dead boys tell no tales.

indie. private (mutuals only). canon-compliant and canon-divergent rp blog for MARCEL GALLIARD (Jaw Titan), from Attack on Titan. written by Cha, she/her, 25+.

There was magic in the ordinary.  Now that the scales had been coarsely filed from Annie’s eyes, she could see that the steady rise and fall of a chest was an answered prayer, that the soft sound of slumberous breathing was nothing short of miraculous.  Marcel dozed in the uncomfortable chair at her bedside, dappled afternoon light bathing his careworn features, and she could not tear her gaze away.  Starved of the sight of him, she continued to stare even after he awoke with a start.

Marcel had stayed with her through the slog across the white-capped sea.  On those occasions where he vanished – ushered away by clinicians, or driven by some pressing need – Annie found herself floundering, insides squeezing with panic.  There was so little of her left now, scraped together from the filthy floor of a cell.  Alive only because she was home to something monstrous and unnatural, a banshee in her blood that refused to die, innumerable wounds stubbornly stitched with ribbons of steam.  Patches of pigmentation slowly faded, wine-red giving way to peach-pale.  Filth had washed away, the tats and mats teased from her flaxen tresses.  For the first time in months, Annie saw through two eyes and had kept the same hands for over a week – this pair held longer and more often than any that came before.

Medical ministrations were a new form of torture.  Pale limbs were decorated with slow-healing track marks where blood had been drawn and lines had been driven.  An IV burrowed into the crook of her elbow, pumping her full of a seemingly innocuous but ultimately mysterious fluid.  A carcass demanded no explanation, consent was not required of a weapon.  Annie supposed it was to purge the fleeting life that sparked unbidden, low in her belly.  What a staggering revelation, to find that a womb scalded and scoured and seemingly sterilised could build miniscule bones, could grow a heart the size of a poppyseed.

“Hey,” Annie whispered back, her voice crackling in her throat, low and conspiratorial; they had always traded in secrets and truths.  With a weak twitch of fingers, she sought his touch, but Marcel was already on the move, shielding the bird bones of her beseeching hand with his warm, rough palm.  Only then did she shake her heavy head, to say she hadn’t been awake for long – though it was difficult to tell for certain, now that the borders between sleep and wakefulness porous and blurred, nightmares melding uncomfortably with the pain of healing.

How was she, beneath the ache, beneath her body’s treachery, beneath the peeling layers of horror that clung to her?  Better for seeing him.  Better for knowing he remained rooted at her bedside.  Had it been permissible, she would have invited him to lie next to her on the firm mattress and stiff, starched sheets.  Had it been allowed, she might have even asked him to hold her.  Instead Annie gazed at Marcel and then at his hand, her expression pinched, eyes soft and defeated.  It was a gift, his touch.  Gentle, protective, steady.  Rolling over, Annie smothered his hand gracelessly with her other and curled around that holy, ordinary place where their bodies met, gazing at the layers of their stacked fingers.

“They’ll allow my father to visit soon, I think.”  It was less an answer of how she was and more a hint at the thoughts that preoccupied her mind.  Her stomach clenched to imagine Gabriel Leonhardt paging through the medical notes clipped to the base of her bed.  Assuming Marley didn’t decide to tear the Female from the ruined vessel of her flesh.

“You look tired.”  Annie watched Marcel from where she lay, her hair a shallow pool of pale gold.  For all the concern that laced her quiet voice, she was too selfish to suggest he leave, that he rest.  Instead, she clasped his hand with what strength she could muster.

She would have every reason to hate him and claw his eyes out. Abandoned for a year, left in the cruel clutches of the Island Devils to endure countless tortures, the nature of which he can only guess and barely grasp (are Paradis’ interrogators as merciless and twisted as the ones produced in Marley’s msot secret services? Knowing the likes of captain Levi and commander Hange, he would ot be surprised). Instead of clawing his eyes out, she folds in onto his hand. Marcel should count himself lucky. Instead, guilt, his oldest companion, rears its ugly head, bites at the neck of relief and affection to remind him, inevitably, that sometimes, ignoring anger and resentment is nothing more than a survival strategy. Once she recovers, once she is nursed back to health - then maybe she’ll realise she wants retaliation, after all.

His tired smile falters at the mention of Gabriel Leonhardt. The last time he saw the old man had been when he had returned from Paradis the first time. A father standing at the pier, asking where his daughter was - a cold harshness in his steel gaze only growing sharper when Marcel had informed him Annie was at the hands of the devils. Marcel had often wondered about that look - was it the look of a grieving father? Or of a master robbed of a precious, invaluable tool and demanding it is brought back to him? 

“Do you want to see him?” Marcel asks, thumb gently brushing over Annie’s knuckles. The skin on her hands still feels incredibly worn and thin, regenerating, fragile as an old woman’s in spite of the smooth youthfulness of her features. Should he press too hard, she might start to bleed. “I can find ways of delaying the authorisation, should you want some more time before they let him in.” 

Maybe it’s cruel trying to keep father and daughter apart - maybe that’s not even what Annie wants. Still, he will offer it; he has too many memories of Annie’s bruised body and avoidant eyes to not feel the hair on his neck stand at the thought of the two being in the same room again. The pressure on his hand pulls him out of his circling thoughts, drag his focus back on the present rather than hypotheticals; and Marcel offers a tired smile and a sigh, leaning over the mattress to carefully run free hand over Annie’s pale blond hair.

“I am tired.” He admits. For all his lies and betrayals, he had always been most honest with her. She coaxed the truth out of him with ridiculous ease, ever since they were children. Perhaps that’s why he became so good an actor, over the years. Had she had the slightest suspicion of his intentions with Reiner and Porco, he knows he would not have been able to hide it from her. And everything would have been over. Perhaps it would have been preferrable. Well. Too late to think about this now. “The Jaw is proving useful in the war against the Easter Alliance, so I’ve been out on the field quite a lot - even compared to before our time on Paradis. It’s taxing, sometimes.”

@dehducer​ said:  “ fine. don’t be their hero. be MY hero. “ (slippery slope prompts) (acc.)

There is a fire burning between them. Somehow, it sucks up all the warmth around it, pulls darkness over their little group like a hungry well swallowing whatever light and colour it may seek to cast. That, or Marcel is his own problem: laser-focused on the flames, staring into them until his eyes maybe dry out or melt in their sockets or burn and leave him blind to the world around him. If he’s lucky, he’ll even get all of the above. If he’s lucky, the fire will get him too. Suck him in, swallow him, engulf him until there is nothing let but one last, furious scream to tear the night apart. 

Marcel stares into the fire, his arms draped around his knees, deaf to the conversations happening around him. He hears Reiner’s voice, distant, muffled, detects some sort of explanation of pleading, and Marcel’s heart drops like a sharp-edged stone in his chest. He hears other voices, Jean’s, Connie’s, angry, remorseful, grieving, and Marcel is tempted to rise to his feet and unleash an onslaught of violence on all present company. Maybe then, Mikasa would take out her blade and finish the job started four years ago. Marcel is has always been familiar with grief, robbing him of comrades and friends left and right; plucking unfortunate souls in the slums of Liberio and in the ranks of the aspiring candidates alike, or in the trenches. No one is safe from death, is a valuable lesson he has known for as long as he can remember. 

Yet there is one soul, and one soul only,  That he had moved mountains to preserve.  And now, he is gone. Grief is a pain soaring so high, Marcel sits in it paralysed, numbed, delirious in his own exhaustion in the face of a scene replaying in his mind, time and time again. Pieck startles him out of his horrific zoetrope, momentarily pulls him out of his miserable abyss and abyssal misery. I don’t care anymore. You guys do what you want. He vaguely remembers telling them that, before tearing himself from an attempt at dialogue - he doesn’t remember by who. I don’t care anymore. Eren Jaeger wants to destroy the world? Annihilate all of humanity beyond Paradis? Good for him. Go ahead. 

A world in which his brother is no more, is no world worth surviving. 

Pieck disagrees, of course. Pieck gently shakes him by the shoulder, not so gently shakes him with quiet voice and harsh reality wrapped in words that hook onto the bleeding heart pitifully hanging in his chest. Hero, hero - don’t you see I’m anything but, Pieck? Hasn’t it been almost thirteen years, since he lost any right to the title? Hasn’t killed, lied, betrayed enough to be stripped of an aura bestowed on him by a group of lost child soldiers desperate for a semblance of safe, protective presence? Enough, he tries to tell her. There is no hero. Never was. Please, enough. Grant someone else the honour, this time around.

Fine, she says; and Marcel’s chest caves in on itself. Fine is not Pieck. Fine is giving up; Pieck never gives up. Especially not on him. She is too entangled in him, possesses too strong a grasp on the threads that command him, for him to resist her iron will. Where he will not move, she will make him. Where he won’t move for anyone, he will move for her. Some bonds move from tenderness to cruelty with such ease, the difference between the two vanishes. 

Curled fist rises to his forehead, presses against his skull, a sorry attempt to disperse the fog and mind-numbing, searing pain splitting his head open. Marcel feels Pieck’s eyes on him, expectant, impatient, demanding. She knows what they have to do; and Marcel’s last walls collapse upon themselves. Fine, he sighs, too. Fine. Grief and pain will have to wait. “... we’re gonna need a plan.” He mutters under his breath. Scrapes at what little is left of combative spirit, looks inside for traces of his own personal monster. 

If he can’t fuel himself, there is at least another, buried deep within him, that will never fail to demand blood and retribution. All those years trying to contain it; and now, Pieck summons it, all teeth and claws and hellish roars. With his other hand, Marcel reaches to grip Pieck’s. One more time. 

It’s only one more time.

@massensterben​ said:  “ a part of me still thinks that if i can find the right words, it will save us. ” (misc. quotes)

It is all starting to unravel. No, it has all unravelled already: Reiner rang the bell the moment his last line of defense snapped, the moment when, on top of this wall, the Warrior had left the soldier in the dust and taken over for this one fatal second. Marcel hadn’t been there to see it, Reiner’s abrupt confession; but Bertholdt had told him just enough that he could imagine it. Now sat atop Wall Maria, looking over the ruins of Shiganshina, Marcel welcomes Bertholdt’s muttering in the hollow space in his chest, before tearing his gaze from Reiner to turn it to the youngest member of their group. 

It was never going to last. They had known that from the start; but perhaps Marcel should have been more insistent in reminding them that it wouldn’t. Five years - half a decade on this island, cut off from the rest of the world, cut off from Marley. No one had warned them, how freeing it would be, to be away from it all (how could they?). How easily hope would creep its way into their chest; how easily they might delude themselves in thinking that maybe, just maybe... there may be another way.

It is Marcel’s failure. He should have protected them against such delusions, against the sweet lullabies this strange new normal had sung into their ears. He should have been more stern, more defiant; but truth be told, whenever he would lay eyes on his three friends and the others, having dinner, playing games, laughing together; especially Bertholdt, so young...

He hadn’t had the heart. 

Marcel holds back a sigh, and pours coffee into a tin cup - courtesy of Zeke, of course - before coming to sit besides his friend and offering him the beverage. “Bertholdt.” He starts; a short pause sneaking its way where he didn’t want it to. There is no more space for hesitation. He is not doing Bertholdt any favour by pretending there is, is he? Surely, there is now only one way forward. As sad as it is, as distressing as it is; they always knew it would come to this just not like that. 

“There is nothing you could have told them, or can still tell them, that could change anything.” Yes, he’d heard about that too - from Reiner, this time, shortly before the Jaw had joined the fray. “I’m not blaming you for trying. I even think some of them may have listened. Maybe some of them would have understood, too.” But. There is always a but; and it is his job to keep that in mind. Even if it’s too late. “... but even if they did, there is nothing they could have done to stop any of it. They’re tethered to Paradis and their superiors, just like we are to Marley and ours. We would have been the enemy, and we would have been treated as such, no matter how much sympathy we may have inspired in Connie or even Jean. Their opinions wouldn’t have mattered. Not to the people who do matter.”