Nobody will believe me
Nobody seems to care
How lonely, how lonely can you be
I walk around the city, my heart sends out a prayer
Baby, baby, baby, won't you rescue me
It's only after a frying pan that Armin distinctly remembers from Eren and Mikasa's kitchen sails through that window and into his front yard one night that he decides he has to do something.
Eren keeps up the front. Whenever Armin can catch him, coming home from work, going to and from the local gentlemen's clubs or barbershops, he's the picture of gentle, robust charisma. They chat much like they did when he and Mikasa first moved into the neighborhood, dancing around vague hearsay they've gotten of each other's lives in their comings and goings. Armin asks about Mikasa and how they're adjusting, about church, and her enshrining herself in with the neighborhood's flock of bored housewives. Eren wonders aloud about Armin's work and how his home is keeping up, along with his own prospects for marriage, which Armin's not chagrin to admit are fairly bleak. Political turmoil in faraway places and wars fountaining upon poor-nations come up; Eren bashes the globe's woes aside with an intolerable flippancy. "Let them draft us," he boasts. "The fate of the free world's resting on whether or not we stop Marley. It's up to Paradis to save all of these ignorant people, I tell you." To anyone else, be they milkman or mailman or high school canvasseer, they look like harmless afternoon hashing-outs between neighbors.
But that chorus of horror on the other side of his fence continues.
Two different versions of Eren walk around, one of day and one of night and it's an almost Hyde-like transformation he undergoes when Mikasa chooses to have an opinion. He may not be able to understand her very well, but indignation and exasperation come across in ways that transcend language. She's caged, totally, stuck in a maze of anger, and Armin finds it a little terrifying that he's angry, too. Eren's rage poisons into him every time he buys those goddamn roses because for Ymir's sake Armin knows by now why he buys the roses and what they try with so little efficacy to hide.
Eren threw a frying pan at his wife.
Armin's veins burn.
He's just finished setting up the sprinkler in its perfect perch on the fence's beam when Eren whips off the street and up to his garage. In the heat, the great turquoise beast he's driving shivers, mirage-like, invisible obfuscation muddling it against the pavement. Mikasa's waiting for him on the porch, angling her right shoulder to the hot press of the sun in an attempt to keep the red bruise on her left arm hidden. She's outside, after all, and Eren has appearances to keep up. Armin catches it anyway. It's not as though he hasn't had enough practice deducing these things.
"Eren!" he calls with a genial smile plastered firmly on his face. The other man parks, kisses his wife on the cheek, stabs a red bouquet her way (goddamn him) and plods across the immaculate Yeager lawn, his shoes leaving mashed grout in its bladed surface. Everything he does seems to leave wounds. A handshake. Armin has a hard time keeping from recoiling.
"Good to see you, Armin," Eren barks. "All quiet on the western front?"
"Sure is," he replies. "And you? How's little miss Mikasa?"
"Oh, you know her," answers Eren. "She's sewing tonight for the church's fundraiser this Sunday. You remember? The scarves and shawls. I mean, you've bought a few yourself, haven't you?" Brutality dressed in idle suburban babbling. It's Eren's favorite sport. Armin had bought a few of Mikasa's creations and they were exquisite, with elegant designs and tight needlework that kept them together long after poorer-made works would've fallen apart. It's his coward's way of trying to help her, he can't even wear them. He thumbs the space between his belt and his beltloop nervously.
"You are correct," he says. "But, I think you know what I mean. . . . How is Mikasa? The whole neighborhood's been hearing all sorts of racket at night, foul words and everything. You can imagine how it looks. It's . . . unseemly, Eren." The other man's face hardens, his shoulders hunched and tight beneath the cloth of his suit.
"She hasn't been here long," Eren growls. Just a little bit of that veil of his falls away. Armin doesn't like what's revealed behind his eyes. "She's still adjusting to how we do things here in Paradis. What's expected of a woman in this part of the world. I'm just trying to teach her, is all. You know how non-Eldians can be sometimes." A conversation Armin had done his best to forget pops back into his head, and he can see Eren, hunched over the flowering bushes that girdle his lawn, wondering angrily why a caravan of minorities protesting in front of President Pixis' home couldn't just shut up and accept the hand they'd been dealt in life. This is the man he's dealing with, the man that's outed himself.
"Would you mind if I was plain with you, Eren?"
"Be my guest, Armin." He turned to the porch, where Mikasa still stood and silently beckoned. "I'll be in in a moment, darling."
All or nothing. Here's to the end of the madness, the beginning of a jaundiced hope that Eren could be reasoned with.
"Do you have to be so violent with her?" Armin breathes. A tan frown over Eren's face, gravity maligning his lips into a tense, angry line. All parts of him are textured with fury. Armin thinks it might give him meaning. Identity. "Surely there's a better way to naturalize her than to make her hate our people." The glare soars past the slats of the fence and straight into Armin's heart.
"What a fellow does in his own home ought to be his own business. Don't you think, Armin? After all, I don't tell you how to spy on your neighbors." Then he turns on his heels and leaves a trail of foot-shaped cuts in his lawn before Armin can say a word.
The sprinkler's been forgotten all this time, and it sprays his back down in five ice-cold trails. Freezing as it is, fuming in his front yard at something he's so mad he can't put into words, Armin doesn't feel cold at all with the anger billowing in his stomach.