Work Text:
The first swallow is more of a gulp. Desperate. He almost chokes but forces it down like military regulations and the reality he lives in, feels the burning and imagines it’s penance for at least one stupid thing he’s done in his life.
He concentrates on that, on the burning in every single swallow of alcohol, ‘cuz it makes him feel something that’s tolerable. He doesn’t have to think if his throat’s on fire, right? He doesn’t have to do anything but pretend that the warmth spreading through his limbs and into his belly’s gonna do something good for once, gonna let him forget that he’s just a fucking man working in the goddamn military—a man who can’t really do anything right and does a lotta things wrong and is still, miraculously and unfairly, alive.
The bottle’s gone too fast, and it was the good stuff—the only stuff he can reach without crawling under his bed. He feels sick, but he knows he’s not drunk enough because he can still fucking think. He can still feel that hot fucking breath, and the blunt edges of teeth against his shoulderblade, and he can still hear the scream that wasn’t his, the scream that’s probably gonna haunt his dreams for the rest of his life ‘cuz he was too fuckin’ late to do anything. Too reckless and too late.
Something in him crumbles when he looks at the other side of the room. Empty. Someone will come in to pack everything up by the end of the week. Gelgar tells himself that he needs to do it. He needs to get up and he needs to fuckin’ do it.
Right now.
Right fuckin’ now.
‘Cuz it’s not fair to make other people dig through his roommate’s stuff when he knows where everything is and what’s supposed to go to who, and where Peter’s last letter to his family is, unfinished in the top drawer of his desk.
(He peered over Peter’s shoulder as he wrote it. Dear Stupid Family, it started out. You already know I love all of you. He scoffed at it, and Peter shoved him away with a grin. “I have to keep it silly or they’ll cry at every single letter.”)
Well, Gelgar thinks, they’re gonna be crying anyway.
He’s not supposed to leave his bed, but he stumbles out of it, anyway. He’s not drunk enough to ignore the pain in his shoulder, the puckered pink skin sewn haphazardly together.
Thank God for Mike, he thinks, and in the same breath, why’d he have to go and save me?
Shoulda saved Peter, really. Peter, whose older sister is getting married in two months. Peter, whose parents write him twice a week at bare minimum. Peter, who has a girlfriend in town and more friends than he can count and hair so fuckin’ red it’s painful to look at and—it’s just so fuckin’ stupid that Mike would pry Gelgar out of a titan’s mouth and let Peter hit the ground hard enough to break his neck.
There aren’t any crates in the room, yet, but Gelgar can start putting things together. He does, too, not drunk enough and feeling like shit. The blanket Peter’s mother sent him the previous winter goes with the clothes. Maybe the extra military jacket’ll make his family cry, but at least it’s clean. The whistle Peter blew on just to piss everyone off—that goes with his family’s letters.
There isn’t a lot of stuff.
There never is.
Nobody ever lives long enough to amass a collection of useless things.
Peter lasted a few years, and Gelgar almost thought that, well—maybe the guy would live as long as he and Nanaba had somehow managed to live. Maybe Peter would be a permanent member of the team. A presence he could count on. Someone who wouldn’t just up and fuckin’ die horribly right in front of him.
He finds cheap alcohol under Peter’s bed. It’s not something that can be sent to his family; they won’t want it. He’s not even sure why Peter has it. But it aint’ goin’ to waste.
He can’t even taste it. Can’t fuckin’ taste any of it. He knows it tastes like sewer piss, because that’s what cheap alcohol always tastes like to his experienced tastebuds, but for once he doesn’t care. The taste doesn’t matter, anyway. Nothing matters a whole lot, he thinks, when all he wants is to—
He’s not exactly suicidal, but he wouldn’t mind dying. Wouldn’t mind drinking himself into such a dark state that he can’t feel or see or think anymore. He can just close his eyes and never wake up again—never have to deal with another dead fuckin’ roommate and letters to their parents—dear stupid family, you already know that I love all of you—never have to wonder why his squad leader saved his worthless incapable ass instead of a better man’s.
For an instant, it sounds so fuckin’ easy.
He can crawl under his bed to get more of the good stuff.
He can die under his bed, and until someone remembers to check on him, nobody’ll even know.
God, he hates that he thinks this way, but it’s hard not to. It’s hard not to see the easy way out when everything hurts. He just wants it to stop, really—he wants everything to stop.
When the door to his room opens—five or ten or thirty-five minutes or an hour later—he’s got cheap sewer piss alcohol all over him and his face is wet with tears and he keeps fuckin’ trying to drink but nothing’s going down. It just falls out of his mouth and dribbles down his chin and slides down inside the collar of his shirt. He can’t swallow, he can’t breathe—
Mike’s voice reaches him belatedly. Everything sounds as if his head is underwater.
He doesn’t even realize that he’s in the middle of the room, now, cheek pressed against the floor, stomach rolling. He feels like he’s drowning. He feels like he’s on fire.
Mike’s concerned, but Gelgar just laughs. Tries to laugh.
Or maybe he just cries—a gasping choked sob because he couldn’t save Peter and he couldn’t save himself and why the fuck can’t people just leave him to die?
His words, when he speaks, are garbled sentences, sparse and confused and he’s so fuckin’ drunk he’s not even sure what it is he’s saying or if he’s actually talking at all. He can’t really see anything. He’s never been so drunk before.
He’s never tried to off himself before. He’s not even sure that he’s trying to off himself.
What does he want? What is he doing?
Gelgar loves alcohol. It seems fitting that it would kill him. He tries to tell Mike that.
Mike disagrees, because the next thing Gelgar knows, his squad leader’s hauling him up and suddenly he’s gagging—retching all over the floor. It lasts for what feels like forever. Burning in his throat again, something he can concentrate on. Penance: for failing to save Peter for making Mike choose to save him for Peter’s death and his broken neck and his broken fuckin’ family.
When it’s over, when his stomach can’t fuckin’ empty anything else out, the only thing he can say around the mouthful of sour vodka-infused spit in his mouth, is, “I gotta smell like such shit right now.”
For some reason, Mike doesn’t leave. He doesn’t gag on the smell of vomit on the floor: vodka mixed with the food Gelgar hadn’t put in his stomach for dinner.
He just says, after a long pause, voice clearer now than it was before:
“None of that is your fault.”
Like he fuckin’ knows that Gelgar’s still thinking about it. Like he knows it’s at the forefront of his mind.
Maybe it’s obvious.
When Gelgar manages to open his eyes, he sees Mike’s mouth set in a frown, eyebrows low over his eyes.
“Why’d you—?” he starts to ask, but has to wipe some of the taste of vomit off of his tongue before he can continue. “Why’d you fuckin’ save me?” he asks, and waves a hand around them at the mess he is and almost falls over backward in the attempt. It’s just the fuckin’ proof Mike needs to know better than to save him next time.
If there is a next time.
If any of them are around for a next time.
Gelgar prays that there isn’t a next time. He doesn’t think he can handle it again.
“Peter was already dead,” Mike explains as if through a tunnel, now. A long tunnel, far underground.
“Tha’s not true.”
There is a pause. “We’ll talk when you’re sober,” Mike says, and Gelgar wants to argue with it, but he can’t form words, can’t think. He tries to move back as his vision fades to grey—though he’s not even sure if he cares whether or not he falls face-first in his own vomit.
When Gelgar wakes up, he is wearing clean clothes. The floor is spotless. He’s in bed with fresh bandages.
A swipe of his hand tells him that all of the alcohol under his bed is gone.
He remembers things in bits and pieces.
He stares up at the ceiling for what seems like hours before Mike walks in.
“You’re going to listen,” Mike says, “and you’re not going to say a damn thing.”
Gelgar listens.
“I had less than a second to decide who to try to save. Peter, who would likely die anyway, or you. You had a much higher chance of survival. Peter may well have died before the fall broke his neck. I picked the only viable option.”
Mike’s voice almost turns into a comfortable drone.
“I think I wanted to die last night,” Gelgar says, eyes on the ceiling.
Mike allows himself to be interrupted. “Why?” he asks.
Gelgar doesn’t have an answer for it. “I don’t know,” he admits, fractions of the night before building up in his head to form a still-incomplete picture. “I guess sometimes I just think it’d be easier to be dead.”
“You can’t do anything if you’re dead,” Mike points out, looking—well, Gelgar can’t put a word to the expression on Mike’s face.
“I know.”
“You’re not the kind of man to take the easy way out, anyway.”
That makes Gelgar smile—just a little. “You don’t know that,” he says.
“Yes, I do,” is all Mike bothers with for a long time, but Gelgar can’t break the silence. He waits for Mike, who eventually says, slowly, as if he’s still thinking about how to say it: “You joined the Survey Corps, didn’t you?”
Gelgar considers saying that Mike doesn’t know why he joined the Survey Corps, or he’d change his mind, but he suddenly realizes it doesn’t matter; any other way would be the easy way, technically speaking.
“Yeah,” he says instead. “Why the hell’d I go’n do that for?”
Mike almost smiles. “I don’t know,” he admits, “but I suspect that, like the rest of us here, there was a reason involved. Maybe you should think about what that reason was—or what it’s become since you’ve joined.”
Mike never tells anyone about the incident.
Not even Nanaba.
And Gelgar… Well, he still drinks, but he invents reasons to live.
He’s not gonna waste the life Mike saved, for one, and it’s true what Mike said: he can’t do any good at all if he’s dead. So he might as well live.
A new roommate replaces Peter by the end of the month.
When Henning pulls out his lute for the first time, Gelgar groans and declares that Mike picked Henning just to torture him, but they become friends. Somehow. Unlikely friends. Henning is patient and quiet, and Gelgar is—not.
But it works out.
Gelgar comments on Henning’s playing and lets him talk about his family. All of them are musicians of some kind, and for some reason, Gelgar’s not surprised.
In return, Henning wakes Gelgar from dreams he can’t wake himself from; when the shaking stops he always asks, “Are you all right?”
And even though they both know Gelgar is lying when he says, “I’m fine,” he lets it slide because somehow Henning understands that if Gelgar doesn’t tell himself he’s fine, he really won’t be.
Gelgar doesn’t want to let him in because he’s afraid it’s gonna hurt when Henning inevitably dies, but somehow it happens, anyway. He lets Henning in, and then Lynne, and the next thing Gelgar knows his squad is a better family than his real family ever was, and he knows it’s a stupid thing to do, to care so much about other soldiers in the military, but God, in the end he knows he loves every single stupid one of them—
Which is why it hurts so much to lose them.
He knows Mike’s dead before he’s out of sight. He knows because he feels it in his bones: there’s a breach in the wall and they’re all—the whole thing—the entire situation is—
But he can’t let Henning follow Mike and he can’t let Nanaba follow him, either, though her face has turned to stone and Gelgar knows it’s killing her to let Mike run off on his own.
By the time he reaches Ragako Village with Lynne he wants a drink so bad he can hardly stand it. He wants it because Mike’s dead and the entirely of Ragako Village is an impossibility and he can’t even talk to Lynne about it because the recruits are right there: gearless and defenseless and it’s been years since he’s wanted to drown himself in a bottle so badly.
At Utgard Castle he finds a bottle of vine. It’s probably good stuff—potent, at least. The only reason he doesn’t drink it’s ‘cuz he’s on duty—and because he needs his wits about him. Dulling his mind with alcohol would make things easier, but Mike’s dead and he’s not sure if the rest of them can live long enough to be okay. They have to try, though; he’s willing to try.
He wishes he would have taken Mike’s place—wishes he’d have let Mike lead the South Team. Wishes he’d have been able to fuckin’ repay Mike for saving his life all those years ago; twice in one day, even: from a titan and then from himself, from the dark and burning-painful thoughts that were impossible for a man to escape alone.
When Lynne heads up to the roof to take watch, his reaches out, lets his fingers graze hers. He can’t say it, because he doesn’t believe it, but he wants to tell her that everything’s going to be fine. She smiles as if she’s the one reassuring him, but he can’t believe that, either.
He sits with Nanaba and Henning and the kids are right there so they can’t talk without waking them up, but none of them can sleep, either, and that should say something, shouldn’t it?
No goddamn hole in the wall—that’s what they’re all thinking, pondering, turning over in their heads. That’s what they can’t stop thinking about. Ragako Village’s homes: destroyed from the inside-out. Titans, but no goddamn hole in the wall for them to get through.
When Lynne runs down the stairs, ponytail streaming behind her, eyes wide in panic, he knows.
He knows they’re all fuckin’ dead.
He just doesn’t expect to have to watch Henning and Lynne die. But he does. An hour or two or three into their desperate pathetic clawing attempt at fighting for survival, there is a loud sound, and then a dark shape appears out of nowhere. Gelgar realizes at the last second that it’s a boulder overhead, and he gets free of it as it falls, but Henning and Lynne…
They’re crushed, instantly, and they fall. It’s like Peter all over again, except this time Gelgar’s certain that they wouldn’t have lived even if he could have caught them before they hit the ground.
The alcohol’s looking better by the second. He can’t even cry when he folds Lynne’s broken body in on itself so that he can carry it to the top of the tower. Just in case. Some vague hope that she won’t be dead. He knows better, but he still checks, and Nanaba checks Henning, but it’s all no fuckin’ good.
At least we know, he tries to say to Nanaba with a look. At least they know they’re dead. At least they won’t spend the next two hours fighting only to wonder if they should have tried to check. It’s better to know.
He feels numb, but he can’t give up—can’t stop fighting. Not until there is nothing left to fight for. Not until he just can’t fight anymore.
Lack of sleep and fear makes his fighting style more reckless than usual. He loses track of time. After grappling back to the tower, his gear gives a horrible shudder, and while the hook stays embedded in the tower, his upward movement stops in midair and he swings down—right into the side of the tower. It takes him a moment to realize that he’s hit his head, that he’s hit it so hard that the skin is torn and blood is dripping down the side of his face. A fitting end, really.
He can’t get his eyes to focus properly, but he can hear Nanaba talking to him. He hardly hears his own responses. He just—
Is he really gonna leave her all alone?
Is he really gonna do that to her? Make her the last one standing?
She’ll be okay, he lies to himself. She’ll be fine. He knows deep down that she’s going to die, too. And he needs a goddamn drink, ‘cuz he isn’t sure how he’s gonna face his death sober. Even with a concussion. Things fade out, and he can feel himself fall.
He thinks this is it, and then the next thing he knows he’s jolted back to clarity—fuzzy clarity. He waits for death for a heartbeat, and when it doesn’t come, he opens bleary eyes; a bottle of alcohol is in front of him.
Praise God for small miracles—or hallucinations. Either is a blessing as far as Gelgar is concerned. How much can he drink before he dies? How much time does he have?
It’s easy to remember the night he tried to drink himself to death. The way he’d felt then: burning, drowning, floating…
He knows that it’ll be easy to die that way, even in the mouth of a titan. Easy to drown in an ocean of fire because maybe he’ll never feel the death coming, never see Nanaba’s stricken face, never see a goddamn thing ever again.
He opens his mouth and tips the bottle back with shaking hands.
God, he thinks. God, I need this. His mouth tastes like copper and iron, and his vision is spotty, and everything aches-hurts-spins.
A moment passes, long and agonizingly slow; he waits for the alcohol to spill out of the bottle and into his mouth. He tips it up further.
He waits for it—for the slow burn of alcohol down his throat as he swallows—
But there’s nothing there. The bottle is empty.
And he wonders about it even as he’s raving, even as he’s ranting in a crumbling castle tower about the injustice of the lack of alcohol when he’s suffered enough in his life already—
Is this his penance? A sober death?