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The other Military Police recruits found the time they spent together to be odd, but pitying. Surely they were two misfits desperate for human interaction: Hitch, incapable of intelligent thought, and Marlowe, too capable of it. It would never work. He would get sick of her eventually when he realized he couldn’t make her smart like him, couldn’t make her think like him.
Nobody knew the truth; they wouldn’t have believed it anyway.
Hitch and Marlowe grew used to discussion. Marlowe proposed a topic, sometimes offhandedly, sometimes accidentally, and they fell into a pattern of dissecting it for the purpose of understanding. It was easy; he made it easy because he listened—to her. He really listened. She knew he did because his responses were always fitting, always related. A conversation about pickup lines could turn philosophical in less than ten seconds between them.
Maybe that was how she’d come to love him.
It wasn’t slow and steady like she’d expected, but fast; it struck like lightning and left her insides quivering, leaves on a tree after a storm.
It was thrilling to feel important and cared about, to think for even just a few minutes each day that she was worth listening to.
She didn’t know what anything he did meant, but she tried not to question it too much. Marlowe simply enjoyed discussion. Had any of their peers thought to engage him in discussion of the same caliber, he would surely have latched onto them, too. She wasn’t unique in that regard.
She just was. Herself.
But he still listened to her. And he understood—sometimes things she didn’t even say, as if he could read beyond the words she spoke by watching her face or her hands.
He didn’t have to love her.
She never expected that.
It was enough to know that he knew her, and he still cared.
She knew she was going to lose him before it actually happened. Boris told her when the transfers opened up, a satisfied expression on his face as if he knew something she did not.
“You should probably transfer right away,” he said.
“What?” she asked. “Why would I do a thing like that?”
“Uh.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Because if you put in after Marlowe, he’s going to think you’re being creepy—and you know he’s going to put in as soon as he finds out about it.”
The joke was on Boris, though: she already knew. She knew Marlowe would join the Survey Corps in an instant. He talked about them a lot. He’d enjoyed saving Eren and Historia, enjoyed being instrumental and mattering to the world.
Hitch didn’t care about that, though someone like Boris might think she did.
She had only ever cared about mattering to the people who mattered to her.
She swallowed hard and forced a bored expression. “I’m not transferring.”
“A shame,” Boris said, smiling a little. She couldn’t tell if his expression was serious or teasing, and she didn’t care to know. “But it doesn’t matter; my chance for promotion is still probably higher than yours—all things considered.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What things.”
“Marlowe? Leaving? He’s the only reason you’ve put any effort into anything, right?”
She turned around.
“Hitch!” he called after her, and caught up, a hand pressing down on her shoulder. “Look, I don’t care if it’s true or not. Are you really going to let him transfer by himself, though? He means well, but… Well, you remember the scene at the canal.”
Of course she remembered. She’d never forget it: Marlowe proved he wasn’t full of shit that day, and the price he’d paid for doing it had been that he’d gotten the shit beat out of him. It had been bad enough by the water when the issue had been their superior officers, but in the Survey Corps, he’d be facing titans. Annie couldn’t save him this time. Annie wouldn’t even be on his side.
And she—
She couldn’t do anything, either, to protect him there. Even if she did transfer, what were the chances of them staying on the same team? And what if she was too late? What if she had to watch him die right in front of her?
She swallowed hard and shrugged off Boris’s hand. “I know,” she said.
Marlowe came to her that night, smiling and excited. It broke her heart. She knew she was being selfish.
“The Survey Corps opened up transfers,” he said. “Naturally I put in for one right away. They said it might take a week or two to go through, but—“
“Marlowe,” she interrupted, hands curled into fists to keep her fingers from trembling, eyes focused on his face. She watched his smile fade, felt her heart fall with it. God, she hated herself, but she had to try. She was the only one who had a chance of convincing him of anything.
She was the only person he ever listened to.
He tilted his head to the side slightly in her silence, waiting. Listening.
“The Survey Corps really isn’t for you,” she said, each word harder than the last; if she didn’t fill her words with resolve her voice would tremble, and then he would know. He would know, and he wouldn’t change his mind anyway, and that would hurt way more than she could stand. “You don’t even have any practical experience. And—“
He was so excited to leave her and join the Survey Corps that it made it hard to try to convince him that it was a bad decision. If his life wasn’t in danger, she wouldn’t have even bothered to try; if he’d be happier without her, she’d let him go. But he couldn’t be happier dead; he couldn’t be happy at all that way.
She wanted him alive, and selfishly she wanted to keep him with her.
But her tongue grew tangled in all the words that tried to leave her mouth, and everything came out wrong.
“So you’re saying I’m too weak to join the Survey Corps?”
“No! Marlowe, I’m saying that—“
“Like all of the people transferring are just idiots, right? Like we’re all too weak and too stupid to make difference?”
“That’s not what I’m saying!”
“Then what are you saying?”
“That you should think about staying here! I—I mean, helping overthrow the government’s already helped us out a little, so over time it’ll probably help out a lot!” Her fingers were trembling, now, hands gesturing wildly as if she could encompass her feelings and desperation into one sentence that would convince him to stay. Her voice softened: “We’d do really well here with all the benefits we’d get, Marlowe.”
His face colored. “I get it,” he said, and for a moment she let herself believe that he did. But then his eyebrows lowered and his fingers were curled into fists, arms stiff at his sides. “All this time and all that matters to you is monetary gain.”
“I—what?” She could have cried. Never in her life had she wanted so badly to be heard; never had she struggled so hard to make herself understood. She had thought he would understand her, like he always did. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. “Marlowe,” she asked, voice straining, thick with emotion she didn’t mean to give away, “why aren’t you listening to me?”
“I am listening!” he said back, voice heated, words sharp. “What you’re saying is just—I can’t—“ He fumbled for words, losing them for a moment, and then his back straightened, and his words were flatter than before. “Over the last few months my opinion of you has been improving, but I see, now, that I was wrong.”
“What?” she asked, a nearly voiceless whisper.
“I was wrong about you,” he said, and turned toward the door.
The last time she saw him, the smile had fallen from his face and out of his eyes to someplace far, far away.
The last time she saw him, his back was to her, filling the doorway to the room she’d once shared with Annie.
His muscles were stiff, his posture too rigid to be natural.
“You tried, right?” Boris asked her a few days later, when Marlowe’s transfer had gone through; he hadn’t even stopped by her room to tell her goodbye.
Hitch gave a shrug that was meant to convey that she didn’t care, but Boris ignored it—or maybe he didn’t understand what it was supposed to mean. Of course he didn’t; he wasn’t Marlowe.
“He was pretty upset, came in all red-faced and stuff the other night. But he didn’t start ranting, which I thought was weird. Usually he doesn’t hesitate to start lecturing about how stupid someone else acted or how corrupt and evil this organization is, but he didn’t say a word.”
“I tried,” she said, quietly.
“I thought so.” He touched her shoulder, just barely. “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”
She shrugged again.
She realized later that she had hurt Marlowe’s feelings. Of course he wasn’t impervious to damage just because he acted that way.
He expressed anger and fear and bravery and irritation and sympathy so openly that she had always assumed he’d express everything that way: loudly and passionately. But he hid the hurt.
Just like her.
So she wrote to him, a long rambling letter full of fumbling, stumbling words in sloppy handwriting. She knew when he read it he’d think she was drunk, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care what he thought so long as he knew the truth.
She was sorry.
She had only wanted to protect him.
She wasn’t strong enough to do that—not when titans were his opponent.
So she’d tried to protect him the only way she could think of and it had backfired.
She hadn’t meant to hurt him. He wasn’t weak at all, but what good was a strong person that was dead? Didn’t he know how many people had died in the Survey Corps? She didn’t believe in miracles but she’d be praying anyway, to anyone who would listen to her. Every night, just in case it bought him even one more day.
Please be safe, she thought, and wrote, and signed.
She sent the letter the next morning.
There’s a knock on her door too early in the morning a few weeks later. She stumbles out of bed and rushes to answer it, uncaring, for once, that her hair is mussed and her nightclothes rumpled from sleep. Nobody ever knocks on her door early in the morning but Marlowe; no one else is ever awake that early on purpose. If he’s come all this way to speak to her, he’s probably had time to consider her letter, and the answer must be positive or he would have simply written back, a terse little reply on a too-large piece of paper.
But when she opens the door, it’s not Marlowe standing there.
It’s Jean, hand outstretched. In his palm rests a small black book.
She slams the door in his face.
He waits, patiently, for her to open it again. She knows because he doesn’t make a sound until she does, a full three minutes later. She’s wearing her uniform and her hair is brushed, now.
She’s not going to hear this news looking like a surprised fucking housewife.
She’s a soldier and she’s going to—
—going to listen like one.
Jean looks at her and then at the floor.
“This is the one from his room,” he says, and holds the book out to her again. “I thought you might want it since you two were—“ he hesitates, but finishes his thought anyway: “—close.” He swallows, chews on the inside of his cheek. “There’s a book, too,” he continues, and it feels as though he’s changing the subject. “A real one.” He holds up a small bag. “It’s in here.”
She doesn’t know what to say, or how to act, but she takes the book from his hand, the black one, the one that has the MP unicorn embossed on the front and reads Military Identification Documents in script, and she holds it too tight.
This can only mean one thing, but she says it anyway, forces the words past stiff lips: “He’s dead.” It’s a question framed as a sentence, but she already knows. Why else would Jean be here?
Jean starts to fold his arms, but holds them instead, as if he’s feeling chilly. His voice, when it comes, is too soft and strained: “Yeah.”
“When?” she asks. “How? I—“
“A few days ago. It was—“ His fingers grip his own arms tighter. “Are you sure you wanna know, Hitch?”
“No,” she says, voice cracking. “But I should hear it, shouldn’t I? I should know if I could have made a difference, right, if only I weren’t so selfish?”
“I didn’t.” He meets her eyes but doesn’t smile. “I didn’t make a lick of goddamn difference, so don’t—don’t beat yourself up over it. Okay?”
She can feel tears prickling behind her eyes.
Jean reaches for her, but stops himself, takes his hand back. “He wouldn’t want you to. I didn’t know him that well, but I knew that much.”
Jean tells her what he knows even though she starts crying partway through. She begs him to tell her the entire truth. She doesn’t want to know, but she needs to, the same way she’d needed to know the truth about Annie. Knowing won’t make things better, but it might keep things from being worse, from her own imagination inventing worse scenarios every single night, forcing her awake.
He tells everything haltingly, with difficulty, and she realizes it’s hard for him to talk about. He saw it happen, after all. He saw it all. He was there.
Marlowe’s new black book, the one embossed with the Survey Corps’s logo, was sent to his family. His body could have been sent back, but—
Jean shakes his head. “It was bad. The letter he had folded up in his pocket—you couldn’t read a word of it; it was soaked.” In blood, he doesn’t have to say.
“Letter?” she asks, voice faltering on just that one word.
“Yeah. He got it a week before we left for Shiganshina.” Jean taps the left side of his chest. “Kept it in his pocket after that. Look, I—I know you wrote it, okay? I don’t know what it said, and like I told you, I couldn’t read it afterward. He didn’t really talk about it or anything, but it was obvious. He did tell us that you’d fought; we told him he was a goddamn idiot for not understanding you. But after he got your letter, he said he had a visit to make after we were done cleaning up in Shiganshina. Said he had someone waiting for him to come back. I wish—“
It’s Jean’s turn to stumble over his words, and he doesn’t recover right away. Hitch can hardly believe he’s younger than she is, standing in front of her delivering this bad news. He probably volunteered to do it because he knew them both a little bit. It makes her chest ache. She wants to thank him, somehow, for doing that for Marlowe—maybe for her, too.
“I wish he could’ve made it,” he says after a while. “I’m sorry. I just—I don’t know what else to say.”
She doesn’t either.
Jean goes back to the Survey Corps.
Hitch goes back to work.
Marlowe’s roommate for his time in the Military Police had been Boris, and Hitch tells him the news later, when she can say it without feeling like she’s crumbling into dust.
He shakes his head, swallows hard. “That’s too bad,” he says after a long moment, as if he has to compose himself to speak. “I’m sorry.” When she opens her mouth to say that she is, too, he takes her hand and looks her in the eye. “Hitch, I really am sorry.”
It takes her a moment to find the words, and her voice cracks despite herself: “I know.”
She knows what the other book is without looking, so it takes her a few weeks before she has the courage to see it for herself. She pulls it from the bag slowly, carefully, tenderly, like it’s alive and fragile, a softly-beating heart.
It was Marlowe’s favorite book, full of some of his fondest memories. She can remember his face if she closes her eyes, remember the way he talked about his grandfather as his fingers skimmed the spine of the novel.
She half-expects to find a note, a promise on paper, something—anything.
But there’s nothing there.
Still, she pulls the book to her chest and rocks back and forth in the top bunk of her bed and thinks about how it’s just like him to put her letter in his pocket because of course he’s going to come back to tell her that they were both idiots and he’s sorry, too. Of course he wouldn’t let himself think that he could die out there, that he wouldn’t be able to tell her those things himself.
She knows the story because she’s read it before; the story is Marlowe. A man hell-bent on making a difference, doing the right thing, struggling to be upright and righteous no matter what temptations or horrors cross his path.
She opens it to the first page, and that’s when she sees it.
Next to the chapter title is her name, written in Marlowe’s too-neat print: Hitch, it says, thank you for listening.
She fastens her harness on over her clothes, one buckle at a time. It’s barely dawn, the light arching over the rising sun in her east-facing windows, but she works with the efficiency of a veteran: years of service, she supposes, allow her to do so. She doesn’t hate mornings anymore; now she understands why Marlowe liked them so much.
They’re quiet—peaceful before the day crowds her mind with a million other things.
When the buckles are fastened, she slips on her jacket and reaches for her books. One has been updated recently to reflect new information; the cover is still inflexible. The other’s cover is worn and soft, pliable, now. She slips them both into her left-side breast pocket and reaches for her tie.
The red stone glints as it catches the coming day in its depths, and then it’s around her neck, settled in the space just below her collarbone.