Chapter Text
Paris Wasn’t
in the Plans
Some departures are only love
taking the longest road home.
by JulietDavis8
───── ⟢⟣ ─────
Part I: Rue du Temple, 7:46 PM.
──────────
It had been raining, though not with the violence of a storm nor even with the steady insistence of a true downpour, but with that finer, more treacherous sort of rain that seemed less to fall than to linger, suspending itself in the air before settling into wool, into hair, into the seams of a coat like a memory one never invited and could not quite shake free. It was the kind of rain Paris wore better than any other city, especially in the quiet cold of late January, when the wind slipped through the weave of a scarf with thin, patient fingers and the whole of the city, dim beneath a sky of pewter, seemed to breathe in greys and silvers.
Le Marais gleamed beneath the first deepening lights of evening, its cobblestones lacquered with rain and crowded with reflections from yellow brasserie windows and passing red taillights, while puddles caught and distorted the shapes of wrought-iron balconies, crooked shutters, and old facades softened by the damp. A faint fog had begun to curl at the corners of shuttered bookshops and narrow hidden passages, and the mingled scent of wet pavement, exhaust, and fresh bread drifting from a nearby boulangerie created a strange and aching sort of poetry in the air, the kind she would once have known how to decipher and no longer had the strength to interpret.
People moved quickly through it all, heads lowered, umbrellas opening above them like cautious flowers.
Mikasa had none. Whether she had forgotten to bring one or had brought it only to leave it behind without noticing, she could not have said. She only tightened her hold on the Chanel press tote tucked beneath her arm, careful not to let the rain blur the pristine white lettering, while her heels struck the wet stones with a soft, measured rhythm that sounded fragile and deliberate at once.
Her press badge from the morning remained in the pocket of her coat, VOGUE GERMANY - MIKASA ACKERMAN - CHANEL PRIVATE PRESENTATION, GRAND PALAIS ÉPHÉMÈRE, and the plastic sleeve, now slightly damp, knocked coldly against her hip with every step she took.
It had not been Fashion Week, not officially, not yet. The Haute Couture shows were still days away, and what she had attended that morning had been something quieter, rarer, more intimate: a pre-season unveiling of Chanel’s upcoming Autumn/Winter 2026 collection, held beneath the pale glass roof of the Grand Palais Éphémère in the early hours of a grey January morning and reserved for a very narrow circle of invited eyes, editors and critics and clients, the sort of people who had learned long ago how to watch in silence and judge without spectacle.
She had been one of them.
She had taken notes with mechanical precision, her gaze shifting between line and texture and silhouette while the backlight of her phone cast a muted glow against her thigh, and the collection itself had been a study in restraint, in sharp shoulders and muted silks, in charcoal lace that whispered rather than demanded to be seen, in the sort of elegance meant not merely to impress for a season but to outlast fashion’s usual appetite for ruin. None of it had stayed with her, not truly, not in the way such things once would have, back when she had still believed beauty, on its own, might be enough to save anything.
Now, as she moved through the rain-dark maze of Le Marais, she felt less like a fashion journalist than like some blurred and bodiless thing drifting through the dream of another life, her heels clicking over the stone like punctuation severed from the sentence that should have held it all together, while the rain gathered in the shoulders of her coat, in the wool at her throat, in the roots of her dark hair, and she neither minded nor really noticed.
She had not meant to walk this far, though in truth she had not planned much of anything at all. Her hotel was scarcely five minutes away by car, yet the thought of sitting inside that polished, immaculate silence had become unbearable almost as soon as the door had opened for her, and so she had chosen the street instead, passing shuttered boutiques and darkened florists, passing couples pressed together beneath awnings and friends sharing cigarettes beneath the dim spill of doorway lights, while Paris, which always seemed to know precisely how to wound with elegance, played a little crueler than usual in the rain.
Then, through all of it, a voice reached her, breathless and disbelieving.
“Mikasa?”
She stopped so completely that it felt less like a choice than a bodily failure. The surprise of hearing him was real, certainly, though what seized her was deeper than surprise, because for one suspended moment her lungs forgot how to draw breath, her heart stumbled against her ribs, and the present itself seemed to collapse inward like something too bright and too dense to remain standing.
She lifted her eyes slowly, with the instinctive caution of someone afraid not of emptiness but of recognition, and there he was.
Eren.
He was older now, broader through the shoulders than memory had preserved him, and whatever hard brilliance youth had once sharpened in his face had settled into something quieter and heavier, a gravity born not from time alone but from what time had carried away. His hair was longer than she remembered, curling slightly at the nape of his neck where the rain had darkened it, and there was stubble along his jaw, tiredness in his eyes, and the faint parting of his mouth of a man caught halfway through a thought that had never made it safely into speech.
Under his coat, he wore a perfectly fitted charcoal suit and a navy cashmere scarf looped around his neck with that same careless precision he had always possessed, as though he had dressed without thinking and somehow still looked as if he belonged inside a photograph rather than on a street.
He looked like Berlin.
He looked like cold mornings and the smell of coffee, like the bookshelves they had built together with uneven hands and too many instructions scattered across the floor, like laughter in a kitchen at one in the morning when sleep had seemed less necessary than being near one another. He looked like the boy she had loved and the man she had left, like home and like everything she had spent three years teaching herself not to remember.
“Hi,” she murmured.
It was the only word she could seem to reach, and even that emerged smaller than she intended, as though it had been shut away inside her for too long and diminished there in the dark.
Eren blinked at her as though he still did not fully trust the evidence of his own eyes.
“I... didn’t know you were in Paris,” he said at last, and his voice came rough at the edges, like something too long unused for this kind of truth.
“I didn’t know you were,” she answered, though the words felt strange as soon as she spoke them, unreal in her own mouth, as though she had stepped into a life that belonged to someone else and was merely repeating the lines expected of her.
A heartbeat passed, then another, then a third that seemed to stretch well beyond its natural measure, and in that narrow, unbearable silence the air between them altered, thickening until the city itself, the hiss of rain, the rush of tyres over wet streets, the murmur of pedestrians moving past, all seemed to recede, leaving only the two of them standing inside that peculiar stillness reserved for people bound by too much history and too little closure.
She looked at him then with a steadier gaze, and the changes in him came forward all at once: the faint creases at the corners of his eyes, the tension he held in his jaw, the way his hands remained clenched inside his pockets and his shoulders too square, too controlled, as though he were standing by force alone and keeping something vast from breaking loose. He looked older, yes, though what struck her more than age was that he looked like someone who had stopped pretending to be all right.
Her gaze drifted downward before she meant for it to, catching on the rain clinging to the line of his collar, on the uneven rise of his chest, on his lips, parted and pink from the cold, and she saw his green eyes flick once to her mouth before returning immediately to hers.
“You’re soaked,” he said quietly, and for all the restraint in him there was a crease between his brows that gave him away, concern slipping through before he could call it back.
“It’s just rain,” she replied, though her voice trembled on the words, because it was not just rain at all. It was him. It was everything.
His lips parted again, as if speech had risen to meet the moment and then failed at the last threshold.
There were too many things he could have said, too many things he had no doubt shaped and reshaped in his mind over the years into apologies and explanations, into angry rebuttals, unfinished confessions, pleas he would never voice, promises too late to offer. In dreams he had shouted after her. In nightmares he had chased her through corridors and stations and streets and never reached her. In waking life he had done nothing at all. He had not followed when she packed her bags, had not called her back when the door closed, had not gone after her when she changed cities, changed numbers, and taught herself not to look behind. He had let her go, and no matter what else he had lost since then, that had remained the great and unforgivable mistake of his life.
Yet here she was, standing in the middle of Rue du Temple as though some unfinished part of his life had suddenly stepped back into view.
“Do you... want to get a coffee?” He asked finally.
The question came softer than she expected, almost hesitant, and there was something in that hesitation that unsettled her more than certainty would have, because it sounded like a man no longer convinced he had the right to ask her for anything at all.
Mikasa did not answer immediately. She felt the catch of her breath, small but undeniable, and knew at once that she could have refused, that she likely should have refused, because the sensible part of her, the hard-won self she had rebuilt from the ground up in Munich, the woman who wrote clean, sharp columns and no longer opened old photographs, was already telling her to leave before the past could take shape around her again. She saw the way he was looking at her and knew with a painful clarity that he did not look like a man expecting forgiveness. He looked instead like someone who had spent years learning how to survive without it.
Still she hesitated.
The rain had begun to lighten, softening to a hush over the stones, though nothing about the space between them had become easier to bear. Her eyes wandered for a moment, down to a crack in the pavement, then past him to the wavering glow of a streetlamp behind his shoulder, and she wet her lips and drew in a breath as though yes might be on its way, though when she finally moved it was only to shake her head.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she whispered, so softly that the words nearly disappeared into the rain. “It’s late.”
Her tone was not cold. Caution held it instead, the caution of someone who knows from experience how little it takes for an old wound to open cleanly again.
Eren did not visibly flinch, though she saw the tightening in his jaw all the same.
“I understand,” he said, too quickly, with a steadiness so deliberate it gave itself away at once, sounding like the voice of someone who had been bracing for refusal from the moment he first saw her face. Then, after the briefest pause, he added, “Just coffee. Nothing more.”
Mikasa remained where she was.
He watched her in silence, the movement of his chest a little faster now, his hands still hidden in his pockets while tension gathered unmistakably across his shoulders.
“I just...” He tried again, then stopped, swallowed, and began once more. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. I just didn’t expect to see you. Not like this… not tonight.”
She lifted her silver eyes fully to him then and looked without evasion at the faint brightness in them, at the shift in his throat when he swallowed, at the effort it was costing him to remain composed.
“Eren,” she said, “I think it’s better if we don’t.”
This time there was more firmness in her voice, though something inside her still closed painfully around the words as she let them go. A flicker crossed his face then, brief but unguarded, and it was neither anger nor simple disappointment. It was something heavier than either, the ache of things left unsaid and years that had never stopped existing simply because they had passed.
“Do you have somewhere to be?” He asked suddenly.
The question came too quickly, too sharply, and she heard at once the hidden edge inside it, the way somewhere was only the weaker substitute for someone.
She blinked and frowned.
“No,” she replied, and the look she gave him carried a quiet incredulity that did not need to harden into anger to wound. Why does it matter? Why ask me that now, after all this?
He did not look away; he only stood there beneath the rain, letting it dampen his hair and darken the line of his suit, searching her face as though the truth might still be waiting there if only she let him come close enough to see it.
“I just...” He murmured, softer now. “I didn’t want to intrude.”
A laugh nearly escaped her then, not because anything in the moment was funny, but because there was something painfully familiar in the contradiction of him, in the way he could be bold enough to stop her in the street one second and so full of guilt the next that the words themselves seemed to wound him on the way out.
There followed one of those impossible silences that seem to last far longer than time allows, a silence in which her heart pulled in opposite directions so sharply that for a moment it seemed it might tear itself apart trying to obey both.
At last she exhaled.
“Fine,” she agreed, the word reluctant enough to preserve something of her resistance. “Just for a bit.”
His breath caught audibly. He blinked once, then again, as though he had not truly believed she would say yes, and when he nodded the movement came too quickly, too visibly shaken by the force of what it meant to him.
“Thank you,” he rasped, and his voice broke just slightly on the second syllable, not enough to humiliate him, only enough to reveal that thank you was not remotely equal to what he was actually trying not to say. It might have been I missed you. It might have been I never stopped thinking about you. It might have been this means more than you know. Whatever it was, he did not let it rise.
He only lifted one hand at last and gestured toward the corner.
“There’s a place just down the street,” he said. “It’s quiet.”
This time, when they moved, they did so side by side, neither lovers nor strangers, but something far more uncertain and therefore far more dangerous than either, two people walking together through the wreckage of what they had once been without yet knowing whether there was still anything left beneath it that could survive being found again.
⟢⟣
They walked in silence, side by side, while the rain softened into a fine mist by the time they reached the entrance of Carette, tucked beneath the elegant arcades of Place des Vosges, where the glow spilling from the windows spread across the cobblestones in a wash of muted gold and seemed to promise warmth, quiet, and perhaps something gentler than the night they had just stepped out of.
Inside, the café breathed with low conversation and the delicate clink of china, its brass fixtures gleaming beneath crystal lights while glass displays shimmered with rows of pastel-colored macarons and intricate pâtisseries arranged with almost theatrical precision. A waiter approached them at once, impeccably dressed in black and white, with a linen napkin draped over one arm, and asked, “Bonsoir, vous avez une réservation, monsieur, madame?”
Eren blinked, then offered the faintest smile.
“No reservation,” he said gently, switching to English, “but we were hoping you might have a table for two.”
The waiter inclined his head with gracious ease, having clearly followed the shift in language without effort. “Of course, sir. Please follow me.”
He led them through the softly lit interior to a small table near the window, round and white with its marble surface catching the dim reflections of the room, two velvet-cushioned chairs waiting on either side, while outside the rain drummed softly against the glass and the blurred city lights cast wavering shadows across the tabletop.
Mikasa slipped off her coat without a word and draped it over the back of her chair. Eren did the same before settling across from her, and for a moment neither of them spoke, because the tension had not dissolved at all. It had simply followed them in and taken its seat with them.
The waiter returned a moment later and set down two embossed menus with polished efficiency.
“I’ll give you a few moments,” he said, in fluent and polite English, before stepping away again.
Mikasa glanced around the café, her fingers brushing the edge of the menu without opening it. The scent of roasted espresso beans and warm butter hung in the air, rich and familiar, and she remembered with sudden clarity that she had been there once before, last year, after an interview near Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, when the place had felt indulgent in that easy, fleeting Parisian way. Now it felt surreal.
Everything about the moment was somehow too much and not enough at once.
Across from her, Eren sat with his elbows resting lightly on the table, his attention nowhere near the menu, his eyes on her instead, quiet and searching, and though he did not say a word, Mikasa could feel the weight of what he was thinking pressing between them like a second silence.
⟢⟣
They remained silent.
It was not the silence that belongs to people who know each other so well that words become unnecessary, nor the softer kind shaped by ease and long familiarity. This was something harsher, edged and airless, the sort of silence that seemed to buzz in the ears and stretch a handful of seconds into something much longer and far less bearable.
Their menus lay open before them like shields. Mikasa kept her eyes fixed on the page, her fingers tightening around the edge as though the printed words might anchor her if she held onto them hard enough. Café crème, éclair au chocolat, tarte fine aux pommes, soupe à l’oignon gratinée... the letters might as well have belonged to another language entirely, because none of it registered. She could feel the air tightening around her, could feel the warmth rising into her neck and the pressure settling in her chest, while the softly lit café, with its mirrored walls and Art Deco chandeliers, suddenly seemed far too small, as though the room itself were beginning to fold inward.
Her heart was pounding.
She should not have been there. She had known it the moment she said yes, and now, sitting across from him with the rain tracing slow patterns over the window beside them, she could feel the panic rising in her throat like water in a locked room.
Three years.
Three years of silence, and now this.
Across from her, Eren had not spoken. He sat very still, too still, the menu in his hands more prop than object, because he had not turned a page or looked down at it even once. He was watching her, not openly, not rudely, yet with that same attentive precision that had always belonged to him, noticing the bounce of her foot beneath the table, the way she pressed her lips together too tightly, the tension gathering in the smallest movements of her body.
He always had noticed.
She could feel his gaze, and it made her stomach twist.
She did not want this. She did not want the awkward silence, or the unbearable weight of everything unsaid, or the chance to see with such painful clarity how much it all still hurt.
Her fingers twitched. The instinct to flee rose so suddenly and so violently that she could almost feel it in her muscles, the need to close the menu, say something polite, and leave with whatever pride she still had intact, and she was just about to speak when a voice entered the space between them.
“Have you made your choices, monsieur, mademoiselle?”
The waiter had returned. He looked to be in his early forties, carried himself with impeccable posture, and spoke fluent English with the polished tone of someone trained in the dining rooms of five-star hotels. His smile was warm, practiced, gentle, and in that moment he felt almost like a lifeline.
Mikasa startled slightly, the question pulling her cleanly out of her spiral.
“Um...” She glanced quickly back down at the menu, though she still had not properly read a single line. “Yes. I’ll have a café crème, please.”
“Very good,” the waiter said with a kind smile, then turned toward Eren. “And for you, sir?”
“An espresso. No sugar.”
“Of course,” the waiter replied, smoothly noting it down in a small leather-bound notepad. “Would you like anything to eat with your coffee? We have fresh pastries from this morning’s delivery, pain aux raisins, madeleines, and the lemon tartelette is especially nice today.”
Mikasa shook her head almost imperceptibly, and Eren added quietly, “Just the drinks, thank you.”
“Very well. I’ll return in just a moment,” the waiter replied with a slight bow. “Please take your time.”
When he left them alone again, the silence that settled back over the table did not return with quite the same cruelty. Something about the interruption, however brief, had punctured the tension enough to make it breathable.
Mikasa inhaled slowly through her nose and let the breath out with deliberate care, willing her heartbeat to slow, her fingers loosening at last from their near-desperate grip on the edge of the table. Her eyes dropped to the napkin folded in her lap. She still felt the urge to leave, though something in Eren’s face kept her where she was. It was not pity, and it was not apology either. It was only a quiet kind of ache, and a patience he had never once possessed when they were younger.
Across the table, he folded his hands and looked at her without pressing, without speaking, simply waiting.
That somehow made it worse.
The waiter returned moments later, silent and efficient, and set the drinks before them with graceful precision, the café crème in front of Mikasa with its thick crema swirling beneath a delicate layer of steamed milk, the espresso before Eren dark, still, and sharp.
“Enjoy,” he said with a gentle nod before disappearing once more into the low hum of the café.
Mikasa murmured a soft Thank you without lifting her gaze. She reached for the small silver spoon resting on the saucer and began to stir, slowly and absently, watching the pale spiral of cream dissolve into the amber surface of the coffee, while the soft sound of metal against porcelain became almost hypnotic, and with that sound alone the past opened beneath her feet.
⟢⟣
Berlin, five years earlier.
Late spring.
A Sunday morning, with the kitchen windows open and the air warm with the smell of coffee and cut fruit.
She was sitting on the counter in one of Eren’s shirts, the sleeves rolled up, her bare legs swinging gently while he stood barefoot by the moka pot, humming something under his breath.
“Stir it twelve times counterclockwise,” he said without turning. “Otherwise the flavor doesn’t open.”
She laughed at once. “That’s not science. That’s superstition.”
“It’s love,” he replied, glancing over his shoulder with that crooked grin of his. “Don’t question my methods.”
She had rolled her eyes, though she obeyed anyway, stirring her coffee with slow and deliberate movements.
Twelve times. Counterclockwise.
Then he had crossed the kitchen, leaned close, and kissed her temple while she counted aloud.
“Ten... eleven... twelve...”
His lips had lingered a little longer than necessary, and when she looked up at him, at that sleepy and radiant version of him with his hair a mess and sunlight caught across his skin, she had thought with the full certainty of someone too happy to fear the future: this. Forever. I could do this forever.
⟢⟣
Mikasa’s hand jerked suddenly, and the spoon struck the side of the cup with a sharp clink that snapped through the memory at once. Her breath caught in her throat as the image shattered and vanished like glass struck by stone, leaving behind not only the memory itself but the force of what it had carried, as though her body had remembered more than her mind had ever intended to touch again.
She set the spoon down carefully, though her fingers were trembling, and blinked once, then again.
Across the table, Eren was watching her.
There was no judgment in his gaze, nor even surprise. There was only quiet recognition, as if he knew exactly where she had gone.
“Was it the spoon?” He asked gently.
Mikasa looked up then, sharply this time, though the precision of the movement made it feel less abrupt than deliberate, like a blade unsheathed with care. Her eyes met his, and there was something darker in them now, something that was not rage and not quite disappointment either, but something older and more brittle than both.
It was not only what he had said. It was the way he had said it, as though he still possessed the right to ask, as though a single careful question could reach back through time and pretend he had not stood in silence while she walked away.
She held his gaze a moment too long before letting out one dry breath that nearly resembled a laugh.
“That’s a stupid question,” she said flatly.
She reached for her cup, though her hand betrayed her with the smallest flicker of a tremor.
Eren noticed, of course he did.
She took a sip too quickly, then lowered the cup back to its saucer with exaggerated care, almost ceremonially, her fingers releasing it as though she feared she might crush it otherwise.
Eren did not move.
“I was just making conversation,” he said eventually, his voice low and measured, gentle even.
Mikasa kept her gaze fixed on the table, her lashes lowered, her expression unreadable.
“Well,” she murmured, turning the cup slowly beneath her fingertips, “maybe we shouldn’t.”
The silence that followed arrived at once and settled deeply between them. It was not awkward, and it was not hesitant. It was surgical, as though she had reached across the table and cut something cleanly in two.
She did not look up. She did not need to. She could hear the subtle change in his breathing, could feel the almost imperceptible tension that moved through him, the slight curl of his hand beside the espresso, the way his body leaned back by the smallest fraction, as if bracing.
She was not trying to hurt him.
She was trying to survive.
The truth was unbearable, because the truth was that she had just remembered that morning in Berlin with such ruthless clarity that she could smell the roasted beans, feel the cotton of his shirt against her bare thighs, hear her own voice counting, ten, eleven, twelve, while he kissed her skin as though it meant something.
It had meant something. God, it had.
She hated him for that.
She hated him for existing inside a memory that still lived in her like a ghost she could not cast out, and she hated him for the way her heart still split open around the fact that he had not come after her, that he had let her go, that he had watched her walk away and never tried to stop her.
She sat a little straighter, her shoulders drawing taut as though armor were sliding back into place over old wounds, and turned her head slightly toward the window, not because there was anything specific she wished to see there, but because she needed distance from the table, from the pressure, from the trembling that had begun again in her hands beneath the napkin in her lap.
Outside, Paris glowed through the mist, streetlights diffused in rain, couples moving beneath umbrellas, the faint hum of life continuing without them.
It was beautiful, and it made her feel sick.
She focused on the window as if it might anchor her, as if the reflection of the café’s chandeliers in the glass might be enough to erase the reflection of the man seated across from her. She told herself to breathe, to count, to hold still, yet her fists remained clenched in her lap and her jaw stayed locked hard enough to ache.
Eren still said nothing.
He did not flinch, at least not outwardly, not in the way someone else might have with a sharp reply or a wounded breath or a bitter laugh. He simply sat there, very still, like a man who had learned to endure silence the way other people learned to breathe.
His fingers rested lightly near the handle of his espresso cup. He did not touch it. He did not even look at it. His eyes remained on her, not burning, not pleading, only heavy and steady and unbearably quiet.
It was the kind of look a person gives someone they have dreamed about for three years and never expected to see again, the kind that says I do not know whether I am allowed to want anything from you anymore, yet I cannot stop needing to know whether you are still real.
She did not meet his eyes. He knew she felt it anyway. She always had.
He blinked once, slowly and deliberately, and when he finally spoke his voice was nothing but breath and gravel.
“Okay.”
That was all, one small word, and it fell between them with the force of a brick through glass. There was no anger in it, no resignation either. There was only acceptance, and perhaps that hurt more.
He leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on the edge of the table, his whole body careful and contained, not demanding closeness, only revealing how deeply he wanted it.
“I deserve that,” he whispered. There was no crack in his voice, yet tension ran beneath every syllable like coiled wire. “Probably more than that.”
Still Mikasa said nothing. Her gaze remained fixed on the rain-blurred window, unfocused and distant, as though memorizing the way the streetlights dissolved in the wet glass required all the strength she had left. Her breath was shallow. Her jaw was so tight it looked as though it might splinter.
Eren did not press. He waited.
Then, softly, he said, “I didn’t come here to fight with you.”
Silence.
“I didn’t expect to see you at all. I’m glad I did.”
That made her blink, slowly. She did not turn toward him, though her voice came back low and thin and cold as the glass she was staring through.
“Why?” She asked. “So you can clear your conscience?”
The words cut cleanly, almost too cleanly.
Eren did not recoil. He seemed instead to breathe through the blow as though he had been expecting it since the moment he first saw her.
“No,” he answered, and the word landed with the force of truth, not defense, not excuse, only that kind of raw honesty that does not need volume to strike hard. “I don’t think that’s possible anymore.”
At last he reached for the espresso and lifted the tiny cup to his lips, though he did not drink. He held it there a second too long, as if the bitterness might choke him if he allowed it past his mouth, then set it back down, his fingers lingering against the porcelain.
“I think I just wanted to know if you were okay,” he said, and then, after a pause so quiet it nearly vanished, “if you... survived it.”
That was the sentence that broke something open.
Not outwardly. Not at first.
Still, something in her breathing changed, something folded inward inside her chest.
She did not flinch, at least not in the visible way he had not flinched, though her body betrayed her all the same. Her spine, which had remained rigid all evening, went still in a different and far more dangerous way. Her fingers tightened beneath the table, hidden in the folds of the napkin, and her throat moved with the effort of swallowing.
Then she turned toward him, slowly enough that time itself seemed reluctant to move with her, and when her eyes met his there was no fury in them now, no venom either.
There was only wreckage.
Wreckage shaped like a woman who had built walls out of the silence he left her in, who had learned to carry herself like glass that had never once been allowed to shatter.
“Did you?” She breathed.
Her voice barely lifted above the low hum of the café, though it did not need to. He heard everything packed inside those two words, everything she did not ask aloud. Did you sleep at night? Did you think of me? Did you regret it? Did it devour you the way it devoured me?
Eren did not look away, did not even blink, and for one suspended second he seemed not to breathe at all. Then he said, “No.”
It was more than an answer. It was an admission, a confession offered too late and with empty hands, the kind that comes only after what should have been protected has already slipped beyond recall. There were no justifications, no effort to soften the wound, only truth, raw and stripped bare, left bleeding openly between them on the table.
This time she was the one who looked away.
Hearing it did not bring peace. It only brought her back to the night she left, to the silence after the door closed, to the phone that never rang, to the certainty that he had let her go, and to the cruelty of learning now, only now, that he had broken too.
⟢⟣
Mikasa let the silence gather again, though this time it did nothing to soothe her.
It crawled beneath her skin like static, buzzed in her ears, scratched at the inside of her chest until she could scarcely bear to remain still. She stared down at her cup as if it might anchor her, though her fingers had gone white around the napkin twisted in her lap, her nails pressing into the fabric as if she needed something, anything, to keep herself tethered to the ground.
When she finally spoke, her voice came low and uneven, like steel carrying a wound through it.
“Do you want a medal for that?” She muttered. “For not surviving?”
Her silver eyes flicked up fast, like a blade, and met his.
The look she gave him was neither brutal nor bitter, which made it far worse, because it was honest.
There was venom there, though not the sort meant to kill. It was the kind meant to defend, the kind that said You do not get to be the broken one. Not alone. Not after what you did to me.
Her voice cracked then, not in sound, but in weight.
“Because I didn’t either, Eren. In case you were wondering.”
A laugh escaped her then, dry and utterly humorless, dying almost as soon as it left her mouth. Her shoulders tightened, her breath hitched and her heart beat so hard it seemed to shake the rest of her with it.
“You think you were the only one who lost something?” she said, her voice climbing by a thread. “You think that just because you hated yourself for what you didn’t do, I didn’t have to live with the fallout?”
He neither spoke nor moved, and she went on.
“You know what the difference is?”
She did not wait for him to answer. She did not want one.
“You had your fucking job. Your brilliant career path. Your executive-track life. You had flights to catch and meetings to run and all those goddamn structures to keep you upright. You had a thousand things to distract you from me.”
Her breath trembled, her voice thinning as it rose. “I had to crawl out of that apartment with my dignity in a trash bag. I had to sit through meetings with mascara smeared into my sleeve because I couldn’t stop crying in the bathroom. I had to fake smiles in glass offices while people told me I was glowing, that I’d blossomed, that I’d finally come into my own.”
She laughed again, bitter and sharp as glass.
“I couldn’t even remember how to fucking eat at first. I’d sit at my desk and forget food existed. I lost seven kilos in two months, and the editor-in-chief said I looked amazing.”
Her mouth twisted, and when she spoke again her voice dropped lower.
“I didn’t look amazing. I looked empty.”
She paused then, breathing hard, her grip loosening only slightly on the napkin before she swallowed and forced herself to meet his eyes again.
“You disappeared, Eren.”
This time she said it softly, and the softness in it made it sound almost like a bell tolling at a funeral.
“You let me go. You didn’t fight. You didn’t try.”
Her voice broke then for real, a small rupture at the back of her throat that sounded too much like heartbreak.
“You made it so damn easy to believe I didn’t matter.”
The moment the words left her, she felt it all over again, the cold finality of that night, the hollow shape of the doorway, the silence that followed her for months, the absence of him in every place she had once gone without thinking.
The worst part had not been that he broke her.
It was that he never tried to repair any of it.
Across from her, Eren finally moved, if only barely. His shoulders shifted with such subtlety that it seemed as though the words she had thrown at him had only just now reached the center of his chest and were settling there as fracture.
His hands twitched once, then again, as though he no longer knew what to do with them, as though they wanted to reach for something that did not exist anywhere on the table between them, and then, in one abrupt and almost frustrated gesture, he lifted both hands to his head and dragged his fingers back through his hair hard enough to suggest either fury or desperation, as though he were trying to force something out of his mind or stop it from collapsing in on itself.
The elastic holding his bun snapped with a quiet sound that seemed, to Mikasa, to echo.
His hair fell loose in damp strands around his face, disheveled and slightly wild, clinging in places to the collar of his coat. One strand stuck to his cheek. He did not notice, or perhaps he simply did not care.
He let out a rough breath through his nose, half laugh, half grimace, and reached into the inner pocket of his coat for a fresh tie, black and worn and slightly stretched from repeated use. His fingers moved too quickly now, clumsy with tension, as he tried to gather his hair again, as though fixing it might somehow fix the rest of him too.
The elastic slipped once.
Then again.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath.
He tried a third time, slower now, tighter.
He did not look up even once, and Mikasa watched him through every flicker of motion, every forced breath pushed through clenched teeth, every pulse of restlessness running through him like static.
It caught her off guard, how human he looked in that moment, how visibly he was unraveling.
She had seen him angry before. She had seen him distant, cold, controlled with that terrible tension he carried across his shoulders like wire pulled too tight.
This was different. There was no armor left on him now, no edge, no fire, only the quiet, helpless effort of a man trying to hold himself together with a rubber band and a memory.
At last he tied the knot with shaking fingers and drew the elastic into place at the base of his neck. His hands lowered slowly back to the table.
When he finally looked up, she saw everything at once: the faint flush rising across his cheeks, the fragile sheen gathering at the edges of his eyes, and the slight tremor still lingering in his fingers where they brushed the saucer.
Then, from somewhere deep in the center of his chest, in a voice that sounded as though it had fought its way through every corridor of his body before reaching his mouth, he said, “I’m sorry.”
It was neither loud nor grand, yet those two words split the air between them all the same, like lightning striking still water, and when they were gone, nothing followed.
He seemed not to trust himself with more, or perhaps feared she would not let him say it.
He looked at her then, truly looked at her, like a man trying to find his way back into a house that had long since burned to the ground.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come after you,” he rasped at last. “I’m sorry I didn’t pick up the phone. I’m sorry for every night you waited for something from me that never came.”
A laugh left him then, breathless and bitter, as though even that sound cost him more than it should have.
“I was a fucking coward.”
Mikasa did not answer. She had gone still, not because she felt nothing, but because she felt too much and had nowhere to put it. The words struck her and remained there, and she did not know what part of herself was meant to hold them.
Eren swallowed. The motion in his throat was visible; his voice roughened further.
“I told myself it was better to stay away. That if I reached out, I’d only hurt you more. That you were better off hating me than watching me spiral into someone you couldn’t recognize.”
He leaned forward then, resting his forearms lightly on the table, and lowered his voice.
“But I thought about you.” A pause. “Every day.”
Then, quieter still, “For three fucking years.”
The silence that followed was not cruel this time; Mikasa felt it land everywhere at once, in her chest, in her stomach, in the space beneath her ribs where she had hidden everything she could not bear to touch. She did not speak, because she could not. Her hands were clenched in her lap again, and her heart was beating so hard she was afraid he might hear it.
A little more softly, he said, “Just give me an hour.”
She blinked as though pulled out of a daze by force.
“What?” She whispered.
“An hour,” he repeated, his eyes holding hers. “Let me talk. Let me explain. Let me say what I never had the guts to say when it counted.”
She stared at him, stunned.
“I’m not asking for more than that,” he added. “Not a chance. Not a second chance. Just one hou to tell you the truth.”
He swallowed again.
“If at the end of it you want to tell me to fuck off, you can. I’ll walk out of here. Right now. For good. You’ll never have to see me again.”
There was no drama in it, no trembling plea, no threat veiled in softness, only a man stripped bare, holding her gaze with nothing left between them but the wreckage of who he had once been.
Mikasa did not know which thought frightened her more, the thought of saying yes or the thought that she might actually mean it, because there was something in his eyes now that had not been there before, something changed, something real, and she was not ready for what it implied, not if it meant losing him again, not if it meant wanting him again.
So she only looked at him, looked at the boy she had once loved and at the man she was no longer certain she could survive loving again, and said nothing.
Not yet.
⟢⟣
Her heart was beating too loudly, too violently, with such force that she could hear it in her ears and feel it everywhere at once, in her throat, in her fingertips, in the fine tremor running the length of her spine, until it drowned out the café itself, the clinking of cups, the muffled conversations, the soft French music drifting from somewhere distant and indistinct. Mikasa stared at him, at the man who had once held her while she cried, at the man who had once kissed her inside apartment walls lined with books and plants and half-finished dreams, at the man who had let her go and was now, at last, asking for the chance to speak.
She did not want to cry, but something inside her chest stung like a wire pulled too tight for too long, and when she finally drew in a breath it came shaky and thin, as though even that small act required more strength than she wanted to give. Her lips parted. For a moment she said nothing, only sat there with the word gathering inside her like something dangerous, something that might break open the moment if she let it free, and then, softly, barely audible, she said it.
“Okay.”
The word was there before she could take it back, a fracture in the wall, a single loose thread pulled free from something she had held shut for years.
“Okay,” she repeated, firmer this time, though her voice still cracked. “One hour.”
Eren did not move at first. He did not smile or even seem to breathe. He only looked at her as though he could not quite believe what he had heard, as though her voice, that quiet and impossible okay, had not fully reached him yet, and Mikasa, unable to bear the force of it, looked away instead, down at her half-empty coffee cup. She hated the trembling in her hands. She hated how small her voice had sounded. More than anything, she hated that saying yes felt like unlocking something she had nailed shut with both hands.
“You get one hour,” she spoke again, scarcely louder than before. “And then...”
She did not finish.
The truth was that she did not know what came after, and that uncertainty terrified her more than anything else.
Eren blinked once, then again, slow and almost dazed, like a man trying to trust what had already happened. His lips parted slightly, as though words were rising inside him too fast and too many to cross the distance cleanly, and then his breath caught, sharp and unsteady and unmistakably human. The movement was small, though not small enough to escape her. His shoulders trembled, barely, and he lowered his head for a second, not in shame and not in defeat, but like someone who needed that single moment simply to survive the weight of what he had been given.
When he looked up again, his eyes were wet.
Not in a way that asked to be seen, and not in any way that felt performative or calculated. They simply were, the surface glassy, the rims faintly pink, the grief in them quiet and unguarded.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
The words were too small to hold everything inside them, yet they had to try.
He swallowed hard, then said it again, more slowly this time. “Thank you. For giving me this. Even if you hate me after. Even if it changes nothing.”
His voice caught slightly on nothing, and though he kept the rest of himself still, his hands betrayed him. They tightened softly at the edge of the table, not slamming down, not visibly shaking, only curling there as though something inside him needed balance and had found nothing else to hold. His fingers pressed against the wood grain, his thumbs touching as though to anchor him, his wrists shifting forward by the smallest degree toward the space between them, because he wanted to reach for her. That want was all over him, in every breath, every hesitation, every measured inch of restraint. It showed in the way he leaned in just enough, never too much, and in the way he looked at her, not quite directly, but as if her presence alone were the only thing keeping him intact. Even his stillness gave him away, because it was not indifference that held him back. It was restraint so deep it could only belong to someone who had already learned what it meant to lose.
He did not touch her; he did not even try.
Somewhere deep down, he knew that if he moved too quickly, if he tried to bridge the distance before she was ready, he would lose her again, perhaps for good. So he stayed where he was, knuckles paling, shoulders locked, eyes unbearably soft, and Mikasa saw all of it. She saw the longing beneath his restraint, the desperation buried beneath years of silence, the painful and deliberate effort it cost him not to ruin that fragile, impossible moment, and the sight of it made her heart tighten so violently that for one terrible second she nearly reached for her own chest.
She recognized it.
Even after all that time, she still knew exactly what he looked like when he was breaking on the inside.
She hated that. Hated how easily she could still read him. Hated that the part of her she had locked away and buried beneath work and distance and polished self-sufficiency still responded to him with that old and terrible accuracy, still tuned itself to his breathing as if nothing had ever severed them. She gave none of it away, and she did not move. Her spine remained straight, her shoulders squared, her expression composed behind the same careful mask she had worn in boardrooms and interviews whenever someone mentioned Berlin and she felt her ribs collapse inward.
Deep within her, though, something had cracked, not shattered, but opened just enough for her to feel it.
Cracks, she knew too well, did not heal on their own.
They remained like that for a long moment, longer than comfort, longer than silence should ever be allowed to stretch, and still neither of them dared to disturb it, because the air between them had changed again. It was no longer angry, no longer volatile. It was fragile now, worn thin, heavy with memory.
Outside, the rain had softened to a whisper, as though even the weather had lowered its voice around them, and beyond the window the cobblestones of Place des Vosges gleamed with gold, lamplight spilling down the façades while umbrellas passed like quiet shadows through the mist. Inside, the café glowed steadily around them with the scent of coffee, the low clink of porcelain, the flutter of turning pages from a nearby table, the entire world continuing in its ordinary rhythm while theirs seemed to hold its breath.
At last Eren spoke again, not urgently and not with any trace of drama, only gently.
“You remember the night before you left?” He asked, his voice low and careful. “That last night. When we didn’t say anything at all.”
Mikasa inhaled, slow and shallow. The air tasted like regret.
Still, she neither looked away nor pretended, nor did she try to hide.
“Yeah,” she answered quietly. “I remember.”
Eren nodded, and for a second his eyes seemed to drift, not away from her but somewhere inward, as though he were watching a reel of memory he had tried to burn and still knew frame by frame. His fingers loosened a little on the table. The corner of his mouth shifted, not into a smile but into something older and sadder, something like grief worn down into familiarity.
“I think I knew you were going,” he murmured. “I think I felt it in the way you moved. In the way you didn’t ask me anything that day.”
His voice dropped further.
“But I didn’t ask either.”
He looked at her then with nothing left over his face, nothing hidden.
“I didn’t stop you. I just sat there, like a fucking idiot, holding onto my own silence like it could protect me. You walked to the door like you already knew I wasn’t going to come after you.”
He rubbed his palm against his knee in a small reflexive gesture, as though his body needed something to ground itself while he spoke.
“I didn’t know how to fix it. You and me. What we’d become. I kept telling myself next week. After the deadline. After the pitch. After the next meeting. I’ll talk to her. I’ll bring her flowers. I’ll take her out. I’ll be better. Just not now.”
He shook his head slightly.
“The thing about later is that it never came. By the time I finally looked up...”
He blinked, and this time his voice caught for real.
“You were gone.”
For a single, suspended moment, Mikasa was there again, no longer in Paris, no longer wrapped in silk and tailoring and the woman she had painstakingly taught herself to become, but back in Berlin, sitting on the edge of the bed with keys in one hand and silence in the other, while he stood in the kitchen holding his coffee, looking tired, distant, unreachable, and she waited for him to say something, waited in vain, until the sound of the door closing behind her became louder than any fight they had ever had.
She closed her eyes, and something shifted inside her chest then, something that was pain and yet not pain alone, but another feeling far more dangerous in its own quiet way.
Hope.
She was not ready for that, because hope, unlike grief, asked something of you. Hope demanded movement, demanded risk, demanded that a person reach for what might wound them again, and Mikasa was not at all certain she could survive wanting anything from him after learning how to survive without him.
──────────
Part II: Berlin,
The Things We Lost in the Silence.
──────────
Before the silence, before the door, before the rain in Paris and the untouched coffee cooling between them, there had been Berlin.
Berlin in winter, when the sky turned to stone and the city’s breath lingered in the air like fog. Berlin in spring, when trams hummed through broad boulevards and students spilled out of bookshops carrying too many ideas and not enough time. Berlin in all its grey and all its gold, the city that gave them everything before it took it away.
It was where it began.
It was where they still existed in photographs, in polaroids pinned to the walls of apartments that no longer belonged to them, in folders neither of them had dared open in years. It was where they were still real, still young, still possible.
Eren and Mikasa had loved each other for almost a decade, yet the beginning, the true beginning, had not been a blaze. It had not been fireworks, nor declarations at train stations, nor anything grand enough to be turned into a film. It had been quieter than people liked to imagine, with no dramatic moment, no sudden confession, no scene in which one of them fell into the other’s arms while the world held its breath. It had been a look, a pause, a breath that caught without warning, the slow and magnetic recognition that something had shifted and, once shifted, could never return to what it had been before.
They met when they were seventeen, two students in their final year of high school, two lives already being carved into very different futures.
Eren attended the Heinrich-Hertz-Gymnasium near Friedrichshain, a place of logic, precision, and numbers, the sort of school where brilliance functioned as currency and expectation rested heavily on young shoulders. Even then he wore ambition like a second skin. He was competitive, restless, forever leaning forward as though Berlin itself were too small to contain everything he wanted.
Mikasa, by contrast, went to the John-Lennon-Gymnasium across the river in Prenzlauer Berg, known for its art studios, its student protests, its bulletin boards plastered with poetry and unpaid internship offers. She had already been writing then, already sketching, already observing the world with that quiet and unsettling intensity that made people uncomfortable if they were not ready to feel seen.
They were not in the same classes. They were not even in the same school. They did not share teachers, and they did not take the same trains in the morning.
Their lives should have remained parallel.
Berlin, though, was a city of intersections, a place where friendships formed in smoky kitchens at two in the morning, where night buses ran endlessly through neighbourhoods that never truly slept, where youth became its own ecosystem made of group chats and Thursday concerts and weekends that began on rooftops and ended on cold mattresses.
It began, as many things did, with Armin.
He was the bridge, always the bridge. He had known Mikasa from a summer writing camp at the Literaturhaus, and he had known Eren since childhood, back when they were boys in Moabit with scraped knees and shared secrets.
Then came Sasha, who had once eaten Mikasa’s lunch by mistake and simply never stopped talking to her afterward. Connie turned every group study session into a comedy show. Jean was sarcastic and magnetic in equal measure, forever pretending not to care while caring more than anyone. Reiner and Bertholdt were two steady presences who brought beer and silence in equal measure. Annie was sharp-edged and unreadable. Pieck somehow remembered everything everyone ever said and always arrived ten minutes late with a flawless excuse. Colt was quiet but fiercely loyal, the one who stayed behind to help clean up and remembered birthdays when no one else did. Porco was blunt, hot-tempered, always the first to argue and the first to defend anyone who was hurting.
The circle expanded slowly, the way roots find one another underground, and then, one night, it happened.
A birthday party.
It was in a fifth-floor walk-up in Kreuzberg with furniture made from crates and fairy lights that did not work. The room smelled of smoke and peach schnapps. The music was loud, though nobody was really dancing, only swaying, laughing, shouting over the beat.
Mikasa arrived late. She had almost not come at all. An article still needed finishing, her long hair was still damp from the shower, and she did not even know whose birthday it was supposed to be.
Eren was sitting on the arm of a torn velvet sofa with a drink in his hand, arguing with Connie about something philosophical and entirely irrelevant, and his laugh cut through the noise with a sound that was sharp, confident, careless.
She noticed him before he noticed her.
That, in itself, surprised her, because she was not used to being the first to notice anyone.
Then he looked.
Only once, only a glance, yet it lingered.
Their eyes met across the room, past the bodies, past the noise, past everything else, and something inside her chest tilted. It was not a fall, not even close, only a shift, small and irrevocable.
He lifted his glass a little, not quite a toast, more a signal, a hello without the trouble of words, and she, uncharacteristically, walked toward him.
No one introduced them. No one needed to.
The conversation was awkward at first, then easy, then somehow too much, then quiet again in a way that felt less like discomfort than recognition. She told him about her dream of writing for Vogue. He told her Berlin was only a starting point, that he wanted to learn how the world moved and then move it himself. They talked about train stations and deadlines and the strange urgency of being seventeen, and when she finally laughed at something stupid he said, really laughed, he looked at her as though he already knew.
That was all it took.
From that night on, it was them.
There were no grand promises, no first kiss beneath a storm, no cinematic beginning anyone would have envied. There was only the quiet arrival of a new constant inside a city that had never promised permanence. They texted every day, studied in cafés, took the S-Bahn late at night just to watch the lights blur beyond the windows, shared playlists and homework and secrets.
It was not a whirlwind but a kind of gravity, quiet and inescapable, and it did not take long for everyone around them to notice that, from then on, there was no one else, not really, not in any of the ways that mattered.
⟢⟣
They did not fall in love loudly, because they did not need to. It unfolded gradually, almost imperceptibly, like light filling a room at dawn, slow and soft and impossible to hold back once it had begun.
It showed itself first in small things. In the way Mikasa started saving him the last bite of her croissant, even though it was always her favourite part. In the way Eren gave her his jacket even when the weather did not call for it, not because she needed it, but because he liked seeing her in something that belonged to him. It was there in the strange certainty with which they always knew where the other was in a crowded room, not by sight so much as by presence, in the way her hand would find his without her even looking, in the way he tilted his head whenever she was speaking, even to someone else, as if hearing her voice more clearly were its own form of instinct.
None of it was showy. None of it felt rehearsed.
It simply existed in the space between sentences, in glances that lingered a fraction too long, in the way their laughter tangled whenever they forgot to be careful. By the time anyone else began to understand what was happening, it was already done. They were already in it.
Still, they did not rush.
They did not kiss right away. They waited a week, then two, then three, not because they did not want to, but because they did, and wanted it to matter when it happened. It had been Pieck’s birthday when they first met, though neither of them had known her especially well at the time, and they both ended up staying too late, leaving with the last wave of people, wrapped in coats that smelled of smoke and someone else’s perfume. They had walked side by side down the hallway of that old building, and something between them had shifted. The door had opened, only not all the way.
A month and a half later, when the air had turned crisp and the leaves in Berlin had begun to die in colour, they had their first date.
It was not a film, not dinner, not anything scripted enough to feel borrowed from somebody else’s life. Eren only told her to dress warm, saying he had something in mind, though he refused to tell her where they were going. He picked her up carrying two coffees from Five Elephant and wearing a smile he was trying very hard to pass off as easy, though the nervousness in him was plain enough for her to see.
She loved that.
They took the S-Bahn to Charlottenburg and walked through quiet residential streets until the city seemed to soften around them, until at last they arrived at Lietzenseepark.
It was neither famous nor crowded, and it was not even particularly large, but it was beautiful all the same, with still water, old iron bridges, trees leaning over the paths as though they carried secrets, and a bench beneath a willow that looked as if it had been waiting for them for years.
They sat there and talked.
They talked about the things they did not tell other people, about books and fears and childhood memories. He told her how his father had never truly had time for him. She told him what it had been like to lose her mother while she was still too young to understand what gone was supposed to mean. Even then, even opening the darkest parts of himself, he still managed to make her laugh, and she loved that too, loved that he never let the shadows in him swallow the light entirely.
At some point he stopped speaking and only looked at her, not with the uncertain awkwardness of a boy trying to gather courage, but with the steady attention of someone who already knew he would never grow tired of watching her.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked.
He said it quietly, not like someone trying to charm her, but like someone who still was not sure whether he was dreaming.
Mikasa blinked once, slowly, as though the question had surprised her even if she had been waiting for it, even if some part of her had known it was coming from the moment they sat down on that bench. The air between them seemed to still. The lake, the trees, the distant murmur of passing cars all receded until there was only him, only her, only that moment suspended between them.
She did not speak, but gave the smallest and most vulnerable tilt of her head, and Eren leaned in like a boy stepping across a threshold he had never truly believed would open for him.
The kiss was soft, so soft it felt almost like breath, like light, like the first touch of dawn against a windowsill. There was no urgency in it, no pressure, only the meeting of lips, the slightest movement, the faintest tremor, as though both of them feared that pressing too hard might break it, or perhaps prove it was never real at all. It was not the kiss of someone trying to win anything. It was the kiss of someone who only wanted to hold, only to feel.
Mikasa’s eyes fluttered closed the moment their mouths touched, and her breath caught, not from surprise, but from the terrible, aching rightness of it.
It felt so right it hurt.
His hands did not move. They remained in his lap, softly clenched in nervous stillness. Hers stayed folded inside the pockets of her coat, as though some instinct within her understood that the moment was too sacred to hurry, too delicate to break open with unnecessary movement. There was only the touch of their mouths, the silence between heartbeats, the taste of coffee and cold air and longing.
She felt him exhale softly against her lips, warm and unsteady, and when she tilted her chin the slightest bit, he followed without thinking, as though their bodies had already begun to learn the shape of each other’s language.
It was a kiss that asked for nothing.
It only said what neither of them yet knew how to say aloud: that she mattered to him, that he saw her, that he wanted her not all at once and not in flames, but in time.
When they finally drew apart, they did so slowly, not in retreat, but in something closer to reverence. Eren opened his eyes first, as if he did not quite trust the moment to remain there if he waited too long. His face was flushed, his mouth slightly parted, and the smallest smile had started to form, shy and crooked and impossibly unguarded. He looked at her like someone who had just been handed a secret.
“You taste like coffee and wind,” he murmured, almost as though he had not meant to say it aloud.
Mikasa rolled her eyes, though the corner of her mouth betrayed her at once. “You taste like nerves,” she replied dryly.
“Fair,” he said under his breath with a soft laugh. “I am.”
Her voice had softened by then, and when her eyes met his again, there was something warmer in them beneath the sarcasm, something open, something no longer trying quite so hard to stay hidden. A second later she leaned in again, only a little, though enough, and kissed him once more.
This time it was slower and deeper, still gentle, though no longer cautious, and it felt like a decision.
It felt like she had sensed the world tipping, however slightly, in his direction and chosen not to resist it. Her hand brushed his wrist, feather-light, and his answer was nothing more than a soft inhale. His hands still did not move, though his fingers curled as if he were holding himself back from the instinct to reach for her, and when their lips parted again, neither of them spoke.
They only looked at each other.
Two seventeen-year-olds on a park bench in Berlin, suspended inside a stillness so rare and so fragile that they would spend the rest of their lives remembering what it had felt like to exist within it.
⟢⟣
The morning after the kiss, they did not try to hide it, not because they wanted to show off, but because there was simply no way to.
Something had opened between them the night before, something at once quiet and immense, like a dam giving way not with violence but with relief, and the shift had left the world feeling strangely clearer. Now, as they walked through the icy streets of Berlin with their fingers tightly laced and their noses pink from the cold, there was no part of Eren that wanted to let go.
It was Sunday, one of those late-autumn Sundays Berlin did so well, when the sky had already gone grey by noon and every breath hung in the air like smoke. The streets were wet, the wind was sharp, and even the pigeons looked offended by the weather, but inside the little café on the corner of Oderberger Straße, Café Morgenrot, their usual refuge, everything was warmth and dim light and the kind of noise that only made a place feel more alive.
The windows were fogged. Paper snowflakes had been strung from the ceiling. The air smelled of cinnamon and burnt espresso, while the old radiator hissed now and then in protest. Indie music drifted low beneath the hum of conversation, broken only by the hiss of steaming milk and the clink of cutlery against mismatched plates.
They stepped in together, Eren holding the door while Mikasa entered first, her cheeks flushed from the cold and the edges of her hair damp around her scarf, and when she turned back toward him she smiled, not broadly, but with something real and unguarded in it, giving his hand the faintest squeeze.
The bell above the door rang sharply.
At the far corner table, their table, always their table, the rest of the group was already spread out in what looked like the aftermath of a caffeine-fuelled argument about mathematics, ethics, Marvel versus DC, the disappointment of George R. R. Martin not finishing A Song of Ice and Fire, or whatever else Connie had become intensely invested in that week.
Armin was the first to notice them.
He looked up from his cappuccino and blinked once, then again, his eyes narrowing as he processed what he was seeing, only to widen a second later when he saw their hands.
“Wait,” he said slowly, lowering his cup halfway to the table. “Are you...?”
“Together?” Sasha cut in before he could finish, a pastry suspended halfway to her mouth. “No way. No fucking way.”
“Wait, what?” Connie nearly shouted, banging his knee against the table as he twisted around in his chair. “You two? Since when?”
Mikasa flushed faintly, though she did not let go of Eren’s hand, nor did she hesitate even for a second.
“Last night,” she asnwered, calm and clear.
Eren stood just behind her, still holding her hand as though it were the most natural thing in the world, while doing a very poor job of pretending not to look smug.
“Define last night,” Jean said, leaning forward with narrowed eyes. “Do you mean last night last night, or last night as in we’ve been secretly fucking since October but only now decided to pretend it’s new?”
“Last night,” Eren confirmed, failing to suppress the grin at the corner of his mouth. “As in twelve hours ago.”
“I knew it,” Pieck sighed from the corner, sipping her coffee with the serenity of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment for far too long. “I should’ve started a betting pool.”
Porco scoffed under his breath.
“Honestly, I thought you two were eventually going to kill each other.”
Reiner nodded as though weighing the matter seriously. “Or get married.”
“Both are still on the table,” Bertholdt added, with all the gentle solemnity of someone making an entirely reasonable observation.
“Okay, no, wait,” Sasha screamed, setting down her pastry with the urgency of a witness about to be cross-examined. “You kissed, or you kissed kissed? Tongue? Pressure? Was there a head tilt?”
Mikasa turned and gave her a look. “Do you really need that much detail?”
“Yes,” Sasha and Connie answered in perfect unison.
“Enough,” Mikasa said, firm, though she was laughing now, her cheeks pink for an altogether different reason.
Annie lifted her eyes at last from her worn copy of Medea, one eyebrow arching.
“I give it three weeks.”
A collective groan went around the table.
“Jesus, Annie,” Jean muttered.
“I give it forever,” Armin said immediately, too quickly and too sincerely to be anything but entirely himself.
For a moment no one said anything.
Everyone turned to look at him.
He blinked, as though only then realizing he had said it aloud. “What?”
Sasha stared at him in open admiration. “Armin. You romantic son of a bitch.”
Eren laughed then, not only because of what Armin had said, but because the sentiment was so unmistakably Armin, that reflexive loyalty, that unwavering faith. Mikasa turned to look at him too, at her oldest friend, and something in her expression softened.
“You’re not wrong,” she murmured.
The table fell silent for half a second, the kind of silence that arrives only when something unexpectedly sincere has moved through a room and everyone feels it at once.
Then Connie, doing exactly what Connie always did with any remotely sacred moment, threw a napkin into the air and said, “Okay, but who the hell didn’t see this coming? Raise your hand.”
Three people did.
Jean muttered something about obvious sexual tension, which Pieck seconded loudly and without hesitation, while Reiner began listing the top five moments when he had first suspected something was going on. Porco rolled his eyes through all of it. Colt looked vaguely amused, as he almost always did, and Sasha attempted to recruit an artist at the next table to draw Eren and Mikasa kissing beneath a streetlamp.
All around them the café went on humming, laughter rising and falling beneath the warmth and noise, the heater clicking again somewhere in the background while a waitress appeared with two more chairs, and for the first time in a very long while, it felt as though something had finally settled into place, as though something had always existed there, quietly waiting to be named, and now that it had been, everything made sense.
⟢⟣
They had not planned it.
It simply happened, not like a storm, but more like a tide that had been drawing them closer for so long and with such quiet persistence that neither of them realized how far they had drifted from shore until the ground was gone beneath them and there was nothing left to hold onto except each other.
That Friday, Berlin was cold and still. The trees beyond the windows swayed as though they were keeping secrets, while the streets lay quiet beneath a thin dusting of snow that never quite settled, only clung to the edges of sidewalks and the hems of coats. Inside the Jaeger apartment, warmth lingered in the wooden floors and in the glow of the kitchen light.
Eren’s parents had left early that morning, Grisha and Carla bundled into their coats, luggage rattling behind them as they hurried off to catch the train for Nördlingen, the small Bavarian town of cobbled streets and red-tiled roofs where Carla’s parents lived. They went every month, always for the same kind of weekend made of quiet conversation, warm soup, and the soft, unhurried rhythm of the countryside.
Eren had stayed behind, and Zeke had done the same.
Grisha had not argued. He rarely did anymore when it came to his sons, not out of indifference, but out of distance, that habitual and well-worn absence that had become part of him over the years. He was a man who had built his life around saving other people, and as one of the leading trauma surgeons at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, he carried too many lives in his hands to ever hold his own family as fully as he should have. Both his sons, each in his own way, had learned how to live with that, how to love a man who was not always there, how to become themselves in the space he left behind.
Zeke, being older, understood it better than Eren ever could. He remembered the first woman, Dina, her perfume, the heat in her voice whenever she spoke to Grisha, the fire and disappointment that seemed always to live beneath her skin. Most of all, he remembered the day she left, far too vividly for something witnessed at the age of three, one bag in her hand and the sound of the door slamming shut behind her, not only on her husband, but on her child.
What came afterward had been quieter. Softer.
Carla.
Zeke had been wary of her at first, though she had never once tried to replace anyone. She was simply there, steady and kind and present in all the ways that mattered most. She packed lunchboxes with handwritten notes. She remembered his favourite books. She hugged him even when he acted like he did not want it. In time, he had started calling her Mutter – Mum – without even noticing the moment it became natural.
There was no resentment in it, no jealousy, only that rarer form of love which is chosen and then slowly grown into, and Eren, though much younger, had always looked at Zeke as though he hung the moon.
They were opposites in so many ways, fire and smoke, impulse and calculation, yet the bond between them belonged to that deeper category of feeling that never needs explaining. It was simply there, an unspoken line drawn between them that life could stretch, but never sever.
That evening, the apartment smelled of garlic and tomato. Eren stood in the kitchen frowning at the pasta bubbling on the stove as though it had personally offended him, having already spent far too much time trying to make dinner appear effortless despite the fact that his stomach was tied in knots.
Mikasa was coming over.
Just the two of them.
He had texted her earlier that week: You wanna come over Friday? My parents are out of town.
Her reply had come five minutes later: Sure. Should I bring dessert?
That had been all.
Now he was standing there arranging cutlery with awkward concentration, as though the exact side of the plate on which the fork rested might somehow determine the course of the evening, when Zeke wandered into the kitchen, shrugging into his coat.
“She’s staying for dinner, right?” His older brother asked, lifting his wallet and keys from the counter, his voice casual even if his eyes were lit with unmistakable mischief.
Eren did not look up. “Yes.”
Zeke paused at the door and turned back with a grin. “Good.”
A beat passed.
“I’ll be back late,” he added, pointedly slipping on his shoes. “Very late.”
Eren groaned. “You’re so obvious.”
“I’m doing you a favor,” Zeke replied with a shrug. “Don’t be a dumbass. Don’t ruin it.”
He leaned forward to open the door, cast one last glance over his shoulder, and lifted a brow in perfect provocation. “Maybe don’t burn the garlic either.”
A moment later he was gone, and the silence that settled over the apartment felt warm and expectant, the rooms still, dimly lit, and strangely safe. Eren glanced at the clock. She would be there in twenty minutes.
He wiped his palms against his jeans, checked the table once more, and stood for a moment staring into the living room, wondering whether he should tidy up further or whether the place looked more natural with a little mess left behind.
When the doorbell finally rang, Eren’s heart seemed to stop for a single stunned beat before turning over hard in his chest, every restless minute of waiting collapsing at once into the sharp, breathless certainty that she was there.
⟢⟣
The doorbell rang at exactly 7:03 P.M.
Eren’s heart struck again, heavy and dull against his ribs, as he wiped his hands one last time on the dish towel. He caught his reflection in the dark glass of the oven door, ran a hand quickly through his hair, muttered a curse beneath his breath, and crossed the apartment to open the door.
Mikasa was there.
She stood on the threshold in a long black coat, her cheeks flushed from the cold, fine strands of hair damp with mist and clinging near the edges of her face, and the moment her eyes met his, something passed between them, electric and wordless and impossible to mistake.
Eren did not wait for her to speak.
As soon as the door clicked shut behind her, he stepped forward and kissed her, fully and without hesitation, with a force that was not roughness so much as certainty. Their mouths met at once, lips parting, breath catching, tongues finding each other like something that had been searching too long to settle for anything gentler. Mikasa gave a soft gasp into the kiss and let the paper bag she was holding fall onto the bench beside them without ever breaking contact.
His hands found her waist. Hers rose instinctively to the collar of his shirt, gripping the fabric and pulling him closer, deeper, until the kiss ceased to feel anything like a greeting and became instead something fiercer, something that carried the shape of a claim.
When they finally drew back, if only by inches, they were both breathing hard, lips swollen, foreheads hovering close enough to touch.
“Hi,” she whispered, breathless.
Eren smiled, his eyes still fixed on hers, his voice roughened by the effort of holding anything back at all.
“Hi.”
He did not think after that. He only moved, guided by instinct, by want, by the staggering fact that she was there.
Three steps later, she was pressed gently but firmly against the hallway wall, not handled roughly and not rushed, only held there with the inevitability of something that felt necessary. His hands braced themselves on either side of her head, fingers curling against the plaster as he kissed her again, deeper this time, tilting her chin upward and feeling the way she rose onto her toes to meet him, her whole body leaning into his.
Then his mouth left hers and found her neck instead.
He kissed her harder there, open-mouthed, with heat and breath and the bare scrape of teeth just beneath her jaw, and the sound that left her then was sharp and soft at once, too close to a yes for him to mistake it for anything else. She tipped her head back without a word, giving him more room, yielding in that silent way that undid him far more completely than speech ever could have.
Eren nearly lost whatever composure he had left.
He could not stop the grin that broke across his face when he kissed her again just below the ear, laughing softly against her skin, half with disbelief and half because want had drawn every nerve in his body taut. Zeke’s voice flashed through his mind like a warning and a curse all at once. Don’t be a dumbass. Don’t ruin it.
A low, playful sound left him against her throat before he pressed his forehead briefly to the side of her face, still trying to steady his breathing. He forced himself to stop, forced stillness into his hands and restraint into his mouth, even while every part of him was straining against it.
Mikasa blinked up at him, kiss-bitten and breathless, her pupils wide.
“What is it?” She asked, her voice husky.
He looked at her and found that he still could not stop smiling.
“Nothing,” he said softly. “I’m just really happy you’re here.”
Her gaze searched his for a moment, and then she smiled too, not because he had said anything especially clever, but because she could feel the truth of it.
Without another word, he took her hand, still warm from the shelter of her pocket, and led her gently down the hallway.
“Come on,” he murmured. “Dinner’s getting cold.”
She followed him without letting go.
⟢⟣
The dining room was quiet and warm, not elegant in any studied or elaborate way, but real.
A long wooden table stood at the center of the room, its edges marked here and there with the faint scuffs of ordinary life, surrounded by mismatched chairs that had clearly belonged to different years and different moods. Above it, the overhead light gave off a muted amber glow, casting soft shadows across the walls, where adorable photographs hung in careful rows, snapshots of birthdays and holidays, awkward family portraits and ordinary moments preserved without ceremony. Mikasa’s eyes had already begun to drift toward them, curious and faintly moved, though the smell of the food drew her back almost at once.
“Wow,” she whispered as she sat down. “You really went all out.”
Eren gave a small shrug, though the colour rising into his face betrayed how pleased he was. “I tried.”
He had.
The table had already been laid for two, with plates and wine glasses set in place, the red wine dark and breathing softly in the air, while steam rose in delicate curls from the dishes arranged at the centre. One held a bowl of spaghetti coated in a thick and fragrant tomato sauce, flecked with fresh basil and Parmigiano.
“The pasta’s an Italian recipe,” Eren said, handing her a fork. “The sauce is my mom’s, though. She made a huge batch last weekend and froze it, so I just heated it up.”
Mikasa lifted an eyebrow. “And the pasta?”
“I made it myself,” he replied a little too quickly. “Not made made, obviously. I mean, I cooked it.”
A smile touched her mouth then, small and warm and just barely held back, though it bloomed more clearly in her eyes. “I was already impressed, Eren. You really don’t need to defend yourself.”
“Wait until you see the second course,” he rasped, lifting the lid from the other dish with a little flourish that was almost theatrical.
Inside were Königsberger Klopse, traditional German meatballs, browned beautifully and served in a creamy white caper sauce beside buttery Petersilienkartoffeln, boiled parsley potatoes still glistening faintly from the pan.
Mikasa’s brows rose. “You made all that?”
“The meatballs, yes. And the potatoes.” He hesitated for half a second. “I’ve watched my mom make it a hundred times. I thought I’d try doing it myself.”
She looked down at the food, then back at him, and something inside her chest pulled tight in the gentlest, most dangerous way.
“You’re incredible,” she said softly. “Seriously. This looks amazing.”
Eren lowered his head a little, like someone who still had no real practice receiving praise, then pulled her chair out for her the rest of the way. “Let’s eat before it gets cold.”
They started with the pasta, and Mikasa realized almost immediately that she had not been flattering him for his sake.
It was genuinely wonderful.
Even if the sauce had been Carla’s, Eren had done something to it, some quiet adjustment of his own, the garlic balanced exactly right, the pasta perfectly al dente, a touch of chili at the end that lingered just enough to make the whole thing come alive on her tongue.
“I’m never eating cafeteria food again,” she declared after the first bite.
Eren laughed. “Please do, because if you start expecting this all the time, I’m screwed.”
She smiled again, more openly now, because she already knew from the way he was looking at her across the table that he wanted to do this for her, wanted her there, wanted the evening to mean something.
By the time they moved on to the meatballs, the air between them had softened even further. Their legs brushed once beneath the table. Their fingers knocked lightly against each other when they both reached for the salt, and neither of them pulled away.
Mikasa glanced once more toward the wall, toward the photographs that had caught her eye the moment she walked in.
“That’s your kindergarten picture, isn’t it?” She asked, pointing with the stem of her wine glass.
Eren turned to look and groaned at once. “Oh my God, yes. The bowl cut. Why would they hang that one?”
“It’s cute,” she said, tilting her head.
“Lies.”
Her gaze moved to another photograph, older than the rest, where two boys stood on a beach, one clearly in his teens, the other much younger, with wet hair and a grin that looked far too mischievous to belong to anyone else.
“And is that Zeke?”
“Yeah,” Eren replied, more softly now. “That was Sylt. Summer holidays. Our mom always made us take a photo the second we got out of the water.”
“You look happy,” she said.
He looked back at her, and for a moment his smile lost all of its usual edge, all of its playfulness, becoming something quieter and entirely sincere.
“I was,” he murmured. “I think I am now too.”
Mikasa lowered her eyes for a second, suddenly breathless, her fork pausing halfway to her mouth. The wine, the food, the warmth of the room, the low intimacy of his voice, it all pressed in on her at once, too much and not enough, leaving her with the strange and aching certainty that she had never felt more at home in someone else’s house in her life.
When she looked up again, she found him already watching her, and there was such softness in his face that it made her dizzy.
“Eren...” she breathed.
The rest of the sentence never came.
It did not need to, because he reached across the table, took her hand in his, and laced their fingers together, and after that neither of them spoke for a very long time.
⟢⟣
They did not finish the dishes.
They did not even attempt to.
Mikasa had only just risen from the table, reaching for her plate with the quiet, automatic movement of habit, when Eren was already there behind her, sliding one hand around her waist, firm and steady, his body settling lightly against her back. She stilled at once, feeling the heat of him and the tension running through him, hearing the change in his breathing before he touched her again.
Then his mouth was on her neck.
There was nothing tentative in it, nothing soft, only hunger, as his lips traced the line beneath her ear and his teeth caught gently at her skin, drawing from her a sound that hovered somewhere between a gasp and a sigh. Her eyes fluttered shut as she leaned back into him, and the plate slipped from her hand onto the table again, cutlery clattering against ceramic in the sudden quiet, though she did not care in the slightest.
“Eren,” she whispered, and it was not a warning so much as a plea.
He turned her toward him then, his hands rising to cup her face before he kissed her, deeply and without restraint, with a kind of raw intensity that left no space for hesitation. Their tongues tangled, their breath caught, and his hands slid into her hair, fingers threading through it and tightening just enough to anchor her to him, as though he could not bear even the thought of her slipping away. Mikasa answered him with equal urgency, her own hands closing around the collar of his shirt as she pulled him nearer, asking wordlessly for more, more closeness, more warmth, more of him.
Their bodies met fully now, pressed together so completely that the heat between them seemed to pulse like a second heartbeat. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest against hers, could feel the tremor running through him, no longer born of nerves, but of want.
By the time they drew apart, it was only by the smallest margin, their foreheads still resting together, their eyes half-lidded, their breathing uneven.
They did not speak, because everything that mattered had already passed between them in that single look alone: I want you. I have never wanted anything more. I am ready. You are mine.
His thumb brushed slowly along her cheekbone before he spoke, his voice reduced to little more than a whisper.
“Come with me.”
Mikasa nodded at once, wordless and certain.
Eren took her hand, their fingers threading tightly together with something almost grounding in the gesture, and led her slowly down the hallway. Behind them, the plates remained abandoned on the table, the candles still flickering softly, the wine bottle left half empty where they had forgotten it, though none of it mattered anymore, not with their bodies already leaning toward the bedroom door, toward the one thing they had both been wanting for weeks, perhaps for months.
Each step was quiet and heavy with anticipation, carrying the weight of a silent agreement that felt no less sacred for never having been spoken aloud.
When they reached his room, he opened the door slowly, almost reverently, and turned back to her one last time.
This time he did not ask permission.
He could already see it in her silver eyes, in her parted lips, in the way she reached for him before he had the chance to say anything at all.
They stepped inside, and the door closed behind them.
⟢⟣
The room was dim and quiet.
Eren closed the door behind them with a soft click, though in the stillness it sounded louder than it should have, as if the moment itself had sealed with it and the world beyond the room had fallen away. Mikasa remained where she was, standing at the center of the room, her eyes moving slowly not to take in the space around her, but to take in him. Her breathing was steady, her hands resting at her sides, yet her heart was pounding so fast she could scarcely hear anything else.
Eren looked at her, and for a long moment neither of them moved.
Then, slowly and gently, he stepped closer, without rush and without bravado, drawn only by the quiet pull of something neither of them could have resisted. His hands found her hips first, tentative and warm, as though he were still asking permission without needing words, and when she leaned into him, that small movement was all the answer he needed.
They kissed again, though not like they had at the door or in the hallway.
This time it was slower and deeper, no longer driven by sudden hunger, but by something more deliberate. Their mouths moved together in a rhythm that already felt strangely known, as though it had belonged to them long before either of them understood it, and Mikasa’s hands slipped beneath his shirt, her fingers tracing the warmth of his spine as she drew him closer still, until their bodies were fully aligned.
Eren let out a hard breath through his nose and rested his forehead against hers.
He was trembling, and she was too, yet neither of them pulled away, because whatever lived between them was nervous, yes, but certain all the same.
Their clothes came off gradually, slipping from shoulders, passing waists, falling softly to the floor with the hush of surrender, while the room seemed to grow warmer with every layer shed and the air heavier with skin, breath, and the faint, nearly imperceptible sound of their hands learning each other for the first time.
So much was already contained in the way they moved, in the way Eren looked at her as though she were something sacred, in the way Mikasa touched him with the quiet certainty of someone who had always been meant to, and there was reverence in every motion, though beneath it lived something deeper still: joy, the fierce and trembling joy that it was them, that this was neither mistake nor regret, but a choice, beautiful and slow-burning and enough to set the whole of them racing.
When Eren eased her gently back against the bed, he hesitated for a single moment, his hand brushing her cheek, his eyes never leaving hers.
She nodded, soft and certain.
“I want to,” she whispered.
That was enough.
That was everything.
⟢⟣
He took his time, moving with a care that was focused and tender, the kind of care that belongs to someone who is at once afraid of causing pain and overwhelmed by the privilege of being allowed so close.
Neither of them was entirely new to desire. Both had been kissed before, had touched and been touched, had whispered in the dark to other people and learned, in fragments, the restless language of wanting. They had known the charged uncertainty of hurried moments, the spark of arousal passing through teenage nerves behind doors that never seemed fully closed, and they were not so innocent as to mistake this for their first encounter with intimacy. None of that had ever felt like this, though, and none of it had ever carried this same stillness, this same fullness, this same impossible sense of safety.
With Mikasa, Eren moved as though the moment itself were sacred, not because she was fragile, but because what they were sharing was. He kissed her like he wanted to memorize the rhythm of her breathing, and when his hands trembled as he undressed her, it was not fear that unsettled them, but awe. Mikasa met him with that same quiet fire. She was neither shy nor passive, but wholly present, kissing him back with a tenderness so certain it almost felt like grief in reverse, as though some part of her already understood how deeply she would one day remember this version of him. She guided his hands whenever he hesitated, let her fingers wander over his chest and shoulders and ribs, and looked at him with the kind of gaze that seemed to see everything and still ask for more.
There was no shame between them, no apology for desire, no attempt to pretend they needed less than they did. Their bodies moved slowly, not clumsily, but carefully, not lost, but learning together, and there were moments when stillness entered between them, breaths caught in the space between one movement and the next, followed by the soft, shy laughter that comes when reality refuses to unfold with perfect elegance. A limb would tangle, one of them would shift too fast, a startled gasp would turn into a smile, and then into another kiss, gentler than before. Through it all, the quiet check-ins kept returning, murmured into the dimness as naturally as touch itself.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Still okay?”
“Yes. Please.”
By the time they finally crossed that last threshold together, it happened slowly and with such care that neither of them looked away. He was shaking, and so was she, but the uncertainty in them never became fear, because what held them there was larger than nerves. It was not perfect, not in any polished or cinematic sense. There was heat and tension and the familiar awkwardness of two young bodies finding their way in real time, yet that imperfection only made it more unmistakably theirs, full of warmth and breath and hands that held tighter with every passing second, of kisses that deepened as though they were discovering a new language inside each other’s mouths, of flushed skin and tangled limbs and muscles trembling under the weight of something too vast for speech.
It was not only pleasure. It was not only discovery.
It was the act of choosing each other fully, at last.
When they reached that final edge together, when Mikasa arched against him with his name breaking in her voice and Eren followed moments later, burying his face against her neck as if even this closeness still was not enough, the feeling that moved through them was not bright or explosive, but quieter than that, deeper, heavier with meaning. It did not end when the movement stilled. It remained, settling inside them with the slow certainty of roots finding earth.
Later, they lay tangled beneath the blanket, their skin still warm, their legs loosely hooked together, Mikasa’s head resting on Eren’s chest while his arms held her with a fullness that seemed almost instinctive. One of his hands moved idly through her hair, the other stayed flat against the curve of her back, anchoring her there as though letting go might cause the whole night to disappear.
They lay in silence for a long while, Mikasa listening to the quick, uneven beat of his heart beneath her cheek as it gradually began to steady, and when he shifted just enough to press a kiss into her hair, she closed her eyes with the faintest smile, so completely overcome by the tenderness of it that for a moment all she could do was remain there and feel.
Whatever this had been, it marked the beginning of something that would stay with them long after the night itself had passed, and they were glad, not because it had been flawless, but because it had been real, because it had been theirs.
When Mikasa finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper, her fingers tracing slow circles over his chest.
“I’m glad it was with you.”
Eren kissed the crown of her head again.
“So am I,” he murmured. “So fucking glad.
⟢⟣
It was early March when the idea came to Eren, not as a plan and not even as something he could have called a conversation with himself, but as a feeling, a slow and persistent thrum low in his chest, a kind of restlessness that had nothing to do with boredom or stress or exams and everything to do with something deeper, something quieter, something he did not yet know how to name.
That morning, snow had fallen over Berlin with quiet persistence, the kind that seemed almost reluctant to leave the season behind, dissolving the moment it touched the pavement and still continuing to drift from the sky as though winter were insisting, one last time, on being remembered. Beyond the windows, everything lay muted in white and grey.
Inside Mikasa’s room, though, there was only warmth.
They had spent the afternoon together in that rare kind of quiet that exists only between two people who no longer feel any need to prove themselves to each other, and there had been no plan for the hours, no urgency, no reason to be anything other than exactly what they already were. They had simply stayed there, wrapped in warmth and closeness and the steady rhythm of shared breath, curled together on her bed with their limbs tangled beneath the thick pink blanket that still smelled faintly of laundry detergent and something floral, something unmistakably her.
A film played softly in the background, something they had both already seen and neither of them was truly watching. Mikasa lay half-asleep against him, her face tucked into the curve of his neck, her breath warm where it touched his collarbone. One of her legs rested over his, and her fingers lay lightly against his stomach, rising and falling with each inhale. Eren’s hand moved slowly up and down her back without thought or intention, guided by nothing more than instinct and comfort, and the weight of her against him, the quiet trust in the way she had curled herself around him, undid something inside him with a force so gentle it almost escaped notice.
He turned his head and kissed the top of her hair before looking at her properly, really looking, at the way her lashes rested against her cheeks, at the small crease that remained between her brows even in near-sleep, at the way her lips parted softly with each breath, vulnerable and unguarded, as though whatever she was dreaming belonged to some gentler world.
Something opened inside him then, not all at once and not with any violence, but with the quiet certainty of a truth settling at last into place.
I love her.
The thought landed so lightly he nearly missed it, though once it was there it did not leave. It remained, deepened, spread itself through him until he could no longer pretend it had not always been waiting. After that he found himself staring up at the ceiling, watching the light shift across her walls, listening to the pattern of her breathing, feeling the faint twitch of her fingers against his shirt, while the words kept returning with a steadiness that made them feel less like revelation than recognition.
I love her.
I love her.
I love her.
They were already woven into everything, into the way he touched her, into the way he thought of her when she was not there, into the way her presence made the world feel, for the first time in his life, as though everything had finally fallen into the right place. Yet he had never said it aloud.
Neither of them had.
Not yet.
They called each other baby, babe. He kissed her eyelids in the morning. She wrote her name beside his in the corners of her notebooks. They were always holding hands, always touching, always giving the others in their group an excuse to groan and tell them to get a room. The words I love you, though, had still not passed between them, and Eren did not want them to arrive carelessly. He did not want them to slip out on a train or in the middle of a walk to school or between two lines of laughter neither of them could control.
He wanted to choose the moment.
He wanted it to be quiet.
He wanted it to be private.
He wanted it to be real in a way nothing could shake.
Later that night, after Mikasa had fallen asleep with her head in his lap, and after he had walked home through the cold with his hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets and his heart pounding for reasons he could no longer dismiss, he reached out to the only person he knew would understand.
Well, he texted him.
“Hey. Where would you take someone you love, if it was freezing but you still wanted it to be the most romantic thing ever?”
The reply came almost instantly.
“You’re asking me this now?”
“Yes.”
“It’s 11 p.m., Eren.”
“So?”
“…Give me a minute.”
Ten minutes later, Armin delivered exactly what Eren needed: three links, a screenshot, and a voice note.
“This place is perfect,” Armin said, his voice slightly muffled through the speaker. “Sankt Peter-Ording. It’s on the North Sea. You’ve got this massive beach that just keeps going, and those old stilted houses out in the water, and wooden walkways through the dunes. It’s windy as hell, but it’s beautiful. Quiet too. You’ll be alone out there, though not in a lonely way. In a good way. Go there. Seriously.”
Eren played the voice note twice.
Then he looked again at the photograph Armin had sent, at the beach stripped of everything unnecessary, at the wooden structures standing on tall legs like patient giants, at the grey, endless stretch of sand and the sea beyond it, ancient and severe and strangely gentle all at once.
Perfect, he thought.
He smiled then, because he could already see her there with perfect clarity, his scarf wrapped tightly around her neck, her cheeks pink from the cold, her hand in his, and the words at last rising between them as naturally as breath.
⟢⟣
Two days later, instead of ending up at their usual café, Eren and Mikasa found themselves at Modern Graphics, the comic shop they always drifted back to in the heart of Kreuzberg. Tucked away on Oranienstraße 22, the place had long since become one of their favorite refuges, a haven for manga lovers with shelves crowded by volumes in German, English, and Japanese.
The moment they stepped inside, the familiar scent of paper and ink folded around them. Bright posters covered the walls, and the low hum of conversation between other customers gave the whole shop the comfortable, lived-in warmth of a place where people were allowed to care deeply about the things they loved.
Mikasa was in heaven almost at once. Her eyes moved quickly from shelf to shelf, her cheeks still pink from the cold outside, her scarf wrapped loosely around her neck as she scanned the newest arrivals.
“Do they have the new volume of My Hero Academia?” She asked, without looking up.
Eren was already holding it.
“Yup.”
She turned toward him with a grin. “You read my mind.”
“You always say that, babe.”
With a smirk, he handed it over before turning toward another section and scanning the spines. “I’m missing, like, three volumes of Berserk. Don’t let me forget.”
“Oh my God, you’ve been saying that for a month,” Mikasa called after him, already crouched in front of the shōjo shelf. “You keep rereading volume thirteen and refusing to move on.”
He grinned. “It’s a masterpiece.”
She rolled her eyes and lifted another volume. “This is out? Ao Haru Ride volume nine. I didn’t even know it had dropped here already.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he teased. “Your manga radar only works for tragic romances and unstoppable crying.”
Mikasa ignored him and reached for something else, though not before smiling to herself.
A few minutes later, as they drifted toward another section, she suddenly caught sight of the latest volume of Jujutsu Kaisen.
“Oh, they have it,” she said, immediately adding it to the growing stack in her arms.
Eren lifted a brow. “You and your obsession with that white-haired sorcerer.”
She laughed. “He’s cool, but he’s got nothing on you.”
He smirked. “Glad to hear it.”
Behind them, the bell above the door rang again as a few more customers stepped out of the cold and into the warmth of the shop. At the register, the woman behind the counter, tall and sharp-cheekboned, with a delicate Ghibli tattoo curling around her wrist, looked up and greeted them in German. Neither Eren nor Mikasa really noticed. They were too busy scanning the shelves.
Then, almost at once, they both caught sight of the familiar logo at the end of the manga aisle. They turned toward one another, grinning, and in the exact same breath asked,
“Do you have the new Attack on Titan?”
The woman laughed. “You two and half the city.”
She pointed toward the end of the aisle, where the German release of volume 23 had just been shelved.
“It came in this morning. Don’t run.”
They ran.
More accurately, they broke into the kind of half-run that came naturally to people too excited to bother with dignity. By then, a new release no longer needed announcing between them; both had learned to sense it almost before it arrived, as though the series carried its own pull and they had been orbiting it for years.
Their devotion had begun long before they became a couple, back when it was only a handful of borrowed volumes and the occasional late-night episode watched on some deeply questionable streaming site. What had first been simple fascination gradually widened into something larger, drawing in the rest of their friends until Attack on Titan stopped feeling like a private obsession and became something shared, almost sacred in the place it held among them.
Every release day turned into a minor event. Every cliffhanger sent them spiraling into voice notes, calls, memes, and hours of overanalysis in group chats so active nobody could keep up. Eren and Mikasa, Armin, Jean, Sasha, Connie, Annie, Colt, Porco, Reiner, even Pieck and Bertholdt, all of them had spent nights arguing over theories, grieving panels, debating which character had made the right choice, which twist had hurt the most, which moment they had predicted and which one had struck like a blow to the ribs. Eventually someone, usually whoever had cried hardest, would end the whole conversation by whispering, “I think this is the best thing I’ve ever seen.”
It was never only the plot.
It was the feeling of it. The desperation. The weight. The kind of loyalty that burned so fiercely it turned to ash. The sense of being trapped inside a world that did not care whether you survived it or not. It was brutal and dark and merciless, and yet it felt real in a way so many other stories never managed to be. Perhaps that was why it had wrapped itself so tightly around all of them, because in ways they could not always explain, they kept finding themselves there.
They saw it in the one who moved before thinking, as though the fire inside him would die if he ever stopped. They saw it in the one who could not stop calculating outcomes, even when that habit dragged guilt in behind it. They saw it in the one who would do anything to protect the people she loved, even if the cost of it was losing herself.
Sometimes it was uncomfortable, realizing how precisely fiction could mirror life.
Sometimes it was comforting too.
Mikasa, already flipping through the first pages of the new volume, let out a soft breath. “I’ve been waiting for this chapter since forever.”
Eren was reading over her shoulder before she even finished the sentence. “We are not making it through this one without somebody screaming in the group chat.”
She smiled. “Probably you.”
He smirked. “Only because I care.”
As she turned another page and paused over a sprawling cityscape rendered in brutal, beautiful ink, Eren tilted his head slightly and said, “You know, the city in this story, the walls, the towers, the curved streets, doesn’t it remind you of something?”
She glanced up. “What do you mean?”
“My grandparents’ town. In Bavaria. The one we visit every month.”
“The place with the wall around it?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Nördlingen. The more I look at these panels, the more I swear Isayama must have seen it. The towers. The shape of the city. The rooftop views. It’s eerie.”
Mikasa studied the drawing again. “You might be right. It has that same compact feeling. Like the air presses in.”
“And the architecture,” he added. “Those narrow streets. Those stone archways. The city feels old in exactly the same way.”
She tipped her head. “You think it was deliberate?”
“I don’t know,” Eren said. “But it would make sense. If I were building a world like this, I’d start from something real too.”
For a few moments they stood there without speaking, surrounded by the quiet life of the shop, the murmur of other customers, the faint rustle of paper bags at the register, the music drifting softly from the back room.
Then Mikasa whispered, almost dreamily, “I miss our watch nights.”
Eren grinned. “When was the last one? The retake of the Shiganshina arc?”
She shivered. “Don’t remind me. We were all on the floor by the end.”
“You almost passed out.”
“You cried.”
“I didn’t cry.”
“You totally cried.”
He gave up without much resistance. “Fine. Maybe a little.”
That night had been unforgettable. The whole group had crammed themselves into Armin’s living room beneath blankets, surrounded by pizza boxes and far too many soda cans, while somebody rigged up a projector and pinned a white sheet to the wall. When the episode aired, the one with the return, the one with that long shot of the protagonist’s face just before everything changed, the room had fallen so silent it almost felt unnatural.
Nobody breathed.
Nobody blinked.
They just sat there, stunned and devastated, their eyes wide, their hearts breaking in sync.
Then Sasha had started yelling. Connie had launched a pillow across the room. Jean had stormed out of the building entirely with Reiner and Bertholdt behind him. Mikasa had curled instinctively into Eren’s side and refused to move.
He still remembered looking down at her then, at the way her hand had tightened around his, and thinking, This matters. Even if it’s fiction. Even if it’s only ink and paper. This matters.
Now, standing beside her in the comic shop, Eren lowered his eyes to the volume in his hands before speaking, his voice quieter than before.
“I want to read this with you. Just you.”
Mikasa looked up at him, her eyes bright.
“You always do.”
⟢⟣
Outside, the sky still had that metallic color Berlin wore so often in winter, pale grey and cold and strangely bright at once. The wind had sharpened, though not enough to make them hurry, not with their bodies drifting so naturally close together and that quiet warmth still lingering between them.
Eren carried two crinkling paper bags in one hand, both filled with manga, their latest spoils stacked inside them in uneven abundance: fantasy epics, cursed sorcerers, tragic romances, post-apocalyptic horrors. The weight of them did not bother him in the slightest. His free hand was wrapped tightly around Mikasa’s, and that was the only thing he was truly aware of.
She walked close beside him, her arm brushing his now and then, her breath visible in the crisp air. Her scarf had slipped just enough to reveal the curve of her jaw, and before he could stop himself, he leaned in and kissed it, quick and light, a spark more than a gesture.
Mikasa turned toward him with a half-laugh. “You’re impossible.”
He kissed her again, this time on the cheek. “I’m affectionate.”
“You’re shameless.”
He gave a small shrug. “That too.”
She smiled then, openly and without reserve, in that way she seemed to save only for him, and the sight of it sent his heart racing with a force that still caught him off guard.
They turned onto a quieter street, their boots crunching over the last thin traces of snow. Berlin still carried that late-winter glow in its corners, that hesitant hush that comes just before spring begins to test the air, and above them the lampposts flickered reluctantly to life while a cyclist cut past in a blur of motion and cold wind.
Eren let out a breath.
Mikasa noticed at once. “You’re quiet.”
He shook his head lightly. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
For a moment he hesitated, his fingers tightening around hers almost without meaning to, and then, instead of answering right away, he stopped walking.
Mikasa looked up at him, surprised, her brows lifting slightly.
Eren glanced down at the bags in his hand, then back at her, and let out a soft, breathless laugh. “I was going to wait.”
She tilted her head. “Wait for what?”
He stepped a little closer, the bags rustling faintly at his side, and lowered his voice.
“I booked something.”
She blinked. “What?”
“A weekend,” he said. “Just us.”
A playful suspicion entered her face. “Like a hotel?”
He shook his head. “More like a house by the sea.”
She paused. “Eren...”
“I know it’s still freezing,” he added quickly, the words rushing out before she could interrupt. “And I know it’s random, but it’s somewhere quiet. Really beautiful. There are dunes, and wind, and you can see the water from the window. I just... I wanted to take you there.”
For a second she said nothing, and the silence made him continue.
“I talked to Armin. He helped. It’s on the North Sea.”
Mikasa blinked again, and then her smile returned, slowly this time, warm and tilted slightly to one side in the way he loved most.
“Is this a kidnapping?”
“Yes,” he said at once. “Voluntary.”
She leaned into him, nudging her shoulder gently against his arm. “You’ve been acting weird all day.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been fidgety since we left the house.”
“I know.”
Mikasa squeezed his hand, and he let out a long breath, as though something inside his chest had finally loosened and settled where it belonged.
“So,” he murmured, and now there was something almost shy in his voice, “will you come with me?”
She looked at him with an expression that was part mock severity and part such overwhelming affection that it made his stomach tighten.
“You’re carrying all my manga,” she said. “I think the answer’s obvious.”
Then she rose onto her toes and kissed him there on the sidewalk, softly and with complete certainty, in that way of hers that always felt both tender and unmistakable at once.
When she drew back, she smiled and said, “Lead the way, Jaeger.”
He did.
⟢⟣
They arrived just before sunset.
The train ride had been long, though quiet in the way the best silences always are, full of shared glances, Mikasa’s head resting on Eren’s shoulder, and his thumb tracing absent little circles over the back of her hand while the North Sea drew nearer with every passing station. By the time they reached the guesthouse, the light outside had already begun to shift into that golden late-afternoon hour that made the dunes seem to glow from within and turned the edges of the sea to glass.
Their room was upstairs, small and warm, with white walls and windows open to the wind. The bed was layered with thick blankets, the curtains moved softly in the draft, and at the center of it all stood a vase of red roses, thirty of them, lush and full, red as heartbeats, arranged with unmistakable care, as though they had been waiting there only for her.
Mikasa stopped in the doorway.
Her breath caught.
Eren said nothing at first. He only stepped in behind her and set their bags down gently, while the only sounds in the room were the gulls outside and the quiet rustle of the curtains.
She turned toward him slowly, her lips parted. “You... did this?”
He nodded, not with smugness and not even with pride, but with that quiet certainty that always felt more devastating than either.
“I wanted you to walk into this room and feel like you mattered.”
Mikasa blinked, her fingers curling lightly against her chest, because no one had ever said something like that to her before, not in that way, not with such plain and devastating simplicity. She took a step forward, reached out, and touched one of the petals as though she still was not entirely sure it was real.
Then she turned and kissed him.
Hard and slow all at once, with the kind of kiss that comes when something inside a person gives way and there are no words large enough for what they feel, only breath and hands and skin and the desperate need to be close.
They did not speak while they undressed. They did not laugh, and they did not hurry. They made love with the window open and the red roses watching, her back against the pillows, his name on her lips, his arms around her like a vow.
Later, when the room had gone soft with dusk and warmth and the unsteady rhythm of their breathing, they stayed where they were, tangled together in the sheets, saying almost nothing and yet somehow filling the silence with everything that mattered.
Only afterward, when the first stars had begun to appear beyond the window, did they finally dress for dinner. Mikasa wore the little black dress he loved, and Eren buttoned his shirt with fingers that still carried the faintest trace of trembling from the way she had touched him. They left the room hand in hand, and Eren was smiling so openly it seemed impossible for him not to.
He had booked the best table in the little restaurant by the shore, with candles, a view over the dark restless tide, and even a pianist playing softly in the corner. He chose her wine, complimented her dress in a way that turned her cheeks pink and made her smile go shy despite everything they already were to each other, and when dessert arrived, rich and sweet and shared between quiet glances and small stolen smiles, he leaned across the table and said, “You deserve to be treated like this every day.”
Hours later, they were walking along the wooden path by the sea, warmed by good food and lingering happiness, though more than anything, they were full of each other.
⟢⟣
The wind along the coastline had grown sharper, not enough to drive them back inside, though more than enough to make Mikasa pull her coat more tightly around herself as they walked. Her wool gloves were tucked into Eren’s pocket now, because her hand was in his instead, bare and threaded through his, still warm despite the cold. She wore a long charcoal coat that billowed slightly whenever the gusts caught it, and a soft navy knitted hat pulled low over her ears that made her look younger somehow, a little wilder, and even more distinctly herself.
Eren could not stop looking at her.
For a while they walked in silence beneath a sky where the stars looked pale and sharp, scattered above the open dark like notes from a song neither of them yet dared to sing aloud. Even so, the moment seemed to hum around them with a life of its own.
Then she shivered.
Only once, and barely enough to be seen, though he felt it at once.
Eren stopped. He released her hand for just a moment, and Mikasa turned toward him in faint confusion until she realized what he was doing. He was unwinding the red scarf from around his own neck, the one she always stole, the one he had put on that morning without thinking, perhaps because some quiet part of him had known all along that it would end the day wrapped around her instead.
He stepped behind her and, without a word, draped it gently around her neck, looping it close and tucking the ends into place with fingers that trembled more than he wanted them to. Then he leaned nearer, his mouth close to her ear, his voice soft and roughened by the cold and by something deeper.
“Keep it,” he whispered. “It’s always looked better on you.”
She went still for a second, her lips parting slightly, and then turned until she was facing him again. Her cheeks were red from the wind, or perhaps from something else entirely. She looked at him, really looked, and then she smiled.
Lifting both gloved hands, she cupped his face and kissed him.
There was nothing greedy in it, nothing hurried. It was simply full, full of everything she did not need to say aloud, full of trust and recognition and the quiet certainty of belonging. When they parted, she let her forehead rest lightly against his.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
Eren only nodded, still unable to speak.
They started walking again, more slowly than before, her hand returning to his while the red scarf trailed down the front of her coat and her breath caught softly in the wind. That was when it happened, that tightening in his chest, that strange flutter that felt like neither panic nor joy, but something immense trying to force its way out of him without knowing how. He tried to swallow it down. He tried to breathe through it. The words, though, were already there, resting against the back of his teeth, waiting at the edge of everything.
He squeezed her hand once, hard enough for her to turn and look at him, and Eren, for one suspended second, kept his eyes on the sky as though the stars themselves might grant him more time.
“I...” He began.
The word broke apart before it could become anything more. His voice caught in his throat as though even language did not yet know whether it belonged in the world between them, as though speaking it aloud might break something sacred or, perhaps more frighteningly, transform it forever.
Mikasa did not push or rush him; she simply stood there, steady and still and waiting, and that nearly undid him more than anything else could have, because no one had ever waited for him like that, no one had ever let him come apart in his own time without trying to hurry the process along or seal it shut again out of fear.
At last he looked at her.
She saw it immediately, not hesitation and not doubt, but the raw, stripped-down fear of someone standing at the edge of a feeling large enough to consume him whole. It was not fear of her, and it was not fear of rejection.
It was fear of the sheer magnitude of what lived inside him, because love, real love, had never seemed light to him. It had always felt heavy, demanding, the kind of thing that carved itself into your bones and rewrote the rhythm of your breathing. It asked for surrender. It asked for truth, and Eren had never been good at surrendering to anything.
Not until her.
“I’m scared,” he said at last, his voice so soft it nearly disappeared into the wind.
She did not flinch. She did not let go. Her gloved hand only tightened around his, and her gaze never left his face.
“I know,” she whispered.
She said it not as comfort, but as recognition, as though she had known all along, as though she had been carrying the same fear inside herself and had simply reached it first.
His throat tightened painfully. He could feel the pressure building in his chest with almost unbearable force, as though his heart were trying to break out of him. His fingers trembled. His jaw locked. Every muscle in his shoulders ached beneath the weight of what he had kept inside for so long, and still some part of him hesitated, still some part remained that boy who had grown up believing love always came with consequence, that to reveal it was to expose something too tender, that to speak it aloud was to make it breakable.
He could not hold it in any longer.
“I’ve been trying to say this for weeks,” he breathed, and this time his voice cracked open around the words.
Mikasa stepped closer until hardly any distance remained between them, until her breath warmed the small space at his mouth.
“Then say it,” she murmured.
He looked at her, at her wide and fearless eyes, at the red scarf around her neck, at the hat tugged low over her head, at the color the cold had drawn into her cheeks, at her slightly parted lips, while behind her the sea roared like a witness and above them the stars remained still and silent, waiting.
“I’m afraid it’ll change everything,” he admitted.
His voice was barely more than breath now, like a prayer spoken through a locked door.
Mikasa did not look away, but moved closer until her forehead nearly brushed his, lifting her gloved hand to his chest and resting it there, directly over the frantic pounding of his heart.
“It will,” she replied, and with those words a soft, aching smile touched her mouth, the one she seemed to keep for him alone, the one that always made the rest of the world fall away. “But not the way you think.”
For a breathless instant, everything around them seemed to quiet: the wind easing, the sky drawing lower, the stars flickering above the sea while the earth itself felt suspended, as though listening.
A sound left Eren that was not quite a sob, though it came painfully close, a breath pulled from somewhere deep inside him, as if he had been holding it in for years. His eyes burned, his whole body trembled, and at last he let the fear fall away and the love rise in its place.
⟢⟣
He could not hold it in any longer, not with her looking at him that way, so open and unguarded, as though the whole of her soul had tilted toward him, not with the wind threading through her hair and his scarf wrapped snugly around her neck, already claiming her in the quiet, wordless way he had never yet managed aloud. She stood before him steady and strong, and still so unmistakably his in every way that mattered, even if neither of them had ever said the words.
So he said them.
They did not come out gracefully. They came out scorched and unsteady, torn from the softest and deepest place inside him.
“I love you.”
Three words, too fast and too raw, sounding almost too loud in the stillness between them. They burst out of him before he had time to temper them, before he could breathe through them or smooth away any of their jagged edges, as though they had simply grown tired of being carried in silence and had chosen their own moment to be born. Heat flooded him at once. His cheeks flamed, his ears burned, his palms went damp, his jaw locked, and his heart struck so hard against his ribs that it hurt, as if it wanted her to hear it too.
Still, he did not look away.
He could not, because she was already looking at him as though he had split the sky open and poured the stars straight into her chest.
Time seemed to falter around them. The ocean roared somewhere behind her, the wind stole the warmth of their breath, and the sky above stretched wide and full and impossibly still.
Then she whispered it back.
“I love you too, Eren.”
The sound of his name in her voice made everything inside him shake. It made it real.
There was no hesitation in her, no falter, no wavering or shyness. Her voice was full and fierce and utterly certain, as though she had been waiting for that exact moment, as though the words had lived just behind her teeth for days and days, aching for release. Before he could even properly take it in, before he could blink or breathe or recover from the force of what she had just given him, she moved.
She launched herself at him in one swift, gracelessly perfect motion, a rush of breath and heart and instinct, and he caught her as though his body had known to do it long before his mind did. His arms closed around her with absolute certainty, holding her as though she were oxygen, while her legs locked around his waist and held tight with no intention of ever letting go again.
For the briefest second she buried her face in the curve of his neck, long enough to breathe him in, long enough for her heart to collide with his, and then she pulled back and kissed him.
The kiss was hard and messy and full of need. It was not perfect. Their noses knocked together, their teeth clicked, they missed each other at first and had to find the rhythm again, though none of it mattered, because this was not a kiss meant to look beautiful from the outside. It was all of the feeling they had kept pressed down finally spilling free between their mouths.
Eren let out a low, shaky sound from the back of his throat, not with lust, but with the sheer and excruciating force of relief, because she loved him too. She loved him. The truth of it was no longer imagined or hoped for or hidden in glances and gestures. It was real now, undeniable, written into the way she clung to him, into the way her fingers tangled in his hair, into the relentless way her lips kept returning to his as though no amount of kissing could ever quite be enough.
His hands slid beneath her thighs to hold her higher, strong and steady and almost rough in their urgency, one of them brushing over the curve of her ass as he pulled her closer, pinning her against him as if she weighed nothing at all, as if she had always been meant to live in his arms. A small, helpless sound escaped her when he did, and the feel of it nearly knocked the strength out of his knees. Her legs tightened around him at once, grounding herself to him with the same instinctive certainty with which he was holding her.
He kissed her again, deeper this time, slower too, allowing himself at last to tremble, allowing the sting in his eyes to gather into tears he had not even realized were there. When he finally drew back, it was only by an inch, his lips still brushing hers, his breath unsteady against her mouth.
“You’re mine,” he whispered, his voice hoarse.
Her eyes opened, dark and wide and burning as they found his.
“I’ve always been.”
The answer came breathless, but sure.
Eren smiled then with such force it almost hurt, and kissed her again while his whole body still shook with the enormity of it. They stayed that way, wrapped around each other in the dark, in love and in shock, while the ocean thundered behind them and the sky stretched open above, thick with stars, and everything else, the world, the noise, the hour itself, seemed to fall away.
Because this was the moment, not of their first kiss or their first time, but of finally saying it and meaning it.
⟢⟣
By the time autumn arrived, everything had changed.
They had graduated from their respective schools, Mikasa from the John-Lennon-Gymnasium and Eren from the Heinrich-Hertz, both with honors and both enduring the too-loud applause of their friends, who had spent the entire ceremony teasing them about the so-called golden couple somehow surviving high school.
They had, and after two years together already, something new had begun.
They were now in their second year of university, Eren at Humboldt studying Finance, Mikasa at AMD Akademie throwing herself into Fashion Journalism and Creative Direction, and for the first time they were no longer limited to seeing each other after class or on stolen weekends. They had moved in together.
Their apartment stood on a quiet corner of Prenzlauer Berg, in the kind of neighborhood that seemed built for artists and students and people who still believed life might become exactly what they dreamed of. Pastel façades lined the street, cafés spilled mismatched chairs onto the pavement, bicycles were chained to nearly every post, and the air always seemed to carry some mixture of espresso, rain, and fresh bread from the organic bakery downstairs. On Saturdays the street filled with flower stalls, flea-market tables, and couples walking hand in hand, laughing into the soft noise of the city.
It was perfect for them.
The apartment itself sat on the second floor of a classic Altbau, all high ceilings and tall windows that pulled in light as though the rooms were hungry for it. The floors creaked in the most endearing way. The living room had only just enough space for the secondhand sofa they had found after three exhausting days of searching and a table permanently cluttered with textbooks, sketchbooks, notebooks, and half-finished ideas. The bedroom was smaller, though warmer somehow, with one wide window overlooking the chestnut trees in the courtyard below.
Mikasa filled the place with softness. Blankets. Candles scented like vanilla and woodsmoke. A tiny ceramic fox she kept on the windowsill. Eren brought the music, a Bluetooth speaker he guarded like treasure, a stack of vinyl records he had more or less stolen from Zeke, and late-night playlists that somehow made her fall in love with him all over again.
The apartment had been his idea first.
He found it one rainy Saturday in August while scrolling through listings on his bed, with Mikasa beside him braiding her hair, and three weeks later they were carrying boxes up the narrow stairwell and laughing breathlessly every time they had to stop halfway to rest.
Their parents helped, of course. Furniture. Kitchen supplies. A little support with rent. Carla cried more than once. Grisha hugged Eren too tightly. Mikasa’s father took photographs of nearly everything. Her older brother stood in the corner with his arms folded, pretending very badly not to smile.
Even so, they had made a promise to each other almost immediately.
We do this ourselves.
Mikasa started tutoring first, mostly students from a nearby Gymnasium who needed help with literature, history, or English. Twice a week she rode her bike over with a tote bag full of pens, loose notes, and colored flashcards, and by the end of the month she was making enough to cover groceries and set a little aside. Eren did the same with math and economics, tutoring teenagers who barely understood compound interest but thought he was cool.
He charged them less than he should have.
Mikasa told him he was soft.
He only shrugged and said, “They remind me of me.”
They were not glamorous, and they were certainly not rich, but they were fine, and that was more than enough for them.
The apartment became theirs almost immediately. A bookshelf in the hallway filled up with manga and textbooks before they even finished unpacking. The kitchen became the place where Mikasa cooked in his T-shirts and Eren danced with her barefoot across the tiles while water boiled over on the stove. The bedroom took on the scent of cinnamon and cotton and the two of them together. Posters appeared on the walls. Candles multiplied. The record player took over one corner of the living room as though it had always belonged there.
Then, one Sunday just before midterms, they threw a party, not a huge one, only their friends: Armin, Sasha, Connie, Jean, Reiner, Bertholdt, Annie, Pieck, Porco, and Colt.
There was pizza and beer, loud music, people sprawled across the floor with drinks in mismatched cups. Jean lifted his beer and looked around the apartment with theatrical disbelief. “You two are insane. You’re what, twenty? And already playing house?”
“Correction,” Sasha said, swallowing a mouthful of pizza. “They’re not playing house. They’re playing married.”
Pieck nearly choked laughing. “Are you two going to adopt a dog next, or are you skipping straight to children?”
The room erupted at once. Groans, laughter, someone knocking into the coffee table.
“Give them two more weeks,” Jean muttered.
Connie pointed dramatically between them. “Two weeks until matching pajamas. Unironically.”
“They already do that,” Porco said from the sofa, unwrapping the last slice of margherita with the resignation of someone forced to witness too much romance.
Mikasa opened her mouth to protest, though Eren was already trying not to laugh, and before either of them could answer, Reiner pushed himself to his feet with a stretch and began rummaging through the pocket of his battered canvas backpack.
Armin went rigid. “No.”
Jean, who had clearly recognized the expression on Reiner’s face before the rest of them, groaned from where he was sitting on the floor. “Here we go.”
Reiner pulled out a small pouch, faded and familiar, tied shut with a worn leather cord. He opened it with the solemnity of a priest unveiling some sacred relic, and inside were six thick homemade joints, rolled with infuriating competence.
Connie made a sound like someone seeing heaven. “Yes.”
“Absolutely not,” Armin whispered, far too late to matter.
“Yes, absolutely,” Reiner shot back, as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world. “We are celebrating young domesticity.”
“Use the balcony,” Mikasa called from the couch, waving one hand vaguely toward the French doors. “Otherwise I’m setting all of you on fire.”
“Seconded,” Pieck said, already halfway into her oversized coat.
Bertholdt, who had been sitting cross-legged on the rug with a beer balanced on one knee, looked up with his usual patient expression and said, “In our defense, the balcony does make this feel almost elegant.”
“Nothing about you people is elegant,” Annie replied.
Colt, from the armchair near the window, raised his cup with a quiet grin. “I don’t know. Reiner presenting weed like a family heirloom had a certain dignity to it.”
“That,” Jean said, pointing at Colt, “is the first wrong thing you’ve said all year.”
Five minutes later, half the group had migrated onto the tiny balcony that had somehow become their unofficial smoking lounge, squeezed between a crooked laundry rack and three dying pots of herbs Mikasa kept insisting she could still save. The cold hit them hard the moment they stepped outside, though nobody seemed to care. The joints were lit, the first inhales passed around like communion, and someone dragged out a speaker so Pieck could take control of the music and queue up old Arctic Monkeys and Tame Impala.
Eren stayed inside at first.
Mikasa was curled against him on the couch, her legs thrown lazily across his lap, a glass of wine balanced on her stomach while her cheeks glowed warm from the alcohol and the constant laughter. The balcony door stood open just enough to let smoke drift back into the apartment. She turned her head, watched the haze curl through the gap, then looked up at him again.
“They’re going to get us evicted,” she muttered.
“They’ll have to kill me first,” Eren rasped, letting his hand slide absently along her thigh.
She gave him a sidelong look, then sat up. “Come on. One hit. For the memory books.”
He grinned. “You always know how to peer pressure me.”
Mikasa rolled her eyes, took his hand, and pulled him to his feet.
Outside, the wind bit at their faces, though by that point everybody was too pleasantly gone to care much. Connie was laughing at something Reiner had said that no one else had heard. Jean leaned against the railing as if he were starring in a deeply tragic French film. Pieck, wrapped in three layers and somehow still glamorous, kept changing the music every thirty seconds.
Mikasa slipped into the only free corner of the balcony and sat down with her back against the wall, knees drawn up to her chest. Eren crouched beside her and looped one arm around her shoulders to keep her warm. She took the joint when it came around, inhaled with the smooth familiarity of someone who knew exactly what she was doing, then passed it to him.
“You’re a terrible influence,” he murmured.
She tipped her head toward him, smiling. “I’m your favorite one.”
He did not argue.
Eren took his turn, the burn settling into his lungs with an old, familiar warmth, and exhaled slowly while his head tipped back against the wall and the stars above seemed to spin just slightly. For a second he could feel everything at once: the cold stone at his back, the warmth of Mikasa against his side, the laughter of the people he loved most wrapping around him like music.
“One of these days,” Mikasa whispered as Connie produced an absurd cough-cloud across the balcony, “the neighbors are going to call the police.”
“Let them,” Annie said from the doorway.
She stepped out wearing a hoodie far too thin for the weather, flicked ash into an empty beer can on the sill, and looked as unimpressed as ever. “You and I will go downstairs and handle it.”
Mikasa gave her a slow, dangerous smile. “Us, against some furious Berliner with a broom?”
“I’ll bring the broom,” Annie said.
“I’ll bring the bruises,” Mikasa answered.
“Remind me never to piss either of you off,” Jean laughed, half choking on smoke.
“You already have,” Annie said sweetly, plucking the joint from his fingers without asking.
Reiner, leaning against the other side of the railing with all the confidence of a man who thought the balcony belonged to him now, exhaled and said, “For the record, if the cops do come, I’m blaming Jean first. He looks the most guilty by default.”
“That is deeply unfair,” Jean protested.
Bertholdt, taking the joint from Reiner with a sigh that suggested he had accepted his fate years ago, said, “You do have the face of someone who would somehow insult a police officer in under thirty seconds.”
Colt laughed quietly into his drink. “He would not need thirty.”
More laughter broke out. Someone kicked over a beer bottle inside. Sasha reappeared carrying chocolate cake with no plates and no utensils. Bertholdt attempted to open a second bottle of wine with a fork because nobody could find the corkscrew. Porco and Colt ended up half collapsed on the sofa, arguing about whether anyone in the apartment owned a functioning lighter.
It was chaos.
Soft, golden, glowing chaos.
Right in the middle of it, Eren turned and looked at Mikasa.
She was facing Annie now, laughing at something under her breath, the tip of her nose red from the cold while smoke curled around her jawline in soft silver threads. Her fingers had caught unconsciously in the cuff of Eren’s sleeve, as if even distracted she still needed that point of contact.
She was beautiful, not in the sort of way that makes people stare, but in the sort of way that makes breathing feel briefly impossible.
She turned then, as though she had sensed his eyes on her, and caught him looking.
“What?” She asked, her voice low and a little sleepy.
He shook his head slowly. “Nothing.”
That was a lie, and they both knew it.
He still did not look away, and she held his gaze just as steadily, while all around them the smoke, the music, and the noise of their friends seemed to blur at the edges, leaving the two of them once more at the heart of their own small universe, bound to each other in a way no one else could reach and feeling, with quiet certainty, like home.
⟢⟣
The final years of university did not arrive with any grand sense of rupture, but with the quiet accumulation of ordinary days, one laid gently over the next until seasons shifted, years passed, and life, almost without announcing itself, changed once again.
Once they entered their Master’s programs, Mikasa and Eren had already built something solid together, not merely an apartment they shared, but a rhythm, a safety, a way of moving through the world side by side that no one questioned anymore.
Eren remained at Humboldt, pursuing a Master’s in Finance and Investment Strategies, where he quickly began to stand out for the precision of his thinking and his instinct for risk assessment and corporate structures. It was there, during a late seminar on international private equity, that he met Floch. He was thoughtful, ambitious, and perhaps a little too intense about macroeconomic forecasts, though he was also clever, loyal, and, once one got past the sharp edges, unexpectedly good company. They first bonded over a mutual dislike of a statistics professor, then over beers on a Thursday night, and by the following week Eren had invited him over to study. A week later, Floch had met the rest of the group. Somehow, almost immediately, he fit.
Mikasa, meanwhile, had chosen to specialize in Fashion Journalism and Creative Writing, a path designed for people who wanted to merge aesthetic sensitivity with editorial clarity. Her thesis would one day be shortlisted for a national award, though back then she was simply the quiet girl in black who carried notebooks full of ideas and observed more than she spoke.
It was during a workshop in her second year that she met Historia.
The class was called The Ethics of Representation in Fashion Media, an early morning elective that most students treated as background noise, arriving late, leaving early, and half-listening while they scrolled through their phones. Two people, however, took it seriously.
Historia always sat in the front row.
She was golden-haired and luminous-skinned, with outfits so perfectly curated they looked effortless in exactly the way Mikasa suspected they were not. She took color-coded notes, smiled at professors, and brought her own tea in glass bottles wrapped in knitted sleeves. One morning, tired of sitting in the back with students who seemed more interested in becoming visible than in learning anything at all, Mikasa took the empty seat beside her.
The first thing Historia did was offer her a piece of banana bread.
“I made it last night,” she murmured. “Too much for one person.”
Mikasa blinked, nodded, and accepted.
They were friends from that moment onward.
It took another two weeks, several coffee runs, shared articles, and more than one frantic pre-deadline editing session before Mikasa saw Historia step off a tram and into the arms of the woman waiting for her on the corner.
She was tall, sharp, and carried the kind of untamed presence that made it seem as though she answered only to herself. Her jet-black hair was cut just above the shoulders in a style that looked deliberate without ever becoming polished, her jeans were ripped, her boots worn, and her hands, which Mikasa noticed at once, were covered in ink, intricate lines curling along her fingers and wrists. She kissed Historia without hesitation, softly and fully, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and when they parted, she drew her closer by the waist and whispered something into her ear that made her laugh.
Mikasa stared.
The next day, after class, when she finally asked, Historia did not hesitate for even a second.
“That’s Ymir,” she said, sipping her tea. “She’s my girlfriend. We’ve been together for three years.”
“Is she a model?” Mikasa asked, half joking and half serious, because she looked like one.
Historia smiled. “No. She’s a tattoo artist. She works at this studio in Friedrichshain. It’s kind of famous, actually. Alternative, queer-friendly, mostly handpoke and blackwork. You should come sometime.”
“I’ve never had a tattoo,” Mikasa admitted.
Historia tilted her head. “Then she’ll adore you.”
That weekend, they went.
The studio was tucked inside a renovated warehouse, all cement floors and warm lights, with plants hanging from the ceiling and murals covering nearly every wall. Ymir was in the back, bent over someone’s shoulder blade with a level of concentration so complete it was almost beautiful to watch. When she finally looked up and saw them, she smiled, and it was one of those quiet, sideways smiles that never tried to impress anyone and somehow always did.
“Mika,” she exclaimed, testing the nickname as if she had every right to it already. “Nice to finally meet the girl who makes my sunshine laugh all week.”
Mikasa flushed, just slightly, and from that day forward she belonged to their world too.
Ymir was older by four years and already deeply rooted in Berlin in a way the rest of them were only beginning to become. She had lived through heartbreak, scraped by financially, and worked strange jobs before finding her place. She had tattooed drag queens, dancers, ex-cons, fashion designers, and, supposedly, the son of a very famous politician. She smelled of ink, tobacco, and citrus balm. She read poetry late into the night and recited lines aloud while Historia cooked. Sometimes she sketched across Historia’s bare back just because she could, just because she loved her.
They looked like opposites at first glance, Historia all softness and silk, Ymir all edge and ink, yet what existed between them was unmistakable, something built on time, hurt, tenderness, and the repeated act of choosing each other again and again. Mikasa admired them, though she never said so.
Slowly, Ymir became part of the group as naturally as if she had always been there. She came to birthdays, Sunday brunches, and film marathons at Eren and Mikasa’s flat. She argued with Armin about tattoo symbolism in literature, pierced Connie’s eyebrow after too many shots, got Jean blackout drunk on absinthe, then drew a cat across his stomach in Sharpie. Everyone loved her.
Even Eren, who usually took time to warm up to people, gave her the rare kind of approval he reserved for those he respected without feeling the need to explain why.
So, by the end of it, Historia and Ymir had been absorbed into the group with complete ease, laughing over wine in Eren and Mikasa’s kitchen, helping with last-minute university projects, wandering through the Mauerpark flea market on long Sunday afternoons.
The apartment in Prenzlauer Berg became a kind of base for all of them. Some nights there were six people in it. Other nights there were ten. There was always music, always someone cooking something, always at least one argument underway about anime canon, ethical investing, or which of them was most likely to end up rich first.
Then there was Sasha.
Sasha, who fell in love in the most unmistakably Sasha way imaginable.
It happened on a rainy afternoon when the girls had gone out to celebrate Mikasa finishing a portfolio submission. They ended up in a tiny Italian restaurant in Kreuzberg, all candles and jazz and hand-painted plates. The food was excellent, though Sasha barely noticed any of it, because the waiter, sweet and curly-haired, with flour dusted across his apron and laughter in his eyes, left a folded note beside her bill.
It read: You’re beautiful when you talk with your hands. If you ever want to do that again, here’s my number. - Niccolo.
They had been together ever since.
Niccolo was studying Food and Beverage Management at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik. He cooked as though it were his first language, and Sasha, naturally, became his favorite meal.
As graduation drew nearer, everyone began to sense the shape of the future forming around them.
Eren landed a competitive internship with a German-American investment firm in Mitte, one that handled portfolios for international luxury brands. The hours were brutal, though he was brilliant at it.
Mikasa, meanwhile, was offered a placement at Vogue Germany, working with the editorial team responsible for seasonal trend reports and backstage coverage during Berlin Fashion Week. She wrote for long hours, edited obsessively, and never regretted the direction she had chosen for even a second.
Their apartment grew quieter after that. More adult in its rhythms. Still warm, still recognizably theirs, but calmer. There were fewer all-nighters, more email chains, more meetings, more early alarms, more carefully structured chaos.
Even so, they remained unmistakably themselves.
There were still late dinners. Still hands brushing under tables when no one was looking. Still those glances exchanged across crowded rooms that said more than speech ever could. Weekends still meant lying in bed with manga and music, Eren with his head on Mikasa’s stomach while he read her lines aloud and she edited.
When Mikasa’s father came to visit, quieter now than he once had been and alone more often than before, he brought a thermos of miso soup and sat at their kitchen table as though it were a shrine built to his daughter’s happiness.
“You’ve built something good here,” he told her once, softly.
She only nodded and smiled, though her eyes stung a little.
Her older brother, now working as a paramedic, visited less often, but whenever he did, he hugged Eren like family and never once questioned the life they had made together. He said only one thing, always the same thing.
“Keep her safe.”
Eren always answered the same way too.
“Every day.”
They were in love, worn thin by long days and growing more real with every passing season, yet none of it frightened them, because even through all the change, their life together still felt steady beneath their feet.
⟢⟣
Eren graduated first.
A soft breeze moved through the tall linden trees lining the Humboldt campus, while sunlight filtered down in pale gold through the leaves. Berlin looked almost gentle that day, with its broad avenues washed in sunlight, the lindens stirring softly overhead, and the pale façades of the old buildings glowing beneath a sky so clear it made the whole city feel briefly suspended between spring and summer.
He had ironed his shirt carefully that morning. He had tied his tie three different times. Now, seated in the grand auditorium with his name printed neatly in the program, Eren was trying, with very little success, to remember how to breathe.
Mikasa was already in the front row beside Carla and Grisha, who, for once, had taken an entire day away from the hospital. Zeke was there too, wearing a linen blazer and sunglasses and carrying himself with the effortless arrogance of someone who looked as if he owned the building. Around them, filling out the row and spilling into the next, sat the rest of their people: Armin, Jean, Sasha, Niccolò, Connie, Reiner, Bertholdt, Annie, Pieck, Colt, Porco, Floch, Historia, and Ymir. They had all come, despite exams, internships, and deadlines that would have justified staying away.
When his name was called, Jaeger, Eren Lukas, a burst of cheering rose so loudly that half the room turned in surprise. Sasha let out a whistle sharp enough to cut through the formal applause. Jean actually stood. Mikasa clapped until her palms stung.
Eren crossed the stage with his shoulders straight and his mouth caught somewhere between a smile and a breathless laugh, and when the diploma finally rested in his hands, something inside him shifted with quiet finality.
That evening they celebrated at a candlelit bistro near the Spree. Grisha raised a glass to his son and said something low enough to make Carla wipe at her eyes. Zeke hugged him too hard. Floch lifted his drink and announced, far too loudly, “To the most terrifying brain in the room, and the only man who can still beat me at probability theory.”
Eren laughed. Mikasa rested her head against his shoulder. Beyond the windows, the city lit itself slowly into night.
Two weeks later, it was Mikasa’s turn.
The AMD Akademie graduation took place in a converted industrial space in Kreuzberg, all exposed beams and sheer white drapes, minimalist and sharply modern in the way only art schools ever managed to be. Design portfolios lined the walls, runway footage played in muted projections, and soft house music drifted beneath the low swell of conversation from proud parents and impatient partners.
Mikasa did not wear a dress. She wore a slate-grey pantsuit, sharply tailored, with gold thread at the cuffs and her mother’s earrings in her ears.
When she crossed the stage, Historia cried immediately. Ymir took a picture before anyone else could get in the way. Eren stood in the back row with his arms folded, his eyes bright behind his lashes, watching her with the sort of expression that made it clear he had forgotten there was anyone else in the room.
She did not look nervous.
She looked radiant.
The moment she stepped off the stage with the diploma in her hand, Eren met her halfway and kissed her, slow and firm and full of something very close to reverence.
“I’m so proud of you, love,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended.
“I know,” she whispered. “Say it again.”
He did.
After both ceremonies, the apartment in Prenzlauer Berg filled almost to bursting with flowers, cards, champagne bottles, and people who refused to leave. They kept their gowns on for hours, sitting barefoot on the kitchen floor with slices of leftover cake in their hands while music played too loudly and somebody, almost certainly Connie, spilled wine on the rug again.
Reiner grilled sausages on the balcony with the seriousness of a man performing a sacred rite. Pieck braided gold thread into Sasha’s hair. Jean fell asleep on the couch clutching Mikasa’s diploma as though it were a religious artifact. Historia and Ymir slow danced barefoot in the hallway. Sometime after midnight, when only the light above the stove was still burning, Eren kissed Mikasa at the temple and murmured, “We’re here. We actually made it.”
She only smiled, and after that life changed again.
Eren’s internship at Valenstein & Marek Capital, a sleek German-American investment firm based in Mitte, turned quickly into a formal offer. He was placed in the luxury asset management division, overseeing portfolios for high-profile clients in fashion, art, and real estate, and the work, high-pressure, relentless, exacting, lit something in him that Mikasa had never seen burn quite so brightly before.
Mikasa, after a summer spent publishing trial articles and assisting with backstage coverage during Berlin Fashion Week, was offered a contributing writer position at Vogue Germany, along with a mentorship under a senior editor for the winter collection. Her first published feature, on post-pandemic couture narratives, appeared both online and in a limited print run. Eren bought ten copies. Armin framed one.
Before new jobs could fully claim them, before the emails, deadlines, and slow, devouring machinery of adult routine had the chance to close around their days, they went where they had been dreaming of going for years: Japan, for three weeks, just the two of them, with no coworkers, no clients, no obligations, only maps, trains, and time.
By then, the manga had ended. The final chapter had dropped only a few months earlier, closing the story that had shaped an entire generation of readers, and their group chat had imploded the night it came out. There had been voice notes, essays, memes, playlists, and full-scale arguments. Sasha cried so hard she could barely speak the next day. Armin rewrote the ending twice in his Notes app. Jean claimed he was not angry, only “dead inside.” Reiner had some kind of breakdown while listening to the ending song. Bertholdt smoked a joint just to quiet his mind. Annie refused to discuss it at all. Connie, in full melodramatic collapse, declared that he wanted to sue Isayama for ruining his sanity forever. Pieck, after reading the final sentence, had shut her eyes and muttered, “Why did I ever start this?”
Eren and Mikasa had read it together in bed, wrapped around one another with the only light in the room coming from Mikasa’s phone.
When it ended, truly ended, they did not speak. They only stared at the screen for a long moment and held each other a little tighter.
The story was over, but what it had left inside them was not.
So when Mikasa turned to him one February night, with snow dusting the window and her head resting on his shoulder, and asked softly, “Should we go?”
Eren did not hesitate.
“Yes.”
⟢⟣
They landed in Tokyo in early spring, when the air carried the scent of rain and sakura petals and the first blossoms were only beginning to loosen themselves from the branches like carefully kept secrets. The sky was pearl-grey, the light soft and diffused, as though someone had drawn a veil of silk across the sun.
Mikasa had planned the entire itinerary in a worn Moleskine notebook, every stop carefully marked out, from the ryokan in Kyoto to the neon alleys of Osaka, from the art districts of Naoshima to the old temples of Nara. Eren, as promised, had only added two things to the schedule: food and Attack on Titan. Everything else, he told her, was hers.
They ate everything.
They bowed until their spines ached. Eren cried standing before Sensō-ji in Asakusa. Mikasa disappeared into a bookshop in Shinjuku and did not reappear for nearly an hour.
After Tokyo, they moved through the heart of Honshu.
Kyoto wrapped itself around them in vermilion shrines, moss-covered stones, and that deep, fragrant silence that seemed to cling to the skin like incense. They wore yukata in the ryokan, sank into steaming onsen water, and watched the sun rise behind the hills from their wooden balcony while the morning still felt untouched by the rest of the world.
In Nara, deer nudged at Mikasa’s pockets in shameless search of crackers, and she laughed so loudly that Eren nearly dropped his phone trying to film her. In Kanazawa, where gold leaf seemed to shimmer from every corner, she spent an entire afternoon sketching details from Kenroku-en into her journal, her hair pinned back with a cherry blossom clip while he watched her with that quiet, helpless fondness he no longer even tried to hide.
They wandered through the old houses of Shirakawa-go with the last of the snow still melting from the thatched rooftops, drank amazake from paper cups, and sat for a long while on the hillside above the village, watching the mist curl over the valley like a dream too beautiful to release. In Kobe, they walked the harbor after dark while the sea breeze tangled Mikasa’s hair and Eren draped his jacket around her shoulders, and later they splurged on a dinner of Kobe beef so absurdly expensive and so good that both of them came dangerously close to tears.
Then came Hiroshima.
It was a place Eren had insisted on seeing.
They stood before the Peace Memorial hand in hand, saying nothing, only breathing, while the quiet of the place seemed to settle into them. Mikasa rested her fingers lightly against his back as he looked at the Atomic Dome, his throat tight, his eyes darker than usual.
“It reminds me,” he said softly, “how fast everything can be lost.”
She did not answer, because she did not need to. She only tightened her fingers around his.
Of course, even there, they were still themselves.
They bought too much merchandise. They ate themed food in cafés with pink chairs and anime menus. They posed like idiots beneath every arcade sign in Akihabara. Mikasa lost forty minutes of her life to a crane machine because she fell in love with a plushie she absolutely had to win, and Eren eventually ended up bribing a teenager to help her get it.
They were in Japan, in love, and unmistakably happy.
⟢⟣
On the eleventh day, after Kyoto’s tranquil temples and the sakura-lined canals of Kanazawa, after the sacred stillness of Hiroshima and the electric chaos of Akihabara, after postcards and more postcards and the endless clicking of Eren’s camera every time Mikasa so much as glanced at a torii gate, they finally made it to Osaka.
That morning, dressed in hoodies and sneakers with their fingers laced together, they passed beneath the steel archway of Universal Studios Japan, the famous theme park set in Osaka’s Konohana Ward along the bay. It was still early, the air crisp, the vendors only just opening their stalls, and already the whole park seemed to pulse with energy. They walked past the Minion Mayhem zone with barely a glance, skipped the Spider-Man ride despite Eren’s promise that they would come back to it later, and offered the Mario Kart track only a brief salute in passing, because they were there for one thing and one thing only.
Attack on Titan: The Real.
The entrance was impossible to miss. A jagged fortress wall had been built into the edge of the Cool Japan seasonal attraction, enormous flags snapping overhead with the Survey Corps crest stretched across them, while hidden speakers thundered with music full of strings, war drums, and the lingering tension of battles long since written into memory. Every few minutes, a loop played above them, voice clips in Japanese, battle cries, the hiss of ODM gear, Titans roaring somewhere in the distance, and looming over everything were two enormous Titan heads bursting through the wall itself, one snarling, the other screaming.
Mikasa gasped out loud.
There was nothing subtle about it. She grabbed Eren’s sleeve so fast she nearly yanked him sideways.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.”
He only grinned and said, “Go,” and she did.
They were ridiculous from the start, screaming and laughing as they climbed into the hand-shaped photo booths and posed like panicked civilians caught mid-disaster. Mikasa threw herself dramatically backward in the palm of the Colossal Titan as if she were about to faint, while Eren, unwilling to be outdone, struck a heroic pose with his hoodie zipped to the throat, fist over his heart, lips set in the expression of some doomed commander. A friendly attendant offered to take their picture together, and they complied with comical solemnity, dead serious in the grip of a Titan’s hand, only to break into helpless laughter the moment the shutter clicked.
“Love, we look like idiots,” Mikasa laughed, wheezing as she wiped at her eyes.
“Glorious idiots,” Eren replied, already setting the photo as his phone wallpaper.
The merchandise shop came next, tucked just behind the main wall inside a reconstructed façade of Shiganshina District. Brick buildings leaned inward at careful angles, broken barrels had been scattered across the streets, and the stone underfoot had been aged just enough to feel convincingly worn. They spent nearly an hour in there.
Eren bought the limited-edition Wings of Freedom hoodie, dark navy with the emblem embroidered in silver across the back. Mikasa chose a black baseball cap with SCOUT REGIMENT written in kanji and a keychain shaped like a 3D Maneuver Gear hook. Together they added matching mugs, a replica sword, a plush Armored Titan that Mikasa threatened on sight to throw directly into the nearest bin, and a tiny notebook designed like a field report log.
“Don’t judge us,” Eren told the cashier as they checked out.
The man only smiled. “Trust me,” he answered in English. “You’re not even close to the worst.”
After that came the main event, the 4D attraction.
They queued beneath a steel-and-canvas canopy, passing posters of fallen comrades and bilingual warnings about motion sickness, until at last they were strapped into their seats, handed 3D glasses, and dropped headfirst into the chaos of the Fall of Wall Maria. The ride was part film, part motion simulator, part assault on every sense at once, all flashes of steel and screaming wind and fire, the sensation of flying on ODM gear so convincing it almost made breathing difficult. The original voice cast only made it worse. At one point Mikasa gripped Eren’s arm so hard during a sequence that he lost feeling in his hand.
Then came the Titans.
They fell from the sky, crashed toward the gates, and filled the screen with those grotesque, surreal expressions of hunger, too close and too alive and far too much.
The audience applauded when it was over, and a few people were crying.
Eren and Mikasa sat still for a second after the lights came back up, both of them staring straight ahead.
“Round two?” He asked.
She was already undoing her harness.
They stepped back out into the daylight dazed and breathless, a little sweaty, a little shaken, and that was when they saw it.
The replica of the outer gate of Shiganshina.
It had been recreated almost perfectly: two towers, stone columns, the enormous iron gate torn halfway open, claw marks gouged into the wall, cracked pavement, a Scout banner swaying gently above the arch. At the center of the keystone overhead, carved into the stone itself, were the Wings of Freedom.
They slowed as they passed beneath it.
The noise of the park receded behind them until only the wind remained, along with the rhythmic clicking of ODM gear effects drifting from hidden speakers.
Mikasa stopped first.
She reached for his hand.
“You know,” she said quietly, “when I was sixteen, I thought this story was going to ruin my life.”
Eren did not laugh. He looked at her properly, at her cheeks bright with cold and feeling, at the faint tremor in her fingers, at the weight she had not fully put into words sitting just behind her eyes.
He let out a breath. “It kind of did.”
She nodded once. “But I’m still here.”
He tightened his fingers around hers. “And you’re mine.”
Without another word, she leaned in and kissed him there, right beneath the Wings of Freedom, like someone coming home.
The moment felt sacred, like the closing of some impossibly long chapter. Around them, other fans had gone quiet. Some stood with tears in their eyes, some were holding hands, some clutching old manga volumes tightly against their chests, and no one laughed, no one interrupted, because everyone there understood.
Some stories do not leave you.
They burn themselves into your blood. They teach you how to hope, how to break, how to put yourself back together after.
When Mikasa finally drew back, her hands were still resting on his shoulders.
“I’m glad we came,” she whispered.
Eren pressed his forehead gently to hers. “I’m glad we survived.”
In the end, they remained there together beneath the gate, beneath the emblem, beneath the sky of a world that had once lived only on paper, and for the first time there was nothing to outrun, because they were alive, they were free, and they were still standing side by side.
⟢⟣
One week later, in the quieter final stretch of their journey, they arrived in Hita, in Ōita Prefecture.
It was the warmest morning they had had since landing in Japan. The sun had risen gently over the mountains encircling the town, bathing the tiled rooftops in an apricot-colored light, while the streets of Hita, Hajime Isayama’s hometown, felt both peaceful and alive, with children weaving past on bicycles, shopkeepers sweeping the fronts of their stores, and steam lifting from cups of morning tea behind café windows.
Eren and Mikasa had taken the first train in. They had booked a small guesthouse near the river, old and wooden, with sliding doors and tatami floors, and the whole place carried a kind of stillness that made Eren feel as though he had stepped into one of those long, wordless manga panels where nothing seems to happen and yet everything does.
“This is it,” Mikasa whispered, turning slowly to take it all in. “This is where it all started.”
He nodded and drew in a breath that smelled of cedar, stone, and something green and damp from the morning air.
They did not rush.
They wandered through the town like pilgrims, not with the hunger of tourists trying to collect sights, but with the quieter desire to understand.
They visited the Hita City Museum first, where a small exhibit was still dedicated to Isayama’s work, with sketches, photographs, and early notes written in that sharp, angular hand of his. Mikasa stood before one glass case for nearly ten minutes, tracing the edge of a storyboard with her eyes as though the shape of it alone might reveal something essential.
Afterward they walked through the old Mameda-machi district, past merchant houses and narrow canals, and Eren bought them both yubeshi from a stall, then stood watching Mikasa nibble at hers while the wind teased strands of hair loose beneath her black baseball cap.
She looked radiant in that light, and as always, Eren reached for his phone.
“Wait, stay like that. Just like that, love,” he murmured, stepping back a little.
“Eren.”
“Please?”
He took three pictures in quick succession. “Okay, now turn a little to the left. No, your other left. Good. Chin up. Now look at me, but don’t smile.”
“Eren.”
“I mean it. You look incredible. I’m framing these, baby.”
She rolled her eyes, though her cheeks had already started to flush, and let him keep going. A few minutes later she took the camera from him and turned it back on him instead.
“Oh, so now you’re shy?” She teased when he instantly forgot what to do with his hands. “No, no. Hands in your pockets. Look off into the distance like you’re about to start some tragic monologue.”
“Like this?”
“Exactly like that.”
They laughed like children.
Then, after a late lunch, they went to see it.
The statue.
It stood in a quiet, gardened square, bronze and solemn and almost overwhelming in its presence, three figures facing a great stone wall that loomed before them, blank and massive. None of them turned. None of them smiled. They simply stood there, still and ready.
Eren and Mikasa said nothing at first; they only watched.
It was eerie. Sacred, too. More than anything, it carried the exact same feeling they had known as teenagers, back when they devoured new chapters during school breaks, cried over panels, and believed no story could ever feel more real than this one.
“I still remember the first time I saw the anime opening,” Mikasa said at last, her voice low. “It felt like something inside me just opened.”
Eren’s fingers brushed hers.
“It’s the reason I fell in love with stories.”
She turned toward him, surprised.
He smiled. “And then with you.”
Her breath caught.
She kissed him then, softly and with absolute certainty, and afterward they asked a passerby to take a photo for them. An older woman agreed with a warm smile and took three, then four, as though she understood instinctively that one would not be enough.
When they looked through the pictures, Mikasa inhaled sharply.
There they were, real and alive, standing just behind their fictional echoes and looking up at the wall together, and Eren sent the photo straight into the group chat without a caption, only the image itself, though the reactions still came within seconds.
Sasha:
I’M GOING TO THROW UP.
I’M CRYING.
YOU TWO HAVE NO SOULS.
Jean:
wtf
wtf
wtf
i hate how good you look
Floch:
don’t mind me sobbing in public
Armin:
I can’t breathe! This is art!
I need this as my lockscreen immediately
Historia:
I’m actually emotional. Like?? Real tears??
Pieck:
Mika looks like she’s about to kill a Titan with her bare hands. 10/10
Connie:
WHY DO YOU BOTH LOOK LIKE STATUES TOO WTF I’M SHAKING
Then came an audio message from Sasha, played at full volume.
“IF YOU MEET ISAYAMA, I SWEAR TO GOD, I SWEAR ON MY MOTHER’S OVEN, YOU TELL HIM I AM STILL TRAUMATIZED AND I HAVE NOT HEALED. AND IF HE EVER COMES TO BERLIN, I’M THROWING HANDS. FIST. ELBOW. KNEECAP. FOR WHAT HE DID TO MY FAVORITE CHARACTER. BURNING THEM ALIVE? I WILL SET HIS EDITOR ON FIRE. I AM SERIOUS.”
In the background, Pieck could be heard wheezing with laughter while Niccolo shouted, “YOU CANNOT THREATEN A NATIONAL TREASURE.”
A second audio arrived almost immediately after, this time from Connie.
“LISTEN TO ME. LISTEN TO ME VERY CLEARLY. I AM SENDING HAJIME ISAYAMA THE INVOICE FROM MY THERAPIST, AND I EXPECT FULL REIMBURSEMENT. FULL. WITH INTEREST. I HAVE NIGHTMARES ABOUT THAT ONE CHAPTER. YOU KNOW THE ONE.”
That one ended in chaotic breathing and someone, almost certainly Reiner, yelling “PREACH” in the background.
For a beat, the chat went quiet.
A second later Annie, as dry and unbothered as ever, dropped in with:
Or you could just read a really good fanfic on Ao3 or Wattpad and move on.
There was barely enough time for the silence to register before Sasha came in at the speed of divine intervention:
LINKS. ANNIE. NOW.
Pieck:
YES. DROP THEM. I’M AT WORK BUT I’LL RISK IT.
Historia:
I’ve read everything tagged slowburn + canon divergence + emotional devastation. I NEED NEW CONTENT. PLEASE!!!!!
Floch:
Okay but I’m sorry, the girls in this fandom are actually unwell. I read ONE fic and she was calling him “my slaughter prince” by chapter 3. I haven’t slept since.
Armin:
Same. I read one where he dies seventeen times and she still marries his ghost in the end. I was not okay for a week. But it was beautiful!
Connie:
I’m convinced Ao3 is a spiritual trial. You do not come out the same.
Jean:
You all scare me!
Porco:
No, because why did I open one out of curiosity and suddenly he was bleeding in the snow for twelve pages while she called him her ruin. What is wrong with all of you?!
Bertholdt:
To be fair... some of them are written frighteningly well. I started one on the train and missed my stop.
Reiner:
I’m not ashamed to say canon divergence saved my mental health. Some of us need alternate endings to survive.
Colt:
I don’t even read them often and somehow I still ended up in a 200k slowburn where nobody kissed until chapter 41. I respected the commitment.
Annie:
Good.
Sasha:
New rule: fanfic night. Every week. Wine, tissues, and dramatic readings.
Armin:
I volunteer to narrate the pining chapters.
Reiner:
I’ll handle the emotional war monologues. I was born for this.
Bertholdt:
I can read the tragic ones if nobody minds crying.
Porco:
Absolutely not. If Bert starts reading in that voice we’re all done for.
Colt:
I’ll bring snacks and emotional support. In that order.
Floch:
I’ll bring therapy.
Annie:
You’ll need it!
Mikasa smiled down at the screen, her heart suddenly too full for something so small, warmth rising into her cheeks as Eren leaned over her shoulder, read the last few messages, and murmured against her temple, “I love them.”
“They’re insane.”
“They’re ours.”
He laughed so hard his eyes filled with tears, while Mikasa covered part of her face with one hand, half embarrassed and half overwhelmed by how completely those people belonged to them.
“I can’t believe we have to go back to our real lives after this,” she said.
“Let’s not,” he answered immediately. “Let’s stay here. We’ll open a noodle shop. We’ll be happy.”
She laughed and let her head fall against his shoulder.
“Fine,” she whispered. “But only if you wear the hoodie every day.”
He kissed her temple.
“Deal.”
⟢⟣
The train rattled slowly into the little countryside station, its brakes giving off a long, thin squeal that sounded almost like an old memory being dragged back into focus.
Doncio.
It was not a town made notable by fame or grand history, but by something quieter and older, something that seemed to live in the bones of stories passed from one generation to the next. This was where Mikasa’s mother had been born, where her grandparents had lived, where, long ago, there had been childhood laughter, plum blossoms, and the sound of wooden sandals striking warm stones.
The station was small, almost delicate in its simplicity, with a single platform, a faded blue bench, and a hand-painted sign in hiragana. Along the fence, clusters of spring flowers had opened fully, pale and soft in the mild air, while everything around them carried that unmistakable sense of the season having settled in at last.
Mikasa stepped off the train with slow, careful movements, the wheels of her suitcase barely making a sound. Eren followed beside her, half a step behind, watching her with that same quiet reverence he always seemed to carry whenever something mattered deeply to her.
“You okay?” He asked gently.
She nodded once. “Yeah. I just want to see it.”
They walked down the main street in silence, and Doncio felt at once exactly as she had imagined it and nothing like it at all, holding that peculiar stillness certain places acquire when time has not forsaken them, but merely allowed them to grow quiet. Wind moved softly through the bamboo groves at the edge of the fields, a farmer raised a hand to them from beside a vegetable stand, and a cat slept on the stone steps of a shrine as though it had belonged there forever.
Everywhere Mikasa turned, she felt the presence of memory, not truly her own, and yet something in her recognized it all the same.
They found the house half-hidden behind a thick tangle of green. The wooden gate hung unevenly from rusted hinges, the roof tiles were chipped, and the garden had long since grown wild, though the stone path leading to the entrance was still visible, each piece seeming as though it might once have been set there by her grandfather’s hands, one after another with patient care.
She stood before the gate for a long while with her arms folded lightly across herself, her face unreadable and her eyes wide.
Eren said nothing, only reached for her hand and held it.
“I think she used to sit here,” Mikasa said at last, pointing toward the edge of the low stone wall. “She told me once that she and her sister used to watch the rain from there and just wait for the thunder to pass.”
He glanced toward it, then back at her. “I can see it.”
She looked at him then, and something in her expression softened. “You’re really here with me.”
His smile was quiet and a little crooked. “Always, love.”
Her eyes shone at that, though she said no more.
“Come on,” he murmured after a moment, giving her fingers the gentlest tug. “Let’s take a walk. You can show me everything she loved, even if we have to guess some of it.”
So they wandered slowly through the quiet lanes, past moss-covered lanterns and the old community bathhouse that had long since closed its doors. Mikasa paused at nearly every corner, every tree, every bend in the path, as though she were waiting for the ghost of her mother to appear young again, barefoot and laughing, running toward the river with the whole of spring still opening around her.
After a while they sat beneath a willow by the bank, the air soft and lightly perfumed with water and new leaves. Mikasa took out her sketchbook. Eren lowered himself beside her, then rested his head in her lap while her pencil moved lazily across the page, tracing the curve of the bridge, the light caught in the water, the shadows of birds passing overhead.
“Do you think she’d be proud of me?” She asked quietly.
Eren reached up and brushed his fingers over her wrist.
“I think she’s looking at you right now and smiling,” he said. “Because you came back.”
She gave no answer, but bent and pressed a kiss to his forehead instead.
By evening, when the sky had begun to melt into watercolor shades of lavender and rust, they walked through Doncio one last time. Golden light pooled in the windows, wind chimes stirred softly above the doorways, and a little boy ran past them with a paper fan in his hand, laughing at something only he could see.
When Mikasa stopped again before her family’s old house, no tears came. What left her was quieter than that, only a whispered goodbye, and Eren, stepping up behind her, wrapped his arms around her and held her there for exactly as long as she needed.
The following morning they boarded the train back to Tokyo, while the countryside slipped past the window like a dream gradually loosening its hold, and by the time they reached Haneda Airport, with the city alive once more in glass and noise and neon, Mikasa was sitting beside Eren in the terminal, her head resting on his shoulder as she watched the planes rise into the sky.
“Thank you, love,” she whispered.
He turned his head slightly toward her. “For what, baby?”
“For coming with me. For understanding. For making this something I’ll never forget.”
Eren kissed the top of her head.
“You’ll always have this,” he said softly. “And me.”
So when the plane finally rose into the clouds, above Japan and above memory and above the story they had just lived together, they sat with their hands clasped, still close, still safe.
What neither of them yet knew how to name was the ache already beginning to gather between them, small and invisible and quiet as a shadow folded into the space between their palms, because once they landed in Berlin, something would shift, and the silence that had once held only warmth would begin, slowly, to turn cold.
⟢⟣
It did not happen all at once.
There was no single moment to point to, no fight, no silence sharp enough to call itself a fracture. The change came more quietly than that, more slowly, the way certain things enter a life so gradually that they are already part of the furniture before anyone realizes they have arrived.
A few months had passed since they returned from Japan. Summer had settled over Berlin and then, almost without warning, thinned into autumn, until the city had turned gold and grey and cold, with that particular kind of cold that gathered on the windows and slipped into the mornings alongside the sound of trams and deadlines.
They were still living together, still laughing, still reaching for each other in passing, and in so many ways they remained unmistakably themselves, even as something had begun to shift, not in the way they looked at one another, but in the spaces that had quietly begun to open between those looks.
Eren had always been ambitious. It was one of the things Mikasa had loved most fiercely about him, the way he pursued things with his whole chest, the way his eyes brightened whenever he spoke about building something real, something lasting. He had never been like other people. He wanted to create an empire, not out of vanity, but out of purpose, and part of that purpose had always, always been her.
Back in university he used to tell her, “I want you to live the most beautiful life. I want to give you everything.”
He had meant it.
He still did.
Only now, everything had begun to ask something in return.
At first it was only longer hours at the office. Then came the weekend meetings, the early-morning calls with clients in New York, the late dinners with the Luxembourg board, the habit of checking emails even while they were eating breakfast. Mikasa still woke beside him, though half the time he was already on his phone by then, or gone before she properly opened her eyes.
He still cooked sometimes. He still came up behind her in the kitchen and slipped his arms around her waist. He still kissed the side of her neck while she made tea.
The difference was harder to define than to feel.
Those moments had grown shorter. More distracted. As though part of him were always elsewhere, caught in the momentum of everything he had worked so hard to build and no longer fully able to set it down.
They were still sleeping together.
At first, Mikasa had clung to that almost without realizing it, because the passion between them had not disappeared. It remained there, familiar and electric and desperate in all the ways she knew by heart. Eren had always been possessive with her in bed, never carelessly, but with an attentiveness so instinctive and devoted that it seemed woven into the very structure of how he loved her. He used to take his time, to worship her body with that almost unbearable patience of his, to murmur things against her skin that left her weak in his hands and trembling with the certainty of being utterly known.
Now it was different.
It had grown faster, rarer, threaded through with a kind of haste that had never belonged to them before. It was still good, undeniably, still capable of pulling her under, still able to leave her breathless in his arms, though something in it had changed all the same, as though even desire had begun to move to the rhythm of deadlines.
She did not blame him. Not truly. He came home late and exhausted, sometimes so tired he could barely keep his eyes open, and he still kissed her, still held her by the hips, still told her, I missed you, with a sincerity she never doubted. The trouble was what came after. He would fall asleep halfway through their favorite show, or take a call while she was still naked and curled against his chest, the warmth between them not yet faded.
Mikasa said nothing at first, because she understood too well what it meant to be consumed by work. Her own life was no softer. At Vogue Germany, every day required proof that she belonged there, and she moved through pitches, interviews, research, styling previews, and gallery features with the relentless discipline of someone who knew she could never afford to arrive less polished, less prepared, or less composed than anyone around her.
She kept up.
She did not resent him for it.
Even so, there were evenings when she walked home through the rain with her heels in one hand and her folded coat in the other, and the longing hit her with such force that it made her chest ache, despite the fact that he was waiting for her at home, despite the fact that he was, in every ordinary and visible sense, still hers.
They loved each other. She knew that with complete certainty, and so did he.
There were moments that proved it without effort, moments in which he pulled her into his lap, buried his face in the curve of her neck, and whispered, my baby, I love you so much, in that low, tired voice that always seemed to undo her. There were flashes of them that remained whole and unmistakable, reminders that whatever had begun to shift had not erased what they were, only made it harder to reach.
What frightened her was not the disappearance of love, but the slow drifting of all the little things that had once carried it so naturally. She began to notice the absence of gestures she had never before needed to think about: the way he no longer reached for her automatically when she climbed into bed, the way he had stopped pressing absent kisses behind her ear while she made coffee, the way his hand no longer settled at her waist in public as though it belonged there by instinct.
It was not neglect, at least not in any deliberate sense, which made it harder to name and, in certain ways, far more frightening. What had happened between them was subtler than harm. They had become something assumed, something so thoroughly embedded in the structure of daily life that it no longer seemed to require tending, like the ceiling above their heads or the pulse beneath their skin.
That, more than anything, unsettled her, because love so rarely dies in one dramatic rupture. More often it wears away in increments, one forgotten glance at a time, one interrupted moment at a time, one small silence after another.
One Saturday morning she found herself alone at the breakfast table, the eggs on both plates slowly going cold while Eren took yet another last-minute call behind the glass door of his office. At one point he looked up and mouthed, I’m sorry.
She nodded, and the ache returned anyway.
Once again, that same quiet question unfurled inside her, soft and terrible in its persistence:
What are we becoming?
She had no answer. She knew only this: the version of him who had once run late because he could not stop kissing her was now leaving early because he could not afford to miss a call.
She loved him.
More than anything.
What had begun to haunt her was the possibility that love on its own might no longer be enough to draw him fully back to her.
⟢⟣
It was supposed to be their Saturday, the first real weekend in weeks when Eren had no meetings and Mikasa had managed not to book a shoot or a gallery event. Berlin still carried a trace of winter in the air, though the sky was bright and clear, and the parks were already filling with families, with children running and shouting through the pale afternoon.
They were supposed to go see a house, not necessarily the one that would hold forever, but something larger than the life they already had, a step forward into a home that might belong to them in a new way, brighter and more spacious, with room for a guest bedroom, perhaps a library, perhaps even a balcony wide enough for plants and slow mornings spent drinking coffee together.
Mikasa had found the listing herself, a modern building in Charlottenburg-Nord, still under construction, set in a quiet residential pocket not far from the city center, though full of trees, bakeries, and old villas that made the streets feel almost removed from time. They could afford it now. Both of them had worked too hard for too long for that not to be true. It was no longer a dream.
She had booked the tour for three in the afternoon.
Dinner was at seven-thirty, at one of the best à la carte Japanese restaurants in Berlin, where she had reserved their favorite corner table a month earlier.
It was meant to be a celebration, but at 2:11 p.m. Eren got a call.
Mikasa watched his face change as soon as he saw the name on the screen. She watched the hesitation too, brief but unmistakable, three seconds, perhaps four, before he answered.
She only caught fragments.
“No, who?”
“Are you serious?”
“Christ. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I’ll cover it.”
When he hung up, she was already standing by the door with her keys in hand, coat on, scarf looped once around her neck.
“Eren?”
He turned toward her slowly, the guilt already visible in his eyes.
“Baby, I’m sorry. One of the guys collapsed. It’s bad. He’s in the hospital. I’m the only one fluent enough to handle the Hong Kong brief. They moved the meeting up. I have to take it. Now.”
For a moment she said nothing at all. She only stood there, staring at him.
“You promised,” she whispered at last, quietly.
“I know. I hate this.”
“You promised, Eren.”
“I know. I know. I just can’t say no to this. You know I can’t. It’s not only me anymore.”
“I’m not asking you to quit your job,” she said, and there was a sharper edge in her voice now, one she had not meant to let through. “I’m asking you to show up. Once. When it isn’t convenient. When it’s about us.”
He stepped toward her and reached for her hand.
She pulled back before he could take it.
His shoulders dropped a little beneath the weight of it. “I’ll make it up to you. I swear.”
Mikasa did not answer.
He leaned in and kissed her forehead gently, as if gentleness could repair the thing already opening between them, and then he left.
She remained where she was for a minute, then five, and only after that did she go to see the house alone.
It was beautiful.
White stone. Wide windows. A second floor tucked beneath a slanted roof. A small garden in the back. The building was only half-finished, though she could already see it clearly, the light that would fill it, the air, the life they might have made there together. She took pictures. She tried to smile.
Somewhere in the middle of it, something in her broke.
That evening, instead of going home, she texted Sasha.
“Are you home?”
The reply came instantly.
Sasha: Always. Come. Pizza or hugs?
Both, Mikasa wrote back.
By the time she arrived, eyes red and her scarf pulled high over her mouth, Sasha was already waiting at the door, asking no questions and making no comment, only opening her arms.
“Mika,” she murmured into her shoulder. “Oh, honey.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Mikasa breathed.
They stood there for a long time before Mikasa finally pulled back, and only then did she notice someone else inside the apartment.
Niccolo.
He was standing in the kitchen doorway, and from the look on his face it was clear he understood enough immediately. “Hey, uh, no worries,” he said gently. “I’m just gonna head out, yeah?”
Sasha nodded. “Thanks, babe.”
Niccolo looked at Mikasa with quiet kindness and did not ask a single thing. “I’ll grab some pizzas and come back later. Text me if you want more time and I’ll stay out longer, okay?”
“Thank you,” Mikasa replied softly, her voice already breaking again.
He kissed Sasha at the temple and left.
Only after the door had closed behind him did Mikasa sit down on the couch, draw her knees to her chest, and let go.
The tears came hard, hot and furious and shaking, carrying not only sadness but exhaustion, the grief of something that still technically existed and yet no longer felt alive, all of it held in for far too long: the quiet ache each time he failed to look up from his laptop, the hollow sting of a kiss pressed to her cheek instead of her mouth, the humiliating patience with which she had begun to time her affection around his stress level, waiting for him to remember that she was waiting at all, until at last everything spilled out.
At first Sasha said nothing. She only sat beside her, rubbing slow circles between her shoulder blades, one hand holding a tissue she had not yet tried to press on her. Mikasa was not crying prettily. She was crying like something inside her had split open and would not go back together by morning.
After a long while, she whispered, “I love him.”
The words came out cracked and raw, like a confession scraped straight from bone.
“I love him so much it makes me sick. He’s just not, he’s not him anymore. He’s becoming someone I don’t recognize, and I don’t know how to reach him.”
Sasha’s face softened, though her eyes remained steady, and there was something in them now that made Mikasa feel cold.
“You don’t have to do this alone.”
“I’m trying to be patient,” Mikasa said, her voice thick and unsteady. “I’m trying to remember why we started. I’m trying to hold it together because I know he’s tired and I know his job is demanding and I know he loves me, I know he does...” Her voice faltered there. She swallowed hard. “I just don’t feel loved anymore,” she murmured. “Not really. Not the way I used to.”
Sasha drew in a slow breath.
“Mika,” she began very quietly, “I’m gonna be honest. I kind of suspected.”
Mikasa turned toward her so fast it was almost a flinch. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything because it wasn’t my place. I thought maybe you two just needed time. Even so, yeah… I noticed.”
Mikasa stared at her, stunned, mouth parted.
Sasha kept going, gentle but unwavering. “The way you looked the last few times we were all together. The way you smiled less. The way you kept reaching for him without even realizing you were doing it. The way he didn’t seem to notice.”
Mikasa’s throat burned.
“It isn’t only me,” Sasha added. “Reiner said something last week. Historia mentioned it a while ago. Armin tried talking to Eren a few months back, but he didn’t get anywhere.”
Mikasa wiped at her cheek, overwhelmed by the force of the truth all at once. “I didn’t think it was obvious.”
“It isn’t, not to most people,” Sasha said softly. “You’re good at hiding things. You always have been. Just not from us. Not from the people who love you.”
Mikasa lowered her eyes to her hands.
They were trembling.
“I kept telling myself it would get better,” she rasped. “That it was a phase. That he was stressed. That once this quarter passed, or this project ended, or this meeting was over, he’d come back.”
Sasha nodded. “And he hasn’t.”
The silence that followed felt heavy enough to touch.
“I keep hoping,” Mikasa whispered, “that he’ll notice me again. That he’ll look at me and actually see me, the way he used to. That he’ll remember who we are.”
Sasha took her hand and held it tightly.
“If he isn’t fighting for this with you,” she said, her voice lower now, “you need to decide whether you’re willing to keep fighting for both of you on your own.”
Mikasa looked at her, really looked at her, and in her eyes, for the first time, there was something very close to fear.
There was clarity too.
“I’m so tired,” she mumbled.
Sasha’s expression softened. “I know.”
“I love him.”
“Of course you do.”
Mikasa drew in a shaky breath. “I just don’t know if he’s still with me,” she said. “Or only next to me.”
They remained there for a long time after that, shoulder to shoulder, woman to woman, with no pretense left between them and no room for denial. Mikasa, who had always been loyal beyond reason and stronger than most people ever realized, stopped pretending.
She cried, she cracked, and again and again, in a voice worn thin by grief, she whispered, “I miss him. I miss him. I miss him.”
Sasha held her tighter.
“I know, baby,” she murmured. “I know.”
⟢⟣
The office was too bright.
The lights were always on, even on weekends, and the glass-walled conference rooms cast that same hollow, clinical glow over everything. Eren sat at the head of the table in a navy shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, his blazer discarded somewhere in the corner, his laptop open before him and the video call already in progress. Three men from Hong Kong filled the screen, their voices carrying through the speaker system with a faint metallic echo.
“And as you can see from the performance trajectory over Q4…”
Eren nodded, lips drawn tight, his pen tapping lightly against the edge of the tablet as he followed every word, took every note, answered every question exactly as he was expected to. On the surface, nothing was wrong. He was attentive, precise, entirely in control.
His phone vibrated once in the pocket of his jacket.
He ignored it.
They had moved on to risk projections now. The hedge fund was shifting, and he was supposed to step in with clarity, numbers, certainty. He always did. That was why they trusted him, why they called him, why Eren Jaeger had become the kind of man other people relied on without hesitation: efficient, fluent, unshakable, the sort of presence that made everyone else feel steadier simply by being in the room.
His thoughts kept drifting anyway.
They kept returning to the red scarf Mikasa had laid out that morning, to the faint trace of her perfume still clinging to the collar of his shirt, to the look on her face when he told her he could not come. He saw again that split second of stillness, that flicker of something he had not known how to read quickly enough, disappointment, perhaps, or sadness, or something worse than either, something closer to resignation, before she nodded and picked up her keys.
He had not said much, and now he could not stop seeing it, that silence in her eyes.
“Mr. Jaeger?” One of the men said.
Eren blinked and looked up. “Sorry. Could you repeat the last point?”
His throat had gone tight. His suit felt suddenly too stiff across his shoulders. He shifted in his chair, forced himself back into the rhythm of the meeting, and the conversation moved on around him in its cold, relentless order: charts, metrics, strategies, forecasts.
All the while, a single thought kept circling quietly in the back of his mind.
She went alone.
He did not know what the house looked like. He did not know whether it had the balcony she wanted, or wooden floors, or the wide open kitchen she always talked about as if she could already see herself standing in it. He did not know whether she smiled when she first stepped inside.
He did not know whether she had cried.
He should have been there.
Instead he was here, saying all the right things to all the right people, polished and charming and intelligent, performing competence with perfect ease while something beneath that surface refused to settle.
For the first time in a long while, he felt like a man in the act of losing something he could not yet have named, and so he kept talking, kept presenting, kept performing.
Far below the ambition, the pressure, and the carefully maintained calm, he began to feel it at last, faint but unmistakable: the beginning of something cracking.
⟢⟣
The last slide had disappeared, the clients had logged off, and at last the room had fallen quiet.
Eren pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes for a moment, feeling the dull, rhythmic throb behind them, then let them drop as he remained seated in the stillness of the conference room, surrounded by empty chairs and the untouched cup of coffee that had long since gone cold. Most of the building had emptied out by then. Only the low hum of the night lights remained, along with that strange, static silence that follows too many hours of talking.
When he finally stood, it was slowly. He rolled his shoulders and felt the ache settle through his joints more deeply than it should have, his neck stiff, his jaw tight without his even realizing he had been clenching it. He packed his laptop into the leather satchel, slid the tablet into its sleeve, and only then noticed the phone lying lit on the desk.
Three missed calls, all from Mikasa, and one message.
The house was beautiful. I took pictures.
He looked at it without moving, not for long and not dramatically, only with that peculiar stillness that comes when something small lands harder than it should.
A breath left him through his nose. He typed a reply.
I’m so sorry, love. Can’t wait to see them.
His thumb hovered above the screen.
He deleted it and tried again.
I’m sorry I missed it. How was it?
That too disappeared a second later.
In the end, he sent only a heart.
The elevator down to the garage took too long, gliding with that infuriatingly polite slowness that made him more aware of himself than he wanted to be. In the mirrored doors, just before they shut, he caught a glimpse of his reflection: collar slightly crooked, hair fallen into his eyes, exhaustion etched into the shape of his mouth.
When had he started looking like that?
Older. Sharper.
Emptier, somehow.
Too much like his father.
The doors opened with a soft chime. The underground garage waited below in dim light and silence, his footsteps echoing over the concrete as he crossed toward the car parked in the far corner, dark grey, sleek, expensive, every line of it a symbol of success that felt strangely hollow tonight.
Once inside, he closed the door and let both hands rest on the steering wheel.
He did not start the engine, but sat there instead with the keys in his hand, staring at nothing while his thoughts circled restlessly through everything he had been trying not to face: Mikasa in the dress she had bought for the dinner he had missed, the table set for two, the empty chair across from her, the house she had gone to see alone.
A quiet, inescapable shame rose in him then, not so much for what he had done as for what he had failed to be.
He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.
In the darkness behind them, her face appeared at once, and with it came a thought so simple it felt almost unbearable: he no longer felt like a man building a life.
He felt like a man in danger of forgetting how to live it.
⟢⟣
The hallway light flickered on with a faint hum, spilling a wash of gold across the floor as Eren stepped inside and let the door close softly behind him. He did not bend at once to untie his shoes. For a moment he only stood there, allowing the warmth of the apartment to settle over him after hours of glass, concrete, and artificial light.
Something felt wrong immediately.
The stillness was too complete, the quiet too deliberate.
He dropped his keys into the dish by the door and called out, partly from habit and partly from hope. “Babe?”
Nothing answered him.
He waited a beat, then tried again, softer this time. “Mi...?”
Silence.
He slipped off his coat, moving more slowly now, suddenly aware of the unnerving absence threaded through every room. There was no music playing, no candle burning on the dining table, no soft sound of her footsteps from the hallway, no distant hum of the blow dryer from the bathroom.
When he checked the bedroom, the bed was untouched, still perfectly made. The closet door stood slightly ajar, and through the gap he could see at once that the space where her overnight bag usually sat was empty.
She was gone.
A cold knot tightened in his stomach, not panic and not quite fear, but that heavier thing, the quiet pressure of absence, the kind that does not scream but simply settles and stays.
He reached for his phone.
No missed calls.
No texts.
He was just about to dial her when the screen lit up with a message from Mikasa. A sharpness moved through his chest as he opened it.
Don’t wait up. I’m staying at Sasha’s tonight. There’s food in the fridge if you’re hungry.
That was all.
No love you. No kiss emoji. No softness anywhere in it, only the clean politeness of fact, and it landed harder than any argument could have done.
He stood there rereading it, as though the words might alter if he stared long enough. They did not. They remained exactly as they were, still and bare and cold.
At last he set the phone down on the counter and opened the fridge. On the middle shelf sat a neatly covered glass container, which he took out and placed beneath the kitchen light, where the truth of it became impossible to miss: homemade curry, his favorite.
It might still have been warm, or perhaps it had already gone cold; he could not have said, because he never opened it, never touched it again after setting it down, only stood there staring as though it were some message written in a language he had once understood and somehow lost. She had cooked for him, she had left it waiting in the fridge, and she had chosen not to be there when he came home, and there was no one to blame for that except himself.
He leaned back against the counter, palms flat behind him, his gaze fixed on the cabinets across the room. Everything looked exactly the same as it always had. Their framed photograph still stood on the shelf. Her white coat still hung over the back of the chair. The tiny espresso cups they were forever arguing over, hers delicate, his absurdly oversized, were lined up side by side as though nothing at all had changed.
Everything was in its place.
Everything except her.
The apartment felt too large that night, not in any physical sense, since it was the same place they had lived in since college, but in the way rooms do when the person who gives them warmth is missing, and without her voice or the ordinary movement of her body through the space, it seemed cavernous, hollow, and echoing in a way it never had before.
He crossed into the living room and sat on the edge of the couch, elbows resting on his knees, his hands loosely folded between them.
His mind was not racing. It was not even thinking clearly. It was only aware, painfully, relentlessly aware of the silence and the weight of it.
She had been trying, and he knew it now with humiliating clarity: she had booked the house visit, made the dinner reservation, arranged everything with care, and he had said yes to a meeting again, because it was urgent, because he was needed, because success moved by its own clock, and because there was always some reason no one else could do what he did. Sitting there alone in the darkened apartment, he was no longer sure he remembered how to come home to her at all.
He picked up his phone again and opened their chat, his thumb hovering over the words I’m sorry before he let the screen dim without sending them, because she already knew. She had known for weeks, perhaps for months, and tonight she had done the one thing she almost never did: she had left him to the silence, not in anger and not forever, but with a quietness that felt far more dangerous than either.
He leaned back against the couch and stared at the ceiling, the room lit only by the small light above the stove, while memories came to him in fragments, the first kitchen they had shared, the day she painted the hallway with eighties music blasting through the apartment, the way she used to curl into his lap on Saturdays and murmur, “Let’s never leave.” What frightened him most was not her absence itself, but what it meant, because silence, he understood now, is what begins to grow when someone stops believing anything will change, and tonight he was alone inside it.
⟢⟣
It didn’t get better, not in the small, quiet ways that might have mattered, not in the moments that could have changed the course of things, and not even in the gestures Eren began trying to stage with roses and velvet boxes and carefully chosen gifts that arrived too late to mean what he wanted them to mean.
A month had passed since Mikasa spent that first night at Sasha’s, and by then the pattern had settled into something neither of them named, though both understood it. She did not stay away every night, but often enough that the pillow beside him was cold more than it was not. She still came home, still slept there sometimes, still answered his messages, still shared the same apartment, the same bathroom drawer, the same shelf in the fridge, and yet the rhythm that had once held them together had altered beyond pretending.
She no longer waited for him to come back. Dinner had become two separate plates in the refrigerator, one labeled Mikasa, the other Eren, with no candles, no wine, no easy conversations beginning with How was your day? She texted Sasha more, and Historia, and Annie and Pieck. Fridays belonged to going out now, Saturdays to brunch, and she began making plans without asking whether he was free, because she already knew the answer.
Even when he was home, he was not truly there. He came in late and exhausted, shirt creased, tie loosened, carrying the smell of coffee and conference rooms on his skin, and almost every time he arrived with something in his hands, a peace offering, a substitute for the conversation he did not know how to start.
First it was roses, then a charm bracelet from a little shop in Mitte, then a rare artbook she had mentioned in passing half a year earlier, then new pens for sketching, then tickets to a show he already knew he would not be able to attend. Mikasa thanked him, sometimes even smiling, sometimes pressing a kiss to his cheek, but never to his mouth.
He began lining the gifts up on her side of the dresser in a quiet row of objects he hoped might say I’m trying, though she saw too clearly what they were: distractions, not accountability, not the man who once would have said tell me what I missed instead of here, I got you this. Even sex, when it happened, had changed even more. It was shorter now, quieter, with less eye contact and fewer words, still marked by need, still carrying the old reflex of wanting each other, but no longer lit by joy. It felt more like habit than celebration, more like muscle memory than love made visible.
One Saturday afternoon she packed an overnight bag without saying a word. Eren watched from the kitchen doorway with a bowl in his hands, cereal slowly softening in milk he no longer tasted.
“Are you going to Sasha’s again?” He asked.
She did not look up from the zipper. “Yes.”
“Will you be back tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.”
He paused, wanting to say something, anything, but in the end he only stood there and watched her leave.
Again.
This time she did not text when she arrived. She sent no heart, no sleep well, no small thread of softness to bridge the distance she had crossed.
Standing there with the bowl still in his hands, Eren realized with a kind of sick clarity that he could not remember the last time she had said I love you.
It was not because she was angry, and not because the feeling itself had vanished. It was because something between them had broken, and he had been far too busy trying to paper over the crack with pretty things to ask what it would actually take to mend it.
⟢⟣
A soft glow filled the apartment, nothing polished or extravagant in the way of magazine interiors, but something far more intimate, born of effort, of careful hope, of someone trying to shape the evening into a memory before it had even begun.
Mikasa had lit two candles, one on the small table in the hallway by the door, the other on the edge of the kitchen counter, just enough to wash the corners of the apartment in gold and lend the rooms a fragile warmth, as though something between them might still be alive if she tended it carefully enough. She stood within that light like something half-real, half-remembered, like a vision that had waited too long to step fully into the world.
She was dressed completely, elegantly, with a care that could not be mistaken for anything casual. A black velvet gown traced the length of her body, fitted at the waist, its back cut low, its long sleeves clinging to her arms like shadows. Her black hair had been swept into a loose bun, with only a few strands left soft around her temples, and in her ears she wore the same delicate gold earrings she had chosen for her graduation, quiet little points of light that seemed to remember a happiness she was trying very hard not to lose.
She had not put on perfume yet, saving that for later, for the moment he arrived and she knew for certain that he was coming, because this was not merely a night out, but a night she had believed in.
The Staatsoper Unter den Linden was hosting the Berliner Philharmoniker, and the guest conductor that evening was one she had adored since she was fifteen, the one whose interpretation of Mahler, this Mahler, had once made her cry alone in the back of a school library with headphones on and her heart wide open. She had bought the tickets fourteen months earlier, the moment the dates were announced, the moment the listings went live, back when it had still felt natural to assume they would go together. She had kept them tucked in the drawer beside their passports, checking the date every few months with the strange and private excitement of a child counting down to Christmas.
At 6:32 p.m., she texted him.
Don’t forget what time we need to leave. I’m ready.
No reply came.
She sat on the edge of the couch with her hands folded in her lap, careful not to wrinkle the dress. Her heels were already on; she had been ready since six.
She opened Instagram and scrolled without seeing anything, then closed it and opened their shared Google calendar instead. The concert was still there, bright purple against the screen.
Philharmonie w/E.
At 6:57, she called.
He did not answer, so she left a voicemail brief enough to sound almost controlled.
“Hey. It’s getting late. Please don’t be late.”
Afterward she stared at the phone in her hand, watching the seconds crawl forward and listening to the faint, uneven sound of candle flames shifting in the stillness.
By 7:10, she was standing again in the living room, utterly motionless, when the door finally opened.
He came in quickly and distracted, one hand still holding the phone to his ear while the other was already pulling off his coat. His tie had been loosened, his shirt creased, his sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms in that familiar way they always were when he had been buried too long in numbers and time zones and meetings that blurred into one another.
“Hey,” he said quickly. “I just need ten minutes. I have to call Lennart back. Some numbers came in wrong from Tokyo and...”
Mikasa did not move.
She stood at the edge of the room like something painted there, too still, too sharp, heartbreak held in place by candlelight. When she spoke, her voice was flat enough to cut.
“You’re not serious.”
Eren stopped halfway through a step and only then properly saw her, the dress, the hair, the charged silence waiting in the room.
“What?” He asked, already wincing.
“That call can wait.”
He frowned, guilt beginning to show in his face. “No, it really can’t. They...”
“Yes. It can.” Her jaw tightened. “You said you wouldn’t be late. You promised me, Eren.”
“I didn’t forget,” he murmured quickly, softening his voice as though gentleness might save him. “There was just a situation with Tokyo and...”
“There is always a situation.”
Her voice never rose, yet the words split something open all the same, and the silence that followed came down hard between them while he stood there feeling the emptiness inside him deepen by degrees, as though something hollow and widening were slowly pulling him under.
“I bought those tickets over a year ago.”
“I know.”
“I planned this for us.”
“I know.”
Her eyes did not leave his face. “You’re not getting dressed, are you?”
He did not answer immediately.
That was answer enough.
“I’ll only be twenty minutes,” he rasped, already reaching for the phone again.
Mikasa laughed.
The sound was sharp and cold and empty of anything resembling humor.
“You’re not listening to me.”
“I am,” he insisted, stepping toward her.
She shook her head once. The earrings at her ears caught the candlelight and flashed like small betrayals.
“No, Eren. You’re hearing me. That is not the same thing.”
The crack in her voice was slight, though it was there.
He reached toward her wrist, but she stepped back.
“Mikasa...”
She didn’t answer, but turned, walked to the kitchen, opened the drawer, and took out the envelope containing the tickets.
For a second she only looked at them.
Then, slowly and with perfect deliberation, she tore them down the middle, once and then again, before dropping the pieces into the trash.
The paper fell softly, and the sound of it was like an ending, leaving Eren utterly still.
“Mikasa...”
“No,” she said, turning back toward him. “No more I’m sorry. No more next time. No more I’ll make it up to you.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
Her hand went to the zipper at the back of her neck. The dress loosened and slid from her shoulders with a quiet, heavy grace, folding downward like velvet resignation.
“I have been doing this alone for months, Eren. Holding the line for both of us. Making plans. Remembering anniversaries. Cooking dinners. Lying to our friends.”
He looked stunned. “Mikasa, please.”
She took another step back, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped.
“I’m done begging you to love me like I matter.”
He moved toward her. “Don’t do this. We can fix it.”
She stared at him, her hands clenched at her sides.
“I don’t think you even remember what needs fixing.”
With that, she turned, walked into the bedroom, knelt beside the bed, and pulled a suitcase out from underneath it.
⟢⟣
The bedroom was quiet, too quiet, and Mikasa moved through it with the kind of practiced precision that belonged to someone who had imagined this moment a thousand times without ever truly wanting to live it.
She had pulled two large suitcases from the closet, the same ones they had taken to Japan, and now she was filling them with pieces of herself. The first zipper opened with a rasp that sounded almost final. She had changed into a loose grey sweatshirt, one of her own rather than one of his, and a pair of soft cotton shorts, nothing elegant, nothing romantic, only something comfortable, something unmistakably hers. From the wardrobe she began taking what mattered, her clothes, her sketchbooks, the small glass box where she kept her rings, the gold chain her mother had given her before she died, placing each thing inside with no haste and no display, only that careful, methodical rhythm grief sometimes takes when it is finally forced to become action.
She opened another drawer and pulled out a folded tote bag, one of the sturdy ones she used for press kits and assignments, then laid it beside the suitcase. After that came a third bag, the soft duffel she always took to Sasha’s, into which she folded her silk pajamas, a few essentials, the sunscreen from her nightstand, all the small things that make leaving feel real. It was then that she heard Eren's voice from the hallway, low and rough and stunned enough to cut through the silence.
“Mikasa.”
She did not stop.
His footsteps came fast, and when he reached the doorway he froze at once, taking in the sight before him, the suitcases, the open drawers, her makeup pouch, the shoes lined up by the bed, and finally her, dressed down and expressionless, as though whatever tenderness had once lived in the room had already been stripped away.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
The words were not loud, at least not yet, though they were already fraying around the edges.
Mikasa did not look at him. “I think it’s pretty obvious.”
“No,” he said, stepping fully into the room now. “No, it’s not. What the hell are you doing, Mikasa?”
Her fingers tightened briefly around a stack of folded shirts before she placed them into the first suitcase. “Don’t do this,” he rasped, “You’re pissed, fine. I get it. This is just... this is over the top.”
At that, she turned and faced him.
Her eyes were calm.
Terrifyingly calm.
“This isn’t about tonight.”
“Yes, it is.”
“It’s not.”
“You’re leaving because I was late?”
“No, Eren,” she said, cutting cleanly across him, her voice rising at last. “I’m leaving because I’ve already been alone.”
He stared at her. His mouth opened, though for a second nothing came out.
Then something in him snapped, not in grief, but in denial, and he slipped at once into that familiar defensive posture of his, the one that surfaced whenever what was happening in front of him was something he could not bear to accept. He crossed the room, seized the handle of the half-zipped suitcase, and said, “Stop it. You’re not leaving.”
She yanked it back. “Let go.”
“No. You don’t get to do this.”
“I am doing this.”
He looked at her as though she had started speaking another language, his chest rising too fast now, his breath turning ragged. “You’re not thinking straight.”
“Eren...”
“Put the clothes back.”
“Eren...”
“No, seriously, what the fuck is this?” He reached for the bag again. “We have a rough few months and you just what, walk away?”
She slapped his hand off the handle. “Don’t you fucking touch my things.”
“Why are you acting like this is nothing?”
“I’m not.”
“Then stop packing.”
Her voice broke open then, sharp enough to shake the room. “You stop acting like this is a surprise.”
He blinked at her as though he had never heard her raise her voice before.
When she spoke again, it was quieter, though no less breathless. “You’ve been gone for months, Eren. Every time you said next time, every dinner you missed, every time you turned away from me instead of toward me, this moment was building. I begged you. I gave you everything. You didn’t even notice I was slipping away.”
“I didn’t think...”
“You didn’t think, period.”
His jaw tightened. In that instant he looked less like the man she had loved and more like a boy cornered by the ruins of something he had believed would hold simply because he needed it to.
“So what?” He asked. “You’re just going to run?”
She held his gaze. “No. I’m not running. I’m leaving.”
Then, after the briefest pause, she added, “That’s different.”
He stepped toward her again, too fast, and grabbed the second suitcase. She caught it back at once.
“Eren. Let go.”
“Then stay.”
“Let go.”
His grip only tightened; he could not, or would not, let go.
The bones of his hand stood out white beneath the skin, and when he swallowed, the movement in his throat looked almost painful. Mikasa moved closer then, until there were only inches between them, and when she spoke her voice had dropped so low it was nearly a whisper, though the quietness of it was far worse than anger.
“I gave you a thousand chances to hold me when it mattered.”
His hands loosened.
She looked at him for one last second.
Then she turned back to the bed and kept packing.
Eren, for all his strength and certainty and goddamn pride, could do nothing except stand there with empty hands and watch her move through the room as though the life they had built together already belonged to the past.
⟢⟣
Mikasa zipped the second suitcase shut.
She moved through the room like someone seized not by panic, but by that hard, furious clarity that comes when a heart has broken once too often and the body finally begins to do what the mind has spent too long begging it not to do.
The bathroom was next. The door slammed open, cabinet doors followed in quick succession, and bottles and boxes disappeared into her bag one after another, her skincare, her shampoo, her perfume, the silver hairbrush she had owned since she was a teenager. Eren followed her down the hall.
“Mikasa, stop...”
She did not.
To him, it felt like watching a house burn while still foolishly believing there might be one sentence, one gesture, one final act that could pull the flames backward and restore everything before it collapsed. He stayed in the doorway, helpless and stricken, and tried again, his voice quieter this time, though no less desperate.
“Don’t do this.”
She shoved the hairdryer into the duffel without looking at him.
He stepped forward and reached for her wrist. She tore it away at once and turned on him, her eyes bright and wild with tears she had not yet let fall.
“Touch me again and I swear I’ll scream loud enough for the entire floor to hear.”
He froze.
She meant it.
“I’ll call the police. Don’t test me.”
He took a step back, not because he thought she was bluffing, but because in that moment he believed every word.
Mikasa’s chest was rising too fast now, her throat tight, her vision beginning to blur at the edges, and then the tears came, not softly and not prettily, but with all the force of something that had been held down too long. She cried like someone who had smiled through too much, waited too long, hoped too hard, bent too far, until at last there was nothing left to do but break.
“You don’t get to hold me now,” she shouted. “You don’t get to stop me now when I begged you to see me and you never looked.”
“I didn’t think you meant it like this...”
“Of course you didn’t. You never thought it would come to this, because I was always here. Always waiting. Always forgiving.” Her voice cracked violently. “Not anymore.”
Her hands shook as she shoved the last toiletry pouch into the bag. Eren moved toward her again, empty-handed now, emptied of any real idea what to say.
“Mikasa, please...”
“Shut up,” she screamed, the words splitting out of her.
Something in him gave way then too.
“Fine,” he said, and the word came out sharp and bitter and exhausted. “You want to go? Then fucking go.”
She went still.
Her eyes widened, as if she could not quite believe he had really said it, and perhaps he could not either.
“Get the fuck out,” he went on, his voice lower now, harsher for it. “You clearly packed enough.”
She stared at him, her breath coming in slow, ragged pulls. Then, with a terrifying calm, she crossed back to the first suitcase and reached toward the top shelf where, folded carefully between two old winter sweaters, lay the red scarf.
His scarf.
The one he had wrapped around her in the cold beneath the stars on the night he told her he loved her for the first time.
She held it in both hands for one suspended second before turning, walking straight to him, and throwing it at his chest. It struck him and fell at once, dropping to the floor at his feet like something dead.
“Keep it,” she said, her voice wrecked. “It means nothing now.”
After that she walked to the front door. He did not follow. She opened it, pausing only long enough to say, without looking back, “Fuck you, Eren.”
A heartbeat later, she was gone.
The door slammed behind her, and Eren was left alone with the scarf at his feet and an apartment that had never felt so silent in his entire life.
To be continued…