It was an awfully big place for just nine people, but they'd settled into a sort of daily routine in the past month or so that made life seem just a little bit less lonely. Not that life was ever lonely, mused Mikasa, not with Eren by her side. She hadn't gotten this much Eren time since before Bertholdt had broken through the wall in 846. He'd changed a little bit in the meantime, but she could see glimpses of the boy she'd fallen in love with long ago.

He was a little tamer these days. Of course he'd been tense and frustrated in wartime – everyone had – and he'd snapped at Mikasa quite a bit. She'd be lying if she said it didn't hurt; nothing (within reason) felt quite as bad as the heat behind his gaze when he was frustrated with her. She tried to recall the feeling, the tears that would well behind her eyes as he shouted about something or other, and she couldn't stop a smile from surfacing on her face. Why, it had been so long since he'd exploded that she barely remembered. She grinned to herself as she washed the dishes – it was her turn. And better yet, he'd been so considerate of her, so much more so than in the past. He'd spent so much time with her, just talking about this and that, going out into the woods to chop firewood – he'd even picked a play fight, throwing a handful of grass and twigs in her direction. How long had it been since they'd–

"What're you smiling about, Mikasa?" Jean's voice snapped her out of her reverie. Mikasa felt the smile drop off her face; Jean regretted his word choice almost instantly. "Um, no! Don't stop! I was just…" his voice trailed off as she turned to face him and… gave him a smile?

"Jean! I'm not smiling about anything in particular. Just…" she paused to consider her words. "Life is good. Isn't it?"

Jean was slightly taken aback by Mikasa's sudden optimism. After all, she wasn't typically one to be so happy-go-lucky. 'Something must have her particularly happy today,' he surmised. He had a guess, but he wasn't exactly in the mood to hear her rave about Eren. He settled for the safer option.

"I guess," he began. "You don't really seem like yourself today." She seemed surprised by the observation. He made to backtrack, but she interrupted his train of thought, which was always slower around her.

"Jean," she said, still sporting an uncharacteristic smile that struck fear into his heart like a bolt of lightning. "Maybe 'myself' is a little different than you though." She peered at her teammate and saw complete incomprehension. "Well, we met under… unpleasant circumstances." Pausing, she added, "I'm not exactly the girl you think I am."

Jean wondered if that was a good or a bad thing. After all, it was the callous, ruthless Mikasa that he'd developed such a crush on.

But then, what was it that he liked about Mikasa? It occurred to him that it wasn't entirely about her demeanor, if at all. After all, it had been her unique hair that he'd noticed first; he'd regarded and fantasized about her face and her body long before he learned how her mind worked. Jean internally cringed at his own thought process, but fact was fact. He was far more physically attracted to Mikasa than he was to her personality, so perhaps this change was a good thing.

But wait! No matter why he liked her, at least he showed any interest at all. She was so hung up on that bastard Eren that she refused to pull her head from the dirt and look around for a man who actually wanted to stimulate her, physically and intellectually. Jean could be that man; she just needed to see the light. He picked up one of the plates and began to scrub vigorously. That bastard.

"Jean," she interrupted his train of thought. "I've been meaning to talk to you about something… personal." He could see doubt and hesitation in her face, emotions that he'd never before seen on the raven-haired girl.

She was turning red. The combination of the sight of her reddening cheeks and her words hit him like a ton of bricks. There was no way… could she finally be accepting his confession? After all these years of pining after the prodigious Ackerman, perhaps she'd finally seen the light? He was quite literally shaking in his boots; he felt a piercing cold in the pit of his stomach.

"It's about Eren and me," she finished. His heart, having climbed up into his throat, dropped back into his chest; the hairs that had begun to rise on his arms settled. He couldn't stop the trembling, but he reasoned to himself that it was more of an angry tremble now. That son-of-a-bitch. Hell, it was almost like she'd read his mind and stepped to the defense of her prince Eren, once again his knight in shining armor. It irked him to death.

"We met when we were nine years old," she started. "He came with his father to do some medical checkups on me and my family." Jean was bored already. This was the last thing he needed to hear. "By the time they arrived, human traffickers had invaded my home, killed my parents, and taken me away."

Crash! Jean had dropped the plate he was holding and it fractured into several pieces upon contact with the stone floor. What? He knew Mikasa's parents had died before the Fall of Shiganshina, but he'd never known why or how.

"We were just nine years old at the time, like I said," she continued. "I was scared, too scared to cry. And…" she hesitated, as though searching for the proper words; she settled on, simply, "he saved me." Her fingers absentmindedly clutched at the somewhat-tattered scarf at her neck, once a bright crimson but now a dull maroon. "He wrapped this muffler around me."

"Of course I was heartbroken, but the story gets better!" Mikasa had noted the dull look in Jean's eyes. "After all, here I am, alive and well, with you and everyone else. And right now, today, I look back on that rainy summer's day, and it's not the day I lost my family any more." She looked pointedly at her teammate. "It's the day I found Eren."

"I hope you understand what I'm trying to say, Jean," she said to him, her voice quieter than before. And he did. She was asking him to understand why he shouldn't hate Eren so much. She was asking him to understand why she was indebted to him. She was asking him to understand why she always, unfailingly, picked Eren over him.

And he did.