Work Text:
When Jean doesn’t have drawing pencils, sometimes he uses dirt or blackberries to draw on the pad his mother gave him when he left for the military. He’d scoffed on that day, telling her that he wouldn’t have room, but had kept it nonetheless.
Now, on days when he can’t move his arms because he’s so tired, it’s a nice reprieve.
He draws things when no one is looking, swinging on ODM gear: the way leaves look at the very top of the tree line, bark on trees, the sky at sunset.
And he realizes that there are also different kinds of dirt—dust that blows around the training grounds after hand-to-hand combat that’s tinged with blood; thick wet mud in springtime; red clay from the nearby creek bed. The colors in the wilderness Jean finds are endless.
He doesn’t draw portraits until the year before graduation. It’s an urge he feels silly about, a bit of longing to let fingers trace shapes that he cannot; something perfect about a strong jaw line, untraceable by fingertips.
Nonetheless, Jean finds drawing nibs and paint hues from the ground, and he traces the contours of one particular face over and over. The closer graduation draws, the more he draws.
But he can’t render Marco’s smile in dirt; nor in poisonous berries or clumsy sketches.
Two months before graduation, though, Marco catches him drawing and begs Jean for a portrait. He says he doesn’t care what the material is.
He doesn’t care whether he’s depicted in red with berry blood or earthen in dirt.
Despite Marco’s enthusiasm, Jean refuses to show him the sketch after the fact.
= = =
The morning after fires have burned down is quiet and blue, clouds streaking an ever spitefully beautiful sky; there is bone is Jean’s pocket where there shouldn’t be.
Pyres are strange, how they interrogate onlookers and demand answers; and it’s only now that Jean realizes the Survey Corp. has been burning for a long time.
He bends in the brightening dawn as ashes turn to memory, to dust and sad pigment.
Soon, the bone—foreign or familiar—will turn white, will pale, will weaken. But it is a hard memento in Jean’s palm, a physical reminder that life is not only jawlines, not only longing.
= = =
“Okay,” Marco says softly, tipping his head to the side, “if you need anatomy practice.”
Jean grunts, fingers trembling against Marco’s face as he smooths fingers along the contours.
He needs.
= = =
The wind beyond the Wall is broad and swift, blowing spring pollen every which when they venture out again.
Jean has given up drawing, given up finding paint pots in the mortal world.
The bone sewn into the cuff of his shirt is like a nub, waiting to be inked and used; waiting.
To cast in his own human image seems cruel, but he notices small things: color, texture, shape. And when he realizes no one else does, he stops and thinks about how red creek beds are.
He thinks about painting things that make him ache; of the things most valuable as blood-tinged dust falls in the evening with a tender and resplendent sky.