Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

The morning after Armin found out, Eren woke to the smell of burnt porridge and Carla swearing quietly in the kitchen in a way she thought nobody could hear.

He came downstairs to find the pot scorched black on the bottom and his mother scraping furiously at it with a wooden spoon, hair escaping its usual knot, looking for all the world like a woman who had also not slept.

"Don’t," she said, without turning around, "say anything about the porridge."

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were absolutely going to."

He wasn’t, actually, but he let her have the argument anyway, because some mornings a person needs a small fight to win before they can face a large one. He got the good bread down from the shelf instead and set it on the table without being asked, and Carla’s shoulders came down an inch when she saw it.

"You didn’t sleep either," she said.

"No."

"None of us did, I imagine." She abandoned the pot, finally, and sat across from him with the specific tiredness of someone who’d spent the night listening for a sound that never came again. "Your father told me. Some of it. Not everything — I think he’s still deciding how much of everything a person can survive hearing at once."

Eren didn’t know what to say to that, so he reached across the table and took her hand instead, the way he had a habit of doing lately with the people he loved, like touch could say the parts words kept getting stuck on.

"I’m scared," Carla admitted, quiet, the kind of quiet she usually kept for church. "Not of the Titans. Of you carrying something that big without me being able to help carry it."

"You do help. Every day. You just don’t always know which parts are the help."

She looked at him for a long moment, eyes bright, and didn’t ask what that meant. Some questions, he was learning, people asked only when they were ready for the answer, and Carla — this morning, exhausted, still smelling faintly of smoke from a Titan that had nearly reached her son — clearly wasn’t yet.

"Eat your bread," she said instead, which from Carla, he’d come to understand, meant I love you and I’m not finished being frightened yet, but I will be.

He found Mikasa at the well behind the house, not fetching water, just sitting on its edge with her knees pulled up, watching the frost melt slowly off the wooden cover where they’d hidden the maps weeks before.

"You look like you didn’t sleep either," he said.

"None of us did."

"Feels like that’s becoming a theme."

She made room for him without being asked, the way she’d started doing months ago, and he sat close enough that their shoulders touched, close enough that the cold didn’t quite reach either of them the same way alone.

"I keep thinking about last night," she said. "Not the Titan. After. On the roof."

"Which part?"

"All of it. Mostly the part where you said you loved me like it had been sitting there the whole time, just waiting for the right disaster to shake it loose."

He huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. "That’s an accurate description, actually."

"I noticed." She turned to look at him, and there was something unguarded in her face this morning that he hadn’t seen even in the woods, even on the porch — not careful, not measuring him, just there, entirely open. "I’ve loved you for longer than I’ve said out loud. Since before I understood what the word meant, probably. I just didn’t think you needed the weight of that on top of everything else you were already carrying."

"You could have told me anyway."

"I know. I was scared too, in my own way. Not of Titans." Her hand found his on the cold stone. "Of saying it and finding out it mattered less to you than it did to me."

"It’s never going to matter less to me than it does to you. I don’t think that’s possible."

She smiled — small, real, entirely his — and leaned her head against his shoulder, and for a while neither of them said anything else. The frost kept melting. Somewhere behind them Carla was singing badly to herself while she reheated the ruined porridge into something edible out of sheer stubbornness. The world, battered but unbroken, kept turning around them the way it always had.

"I don’t want this to change us," Mikasa said eventually. "Now that Armin knows. Now that your father’s talking. Now that there isn’t a secret holding us together in quite the same way."

"It won’t."

"You don’t know that."

"No," he admitted. "But I’d rather promise it and work to make it true than not promise it at all."

She laughed, soft, against his shoulder. "That’s a very Eren way of making a promise. Optimistic and slightly reckless."

"You love it."

"I really do." She lifted her head, and this time when she kissed him it wasn’t cold-tinged or breathless with adrenaline the way it had been the night before — just slow, and certain, and entirely unhurried, like two people who had all the time in the world instead of a hundred and twenty-four days.

When she pulled back, her forehead stayed against his. "Whatever’s coming," she murmured, "I want mornings like this in between the bad parts. I want you to promise me that too."

"I promise."

"You’re very free with promises today."

"I’m trying to make up for a year of not making any."

She smiled again, and this time she didn’t pull away at all, just stayed there against him in the cold morning light, the compass in his pocket and the wristband on his wrist and her hand warm in his, and for a little while — not forever, but for a little while — the countdown in his chest went quiet enough to let this be the only thing that mattered.

That night, alone with the daily draw, Eren found himself smiling before the wheel had even finished spinning, which hadn’t happened once in the entire year he’d been doing this.

[Daily draw available. Spinning...]

[Result: Minor Vitality Boost (Tier 1).]

Small. He didn’t mind. Some days, he was starting to understand, the system wasn’t the only thing worth paying attention to before sleep. He set the compass on the crate beside him, needle steady, and thought about a girl at a well, unguarded for the first time in her whole careful life, telling him she’d loved him since before she had the word for it.

One hundred and twenty-three days.

Whatever the number cost him in the end, he thought he finally understood what Mikasa had meant on the roof, in the woods, at the well — that the days weren’t just something to survive. They were something to spend, carefully, on mornings exactly like this one.

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