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When they were in high school, Eren always dared Jean to jump on the train cars thundering toward the city proper, slivers of sleek steel that would appear on the tracks that stretched from Shiganshina to Trost.
Local kids always stood just at the top of the tunnel where the tracks turned into a bridge, passing over a river on its way into the Interior where they weren’t allowed to go without a city-state visa—merchant, student, or work permit.
Jean used to scoff, but he was always brave enough to follow Eren up to the mouth of the tunnel when they were sixteen, too stubborn to admit he was terrified.
The train would come roaring through that tunnel and over the trestle faster than they could even both keep track of, and in each car there would be contents of wild dreams—oats, salt, livestock—only things available on the black market.
“I’m gonna get there,” Eren always said, pointing into the darkness of the tunnel that yawned through hilltops as the train disappeared into the other side of the bridge, “where Armin went.”
Jean always just pursed his lips, not wanting to contradict Eren for once in those moments.
No one knew where Armin had gone, at least not back then.
Jean shoved his hands in his pockets, scuffing at the rocky rural ground with his worn shoes, and snorted. “Yeah, well, you better get the grades then, asshole.”
They stood there together at a safe distance, staring off into the quiet tracks as the sun slowly began to set over the river that separated them from what lay on the other side of the water.
Jean figured they were a couple of bumpkins, a few people who didn’t matter. And the honest truth was that he didn’t mind.
He aimed to get through that tunnel where the train had gone without anger or excuses, but just by being good enough; good enough for his mother, to live in Sina, to get out of this rocky shit hole.
Eren had different goals.
“You’re a copout, Kirschstein,” he’d always say. “You’re pathetic.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jean would reply, rolling his eyes as the sun set. “At least I’m not gonna be stuck between a mountain and a shit stream by the time I’m eighteen, talkin’ about trains.”
“Maybe not,” Eren replied with a slight shrug.
Another train rumbled through the tunnel suddenly, and Jean had been startled enough to stop and look over.
“It’s off schedule.”
“Yeah,” Eren replied, grinning with all teeth as he turned his face toward Jean, strangely orange in the sunset, as the locomotive cars thundered out onto the trestle.
Jean swore he never saw someone leap the way he did Eren Jaeger that day, landing somewhere he was pretty sure wasn’t in the river, and then everything was still again.
Years later, after Jean had been accepted to university, he still wondered what happened when no one ever heard from Eren again. There were rumors he ended up in Sina, that he escaped prison, that he’d arrived in a cart full of salt.
But it wasn’t until Jean was trying to get his coffee maker to work in his new, sterile apartment that he got a letter from Armin Arlert.
Somehow, the idea of speeding trains had become attractive after a night with a strange waitress he couldn’t please.