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Their friends are burning.
It’s all Jean can think about.
How many of them unnecessarily died over the past few days? How many of the people he spent the last three years training with will he never see again? How many of them did he carry, lifeless and unrecognisable, to join this pile of ashes?
How many of them are burning in front of him?
Connie’s head is in his hands, and he’s sobbing. Jean has never seen him like this—hell, he’s never seen anything like this. Strong people falling to their knees, hearts shattering for their lost comrades.
Who are burning. Nameless. Just bodies on a fire.
Everyone will forget about them soon enough.
All Jean can think about is death. All he can smell, all he can taste is death. There’s charred bones on the ground. Fragments of people that once were, but aren’t anymore. He’s got so many regrets, so many fears, that are just eating him up from the inside. So many things he should’ve said, should’ve done.
There’s still things he can do, though.
He crouches down to the floor, and picks up a piece of bone. Maybe this is Thomas. Or Mina. Or Nack. Or Milieus. And that’s just the people he knows that are dead. Who else of his fellow cadets have lost their lives that he doesn’t know about?
What if it had been him in there. What if it had been Sasha. Connie. Reiner or Bertholdt. What if it had been—
“I don’t know how to tell you this—”
The voice next to Jean is soft, as it always is, but he can tell it’s laced with fear. Just as scared as he is, just as apprehensive about what comes next.
“—but I think I’m going to join the Scouts.”
Jean raises to stand straight as he turns his head. Casts his gaze over the boy beside him, at the way the glow of the fire casts a halo over his dark hair, how his brown eyes have never looked sadder, staring into the blaze that burns before them.
He almost wants to argue, wants to refuse, wants to tell him how ridiculous he’s being, but…he’s not. It makes sense, and Jean would be a liar if he said he wasn’t thinking about it too.
And now, with those words spoken, with the thought of being anywhere but beside him from now on, he nods.
“Yeah. I think…I think I’ll join you.”
He doesn’t expect a hand to wrap around his wrist. Doesn’t expect furrowed brows and such a tight grip a moment later.
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You just…Jean, you can’t.”
He takes a breath. Covers the hand around the wrist with his own, and offers the smallest of smiles.
“If you’ve decided, I’ve decided. Wherever you go, I go, alright?”
𖤓
The barrack beds have never felt so comfortable, a place to finally rest their weary bones, but the room has never felt so empty.
It’s eerily quiet. The whole place feels like a graveyard. The whole place feels like a reminder of what they’ve lost.
There’s a body beneath his fingertips, pressed flush to his. Tight, close, wrapped together. They’ve never been this near before—never dared this level of contact—but it’s different now. Something has changed.
And it’s not just the loss they’ve suffered.
Jean presses his nose into the dark head of hair that is tucked beneath his chin. Strokes his hand across a strong back as there’s a shaky exhale. The kind of breath one takes alongside resignation.
Words won’t help, so he’s been trying with actions: a hand on a shoulder, linked fingers beneath the dining table at which they’d barely touched their stew—and now this. Jean had opened his arms up, silently, and the boy had crawled right in, fitting to him like a puzzle piece, like this was the spot he was meant for, like he should never be anywhere else but in Jean’s arms.
And damn it, Jean thinks back to the burning pile of bodies. To the what ifs, to the thought of all the people they’ve lost, all the people they could’ve lost, to the very thought that there was a chance, a possibility, that Jean could’ve lost his best friend.
That he could’ve been on that fire of lifelessness, and not here in Jean’s arms, with a beating heart and shuddery breath, and so wonderfully alive.
Tears sting his eyes. His lip wobbles at the thought and he presses his nose in harder, inhaling, wrapping his arms around him tighter, fingers grasping at the fabric of his sleep shirt.
He’s not going to let him go. Not going to watch another one of his friends die. Not going to let them burn, nameless and forgotten.
Especially not him.
“Don’t follow me,” comes a small whisper against Jean’s chest a few minutes later, “I need you to be safe. I need that to be guaranteed. It won’t be if you join the Scouts.”
“Can’t be anywhere safer than with you, right?” Jean lifts a hand and threads his fingers through the dark hair, curling the longer pieces around his digits. “Gotta stick together now. I need to keep an eye on you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Maybe,” Jean agrees, “but maybe I just want to be with you. Maybe a life in the interior isn’t really worth it if you’re not there.”
“Jean—”
“I keep thinking,” Jean continues. He’s glad he can’t be seen right now, because this is the most honest he’s ever been with anyone. But it cannot be helped, not after everything. “What if it’d been you? What if I’d had to put your body on the fire? What if you weren’t here with me right now? What if—” his own voice chokes him, so he takes a moment to breathe. “—what if I never got to see you again?”
There’s no response, but he can feel a sharp intake of breath.
“What you said to me…what you did for me…I can’t be without you, alright? I mean it. I’m with you, wherever you go.”
“I meant it too,” another small whisper, “you’d make a great leader. You’re going to make a great leader. A-and fine, if you’re going to follow me to the Scouts, then I’ll follow you the rest of the way, for the rest of my life. However long that’ll be. For however long I’ve got left.”
𖤓
“You’re really set on the Scouts?”
“Woah, are you serious? Aren’t you scared?”
Jean looks over to his friends, at their perplexed faces. Excuses himself from his conversation with another cadet, and scuffs his boots in the dirt as he walks towards them.
“Of course we are. But…it’s the right decision. What good will we be in the interior? There’s so much to fight for beyond the walls.”
“We? You mean, you and—”
Jean comes to a stop by his side. Looks at Annie, Armin, Sasha and Connie, then tilts his head.
“Huh? What, don’t believe that I’d go too?”
“But…you two were both so set on the MP’s…what changed?”
Jean glances at him. Finds comfort there, finds a safe place in those warm eyes, in the slope of his nose and the curve of his jaw. In the freckles across his cheeks and the length of his lashes.
He finds home. For the first time in days, he doesn’t just think of that fire that has burnt into his memory, but he finds hope, finds a future, finds that where he wants to be isn’t a place, but a person.
In Marco, he finds love. That’s the truth of it.
That is what has changed.