Chapter Text
“Son, if you can recognize the body, then please let us know. Otherwise, we need to get a move on.”
Jean knows the body, of course he does. How could he not? He’d recognize those soft freckles, fluffy black hair, and kind eyes anywhere; even in their mangled state, even matted with blood, even covered in gore. They were the same eyes that sparkled so mischievously when Jean would stay up with him late at night, trading stories about the other cadets and their teachers. It was the same hair that Jean would wash clean after a muddy day’s training, griping and complaining even though he didn’t really mind it.
It was Marco Bodt, and of course Jean would recognize him. There isn’t a world in existence, any possible circumstance where he wouldn’t recognize Marco.
But there is a world where Jean wished he didn’t.
Nausea rises hot and heavy in his throat at the gore caked around the ground Marco lies on, the house just behind him. He has picked up more bodies than he can rightfully count, identified more corpses than he wishes he could, and yet this one hurts. It hurts, like a punch to the gut and the feeling of breathlessness that comes only seconds afterwards. He wants to cry. He wants to yell and scream and rage and suddenly, suddenly, he understands why Eren is the way that he is.
He wants to find the titan responsible for this, tear it limb from limb, and then rend apart every other titan in existence just for good measure. There are so many things he wants to do, and yet he does none of them. He stares, uselessly, at the corpse of a friend and wishes above all that it was him.
A hand comes to rest on his shoulder, and he recognizes it to be the woman accompanying them in the body count. Her eyes are frighteningly blank, and he wishes he could force himself to banish his emotions the same as she has.
“Pull yourself together,” she says, but not unkindly. “We have to get these bodies out of the streets quickly, or disease will spread. Do you understand?”
Jean nods, numbly, even though he doesn’t. He doesn’t understand anything. “It’s, um… my friend, Marco Bodt. 104th, same as me.”
“I see. I’m sorry for your loss, but we should keep moving if there isn’t-” She abruptly stops, eyes widening, as a groan echoes out into the street. It is gurgling, wet and hoarse, and followed quickly by a wet cough and a wheeze. Jean feels his stomach drop, and the noises in the street fade to rushing in his ears. He can feel his own heartbeat, thudding quick and heavy in his ears, as he turns his head slowly, like his neck is moving on rusty gears.
Marco is… Marco has moved, and his eye is open.
His eye is open.
Jean’s convinced he’s hallucinating, that everything must have really gotten to him, until Marco’s mangled chest heaves with another wet cough. His hand raises weakly, batting about as if looking for something. Jean feels himself moving, kneeling down on the ground to catch Marco’s bloodied hand in his own. As soon as he does, there’s another gurgle-wheeze, and Marco’s hand twitches back as his eye rolls, unseeing and wide.
“Marco,” he hears himself saying. “Marco!”
“...an?” It sounds like words, sounds like his name, and that’s what grounds him in the moment. “-ill m’... od, th’y’re g’na… ‘ll me!”
His chest is heaving, and there’s a sound like whistling that Jean can just barely hear. He glances to the side of Marco’s chest, where the whistling is coming from, and the nausea redoubles when he sees bone and flesh barely visible through the mass of blood and ripped cloth. There’s something pink that rises and falls with Marco’s chest—a lung. He realizes it’s a lung, torn and weakly inflating with each breath only to whistle air out sadly.
This time, Jean does throw up.
It’s bad enough to see the gore, bad enough to see the carnage, but to know that Marco is alive under all of that? It has his eyes prickling with tears and horror, and he can’t get a proper breath in.
“He’s alive?” he can hear the woman saying, sounding as horrified as he feels. “I don’t… Sina above.”
It’s only when his stomach dry heaves with nothing left to offer that Jean gets ahold of himself. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve, grits his teeth and looks back at Marco, who’s still muttering, still wide-eyed and fearful. Jean pulls his jacket off, running on autopilot as he reaches shaking hands forward to press it against the gore of Marco’s right side. The other teen hisses in pain, jerking away, so Jean crawls forward to press it more tightly.
Something possesses him, something makes him pull Marco’s body against his chest, holding him tightly as if it could somehow push all of Marco’s spilling organs back into his body. Something sharp and wet presses against his neck, where Marco’s head is leaned, and he tries not to think about it. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know. Marco’s free hand flails about again, and Jean takes it up, lacing their fingers together and squeezing. The other teen stills, then, and Jean tells himself that it’s not death. Marco is not dead.
He doesn’t realize the woman has called a med team until he hears the pounding of feet down the street, and the distant calls of them moving in. He sees them soon after, a group of men and women in sterile uniforms that bring stretchers and medical kits. One of them, a woman with bright green eyes, kneels down next to him.
“Which one is alive?” she asks, and Jean almost laughs at that. Almost.
“Both of us,” he says, instead. He leans back so she can see Marco better, and the carnage that is now sticking to his chest. “He’s, uh… he’s in bad shape, but he’s alive, so can you-?”
“I don’t know if there’s much we can do,” she says, frowning heavily. She seems to consider something, and then she sighs, reaching her hands up to rest on her knees. “We can try.”
A spark of hope lights up in Jean’s chest, no matter how weak. He doesn’t know if Marco can survive this, or if he’d even live more than a few days beyond medical care, but it’s worth the try. Marco is worth the try. “Please?”
“Let’s get a move on, then!” The woman stands up then, motioning for one of the men next to her to move in. He’s blonde and older-looking, and he frowns just like she had when he looks down at them.
“Can we even pull them apart?” he asks her, quietly, like he doesn’t want Jean to hear.
“I can- I can let him go.” Jean starts to lean back just to prove it—he’s not a liability, he won’t put his emotions over Marco’s life. But as soon as he does, they throw their hands out, panicking.
“Wait!” The green-eyed woman cries, and Jean immediately freezes. They seem to relax then, as he goes back to holding Marco, but there’s still tension in the woman’s body. “Look, kid, don’t freak out, but- but we don’t know if he’ll, you know…”
He does know. Holding Marco together wasn’t just a figure of speech; he’s literally holding the other teen in one piece, now. It would make him puke again if his stomach weren’t so ravenously empty.
“It looks like some of the blood and tissue may have dried to your shirt,” the man explains, calmly. He kneels down by Jean and motions for the stretcher to come over, where the woman kneels at Jean’s other side. “If we try to separate you dry, we don’t know if it might… well, pull something loose. We’ll get you free, though, don’t worry.”
“It’s fine.” It isn’t, really, but he says it anyways. It would be less fine if it weren’t Marco. “Tell me what to do.”
The man nods. “We’ll need you to get yourself and him on the stretcher, if you can. Don’t stress it; keep him together, and we’ll move you both if we need to.”
He swallows, trying to draw up what strength he has left. It’s simple enough: get himself and Marco on the stretcher. Jean looks over at the cloth and wood helpfully held just beside him, and then looks down at Marco. The other teen is out cold, which makes this a little easier. Maybe Marco will just sleep through the whole thing—wouldn’t that just be incredible?
He brings his knees up and braces them on the ground, letting go of Marco’s hand just long enough to wrap his arms around his body. Jean holds him close, holds him tight, and leans his hip up. Thankfully, the man takes the hint and moves the stretcher up under his back, so that Jean can lean his hip back up and wiggle more fully onto the cloth. It’s a bit of a shuffle-and-lift routine to get onto it completely, but he knows he’s made it when the woman’s expression relaxes with relief.
It’s unspoken permission for him to do the same, and so he does, leaning his head back onto the cloth. The stretcher is moved and lifted up, and then all that’s left is the passing lights and whispers of their journey to the Garrison’s makeshift military hospital. He can feel Marco breathing against him, and the wheeze-whistle of his exposed lung. Jean can even feel his heart beating.
“...an, Jean-”
He recognizes his name, even through the slur of Marco’s words and his torn lip. Jean looks down at him, but his intact eye is only open partially. There’s something like tears engraving tracks through the blood and dirt on his face, and his breath rattles as he reaches a hand up to grip Jean’s shirt.
“...kill me,” he’s saying, quick and distorted all at once. “-ey’re g’nna…”
Whatever he says next disappears in a wheeze, and Jean shakes his head, reaching a hand up to brush through the much in Marco’s hair. “We’re not gonna kill you, Marco. You’re gonna live, I promise, I swear.”
Marco shakes his head, and his voice picks up, pleading. “‘n you, they… ‘ook m’gear.”
Jean’s eyes widen, and he looks down at Marco’s body. He hadn’t even thought about it before, but the other teen is right; his gear is missing, leaving his waist bare. He hadn’t even had a blade with him when Jean found him, which would be customary. If Marco were dying, then any soldier worth their salt would’ve taken his gear but left him with a blade to defend himself. Marco had neither.
“Marco,” he says, slowly. “Did someone… did someone steal your gear?”
The other teen nodded. Another rattling breath.
It’s… a lot to wrap his head around. Someone had stolen Marco’s gear? Left him to die? It’s all he can do to try to set the thoughts aside, to get another question out. “Who?”
“...nie… bert…”
“Niebert?” he echoes to himself, confused. He doesn’t know any Nieberts, but maybe in another Corps? Another squadron? He leans up to look at the green-eyed woman behind him.
“I think we have a traitor,” he says. “Marco says someone stole his gear, some guy Niebert or something like that. Either he’s stealing gear, or he’s defecting, but we should report it, right?”
“We’ll get it, kid,” she says, looking back up at the street in front of them. “You just focus on Marco for now, okay? We’re almost there.”
Jean nods, but it’s impossible to stop thinking about it. He doesn’t know who this guy is, but his anger towards the world and titans seems to narrow down to one fine point. Whoever the Niebert is, he’d left Marco for dead for whatever cowardly reasons justified stealing someone else’s gear. Desertion or betrayal, Jean knows he won’t rest until the man is court-martialed, and hung if the circumstances call for it. Looking down at Marco, and his wheezing breaths and bleeding torso and ruined eye, he feels no sympathy for the bastard.
Jean is going to make sure he had what was coming to him.
But before he can fantasize what he’d say to the man when throwing him to the Military Police, the stretcher comes to a stop, as do the people carrying it. The light of the sun had been dulled by a large tent that stretched over them, and he can hear the murmuring of medical personnel just over the groaning and sobbing of wounded soldiers. He squeezes his eyes shut as they pass by, holding Marco close. They’ll be fine, they’re going to be fine.
The stretcher is set down next to something like a bed, and more people crowd around him, grabbing the cloth beneath him and Marco to lift them up. Then, they’re on the bed, and both the man and woman from before are right in front of them.
“Time to pull them apart,” the woman says, but her face is pale and her lips are pursed. Her nervousness begins to make Jean nervous, and he sucks in a breath in preparation. “Hey, Gil, can you go get some warm water, please? And as much gauze as you can find?”
The man, Gil, nods, and leaves the three of them to retreat into the rows upon rows of injured and dying soldiers. That leaves Jean alone with the woman, who reaches a hand down to squeeze his forearm.
“This is gonna suck,” she tells him, eyebrows furrowed. “If you wanna keep your eyes closed the entire time, I won’t blame you. It’s not gonna look pretty.”
“It’s fine. I- I think I’ll be good.” He wants to try, at least. He wants to be strong for Marco. If he can hold his friend together, he can watch him come apart again. It’ll be fine.
She doesn’t look as if she believes him, but she says nothing. Gil finally returns after a minute, carrying a pitcher of water and a stack of gauze that he sets on the ground just next to the bed. It’s then that he realizes how close the ground is, and how the bed is more of a cot. It’s much more preferable to think about than the pulse of Marco’s heartbeat against his shirt.
“Dana, you wanna pour or do you want me to?” Gil asks, pulling Jean’s attention back into the moment.
“You do it, I got the separation,” she sighs. Dana looks up at Jean, then, eyes sympathetic. “Lean on your side for us?”
Jean nods and does so, but his expression crumples with reluctance and trepidation when Marco lets out a soft groan at the movement. He was really, really hoping that Marco was still passed out. Dana and Gil share his feelings, taking a second to steel themselves before starting the arduous process of pulling Marco free.
Gil picks up the pitcher and begins to pour warm water over where Marco’s torso is glued to Jean’s own, loosening up the fabric of his shirt. Dana reaches her hands down to gently pull his shirt free, before grabbing gauze to press up against Marco’s exposed flesh. The other teen groans again, holding Jean’s shirt tight in his fingers and shifting his legs with discomfort. Jean finds himself soothing Marco mindlessly, saying whatever stupid comforting nothings he can come up with just to keep his friend still.
It goes on like that, until Marco’s torso is mostly pulled free. That’s where they take a break, where Dana cuts off what’s left of Marco’s shirt and wraps the hole in his stomach up with gauze and wrappings. They quickly become stained with blood, but she adds more layers, wraps him in more white, and it begins to slow. Jean breathes out a sigh of relief.
“Not done yet,” Gil murmurs, looking at Jean’s neck, then up at Dana. “You wanna switch off?”
Her face is growing more pale, her eyes more shadowed when she nods. “Yeah, uh… yeah. The head is- yeah.”
“I gotcha,” he says, and passes the pitcher off to her. Her hands smear red across the pitcher, and when she goes to pour the water across his chest and neck, her hand slips and spills more than she intends.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine, just calm down and focus.”
Jean does close his eyes now, because it’s not as if he could see them prying and peeling Marco off of him even if he wants to. All he feels is the warmth of the water, the pulling of his shirt and eventually his neck, and the sounds of gauze being wrapped. Gil quietly asks him to help lift Marco up, and that’s when he opens his eyes. The other teen’s lower face is mostly wrapped, save for the bloody mess of the top of his head.
He gently holds Marco’s head and neck up for Dana to rinse it, and though the blood finally starts to melt away, the torn skin and fragments of bone that he can see almost makes him want to cry. The only reassuring thing about any of this is that the actual hole in his skull doesn’t look very large or deep, and it doesn’t take much gauze to wrap up.
Marco ends up being more bandages and wrappings than skin, but at least he isn’t falling apart at the seams. Dana and Gil lean back on the ground, and they’re all coated in blood, looking down at Marco. The first to move is Gil as he lifts up the pitcher to try rinsing the blood off of his hands, while Dana sighs and looks up at Jean.
“He won’t bleed out from here,” she explains, “But he’ll probably need a blood transplant, and surgery. We can get him on saline, but a surgeon… I don’t know if he’ll get one. He’ll just have to hold on, or…”
...or die. Jean swallows and nods, and Dana gives him another sympathetic pat. He tries to put on a grateful smile for her as she turns to Gil, and begins retreating further into the tent to help others, but it falls apart as soon as they’re gone. There’s not much more room on the cot beside Marco, but he lies on his side and squeezes in aways. He only looks at Marco for another second, at all the gauze, before curling up next to the other teen’s side.
Having Marco’s bandaged torso back up against him isn’t comforting on its own, really, but knowing that Marco can’t fall apart so long as he’s in Jean’s arms does make it easier to relax. Maybe it’s selfish to skip out on the rest of the body collecting duties, but just the thought of leaving his friend behind is… it’s paralyzing. He can’t, and he won’t. Won’t leave Marco behind, not to wake up alone, not to fall apart again.
He knows that the quickly approaching night will be the moment of truth. Marco is in bad shape, and Jean has no delusions about whether or not he’ll make it. He knows, in the same way, that it’s ridiculous to think that he could give some of his health to Marco, some of his years…
...but Sina, he wishes he could.
It’s all he can do to hold Marco tight, and pray.