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It was the sunflowers. Bright and yellow and completely inappropriate, given his current circumstances. Painfully nostalgic and a curse in the most beautiful of ways.
There was a small field of them, not too far from where he lived, back when he still had a comfortable home. He passed it sometimes. Eventually he decided that the scene was pretty, even with the unappealing stone grey of the wall beyond it. He would have preferred the field to be endless, but he paid extra attention to it anyway.
On simple, lazy days Armin would spend time with Eren and Mikasa, often there among the yellow flowers. Usually playing Eren’s made up adventures or imagining some unreachable part of the world, or relaxing.
One day Eren said, “It kinda matches his hair, doesn’t it Mikasa?”
Mikasa hummed curiously, and in no time Eren crawled over to him, yanking a single flower loose and thrusting it in Armin’s hair. Mikasa sat up and tilted her head, and Eren grinned.
“What?” Armin asked. He could feel his cheeks getting warm.
“You look…” Eren started, still grinning. “What’s the word…”
“Cute,” Mikasa said, with a tiny smile of her own, and he felt his cheeks go from warm to as hot as they could be.
“Cute? Me? Cute?” Mikasa nodded and Eren, not affirming anything, fidgeted and blushed with a redness of his own.
Briefly wondering why Eren seemed to be uncomfortable, Armin promptly asked him “Is it embarrassing?” while plucking it out of his locks, even though Mikasa called him cute. Armin’s head felt much too light. She was probably just being nice.
Armin looked down at the flower in his hand, against Eren’s “No! Put it back on!” He frowned. He didn’t think his hair was that bright.
And so he said “Maybe it’ll look good on you-” and leaned over the short distance to place it in Eren’s. His hair wasn’t bright, Armin thought, but his eyes were.
The sunflower was in Eren’s hair, and Eren had an expression as if he couldn’t quite possibly believe that it could be on his head. But he left it alone anyway, eyes darting from Armin to Mikasa, who was…making something. Armin asked.
“Flower crowns,” she said and, looking at Eren with a soft smile, began to open her mouth.
“I’m not cute,” Eren said immediately, with a harmless bite. “Don’t call me cute.”
Mikasa shrugged and went back to twisting. At the same time, Armin giggled. “Why not? It’s just a compliment.”
“A wrong compliment.”
Beside him Armin heard Mikasa sigh and say, “Take it off, then.”
Shaking his head with the last of his giggles, Armin, before Eren could give the sunflower back to him, said, “No, keep it on, it looks good!”
Eren stared at Armin for a few seconds and then rolled his eyes.
“It probably looks better on you, though.” And then his grin was back as Armin felt something slightly ruffle his hair. He reached his hands up, feeling the soft velvet of the petals circling his head, before stuffing them back between his folded legs.
Mikasa said, “Better,” and Eren nodded vigorously, so much that his flower threatened to fall to the ground.
“Yeah,” he said slowly, quietly. “Yeah, cute,” he decided, despite himself.
Armin thought his hair was too long. And his nose was odd-looking. And every time he cried – which he did far too many times – he’d be some blubbering mess. Fat tears and runny snot. He would have never thought, not for a second…
But Eren and Mikasa did. Armin remembered feeling giddy and thrilled, and wondered at the nature of words – how four letters could make him feel such a way.
He remembered all of that - that incident, that feeling in their past, carefree lives - when three slightly wilted sunflowers were thrust in his face by Mikasa’s hand.
“Where’d you get those?”
Mikasa sat down beside him. “A strange man gave them to me.”
His nose wrinkled and she said, “Nothing happened.”
“Oh.”
“I kicked him in the stomach and he ran.”
“Then something happened.”
There was silence for a moment, and then “I wanted to show these to you. They reminded me of you.”
Armin eyed the light petals, her slightly dirty hands, and then her face – eyes softer than he had seen them in a while. Just like that day.
And then they started, his stupid stupid tears welling in his stupid eyes, because there were sunflowers and Mikasa being nice. And it wasn’t the same, not at all. They were lost and broken and impossibly close to dying every minute.
Mikasa’s eyebrows rose with worry, and Armin managed to keep his tears in.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Thank you.”
Studying him for a few more seconds, she finally got up, satisfied enough, and left with one glance back. For more work, Armin presumed. Scrounging around for food. Something, anything that the three children did to survive.
Armin clutched them to his chest, the lovely sunflowers, and cried.