Armin POV
The nights were cold and Armin wasn't sure that he would ever get used to it. The little noises of branches cracking and moving under the weight of birds and squirrels, the chattering of his friend's teeth when the wind reached their side of the small camp they had set up with burning muscles and fear in their bones...
"Am back.", he heard Eren's voice breaching through the trees as his friend made it's way through the bushes and plants, his hands full of chopped wood. "We can try to get the fire going now."
"Don't.", Ymir said with her hands crossed behind her head and rested against a tree. She didn't bother to brush away the small insects crawling over her lap and shoulders. "There is a storm coming. Hide that shit away so we can use it later on."
"How would you even know if a storm was coming?", Eren grumbled but put the wood down on the ground, his arms red because of the many scratches and the blood from the wounds he had gathered in that forest.
Armin swallowed as he thought back to their first nights when they had tried to get some meat to eat. The squirrels and birds were too fast as were the rabbits. But many predators...wolves...or even their prey...deer...
He bit back a nauseas groan.
It had to be done.
They wanted to survive. And the risk to get something poisonous from all the bushes around them...Ymir had been the one to tell them otherwise.
"Can feel it.", the girl said, her skin dirty and almost as scarred as Eren's. "Trust me on this or you'll have to go twice to get some new branches and sticks from out there."
"Are you too much of a royal to listen to us, Your Highness?", Jean teased him from where he stood watch between some trees, his eyes directed at the darkness that surrounded them, kept them where no one should be able to find them.
And if they did...
Armin turned his head in search of Mikasa.
He found her sitting next to the fireplace they had created. Sometimes the flames burned high enough to really warm them. Sometimes they couldn't get the fire started at all. The girl stared into the mix of ashes and all the dirt in between.
Her hands drew her knees against her chest. Even from his place Armin noticed her shivering. She clutched Eren's scarf with one hand and tightened it around her throat. The shivering still didn't cease.
"Shut up, horseface.", Eren growled and got rid of the clothing he wore.
After a month out here in the wild, their old clothes were torn and dirty and didn't protect them even a bit from the cold anymore. Eren and Ymir had been the one to go back to the village, to search the houses for something that had survived the fire rampaging through them.
They had taken new clothes – if a bit dirty – and a set of bandages and fruits with them. The food was old and soggy but they hadn't been used to the pain of slowly starving back then.
But when the cold nights came for them and they realized that food wouldn't come to them so easily – they ate everything. Everything they could find and believe to be harmless.
Armin shook his head, the old pictures of that first month still so real in his mind.
"Eren, should I give you my cardigan?", he offered his friend but Eren waved it off and shrugged off his own jacket. It didn't have any sleeves since they had been too old and full of holes so Eren had cut them off. But they would do the job and protect the wood as good as possible from rain and wind.
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Coming for your heart
Fanfiction|| Book 1 || Eren Yaeger had to flee from his home when he was only six years old. With his mother and his adopted sister he tries to forget anything related to the King and the secrets they left behind. Many years later war comes for Eldia and Er...
