#baby and their very concerned cursor dad :]

[i3utterflyeffect]

okay i know i just posted selkie SC art earlier but i drew this and i think it's very cute so behold. extra art

[ghostmartyr]

how a life can move from the darkness [8/?]

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |

Summary: Two drug addicts (Eren and Historia) meet in group and decide to be roommates to make their  living situation slightly less weird. From there we do the slow burn  found family dance mixed in with the struggles and agonies of recovery. Heavy on friendship feels, especially EMA. Eventual yumikuri.

“Deep water first.”

Armin was comparing his map with the one on the directory, frowning studiously at their options. “You don’t think we should save that for last?” he asked. “We always spend the most time there.”

“You’re just saying that because you want to go to the Forgotten Marvels of the Deep screening,” Eren said, searching out the times for all of the film events on his map. “They have those every hour, you’re not going to miss it.”

“But we know how much time that will take,” Armin said.

“So it can go anywhere,” Eren said. “You’re always saying how we could use a break from walking. If we go first thing, that’s out.”

“That’s what I say to remind you two to eat something,” Armin said, talking too fast for Eren to point out that Armin was even worse than him and Mikasa about skipping meals. “Lunch is a break. Film features aren’t, and they put all of the other exhibits into context.”

Eren gestured at Armin’s entire everything. “We already have you for that. And the earlier we go see it, the longer you’ll have to brood about them getting the CGI for the megalodon wrong.”

Armin, with the infinite faith that had never once gone his way when they marched into the aquarium, renewed membership cards at the ready, said, “Maybe they’ll get it right this time.”

They never got it right. Eren didn’t know what elusive magic Armin was waiting for from the special effects wing of the world, but no matter how many movies with megalodons they saw, something had always gone wrong with the design. Eren was on Armin’s side for seeing some quality sharks, but he was always so disappointed. No one in the world saw things like Armin did. That should have meant nothing but good things for him, but instead it was a domino city of letdowns designed for Armin’s indomitable heart getting stripped bare.

Hanging back behind them, where the stakes of where to go first could be played off, Mikasa offered her opinion. “I would like to see the penguins.”

Eren and Armin looked down as one to check times.

“Do we want to be there for feeding?” Armin asked. “We should get there early if we do.”

“We should do early anyway. We don’t have to stay for the feeding, but they’ll be more active when they’re waiting for food, and there will be less of a crowd before it starts,” Eren said.

“It’s all the way on the other side of the building, and the feeding’s in forty minutes. We should move now.”

“Done.”

Armin nodded and folded up his map, then jolted forward a little before starting the familiar speed walk down the steps and into the aquarium parts of the aquarium. He turned around guiltily at Mikasa, and that sparked a jolt of Eren’s when he realized that Historia was standing even further back, and she wasn’t used to drawing battle plans up.

“How about you, Historia?” Eren asked before Armin’s guilty face got any worse. “Is there anything you want to see?”

Historia shook her head, drawing one more frowning face her way. Mikasa had decided to replace her cat as Historia’s buffer. Eren would have felt weird about both of them feeling like Historia needed a buffer, but this trip hadn’t been planned, and he didn’t think Historia was used to having friends. Ones who did stuff like finding tanks outside their apartment to stare at.

Eren hadn’t been ready for the excursion either, but Armin’s address was where his new membership card still went, and they always went the weekend those showed up. He was used to it.

He had missed it.

Each second no one was talking or moving had more weight and awkwardness than he’d ever thought could happen around Mikasa and Armin, but they all knew what it was, and he wasn’t allowed to yell at anyone over it anymore. They could let it bite into them and smile through the pain as long as they were all doing something together.

They were a better fix for the heartache than the pills had ever managed. Being with them again made Eren feel like a person.

Remembering to pull in the other person who needed that feeling because she refused to include herself made him feel like a slipshod, incomplete person. They’d almost been late because she hadn’t interpreted Eren telling her the aquarium trip plans as him inviting her along. She’d stared at him so long when he told her she was coming that he’d worried that something new had gone wrong.

“You get a vote,” Eren told her. She hadn’t opened her map yet. “We could check out stuff for Benjamin’s tank. Most of the eels are in the smaller areas, so they aren’t as crowded.”

Historia glanced at Mikasa. “Penguins sound fine.”

Eren looked at Armin, who was looking at Mikasa, who was looking at Historia.

Armin cautiously opened his mouth. “…Historia?” he asked, a tone of dawning horror in his voice. “Have you… have you never been to an aquarium before?”

Historia shrugged, a little helplessly, with the start of a defiant scowl growing. “I’ve seen fish before. We went to the store twice to find Benjamin.”

Armin’s horror rose to high noon and stayed there, staring at her in shock.

No friends, rightfully dead father, and a sister who treated her like the glue was still wet on all her broken pieces. No aquarium trips. That made sense.

The wrongness of it was still profound, and Eren didn’t have the words to fix it because the only ones his head was interested in coming up with said too much about how much several people before Historia should have taken a shot at killing her father.

Armin was on that same level, only with less active bloodlust. He looked like he’d just been told their library was closing. Eren turned to Mikasa. She had her overprotective concerned face on, but her eyes snapped to Eren quickly, a plan written in them.

“Otters,” she said.

“Otters,” Eren agreed firmly.

Armin caught on, and with revived vigor, he and Eren each took up one of Historia’s arms, melting her expression of flushed defiance into alarm, while Mikasa stepped behind her and took the place of pushing her forward and keeping her stumbling feet from tripping down the stairs.

“You’ll like it,” Eren said.

“And then we’ll go look at tankmates for Benjamin,” Armin confirmed.

“Or the penguins,” Mikasa said quietly.

“We could do all of that first,” Historia said, being tugged along, her hand crumpling her unopened map. “Or the movie Armin wants to see?”

“No,” they all said together.

----

Eren’s mom didn’t take things for granted. She never had, and losing most of her world had only brought that closer to her heart.

Her son being willing to spend time with her when it wasn’t a special occasion was a door she’d wanted open for months, and Eren had had a promise to come over at least once a month, with at least one of his friends or his brother, exhorted out of him before she let him take his spackle home.

“Or maybe your brother,” had been said with the sort of casual deliberation Frieda had used when she talked about a pet for the apartment.

Leaving Eren upside down on the back of the couch, staring mindlessly at his phone with his hair dangling to the floor.

hi zeke

good morning

we don’t have a tv but armin said

there’s a movie out at

good afternoon

my mom wants you over for dinner

The cursor on the last one blinked more than he could make himself. It was all bad. The only reason he wasn’t smashing the delete key on the last one was because Zeke’s complicated minefield relationship with his parents meant studiously and politely flipping off all of their dad’s awkward suggestions that he come over, and very politely accepting his mom’s invitations. He’d even bring flowers.

Historia’s bedroom door swung open, and she finally emerged from her room for the day, wearing one of the otter shirts Mikasa and Armin had encouraged her to get. The short-sleeved one. She stopped in the hallway when she saw Eren, thumb still hovering over her own phone.

“I’m texting Zeke,” Eren said.

Historia nodded slowly, and continued her walk to the kitchen. “Does that help?” she asked, reaching into a cupboard for a glass.

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

Eren spun the phone up into the air a bit, catching it before it could hit the floor. He tossed it again, moodily, when one of the random memories of Zeke doing the same thing with a baseball every time he took a step near one started to play in his head.

“What do you text Frieda?”

Prolonged silence followed the question. Eren pulled himself away from his phone’s cursor to watch his roommate’s back. He lifted his head up so that his hair wasn’t touching the floor.

“…You text her, right?”

“I respond when she asks how I am,” Historia said.

Eren removed himself from the couch with a clumsy flip that Mikasa’s cousin would have found horrifying. “You don’t message your sister?” Eren asked. Barely, barely remembering that Frieda and Historia were too complicated to make the point that if Historia had no problem getting into drawn out fights on Twitter with strangers, she should have some words for her sister.

Historia shrugged. The baby otter hiding under the seaweed that draped over her shoulder didn’t offer any deeper hints about her mood.

“She’d be happy to hear from you,” Eren said, because it was true. Besides Frieda being that sort of person, he kept seeing it in Armin and Mikasa, and the screaming guilt was learning to shut up and let that feel good. “You wouldn’t have to come up with anything fancy. Talking about the weather would work. Or Benjamin. Or school.”

Historia didn’t quite turn around, but he could see more of her head than her hair when she spoke. “Why can’t you send Zeke something like that?”

“It’s not the same.” It was nowhere close to the same. Frieda was hot chocolate and comfort. Zeke was. Zeke. He’d never been anything different. Eren had just taken forever to work out how much that annoyed him. “Our relationship’s not… like normal siblings,” he said.

Historia pulled her glass out of the stream of water the fridge had been dutifully filling it with, and fixed Eren with a look. “My sister comes into my room at night and watches me sleep to make sure I’m still breathing.”

Eren’s phone and its blinking cursor shrunk a few sizes. “You know about that?”

Historia put her glass down on the counter. “Yes.”

Frieda would love that. Eren wasn’t sure when he’d switched sides on the habit, but it got him a hot drink and a listening ear in the middle of the night, and Historia refusing to participate instead of not knowing she could sounded too familiar. “If you texted her more often, she’d probably back off on that. Or if you talked to her at all,” he added.

Historia, devoid of amusement, looked over the otter on her shoulder at him. “Have you told your brother you want him to pay attention to you?”

Eren’s jaw set. He put his phone on the counter, where Historia could clearly see the screen. He erased all of the last attempt, and for a paralyzing instant couldn’t come up with anything to fill up the space with—before he remembered that quality wasn’t the point, and he could recite the alphabet and it would still put a win in his column. His fingers marched across the keyboard.

hi. how are you?

He hit the send button.

Pride and success flourished for about as long as it took to have the notification text go from ‘sending’ to ‘delivered.’

Then the knot in his chest that belonged to Zeke—more noticeable than ever with all the untying he’d gotten done on the others—throbbed, and his phone went from only a few sizes too small to microscopic with one little shift of the screen.

‘Read.’

A trio of dots followed, and the jolt of adrenaline they caused felt like every doorbell the nights Eren was waiting for Zeke to come over for babysitting.

               Are you feeling all right, Eren?

The adrenaline didn’t evaporate.

The excitement that had tried to rush past a decade of poor communication didn’t last an extra heartbeat.

Eren didn’t have the income to throw his phone into the garbage disposal. Acknowledging that and tightening his fingers until they went white was growth. Not needing to buy more spackle, or putty knives, was a good thing, and his progress should be a delight to anyone who knew how hard he’d worked for it.

To quote Petra.

He wondered if there was any school of thought where wrapping his hands around Zeke’s throat counted as progress, but that went into violence and other problems too fast to imagine properly, so he was left with Zeke.

“He thinks there’s something wrong with me,” he informed Historia.

Historia finished pouring her lemonade. “Is there?”

“No!” he snapped.

Her head swerved in his direction, eyebrows lifted in surprise. It took him a second. A full second, enough for her look to turn uncertain, for what he’d said to process as language instead of righteous indignation. Something that hadn’t belonged to him in over a year.

He used to burn through it at so fast Mikasa and Armin almost couldn’t keep up. Fights and protests and causes and that one idiotic proposal about cutting the library’s funding. People were being stupid, and he wasn’t going to sit around like everyone else and let them be stupid.

Until the only sort of good thing he could do for himself was walk into a gym and take a chair, where all the unclean hate boiled and festered and didn’t help anyone.

Zeke was being stupid.

Historia put her phone down next to his, swiping away from the open Twitter tab with an unfinished tweet in process. Her texting app opened, with only one other name besides Eren listed under the contacts. With deliberate precision, she typed out a new message.

Hi Frieda. Would you like to come over for dinner?

She sent it. After making sure Eren read it.

When she pulled away from the counter, the hand that took her phone moved like it was anchored to the marble. The screen flicked back to Twitter, and her thumb grazed the case. “Some people…” she said. “They don’t know how to be a family.”

It sounded like an apology, but Eren couldn’t guess for what. It also sounded like something his mom had said. About his dad. When Eren asked why his brother was living with their grandparents and not them.

Eren looked back at his phone, with Zeke’s text. His stupid brother with his stupid hands-off love that felt like he’d picked it up from a manners book, because why would giving someone a reason to keep trying ever be something that cropped up naturally? “I don’t think Zeke wants one.”

Seconds of quiet passed.

Historia, with thought and care ponderous as a boulder, said, “He doesn’t seem like the type of person who would bother talking to someone he didn’t want.”

Eren wanted to argue with that, because he wanted to argue against everything that said maybe someone a little less like Eren could make sense out of his brother being the exact same person he’d been since the day Eren was born. He wanted to argue, period, because Zeke was Zeke and Eren…

Eren might have been Eren.

And before he’d needed his brother, and Zeke was just some cool adult to break rules with, the thickest knot that tied them together was knowing that Zeke took his calls every single time he made one. Even when he only took their dad’s once a year. When Eren’s mom asked him to.

Zeke loved his little brother as well as he could. The way he thought he was supposed to.

Eren huffed and went over to say hi to Benjamin. Leaving Historia some time to finish yelling at Ymir before her sister, who knew how to love people, showed up and reminded them that they weren’t any good at it, either.

----

He had the wrong wallet.

That was already bad. Not terrible bad, but Ymir had been the one to point it out.

Walking into the rock climbing gym, unannounced, with Reiner and her usual self, she’d taken one look at Eren getting ready for work and said, “I thought I got ripped off when mine started sprouting holes like that. Guess that brand just sucks as a rule.”

Eren’s wallet didn’t have holes. Historia’s did. He had no idea why, and talking money with Historia always ended so badly that he wasn’t interested in asking. Her wallet also had more cash in it than Eren had ever seen in one place. What an Armin from years ago would have called drug money with a laugh, and something the Eren of the moment wanted to hurl out of his hands as fast as possible.

Working with Reiner and Ymir was an unexpected hitch in his day, but Reiner had immediately gone over to the free climbing wall with a bounce in his step. The worst they could get falling from that was a bruise or two, so Eren could stall by one of the other walls with his phone.

grabbed your wallet by mistake you want to come by and nab it?

Historia was between classes, so her reply came fast.

               Yes, thank you. Should I pick yours up?

yeah that would help

They didn’t have any real routine to their middays, but Historia had dropped by to share lunch a few times, so Eren was spared sending off the address. His eyes wandered over to the only customers they had so far. Reiner was trying to figure out how to climb the underside of the wall. Ymir was crawling it like a spider, way too capably to be new to it.

Eren typed out another thread.

Reiner’s here with your friend

               She is not my friend

k

He put his phone away and went over to help Reiner. There weren’t any tennis balls in the building, but they’d all be better off if he could get Historia her wallet without her coming into contact with Ymir. From what he could tell, weeks of Twitter arguments, which Reiner insisted were the best thing he’d ever seen, hadn’t burned off their edge. Smiling Ymir or not, they probably didn’t need a real introduction.

----

Reiner wasn’t bad for someone who’d never gone climbing before. He stretched for handholds instead of taking the ones nearby and wasn’t built for it yet, breathed too hard, paid too much attention to how fast Ymir was making her way up next to him—but it wasn’t like riding a bike. Eren didn’t think he’d have to throw himself against the ropes to keep him from crashing.

He wondered if it would be the sort of thing Reiner would have any interest in keeping up after the coupons wore out. Mikasa liked climbing. They could make a day of it or something. Show Reiner he had friends.

Ymir swung over to Reiner’s side of the wall and flicked him on the ear. Eren’s grip on the safety lines turned glacial when Reiner let go to bat back at her.

But he was smiling under the red face and sweat. They’d all figured out how to do that again somewhere, and Eren went back to holding the lines like he got paid to do it.

Until Thomas hailed him from the cashier’s desk, and a pocket of leather tapped his shoulder.

“Here,” Historia said, tone and eyes carefully directed away from Eren’s customers.

Eren fished her wallet out of his pocket and swapped it for his, with its zero holes and coupons stuffed in next to enough bills for lunch and nothing else. “Thanks,” he said. He held back on asking if she wanted to stick around and share lunch. “Sorry.”

“It wasn’t a problem,” Historia said mechanically.

She didn’t walk away. She wasn’t making eye contact with him, either. Her gaze was set somewhere between where Ymir and Reiner were climbing and Eren’s head.

Eren hadn’t thought much about it, because thinking about Ymir and Historia’s Twitter war wasn’t good for much outside of amusing Armin to get through an awkward texting pause.

“…Do you want to say hi?”

Historia’s hackles rose the way Rivaille’s did when Eren tried to pet him, and she finally broke her staring contest with the orange handhold to scowl darkly at him. The hand that had taken her wallet balled into a fist small enough to probably rip another hole in it.

“We’re having lunch together if you want to—”

“Hey Eren!” Ymir shouted down, freezing Historia’s expression to nothingness. “I thought it was only in your job description to pick up chicks if they were falling from—”

She stopped talking, which sounded like a dream come true, except it came with Ymir’s rope spinning taut and Eren’s heart seizing as suddenly in his chest as her whiplash brake in the air. She was so still that the first panicked emotion to make its way into thought was that he’d killed her just like the bus and the blood and she wasn’t someone he wanted gone just quieter.

But those eyes were too alive with something for him to worry about that instead of gearing up to scream the speech he knew by rote, from a hundred different teenagers not listening when he said to be careful with the equipment, directly into Ymir’s thick skull. Knowing that speech was why Hannes let him keep his job, and every syllable of it thundered in his electrified blood.

Reiner beat him to words. “Ymir,” he asked, dangling in a way that said it didn’t matter he didn’t know what he was doing yet, he would jump into thin air if it would help, “you okay?”

And maybe that wasn’t a bad question.

She wasn’t going for the handholds, putting all the work on Eren. If she cared at all about Reiner’s mounting concern, none of it or anything else showed. She looked shell-shocked.

Eren put the speech on hold. “I’m getting you down,” he said bluntly. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Whatever was going on, past experience with not breaking her neck kept her from actively hampering her descent, even if Eren was mad enough that he wouldn’t have minded an extra excuse to read her the riot act.

Historia didn’t help, standing stock-still next to him instead of thinking to move out of the landing area. Eren moved around her instead, pulse at a high that didn’t promise anything good. By the time Ymir’s feet hit the mat, he could feel his fingers itching to let go of the ropes and find a bottle.

His clenched jaw kept it all back, and he unhooked her in stressed silence, ordering Reiner to stay put with his glare. Even though he’d probably be helping him down the wall the second he was done with Ymir.

Ymir didn’t need ordering. She stayed next to the wall, quiet enough to ping Eren’s first-aid lessons instead of his temper. He breathed in. Out. Didn’t murder her like

He took another breath and a step forward, raising up a hand in front of her face. “Follow my finger,” he instructed, peering into her eyes and hoping the ghosts in her expression weren’t anything dangerous.

Ymir batted his hand away. Her hand was shaking. Eren’s temper dropped another notch. “Ymir…”

“Krista,” she whispered.

She wasn’t looking at nothing, Eren realized.

Because she was looking at Historia, who had turned into a sculpture of ice.

Reiner spasmed up on his perch, and Eren abruptly decided that whatever was going on, it was time for everyone to be on the ground. Descent went much simpler with someone who was bothering to be present for it, even if Reiner had the same shaken look on his face that had drained all the blood out of Eren’s.

The childish whining in his head wanted to cry. They couldn’t all just be normal together. Something had to go sideways and broken and fuck him he needed another tennis ball in his face, but he didn’t have one so he was just going to have to grow the fuck up and handle the broken pieces with some fucking gloves for once.

Ymir was odd and quiet, and her hands were trembling like Eren’s used to.

Historia didn’t look like a person.

Eren could guess how out of his depth he was, but he couldn’t see it hitting anywhere close. He stepped over to his friend and clapped her on the shoulder, trying not to turn into Frieda when that didn’t spark anything. He stuck to what he did have a dim comprehension of. “Historia?” he prompted. “You have a class to get to, don’t you?”

Nothing. Not even a damn flicker. Whatever was left in there was locked on Ymir.

Who—Eren did a double take.

That… was different, and his depth and comfort zone went somewhere else to leave him with nothing but pure confusion.

Those were tears in Ymir’s eyes. Actual, human tears.

And Historia moved.

“No,” she said, the one word so raw and crackled it didn’t sound like a language. A spark came back to her, and Eren’s hand fell off or her shoulder ripped away, leaving him to rejoin Reiner on the sidelines as the lopsided, unsure mass of puzzle pieces started snapping together.

“No,” she said, approaching Ymir on wobbly legs. Shine and fire broke the ice, even if they both looked three days into withdrawal. “You…” she breathed in like it was strangling her, and maybe Eren was caught up in the same haze they both were, because her exhale sounded something like laugher.

Historia, bright with tears, the shortest person Eren knew, looked down at Ymir.

“You don’t get to be the one crying!” she shouted.

Her fingers were digging new holes in her wallet, and Ymir was the first one to break the stunned staring, to look at the shredded collection of money and leather.

Crying.

Silently, to go with Historia’s repressed sobs. The tears were unrelenting and steady, winding down Ymir’s cheeks like a river that had been just waiting for spring.

“Historia,” she said, tender and so, so lost.

Click went the puzzle. The fiancée.

Historia had called her that, the very first time she brought her up. The only time she brought her up at all until she read the book that confessed all of the ways they’d missed each other. Padded out with how it was probably a joke, and never something real that broke her heart.

Eren didn’t think anyone could say someone’s name like that and call it a joke.

Or hear their name said like that and think it was anything other than what it was.

Historia’s whole expression collapsed, emotion spilling out faster than the tears. Her mouth wordlessly traced Ymir’s name, and her hands dropped the wallet to hold her head as she stared down at the girl she’d somehow undersold her love for, complete ruin and hope coalescing into the only words she appeared able to come up with before her legs tripped her down.

“You unromantic jackass,” Historia murmured, burying herself in Ymir.

Eren could have counted the seconds it took for Ymir to trust that she was allowed, that ruining absolutely everything and salting the ground didn’t mean what she thought it did when someone was willing to grab you and welcome you back to your home. He saw the second the connection sparked in her head, and her broken heart was punched through with a sewing needle.

Ymir crumbled, a hiccupping sob finally leaving her as she hid it all away in Historia’s hair.

----

I haven’t said it recently so I thought I would […] I love you thanks for taking me back

               Eren??? Are you okay?

                               We were always going to.

----

They didn’t have lunch together.

Not the way any of them had planned.

They were seated at a table for four at the deli near Eren’s work, two of the chairs empty while Eren and Reiner’s life focus became not running off to eavesdrop on whatever outpour of emotion Ymir and Historia needed to have. If their food tasted like anything, Eren was missing it.

Historia had held back Mikasa to let him talk to Armin alone. She’d helped Armin let him talk to Mikasa alone. He owed her.

“Krista, huh?”

Eren jolted back to his spot at the table. “Huh?”

Across from him, Reiner didn’t look any more together. But he’d finished his sandwich, so maybe holding on to the edge of the table with a grip meant for tearing things in half wasn’t the warning sign Eren wanted to call it.

“Krista,” Reiner said again. “Ymir’s girl. That—that was what Ymir called her.”

All Eren knew about that was a vague memory of Historia telling him the girl from juvie had never known her real name. He swished his water around in his cup.

“I guess… I guess Kr—Historia told you all about what happened,” Reiner said.

Eren tried. Since it was Reiner. “Not really. We talked about…” Things he felt weird about repeating, because now that the girlfriend was Ymir, and Ymir took one look at her and started crying, he was less sure about how much he wanted to punch her. He was more sure that Historia would be mostly okay throwing a tennis ball at her.

“We talked about how much it hurt when she wasn’t there anymore,” Eren settled on.

“Right,” Reiner said.

His knuckles were pure white around the table. Eren took an experimental bite of his sandwich, staring out the window and quashing the urge to go out and find his friend and his sometimes other friend to make sure nothing else broke. He hadn’t been able to help when he was standing right next to them. His contributions weren’t anything good.

His contributions were things like wondering if his roommate would ever come home again. He was a child, and channeling that into more unwanted worrying was all he had for the day.

“It was my fault,” Reiner blurted.

Eren pulled himself back again. “What was?”

Reiner’s look was straight out of rehab. His hands dug through his hair for a moment instead of the table, too short to hide the nervous twitch of his fingers completely. Eren straightened in his chair. Reiner took that as a sign to try to smile, which worked badly.

“I overdosed,” he said. “A lot.”

“I know,” Eren said.

“Right.” His fingers started tapping on the table. “But one of them—Ymir was going to be out any day. We knew that. Or—I guess Bertolt knew, I didn’t know much of anything by then, but…” Reiner clenched his eyes shut. “I overdosed, and Bertolt called her, and then she… she was there.”

Eren tried another bite of his sandwich and had to stop himself from spitting it out. He could picture it, and the unsaid half about the person Ymir had left behind, who hadn’t been in such immediate danger but never stopped needing her. He knew that story. He’d lived some of it, and now that the girlfriend had a face it was too easy to remember that Ymir was the idiot who left and Historia was the idiot who still wanted her.

Only this time the idiot who left had a good reason.

He wanted to call Armin and apologize again, not just texting because his fingers worked when his voice wouldn’t. He wanted to call Mikasa and remember that she’d survived him and they had Zeke’s damn baseball practice together.

He didn’t know how to call Zeke, but someone had, after the accident, and after Eren being stupid. And Zeke had shown up. No questions asked. He’d dropped everything, because Eren needed his brother, so his brother had shown up. Because that was something he knew how to do, even if conversations and feelings weren’t.

Ymir was so bad at knowing what to do with feelings she wrote an entire book about failing to share them and then got defensive when the person she had them for complained.

Eren wanted to check in on them. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do to help, but it felt like someone should be around to keep them from ending up in a place where Ymir went with releasing another book for her and Historia to fight over as a conversation starter. Counting on Historia to be that someone when she hadn’t been able to let go of Ymir when Eren was getting her harness off felt like a gamble.

He didn’t think either of them would like that argument. Their first act as a couple would be to find a ball pit to dump him in.

“It’s my fault,” Reiner said again. “If Kr—if Historia got hurt. I—Ymir has trouble being upfront about some things, but she wouldn’t have left it that way for anything else. She’s a good person, and Krista—she’s crazy about her. Still. She won’t hurt her.”

Eren stopped swishing his drink, and stared as much threat into Reiner’s eyes as he could without actually thinking about what hurting another person like that looked like.

“She’d better not,” he said.

----

We love you too. […] We can say it more often. If you want.

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