I posted something on Twitter that went more or less like this: “new hc: mikasa becomes an anonymous poet after the events of aot, and all her finest poems are about the green-eyed man.” Later today, while I was in the car (as copilot, of course) the idea would not leave me alone. So I started writing. What came out is something I imagine Mikasa herself might have written about her dead muse, Eren, part poetry, part lyrical prose, and part me practising 🙂↕️ So here it is!
—Or poet Mikasa’s elegy for Eren.
I have tried many times to write your name, and it ought to be easy. Four letters only, nothing complicated. But, each time I try, my hand slows, as though the ink itself knows what it must confess: that the world still turns because you don’t.
There. I have written it again.
The wind is gentler now. Children laugh in streets that once knew only smoke. Spring arrives without asking permission of artillery or marching boots. The world breathes with the careless relief of someone who has forgotten the cost of its own survival.
I suppose that is victory.
The voices in my head say I saved everyone. They say your death ended the roar of the earth and the trembling of nations. They say the future was purchased in that single, terrible moment. They do not say your name when they say these things.
But I do. I say it aloud.
Boy with hair the colour of chestnut bark after rain. Boy with eyes green as the deep woods in early spring. Boy who stood in the sunlight so often that the sun itself seemed to claim him as its own.
It is strange what the mind keeps. Not the thunder of armies or the collapse of cities. No. I remember the little things. The way you frowned when you were thinking too hard. The way you ran ahead as a child, always ahead, as though the horizon had called you by name. The way your voice sharpened when you spoke of freedom, like a blade drawn from its sheath. The way you were always moving towards something I could not yet see.
Perhaps you saw it long before the rest of us. Perhaps that is why you smiled that day.
Sometimes I wonder whether you were relieved. Whether the weight you carried had grown so vast that even breathing must have felt like lifting mountains. The world believed you had become a monster. Yet monsters do not look at someone the way you looked at me in the end.
Monsters do not lick the hands of their executioners.
Your head was heavy in my arms. I remember the warmth of your hair beneath my fingers. The world was loud then—screaming, crumbling, ending—yet around us there was a silence that did not belong to war.
Just us. Just the boy who wanted freedom and the girl who followed him through every storm.
The world will never understand that moment. They will write histories and tragedies and speeches about salvation. They will measure victory in numbers.
The world was saved by a boy who ran too far towards freedom and by a girl who loved him enough to stop him.
I visit the tree sometimes.
The wind moves through the branches and makes a sound in a way that reminds me of your laugh. It is a poor imitation, yet the earth tries its best. I bring flowers when I can. Not because you cared for flowers. You never did. But because I do not know what else to bring to someone who gave everything.
Sometimes I speak aloud, as though you are merely late returning from some reckless journey. I tell you about the sky, about the silence, about the ordinary peace you once believed was impossible.
You would hate it, I think. You would say the world is too complacent now. Too satisfied. You would glare at the horizon and insist there must be more beyond it.
And then you would run again, because you were always running, never stopping. I suppose I am the one who did.
Still, if the wind carries words where the living cannot reach, then hear this: you were loved.
Not as a soldier loves a cause, nor as a nation loves a saviour. Those are shallow things, loud things. What I carried for you was quieter. It lived in the spaces between heartbeats, in the way my hand always found yours without thought.
You were the beginning of my world.
And you were the ending of it.
The earth is calm now. The sea sleeps without trembling. Children are born who will never know the sound of Titans walking.
That peace belongs to you.
Rest beneath the same sky you once tried to seize with both hands. And if there is any freedom beyond death, I hope you have finally reached it.
I will keep writing your name.
