Pyrrhic Victory: Part 1
Category: Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Canon Divergence
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Summary:
Jean is captured in the aftermath of the raid on Liberio. Reiner is invited to front-row seats to his plight.
For ReiJean Week: The Raid on Liberio.
Reiner had always assumed Jean would be one of the first to go, the focus leaving his eyes before the first measly hairs sprouted on his chin. Jean would not have lasted a day as a Warrior trainee, too besotted by his own swagger to be of any real use, too queasy to do what needed to be done.
Yet here Jean is, shackled to the cell wall by the wrists and ankles, with blood crusted from his temple to his trimmed beard.
Rolf, the Senior Group Leader who had called Reiner to the correctional facility near the military base, yanks Jean’s head back by the hair. “We found this dirty rat hiding near the town square. I guessed you would know his name.” He is not taller or broader than Reiner, and his middle is soft from too many hours spent at a desk, but he talks as if his words will shift the world to his liking.
“Jean Kirschtein,” says Reiner, clear but quiet. It is not a name he thought he would have to speak again, and his mouth does not fit comfortably around it.
Jean gives Reiner a look of distaste. Beneath the sickly light from the single lightbulb, his face with its deep shadows is a Melpomene mask.
“You will provide a full write-up on everything you know about him, down to the hairs on his toes. He hasn’t talked so far, but I trust that he will. We’ve barely gotten started.”
Had the captive been someone else - Mikasa, or Captain Levi, or even Armin - Reiner would have said, Save the trouble, but Jean had never been known for a strong will. Reiner still remembers the tremor in Jean’s voice in Shiganshina, when he said, No, wait, please, as Hange pressed their blade into Reiner’s throat. He had thought he would - should - forget Jean Kirschtein and his ill-made kindness, but he never did.
“Should we begin with the pliers?” says Rolf with a grin. Outside they are still excavating the bodies of the dead and half-dead from the rubble, but Rolf has had people’s teeth pulled out for lesser crimes, for a That’s silly, Group Leader Rolf, for a parcel not delivered. “Or would the baton do? I’m more inclined towards the baton.”
This would be easier if it were not Jean, if Reiner did not have No, wait, please looping through his head. Even now, Reiner cannot help being half-assed. “Do I have to stay? I need to finish my reports.” He does not; he handed them in an hour ago, at two-thirty in the morning. But if he cannot stop Jean from getting tortured, he at least does not have to see it.
Rolf’s gaze is knowing, his voice measured and amiable. “Stay, Braun. I may need you to hold him down.”
You can ask the guard right down the hall, Reiner wants to say, but does not. There is only so much backchat he is permitted to give a Marleyan. He nods. The chill damp coats his lungs, and from a corner a pipe drips, insistent, plip, plip, plip; a stench of old piss and faeces occupies the facility.
“Now, then.” Rolf picks up the baton. It is not standard police stock, the kind that cracks after the third good hit; the batons issued to high-ranking officers are lacquered oakwood, fit for ceremony as much as punishment. As a boy Reiner used to imagine that, one day, he would march around Liberio swinging one to and fro, that his father would see and smile and tell everyone, That’s my son, you don’t mess with this family.
“Ready to talk, Johann?” says Rolf.
Jean’s jaw twitches. “No.” His voice, beneath the disdain, is unsure. Reiner winces, embarrassed for him.
The baton swings down onto Jean’s waist with a crack. Jean’s eyes fly wide open and a sound of shock leaves his mouth, and in the aftermath of the blow, he gasps, wet wheezing things.
Reiner burns. His breath hitches and the cell swims. He unclenches his aching jaw and counts the cracks in a wall. Three, four, seven.
“Why would you attack us,” says Rolf, “if you knew the entire world would be your enemy? Are you looking for an excuse to start the Rumbling?”
Tears clump Jean’s eyelashes. He will not survive this. Jean’s vocal dreams of living in the interior had been annoying, but they were also speckled with mentions of a wife, of children. He would have made a devoted husband.
But so would Bertholdt. Reiner’s fist curls. The next strike of the baton - against Jean’s hip - does not garner sympathy from him. And then he remembers that he broke the gates and hunches his shoulders.
A string of saliva is dripping down Jean’s chin, and his head is bowed, his eyes glazed. Rolf takes Jean’s face in his hand. “I can tell you’re not good with this. I’ll ask again: what is your plan?”
Jean shakes his head.
More blows. More grunts, animal and breathless. Rolf uses his fist and a tooth clatters next to the polished toe of Reiner’s boot.
Rolf is starting to grow red-faced. “Perhaps conventional methods won’t work. Well. I’ve been wanting to blow off some steam. It did make us angry, killing so many of us like that. Did you enjoy it?”
Jean raises his head. “Who would enjoy that?” he rasps.
“Then why do it?” The blunt end of the baton comes up beneath Jean’s chin, lifts it higher. “You see, when we attacked you, we enjoyed it. We wanted to see your dirty, worthless race exterminated. Deputy Chief Braun here can vouch for that.” Rolf glances at Reiner, as if expecting him to voice agreement. Reiner makes himself look back steadily. Jean gives a weak scoff, and Rolf turns back to him with a sceptical scowl. “I suppose you are stubborn if nothing else. Braun, I’m going to need your help.” The baton drops to the ground.
“What do you need me to do?” asks Reiner, even though what he is thinking is, Do you have any idea how much more valuable I am to Marley than you are?
“Hold him down. I’m going to remove his cuffs. Is the door locked?”
Reiner’s confusion grows. “Yes.” He restrains Jean as Rolf undoes the cuffs on his wrists, then his ankles. Jean kicks out, but he is weakened, and Rolf answers his cheek with a backhand that rings like a gunshot. “Stop that, horseface,” Reiner hisses, hoping that Jean will understand that antagonising Rolf will only make things worse. He wrestles Jean to the grimy floor with Rolf’s help, pinning his arms beside his head, and for a second, Marco stares up at him with wild bulging eyes and tears and snot streaking through the dirt on his face, and Reiner pulls blood from his lower lip with his teeth.
“This should have been the way we kept you Eldians,” Rolf is saying. His hands go to the buckle on Jean’s belt. Reiner frowns. What is Rolf doing? Jean’s trousers are yanked down around his thighs, and he squirms and babbles in a language Reiner does not know, and Reiner watches blankly, as if through a telescope, the moment both remote and contained.
“Flip him over,” Rolf says. When Reiner remains still, he adds with an edge to his voice, “Braun, that’s an order.”
No, wait, please.
“I - ” And he is Jean now, hesitating, a boneless creature black-holing time and resources. The entire Warrior unit that was sent to Paradis is gone like a tatter of smoke and it’s because of him. He ignores the way Jean is shaking his head and pleading, ignores Marco’s voice interspersing Jean’s, and follows the order.
“Why are you looking away, Braun?” says Rolf. “Do you think that he is human?”
“No.” He does not think it; he knows it.
Jean is hyperventilating. His ribs must be bruised if not broken. Every breath must feel like a knife.
“They hurt you,” Rolf is saying, as if he can see into Reiner’s mind. “Don’t you remember?”
It is a funny thing, regeneration. You bear the pain more easily because you know it will not result in permanent damage. But “more bearable” is relative, and fails to work beyond a point. Nothing will compare to Reiner’s arms and legs being sawed off by Mikasa’s swords, one by one. Mikasa could have made it quicker. He had bitten his tongue clean off and blacked out twice, and he cannot recall if he had cried out for his mother.
Jean snarls and tries to buck Rolf off him, but Rolf tightens his grip on Jean’s hips in a weird twisting motion, the way you might break a rabbit’s neck during a hunt. Jean turns his wet, red-rimmed eyes to Reiner, and his face is hurt and disappointed, like he expected Reiner to do better, and Reiner is dizzy, because he has never done better, and going by consistency he’s not about to start now.
“Real shame you’re Eldian.” Rolf runs his fingers across the bristly hairs on Jean’s jaw, and Jean spits at him, but it lands on his own chin. “But it’s what some people say, right? That thing about you devils seducing the rest of us good folk. At least you’re not a woman, so it won’t result in an unfit little half-breed.”
Reiner thinks of Eren and the kind of anger that might have driven him to do what he did last night. He thinks he might understand, just a little bit. For a moment, Reiner’s father’s face replaces Rolf’s. Reiner cannot imagine his father had been anywhere near the stage. Maybe he should have been. The thought is sacrilegious, and feels good, like the first hit of cool air on knitting skin after you peel off a bandage.
Rolf uses his fingers, his eyes dark, his nostrils flaring. Did he wash his hands before coming to the cell, or is there muck crawling with disease beneath his brittle fingernails? There is a mole on the knuckle of his index finger that Reiner cannot stop staring at as the finger disappears and reappears, disappears and reappears.
Jean’s eyes are screwed shut, his lips pulled back in a Titan grimace, and his breaths sound like sobs, but Rolf carries on, looking like he could start humming a tune any moment now. There is no state punishment for a Marleyan raping an Eldian.
Maybe Reiner’s mother had lied, and she had never wanted his father at all. Every fibre in his body feels sick.
The sound of a zipper interjects Reiner’s thoughts. Sweat beads Rolf’s hairline, wisps of blond hair falling onto his red, puffy cheeks. He grasps the meat of Jean’s buttock with one hand and yanks down his own trousers with the other, and Reiner glimpses a thatch of curls. The head of his penis slides against Jean’s blood-streaked skin.
Jean is saying something, but Reiner is not listening.
He stands up, picks up the baton from the ground and swings it into the side of Rolf’s head.
Rolf’s skull crunches in. The weight of the baton is just right in Reiner’s palm, and he raises it and brings it down again and again, unable to stop, till Rolf’s fingers stop twitching, till his face is a pulp of bone and cartilage and meat. Outside him the gates break and break, and Marcel’s spine is ground between molars the size of adult skulls, and a pastor howls that salvation is still found in the Walls. It could not have been Reiner amidst all that; it must have happened to a different person, a different body.
A hand scrabbles at his ankle, and he jerks and looks at Jean, who says, “Stop.”
Reiner is still gripping the baton; he pries his fingers open with his other hand so he can let go of it. “He - ”
“Is already dead.” Jean’s voice is a trickle going thin. He pulls his trousers up with shaking hands, does up the zip and button, buckles the belt, and the arrhythmic movement reminds Reiner of an ant that has been stepped on but not granted death. Seemingly having exhausted himself, Jean lies back down and closes his eyes, and after a few seconds, Reiner realises that he is unconscious.
He revels in the silence, in the nothingness. If he could have anything, he would have his bed and duvet, and not wake up till noon, and have tea and toast with marmalade by the window.
Then the nothingness dissipates. He staggers to a wall, leans against it, and clutches his pounding head. The headlines tomorrow will have every Eldian in Marley locking their doors and telling their children that they won’t be allowed outside for a few days, a few weeks, yes, I know you’ll miss your friends, I’ll play with you.
He draws a long breath. Slows his heartbeat.
First priority: Get Jean medical attention. A skeleton crew is working the facility; most of the staff are still helping with the aftermath of the raid. Beyond the door the guard is slumping in her stool, and Reiner wonders who she has waiting at home for her. He wonders if Jean killed her sibling or parent or child or friend last night and she has no one waiting for her at all.
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Canon Divergence
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Summary:
Jean is captured in the aftermath of the raid on Liberio. Reiner is invited to front-row seats to his plight.
For ReiJean Week: The Raid on Liberio.
Reiner had always assumed Jean would be one of the first to go, the focus leaving his eyes before the first measly hairs sprouted on his chin. Jean would not have lasted a day as a Warrior trainee, too besotted by his own swagger to be of any real use, too queasy to do what needed to be done.
Yet here Jean is, shackled to the cell wall by the wrists and ankles, with blood crusted from his temple to his trimmed beard.
Rolf, the Senior Group Leader who had called Reiner to the correctional facility near the military base, yanks Jean’s head back by the hair. “We found this dirty rat hiding near the town square. I guessed you would know his name.” He is not taller or broader than Reiner, and his middle is soft from too many hours spent at a desk, but he talks as if his words will shift the world to his liking.
“Jean Kirschtein,” says Reiner, clear but quiet. It is not a name he thought he would have to speak again, and his mouth does not fit comfortably around it.
Jean gives Reiner a look of distaste. Beneath the sickly light from the single lightbulb, his face with its deep shadows is a Melpomene mask.
“You will provide a full write-up on everything you know about him, down to the hairs on his toes. He hasn’t talked so far, but I trust that he will. We’ve barely gotten started.”
Had the captive been someone else - Mikasa, or Captain Levi, or even Armin - Reiner would have said, Save the trouble, but Jean had never been known for a strong will. Reiner still remembers the tremor in Jean’s voice in Shiganshina, when he said, No, wait, please, as Hange pressed their blade into Reiner’s throat. He had thought he would - should - forget Jean Kirschtein and his ill-made kindness, but he never did.
“Should we begin with the pliers?” says Rolf with a grin. Outside they are still excavating the bodies of the dead and half-dead from the rubble, but Rolf has had people’s teeth pulled out for lesser crimes, for a That’s silly, Group Leader Rolf, for a parcel not delivered. “Or would the baton do? I’m more inclined towards the baton.”
This would be easier if it were not Jean, if Reiner did not have No, wait, please looping through his head. Even now, Reiner cannot help being half-assed. “Do I have to stay? I need to finish my reports.” He does not; he handed them in an hour ago, at two-thirty in the morning. But if he cannot stop Jean from getting tortured, he at least does not have to see it.
Rolf’s gaze is knowing, his voice measured and amiable. “Stay, Braun. I may need you to hold him down.”
You can ask the guard right down the hall, Reiner wants to say, but does not. There is only so much backchat he is permitted to give a Marleyan. He nods. The chill damp coats his lungs, and from a corner a pipe drips, insistent, plip, plip, plip; a stench of old piss and faeces occupies the facility.
“Now, then.” Rolf picks up the baton. It is not standard police stock, the kind that cracks after the third good hit; the batons issued to high-ranking officers are lacquered oakwood, fit for ceremony as much as punishment. As a boy Reiner used to imagine that, one day, he would march around Liberio swinging one to and fro, that his father would see and smile and tell everyone, That’s my son, you don’t mess with this family.
“Ready to talk, Johann?” says Rolf.
Jean’s jaw twitches. “No.” His voice, beneath the disdain, is unsure. Reiner winces, embarrassed for him.
The baton swings down onto Jean’s waist with a crack. Jean’s eyes fly wide open and a sound of shock leaves his mouth, and in the aftermath of the blow, he gasps, wet wheezing things.
Reiner burns. His breath hitches and the cell swims. He unclenches his aching jaw and counts the cracks in a wall. Three, four, seven.
“Why would you attack us,” says Rolf, “if you knew the entire world would be your enemy? Are you looking for an excuse to start the Rumbling?”
Tears clump Jean’s eyelashes. He will not survive this. Jean’s vocal dreams of living in the interior had been annoying, but they were also speckled with mentions of a wife, of children. He would have made a devoted husband.
But so would Bertholdt. Reiner’s fist curls. The next strike of the baton - against Jean’s hip - does not garner sympathy from him. And then he remembers that he broke the gates and hunches his shoulders.
A string of saliva is dripping down Jean’s chin, and his head is bowed, his eyes glazed. Rolf takes Jean’s face in his hand. “I can tell you’re not good with this. I’ll ask again: what is your plan?”
Jean shakes his head.
More blows. More grunts, animal and breathless. Rolf uses his fist and a tooth clatters next to the polished toe of Reiner’s boot.
Rolf is starting to grow red-faced. “Perhaps conventional methods won’t work. Well. I’ve been wanting to blow off some steam. It did make us angry, killing so many of us like that. Did you enjoy it?”
Jean raises his head. “Who would enjoy that?” he rasps.
“Then why do it?” The blunt end of the baton comes up beneath Jean’s chin, lifts it higher. “You see, when we attacked you, we enjoyed it. We wanted to see your dirty, worthless race exterminated. Deputy Chief Braun here can vouch for that.” Rolf glances at Reiner, as if expecting him to voice agreement. Reiner makes himself look back steadily. Jean gives a weak scoff, and Rolf turns back to him with a sceptical scowl. “I suppose you are stubborn if nothing else. Braun, I’m going to need your help.” The baton drops to the ground.
“What do you need me to do?” asks Reiner, even though what he is thinking is, Do you have any idea how much more valuable I am to Marley than you are?
“Hold him down. I’m going to remove his cuffs. Is the door locked?”
Reiner’s confusion grows. “Yes.” He restrains Jean as Rolf undoes the cuffs on his wrists, then his ankles. Jean kicks out, but he is weakened, and Rolf answers his cheek with a backhand that rings like a gunshot. “Stop that, horseface,” Reiner hisses, hoping that Jean will understand that antagonising Rolf will only make things worse. He wrestles Jean to the grimy floor with Rolf’s help, pinning his arms beside his head, and for a second, Marco stares up at him with wild bulging eyes and tears and snot streaking through the dirt on his face, and Reiner pulls blood from his lower lip with his teeth.
“This should have been the way we kept you Eldians,” Rolf is saying. His hands go to the buckle on Jean’s belt. Reiner frowns. What is Rolf doing? Jean’s trousers are yanked down around his thighs, and he squirms and babbles in a language Reiner does not know, and Reiner watches blankly, as if through a telescope, the moment both remote and contained.
“Flip him over,” Rolf says. When Reiner remains still, he adds with an edge to his voice, “Braun, that’s an order.”
No, wait, please.
“I - ” And he is Jean now, hesitating, a boneless creature black-holing time and resources. The entire Warrior unit that was sent to Paradis is gone like a tatter of smoke and it’s because of him. He ignores the way Jean is shaking his head and pleading, ignores Marco’s voice interspersing Jean’s, and follows the order.
“Why are you looking away, Braun?” says Rolf. “Do you think that he is human?”
“No.” He does not think it; he knows it.
Jean is hyperventilating. His ribs must be bruised if not broken. Every breath must feel like a knife.
“They hurt you,” Rolf is saying, as if he can see into Reiner’s mind. “Don’t you remember?”
It is a funny thing, regeneration. You bear the pain more easily because you know it will not result in permanent damage. But “more bearable” is relative, and fails to work beyond a point. Nothing will compare to Reiner’s arms and legs being sawed off by Mikasa’s swords, one by one. Mikasa could have made it quicker. He had bitten his tongue clean off and blacked out twice, and he cannot recall if he had cried out for his mother.
Jean snarls and tries to buck Rolf off him, but Rolf tightens his grip on Jean’s hips in a weird twisting motion, the way you might break a rabbit’s neck during a hunt. Jean turns his wet, red-rimmed eyes to Reiner, and his face is hurt and disappointed, like he expected Reiner to do better, and Reiner is dizzy, because he has never done better, and going by consistency he’s not about to start now.
“Real shame you’re Eldian.” Rolf runs his fingers across the bristly hairs on Jean’s jaw, and Jean spits at him, but it lands on his own chin. “But it’s what some people say, right? That thing about you devils seducing the rest of us good folk. At least you’re not a woman, so it won’t result in an unfit little half-breed.”
Reiner thinks of Eren and the kind of anger that might have driven him to do what he did last night. He thinks he might understand, just a little bit. For a moment, Reiner’s father’s face replaces Rolf’s. Reiner cannot imagine his father had been anywhere near the stage. Maybe he should have been. The thought is sacrilegious, and feels good, like the first hit of cool air on knitting skin after you peel off a bandage.
Rolf uses his fingers, his eyes dark, his nostrils flaring. Did he wash his hands before coming to the cell, or is there muck crawling with disease beneath his brittle fingernails? There is a mole on the knuckle of his index finger that Reiner cannot stop staring at as the finger disappears and reappears, disappears and reappears.
Jean’s eyes are screwed shut, his lips pulled back in a Titan grimace, and his breaths sound like sobs, but Rolf carries on, looking like he could start humming a tune any moment now. There is no state punishment for a Marleyan raping an Eldian.
Maybe Reiner’s mother had lied, and she had never wanted his father at all. Every fibre in his body feels sick.
The sound of a zipper interjects Reiner’s thoughts. Sweat beads Rolf’s hairline, wisps of blond hair falling onto his red, puffy cheeks. He grasps the meat of Jean’s buttock with one hand and yanks down his own trousers with the other, and Reiner glimpses a thatch of curls. The head of his penis slides against Jean’s blood-streaked skin.
Jean is saying something, but Reiner is not listening.
He stands up, picks up the baton from the ground and swings it into the side of Rolf’s head.
Rolf’s skull crunches in. The weight of the baton is just right in Reiner’s palm, and he raises it and brings it down again and again, unable to stop, till Rolf’s fingers stop twitching, till his face is a pulp of bone and cartilage and meat. Outside him the gates break and break, and Marcel’s spine is ground between molars the size of adult skulls, and a pastor howls that salvation is still found in the Walls. It could not have been Reiner amidst all that; it must have happened to a different person, a different body.
A hand scrabbles at his ankle, and he jerks and looks at Jean, who says, “Stop.”
Reiner is still gripping the baton; he pries his fingers open with his other hand so he can let go of it. “He - ”
“Is already dead.” Jean’s voice is a trickle going thin. He pulls his trousers up with shaking hands, does up the zip and button, buckles the belt, and the arrhythmic movement reminds Reiner of an ant that has been stepped on but not granted death. Seemingly having exhausted himself, Jean lies back down and closes his eyes, and after a few seconds, Reiner realises that he is unconscious.
He revels in the silence, in the nothingness. If he could have anything, he would have his bed and duvet, and not wake up till noon, and have tea and toast with marmalade by the window.
Then the nothingness dissipates. He staggers to a wall, leans against it, and clutches his pounding head. The headlines tomorrow will have every Eldian in Marley locking their doors and telling their children that they won’t be allowed outside for a few days, a few weeks, yes, I know you’ll miss your friends, I’ll play with you.
He draws a long breath. Slows his heartbeat.
First priority: Get Jean medical attention. A skeleton crew is working the facility; most of the staff are still helping with the aftermath of the raid. Beyond the door the guard is slumping in her stool, and Reiner wonders who she has waiting at home for her. He wonders if Jean killed her sibling or parent or child or friend last night and she has no one waiting for her at all.