It had only been merely a few days since the events that happened in Trost. The clean-up crews had found several bodies and several among hundreds of comrades were either dead or missing. The majority of which found dead had missing limbs and other parts of their bodies, such as their eyes and parts of their faces were missing.

Marco Bodt, a top of the class student of the 104th regiment, was found in this condition. He was the leader of squad 19 in the battle in Trost. Yet, during clean-up, the leader of the squad could have easily been mistaken for a simple person like Samuel or any other black-haired person in their regiment. If it hadn't been for the faded freckles that were almost completely worn away from the decomposing flesh of his comrade, Jean wouldn't have been able to recognize him in any way.

The young man had been found, partially decomposed at that point. His skin was peeling, turning an ashy gray color as the days wore on into the later hours of the evening. Once perfect skin had been marred, only half of his body positioned against the lonely walls of the abandoned buildings inside of Wall Rose. His chest was ripped in half, organs partially rotting on the ground next to the cadaver, only half of his face there, his eye ripped straight out of his eye-socket.

Jean could just imagine the pain that Marco had gone through in his final moments. Though, there were multiple different scenarios that played through his mind as he realized… nobody knew how Marco died. Well…someone should know, they probably weren't talking. Or maybe they were guilty… maybe they saw how he had died, but they didn't have the guts to go and help their dying comrade in his final moments.

How bad was it to die? All alone, by yourself as the blood drains through half of your body, how it feels to have half of your body ripped straight off of you in one single bite, his body flung up against the wall. How did it feel to realized that nobody would there to whisper sweet nothings into his ears as his bleeding body soon gave out. How did it feel to not be able to anyone he loves them, or be able to say the final goodbye, not be able to tell his family that he loved them.

But Marco would never know how Jean had felt about him. Jean had never told him how much he loved him. Marco would never know how much he dreamed of him, how much he wanted to kiss his soft lips each night before he fell asleep, he wouldn't know how much he wanted to hold him close to his chest and tell him all of the dreams that he had, how he wanted to just go to the interior and live there In harmony with him, get married.

It was near the end of the universe. When you were about to get killed by the universe's number one predator…what was there to lose? There were little to no "morals". They just made the happiest time out of the final years that they got to spend on that land.

And with Marco's death also died the dreams him and Jean had conveyed through the time of their friendship. They wanted to see the huge, vast, pool of water that tasted straight of salt. They wanted to see the fire that ran like water. They wanted to see the giant rocks that took several days to climb. They wanted to see sheets of ice, and see so many animals they had heard of before, that they had believed to be just a myth.

And now, just as ashes began to fall from the sky, Jean felt the soot in his hand, and held it straight to his heart as he fell to his knees, almost bawling, screaming into the skies.

"Marco…I can no longer tell which bones are yours anymore out of these ashes…"

And nobody even cared. Hardly even anyone noticed that Marco had died, vanished, straight off the face of the Earth. Nobody saw the freckled light of his day perish amongst the rubble of their falling society.

If it had been someone else, Marco would have been the first person to notice the loss of them. He would've cried, he would've felt so much sympathy.

He smiled weakly as he stared out at the ashes in his hand, and pressed his lips to the center of his palms, smearing the ashes with his lips as he whispered to himself, "I'm sorry…I'll be joining you soon…"

And with the hurt of dying, came the shear pain to feel love for someone you could never have.