Chapter Text
Over the past weeks, Eren had watched Armin’s nerves rise and rise until they reached fever pitch. It gave him a flighty manner that was almost contagious; Connie and Sasha reacted like startled livestock, avoiding Armin at his worst and eyeing him warily otherwise. Not that Armin seemed to notice. He was too wrapped up in his personal circle of hell to notice much of anything that went on outside of it.
Assignments got completed, at least. Eren saw reports appear on Armin’s desk and get returned in plenty of time. He might have been distracted during drills, though never to the point of accident—Armin was so careful to avoid a blood injury that it bordered on phobic. It was only in moments of downtime that he let show the real frantic wreck of himself. Never mind reading or playing chess or swapping jokes, the simple act of sitting at rest had become impossible. Armin’s hands would be in almost constant motion, whether twisting in his lap, fixing his uniform, or—and this was the most disturbing, the most difficult to watch—writing out reams of notes that would inevitably be fed into the fire by the evening’s end. It was like watching a man near his last days. A rat lapping the trap only so it wouldn’t chew off its own tail.
Eren recognised the fear he was gripped by. Not so primitive as that which came when facing down a titan or a rifle, but a terrible one nonetheless. Armin never spoke out loud what it was that so upset him, and Eren could not bring himself to ask, but there was no need to. Once the news broke, it hung over the rest of the Corps like a thunderhead.
Spring was nearly upon them. Hanji’s titan guillotines had seen less and less victims until—gradually, unbelievably—the Garrison reported that they saw none at all. What started off as a tentative whisper gained steady momentum, until even before an official announcement was made it was in the citizens’ mouths: the titans in Wall Maria were gone, or near enough. Any remaining would likely be so idle that even a rookie scout could finish them off. Operations to re-establish a functioning road system were already underway, and making rapid progress. It was exciting. You could taste the change in the air, a kind of storm static; districts were livelier, people happier. Eren was amazed that even the tenuous promise of a better life could be so transformative.
But such news brought other changes, too, within the Corps. Obligations that had been put on the back burner were suddenly thrust to the front, and the most pressing (it was practically setting Hanji on fire) was the experimentation with Armin’s Colossus. It wasn’t that it had been impossible before, but Eren could remember the council meetings well enough—in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Shiganshina, their priorities had been more political. Zackley and his men had been keen to avoid any unnecessary panic, anyway, should Armin have lost control too close to civilisation. The goodwill they had gone through such pains to achieve would have vanished in an instant had anything gone wrong near Rose territory.
The problem was that it had been so long in coming. Eren had hardly had the chance to breathe between the revelation of his shifting and Hanji’s excited attention, but that had had its own benefits. Less time to think, and with how eager Eren had been to show his value, that had suited him plenty. But the months since inheriting this power had done little to acclimatise Armin—to acclimatise anyone—to the fact of it. Even now, just considering those things together (Armin; the Colossus; Armin shifting into the Colossus) was enough to make Eren’s own thoughts falter, two concepts so opposed in his mind that to relate them felt absurd. As often as it had come up in briefings, it had always been discussed in such abstract terms. Yes, the Corps were able to attain another power of the titans, a great boon to Paradis’ arsenal. It was hard to believe that it was Armin who had that power, that weapon, sleeping beneath his skin.
Eren had not been there when Hanji had first raised the imminent prospect of the experiment. Maybe they had done so privately on purpose, as a kindness, to give Armin the freedom to react without an audience. But he had never been the most subtle, and while Eren hadn’t known at the time the cause of his anxiety, it had been immediately apparent: Armin had entered the mess hall one morning the same greyish colour of the winter sky, and he had barely picked at his food.
It was one of his most obvious tells. Handing off his breakfast to Sasha at her inevitable request had threatened to become a habit, until Mikasa stationed herself as some kind of dietary guardian. She would never remark on Armin’s appetite, but her presence had worked as pressure enough—against Sasha and for Armin—and Eren had been secretly, desperately grateful. She was far and away more tactful than Eren himself was. Hell, it had taken all the willpower he’d had (not much, but enough) to not grab Armin by the shoulders and beg him to eat, or to plead with the captain for meat rations. Either option would have been a terrible idea. Similar intervention had never failed to make Armin livid in the past. Quietly, internally, more at himself than anyone else—but livid nonetheless, his anger burning like a coal seam beneath the still surface of the earth. Knowing that hadn’t stopped Eren from wanting to do it anyway, though. Sitting opposite Armin at the table, he would repress the urge so hard that his jaw would ache from the forceful way he champed his own breakfast.
To Armin’s credit, he was doing a decent job concealing his unease from their superiors. His calm front might have stood on shaky ground, but he managed to maintain it through the operational briefing with the military commanders. It was only when news of the experiment was leaked to the papers that he turned into this brittle, bristling shadow.
(Jean had even accosted Eren in private to ask about it, and what an agony that had been. Guiltily, awkwardly, Eren had downplayed Armin’s behaviour, his gaze drifting from Jean’s earnest own. You know… just nervous. Who wouldn’t be? And Jean had nodded, understanding. Kinder than Eren had expected, honestly. It had felt like a betrayal to suggest that Armin might very well be shit-scared. At least Mikasa had agreed with Eren there: if he did want to admit it, then Armin would do so himself. Though the idea of Armin confessing his worries to Jean rather than to him and Mikasa had been surprisingly upsetting, even in the hypothetical.)
They saw less of Armin the closer the mission came, necessarily; most of his time was taken up running through the finer details with the commander. But it made Eren more anxious still, and even Mikasa—who had kept up her cool facade in Armin’s presence—threw herself into training with the nervous intensity of someone who needed the distraction.
Had the matter been anything other than what it was, the confrontation would have been simple. Still painful, yes, but easier. It wouldn’t have been necessary to call it a confrontation at all. Eren and Mikasa would have spoken to Armin honestly, as they had always done, and that had always worked, because that which was comforting did not have to be coddling. When Armin was at his most even-keeled, he understood that too. But what they were dealing with this time was such a twisted mess, one that soured Eren’s stomach even though he was sure—as sure as he had ever been, about anything—that they had made the right choice. All else that came with it was irrelevant. The enormity of the Colossus in size and in significance, and the crushing weight of the fight, and the guilt, and the ghost of Erwin Smith, whose presence they felt so strongly that he was hardly a ghost at all, whose voice and eyes and manner must have sewn themselves into Armin’s skin and branded his bones—to Eren, it was chaff. Right or wrong though that thought might have been. Armin was alive; in what world could that have been the wrong choice?
Maybe, though, there lay the core of the issue. For Armin would never be dissuaded from the belief that they had chosen wrong. He had reached his own conclusion, and as rare as it was for Armin to cede a point, it was rarer still that he was mistaken. Trying to change his mind was like trying to reverse the current of a river with your hands while you stood in it. The water would simply course past as though you were hardly there at all.
There were only some days left before the mission when Eren broached the topic with Mikasa. Up to then, they had operated on some wordless understanding: best to let Armin work through his demons without interference. It was their default approach, and often a safe bet—ever since they were nine years old and Armin could not bear to look at their raw knuckles and split lips from fighting where he would not. It had become increasingly obvious that it was not working now, though.
Eren was lucky to catch her. With preparations well underway and Mikasa’s own exhaustive training regimen, there were few chances to make conversation alone. It was just before lights-out that he saw her coming in from a shower. Her wet hair was snatched into a bun, up and away from her neck; it made her look especially vulnerable.
If Eren’s question came as a surprise, it did not show on her face.
“Do you think we should talk to him?”
Mikasa touched her scarf, an unconscious habit that never failed to give her away. It was unusual to see such naked uncertainty from her, and the sight of it made Eren even edgier.
“He tends to get more upset if we make a point of asking,” she said quietly.
Eren had only just sat down, but he shoved himself up from his chair with such force that it screeched against the floor. Frustration prickled beneath his skin, frothing his blood. “Have you said anything already?”
Mikasa let out a sigh. She leaned forward on to her folded arms.
“I asked if he was okay.”
“Oh. And?”
Another sigh. “He said he was fine. He asked me to please not worry about him.”
Eren felt the abortive urge to kick something. It wasn’t anger directed at anyone—not at Armin or Mikasa, at least—but it felt like if he did nothing, he might explode. Instead, Eren took a deep breath, counted, and released it through his nose. “Well, that’s nothing new.”
Mikasa lowered her head into the cradle of her arms, hiding her face completely. Her voice, muffled though it was, sounded forlorn. “He’d hate it if he knew we were talking about him like this.”
And how true that was. Eren felt all the violent energy drain from him, and in its place there was left only empty exhaustion. He collapsed back into his seat.
“I know,” he said at last. It was a pointless comment, but then this was a pointless discussion. On the unlikely chance that they were able to get Armin alone over the coming days, that he’d be willing to tolerate the combined front of their concern was even less likely. “I thought he was… I thought we were past this.”
There was an acknowledging noise from across the table. Mikasa did not lift her face from her folded arms. Eren wanted to comfort her, to rest his hand on her wrist or the damp crown of her head, and he wanted comforting. He would have accepted the words from anyone—everything will work out—but there was no one there to speak them, and Eren could taste the bitterness of the lie even as the words formed only in his mind.
Shiganshina’s restoration was a few months down the pipeline yet. There were districts within Wall Maria that were not flattened wrecks that could and would be repopulated first. It made sense, then, for Armin’s first transformation to take place there. Any collateral damage would be contained to an empty town that had already been razed twice; Armin could hardly make it worse. He was to shift within the district itself, by the internal wall that separated Shiganshina from Maria territory proper. The Colossus was enormous, but it was slow; and the wall was, of course, the perfect height to reach its nape in an instant.
A temporary outpost had been established by a recon team some days before and supplied appropriately. The project was to last a week, and so they would be staying in a clutch of shabby huts in a former farming village without a name, a half-hour ride from Shiganshina through a forested plain. It gave them more than enough distance and cover from any potential fallout, while staying within easy reach of the district’s wall.
“We’re going to work quickly for this first time,” Hanji said on the journey. “Armin shifts, we cut him out. If it’s anything like it was for you, Eren, then I’m not expecting him to have full—or any—control.”
Armin barely reacted to this surreal discussion. He stayed pale and silent throughout, raising his head only when called on to speak. Eren fought the urge to watch him too closely, but it was impossible; his gaze moved back to him again and again. When Hanji began to run through the precautionary measures—of which there were many—they did so at such manic speed that, with Eren’s distracted attention, he caught hardly any of them.
The sun was setting as they started out for Shiganshina, only some hours since their arrival at basecamp. By the time they reached the internal wall, it was dark. A night operation. When Connie had asked why, Armin had shrugged, looking out ahead rather than at any one of them: “On the off chance that I damage the wall and expose any of the colossal titans inside it.”
The air had gone very still after that.
Lifts had been installed for the express purpose of the experiment, and so horses, soldiers, and supplies could be transported easily to the top of the wall, out of harm’s way. It took multiple trips to get everything in place. As Eren watched the mass movement, it dawned on him the enormity of the operation, and how long it must have taken to prepare. No wonder Armin had been whisked away so frequently. And no wonder his nerves were so frayed.
Armin had been inscrutable all day, and even now his expression gave little away. But as the moment of truth approached, Eren could not help but notice the tremor that shook his hands as he held them together in his lap. There was one final load to be raised—barrels full of water and med supplies—and then Armin would be left there on the ground, alone, with nothing but a flare gun and a hunting knife.
He kept turning it in his palm, the knife. Over and over, the flat of the blade flashing back the light of the moon, the lantern, his own sallow face. Eren felt a comment tickle his throat every time Armin did so. Oh—be careful. Nothing but a remark he would always make when he’d see Armin get distracted, telling Connie some answering fact or old story as they chopped vegetables together on KP duty. Knee-jerk, pure reflex, his mother’s habit passed into him now like some stone tablet he could not help but read from. He often had to swallow such comments around Armin. Watch your fingers. You should eat more. I can reach that for you, let me…
It was not that he thought Armin at all incapable; that had never entered his mind. But these things formed in Eren’s mouth with such readiness that he could barely catch them with his teeth before speaking them out loud.
On top of the wall, it was dead silent but for the grinding squeal of the lift’s winch. Armin paced back and forth, pausing only to crane over the edge and watch the platform rise ever upwards. He must have felt the weight of Eren’s gaze, for he turned suddenly to face him. It was the first time Armin had addressed him so directly since that morning—a clinical question of how long it took to heal a knife wound—and though Eren was glad to hear his voice, it brought little relief.
“Are you worried?” Armin asked. He looked very small, hunched up in his cloak as if he could disappear beneath it.
Eren’s throat worked. He wanted to say otherwise with the kind of immediate confidence that would ease Armin’s nerves, but the words wouldn’t come.
“Worried?” he echoed. He was acutely aware of his own dry mouth. “I… worried isn’t the right word, I guess.”
It was a useless non-answer, but that didn’t seem to matter; Eren’s words prompted no reaction. Armin was looking out over the landscape again, its blank darkness yawning ahead. The light of the shining stones was eerie, bluish. It made Armin’s already pale face paler still, his skin stark as bone.
“I’m not worried about the transformation, you know,” he went on, as if he hadn’t asked Eren the question at all. “I don’t really care about what happens after. I mean, Hanji said there’s a risk of amputation, and that’s…” He paused, a queasy look coming over him though only briefly. “I can handle that. I mean, I have to. But I’m worried that I won’t be—”
“Armin! We’re all set.”
Eren froze. He had been so absorbed in Armin’s haunted expression, his musing—spoken so quietly, a mantra more to himself—that he hadn’t noticed the lift had finished its ascent. Behind Hanji’s approaching silhouette, barrels were being rolled and set in rows. A column of stacked buckets stood nearby. Another safety precaution: water could be bailed out as needed. All of a sudden, everything felt very real.
Armin shot upright. “Of course. I’m coming.”
His hand went to his waist as he walked past. He wore no gear, no blades, only the harness. There was the slithery noise of metal against leather as he tucked the knife into the sheath attached to his belt. It should not have caught his attention, but Eren watched too closely not to notice: that, while Armin’s hands were steady now, his nails were bitten to the quick.
The red light of the signal flare tore through the empty dark. The flash made the entire unit cringe, the only forewarning a pop a scant second before, no louder than a cork released from a bottle. After Armin’s descent, they had moved farther along the external arc of Shiganshina’s wall, but it was bright enough to cast them all in its odd acid light despite the distance.
They had been standing there for thirty agonised, agonising minutes. At first, the dread anticipation had been so great that no one had dared speak, but gradually the fear had waned. The mood on top of the wall had turned edgy, and then impatient. Eren had felt only miserable panic, his mind running through its imagined scenes with such vivid clarity that they might as well have been real. Armin, slicing strips off his palms. Armin, cursing under his breath. Crouching, and standing, and stalking back and forth as if he could chase the transformation out of himself.
For Eren, the sight of the flare filled him with as much relief as it did unease. A feeling shared by most of the squad, it seemed, by the flagging expressions they wore. The only exceptions were the commander and the captain. Hanji looked at their wit’s end. At the signal’s searing flash, they had thrown their hands up in the air and turned away from it. Levi, meanwhile, looked the same as he always did. Unsurprised, unaffected, his grey eyes somehow tired and alert at once.
“Well?” His voice cut through the awkward silence. Everyone turned to face him but Hanji, who stared resolutely out at the world beyond. “What now, Commander? Back on the lift?”
Hanji paused. And then, sucking air through their teeth in an audible hiss, they said, “You go down there and check first. I want to be sure before we make a mass exodus.”
“I’ll go,” Mikasa offered. Her hands were already closing around the grips of her manoeuvre gear, but the look Hanji shot her made Eren blanch, and he wasn’t even its intended target.
“No, you won’t,” they said, not cold so much as weary. “That’s an order, Levi.”
There was no argument—there was no room for it. Mikasa lowered her gaze and her hands, obedient, as Levi pitched over the wall. He moved so quickly and so quietly that he could have been somebody’s cloak snatched in a tailwind, vanishing into the dark. The only anchoring point below was the white glow from Armin’s lantern. You wouldn’t know Armin was actually down there. The night, and the dense shadow of the wall, swallowed everything that lay beneath it.
Manoeuvring was faster than taking the lift, and Levi was freakishly fast anyway; it felt like he’d hardly left before he was back again, boots creaking as he heaved himself upright from the edge. His expression was no different, and despite the long months spent working together, Eren struggled to glean anything from it. If Levi had looked disappointed, then that would have given him something—something to be angry at, maybe—but instead he was cool and blank.
“It’s not happening,” he said, directing his attention towards Hanji, “he’s cut himself a few times and he’s steaming away down there, all right. But Armin says he can’t seem to do it.”
The only sign that Hanji had heard him was the barest twitch of the left side of their mouth. Eventually, they said, “Right. Okay. Well… it was a likely possibility.” They turned to face the squad. “We’ll make our way down. No point wasting the rest of the evening just to be tired tomorrow.”
The startled pause after they spoke could not have lasted more than five seconds, but it was long enough that Hanji swatted the air. “Go on!”
There was an answering flurry of movement. Horses were led to the platform, the cart driven into place. At least most of the supplies could stay where they had been unloaded; they would only be back here again the next night, after all, and the next, and the next after that. Eren felt the terrible seizing hope that Armin would be okay—tonight and for the nights to come—whether he managed to shift or not. He knew the corrosive nature of this pressure. An expectation made heavier still by the weight of the lives that had been lost and those that could be saved.
It was a long way down. Eren hauled himself into the corner of the cart next to Mikasa, and he tried to let her solid presence steady his skipping pulse.
On meeting Armin at the base of the wall, he avoided everyone’s eye but Hanji’s, and even then his gaze would slide away as if repelled by some irresistible force. The descent had taken long enough that his injuries had healed completely. Not even steam rose from them now, though blood smeared his wrists and hands in blackish streaks. The handle of the knife, tucked back into its sheath, was sticky-shiny with it. Mikasa lifted her cloak from her shoulders and tried to pass it to him.
“Use this,” she said.
Armin did not even look at her. He shook his head. “It’s fine. I’ll use mine.”
“You’ll be cold,” she said, almost below earshot.
“I’m not cold. There’s spares back at basecamp, anyway.”
And with that, he tore off his own cloak and swiped at his arms with such viciousness that Eren saw Mikasa wince.
Armin’s insecurities had become a latent thing over the past year, and for good reason: he had shown his worth again and again, in battle and outside of it. But with the increasing pressure they had risen back to the surface with a vengeance. Any kindness, from anyone, was met with flat—albeit polite—rejection. The politeness was the problem. It made it impossible to call Armin out, at least not without seeming unreasonable.
With an unhappy shrug and a lingering look, Mikasa turned back towards them. Eren felt himself swallow. Witnessing Armin’s cold shoulder from afar was not much better than bearing the brunt of it, and the pall of tension was oppressive. Mikasa simply fixed her gaze on the horizon and said nothing, lifting her scarf over her chin. Armin followed shortly behind. He was caught by Hanji on his way, and though few words appeared to pass between them, they touched his arm. Gently, briefly, but still.
That assurance did little to lighten Armin’s mood, though at least he did not shrug it off. Jean was not so lucky. On reaching the cart, Armin ignored his outstretched hand and instead heaved himself over the side, settling into sullen silence. If the atmosphere had been bad before, it was unbearable now. No one was brave or oblivious enough to speak across it, and the comfort that Eren had meant to offer died in his mouth.
It had been like that for him, too, after all. Even now the memory of that desperation itched like a nettle sting. Not so fierce as it had been under the suffocating attention of Levi’s squad, but impossible to forget. The close dark of the well and how it had reeked of standing water long gone dry. The taste of his own blood in his mouth, and his hands throbbing in time with his heartbeat. The pain had been bad, but the shame—that had been worse.
The outpost was not far, though the airless silence made the half-hour ride feel much longer. Eren’s skin crawled with the urge to speak. Across from him, Sasha and Connie had found refuge in falling asleep almost on top of each other. The easy way they talked and joked and jostled elbows had been making him jealous of late, and now Eren felt that jealousy so keenly that his stomach hurt. All he ever seemed to do was look at Armin, these days. And sometimes even that felt like a transgression.
Eren risked a side-long glance. He could not see Armin’s face; it would have been difficult anyway, sat along the same side as they were, but with how Armin was bent forward it was impossible. His elbows were on his knees, his hands hovering in the air between them. The curtain of his hair hid his profile from view. Now that he had rolled his sleeves back down to his wrists, Eren could see the blood that blotted the cuffs. Every so often, when the cart jerked over some rough terrain or the horses balked, Armin’s hands would tighten as if he were holding the reins.
That, if nothing else, lifted some of the weight from Eren’s chest. Armin had often been assigned to drive the cart when it had been necessary. The mechanics of it were worn into his muscle memory.
You’re still you, Eren thought, so fervently that he hoped Armin would somehow grasp what he would not say. The things that make you haven’t gone anywhere. It’s easy to forget that, sometimes.
Monsters though they might have been, nothing could take that away. Even in Trost—mere moments after Eren had been dragged from the carcass of his titan only to face down a firing squad in that seething, silent square—Armin and Mikasa had not doubted him, not even for a second. In how they had looked at him, and held him, and with their shameless unfailing faith, they had shown Eren just how human he was within that mass of scalding flesh.
The night grew denser as they passed through the woods. The watery shafts of moonlight that made it through the canopy did little to help visibility, though the shining stones worked to illuminate the ground ahead. The huts serving as basecamp appeared only as they were upon them, squat and sad-looking—but clean, as Levi’s presence had guaranteed—and there was a rapid jockeying to get the horses settled and their meagre kit unpacked. The experiment might have been cut short, but exhaustion rolled over everyone like a fog. It was always that way the first night of a nocturnal operation. They would only get used to these hours by the end of the week, Eren knew, after which they would have to adapt yet again to the routine early rises of HQ.
Eren was not tired at all. Any weariness had been chased away by the queasy mix of guilt and concern that turned his stomach. There was only one way to be rid of it. As much as Armin might try to excuse himself, Eren had mustered up enough courage during the journey that he was certain he could convince him otherwise. Just a talk. Armin couldn’t, wouldn’t refuse him that.
Though as he went to call Armin’s name, he was off like a shot. His cloak sat in a heap on the bench, abandoned; Armin practically threw himself out of the cart. Eren’s panicky wait! was cut clean away as he realised that Armin was going in the wrong direction. He was not heading for the huts. Rather, he was walking straight back into the woods they had just emerged from.
Eren stared, stunned into silence. It took Connie’s startled yelp to steal his attention: Hanji must have dismounted—they had ridden ahead on horseback—but on noticing Armin’s retreat, they thrust the reins into Connie’s face.
Hanji took a few halting steps.
“Armin! Where are you going, exactly?” It was said with forced lightness. Hanji wore a tight grin, one hand at the edge of their goggles as if they could adjust what they were seeing.
Armin froze. He kept his back to them. It would not be obvious to everyone else, and certainly not from such a distance, but Eren could see the high tension in his shoulders. They were hunched nearly to his ears.
He turned his head, just a little. The liquid edge of his eye flashed. “I’m just going for a walk.”
Hanji jogged closer, only some feet from Eren standing at the cart. There was a breathless moment, in which Eren felt the attention of everyone in the clearing fix on this strange scene. Armin was perfectly still, his upright shape picked out against the dark canvas of the trees. More like a pillar of stone than a person.
“A walk?” Hanji sounded incredulous, the pretence of humour vanishing from their voice. “Now? In the woods, in the middle of the night?”
Silence. Eren had spent the past month being unnerved by Armin’s behaviour, but this insubordination, benign as it was, inspired active dread. At least Hanji had seen much worse, and from their very squad. The memory made Eren’s chest tighten. His heart felt like an angry bird, thumping against the cage of his ribs.
Levi spoke before Armin could come up with an answer. “Hanji. Leave it.”
Shock broke open the tense grimace on Hanji’s face, but they schooled it back to neutrality once again. “Really, Levi?” They let out a short laugh, and their eyes shifted to Eren. “Looks like your troublesome teenage phase is spreading, huh, Eren?”
They offered him another humourless grin. Eren said nothing. He felt the heat of Levi’s gaze as it passed between them.
“It’s been a long day,” Levi said, “and you’ve got the rest of the week left to play with. The walls aren’t going anywhere.” He dropped his voice low, just beneath Eren’s hearing. Whatever he said this time seemed to work: Hanji released a long, unbroken sigh, and for the first time Eren saw weary misery slip through the mask.
With a final shake of the head, Hanji pivoted on their heels and marched off. “Fine. Fine! I guess I am getting too old to understand.”
Levi did not follow. The sear of his hawkish gaze made every member of their incidental audience scuttle off, heads and eyes low. Only Eren and Mikasa—she had been by the nearest hut, watering the horses—remained where they were, caught between the implicit command and their concern for Armin. When Eren took the chance to look, he saw that Armin had already started off again.
“One of you go after him,” said Levi. “Idiot’s not even geared up. I don’t want him running off or running into a titan’s mouth, if he should be so lucky as to find one.”
Despite the words, there was no real venom in them. As always, Levi gave nothing away. Not in his voice, in his face, nor how he stood there watching them. Eren could sense his own stare in tandem with Mikasa’s. The oddness of the stand-off—not confrontational but unsettling still—made gooseflesh rise on his arms. It felt like a challenge, though Eren did not know why he was looking for one.
It would have been easier if Levi were angry. Frustrated. This was his burden as much as it was Armin’s, Eren thought, and there rose the selfish question: why should Levi seem so stable when Armin was so fractured?
It felt unfair. Even as Eren knew that he should have been grateful for the captain’s cold kindness, because that’s what this was. Most superior officers would have dragged Armin back to camp themselves, and with the promise of discipline on their return. Maybe Armin would have been cuffed to his bed, as Eren had been so long ago. The idea chilled his blood.
Something in Levi’s face softened, just barely, and with it the strained atmosphere dissolved. He turned back towards the huts. “What a shitty situation,” he muttered.
And they were left mostly alone.
Mikasa spoke first. Eren was still catching his breath; with the release of tension, it felt like someone had been holding his lungs in a vice grip.
“Are you going to go after him?” she asked.
The woods were dark and still. It had not taken long for Armin to vanish between the crowding trees; though their branches were winter-bare, they stood close enough that in the night they looked like a solid wall. The light of Armin’s lantern was visible still. Faint but not fading, not yet.
“I’ll go if you don’t.”
Eren turned to face her. Fear was thick in his throat, and it took him a moment to get it to work. “You don’t think we should leave him alone?”
Mikasa watched him with an unreadable expression, but Eren knew her well enough that she was rarely beyond his understanding. And since their imprisonment, a little more feeling had begun to show through her flat affect. Mostly, Eren saw sadness there. She looked sad, now, too.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But he’s been avoiding us for weeks now and nothing has changed. You know what Armin can be like.”
The comment could have made Eren laugh. It should have. But the urge slid over him like a cloud’s shadow: it had no real power.
“You’re not going to start shouting, are you?”
Armin leapt a good foot into the air. The lantern leapt too, flying from Armin’s grip and clattering noisily to the ground, its light cast upwards like a beacon. It cut strange shadows into the woodland around them.
“Eren? … God, you scared me,” Armin said. He had his hand pressed up against his chest, as if he could dampen the pounding of his heart.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you,” Eren said. Quieter, this time.
In truth, Eren had been deliberately graceless to avoid such a fright—kicking at leaflitter and tramping through the undergrowth with such abandon that Eren himself had cringed at the noise. Armin must have been very deep in thought if he had not noticed his approach. Unbidden, the captain’s words surfaced in Eren’s mind. The fear came not from the mere possibility of a titan nearby, or even that Armin would not hear one, but that he might not run from it in the first place.
Armin only shrugged. He bent for the lantern, though he did not lift it. He simply set it upright in the grass.
“Right. Sorry,” he said, halting. “My mind was elsewhere.”
Eren watched him hover halfway out of his crouch, as if he had not even the energy to stand. The impulse to offer a hand took some serious effort to push down. At last, Armin straightened up on his own. He turned out towards the woods, the light shifting from his face as he did so.
The silence that hung over them was unsettling. There was no breeze, and they were far enough from camp that no noise reached the clearing; this could have been another world, a space carved out for them. He only knew Armin was breathing by the vapour it made in the frigid air.
This should not have been difficult. Wasn’t this the chance that Eren had wanted so badly? With each passing silent second, he could feel the line trailing out of his grasp, and when he’d only just found it again. For all his fretting, Eren had not thought about what he should actually say once he’d got Armin alone. It should have come naturally. He had expected it to. Everything had always been natural with Armin.
So—of course—Eren spoke the first thing that came to mind. “There could be a titan lying dormant around here, you know? It’s dangerous.”
There was a moment of quiet consideration. And then, Armin gave a high, dry little laugh. “I guess it would be some random Eldian’s lucky day.”
Though his face was turned away, there was no mistaking that bitterness. And as awful as it sounded, Eren felt a thrill of hope: this was a part of Armin he recognised, no matter how miserable. With how strange he had become—so hard to reach—any familiar sign filled Eren with relief.
“… You only make morbid jokes like that when you’re upset,” he said.
At first, Armin did not reply. He was thinking, and Eren could sense the impending comeback even from behind, in the rigid set of Armin’s spine, the tilt of his head. But then the tension broke, and his shoulders went slack.
“Yeah. I guess that’s true,” he said. His voice had that familiar hoarse edge of swallowed tears, but when he turned to face Eren there was no sign of them. His eyes looked dry and dull. “You know me too well.”
Of course I do, Eren thought. Better than I know anything. Than I think I know myself, half the time.
He shrugged instead. “You’re not too hard to read.” It was the wrong thing to say, by the sudden thinning of Armin’s mouth. Shit. Eren took a step towards him and stopped. “I only mean that, you know, running out into the woods? It’s not usually part of your evening routine.”
That, at least, earned him a wan smile. “Well… not lately.”
Ah, there it was. Familiar ground, solid and warm as sunned earth itself. “And even then, you’d only sneak out after you were sure everyone was asleep.”
Some colour came into Armin’s cheeks. It suited him better than his previous pallor. He lowered his gaze as if shy, or maybe just with the effort of remembering. How long ago that felt now, impossibly so—another world, another lifetime.
Suddenly, Armin asked, “Why are you here, Eren?”
He sounded so tired. Eren could hear him breathing despite the distance, deeply, slowly. In and out, a forced rhythm. If Armin would just look at him again, Eren was sure it would be okay. Eren would comprehend the anguish that had him so gripped, and from there it would be simple, instinctive. But Armin’s gaze was fixed firmly on the ground.
The question gave him an in, though. One Armin offered unwittingly, maybe, but still—they were talking, and that had to be a step in the right direction.
“I was worried about you,” Eren said, quickly, before he could think better of it. “I—”
“Don’t be.”
Eren’s mouth snapped shut. The tone of Armin’s voice suggested he wasn’t interested in an argument. But that tiny kernel of frustration could be turned to use, as long as Eren handled it with care.
“You’re angry,” he said. Pause, breathe. Armin’s eyes, a deep and misted blue, lifted to meet his.
“I’m not angry.”
“You’re allowed to be.” The words he had been wanting to say for so long were rising from the depths of his guts where he’d buried them, over and over, every single time they surfaced. Be angry. Get angry at me. Go on, I can take it. “Anyone would be.”
Another sigh, this one irritated. “Who am I meant to be angry at, Captain Levi? The commander? Or you, or Mikasa?” Armin asked. He closed his eyes and kept them closed. “If anything, you should be frustrated with me.”
“What?” Eren frowned. “Because you can’t transform? I couldn’t do it the first time, either. I told you, didn’t I? The spoon—”
Armin cut him off. “I remember,” he said. There was a long, uneasy pause, and then Armin pressed the heels of his hands into his face. “Sorry, Eren. I mean… you went through the exact same thing. I should be grateful that I’m not being treated like a criminal as well as a test subject.”
Finally Eren found the courage to cross the distance between them. It was easier now that he couldn’t see Armin’s face. Eren lifted his hands but he did nothing with them; touching Armin still felt off limits. “Don’t say stuff like that,” he said. “This isn’t some kind of... competition as to who's had it worse.”
He’d thought that his voice—louder now with the proximity—would prompt Armin to raise his head, but he did not. He simply stood there, silent, breathing like every breath took a concentrated effort.
Very quietly, so quietly it was almost inaudible, Armin said, “I don’t know if I can do this, Eren. I’m… I’m not as brave as you.”
Eren wondered what expression he was making. What emotion Armin considered so unacceptable that Eren could not be allowed to see it, when Eren had seen so much of him already, and Armin so much of him.
The statement was absurd enough, anyway, that it hardly warranted a response.
“You still don’t remember, then,” said Eren. He did not elaborate; he didn't have to, and this at least made Armin look at him.
“I’ve heard the reports enough times. I’ve made copies of it myself.” Armin’s mouth twisted unhappily. “Does it matter if I don’t remember?”
Of course it mattered. Once, Armin had admitted that hearing the account second-hand so many times made it seem yet more unreal. As if such an act was beyond him, his fear too great an obstacle. But Eren knew. He could recall the moment so clearly that Armin’s shaking voice still rang in his ears, sometimes. That Eren dreamt about the look on his face, sure and solemn, and the horrible light of hope that would not be dimmed, not even as Armin had thrown himself into that wall of scorching heat.
Maybe if he did remember, Armin would finally realise just how brave he had been. That he was. But most likely, he would never remember. There might be flashes, moments of pain and noise and pressure, that would find clarity only in that liminal space between sleeping and waking. Some nights Eren heard Armin jerk awake as he often had himself. And every time, Eren would want to go to him, the impulse so strong that it kept him from sleep. Though not in a bad way. More like the light of the morning sun on your face as you rose from a dream. Familiar, warm, inescapable. This longing, after all, was a well-worn thing by now.
Eren could not find the right words with which to argue the point. A part of him was afraid to try, because he felt Armin might see through them to the naked truth that Eren struggled daily to keep locked away. It wouldn’t be fair to admit these feelings. Not with what Eren knew now, and not with the burden Armin had been forced to carry.
Eren’s gaze dropped from Armin’s face to his hands. Clean, uninjured. His writer’s callus, which used to be so prominent that it resembled another knuckle, was gone. More than that—it would never exist again.
Armin flexed his fingers as though he had sensed Eren’s attention. Watching intently as he did so.
“It still hurts a little,” he said.
Eren clenched his own fists. His nails bit sharp points of pain into the meat of his palms.
“Yeah. It’s weird. It’s like your mind expects it to hurt even though it’s healed.”
“Phantom pain,” Armin murmured.
The knife was still at his waist. As Eren lifted his head, he was drawn to the black handle. How benign it seemed now that it was sheathed. The shape of it was evident even so, the curve of its blade echoed in clumsy brown leather.
Armin looked up in surprise as Eren pressed closer—his face opening up as if expectant—and Eren took advantage of the drop in his guard. With his right hand, he unsheathed the knife; with the other, he grabbed Armin’s wrist. He held his palm up between them, thumb pressed beneath Armin’s lax fingers to keep him from forming a fist.
“Eren?”
“It’s okay,” Eren said. He caught Armin’s stare and held it. “You trust me, don’t you?”
Armin did not look away. The frown had been swept from his face. “Of course I do,” he said, softly.
He must have understood Eren’s intent. Even someone like Connie would have been able to put these simple pieces together: Armin’s knife, Armin’s hand. Quickly, smoothly, Eren slid the blade across Armin’s open palm. There was a shallow gasp, involuntary. Blood welled beneath the knife’s press. The cut was deep and clean. Eren could see the startling edge of parted flesh either side of the wound, translucent, even with the free flow of blood.
There was a long and loaded pause. Armin was holding his breath. Blood ran down the channels of his palm lines, pooling around Eren’s thumb. And then—slowly, slow enough that it could have been a trick of the light—steam began to rise from it. The bleeding eased. The flesh started to seam together. Eren could feel some strange staticky pressure in the air, though he had no idea whether it rose from Armin’s power or purely from the atmosphere between them. But he was not afraid, and Armin did not shift.
After several protracted minutes, the cut on his palm had healed completely.
Armin’s voice punctured the curious peace. “That was a stupid thing to do.”
“Maybe,” said Eren, “but you let me do it.”
Armin ignored the comment. His brow was furrowed again, but the worst of that cold and empty despair had left him now; there was new warmth in his eyes.
“What if I’d shifted?” he said.
Eren had an answer prepared, inane as it was. “I would have shifted, too. I could have bitten you out.”
“That’s—ridiculous. You would have been blown to pieces by the transformation in the first place. Even you couldn’t heal from that.”
There was no denying that. Eren might have managed to shift in time, but he was still too close—he would have been crushed by the Colossus’ size or torn apart by the impact. But Eren had known with crystalline conviction that Armin was not going to shift.
He shrugged easily. Eren quirked one corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile, but enough to show willing. “I dunno. I am pretty resilient.”
Armin stared at him with a turbulent expression. There was so much evident in his face, now, more emotion than Eren had seen from him in weeks. Fear and frustration, sure—but something brighter kept shining beneath that sullen veneer. Amusement, maybe. Affection, Eren dared to hope.
Finally, Armin’s face arranged itself into something like fond disdain. “You’d need to be more than resilient to survive that,” he said. His voice dropped low as he went on, “Seriously, Eren, that really was dangerous. If something had happened to you… I don’t even want to think about it. I could have destroyed the whole camp.”
Eren shook his head. “You’re talking like you have no control over it. But you do—you’ve just shown that. You need to trust yourself more, Armin. It’s not like what happened with me is a guaranteed outcome. You aren’t like me. I mean, even when I try not to, I let my emotions take over. But you… you think through everything. You’re so considered.” Eren heard the tremor in his voice, and he forced himself to take pause. When they were this close, it became increasingly difficult to swallow down the feelings that clawed at his throat. Some things were better left unspoken.
And still he held Armin’s hand in his own. A little too tightly, but Armin made no attempt to pull away.
“Maybe I make a lot of wrong choices because of that,” Eren went on. “But if that’s the case, then I’ll always make the wrong choice.”
Come on, Armin. Understand what I’m not brave enough to say. You’ve always seen right through everything, haven’t you? Right to the very guts of me.
Armin’s eyes went wide. So bright that they hurt to look at, even with the light of the lantern so low.
“Now that is a risky thing to say,” he said shakily. “If Hanji heard you talking like that…”
“They’d what? Give me a lecture? A disciplinary hearing?” Eren grinned. It was uneven, but it was sincere. “I don’t think it would hold up. And I’m pretty used to getting chewed out by now.”
And there—at last—a real smile dimpled Armin’s cheek. Eren could hear it light up his voice when he spoke, and the sight and sound of it lifted his heart right out of his chest.
“Your resilience in action, huh,” Armin said.
The room was clean, but still it smelled sour from the years left empty. That, along with the cold, kept Eren awake. He was sharing with Jean and a Garrison officer whose name he couldn’t recall; they had already been deeply asleep on his return. Armin had gone off to his own hut. He was not sharing with anyone—another safety measure though an arbitrary one, considering how close they were clustered together.
Eren lifted his hand into the air above his head. He’d rinsed it off earlier—Armin had not wanted to face an interrogation had the evidence of a recent injury been noticed—but some of Armin’s blood remained there, a dark crescent crusted beneath his thumbnail. Had it been a stupid thing to do? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely. Even now Eren could feel the cushion of Armin’s palm within his grip. The weight of expectation as his gaze fixed on Eren’s, intrigued. That vulnerability, offered so easily. No fear had darkened Armin’s face, not for a second; not even as the knife had sliced so cleanly through his flesh.
A titan’s body and blood would evaporate, eventually. Given up into the air it formed from. But a shifter, injured as a human, would bleed as normal until the wound closed itself. Eren had seen Armin bleed for many reasons. From being shoved against a wall, face-first. From the chafe of the harness straps (his heels used to blister horribly, every pair of socks stained as if by rust). From botching a landing during manoeuvre training. And once, the vegetable knife had taken the very tip off his index finger as he’d peeled potatoes. That had been rather dramatic, and Eren could not keep himself from smiling at the memory. There had been a solemn debate about whether they could serve bled-on potatoes—rinsed, of course—but Armin had won out. Even woozy and pale, his hand swaddled in a rapidly darkening washcloth. They had tossed them, in the end.
Armin had always healed from these things. That had not changed: still he would hurt and bleed and heal. When it had been his own beaten and broken body, Eren had not given the miracle of its recovery much thought at all. Now, it seemed like the most important thing in the world, purely because Armin would benefit from it.
Eren had tried to swallow that selfishness. He understood the enormity of the burden that Armin had to bear, and the consequences for humanity at large. But death came so easily. Without reason, without ceremony. His mother, Levi’s squad, Mr. Hannes. Life stole away with hardly any notice at all, as sudden and silent as a snuffed-out candle. Now, Armin’s would not be; now he could withstand that which would kill a mortal man, regardless of his size or strength or stamina.
The relief was a shameful one. One best kept close to the chest. But late at night, and early in the morning, Eren would come back to that certain truth like an animal crawling back into the dark it knew so well. Armin was alive. Armin would live. And sleep would come on the heels of that thought, pulling Eren down into some bleak and empty place that only that desperate comfort could bring light to.