Chapter Text
They’re married within the hour.
Running, hand-in-hand, away, away away away, from the future he was sure he was trapped in and everything that carried with it, along the side of the refugee camp--and they’ll all live now, maybe things will be hard, maybe things won’t get better, maybe they’ll die, but it won’t be all of them, and it won’t be his doing--he spots what is obviously a makeshift church.
Eren stops running. “Hey,” he says, and points with the hand that’s not clutching hers. Mikasa, who still looks faintly like she’s been hit with a hammer, follows the line of his finger. “This is sudden, but so is everything else--do you want to see if they’ll marry us?”
“I,” she says. “What?”
Eren might have taken that tone, that disbelieving blink, as rejection just a few minutes ago, but not anymore. He’s giddy with this--with her, with the weight that has been lifted off his shoulders. There’s still some to bear, there’s still blood on his hands, and abandoning their lives and their duties and their friends will have consequences, but after the burden she just lifted from him, that all feels like a feather. It’s so easy to brush off for right now. “That’s a church. I bet they have a marriage ceremony. Do you want to get married?”
“Oh,” she says, shaking her head. “That makes much more sense. Um. Yeah. Yes!” She bursts into a giggle. Eren hasn’t heard her giggle since they were ten years old. He feels like he’s flying.
He lets go of her hand long enough to cup her cheeks and kiss her--her angelic, perfect, beloved face, her lips and cheeks and nose and eyelids--and then he grabs her hands and pulls her backward through the tents.
The man Eren pegs as a priest speaks some Eldian, and they’re able to explain that they’re--eloping. Which is actually exactly what they’re doing. Eren laughs when the thought occurs to him; he hasn’t laughed, actually laughed, for joy and nothing else, in so long. The priest is happy for them--their wild joy is infectious, maybe. But more likely this is just a fine man who is happy to cater to young love, and he’ll remember this night fondly whenever it crosses his mind for as long as he lives, which should be a long, long time. Or at least Eren won’t cut it short. He rounds up a few witnesses, lights some incense. They don’t have rings, so Eren grabs two blades of thick grass and ties them into circles. Following the priest’s--his name is Nasir, Eren will remember it for the rest of his life--broken instructions, Eren slides one onto Mikasa’s left hand fourth finger, and she does the same to him.
She’s glowing in the light of the lanterns, flushed and confused and happy. Her lovely baby-pink suit is wrinkled; her hat is gone, there’s dirt and grass on the hem of her skirt, and her bangs are falling all in her face. Eren has loved her from the first moment he saw her, in her nightgown on that filthy floor. Maybe even before that, maybe from the second that he realized that something had happened to this girl who he had never met and a monster roared to life in his chest, prepared to raise hell and move heaven to save her. Had he done that? Somehow manipulated it so that he’d found her? Had he sent the love he feels for her now to his younger self to make sure there was no chance where he left Mikasa to that fate; made sure he wouldn’t go through life without her? He doesn’t really remember the stretch of time between his father telling him to hurry along down the mountain and knocking on the door. He remembers the feeling of his knife cutting open a monster’s throat; remembers charging at the second one with a spear made of a broom and a pocket knife and tackling him and stabbing him over and over again. He remembers the stricken terror on Mikasa’s pale little face with her busted lip and bruised jaw. He remembers the crushing pain and panic as the third man held him by the throat, remembers the way the world grew black around the edges so that all he could really see was barefoot Mikasa as she snapped from a shaking waif into a warrior. He remembers the hours they’d waited outside until eventually his father and the Garrison soldiers found them, where he spent forever coaxing flames out of damp wood to keep her warm, and then just holding her hand in silence. He remembers the feeling of his head exploding off his body and the earth quaking before him under the weight of millions of titans on the march, remembers the awful ruin and the craters and the puddles and the charred remains as he crawled after them on hundreds of ribs--but all of that is so far away. It’s so far away that he’ll never see it again. All he can see is Mikasa, smiling up at him.
Nasir says something. He’s been talking this whole time, giving them a blessing, but these words have a ring of finality to them and Eren hopes that they mean, “You may now kiss the bride,” because he can’t wait another second. He grabs her by the waist and pulls her in. Mikasa wraps her arms around his neck and smiles against his lips. It’s chaste, really--they’ve gathered more of an audience, and she’s still so baffled by everything-- she doesn’t know what was at stake; he’s not sure he wants to tell her but he probably should, for the sake of their marriage. Their marriage.
He pulls back and says, “Hello, Mrs. Jaeger.”
“Oh,” she says breathily. “Hi. I like that.”
Eren buries his face in her shoulder. She smells like the perfume Kiyomi had insisted on giving her. Like strawberries and clean linen. She feels like every good thing in the world. Like salvation for him, for his soul, and for everyone around them.
Maybe that’s why everyone seems so happy. They know, somehow. People are cheering, beginning to break into a song he can’t understand, and throwing ripped-up blades of grass at them. An older woman babbles something at them, gesturing, and then mimes dancing. Who is Eren to argue? He’s nobody right now. He’s just a boy in love, who’s destined to spend the rest of his life in peace with the girl he loves beside him, like any other boy in the world. It doesn’t matter what’s flowing through his veins or lurking in his bones or rattling around in his head. What matters is what he has in his arms.
***
By some stroke of fate, Mikasa still had her coin purse on her. Kiyomi, of course, had given her a heftier allowance than the rest of them. Enough for some news sets of clothes and some tools and supplies and whatever groceries they can’t hunt or fish or pick or grow for themselves immediately. The closest village to their cabin is nearly nine miles away. They only ever make the trip when they need more flour or soap, really. And Mikasa’s getting better at making soap. They trade herbs Eren recognizes from his father’s teachings and fish from the river when they realize it goes just as far as coin. The villagers are decent folk--and their blood won’t splash on this ground and dirty his hands or his soul--but they keep to themselves. They have no quarrel with the young “Mr. and Mrs. Krueger” who settled into the old Weber place, but little desire to befriend them. Thank God Mikasa is Hizuran, really. Eren can pass for Marleyan, but Mikasa saves them from too much suspicion.
Cleaning up the cabin takes ages. It’d fallen into disrepair in the thirty-odd years that it’d been abandoned. They have to clean our decades’ worth of dust and spiderwebs, fix up the broken windows, fix the chimney. The plumbing works fine, thankfully--neither of them would know a thing about that. They have to buy a new mattress and pillows and quilts. It gets much colder on the Marleyan mainland than it does on Paradis; they have to stock up on firewood.
It’s a quiet, peaceful routine. Eventually, immediately necessary measures get taken care of. They learn how to relax again. For the first time, there’s nothing forcing them to get out of bed--no school, no labor, no training, no mandatory wake-up, no missions. Some days they barely get out of bed--though they’re not exactly idle--except for rushed meals and baths. Some days they can’t get up and going fast enough. Like they’re little kids again, they play tag, they swim in the river, they race each other and make games and challenges out of chores and find shapes in the clouds and make flower crowns. Unlike when they were little kids, roughly half of these activities seem to end with them having sex. A definite improvement.
They keep a garden. Eren tries to figure out woodcarving. Mikasa makes a lot of bread. A wild chicken wanders into the yard one day while he’s out fishing, and when he comes back his wife has named her Eloise and is making a pen for her. Eloise lays an egg a day; Eren thinks it’s worthwhile to get another chicken or two, but they’re putting it off until the next supply run. They make a picnic table overlooking the breathtaking view. Evidently, they don’t hammer the nails in deep enough, because when they have sex on it immediately after they think it’s done, it collapses under them. (Spare him the nailing jokes, please. Mikasa, who thought the whole thing was hilarious, made plenty. Apparently, along with superhuman strength, the Ackermans also have a genetic predisposition for inappropriate jokes.)
It’s a good life. The summer goes by quickly, but they have so many days that unfold in a lazy golden haze. It’s just them, their own private heaven, and Eren wouldn’t change it.
***
It’s not a perfect fairytale happily ever after.
Mikasa regrets it, sometimes, he thinks. Sometimes, he almost does. But Mikasa--she doesn’t know what would have happened. There’s a difference between her listening when he broke down and told her what he would have done in the safety and seclusion of their bed, the scent of baking bread in the air and the fire crackling across the room, and knowing. She’d told him early on in that conversation, that he would never do such a thing, and that had only set him sobbing harder because he would have. She’d corrected herself quickly, but it doesn’t make him feel better. He has nightmares about walking over a dead, flattened world. He had been so high that the Wall Titans had been like Eloise to him. He’s been able to see beyond them, the hordes of people who couldn’t outrun his apocalypse. And then he’d walked over their pulped remains.
To Mikasa, that’s something that would and will never happen. All she knows in her bones to be real is this world that they have here. She doesn’t know that there was any other version of the night they ran away. A world where she had told him he was family and then the old man and their friends had interrupted them, where Eren had nothing to run to when he wanted to run away, and so continued down his awful path.
So it’s harder for her to ignore the consequences that their selfish decision to run away has on their friends. “Their” decision. He chose to run, she just chose to follow him. She was so shocked that night that she would have done almost anything he asked, and it’s possible he took advantage of that.
She tries not to let him know, but she’s dead worried about Armin, Sasha, Historia, Jean and Connie, Captain Levi and Commander Hanji, and all the rest. Eren has no idea what will happen to Paradis, only that it’s not likely to be anything good. Armin must be tearing his hair out looking for them. They must be either wanted for desertion or presumed dead. Maybe both. Floch and Zeke are out there somewhere waiting for him. Historia’s baby gets closer and closer to due, and it’s unlikely that she’ll be allowed much rest before she’s told to have another. One of those kids will eventually grow up and eat their mother.
The people of Paradis, his closest friends, the land to which he owes his loyalty, will be under attack soon. Whenever he wanted to, Eren could leave, could track down Zeke and unharden the Walls and unleash the Rumbling, save Paradis.
But he won’t.
He doesn’t know if it’s right or if it’s wrong. It’s definitely selfish. Sometimes the thought of what will happen to Paradis saps the strength from him, leaving him feeling like a hollow shell with guilt sloshing around in his gut, eroding his insides. Sometimes he thinks of the way things are for his people and he gets so angry he thinks he could find it in himself to do it. But then Mikasa smiles at him and all that rage is wiped away. They’ve made their bed and now they’re going to lie in it; there’s little use in talking or thinking about it.
It’s not like that for Mikasa. Her soul isn’t on the line here. Arguably, by choosing him, she damned Paradis. She saved the world, but it’s so hard to see a negative. In the other world, she would have been the one to stop him; she’d be remembered as the savior of humanity and she’d be beloved by what was left of the world. But now she feels like she’s just damned their home.
But at the end of the day, this is their home now. These four walls and the river and the chicken that follows her around hoping for bread crusts. A village that feels as far away as Paradis or Hizuru. It’s each other, as it has been for most of his life. And when the stars come out, they see the pair of them in their bed, guarding each other from nightmares and living peacefully with the choice they made.