Disclaimer: I own nothing. Not a thing.
Author's Note: SPOILERS FOR CHAPTER 59. Also, after the roaring success that was "Homecoming," I decided to try my had at some more Armin comfort fics. I don't know why I always fall back to Jean. You can see this as Jearmin, but I think it's also sweet as friendship.
Also, please forgive any typo or grammar errors, as I did most of this from 11 o'clock to 2 in the morning. Tada!

"Where is he?"

Jean hardly needed to clarify his question. Connie simply tilted his head towards the back of the cabin. Jean didn't know why he even asked in the first place. He had been there since they got back.

Regardless, the taller brunet muttered a soft "thank you" before making his way slowly to where Connie had gestured. Jean paused to consider their expressions. Something was different. Something had changed for good. Jean's mouth pursed into a discontent frown. Even if Armin somehow managed to forgive himself for what he had done, the others would never forget.

Connie's cautious treading, forced laughs with pressed lips.

Sasha's fearful side glance, careful not to stand too close.

The hardened glint in Mikasa's eye, more wary than familial.

Eren's look of horror and disbelief when he heard through a faceless whisper, because Armin would never speak about it openly.

Perhaps Christa would cry, reach out to hold him and then pull back.

They wouldn't mean to, but each automatic reaction would only reinforce Armin's belief that he was a monster. The first one to pull the trigger on a human. On humanity.

The brunet rubbed his cheek in pensive thought. This was Jean's own involuntary response. Trying to make sure all of her blood was gone before it leaked into his blood stream. He knew from Armin's fond lectures of the past that was simply not what happened, but it didn't stop his fingers from scraping across his unmarred and clean skin. Jean's doubt would hurt Armin.

He knew Armin would be smart enough to notice it. He would pick up on all of their lasting reactions.

The only one of them skilled enough to hide their face would be the one breaking apart, no outwardly sign of weakness until everything just collapsed. A vicious cycle, but Armin would hold everything in, determined to atone for his sins through solitary suffering.

Jean supposed Armin had always been that way. Willing to listen and offer advice, but never wanting to open up about his problems.

I can't let him destroy himself over this. To hell with hesitation—he saved my life.

The brunet took a deep breath, dropped his hands, and forced them to relax by his side. His first step was rigid and hesitant, but gradually his casual gait returned and Jean knew he could make things right if he could just get Armin to listen.

Armin was sitting by the river, his shoulders hunched and his back to the cabin. Jean observed the boy slowly, his brown gaze traveling from the bowed head to the crimson stained cloak. The blotches were nearly ebony against the emerald green. Either the boy hadn't heard him or he ignored him. Jean couldn't tell, as Armin's drawn hood hid most of his face.

Mikasa, on the other hand, noticed Jean's approach, though her reaction was just as muted. Standing only a few feet from the boy, she turned curiously and nodded once to the taller brunet. He didn't even have to ask, but Mikasa seemed to understand their desire to be alone.

She paused on her way past Jean and tilted her head. Jean blinked, waiting for the girl to say something, but she merely stood there, gray boring curiously into brown. The brunet used the opportunity to search for any sign of distrust or hesitation for him or for Armin, but Mikasa revealed nothing. Either she was better at hiding her emotions than Jean expected, or the brunet was wrong in his evaluation of her.

"He killed her to save you."

Jean almost missed it, because Mikasa had murmured it so faintly.

"Yeah?" Jean whispered back, wondering if they were talking softly for Armin's benefit or because it was simply a topic they didn't want to hear.

"You're a reason," Mikasa finished cryptically. With another nod, Mikasa continued up the worn path back to the cabin. Jean turned slightly, watching her go with a scrunched brow.

"Thanks…?" he echoed. What does that mean? I was the reason he killed? Yeah…? Jean shook his head. Never mind, he decided, passing off the girl's mysterious words to her strange nature and the exhaustion felt by all of them. It was getting darker, and Jean needed to get Armin back to the cabin by nightfall.

Resisting the urge to rub at his cheek again, Jean carefully made his way down the faint slope leading to the softly burbling river. He took precautions to step on each twig and dried leaf in a nonthreatening way to alert the boy of his presence if he hadn't already figured it out. With a low sigh, Jean slowly folded down into a sitting position, wriggling slightly to get comfortable on the hard ground.

He was silent for a moment, waiting for the blond to acknowledge him. The only sound was the infrequent chirp of a bird hidden deep within the forest and the gentle mumbling of the river. If the situation had been different and his rear end hadn't been so sore, Jean might've found the entire scene relaxing.

When Armin made no effort to even glance in Jean's direction, the taller brunet took matters in his own hands. He cleared his throat and rubbed at his arms before turning to observe the blond. Armin had not moved an inch since Jean had gotten there. The brunet had a sinking suspicious that the younger boy had spent a much longer time simply frozen by the river than he had thought. Closer up, Jean could smell the faint acidic tang of human vomit and the rich, overwhelming scent of blood wafting off the boy. The bloodstains were on the other side of Armin's cloak, but Jean could still see faint speckles of dark crimson caught along the boy's hood.

"Armin."

The boy didn't turn towards Jean, but he drew his knees up further to his chest.

"Armin," Jean began. "Take off your hood. Please."

After a moment of silence, Jean gently reached for the crusted hem and pulled back gently, so as to not startle the boy. Jean dropped the fabric and it folded back on itself against the nape of the boy's neck.

"Armin," Jean started for the third time. The boy let out a shuddering sigh and turned to back the brunet. For the first time since returning home, Jean was finally able to catch a glimpse of the blond's face. What he saw frightened him.

Armin had stopped crying, but his eyes were red and worn. The sickly pallor of his skin was in sharp contrast to the previously livid flush of scarlet that had filled the boy's cheeks in the heat of the earlier, fateful moment. The residual splatter of the MP's blood across his face stood out like dark marks and dried in his hair in crimson flakes. At the corner of the boy's mouth, there was a faint greenish yellow tinge, as if he hadn't managed to wipe away all of the evidence of his purging.

"J-Jean," the boy whispered back, lowering his gaze from the brunet's intense, concerned stare.

"You have some—" He broke off, hovering a weak finger over the corner of his mouth.

Armin blinked and immediately wiped at the spot with a stained sleeve. "Thanks," he murmured. It did little to clean his face, only smearing his shining cheeks further.

Jean glanced down at the boy's hands. They were rubbed raw, bright red with puckered flesh. He wondered how long the boy had spent, perched by the edge of the river, trying to wash off all of the blood, pain, and regret off of his hands, before Mikasa had found him. He wondered how close the boy came to throwing himself in at the sight of the red tendrils leaving his skin. Jean took another unsteady breath, cursing whatever had put mere children into such a heartless, cold world.

"I don't know what to say," Jean started slowly. In his mind, he had planned his inspirational, powerful speech in his head. However, seeing how shattered the blond was caused every single word to slip from his mind.

"I'm sorry…"

"What you did—"

"What I did was bad," Armin interrupted. "Wrong. Evi—"

"—Necessary," Jean broke in, causing the blond to freeze. "What you did saved my life."

"I—she hesitated. I was the first one to pull the trigger. Maybe it didn't have to end that way."

"Maybe it didn't," Jean countered slowly. "Maybe if you hadhesitated, you wouldn't have been the first one to pull the trigger." The brunet hesitated before continuing. "She was a soldier. She wasn't going to give us a break because we are a couple of kids. Someone was going to die and there isn't anything one of us could have done to stop it."

Armin mashed his lips together and searched Jean's impassive face before glancing down at the river. Jean waited patiently for the boy to sort out and share the chaos broiling in his mind.

"It's just—why did it have to be me?" The blond curled his fingers in and began to rub them against one another subconsciously.

Reaching out, Jean stopped the boy's incessant twitching by cupping one of the boy's hands in his own in a reassuring grasp. Armin started at the sudden contact and his other hand flung back automatically with a sharp jerk of his shoulder. Giving the trembling appendage another tight squeeze, Jean dropped Armin's hand. Immediately the blond retreated back within himself, wrapping his arms and hands around his knees and drawing them tighter to his chest.

Jean suppressed the urge to groan at the progress lost so quickly.

"Why you? Hell if I know," he sighed loudly. "It could have been any of us. It could have been you in the back and me with the gun." The brunet noticed that the blond hardly looked convinced.

"Look, Armin, I don't know why this happened to you. I wish I could have done anything to change it. I would have even taken the bullet so you wouldn't feel this way."

For the first time, a wry smile flickered across Armin's face before being drowned by his impassive, blank stare. "You say that now since we're both alive."

"Yeah," Jean responded, leaning back on his wrists and glancing up at the dark canopy of trees above them. "I guess you're right. Maybe I'm glad I'm still alive. I don't know."

The two fell silent again. Jean watched with a passive expression as Armin fiddled weakly with two twigs at his feet. Somewhere the bird began to chirp again. During their exchange it had disappeared, but the lapse in conversation prompted it back into a low, whistling song.

"It's going to stay with me forever, isn't it?" Armin murmured, barely audible over the gentle babbling of the river.

"I'm sorry," Jean lowered his gaze and then glanced back in Armin's direction.

"I—I asked Mikasa if she had ever gone through this…" the blond started slowly. "Done something she regretted or done something wrong." Jean stiffened automatically. There was so little he knew about Mikasa's past. Hell, he even knew more about Ymir now then he knew about Mikasa. Still, the girl's icy exterior and her quiet devotion to her closest friends hinted at something ominous beneath the surface.

What did she say? I'm a reason…?

"She," Armin hesitated, "didn't really answer." Jean nodded slowly. Other than Eren, Armin was perhaps the only other person who knew Mikasa best. If he didn't know, he knew it must have been something dark.

"But she did tell me that she had a reason for doing what she did. That whatever she did back then—it was okay now." The boy rubbed his arms quickly, exhaling a faint fog in the crisp evening air. Jean had been sitting with Armin longer than he thought he had. "Sort of like the result outweighed the sacrifice."

The brunet suppressed a gasp at hearing Mikasa's echoed phrase. A reason. There was a reason Armin did what he did. To save me. And he made the right choice, so he can be forgiven. That's what Mikasa meant.

Jean closed his eyes and nodded faintly. He was finally starting to understand the girl, even if he never found out what she had done in the past. The brunet had been wrong to predict that she would regard Armin more coldly. It seemed like now the three of them were linked closer together than ever.

"Jean?" Armin's voice was tiny and hesitant. The boy cracked open one eye to glance in his direction. The boy had fixed him with an unnerving, piercing stare that caused a faint shudder to trace down the older boy's spine.

"Have you ever done something bad? Something you wish you could change?"

Jean swallowed, wondering why his throat suddenly felt so tight.

"Yeah, Armin. I have."

The blond watched him without prodding, waiting patiently for Jean to continue. Jean glanced to the boy beside him and rolled his neck with a mumbled curse, rubbing at one shoulder.

Jean exhaled loudly through his teeth, making a pained tuh sound. "I—I killed Marco."

"What?!" Armin's panicked squawk was enough to startle the bird into silence.

"I—dammit—let me rephrase it. Marco died because of a decision I made."

"How?" Armin looked so small and unassuming, with his stained cloak wrapped tightly around him. His bright eyes scrutinized Jean's face carefully. "Annie was the one who had his gea—"

"I wasn't there when he died," Jean added after a tentative pause. "But I was one of the last ones to see him. It was after Eren sealed up the hole at Trost. We were sent to clear up any last titans from the city. He—" Jean laughed bitterly, rubbing at his eye with a humorless shake of his head "—Marco said he had a bad feeling, so he didn't want to go off alone. He wanted us to stay in a group. Find more people to go with."

"I, well, I was so damn happy that I made it back and I sure as hell wasn't going to risk my life again right before joining the Military Police." Jean shook his head again, obviously disgusted with his past self. "So I told him to shove off and he did. And well…" the brunet trailed off, swallowing another guilty clench in his throat.

"If I had gone with him, he might not have died. We could have stopped that titan and—"

"Then you would have signed up for the Military Police the next morning," Armin finished weakly.

Jean blinked and his tense face softened. "Yeah, you're right. I would have gone with them. I wouldn't have a reason to join the Survey Corps." There it is again. A reason.

"It's probably for the best though," Jean continued. "I don't think corruption would have looked good on me," he added, half-jokingly. "Besides, imagine all of Jaeger's stupid jokes."

"A horse on the front and a horse on the back?"

Jean uttered a weak chuckle before smacking the blond playfully on the back of the head, careful to avoid any crimson flecked strands of hair. Armin's desolate expression warmed faintly and his shoulders were no longer slumped.

"But would you change your decision? Would you have gone with Marco?"

Jean tipped backwards to rest on his wrists again, studying the darkening leaves above him.

"I'm not sure. Maybe nothing would have changed. Maybe I would have been the one who died instead and Marco would have joined the Survey Corps. It's hard to say." Jean hated how fickle and fate-heavy this conversation sounded, but it was simply impossible and useless to waste time hazarding guesses on hypothetical situations.

"Yeah," Armin murmured slowly. "But if you didn't join the Survey Corps, I would have died."

"Huh?"

"During the 57th expedition," the blond began. "The Female Tita—I mean, Annie. You found me after I lost my horse. Otherwise I would have been stranded."

"Reiner could have found you though…?"

"Then I would have asked him to tell the Commander about Annie being a titan shifter."

"Oh."

Jean shuddered, suddenly realizing how close to the enemy they had been all along.

"Who knows what could have happened then?"

"Yeah, who knows," Jean echoed back with another nervous swallow. Things seemed so complicated and fragile in hindsight.

"Do you…" Armin hesitated and glanced away. "Never mind…"

"No, go on, Armin. Do I what?"

"Do you think that joining the Survey Corps and helping humanity is the reason it's okay that Marco died? Does it make it okay that you didn't go with him?"

The brunet sighed and shrugged his stiff shoulders.

"Erwin Smith and the Survey Corps gave me a chance to redeem myself. I became a better person the moment I offered up my heart to humanity. But…I still wake up and wonder what I could have done differently to change what happened to Marco. There isn't anything I can do about it. In a way, Marco's blood is on my hands, but I think he would understand."

Armin nodded slowly, glancing down at his own hands. "I know what I did was cruel, but maybe someday the reason will come clear too for me?" he offered weakly, his voice cracking slightly for the first time during their conversation. "Maybe I'll find out what it was all for?" The blond tilted his head towards the brunet, pleading for the taller boy to offer some sort of confirmation. "And it'll be all better?"

He killed her to save you.

"You already had a reason, Armin," Jean smiled weakly, reaching out to grasp his friend's thin shoulder. "You're doing your best to save humanity. It'll be alright in the end."

The blond nodded again, taking in the information with a blank stare. Although the boy's face was remarkably less stressed and anguished after their conversation, Jean still could catch the occasional dark flicker in the boy's once innocent eyes. Jean supposed that the younger soldier would never be the same Armin again, as much as he and his companions wished it.

"Thank you, Jean," Armin whispered softly. The boy lowly lowered his knees and his tense shoulders softened underneath Jean's comforting grip.

Jean was about to reply when the loud crackle of twigs snapping sounded behind them.

"Oi! Kirschtein! We need someone for bait."

Why is it always me? Jean arched his neck to see Captain Levi standing at the top of the hill with his arms crossed.

Before the brunet could respond, Armin suddenly twisted out of Jean's grasp and scrambled to his feet. Jean felt his now empty hand fall weakly to his side as he too stood up.

"I'll do it, Heichou," the blond volunteered quickly, cutting off Jean's objection immediately.

The shorter man surveyed the blond for a moment before nodding. He glanced back towards the taller brunet, waiting for Jean to try to object again. However, when the older teen remained silent, Levi shrugged and turned back to Armin. "Whatever. Just as long as someone's out there. I don't care who."

Armin nodded in response, avoiding Jean's concerned stare. The blond steeled his face against all emotion, brushing past the brunet without a second glance. Armin's eyes were hard and lifeless—the eyes of a man with a purpose.

Jean felt his shoulder sag as he watched the blond leave with his crimson flecked hair and stained cloak trailing behind him.

Without the bird's song, the forest seemed too quiet and distant.

Thank you for reading! Also, can I just say Chapter 59 physically hurt. Also, I've never loved Levi more than this moment. He's a champ.