Work Text:
For most people, childhood is just a phase of their life. A significant one, but also very short. For Armin, it's very significant, too, but it's supposed to be his whole life, not a fraction of it. He was born with heart disease, and nobody expects him to live past fifteen.
Many things, small and big ones, are different for him because of it. He doesn't attend PE class, and classmates are often jealous of him. They don't know he is jealous of them too. He'd be happy to play basketball and do the running, to be out of breath without risk of his heart giving out. He also attends to the hospital two times a week and spends there half of the day.
Maybe it’s his awareness of dying soon that makes him unsusceptible to the things teenagers are very sensitive about. He doesn’t know how to be insecure. He became friends with the prettiest girl in school and her hunk of a brother in a day and he didn’t ask her out just because she was not his type.
Nobody is his type, until one day he sees a gloomy girl with blond hair and just knows it.
“Hi,” he says with a bright smile. She seems confused as to why he approached her. She’s new in school and doesn’t know anyone yet, but she returns “hi”.
He gives her his name and asks for hers. And then asks her out, not wasting any time.
She doesn’t seem surprised a bit. “If you get past my father,” she says with a shrug. “For him, anyone who wants to talk to me about the weather has to marry me first.”
Armin laughs, “Works for me.”
With that, he might accomplish even more than he ever hoped.