Chapter Text
“There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't sit still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.”
~Robert W. Service
He’s eleven years old and every kick of his feet pulls him higher, back and forth along the repeating sine curve of the swing’s arc. The playground around him is deserted, and heavy with the humid, prickling promise of a spring storm. He kicks until he’s going weightless at the height of each arc. Each angry slice of his bare feet through the air is driven by a soul-deep pain only children can truly feel.
They told him he was weak. They told him no one cared. They told him...they told him that he wasn’t good enough.
Kick. Fly. Float. Fall back down hard. (Fight against gravity, fight against all the chains holding you down—fight the boxes people put you in, fight the hierarchies and the bullies and every little string holding you back) Kick. Fly. Float. Fall.
The sky is about to rip apart in a deluge and the ropes on the swing are about to snap from being pulled so hard and Armin knows nothing but his own anger, throbbing through his arteries. It’s the righteous anger of a child, still innocent, who knows that he’s not being treated fairly. It’s not a grown up anger, that would stew or fester or ever fight back. It’s a child’s anger, that hurts and teaches and shapes a belief so deep in his core that he won’t put a name to it until he’s grown up and worn down, and huddled under a tree on the back roads of Bhutan. It’s a child’s anger, fast and new and bright with the fire to spark something within an open, blank slate of a spirit.
Children are so easily written on.
He’s not going to fight back. Armin knows himself better than that.. They’re right, he’s weak. But it’s his weakness that gives him strength, because they underestimate him. They always underestimate him. Normally he agrees with them, but he is so angry, so determined—
He’s going to wait. He will wait and plan, and he’s going to work. Every day, every year, every single breath, he’s going to fight to get better. Not just better: the best. He’s going to be so good that no one will be able to ignore him anymore, and they’re all going to look up suddenly and realize how much he really is worth and then. Then they would be sorry that they’d rejected him and told him he was worthless.
He was going to be so good they couldn’t ignore him. He was going to be better than the best. He was going to be amazing, and the others were going to see one day. He was going to be the best, the biggest, and then they’d be sorry.
The sky cracks just as he lets go at the top of the arc, and the first lightning flash visible in front of the trees illuminates his graceful flight down onto the gravel. Abandoning his old, sturdy, dependable canvas sneakers, he takes off towards home at a sprint and relishes the mud splashing up his legs, the gravel tearing little stinging cuts into his still-bare feet. It’s something he controls. This is pain he chose, and this is pain that is will make him stronger.
From that first flying leap he took, the first steps of that wild run, the simmering pull towards unbridled freedom begins burning deep inside him; it burns an irrevocable seal on his soul. And when he dreams at night of strange forests and far-off wanderings among landscapes he’s never seen, something within his child’s heart knows he can never break the contract he’s forged.
He never does go back for those shoes.
He’s seventeen and choosing a college, the shining star of his hometown. Honors and awards and hundreds of universities begging him to choose them, grace them with his talents.
Somehow, victory doesn’t feel as good as he thought it would. But he holds to his course, because he set it years ago and there wouldn’t be a point in changing now. He chooses the most beneficial option and takes that leap.
He’s nineteen and screaming on a rooftop.
He’s living off adrenaline thrills because nothing gives him the satisfaction he craves. He gave up on finding it in the schoolwork he still faithfully completes. Now he searches for it in the rush of spray paint art at 3 A.M., in the wildly dangerous rooftop-leaping he’s started flinging himself into (literally and figuratively) just to feel something.
One day, he leaves and he doesn’t come back.
Armin’s life until this has been a series of leaps. He’s taken so many blind jumps, but it’s never been into what he wanted. Every leap he’s taken so far has been to fulfill other people’s critera. To measure up and succeed on a scale that others determined. He’s finished with that now.
He’s got a backpack to his name and On the Road clutched in his right hand like a Bible. And as he takes his first running steps towards the next cliff edge he’s about to dive off of, the first one he’s truly chosen for himself, he realizes that all this time he’s been wrong.
It was never the fear before the jump that he craved. It was the thrill of the fall.
Armin Arlert tugged his old red bandanna a little higher on his shaggy mess of blonde hair, squinting at the rising dust hovering over the horizon. It was rare, in this devastatingly-poor area of Belize, to come across any vehicle. And whatever this one was, it was kicking up a lot of dust. The odd rich kid out for a joy ride wouldn’t be driving out here; there were much more appealing places to speed around with daddy’s top down and impress the squealing friends in the backseat.
It was most likely a supply van or jeep, maybe even a tourist bus. The buses were the best, because they could always be counted on to have air conditioning—and usually snacks. Armin never ceased to be amazed at how many cruise ship tourists loved to proudly present him with one of those tiny little mini-boxes of cereal. It always amused him—were they proud of their little stolen cereals? Was it their small way of living on the edge or getting an adrenaline rush from going out of their comfort zone? Were all these tourists trying, in their quiet, sheltered little ways, to express somehow that they weren’t just part of a herd, that they had a little spark of fire inside them that made them different from the rest of the cruise ship sheep?
That thought always made him laugh, because he would wonder—did it make them any different from the rest if everyone did it? Maybe it did, because they believed it did. Was it the person themself that determined their own experiences of existence, or was that something immutable and only the person’s perceptions were subjective?
Whatever the fundamental truths of individuality were, the truth Armin had at the moment was that there was a vehicle approaching for the first time in two days and he would really love to snag a ride to the coast if he could. He loved the walking and traveling solo, he really did. But there was no shame in wanting a break every now and then, and quite frankly his decrepit shoes probably wouldn't last him another day of trekking over rock-laced terrain. He started a slow walk towards the approaching vehicle, remembering to throw a casual salute to old Snake Man perched in his house of cardboard boxes.
Snake Man shouted in acknowledgement, raising his hands in the air and carrying one of the snakes up with him. Armin laughed and gave him a final wave before turning back to the road. The vehicle—a jeep, he could see now—would probably cross paths with him in only a minute or two now.
As he picked up his pace, he breathed in the distinctive damp dust, warm and fragrant with the living scents of the earth. The kind of land that had been achingly absent from his childhood home, the kind he’d never seen until he’d ended up kicked off a train in Mexico. Most people would say it was dry, unfruitful, dead. It certainly didn’t look like much. But Armin knew they were wrong. When you lived with the earth, when you walked it so much that it started seeping through your skin into your bones, when you had experienced being so hungry you were willing to eat mud just to ease the pain, when you had exhausted yourself so deeply that you fell face-down in the dirt and were breathing in soil with each tired breath, you began to understand how alive the earth really was.
Armin’s tiny puffs of dust were quickly being overwhelmed by the billowing halo of dust from the Jeep. Armin shoved out an arm and leapt almost into the vehicle’s path, shouting hello in about four different languages for good measure. An alarmed shout came from the Jeep as the driver slammed on their brakes, and Armin stepped back to wait patiently.
After a few muffled curses accompanied some engine-killing noises that sounded a tad bit angrier than necessary to Armin—although what did he know? He hadn’t driven a car since that time on Isla Roatan eight months before, and that hadn’t even been legal—the driver finally kicked open the door and jumped out into the settling dust, looking fairly pissed off. When he turned around and looked over the hood at where Armin stood, his mouth was already open (probably to cuss him out)...but his entire expression flipped to utter shock as Armin’s voice filled across the space between them.
“Jean?”