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In their first year of training, one of their classmates falls to his death while practicing with the 3D maneuver gear.
Eren is tense and tight-lipped until they get back to the barracks where he explodes, pacing and ranting. He yells about the incompetence of their superiors and their disregard for human life and his classmates watch him, young and impressionable.
"The entire system is useless," he says, eyes lit from the inside with something close to hysteria. "If that's where training is going to get me then count me out, there's no point in going through all this, I can fight Titans without their sad excuse for help--"
In one move Mikasa picks him up by the lapels and slams him against the wall. His breath escapes him in a hoarse whoosh. No one says a word.
He looks at her with indignant surprise.
"Eren," she says, quietly. "You're scaring Armin."
He glances over her shoulder at the frightened faces of their classmates. After a moment, the fight fades from his eyes and his shoulders sag in her grip. She keeps him propped against the wall with one hand on his collar, turning to the crowd of students.
"What happened today was an accident," she says, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Accidents happen. Right, Armin?"
Armin startles.
"Yes," he says, hesitant, "training accidents are common in any profession."
She nods at him.
.
When Eren gets frustrated he takes it out on practice dummies or his sparring opponents or even the table, banging on it with a fist to illustrate a point. Mikasa waits until he has tired himself out, his spine no longer a rigid line, and ushers him to the barracks.
Tonight she keeps a close eye on him. His face is bright with an harsh kind of mania.
"Go to sleep, Eren," she says, after a while. There are smears of sleepless black beneath his eyes. He shakes his head, a book in his hands.
"This is more important," he says, and she frowns.
.
He falls asleep, eventually, an arm flung over his eyes, and Armin and Mikasa sit on the floor.
"You don't have to be cautious around him when he's like that," Mikasa says. "You can tell him to shut up."
Armin laughs.
"Maybe you can!" he says. "You're probably the only person in the world who can say that without getting punched."
Mikasa considers this.
.
Mikasa has seen no point, thus far, in looking outside their immediate world. No one else holds any interest to her. The small cluster of brightly lit galaxies she has gathered to her chest are more than enough: Armin telling them about the ocean. Eren roaring like a preacher, possessed, promises of the outside world falling like diamonds from his heretic lips.
She catches them in her hands. She worries about him.
.
"I worry about him," Armin says to her, late one night. They are drinking watered-down beer. Armin looks sickly under the dim lights, thin wrists knocking together. Mikasa says nothing. They have had this conversation before and the end result is always the same.
"He doesn't care about anything else, does he," Armin says, looking at her like she is going to contradict him. But Armin should know better by now.
"He's made his decision," Mikasa says.
She doesn't say "we."
She has thought about all sorts of different worlds: worlds in which her parents lived. Worlds in which the Titans are gone. It is easy to picture a peaceful world, late at night. If she closes her eyes, she can see Armin by the seaside. She can see herself, resting on a grassy hill.
But she can't imagine a world where Eren is at peace. Not anymore.
"Don't worry about Eren," she says, standing up. Armin looks up at her with watery eyes. "There's no point to it."
.
Eren breaks his collarbone sparring one day. The excruciating snap is audible to her from half a field away and she closes the distance in mere moments, red dots pricking furious holes in her vision. Cadets scramble to get out of her way.
She grabs hold of Eren's sparring partner by the collar and tosses him to the side, crouching to Eren's level. He's crying. She thinks: she will never get used to this.
.
"It's nothing," he tells her later, struggling to sit up on the medical cot. "Idiot threw me too hard and I landed wrong."
Mikasa stands by the side of the bed, hands balled tightly into fists. The adrenaline has not yet bled away and her veins are singing a battle march.
"Hey, calm down," Eren says.
"I can't," she says. He gives her a stern look. He is doing a very good job of pretending like he wasn't crying in pain an hour ago.
"You're hopeless," he says, leaning his head back and closes his eyes. "Everyone thought you were going to kill Jean."
"I might have," she says. He laughs a little and she smiles.
.
The training is not easy but it is simple. It is startlingly clean and sharp and it feels good to focus on, to drive away the blinding white noise in her head with regiments and crisp commands. She pushes herself to her physical limits and when she gets up in the morning her muscles burn and she is grateful.
The other cadets look at her with something like jealousy or awe and Armin slumps next to her at dinnertime and tells her how one day he will be able to keep up, but Eren only looks at her like she is Mikasa. When she receives top marks on a test or finishes the run first he merely nods at her, once. They both know that she is a capable soldier.
She doesn't want to impress him, exactly. She just thinks it would be nice if he looked at her with a little of the awe her classmates show her.
.
She is pleased to discover that they seem to grow at the same pace, Eren and her. Any height difference one way or another would be strange, even unwelcome. In this regard they are equals. Like siblings.
The sharp stabbing growing pains in her legs are something of a benediction.
"What are you thinking about," Eren says, distracted. They are going to practice with the blades tomorrow morning and he is excited.
Mikasa is thinking that he is probably going to hurt himself.
"Growing up," she says instead.
.
But Armin is small, has always been small. Mikasa thinks he should be kept safe somewhere in a library the size of the sea but he presses his small hand to his heart and pushes onward.
After a vigorous run Armin throws up behind the barracks and Mikasa stays with him.
"It's okay, Mikasa," he says, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. "I'm okay."
Mikasa eyes the thin contents on the ground. They appear to be mainly stomach fluid. Her insides twist.
"You should eat more," she says.
He laughs, shakily.
"I know, I know," he says, resting his hands on his knees. "I'm as bad as Eren, huh?"
He is not as bad as Eren. There is no superhuman rage driving him to succeed. Armin is simply small and hopeful and yet he is the one retching behind the barracks.
Mikasa says, "You're worse."
.
In the mess hall one night Eren knocks over his plate lunging at one of their classmates. Mikasa does not flinch as her sleeve is splattered with water. She watches them push each other around for a few moments.
"You're a coward," Eren hisses to his classmate, fingers digging into the other boy's collar.
Armin tugs on her sleeve.
"Mikasa, you have to stop them," he says, eyes wide with concern. She nods at him. Eren draws his hand back in a fist and she stands up, scraping the bench back loudly.
"Eren," she says. He ignores her. "Eren!" she says again, sharper.
The boy Eren has got a grip on stares at her over Eren's shoulder. Armin's fingers tighten on her sleeve.
"Do something," he says, pleading, "Jean's going to--"
The other boy shoves Eren away from him and into the table. Eren tries to jump at him again but Mikasa grabs his collar and yanks him backwards.
"That's enough," she says as Eren shakes himself free. He is bruised and angry and the other boy is looking at Mikasa like she is deliverance itself.
She dismisses it as unimportant.
.
Sometimes Armin will come running, out of breath, with a book. He guards books like they are precious stones, opens them up and reads about ancient civilizations and Eren eats it up like he is starving.
She abandons her essay on noble self-sacrifice and watches them.
Their shoulders bump together, huddled over a book. She is reminded, sharply, of their younger years.
Armin points at a passage in the book and says something she doesn't catch. Eren grins and nods.
Mikasa ignores the knife of jealousy in her chest.
.
Eren recites information to her out of their textbooks, feet propped up on his bed. Mikasa sits cross-legged on the floor and listens to him.
She already knows the information he tells her: weapons catalogs and battle dates. The words don't matter. The important part is his voice.
She feels as though as long as she is able to hear him talk, the outside world cannot harm them. He recites numbers and tactics and it is like he is weaving a spell in the air, protecting them from humans and Titans alike.
.
She hears the whispered word 'lapdog' and it does not bother her. Her loyalty to Eren is in her bones, she thinks, written in her veins and fingerprints. The truth is that they would be dead without each other.
In darker hours she imagines universes where Eren comes to rescue her too late. She imagines universes where Eren does not come to rescue her at all. She imagines universes where her parents live, and she and Eren grow up quiet and normal.
She thinks of worlds where they find each other too soon, too late.
She is always broken and he is always crying.
There is always blood.
.
She knows she is a better soldier than most of her classmates but some days it doesn't seem to mean anything. She likes the wind on her face when they are rushing through the trees and she likes when they are practicing with the plug-in blades, a sharp coiled power in her arm.
Eren yells at her sometimes, why can't you care about this, and she does care. She does.
She thought it was obvious. She cares so much it hurts.
.
She does not worry about someone else taking Eren away from her, least of all a girl. The very idea of Eren on a date is laughable.
She hides a smile in her scarf when she thinks about it.
"What's funny?" he says. He's lying on the floor reading a book on battle tactics. His hair is a mess and his eyebrows are scrunched up at her.
"Nothing," she says.
"You're weird, Mikasa," he says fondly. "What do you think of this cannon schematic?"