#phoarda

i will say it was a JM fic but not really; i wanted EJ at the time but it wouldn’t fit with what i had going, so there’s that. i had gotten very, very uninvested in the ship itself and was more of wanting to use the potential dynamic, but that’s ahead of myself. 

it started off as a JM fic with little emphasis on the JM, mostly there to emphasis jean’s feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt that he was contributing to the relationship at all. it’s supposed to be a contrast b/w marco knowing his place/relationship to other people, and jean not understanding it at all. 

this is actually where, bizarrely, ABBA’s “the winner takes it all” fits in thematically, as he’s convinced that he is the loser in this scenario. mostly envisioning any break-up scenario is him in the getting the smaller half of the wishbone situation and it’s terrifying to him. 

i don’t actually know where some of my notes are, because i had a more in depth thing on marco. he had a whole Ace Attorney Lawyer bit, where depending on some situational aspects of the day his case would end well or badly. jean has no idea this has to do with him and is in general bad at predicting what will happen. i had case details but i don’t have them anymore ATM. something with armin, eren, and mikasa. 

there was also a snow storm on the next day; a big snow storm and it keeps confusing jean that it doesn’t happen until he finds out why.

the time loop starts out like, okay, these things keep happening but jean doesn’t realize it’s monday again. he gets until like, thursday, then is entirely freaked out and has no idea what is going on. after one very long freaked out call to sasha, he eventually just hopes after seven days it will be fine, but it isn’t.

then there’s a small period of time where he’s like.... okay....... i have no consequences. like, at all. so he does a wide variety of prank calls and general fun, he calls his boss a couple of times for fun, he spends like a hundred dollars in quarters at the crane machine at the mall, he does a variety of inane things on his weird power trip. it slowly begins to feel wrong, though, because things don’t move forward at all. it’s heavy emphasis on the importance of consequence; he does these fun things and has interactions w/ his friends during it, but they don’t remember and it doesn’t matter afterwards because of it. it’s unnerving to jean.  

there’s also a couple of bits i do not have like, fully planned yet. i have two arguments b/w marco and jean planned, where jean panics thinking this is like, the time he gets out of the loop at this bad break up end, and the second time it happens (same argument) they actually have some... resolution from the argument to move forward and help and this is lost during the next loop.  

at that time, he knows some of the things that will happen, but is very bad at like. manipulating these events. he doesn’t fully get his position to people, and either over or under compensates because of it. at this point things start feeling very empty and meaningless, since things seem to happen for no rhyme or reason, and he starts to try to find a way out by picking at his faults. 

he a) decides to quit his job once in a drammatic fashion, thinking that’s what it is, that’s what his life needs, even if it’s utterly terrifying and not financially viable since marco is still a rookie attorney and they need to pay the rent. it’s not. that doesn’t get him out of it. he also tries like, breaking up with marco, refusing to involve himself in absolutely anything, that sort of drastic measure. nothing happens. 

anyway and then i have a random passage typed up but not perfected or polished: 

This is, as he’s counted, his 36th Monday. It’s the 36th time Jean’s bus had gotten to the stop twenty minutes late, the 36th time the elevator at the office stopped working, the 36th time for everything on this godforsaken fucking Monday, and Jean had finally gotten the message that his actions weren’t meaningless, they had their consequences and they had their butterfly effects. They were just meaningless for the moment, caught in the stasis of a repeat timeloop.

And that was weird for him. It was weird for him to see their temporarily meaningless consequences, how wrong his estimates and judgements were. It was weird for him to see that he wasn’t really a realist; a realist would have some grounding on the situation, some intuition about how the day would play out, something more than hackneyed attempts at underestimations to compensate for slightly-too-hopeful instincts.

    It wasn’t weird that Jean’s wrong. He was always wrong, or wrong enough that he instinctively mistrusts his instincts. It was weird that he was just now noticing that he’s not wrong out of bad luck but just because he doesn’t understand- not just how the world works, either. Jean Kirstein has had plenty of Mondays to figure out how the world, or at least how Monday, February 2nd, 2009 worked.

It was just weird, because he doesn’t understand how he fit into Monday, February 2nd, 2009. It was the one thing he didn’t understand, with his under compensations and over compensations and awkward fumbling through the days. He was always loud to compensate for bubbling insecurity and overwhelming uncertainty, but, for whatever reason, he didn’t anticipate or understand the rippling effect that had on people around him. He was so caught up in trying to compensate, trying to underestimate himself to avoid disappointment, that he completely missed the consequences until now it was pointed out to him by way of irritating Monday timeloop. ///

Jean leaned back into the couch, the movement shifts the delicate couch balance, and Marco’s sleeping figure slouches over onto Jean’s shoulder. Jean let him rest there, craning his neck and looking at Marco with a mix of envy and aspiration; no matter what Jean did, no matter how many odd Mondays he went through, Marco would react to the changes with stunning precision and instinct that Jean just didn’t understand.

the actual ending is sort of not solving his problems really entirely. there’s one pivotal moment in the day that really makes or breaks marco’s case, that jean slowly figures out it’s an off-handed advice comment he makes to marco that wins him the case. and he eventually pin points this comment and reiterates it, and he’s actually confidant that that changed something, that it’s not some weird fate’s string randomness pulling him along, and that’s what gets him out of the time loop.