Iɴʙᴏx ✉ Vɪᴄᴛᴏʀʏ Rᴏᴀᴅ

[bertall]

Um... This is Bertolt, and if you're hearing this I'm probably busy. You can leave a message here or call back later if you want? ...Can I start over?

Comments

[lyingheart]

He'll have to learn some version of control at some point. Or I hope he does, for everyone else's sake. Marley won't be ready for him either way.

[ He'll never sit on his hands, but he may well work toward an end goal based on still getting to follow what he believed in. ]

"Somehow." Considering how the Titan shifters showed up at once, it wasn't much of a guess that there might be some camaraderie between us. If there hadn't been, he'd have switched tactics. He takes gambles. With you and Reiner flushed out, that was one more.

As for what I'll tell him, if anything, I don't know. Pizza, baseball, some version of history wiped out behind the walls.

[bertall]

That scares me, too.

_{[Marley as a whole needs to be taken down a few pegs, but he's not worried about them. What he worries about most is the people left behind. People like his father, Reiner and Annie's families, the neighbors down the street, and even that one guard who had been strangely soft on certain people in Liberio.]}

There's things I'm worried about him piecing together. I wasn't|

excited

like everyone else was about the ocean.

[lyingheart]

[ All the people who will die even if not directly because of Eren, in far too great a likelihood.

She wants to see her father again before that happens. In a cruel, uncaring world, it's all she wants. ]

How did you respond?

[bertall]

I didn't have much of one, really. I was dreading the ferry ride more than anything when the travel plans shifted to going to the Sevii Islands.

Seasickness, remember?

_{[Thankfully they've got medicine for it here, but he hasn't found one that works yet.]}

[lyingheart]

Fear of the unknown and dread of crossing it is still real. Even if you'd been born and raised in Paradis, it doesn't mean you'd naturally share their enthusiasm. You can be a worrier.

[bertall]

Haven't I always been one?

[lyingheart]

Yes.

[bertall]

Someone has to be, at least.

_{[If he doesn't worry, who will?]}

What did you tell him about Marley?

[lyingheart]

So why would it surprise any of them that you worried, like you do?

That Marley is a country where all the off-island Eldians live, and that they're in control of the Warriors, "like me." That meant mentioning what Eldians were, and that Titans were formerly human.

[bertall]

You can still be excited and worried at the same time. Blackthorn made me feel like that - it still does, sometimes.

_{[His initial worry had been about Blackthorn not living up to his expectations, but he was pleasantly surprised when it surpassed them. There's more than one reason why he's been renting out that cabin in the mountains!]}

What are you going to do if he asks about the Armored and Colossal Titans? I wouldn't be surprised if he figured out that "they" all came from the same place seeing as how "they" wanted to take humanity out.

[lyingheart]

You can feel both those things and still not react as more excited than anything else. Look, I'm not interested in arguing this, because I wasn't there when you saw the sea with everyone else here. You're the one who needs to figure that one out. If your peace here is so fragile you think the first conclusion he'll jump to is, 'it was Bertolt!' because of something like that, I don't know what you want me to say.

I'll figure that out when it comes up, but it's very likely I won't need to "do" anything.