*?? EREN JAEGER X READER
When you're paired with Eren Jaeger for a semester-long psych project on vulnerability, you expect awkward silences, not slow-burning tension and quiet moments that say more than words ever could. He's distant but not cruel...
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[EREN]
HE HADN'T SEEN you in days.
Not properly. Not in a way that counted.
There had been glimpses, yes — unintended intersections on campus. You exiting a building just as he ducked into another. A flash of your jacket on the edge of the quad. The soft echo of your laugh carried down a corridor, just far enough that he could pretend it wasn't meant for him to hear. Moments like that came and went, quiet hauntings he didn't know how to shake.
Each one pressed a little deeper into his chest.
And every time, he turned the other way.
He told himself it was the right thing. That putting space between you was noble in some twisted, preventative way. But deep down, he knew better. He wasn't protecting you. He was protecting himself — from the fallout, from the burn, from the feeling that if he let this thing unravel the way it wanted to, it would take too much of him with it.
Because caring meant risk. And risk meant loss.
He knew that pattern by heart.
Eren sat on the floor of his dorm, hoodie sleeves pulled over his hands, the laces of his boots still untied from when he'd come in and slumped down without meaning to. The late afternoon light bled through the blinds in narrow gold slats, striping the floor like prison bars. His books were open on the bed, a half-hearted attempt at distraction, but the words didn't register. Couldn't. His mind was elsewhere, running laps around a memory he hadn't given himself permission to touch.
You, close. Your breath warm. The moment hung between you like a held note — fragile, suspended.
And then he'd pulled back.
He hadn't even given you an explanation.
It was the part that stung the most — how easily the moment collapsed under the weight of his fear. How you didn't push, didn't ask, didn't demand anything from him. You just sat there in the quiet, letting him make the call, and when he stepped back, you let him.
But that didn't mean you weren't hurt. And that didn't mean he wasn't wrecked by it.
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes until stars bloomed behind his lids. It didn't help. Nothing helped.
How had it happened so fast?
One week you were a project partner. The next, you were a fixed point in his chest, tugging him forward like gravity. Like inevitability.
And still, he resisted. Because wanting something never guaranteed it would stay.
