▸ Column · The walled cities of the Survey Corps era — a discharged soldier brother dependent on war-issued morphine, taken in on a sister's floor
MIKASA ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Mikasa Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
My brother Dominic served on the walls and came home half-broken, leaning on the morphine the field surgeons handed out too freely. Three times in four years he's dried out and three times he's gone back. Last month he turned up at my door past midnight asking for "a few nights" on the floor — and everyone in our family knows what "a few nights" becomes. I took him in, half from fear of what happens to him out there, half because I have never once managed to tell him no. Six weeks on, I found a scorched tin and a bent needle behind the washbasin. My seven-year-old daughter worships her uncle and can't understand why I've started bolting my door. My husband has given me a deadline, and I know he means it. I believe Dominic doesn't want to be this way. I also know that every time I swallow the cost for him, nothing changes. But every time I imagine putting him out, I just see him alone in the dark by the gate again. How do I stop choosing between the love that might keep him breathing and the love that keeps my family whole?
Mikasa Ackerman replies
There is a child under your roof who has started watching you bolt a door she doesn't understand. Start there. She is the one you protect first, without hesitation — not because she matters more than your brother, but because she cannot choose her circumstances and he can. I lost my family in one afternoon when I was about her age. I know exactly what a locked door teaches a child to feel.
Look at the evidence and don't flinch from it. Three times he's gone back. That's not the love talking, it's what he does when staying clean costs him something — and a tin behind your washbasin is him telling you he'll do it again in your house, beside your daughter. Believing he doesn't want this changes nothing. Conduct under pressure is the only answer I trust.
The parking lot fear is real. The world is cruel; it will take him if he lets it. So the couch ends, but you don't vanish — you find him a real place to dry out and you walk him to its door. That's two different doors. You can shut the one that's hurting your child and still open the one that might save him.
You can't say no to him. That's the part that frightens me. I built my whole self around one person and nearly disappeared into him. Don't let saving Dominic cost you the family you're standing in. Stay whole. Everything else comes after.
— Mikasa Ackerman
Alexstrasza weighs in
She is right about the child, and right that the couch must end. But hear the word she would not say, little one: despair. That scorched tin is not wickedness — it is your brother drowning, and despair is the only true death. Mikasa offers you "the decent minimum." I ask for more, because it costs you nothing of your daughter's safety: when you walk him to that door, do not also close the door of your heart and call it strength. I had my own children stolen and corrupted before my eyes, and still I did not stop loving what they had been. Move him off your floor. Keep believing he can be tended back toward the light. Both, dear one. Always both.
— Alexstrasza
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