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The front wall of the baker’s shop is completely destroyed, nothing but crumbled brick and dust. That can be fixed, Jean thinks as he runs past, trying to be calm. Stronger emotions lurk at the edge of Jean’s mind, like titans themselves—large and vicious enough to consume him, threatening to overwhelm everything, only just kept at bay. Jean does not think about how long it will take to mend the bakery, or that there are bodies strewn outside the shop and inside it, those who tried to flee and those who did not; in the end it didn’t matter.
Jean does not think about Marco. He does not. There isn’t time.
On any other day he could navigate these streets with his eyes closed. The scent of baking loaves until the bend in the street, fresh cut flowers at the corner with the stench of the tannery down the road, the street to his home marked by the shouts of old men who staked out the street corner years ago for their board games and idle bickering.
Today there are no flowers, or open shops, or people. The astonished, horrified silence is marked only by distant cries. The air smells of powdered brick, wood smoke, and the sour reek of regurgitated corpses. To find his way Jean has to look. He has to see.
His house is off the main thoroughfares, down an alley so small and winding that it doesn’t seem any titan made it that far. Signs of abandoned lives are scattered in the street—dropped baskets, an overturned carriage. Jean cuts through a shortcut he’s known since he was five, through a fence post that swings open when you wiggle it just so.
He runs until he can feel it in his legs, but something stops him as he reaches his house. He realizes he isn’t sure they’re inside, or if—
But they are home, alive, and in the end his parents come to him. His duties, why he’s away from the other trainees—meaningless. For a long moment they simply hold each other, clinging to one another there in the street. This can be fixed, Jean thinks, but suddenly those are only words, empty of meaning. He shakes his head and buries his face against his mother’s shoulder. His father’s strong arms wrap around all of them.
When they pull back, he tells them he isn’t going to join the Military Police.
His parents are less surprised than he is, perhaps. His mother pulls her lips back as though trying to smile. Her face was wet from tears but they are beginning to dry as she fusses with the front of his jacket, not reaching down anymore. Jean’s grown since the last time he saw them. His father just nods. And, well. Hadn’t it been his plan to leave them all along?
So maybe the plan changed. Not because of idiotic, suicidal vengeance in the guise of optimism. Not because of aristocrat assholes who’ve never seen death or honor first hand in their entire lives but think they’re entitled to lecture on the best ways for a soldier to die.
Fuck them. Jean never bought into that horseshit.
But he has seen now. He knows how it would end. Can this ever be fixed? As he leaves his parents and returns the way he came, skirting around rubble and debris, Jean thinks it a third time and listens to himself, trying to decide if he believes it. Maybe not. He isn’t sure. But what he knows is that he wouldn’t be walking his old streets right now if they had retreated past another Wall and done nothing.
The white eyes of his neighbors follow him through the streets, staring out from the heads of bodies flung lifeless onto piles and the backs of wagons. The streets where he grew up are laced red from blood clotting between the cobblestones.