Done for a French word prompt on Tumblr, much like Fleur.

Rating: T
Characters: Armin Arlert, Eren Jaeger
Genre: 'Backstory', Friendship, 'Angst'

Flamme

"Here, you try," Armin insisted and shoved his grandfather's magnifying glass at Eren. Once it was out of his hands he went back to fiddling with the leaf he'd only semi-successfully burnt a hole through; he held it up to his eye and watched his friend through the brown-edged pinhole he'd created.

The wonder and excitement on Eren's face turned first into a squint of concentration as he angled the glass in the sun over the pale green leaf pinned down unnecessarily heavily by his splayed thumb and forefinger. He had trouble focusing the beam of light and, judging by the increasingly quick back-and-forth wavering of the glass, he was getting frustrated. Armin glanced at Eren's face, which was developing a snarl. He debated whether to intervene.

Eren caught his eye. His hand dropped and the ebony handle of the magnifier tapped on the warm stone of the rood terrace. "This isn't working. My leaf is stupid." Armin opened his mouth to object but Eren was already shuffling on his knees to where an old bucket sat against the door to downstairs. "Imma try an' get the spider!"

Armin's expression saddened as he watched his friend position the glass above the spider sitting in the center of its sail-shaped web. "Eren…"

"Ssh, you'll scare it!"

Even from here by virtue of the magnifier Armin could see the spider's striped legs in great detail; Eren finally found the right angle and the yellow of its back became articulated gold. He could see its mandibles working thoughtfully, the eyes no bigger than pinheads gleaming in the light. Staring – at Eren, its attacker, or Armin, its observer?

Eren adjusted the angle a little more and the beam became a dot on the spider's back. One of its legs twitched and Eren hissed.

"Eren," Armin began, sadly.

Eren hissed louder.

A tiny tendril of steam, easily mistakable for a thread of silk, began to waft off the spider's back.

"Eren, don't." Armin reached out and jerked Eren's arm at the same time that the spider scampered away into the shadow of the bucket.

Eren whirled on him, the balls of his feet grinding tiny pebbles beneath them. "Hey! I had it!"

"But you were going to kill it!"

"So? How's that any different from you keeping bugs in jars?"

Armin slumped a little, frowning, "I put air holes in the tops."

"They don't need just air," Eren said. He sat back, his arms behind him, and looked out into the distance where Wall Maria rose to nearly touch the clouds. "They're still in a jar."

I didn't save that spider, Armin realized. It was going to save itself – maybe Eren knew that. But I still put all those bugs in the jars and kept them there on the windowsill. They suffocated even with the air holes. Their entire life was under a magnifying glass with no escape.

Eren and Mikasa's cries for him to regroup with the others rang dully on his ears and the warmth of that summer afternoon faded into the rain and gray mud around him. He gently let the new recruit's head rest on the ground and closed her unseeing eyes, leaving two stripes of mud through her eyebrows. The warmth of the blood so recently coughed up through her lips also began to chill as it ran into her wet blonde hair. What was it she'd said, before they set out?

"'I'm so tired of being trapped. I want my death to be in my own hands,'" he remembered. Hooves thundered behind him and he stood, looking around him at what remained of the squad to which he'd belonged. So many insects pounded into the earth.

"Regroup, Arlert!" someone else nearby called, and his body was moving for him, getting back on his horse, that horse's body moving for him, getting back into the formation, that formation moving for him, coursing like a dark flame across the landscape.