Under the moonlight

- Year 844 - Shiganshina, at the riverside, near the Yeager house

It was nightfall and the two friends had been playing together all day. And in their race back home, Eren had become distracted and he and his best friend got lost from one another.

"Eren! Eren! Eren!" Armin shouted around the streets when he saw a shadow of a figure. A very small shadowy figure, sitting near the river. The little girl had her head down, she stared at her reflection and at the moon's reflection over the river.

Armin came in closer, very curiously. He hadn't seen the girl's face before, she'd arrived at the Yeager residence only a few days prior and he had only seen her in the distance. Armin recognised her by the clothes. From what he could say, they were different from what the girls their age from Shiganshina were used to wearing. And the black hair, that was surely very unusual too.

"Hey, have you seen Eren?" he asked, but she didn't reply or acknowledge him. The small girl just kept staring at the slow moving waters.

The nine-year-old was carrying some books with him, because he loved to take his books everywhere. And all the running had made him tired and the books were feeling quite heavy now. So he saw no harm in sitting on the riverside, next to the girl. In truth, he was actually very curious to see her face.

He placed the books near her and started to look up to the stars. Mikasa turned her head, the cover of the book at the top of the pile called her attention, she had seen it before. Armin looked back down and she turned her face again. Avoiding that strange-looking boy's face.

"You're from Asia, right?" he asked, but was still ignored. Armin leaned in closer to tell her a secret. "I have this secret book with drawings of it. Drawings of what the world was like before it was consumed by Titans, a hundred years ago," Armin explained and stood up excitedly. He took a small, dry branch and started to draw in the grainy dirt.

He drew what he remembered from that old atlas, and he remembered a lot. He had seen it a thousand times.

"And so around here," he moved the branch around. "Around here is where your country used to be." Armin pointed with the branch. "Which is not very far from the Walls so it explains how your family arrived in time," he added.

Mikasa observed at all, hidden under her new scarf. While the boy kept leaning over, trying to get a better look at her. Armin still hadn't seen her face completely and he was extremely curious about it.

'I'm from the mountains, not from the outside. And I want to go home,' Mikasa thought but she couldn't bring herself to speak. She knew, of course, that she could never go home, for she no longer had a home to come back to. Mikasa accidentally looked at the boy's eyes and he looked at hers. It was only for a split second, and she turned her face down again, feeling a little embarrassed but also strangely thrilled.

"I know you're from the mountains of course," Armin said, which caught her off guard, it was like he had just read her thoughts. "Eren told me everything," he said.

That wasn't true, Eren hadn't told him everything, his father had forbidden him to do so, and so did the Military Police.

Armin stared at that girl, he could feel how lost she was, her silence was screaming her pain.

"I know how impossible it feels," he said. "That you will never see them again, hug them again. That you can never return home, because they won't be there, because they are your home," Armin told her. "They will always be your home."

Mikasa only listened to what he said. The nine-year-old stared at the waters, absorbing every word the strange boy said.

"It wasn't long ago when my parents died," he disclosed and she finally looked up, her black eyes found his blue ones and stayed there, fitted. Armin continued. "And my grandfather told me to be stronger, because that's what they would have wanted. He said they will always be alive in me, as long as I carry them in here," he pointed at his head. "In my memories."