Work Text:
856, Somewhere Overseas
He traced the lines with his fingers, carefully crossing the planes of his chest and skirting over broad shoulders. Armin found himself the slightest bit distracted from the task at hand, too focused on the sight laid bare before him.
They weren’t as red as they once were, no longer as raw, but a deep tan in color. Rippled, almost. Greyish, in an odd way, but not one unfamiliar. The color offset the already olive tone of his skin and the pale sliver of flesh by his shoulder. Still, it was much different than the pinkness of Armin’s hands, the barely blemished skin all over his own body.
The salve he rubbed into Jean’s scars smelled vaguely of lavender but was also oaky. Like the moss on a tree after a long summer’s rain, or the wide and dewy open fields back on the Island on the morning of an expedition.
Armin spared a quick glance at Jean’s face. His eyes were shut and his jaw no longer clenched while he sat on the edge of the bed with Armin slotted between his legs, leaning back on his arms so that his whole chest was accessible. A few pieces of hair had fallen across his cheeks out of their enclosure, but the rest was still tied back neatly in that way he sometimes wore it when they were at home. It was getting long, but Armin certainly didn’t mind at all.
“Does it hurt?” he whispered against his own accord, barely realizing he had said it out loud. He thumbed at the perpendicular lines along the junction of where shoulder met chest, a gnarled bit of a scar that was twisted into his skin and left the slightest impression. Armin vaguely remembered a training accident and Jean’s gear getting snagged years ago, surely healed by now. Still, it looked like it hurt.
Jean huffed a short laugh from his nose and shook his head, speaking without opening his eyes. “You ask me that almost every time,” he chided, the quietness of his deep voice sending a chill down Armin’s spine. There was no real malice to his words, just age-old familiarity with Armin’s curious questions and worrying nature.
He smiled, a quiet breath coming from his nose that echoed Jean’s. “I do, don’t I.” He continued rubbing the salve into careful circles on his chest, dipping his fingers back in the tin to gather a bit more. “Sorry.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Jean said after a passing moment, humoring Armin. “Not anymore.”
He remembered the way the ODM gear bit nasty welts into his own skin when he was younger, but unlike Jean, Armin had no scars left behind as evidence of any of his time as a soldier. Sometimes he wished he did.
Jean was covered in them, branded and marked up. He had that bad shoulder too, the muscle smarting whenever he lifted his arms above his head or moved the wrong way. Armin on the other hand, had skin like a baby. His joints moved with ease, and age was only just now catching up to him, having stalled a bit during his time as a shifter. He was twenty-one, but often he felt just as spry as he did when he was a teenager.
Still, there were small signs of aging, of growing older. Things that came with a life after war, almost as mentally rigorous as the one lived during it.
“You have a wrinkle,” Jean had said to him one night while running his fingers across Armin’s face, examining him in that way he liked to late at night in their bed. He had pressed the pad of his thumb between Armin’s brows, a look of relief written across his face. “Right here.”
There was an odd relief that came with aging.
“Let me get your back now,” Armin murmured, his hand resting softly on Jean’s chest, thumb stroking over the calloused line that stretched from muscle to muscle.
“Hm?” Jean opened his eyes, blinking dazedly a few times, almost like he had been asleep sitting up at the edge of their bed. Armin wouldn’t have minded if he were – it had been a long day.
“Your back,” he repeated, lifting his hand to Jean’s jaw, running his thumb along the stubble he had there. “Lie down.”
Jean stared at Armin, eyes puffy and rimmed red with drowsiness. There was something like a smile turning up at the corner of his lips, and something unspoken passing between their gaze. Armin lingered in it for a moment before he pressed a kiss to Jean’s forehead and tapped his shoulder, urging him again to lie down.
He moved his body, naked except for his briefs that hung low on his waist, and rolled onto his stomach. Their bed was much too small for two grown men, Jean’s long legs stretched out and feet hanging over the bottom of it. Armin sat cross-legged next to him and leaned over to grab the tin of salve from the nightstand.
“How’s your shoulder?” he prompted, knowing that it had been bothering Jean more than usual as of late but that he was often too prideful to discuss it. Armin only knew from the times he had caught Jean seething and gritting his teeth when he moved in a way that irritated it.
He hummed absently and Armin already half-expected him to dismiss the topic altogether.
“Been better.”
“We should go back to the doctor. See if he can do anything about it.”
“He’ll just say the same thing as last time,” Jean said, voice muffled by the pillow beneath his cheek. “Stretches in the morning and before bed.”
Armin sighed and shook his head. “It doesn’t seem to be working,” he muttered, tone pointed. He hated seeing Jean in pain, and hated even more when Jean resigned himself to it.
“No,” he whispered back admittedly. “It’s not. I’m okay though, so please don’t worry.”
Armin took more of the salve onto his fingers, rubbing it in his hands to warm it before kneading into the marks on Jean’s upper back. He hissed at the pressure, tensing for a moment before melting back into the mattress.
“Sorry,” Armin murmured, frowning a bit. “You’re tense back here.”
“‘S’alright,” he slurred, nuzzling his face deeper into the pillow, voice laden with sleepiness. “Feels good.”
Seeing Jean this peaceful amidst the stress of their lives always brought a smile to Armin’s face. He liked knowing that he was able to relax sometimes, even if just for a small moment every now and again, though Armin would never tell him about the few stray grey hairs he could see toward the back of his head.
Armin took a simple pleasure in knowing that Jean was aging as well, and he was sure that his relief must have been quite familiar to how Jean felt whenever he found a new line on Armin’s face.
Within minutes he was snoring softly, lips parted just a bit and eyelids fluttering. Armin continued to rub the salve into his skin until it was no longer greasy before he pulled the sheet up over Jean’s shoulders. He laid himself next to Jean and brushed the soft locks of hair from his forehead, tucking them behind his ear.
Armin knew he likely wouldn’t be sleeping tonight, insomnia seeming to worsen with each passing day, but looking at Jean’s face, so relaxed and devoid of its usually hard lines and anxious nature, brought him at least some small bit of peace.
He thought, fleeting, that maybe just that would always be enough.