The Weight of Your Wings
Category: Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: Teens
Summary:
After the war, Reiner struggles to adjust. Jean, unknowingly, helps him through it.
Had a nice coffee. Hugged mom. Reiner gnaws the end of his pencil. Taps at his open notebook with a finger.
One more. There has to be something else.
He looks out the window and is greeted with a sheet of darkening blue above the town. The sky is pretty today. There, done. He tells himself, The reasons to be happy are small but significant.
Now he should go out instead of huddling in bed - it is the healthy choice to make. He fetches his jacket and hat from the coat rack, tells his mother that he will be away, and soon finds himself at a cafe by the docks.
He has already had a coffee, but he has a mind to take another, and - and he can allow himself this. A cup of coffee with milk froth and flaked chocolate on top and a complimentary butter biscuit that he will not like but will dip into his coffee anyway, for the routine. The dead from Shiganshina and Trost will never know.
Reiner has just gotten his coffee when he spots a head of ash-brown hair bent over a table. He knows the back of that head. His first instinct is to bolt, or to sit in a corner where the owner of that head will not see him, but then he remembers the doctor told him to try to maintain relationships. Reach out, ask about people’s day, just smile at them.
“Jean,” Reiner calls, before he can think himself out of it.
Jean starts and blinks a few times, like he’s just waking up. On the table there is a half-finished cup of tea and an open sketchbook with a charcoal sketch of a corner of the coffee shop. That’s right - Jean would sketch sometimes in the barracks, under the covers, when he thought no one was looking. Reiner used to steal glances at the way Jean would smudge the sketches with his long knotty fingers, drawn in by the attentive, worshipful movements. “Do you sell them?” Reiner asks.
“Sell them? This is maybe the third sketch I’ve made since we made it out of the Rumbling. And I’m no good.” He says that last line with serene confidence, or perhaps serene resignation.
Reiner would not know; he possesses the artistry of a brick, and, to him, any one of Jean’s sketches could be framed in a museum. His eyes land on the name at the corner of the sketch and he does a double take. “Why are you signing it as Dubois?”
“I took my mother’s maiden name.”
Reiner finds such a change unnecessary, but he understands wanting to put the past in a garbage sack and toss it into a fire. But then, Jean is not guilty of the kind of sins Reiner is; Jean has nothing to own. Reiner is - both envious and glad. “Jean Dubois. Nice ring. Bit too fancy for you, don’t you think?”
He expects Jean to respond with sarcasm, but Jean only says, “Maybe.” His shoulders are rounded and his eyes fixed on some far elsewhere behind Reiner’s shoulder. Reiner wonders: if a titan leapt out from behind a building right now, would Jean react fast enough to escape? He shakes off the thought. There are no more titans.
But there are still enemies, and there are only so many bullets Jean can dodge before one finds its mark.
Reiner quashes the thought. “Can I sit down?”
Jean gestures to the seat in front of him, charcoal stick still in his black-stained hand, and Reiner sits. He gropes for something else to say. Jean’s face is washed out, pale. His eyes - are they hazel or amber? - are still unfocused.
Reiner tries to lighten the mood. “Remember when you dyed your hair blond? Before we joined the Corps.” Sasha had choked on her bread and Eren had howled so loudly that Reiner suspected it was an effort to rankle Jean. Reiner smiles at the memory.
“Don’t remind me.” Jean grimaces, and annoyance pulls at Reiner.
“I wish you’d stop cringing at yourself. It was funny. It was normal.” Normal, unlike infiltrating the enemy’s military and making friends with them and putting those friends in their graves. Reiner could have been normal too, but his mother had talked and Marley had talked and he had listened, and after the mutilated bodies started to pile up there was no one to blame but himself.
Jean rubs his eyes and smears charcoal over his face, and Reiner wants to take him by the shoulder and ease off the cloudy smudges with a napkin. “I was trying to look cool, I guess. Like Commander Erwin, or like you.”
“Like me?” He feels himself go warm, only for a moment, before he remembers that the Reiner Jean is speaking about had been Scout-Reiner, Marcel-Reiner, not Reiner of Marley, and his stomach lurches.
“Are you really surprised? Reiner, half the 104th had a crush on you and the other half wished they were you. Except Mikasa.” He takes a sip of tea and continues working on his sketch, adding detail to the curtains on the window. The words That was before we found out who you were go unsaid, but Reiner hears them clear as a bell.
“Well,” says Reiner, trying to ignore the acid in his throat, “I can’t picture you with anything but your own hair colour. Though I wish you’d kept the undercut.”
Jean does not stop sketching. “What was I thinking? I’ll go shave it right now.”
Reiner laughs quietly, which gets a smile out of Jean, a soft thing that smoothens the lines from his forehead and deepens the ones around his eyes. “You should smile more,” Reiner finds himself saying, and he knows it is audacious, but he does not want to stop, because Jean deserves to be happy, deserves to know how good he is. “You look better when you smile.”
Jean looks embarrassed, rubbing the back of his neck and getting charcoal all over it. “I’m going to pierce my ears,” he says, in an obvious attempt to change the subject.
“Both of them?” Reiner asks, surprised. Ear piercings had not been common among men, either in Marley or on Paradis. They had not even been common among women.
Jean gives him a wry look. “Yeah. There’s no law against it.”
“You’re doing it alone?”
“I was going to ask Connie.”
“I can do it for you.” Reiner is horrified at the boldness of his offer. Jean has better friends than him. “I mean, if you want.”
Jean shrugs. “As long as your hands are steady.”
Reiner holds his hand out, palm facing down. Not a tremor. Never a tremor.
There is that smile again, small and fleeting and dry. “Of course they are.”
Reiner clamps down on the hysteria rising in his throat.
But then Jean frowns. “What’s that?”
Reiner takes back his hands, fiddles with his hair. After the Rumbling had ended and he’d moved in with his mother, he had found himself contemplating the smooth skin of his arms, thinking, It can’t be gone. And he had stood in a grassless field at the edge of the town and slit his palm with a kitchen knife, half ready for the crack of lightning. But there was no lightning. His blood had dripped all over his trousers and shoes and onto the dirt and now he feels mildly foolish every time he looks at his scar. (And if he also feels like he does not belong anywhere, like he has outlived his usefulness, then no one needs to know.)
“It’s stupid,” Reiner settles for saying.
Jean does not press. He puts his sketchpad away in a duffel bag. “Well, here’s your chance to punch some holes into me again.”
Reiner winces.
“It was a joke. Calm down.” He stands up and slips on his jacket. “Tomorrow, my place? I have a pamphlet on piercings that you can read before we do it. I’m free around noon.”
“I’ll be there.”
Jean gives him the address.
That night, Reiner finds himself smiling and humming a tune as he washes the dishes, and the guilt for doing so is not so bad.
At almost-noon the next day, he stands in Jean’s apartment, in a red-brick building an hour’s brisk walk from his own place. Tepid, watery light falls in through the window. The space is surprisingly spartan: sofas with no pillows, a bookshelf only half filled with books, a liquor cabinet with no liquor. Is Jean having difficulty living the cushioned life he had always said he wanted? The only luxuries Reiner can see are a tin of tea and a porcelain tea set on the kitchen counter.
Jean brews some of it and pours out two cups without asking Reiner if he wants any. Reiner has always been more of a coffee man (years on Paradis notwithstanding) but he accepts the tea. You don’t refuse tea from a Paradisian unless you want them to hate you.
Reiner eyes the piercing needles and unlit candle and corks and things on the drawing room table as he drinks. “Why the sudden desire to pierce your ears?”
Jean rubs at his cup with his thumbs. “You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t.” Reiner means it.
Jean drains his tea as if it is a shot of whiskey. “I’d been with the Survey Corps for so long. Everything about me was tied to them. I don’t regret it. But I want to feel like I belong to myself now.” He touches his ear, grins suddenly. “They would’ve had a fit. Someone in the Corps, with piercings.” He giggles, a touch unhinged. “I can’t wait till Cap - till Levi sees them.”
“I don’t think he would care. I met him at one of the camps last month. Sitting there in his wheelchair and handing out candy to the refugee kids.”
“Levi, handing out candy.” Another giggle, high-pitched. “If nothing else, I’m glad I survived to hear that.”
“I’m glad you survived,” Reiner says, sombre. “I’m really - I really am.” The meaning, also, is, I’m glad I didn’t kill you. It is luck alone, Reiner knows, that Jean had not been in his way, back when they were both in the Corps. He could have done it. He would have done it, if it had come down to it. Marco’s guileless freckled face bears testimony to that, in Reiner’s dreams. “I would buy your art.” He wants Jean to fill entire sketchbooks with sketches, sketch out in the open with the sun warming his hair, sketch the leaden weight of his wings away.
Jean is looking at him slack-jawed. The silence stretches. “Oh,” he says finally in a sort of feeble gasp. “I’m. Same for you, I. Guess.”
Reiner smiles. “Shall we get started on the hole-punching session?”
It is more nerve-wracking than Reiner expected; they have both had intimate relationships with injury, but the idea of piercing above or below the mark, or of wiggling around and causing Jean pain, is enough to get his heart racing. He goes through the pamphlet three times and underlines parts he deems important before he starts. Jean hasn’t shaved and his stubble scratches the back of Reiner’s hand as Reiner marks the lobe. Piercing cleanly through turns out to require more force than he anticipated, and Jean cringes and hisses as Reiner struggles. It is easier with the second ear.
As Reiner pulls out the needle, leaving the stud in place, he finds himself stunned at how close Jean has allowed him. He feels like he is on display without his clothes on, even though Jean is the one leaving himself vulnerable. But instead of feeling like an ordeal, it feels like a privilege. The light that had earlier seemed watery now appears bright and golden.
Jean gets up and admires himself in the little mirror on the wall, seeming terribly pleased. The studs do suit him. “It will be a bitch to shower with these, but you did a banger job.” He turns to Reiner, looks at him with an intensity that could have burned the goatee off Reiner’s face, and says, “Thank you.”
Reiner looks away from Jean, lest he stare. “What will you do now?”
Jean puts his hand on his hips, hums, and looks out the window. “I’m thinking. I’m thinking I’ll get some art supplies.”
“You’re going to sketch more?”
“I have a customer lined up. Can’t disappoint him, can I?”
Reiner does look at him then, finds him grinning crookedly. “No, you can’t,” he says quietly.
Jean reheats some meat pie for lunch, and they eat in comfortable silence. Reiner thinks, I’m here, Jean doesn’t hate me, he may even like me, despite everything I did, and it makes him giddy; because if he can be this person for Jean, he can be this person for other people too.
On the way back home, Reiner notices the kind of things he did not before: A woman placing potted lavender on a narrow, lightless balcony, a couple of boys in worn, oversized jackets kicking around a football and shrieking with laughter, the bright tangy smell of cooked onions wafting from a rickety roadside stall. He tips his head back and allows himself to feel the bracing wind carding through his hair.
That night he sits at his desk and opens his notebook earlier than usual, and swings his legs like he is ten again. For a moment he stops, thinking, Do I deserve to swing my legs? and then shakes his head, and continues his leg-swinging.
He picks up his pen. Three points is what he is meant to write.
But he thinks, this evening, he will write a paragraph.
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: Teens
Summary:
After the war, Reiner struggles to adjust. Jean, unknowingly, helps him through it.
Had a nice coffee. Hugged mom. Reiner gnaws the end of his pencil. Taps at his open notebook with a finger.
One more. There has to be something else.
He looks out the window and is greeted with a sheet of darkening blue above the town. The sky is pretty today. There, done. He tells himself, The reasons to be happy are small but significant.
Now he should go out instead of huddling in bed - it is the healthy choice to make. He fetches his jacket and hat from the coat rack, tells his mother that he will be away, and soon finds himself at a cafe by the docks.
He has already had a coffee, but he has a mind to take another, and - and he can allow himself this. A cup of coffee with milk froth and flaked chocolate on top and a complimentary butter biscuit that he will not like but will dip into his coffee anyway, for the routine. The dead from Shiganshina and Trost will never know.
Reiner has just gotten his coffee when he spots a head of ash-brown hair bent over a table. He knows the back of that head. His first instinct is to bolt, or to sit in a corner where the owner of that head will not see him, but then he remembers the doctor told him to try to maintain relationships. Reach out, ask about people’s day, just smile at them.
“Jean,” Reiner calls, before he can think himself out of it.
Jean starts and blinks a few times, like he’s just waking up. On the table there is a half-finished cup of tea and an open sketchbook with a charcoal sketch of a corner of the coffee shop. That’s right - Jean would sketch sometimes in the barracks, under the covers, when he thought no one was looking. Reiner used to steal glances at the way Jean would smudge the sketches with his long knotty fingers, drawn in by the attentive, worshipful movements. “Do you sell them?” Reiner asks.
“Sell them? This is maybe the third sketch I’ve made since we made it out of the Rumbling. And I’m no good.” He says that last line with serene confidence, or perhaps serene resignation.
Reiner would not know; he possesses the artistry of a brick, and, to him, any one of Jean’s sketches could be framed in a museum. His eyes land on the name at the corner of the sketch and he does a double take. “Why are you signing it as Dubois?”
“I took my mother’s maiden name.”
Reiner finds such a change unnecessary, but he understands wanting to put the past in a garbage sack and toss it into a fire. But then, Jean is not guilty of the kind of sins Reiner is; Jean has nothing to own. Reiner is - both envious and glad. “Jean Dubois. Nice ring. Bit too fancy for you, don’t you think?”
He expects Jean to respond with sarcasm, but Jean only says, “Maybe.” His shoulders are rounded and his eyes fixed on some far elsewhere behind Reiner’s shoulder. Reiner wonders: if a titan leapt out from behind a building right now, would Jean react fast enough to escape? He shakes off the thought. There are no more titans.
But there are still enemies, and there are only so many bullets Jean can dodge before one finds its mark.
Reiner quashes the thought. “Can I sit down?”
Jean gestures to the seat in front of him, charcoal stick still in his black-stained hand, and Reiner sits. He gropes for something else to say. Jean’s face is washed out, pale. His eyes - are they hazel or amber? - are still unfocused.
Reiner tries to lighten the mood. “Remember when you dyed your hair blond? Before we joined the Corps.” Sasha had choked on her bread and Eren had howled so loudly that Reiner suspected it was an effort to rankle Jean. Reiner smiles at the memory.
“Don’t remind me.” Jean grimaces, and annoyance pulls at Reiner.
“I wish you’d stop cringing at yourself. It was funny. It was normal.” Normal, unlike infiltrating the enemy’s military and making friends with them and putting those friends in their graves. Reiner could have been normal too, but his mother had talked and Marley had talked and he had listened, and after the mutilated bodies started to pile up there was no one to blame but himself.
Jean rubs his eyes and smears charcoal over his face, and Reiner wants to take him by the shoulder and ease off the cloudy smudges with a napkin. “I was trying to look cool, I guess. Like Commander Erwin, or like you.”
“Like me?” He feels himself go warm, only for a moment, before he remembers that the Reiner Jean is speaking about had been Scout-Reiner, Marcel-Reiner, not Reiner of Marley, and his stomach lurches.
“Are you really surprised? Reiner, half the 104th had a crush on you and the other half wished they were you. Except Mikasa.” He takes a sip of tea and continues working on his sketch, adding detail to the curtains on the window. The words That was before we found out who you were go unsaid, but Reiner hears them clear as a bell.
“Well,” says Reiner, trying to ignore the acid in his throat, “I can’t picture you with anything but your own hair colour. Though I wish you’d kept the undercut.”
Jean does not stop sketching. “What was I thinking? I’ll go shave it right now.”
Reiner laughs quietly, which gets a smile out of Jean, a soft thing that smoothens the lines from his forehead and deepens the ones around his eyes. “You should smile more,” Reiner finds himself saying, and he knows it is audacious, but he does not want to stop, because Jean deserves to be happy, deserves to know how good he is. “You look better when you smile.”
Jean looks embarrassed, rubbing the back of his neck and getting charcoal all over it. “I’m going to pierce my ears,” he says, in an obvious attempt to change the subject.
“Both of them?” Reiner asks, surprised. Ear piercings had not been common among men, either in Marley or on Paradis. They had not even been common among women.
Jean gives him a wry look. “Yeah. There’s no law against it.”
“You’re doing it alone?”
“I was going to ask Connie.”
“I can do it for you.” Reiner is horrified at the boldness of his offer. Jean has better friends than him. “I mean, if you want.”
Jean shrugs. “As long as your hands are steady.”
Reiner holds his hand out, palm facing down. Not a tremor. Never a tremor.
There is that smile again, small and fleeting and dry. “Of course they are.”
Reiner clamps down on the hysteria rising in his throat.
But then Jean frowns. “What’s that?”
Reiner takes back his hands, fiddles with his hair. After the Rumbling had ended and he’d moved in with his mother, he had found himself contemplating the smooth skin of his arms, thinking, It can’t be gone. And he had stood in a grassless field at the edge of the town and slit his palm with a kitchen knife, half ready for the crack of lightning. But there was no lightning. His blood had dripped all over his trousers and shoes and onto the dirt and now he feels mildly foolish every time he looks at his scar. (And if he also feels like he does not belong anywhere, like he has outlived his usefulness, then no one needs to know.)
“It’s stupid,” Reiner settles for saying.
Jean does not press. He puts his sketchpad away in a duffel bag. “Well, here’s your chance to punch some holes into me again.”
Reiner winces.
“It was a joke. Calm down.” He stands up and slips on his jacket. “Tomorrow, my place? I have a pamphlet on piercings that you can read before we do it. I’m free around noon.”
“I’ll be there.”
Jean gives him the address.
That night, Reiner finds himself smiling and humming a tune as he washes the dishes, and the guilt for doing so is not so bad.
At almost-noon the next day, he stands in Jean’s apartment, in a red-brick building an hour’s brisk walk from his own place. Tepid, watery light falls in through the window. The space is surprisingly spartan: sofas with no pillows, a bookshelf only half filled with books, a liquor cabinet with no liquor. Is Jean having difficulty living the cushioned life he had always said he wanted? The only luxuries Reiner can see are a tin of tea and a porcelain tea set on the kitchen counter.
Jean brews some of it and pours out two cups without asking Reiner if he wants any. Reiner has always been more of a coffee man (years on Paradis notwithstanding) but he accepts the tea. You don’t refuse tea from a Paradisian unless you want them to hate you.
Reiner eyes the piercing needles and unlit candle and corks and things on the drawing room table as he drinks. “Why the sudden desire to pierce your ears?”
Jean rubs at his cup with his thumbs. “You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t.” Reiner means it.
Jean drains his tea as if it is a shot of whiskey. “I’d been with the Survey Corps for so long. Everything about me was tied to them. I don’t regret it. But I want to feel like I belong to myself now.” He touches his ear, grins suddenly. “They would’ve had a fit. Someone in the Corps, with piercings.” He giggles, a touch unhinged. “I can’t wait till Cap - till Levi sees them.”
“I don’t think he would care. I met him at one of the camps last month. Sitting there in his wheelchair and handing out candy to the refugee kids.”
“Levi, handing out candy.” Another giggle, high-pitched. “If nothing else, I’m glad I survived to hear that.”
“I’m glad you survived,” Reiner says, sombre. “I’m really - I really am.” The meaning, also, is, I’m glad I didn’t kill you. It is luck alone, Reiner knows, that Jean had not been in his way, back when they were both in the Corps. He could have done it. He would have done it, if it had come down to it. Marco’s guileless freckled face bears testimony to that, in Reiner’s dreams. “I would buy your art.” He wants Jean to fill entire sketchbooks with sketches, sketch out in the open with the sun warming his hair, sketch the leaden weight of his wings away.
Jean is looking at him slack-jawed. The silence stretches. “Oh,” he says finally in a sort of feeble gasp. “I’m. Same for you, I. Guess.”
Reiner smiles. “Shall we get started on the hole-punching session?”
It is more nerve-wracking than Reiner expected; they have both had intimate relationships with injury, but the idea of piercing above or below the mark, or of wiggling around and causing Jean pain, is enough to get his heart racing. He goes through the pamphlet three times and underlines parts he deems important before he starts. Jean hasn’t shaved and his stubble scratches the back of Reiner’s hand as Reiner marks the lobe. Piercing cleanly through turns out to require more force than he anticipated, and Jean cringes and hisses as Reiner struggles. It is easier with the second ear.
As Reiner pulls out the needle, leaving the stud in place, he finds himself stunned at how close Jean has allowed him. He feels like he is on display without his clothes on, even though Jean is the one leaving himself vulnerable. But instead of feeling like an ordeal, it feels like a privilege. The light that had earlier seemed watery now appears bright and golden.
Jean gets up and admires himself in the little mirror on the wall, seeming terribly pleased. The studs do suit him. “It will be a bitch to shower with these, but you did a banger job.” He turns to Reiner, looks at him with an intensity that could have burned the goatee off Reiner’s face, and says, “Thank you.”
Reiner looks away from Jean, lest he stare. “What will you do now?”
Jean puts his hand on his hips, hums, and looks out the window. “I’m thinking. I’m thinking I’ll get some art supplies.”
“You’re going to sketch more?”
“I have a customer lined up. Can’t disappoint him, can I?”
Reiner does look at him then, finds him grinning crookedly. “No, you can’t,” he says quietly.
Jean reheats some meat pie for lunch, and they eat in comfortable silence. Reiner thinks, I’m here, Jean doesn’t hate me, he may even like me, despite everything I did, and it makes him giddy; because if he can be this person for Jean, he can be this person for other people too.
On the way back home, Reiner notices the kind of things he did not before: A woman placing potted lavender on a narrow, lightless balcony, a couple of boys in worn, oversized jackets kicking around a football and shrieking with laughter, the bright tangy smell of cooked onions wafting from a rickety roadside stall. He tips his head back and allows himself to feel the bracing wind carding through his hair.
That night he sits at his desk and opens his notebook earlier than usual, and swings his legs like he is ten again. For a moment he stops, thinking, Do I deserve to swing my legs? and then shakes his head, and continues his leg-swinging.
He picks up his pen. Three points is what he is meant to write.
But he thinks, this evening, he will write a paragraph.