Our Love Will Be Legend

Jean Copes

For the first time in a long time, Jean could honestly call himself an idiot. He halfway considered thinking that he was glad Jaeger was dead so he could think this without risk, but then a bolt of guilt shot through him so thoroughly that he was tempted to crash into a tree.

After all, he would probably never let go of the fact that two bodies, both killed of their own volition, lay side by side in a bed of ice where the titan shifter once spent his nights.

But anyway—he pushed away the negative thoughts and brought his mind back to its numb, sweaty, exercise-induced bliss—he was an idiot, and quite possibly an amnesiac idiot as well.

He couldn't draw his thoughts from the near mind-blowing (but not really) concept that Eren and Levi were in a relationship. That was sexual (but also not really). He supposed he could blame it on not knowing whether it was dream or reality—though that would be a quite incriminating dream—but after the initial memory that came barreling down on him after the suicide, he threw himself not only into his work but into scouring his memory for more of these incidents.

He was quite aware that he was possibly too obsessed with this matter. Sure, he could stubbornly accept that they were friends, and yes, he had cared more than he let on. But it was honestly starting to scare him, the circumstances in which he literally could not remove his thoughts from the subject of love.

Thus, he did the only suitable thing he could and went to ask Armin.

Armin never made a big deal out of it, but as a proudly homosexual man Jean had to resist the urge to brag about the physical charms of his basically closest living friend. In the beginning, he had been a small-framed example of adorable, Aryan perfection. He had always, to some degree, reminded him of a male Christa, and he had believed for the longest time that they were long-lost siblings. They were both into girls, after all, and he distinctly believed (back then, locked in his teenage stupidity) that that was the sort of thing to run in the family.

But a little after the failed expedition, he began to notice the small things. His jaw was no longer round. Yes, his jaw was definitely straight, defined, and muscular, and suddenly his neck was too. And were those high cheekbones? No—actually, yes. His blond hair lost the girlish, even quality to it as he continued to let it grow, and somewhere along the line he had shaggy bangs and a long ponytail. Eren told him to cut it. Armin never did.

And suddenly, as well as asking for private study, Armin was challenging his squadmates to races around headquarters—sometimes on gear, sometimes running—and he consistently won.

Actually, now that he recalled it, that was the reason Rivers was pissed at him in the first place. It had been an unusual race, and the riskiest of them yet—shoot up the staircase to the terrace tower and leap of it, catching themselves with gear. He'd originally said no, but Armin justified it by saying that it was noteworthy training for control.

And that, then, was more circumstantial evidence that Jean was an idiot, because when he'd repeated those exact words to Lieutenant Rivers, he'd gotten an irritated kick to the cheekbone.

Back on the subject, he gradually noticed that Armin was now his height and at least his girth—he still retained the slender form of bones, but his muscles were solid now. He also had a thin layer of blond stubble.

Jean had gotten over Armin romantically long before Trost. But even so, he'd be a fool not to recognize that the virtual genius was quite possibly literally a god.

These days, Hanji reclined in her favorite chair by the window, with a haphazard stock of documents beside her feet. She'd been tasked, in honor of her scientific prowess, with the job of organizing her findings and statements for federal archive, in lieu of the daunting possibility that titans might appear again.