jean || peacekeeper || fin

It's quiet at night. Breeze shifting through the cracked glass of an old window and it is so cold that I cannot keep a blanket over my legs long enough to chase it away. Restless energy, nervous chattering of teeth with my fingers wrapped around the scalding base of a mug filled with coffee. And then it is lukewarm and my lips have not kissed the brim and my quiet breaths have chased her steam away. I don't pride myself on my heroism. No, I am not a man who will risk everything for nothing at all and I am not selfless in every way that society expects a hero to be. I cower in the face of death, avoid her at all costs and even when I am faced with her my eyes are sewn to the exit instead of her abyss.

I don't pride myself on my heroism, I pride myself on my common sense. For the purpose of life is to live and only a fool would throw away such a gift. Or, at least that's what I think to myself on nights when the breeze shifts through a cracked window and my fingers are wrapped around an ice cold mug.

Temper- hot like a palm pressed against the red coils of a stove. A tongue with pointed edges and not a chain to keep it in place. I'm certainly lacking the charm that most of my peers have an excess off- social graces and the knowledge when to keep your mouth shut because goddamn your pride this once, Jean Kirstein.

The sun is bright by the time I stand, settled in the sky surrounded by golden-orange currents. Nights like this are restless, work has taken an unforeseen toll upon a mind once troubled by nothing more than what to have for breakfast. I told my mom, one morning before I knew how the world worked, that all I needed was to live a happy life. Safety was the most fulfilling dream that a much younger me could even fathom.

I must have been smarter all those years ago.

Eighteen years old and with bright eyes that I thought could grow no duller, I enlisted to become a peacekeeper. My goal was simple- be top ten in the ranks and spend the rest of my life comfortable and happy and fat in the capitol. Be payed thousands for patrolling streets where nothing ever happened and live happily ever after. I'd buy my mom a house, bigger than the perpetual middle-class hellhole which was where I grew up.

What a pompous fool I was, thinking that my life of inaction somehow prepared me for every person I was doomed to face during training. Those with eyes that died years before, eyes that seemed so fragile even a breeze might shatter them. Those with tongues and tempers as hot as mine and fists that flew guided by puppet strings of pride and venom. I never really knew just how awful the world could be until those that it had fucked over became my comrades.

Still, I was dead set upon the life that I had fabricated all those years ago. That spoiled brat with no knowledge of how the world was supposed to work still rested somewhere in the pit of my stomach. After all, was that not the best option? I wasn't suicidal, not so hot headed that I thought I stood a chance in the survey corps against beasts genetically crafted to deliver painful deaths upon a silver platter.

I said as such, every chance I got. Boasting that I would live longer lives than those I had come to call my friends and, if you asked me why I don't think I could tell you. Perhaps I was scared. Perhaps I'm just an asshole. If I have learned anything it is that there is no simple answer to any simple question.

So I stand, closing navy blue blinds upon a rising sun. Black coffee crawls down the drain, disturbing the eerie silence that I had basked within most of the night. Hands brace the bright porcelain of a bathroom sink and in the mirror I face the man I have become. Once clean shaven, I've found that I haven't the time to keep that up. Perhaps I simply can't be bothered, as these long moments I spend introspecting would be much better spent cleaning myself up. But I don't.

When I turn away from the coffee-stained sink my hands feel heavy, its harder than expected to make my way toward the uniform laid out upon a bed that remains untouched. Nights like these are restless, after all.

I couldn't tell you what changed my mind.

Well, I could, but I couldn't tell you why.

What was so appealing about their fearful faces, about others putting their trust in me, in Jean of all people? About mutts gone rogue and watching a man I had trained with for months bleed out in front of me? To feel the hopelessness that came along with watching the life drain out of one's eyes and to feel the fear that comes with witnessing death wrap her hands around his neck. And what was so appealing about helping them? Saving them? Being looked up to instead of down upon? I don't know. There must have been something about it.

Because when I pull a white jacket across my shoulders and leave it there to cling to them lazily, it is an emblem of wings that it so proudly displays.

And it is not a simple question that remains, hung silently above my head as I duck out of the dark apartment and into even darker streets.

Why did I join the Survey Corps?

Because that is where I found my home.