#you'll have to wait and see | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

karizard-ao3 · 1 year ago

Text

Eremika Role Reversal WIP Segment

It's Mikasa Week on Twitter and I was really trying to get this fic done in time for it but it's ended up being a lot more than I anticipated, so I'm sharing this portion of the rough draft because I still want to celebrate Mikasa, who is a perfect angel and has never done anything wrong in her life.

There's no context needed. This is from the start of the WIP onward.

The door swings open and slams into the wall, rattling the paintings that hang there in the luxurious suite.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Armin shouts, storming into the room, his eyes blazing with fury and panic. “Do you even know what you’ve done?”

Eren is on his feet in an instant, his eyes hard and dark, his teeth set into a snarl, stalking towards him, wolflike and dangerous, putting his body between Armin and the pale, black-haired girl beyond. It is still strange to Armin, seeing Eren like this: glaring at him with two gleaming eyes, standing there without his prosthesis or his crutch. Armin’s eyes linger for a disoriented moment on the strange curve of calf and shin that fills out Eren’s pant leg before he comes back to himself and turns his attention to the young woman beyond. At the window seat, Mikasa has barely moved, her eyes still trained on the desolation below. Armin’s stomach twists, fresh anguish and rage coursing through him. He doesn't recognize either of his two best friends anymore. He doesn’t know where he fits in this new hell they have created.

“Mikasa!” Armin shouts.

“Get out,” Eren growls. “If you’re here to act superior, just go.”

“I won’t,” Armin snaps. “I need to talk to Mikasa.”

Mikasa turns towards the commotion, watching them both with shadowed eyes, her lips pulling into a frown.

“Armin?” she says. “How long have you been here?”

“Do you know how many years of diplomacy you’ve just wasted?” he demands, ignoring her question, pushing past Eren. Eren grabs his wrist, restraining him, squeezing far tighter than he needs to, his fingertips digging into Armin’s skin hard enough to bruise. Armin ignores the pain. “Do you know how many people you’ve slaughtered, Mikasa?”

“They were coming to kill you,” Mikasa says, faintly, her cheeks fading to an even whiter cast. “They…”

“Leave. Now,” Eren instructs, swinging Armin around and shoving him towards the door. “She needs to rest.”

“She needs to answer for her crimes,” says Armin, his voice dripping with vitriol.

“She hasn’t committed any,” Eren hisses, giving Armin one final shove and shutting the door in his face. He turns the key in the lock and turns to Mikasa. “Don’t listen to him,” he says, but she has already turned back to the window, her body curling in on itself. He comes up behind her, resting his hand on her shoulder.

“The houses look so small without the walls,” she says. Eren considers this, looking out at the scene before them. The cottages and inns and shops of Shiganshina huddle together like frightened mice, surrounded by a mind numbing expanse of empty, trodden fields. In the distance, he can see the horizon. It feels like a dream to be able to watch the sun set instead of losing it to the walls long before darkness falls.

“I wasn’t thinking about diplomacy,” Mikasa whispers. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t.” She sits for a moment, the muscles in her throat shifting as she swallows again and again. “How many babies did I kill?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Eren soothes. “You didn’t mean to do it. It was her, and they’ll see that soon..”

She takes a deep, shaky breath, her gaze still glued to the scars she has left on the land. She hasn’t looked Eren in the face since she came out of her titan, wheezing and gasping for breath, her eyes wild and frenzied, their friends staring at her in simultaneous horror and relief.

No one can agree on whether she has saved them or damned them all.

But Eren knows where he stands, and it is here at her side. He combs his fingers through her tangled hair, an idle habit, and she wilts beneath his touch.

"How do I live with myself after this?" she says. "Why did your father put this burden on me?"

That's something Eren has often wondered himself, first with discontentment and jealousy and then with dawning sorrow as he realized the full scope of the unwilling sacrifice his father had exacted from her. She would not talk about it at length, besides when she had revealed all during her trial, but he believed he could pinpoint the night it had happened. He had risen, restless, from his sleeping pad on the floor of the makeshift refugee center- a colorless, hollow cavern echoing inside his chest as his every nerve screamed for his mother to return to him from across the gulf of mortality. How could he sleep when the memories of her disappearing into that titan's grinning craw played an endless, looping show in the theater of his mind? Surrounding him, curled on their own thin mats, Armin and Mikasa slept, their breath deep and even, sleep erasing the harrowed, wide-eyed panic that had painted their faces beneath smears of tears and dirt. Eren could not lose himself in sleep and so he walked, wandering the streets of this unfamiliar city, imagining he would find his mother waiting around just the next corner and reminding himself that wishful thinking was not enough to raise the dead. When he finally returned, not long before sunrise, Mikasa was lying awake, staring up at the ceiling, so still that he feared for a moment she was dead, too, but, as he lowered himself onto his mat and pulled the thin blanket to his shoulders, her head fell sideways and she looked at him. Her eyes were so wide and shiny that they seemed to glow like twin full moons, the reflected light silvery and sad. She looked even older than she had before she had fallen asleep. He had a moment of disorientation noticing that the scratches he remembered seeing on her cheeks and forehead were gone, but memory could be fickle and he brushed away his moment of unease.

"I couldn't sleep," Eren said, scooting to the edge of his mat, closer to her.

"Someone woke me up," she'd said, rolling to face him. "Now I'm thinking."

Their eyes met, and for a moment Eren could imagine that they were in the bedroom they had shared in his family home, back in Shiganshina, tucked into their twin beds and whispering their secrets to each other from across the expanse of floor that separated them. Now they were so close that Eren could reach out and take her hand when he confessed, "I miss my mom."

"I don't know who I am anymore," said Mikasa, repaying his revelation with one of her own. She was working her way up to telling him what was truly on her mind. She never disclosed her real secret in the first round

"I want to kill every last titan," said Eren, his hand tightening around hers, his voice quivering with irate passion. "I want to wipe them off this earth." Mikasa shrank in on herself, and Eren didn't know why there suddenly appeared to be a wall between them. He hated walls. "When they're all gone, we can have our home back," he said. "When all the titans are dead, we'll be free."

He waited for her to take her turn, but it was a long wait, agonizing as she turned her thoughts over in her head, always so much more careful than he. Finally, she met his eyes again and said, "I'm scared."

"Then you can sleep with me tonight," said Eren, just as his mother would have done, and lifted his blanket for her to crawl under. It barely covered them, but she added her blanket to the pile and they wrapped their skinny, ten-year-old arms around each other and laid like that until dawn, neither of them speaking but neither of them sleeping either.

Now he wonders if they're in for another sleepless night as he strokes her black hair, humming under his breath. She rouses a little, turns to him. "Don't do that," she says. "I don't deserve it."

“Of course you do,” he murmurs, his fingers smoothing down the black, silken strands, gentle but persistent.

“How do I live with myself?” she repeated, and even though it pains him to hear the anguish in her voice, it comforts him to see that she is no longer playing the statue.

“You lost control,” he reasons. “Ackermans aren’t supposed to transform. It’s the one thing you’re not good at.”

Her lips twist and she touches her fingers to the back of her neck, her eyes dulling like stones. He knows what she is thinking, knows better than he knows his own mind. “And yet…” she murmurs.

And yet she can transform.

She wonders, as she often does, how many people ignored her screams on the night that Grisha Jaeger cursed her, when he lured her from her mat at the refugee shelter, murmuring, “Come with me, Mikasa. Let’s find Eren,” and spirited her away to the small wood outside of town. She had trusted Eren’s father, had thought nothing of following him in among the trees, had still believed he would never do her any harm when he withdrew the syringe from his coat and held it up, gleaming in the moonlight. “This has to work,” he had rasped, grabbing her arm with a hand like a vise. “I can’t give this to my son. I can’t give this to Eren.”

“Uncle?” she had whimpered as he twisted her into a headlock and forced her chin forward, exposing the nape of his neck. She was polite in her terror, respectful of her elders as her Hizuran mother had taught her to be.

“If I do it here, maybe… Maybe…” Grisha muttered, running a finger along the ridges of her vertebrae and settling on one bony peak.

“Uncle?” she whimpered again. Then, pain. It stabbed into her and shot down her back and clawed at the base of her skull, howling through her throat in an agonized wail that shifted into a roar of hunger.

It wasn’t until she had devoured the old man that she came to and realized what he had done to her and what she had done to him. His memories bled into hers, giving her a panoramic view of his violent demise, crushed between her gnashing teeth and down into her gullet, and the understanding that she was one of the fabled Ackermans, and she could not be turned into a titan except by this one trick, Grisha’s final gambit – an injection directly into her spine.

She was delirious as she stumbled back to the shelter, battered by tidal waves of past lives that would have been locked to her if it weren’t for her exceptional inheritance – her Ackerman immunity. She lost her way several times, dogged by the paranoid sensation of being watched from inside her head, her every confused thought observed by a pair of shadowed eyes. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she searched for her sleeping mat and Armin, hoping that Eren would come back and that he would not hate her for what she had become. The memory unleashes her tears in the present. They lacquer her cheeks and she tastes their saltiness when the beads break open on her lips. The back of her neck prickles. She resumes her vigil at the window, her teeth making tatters of her lips as she frets, wisps of steam shrouding her face as her skin stitches itself back together with Sisyphean diligence beneath her unrelenting ravages. Her hand hovers at her bare throat, her fingers reaching for nothing. Eren stands and goes to her bedside, retrieving a neatly folded bundle and letting it unfurl.

He loops the scarf around her neck and her grasping fingers find purchase in the knit fabric, tugging it up over her nose. She sighs, the tension in her back easing just a little. Eren brushes the hair away from her forehead.

Mikasa lets out a long, painful breath. “I don’t know why I thought I could control it this time. I thought… Historia…” she trails off, nestling deeper into her scarf. “Do you know where she is?”

“I can find her for you,” Eren offers, wondering if he should leave her alone. “We can go look for her together.”

Mikasa looks towards the locked door. On the other side are the friends who had become her foes. She almost wishes they had succeeded in killing her.

No.

Not almost.

She should be in the ether along with everyone who had died today. And yet, she is not and she is not sure whether she even deserves that peace. Because of her, twenty percent of humanity has been trampled and a new wall has formed, advancing Paradisian territory far beyond the island, bisecting continents and cupping the sea. Years of diplomatic efforts had been negated in a matter of hours. Would Hizuru at least still stand with her, or was this too much for even them who had declared themselves allies to the devil island that had sheltered and raised their lost Azumabito princess?

“Mikasa?” Eren asks. “Do you want to go look for the Queen?”

Mikasa does not. She is afraid to see Historia. She is worried they will come too close and that skin will touch skin and the horror will begin anew. And yet, Mikasa needs to see her with an intensity that threatens to turn her inside out.

She falters. “No,” she says, running her hands up and down the gooseflesh that has risen on her arms. “I can’t face- When they see me again… I want- I want to at least look strong.” She takes a deep breath. “I want to take a bath and put on my uniform. I think… I think I should at least do that… I should be at my best when I go to face my crimes.”

With that declaration, the meager ration of resilience bestowed upon her by her scarf’s gentle embrace is depleted and she is nearly crushed by the weight of what she’s become.

Eren surges towards her as her eyes cloud over and she wilts like a moisture-starved campanula. She has withdrawn once more. He cradles her face in his hands, trying to catch her gaze but she is limp and listless and all he can think to do, when all his other efforts have been exhausted, is to pull her to her feet and help her to the bathroom. She stands against the wall, staring at nothing as he fills the claw-footed bathtub.

"Come here, Mikasa," he says in a melodious, inviting baritone. "Your bath is ready."

She wanders over and looks down at the clear, steaming water. She wants to be immersed in it, but the small feats she must complete before she can are insurmountable. Her fingers falter at her neckline. The small white button on her shirt is the heaviest thing she has ever had to move.

Eren does it for her, brushing her hand away with gentle fingers. His capacity for softness becomes infinite when they are alone. He looks everywhere but down as he slips each button through its buttonhole, remembering another time when he undressed her. His breath catches and he fumbles on the last button, then steadies his hands and slides her shirt from her shoulders. She doesn't blush or smile at him like she did in Marley. Her eyes now are like tarnished silver coins when back then they had gleamed like polished hematite, holding his as he settled on top of her with gleeful uncertainty. He helps her remove her pants, sliding them down her legs and tapping each shin in turn, prompting her to step out of them.

"Sorry," she mutters, placing a light hand on his shoulder to steady herself.

He keeps his eyes on her feet as he removes her underpants, then stands, averting his gaze, and turns her around so only her bare back is visible to him when he pulls her athletic brassiere over her head.

He helps her into the tub and she sinks down to her chin, resting her head back against the porcelain. The tips of her short hair fan out across the surface of the water and she closes her eyes.

Eren retrieves a chair and sets it with its back against the tub before he sits in it, wiggling the toes he's still getting used to having again while he listens to the faint lapping of the bathwater behind him and Mikasa's measured breaths.

He extends his leg, moving his foot back and forth. It still didn't feel like his after so many years without it. He had been eaten in Trost when he was fifteen, swallowed by a bearded titan after throwing Armin from its maw. His leg had fallen victim to the monster's teeth, and his eye had been damaged after, possibly when Mikasa, in her titan form for the first time ever, had torn open the bearded brute and excavated his gullet, searching for Eren. He had lost a lot of blood and his consciousness, remembering nothing past pitch blackness, suffocating heat, and his futile attempts to haul himself back up the monster’s esophagus with his blades, plunging them into titan’s slimy gastric wall, his head swimming from the temperature and the sanguineous gush from his severed knee. He thinks he remembers ripping his sleeve and tying a clumsy tourniquet around his stump, but the only thing he can be sure of is that he has been ingested, and then he woke up in a bed with a bandage over half of his face and phantom pains in his missing foot and calf. Armin was sitting with him, staring out the window, unaware that Eren had returned to the waking world.

“Did Mikasa save me again?” he’d croaked. He was parched. His tongue was rough and tacky against the roof of his mouth and he wanted nothing more than he wanted a sip of water.

Armin jolted, looking down at Eren with wide eyes. “Good morning!” he said. “I mean, good afternoon!”

Eren cast a feeble glance side to side, expecting to see Mikasa, but she was nowhere to be found. The betrayal irked him but he was too proud to ask why she wasn’t at his bedside with Armin. “How- how long-?” he asked, struggling to form the words in a mouth like the deserts in Armin’s book. How long had he been asleep for?

Armin stood. “I’ll get you some water,” he said, catching Eren’s predicament. “And then… I have to tell you about Mikasa.”

Armin said it in such a grave way that Eren was sure that she was dead. He would have gulped if he’d had enough moisture in his mouth to do so, but he could hardly swallow. Instead, he lay there with his hands clasped on his chest, waiting for the water and waiting to find out his dearest and most confusing friend was gone. It didn’t make sense. She was strong, and talented, and she was supposed to survive longer than the rest of them. She was supposed to die as an old woman.

Armin helped Eren sit, propping him up with more pillows and holding the glass of water to his lips. Eren drank as much as he could stomach, then lifted his chin, indicating he was done. Armin sat back down in his chair, holding the half-empty glass in his lap with both hands.

“What happened to Mikasa?” Eren rasped.

Armin didn’t answer for a long time.

“Armin? What-?”

“She’s a titan.”

Now it was Eren’s turn to fall silent as he tried to work out what Armin could possibly mean. “You mean…” This time he can swallow. “Are you saying a titan ate her?”

“...No,” said Armin. “I mean…” He sighed. “It sounds… It sounds insane, doesn’t it? But… in Trost… after you saved me from that bearded titan and he swallowed you instead, the supply depot was abandoned and overrun by titans. We couldn’t retreat without more gas and we couldn’t get to the gas. It was just us cadets, and… well. Mikasa… she screamed something about being strong and if we don’t fight we can’t win and she went tearing away across the rooftops and went after the titan who had eaten you. She used up way too much gas and we were too far behind her to help. One of the titans noticed her and headed her way, and…” Armin stopped, staring sightlessly in front of him, reliving the moment with lingering disbelief. “She cut her palm with her blade, and… she just… burst, somehow. Like… she burst and the titan inside of her shot out and wrapped around her, and… Uh.” Armin shook his head. “The first thing she did was rip apart the bearded titan and take you out. Once she'd put you out of reach, she took care of the titans outside the supply depot and we took care of the titans inside, and… Well. I had this idea, too. That we could do before we went back to rejoin the troops. There was this big boulder near the gate and Mikasa was still a titan and…” He trailed off.

“And what?” said Eren.

Armin was clearly proud of his ingenuity but doing his best not to brag. “I suggested that she could seal the gate with the rock. I think it saved her life.”

“Eh?” said Eren. He was tiring out fast but he was still trying to make sense of how Mikasa, their Mikasa, could be one of the same enemies who had killed his mother.

Armin gripped the water glass tighter. “They wanted to kill her,” he said.

Eren tensed.

“Most of the cadets retreated before we tried for the gate and reported what had happened to Command. And then it took her a while to come out of the titan. She kept pacing around until eventually she collapsed and… well. People were scared and the wait gave them plenty of time to panic. She could barely move when I got her back over the wall, but everyone was circled around us, flinching and jumpy like they thought she was going to attack them. There was this one guy who kept screaming to ready the cannons. But, you know. The gate was sealed because of her, and Pixis had just arrived and he's… If you meet him, you'll get it. He's… interesting." Armin stopped talking for a moment, lost in thought. "If Pixis hadn't been there, I don't think Mikasa would have made it out alive."

"Of course she would have," said Eren, resting heavily on his pile of pillows. "She's the most talented cadet in our year. Maybe ever."

Armin was doubtful. "You didn't see her," he said. "Trost took a lot out of her."

"Where is she now?" Eren asked. He was too weary to restrain the plaintive note in his voice, or to decrypt what it meant for him if the girl he'd always wanted to save had become one of the monsters he needed to destroy.

"She's locked up while they decide what to do with her," Armin said.

Eren had gone back to sleep not long after that, and in his dreams Mikasa loomed over him, smiling like the titan who had orphaned him, blank-eyed and clumsy. He spent the next couple of weeks stewing over it whenever he was alone, trying to make sense of it. He wanted to see her but the thought repulsed him at the same time. Mikasa was a titan. Armin had seen it happen, and the people attending to Eren's care whispered about it with each other, sharing the rumors that were floating around on the streets.

When they helped him into a wheelchair and rolled him to the courthouse for his first outing since his injury, he was sullen. The conflict still raged inside him. How could he kill all of the titans when she was one of them? Without her he had no more home, but creatures like her were the ones who had taken it from him in the first place.

#mikasa week #mikasa ackerman #mikasaweek2023 #role reversal au #Attack Titan Mikasa #Founder Mikasa #She does the Rumbling but it's not the same #You'll have to wait and see

26 notes · View notes