I'm back! Exams are over, so you can (probably) expect more writing from me. So here! Have some Aruanis.

I read this like four times when I was redoing certain parts and adding stuff, so now that it's up I can't stand to read it again. So if there are any typos, misspelled words, absolute grammar fails, etc. please tell me, and I'll try to get them edited.

This is a one-shot, but I might add other one-shot-ish chapters in the same AU after it, maybe? I'm sorry this A/N sucks so badly.

As always, characters do not belong to me, but the story does (and I guess the setting? Since it's AU?). Enjoy!

"I hate you."

"I hate you."

"I hate you and you and you."

"But most of all, I hate you." She shoots a venomous look at the house behind her.

"I hate you," she whispers. Her hands clench into fists, stupid scarred knuckles whitening and tightening. "I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you," slowly growing in volume, "I hate you, I hate you," practically shouting, "I hate you, I hate you!" And then she is shouting. And she hates the stupid rain and she hates the stupid flowery Toms standing beside her that she is sure came from a thrift store and she. hates. him (convincing herself of this will make it easier to leave).

But most of all, what she hates is that the second he sits down half behind her and drapes his arms around and over her shoulders she leans into him almost unconsciously. The light brown fringe of his hair is long enough now to flop over onto her shoulders, and she notices that he's worn it half-up again.

"Annie."

She doesn't feel the need to dignify that with a response and instead takes a second to lean further into his arms. They have grown, in the past few years, and they are still longer than he thinks they are. So when she says to herself that they drape over her shoulders, she doesn't mean it in a poetic sense at all (although she writes poetry in secret, hiding the poems around her house and his, only reading him the ones she likes best). They drape around her with their longness, and the sleeves of his sweaters are too short.

She also hates the tableau she has set today. She sits, in a hoodie and too-short jeans, on the curb. She is soaked through because of the rain, and she is the very essence of sullen teenagery-ness. Hidden beneath that is the fact that she hates the man-boy (who she also really likes) sitting next to her in the same way that she hates her father, and she can't figure out how to fix that.

She inhales his scent and allows the second she had taken to bleed into a minute. His thin, wiry arms protect her in a cage of warmth and too much honesty for her to handle. It's a cage, she bitterly reminds herself. I cannot allow myself to fall into a pattern of safety.

"Trust no one. No one but me." Her father had reminded her on multiple occasions that the world was spun of lies and half-truths. He wouldn't lie to her. But he might, and in doing so he would undeniably break her. Annie cannot afford to be broken.

He exhales behind her, and her name is a prayer and an admonition on his lips. "Annie."

She exhales in response, and for another fleeting second (she won't let this one drag into a minute, though) she allows herself to pretend that this is home. But then the second is over. "Armin. Why are you here?"

"Hmm..." he ponders her question, half-seriously. He already knows the answer, but he's probably analysing. He does that a lot.

"What are you doing?" He's been staring at her face for a few minutes, and she finds his gaze unnerving, for once. "Analysing." She rolls her eyes, and he grins as she pushes her chair away from the table and stalks away to do some newly invented task that involves not being analysed.

Now, she stares at his fingers, which tap out a mindless melody on her forearm. It's merely a habit, she knows, because he's never touched a piano in his life. He plays a partially broken violin and his grandfather's saxophone, when he can find the time. He's essentially perfect with the violin, but the saxophone is where the happiest memories are made. Armin takes a breath to answer her question.

"Because the girl I care about is sitting on the curb by a mailbox in the rain yelling that she hates me, and I'm not sure why." He pauses, then continues, almost apologetic. "Also, you're sitting outside my house." Annie narrows her eyes, ah, that.

"Annie?" His voice is soft, and the way he says her name (still, and every time, like a prayer to an angel with blond hair and broken wings) makes her want to ignore her father and lie down in the softness of it. "Why are you here?"

She furrows her brow and glares at his hands as she tries to come up with a suitable response. Nothing particularly comes to mind, though, so she opts to reiterate her previous statement. "I hate you." She tries not to notice the subtle, suppressed flinch, but it's almost impossible seeing as she is leaning on him. She ignores the fact that the echoes of his wince make her chest ache.

"Really?" He asks, and he almost sounds casual, conversational even. But she knows him too well (she hates that too), and she can feel the intensity in his eyes through the way he breathes through the 'r' in his question ever so slightly.

"Ye..." she trails off, because she can't finish the statement with him there. It's all very well to despise someone who cares for you, but when it comes down to it, you can't stand to break them. At least that's what she tells herself. They've fallen into a pattern of comfort, and she doesn't want to break him in the same way she's afraid he will break her. Yep.

He scoots further around behind her and leans back on the mailbox post, pulling her toward him so that his knees are on either side of her and his arms are around her waist. Annie reaches up and draws the string on her hoodie hood tight so that it scrunches up around her nose. She doesn't want to have this conversation, now or ever. They've been avoiding it for who-knows-how-long, even in the time from before they started dating.

"Annie—"

"Let's not have this conversation, okay? I mean, fine, I lied. I don't hate you, but can we just go back to normal and forget this ever happened?" She glares at the inside of her hoodie, and then she glares at his fingers when he pulls it open and over her head. Her hair is going to get wet.

"Sorry, will you say that again? I couldn't understand you through the hoodnie." He twirls a few strands of her hair around one finger and Annie almost smiles, then remembers that she is angry and leaving. The hoodnie was a term Armin had coined when he realized that Annie had four of the same hoodie, so that she could wear it every day even if one got dirty. His attempts to combine her name and 'hoodie' had been entertaining, and 'hoodnie' had been the least offensive option. Annie frowns as she remembers his request.

"Let's just not talk about this."

"Now, or ever?"

"Never." Annie is vehement. She hates the fault line between her two realities, that of her father and that of her life. Annie is a teenager, and she has teenager friends who do teenager things and seem surprisingly not-broken. Even when they are broken, they have people to hold them together from the outside, all leaning their own weight against the broken pieces so they stay together and having others lean on them so that everybody is interdependent.

Everybody tries to keep everybody else together, because if one fails, everybody will come crashing down. And that's what her father is worried about, she supposes. In her father's life, somebody fell apart, and everybody else came crashing down.

But she can't keep herself cooped up in the house all day long, and she can't seem to find the words to tell her father that she will be fine (Armin says he's instilled fear in her, but Annie isn't afraid of anything). So the fault line remains, caught in between centuries and not moving, the tension growing ever greater as the days continue to pass.

"We can never have this conversation. Never." Annie doesn't realize that she's crying until she tastes salt, and then Armin is rocking slightly from side to side and rubbing circles on her forearm. And she is angry because she is not weak, but she's still crying. She pinches the back of her hand to remind herself that crying does not signify weakness. Armin notices and smoothes the rough pad of his thumb over the pinched spot, knocking her hand out of the way so she doesn't do it again.

"We have to, though." He has always been able to intuit tone easily, and his whisper matches hers.

"Why?" And she hates the way that her voice wobbles a little, even though she knows that he already knows she's crying.

"Because it's tearing you apart, milady." And perhaps it is the use of his pet name for her, or perhaps it is because she realizes that no matter how hard she's tried, she was broken to begin with when she met him, and the fault line has been cracking her further. But for whatever reason, she turns her head and cries into his hideous button down shirt with big shaking cries. She is loud and messy, and she wants to curl up into a ball and disappear.

Thunder rumbles in the background, and Annie flinches. Armin only holds her tighter, smoothing her hair and rubbing her back and murmuring random snatches of poetry about rain and thunder that he'd memorized into the top of her head. She has stopped crying now, and they just sit there. And when thunder shivers through the clouds again, the flash of lighting is contained within Annie's brain, and she realizes that she cannot leave this.

"My father doesn't want me to trust anyone." Her voice is too loud and too quiet in the muffled cacophony of rain.

"Do you trust me?" She can feel his voice reverberate through his chest, but it is infinitely more soothing than the thunder.

"I do."

"Do you trust Mikasa?"

"Mmhmm."

"And Marco?"

"Yeah."

"Do you trust... Levi?"

Annie makes a face. "I guess."

"Do you trust Bertholdt? And Reiner?"

She shoots him a look. "Okay, okay," he laughs. Annie is hit with a thought, and it completely blows her mind for a second. "Were you ever jealous of Bertl and Ernie?" He laughs loudly, quieting himself quickly but then exploding once more in giggles.

"What?" Annie is equal parts amused, confused, and annoyed. Armin buries his face in her shoulder and finally gets himself under control. "That nickname," he gasps. "Oh God, that is so perfect." Annie rolls her eyes. "You've never heard me call them that before?" Armin shakes his head, and Annie sighs heavily. "Anyway, were you?"

Armin looks up, hints of mirth still caught in the creases around his eyes and mouth. "I never even considered it. I always assumed we would have to adopt them eventually." Annie snorts, and they are back into their normal pattern. Her smile falls as she realizes that they can't be in their normal pattern right now. She settles glumly back against Armin, toying with the end of a hoodnie drawstring.

"I want to trust people, but I don't want to lose my father either." And that is the crux of the matter. It seems she can't have both.

"That makes sense." Armin nods. "Especially since parents are such a commodity in our particular friend group." It sounds like a joke, but it's not. It's almost an unspoken rule that nobody in their group gives up on their parents because there are so few of them. Armin's are dead, and he lives with his grandfather; both of Marco's are dead, but he lives with Sasha and her dad; Mikasa's parents were both killed, and her adopted mother, who is also Eren's mom, died, which is why she and Eren live with their father, even though he's useless and detached; Bertl and Reiner's parents are dead, but since they're both eighteen anyway, they manage on their own; Jean has a mother who loves him, and Connie lives with them, since both of his parents are dead as well; Christa, whose mother is dead and who doesn't even know her father's name, lives with Ymir, who is eighteen with no parents either. For Mother's day, everybody gets Jean's mother presents, although Eren and Armin got presents for Mikasa one year too, as an almost-joke.

"How do I do this?" The rain has begun to stop, and only a fine drizzle remains. Armin sighs, "I don't know, Annie." That scares her more than she cares to acknowledge. Armin knows everything.

"Have you considered... I don't know," he exhales through his nose in frustration, "like, taking him to a bridge club or something?" Annie laughs. "They would be so freaked out by him. Can you imagine all the little old ladies sitting there chatting, and then he's just sitting in a corner, fervently not trusting any of them."

Armin breathes a soft chuckle, but neither of them find it very funny. After a pause, Annie answers. "Maybe I will bring him to some sort of club. Maybe if he goes back week after week he'll come to trust the other people there." She doesn't think it'll work, but since Armin suggested it...

"Try it. Maybe it'll work." Armin kisses the top of her head, and Annie puts her hand out to feel the mist, which is all that is left of the rain. She shivers.

"What...?" Armin trails off, hesitant. "What happened?"

Annie sighs and tips her head forward. "He found out that we've been dating." Armin exhales. "Oh." Annie nods. "He um," she squeezes her eyes shut in memory, her mouth pinching slightly. "He broke a vase. And he hasn't spoken to me since." Armin tries to subtly check her for injuries by faintly tightening his hold on her various appendages, but Annie pushes back. "Against the wall. He threw the vase at the wall." Armin relaxes almost imperceptibly, and Annie wants to be mad but can't quite manage it. Her father has stopped hitting her for the most part, but Armin is right to be worried. He starts to move and she turns her cranes her head to look at him.

"Come on. We're both soaked, and we're going to contract pneumonia at this point." Armin pulls her up as he stands, and Annie allows herself to be held with her feet dangling six centimeters off the ground (he's grown again, damn it all) for a few seconds, just so that she can stare him straight in the eyes, before she presses a quick kiss to his lips and wriggles out of his grasp. "I'll make sure to buy you flowers for Mother's day next year," she adds as an offhand response to his previous remark. Armin snorts, and she smiles.

She grabs his hand as they stand on the pavement, staring at the house, and he doesn't comment, even though he knows she's not often the hand-holding type. Annie feels like he deserves it, though. She's uncomfortable with hand-holding because it is so personal and makes her feel so vulnerable, but Armin is Armin, which has come to mean more to her this past year-and-a-half than she ever thought it would.

They walk through the grass to the front door. They take the single step onto the wooden porch and stop. Annie glances briefly at the faded, peeling powder-blue paint, damp from the rain. Her gaze travels to the door, which is painted a cheerful yellow with a wooden sign that says 'Arlert' hanging from a nail. She knows that if she stepped forward and opened the door, she would see a short, wood-paneled hallway opening up into the living room. On an end table slightly to the right would be a photo of Armin and his parents, and one of him and his grandfather would be standing beside it. One last photo, recently added, would lean, frameless, against the edge of the one with Armin and his grandfather. Or maybe Mr. Arlert would have already framed the print of Annie and Armin, standing it next to the others. Either way, she knows it better than her own house. She's memorized the nooks and crannies of the Arlert house, and she realizes with a bittersweet ache that she no longer thinks of her own house as home.

She turns abruptly to Armin and hugs him roughly, grabbing the edges of his long frame and turning her head sideways to look at the sun peeking through the clouds. He stiffens for a split second, then relaxes and wriggles his arms out of her hold so he can return the gesture. He leans his jaw against the top of her head (he really has grown too much) and knows her better than anyone else does.

"Welcome home, Annie."

And for once, Annie allows herself to begin to fall into a pattern, trusting that there's someone falling beside her who won't let her hit the bottom. They'll keep flying forever.