Work Text:
the weather has been colder lately.
her bare feet touch the cold ceramic of the floor with every painful step, headed towards the counter, the white fabric of her nightgown too thin for the gusts of wind that maliciously blow at her sides.
a lonely candle flickers in the chill of the night, projecting grotesque shadows on every corner. mikasa turns around in alarm, always hyper alert, muscles tense and ready to jump. there’s nobody there. she shivers from the cold. there are shadows of bones, teeth, skeletal horrors bigger than her and the world.
she woke up because she’d been dreaming of titans.
her teeth over her hand. she curses Eren’s name. some drops of blood reach the floor. another tiny drop falls on her white gown, staining the point over her left hip with a red that she has seen too many times before.
strands of dark hair fall over her face, because she hasn’t been bothered to cut them. long and straight over her back, it makes her look younger, it gives her the looks of a happier woman.
someone else lives here. she knows it like she knows the land below her feet is tainted with corpses new and old, feeding itself with bones and flesh and the bitter rain.
another woman lives in the empty house. she’s alive and happy as one can be happy when in love. she does not live on an island.
a could-have-been version of a woman with long black hair. she dances, spins like fire with her dress, with the bracelets circling her wrists, thin and frail and having never held a blade.
she marries her lover in secret before they run away from town with their best friend. she laughs and he cries with the vows and they run away forever. the three laugh and crash at an older, more wild town. she loses herself in the woods outside town and goes home every night to the tiny house she and her lover and her friend built. they live together and share the food and at night, she dances around a fire, laughing with her bracelets glistening, and her lover dances with her.
she smiles, she frowns, she sings and laughs loudly in the market. she walks the streets with her friends, borrows books, bargains with the shopkeepers.
her hair is kept long and a mess because it doesn’t get in the way with any equipment, her dress is pink and beautiful and it has never been stained with blood. her nails have never been dirtied with skin and dirt, her eyes have never been blinded by hot, steaming blood. she does not wear a scarf.
but Mikasa is not that woman. she’s all but a husk of a weapon when she sits in the freezing floor of her kitchen, alone, alone, alone. she was a girl before she was a murderer. she was a sharp blade before she was a woman, and she’s a widow before she’s a lover. her white, thin dress can be her clothes for the wedding and her rusty kettle can be the wedding gift.
it’s so cold outside it should be snowing. she shivers. she has never seen snow. the sea should freeze over one day. the only kettle in her kitchen is rusty enough to make the water taste like blood. she knows the taste well.
everybody knows weapons rust faster in times of peace. while Paradis tries to bloom like flowers, watered by massacre, the people forget and remember and agree with what happened.
mikasa tries to remember how things were before and the only thing she feels is the horrible weight of a head of a lover on her trembling hands. she moves her hands to her sides again so she will at least stop feeling that endless weight when they're on her lap. the other woman could be named Sorrow.
and Sorrow takes pity on Mikasa’s trembling form when she sees her trembling on the cold floor, hands around her knees, covered in the thin fabric of her nightgown. in the spectral white of the gown, with the night dark of her long, unkempt hair, with her pale and unresponsive face, Mikasa resembles a ghost more than Sorrow does herself. Sorrow takes pity on her and helps her up, takes her back to bed, helps her under the unmade covers.
Sorrow gives her a goodnight kiss, on the lips, and sends sweet dreams her way. but it would be more merciful to send her nothing at all, just a pitch-black darkness of peace, because Mikasa already spends the day dreaming, feeling the pain of a million different herselfs. Eren dies in all of them and with him, Mikasa dies too. there was nothing awaiting beyond the sea.
the next day, Mikasa opens the windows of her room. the tree next to it has small, white flowers growing all over. they remind her of bones.
it’s the middle of summer.