Chapter Text
Never forget we were built to last
WARNING: This is an English translation of one of my older fanfictions. You can read the original Italian version (full story) at this link:
"He's been like this—" he breaks off, because it comes out so wrong that Jean can’t continue. He swallows a bitter lump, tries again: "He's been like this all night—" His gaze bounces from the floor, to the still flame of the lamp on the nightstand, to the large dark canvas bag that squad leader Hange, in pajamas and a dressing gown, had dragged along before leaving her quarters and following him. On anything but Marco’s lips, so constant in croaking those disconnected sounds from one side to the other of the pillow that now, Jean seriously doubts they are capable of forming anything coherent.
Behind him, on a corner of the bed, Hange absorbs those words with the same concentration as someone trying to decipher hidden messages, only to announce, against all expectations, a meaningless 'it's the fever, Jean.'
Yeah. It’s the fever. And a whole avalanche of many other things, or rather, non-things – like his no-longer arm, his no-longer eye, his no-longer-God-knows-what else. Thanks a lot.
"He's dehydrated, that's why he's delirious—" she adds again, and Jean sees her as she runs her fingers through Marco's hair, combing it back; he watches as she, with whispers and gentleness, motherly lets her knuckles glide over that face covered in bandages, as if she were the first to do so; as if he hadn’t spent the night there, at his bedside, doing the same thing, without resolving anything, and damn it – damn it.
Is it possible that Marco can’t have anything better?
"Could you—give him something?" he stammers, a mix of shame and desperation.
Hange doesn’t respond. "Did you manage to get him to drink water last night?"
Jean shakes his head, and she doesn’t seem surprised. It scares him.
"That's not good, he needs to drink—" she sighs.
"I tried, but he started coughing right away—" and crying, and screaming his name. God, how many times has he screamed his name? Surely, more than all the ways he had tried to make his presence felt there. But those are details Jean keeps to himself.
Hange sighs again, then changes her expression and tone.
"Marco? Can you hear me?"
If the umpteenth lack of response to that call hadn’t made the usual bile rise in his throat, Jean would almost laugh at the presumption. And he’s genuinely surprised when, for reasons only she can understand, the squad leader seems to catch the contact she was looking for. She straightens up, almost moans with joy.
"Listen to me," she smiles, her soft voice a valid alternative to the caresses she had been giving a few seconds before. "Now I’ll take the bandages off your face and take a look at the stitches. It might hurt a bit, but I’ll be gentle—"
She starts even before finishing the sentence. She stops a few seconds later when something makes her hesitate.
"Jean," she whispers. A wave of her hand explains her intentions: "Help me, let's adjust these pillows under his neck, we have to try to move him as little as possible—"
And seeing him there again, Jean slips back into that abyss from which Hange's figure had temporarily shielded him; into that hell of flesh, fire, and pain where Marco is trapped, and from which none of his efforts have managed to save him.
"I’ll be very, very gentle. I'm good at this, I mean it—" she reassures him again, because when she goes to touch the bandages, Marco's breathing has already changed, his confused phrases have taken on different tones, a faster rhythm, and then there’s that thing, damn it. Damn it.
He starts doing it again.
He starts squeezing that face in such a tight, pained grip that Jean just can’t do it.
He can’t go back there again, to that shitty hospital, to those heart-wrenching screams, to that—
"Hey—"
Hange's hand drops to his wrist, and Jean realizes that the images he’s reliving are just memories painted behind the tightly closed eyelids.
"I really need your help."
And she’s serious. More serious than he had ever seen her before.
Hange tilts her head, indicates Marco with a glance, and Jean is scared.
"I could do it alone, but he’d suffer more than he would if you helped me. So, help me, Jean—"
And that plea is more than Jean can tolerate.
He nods, takes a deep breath, and feeling terribly stupid for even hesitating, he does it.
He moves closer, gently slides an arm under Marco's neck, under that mass of sweat, damp and trembling, and adjusts him on the pillows as instructed. He tries not to notice the chattering of teeth in unison under the only intact cheek he’s decided to caress, he tries not to hear the moans or the moments when Marco loses his breath, only to find it seconds later at the next 'it's okay.'
Hange slowly removes the bandages, and she’s really as good as she said she was.
She does it with care and a gentleness Jean didn’t think she was capable of.
She’s good, sure, but not good enough to stop him from screaming in agony (or at least, that guttural sound choked in his throat is as close to a scream as his worn-out vocal cords can manage) the moment the horrendous stitches are exposed and she, perhaps too impatiently, goes to probe their edges.
She apologizes. Withdraws her fingers, lets Marco catch his breath and the desire to have someone touch him again before starting that ordeal over again, and really – Jean has a fucking urge to pull him out of that torture, take him somewhere where nothing and no one can make him feel pain again, but he also knows that if something like that existed within the remaining two walls, he wouldn’t find it anywhere else but where he is.
"They work like hacks at the hospital in Trost."
It’s Hange who hisses through her teeth now. This time, her fingertips are cautious on the stitches, and Marco holds on.
Rigid and trembling, he holds on. "—animals, butchers!"
"I guess you would have known how to do better—"
It sounds a bit sarcastic. He doesn’t even know why he says it, really. He just feels the need to say something, to give his mouth something to do that isn’t cursing.
"Oh yes," she responds promptly, not picking up on the involuntary note of sarcasm - "much better. Ask Miche, or Erwin if you don’t believe me—I’ve stitched up Levi too, you know? Sometimes even on the battlefield, among pieces of giants, frenzied horses, flames and fire—it was interesting!"
Jean isn’t entirely convinced, but he also has no reason to believe it isn’t so. To be honest, he doesn’t even care much at this moment. Marco moans and tries to pull his face away when Hange probes a part of the stitch, red as fire, and which has nothing beautiful about it. And the fact that he, under instruction, is pressing his hands on Marco's forehead and chin so that he can’t escape that ordeal is enough to make him feel the dizziness empty his head.
"But in all honesty," the scientist continues, without shifting her attention from the spot she’s examining, "who wouldn’t have done better than this mess?"
Hange leaves Marco's chin after showing him the most disappointing points, in her opinion, before bending down toward the large bag at her feet and rummaging through it in search of something.
"Anyway, as horrible as they are, they'll hold. And they don’t seem infected, which is certainly a good thing,"
"They’re not—not infected?"
If there’s something capable of bringing a glimmer of joy to Jean right now, it’s exactly news like this.
"That's what it seems," Hange places what she had gathered on her lap, then pauses to study for a few more seconds the old sheets soaked with sweat, medical ointments, and who knows what other filth that Marco is wrapped in from the waist down, as if he were in a giant shroud. She leans in, the palm of her right hand feeling the now-exposed forehead of the unusual patient, before grabbing the cloth from the basin on the nightstand, wringing it out, and gently dabbing his neck and temples.
A gesture too sudden to be entirely spontaneous. Jean doesn't know if it's Hange being an open book or if he's just honed certain deductive skills, but either way, he's not wrong: it's her way of preemptively apologizing for what she's about to announce.
"But this doesn't explain the high fever, Marco. I need to check the sutures on your shoulder and chest to make sure they're not infected too—"
Jean shivers. Those wounds are the worst, Jean knows it. And God, he really wants to hug him, or kiss him, when Hange, after adding and arranging another set of pillows in strategic positions, asks him once again to help hold Marco in place.
When, with patience, she starts removing the dirty bandages one by one, Jean really doesn't know what to do. The truth is that he barely has any idea where to touch him without eliciting worse groans than those that fall from his lips as Hange continues her work, and truly – he doesn't know what to do.
But then it happens.
Two bruised fingers with almost completely lost nails reach out to touch the hand that Jean has placed on his face, and it's a touch Jean didn't expect—it catches him off guard. He's unprepared for Marco to fix his one eye on him, reddened but, after so long, clear, and grab hold. He clings. He asks for help.
And Jean really doesn't know what to do, or more importantly, how to do it.
He simply lowers his head, leans down to Marco's dark hair now matted with who knows what, and hopes that by kissing that eyelid, which closes under the weight of his lips, their tears can mingle with Marco's, which are small and mostly stuck in his lashes, and don't even have the strength to slide down his face.
"These, on the other hand, I like much less—"
And there's something frightening in that sentence. Something horrifying in that sigh that Hange lets out with her lips pressed together in a straight, severe line.
It has the strength of a terrifying giant, perhaps the most terrifying of all, suddenly crashing down in front of him, leaving no escape.
Unwittingly, Jean lifts his head abruptly, forgetting everything else.
The chest wounds are infected, and maybe so is the stump.
He realizes this without anyone having to say it.
"What—" there's that damn lump in his throat again; that damn mess. "—what does this mean?"
Hange doesn't hear the question; she takes off her glasses, massages her eyelids for a few seconds before putting them back on, then, still with her eyes closed, exhales deeply.
She only reopens them when she shifts position, as if she needed to view the disaster before her from a different perspective.
If before it had seemed like a blessing that Hange had given up examining the edges of the sutures, now Jean isn't so sure.
"Squad Leader Hange—"
"They'll hold," she abruptly says, in response to a question Jean hadn't asked. "Don't worry, the stitches will hold,"
She stands up suddenly, as if she had just remembered an important task.
Before stepping away, she freshens up the cloth on Marco's forehead. Given the previous events, Jean trembles.
"It's a disinfectant ointment," she says methodically, handing him what she had picked up from her bag minutes before. "Wash your hands thoroughly, then apply a strip along all the sutures. Be careful, I mean it. We'll let it sit for a bit, and when I return, we'll redo the bandages—"
"Return?"
Hange is already at the doorframe, her expression that of someone who has just failed to conceal something. She admits it.
"Marco needs medicine that I'm not sure I have. I need to go fetch it from the infirmary at headquarters, or if necessary, prepare it—but in that case, it might take some time."
And from the way her eyes dart to Marco's figure, left gasping on that bed, Jean understands that time is exactly the problem.
He thinks back to that night, to all the times he told himself to wait a little longer, to listen for the sound of the bells, to not disturb the superiors' sleep, – before throwing all those damned good intentions to the wind and running to knock on Squad Leader Hange's door with ragged breath and trembling hands, at some unspecified point of a dawn he hadn't even realized was breaking.
And he feels guilt gnawing at his insides.
He feels that Marco is in this condition partly because of him, and no matter how hard he tries, he can't find anything in his mind to convince him otherwise.
"Jean—"
The fact that Hange felt the need to put a halt to her urgency should tell him a lot.
"Come on, don't make that face!" she smiles, but it's all wrong. "Marco will be fine, we'll make sure he's fine together – don't worry!" she chirps again, but it's not very convincing. Perhaps she doesn't even believe it herself.
Two tears that Jean didn't even know he had fall silently and discreetly down his face. Hange allows him to cling to her uncertain smile a little longer, and Jean is more grateful for it than he shows.
The scientist reminds him once again about the ointment, to try to get Marco to drink again, to stay calm, to wait for her imminent return without any fear– all things to which Jean nods distractedly and nervously, and that only the click of the handle – a modest sound, but to his ears, it arrives like the blast of a cannon – can put an end to.
End first part