"Sorry," Akeno said softly.
"Hm?" Eren asked curiously, looking at her out of the side of his eyes.
It was still surreal, even after weeks, to see him without the bandages covering the top half of his face. The curving marks simply enhanced the effect of his grey eyes.
It wasn't like Eren was suddenly cured or anything. He was still thinner than he should be, still paler, but his eyes conveyed so much more than what she was used to.
Like the softness in them as they watched Lady Ackerman tend to the flowers she was planting along the path in this small park.
"About prying," Akeno explained. "When we first came back?"
Akeno had been trying to find the time to get Eren alone for a while now to apologize, but Mikasa was always with him. Ultimately, she had decided it was better to talk to them together rather than keep putting it off.
Eren looked blankly at her for a moment, then his mouth set into a line, and he looked away, remembering her insistent questioning.
"I didn't mean to hurt you two."
"You didn't," Eren grunted.
Mikasa's movements slowed slightly, but she continued her work without saying anything.
"I did."
Akeno would never forget the look in Eren's eyes that afternoon.
For months, she had thought Eren's admittance to killing his parents had been, if not painless, then at least numbed by the fact that he hadn't spent that long with them.
After all, he wouldn't have had long between meeting them and his retirement.
But that wasn't true.
Eren had been talking about parents in an old world.
Parents who had raised him, loved him, and who he had loved deeply in return.
Parents who had been kind enough to take in a girl who lost her own mother and father.
And Eren had killed them.
That self-hatred, that absolute despair in Eren's eyes, Akeno had seen it before—seen it in her own eyes when she looked in the mirror.
And Mikasa's gaze…
She clearly knew about the incident, whatever it was. Clearly knew that the man she loved had killed the parents who had taken her in as their own child.
It didn't look like she blamed Eren, but she couldn't look at him at that moment.
Not for the first time in the last few weeks of internal struggle did Akeno ask herself what type of world they came from. One where children were put in situations where they had to kill parents they loved.
She wasn't surprised they didn't want to talk about it, but Akeno couldn't help wanting to know more. Wanting to know more about the man sitting beside her and the woman tending the flowers.
What a rotten woman Akeno Himejima was.
"What happened, happened," Eren grunted. "I'll never be able to change that. I made my choices. No matter how much I wish things could have gone differently, they didn't. They are my sins. I've lived with them for nineteen years already, and your questions did not hurt me."
More than he was already hurt by them.
It went unsaid, but Akeno understood.
Mikasa had entirely stopped gardening, but she didn't turn around. Didn't face the pair on the bench.
"Still-"
"I don't need your pity," Eren cut Akeno off. "Don't treat me like I'm made of glass. If you do, I am going to hit you again."
Mikasa made a little noise, her shoulders shaking slightly, and then resumed her work with the flowers.
Akeno couldn't help but smile at the sound. That had been the closest she had ever heard the usually so severe Lady Ackerman come to laughing.
Still, that didn't change what she had come here to do.
"I am sorry," Akeno repeated, and when Eren raised a fist, she hurried to continue. Less of fear of pain and more to not have him strain himself. "For pushing, if nothing else. It's not fair to try and pry when we were keeping secrets from you, too."
"Nobody needs to know everything about someone," Eren shook his head. "Secrets, lies, identities, even our pasts. They matter, but not to others. Only to ourselves. What matters to others is our actions. Yes, I am from another world. Yes, you are devils. But you all have never been my enemy, and I am not yours. For the moment, that is all that matters."
Mikasa looked back at the pair for the first time since Akeno had apologized. The Pawn had never been the most emotive person, but the Queen thought she could sense something in that gaze.
Relief? Concern?
"Maybe," Akeno allowed, meeting her fellow devil's gaze. Mikasa turned back to her work. "Still, I felt I needed to apologize."
"And now you have," Eren grunted again. Either he didn't catch Mikasa's look or, more likely, understood it even better than Akeno and saw no need to address it. "Feel better?"
Akeno winced.
Maybe Eren using his eyes wasn't a purely good thing after all. He had clearly realized how much it had been eating up at her, something he might not have while still wearing his bandages.
At least before she brought it up herself.
"A bit," Akeno admitted with a helpless smile. "I also wanted to explain myself a bit."
Eren just looked at her, no expression on his face. Akeno took a deep breath.
"My father is a fallen angel."
Eren kept looking at her with the same expression, even as she opened her wings as proof.
"He's actually... Baraqiel."
Eren just looked at her.
"Baraqiel is one of-"
"I know who Baraqiel is," Eren said, interrupting Akeno. "I just want to know the point of telling me this."
"Eren!" Mikasa said sharply as Akeno winced.
The older boy looked at the woman, almost as if he was surprised she had raised her voice against him.
He didn't look unhappy about it, though.
Mikasa just shot Eren a look that he was somehow able to understand.
"Right, sorry," he sighed, rubbing his face. "This is important to you. Your mother. She died because of your father, right? Because he was a fallen angel, and so were you. But... I can't help you, Akeno. I can't change who you are. If you just want me to listen, I can do that. But I told you already. You need to be the one to take that step forward, no matter how much it hurts."
A part of Akeno was happy that the confession of her race hadn't changed how Eren viewed her.
Another part felt a little betrayed. Gathering up the courage to talk about this part of her life wasn't easy, and taking that step forward had been a hurdle. To have it brushed aside so easily felt... Well, it didn't feel good.
The most significant part of Akeno felt foolish.
What had she been expecting? Eren didn't seem to care that they were devils. Why would he care that she was part fallen or Koneko was a nekoshou?
Had she been expecting her admission of being part fallen to garner sympathy?
Eren already knew why she hated her fallen side, that her birth had been what led to her mother's death. Had Akeno expected Eren learning that it was her fallen blood was the cause to suddenly change his views?
It all seemed so absurd to Akeno at that moment.
"Fufufu," the Queen couldn't help but laugh, shaking her head at the questioning looks she was receiving. "Sorry, just felt very silly for a moment."
Eren clearly wasn't convinced.
"Silly?" Eren asked rhetorically, knocking his cane against Akeno's shins in chastisement. "Our problems might seem silly to others, but they are important to us. Your father... I know of him, like I said, but I don't know him personally. Never met him. I can't judge if he was a good father, whether he was to blame for your mom or not. But whatever you feel for him, whether you hate him or not, is not silly."
Akeno was honestly surprised Eren even knew who Baraqiel was. While he was well known in supernatural circles, to someone who only knew about the supernatural through tangential sources like Eren it was surprising to have heard about him. He was less known than the big names like Azazel or Michael.
Still, Akeno's giggling didn't stop. Less in self-recrimination and more at Eren's actions and words.
He could act like such an old man sometimes. At least she knew why now.
"Grisha."
"Mikasa?" Eren asked the woman turning up dirt.
Akeno also looked at her at the sudden name. Mikasa continued to work, not looking at either of them.
"That was our father's name. Grisha. He took me in after my parents were killed. He was a doctor. The best doctor in the area. He single-handedly saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, from a localized plague. As long as I knew him, he was a gentle, kind man. Never raised his voice. Never had a bad word to say about anyone. We loved him. I named my son after him."
Akeno didn't miss Eren's grimace at the mention of Mikasa's child, but he didn't interrupt.
"We learned later that we were his second family," Mikasa said, the ground ripping with a particularly strong tug. "Before he met Carla, he had another one. A wife he married for political reasons and a son he was nowhere near as kind to. He loved them both, but the man he described in the journals and the man I knew were so different that they would have been unrecognizable to me."
"Before he met my mom, he was the leader of a resistance movement," Eren explained with a grimace when Mikasa trailed off. "He joined it after he watched his sister, my aunt, be torn apart by dogs. They were children at the time, and she was still alive when it happened. He wanted revenge."
"I understand his reasons," Mikasa shook her head, still looking away. "But what he did to his son... I hated Zeke, but Grisha was not a good father to him. It doesn't excuse either of them. But the Grisha I knew and the Grisha back then were two different people."
"What happened?" Akeno asked.
"His rebellion failed. He was caught and sentenced to death. They tortured him and his wife. Before he died, though, he was saved. I don't know if it was Zeke turning him in that changed him, or it was seeing what happened to his first wife."
"It was both and his revenge," Eren said hollowly, eyes distant. As if he was watching it all play out in front of him. "He saw the man who killed his sister torn apart like she was. But rather than feeling happy, he just felt sick. After that, he never wanted to hurt anyone again... until he was forced to."
"... Grisha made mistakes," Mikasa eventually said, her voice soft. "He knew that more than anyone. But he could be the kind man I remember because of those mistakes. I didn't name my son after Grisha, the freedom fighter. I named him after the man who took in an orphaned girl when he didn't have to."
"My- Baraqiel is not like that," Akeno denied. "He's a leader of the Grigori. He's been around for thousands of years. He's one of the strongest beings in the world. He should have been able to protect his family. He should have been there."
"I don't know Baraqiel either," Mikasa sighed, repeating Eren's words. "I am not telling you to make up with him or forgive him. But losing someone you love puts things in perspective. The type of man he is now might not be the type of man he was before. Good or bad, you would regret not knowing what type of man your father is."
Akeno didn't know what type of man Baraqiel was.
She hadn't seen him since she ran away from him, blaming him and herself for the death of Shuri Himejima.
"Race is... it's stupid," Eren grunted, looking away from Akeno. "It's so stupid. I don't know if your dad deserves your hatred or not, but your race doesn't. Hating people because of their bloodline, because of something they couldn't control, is pointless."
Now it was Mikasa's turn to look at Eren in surprise, but she did nod in agreement.
"They called us Island Devils," Mikasa said, putting down her trowel and walking over to stand beside Eren. "The entire world hated us. Feared us. But the people who hurt us the most? They were also Eldian. Fritz, Ymir, Zeke, Reiner, Annie, Bertholdt, the slavers who killed my parents. They were all Eldian. Race had nothing to do with it beyond motivation."
"This world is different from ours, but in many ways, it's the same," Eren said, leaning back against the bench and looking up at the sky. "When I learned devils, fallen angels, angels, gods, monsters, and every other myth was real, do you know what I felt?"
"What?"
"Nothing. I felt nothing. Because nothing any of these supernatural races can do to humans is worse than what humans have already done to themselves, are still doing to themselves, and will do to themselves. The existence of monsters, of a common enemy, does not change humanity."
"It was not angels, fallen, or devils that created the Holy Sword Project," Mikasa pointed out. "It was humans."
What a bleak way to look at the world.
Still, that got another laugh out of Akeno, this one more genuine.
"As always, you are terrible at consolation. Both of you," she giggled helplessly.
Eren grunted, not commenting one way or the other. Akeno sobered as she continued.
"You are wrong, though, not about humanity but about the existence of the supernatural. It does change things. A lone human, no matter how powerful, will eventually die. No devil has ever died of old age. Grudges will last eons."
It had been humans that killed Akeno's mother. There was no denying that, nor was the Queen trying to forgive the Principle Clans of Japan. Even after Akeno fled, living in exile, the Himejima clan continued to hunt her and try to kill her.
But it was precisely because of Baraqiel's existence that such a thing happened.
The Lightning of God had made so many enemies, killed so many people, and led the Grigori for so long that entire generations of the Principle Clans had fought and died defending their land from beings just like him.
Several of Akeno's ancestors had died against fallen angels who still live today.
To her, those people might be a long thing of the past, but to the clan as a whole, they were enemies they couldn't forgive.
"Grudges and hatred will last centuries, even if their original causes are long dead and forgotten," Eren shook his head.
"There is also the benefit of long lives," Mikasa said to both of them, resting a comforting hand on Eren's shoulder. "Hatred will never fully die. Nor will war. But those who experience and rise above it will live longer, too. The mistakes of the past will not be forgotten over generations."
"We are at peace now," Akeno sighed, knowing what Mikasa was alluding to.
The leaders of the Grigory and Heaven were putting aside their millennia-old grudges for the sake of their people. Even the Satans of the Underworld, younger than the other faction leaders, had still lost family in the Great War.
But it was precisely because they had lost so much that all sides knew it couldn't continue.
Hell, Azazel was now their club supervisor.
He was watching over devil children, a race he had waged war on for countless years, yet he wasn't treating them in any way Akeno could describe as badly, despite his great interest in the Sacred Gears of the Occult Research Club.
If it weren't for Mikasa's liberal use of threats to get him to leave Eren alone, he might be there with them right now.
Akeno hated how petty she sounded, even to herself, when complaining about fallen angels while going to school with their leader and having an actual angel transfer in as a student.
At least Irina was good for teasing Issei. Rias had one-upped Akeno when she had somehow managed to get Ravel Phoenix some alone time with the Red Dragon Emperor.
If Akeno could get the new angel to commit to Issei somehow, she retake her lead in her little competition with Rias over who could get Issei's harem going better.
That, or get Xenovia to finally pursue her desire to have kids without interruption. It was like the universe was conspiring to keep Issei a virgin.
Akeno grimaced, shaking her head.
They had gotten off target about why she had come here in the first place. She hadn't intended to bring up their wounds about their past again when she was meant to apologize.
She was about to apologize again when she caught sight of Eren's face.
He stared up at Mikasa, his eyes wide as if she had just said something that had overturned his entire world view.
"Eren?"
"Sorry," the older boy said at the Pawn's gentle question. He shook his head softly, looking down at the ground and tapping thoughtfully with his cane. "Just... I was just wondering what it would be like if this world had someone like Armin in charge."
"Oh," Mikasa said, eyes softening. "I sometimes wonder about that, too. I miss him."
"Armin?" Akeno asked.
"Our friend," Eren said softly, still tapping thoughtfully with his cane. "Smartest man I ever knew. One of the kindest, too. But he knew how to get things done in a way nobody else could, even when he had to sacrifice that kindness. I... I left a lot of stuff to him because I knew I could trust him."
"We both did," Mikasa sighed as well, sitting on the side of the bench beside Eren. "Still, he always went above and beyond."
"Hmm," Eren nodded, still tapping away. "I see."
Then he looked up, meeting Akeno's gaze.
The tapping stopped.
"Sorry," he said suddenly. "Got lost in thought."
"I did the same," Akeno shook her head with a smile.
"Anyway, are you feeling better now?" Eren asked bluntly. "Don't you have another rating game coming up soon? Issei mentioned one. He's pretty angry."
Akeno grimaced at the reminder.
It was not that she had any doubt that they'd win. Diodora Astaroth simply had no way of beating the Gremory Peerage.
Instead, it was his unwanted advances on Asia and continual requests to Rias for a trade, combined with his inability to take no for an answer, that had her grimacing.
If anything, Akeno was looking forward to trying out her Holy Lightning on the Astaroth heir. She had a good idea now how to do it without hurting herself.
"Are you worried?" Eren asked, mistaking the reason for her grimace. "Don't be. It'll turn out fine."
"No," Akeno denied. Then, seeing an opportunity for mischief, she continued with a fake sigh. "I am just worried about leaving you."
Eren and Mikasa furrowed their brows at the Queen, though the Pawn looked noticeably more wary.
"I'll be fine," Eren grunted in displeasure. "I have been until now. Go fight your game."
"Ah, but before, we weren't leaving you at the mercy of an older woman," Akeno 'lamented.' "What if we return to find she has had her wicked way with you?"
The younger girl shivered in delight at the red hue both Eren and Mikasa's faces gained under her teasing words.
Akeno hadn't seen them so much as kiss, despite how close they were to each other at all times. She didn't know why they maintained such a boundary in their relationship. They clearly cared deeply about each other.
Something was holding them back, but that was one area Akeno knew well enough to leave alone.
Still, they were almost 'pure' in their reactions to her teasing, and Akeno couldn't get enough of it.
Seeing them together, talking to each other without words and with looks only the other could understand really showed how close they had been in their previous world. It made Akeno sort of jealous, but also devilishly pleased. She felt like every time she touched Eren, she was pulling a trick on the older devil.
Ah, what a rotten woman she was.
"I will be there," Mikasa said, her voice low and dangerous. "Sona is facing Sairaorg before your match, and I promised to watch her matches."
"Alas," Akeno sighed dramatically. "Eren must go unattended. Do not worry. I shall return to your side as soon as possible to keep you company."
Eren's blush had disappeared, and he was just looking at Akeno with a blank face.
Mikasa was grinding her teeth.
Maybe Akeno had gone overboard?
"Do you remember ODM training?" Eren asked suddenly. Mikasa looked at him and nodded slowly. "I think Akeno is feeling better. She could use similar training before her match."
Mikasa's eyes lit up, and Akeno suddenly felt very vulnerable.
"Eren?"
"I've always found that most supernatural creatures that can fly don't know how to use their wings to their advantage," Mikasa said lowly, two swords appearing in her hand.
"Eren? You'll save me, won't you, Eren?"
"No."
It took barely a second for the boy to be left alone again as the Pawn chased the Queen into the distance.
Eren wasn't watching them.
Instead, he spent the time thinking as his cane tapped away the hours on the bench.