Written for the Jearmin Reverse Bang 2015, based off tumblr user sundae-dresses' lovely art!
Okay, I admit while this is the longest thing I've ever posted so far, it isn't my best. At all. With the whole relationship thing - this is basically where "two strangers 'fall in love' in one night andgo their separate ways the next" so forgive me if a lot of things are...off? But I guess it's good enough. Anyway, I hope you like it.
The boy he loved, he met only once.
It was September, when the wind blew through dark alleys and shadowed streets in chilling breezes, turning breath to faint white clouds and turning cheeks and fingers pale and numb. Everything that wasn't Marco's pizzeria, with its yellow lights and warmth and familiarity, was unwelcoming. Jean didn't like the outside; not the buildings with unlit windows like missing teeth nor the droll shadow people and the roads that cracked underneath the weight of their dead gazes. September welcomed the chill and the gray and let them overstay their welcome, and like a spineless host allowed them to torment the already defeated people below.
And he was in the Ehrmich district of Wall Sina, bike out of gas and a gradually cooling pizza beside him on the bench he sat on like a wanderer in a diorama with a rich city backdrop and a cast of homeless, defeated dreamers. Sina was cruel, especially to those that came from Maria and Rose.
Jean was lost. Trost, while only a bit less gritty and gray, was still home, and was far, far away.
He was never going to set foot in Wall Sina again, God, he hated this place. It was just about the worst place to be stuck in at almost 9 pm after realizing that the order for a delivery was to a fake address and his bike was out of fuel because Sina was farther than he had expected it to be. So now he was sitting on a bench on a wide street lined with residential buildings, looking stood up with a rather creased box of rapidly cooling pizza sharing his lovely metal bench. He needed to smoke. Right now. Except he had nothing on him right now. Absolutely fantastic.
In the midst of the irritable groveling in his cesspool of general loathing (of Sina, of prank calls, of the cold, of his useless bike…) a stranger approached.
The stranger wasn't lost. His apartment was meters away, at the end of the dull gray street, but his twisted ankle had had enough and seconds ago his heart had been damn near ready to burst out of his chest. Metaphorically, not literally, like that of the man that lay in an alley several streets away.
He had discarded everything, though. Gun, clothes and all. Parted ways with a nameless accomplice that was one of his father's people with the information tucked away in a chip and in the labyrinth of his mind.
So now he really needed to sit down, to rest, to relax, because his work for now was done until he had a flight booked back to New York or Moscow or wherever his father and his team were staying this time. Which would be tomorrow. He blinked the thoughts away and smiled at the stranger on the bench a little tiredly, only minding a little bit that he seemed to have gone unnoticed.
Jean imagined the pizza box magically expanding in between them, like a wall. He remained motionless, even as his rational planning diverged into surreal ideas like suddenly acquiring teleportation powers to bring him, his bike, and the pizza home.
The bench dipped a bit when the stranger sat, and Jean gave him a sideways glance.
And suddenly, the surreal ideas and any other thought evaporated like the cloud that formed at the soft rush of breath from his mouth upon seeing the striking, slender young man in a white and black pinstriped suit, fixing his cufflinks as his hair fell into his face like rays of sun. Jean almost felt embarrassed at this comparison, but at the moment he felt like that hair was more like sunlight than the weak, pale gray light that sometimes seeped through the clouds on some days.
Interest piqued, Jean watched in silence out of the corner of his eye, and time rolled along lazily.
The boy breathed in the sharp, cold air, heart now resuming its normal pace, and vowed to have one night as a normal person, an average Sina boy in a designer suit wandering around the outskirts with a twisted ankle. Of course. "Cold out here, isn't it?" He faced the other boy, face faint pink, voice smooth but quiet, like the feeling of steady ripples in water.
Jean blinked.
"Um, yeah, it is." Anyone else and he would have merely grunted out, from underneath his scarf and his jacket and his gloves. His own voice didn't sound any less dour, however.
"You kind of sound like you have a shitty day too," the golden boy offered with a smile. The tiredness could pass as the quietness of a person that was almost shy, as if unused to talking to people like this. Lengthy discussions with people he had never seen, in office or at gunpoint, sure. But never anything this casual. But he would try, anyway.
"Yeah," Jean responded, nodding his head in the direction of his bike. The stupid thing leaned on a bent bike rack, the red box so very noticeable in the gray and beige and black of the surroundings. "All I have right now is a cold pizza." He dropped his gaze to the box. "Want some?"
The friendly, small curve of smile went a little bit crooked.
"I was kidding. But even if I wasn't, Marco's pizza still tastes pretty damn good," he added hastily, fidgeting with the box before opening it. He doesn't know if he should be embarrassed about offering a Sina boy in a suit pizza from Trost or telling him he's missing out on a lot because Marco's pizza is fucking great. He took a slice anyway, averting his eyes to the scuffed toes of his shoes as he ate. Jesus, he really should learn how to close his mouth.
A long, pregnant pause. Jean twisted the toe of his shoe into a shallow crack on the ground. "If you say so." To his surprise, the other boy took a slice and ate it. He watched as his eyes widened the slightest fraction, dropping down to the slice of five different kinds of cheese between his fingers. It was good – not the expected kind of good from food he was used to, but a simple, homely kind of good, like a friend or family's cooking.
Jean's brushing the crumbs off his gloves when the other finished, looking actually very pleased. "You're right, it was pretty good. I didn't even notice it was cold." He studied the box, memorizing the name of Marco's pizzeria and the contact number. It was pretty good pizza, he mused. "Did someone give the wrong address as a joke, is that why you didn't deliver it? They missed out on a lot."
"Oh, they did." Jean felt the beginnings of a smile now. "Sucks for them."
He hummed in agreement, and gratefully takes the next slice Jean offered him. "Um, isn't it a bit late already?"
"9:27. I guess you could say so."
"I'm taking it you aren't from Sina" – Jean almost scoffed – "and it gets extremely dangerous around here by this time…" (said the boy who just watched a man get shot for documents, almost shot someone in the last two hours, had in fact shot at people quite a few times in the past, and was part of a steadily growing rebellion with his own father at the head of it all.)
"If you were going to ask why I wasn't heading home already, well, my bike is busted and I don't feel like going home without it, or walking it all the way to Trost." Those things weren't cheap, either.
The boy nodded, crossing his ankles as he fell silent. A chilling breeze passed by them and Jean's face melted into a frown again. He thought of his apartment, and Marco's pizzeria and the warmth and light and smells like home, and his co-workers' noise and antics, he would put up with all that to get home right now.
The boy thought of his own apartment and the space no one but him took up, and with that followed a little vision of something entirely reckless and petty. Maybe it was the craziness of the past days and the past hours. There were also thoughts of his own soon-to-be never-to-be-acknowledged-anyway act of rebellion against the rules he set for himself and the a couple of unspoken rules here and there. He spoke anyway.
"My apartment is just down the street, actually."
Jean stared. "What?"
"I mean to say, well, that was really sudden and I completely understand if you're suspicious, because who accepts offers like this to a stranger they've been sharing a bench with for 15 minutes? But I have an extra bed and I don't actually take pleasure in my acquaintances sleeping on a bench or on the street in the cold."
"Um." Jean felt his cheeks warm the slightest and teetered between relief and suspicion, thanking him or declining him.
The boy studied his nails, determined not to regret anything, and Jean didn't know if he was shy about this or just really nonchalant. "Of course, you can always stay here out in the cold if you'd deem that safer." He inclined his head. "I personally don't."
Jean began to sputter. "Well, I – er, you can't—"
"There's the possibility of getting mugged, killed, or both, or worse – trust me on this - and pneumonia and a few ozen other sicknesses you can get from just one night here. Also, you never know where some drunkard just threw up on a couple of nights ago."
Oh, Jesus. Jean's eyes darted from the roads to his bike to the pizza and then the stranger, wondering if he would rather he killed and mugged by this rather attractive and rather uncanny stranger, or by, well, worse people.
"Alright," he ground out. If he was going to die, he thought as he stood and picked up the pizza, at least it wasn't going to be on the streets of Sina.
"That I assure you, sir," the boy laughed, his grin like a little slice of the great white moon. Yes, he had done it, he thought almost giddily, and watched with amusement as Jean pinked and huffed, lips twisted with embarrassment – he hadn't meant to say that aloud. "I'm sorry. But could you help me up? I kind of twisted my ankle."
He hadn't noticed him limp when he walked to the bench, but Jean just gave him a look, the warmth on his face subsiding, and handed him the pizza so he could hold it as he helped him walk the distance from the bench to his apartment.
The warmth was rather comfortable, if the proximity wasn't a little awkward.
.
.
The heater was turned on by the time Jean came back after going outside again for his bike. The boy's room was on the last floor, in the room with a narrow balcony of rusted metal. Two beds were pushed up against a wall, with a small drawer between them and a frayed lampshade housing a burnt-out bulb above it.
"Don't worry about anything," the boy explained, "there's food in the fridge by that counter – I put the pizza in there too, by the way - an extra blanket in the drawer by the bathroom. Feel free to watch some TV or use the bathroom any time."
He could pretend he was doing what normal people did, that thing where people shared apartments and everything. He was done for the week, he wanted out. Just a temporary out with a cute, grumbling pizza boy he met on a bench.
He was never normal, anyway. But he could be generous a lot of the time.
"Thanks," was all Jean could say, pink in the face and confused and relieved all at once. He hadn't believed in things like angels in years, but this could be proof. Angels wore expensive suits and were eerily casual and nonchalant about giving all this stuff to strangers in need. For a moment Jean considered asking for his name and probably a number to go with it, but this situation was already awkward enough and the idea of rest was incredibly alluring. So when he was left alone in the room, he reached over and clicked off the light.
He closed his eyes and allowed his tired body to melt into the thick duvet.
.
.
Jean woke up a little less sore and a bit more complacent. Until the fact that the room was dark even though the window was big and the city skyline was glowing faintly through the curtains dawned on him. "Jesus Christ," he groaned as his watch lingered on 10:56, the colon blinking steadily, mockingly. He twisted into the covers aggressively, plunging himself into a stifling warm darkness than had him pulling them off his face hastily. Nothing. His eyes wouldn't stay closed for some reason, and the dark was too empty, too tight and too vast, the city humming muffled by walls and glass until it was like some sort of faint itch underneath the skin, flaring as horns wailed and motorcycles roared. He twisted and laid still, arm slung over his face then over the edge of the bed.
Maybe it was the fact that he was miles away from home, in a bed in the apartment of a strange young man he had never met until today, and he was worrying himself sick.
By now, curses were slipping past his lips like water through fingers, cold and easy and evaporating into the cool air to be replaced with more.
11:09. He glowered at his watch.
He got out of bed, thinking that maybe doing something would get him to feel sleepy again, and fumbled around in the dark barefoot, accidentally stepping on his jacket as he tried to move quietly so as not to wake his host in the bed beside his. The tiles were cold and Jean suspected that the heater was turned down. The hallway that led to the bedroom to the living room was unlit, a claustrophobic corridor of eigengrau that had Jean walking faster—
The sliding door to the balcony was thrown open, curtain fluttering lightly.
Jean's eyes dropped to the strip of faint light underneath it, to the long shadow outlined in the curtain, heart beating only a little bit faster. So the boy wasn't asleep at all.
He padded over lightly, and pulled the curtain back just a fraction, and sure enough, there he was, curled up at the corner of the balcony, still in his dress pants. His tie was placed over the suit jacket that was discarded and laid beside him unfolded, the top buttons of his dress shirt undone.
He peered at Jean over the top of his cup of tea, eyes lidded.
"Hello, Jean, having trouble sleeping too?" he offered innocently.
"How do you know my name?" Knuckles turned white around the material of the curtain, gripping tightly.
"Scrap of paper inside the pizza box, the one with the address. There was a note written to you at the back."
"Oh." Most likely one of Marco's notes, the kind about staying safe and texting him when he gets home.
"I'm really sorry you can't fall asleep here, I know how it feels like. So I guess you'll just have to put up with me until morning, when we can get your bike to a gas station and you out of this place and back home safely, hopefully." When Jean nodded mutely, he added, "you know you can sit down."
So Jean sat, and stared at the city through the rusted, dented bars. The skyscrapers reached out to the empty night; the traffic was relentless, and underneath a hundred giant screens people hurried and groveled, existed and faded. Wall Sina was not a place for people that wanted to live, it was where people born rich lived rich and the others were finished off. The entire system was corrupt, and the rotten fruit of it hidden behind a glittering façade.
But then again, everyone knew that, Armin thought, it's just that the dreamers believe they can fight it.
"Um, I don't believe you've told me your name," Jean spoke, shattering the silence between them.
"Oh, I'm sorry." The boy laughed shortly. For once, he would be honest, and forget about the fake names and fake documents and stories, and tell what little he allows himself of the absolute truth. "You can call me Armin."
Armin. Jean rolled the name around in his mind, finally matching it to the boy sitting across him. Armin. A strange kind of feeling swelled in his chest.
"Hey, I'll go get you a cup for tea. If you want tea, that is – God, forgive my terrible hosting skills, it is rather late and I'm not usually this distracted, this is kind of a rare situation for me." Armin disappeared into the dark of his apartment and returned with a cup, cream colored and rimmed with gold. He poured Jean a cup. The tea was like copper, steam like fragrant tendrils curling over his nose and cheeks. "It's Darjeeling," he added like an afterthought.
Jean, who had never really drank tea except for the honey lemon his mother made him for sore throats and other things when he was younger and the occasional cup of chamomile, let the first sip linger on his mouth. There was a faint sweetness, an undertone of musky spices that left his tongue tingling coolly by the time he swallowed. "It's good," he mumbled. Entirely new and kind of strange, but good.
"Thank you. I can't ever make it as good as—" he cut himself off, pulled the cup away from him a little bit. "As good as this one friend of my father's. He makes perfect tea, all kinds of it, really. Though he drinks it funny. He holds it like this." Armin placed his thumb and his fingers on the rim of his cup. "I don't know how he does it, but he drinks all of it without spilling a drop." In a poor attempt to imitate his father's friend, some tea ended up dripping off his chin and he wiped it hastily with the back of his hand.
They shared a little chuckle, tinged pink, before falling into a silence that lasted for a few seconds before Jean spoke again. "You know, you kind of got an accent. I can't place it, though."
Armin chuckled. "Perhaps it's the Swiss. I don't really notice. I just flew in from Switzerland a week ago, actually; lived there for a year. I think everyone's accents rubbed off on me." He cleared his throat and began speaking in a more familiar way, the kind of voice Jean was so used to hearing. "I let it slip. I didn't have it earlier, did I?"
"No, not really."
They drank more tea. It was midnight.
"Do you feel sleepy already?"
"Nah."
"Me too. So, have you lived anywhere other than here in Germany, or…?"
"Afraid not. I've been stuck in Trost forever. My mother's French, but I've never even been to France. I'd love to, someday, for her. She wanted so badly for me to be able to see France, but there were never opportunities…" Jean paused, face coloring once again. He took a rather undignified gulp of his tea and leaned his head on the metal bars of the balcony. "You, though?"
"Well, I've lived in Sina a lot, but I've been to various places in Europe, though I only stayed for a long time in Switzerland, of course. I spent my childhood in England, and then Amsterdam for around a year, I suppose. I also spent one summer in Japan with my best friends. They were lovely places."
Nowhere was home, really, not even England. He lived in apartments and hotels wherever he was needed to track down people for interrogation or information, or when he had to meet up to make plans. A detective, if you will, and a tactitian. But mostly because he was valuable, a prodigy, the commander's son. He was to stay out of trouble at all costs, dumped here and there under disguise, with some freedom – sometimes he took advantage of that, and thus the 'travelling'.
Jean didn't know this. Jean only knew he was a rich boy who could take vacations whenever he pleased. So he stared at the boy, obviously younger than him, but had already seen more, learned more, and been to more places than he could possibly ever be in his life, and after the momentary surge of anger brought on by envy of his privilege, came the intense desire to know more, have memory and experiences and stories passed on to him from Armin's tongue, dipped in accents of languages he'd never speak and emotions he'd never draw. The feeling settled like a smoldering little ember at the base of his stomach, and all he could manage was, "wow."
They exchanged lopsided little smiles. Jean wanted to know, to see, to go, but the sky was too dark and the cracks on the walls and the rust on the metal were all too real, the city and the slums too close. All that was unattainable for one like him. He was rooted to this place.
Armin downed his second cup of tea since Jean's arrival and for a moment, as he licked his lips subtly of the musky taste, his eyes were unfocused past the hanging curtains by the balcony doorway. "Would you like to see?" he whispered finally.
There was a small black bag tucked away in the corner of Armin's suitcase and inside was one large album, a journal, and two plastic envelopes. Armin tucked the journal, a thick brown moleskine book, back into the bag with a rather apologetic smile and a "sorry" before turning back to the remaining items on his bed. Jean sat cross-legged beside him as he opened the album to the first page, which was simply a picture of Armin sharing a small smile with an Asian girl, both at either side of a boy with a grin that rivaled the sun above them.
"I started this album only a few years ago. We were in Turkey, with my friend Eren," he began, tapping the boy in the middle. The next pages were pictures of the Hagia Sophia, lush gardens, ruins of great temples. There were little pictures of Armin himself, more of the places and occasionally his friends or other people. "I liked the Grand Bazaar," he said almost dreamily, and then before Jean's eyes was a two-page spread bursting with detail and color, a mosaic of everything from jewelry to carpets to boots to food. Real dried tea leaves and colored grains were stuck to the sides of the page like decorative borders. "It truly was grand. We spent the whole day there, surrounded by colors and scents and noises, and when we got home Eren's mom made us food and tea, it was amazing."
Jean almost shivered, imagined being in there breathing in the art. So much art, visible and intangible and rough and edible, a hurricane so frustratingly out of his reach. "Holy shit, the detail in these things," he murmured, staring intensely at the filigree, the mats, the stories they told. "It looks amazing, it'd be great to visit this someday."
"I wouldn't mind going back either. Now, we went to Greece after that, just for a few days," he continued, flipping to a page of more temple ruins, museums with high buildings and ancient art, buildings that looked liked blocks piled upon each other around the coast. "There's more pictures of the beach, though, because we've already been to Greece, but the, err, boring places, as Eren said. Naturally, he wanted to go to the beach, so we went. I was sunburned by the end of the day."
"You burn in the sun?" Jean asked, taking in the pale skin, the only barely-there undertone of pink.
"Unfortunately, yes. It was painful," he laughed. And then, under the noise of the turning of a page, mumbled, "not as much as those bullets to the shoulder, though." Greece wasn't such a pretty place when you've been shot in it, and while wearing a dress, he recalled grimly.
"Did you say something?" The alarm in Jean's voice was unmistakable.
"No," he answered coolly as he smoothed down the next page. "I usually spend Christmases with my father in Berlin or New York, or England, if I get to spend it with him. If not, there's my friends. This one was in Berlin," he explained. The town square was alight with gold, a giant tree laden with snow and baubles and lights towering above them all. The table in an apartment was laden with food, a blurred shot of a grinning woman and a scowling man behind a bottle of wine, an unfocused picture of a Christmas tree glowing brightly.
The pictures diverged into pictures of fireworks and other things, blue skies and twilight, small plants and panoramas of cities and countrysides. A page of pressed flowers, delicate veins stark against the thin petals trapped underneath sticky, hard plastic around a wrinkled note written in Japanese. Small notes in other languages, some in alphabets Jean couldn't even read. Numerous pictures framed by skyscrapers, dour faces drawn in the square space of smoggy gray skies in the centers.
"We did them to pass time. A lot of them feature my dad's friend. You know, the one that makes tea."
"Wow, he seems pretty grouchy."
"He is, but that's just Levi I guess."
How amusing it was, pretending he was a traveler, as if the people he knew weren't one of the biggest threats to the government and as if he wasn't one himself. The album showed the surface of the places, but never the events. No murder, no disputes, no secrets. He could cling on to this lie forever.
There were pictures of an unpopular little gallery on a little road in Hong Kong, black and white portraits and soft watercolor landscapes. Intricate designs carved into marble, arches and towers rising high. There was art in the gritty pictures of red sunsets, in the poems spraypainted into crumbling walls. Jean, clueless as he was, wanted to step into the pictures and live inside them, yet reality confined him in these walls and kept his dreams of art and blue skies underneath a thin, impenetrable barrier of stiff plastic and ink.
There were pictures stuck between the pages, occasionally fluttering out: stained, slightly tattered it at the edges, glowing, unfocused pictures of a tall blond man and a child standing in fields, in a library, in elegant-looking places. Jean didn't see the nostalgic fondness that made its way across Armin's visage, and pretended he never saw the photographs.
.
.
"Do you have pictures of France here?"
"Our visits to France were never meant for sightseeing, but yes, I do have some of France." Armin flipped past clumps of pages until he landed on one. Glimpses of the Arc de Triomphe, and numerous monuments through a car window, a cathedral alight with vibrant colors at night, a corner bookstore with flowers dripping from its wire balcony. "I figured I had to, you know. But I wish I had pictures of inside the Notre Dame or the Louvre." He glanced at Jean. "You like art, right?"
Jean pulled away a little, running his hand through his hair. "Not – not like like art. I mean, it's nice to look at…" He looked up, and Armin raised a brow as if asking him, really?. "Alright, I dabble a bit. Doesn't mean I'm good at it, though, I just make shit."
"You know you shouldn't be ashamed of that at all, I'm sure it's not that bad," Armin insisted firmly, the hand he placed on Jean's upper arm spreading a tingling warmth.
That, and the glint in his eyes send red creeping up Jean's neck and the instinct to shy away and press into the touch – he sincerely hoped he hadn't twitched strangely as he jabbed at the album, at a picture of numerous skulls embedded into the walls of a dim room. "Where's this? That's kinda fucking creepy."
"Catacombes de Paris," the blond pronounced perfectly, "the world's largest grave, housing the bones of over 5 million people since the 1800's. It was incredible, though I never got the chance to go back."
"You'd want to go back to a…an underground mass…grave?"
"It's called an ossuary. And I wouldn't mind, it was plenty interesting. I hardly ever got to be anywhere in France but Paris or locked up in buildings staring at the ceilings, anyway."
Jean glanced at the ceiling, finding only white and the faint outline of boards, the faint crack that sprouted from a corner like a shy root.
"So about art," Armin tried, emphasizing the phrase. "I want to see your art. Please?" And for a moment, there was a new surface over the layers of the witty, banter-loving boy, the traveler, and the sleek, sophisticated, Sina boy – this time, a more childish, more earnest exterior put on for times like these.
With the fucking puppy eyes and everything; sky-colored irises wide and aglow, over rose-tinted cheeks, his bottom lip pushing outwards ever so slightly.
"Jesus Christ," Jean groaned, flopping back on the bed. "Armin, you've been to the Louvre, probably to the Uffizi or the Smithsonian—"
"I only wish I had time for that—"
"—what I'm saying is: why would you want to see my art. Of all things, of all people. What makes you think a pizza delivery guy from Rose can make good art?"
Armin leaned down and stared at him, eyes narrowed. Those eyes never dimmed; it was almost like looking out a window on a bright morning. "I'm not saying you're a Michelangelo, I just wanted to see your art."
"Well, I don't have anything with me, so you can't," Jean laughed.
The corner of his lip lifted to a subtle smirk as pulled away to take Jean's jacket from the floor, balled up. He shook it open gently, dropping a small, thin notebook into Jean's chest. Lose paper fluttered out, the drawings clear though obstructed by the blocky handwriting "But I do. Now come on, please?"
"T-these are just shitty notes!" Jean bolted up, scrambling for words as he reached for his jacket to shove it back in, but the other had tossed it back onto his bed.
"That's impressive, taking notes in the form of sketches of people."
"That's creepy, how you looked through my thing without asking. Probably when I was asleep."
"No, it fell out of your jacket's pocket when you dumped it on my floor. There were pages peeking out. I don't see why you rip pages out and just keep them in there, you'll lose them."
"Doesn't matter," Jean muttered, taking a loose page, crumpling it and shoving it into his pocket. "Honestly, there isn't anything to see. Can we get back to the album?"
"After I get to see your drawings."
"I didn't know you were so nosy."
"I have to be. Jean, please?"
He groaned, falling back onto the bed, but this time face-first, face dangerously red. Frustration of embarrassment, he wasn't quite sure. No one knew about his "art thing", except for Marco, but he was a hell lot easier to open up to. This was crazy. But he was a stranger, wasn't he? Albeit a very interesting stranger whose bed he was currently sitting on and whose memories he was currently going through…oh. "Shit, alright. But don't tell anyone. Please."
The bed bounced beside him and he could hear the grin as Armin exclaimed a "thank you". He pressed his face harder into the bed.
"These are good," Armin said quietly. Under thin, cheap paper were bold lines and soft strokes, people and buildings, unrefined and sketchy. His writing left raised impressions over profiles, and cities were scratched out. Sometimes he saw the same boy over and over again, a smiling, freckled face framed but wavy locks of dark hair. They needed work, of course, but they were good, and they were Jean's. "I don't see why you have to be ashamed of it."
"It's just a hobby of mine. I appreciate art, it can be…fun…but –ah, forget it," came the muffled reply.
The blond paused at the end of a notebook. A light sketch erased and smudged, but still distinct: a spacious studio. There was an easel, sketchpads, a girl with paint-spattered hands looking out tall, wide windows. His eyes left the paper to glance at the man on his bed once again, and he wondered how long it was since he had watched someone draw. Not as a streetside performance, huddled beside indifferent or overzealous people; not as a painter working publicly as if he were the exhibit.
Then again, it might only be a drawing, and Jean was never as passionate as Armin liked to think anyone would be (maybe Eren's idealism and all that poetic hipster crass got to him). But he wanted to see, just this once. He wanted one peaceful night with Jean before he would leave and throw himself back into the madness, because there was a fire glowing like a vibrant candlelight in the vacant chamber of his ribcage and he wanted to know how it would feel when it would grow bigger.
Jean was stubborn and awkward and it was endearing, really; even how his words could slip from one emotion to the other so easily, how his eyes would never turn to liquid gold like in the stories underneath the fluorescent lights, but brightened and sharpened as they took in the art in the album, the art he could never have. It was fascinating, and Armin was staring at the edge of a cliff wondering what a freefall felt like. For once, he was going to be reckless, even if it meant never happening again for a long time.
Because maybe the short freefall would be worth more than decades safely on his feet.
"Put your jacket on, I'm going to show you a place."
.
I think, somehow, I fell for you. Not entirely, not all the way through, but I think I did.
Or am I only telling myself I did?
.
There were plenty of forgotten streets and sleepy towns in Rose. That was where Armin took him, to an old studio in a forgotten street in a sleepy town in Rose, far away from the noise and the familiarity, in an eastern district that took them about an hour to get to.
It was 4:36 in the morning, yet it seemed perfectly, simply right.
Armin left his rental car outside and pushed the glass door open. The studio was always unlocked, always open even until now, he mused nostalgically. He had come here as a young boy, barely a teenager when he returned from England. There were stories here, told by a man with wise eyes and a tongue that could weave stories from the air or take them from the roots of the earth, fantasies and folklore that gave him no reason at all to leave. He lingered by the makeshift library, a large cabinet that stood from floor to ceiling in the first floor, for the first time enjoying fantasy instead of history, cultures instead of tactics, and allowed himself the stories he couldn't have in his actual childhood.
He didn't go up to the studio much, but he figured now was a good time as any to do so. It was at the highest floor, the third.
"This place looks old," Jean commented as the lights above the staircase flickered on weakly and they made their way up.
"It is, I've been here where I was younger," Armin confirmed, gingerly brushing away abandoned spiderwebs in front of him and hastily rubbing them off his sleeve. "I know they abandoned it a couple of years ago due to financial problems." The dance studio that took up the entirety of the second floor was still, eerie, empty through the glass door and he thought of the children he knew, the girls that took ballet there and wondered how they were doing. Most people in this place didn't pursue art.
"Here we are," he said finally as they stepped into the third floor, flicking on the switch by the wall.
The ceilings were high, the windows wide. The middle was empty, though seats and figures and easels lined the room; in the corner, a shelf of materials where a few canvasses and a large pad leaned against. Jean stood still at the end of the staircase.
"I know it's not much, really, but it's a studio and I figured you might like it if you still liked drawing, well…" Armin said quietly, drawing in a breath, suddenly feeling strangely timid in anticipation of a reaction. "Do you like it?"
Jean walked over to the canvasses, picking the pad up and skimming through the blank pages. Ran his hands over the near-empty cans of paint, the frayed, used brushes, the pencils. Their eyes met, and he almost smiled. "Yeah." He peered outside the window, seeing nothing but dark streets and shadowed buildings, and glanced back at the shelf. "But can I use these?"
"Of course. No one came back for them, anyway."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
"Sweet," Jean breathed out, brushing his hair back. He picked the pad and a box of colored pencils and markers and other things, settling in the center of the studio beside Armin, who sat on the floor. And for the first time in what seemed like a long time, Jean put pencil to paper and started to draw again.
.
.
But that was all that happened, really. He started. The paper was littered with guidelines, rough circles, the skeletons of people. A nose or two, and eye or two. Discontinued, unfinished.
"Ah, fuck, I'm the worst," Jean groaned with his face flat on the pad. "Sorry for wasting your time."
"You didn't," Armin murmured, patting him on the back. It was entertaining to watch, until the frustration set in.
"Nothing's coming," he pressed on, tearing his head from the pad. "I thought it would. I need inspiration, like in your album, except I can't really draw scenery that well – I need. Something. That isn't this stupid underworld slum. I need…"
His eyes stopped darting around, focusing on the boy beside him. "Hey."
"What?" Armin blinked.
"Can I draw you?" he asked. "I mean, for the reference, it would probably make it easier…"
"A-alright." Armin scooted over to position himself in front of him with a little smile that was returned with a grateful one. It felt warm, that little candle in his chest glowing a little bit brighter. Warm and quiet, not giddy or bubbly, just pleasant. "Hold still," Jean said under his breath, and Armin traced every stroke of the pencil and every curve of his body with his eyes. Jean did have artist fingers, long and steady, and Armin watched them move too. "It probably won't be as good as you expect, but…"
Behind the pad, Jean also watched. On paper, he admitted that Armin was, is, attractive – beautiful, even. The flawless looks of a surely cosseted rich boy mixed with years of travelling outside the Walls; the way he held himself so surely but could turn so timid sometimes, the way he could morph from a playful boy to a cultured young man. And his eyes. Jean worked especially carefully with his eyes. They were like the skies he had never seen past the layer of gray smog, to skies he only saw in pictures. Armin's eyes were both possibility and impossibility, clear and steady, and Jean wondered what those morning skies looked like with a storm brewing in them.
Somewhere along the line he stopped and looked up, saw Armin's eyes just barely obstructed by his long fringe, and reached out absently and brushed it back.
And Armin leaned into his touch, equally absent, and for a moment, the eyes of the sky locked with those of the earth, and he reached up to brush Jean's hand with his own.
Heat bloomed around Jean's fingers and Armin pulls his hand away when he realized, leaving the other's hand tingling with the softness of his hair and the slight prickle of his lashes. Pink surged beneath Armin's pale skin as he also pulled away, tucking his hair behind his right ear, flames licking up his ribs, but he felt his lips curve as Jean stuttered out ah and I and well and went on to finish up the sketch with vigor.
Above, the lightbulb buzzed quietly and flickered briefly, returning with the lights dimmer than before. Jean pulled away from his pad, finally done, and Armin scooted back to his side. "It's not that good," he mumbled.
Armin stared at his figure on the paper. It's him, drawn by Jean, and for a moment the warm and quiet grew into giddy and bubbly. "No, I love it," he said, taking the pad from his hands. "Don't be too hard on yourself. Seriously, Jean, this looks really good…"
"Not as good as good as you do, though," Jean muttered more sharply than he intended to.
"I—"
"Shit, wait, I didn't mean it like—I mean, well—" he paled, stiffened, his heart thrumming in his chest.
"Hey," Armin waved dismissively. He smiled, small, almost secret. "You don't look bad yourself, too." On the cold, bare floor, their hands lay close, fingers almost brushing, the drawing momentarily forgotten in front of them. "Don't worry about what you make not looking as good as you expect it to be. And I'm not perfect, you know? Look." And then he rolled up his sleeves and pulled up the hem of his shirt a little, just enough to glimpse the healing tissue, the faint, raised scars of stitches. On his arms were faint chafe marks, a long pale gash that laced from his elbow and upwards. "It isn't pretty underneath this suit," he said as he rolled his sleeves back down.
Eyes blown wide; the words couldn't leave the underside of his tongue. He didn't know what he expected. "Oh…" he breathed out, and Armin inclined his head, fringe falling over his eyes. "Oh, Armin, who did this to you?"
"Oh, let's say international criminals and—" his forced chuckle was cut off as his breath hitched in his throat what Jean took his calloused hand in his, warm and sure, thumb rubbing over the barely-there scars on his knuckles. He looked up, as he laced their fingers together, and Jean saw the skies grow brighter, the flames behind the stained glass skies, and reflected them in his own: but softer, a tamer smoulder of embers. And they were drawn, moths to each others' flames.
And when their lips brushed, it was the feeling of falling, a downwards pull that sent blood and electricity surging—
But it was only that, really. A brush, the barest feeling of skin against skin, and freefall stopped short, like a falling dream.
"Too fast?"
"Sorry."
"Me too."
Jean dropped his head. Armin's hand was on his forearm, drifting down to cover his hand. And they sat still, the air stale with their silence, in the closed studio room as the world outside kept turning in the dark.
"Jean," he tried. The next words were thick and caught in his throat, like some kind of reverse bitter pill. "I'm leaving in a few hours, and I-I - there's no time to keep things slow. There isn't going to be any more chances after this." He felt his heart beating in his ears, suddenly overwhelmed. "I'm not saying that you must…return my feelings. But if you do, if you'll take the chance, then by all means, please don't think we should wait. It's just these few hours left, Jean."
Because in the moment he felt like he could love, for a short infinity that lasted from now and until the morning, he could have someone and feel like he's known them for longer than those few hours. One moment of freefalling for a hundred more on his feet.
And Jean wrapped his arms around him and he in turn did the same, his heart thrumming so quickly he thought Jean would feel it himself. They were still, suspended, with the scent of each other filling their lungs as they breathed. They pulled back, lips dragging across each other almost languidly, shyly, the faintest glimmer of irises peeking beneath lowered lids and lashes. Again and again, as their hearts swelled and their laughter rose between them softly. Again and again, as the words finally came and they met again, and again, and again…
.
.
In the dark Jean could make out his scars, yet dared not even touch them as if they were what held Armin together, and the slightest touch would unravel him. Armin sighs into the air. Jean draws him a few more times, in color this time, and he keeps one of them in his breast pocket, right over his heart.
.
"Tell me one thing you won't tell anyone else?"
Armin smiled and very quietly, very surely, tells him who he is. A significant member of a group that would change society forever, the son of its commander, the person the government had yet to know they wanted. Not as detailed as that, anyway, but still. "Of course, you shouldn't tell anyone," he added with an artificial tone of playfulness, as if he had been joking.
Jean wasn't quite sure. He didn't know how to react to that.
.
The so-called freefall, it was a little more like floating down on a parachute.
But it was every bit as exhilarating.
.
They ended up on the roof, watching as the dark turned gradually lighter.
"I didn't think we'd end up like this."
"Yeah. But I liked you from the start, anyway. Sort of."
"I did too, I guess."
"When are you leaving? Where to this time?"
"Russia, at ten."
Jean thought, running his thumb over Armin's knuckles. The action had become habitual. As the sky turned another shade paler, he asked, shyly, "do I at least get your number? Or email, or anything?" It wouldn't occur to him until much later that he didn't even know Armin's last name, but for now, that was what he thought of.
Armin had anticipated it, anyway; he leaned his temple on Jean's shoulder. "I can't do that." He wondered if Jean was beginning to believe what he said, or if he thought he was being ridiculous. Jean didn't say anything.
.
.
Later they get Jean's bike running again after getting help to a nearby gas station. The last vestiges of night were gone, and the gray light that was their morning filtered through the clouds. The world was turning again, and people rose and walked the streets so very unaware, so very tired from their own uneventful night. The sleepiness was only beginning to settle for Jean and Armin.
It was morning. Disorienting in the least; the worst being that irrevocable closing. The night had ended.
Outside an apartment at the end of a street with an old metal bench, two people spoke one last time, delivered the afterword of their brief story, before throwing themselves back into the chaos of their normal worlds.
"Do you believe in fate, Jean?" Armin asked with that little smile of his, those bright eyes of his, like any other boy if not a bit too cheerful on a morning such as this. He would miss those.
"Dunno," he replied with his own smile. "I don't have any reasons to."
"Cynical as ever." He shook his head, smile growing, and he leaned in closer. "I hope we meet again someday. That would be nice." So very nice. But did he truly have that to look forward to? "The next time I come back here, I'll order Marco's." It would be a long time before that happened.
The smile grew strained. He closed his hand over a handle on his bike, the ridges cutting deep. Deeper. Everything they wouldn't say right now had so much meaning, but they would never come.
Will you remember me?
Fate, what bullshit, but I hope it'll be merciful to us.
Sitting on that bench was the worst and best decision in my life.
I want to see outside the Walls with you.
Let's go to Paris, can we go to Paris?
"It doesn't have to be like this."
Jean's eyes widened as the words left his mouth. But either Armin didn't hear or he refused to. And he hated it so damn much. How could one night mean so much for the morning to hurt so much? "I, uh..."
"Well, Jean, I guess this is goodbye." The skies were so bright, so blue in his eyes. Back to the fray it was, and it was time for the events to turn into nothing more than a beautiful memory in his mind; it would take up a lot of space. He had landed from the falling, and it felt like gravity would never let him leave the ground or even stand up straight again.
Jean raised his chin. Neither reached out for a last time, and it was the bench all over again but the dullness was fading back to the picture and not out of it. He swung his leg over the seat and his bike and seated himself. "Bye, Armin. And thanks."
"Thank you too." He meant it. "Thank you for everything." Such happiness, such pain, it was ridiculous but he was a damned liar if he said he didn't feel like the tears were coming then.
The engine roared and Jean nodded his head, and all words would be lost to their ears now. The sound rushed through Armin's head, taking over everything as Jean turned and rode away quickly, and the woken citizens of Sina closed the gap, the trail, and it was as if he had never been. But he had.
He had.
It was September and the skies were gray as the road beneath him, hard and unnatural unlike the color of earth, of Jean. The skies here were so ugly, and it felt like realizing that for only the first time. The clouds watched as the diorama figures, the dead people walked beneath to make their way through another day.
Armin walked up the steps to his apartment and closed the door behind him.