#oncejaw

"it's five."

✦   @oncejaw​ said:  ❛ a kiss on the forehead of one who is starting to fall asleep 🥺 ❜  //  another kiss prompt

It might have been peaceful in their little burrow, if not for the smatterings of gunfire.  Annie was not afraid of the threat of artillery bombardment, nor did she recoil from the knowledge that the churned and cratered soil was soaked in equal parts blood and rainwater.  What frightened her – in a furtive, unspeakable way – were the men.  A flint-eyed breed largely immune to shellshock, they patrolled the trenches that ran like fractures through ruined earth, speaking in guttural tones, rasping voices rough with cigarette smoke.  Infantry and officers.  Eldians and their Marleyan superiors.  All one and the same when it came to the nudge of elbows and sly grins and salacious hums of appreciation.  The Female Titan was a favourite.  Mercifully, Annie Leonhardt was not.

Clawless thing, she stared at the face that hovered so close to her own.  Marcel, the warm and beating heart of their unit, gazed back at her.  Tomorrow, they would go over the top together.  Tomorrow, they would unfurl into forms far grander and more destructive than the barely pubescent bodies folded onto this single, narrow bunk.  Daylight was needed so that they might be assessed, their performances recorded and reported.  Annie was primed for bloodshed, for violence on a gargantuan scale.

Nested beneath military issue blankets, at home in this open grave, the tension slowly ebbed from her childish form.  Tiny hands, once knotted into anxious fists, wilted like exhausted flowers.  Quiet conversation frequently stalled, but never grew stilted.  There was something easy about Marcel’s company, something reassuring in his choice to shelter in this very dugout and keep a miserable girl company.  Perhaps it had been intentional.  Maybe he had seen the danger.  Whatever the truth, Annie felt a rare peace despite the disturbances, despite the death that walled them in on all sides.

zeke said it would be a good idea to have brunch as a group,  since there was a clear tension between CERTAIN MEMBERS.    sure,   get together, try & set these bonds back in place  /  ironic, how this felt more like splinting a torn off arm  /  setting a broken bone back in it’s skin  /  how vain to mend what is irrevocable  :  &  of course, that man didn’t attend this said union.  [of coooursseeee.]  How foolish  /   how silly  /  how dim you are,   you fell right into his trap.  &now,  you must sit,  mediate the table.  pieck;  ensure annie sits still /  ensure reiner does not poke & prod at such lose threads /  ensure porco or bertholdt does not feed the fire  /   ensure some sense of sanity is held.   ‘  since this is on zeke, order as much as you can.  ’   you try to joke,  you try to sound gleeful, & yet spite is dripping from your lips.      & so,  one by one you sit,   one by one you take a seat   ;   you sit between blondes  / armor & woman /  dividing such a pending doom.   & a boulder now resting on your gut  --  you taste it,  you can feel for the first time a hint of anxiety sprouting from a plot in your ribs  /  organs throbbing with anticipation  /  they might rapture with the slightest threat.   zeke should know this by now,  you can bury all the broken & ugly bones you want,  you can bury the hatchet, but erosion will soon expose it all.  & corrosion will take these bonds, eating  / devouring  /  biting, so famished  -- biting away at rusted & dirty blades / weapons -- they are so bent from war  /  wet too long from blood  /  too damage to fix [but they refuse to toss them away] hmm. 

‘  this will be so fun. ‘  a whisper,  such a flat cadence will hum  /   caught between teeth  /  so wide that smile casts  ;   was that amusement or dread just now?  hm.  annie, she was not the sour note in this melody, no  /  marcel & porco knew this as well.    Oh,   slate stare will sit over pair   ---  how the issue stemmed from reiner and berthold, & their lover's quarrel? again. & again.  how routine.  so shameless,   so outright   /   so crass -- so disgraceful-- [men are truly so trivial.]   & you close your eyes,   cheek resting to hand,  & you listen,     brothers will whisper & men will fumble over short chatter.  how awkward.  [ is there alcohol here.]   ‘ do you all know what you want?  ’

     @oncejaw​ said    :    𝚒 𝚍𝚒𝚍 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚎𝚎 𝚖𝚢 𝚏𝚎𝚊𝚛, 𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑 𝚗𝚘𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚠𝚎 𝚔𝚎𝚙𝚝 𝚗𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚑 𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛     ♡

     how she had longed to see his face again. how things had changed. how, if she were to be honest, she had thought to many time that she’d never see him again. any of them again. pieck would reserve time to grieve for bertholdt & annie at a later date, knowing the tax it would pay against her mind should she focus on them for too long. a time and place would be found for their memories, somewhere special within pieck that she would have to protect with every bit of innocence she had remembered about them. 

     marcel’s words would ground her back into their reality, as dirty and smudged as it was. she always felt so comfortable around marcel, something that had been missing the past half a century  —  it truly was only now that she had him back that pieck had realised there had been such an emptiness within her that had been created when he left. perhaps it was due to pieck swallowing her emotions & moving on with the show, couldn’t have one of the two titans left to protect marley in a state that mimicked a blubbering toddler.  “ you don’t have to explain yourself. ”  her tone was soft, smile on her lips paper-thin and threadbare. the fire that was lit between them crackled softly, illuminating their silhouettes with a warm glow. she wondered how the two on the other side of the clearing were getting on. pieck hoped zeke’s fire refused to light. 

        “You should have seen the look on Zeke’s face,” she sang, skipping just a slight bit ahead of him, shoes clacking on the cobbled street. “He was trying so hard to pretend he wasn’t listening.” she clutched her jacket over her shoulders, trying to hide from the chill in the air that brought her breath into clouds. “I’ll get Pieck back tomorrow if you promise to get Porco.”

           she spun around to face him, her skirt flayed out, a halo around her waist. she reached out, offering to shake on her proposal to find some small joke to play on the two - until she fell, landing straight down into a sit right in front of him. her hand still extended, she tilted her head up to look at him, blue eyes set up in opposition to her red cheeks. it only took a moment for a smile to grow on soft lips.

                                                    what a beautiful day it is...                                                             if only I’d realised sooner.

              Zeke knelt in the sand, hands holding at his neck in a clasp. his breathing was the loudest sound, a cacophony in this bath of silence. he wanted to sink into the silt, fade into whatever version of the paths Ymir ( or Eren, forbid ) would create. he had gathered souls, asked for their aid in order to fight back against the living hell that his brother had wrought — war was no stranger to Zeke, but a war against his brother was not one he could bear any further.

              once again, he was alone. he had seen the faces of old friends, old mentors... his father. yet, it was fleeting, they had only the time to ask for help, then disappear. he would be condemned to silence now, and what a fitting punishment — he could harm souls no longer.

                                      Zeke...

               had it been any longer, he would have laid down, begun his descent into the depths of the sand. that voice — my mind must be playing tricks. the voice was not his own, was not the angel and devil who’d been sliced off his shoulders by Levi’s blade. what harm is it to look? the blond slowly, sleepily looked up — had it not been in these circumstances, perhaps... peacefully.

                oh, it felt like centuries of tears poured down his face, flowing like silver over his face, through the white tinged edges of his beard. the steps he took forward felt like his limbs were being pulled into the sand, but that was no longer his wish, no longer what he wanted for his eternity. he fell to his knees, arms wrapped around the small frame, head pressed into a chest that held the beating heart of a brother far more wise than he.

Annie had never considered herself a child; she smouldered with strange intensity, she was something other, displaced even within her cohort.  Bertholdt, Reiner and Porco at play was a behaviour she could not comprehend.  Nor could she understand how Marcel could stand to be caged with her, in the shadow of a solitary sycamore tree.  He was staring – she could feel his gaze as if it was a tangible thing, fingertips brushing a bruise.  So Annie punished him with her attention, expecting him to flinch or withdraw, burned by the frost of her perpetual winter. Instead, he smiled, unfazed by her bland expression.  Glacial eyes narrowed, soaking in the way in which the corners of his mouth lifted, reading the unspoken apology that wrote itself into his features.  Marcel was universally liked, as far as she could tell, he was mature, earnest, someone to be trusted.  Even if she mastered the art of imitation, of peeling her lips back, baring her teeth as he did, she could not replicate the warmth and light in his amber eyes.  On her, a smile too often twisted into a sneer.  It was futile.  It was easier to be her unapologetic, listless self.

And yet there were changes beyond her control.  An ache nestled low in her belly, a faint sense of nausea, all speaking of her young body’s betrayal.  Sometimes she wondered if the others could smell the blood on her, she lived in fear of flecks of crimson on white fabric – what a cruel, inconsiderate colour.  According to the military physician, she would stop growing soon.  So she sat in the shadow of the tree, hiding from the sun that would blister and scorch her fair skin, and scowled jealously at the lithe, hard-angled bodies of the boys.

At least Marcel offered her a place to hide.  He shone brightly and Annie, hovering in his brilliant glare, offered him an apple.  On days where she performed well and without complaint, her father might give her something from his plate.  It never failed to stir something in her.  Perhaps she – hollow girl, empty outline of a person – could provoke something in Marcel too.  It was an experiment, she told herself, failing to believe it even as the thought ran through her mind.  The gesture won her another smile, wider and warmer now, and talk of sharing. Perplexed, Annie directed her uncanny, glassy gaze towards the other boys, catching the moment Reiner and Porco spilled onto the ground, kicking up plumes of dust as they roughhoused.

A question, unexpected.  Annie finally blinked, but she did not answer immediately, the warm air tarnished only by the yelps and bellows and ragged breathing of the wrestling pair.  During the early days of their training, concerns had been raised about her silence.  Her father had been displeased, entirely blind to his role in her shortcomings.  She had sat quietly, obediently, as he berated her, beating her with the same old sticks; she was in the military to succeed, to earn the title of Honorary Marleyan, not to make friends.  As if she would even know where to begin.

〈 * it was pieck’s birthday    -/-  @oncejaw

COMMOTION AROUND IS A BUZZING,  A BUZZING STUCK IN THE CATACOMBS OF ID   /  THE FOUNDATIONS IS TREMBLING. this ticking / this swelling, it will make its hive in your carcass  /  that hollowed out gorge where that heart shape rot sits.  does it beat? or is it just the bees?   that anxiety you keep poking & irritating /  why can’t you let it be―――― why.    [maybe tonight, they shall set fire & dissipate. maybe you will set this whole bar on fire.]  & that buzzing,  yes, that buzzing like any summer night.     & under all the sounds,  the swarm that drowns out those perceptions far before any ale could   /  &  you can’t ignore it,  the lacking,   a lacking in harmonising  /  it would hum like a dissonant verse of poetry spewed from a hatter  /  maybe, one sung in such atonal husks of fangs, grit your teeth,  & huff out another cheer  /  another utterance of nonsense  /  nonsense & incessant merriment / merriment & ignorance that filled the space  /  babble & shit & babble  /  you will get a headache if you keep listening to them  /   such joy on such a tragic day  ―  really?   & TONGUES ARE ROLLING & SLURRING, dialect is lost / distinction of dialect, it became as nonexistence as sensation  / can you hear it. [hear what.] the shift of sleeves of fabric, it is a soft rustle blurred out under steps / creaking chairs & horsed laughter for celebration  /  stupidity.   ――  &,  there is a CLACKING OF GLASSES & HARD WOOD IS STRUCK BY HEEL,   a clank  /  clank   /  clank  / CLANK ――― bottoms of pints sliding across grain   /   & RAISED & SET - DRINK & REPEAT  /  REPEAT  / REPEAT  / REPEAT TILL A GLASS BREAKS.   simple motions  /  simple actions  /  simple mundane instances.         

   it really was lively tonight.   & on such a tragic day.  

    [mother,  you are dead?  aren’t you.]  isn’t that what you said when you found her  /  you found madonna  /  you held her hand  /   you were expecting her to hold it back?  [what a gift.]   heartache & apathy.   she left you such a gift, yes.  something you cannot forget  /  it’s a ticking,  a swelling,   a buzzing.    & you can’t help but slip between all the background chattering & how slow your heart is beating, again.  that buzzing is fading   /   & that emptiness & that fullness you feel.     is it a bittersweet feeling ?      for grief refuses   /   it clogs your pores & sticks to bones  /  it chokes you till you are gagging on nothingness again.    NOTHINGNESS?  girl, this is sorrow,  this is longing.   this is insignificant.   this is fear.     this feeling of everything-nothing    /  numbness & awareness  / regret for a lack of emotion  & regret for too much.   perhaps father was right,  you have your mother’s heart?  [do you have the same sickness too, the same sick little heart? ha! ]  because this aching,   this pounding that presses /   that crushes  /  that takes & takes & takes  /  that will stop & may you fall dead in your tracks.   this feeling is one you can’t seem to stop.     & you are too scared to stop it.           

                        ――――  what if your heart stops too?     what if.

& so,  you sit in silence sipping - stalling to finish that beer.    & so,  you bite your lip, worried that it make begin to shake.   & so,  so here it is.   here is to another year that has gone.   another gained /  another loss   /   is aging so trivial ?  is death merely a doorman awaiting your visits  /  will your stay be permanent this time?  no, no, you will have to stop by again.   another tryst between you & death.   another night to cough up your lungs   /   cough up all your doubts  /  bury them from sight.  you, will drink,   & drink,  & drink.    you really believe you are drowning these thoughts?  no, you merely water them.    yeah.    yeah.   & every year,  every single year,  you only root them deeper  ―――  silly girl, what a mess  /  your grief is so lovely.   & such emotive notions, they fill the gaps   /   that monstrous irking of flesh, you want to sleep this feeling off   /    that unbearable question,  what if that heart .....what if your heart is running on borrowed time  /  you can’t forget it, even for a night.  even for a moment.   such an evocative presence.  even with marcel so close.     maybe you are the devil.   your birth brought nothing but death.  maybe you were the illness that ruined your mother.    &  you never will tell them,  you can never tell anyone  /  you will never say why you never cared for this day.  because maybe they would say just that.

             PIECK.   COME ON.    you rather be in your room.        [don’t kill the mood, smile a little. marcel is here.]   but even so,  even his company feels lonely  /  a ghost of a man   /  adam, has you lost another rib to eve?   are you offering such things out of pity for a sad girl?  guilt for what she has lost?  stop it.     just drink,  you might feel better,   or less――  we will see.

  ‘  alright kid, alright.  ―――  let’s see which one of us get fucked up first.