Chapter 26: Market Day Disasters
Shiganshina’s market only came alive once a week, and apparently the entire district had decided to show up at once.
"Move your cart!"
"I was here first!"
"You were not—"
Eren ducked around two arguing vendors with a basket balanced on his hip, Armin trailing behind him clutching a list Carla had written in handwriting so precise it looked like a legal document.
"Eggs, flour, three onions, the good thread from the Feldt stall—" Armin squinted at the paper. "Your mother underlined ’good thread’ twice."
"Last time we brought back the cheap kind and she made a face about it for a week."
"What kind of face?"
"The kind that means you’ve personally offended her ancestors."
Armin laughed, and it was such an unguarded, honking sort of laugh that two women browsing vegetables both turned to look. He clapped a hand over his own mouth, mortified, which only made Eren laugh harder.
"Don’t," Armin hissed. "Don’t you dare."
"I didn’t say anything."
"You’re thinking it."
"I’m always thinking something. You can’t arrest me for that."
They found Mikasa exactly where she said she’d be — at the fabric stall, examining a bolt of red cloth with the focus most people reserved for matters of national importance.
"Find the thread?" Eren asked.
"Found something better." She held up the cloth. It was almost the exact shade of her scarf, if a little brighter. "For repairs."
"Your scarf doesn’t need repairs. I’ve seen you nearly wash it into the ground and it still looks brand new."
"It’s not for the scarf." She folded it with a precision that suggested she’d already decided this and wasn’t going to explain further, which — Eren had learned — usually meant she absolutely intended to explain it eventually, on a schedule only she knew.
"Mysterious," Armin said, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that suggested he’d picked up the gesture from watching adults gossip and hadn’t quite mastered it yet. It came out more like he had a sudden eye twitch.
"Are you having a stroke?" Eren asked.
"I’m being suggestive."
"You’re being concerning."
Mikasa, mercifully, ignored both of them and paid for the fabric.
Disaster arrived, as it usually did, in the shape of Hannes.
"There’s my favorite trio of troublemakers!" He clapped Eren on the shoulder hard enough to nearly plant him face-first into a crate of turnips. "Buying groceries like responsible little adults, I see."
"We are responsible little adults."
"You’re nine."
"Responsible little adults in training."
Hannes grinned, then made the catastrophic mistake of leaning against what he assumed was a sturdy market stall. It was, in fact, a very poorly constructed pyramid of apples belonging to a vendor who had stepped away for exactly eleven seconds.
The pyramid did not survive.
Apples went everywhere — rolling under carts, bouncing off unsuspecting shins, one memorably careening directly into a duck that someone had, for reasons no one present could explain, brought to the market on a leash. The duck screamed. Several onlookers screamed in sympathy. Hannes stood frozen in the wreckage like a man who had just discovered gravity personally hated him.
"I didn’t do that," he said, to absolutely no one’s belief.
"You," the vendor said, returning at the worst possible moment, "are going to help me pick every single one of those up."
"I have — official Garrison business—"
"You have apple business now."
Eren had never in his life laughed so hard he had to sit down on a crate, but there was a first time for everything. Armin wasn’t faring much better, wheezing with one hand braced on Eren’s shoulder for support. Even Mikasa — Mikasa, who Eren had personally never once seen laugh at Hannes’s expense without at least trying to hide it — had a hand pressed over her mouth, shoulders shaking.
"This is the best day of my life," Eren managed.
"Don’t," Hannes said, on his knees now, gathering apples with the grim dedication of a disgraced soldier, "you dare tell your mother about this."
"I’m telling her tonight."
"Eren—"
"I’m going to act it out. With gestures."
"I will end you."
"You’ll have to catch me first, and you’re currently on your knees for a duck."
The duck, as if sensing it had won, gave one final indignant honk and waddled off with what could only be described as smug satisfaction.
By the time they finished the shopping — and by the time Hannes had, in fact, personally paid the apple vendor for the entire ruined stock, muttering the whole time about ungrateful children with no respect for their elders — the sun had started dipping low enough to turn the market gold.
They took the long way home, past the old well at the edge of the square, because Armin wanted to check whether the frogs that lived near it had come out after yesterday’s rain. They had. Armin crouched at the edge for a solid five minutes making quiet, delighted noises at a frog that regarded him with what Eren felt was deep and justified suspicion.
"You’re going to marry a frog someday," Eren said.
"Frogs are wonderful and I won’t hear a word against them."
"I said nothing against frogs. I said marriage."
"That’s worse."
Mikasa, walking a step behind with the fabric bundle tucked under one arm, watched this exchange with the small, private amusement she rarely let show all the way to her face.
"You two are ridiculous," she said.
"We’re a delight," Eren corrected.
"That wasn’t the word I used."
"It’s the word you meant."
She didn’t argue, which — from Mikasa — was as good as agreeing.
They dropped Armin at his house first, still faintly frog-scented and completely unbothered by it, waving them off with a cheerful "tell Hannes I hope the duck haunts him" before disappearing inside.
The rest of the walk home, Eren noticed, took slightly longer than it needed to. Not because of the baskets, which weren’t especially heavy. Just — slower. Neither of them seemed to be in any hurry to end it.
"Here." Mikasa stopped near the corner before their street and held out the fabric bundle.
"I thought this was a mystery project."
"It still is." She unwrapped one corner, just enough to show him — not fabric at all, tucked inside the folds, but a small strip of the red cloth already sewn into something narrower. A wristband, roughly the width of two fingers, the stitching neat despite clearly having been done in a hurry sometime in the last hour, probably while he and Armin were busy nearly dying of laughter over apple carnage.
"You made this today?"
"I bought the fabric today. I’ve been planning it longer." She held it out. "For the charm. So it doesn’t just hang from a string that might break again."
He took it carefully, the way he’d taken the bird carving, like the ordinary handling instructions didn’t apply.
"You keep making me things."
"You keep needing them."
"I don’t need — " He stopped, because arguing that point felt suddenly like a much worse idea than just accepting the gift gracefully. "Thank you."
"You’re welcome."
He tied it on right there, on the street, fumbling the knot twice before Mikasa — without a word, without being asked — reached over and finished it for him, her fingers quick and sure against his wrist.
"There," she said, stepping back to survey her work with the same critical eye she’d used on the fabric bolt.
"Perfect."
"It’s crooked."
"It’s charming." He held his wrist up, admiring it with theatrical seriousness. "Everyone will ask where I got such a fine accessory, and I’ll say, ’oh, this old thing? A girl who’s in love with me made it.’"
Mikasa’s ears went pink so fast it was almost funny. "I am not — "
"You absolutely are."
"I made you a wristband, Eren, that doesn’t mean—"
"You made me a bird. You fixed my charm. Now a wristband." He ticked them off on his fingers like evidence in a trial. "At this point you’re basically courting me and I think it’s only fair someone tells you."
"I will throw you down this well."
"Very romantic gesture. I accept your love."
She actually shoved him then — not hard, more exasperated than anything — and he let himself stumble sideways with far more drama than the shove warranted, laughing the whole way down onto the grass at the side of the road.
"You’re impossible," she said, but she was fighting a smile so hard her whole face looked strained with the effort of it, and she sat down on the grass next to him anyway instead of walking on, which told him everything he needed to know about how much she meant it.
"Impossible," he agreed, staring up at the sky gone orange and soft above them, the wristband still a little crooked on his wrist, "but you keep coming back anyway."
"Someone has to keep you from getting a big head about it."
"Too late for that."
She swatted his arm, and he caught her hand before she could pull it back — not for any reason, just because he could, just because for one evening the walls felt very far away and the only thing that mattered was a badly ruined apple stall and a girl who blushed at her own gifts and pretended she didn’t.
Above Wall Maria, the sky went from orange to violet, unhurried, the way it always did on the good days.
He intended to remember this one for a long time.