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Mikasa jerks awake just in time for the ceiling to cave in.
Thank goodness. She'd hate to have missed it.
Some sounds are so loud, you simply disappear into them. Every last bit of you. There's a thud, the report of a faraway cannon, like she's back at the Walls and the Garrison has lined up a shot -
The cannonball scalps off the rest of the roof. Mikasa doesn't notice. It's like the sky falls in with a roar so tremendous sound is sucked away into the wound left behind, and Mikasa is numb and flailing and the world is black. Right up until -
She's dazedly spitting sand, inside-out and topsy-turvy and nauseous to her core. A briny breeze is raking across her oversensitive skin.
Spitting hurts. Her throat is raw, her teeth aching from where they must have clacked together. When she looks around - turning her head hurts more - her sturdy hut is a ruin like a child's discarded playthings at the jagged line where the beach meets the trees, the doorframe still partially intact but the door itself wonky and hanging in the moonlight. She'd been blasted right through it, bare feet, breast band, sleeping shorts and all.
She'd shared that hut.
"Eren?" She stumbles on her knees, scrambling on all fours. Innocent silence swallows her hoarse cries. "Eren! Armin!"
Their beds were empty, she reminds herself. They weren't there. But they also aren't anywhere, the sky is clear and winking with stars and the ocean is shivering under a cold moon and Mikasa -
Mikasa is just here.
"Eren!" Desperation creeps up her spine and her body forgets what pain is. Only broken bones could possibly stop her now. She springs to her feet. "Eren, Armin, talk to me!"
This time, she gets an answer.
Tiny, rapid thumping, approaching fast. Breathing hard through her mouth, Mikasa turns. Twin jets of sand skittering toward her in perfect rows up the beach, pistoning up one after the other quick as lightning. She stares, slackjawed.
Another cannonball hits her square in the gut. Warmer, and just barely softer, than any metal she has ever touched.
The wind is so perfectly knocked out of her, she doesn't make a sound. Hitting the sand scrambles her into another tangled heap, and when something grabs her under the arm to haul her back up - she should be dead. Blood and bones on the beach.
"Ackerman - Ackerman, snap out of it."
Hands grip and pull at her arms simultaneously, dragging her forward. Wheezing, bile up, she looks up through a tangle of her hair just in time to watch the thin geysers of sand disappear at the treeline and instead - instead, the thin, wispy trunks are demolished before her very eyes, torn to shreds to the music of a buzzing report somewhere back across the water, like she's watching the forest be devoured by termites in super-fast motion, the chunks spit out every which way.
Her brain catches up.
"Ackerman," snaps Captain Levi, his hand a band of iron around her bicep as they stumble over one another across the sand. "No holes in you, right?"
The Captain is enviously far more prepared for the weather than she is, head-to-toe in black and green and halfway into his gear, a rifle strapped to his back. His face is steel borrowed right off the flat of a sword, the hollows of his eyes so deep and skull-like in the moonlight Mikasa feels the briefest pang of fear for him. But his gaze roams her face with such focus, either he's about to reproduce her likeness in the sand with a stick, or he's going to tell her which of her pores needs scrubbing before they're both shot to death for just standing here like fools.
His grip on her arm is still too tight; she shakes him off. "Eren -"
"Is better off than you and me. Run!"
They tear into the treeline side-by-side, foliage stabbing at the soles of Mikasa's feet through the thinning layer of sand. Immediately their sudden movements give them away; immediately the ground explodes behind them, dirt and trees and underbrush shredded by a hundred bullets on their heels. They leap over boulders, zigzag between the scrawny tree trunks, the brambles of squat bushes catch on Mikasa's ribs and whip shallow scratches across her bare abdomen. She puts her head down and pumps her legs - soon she's sailing past the Captain, who's just a dark blur outlined faintly in the night, they're headed uphill, the bullets are receding, they're going to make it -
Just the swish and slap of plants against their bodies. The bullets have stopped coming.
Silence fills the air like the hitch on the end of an inhale. An orange-white flash stretches every shadow as far as the eye can see, and two explosions shatter the night, one right after the other.
Mikasa stops dead, wheels around. The Captain crashes into her at full speed, leaving bruises on top of bruises. His smallish body is unyielding iron under his soft clothes. He swears thundrously and steadies them both with a hand at her bare waist, thumb hooked over her lowermost rib for leverage, his skin hot where hers feels ice cold. "Keep moving!"
"Captain."
She can't continue. Nor can she move. The Captain glares at her - he has to tip his chin up to do it properly, making matters worse - but seeing the look on her face, he slowly turns and follows her paralyzed gaze back between the trees, down the beach, and out to the shallows of the ocean.
The scene is framed perfectly between the trees, like she was always meant to come here and see it all just like this. The ocean glitters with silver moonlight fractured across its surface, almost obscuring the dark oblong shape approaching the shore. It seems to crawl forward on a dozen insect-like legs. The boat has a long mast that stretches high enough to touch the horizon, the sail nowhere to be seen. Its mounted cannon is barely visible as a shadowy nub sticking up halfway to the prow.
Whoever is on the boat, however many there are, they don't move, they don't react at all. Not even when the ground concusses and a piece of the steep, jagged foothill that drops into a cliff on the southeastern shoreline detaches from the shadows cast by the moon overhead. The Titan is almost too massive for description, too immense for measure, and it takes an achingly slow and impossibly gigantic step into the shallows. The water splashes high. The Titan is sixty meters tall and skeletal, the muscles there but with no skin to speak of.
The second step takes an eternity. Mikasa and Levi watch the foot's progress as though transfixed. The boat, with her prow pointed right at it, seems to be holding her breath. Then the foot comes down with a crash, and a wave bobs the boat like a toy in a child's bath, and the screaming starts.
First they try the cannon. But the Colossal Titan is already so close, they can't angle it up quite high enough. The ball takes a mosquito bite out of one massive hip, and then the guns start up again - so many, so fast, it lights up the ship for a short time. Tiny shadows weave frantically amongst the frenetic flashes. Then a second Titan fifteen meters tall steps into the ocean behind the first with a practiced sort of unhurried grace, and people start spilling over the boat's sides.
It doesn't take long. Mikasa and Levi watch in wonderstruck silence. Even so, the Captain edges closer, keeping his body angled between her and the distant threats, one hand twitching for his rifle. And Mikasa - she gets it. People are so delicate at the mercy of a threat so large, something they two know firsthand.
Just not when their friends are the threat. Not that the Captain has friends.
When the last scream fades, all is utterly still, even the Titans still standing in the ocean. For the first time, Mikasa notices her own breath clouding into the air; her skin, so much of it exposed to the night, is tight with gooseflesh. She hugs herself and it makes her smaller.
The Captain comes back to life subtly but suddenly. All the energy in their immediate vicinity points straight to him. He slogs forward, downhill a couple of stilted steps, like his legs have gone and aged without the rest of him. Then he sets off toward the beach at a slow trot, saying nothing. Mikasa can only follow.
A dense wad of black clothes and metal machinery thumps into Mikasa's chest. Her arms snap up automatically to hold it there. "Gear up."
"Wait," she says, frowning. And the Captain does wait, hovering close, the bundle of gear nearly brushing his own chest. "There's too much here. This isn't my suit."
"Just gear up." He steps away, not meeting her eyes. She suspects that it's because of the bandage so near them, gauze taped across her temple - one of three spots where bullets had grazed her. A messy wound, a messy patch job, beneath his scrutiny. "And you three."
Three shapes edging around the corner of the bunker hallway promptly freeze in place. Jean, Sasha, and Connie, in that order, in various stages of arch-backed guilt.
"Report to Commander Hange. Debriefing in ten minutes. You'd better gear up, too." His lips twitch grimly. "She's got a couple of protoypes she wants to try out."
Three faces immediately blanch. But there's no heel-clacking or salutes - such formalities always felt too... too, between their unit and the Captain.
"Captain." Sasha's gaze steals to Mikasa, and Mikasa is awash with a sudden surge of gratitude. "Just, um, not that anybody's assuming she's not coming, 'cuz that's just, just weird, but, uh, Mikasa's coming too. Right?"
"She's not."
Sasha wilts. Jean and Connie both look like they sorely need to make a fast exit and dig themselves holes in the bushes behind the bunker, until Mikasa realizes it's not their bowels pulling their faces so taut and holding their eyes so wide open. They're both trying to send her deeply apologetic looks from across the bunker corridor, but mostly their eyes just start watering.
It's fine. She's seething, but she's - she's fine.
"And now you have five minutes," the Captain adds flatly.
Connie chokes even as the three of them automatically jolt for the exit. "But our gear is back in our hut, we have to -"
"Which reminds me. When the new shelters go up, we'll be changing around the sleeping arrangements too."
And then -
And then the Captain's eyes meet hers.
But he - he wouldn't. Suddenly oxygen in the bunker is scarce; suddenly Mikasa's face is flushed. She can't remember the last time fury had made her skin feel so hot. Oh, but he wouldn't.
He looks away. And therefore, Mikasa vows darkly, lives another miserable day. "We're splitting up the two Titan shifters. Make sure Eren and Armin get the message. And Mikasa shares with Sasha. Armin too, maybe."
Sasha - of course. Better eyes and ears than the others. She'd reportedly been awake even before the first cannonball had struck, tense and waiting with her rifle over her shoulder for the danger to show itself. Mikasa's ire reopens like a chafed wound, bleeding slow and ugly.
"And tell Commander Hange that if she leaves any one of her undergarments on the floor of our hut one more time, she's sleeping on the beach. Permanently. Now get going."
"Y-yes, Captain."
Her three friends gone, Mikasa turns woodenly, headed for a storage closet to change. She doesn't trust herself to look at the Captain right now, so -
"Ackerman."
She stills, but doesn't turn around.
"Better get used to Sasha while you can. I hear she snores."
Only when his receding footsteps fully fade does she turn around, scowling at the empty bunker, heart flipping jerkily in her chest.
Slim knee-high boots leave shallow impressions in the sand with each step. It's even colder today, though the sun is high, the ocean energetic, slapping closer and closer with each rhythmic heave of the waves against the shore. A twisted wreck of metal and wood lies beached in the shallows half a mile away, its useful parts already scavenged by Commander Hange. Everyone's been doing a marvelous job of not looking at it all day. Next time, the Commander had promised them, it would be prisoners only.
Somewhere off in the distance, up the slope and down the other side of the incline, low, massive booms shake the ground at intervals. What Eren and Armin are practicing in their Titan forms, Mikasa isn't often told, and it grates.
Captain Levi is circling her. Intermittenly, he swoops in close to fuss over straps and buckles, adjust the seat of a piece of gear against her back or hip. She holds herself still every time, letting him tinker. Only when he's directly behind her does she turn her head intinctively, trying to keep him in her sights. It must be the haircut - now the slender line of her jaw is newly exposed. The nape of her neck shows too, even with the red scarf tucked into the suit. This must be what it feels like to be a Titan, she thinks, feeling a bit foolish, with the Captain hovering there. Honing in for the killing blow.
"How does it feel?" he asks at last, apparently satisfied. His painfully slow circuit around her body doesn't stop.
"Too heavy. I can't maneuver in all this."
"You can." He mostly just sounds pleased now, a sculptor admiring his own handiwork. A sculpture in his own likeness. The likely accuracy of the thought hits Mikasa like a thunderbolt from the blue, vaporizing any response waiting on the tip of her tongue.
She's not exaggerating, though. The gear is going to be a problem. They'd all begun training in the thickly-padded black suits and the guns and the backpack-style maneuvering mechanisms since the first day a cartload of the gear had arrived for them from the Walls. But Mikasa's new suit boasts extra reinforcement around her thighs and hips, additional cords and rods rigged to the chest plates and the backpack gear to attach extra-heavy thigh holsters to the overall apparatus.
She now carries not just the semi-automatic pistols, but oddly short, wide blades too. And no less than eight thunderspears.
It'll take some getting used to, is all. There's no weapon, and no weight, that Mikasa Ackerman cannot bear. It's people she can't stand.
She fixes the Captain with an irritated glower, just because she knows he won't try to wipe it off her face. "So this is how I'm going to train."
"Problem, Ackerman?"
"I think the others could use the practice with all this gear, too."
"They will. Eventually." The Captain comes to a stop in front of her at last. He looks unusually dangerous in his own black suit and much more minimalistic gear, sharp angles and exposed muscles, the look and cut of someone who could vanish into the dark and reappear stonefaced, breathing even, and soaked in red head-to-toe. It's like the now-defunct green cape of the Survey Corps had been a leash, just draped over his shoulders, and Commander Erwin had held the other end. Now all that was gone.
The Captain wasn't exactly a special case or anything. Everyone had looked disturbingly lethal the first time they'd slipped into their blacks. Armin had even said as much, looking around at all of them.
Only Eren had frowned at her from behind his potatoes that night and said, "Mikasa looks the same, though."
And Armin had buried his face in his hands and Jean had cuffed Eren on the back of the head, but -
But maybe there was something to be said for that after all. The idea makes her look back across the years with a twinge in her chest. She was strong. Not - not deadly. Not to her friends.
She recalls Bertholdt with a sickening lurch, her blades scything through his neck. Rheiner. Well. The good ones, at least.
She's snapped out of her thoughts abruptly by the Captain unholstering one of his pistols, spinning it contemplatively in his hand, its connecting wire coiling about his wrist. "Jean and Connie will be our muscle," he tells her. His eyes meet hers from under a flop of his hair - the long part needs cutting. "Sasha will be our sniper. Eren and Armin will be the obvious. And then there's the rest of us."
Mikasa doesn't humor him. "Still sounds like they could use some training with you and me."
"They could."
Her fists clench. "Then isn't it strange -"
"Nothing strange about it. They're not ready." He unholsters his other pistol, so casual. "You, on the other hand, could've died like a dog last night. You're more than ready."
He says it so factually, so evenly, Mikasa knows she shouldn't be offended. But her stomach still rolls with shame. The Captain was always around to snag a front-row seat to her screwups. "You've sure taken an interest in that lately," she says coldly. "Me dying."
Silence. The Captain looks at her then - really looks. And then he's coming closer across the sand, unhurried. "You do realize just how fast this could all go to complete shit."
Mikasa frowns. "I don't -"
"And when it does," he says, cutting her off, "and some foreign army comes crawling all over us with hundreds of thousands of guns and half a dozen Titan shifters, the one who makes it out alive has to be you."
Well.
Mikasa had tried to predict his sentence even as the words had left his mouth. That had been her last guess. He could've finished with a pirouette and a backflip into the ocean and at least then she would've still had her wits about her.
The Captain stops before her within arm's reach. For a split second, something in his expression cracks. But the Captain is not known for his bouts of compassion. Still, something in her wills him forward those last couple of steps - and it has to be him, for some reason, like he's got the solution to all her rapidly deepening problems just a pageturn away in his own personal supersoldier handbook.
A hand on the shoulder would do.
He points his pistol at her chest. "Don't clench up, Ackerman."
For the record, they use rubber bullets. They still hurt like hell. It's surprisingly effective motivation to not get shot.
"This would be more realistic," she huffs on day five, one hand on his throat and the other pinning his twisted wrist behind his back, "if we used the gear."
"Not a fan of open spaces, then." He's shaking in her grip, trying to pry her off his windpipe. If he lets go of her arm to go for his gun, she'll punch him in the throat.
They're on the beach, of course. They spend every day, every hour - day and night - on it. Where their maneuvering gear is completely useless.
"If I'm going to fight the Titan shifters -"
The Captain goes still. A look crosses his face - shock, she finds to her dismay. "Titans are the least of your problems, Ackerman."
He twists like a viper on hot coals. Space opens up between their hips and suddenly she hasn't got both feet on the ground anymore. Sand flies, they scramble, Mikasa trying to lock a leg around his to bring him down, too - and Mikasa gets a faceful of cool grains, the Captain's knee in her back, the cold nozzle of a gun pressed to the base of her skull.
"Dead," he says offhandedly, bored. She half-expects him to go ahead and crack one of her vertebrae with a rubber bullet for her trouble, but he just gets off her instead, holsters the pistol, and holds his hand out to her. Swallowing her pride, she takes it, getting to her knees. Her entire body sings with soreness from bearing the extra weight of the gear for hours each day.
"You've thought about it," he says abruptly, hauling her to her feet. He's slow to drop her hand, but he gets around to it. A crushing grip, then nothing. "An army takes one look at us, we have to assume that my reputation precedes me. Yours too. They'll come for us first. We're protecting Eren. And this -" He gestures at the beach - flat, no cover. "- is exactly where they'll want us."
"So we fight in the cities. Don't get caught on open ground like idiots."
"If you could describe this squad's luck in a word, what would that word be?"
Mikasa looks at him; his expression is as deadpan as ever. But her lips can't help but twitch. "Could be worse."
The lower half of his face twitches oddly. "One word, I said."
And a warm thrill shoots through her, dissipates, pools hot and startled high in her chest and low in belly. A flush creeps up her neck. It's been ages, ages, since someone had - not smiled at something she said, but close, alarmingly close, close enough - not counting Sasha, who smiles to appease and to scorn, or Armin, and his academic kindness that -
Sensing distraction, the Captain draws his pistols faster than a blink, and Mikasa is throwing herself to the side, bullets whipping past with less than an inch to spare.
And on and on they go.
It gets, predictably, worse.
The easier she can bear the gear's weight, the faster the Captain gets. Sometimes he adds Sasha into the mix, with Mikasa as her target practice from a hundred meters away. The only rule is no headshots - Mikasa limps back to her and Sasha's shared hut invariably nursing bruises on those days, no matter how tightly she jumps and zigzags across the sand.
The Captain knows how to make her fail. It's spite, pure and simple, that gives her the leg up in the end.
Guns, like Titans, are merely fast. Humans, like Titans, attack with intent. Every intent carries with it an exploit.
Goosebumps pucker her flesh under her suit, but she's sweating too. Blistering speed - inhuman speed - sees her hurtling toward the sea where the Captain stands ankle-deep in the surf, pistols up, spraying bullets right at her. The angle of the barrels tells her everything she needs to know. Confident in himself, he stays there in the surf, refusing to cede to her charge.
Triumph coils in her chest.
She weaves frantically, left right down up right, nonlethal hits skidding off the outer edges of her shoulders and thighs, right up until the Captain tries to skitter off to one side, right up until she's so close he just aims right for her chest, she dodges wildly -
Mikasa splashes into the ocean and strikes one wrist, grabs the barrel of the gun he holds in his other hand. Bullets spray harmlessly over her shoulder. The hand she'd loosened from its gun comes swinging for her immediately, but she ducks into the Captain's chest and he fists the hand in the roots of her hair instead. His grip is merciless, and his fingers curl in a brutal twist.
Until she draws one of her short blades quick as lightning and he hisses and lets go of her hair, seizing her wrist before she can swing it into his side.
They've stumbled deeper into the surf - a low wave rushes into their knees, pitches their balance. WIth a triumphant grunt, the Captain twists her blade out of her hand.
And Mikasa twists the gun out of his.
It's how the Captain's eyes widen in his flushed face that does it. Mikasa freezes, he freezes. The blade hits the water with a sploosh.
The gun, still connected to the Captain's gear by its cord, is pointed directly at his heart. Mikasa is easily within arm's reach - a point-blank shot. She can't miss. But in that split second, she can only stare at him, breathing hard. Water thrown high by the waves is dripping through his hair, forcing him to blink it out of his eyes. He looks younger and more startled than ever.
It was just a split second.
"Yield," she breathes. But that was never a part of their rules.
His face twists into a terrible scowl. "Too slow."
The gun is out of her hand. Her back hits the water and the Captain is on top of her before she can even think of scrambling away, his thighs bracketing her waist, knees digging into the loose sand under the shallow water. Immediately there's a warning elbow at her throat - so Mikasa just shakily gets her own elbows underneath her, levering herself up just high enough to keep her face above water. The gear at her back has bruised her spine awkwardly in the fall; the thunderspears at her thighs gurgle glumly. The Captain doesn't seem to care. His eyes are wide, jaw set, possibly too angry to speak.
"I couldn't do it," she says.
The elbow drifts away from her throat. "Come again."
"I couldn't shoot you," she snarls. She wrestles herself up higher, closer to him. He leans away, but a low wave hits him square in the back, forcing their faces so close together Mikasa can pick out the errant tangles in some of his eyelashes. Good. Personal space has never been a sticking point for him - let him know how it feels.
The shift in his compact weight on top of her - arrows pressure into her core, hot pressure, pressure that makes her catch her breath and hold it like there's a needle about to pierce her skin, like there's a hammer blow poised to fall, to shatter. It throws the thought back in her face.
"I know what you're trying to do," she spits, determined. "You could've just said -" The Captain's weight knifes harder into her pelvis when he reels back in frustration, lips curling back from his teeth, and stars burst behind her eyes, choking off her voice, shame pooling like an oil spill. And anything further she has to say is swept away with the tide when he grabs one of her shoulders, holding tight.
"You know," he says flatly. "Interesting. I'm pretty sure I'm the one person on this godforsaken beach you're dying to shoot." His grip tightens; there'll be bruises, but she's stonefaced. He gives her a sharp shake. "Am I wrong?"
She glares up at him, and holds her tongue. His eyes darken , disapproving.
"All that training," he says, "all those bullets, all those shitty days, and you never just grabbed your pistols and turned them on me." His voice is low, but the words are damning. Realization and exposure flushes through her, ending in a steady burn across her cheekbones. He grabs her other shoulder and holds her firmly between his hands. He could push her down and drown her right here, and she still doesn't think she could tear her eyes away from his while he did it. "You do what needs to be done. You survive, even when no one else can."
"You're trying to turn me into you."
It's just the ocean after that, for a while. They don't even shiver as their soaked clothes cling to their skins. They're lying in a pocket of turbulent heat. Mikasa has never been one for many words anyway, and so quickly she's already drunk that bottle dry, and now there's nothing left.
She's powerless to end the silence, but she dreads the next second's worth of it for every one that ticks by. Tell him he owes you an explanation. Tell him to get the hell off. She would've demanded an explanation in so many words already - if she was right. Doubt, she finds, tastes like metal, and mud.
She would've told him to get the hell off ages ago - if she wanted him to get the hell off at all.
Rose, Maria, and Sina all save me. She can feel the Captain's gray stare burning an angry path up her jaw. No. Lightning strike, smite me, right here, I'm begging you. That doesn't stop her from wanting to curl one of her legs up, drag her knee up his ribcage, just to see what would happen. He's a mystery, unquestionable variables locked into place here and there but with too many still missing in between. Curiosity is burning at her as hotly as it had during her trainee days when Annie would wrestle the hulking Rheiner to the ground and his wrist or his elbow would pop like a miracle, how did she do it, where did she put her hands - or the first time the Captain had wheeled through the air right before her eyes and ripped through two Titans like they were made of paper, and if she held her blades like that, if she put on a burst of gas and pitched into a roll at the same time, what would happen? What would those actions set into motion?
Even if she wanted to, she couldn't. The Captain has clamped himself around her body like he half-expects her to rear up and lunge for his throat at any moment, his thighs keeping her hips pinned tight underneath him. There's something determined about the way he's holding himself absolutely still on top of her, as if the slightest movement of either his or hers will snap some invisible and unknowable thread. His dark hair is lank with seawater and dripping, his angular features are flushed despite the cold breeze, his suit is plastered to him so wetly that, if she deigned to glance down, she could see the ridges of his abdomen trailing down and disappearing down to where he's pressed against her stomach between her legs.
Liquid heat pools, then aches, then burns at the junction of her thighs. Her heart flutters madly, but weakly, like the Captain's got a fist around it and is adding pressure by torturous increments. She absolutely doesn't trust herself to say a word.
At length, the Captain lets out a long, careful breath. "Maybe you're right." Even with those words, the taste of doubt intensifies on her tongue. His hands relax their numbing grip on her shoulders and trail down her biceps, settling firmly over her elbows under the water, steadying himself. "So what am I, Ackerman?"
A fascinating question. One she can't answer, not right away, not when his body subtly rolls, driving her deeper into the loose sand. It forces her to stretch her neck further to keep her face above water, and her spine follows, arching her hard against him. Their hips drag, then lock firmly together, and the Captain's expression wipes itself completely blank.
When she finally speaks, she's horrified to find her voice half gone, the rest of it too badly charred from how her body is burning. She wants to move, find relief - shake the Captain's hold on her, grind him into powder. "You want me to get used to attacking you. And being afraid of Sasha. That's only the beginning, isn't it?" It feels so sweet to be angry, she pushes aside all thoughts of being in the right, or in the wrong. She just focuses her scattered thoughts into a blade. "But you wouldn't hurt your own team."
He arches a disbelieving brow.
He has a point. He's beaten up about half of everyone in the squad at least once by now. "You wouldn't kill them!" she snaps, and then hurries along, because he has a response and she finds that she doesn't want to hear it. "The gun training, fine, we're going to war against humans - but what's the point of taking on my own squadmates? Why be that ruthless? It's -"
"Savage?" he says quietly. "Inhumane?"
"Yes." She swallows. "All that and more."
His tone turns strangely wistful. "I wonder what you'll do when Eren turns on a Corps member," he muses. "Or the day he plows through a crowd of civillians."
Mikasa bucks her hips, and it's so violent and the Captain had hunched down so close over her he's tossed off her into the shallows. She reverses his grip on her wrists as he goes over and right away she's straddling him this time, pressing him back into the sand. Like she had done, he pushes himself up against her weight, keeping his head out of the water. "Eren wouldn't," she growls. "Not on purpose."
"Talked with Eren much lately, have you?"
Mikasa is silent, guilty. She'd hardly seen him at all, not since the incident with the boat. "We need Eren."
"Meaning, we need you. To do what you have to do, when the time comes." He settles back into the surf just enough to pull her a bit off balance; he drags his wrists up and takes her hands with them, and suddenly she's all but breathing his breaths, the sodden ends of her hair are touching his face, he's gazing at her from beneath his lowered lashes. One slip, and her mouth will brush his. She fights down the urge to wet her lips, how it's roasting through her like cloying thirst.
"Even you can think rationally when you put your mind to it," he tells her. His voice is deceptively soft.
She pulls up and away, dragging his wrists back toward her with sheer trembling force. His biceps go taut under his suit with the effort of resisting her, but today, she wins. "I always thought you'd jump at that chance," she says bitterly. "You've always -"
"It might not be as simple as swords in the nape. You came to that conclusion on your own." He sighs, suddenly weary and pliant under her hands, as she frowns. "It's rarely that simple. Also." His eyes narrow to stormy slits. "Let me go or just drown me already. I'm getting a cramp down here."
She narrows her eyes right back at him. "Drown you?"
"If you've got the guts."
Quick as a snake, one of his legs slips her straddle. He hooks her ankle and then collapses her leg, trapping it tight against him. The heat in her that she'd thought had fizzled out like a candle flame in the rain roars back to life, so sudden and so hot her breath hitches and holds. Only her hands braced on his wrists stop her from falling right into him. She wonders what that would even be like - flopping belly-first onto a bed of nails, probably. He'd doubtless give her a thousand pushups afterward.
His other leg slips free. She's still on top, but just like that, she's in his grasp.
"I thought -" she starts to protest through her teeth.
"Too slow," he says. "Try to avoid insubordination next time." And then he's sitting up, taking her with him. He's going to throw her on her back again, this time into deeper water. Clasped so tight between his legs she can barely breathe, she doesn't think.
She fists a hand in his hair and pulls.
That eerie stillness steals over the Captain with a shudder. They freeze at the apex of his bodily throw, sitting up perfectly straight in the frothy surf. He swallows and lets his head fall back into her vicious grip. She'd only meant to distract him; she's yanking only barely hard enough to hurt. But his teeth are clenched, his narrow jaw squared, so all the tendons and muscles in his neck seem wired directly to her fist. They tighten when she tries to sit back from him, standing up in sharp relief under his bone-pale skin; they relax when she lets up the slightest bit. She considers just letting him go. For the briefest instant, she nearly does, nearly slides her fingers through the dark strands to rasp over the shaven curve of his skull. Just to see what would happen.
One of his heels is digging into her ass. She shifts uncomfortably and the heat curls sharp and deliberate inside her. A swallow stutters in his throat. She stares, transfixed and a bit stricken. It's hard to imagine him leering, with his eyes as clouded over as they are. It's harder still to imagine his blades slicing for her, for Eren, for any of them, when the slightest move from her draws humanity's strongest soldier tight as a bowstring, like he's about to snap in two in her hands.
"Ackerman," he rasps, as though in pain, but he gives her no order. She realizes she's breathing through her mouth, fast and dry, like they've leeched the air of all its oxygen at last.
She lets him go. Her hands go to his hips, to push him off.
"All right." A shove, and she's the one that goes sprawling. She hits the water with a splash, submerges, flounders - then gets her knees under her and emerges, spluttering. She blinks up at the Captain, who's turned away from her, on his feet and already slogging for the shore, the sea pouring off his tense form in sheets. "Just get it over with and shoot me next time. Rubber bullets are rubber bullets. This conversation is over."
After that, there's no choice. She has to go see Commander Hange.
"I'm going to tell you something that Levi told me in complete confidence," she says once Mikasa has finished. She takes a pert sip of tea. "Meaning, if you ever want to have me assassinated, just tell him that I told you what I'm about to tell you, and it's a done deal."
"So." Mikasa's heart seizes. "So, everything he said?"
"Oh, it's all true. We've discussed it." Another sip of tea. The glare is high on the lenses of her glasses. Her one eye is placid, nonforthcoming. "You have the highest chance of surviving this mess of a world out of all of us, and an innate sense of justice. Save where dear Eren is concerned. But even then, you wouldn't let him make himself into a terrible person."
"Eren's not becoming a terrible person."
The Commander just sets down her teacup with a clack. "Even if all the so-called heroes of this world die, and you're left alive, you alone could still save it. Levi and I have total and complete confidence in that." Her one eye fixes Mikasa in a sudden, piercing stare. "That you're able."
One of Mikasa's hands clenches her own knee, hard. "Yes, sir."
"Now - to the item of business that could very easily get me smothered in my sleep." She leans forward, and Mikasa, drawn by her focused energy, can't help but lean forward too. "There's just one thing you need to know. When Erwin died - the day you wrestled Levi for the Titan serum - Erwin didn't need to die at all."
Mikasa blushes so hard her blood vessels ache. "I don't regret that day."
A raised hand quiets her. "That's not what I'm getting at. Things are the way they are." Her hands spread flat against the surface of her makeshift desk. "Levi tells me that Erwin gave him a choice. Erwin could have either retreated - fled the Beast Titan entirely, and resulted in all of our gruesome deaths - or charged the Beast Titan and his soldiers. He left this choice up to Levi."
Mikasa stares blankly. "I don't understand."
"Levi told Erwin to die. Essentially - Levi killed him."
Mikasa sits back in her chair so hard she bounces off the back of it. Somehow... somehow, she feels as though she ought to have known that. Like the Captain and all his anger at her and Eren after that day had been pointing in that direction all along. It had just never sunk in.
He'd felt guilty.
"That means," she says slowly, "that when the Captain insisted that Commander Erwin get the serum instead -"
"That was different."
It's not the speed of it, but the sheer ice in Commander Hange's voice that makes Mikasa shut her mouth. Resentment coils in her - but she makes herself let it go. She doesn't know if she'll ever get used to it, her leaders sharing her own crippling weaknesses and her own denials, like mocked-up shades of her worst self telling her to bow and scrape.
Commander Hange clears her throat. "The point is," she says in a way that brings the conversation to a firm close, "Levi is humanity's strongest soldier. But he's got too many people to be responsible for to last long. I mean -" She snorts. "Who knows what keeps that man ticking. But you're going to outlast him - both of us - all of us. And that's just the facts. The one who takes up his mantle has got to be you. And once you do, you can't let anything, or anyone, stand in your way."
Mikasa refuses to dwell on those words. Her train of thought runs up against the concept of the Captain dying and then turns itself right back around, never mind the rest.
"This all started with the boat incident, correct?" the Commander asks suddenly. "His sticking close to you. Being incessantly annoying."
"I - yes." She doesn't know if that's all there is to it or not, is the problem. It hasn't escaped her just how fast the Captain must have had to run from his hut to reach her as quickly as he had. How snap his decision to come for her must have been, not even knowing that Eren wasn't with her at the time. The mystery niggles at her when she looks at him sometimes, an ever-insistent, but wait.
"Hm." The Commander toys with her teaspoon. "Well, it's tough to blame him. You were vulnerable that night, whether you like to admit it or not. A cannonball spit you out onto the cold beach in your night things."
She takes a long sip of tea. She must be all the way to the bitter dregs by now.
Mikasa gapes at her, then folds her hands primly in her lap. She clears her throat. "He didn't even blink, Commander."
Commander Hange chokes lightly on her tea dregs. A bit of liquid trickles down her front. She speaks into her cup, voice simultaneously muffled and amplified, not noticing. "Oh - I'm sure he didn't."
The Captain has the reins of two horses in his hands, and that's how Mikasa knows about how well this day is going to go.
Once she's close enough, he drops one set of reins into her hand. He's wearing a soft green pullover over his blacks, complete with lowered hood, sleeves rolled up. Perfect for trees, for vanishing into them like a forest wraith. He's watching her from under his austere brows, and something about the look brings yesterday - the ocean - all of it - back in a dizzying rush.
"So - Ackerman," he murmurs. Ackerman, her name hissing between his teeth like a curse.
With how close he's standing, there's no need for him to raise his voice any louder than this, like he's claiming some odd form of intimacy. It's such a small thing, and yet still her mouth runs dry.
He could almost be smiling. "Feel like killing me today?"
This is what she was meant for. This is what she was born to do.
The branch honestly comes out of nowhere. A twist saves her the worst of it, but her hip still crashes into it with such force that the whole branch nearly snaps free. As it is, she tumbles wildly through open air, hangs upside down, stomach and lungs trading and trading places - she shoots a hook low into an opposite tree, loses height, lets the taut cord catch her. She forces herself upright. She'll have thunderspear-shaped bruises in odd places tonight.
So. She hadn't been born to do that. At least there was no one around to see.
"Look sharp, Ackerman!" The ghostly call comes from nowhere and everywhere at once, echoing off dozens of trees, filling the green gloom. She swears there's a snigger in it.
Hell.
She hits the next trunk with both feet hard enough to crack the bark, then pushes off with a burst of gas, air tearing at her face, coaxing tears out of the corners of her eyes. He's above her, she's sure - the rustling of the leaves up there can't all just be the wind.
A shape detaches itself from thin air and goes hurtling past her at breakneck speed, falling straight down like an arrow shot at the ground. Mikasa nearly wrenches her shoulder out of its socket changing trajectory fast enough to avoid the bullets that come whipping at her face. It's still a strange sensation, feeling the center of her thrown weight between her shoulder blades instead of at her hips - all the same, she dodges clear of the Captain's range and is in time to see him still falling toward the ground back-first, both arms extended toward the sky, pistols blazing. A thrill races through her chest just watching him, like he's got a hook in her, pulling her along with him.
He's almost certainly having even more fun than she is.
Her momentum wedges her against an ancient bough, legs splayed and back arched like a wildcat, just long enough for her to draw both pistols and take aim. Then gravity pitches her into a fall, straight down.
The Captain sheds his empty cartridges and reloads in record time - twists, just a black shadow nearly at ground level - Mikasa fires, body braced for the brutal twin kicks.
But he's gone, sped away between two trees, staying low. She's spraying bullets at forest loam and, probably, unsuspecting rodents. She hastily holsters one gun and corkscrews through the air, firing one hook into a thick branch above her, letting it swing her in a stomach-sucking arc in the direction her captain had fled.
Because the game has changed. Mikasa doesn't just have to survive.
She has to catch him.
Later, she never figures it out. Whether she caught him, or whether he caught her.
It's probably pure chance that Mikasa even spots the metallic glint of the Captain's gear in the shadows of the woods. Triumph roars up to claim her whole. With a fierce grin stretched across her face - by the gods, how long has it been since she smiled last? - she puts on a burst of speed, weaving between trees, flitting from one side of the trunks to the other with just enough effort to barely not break her own neck with a crash into a trunk. Her body tightens, knees drawing toward her chest, feet and head moving forward to bend her body into an aerodynamic wedge. Now she doesn't even have a cape to catch the wind and slow her down. She needs just a slight boost - she recalls the Captain's jibes about Eren, those crucial seconds of cruelty, and she fires her hooks extra hard, pushes off the tree trunks extra viciously.
She draws abreast of the Captain soon enough. He's just a flicker, a frenetic ghost glimpsed between the trunks and the branches that blink by by the dozens, the hundreds.
This is it. He's surely seen her, and means to simply outpace her, run her ragged. She has one shot, and it'll have to count.
His general direction is aimed slightly upward, so even as Mikasa readies her righthand pistol, they hurtle toward the forest canopy. More and more light bleeds into their eyes the higher they go - soon she can pick out the Captain's lithe form in its entirety, his gaze focused straight ahead. Probably listening for a stutter in her pace, a stray puff of wind - anything but sight to betray her lining up the shot.
It's a shame. Just watching him move is captivating, breathtaking, his coiling and flipping in the air to give his feet perfect leverage on every tree, not using even a slip of gas. A real shame to have to end it so soon.
Mikasa flicks up her wrist and squeezes the trigger -
Her righthand hook, the one closest to the Captain, is en route to the nearest tree trunk, as per usual.
The Captain flips like an acrobat horizontally around the tree and catches the hook in his hand, palm to its side.
The last thing she sees is an insufferable little smile, right before he lets it drop.
It's not, by any means, a bad fall. She's still got one hook buried in a tree somewhere behind her - she'll reach the end of its arc and get jerked backwards, curse fluently, and then get back on the Captain's trail, only with a little more caution this time.
Still, to be safe, she gets her hook reeled in double time, and launches it again.
Too soon, apparently. It never quite reaches its holster before she fires - so it lurches rather lamely, unraveling from the mechanism even faster than it falls away from her.
At the exact same moment, there's a tug between her shoulder blades, and then nothing, as her other hook simply tears loose from the tree, the trunk too skinny to bear her weight alone this high up.
Both hooks twine limply through the air. They won't reel in fast enough - the ground is racing up to meet her. And she's too shocked to even utter a peep. And the wind rushes in her ears - gravity is a long, unbroken pull towards finality.
The Captain doesn't waste his breath, either. He simply plunges out of the sky, silent as an owl, velocity maxxed. Even as the forest cartwheels above her, a patch of faraway blue sky dwindling in the pinwheel, she's able to meet his gaze. Amazingly calm despite the circumstances. Utterly focused.
That moment sets itself on fire. There's no going back once the old kindling has burned itself to ashes. And then he's crashing into her.
One steely arm slams low around her waist, crushing her to him chest-to-chest. Immediately she grabs him back, both hands fisting in the back of his green pullover. Over his shoulder is a knot of forest that twists and tumbles - the Captain curls them into a slow somersault, trying to control their descent. Their combined weight is such a blessed relief Mikasa could sob, but there's no way just one set of gear will hold them both, not when they're moving this fast, hurtling uncontrollably through the silent forest.
The Captain's hooks find their marks, rapid shots that drag them grudgingly away from the ground. The Captain abruptly holds her tighter and pitches into a roll; Mikasa buries her face in his shoulder, dizzy. She only feels him hit a tree, the ominous pop of his joints as he tries to absorb the impact with his legs, slow them down.
When he pushes off, she knows it goes wrong. The Captain is a very descriptive curser.
She opens her eyes and in a moment, has switched her grip on him, one arm around his waist. They don't even look at each other.
He just, very plainly, retracts his hooks. Curls his other arm around her neck. They combined drop like a lobbed stone.
The protectiveness that surges through her is so sudden, so shocking, it's nothing to fire her returned hooks into the trunks that flash by, nothing at all to hold the Captain against herself with frightening strength, to whip them in a heavy but perfectly balanced arc high, high, higher, her muscles aching but pain is a just stranger, only broken bones could possibly stop her now and maybe not even then, until the Captain is loosening his grip on her and murmuring, "It's all right, it's all right, let me go," even though he must really be yelling to be heard over the windy roar of their speed, and terror rips through her but she does, and he's falling away from her but his hooks are lashing out, and that's it. That's it.
They twine about one another in the air - whip around tree trunks, tumble over and under one another. She goes high, he goes low. He goes left, she goes right. Soon they've got a rhythm set, burning off their excess speed in style, swooping falcons doing battle without touching, exhiliration - over being alive, over him - launching her more and more recklessly through the air. Until finally she lets herself slow. Finally she spies a promising branch, flips over her lines, re-grapples, and soars right for it.
Her hooks release. Before she can fire again, there's an arm around her, she's being yanked off course, shouting in protest. The back of her head rests along the Captain's shoulder and he hits a massive branch at a run. She struggles, slips - and he's got her up against the tree trunk, pinned her between the bark and his body, and they're breathing so hard it almost hurts, their heaving chests crushing up against one another with each inhale, her knees up to grasp at his hips she's pushed so tightly to the tree, leaving her exposed and open, leaving them at one another's eye level, for once.
There are some people who just can't let things lie. People who simply cannot let moments follow nature's course and peter out to be replaced by some new moment, full of fresh possibilities. The Captain is panting against her cheek when he presses his forehead to her sweaty temple, drags an open hand up her neck and jaw and cheek and into her short hair. She turns her head at his insistent press and he strokes his nose along hers, his eyes closed, breath slanting across her lips. She grips his biceps in sudden euphoria, in sudden panic - she's going to burst, too much all at once, not enough -
Mikasa buries her face in his shoulder once more, taking refuge in that darkness and that stillness, the feel of the soft fabric against her wind-chafed skin. And that's it.
The Captain pulls back, but not far, just far enough to ease her feet back down to the branch. He curls one arm around her neck just like he'd done in their mad tumble through midair, his other hand gently skimming her ribs above her lefthand holster. She clutches his arms and they just hold each other like that, they just breathe, and they are very much alive.
Time passes slowly for once, and for that Mikasa is grateful. The Captain gets his wish and that moment does last an eternity, just their sweat-slicked bodies close together, sparking with want and a driving need to be closer but holding those desires at bay. Letting them ferment, letting them dig furrows into their skins. By the end of it, Mikasa thinks she could be breathing him in, tattooing his presence into her shadow so it will be there rain or shine, just waiting for her to pull it out and examine it in varying distances from her heart. She'd thought she'd already known what it meant to be close to a person in every way that mattered, carved out of the same stone as them; she'd been wrong, and living tragically beneath her privilege.
In this life they've chosen, this is all they'll get. Just stolen moments, and borrowed time.
Eventually, they sit. Mikasa moves to hunker down next to him, but he gently grasps her hip and pulls her closer, and so now she's sitting between his legs, her own legs draped over one of his and feet dangling slightly over the edge of the branch, her shoulder leaning into his chest. She'd thought he'd be eager to stop touching her, get his own private bubble back - but whatever had made the impression upon her that he preferred that is clearly a lie, or at least in her case it is. He keeps one hand at the small of her back, lending her more freedom to lean however she wants fearlessly.
He is, at last, the first to speak in what feels like a lifetime. "I could've just let you fall. And won the game."
Mikasa turns slowly to stare at him in disbelief. Her eyes narrow to slits. "You wouldn't kill me," she says with finality. "You don't have the guts."
After the events of the day, it's quite possible that the Captain had simply run out of emotions, no expressions left to him. But his eyes still manage to smile, and that alone makes him look young enough, light enough, that Mikasa instantly regrets not just letting him claim her lips. She nearly leans forward and gets the job done right then and there.
"And you wouldn't kill me," he replies seamlessly. "Even though you've got the guts."
And then he hooks a hand into the neck of his pullover and drags it, plus his blacks, down as far as he can, shifting the gear's chest plating out of the way as he goes. Mikasa watches, curious - glimpses a slim collarbone, the beginnings of a pectoral.
A perfectly round, red and purple bruise, welting gently. The strike of a rubber bullet, just barely shy of his heart.