Missing In Action
By: Carol Molliniere
Summary: In which there is no goodbye, no closure, not even a half-eaten body to bury.
Disclaimer: I don't own Attack On Titan/Shingeki no Kyojin. Or the feels that come with it. But I do own this slight AU.
Rated for one curse word.
Two hundred soldiers, either dead or missing in action. Eight hundred soldiers, wounded. These were the statistics of the aftermath of the Battle of Trost. The Military Police had made these lists in order to keep record.
When Marco Bodt didn't show up for roll call after the battle, his friend Jean Kirschtein had grown concerned. Where was Marco? Was he with the injured? Jean didn't want to think about what he would do if he found out Marco was one of the soldiers that had been killed in action.
After 24 hours, Marco Bodt's name was on the list of soldiers that were MIA.
During the clean-up, Jean's eyes had darted from left and right, trying to avoid any faceless corpses (or corpses with faces that he knew). But his classmates from the 104th could tell he was really only searching for his best friend – a freckled face that needed bandaging; brown eyes to look up, smiling and laughing; or even a bloody body lying beside a house or a face that looked somewhat like Marco's in Titan puke – not that they would be able to identify him in that state. Something, anything to confirm in Jean's mind what had become of him.
Nothing showed up, even after the clean-up. And Jean grew restless. There was the tiny flicker of hope that the freckled boy was out there somewhere – but with that came the twinge of rationality that he could have died in the Battle of Trost and no one noticed. No one knew. And here Jean was, standing in front of the funeral pyre because he didn't know whether Marco was one of the faceless corpses or not.
That was when Jean resolved to join the Recon Corps – because he knew no one else deserved this. All this, because of mindless monsters that killed thousands of people and took a friend away from him. It was now foolish, Jean knew, for him to think that Marco was alive, that he had survived. Nobody knew what happened. No body was found.
Days passed. Weeks passed. Possibly even months, even years. Nothing showed up, except for the fact that Annie Leonhart had Marco's 3D Maneuver Gear (Marco would never give up something so crucial to his survival just like that, but things do tend to fall into play when you're fighting a fucking war). No brown eyes, no freckled face, no voice giving Jean words of encouragement. Not even after the war ended.
Marco Bodt's name was finally added to the list of soldiers killed in action.
And Jean Kirschtein didn't think it was fair, no matter what rationality told him.
(But, in this life they lived, was anything ever really fair?)