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"He babies you," Jean says, and Armin looks up at him, considering his face in the moonlight. They have a shared watch shift, but Armin hadn't expected Jean to make conversation; it's late, and they're both tired. Jean is looking straight ahead, too, almost like he hadn't spoken at all. Armin frowns, and looks forward again himself.
"Who does?" he asks. "You mean Eren?"
"Yeah."
"Hmm." Armin crouches, and Jean watches the way his head sinks down, his straw-colored hair glinting and glazed with blue in the night lighting. "He's always looked after me," Armin says. He finds a pebble, and rolls it between his fingers. "Ever since we were kids. I don't think it's ever occurred to him to stop."
"'Looked after?' Didn't really strike me as a troublemaker. I'da thought that'd be him."
Armin smiles down at his pebble, and it's small and fond, and Jean can barely see it from this angle but it still makes something in him churn. "No, he was the troublemaker. He got into fights a lot, way worse than he does now. But I got picked on a lot, and Eren started a crusade against it. He was pretty effective sometimes." Mostly it was Mikasa, though. Armin rubs at his nose a little, smiling, whitewashing his youth because it feels nice. It's better to remember the admiration he held for Eren than the throbbing of his busted lips and stinging cheeks.
"So you were a bully magnet," Jean observes, and toes at the dirt with his boot. He leans against the side of the shed they're stationed in front of. "Was it because you're..." He waves a hand, vaguely, and Armin looks up at him, eyebrows arched. "Y'know."
Armin stares at Jean, thoroughly unimpressed, and Jean realizes with a weird sort of heat - embarrassment, he guesses, though maybe there's some mild shame - that he's never seen Armin look at anybody that way before. He doesn't look soft and pleasant right now; he looks like he's never seen someone as stupid as Jean. Then Armin sighs, and leans against the shed too, still down low near the ground. "When I was, I think, six," he says, "there was this man. I think he was twenty. He had just joined the garrison and there was a little party for him near the gate at the Wall. There was mead and stuff, people were celebrating for him, since he'd come back to protect his hometown and everybody was proud. My grandfather took me by to see the festivities, and I just... I just thought he was great, I don't know. I was really impressed with him. He was grown-up and handsome and amazing. I went on and on about him, and it got out that I had a crush on him. I was just a little kid, I don't know. Maybe it was a real crush, maybe even my first one. But when other kids found out, they just, they got after me for it."
Jean scoffs a little, and immediately feels like kind of a jerk for scoffing. He remembers similar things in his neighborhood, though. The boys he looked up to called the softer boys pansy and Nancy and wrinkled their noses. They made gestures with their hands that Jean didn't understand until later. Jean wonders when Armin started to realize what the motions meant. "I figured," he says.
"Figured what?"
"That you're — you know. Like that."
"Oh. Yeah." Armin picks at some crab grass. It's got slippery blades, and he can't uproot it. "I don't know why some people think it's obvious. I do things like everyone else. But yeah, a lot of other guys realized, I guess."
This is making Jean more uncomfortable than he expected it to, and not in the way he expected it to. Sure, yeah, that sort of thing was - you know - in its way - kind of gross, but Armin's never been sleazy or slimy or creepy, just kind of delicate and not really manly. And not being manly doesn't make something gross, because girls aren't manly and girls are great. Girls are even great when they're a little manly— Mikasa's arms come to mind. He brushed one, once, walking past her, and went bright red. She was firm. But soft girls, they're pretty good, and if a firm girl ain't so bad, what's so bad about a soft guy... Jean wishes he'd never opened his mouth, because he's trying to figure out what's so weird about Armin and now he's feeling like the weird one. "So, uh," he says, against his better judgement, "Eren knows, huh?"
"What, about 'that?'" The way Armin says that is indulgent, a mild mimicry of Jean, and Jean's toes cringe in his boots. "Of course he knows. When we were little, a bigger boy called me a — he called me some names and said some stuff, and Eren heard it all but he practically bit that boy's ear off."
Jean swallows and is incapable of shutting up. "So he's okay with it? He's not worried? That you're—" He cracks his neck awkwardly and rubs the side of his face. "For him."
Armin flinches back, pink-faced in his surprise, and finally pulls the crab grass out of the ground. Both of them are quiet for a moment, and a cricket picks up nearby, thinking they've left. He opens his mouth again, though, and shrugs. "I think, Jean," he says honestly, moving to stand upright, "that I could write 'I like you' on a brick, and hit him in the face with it, and he'd ask, 'What the hell's this?'" In spite of himself, Jean laughs, clumsily muffled against his palm. "We're friends. I admire him. I'm always gonna be there for him, or I'll really try, and that's the important part. I don't care if he knows anything else."
Jean looks at Armin and understands why people listen to him. He's small, and he doesn't look or sound or move like anything special. He's got some words in him, though. He's got some spirit and honor and he's a pretty good guy. Jean sticks out his hand, chewing on his lower lip, glancing off to the side. "Uh," he says, which isn't good enough. He swallows. "Yeah, I guess."
Armin shakes his hand. "I guess," he agrees. They finish their watch with a thin line of familiarity between them.