Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

Armin found out at breakfast.

It took him exactly four minutes and thirty seconds — Eren was fairly sure Mikasa had actually been counting — before he set down his spoon, looked between the two of them with the calculating gleam of a detective closing in on a confession, and said, "Something happened."

"Nothing happened," Eren said, too fast.

"That’s exactly what someone whose face is doing that would say."

"My face isn’t doing anything."

"Your face is doing several things, Eren, I’ve catalogued at least three of them since you sat down." Armin leaned forward, elbows on the table, utterly delighted. "You keep looking at Mikasa and then looking away really fast, like she’s the sun and you’re worried about damage to your eyes."

"That’s not—" Eren glanced at Mikasa despite himself, caught her looking back, and looked away really fast, which did absolutely nothing to help his case.

"You just did it again."

"I did not."

"You did, I watched you—"

Mikasa, buttering a piece of bread with the studied calm of someone determined not to engage, finally sighed. "Nothing happened, Armin. We talked on the porch. Carla called us in for dinner. That’s the entire story."

"That’s not a no."

"It’s a complete and accurate account of events."

"You’re being evasive. Evasive people have things to be evasive about."

"I’m being concise."

Armin looked between them again, weighing this, clearly unconvinced but sensing, correctly, that he wasn’t going to get further ground this morning through direct interrogation alone. He sat back, suspicion fully intact, and switched tactics with the smoothness of a boy who had clearly thought about this strategy in advance.

"Fine. I’ll just watch, then. I’m very patient. I have all the time in the world, and eventually something will happen where I’m standing right there to see it."

"That sounds less like patience and more like a threat."

"It’s observation, Eren. Science requires observation."

"This isn’t science."

"Everything’s science if you’re rigorous enough about it."

Mikasa, mercifully, chose that moment to stand and clear her plate, ending the conversation by simple virtue of physical departure, which Eren envied immensely and had no graceful way of replicating without it looking exactly as suspicious as Armin already thought it was.

Armin’s promised patience lasted, in total, about six hours.

"You’re doing it again," he announced, apropos of nothing, while the three of them sat by the river that afternoon, Eren skipping stones with more focus than the activity strictly required.

"Doing what?"

"The eye thing. Sun-damage thing." Armin picked at the grass, entirely too pleased with himself. "You did it four times just walking here."

"I did not count."

"I counted."

"You’ve been counting my eye contact with Mikasa? That’s deeply strange, Armin, even for you."

"I contain multitudes." He flicked a pebble into the water, sending ripples out toward where Mikasa sat a short distance away, boots off, feet in the shallows, apparently unbothered by the entire conversation happening about her in the third person. "You know what I think?"

"I genuinely don’t want to."

"I think," Armin continued, undeterred, "that at some point — could be next week, could be next year, I’m not going to put a timeline on it — you two are going to have a conversation that isn’t interrupted by a boar, or dinner, or me having spectacularly bad timing, and when that happens, I expect a full report."

"There’s not going to be a report."

"There’s absolutely going to be a report. I’ve earned it. I’ve been present for two near-misses now. I have investment in this outcome."

"You sound like you’ve placed money on it."

Armin went very quiet, very suddenly, which was, in itself, deeply incriminating.

"Armin."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Armin."

"Hannes might have started it," Armin admitted, at the exact volume of someone confessing to a much larger crime than the situation warranted. "I just — participated. A little."

"You bet on me and Mikasa with Hannes?!"

"It’s not betting, exactly, it’s more of a — a shared prediction market—"

"That’s literally betting—"

"—regarding an inevitability, really, so it’s less gambling and more just correctly forecasting the future—"

"I’m going to throw you in the river."

"That seems disproportionate to the crime—"

Mikasa, from the shallows, finally spoke without turning around, voice carrying easily over the water. "What’s the current odds?"

Both boys froze.

"...You weren’t supposed to hear that," Armin said weakly.

"I hear everything. It’s a skill." She waded back toward the bank, entirely composed despite the deeply pink tint climbing her ears. "What’s the timeframe on this prediction market of yours?"

"I plead the fifth."

"There is no fifth. You made that up."

"I plead something. A general legal principle. The right to not incriminate myself further."

"Coward."

"Strategic," Armin corrected, with as much dignity as a boy could muster while visibly regretting every choice that had led to this exact moment.

Eren, face burning, decided the conversation had officially gone somewhere beyond his capacity to survive with any composure intact, and did the only reasonable thing available to him.

He shoved Armin, gently but decisively, directly into the river.

The resulting shriek startled a flock of birds from the nearby trees and drew a rare, delighted laugh from Mikasa that made the entire mortifying conversation almost worth it.

"That was unprovoked—" Armin spluttered, hauling himself up out of the shallows, soaked through and thoroughly betrayed.

"That was deserved."

"I’m going to remember this. I’m adding it to the eventual wedding speech."

"There is no wedding, Armin—"

"There’s a prediction market, Eren, keep up—"

Mikasa, laughing harder now than Eren had seen in weeks, finally took pity on both of them and offered Armin a hand up out of the water, which he accepted with the wounded grace of a boy determined to maintain some scrap of moral high ground despite being completely drenched.

"I hate both of you," he announced, entirely without conviction, wringing out his shirt.

"You bet on us with Hannes."

"That’s different."

"It’s really not."

They walked home as the afternoon slid toward evening, Armin squelching with every step and complaining about it loudly enough that a passing farmer offered genuine sympathy, mistaking the whole situation for some kind of accident rather than deliberate retaliation.

Mikasa fell into step beside Eren, a comfortable few inches closer than she used to walk, the space between them having quietly narrowed over the past weeks without either of them formally deciding it should.

"For the record," she said, voice low enough that Armin, several paces ahead and still audibly grumbling, couldn’t hear, "I don’t mind the prediction market."

Eren nearly tripped over nothing. "You — what?"

"I said I don’t mind it." A small, private smile, the kind reserved only for him. "It’s not exactly betting on something unlikely."

"Mikasa."

"I’m just saying." She looked ahead, composed as ever, though her ears hadn’t fully recovered their normal color. "If Hannes wins his bet eventually, I won’t be upset about it."

"That’s — you can’t just say that and then keep walking like it’s nothing."

"I can, actually. Watch." She kept walking, entirely unbothered, leaving him standing several paces behind, thoroughly undone by four sentences delivered with the same flat calm she used to discuss laundry schedules.

"Mikasa—"

"Coming, Eren?" Not even turning around. "Armin’s already halfway home. He’ll never let either of us live it down if we’re late for dinner because you were standing in the road looking like that."

"Looking like what—"

"Like the sun-damage thing Armin mentioned." A laugh in her voice now, rare and warm. "It’s rather obvious, you know. On both of us."

He caught up to her in three long strides, chest full of something he didn’t have a name for yet — not quite someday, not quite ready, but closer than it had been that morning, closer than it had been in the woods, closer with every single day the countdown ticked further down.

"One of these days," he said, "Armin’s going to actually witness whatever this is, and I will never, ever hear the end of it."

"Probably not."

"You don’t sound worried about that."

"I’ve made my peace with it." The smile again, small and entirely hers. "Some things are worth the teasing."

He didn’t have an answer for that — not one steady enough to say out loud — so he settled for walking the rest of the way home beside her, shoulders brushing, the space between them smaller than it had ever been, and let the quiet say what neither of them was quite ready to.

One hundred and thirty-nine days.

Whatever someday looked like, he thought, it was getting harder to imagine facing it without her standing exactly this close.

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