Notes: This isn't so much a crossover as it is an Attack on Titan fic that includes a few AU variations of FF7 characters as key elements. One is introduced in this chapter, but not by name. As this was initially drafted over a year ago, it is not canon compliant to any plot elements introduced after Reiner and Berthold's big reveal. It will also use the original spellings of everyone's names, so we'll have Berthold rather than Bertolt and Bodt over Bott, et cetera.

One

The first stage of damage control was finally finished, and today they were burning the bodies.

It was the way it had always been done. There were stories that said the dead used to be buried, sealed away underground—six feet down, Armin said, that's what it says in the books—but Jean was sure those were just that: stories. Why would anyone do something like that? There was so little space inside the walls and so many people dying so often, the ground would be turned up from one end of Wall Maria to the other within a decade.

Instead they were burned, broken down to ash and smoke and bits of blackened bone. The clumps of hair and flesh and dried blood all burned the same, it all ended up the same way. Afterward, the ashes were taken and divvied up among the surrounding farmland, where they were sifted to get out the few hard pieces remaining and used in fertilizer. Sometimes families kept pieces of bone and tucked them away in small wooden boxes, like baby teeth, for memory's sake; in this case, that wasn't really an option. Too many dead, keeping them separate would take too much time.

Jean volunteered to lay Marco on the pile. They had him wrapped up and he was heavy and cold, but not stiff anymore. Loose, like the rag dolls Jean's sister probably still played with back at home. He wasn't sure, it had been a long time since he saw her. Maybe she finally gave them up.

He put Marco down and stood there for a moment. He thought about going home. Seeing his sister, his mother, telling them what happened. Telling them how he met Marco and knew him and then lost him like this. But what good would it do?

Jean exhaled, his breath shook, and he turned and walked away. There was a little while before the burning was set to start, and he promised to get Marco's things put together to send back to his family. He needed to write a letter apologizing for not being able to send a piece of bone to put in the box that the army was sure to send. But then, all they would do is tuck it away somewhere that they couldn't see, somewhere it wouldn't hurt, and Marco deserved better than that anyway.

A man in uniform—short and thin with black hair and black eyes, wearing the crest of the Military Police—picked his way through the bodies as Jean walked away, checking the tags on each wrapped bundle of flesh and bone. Periodically, albeit rarely, he made an odd gesture with his hand and one of the men with him pulled a body from the pile and carried it away.

Jean was already gone when he got to Marco, checked his tag and smiled.

"Oh, here it is," he breathed, almost reverently, his pale, bony fingers dancing over the wrapped burlap. "Bodt, the trainee from the 104th. I have use for you, boy."

Eyes open, everything is a blur.

He can't hear

speak

breathe

move.

He's afraid, panicked, but he can't do anything. He feels something on his forehead; it's warm, careful. A hand. He angles his eyes—at least one, he can't see out the other at all—upward, and slowly the blurs come into more familiar shapes and angles.

His first thought is that this man has hair like Mikasa and eyes like Mikasa, although his are black where Mikasa's are blue. Somewhere back in the cacophony of confusion wracking his brain, he thinks about how he's definitely too old for Jean and that he would be so disappointed if he were here.

He wonders where "here" is.

The man's mouth moves for several seconds before he finally hears a voice; even then it's far away, distorted, like he's underwater. "How are you feeling, Trainee Bodt?"

Marco croaks something, not sure what it is. The response is automatic. When a medic asks you how you feel, you respond.

"That's good," the medic says, smiling. He straightens and brushes his ponytail back over his shoulder, adjusts his round-framed glasses. "Even better than I was expecting." He faces forward, and it looks to Marco that he's talking to someone else; he can't move to see who, though, and angling his good eye down that far makes pain lance through his head.

The man's voice rings clear even through the pain.

"Proceed with the next phase of the project."

Jean honestly couldn't say how long it had been, but things were…not better, not even close to better, but he was managing much better than he'd been expecting. He made it through his birthday without incident, made it through Marco's without breaking down, and now here he was.

Going after Reiner and Berthold, just like everyone else. Connie was a wreck; he asked if Sasha had gotten back yet, and when no one could say yes he hung behind in the stables with his things, prepping to go after Mikasa and Armin and that Garrison officer—Hanes or Hannis or whatever—with the next wave. Jean couldn't blame him.

The group Jean had opted for took a detour, moving to circumnavigate the forest of giant trees altogether in an attempt to cut Reiner and Berthold off. The different route took them through an overgrown apple orchard; the rhythm of his mount's hooves pounding the earth echoed off the trees and vibrated through Jean like a heartbeat, steady and even louder than the blood screaming in his ears.

How had it come to this? Here he was, going after two of his friends for kidnapping two people he couldn't stand. And why? Because they were Titans too, like everyone else. First Eren, then Annie, and after that it was Ymir; now it was Reiner and Berthold. Just how many of these monsters were there in the 104th, anyway?

Best not to think on it—acting was far too important right now. Armin was the only one of them who could really think on that level while he acted. He always knew what was going to happen next, figured everything out just before it exploded on the rest of them. There were people looking to him now, asking him questions, hoping for his help in making sense of the nonsense that was the entire world since the day Trost was breached, and Jean didn't envy him that one bit. No matter what Marco said, leadership was hardly his strong suit. He knew the right thing to do, that didn't mean he wanted people asking him about it.

They broke through the trees, and Jean barely had time to react before a hand larger than he was slammed into the ground in front of him, uprooting trees and turning up earth in an explosion of clumped dirt and stone.

Aberrant, he thought as he broke away from their shattered formation, glancing back at the grinning abomination slapping at the earth behind him with each lunge in his direction. Seven meter class at the most. Uncoordinated.

Uncoordinated aberrants were definitely preferred, being much more likely to trip up and slow themselves down. All Jean had to do was the only thing he could do: keep running.

"That's not so bad…" He murmured to himself, shifting in the saddle, leaning forward and urging his horse to pick up speed.

When Marco woke up this time he could see clearly. He could hear, breathe, feel—he felt hot. Like he'd been dropped into a bath, like he was wrapped up tight in blankets just brought in off the clothesline in the middle of summer. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation, but certainly…strange.

The wind was cool on his skin, though. Birds flew overhead, chirping and calling out to each other against the cloud-patched sky. He smelled earth, grass and rain.

Marco assumed he was dead.

Still, he felt like he could move now. That was a definite positive, dead or not. It took a little concentration, but after a few seconds he succeeded in pulling back his arms to push himself up; he felt the ground come up in the motion, almost fluffy under his fingers as he slid them back. Like running his hands over thick fur. He pushed himself up, and decided that everything ached far too much for him to possibly be dead.

"Very good!" Came a voice from his left, somewhere low. Far away. Marco turned to find the source, and…there was nothing but open field, as far as he could see. There were trees in the distance, saplings maybe. They looked small even from here, but his depth perception felt a little off. He gave his head a shake, reached up to rub at his right eye. Couldn't quite seem to focus properly…

"Easy, boy," the voice said again. "Take it slow, we don't want you damaging anything."

Now Marco recognized that voice as belonging to the medic from before, although his tone was the opposite of concerned. It felt like Marco had heard him speak for hours, days, although he knew that couldn't be so. He'd just seen him for the first time a little while ago, he assumed after the battle for Trost was over. He hoped it was over, anyway. He hoped Eren had made it. He hoped they won, for once in history.

"Down here, come on."

He blinked and, slowly, angled his head downward. He felt a little satisfaction from finally locating the medic, a distracted oh, there he is, ringing out in his head.

Then he realized how far down the man was, that he was smaller than Marco's hand, which he had leaned on the ground not far in front of him.

Marco felt hot, but his blood ran suddenly cold.

Jean had no idea where the rest of his formation had ended up, but before long the pounding behind him grew quieter, the vibrations through the ground grew weaker. Eventually they stopped altogether, but still Jean ran. He couldn't let his guard down like the Scouting Legion had with Annie, assuming that it was too far away to be a threat. Titans were capable of great and terrible things, he couldn't slow down just yet.

He found himself in another overgrown orchard—pears, it looked like, but at this speed he couldn't be completely sure—and thanked Wall Rose for the added cover. Now he slowed down, giving his horse time to breathe and his heart time to settle back down.

Jean weighed his options. He couldn't fire off a flare and risk alerting the traitors of his location, but he had to reconnect with his group somehow. He had a compass in his pocket, he could use it to at least start back in the right direction. There was no telling when he would get there, if he even could on his own. He was alone out here, surrounded by trees covered in underripe fruit.

What a way to go.

A howl rang out far too close for comfort, and Jean almost fell off his horse. Everything happened at once—a man in a Military Police uniform, attended by another half dozen men wearing the same crest, burst into the orchard, all but tumbling over each other in an attempt to stop before colliding with Jean or his horse.

"What are you doing here?!" The man in front demanded. "Who the hell are you?"

All Jean could think for a second was that this man had hair and eyes like Mikasa—but black in color instead of blue. Maybe he was a closer relative to whatever ethnicity made Mikasa look so different from everyone else.

"I…you don't have horses, do you?" He looked over the small party in bewilderment. "How did you get out here without horses…?"

That howl rang out again and the man looked over his shoulder, black eyes looking somewhere past the treeline. "We have horses," he said quietly, holding perfectly still. He looked somewhere between terrified and elated. "They're on the other end of the orchard."

"Maybe you should get back to them and get out of here," Jean replied. "That sounded like a Titan." It reminded him of Annie, how she'd howled when the Commander had finally captured her in Titan form.

Now the man looked back at Jean, glanced up and down. "Oh. Scouting Legion. And obviously a new recruit, how lucky for me."

"What's lucky about—"

The other men moved in that instant, grabbing hold of him, pulling his feet from their stirrups and forcibly dragging him off his horse. Jean cried out, kicked and fought, demanded to know what they were doing, all to no avail. The man in the glasses took his horse, expertly swinging up into the saddle while Jean found himself brought to the edge of the trees and unceremoniously thrown out of his cover.

Marco screamed. He screamed and thrashed, swung at the man as he fled, hit the ground as he struggled to move after him. Everything hurt, nothing moved properly, like his body was a foreign machine he didn't know how to control. He couldn't crawl, much less stand, but he had figured out his arms and he used them to drag himself after the medic.

The trees were much closer than he'd been expecting; the entire group disappeared into them within a matter of seconds. Marco screamed again, dragged himself forward. He couldn't let him get away, not without explaining anything.

What in the name of Wall Sina had they done to him?

It took far too long to get close enough to the trees to see anything—the vision in his right eye had gone completely white and the back of it burned, like he was staring at the sun—and almost the same moment he did, someone burst out from the trees. Marco pushed himself up and raised one arm to swing down at the uniformed figure below him, too far below him, too small, what had they done to him, but froze when the man looked up.

Blond hair, sandy, sun-bleached brown except for the darker roots visible on the back of his head; his skin was darker than Marco remembered, tanned, like he'd spent a week outside; he was too far down to see the color of his eyes, but it didn't matter. Marco would recognize him from a mile away.

Why was Jean here?

Jean started up at the Titan, eyes wide, taking in the spectacle as the creature raised one massive arm in preparation to crush him—and then what he was seeing finally sunk in.

The build of the thing, its body structure, was far too properly proportioned for a normal Titan. It bore the same strange cutaways of flesh as he'd seen in Annie and Reiner, exposing red muscle tissue underneath; fissures and holes up either side of its face showing glimpses of bright white teeth and cheekbones. The face itself, however, was frighteningly familiar.

Deeper-set eyes, maybe, and the pupil on one of them appeared to be dilated so completely it made the eye itself look like a giant black marble set into the socket. There were grooves cut into his face spreading out from his eyelids, like Jean had seen on Ymir when they got her back, but the pattern was symmetrical. Too ordered, too human, not a normal Titan at all.

His voice threatened to break when he finally spoke.

"…Marco?"

It was impossible, Marco was dead. If he'd been like Eren or Annie or any of the rest then he would have regenerated, he wouldn't have died at all. What the hell was going on?

The Titan stared down at him for a long second more, then worked its—his—mouth for a long second. Jean had never heard of a Titan speaking before, but how was he supposed to know what they could and couldn't do? Nobody understood much about these monsters. Staring up at the giant wearing his best friend's face, he understood less by the second.

It took a minute, two, three, before the Titan's mouth pulled up into a smile and at last he spoke.

His voice was loud and deep and strange, and it did break. "Jean."