Chapter Text
Armin is five years old when he finds out about the names.
It happens like this: He and Eren are sitting together on the floor of his bedroom, hunched over one of his books about the outside world, when Eren suddenly makes a high, keening noise of pain. When Armin turns towards him in confusion, his body is curled protectively over his right arm and his face is contorted into a pained grimace.
Armin freezes for a moment as his mind races, trying to understand what’s happening, trying to find a reason- he has never heard Eren make a noise like that, not even when he was getting beaten up by older and stronger boys on Armin’s behalf- and then he is up and screaming for his grandfather, for help. But Eren is already uncurling, staring down at his wrist, where dark letters now curve across his green-blue veins. Mikasa Ackerman, Armin reads, though the words mean nothing to him yet.
“What does it mean?” Eren asks, shoving his arm towards Armin.
“It’s a name,” Armin answers, hesitant, because he knows just enough to understand that this is not the answer Eren needs.
His grandfather stumbles into the room swearing, just a little too late.
The name belongs to Eren’s soulmate, Carla explains to them later, after Armin’s grandfather takes one look at Eren’s wrist and bundles them up and off to her. Everyone has one, a person who is meant for them alone, who will love them more than anyone else could hope to. Their name will appear on a person’s wrist any time from the day they turn five to the day they turn ten, so that they can find each other, wherever they are. No one knows why this happens, Carla says, only that when people find the person with their name on their wrist, they stay together all the rest of their lives.
“Does everyone get one?” Armin asks curiously. He peers at the neat, precise letters on Eren’s hand in fascination.
“Everyone.” Carla says firmly, but she pauses for just a second too long before answering.
Armin doesn’t notice.
“Did Mother and Father have each other’s names?” he asks hesitantly. His grandfather starts, nearly dropping his teacup in surprise.
It’s mid-afternoon, and they’re sitting in the kitchen in a comfortable silence while Armin flips through a book without any real intent and his grandfather drinks copious amounts of tea. It’s been a few days since Eren received his name, and Armin has spent most of that time trying to build up enough courage to ask that question. It’s not that his grandfather dislikes talking about Armin’s parents, precisely. But Armin cannot deny that there is a distinct sense of awkwardness between the two of them whenever the subject comes up. His grandfather is a reticent sort of man, not given much to emotional conversations, and discussing his daughter and her husband is very difficult for him. Or so Armin suspects anyway. It’s difficult to infer anything when his grandfather gives him monosyllabic replies. Still, he barely remembers either of his parents in any detail and there are some days where he can feel even those scraps of memory slipping away.
Even if they aren’t really his own memories… even then, Armin can’t help but want to gather every last bit of information he can find and preserve them in his head, like some tangible way of proving to himself that they existed outside of his own head, that they were real people, with lives of their own. Which brings him to where he is now, perched uncertainly on a rickety wooden chair in his kitchen while his grandfather squints at him warily over his tea.
“You don’t have to answer or anything,” he adds uncomfortably as the silence stretches.
Then his grandfather sighs heavily, and leans back in his seat.
“No,” he says gruffly. “It’s alright, Armin. You’ve got a right to know.”
“Oh.” Armin shifts in his seat, clenching his hand into fists on his lap. “So… did they? Have each other’s names, I mean.”
“Well, yes.” His grandfather clears his throat. “Your mother got hers when she was seven. She was real pleased about it, if I can recall. Showed it off to all her friends. Wouldn’t stop talking about it for weeks, wondering what your father would be like, that sort of nonsense.”
One of Armin’s clearest memories of his mother is of her laugh. It was a little too loud to be entirely polite, but warm and sunny and genuine. She did talk a lot, or so he thinks. Maybe that was the kind of person she was- cheerful and talkative. Probably popular too, with a lot of friends, but maybe this is just Armin’s wishful thinking. Armin knows he looks like her, because everyone who’d ever known her has told him so, but he doesn’t think he inherited much of her personality. His laugh is like the rest of him. Awkward and short and sort of stilted. Maybe he takes after his father in that respect, but somehow he doesn’t think so.
“How’d they meet?” he asks.
“Right out of school she went to apprentice at that shop round the corner, you know, the jeweler’s?” His grandfather shrugs. “Your father worked at the factory nearby, as one of the engineers. Anyway, one day he was in a rush, I forget why, and he rammed straight into one of her display tables. While they were sorting out the mess she glanced at his wrist and well, that was that.”
“Huh,” Armin says. He doesn’t quite know what he feels about that part of the story. It seems awfully frightening, to just run into some stranger one day and have your whole life turned upside down.
“Anyway, that’s the story.” Armin’s grandfather picks up his teacup and drains it. “Need anything else, son?”
Armin shakes his head, his grandfather gets up to do the dishes, and before long the kitchen has settled once again into a comfortable silence.
After hearing his parents’ story, Armin starts noticing them everywhere. Hannes, for example, wears his proudly, bold letters splashed across half his arm. It’s visible even through the white fabric of the Garrison’s uniform, and only hides when Hannes puts on his jacket. His name is a thick, dark black, and he grins when Armin points it out.
“There are all sorts of superstitions about that sort of thing, you know,” he tells Armin. “All kinds of weird beliefs. My own mother took one look at my name and practically threw a party. They like to say the darker the letters, the more your soulmate loves you or something, you see.”
“That is kind of weird,” Eren agrees, scowling. Armin suspects his distaste has something to do with how faint Mikasa’s name is in comparison to Hannes’ wife’s but refrains from commenting.
“What other things do people believe?” he asks instead. Carla’s explanation had been woefully bereft of any mention of odd superstitions.
“Ah, lots of stuff.” Hannes waves a dismissive hand. “Most of its all rubbish but a lot of people still put a load of stock in it, you know? Like how people don’t want to talk about the outside world because they think it’ll bring the titans down on us.”
“Now that’s really stupid,” Eren says, scowl growing even larger at the mention of titans, and their conversation promptly gets derailed into yet another argument about whether or not people should be trying to go beyond the walls.
He would have forgotten about the names in entirety after that, but it is as though the world is going out of the way to remind him, especially when all the other children in Shiganshina begin to get theirs, one after another. Eren is the very first in their neighborhood, but one of the boys who regularly likes to corner him in alleyways and ridicule him gets his name three months later, and the ensuing drama is public enough that everyone on Armin’s street knows about it before the day is out. His soulmate turns out to be Ilsa Berger, another victim of his, a girl who was plump and shy and routinely bullied because of both those things. When he approached her, filled with an idiotic amount of confidence for someone about to ask out a girl he’d been nothing but cruel to for most of the time he’d known her, she’d responded by pushing him into the nearest canal. Armin is impressed by her guts but slightly disturbed by the attitude everyone else seems to hold towards the incident.
“She’ll accept him eventually,” remarks one of the women who regularly visits Carla in the afternoons to sip tea in the kitchen and gossip. Armin and Eren are reading outside his house, but the words drift through the open window, clear as a bell.
“The names always bring people together,” someone else says with a hum of agreement. “There’s no fighting it.”
This is new information, and kind of disturbing, frankly. Armin had understood theoretically that people with names ended up together one way or another, but he’d never actually considered the implications before. Did that mean people had no choice but to love whoever had their name? His stomach squirmed at the thought. Then something even worse occurs to him. What if he never gets a name? What if there is no one out there for him? Will that mean no one will ever love him?
He shoves the thought away almost as soon as it appears. He’s never heard anything about people not getting their names, he tells himself sternly. There is no point thinking about this.
Eren tugs at his hand impatiently, gesturing at him to turn the page. Armin smiles at him in apology and turns his attention back to their book.
Armin has always been a pessimist, though, and now that he is paying attention it is almost impossible for him not to notice the things that the adults won’t speak of, and so, at two weeks after his sixth birthday, he discovers what happens if a person doesn’t get a name by the age of ten.
The man in question is one of the Garrison, and Armin has known him for most of his life, really. He’s never had real opportunity to notice him before though. He’s short, brown-haired and solemn-faced, quiet with a tendency to hover in the background most of the time while Hannes and Eren tussle with each other loudly, so perhaps this is not a surprise.
That changes the first time he sees one of the drunk Garrison members clap him on the back and sneer, ugly and twisted.
“Johann here will sleep with anyone who gives him the chance, won’t he?” he announces to half the street. “After all, no one’s got a claim on him. So he’s gotta be pretty desperate y’know?
“Let go of me,” the man- Johann- says, quiet but intense.
“Cut that out,” Hannes hisses sharply, jerking his head towards Eren and Armin. Eren is frowning, angling himself in front of Armin the way he always does when violence breaks out.
“Ah, sorry Hans,” the Garrison member slurs, blinking. Hans shoos Eren and Armin away, his smile tighter than usual, and neither of them protest for once. Armin glances over his shoulder at Johann though, and sees that his shoulders are pulled taught; his face is drawn and pale.
So that’s that, he thinks.
He tries to put it out of his head, but the look on Johann’s face sticks with him, stubborn, even when he stays up nights trying to remember his mother’s smile or his father’s eyes.
He can’t help but be angry about that, even when he’s not quite sure who he’s angry at.
Armin is nine years old when he meets Mikasa Ackerman. It’s a little strange; hers is a name he’s known for half his life but he’s never had a face or a personality to match to it. He and Eren have often speculated upon what she would be like; have spent hours during lazy afternoons while they lounge around Armin’s room arguing about whether she is more likely to be tall or short, sweet or sarcastic, dark-haired or light.
He doesn’t think either of them ever expected her to be so quiet.
She’s so silent Armin actually doesn’t notice her in the room for the first few minutes, although to be fair it is the first time in nearly two weeks that he’s seen Eren again, the longest time they’ve been separated from one another since they became friends. The only thing Carla has told him is that Eren needs time to recover from an ordeal, which is worryingly vague information, readily used by Armin’s imagination to conjure up increasingly horrible scenarios for Eren to be subjected to. In any case, he has good reason to be distracted, especially since the first thing that he sees is Eren bouncing towards him, beaming and looking none the worse for the wear.
“Armin!” his friend exclaims happily, pulling him into a hug. Some vague animal part of Armin’s mind that he doesn’t even realize was tense abruptly relaxes at Eren’s smile.
Then he pulls back from the hug and gets a good look at Eren’s neck.
“What happened to you?” he asks in horror.
The bruises aren’t so bad really. They’re yellowing, fading, almost healed in fact. But if they’d taken this long to heal, Armin can only imagine how bad they were in the beginning.
Eren makes a face.
“Nothing?” he says, more hesitant than Armin has ever seen him. He catches sight of Armin’s disbelieving expression and ducks his head, scowling. “Well, not nothing exactly. But I don’t really know how to explain it.”
“And,” he adds, his face pleading now. “A lot of it… didn’t really happen to me or anything. I just showed up at the end and stuff happened and. Well. Stuff.”
He waves a vague hand and looks past Armin as if for help, and it’s only then that Armin realizes that there’s someone else in the room with them.
The girl who is sitting curled in the chair in the corner is pale and skinny, with dark grey eyes that peer at him through hair that falls across her face. She has a red scarf wound around her neck, and one of her hands is buried in it as if she needs to make sure it’s still there.
“Oh,” Armin says in surprise, and takes a step back, nearly bumping into Eren as he does.
“That’s Mikasa,” Eren says, looking grateful for the change in conversation.
“Oh,” Armin says again, this time in recognition. “Um… hello?”
He gets the slightest of nods in response, but the girl –Mikasa- stays silent.
“She doesn’t talk much,” Eren explains with a shrug. “She’s ok though.”
Armin is a little surprised by his ready acceptance. Eren is not always the easiest person to get along with. But maybe that’s because he has Mikasa’s name on his wrist. After all, in a way it’s like they’ve known each other for years. And his parents fell in love almost immediately, didn’t they? This is probably normal.
He rubs his own blank wrist compulsively against his pants. One more year. One more year and he’ll have a name of his own. He just has to be patient.
“My grandfather got me a new book a few days ago,” he says, eager to get back to some part of their usual conversation. Eren’s face lights up in response, and a sense of relief washes over him.
“You’ll let me see, right?” Eren demands happily, and Armin is quick to nod in agreement.
“Yes, of course,” he says, and the conversation devolves into their usual discussion about the world outside the walls.
All the same though, Armin feels the gaze of the girl in the corner the whole time, and he can’t quite shake the uneasy sensation that nothing in his life will ever be quite the same again.
He’s right, as it turns out.
Mikasa follows Eren everywhere, and her presence takes a lot of getting used to, especially since Armin and Eren have never truly had any other friends. And despite the fact that Armin has never even heard her voice, Mikasa’s presence has… well, presence. She might not speak much, but she gives off an aura that’s incredibly difficult to ignore or dismiss, and Armin can’t help but be aware of her at all times. He tries not to resent it, but he’s had Eren for so long, and Eren is really the only person his age that Armin has.
And now Eren has someone else. Someone who seems wholly uninterested in Armin.
He isn’t surprised by her indifference- he has only had, after all, one friend in all his nine years, which tells him a lot about how other people perceive him, and Mikasa seems more than a little traumatized by whatever occurred when Eren was away- but he does find it more than a little awkward. After all, his bullies had never sought out his company to sit across from him in complete silence. Although if they ever found out how uncomfortable it made him, he wouldn’t put it past them not to try it out.
For a while, though, they settle into an odd equilibrium, with Eren and Armin doing their best to carry on as usual, and Mikasa being a constant reminder that things have changed whether they like it or not.
It’s foolish to be jealous, especially since Mikasa definitely needs Eren a lot more than he does, but Armin is just a little anyway.
That all changes on a day about a month after he meets her though, when he knocks on the door of Eren’s house, only for Carla to fling it open and tell him that Eren has gone out with his father for the afternoon, and that she doesn’t know when he’ll be back.
“Mikasa’s here though,” Carla tells him, cheerfully ushering him in. “Hold on, I’ll get her.”
She’s gone before Armin can protest, but he’s not really sure how he could explain to Carla that he and Mikasa aren’t friends, really, that their only real connection is Eren. He’s not even sure if he would explain it if he could- Carla is after all the closest thing to a mother that he’s ever known, and some part of him shrinks at the idea of disappointing her in any way.
In any case, Mikasa and he end up sitting together in Eren’s room, an awkward silence settling down between the two of them. Armin, perched on Eren’s bed, stares determinedly at a crack on the wall next to Mikasa’s head, who’s settled herself into the only chair in the room, a rickety old wooden thing that a grateful patient of Grisha’s had offered as a gift not long after Eren had been born. Armin can’t help but think glumly to himself that he probably knows the chair she’s sitting on better than he knows Mikasa herself.
He’s still racking his brain desperately for something to talk about when Mikasa shifts in her chair and, for the first time ever, speaks.
“You were,” she begins, and then coughs slightly. Her voice is a little hoarse, probably from the lack of use, but sweet underneath that. It’s a little incongruous on someone so solemn, honestly. “You were talking about the ocean. Before.”
Armin just stares at her for a second, genuinely surprised, and she shifts in her chair, her hands fidgeting in her lap.
She’s nervous, Armin thinks, with slowly dawning realization. Just as nervous as me.
He doesn’t know why it never occurred to him this might be the case. It makes sense after all. Armin’s life has changed, but Mikasa’s- Mikasa’s must be unrecognizable. He doesn’t know what happened to her parents, but it can’t have been anything good. All she has is Eren and his family as an anchor, and they were never part of her old life.
Of course she’s nervous having to make conversation with her soulmate’s best friend when all she probably wants is to be left alone with her grief.
Armin feels a stab of empathy so intense that it actually hurts, an ache that flares and fades in a single sharp instant. He understands, he wants to tell her all of a sudden. He knows a thing or two about missing parents too.
“Did you like it?” he asks carefully. There’s a long pause.
“I don’t know,” Mikasa says. She sounds lost. Confused.
“Do you maybe,” Armin hesitates, trying to find the right words. “I have a lot more books at home. You could come look at them if you want. And maybe you’ll find something you want to know more about?”
Grey eyes peer at him cautiously, assessing. Armin holds himself absolutely still under her gaze for a second. Then-
“Okay,” Mikasa says, carefully. She gets up and holds her hand out for him to take. Armin reaches his hand out and tentatively closes it around hers, and she pulls him up and out of his chair. Her grip is strong and sure.
“Lead the way,” she tells him, and, for the briefest of seconds, actually smiles. It’s one of the most beautiful things Armin has ever seen.
They don’t ever discuss it or anything, but from that day on, they are friends.
It is his tenth birthday, and it is the worst day of his life, at least until the day the Titans invade.
But Eren is all but baring his teeth at anyone who even glances at Armin, his whole body bristling with contained aggression, and Mikasa is hovering close in a protective sort of way she usually only utilizes around Eren when he’s picking a particularly stupid fight, and Armin knows he should pull himself together and ignore the glaring empty space on his arm, if only because he wants them to stop looking at him with so much worry in their eyes.
“It’s okay, really,” he tells them, struggling to summon up a smile.
Mikasa frowns. Eren glares.
“Really,” he insists. Neither of them look all that convinced.
It’s been like this since this morning, when he woke up and his wrist was as blank as it was the day before. Armin had kind of known not to hope by then of course- despite the endless number of stories he’d heard about children waking up on their tenth birthdays with a name on their arm, most children who had names got them way before they even reached nine years old. Some small part of him had wanted to believe though, and his chest had gone abruptly tight that morning, when he couldn’t deny it any longer. He didn’t have a soulmate.
His grandfather hadn’t said anything when Armin had brought it up tentatively during breakfast, but he’d rumpled his hair in a rough, affectionate sort of way. When he’d gone to Eren’s house, Carla had stopped her usual bustle over her household chores to lean down and hug him, very carefully, like he was something fragile. Even Grisha had given him a solemn nod and clapped him on the shoulder as he’d left Eren’s house for work, and Hannes had kicked his noisy squad members silent the second they started their usual teasing.
Armin had suggested the three of them go out of the city for the day just to escape the weight of everyone’s attention, but of course, even as they stroll across the grassy fields outside Shiganshina Eren and Mikasa have found ways to swoop around him like hawks protecting their chick all day.
It’s meant to be kind, and Armin wants to take it how it’s meant, but mostly he can’t stand their pity.
“I want you to stop,” he snaps, and it comes out harder and sharper than he meant it to but he can’t bring himself to regret it, wheeling around to glare at the two of them.
“Armin?” Eren says, confused. Mikasa straightens, her gaze on him steady.
“Just stop, okay?” he says again. “I already have everyone else treating me like there’s something wrong with me, I don’t need you two to do it too. I just want…”
He pauses then, struggling, trying to gather his thoughts. “I just want you to act normal,” he finishes, his voice plaintive.
There is a long and awkward pause, wherein Armin cannot bring himself to look at either of them.
“It’s not fair, though,” Eren says fiercely. “You should get someone who loves you. Everyone should love you. You’re a good person. You’re smart and you know all about the outside world. You deserve a soulmate.”
“He’s right,” Mikasa says firmly, her chin set in that stubborn way that means she’s readying herself for a fight.
There is a long pause, during which Armin finds himself suddenly in tears.
“I love you,” he blurts out.
The other two blink at him, faces identically blank and confused. It’s pretty funny, really, Armin thinks, and for the first time all day laughter bubbles up from inside him.
“I love you,” he says again, just because he likes the way the words sound. Just because everyone thinks he won’t every get the chance to say this to anyone, and they’re wrong. With friends like these, he could say it every day and it would always be true.
“…Weird,” Eren decides, but he slips his hand into Armin’s and tugs him further along the path, and Mikasa leans into Armin’s side as they walk, their shoulders brushing, her body warm against his side. They don’t speak much for the rest of the day, but then, they don’t need to.
In hindsight, Armin realizes, for all that his tenth birthday was terrible, he’d been spared the worst reactions to his not having a name.
He comes upon that epiphany not even a week after that day, in one of the narrow alleys that veer away from Shiganshina’s main canal, as he kneels in the dirt and clutches his side, struggling to take a full breath.
“It figures you wouldn’t have a name,” one of the boys standing above him sneers, pressing a foot between his shoulders and shoving. “Who’d want a weakling like you?”
Armin doesn’t have the strength to resist, and his face is pressed hard against the ground almost before he realises it. He doesn’t close his mouth in time, and so the dull taste of dirt mingles with the coppery blood flowing from where his teeth have cut open the inside of his cheek. He should fight back. It’s what Eren would do. What Mikasa would do. But this is a fight he can’t win, and so all he actually does is lift his head and meet their eyes head on.
That just gets him another kick to the head. This time the back of Armin’s head bounces of the wall behind him, and the whole world spins for a minute.
“Stop,” he croaks out. “Please.”
They’re not usually this violent; normally all he’d get were a few insults tossed his way and maybe a bruise or two if they were in a particularly bad mood. Armin wonders, dizzily, if they could somehow sense the weakness in him. It makes about as much sense as any other explanation.
“Stop,” he pleads again, and he really is pathetic, he thinks to himself viciously. They don’t listen, of course. He expected that.
“It’s not like anyone’s going to miss you, are they?” says a second boy, disdainful. “You don’t even have parents.”
That stings more than Armin would like to admit.
“Better not to have parents than for them to regret having me,” he retorts anyway, because what else can he do?
It just earns him another kick. He expected that as well. He wishes that would make it hurt less. It never does.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Eren’s furious voice rings through the back alley, but rescue only makes Armin feel worse. He presses his face against the cool stone of the ground, wishing he could disappear.
“What does it look like we’re doing, moron?” the first boy snorts. Then there’s a sharp yelp, and even through his self-pity and pain, Armin smiles, because that means Mikasa’s here.
“Leave,” she says. That’s all she needs to say. The boys are gone, just like that.
“I wish I could do that,” Eren says grumpily. Armin laughs, and then winces in pain as his ribs protest. Mikasa presses a hand against his back.
“Breathe slow,” she tells him. Armin does as she says until the pain finally ebbs away, the sound of his own breathing harsh to his ears. “Don’t listen to them, Armin.”
“I don’t,” he tells her. “Why do you think they started hitting me?”
Mikasa makes a rueful noise in reply as Eren helps him to stand, taking care not to brush up against any of his injuries.
“Maybe we should see my dad?” Eren says worriedly.
“No,” Armin tells him, grimacing. “It’s just bruises. You turned up really quickly.”
He sees the look that passes between Eren and Mikasa at his words and rolls his eyes. “I promise. Nothing’s wrong.”
“Says you,” Eren grumbles, but he lets it go.
Mikasa doesn’t.
“You don’t deserve that,” she says. Her voice is always so absolute for someone so young. Armin sometimes wonders if she would sound that convincing no matter how ridiculous whatever she was saying was. He’s tempted to ask her to try sometimes; Mikasa’s sense of humour could be strange enough that she might find it amusing.
“They don’t know any better,” he says wearily, brushing down his clothes. “They’re just picking on me because they think it makes them strong.”
“I could educate them,” Mikasa mutters rebelliously. It makes Armin smile, finally.
“Don’t worry about it,” he tells her. “They don’t want to change their minds, so they won’t.”
“Assholes,” Eren declares, taking his hand. “Do you want to go back to my home? I think my dad brought home some new books you might like!”
“Your home it is,” Armin says, struggling to keep his smile in place as they turn away.
The rest of the day passes in relative peace, but Armin never quite forgets the feeling of that foot pressing him into the ground.
It is the worst day of his life.
Worse than the day his parents died. Worse than his tenth birthday, when he woke up and his wrist was bare. Armin is pretty sure there won’t be any beating this.
He, Eren, Mikasa and his grandfather are all packed into one of the ships currently making their way away from Shiganshina as fast as humanly possible. He can still see the city in the distance, and apart from the shattered gates which the Armored Titan had crushed as easily as a child knocking down a toy, the whole scene seems oddly idyllic. Almost normal, to be honest. Every time Armin’s read about war, about cities being conquered, the scene set was one of destruction. Buildings burning, children screaming, chaos taking over. But the only bit of smoke he can see now is actually steam, left over from when the Armored Titan disappeared, and the other people on the boat are deafeningly silent, apart from the odd stifled sob. It’s all so unbearably still.
Well, that almost makes sense, he thinks. What are they supposed to do? What can they do? What happens now?
He can’t think of any answers, so really, it’s no surprise that everyone else is so silent. There’s really nothing they can do apart from wait.
When the Colossal Titan had broken through the wall, Armin had thought it was the worst fear he could ever feel. But the uncertainty of the moment is just as terrifying in its own way, and Armin is somehow sure that there is just as much likelihood of dying in the next few months as there was trapped in the city as Titans poured in.
A sharp movement from in front of him drags him out of his thoughts, and Armin looks up to see Eren leaning his hands against the railing of the ship and staring back down the river, his face intense. Mikasa is next to him as always, but something about her face is drawn and pale in a way it hasn’t been since the first few days after her parents died.
Armin doesn’t know what to do about that. Armin doesn’t know what to do about anything.
He gets up though, and heads over to join them. It’s something to do at least. Maybe it’ll distract him from his uncertainty.
The three of them watch the city together in absolute silence until it disappears on the horizon.