Warning: adult content, angst, body horror

It was December.

Eren was falling.

Through the darkness, he dropped, sourceless, from an unknown height. What had once been snow was now walls of ice-needles. A hard black wind blew, filled with the groans and crashing of the forest. There was no sky. No light. No moon. There was the smear of a Survey Corps cloak, blacker than shadow, falling with a tail like a star. Inside it was Eren.

A seal of ice came between him and the bottom of a lake. His body made a dull echoless sound; a gash opened. Into nothing Eren vanished.

Twelve meters tall, a titan came off the bank. An abnormal. Somehow able to move without any light, lumbering in its grotesque oversize toward the water. Its foot rose and came down. Under it the lake swelled. The ice-surface stretched like a breathing belly, rising, growing larger, inhaling. Tension tore across the ice, thundering with strain. Groaning creaks came to a crescendo. The lake shattered. Ice plates craned up, piercing a black skyless void. Waves trundled onto the banks, crashing, fizzling the snow like it was hot.

Where Eren had vanished, the titan reached its oversized hand.

Twisting in flight, Mikasa jerked her blades out. They connected. The nape flung free. The titan fell, hand mid-reach, and dissolved away. The water boiled where it was submerged. Still flying the air, Mikasa swung through the centripetal arc, and raising speed and momentum, she unfastened the containers at her hips. They plummeted, diminishing under her, vanishing soundlessly.

Climbing higher now, Mikasa fought the weight of the wind, lashed and beaten. Her hair slashed her face. The cloak screamed behind her. As she continued rising, slowing as she came to the highest point, Mikasa reached her hands out, streamline, and dove like an arrow into the water.

When she hit the lake, she did not feel it. She only knew the organs had ceased operating. No longer feeling her own body, she wrestled the lake in her gear. Her hands cut through white-caps, digging under the waves for Eren. She did the action without feeling herself doing it, only seeing it occurring, knowing it must be happening.

She watched her hand fumble into an eddying shadowy form of tendrils. It was the Survey Corps cloak, sinking. She watched her hands seize it up, unable to feel them. Yanking the cloak toward her, she never ceased swimming. Her legs pumped through the bulk and resistance of heavy military boots, fighting to keep her head above the waves. Weight on the other end of the cloak pulled and wrestled. She wrestled back. From out of the deep, she dragged the mass strongly up. Eren's head nodded to the surface as blue as ivory. He wasn't breathing. She heaved him up against her side, her legs still pumping, still kicking, fighting to keep her head above the water.

She swam them both to shore.

Wind, water, and ice beat her. Waves crashed over her head. She dropped under and kicked back up, dragging Eren in her arms, using them to pull through waves, spluttering and kicking, fighting all the seething elements of the storm at once. The swimming mechanics were beginning to fail. Not feeling her body, she only saw the slowing down, saw the labor of her arms as they pulled and grappled with the water. The bank was fat with a paunch of snow. She lurched toward it. At last she dragged them both onto land, crunching into a belly of ice.

Without stopping to rest, her arms and legs worked to climb them up the slope. Her fingers scooped through snow, her body soaked to the skin, dragging Eren by the straps of his maneuver gear. Sliding in cold wet slush, her arms and legs worked, climbing them upward, sliding as she climbed, working hard to get them somewhere, anywhere, going nowhere. Her muscles began to slow. Then they began to shut down.

Out of stamina and out of strength, Mikasa rested her head on the ground. Wind cut by her ears. She shut her eyes. The lubrication of her lungs had frozen. Pain knifed through the respiratory system. The top of her lungs tried to breathe. It was shallow breathing, slow breathing. Alongside the bank, his chin tilted slightly upward, Eren lay on his back, not breathing at all.

Mikasa raised her face. Her skin had very little blood in it. "Eren." She heard her own teeth clattering inside her mouth. "Eren." She shook him. His head rolled. His mouth was taut and bloodless like hers. For a moment, she thought he might be dead. For a moment, she thought she might be dying too. Then she knew that he wasn't, and knew that she couldn't.

Wiped of all feeling, her hands were amputated by the early stages of frostbite. She watched the two hands—they weren't shaking anymore—as they removed Eren's Survey Corps cloak. It sloshed aside. Then she concentrated on her fingers and guided them with her eyesight to her mouth; her rubber lips groped around two of them. Three times it failed. On the fourth, a whistle shrieked into the air. She squinted. She saw only the black wind with horizontal spears of snow tearing through it. She squinted hard as though the will of her eyes could bring it forward. She searched the line of trees willfully, straining her eyesight until it blurred. Then it came.

Against the blackness, the shadow of a horse began to form.

When the horse reached her, without getting to her feet, Mikasa stretched and fumbled at the bags harnessed across its chest, scrabbling for the coat she knew was inside. She took it out and retreated into the fur. She called Eren again. Lying on the bank, unbreathing, he didn't respond. Her eyes watered with cold. She shrank into the coat. She sat. Sitting there motionless, her muscles and fluids battled vasoconstriction—she had stopped feeling the cold ten minutes ago. Without her knowing it, her eyes fell asleep. Then she began to dream.

Mikasa dreamed of herself being a little girl. Then she dreamed of Eren being a little boy. Then she didn't dream anymore.

The hard black wind blew. The whole forest crashed with speed and power. The horse vanished.

With a sound like something solid being broken in half, Eren lurched awake. Water spurt from his mouth and for a long time he vomited as his lungs wrung dry, emptying of the drowning, then emptying of the empty. He gasped and collapsed onto his palms. He almost fainted. Vertigo darkened his vision, dimming an already black world. Then it passed and clarity came on again. He looked out into a shattered December night.

When he saw the snow, convulsions seized him; his body realized before his brain could that he was going to die of hypothermia. His muscles shivered to a friction, functioning in a mode higher than that of human ability. He jerked violently, reheating his systems, though he should've succumbed a long time ago. He raised on his knees. His eyelashes were frozen. No salt. No saline. He blinked moistureless gritty blinks that stuck the lids to the corneas.

Next to him, sitting up on its own, was the fur coat. His hand extended to open it. With her legs pulled up in a fetal position, Mikasa sat motionless inside, womblike, snow clotted in her hair and clothes, swollen in a bone-marrow freeze, already halfway dead.

"Mikasa." The wind howled over Eren's voice and blew it away. He squeezed her shoulder; it did not yield, hard with something like rigor mortis. Then he tried to stand. The wind beat against him and pushed to keep him down. It leaned mass on him like the palpable hand of a creature of pure rage and power. Eren pushed back, shielding his face, ice barraging his arms, getting to his feet.

The wind fought him even as he stood still. It pressed an unrelenting weight on him. A living roaring force. His thighs held strong against it, snow beating his flesh and muscle, spitting solid pieces of hail and what felt like jagged metal shrapnel, though he knew it wasn't. His left hand shielded his eyes. Into the other sank his teeth. The sweetish taste of blood poured over his tongue; a paralyzing yellow light broke open.

Eren rose higher, and Mikasa faded, growing smaller, diminishing behind a shroud of wind and snow, cradled rigid in the coat.

Around him trees shriveled and the fight with the wind shrank. The weight came off his body a great deal, his mane whipping ferociously around his head. He seized Mikasa up from the ground. In his fingers, she fit like a doll with all the passive give of a manmade object. His jaws creaked and steamed apart before his hand clapped to his teeth, feeding her into the hot broiling gulf of his titan mouth. Between his skull teeth hissed a burst of steam. His jaws were shut now. He started away.

As he walked, each massive step scorched the snow.

# # #

The cabin in the woods hadn't been lived in for a long time. It wasn't inhospitable. And it wasn't deteriorated either. But it had a strange quality of isolation and untenability. This is where Eren and Mikasa sheltered out the storm.

Inside the cabin was an ignited hearth and the fire exhaled heat throughout the frozen unlived-in home. A slash glinted darkly across Eren's palm. The injury had opened a pathway to the command over the cryptic titan faculties, and a slow attentive heat pumped from his pores, gradually warming Mikasa's body. A matted fur coat insulated them both. Wrapped inside it, their chests cupped one another. Her ribcage leaned on his. Mikasa's cheek lay on his shoulder. In his hand, Eren held the back of her head. Sitting in front of the fire, he watched the light.

Above the hearth mounted over the mantle was the taxidermy of a male deer-head with a ten-point rack of antlers bearing down its dead glass-eyed stare. The black marble eyes could see everything. A kind of insentient omniscience that only the perfectly preserved embalmed dead could access. Quiet crackling filled the house. Eren's eyes drooped, then they shut altogether. When he opened them again, Mikasa was saying his name. He began to wake up without remembering he'd fallen asleep.

"You can let go of me," she said. Eren let go of her. His arms retracted and he leaned back. He averted his eyes. She used her palms to cover herself and twisted around from him and faced the fire, and he drew his legs away. The light bathed her. Her shadow covered him. When Eren's eyes returned to Mikasa, he saw the harsh curve of her spine with how she was twisted away.

"How long have you been awake?" Eren said.

"Not long," Mikasa said.

"How are you feeling?"

"You don't need to worry about me," she said. "I'm all right now. Will you hand me that coat?" He opened the fur coat around her shoulders. She closed it up around her throat. The fire sputtered. Sticks burned and disintegrated to ash. The light was tight around them. They were quiet. It was an insulated silence filled with private thinking and as they thought to themselves, they never attempted to disclose what thoughts they had.

"Only the fire was needed," Mikasa said. "Anything more wasn't necessary." The burning flames ate up the wood. It seemed to eat up her voice too, but Eren didn't have to hear her to know what she had said, knowing too how he would reply without having to think about it. When the house lapsed into silence again with nothing but the flames eating up the wood, he realized he hadn't replied at all, even though he had thought he knew what to say.

Eren flexed his hand. The gash hissed shut. Mikasa didn't take her eyes from the fire or say another word about it.

He said: "Thank you for pulling me out of that lake. I'm sorry you had to put yourself in danger because of me." The fur coat was bunched hard below Mikasa's chin, as if the head had been set on top of the stiff upright coat like a decoy with just the two pieces, the head and the bear-sheared coat. "I'll go see if I can find more supplies."

Eren started off. His footfalls pounded, hollow and hefty, behind her.

"Eren," Mikasa said. She was still watching the fire, no longer concerned about the clothes that had been removed. The pound of his footfalls ceased. "You saved my life too. Thank you."

Then the feet began again, hollow and hefty, behind her.

# # #

When Eren returned, he had cans of food, two canteens of water, two bottles of booze, and a large man's shirt. He threw the shirt to Mikasa. Without dropping the coat, she turned to the fire and lifted her arms, and as she reached up, the interspaces of her rib bones expanded and stood in sharp relief in a haunting anatomical allusion. Eren thought, strangely, of a pin stabbing her through the thorax to the wall on display like a butterfly corpse. A moment: her figure glowed in orange sexless highlight. Then the shirt glided down to contain her. It swam shapelessly.

This was all he could find, Eren said, and he broke open a can of food and fell back onto an old wingback sofa. Without turning around, she heard his weight fully seat itself in the cushions.

Lying stretched out on his side, braced on his elbow, propping his head on his palm, Eren drank the food straight from the can. A pair of linen shorts he'd found was all he wore.

"You shouldn't eat it raw," Mikasa said.

"It's fine," Eren said.

"There's a pot," she said. "I'll cook it for you."

"If I wanted it cooked, I'd do it myself."

Mikasa got up and threw her shadow over the floor. It slithered soundlessly up Eren where he laid on his side. She held out her hand. He saw her opened beckoning fingers. His face was immobile and impenetrable with her shadow overlaying it. Then he kicked his legs off the sofa and swung around and got to his feet and went to take up the pot, which sat in its iron disuse of years, ten years, twenty—it was impossible to tell—by the hearth, expectantly almost. He stuck his hand through the flames and hooked the pot's arm across the cast iron crane. His immobile head was slanted down. Direct light suffused Eren's face, and his eyelashes seemed to spark and catch fire with the way the light shifted and translated upon itself.

Seeing her own hand still reached out to where Eren had been lying on the couch, Mikasa lowered it and with her head turned, she looked at him standing in front of the fire.

"We should wait out the storm," Mikasa said, "and try again in the morning."

"Yeah," he said. "I only hope the others aren't frozen to death."

"I'm sure Armin thought of something," she said. "You should rest, Eren, and regain your strength. It's your titan we'll have to rely on to get us back home."

"I know," he said.

Mikasa's nostrils perceived a smell before seeing what it was. "Your hand. Don't you feel it?"

Eren lifted his boiled hand. "It doesn't make a difference." In a few seconds, it reverted to the unmarred state, giving off a thin trail of steam, not immune to injury, not even resistant to it, but able to erase the effects after they'd already been thoroughly suffered. Eren took a second food can and a third and squeezed the nonperishables into the cast iron pot. Mikasa went to the fire and crossed her arms. The silence now passing between them was different. It hummed with a kind of concentrated charge.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing," she said. Eren's neckhair picked up the hum, bristling up stiff. He stared down into the pot, sensing that she had something to say. It grinded against her, resisted verbalization. It was her own character getting in the way, he thought. The impairing, self-editing introversion. Not simply introversion. Beyond that.

Eren and Mikasa had known each other since they were children. Like brother and sister, they fed on the vibrations radiating off one another. He knew that she was self-editing, hiding something from him. Knowing this, Eren neither persuaded nor dissuaded her to say whatever it was she wanted to say—they were not like brother and sister in any other way—standing there silently with his arms crossed.

Then Mikasa tried to tell him: "It's just—At this rate—" but her voice fell again. And this time Eren knew she wouldn't begin to start over nor would she continue from where she left off. Uninquiring, he let her let it go unsaid, knowing exactly what she wanted to say anyway.

The steady fire heated the iron pot and softened down the nonperishable food into something almost palatable. Finally, Mikasa turned her face across her shoulder and Eren matched her, with the hard soldier arms crossed over the chest, neck turned to look at the other's eyes, both with impenetrable soldier faces. Eren had grown taller than Mikasa in the past few months, surprising her with an abrupt unforeseen transformation which did not seem to have any distinguishable stages but was realized retroactively at the sudden gruesome emergence of height and width and the unknown all-things that differentiated adolescent boys from adult men; he tilted his chin down a little.

"Is there a ladle?" she said.

"I'll go see," he said. And left.

# # #

In sleep, Eren's face was neither placid nor peaceful nor undisturbed. He bore the implacable fury of a thousand generations, sleeping on his side with his neck as straight as a concrete post across the armrest, his arms folded over his chest. You could tell he was strong and solid, containing no soft flesh from periods of inactivity by the way he maintained a firm shape even when he slept. He seemed larger naked and asleep than he did awake and with clothing on.

Mikasa stirred the cast iron pot. Under the large man's shirt, her own bare body asserted itself and demanded her chronic awareness. With each second that passed, she knew graphically how exposed she was. On the floor near the fire, their clothes were outspread, rumpled and saturated with lake water. She clamped her arms, crosswise, inclosing herself, trying to feel dressed. Now Eren slept on his back, too long for the wingback sofa. Silently, Mikasa left the fire and began to walk into the bowels of the unlived-in house.

A hallway cut straight backward. It was a dark doorless path with no discernable end. Just four walls moving in retrograde into darkness. She went down it. As she grew farther away from the living room, the temperature began to drop. Unwarmed by the fire, the atmosphere grew emptier and emptier. Nothing but ribbons of shadow stretched down the rectangle of walls into secretive untenable alcoves. The further she went, the less of herself she became. The less she could remember about where she was and why she was here. The house's darkness didn't simply accept her. It adopted her, taking her in the way darkness takes in more darkness, becoming more of itself. She'd been walking for a long time, it seemed. But no doors had appeared.

Gooseflesh prickled Mikasa's armhair. She gripped her arms, feeling so cold and bare under the man's shirt. The darkness and the cold swallowed up the last of the diminishing connection she had with the fire and then she stopped. She reverted her neck. Streams of light flowed back toward the living room. She almost turned around. Then forward she continued walking.

The darkness drew her in. It told her there was more. That there was something to find here. And then from out of the right wall carved a doorway. The door was already opened. She pivoted through and found a bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was not lived in anymore. A neat and made bed buoyed isolated in the middle of a rug. There was a wardrobe, a dresser chest. Jammed against the wall was a piano. A thin skin of dust blanketed the keys. On her bare feet, she went to it.

She saw her finger uncurl and extend. Her touch left a pristine undusted oval on the key; a note rang out of tune. An echo returned a lonely depth of bedroom and hallway space. Silence fell again. With a different finger, she hit an unmusical soprano A-flat. Another oval-shaped print stamped the keyboard. Gray smudges came away on the fore- and middle fingers. A following echo of lonely space died. Then it went very quiet and very still.

Suddenly an interrogative stare came swinging down on her like a blade. She thought she could hear the air particles cut apart and split, and jerked her head up.

In the door was the large wide frame of a gruesome un-adolescent Eren without the details, just the shape of his shoulders and long loose hair. Not even his eyes could be made out. His arms were crossed, she could see, by the way the black figure-shape bulged with tensed biceps. His black undetailed figure flooded the doorway, making him look even older, even more gruesome and unexpected. At first, he said nothing. They were both quiet, looking at the other, not moving.

Then: "Mikasa," he mumbled. But it was more silence than voice, there wasn't much voice at all, and she couldn't make out the details of his mouth. Perhaps his lips hadn't moved a centimeter.

"Yes?" she said.

" . . ." he said.

"What is it, Er—"

The black shadow of Eren's head silently slumped over.

It dropped off the shoulders entirely, unattached, like it'd never been attached in the first place. The rest of him was left standing there, large and gruesome, bodily-unwhole in the doorway. Mikasa's hands jerked out on their own. Her legs surged forward. She dove with her hands stretched in front of her. Dead weight and loose hair struck her palms. Her fingers grabbed it out of the air.

"Ah." Mikasa lifted it, turning it over in her hands. She began to shake. "Ah—" The lungs dredged up breath for a mounting scream. The scream mounted but nothing ever came. No air had come to the lungs, the lungs drawing in, the air escaping them each time.

There was no breath anywhere forever anymore.

Her body broke into the uncontrollable trembling of a person physically denying an unimaginable horror. An incomprehensible human terror and suffering. Physically unable to endure the actuality of all the eternal things of which a person must endure eternally.

Mikasa looked at it cradled in her hands. In her ribcage, the heart valves began to slow, opening and closing, hard and painful, slowing but never ceasing. Not flowing with blood anymore. The valves pumped granulated fear and suffering like desert sand through the chambers, stirring waves of it, filling her limbs. No no no no—

The heart muscle slowed but never ceased. It could endure all the eternal things, anything, anything eternally.

She used her fingers to brush the hair tenderly away.

Her feet ran out the door, back into the living room, she didn't look where she was going, her hands cradling it with the face up, the eyes staring insentiently with that dead omniscience, seeing everything, beyond everything, her arms stuck out in front of her, shaking, denying what the hands were themselves cradling. The fire gently threw its gentle warm light. Her shadow darted across the rug. Her legs blurred together, nebulous long-shapes alternating with running.

Stretched along the couch, Eren was still lying on his back. Oil and sweat slicked his face. He was still asleep, but his muscles weren't resting anymore. His body jerked and shivered with dream-electricity. His teeth were gnashed together. Somewhere on the floor, she set down the deer skull (this one was small and skinless), which had fallen from its mount on the bedroom wall (the nails had rusted out, probably), and she kneeled down, putting a hand against his cheek. It was very hot. Her fingers were trembling.

"Eren," she said. "Are you having a bad dream? Won't you wake up soon?"

She buried her face in her knees.

# # #

Vertical bars rose from the floor to the ceiling in fixed iron indifference. The cell did not discriminate or calculate; it stood without significance or symbolism. The cell door was closed and locked. Eren Jaeger stood on the one side which seemed to an outside eye to be contained by the iron cell. Confined by it. But the cell was entirely unable to do the containing. The confining. The prison cell served no real purpose at all.

Standing deadpan and motionless, not grabbing the bars, Eren stared through their indifferent rigid spaces from a shadowed down-tilted face that seemed to be a hard unknown face, not fully Eren Jaeger, rigid shadows underlying the unfully Eren-Jaeger face, countless shadows cast by countless others. Within his own infested brain matter, Eren knew that a long time ago he had lost his mind.

On the other side, she stood with the same fixed iron indifference of the prison. Her hair fell straight over both shoulders and down the front of her body. Black rivulets were running down her legs. It was leaking from an open wound that didn't seem to have been inflicted from an outside foreign object in some method of penetration. It seemed to be an open wound in which the inside had torn out, not penetrating her, but something like its complete and total inverse.

Perhaps the wound was self-inflicted.

There was no way to tell which it was.

The taut bloated stomach bulged quiveringly from out of her small pale body like a thing of its own individuality, nursing its own personal vendetta. The black streams ran faster down her legs, heavier. It smelled not of rust or brass. An undeniably female non-odor. A pool gathered around her feet. Wet chunks of flesh coagulated, shed from her tattered insides, displaced and moved around by the growing mass, flowing out of her now, fast. It was about to arrive.

When she began to squat, Eren stood stock-still, not moving, not grabbing the bars, his eyelids pinned back wide open, his pupils contracted to small black dots, not looking away, frozen inside the indifferent insignificant cell. He was arrested by the immutable male un-experience, the un-empathy, unable to understand what was happening right in front of him. The female body began to horrifically open. Somewhere distantly the snowstorm clashed against the cabin and shook the wood boards. The fire was burning gently.

Between her legs, a thing born out of insatiable wrath and the rage of all-history slickly crowned its soft red skull. Squatting with her feet apart, naked and rigid, the quivering belly violently bulged and moved, her long hair draped down over her shoulders. With an unmotherly incomprehension and terror, she watched the soft red mass come out of her own body. A scream rose up. He did not know from where the scream came; if it had burst from the dilated uninflicted wound between her legs or from out of her warped white face.

Inside the cabin, Eren's back arched off the couch and twisted in a strange levitation-like contortion. Somehow, Eren knew, whatever had been coming out of her was now coming out of him, transmitted into his belly in some sort of sympathetic surrogacy. He then collapsed back to the cushions and jackknifed at the waist. His mouth protruded, hard and livid, around the mass as it swelled up his throat.

His hand went out and found the man's shirt, and bunched in his jerky contorted grasp, the shirt rose over Mikasa's stomach; he did not know this, he couldn't see her or anything else in front of him. Still without him knowing it, the arm then swiped Mikasa hard, backward, away from him. Her feet backed away heavily and unsteadily. She never fell.

The gut muscles labored, hot and perspiring with effort, clenched to expel it fast, trying to push it out, giving Eren no time to breathe or think, seized by the singular instinct of a woman in labor to expel and eject. Bracing himself on the sofa's armrest with one arm, Eren made a dying vomitless vomiting sound as it surged up, solid and whole. His ears rang with blood. Just when he thought he would die, the gut muscles began to slacken and his lungs worked in oxygen. He breathed deeper or at least tried to. He sank back and rested against the couch. He gasped and wetly panted. Gradually his body let go of its suspicion of continued vomiting.

Then it gripped him again, starting all over. His head plunged and strained forward. In his throat, arteries thundered, intense and protuberant. His vision went out.

A bowl hovered beneath him now. Bile drooled from his mouth and poured into the white-moon ceramic. His mouth welled with hot liquid. His lips weakly hung open. He spit. Drool instantly welled back up, boiling in his mouth. He spit again. When he was sure the gut muscles were finished, spent of all their expelling energy, Eren sat back and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. His throat and mouth were scorching.

There was nothing more in his stomach, so there was nothing more to give. The bowl contained only his drool and the black shreds of the canned food, which had now grown solid and cold. Carrying the bowl away, Mikasa disappeared into the darkness where the kitchen was. When she reappeared, her hands were empty. Over his knees, Eren was hunched with his eyes closed. His feet were planted, his legs apart. On the floor nearby were the two bottles of booze. Eren took one, opened it, and lifted his head back. After getting a good mouthful, he relaxed his neck and swished the booze around and swallowed.

"Are you all right?" Mikasa said.

"It's nothing. I was having a bad dream, is all," he said hoarsely. He drank from the bottle again; and this time he drank to drink.

"What was it about?"

"Historia."

"Historia?"

"Yeah."

The bottle was drank empty. He put it down on the floor. The skinless deer skull was close, watching them through bone sockets. Mikasa had never seen Eren drink before, the deer seemed to have seen everything before. Eren grabbed the second bottle and opened it.

"It was only a dream," Mikasa said. "You shouldn't be drinking like that."

"Like what?" Eren said, and drank. He surprised Mikasa with his drinking in the same way he had surprised her with his height. "My dreams aren't always dreams. Not lately. Not anymore."

"You're going too fast."

"Not really," Eren said, and didn't slow. Mikasa watched, surprised by him.

"Are you feeling anxious about Historia?" she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Are you worried she might go against your wish not to put her body at risk?"

Something slipped in his drinking. He wasn't as good at it suddenly. Booze ran thinly from the corner of his lips.

Mikasa said: "Are you anxious knowing that she could start looking for a man who would submit to her unquestioningly?"

Eren brought the bottle away from his face and dragged his wrist over his mouth. "I thought you were on my side." He put his eyes on her and idled the drink in his hand. He thought about what he saw in Mikasa's face. Then her face changed and he thought about that too before speaking again. "At one time she wanted to become closer to you. She thinks you have a lot in common. She has special feelings toward you, Mikasa."

"I." Mikasa touched her hair. She looked away. "Yes, Historia is special to me."

"Then what was with that expression you were making?"

Mikasa thought about what face she was making now and what face she had been making before. She didn't know what face it was and couldn't remember what face it had been. She said: "I don't," and then Mikasa changed faces again, and Eren thought about this new change while Mikasa didn't even realize she had changed at all: "I want to protect her but—"

"But?"

"Do you wish it were you? Could you be thinking that if it were you, it'd be a better alternative because you could make sure she wouldn't be hurt?" No word could express the meaning of what Mikasa was talking about.

Eren licked his lips.

"If it were you," Mikasa continued steadily, almost objectively, "it wouldn't have to be painful, it wouldn't even have to be that unwanted because—"

Then Eren shouted. There were no words or meaning to it. Only harsh, intense volume, cutting her off. Mikasa jolted on her spine. She stared. "What makes you think that I could be better?" he said. "What makes you think that I would think I could be better?"

"I only thought—"

"What—"

"That out of your own kindness and gentleness—"

"WHAT ABOUT THIS COULD BE KIND OR GENTLE?" Eren was very loud now, gaining more and more heat. His eyes were bright and gleaming and hot. "This isn't about me. It's not about who or how or, or, trying to disguise the cruelty of the position she's been forced into with gentleness. This is Historia we're talking about. Our friend."

"Y-yes. Historia . . . " Pain thundered up behind Mikasa's eyes. She felt the cumulus masses of an ache ballooning inside her cranium, building with weight and rain, but not actually weight or rain, building with pounds and pounds of blood. She bent her head and put a hand on her forehead, grimacing over the penetrating well of a migraine. Her eyes tightened shut, Why can't I think only of her? Why can't I— His—tor—i—a— I can't— Eren, Eren, It hurts—

"Mikasa?" The volume and heat were gone. "Are you having a migraine?"

Distant behind the pain, hearing her own voice but not hearing the words, she said: "Eren, do you have strong feelings for Historia?" not knowing what had been said.

"Strong feelings," he said hollowly.

Mikasa didn't say anything more, her eyes were tight shut. Sweat beaded on her face, her head throbbing, her teeth gritted, creaking with pressure.

"What are your feelings for Historia?" Eren said. "Do you hate her?"

"N-no." Mikasa's head snapped up. "No," she said, trying to tell him something more than what she was saying. "It's not like that." She began to strain internally, wrestling with herself. Her lips were tightened, full of intent, about to move, trying to tell him again. Eren's neck hair vibrated. He listened. He was already beginning to guess.

"When you're close to her, I feel this—heat in my body," Mikasa flattened a hand over her chest and again visibly struggled to continue telling him. "This violence. And I don't know what it is or why. Historia . . . it's not her fault. She's not to blame. She's my friend and I don't want to hold these unfair feelings against her. I am just—a selfish person with a finite heart." Once it was all out, she stood with her arms limp at her sides, looking pale and physically drained.

"If it's like that," Eren said, having already guessed, not in words, not even with his own intuition, but like an outsider looking medically at the signs, diagnosing, "and right now it's only you and me alone, and Historia is far away from here— Why is it that you haven't gotten on your knees already if you're just so—selfish?" He didn't look at her. He wasn't looking at anything. It wasn't even Eren Jaeger speaking anymore. There wasn't any heat or meanness to his manner. He was saying something insentiently, and somehow omnisciently at the same time. "I don't know firsthand about this kind of thing. But isn't that how it usually begins?"

Without her volition, Mikasa's knees dropped to the floor. She opened her mouth, alarmed. Unaware that she never had the choice to allow or deny, to accept or refuse, ignorant, she was surprised by the automation and viciousness of the fall, already on her knees before she could process the meaning of what had been said, already weakened from fighting herself.

Eren however, who was also unaware, also ignorant of the automated obedience dictating the biological instinct, was beginning to surmise. It could have been the embalmed omniscience connecting him to the knowledge of dead people. It could have been his own terrible fear finally being realized.

He stood in front of her in only those linen shorts, holding the booze bottle. Mikasa looked up at him, her head bent back, her throat turned up, from a position of utter and paradoxical submission. At his full height, Eren stared down on her and stood with his feet apart, his face unfathomable and calm and dark and dissimulated of the inherited rapacious vengeance. He wasn't kind or unkind. He wasn't anything.

Mikasa didn't rise from her knees. The thought never even occurred to her that she could get up or that she might want to. Then she began to think about what was going to happen. She knew he was about to get ready to tell her to do it, though his hands hadn't moved yet, the one still holding the glass bottle, he hadn't begun to move at all yet, and the thought of not wanting it would never come, could never come. And she couldn't even realize her own limitations, her own unimagination, the subhuman un-individuality because the automated submission was coded into her blood and she had learned about only half of her own ancestry: that of the matriarch. But it was that of the patriarch which smothered the individuality under the submissive instinct.

"You're joking," Eren said. He did not laugh. His expression was filled with a dark, silent almost-outrage, staring down on her upturned face and throat. His hands had never moved since he began to speak. "Do you have any idea how you look right now?"

"How would I know," Mikasa said quietly, sitting on her knees, "what I look like?"

Eren closed his eyes. She could see his eyeballs looking around behind the eyelids. When his eyes came open, they weren't seeing her, trained on her face. He offered the bottle, holding it out. Silently she took it. He turned away. As he moved again to the sofa, the muscles in his shirtless back seemed to also contain an expression of dark, silent almost-outrage.

Getting to her feet, Mikasa pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead, alarmed. It was an undefinable sense of violation, one which she could not fully comprehend. It churned in her subconscious like an unseen current at the bottom of a flood. She put the bottle to her lips. Wincing, she shuddered and felt the booze drop, hard and solid, to the bottom of her belly.

"I don't know what she's even talking about." Eren was mumbling to himself, lying on the couch. "Unfair feelings, a finite heart?" Then not to himself anymore, turning his face: "Now what are you doing, Mikasa?"

"There's something about me," she said, wincing at the alcohol weighing down her gut, "that's not normal. Isn't there?"

Eren looked at her. On the couch, his body lied prone and perfectly impassive.

"What should I," she said, then restarted. "Will you tell me what I should do?"

Eren looked at the ceiling, impassive, mumbling to himself again. "Why would I?" He rolled over. Then not to himself: "Tell yourself what to do, Mikasa. You should be able to do that on your own, right?"

I don't know. I don't know. I—

Eren looked larger than ever, lying with his back facing her, falling asleep again.

His hair seemed very long.

He looked like his father.

But bigger.

Then he looked like neither.

Un-Grisha.

Un-Eren.

Mikasa turned. The booze jostled around, solid in her gut.

Above the fireplace, the dead deer-head was watching everything in the world.