Chapter 107: What Carla Wants

Carla was fourteen when she announced, over dinner, with the particular flatness of someone who’d rehearsed the sentence many times, that she wanted to join the Survey Corps the moment she was old enough to enlist.

The table went quiet. Mikasa set down her fork.

"No," she said, simple and immediate.

"You don’t get to just say no."

"I’m your mother. I get to say a great many things." Mikasa’s voice stayed level, but something old and fierce had entered it, the same tone she’d once used telling Eren not to throw himself off a cliff without warning her first. "You have no idea what that life actually costs."

"I know exactly what it costs," Carla shot back, years of careful, honest upbringing apparently having given her more ammunition than her mother expected. "You told me. Both of you. Everything — Trost, the binding, Dad’s second ritual. I’ve grown up knowing the cost better than most kids my age know their own street address."

Eren, caught between them, said nothing for a moment, weighing an old, uncomfortable memory of his own nine-year-old self insisting on a fight nobody wanted him fighting either.

"Then you also know," Mikasa said, "that I nearly lost your father more times than I can count. That I don’t want that same fear for you."

"That’s not your choice to make for me." Carla’s voice cracked, frustration and something rawer underneath it. "You get to have chosen this life. Dad got to have chosen it. I don’t get anything except being born into the aftermath and told, my whole childhood, how brave everyone was — and then, the one time I say I want to actually do something with what I’ve learned, I’m just supposed to sit quietly in the garden instead."

The argument didn’t resolve that night. It didn’t resolve the next night either, the household settling into a tense, careful quiet that neither parent nor daughter seemed to know how to properly break.

Armin, visiting a week later and immediately sensing the tension, found Carla alone in the garden, arms crossed, still fuming.

"Your mother told you no," he said, settling onto the low wall beside her without asking permission.

"You’re going to lecture me too."

"I’m going to ask you a question first." Armin’s voice carried the same patient, careful curiosity he’d once brought to every impossible mystery this family had faced. "Why the Survey Corps, specifically? Not the Garrison. Not diplomatic work, like the treaty office. The Corps."

Carla was quiet a moment, some of her defensiveness easing slightly under the genuine question. "Because that’s where the real choices get made. Where people actually decide, in the moment, whether to fight or understand. I want to be someone who makes that choice well. Not just hear about it secondhand at dinner."

"That’s not actually about danger, then," Armin said slowly. "It’s about mattering. About proving you’re more than the daughter of people who already fought the important fight."

Carla’s composure cracked slightly. "Maybe."

"I understand that better than you’d think," Armin said. "I spent years feeling like the weak one, the thinker instead of the fighter, standing next to your father and mother while they did the things that actually seemed to matter. It took me a long time to understand that understanding mattered too — that Colt Grice is in prison instead of dead, and that lighthouse never detonated, because someone thought carefully instead of just fighting."

"So what are you saying? That I should become a diplomat instead?"

"I’m saying you get to decide what kind of contribution matters to you. I’m saying your mother’s fear isn’t actually about controlling your choices — it’s about carrying scars neither of us can fully explain to someone who didn’t live through them. Both things can be true at once." Armin met her eyes steadily. "Talk to her properly. Not as an argument to win. As an actual conversation about what you’re both afraid of."

Carla found Mikasa in the garden two evenings later, both of them working the rows in careful, deliberate silence before Carla finally spoke.

"I’m not trying to throw myself away," she said quietly. "I know that’s what you’re afraid of. That I want the danger because I don’t understand it properly."

"That’s part of it," Mikasa admitted, not looking up from the soil. "But it’s not all of it."

"What’s the rest?"

Mikasa was quiet a long moment, old grief surfacing carefully, deliberately, the way she’d learned across two decades to let herself actually feel things instead of only enduring them.

"The rest is that I spent years terrified I’d lose your father to every fight this world demanded of him. I built this garden, this life, specifically as proof that peace could actually hold, that the fighting could actually end." Her voice caught slightly. "If you join the Corps, some part of me will feel like the fighting never really stopped. Like I failed to build the world I promised myself I’d give you."

Carla sat with that, something in her own fierce resolve softening slightly. "You didn’t fail, Mom. The world you built is exactly why I want to protect it properly, the way you and Dad did. That’s not the fighting continuing. That’s me wanting to carry forward what you actually taught me — that peace is worth choosing, actively, generation after generation."

Mikasa looked up at her daughter — nearly grown now, fierce and thoughtful in ways that reminded her, uncomfortably and proudly, of both herself and Eren at that age — and felt something old and stubborn finally begin to ease.

"I’m still afraid," she admitted. "I don’t think that fear goes away, whatever you eventually choose."

"I know. I’m not asking you to stop being afraid. I’m asking you to trust that I’ve actually learned something, growing up in this family, about how to make hard choices carefully instead of recklessly."

[System notification: No mechanical relevance. Filed simply because it matters — Carla Yeager, age 14, first real adult conversation with her mother.]

Mikasa read the notification over her daughter’s shoulder, the strange, quiet system still occasionally, gently present in their lives, and something in her finally, fully softened.

"Two more years," she said. "Before you’re actually old enough to enlist. Between now and then, you train properly — with your father, with me, with people who’ll teach you to be genuinely ready, not just eager. And you keep talking to me. Honestly, the way you just did tonight, instead of just deciding things and presenting them as finished."

Carla’s face broke into a real, disbelieving smile. "That’s not a no."

"It’s not a no," Mikasa agreed, old fear and fierce, hard-won pride tangling together in her chest. "It’s a mother trying very hard to trust the world she helped build enough to let her daughter actually live in it fully."

That evening, Eren found them both in the garden, working the rows together in a silence that had finally, properly eased, and felt something settle warm in his chest at the sight.

"You talked," he said, joining them.

"We talked," Mikasa confirmed, meeting his eyes with old, complicated relief. "She’s not wrong, Eren. About wanting to matter. About understanding the cost better than either of us initially gave her credit for."

"She’s your daughter," Eren said, watching Carla continue working the soil with fierce, careful attention. "Stubborn enough to argue you into actual conversation instead of just conflict. I don’t think that’s a flaw."

"No," Mikasa agreed, watching Carla with something between fear and fierce, unshakeable pride. "I don’t think it is either."

Above the garden, the evening sky stretched wide and quiet, carrying no countdown, no mission tracker’s urgent notification — just an ordinary family, working through an ordinary, difficult conversation about what the next generation actually deserved to inherit from everything the last one had survived.