Jean, Sasha, and Connie walk into the cabin joking about using their swords to dress and butcher the rabbits they've caught, so Mikasa gruffly volunteers to cook dinner instead. No one tries to argue with her; Mikasa is the best cook out of all of them.

The squad congregates in the living room, which quickly fills with the sound of animated voices. From the snatches of words Mikasa can hear from the kitchen, the recently returned soldiers are retelling the story of how they caught and killed three big rabbits, their voices overlapping as each one interjects with their perspective, each trying to sound like they were the one to ultimately dispatch tonight's dinner.

Mikasa chuckles to herself as she strips the fur from the rabbits with a short-bladed knife, each small body pierced cleanly with a small, deep gash. From an arrow, Mikasa thinks as she inspects the wound on one rabbit with the tip of her knife. It is undoubtedly Sasha's work; Connie is fair with a bow, Jean utterly hopeless.

As she thinks on that, she hears Jean's voice crescendoing over the others, insisting that it was his arrow that killed the largest rabbit, followed by a chorus of boos from the rest of the squad and then Levi, shushing them all.

"Calm down," he instructs them. "Who cares who killed the rabbits? You'll have forgotten about this pissing contest by the time you're shitting out this meal."

The squad falls silent. "Morale," Armin offers, his voice soft. He looks over at the Captain, then away at some unfixed point on the wall.

"Hm," Levi sighs. He pauses for a moment, then decides further distraction is in order. "Do any of you know how to set rabbit traps? I could teach you."

"I do!" Sasha yelps. "I was trying to do that, but these two wanted to have an archery contest."

That gets the boys going again, and soon the living room is filled with noise again, overlapping conversations punctuated with bursts of laughter. Mikasa tries to remember the last time she was in a home like this, the last time she saw a glimpse of the future she can never admit she wants: a fire burning high in the hearth, a hearty meal bubbling on the stove, the happy chatter of the people she loves.

She thinks it was at the Jaegers', probably entertaining Armin's grandparents with tea and cake. Or maybe it was the occasional family who stopped by with food and good cheer for the doctor, introducing the children he'd delivered in order from oldest to youngest. In that short year she spent in Shiganshina she never felt bold enough to say hello to the new faces, and Grisha and Carla never felt the need to force her or to explain the presence of the silent, dark-eyed child who looked like none of them.

Mikasa sighs, the slow exhalation the closest thing she will allow herself to a wail of mourning. They are gone now, Grisha and Carla. Eren has told her that Grisha is dead, but refuses to explain how or when. She can see the answer in his eyes, though, in the way his gaze never focused on hers the few times she tried to gently pry the information from him, the way he still can't quite look her in the eye months later.

She works quickly and efficiently as she skins and butchers the rabbits, then hacks the raw meat into chunks, seasons them with salt and pepper, and sets them aside in a bowl. She washes her hands, then gets to work on the veritable mountain of vegetables the squad managed to swipe the night before from a nearby farm: potatoes and onions bigger than their fists, thick stalks of carrot and celery. Sasha also returned with a few foraged herbs wrapped in her handkerchief; hours later, she sniffs at it occasionally as she sits with the squad, rewarding her ingenuity with the scent of sage on clean linen.

Over the sound of Mikasa's chopping she can listen to the conversation in the living room, can hear Eren trying to top Jean's feigned hunting prowess with an equally false story of his own. Although, she thinks, he did indeed get in a lucky shot with a bow and arrow, but it was a rat, not a rabbit, eating a crust of bread in some filthy corner of the refugee camp. She cannot quite remember who gave them a bow and arrow — only that they were taken away immediately after the rat incident — but it seems appropriate for those idle lawless days.

Mikasa smiles to herself as she pauses in her routine of rinsing, chopping, and setting aside to look out the small window above the stove, the sky streaked with shades of red and pink as the sun starts to set. The sounds from the other room blend into white noise as she is struck by an intense wave of deja vu: people in her home on the farm, not in Shiganshina. Her mother, wearing her best dress, stirring the pot of stew gently so as not to splash any on her clothing. And Mikasa, six or seven years old, asking her mother if she could help and being given the important task of drying the dishes. Her mother paused after a few minutes to watch the sunset, Mikasa's little hands grasping at nothing, expecting a dripping-wet plate. She looked up at her mother, at the red-orange light illuminating the fine angles of her face. The image is still there in her mind, clear as the day she saw it.

It is too much, far too much to resist allowing herself to daydream. She does not know the next time she will be in this position, the next time she will be in a cabin not unlike the one she grew up in, warmed by a fire and by the sounds coming from her squadmates in the next room, even if their noise level is starting to creep from boisterous to obnoxious.

"Quiet down. Let Mikasa work in peace," Levi yells over the din, and Mikasa's breath catches in her throat. He is stern, as he always is, but beneath the sharpness there is a glimpse of something tender. She has considered this in passing, but now, in this place, with the sunset painting the room in golds and crimsons, the revelation overwhelms her and she stands there, bent over the cutting board, her knife useless in her stalling hands.

He is like me, she thinks. It makes her hate him a little more, but it soon dissipates into a joking hatred, a slippery teasing thing. She wants to gently rib him — ha ha, you love us. He'd make her run laps for that and she would do them, gritting her teeth in something between a grimace and a grin.

Sometimes it does feel as though they are the mother and the father in the squad, two strong sentinels to protect the rest. And that thought is all she needs to slip into a reverie, one she saves for perfect moments like this one or when she is miserable, alone on watch at oh-two hundred when the bitter wind seems to wrap itself around her and cut straight through to her bones.

She is here but not here, in a cabin of her very own. Floral print curtains on the windows — she's always wanted those. She wonders if Levi would decorate, would prefer something more masculine. A slow smile starts to form on Mikasa's lips, thinking of the ways she could make him eventually capitulate to these little whims. She imagines Levi would be particularly susceptible to a surprise kiss, which startles her, never having thought about kissing anyone before. A furious blush burns its way across her cheeks but her brain is off and running before she has a chance to stop it — not that she particularly cares to, anyway.

They would have children, she decides. Three of them, three rowdy dark-headed terrors who would love as fiercely as they fought. Two girls and a boy. She doesn't name them, imagines conferring with Levi instead, his hand gently stroking her rounded belly as he tells her he has never considered having children before and doesn't have any preferences otherwise, but he'll be damned if he names his son Kenny.

And they'll eat like this, Mikasa cooking ("My favorite!" little Otto says and Erika agrees, though Sen and Papa think that Mama's chicken casserole is best) while the sounds of the children playing and their father trying to keep them from destroying the house accompany her. Every night will be like this, she thinks, and every night she can fall asleep protected in the strong circle of her former Captain's arms. She remembers what it felt like to be waylaid by him in the forest, how securely he had her pressed against him. She was of two minds then: to scratch and claw and bite at him like a wild animal, anything to retrieve Eren. But she also wanted to relax in his arms, to rest against the warm solid bulk of him.

She shoves those thoughts down, deep down, when she hears footsteps behind her.

"You people are ridiculous," Levi calls behind him as he walks into the kitchen, Mikasa can see (via a quick, near-imperceptible glance over her left shoulder, followed by a resurgence of the fierce hot blush which ignites across her face from ear to ear) that he wears a wry twist of a smirk on his face. He'll mock the squad, but ultimately he enjoys their squabbles, the joking around, especially because it seems to happen less and less these days. He'll take the most inane chatter over the stunned silence of their dinners, the sounds of shaky breaths and the scrape of silverware deafening in the echoing emptiness of the room. "How's the stew coming?" he asks.

Mikasa looks up from the cutting board as Levi picks up a discarded fork and stabs it into a slice of raw carrot, then gently pulls the morsel of food from the tines, taking care that his fingers do not make contact with the metal. The piece of carrot disappears into his mouth as he lays the silverware on the table gently, just so, perfectly parallel to the edge of the table.

"Still chopping vegetables," she replies, slicing into what seems like the fiftieth potato.

"Do you want any help with that?" the Captain asks, loudly chewing the carrot in his mouth as he talks. "It'll go faster." Mikasa suppresses a chuckle at the coincidence of it all, suppresses the rise of giddy panic in her chest as she imagines herself standing near Levi, chopping vegetables with him. She wonders if he will talk to her while he works. Perhaps he will stick around to watch her cook, an idea which she mentally catalogues to review at length at a later date or, more likely, before bed tonight.

"Yes," she tells him, pursing her lips in her usual grim half-smile. As she looks at the Captain, she feels her lips relax a little. The muscles in her cheeks are sore from disuse, but she is unable to keep herself from nearly beaming. "Yes. That would be very nice."

The End