He waits patiently as his eyes dart between rows of blades and bottles of antiseptics that line the table he's seated at.
They always make these procedures look more harrowing than they really are, he figures. There's nothing to be afraid of. Hange knows what they're doing, even if they're always a little bit theatrical in their rush and it ends up leaving a crude impression.
Speak of the devil and they enter the room, bursting through the door followed by Levi who closes it again, before Hange approaches the table and firmly plants both hands atop.
"Armin! How are we feeling? Ready to begin?"
"Have been since I got here," Armin tries to match Hange's enthusiasm. "I'm good to go."
"Great!" Hange says in return, pulling back a chair and plopping down on it. "Your pick where we start."
"Back of the forearm, please."
His answer comes instantaneously while he rolls up his right arm's sleeve to the elbow. He has given the exact location much thought, but ultimately decided that he would be most comfortable with his arms. His upper thighs, the back of his calves, and his back would've worked just as well, but his arms just happen to be far more accessible and allow him a view of what is done with him.
Hange beckons with their fingers. Armin places his arm on the table as Levi approaches to get a better look and Hange grabs a bottle, opens it, and pours some antiseptic fluid onto a cloth before rubbing it over the skin of his forearm. Grabbing one of the knives, a rather sharp-looking scalpel, they then run the blade through the cloth a few times before they put it away and place its sharp end against Armin's skin.
"Little pinch, you'll barely feel it," and they press down, easily breaking his skin as they pull it back and make a cut that's several centimetres long.
Blood immediately seeps out in a thin trail and it stings, but it's not the worst pain he's felt in his life. Still, small tears bud at the corner of his eyes. He looks away, but the cut is already finished before he does.
"Feel anything yet?" Hange asks, leaning close to observe the cut as if something fascinating is about to happen.
"Just a little sting. Nothing out of the ordinary."
"Alright. Why don't you give it a try then?"
Armin nods.
Hange sits straight again, leaning back a little as a safety precaution. One they won't need, Armin reasons, but miracles are never out of the question.
He closes his eyes and the tears that budded at the corners get pushed out by his eyelids. He breathes in to the fullest capacity of his lungs, then out again, before he visualises it: that small cut on the back of his forearm stops bleeding, then begins to knit itself back together, releasing a cloud of hot steam from the seam. The passionate, aggressive way he has seen Eren's many test injuries heal up again. The steadfast, determined way he has seen Reiner mend his broken arm. The slow, passive way he has seen Ymir heal the hole in her stomach. The panicked, fearful way he has seen–
He bites down, hard enough to draw blood out of his tongue, and opens a single eye. The cut is still there, unchanged. His blood is starting to dry against his skin as Hange and Levi both keep their eyes on the wound, the latter more aloof.
Honestly, he's a little disappointed. He expected failure, but a small voice inside him had really hoped that it would go more smoothly. A droplet of healing, maybe. Slow but there. It doesn't look so hard when Eren does it, but Eren has always been a natural at excelling when he's thrown into unfamiliar situations and left to figure it out on his own. This isn't like an academic subject; Armin will have to accept it will take time.
"We just got started, don't worry about it," Hange encourages. "You're doing something your body previously couldn't. It's like having to learn how to flex a muscle you grew overnight. You'll get the hang of it the more you try."
Right.
He closes his eyes and tries again. Like a muscle, Hange said, so he imagines flexing a muscle in his arm that he has not discovered yet. He pulls his hand into a tight fist and releases it again continuously to stimulate the blood flow. He swings his legs between the chair, flexes every muscle in his body before he tries relaxing them and going limp, massages the area in every way he can think of. He gets down in a vertical position, lies on the floor with his legs up on a chair, finds a way to hang his body upside-down, stands, squats, leans, jogs in place until his heart is racing, anything to get his body to experience pressure in a different way.
Levi is long gone by the time Hange looks at the wound with a magnifying glass, then puts it aside and places Armin's arm on the table again.
"Still the same. One more try?"
Armin just nods. He looks at the wound this time, encrusted with dried blood and the skin now red from the growing inflammation as he has for the past hours, and just breathes and imagines. As expected, it doesn't do anything, and Hange pats him on the shoulder.
"Let's call it a day," they say as they let go, grab a clean cloth, dampen it with water, and start to clean the remnants of dried blood off of his skin. "You did your best. You're a step closer to figuring it out than you were at the beginning. Go rest, we've been here for a long time and tomorrow could be a long day."
When Armin leaves the research quarters, it's with the cut in his forearm still as intact as the moment it was made.
The second time they meet up, it's just him and Hange. They start out in the same study and Hange makes a cut with a different blade this time, just below the first one, with the idea that a fresh wound will be easier to heal than an old one and that the pain of the cut will alert his brain to the fact that he needs to heal.
When they book no results, they head for the armoury and each strap on a set of maneuver gear before they head for the northern part of Wall Rose. They walk a little distance atop the wall, to the west, until they are a distance removed from Trost. A life-or-death situation may spark the titan consciousness trapped within his body into healing its wounds to save its shifter, so with Hange's full confidence, Armin jumps off of the wall.
Something happens. Not what they expect, but when he's almost at the bottom of the wall and flexes his fingers to shoot his anchors into it, something explodes out of his wound and he's momentarily blinded as he just manages to anchor himself to the wall and slam against it, the full extent of the crash halted by his hands and knees.
Hange is screaming from above as Armin hangs limp against the wall, shaken and trying to process what he just went through, if he didn't accidentally plummet to his own death, but it's pretty clear: his body tried to transform for him.
He looks at his arm. Where he saw that singular spark that lit up the plains below, the two wounds still remain carved within his skin, unchanged. He doesn't think he has broken anything, but now, every single movement feels like it could accidentally unchain a gargantuan monster, so he doesn't move. He understands why Hange stays atop the wall, peeking their head out from over its border, instead of maneuvering over to check up on him.
Armin makes it back up the wall eventually and is immediately bombarded with questions.
What happened? Why did you do that? What do you mean you had no control over it? Did you heal? What did you feel? How do you feel now? Do you have it under control again?
He doubts that he will be let back into the city until they can tell for a fact what it is that made Armin initiate a transformation sequence that he has never even tried before.
Hange changes plans; asks him to go stand in the middle of a field far away and try to initiate a transformation without letting it come to fruition. He continuously fails to make even sparks appear, and they determine that it was his survival instincts from the fall that made him do something he otherwise could not.
Until Armin figures out how to mend his wounds and he learns how to control his transformations, he is banned from engaging in vertical maneuvering or any other exciting activities.
He doesn't mind; his life has been exciting enough recently and he could stand to take a break.
The third day, all of his friends are present. They were disappointed that neither had told any of them that Armin's titan experiments had begun, so they were with him for moral support, and more importantly, out of curiosity.
Hunched over that table all experiments happen at as they all are, Armin doesn't quite feel like the added pressure will help him. They all stare as Hange makes the third cut in a row, but it's the same as always: he bleeds out of the cold wound a little, and then, nothing happens.
"Have you tried cutting a little deeper?" Sasha suggests.
"Deeper? It's already deep enough, look at the size of those cuts," Jean says with sympathy.
"Maybe a cut isn't right. Isn't there anything in those journals about how they taught those kids these things?" Connie thinks out loud.
"Give him some space," Mikasa tells them as she pushes them away and gives Armin some well-appreciated breathing room.
Eren is the only one who stays quiet. Out of everyone in this room, only he actually knows what he's talking about, but he does not offer Armin any wisdom. Maybe he trusts that just as he figured everything out by himself, so will Armin in due time.
The session ends with Armin walking out of the office alone with three cuts in his right forearm.
The fourth session, Mikasa is there with him before Armin assures her that he will be fine and that she can leave the uneventful stuff to him. It takes him some convincing, but eventually, she leaves.
"Are you sure that this is the right way to do this?" Armin asks when he's alone with Hange again. "Eren learned how to transform and we weaponised it long before he even knew he could heal or how to control his titan. The earlier I learn the most important skill, the earlier we can use it to the defences of Paradis."
Hange shakes their head, finishing their sip from their cup of tea with a vocal swallow.
"And what if you turn to pulp and we don't know how to fix it? What if you turn into a heap of ash? You know what happened to Eren when we overexerted him. The titan you're handling is much hotter than Eren's and it can explode. We can't lose the Colossal Titan to imprudence."
If he turns into a heap of ash, he doubts that any healing can still save him. The same way he almost transformed to survive, his body will sense danger and enable his healing for him, he reasons internally.
It's not that Armin lacks his necessary caution, but it's that despite it having only been little over a week since he obtained it, they still haven't done anything with Armin's titan. The sooner, the better, in case the enemy plans to return soon. They will want both him and Eren now and he needs to pose a threat to that.
If he's going to prove that he's better off alive than dead, he wants to be of use to his homeland and in the same blow show them that holding a destructive weapon doesn't need to mean it can't be used to build bridges and extend peace the other way.
"Have you received any memories yet?"
Armin shakes his head.
"Nothing that will help me in this situation."
"But you have received some already?"
Trench warfare is the term that comes to mind at that question. The sound of a cacophony of gunfire, the smell of burning gunpowder and blood rife in the air, the taste of mud, but no concrete visuals. This must precede when he received the Colossal Titan.
"They're hard to place," Armin answers. "I remember mostly sounds and smells. As I said, nothing that is of any help to anyone. Nothing about his first time."
"Armin! I asked you to tell me when you got anything, didn't I? Why is this the first time I hear about this?" Hange admonishes not as a commander, but as a scientist.
"I'm sorry, it slipped my mind. I hadn't considered it to be a memory of his until you asked me to think back."
Armin's placating goes accompanied by a small, nervous laugh.
Truly, he thought it was one of his own. Better keep that to himself to avoid getting accused of being unable to tell the difference between his own and another's thoughts. Once specific ideas start to show up instead of generic observations, he'll be able to tell the difference more easily.
He leaves the research quarters with four parallel scratches in his arm. He never quite thought about wounds this way before, but it's interesting to see the various stages of healing next to each other.
"Might as well make the best of it while we have time to kill," Hange says on the fifth day, before they've even made a cut. "I want to look at your blood. You won't be using it anyway, let me harvest some from today's cut!"
Harvest. How crude, but it's an accurate descriptor.
"Go ahead," Armin consents.
Hange manages to create three individual slides out of today's wound. While Armin waits for something to happen, they examine them under a microscope, vocalising wonder and excitement before stating that they couldn't see anything interesting and they move on to the next slide.
If it's his blood today, then other parts of his body will likely follow. Armin counts himself lucky that he hasn't figured out healing yet, because he knows very well that they will happily relieve him of chunks of his flesh if it meant they could study them. Rumour has it that Hange is clearing out a storage cupboard and that they aim to collect what remains of the bones that have been crushed beneath molars from Shiganshina, if they don't straight-up reconstruct what's found.
Armin couldn't imagine a more morbid image to remind him of where his own fate lies within thirteen years.
Will they study his remains, too? How much will there be left to bury?
At least he will be buried.
(That's probably what his predecessor thought too.)
The sooner he's done here, the better his chances are of avoiding having to see Hange's souvenirs. He's not sure they would inspire him the way they apparently do the Commander.
Something's been nagging at him ever since they began these harvests. A memory poking into his brain before it has quite emerged just yet, he figures, but it bothers him that he can feel its presence but not its nature. It's not obtrusive, but it does unsettle him whenever he takes note of its presence.
With the growing amount of cuts in his arm, it becomes rare for him to go without small blood stains in the sleeve of his shirt during the evening when he changes or when he wakes up in the morning. Either because of his activities during the day or because of his movements when he sleeps, at least one little wound opens again, but even in his sleep, he never heals.
The sixth session, Hange adds a special substrate to the slides to prepare them differently, but they don't find the special cells they are hoping to encounter.
The seventh, with an apology they don't really mean on their lips, the cut slices deeper into Armin's forearm and they carefully funnel the blood that gushes out into test tubes. They finally decide that keeping him inside and bored for so long would just be torture and they can't do that to Shiganshina's hero (the term makes Armin's stomach roll), so he's allowed to read a book while he tries to activate his healing factor.
The eighth, the ninth, and the tenth all look the same as the seventh, with the exception that Hange starts to carry out various tests on the newer samples as soon as they're ready. Armin isn't sure what they hope to find in his blood, but they're eager to make a new slide to examine under the microscope every single day. Maybe to track changes in them for when he finally does manage to heal, he reasons.
The cuts get more painful as they go deeper under his skin. They chose one of the least painful zones, but that doesn't make them entirely painless. Eren had to learn how to deal with this pain too, but he's always been far hardier than Armin, who was practically born with a weak constitution and the tendency to cry at everything.
Armin knows what they're working up towards. He'll need to be prepared for anything once they figure this out, and that means that he will need to get used to losing limbs and regenerating them.
He stares at the red vials of gore that stand on the table in front of him. A little morbid, to see how much has already been removed from his body. Is it more than the total volume of blood he has inside him?
His face is reflected once in the round glass of each vial. Ten pairs of large brown eyes look back at him, barely recognisable as they are warped and their colour is distorted by the red fluid within.
Then, suddenly, it clicks in his mind what missing link he has been overlooking all week.
It's not a new memory that presses against his brain. It's one he overlooked so badly that he might as well have forgotten that he now suddenly remembers again, wafting into his mind and consuming everything else like a wildfire.
When was the last time he had his monthly bleed?