Would You Still Love Me? Part 2
Reiner x fem reader; established relationship; college au; comedy-fluff
synopsis: Reiner's love for you is tested in a way neither of you saw coming... The next day, he discusses the issue with his friends. Think they'll be any help?
warnings: none
notes: Part 1 beta read by @reiner69er. Banner made by me. Dividers by @delishlydelightfuldividers. Comments help earthworms grow large and healthy!
taglist: @ariasfandom
“So...” Sasha blinks, peering into the jar that sits on the table in front of Reiner. “Y/n turned into a worm, and… you’re keeping her in a jar now?”
Reiner covers the container with a piece of paper again, stifling a yawn. He hadn’t slept much, and had to admit he had been a little gutted when he’d awoken that morning to see that you were still a worm. He’d hoped maybe you’d… sleep it off or something?
“The jar’s just temporary until the aquarium and things get here.”
“Aquarium? She’s not a fish, Reiner,” says Connie, who is busying trying to finish last week’s assignment before the professor collects them that day.
“The stuff I found online said she’ll do best in a habitat with alternating layers of sand and potting soil so there’s be enough nutrients and moisture. I was up late reading about it.” Reiner tiredly rubs his face as the others stare at him.
Bertholdt, who spent the night at Armin’s dorm, rolls his eyes but says nothing.
“And you brought her to class with you because…?” Ymir prompts, a smirk playing on her lips.
“I just want to keep an eye on her, in case she suddenly changes back or something. I’ve got her phone in my pocket, and if her family calls I wanna be able to tell them I know exactly where she is.”
There’s a deeply uncomfortable pause, and Ymir opens her mouth but is interrupted.
“Well, I think it’s sweet!” Historia declares, trying to avoid an escalation of whatever is going on with Reiner. “Reiner, how can you, uh, how can you tell the worm is a she?”
“Um...” Reiner shifts uncomfortably, a hint of a blush on his cheeks. “Well, Armin says earthworms are actually uhh...”
“They’re true simultaneous hermaphrodites.” Armin finishes the sentence for him. “They have both complete male and female reproductive organs. They can’t self fertilize, though, so in a way, they function as one sex as a time during mating.”
"Yeah," Reiner says gruffly. "But y/n is a she, because she's always been. That's how gender works, right?"
“Oh, that’s beautiful!” Ymir laughs. “You must be relieved, Reiner. You and your hermaphroditic girlfriend-worm make an adorable couple. I bet they’ll even make a Lifetime movie out of your story.”
“Haha, yeah!” Connie wheezes. “They can call it, ‘Worms of Endearment!’”
Reiner is too pissed off to admit that that’s actually pretty funny. You’d probably have laughed out loud, he thinks, if you weren’t currently a worm.
“I wanna see y/n up close and see if she remembers me!” Sasha says, grabbing the jar before the sleepy Reiner can stop her.
She removes the paper and reaches in and picks you up, but you’re wet and wiggly and almost immediately slip out of her fingers, falling several feet onto the filthy floor. Sasha freezes. The fear in the room is palpable as Reiner springs from his seat and dives across the table, falling gracelessly onto the floor and cupping his hands over you to shield you from the many pairs of surrounding feet. His gaze snaps to Sasha, and his golden eyes are icy enough to send the girl into a frantic apology.
“I-I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to drop the girlfriend!! – I mean, your worm! – I, I mean, I –”
With a low growl worthy of a dog guarding a marrow bone, Reiner orders to Connie, “Give me your water bottle.”
Too afraid to question why, Connie hands him the bottle. Reiner pours a little water onto his hands, then gingerly picks you up off of the floor and uses the rest of the water to carefully rinse you clean of any debris, before setting you back down in the dirt in your container. He’s practically holding his breath, watching until you start to burrow back into the soil.
He sighs in relief and gets to his feet and grabs his bag and slings it over his shoulder, then gives Sasha another dirty look before leaving the classroom, holding your jar in both hands as if it might jump away. Everyone watches, wide-eyed.
Ymir scoffs, breaking the tense silence. “Tsh, what a man child. His girlfriend skips their afternoon make out session for a day and he’s already doting on a literal bug and pretending it’s her? Sheesh, no wonder y/n dipped. What a freak show.”
“Well… worms aren’t bugs. They’re annelids.”
“Great defense, Arlert. I take it all back. Makes what he’s doing seem perfectly normal.”
Bertholdt stares at the table. It really isn’t like you to go somewhere without telling Reiner, or to leave your phone behind. Could something have really happened to you? He makes up his mind that he’ll have to find you himself.
As class ends and the room empties, Bertholdt motions to his friends to wait. “Have any of you seen or heard from y/n since yesterday afternoon? That’s when Reiner says she, um, turned into a worm.”
Armin shakes his head. “I asked Mikasa. She said that y/n has an evening class on Tuesdays, so she and Reiner always meet around 4:30 to hang out behind the auditorium. I... don’t know why she knows that. Anyway, she saw y/n leave one of the lecture halls not long before that. She said y/n seemed tired, and Mina Carolina says y/n didn’t show up to the evening lecture. Maybe she felt sick and went home? It still doesn’t quite make sense, though.”
"Could this all be some elaborate prank they're both playing, and Reiner is just a way better actor than any of us ever thought he'd be?" Eren asks, joining them. Armin and Bertholdt filled him in on the details last night.
“His having her cell phone is pretty suspicious,” Armin points out.
Ymir shrugs. “Maybe he killed her. Maybe he just snapped, and then the guilt made him break from reality and convince himself she turned into a worm.”
“Ah, that’s stupid,” Connie waves it off. "Reiner's practically golden retriever in human form around y/n. He'd never hurt her."
“Maybe he’s got a dual personality,” Ymir counters.
“Ymir, please don’t let Reiner hear you making jokes like that,” Bertholdt says with a sigh. “Skipping classes for a weird prank like this is a little extreme, right? Look, my theory is that they had some kind of dispute--”
“And he killed her.”
Bertholdt ignores Ymir’s interjection and continues, “And she told him she wanted to take a break, or maybe even break up. She was probably so upset by that that she skipped her evening class and went home, and Reiner was so devastated that he...”
“...went totally insane?” Connie offers.
“I was going to say, ‘retreated into a comforting fantasy.’”
“Okay, but, he doesn’t exactly seem comforted, does he?”
“It’s a little over the top,” Bert admits. “But even though Reiner acts like a jock, he’s always been really sensitive deep down. When we were little, Porco told him the Rugrats all died in a plane crash and Reiner cried so hard he threw up a little.”
“So, if you’re right, how do we snap him out of it?” Eren wonders.
“What if we get rid of the worm? We could sneak in and take it and let it go somewhere. Maybe once the worm is really gone, he’ll have to face reality.”
“Wow, Armin, that’s cold!” says Connie. “And besides, Reiner might literally kill us. You saw how he looked at Sasha when she dropped y/n by accident.”
Bert thinks for a moment. “I... I don’t think I could do that to Reiner. I think the first step would be getting him to admit something went wrong between them. Then maybe the rest will fall into place. I’ll try to get him talking tonight. In the meantime, I think we should avoid mentioning the worm around him, even if he’s carrying it around. That’ll just encourage his fantasy, right?”
As they all file out into the hallway, the others seem to agree, and as they go their separate ways, Ymir can be heard whining to Historia, “If I disappeared, would you go insane and pretend I’d turned into a worm because you love me so much?”
Bertholdt, meanwhile, wonders where Reiner was headed with the worm...
Part 3 coming soon
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