Our Love Will Be Legend

Mikasa's Witness

If there had ever been one thing Mikasa associated Eren with, it was warmth. From the very beginning, even before he became a new stove-top titan, warmth radiated from him with the diversity and feral strength of fire—the anger of raging flame, and the comfort of flickering candles. He was a wildfire when he killed her kidnappers. He was a beckoning fireplace as he muffled her silent screams with a scarf. He was flying sparks, settling on each of the trainees, when at the military camp.

Even now, as he was dying, he protruded an intense wave of mournful wave, not snuffing out until the last second, but even then ashes settled that they all knew would never be able to be washed out.

Yet, the moment the embers quaking in his heart stilled, everything became cold.

She was torn between two irresistible urges—look away, or witness his last painful moments of life. In the end, it was a matter of figuring which was more agonizing. Her blood boiled cold and her heart pounded cold and her mind was cold cold cold and her scarf wasn't keeping her warm.

It was a threadbare scarf. The tassels were thick, but in the bitter wind, they did nothing to shield her neck. She supposed that it was Eren who made it work. Neither she nor Armin had a doubt—at least she thought Armin agreed; there was some form of agreement somewhere—that there was a passionate sort of magic contained within the boy—no, the man. He wasn't particularly athletic, though he'd become so in the past years; he wasn't the most intelligent; he made stupid mistakes, and he still occasionally lost his temper—mostly around Jean.

But there was a hidden quality, an unnamed entity, inside him that bent so many to his will without fancy words or trickery or even trying, really. It was a quality that struck love in all his friends' hearts and made them fall, hard, like silver ink into the forbidden book of Eren.

As she held back a ragged scream—or she might already have been screaming; it was too loud and too quiet and she couldn't tell—she realized that it was probably because Eren didn't have a lying bone in his body. There was always the truth etched in his face, as many truths as anyone could ever ask for or ever need in their lives. And on that note, it had always surprised her that he hadn't stumbled upon a lover yet.

To be honest, she had spent the majority of her teenage years believing wholeheartedly that she was romantically in love with Eren. It took her until she was seventeen to realize that those feelings transcended the sexual into the domestic into pure family. If she was even going to make a move, she'd wait until the conclusion of the war, and there was no way to predict what was happening now.

Of course, even though the idea had lost its appeal over the years, even if she still went through with her poorly thought out plan, it seemed that someone else had beaten her to the spot.

"No no no no Eren please no please no don't leave me alone I need you I'm sorry I'm so so so sorry I love you Eren I love you, love, love, love, love just please open your eyes for me Eren open your eyes and tell me you're okay please ROSE DAMMIT I NEED YOU PLEASE."

On the opposite side of the spectrum, she'd always seen Corporal Levi as ice cold. She'd grudgingly understood and forgiven him for the court incident, which took about a year, and a few years later, she could grudgingly admit that they were mostly friends. But after the 57th expedition, it had become clear that around the majority of the world, he was as hard as Annie's crystal, with the biting chill of the HQ winters and soldiers' corpses piled atop a supply wagon. She'd only ever seen him let a little light into himself around Eren, who had, with time, risen with rank and wisdom, and now the two were practically inseparable…

Oh.

Oh, no.

How had she never realized, was what she wondered. With the sudden revelation, it didn't occur to her to be angry or proud or something in between, but it disturbed her in equal measures that Eren never told her and that she was too dense to pick up on the signs. Oh, Maria, this completely changed her scope on things. What had they really been doing when they "accidentally" happened to volunteer for kitchen duty almost every night together—they'd always sent playful glares across the room at each other, and she'd just assumed it had become a running inside joke between two good friends—but were they running the bases? And what kind of "private training" had it been? She should have known that the hero worship had long elevated to pure affection, and she'd seen it in the Corporal's eyes, seen the joyful glances he'd sent at Eren when he thought nobody was looking. Oh, she would sit them both down later, after all this was over, and have them a talk.