Chapter Text
Porco heard the drumroll of artillery fire rolling closer, close enough that the flesh of his Titan started to convulse around him from the sound. He realized with a sinking feeling that a curtain of death was coming for him and he wasn’t going to outrun it. As the leading edge hit, the shockwave nearly wiped him out him first, hitting him like a massive fist and making him puke inside his Titan. He was choking and running, blind and deafened. With what was left of his vision, he saw something overshadow him and then he was hoisted off the ground, the percussive blasts not silenced but muffled.
He had almost no time to get used to this new reality before he felt himself spun, so hard it was like he was back in paratrooper training, enduring the g-force of a mid air tumble. The spin resolved itself into overwhelming forward momentum and he tightened his limbs to his body, instinctively. He had one second to be astounded before he was airborne and hurtling over the enemy front lines, his claws out and sinking into their heavy artillery. The next few minutes felt instantaneous and like an eon as he tore through their howitzers half blind and guided mostly by his feet and the vibrations he could feel in the pads under his claws. He kept clawing and biting until the sound faded to a distant roar and then when he’d done as much damage as he could he ran back the way he came under mortar fire from their reforming defence.
He found the Armoured face down in the dirt; torn apart by shells. He streaked towards him, screaming in his Titan: “Braun!”
When he got close he noticed steam coming from the Armoured’s nape as Reiner ejected and he felt relief; only momentary because he could hear the blasts start up again as they filled in the gap he’d created by re-aiming intact nearby artillery. He had seconds at most.
He saw Reiner emerge, crawling out of the ropey flesh of his titan, and could only slow down to allow him the chance to grab onto his mane. Once he had, Porco ran, feeling the burn of more mortar on his back and the rumble of another barrage. This time with his Titan fully intact he was able to outrun it, get out of no man’s land and nimbly dodge the friendly trenches on the other side.
He didn’t stop until they were past the support and reserve trenches, and then counted out a dozen angled kilometres to get out of the effective area of the enemy’s long range artillery. This was doctrine; they always retreated out of the range of artillery at an angle, not straight out.
When they were clear Porco finally pulled himself out of his reeking Titan and jumped down from the nape. He was sick again and spat out bile into the dirt, then put his thumb against one nostril, then the other, blowing out snot.
Reiner managed to jump down from Porco’s Titan, immediately falling over, his flesh steaming from healed shrapnel wounds. They huffed and ignored each other while they got their bodies under control.
Porco watched Reiner eventually stand up.
“You fucking idiot!” Porco punched Reiner’s shoulder. “What the hell?”
“It worked!” Reiner’d looked him over and then grabbed his neck, laughing. Porco laughed too.
They were alive. Reiner had sheltered Porco when he’d been surprised by enemy fire power in a location Military Intelligence had assured them enemy firepower should not have been… and then fucking tossed him into a fucking bank of enemy artillery. And Porco had taken it out before it could turn Reiner into pulp.
“That was fucking awesome!” Porco yelled.
“Why are you yelling?” Reiner transferred his grip on Porco’s neck to his head and pressed his forehead against Porco’s, still chuckling. They stayed like that for a long time, their breath heaving, so close that Porco could smell Reiner’s soap even under the stink of dirt and sweat and Titan funk.
Porco wiped itching blood from his chin and neck; it’d come from his ears. "The Artillery blew out my eardrums." He said and he could tell from the grating in his vocal cords that he was saying it harder than usual.
He looked up and saw Reiner staring at him. They stared at eachother—grinning like idiots, feeling some sort of way—then Reiner glanced past him.
Porco turned. Zeke was nearing in a Jeep with medical crew and Porco hadn't even heard it. He didn’t know why but he suddenly found Zeke’s face profoundly irritating.
Porco ran towards Zeke. "What the fuck happened? There wasn't supposed to be any enemy ordinance in that area!"
Zeke stared at Porco impassively. "A Military Intelligence oversight."
"That is more than a fucking oversight! Why are we headed by people who can't think their way out of a one hedge maze--"
Reiner caught Porco's chest. "Porco. We must have made an error."
Porco rounded on him, furious. "We made the error? Are you fucking kidding me you goddamn boot licker?"
"Did the Southers get out alright?" Reiner asked Zeke, ignoring Porco, to Porco's increasing fury.
"For the most part, only 17 casualties." Zeke replied.
—
Reiner and Porco were told later that the 17 casualties weren't in the platoon Reiner'd served in. Porco had watched Reiner absorb the news without much change in his expression, except briefly closing his eyes with relief. It was another part of Reiner's life Porco was completely locked out of, not that it mattered, except insofar as Reiner had come back harder and better and now almost impossible to beat at hand-to-hand combat.
Porco seethed for days over Reiner's absurd attempt to deflect blame for the complete failure of Military Intelligence onto them. Goddamn asshole zealot.
A week later they learned their conduct earned them a Marleyan medal of commendation. Which had calmed Porco's fury. Even if they weren't competent enough to avoid getting two Titans nearly killed on what should have been a routine mission accompanying Infantry, at least they'd acknowledged that Reiner and him had gone above and beyond to pull Marley's fat out of the fire.
After it was awarded one of the Marleyan diplomats decided to gift them with a stay in his mansion in Liberio so that they could attend a weeklong gala event in their honour. This was a diplomat with ties to the Tyburs that was particularly fond of them and the program. Porco already knew that Zeke And Reiner were acquainted with the family, being the program’s War Chief and Vice War Chief.
Porco had spent most of the time at the Gala shoved in a corner, looking at the medal he’d been awarded in its lacquered box. It wasn’t so much the recognition—since it they’d both been recognized, it sort of cheapened it—but it represented the Marleyan Brass acknowledging they'd fucked up and him and Reiner had pulled off a near miracle in a backhanded way. Even if they never publicly admitted it. He also liked remembering the team work, him and Reiner had done it together and the open fucking grin on Reiner’s face. Porco liked that grin and his laugh, but he almost never saw it so he usually settled for pissing Reiner off. A pissed off Reiner was better than a miserable Reiner, who inevitably laid his tar pits of misery everywhere he went. Porco ended up getting sucked into them like some kind of tragic primordial animal.
Because of his desire to not be part of the glittering, chattering festivities, Porco ended up sitting at the wall with all the bored husbands who were tired of the gossip. He would talk about sports and war and what it was like to pilot a Titan. Even those Marleyans who were more aloof and bitchy—not all were, but a fair amount—would end up leaning forward with fascination when he talked about that.
Pieck stayed for as long as was polite, then left to relax and sleep. It was always her priority during leave.
Zeke was always surrounded by old women. He would entertain them with sanitized war stories, patiently tolerate their flirting and lead them in waltzes when the dancing started. Porco did not know how he could stand it, but he supposed they were the best source of contacts and information. Both of which Zeke had a fondness for.
Reiner, on the other hand, was inevitably surrounded by younger women, who giggled incessantly, fought over who got to hang off his arm and made a nuisance of themselves. Porco took this personally.
On the second day, Porco noticed that Reiner had taken a particular interest in one of the girls that constantly fluttered around him. To the casual observer it wasn’t obvious which one. He would flirt in a continuous benign manner with all the girls, but there was one who he was positively chilly too, except when he’d corner her and whisper to her for minutes at a time and abruptly leave her. The girl would be left flustered and flushed, her fingers lightly brushing her décolletage.
At some point this happened and almost immediately after Reiner bowed out, which wasn’t unusual because he went to bed early. He didn’t stay in bed, but he went to bed early. And then after an hour nap, he’d get out of bed, wander around for a bit, then sleep another hour or so, then get up and wander some more. All. Fucking. Night. Porco had fantasied about murdering him just for his shitty sleeping habits.
Porco floated closer to the girls, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Very soon after Reiner had left, the girl left too, with all of the other girls kicking up a fuss because she was bowing out early and she usually never. At least according to them.
Porco narrowed his eyes at this.
It wasn’t until the second night that this happened that he put two and two together.
On that night Porco rationalized he needed to make sure Reiner wasn’t being tailed and also since he suspected that the other Warrior was up to no good it was his duty as his colleague to find out what that was. Which was why he followed that rat bastard when he skulked out to do his criminal activities.
The mansion was large and fashionable enough to have its own interior elevator; from watching the brass dial at the top, Porco discovered Reiner was going to the top floor. Which was definitely not their floor.
He nonchalantly stood in the lobby, reading a newspaper and waiting for the girl to arrive. Which she did. And go to the top floor. Which she also did.
Porco waited a bit in the lobby to make sure no one else was aware of the shenanigans going on and then took the stairs.
At the top floor, the sixth floor in fact, Porco entered a hall leading to several rooms. He listened at each door; all but one were empty. Luckily the mansion had large, antiquated locks and he was able to look through the keyhole.
Fifteen minutes later he was in the ensuite of one of the other empty rooms, desperately trying to relieve the pressure inside him.
Forty-five minutes later he was back at the Gala on his sixth glass of champagne.
Porco felt a heavy hand hit his shoulder. Reiner was standing beside him but facing the other direction. “I know you followed me.”
Porco stiffened. He was about to protest when Reiner leaned close. “Join us. Tomorrow.” Reiner stared at him. "I'll see you then, unless you chicken out." He said, then walked off.
Porco didn’t stare after him; instead he swallowed his champagne quickly and put the glass down on a bus-boy’s tray. “I'm not going to chicken out you son of a bitch.” He said to Reiner, long after the man had left.
—
The next day Porco knocked on the door to the room and Reiner ushered him inside.
The room was pristine, the trim board and dividers on the walls were a smooth flawless white, with vibrant panels of wine red wall fabric embossed with velvet flocking in curling patterns, none of the dingy wallpaper and tack wood of the ghetto. Porco nodded his approval. Very nice.
Reiner stopped him, his hand on Porco’s chest. "Do you understand what's happening?"
"Yeah. I'm not an idiot." Porco said. "We're sharing a girl."
“You can handle this? And all the fallout?”
Porco’s nostrils flared. “If you can handle it, I can handle it.”
Reiner shook his head, chuckling. “Of course.” He stepped aside and let Porco enter the room. “Tell me if you want to stop.”
“Pfft.” Porco scoffed. “I’ll outlast you, moron.”
The girl was already naked on the bed, reading a magazine on her stomach with her feet in the air. Porco didn’t know her name but he was aware that she was the older daughter—about the same age as them—of the diplomat who owned the mansion they were currently privileged to stay at. Which meant they were definitely imposing on his hospitality. She was gorgeous: a figure like a pinup, long honey blond hair and dark eyes in a heart shaped face. As he came closer she looked up, sat up, her breasts swaying with the motion and then laid back on bed, cocking her head to one side and appraising him. “You’re very pretty.” She said finally.
Porco grit his teeth, there was a certain Marleyan arrogance to her which almost immediately irritated him. But still, she was beautiful. And she thought he was pretty. He preened briefly, then scowled at her.
She stood up and walked over to Reiner, hugging him and pulling him down for a kiss.
Porco fidgeted, feeling ignored. After a moment he decided to plop himself down one of the couches in the sitting area.
The girl broke away from Reiner and pulled an open bottle of gin from the side table, taking a swig as she just invited herself into Porco’s lap. He sat up straighter, a little startled and she pressed her lips against his, opening her mouth and the gin trickled into his.
He slipped his hand up her back to her neck, pulling her tighter against him so he could kiss her more forcefully. She in turn stripped his tie of its knot and started to unbutton his over-shirt, slipping her hands underneath the sides and rubbing circles on his chest. Porco melted at just being touched alone. It’d been six months for him; six months since his last girl told him she liked him too much to lose him in ten years, so she’d rather lose him right then.
The girl kept feeding him gin and they slowly made out and got drunk together. It was fun, Porco thought, although Reiner lurked in the back of his mind like a black cloud and he wondered how it would proceed from this point. Would he be expected to screw Reiner? The thought made him conflicted. He could probably do it, maybe. Certainly if Reiner could do it, he could do it.
Eventually she got out of his lap and he realized she was annoyed that he’d zoned out a bit. She went over to Reiner. Porco frowned at them both.
They lost no time, he pulled off his great coat and deposited it on a chair, she unbuckled his belt and got on her knees in front of him on the bed, pulling him out of his pants.
Porco was relieved to note that they were about the same size. Reiner might be longer. Might.
Reiner unbuttoned his over-shirt as she got to work. Porco watched her stroke Reiner and the act was sort of thrilling because it was a point of no return. He was, really, watching two other people have sex. He was going to eventually have sex with them as well. And he wasn’t in a backstreet movie theatre, it was live. He could smell their arousal mingling and it was doing him in too.
When Reiner finished unbuttoning his shirt, he pressed the girl forward onto her back on the bed and slid into her. She made a mewl of pleasure and Reiner grimaced, grabbing her by the throat in one hand and lifting her hips up off the bed in the other. Once positioned, he began.
Fury spat off of Reiner as he fucked, his shoulder muscles and arms so tight Porco thought his skin might tear open. Porco was stunned into stillness, it felt more like a murder than sex and he was almost about to say something or do something to stop it when he looked at the girl.
She was eating it up.
Her hands were around Reiner’s wrists as he choked her but there was no way she could fight him off and her face was contorted in a grimace. Yet… she was raising her hips to meet his thrusts to get him as deep inside her as she could and her ankles were locked around his waist.
Porco watched, mesmerized as Reiner did her like he was fit to break her damn spine in half. Eventually he saw a tremor start in her lower belly, her thighs trembling, and she managed to squeal and thrash despite his hold, bucking her hips against him desperately.
When she’d subsided, Reiner waved him over. “Come here, Porco.”
Porco stepped over. The whole scene was almost otherworldly but he was drunk enough to be willing to just flow with it.
“Unbuckle your pants and kneel on the bed.”
Command presence, they called it and Reiner had it. Porco obeyed without even a snarky word, unbuckling his pants and pulling down his underwear, kneeling on the bed. Reiner grabbed the girl by the hair and pulled her up; she fumbled forward on her hands and knees. She yelped and he slapped her hard on the ass. “Suck him off.”
Porco was astonished at his casual cruelty and even more astonished when the girl crawled over to him and without protest. Then started to lick him up and down his length.
In an instant everything so very real that even the alcohol haze couldn’t dull it. Porco was torn between the pleasure of what she was doing, which was intense, and that he didn’t even know her name, in fact she hadn’t even known he existed an hour ago. This was a level of impersonal that he was finding unsettling.
Then he looked up and saw that same superior smirk on Reiner’s face from when the man won the Armoured from Porco as a boy. It was etched in fire in Porco’s memory.
Porco grabbed the girl’s hair and started to fuck her mouth. “You like being used by Eldians?” He snarled. She gagged a little around him, looking up at him and nodding, drool streaking her chin. Reiner resumed screwing her from behind, rocking her into her and her into Porco with force. Porco was furious with himself for hesitating for a single second and allowing Reiner a single opening for that shit eating grin.
Eventually Porco felt Reiner’s hand on his naked shoulder: his rough, calloused palm warm against Porco’s skin. Reiner stroked his hand up Porco’s neck and buried his fingers in the longer hair above Porco’s undercut, continuing to tease the hair behind Porco’s ear with little swipes of his thumb. Porco glanced at him, and Reiner gave him a genuine smile, as if urging him on.
Between the girl swallowing him to the hilt and watching Reiner drilling into her from the other end—the larger man flushed and messy with arousal—Porco had been hanging on the edge, but, unbelievably, it was Reiner’s small encouragement that started to tip him over. He thrust into the girl’s mouth, his hand behind her head to force himself deeper and spilled.
The girl gagged and yelped a protest and Porco blinked down at her, his own breathing laboured in the aftermath. She pulled back, choking a bit, his cum smeared all over her chin and lips and glared at him.
His brow drew. Had he violated some kind of gang-bang etiquette? Before she could say anything, Reiner grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back so she was sitting in his lap. Without pausing in his thrusts he kissed her, “you’ll take what we give you, fifthly little Marleyan breeder.”
Amazingly all the anger seemed to drain from her at that. She moaned, muffled by Reiner’s mouth and began to squirm against him. Porco’s lip curled in baffled disgust. Apparently he hadn’t given his actions appropriate context? Fucking people. They were incomprehensible sometimes. Goddammit.
Porco watched as Reiner started to lick the girl’s face clean of his cum. He was startled for a second, then the blood rushed to his face and his groin. Something about the sight of the bigger man licking him off of her was making him sweat.
Reiner’s hand snaked down the girl’s waist and cupped her sex, rubbing with firm strokes. Within a minute she was shuddering against him and squeaking even harder. Her ridiculous childish noises made Porco want to slap her, instead he just settled for watching their fun sullenly and ignoring the fact that he was getting hard again; or rather ignoring why, which had everything to do with wishing he was the one in Reiner’s lap. Ridiculous notion, really. Fucking ridiculous. Porco folded his arms over his chest and glared a hole in the headboard.
When she was done Reiner dumped her down onto the bed in an unceremonious heap like he was throwing garbage on a curb. The girl seemed to love this, curling into a dejected ball and purring contentedly. Once again Porco was amazed at Reiner’s ability to convey icy contempt while doing apparently everything the girl was wanting. He also noticed Reiner was still hard. He hadn’t finished.
“We’re not done yet.” Reiner caught her by the scruff and pulled her out of her ball and ducked down to eye level with her. “He fucks you now. Go on, get that ass up.”
She glanced back at Porco and did as she was told, kneeling in front of him. Porco closed his eyes, shaking his head. “Goddamn.” This was almost too much.
“Are you saving yourself for someone special?” Reiner smirked.
Porco sneered at him. “Fuck you, Braun.” Yeah right. Someone special was not something Warriors got; not when they had an expiry date. Spurred by Reiner’s needling, Porco pressed himself against her opening, and teased around it. Porco frowned. There was a threshold he was crossing here, an acceptance of a certain reality. He hesitated to take the plunge. After a few rotations, she decided she’d had it with his indecision and simply thrust herself back, enveloping him. He slid in easily; she was absolutely liquid. He’d never had such a ready girl before and in a second she was already breathing hard and writhing against him. He leaned over her back and let her move, noticing for the first time that she was really quite small even compared to him. With her slick warmth around him—and also knowing in the back of his mind that Reiner had just been there and that thought was both aggravating and making him even harder—and he decided that reality wasn’t so bad.
“Don’t come in her.” Reiner warned. “You don’t want to make the same mistake twice. Particularly not now.”
Porco frowned, incised that Reiner was lecturing him. He wasn’t a virgin; even if the weirdness of the situation was making him act more indecisive than usual. “Fuck you Braun.” He repeated.
Improbably Reiner laughed and shook his head. “Maybe if you’re good.”
Porco glared at him for his ambiguous answer. “What the fuck does that mean?”
The girl seemed to lose her patience with their squabble, “Could we finish here first?” She pulled Reiner closer, swallowing him as she had Porco earlier. Porco was usually fairly gentle and he wasn’t inclined to change his style but he frankly wondered if she could feel anything after the harpooning Reiner had given her if he didn’t at least try to get aggressive. Then he noticed Reiner was being a lot more gentle too and he figured he was fine.
Porco kept a steady rhythm but having already come, he had some trouble climaxing a second time; Reiner seemed strangely reluctant to finish at all, she on the other hand seemed to want to keep going even after her third or fourth like a little dynamo. Eventually Reiner just upended her and ate her out until she convulsed and then kept going until she was begging him to stop. Even then, he pushed it. Porco remembered wincing at the sound of her fingers tearing at Reiner's hair as she peaked a final time and then flipped over, one hand hiding herself from him, the other pushing at his head, tears in her eyes. “No more.”
He patted her head. “Good. Next time be more reasonable in your expectations.”
“Goddamn.” Porco said, staring at Reiner. “You’re terrifying.”
Reiner snorted at him. He laced his fingers in the girl’s hair and now that she’d recovered a bit from the overstimulation she stretched like a cat, smiling at him languidly. “That was fun.”
Reiner picked her hand up and kissed her fingers. “Glad you enjoyed it.”
Porco felt somewhat left out and annoyed by their affection. So it wasn’t entirely impersonal; she’d likely been okay with Porco because on some level she trusted Reiner and whomever Reiner chose. That didn’t help his annoyance though. He didn’t like being someone’s tool.
He brooded and watched Reiner stroke the girl's hair until she fell asleep and then tuck her in under a throw, all with paradoxical gentleness.
When he was done, he turned to Porco and started to redress him, pulling up his pants and rebuckling his belt. Porco stared at him. “What are you doing? I can dress myself.”
“Stop me.” Reiner challenged.
Porco just frowned, confused and did nothing as Reiner rebuttoned and tucked in his shirt then knotted his tie again. “Pieck did this for you right?”
Porco flushed. He was right of course. “Why are you doing this?”
Reiner shrugged. He then pulled his pack of smokes out of his great coat pocket from where it was thrown on a chair and walked out to the balcony.
Porco frowned at the other man’s broad back and then scooted after him, fully intending to bum some smokes off of him.
When he joined Reiner on the balcony, the night air was warm and humid. It smelled of bay laurel from the hedges below them and lilac. Porco took a deep breath and watched Reiner as he sat down on the balcony, dangling his legs over the edge—there was a large the space between the balcony floor and the bottom of the railing—and leaning his arms on the railing cross bar. He was lighting one of his smokes, inhaling slowly as he did.
After a moment Porco joined him. Together they sat side by side and stared at the harbor. Light from the city danced on the waves of inky dark water. Despite being semi-visible to the public, neither of them wore their armbands. The Marleyan girl fucked to exhaustion and smeared with their seed in the bedroom behind them was a bomb waiting to go off. If they were found there wasn’t much more they could do to make it worse for themselves.
“She’s getting too attached to me.” Reiner explained, waving his smoke. “So I needed to make it more impersonal. Thanks for the help.”
“I’ve never had a Marleyan girl before. Do we get executed now or something?”
Reiner laughed. “No. Everyone just looks the other way unless she complains.”
“Is she going to complain?”
Reiner smirked and looked back through the double doors. “What do you think? She’s probably going to be looking back at this fondly when we’re dead and gone and she’s in her seventies with grand kids.” He turned back to look over Liberio, staring out at the harbour, his eyes unfocused. “The real problem is stopping. That’s the dangerous part of the game. Zeke’s pissed at me for playing it.” He frowned. “When it’s not my choice it’s okay; but the moment I’m choosing, everyone gets furious.”
Porco said nothing. He felt an echo of the sick pain he’d felt waking and watching Reiner suffering nightmares the night he’d returned from Alder.
“Zeke deserves this.” Reiner said. “He made me leave Annie behind.”
Porco would normally have piped up with something about him leaving Marcel but the surreality of the last hour left him incapable of building up a good head of anger. He never even considered that Reiner resented Zeke. He was still stunned by witnessing Reiner being anything but blandly obedient. It was like Porco’d cracked through the earth and fell spinning into an upside-down twilight realm. Even Porco’s sarcasm was failing him.
They sat in silence, watching the boats glide along the surface of the harbour and the distant lights of the buoys out on sea. After awhile Porco glanced back at Reiner and realized he was hiding his eyes behind his hand, his face twisted by some horrific emotion that Porco couldn’t place.
“I fucking hate myself like this.” He said, his voice strangled.
Porco frowned. “Why do you do it?”
“What else is there for us? At least Gail’s enjoying herself.” At the admission whatever had gripped him seemed to ease. He dropped his hand and went back to watching the boats, this time more subdued.
Gail. So that was the girl’s name. Porco said nothing more. He figured whatever thing Reiner was struggling with had to do with Alder and the less said about that the better.
“Do you ever regret joining?” Reiner asked. “I do.”
Porco’s eyes went wide. Everything they’d just done, everything they’d said… and now Reiner was adding treason on top. Porco’s first thought was that he was being baited to expose himself. But he and Reiner had shared in the atrocity they’d left in the bed—the violation of the most fundamental taboo underpinning their reality—and that girl fucked to ruin by two Warriors felt like a shield, granting them a weightless moment of simpatico: Marley was incapable of getting in between them now.
“Yeah.” Porco said. Of course he fucking did. When he was a kid, he wanted to become a Titan because his brother wanted to become a Titan and he didn’t want to be left behind. Now he was an adult he was slapped with how fucking raw the deal was every time he lost a girlfriend to the thirteen year curse. He had started to loathe everyone involved, including his parents who’d never once tried to stop him—or hadn’t tried to stop him enough—but he couldn’t tell anyone any of this. And to top it off he’d lost his brother, because of the dumbass right in front of him. The anger usually just festered until he could bait Reiner into a fight to relieve it. But he never got to confess. Not until that moment. “I regret it.”
“Becoming a monster for Marley in order to redeem our sins.” Reiner leaned over the rail, tapping ash into the garden far below. If Porco listened carefully, he could hear the party still going—a quiet rumble of music and conversation—on the other side of the house. “They call us devil-bloods and yet they pant after us like dogs in heat. We have to be stronger, faster, smarter, braver, tougher, in every way superior. We have to do everything they say and also take responsibility for being forced to do it.” Reiner closed his eyes. “I’m supposed to obey Gail but also know better.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “What happens when I choose not to know better?”
“Hm.” Porco realized that Reiner was angry, just like him. This was his way of acting out: fucking when he knew better, but had plausible deniability. They were supposed to give Marleyans whatever they wanted, right? Didn’t that include a diplomat’s horny daughter? How could Zeke argue with it without betraying the fundamental hypocrisy of the entire system? And Zeke hated sounding stupid. Reiner had found a loophole in the logic around him; a dangerous one… and he was using it to fight his own personal war against Marley’s bullshit.
And Porco had never even noticed. Not until now.
Maybe Porco’d never forgive him for Marcel, but… it was obvious Reiner wasn’t an oblivious zealot, happy with his lot, which was what had always really pissed Porco off more than anything. The idea that Reiner somehow had escaped the horror of it all into a perfect, blissful subservience to the Motherland.
The old Reiner Porco knew, the one that toadied up to pompous, imbecilic, creepy old men—like Alder in fact—and parroted ridiculous lies with smug self-righteousness, the one Porco had despised, was not beside him, maybe he was gone completely. In his place was a man who was capable of somehow rebelling by obeying.
Porco remembered how Reiner’d threatened him with exposure as a traitor when they were kids, just because he was pissed at Porco. He’d always had that kind of scary ruthlessness about him, being able to understand and use the rules—spoken and unspoken—to his own advantage. Although this was truly something else. Dangerous, psychotic, destructive, hateful, angry, seditious… and really damn hot.
“Want to do it again?” Reiner asked.
“Yeah.” Porco smiled, he waved for Reiner to share his smoke. “Fuck. Why not?”