A/N: This fic is heavy on the body horror and unsettling concepts. It contains graphic descriptions of injuries, cannibalism, and pain.
After what he has already faced today, walking into a rusted nail should be the least of Armin's troubles.
His friends think it is a bad idea for him to move so soon, but he needs to get out of the sun and away from where he can see the city. Smoke still hangs over the burning remains of Shiganshina, but anywhere is better than up on that wall where he learned of what went down no more than a few hours ago. So he puts on socks and boots and replaces his borrowed jacket with a shirt before he descends the wall.
He should've been paying attention to where he was going, if only not to walk into the smouldering remains of what had once been a scout. A deep sting sends him tumbling to the ground with a gasp, and when he tears his boot off his foot, his sock is soaked in blood. Steam already rises off the deep puncture wound in a thin line, and the reminder of what he has become sends what little he could fathom to eat into the city's soil.
The streets are littered in old nails, some stuck in upturned planks while others lie loose on the stones, an orange residue coating their metal points. He wipes his mouth and quickly deduces what happened. Removing his sock to remove the still-burning point, he only finds the cavity inside the sole of his left foot. His sock has a hole in it, and when he grabs his discarded boot, he finds a stained entry point where the nail punctured the sturdy leather, but no nail. It must have fallen out already despite how deep it penetrated his foot, despite the fact that he sees no bloodied nail or plank he could've walked into in range.
Will he still need medical care for this, or will it have healed by the time he's back?
Wiping his residual tears with his sleeve, he decides that he has survived much worse than a nail. He rubs the blood dry on his sock and waits until the worst of the flow has subsided, but when it doesn't stop, he resigns himself to pulling his sock over his wet foot and pulling his boot back up to his knee against the throbbing protests of his sole.
Maybe they were right about his ability to look out for himself, because he doesn't dare engage in maneuvering between the rickety buildings when his limbs are still jittery from his injury and has to limp back all the way back to the wall. His foot swells and swelters over the evening despite the steam that rises from it. Eren will have to instruct him on how to consciously heal such a wound.
(Eren does it without trying. What makes Armin different?)
As they find a working cart and living horses and flee the city under the cover of the night, the fresh air finally gives him the presence of mind to understand that while he entered the city with one soul, he left again with two.
It serves no one to feel as horrid as he does, so he doesn't think about it.
A hundred people have a thousand questions.
Is the Colossal Titan dead?
Where is Commander Erwin Smith?
How could you possibly have been chosen?
How could you do this?
Who do you think you are?
What have you done to deserve this?
How are we supposed to move forward from here?
How dare you doom us?
How dare you?
Nothing they throw at him can drag his mind away from his foot. They've covered it up with bandages, but this no longer suffices to hold back the yellow guck that freely flows from the wound and that pins a migraine behind Armin's eyes. It soaks his sock and slowly logs the inside of his shoe in sticky pus. It's one small dot on his body, yet he hasn't felt this much agony in his life as his flesh festers faster than his base healing can counteract it.
No one feels much compassion when he grows light-headed and asks to be excused from the media's interrogation to rest. He's the reason Erwin is dead, after all. He deserves this.
He can't be alone right now.
The lightning bolts that dance in his vision converge into a sharp object when his eyes drift. Everything he sees, hears, tastes, feels, pulls his attention towards that warm object lodged into his flesh. His fingers lay clung into the fabric of his sides and he curses himself for making his first struggle against becoming a titan one caused by a completely avoidable accident.
The sheets stain. His clothes stain. His hands stain. The floor stains. He can't keep changing bandages when they, too, stain within minutes. Yet if it weren't for that gaping hole in his foot, then he would've thought about the other component of his metamorphosis.
His migraine pounds on his skull, yet he knows it's not the only thing going on. Like someone pounding on a door begging to be let out, he thinks, before he decides that metaphor lacks the finesse he'd want it to have.
Like someone poured ice water up his nose and wants them to drown together.
He already decided in Shiganshina that it is pointless to think about any of this, so he instead listens. And when listening to his dysregulated pulse doesn't speed up time, Armin decides that he can't be a burden again and he needs to take matters into his own hands.
Hange examined him when he returned up the wall and couldn't find a thing, but it makes no sense. The nail is still pressing on his nerves, lodged between his muscles and difficult to find. Their new Commander is too busy talking to the press to notice when Armin sneaks some tools out of their underground study and takes them to the bathing halls. By the time his fingers grow too cramped to continue, the hole in his foot has grown twice as deep and five times as wide, yet he has no nail to show for it.
Rationally, he knows that he would have already found it if it were really there. It goes against everything he knows to ignore his gut feeling, but it's the only way he might survive. His brain itches to find what he can so obviously feel is still there, but his body collapses and he has to accept that he has reached his limit.
He sees flashes of an event he does not remember. People he does not know. A hunger he hasn't possessed.
It has already begun.
As he lies on the floor and tries not to pass out from the blood he has spilled on the stone tiles of the bathing halls, he doesn't see when a figure hunches over him and calls out his name, and eventually, he gets carried to the infirmary.
He sleeps for a full day.
It's no problem, he says while he's at the dining table and everyone so clearly saw him hesitate when he opened his jaws to take his first bite of a proper meal since the evening before Shiganshina.
They conspicuously stare at his lips, pause their own meal to watch his teeth crush his bread between his jaws, devour the mystery stew in his bowl, and he knows that they are replaying memories of a sight that he might be lucky enough to never relive.
Is that what they think of him now? How they will remember him? The one who ate his own friend to live another thirteen years?
They were the ones who dragged him between his jaws.
He doesn't know why his mind is this venomous when he's the only benefactor.
What sounds did he make? Did he crack like bread or did he squeeze like stew? Was it wet?
When he excuses himself, he makes it to the lavatories just in time to throw up the five bites of bread he managed before the line of thought became too much inside the toilet's stone basin and not in the hall leading there. There is a reason why it is better not to think about it too much, and this is one of them. He will need to be healthy if he wants to prove that he wasn't a waste of serum, but he can't keep anything down.
Bertholdt no longer exists. The fear he felt is not recorded anywhere and the sounds that he made only still exist in the mind of those who heard them.
Armin carries no blame for what happened. He shouldn't. It serves no one if he does.
So he wipes his lips and goes to the basin to rinse his mouth and splash his feverish forehead with something cool. In his careless dash, the deep wound in his foot broke open again and the inside of his sole is wet.
He sighs and removes his shoe and sock to clean up.
The worst passes with time.
Armin starts to eat again, and eventually, the constant bleeding and seeping of his wound lessens as he's growing more in control of his healing. It seems he will abide.
Few people still stare at him within the Survey Corps. He doesn't leave the headquarters that often anymore, and that probably contributes, but he feels like he slowly stops being the person who ate the Colossal Titan and doomed the Walls and starts being Armin Arlert again.
Sasha is getting better, too. She's quieter than she would usually be, and when he catches word of a vigil she's organising, he only briefly attends together with Historia before he tells them that his foot is acting up and he needs to go back to the headquarters, abandoning the two women alone in the woods with their improvised memorial stone. It doesn't feel right to be there when he is the whole reason they need to do this, and the way Sasha catches glimpses of him, he's not sure he's so welcome.
Sometimes, Bertholdt is there. It's not him, not literally, but it's parts of him Armin can't deny once belonged to another man. The handwork of reloading of a gun whose design is foreign to him. The sound of a deep trembling breath. The smell of blood and urine. The taste of a product he does not know.
But no sight. He hasn't been offered to view his world. Not yet.
He doesn't leave space to think about it too much when he approaches Hange and asks them if he should start training to be able to use his titan. Their yes resonates through his stomach like writhing maggots, but he keeps it together when he finds something to do.
Now more than ever, he reads. It helps him escape into worlds he has never visited and anchors him to something concrete, but when he picks up a work of fiction, it ends with his nails plunged so deep into the sole of his foot that his sheets need to be washed.
When he sits together with Hange and Eren, healing is his first objective. So that when the time is there to transform and something should go wrong, Armin can at least fix it by his own merit. The scratches Hange carves into his arms don't motivate him nearly enough, and even with Eren's guidance, it takes him a full month before the first one steams away at his command.
The practice wounds heal before his foot can. He's embarrassed to admit that he can't stop digging into the wound to find something that is not there, so he doesn't.
Once he has gained control over these powers, he can close the wound and this feeling will vanish. The more he thinks about it, the worse it will itch, so he returns with another dozen books borrowed from the Survey Corps' library to occupy his mind as he sits alone in his room.
He's no beast. He can control himself when he undergoes a sensation he doesn't like.
He promises himself that he will ignore it, the way he has ignored so many other issues, and this time, he believes that he might.
To his surprise, his resolution ends up sticking.
With the proper medical care, the wound bleeds less and less often. It has long stopped steaming, but he can still feel his flesh slowly filling out the cavity—and it scares him more than he likes to admit when that also increases the pressure on the phantom nail that still burns somewhere within his sole.
Bertholdt makes himself at home. Like the cold of October, he creeps into Armin's life at the most unexpected and unwelcome times before melting just as quickly. He shows him his hometown and the people who inhabit it, but only in syllables. He shows him the parts of the infiltration mission that were never clear, but only in flashes Armin then has to reconstruct. He shows him what he felt, but never why he felt it.
A stronger man could probably ignore his weak presence, but Armin would feel rude to look away during his times of weakness.
He can eat breakfast without flinching. His crescent roll doesn't taste as great as it should, so he passes it off to Sasha and decides he will arrive in Hange's study early. He's at a point where he has pretty good control over his healing. He could likely even close off the hole in his foot, but ignoring it means ignoring it in every way he can.
"The day's fast approaching," Hange excitedly announces while rinsing off their scalpel. "The permits might even be approved this time around."
Smoke and wet meat line the inside of Armin's throat. He suggests cutting deeper into his body first before they assume he's ready to heal mortal wounds.
His stew tastes muddy. He observes the others as they eat theirs, but no one seems to complain, so he finishes his own bowl to give his bones some meat to run on and considers telling the chefs to check their potato stock.
Even though it has by no means fully healed, he has gotten skillful at paying the pain in his foot no mind. He barely limps anymore and he can run just fine. He's always survived by being a fighter. He has noticed that he's been getting broader and thicker, if only by the millimetres, and it seems that the effects of his puberty are finally coming through when he comes out two centimetres taller and a few hundred grams heavier than he was at his previous medical examination.
The sweet roll he grabs for breakfast has an ashy taste, yet when he searches, he can't see a thing. Sasha yet again relieves him of his meal, and she would notice mouldy pastry, but she happily devours the roll and licks her fingers when she's done.
Hange's scalpel plunges deep into Armin's abdomen. He screams, of course he does—but they urge him to hold on just a little longer until a wild swing of his arm knocks them away and he tears the blade out of his body. The plume of steam that rises from the wound is thick and he doesn't know if he can do this anymore, so he stumbles out of the study with his guts still hanging out and Hange calling after him.
He opts not to eat today.
The throb in his foot gets worse. The wound is once again red-hot; its pain radiates through his ankle deep into his shin and calf, and the ensuing migraines are back. Hange asks him for tests. Armin says he will throw up on them.
Whatever he needs to do to get rid of this, he will. Dinner tastes of the Karthon bog, including the man who drowned in it, and it takes plenty of water to down his entire bowl of soup without running for the lavatories. It doesn't make sense, yet he does not want to worry his friends. They have enough concerns already; Armin growing into a picky eater after consuming a squirming human being should not be one of them.
Armin has taken to going over his washlists while he lies on that table enduring Hange's attempts to teach him how to heal. Name all the bones in the human body, number of teeth, names of organs, veins, all the rivers in Paradis, the ports of the Walls, edible and poisonous plants, military knots—but today, he gets glimpses of a city he's never been to that don't end within the second, and it's abundantly clear that his second soul is rearing its head. Whether because these tests hit so close to home or for some unrelated reason altogether, he's been seeing things not meant for his eyes with increasing frequency, and he fears that one of these days, a proper memory may manifest.
Tonight, even the smell of dinner rots the inside of Armin's nose. Nothing could force this guck inside him, so he flees the mess hall before anyone has seen him.
He wants to scratch more than anything in his life. Hange leaves him alone with the blade they use to open his abdomen. He's too slow, and by the time they're back, he's only had the chance to stare at his own reflection in the metal and they smile and laugh as they ask him what he's doing.
Nothing. He's doing nothing. That's the whole damn problem.
He's there in dreams, now, too. He just plays along, but sometimes, his vengeful hands do with Armin as they please. Armin lets him.
His stomach caves as he tries to find alternatives. Cheese tastes of rot, cake burns on his tongue, and even the water he drinks starts to taste foul. He craves a nostalgic dish he does not know, something sweet and brown, but he knows that as soon as it touches his lips, it will turn to ash, too.
To deny that something is wrong at this point would be foolish, but there is no one in the world who can help him. They wouldn't understand. Something has grown inside of him, and it is now taking everything away from him. He doesn't doubt the source of his famine, yet as it grows, like the infection that plagues his foot, he can only think to ignore it until its maddening presence somehow vanishes and they won't have to worry whether a malicious force is trying to take a hold of him.
He stands in the middle of a field, because somehow, Hange hasn't noticed that he has yet again lost weight and his eyes are dark. He goes over his usual washlists.
"It's the only way," Hange had said as he fidgeted with the fabric around his calf. "Unless you have survived a major wound once, I cannot trust you to transform."
It's just the two of them because the others would never let them do this, and every step Hange removes themselves from him, Armin switches to a different topic. Days since he graduated. Species of grass. Days since he signed up for the military. Constellations. Days since his father got treatment. Types of bolts and screws. Days he has left to live. Days since he died. Days until–
Hange calls something out. Armin affirms and hears a click.
He swallows hard, his saliva rotten, and when a deafening bang sounds from behind him, he falls forward amid the ringing of gunshots. An explosion right by his side forces him to leave the gutter of his mind. Scrapes litter his palms and knees as he pushes himself up from the bleak mud and the air tastes of iron while he yanks his gun close to his body and runs.
He's shoved. A body falls atop him. A bullet grazes his face. In a blind panic, he shoves the body off him and wipes his stained cheek against his shoulder. Act now or die—so he takes aim and shoots where he cannot see it. Nothing he or his comrades or his enemies scream can drown out the chaos, and when a gun is forced between his eyes, he grits his teeth and men fall in front of him. He wants to run more than he ever has in his life, but the sheer struggle for survival keeps him shooting and fighting and–
And he knows that he got pierced when he's on his back looking up at the pale sky with glassy eyes, his scream dying out within moments until it is reduced to a wheeze. His commander is with him in seconds to cradle his limp body, and he grabs his coat and holds the fabric, whispers, "I don't want to die… You can't let me die… Sir… Please…"
Futile when the bullet has ravaged his lungs and everything he has sacrificed in the past years has been for nothing. His vision blacks out and the noise of the battlefield fades.
Blood seeps out from between his lips. He doesn't mind if the last thing he feels is a taste so sweet.
"Armin!" he hears through the fog. "Armin, are you with me? Armin!?"
Armin.
He grimaces.
What a pitiful name.
When he gasps, the metal clank of a bullet hits the concrete floor beneath him. The sky is dark and he scampers and scoots to get to his feet, but then collapses into the grass again when his limbs are too weak to carry him. Have they left him to die only for him to miraculously survive his gunshot wound?
He taps his pec. His chest is bare but clean of any blood, and when he tries to stand again, he is blindsided and punches his assailant in the throat.
"Hey! Whoa, steady, it's alright! It's me!" Hange yells in a strangled voice as they grasp their neck. "You're okay! You're healed, it's fine!"
He slumps through his knees when their hands make contact with his shoulders and his eyes sting with tears.
"What happened?" Hange asks, and he can't answer. "Did you see something?"
He shakes his head, breath shivering in his throat.
"Armin?"
Armin.
That's right. He swallows hard as it occurs to him.
"Did I do something?" he whispers.
"When I shot you, you ran. And when you couldn't run anymore, you attacked me."
The mortifying revelation is what sends Armin's tears over the edge. "I saw… I…"
"You saw a memory."
Nodding weakly, Armin draws his arms closer.
"What kind?" Hange pries.
"A battlefield."
"A battlefield. Huh. Being shot seems to have activated it. I wonder…"
"No," Armin protests, "it wasn't being shot. It was hearing the gun go off. I'm… I'm pretty sure it started before I got shot, and…"
Blood sits dried in his throat. He swallows and expects the worst, and it hits him like a bayonet to the skull when it is the first thing he has eaten in a month that doesn't make him gag.
He covers his eyes with his hands and pulls his knees close. Hange seems to lose their sternness over his failure and closes the distance between them—and that breaks him, allowing himself to fall forward and clutch the fabric of their coat as their arms wrap around him and he sobs into their shoulder.
"You may have witnessed a formative memory," Hange quietly speaks to him. "One that would go on to dictate the kind of person he would grow up to be. And a horrific one, I can tell. To see what he saw, to feel what he felt, and to live what he has lived through… It is fine to be affected. You shouldn't be the one to feel these things."
They're right. It serves no one to look too deep into these feelings.
But that leaves one important question: if Armin can live through key moments of Bertholdt's life, when will he get to see the most terrifying one of them all?
"Before you can transform," Hange offers no answers, "we have to desensitise you to these triggers. Gunshots, explosions, blood, weaponry. You can't fall into another vivid reality when you control something so destructive."
That is fine by him. Anything to extract Bertholdt's fingers from his brain, he will take.
Armin returns home listless and defeated, limping on an almost fully healed foot with a blistering piece of metal within. Hange descends into their basement as soon as they arrive, as they have important notes to finish. He drags himself to bed unseen, but he knows it to be futile.
He slipped in a way he never has, a way he didn't even think possible—and now, Hange likely believes him to be possessed, or some other nonsensical notion about his control. Whatever it is, the intensity of being pulled out of what he just briefly considered real has him tossing and turning under his sheets.
Something needs to be done about this. Something tried to weave itself into his fabric, and he failed to predict it. It's dangerous if left to do as it pleases. Now more than ever, he needs to get a grip on what's his. Who he is.
The fall of Wall maria?
Victim.
The assault on Trost?
Victim.
The battle at the Reiss chapel?
Perpetrator.
The body double kidnapping?
Victim.
The shootout at Bailey?
Absent.
The battle for Shiganshina?
He bites his lip.
This is not a matter of not remembering. It's a matter of lacking meaningful definition.
But he knows. He has control. No split second of distraction will change that he is Armin Arlert and that he knows that he is Armin Arlert.
This would be a lot easier if he didn't have to work on an empty stomach.
He doesn't want to get up to grab something, it would all taste the same—but then, a recent memory of something that he did manage to stomach tells him he may not have to. Sweet and refined, yet something he instinctively avoids as his tastes lay elsewhere and he quietly thinks it cruel.
The blood that seeped from his mouth wasn't so awful.
Is it simply a meat deficiency? Has he turned anaemia into a spiritual mystery? The Survey Corps isn't known for serving such expensive products to its members. Is this all because he hasn't gotten to eat enough animal products?
No, he knows that's wrong. It would just taste of death like everything else does.
That wasn't animal blood on his lips.
He folds his hands behind his head and squeezes shut his eyes. Most would consider it vile. Right now, all he craves is to get another taste. It's been the first thing in months that wasn't tar in his mouth and it's the first real solution he's had to an escalating problem he can't tell anyone about. If he can't get past his inhibitions, what can he achieve?
He said he'd do anything to move forward.
So he sits up. With his fingers clinging into the bedsheets, he pulls his leg closer and undoes his bandages—why that's the first place he goes for, he doesn't know—and peers into the inconspicuous hole that's been causing him so much trouble.
Maybe that's been the answer all along.
Armin has been flexible since he was a child, so it takes him no effort to bend his leg at the knee and draw his foot by the ankle until his blackened sole sits in front of his face.
When his lips make contact with the shallow wound, the rough texture of his scab brushes against his tongue, and it's not nearly as awful as he thinks it should be. The mud from his sock has knitted into the surface and forms the only impurity in his wound. He rips it off and spits it out despite salivating. Next comes the small amount of white pus that the infection brought about, and finally, when he begrudgingly spits that out too, the wound streams freely.
He starts out apprehensive. Sticks out his tongue, wary of the dirt and sweat that stain his foot after the experiment. Once he makes contact with the thin, red line that coats its edges, he loses his reservation as the sweet taste of iron fills his mouth and he finds himself allured.
It's what he needs to lick upwards, his knee already tired from the position he's in, but he's curious. His tongue slips into the crevice of his foot and his saliva mixes with his blood. Across the surface of his tongue, he sucks in the mixture and swallows, and his stomach lets out a growl, so he repeats the motion, slowly lapping up what he can get.
Once he has started, he can't stop. Something overtakes him, keeps him there; and while he has it under control at first, lapping at the thin stream quickly turns into exploring the walls of his wound with his tongue and lips and pressing deeper inside. And when licking into the wound isn't enough and the flavour dillutes, he refuses to accept that it's over already and instead seals his lips over the cavity and sucks. Pieces of scar and skin tissue let loose, but they're not so horrible. Compared to everything else he's eaten, nothing is—and the hairs in his neck stand on edge and a warmth floods his chest from the wonderful taste of his first proper, enjoyable meal in well over two months. His fingers claw harder into his ankle as it grows tired to keep it against his face and his teeth scrape against his skin as he pushes himself as far into his foot's wound as his face allows him to, and he feasts.
It's not enough. The pressure that builds around the nail hurts, but he refuses to let himself stop, even when he falls backwards after his head started to feel light and he's contorted into an awkward position; even when his stomach starts to cramp and contract and he drinks more, harder, deeper; even when he drips on his clothes. His moves turn frantic and he fails to notice how much he trembles.
It's only when an acidic red substance launches out of his oesophagus that he disconnects from his foot to retch to the side, staining his bedsheets and pillow. Even on the way out, the massive volume his stomach sends back tastes impeccable, and it makes Armin want to reach for the leg that now lies stretched on the bed and is leaking precious blood for more, more, more.
Black dances in his vision and his elbows form an unsteady foundation, so he collapses into the puddle that seeps into the textile beneath him. Maybe he can't make it so far.
No, he has to. It's a matter of life or death.
Crawling onto his side, he curls up to make the access easier and pulls back on his ankle, but the contorted position yet again pushes the fluids that returned to his oesophagus back up, this time burning his throat and mouth as he vomits onto the bedsheets.
He reaches behind one final time to try to bring his foot back to his mouth, but nothing he tries brings his limbs to where he needs them to be. His feet tingle and his arm drapes listlessly over his torso, and as he lies there panting and licking the remainder of what he expunged off his lips, somewhere between that chaos and the fulfilling satisfaction, he drifts into a dreamless sleep.
His eyes shoot open to blaring white. He's coated in cold sweat, his clothes clotted to his bedsheets by the blackened blood he threw up the night before. Judging by the light that shines through his window, it's past the morning, and by the large volume of blood under his leg, he can tell he continued to bleed well into the night.
It's not easy to sneak a full set of bloodstained bed linens past the others unnoticed, but Armin manages to dispose of them anyway. He couldn't explain them if he were to be found out, they're better off gone. It's a shame that one of his favourite sweaters had to succumb to bloodstains as well, but it's better if they don't know.
It doesn't take long to finish cleaning up his room, so he's left sitting on the foot of his bed silently staring at the wall across from him.
Eren never spoke of this. Eren never saw figures. Eren never drained himself of most of his blood in a ravenous famine and then passed out after vomiting most of it up again.
He's a titan shifter, gods' sake, not a vampire. Not an animal. None of it makes a lick of sense.
And yet the worst part isn't that he has done it, but that he doesn't even mind. The memory comes back to him as pleasant and fulfilling. He considers something so self-destructive to be pleasant, on the day when he briefly melded with his second soul. If anyone ever were to find out, it wouldn't look good for Armin.
He's been compromised, there's no more denying it.
And for the first time in a long time, he no longer feels hungry.
He falls back into bed and stares up at his ceiling until Jean comes in to drag him out of his room for being absent during lunch.
He fully expects it to get worse.
Bertholdt will dictate him to try human flesh next. His own, or someone else's. In a week, or in a year.
It's the next logical step, right? If he could compel Armin to do something as foul as drink his own blood from the bottom of his bruised foot, he can make him do it to another. He could make him seek out the recently deceased. Or worse: he could compel him to kill someone to fill this need.
Yesterday's frenzy was certainly enough to make him consider it. He knows that he's better than this now, but what happens when he grows hungry again? What happens when he's in his daze and realises his own body doesn't sustain him anymore? What if he loses control? What if what happened was already a loss of control, a possession by a malicious force that cries out to him for dragging him into hell—why shouldn't Armin join him?
He fully expects it to get worse.
It doesn't.
Bertholdt shows up here and there, like a child pulling on his sleeve to show him something before going his merry way again. Armin does not acknowledge him, and that tends to make him go away faster. They don't meld again. He can easily ignore what he gets, though it paints a completely different picture of him which he does not want to dwell upon. He does not acknowledge what he sees or what it might mean, either. Better not to think about it.
But the biggest change comes when a week after the incident, as he's shovelling his food down his throat and trying not to think about that either, it occurs to him that he doesn't feel the need to retch. The food he's eating is subpar, when he foolishly shifts his attention to its flavour—but it's not rotten. The mess hall doesn't stink of coal and his soup tastes slimy and dull at worst, but he can drink it.
A week later, he gets to enjoy his first tasty, actual meal in three months.
With the passage of time, his dead friend visits him less and less frequently, until he's a mere afterthought in Armin's day to day life and he barely even comes to mind anymore as they plan out their trip to the ocean. His wound has healed enough that when he treads the salted water, it barely stings.
He can't decide whether his humiliating feeding session is to blame, or if he was already on his way to recovery regardless of personal intervention.
Regardless, life can go back to the way it was. To before he felt like a beast. He prefers it this way, and once again resumes ignoring.
A gunshot rings next to him. He jolts, but that's the full extent of his reaction.
Another gunshot. Third, fourth, sixth, tenth. It leaves him cold. The bowl of pig blood under his nose triggers nothing and Eren's titan explosion only puts vague images into his head.
Hange wants to stab him. The others refuse. They don't know what happened in that dank basement, out in those fields, where no one would see. They don't know what Armin suggested, but it feels nice that they stand up for him regardless.
Volunteers come in. They wish to help Paradis, and Armin finds joy in his interactions with people once again as their presence reignites the 104th's spirits and offers them the first sprinkle of hope they've had in a year. Interacting with people from the outside world sets off something in his foot, but has gotten so good at ignoring it that he only notices when he's tossing and turning in his cot.
It will never fully go away, he's not naive to think that—but he allows the recent successes to let him believe that he's recovering.
"You'll never guess what came!"
Hange excitedly waves about a letter. Armin can't grab it.
"What?"
"Permits!"
Armin's heart sinks.
A lot more needs to be done before they can actually go out there and teach him this new skill.
Armin spends much time in his room, unable to let any of the books that the volunteers brought in hook him despite offering so much new information to devour. He finally caves and in the dead of the night knocks on the door to Hange's basement.
"We shouldn't do it."
"What?"
"We shouldn't learn how to use it."
"Huh? Why!?"
"Because we will just repeat the mistakes of the ones who have hurt us. We're better. This is a weapon meant to destroy entire populations, we cannot tread into the footsteps of our predecessors."
Hange covers their face with their hands. Their back and forth lasts over an hour, but finally, they emerge and make their ultimatum.
"You did not choose to inherit the Colossal Titan, but that is what happened. Now, your only job is to ensure that it is used to help the world, not harm it. I cannot let you sit on it and not use it. We will proceed as planned, and that is the end of that."
Armin leaves dishevelled, unable to sleep that night. When he meets the others, he outlines his worries in the hopes that they will be stronger when they are a group, but one by one, they undermine any argument he may have against Hange's plans.
"You've come so far, why stop now?"
"You're more than capable of using it, there's nothing to worry about!"
"We'll be there with you."
"Yeah, and aren't you worried about, you know… getting the serum and not making anything of it?"
"What he meant to say is that we know you can use this to defend the Walls and all of us. We all believe in you."
He doesn't say it, but for the first time since he was revived, he feels like they wield him as a tool. They don't say it, but they need him for what he can do.
Were they always like this? This pragmatic, this cold, this dismissive?
He dismisses it as common sense. He would forget about himself, too, if this much were on the line.
When he descends to the mess hall, his crescent roll has ashy spots in it.
The day of his first transformation, Armin's foot stands throbbing against the inside of his boot to rival the pounding of his atrophied stomach, the friction of his sock like poison on his hot skin. He quietly hopes he might pass out so that he won't feel it when his boot is removed.
When he lets the storm wash over him and he pushes don't think about it too far, he doesn't stand a chance against the nuclear forces that tug at his unsuspecting body. An explosion rumbles the earth as an ocean of boiling blood pours out of the vaguely titan-shaped entity he manages to incarnate. His comrades have to flee the area when their skin sustains burns from his sanguine rain before it can evaporate out of the air and the plains smell of gunpowder.
What they find when they return is skinless and gaunt; an amalgamation of reddened bones covered in gargantuan meat, and when they can finally identify its mass, they find nothing beyond a fleshy spine that still seeps evaporating rivers of blood in arrhythmic pulses and a dead skull that stares into their very souls.
Eren doesn't heed Hange's warning when he transforms and claws into what he can barely call a nape and he digs out what he can barely call his friend.
They believe him dead. Who looks at a meaty spine with a half-filled skull attached to it and still considers that a human being? They played with a power they did not understand and expected a bomb that could level cities not to tear Armin apart. Jean is the one to suggest giving him rest, and the others cry out in anger as if it's an ill-timed joke—but it might be what saves Armin's life. They give in to his absurd last-minute pass and would rather believe Armin is still with them than to consider that pile of gore beyond saving.
Like the failed titan he incarnated, the veins around his spine won't stop seeping. They place him in a tent in the grass before they consider this too dirty and bad for healing and they move him to a tarp that soon stains black. Gentle steam rises off what little remains of him. It's all they have to break through the dread that hangs over the Survey Corps like a storm.
What are they supposed to do? Does he need to be rinsed or do they leave him alone? Can they even offer him sustenance?
They can't touch his hand and be reminded of their comrade's humanity. They can't whisper into his ear it will be alright. They can't brush his hair, can't look at his peaceful face and remember he is a boy, can't offer him the basic hygienic care one would offer a comatose friend. Day and night, they stare at the thin line of steam that seeps out of his nape, too afraid of the day when it stops; too attached to consider whether he feels any of this and put him out of his misery. It fans their anger at a man who is long dead and easy to blame for their decision.
When Hange puts the idea of euthanasia on the table and the others have grown too defeated to come up with a reason not to, as if to prove them all wrong, Armin's arteries finally close up and a sticky layer grows over his spine. It is like the day of his revival all over again—and Connie and Sasha can only laugh in relief and yell for the others as they discover his tarp clean when they come to refresh it.
Every day, a little more of Armin grows back. First, the nubs of his ribs protrude from his spine, and like wings, his shoulders and pelvis branch out from either end. Flesh fills the cavities between his lengthening bones, like cobwebs in the dusty corner of an abandoned room, and the only one of his friends who can still stomach to visit, pale in the face, are Eren and Mikasa when the intricate network of fibres and muscles over his chest has woven itself into a bare heart that pounds into the open air, surrounded only by a cage of ribs.
The aorta comes first, and to everyone's relief, its stubby end does not leak. A network of red threads and strings proliferates over the basin of his spine like a tight-knit fishing net before organic matter weaves around them.
The base of his head is there, but it never completes. His eyes, every time they finish regenerating, wither away again, stuck in a cycle of construction and degeneration. His missing jaw and teeth are long back by the time his tongue grows out of his throat and the internals of his nose lay bare, but his face doesn't seem to want to grace them with its presence.
At the end of the first week since he stopped bleeding, Armin is a cutting board of organs that one by one come back to life as his body neglects to cover them up with muscles and skin. His sternum is complete and between his ribs, his lungs have started inflating and deflating.
They celebrate that day and ignore the strained wheezing that emanates from his regrown throat.
Hange sits by his side day and night, refusing sleep. Two logs have been filled; a third lays open on their chest as they have slipped away for a few hours. Connie's curiosity gets the better of him and he grabs one. He quickly returns it when he shares it with the others and they find that most of the pages are littered with sketches documenting the slow progression of Armin's remains.
Skin comes last. His chest is complete, and one by one, new organs lay gently pulsating across his abdomen and spilled onto the tarp—yet nothing bundles them up into their human shape yet. It's only when the beginnings of dual bones poke out of his pelvis and shoulders that a thin fibre begins to string together his viscera and slowly pull them together into a bag, and that is when the muscles and skin of his torso finally, layer by layer, pull over his torso and give them a place where they can touch him and feel a human being under their fingertips instead of a warm corpse.
That day, a bloodcurdling scream sounds from Armin's tent. Enough of his vocal cords and tongue have regrown that he can finally articulate whatever horrors have flooded his nerves for the past couple of weeks, and no one knows what to do, so they eventually decide that all there is to do is let him scream it out until his vocal cords have depleted and he silently wheezes. There's a cycle to this. First, Armin grows loud. Then, he grows quiet again and heals in a burst. They go through it seven times before his limbs are whole and his face finally seems to slowly resemble that of a human being again.
By then, Armin has given up on making noise.
He doesn't respond when they hug him tightly and he's welcomed back to the world of the living. He doesn't talk when he's fed. He doesn't talk about where he has been and what he has felt. No one asks; or rather, no one who should ask, asks.
They'd rather not dwell upon what happened, and that is yet another red flag in Armin's mind. They should've asked. They should've hated themselves for forcing Armin to go through with this, yet they only consider themselves upstanding for staying by his side all this time.
What are they even there for?
He doesn't deserve their care, but that doesn't mean he can't crave it.
What is their problem?
It's an odd sight—the pale, bare skin of his foot's sole. The wound never quite healed before his transformation. The decision was made for him now that the nail has been decimated for good.
Annoyingly enough, the food he eats still doesn't suffice. He's gotten used to mindlessly swallowing it down, but he's got an inkling of what's to happen next. And indeed, when he reaches his worst, so does Bertholdt. He begs, screams to be heard, and the harder Armin covers his ears and pretends that he is not there, the louder he wails.
In this deafening cacophony, Armin can't tell when he speaks and when he does not.
He was broken, once, too. The others don't acknowledge that it happened or that it may have impacted him. When Hange announces they have acquired new permits to try again, they remain cheerful. Any fear they may suppress is about their own sanity; what they saw and what they cannot forget.
The world is cruel and it does not care for us is gently whispered into his ear throughout the noise. He'll have to go through it all, again, for them. It is times like these when Bertholdt's voice doesn't need to wail particularly loudly inside his head to win Armin over from the others.
He knows better than to lean in. He'll only lose himself to a force he laments he does not understand enough to control. Erwin wouldn't have lost himself, not like this. He wouldn't have been a spiny coward, he wouldn't have listened to Bertholdt, he wouldn't have struggled. It's nothing new that Armin was the worst choice.
Once again, that craving grows. He knows he can fix this within the hour, and the idea of bringing a blade to his room swelters in his mind, but he can't. He decided he wouldn't be a beast, that he wouldn't allow himself to stoop so low and let himself be controlled, but it hurts worse than regenerating from a spine did.
And then, he falls off the face of the earth.
Armin eats like regular. His taste and smell return to what they were before, and now, the voices have quieted down to a mere whisper. He did nothing to end it, and it happened by itself, just like that.
Funny how the world works.
This time, he is not so naive. It won't remain like this. He needs to make the most out of things now that they are fine.
And so he functions, until a new permit arrives a few months later and Hange tells him to prepare for another attempt. He confirms that he has triggers for this, and that anything his comrades ask of him will be at his own detriment.
He sees them laughing at the mess hall table and feels it is directed at him. They murmur and whisper unkindness behind his back. They ask him to keep going, and he wants to beg them for compassion, but knows that it won't come.
His life resembles that of his second soul more and more than it does his own. He leans in and listens to those wailing voices while he lies awake at night, where else is he supposed to go? The more he listens, the quieter they turn and the closer they lure Armin to hear what they have to say, and the closer he lets them walk him into the comforting unknown.
It feels nice not to talk, for once—until he senses the heat of his decision and pulls back before he makes any more mistakes and heads back into his familiar loneliness.
Mikasa is the first one he confides in, quietly one evening not long before he's forced to trek to the fields again, when he suspects they won't be overheard. She's worried, of course she is, and offers pointless suggestions that were Armin's first steps in his recovery.
She doesn't keep it to herself, because the next day, they all come and get him and place him in the mess hall. They cook for him using lavish, expensive ingredients, and he wants to shake them by the shoulders and scream at them, why!? Why would they do something so inconsiderate, so self-serving, so utterly idiotic and thoughtless when they know that this is all wasted on him and nothing helps?
But he doesn't. He quietly shovels everything down his throat the way he has learned to and tells them he feels better already. They believe him. How are they ever supposed to take it well that when he smiles at them, it is not their cooking he salivates at?
The day comes much too soon. Not thinking about anything was what put him in this mess; maybe, if he listens to the noise in his head, things might go better.
The dry ground boils as everything around him quakes. It's not immediately evident what exactly he has incarnated. When the smoke clears, the organism around him has a chest and a pelvis. He's conscious—at least he thinks so, because he can tune into the murmurs that echo through the dark.
He recovers within three days this time, with just limbs, his face, and the organs and skin of his torso missing and no more leaking blood. Hange is ecstatic; he's improving and soon will be able to incarnate a proper titan. Armin nods in agreement and says nothing.
Back home, back to the barracks. Back to the ocean, back to bullying outsiders until they help Paradis or suffer a fate worse than death. Back home, back to regular meals. Back to the fields, back to forming and recovering from an incomplete titan. Back home, back to ash. Back to staring at his ceiling, back to deciding that listening has become too dangerous and being shouted at in futile, infantile retaliation.
When he stands after regenerating both legs following his fifth transformation, something stings the sole of his foot. He has checked it a hundred times over by the time he sits with his fingernails pressed deep into the skin of his heel and a reddened sole before his eyes.
It's in his head.
No entry wound, no nail.
It's in his head.
Any transformation that blew off his limbs should've destroyed whatever may have been inside his body.
It's in his head.
No clothes, no external materials, nothing that doesn't belong to his body has ever survived his transformations.
It's in his head. It's in his head. It's in his head.
Or it's been a part of his body for so long that it now regenerates, like a bone.
He already has his blade in hand and driven the tip into his foot by the time he can stop himself to think. He's not perfect, he won't heal back perfectly either. If it makes no rational sense that this piece of metal has made it back into his body so many times, then it's all in his head.
But the question remains: why is he allowing something to play with his head?
It just makes sense one day. They're going to ask him to kill for them.
Eren's been distant. No one quite knows how to deal with him, least of all his best friend when his head is stuck between rust. The volunteers are cheerful, but whatever new wave of hope they use to inspire the others runs aground in the shoals that his memories have erected around every plan they may come up with.
He tells them that nothing he has seen in Bertholdt's memories is meaningful. It would only convince them that he is losing control.
Bertholdt is afraid of Eren. Armin does not want to be.
Things won't stay this way. Not like this. Not with what he has learned, what he knows the volunteers choose not to tell them. Marley hungers. Armin has figured out something Bertholdt never quite did, and if it is true, then Marley won't stop until Paradis is defenceless against being stripped bare of its resources.
They don't like it, they will fight it until there is no other way—but he knows that he now forms one of the only two lines of defence against that bloodthirsty war machine.
And therefore, they will ask him to kill for them.
They have made him into a monster and now they are going to ask him to kill for them.
It's only then that he realises that he has lost sight of what he is prepared to do to save them. Which parts of himself he still can give up when he has already given so much and they don't seem to see. Of course he will do it. He just doesn't know how he will be able to look his friends in the eyes once he has done his duty and proven that he deserves to live.
Is that what Bertholdt felt, too?
It's no longer a question. He has heard it whispered into the stars, when he refused to fade into the night alongside the others. He has soaked, first by the tips of his fingers and eventually by the root of his tongue, into the desolation that plagued Bertholdt, yet he could not change anything about a man who has long evaporated into the mist.
To ask is to deny that he knows.
And as Bertholdt's voice continues to cry out for him and the others remain silent in the wake of his echo, his urge to lean in closer grows with the day.
Bertholdt has something to tell him, he can feel it. No longer just fragments of time scattered to the wind—but something concrete. Something rears its head, something raw and thrashing that would make Armin gnaw his hand with ravenous intent should he not stop himself by any means necessary.
He never got the full story, but they have spoken about some of the loose details when they thought he wasn't listening.
He was awake.
He was afraid.
He didn't want to die.
He didn't die immediately.
They didn't think far enough ahead to predict where these feelings would eventually wash back ashore. Now, he sees Bertholdt looming in the dark clouds that hang over the ocean, waiting for an opportunity to let his side of the story be heard.
Armin equal parts does not want to hear it and hangs off every word Bertholdt graces him with.
He digs deep into his foot, emptying blood and muscle from the newly-dug cavity but once again coming up empty-handed. It takes him everything not to stuff everything into his mouth and swallow it whole, but he refuses to cave. Bertholdt cannot go; these moments when he reaches out are the only pieces that make Armin feel like he isn't completely broken, so he digs without caving to his demands so that he may stay.
It burns. Gods, does it throb and brand and fester.
But it's better in than out.
While looking into the mirror and trying to remember what he might have once seen in his friend, he realises that the phantom in his memories has lost his face.
He can remember loose details. Words. Bertholdt was tall. He had short, dark hair, and large hands that Armin so loved to feel on his skin, and he was always warm, and he was slightly tanned—but the finer details escape him every time he tries.
Armin is a detail-oriented thinker. Everything else is pristine, but in this snapshot, Bertholdt stands blurred, obscured by a void that only expands outward as time passes. The few times he is fully there, all he sees is a broad back. Never a face. Never eyes.
It doesn't make sense for him to forget. It can't be his fault.
He tries his hardest to remember, but in his frustrations and a failed ploy to touch his own body parts and pretend they are Bertholdt's to see if he can remember what they must have felt like and assign them an image, through a series of deeply shameful events, he ends up masturbating to the fantasy, and his orgasm rips out of Bertholdt the memory of a kiss he was none the wiser of.
A kiss that may have once taken place in the library, when the entire training camp was asleep, including its recipient.
A kiss that felt so filthy, so undeserved that its deliverer admonished himself for even trying when he knew that he had no right to be so close.
A kiss so sweet for an unconscious boy in his lap, akin to a wolf raking a lamb's arteries and leaving it stained in blood—and the shock of the revelation that Bertholdt once believed himself so unworthy of his company that he had to sneak in his displays of affection leaves his head numb for days on end.
Not only has he let a demon pry inside his brain; now said demon also loved him.
For the first time since this started, it feels like a conversation and not a bombardment. Armin prompted him. Bertholdt answered. It feels like consent, like reciprocation after so long of waiting, of yearning. Like softness in a world of teeth.
Like forgiveness, but Armin isn't naive to think this for long.
He could tear at his hair, pummel his teeth out of jaws and gouge his eyes at how utterly unfair it is that he needs to learn about this now, but it wouldn't help anyone. It would just deepen his hunger for what could've been.
It would just make that moment he dreads approach faster when the whole point is that he is powerless.
And then, one day, it just comes.
Almost unassumingly. Armin sits at his desk eating a sandwich, the next moment he lays in the palm of a hand, shouting his lungs out for help, for compassion, for his friends as they watch dead-eyed not him but the titan above him, as he hears his own bones shatter, as his blood splatters out of his skull, as he blacks out.
His wrist is cracked, but it doesn't stop him from stumbling to his feet from the floor he has landed on and fleeing his quarters, swinging open the door to Jean's and screaming questions into his ear.
Jean is dishevelled, half asleep and alarmed by this rude awakening, and none of his attempts to calm the panic in Armin's heart work.
"Armin, c'mon, what the hell… It's the middle of the night…"
"No! You can't just dismiss this, you can't just–"
"What's up with you?"
Armin pulls himself out of Jean's grip. "What's up with you!?" he shouts, probably for all the sleeping quarters to hear, and Jean looks at him with wide eyes that disgust him, like he did that day.
"This ain't like you!"
"How could you do this?" Armin's emotions shout out for him more than he does. Someone's at the door. It doesn't let him stop himself from shoving Jean and continuing his contentless argument. "How could you!?"
He's held back and turns to pull his wrist free from Connie, whose distraught look sends terror into his heart all over again. His torso quavers at each breath, and when they approach him, he darts backwards and stares like a rabbit thrown in front of wolves.
"Don't tell me you saw…" Jean starts but doesn't finish, and his compassion rakes him like ice shards.
"Saw what?" Connie asks, but Jean glares until he's with him, and then he just hums uneasily.
"Be angry at the fucking guy who put you in that situation, then, and not us."
"You are the ones who did that! He didn't want to be there!"
"And we did? What did you want us to do? We needed you to come back, we had no choice!"
"You just stared! You just watched!"
"And you're alive because of it."
That's the worst part, isn't it?
Armin can't hear it anymore. He storms off between them, somehow, to somewhere faraway where they won't find him, and kicks his foot against a wall. It resonates with the dull thud of metal and he screams out into the fields knowing no one who hears it will come save him. He pounds on his head and pulls out locks of hair and scratches on his face until the skin hangs under his nails in patches, but it cannot quell the utter despair clamped around his veins, not unless he finds a way to also tear out his heart.
He wants to fall to his knees and grasp the textile of Bertholdt's clothes, beg and plead and apologise for something he didn't choose to do, something he would've never allowed to happen had he known—he needs him to grab him; to grope him and to feel him; to kiss him and to beat him and to fuck him and to drown him; to dump his cadaver by the side of the unassuming road and to forget about him, as everyone did to him years ago.
Nothing he does or feels will change a thing, but more than ever, he wants to be held by his tormentor, be told it will be fine, be given his absolution.
Bertholdt is quiet. Armin sits alone under an infinite blanket of stars on a pitch black night hoping to hear him, but eventually falls asleep by the side of the dirt road.
He doesn't return home.
He leaves his wrist unattended. It infects and severely hampers him, but he won't heal it.
Together, they wander. Countryland, cities, hamlets, farms, rivers, lakes, plains, forests; limping on a foot that blisters and leaks and a stomach that does not accept food. They come to a sort of agreement, he believes, and it does lessen the degree of his ailments.
Posters carry his face. He convinces someone to trim his locks until all that remains are his forehead bangs he can't bear to lose, the rest short.
His gums bleed into his saliva a few times. It fans his flames at first, but as he leaves the cities for the countryside and waits until the worst is gone, he finds that he no longer stares at the people he passes with that same ravenous lust in his eyes.
He takes it as his cue to finally drag his infected feet back home.
His reception is met with shouts and cries. No one dares touch him. They have lost faith in his sanity, and if Hange wasn't already thinking up a plan to get rid of him, they are now.
But the worst thing is the look on Eren's face. That distant disappointment that strikes at Armin's core, finally makes him feel guilty for leaving them. He cannot look the others in the eyes or risk panicking all over again over what they might do to him, but Eren is vacant.
Not once during his many days away from the others has he felt as abandoned as he does now.
He doesn't see Eren again during the time he spends in an underground cell playing pincushion for Hange as retaliation for his disappearance. They ask why his leg is red and his foot bloody. Armin attributes it to nettles and an infected corn eye and the matter isn't researched any further.
It would be better to resume; to resign himself to what he must do and what they think of him, but leaning into Bertholdt has become such a habit that he can no longer untangle himself.
He wants something he cannot have. He might know more about Bertholdt than anyone else in his life ever has, and it would feel so impossibly cruel not to make that meaningful. Reiner couldn't, Annie refused, and there were no others; if Armin doesn't choose to see him for who he was and feel bad for what happened to him, then no one ever will. And whether that means that Armin loves Bertholdt back, he cannot say.
It does not matter when his actions speak so loud.
So he carries on. Suppresses that terror in his gut when he sees his friends that has only grown since avoiding them for so long, continues to pretend that he trusts them, gets back on their good side—and they surprisingly easily forget about what he has done to them, even Hange. They don't talk about it, because no one talks about anything anymore in this madhouse.
He comes out of his next transformation nude except for his shirt. No blood, no shrapnel. The scouts grow hopeful that he may be able to pull off a full transformation and come out unscathed, fully geared, so they take him out to train weekly, until that single assorted clothing piece turns into two, and then three, and finally, he emerges with the knife and holster strapped around his waist intact.
He goes to bed early as they celebrate their greatest victory yet and stares at the stars.
Somewhere, he had hoped that it would remain hopeless. That he would always emerge an arrangement of bones. That he would be punished for taking what was not his, or maybe even rewarded and spared from having to kill.
But he has no such luck. The Colossal Titan is practically under his control. All that is missing are its ribs, its throat, its fingers and toes, and some of its facial features. With practice, they will come, too.
Nothing about it is fair, so the least Bertholdt could do is be fair to Armin. So why is it, then, that he remains just as cruel?
For maybe a year now, Armin has listened to him; made clear to him over and over that he understands, he forgives, he craves to be forgiven—but none of that mercy is reflected back to him. His stomach cramps longer and deeper than it ever has, and with it come horrific visions he cannot shake off. The burn has ascended as far as his pelvis, leaving him scratching and thrashing. He stands alone, hand in hand with an entity none of the living can see, and has yielded—but none of it is enough, and why? Why isn't it enough? Why can't it ever be enough?
Is Armin not enough?
He's alone with him practically all of his free time, and it was fine, it used to be fine—until Armin develops this sense of not belonging, not being worth it. The same feeling Bertholdt forced upon him about his friends.
Something new grows inside of him. He whispers into the night but is not answered. He digs into his foot in the hopes of finding something. He paces despite not being capable of it. He sits in the corner of his room and reasons, then pleads, then begs.
His plea falls on deaf ears.
It doesn't occur to him just how much it has shaken the foundation of his trust until Connie's hand lands on his mouth during his usual tomfoolery, and instead of acting like a normal fucking human being, Armin's jaws close around him so hard that by the time he finally pulls himself free, he bleeds.
He curses and sobs; asks Armin what the hell that was, and somewhere between Armin getting up and stumbling away from the scene, he can slur out a series of apologies that don't even scratch the surface of what he's sorry for.
That he bit open Connie's flesh.
That he collapses in his bedroom and licks his lips and hands until the skin is raw.
That it takes him everything not to come back for him.
That the taste of Connie is so maddeningly satiating that he can only imagine what it might feel like to cleave muscle from bone, to devour the raw–
STOP
For the love of all that's good, can this just stop?
Clutching his head, gritting his teeth, contorting his body into every shape he can to shake this thirst, biting his fist—none can douse the adrenaline that runs through his stomach. He pounds his foot against the floor, scratches his leg from foot to pelvis until his nails leave red in their wake, and it only makes the urge to run and pounce more unbearable.
This is the price he pays for listening to Bertholdt all these years.
This is the mercy he gets for hearing his cries.
This is the lenience he gets for showing him sympathy.
This is the amnesty he gets for having been helpless to stop the others.
This is because of Bertholdt.
This is because of Bertholdt.
This is because of Bertholdt.
.
.
.
Why did he ever love Bertholdt?
He conceals himself well. They wouldn't have taken him out here if they suspected anything more about his shivering breath, his antsy movements, and his absence from the quarters than a bad week.
A thumbs up signals that everything is ready. They leave him alone, and he stands on quivering legs, focusing on breathing in and out, in and out, in and out, until one breath is much deeper than the others and it fires up his diaphragm with cold nerves and red-hot excitement that rivals the nail that stands burning inside his foot.
One slice, no more. He jolts, then buzzes, and with a loud thundercrack, he makes the world shake as he incarnates around him the titan that will destroy nations.
He's covered in slick muscles and damp heat. No more prying eyes will find him, and that's what he's been waiting for—because he lets out the most bloodcurdling scream he can manage, and another one, until his throat is raw and his lips wet with saliva.
That's what he wanted, right? A way to vent?
Well, tough luck, it doesn't help. He fails to calm himself down, panting and huffing and gritting his teeth over his growl as the heat of his nape intensifies and his sweat and pulse press on his concentration.
Was this a good idea, so soon?
The tendrils that reach deep into his flesh embrace his feet, weave themselves into his festering wound as he feels the Colossal Titan's fearsome heartbeat reverberate through his limbs, like drums of war.
Did he mess up?
The spikes that split his stomach wide open contract in unison; pull on his peritoneum, shift his entrails, prepare to make more space. He scrapes his lips with his teeth and makes the mistake of drawing the blood that splattered during his transformation to his tongue.
For a moment, he hangs suspended completely limp inside the nape of his titan.
And then, he screams.
Thrashes around, pulls on his limbs as hard as he can without moving his titan until he has torn his foot loose from his boot and his leg contorts all the way until his knee is in front of his eyes, pulls his hand loose, and he bites on his lip so hard that it bursts open underneath his teeth.
It's too late. He knows this tale by now. Once started, it's hard to stop, and whatever happens, he refuses to let himself be stopped.
His hand goes for his hip, wildly grasping until it finds what it needs, and his blade has already split his shin into two by the time he knows what he's doing, but he can't stop, refuses to stop. He hacks and slices, inching ahead through his muscles and his tibia and his fibula and he has no space to cut by the millimetre and it is the worst pain he has ever felt and he feels awake and he feels alive, chopping and slashing and–
Snap.
He drops his blade into the cavity, where it hangs.
For a moment, there is silence.
Then, a burst of energy forces him to bite through the scalding pain and he tears his leg free from its final tendons. He can barely see, but he sees enough to see the white metal of that cursed nail all the way through his calf, and it fills him with so much rage that there's no hesitation when his teeth sink into his leg's severed flesh, breaking his jaws tugging at the stiff muscle tendons, wasting not a drop as he swallows it all and pulls fibre from fibre, and for the first time in nearly four years, a calm satisfaction floods his nerves so starkly contrasted against the chaos of his famine that he might just fall asleep. It does not satiate his hunger, but it tames the cravings that he's been keeping under control for the better of four years, and that is enough, enough to make this insane mistake worth his idiocy, his recklessness, his acceptance that he, too, is a beast and it would be cruel to deprive him of his instincts.
There's no build this time around; no careful exploration of his tongue, no waiting for a trickle. He tears his leg apart with his hand, peels the flesh off his bones, swallows whole muscle fibres before their attachment sends them back and he spews meat all over his meal, tears the skin off to better reach what he needs, swallows entire inedible pieces whole—and finally, he migrates to that cursed foot and tears it apart the way he has always wanted to envision it, a sick satisfaction flooding his spine as he leaves no muscle intact, no bone in place, no–
There's a loud crack. He doesn't quite know what happened until through his haze, he notices that pain that shoots through his mouth. A gap lies between his front teeth, boring deep into his nerves and setting cold sweat on his boiling skin. The tension on his jaws vanishes immediately as he's left in complete silence save for the deep tremble of the Colossal Titan's heartbeat, panting through the sanguine saliva that has trickled all the way into his trachea.
All passion evaporated, he apprehensively lets go of that leg. His fingers climb to his lips, and from between them, he pulls a rusted nail.
Much has happened between then and now, far too much to think about—so when he finally gets the room to breathe for the first time in months, it comes as a surprise that it happens in such a mystical place.
Plains of sand, like the ones his book described.
An endless blanket of stars, like the ones at home and in distant memories.
Faces old and new, but not the one he needs.
A strip of light that tears open the sky, more like a waterfall than a tree.
A chance to finally prove himself better than everything they have been saying about him. Everything he has been saying about himself.
The air he breathes is fresh. Slightly saline, like the air by the ocean. Pain doesn't exist here, and neither does the hunger that has rendered him near immobile through their battles, leaving him with just enough energy to pull off a single incomplete transformation.
This is where it should happen.
And it does.
From the tree, there emerges a figure, separated from the others, and that's how Armin knows that this is it. With his head held high, Armin approaches, and this time, he knows fully who he is.
The raid on Liberio?
Victim.
Of Eren's.
The Rumbling?
Victim.
Of Eren's.
The port battle?
Victim.
Of Eren's.
The Battle for Shiganshina.
It's so long overdue, but finally, he knows that there, too, he was the victim. He knows who he is, who he is meant to be, at long last, and so when he approaches Bertholdt and swallows his nerves, he can safely say that it is the most truthfully they have ever faced off as those familiar features flow back into his mind like he never forgot about them in the first place.
What does one say when this is the first time it's so physical?
Simple. The truth.
"I didn't expect to find you here."
Bertholdt's eyes are vacant. Something is holding him back, the same way he fights against his will in the world up above. But he's there. Armin can feel him.
He looks down into his empty hands.
"And I'm sure that you didn't expect to find me here, either. That we would be this close again. That I could finally talk back to you."
He looks up from under hooded eyes.
"But I can. I refuse to be silent any longer."
Bertholdt is the one who doesn't speak. An inversion of their roles. His mouth hangs into a loose scowl, as if to protest the new dynamic, but he lets Armin speak his piece.
"I know you have been hurting," Armin says, and it softens the tension in Bertholdt's face but doesn't eliminate it. "Why else would you cry out to me so long, so loud? You need something from me, but whatever I have tried, it didn't work. You do not answer when I get hurt, so I will not continue maiming myself."
Tilting his head curiously, Armin's words seem to reach Bertholdt.
"You do not answer when I leave my friends, so I will not be alone ever again."
He has to swallow sand.
"And you do not answer to my sympathy, so I will not look down on you by giving you it, either."
At those words, the vacant void around Bertholdt's eyes finally seems to widen slightly. Armin looks up at him with certainty, knowing his full worth, and what Bertholdt can and can't do.
"But if those are not why you were there, then why did you cause me so much suffering? Why did you do what you did? I think I have finally figured it out. There is a thing that could never be rectified, no matter what we tried. So let me try now."
Armin feels confident as he approaches Bertholdt; a head follows him, a body does not. And once close, much too close, as close as he promised himself he would never go again, he breathes in deep before his hands ascend. His fingers land gingerly, his arms stretched all the way above him, atop those shoulders that had once been broken and so thoughtlessly discarded. He clutches textile and pulls, rigid and unyielding, until this much taller body is level with him.
In one last burst, he closes his eyes and leans in, until his lips touch Bertholdt's softer, warmer ones.
Bertholdt does not reciprocate. He remains still as ever, but Armin gives it every bit of warmth, every bit of humanity he deserves; and what he feels differs so much from what he expected; from butterflies or indignation or attraction or humiliation or repulsion or regret or hunger or fear or rejection.
Absolution.
He was right.
The one missing puzzle piece, the one thing Bertholdt was always asking for, was to be loved as he loved others. And now, Armin can finally make him whole and save him from having to scream out at night with no one there to know him.
Armin knows. His throat constricts and a tear rolls over his cheek. He knows. And maybe, that means that he can finally offer Bertholdt the forgiveness he needs.
There is no time here, but the kiss still lasts an eternity. Nothing breaks them apart, nothing could, until Armin remembers the urgency of what is happening up above.
That is how he knows that it is time to let go. They cannot stay like this forever.
His eyes open and look into those shadows in front of him. He pulls away and slowly lets go, and Bertholdt does not immediately get back to his full height, bending back like a windswept tree retaking its original shape. For a moment, Armin does not know what to do.
Something burns in the breast pocket of Armin's shirt, and he understands. He doesn't need to look or feel to know what it is he takes out when he does.
Looking up, he puts on his bravest face.
"This is yours, isn't it?"
He looks down into his hands, a solemn smile tugging at his lips.
"You loved me once, but now you are gone. And it is unfair, but we cannot change this. It is time to accept that what's gone is gone. We need to let go. Both of us. There is no more need for us to fight."
One of his hands extends. It brushes softly against a hand he has not felt in ages, one he has so missed, but chooses not to linger when he pulls it close and turns it over, uncurling every finger. With just a moment of hesitation, his other places in Bertholdt's a red rusted nail, but his fingertips linger over what has essentially become a part of his body as he locks eyes.
"Today, I choose to let go of this. It served its purpose, but now, it is time to stop. This hurt you just as much as it hurt me, but I cannot help you do what I am doing. That is a choice you have to make, and that is peace you reject and pain you have to bear if you are unable to let go."
The gentle expression fades from Armin's face.
"Please, Bertholdt. Let go."
There has to come an end to everything. Armin knows that this is theirs, so he gently folds Bertholdt's fingers back over the nail and lets go of his hand, which falls back to his side but does not let go.
Bertholdt looks on in his ever-constant apathy. Armin has done everything he could; it's all left in Bertholdt's hands now whatever he ends up doing. Whether he might breathe peace or live his final moments drowning in bitterness.
So Armin turns his back on him and chooses to finally leave behind this part of his life.
Much has happened between then and now, far too much to think about—and so much has changed for them.
There has been no more hunger or pain. As far as Armin's concerned, he has been the most regular man to walk the earth as the alliance travelled around a broken world shining a beacon of hope and absolution onto the hopeless peoples they met. The feast at the ambassadors' buffets tastes just fine and the colour and meat have returned to Armin's bones.
Bertholdt sometimes is there, too, but his screams have been silenced since the day the curse was lifted, his echoes all that remain. Memories that Armin made, not ones Bertholdt is giving him. Armin likes to think that he made the right choice; the one Armin urged him to take, the difficult one to forgive and let go, and to die in the peace he was denied for so long.
Now, Armin gets to be that peace.
Where he treads, the world becomes a better place.
Where he talks, his enemies listen.
Where he strategises, he wins.
Where he asks, he gets.
After all, it seems that his life is worth infinitely more than he once convinced himself it was.
He finally has found his happiness.
The shiphands install the boarding ramp that connects their vessel to the harbour. Three long years, he has been away from home, but he has not felt alone for even a second. And at long last, he is given chance to prove himself in the ultimate act of peace and quell Paradis' war machine with nothing but his words.
The Queen and her delegation are already in sight. Those guns will soon become obsolete. This is the last holdout of hatred in the world, and it is time for them, too, to hear Armin's words and let go.
A calm floods Armin's chest and out flows a smile.
Crossing the boardwalk first, he feels good about this next challenge, and as his boot touches the pristine Paradis soil for the first time in three years, through the centre of his foot resonates the dull thud of rusted metal.