Work Text:
As life becomes more mad, and reality is increasingly surreal, Jean decides indulge in a strange impulse he has one day. After all, everyone has a streak of irrationality, like a vein of metal twisting through stone, waiting to be electrified.
He does it while he’s alone, finds a place on the Wall that’s quiet to indulge in his ceremony. He’s sure Armin must have heard him once or twice, maybe even Levi, but soldiers that have seen what they’ve seen are each entitled to their own quirks. Coping mechanisms are part of what make them human, since it means one can still feel sorrow.
He calls Marco’s name.
Standing there on the precipice, looking out where the sun rises and sets on a distant line of horizon he’s never been past, he shouts into the wind.
Death doesn’t make sense anymore; memory is even more undependable. And Jean starts to believe that there’s something beyond Titan territory; beyond abandoned, crumbling castles; beyond huge, ancient trees where Titans congregate. Something even further out than whatever hell Bertolt and Reiner crawled out of to try and destroy them.
He calls out because he thinks that maybe beyond the valleys and untread horizons, heaven exists.
And if there is a heaven, he’s sure to find Marco there, and so he will call out until they meet again. Until he can touch lips, skin, kiss at freckles and laugh about stupid things like sunburn.
After some time, Jean’s voice grows hoarse, and he never receives an answer. Nonetheless, whether it’s death or a horse that carries him to that distant, mysterious paradise, he knows he’ll get there.
He dreams of it: approaching Marco lying in a bed of tall summer grass, smiling and asking him to come closer, just like the first time.
But regardless of whether heaven or death lies across untraveled lands, Jean knows there is something to be found; and so he fights, and he calls.