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Armin tries to avoid favoritism.
He tries, but here he is peering over his student’s shoulder, from-god-above red light coming down and burning all around. Armin has one airpod in. The Beach Boys are harmonizing in his dark room. Besides them? The transfer student. The problem child that’s in fight after fight after fight. Has a few false teeth replacing lost ones and a generally prickly disposition. Armin watches his student develop the prints, watches him tip fluid from one end of the tray to the other with steady hands and scraped knuckles, watches him transfer those prints to another tray.
“If you entered the district art contest, I think maybe you’d do well.” Better than well. Eren’s got the kind of talent that blinds. And it’s a damn shame because he doesn’t care.
Eren snorts like he doesn’t believe him (like Armin is contractually obligated to be nice to him, and he technically is). His head is bowed. Hair shaggy like he took a pair of scissors to it and gave up halfway through a sporadic midnight manic episode. His face is pocked with acne and he’s got the lankiness of a teenage boy. All legs- he stumbles around like he doesn’t know when he got tall and doesn’t like that he suddenly is. “Sounds stupid.” He mutters, and Armin can picture him giving long rants about why the world is basically garbage revolving around garbage suspended in a void of garbage. Teenage angst under the bridge with pot and a well shaken can of spray paint. Effort is stupid. Being talented is stupid. Life is stupid.
Armin has gotten old. He knows he has because year after year, his students grow just a bit more alien to him.
Eren’s hanging his photographs on a long line of other photographs. The lesson was perspective. There are students holding buildings in the palms of their hands. Opening their mouths to swallow and devour various household pets that sit far in the distance. What Armin notes in most of these photographs is that his students choose to be in the foreground. Larger than life, screaming to be seen. And what he notes about Eren’s photographs is the teen puts himself so far away. He lies in the grass, and perhaps he got his older brother or a cousin to do it but- there is a foot that hovers above him. Crusted in mud, coming down massive (monstrous) as if to stomp the boy’s nymph-sized body lifeless.
Splat,
Gone.
“Why?”
Eren’s a firm blotch of dark denim jeans and a dark ratty tee in the red of Armin’s dark room. The teen grunts. Shrugs. Scratches at his scalp like he’s got a bad case of lice. “Every kid is special. Every kid is a superstar. I would win even if I didn’t. They’d give me a consolation prize and tell me to be proud of losing.”
“I wouldn’t say that. And maybe every kid is special, maybe they have the potential to be through hard work and-!’
“Oh God. Spare me Mister Miniature.”
“You are absolutely not to call me that! How many times have I told you?”
“So write me up.”
They eat in his classroom with one other student.
Armin does not write him up.
Armin relaxes in his swivel chair. His Bluetooth speakers on the high shelf above his head play music that one of his present students dances around to, taking quick pictures with her cheap disposable camera. Pictures of the chalkboard. Pictures of a pensive Armin stirring his bowl of instant noodles with a plastic fork. Eren moping at his desk with his Monster and his bag of Cheetos. Not a balanced meal but Armin has been snapped at enough that all he does is toss a green apple in Eren’s direction. The boy catches it. Wipes it off on the end of his t-shirt.
Historia snaps a picture of him taking a bite. Bright white flash. Crunch. Crisp.
“I am raiding the vending machine.” Historia announces things and Armin thinks that in ten years she’ll be paying someone to do it for her with a megaphone. ‘Introducing: The Duchess of Nowhere, Historia Reiss.’
Cute kid, if a little arrogant. But that’s cute too in its own right.
Her camera is left behind on a desk. The door swings open, swings closed.
Armin slurps his noodles. Slips from behind his desk as he chews. The abandoned camera is taken up in his pale hands and he squints through the viewfinder.
“Don’t you tell everybody to submit a project to that stupid contest anyway?”
“Yes. It’s good to encourage everybody to try their best. Ah, but…” Armin lowers the camera to peek at his slouching student with a pair of anxious blue eyes. “Don’t tell anybody, but I think you’d actually have a chance.”
Eren laughs. Leans back in his chair and rips through more green skin. Mashing apple guts with his not-quite-white teeth. “What happened to ‘everyone has potential’?”
“Some people have… More potential than others? There are potential points, a-and you gather them in a sort of basket, and I think that you gathered more than other students… It’s a very… Heavy with potential basket.”
Armin stumbles over words.
Eren laughs more. Two moss green eyes that gleam and ruddy cheeks and so light you can barely see them freckles-
Armin snaps a picture, the plastic button giving out under his index finger. “At least think about it.” Walking wasted talent. Armin sucks at his teeth.
“Maybe,” Eren grins like the devil. “If you say I’m your favorite student.”
“You are a favored student.”
“Your favorite student or I’m dropping photography next semester. Maybe I’ll take a pottery class.”
More laughter as Armin drops to the floor on his knees in practiced, dramatic despair. Like his very heart has given out. He snaps another picture of his inconsolable student, still red and gasping for air. The boy doesn’t smile enough. Doesn’t laugh enough. Historia’s film roll holds the rarest photos on Earth. Armin sighs. Sets the camera down and folds his arms on the desk, chin resting on the top one as he kneels there.
“Blackmail’s illegal in the district of Trost, Eren.”