[ The squeeze grounds her, settles her, and Mikasa can feel briefly like she can breathe again. It's not as if the people she's here with aren't empathetic and understanding - Jean is certainly that, helping her with her network information and standing at her side through her grief - but it is too much, with Eren being so young. Perhaps this is the way that Levi felt when he had arrived here to see Erwin alive and well: a kind of bottomless grief that could only be made softer from the sheer joy at seeing them alive.

Eren is alive, and though her hands are stained with his blood, she can hold her head up for a little longer, feel the happiness of certainty, that this time she will keep his safe and not be his murderer.

If she was younger, the woman that Levi might remember from so many years ago, she would prickle at the closeness from her captain, rebel against any possible need for comfort or tenderness from someone who wasn't in her carefully protected direct circle. Mikasa is older now, and she has seen the depth of Levi just as he had seen of her; even without that distant, damning bond of the Ackerman family, she thinks she would still lean on him for strength.

Mikasa knows how he understands her, knows that when they look at each other they see lives mirrored but different at the same time, and it gives her the smallest sense of relief. She thinks she might be okay. ]

I don't want him to know it was me. Not yet. I don't know how he'll take it.

[ Will he understand? Or will Eren, younger, rougher, see it as the betrayal her heart did? There's a reason why Armin claimed that he had been the one to finally kill Eren - to protect their people, but maybe to protect her as well. His heart was always the best out of all of them. ]

For now, he deserves to find some happiness.