children of the forest - Chapter 2 - assentodele, banalycha - Shingeki no Kyojin (2024)

Chapter Text

Jean Kirschtein was sixteen years old when his rivalry with the neighborhood troublemaker, Eren Jaeger, came to a head.

According to a number of people, the two of them had been at each other's throats since kindergarten: A fellow classmate vividly remembered them fighting over the same toys and costumes at recess, describing one particular altercation over a child-safe foam bat that somehow, against all odds, resulted in Jean suffering from a concussion. Jean had been silver-tongued and condescending even back then, and Eren, by contrast, met his scathing words with chapped knuckles and sharp teeth.

I don’t think they’ll ever get along, their second grade teacher told both sets of parents wearily, suggesting that the boys be split up for their own well-being the following year. Both of them will grow up enough eventually that sharing a classroom won’t be a problem anymore, but until Jean gets past his tendency to talk down to the other kids in class and Eren learns to control his anger, this is the only real solution that’ll keep them out of each other’s hair and focused on their academics.

Of course, this proposed solution assumed two things: One, that Eren actually cared about his academics (he didn’t, not even when he was younger), and two, that separating them would be able to change anything when they still saw each other in the hallways and stood at the same bus stop every morning. For the most part, however—and to everyone’s surprise—the split seemed to be helpful. There were still smaller arguments and a bit of name-calling, but years went by without any major fights or trips to the principal’s office on the other’s behalf, which was a relief to both their parents and the faculty at large.

Unfortunately, their unspoken truce didn’t last long into middle school.

When they were thirteen, their bus driver, Ms. Ral, reported an incident involving Jean’s backpack being set on fire. Considering Eren was openly playing with his father’s Zippo lighter while Jean and a few other students attempted to stamp it out, there was no question who’d done it; when Eren was sent home with a written warning and a two-week suspension, it also became clear, given his blasé attitude, that he’d been hoping to have an excuse to ditch classes for a few weeks. He left the building with his backpack slung over his shoulder, his head held high, and his hands balled into stubborn fists. The only time he expressed remorse for his actions was when his mother rolled up to the student dropoff with tears in her eyes, at which point he mumbled a half-assed sorry and stared down at his shoes until she unlocked the passenger door. Jean and his friends had been present to snicker at and subsequently humble him from afar, which only seemed to strengthen their mutual distaste for one another going forward. One of Eren’s neighbors—a woman that used to live between him and Armin—said she’d heard a litany of shouting and swearing from their house later that night. More sinister accusations followed in the wake of her testimony: namely, that Grisha had broken a wooden spoon over his eldest’s bare ass before, and that Eren was likely facing the same type of discipline.

Nobody ever wanted to look too closely at the Jaeger household or get involved, however—not when middle-class lifestyles were so bereft of scandal, and by extension, excitement. What better topic of conversation for the annual summer barbecue than the eccentric doctor who lived down the street and his two oddball sons?

Following that incident, Eren and Jean fell back into their same destructive dance. “It’s a little bit like sex,” a then-twenty-six-year-old Zeke said to his younger brother over coffee and a crossword puzzle one morning, not thinking about how Eren would internalize the comparison. “You’ll keep pushing each other further and further until one of you explodes, and then, you’ll do something you can’t take back, like getting her pregnant.”

Despite the tail end of his statement being wholly irrelevant, Zeke’s words eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Winters in their region were always bitterly cold, the entirety of Shiganshina covered in layers of black, white, and piss-colored slush— the Neapolitan, a younger Eren had called it after a particularly insidious round of Truth or Dare back in elementary school. He'd packed together a handful of questionable snow and eaten it without a moment's hesitation, hoping to earn the admiration of his classmates, only to cause them to talk about him for weeks afterward instead. Even without the full context of why his neighbors gossiped about him or his father, he couldn’t help but feel like it was just more of the same sh*t no matter where he was or what he was doing; it was another reason he couldn’t stand school, coupled with the routine and monotony of it all.

Connie Springer, at least, had been impressed, and it was Connie who Eren often found himself bitching and moaning to even years later because of their shared propensity for attracting unwanted attention. He was also a mutual friend of both Eren’s and Jean's, making him the perfect unwitting middleman.

After throwing a punch at Jean earlier that afternoon and having the fight be broken up prematurely by the school guidance counselor, Eren slipped a note into his locker after school, telling Jean to come find him by the river behind his house so they could settle their sh*t once and for all. In any other circ*mstance, Jean wouldn’t have allowed himself to be goaded into a private confrontation, but the punch in question had been over a girl Jean was currently talking to:

“Only a desperate whor* would ever date Horse Face. I’m guessing he must have the dick to match, because she’s definitely not seeing him for his winning personality,” Eren had slurred in Connie's direction. He was halfway to drunk between his Algebra and European History classes, the smell of booze still acrid on his tongue. “Maybe it’s just daddy’s money she’s after though, who knows? I guess if you can manipulate an idiot like Kirschstein into marrying you, why not go for it? I would. I might even let him stick his dick in me if he snuck me a good vintage and asked nicely.”

Consequently, the late afternoon saw Jean meeting up with Eren shortly after their bus dropped them off. Eren’s hair was still relatively short back then, hanging just past his ears. His cheeks were bitten pink from either the cold or whatever he had in the cheap flask he was drinking from, and Jean watched him shudder in contentment as he polished off the remainder of what was inside. He considered turning around before Eren noticed him, but there was something lonely about the line of the other boy’s bundled-up body—a detail Jean had been picking up on more and more lately, even if their dynamic was too set in its ways to reverse overnight.

“Jaeger,” he’d said, announcing his presence. Eren looked up at him, his green eyes made even more vibrant by the pink tinge of his sclerae. He was still drunk, high, or potentially even both, and he stuffed the empty flask into the inner pocket of his jacket quickly, like he didn’t want Jean to see it.

His mouth formed a curved, wicked smile once it was safely hidden away. “Kirschtein,” he replied. His expression was full of subdued puerile glee. “I didn't think you’d actually show. I figured having a little one-on-one time with me in the woods would be ‘totally beneath you’ or some sh*t.”

“Oh, it is.” Jean walked down the slope, minding his steps as snow crunched beneath his feet. “But this isn’t really about you or me or our stupid thing anymore, is it? It’s about Mina and what you said to Connie earlier.”

Eren looked amused. “So you’re here to fight for her honor, then? What a chivalrous knight you’ve become in these last couple years. Mama Dearest must be so proud of you, Jean Boy. Can’t say I ever expected it myself.”

“I’m just full of surprises today,” Jean said dryly, ignoring Eren’s passive-aggressive use of his nickname. He tucked his hands into his pockets and examined him from head to toe. “So…you've been drinking again, huh? Like, drinking drinking.”

He indicated Eren’s coat with his chin, and the mood shifted dramatically. Jean couldn’t say he was surprised, especially since he was used to dealing with alcoholics in his own extended family. There was a degree of shame in the habit, even if Eren thought it made him seem like a hardass or some sort of bad boy to his peers.

“Why the f*ck do you even care?” Eren snapped, his hand flying to his inner pocket. There was a pained sheen to his eyes—like he was upset about concern coming from Jean Kirschtein of all people—and he continued, “If you’re worried you’ll only be able to kick my ass because I’ve got booze in my system, don’t be. I actually hold my sh*t well, unlike some of us.”

Referencing Marco’s Christmas party. Cute.

The year prior, one of their classmates had hosted a Christmas party while his parents were visiting relatives. Someone—most blamed Eren, though Thomas and Daz were also prime suspects—had broken into the Bodts’ wine cabinet and began circulating multiple bottles. One had ended up in Jean’s hands, and Jean had ended up bent over a toilet an hour later, relying on Eren’s goodwill as the latter brought him a box of stale crackers and several cups of tap water.

He’d never thanked him for that night, come to think of it. He’d never paid Marco back for the wine, either.

Jean sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look Eren, say what you will, but we’ve known each other for a long time, right?” he said. “I’m just—I’m getting tired of repeating this same crap over and over again with you, and now that me and Mina are dating, I guess I want to try and put an end to it. Move on, you know? We’re getting older. We don’t need to keep doing this sh*t to each other. It’s not like I hate you or want to see you dead in a ditch. If anything, you’re probably the closest thing I’ve ever had to an actual—”

He stopped abruptly at the sight of a single tear rolling down Eren’s face. He was still clearly more frustrated than anything else, but it was like watching the first fissures appear in a dam. For an infinitesimal moment, it felt as if time had frozen like the earth below: The hairs on the back of Jean’s neck stood up. His instincts screamed at him to move, but he wasn’t sure why. Eren looked almost unsettlingly vulnerable.

“Jaeger…?” he said softly. “Are you—?”

Then, Eren was on top of him, attacking his closed mouth with his teeth. Jean was stunned into compliance for a few seconds as his brain struggled to keep up, the tip of Eren’s tongue pushing past his lips as he yielded absentmindedly. He groaned at the feeling of hands squeezing his ass before remembering who they belonged to, the scent of drugstore body spray thick in his nostrils to cover up the stench of weed.

The kiss was over before it ever really began, punctuated by a brutal shove and an involuntary whimper.

“What the f*ck, Jaeger!” Jean shouted, wiping the back of his mouth vigorously on his sleeve. “Are you out of your f*cking mind?”

Eren had staggered backward a few steps and was now doubled over, pushing his hair out of his face.

“Admit it: You just want to screw me,” he said breathlessly, his face even redder than it had been before. His pupils were blown black. “Ever since we were kids and you got your first little baby rager over me stealing your f*cking Nerf gun.”

Jean couldn’t follow Eren’s train of logic anymore, and something about the way he spoke unnerved him. His body was also responding to Eren’s accusations—and touch, if he was being completely honest with himself—with the barest hint of arousal, and that was something he’d never even begin to entertain.

The sun had fallen below the horizon line, shrouding both boys in a bruise-colored veil of darkness. The trees’ brittle leaves had long since been ground to dust beneath their heavy, plodding steps and layers of compounded snow. ‘You’re not normal,” Jean said quietly, spellbound by the harsh, angular lines of Eren’s face. Monstrously pretty was the description that came to mind, and Jean hated himself for thinking it. “Everyone at school is right about you: You’re just an angry, f*cked-up freak, and you're going to spend your entire life in and out of prison unless you wake up and get your sh*t together.”

Eren growled in response before surging forward and sinking his teeth into Jean’s exposed neck, eliciting a loud, panicked yelp. Jean felt something warm and wet trace the curve of his Adam’s apple as he tried to free himself to no avail, Eren’s nails digging tiny crescents into his exposed wrists. He was starting to get hard in earnest now, and it took every bit of willpower he had not to fall apart as Eren pressed a halo of open-mouthed kisses around his collarbone.

If any of this had happened at the Christmas party, maybe the two of them could've—

“We’re really gonna do this now, huh?” he asked loud enough for Eren to hear, his breathing labored. He threw Eren off of him yet again and punched him in the nose in retaliation, earning a satisfying crack! as it splintered beneath his fist. Eren’s hand flew up to his face to stymie the flow of blood, letting go of a short, frenzied cackle as he located the broken bone and licked the copper off of his split lips. Jean watched him poke and prod at the injury, almost as if he was testing the limits of his pain tolerance or punishing himself, and started to become concerned for his well-being.

Eren’s voice was muffled when he finally spoke again:

“I get it: I’m probably the worst person alive,” he said dismally. “Even then though, and even with all the sh*t we’ve given each other over the years, you still think about my co*ck buried deep inside you every night, don’t you?” With a loud, full-bodied sniff—one that resulted in both blood and mucus dripping down the back of his throat—he got to his feet, and there was something wholly self-immolating in his gaze. He pounced on Jean again, fumbling around for the half-hardness he was positive existed and hissing like a bloodthirsty beast when he found it. He punctuated his next words with an aggressive squeeze, spitting his next words through gritted teeth, “Don’t you, you fa*ggot-ass f*cking liar?”

Jean braced his hands on Eren’s shoulders, trying to push him away, but Eren's reflexes were too good, ducking out of his hold and using his momentum against him. The latter lost his footing on a patch of ice as he stumbled backward, and the boys' combined weight sent them toppling to the ground at breakneck speed. Both of them realized what was going to happen just before it did, and the ensuing sound that echoed throughout the forest made Eren’s entire body break out in goosebumps.

Jean’s head hit the embankment first on their descent; Eren’s was second, but the collision only left him mildly disoriented since he’d been buoyed by Jean’s body. His vision swam as he rolled over onto his back. His periphery was dyed red.

There was far too much blood. It stained the slush and snow; it stained the soles of Eren’s boots and ran into the river. He scrambled away from the carnage on his palms, his chest heaving. An effluvia of gore filled the air, and in the middle of it all was Eren, always, always the self-imposed victim of circ*mstance. Jean lay across from him, unmoving. His booze-addled, fraying nerves tingled at the sight of Jean's dick still hard in his pants, his own co*ck stirring at the thought of f*cking him before rigor mortis fully set in. It had always been a bucket-list fantasy of his to have sex with something dead, but he’d never actually expected the opportunity to present itself, much less as a result of his own actions. The sight of him still didn’t feel real, but then again, not much did anymore. He reached for the flask inside his coat, flinching when he remembered that it was already empty. He didn’t have any cigarettes on him, either, and he pulled his fingers through his tangled hair, digging at his scalp.

Maybe Kirschtein was right: maybe he really was too far gone.

More importantly, what the f*ck was he supposed to do about this? Everyone knew his and Kirschtein’s feud had been going on for years. There was no way in hell he was getting out of this without being hauled off to jail, whether it was ruled involuntary manslaughter or otherwise. He had a life to live and far too much sh*t to do. He couldn’t spend the rest of his brief stint on earth rotting away behind bars.

The note, you f*cking idiot, he seethed at himself internally. Find the note. Burn it, rip it up, do something!

Perhaps the biggest strike against Eren in the moments that followed was the fact that he didn’t stop to check if Jean was still breathing. Instead, one hand found the swollen mound in his pants while the other half-heartedly searched his pockets, both rubbing circular motions into the other boy's body because Eren couldn’t concentrate enough to differentiate his actions between the two. He found a few coins. Keys. A student ID. A piece of paper. He unfolded it, one-handed, and recognized his own handwriting. Then, he began to stand up.

Hold on, something inside him whispered. Keep the stuff you found. You want him to be remembered, don’t you? Only you can do that now.

He turned around, eyeing the snow-strewn scraps of Jean Kirschtein’s life at his feet.

Only you know what he looked like in his final moments. It’s your responsibility to carry that knowledge with you—to pay him tribute until your dying day. Isn't that right?

—Until death, even after death—

This is your penance.

He collapsed back to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, picking through the items there dazedly. Keys were too risky. If anyone pressed the buttons on the fob, that could end poorly—at least until Jean’s car was moved or impounded. The coins lacked a personal touch, so Eren deemed those useless, burying them in the snow with the toe of his boot. The ID though, that was a time capsule: That preserved Jean Kirschstein, just as he was, in perpetuity. Eren pressed the plastic to his lips with shaking hands, slotting Jean’s calf between his legs and pushing himself into the jut of his knee, repeatedly, until his entire body was trembling. The cold bit into him as he lifted his shirt and fondled his nipples with snow-soaked gloves. While at first, he’d tried desperately not to stare at the gaping wound on the back of Jean’s head, he eventually found himself tilting his chin to get a better look at it, imagining it was a menstruating puss* and he was just doing his best to make its owner scream.

In his mind, he f*cked it open and found a home within Jean’s scrambled gray matter, leaking prerelease all over his insides. It was warm. Soft, like silt at the bottom of the ocean. It took him so well, confirming his suspicions that the human body was just one giant sexual organ in disguise, meant to be titillated and raped until it deteriorated. He thought about his co*ck ramming hard enough into Jean’s frontal lobe to leave him in a vegetative state and cried out as he came in his pants, mouthing the bloody seam on the back of his head until he’d fully ridden out his org*sm. He didn’t dare stick his tongue inside it, even though he wanted to—because that, he thought in no uncertain terms, would be crossing a line.

“f*ck, I’m so sorry…” he whispered, kissing the matted hair at the nape of his neck. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I just wanted to…” Eren trailed off, his eyes unfocused. He was sobering up in the aftermath of what he’d just done, though he was still drunk on a heady co*cktail of delusion and denial. Panic snowballed inside him as he went flaccid and the cold set in. More tears fell, and before long, Eren found himself sobbing into the back of Jean’s jacket, grinding his knuckles into the frozen ground until they bled.

— You’re just an angry, f*cked-up freak—

I’m not, he told himself over and over. All of you are just a bunch of f*cking liars. You don’t know jack sh*t about the real me.

—You’re never going to be worth a damn to anyone but yourself in your egomaniacal, isolated little world—

Shut up, he thought louder, crushing his temples between his palms hard enough to go blind.

—You’re going to die like this, never having understood the people around you or fallen in love—

—You’re psychotic—

—A killer—

—A cold-blooded murderer—

“Shut the f*ck up!” he shouted out loud, jolting himself from his chaotic reverie. A rabbit across the river scampered into the frozen underbrush; several birds fled their perches within the surrounding trees. After a long, excruciating moment of silence, Eren realized he was still in the woods, hunched over a corpse. The air was sharp in his lungs. It was almost completely dark now, and the body beneath him was beginning to stink. The cum drying between his boxers and scrotum wasn’t helping much, either.

Armin couldn't remember much after being knocked unconscious. When he came to, his hands were tied behind his back and a scarf was stuffed haphazardly in his mouth. The sound of the river, which was ordinarily calming—which had been calming to him, just before he passed out—grated on his nerves in the wake of a sudden, debilitating wave of sensory overload. His first instinct was to thrash around and attempt to scream, but any sound died in his throat at the sight of a shadowy figure using an old hacksaw to cut a severed arm into uneven, mutilated bits of sinew and bone beside the embankment. A pair of familiar nitrile gloves were rolled up to its elbows. It had a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the tree trunk next to it, and its hair was pulled back into a slick, grime-laden bun. When it heard Armin stir, it paused, glancing over its shoulder.

Bright blue eyes met viridian ones. The rich summer air smelled like death. Someone's wind chimes tangled together in the distance, creating a discordant, almost atonal song, and the buzzing of locusts swelled around them like a whirlwind, loud and cacophonous, until the figure —Eren— finally spoke:

"Hey, Min," he said a little too casually, not quite meeting his eyes. He bent down and submerged his hands in the water to scrub as much blood as he could off of his gloves. Armin watched in horror as he picked up the knife he’d threatened him with earlier, and in turn, Eren froze the moment he realized just how petrified the other boy was. His next words were slow and methodical. "Listen to me: I'm gonna come over there and cut you free, okay? But I need to hear me out before you wake up the whole neighborhood. I can't promise I won't hurt you if you start yelling, but if you're good for me and stay quiet, I'll answer whatever you want. Scout's honor."

The whole situation was too much to process, and the sheer absurdity of Eren saying scout's honor as if that had any merit in what was essentially a hostage situation only compounded Armin's panic. Some of those feelings began melting away as Eren approached, however, and when he dropped to his knees just in front of him, Armin forgot how to breathe for entirely different reasons.

"Shh…" Eren said soothingly, tucking a few strands of hair behind his ear. Armin felt water from the river trickle down the side of his neck, and as the breeze picked up to lap at the moisture and wick the heat from his skin, he couldn't help but sag into his touch. A hot, fat tear rolled down his cheek, and Eren caught that with his thumb, too. "It's still me," he said softly, and despite his reassurance, Armin saw something broken deep inside him. Every movement, every draw of breath past chapped lips was suffused with despair. Meeting his gaze was like plunging headfirst into a hurricane or some other natural disaster, and Armin couldn’t help but be swept away by it. "Remember the time I called you over to my house?" he asked. "I was dicking around with a box of chalk in my driveway, and you were across the street with this little plastic shovel. I remember because you were in like, seventeen layers and it was the middle of August. I don’t know how you weren’t suffocating.”

Armin saw the centipede grafted into Eren's spine from his nightmare, followed by Eren's warning: You can't fall in love with me again.

When Armin nodded, Eren's eyes lit up with genuine excitement, but the spark died as quickly as it came. "Good,” he said quietly, clearly talking just to talk. “I’m glad.” He held up the knife between them placatingly— I won’t hurt you, the motion said—and nodded to the rope bundled behind Armin's back. "You were so much smaller than me back then, which is kind of crazy. You're still a twerp, don't get me wrong, but you're my twerp now, you know?" He cut one of the lengths of rope, and Armin jumped at the feeling of his left hand being freed, swallowing.

Eren watched him closely following the sudden movement, still wary. His skin was flecked with blood, but that only made the green in his eyes more vivid. "That centipede f*cking sucked, by the way," he continued as he began to slice through the other knot. He played his strongest move then, rubbing circles into Armin's wrists once both hands were freed and giving voice to his greatest fear: "Almost as much as you do at covering your tracks, actually. What exactly was your plan with Tybur's dog once you dragged it here?"

Lara. Armin had completely forgotten. He twisted around and stared into nothingness, remembering his grandfather's abandoned car and its blood-splattered bumper. He needed to get it cleaned up and parked back in the driveway before—

"We have time," Eren interjected, seemingly reading his mind. "It's not even four yet. Sun rises at six." He reached up and pulled the scarf from Armin's mouth with a bit of effort, tossing it to the ground. Armin gagged at the sudden influx of air, and Eren got up to retrieve his bottle of whiskey from beside the river, tipping some into Armin's mouth when he held out his hands for it. Armin shuddered as it seared a path down his esophagus, warmth flooding his extremities. Every touch of Eren's suddenly sang to him, from the way his fingers ghosted his sore jaw to the way the nitrile felt against his skin.

"It—it was an accident…!" Armin stammered, clenching his fists. The words wouldn’t stop coming. "I was just driving and she—out of nowhere…!"

"Shh, shh, shh…" Eren hushed him again. His eyes were iridescent beetles in the darkness as he murmured, "I'm gonna help you fix this, I promise, but I need you to listen to me really carefully over this next hour or so, okay?"

It dawned on Armin once again that Eren had beheaded a man and was still in the process of dumping his body—that the person speaking to him so gently wasn't just capable of killing a dog, but another human being. Heavy breathing quickly escalated into hyperventilation, and Eren ripped off one of his gloves without a second thought, cradling Armin's cheek. The feeling of skin against skin was one of a few things that grounded him, and he wondered if Eren had managed to intuit that in their limited time together.

"Come on, look at me. I've known you since you were like, a foot tall." Eren worried his lip between his teeth, reminiscing aloud once again. "Your parents brought you to this stupid cookout the Brauses were having, and I came over and played with you in your stroller. I fed you mashed potatoes, too, but your mom kind of hated that." Eren's breath smelled like whiskey and packaged noodles. "You grabbed my finger, just like this."

He plucked Armin's hand from his lap and coaxed his fingers into curling around one of his own. The disparity in size wasn’t quite the same as it had been fourteen years prior, but when he pressed their intertwined hands back to Armin's face and stared into his eyes, Armin felt his inner turmoil slowly ebb away.

"Stay with me, Minnie." His voice deepened then, taking on a more serious tone: "I said you could ask me anything and I meant it. I know what this sh*t looks like, but one, there's an explanation, and two, I'm not gonna let anyone hurt you."

It was an invisible threat—Armin wasn't actually in any danger—but he felt like he was, and that's what made Eren's words so valuable. Armin took a few measured, deep breaths, focusing on Eren’s steadfast gaze as the latter traced invisible shapes over his cheeks. Eventually, he wiped his face on the back of his sleeve, staring at the corpse's silhouette by the river with bleary eyes. The scene was a massacre; there was no other word for it. He didn’t want to ask, but he had to know. "Who…?"

"Willy Tybur," Eren answered, each syllable more acerbic than the last. His entire demeanor changed in that moment, frigid and full of venom. “Probably not too surprising, given what you know about him.”

“He’s a pedophile,” Armin said weakly, filling in the blanks. He knew that was probably the only justification Eren needed, and the more he thought about it, the more he also ruled his death an objective good. Someone who repeatedly hurt children and had as much local authority as Willy Tybur did didn’t deserve to walk around freely. What if he had been on Tybur’s radar himself? According to Eren, he was around the same age Zeke had been when Willy began targeting him. Armin didn’t trust himself to identify potential threats to his safety alone, and in that sense—and despite everything about his surroundings signaling him to run—Eren’s presence was comforting.

Eren’s mouth twitched into a small smirk. “He's also just the world’s biggest c*nt, but yeah,” he added. Armin grimaced, and Eren tilted his head slightly in response, looking far younger than he actually was. “What?”

Armin bit his lip, trying to think of how to phrase things in a way that didn’t make it sound like he was criticizing him. “I guess I just don’t get why you decided to go this far. It hurts you more than anyone else, doesn’t it?” Eren frowned, and paranoia began to seep back into their friendship’s figurative cracks. “Won’t it be obvious that it was you? He’s been pestering you for—well, years, I guess, but at least a few weeks.”

Eren’s eyes glittered with a mix of triumph and sadism. “Oh, but that’s the best f*cking part, Min.” Armin wasn’t sure where the new nickname had come from, but he didn’t mind its sudden employment; it felt right on Eren’s lips, like he should’ve been calling Armin that since the moment they met. “He and his wife split thirteen years ago after all the sh*t went down with Zekey, right? And he’s definitely brought women home since, I have no doubt about that, but he’s not actually dating anyone. His only daughter is all grown up now, and they’re completely estranged. Turns out she was barely a year younger than Zeke was when Willy slept with him, so the whole divorce and the reasons behind it didn’t exactly go over well.

Armin made a face, and Eren continued. “f*cked up, right? Makes you wonder what he might’ve been doing to her when mommy wasn’t home, you know? But anyway, Tybur’s pretty much been alone since then. He got lonely and paranoid and bought a dog, but that’s all he has. Had,” he amended. “As far as anyone around here knows, he’s preparing to board an international flight tomorrow night so he can bed some bitch of his in Marley, but thanks to his phone—because he’s one of those stupid f*cks who won’t put a passcode on anything—I know exactly which airline it is. So I’m going to cancel it at the last minute—”

“—and create a massive gap of time where nobody knows where he was or what he was doing,” Armin finished for him, recounting select details of the last hundred or so true crime podcasts he’d listened to. This was a particular topic he had a vested interest in, and it was frightening how quickly he assembled the puzzle pieces of a criminal’s MO. “Because there’s a twenty-four-hour window when it comes to missing persons cases, and after that, not only does evidence get harder to find, but—“

“—the likelihood of discovering that person alive drops below fifty percent,” Eren said, taking back the figurative baton.

Now that the tension between them had dissipated somewhat, Armin found himself staring openly at Eren’s face, then his lips. They were so excruciatingly dry. “You know that dumping his body in the river is one of the fastest ways to get caught, right? It might extend a ways out of here, but it flows downstream from Shiganshina Park. It also basically starts right behind our houses. It’s like a giant arrow pointing straight to us.”

Some long-abandoned fire seemed to crackle to life inside Eren’s body at Armin’s usage of us rather than you. It betrayed a vital shift in the latter’s mindset, and it seemed to be the one Eren was hoping to catalyze.

“The river is to help me clean sh*t up and drain the body,” he said, looking a bit too proud of himself. Armin realized that must’ve been the source of all the blood he saw earlier, before he’d been knocked out. “His chest and legs are already buried far the f*ck away from here, and those aren’t easily identifiable if someone happens to find them. His dick and balls are going to become a little art project of mine, so they’re currently sitting in my basem*nt, all nice and stitched up.”

The reality of Armin’s circ*mstances came crashing into him once again, and he took a deep breath to ground himself, ice blue irises copulating with Eren’s emerald green ones to give birth to a roiling, tempestuous sea. “And what happened to the rest?” he asked, breathless. “Did you dump those, or bury them someplace else?”

For the first time since their conversation began, Eren hesitated. His eyes still sparkled, but his word choice was deliberate, and as he finally articulated a response, Armin felt his stomach sink far beyond his body and straight into the pits of hell:

“Meat’s getting kind of expensive these days, don’t you think, Minnie?”

Even though it probably shouldn’t have, Armin’s car took priority on their disconcertingly long list of sh*t to clean up . Eren put on a fresh pair of gloves and tossed the box to Armin, who almost fumbled it with an anxious squawk. His hands shook as he rolled up the sleeves of his already-soiled hoodie, and once Eren was finished getting himself together, he walked over and helped Armin straighten out the cuffs, making sure the band of each glove was fully rolled out and taut against his skin. He pulled his hood up, too, for good measure.

“Deep breaths,” he whispered, clapping his shoulders. It was a very fatherlike thing to do, Armin thought, and he wondered if that’s how Grisha used to handle his sons when he wasn’t too busy beating them or writing them out of his will. “We’re in this sh*t together now, right?” Eren reaffirmed, his eyes shining with a certain gravitas Armin didn’t know how to parse. “There’s no way I’d ever abandon you. Not now, and not in a million years.”

“I–I know,” Armin eked out, his eyes downcast. “And I’m sorry, I’ll be okay, this is just—“

“—insane?” Eren supplied with an infectious grin. “Way too goddamn much?”

He leaned down, and Armin felt something gentle press against the crown of his head. He looked up at Eren, awestruck, as the former retreated. If that had been a calculated move, Eren was a damn good actor: His cheeks bore a faint rosy tint, and his gaze was trained somewhere to the left of Armin’s face.

“You kissed me?” he asked in utter disbelief. Eren cleared his throat in response.

“Yeah, yeah. Come on, nerd.”

He took Armin by the hand and led him out of the woods. Maybe it was because they were so close, but the trek to the Jaegers’ house felt much shorter than it should have. Once they cleared the treeline and found themselves in the weed-infested expanse of Eren’s backyard—Armin swore he saw ticks in the grass and vowed to help him mow as soon as possible—he pulled Armin toward his garage’s entrance, opening the door slowly so as not to alert either of his next-door neighbors.

The Jaegers’ garage was, for the most part, exceptionally ordinary. It seemed as if after Grisha had died, his sons had packed most of his things and stored them there. Bins upon bins were stacked upon each other in the furthermost corner, the front of a half-assembled car booted over some sort of tarp. The inside smelled like propane, and Armin located an old heater shoved beneath a tall workbench.

“Did you build that?” Armin asked, indicating the skeleton of the bright red sports car. “That’s really cool. It’s a kit, isn’t it?”

Eren’s eyes seemed to ghost right over it. He made a small, dismissive noise and scratched furiously at the back of his head. “Now’s not the time. We have bigger sh*t to worry about,” he said, sounding irritated. Armin frowned, and Eren seemed to wilt at the sight. “Later, okay? I’m not in the mood to get into it. Now grab the bucket and fill it with some water out back. I’m gonna grab some rags or towels or something.”

Armin nodded, scampering off. They regrouped a moment later, Eren’s arms full of shredded, stained Shammys and old towels with bleach spots. Armin remembered Eren having bright red streaks in his hair when he was twelve or thirteen, and he couldn’t help but smile privately after putting two and two together.

“This is probably overkill,” Eren remarked as they wiped Lara’s blood off the front of Armin’s grandfather’s car with diluted Comet—two parts water and one part cleaner. “We could actually f*ck up the paint in the process, just FYI. Kind of…skirt over the body, I guess, if you can.”

Armin had been purposely avoiding the stringy flesh of Lara’s shoulder, opting to wipe down the other side instead. Eren, however, seemingly had no issue with it, flicking it like a cat toy before tearing it free and throwing it into the nearby yard.

“Is a squirrel supposed to come eat that, too?” Armin asked slyly.

It took Eren a moment to process what Armin said, and he stared at him, bemused. “No f*ckin’ way you actually remember that.” A wide grin split his features. “Do you have a photographic memory or something, Mini-me?”

A new variation. Armin wasn’t too sure if he liked ‘Mini-me’ as much as the others, but any display of affection from Eren felt strange and sublime in equal measure. Armin was quick to reply despite wringing blood-stained rags into a utility bucket. “Nope. Do you?”

Eren made quick work of his portion, and Armin envied him for being so level-headed; underneath all the forced ambivalence and nervous smiles, he was still shaking. “Nah, I sucked sh*t at memorizing dates and things in school,” Eren said. “I mostly just remember the stuff I want to. Whatever my brain doesn’t dump after five minutes.”

Like meeting me?

Armin didn’t dare ask that aloud, but he was surprised by just how giddy the idea made him. He felt adrenalized. Invincible.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Eren exclaimed as loudly as he could get away with, grabbing Armin’s wrist. He’d been scrubbing at the paint too hard, and the bleach was beginning to eat into it. “Don’t get too excited. Remember: Just skirt it. We want to have a car to put back.”

And put the car back, they certainly did. After its bumper was pristine and the street below was spotless, Eren threw a dry towel down to keep any blood off the upholstery and assumed the driver’s side, inhaling deeply the second he adjusted his seat.

“Your grandpa smokes in here?”

Armin had a feeling he knew what was coming as he responded tentatively, “Yeah, but we probably shouldn’t risk—hey, hold on!”

But it was too late: Eren was already lighting a cigarette of his own, and his head lolled back against the headrest the second he got his lips around it, his brows furrowing.

“f*ck me…” he breathed. Smoke billowed out of his nose and mouth, swirling around them. “Sorry, Minnie. It’s been hours. Had to or I would’ve started going crazy.” Armin had to drag his mind out of the gutter as Eren rolled over in his seat to face him, his tank top twisting around his frame until half of his torso was exposed. Armin’s eyes fell to the glowing cherry of his cigarette, then his dark, flushed areola.

His nipples were pierced.

A chipped black rod adorned the one Armin could see, and there was a little loop that suggested it once held a charm of some sort. Armin’s mouth went painfully dry at the sight.

Wanna suck it, baby? his imaginary Eren purred, grabbing the collar of Armin’s shirt and pulling him over the center console. Eren was fully erect in his mind’s eye, and Armin balked at just how big he was—comically so, to the point of impracticality. When Armin swung a leg over his lap and relaxed without fully bearing down on him, he felt the swell of him beneath his ass, like an immaculate fifth limb. Eren hissed through his teeth at the physical contact, eyes glittering, before—

“Armin.” There were two loud snaps to punctuate his name. Eren looked amused, and Armin blinked rapidly, torn from his daydream. Eren was halfway through his cigarette now, and they’d somehow teleported into Armin’s driveway. Holding the filter out toward him, Eren said, “Look alive. We still have a bunch of sh*t to take care of. You can sleep or zone out or whatever the hell later, okay?”

Armin took the proffered cigarette with a sigh, not entirely positive why he did so. He’d never planned to smoke after that first time a few weeks prior, but there was something tantalizing about having the dampness from Eren’s mouth inside his own. An indirect kiss, if he felt like being juvenile about it. He took a short drag and coughed almost immediately, forgetting Eren’s instructions from last time. Eren took it back with a caustic, almost mean laugh, and unless Armin was losing his mind, he thought he saw Eren’s tongue dart out to catch a string of his saliva hanging from the filter.

That was pierced, too.

Eren wasn’t wrong about their proximity to the river being extremely helpful. Armin hadn’t gotten a good look at the decimated remains of Willy Tybur yet, but when they returned to the forest, he finally made his way over to the heap of scraps, determined to see Eren’s handiwork. They were largely bloodless now, and truth be told, most of it didn’t look much different from packaged pigs feet or liver you could find at the grocery store, pale and yellow and fatty. The smell, though— that was awful, like rotting gourds doused in sulfur and ammonia. Armin gagged, burying his nose in his sleeve, and Eren was by his side in seconds, pressing one of the used Shammys over his face.

“One deep breath, then short ones only. Don’t want to get you high on f*cking tile cleaner,” he said, wrapping an arm around him. “I’m used to this, but you’re not. If you really want to, you can clean the tools downstream. That’d be a big help. Cool?”

Something about Eren’s statement rubbed him the wrong way, but the scent of lemon and bleach was so thick in his nasal passages, Armin couldn’t think straight. With a little push of encouragement between the shoulders, Armin wobbled over to the pile of tools and removed the rag from his face, feeling lightheaded. He splashed some water on his face to remove any traces of cleaner—some of the budding acne on his chin had started to burn—and watched Eren as he hauled a different utility bucket toward the pile of meat, some sort of homemade brine sloshing around in the bottom.

Armin picked up the crusted hacksaw and submerged it in the river, bracing himself against the current. He watched Willy’s dried blood turn gelatinous before flecking off the blade, and there was something satisfying about rubbing dish detergent into the last bits of gore that clung to it. It sudsed up beneath his fingers, tangy and aromatic. He glanced at Eren again out of his periphery, shocked that he could work so closely with something that smelled so terrible. How did he have such a high constitution for this sort of thing? How was he not doubled over and suppressing the urge to vomit? It wasn’t fair, Armin thought. Earlier, when they’d been coming up with a game plan, they were on the same playing field—they were equals. Now, however, Armin felt more like Eren’s pathetic flunkey, relegated to menial chores because he couldn’t handle the actual dirty work.

It was a strange development, especially after being held captive less than an hour prior, but Armin couldn’t help himself: He wanted Eren to think he was good enough to keep around. Maybe some of that was just old fears of his talking.

“The Persians used honey to preserve Alexander the Great’s body,” he said without preamble, aiming for a conversational tone. “They had to move him from Babylon to Alexandria, so they allegedly filled his coffin with it. It’s antiseptic, and if I remember right, the sugars in it also helped…They call it Mellification.”

Eren’s expression was guileless in the aftermath of this trivia. He looked surprised, too.

“Oh, if you already know that—” He smiled, but it faltered almost immediately. “Wait. You like rocks and stuff, right Minnie?” he confirmed, edging closer to him. Armin could hear the excitement in his voice, and for a moment, he felt silly for ever putting Eren on a pedestal. Armin nodded, and his grin returned. “Okay, good. You know Cinnabar? The mineral.”

“Mm-hm.” Armin dried off the hacksaw in his lap with careful strokes. It was difficult to focus with Eren staring at him so intently. “It’s toxic, right? It has mercury in it.”

“Yup,” Eren said. “And the earliest records of mummified corpses—guess what they were covered in?”

Armin looked over at Eren expectantly, but he didn’t say anything. Eventually:

“C’mon, guess.”

“Eren,” Armin said, laughing. “Just say it.”

Eren rolled his eyes dramatically. “They dug up some grave sites almost five-thousand years ago in Spain and found a bunch of bones covered in Cinnabar. It was basically powder, though. Totally crushed.” He snapped his teeth in the air in front of him. “Rock candy.”

Armin barely hesitated before splashing him in the face, emboldened by his childishness. Eren spluttered, scrubbing himself dry with the hem of his shirt, and Armin’s ensuing smile was feeble. “That was corny,” he said, justifying it. “You deserved that.”

Eren shook his hair out of his face like a wet dog. A few of his eyelashes were still stuck together.

“Oh I did, huh?” He dipped his hand in the water, poised to attack. “Listen, I could’ve said something about snorting it instead, but I didn’t. That took a lot of self-control.” He donned the most saccharine pout Armin had ever seen in his life before asking, in a tone of voice that betrayed any perceived innocence, “ Aren’t I such a good boy for you, Minnie?”

Armin splashed him again, ducking to avoid the tidal wave Eren sent his way in retaliation. He underestimated the spread of it, and it slapped him in the face, soaking his hair and clothes. He blinked furiously, trying to clear the water from his eyes, but a second swell pummeled him, running down his neck and chest in rivulets. He aimed blindly and heard his own handful of water make contact, punctuated by a string of hissed swear words.

What happened next made something in Armin’s abdomen curl.

He heard Eren plunge into the river and opened his eyes just in time to see the larger boy grab his ankles, pulling him down into the water. Armin winced when his navel and extremities became fully submerged, the cold sinking into him like lead, and Eren caged him between his arms a moment later, soaked to the bone. Every bit of water that clung to his skin glittered like scales, catching the meager amount of light that shone through the thick canopy of trees overhead. His hair, similarly, hung around his face like heavy sheets of kelp, dripping persistently around Armin’s ears. Even the bloodstains on his tank top, whose thin fabric left absolutely nothing to the imagination, made him look like a merman or a siren or some other sea-bred monstrosity, invigorated by a recent kill. For a moment, Armin understood the desire to be eaten alive; if Eren had sharp enough claws or vicious enough teeth, he might’ve let him rip his throat out.

In the stretch of silence that followed, laced with the shrill sounds of mating insects and soft, tinkling chimes, Eren’s fingers drew a serpentine path down Armin’s damp torso and disappeared into the water. Armin squeezed his eyes shut, willing his attraction to the boy above him to go away. Eren couldn’t know. He could never find out. If he did, it would ruin everything: No more time spent together in his yard blasting loud music until disgruntled neighbors threw them nasty looks through their windows. No more shared cigarettes, indirect kisses, or physical closeness. No more conversations about mutual interests or conspiracy theories. It would all be gone in an instant, burnt to ash between his quivering thighs.

When Eren found it, his head shot up. His eyes were wide and vivid and beautiful.

“Min…” he breathed. Armin panicked and tried to cross his legs, but Eren wedged himself between them, searching his face.

“I’m sorry,” Armin said weakly, trying to angle his body away from Eren as much as possible. “It’s probably just my hormones going crazy, or—”

The other boy’s touch rendered him mute. Armin felt a slow, mounting pressure against his groin as Eren located his balls through the thick layer of denim separating them, the inseam of his jeans biting into sensitive skin until it hurt. His mouth fell open, and when Eren pushed a finger lightly into his zipper, he whined, arching into the motion.

“Was that what all of this was about?” Eren asked. His words were so soft, they barely carried across the short distance separating them. “All this time, you wanted me to make you feel good?” He unbuttoned Armin’s jeans with deft fingers and wormed his way beneath his shirt, raking his nails gently over his stomach. Armin shivered, his body covered in goosebumps. “We still need to clean ourselves up. Making you come all over yourself is gonna put us back a bit.”

Eren's voice had a hint of darkness to it, and the sound licked up and down Armin’s spine. He wanted to tell Eren his assessment was wrong, but he couldn’t—not when he’d gone home the same night Eren accepted his offer and fingered himself so hard, he saw stars. He mewled a half-baked rebuttal to the question as Eren pushed his shirt up and placed a sloppy kiss against his bellybutton, tonguing it with enough fervor to feel violating. Armin heard one of the metal balls from his piercing clack against his teeth, and his hands flew to Eren’s hair at the feeling of him nosing the elastic of his briefs. His mouth was so close to him. Armin could still feel the grease and dead skin cells near his follicles. It was something that not even the river’s steady current had managed to wash away, and the more Armin mulled it over, the more he was fine with it: It was undeniably Eren, and there was such a delicious contrast between his own meticulous grooming and Eren’s total lack thereof that left him weeping when he sucked on Armin’s frail hip bones with his furry, neglected mouth.

Eren was dirtying him—he was corrupting him. There wasn’t even much to corrupt, truth be told, but there was enough of a difference in their respective ages and life experiences that they colored them both differently. Armin was the budding nymph and Eren was the young adult, molting in his arms even as they twisted and fused together; when Armin’s plump skin didn’t disintegrate beneath Eren’s feverishly-bitten nails, it became clear to them both that he wasn’t ready for things to progress.

“Okay—” Eren rasped, backing into the water. His pupils had almost fully engulfed his irises, making him look like even more of a demon. “Okay,” he said again, more resolutely, carding his fingers through his hair to get it out of his eyes. “Here’s how this is going to go: We need to get you back to your house before sunrise. I need to get that sh*t—” He nodded toward Willy Tybur’s forgotten remains. “—back to my basem*nt. That means we actually do need to clean ourselves off.”

When Armin didn’t immediately respond, Eren prompted him to. “You with me, Minnie?”

Everything he said came out strained, and when Armin pushed himself into a sitting position, his mind went blank.

Not only was he embarrassingly erect, but Eren was, too. It was a bit more difficult to make out through his joggers, but there was an unmistakable something tenting the cotton where his pants were tied. Armin’s mouth watered despite himself.

“Y–Yeah,” he stammered, swallowing. “Do we, um—?” He looked around for the bottle of dish detergent and grabbed it, holding it up. “Is this it?” he asked, meaning to say is this all we have .

Eren took it from him and nodded. Then, he indicated Armin’s shirt, his fingers twitching as if he wanted to do the deed himself. “Take it off,” he ordered.

Armin’s hesitation was brief. Watching Eren watch him, he lifted the shirt over his head and wiggled out of it, holding the bunched-up fabric awkwardly in his lap. The night air was cool, and his skin pebbled in the slight breeze. He felt frail under Eren’s scrutiny.

To Armin’s disappointment, rather than making a comment about his appearance, Eren said, “I hope you know that hoodie of yours is absolutely f*cked, by the way. No amount of soap is getting all that blood out.”

Armin had almost forgotten about it. He looked at it over his shoulder. It sat atop the tree trunk Eren had been using for his bottle of whiskey earlier, far too stained to salvage. He wasn’t sure where or how to get rid of it. “Are you planning on burning anything?” he asked after a moment.

Eren shook his head. “Nah, we can’t. Not easily, anyway. We’d need access to a furnace. A fire out in the open would attract too much attention,” he said. “The plan for my clothes was to do a bleach wash and then just throw them away with a bunch of other trash.”

As Armin made a small, neutral noise, Eren squeezed out a few drops of soap and lathered it slowly between his hands. When he glanced back up, Armin swallowed, feeling the mood shift back into the same dangerous territory it had been in before. Neither of them spoke for a moment, almost as if they didn’t trust themselves.

“When you do throw them away—” Armin started in a misguided attempt at breaking the tension, taken aback by the huskiness in his own voice. “—make sure there’s no food in the bags, or else animals might try to get into them.”

Eren half-walked, half-waded into his space. Armin’s heartbeat was a war drum as he touched his neck, trailing rough, sudsy fingers along the slope of it. “Chemicals and old rags then, you think? To mask anything?”

The way Eren spoke sent chills down Armin’s spine. He nodded, dazed, and felt two slippery hands trailing down his torso. Pinching one nipple and pulling the other lightly on his descent, Eren let go of a labored exhale just beside his ear, pressing the rigid outline of himself into the soft, pale expanse of Armin’s inner thigh. Armin shook with anticipation, equally aroused and terrified.

“You’re so f*cking smart, Armin…” Eren breathed, and Armin was struck by just how much he missed Minnie in its absence. “Way f*cking smarter than me. I knew you were perfect for me from day one, and honestly, maybe even before that. I was just too much of a puss* to admit it to myself till now.”

Armin could hardly believe what he was hearing. Had Eren really liked him liked him from the start? Had all of those little touches been his way of testing the waters? His chest swelled with something blazing hot and desperate. He found the hem of Eren’s tank top and tugged, his bright blue eyes full of trepidation. “You too,” he said, determined to make Eren prove his desire for intimacy rather than just sex. He wanted to feel Eren’s skin against his; he wanted to believe the confined heat between his legs was love. “You’re so…”

He trailed off, blushing furiously. The feeling of Eren’s co*ck against him was driving him insane. Eren seemed to pick up on his distress, rutting deeper into the meat of his thigh.

“So what, baby?” he purred, and if Armin had felt insane before, now he was positively rabid, the word baby sinking into his already-tingling abdomen like a brand. Eren covered Armin’s hand with his own, pushing it up beneath his shirt. The feeling of both lean muscle and sharp, protruding ribs made Armin dizzy. “It’s okay. Tell me. I wanna hear what you think about me.”

Armin accidentally scraped one of Eren’s nipples in his pursuit to locate it, causing him to wince. Shadows danced behind his bright green eyes, and Armin felt Eren’s co*ck twitch in his pants, eager for more. He flicked it again, his entire world tilting on its axis upon hearing the small noise that Eren tried—and failed—to snuff out deep in his throat. He was sensitive. Armin thought about Alexander the Great, about Babylon, about ancient cultures and their use of jewelry to adorn royalty and denote wealth. Eren would look breathtaking full of even more metal: rose gold chains connecting his nipples and navel like a leash; several studs and bars through his ears, glittering with heavy emeralds; a wide-gauged horseshoe threaded through his foreskin—

“…Pretty,” Armin answered lamely, circling his areola. Eren’s answering laugh was reedy.

“Yeah…?” He readjusted himself between Armin’s splayed legs and dragged himself over Armin’s groin, wrenching an unrestrained whimper from his throat. “Just pretty?”

“Eren—!” Armin hissed by way of the word stop, squeezing his legs together. It was too much. His head was spinning. Eren didn’t stop, however, spurred on by the smaller boy unspooling in his arms. He forced Armin’s legs apart and untied his joggers, pushing the elastic band down over his hips. He was entirely soaked from the waist down, but there was still a foamy outline where precome had begun to dry, tapering down his boxers. His co*ck fought valiantly against the last layer of black cotton that separated it from the balmy summer air, thick and heavy as it lay across Armin’s inseam. The smell of him was cloying.

“Not ‘hot’, huh? Not even ‘sexy’?” Eren asked, his voice light. “I’ll take it, I guess.” He peeled off his tank top and rolled it over his shoulders with a bit of difficulty, throwing the sopping wet bundle of fabric somewhere over Armin’s head. They’d sunk down a bit further into the river at this point, and when Eren pushed against him, there was a loud splash as he broke the water’s surface, causing them both to giggle like a pair of awkward kids. Eren buried his face in Armin’s neck, nosing the hollow of it before finishing his thought. “I think you’re pretty, too,” he practically whispered, kissing every word into his skin. “Like a doll I’m scared of breaking. Everything about you is so small and fragile. Don’t wanna mess anything up.”

Armin usually hated being referred to that way because it fed into his insecurities, but the way Eren said it was full of reverence, like he was some priceless treasure. “You wouldn’t hurt me,” he argued with himself more than anyone else. “I’d probably be okay with a lot of stuff.”

Some of Eren’s hair fell into his face as he pushed himself up, and he was back to looking like an otherworldly beast, grinding against Armin’s leaking co*ck with an uncharacteristic amount of restraint. Armin’s underwear felt like it was full of jelly, slick and porous as precome dribbled down his taint. “Yeah?” Eren asked, breathless. A quick peck sent Armin’s spirit hurtling toward the astral plane, and when Armin tried to chase his lips, he was held down with a bruising amount of strength, the tip of Eren’s co*ck digging into his belly like he was trying to carve out a womb. He sucked in a gasp at the warmth of him. “Do you want me to hurt you?”

He did. Armin knew he did. Eren could probably stab him multiple times and come inside each wound without any real repercussions. Ever since the moment Armin had run home and touched himself to a piece of Eren’s skin, he’d known he was far gone. Call it sick; call it obsessive or disgusting. He just wanted to be as close to Eren as humanly possible, and if that meant dying with his intestines wrapped around Eren’s co*ck, so be it.

“You can do whatever you want,” Armin said, not quite meeting his eyes. “I just want you.”

Eren let go of a shaky breath and hovered above his lips, narrowing Armin’s field of vision to just the two of them. “I really hope you don’t regret saying that,” he growled weakly. “That’s blanket permission, you know. f*cking dangerous to give anyone, let alone some guy you just saw cut up a dead body. I’ve said this before, but your self-preservation instincts seriously suck.”

Armin trembled violently beneath Eren’s hands. He knew Eren could feel it—he knew he could see it, too, as a tear worked its way along his cheekbone—but he still said, with dumb, unfounded courage, “I’m not scared of you, Eren.” A thin intake of breath—one Armin could feel against his lips. “Nothing anyone could ever say about you would make me run away. I’ve probably had a crush on you since we were—”

“Shut up,” Eren interjected softly, fully declawed. He crushed his mouth against Armin’s, swallowing his moans. Armin saw stars at the feeling of Eren’s tongue against his, the tip of it swiping his teeth. He tasted like cigarettes and liquor and something newly fermented, and Armin felt like he was choking at the sensation of a metal bar tickling his soft palate. He pushed his hips into Eren’s kneecap, desperate to feel his hardness again, and Eren got the memo, reaching down to unfasten Armin’s jeans. When he broke the kiss to concentrate on what he was doing, a string of saliva still connected them, causing Armin’s entire body to break out in a cold sweat.

“I take it all back, Min. You’re f*cking stupid,” he hissed through gritted teeth, clearly affected. “Why the f*ck are you so…?” Armin hadn’t realized Eren planned to take off his underwear, too. Maybe that hadn’t been part of the initial plan—maybe they’d stuck to the denim, still soaked through—but Armin sprang free of his briefs regardless, smaller and wetter than Eren, but more than enough to give him a wave of friction he hadn’t anticipated as he sank back down on top of him. Armin painted the front of Eren’s boxers with precome, and both of them gasped at the sudden pressure, Armin’s back arching as he mewled. Eren threw his hair out of his face and yanked his boxers down so hard, Armin heard a seam rip in the process. “Gotta get these off before I really f*cking lose it and do something I'll—”

When Eren settled against him, Armin’s mind wiped itself completely blank. There was nothing else in the world but Eren—nothing else but the incredible feeling of dark, velvety skin flush with his own; of prominent veins and coarse, wiry hair juxtaposed against his pretty, pink genitals. Armin's own hair was much lighter and finer, and watching it tangle with Eren’s veritable rat’s nest while their precome melted together like warm wax was too much for him to process. He was a single aching nerve, his extremities turning ice cold as all the blood in his body flowed downward to stimulate his inexperienced and overwhelmed co*ck.

Eren’s voice quivered as he said, “I’m gonna go slow, baby, okay? Real slow.” He punctuated this with an agonizing roll of his hips, coaxing forth a small squelching noise from somewhere between them. Armin whined, on the verge of coming already. “But I’m not gonna stop until you get us both wet. I have to clean you up still, remember? Wanna watch you come, and come again, and—”

Armin nodded along to Eren’s babbled stream of nonsense, eyeing the traces of blood that clung to his skin. He felt filthy. Eren’s chest was still covered in spongy patches of blood from his tank top, tinting his already-flushed nipples even darker. He shielded Armin with his entire body, a wave of musk and heat washing over the smaller boy, and reached down between them, taking hold of them both and giving each of their co*cks a perfunctory squeeze.

“f*ck!”

It didn’t come from Eren this time. Armin stared up at him, wide-eyed as if he was about to get slapped. He forgot, for a moment, that he wasn’t just a child doing childish things. This was a big deal, and Eren was the last person who would ever judge him for maturing between his legs in real time. His co*ck wept like a man’s, if a little over-eager; his every inch throbbed beneath Eren’s fingers.

“Cute,” Eren remarked, panting each word down at him as he continued to move. “Am I rubbing off on you, baby?” A nip to the jaw. “Or maybe ‘Minnie’?” He jerked his hips aggressively, drooling a viscous strand of precome into Armin’s pubic hair. “…‘Princess’…?” He slipped free of his own grip for a minute and accidentally skidded across Armin’s stomach, laughing. He wiggled his hips a little, tilting his head. “See that?” he asked, indicating his length. He drew the pad of his thumb through a bead of precome at the tip and smeared it across Armin’s abdomen, readjusting himself so he could blow on it lightly. He perched near his waist, careful not to hurt him, and when he looked at Armin from between his legs, Armin felt his co*ck ooze once again, his tepid spend desperate to thread itself through Eren’s dark, errant locks. “That’s how deep I can reach inside you if you’re able to take all of me someday. Right—” Eren licked a hot, horizontal stripe across Armin’s stomach, dragging it through old blood. “—here.”

Armin had to fight his own imagination as it conjured a phantom pain between his tight asscheeks. His reproach came out half-baked. “Eren, don’t,” he mumbled. “I’m still all messy from tonight.” Then, in a completely antithetical maneuver, he wrapped his legs around Eren’s lower back, pulling him closer. “And no ‘Princess’, either. I’m a boy. I don’t really like that.”

Porco and his various monikers came to mind, but Armin didn’t want to ruin the mood by comparing Eren to his bullies.

Eren extricated himself from the vise of Armin’s criss-crossed ankles, diving into the water. Armin sat up, worried that his rejection had made him angry, but when Eren resurfaced, he bore a wide, devilish grin, wrenching Armin toward him and hooking both of his legs over his shoulders. It was then that Armin realized Eren was completely naked now, and the latter threw his sopping wet pants down on the ground beside him, tapping his arm. Any protests about being dragged around died in Armin’s throat at the sight of Eren’s co*ck curled against his stomach, the image distorted by the water.

“Lift your back for me. I wanna make you comfortable first.”

“What’re you—?”

“You trust me,” Eren stated as if it was the easiest thing in the world, his expression open. “Unconditionally, no questions asked?”

He did. Armin lifted his back without a word, feeling Eren try to wedge his pants— and his underwear, unless he was mistaken—beneath him. It was a bit clumsy, and Armin had to shuffle around quite a bit to get them spread out like a blanket, but before long, he was flat on his back, his blond hair forming a damp halo around his head as Eren expressed his intentions:

“I’m gonna make you like it,” he said quietly. “Nobody ever said a boy couldn't be a princess, and you’re too pretty to be anything else. You’re my Princess. I’ve decided.”

“Eren, I’m kind of serious,” he said. “I really don’t—“

Eren cut him off by pulling one of his testicl*s into his mouth, throwing him a pleading look beneath dark lashes. Armin squirmed as he sucked on it like an overripe fruit, the tip of his tongue tracing the seam between his balls. He released him with a little pop after a moment, licking his lips.

“Pretty please?” he asked in a low timbre, each word vibrating against Armin’s sac. “If some little f*cking cumrag at your school called you that, I’ll beat their head in.”

“Not Princess, but—” Armin began to object.

“Then it’s for us. Us only.” He kissed the base of Armin’s shaft, causing the smaller boy to buck his hips against Eren’s face. “In moments like these, when I wanna make you feel so good, you forget who you are.” Another kiss, this time to his overstimulated head, with a hard dip of the tongue that teased his urethra. “So good that you forget the world around you—that you forget what everyone else is doing with their vapid, sh*tty lives.” Finally, he kissed Armin’s knuckles, brushing a thumb over his much smaller fingers. His gaze was full of distant darkness. “We’ll build our own paradise outside these stupid f*cking walls someday. Travel the world. Find someplace nobody’s ever seen before. Find out where the Bermuda Triangle leads, even though I’m pretty convinced it’s just a giant portal to hell.” He chuckled, and it was like the first breath of spring, allergens, mosquitos, and all. “According to religious assholes, all ‘lost souls’ really do down there is suffer for eternity and f*ck. Think we could survive in hell together? Just the two of us versus the devil?”

Armin was unraveling at record-shattering speed. “I think you could probably kick the devil’s ass and take the throne all by yourself. No help needed from me. You’d look pretty good on a throne, too.”

The two of them lay together some time later, Eren pushing his co*ck lazily between Armin’s thighs as Armin fished traces of his own come from Eren’s mouth. He’d finished several times—across his stomach, in Eren’s hand, and in his hair—and each time, Eren attempted to clean up as much of it as he could with his tongue, like an obedient pet. Armin wasn’t much better though, his co*ck getting standing at attention upon hearing the first whispers of his lover’s praise.

“You’re so good for me, baby,” Eren had told him after he announced he was about to come. “Just in time, too. We didn’t waste a single drop, so now I can keep it all inside me, right here,” he’d added, raking his nails over soft abs.

The ‘Princess’ debate had ended in Armin’s surrender as well, with Eren murmuring it into his skin as Armin used his face to get off. That was the round that had ended up in Eren’s hair, his lips and nose and teeth glazed with Armin’s spunk in the fallout. That was also when they’d taken a break to get themselves properly cleaned up, with wandering hands, more impromptu splash fights, and Eren’s thick, calloused fingers taking their time 'cleaning' Armin’s asshole.

“You’re f*cking perfect,” the older boy slurred between kisses back in the present, half out of his mind. He was so painfully hard and hadn’t come once, content to service Armin while simultaneously tormenting himself. Armin had tried to touch him several times, but Eren batted him away constantly, murmuring something about liking it better this way. Truthfully, Armin was surprised at the level of control Eren exerted over his body in general, keeping his org*sm in check even when he was on the verge of spilling over. “Perfect baby Minnie,” he muttered again, brainless. “Gonna eat you alive someday. Have all of you live inside me, not just your come.”

Armin knocked their noses together. “Eren, you’re storing Willy Tybur’s body to actually eat later. You might want to rephrase that before I get the wrong idea.”

Eren’s smile was toothy and full of mischief. “Mm, but I want to eat you up in a cute way. And besides, you still trust me, right?” He twisted around to face him and opened his eyes. Every movement of his was tinged with post-coital languor, and his next words were unusually theatrical. “Or have you finally seen through my sh*tty disguise, Red?”

“Red?” Armin repeated, searching his memory for why it sounded so familiar. “You mean like Little Red Riding Hood?”

A flicker of embarrassment passed through Eren’s expression, and he shrank a little, staring at the ground.

“No, no, It’s okay!” Armin reassured him. “I’m just curious why it came up. It isn’t the first time you’ve referenced stuff like this, and it always surprises me. It’s not really something I ever would’ve guessed about you.” It seems to go against everything you are, Armin didn’t say, thinking about the way he clung to certain animated movies on VHS as a kid. He tried to imagine Eren doing the same, watching and rewinding his favorites between drawing chalk monstrosities on the Jaegers’ driveway.

It didn’t quite work in his head.

Eren looked at him warily. “Will you laugh at me if I’m honest about it?” he asked, and Armin could’ve sworn he was pouting somewhere beneath his usual veneer of masculine bravado.

“I think the better question is, do you trust me?” Armin rebutted. “Of course I wouldn’t laugh. Never, not in a million years. I get made fun of at school, remember? Why would I ever be mean to you or shame you over something?”

Eren recognized his own words and relaxed, biting the inside of his cheek. He picked at one of the belt loops on Armin’s jeans. “So…I was kind of a late bloomer,” he said eventually, clearly anxious. “Not like you, Minnie. It took me years to start talking and even longer to learn how to read. My dad wanted to throw complicated sh*t at me the second I hit fourth grade, saying that so-and-so down the street was already on collegiate-level stuff while his son—yeah, his son, let’s hammer that detail home early—was going to grow up and be a f*cking idiot. Zeke also thought I was stupid for years thanks to dad’s BS, so that left mom to teach me on her own. I liked picture books for a long time because they weren’t super challenging, so that’s how we ended up with a bunch of illustrated fairytales. You know the ones, with pop-out castles and knights and stuff like that.”

Armin frowned. “That’s not weird and that definitely doesn’t make you stupid,” he said defensively. “You can’t really help how quickly you learn or pick up on things.”

Eren gave him a half-shrug. “Yeah, I guess,” he agreed. “And I’ve gotten a lot better, anyway. I can read those stupid collegiate books or whatever now—not that I want to—so dad finally had to shut the f*ck up or bear the brunt of my mom’s wrath. Mom was the one who continued reading fairytales to me, even as I got older. It was kind of our thing. We eventually got around to Grimm's versions, too.”

“I’ve always liked those ones better. More to dig into than the standard stuff,” Armin said, and Eren’s smile was brighter than the sunrise peeking over the horizon.

“True. That bitch of a queen deserved those shoes in the end though, no matter what,” he whispered darkly, rolling over and nipping at the corner of Armin’s mouth. “So did Willy, for all the sh*t he did.”

Armin reached up and hugged Eren close to him, feeling Eren’s co*ck slide over his own. It hurt more than anything else now, his skin dry and his groin an angry red from overstimulation, but the physical contact was still comforting.

“You get it, Minnie, right?” Eren asked feebly. “I don’t wanna feel like I’m still convincing you at this point, but Willy was like that. You’re supposed to feel catharsis when someone like him dies.”

Armin wasn’t sure exactly what Eren was asking from him—absolution, maybe—but he squeezed him tighter, offering him whatever kind words he could conjure up. “You don’t have to convince me. I get why you did it, if that’s what you’re asking.” Then, as an afterthought, “I don’t think you’re evil for doing it, either. Some people are, but that’s not what this is.”

Eren looked at him like he was an angel. “If you say so, I guess I have to believe it too, huh?”

He buried his face in Armin’s chest, and a peaceful silence enveloped them. The river looked particularly beautiful under the wash of pinks and yellows that dyed Shiganshina Park. Eren’s weight was a bruising blanket, and Armin felt his arms tremble slightly as he held his body above the younger boy’s midsection, trying not to crush him. It was a small, thoughtful gesture, and one that Armin would tuck beneath his pillow for many a night to follow—a shard of love soldered into a cage of leaden bones. When Eren lifted his head, his eyes reflected tiny orbs of vermillion, like dancing faefolk. In a moment of striking clarity, Armin realized that Eren was pretty enough to be torn from the pages of the same fairytales he read; whether he equated him to merpeople or satyrs or heroes of legend, nothing quite captured what made Eren so alluring. Maybe it was the blemishes and dirt and the little bit of Armin’s dried spend that clung to the beginnings of stubble on his chin. Maybe it was the way he scratched and picked at himself with so little regard for what the world around him thought. Maybe it was the way his own reputation rotted in his eyes beneath a drug-fueled haze of rebellion and desperate, boisterous laughter.

Or, more simply, it came back to Armin’s first impression of him when they were kids: that he was something excavated from a vertical slice of nature, with all the good and bad and unknowable, nebulous bullsh*t in between.

Armin was thinking in Eren’s voice more often, and he liked it. It denoted a certain degree of closeness. He sifted his fingers through the older boy’s hair, scissoring apart each sopping wet knot. Eren didn’t even flinch. ”In that metaphor of yours,” Armin began, searching for the best way to word his question. “I’m your princess, right? If so—”

Eren’s eyes sharpened, and the dancing faefolk inside them disappeared.

”What exactly does that make you? To me, I mean?” Armin tacked on awkwardly. “My prince, or…?”

Eren scoffed, but any ridicule was directed inward. He sat up a little too quickly, dusting a few brittle leaves off his hands, and Armin had to force his line of sight away from his still-hard, albeit significantly wilted, co*ck.

”It’s not that deep, Minnie,” Eren murmured, his voice heavy with tiredness as he reached for his discarded tank top. “Come on, let’s get dressed. We’re already running behind on everything as it is. It’s almost morning.”

”If it’s not that deep, then why don’t you want to talk about it?” Armin asked, a lump forming in his throat the second the question left his mouth. He’d meant for it to sound more curious than accusatory, but he wasn’t sure Eren had interpreted it that way.

Eren turned toward him, his expression unreadable. The corner of his lip quirked. ”You want a metaphor?” Armin threw him an apologetic look, causing him to clarify, “No, really. I’m not being an asshole about it, I'm being genuine." He rolled his shirt over the planes of his torso and whipped his hair out of his face, trying to run his own fingers through it to no avail. Something about the sight of him kneeling beside Armin, half dressed, with his co*ck dangling between his legs was even more salacious than full nudity. “If you’re a princess in the woods, right? And say you’re alone, trying to find your way back onto the main path so you can reach the castle—”

He paused, his gaze lost somewhere in a thick blanket of imaginary fog over Armin’s shoulder. It was as if he’d transported himself somewhere else, visualizing ghosts of the characters he was creating in real time. His eyes tracked their movements, and when he resumed, his voice had taken on a more serious tone:

”Say she’s also a little naive and has no idea how to survive in a place like this: She has no idea where north is, she has no idea what she’s able to eat and what’ll kill her, and she’s totally clueless when it comes to hunting. Basically, she’s just a kid.”

Armin didn’t like where this was going, and he was extremely cognizant of Eren's shift away from using personal pronouns. “Okay…” he said carefully.

”If she’s the lost kid, I’m the thing that’s been planning to eat her for days on end. And he’s f*cking starving, right? He hasn’t fed in what feels like forever, but even then, there’s this…I dunno—a weird impulse, I guess, to help her escape.” Eren’s eye contact was uncharacteristically sheepish as he continued. “But on the other hand, part of him wants to love her so much, she suffocates. She’ll get addicted to him, and because he’s so nice to her, she’ll never leave. She’ll always think it was her choice, staying with him and learning how to survive out in the wild, but it never actually was. She just doesn’t know any better right now.”

Armin’s mind was racing. Eren’s words were a slow-acting poison. There was an unspoken truth laid bare in that moment, and if Armin had any sense at all, he would’ve promised to keep Eren’s secret and run back to the safety of his home. The problem, however, was that not loving Eren wasn’t an option. If killing a man and tying him up hadn’t put Armin off, what would? Eren ‘suffocating him’ with love? There were much worse ways to live—or more accurately, worse ways to die—and he wanted that kind of affection. He was young, and adulthood was just around the corner: His time to throw himself into things with reckless abandon was waning, and what better way to get everything he ever wanted than by bedding the embodiment of reckless abandon itself?

After a prolonged silence, Armin sighed. “I already told you how much I like you, you know. It didn’t just…come out of nowhere.”

”And so did I,” Eren countered firmly. “I’ve literally been beating off to you and some of the other kids around here since I knew what masturbating was, Min. How do you know I’m not just f*cking with you, or taking advantage of whatever this crush is? It’s not like I don’t get anything out of it.”

Armin was rendered momentarily speechless as he digested the idea of Eren Jaeger masturbating to him from the time they first met, back when Eren’s hair was still short and he was still covered in dozens of boyish injuries. He swallowed and tried to collect himself long enough to formulate a response.

“Okay, so—sure, that’s a valid question, but by that same token, how do I know you aren’t just saying these things to reel me in?” he pushed back gently. “We could go in circles with this stuff all day. Sympathy is kind of powerful, too. You could just be manipulating me right now instead, and everything you said before was just a setup because you knew how I’d answer.”

Eren's mouth fell open like he wanted to refute him, but he faltered, looking defeated. He also looked like he’d momentarily lost the plot, the cogs in his mind spinning out like wheels on an icy surface. “Maybe I should stop talking about it.”

Armin smiled weakly. "And isn't that just shutting down the conversation?" he asked. "Doesn't that also make you some horrible, evil manipulator?" Eren stared at him, stricken, and Armin was surprised to see his eyes turn glassy. He glanced away when he realized Armin noticed. "You get my point though, right?" he asked quietly. "I get what you're thinking and I know why you're worried about me, but I can take care of myself. I just…really, really like you, Eren, and from what I can tell, you're not the type of person who intentionally sets out to hurt others."

—If someone tries to take my freedom away, I'll steal theirs first—

Eren reached for his joggers, rolling them into a ball in his lap. "You might be the only person alive who still thinks that, Minnie," he said. "It's hard to ignore a bunch of people calling you a killer or a psychopath your entire life. Eventually, this sort of sh*t becomes true. You just end up manifesting it, even if you don't mean to."

“You think you manifested having no feelings or remorse?”

Eren made himself look small, like he’d been chastised by a parent. Armin reached out and placed a hand on his arm, hoping the gesture was able to quell whatever tempest of self-loathing was clearly wreaking havoc inside him.

“Listen, psychopaths don’t care what people think of them, whether that’s me or a total stranger. They also don’t care if they’re hurting people. I can’t really deny the other thing—” Armin nodded at the bucket upstream. “—but like you always say about killing and ethics and stuff like that, how is this any different from politicians waging wars overseas or systemic poverty? ‘Just because they don’t pull a trigger doesn’t mean it’s not still murder—’

“—We’re all killers by proxy.”

“—‘because we’re all aiding and abetting every day of our lives.’”

They finished the thought simultaneously, and while the wording was different, the core message was still the same. Eren grinned, staring down at his knees.

“I’m such a f*cked-up influence, huh? Not really the first time I’ve heard that from people around here, either,” he said. “You might just be the craziest person I’ve ever met.”

Armin smiled, too. “Careful,” he warned, his voice saccharine and full of fondness. “Say that too much and I might just become crazy. Hard not to manifest, right?”

Eren knocked his shoulder into Armin’s, and despite their differences in both stature and innate strength, Armin knocked Eren’s in return. Quiet, mutually-wounded laughter joined the first rays of early morning sunlight, pale yellow dappling their faces. To some, the ambience might seem beautiful—warm, like the halcyon days of childhood precluding fall; to others, that same yellow heralded a storm—a shift in the atmosphere, bringing with it change, upheaval, and first whispers of madness.

“Come on, Minnie, get up,” Eren said some time later, jerking his chin over his shoulder toward the line of houses behind them. “I’m gonna have to sneak you back home at this point. We’ve been dicking around out here too long.”

As he snapped the elastic of two fresh nitrile gloves around his forearms and pressed a bloody, pre-rolled joint between his cracked lips, it was anybody’s guess what kind of ending awaited the two of them. If one believed in karma, the answer was still somewhat ambiguous, a seasoned pedophile’s entrails stinking to high heaven in a dubiously-sanitized utility bucket before they ever reached Eren’s basem*nt; if, however, karma was a value that stacked cumulatively, free from the constraints of time or space, how heavy was Eren’s soul in the eyes of whatever being watched over them? What of his own private crosses to bear? And assuming that God —Ymir— didn’t actually exist, who was responsible for concluding his story? Armin’s story?

Perhaps fairytales were comforting to them both because they presupposed the existence of endings rather than emphasizing the much more human nature of cycles: Cycles of abuse; cycles of violence. Cycles of deeply-ingrained, inexplicable cruelty toward others.

“This place is f*cking suffocating,” Eren groaned dramatically, leaning back at the kitchen table after finishing across Armin’s face in late fall of that same year. The chair’s legs threatened to give way beneath him, and Armin swore he saw a silent dare in Eren’s eyes, begging fate, capital F, to fracture his spine and put him out of his misery. “After you finish school, we’re getting the hell out of Shiganshina, Minnie. Just you and me. We’ll drive into the f*cking ocean if we have to.”

In his mind’s eye, Armin saw Eren’s half-built car run over hundreds, if not thousands of bodies washed ashore before breaching the water’s surface. The kit’s buoyancy was short-lived, and as it began to sink, Armin found himself in the passenger’s seat instead of outside the wreck. His seatbelt was unfastened and his airbag was deployed. Eren, meanwhile, had difficulty peeling his face away from the steering wheel, his nose crushed and his legs trapped beneath him. Bright red blood laced the water, and despite being fully submerged, Eren spoke with perfect clarity:

— If we kill all of our enemies across the sea, will we finally be free?—

“Before we get out of here though, I think it’s finally time to get back at those assholes who hurt you,” he said back in the present, his eyes hazy. A bottle of tile cleaner and a used rag sat on the counter, though Armin couldn’t recall Eren doing anything with it since the night of Willy Tybur’s murder. “Like divine-f*cking-retribution, or maybe even Judgment Day if we feel like getting creative with it. Halloween’s around the corner. Could buy a pair of sh*tty angel wings and have some real fun.” A too-hard tap of his cigarette into an old Pyrex dish punctuated what seemed like a manufactured manic episode to the untrained eye, shaking fingers and all. “What was that kid’s name again, anyway? f*cking ‘Potbelly’? ‘Porky Pig’?”

Armin wondered if Eren realized how he referred to other boys his age, like Armin was the only exception among his peers. He licked his lips, knowing he was in far too deep to refrain from answering him. There was also a part of him that loved the rollercoaster ride his life had become, bookended by sweaty sex in Eren’s bedroom and the occasional moments of dorky passion down by the river as they identified and cataloged different minerals. Despite not caring for jewelry much himself, Armin wore two pieces now: a seashell necklace, given to him by his mother before her passing, and a crude leather wrap bracelet with a few beads of cinnabrite. Eren had one to match.

With an unbearable heaviness in his chest, he responded, “Porco Galliard.”

The legs of Eren’s chair met the ground as he sat forward, looking alive for the first time in weeks. “Before the semester’s over, then,” he said, his eyes glittering with thinly-veiled sadism. When he noticed Armin's apprehension, he dialed it down. “We’ll just scare him a little, baby. I promise.”