A Mood For Quiet
Silence.
If there was one thing that Annie was good at, it was holding silence.
Be it a peaceful quiet or the cold shoulder sort, Annie could provide.
Mikasa was perfectly content with this, she was a fan of silence herself. And for the most part, the hush between them was of a soothing nature. Mikasa would leave Annie to her reading or to her military police forms and Annie would leave her to her art.
That night silence meant was tense.
Annie was in a mood.
What had caused it, she didn’t know.
She didn’t ask.
If Annie wanted to share, then she would share.
Mikasa had a suspicion that it had something to do with the girl’s father. She had a tendency to get moody around that time of the year. She thought that Annie might have mentioned something about the anniversary of the day she’d said goodbye to the man. And it was a departure on bad terms.
Annie was never loud nor vocal about her distress though. She suffered in the silence she was good at keeping. So it took Mikasa by surprise to find the girl curled up in bed with her hood drawn up, crying to herself. She hardly spared Mikasa a glance. Mikasa didn’t think that Annie had noticed her at all. Not until she had dropped herself onto the girl’s bed.
Annie peered up, before drawing the hood further over her face and rolling onto her stomach. Just like that, Mikasa knew that she had intruded on a private moment. It was too late to retreat now. So she rested her hand on Annie’s back. She didn’t know what else to do.
She didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew the pain well.
And that was enough to keep her close to Annie.
It was enough to compel her to cuddle up next to her and hold her in the way that she wanted someone to hold her. They had no one to protect them from the harsher elements of the world, but they could weather it together.
Silently.
Even if they never shared with each other, the exact nature of their inner demons.
They could stand together in the quiet.