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Happiness was a hard-won thing, in a world rent by war. Marco had always found that it came in fragments, slivers of gold tucked into unsuspecting nooks of ashen days. Sleep-softened kisses in the glaucous half-light of dawn; choruses of amicable laughter, dizzy with liquid buoyancy; the barest brush of calloused fingertips against his own, igniting spark-bright against his skin. These were the junctures upon which his life was hung, the moments that kept him sane, kept him whole, as he scrabbled blindly through the dark from one to the other.
He had not quite determined whether this was one such moment, but it certainly took the initial shape of one, unfurling soft and gauzy in his chest as he followed the others down the ship’s gangway and out into the moil of salt and sweat that was Liberio.
“We made it,” he breathed, soft with disbelief. “We actually made it.”
The smile on Jean’s face when he glanced back was fond, bright with anticipation but laced with something sweeter, quietly intimate amidst the pandemonium of the docks about them.
“Who’d’ve thought, huh? Us, crossing the sea?”
“Smells like shit, same as home,” Levi muttered, nose turned up against the harbour’s piscine reek.
“It’s so...ordinary. Just like any other town,” said Armin. “You wouldn’t ever guess that these people were...that they would…if they knew who we were...”
His words tapered into unintelligible mumbling, but Marco felt the truth of them nevertheless. It sat at odds inside him, like a bone set slightly off kilter, the knowledge that this town, for all its unexpected humanity, was one misplaced word away from becoming a battleground. It stung, startling and whip-sharp, and had Marco aching for the comfort of Jean’s presence.
Allowing himself to be drawn into the other man’s orbit came easy - a reflex more than anything - forgoing physical contact in view of his limited knowledge of Marleyan social customs, but still feeling better for the proximity. Jean glanced at him, a question forming in the sweet bow of his mouth, but quickly appeared to come to an understanding. A single innocuous movement brought their shoulders together, and Marco felt able to breathe a little easier.
Keep him close, he thought. Just keep him close and everything will be fine.
“Our guide should be with us any moment now, but make sure to stick together until he shows up,” called Hanji over the din, an uncharacteristic austerity to their tone.
They looked tired, Marco realised, the skin beneath their one visible eye bruised purple. There was a newfound fragility in the slope of their shoulders, weariness etched into the lines at the corners of their eyes and mouth, as though they had aged years in the span of a few short months. It was no secret among the Corps that the sudden propulsion into their new role at such short notice had taken its toll on the new Commander. It was only upon closer inspection, however, that Marco had begun to realise just how much.
“No skin off my nose,” muttered Jean, and Marco jolted back to the present.
He felt the push of the other man’s little finger against his own, small but insistent, and it coaxed a helpless little smile out of the atypical gloom of his expression.
Careful to maintain subtlety, he pushed back.
Onyankopon was exceedingly polite, all charming smiles and velvet baritone, and Marco found himself warming to their guide within minutes of making his acquaintance. Naturally Jean’s displeasure swelled into a tangible force, hanging over the other man’s head like his own personal storm cloud, but Marco paid it no mind - rather, he delighted in it.
“You’re flirting,” Jean grumbled once Onyankopon had turned away to converse with the Commander and Captain.
“I’m being friendly,” Marco replied, eyes wide and innocent as a lamb's.
Jean’s answering pout was delicious.
“Get a room,” Connie griped from up ahead, but it lacked any true irritation.
“C’mon, have some compassion. They haven’t been able to touch each other for a whole thirty minutes,” Sasha interjected, hooking her arm about Connie’s neck and letting out a piercing shriek when he pushed her off, with perhaps a mite more force than was strictly necessary.
“Piss off,” Jean grunted, but there was no mistaking the rosebud flush blooming upon his cheekbones.
Marco barely succeeded in concealing his smile.
“Lighten up, grumpy,” said Sasha, as bright as ever, brushing herself down and promptly reattaching herself to Connie’s neck. “There are cars in this town. If that doesn’t deserve a smile then nothing does.”
“You didn’t know what cars were ten minutes ago,” Connie snorted, and the two immediately resumed their bickering.
This was nice, Marco realised. The familiarity of it all. It helped to assuage that nauseating feeling of displacement that had been slowly swelling within him over the course of the last hour.
Anxiety had never been a particular problem for him - his deepest self was, after all, founded upon the iron scaffold of reliability. He attracted the woeful, the angry, the lonely, drew them into his orbit with gentle affirmations and attentiveness, and found gratification in doing so. His calling lay in the art of counsel, and he had long made his peace with that. Still, there was something about being on this continent, a stowaway with the wrong blood running thick in his veins, that had him freezing over inside.
He could feel Jean’s gaze upon him, pleasantly heavy, like a blanket draped across the framework of his shoulders, and he met it with a smile, watery and unconvincing to those as familiar with the minutiae of his facial expressions as Jean undoubtedly was. The man huffed, his disgruntlement an instinctive screen pulled over his concern, and shifted closer.
“What’s that?” Sasha cried, grabbing Marco by the hand so quickly he startled.
Her palm was rough against his, the skin stiffened, gun-calloused. Blood in the water, if Marco had ever sensed it. A stray touch of this hand alone could lay waste to the facade of normalcy that had until now enabled their continued survival in this strange, frightening country.
Still, he let himself be tugged towards the stall that had caught his friend’s eye, and felt that frostbound fear drift somewhat. There was no need for it - not now, at least. This moment was a fragment, precious in its inevitable brevity, and it deserved to be treated as such.
He tightened his grip, clutching the warm pressure of Sasha’s hand to his own.
“Looks good,” he said, and beamed.
Many years ago, when joining the military had been nothing but some distant, rosy aspiration, Marco had had a dream. That was, of course, nothing unusual for a curious, brave little boy with an overactive imagination like himself, but even so, there was something about this particular dream that had remained with him, in spite of the years that should have softened its too-sharp edges.
It went something like this.
He was running, as fast as his legs could carry him, the pinpricked night above arcing up and over a seemingly endless sandy plain. There was a luminescence to the atmosphere; an active pulse, the silvered land beating beneath his pounding feet. He ran, and he ran, and still he did not tire, as is so often the case in dreams. He could have run forever, if he had so desired.
The tree - for he was unsure of what else to call it - had revealed itself slowly and then all at once, at first a shard of white light against the horizon, then a sudden blaze, trunk vast and branches erupting up and away into oblivion. It made little sense to him, even now - afire as it was, a thing of light and life - and yet still the very thought of it brought him great comfort. A sense of homecoming, of being brought back into a fold from which he had not known he had been apart.
By the time he saw the girl, he was almost atop her. Perhaps around his age, she was fair-haired and birdlike, eyes unsettlingly lifeless, crouched with her back to the tree. She was playing with the sand, thin fingers moulding something with tender precision.
An arm, part of a torso, half a face.
To this day, he had difficulty identifying the nature of the ache that burgeoned in his chest when he thought of that strange, half-built creation and the earnest gentleness with which the girl had crafted it. It sat deep-rooted inside of him, atavistic, hewn into his very bones. The closest that he had come to labelling it, after many years’ worth of pondering, was ‘gratitude’. But that couldn’t be right. Why on earth should he feel gratitude towards a figment of his own imagination?
Still, it haunted him, even now, as visceral and peculiar as the night he had dreamt it. Shaking some shadowed element of himself into wakefulness, and leaving him with an ardent, nameless desire to take those sun-sweet fragments of life and love gifted to him, and to run, as far and as fast as he possibly could.
“You’re quiet,” Jean mumbled around a mouthful of ice cream.
“Hm. Just thinking.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
Marco laughed quietly, shaking his head. “Maybe later. Can I try that?”
Jean hesitated, gaze evaluative, before nodding and holding out the cone. It was fresh, sweet on Marco’s tongue. He winced against the sudden ache in his teeth.
“Cold.”
Jean snorted, bringing the dessert back to his own lips, as though he hadn’t been exclaiming the same thing not five minutes prior.
“It’s good. Wish they had this back home.”
“You soon wouldn’t fit into your gear,” said Marco, fond.
“Worth it,” Jean retorted with a grin, and Marco laughed, in spite of himself.
“Idiot.”
“You say the sweetest things, dear.”
There was pink smeared at the corner of Jean’s mouth, stark against his skin, and Marco yearned to kiss it away.
Later, perhaps.
“You’ve got a little…”
He mimed wiping the corner of his mouth, and watched in quiet regret as the other man swiped at it with the back of his hand, licking away the precious residue.
They fell quiet, weaving their way through the crush of humanity with practised ease, just about able to keep eyes on the bobbing heads of the rest of their party up ahead. Eren, Mikasa and Armin had, as per their usual, separated themselves from the rest of the group, the latter two appearing to defer to the uncharacteristic brilliance of Armin’s excitement. There was an almost childlike exuberance to the way in which he tugged upon his friends’ jacket sleeves, in the wide-eyed laughter that looked, to Marco’s discerning gaze, to be thinly papered over the profound discomfort of trying to fill silence where others would not.
“He’s been acting weird recently.”
“Hm?”
“Eren,” muttered Jean with a nod in the trio’s direction. “He’s acting weird. Or at least weirder than usual.”
Marco huffed a laugh. “He’s seemed off for a while. Quieter. Which is...very weird.”
“Hm. Gives me the creeps,” muttered Jean with a vehement bite of his ice cream.
“I spoke to Armin about it a few days ago. Says he’s been distant, like his mind is elsewhere. He’s tried to coax it out of him, but nothing seems to work.”
“It feels wrong seeing him like that. I’m not gonna ask him about it because, y’know, that’d be even weirder. But still. Wrong.”
“Yeah,” said Marco, peering ahead at the man in question, who, alongside Mikasa and Armin, finally appeared to have picked up the pace just enough to reintegrate with the rest of the group. “Maybe he’ll perk up once we meet the Azumabito.”
Jean grunted, punctuated with a final crunch of the sugar cone. “Maybe. Who knows, he might be as nervous as the rest of us, being here.”
Marco pondered that for a moment before shaking his head. “No, I don’t think so. He seems...calm. Eerily so. Like he’s...biding his time.”
Jean frowned. “What for?”
Marco shrugged.
“I wish I could tell you.”
With a click of his tongue, Jean took a moment to wipe his sticky hands on his trousers, saying, “Well, he needs to snap out of it. We need him back, if any of this is going to work out.”
“Hm. Here’s hoping.” He hesitated, expression thoughtful, before shaking himself and saying, “C’mon. We should catch them up or we’ll get a bollocking.”
He made to follow the others, lengthening his stride, but abruptly found himself being dragged to a halt by a hand on his wrist. He glanced back, surprised.
“...You okay?”
“You’ll tell me what’s up later, right?”
Blinking, Marco peered at the other man, who suddenly did not seem quite able to meet his gaze.
“I...yeah. I’m fine though.”
There was a flicker of frustration across the curve of the other man’s forehead, there and gone in a moment but utterly familiar.
“Don’t...why do you always…” he stopped, and Marco felt his chest squeeze tight and sharp around the knowledge that he was precariously close to hurting the other man. “I know you don’t want to talk now, but please. Later.”
He met Marco’s gaze then, and it was pleading, buckled under the pressure of his concern.
“Yeah. Yeah okay,” Marco said, and some of the tension in Jean’s expression dissolved, replaced by something closer to resolve.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
“Don’t I know it,” Marco muttered with a roll of his eyes, but he was smiling. “Come on, we really do need to catch up. Levi’ll have our balls.”
“Not an image I ever wanted to consider so thanks for nothing.”
“I’d be concerned if it was something you’d ever wanted to consider.”
Jean opened his mouth, some barbed retort undoubtedly poised on the tip of his tongue, but froze, the words going unspoken, when someone up ahead started shouting.
“What was that?” he asked, uneasy.
Shading his eyes against the glare, Marco squinted in the direction of the commotion. It was only when he saw what he thought was Levi, stock still amidst the stuttering surge of the throng about him, that his mouth went dry.
“I think...is that Levi? I can’t see what he’s...”
Another shout, guttural and angry, and the two were up and running before they could think to do otherwise, pressing forward through the crowd until they finally stumbled across Armin.
“What’s happening?” Jean asked, sharp with fear.
Armin was sickly pale when he lifted his head, wide eyes haunted in a manner that instantly had ice tracing the length of Marco’s spine.
“Armin,” Marco said, as steady as he could manage. “What’s going on?”
“There was a child...he tried to steal Sasha’s wallet, but we didn’t expect all this attention...”
Looking up, Marco found that they stood at the outer margins of a ring, gradually swelling in size as curious onlookers pushed forward to gaze their fill. The Paradisians were scattered among them, faces worryingly grim. The atmosphere was wound tight, shot through with something horrifyingly feral, and when Marco glanced around at the people gathered there he saw a little of it in their expressions, barely-banked bloodlust frothing at the surface.
And at the centre of it all, quaking small beneath the force of their predacious scrutiny, stood a little boy.
Happiness came in fragments, but by their nature they were fleeting, and as fragile as the life to which Marco clung, white-knuckled. The marvel of their safe passage over the sea, the action that seemed to signify the final sloughing of the shackles that had bound their people for as long as they could remember, was irreversibly soured by the sickening realisation that there had, in fact, been no sloughing at all. Their incarceration, once contained within the walls, had ballooned, distending far beyond itself to engulf everything, as far as the eye could see.
They might have made it to the continent, but Marco knew with a terrible certainty that he would most likely never live to see a day unburdened by the fetters that had shaped his existence since birth.
And that was painful, beyond anything he felt able to describe.
The tent was stifling.
Marco was drunk, getting drunker, and the tent was stifling.
After the incident with the boy, Marco had been so shaken that he had found himself quite incapable of focusing on anything more than the base task of following the rest of the group to the Azumabito estate. The ensuing meeting had been the final nail in his proverbial coffin, anxious speculation and political jargon curdling into a sour slurry that sat heavy in his gut and left him feeling ready to sleep for a week. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed - preferably next to Jean - and lose consciousness for as long as possible before the forum the following morning.
That said, he had, against his better judgement, found himself at the forefront of the crusade out searching for Eren when the man had unsurprisingly gone missing, which had in the blink of an eye turned into a rapidly-devolving night of drunken debauchery. One moment he and the rest of the 104th had been scolding Eren for leaving the estate unaccompanied, the next Marco was five cups of unidentified liquor down and gradually coming to the realisation that he could no longer tell the difference between the floor and the ceiling.
The air inside the tent had acquired that particular kind of pungent humidity that came from too many people and too much alcohol. The immigrant family who had so kindly invited them to partake appeared to have no issues with the present situation, participating in the revelry with joyous fervour and maintaining a steady stream of conspicuously unlabeled bottles that the 104th were more than happy to empty at their behest. Marco had long since consigned himself to the floor, supine, while he waited for the world to resume its regular scheduled programming of keeping still. Unfortunately, the world was in no hurry to do so.
“Marco you silly bastard, what’re you doing?”
A wordless, noncommittal noise was all Marco could muster in response.
There was a sudden grunt and the sound of something heavy hitting the rush flooring somewhere to Marco’s left, followed by a small “ shit .” When Marco, ponderous and with great difficulty, turned his head to one side, he saw Connie, face flushed and eyes veined, with a splatter of red dashed artfully across one side of his very white uniform shirt.
“You good?”
“Spilt the wine. Doesn’t matter. Shirt needs washing anyway.”
Marco hummed in affirmation before letting his head roll back, squeezing his eyes shut against the wash of dizziness that accompanied it.
“You should have another drink.”
“That is a very bad idea.”
“I disagree. Alcohol helps with everything.”
“Not true.”
“Are you sulking? Jean’s just over there. Go make out or whatever it is you guys do when you’re sad.”
Cracking an eye open, Marco fixed the other man with a glare of considerable severity. It was not often that he lost his temper - it simply wasn’t in his nature - but he had been told that upon the rare occasion that it did happen, it was terrifying. True to form, Connie promptly started to squirm, muttering, “Was only joking. Sheesh.”
Marco held his gaze for a moment longer before putting the other man out of his misery, heaving himself up into a sitting position with a groan. The tent span, people and objects indistinct and miscible, and nausea leapt to the top of his throat with sickening force.
“Hey, easy,” Connie said, a hand at his back, and all of a sudden Marco realised that he needed to get out.
“I’m sorry, I…”
He stumbled as he moved, legs trembling, fawnlike, as he fought his way to his feet.
“If you’re sick on me I’m gonna tell Levi I saw you neck two straight bottles of wine.”
“No I - I’m fine, I just...I need a moment,” Marco replied, despairing at the sudden glutinous texture of the words in his mouth.
He staggered across the tent, colliding with several people on the way, feet tripping over themselves. He looked up once, only to lock eyes with Jean, and felt himself flush all over, the unpleasant heat of the tent suddenly unbearable. In spite of his obvious intoxication, there was a notch of worry pinched between the other man’s brows, and that only served to make Marco feel even sicker.
It took every ounce of concentration he had to navigate the remainder of the floor, transformed into a minefield of empty bottles and fallen bodies. The night air outside was blessedly fresh on his overheated face when he finally broke out, and he gulped it down in desperate lungfuls. His limbs were pendulous, heavy, as though weights were strapped to his wrists and ankles.
He toppled like a felled tree, landing with a jarring thud, legs spread-eagled and palms smarting. He paid it no mind, the alcohol greying the pain at the edges. His heart raced in his chest, a distressed little patter against the inside of his ribcage, like a trapped bird. He pressed a hand over it, the abrasions there scraping against the cotton, and willed it to slow. He needed to pull himself together, before someone came looking for him.
It might have been an hour or a minute, time malleable and meaningless as it passed him by, that he sat there, fruitlessly trying to soothe his frayed nerves. He had almost succeeded by the time Jean appeared, footsteps unsteady as he staggered across the distance between them, settling himself opposite and pinning him with a gaze that was far too shrewd for the amount of alcohol Marco had seen him consume.
“Marco.”
“Jean.”
He sounded wrecked, hoarse, as though the bird in his chest had tried to claw its way up his throat.
“Connie said you went to throw up.”
“I feel better now. Just needed some air.”
Jean nodded, but his gaze was unrelenting, and Marco knew he was caught. Reaching out, the other man ran his hand along the slope of Marco’s shoulder, long fingers loose and lazy as they moved to rest at the side of his neck, thumb placed atop his jaw. He stroked lightly, the rough pad catching on the beginnings of morning shadow there.
“Please talk to me,” he murmured, expression soft.
Silence hung between them for a little while, muffled sounds of drunken laughter and music sweetened by the shivering creak of crickets in the undergrowth, and the clatter of other residents of the encampment going about their nightly business. Jean was flushed, pink in the moonglow, the wan light not quite enough to wash out the pigment of it. Marco’s heart had been in his throat, but he found now that it was quite calm, the bird finally gentled.
“I’m scared.”
Jean froze but quickly recovered himself, moving his hand down to rest in his lap, open.
“I’m so scared. I’m sorry, I don’t want to...I don’t want to bring you down. I don’t know why I...why it’s only now, when we’re actually able to breathe for a moment that it’s all become…” He cut himself off to drag in a hasty shudder of a breath. “The boy...I thought he was going to die …and it just made me think of us, and how this is all...this is all just...” Another pause, this time to shake himself. “I’m sorry. I’m...I’m just tired. Of all this. I wish this were all over. I just want it to be over.”
He stopped, fingers twitching restlessly in his lap before coming up to thread themselves through his hair, gripping tight. He sat like that for a few seconds, curled into himself, before he felt a touch against his hand, a brush of fingertips that trailed first across the undulations of his knuckles, then slid around and under his palm, pulling upwards.
Jean was uncoordinated, motions heavy and pawing with the drink running rampant in his system, and in the end it was only because Marco allowed it that he was able to take his hands at all. It might have been amusing had his mood been lighter, the charming expression of intense concentration furrowing the other man’s brow as he peered down at the hands cradled between his own, as though he were not quite sure what to do with them now that he had them.
“Yeah. I feel the same.”
Marco closed his eyes, willing the wetness dewing upon his lashes to disappear. His right eye ached beneath the eyepatch.
Once he felt certain that his voice was not going to crack, he murmured, “We’d get a farm. Raise some chickens, keep a cow for milk, plant our own orchard. It’d be nice. Quiet.”
“Hm. I’d fuckin’ hate that.”
Marco laughed weakly, swiping at his face as a couple of errant droplets shook themselves free. “You would. But s’okay, we’d have a city house too. We can live there most of the time, but I think I’d also like a place in the country, to go back to every now and then.”
Jean stared for a moment, eyes bright as they traced the contours of Marco’s face. He seemed on the verge of speaking, mouth hanging open upon the gust of a preparatory breath. Marco could see the ripple of some inner conflict unsettle the surface of his expression before he appeared to come to a decision.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this scared.”
The breath Marco took then was abrupt, shattering any and all internal rhythm he had been attempting to establish since setting foot on this damn continent. His lips parted, found the vague shape of a response, but all at once the passage of his throat was too narrow, and his mouth too dry. He managed a brief series of small, wounded noises before giving up, looking away.
“Marco...you...are you crying?”
“It’s okay.”
“Did I just make you cry?”
“Jean, it’s fine. I’m fine. I’m just drunk. I’m sorry. Go back inside - I just need...I need...”
“I didn’t mean to make you cry. Fuck, I'm sorry.”
“You didn’t...I’m not…”
But the tears were coming fast now, hot, formless things that Marco could barely feel, much less control. Jean’s hands had released his, instead coming up to wipe frantically at his face, fingers trembling as he did so.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re not, you’re crying. ”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not . Stop saying that.”
Marco bit down hard on the rebuttal that surged like vomit to the top of his throat, resigning himself to his fate. The press of Jean’s fingers against his cheek was sloppy, a little harder than necessary, smudging salt beneath the eyepatch. He let it happen.
Eventually, Jean appeared to deem his work satisfactory, the flow successfully stemmed. When he took Marco’s hands again, he did not meet his gaze, returning to his absent fussing. His right fingertip traced the shape of his nails.
“You...your hands...your hands are nice. Always liked your hands,” he started before shaking his head, pausing, trying again. “That’s...that’s not what I meant.”
Marco kept his mouth shut, instead making use of his gradually returning sobriety by interlinking their fingers and squeezing.
“I...what I meant was...I like your hands. And I like your face, and I like your freckles, and your smile, and your laugh.”
Marco couldn’t help a weak chuckle at that. “You smooth talker.”
“Shhhh, not finished,” Jean muttered, pulling a hand free and pressing a finger against Marco’s lips with surprising dexterity. “I like all those things. Everything. But I also like the other things. The sad things, and dark things. The things you don’t like to talk about. I love those things too. I love everything. You...you understand, right? All of you. I love everything about you. You don’t...you can be scared, y’know? You can talk to me when you’re scared. I don’t...fuck I’m...I shouldn’t be trying to say this right now because I am so fucking drunk you wouldn’t believe, but you understand, right?”
“I understand,” Marco whispered.
“And...and I’m scared too. All the time. Sometimes I struggle to get out of bed, because I’m so afraid of what’ll happen if I go outside, y’know? Sometimes I can’t breathe, I’m so scared.” He stopped, breathed through his nose. Grated out, “I still see it, y’know? You in that bed. Bandaged up and bleeding and...I still see it. All the damn time. I drive myself crazy, thinking about what would’ve happened if...if you’d…”
“Jean…”
“Anyway. You’re here. You’re here, and so are the others, so it’s not as bad. I can...I can deal with it. Better. Because you’re all here with me.”
His eyes had grown glossy, red-rimmed with more than just the alcohol, and all Marco could do was nod, helpless.
“You always...everyone always makes you...makes you feel like you’ve got to be happy, all the time. You’re the...the rock. Everyone just uses you. Leans on you. All the time. But you don’t have to let us. You don’t, Marco. You can just be you. I want you to just be you.”
Marco laughed, abrupt and wet.
“That’s the cheesiest thing you’ve ever said in your life.”
“I’m pissed right now, Bodt. I’m off my fucking face and I’m trying to help you feel better. Accept the cheese. Embrace the cheese.”
“Okay I’m embracing the cheese. I’m sorry.”
“Good. That’s good,” Jean said, and lifted Marco’s hand to press a series of clumsy kisses to his sore palm. “I mean all of it. Every word.”
God, Marco loved him.
They shuffled in closer, knees pressed tightly together, hands clasped. Marco could taste Jean’s breath on the air, hot and liquor-sour, so close that his face had melted into a comfortable blur at the edge of his vision. The touch of his nose against Marco’s cheek was light, ticklish, before he pushed closer, into the crook of Marco’s neck, his goatee just barely grazing the delicate skin there.
“I...I’m scared. I am. But...it’s good to be here. Now. With you.”
The words came quick, soft, so much so that they might have been swallowed up by the night if not for their proximity. It took a moment for Marco to register that it was in fact his own mouth that had spoken. He shuddered, unaccustomed to this feeling. Spread thin, spread open, to be picked through and scrutinised. That was just Jean’s influence - always the one to peer past his sun-bright exterior and into the blue beneath.
Jean did not respond for a little while, huddled close, warm breath tickling Marco’s neck. When he eventually moved it was sluggish, a gradual tipping of the world upon its axis that most likely had his head churning itself up a storm upon his shoulders. He lurched back, a ship at sea, hands freeing themselves so that they could come up to cup Marco’s face, one sliding round to anchor itself at the back of his skull. His gaze was thoughtful, at odds with the drunken blankness sitting just behind it.
“Marco Bodt, you are just...”
“Marco! Jean! You two had better not be fucking out here!”
Jean’s jaw snapped closed, the words he had been about to say dispersing as quickly as they had come together, as Connie tottered out of the tent. If his near-catatonic state was anything to go by, his intoxication appeared to have increased exponentially in the short time since Marco had spoken to him.
“Connie, leave them alone!” came a squawk from inside, bearing uncanny resemblance to that of an equally inebriated Armin.
“You should listen to him,” Jean said, nodding in the general direction of the tent.
“Fuck, it’s freezing out here. Come back inside, we’re gonna play games.”
Jean glanced back at Marco.
“You wanna go back in?” he asked, hushed, and Marco was smiling before he had even registered the pull of muscles required to construct it.
“We won’t be a moment,” he said, loud enough for Connie to hear.
“Nice. Don’t start fucking though. No time,” Connie said, eyes so far closed that he looked about ready to collapse where he stood, before turning and stumbling back inside, tripping over thin air as he did so.
The sight was so absurd that Marco couldn’t help but laugh, sharp and bright and ebullient, so sudden that he surprised himself.
“Such a fucking cockblock,” grumbled Jean, but there was warmth behind the acerbity, a lightness in his tone that bubbled up into a chuckle.
They sat for a moment, sniggering to themselves like children, before their gazes were inevitably drawn back to one another.
Marco realised that the world had stopped spinning a long while ago.
“Let’s go,” he murmured, and held out a hand.
Jean smiled, languid and soft, and, awash in the compound lustre of moon and lamplight, he took it.
“Lead the way.”