'Ohne Dich'

I was listening to 'Reise Reise', an album by one of my all-time favourite metal bands, Rammstein (aka. that band that Jeager loves in my Four Fragments and Dimension universe! Well, he would). It's a great album, but I digress. Listening to one of the songs, 'Ohne Dich' ('Without you', for people who don't speak German!), really left me feeling cold and empty - not that I have any reason to feel that way, but the song just had something about it that went right through me. That got me thinking about a picture, and this is it.

Jeager is one UM character of the younger generation who has had a damn hard time. His mother is dead, his father buggered off and became an alcoholic and didn't reveal that he was Jeager's father until Jeager's eventful match with Mars. Speaking of Mars, the bird betrayed Jeager, who was obviously friends with him in the Hercules Factory. Did I mention that Jeager's aunt and uncle, his surrogate parents, were murdered in a house fire while he went to the bakery one day as a young child? Add to that the fact that Mars not only lied to him but ripped his arm off, and Ricardo horribly wounded him, and well...you get the picture.
This is one of the things that endears me to him so much. Guys like the Kid and Terry Kenyon should count themselves lucky. After all, Kid grew up as royalty, and Terry at least had a stable background with two loving parents. Jeager grew up in poverty, parentless, and keeps finding out that different people have deceived him.

Anyhoo, I was going to write a very brief fic based upon the song, but in the meantime, I did this. I wanted to create a sense of solitude and loneliness, so I played with a picture I had of trees and modified it for a while to become the background. It's hard to make a distinctly un-waif-like person appear vulnerable, so I used Jeager's awkward posture, his slanted shoulders and down-turned face, to express this. I also drew his helmet, so it could cover his eyes. Darn, it's hard to draw when you're half-asleep! I bandaged his right arm, which creates the implication that this takes place sometime after his match with Mars, and I think that's appropriate. After all, he discovered many lies within such a short time, so why not?

Jeager could be thinking about Mars, or his family members, or anything. Basically, I went to a lot of effort to create a brooding, cold mood, and here it is! For what it's worth, it took me a long time to complete, as I altered several aspects of it. I had a reference for the base work on his posture (though with a skinny model, which meant it wasn't too much help...), and a reference screenshot for his helmet.

Enjoy!

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=Full translated Lyrics for Rammstein's 'Ohne Dich'=
(I did not translate this myself, by the way! I may speak some basic German, but I'm not up to getting my head around all of it.)

I'm going to go into the fir trees
There where I last saw her
But the evening is throwing a cloth upon the land
and upon the ways behind the edge of the forest
And the forest it is so black and empty
Woe is me, oh woe
And the birds sing no more

Without you I cannot be
Without you
With you I am alone too
Without you
Without you I count the hours without you
With you the seconds stand still
They aren't worth it

On the branches in the ditches
it's now silent and without life
And breathing becomes oh so hard for me
Woe is me, oh woe
And the birds sing no more

Without you I cannot be
Without you
With you I am alone too
Without you
Without you I count the hours without you
With you the seconds stand still
They aren't worth it without you