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The clunk of boots descending stone steps makes a sick feeling rise through Eren’s innards. He bends his knees to his chest, curling his torso around his legs, and flips the bedcovers over his head.
Some presence stops and stands beside his bed – he feels it through the cloth shield, eyes bearing down upon him. His muscles ache at the thought of speaking right now. Chills rack his spine down to each vertebra.
“Eren.” It’s Armin’s voice, low and mournful. The sound snakes out of his mouth and coils passive through the air, and does not knock its way into Eren’s mind, but slithers in search of an opening, only to find none. His voice has always had a way of doing that: carefully sneaking, coercing, planting itself and growing.
His throat tingles with the urge to speak, but he holds back. He can hardly move.
“Eren, are you feeling okay?” Mikasa asks, and a weighty awareness of her materializes instantly in his head. He does not answer her.
A moment passes second by terse second. All at once he feels and hears the covers ripping off him, the faint light and the dank coldness like a million blades assaulting him. He wants to throw up – he’s going to throw up.
Her call is more forceful, “Eren.”
“I’m tired,” he blurts. Tight pressure bubbles from his stomach, to his chest, to his throat, to his mouth. He makes himself smaller. It soothes the pain just a little. “I am so tired.”
“I understand that,” Mikasa says, “But we’re worried about you.” She sits on the very edge of the mattress, her weight barely pulling at the sheets.
She pauses, maybe for a response or something to add. He feels her fingertips graze over his sweaty hair. “Talk to us—”
“I just want to sleep,” he barks. Her hand retracts.
His words echo, against not the walls but the hollows of his chest, stinging so rotten at the back of his throat that he thinks his insides could fly out if he opens his mouth again.
Armin’s sweet, unimposing snake-voice wafts to him. “Are you upset about Annie?”
“Of fucking course I’m upset about fucking Annie!”
His whole body flops onto its back – burning, writhing on the inside, legs straightening. His eyes fly open to find Armin, a circle of light on his face from the candle he holds. Mikasa comes into view as well.
“God. I don’t want to do any of this anymore.” The corners of his lips pull uncontrollably downward. “I go straight from training to Trost to that disaster of an expedition, and now I have to leave for the capital tomorrow to either get executed or face one of my friends who killed hundreds of people.” The heat pokes at the backs of his eyes now.
“I just want to sleep one night without feeling like I’m going to die the next morning,” he chokes out. His voice starts to shake – he catches this, gulps and gasps through the mouth. He forces himself to crack a smile.
Any second now, he might vomit his own heart out of his body. That would bring so much relief.
His jaws hinge wide open and he hiccups. “Who am I kidding?” he breathes. “I’ve never known a night like that in my life.”
He inhales sharply and howls out a sigh, as his gravity folds in on itself like that of a dying star.
“Eren,” Mikasa whispers. She clenches the hand on her thigh into a fist. The air grows too, too cold.
Armin bows his head. His knuckles grow white around the candleholder, and his eyes trace the uneven seams in the stone floor. “I’m sorry,” he says.
Eren starts to inhale through the mouth and finishes through the nose, and holds, squeezing his eyes shut. The breath whines out of his depths.
The sheets beside him move: a small bout of air hits his leg, he feels a mass close in on him, and then the blankets slide up to his chest. He clenches his teeth and opens his eyelids.
Mikasa’s hard black eyes are locked on him from mere inches away.
“What are you doing?” he asks, his voice cracking.
“I will stay here with you until you fall asleep, so you can feel safe,” she explains.
His mouth hangs open a bit as he regards her, with the way her pale skin almost glows but her hair blends into the darkness. She hardly blinks. Her presence, so close, magnetizes the nausea straight out of him.
He furrows his eyebrows. “You—…”
“Are you uncomfortable?” she asks.
“I – I’m fine.” Eren consciously raises his brows.
His eyes flit to Armin, who stands only partly illuminated beyond the peaks of her figure, chewing the inside of his lip as he gazes into nothing, the way he does when he thinks.
Eren calls, “Armin,” and the boy snaps out of his thoughts. “Do you want to lie here, too?”
Armin considers it for a minute, scanning both of his friends’ bodies from a couple yards away.
Mikasa cranes her head far to the side to get him in her peripheral. “There’s room,” she states. Eren uses his opposite arm to feel for space, and there is not much, but he does not say anything.
Armin visibly tenses. He takes one glance at the flame atop the candle and blows it out. At this, all light vanishes from the basement. Eren senses him set the brass holder on a shelf, pad around the bed, slide onto the mattress, and after a few seconds, drape a portion of the blanket over himself.
Without a word, Eren scoots his body one segment at a time toward the middle of the mattress, letting his friends settle on the edges. He tucks his arms close to his sides so that they have enough room.
Mikasa, on her side, turns so that her breasts press against his upper arm, and she buries her face in the base of his neck and wraps one arm around his waist. The contact feels burning hot against the chilly air. Armin makes an effort to stay in the position exactly between touching Eren and falling off the bed.
“Is this better?” Eren asks. She gives an mm-hm. Armin hesitates – then nods and squeaks out a thank-you.
She brings her top leg over his. Her boot is heavy. Eren stiffens, not too sure whether he should touch her in return or just remain. He waits a long silent moment. Warmth starts to reach him, the smooth and deep kind of warmth he used to feel when his parents hugged him before bed each night. This kind of warmth isn’t around much anymore.
All at once exhaustion seems to vacuum out any willingness to move. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and lets himself sink into the mattress. One of Armin’s hands taps on his opposite side, in search of fingers with which to mesh. Eren unburies his right arm, grabs it and squeezes. The warmth grows.
“Do you guys remember when Mikasa first came along? I was so scared of her,” Armin says with a hint of some hindsight-driven giggle. His blue eyes beam across Eren’s abdomen to Mikasa, but dim with each passing minute.
“You were scared of me?” she asks. She peers back at him.
“When Eren introduced me, you looked at me like you wanted to kill me.”
She frowns, trying to recall the moment. “I made that face?”
“You do make mean faces sometimes,” he admits.
She chews the inside of her cheek, and mouths, “Maybe I do.” Without thinking she grasps at her scarf – but her fingers miss and meet nothing, just her nails lightly scratching her skin. She swallows hard. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting Eren to have other friends.”
Armin lets out a rumbling laugh, making Eren groan. Mikasa sucks both of her lips into her mouth. The rumble stops after a moment.
“Remember when we tried to bake cinnamon bread?” Eren’s voice cuts into the dusty black air. It pours from deep within him, and the faint tingle of it spreads through their three bodies. Faintly, he can smell it. “We ended up getting flour all over the kitchen.” That was mostly his fault, he knew – he was such a klutz with the bag. Mikasa accidentally inhaling cinnamon dust had not helped, either.
“I remember that,” Armin says, a smile growing on his face. “Your mom got so mad.” Mikasa gives a muffled grunt.
The look she had on her face flashes into his mind: eyebrows raised, hand over her mouth. She’d run to him and asked, shaking him by the shoulders, where he and his friends had even gotten the idea of baking by themselves.
Mikasa rotates her head slightly to rest her cheek on the bony corner of Eren’s shoulder, so that her mouth is unobstructed. “Didn’t we burn it?” she says.
They did indeed burn it. Smoke had even plumed out of the oven.
Eren lets out a short, low moan. “Armin was supposed to watch it.”
“I said I was sorry,” Armin whimpers. Eren chuckles, and Mikasa chuckles too.
She presses her lips soft to Eren’s skin and hot breath leaks out of them as she speaks. “Remember when we stayed up ‘til dawn, reading?” she asks.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Armin replies, his voice starting to go hoarse.
“Your grandfather gave you a collection of plays by William Shakespeare,” she explains.
He cranes his neck upward, dragging his hair between his head and the pillow. “Oh, that’s right,” he says. He curls closer to Eren, nuzzling his head to Eren’s chest. His words bear a strange echo as he recites, “‘For this relief much thanks…’”
“‘’Tis bitter cold,’” they declare together, “‘And I am sick at heart.’”
They laugh again, lazily, breathily. Mikasa sighs. “Hamlet,” she mumbles. The weight of the two of them settles on Eren. His stomach feels strange. He realizes he has not laughed in a long time.
A line comes to his head: “I do bite my thumb, sir.” It’s from Romeo and Juliet, if he is correct, but he’s too tired to form words outwardly. Perhaps in the morning he can rack his friends’ brains.
Eren takes in a deep, slow breath, releases Armin’s fingers, and holds each of his friends in an arm that slides over the fabric of their clothes and buries itself in the bend of their waist. Armin cements both of his hands around Eren’s, and Mikasa moans.
He opens his eyes and lifts his head just the slightest. He sticks out of the covers from the shoulders up, as does Mikasa from the neck, but everything else is a series of lumps, the back of Armin’s blond head only partly exposed. The heat is consuming, pressing on him from all sides, thickening the air in his lungs, melting their bodies together. Heavy, fluid, safe. He eases his head onto the pillow, shuts his eyes and exhales.
“I love you both,” he murmurs, “So much. I don’t say it nearly enough. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
He lies there a moment in the softness. He waits to process the words he has just spoken and the gravity of how much he means every one of them.
“We love you too, Eren,” Mikasa whispers. Her grip around his waist tightens. Underneath the covers, Armin fiddles with Eren’s fingers, filing his own between them and squeezing the segments.
“Please don’t ever leave us,” she says.
He wills his lips to part and sound to leave them. “Never.”
If he could, he would stay like this forever.
Eren brings their bodies closer to his, hunching his shoulders just a bit, and catches all their weight. Slipping into them is the easiest thing in the world to do. Armin’s hands stop moving. Eren can almost feel the consciousness leave both of the bodies surrounding him. His own body falls through a wave of the most comforting heat, and before he can even stop himself, in the silent minutes to come, the sensation is forgotten in sleep. He is alone in his own mind again, where the air sweeps cold, and toothy smiles taunt.