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There’s the gentle rumble of the street outside coming through his shuttered window. The hiss of the frypan, closer. If he shuts his eyes and concentrates, he can even make out the voices of his parents in the other room.
The bed is warm, and Armin has nowhere to be. Only, he does. There is training, drills, reports to be done. The thought makes his stomach drop like he’s missed a step.
I’m dreaming, Armin thinks.
The revelation hollows him: yes, this is only a memory. It’s been a long time since he’s dreamt of home—the camps, perhaps—though he’s woken before with some lingering sense, more feeling than any singular detail. Still, this is so very nearly real. The cotton of the pillow against his cheek. The smell of breakfast, and the cutting clean of the linen. When he stands from the bed, the room seems peculiarly small. It takes him a moment to realise why, that he’s as tall as he is now, not then, as if he’s grown up here.
Muscle memory leads him down the stairs. Through the hall, into the kitchen, where the hiss of the skillet is loudest. His mother is at the stove, and his father at the table; Grandpa must still be in bed, too old now for a farmer’s early mornings. Someone is humming a tune he knows but can’t place, and breakfast is eggs and fried bread. It’s the best thing Armin has ever smelled.
“Armin,” his mother says. Her voice is warm, familiar, but when she turns to look at him, the smile drops off her face. “What’s wrong? Was it those boys again?”
She comes to meet him in the threshold of the door. Her fingers brush the hair from his forehead, a touch so natural it rocks him to the core. She holds his face in her hands. Armin can feel his pulse racing against the heel of her palm as she tilts his head one way, then the other.
“I’m dreaming,” he says thickly. He’s crying, he must be, because her thumb traces over his cheekbone and presses the dampness into his skin. “This is all just a dream.”
It’s a cruel thing to dream about. Nightmares—he’s had plenty of nightmares, even before the wall fell—but now Armin knows there are things so much worse than fear. Things that put hooks in you, tear you open. The physical clarity of his mother’s face here, in his dreams, which in recent times has become so hard to recall. It puts hooks in him. It tears him open.
Armin wakes with a miserable hard knot in his stomach, though his eyes, at least, are dry. By the grey light filtering through the curtains, it will be another hour or two before the reveille sounds. Sleep is yet within arm’s reach. Still, it's not a welcoming thought with the snare of the dream still on his heels.
Armin lifts his head from where it’s pillowed on Jean’s shoulder. His breathing is deep and even as he sleeps, but Jean's frowning as though he, too, is troubled by some dream. Without thinking, Armin reaches two fingers to the furrow of his brow. Jean’s eyes flutter open at his touch. They sleep less deeply than they used to: with their own private quarters, the risk of being woken by a fellow soldier is a non-issue. Well. Unless you keep a bedmate.
“Sorry,” Armin whispers as the fog of sleep leaves Jean’s eyes. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Don’t sweat it,” he says. Jean catches a yawn in his fist and lifts his head to look at the visible sliver of window, just as Armin had done. “... It’s pretty early. Rough night?”
Armin lets himself lie back. He exhales a wobbly sigh. “Just a dream. Not a bad one,” he adds, at the hitch of Jean’s breathing. “No, it just felt… real. Really real.”
The arm curled about his waist shifts a little as Jean strokes his hip. The regularity of it is soothing.
“D’you want to talk about it?” he asks, tilting his head to meet Armin’s eye. The look Jean gives him is bright with concern.
Armin shakes his head. “It’s fine,” he says. He wonders if Jean ever dreams of—home, of Trost, as it was before the breach. It seems too intimate a thing to ask.
Gently, so as not to stab Jean with some errant limb, Armin turns over. He rests his folded arms on Jean’s chest, and his chin in the cradle of them. This way, Armin can make out the finer colour of his irises. The shadows his eyelashes cast. It seems suddenly and urgently important to commit Jean to memory, especially like this—with the softness of sleep still on him, gentle and unguarded as he so rarely is. It makes panic well in Armin’s chest. He studies Jean so long that when he closes his eyes, the pale shape of him in this fading dark remains.
The movement of Jean's hand jars him as he sweeps the hair from Armin's forehead. The touch is familiar in many ways, more so than just an echo of the dream; the way Jean ruffles his hair even now, or how the wind blows it back when he’s practicing maneuvers. How Mikasa and Eren, too, brush it away when it falls before his face.
He reaches for Jean’s hand, catches the fingers in his own a little too tight.
“I’m lucky,” Armin says. In this world, Armin knows, you have to take what you can get. It can be snatched away so easily.
Jean looks at him for a long time. He squeezes Armin’s hand back, and mumbles, very nearly bashful, “What brought this on?”
“I don’t know,” Armin says, because the answer trapped in his throat won’t come. “Just thinking.”
The worry in Jean’s eyes gives way to some fond exasperation.
“‘M not surprised,” he says. “That brain of yours is never not working.”
“A curse as much as it is a blessing.”
Jean laughs at that, and the deep rumble of his chest resonates in Armin’s own. He strokes the delicate lunette at the nape of his neck with his fingertips. “And yet,” he says, “imagine how much worse off we’d be without it.”
Throughout the day, things bring him back to the dream from time to time. The movement of Sasha’s hands as she whittles; Eren’s voice, nothing at all like his father’s (Shiganshina rural-poor), but rather like the same chord from a different instrument; the rattle of gear, reminiscent of cart wheels on cobble. It makes his efforts to forget fruitless.
And yet, perhaps to remember is not so terrible. When Jean’s palm rests against his shoulder, Armin feels the memories rush through him like a torrent of water, and the sting they used to carry has faded. Armin has never lost so much that he doesn’t know how to build them back up again. Family, a home, friends. A reason for living. Looking at Jean’s face, lit up with affection, Armin sees something there worth remembering no matter what lies ahead.