@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.”
