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pixel skylines
Xuebing Du
Not today Justin
i don't do bad sauce passes
hello vonnie
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will byers stan first human second
$LAYYYTER
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Cosimo Galluzzi
noise dept.
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Misplaced Lens Cap
DEAR READER
ellievsbear
Love Begins
Cosmic Funnies
Three Goblin Art
Discoholic 🪩
seen from Indonesia
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seen from Algeria
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@oncejaw
“I wanted to protect my brother... I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
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+.
rules - about - verses
not me deserting these blogs for one year and then missing this rpc.
(ooc) i love one (1) bby boy.
@oncejaw ; starter call.
Three seconds, that’s all it takes for him to realize what was about to happen. The mission was stealth: get in, destroy enemy resources, get out. Porco at the helm, leading the handful of soldiers in under the blanketed cover of night. A lot has happened since his brother left and returned empty handed from Paradis. And Porco was determined to prove just how competent a warrior he had become during that absence, even without a titan. Especially without a titan. However, the second he stepped foot into the stone fortress, something was off. Turning his head was the only action he could do before being exploded backwards, slamming into the collapsing walls as the side of the fort is taken down with him, a single name unable to leave his lips in time.
─── Marcel!
Flames reach to consume him like a jealous lover, but barely get in a lick, Porco knocked into the air from stories above. His limbs flail, and a brief glance over his shoulder tells him that the ground is nearing very hard and very fast. He squeezes his eyes tight and braces for an impact that never comes. Instead, he feels his body swept into large claws that carry his momentum. A beast cradles him when he opens his eyes, with flowing brown locks framing an armored face that Porco isn’t sure he feels relieved or angered by seeing. Poor little boy, still having to rely on his big brother whenever he gets into trouble.
“ Took you long enough! ” Porco shouts with usual sarcasm, though he grips The Jaw’s hand tightly, as if he were a child again, afraid to let go. “ It was a damn trap. They knew we were coming. We gotta go! ”
He should have seen it coming. At what point the chain of information had broken down, letting something crucial slip past their attention, he doesn’t know yet (but is dead set on finding out the minute they get out of this hellhole - one problem at a time). The fact remains, they did just walk into a damn trap, and it is his brother’s voice that pulls him out of furious stupor, prompts him into action, launches the beast into the fire to catch him before he hits the ground; not matter how hard Porco may grit his teeth, Marcel remains older brother through and through.
They do have to go; and though the Jaw can only let out a low rumble to manifest approval, it is a short-lived one. From inside his encasing of flesh, Marcel, hyper-alert, hyper-vigilent (the Jaw always requires his full attention, bleeds him dry of energy; all the more so when razor-focused on keeping an eye on his brother) picks up on a noise. A whistle; something piercing through the air.
Rocket.
The claws of his free hand dig into the stone fortress like butter, and propel him up, monkey-like form crawling and scaling up the crumbling tower at lightning speed; crumbling being the operative word, here. The blast of the rocket colliding with the facade shocks through the air, burning and suffocating; against his palm, he can feel his brother clinging harder. Quickly, the Jaw finds refuge behind a sturdy ruin, unfurls its large clawed fingers to free Porco; large head suddenly dipping forward as Marcel partly emerges from the nape of the beats in a flurry of steam.
“Porco! You okay?” Sinuous lines like deep cuts zigzag along the hard lines of his visage, amber eyes drilling into his brothers, checking, looking for a sign of injury. In the hiss of steam volutes, Marcel catches his breath, briefly glances over his shoulder. Already he is beckoned back into action; a rush of fire fueling veins that will not stop until the job is done. Marley truly has trained him well. “They brought a whole damn artillery squad with them. We’ll figure out how later - I’m gonna go and take care of it. You find whoever made it out and retreat. Got it?” Realistically, he knows this should be a two-men job. Going in alone is putting the Jaw at risk; he should have a spotter with him to scout ahead for anti-titan weaponry before launching into action. Obviously, there is no way he’d ask Porco. Mission integrity be damned - wouldn’t be the first time he put his brother’s life above Marley’s best interests, would it?
austerulous
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.”
The stream of his voice remains low and quiet, from his mouth to her ear, for only the two of them to hear. Secrets and truths, always. “I suppose I should count it as a blessing.” He mutters. “As long as I’m useful, they’re not thinking of passing it on to my brother.” He moves his hand from her hair to the pile of hands resting on the mattress, covering entangled fingers with calloused palms. Sometimes he wonders if his fingers are becoming as lethal as his titan’s. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. I’ll manage. How are you holding up in there?”
― Hiromi Kawakami, The Briefcase
— Mitski, First Love / Late Spring
I shall emerge from this darkness where I am afraid, darkness and ecstasy. I am the heart of the shadow.
Clarice Lispector, tr. by Stefan Tobler, from Água Viva (via feral-ballad)
Encanto (2021)
@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.
“We’re gonna need a plan.” He repeats, a low growl at the back of his throat. He stares into the fire. Angry. Exhausted. Resolved. He looks within himself and brushes against something distant, and familiar, and closes his hand on it. Guilt, determination, courage, rage, he doesn’t care to name it. It is fuel, the same old fuel that once guided his hand and voice as a thirteen year-old boy leading an operation on a distant island; and today, still, it is fuel enough. “And every dual blade and thunderspear we can lay our hands on. Preferably without using them on each other.”
(ooc) I still haven’t watched the film, but Jack O’Connell in Unbroken continues to give me major Marcel vibes
river phoenix in running on empty (1988) dir. sidney lumet
Stand by me (1986) dir. Rob Reiner
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father
(ooc) the Halloween theme except it’s Marcel’s Jaw’s theme.
@oncejaw said: ❝ no man is worth more than another, wherever he is from. ❞ :’)
It’s a peculiar arithmetic they are taught at the front. Wide-eyed, blinking like an owl, Bertholdt has watched as a Marleyan officer walked down the rank and file of an Eldian company and, with a piece of chalk, marked every third soldier’s helmet. There was no explanation, no running commentary to the grim ritual but these men who had been laughing in the morning, playing dice, teasing their young monster-siblings on the march to camp, all these men were silent then. Their faces were like skulls, pale and hollow, the fear-blank eyes sunken deep into their sockets. And then they were led away. And then Bertholdt never saw them again.
Bertholdt is a child, but not in the way others are. He watched them go with that same sober, mournful attention with which he observes every subtraction. If he is curious about the fate of these men, then he knows to bite his tongue. Where are they going? Nowhere good. Never anywhere good. If good places remain, then they are far away from here. Here is the trench where he sits with Marcel at his shoulder, calmly cleaning his rifle with small practiced motions. He doesn’t look up as the two captains saunter along in their fine pressed uniforms, not a mud stain on their bleached overcoats, no blood splattered along their sleeves, no sand dusting the brims of their military caps.
He doesn’t listen to their talk, their laughter about mathematics (If I give you five Olgovians, how many Eldians will that buy me?), their crude hyena-fanged sneers. It’s something about a POW exchange. Those happen. The enemy forces don’t like to exchange prisoners with Marley, especially not Eldians. Bad blood runs both ways. Bertholdt has heard the stories. A few injected soldiers would be mixed into the batch and then once they were in camp, that’s when Zeke would show up on the horizon, looming and predatory. One scream from the Beast, and the campsite was rubble come sundown. On the other hand, nobody likes to return Eldians. Like restocking your enemy’s ammunition, that. You’re bound to get them back, and in a worse way. Bertholdt doesn’t speak, but he listens well, and he remembers every snarl, every sharp-tongued aside, every stab into the open wound. Bertholdt pretends it is a mean card game.
Round, cowed eyes stay glued to the mechanism of the rifle, the shining metal, the smooth clicking of the empty chamber. Focus only on what is ahead of you. Don’t look left, don’t look right. Don’t you dare look down. Bertholdt reassembles the gun, his thin, steady fingers chewed to the quick again. It is Marcel who stirs, who lets slip his tongue in a defiant mutter.
—No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.
His words flinch through Bertholdt like a deer on the run. They spring apart in the thicket of his mind, breaking through the underbrush in eerie silence, and slip out of sight. Marcel makes to stand. Surely not to oppose, not to force his point. Marcel is way too smart for that. More likely, he just wants to stretch his legs, shake off his frustrations. There are so many these days, and Marcel is not very big. He’s been on edge for weeks, ever since they sent him out into the field. His titan is gnawing on his nerves, on every sinew. Bertholdt knows. He can almost smell it. He doesn’t know why. Either way, Marcel tries to get up too suddenly, with a jerk forward.
He does not account for Bertholdt’s hand that suddenly wraps around his forearm and grips him tight. The tug goes all the way up into his shoulder, but the younger boy doesn’t budge. “Stay down.”
His words are tailed by an earth-shattering explosion. Dirt and blood sprays in a high column over their heads. Bertholdt curls protectively over his rifle, pulls Marcel down with him, as the pebbles and soil rains down on them like hail, clattering against their too-large helmets. The rumbling subsides to the chorus of outcries for medics, for stretchers and shovels.
In the confusion and noise, Bertholdt finally looks up at his friend, his brows furrowed in that same death mask stare every soldier has worn before him: “Don’t say such things. Don’t ever say such things. Everyone can hear you.”
@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.”
There is no saving Paradis. There is no saving the 104th. There is no us. Not anymore.
