not hearty.
“So, we met up with Niccolo before we stopped here,” Connie tells her, “he’s doing well. I mean, he’s still involved in stuff he shouldn’t be involved in, but at this point he’s practically one of us, kinda.”
Mikasa hands him a piece of her bread, which he takes with a surprised stammer. Jean on her right side rolls his eyes. He hasn’t said much today after the initial hellos. No comments on the state of Paradis. No reminiscing. Just one comment telling her Reiner and Pieck were still in the interior, staying with Historia for the time, and one half-formed question that began with is he and never ended.
Annie is the most changed, almost smiling when their eyes meet. Mikasa wonders when she started doing her hair like that.
She listens as Armin and Connie fill her in on the details of the past three years. As expected, the world is a flattened mess and Paradis is still hated. But they bring some good news, too:
“My mom is okay.” Connie doesn’t try to hide the way he tears up. Jean claps him on the shoulder and nods with a quiet “mine, too” and Mikasa chews through the pang in her chest. Annie’s dad is also okay, according to an Annie that makes a blatant attempt to turn them away from heavy emotion.
And then, other topics — now Jean chimes in with digs at Reiner and his inner turmoil about his facial hair, leading to a loud, boisterous laugh from Connie. Annie only says, bluntly, that Connie is so annoying, but that just sets off another round of quick witted, playful jabs that even have Jean and Armin chuckling. Mikasa finds she doesn’t mind the noise, either; it reminds her of Carla’s kitchen, the sound of steam and fire and Eren’s loud, lively voice. Her house has been a place of quiet and peace for so long: now it’s full of life.
She doesn’t recognize the hiccup in her throat or the sharp exhale through her nose, but the whole table goes silent for a moment.
“What?”
“Quick, Jean, say something stupid,” Connie instructs, slapping Jean’s back.
“Huh? Shut up, you say something stupid,” Jean barks, and it happens again like something of a sneeze. Mikasa covers her mouth, but her shoulders scoot all the way up her neck.
“That’s our squad leader, always so reliable,” Connie cries — Jean’s eyes widen, affronted, comically round, and his voice is husky as he growls empty threats back at Connie. Mikasa finally tosses her head back and laughs out loud. Connie joins in, screeching something so ridiculous that it doesn’t even make sense, and suddenly the whole lot of them lose it in starts and fits.
•••
Right at the edge of waking, Mikasa always hears Eren, in that false memory, telling her to forget about him and move on.
The whole world is supposed to move on, unite around the heroes that stopped the Rumbling, condemn Eren Jaeger and let him lie forgotten somewhere in the rubble, but here she is, bringing her whole world to the hilltop tree where he rests with a gravestone standing guard over him and fresh flowers laid atop the dirt.
“Hey, Mikasa. Did he… did Eren say anything to you? In there?”
There’s Jean. His fist won’t relax as he stares down at the simple gravestone.
She hasn’t heard anyone refer to Eren by name since the day Jean told her they’d have to kill him. She shakes her head, instead. It’s a new day; Reiner and Pieck are here from meeting with Historia or Kiyomi-san or whoever they were supposed to talk to, though Pieck, disinterested in cemetery talk, is simply there to enjoy the breeze.
“By that time, he’d said everything he needed to say.”
Jean’s fingers loosen. “Alright.”
Mikasa looks at the grave, and she can almost hear Eren laughing as he pops out from beneath the earth: hey guys, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it, the same ache crawling through her body because it isn’t real.
“I didn’t think he would, but if he hurt you at the very end, I’ll never forgive him,” Jean declares.
Annie had said it best when they were flying through the spine of the Founding Titan: just focus on saving Armin. Leave Eren to us. Mikasa knows she’s allowed the memory of Eren as she loves him because the rest of them contend with the memory of him as the devil slave to a freedom that cost most of the world.
“Thank you, Jean.”
Jean gives her the same awkward half-smile he tried to hide that day in the wagon.
Later, Armin asks if she wants to stay in Shiganshina for a while longer. Of course she does, and she can. She asks him if he wants to stay in Shiganshina, just a little bit longer. Of course he does, but he can’t.
“You’re like a bird, always flying from one place to the next,” Mikasa notes.
“The world is big, and the sky hasn’t been claimed,” Armin replies. His brow furrows. “I think it’ll happen soon, though. People will think about how we approached the Founding Titan from above and draw conclusions.”
When he sighs, it is like the whole earth trying to dispel tension. Mikasa turns back to the embroidery in her lap. It’s a seascape, with a pearly pink shell tucked partway into the sandy beach. There weren’t enough shades of blue to separate the water from the sky, but in the end, that doesn’t matter. Already the picture is outdated, according to Armin: the skies are always stormy, and the water is dirty with debris nowadays. Mikasa tries to care about it the same way Armin does, and can’t. Lost in the past, lost in the paths, both of them dissolved, always looking for the things she’s lost, she doesn’t have it in her to care about the rest of the world.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. Armin understands.
“You’ve done enough. More than enough.”
“I’m not giving up,” she promises him. “Just… living for myself.”
“I understand.” Armin always understands. “Do you remember, when Annie left us?”
“I want you to be honest.”
“I am being honest. You would be an asset, if you came with us. But you’re human, too, Mikasa. We all want that for you. Just remember the door is open. Maybe you’ll never come through the door, and that’s okay. Maybe it will always be us pushing it open from our side. But it’s open. It will always be open.”
Mikasa reaches for a new thread. “The kids… Gabi and Falco? How are they?”
“Gabi’s mother tried to remove her bedroom door,” Armin laughs softly. “She ended up moving into a different area with just Falco. They’re alright.”
“Oh, are they…”
“Yeah.”
Mikasa deliberates on the next question for a while. She wonders when she’ll next talk to Annie. The others, everyone except Armin, left for Trost earlier that morning. “And you and Annie?”
“Ah— that’s, well, sort of,” Armin stammers out.
Rhythmically her needle pokes through the fabric, grey silk trailing behind over the contours of a rock’s surface.
“Is it going anywhere,” she prods, while Armin blushes and hugs his knees. “Are you happy? Will you be happy?”
“Well, things are going well, I think, all things considered.”
“Armin.” Snip goes her scissors. With an effortless flick of her hand, she threads a different color. “I don’t mean busy, I mean happy.”
“Sorry. I mean, yeah.” Armin crosses the gulf of unshared experiences easily. “You know, the stories about princesses being locked up in towers that we had when we were kids…”
“I’m not.” Mikasa looks up, frowning. Does Armin think she’s being locked up in a tower?
“Relax, I didn’t mean you were one of them. I was just thinking, it’s funny how wrong those stories are. About you and Historia, both. You’re more like… the dragons guarding the castle.” An embarrassed giggle slips out. Mikasa relaxes.
“Do you still think about those old stories?”
“Not really. Do you?”
“Often,” Mikasa admits. “I feel like I wander, Armin. Everyone says dwelling on the past is bad.”
“It’s not.”
Which, really, is kind of Armin to say, as someone who holds up Eren’s mantra of always moving forward. Now that Mikasa really looks at him, he’s tired in a way that isn’t too different from the war. His eyes are reddened victims of sleepless nights, jaw clenched from a constant, low-grade headache. Even during his stay here, with barely a clock to tell time and only the angle of the sun to dictate the pace of their days, Mikasa knows he’s counting down the time he has left before he has to go back into the world again.
“It’s comfortable here,” says Armin, cautiously lying back on her bed, fingers brushing over the soft linen spread. “I miss it. You’re allowed to rest, you know.”
“I have been resting, though. I think I should go and do something.”
“I think when it’s time for you to do something, you’ll do it.” Armin gestures vaguely around the room, at the tidiness of it, crumbs cleared from the tablecloth and dishes put away into a cabinet despite the chaos from the group dinner (and wine). He has a point, Mikasa supposes. “You don’t need to tire yourself out just because I am.”
“Well, you don’t need to tire yourself out, either,” Mikasa says petulantly.
At this, Armin cracks a smile. “This was nice.” He yawns. “You have a lot of pink things.”
“I like it,” Mikasa replies. Her house is practical, yes, but full of pretty things, the same way her mother kept it, she’s sure.
“I think I want to visit again, soon, if I can get these talks done smoothly,” Armin says, yawning again and barely covering his mouth as he does so. Mikasa gets up from her chair, yanking a blanket from under him and draping it over his shoulders.
“Rest, Armin.”
•••
Truth be told, Mikasa was never the kind of artist that Jean was, always too busy to sketch in a notebook, but she’s always liked looking at the world around her, at its beauty. So she stitches her way through the quiet scenes she remembers from her life: the bell flower field; the big tree; the vast sea; the one settlement in Marley where lantern-lit tents dotted the night like fallen stars. Sometimes the proportions don’t come out right, or her lines extend out too far, but eventually, the smaller mistakes start to either correct themselves or feel insignificant enough to ignore. And the larger mistakes become lessons.
In the middle of her fourth year in Shiganshina, bandits come into town. Mikasa isn’t strapped into ODM gear, of course not, though she keeps the gear and harness maintained well enough, but she has a hunting knife strung onto her belt. She also isn’t superhuman anymore, so fighting them off isn’t the same kind of easy she’s used to. She’s left with a sprained wrist, a few cuts, three more crosses to bear, and a meager supply wagon that is happily split between the townspeople on the scene.
“Are you alright?” “You saved us, Miss Ackerman!” “So it’s true, you are a former Scout member, aren’t you?” “My daughter was in the 107th cadet corps, maybe you know her?”
Mikasa, like so long ago, gives them a fist-over-heart salute (and hides a wince, due to her wrist) before she ducks into her house to lick her wounds. But it isn’t a year of sitting in a dark room again; she mends quickly, refuses Historia’s well-meaning but misplaced offer of stricter security detail, and goes back to work.
Letters come and go slowly. Suddenly Mikasa is busy, her hands full of little disputes to settle for her neighbors during the day, and embroidery cloth at night. Armin sounds amused when he writes her next and calls her a peacemaker of sorts. She replies in kind. Words that felt unnecessary to say out loud find their way onto paper, anchoring down the day and month on which they leave her. The Alliance separates — a temporary separation — Jean and Reiner off to one corner of the world, Annie and Armin to another, Pieck and Connie still corresponding between Paradis and what’s left of Marley. Letters start to trickle in not just from Armin. Mikasa replies to all of them.
Summer passes before she has a chance to visit the grave again.
Shiganshina is so alive when the days are long. The closest rail stop is half a day’s travel, but those who do come into town are eager. Whispers about festivals and dedicating hearts pervade the streets. Mikasa takes a passive interest in it until Jean and Connie decide they want to join in on the fun, and then suddenly they’re visiting for a week and Mikasa finds herself taking on the responsibility of dragging two grown men home from the tavern every night.
“Why couldn’t Annie and Armin have heard about this first,” she says, not quite scolding but approaching it. Connie responds by throwing up considerately out of the range of her shoes.
“I’ll take him,” Jean tells her, hauling a whining Connie into his arms. “Ugh.”
“That’s our reliable Jeanbo,” Connie groans, “fuck, what kind of alcohol did they give me? My head feels like it screwed on an extra time around.”
“Extra secure to make sure your brain stays in,” Jean mutters.
Mikasa smothers her mouth with her free hand. They heave Connie over Jean’s back and walk back to her house, where she keeps her curtains and windows open, letting the balmy breeze through the room. Connie gets dumped onto her bed and handed a cup of water.
“I haven’t seen him this drunk since Marley,” says Jean with a deep sigh. He sits at the kitchen table, eyes half-focused on the tablecloth, while Mikasa looks around for her needle. “Hey, watch out for eye strain.”
“It’s fine.”
Jean snorts. “You’ve been rubbing your eyes all evening.”
Even as he says it, there’s a telltale prickle in her eyeballs. She blinks through it stubbornly. “You should rest, too. Tomorrow’s the last day.”
“All the more reason to go wild, no?” He looks over at Connie, lips pulled into a fond grin. “At least one of us has got the right idea. I don’t know if I can let loose that much anymore.”
Mikasa lets him ramble.
“I stopped by Trost before we got here, obviously. It changed so much already. Do you know how weird it is to hear cars outside the window in your childhood bedroom? Thank fuck it’s quiet here. I can’t believe I spent my entire life wishing for a cushy life in the interior and now I’m wishing I lived in the countryside with no transit and barely a town center.” Despite insisting he didn’t need water, Jean takes a big gulp from the cup on the table. Mikasa doesn’t know if she’s supposed to reply to him or just keep listening, so she does the latter.
Sasha probably would have said something, though. Not that she wants to be Sasha. From the bed, Connie mutters something about how travel time is the slowest part of their day. Jean scoffs, but he comes to life after that, like he just needs to bicker with people.
Ah.
Some time passes before Connie decides he wants to sleep, and, as the loudest one, the energy in the house dies down as soon as he’s knocked out. With one lamp and a half finished cup of water between them, Mikasa takes a good look at Jean.
Like Armin, he looks tired.
“Jean,” she says, “aren’t you going to sleep?”
“What an interesting concept.” He smirks like it’s a practiced response.
“… It’s nighttime. What about this concept is so interesting.”
“Have you always been able to fall asleep at night? Even with everything that happened?”
Mikasa nods. “Rest is good. I have to have enough rest to keep going every day.”
“You Ackerman lot,” Jean grumbles.
Mikasa doesn’t even grace that with a response.
“I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve slept through the night since Liberio,” Jean says. “Most of them were in your house.”
Again, she doesn’t know how to respond, and so stays quiet, building the trunk of a tall, tall tree on her cloth.
This is usually when Jean starts complaining about something or the other while doing the lion’s share of the work, but he doesn’t complain now. Connie and Sasha always said Jean’s kindness was foul mouthed, a part of himself that he reserved for his favorite people.
“It feels like a home,” Jean tells the table.
Mikasa flushes all the way to her ears and puts her embroidery down. “I’m going to sleep. If you can get up to the roof, it’s nice during the summer.”
“Yeah, and risk falling off in the middle of the night?” But Jean takes the blanket she offers him and decides to climb up after all, leaving her to shove Connie to the side of her bed for some space. She lets the lamp burn itself out during the night. Connie’s warm against her back, the same as he is every night since he and Jean arrived.
It dawns on her, sleepily, that she wishes she’d bickered more with everyone.
•••
What am I to you? Family?
You’re… like family. Yes.
Let’s take it easy today.
Mikasa, let’s kill him. Let’s kill Eren.
Mikasa wakes. As with most mornings, sleep erases itself from her body neatly, like a streak of dust wiped away.
Jean is at the sizzling stove, bent low because he’s impossibly tall. Connie’s still asleep, back to back with her but still comfortable.
“Your bedhead is always so funny,” Jean says, turning to see her sit up. “Sleep well?”
“I always do.”
“That makes one of us.”
“Were you up on the roof all night?”
“Yeah, got your blanket a little dirty. Sorry about that.”
Mikasa, do you want to save him?
“I’m not Levi,” Mikasa murmurs, padding off to wash her face and get ready for the day. When she comes back, three omelettes are laid out on the table. There is no resemblance to anything from back then; Jean’s not even wearing an apron, but something about the way his hair (too long) falls over his shoulder and the way Connie wakes up from smelling food, bounding over to his seat straight from bed, makes Mikasa blink rapidly.
Eren wants to join the Survey Corps.
“Dig in,” Jean insists magnanimously. “The post-hangover Kirschtein special from yours truly. Mikasa, I borrowed the last of your eggs.”
“Borrowed? Are you going to return them? I never saw a horse lay an egg before,” Connie snarks through a half-yawn.
“It’s a fucking figure of speech!”
Truth be told, the omelettes aren’t well seasoned. Possibly because her spices are unlabeled. But the texture of them is good, soft and fluffy, and easy to swallow down. Mikasa tucks her hair out of the way in between bites.
“Your hair’s getting long, ‘Kasa,” Connie says, swatting at it absentmindedly. Then he turns to Jean with a shit-eating grin. Jean scowls even deeper and jerks his head out of the way. “Aww, come on, you let Reiner play with your hair.”
“He doesn’t play with it, he brushes it for me because it soothes him.”
“I bet it’s because he compliments you every time he does it.” Connie bats his slightly crusty eyelashes, a little disturbingly. “Wooow, I never knew the hero who stopped the Rumbling had such beautiful luscious locks. Can I touch it?”
“Fuck off, Springer,” Jean snaps, his face entirely red now. “Mikasa, for Walls’ sake, don’t just sit there smiling. Your chef’s dignity is threatened.”
“It’s just hair,” Mikasa says to the tune of Connie’s guffawing.
“Ha!”
“You’re all traitors and I’m never making you breakfast again.”
Mikasa smiles around a mouthful of bland egg. “Jean, Connie. I’m going to go see him today.”
“Him, as in…”
“You idiot, who else?”
Over the hill they go, Mikasa, Jean, and Connie, reminiscing about the before. It’s strange: she’s not used to not having Eren and Armin at her side, and maybe Jean and Connie miss having Sasha by theirs; the puzzle pieces don’t slot in perfectly, but she’s tied her hair up into the same kind of ponytail Sasha showed her back then, and her friends are smiling even though the wind makes them quiet. Armin should be here — he’s got more memories than anyone, could do with more laughter and the taste of home, but Armin has always been the one doing what Eren wanted to so badly: move forward, see the world, be free.
She’ll just have to take that message to him, some day.
“I say this every time, but man this tree is huge.” Connie stretches his arms up towards its crown. “You ever climb it as a kid?”
“Once or twice,” Mikasa says, taking her usual seat by the grave. “Hi, Eren. Jean and Connie are here.”
Jean sits down next to her as Connie decides to investigate the wide trunk, the ancient bark, the roots that seem to spread out impossibly wide far even after dipping into the earth. “So, is that another tablecloth or what?”
“You’ll see.”
“Alright.” He scoffs towards the headstone. “What’s up, suicidal maniac.”
Jean rambles a little at Eren. There’s nothing particularly emotional about it. He rants about the logistics and quirks of policymaking, dealing with entitled people, and how bad it sucks to be stuck on a boat at sea (“the ocean is shitty, so you’re basically a huge blockhead on top of everything else”). Then he tells Eren they’re not giving up, even though the situation is objectively bad.
It’s so different to what Mikasa tells him. When Jean gets excited the hotheaded part of him leaps out from the serious squad leader shell he’s encased himself into.
She’d give up a lot to go back to when a simple argument between Eren and Jean was enough to entertain their whole 104th class, but she doesn’t want to give up the bonds she has now.
•••
Mikasa sends the first piece off to Historia along with her next letter: an embroidered tableau of the sea. Historia doesn’t make too many appearances outside Mitras nowadays. It is weird to think about: for a queen who makes decisions about Paradis’s role in the rest of the world, she has never even seen what’s beyond their own island. She tells Historia that in the letter, too.
She sends her second piece off to Armin. It’s Shiganshina as it sits in her memories, the turn up the street of Eren’s childhood home, the corners of the Jaeger’s stone house softened by moss and vines. Dots of colorful flowers bloom along the sides of the street. She tells Armin there will always be a hometown for him, where she is.
Her third piece she sends to Levi, Onyankopon, the rest of their small band of heroes who don’t travel the world but instead build their lives atop new soil and reorient the lives of others around them: a bird, with one white wing and the other a dark blue.
It goes slowly; she considers each stitch as her needle passes through her fabric. A whole season goes by as she puts her work down to tend to her own life, acquiring food, protecting the innocents and the children who remain, fixing cracks in her home, clearing out the last of the debris from Wall Maria crumbling down around them. And a whole season might go by before any of her mail gets delivered. But Mikasa doesn’t idle; she never has, and she makes sure to tell Eren, too.
“Eren, I’ll come back for you one day, when it’s time. But until then, I have a long life to live.”