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There was a better world, somewhere, in which Eren had done this from the start.
Eren had been the one to propose the brief outing to the beach, after months of not-quite-right, after lukewarm quiet and silent stewing over diplomacy meetings gone wrong and wordless training deep into the night. There was warmth in Eren’s request, Armin recalled, listening to the soft clop of grass-muffled hooves as they neared the shoreline, but also a transience. As if things wouldn’t be this way, for long.
A shifting of the tides.
There was a world in which Eren had never pointed past that horizon—past him, through him. He was looking at him now. He was smiling—familiar creases on his face gilded by the low gold sun, painted in warm light—and there was no bright and cold blue smeared over the horizon now. A rich bleeding canvas of scarlet and violet, with a heavy white-hot sun just kissing the lip of the water. Blinding, blinding light.
Without staring at the sun, Armin was just as blind.
The blonde remembered Hange peering at sand under the microscope and showing him the slide—light cutting clean through a crystalline landscape that could fit in a thimble, each grain sparkling and spindly. Learned they were pieces. Broken remnants of twisting, shining shell, of spirals and crowns and grand designs, fragments worn down until their splintered edges dulled, until they lost all form, all sharpness, all voice.
Armin felt, sometimes, crushed under the weight of his words in the same way—beneath that promising gravitas that had always radiated around Eren, beneath some indomitable will that pressed the breath from his lungs. That promise, that belief in a shared dream, that had magnetized him once. Worn down into pieces until he could spill and billow through through the other man’s fingers.
The volunteers had brought them knowledge of what lay beyond the skies themselves—of astronomy, of maps and lenses. And when the metal lip of the telescope eyepiece met his cheek and he stared through, when he watched their planet’s celestial sisters sweep arcs through the sky, crying out helplessly in tongues of light, he understood their loneliness. Watching them felt like staring into Eren’s eyes sometimes, worlds away. But he was here with him now.
There was a world in which the rust of his blood would never paint Eren’s knuckles.
Eren held his face in his hands. And Armin remembered his words.
“All of you are special to me.”
Either way, in any and every world, Eren loved him more than he loved himself.
For Armin, this was enough.