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They get the approval to go ahead with the peace talks.
“Excellent,” Jean says, because he's woken up with stiff shoulders still humming with the unease beaten into them by lying on a thin sheet on a hard floor, “now we just need to find nations insane enough to make peace with.”
Pieck and Armin glare at him. They’re not the only ones who do, but they’re the only ones he notices — at least until Reiner says, “This is not a joke.”
Jean’s eyebrows climb. “It’s not? Oh, because I was under the impression we were forming a group of former Titan shifters with no leverage.”
“We need to have faith in Historia’s influence,” Armin says. “The few survivors will certainly not be fond of Eldia, but they don’t have enough manpower or resources to go against us now. They’ll have to listen. Remember, only a few people lived.”
“Clearly not the worthy ones,” Jean bites out, never having taken his gaze off Reiner.
Pieck blows a puff of air and rests her chin on an open palm. “Do you have to do this now?” she asks, at the same time Armin reminds him, “We all survived this together, we were all needed.”
It’s a precautionary measure, he opens his mouth to say, knowing it’s false. Jean is just angry. Angry, and looking for easy, willing targets. Eren was easy and willing and slipped into meaningless fights as often as he breathed. A man indulging his whims and certain of his goals like they were an offering from the skies — and Jean respected that, saw part of himself in that, until those decisions left the world barren.
— —
As long as one stays close to where Mitras used to stand and doesn’t look outside, very little has changed since the Rumbling. Jean’s morning meals inland remain much the same — as lacking as they were before Wall Maria was retaken, distinctly no longer offering the new tastes of saltwater fish now that everything further south was stomped flat. Yellow only, straw-like earth as far as the eye can see, patches of healthy green smaller than a footprint in between them. Old castles with their foundations exposed, the wooly coat of vegetation ripped from the talus.
Arriving by ship was nothing short of depressing. The assembled bunch they were made of was barely welcome home — too many Jaegerists too eager to buy into blind belief that the results yielded by Eren's efforts were what success looked like, too volatile to take the news of their leader's and Floch’s deaths nicely or quietly — and those it was not home for waited by the sea for days, until Historia — Queen Historia — made her stance of the people, of the future, clear. Jean carried the news to Pieck and Reiner, relieved then, the tension and bond unwillingly formed from trials endured together still a tether.
It’s been days since. He is no longer sure if the plan forward is a good idea.
Connie joins him at the table, each fist held out, closed. “Choose! I’ve got ration bar, and ration bar.”
Jean laughs. “The left one.”
“Good choice! Breakfast fit for royalty.”
He’s only one bite in when Reiner enters. They must’ve been pretty quiet because he freezes, eyes widening enough to be more prominent than the awful eyebags under them for a moment, as though he was not expecting people to be there.
They haven’t really talked since the admission of how Marco truly died, Reiner and he. Nor since anything else. The combination of hitting him as many times as he can manage and later saving his life have left Jean unmoored, feelings forming threads that do nothing except tangle further each passing day. A fretful sense of right and wrong, an enclosed space, wandering limbs — he looks at Reiner and doesn’t know whether he wants to punch him some more or tell him it wasn’t his fault. He’s been raised this way, and the place he was raised at is no more. Is that grounds for forgiveness?
Jean wants it to be. He’s just not sure Reiner does.
The seconds trickle by.
“…Ration bar?” Connie tries.
“Yeah.” Reiner coughs. “Yes.”
— —
The wait for something, anything, to happen slowly but surely, ramps up Jean's anxiety, and in turn so do the dreams he has about Marco. His face pops up same as always. He's smiling after training, whether in the grueling heat or the deep-winter hoarfrost. The one certainty of life, back towards the beginning, Jean's personal North: Marco's smile.
There is no North, nor a South, East, West anymore. He doesn’t tell anyone about the dreams, but they make things awkward, their accumulatingly fading nature. Jean forgets about a freckle here, a reaction there. The repetition of them provides him with questions. No answers.
— —
Jean makes certain no animosity is outwardly expressed after that event. Armin hammers the need for unity into them every time. In the quiet spaces between one meeting and the next, in which Jean gets forced to face their new reality head-on, he feels appropriately harangued. He pads lightly across the shared room when everyone else is out. The facts tell him that he was the one who made sure Reiner lived, that day in Shiganshina. They tell him that Reiner never fights back. That Reiner offers his everything, pours all his energy into the preparations like they’re going to offer him something back. Like he's paying for something.
Jean can see this; it doesn’t mean he has to acknowledge it verbally, or physically, or in any way that escapes the confines of his mind and their calculations.
— —
Other dreams come, too. Less depressing ones, in which the sweat on his body is not cold and fearful and unconnected to nightmares, dreams in which touches come and do not leave trailing blood. Marco isn’t the star of those. Reiner is.
Jean watches himself jerk awake those times as though from outside his body. Those dreams latch themselves onto his full consciousness and replay in a constant loop for hours, like a betrayal.
— —
“Is this about Marco?”
Reiner’s voice comes as a surprise. They’ve boarded the ship again, making their way across to what used to be Marley and other nations. The abstract blue coming from both above and below them gives incentive for nothing but thinking until one passes out. Jean sits against the railing after one of the longer decision-making sessions.
He looks up. Sure enough, there is Reiner, looking as haggard as he usually does these days, the pattern of vibrations from his steps causing Jean's fingertips to tingle where they're touching the floor.
“I thought— perhaps we should—”
Jean waits.
“Look, man, this is about the world. We have to get past this.”
The irony of being called immature by Reiner is not lost on him. “Now you decide to care about the world above all?” Jean laughs. “Do you think it also cares about you?”
“I don’t,” he says. He says it casually, like he expected the question. “I’ve made my mistakes. But Gabi, the others, they finally have a chance to be more.”
“More than you were?” Jean mocks. “That’s not hard.”
Reiner says, “None of us was going to see the other side of twenty-five,” ignoring him and the reprieve in rage he was seeking.
It should be a jarring enough reminder to shut Jean up. It would, if he was being more rational.
He barges forward instead. “Neither did Marco,” he stresses. “Nor— how many people died in Shiganshina alone? How many in Trost?” A lump makes itself known at the back of his throat. So many gone. So many dead, some of which by Jean's own hand. They spent so long thinking they were all the world had to offer; now they just about are. “What about Connie’s entire village? His mother?”
“What about Bertolt?” asks Reiner.
It hangs there, with the dust motes visible in the refracted sun ray crossing between them. Unfair that Reiner would remind him of this. Unfair, that the first time Reiner shows a sign of true life rather than mechanistic motion in him, it is to utter the name of a dead comrade.
Jean shuts his eyes. Unbidden come the images: Bertolt, tied up. Armin, a mindless, perpetually-hungry beast. Bertolt, chewed up. The worst part is that they're not what makes him nauseous the most, no — that's reserved for a spark of traitorous envy. That it's not him who re-awakes Reiner’s spirit. His molars grind. “What about him?”
“You stood there and watched him get eaten.”
“And I’d do it again,” he says, and it comes out easily in its truth.
Reiner sits next to him, shoulders almost bumping, legs stretched out. The calm of the sea does nothing to help the atmosphere between them. “He was important to me, as Marco was to you.”
The sentence holds a weight like a secret. Perhaps it was — Jean has definitely never suspected, not with the earnest worship of Historia.
(He’s hoped.
This kind of conversation has not been how he imagined finding out he was right.)
He lets the discomfiting silence stretch, the anger brimming for weeks abruptly shut down. Strange to have the result one actually intended.
“There was no choice,” he says finally, calmly. “It was either him or all of us.”
“Either us, or you.” Reiner nods.
Jean shakes his head. “Either them. Zeke and Bertolt,” he explains, when he sees the questioning expression. “Not you.”
It is simple, now that he says it out loud. A secret for a secret, buried underneath the words. I didn’t let you get eaten, a confession of motive in it.
The surprise is here, on Reiner’s every feature. Now Jean has to wait to see if it can keep the life going.