Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

Armin didn’t come to Shiganshina with them.

That was the detail nobody had planned for, the gap in an otherwise tight formation of three that had held for two years, and Eren only realized how strange its absence felt when he reached for a joke about Carla’s cooking and there was no one there to make it back at him.

"He stayed to help the wounded," Mikasa said, reading the shape of his distraction without needing it explained. "Someone had to. He volunteered before either of us thought to."

"That sounds like him."

"It does." She said it with a kind of quiet pride that made Eren look at her properly, and he realized, with the mild surprise of noticing something that had been true for a while without him ever naming it, that she’d stopped needing to be convinced Armin was worth admiring instead of merely tolerating. Two years ago she’d have called it reckless. Now she just called it Armin.

They found him three days later back at the Trost infirmary, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hands stained with iodine, dark circles under his eyes that hadn’t been there before the attack.

"You look terrible," Eren said, by way of greeting.

"Thank you. I’ve been holding a dying man’s hand for the better part of an hour, forgive me for not prioritizing my complexion."

The words landed harder than Armin clearly meant them to — his voice cracked halfway through, and he sat down abruptly on an overturned crate like his legs had simply stopped agreeing to hold him up.

"He didn’t make it," Armin said, quieter now, no performance left in it at all. "First one I actually watched go. Everyone kept telling me it gets easier, and I don’t think that’s true, I think it just gets more familiar, and I don’t know if that’s the same thing at all."

Eren sat down beside him without saying anything clever, because there wasn’t anything clever to say, and after a moment Mikasa sat on his other side, and the three of them stayed like that a while, saying nothing, which turned out to be exactly the right amount to say.

"I keep a notebook of theories," Armin said eventually, voice rough. "Marley. The Coordinate. Shifters. I’ve treated all of it like a puzzle, this whole time. Something to be clever about." He turned the bloodstained edge of his sleeve over in his fingers, not quite looking at either of them. "I don’t think I understood, until three days ago, that the puzzle has actual pieces that bleed."

"You didn’t do anything wrong," Mikasa said.

"I didn’t say I did. I said I understood something I didn’t understand before." He managed something close to a smile, thin but real. "I still want the notebook. I still want the theories. I think I just want them for a slightly different reason now than I did a week ago."

Reiner turned up at the infirmary that evening too, unasked, carrying a crate of bandages he’d apparently commandeered from a supply officer through sheer force of politeness, and the four of them ended up, against every reasonable expectation, working the same ward together until well past midnight — Armin stitching, Mikasa hauling, Reiner lifting anything too heavy for the others, Eren running messages between cots because his hands, everyone had quickly agreed, were not steady enough yet for anything requiring precision.

"This is strange," Eren admitted, catching a rare quiet minute beside Reiner near the supply shelves.

"What part."

"All of it. You. Here. Helping." Eren studied him, still working out where honesty ended and caution should start. "A week ago I didn’t know if you were going to try to kill me."

"I still might have to, eventually." Reiner said it without flinching, which Eren had come to recognize as more honest than if he’d tried to soften it. "That doesn’t mean I can’t also carry a crate of bandages tonight. The two things aren’t as contradictory as you’d think. I’ve had a lot of practice holding both."

"That’s a miserable way to live."

"It’s the only way I’ve got." Something almost like a smile, tired and real. "You should know — Bertholt’s here too. Third one of us, actually, though he’s kept himself scarcer than either Annie or I have. He’s not as good at this as we are. The lying, I mean. It costs him more."

Eren filed the name away — Bertholt — another piece scattered across a puzzle that kept growing new edges every time he thought he’d found its border.

"Why are you telling me this? Any of it?"

Reiner was quiet a long moment, hefting another crate onto the shelf with more force than the task required.

"Because I watched a twelve-year-old die on that cot two hours ago," he said finally, "and Arlert held his hand the whole time so he wouldn’t have to do it alone, and I’ve spent years being trained to think of people inside these walls as targets, not children, and I don’t know how to go back to thinking that now that I’ve watched exactly how it happens." His jaw worked. "I don’t know what that means for what happens later, when my orders finally catch up to whatever’s left of my conscience. I just know I’m not ready to pretend tonight that it doesn’t complicate things."

Eren didn’t have an answer for that. He wasn’t sure one existed yet. He clapped a hand on Reiner’s shoulder instead, briefly, and went back to running messages, and neither of them mentioned it again that night.

Mikasa found him near dawn, slumped against a supply crate too exhausted to make it back to the barracks properly, and didn’t wake him so much as fold herself down beside him until his head found her shoulder on its own.

"You should sleep," she murmured.

"So should you."

"I will. In a minute." She brushed a thumb across his knuckles, still faintly stained despite three washings. "You did good work tonight."

"I ran messages. Anyone could’ve run messages."

"You ran them fast, and you didn’t flinch from any of the wards, even the bad ones, and you made three separate children laugh in the middle of the worst night of their lives." She said it plainly, the way she said everything true, no exaggeration in it at all. "That’s not nothing, Eren. Don’t let exhaustion talk you into thinking it was nothing."

He turned his head enough to look at her properly, hollow-eyed and half-asleep and still, somehow, the steadiest thing in the room.

"I keep thinking about the boy who died," he admitted. "I didn’t even know his name. Armin held his hand and I don’t even know what he was called."

"Would knowing his name have made it hurt less?"

"No. Probably more."

"Then maybe that’s not the failure you’re treating it as." She pressed her lips briefly to his temple, the gesture worn familiar now from a year of small, steady affections traded back and forth between them. "You can’t carry every name, Eren. You’ll break trying. Carry the ones you can — Carla’s, mine, Armin’s, your father’s — and let the rest be someone else’s names to carry too. That’s not abandoning them. That’s just being one person instead of pretending you can be everyone."

He didn’t answer, mostly because he didn’t trust his voice not to crack, and instead just tightened his arm around her, and they sat there together as the sky outside slowly lightened from black to gray, neither of them in any hurry to be anywhere else.

By the time full morning came, the infirmary had quieted into the exhausted lull of a ward that had finally stopped losing people for the night, and Armin found the two of them still tucked against the crates, Reiner asleep sitting upright a few feet away with his mouth slightly open in a way Eren privately decided he would absolutely never let him live down.

"We’re a mess," Armin said, surveying the scene with the specific, punch-drunk humor of someone running on no sleep and too much grief. "Genuinely. Look at us. Three exhausted recruits and a possible enemy combatant, all asleep in a supply closet like it’s a sleepover."

"Don’t wake Reiner," Eren murmured. "I want to remember this exact face for later."

"You’re both terrible," Mikasa said, though her voice had gone soft with something that wasn’t quite laughter but was close enough to it.

"We’re terrible and exhausted and somehow still here," Armin said, settling down against the crates beside them without further ceremony, "which, considering everything the last week has thrown at us, feels like it should count for something."

It did, Eren thought, watching the pale morning light stretch slowly across the ward, illuminating cots of people who’d survived and, more quietly, the empty ones that hadn’t been refilled yet. It counted for quite a lot, actually — not a victory, not really, but a version of surviving that none of them had managed entirely alone.

Seventy days left, give or take, on a countdown that had stopped, somewhere in the last week, being only his to carry.

He’d take it. Whatever came next, he’d take exactly this — exhausted, grieving, and still, impossibly, together.

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