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It’s a long walk from the river to the cabin.
Normally Eren doesn’t mind it, but then, Mikasa is normally with him. He doesn’t like being alone; he didn’t come here to be alone. He came here to be with her, and sometimes, every second that he’s not feels wasted. He doesn’t have all that many left.
But she needed to watch the stove. If the house burned down, then all the time they’d spent fixing it up would be wasted and they’d have to start from scratch. And this place is perfect—there’s no one around for miles and miles, no one to bother them, but they’re close enough to a slice of civilization that they can still find simple luxuries, like flour and sugar and yarn and decent soap. It’s so gorgeous out here, too. The mountains and fields and the woods, the clear snowmelt river and the wildflowers that grow all around.
If he had forever, this is where he would choose to spend it.
***
***
***
There’s not time for it to hurt, initially.
When the girl, the one favored to inherit the Armour, the one poor, naive Falco loves, the one who fired the bullet that killed Sasha, blows his head off, between his vertebrae shattering and his head landing in his brother’s hand, it doesn’t have time to hurt.
***
He hates himself for his final real conversation with Armin and Mikasa almost as much as he hates himself for what he is about to do.
He’d had to do it. They needed to sever their attachment to him. To give up on any naive ideas of saving him. He knows they will want to. They’re better than him, both of them, and that’s why he’d had to do it.
He’d practiced the conversation over and over again. When he was cutting himself to pieces in Marley, methodically stripping away as much as his humanity as he could. He would stare at the sky, at the wall, at the ceiling of his room in the veteran’s hospital and practice what he would say to the people he loved most in the world, how to say it right so that they would hate him.
For Armin, attack his insecurities. The fact that, pyhsically, he can’t match Eren, has and will never. His feelings for Annie. His fear of what consuming Bertholt may have done to him. A real, solid beating, too, and—
And what he will say to Mikasa.
Armin adores Mikasa like a sister. In some ways, the pair of them are closer to each other than they are to him. They’ve always fought less, at least. And they’ve always defended each other when he was hurting them.
And he is going to hurt Mikasa badly.
When he practiced his lines, he tried to channel the very real anger and resentment for her that he feels. That day in Marley, when he would have given her his heart raw on a platter in exchange for some hope, she was such a damn coward. She didn’t stop him because she couldn’t be honest about how she felt.
But that’s a dangerous line to walk. He’s no better, after all. If he had been brave, been a man, taken the initiative, where would they be now?
Not here, he’s certain. This is the last place he ever wanted to be.
It’s for the best, in the end, he tells himself. It will make it easier for them in every way. They’ll be able to move on with their lives. Armin won’t blame himself for Eren’s sins, and Mikasa will go on and live a long, happy life one day. Armin’s days might be numbered—they might not be, when all is done, he hopes, he prays—but Mikasa is the one who will live. He knows that for certain. She has to. She has to.
That doesn’t make the memory of the blood on Armin’s face, the tears in Mikasa’s eyes, any easier to bear.
Walking into that room had been one of the hardest things he had ever done. The pair of them there, comforting the little Warrior candidate. They’re so much better than he is. That girl, with her messy brown hair and her tan skin and her big eyes—for a split-second his mind had conjured up the fantasy that she was theirs . She looks like him. If they’d had a daughter, she could look something like that girl. Mikasa would be—will be, one day, he prays—such a good mother.
But not to his children.
If she had said something different, he thinks. If she had given me something to run to. The dream of a life they could have had still hurts like insides are being pulled out, but it really doesn’t matter. No matter how much he might have wished for it, they never could have run away.
***
In the Paths, it’s beautiful. In a haunted, lonely, oppressive way. The sand slides around under his feet, making it just a bit harder to stand. The column of light—the actual Paths, he guesses—almost hurts to look directly at. The air thrums with a low, discordant pulsing, in time with the streaks of light. Ymir, his foremother, this woman who is god or devil to all the world, is just a child in rags, her eyes closed and shadowed as she dutifully does as she’s bid. Nothing about her seems particularly special. She’s just a kid. She looks a little like Historia. Especially when she was young. Freida Reiss’s memories skitter through his head, and Uri Reiss’s before her, and Karl Fritz’s and dozens more, for a fraction of a second, until he watches, just for a moment, hands, his own but not, small and soft and pale, tearing into the corpse that had belonged to this girl before him; this body that had borne him.
So very, very, long ago.
Zeke is there in chains, but the chains crumble away, and his brother, his worthless, foolish, joke of a brother, drags him into their father’s memories.
***
Eren has seen some of this before.
Only glimpses. Enough to recognize the Reiss’s church and the noblemen’s homes.
Not himself as a baby, his mother young and beautiful, the sense of peace that Grisha had felt, peace like Eren never has—
—Mikasa is hanging their sheets when he comes back from the garden, and Eren, feeling half a child again, ducks under the blowing cotton and pops out, grinning. Mikasa reels back, smiling, and Eren surges forward and kisses her, arms hooked around her waist, her arms draped over his shoulders. He bends her backward, leaning over her while she smothers giggles against his mouth. Through half-cracked eyes, Eren watches the summer sun illuminate her face. She’s so beautiful.
If he could pick a moment to spend forever in—
“Eren wants to join the Survey Corps,” Mikasa tattles.
His mother panics and his father realizes, slowly, grittily, what is about to happen. Eren makes eye contact with a man nine years dead and watches himself and Mikasa and his mother watch his father leave their home for the last time.
My family, he thinks, turning the phrase over in his mind. She’d said to him a dozen times, but only once that had mattered.
Mikasa is his family, that’s true. She’s certainly more his family than Zeke is. But she’s not his sister.
. . . Is she? Had he really only been a brother to her all these years? Is it better or worse if that’s all she sees him as? Better for her, surely.
His father makes his way to the church, and Eren knows how this goes. He can feel the Reiss children smashed like bugs under his hands, see their blood all over the cavern that he had once been—will be—chained in.
“My wife,” Grisha pleads. “My son, and my daughter—”
He’s always known that his parents had thought of Mikasa as their daughter. They’d told her just weeks after moving in with them that she could call them whatever she liked, that Doctor and Mrs. Jaeger were so formal for her. Once, his mother had said to him, “Go help your sister,” and Mikasa had dropped the plate she was washing. No one had ever called her that again, but—is she his sister?
They’re bound by blood, aren’t they? Not their own, no, but the blood they’d shed in that cabin. She’s more a part of him than any part of his body, any limb or organ. She's all that's left of his family, of his home.
And anyway, isn’t Eren his father’s son?
He’s angrier than he’s ever been listening to Frieda Reiss spout her nonsense about atonement and past sins. No Eldian has done a thing to warrant the world’s hatred in generations. Sasha hadn’t. His mother hadn’t. Faye hadn’t.
And yet his father has the nerve to collapse on the ground, unable to bring the scalpel across his hand, unable to understand that there’s no version of the story where you get to walk away with your hands clean of the blood of innocents.
“What are you doing?” Eren demands. “Stand. Have you forgotten what you came here to do?”
Eren cannot imagine coming so far to only go so far. He can’t imagine his rage ever hollowing out.
“Isn’t this for your sister, eaten by dogs?”
If Mikasa—the closest thing to a sister he had—had been murdered like that, Eren would have gone to war. He’d have burnt down the world.
Isn’t this for your daughter, hidden by the Walls?
Are you truly so weak as to fail now? If it were me—if it were Mikasa—if it were Mikasa—
“You started this story, didn’t you, Dad? Finish it.”
***
What is freedom, anyway?
For so long, it had been the ocean. Armin had shown him that book and it had lit a fire in his mind. In both of them, really—it was what had drawn them so close together, this shared dream of theirs. That one day, they would escape the Walls and see it together.
For so long, that had been his goal. Freedom—Armin and the ocean—and vengeance—Mikasa and the home they had lost. But when they took back their home, his dreams of the ocean shattered. When everyone else had been happy, taking in the crystal blue water, the sheer enormity of the sea, Eren hadn’t felt a damn thing.
He’d seen it before. Liberio had a port. Even if his father hadn’t ever swam in it, he’d known what the ocean looked like. And from him, and Krueger before him, Eren knew what the beaches of Paradis looked like, and what the ocean looked like on the boat ride over. He’d seen it tranquil, he’s seen it storming.
The ocean holds nothing for him. It’s nothing but a barrier to cross so he can get to his enemies. Another step to take before he reaches freedom.
***
“I’ll put an end to this world!” Eren swears. “Lend me your strength!”
***
It hurts afterward.
Whatever the creature is that had erupted out of his spine, it spares no thought to Eren’s comfort. His previous Titan form had been as natural as his own skin; the only time he’d used the War Hammer Titan’s ability, it had been easy. But this—this, what he’s become now, it hurts.
***
Eren crosses the ocean on the backs of his Colossals.
They can swim; he cannot. This body is too huge, too dense. He has arms but they’re useless. He has legs but they drag after him. He scuttles along the ground on his hundreds of protruding ribs. He feels them puncture the soil, the sand. Rocks scrape against the exposed bone, and when he stands on the blisteringly hot exposed muscle of his Titans, the water steaming up around, it would be enough to char if it weren’t for his healing. He’s kept on the brink of burning, unable to let the heat kill his nerves.
It hurts.
But it only lasts a few hours.
And while the steam still burns, while the pressure on the points of his ribs is odd and painful, now, it is time for others to hurt—
—“Mikasa,” Eren says, shaking her awake. “Mikasa, wake up.”
Mikasa rolls over and looks at him, eyes already losing their sleepiness. “Hm?”
He grins down at her. “Let’s watch the sunrise. On the roof.”
She smiles and stretches. “Okay.”
He tugs her up out of bed and pulls her out of their house—their house, with the wavy old windows and thick wool rug by the fireplace and the pans hanging over the stove, this place that is theirs alone for the rest of his life—through the creaky door and out into the gray pre-dawn light. He boosts her up so that she can get a foot on the firewood cover and then push herself onto the roof, and then he lets her pull him up after. They settle down, facing the east, Mikasa’s head on his shoulder. She smells like the mountain air and the rock jasmine soap they’d bought a few weeks ago in the village.
When Eren looks up, he can still see stars. They’re not quite in the same places that they were on Paradis, but he recognizes constellations. The Ram. The Jug. The Seven Sisters. Helos.
The sun begins to rise over the horizon, eventually. It lights up the world they’ve carved out for themselves, the green grass and the gray stone of the mountains below and around them. In the pink-purple-orange sky, clouds drift by, seeming close enough that if he shifted, he could touch them. They’ll have to see, one day. But not now, he wouldn’t disturb this precious moment for anything.
“I love you,” she tells him. It’s not out of nowhere because everything they have here is I love you. This house and their garden and the forest hiding them, the mountains protecting them, the sun watching over them. Their whole world is I love you.
He turns to kiss her cheek. “I love you.”
He inhales the mountain scents and the smell of her hair, letting the clean, pure, air fill his lungs. Every breath they take is I love you—
***
Every breath he takes is horror.
He can see the people fleeing, over the heads of the Colossals. He can see them from afar, tiny and writhing, and he can see them up close, through the shadowed eyes of a young girl. Ramzi, he sees. And his brother. The child's brain slides out of his skull, and he's gone quickly, and Ramzi follows after. It's not instantaneous, though. There's enough time that Ramzi can feel overwhelming grief for the little brother whose hand he still holds, and bright, awful pain as his bones splinter. Then he's dead, and his bones are ground to dust and his body is smashed to a pulp. Eren steps in it as he keeps moving forward. The ends of his ribs are wet with blood.
***
So freedom is not in the ocean.
Perhaps it is in the sky, then.
That seems a more obvious answer. But no one has ever denied the sky to him—it’s simply not an option by the design of the world. There’s no one to blame for his lack of wings.
He remembers watching birds fly with Armin, watching as they sailed over Wall Maria without a care in the world. He'd been so envious. There was a swing, back in Shiganshina, that he and Armin had made. They'd taken turns on it. Eren would swing as high as he could and jump off. He'd roll down the hill and give himself all sorts of bruises for his mother to fuss over when he got home. Armin was always content to just swing. He could get so high, but he never pulled the stunts Eren did.
Is that why Eren had left him behind?
No.
It wasn’t that Eren had left Armin behind. Eren had kept moving forward, ever chasing greater heights to fall from, and Armin had planted his feet behind a line in the sand and said, "I will not follow you."
And here they are now.
***
In the Paths, Eren hardly recognizes them. He’s not sure how much of himself is there to see them at all. Some part of him is flying high, head in the clouds; some part of him is wading through enough burning death that he should by all rights have drowned; some part of him is far away from it all, in a cabin in the mountains. They look different. Older, bigger. Isn’t Armin a little shrimp of a thing, too small to run so fast? Isn’t Mikasa’s hair longer than that? Who—who—who—the rest—the others—his friends and even some of his enemies, they’re all together, all united against him, and he’s glad for it. The world needs them.
The world—his people, they need him.
He’ll let the pieces fall where they will.
The only option is to fight.
Fight, he'd told Mikasa once, exactly as he is now. You have to fight.
But there’s a line in the sand that he has drawn, too.
Don’t kill them, he had begged of Ymir, he had sworn to himself. Let them die, if they must, but do not kill them.
“And Armin?” she asked. “And Mikasa?”
Eren grit his teeth. “Don’t kill them. Let them fight. They’ve earned that.”
“And shall I let them die?” she asked, head cocked. “Have they earned that?”
He closed his eyes. If they die— if they die—not them, please, please not them, this is to save Mikasa and Armin and everyone else, this is the only way to save them—
***
Physically, the worst thing he has ever done to himself had been cutting off his own leg.
He’s surprised he managed. He’s lost his limbs before, enough that it’s morbidly funny when he thinks about it, but sawing through his own bone had been so, so, so, so horrible. He doesn’t really understand how he did it, but then, he doesn’t really understand how he’s doing a lot of things. Because he must.
This is for them, he’d told himself, dragging the knife back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, pushing down. You do this for your people, he reminds himself. For his home, for Armin, for Mikasa—Mikasa—if she hadn’t said that goddamned word I wouldn’t be doing this right now—
—Mikasa puts her feet on his legs and Eren yelps.
She shushes him.
“Your feet are freezing,” he whispers.
“And you’re a furnace,” she says, tilting her head back to look at him. “This room is cold.”
The train compartment is cold, he’ll grant her that. They’re in a coach room, squished together in a single bed, tucked under the thin blanket. Early spring in these mountains is cold, and their window just won’t shut all the way, letting in the thinnest stream of icy wind.
He wraps his arms tighter around her and pulls her against his chest. “A little warning is all I’m asking,” he says, pressing the words into her neck, and Mikasa shivers not from the cold, but—
—but that never happened.
“I’m writing letters to my family,” he lies to Falco, later. Mostly lies.
“You’re family,” she’d said, and Mikasa is reading these letters, too.
My family, he thinks sourly.
***
He has to focus on the ugliness of the world, and of himself, to make himself do it, as much as he has to focus on the beauty.
***
He can't tell if what's before him or what's behind him is worse.
The crowds of people screaming, husbands pulling their wives, mothers carrying their children, friends pushing and shoving each other and total strangers passing babies to temporary safety, yanking up people who have tripped, all of them moving forward together, for no reason, there's no salvation ahead as long as he still lives, but they carry on anyway for the shadow of a chance at hope, even if all they might find is another hell.
Behind him, silence. The only movement is the odd piece of rubble settling, but even that's rare. It's hard to see anything that hasn't been completely flattened. Everything is dust and steam and death and death and death, a horrible finality to it.
***
When his friends, and his enemies, finally blow his head off, it doesn’t end, not completely. There's still a way for him to go on, and he's distantly aware that he's marching towards it. But—isn't he walking up a hill?—
—The fishing pole bounces against his shoulder as he walks back to the cabin, the fish swinging in his other hand. It's big enough for dinner tonight and tomorrow, too. He deposits the fish in the cellar and comes around to the front of the house to find a scattered pile of chopped wood and Mikasa resting against the side of the house, her pretty face peaceful and blank, her hair blowing in the wind—
He cannot do this, he cannot do this. They are going to stop him, and while Eren accepts, welcomes, death, he cannot accept dying, not yet, not where he left it.
Mikasa, I’ve always hated you.
He’d done what he thought was best, to spare her the most pain in the end, but now he’s putting himself in her shoes. If one of the last things Mikasa ever said to him was “I have always hated you,” how could he ever go on? How could that possibly give him peace?
The creature thrashes, summoning an army in its dying panic. Eren, locked in his own mouth, does the same. Mikasa, he thinks, flailing his mind out in the Paths. Armin, Mikasa—where are they, where is she, Mikasa, Mikasa—
***
***
***
“Mikasa,” he says. “Get up. You’ll catch a cold.”
She blinks up at him, bleary-eyed. “Eren? Huh?” she says. “When . . . did I fall asleep?”
He smiles, bending down to pick up the wood. “You must’ve been exhausted.”
She yawns, putting her hand over her mouth. “I feel like I just had a long dream.”
“Let’s just take it easy for the rest of the day,” he says. “I managed to catch a big fish, after all . . .” He looks up at her and is startled by what he sees. “Mikasa, why are you crying?”
She’s just sitting there still while tears spill down her cheeks. She picks her hand up and wipes one away, seeming just as surprised by them as he is. He stands up, turning to comfort her, and then she says, “I . . . I'm wondering if it’s really okay for me to be here . . .”
Eren’s shoulders slump. He’d thought they were done with this. “You know there’s nothing we can do about it now. The two of us abandoned everything.”
They’d been so happy that night. They are happy, he knows they’re happy, so why does Mikasa keep coming back to this? He explains it to her again, like she needs to be caught up, and Mikasa wipes her tears away and stands.
“You’re right,” she says gently. “I’m sorry.” She winds her arms around his waist. “I promised I wouldn’t bring this up anymore.”
A strange mood has fallen over him. Why’d she have to bring it up? Maybe that’s why he says, “Will you make me one more promise?” His hands drift up to her waist, resting lightly on her sides. “Throw the scarf away once I’m dead.”
—a violent impact rattles the core of him, and he throws his weight into a maneuver, trying to throw an opponent—
“You have a long life ahead of you,” he continues, his hands tightening around her middle. “So forget about me and be free.”
—and he isn’t really here, is he? He’s in his own mouth, dead-tired, waiting for the end to come, in the form that he’s sure it will take, of the familiar, beloved face of this girl in his arms—
He clutches her to him fully, squeezing her tight. “Please, Mikasa,” he begs. She rests her forehead on his shoulder. “Forget about me.”
—and he continues to battle it out with Armin, and how did it ever come to this, how did it ever come to this, how will his life end trading blows with Armin and waiting for Mikasa to deal the final one—
He’s so tired. He’s so tired. Somehow, they’ve traded positions, Eren resting on the bench with Mikasa bent over him. Doesn’t he know this scene? Hasn’t it happened a thousand times before? She takes his weary head in her hands and says, “See you later, Eren,” and—
—Mikasa bursts in through a hole she blasts through his teeth, and they had met in violence and that is how they will say goodbye, and he looks at her, drinking in the sight of the only piece of his home that remains, and all the beauty there is in the cruel world is concentrated in the sweet smile on her face as she brings her sword down—
—Eren leans forward with the last bit of life that he has and kisses her.
Let it be the last thing he does.