June (ERERI//RIREN)

June

Happy Pride Month, whores. Hopefully this one shot finds you well, but before you read it, I'd like to formally apologize to my thirstiest readers, as this one shot is not a smut-shot (GASP. I know. Who am I?). But, it's definitely a much needed happy meal for everybody during these hard times. Love you guys.
XO,
V

It was a funny thing, the way the slightest breeze could change an arid summer day so drastically, Eren Jaeger thought to himself while he brought his knees to his chest and waited for the Amtrak to pull into the outdoor station. He checked his watch nervously and read 9:28 across the digital face.

He'd run a factory reset on his phone and left it shut off in the drawer of his nightstand. He carried with him only a small backpack of essential items, things he'd need . He went down his mental checklist, rattling off everything he'd put into his bag. "Two clean shirts, one change of pants, and three sets of socks and underwear," he mumbled to himself, wondering if he'd managed to remember toiletries. Panicking for a second, he reached into the front pocket, to feel around for the ziplock bag with his toothbrush and toothpaste, relieved to feel it resting inside of the pocket. Upon reaching into the pouch, he also felt several loose bills and exactly five dollars of heavy cold change resting at the bottom.

The change was in case he needed to use a payphone to call Levi. He'd been seeing Levi in private for the last three years of his life, after having met at a covert pride function when the boy was fifteen. The plan had always been to drop everything and run on his eighteenth birthday, but Eren had secretly known it would be longer than that, given that he still had school to finish. Now that school had finished for the summer, and he was armed with a diploma, Eren felt secure in his decision, and Levi was more than thrilled to have the boy all to himself.

It wasn't like he hadn't made the trip a thousand times before. Over the course of those three years, he'd gone to see Levi every other weekend, taking the three hour train ride to the city on Friday after school, and hopping on the returning train Sunday evening with the promise that they'd see each other again in two weeks. And so for three years, until Eren was legal, that was how it went. He'd had to hide it from his family, as the small town he was raised in was filled with radical Christianity. Being gay could have easily gotten him beaten up, or worse.

He shuddered at the memory of his own sister being thrown against walls like a little ragdoll, until one night she simply didn't return home from school. Eren's father and mother made very minimal efforts to search for their missing daughter, and stopped looking completely after only a week had passed. It had been more than a year since Mikasa had gone missing, and Eren still missed her every day. He had always felt an unspoken solidarity with his sister, and without ever giving away too much, the two of them were able to talk about their situations together, using intricate languages of code that they'd spent several years developing together. After she'd vanished, he was completely alone in that godforsaken town. He also knew, however, that her disappearance had been a serious wake up call for him. He wasn't safe in his own home, and Levi had always been more than willing to take him in.

So, sitting outside on the dry June morning, Eren watched the train pull into the station, hissing and groaning as the brakes pulled it to a halt. He knew his parents wouldn't look for him, but he didn't want to make himself easy to find in case they did. Levi would be waiting at the station with a new phone for the boy and a place for him to call home. He boarded the train and climbed the stairs to the second story, taking a seat and resting his ticket on the table in front of him in case the ticketmaster came around. He leafed through his bag one last time, checking for his birth certificate and social security card, so that he wouldn't need to get new ones when he got to the city. He let out another quiet sigh upon finding them, reassuring himself that everything was alright, and he didn't need to check anything again.