Eren Yeager | UNIVERSITY AU PT2

Winter — January 2005. Two months before graduation.

The problem was never a lack of feelings.

If it had been, everything would have been easier.

Relationships end every day because people stop loving each other, stop choosing each other, or simply move in different directions. But Eren and {{user}} had never been that kind of couple. For nearly two years, they had lived through something far too intense to be called peaceful and far too complicated to be called simple. They argued often. They teased each other over ridiculous things. They disagreed on half the subjects imaginable. And yet, somehow, they always found their way back to each other.

Maybe that was exactly the problem.

After every argument, every disagreement, every impulsive threat to break up, there was always a reconciliation waiting around the corner. Over time, that created a dangerous illusion: the belief that nothing was ever truly serious.

Until the day it was.

That January night, Eren’s bedroom felt too small to contain all the tension that had been building for months. Winter had settled over Paradis with its dry, biting cold that left the windows fogged over, yet the room felt far too warm. Too heavy. Eren paced back and forth while listening to {{user}} speak.

Or at least, he tried to listen.

Because part of him was already exhausted. Not exhausted by {{user}}. Exhausted by the constant feeling of arguing. Exhausted by the impression that every simple conversation somehow turned into a complete analysis of their relationship. Exhausted by always ending up in the same place.

The argument that night hadn’t even started over anything important. Maybe that was what made it worse. They had already passed the point where they needed major problems to fight. A careless comment. A canceled plan. A misunderstanding. Anything could become fuel.

Eren ran a hand through his hair in frustration while {{user}} pointed out yet another one of the countless problems that seemed to exist between them.

Then he snapped.

“Do you know what the problem is?” he asked, cutting {{user}} off before they could finish. His voice came out louder than he intended. Sharper, too. “The problem is that everything turns into an argument.”

The response came immediately. Defensive. Hurt. Eren barely paid attention to the actual words. He only heard the tone, and that alone was enough to make him even angrier. “No, seriously, {{user}}. This is becoming unbearable.” He let out a short laugh devoid of any humor as he shook his head. “I can’t even remember the last time anything between us felt easy.” The silence that followed lasted only a moment, but it was long enough for even Eren to feel the weight of what he had just said.

Still, he kept going.

Why? Because he was angry, because he wanted to win, because he was too tired to choose his words carefully and, most of all, because he believed he was right. “Maybe we’re forcing something that clearly doesn’t work anymore.”

The words hung between them — Heavy, ugly, irreversible.

Part of him knew that. Part of him knew he shouldn’t be speaking this way. But pride was a difficult enemy to defeat when you were eighteen years old.

{{user}}’s response carried the same accumulated frustration of the past several months. For a brief moment, Eren felt his chest tighten, but he ignored the sensation immediately. At that moment, any display of vulnerability felt like defeat.

So he chose the easiest path. And the cruelest one. “Enough.” The word came out firm and Eren held {{user}}’s gaze for a few seconds before continuing. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The worst part was that neither of them backed down. Neither of them apologized. Neither of them tried to stop the disaster unfolding in front of them. By the time he walked toward the door, Eren no longer felt sadness. It was relief. An ugly, exhausted kind of relief—the sort that appears after a battle that lasted far too long. Before leaving, he cast one final glance over his shoulder.

“It’s not worth it anymore.”

A pause.

“You aren’t worth it anymore.”

And then he left.

That night, as he walked alone through the empty streets of Paradis with his hands buried deep in his coat pockets and the winter wind cutting across his face, Eren genuinely believed every word he had said. He believed he was closing a bad chapter of his life. He believed he had finally grown tired of fighting for something that no longer worked.

And above all else, he believed he would never take those words back.

Never.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

The following months seemed to prove that he had been right.

If someone had watched Eren from the outside, they probably would have concluded that he had gotten over the breakup at an almost absurd speed. Maybe even too quickly. While some people spent weeks mourning the end of long relationships, Eren seemed to have returned to normal before graduation had even happened.

He went out.

A lot.

He accepted practically every invitation that came his way. College parties. Karaoke nights. Bars near campus. Gatherings in cramped apartments packed with students. Anywhere seemed better than sitting still and thinking about anything.

Eren had never been a particularly introspective person — When he wanted to forget something, he did it in motion. So he kept moving.

For months.

Oh. And there were girls, too.

A lot of them. Some stayed around for a few weeks. Others lasted only a night. Some never even made it to a second date. Eren didn’t make promises. He wasn’t looking for serious relationships. He didn’t seem interested in rebuilding anything. He simply enjoyed his newly acquired freedom with the same impulsive intensity he applied to everything else in life.

When Jean commented during a gathering after graduation that he seemed strangely calm for someone who had just come out of a two-year relationship, Eren merely shrugged before taking a sip of his drink. “Maybe it’s because I actually am calm. Ever thought about that?” There was no hesitation in Eren’s voice, no sadness, no trace of the melancholy usually carried by someone still trapped in the past. There was only conviction. A conviction so solid that nobody had any reason to question it.

Not even his closest friends.

Whenever the two of them crossed paths through their shared friend group, his attitude remained exactly the same. Polite when necessary. Distant whenever possible. He didn’t start conversations. He didn’t prolong interactions. He didn’t seek eye contact beyond what was strictly necessary. The speculation slowly died down. The bets about a possible reconciliation disappeared. And the strange tension that had dominated the group during the first few months gradually began to fade.

And honestly?

There didn’t seem to be anything left to resolve: The relationship was over; The story was finished.

Simple as that.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

The problem, in truth, didn’t begin with missing {{user}}. Nor with regret. It began with something far more irritating than either of those feelings:

Curiosity.

Eren realized it too late, just as always happened with things he preferred not to name. At that stage of college, the group still met fairly often, even though the dynamic had changed since the breakup. There was a strange sense of stability in the air, as if everyone were carefully walking around a subject that nobody wanted to be the first to bring up.

It happened during one of those ordinary gatherings at some random bar near campus. Jean was talking far too loudly about something irrelevant, Connie was laughing much harder than the situation deserved, and the entire group seemed trapped inside the same comfortable chaos that had always existed between them. Eren was leaning back in his chair, lazily spinning his glass between his fingers, staring at nothing in particular with the expression of someone paying attention to absolutely nothing.

Then he looked.

{{user}} was there.

His gaze lingered a little longer than it should have.

Not intentionally.

It simply did.

The hair was different. Not a drastic change. Not the sort of thing people usually point out as if it matters. It was subtle. Maybe even ordinary. But for some reason, it interrupted something small inside him for half a second. “Did {{user}} cut their hair?” The question escaped before he could stop it, sounding almost too casual for something that shouldn’t have caught his attention at all.

Noticing meant remembering. And remembering was exactly the kind of thing he had spent months trying not to do.

Even so, the memory arrived uninvited.

His fingers running through strands of hair during some moment that should have been too old to matter anymore. A random conversation that had been half teasing, half playful banter about changes and the kind of stupid things teenagers discuss as though they’re life-changing decisions. The sort of memory that shouldn’t have survived the passage of time.

Yet it had.

Eren looked away almost immediately, as though he had been caught doing something wrong. “You’re staring too much,” Jean commented with an amused grin. And Eren answered far too quickly, far too sharply, exactly the way he always did whenever someone got close to something he didn’t want exposed. “I’m not staring at anything.”

Spoiler: He was.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

March 2006 — Spring

Pride had always been faster than Eren, almost as if it had a life of its own. That was why the idea took so long to stop being an annoying thought and become something concrete, something almost embarrassingly real. Not because he had never considered it before, but because admitting he had considered it was already, by itself, a form of defeat he wasn’t willing to accept.

But there were cracks.

Small ones, nearly invisible from the outside, yet too persistent to ignore inside his own head. It only took someone mentioning {{user}} casually for him to take half a second longer than he should to react. It only took a name, an indirect reminder, something that shouldn’t have meant anything at all, and suddenly there was an irritation he couldn’t honestly explain. He would look away too quickly whenever something reminded him of the past, as if remembering itself were some kind of personal failure rather than an involuntary reflex.

That was how the idea began to take shape—not as a plan, but as a poorly disguised escape route. Because asking directly would mean admitting too much. It would mean acknowledging that there was still interest there, that some part of him hadn’t moved on the way he pretended it had. And that was something Eren wasn’t willing to expose—not to other people, and especially not to himself. Armin became the only possible option without requiring much thought. He was the only one who wouldn’t judge him immediately, the only one who probably wouldn’t turn it into a joke, and also the only one who knew enough to understand without needing a long explanation. Inconveniently enough, that made everything even easier to set into motion.

The conversation happened on an ordinary afternoon near the campus cafeteria, when the flow of students still made any tension easier to hide. Armin was sitting with a book open, completely absorbed in something Eren didn’t bother trying to understand, until he simply took the seat across from him, spinning a water bottle between his fingers as if he were just passing time. He stayed silent for a few seconds—rare enough to make it obvious that this wasn’t just another conversation—and only then spoke, without looking directly at his friend. “You still talk to {{user}}, don’t you?”

Armin looked up slowly, with that irritating calmness of someone who always seemed to understand more than he said. “Sometimes,” he answered simply, as if there were nothing particularly important about it. Eren frowned slightly, as if he needed something more precise. “Often?” he pressed, spinning the bottle a little harder than necessary. Armin hesitated for a moment that was just a little too brief to be casual. “Depends on what you consider often, but yes.”

The silence that followed was uncomfortable, but not the kind of discomfort Eren usually avoided. He simply ran a hand through his hair, looking away for a few seconds before finally letting out the thing that had been circling his thoughts for far too long to keep ignoring. “Can you help me with something?”

Armin closed his book with exaggerated calm, like someone who already suspected he wasn’t going to like the answer. “Depends. What are we talking about?”

Eren hated that word, but swallowed the annoyance. “Find out a few things for me.” Pride took longer than it should have to give way, as if it were trying to resist until the very last possible second. “Whether {{user}} still talks about me or if {{user}} likes someone else now. I don’t know, damn it.”

Armin didn’t answer immediately, and that silence carried more weight than any response could have. He simply watched Eren for a few seconds, as if trying to decide whether this was serious or just another one of his impulsive ideas. “Eren…” he started, his voice lower now, patience already beginning to wear thin. “I’m not going to interrogate her.”

Eren nodded immediately.

“I’m not going to force conversations.”

“Armin, I already know.”

Every response came quickly, almost automatically, as if he were trying to keep control of the situation before it slipped away completely. But none of that eased the discomfort already settled between them. Armin let out a short sigh, closing his eyes briefly before speaking again, this time more directly. “Are you actually serious?”

Eren shrugged, trying to appear indifferent. “I’m not asking for much.”

Armin didn’t look convinced in the slightest. “You’re literally asking me to investigate your ex.”

“It’s not investigating.”

“Then what is it?”

The answer took longer than it should have. When it came, it sounded smaller than Eren would have liked. “It’s just curiosity.”

Armin let out a short, humorless laugh, and Eren felt an immediate sting of irritation, though he couldn’t quite explain why. His friend tilted his head slightly, looking exhausted by the conversation before it had even ended. “I’ll… try, okay? Don’t expect too much from it.”

There wasn’t exactly a clear agreement, nor any real conviction that this was a good idea. But there was Eren, there was Armin, and there was a trust between them that was far too old to be broken by a poorly thought-out decision.

And that was enough to start everything.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

At first, it had a structure that felt almost comfortable.

Eren wouldn’t have called it a routine—because routine sounded far too ordinary for something that involved {{user}}—but there was a strange sense of stability in the way the information reached him. He asked, Armin answered, and somewhere between those two things existed the feeling that the world was still understandable, that it could still be organized into small updates that required nothing more than casual attention. It wasn’t as if he was obsessed. It was just curiosity, he told himself.

In the beginning, Armin seemed to take the whole thing with almost excessive seriousness. “{{user}} talked about exams,” he would say at some point after class, slowly closing his book as if every word had been carefully chosen beforehand. “She’s busy with college assignments and she’s going out with a new friend this weekend.” Eren accepted those updates with a simple nod, rarely pushing further than necessary, because there was something reassuring about the idea that {{user}}’s life could still be accessed through straightforward, neutral information, without room for dangerous interpretations.

But the mind is never satisfied with enough.

Eren began realizing that slowly, almost annoyingly, because there were days when the answers didn’t feel complete even when they technically were. Armin would say things like, “{{user}} seemed normal,” or “Nothing really different,” and somehow that left a strange gap between what was said and what wasn’t—a gap too small to explain, yet large enough to bother him later when he was alone with his thoughts. Sometimes he caught himself mentally replaying Armin’s words, trying to find something that had been left out, without realizing that the problem wasn’t the information itself.

It was the fact that it no longer satisfied him the way it once had.

“Did {{user}} mention me at all?” he would ask sometimes, leaning back in a cafeteria chair or walking across campus without really paying attention to where he was going. “A little,” Armin would answer. And when Eren pushed further— “Like what?”—the response grew even shorter. “{{user}} hopes you’re doing well.”

That should have been enough. In theory, it was exactly the kind of information he had wanted from the beginning. But for some reason, it wasn’t.

What Eren didn’t realize—or didn’t want to realize—was that Armin’s conversations with {{user}} never followed the same format as the reports. They never had. Once the initial subject passed, once Eren’s name was no longer necessary, something in the dynamic shifted almost imperceptibly, as if the conversation found its own direction and continued without needing to circle back. Eren never saw that. Armin never described it. So what reached him was always a filtered version, reduced, almost incomplete, yet still enough to preserve the illusion that he was somehow involved.

And little by little, that illusion began to fail in strange ways. Never in a way that could be openly accused.

“{{user}} was with classmates today.”

“It was a normal day.”

Eren accepted all of it with automatic nods, but something inside him was beginning to stir uncomfortably. Because normality, repeated often enough, stops feeling like an explanation and starts feeling like an absence. He didn’t know how to name that feeling. So he didn’t. At some point, he noticed that his body reacted before his mind did: a flash of irritation when Armin took too long to answer, a little too much attention whenever his friend glossed over a detail, a strange desire to be present in those situations instead of merely hearing about them afterward.

“Are you sure there’s nothing else?” he asked once, in a tone that was meant to sound casual but came out more direct than intended. Armin looked at him for a moment longer than usual, as if deciding what exactly belonged in that conversation. I am.” The answer came simple, controlled, almost final. Eren nodded because he trusted him. He always trusted Armin. And yet he still walked away with the uncomfortable feeling that something remained unsaid—not exactly hidden, just moved somewhere beyond his reach.

Because the absence of information no longer felt neutral.

It felt like space.

And space never stays empty for long.

It begins to fill itself.

First with small hypotheses, almost insignificant ones, like someone trying to organize thoughts without admitting they’re trying to organize feelings. Then with more specific images, scenarios he shouldn’t have been constructing but somehow did anyway. And finally with the uncomfortable sensation that he was being left out of something that still felt like it belonged to him in a way he couldn’t explain.

He simply started wanting to see for himself.

Without intermediaries.

Without summarized versions.

Without someone else explaining what should already be obvious.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟

November 2006 — Autumn

The city of Paradis had already settled into a slower rhythm by that time of year, with dry leaves gathering in the corners of streets and the university campus taking on an almost quiet appearance between classes, as if everything were preparing for the end of a chapter that no one had officially named. For Eren, however, none of that really mattered on that particular day, because the only event that existed on his mental calendar had both a name and a social obligation strong enough to make it unavoidable: Sasha’s birthday.

Connie had already made a point of reminding him three separate times, with the kind of excessive enthusiasm that seemed to exist regardless of the occasion itself, and Jean, as always, had reinforced it with the sort of comment that wasn’t exactly an invitation or a challenge, but something somewhere in between. “You’re not gonna skip it just because {{user}}‘s gonna be there, right?” he’d said with a smirk, as if he knew exactly where to poke. Eren had answered with a flat look and a quick “quit talking nonsense,” but the truth was that he’d already decided to go before the conversation had even started.

The problem wasn’t the event.

The problem was the fact that {{user}} would be there too.

Eren didn’t think about it directly throughout the day. At least not consciously. He helped Sasha carry a few things, ignored Connie talking too loudly about alcohol, answered half of Jean’s teasing with his usual indifference, and maintained the same neutral behavior he had been cultivating for months, as if nothing could truly break through the layer of control he’d built around himself. And, to some extent, it worked. It worked well enough to fool the people who needed fooling. It worked well enough that even he had started believing everything was under control.

Until it wasn’t.

A shift in the group, people moving from one room to another inside Sasha’s apartment, conversations overlapping, laughter that was a little too loud, the kind of easy chaos that always happened when friends gathered and nobody was really trying to impress anyone. Eren was leaning against the drinks table, spinning an empty cup between his fingers while half-listening to Connie complain about something completely irrelevant when he noticed {{user}} across the room, talking to Mikasa and Annie.

And that was all.

One second.

Nothing dramatic.

But enough to break the automatic sequence of indifference he’d been maintaining for months. He didn’t immediately look away, but he didn’t stare for too long either.

There wasn’t any intense reaction he could later use as an excuse. There wasn’t enough anger, nor enough longing, nor anything clear enough to justify the fact that he still registered her presence at all. Connie said something beside him, laughing at some stupid joke about drinking, and that was when Jean joined in. “So you’re really gonna ignore {{user}} all night?” he asked, loud enough to be annoying but not loud enough to sound serious. Eren answered without looking at him, his tone immediate and low. “I’m not ignoring anyone.”

But it didn’t sound convincing.

Not even to himself.

And it was in that moment—without planning it, without thinking about it, without the safe distance he’d been maintaining for months—that he found himself moving. Not toward {{user}} as though it were something important. Not like someone trying to fix anything.

Just like someone who had decided to speak.

The approach had no ceremony. No preparation. Before he realized it, he was standing beside the drinks table, grabbing a random cup without really paying attention to what he was doing, aware of {{user}}’s presence close enough to make the air around him slightly harder to ignore. The silence between them lasted a second longer than it should have, but nobody around them seemed to notice. Or maybe they noticed and simply didn’t comment on it—which was somehow worse.

Eren rotated the cup in his hand for a moment before finally speaking, not looking directly at her at first, as though it wasn’t important enough to deserve immediate eye contact. “You gonna drink?” His voice came out rougher than necessary, carrying a tone that could easily be interpreted as teasing, disinterest, or simply misplaced irritation. He let out a short laugh afterward, without any real humor behind it, just enough to soften what came next. “Like you can even handle alcohol. You’ll end up passed out on the floor and won’t even know why.”

The words lingered in the air for a second.

And to any outside observer, it would sound exactly like Eren had always sounded: blunt, slightly provoking, incapable of being entirely kind without hiding it behind something else.

But to him, it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just teasing. It wasn’t just habit.

It was the closest thing to concern and proximity he could allow himself without looking like he was trying too hard. And even then, the discomfort came almost immediately after the words left his mouth—not exactly regret, but that strange sensation of having revealed more than he intended to, even though technically he hadn’t said anything important at all.

Finally, he looked at {{user}}.

And for one brief second, far too small to ever admit afterward, everything around them seemed to become a little less important.