COMRADES • Eren Jaeger

CHAPTER 24: Waves

YOU RETURNED to the canteen for breakfast. Stares still followed you, gossip not much so. You took your bowl of porridge — they were still serving the same kind of food in both breakfast and dinner, which surprised you a little — and headed to your little table at the corner to sit down and eat it.

Your eyes scanned the room again and you finally saw Eren and Armin, sitting with their friends at Squad Levi. The people you were assigned to show the new inventions too. There they all were huddled once more, heads pressed together and talking amongst themselves.

A few times the boy with the buzzcut and another boy with sandy hair would both glance at you before getting shushed and smacked in the arms by the girls of the group. You guessed that you were probably either being talked about again, or they simply found you that interesting.

In fact, you were quite curious as to what they had to say about you. Maybe it was about the books you had given to Armin, if Eren had successfully passed them onto him. The black-haired girl moved a bit in her place, and that's when you saw what they had all been poring over.

Spread out on the table were the all thick books you had given, opened so widely that you were sure their spines would have those little creases in them. All of the soldiers had been flipping through the large pages of the marine biology textbooks and were curiously pointing at the various illustrations drawn in them.

That's when you began to properly eavesdrop into their conversation:

"What the heck... are these things?" asked the buzzcut boy. "Is this what Y/N saw when she was in Marley?"

"How scary," the girl who asked for your food added. "No wonder she's all messed up now!"

"If this is the kind of stuff that's lurking in the sea, Armin, I think we're better off staying dry on land," the sandy-haired boy dryly said to him. "I'm never gonna look at those waters in the same way."

"Their alphabet is so weird! I wonder what all these silly texts mean."

But Armin was not listening to their derogatory comments about the strange sea creatures. He was looking directly at the pictures, open-mouthed as he carefully flipped through every page like the ugly drawings were some sort of priceless treasure. Sitting beside him was Eren, also gazing at the illustrations with mild interest written on his face.

Compared to the others, he didn't look quite as amazed with the newfound images about these weird sea animals, but there was still focus in the way that he was looking over the pictures in those books.

As if on cue, his eyes slid to you.

You had been caught staring at him once again. You raised your eyebrows at him, which he reciprocated to you.

Thank you, he mouthed.

You shrugged at him with indifference. It's not as if giving Armin some old textbooks was any big deal. It just so happened to be an amazing stroke of luck when you stumbled on some textbooks about the sea and its creatures.

Huh. Funny how fate works sometimes.

Once again, you failed to finish eating all your porridge. Your stomach was going to have to do some adjusting to their cuisine before you could properly digest the food of Paradis Island again, no matter how spoiled that may have sounded of you. It was probably best to gobble it down little by little until you were finally used to it.

You got up to return your food tray to the people serving it when you passed by Eren's group's table again, where the group took notice you briefly glancing at them. As you passed by, you realized that they had quieted down a little as if afraid that you would hear their conversation.