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Armin could remember with cringing clarity his first ever physical after enlisting. Not that it had really been so terrible—plenty of orphaned refugees had signed up, and so there’d been no shortage of scrawny twelve-year-olds with sunken stomachs. The nurse had taken Armin’s measurements with such disinterest that he had felt less like a person and more like a piece of furniture, and when the tapes and charts had been put away, he’d spoken with flat apathy.
“You’re on the fifth percentile for height and weight,” the nurse had said, as though Armin should have known what that meant. Still, context had provided clue enough. “You’re from the camps, aren’t you? Once you start getting regular meals, you’ll likely be fine.”
And he had been sent away with that knowledge. Not new, for Armin had always been small, but the cool analytical truth of it had left him feeling smaller still. A feeling that had not been helped once they were assigned to Trost’s barracks. His stomach had dropped at the sight of Reiner and Bertholdt—older, but not by much—and even Jean, whose lean lankness had made him one of the tallest among Armin’s age.
He’d eaten the same as everyone else. He had slept the same hours, drunk the same water, suffered the same training. Yet he had remained short. Small. Diminutive. Not that it hadn’t had its upsides: Bertholdt’s gangly spread had made him an unpopular bunkmate, and manoeuvring was actually easier if you didn’t carry much bulk. Connie had been proof enough of that. Light of foot, faster than the wind, he had zipped through the air like a swallow on the wing. And Annie—less a slip of a thing than a cauterising blade—had shown again and again that one’s skill need not depend on size. The problem was, though, that Armin hadn’t been skilled, at least not physically. Instead he’d had a nascent complex and a stubborn streak; even on mornings when Armin had been so sore and stiff that he’d needed Eren to lever him into the harness, he would face the day with grim resolve.
From time to time, Armin would think back to the nurse’s comment. Certainly he had filled out during training, the muscles in his arms and legs no longer so alarmingly ropy. But his size had remained a constant frustration. That first year, he’d had to notch the straps on his harness on the last hole. (The harness itself one of the smallest sizes available.) He’d worn extra socks to pad out his feet in the boots, otherwise they were annoyingly gappy. And Armin swore that if he’d at least had longer legs, he wouldn’t have fallen so far behind on pack runs, even with his meagre stamina.
Still, there had been cadets yet more stunted than him. Even among those that weren’t, some simply had not been equipped to handle the cruel rigour of training. Every quarter Armin had wrestled with the thought that he could be sent back to the fields—for he would never have made that choice willingly, even if it killed him—but by some miracle, his body carried him through three nearly impossible years. He might have stumbled on the block, but Armin had pulled himself over it.
There had always been the promise of a growth spurt to soothe his wounded pride. When Armin had ever been at his lowest, Mikasa would deploy that platitude with near tactical precision: you have plenty of time yet to grow, and though it was such a ridiculous thing he had nursed that hope like a candle against the wind. There was always time. As long as you were still alive, there was time.
Now nearly at the age of nineteen, it seemed there was little chance left of extra footage. Armin did not have the luxury of so much time anymore, anyway. He’d always been aware that he would likely die in service. He already had once, or as good as. But it was a very different beast to have a looming deadline—to know that no matter how much he coddled or cared for this body, it would fail within nine years.
At first that revelation had made everything feel so significant, the cold truth of it a constant weight in his stomach. But imbuing every moment with such sentimental gravity had been exhausting, and anyway Armin was too busy to be morose. Most Survey Corpsmen didn’t make it past thirty, and nine years was a long time from now. Nine years ago, he had been ten, and the myriad things that had happened between then and now were practically unfathomable. Armin was certain that he’d had singular months more eventful than some people’s decades.
So there was time, yet. For fighting and loss and anger, but also for worthier things: tasting new food, feeling sand warmed by the sun beneath his back, the casual comfort of the people he loved around him as he read, trained, slept. None of these things granted him the further few inches he would have liked, true. But it was a bearable compromise.
Mikasa’s fabled growth spurt seemed to pass over Armin completely. Instead it blessed Connie with the full extent of its power, and over a matter of months he outgrew nearly everything he owned, three times. At which point Jean took mercy and lent him his old clothes until his height stabilised. Armin had watched at first with a secret stirring of hope—Connie had been shorter than Armin before he shot up like a reed—but as the years passed, he felt that hope slip away with no small measure of jealousy. Not that he hadn’t grown at all. In four years, Armin had gained a couple of inches in height, his shoulders and chest no longer so narrow. Now the highest shelf was rarely beyond his reach when it had so often been before. And if it sometimes was, by god was Armin determined to scooch whatever book or bottle stood there with the tips of his fingers until he could reach it. Even if he regularly risked concussion doing so.
For the most part, then, he tried not to let it bother him. There was no changing his size, after all; it wasn’t as though it were a personal failing. It was biological fact, as much as the colour of his hair or the shape of his nose. When Armin tried to recall his parents, it was hard enough to remember their faces, never mind how much—or not—they had loomed over him as a child. Every adult had seemed enormous, back then. His grandfather had been on the shorter side, but fifty years of hard labour lay heavy on his bones: a farmer’s life had bent him over to a permanent stoop. It was easy enough to place the blame at their feet (small though they might have been) and not waste the energy fretting over his protein intake.
Yeah. That would have been the rational attitude. Reasonable. He would never love being short, but that didn’t mean he had to hate it. Captain Levi was yet shorter than Armin was, and it never gave him any grief, besides Mikasa’s angry mutterings those few weeks following Eren’s trial. Though the captain was an Ackerman, and easily the best soldier the Corps had ever known. Which Armin felt must have soothed most insecurities before they could take root. Sure, he could shift into a titan some sixty metres tall, but it wasn’t as though he could do that most any time—not unless Armin wanted to destroy everything within the near vicinity.
It was understandable that some things would rankle. Take Jean, for example. Jean, who was so tall now that it was obscene. He had been tall enough at fifteen, Armin thought unhappily; at fifteen, Jean still would have stood a couple inches taller than Armin some four years later. And wasn’t that just unfair? There hadn’t even been any awkward beanpole years. Jean had grown as surely and solidly as an oak, and now he looked, well, like an adult, when Armin felt not much different than he had at fifteen. And then he’d had the audacity to go and grow a beard! Armin had found that a little amusing initially—Jean had started early with the razor when he’d had only scant whiskers to scrape away—but now he could cultivate an impressive scruff. Looking at it, Armin would unconsciously touch his own soft face and then get annoyed at himself for doing so.
It was a petty grievance. Armin knew that. Sometimes it was for that very reason that he chose to wallow in such vindictive misery. Almost everything else he had to worry about was so significant; grousing over something as minor as this was a fun hobby by comparison. But some grievances, no matter how petty, still had enough bite to leave a mark. It wasn’t even his own insecurity that caused this secondary—sharper—ache.
Eren had always been taller than Armin, though never by much. There might have been a couple of months, at eight or nine years old, when Armin had been the same height or even a scant quarter-inch taller. Dr. Jaeger would mark their heights on to the frame of the door of the kitchen—Eren, Armin, Mikasa, and even Eren’s mother would oblige with a gentle laugh, crouching or stretching as if her height too would change over the years. A set of pencil marks in two distinct clusters, dated and named appropriately. The distance between them then had never been so great as to be remarkable.
So it had been a little surprising when Eren outgrew the height difference they’d maintained with such consistency. Not as shocking as Connie, but perhaps Armin knew Eren too well, a closeness so constant that it had seared itself into his muscle memory. Now he had to lift his gaze a little higher to meet Eren’s eye. Now, Eren’s hands looked sturdy, solid, in a way that they never had before. And sometimes, first thing in the morning, Armin would see the dark burring of stubble at Eren’s jaw before he headed for the washroom.
It gave him a very peculiar feeling. A swooping, startled feeling, as though he’d overlooked the last step and was in free-fall. Beneath it, something yet more secret, a dark and wondering hunger, had made its home. The kind of hunger that woke him in the middle of the night, his face and body burning for different reasons—a heady mix of shame and desire—even as they rose from the same source.
What was it about Eren that could drag such things out of him? Courage that could turn the tide, fear that could blot the sky. A love so wonderful and wretched that it was as impossible to acknowledge as it was to ignore. He had put Armin’s world back together with those sturdy hands, many times. And lately, Eren had dismantled it just as easily—as when he whisked away to that remote place in his memory, even as he stood mere feet from him.
Maybe this want had always been there, grinding away at Armin’s wilful naivete until there were no excuses left. The other cadets had thought it strange, but it had only ever felt natural to be so close with Eren; to offer the comfort of touch when needed, and to accept it in turn with grateful ease. He had always toed that line, hadn’t he. One so thin that it might as well have been invisible. What makes a friend and what makes a lover? Armin wasn’t experienced enough—not in such matters—to know with any certainty. But the context of Eren’s changed body, the new presence he had when he walked into a room, had launched Armin well over that border and deep into unknown territory.
In the Survey Corps, birthdays passed without much comment. It used to be a cause for celebration, and for new recruits in particular it had represented another layer of defence—if you’d made it to your next birthday after graduation, your percentage chance of survival more than doubled. The statistic was meaningless now, though, without titans to wage war against.
Some people received birthday packages in the morning delivery. Done far enough in advance, one could request leave of the nearest weekend to visit family—or to get so dead drunk that the only solution was to get drunker still the next day. Some others let the day pass without mention. Mostly it was a private thing to which one’s friends would raise their glass at evening mess, and there would be jostling and laughter and gentle bullying. Maybe they’d let you win at cards, that night, or thrash you so soundly you’d beg for mercy; both were acceptable kindnesses.
Armin would often forget his own birthday. It had never been an extravagant celebration even when he was a child, excepting his grandfather’s slipping of a coin into his tiny palm like a secret. There might have been a token gift otherwise, and his favourite meal on the table, though honestly even those things were so vague in his memory it was hard to discern lived reality from his imagination. At the camps, birthdays had meant nothing. Time’s passing was marked only by the coming creep of the hoarfrost and then the summer’s baking sun.
But now—for Eren, Mikasa, and Armin—birthdays had developed a new weight. Four years was all that Eren had left. Four years. It felt like no time at all even as it stretched ahead like an eternity. When Eren’s birthday approached every spring, Mikasa’s mood would darken as the days grew brighter. For his part, Eren did not mention it. He reacted hardly at all; the day was like any other. But there was no doubt he was aware of its passing, and exactly what it meant. In strategy meetings he would throw out that barb of truth with clinical coldness: I’ve only got four years left. It was not just a deadline for Eren. It was a deadline also for Paradis.
The day had begun with one such meeting. A tense one, though most meetings were these days. Even among the Corps’ own officers, it was difficult to reach a consensus; with Yelena as an increasingly chaotic element, it had become impossible. And it was a miserable autumn to boot. None of the beautiful brisk days that Armin loved at this time of year—instead it was wet and bitterly cold, the kind of chilly damp that, once in your clothes, was impossible to get out.
Though it was only owing to the lousy weather that he remembered the day at all.
He was warming his hands, crouching too close to the fire and relishing the near-painful heat that suffused his skin. He was alone—stuck writing a report on the potential uses of the iceburst stone for Hizuru, though Armin was sure they had their own lucrative plans—and he was there still some minutes later when Jean poked his head through the door.
He spoke with breezy charm. “You shouldn’t sit so close to the fire.” It was said too kindly to be a scold, and anyway it only made Armin smile. “Here, this should warm you up.”
The mug was set with undue gravity on his desk for it to be tea. The smell struck him only as he rose to reach for it. An unmistakable smell, delicious, dark and roasted, like a woodfire tinged with sweetness. Armin blinked down into the cup.
“Where on earth did you get coffee from?”
Hizuru had traded a little coffee to Paradis on the request of the anti-Marleyan volunteers, though it was rationed so severely that you’d be lucky to catch the dregs of it in a senior officer’s cup. Your average soldier would not have had easy access.
Jean grinned. A pleased, bashful grin. “Sasha’s not the only one who can sneak supplies. Mind you, do keep it a secret.” He shrugged and turned, leaving this precious gift with so little fanfare that Armin was filled with warmth before he’d even taken a sip.
“I will. Thank you, Jean. Though I hope you didn’t take that risk on my account.”
At the door, Jean paused. “It’s your birthday, right? I know you’re not gonna want to… I don’t know, go out drinking or whatever, so think of it as a present.” He paused again, and Armin could have sworn he was blushing as he rushed out into the corridor. Jean offered one final parting remark as the door swung shut. “Happy birthday!”
At first, Armin thought he must’ve been mistaken. It was indeed the right time of year—the leaves shedding from the trees now in sodden heaps—but had it really come around so soon? A quick check of the calendar confirmed it. Armin cradled the mug against his chest, steam lifting its scent into the air. He took a deep breath of it, a deeper drink, and turned back to his report with renewed attention.
He’d expected the barracks to be empty. It was an odd time of day, the early evening lapse before mess; Armin was only returning to grab a pullover from his footlocker. And it nearly was empty, except for one person.
“Eren?” Armin said, almost involuntarily. The shock of seeing him there, sitting with his gear laid out on the table, actually made him step backwards—as if Armin had been caught doing something he shouldn’t. He cleared his throat, embarrassed at the high pitch of his surprise.
Eren looked up from the table. It was such a peculiar scene even though it used to be commonplace; the concentrated quiet as Eren maintained his gear, a calm otherwise so rare for him. Besides the metal fixtures of his dismantled kit, there were cleaning cloths, a bottle of oil, and a set of fine, flexible brushes. Armin’s attention was drawn to the table again and again, the novelty of it arresting. When was the last time he had witnessed Eren doing something so simple, so domestic? They hardly used the gear these days outside of drills, and Eren was frequently absent from them.
“Hey, Armin,” Eren said. He flashed him a brief smile. In his left hand, he held a fan blade, turning it on his finger as he cleaned it with meticulous care. “The meeting was a crapshoot, huh?”
Armin’s belly tightened. It had been. Hanji had left with their head nearly in both hands, which was by now a sad and familiar sight.
“Yeah.” He tried to sound wry, unbothered. “They’re pretty much always like that, these days.”
A quiet hum. Armin felt that he had somehow intruded, though Eren was here alone and the barracks were hardly a private place. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands, nor his face, though standing there awkwardly was unbearable. Finally he went over to his trunk and grabbed his sweater. Eren wasn’t watching him—his attention fully on his gear—but Armin felt under scrutiny all the same. There was a curious atmosphere. He couldn’t figure out whether Eren wanted his company or not, and that realisation triggered a strange, sad ache in his chest. That uncertainty would have been inconceivable four years ago. Back then, Armin would have sat next to him without a second thought and gone to help—probably with the fiddly bits he liked most and everyone else hated, threading the brushes through each pipe and coil until he had a gleaming pile.
Such simple satisfaction. Such easy company. Sometimes they would lapse into silence, and it was comfortable and comforting, meaningless and meaningful.
Instead, Armin hovered at the opposite end of the table. His hands made fists in the fabric of his sweater. He had been cold earlier, but now his skin prickled with heat. A bead of sweat trickled from the nape of his neck, down between his shoulder blades.
Eren looked up at him. He made a clucking sound. “Not a great way to start your birthday, though.”
A funny little thrill went down Armin’s spine. It shouldn’t have, but its pleasant shiver softened the raw edge of his nerves. It wasn’t that he was surprised Eren had remembered—well, perhaps a little, considering Armin himself had forgot—but it was that he had made the remark at all. He initiated conversation less and less often, these days.
This time Armin was able to summon a dry smile. “Well, it’s not the best. But there are plenty of worse ways.”
Eren snorted. And still, he cleaned, his thumb rubbing repeat circles into the cloth, against whatever piece he held in his other hand. Armin couldn’t see it from here.
“There’s just no time to celebrate, is there? I swear I’ve lost weeks without noticing.” Eren’s expression was thoughtful, but he redirected his focus back to the table, away from Armin. “It’s going by too quickly.”
Armin felt the unspoken meaning there as if Eren had struck him with the words. He swallowed hard. It was not a conversation he wanted to have, not right now, not when for that short second he had felt a familiar part of Eren reaching for him. Maybe he was imagining it—wishful thinking so strong it could blind you—but maybe he hadn’t. And that was a chance worth pushing for.
“Too quickly,” Armin agreed, but he swerved, “I wouldn’t mind so much if I actually got what I wanted for once.”
Eren’s gaze rose to meet his again, and with it his eyebrows lifted behind his hair. An intrigued look.
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” Armin grinned. It felt a little false, a little desperate. He wanted so badly for Eren to see him—to really see him, to think of something other than the blank, bleak future he glimpsed ahead. “I wouldn’t mind an extra foot or so, you know? You and Jean got all the luck.”
He gestured in the space above his head for good measure. It wasn’t a joke, not really, but it was something other than this eerie coded language they seemed to speak in now. Please, Armin thought, the smile he wore increasingly rictus-like. Please, Eren. Give me something.
Eren’s face was flat, blank. He didn’t laugh. Again, his attention returned to his gear. Again, Armin’s stomach dropped through the floor. There was a brief pause—it couldn’t have been more than several seconds, but to Armin’s agonised mind it felt like a long five minutes—until Eren’s voice broke the silence.
“What for?” Eren said. He spoke distractedly, holding a wingnut up to the light as he screwed it into place. “You’re perfect as you are.”
The statement was offered so casually, though it might as well have been a grenade thrown at the table. And still Eren sat there, twisting the fitting between his fingers while Armin’s face burned like a stove, while his stomach rose from his feet and flipped over instead. It was not that the reassurance was unexpected. Eren and Mikasa both had always been quick to comfort Armin, even when he turned his frustration inward. It wasn’t even the word itself—perfect was a meaningless word, a hollow concept—but rather the way Eren had said it. Naturally, instantly, as though it had required no thought at all. Eren’s typical blunt and unconscious honesty.
There was a minute clink as Eren set down one component and moved to the next. With practiced ease he folded the cloth into a neat triangle and pressed the bottle’s open neck against it. His hands were larger, but this delicate work was still within his means. As he worked the oiled cloth into the cogs of the gear’s mechanism, Armin could see the muscles in the crook of his forearm flicker.
There were no words in his mind. He stood there in the grip of some strange paralysis, the sweater dangling from his right hand; he was absently aware of its sleeves brushing the dirty floor. Armin was almost scared to move in case Eren—otherwise so absorbed in his work but somehow, some way—would sense his intent and leave. A rejection softened by plausible deniability, if he were to get up before Armin reached him, but rejection nonetheless. Which would be worse: that, or for Eren to stiffen at Armin’s touch?
Even as he thought it, the question seemed absurd. Armin should have dismissed it out of hand. But it was impossible to shake this new unease, even when he had been given reason to hope. Perhaps it would be better not to chance it at all, safer still to keep his hands to himself than to risk them being knocked aside.
Armin had never been good at running away, though. Not even when the odds were against him. As the fear scattered his thoughts, Armin dropped the sweater on the bench and rounded the table, near enough now to catch Eren’s attention—near enough to yank him up from his seat, from his gear, and then to pull him into a hug. It was a fierce and frightened hug, and as Armin gave it he could not help but recall that moment on the top of Shiganshina’s wall. So long ago now, but as fresh in his memory as if it were yesterday. The wind cut through you differently there without further walls to act as a buffer, its full force rolling in from that wide and empty landscape. Armin had been cold, and confused, and Eren’s hug had been so desperate that it had knocked the air from his lungs. And it had been so familiar that returning it had required no thought at all.
It had been—it was, always—so natural, natural as breathing, to fit himself in against Eren.
Like this, the height difference was more obvious. Armin had almost forgotten it while he’d been standing and Eren, sitting. If he’d wanted to, Eren could have rested his chin on the top of Armin’s head. He did not, but as Armin’s nose pressed against his collar, as he clung to Eren like a lost child, there was no hesitation: Eren embraced him. Slowly, gently. One hand cupped the back of his neck, and as Armin felt the weight of his palm settling there—changed by time but the same, even now—he could have wept. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Happy birthday, Armin,” Eren said.
He said it so quietly that Armin would not have heard him but for how close they were. Close enough that Armin could sense his ready warmth, the way Eren’s breathing lifted his hair; close enough that Armin could hardly believe that this had felt impossible mere moments ago. They would have to let go eventually. The world would settle back into place, not cruel or uncaring so much as it was simply real—and with it, Armin knew they would return either side of the strange chasm that cleaved the earth between them. He was too much of a coward to bridge it, and too much of a coward to flee.
There was courage enough in his heart for this, though. Warmth was rising in his blood, real warmth, not that from the fire, or from a mug of coffee, or from the thick weave of his sweater. Rain lashed the windows. He could smell it in Eren’s clothes, even though they were dry. If he were to pull away now, he was certain that Eren would read every story in his face, each sad stirring of grief and hope and need, and something else so raw that Armin dare not put a name to it.
And so, to hide his face—to make this fragile moment last, those extra inches he wanted so badly better traded for minutes—Armin held Eren as tightly as he could, for as long as the evening would allow.