he is not good at this, he knows. he is acutely aware of the fact as he scrapes the chair across the floor, sits down and arranges himself in it mechanically, crosses one leg over the other and reaches into his pocket to fish for the carton of cigarettes he keeps there.
he is not a man made for heart-to-hearts. he is an automaton of apathy, their war chief. he assesses the best approach, takes a methodical scalpel to the conversation. porco is not like the others — he is bark and bite, all teeth. he does not require the same sensitivity as some of the others do, a deceptive kind of coddling that dissipates the moment their boots step onto the haunted ground of a battlefield. perhaps he would appreciate something more forthright.
zeke props a cigarette between his lips, flicks the lighter beneath the pad of his thumb as porco watches him. he is an actor on a stage, puppeteered here by his superiors who are somehow under the impression porco might glean some kind of wisdom from him. or perhaps they're more interested in sending zeke to pry one last time, assessing whether they've raised their cattle well enough to send to slaughter.
" would you prefer if i were subtle about this — or would you rather i just come out with it? " he says. inhales, exhales, blows smoke in the opposite direction. expensive cigarettes and a nicotine buzz are the only consolations for conversations like this. there will be another pack waiting for him on his bed when he returns for the night, he knows, like a bone for a dog.
@jxwz says: sometimes subtlety is overrated.
he almost smiles. it's the answer he expected — porco has always been tenacious. he tries to conjure the ghosts of all the talks like this that have come before, passed down between a long line, all the nights before marley's chosen warriors inherit her titans. he himself had one not unlike this, many years ago, when ksaver reached the end of his tenure and sat across from the boy he made his surrogate son, the boy whose jaws would come down upon him the next day to applause, their new beast titan. he searches for that conversation now. what would ksaver say?
" they'd like me to ask whether you're ready, how you feel. " he does not give it any sort of sympathy, any kind of pity, the way he might with others. only a blunt kind of understanding, an openness that might sway porco to trust him with any doubts. it isn't to say that he feels none of it at all, only that it isn't the most productive approach. he imagines his conflict might be in a similar vein to his own of many years past, that kind of grief only someone close to a shifter might feel as their heir — the girl is the one who cut marcel's tenure short, after all.