Armin still thinks about Eren sometimes. It shocks him whenever he realizes just how often he seems to forget about Jaeger entirely, when he's caught up in work or chatting with friends. With Mikasa missing and the nature of his job making Eldian presence a rarity besides his coworkers, there aren't many constant reminders of him, besides the whole... world changing event that makes itself known wherever you look. But it's still hard to tie the chaos and scale of the Rumbling to a single person in his mind, let alone the boy he had once loved and respected.
That respect was long gone. The outcome of the Battle of Heaven and Earth was bleak. Maybe it was better than Paradis being the last remnant of humanity, but Armin finds himself wishing on occasion that Eren had finished what he started just to spare the world the turmoil it now experiences.
But that's not what Armin tends to think about when Eren crosses his mind. No, he thinks about their conversation in the restuarant. When he told them both those terrible lies. Well, in Mikasa's case, lies, but Armin wasn't so sure about his own so-called slavery.
Bertholdt Hoover. The one he... ate. The one whose life he stole. Armin used to feel his presence at all times, a trapped spirit observing through his eyes. There was a time when Armin thought his love for Reiner and Annie, brotherly for the former and romantically for the former, was real. Was his. But Eren had to be right. When you take someone's memories, you take their soul. Their experiences become a piece of you, and thus you lose a piece of your own identity.
The Curse of Ymir is gone, or so they say. Armin's got a full life ahead of him now, and he'll never have to take lives with his titan again. Even the memories are getting a little hazy. So why does he still love Annie? Why does he get along with Reiner so well? He should hate them. Armin was always the diplomatic one, but that doesn't mean he should be able to nonchalantly crack jokes, make love with the ones that destroyed everything he valued once upon a time.
The moments of clarity, and the moments of absolute delusion, Armin doesn't know which is the norm and which is the exception anymore. Sometimes he looks at Annie and a churning dread in his stomach forms, sometimes he slips and references a conversation that Bertholdt had with Reiner. These lives are interweaved in Armin's head now, only tightening as the memories fade naturally into the background of his mind.
And the man he became is pounding on the walls of this flesh prison called Armin Arlert, the panic seeping into them. He's started to have fights with his wife now, snapping at her over the slightest inconvenience. Reiner's distanced himself from him, concerned glances whenever Armin isn't acting like himself. Whenever Bertholdt is acting like himself.
Eren was no longer completely Eren by the time he had returned from Marley. And now, Bertholdt isn't completely Bertholdt. There's another, there's Armin, whose body he's trapped in. The two never spoke before, but now they know each other inside and out.
And now a foreign ambassador is holding his hand out to him. Bertholdt snaps out of his thoughts.
He shakes his hand, and with a smile, "It's a pleasure to meet you, sir. Hoov- no, my apologies, Arlert. Armin Arlert."
Disjointed and pretty messy, I know. This is all pretty improvised, and it's 2AM, but I just want to get something out. Maybe I'll clean this up, but probably not.