"Easy on, Jean" Marco tells his friend as he rests a hand on his shoulder, the fabric of his slightly sullied blue shirt feeling somewhat grainy under Marco's calloused fingers. Marco wonders how long Jean has owned that shirt - by the feel of it, a pretty long time. He bets to himself that it reeks of Jean's fancy French cologne even more than the young man himself. Marco wonders how Jean feels about the droplets of Eren's blood clinging to the breast. He daren't ask.
Jean tutts, knocking back another large gulp of the lager in the pitcher before him. "Don't patronise me, Marco s...sparco" Jean snorts at what he probably quite drunkenly mistakes for wit.
Marco can't help but smile, glancing briefly at his own untouched pitcher and wondering if he should drink it. Jean sure does seem happier with a few pints in him.
"I'm not patronising you." Marco argues with an entirely put-on long suffering sigh.
Jean catches Marco watching his face out of the corner of his eye as he begins to hum absently to the music playing around them - some old catchy tune he'd ordinarily be ashamed of knowing all the lyrics to.
He smiles at Marco slyly, eyes watching the tips of his friends ears pinken under his scrutiny.
"Are you checking me out?" Jean asks him. Marco's freckles disappear under a red haze that forms across his skin. Before the boy can offer a stuttered denial, Jean adds with a mischievous laugh; "It's okay if you are - I look damn fine, right?" When Marco says nothing, Jean glances down at his bandaged fingers and a melancholy briefly takes him. "Mostly, anyway."
Marco decides that yes, he is going to drink that lager.
A sharp hiss of scraping metal can be heard as the little blue car misjudges the height of the speed-bumps below it.
"Tell me why we let Connie drive?" Ymir moans from the backseat where her organs were being crushed underneath Annie's elbow.
Connie's teeth grit together as tightly as his jaw would allow.
"Because it's my damn car?" His voice comes out like the voice of a man in the throes of a deep, long lasting constipation.
"You can't even keep your feet on the pedals and look over the steering wheel at the same time." Ymir adds coyly.
Connie leans over his shoulder to glare wickedly at her over Christa's head.
"Yes I can! You wanna go, sk-"
"EYES ON THE ROAD!" shrieks Jean from beside him.
A bit slow on the uptake, Connie turns back just in time to avoid careening off the road as he tugs hard on the wheel to make the sharp bend, the inhabitants of the car (minus Christa, Annie and Reiner, who were asleep) squealing like stuck pigs.
The remaining three passengers quieten as Connie pulls into a layby.
"You could have killed all of us, you idiot!" Ymir hisses. Connie could see her in the rear-view mirror checking Christa's head for imaginary injuries. "Maybe I should drive" Jean suggests as he finally manages to slow his breathing to an almost rate.
Connie sighs in defeat. "Yeah, you're probably right. But who will read the map?"
"Any fucking moron can read a map" Ymir grunts from behind him.
Connie begins to reply 'I can't read a map.' But good judgement stills his tongue in the nick of time.
"You do it then, bitch."
Ymir snorts derisively. "Christa is in the way." She retorts, carding her fingers through the silken hair of the sleeping girl sitting in her lap.
"Oh for fucks sake!" Reiner grunts, apparently awoken by their screams. Reiner snatches the map out of Jean's unsuspecting hands. "I'll read it! Let's just go."
"Right." Connie and Jean agree as they get out of the car into the sleek sheets of summer rain to change seats.
Jean brushes along the bench to sweep away the crumbs gathering around the wood in his snack's wake. "-And so Connie and I swapped seats and that gave Ymir the perfect reach to poke him in the back of the head for the rest of the ride. I'm telling you Marco, it was hell getting here. And now Eren's just being a dick about everything and I just…" Jean reaches out with finger claws to the heavens and screeches in a demonstration of fury. "Why did we even come here?"
Marco sighs and bends down his head to stare at the wet marks left from where he'd rested his long-since finished drink, without a coaster, on the bench.
Going on a trip to celebrate their completion of high school had been the illegitimate brainchild of Marco and Christa, with Annie chipping in the location of her 'old people's' summer home in a desolate village in the south of Germany. That meant that if Jean was unhappy, it was his fault by proxy.
Catching Marco's uncharacteristic misery, Jean clapped his friend on the back once with a firm crack.
"Aw Marco come on you handsome devil you...hehe, you know I don't mean it like thaaaat" the young man slurred, leaning heavily onto his friend's back while under the false pretence that it qualified as an affectionate gesture rather than one of the creepy kind. Marco blushed again anyway. "The hanging out together part is super cool - sometimes I just think it'd be better without Eren lecturing me about morality 'n' stuff, y'know? That fucker is no saint himself, y'know? "
Marco did know. He had heard a rumour that Eren had actually killed two other people. Marco doubts its true - but it still stood that Eren had a very complex moral code that Marco couldn't quite wrap his head around. Marco was of the opinion that simply being nice to people was generally the way forward. People are less likely to punch your lights out if the like you, after all.
Marco watches with a little smile as Jean sits back on his stool again, grinning fiendishly. He leans forward with his elbows on the bench and raises his lightly bandaged hand to call over the barman to ask for another round.
When their drinks arrive neither boy hesitates to take a large gulp.
"Yeah, and so there's my thing and stuff. How was your ride here?"
Marco scratches his neck with an embarrassed smile.
"It was okay, I guess?"
Jean tilts his two-tone head. "You guess?"
"I slept through it."
Jean nearly knocks his drink off the bench when he suddenly gestures out wildly with both arms. Marco wobbles a little on his stool for a while after the outburst.
"I'm gonna sing a song!" Declared Jean.
Marco nearly spits out his drink. "What?!"
Jean clambers up into a crouched position on his stool, unsteadily straightening his athletic legs until he was standing ramrod straight on the barstool.
"Right here." He adds, pointing at his feet. "Right now."
Marco slaps his face with his hand and proceeds to leave it there as something to hide his embarrassment behind.
"C'mon Jean, haven't you had enough now?" He whines.
"Nup!" Jean proclaims, wobbling a little.
"Get down from there, idiot!" A stranger's voice is ignored by Jean, who throws out his arms wildly again.
"I am the tallest person in this bar!" Jean shrieks.
"That's because Bertl's not here" Marco mutters, returning to his drink while watching his friend carefully. This could only end badly, after all.
"Nuh uh. I think from here I'm taller than him." Jean disagrees, shaking his head.
Marco sees how serious Jean is, but it makes him laugh anyway. "What if Bertholdt was also standing on a stool?"
Jean tips his head back to stare at the ceiling. "He'd probably crack 'is scull on the-tha-the-the roof" Jean says as he wobbles precariously on his perch.
Marco seems to see it happening before Jean does. Jean shifts his weight and suddenly the stool is sliding out from under his big feet. Marco sees his friend's expression shift from one of glee to abject horror and he doesn't even have to think about his next actions. They are quite simply reflex. Marco doesn't plan stretching out his hands to catch Jean's falling frame - but before he knows it, there he is. Jean, reeking of French cologne and German beer and slightly sprayed with the blood from a German-Turk teen's nose. Jean, looking up at him with surprised brown eyes. Jean, in his rough skinned, gentle hands.
The pub had gone silent aside from the music and Marco's heavy breathing. And then Jean speaks.
"My hero!" His voice is breathy and soft, and when he smiles up at him, Marco hears his own breath hitch.
Neither of them is sure who kissed who.
All Marco was sure of is Jean's hands caressing each side of his face. His own hands dropping from Jean's waist to his hips, and their intermingled breath.
All Jean was sure of is how good it felt.
They separate at the sound of someone clearing his throat, jerking apart with wild eyes and swollen lips.
Looking up, the young men discover that they are surrounded by disapproving glares and tightly folded arms or clenched fists.
While Jean seems somewhat ignorant (or perhaps simply apathetic) to the pub dweller's distaste, Marco's face visibly crumples. He gives the pub patrons a defiant glance before grabbing Jean by the arm and wrapping it around his shoulders.
"Whoa." Jean says at last.
"C'mon. We shouldn't surround ourselves with this kind of company." Marco says, trying to sound angry, but Jean could tell his heart wasn't in it.
"I can walk y'know." Jean groans as Marco presses forward through the crowd toward the door, Jean in tow.
"I know. Better to have a crutch though, right?" Marco's voice sounds strained.
"Are you taking me to bed?" Jean asks as Marco pushes open the door. "Because I'd be so so down for that."
The night air is surprisingly cold for summer, the darkness lit only by a smattering of fireflies dancing through the sky.
Marco's centre of gravity keeps shifting, swaying both boys like they were sailing across unsteady seas and not following a simple gravelly path on foot.
"No, Jean, I'm not taking you to bed." Marco groans, like he really wants to say yes but is still sober enough to know he shouldn't. Just. It wouldn't be particularly plausible anyway, considering the fact they need to share a room with the other boys (minus Connie, who decided to sleep on the couch to avoid the arguments that were likely to ensue between them all).
"Why not? Don't you-" Jean's drunken babble was interrupted by Marco's foot catching on something out of nowhere, sending the duo tumbling into the hard stone of the path.
Marco has to shove the dead weight of Jean from his chest to sit up and rub his skinned elbow.
"Ack, what the hell?" He says, eyes drifting away from the scraped appendage toward whatever had tripped him.
Jean just buried his face in the crook of his own arm with a groan.
When the realisation of what he was looking at set in, Marco's blood ran cold. Without a glance, he shook the other boy's shoulder.
"Jean, look."
The first thing the drunken boy's eyes met was the pool of blood slowly reaching out toward him.