Um...Sorry? This chapter has been arguing with me and was supposed to be twice at long, but the end of Jean's half was a good ending point even though the first part is a direct continuation of chapter 25.

1 August 2025

"You're not going and that's final," Kalura says, declares, with every bit of authority she's made for herself as a mother, as the daughter of her mother. The tone is one that makes Grisha back down, mutter a quiet "Yes, dear," and go about his takes with nary a word about whatever topic made her use the tone. It's the tone that makes doctors shut up and listen when she says something. It's the tone that has other mothers, other parents, give her quiet looks of envy when she manages to end an argument between hysterical children in just a word or two.

Eren is fifteen. A fifteen-year-old boy should slump over the kitchen table at that tine. He should be full of sullen, teenage angst and angry defiance. He should yell. Slam thing. Rail against the authority she's always possessed.

Instead, he's standing straight, feet apart and shoulders back, hands clasped behind his back in a stance so practiced it almost seems natural. All of her authority quails under his quiet confidence. Strength. He doesn't even look at her, eyes level and staring somewhere out the kitchen window at the dead grass of the lawn and their neighbor's house.

Teenagers shouldn't have this sort of confidence.

It's not like the stance is unfamiliar either. That's what probably hurts worst. The posture, the polite yet disinterested expression, like this is just some formality he has to go though with even though the outcome in inevitable. She's seen him use it at dinner parties with his father's colleagues. With doctors. With teachers. People that he has to interact with but considers largely unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

And now he's using it on her. Just as he has the last five times they've had this particular conversation.

"You met that John kid -"

"Jean, Mom. His name is Jean Kirstein. He's fifteen. He lives in Vermont with his parents."

"You met him online, Eren! There's no telling if anything he says is true! You're not going." Maybe if she repeats it enough it will finally get though. Finally start sounding more true than not. (She knows it won't. She's never really been able to talk Eren out of anything he really wants to do. She was barely able to keep him in gymnastics, barely able to keep him from going five hours away every weekend to visit that girl and that boy.

"I've met him in person." And that's news. Eren doesn't have friends in person, not unless Mikasa and Armin count. Kalura doesn't think they count. They're too far away, the bond of friendship forged though shared trauma. She doesn't trust how close they are, thinks it's suspicious how quickly that agent and his boss snapped up the children.

She doesn't trust the agent in charge of Mikasa doesn't like or feel comfortable with how close the man is with her son.

"When? When did you meet this boy in person? And video chat doesn't count, young man."

Eren heaves a sigh, long and deep. It fails to ease his posture. In anything, his shoulders tense. His mouth thins. "It was a long time ago," he says, calm. Even. "We were twelve. Didn't like each other much, but we learned to work together, to get along." Another sigh. "We didn't have much choice," he mumbles. She barely hears him.

"I'm still not sending you halfway across the country to spend a week in some expensive resort with people we don't know."

"It's already paid for," he says. That's not the issue. Money has never been the issue, but he acts like it is. "Besides, Armin and Mikasa are going too. So are Erwin and Levi. Even if Jean is the serial killer pedophile you seem to think he is - he's not - we'll have two highly trained FBI agents with us."

Kalura closes the dishwasher slowly. Calmly. She wipes her hands dry on a towel. Finally, she turns back to face her son. "Stop talking like you're going, Eren. You're not. Especially since you lied to me about winning that contest!"

"Yes. I lied. Because I knew you were going to say no. Just like you do every time I want to spend time with my friends. I am going."

It's the first time he's stated a direct opposition to her decision. He's implied, alluded and talked around her words as if they weren't even there, but he's never outright defied her like this. It hurts more than she expected.

"Oh? And why's that?" she snaps. "Because your friends are going?"

"Partially."

"And you'll do everything your friends do, will you?"

Finally, finally, he turns to look at her. He drops a shoulder and cocks a hip, torso twisting just enough so that he can face her without moving his feet. His smile is wry, eyes dark and dangerous, a different color green than she's used to. "No," he hums, "because monsters can't be human. But I'll do anything to be with them."

And for the first time, Kalura is afraid. Not for her son, but afraid of him.

In the morning, her car is gone. Probably safe in a parking garage over in Sioux Falls. Her son, too, is gone. So are most of his clothes, the few precious things he'd never leave behind. The difference is that he's not safe in Sioux Falls where she can call Erwin Smith or his boss, but headed east in a car with four people she'll never trust.

20 June 2023

Jean flops haphazardly into his chair, fingers slipping through the condensation on his glass of ice water, grinning at his best friend's sputtering whine about cold and why would you do that? He didn't do anything bad. Not really. Just set a frigid glass of water on the bare chest of an unaware bed thief.

Harmless. Completely harmless. And Jean didn't take any sort of vindictive pleasure in Marco's rather delightful yelp of surprise. None whatsoever.

"That ws not cool," Marco grumbles, using Jean's blanket to remove the condensation from his skin.

Jean grins. "I rather suspect it was cold."

"Jean, I will throw this entire glass of water at your head," Marco says flatly. "Don't think I won't."

Jean nearly slides off his chair laughing. It's hot - beyond hot, really, like that one summer with Historia and Eren, their laughter echoing his own. They were stuck in what used to be an apartment building in what would become the City of Orphans waiting for something. Something - a supply run? Orders? Maybe there was a unicorn patrol passing too close and Armin gave them orders to lay low. Jean remembers something like that. Until the city was populated, they used it as a base of operations, a safe house of sorts, and very deliberately let the unicorn brigade pass by without causing trouble. No picking off sentries or wiping out entire units.

It was hotter than hell, though, sitting with the other in that cramped and dusty room, sunlight coursing through a shattered roof and no sign of a breeze for days.

Eren had started it. He said something stupid - he usually said something stupid - but this time Historia reacted, face breaking into a smile the likes of which they hadn't seen since she was Krista. She clasped her hands over her mouth but that did little to mother the laughter breaking free. Eren followed her over the brink, collapsing into a fit of giggles and dust. It wasn't even all that funny, just a normal Eren-coment, but their laughter was contagious and Jean was helpless to resist. For going on ten minutes, they laughed and choked on the dist and laughed some more, minds bordering on hysteria, until they couldn't breathe and settled, propped up on elbows and against walls, gray from the dist they rolled around in.

The heat was misery and the room stank of death and unwashed bodies, but it was a good day.

He misses them. He thought the hole Marco left in his chest when they were fifteen and the other boy died was the more grief he'd ever have to experience. Then came the war and his friends died off one by one - Connie, Sasha, Annie, Reiner, Bert, Levi... Each death just brought more pain, took that hole by its raw and tattered edges and tore it wider than he thought he could survive.

Jean dead, just a little, with each allied death he witnessed and for every life he and his friends took. He died a little when killing stopped making Armin sick. And every time he raised his blade, or a hammer, or any of the other dozen took he kept for the more physical aspects of his interrogation techniques, to another human being ebcause he couldn't talk the information out of them and Armin needed it.

Gods, he misses them so much and it's so much more apparent now that he has Marco. Marco, who died when they were kids and he doesn't understand...anything.

"Jean?"

Marco's sitting up now, frowning slightly, concern evident on his freckled face. Jean realizes, rather belatedly, that he probably when from amused to melancholy and silent, and stayed that way far longer than he meant to.

"I'm fine," he lies. Pauses. "Do you think, maybe, that the others..." He isn't able to finish. Isn't able to even breathe the hope that he's been harboring since he woke up, since he found Marco.

"The others?" Marco queries, soft and concerned. He looks older than he should, Jean muses, and supposes he does too. They're thirteen in this life. Jean, what, what, thirty-five when he died? He's a good twenty years older than his best friend and - he doesn't know how to deal with this. He's too young for the methods of stress control he perfected back in the Walls. Marco probably wouldn't be cool with that anyway; he didn't live through the events that made casual sex with a willing partner acceptable. Common. Expected. "Jean?"

Jean catches his breath, holds it until the anxiety recedes and he can look at Marco without swearing or yelling or blushing because he's forty-eight fucking years old and he nearly had a panic attack over something he's been dealing with for thirteen years.

"Yeah, I'm fine," Jean lies again. Marco smiles at him, a little condescending, but lets it go. Jean takes a fortifying breath and rushes to finish his thought, "Do you think the others came back, too?"

Marco blinks at him for several minutes. "Well," he says finally, "if they did, the best way to find them would be the internet."

"But the Wall Seekers-"

"If we phrase things right..."

They crowd around Jean's computer, pulling up pages and sites and lines of code that Jean can't tell heads or tails of but apparently Marco can read.