Complexity- Armin x Reader

Chapter 7: Shaking the Devil's Hand

"Crapcrapcrapcrap what do I do, what do I do? Do something, you idiot!" She thought to herself manically.

"Young lady, are you going to move or what?" A very disgruntled, older woman had asked impatiently from behind, only worsening the situation. Y/n felt nervous as she looked straight behind her at the woman's glaring face. Her mouth went dry.

"You can go on ahead of us, M'am." Jean had noticed the situation from a distance and decidedly stepped in, giving the lady a confident smile as he took the cart from Y/n's trembling grasp and moved it aside. He watched the sneering lady move forward with her cart, shooting one last glare at the fragile girl that had been holding up the line.

Jean simply continued to smile sweetly at the lady until she turned her attention towards the cashier. "Jackass." He muttered under his breath loud enough for Y/n to hear. "Don't pay her any attention, Y/n."

Y/n looked up at Jean with a clearly distraught look on her face, her eyes taking on a glassy sheen that the boy didn't like. "I'm really sorry you had to do that." She spoke to him in a soft, perturbed voice.

He slightly shook his head at her and lined his voice with a gentle tone. "Hey, don't worry about it. You just gotta work on your people skills. You get way too anxious in small situations like these. Next time, just tell the people in line that they can go on ahead of you, it's not a big deal. They won't bite your head off." He paused before looking in front of them at the old woman. "Well, most of them."

His timid friend nodded weakly at him, looking down at the smoothed flooring. She was glad that Jean had come, or else she would have gotten off worse.

And then she felt it. That usual feeling of disappointment that she felt with herself after failing to do the most basic of tasks. Her reluctance to communicate with people outside of her friend group was starting to become a problem, and at this rate, it would begin to affect her daily routines.

"Here." She looked up to see that Jean was holding out a piece of candy for her to take from his bag of groceries that he had already bought. He was currently munching on some himself.

The girl smiled and took the offering.

"Thank you, Johnny-boy."

He chortled lightly at the nickname before standing in quiet comfort next to the girl, waiting alongside her. He watched on as the mean lady kept piling grocery after grocery on top of the conveyor belt. He sighed.

"Y/n, can I be honest with you?"

The ()-eyed girl looked up at him quizzically.

"About what?" She tilted her head at him.

"You have no chance in Hell of asking Armin out with that mindset of yours."

He hadn't meant for his words to come out so heavy as he saw the girl wince under their weight.

"Sorry, I come off as too blunt sometimes, huh?" He asked rhetorically. Y/n answered anyways with a slight nod of her head.

"What I mean is...let me help you."

Y/n's face twisted in confusion. "Help me?"

"Yeah," he grinned at her. "like to coach you and stuff. You know, Y/n, I do consider myself to be a master at flirting. So good at it that I'm considering releasing a book on the subject." He casually draped an arm around Y/n's shoulder much to her surprise. "I'm thinking of calling it," he said all of this while extending his free arm in front of them and gliding his hand through the air, tracing the shape of an arc as he imagined his fictitious book, "'The Bitch Whisperer'."

Y/n quickly shook Jean's arm off of her and stepped a good distance away from him, throwing the boy a slight glare.

"Jean, thank you for earlier, but I'm going to slap you so hard right now."

The tall boy found her reaction comical and laughed a boisterous laugh, bringing his hand up defensively before the girl in front of him actually went through with her remark.

"Y/n, chill, I'm obviously kidding." He kept laughing, stopping afterwards to try to catch his breath. "Of course I'd never do that. Because fuck yeah, respecting women. Whoop!" He pumped his fist in the air as Y/n rolled her eyes at him.

"So you moved on from Mikasa and are going after Y/n now, Jean?" Armin had seen Jean put his arm around Y/n from afar and frowned in confusion before approaching the two of them. In his hand, he held a folded up paper bag that bulged with a generous amount of honey crisp apples, his knuckles turning seemingly white as he clutched onto the bag a tad bit stronger than necessary. He held an odd smile on his face as he looked at Jean.

"What?" Jean asked incredulously as he noticed the off-putting tilt to the blonde's lips. "No. Of course not. I mean, don't get me wrong. Y/n's a sweet, cool girl and all, but my heart belongs to Mikasa."

"Wow. Truly a loyal man." Y/n deadpanned.

Jean smiled broadly. "You bet I am. Anyways, where'd Eren and Mikasa go? I'm assuming they went to go get things they forgot, but shouldn't they have been here by now?" He questioned while scanning the store in search of the two.

"Yeah, they're taking forever. Armin got here quicker and he had left after them-" Y/n's eyes had caught sight of Eren, who held in his arms an assortment of snack cake boxes with a single small loaf of bread stacked on top. Mikasa was following behind him and holding a container of butter, looking angry. Probably at the fact that Eren was investing too much on junk food.

"Yo." Eren greeted as he messily dumped the pile of boxes and the bread into the cart.

"Dude. How are you going to carry all of this crap home? You better not dump it all onto Mikasa." Jean looked at the overloaded shopping cart skeptically, wondering if the two siblings were actually going to end up buying all of the groceries crammed in there.

"No." Eren blinked his piercing, green eyes over at Jean. "I'm not that cruel. I'll just dump it all onto you." He chirped, smiling brightly at the boy before moving ahead of the cart to begin to load it onto the conveyor belt.

"Wh- like hell you will!" Jean stammered, baffled that Eren had the audacity to saddle his groceries onto him.

Armin peered wearily over at the grocery cart, pondering how long this was all going to take from unloading to packing the goods.

"Yeah...um, I think I'm just going to go use self-checkout." Armin walked off towards the short self-checkout line, Eren shrugging and continuing to empty the cart.

"So, Y/n." Jean lowered his voice, facing away from Eren and Mikasa and turning to speak solely to Y/n. "Do you want my help? I promise that you'll be less of a dweeb when I'm done giving you advice." He raised his eyebrows over at the hesitant girl, plastering the smile of an overly persistent and charismatic car salesman onto his face.

"You know, I can't help but feel offended by that statement, Jean." Y/n cupped her face in thought, wondering if taking advice from this clown would actually help her in her current predicament.

Jean knew that he at least had his foot in the door in this deal since Y/n seemed to be mulling the proposition over. In order to secure the deal, he decided to sweeten the pot.

"I'll help you over some hot chocolate at Coffee Bean."

"Deal." Y/n quickly perked up at the thought of the warm beverage as she eagerly held her hand out for Jean to shake. The boy in front of her smiled. He took her dainty hand firmly into his and shook it.

"It'll be a pleasure working with you, Y/n."