i want to see you up close
    To say he was tired would be an understatement. Jean had woken up that afternoon with the intent to enjoy yet another busy, mind-numbing shift at the city morgue. He would stop in at the closest gas station to grab breakfast for himself and a midnight snack for Marco, and then once he struggled his way past the heavy chrome double-doors of his workplace, he would shrug on his lab coat, and go over some possible applications for an assistant.
    If only his life had continued to muck forward so slowly. Rather than open up and dig into the insides of some poor sap, he ended up stitching up the cadaverous body of who he had hoped would be a good fit for his job search. At least he hadn’t had to stray far from his safe haven room out into police-hell to find Marco, who had carried Eren Jaeger’s stiff body in and strewn him out on the clean autopsy table.
    Some mild part of Jean wondered, as he washed the shadow of blood from his hands, exactly how Marco had earlier managed to drag a dead body in without anyone seeing, but he supposed it was late enough for those on duty to be really aware anymore. Regardless, the state of the boy he had safely stowed on a refrigerator table had him completely on edge. Eren Jaeger was literally a hungry monster and that was terrifying. The head wound Jean had cleaned and stitched was minor, but the boy’s body had been completely taken over by what he had assumed was rigor mortis. He partly wished the situation was that simply; maybe then he woudn’t have a living nightmare snoozing so near him. Marco’s convincing tale of a mugging turned feeding session should have been a disgusting and in-poor taste joke, had Jean not pried Jaeger’s bloodstained mouth open to find actual flesh still stuck in his molars. That had been a truly frightening discovery, but convincing nonetheless.
    The same cool clear part of him wondered why he hadn’t freaked out as much as he should have. In trade of passing out or running away, he’d set into examiner mode and had done the job required of him. Now that the immediate danger had passed and he had a verifiable cannibalistic...thing locked in his positive-temp cooler, he had little to take his mind off of the here and now. Jean dried his hands on a disposable paper towel and took a seat on the mostly cleared off top of his desk. His gaze went from the door of Eren’s drawer to the forgotten bag of food beside him, and his waking grumblies returned. Not even the memory of pulling the would-be human dinner out of Jaeger’s mouth was enough to absolve his hunger. Coroner work did that to an individual. He shrugged and pulled out his bagel, set on at the very least feeding himself.
