Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

The precognitive flicker, Eren quickly learned, came with absolutely no user manual.

It hit for the first time three days later, in the middle of an entirely unremarkable afternoon, while he was carrying a jug of water back from the well.

One second he was walking. The next, for the space of a single heartbeat, the world went strange — not dark, not blurry, just wrong, like a page of a book skipping ahead and back again too fast to read. A flash of gravel. A shadow moving too fast. Gone before he could even call it a thought.

He stopped walking.

"Eren?"

He looked up. Mikasa was watching him, a basket of laundry balanced on one hip, head tilted in the particular way that meant she’d already noticed something was off and was deciding how long to wait before asking about it directly.

"Give me a second," he said.

She didn’t ask. She also didn’t move.

Three seconds later, a runaway cart — its owner sprinting after it, wheel wobbling badly — came barreling around the corner directly through the spot where Eren would have been standing if he’d kept walking.

It missed him by a foot. Mostly because he hadn’t moved.

"...Huh," Eren said.

"Huh," Mikasa agreed, watching the cart’s owner chase it down the street with the flat calm of someone who had decided a while ago that strange things simply happened around Eren and stopped being surprised by them individually. "You’ve been doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Stopping. Right before something happens." She adjusted the basket on her hip. "You did it last week too. Before the shelf in the warehouse fell."

He had, in fact, done that. He’d chalked it up to luck at the time. Twice now was starting to look like a pattern, and Mikasa did not believe in coincidences nearly as much as he needed her to.

"Good instincts," he said, which was true in the most technical, least helpful sense possible.

"Mm." She didn’t push it. She just filed it away — he could see her doing it, the same careful cataloguing she did with everything — and resumed walking like the conversation was merely paused, not finished.

He was starting to suspect Mikasa kept a running list somewhere in her head titled Things About Eren That Don’t Add Up, and that list was getting uncomfortably long.

Armin, when informed of the cart incident that evening — with several key details omitted, namely the flash of borrowed foresight that had actually saved him — was predictably delighted by the wrong part entirely.

"A runaway cart. This town is a menace. First the duck, now unregulated cart violence."

"It wasn’t cart violence, the wheel came off."

"That’s how it starts, Eren. First the wheels come off. Then the axles. Before you know it we’re living in complete cart anarchy."

"You’ve clearly thought about this."

"I think about a lot of things." Armin flipped a page in the book he was absolutely still smuggling everywhere, treehouse fire hazard be damned. "Did Mikasa see it happen?"

"She was right there."

"Did she do the thing?"

"What thing?"

"The thing where she gets very quiet and looks at you like she’s recalculating something." Armin didn’t even look up from his book. "She does that a lot around you lately."

Eren opened his mouth to argue, found he didn’t actually have an argument, and closed it again.

"...She might have done the thing."

"You should probably figure out what you’re going to tell her. Eventually. Before the recalculating turns into an actual equation she solves without you."

It was, annoyingly, the smartest thing anyone had said to him in weeks, and it had come out of a boy currently more invested in the moral panic of cart safety than the conversation at hand.

The problem, Eren decided, was that he had absolutely no idea how to explain any of this in a way that didn’t sound insane, dangerous, or both. Hey, I’ve lived this life before and everyone I love dies, also there’s a voice in my head that gives me superpowers sometimes was not an opening line that led anywhere good.

So instead, that weekend, he did what any reasonable person with an unsolvable problem would do: he avoided it by helping Carla bake instead.

"You’re doing it wrong," Carla said, not unkindly, watching him mangle a piece of dough into something that vaguely resembled bread only if you squinted and had low expectations.

"I’m doing it creatively."

"You’re doing it like a boy who has never once watched me actually do this."

"I’ve watched you do this a hundred times!"

"And retained none of it, apparently." She reached over and fixed his grip with the patient exasperation of someone who had corrected the exact same mistake several times before. "Fold, don’t punch. It’s bread, not an enemy."

"It disrespected me first."

"Bread cannot disrespect you, Eren."

"This one can. I can feel it judging me."

Carla laughed — a real one, the kind that made the kitchen feel warmer — and swatted flour at him for good measure. He retaliated immediately and without remorse, and within a minute the kitchen had descended into a flour-based skirmish that Carla very obviously could have ended at any point and chose not to.

Mikasa walked in halfway through, took one look at both of them dusted white like a pair of poorly-made snowmen, and very deliberately backed out of the doorway.

"No," she said.

"Mikasa—"

"Absolutely not."

"You can’t just—"

She shut the door.

Carla, wheezing with laughter, hurled one last handful of flour at the now-closed door in solidarity with nobody in particular. "Coward!"

A muffled voice came from the hallway. "I have one clean shirt left this week."

"That’s what laundry day is for!"

"It’s tomorrow."

Eren opened the door a crack, one hand held up in visible surrender, flour still clinging to his eyebrows. "Truce. I promise. No flour."

Mikasa eyed him with deep suspicion, the kind reserved for someone with a documented history of promising exactly this and immediately breaking it. "You said that last time."

"This time I mean it."

"You always say that too."

"...Fair."

She stepped inside anyway, keeping a careful two feet of distance from both of them, which — given the state of the kitchen — was probably a reasonable safety measure. Carla, entirely unrepentant, winked at Eren the second Mikasa’s back was turned, and Eren had to bite down hard on a laugh.

Later, once the kitchen had been declared a disaster zone and mostly cleaned, and once Carla had gone to bed still finding flour in her hair, Eren found himself back on the roof, the way he always ended up eventually.

Mikasa joined him without being asked, the way she always did too.

"You never did explain the cart thing," she said, settling beside him, close enough that her shoulder rested against his.

He looked out at Shiganshina, quiet and gold-lit under the last of the evening sun, and thought about how much easier this would be if he could just say it plainly. I know things I shouldn’t. I have help I can’t explain. I’m trying to save you and I don’t know if it’s working.

"Good instincts," he said instead. Same answer as before.

She didn’t call it a lie. She didn’t call it anything. She just looked at him for a long moment, the kind of look that saw more than he wanted it to, and then let it go — not because she believed him, he realized, but because she trusted that whatever he wasn’t saying, he had a reason for it.

"Okay," she said simply.

"Just — okay?"

"You’ll tell me when you’re ready." She said it with the same plain certainty she said everything true. "I’m not going anywhere."

Something in his chest went tight and warm at once, the particular ache of being trusted more than he’d earned.

"You say that a lot," he managed.

"Because it’s true."

He nudged her shoulder with his. "You always say things like that."

"Because you always say things like that." A small smile, private, only for him. "I learned it from somewhere."

Above them, the first stars were starting to show through the fading blue, and the wristband on his wrist — a little less crooked now, worn soft with use — caught the last of the light.

One hundred and sixty-nine days.

For once, counting down didn’t feel quite so much like counting toward an ending. It felt, a little, like counting toward a chance.

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