Eren had to admit, the lord of this forbidden castle was a lot more gracious a host than the citizens of the surrounding villages played him up to be. Especially considering Eren had rode in on horseback and kicked down his door.
He thought he'd taken all the needed precautions. He'd rode in at the height of the sun in the sky, silver buttons and buckles and chain around his neck, packs filled with cruel wooden stakes, had stuffed himself with garlic stew the evening before until he was sick enough himself. But the moment he crept through the foreboding threshold, the door had slammed behind him, locks falling with a final sound, and he had found himself tripped and tumbling down a trap door, falling down into a high-walled steel cage. He'd raged, thrashed, tried to break the magical bindings on the bars for hours, to no avail. The sun sank in the sky, and Eren steeled himself to stare the devil himself in the face.
The devil himself, incidentally, seemed to be a positively cherubic blond, shuffling into the room clutching an oversized book, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Eren would have thought himself in the wrong place if not for the flash of fangs in the boy's yawn.
The boy blinked at him owlishly, tilted his head. "A Jaeger, I presume?"
Eren stiffened his jaw, tried to find some of the foolhardy courage that had burned in him before. He failed to do anything but stare at the fall of the boy's golden hair around his face as he approached the cage, cheeks soft and round, pale as snow, eyes like the evening sky.
Damn it all. He had to focus, he had to remember that he was here as a Jaeger indeed, as a representative of the kingdom's premier vampire-hunting family, he had a thousand-year reputation to keep up, he had his mother's murder to avenge, he had his pride—
And then the boy smiled, so sweet, so lonely, that Eren could almost ignore the distant voice of the lessons he'd had drilled into him for years, they are demons, they are cruel and cunning, they wear the faces of angels to devour the innocent.
"I don't get many visitors, regardless. Would you care to take tea with me?"
Eren was, after all, quite thirsty.
The boy's name was Armin, and Armin had a ravenous hunger only for knowledge. Did you know, he asked Eren as he poured him another cup of herbal tea, fingers long and pale against the fine china. Did you know, that coconut milk is an appropriate substitute for the warm blood of living souls. Many of his kind had made the long trek to more tropical climes, and were living quite well against a backdrop of tropical sunsets and warm salty breezes. It was so hard to travel on one's own, as Armin was now. But he would like to see it, one day.
The offer to travel with him almost made it out of Eren's throat before he gulped his tea to drown it down.