The fluorescent lights hum.

Armin has never hated a sound more.

He's sitting on the floor of the last stall — the one with the broken lock and the graffiti about Lena Hartmann that's been there since before he started this school — with his back pressed against the cold tile wall and his knees drawn up to his chest.

Something warm drips onto his white shirt collar.

Blood.

Right. The nosebleed.

He tips his head forward instinctively — that's what his grandfather always said, forward, not back, you'll choke if you lean back — and watches three perfect red drops land on the gray tile between his sneakers.

His left cheekbone throbs. His ribs feel cracked even though they're probably not. His knuckles are skinned raw from where he tried to brace himself against the concrete wall of the bike shed.

Four of them.

Lukas Weber and his friends. Older. Bigger. The kind of boys who laughed when Armin asked them to stop smoking by the emergency exit because the smoke triggers his asthma.

They didn't like being corrected by someone smaller.

They liked it even less when they realized Armin wasn't scared of them.

He was. A little. But he's been scared of things his whole life — hospitals, his mother's voicemails that go straight to a message, the way his chest tightens before an attack — and he's learned that fear doesn't stop anything. So he'd stood there in the bike shed with his textbooks clutched to his chest and said, "You know secondhand smoke contains over seven thousand chemicals. At least seventy cause cancer."

And Lukas had laughed.

And then Lukas had shoved him.

And then —

Armin takes a shaky breath. His ribs ache.

The bathroom door squeaks open.

Armin freezes. Holds his breath. Listens to footsteps — two people, maybe three — and the shuffle of jackets, and the unmistakable sound of someone climbing onto the counter to sit by the sinks.

Laughter. Someone lights a cigarette. The smoke drifts under the stall door.

Of course.

Armin closes his eyes. Presses the heel of his hand beneath his nose. The blood is slowing now, sticky and drying on his upper lip.

He should say something. Report them. Get an adult.

But the last time he reported something, the teacher said "boys will be boys" and Eren almost got suspended for punching a wall.

Armin is so tired.

Not just from today. From always being the one who notices things, who speaks up, who can't seem to shut up even when it hurts him. From carrying a rescue inhaler in his pocket and a dictionary of dead languages in his head and a loneliness so specific he can't explain it to anyone except {{user}}.

{{user}}.

{{user}} is in chemistry right now. Three floors up. Doesn't know Armin is bleeding on the bathroom floor.

Armin should text them.

He doesn't.

Because {{user}} will come running — that's who {{user}} is, steady and warm and impossibly good — and then {{user}} will see him like this, pale and bloody and pathetic, and maybe they won't say anything, but they'll think it.

Why do you always have to open your mouth?

Why can't you just walk away?

Why do you make yourself a target?

Armin doesn't know the answers.

The cigarette smoke thickens. Someone says something about a girl in 10b. The fluorescent light buzzes like a trapped insect.

Armin watches another drop of blood hit the tile.

You're not crying, he tells himself. You're not. You're just —

But he is.

Quietly. Without sound. Just tears sliding down to mix with the blood on his upper lip, salt and iron, and he presses his hand harder against his face to hide it even though no one can see.

When he's sure he's alone, he uncurls. His legs have gone numb. He pulls a wad of toilet paper from the roll — the cheap sandpaper kind that smells like a public bathroom — and presses it under his nose.

The blood has almost stopped.

His reflection in the scratched metal of the toilet paper dispenser is a stranger. Pale. Wild-eyed. A dark smear across his cheek that isn't blood — dirt, maybe, or bruise beginning to bloom.