Work Text:
“Pens?”
“Check.”
“Pencils?”
“Check.”
“Highlighters?”
“Check.”
“Flashcards?”
“Check.”
As he calls out each and every item, Mikasa rummages through the pile of study materials on her rumpled bed sheets. Armin dutifully crosses them off once he sees proof. It’s a good system.
“Text book?”
“Shit-” Mikasa is spritely as she leaps off of the bed, the extension of her long, lithe legs concealed by the black lace of her skirt. She tosses a ratty copy of Frankenstein behind her shoulder, searching through the depths of her school bag. It’s closely followed by a crumpled up, half completed algebra worksheet, the corners of which are adorned with doodles of scribbled figures and some uncharacteristic hearts that Armin knows better than to comment on, lest Mikasa curse him again. Last time that happened, he had nightmares for weeks. “Ha. Text book, check,” She confirms, brandishing the pages in Armin’s direction.
“Right. Now onto the important stuff: energy drinks?”
The clanking of cans in a grocery bag answers his question.
“Candy, too,” Mikasa adds, before he even has the chance to ask, just because she knows he will and likes seeing the tip of his nose get that bit pinker when she surprises him with how well she knows him.
“O-Oh.” (And there it is, that dusty rose creeping up the bridge of his nose.) “Good. Umm…” He shifts his folded legs beneath him - clad, as per usual, in khakis - and casts his eyes around the room awkwardly, as if he were a stranger in Mikasa’s home. Of course, this couldn’t be farther from the truth: Armin spends approximately a 50/50 split at his own home and Mikasa’s. In fact, he was here for dinner just two days ago. While Mikasa supposes she could just put it down to the fact that Armin has a talent for making himself look awkward and uncomfortable - honestly, he spends so much time looking like a spare part, it might as well be a hobby, but then again, so does she - she is also acutely aware of the fact that he has turned down all of Mikasa’s offers for a sleepover for the past six weeks, unless Eren was also in the picture.
Eren . Mikasa didn’t even see what was so great about the new kid. He was so… normal. Unextraordinary. Average. Armin, on the other hand, was entirely one of a kind. He’s special, and intelligent, and passionate, and, for some reason, seemingly obsessed with Eren Jaeger, of all people.
For once, Mikasa was considering the upcoming AP Calculus quiz to be a blessing, because it meant she had an excuse to invite Armin around. Without Eren. And, sure, she had felt a little guilty about the glare she had thrown Jaeger as she had asked Armin to stay at his locker yesterday, but the newbie would just have to get over it. (I mean, he plays baseball, for God's sake. Baseball . Get a grip, Armin.) Besides. She was Armin’s friend first.
“Maybe we should drink an energy drink before we start studying,'' suggests Armin, who wearily eyes the thick textbook Mikasa had produced minutes before. “Since we’re going to be cramming, you know…”
“Good idea,” She concurs. She pops the tab on a green can which she knows to be Armin’s favourite and takes a red one for herself, watching him bring the can to his lips with a sly grin. “Dare you to down it.”
“Oh, you’re on ,” He grits back, any remaining uncomfortable presence in his limbs slipping in to a practised familiarity.
“Three,” Mikasa begins, dangerously.
“Two.” And Armin’s glasses are glinting mischievously.
“One…”
“Go!” They cry at the same time.
It’s not long after Armin wins their energy-drink-chugging contest that the pair run out of excuses to actually put off cramming for this quiz any further. Having gotten dressed for bed ( “We’ll concentrate better if we’re cozy,” ), shared a bag of chips ( “It’s easier to study on a full stomach!” ), eaten some candy ( “Dessert,” ), and then finally brushed their teeth again, Mikasa and Armin have fully exhausted any rational explanations as to why they cannot yet begin studying.
She gives in and works through a few problems from the chapter they were assigned last week. She probably should have done them for homework at some point, but as far as she can recall, she hadn’t. Though, that might well just be because her leg, now decorated with My Little Pony pyjama pants rather than one of her usual skirts, in varying lengths and shades of red or black, is pressed flush against Armin’s silly plaid bottoms that make him look like a grandpa. And that his face is close enough to hers that she can hear each and everyone of his shallow inhales and exhales as he checks over her working out, at her request.
Okay, maybe it had been a ploy to get him closer - but this problem really is tricky, and Armin had always been the better one in math!
“Good,” He murmurs. “You got it!”
“Really? Maybe you should check again. Just to be sure.” Anything to keep him close.
“In a minute,” He decides, after a moment of umming and erring. “We deserve a little break now.”
For one awful, dreadful second, it feels like Armin is going to roll away from her, to the other side of the double bed that is entirely too large for her childhood bedroom with its baby pink walls and butterfly stickers, putting an expanse of contrasting black sheets between the two of them, but instead, he just hooks his leg around hers at the ankle and bounces it a little.
It’s Mikasa’s turn to flush. She feels her cheeks warm up, right on the apples, then quickly looks away. Selfishly, and maybe a little cruelly, she wonders if Eren has ever had this privilege, whether Armin goes touching the bare skin of where his pants slip down his calf a little to just any old person’s leg. She bets he hasn’t. Not at any of the sleepovers the three of them have had together, anyway. But she can’t bear to think about Eren and his stupid normal legs for any longer, now, and even if she wanted to, she couldn’t: a foggy, cloudy haze has settled over her brain, making any kind of rational thought seem impossible. Her common sense has been obscured by the kind of cotton candy they shared at the fair last year, before the stupid new kid had even moved in. She had wondered what Armin’s lips would feel like then, too, except that was the first time she’d ever thought anything like that about her best friend, and she had been vehemently denying her mind the pleasure of daydreaming about it ever since.
Except for recently, of course. She’s not saying the jealousy of Armin making a new friend out of Jaeger made her realise quite how bad the whole… crush situation had gotten, but she isn’t sure she would have realised how much she enjoyed being alone with Armin if that privilege hadn’t been taken away from her. Every weekend spent alone for the past month and a half has been torture, every night that Eren had enjoyed them for their regular video game tournaments had made her heart contort and twist and ache, and having to watch the new kid eat his stupid packed lunch every afternoon made her blood boil. Armin would always frown at her when he caught her staring at him with her jaw set tight, so she tried her best to stop. For him.
She taps her toe against the arch of Armin’s foot. He smiles.
Not much more studying occurs. By midnight, the two are still on their ‘well deserved’ break, and engaged in a deeply competitive Super Smash Bros tournament.
“Get KO'd, Dr. Mario!” Mikasa cries, and promptly misses the character.
“Ha! Nice try, Zelda,” Armin taunts back. “Oh - yes - final smash!”
“Crap, crap, crap-” Mikasa button spams in a failed attempt to dodge Armin’s move. She’s blasted off the stage.
“Game!” Booms the television.
“That was a close one!” Armin half-pants, as if he was actually fighting a magical princess and not just pressing buttons on a game cube controller. In all fairness, it had been an intense game. “Good game,” He yawns.
“Mm,” Mikasa agrees. “I… I always have a lot of fun with you, Armin.”
“I-” The tip of his nose turns pink again, the flush creeping up his cheek bones. “I always have a lot of fun, too, Mikasa.”
“More… more than with Eren?” She asks, trying not to sound surly and probably failing, if the way her lips involuntarily purse into a childish pout is anything to go by.
“What?” Armin scoffs. He’s half off the bed, using an arm to prop himself up on Mikasa’s television cabinet so he doesn’t fall off completely. He switches the gamecube off.
That’s not the response she had been hoping for. She’s about to make some excuse, saying that she’s just kidding, that she has a great time with Eren now, that he’s the third musketeer that they’ve been missing all these years, when -
“Of course I have more fun with you. You’re my best friend. I don’t think… I don't think Eren could replace you. Nobody could. We’re…” Firmly planted back on the bed now, and facing Mikasa, Armin trails off. He takes Mikasa’s hand in his, shyly, barely wrapping their fingertips together. “We’re different from, like, best friends. We’re different from the rest.”
He’s right, of course. She’s always been aware of this fact. Even from childhood, when they were the only kids in elementary school who didn’t have a mom or a dad to come see them in their school play, just a weird uncle whose ripped jeans made him stick out from the rest of the maxi skirts and slacks and a grandpa who was obviously twice the age of all the other adults, she’d known. And she’d known when Armin was teased for having weird long hair and knowing things beyond his years, and when Mikasa herself was subsequently teased for being a crazy attack dog who overreacted when nerds got bullied. And she’d known, deep down, however hard she’d tried to ignore, when they shared that cotton candy when the fair came to town.
(She’d even known when she rubbed Armin’s back after he puked up the cotton candy fifteen minutes later, after a ride on the Waltzers.)
He’s always been right.
“But, you know, I, uh, understand. If you want to be with Eren, I mean. I get it.”
Wait, what?
Crap. She probably should have said that out loud, instead of staring at him with her mouth wide open.
“Wait, what?” Mikasa blinks, picking up her jaw from where it had dropped in shock.
“I give you my blessing. I’m not dumb, Mikasa. I’ve seen the way you stare at him… a boy won’t come between us, you know?” He’s giving her this wise, yet sorry look, the kind that she’d seen on Kenny at Levi’s wedding last fall that he’d threatened her not to tell anyone about, ever, if she ever wanted Armin to stay at their house ever again. It’s bittersweet, and foreign-ly parental, and confuses her even more.
“I- I thought-”
“It’s okay,” Armin soothes. “Just… as long as we still get nights like this, okay?”
“Armin, shut up for a second, okay?” Once the words start coming, Mikasa can hardly stop them. She’s hyper-aware of how blunt she sounds, and while normally she isn’t insecure about that sort of thing, she can’t help but wish this was going a little more poetically. All of the hours spent reading up on Romantic poetry and love letters from classic writers feel wasted at this moment, when her words are all she has to offer and she can’t even choose the right ones. “I… I don’t like Eren. I’m - I’m jealous of him, because all you want to do is hang out with him, and I want you to like me and not him , because he plays frickin’ baseball . Baseball , Armin. You deserve more than a stinking baseball player who can’t even beat a level three CPU in Smash. You deserve - you deserve royalty , not someone so, so normal!”
“And, yeah,” Mikasa continues, gesturing wildly with hands that she doesn’t realise are still intertwined at the fingertips with Armin’s. She doesn’t dare look at him: in fact, she has her eyes so tightly screwed up that she thinks she might be making even more of a mess of the makeup that remained on her eyes after she washed her face when she was getting ready for bed. “Maybe I can’t be enough for you. Maybe nobody can ever be good enough for you, but - I would try. I am trying. More than Eren Jaeger ever will.”
When she finally does open them, he’s looking at her. Not blankly, but sort of… well, she doesn’t know, and that’s a strange thing to not know when you’re looking at your best friend of well over a decade. With a furrowed brow and frowning mouth, Armin scrutinizes her like a math problem that has him stumped. She casts her eyes down to her lap. She can’t bear to look.
“So when you stare at him-?” Armin asks, not appearing to register the fact that what he just said wasn’t a full sentence, or a question for that matter. It doesn’t matter: Mikasa knows what he’s trying to say, sometimes before he even opens his mouth.
“It’s because I hate his stupid face. Have you seen him in class? He looks so fucking dumb, and I’m trying so hard to figure out what it is you see in him,” Mikasa fumes. Just thinking about that vacant look in the kid’s eyes, or the way his mouth always dumbly hangs just a few centimeters open is enough to get her mad.
“I- I don’t see anything in him, Mikasa, I-”
It’s her turn to interrupt him. “But you’re always inviting him to hang out with us! It’s like you only want to be around me as long as he’s there!”
“I was trying to be a good wingman!” Armin protests. “I thought you wanted to be around him, and I was worried that if I was alone with you for too long I wouldn’t be able to- you know, that I would just, just - I don’t know, fall even more in love with you!”
She had expected this moment to feel a lot more significant. Wasn’t there supposed to be a pause, some kind of silent, tense moment, heavy with the weight of the unspeakable being spoken, where they looked into each other's eyes and communicated the rest of it in tender looks and a passionate kiss? It kind of feels like a con. There’s no Moment. There’s no kiss. Mikasa just keeps talking.
“You… You l-love me? ...Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Armin demands. “You’re the prettiest girl in the school. No- the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. And, and, it’s like, you’re the only person who understands me, you know? We just get each other. It’s so easy to just be with you.”
The more he talks, Mikasa realises, the less he stumbles and stutters over his words. Maybe they’re even more similar than she’d thought.
“And I guess I didn’t realise until I thought you liked Eren, because I suddenly realised that if we stopped hanging out like this, just us, my life would be a whole lot worse. And then I thought about the two of you holding hands or something and my stomach just, like, sank, and I realised I want to be that person for you. I - I want to hold your hand, I mean. So I guess what I’m saying is-”
“I like you too, Armin,” Mikasa says. Because she’s tired of waiting, and has been since Armin threw cotton candy up at the fairground.
And it’s as easy as that.
She squeezes Armin’s hands where they’re tangled with hers, and he gasps: Mikasa guesses he hadn’t realised his dream had already come true.
“Thank God,” He murmurs. “That would’ve been really embarrassing if not.”