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It was too cold and windy to stomach much outdoor training despite the Legions' famous warm wool cloaks, and so the trainees were stuck inside studying formations and organizing supplies. The constant gusts whistling through the chinks in the stone walls sometimes turned into freezing rain, and the sound was so loud on the shutters that most of the trainees made excuses to work down in the basement packaging up rations into crates. Eren got too restless reading about what exactly each row of the long-range formation did and which signal was used for what and Mikasa and Armin dragged him downstairs to get him doing something. Armin checked over the crate they were helping with for any big knotholes while Mikasa shepherded Eren over to pick up a flat of hardtack.
One side of the crate turned out to be too beat up to reliably hold up to being thrown on a cart and ridden hard out beyond Wall Rose, so Armin decided they could probably get use out of it by nailing a plywood sheet into the sound edges of the side. There was a pile of scrap wood over in the corner and he crouched down and carded through it, looking for a relatively large squarish piece. The middle of the pile started shivering, and Armin worried he'd shifted the wrong piece and the whole precarious thing was going to come toppling down on him. He scrambled back, but there was a shadow on the ground below him and he figured he hadn't made it far away enough. He looked up, wanting to know where the unfortunate splinters were going to end up, but the candlelight just reflected off of Sasha's sharp grin as she tapped him on the head with a board big enough for reinforcing his crate, wood pieces knocking against each other as she shifted under them.
He was stunned for a moment, but got up and helped her out of the wood pile, really hoping he wouldn't have to help tweeze for splinters later. "Where did you find that piece? I didn't think there'd be anything left big enough."
"There are some neater pieces at the bottom. I guess they got mixed into the scrap by mistake?"
"Thanks, anyway. You've always been good at coming up with things out of nowhere."
He walked over to the toolboxes they were all sharing for the project and scrounged up a hammer and nails enough to fix the sheet onto the weak side. He was surprised to see Sasha kneeling down by the crate with its bad side turned upwards, making sure the wood was big enough to nail into the structure of the box.
"Hey, don't you have your own crate? I thought I saw you over there with Connie."
"Eh, he's putting sandy crackers into a box. He's fine. Mikasa's caught up over there trying to keep Eren from breaking anything, so I figured you might want some help."
"Fair enough."
He took out a little pencil stub from his pocket and marked out quickly where the nails should go, roughly estimating midpoints and how far away from edges to keep and focusing very intently on the wood grain, since he wasn't sure what sort of small talk you were supposed to make while doing construction projects. A lot had happened since graduation and since they'd last talked at all and topics weren't rising as easily as they did at trainee camp. The noise when he tapped in the corner nails a bit to fix everything in place seemed deafening. He handed the hammer and the rest of the nails over to her so she could finish, and sat curled up on the rough dusty floor. He knew it was happening, but he flinched a bit every time she drove a nail farther into the wood. He was having strange fears about the crate snapping under the pressure of extra hammering and knew he was probably just worrying about what was going to happen on the trip outside, since they were sitting here crammed in the basement packing and couldn't help thinking about it. He knew Sasha in particular had taken the surprise attack on Trost hard and wondered if she was thinking about the expedition too. At least they didn't have to worry about citizen evacuation and running out of gas, but he was uneasy about having so little in the way of maneuverability. The open plains rendered any fancy 3D gear close to useless for trying to outrun Titans at all, even though he understood the basic premise that they could outrun the average one on horseback. He felt more secure in himself since the last time he'd been sitting worried before a mission, and he'd gotten a lot of impossible things to happen, but he also felt like his luck was running out.
"Hey."
For a moment it felt like she was going to come out with something profound regarding her mindset and outlook, and he focused in on the pause between the interjection and what she was planning to say.
"Do you know when lunch break is?"
He wasn't quite sure if that was something profound regarding her mindset and outlook or not.
She took his silence as an indicator that he didn't, and finished the last nail. From what he could tell, the crate was as structurally sound as it was going to get. He helped roll the plywood piece to the bottom and checked for any cracking caused by the fix in the opposite boards. He thought he made a really good show of industriously poking the sides for how strange he was feeling, and couldn't stop from wondering himself when lunch break was. He hit a stroke of luck after that, when Connie called Sasha over to help nail on the top of their crate. He didn't have much time alone to contemplate whether he should just stop thinking about things so much, either, since Eren careened over carrying way too many boxes of hardtack by himself with Mikasa attempting to hover in all possible directions the pile could topple while also holding a modest perfectly stacked load of rations. It definitely didn't look possible, and he hurried over to get Eren to let him take the top half so they wouldn't end up with a pile of crumbs. The rest of the day was swallowed up packing and hauling and itemizing and the rain outside had slid out into a sheet of slick ice covering the training ground, ensuring more boring inside work to come. He was almost glad, since he could at least fade into checking stock and fixing old boxes. If he wanted to see anything outside the walls at all, he knew, he'd have to come back from this mission and many others like it, but he could focus on the boring and ordinary for now while the storms still gave him a good excuse.