#bertday extravaganza

[massensterben-a]

@austerulous​ said:                   She went when she knew she wouldn’t find him there. Still it felt like trespassing, slipping into the study that smelt of smoke, of the saline tang of a restless body. Bertholdt was present even in his absence, in the stack of unmarked papers at his desk, the heavy coat that hung from his chair. Something girlish and daring in Annie itched to wear it, to be swamped by its weight, to imagine she was something small and precious hidden in his pocket. A foolish, self-indulgent notion.

Attention returning to the task at hand, she set down a chipped plate, and removed the faded tea towel that had shrouded it. Circles of shortbread formed islands of pale gold on a sea of sage green, their faces glittering subtly with sugar crystals and delicate speckles of lavender blossoms. A prickle of doubt twisted in her gut – did Bertholdt even like floral flavours?

Too late now. Always too late.

Luckily there was another gift to make up for any potential shortfall. A bottle of something burning and inebriating. Annie had been assured it was the ‘good stuff’ even if it all looked like concentrated piss to her.

There had been something else she thought of giving him, a battered tin that was home to a contingent of confiscated cigarettes plucked from his lips, those that had not been fated to find themselves crushed beneath her disapproving heel. The thought of returning this contraband to Bertholdt made her stomach clench. Another time, perhaps, if she ever learned to harden herself to his self-harm.

Stepping away from the desk that dominated this space, she had to concede this was a terribly mismatched gift, one that couldn’t begin to reflect the depth of her feelings. So Annie did what she did best – she disappeared. The draught from the door caught but did not dislodge the folded piece of parchment tucked beneath the bottle, graced with a flowing script:

Happy birthday Bertholdt. 

Don’t drink it all at once. I’ll know if you do.

Yours,  Annie

He folds the paper over and over. The pad of his thumb slides along the crease line, feels for the gentle fraying of cheap fiber. It feels pretty and damp in his grasp, his incessant toying, his restless fidgeting with it. What is a harmless note supposed to do in the face of such obsession? Bertholdt goes over it again and again, the paper, the letters engraved upon in it dark ink: 

Yours, yours, yours. 

The clutter of his desk pales in comparison. Among the documents, the tests to grade, the schedules to plan, there sits a strange offering: a votive sacrifice composed of bread and liquor, body and blood. It makes of his desk an estranged altar, him the absent priest. And what deity presides over the proceedings? None he cares for. Bertholdt thinks she would’ve rather given up the food to the flames, spiting him by turning everything into smoke. Like he does, like he prefers it. But Annie is not so forward, not so backhanded, with a ring on the fourth finger, bruising his cheekbone. No, Annie has turned herself into steam, has fled out of the window, perhaps. She’s left him her traces to sniff after like a bloodhound. 

Bertholdt glances out through the dusty glass, down into the compound, where the children run and fight and compete for a chance to sink their teeth into him first. No chance. Annie has always had such a habit of slipping out of view. He wishes she had stayed. He wishes she put her cold lips to his ear and whisper in his ear: yours. An unbidden, presumptuous shiver races down Bertholdt’s long spine. It takes a while. He picks up the bottle, looks it over. 

No drinking while on duty, the rules are very clear. But the bottle’s slender neck beckons. That has nothing to do with the date. It isn’t an occasion he thinks to honor, not even with showy disobedience. To think of the passage of time twists his stomach, with dread and delight in equal measure. He is nauseous with anticipation, with the flight towards the finish line. Until then, however, he will rummage through his cupboard for a mug, some discarded element of stilted domesticity. He finds one, chipped and dust-rimmed, and cleans it against his pantleg. 

She should have stayed. He could have poured for her. They are all stuck here, again stuck together, again with no way out. But time has passed, as Annie silently reminds him. Time has passed, and he is no longer the boy that abandoned her, that had to tear through walls and blood and gore to pay for his negligence. He is not that child that froze and wept by the tree. He cannot be. Bertholdt has learned his lesson. He’s made damn sure of it. No matter, because he only pours for himself. No matter, because Annie still isn’t here. 

He wonders if she baked the bread herself. That’s what he imagines; dough molded by her capable, violent hands, deft and precise. It warms the hollow of his chest, to envision her swept up in such a process, something so pure and simple, meditative like prayer. He wishes she can have that, a moment’s peace between two volleys of artillery. Selfish, of course, to primp and preen at the thought of being the reason for her domestic impulse. It has something archaic to it that he finds almost embarrassing. He isn’t that special, has never made that cut, and she probably didn’t even bake it herself. He eats a bite, lets the sweet texture dissolve on his tongue, and he toasts her absence with the golden liquor in his coffee mug.

“To your health, Annie.” 

[massensterben-a]

@worstheir said​:                   She has no coin to her name, nothing to gift her friends all she would wish on their birthdays. What she could offer would likely make them laugh in dismissal of her meek attempt at kindness. Krista was nothing if not kind though and perhaps that fact would be enough... She settles beside the boy with a cheerful grin, placing a bright red apple before him on the table. She'd begged Ymir to sneak into the cellar with her, digging through barrels until she found the loveliest fruit fit to be gifted.

 'Happy Birthday Bertholdt!' Her eyes crinkle at each corner with barely contained delight, shaded only lightly with vulnerability as her voice grows soft 'I hope this is okay... I tried to find one without any bruises.  I would have liked to get you a pastry from the bakery in the city, maybe next year I can!'

If he had any say in the matter, he would never have let it slip in the first place. Birthdays are a terribly dull affair. Forced attention, forced consideration. The last occasion he enjoyed was his coming of age celebration back home. He was ten years old, then, the last of the pack to be welcomed into boyhood. Everything had seemed eternal, with a self-made cake, sitting at the Galliards’ dinner table. Nothing is eternal. He is far from home, far from that dinner table, and he is dying one year at a time. And he deserves it.

This is the first winter he spends in the barracks. Snow flurries and packs the windows. It has lost its luster, its novelty. He has grown accustomed to the early onset of dusk and the biting wind that rolls down from the mountain. It is warmer now, here, than it was in the refugee camp. Bertholdt, now thirteen years old, has become a veteran in the frugality this living bestows. He doesn’t look up when a storm beats down their doors. He doesn’t look down when too-thin soup is heaped into his shallow bowl. 

He looks up, however, when Krista floats over to him, makes herself as small and unobtrusive even as she sets down a treat on his half-finished tray. Bertholdt blinks owlishly at the fruit, obscenely red, shiny wax winking back at him. His mouth slackens in an attempt to gather his wits, design some phrase to politely decline her efforts. Happy birthday, she singsongs, round face alight with sweetness. He can’t look at her for long before his reluctance crumbles.

“Thanks, but it’s fine.” He manages. “Really, that’s not necessary. It’s—” The boy hurries to pick up the apple, to show his appreciation for her effort. The last thing he wants is for her to feel like he doesn’t value her present, the trouble she went through. “It’s more than okay. I didn’t expect anything anyway, so... It must’ve been difficult to get an apple this late in the year. We can share it if you want.”

[massensterben-a]

@gepanzrt​ said:                              "It isn't much." That is what prefaces the reveal of the item he clutches in the grasp of his remaining hand, the words stilted and low in the quiet of the threadbare tent. Reiner has it cradled against his chest the way one might hold a newborn kitten, as if there is enough heat in the core of him that he can keep warm this meager gift. "Annie did most of the work, mind you. I just..." his voice trails off uselessly, his shoulders shrugging beneath his dusty coat. "She did most of the work."

It is a tin can. There is a dent in its side that Reiner's hand encases, some rust on the bottom that could not be chipped away. It is so dingy, so meager and sad, that it would not be worth consideration were it not for what is contained within it.A dense, white loaf fills the canister, blossoms over the tattered rim of it. It is more akin to bread than to the spongy sweetness of a cake, but he and Annie had done their best with what little could be scrounged up. An old sardine tin, of all things — Reiner had scrubbed it mercilessly, clutched between his knees as his surviving hand attempted to diligently wipe away all traces of brine and salt. He hopes, with a desperation he has not felt in some time, that it worked.

Annie had gathered most of the ingredients, had been the one to measure their scant traces of flour, their dirty water, the pinches of sugar — Reiner, crippled and useless as he is, had insisted on being the one to watch over the can they had wedged into the red-hot coals, keeping track of its progress as the "cake" cooked and rose. What sits atop it was a group effort: a square of a scantily rationed chocolate bar, melted and drizzled over the top of the bread as a makeshift frosting.

Bertholdt never should have seen twenty-four. But he has, and even in this barren, frozen hellscape, Reiner is thankful to have him here.He hands the tin over to the younger man, pulling a worn and tattered matchbox from the pocket of his threadbare jacket. They aren't candles, but a match will do in a pinch. He will need help to light it, though. Reiner is still growing used to navigating his severed limb.

"We should wait for Annie, though. She'll want to be here."

He waited, that day three years ago. In some way, he is waiting still. There is no coming back from death’s rejection. For hours, he stood at the mouth of their tarpaulin den and watched the sun rise over the plains. Nothing special there. Everything is plain now. But Bertholdt stood there, let the burning red of the dawn wash the sky in its usual inferno. It was a good sky to die under. Fitting. He thought, if his heart gives out today, then he would be at peace with it. That was the bargain he struck thirteen years ago, then. He sort of hoped for it, of course he did. 

After his monster had been so cruelly scraped out of his nape, and it rendered him ordinary, expendable, useless and small and cold, he mourned so loudly, he kept his pack mates awake at night. He howled and grieved, he clawed at his hands, from pinpricks to glass shards. No blood tax could return what was killed in him, this alien creature that filled his body and kept him upright when all human tissue failed. Perhaps he thought that at least in its cruelty it would return, that while it would never again bestow its horror, it would at least close its red hand over him to take him away, sweep him off the board at last. He paid for thirteen years. He has no right to a single hour more. 

Bertholdt turns twenty-four today. He sits with that knowledge and despises it. Curse that woman, the tinkerer, the thinker, who, though nameless before she died, resurrected time for them. She introduced them to months and days and the turn of the years. Even in utter desolation, someone must keep count. Good for what little farming they can do, good for writing the chronicles that some more lofty-minded people have begun to keep. The poisonous side effect is knowing one’s own age. What should be more important is how damn cold it is. No one should bother with the insignificant anniversary of an old world terror. 

But he watches Reiner, grizzled and weathered, lumber over to him where he ties his cracked leather boots, and he knows what happens next. Already, Bertholdt’s chest constricts with dread and grief. The smallest shake of his head, silent and futile, is his attempted resistance. Bertholdt is so quiet, mute the way the cripples are, with their tongue cut out by all the pain that crawled into their mouth in childhood. His begging is silent, half-hearted but earnest. Whatever he has left in terms of sentiment, it petrifies and turns to charcoal under the weight of Reiner’s soft approach. He knows, as he stares up at his one-armed brother, what happens next, what innocent impulse burrows forth within him every year around this time. 

It is this simple wriggling of humanity that Bertholdt cannot stomach. The smallness of it arrests him, slices him up like a razor. Reiner is merciless in his pursuit of love. He has always been the stubborn sort, and Bertholdt has always been so very tired. He sits, foundations crumbling, as Reiner presents him with a small tin. It is rusty and dinged up, scavenged, no doubt, from a landfill or from the ruins of some civilization or other. The tin isn’t the point. Reiner makes that clear. There is something inside. Bertholdt’s knee shakes something awful as he strains to take the little pastry from his hand. Some dough, halfway risen, nondescript, and a piece of a limp, blooming chocolate bar crumbled over it to top it off. The reference is clear, physical: a birthday cake. Except there is no cake, so they make do. They play pretend. Next year it’ll be made of mud, my dear.

Reiner assures him that Annie did the baking of it, the mixing, the sitting by the fire. Reiner assures him he is only the messenger. But Bertholdt cannot see that. He sees him here, one third of his soul, looming with heavy shoulders and a sewn up sleeve, over the meager offering. Bertholdt holds the tin in his too-large grip, careful, nervous, as if a wrong move might bruise the pasty. He hears the whisper behind the gesture: This is what I want to give you. I want you to eat. There is nothing as humbling as that. It slips into Bertholdt’s ear like poison, aches through his cranium until it garrotes him where the throat is softest. The simplest protest against death can shatter it. 

Bertholdt is staring at the tin, at the small cake-like thing inside of it, at the attempt at festivity when Reiner produces matches. Let’s make believe, let’s make believe. Bertholdt is glad that they will wait for Annie, then. He cannot see the matchstick for how the world turns blurry around him. Bertholdt can’t speak for how his teeth ache with sorrow. He is sorry. He is sorry to be so loved and so without appetite. 

That is what the world amounts to now: Reiner Braun standing over him as his heart breaks, unable to light a match in the dark. Warm water drips into Bertholdt’s beard, salts the soil of his cheeks. He doesn’t speak, but he nods. You cannot think about the years you’ve stolen when someone else is standing by, and so glad to see you here that they make something from scratch for you. Creation has always been Bertholdt’s antithesis. He genuflects before it on instinct. There is nothing to argue against in a cake. 

Let’s wait for Annie, then.

[massensterben-a]

@gepanzrt​ said:                                               Reiner feels the creases around his eyes deepen, the skin of his brow bunching together as he grimaces down at the board. A very sorry display on his part, quite frankly; Bertholdt retains most of his pieces, miniature sentinels of horses and towers and expendable foot soldiers diligently guarding his queen. Reiner's own side of the board looks akin to a massacre. His companion, cool as can be, looks with disinterest down upon his victory, calmly smoking a cigarette. Smug bastard, Reiner thinks fondly.

"I let you win, y'know," the older man lies as he gathers up the pieces, begins to reset the board. He thinks that Bertholdt will understand it for the toothless banter that it is, will remember that Reiner has always been too brash, too short-sighted, to often play the victor. Bertholdt's prowess has only sharpened with age; if anything, there is a newfound edge to his strategy that puts the officer at an even greater disadvantage. Not that he minds. Not at all — Reiner loves to lose to him, because it means that he is here, seated across the table from him, unshaven and swallowing fumes. "You being a sore loser and all— I don't want to cause a commotion.”

The day has passed with little fanfare, the way his companion prefers it. No Happy Birthday, no doting attention. They proceed with their lives as normal. When Reiner manages to prepare the younger man's favorite dish for supper, it is purely coincidental; when Reiner pulls a carved and lacquered chessboard from a box tucked away in the corner, he pretends as if they have owned it forever, that it has inhabited this space with them for months and was not only just purchased the other day for the "non"-occasion of this wintry birthday.

They are on their second — or is it their third? — bottle of wine, and there is enough left for one more round. Reiner tops off their glasses, cheeks flushed and hair tousled as he leans forward against the table. "Another match? Loser cleans the ashtrays for the rest of the month," he says, knowing full well that it will be himself who is relegated to the task.

“Oh, that’s what I am?” Bertholdt’s voice rises to meet Reiner’s, untouched by mirth but no less placid for it. His eyes are focused on the board even as the pieces are rearranged, returned to rank and file. He is not master at this game, doesn’t know the names of moves and gambits, hasn’t ever played with anyone who has pursued it with any fervor. As such, Bertholdt knows nothing but the most basic principles and what he learned he has learned on his own, trial and error against any opponent willing to indulge him. Reiner, mostly. When he was very young, too young to recall details (and glad for it) he sat with his father and played crudely upon his knee. 

He isn’t sure what it spells for him. Surely not safety, surely not home. He played it on the island, too, that dreadful he won’t call by name as if he’s certain it will summon a dark specter. Chess has been a somewhat steady constant, and that may well be where his comfort is rooted. Bertholdt grew up with it, and he has not forgotten how to play. So whatever he does, he may still have a tether to the boy that first played the game in the backstreets of Liberio’s internment zone. 

Once Reiner refills his glass, Bertholdt is quick to pull it back to himself. No doubt their gameplay has been getting sloppier, no doubt the strategy has become short-sighted. The wine goes to his head, buzzes comfortably in his chest, like something warm and humming. He wouldn’t remark on it, but he will admit... He is enjoying the company. Reiner goes to great lengths to make this appear to be a regular evening they share, peopled with coincidences, garnished with tiny gestures of consideration. Nothing blatant or garish, nothing that might offend Bertholdt’s ever twitchy sensibilities. It must be hard, he muses, to be so aware of another person’s tolerance, and lack thereof. It must be tiring. But Bertholdt is too drunk to dwell on his shortcomings, too drunk to contemplate the precarious balance upon which their peace has been built. 

The gleam of his cigarette flares, briefly touched by his breath as he inhales a new bout of nicotine and cloves into his lungs. The smoke billows forth on his exhale. “You’re on,” He allows, almost softly, a quality to his voice that reminds of an affectionate cat, arching into the stroking hand. “If you think getting me drunk is going to help you, though, you’re overestimating yourself.” 

[massensterben-a]

@jawlost​ said:                       The trenches were always cold so close to a new year, the feeling of the wet mud never quite seemed to go away no matter how dry you may or may not have been. It was enough to send a shiver to your bones and ache until you would be set alight. It was not the birthday that Porco had wanted to spend celebrating with Bertholdt, but it was the one he was given. Bones had been rattled during the onslaught of the day, enough so that they’d both wound up in the infirmary. Bed rest. Bullshit, more like it. Hours waiting for guards to change over, moments spend persuading them to turn a blind eye in favour for a favour that Porco would deal with at a later date, he’d dragged Bertholdt (whether he was entirely recovered or not, Porco figured he’d rest later) out into a distant clearing he’d found on one of the many trips back to the camp. It was bone-rattling cold and all Porco had was a shitty blanket, their jackets and a loaf of fresh bread he’d swiped from the eatery. Piss-poor efforts to most, but it was the best he could do with the circumstances they had been given.

A kiss was given to Bertholdt under the stars, the loaf being unveiled between them and Porco harboured the smallest of smiles. A shell sounded off in the distance, Porco let out a chuckle and told him to pretend it was a firework. Tearing the bread open between them, there was a gentle reddening of Porco’s cheeks. “Happy Birthday, Toldie. Not the present I had planned, but y’know. The bread’s fresh.”

The resistance was futile and not well executed to start with. It is his own fault, in the end. He doesn’t keep track of time out here, not with shells springing around his feet and mines crushed under his heels, not with the planes dropping bombs overhead and zeppelins deploying white-parachuted soldiers by the score. Days bleed into each other here, where there is dust in your eyes even when it rains, even when the ground freezes solid. Bertholdt has little to do with such sedimentary concerns. He lords over the battlefield, crouching over battalions of tanks and infantries like a spider over its brood. His jurisdiction deals in sweltering heat and steam, the kind that nearly boils your skin but never quite breaks it. He is unhappily removed from it now, after a bombardment of anti titan shells lodged themselves in his red throat and tore him free of his confines. 

Back on the ground, the anthill business has kept him well away from the awareness of the eclipsing year. Another one, spent far from home. Another one, wasted on senseless brutality, fighting with feral viciousness for scraps of his masters’ dinner table. Originally, he supposes he would have simply slept right through the night, had it not been for Porco. Suddenly he appeared, like a gust of wind, like an errant speck of light, badly reflected in the dark. Under Porco’s urgent supervision, Bertholdt got dressed, sluggishly pulling on his boots and muttering under his breath about what on earth could be so goddamn important. 

It is when the older man guides him to a clearing and makes him sit, that it begins to dawn on Bertholdt that it’s himself. If he had known, perhaps he could have refused Porco with more conviction. As it is, he can only tiredly insist that it doesn’t matter, that it’s not worth freezing their asses off out here. There is nothing to celebrate but one year closer to the finish line, one step down the long queue in front of the slaughterhouse. Instead, he is tugged down and closer, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and told to deal with it. Bertholdt settles uneasily, oppressed by the dark, by the orange glow in the east that is not the dawn. 

Porco makes light of it, calls it fireworks, kisses him for it. He brought bread. The good kind from the Marleyan mess hall. He makes it... not pretty but palatable. Bertholdt sits beside him, struggling to keep up with Porco’s effortlessness, the detail with which he executes tranquility in this frozen, pockmarked tundra. Everything about him seems to cry out with it: simple and quiet, that’s what I’m trying to give you. And Porco breaks the bread. Bertholdt watches him, stunned and arrested. He doesn’t feel like he belongs here, bleeding steam from his mouth as his... his... —As Porco makes himself comfortable for him. 

A sting of embarrassment tightens his heart at the cheesy nickname, that attempt at adoration that hails from their earliest childhood. He’s long outgrown it, this label of innocence, best bestowed upon a little brother or a clumsy pet. But he is tired and he doesn’t want to argue. He wants them to be warm. 

“Works for me,” He mutters as he places his half of the loaf in his lap to instead catch Porco by the hands. He cups them between his palms, turns his grip into a furnace, a glowing oven. “C’mere...” His voice turns into a purr, a vibration so deep in his chest, you’d mistake it for a running engine. It’s gratitude on that halting, coy level that Bertholdt has. He wants to be good, be deserving, but he only has his body and the way that it can serve. 

“I’ll warm you up.”