How Soon is Now? (Jean x Marco)

Part Two

Trost, 24/11/1886

Everything surrounding me blurs into nothing and then I am 'reborn' somewhere else. A new age, a slightly different body...but I'm the same me, I've got the same looks, personality, and the same feelings and memories.

Right now, the world is shifting again. I see Marco's body looking so lifeless and cold after that car hit him, but the image is soon gone. It takes a blink and everything is new.

There's a vile scent that I've smelled before, of sewage and smog, mixed together like chemicals. Each breath I inhale tastes like poison against my tongue. The sky is pitch black, and there are no fast cars or tall buildings, no nice café's or friendly faces. It's 100% Victorian Trost. And let me tell you, the Victorian era is awful.

I look at my hands, becoming covered in the ice-cold rain that falls hard from the sky, biting at my skin with unexpected force. My hands are smaller, rounder...youthful.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror of a butchers shop, I'd say I'm about 14, but I'm unsure. I'll go with that.

I notice that my clothes are dirty and there is a stench coming from every fibre within them. I'm covered in mud or whatever the brown stuff is all over me. Fucking hell, I could have at least been born into a first-class life! I mean, any life in the Victorian era is horrid, but a poor person's life is even worse.

There are a few questions I need to find the answers too before I do a single thing, and it's going to take effort. My legs feel weak as I lift myself from the ground, pushing myself into the crowd that surrounds me. People walk as far away as they can, not willing to walk within a single meter's distance beside me.

I walk through the gloomy streets until my legs go no further; stopping only at the violent growls my stomach is making. What if I just lay here, writhing in starvation but never dying? What am I supposed to do?

The light, the noise, the everything...it's sickening. Feeling helpless is not something I enjoy, at all. Not much later, I find myself sinking into a deep sleep, in the corner of a street, lying among the grimy stone floor and the rats and the mud.

God, how I'd die to be in Kaffihús right now. Under the warmth of Hanji's enthusiasm, the joy of Petra's presence, the perfection of Marco's hand in mine.

Marco's suffered worse than this, is what I tell myself.