The Thirteenth Year

Eren woke before dawn on the last day of his life and decided he would split firewood. It was the only plan he had. He'd lain awake half the night composing better ones: a letter to Armin, a walk to the ridge, something enormous and meaningful to say to Mikasa that would carry her through the next sixty years. Around three in the morning he'd understood that every one of those plans ended with her watching him die, and that the only thing he could actually give her was an ordinary morning. So he got up quietly, pulled on his boots by the cold hearth, and went outside to the woodpile. The cabin sat in a fold of the hills above the old Trost road, two days' ride from anywhere that still had a name. The Survey Corps had built it as a lookout in the years when the walls still meant something, and abandoned it when they stopped. Mikasa had found it. She'd patched the roof the first autumn while he held the ladder and complained, and that had been a little over three years ago, after the Paths closed and every Titan in the world went quiet at once, and the fighting simply stopped, leaving a long, astonished silence that nobody on either side of the sea knew how to fill. Thirteen years. Ymir's curse. He'd done the counting a thousand times. Shiganshina burning, his father's shaking hands, the needle, the forest in the rain. That night had been in late autumn, close to the first frost. He didn't know the exact date and never had. But the frost had come yesterday, white on the water trough, and he'd looked at it and felt something in his chest go still and patient, like a dog lying down. Today, then. Or tomorrow. Close enough that he could feel it. He set a round on the block, swung, and the axe went through clean. The two halves fell into the frosted grass. He set another. Everyone had told him the curse might be gone. Hange had told him, in that letter with three postscripts: the Titans were gone, the Paths were gone, there was no reason the clock should still be ticking when the thing that wound it had stopped existing. Armin had told him, in person, at the table inside, holding his hands. Mikasa had never said anything at all, which was how he knew she believed it least. He believed it least, too. Everything he'd ever wanted had been paid for in other people's lives. It seemed only fair that the last bill would come addressed to him. Swing. Split. Another round. The door creaked behind him. He didn't turn around. "It's barely light," Mikasa said. "I couldn't sleep." "I know. You were breathing like you were counting." Her steps crossed the yard, crunching. She came around the woodpile and stood where he could see her, wrapped in the old gray blanket from the bed, bare-legged in unlaced boots, the red scarf wound twice around her neck the way she wore it when she'd grabbed it without thinking. Her hair had grown down past her shoulders again. Her face was creased from the pillow. "You'll freeze," he said. "So will you." She looked at the axe, then at him, then at the split wood fanned out in the grass. "Is this what you want to do?" He understood the question perfectly. She wasn't asking about the firewood. "Yeah," Eren said. "I think it is." Mikasa nodded slowly. Then she let the blanket drop off her shoulders onto the woodpile, picked up the hatchet from its nail on the shed wall, and set a smaller round on the second block. They worked without talking. The sun came up behind the eastern ridge and turned the frost to water on the shed roof, and the dripping started, a little tick-tick-tick from the eaves. A hawk went over. Mikasa split kindling with neat, efficient strokes, never missing. She had stopped getting the headaches the same winter the Titans went quiet, and sometimes he caught her pressing her fingers to her temple out of habit, surprised to find nothing there. When the pile was taller than either of them could reach, he leaned the axe against the block and sat down on the chopping stump, and his hands were shaking. Not from the work. She sat next to him on the cold ground with her back against his shins. "I wanted to say something," he said. "Something good. I've been trying to think of it all night." "You don't have to." "I know I don't have to. I want to." He looked down at the top of her head. There was a wood chip caught in her hair. He picked it out. "I keep thinking about all the times I told you to stop following me. Stop protecting me. Live your own life. I said it like I was doing you a favor." "You were awful." "I was. I thought if I pushed hard enough you'd go somewhere safe." He turned the chip over in his fingers. "And then the only safe place in the whole world turned out to be wherever you were. Here. This stupid roof you fixed." Mikasa was quiet for a long moment. "That's what you wanted to say?" "It came out worse than I planned." "No." She reached up without turning and found his hand and held it against her collarbone, over the scarf. "It came out fine." They had breakfast late. Eggs from the three hens Armin had sent up from the valley with a note that just said NAMES: SASHA, CONNIE, HANGE (SHE INSISTED). Mikasa burned the bread, which she never did, and neither of them mentioned it. In the afternoon he walked down to the stream with the bucket and stood a long time with his hands in the freezing water, watching the light on the stones, not thinking about anything, and when he came back up the slope she was standing in the doorway watching for him with her arms crossed tightly, and she didn't uncross them until he was close enough to touch. At supper he caught her looking at the window, at the light going orange and then blue and then gone. "Mikasa." "I'm fine." "You're not." "No," she agreed, and put her spoon down very carefully. "I'm not." He went around the table and knelt by her chair, and she put both hands on his face and held it, and looked at him the way she'd looked at him on that mountain path when they were nine, when she'd had nothing left in the world but a boy who'd given her a scarf and told her to fight. "If it happens," she said, "I want to be holding on." "Okay." "Don't fall asleep in the chair." "I won't." They went to bed early, which they never did. She lay with her head on his chest and her ear over his heart, and he understood she was listening to it, counting it the way he'd counted all night before. He let her. He stroked her hair and looked at the dark beams of the ceiling, at the shadow of the roof patch she'd nailed up that first autumn, a slightly paler square of boards against the old ones, and waited. He thought about his mother. He thought about the sea, the first time, the way the salt had stung his hands. He thought about Armin's face reading the letter that would come if this went the way he expected. He thought about Levi, who had sent exactly one letter in three years, eleven words long, the last four of which were *Don't do anything stupid.* He thought: I did plenty of stupid things. But this one wasn't. Her breathing slowed. His did too. When he opened his eyes again there was gray light in the window and a weight on his chest, and for a second he didn't know where he was. Then the weight shifted and muttered something and dug its cold nose into his neck, and the light got brighter, and outside on the eaves the frost was melting again, tick, tick, tick, and somewhere in the yard one of the hens was making an outraged noise about something. He lay very still. He breathed in. He breathed out. His heart, under her ear, went on doing the thing it had always done, stubborn and loud. "Mikasa," he whispered. She was awake at once, the way she'd always been, up on one elbow, her hand flat on his chest, her eyes searching his face in the cold morning light. He watched her understand it. He watched it happen slowly, like ice letting go of a window. "It's tomorrow," she said. "Yeah." "You're here." "I'm here." She didn't cry. She put her forehead down against his, hard enough that it almost hurt, and stayed like that, and her shoulders shook once and then stopped. When she pulled back, her mouth was doing something he hadn't seen it do in years, something crooked and astonished. "You were wrong," she said. "I was." "About the date. About the curse. About everything." "Probably." "Get up," Mikasa said, and her voice cracked down the middle. "We used all the firewood yesterday. We'll need more." He laughed. It came out of him like something breaking loose, and she was laughing too, and the hen outside was still shouting, and he lay there in the patched-roof cabin at the end of the world with her hair in his face and absolutely nothing left to count.