The mission had ended hours ago.

The Titans were gone. The bodies had been counted. The reports were being written in ink that still smelled of blood and ash.

You were in the library—not for research, not for orders. Just to breathe.

The silence was different here. Not empty, but sacred. A place where thoughts could settle without being drowned by screams.

You didn’t expect anyone else.

But there he was.

Armin Arlert.

Sitting at the farthest table, surrounded by maps and journals and a single half-drunk cup of tea. His brow was furrowed, fingers pressed to his temple, eyes scanning a page like it held something he’d lost.

You hesitated.

You’d fought beside him. You’d seen him command, calculate, collapse. But this was different. This was Armin alone, not the strategist. Just the boy who dreamed of oceans.

You walked over.

“Mind if I sit?” you asked softly.

He looked up, startled. Then nodded.

You didn’t speak.

Neither did he.

You just sat across from him, the silence stretching between you like a thread—fragile, but real.

After a while, he closed the book.

“I’ve been trying to understand something,” he said, voice low. “Not about Titans. Not about war. Just… people.”

You tilted your head. “What kind of understanding?”

He looked at you, and for a moment, his eyes were bare.

“How they keep going,” he said. “Even when everything feels like it’s falling apart.”

You didn’t answer.

You just reached across the table, gently turning the book toward you. It was filled with notes—his handwriting, small and precise, margins crowded with questions and theories and fragments of thought.

You read one aloud.

“‘Hope is not a strategy. But it’s a reason.’”

He flushed. “That one’s mine.”

“I like it,” you said.

He smiled, barely.

“I don’t know if I believe it,” he admitted.

You leaned forward. “Then why write it?”

He looked down at his hands.

“Because sometimes,” he said, “I need to remind myself.”

You nodded.

And in that moment, you didn’t need to ask about the mission. You didn’t need to talk about the losses, or the weight he carried in his quiet brilliance.

You just needed to be there.

So you stayed. And he let you.

Not with words. But with the way he didn’t move when you reached for his hand. With the way he didn’t pull away. With the way he let you read him—page by page, silence by silence.

Because even in a world built on survival, Armin Arlert had found something worth staying for.