Chapter Text
“Kill me in the free world,” his dying wish, his dying hot breath. I am what I remember. The silence is like the noise.
Mikasa is free. Her scarf waves like an ardent flag in the scorching winds as she walks. She keeps it pulled up against the desert storm. Behind her, footprints in footprints. Beyond that, all the mass, all the ruin, the punishing weight that had collapsed the earth. Solemn ranks of many-faced gods.
She slides down a shallow ravine, exhaustion making it more of a fall. The winds are less intense down here, funneled through the furrows of the canyon.
She breathes, sitting against the wall. Bleeding uselessly from wounds that wouldn’t kill her. Heat chokes her and she coughs. Her throat feels blistered. Out of habit, she inspects her gear, although there is nothing to fight anymore. Just something to kill. Her blades are dull; they remember everything. She remembers most.
Armin’s eyes through the Colossal's, startled blue, blind revelation. Levi’s flat snap of a command. The war in her head. She had to find him before they did. Dead-footed, holding her blades loosely, she rises, pulled, as always, toward him.
She’s seeing the dead girl again, the lost girl from a bygone era, where darkness couldn’t be comprehended because everything was dark. Now the generational darkness has been returned. The land is restored, ready to be inherited. She wants the other dream back.
Mikasa walks for hours or days, the lodestone in her heart charged and polarized in one direction. And right when she feels like she can’t take another step, she reaches the ocean.
The water has receded. Craggy rocks exposed, red-streaked. Dead things fry in the naked recession, fish, birds, bodies. Chunks of salt from evaporation, wigs of seaweed. No life has been left untouched from the world’s fire, the burn that flushed animals from their dens and clogged the skies with smoke. In the shallow pool by the shore, Eren’s Titan laps the steaming water. He lies twisted on one side. His long tangled hair– filthy, like feelers, like millions of squirming feelers– drifts in the weak waves like a seawitch. Dead opaque eye.
He’s in the head, she had told them.
“Eren,” she says. Her voice scratches like the record Eren played for them from what felt like a thousand years ago. The Titan’s eye jolts; the rings widen. It sees, processing.
Mikasa checks for incendiary movement on the heat-disturbed horizon. Nothing. The Rumbling hadn’t started again. The giants remain motionless. The bone shrine with legs, terrible and supreme and still. The desolate desert storm rages on. Is this what peace looks like? The scramble to draw a weapon on each other?
The filmy eye is staring at her. Mikasa marches down the dunes. The stink of new and old detritus is worse than Trost. Her heart begins to well and she quickens, almost running. Again, she had lost him. Again, she would find him in Hell and drag him up from the underworld to the place where pain didn’t reach, where the residual souls wouldn’t find them.
Something had seized her and it took Mikasa a second to place the emotion. Anger. Of course she’s angry. She is shaking with it. Her blade holster rattles. I can’t do it again. You can’t ask that of me.
The oversized head grins at her smallness. She scales the hand to get to the mouth, wanting to preserve gas; she still had to get him out of here. The veins pulse with borrowed blood; he was alive.
It’s dark in the mouth. And quiet. Mikasa lets her eyes adjust, standing in the rim of weak light; broken teeth, sky through them, torn open from two fissions.
He hangs limply in crucifixion. He has a body now. It’s not done. His nudity is like a corpse’s. She can’t see his face, only his hair. The strings hold him aloft. Mikasa’s mind dissects what she’s seeing as a soldier first: he’s healing, vulnerable, wounded, but alive, he’s siphoning off his Titan; the strings are keeping him alive.
Then, unbidden: the strings are tethering.
Mikasa steps forward. “Eren?”
His jaw strains below his hair. Flayed chin. Mikasa had hoped it was another dream. The nightmare would crawl on.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he says.
“I cannot kill you again,” Mikasa says. “In that regard, I’m powerless.”
Eren raises his head. His eyes hold the last smile she gave him. “Your hair is short.” Humorless almost-smile.
“I’m going to cut you down.”
Eren closes his eyes, energy expended. Mikasa moves closer. Her boots squish. The entire anatomy of the mouth had been restructured to accommodate its suspended host. A thick curling worm, like what ate the Warriors, hooked into his open throbbing spinal cord by manner of bristling feelers. The rest of the strings connected to extremities. Mikasa could see an impulse run through one and twitch Eren’s blue finger. The marks score his face, claw at his eyes.
The rage cuts like one of her headaches. Her mind sloshes thickly. She places her hand on his striated bare chest, feeling his weak tinny heart. She has all of him now.
“I don’t know what happens next, Mikasa,” Eren says. “And I have never known what you’ll do.”
“What will you do?” Mikasa says. “Will you stay in this Hell?” His chest is so paper-thin, she could see his heart struggling.
“I’ve eradicated any chance for a future.”
“Not with me.”
He squints at her through his hair, one eye screwed shut. The strings shiver with harpstring vibrations like a complex organism. Viscera pumps steadily around them. “You– you can’t be serious. It won’t end until you’ve abandoned your mission.”
“I have,” Mikasa says. She moved her hand from his chest to his slender neck. Feel him swallow, touch the resonations of his speech.
“You’ll kill me then?”
“This is a nightmare you created, Eren,” Mikasa flexes her hand. “Like before, I’m powerless in your dreams.”
“Powerless?” Eren bares his teeth and laughs, almost spitting. “You?”
She tightens her hand and the viscera shrieks, strings pulling taut, wrenching Eren’s arms above his head like a beaten prisoner of war. His armpits are a naked shock. His feet dangle like a victim of the gallows.
He spins woodenly until Mikasa steadies him. Reaching out, she brushes one of the glistening sinews and it responds, curling, lifting Eren a little. He shudders, like she had just touched his nape. His eyes meet hers, uncertain without the assurance of the future.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Her anger isn’t slowing, looking at the deathless body she never had any claim to.
“Armin always saw your good,” Mikasa says, her fingers trailing across the ruts of his ribcage, where his heart beat itself to a bloody pulp. “I thought I did too. I couldn’t reconcile you with the person who gave me this scarf. Now, I am capable of different emotions.”
“You’re capable of much more,” Eren says.
She never got to touch him like this, like a lover would, not even in the already fading dream, where they met as ephemeral figments, too afraid to hold something they would lose. The flares of his hips, a fishbone hook. This is not how a lover would touch him. The world’s hate at her fingertips.
“As usual, you’re leaving it entirely up to me,” Mikasa says. “It’s not fair. But it also means I’m free to act as I desire.”
“You were always free,” Eren says. “Do what you will, Mikasa.”
Mikasa grabs his face and wrangles him into a rough kiss, seeing the little girl upside down in his blacker-than-black pupils. His lips are cold as death. They part, breathing like dogs strangled by chains.
“It’s– it’s,” Eren licks his lips, “it’s different when you’re alive.”
“Yeah,” Mikasa breathes.
The faint light from the gap in the door-sized teeth wans; the firestorm picks up; and the shadows contort Eren into a gaunt winter tree, dead branches impaling him, the moment in the fairytales her mother used to tell her where the skin of decency slides off and the cyclical didactic nightmares flutter through your sleep.
Eren’s flat pubic mound is unnaturally smooth, hairless, newly formed. His flaccid penis jumps in her hand, like an infantile mammal shying at its mother’s touch. There is a great groan as the floor shifts: Eren’s Titan is awake. Eren recedes into the dark hearted viscera, away from her. The strings hiss protectively. Steam funnels from a vessel in the mouth.
“What’s wrong with you,” Eren says, and she can see his wide reflective eyes, marred by hair. “I killed them. I burned them.”
The sweetness of the past. The boy she knew didn’t have to be this matted man. Mikasa is undoing her scarf. It would get in the way. A sick headiness washes over her, turns her stomach, and again she’s blindsided by the anger. Nothing would happen because she couldn’t change him and her ineffectual love seeps into the soil, wasted.
Mikasa grabs a central string– grafted to his neck– and tugs hard.
Eren’s nervous system jangles, his eyes roll, he jerks erratically, pulled forward in spasmodic lurches and careless untrained manipulation. He’s flush with her chest, arms slack at his side, feet not touching the ground. Mikasa remembers when she would play with dolls as a little girl.
She keeps one hand on the pulsing nerve to immobilize and one hand on his hardening length. He’s warming up. She just had to get him warm.
“Stop,” he says, “Just give– give me a minute–” boyish abashed, ashamed panicked.
“We don’t have time,” Mikasa says. “Armin is looking for us.” She begins to move her hand. “Please be patient with me. I am wholly inexperienced and I don’t know if any of my skills will transfer.”
“I told you to stop.”
It’s a learning process, figuring which string is assigned to which muscle. The big ones seem to determine broad motor function while the smaller veins trigger minute isolated synapses. He is inextricable, Mikasa thinks: even holding his head up requires the strings.
She’s still stroking him; the friction becomes slick and Eren hisses as her hand slips. Mikasa is amazed by him, amazed by his fluids and inner machinery and the synchronicity between his body and his sins.
Mikasa probes the worm in his spine and he’s levitating like a circus performer, dragged upwards by his vertebrae like a scruffed cat. He makes no sound and the silence is like the noise. She steps back and takes out her triggers.
Zing of mechanical flight; her hips shoot wire into the roof of the mouth and Mikasa rises with him, now both gravity-free in the swollen flesh-womb. Eren’s arousal is thick and heavy and the voluptuous scent secretes from the strings like sex pheromones. His dick is raw and weeping from her ministrations.
“I didn’t think you had atrocities in your head too,” Eren says. There’s finally some color in his face. The titan marks ravage it like burning hand prints.
“We all do,” Mikasa says, more sure-footed hovering than standing. Kissing him is like forcing a pill under his tongue. Zing! Mikasa is upside-down, walking on the roof, level with Eren’s stomach. He cringes away from her face instinctively, and she tightens her hold on the strings, forcing him closer until her lips part around his flushed cockhead.
The anger tenderly thaws her so that the inhibitions melt away. I’m only stealing from a reservoir already depleted, she thinks. Eren shudders as she takes him fully in her warm mouth. Creaking tension in the strings; he’d be resisting without her hold.
A heat buried deep in Mikasa spreads, compounding sensations, exponential frustration. Her thighs rub, seeking. Her ODM wires whine as she lowers herself and starts to unbuckle her belt, the heat in her face now. Eren watches with wide uncomprehending eyes, breathing through his nose shallowly, like a child voyeur, overwhelmed by the basic anatomy.
Shimmying her pants to mid-thigh, then her black underwear, Mikasa floats upside-down, pubic hair glistening with dew. She tends to herself with detached impatience, not looking at Eren, just the circular blur of her fingers on her clit.
Eren is leaning back as far from her mound as the strings will let him. Terror strikes in his eye, green fire-hexes.
“You don’t hate this,” Mikasa tells him.
Eren gulps. She reaches to control him– before she can, he places his mouth on her, cold as cortisol. Mikasa squeezes her eyes shut when his tongue nudges her labia, lips suctioned, breathing hot dying breath into her. She moves forward blindly– closes her lips around his cock again.
They are searching. Curiously, studiously, rooting around for the evil inside and drawing it out like dissipated nullified poison. A scarred girl-body and pristine soft boy-flesh. Reverting to children and letting the weary adults sleep. Eren running. Mikasa chasing. I am what I remember.
Mikasa has always been more efficient than him. He comes, just as she releases his spasming penis. She squints, suddenly reduced to one eye. Manipulating both her ODM and the strings, she lowers them to the ground. Eren is kneeling, twitching all over, pulsing with chemical input.
“Shit,” he says, blinking hard.
“Despite knowing so much, you still haven’t experienced everything,” Mikasa says, wiping her eye with her sleeve.
“I don’t know anything,” Eren says, eyes a little blind, “it’s all senselessly dark after my death.”
“New memories should replace the old.” Her gear clatters to the ground. She undoes her straps, and then carefully unwinds her scarf.
“I don’t want to do this again,” Eren says. “I can’t.”
“I think that you are also capable of more than you know.” Mikasa unbuttons her shirt and she takes off her bra, mad at herself now, mad at her body, at her needs, for soiling a stupid silly girlhood dream.
Eren no longer looks like a corpse. He is full, living boy, blushing at her like a little brother. Almost petulant in his shame. His pale legs fold like a withholding woman to disguise the arousal giving him length.
Mikasa is now fully nude. Lush darkness covers them as she lowers herself, keeping Eren pliant and limp with the strings. His eyes glaze like he’s drugged.
She gores herself on him, hymen snapping like wire, a single drop of blood running down his shaft. It hurts but everything hurts so pain is irrelevant. The only thing relevant to this union is positioning. Eren holds her waist because she makes him. She would make him love her. She mashes a kiss onto his unresponsive lips and begins to move, rolling her hips in slow surges.
Eren says nothing. She pants, wringing him, desperately, hopelessly, smashing her pelvis down onto his with a hard clap, all her easy prowess working to fracture him with her body, crack him open until the waxen desire spills, the reanimation occurs. Eren says nothing, staring up at her mournfully until she closes her eyes.
“Ah,” Mikasa cries. Is she crying? She feels her face. Dry.
It feels so good it was senseless to wait this long. She’s opened up most of her wounds. Ugly, dirty, sweat-stained and bloody.
Her vagina gushed so one pain went away. She could feel the anomalous lightning building, stiffening her nipples, making her pull her teeth over her lip. Eren was tensed and rigid; she couldn’t keep him pliant for fear of softening him.
“My most beloved,” Mikasa pants, “my dear.”
Her release is anticlimactic; it simmers, settling through her like two bodies of water mixing, killing all marine life. Fluid bubbles at her entrance, where Eren is still attached. She slides off him with a wet pop. She collects him in her arms, trembling all over. Her lost dolly, painted rosy face, chipped and peeling.
“If you won’t free me, then take me home,” he says.