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They left on a night like this; a starry night sky drenched in ink blue, a shot of green seeking out the grey, Eren and Mikasa’s faces inches from each other. He’d asked her a question that had burned inside of him for the longest time… And Mikasa had answered.
Today, Eren has a different question.
“What are you looking at?” Mikasa is sitting on the grass, legs stretched out in front of her, palms on the soil.
Eren is sitting with his arms around his knees, his face resting on his arm. “You.” He says it softly but without hesitation, as if he doesn’t have time for it, doesn’t have time for the embarrassment. Doesn’t have space to keep words inside of him anymore.
Mikasa blushes; pink is a nice colour on Mikasa, he thinks. Like her sweater. It’s a soft shade dusted on her cheeks, delicate like her lips. Her blush blooms like the blood inside of her, blood that won’t spill for a long, long time. Mikasa is different from him. She has a lot of time for embarrassment, so much time. Another man will see her this way, he thinks, an inevitability that twists inside of him. He will see her softness and her strength, he will see her blush; he will love her.
Someday when Eren is not there to love her anymore.
Now when he is teetering on the edge of death, he has thoughts like this sometimes. Bitter and heady with regret, and utterly futile— nothing he can say or do will go back in time and rewrite his choices. No matter how much he wishes he’d written his life differently, watched her face when she walked beside him instead of worshipping the survey corps, caught her hand when she offered it, it wouldn’t change what they’d become.
Only a fool chooses war over love, Eren has learnt. And he is a fool.
Freedom doesn’t taste the same when he would no longer be there to taste it— when he wouldn’t be able to partake in it with the people he loves. Death has a way of making things painfully clear; Eren wouldn’t be able to see the life of freedom Mikasa would live, and he wouldn’t live it by her side. And on his lowest days he wonders if she would’ve been happy just with the latter, if she’d gotten only Eren instead of freedom, if she’d lived inside these caged walls, but inside a home with a warm fire, with Eren to bring her firewood, with a belly swollen with the proof of their love.
“Mikasa,” he says. His voice is urgent with questions.
“Hmm?”
She looks peaceful beside him, like she has never held a blade in her life. Like he has never stained her hands with blood. It breaks his heart.
After everything he has done, what right does he have to ask her all this: Will you be mine, Mikasa? Will you promise me your heart? Will you love me more than anybody else, forever?
So instead, he asks, “Will you sit close to me?”
She smiles at him shyly— beautiful, he thinks— and asks “Closer?” They are sitting barely inches apart. If he leans only slightly to the left his arm will brush against hers. But it isn’t close enough for him.
“Yeah.” She gets on her knees and crawls to him, his legs opening up to make space for her. His arms close around her like that space was meant for her, like she was a part of him that he felt uneasy without.
His fingers skim the tips of her hair, brushing against her shoulders. Mikasa’s hair is longer now, and it frames her face sweetly. Eren sweeps it away gently and lets his lips fall to a spot between her neck and her jaw.
Like this, with Mikasa in his arms, with her pulse point below his mouth, he feels less anxious. He doesn’t think about his rights, or his choices, or regrets or all the mistakes he has made in the past.
He only thinks about her, and how right this feels. He thinks about how if him and Mikasa were made in this world, then it was only natural that they were made to be together. It’s as if her heart is speaking to his; telling him this is ok, this is how it was meant to be.
His eyes drift shut, his mouth parts, his kisses develop a hungry nature. His teeth scrape lightly against her skin. “Hah,” she gasps, verbal noises of nothing that Mikasa makes that he has learnt intimately over the past days. It has so many meanings— affirmation, surprise, pleasure, bliss. Things he likes seeing in Mikasa.
Her body changes when he holds her this way, when his mouth touches her skin. There’s an urgency that lives within her, like a shorted wire, and he feels it under his fingertips, when she moves— squirming, back arching when his tongue flicks against a part of her shoulder that is particularly sensitive.
“Eren, stop.” It’s a breathy command; he pulls back, green eyes wide and hungry as he asks her, “Did I do something wrong?” His voice is rough with passion.
She shakes her head. “I want to kiss you.” She whispers it like a confession, like her desire is still new to her even though they have explored each other before.
“Okay,” he murmurs. He bends forward till he is pulling on her lower lip with his teeth, sucking it into his mouth, his palm turning her chin and angling her into him. Mikasa is sweet, sweet on her tongue, and her lips, and her teeth, and her breath, and it makes him think she only moves the way she does against his mouth because she must feel it too. “No,” she breathes. “I want to do it properly.” And she pulls back until she turns around and positions herself facing him, wrapping her legs around him.
It makes his heart race. This position is confrontingly intimate, Mikasa’s eyes boring into him like she can see every shameful, illicit, wanting thought he might have. But when he returns her gaze, her lashes lower, gaze dropping to his mouth, cupping his face with her hands before she kisses his cheek. Left first, then right, then the corner of his mouth, softly on his lips, and then open-mouthed, her tongue licking against his when Eren meets her with his mouth open, his hunger heavy on his breath.
“This is nice,” she says, as she kisses him like she’s tasting him, savouring him, teeth and tongue and lips and it makes him groan, his hands digging into her hips and pulling her as close as he can. There’s no way she doesn’t see it now; just how much he wants her— it presses against her core, a heavy pressure digging into her skin, his body powerless against the force of it, just as the groans that seep out of his chest.
But it doesn’t turn her off, it doesn’t deter her. Her hands thread into his hair, the soft, downy hair at the nape of his neck, and her own moans mingle with his. He can feel the heat between her legs warming his cock through his pants. She wants me to be hers too, he thinks desperately, it has to be so, there’s no other meaning to this.
Because it spurs every action of his; when his hands slip under her shirt and stroke her abs, fingers grazing against the swell of her breast. I want her to be mine. His fingers circle around her mounds, moulding around her.
They’re moving against each other, hips unwinding, her chest thrusting into his palm, mouths sloppy. She inhales sharply, makes the prettiest noise, when his thumb circles around her nipple deliberately. He thinks he could hear it forever.
Is this the life they could have had? Clutching each other in the dead of the night, mouths hungry, bodies hot for each other? Maybe he could have held her hand in the streets when they went shopping, maybe he could have told Carla that she was the one. Maybe he could have given her his mother’s ring, and she would have bought a dress, like the one from the pictures his father had of his family, on his desk. Maybe he would kiss her in front of everyone and call her his ‘wife’. Maybe someday they would have made a child—
“Eren?” She asks, her finger wipes against a wetness on his cheek. “Why are you crying?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not.” As if denying it ever happened, would mean it really didn’t. As if he pretended he didn’t have regrets, he would really not have them. “… I just.” His voice is hoarse. “I really want you.”
She looks at him fondly. “I’ve always wanted you,” she says softly. “It’s a feeling I’m used to.” And she finds his mouth again. Her admission creeps into his skin, tightening around his heart and squeezing. Once again he is reminded of how he could have had a lifetime of loving this girl, but he had been too blind to see it. His hands hike up the fabric of her skirt around her thighs.
She undoes the ties of his trousers deftly. It’s been such a short while but they’ve come to know this dance so well; the first time they did it their fingers trembled with anxiety, now it shakes with urgency, Eren’s with the impatience of a boy who knows his death sentence. The tips of her fingers caress his happy trail and he shudders with the knowledge of how good it will feel when she has them wrapped around his cock.
Through it all, all he thinks is, Mikasa is so good, so good, so good with her hands, her mouth, with her heart that she gave him such a long, long time ago. And not for the first time he wonders how he could’ve been stupid enough to ignore it. Because now when he holds her, his fingers dig into her with the desire to leave a lasting imprint, to take the feeling of her with him to his death.
What comes after? He questions it sometimes, when it is late at night and despair drives sleep away. Mikasa sleeps next to him with her lashes fanning her cheek, her mouth slightly parted, and he thinks if this feeling, this precious fragility that he wants to protect could stay with him even after he is nothing, then it would be enough.
But when Mikasa drags him out, thumb brushing the ridge of his head in a way that makes him feel lightheaded, he feels greedier, like nothing could possibly be enough after this. She brings him to her, guiding his cock inside of her opening, her body warm and so perfectly accepting of him, it drags a moan out of his chest.
Before she can move, before she can capture his mouth in a kiss again, he catches her chin tipping it towards him, his fingers caressing her mouth. Her gaze is heavy with desire. “I like seeing you like this,” he admits, his tone steeped in awe and hunger.
“How do you mean?” She is breathing hard against his fingers. He slips her thumb into her mouth, grazing her teeth.
“Honest,” he murmurs. Like he can see her every thought, like he doesn’t have to wonder what she thinks of him, what he is to her. When she is like this, in his arms, half-dressed and wanting, he is certain that she looks at him like a man. Mikasa looks at him like he is a man that she wants. And it strokes a hunger inside of him that feels as if it had been lying dormant his entire life.
“I never meant to hide from you,” she says. “I always thought…”
He pulls her lip into his mouth, suckling it, cutting her off because he has enough regrets for the both of them. Mikasa didn’t do anything wrong, he thinks. He was always family, it’s just that he wants something different from that word, wants her to wear his name, wants to make her his wife, wants to keep her heavy with his child, wants to tie her to him in every irrevocable way possible.
He groans into her mouth as she squirms on top of him, her hips unwinding and taking him deeper. She fits around him like a glove, his mind blanking from how good she feels. Some days he craves it so terribly, he wishes he could be inside of her forever— an oasis where he isn’t plagued by his thoughts and his fragmented mind, it is only him and her and just how undeniably good they are for each other. His teeth graze her collarbone, open-mouthed, breath hot against sweat slick skin. “You feel so good,” he thinks he tells her. He wants to tell her. He wants her to know just how much she changes him, his body coming apart underneath her. But he isn’t sure the words have come out. The pleasure feels almost delusional; something so good for somebody so terrible felt dishonest, like it just couldn’t be true.
She rolls her hips against him, and he watches as she arches her back as if he were in a fever-induced dream. Everything feels as if it burns, his nerve-endings are on fire. She tells him she’s going to come, and he likes it so much, the fact that she is taking her pleasure with him, that she is honest, that she is telling him she’s feeling good. (Because of him.) He follows soon after, hanging on by a thread, only because he wants to make it as good as he possibly can for her.
“Did you ever think about it?” She asks him, breathlessly, sweat-slick forehead pressed against his. “When we were younger.”
He knows she is referring to what they were talking about before. About them. Like this. “I—“ He feels ashamed thinking about it; thinking about every opportunity at a better life that he missed. “I don’t remember.” It isn’t a lie. “My memories are—“ stained with the future, indistinguishable— “confused.”
She tries to hide the disappointment on her face, but it comes through. So damn honest, it hurts. “I think about it a lot, you know. Now.” Her eyes flicker to his. He clears his throat. “About making you mine.”
Mikasa is quiet. Her fingers are playing with his hair. Do you think about it, Mikasa? Do you want me to be yours? He wants to ask her so badly, but what would be the point? He is already hers, whether she wants it or not. He has been for a long time, even if he hadn’t known it.
She says she has wanted him since forever, but does she want forever with him? He doesn’t know why but it plagues him so. He feels terribly inadequate in front of her, when he thinks about it this way. Maybe because forever is not possible, it isn’t something he can give her, but he wants to know.
No— he wants her to want it. He wants it to drive her mad the way it drives him mad, the feeling of wanting something you know you cannot have.
“You’d make me yours?” She whispers it across his lips, like it’s a wish that feels too precious to even be spoken out loud. But when she says it, says the word yours , it feels a little bit more real. That this make-believe fantasy where he held her in his arms and whispered sweet things to her, his cock still semi-hard inside of her, had a fighting chance of being real. (In another world, in another life, perhaps.)
“Yeah,” he says. “We’re old enough to marry now, you know.” He pauses, awkwardly. “If mom, hadn’t—“ He inhales sharply. “I would’ve given you her ring.”
“If we didn’t— If it weren’t like this,” he confesses, unable to keep it inside him, “… I would never let anything take you from me.” And once it comes out, he cannot stop it. “If we’d had a chance, I would have done it right, you know. I wouldn’t have been this stupid.”
It sounds like an apology. His fingers trace her scar. “I would never hurt you.”
Mikasa is crying now. He realises this when her tears fall onto his cheeks, a sniffle turning into a laugh. “Mikasa?” He tenses. Has he said something terrible? Did he read everything wrong?
Maybe this entire thing was terrible after all. What kind of man builds a mental fortress to be with the woman he loves just to tell her he loves her? Because he had been too afraid to say this in the real world? This should be an everyday thing— Mikasa should never have to go a single day questioning this fact. Because he loved her, he loved her— he wanted to scream it— it was immutable. His head hurts. He feels a little bit unstable, he should’ve known no amount of regret and play-pretend would make up for the pile of mistakes he’d built up in his life. He just wanted her to know—
She lets out a watery laugh again, and shakes her head. “I’m fine.”
He watches her carefully. She laughs again, a pretty, giddy sound. She wipes her nose and her cheeks. If nothing else, the dreadful anxiety he felt in that moment was definitely a completely real sensation.
“We’d be a family,” he says tentatively even though he recognises that Mikasa still hasn’t said anything. He had spilled his guts but Mikasa was still quiet. Quietly crying. He laughs nervously. “I’m not sure if that’s the kind of family you wanted us to be though.”
She looks at him with something bright in her eyes. A light that shone from inside of her. Just for a moment it dispelled the fog that had settled inside of Eren; the dark, consuming heaviness that sat inside of him and made him want to tear himself apart just to get another chance to do things right. Just one more chance with her. “Eren,” she says gently. She cups his face with her hands. “Of course I wanted it.”
“I wanted everything with you.”