Chapter Text
The heat and humidity of Costa Rica enveloped Eren. The golden sunlight made his emerald eyes shine with an intensity that reflected his very nature. The sun bronzed his skin, and the sound of the waves managed to drown out the noise inside his mind.
The lush vegetation, overflowing with life, stood gloriously before him. It inspired him into a state of mind that was almost optimistic, almost peaceful. Or as close to peace as someone like him could ever hope to be.
Looking at that place, he understood why Armin loved the sea so much.
That stretch of coastline had become one of Eren’s favorite places over the past few years. Sometimes he brought Armin with him; his blond friend adored those beaches as well, but he hadn’t had the chance to join him on this short weekend getaway.
Fortunately for Eren, he knew he wouldn’t be alone once he arrived in the country. His grandfather had been living on the coast for several years now, ever since he decided he had had enough of the cold, clinical atmosphere of hospitals and that it was finally time to retire, leaving the younger of his grandsons in charge of the majority of his shares and hospitals.
Eren owned exactly fifty percent of the shares in the Jaeger hospital network. Grisha, his father, held forty percent. His grandfather had decided to keep the remaining ten percent, investing the profits in the stock market more for entertainment than out of necessity. He was disgustingly wealthy, and even after choosing to keep only such a small portion of his empire, it was still more than enough to let him live comfortably for the rest of his life.
And that was exactly what he did.
He lived without a care in the world.
His grandfather constantly reminded Eren that all a man truly needed was a beer and a hammock. Nothing more. It made Eren smile every single time. His grandfather’s company was always warm. He couldn’t understand how someone as warm as his grandfather could have ended up with a son like his father. Grisha Jaeger’s cold personality stood in stark contrast to his grandfather’s warmth.
He remembered how, as a child, he used to play too roughly, always ending up hurt, and how his father would immediately scold him for being careless—and for crying. Eren had been a crybaby.
Truthfully, he still was.
But back then, he had only been a child. He hadn’t needed his father yelling at him all the time. Whenever Carla, his mother, wasn’t nearby, it was always his grandfather who stepped in to defend him.
The old Dr. Jaeger would clean the scrapes on his little grandson’s knees while telling some ridiculous, nonsensical story to distract him until he finally stopped crying.
Eren treasured those memories in his heart. He wondered who would bandage his wounds once his grandfather grew too old to remain in this world.
He had his mother, of course. A loving woman with more affection than she knew what to do with—something she had proven by taking in two children—and who loved him beyond measure. But she was far too sensitive to carry the weight of Eren’s scars. He loved her and trusted her; after all, she was the woman who had given him life. He would always be grateful to her for being his mother.
And precisely because of that, he had to protect her from all the pain he carried inside himself.
There were things he simply could never tell her.
Not without hurting her in the process.
And Eren would never do that.
He also had Levi.
The unbreakable captain, now retired from the military.
He had been Eren’s true father figure ever since his teenage years. He had taught him how to fight and defend himself. He had taught him how to become a functional adult, a man capable of taking responsibility for both himself and others.
Thanks to him, Eren was still alive.
Levi had taken care of him during the past few years, when life had become unbearable. When the anxiety grew so overwhelming that he couldn’t get air into his lungs.
When the idea of plunging a knife into his neck and slicing open his carotid artery became the only thing that allowed him to breathe for a few seconds—just long enough to gather every ounce of strength he had left and end his misery with a single strike.
Unfortunately for him, it had also been enough time for Levi to intercept the knife halfway to his neck, stopping it barely a couple of centimeters from his skin.
He had been forced to twist Eren’s wrist and tackle him to the floor afterward.
Eren had refused to let anyone save his life.
Levi, Armin, and the rest of his friends had been forced to make him keep living on more than one occasion, especially during that first year.
For lack of better words, I’ll simply say they were difficult months.
2019 broke all of us.
Of course, there was also Armin.
Eren trusted him more than he trusted himself most of the time. Perhaps that was why he always tried to keep Armin away from the darkest parts of him, almost always without success. Armin knew him far too well.
He always had.
Sometimes Eren thought that a single glance from his friend was enough to leave him completely exposed, as though Armin could pry open his chest with his bare hands and look directly at everything Eren had spent years trying to bury.
And even so, Eren still saw him exactly as he had when they were nine years old: someone he had to protect.
Someone who had never asked him to.
Yet whose loyalty and kindness had awakened in Eren the irrational need to keep him safe.
Physically safe.
Eren knew that the little boy who used to hide behind him at school, who never stood up to bullies and refused to fight back because he insisted he didn’t want to sink to their level, was the only person capable of saving Eren from his own mind.
Armin was the sun.
So bright that his light reached even the darkest corners of Eren’s soul, leaving behind traces of warmth.
For that reason—and so many others—it felt deeply unfair to let Armin carry Eren’s burdens as well.
Eren forced his thoughts away from the dark path they were beginning to follow.
He didn’t need to worry about any of that right now.
His grandfather was sitting directly across from him, waiting for his grandson to make a move.
The younger of the two men tried to hide the fact that he hadn’t been thinking about his strategy to win the chess match at all.
He remained silent for a few more seconds, his eyes fixed on the board he had been staring at for several minutes.
This time, however, he truly focused, his mind racing as he considered which piece to move.
Finally, he made his decision and moved it across the board.
Then he looked up at his grandfather with a smile, convinced he now held the advantage.
He was surprised to realize that his grandfather had already been watching him instead of the board.
Perhaps Eren hadn’t hidden his dissociation quite as well as he’d thought.
The old man picked up his beer, still cold and sweating in the tropical heat, and took a sip while studying his grandson.
His bottle had left a ring of water on the table they shared. Eren had long since lost count of how many beers he’d had; the cooler beside him, once full, was now nearly empty.
His grandfather had only had a couple, savoring each sip.
Eren had an incredible tolerance for alcohol.
Still, over the past few years he rarely drank, mostly for health reasons.
He only allowed himself these small indulgences from time to time.
Grandfather Jaeger finished his beer and placed it beside the other empty bottles at his feet.
Only then did he finally speak.
But Eren hadn’t expected what came out of his mouth.
“Do you know, Eren? Sometimes all you need to do is sacrifice one piece to save the entire game.”
Eren barely managed to hide the surprise on his face.
He took a moment before answering.
“What do you mean?” the young man asked cautiously.
“You still play the same way you did when you were a child,” the old man murmured, his eyes now on the chessboard. “As if losing a single piece meant the end of the world.”
“I’m not unwilling to sacrifice some of my pieces. Just the important ones. And I could count those on half the fingers of one hand. I don’t think that’s asking for much,” he muttered, with far more honesty than he’d intended, leaning back in his beach chair and folding his hands behind his head to use them as a pillow.
The older Jaeger smiled.
Once again, he watched his grandson with a faint smile and something in his expression Eren couldn’t quite decipher.
“Do you still think about her?”
The question caught Eren completely off guard.
So accustomed was he to keeping his emotions under tight control that he didn’t move so much as an inch, even though every instinct told him to get up and run.
A few years ago, he would have.
He never talked about her.
His grandfather knew that.
There was no need to say her name; they both knew exactly who they meant whenever they said her.
“No,” he managed to answer with almost effortless composure. “That’s over.”
His grandfather didn’t argue.
He accepted the hollow answer, knowing full well it was a blatant lie.
Still, it was more than he would have expected from Eren a few years earlier.
They continued their game in a silence that felt warm and comfortable.
Eren only wanted to play chess and drink.
After a while, his grandfather’s driver arrived in the SUV to pick them up and take them back to the harbor.
Eren wanted to take one last walk, to let Costa Rica’s music and warmth envelop him, to watch fireworks light up the distant sky, and to let the lively atmosphere seep into him before returning to reality the following day.
So he did.
Eren blinked, forcing himself out of his thoughts.
He tightened both hands around the steering wheel of his SUV until his knuckles turned white, trying to drag himself back to reality.
His mind was still in Costa Rica, somewhere warm.
But his body was now thousands of kilometers away, and all he could feel was cold.
Rain poured relentlessly over the city, even though the rainy season had already ended.
Only a day earlier he had been drinking beer on the beach with his grandfather, yet it felt as though centuries had passed.
It was early December.
The cold of Mexico City’s winter was beginning to settle over the capital.
It was still bearable, but at that hour of the morning it cut straight through him.
The sun hadn’t even risen yet.
Eren still had about half an hour left to drive from the airport to the hotel where he was headed.
He felt fortunate that he had paid for airport parking for the entire weekend, allowing him to return in his own SUV.
He would have preferred to go home first, but his apartment was farther from the airport than the hotel where the medical conference he would attend that Monday—as a representative of the Jaeger Hospitals—was being held.
He hated this sort of event.
But he had no choice.
He had a job to do.
And a smile to wear.
He parked in the hotel’s underground garage and sat there for a moment before getting out.
Even underground, he could still hear the distant pounding of the rain.
He planned to stop by his room first to shower.
Normally, he wouldn’t bother renting an entire hotel room for events held in his own city.
But Eren had spent the entire night flying nearly two thousand kilometers.
He hadn’t slept at all.
He couldn’t fall asleep without his medication, but an international flight wasn’t exactly the place to drug himself into unconsciousness.
He would push through the rest of the day.
All he needed was a shower.
He still had plenty of time before the conference began.
He could have even managed to sleep for an hour if he had been capable of sleeping like a normal person.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had fallen asleep without medication.
Actually…
He could.
And that memory was killing him.
He constantly fought to keep his thoughts from devouring him.
But after nearly twenty-four hours without sleep, he could feel his last reserves of strength giving way.
Against everything he believed in, he stopped resisting.
He allowed his mind to drag him back to places he had clawed and bled to escape.
Memories he had believed buried.
“Mikasa.”
Her name escaped before he even realized it.
Before he had the chance to stop himself.
In his daily life, he didn’t even allow himself to think her name.
Saying it aloud was even more forbidden.
Even his friends and family knew better than to mention her.
Years had passed since he had last spoken her name aloud.
After such a long period of abstinence, hearing it leave his own lips felt almost liberating.
What would she think of him now?
Would she be proud of the man he had become?
Did she regret the path she had chosen?
The path they had both chosen?
She was in everything he did.
He could no longer deny it to himself.
A few years ago, after his tears had finally dried up, he had convinced himself that he was fine.
He had lied.
Like always.
“I’ll see you again, my loved one,” he whispered, struggling to steady his breathing as it grew more ragged with every passing second.
Maybe he looked insane, talking to himself.
Truthfully…
He was.
But he needed to hear those words out loud.
He would see her again.
He would.
He would.
He knew it.
Maybe not today.
But someday.
He knew.
He knew he’d never see her again.
Even so, he couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like if he did.
When Levi had forced him to stop hiring private investigators four years earlier, he had finally accepted that he would never find her again.
By then, he had already spent an entire year searching without results.
He had traveled through several countries, including the last one where they had been together:
Turkey.
Nothing.
He crossed the world searching for her mother’s family in Japan.
He knew Mikasa had never been particularly close to them, not even as a child, and even less after her parents died.
Still, he tried.
Nothing.
He followed every lead his various private investigators managed to uncover.
Every trail vanished before it could bring him to her.
All his efforts had been useless.
Just like always.
But he had reached the point of no return.
There was no turning back now.
He missed her.
It was obvious.
He simply hadn’t allowed himself to admit it.
He denied it to everyone.
Even to Armin.
But he was tired.
Without her…
He was a complete wreck.
“I’ll see you again,” he repeated, more firmly this time.
He continued breathing the way they had taught him to during his panic attacks.
Then he slowly looked around.
His gaze landed on the car parked in front of him.
Car.
The word ended with the letter r.
He needed to find another word that began with that letter.
He searched the parking garage again.
Nothing.
He looked inside his own vehicle.
Rolex.
He glanced down at the white gold Rolex on his wrist and decided that counted.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid grounding exercise. And fuck you too, asshole,” Eren thought, insulting the therapist who had treated him at the psychiatric institution where Levi and Armin had admitted him five years earlier.
He had spent a little over a month there.
And he had hated every second of it.
He hated the therapist whose grounding exercises he still practiced to this day because they had become so deeply ingrained in him.
It had been either obey him…
Or never be discharged.
He hated his doctors.
He hated the psychiatrist who had considered him such a danger to himself that he had kept him so heavily medicated he could barely stay awake.
One antidepressant.
One anti-anxiety medication—from the benzodiazepine family, the very same one he later used in an overdose after being discharged.
One antipsychotic to help him sleep, a medication he was still dependent on to this day.
And one anticonvulsant.
He didn’t have epilepsy, but they were sometimes prescribed to psychiatric patients.
He hated the nurses.
They seemed to possess everything except compassion.
Instead of seeing them as people, they looked at them as though they were human waste.
The only people he didn’t hate were the other patients…
Well, almost all of them.
Listening to the eighty-year-old woman scream every night for her deceased husband made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
Even worse was the woman who had asked him whether he ate dogs.
Eren was vegan.
There was no way she could have known that.
But why would she ask something like that while repeatedly pointing at him?
She had done it the very first moment he walked inside.
He hadn’t understood anything until he realized she had actually been pointing at his tattoo.
Those symbols spelled out, in Japanese, the name of the love of his life.
“ミカサ.”
Mikasa.
It made his blood boil.
Stupid.
Stupid racist, xenophobic stereotype.
Still, the patients around his own age turned out to be some of the most understanding people he had ever met.
On his very first day, they asked if he wanted to talk about why he was there.
He refused.
To his surprise, no one took offense.
On the contrary.
They told him they understood he wasn’t ready yet.
Then they began explaining how long it had taken each of them to finally open up—and why they had ended up there in the first place.
The man whose neck was wrapped in bandages, bearing unmistakable marks from a hanging attempt, silently offered him the faintest smile, quietly agreeing with the younger patients.
The following day, they invited him to play volleyball.
Eren could barely remain standing.
He thought a sedated chimpanzee would contribute more to the team than he would.
Or maybe…
Maybe he was exactly that.
Still, it didn’t take him long to realize the purpose of the game wasn’t competition.
It was simply to keep each other company.
Eren appreciated that.
Even so, after a month, he begged Levi and Armin to get him out of that place.
He had almost found peace there.
All he did was sleep all day.
But he was trapped.
Locked away like livestock.
He couldn’t stand it.
He became so desperate that, much to his doctors’ surprise, he started cooperating.
He spoke during therapy.
He followed every instruction.
He took his medication without questioning it.
After six weeks, he was finally discharged with strict instructions he was expected to follow to the letter.
If he failed even one of them, he would be hospitalized again.
And Eren couldn’t survive going through that a second time.
Nowadays, his medication was much lighter.
He took antidepressants every morning and one antipsychotic at night to help him sleep.
Nothing else.
To Eren, that alone felt like tremendous progress.
He had to keep himself under control if he didn’t want to end up back in that place.
So he came up with the least unreasonable plan he could think of.
He would search for her again.
He would.
Once the day was over, he would hire another private investigator to help him find her.
This time, however, he would also talk to his therapist about it.
He wasn’t crazy.
He wasn’t obsessed.
He wasn’t having a psychotic break.
He was simply tired.
Someone had to understand that.
With a clearer plan of action and his breathing finally back under control, Eren stepped out of his G-Wagon and silently made his way to his hotel room.
Once upstairs, it didn’t take him long to shower, get dressed, and make himself presentable.
One of his father’s employees had stopped by the hotel the previous day to leave him a suit and everything else he might need.
He had no idea who it had been.
Nor did he care.
Eren had never wanted a chauffeur or a personal assistant.
He would have cleaned his own apartment as well if he had had the time.
Levi had drilled household chores into him with military precision, and Eren considered himself excellent at them.
In fact, he believed he was better than the housekeeper who came every third day to clean his apartment, do his laundry, and cook for him.
That last part was what he appreciated most.
Finding vegan restaurants wasn’t easy, and eating without knowing whether every ingredient was truly cruelty-free always made him anxious.
He preferred cooking his own meals.
Other than himself, the only recipes he fully trusted were his mother’s and his housekeeper’s.
Fortunately, the person who had delivered his clothes had also brought several containers filled with food from his apartment.
He would be able to have breakfast that morning.
Judging by the amount of food, he wouldn’t have to worry about lunch, either.
Perfect.
He glanced around the room one last time, wondering if he had forgotten anything.
Nothing.
The panoramic view from one of the hotel’s highest floors would have intimidated most people.
Not Eren.
He looked at himself in the mirror one final time and felt satisfied with what he saw.
His black suit and matching black shirt gave him an elegant appearance.
Eren never wore any other color.
Never.
Even his surgical scrubs were black.
His straight brown hair had grown long enough to reach the middle of his ribs.
Five years earlier, Eren had decided he would never cut it again.
And he hadn’t.
It remained surprisingly well cared for considering that the most he ever did was use conditioner alongside shampoo.
He couldn’t wear it loose during an event like this.
So, just as he did before entering an operating room, he had tied it into a tight bun.
He had shaved the light beard that usually grew along his jaw, leaving him looking neat despite the long hair his father hated so much.
Grisha was at least relieved that his son had finally gotten rid of his piercings once he began his medical training.
Even if it hadn’t exactly been Eren’s own decision.
He checked the time.
6:30 a.m.
There was still an hour and a half before the first lectures began.
Even so, he left his room.
He wanted to make sure everything was ready, mentally reviewing the remaining details as he walked toward the conference hall.
His family was among the organizers of the surgical conference.
And Eren was one of the keynote speakers.
He had been invited to share his experience in a war zone.
He stepped into the elevator.
Floor 33.
The city slowly rose beneath his feet as the elevator descended.
Eren had completed his mandatory social service in Palestine.
In Mexico, after graduating from medical school, newly graduated physicians were required to complete a one-year internship, which Eren did at a public tertiary-care general hospital.
Afterward, young doctors were required to complete another year of mandatory social service in rural clinics.
Floor 30.
There were a few exceptions under special programs, and Eren had qualified for one of them.
Because of the situation in Gaza, which had persisted for several years, a special program had been created allowing newly graduated Mexican physicians to complete their mandatory social service in a war zone.
It was an exceptional agreement between the Mexican government, the Ministry of Health, and the NGO in response to the humanitarian crisis.
Floor 27.
The program hadn’t attracted many applicants.
To Eren, however, there had never been a better idea.
Having graduated with honors and possessing extensive hand-to-hand combat training thanks to Levi, he had been accepted almost immediately.
He wasn’t going as a soldier.
Still, they weren’t about to send just any young doctor who couldn’t even carry the weight of their own medical equipment over long distances into a place like that.
Floor 24.
The news coming out of Gaza haunted him every single day, and he hated that all he could do was attend demonstrations in support of Palestine.
At last, he had been useful.
He spent the final months of 2024 there and remained on the Gaza border until June 2025.
2024 had been the hardest year.
A ceasefire was declared in 2025.
It didn’t last long, but it allowed Eren’s group to travel deeper into the country.
Getting in wasn’t the problem.
Getting back out was.
Floor 21.
Carla had been terrified the entire time.
Eren had felt like absolute shit for keeping his mother on the verge of a breakdown for almost a year.
He called home whenever he had the chance.
Carla practically lived beside the telephone, constantly watching both it and the news.
When he finally returned home, she cried in his arms for hours.
Floor 18.
That day, he would have to recount his experiences on the humanitarian front lines.
He hated being portrayed as a hero.
He felt painfully far from deserving that title.
He hated seeing people romanticize what he had lived through.
He hated thinking about all the people he hadn’t managed to save.
Eren hated far too many things.
Floor 15.
Despite his young age, he had earned the respect of the medical community.
Other residents often considered him almost too experienced for someone his age.
Even as a first-year resident, he had already led emergency departments on several occasions since beginning his residency.
He possessed an almost absurd ability to work under pressure.
He never panicked.
He could stabilize a patient more skillfully than many senior residents.
Floor 12.
Emotionally, however…
He was destroyed.
Constant exposure to the deaths of children, severe malnutrition, mass amputations, practicing medicine without adequate resources, and performing triage—coldly deciding who could be saved and who couldn’t—had slowly transformed him into exactly the kind of physician he saw in his father.
Cold.
Detached.
The kind of doctor he had always hated.
Floor 9.
When preparing his lecture, Eren deliberately focused not on himself but on the people of Gaza.
He still remembered countless names, burned permanently into his memory.
He was certain most of them were dead.
He refused to let them be forgotten.
Floor 6.
He hoped his experience would inspire other young physicians.
Those places still desperately needed help.
Floor 3.
After sharing a story that hardly felt like his own anymore, Eren would be joined by more experienced surgeons specializing in traumatology—the specialty he hoped to pursue someday.
The official title of their session was:
“Applying Battlefield Medicine Protocols in Disaster Scenarios.”
He sincerely hoped the knowledge they shared would prove useful during future mass-casualty events.
Floor 1.
The elevator doors slid open.
Eren froze the instant a pair of steel-gray eyes met his.
Her.
Standing right in front of him.
Alive.