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“Don’t touch them.”

She flinches, fingertips still over the river that ebbs and flows with tendrils of souls in its tributaries, ancient films pulled from betwixt the flesh and bone of humans. His voice is not raised, it is not frightening, but he startles her.

“Why can’t I?” Always a challenge, because if she is to be trapped in this desolate kingdom of the undead, she is going to receive the full agency of a powerful queen.

Mikasa turns around to be met with a cold steel gaze, pale narrow features and a gaunt crown wrought of some gnarled, obsidian branch. It almost looks like it curls out of his skull, right beneath the thin shaven sides of his head.

“You are a living goddess,” he steps closer to her, stares down into the gray silt of the river’s edge, a remorseful respect in the reflection of his eyes, “and they are not of this world. They belong here—it is you who does not.”

But she wants to be here. It is a secret she keeps to herself, because it is easier to fight the soulless monsters that escape this Hell and crawl across the Earth, the savages that tear the mortals to pieces, corners them like helpless little sheep.

Mikasa is doing this for the sake of humanity, and she knows there is a twinge of curiosity beneath the ambiguous persona of the ruler of the underworld.

“I could give them life,” her nails reach down again towards the water, but he grabs her wrist so swiftly that the bones within crunch and grind over one another uncomfortably. Mikasa snaps her head up, anger wreathed in bunches across her features. “I will remain here for all eternity, as promised.”

He clicks his teeth together, unimpressed. “You have no choice about that.”

“It was my choice,” she bites out, a righteous laugh in the back of her throat, spreading a smile across her face, “it was never anything but my choice to remain here.”

This does not please him, but Mikasa doesn’t care. She is not here to please him, she is not here for anyone but the humans that are suffering on the Earth she is supposed to be enriching, filling with plush foliage and fruits. “You understand,” he is hardened in every way possible, and this must be why everything burns blue here, cold-blooded fire and the complete absence of warmth, “they can never come for you. If you give them life, it will be your life that you give to them, and you will be like me.”

And he is ruthless, he is a small man amongst dark, twisted forestry and huddled against the clay and bone pedestal in Tartarus, watching people come and go, protecting the things that are rightfully his. He lives in a complete balance—nothing that comes here may leave, nothing that leaves will ever come back.

Mikasa is a brand new trinket chained to this world, now. “If they do, they will not take me—I will not go.”

“I will kill them all,” he waves his hand nonchalantly, “if they try, I will slay them and watch them slip in their own mortal blood.”

There is nothing to weigh in her mind; the fate of humanity is in the cusp of her hands and she cannot let it slip away. So, although her fingers twitch and tremble, she dips them down into the river. His hand is still encircled around her wrist, and the first time she comes back convulsing, a spirit slipping over the pale blue dress drenched with soul-river water, trying to climb within her skin and bones.

She gasps and chokes and coughs, and something flares like a cold fire in her chest, and she is peeling the soul away from her body, watching the light of her own life kindle like a tiny wick within it, and it animates into a young man, naked and terrified out of his wits.

Mikasa feels like she will die, like the cold grip of a soul from the river Styx is going to spread through her skin and she will wilt, pale blue death.

“Leave here,” he commands in a strong voice, and the man is all but crawling, scrambling away from the two of them. He pulls her back into his arms, watches the curled bun of her hair unravel against the bone-black armor on his chest.

“He,” she breathes heavily, “what if he…can’t…get out?”

He curls his arms around her waist and drags her away from the river, her feet away from the edges where they can grab her and yank her below, drown her in their soullessness and render him without a queen.

“He will be able to leave. As I told you, this is not a place for mortal souls, he will be able to find his own way.”

She is silent for a long time; she doesn’t fight against his grip though he does not fight to move her away. And Mikasa does not like it here, she does not think this is what was meant to become of her life as a goddess, but if she may pour her life back into the world, if she may sit by the river and keep those without mortality from forging from the underworld and overtaking the Earth that she loves so much, then she will rule with ruthless vigilance.

“Don’t you ever want to leave this place?” She asks, her blood trailing slowly through her veins now. “Don’t you ever want to see the outside world?”

He tucks her hair out of her face, sighs into the back of her neck. “I see through the eyes of every soul I have ever lent my life to,” and he is like her, he is so much like her that she never knew, “I don’t give a shit about never leaving this place.”

It is candid, for a king of the dead, it is crass and so very human that she finds herself short of breath again. She is the queen of this place, now, and she knows she will never leave now.

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The silent fury begins when Mikasa walks up to the skeletal throne rendered dull and black, with something glittering clutched between her fists. Today she is draped in blood red, her hair long and dripping ink over her shoulders.

Levi doesn’t have to see it to know what it is because he fashioned it out of glass and bone himself, hollowed out the center with delicate, careful hands into a glittering crown for the sliver of a girl he had once known.

“What is this?” She holds her hands open and light glints from her palms and Levi is descending the dais in seconds flat, a malevolent rage contained in the harsh angles of his face. It is shattered in her hands, the old trinket, and he closes her fists over it, glaring into her eyes.

She gasps in shock and pain, but he doesn’t let go, not until the blood in her hands runs over his knuckles, drips onto the dusty clay ground between them. “It isn’t yours,” he hisses, feels the glass crunch underneath the weight of his fist over hers, and Mikasa yanks her hands free.

Her eyes hold more hurt than he expects to find, and there is a subtle twinge in the center of his chest. She shakes the glass out of her sticky palms, wipes them into her dress inconspicuously. “I didn’t break it,” her voice trembles, “and it is mine if I lay claim to it. I am a Queen here, should you forget.”

And she is gone, a flurry of vermilion silk whipped into a dark cloud of irritation.

She is far too brusque to be a daughter of the Earth, he thinks. And it is easy for him to slide behind her like a shadow, to grab her wrists and whisper in her ear that she has much to gain from the darkness, from the winter that may envelope the Earth should she leave it. She is a more than worthy queen.

(And she is right that he lays the choice down in front of her, because it is all her own when she comes stumbling into the permanent nightfall of the Underworld.)

All that Levi can think about is that he will never see her again. Nothing that comes here may leave, nothing that leaves will ever come back, and she will never come back.

Petra was the last—she was the last piece of him that he dipped down into the river Styx and extracted, a wisp of a woman with bright eyes and a luminescent smile, like a sun beneath this Hell he calls a kingdom.

It is this that resonates the same pain when Mikasa touches her fingers to the river and frees someone she does not even know (what he would give for that, what he would sacrifice to thaw his hardened heart to her presence, again). It is the pain he thinks he feels when he sees her crown shattered in her fist, because it is like her smile has been crushed by her and he wants her to feel every bit of it with the ounces of her that still feel.

Maybe he should not be surprised, maybe he should no longer reminisce over these despairingly sad moments.

She is his Queen now, after all.

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Every day is a brand new celebration. He doesn’t ask when she resurrects souls into her meager garden, faintly commanding an army of new blood with loyalty wrapped completely around her. The Underworld is a passive, iron-bone wrought prison, and Levi does not do anything other than puppet and entertain and laze about with wrath contained for centuries of time.

But she must animate the dead, she must traverse each desolate nook and cranny offered to her here. She sullies her pure white clothes with the black dust of ashen bone and nightfall armor, with the sunset orange clay of Tartarus.

It proves no surprise to him when she scrapes up soul-plasma and bits of metal and winding strands of silk, setting them in front of them with a demanding question in her mouth, “why are they all human?”

Sometimes, she is more like a child than a goddess reborn into this dark realm, but it has been so long since he has remembered the inherent curiosity of those on Earth. (Levi may leave, he is the only one, but there has always been something binding him here—something that keeps him restrained as the most formidable tale of the Underworld while all the other monsters have chances to escape.)

“They cannot be anything but.” Levi stares down at her as if she has thrown useless trinkets at his feet. And there are so many ways he can resist her, but there is no use to that, to continue to fight against the dominion she is beginning to split into her own control. “What do you wish them to be?”

Mikasa presses her lips together and eyes him as if he has offered to cinch her tongue out of her mouth with a coal from beneath his black furnace throne. “Like us,” she draws her fingers in patterns along the black ash and dirt, “not mere mortals.”

His expression tightens and he arches an eyebrow, slides off of his throne to kneel in front of her in the sand. And she watches him with the newness of what he’d expected from a goddess residing on Earth—fear and curiosity and reverence in her gaze. He reaches out to touch her face, his hand coarse against her smooth cheek, his thumb flipping up to touch the cupid’s bow of her lips.

“There is only one way to make brand new souls like ours,” he curls his fingers under her chin, against her throat, and tilts his head back to look down the bridge of his nose. There is nothing else to say; there is nothing else that he should need to say.

Mikasa holds his gaze though her rattled bones clench tight in her fist, and he is certain she can will some sort of creation out of the dust and the sheer force of her will. And he can, too, and perhaps he should.

Levi drops his hand and stands, turning his back to face her. “I can give you anything between the sky and the Underworld that you wish,” he glances over his shoulder, staring, “I could give you a legion of bloodless soldiers, I could give you vicious and vengeful daughters of sand and bone, I could fashion you a cavalry to protect your beloved mortals. But even I, my honorable queen, cannot give you that without a gift of my own in return.”

And he isn’t sure what he should expect from her, because there is so much to her that he does not yet know, that he does not understand, except that there is much about the world that is wrong (though Levi remains peaceful below, dealing with the miscreants that stumble into his kingdom and steal his treasures) and that it is very dear to her heart.

“Then, my king, it will be a gift that I shall give in my own time.”

She leaves her bones at his feet and returns to her garden to appease her mind. 

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He shows her how to conserve her spirit.

Levi doesn’t understand why he is always so inclined towards helping her, since he already has what he wants trapped in fraying silk with empty, absent eyes, but he does anyway, aligning the bones she picks out of the puddles by the river and tossing them amongst the dirt.

He should wring her dry, so she is abrasive and soulless, like him.

“Is this what you did for her?” Mikasa asks him and he is stone-silent, fingers rigid enough to shatter the bones spread between the two of them. There is nothing so beautiful contained within the shell of the Earth that he would go so far to save it, but Levi has never been moved to action (not before he resurrected Petra, not after he had to let her go).

All of these things close off inside of him immediately, before he can suspect any of them to overtake him and come spilling out of his mouth. He cups his hands together and spreads a cold, blue fire across the bones, watches the electric flames flicker and consume nothing.

“All mortals are made of perishable things,” disgust roils in the pit of his stomach, as if there is no worse fate than being condemned to a body that will die out from underneath its owner without warning, “and the elements exist in likeness. Place a soul here, and when it dies, it will return to the elements, as all mortals return to the dust of the ground.”

He is the one who drops his hand into the river and pulls out the thin film of a human soul, not given the chance to leech the warmth right out of Mikasa’s palms, and lets it sink down into the fire and bone casket of a skeleton created. It shifts and clatters noisily, but it lifts itself to life just as any soul would have, but as it forms—shock of multi-colored hair and tall, broad frame, it stays down kneeling in the dirt, head bowed.

Mikasa wanders towards him (him because of the shape of his body and the sharp angle of his jaw and the prominence of his sexual characteristics) and rests her hand atop the sandy brown color of his hair, turns to look at him with wide eyes. “He is not human,” she frowns, skims her fingers along the sides of his face, “I can feel it missing, that piece of me.”

“Good.” His voice is clipped as he stares, “They do not need that piece of you to exist, and I presume they will help serve the purpose that you wish for them to have, since you cannot leave this place.”

Her head tilts in a nod and Levi feels the tension spill out of his features, because sometimes the affection in her eyes reminds him of all the tales and stories spread through visits from other gods and goddesses, of captured mortals, captured deities who thrive on slivers of hope and bursts of faith. And though this captivity is partially her choice, he fears she will misstep, she will retract and want to disappear (and though he threatens, he would never be able to stop her, in the end).

And he doesn’t think she will speak, with her fingers running through her new mortal’s hair, but she does, quietly. “If there must be monsters,” she tugs until she is met with silver eyes and a narrow nose, and a face that seems familiar but she has never seen before, “then they will be mine. They will be ours.”

He should prepare himself to forge more skeletal soul containers with the cold fires from this Hell, but instead, he is captivated by the cold fury in her eyes.

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She was always so windswept by how beautiful the Earth was. And though she was destined for something higher than fraternizing with mortals, it never stopped her from being amongst them. (There was something more genuine, more gentle about mortals in the presence of a deity than she ever cared to have with any other gods.)

Perhaps that was why she had such a great fear of the soulless beings that had escaped from the Underworld. Mikasa remembered exactly where she had been, atop a grassy hill in an open meadow, beneath a single sprawling tree, conversing with a mortal boy. (Sometimes the thought still rings in her head, that she marvels over the striking green of his eyes, the width of his sparkling smile, and then the Earth shatter and crack at the seams, and those demons come pouring up from the core like lava.)

Eren, his name is etched into her thoughts even when she is commanding an army much like those monsters, his name is still in the open curve of her mouth when she thinks with the abrupt fervor she addresses the King of the Underworld, as if he is nothing with eyes like blotted coal.

These images flash behind her eyelids when she reaches into the river and feels that lightning in her veins, the faintness swimming around in her head at the tug on her soul, and for a moment she considers pushing Levi to anger, wondering if he contains a power that could unleash and raze the planet with its sheer force, because he is a god unlike any other, with passive power kept restrained.

But she doesn’t, she could never, not so long as Eren walks the Earth.

And so she finds her stomach lined with a twinge of guilt when she rests the thin tips of her nails against his collar, leans her face down to touch the side of his. She isn’t sure whether it is the cosmic event going on that has brought the King to the surface, but his eyes are laserlight focused onto hers, and she knows she has but moments, slivers of seconds passing to trap herself with him, to chain herself to this unbelievable power.

“You have come to take me,” she says with a force like the ocean welling up in her chest, threatening to drown her in the middle of dry land, so she looks into his face, resolves herself even further to this salvation, but it does not show convincingly.

His hands are cold when they seize her wrists, and his breath is a wisp against her neck as he speaks the secrets of darkness into her mind. And Mikasa feels weak with emotion, nothing like she has ever felt before, and all she can curse towards the humans for teaching her their sick empathy. “You have come to take me,” she repeats with a tremble in her voice, “and so you shall.”

She thinks the Earth may still shatter after all.

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There is one for each of the lethal forces in the world, and they all have faces and names and worldly memories tainted by the touch of devotion to their creator, to her. And still, she must have more of them, she must have an entire army.

She touches her hands to his face and wipes the shock of his hair from his eyes. He is tall and slender and staring at her as if she has pulled him from her ribcage and formed him out of her own flesh and blood, as if he could see nothing else but her. Jean, she thinks to herself, this one is called Jean.

And she almost feels inclined to let the flush creep into her cheeks before she remembers that this is what she created, a soldier to fight, and she did not make him from the pieces of herself she was willing to tear apart.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” she murmurs when she feels the mood shift, feels the ominous aura of his presence near her, and his footsteps on the echoless ground.

His fingers are cool on the back of her neck, the scent of ashes and something spice-dry as she inhales. “Then leave this child’s venture alone, Mikasa.”

He addresses her this way sparingly, but maybe even he has pity for the shadows of semi-circles beneath her eyes, and the empty sighs that leave her lips by evening’s end. There is more than enough doubt to say he couldn’t care less, but even despite that, maybe.

But she tenses underneath his touch, cracks the knuckles of her worn hands and crouches out of his touch to dip down beside the soul-flooded river.

“I can’t,” she says resolutely, her hands shaking, “I can’t stop, I need more.”

…

Jean is beautiful, passionate, and void all at once, wrapped in resplendent, pale blue hues as if he was dragged from the curved rocky bottom of the river, sickly skin with sparkling eyes. He holds armfuls of bones and crisp, dead leaves, he watches as Mikasa lifts another shell of a soul into life from nothing but bones and filthy river water and plush flower petals.

And at the end of the day, Jean is the one who carries Mikasa, completely drained of energy, away from the river and back to Levi; he settles her across the cold, black throne and leaves the two of them alone. It is not always Jean alone; there is a girl with pale gold hair who drags Mikasa along the clay floors, even more pale blue than Jean, eyes like eternal rain trapped within them.

They are all slightly unsettling, even to Levi, who has been without a soul for centuries (though they do have souls, they are without the natural spark of life that Mikasa contains, that humans contain, that warmth and light and passion and love and so, they are as ghosts).

He doesn’t know much of them or what they’re like, not the way Mikasa does; just that this one with the languid slant to her posture, the pale hair and pale cloth and pale, pale, pale everything—she is so complacent in her lack of efforts, and even still, she stares at him with piercing, icy eyes.

…

Mikasa watches the aimless way they interact and puts a name to each element of sin in her life, now. And some are in the forms of these almost-human mannequins she has raised from beyond death and into a shallow attempt of life, and others exist in other senses of the words, others are inexplicable.

There is nothing else Jean could be but utter devotion, beautiful when he smiles though his eyes are obsessive, reverent, immersed within any task she asks of him. He is subservient to her, loyal, he is in love with every inch of her, and extremely volatile to all else that comes in contact with her (and she would wish him to have the same characteristics of desire, blown about from end to end, it is jealousy that warms him into a heated, angry thing).

And then there is Armin—the first to rise in the beginning of the day, the first to venture out of the Underworld and bring Mikasa back news of Eren, her Eren on the surface of the Earth, and to wallow in the acknowledgements that she gives to him. Armin is gentle and slow, but sly and ruthless underneath it, and though he has such a soft demeanor, the lack of life within his bones crushes it into arrogance, into intelligence sharpened into a weapon by which no other could measure. (Mikasa wonders what he could have been like, if she had given him a piece of her to hold and cherish and nurture those volatile emotions within him.)

Annie is pressed to feel anything in excess, occasionally driven to move when the crowd around her shifts, but she is the embodiment of strength and it is what drives the others to find her peculiar. She is a wealth of power, a token to be envied, and yet she does not stretch the limits of her bones, she does not use this skill to her advantage, she lets it fall by the wayside without a second thought.

The rest she can call to name with alarming ease:  Sasha, who laughs and laughs and desires nothing more than everything, who hungers to explore, craves each moment spent above the Underworld, resents lying under the shadow but eats it all up regardless. There is Eren, whom she may never see, but she still fights for; Eren, so soft and gentle and hardened and angry, and Mikasa imagines the blinding red when Armin tells her that he knows of her fate.

And Mikasa could not imagine being so well-rounded and falling in love with someone so angry, so blood-red wrathful in intent as Eren is, and still, she thinks she may (and if she gives away all of these intricate parts of herself, she will no longer have that love, she will just have him).

But Mikasa doesn’t complain, because now that she has what she wants (almost what she wants, not completely what she wants, yet) she is ready to give him the gift that he desires, ready to allow herself to succumb to him.

Though she does not understand how to begin; he is sparing in his touches as if his fingertips will drain the life force from her skin and he is not all wilted black like she expects. He is pale lines and sharp angles and purposeful with her body, every tilt and touch is meant for something, and it is nothing she can ever begin to understand.

Levi is desire, though it is mute and silenced, it is hushed against her skin in touches that fear breaking her into pieces. And he shouldn’t because she is not afraid of that at all (she may even welcome it, any sort of reprieve to feeling something new), and when he comes close to her, all she can think is that she wants more.

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Beneath the plates of armor she peels away from his body, his skin is warm. And it surprises her, though every image of hell has been wreathed in the imagery of fire and brimstone and ash, because Levi is cold in every other way he can manage to be. But sitting with his back aligned with his throne and her hands tucked into the edges of his protective black steel armor, she can feel the solid warmth of his muscled body under her fingertips.

Mikasa can’t shake the feeling that this is something that should be done with care, and so she lingers every step of the way; she pokes her fingers into the heavy weights of armor around his waist and slides them over his narrow hips with gentle slowness, she runs her fingers across his chest just to feel the ridges of his abdomen, just to touch his skin.

All he does is watch her with those storm-cloud eyes, patiently and nearly non-responsive to each and every touch, each movement against his skin, that is, until she skims her fingers down his jawline and kisses his mouth suddenly.

This is supposed to be some mechanical action, some performance between the two of them for mutual gain, but her lips are smooth and tempting and her mouth opens underneath the pressure of his tongue at her lips. And it was not meant to be this way, because there is something voracious and gnawing in the curve of her stomach, trying to devour his heat and his lust and his power whole.

And it says to hell with taking it slow.

So when she straddles his lap, he feels the force in the weight of her hips slamming against him, a painful, powerful wave of pleasure pulling him into the undertow. It is a delightful measure of contact and there is something so abrupt about the sensation in her chest that prickles with arrogance at this shift in her attitude that it alarms her, but it does not stop her.

It does not stop Levi either, because he is well-paced with her, his hands sliding up her waist to press his thumbs gently against the undersides of her breasts, to tug her body back and forth in his lap as her hips grate over his. It all resurfaces so rapidly, her greedy penchant to throw herself headlong into something like this simply because she is insatiable, simply because she must have more, she must have it all. And he is simply the one silent and overcome by lust, softspoken nearly silent pleasure guiding him through careful surveillance of her body, even now.

Mikasa is the one who parts her thighs against the hardened length twitching beneath her, and Levi seizes so suddenly that he trenches his nails into her skin, drags them when she flicks her hips over his erection and doesn’t let go. The hiss of his breath against her chest only makes her smirk, only prompts her to curl her hands around his length and push the tip of him into her.

And it aches, immediately, though she wraps her arms around his neck and arches her body closer to his. The stretch between her legs is euphoric, it is edged with pain but it blooms with pleasure, more than she can handle, and when he moves his hips beneath her, it is almost too much for her to handle.

She wonders what this is like, childrearing with gods, because she could certainly stand to practice at this, to keep pushing the heat of their bodies closer, the pain of desire spiking in her blood, and the reddened flush of his cheeks is what nearly drives her frantic in his arms, because it is so real. (She hardly realizes how much time she has spent trying to make a monster out of him when he is nothing but a not-quite-so-empty man.)

His fingers tangle in her hair and yank her mouth close, so that her lips touch his neck and their cheeks lean together, and he hisses, “You always get what you want, don’t you?”

She does. Mikasa feels no guilt about it, will not let herself feel any guilt about it because he is getting what he wants, too; there is just so much of him that refuses to submit to her power, to her control, to the sway of her body over his, and she does not regret it at all.

It doesn’t stop him from slamming his hips into hers, yanking her body down over his so that she sinks down perfectly over his cock, and his mouth is fastened against her shoulder, hissing and swearing and mumbling an almost litany of prayers to things she has never thought of.

She keeps moving, a raw, sharp pain slicing through her hips, and he fucks her noiseless, until there are shadows and outlines of words on her lips being shattered by the rock-steady movement of his narrow hips, back and forth like a pendulum dragging pleasure between her legs.

“Now,” he says, a pleasant smugness in his voice, though she can feel him trembling, quaking apart inside of her, “I get what I want, too.”

Chapter Text

Mikasa can nearly feel the steam roiling off of his body when he slides back down into his throne, his face crinkled in disdain, the tension in his body completely palpable. Her hands are small, useless knots against his shoulders, but he doesn’t push her away. Not in a critical moment like this, where he does not realize he desires her touch until he has it, does not want to risk pushing her away.

“You’re always such a pissant after you come back to this place,” she says, and he grumbles something that sounds more like a petulant comeback than an actual piece of conversation, most likely because it is. She only knows bits and pieces of what goes on, because he is always talking about his alarmingly brief ventures from the Underworld with vigorous swearing and cursing and damnation to all involved parties.

But there is something sullen in the slump of his shoulders, so Mikasa twists herself into the familiar space of his lap, takes his face into her hands despite the jerk of his head away, despite the fact that he fights her unnaturally hard.

“Stop it,” she chides harshly, and though his jaw ticks in annoyance, he does as she asks. His face is narrow, chiseled beauty, and the most vicious curse on the world is that he is condemned to reside below the Earth and out of sight. Levi may not think so, but there is something sinister and beautiful about him, and perhaps it is why Mikasa feels so self-assured as his Queen.

She kisses him, and he snaps his head back with a growl. “He really thinks I give a shit about his picture perfect family with his stupid wife and his shitty kid, well, I don’t.”

Mikasa rolls her eyes and leans in, and though her kiss falls close, it lands on the corner of his mouth instead. “I know you don’t,” she tries again, anchors her mouth against his jaw and slides it down his throat, “you have your own wife, on my own word, who is far from stupid.”

She can feel his smirk before she sees it, before he tips her head back and fits it against her mouth, too. His hands on her thighs, scrabbling and warm and frantic, and they are always tearing, ripping at one another, because they know they are beyond the destruction of mortal things, they know they are so evenly matched to endure this hell together.

(Together, since when—but she knows, she knows when she has started to think this way, ever since she let him sheathe himself inside of her, ever since she decided that this cause for humanity was enough to give herself to him, ever since she felt like giving herself to him of her own volition.)

She folds her hands between his thighs and strokes him carefully, firmly, until he threatens to spill more than a wild litany of curse words, and she enjoys this too much; she enjoys the way he glares into her face as if she has taken advantage of him, because he must be so unaccustomed to this power, to the way she can hold him so easily in his hands, and she feels an errant strand of jealousy burn over the woman with such a tight vice over the remains of his heart, because she wants it, she wants it so badly.

“That shitty kid could fall out of the sky for all I care,” he grits his teeth as she slides friction across his lap, fingers roughly tapping against the tip of his erection, grinning into his mouth, into the harsh line of his lips, and Mikasa sh-sh-shushes him with kisses until his anger drips away, meaningless.

(But he does, fall out of the sky, that child does; falling, falling, until one day, he will tumble right into hell, right along side him.)

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To everything there is a season, and a time, and a place, for all events in the world.

It is autumn, so she falls back into his embrace with ease. She soothes the ache of her absence for the beautiful months of the year, beautiful is what those earth-and-bone children call them, the months in which the goddess, his Queen traipses across the Earth and dapples the surface with beauty and life. He doesn’t mind letting her go because the Earth does not need more than the fleeting touch of her fingers to bloom with flora, and though it is difficult to look at this sinister, powerful woman and picture the sun shining for her, on Earth, it does.

But here, it is always dark, all hours of the day whether she smiles or not. Perhaps that is the way she likes it, a way in which she can enjoy the freedom to not force herself to make the sun shine for everyone else.

And though he does not mind letting her go, he must contend with the wrath that wraps itself around his bones and between the spaces of his joints, because it has been light years away, this fantasy of the two of them reigning over this Hell, and Levi has never had want for anyone, even for Petra, as she left, was nothing more than something he possessed for a time. But his anger wells into fury into coldblooded destructive wrath because he finds the entire space of the Underworld uninhabitable without her.

He is bitter, like freezing raindrops, like sheets of fresh snow pure white over fields, until she returns and lets the world freeze without her. (It is amusing that he exists in the antithesis of the seasons she brings—a stunning warmth on the Earth brings a chill deep within his bones, only chased away when she returns and allows the Earth to wither and die for seasons.)

Levi will not wilt and die without her, and it makes his suffering so much more profound, because he will remember the countless days, the rising and setting sun without her, remember the pull in the pit of his stomach that sang out longing for her.

But the Earth shall freeze and die and he shall have her at last.

He does not waste, does not give her a single moment of time to leave him; there are days she is so immersed in him, so pressed tight against him, so spread thin beneath him that the Earth cries out for her in droves of relentless snow and pursuant storms and whirlwinds of inclement weather.

And there is nothing more he wants in the world to have it last forever, to work her between his hands until she spills into a molten cast of anything and everything he would have her to be.

But it must begin somewhere—it must start in the moments that he falls prey to slumber, because she slips out for the night, for a day, for a week to lay her hands over the hardened soil and overturn splotches of growing grass and saplings and weeping rainstorms to push the plants into springing through the ground.

She does not want him to notice, but he does, and she wonders if there is something like rain happening to him too, something washing away the fantasy of keeping her trapped (though she may be chained, though she may never leave forever, she will continue to escape for a time, continue to do what it is she is destined to do). She wonders if he wonders about Eren at all.

So before she knows it, the sun is shining for the two of them, shining for Mikasa in the shade with her fingers stroking beautiful hues of brand new flowers she never had the time to name, shining for the color of the grass that reminds her of his eyes, but not quite, shining for all of the frozen pieces of the Underworld that have not yet thawed in her absence.

The summer is sweet to Mikasa, though she grows tired of being wanted, tired of fulfilling, tired of everything and longing to find a stretched shadow, longing for a starless night in a hidden-moon-sky, anything close to the darkness like that within Levi’s arms.

She has a fantasy, a nightmare, that she falls into his arms, that he takes her and kisses her and strips her bare, warm against the ground; she has a fantasy that he calls her from the Earth with such commandeering force that it shatters all of her inhibitions, shatters everything that stands in her way until they are together. She has a nightmare that he calls to her and she cannot resist, that she plunges the Earth into eternal winter for his touch.

Mikasa marks her visions on the longest day of the year, where the sun falls onto her persistently, continuing to spray her with golden sunlight, and everything moves so rapidly after that. The days shrink, until it is a chill across her shoulders and she is sneaking back below, back into the Underworld to slip between the curves of Levi’s arms, to startle him into that longing again.

And when autumn begins, again, she falls.

Chapter Text

“Did he show you that?”

She expects the bitter resonance of disdain to surface in his voice, but it is absent. Mikasa sits in the plush grass of her gardden, the only singular place that Levi frequents that isn’t all ash or clay or soil or dust. It is a circle of flowers and a spread of beautiful, lively grass; when she is not seated within it, the others tend to it, with water or careful hands or simply adoring eyes.

Kneeling this way with her hands clasped together, it must look as if she is praying, though she is a goddess, and there is no sovereign above her. But her hands are balled into fists with the flats of her knuckles pressed together, and Levi kneels until he can reach his hands out and hold the shape of her fists in his palms.

“It’s a heart,” she says softly, flexes her thumbs and presses them tight again, “the human heart is the size of one fist and when you press them together, like this, it is the shape of a heart, as in the symbol.”

His tongue clicks against his teeth and she feels his fingers pressing between her fists, itching to separate the two of them, but instead he wraps his cool hands around her fists, presses his lips into a grim slash.

“I won’t be able to love him if I let this piece of myself go, Levi,” she says, as if she doesn’t already love him as well, as if there is not some painful thing twisting into her chest because of him, “but I won’t be able to save him if I keep it all for myself.”

She can’t quite read him when he is this close to her, when she cannot take in every inch of his body and assess the subtle changes in every part of his being. “You will surely lose your soul,” he rolls his eyes about carelessly, “but you will not lose your heart, and you can still love with that.”

Mikasa unfurls her fingers from her palms, stares at the crescent indentations of her nails in her own skin. “You must not know much about love,” and something cracks, she can feel it, she can hear it, she can damn well see it, because he lets go of her, though she continues, “if you think all it takes to love is a heart.”

There has always been so much more to love than having a heart, though she knows Levi has no soul to possess the richness of love like hers, so what could he know?

He is silent when he moves away from her, and she would suspect a modicum of hurt in his eyes if she had ever known him to be so open with her. But he speaks, and his voice is cold and withdrawn, and it says everything it needs her to know.

“It is an absence of elements that leaves an echo, Mikasa, and though I may not have a soul, and you take me for a fool of a child without more than a whim at stake in this…arrangement, I assure you that I am not glass, nor am I steel, and I can feel with this filthy heart of mine, soul or not. The absence of my soul only makes my feelings more raw and jagged and harmful, and humans are meant to contain souls because we gods have mercy and do not want them to suffer the haunting resonance of such things as this.”

He tilts his head over his shoulder at her, his eyes narrow. “We are left for eternity with nothing but our feelings, so all it takes to love, is time.”

And there is nothing else to say but that.

Chapter Text

This is all like a dream when she pictures it, but he touches his hands to her temples until her eyes white-out with brilliant light and she can see nothing else but this.

…

There is one of them that she loves. The beautiful girls with the yawning, sharp slit mouths all sit at the bank of the river and giggle because their Queen, their mother, is in love with one of those torturously weak flimsy mortal men. But they are obedient, so when she sends them forth into the Earth to scour, they go without a word of protest, without a word of judgment.

The black-tipped queen can hardly believe it herself, but she wants this mortal soul to be hers, and she has claimed so many in his place, dragged so many men by their feet into hell to serve as her company until they find him. And her daughters have no trouble, beautifully dangerous twisted monsters that they are, their bodies a gradient from pale porcelain to coal black, hair as dark and fluid as ink, eyes as bright as stars. They take after her looks, though they have teeth for shredding, and Mikasa would rather tear things to pieces with her own bare hands. The deadliest things come in threes and Mikasa is convinced she has swallowed them all whole.

If they cannot bring her what she wants, then she doesn’t know what she will do.

…

He comes to her first, an angry, emotionless, powerful man in a kingdom not his own. The girls smile at Mikasa, even as she vigorously shakes her head back and forth, no, no, this is not him, this is all wrong, take him away. And all they ever wanted was to please her, so she will never know that they have found her beautiful mortal boy, because this man like black diamond, like indestructible darkness, is so much more suited to her majesty.

There is no terror in his eyes, it is the first thing she notices about him. Her kingdom is no welcoming place; there is fire and ash and sticky clay and graveyards of bones like gardens springing through the soil. Where she sows seeds, black smoke and bone is what she will reap. But there is no fear in his blood, and Mikasa grips him around the aristocratic curve of his jaw and stares down into his eyes.

Eyes dark, soul dark, “My name is Levi,” he snarls with his jaw clicking between her fingers, “get the fuck off of me.”

She feels a fight in her blood because no one will ever, no one should ever talk to her that way, and yet she wants to spare him for being the only one to dare to speak to her as if she is less than formidable, as if she is human.

…

“Fine,” he says when Rose tells him of his face, gliding between her sisters with sparkling razor smiles, “I’ll die either way, so dying her changes nothing.”

And they circle him, like bloodthirsty predators, wide eyed and slicing apart the most delectable piece of him to tear apart. The three of them are an otherworldly force, cool and calculated and almost impossible to tell apart.

Levi thinks he has them figured out; Rose is arrogant and loose around her mouth, always first to intimidate but nothing without the presence of her sisters, and then there is Sina, the most vicious as if there is always something lodged in her teeth, as if she has just finished eating a still-beating heart with her two blackened hands, but Maria is all silence and deadly force and dying before one even realizes they are hurt.

They are not so frightening once he reconciles with the idea of the Underworld, and with the idea of death.

…

“Tell me,” her voice is like a shadow, a presence highlighted beneath his standing frame, “tell me about the mortal world.”

All he can do is shrug, because it is violent and terrible and worthless, and he thinks it may be essentially more so to a deity, and yet her eyes are imploring, pleading.

“It is cruel and bloody and an absolute monstrosity,” he does not flinch when she approaches him swiftly, tilts the thin bridge of her nose down to glance at him with steel-grey eyes, “and there is peace in death that we have all found, but there is terror in hope that we all want, so occasionally, it is a beautiful, beautiful world.”

…

The first time she touches him it is her mouth to his mouth and a desire for more than just servitude, for more than just company. And Mikasa knows she does not need to ensnare men within the tangles of the Underworld, that she can create an army from the dust to kneel at her feet and tend to her. But she kisses Levi because he is so like her that it drives her to feeling, it drives her to thinking; he is so unafraid of challenging her that it has awoken a piece of her long since asleep.

So there is no hesitation and there is no resistance when she slides into his arms and buries herself there, no resistance when he kisses her back. Levi is cautious and careful but so precise and calculated in his gentle touches that they crackle like electricity over her skin, like singular shocks over her flesh jolting into her bones.

It doesn’t make sense, but she keeps moving, keeps unwinding until she is close enough to him to make sense of it all. And he is so fragile, his human body has such delicate sensitivity to her mouth and the scratches of her nails, but he unearths her own in turn, until they are so unbearably close that there is nothing left to do but sink into one another, to him into her.

And he does with a slow rhythm at first, a ticking metronome, a tentative flex of his hips and circling of his waist. So it is slow and crawling until it is not, until it is hot and fast and hard, until she feels as though he will rend all of her air useless and empty in her lungs.

…

It seems a long time before Maria relents, before she is the one who drags this terrified man-child into their realm and offers him to the queen. There is nothing but fear in his clear green eyes, though it is not a fear of her that keeps him at bay. It is this lifeless place, it is the familiarity of Levi sitting by her side.

“Eren,” her voice is soothsayer gentle, like they are lovers long lost rather than whimsical strangers. And this Eren, though terror is lively across his features, flushes and dips his face down into the tangled red scarf around his neck.

Something within him dares him to venture close, and Mikasa can feel the ache in her spread and drag its claws around her chest, because there is softness in her at the sight of Eren’s beautiful, green eyes. But it is not her whose hand he touches with rosy cheeks, but Levi’s; his lashes flutter and he drops down beside him and Mikasa is unsure whether she is satisfied or broken.

…

For so long, Eren has been what she wanted, though Levi has always been what she needed.

…

They are so close, in a way that Mikasa recognizes as that unquenchable way they once were, with Eren’s hands always touching, always grazing against Levi’s knuckles, against his back, against his cheeks. And the silent anger she knows is gone, replaced by tolerance and hushed whispers and a hardened, protective look in his eyes.

Mikasa does not quite know what there is, but she knows she wants it all, or no one else will have it.

“Now that Eren is here,” she says with her hand sliding down Levi’s chest, her eyes fixated on that beautiful boy, the one that has always been so outside of her reach, “you may leave this place, Levi.”

But his eyes are strong and solid as he catches her hand in his stronger one, crushes her fingers in his fist to match the shattering look in his eyes.

“I will not leave him here alone.” They know each other, it is in their eyes, and in the relief dripping down Eren’s spine.

…

The first time she touches him, it is when he is braced between Levi’s arms with his hands gentle in his lap, and Mikasa only slides her fingers through his short crop of hair.

The deadliest things all come in threes and she is so very sure this is it.

…

Levi grins at her, a grin full of teeth and smugness and she wants to slap it off of her face because it is all false, it is all a dream that has stirred something deep within her, and he has took it away from her with nothing more than a laugh in his throat.

And it is this that reminds her, she will never forget; he can give her anything in the world that she wants.

Chapter Text

It does not take very long for them to mature. Although they are born of equal parts her and equal parts him, the resemblance that they bear to her is still unsettling. And he could not be more pleased by the sight of them, beautiful godly monsters crafted in the darkness of the Underworld.

Erinyes, he calls them, descendants of darkness, but Mikasa thinks of them as offspring, as her children; the little girl with the pitch-black eyes smiles lovingly at her whenever she passes, asks for flowers braided into her pin-straight hair and the little boy is cheeky and playful and almost like a child and the eldest is a mirror of Levi in every way she has come to know him.

They are almost like children, the whimsical ones she sees on Earth so often, but then Levi snaps a command and they roar with formidable power, call massive amounts of magic between their hands and set off into the mortal world, ready to rain down terror over the Earth.

“They will be okay.” He never calls them anything personal; they are crafted monsters from their flesh and blood, they are a tool, they are a means to an end, and they are never by name, always by their talent. But Mikasa knows the difference, she knows their names and their abilities and some part of her wants to love them, wants to let them love them.

“Izumi,” she says, and her thin, wiry girl snaps her head around, eyes chasm-deep and full of dark emotion. She is the most hostile, the secret keeper, the enforcer of all covenants and promises and secret pacts whispered in the dark. Mikasa wants to touch her face, wants to cup her cheeks within her hands, but she simple settles for watching her with careful eyes.

“Yes, mother?” Her tone is so clipped that her title sounds formal, sounds so far from intimate that something tugs in pain in her chest.

Her eyes glance over the other two, so little, so delicate; they look like school children, like they should be skipping and singing songs and throwing rocks, but she knows better. She knows of their power because it is her power, because it is Levi’s power, because they are made of the Underworld and that is all of the power that they will ever need.

“Protect them and be careful.”

They are gone before she can finish speaking.

…

He climbs up her legs until she has no choice but to take him into her arms. Almost always their eyes are shadow-space black, like obsidian, like ink. But staring up at her, they are clear green. “Mama,” he slurs with a lopsided grin, and there is something powerful in the line of his mouth, even though he is small and helpless and innocent in her arms.

Mikasa smile flickers for a moment before she shakes her head gently and runs her fingers through the dark black hair shading his eyes, pushing it away from his face. She cannot get enough of the color of his eyes, when they are not dark and abysmal and unnatural.

“What is it, Hiroomi?” The blood protector, though he is the middle, though he is so young. Mikasa doesn’t think she quite understands what vengeance he wreaks upon the Earth, save that the value of family is what makes up his name, that is those who violate those relationships that he persecutes, that he torments.

But not with those round, lovely eyes and sparkling Cheshire grin.

“We’re a family?” He blinks and circles his arms around her neck, squirming until his bangs slide back over his forehead.

She thinks about Mitsuki, the little girl whose eyes shine red with glints of copper-brown in their depths, thinks about how she is called the reckoning, how she is humanity’s great equalizer. She is the one of the three who will level the Earth in favor of the mortals, who will protect them with ruthless indiscrimination.

But then she thinks about Mitsuki, who picks pebbles out of the woods and chips them down into marbles to shoot in circles with Hiroomi, laughing and giggling like children, like mortal babies. She thinks about Izumi, silent and always serious, always black-eyed unless beside Levi, watching him with nearly-glowing indigo eyes.

“Of course we are, sweetie,” she runs her hands down his back comfortingly, knowing the three of them contain unimaginable power, knowing they are not traditional, not normal, “of course we are.”

Chapter Text

“Are you going to see him?”

It is a question one would think beyond the scope of her understanding, but Izumi quirks a perfectly manicured brow. After all, if anyone should understand the arrangement between Levi and Mikasa, it would be the descendant of darkness who treasures an agreement like the one between the two of them, it would be the secret keeper. And it hardly matters that she has only jurisdiction over the humans, because she can read Levi as if he was an open book, and Mikasa is far less easier to decode.

Mikasa remembers the reckoning. (She calls it that to distance the occasion from the happy little girl who curled up in her arms every morning, complaining of fatigue and snoozing against her chest.) She remembers the flare of the river as every soul made free disintegrated and fell into silt at the bottom of the Styx. And Izumi knows what it means to her than those soulless monsters are no longer plaguing the Earth.

She tucks an errant strand of hair away from her face. “It is not my time to leave this place, and I do not think I should do that anymore.” It seems so pointless having fought so hard to protect someone she would never see again, and although she finds herself searching for pieces of Eren when she is dappling the world in sunlight and fresh flora, she knows where she belongs.

And Mikasa feels like such a purposeful fit in the Underworld, where she is in command, where she can cut down a thousand men by the power of her own darkness. Izumi’s eyes flit over her face mechanically, dark and insistent, before they drop into a light shade of purple.

“That is the sort of sacrifice you made,” she says softly, “where you will just let him go for the rest of eternity?”

It almost proves piteously easy to drag her off course, but Mikasa nods her head. “I won’t have to let go of him for the rest of eternity because he will die, and he will fade out of existence.” Her children, her Earth-scorn, hellbound children. She touches her fingers to Izumi’s broad cheek, sweep them up towards her hairline and down the back of her head.

Izumi’s cheeks flush before her eyes fill in, dark and black again. “What if he comes for you, mother?”

It hurts for a moment, for a sliver of a second, but Mikasa lifts her shoulders. This is the life she has built around the Underworld and its tragic King, around her shadow children and the bone-fragmented warriors and the memories of humans just a split of the Earth away. “He cannot take me—I will not go.”

And that is all she can say, that is all she can ever say.

Chapter Text

Eren looks like a vision juxtaposed against the night sky. Something within her trembles at the sight of him in the Underworld, because Levi’s words are the only things that haunt her, and she knows that if he is here, he may never be permitted to leave.

But she watches him curiously, unsure of whether she should touch him, unsure of whether she should speak to him. And oh, she desperately wants to. “You’re trapped here,” he says softly as if this is some sorrowful thing that has happened.

Mikasa shakes her head, crosses the space between them to look into his eyes. They are so vivid, so green that it nearly distracts her from the task at hand completely, makes every other thought she has had about gemstones and plush floral life seem dull and faded out. “I am not trapped, Eren. I chose this.”

And she did choose this, she chose the Underworld and Levi and her elemental soldiers and her Erinyes children.

“But why?”

“For you,” she answers back rapidly, and then tampers down the blush spreading across her face, “for all of humanity. And for myself.” Sometimes, Mikasa forgets though Levi is cold that he is still subservient to her, that he still bows to her power and her wishes, that he has given her lease on this unsaintly kingdom of his.

She finds herself more proud than anything else.

Eren inches forward and kisses her, with a clumsy, overzealous press of his mouth against hers, and she wants to stop kissing him back—because she is kissing him back—but she can’t, she can’t. There is something starving prickling at the base of her nerves and she tips her mouth into his, kisses him until she thinks her lips may bleed.

“Come with me,” he pleads and she already knows the answer, “you’ve made the world so beautiful and it isn’t fair that you won’t enjoy it with us all.”

She smiles and it almost feels genuine, but there is some contagion around Levi that spreads to her, that makes everything less human and more mechanical, more practiced, more controlled. And though there are bits of Mikasa that gleam with warmth and livelihood, she has become so accustomed to the spiraling darkness of the Underworld, accustomed to the wealth of power available to her fingertips and the undead dynasty she has become a part of.

“I was never meant to be with you,” and her voice is sad, and she regrets everything, but it is true, “I was never meant to enjoy it with any of you.” Mikasa touches her fingers to his lips again, as if she can withdraw the memories of their kiss through her fingers. “My place is here and I have made my place here.”

“How very true.” Mikasa nearly jumps out of her skin at his smooth voice pervading the conversation, and he looks as nonplussed as usual. His eyes are fixed on her, as if Eren is nothing more than a mere decoration. “You don’t belong here, boy.”

“Neither does she,” he answers back, but Levi only twists his head and laughs coldly.

“There is no place she belongs more than here.”

Mikasa finds that though she is angry, that he is right; there is no place she belongs more than the darkness, more than where she can be the righteous mother of darkness, where she can be deadly and dangerous and no one will pray to her for plants or trees, but for salvation and mercy.

And it is darkness within her that belongs here, too.

“I will always have a special place in my heart for you,” she says in a somber voice, but she turns towards Levi, walks until she is at his side, knuckles bumping together, “I did this all for you, I love you, Eren. But I love this, too.”

She lifts her hand before he can protest, because she sees it springing into action across his features, she can see it in the lights of his beautiful green eyes. It is funny how she would have waited eternity for them; maybe because she failed to realize exactly how long eternity would be if she waited past his mortal death.

“Nothing that comes here may leave,” she says, twisting her fingers and watching the spill of dark ink from her hands, “and nothing that leaves will ever come back.”

…

He is gone and she feels so empty that she cannot even cry and perhaps, perhaps she is more like Levi now than she’d ever dreamed she could be.

Chapter Text

The world is almost silent with nothing to threaten it.

But his soul is constantly filled to the brim with unrest, even on the most resplendent days full of sunshine, even when there is widespread happiness amongst everyone he has come to know. And perhaps is because it is not quite all of his own spirit pushed back into his core, but slivers of the Underworld, bits and pieces of the Queen pulsing within him.

He will make his way back to her if it is the last thing he ever does.

(And ash to ash, dust to dust, it will be the last thing he will ever do.)

“She’s like our mother, you know,” Armin says in the moment that he sees his eyes turn dark, because he knows what he is thinking of and whom he is thinking of and what follows those dark trains of thought, “she saved us all. She’s like a queen, like a vision of god.”

She is a Queen, Eren thinks when Armin curls his hand around his forearm and leans against him, and with halo-bright hair and clear eyes, Armin is a vision of god in his own right, and it takes nothing but his touch to bring him a small stitch of peace for the moment.

…

Eren is holding her hand when she dies. But she is still beautiful with her glowing smile and gentle eyes and even though her fingertips are cold, she looks so happy to be drifting away.

Everyone else is crying but the two of them; Armin is at her temples with her head in his lap, messily raking her hair back away as if he needs to see the entirety of her face full of life for the last time. All of her friends and comrades are crying, but she is stunning and smiling and breathing for a little while longer.

And Eren is tense, but somehow all held together tightly. “Your crown,” he mumbles between the chorus of tears falling around them, “you’ll finally have your crown.”

Petra’s fingers tighten around his palm and it flows into his mind; a jagged glass-and-bone wreath full of sunlight, cascading a rainbow of colors, and he can see her in it with ease, a flowing white dress and tumbles of curly, strawberry blonde hair, before it shatters and refracts and scatters amongst the dust.

Her smile is weak and it drains all of her energy, every ounce of strength she has left. “It is not my crown anymore, Eren.”

She is gone within the minute.

(And when Eren finally cries, it is not for her, but for the shattered glass crown she must walk across to find her way back to him.)

…

Death is like falling fast asleep for Eren. It is just one damp night that he falls asleep and another when he wakes up on the ground, cold and dead with soul-river water trickling in his ears.

The Underworld is all shadows in the evening and there is some human terror within him at navigating it alone, but his soul, her soul, pulls him along inexplicably, magnetically.

He doesn’t expect a greeting, but then there is a child scaling him with an arm wrapped around his legs and hands reaching up towards his face.

Eren’s face pales beyond the ghost-white pallor he retains in his death, and something in the bottom of his rotting stomach drops out at deep, black eyes and slivers of whites.

“Hn.” She peers up into his face and Eren thinks there is a shadow of blood in her eyes because they tint red for a moment, for a few moments, and then she is back on the ground, abysmally black eyes. She searches him with those obsidian carved eyes and then opens her mouth, lips unmoving. “Eren Jaeger. You have come to see the Queen,” she hisses in Latin, energy flowing through her rose-colored skin, filling him with dread.

The little girl grabs his hand and his head spins and everything is dark so suddenly.

…

“You’re always so rough, Mitsuki!”

“He wants to take Mother with him,” a quiet scowl, shuffling feet, “I cannot spare feelings for that.”

A click of teeth, a scoff, a piteous laugh. “Where shall he take her, Mitsuki? Doesn’t he know this is the only place he’ll ever be? Doesn’t he know she is a powerful entity and he is powerless?”

…

Eren stirs to the sounds of plastic children—it is a shell of a child’s giggle and a careless set of skipping feet and an almost precocious curiosity tempered with dangerous amounts of power.

“Drown him,” he does not understand the Latin words but she utters them, the same girl who whispers to him about a queen, and there are fingers wound around his ankles, thick and drenched in amniotic soul.

His eyes glance up and there are three of them crowded around the river, three little children with black eyes and sharp teeth laughing, with sticks and thick, chubby fingers pushing him further into the Styx, knee-deep, waist-deep, almost gone.

He chokes on his terror and with a scream meant to pierce any dimension, “Mikasa!”

And she is there in every way he wishes she wasn’t, with the ghastly King of the Underworld beside her, behind her, because it is she who reigns now. His eyes are cold and grey, glittering only at the sight of his children at the riverside, baptizing his soul.

She is tall and dark and full of latent power, and her eyes are void of everything but color. “Eren,” she says in that soft lover’s whisper, the way she has always, and there are some things about her that soften. She kneels, bone-wired garments in the ashy sand, “for so long I have wanted to see you.”

“Drown him, already,” Levi snaps, “it will be easier than this.”

“Easy,” she laughs empty, her hands caked in black ash tracked in smudges across her porcelain face, “there is nothing easy to this, Levi.”

His smirk is teasing, completely incorrigible. “And yet before you knew better, you shredded her crown with your bare hands and made monsters of our children. You have become a Queen on your own.”

Mikasa is an entirely different, unrecognizable semblance of a human being. Because she is not, he reminds himself carefully, because she has torn her soul to bits and pieces and because she has become filled with the contagion of death, of this vile king and hopeless land and ruthless power.

Her fingers graze his cheek and he knows she is gone, knows because she is so, so cold.

“You must go now, Eren. Like all others before you, just like your friends, like Petra,” and he had so much hope for her, that she would fall back into Levi’s favor so that he may have Mikasa’s back, and yet, “You must go. Drown him.”

Her command is terse and her children are grinning, jagged teeth and hungry eyes crawling towards him to shove him amongst all the wilted souls in the river. She has granted them all peace, and they are all hers to keep.

He should have known better.

…

Her touch is featherlight against Levi’s cheek. “They shall have the sun,” she says carefully, quietly, “and all else I have is yours to keep.”

And the world is almost silent with their Queen enveloped in darkness.