The seventh time it happened was the first time they'd had so much time on their hands.
Bertholdt already stood waiting by the bannister outside the barracks when Armin left the building at their agreed upon time several hours after lunch. They'd arranged to meet at the library, but it was all the better for Armin that Bertholdt stood waiting so eagerly.
"I think we've made a mistake," Armin said as they made their way to the library, their faces warmed by the early November sun.
"By meeting on Sunday?"
"No, by agreeing to let me read War in its entirety first." He demonstratively lifted the book he held in his hand.
"Oh," Bertholdt responded, looking down on Armin with dim sympathy. "Why is that?"
The thought alone sent jolts into Armin's ankles that made him walk faster, his pace easily matched by his companion. "Bertholdt, honestly, I messed it up badly. War was really good. So good that it hurts. Probably one of the best books I've ever read. It gets into the political side of Allumia that the first book only glanced over and it's just… so good! But now I'm gonna have to spend a whole week waiting for you to finish it because I can't just tell you, and I just!" He threw aside his balled fist and pressed the book closer to his chest with his other, growling out those last words.
Looking aside, he found that Bertholdt was looking ahead of him again, smiling.
"… Not that this is your fault," Armin weakly added to his outburst, lowering his outstretched arm with raised shoulders, drawing a deeper smile out of Bertholdt.
"I'll finish it by next week, I promise."
Armin sighed. "That's the issue. Waiting a week. Maybe next time we can decide on a number of chapters to read and pass on the book to each other by the middle of the week. Or something like that."
"Yeah. It'll be better like that," Bertholdt said, voice cracking so badly that he almost wheezed out the last word. He clamped his jaws shut and his smile vanished, to which Armin could only let out a playful laugh.
"You've been having that a lot lately, those cracks. Your voice is getting pretty deep."
Bertholdt's head dipped forward. "I'm sorry, I really… I'll shut up, it's better." He near-whispered that last part.
"What?" Armin shook his head, holding up a placating hand. "Please, you don't have to– I don't mind! It's not your fault that those happen. Besides, it took too long to get you to come here with me for you to stop talking to me now for such an arbitrary reason. I wanna hear what you have to say, it doesn't matter to me how you sound." Was it that Bertholdt tried to take any opportunity he got out of talking, or did he truly not want to? One step forward, two steps back with this boy.
"Ah… Right…" Bertholdt said noticeably shortly, suddenly finding the barren hills surrounding the camp far more interesting than Armin.
Armin decided to let him live down the shame in silence, mildly amused.
They had plenty of work left in the library, even with the two of them hard at work side-by-side. The week prior, they'd left quite a mess behind in the form of piles of books everywhere on top of bookshelves and on the floor since they hadn't arrived in the restocking phase yet. Armin had silently prayed all week that no one would go tattle to Shadis about some library vandal because all traces led straight to him and he wasn't sure if Shadis would understand that he'd made the mess as a means to defeat the mess. People might have even ignored the handwritten sign they'd left behind that they were cleaning and to just leave everything in its place and to deposit books by the table at the entrance, making things even messier.
At their current pace, their hard work left them with two more small bookshelves and two tall ones. They might even finish today, but there would need to be a change of pace after Armin had overlooked one detail.
"Hey Bertholdt, you're tall," Armin said as he checked the pile of books left behind by cadets on the table that week but found no other books from the Tales series in it.
Bertholdt, who had been standing around by the door and looking over the mess ahead since they'd entered, turned his head curiously. "Um… Yeah."
"Can you start with the tall bookshelves? I can't reach the top that easily, but you could. I can focus on the ones a little closer to the ground instead. Clean out the top half of each shelf first before you go to the others."
Bertholdt hummed affirmatively, making his way over to one of the aforementioned bookshelves by the wall and starting at the top. Armin took a moment to watch if he could reach it, which he did with ease, not even having to stand on his tiptoes to grab titles off the shelf — back solid, arm at a straight angle as he reached up, posture steady and certain. Fitting for how quickly he'd accepted Armin's instructions.
Armin went over to his own side to get back to work, lost in thought. Somewhere within this mess, he could find traces of an old system someone must've one day set up before they likely finished training and it fell into disarray.
He wondered how easy it would be to maintain his system during training, and especially how long after he graduated, chaos would once more reign with his impact on this little space completely undone. Maybe another cadet would take it upon themselves to become the new librarian. Maybe he could ask one of the first years to carry on the task once Armin was at the end of his training.
Would he have to instruct someone in the best ways of creating order?
"Armin?" Bertholdt interrupted his thoughts from the other side of the room.
"Yes?"
"I wanted to ask something."
"Oh? What is it?" Armin turned his head to look over the bookshelves and found Bertholdt looking in his direction, shoulders jolting when the smaller cadet faced him and exhibiting what Armin was starting to recognise as his hallmark hesitance again.
"Um… Last week."
Armin blinked at him expectantly waiting to go on, digging through his memories to remember if anything noteworthy had happened between them that they needed to talk about.
"When you talked to me about your hometown. Would you mind if I told you a little bit about mine in return?"
Oh. Well, if it only were that, Armin would love to listen. He'd initially pinned Bertholdt down as someone who'd openly talk about himself like he had during their very first encounter, not someone so cautious to suggest sharing his own story. Maybe he just needed the right encouragement.
"Sure! I'm not familiar with the daily life of such small villages under normal circumstances. When they aren't crawling with refugees, I mean."
Bertholdt turned his back on Armin again to resume his work and Armin did the same, waiting patiently for the other to start his story. Clearing his throat, Bertholdt started. "Reiner and I, we… The town we're from was one that thrived on primarily farming and hunting."
"Which town is that?"
"It's not on any maps I've ever seen and I've never met anyone who has heard of it. It's probably not any maps for how hidden it is, because it wasn't that tiny. Several dozen families lived there together but we didn't have much contact with the outside world, so very few people knew we existed."
"Right." That made sense. Armin hadn't seen too many tiny villages scattered across the maps he'd seen of the Walls either. It would probably get pretty busy if they marked every single one.
Bertholdt cleared his throat again, careful to avoid any more cracking. "The part where I lived was a rather tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone. Not every family was as close, though. But the children of the town all knew each other and we usually played together. It's also how I met Reiner. We weren't allowed to leave the borders of the village at such a young age. Too much dangerous wildlife around. No one really left for long because it wasn't that rare for someone from the village to get mauled out in the woods…"
"So entirely different from Shiganshina," Armin pondered. "The light and noise pollution of the city drove away most animals except the ones we domesticated and I'm sure we hunted dangerous animals out of the area. We just had birds and small mammals."
"Mhm," Bertholdt hummed. "We thrived off of the hunt but there weren't enough of us to make any animals go locally extinct. We were taught from a young age. I shot my first gun when I was five."
"Gun? You had access to firearms in such a small village?"
Bertholdt remained silent for a moment, clearing his throat again before he spoke up. "I suppose it is a little weird… My father once told me they were imported together with ammunition from another village. It was much larger than ours, but still small and secluded by city standards. I never thought them to be out of place, they must have had a tighter trade with the city where they obtained firearms."
"I see. That sounds illegal. I doubt that you had permits to carry those." An interesting detail, Armin thought. He considered how firearms would make it so deep into the countryland, but a good supply from one source village would likely do the trick. Even if the Military Police wouldn't be stoked that potential rebels would be armed. The weapons they had must've been obtained by their providers through shady means.
"Yeah… I'm starting to think so too," Bertholdt murmured before adjusting his volume to speaking levels again. "But it's what we had at our disposal. Illegal or not, they made our lives easier."
"Right." Armin nodded to himself. "I'm not judging. I just thought it was funny."
"It is. I suppose that I liked hunting, so I'm glad we had those weapons instead of having to rely on traditional weaponry. I was pretty good at it. Reiner not so much," Bertholdt softly chuckled. "I helped him learn how to shoot, but he preferred to do other activities. He had his own talents, so he usually stayed behind in the village to help on the fields and with the livestock instead. It's how he got so strong."
He paused for a moment and Armin considered asking a few questions, but decided to let Bertholdt speak for himself.
"By most standards, we were poor. We had very little export and only traded with other nearby villages. Sometimes, there was scarcity, but we largely got by. Enough to import goods. We'd trade them for our produce and whatever we crafted from it whenever the suppliers came over. It wasn't like the people who live in the cities, who get by in luxury with relatively little work, but we got by working hard and it was nice. I'd actually prefer it to living in the city, but the city grants me safety so I've made my choice."
"Oh, so the field work after the Wall breach wasn't anything new for you?"
Bertholdt quietly laughed at that, almost imperceivable. "Actually, for me, it sort of was because I was out in the forests so often and didn't work the land as much as the other kids. Reiner was better at it. He has the strength and the stamina for long days of physical activity. I managed, it wasn't nearly as bad as what you told me about how difficult it was for you to adapt to such a life, but I'm better at shooting things from a distance."
"Why is that?"
"Um… It's how I grew up, I suppose. Before my father's illness made him immobile, he'd often take me and a few of the other kids out to learn how to find and shoot animals. We had a hunting dog named Mara who searched the trail of wildlife and chased them out of their hiding place before I shot them and we went to get them. I learned to aim like that. Mouths needed to be fed and missing meant endangering my family."
"Ah," Armin answered. "Is that why your father didn't have much knowledge about the world to teach you? Because he was too ill to experience it himself?"
An affirmative hum.
"What happened to your father?" Armin carefully asked, setting aside a book and grabbing a new one. He still remembered well how Bertholdt had shrugged off the topic the last time and wondered if he'd be more talkative today if he took the risk to ask a direct question like that.
"He got ill. He had, um… I never knew what he had but he became bedbound as I grew older. He's the one who taught me how to shoot, but over the years, he could no longer join us and let us go with other adults and eventually alone."
"Oh. I'm sorry to hear," Armin said as Bertoldt's silence made clear he wasn't going to elaborate. No mother in the picture so far. Maybe she'd come up later, maybe Bertholdt never had a mother. Childbirth mortality rates were far higher in the countryside than they were in the city.
"It's how the world works," Bertholdt eventually said. "Sometimes, people get injured or ill and sometimes they die. I've seen plenty of bodies when a neighbour died and we went to pay respects before they were buried. My father was probably going to become one of them soon. Had, um… Had the wall not been breached."
He was forcing himself to stay strong and not make his voice falter, Armin noticed. Bertholdt did recount once that he had left his village in a blind panic on horseback with no regard for anyone else. He must've felt guilty leaving his bedbound father behind on his own, unable to fight back or run himself.
Armin had seen people die on the fields — from exhaustion or from some disease that did the rounds or just from plain hypothermia. The thought of seeing his parents or his grandfather slowly die in front of him made him shudder. Bertholdt's attitude towards his life made a little more sense if he considered that he was so prepared to face his father's death, let alone after contradicting his own goals in the spur of the moment and leaving everyone behind to die while saving his own life.
The past years must've been hard on Bertholdt, having to process such guilt. It must've been even harder for Bertholdt to know he still wanted to save himself.
"I'm sure that he'd be proud that you've joined the military and that you have ambitions. I think it's what he would've wanted, for you to look after yourself and Reiner."
"Yeah," Bertholdt responded. "I think so too. He would be proud to know I've made it into the military… But he would also want me to come home someday. Even if he's no longer there. That's why I hope that we can drive the titans out of Wall Maria again."
"Is that why it is so important for you and Reiner to go back?"
"Mhm. I suppose I want my home to be mine again, even if that which made it home is long gone. Reiner is all I have left of home now, but I still just want to go back to the actual place. To rebuild and make a home out of it again, I suppose." He paused. Armin opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted at the last moment. "Despite having Eren and Mikasa now, if you could reclaim Shiganshina from the titans and restore it to how it was before the fall, wouldn't you do it? Even if… you know."
"Even if my parents and my grandfather aren't coming back?" A pang of anger gripped his heart as his own words sunk in, all aimed at a government that couldn't bother with its own citizens.
"Yeah," Bertholdt whispered, barely audible and with even more hesitance than usual.
"Of course," Armin said, halting his work for a moment when he found a tremble had infiltrated his movements. "I want to go back too. If we can drive back the titans inside Wall Maria, we should be able to do the same for the titans outside the walls. I could go home. I could even go explore what lies beyond the walls."
"You talk a lot about exploring the outside world."
A smile tugged at the corners of Armin's mouth. "It's my life goal." Armin turned his head and found that Bertholdt had also paused in his work, looking back at Armin over his shoulder before turning halfway toward him when he saw that he was being watched.
"That's ambitious." He eyed Armin down with a look of skepticism. "What do you think lies beyond the walls that warrants looking?"
Oh, Bertholdt didn't even know half of what could possibly lie out there. The things Armin knew could shake this poor sheltered village boy to the core.
Armin licked his lips. With curfew cutting their time together short each time, he'd only gotten so far as talking about Shiganshina itself, not quite as much about the exact contents of his banned book or his desire to leave the walls. They had so long left now that he could unpack it all.
"A little while back, I told you I grew up reading an important book that belonged to my family and you didn't ask me what was in it, remember?" He'd taken the risk that Bertholdt might want to know more, but the other had simply nodded at the information, like he had at most things Armin said that day. Somewhere he'd hoped that Bertholdt would press for details, because he was antsy to spring this knowledge onto someone so receptive. Maybe today could be the day.
Like then, Bertholdt nodded, now turning the rest of his body to fully face Armin as well. "The one you read with Eren? Did you want me to ask?"
Yes. Of course. "Not if I can tell you what was written in there now. What I didn't tell you is that this book was illegal and the Military Police probably didn't want us to have it. So it's better to keep quiet about what I'm about to tell you around others to keep us out of trouble, alright?"
Bertholdt's eyes widened, mouth opening slightly. Then, he nodded once more, closing his mouth again.
Armin had successfully drawn him in. He turned the rest of his body, sitting down and leaning his back against the bookshelf. "I don't just have thoughts about what lies beyond the walls. I know it. Because this illegal book we had details everything that could be found outside Wall Maria."
Looking up at Bertholdt with a glimmer in his eyes, the other's had grown even wider than his. "Everything?"
"Everything." Armin couldn't stifle the jolts sparking through his legs at this reaction.
For a moment, Bertholdt looked away, then he looked back at Armin with a lopsided smile. "Is there so much out there that it can fill an entire book? It can't be that large."
Nodding fervently, Armin placed his palms flat on the floorboards and leaned forward. "Definitely! It even has illustrations. I wish I still had it so that I could show you, but I left it behind outside my home in Shiganshina when we fled. The elements have probably destroyed it by now, but I know it by heart."
"So… What's out there, then?" He looked at Armin expectantly with equal parts skepticism and intrigue in his eyes.
Here it came. Armin balled his fists against the floorboards to keep the tone of his voice in control, knowing full-well he could be half-screaming it out if he didn't. "The world outside the walls is huge, Bertholdt. Far greater than anything either of us could imagine, and the land is far more diverse than anything we've ever seen inside the walls. You can walk for years and still not reach the end!"
"It's that large?" Bertholdt asked, shifting slightly in position on unsteady feet.
"No, larger. Way larger. The area we have within the walls fits inside the world hundreds, if not thousands of times. Envision the largest you can possibly imagine and multiply it by a hundred, that large!"
Bertholdt was stunned into silence, looking overwhelmed by the scale of it all. If Armin were going to convince him of how great that was, he'd better start filling in all that land with breathtaking wonders.
"Can you imagine it?" Armin asked, finally standing up to throw his arms wildly around him, unable to keep them pinned to the floor any longer. "They say that this world has mountains in it that reach the stars and that are permanently covered in snow and ice. That there's large plains of land so hot and dry that all you can find there are rocks and loose sand, and white fields of ice where there were once great lakes, and even flaming water that burns everything it touches. But best of all, that there's an enormous body of water that surrounds all the land with so much salt in it that no merchant could ever exhaust it within their lifetime! Out of everything that's out there, that body of water is the first thing I want to see once we make it out there."
Armin came closer, leaning over the bookshelf between them and looking up with great expectations. Bertholdt noticed his eagerness and turned his unusual look of apprehension into one of cautious interest. "That all sounds so… unreal. I don't have to ask you if you truly believe all of that lies out there when you talk about it like that. I just could never imagine something so gorgeous would really exist," he said, eyes wandering behind Armin as if he got lost in thought.
"That's why I want to go out there. I have to see it, not read about it or view an illustration of it. I truly want to believe it! It's been my and Eren's dream since we were young to go out there and see it together." He peered down, into the stack of novels atop the bookcase in front of him, warmth flooding his chest. "We can take out the titans inside the walls, even those outside it, and finally go see that world together without fear for the first time in walled-off mankind's history. Maybe there will even be a humanity outside the walls again if we reconquer the world from the titans and we migrate to where we once came from."
He looked up again, afraid that he'd lost Bertholdt with all his fantastical claims. Meeting his eyes, for the first time since he started talking about what lay out there, there was amazement and genuine softness in his smile.
"You really want to explore the world, huh?"
Armin nodded. "More than anything in my life."
"You will," Bertholdt said with a surprising amount of gentleness. "You and Eren will both make it to the ocean and every other place you want to see. You've already made it this far for a reason, no?"
A blush crept under Armin's skin at the validation, and as if that were possible, his smile widened even more to the point of the muscles of his cheeks hurting. He looked away briefly to escape the overwhelmingly warm feelings fluttering through his body before an idea entered his head and he looked back at Bertholdt. "And with the titan threat gone, you won't need to hole up in the city anymore to stay safe. You could go wherever you want and do whatever you want instead of just having to survive. You could go see it with Reiner. All of us can go see it together!"
Bertholdt's eyes were hooded at the thought, before he resolutely nodded. "Yeah, we can. We should do that when the world has become better."
"We will!" Armin beamed back at him, sitting down again and crossing his legs over the floor. The feelings of getting to talk about his dreams with someone so open to them were still coursing through his mind, and there was one small thing he wanted to address.
"So you did know about the ocean already?" he asked with a smug look.
Bertholdt's expression slowly sunk into one of mortification that left nothing to the imagination. "Huh? No, I didn't."
"No, you do!" Armin pointed at him. "You called it the ocean when I hadn't named it! You did hear about it before!"
Shaking his head before ceasing all movement in defeat, Armin had to admit that Bertholdt kind of looked like a startled deer. Armin thought his anxiety equal parts humourous and endearing, a subdued voice in the back of his head calling himself out for cornering him in his lie like that.
Bertholdt scratched his elbow and averted his eyes, a subtle pink dusting his cheeks. "Yeah, I… I did hear someone call a large lake with salt in it the ocean once. I didn't want to spoil your excitement by revealing that I've heard of some of the things you're telling me about before. Sorry."
He was such a bad liar, it was almost amusing. Armin could instantly tell when he was making something up, and he'd been right about him lying about the ocean. He dropped the accusing hand onto the bookshelf and let out a victorious and hopefully forgiving laugh before turning around and getting back to work sorting. "That's very kind of you, Bertholdt. But I really wouldn't mind. In fact, now I can ask you what other stories you've heard of outside the walls!"
"Oh," Bertholdt said, getting back to work on his side as well. "Not much. We were occupied with our own things, we didn't have the need to think of what was outside of the walls. We didn't even think about what lay outside our village that often."
Disappointing, but it was what it was. "That makes sense. So you won't report this to the police, will you?" Armin asked.
"Why would I do that?"
"The kids in Shiganshina would call me a heretic for what I'd say about the world. On the other hand, they also beat me up regularly, and I know you could never hurt someone outside of our sparring training. So maybe that's an unfair comparison."
"I would have to be very insecure to beat you up for something like that," Bertholdt chuckled.
Insecure. That they without a doubt were.
Bertholdt was nothing like the common bullies that roamed Shiganshina's streets. For as little as Armin knew him, he was as good as certain that he would never try to solve his problems through violence and would reach for his words instead. The more he thought about it, the more similar the two of them were.
"You probably want to tell me more about what was written in your book, right?" Bertholdt continued. "If you say that there's enough to fill a whole book, then what you've told me sounds like it barely just scratches the surface."
Armin lit up once more at the request. He must've read his book so often that he could practically reproduce every single page in full detail, though he lacked the artistic skills to remake the images that truly fanned the flames of his imagination were he to try to rewrite the book himself. But he could talk about it, for hours, if necessary.
He began his story, recollecting as much as he could remember; sketching out in great detail the variety in biomes unheard of within the walls, recalling the catalogue of all sorts of life that could be found out there, accentuating the vast emptiness that just lay out there — probably free of titans after all of them swarmed the last human settlement left in the world, riddled with wonders and sights to behold. Sights he was certain he'd get to behold with his own eyes one day with Eren by his side. Sights that he very quietly, very secretly, very selfishly hoped would lure Bertholdt into the Survey Corps as well.
No less than two hours later, he reached the end of what he had to tell before he sensed he might be overstaying his welcome as sole speaker. By then, they'd reached the very last shelf and had switched over to placing everything back where it belonged, each working on a different shelf. They even had two new Tales to add to their collection: the third novel, Tale of Valor, and the eighth, Tale of Midnight, leaving them with only the fourth, the sixth, and the ninth novel before they had everything.
Bertholdt had made quick work of putting all miscellaneous work high up on the shelf, Armin's reasoning being that it would be what people looked for the least often, before moving on to history. As usual, Bertholdt had listened, mostly in silence, allowing Armin to gush and muse about his passion without restraint. He was nothing but grateful that Bertholdt listened to him for so long, never seeming any bit uninterested in what he was saying despite his withdrawn nature. For once, it was nice to explain what he liked without the expectation that the other had to share it as well. It was new.
"We've been at work for too long," Armin complained, rubbing his sore back from sitting hunched over like that for so long, then letting himself fall back onto the wooden floorboards for relief. He'd nearly finished up one smaller bookshelf designated as the fiction corner, no clue on Bertholdt's own progress with the history section. "There's so much left but I can't take it anymore," he groaned.
"Do you want a break or do you want to leave?" Bertholdt asked, standing up from where he was at the other side of the library to catch a glimpse of Armin's form sprawled out over the floor, which he apparently found amusing enough to hide his mouth with his hand for a quick smile.
"I don't know about you, but I haven't exhausted all my energy just yet. But I think I've had enough tidying things up for the week."
"Yeah," Bertholdt said as he walked over to Armin's side, sitting down on the floor by his legs, hugging his knees tightly against his chest. "We should have a little while left before the bell rings for dinner."
"Hmm." Armin stared up at the ceiling, pain setting into his legs and wrists now that he was down. "How about…" He propped himself up on his elbows, then stood and walked over to the table at the front of the library under Bertholdt's curious gaze. Returning, he held up Tale of War. "… we read together? You get started on War, I get something of my own. We can discuss what you've read on our walk back. That way I get some of that excitement out of my system and we get to kick back after working so hard! As a reward, you know?"
Accepting the book extended to him, Bertholdt nodded. "That sounds pleasant."
"Good!" Armin said as he clapped his hands together. "You start, I'll go find myself something."
He didn't need to look far to find said something. There had been a book that caught his attention, one called Mercury's Advent, showing a promising plot involving astronomy and witchcraft. He'd put it aside on his secret 'maybe' stack of books and it seemed like the strongest contender among all candidates.
Returning to their lane, he saw Bertholdt had already started and felt content. Armin sat down, opposite to him a little more to the front of the row, and got as comfortable as he could leaning against the wooden support of the shelf behind him. Armin followed suit, starting with the first page of Mercury's Advent, but he soon found that it was difficult to concentrate on his own literature when his eyes were far more interested in wandering over to Bertholdt to gauge his reaction to Tale of War. How much he got done reading today didn't matter. Watching someone else consume that which he adored was satisfactory enough on its own.
Just as Bertholdt was fully immersed in the story, Armin was fully immersed in him. Bertholdt was a fast reader, too engrossed to notice Armin stealing glimpses of him from where he sat, and Armin wondered which of them was the fastest reader. It showed how much he enjoyed it — turning over his pages with the greatest care in the world, book nestled comfortably against his knees that were just far enough removed from his chest to make space for it, expression reflecting the tone of the high-paced action the book opened with.
He'd seen it from a distance, but never this up close. Like this, it felt as if he was being let in on something not many others had the privilege to be let in on, and the confidence of having forged such strong new beginnings flooded Armin's body like a tempest, etching itself into his mind as an overwhelming success.
He could finally say with complete confidence that he had befriended Bertholdt.