tushanshu_logs | Open catch all introduction

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Open catch all introduction

Characters: Bertolt Hoover
Date: January 13th at first, then the second half of January for the rest
Location: He lives in the Water Sector, and is going to be mostly hiding out there unless someone drags him elsewhere. If you want him to be anywhere specific so your character can run into him, let me know!
Situation: Arrival, and then settling in. Wandering aimlessly around the city. Discovering technology.
Warnings/Rating: None presently.

The whole thing is very confusing. One moment he was sitting in a tree, listening as Reiner slipped again, forever drifting further and further away from him, and he with no idea how to get him back, no idea how to tether him back to himself. Then everything shifted, and for one horrible, confusing moment Bertolt thought he was turning into his warrior, letting the change take him, and terror spiked in his chest. That would be suicide here, the other titans would destroy him, even assuming he could transform now.

But he didn’t transform, and when the world stopped spinning and melting before his eyes, he was... somewhere else. He tried to listen as they explained things to him, but everything just sounded garbled and distorted, almost like they were speaking another language. One thing rang clear to him, though.

He is alone.

When they escort him out of the building, he balks a little at crossing the doorway. He’s a wanted criminal, a monster, a mass murderer that slaughters innocents, and going out in public, especially wearing the gear of another soldier around his hips, is like painting a target on his back.
 Except no one here cares. He gets an odd look or two, but most people just brush past him. Ignore him. Look through him like he’s not there.

And there’s comfort in that.

Still, he’s a wanted man, and Bertolt does the only thing that makes sense: he climbs. He’s hesitant to use the gas in his gear, not knowing for sure how full it is and not wanting to waste the time to check. He wonders, idly, if the soldier it used to belong to dissipated into steam when he pulled free from his warrior body, or if parts of him are still inside him. The thought makes him sick, and he needs to stop and concentrate on his breathing for a few moments.

He’s a monster. He deserves whatever happens to him.

When he reaches the roof, Bertolt settles on the edge of it, his knees tucked up under his chin and his arms wrapped around himself in a pathetic attempt at self-comfort. He watches the people moving down below, wondering if there’s anyone down there that knows him, that knows who he is, what he is. Wondering what they’d do to him if they knew what he’d done. Wondering why, when he spent most of his life trying to fade into the background, being alone and invisible now is so terrifying.

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Meanwhile, Annie doesn't give a fuck about whatever nonsense Bertolt is trying to convince Reiner of. Or any crazy ideas anyone might have gotten from her actions. With him on the couch and not on the floor, she silently pads off to get a glass of water. By the time she comes back, she's already shed her coat somewhere along the way as well.

She doesn't exactly offer it to him so much as she comes over to the couch and holds it out in his general direction while she waits for Reiner to bully him into taking it. There's an odd expression on her face the whole while, something somewhere between curious and concerned.

Bertolt doesn't need to be bullied into taking the water glass! He weakly swats Reiner's hand off his face--he has about as much strength right now as a newborn kitten--and then takes the glass with both hands and brings it to his lips. He drains all of it in one long pull, then gasps when he lowers the glass. Whoops, forgot to breathe.

He looks at Reiner dully. Obviously he's not going to get any sleep until his friend is done talking, but that doesn't mean he'll be giving the conversation his full attention, either.

Reiner folds his arms, leaning back for a moment in thought. It is not like he wants to keep Bertolt awake for longer than necessary, and to that purpose, he mentally goes through the available information he has, trying to figure out what he needed to tell him right now and what could wait until later.

"First off, we are not the only ones here. I haven't seen him yet but Annie met Armin. He knows what we are. He said he was going to keep our secret, but obviously we cannot trust him. Normally I'd say we should kill him, but Eren is here too. He knows me and Annie are here and what we are. He took it about as well as you can expect."

For a moment he rubs his forehead. "Obviously we cannot kill Armin with Eren here. If we kill Eren, Armin will give away our secret. If we kill both of them, we'll likely fall under suspicion. I'm certain a few people must have figured out we are from the same world from our gear and all. We outnumber them now, so I don't think we have to worry about them attacking us while we sleep, if they could even find us. So... I guess for now, we've got a truce, if you wanna call it that."

"It's a stalemate," Annie adds as she sits down on the couch, settling in the corner where her long-bodied teammate hadn't managed to take over. She doesn't take up much space, though it's a little strange that she chose to sit there of all places. (Reiner in these past days, is probably more used to this new behavior.) "There's no winning here."

Of all the people that they had to deal with, running into Armin and Eren were two incidents that had done a number on her. She's not looking at anything in particular as she leans on the arm of the couch.

Armin. Why did it have to be Armin? Of all the betrayals, all the pain they've caused, it was knowing he'd disappointed Armin that hurt the worst. Bertolt hangs his head, averting his eyes from them, but nods once to show that he's understood.

"I won't bother them," he says quietly, and pulls Reiner's coat a little closer around his shoulders.

Reiner's eyes flick from Bertolt to Annie, then back to the brunet once more. They had all grown too close, hadn't they? In reality, the mission had failed the moment they had allowed the members of the 104th to creep into the cracks of their hearts and all of this, the entire fall out, was just a result of that fatal misstep.

Reaching over, he rests one hand on top of Bertolt's hair, lightly brushing it aside. "I know you wouldn't." For a moment the melancholy silence stretches, and it is more than Reiner can handle. Breathing out on a sound, he ruffles Bertolt's hair, the gesture as forcefully energetic as his grin. "Ah, nevermind. Don't worry about anything for now, I'll figure something out. I promise. I won't let you two down again."

There's a soft sound from Annie, almost nothing more than a quick inhalation of breath. That desire not to fail even more than they already have is something that she does understand, at least. One thing, though, that she's sure they didn't feel was that strange, urgent want to see Eren and Armin again. It was a prickling under her skin, a buzzing need, and it made so little sense that it's not too hard to disregard even if she can't ignore it.

Maybe it's just because she wants it over instead of hanging over her head, but there's no way to break this stalemate. She lifts her head, the corners of her mouth turned downward, staring at Reiner before looking back to Bertolt.

Bertolt wishes he had something clever or witty to say right now, but he's so exhausted and overwhelmed that all he can do is nod again. He doesn't share Reiner's optimism, or Annie's silence. He'll do as he's told, and observe. He's good at observation, at seeing things other people don't, even if he rarely has the courage to act on them.

He does have one question, though, and he directs it to Annie, even as his head sags, without his knowledge into Reiner's palm and his eyelids droop to half-mast. "We're still warriors?"

It's a two-fold question, one he hopes she'll understand. Firstly, do they still have their shifting abilities? Being somewhere between, he's not sure if they do. Second, is Reiner still himself, or does he keep slipping?

It's entirely the wrong question to ask Annie. Maybe if it didn't come with so much heavy weight attached for her personally, she might have read the right meaning into it. Instead, it strikes her as such a suddenly, inexplicably terrible question to ask her of all people.

A laugh escapes her before she can clamp down on the feeling that kept bubbling up within her. It's nothing like those flat, dry soft barks of derisive laughter that she made rarely when something really got her going. No, it's almost uncharacteristically giddy instead, but thankfully brief. "For all it does us when there's nothing left to fight for. We can't call ourselves that anymore. We have no right."

Even she looks shocked by her outburst when she's through. Her pale eyes are wide as she looks over at the other two shifters, and her lips part as if to say something more, but the words just aren't there.

At the outburst, Reiner's attention goes from Bertolt to Annie, mouth set in a line and his brows furrowing. It's not the first one of these outbursts he has witnessed, and he has a feeling it won't be the last one. What they had done is weighing heavily on her, too heavily, but for him to judge her for that would be an unfortunate tale of kettles and pots. At least she had always remembered who she was.

"Annie." His voice is soft, steady because he knows she needs him to be that right now. Which says all it does about the kind of situation they are in when they need the delusional guy to be the rock, but it is a role he still readily assumes. It's easier when he can shove his own guilt and inability down to the pit of his stomach to let it fester, so he can instead focus on theirs.

Shifting slightly, he reaches out, resting his hand on top of her head. "You're right, we don't. But we've already done too many things we didn't have a right to, stopping now won't make a difference." If only it did. If he could honestly convince himself that calling off their mission, calling it quits, could even come close to putting some right to what they had done, he would've done it. But it would not undo the thousands that had already died at their hands. It would not make the titans in the walls disappear, or the coordinate, or the needs of their people. They are still warriors, as unworthy as they are of that name, and warriors carry out their duties to the bitter (and it is oh so bitter) end.

Edited 2014-01-25 15:24 (UTC)

Bertolt shifts when Reiner does, so tired he's almost boneless, his eyes still wide from Annie's outburst. All right then, he knows at least a little of what he needs to know. They can still transform if they need to, and Reiner, at least now, is still aware of who and want he is.

He reaches out too, his hand only shaking a little, and touches Annie's knee with his fingertips. "We fight for each other." He looks at both of them, one at a time. "We've always fought for each other. There's no reason to stop now."

They're touching her.

Reiner invaded her space frequently enough, in these days since they arrived. He did it in strange ways, like how he placed his hand on her head as if she might not lash out at him. Sometimes she didn't, though other times she reacted immediately without thinking. They're probably lucky that she's too overtaxed right in that moment to respond properly, instead she's just trying to make sense of what is happening right then.

Bertolt didn't reach out to people. No, he might have lingered near her more than he should have when they were undercover or watched her, but he didn't reach out. Really, he didn't like touching anyone, she thinks.

"I never fought for anyone," she admits, quiet but still too thoroughly well-trained to be unashamed of at least that one facet of her understanding of her actions. It wasn't necessarily true, but she couldn't see it another way.

"Even if you didn't fight with me and Bertl, you fought for our home, didn't you? We all did. We're just a regular trio of heroes." His mouth quirks oddly, the words feeling almost like venom in his mouth. Heroes. That is what they had been told they would be when they set out. Their actions would be for the good of everyone. Reiner had believed it back then, but he wasn't that naive anymore. They weren't heroes. They were barely even warriors.

Annie's right, Bertolt doesn't like touching other people, or being touched himself, with Reiner being the only exception to the rule. One of the legacies of their hometown, besides the ability to grow fifty eight meters all at once and crushing guilt, is his hesitancy and downright reluctance towards physical contact. But she'd helped him when he was almost falling, and it hadn't hurt, or left a sick, ugly feeling in the pit of his stomach, so he returned the favor when he thought she needed it.

It's easy to forget that Bertolt is there sometimes; he has a tendency to fade into the background, a skill he's cultivated and practiced over the years. However, he's always watching, keeping quiet tabs on everything, and even in the depths of his exhaustion, he can tell things are getting too intense in here. Something needs to defuse the situation, before it got too painful for all of them… it might already be too painful for Annie, but there's nothing he can do to help her now, except stop it from getting worse.

He sighs, quietly, and starts slithering forward, like he's going to fall right off the couch. It's easy, once he gets started and gravity claims him, and if they don't catch him, he's going to face-plant right on the floor, and he won't even care.

"What I fought for--" Is something that's apparently not going to be revealed right that moment because, wait, was Bertolt passing out? There's an instant when she almost lets him fall, but she gets past it almost immediately.

She moves lightning quick, ducking forward and hauling to right him. He's got a good fifty or sixty pounds on her, she's certain, and it's not easy to manage when he goes all deadweight like that on her. Next time he's inconvenient, she resolves, he's breaking his face on the floor and she won't care.

Bertolt suddenly pitching forward does good to distract him from the conversation they were having. He suddenly doesn't care at all what Annie fought for, not when he's got Bertolt heading for the ground at an alarming rate.

Annie gets to him first, but Reiner isn't far behind. He grabs a hold of the straps of Bertolt's gear to keep him upright, before shifting forward so he can support him with his shoulder, sliding his arm around his back. "Nevermind, we'll talk about this some other time." That is directed at Annie, but even as he says it, his attention is squarely on Bertolt. His voice goes softer as he addresses him, fondness mixing with worry mixing with exasperation. "Geeze, you should've said something if you were that tired." His arm slides underneath Bertolt's legs as he shifts slightly. "Can you hold on? I'll take you to bed."

Bertolt might have a few inches on him, but Reiner is confident he can still carry him. Bertolt is his best friend, he'll never be too heavy for him.

Ah, good, his ploy was successful. Bertolt winces a little as unfamiliar straps, broken in in the wrong places, adjusted for someone else's body, cut into his chest and sides as they yank on them, but it doesn't last long. He lets his head loll against Reiner's shoulder, and now that he's given in to his exhaustion, it's hard to imagine a time when he wasn't this tired. He nods, faintly, and slings one arm around Reiner's neck. They've done this before; he knows how to hold on.

Seems like all he ever does is hold on to Reiner.

She doesn't even respond to Reiner as he takes him, looking away silently at some point on a far wall. There's nothing else to say now that he was going to be able to get Bertolt off to bed, and she'd probably not speak another word for the rest of the day.

Really, it might be a few days before she's interacting with them properly again.

Annie doesn't even factor into his thoughts anymore, not right now. With a soft grunt, Reiner rises to his feet, lifting Bertolt off the couch, carrying him off to the bedroom. Heavy though he is, Bertolt's weight is almost comforting. Now that he is here, Reiner can look out for him, can keep him safe.

Pushing open the door to the bedroom with his shoulder, he carefully deposits Bertolt on the bed. His hand is on the strap covering his chest before Bertolt can lay down though, and his expression is almost apologetic. "Sorry, let me take those off first."

Partially because he knows Bertolt will sleep easier without the gear digging into his skin, and partially because they only have three sets. The straps and the harness are easier to replace should it come to that, but that is no excuse for being wasteful with things.

Kneeling down in front of Bertolt, Reiner starts with the buckle across his chest, tugging it loose. "I'm glad you're here."

Edited 2014-01-26 16:35 (UTC)

Bertolt looks over Reiner's shoulder as he carries him, his dark eyes watching Annie as they leave the room.

He stays sitting up, nodding and holding still as Reiner starts to get the gear off him. He never wants to wear it again, all things told; the dark leather looks stained with blood and reeks of death. "I'm glad too," he answers quietly, looking at his knees with half-lidded eyes.

That is likely not a luxury they can afford. They can't use their titan forms here, not without calling too much attention to themselves. The 3DMG is all they had to defend themselves.

But Reiner will make it up to him. He'll clean it for him. Or something.

His hands travel down Bertolt's body, loosening straps and buckles as he goes. The air seems almost tense between them and it is that which has Reiner making the next comment, voice pitched low as if he doesn't want his words to carry beyond this bedroom. "Tell you what though, I think you really got a shot with Annie. She missed you a lot too. And did you see the way she reacted to you?"

Reiner Braun, shipper at work.

That comment gets through the exhaustion fog, and Bertolt glances up at Reiner, his expression stricken. Not because what Reiner said is so awful, or even untrue, but because of what it implies. He looks back down quickly though, hopefully before Reiner could see the look on his face.

"And you'll marry Christa." He's too tired right now; he can't try to lure Reiner back into himself. Besides, does it really matter here? If he wants to play at being a soldier, does it make a difference? If a titan kicks in a wall around a deserted city, does anyone want to kill him?

He shakes his head, tugging the last few straps and buckles loose, pulling Bertolt out of his gear. Rising, he gives him a glance. "Naw. Christa is cute but you know she isn't my type." It is strange. When he is out of his mind, he can look at her and really want to marry her, but when he remembers who he is, he knows it is impossible. Not just because he knows she deserves better than a murderer, but mainly because she is missing some very important assets where he is concerned.

Reaching down, he ruffles Bertolt's hair, making it stick out ridiculously. "Don't worry, I'm still here. I'm not gonna slip away like that again." He is sounding far more confident than he really feels. He had never noticed before, would he be able to notice it here if it would happen? Still, what Bertolt needs now is him being confident, not him being broken.

"Come on, just kick off your shoes and go to sleep. Me and Annie will be here when you wake up."

Edited 2014-01-28 14:29 (UTC)

Bertolt nods when Reiner messes with his hair, not even caring at how silly it must look when it's sticking up in all directions. For now, at least, Reiner is here and himself, because he only wants to marry Christa when he's lost. When he remembers who he is, it's okay. He knows Reiner is likely to fall away from them again, that being what they are is too much for him sometimes, but for now, he'll have to depend on Reiner to remember himself, because he simply has no reserves of energy left.

Without another word, Bertolt collapses backwards on the bed. He reaches for Reiner as he's falling, but his fingertips only brush against Reiner's sleeves before he's out of reach. Bertolt is asleep almost before his head hits the pillow, his legs still dangling off the side of the bed and his shoes still on.

Reiner's mouth twitches, helplessly fond as he watches Bertolt. Useless, he swears. Crouching down, he tugs off Bertolt's shoes, not even bothering to try and not wake him. With how Bertolt is right now, he's pretty sure he could shift into a titan and break down half the district before Bertolt would even wake up. Once he has both his shoes off, he pulls both of Bertolt's stupidly long legs into the bed, tugging the blanket over him. For a moment he brushes his hand through Bertolt's messy hair, watching him sleep, before he pulls back, slipping out of the room. For now, Bertolt just needs his sleep. That's the most important thing for now. They can figure out what to do later.

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