AUTHOR’S NOTE: Hello~ One month ago, I, cocky author, thought this chapter was almost ready and I could focus on writing a WIP for a little while before finishing editing. The idea was to update at the beginning of June. Very evidently, I was mistaken. So, very commonplace apologies and gratitude: thank you for reading, even when the chapters take so long. I hope you enjoy it. I wept a couple of tears writing this chapter. I’m very proud of it. I hope you’d love it as well. Please feel free to tell me anything that crosses your mind while reading. Also, I’m too attached to this work now. Can’t believe we are one chapter away from finishing it.

Content warnings [Spoilers]: Angst. Domesticity. Codependent dynamic (sort of). Spiraling Levi and his various very concerning coping mechanisms. Cleaning. Stalking PTSD. Anxiety.  Depression. Much angst.

“Fuck off,” Levi snarls.

His violence is unfit for a supermarket. The fluorescent lights overhead keep their incessant droning. A chorus of beeps rushes from the cash register: five items. Eight furry, deformed animals printed on cereal boxes look at him with ominous eyes. Zeke is grinning, stained teeth bared.

“Levi?”

“Aw.” Zeke’s voice drowns your whisper. It drips with something rotten. “But didn’t you miss me?”

And Levi is grabbing your wrist with too much desperation. He should take you away from that man. He can force his leg; there’s no real wound, anyway.

Nailed in place, he doesn’t tug.

“Shut up.”

“It must have been awfully lonely,” Zeke goes on. He reaches for his wine bottle. It clanks as he lifts it. “I actually hoped to find you. I knew that you’d remember.”

Zeke steps forward.

Levi has the presence of mind to step in front of you. He thinks of the green smoke, the sulfur of titan blood in his nostrils, the entrails of recruits (barely teens most of them) spraying the fields of Shiganshina. You would have died, were you in the charge.

There’s a stain on Zeke’s shirt. Dark red. Nausea rises in Levi’s throat.

“I’m not mad, see,” Zeke says. He extends his arms, bottle grabbed by the neck. “Even if you killed me in the end.”

You say something in a hushed tone—some question, some kind of appeasement. But it sounds like whistles in his ears.

You are shaking. Levi should take you away, but he cannot expose his back. The lesson was ingrained: it cost him two fingers, an eye and his lungs.

“I’d say it was for the better.” The miasma of smoke thickens as Zeke approaches. He’s close enough to touch him. The bottle swings forward; it grazes Levi’s shoulder with its heel in a gesture of warped camaraderie. “You even managed to find your little friend again.”

And Levi thinks of the first night of the Rumbling. Pain exhaled out of his lungs. The quakes of an earth that would be trampled into nothing by giants. The break in your voice as you tried to soothe him into sipping Hange’s soup. He thinks of the Battle of Heaven and Earth: flying and falling amidst the charred remains of whatever poor wretches Eren had reached, gear lightening as the iceburst stone burned away, teeth digging into muscle with blunt force.

Levi steps forward. He doesn’t want that disgusting excuse of a man to speak of you.

“You fucking piece of shit!”

Zeke stumbles backward. But soon he has a smirk back on his face. If Levi just had his knife…

“You are being too rude.” Zeke touches his heart with a melodramatic flourish; he puts on a grotesque pout. “Shouldn’t I also have the right to meet with old acquaintances?”

“I don’t know you.” Your words almost falter under the whirring music of the speakers.  A glistening film covers your eyes. Wet and threatening. But you still shift enough so that you can painstakingly assess the bastard. There’s an incipient recognition in your voice; it asks more of a question than Levi can stand.

“Ah, yes. Of course.” And Zeke senses it. This new life hasn’t made him less cruel. He still revels in having the upper hand. “What did you tell her, Levi?”

He met you when he was five or six and his mother’s hair was still a beautiful black that gleamed like an oil spill when she brushed it at night. She brought men Levi never saw and spent all her money on smuggled tea and old flour. You were as young and as bereft as him. Playmate. Secret keeper. Companion during the long walks to the Underground’s main well where Levi filled buckets of dirt-water and waited for those men to disappear from his mother’s bed. He’d loved you since then.

“Not much, I assume?”

Levi doesn’t reply.

You are listening. Levi’s still grabbing your wrist with too much force, but you don’t flinch.

“Nothing?”  Zeke feigns surprise. He takes out a cigarette from the front pocket of his coat, taps it against his chin. “A bit selfish for a loyal dog. It must have been bad, then.”

After the Battle of Heaven and Earth, steam rose from the earth for days. Then, there were weeks of pyres and months of rains. Levi had stayed at the edges of death: the first refugee camp was erected right next to Eren’s last footprint. The southern countries were quick and generous with their help—at the beginning at least, when the sheer scope of the destruction wasn’t clear yet and humanity could still dream of a frail fraternity. And Levi lay in his pretty little straw cot.

“Let’s go,” he says. Yet, he finds himself unconvincing. He pulls your wrist, but it barely makes you move.

“No.” There’s an apology he doesn’t deserve mixed in with your reply.

You keep your eyes on Zeke. He absorbs the attention like a miserable clown. His lips warp in a gloating sneer. He strides forward, confident in the protection of your curiosity. Closer, his limbs seem to grow back to the lanky, simian length they had back then.

“You have nightmares, I suppose.” Zeke zeroes in on you. Levi can do little more than extend his arm and pretend that it is enough to shield you from the fucker. He makes you step back. “Gnarly things: giant monsters tearing bodies. Right?”

“I don’t know much about the lives of Paradisians. However, have you dreamed about the immeasurable heat that rises from the earth, the world shaking?” Zeke harps on.

Eyes wide, you fixate on Zeke. Tears are freely falling down your cheeks. You are shaking more violently than before.  Levi sees you open your mouth, lips trembling, and close it again, as if no words could form.

When Levi remembered, it was Kenny who managed to tear his hands away from his face. For years to come he joked that he already had the force of a thousand soldiers, that Levi was just about to rip his eyes out. His mother always admonished him with the most sorrowful of downturned lips.

The supermarket is unsafe. The angular shelving. The glass jars filled with marmalades and expensive coffee grounds; Zeke’s shitty wine bottle—Levi could just about see it: a myriad shards scattered on the poorly mopped linoleum floor. You would hurt yourself if you remembered here.

“Hey.” Levi’s soft as he tries once again to make you leave. But you keep looking at the fucker.

A waft of fermented breath scrapes Levi’s nostrils as Zeke laughs.

“Oh. That one rings a bell.” Zeke’s elated as he speaks. He seems childish; it’s the euphoria of talking about it, of finding someone else who witnessed it after years of loneliness. Levi gets it; it’s repulsive—dirt and blood under his nails. “We called it the Rumbling. At the beginning it was just a bogeyman; but Eren was obsessed with the idea. It was a terrible thing. Gruesome, even. I don’t think there was much to recover afterwards. But I didn’t live enough to see that.”

“Go to fucking hell!” Levi snarls again.

“I already went there, Levi.”

Zeke leans back. He scratches the back of his head and stares at the flickering lamps on the ceiling. 

It is then that Levi notices the smudges on his glasses: grease smeared on the bridge and the rim, too many to make out the fingerprints. When he pulls them away from his hair, Zeke’s fingers have a slight sheen.

Dirty hands. Rancid breath. A stain on his shirt. The bottle of wine dangles—nothing but reddish vinegar that smells like shit.  Zeke’s teeth are stained and he has them all on display.

And tears are dangling from your jaw in fat droplets. And his fucking leg hurts. And Levi sees that bastard leaning in, happily discussing the trampled corpses and corpses and corpses that he abetted Eren in strewing across the globe.

“You know, I’m not sure what happened to you back then, but Levi must know.”

The punch is swift. And weak. Still, it makes Zeke stumble. The bottle falls. Green glass smashes against the linoleum. Burgundy spills. It smells of acid.

“C’mon, Levi,” Zeke yells as he cradles his jaw. “Isn’t the past in the past? It doesn’t matter now.”  The smudged glasses slide down his nose.

“Fuck off with your fucking disgusting hands.”

Gaze pinned on the spreading puddle, you haven’t moved.

And Levi wants to take you home. A shower and tea and warm food. You’ll sleep it off. He’ll stay awake, watch you sleep from a chair—far away so that his dirty hands can’t touch you. And somehow, through the night he’ll find the courage to scrape together the words he needs to explain.

Zeke is standing up. With all the grace of a drunkard, he grabs the shelf. Jars of jam are pushed to the floor. Glass upon glass.

He grimaces, but he returns to his jeers: “He hasn’t changed one bit, has he?”

Zeke steps over the broken glass with indifference. It cracks under his dress shoes.

Then, the store clerk arrives. A kid; he’s shaking. He keeps his broom pressed to his chest.

“Excuse me. Good-” He stutters. “Good evening.” He takes a breath so deep his ribcage grows two sizes, clears his throat, and swallows the very apparent fear. “I’ll have to ask you to leave the premises.” His eyes shift between Zeke and Levi as if assessing the danger. “…please.”

The kid seems surprised when the three of you follow him to the entrance. Zeke walks ahead, and he throws back the most pathetic of secret glances. Levi’s grip on your hand is too firm. Your stride is too slow.

Outside, it is still raining.

Droplets hammer down on his head as he takes out his wallet.

“For the damages.” Levi hands the kid enough to cover the wine, the jams, and the fear.

The poor kid is so stupefied that he thanks him.

You apologize, but Levi doesn’t think the clerk heard you as he rushes back inside.

Zeke is still there, watching. His glasses have fogged up. Long blonde hair sticks to his face. Some sort of persistent beast.

“Should we go for a nightcap?” he asks.

“Please leave us alone,” you mutter. You are staring at your shoes, but the plea seems enough to persuade him.

Zeke extends his hand. Under the pink, fluorescent storefront sign, it looks like open flesh.

“Forgive and forget?” he asks. When it’s clear Levi will not shake his hand, he laughs. “Of course. There’s no forgetting.”

Levi doesn’t take his eyes off him until his form has disappeared behind a building.

Beside him, you are quiet. Rain has completely drenched your coat.

You still don’t remember: Levi sees the confusion on your brow.

He takes the umbrella out of his coat’s front pocket. Its plastic sheath crinkles.

“Here.” Levi makes sure it’s covering you fully. “You’ll get sick.”

You don’t reply. Water is pooling just two steps ahead; you keep your eyes trained on it.

“Let’s go home.” Levi tugs your arm and walks.

The streets are emptier. The drumming of raindrops stifles any little noise that might leak from the bars.

You keep pace with trudging steps.

“We’ll drink something else.” Levi finds himself talkative. “An infusion or water. I’ll buy tea in the morning.”

You’ll both take a shower to wash away the smell of cigarettes. And he’ll prepare dinner, something quick and filling. You’ll sleep.

“Or chocolate.” He rattles on. “I think I have chocolate.”

“Levi, I want to go home.”

It makes him stop. A car passes; your shadow elongates across the whole street. He can see his apartment five buildings away. It’s cold and dark and separation tastes like ashes in his mouth.

“No.”

“Levi, please.”

You are still not looking at him. Eyes on the hem of your coat, on your boots, on his hand over yours. There are fresh tears on your lashes. You don’t try to escape his grip.

 “Let me take you.” He chokes the plea out. There’s still your hand under his.

He thinks of the first time he stood in the rain. Furlan and Isabel returned to him in pieces; you were missing. He thinks of the Battle of Heaven and Earth, of that moment of forlorn clarity when the fog lifted and he ceased fighting.

“You shouldn’t.”

Pain catches up to him on the stairs. Torn muscle and bone bitten into smithereens; lungs burned raw, fingers blown away at the knuckle, and hot, hot metal dragging across his lips, his cheeks, his left eye; grief bloating against his ribs.

Levi has to sit down.

You’ll get to your apartment in half an hour. The subway is close enough for it to be safe. He imagines the rain etching away the yellow of your building’s porchlight as you get inside.  He left you the umbrella; you won’t get sick.

His cellphone is but a blurry arrangement of lines until he overfocusses his good eye. Water drips onto the screen. One, two, three droplets from his drenched hair.

“Got home?” he texts you.

You won’t answer.

It takes him too long to get back to his feet. His leg is completely useless now. He grasps the handrail until the carvings of the wood are imprinted on his palm and pulls himself up.

He drags himself back to his floor. His shoes are wet. Soles are slippery. Waxed parquet is too smooth when he compares it to the dirt of the refugee camp: he stumbles twice. He’s cold.

The key clatters against the doorknob as he tries to open the door.

As he takes them off, his boots squelch. He brings them and his dripping coat to the bathroom. A shallow pond forms on the tiles.

The shower does little to warm him up.

Scattered on the kitchen counter lie all the remains of your presence.  The water you had boiled, cooling. Three containers (sugar, flour, salt) you’d taken from the deepest belly of the top right cabinet on your search for tea.  An unused tray. Two cups. Levi doesn’t move them.

He cooks. He eats. Practical, bland, enough.

His phone rests on the table at arm’s reach. It doesn’t light up.

He washes up. He wipes the table clean.

Three tram stops and seven subway stations to your apartment building. You should have already arrived. The chatter of your noisy neighbors should echo through the first-floor hallway as you walk inside. The umbrella would faithfully drip its way into a puddle as you searched for your keys in your bag. You still keep the lilies-of-the-valley he brought you last week. They’ve started to wither; brownish tips. But the sweet, soapy smell would reach the front door.

He hopes you eat something. He hopes you don’t cry anymore. He hopes you sleep tonight.

Pain flares up when he moves his leg and he finds himself sitting on the armchair. He moves the phone to the coffee table.

Rain keeps flooding the streets. Scraps of neon from the laundromat sign float around the edges of his blinds. He stares at the orange glow until dawn gulps it away.

In the early morning, his phone needs to charge and his pains have settled into flailing, aimless muscles.

Levi texts you again.

“Please.”

Afterwards, he severs himself from the screen and leaves it charging on his bedside table.

He cleans the bathroom first.

The puddle beneath his boots and coat spreads its tendrils alongside the grout lines. Levi smells smoke (Zeke’s cigarettes or his mother’s body trapped in a vault of a sky or ashes upon ashes upon ashes of the Rumbling’s dead); the coat must be washed.  He does it by hand, leaning over the shower, left knee throbbing against the hard tile. Then, he relies on the flimsy sunspot in his living room to dry it.

And when the smell lingers, Levi brings out the bleach. He scrubs the bathroom one tile at a time, gloves off. Bleach gets under his nails and stings.

And he thinks of the pristine little house the Global Alliance sent him to when refugee camps were dismantled and the world put away old war relics. Two stories in a quiet neighborhood in Marley—one of the recovered zones, cities all newly built over fertile lands fed by countlesscorpses. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. A kitchen outfitted with all the modern conveniences wars seemed to forge. The second story served him for shit most days; even with his cane, his leg faltered in the middle of the stairs. He used it for Falco and Gabi’s rooms until they got bored with playing house with him and moved down the street.

Once the chlorine-laced stink saturates the whole room, he checks his cellphone.

“I’m fine,” you write. “Don’t text me, please.”

There’s a five-minute difference between both messages. It’s a useless thing to know.

He strips the sheets from his bed; he lets his washing machine handle them and focuses on the bedframe. He removes the mattress.

His hands are raw from the bleach.

Most of your things are tucked away in his left bedside table. As the washing machine thumps its way to a neighbor’s complaint, Levi rubs the festering wood corners until his rag tears and assembles an exact mental inventory of your presence.

Clothes in the bottom drawer; shit you rummaged for during the nights you stayed over in the top.  Four pairs of socks. Two changes of clothes. Three of Levi’s T-shirts you’d borrowed. A spare phone-charger. A box of tissues. A book you read curled on his chest. A notebook. A pen.

He repeats the list again and again as he scrubs his way through his shitty apartment until the sky darkens one more time. He doesn’t touch the kitchen.

It’s Saturday and a rare spring day without pissing rain and there are teenagers giggling outside as they run towards the tram; there must be some crowded noisy event in downtown Mitras.

Levi is not tired. Cracked hands, buzzing muscles, galvanized nerves. The ache simmering in his leg and fingers. The blurry eye.

Still, he takes a scalding-hot shower. He cooks. He eats. He sits in the armchair and closes his eyes and pretends to fall asleep.

On Sunday, he stands watch in front of your apartment building. There’s comfort in the imagined proximity.

It’s quiet. The hours pass quickly at the café where he sat down—on the terrace, behind a naked hedge, because he has enough shame to hide. They offer him orange juice at breakfast, sparkling water at lunch, coffee between meals. He takes sips and orders food and stares at the leaves burrowing out of the bare branches.

People spill from the subway in mismatched waves. Thin lines of stray passengers, most of the time. At noon, the station disgorges thick crowds searching for restaurants.  A few of them pass by your front porch; no one gets in.

He sees your neighbors. A man leaves in the morning wearing jogging clothes. The noisy couple of the downstairs apartment appears a little after noon; they laugh all the way to a fucking wrecked black car.

Levi doesn’t see you. Then again, there’s the slight rustling of your curtains, moving shadows he seeks when he stares at your windows and that, when found, make him instantly avert his gaze—as if that sham of scruples could absolve him. 

And then he’s once again fourteen in the Underground, still, so still in the shitty straw pallet he used as a bed, counting the seconds between your breaths, saying to himself that as long as he watched, as long as he kept guard, you’d stay with him.

The waiter brings him another coffee. It tastes like shit, but Levi drinks in short sips.

And he tries to parse the words he’d use to explain himself to you, if you ever let him.

And he thinks of his house in Marley. The house he had after the world retired him from all wars. They’d furnished his soulless kitchen with an electric refrigerator and a dishwasher he never trusted enough to use and a motherfucking toaster. The whole world tasted like wet ashes.

Somewhere in the late evening, the waiter speaks to him.

“Sir, we’re closing soon.”

There’s an apology in the statement that Levi barely notices: you’ve turned on the lights in your bedroom.

As he leaves, Levi realizes the ache in his leg has tapered. On his way home, he buys a tin of black tea he doesn’t plan to open without you.

He shouldn’t have come.

You don’t text him on Monday.

It’s sunny. He takes the kids out to the playground after a gruesome counting lesson. They are building make-believe fortresses under the monkey bars. Levi, sitting under a leafless oak, is the old knight they are supposed to protect. Midgame, three kids ask Mr. Levi to tie their shoes (residual pain makes itself known in his left knee).  And it all reminds Levi of Falco, who kept calling him that even when his youngest child got children of her own.

He forces himself to stop checking his phone.

Then, he teaches the kids to make a cat using strings of yarn and recycled bottle caps. There’s a music lesson he doesn’t have to teach and nap time and story time  and pick-up time. The negligent mother throws Levi a dirty look, but she arrives on time.

Falco used to sit down next to Levi’s straw cot and talk about the stupidest of pleasures. Roasted beef and caramelized onions; the clear sky brimming with gold during sunset; clean clothes, those made with that fancy cotton from the south. All were fake: the world had been reduced to skies of smoke and a screen of steam hiding the wide stretches of singed earth. Levi didn’t need to see the world after that first pyre to know it. The wails of his fellow survivors— limbs busted by heat and pressure—were enough of a reminder.

It's easy for him to fall back into old routines: after work, Levi people-watches. He perches himself in the café in front of your house and imagines he sees you amidst the sea of people the subway entrance pukes every three minutes.

He stays for the duration of a shitty black tea blend—enough time to command himself into good behavior (Go home. Eat. Sleep. Don’t call. Don’t text. Wait.)

There, he tries to remember the first time he saw you in your first life. You must have been so small, like he was, and starved and dirty and scared. The child of another whore, maybe. But he has no memories of that.

Then, he pries himself away from the table, one shameful claw at a time.

He goes back to the supermarket on Wednesday. He doesn’t enter; Levi wants to spare the clerk any stuttering attempt to turn him away. Instead, he paces across the street. Without the shroud of grey clouds, the building’s red LED signs look more pitiful than menacing.

Levi sees the plumes of the cigarette before he sees Zeke.

One hand in his trench-coat pocket, he’s leaning against the building’s bricked wall. He glances, shit-eating grin growing, and turns his head back to the sky. He only walks towards Levi when he’s smeared the end of his cigarette on the sidewalk.

“Levi! I knew you’d come back,” he exclaims, arms open in a charade of a hug; the reek of smoke clots in the air—thick enough to make Levi wish for a knife. “It took you longer than I thought, though.”

“You fucking bastard,” Levi replies. He doesn’t like the familiarity that comes with the insult. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“For someone who declares hating me so deeply, you seem very keen on finding me.”

He tries to slap Levi’s shoulder, content. And, when Levi grabs his hand with a disgust-filled grip and shoves it away, Zeke chuckles.  It is almost possible to find sincerity in the gesture.

Clean dress shirt and a pair of new (and somehow ill-maintained) dress shoes. A fucking ugly tie. There’s a smudge on the glasses; a thumbprint starting at the bottom right corner of the left lens.

“You don’t look like shit today,” Levi says.

Commuters snake around them; they come from the tram. Some push.

“Why? Thank you!” When Zeke replies, Levi catches a glimpse of teeth and thinks of Vary’s stomach (and veins, and nerves and muscles) saturating with poisoned wine until he was nothing but monstrous ammunition. He can still hear Zeke’s yell.  “You also look better today. Not limping as much.”

There’s a mother pushing a stroller into the supermarket. She has another kid practically dangling from her arm.

“What provokes it? The rain?” Zeke scratches his left ear. The colorful signs of the shops behind him, stark in the cloudless dark sky, stretch the finger’s shadow into a claw. “It was raining back when you decided to chop my legs off. Makes you remember the explosion?”

Levi found it easy to blank out on the shrill of the Thunderspear. It was the quiet that followed: it sank into his ear, whistling about pain and pain and failure. And the blood from his eye sliding down his temples, and the fingers (knuckle and up blown off) still gripping the trigger and the scent of warm grass wet with the rain.

“Shut up.”

His tone startles the closest passersby: two men discussing EOQs and similar useless shit. They stare and keep their distance as they sidestep.

“Yes, you are right.” Zeke grins, oh so charmed by a hurt, old dog’s barking. He fishes for a metal box in his coat’s pocket, takes a cigarette out and rolls it between his fingers before putting it away. “I suppose this is hardly the place to speak about that.”

Zeke’s staying at a hotel. A slender pile of bricks and black boxes; a façade of hanging greenery and black-framed windows. It’s two streets away from Levi’s.

The presumptuous piece of shit talks all the way there: the canned herring from the Marleyan military rations from back then and the shitty immigration line in the Southern Mitras Airport. The ignorance of that woman over there, with her three children, since the planet is overpopulated and other bullshit, and the stiff collar of his uniform shirt from his warrior days (“Clothes are lighter now; cheaper too.”). The decline of architecture in the face of industrial efficiency and “the Marleyan empire, the one from this life, bequeathed us a striking beauty canon”, but “It’s such a pity foreign nations have infiltrated our great culture”. And he talks about the days he spent in the old Paradis, back when it was the land of Titans, the “disgustingly bland potatoes” and the “simpleton living of a rudimentary people” and of the straw roofs of the country and the abecedarian architecture.

He’s still a complete asshole. But there’s a putrid comfort in hearing someone else speak about the landscapes Levi spent a lifetime in.

There’s a café on the first floor of the hotel.

“Very mediocre blends but it’ll do.” The seats are all driftwood carved into different states of rustic. Bright lights reflect off the white ceramic floors and expose every single knothole in the furniture. “It’s not like your palate will even notice,” Zeke comments while approaching the counter.

The barista recognizes Zeke and rolls her eyes.

As Levi follows the complete pantomime (he watches Zeke order an overpriced, bitter dark roast and orders himself a common brew of tea), he wishes he could resort to the ease of his old blades.

The seats are hard; a branch pokes him in the ass. Zeke gloats in front of him, nasty beard touching the rim of his cup.

You should be home by now, probably making dinner.

“You wanted to talk?” Zeke asks. He’s resting his head in his hand, index finger scratching his ear.

 “What the fuck are you doing in Mitras?” The question is safe, conversational even: mere catching up.

“Consulting gig,” Zeke answers. “The company’s usual brand strategy is a bit too sophisticated for the Paradisian Market.”

“They sent you here for that? You sound like just a pretentious asshole. Those abound here.”

“I’m good at my job. Very good.” Zeke retorts between sips of his esoteric coffee order. “Although not as good as I was back then.” He talks about the past with shameless glee, the fucker.

Outside, a motorcycle speeds down the street. The roar seems to multiply and ricochet against the café’s wall. And Levi thinks of Erwin guiding a cavalry of children through a barrage of rocks. A field of corpses—muscles and blood and bones and everything that makes a body smeared into the ground—barely hidden by green smoke.

And yet, Levi’s here, watching Zeke salivate over every little cruel comment he gets to make, guilty relief gurgling at the bottom of his stomach.

“I figure it’s the same thing for you, Humanity’s Strongest?”  He uses his best mocking tone for the moniker. “This life’s too boring, isn’t it?”

You should be eating dinner by now. He imagines you at your dining table, withering lilies of the valley in a vase—you still get too sentimental with trash, sometimes. You would have left your shoes at the entrance, far enough from the rack for them to become a tripping hazard.

If Levi were there, you’d be ranting about some inane detail about your manager’s printing politics.

“Don’t talk shit about what you don’t know.”

“I wonder what your job is. Although not too difficult to guess.” Zeke grasps his cup with both hands and leans over the table, far too pleased with his own stupid games to know when to halt the bullshit. “All that hero complex…It must be hard to know what to do with it.”

He drinks more of his pretentious brew.

“Who are you protecting now? The infirm, the old, the weak? Maybe kids?”

“I don’t give a single shit about your guesses.”

“But you do.” Zeke’s grin grows bigger. “You are here, aren’t you?”

Levi is back in the forest. Hands itching to slice as the hours passed and the unrelenting jabs kept curling around him.

“Indulge me. You killed me, you owe me. I deserve a little game.”

“I won’t play.”

“You always do.” For a marvelous second, Zeke seems to get tired of his own incessant chatter. He takes out his nasty little box once again and places it on the table. He taps it on the bottom until a cigarette comes out. Then, he takes it to his lips. “So, a teacher…”

Levi doesn’t reply. It’s all that man needs.

“It doesn’t suit you. You are too violent for that. But I suppose you were also always too sentimental,” Zeke comments. “Either way, it’s a sad ending for a mythical Ackerman.”

Today, his kids undertook a botanical expedition in the school’s garden. They bundled in their little coats, which Levi had made them wear, even with the sun out, and marveled at the shittiest spectacle of green leaves and burgeoning flowers. Halfway through, a girl had Levi rescue a grasshopper, brutally exposed to her classmates’ grubby curiosity.

“I like it,” Levi says.

It finally shuts Zeke up. He tucks the cigarette over his right ear and pokes at the blocky cup. It’s nearly empty. He looks down—almost like an admonished child. And Levi realizes that, without the titan curse hanging over his head, Zeke seems a lot younger.

Any successful consultant could have refused to travel.

“Why are you here?”

It’s gotten dark outside. Once in a while, a car’s headlights lick the display window. A group of middle-aged salesmen sits at a nearby table, a  banquet-worthy array of pastries on their table. They cackle each time new tidbits of commonplace gossip demand it.

“I don’t think you have earned any type of information,” Zeke says, though his voice has lost its sharp edges. “However, you have that murderous look on your face, and my neck still hurts from last time.”

Levi bristles. He can still feel the pitiful give of the bastard’s neck beneath his blade. It’d offered him no relief.

“I was eleven. I spent the afternoon at my dad’s house, first time since the divorce. Grisha wanted me to meet my new baby brother.” Zeke continues toying with the ugly cup, as if he were disappointed in seeing it empty.

“And?” Levi falls for it.

“And what? That’s it.” The most self-congratulatory of shit-eating grins distorts his mouth.

Levi slaps Zeke’s hand away from the cup.

“And I don’t give a fuck about your permanent daddy issues. How did you remember?”

“I dreamed of paths that night. It wasn’t the first time. I had dreamed of building figures in the sand under a trail of colorful lights before. But that night I knew exactly what I was doing; I saw Ymir and I saw Eren’s colossals flattening the earth.”

Levi thinks of that boy. Protean green eyes. Vicious anger. He remembers him as a simple kid, sweeping the floors of the headquarters with a determination to impress so honest Levi was afraid to let him down. The hero-worship reminded him of Isabel a bit. He’d told you so one late evening when Petra, Gunter, Ouluo and Eld were still alive and playing babysitters. And he pictures his head, tucked under Mikasa’s arm.

Sometimes, when he thought about it all in his little Marleyan blood-earned house, Levi couldn’t remember how one Eren became the other: a brutal sleight of hand he should have called out. It still haunts him—disquiet settling over his skin—in his sleepless nights: he digs in his memories and searches around for the exact moment the boy changed.

Sometimes, he blames Eren for it all.

“Does Eren remember?” Levi asks.

“Not yet. I hope he doesn’t. It doesn’t do any good to remember. It wouldn’t do him any good,” Zeke replies. His eyes narrow and his voice quietens. His lip trembles, just a short-lived quiver before he can rule it with a grimace. “But he has the same look in his eyes he had back then.”

The barista comes to take Zeke’s empty cup. She looks at Levi’s untouched tea and asks a rote question about it; Levi replies with an equally formulaic answer.

He waits for her to scamper away but, unfazed, she stands at his side. She has decided to speak only to him and goes on a spiel about some sort of muffin made with seed flour ground by artisans in who-knows-what village to the north of Mitras.

Swiftly recovered from his slight moment of earnestness, Zeke has taken the cigarette out of the shitty box, again. As he taps it against the table, he snickers.

Levi buys the fucking muffin.

“You’re very popular,” he taunts. “The tortured kindergarten teacher routine does miracles… Does your little friend like it?”

“Don’t fucking start.” Levi falls for it, again.

His phone is heavy in his pocket. Levi hasn’t heard from you for six days; only that last paltry message he knows he should abide by. And he thinks he could be at that other café, chasing the shadows on your windows until your bedroom light turns off. Instead, he has Zeke leaning in with unbridled glee.

“You’re funny,” Zeke says. “But it’s true that she’s the least interesting part about this conversation. She can’t remember. That much is obvious.”

“What do you know about-”

“Quid pro quo, Levi,” Zeke interrupts him. “What about you?”

“I was seven. Birthday party.” Levi doesn’t tell him about the lonely childhood or the mud tracks or his inconsolablemom or the grief. “I blew out the candles and remembered it all.”

It’s getting late. He wants to check his phone, but not in front of Zeke; he’s seen enough.

“You were just a kid,” Zeke remarks, and he seems moved, truly. There’s a pity in his eyes that Zeke makes sure to blink away. “Too young for the unbearable loneliness…”

He doesn’t tell him about the creeped-out kids that cried until playdates finished early (he was too taciturn, too war-torn to play with balls). He doesn’t tell him about his teenage years, slumping into bed after caring for his mother (hair falling out, thin, and frail and fading) only to spend the night awake, thinking about the curve of your neck when you lay down next to him. Or the early mornings when insomnia shook him in its jaws, and he had to pretend to dream about you (a paper cut on your thumb from reading those incomprehensible books, foot soles perpetually rubbed raw by the gear’s leather straps, little hairs on your nape Levi had spent many mornings caressing with his fingertips).

“So were you,” Levi replies.

“It’s not like I had anything to compare it to.  I was already a warrior candidate at that age.” Zeke shrugs, but Levi sees the frown.

Levi imagines you as you should have been when he first saw you. Tiny, swift hands able to steal wallets, knives and the occasional watch in one imperceptible tug. Tiny mouth trying to make sense of the diminutive signs on the crumbling paper of old pamphlets using the few reading lessons your mother had taught you before dying.

You got to be a kid this time; Levi’s glad for it, grateful even. Still, sometimes, you look at him with wistful eyes, and he finds himself remembering Isabel’s singing, or Furlan’s shitty puns, or Erwin’s stories, or Hange’s fucking reckless shit, or the sight of Paradis’ sky at twilight, back when the Survey Corps’ greatest mission was surviving outside the walls and the world could be reduced to expanses of grass and infinite pine trees, and he wishes you could understand.

“Does anyone else remember?” Levi finally asks.

The group next to them leaves. They fight each other at the register to decide who’s paying. Behind lie the remains of their work escapade: scattered flakes, thin and wide, a spill of milk in the middle of the paper placemat, mugs with beige rings and brown dregs on the bottom.

“Grisha and Carla don’t,” Zeke says. “I have met some of the warriors, but none seems to remember.”

“Who?”

“Porco and Marcel, Pieck, once. They also got to live in Marley in this lifetime.” Zeke’s glasses have slid down his nose. He pushes them back and leaves another smudge on the lens.

“Gabi? Falco?” Levi asks. After so many years it became second nature caring for them.

“You managed to meet those two during the war?” He seems surprised: he widens his eyes just before letting out a frank, throaty laugh. “It’s weird: the monster that hunted me in nightmares transformed into a heartfelt nanny.”

“Are they in Marley or not?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the Brauns or the Grices this time around.”

It’s dark. The barista is yawning in the back right next to the shelves of coffee beans. Levi imagines you waiting for him in his apartment—because you’re curious and forgiving, and you’d want to talk. You’d bring a box of black tea, the one he liked. He’d find you sitting on the left side of the sofa, closest to the window. He’d have a chance to sit at your feet to explain or to beg.

“Why do you remember?”

“Royal genes, titan powers.” Zeke is getting twitchy; he fishes for his cigarette box and opens it and closes it and opens it before taking out a cigarette. “It still connects us to paths in a way. Must be similar for Ackermans. Something from that blood of yours. Eren’s friend, the one from Hizuru, she’d remember too.”

“That’s all?”

On some early mornings, when you haven’t been able to blink the sleep away, you look at him with an understanding so unguarded that it makes him hope.

“You look disappointed… Were you expecting a different answer? Some miracle that’ll make her remember?” Zeke shows him his teeth—more of a grimace than a grin. “I’m all you have.”

And Levi could kill him again. If he had a knife. If the mud and blood that caked his fingers were real.

Levi pays for both drinks before he leaves. Zeke stays, fidgeting with the unlit cigarette.

Year 855. Thirty-seven.

The cold pushed into his skin like a million little needles. The wheelchair bumped along the dirt road under Gabi’s overeager push. Falco was somewhat ahead, but he ran back every ten steps to ask his girlfriend to be more careful with Mr. Levi. She bristled every time and then Falco had to appease her as if she were some sort of capricious animal.

His leg hurt—a deep, howling pain that traveled through his body in waves. The camp’s medic had said that it was common for the cold to make it worse.

It hadn’t even snowed and, once again, Levi couldn’t piss by himself.

This morning, he’d called for your help to get out of his cot. He was still too asleep to remember.

Someone had told the brats that today, for Yule, they were serving hot chocolate at breakfast—some of the unblemished countries of the south felt generous. So, Falco and Gabi fetched him earlier to get first in line. They said it was a nice way to start his birthday.

The pain robbed him of any hunger.

“Did you receive any letters, Mr. Levi?” Falco asked him once Gabi had placed him at one of the makeshift tables; splinters nipped at his skin as Levi ran his fingers across the rough grain of the planks. The girl was already yelling her way into the ration line. “For your birthday?”

“It’s too early,” Levi replied. Hange’s stitches were too tight; he still felt a twinge in his mouth every time he spoke. “They haven’t delivered the mail yet.”

Levi did not tell Falco that his bad eye made it too hard to read, that the blurry words made him nauseous and gave him a headache. He did not tell Falco that Armin had mentioned you in his last letter; that Levi couldn’t finish it, that the nurses had found him writhing on the ground, gravel digging into his shoulder.  Levi did not tell him that he hadn’t opened any mail since then.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Levi. They’ll deliver it today. It’s Yule!”

Falco was a good kid. Compassionate, even sweet. Levi was patient with his excitement for the fucking holiday because you would’ve asked him to.

“Yeah.”

Gabi ended up squabbling with a group of old women, as usual; Falco had to intervene by appealing to their sense of pity. The boy pointed at him while sputtering some variant of “It’s Mr. Levi’s birthday! We wanted to do something nice for him.”

Falco was too charming for his own good, and Levi’s breakfast went on amidst the chatter of grandmothers briefing him on the camp’s gossip.

He kept his hand over the mug’s rim; steam floated and coiled in the places where his fingers should have been. He still dreamed of searing air ripping them apart. To Gabi’s dismay, Levi didn’t drink; he surrendered the beverage to the first child that tried to climb over his chair’s wheels.

Someone asked him about the celebrations on the island. He heard the ghost of your voice saying “Fuck Yule” between laughs.

For the first time in his life, Levi got to hide behind his tired body. He asked the kids to take him away from the table.

The cold air was harsher to take in. It scratched his lungs and left him breathless. The medic said that was common, too.

Falco wanted to ask in the field hospital if they had something for the pain. Levi didn’t let him. The medicine shortage had them rationing morphine. Levi could deal with the leg.

Gabi just prattled. She had gotten a gift from Braun—some shiny dress from the lands of giant lakes that Eren’s razing anger couldn’t reach. The Warriors and the remnants of his squad were spending Yule in the outermost south, where the year ends in warmth (no one wanted to talk about peace and hope in barren landscapes). Gabi said she’d wear it for tonight’s Yule dinner. It was too nice for the camp’s shitty meals.

He wondered what you would have gotten him this year. A new knife: he’d lost his in the explosion. Tea: a small, expensive box from the east of Hizuru, the only plantation that had held out. A cane wrapped in a bow made with the sacks the lucky surviving nations sent their wheat in, and a teary laugh promising he would walk.

The kids left him in his tent. They’d come back later with his birthday gift, Falco had said.

Corpses couldn’t be buried after the Battle of Heaven and Earth. The ground was too compacted, too stuffed with human carrion. The pieces of your body that Jean and Connie managed to find were burned away. Levi had seen a resurrected jaw titan tear you in half with its claws.

Levi stumbled back to the cot. He had to drag his bad leg up the straw mattress—pain like his body ripped open right along the thigh bone.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Hello~ One month ago, I, cocky author, thought this chapter was almost ready and I could focus on writing a WIP for a little while before finishing editing. The idea was to update at the beginning of June. Very evidently, I was mistaken. So, very commonplace apologies and gratitude: thank you for reading, even when the chapters take so long. I hope you enjoy it. I wept a couple of tears writing this chapter. I’m very proud of it. I hope you’d love it as well. Please feel free to tell me anything that crosses your mind while reading. Also, I’m too attached to this work now. Can’t believe we are one chapter away from finishing it.

Content warnings [Spoilers]: Angst. Domesticity. Codependent dynamic (sort of). Spiraling Levi and his various very concerning coping mechanisms. Cleaning. Stalking PTSD. Anxiety.  Depression. Much angst.

“Fuck off,” Levi snarls.

His violence is unfit for a supermarket. The fluorescent lights overhead keep their incessant droning. A chorus of beeps rushes from the cash register: five items. Eight furry, deformed animals printed on cereal boxes look at him with ominous eyes. Zeke is grinning, stained teeth bared.

“Levi?”

“Aw.” Zeke’s voice drowns your whisper. It drips with something rotten. “But didn’t you miss me?”

And Levi is grabbing your wrist with too much desperation. He should take you away from that man. He can force his leg; there’s no real wound, anyway.

Nailed in place, he doesn’t tug.

“Shut up.”

“It must have been awfully lonely,” Zeke goes on. He reaches for his wine bottle. It clanks as he lifts it. “I actually hoped to find you. I knew that you’d remember.”

Zeke steps forward.

Levi has the presence of mind to step in front of you. He thinks of the green smoke, the sulfur of titan blood in his nostrils, the entrails of recruits (barely teens most of them) spraying the fields of Shiganshina. You would have died, were you in the charge.

There’s a stain on Zeke’s shirt. Dark red. Nausea rises in Levi’s throat.

“I’m not mad, see,” Zeke says. He extends his arms, bottle grabbed by the neck. “Even if you killed me in the end.”

You say something in a hushed tone—some question, some kind of appeasement. But it sounds like whistles in his ears.

You are shaking. Levi should take you away, but he cannot expose his back. The lesson was ingrained: it cost him two fingers, an eye and his lungs.

“I’d say it was for the better.” The miasma of smoke thickens as Zeke approaches. He’s close enough to touch him. The bottle swings forward; it grazes Levi’s shoulder with its heel in a gesture of warped camaraderie. “You even managed to find your little friend again.”

And Levi thinks of the first night of the Rumbling. Pain exhaled out of his lungs. The quakes of an earth that would be trampled into nothing by giants. The break in your voice as you tried to soothe him into sipping Hange’s soup. He thinks of the Battle of Heaven and Earth: flying and falling amidst the charred remains of whatever poor wretches Eren had reached, gear lightening as the iceburst stone burned away, teeth digging into muscle with blunt force.

Levi steps forward. He doesn’t want that disgusting excuse of a man to speak of you.

“You fucking piece of shit!”

Zeke stumbles backward. But soon he has a smirk back on his face. If Levi just had his knife…

“You are being too rude.” Zeke touches his heart with a melodramatic flourish; he puts on a grotesque pout. “Shouldn’t I also have the right to meet with old acquaintances?”

“I don’t know you.” Your words almost falter under the whirring music of the speakers.  A glistening film covers your eyes. Wet and threatening. But you still shift enough so that you can painstakingly assess the bastard. There’s an incipient recognition in your voice; it asks more of a question than Levi can stand.

“Ah, yes. Of course.” And Zeke senses it. This new life hasn’t made him less cruel. He still revels in having the upper hand. “What did you tell her, Levi?”

He met you when he was five or six and his mother’s hair was still a beautiful black that gleamed like an oil spill when she brushed it at night. She brought men Levi never saw and spent all her money on smuggled tea and old flour. You were as young and as bereft as him. Playmate. Secret keeper. Companion during the long walks to the Underground’s main well where Levi filled buckets of dirt-water and waited for those men to disappear from his mother’s bed. He’d loved you since then.

“Not much, I assume?”

Levi doesn’t reply.

You are listening. Levi’s still grabbing your wrist with too much force, but you don’t flinch.

“Nothing?”  Zeke feigns surprise. He takes out a cigarette from the front pocket of his coat, taps it against his chin. “A bit selfish for a loyal dog. It must have been bad, then.”

After the Battle of Heaven and Earth, steam rose from the earth for days. Then, there were weeks of pyres and months of rains. Levi had stayed at the edges of death: the first refugee camp was erected right next to Eren’s last footprint. The southern countries were quick and generous with their help—at the beginning at least, when the sheer scope of the destruction wasn’t clear yet and humanity could still dream of a frail fraternity. And Levi lay in his pretty little straw cot.

“Let’s go,” he says. Yet, he finds himself unconvincing. He pulls your wrist, but it barely makes you move.

“No.” There’s an apology he doesn’t deserve mixed in with your reply.

You keep your eyes on Zeke. He absorbs the attention like a miserable clown. His lips warp in a gloating sneer. He strides forward, confident in the protection of your curiosity. Closer, his limbs seem to grow back to the lanky, simian length they had back then.

“You have nightmares, I suppose.” Zeke zeroes in on you. Levi can do little more than extend his arm and pretend that it is enough to shield you from the fucker. He makes you step back. “Gnarly things: giant monsters tearing bodies. Right?”

“I don’t know much about the lives of Paradisians. However, have you dreamed about the immeasurable heat that rises from the earth, the world shaking?” Zeke harps on.

Eyes wide, you fixate on Zeke. Tears are freely falling down your cheeks. You are shaking more violently than before.  Levi sees you open your mouth, lips trembling, and close it again, as if no words could form.

When Levi remembered, it was Kenny who managed to tear his hands away from his face. For years to come he joked that he already had the force of a thousand soldiers, that Levi was just about to rip his eyes out. His mother always admonished him with the most sorrowful of downturned lips.

The supermarket is unsafe. The angular shelving. The glass jars filled with marmalades and expensive coffee grounds; Zeke’s shitty wine bottle—Levi could just about see it: a myriad shards scattered on the poorly mopped linoleum floor. You would hurt yourself if you remembered here.

“Hey.” Levi’s soft as he tries once again to make you leave. But you keep looking at the fucker.

A waft of fermented breath scrapes Levi’s nostrils as Zeke laughs.

“Oh. That one rings a bell.” Zeke’s elated as he speaks. He seems childish; it’s the euphoria of talking about it, of finding someone else who witnessed it after years of loneliness. Levi gets it; it’s repulsive—dirt and blood under his nails. “We called it the Rumbling. At the beginning it was just a bogeyman; but Eren was obsessed with the idea. It was a terrible thing. Gruesome, even. I don’t think there was much to recover afterwards. But I didn’t live enough to see that.”

“Go to fucking hell!” Levi snarls again.

“I already went there, Levi.”

Zeke leans back. He scratches the back of his head and stares at the flickering lamps on the ceiling. 

It is then that Levi notices the smudges on his glasses: grease smeared on the bridge and the rim, too many to make out the fingerprints. When he pulls them away from his hair, Zeke’s fingers have a slight sheen.

Dirty hands. Rancid breath. A stain on his shirt. The bottle of wine dangles—nothing but reddish vinegar that smells like shit.  Zeke’s teeth are stained and he has them all on display.

And tears are dangling from your jaw in fat droplets. And his fucking leg hurts. And Levi sees that bastard leaning in, happily discussing the trampled corpses and corpses and corpses that he abetted Eren in strewing across the globe.

“You know, I’m not sure what happened to you back then, but Levi must know.”

The punch is swift. And weak. Still, it makes Zeke stumble. The bottle falls. Green glass smashes against the linoleum. Burgundy spills. It smells of acid.

“C’mon, Levi,” Zeke yells as he cradles his jaw. “Isn’t the past in the past? It doesn’t matter now.”  The smudged glasses slide down his nose.

“Fuck off with your fucking disgusting hands.”

Gaze pinned on the spreading puddle, you haven’t moved.

And Levi wants to take you home. A shower and tea and warm food. You’ll sleep it off. He’ll stay awake, watch you sleep from a chair—far away so that his dirty hands can’t touch you. And somehow, through the night he’ll find the courage to scrape together the words he needs to explain.

Zeke is standing up. With all the grace of a drunkard, he grabs the shelf. Jars of jam are pushed to the floor. Glass upon glass.

He grimaces, but he returns to his jeers: “He hasn’t changed one bit, has he?”

Zeke steps over the broken glass with indifference. It cracks under his dress shoes.

Then, the store clerk arrives. A kid; he’s shaking. He keeps his broom pressed to his chest.

“Excuse me. Good-” He stutters. “Good evening.” He takes a breath so deep his ribcage grows two sizes, clears his throat, and swallows the very apparent fear. “I’ll have to ask you to leave the premises.” His eyes shift between Zeke and Levi as if assessing the danger. “…please.”

The kid seems surprised when the three of you follow him to the entrance. Zeke walks ahead, and he throws back the most pathetic of secret glances. Levi’s grip on your hand is too firm. Your stride is too slow.

Outside, it is still raining.

Droplets hammer down on his head as he takes out his wallet.

“For the damages.” Levi hands the kid enough to cover the wine, the jams, and the fear.

The poor kid is so stupefied that he thanks him.

You apologize, but Levi doesn’t think the clerk heard you as he rushes back inside.

Zeke is still there, watching. His glasses have fogged up. Long blonde hair sticks to his face. Some sort of persistent beast.

“Should we go for a nightcap?” he asks.

“Please leave us alone,” you mutter. You are staring at your shoes, but the plea seems enough to persuade him.

Zeke extends his hand. Under the pink, fluorescent storefront sign, it looks like open flesh.

“Forgive and forget?” he asks. When it’s clear Levi will not shake his hand, he laughs. “Of course. There’s no forgetting.”

Levi doesn’t take his eyes off him until his form has disappeared behind a building.

Beside him, you are quiet. Rain has completely drenched your coat.

You still don’t remember: Levi sees the confusion on your brow.

He takes the umbrella out of his coat’s front pocket. Its plastic sheath crinkles.

“Here.” Levi makes sure it’s covering you fully. “You’ll get sick.”

You don’t reply. Water is pooling just two steps ahead; you keep your eyes trained on it.

“Let’s go home.” Levi tugs your arm and walks.

The streets are emptier. The drumming of raindrops stifles any little noise that might leak from the bars.

You keep pace with trudging steps.

“We’ll drink something else.” Levi finds himself talkative. “An infusion or water. I’ll buy tea in the morning.”

You’ll both take a shower to wash away the smell of cigarettes. And he’ll prepare dinner, something quick and filling. You’ll sleep.

“Or chocolate.” He rattles on. “I think I have chocolate.”

“Levi, I want to go home.”

It makes him stop. A car passes; your shadow elongates across the whole street. He can see his apartment five buildings away. It’s cold and dark and separation tastes like ashes in his mouth.

“No.”

“Levi, please.”

You are still not looking at him. Eyes on the hem of your coat, on your boots, on his hand over yours. There are fresh tears on your lashes. You don’t try to escape his grip.

 “Let me take you.” He chokes the plea out. There’s still your hand under his.

He thinks of the first time he stood in the rain. Furlan and Isabel returned to him in pieces; you were missing. He thinks of the Battle of Heaven and Earth, of that moment of forlorn clarity when the fog lifted and he ceased fighting.

“You shouldn’t.”

Pain catches up to him on the stairs. Torn muscle and bone bitten into smithereens; lungs burned raw, fingers blown away at the knuckle, and hot, hot metal dragging across his lips, his cheeks, his left eye; grief bloating against his ribs.

Levi has to sit down.

You’ll get to your apartment in half an hour. The subway is close enough for it to be safe. He imagines the rain etching away the yellow of your building’s porchlight as you get inside.  He left you the umbrella; you won’t get sick.

His cellphone is but a blurry arrangement of lines until he overfocusses his good eye. Water drips onto the screen. One, two, three droplets from his drenched hair.

“Got home?” he texts you.

You won’t answer.

It takes him too long to get back to his feet. His leg is completely useless now. He grasps the handrail until the carvings of the wood are imprinted on his palm and pulls himself up.

He drags himself back to his floor. His shoes are wet. Soles are slippery. Waxed parquet is too smooth when he compares it to the dirt of the refugee camp: he stumbles twice. He’s cold.

The key clatters against the doorknob as he tries to open the door.

As he takes them off, his boots squelch. He brings them and his dripping coat to the bathroom. A shallow pond forms on the tiles.

The shower does little to warm him up.

Scattered on the kitchen counter lie all the remains of your presence.  The water you had boiled, cooling. Three containers (sugar, flour, salt) you’d taken from the deepest belly of the top right cabinet on your search for tea.  An unused tray. Two cups. Levi doesn’t move them.

He cooks. He eats. Practical, bland, enough.

His phone rests on the table at arm’s reach. It doesn’t light up.

He washes up. He wipes the table clean.

Three tram stops and seven subway stations to your apartment building. You should have already arrived. The chatter of your noisy neighbors should echo through the first-floor hallway as you walk inside. The umbrella would faithfully drip its way into a puddle as you searched for your keys in your bag. You still keep the lilies-of-the-valley he brought you last week. They’ve started to wither; brownish tips. But the sweet, soapy smell would reach the front door.

He hopes you eat something. He hopes you don’t cry anymore. He hopes you sleep tonight.

Pain flares up when he moves his leg and he finds himself sitting on the armchair. He moves the phone to the coffee table.

Rain keeps flooding the streets. Scraps of neon from the laundromat sign float around the edges of his blinds. He stares at the orange glow until dawn gulps it away.

In the early morning, his phone needs to charge and his pains have settled into flailing, aimless muscles.

Levi texts you again.

“Please.”

Afterwards, he severs himself from the screen and leaves it charging on his bedside table.

He cleans the bathroom first.

The puddle beneath his boots and coat spreads its tendrils alongside the grout lines. Levi smells smoke (Zeke’s cigarettes or his mother’s body trapped in a vault of a sky or ashes upon ashes upon ashes of the Rumbling’s dead); the coat must be washed.  He does it by hand, leaning over the shower, left knee throbbing against the hard tile. Then, he relies on the flimsy sunspot in his living room to dry it.

And when the smell lingers, Levi brings out the bleach. He scrubs the bathroom one tile at a time, gloves off. Bleach gets under his nails and stings.

And he thinks of the pristine little house the Global Alliance sent him to when refugee camps were dismantled and the world put away old war relics. Two stories in a quiet neighborhood in Marley—one of the recovered zones, cities all newly built over fertile lands fed by countlesscorpses. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. A kitchen outfitted with all the modern conveniences wars seemed to forge. The second story served him for shit most days; even with his cane, his leg faltered in the middle of the stairs. He used it for Falco and Gabi’s rooms until they got bored with playing house with him and moved down the street.

Once the chlorine-laced stink saturates the whole room, he checks his cellphone.

“I’m fine,” you write. “Don’t text me, please.”

There’s a five-minute difference between both messages. It’s a useless thing to know.

He strips the sheets from his bed; he lets his washing machine handle them and focuses on the bedframe. He removes the mattress.

His hands are raw from the bleach.

Most of your things are tucked away in his left bedside table. As the washing machine thumps its way to a neighbor’s complaint, Levi rubs the festering wood corners until his rag tears and assembles an exact mental inventory of your presence.

Clothes in the bottom drawer; shit you rummaged for during the nights you stayed over in the top.  Four pairs of socks. Two changes of clothes. Three of Levi’s T-shirts you’d borrowed. A spare phone-charger. A box of tissues. A book you read curled on his chest. A notebook. A pen.

He repeats the list again and again as he scrubs his way through his shitty apartment until the sky darkens one more time. He doesn’t touch the kitchen.

It’s Saturday and a rare spring day without pissing rain and there are teenagers giggling outside as they run towards the tram; there must be some crowded noisy event in downtown Mitras.

Levi is not tired. Cracked hands, buzzing muscles, galvanized nerves. The ache simmering in his leg and fingers. The blurry eye.

Still, he takes a scalding-hot shower. He cooks. He eats. He sits in the armchair and closes his eyes and pretends to fall asleep.

On Sunday, he stands watch in front of your apartment building. There’s comfort in the imagined proximity.

It’s quiet. The hours pass quickly at the café where he sat down—on the terrace, behind a naked hedge, because he has enough shame to hide. They offer him orange juice at breakfast, sparkling water at lunch, coffee between meals. He takes sips and orders food and stares at the leaves burrowing out of the bare branches.

People spill from the subway in mismatched waves. Thin lines of stray passengers, most of the time. At noon, the station disgorges thick crowds searching for restaurants.  A few of them pass by your front porch; no one gets in.

He sees your neighbors. A man leaves in the morning wearing jogging clothes. The noisy couple of the downstairs apartment appears a little after noon; they laugh all the way to a fucking wrecked black car.

Levi doesn’t see you. Then again, there’s the slight rustling of your curtains, moving shadows he seeks when he stares at your windows and that, when found, make him instantly avert his gaze—as if that sham of scruples could absolve him. 

And then he’s once again fourteen in the Underground, still, so still in the shitty straw pallet he used as a bed, counting the seconds between your breaths, saying to himself that as long as he watched, as long as he kept guard, you’d stay with him.

The waiter brings him another coffee. It tastes like shit, but Levi drinks in short sips.

And he tries to parse the words he’d use to explain himself to you, if you ever let him.

And he thinks of his house in Marley. The house he had after the world retired him from all wars. They’d furnished his soulless kitchen with an electric refrigerator and a dishwasher he never trusted enough to use and a motherfucking toaster. The whole world tasted like wet ashes.

Somewhere in the late evening, the waiter speaks to him.

“Sir, we’re closing soon.”

There’s an apology in the statement that Levi barely notices: you’ve turned on the lights in your bedroom.

As he leaves, Levi realizes the ache in his leg has tapered. On his way home, he buys a tin of black tea he doesn’t plan to open without you.

He shouldn’t have come.

You don’t text him on Monday.

It’s sunny. He takes the kids out to the playground after a gruesome counting lesson. They are building make-believe fortresses under the monkey bars. Levi, sitting under a leafless oak, is the old knight they are supposed to protect. Midgame, three kids ask Mr. Levi to tie their shoes (residual pain makes itself known in his left knee).  And it all reminds Levi of Falco, who kept calling him that even when his youngest child got children of her own.

He forces himself to stop checking his phone.

Then, he teaches the kids to make a cat using strings of yarn and recycled bottle caps. There’s a music lesson he doesn’t have to teach and nap time and story time  and pick-up time. The negligent mother throws Levi a dirty look, but she arrives on time.

Falco used to sit down next to Levi’s straw cot and talk about the stupidest of pleasures. Roasted beef and caramelized onions; the clear sky brimming with gold during sunset; clean clothes, those made with that fancy cotton from the south. All were fake: the world had been reduced to skies of smoke and a screen of steam hiding the wide stretches of singed earth. Levi didn’t need to see the world after that first pyre to know it. The wails of his fellow survivors— limbs busted by heat and pressure—were enough of a reminder.

It's easy for him to fall back into old routines: after work, Levi people-watches. He perches himself in the café in front of your house and imagines he sees you amidst the sea of people the subway entrance pukes every three minutes.

He stays for the duration of a shitty black tea blend—enough time to command himself into good behavior (Go home. Eat. Sleep. Don’t call. Don’t text. Wait.)

There, he tries to remember the first time he saw you in your first life. You must have been so small, like he was, and starved and dirty and scared. The child of another whore, maybe. But he has no memories of that.

Then, he pries himself away from the table, one shameful claw at a time.

He goes back to the supermarket on Wednesday. He doesn’t enter; Levi wants to spare the clerk any stuttering attempt to turn him away. Instead, he paces across the street. Without the shroud of grey clouds, the building’s red LED signs look more pitiful than menacing.

Levi sees the plumes of the cigarette before he sees Zeke.

One hand in his trench-coat pocket, he’s leaning against the building’s bricked wall. He glances, shit-eating grin growing, and turns his head back to the sky. He only walks towards Levi when he’s smeared the end of his cigarette on the sidewalk.

“Levi! I knew you’d come back,” he exclaims, arms open in a charade of a hug; the reek of smoke clots in the air—thick enough to make Levi wish for a knife. “It took you longer than I thought, though.”

“You fucking bastard,” Levi replies. He doesn’t like the familiarity that comes with the insult. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“For someone who declares hating me so deeply, you seem very keen on finding me.”

He tries to slap Levi’s shoulder, content. And, when Levi grabs his hand with a disgust-filled grip and shoves it away, Zeke chuckles.  It is almost possible to find sincerity in the gesture.

Clean dress shirt and a pair of new (and somehow ill-maintained) dress shoes. A fucking ugly tie. There’s a smudge on the glasses; a thumbprint starting at the bottom right corner of the left lens.

“You don’t look like shit today,” Levi says.

Commuters snake around them; they come from the tram. Some push.

“Why? Thank you!” When Zeke replies, Levi catches a glimpse of teeth and thinks of Vary’s stomach (and veins, and nerves and muscles) saturating with poisoned wine until he was nothing but monstrous ammunition. He can still hear Zeke’s yell.  “You also look better today. Not limping as much.”

There’s a mother pushing a stroller into the supermarket. She has another kid practically dangling from her arm.

“What provokes it? The rain?” Zeke scratches his left ear. The colorful signs of the shops behind him, stark in the cloudless dark sky, stretch the finger’s shadow into a claw. “It was raining back when you decided to chop my legs off. Makes you remember the explosion?”

Levi found it easy to blank out on the shrill of the Thunderspear. It was the quiet that followed: it sank into his ear, whistling about pain and pain and failure. And the blood from his eye sliding down his temples, and the fingers (knuckle and up blown off) still gripping the trigger and the scent of warm grass wet with the rain.

“Shut up.”

His tone startles the closest passersby: two men discussing EOQs and similar useless shit. They stare and keep their distance as they sidestep.

“Yes, you are right.” Zeke grins, oh so charmed by a hurt, old dog’s barking. He fishes for a metal box in his coat’s pocket, takes a cigarette out and rolls it between his fingers before putting it away. “I suppose this is hardly the place to speak about that.”

Zeke’s staying at a hotel. A slender pile of bricks and black boxes; a façade of hanging greenery and black-framed windows. It’s two streets away from Levi’s.

The presumptuous piece of shit talks all the way there: the canned herring from the Marleyan military rations from back then and the shitty immigration line in the Southern Mitras Airport. The ignorance of that woman over there, with her three children, since the planet is overpopulated and other bullshit, and the stiff collar of his uniform shirt from his warrior days (“Clothes are lighter now; cheaper too.”). The decline of architecture in the face of industrial efficiency and “the Marleyan empire, the one from this life, bequeathed us a striking beauty canon”, but “It’s such a pity foreign nations have infiltrated our great culture”. And he talks about the days he spent in the old Paradis, back when it was the land of Titans, the “disgustingly bland potatoes” and the “simpleton living of a rudimentary people” and of the straw roofs of the country and the abecedarian architecture.

He’s still a complete asshole. But there’s a putrid comfort in hearing someone else speak about the landscapes Levi spent a lifetime in.

There’s a café on the first floor of the hotel.

“Very mediocre blends but it’ll do.” The seats are all driftwood carved into different states of rustic. Bright lights reflect off the white ceramic floors and expose every single knothole in the furniture. “It’s not like your palate will even notice,” Zeke comments while approaching the counter.

The barista recognizes Zeke and rolls her eyes.

As Levi follows the complete pantomime (he watches Zeke order an overpriced, bitter dark roast and orders himself a common brew of tea), he wishes he could resort to the ease of his old blades.

The seats are hard; a branch pokes him in the ass. Zeke gloats in front of him, nasty beard touching the rim of his cup.

You should be home by now, probably making dinner.

“You wanted to talk?” Zeke asks. He’s resting his head in his hand, index finger scratching his ear.

 “What the fuck are you doing in Mitras?” The question is safe, conversational even: mere catching up.

“Consulting gig,” Zeke answers. “The company’s usual brand strategy is a bit too sophisticated for the Paradisian Market.”

“They sent you here for that? You sound like just a pretentious asshole. Those abound here.”

“I’m good at my job. Very good.” Zeke retorts between sips of his esoteric coffee order. “Although not as good as I was back then.” He talks about the past with shameless glee, the fucker.

Outside, a motorcycle speeds down the street. The roar seems to multiply and ricochet against the café’s wall. And Levi thinks of Erwin guiding a cavalry of children through a barrage of rocks. A field of corpses—muscles and blood and bones and everything that makes a body smeared into the ground—barely hidden by green smoke.

And yet, Levi’s here, watching Zeke salivate over every little cruel comment he gets to make, guilty relief gurgling at the bottom of his stomach.

“I figure it’s the same thing for you, Humanity’s Strongest?”  He uses his best mocking tone for the moniker. “This life’s too boring, isn’t it?”

You should be eating dinner by now. He imagines you at your dining table, withering lilies of the valley in a vase—you still get too sentimental with trash, sometimes. You would have left your shoes at the entrance, far enough from the rack for them to become a tripping hazard.

If Levi were there, you’d be ranting about some inane detail about your manager’s printing politics.

“Don’t talk shit about what you don’t know.”

“I wonder what your job is. Although not too difficult to guess.” Zeke grasps his cup with both hands and leans over the table, far too pleased with his own stupid games to know when to halt the bullshit. “All that hero complex…It must be hard to know what to do with it.”

He drinks more of his pretentious brew.

“Who are you protecting now? The infirm, the old, the weak? Maybe kids?”

“I don’t give a single shit about your guesses.”

“But you do.” Zeke’s grin grows bigger. “You are here, aren’t you?”

Levi is back in the forest. Hands itching to slice as the hours passed and the unrelenting jabs kept curling around him.

“Indulge me. You killed me, you owe me. I deserve a little game.”

“I won’t play.”

“You always do.” For a marvelous second, Zeke seems to get tired of his own incessant chatter. He takes out his nasty little box once again and places it on the table. He taps it on the bottom until a cigarette comes out. Then, he takes it to his lips. “So, a teacher…”

Levi doesn’t reply. It’s all that man needs.

“It doesn’t suit you. You are too violent for that. But I suppose you were also always too sentimental,” Zeke comments. “Either way, it’s a sad ending for a mythical Ackerman.”

Today, his kids undertook a botanical expedition in the school’s garden. They bundled in their little coats, which Levi had made them wear, even with the sun out, and marveled at the shittiest spectacle of green leaves and burgeoning flowers. Halfway through, a girl had Levi rescue a grasshopper, brutally exposed to her classmates’ grubby curiosity.

“I like it,” Levi says.

It finally shuts Zeke up. He tucks the cigarette over his right ear and pokes at the blocky cup. It’s nearly empty. He looks down—almost like an admonished child. And Levi realizes that, without the titan curse hanging over his head, Zeke seems a lot younger.

Any successful consultant could have refused to travel.

“Why are you here?”

It’s gotten dark outside. Once in a while, a car’s headlights lick the display window. A group of middle-aged salesmen sits at a nearby table, a  banquet-worthy array of pastries on their table. They cackle each time new tidbits of commonplace gossip demand it.

“I don’t think you have earned any type of information,” Zeke says, though his voice has lost its sharp edges. “However, you have that murderous look on your face, and my neck still hurts from last time.”

Levi bristles. He can still feel the pitiful give of the bastard’s neck beneath his blade. It’d offered him no relief.

“I was eleven. I spent the afternoon at my dad’s house, first time since the divorce. Grisha wanted me to meet my new baby brother.” Zeke continues toying with the ugly cup, as if he were disappointed in seeing it empty.

“And?” Levi falls for it.

“And what? That’s it.” The most self-congratulatory of shit-eating grins distorts his mouth.

Levi slaps Zeke’s hand away from the cup.

“And I don’t give a fuck about your permanent daddy issues. How did you remember?”

“I dreamed of paths that night. It wasn’t the first time. I had dreamed of building figures in the sand under a trail of colorful lights before. But that night I knew exactly what I was doing; I saw Ymir and I saw Eren’s colossals flattening the earth.”

Levi thinks of that boy. Protean green eyes. Vicious anger. He remembers him as a simple kid, sweeping the floors of the headquarters with a determination to impress so honest Levi was afraid to let him down. The hero-worship reminded him of Isabel a bit. He’d told you so one late evening when Petra, Gunter, Ouluo and Eld were still alive and playing babysitters. And he pictures his head, tucked under Mikasa’s arm.

Sometimes, when he thought about it all in his little Marleyan blood-earned house, Levi couldn’t remember how one Eren became the other: a brutal sleight of hand he should have called out. It still haunts him—disquiet settling over his skin—in his sleepless nights: he digs in his memories and searches around for the exact moment the boy changed.

Sometimes, he blames Eren for it all.

“Does Eren remember?” Levi asks.

“Not yet. I hope he doesn’t. It doesn’t do any good to remember. It wouldn’t do him any good,” Zeke replies. His eyes narrow and his voice quietens. His lip trembles, just a short-lived quiver before he can rule it with a grimace. “But he has the same look in his eyes he had back then.”

The barista comes to take Zeke’s empty cup. She looks at Levi’s untouched tea and asks a rote question about it; Levi replies with an equally formulaic answer.

He waits for her to scamper away but, unfazed, she stands at his side. She has decided to speak only to him and goes on a spiel about some sort of muffin made with seed flour ground by artisans in who-knows-what village to the north of Mitras.

Swiftly recovered from his slight moment of earnestness, Zeke has taken the cigarette out of the shitty box, again. As he taps it against the table, he snickers.

Levi buys the fucking muffin.

“You’re very popular,” he taunts. “The tortured kindergarten teacher routine does miracles… Does your little friend like it?”

“Don’t fucking start.” Levi falls for it, again.

His phone is heavy in his pocket. Levi hasn’t heard from you for six days; only that last paltry message he knows he should abide by. And he thinks he could be at that other café, chasing the shadows on your windows until your bedroom light turns off. Instead, he has Zeke leaning in with unbridled glee.

“You’re funny,” Zeke says. “But it’s true that she’s the least interesting part about this conversation. She can’t remember. That much is obvious.”

“What do you know about-”

“Quid pro quo, Levi,” Zeke interrupts him. “What about you?”

“I was seven. Birthday party.” Levi doesn’t tell him about the lonely childhood or the mud tracks or his inconsolablemom or the grief. “I blew out the candles and remembered it all.”

It’s getting late. He wants to check his phone, but not in front of Zeke; he’s seen enough.

“You were just a kid,” Zeke remarks, and he seems moved, truly. There’s a pity in his eyes that Zeke makes sure to blink away. “Too young for the unbearable loneliness…”

He doesn’t tell him about the creeped-out kids that cried until playdates finished early (he was too taciturn, too war-torn to play with balls). He doesn’t tell him about his teenage years, slumping into bed after caring for his mother (hair falling out, thin, and frail and fading) only to spend the night awake, thinking about the curve of your neck when you lay down next to him. Or the early mornings when insomnia shook him in its jaws, and he had to pretend to dream about you (a paper cut on your thumb from reading those incomprehensible books, foot soles perpetually rubbed raw by the gear’s leather straps, little hairs on your nape Levi had spent many mornings caressing with his fingertips).

“So were you,” Levi replies.

“It’s not like I had anything to compare it to.  I was already a warrior candidate at that age.” Zeke shrugs, but Levi sees the frown.

Levi imagines you as you should have been when he first saw you. Tiny, swift hands able to steal wallets, knives and the occasional watch in one imperceptible tug. Tiny mouth trying to make sense of the diminutive signs on the crumbling paper of old pamphlets using the few reading lessons your mother had taught you before dying.

You got to be a kid this time; Levi’s glad for it, grateful even. Still, sometimes, you look at him with wistful eyes, and he finds himself remembering Isabel’s singing, or Furlan’s shitty puns, or Erwin’s stories, or Hange’s fucking reckless shit, or the sight of Paradis’ sky at twilight, back when the Survey Corps’ greatest mission was surviving outside the walls and the world could be reduced to expanses of grass and infinite pine trees, and he wishes you could understand.

“Does anyone else remember?” Levi finally asks.

The group next to them leaves. They fight each other at the register to decide who’s paying. Behind lie the remains of their work escapade: scattered flakes, thin and wide, a spill of milk in the middle of the paper placemat, mugs with beige rings and brown dregs on the bottom.

“Grisha and Carla don’t,” Zeke says. “I have met some of the warriors, but none seems to remember.”

“Who?”

“Porco and Marcel, Pieck, once. They also got to live in Marley in this lifetime.” Zeke’s glasses have slid down his nose. He pushes them back and leaves another smudge on the lens.

“Gabi? Falco?” Levi asks. After so many years it became second nature caring for them.

“You managed to meet those two during the war?” He seems surprised: he widens his eyes just before letting out a frank, throaty laugh. “It’s weird: the monster that hunted me in nightmares transformed into a heartfelt nanny.”

“Are they in Marley or not?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the Brauns or the Grices this time around.”

It’s dark. The barista is yawning in the back right next to the shelves of coffee beans. Levi imagines you waiting for him in his apartment—because you’re curious and forgiving, and you’d want to talk. You’d bring a box of black tea, the one he liked. He’d find you sitting on the left side of the sofa, closest to the window. He’d have a chance to sit at your feet to explain or to beg.

“Why do you remember?”

“Royal genes, titan powers.” Zeke is getting twitchy; he fishes for his cigarette box and opens it and closes it and opens it before taking out a cigarette. “It still connects us to paths in a way. Must be similar for Ackermans. Something from that blood of yours. Eren’s friend, the one from Hizuru, she’d remember too.”

“That’s all?”

On some early mornings, when you haven’t been able to blink the sleep away, you look at him with an understanding so unguarded that it makes him hope.

“You look disappointed… Were you expecting a different answer? Some miracle that’ll make her remember?” Zeke shows him his teeth—more of a grimace than a grin. “I’m all you have.”

And Levi could kill him again. If he had a knife. If the mud and blood that caked his fingers were real.

Levi pays for both drinks before he leaves. Zeke stays, fidgeting with the unlit cigarette.

Year 855. Thirty-seven.

The cold pushed into his skin like a million little needles. The wheelchair bumped along the dirt road under Gabi’s overeager push. Falco was somewhat ahead, but he ran back every ten steps to ask his girlfriend to be more careful with Mr. Levi. She bristled every time and then Falco had to appease her as if she were some sort of capricious animal.

His leg hurt—a deep, howling pain that traveled through his body in waves. The camp’s medic had said that it was common for the cold to make it worse.

It hadn’t even snowed and, once again, Levi couldn’t piss by himself.

This morning, he’d called for your help to get out of his cot. He was still too asleep to remember.

Someone had told the brats that today, for Yule, they were serving hot chocolate at breakfast—some of the unblemished countries of the south felt generous. So, Falco and Gabi fetched him earlier to get first in line. They said it was a nice way to start his birthday.

The pain robbed him of any hunger.

“Did you receive any letters, Mr. Levi?” Falco asked him once Gabi had placed him at one of the makeshift tables; splinters nipped at his skin as Levi ran his fingers across the rough grain of the planks. The girl was already yelling her way into the ration line. “For your birthday?”

“It’s too early,” Levi replied. Hange’s stitches were too tight; he still felt a twinge in his mouth every time he spoke. “They haven’t delivered the mail yet.”

Levi did not tell Falco that his bad eye made it too hard to read, that the blurry words made him nauseous and gave him a headache. He did not tell Falco that Armin had mentioned you in his last letter; that Levi couldn’t finish it, that the nurses had found him writhing on the ground, gravel digging into his shoulder.  Levi did not tell him that he hadn’t opened any mail since then.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Levi. They’ll deliver it today. It’s Yule!”

Falco was a good kid. Compassionate, even sweet. Levi was patient with his excitement for the fucking holiday because you would’ve asked him to.

“Yeah.”

Gabi ended up squabbling with a group of old women, as usual; Falco had to intervene by appealing to their sense of pity. The boy pointed at him while sputtering some variant of “It’s Mr. Levi’s birthday! We wanted to do something nice for him.”

Falco was too charming for his own good, and Levi’s breakfast went on amidst the chatter of grandmothers briefing him on the camp’s gossip.

He kept his hand over the mug’s rim; steam floated and coiled in the places where his fingers should have been. He still dreamed of searing air ripping them apart. To Gabi’s dismay, Levi didn’t drink; he surrendered the beverage to the first child that tried to climb over his chair’s wheels.

Someone asked him about the celebrations on the island. He heard the ghost of your voice saying “Fuck Yule” between laughs.

For the first time in his life, Levi got to hide behind his tired body. He asked the kids to take him away from the table.

The cold air was harsher to take in. It scratched his lungs and left him breathless. The medic said that was common, too.

Falco wanted to ask in the field hospital if they had something for the pain. Levi didn’t let him. The medicine shortage had them rationing morphine. Levi could deal with the leg.

Gabi just prattled. She had gotten a gift from Braun—some shiny dress from the lands of giant lakes that Eren’s razing anger couldn’t reach. The Warriors and the remnants of his squad were spending Yule in the outermost south, where the year ends in warmth (no one wanted to talk about peace and hope in barren landscapes). Gabi said she’d wear it for tonight’s Yule dinner. It was too nice for the camp’s shitty meals.

He wondered what you would have gotten him this year. A new knife: he’d lost his in the explosion. Tea: a small, expensive box from the east of Hizuru, the only plantation that had held out. A cane wrapped in a bow made with the sacks the lucky surviving nations sent their wheat in, and a teary laugh promising he would walk.

The kids left him in his tent. They’d come back later with his birthday gift, Falco had said.

Corpses couldn’t be buried after the Battle of Heaven and Earth. The ground was too compacted, too stuffed with human carrion. The pieces of your body that Jean and Connie managed to find were burned away. Levi had seen a resurrected jaw titan tear you in half with its claws.

Levi stumbled back to the cot. He had to drag his bad leg up the straw mattress—pain like his body ripped open right along the thigh bone.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Staying late updating because I need something to sustain myself during the whole work week. Also, I have a thousand works to read from LeviNSFW26 (I’m so excited to see what you all did with the Mythology prompt). It was a joy to write about the 104th Squad. I do have my favorites, and I hope they are not that obvious (It’s Jean. I love Jean). And Kindergarten teacher Levi has my soul. I remember reading it on a doujinshi a long time ago and it convinced me it was his perfect profession in any modern au. Anyway, this is the closest to a timely update I’ll ever manage (just one month? I’m becoming too quick). Please let me know what you think. All comments are thoroughly beloved and squealed at. And, as always, thank you for reading.

Content warnings [Spoilers]: Birthday party (reluctant). Levi Squad (104th  Training Corps). Slow dancing. Phantom pain. Kindergarten Teacher!Levi. Intrusive thoughts. Grocery run. Domestic fluff. Domestic angst. Soft!Levi Ackerman. Detailed warnings on AO3.

Year 853. Thirty-five.

The kids barged into his office during a strategy briefing. You were in the middle of explaining the fucked-up history of dalliances between Marley and the nations of the Mid-East Allied Forces, according to some Northern professor’s book, when the door creaked open.

Mikasa was at the head of the group, metal-sharp eyes challenging him to try to scare her.

She was direct: “It is your birthday.”

In spite of the terseness, she was holding a wrapped box in her hands—no bows or decorations, just red fabric arranged in skillful folds. She set it down on the desk, right over the fancy global administrative map Hange had found in one of the Marleyan warships the Survey Corps had seized and held. The gift settled on the wood with a blunt and peremptory thud that gave the rest of the brats enough courage to trickle into the room.

Bewildered, you kept the little wooden figurine, the one you were using to represent the Shah of the long-fractured empire of Perser, dangling from your hand.

“Get out.” Levi didn’t stand up. Jean and Connie cowered back to the door’s threshold, but the rest of the squad held their position.

Levi was about to beat the fuck out of them and lock them away for the rest of the month for insubordination when you tried to appeal to reason.

“Armin, we are busy. We are in the middle of a briefing. Can we do this later?”

“You and the captain-” Arlert looked at Levi and deflated. Words became thinner and thinner until he was squeaking like a mouse. “You always say that. And then you both disappear for the rest of the day.”

You turned to Levi. There was a conceding tilt on your brow.

You always babied Arlert. You’d babied him since you first heard him fearlessly talking in the canteen about the vast, deep, blue ocean, and the stretch of frozen, white, blinding snow at the edge of the earth, and of the men and women who lived in the confines of the world, and of their princes and queens. The boy had grown up with his own illegal encyclopedia. A kindred spirit, even if you’d long confessed to Levi that any silly dreams of landscapes faded the same day you first saw the sky— that the beauty of all the fantasies of your childhood was nothing but a barren stage.

Truly, you babied them all. And it had stuck to him, because as he saw Sasha salivating over the cake that she probably had her boyfriend bake, Levi started to wonder if he could maybe cede them one night.

“Why the fuck is this so important to you, Arlert?”

“We’ll infiltrate Marley next year, sir. We don’t know what will happen,” Armin said. He glanced at Eren and Mikasa; he glanced at you. The kid found his reassurance and steadied his voice. “You’ve been a good captain, sir. And we want to-”

“Fine.” Levi relented.

“Fine?” Armin echoed.

“If you so much as leave a single crumb in my office, I’ll have you scrubbing the bathrooms with your own fucking nails.”

The squad stood motionless for a brief second of disbelief. Then, they cheered enough to make Levi regret it.

“Wait,” you managed to stop Connie, Jean and Sasha from placing a banquet-full of food on his desk. “Let me put the map away first. Mikasa…”

The girl grabbed the box again.

You were fussy about rolling the piece of paper back into its cylinder,  like you were years ago with the crumbly, yellowed pages of the censored books that sprang up in the Underground every time the powers above decreed no true human should have access to such apocrypha—as if the whole scope of the world and its resources were still contained by three sets of walls; maps ransacked from enemy warships fucking abounded.

“What’s that box, anyway?” Levi asked.

It lay once again on his desk, alongside three bottles of wine, an uncomfortable amount of those pink marine cockroaches, several platters of shit that would leave crumbles, and that fucking cake oozing whipped cream. He’d have to clean and revarnish.

“Well, Captain, you have to open it to know,” Springer blurted with the stupidest grin on his face.

They all gathered around him in some sort of tight circle as he unwrapped it.

It was a wooden box fitted with a metal platter and various cranks and levers.

“What the fuck is this?”

All the kids around him were particularly excited. Jean and Connie even snickered. He surmised it must have been one of those inventions from beyond the sea.

“Onyankopon calls it a gramophone,” Armin explained.

“And what the fuck does it do?”

“I saw an advertisement in one of Marley’s newspapers,” Jean added. “It plays music.”

“How?” you asked, much more interested in the contraption than Levi ever could be. You trailed your fingers across the velvet lining. “There are no strings or holes.”

“They are in these,” Armin produced a black disk out of some sort of compartment underneath the metal platter. “They have tiny spiral grooves that memorize the music.”

The thing was very fucking smooth, as far as Levi was concerned.

“Can you make it play something?” Mikasa asked, somehow more interested in the contraption than in the boy frowning his life away at the window.

“Yes, but we have to assemble it first.”

After the briefing, you and Levi were going to ride to the sea. A white glare of the winter sun would make you squint as you walked with him across the beach. You would have to keep your boots, because Yule always came with biting winds, even when there was no rain. He would accept the fine wrist-watch you’d wrapped in a silk handkerchief embroidered with his name on the four edges. He would pretend he hadn’t found it in your room a couple of days before, when his afternoon was too idle and he had the sticky thought the dust in the corners of your drawers would make you sick. You’d trace his wrinkles, saying something about how old he was getting, about how grateful you were. And he would feel the tickle of your hardened fingertips—layers of weapons: the scars of Kenny’s knife-learning, ten years of calluses from the vertical maneuvering equipment, the new blisters from the training with the advanced overseas rifles.

Instead, Sasha was salivating all over his desk, gobbling the food when she thought Levi wasn’t watching. Connie tried to pour the wine into glasses and ended up spilling it on his desk; Jean noticed and tried to clean it up with his own sleeve. Mikasa had retreated once again to Eren’s side. She offered him a plate of that nasty shrimp; he didn’t take it.

Levi decided he did not like the machine. But he saw you gawking at the box, mouth agape and eyes wide, as Armin started turning the crank, and that expression was enough of a gift.

“I think it’s ready!” he finally exclaimed.

It was an unnatural thing, the sound coming out of the disk as if invoked by the needle. A piano and gravel tones and trumpets and a choir of voices all singing about warmth and happy people who hadn’t felt the sting of titan blood evaporating from their hands. Charming. Jolly. Bodiless.

No one spoke during that first song.

But the cheeks of the kids flushed gradually. Their grins grew. They sought each other’s eyes. Jean started tapping his foot—a paced thump that vibrated on the office’s floorboards. Armin had that bright-eyed stare. Eren stared at Mikasa with that dopey look he wore when he thought no one was paying attention. She was smiling. The other two brats were practically vibrating.

They started dancing and laughing all over his office. He let them for a while. Levi retreated to a corner (and there might be some indignity in letting his teenage squad take over his office for a birthday party, but he thought of the field of corpses in Shiganshina: young bodies pelted through the legs, the chest, the head. Armin had ten years left. Eren had five. So, Levi let them.)

You were in the same corner, watching Connie and Sasha guzzle wine while they jumped to the rhythm of some ragtime tune.

You were not grinning like the rest of them. Glossy eyes. Wet lashes.

He reached for his handkerchief, fine silk from Mitras with loose leaves shoddily embroidered in a corner—you’d made it to wrap his birthday present last year— and rubbed your eyes dry. Amidst wet spots, one eyelash tangled in the fabric.

“I’ll have them scrub the office clean in the morning,” Levi said because he knew it’d make you smile.

It did, but it was sad and pitiful: a minuscule trembling on the corners of the lips.

“The squad always has a rest day after Yule.” You played along with his shitty back-and-forth. Your voice was shaky.

Levi let his shoulder graze yours. Stiff coats rasped under an absurd song about red-nosed draft animals guiding King Fritz through a dark gift-giving night. His subordinates were yelling inane comments over the music: that Sasha had to leave some shrimp for them, that Connie was a disgusting pig with his uniform soaked with wine beyond salvaging, that Jean could wipe that smirk off his face, because his sleeve was fucked.

“Yule can get fucked,” he said.

Eren brushed Mikasa’s hand. Then, he ducked his head and cowered toward Armin, cheeks a bright red. The blonde boy was humming while parsing something on the back of a cardboard slipcase. His Marleyan was still rudimentary, despite the late-nights Levi had found him (and you) fumbling over grammar manuals—it was still better than Levi’s shit-fuck nothing. Sasha was clamoring about the depth of flavor of some grotesque combination the Marleyan cook had shown her.

“If you want to punish them, you’ll need to ask Hange. They are the commander, after all,” you replied.

Your hand hung next to his; during the minuscule shifts of your body that accommodated each inhale and exhale, your fingers brushed the back of his hand.

“Hange can get fucked, as well.”

“Oh, they will happily.” You paused, caught his gaze. A glint of playfulness shimmered over the sadness. “If you lend them the gramophone.”

Levi couldn’t help but smirk.

“Why are you so constipated, anyway?” he asked. If he just could grab your hand—fingers over your wrist, a tiny rumble of your pulse against his thumb. If he were riding across the coastline beside you. Cloudless skies were rare in Yule: on clear nights, the sand seemed to be made of the same glistening dust as the stars. The horses would be left to rest alongside the tree line. You’d plead with him to sit over his own coat, and he’d complain about the fuck-ass sand getting in the seams, but he’d do it, and you’d sit on his lap, and your head would rest against his chest as you stargazed.  “Wasn’t your morning shit good enough?”

“The songs-” Your eyes were still fixed on the kids. You were following Eren; he worried you. The fireplace shed shadows on your cheeks.

“What do you-”              

Levi did not get to ask his question. The heroic self-restraint that had kept Sasha leashed through the whole evening finally snapped. She came to the corner to retrieve him. First, he heard her mumbling some delirious refrain about sweet, sweet cake; then, she tried yanking him by the arm, any fear of discipline utterly vanquished by her fucking gluttony.

 When Levi didn’t yield, the force of her grip had her toppling on the ground.

“What Sasha meant is that it’s time to cut the cake, Captain.”

Armin was vehement, even in his mousiness.  He did not stammer as he spoke, like he tended to when his friends made him their spokesperson. He looked at Levi directly in the eye. The boy’s cheeks were red.

It had just become very fucking clear that none of the kids would be functional enough to clean his office tomorrow.

Levi knew you’d come to the same realization before you pushed yourself off the wall. For a mere second, there was a tug on his sleeve; a thread from your cuff had tangled with his coat. It snapped off as you walked toward the kids.

“That’s it.” You were stern as you snatched the last bottle from Jean’s hand. He sluggishly pursued it with his giant arm before letting his hand fall to his side in resignation. “No more wine.”

“But the cake, captain. The cake.”

Untouched amidst the ravaging force of Sasha’s mouth lay a cake. White frosting with “Happy Birthday, Captain Levi” piped on the center in practiced cursive. It was nice. Levi had never gotten a cake before. He’d never wanted a cake.

“Fine.”

They spared him any birthday songs. But the synchronized “Happy Birthday, Captain” was enough to pull the corners of his lips.

Most of their voices were deeper now. Jean was on his way to becoming a colossal; the other boys were following suit. Mikasa had already lost the stubborn baby fat he remembered in her cheeks back in Trost. Sasha would soon enough tire of the war and retire to the restaurant of that boyfriend of hers.  Connie was still a dumbass. Sometimes, Levi caught himself finding Erwin’s eyes or hair or manipulativeness in Armin. Eren wouldn’t get to twenty-five, and he knew it.

Them, and Hange—trapped somewhere in a grinding higher-brass meeting— were all that had survived Shiganshina.

Titans did not eat the dead; the cheapness of death filled the stomachs of all of Paradis’ crows and then left some.  The corpses rotted on the field outside the city. Retrieval was only possible after three months. Nothing but bones and sinew. Skin attached to the fingers, the ribs, the scalp —some reddish leather. But the flesh had putrefied into all-permeating sulfurous scent. Bodies couldn’t be recognized. They were placed in a communal grave at the gates of the district with some shitty memorial plaque. Most of the recruits had just finished the Training Corps.

He swallowed it all down with the cake. It was good.

You liked it as well. Your tongue darted over your lower lip to clean a smidge of whipped cream. You hummed. You scraped your fork against the plate to collect the last crumbles.

“Want more? Eat mine.” The offer felt natural. A remnant of the weeks in the Underground where there was nothing to eat but one half-rotten potato and he was so fucking afraid of the slowness of your breath.

“Levi. It’s your birthday.”

He’d ask the Marleyan cook for a cake for your birthday.

“We should save Hange a slice,” you mused. “They come back from Mitras tomorrow.”

The cake was too massive for a party of seven; half of it stayed intact, even when generously portioned. 

He recalled a childhood of cutting stolen loaves in half and carefully sweeping the crumbles into a tin plate—stale bread fell apart too easily. The flame of the oil lamp elongating the shadows until the bread seemed infinite. He recalled ladling his potatoes onto your plate to give you something more to eat during those months when, after Furlan’s and Isabel’s death, you retched at the taste of any kind of meat. He recalled splitting ration crackers during the endless humanity retrieval expeditions that kept the wretched remains of the Survey Corps out of the walls for many weeks following the Fall of Maria.

Levi would get you a second slice.

For now, Armin was negotiating with Sasha about taking another slice instead of directly biting the thing.

“We’re done.” The categorical tone was enough to have them all straighten their backs. Sasha withdrew from the food table with a feral growl. “Turn off the music. You still have to wake up tomorrow to clean the bathrooms.”

Armin took the needle arm away from the rotating disk and the room, once again, drowned in the stagnant silence of winter nights.

Among the crumbs and scraps that littered his desk, Levi caught a white, wet spot. The spilled wine had fucked the varnish.

“But Captain-”

Kirstein got remarkably courageous when drunk; he got close enough for Levi to gut-punch him into sobriety, had their efforts not softened him.

“Does this office look spotless to you, Kirstein?” he interrupted the kid before he whined his way into a true punishment.

“No, sir.”

Then, the idiot turned to you with pleading eyes. He tried to be subtle, but his face deformed in a pout.

“There’s no weak link,” Levi said. You placed your hand over your mouth, and Levi hoped they were drunk enough to not notice you were hiding a smile of endearment. “Hold your part of the deal.”

“Yes, sir,” Jean replied with that pout still on his face.

“Now leave.”

Connie wobbled enough that both Sasha and Jean had to help him walk. Both were quick to forgiveness. Sasha was raving about eating the leftovers of the Yule feast the Marleyan cook prepared; Jean was healing his pride by remarking how terribly bad his friends were at holding their liquor—Levi let the hypocrisy pass because he saw your crinkled eyes and heard your chuckle and hoped he might rest his head on your lap this evening.

“Thank you for letting us celebrate your birthday, captain.” Armin approached with Eren and Mikasa in tow. Blonde hair stuck to his sides like straw. “We’ll clean everything tomorrow, we promise.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

For a tiny moment of smiles and blushes, the whole squad glowed. It reminded Levi of another team that also cherished his praise as if it was worth something.  Petra’s dad still wrote to him, penmanship blurred by a shaky hand and tears; the soldier’s pension kept him fed as the shaking palsy robbed him of his farmer’s strength. That check wasn’t his daughter.

Eren, however, did not seem to budge. The loss of his naïve idolization was disappointing—although Levi always made sure Hange didn’t hear about it. The boy fixed his uncannily green eyes on you. Numbness. Anger. Regret. A scorching guilt that shrouded everything else. Levi had heard you try to talk with him, but he always responded with tight lips and clenched fists.

“Take this with you.” You, always spoiling them rotten, handed Mikasa the half-full bottle of wine and a chunk of the cake. “Enjoy Yule.”

As the three lagging soldiers pulled them shut, the office’s doors creaked again. The squad’s laughs echoed in the hallway. They’d try to continue their party in the canteen.

You could finally rest your head against his shoulder. Wisps of hair tangled in the embroidered Wings of Freedom on his arm.

On the floor, a trail of crumbs followed his subordinates’ dance patterns. Sprinkles of red wine marred his parquet. He could go back to his quarters and itemize from memory the lines and calluses and scars on your hands before nestling his head in your lap, but red wine stained.

“They fucked up my office.”

“It was sweet,” you corrected him. “And you let them.”

There was a puddle of wine next to the bookcase. Shallow and narrow. And yet, it spread farther every time Levi looked at it.

“They should drink beer like normal soldiers.” Levi’s hands itched to clean.

You took a rag, a scrubbing brush and spirits of salt from his cleaning cabinet.

“Don’t clean too much,” you said, perching on the ledge of his desk. “You promised Armin you’d let them clean.”

“Vermin will fuck the shit out of my office before he does.”

A trail of crumbs and icing circled the empty cake tray. Under the spills, varnish turned opaque. White, humid, disgusting spots he shouldn’t touch until it dries again. A droplet of lantern oil had dripped onto his desk’s top right corner. The desk ought to be sanded and revarnished, if Levi wanted it truly clean.

But you, pupils wide and trailing his hands, were still leaning against the edge of his desk.

The air was stuffed with sweat. The room was too small to withstand the excited dancing of too many teenagers. Levi opened the window and the early winter winds swept their cold throughout the room. The fire was dimming; pulsing embers cast amber hues onto your neck.

He blotted the wine and brushed off the crumbs, little more.

Levi would drag the kids from their bunks in the afternoon (they’d still be too hammered in the morning) and order them to sand his desk and wax the floors. He’d redo their work during the night.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I don’t want to see the fucking dirt in this place more than I have to.”

“What are you going to do with the gramophone?” you asked, fingertips carefully tracing the metal corners of the box.

It stood intact and alien, metal arm jutting out towards his desk.

“Don’t care. It’s too tricky. Creepy.”

“It’s not that hard,” you said, voice tinged with a curious brightness. “You just have to turn the crank, place the vinyl, and set the needle.”

You demonstrated and then there was music once again spewing out from the depths of that ugly brass horn.

“Fine. Let’s stay, then.”

A doleful singer wailed above a piano and some sort of raspy trumpet about her neglectful lover abandoning her for another (apparently less whiny) woman amidst Yule’s twinkling lights.

You’d fallen back into the habit of collecting advertisements. You hunted them in the Marleyan newspapers the Corps were required to smuggle for information gathering. You cut black-and-white photographs promoting cheap merchandise or good deals or innovative technology. That was how he learned that Marley liked to decorate trees with strings of electric lights for Yule. And Levi felt that Underground vault covering the sky again—that shit taste of squalor in the face of wasteful abundance.

The wistful expression had returned to your face. You watched the black disk spin, chin cradled in the meat of your palm and fingers splayed on your lips.

“Do you want those lights?”

Onyankopon was thrifty; he’d get them if Levi asked.

“Not really. It’s a waste. Most of Paradis doesn’t even have electricity.”

“Then what the fuck is wrong with the thing?”

You fiddled with the lapels of his jacket; fingers traced the seams before flattening the fabric against his chest. Levi was wearing his old uniform—you’d said you liked it more. The first lot of the new design, slick, petrol-black and sorely tight had already arrived. The squad would have to train in vertical maneuvering with the black suits.

“Nothing. It’s a nice gift.”

Levi reached for your wrist; you let him grab it without any resistance. He sought the labyrinthine lines on your palm, the same as he had always seen them—they revealed the span of one’s life, had once told him one of his mother’s friends as she, bony fingers and ulcerated hands, read his palm. And some nights when, muscles tight and mouthfuls of rot, his body inventoried the dead, Levi found himself tracing those lines of yours from memory.

The skin at the base of your thumb was torn. He placed his lips there.

“The new rifles?”

“Some have unpolished wood at the handle,” you replied. Levi saw you try to find your words in the window behind him. The perpetual torches on the headquarters’ walls reflected in your eyes. “The songs make me think…”

“A tragedy, always,” he coaxed you to continue.

“They must all be in their own parties, dancing to these very songs.”

The needle scratched a different melody: a baritone so similar to Erwin’s voice during those scarce occasions he got drunk enough to sing the raunchy songs he learned in his training days. But this song was a cautious love ballad about the new year.

“Well, the kids were also dancing to them. It’s not that special.”

Violins and trumpets joined the voice in some sort of musical keening. It didn’t compare to his mother’s Yule lullabies, heard directly from her chest as she rocked him to sleep after all her clients were gone; to the makeshift polkas of his fellow soldiers during Yule parties, always filled with flat voices and a boorish grasp of string instruments.

“That’s the problem, Levi.” Your gaze fell; eyes followed the slow swinging of your legs. Close as he was, your inner thighs grazed his hips.  “They are like the kids. And there’s going to be war. There’s-”

“You don’t know.”

The first pamphlets started arriving shortly after Zeke’s cohort first proposed his shitty plan. It had been an obvious manipulation attempt: with no other allies, Paradis would have to fold to whatever that disgusting ape planned. But it had also been true.

Hange had agreed with the rest of the brass that peace talks should start in the new year. But Levi remembered finding you in your office, face on your palms, tears on your cheeks, harsh breathing. Hundreds of paper clippings sat on your desk. Tracts calling for the extermination of the island’s population (corrupting vermin, immoral, inhuman); caricatures of the Walls teeming with cockroaches and rats; some sort of children’s story about flesh-eating Eldians hoarding gold and the dashing boy who eradicated them. “Who would negotiate with cockroaches,” you’d asked him.

Levi was gentle when he pulled your arm.

“Stand up.”

Crestfallen and fixated on the idle movement of your feet, you didn’t comply. “What-”

“Stand up. Come.”

The next song on the black disk was stewed in the same melancholic lovestruck sniveling as the others—a duet he quickly stopped paying attention to. You were close enough for your knee to dig into his thigh as you stepped away from your perch; you stumbled forward. After catching you, Levi did his best to copy the frock-coated, feathered nobles he’d frowned at during the scarce fundraiser balls Erwin had made him attend: he kept his left hand tangled with yours, guided your free hand to his arm and placed his right hand on your back.

Then, he stepped forward and you, a standing doll, were unmoving. He trod on your feet.

“You are very bad at this,” you teased, voice shaky. Your back was stiff.

 “You know you are supposed to move as well. Don’t make it worse,” Levi retorted. He looked down, willing his feet to follow the music.

Movements as cautious as his, you indulged him with a firmer grip on his arm and unrefined footwork.

Levi had never danced before; neither had you.

So, he heeded his body until the movements became familiar. Soon enough, he was pressing his forehead against yours. Eye-to-eye. Touching noses. Shared breath. He half listened to the song and found himself tasting the declarations of love on his tongue.

“Why are we doing this?” you asked. He felt the air shaping around your mouth.

The yield of the uniforms was sparse—leather and stiff cotton were meant to brace the body for the gear’s impact. But Levi could imagine you wearing one of the silken, draped evening gowns Marley advertised in the newspapers. He could almost imagine you liking them in a life where opulence wasn’t cruelty.

“Now we are dancing as well,” he replied. “We are like them.”

“Levi, you know well that-”

“Listen to me. We are like them,” Levi repeated because he would not risk you saying it aloud. “And we’ll make them understand that. Yeah?”

“Okay.” You shut your eyes and pressed closer to him. Your hands escaped his grasp as you wrapped your arms around his back.

“There will be peace talks,” he insisted, still swaying. “And we will make it work. We’ve always made it work. Yeah?”

“Yes.”

Unease cakes under his nails like a fucked-up slurry of blood and dust.

It’s been the same all week.

Today, he’s felt it while he helped his little students take off their wet coats in the morning, and while he watched them make a murky swamp of the classroom entryway, and while he explained to them, for an appalling tenth time, the perils of eating the half-chewed, soggy sandwich they found in the hallway.

Most of the kids are still happy to see him without the cast. They gather around him and grope his arm until they stir the ache in his shoulder. Then, they notice his limp and suggest he put the cast back on.

His leg worries you, too. It has hurt all week. “It’s maybe from the car-crash,” you tell him. You want to take him back to physiotherapy.  And then Levi thinks of the rattling of giant teeth against his femur.

Levi appeases you as best as he can. It’s always happened to him, he tells you: that he’s had a fucked-up leg since he was a kid and that he’s stiff, probably sleeping wrong.

You never believe him, not fully. There’s guilt in the lie. But the same instinctual dread that followed him around during the first life—when Kenny left, when Furlan and Isabel died, when Maria became a mass grave, when burning dust rose under the giant feet of Eren’s wrath—came back with the scent of smoke in your hair.

Levi’s been dreaming of scorched, trampled earth. He doesn’t know how to explain it to you; he doesn’t want to.

After the Battle of Heaven and Earth, he stayed in Fort Salta, or so Falco told him months later when Levi could listen. All he remembered of the aftermath was pain clamping its jaw around his leg.

And the pyres.

They had been Jean’s idea: half-reverential, half-practical. Flesh rots fast in the heat, and beneath the thick, heavy clouds that shrouded the sky, scavengers had started to show their disgusting beaks. Bodies were recovered only in parts. Arms and legs and severed torsos and every shredded leftover of Eren’s tantrum—all covered in layers of flies.

He was conscious enough to watch the first pyres. Long. Tall. They covered Marley’s land for as far as he could see. They burned into black smoke, feeding the dark clouds that covered the sun for months.

He wasn’t conscious after that.

Corpse recovery used to be a common task for the Corps. But this time Levi couldn’t do it; he snarled and gritted his teeth and bled in the pretty little straw cot Falco found for him inside the fort. 

The medics arrived alongside the brutal tempests that shelled the earth once the air had cooled enough. Levi remembers they wanted him still and calm and that all the endurance his genes had carved into his body had bled away through his leg (and fingers, and eyes and ribs). He remembers screaming and thrashing and tearing open the skin of his wrists from the friction of the rope until it snapped.

Fat droplets are still crashing against his classroom’s windows when that last fucking negligent mom comes for her kid. His little student has spent the last half-hour trying to comb into compliance the sloppy pigtails Levi let her do with his hair. The mother exclaims something about rainwater and the slippery roads and how she had to drive from the nail salon with freshly done nails.

“Arrive on time tomorrow.” Levi’s stern. The kid is already transfixed by the iridescent shine of her nails, all toothy smiles; but her nose, which Levi had wiped clean of snot earlier, is still red. “You’ll screw her up.”

He knows he has fucked up. But (tense muscles, prickling skin, the taste of wet earth in the air, the utter certainty that prepares his body for violence) Levi’s always been a natural soldier. He doesn’t find it in himself to be softer, more patient—not with this woman, not this week. And the mother seems ashamed enough to shut up.

They leave. Before the mother can even offer to help, his little student puts her coat on alone.

Levi can spend another hour disinfecting the classroom: you’ve promised to spend the night, but the hours at your shitty job are long. You said you’d come to his classroom.

So, he makes sure the kids’ finger paintings, convoluted splashes of colors labelled in squiggly pencil letters, are neatly displayed in all their laminated glory. He reorganizes the crayons by color, size, state of decay. He washes his hands with scalding water to try to remove the ghost of dirt from under his nails. He thinks of dinner: something easy, rich and warm followed by your soft hands in his hair. He picks up the leftover clutter his kids are not even able to recognize (toys outside their station, a lone half-chewed pencil, a discarded drawing of him with “Teechr Levy” crammed in the bottom left corner) and ignores the sharp strain in his leg when he bends down.

You’ll gift him that endearing smile of yours when he shows you the drawing. Levi wants you to move in.

Somewhere between the tables and the building blocks, you text him.

“How’s the leg?”  

It hurts to stand up. His knee locks up, making the limp more noticeable. A bone-deep ache throbs its way around his leg before dwindling again. It’s not real.

Still, Levi sits down. He has to grab his phone with both hands to reply. The fingers he blew off back then are too stiff to do much.

“Work’s done?” He ignores your question.

You reply with a green fucking heart.

Without daylight, the assortment of stuffed animals his students brought at the beginning of the year looks creepy as fuck. Shaggy big-eyed little things deformed by shadows. There’s a monkey, the favorite of one of the boys. And, for a moment, he wonders if Zeke’s royal blood-

Levi washes his hands, again. He scrubs soap deep under his nails.

Before you arrive, Levi has time to check the desperate writings he published during all those years he hadn’t found you—he should delete them, now. There’s a comment complimenting the worldbuilding and asking for updates, although the whole thing is maybe too bleak. Someone calls him cuckoo-insane for his description of the Rumbling’s famines.

You are wearing your green scarf; you know Levi likes it.

You wait just behind the classroom’s threshold, a folded umbrella dangling from your arm. The hems of your coat are wet.

“You hung new drawings,” you state.

“Farm animals,” he replies.

You are eyeing a three-legged brown scribble posing in the middle of a grass field and a sunny sky. Among the blue, there is “horz” written in the shittiest handwriting Levi has ever seen; beside it, Levi had helped him write the correct spelling.

“They are getting better,” you say. Your umbrella is still dripping onto the hallway. You won’t step inside and dirty his classroom.

It might get you sick—the cold or the rain or the wet coat. He wants you in his home.

“Museum-worthy, already.” Levi walks as he speaks. He tries his best to hide the limp; you are watching him keenly. “Might sell them and retire.”

You kiss him once he’s close enough. Lips against his cheek are cold from the weather. Levi reaches out to probe your hands. He does his best to warm them up with the same tenderness you did in the past: thumbs running over knuckles again and again in quick circles. Palm against palm.

“Levi,” you ask while he locks his classroom’s door. “What were you doing in the classroom?”

“Waiting for you.”

He walks you through the poster-packed reception.  He is slower. The leg fucking drags. You notice.

“In the dark?” You are playful, arm looping around his good one, head leaning against his shoulder. But he senses the worry.

“Do you need lights to wait?”

You exhale an exasperated chuckle and press yourself harder against his arm.

The rain is nothing but a drizzle now, but the water that poured down earlier had already flooded the sidewalks. The tram is a five-minute walk.

The little light the thick stack of clouds lets through grays out the yellow of the streetlamps. And he thinks of waking up one morning, six months after the Rumbling, still relegated to one pretty straw cot, still hearing the whimpers of his fellow infirm, still rationing the half-rotten food that the Northern nations generously sent to the unfortunate half of the world, still writhing under Falco’s ceaselessly pitiful gaze. It was the first morning he tried to walk. By then, the rains had already started.  Shellings of water softened the soil. Even inside the tents, the ground was nothing but sludge. Three steps in, field nurses had to wrench him from the earth.

His fucking leg is still-

Levi does his best to entertain himself with the menial task of holding the umbrella. He thinks about the drawers you’ve been slowly filling up with washed clothes you refuse to take back to your house. He presses his cheek harder against the crown of your head and thinks of dinner.

Coats hung to dry in the bathroom rack. A hot shower. Black tea. An easy dinner. The vibrations of your voice in his chest as you tell him about your day under the covers.

Levi steps into a particularly deep puddle. Water seeps into his boot and drenches his sock. He spits out a “fuck”.

He didn’t notice—he should have noticed. It’s the fucking leg and the dark skies and the grime under his nails and his guts preparing for some sort of terrible wrongness.

Worry in your frown, you look at him.

“Too bad?” you ask.

You reach out for the umbrella, as if releasing him from it would fix shit. You let him keep it when you see the tightness of his grasp.

He’s thankful for the way your hands caress his cheeks, cold as they are.

In his apartment, you’ll lean against him as he prepares the tea. You’ll tell him about the condescending prick who doesn’t know how to restock the printer’s paper and about the soggy lettuce of your lunch. The warmth will soothe his leg.

The station is one street away.

He grumbles about the shitty job of Mitras’ Department of Roads. You laugh at the crassness and tell him the latest developments of the torrid, carefully hidden love affair between your middle manager and the guy at HR.

Once in a while, Levi can sense you focusing on his leg, fixating on the hints of the limp he’s not able to hide.

When the tram finally arrives, the digital timetable has already been blinking for a minute. It’s not completely full. You weave through the late commuters until you find a pair of seats. Then, you cajole him into sitting down (“I had to walk from my job to the kindergarten. Let’s sit down, Levi. I’m tired”) before you ask him:

“Is your leg better?” You are earnest, caged as you have him on the five-stop trip to his house.

Two rows ahead, there’s a pair of teenagers conspicuously letting smoke blow out of their mouths. They wave their hands in the air, trying to guide it towards the ventilation windows. It smells like rainbows and shit.

You wait patiently for him to reply, fingers caressing his palm with an avid worry Levi wishes he didn’t understand.

“It’s just stiff,” he tells you, eyes on the smoke. “The cold makes it worse.”

It also did, back then. He needed the wheelchair almost every winter.

That fucking wet sock is slowly draining the heat from his body. All that is left is the numbness in the muscle and the deep ache in the bone.

“Levi, I really think we should go to-”

“It isn’t from the accident.” He’s curt. And, again, he knows he’s fucking it up.

But you don’t remember, and in all the wretchedness of his solitude, it is a blessing. How can he talk about the pieces of bodies (rotten fingers, mats of hair, severed legs) they found in the mud when the year-long tempests stopped for long enough?

He can’t talk to you about the Rumbling; he doesn’t want to.

“But still, maybe they can give you something,” you insist. “Please.”

He keeps his stare forward. A monotone voice states the name of the station. A second one repeats it, emphatic, almost cheery. Next Stop: Trost Street.  The two teenagers rush towards the door, holding hands. One of them has long straight hair. Ratty and greasy, just like Eren’s when he returned to Paradis.

“It isn’t real,” Levi says. It’s a useless thing; some sort of vague comfort he repeated to himself when he was a teenager, orphaned and alone, and his growing pains resembled more and more his injuries: the bite of heated metal; the perpetual pulsing of flesh surrounding old bones. “I’ve had it before. Since I was seven.”

You are quiet, gaze locked on his face. Levi stares at the seats in front of him, at the display panel.

Next Stop: Karanes Street.

“I get nightmares. Then the pain appears,” he continues. Your grasp on his hands becomes infinitely tender, soft. You are still cold. “It fucks everything up and then it disappears.”

Outside, it starts pissing rain again.

There’s the twisted desire to find recognition in your eyes when he turns. He finds it—some sort of memoryless kinship that tenses your jaw.  

“Nightmares?” You have to drag out every syllable.

Next Stop: Stohess Plaza.

Two stops to get off the tram. One freezing claw at a time, cold keeps creeping up his leg. A woman pushes her stroller all the way to the back of the car; water slides down the waterproof liner. There are three men, white-collared workers, loitering near the exit doors.

“It’s bullshit. But the rain makes it worse,” Levi says. “All. The pain, the nightmares. It’ll go away on its own.”

You don’t reply immediately.

You blink. Head down, you clasp your hands in your lap.

“Hey.” Levi stumbles over the little gentleness he’s ever capable of giving. “It’s fine. It’s not real. Yeah?”

“What kind of-” You choke back the question, like you did after the nightmare you had in Levi’s bed—the only one he’d witnessed— when you had to grieve for people you didn’t remember knowing. “I get nightmares, too. Sometimes.”

Levi’s hands are again all over yours, rubbing and pressing and uselessly trying to create some sort of warmth.

“Sometimes I even see you in them.” The confession comes in a whisper. “Sometimes you are hurt, bleeding in the grass. And the air is hot. It smells of explosion. And I think you are dead.”

For a second, he feels like he’s sharing that first life with you. He is relieved. And selfish for wanting you to remember. And he becomes a coward when he avoids uttering the truth.

Levi can’t explain it to you. He doesn’t want to. He replies with the same worthless recitation: “It’s not real. Not now. They are just shitty nightmares.”

Next Stop: Reiss Chapel.

“I’ll make tea when we get to your apartment,” you say, all glimpses of vulnerability wrapped in the brightness of your voice. “Getting you warm will help your leg.”

You stand up. Levi follows.

His leg is completely fucked up. He conceals it as best as he can.

Next Stop: Maria Park.

As you step out of the tram, Levi opens the umbrella. Large raindrops drum overhead as you both walk towards his apartment.

It’s early enough for the storefronts to be lit up and filled to the brim.

While he hangs the coats to dry in the bathroom, dishes clink in his kitchen. He dries his dripping wet foot and changes his socks. You are boiling water in the electric kettle. Cupboards open and close. Pans rattle. You are pulling his storage jars and then putting them back.

Levi wishes he could have convinced you to take a shower and change into warmer clothes first. But you had just stared at his limping leg and told him to go warm up—that it took two minutes, even less, to prepare a cup of tea.

He’s changing into his house-clothes when you appear in the bedroom, tin in hand.

“There’s no tea.”

You are apologetic. But it is his fucking fault: his shitty leg doesn’t let him think. He should’ve noticed.

“Shit,” he says. The sweater he just picked lies, limp, on his forearm.

“It’s still early. I can go buy some,” you offer. Under your voice, the eternal clatter of the rain goes on.

“No,” Levi replies. “It’s already dark.”

You peer through the window, empty tin swaying in your hand. The metal catches the teals, yellows and oranges of the street’s signs.  

“The supermarket at the end of the street must still be open.”

“I don’t need your shitty tea.”

You step forward. You seek his eyes and hold his stare. The movement makes the pitiful scraps in the tin rustle. 

“Levi, I’ll be fine,” you insist.

The unease he’s carried all day keeps piling up. He folds the fucking sweater, just to have something to do with his hands.

“Fine,” he says. He puts the sweater back in the closet. The wooden floors are slippery under his socked feet; he has to put more weight on his leg to walk.  “I’ll go with you.”

You don’t even try to argue.

The coats are still dripping when you put them back on. The folded umbrella leaves behind a second set of tiny puddles as you retrace your recent steps down the stairs. Levi has trouble raising his knee; he lets you lead. You turn back several times, worried. Once, you try to suggest going alone before Levi shuts it down.

The laundromat in front of his apartment glows in a shitty blue neon. The five minutes of comfort in his own home left him colder. Beside him, you are freezing.  Levi tightens his hold on your hand.

The first time it rained after the Rumbling, Levi was tied down to his cot with repurposed leather straps of his own gear—Jean and Connie apologized afterwards, once Levi could nebulously think; they had braced for a beating that Levi couldn’t give anymore. By that first rain, the pyres had been burning for weeks. They’d still have enough carrion to burn for months to come. Drops loosened the soil and a boiling heat rose back from the earth. Levi remembers having the delirious conviction that he was in hell. Pain pain pain bleeding from his leg (open, raw) to whatever was left of his body.

“We should buy take-out on the way back,” you comment. “It’s faster than cooking.”

He hums.

The sidewalk is crowded. People returning home from their cushy office jobs in the outer ring of Mitras. People braving the shitty spring weather to eat outside after cooping up for most of winter. Too many umbrellas to dodge. A wet leaflet for a new clothing store almost makes him trip.

“See? It’s open.”

The supermarket is empty. One cash register is working. The cashier is alone, elbows against the conveyor belt. There’s buzzing: the fluorescent white lights and the fridges encroaching on the room. It smells of old, wet cardboard. Emanating from the freezers, the warmth is of the pasty kind. Bland pop songs drone out of the speakers: a singer talks of heartbreak and revenge in clichéd terms.

Tea is at the back of aisle four, alongside coffee and breakfast meals.

“Same as always?” you ask him as you both pass the produce section.

Raindrops fall against the metal panels of the roofs. The noise mixes with the shitty music and the buzzing lights and the whirring of the fridges and the squeaks of wet soles against linoleum floors. There’s a leak: red buckets are fenced off with yellow plastic signs.

“Levi,” you ask him again. “Black with bergamot?”

He half-listens, the second time: “Yeah.”

There’s something wrong. And the certainty makes his skin prick up with the mere rustle of the air. Levi picks up the pace. He ignores the leg and wills it to work; he’s made for endurance, after all. He pulls you along, and you follow him with such trust Levi knows he’ll have to answer for it later.

The miasma of cigarettes envelops him first.

A sour stench that soaks into clothes and hair. Levi recognizes him by it—the tall man with greasy blond hair and a dirty beard, slouching towards some blue-branded cereal. Lying on the floor next to him is a full bottle of wine. Dark red. Green glass.

 He’s quick to turn. But, rooted to the spot, you don’t yield.

“Come.” The smell of smoke scratches his throat raw.  “Please.”

“I don’t-”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Staying late updating because I need something to sustain myself during the whole work week. Also, I have a thousand works to read from LeviNSFW26 (I’m so excited to see what you all did with the Mythology prompt). It was a joy to write about the 104th Squad. I do have my favorites, and I hope they are not that obvious (It’s Jean. I love Jean). And Kindergarten teacher Levi has my soul. I remember reading it on a doujinshi a long time ago and it convinced me it was his perfect profession in any modern au. Anyway, this is the closest to a timely update I’ll ever manage (just one month? I’m becoming too quick). Please let me know what you think. All comments are thoroughly beloved and squealed at. And, as always, thank you for reading.

Content warnings [Spoilers]: Birthday party (reluctant). Levi Squad (104th  Training Corps). Slow dancing. Phantom pain. Kindergarten Teacher!Levi. Intrusive thoughts. Grocery run. Domestic fluff. Domestic angst. Soft!Levi Ackerman. Detailed warnings on AO3.

Year 853. Thirty-five.

The kids barged into his office during a strategy briefing. You were in the middle of explaining the fucked-up history of dalliances between Marley and the nations of the Mid-East Allied Forces, according to some Northern professor’s book, when the door creaked open.

Mikasa was at the head of the group, metal-sharp eyes challenging him to try to scare her.

She was direct: “It is your birthday.”

In spite of the terseness, she was holding a wrapped box in her hands—no bows or decorations, just red fabric arranged in skillful folds. She set it down on the desk, right over the fancy global administrative map Hange had found in one of the Marleyan warships the Survey Corps had seized and held. The gift settled on the wood with a blunt and peremptory thud that gave the rest of the brats enough courage to trickle into the room.

Bewildered, you kept the little wooden figurine, the one you were using to represent the Shah of the long-fractured empire of Perser, dangling from your hand.

“Get out.” Levi didn’t stand up. Jean and Connie cowered back to the door’s threshold, but the rest of the squad held their position.

Levi was about to beat the fuck out of them and lock them away for the rest of the month for insubordination when you tried to appeal to reason.

“Armin, we are busy. We are in the middle of a briefing. Can we do this later?”

“You and the captain-” Arlert looked at Levi and deflated. Words became thinner and thinner until he was squeaking like a mouse. “You always say that. And then you both disappear for the rest of the day.”

You turned to Levi. There was a conceding tilt on your brow.

You always babied Arlert. You’d babied him since you first heard him fearlessly talking in the canteen about the vast, deep, blue ocean, and the stretch of frozen, white, blinding snow at the edge of the earth, and of the men and women who lived in the confines of the world, and of their princes and queens. The boy had grown up with his own illegal encyclopedia. A kindred spirit, even if you’d long confessed to Levi that any silly dreams of landscapes faded the same day you first saw the sky— that the beauty of all the fantasies of your childhood was nothing but a barren stage.

Truly, you babied them all. And it had stuck to him, because as he saw Sasha salivating over the cake that she probably had her boyfriend bake, Levi started to wonder if he could maybe cede them one night.

“Why the fuck is this so important to you, Arlert?”

“We’ll infiltrate Marley next year, sir. We don’t know what will happen,” Armin said. He glanced at Eren and Mikasa; he glanced at you. The kid found his reassurance and steadied his voice. “You’ve been a good captain, sir. And we want to-”

“Fine.” Levi relented.

“Fine?” Armin echoed.

“If you so much as leave a single crumb in my office, I’ll have you scrubbing the bathrooms with your own fucking nails.”

The squad stood motionless for a brief second of disbelief. Then, they cheered enough to make Levi regret it.

“Wait,” you managed to stop Connie, Jean and Sasha from placing a banquet-full of food on his desk. “Let me put the map away first. Mikasa…”

The girl grabbed the box again.

You were fussy about rolling the piece of paper back into its cylinder,  like you were years ago with the crumbly, yellowed pages of the censored books that sprang up in the Underground every time the powers above decreed no true human should have access to such apocrypha—as if the whole scope of the world and its resources were still contained by three sets of walls; maps ransacked from enemy warships fucking abounded.

“What’s that box, anyway?” Levi asked.

It lay once again on his desk, alongside three bottles of wine, an uncomfortable amount of those pink marine cockroaches, several platters of shit that would leave crumbles, and that fucking cake oozing whipped cream. He’d have to clean and revarnish.

“Well, Captain, you have to open it to know,” Springer blurted with the stupidest grin on his face.

They all gathered around him in some sort of tight circle as he unwrapped it.

It was a wooden box fitted with a metal platter and various cranks and levers.

“What the fuck is this?”

All the kids around him were particularly excited. Jean and Connie even snickered. He surmised it must have been one of those inventions from beyond the sea.

“Onyankopon calls it a gramophone,” Armin explained.

“And what the fuck does it do?”

“I saw an advertisement in one of Marley’s newspapers,” Jean added. “It plays music.”

“How?” you asked, much more interested in the contraption than Levi ever could be. You trailed your fingers across the velvet lining. “There are no strings or holes.”

“They are in these,” Armin produced a black disk out of some sort of compartment underneath the metal platter. “They have tiny spiral grooves that memorize the music.”

The thing was very fucking smooth, as far as Levi was concerned.

“Can you make it play something?” Mikasa asked, somehow more interested in the contraption than in the boy frowning his life away at the window.

“Yes, but we have to assemble it first.”

After the briefing, you and Levi were going to ride to the sea. A white glare of the winter sun would make you squint as you walked with him across the beach. You would have to keep your boots, because Yule always came with biting winds, even when there was no rain. He would accept the fine wrist-watch you’d wrapped in a silk handkerchief embroidered with his name on the four edges. He would pretend he hadn’t found it in your room a couple of days before, when his afternoon was too idle and he had the sticky thought the dust in the corners of your drawers would make you sick. You’d trace his wrinkles, saying something about how old he was getting, about how grateful you were. And he would feel the tickle of your hardened fingertips—layers of weapons: the scars of Kenny’s knife-learning, ten years of calluses from the vertical maneuvering equipment, the new blisters from the training with the advanced overseas rifles.

Instead, Sasha was salivating all over his desk, gobbling the food when she thought Levi wasn’t watching. Connie tried to pour the wine into glasses and ended up spilling it on his desk; Jean noticed and tried to clean it up with his own sleeve. Mikasa had retreated once again to Eren’s side. She offered him a plate of that nasty shrimp; he didn’t take it.

Levi decided he did not like the machine. But he saw you gawking at the box, mouth agape and eyes wide, as Armin started turning the crank, and that expression was enough of a gift.

“I think it’s ready!” he finally exclaimed.

It was an unnatural thing, the sound coming out of the disk as if invoked by the needle. A piano and gravel tones and trumpets and a choir of voices all singing about warmth and happy people who hadn’t felt the sting of titan blood evaporating from their hands. Charming. Jolly. Bodiless.

No one spoke during that first song.

But the cheeks of the kids flushed gradually. Their grins grew. They sought each other’s eyes. Jean started tapping his foot—a paced thump that vibrated on the office’s floorboards. Armin had that bright-eyed stare. Eren stared at Mikasa with that dopey look he wore when he thought no one was paying attention. She was smiling. The other two brats were practically vibrating.

They started dancing and laughing all over his office. He let them for a while. Levi retreated to a corner (and there might be some indignity in letting his teenage squad take over his office for a birthday party, but he thought of the field of corpses in Shiganshina: young bodies pelted through the legs, the chest, the head. Armin had ten years left. Eren had five. So, Levi let them.)

You were in the same corner, watching Connie and Sasha guzzle wine while they jumped to the rhythm of some ragtime tune.

You were not grinning like the rest of them. Glossy eyes. Wet lashes.

He reached for his handkerchief, fine silk from Mitras with loose leaves shoddily embroidered in a corner—you’d made it to wrap his birthday present last year— and rubbed your eyes dry. Amidst wet spots, one eyelash tangled in the fabric.

“I’ll have them scrub the office clean in the morning,” Levi said because he knew it’d make you smile.

It did, but it was sad and pitiful: a minuscule trembling on the corners of the lips.

“The squad always has a rest day after Yule.” You played along with his shitty back-and-forth. Your voice was shaky.

Levi let his shoulder graze yours. Stiff coats rasped under an absurd song about red-nosed draft animals guiding King Fritz through a dark gift-giving night. His subordinates were yelling inane comments over the music: that Sasha had to leave some shrimp for them, that Connie was a disgusting pig with his uniform soaked with wine beyond salvaging, that Jean could wipe that smirk off his face, because his sleeve was fucked.

“Yule can get fucked,” he said.

Eren brushed Mikasa’s hand. Then, he ducked his head and cowered toward Armin, cheeks a bright red. The blonde boy was humming while parsing something on the back of a cardboard slipcase. His Marleyan was still rudimentary, despite the late-nights Levi had found him (and you) fumbling over grammar manuals—it was still better than Levi’s shit-fuck nothing. Sasha was clamoring about the depth of flavor of some grotesque combination the Marleyan cook had shown her.

“If you want to punish them, you’ll need to ask Hange. They are the commander, after all,” you replied.

Your hand hung next to his; during the minuscule shifts of your body that accommodated each inhale and exhale, your fingers brushed the back of his hand.

“Hange can get fucked, as well.”

“Oh, they will happily.” You paused, caught his gaze. A glint of playfulness shimmered over the sadness. “If you lend them the gramophone.”

Levi couldn’t help but smirk.

“Why are you so constipated, anyway?” he asked. If he just could grab your hand—fingers over your wrist, a tiny rumble of your pulse against his thumb. If he were riding across the coastline beside you. Cloudless skies were rare in Yule: on clear nights, the sand seemed to be made of the same glistening dust as the stars. The horses would be left to rest alongside the tree line. You’d plead with him to sit over his own coat, and he’d complain about the fuck-ass sand getting in the seams, but he’d do it, and you’d sit on his lap, and your head would rest against his chest as you stargazed.  “Wasn’t your morning shit good enough?”

“The songs-” Your eyes were still fixed on the kids. You were following Eren; he worried you. The fireplace shed shadows on your cheeks.

“What do you-”              

Levi did not get to ask his question. The heroic self-restraint that had kept Sasha leashed through the whole evening finally snapped. She came to the corner to retrieve him. First, he heard her mumbling some delirious refrain about sweet, sweet cake; then, she tried yanking him by the arm, any fear of discipline utterly vanquished by her fucking gluttony.

 When Levi didn’t yield, the force of her grip had her toppling on the ground.

“What Sasha meant is that it’s time to cut the cake, Captain.”

Armin was vehement, even in his mousiness.  He did not stammer as he spoke, like he tended to when his friends made him their spokesperson. He looked at Levi directly in the eye. The boy’s cheeks were red.

It had just become very fucking clear that none of the kids would be functional enough to clean his office tomorrow.

Levi knew you’d come to the same realization before you pushed yourself off the wall. For a mere second, there was a tug on his sleeve; a thread from your cuff had tangled with his coat. It snapped off as you walked toward the kids.

“That’s it.” You were stern as you snatched the last bottle from Jean’s hand. He sluggishly pursued it with his giant arm before letting his hand fall to his side in resignation. “No more wine.”

“But the cake, captain. The cake.”

Untouched amidst the ravaging force of Sasha’s mouth lay a cake. White frosting with “Happy Birthday, Captain Levi” piped on the center in practiced cursive. It was nice. Levi had never gotten a cake before. He’d never wanted a cake.

“Fine.”

They spared him any birthday songs. But the synchronized “Happy Birthday, Captain” was enough to pull the corners of his lips.

Most of their voices were deeper now. Jean was on his way to becoming a colossal; the other boys were following suit. Mikasa had already lost the stubborn baby fat he remembered in her cheeks back in Trost. Sasha would soon enough tire of the war and retire to the restaurant of that boyfriend of hers.  Connie was still a dumbass. Sometimes, Levi caught himself finding Erwin’s eyes or hair or manipulativeness in Armin. Eren wouldn’t get to twenty-five, and he knew it.

Them, and Hange—trapped somewhere in a grinding higher-brass meeting— were all that had survived Shiganshina.

Titans did not eat the dead; the cheapness of death filled the stomachs of all of Paradis’ crows and then left some.  The corpses rotted on the field outside the city. Retrieval was only possible after three months. Nothing but bones and sinew. Skin attached to the fingers, the ribs, the scalp —some reddish leather. But the flesh had putrefied into all-permeating sulfurous scent. Bodies couldn’t be recognized. They were placed in a communal grave at the gates of the district with some shitty memorial plaque. Most of the recruits had just finished the Training Corps.

He swallowed it all down with the cake. It was good.

You liked it as well. Your tongue darted over your lower lip to clean a smidge of whipped cream. You hummed. You scraped your fork against the plate to collect the last crumbles.

“Want more? Eat mine.” The offer felt natural. A remnant of the weeks in the Underground where there was nothing to eat but one half-rotten potato and he was so fucking afraid of the slowness of your breath.

“Levi. It’s your birthday.”

He’d ask the Marleyan cook for a cake for your birthday.

“We should save Hange a slice,” you mused. “They come back from Mitras tomorrow.”

The cake was too massive for a party of seven; half of it stayed intact, even when generously portioned. 

He recalled a childhood of cutting stolen loaves in half and carefully sweeping the crumbles into a tin plate—stale bread fell apart too easily. The flame of the oil lamp elongating the shadows until the bread seemed infinite. He recalled ladling his potatoes onto your plate to give you something more to eat during those months when, after Furlan’s and Isabel’s death, you retched at the taste of any kind of meat. He recalled splitting ration crackers during the endless humanity retrieval expeditions that kept the wretched remains of the Survey Corps out of the walls for many weeks following the Fall of Maria.

Levi would get you a second slice.

For now, Armin was negotiating with Sasha about taking another slice instead of directly biting the thing.

“We’re done.” The categorical tone was enough to have them all straighten their backs. Sasha withdrew from the food table with a feral growl. “Turn off the music. You still have to wake up tomorrow to clean the bathrooms.”

Armin took the needle arm away from the rotating disk and the room, once again, drowned in the stagnant silence of winter nights.

Among the crumbs and scraps that littered his desk, Levi caught a white, wet spot. The spilled wine had fucked the varnish.

“But Captain-”

Kirstein got remarkably courageous when drunk; he got close enough for Levi to gut-punch him into sobriety, had their efforts not softened him.

“Does this office look spotless to you, Kirstein?” he interrupted the kid before he whined his way into a true punishment.

“No, sir.”

Then, the idiot turned to you with pleading eyes. He tried to be subtle, but his face deformed in a pout.

“There’s no weak link,” Levi said. You placed your hand over your mouth, and Levi hoped they were drunk enough to not notice you were hiding a smile of endearment. “Hold your part of the deal.”

“Yes, sir,” Jean replied with that pout still on his face.

“Now leave.”

Connie wobbled enough that both Sasha and Jean had to help him walk. Both were quick to forgiveness. Sasha was raving about eating the leftovers of the Yule feast the Marleyan cook prepared; Jean was healing his pride by remarking how terribly bad his friends were at holding their liquor—Levi let the hypocrisy pass because he saw your crinkled eyes and heard your chuckle and hoped he might rest his head on your lap this evening.

“Thank you for letting us celebrate your birthday, captain.” Armin approached with Eren and Mikasa in tow. Blonde hair stuck to his sides like straw. “We’ll clean everything tomorrow, we promise.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

For a tiny moment of smiles and blushes, the whole squad glowed. It reminded Levi of another team that also cherished his praise as if it was worth something.  Petra’s dad still wrote to him, penmanship blurred by a shaky hand and tears; the soldier’s pension kept him fed as the shaking palsy robbed him of his farmer’s strength. That check wasn’t his daughter.

Eren, however, did not seem to budge. The loss of his naïve idolization was disappointing—although Levi always made sure Hange didn’t hear about it. The boy fixed his uncannily green eyes on you. Numbness. Anger. Regret. A scorching guilt that shrouded everything else. Levi had heard you try to talk with him, but he always responded with tight lips and clenched fists.

“Take this with you.” You, always spoiling them rotten, handed Mikasa the half-full bottle of wine and a chunk of the cake. “Enjoy Yule.”

As the three lagging soldiers pulled them shut, the office’s doors creaked again. The squad’s laughs echoed in the hallway. They’d try to continue their party in the canteen.

You could finally rest your head against his shoulder. Wisps of hair tangled in the embroidered Wings of Freedom on his arm.

On the floor, a trail of crumbs followed his subordinates’ dance patterns. Sprinkles of red wine marred his parquet. He could go back to his quarters and itemize from memory the lines and calluses and scars on your hands before nestling his head in your lap, but red wine stained.

“They fucked up my office.”

“It was sweet,” you corrected him. “And you let them.”

There was a puddle of wine next to the bookcase. Shallow and narrow. And yet, it spread farther every time Levi looked at it.

“They should drink beer like normal soldiers.” Levi’s hands itched to clean.

You took a rag, a scrubbing brush and spirits of salt from his cleaning cabinet.

“Don’t clean too much,” you said, perching on the ledge of his desk. “You promised Armin you’d let them clean.”

“Vermin will fuck the shit out of my office before he does.”

A trail of crumbs and icing circled the empty cake tray. Under the spills, varnish turned opaque. White, humid, disgusting spots he shouldn’t touch until it dries again. A droplet of lantern oil had dripped onto his desk’s top right corner. The desk ought to be sanded and revarnished, if Levi wanted it truly clean.

But you, pupils wide and trailing his hands, were still leaning against the edge of his desk.

The air was stuffed with sweat. The room was too small to withstand the excited dancing of too many teenagers. Levi opened the window and the early winter winds swept their cold throughout the room. The fire was dimming; pulsing embers cast amber hues onto your neck.

He blotted the wine and brushed off the crumbs, little more.

Levi would drag the kids from their bunks in the afternoon (they’d still be too hammered in the morning) and order them to sand his desk and wax the floors. He’d redo their work during the night.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I don’t want to see the fucking dirt in this place more than I have to.”

“What are you going to do with the gramophone?” you asked, fingertips carefully tracing the metal corners of the box.

It stood intact and alien, metal arm jutting out towards his desk.

“Don’t care. It’s too tricky. Creepy.”

“It’s not that hard,” you said, voice tinged with a curious brightness. “You just have to turn the crank, place the vinyl, and set the needle.”

You demonstrated and then there was music once again spewing out from the depths of that ugly brass horn.

“Fine. Let’s stay, then.”

A doleful singer wailed above a piano and some sort of raspy trumpet about her neglectful lover abandoning her for another (apparently less whiny) woman amidst Yule’s twinkling lights.

You’d fallen back into the habit of collecting advertisements. You hunted them in the Marleyan newspapers the Corps were required to smuggle for information gathering. You cut black-and-white photographs promoting cheap merchandise or good deals or innovative technology. That was how he learned that Marley liked to decorate trees with strings of electric lights for Yule. And Levi felt that Underground vault covering the sky again—that shit taste of squalor in the face of wasteful abundance.

The wistful expression had returned to your face. You watched the black disk spin, chin cradled in the meat of your palm and fingers splayed on your lips.

“Do you want those lights?”

Onyankopon was thrifty; he’d get them if Levi asked.

“Not really. It’s a waste. Most of Paradis doesn’t even have electricity.”

“Then what the fuck is wrong with the thing?”

You fiddled with the lapels of his jacket; fingers traced the seams before flattening the fabric against his chest. Levi was wearing his old uniform—you’d said you liked it more. The first lot of the new design, slick, petrol-black and sorely tight had already arrived. The squad would have to train in vertical maneuvering with the black suits.

“Nothing. It’s a nice gift.”

Levi reached for your wrist; you let him grab it without any resistance. He sought the labyrinthine lines on your palm, the same as he had always seen them—they revealed the span of one’s life, had once told him one of his mother’s friends as she, bony fingers and ulcerated hands, read his palm. And some nights when, muscles tight and mouthfuls of rot, his body inventoried the dead, Levi found himself tracing those lines of yours from memory.

The skin at the base of your thumb was torn. He placed his lips there.

“The new rifles?”

“Some have unpolished wood at the handle,” you replied. Levi saw you try to find your words in the window behind him. The perpetual torches on the headquarters’ walls reflected in your eyes. “The songs make me think…”

“A tragedy, always,” he coaxed you to continue.

“They must all be in their own parties, dancing to these very songs.”

The needle scratched a different melody: a baritone so similar to Erwin’s voice during those scarce occasions he got drunk enough to sing the raunchy songs he learned in his training days. But this song was a cautious love ballad about the new year.

“Well, the kids were also dancing to them. It’s not that special.”

Violins and trumpets joined the voice in some sort of musical keening. It didn’t compare to his mother’s Yule lullabies, heard directly from her chest as she rocked him to sleep after all her clients were gone; to the makeshift polkas of his fellow soldiers during Yule parties, always filled with flat voices and a boorish grasp of string instruments.

“That’s the problem, Levi.” Your gaze fell; eyes followed the slow swinging of your legs. Close as he was, your inner thighs grazed his hips.  “They are like the kids. And there’s going to be war. There’s-”

“You don’t know.”

The first pamphlets started arriving shortly after Zeke’s cohort first proposed his shitty plan. It had been an obvious manipulation attempt: with no other allies, Paradis would have to fold to whatever that disgusting ape planned. But it had also been true.

Hange had agreed with the rest of the brass that peace talks should start in the new year. But Levi remembered finding you in your office, face on your palms, tears on your cheeks, harsh breathing. Hundreds of paper clippings sat on your desk. Tracts calling for the extermination of the island’s population (corrupting vermin, immoral, inhuman); caricatures of the Walls teeming with cockroaches and rats; some sort of children’s story about flesh-eating Eldians hoarding gold and the dashing boy who eradicated them. “Who would negotiate with cockroaches,” you’d asked him.

Levi was gentle when he pulled your arm.

“Stand up.”

Crestfallen and fixated on the idle movement of your feet, you didn’t comply. “What-”

“Stand up. Come.”

The next song on the black disk was stewed in the same melancholic lovestruck sniveling as the others—a duet he quickly stopped paying attention to. You were close enough for your knee to dig into his thigh as you stepped away from your perch; you stumbled forward. After catching you, Levi did his best to copy the frock-coated, feathered nobles he’d frowned at during the scarce fundraiser balls Erwin had made him attend: he kept his left hand tangled with yours, guided your free hand to his arm and placed his right hand on your back.

Then, he stepped forward and you, a standing doll, were unmoving. He trod on your feet.

“You are very bad at this,” you teased, voice shaky. Your back was stiff.

 “You know you are supposed to move as well. Don’t make it worse,” Levi retorted. He looked down, willing his feet to follow the music.

Movements as cautious as his, you indulged him with a firmer grip on his arm and unrefined footwork.

Levi had never danced before; neither had you.

So, he heeded his body until the movements became familiar. Soon enough, he was pressing his forehead against yours. Eye-to-eye. Touching noses. Shared breath. He half listened to the song and found himself tasting the declarations of love on his tongue.

“Why are we doing this?” you asked. He felt the air shaping around your mouth.

The yield of the uniforms was sparse—leather and stiff cotton were meant to brace the body for the gear’s impact. But Levi could imagine you wearing one of the silken, draped evening gowns Marley advertised in the newspapers. He could almost imagine you liking them in a life where opulence wasn’t cruelty.

“Now we are dancing as well,” he replied. “We are like them.”

“Levi, you know well that-”

“Listen to me. We are like them,” Levi repeated because he would not risk you saying it aloud. “And we’ll make them understand that. Yeah?”

“Okay.” You shut your eyes and pressed closer to him. Your hands escaped his grasp as you wrapped your arms around his back.

“There will be peace talks,” he insisted, still swaying. “And we will make it work. We’ve always made it work. Yeah?”

“Yes.”

Unease cakes under his nails like a fucked-up slurry of blood and dust.

It’s been the same all week.

Today, he’s felt it while he helped his little students take off their wet coats in the morning, and while he watched them make a murky swamp of the classroom entryway, and while he explained to them, for an appalling tenth time, the perils of eating the half-chewed, soggy sandwich they found in the hallway.

Most of the kids are still happy to see him without the cast. They gather around him and grope his arm until they stir the ache in his shoulder. Then, they notice his limp and suggest he put the cast back on.

His leg worries you, too. It has hurt all week. “It’s maybe from the car-crash,” you tell him. You want to take him back to physiotherapy.  And then Levi thinks of the rattling of giant teeth against his femur.

Levi appeases you as best as he can. It’s always happened to him, he tells you: that he’s had a fucked-up leg since he was a kid and that he’s stiff, probably sleeping wrong.

You never believe him, not fully. There’s guilt in the lie. But the same instinctual dread that followed him around during the first life—when Kenny left, when Furlan and Isabel died, when Maria became a mass grave, when burning dust rose under the giant feet of Eren’s wrath—came back with the scent of smoke in your hair.

Levi’s been dreaming of scorched, trampled earth. He doesn’t know how to explain it to you; he doesn’t want to.

After the Battle of Heaven and Earth, he stayed in Fort Salta, or so Falco told him months later when Levi could listen. All he remembered of the aftermath was pain clamping its jaw around his leg.

And the pyres.

They had been Jean’s idea: half-reverential, half-practical. Flesh rots fast in the heat, and beneath the thick, heavy clouds that shrouded the sky, scavengers had started to show their disgusting beaks. Bodies were recovered only in parts. Arms and legs and severed torsos and every shredded leftover of Eren’s tantrum—all covered in layers of flies.

He was conscious enough to watch the first pyres. Long. Tall. They covered Marley’s land for as far as he could see. They burned into black smoke, feeding the dark clouds that covered the sun for months.

He wasn’t conscious after that.

Corpse recovery used to be a common task for the Corps. But this time Levi couldn’t do it; he snarled and gritted his teeth and bled in the pretty little straw cot Falco found for him inside the fort. 

The medics arrived alongside the brutal tempests that shelled the earth once the air had cooled enough. Levi remembers they wanted him still and calm and that all the endurance his genes had carved into his body had bled away through his leg (and fingers, and eyes and ribs). He remembers screaming and thrashing and tearing open the skin of his wrists from the friction of the rope until it snapped.

Fat droplets are still crashing against his classroom’s windows when that last fucking negligent mom comes for her kid. His little student has spent the last half-hour trying to comb into compliance the sloppy pigtails Levi let her do with his hair. The mother exclaims something about rainwater and the slippery roads and how she had to drive from the nail salon with freshly done nails.

“Arrive on time tomorrow.” Levi’s stern. The kid is already transfixed by the iridescent shine of her nails, all toothy smiles; but her nose, which Levi had wiped clean of snot earlier, is still red. “You’ll screw her up.”

He knows he has fucked up. But (tense muscles, prickling skin, the taste of wet earth in the air, the utter certainty that prepares his body for violence) Levi’s always been a natural soldier. He doesn’t find it in himself to be softer, more patient—not with this woman, not this week. And the mother seems ashamed enough to shut up.

They leave. Before the mother can even offer to help, his little student puts her coat on alone.

Levi can spend another hour disinfecting the classroom: you’ve promised to spend the night, but the hours at your shitty job are long. You said you’d come to his classroom.

So, he makes sure the kids’ finger paintings, convoluted splashes of colors labelled in squiggly pencil letters, are neatly displayed in all their laminated glory. He reorganizes the crayons by color, size, state of decay. He washes his hands with scalding water to try to remove the ghost of dirt from under his nails. He thinks of dinner: something easy, rich and warm followed by your soft hands in his hair. He picks up the leftover clutter his kids are not even able to recognize (toys outside their station, a lone half-chewed pencil, a discarded drawing of him with “Teechr Levy” crammed in the bottom left corner) and ignores the sharp strain in his leg when he bends down.

You’ll gift him that endearing smile of yours when he shows you the drawing. Levi wants you to move in.

Somewhere between the tables and the building blocks, you text him.

“How’s the leg?”  

It hurts to stand up. His knee locks up, making the limp more noticeable. A bone-deep ache throbs its way around his leg before dwindling again. It’s not real.

Still, Levi sits down. He has to grab his phone with both hands to reply. The fingers he blew off back then are too stiff to do much.

“Work’s done?” He ignores your question.

You reply with a green fucking heart.

Without daylight, the assortment of stuffed animals his students brought at the beginning of the year looks creepy as fuck. Shaggy big-eyed little things deformed by shadows. There’s a monkey, the favorite of one of the boys. And, for a moment, he wonders if Zeke’s royal blood-

Levi washes his hands, again. He scrubs soap deep under his nails.

Before you arrive, Levi has time to check the desperate writings he published during all those years he hadn’t found you—he should delete them, now. There’s a comment complimenting the worldbuilding and asking for updates, although the whole thing is maybe too bleak. Someone calls him cuckoo-insane for his description of the Rumbling’s famines.

You are wearing your green scarf; you know Levi likes it.

You wait just behind the classroom’s threshold, a folded umbrella dangling from your arm. The hems of your coat are wet.

“You hung new drawings,” you state.

“Farm animals,” he replies.

You are eyeing a three-legged brown scribble posing in the middle of a grass field and a sunny sky. Among the blue, there is “horz” written in the shittiest handwriting Levi has ever seen; beside it, Levi had helped him write the correct spelling.

“They are getting better,” you say. Your umbrella is still dripping onto the hallway. You won’t step inside and dirty his classroom.

It might get you sick—the cold or the rain or the wet coat. He wants you in his home.

“Museum-worthy, already.” Levi walks as he speaks. He tries his best to hide the limp; you are watching him keenly. “Might sell them and retire.”

You kiss him once he’s close enough. Lips against his cheek are cold from the weather. Levi reaches out to probe your hands. He does his best to warm them up with the same tenderness you did in the past: thumbs running over knuckles again and again in quick circles. Palm against palm.

“Levi,” you ask while he locks his classroom’s door. “What were you doing in the classroom?”

“Waiting for you.”

He walks you through the poster-packed reception.  He is slower. The leg fucking drags. You notice.

“In the dark?” You are playful, arm looping around his good one, head leaning against his shoulder. But he senses the worry.

“Do you need lights to wait?”

You exhale an exasperated chuckle and press yourself harder against his arm.

The rain is nothing but a drizzle now, but the water that poured down earlier had already flooded the sidewalks. The tram is a five-minute walk.

The little light the thick stack of clouds lets through grays out the yellow of the streetlamps. And he thinks of waking up one morning, six months after the Rumbling, still relegated to one pretty straw cot, still hearing the whimpers of his fellow infirm, still rationing the half-rotten food that the Northern nations generously sent to the unfortunate half of the world, still writhing under Falco’s ceaselessly pitiful gaze. It was the first morning he tried to walk. By then, the rains had already started.  Shellings of water softened the soil. Even inside the tents, the ground was nothing but sludge. Three steps in, field nurses had to wrench him from the earth.

His fucking leg is still-

Levi does his best to entertain himself with the menial task of holding the umbrella. He thinks about the drawers you’ve been slowly filling up with washed clothes you refuse to take back to your house. He presses his cheek harder against the crown of your head and thinks of dinner.

Coats hung to dry in the bathroom rack. A hot shower. Black tea. An easy dinner. The vibrations of your voice in his chest as you tell him about your day under the covers.

Levi steps into a particularly deep puddle. Water seeps into his boot and drenches his sock. He spits out a “fuck”.

He didn’t notice—he should have noticed. It’s the fucking leg and the dark skies and the grime under his nails and his guts preparing for some sort of terrible wrongness.

Worry in your frown, you look at him.

“Too bad?” you ask.

You reach out for the umbrella, as if releasing him from it would fix shit. You let him keep it when you see the tightness of his grasp.

He’s thankful for the way your hands caress his cheeks, cold as they are.

In his apartment, you’ll lean against him as he prepares the tea. You’ll tell him about the condescending prick who doesn’t know how to restock the printer’s paper and about the soggy lettuce of your lunch. The warmth will soothe his leg.

The station is one street away.

He grumbles about the shitty job of Mitras’ Department of Roads. You laugh at the crassness and tell him the latest developments of the torrid, carefully hidden love affair between your middle manager and the guy at HR.

Once in a while, Levi can sense you focusing on his leg, fixating on the hints of the limp he’s not able to hide.

When the tram finally arrives, the digital timetable has already been blinking for a minute. It’s not completely full. You weave through the late commuters until you find a pair of seats. Then, you cajole him into sitting down (“I had to walk from my job to the kindergarten. Let’s sit down, Levi. I’m tired”) before you ask him:

“Is your leg better?” You are earnest, caged as you have him on the five-stop trip to his house.

Two rows ahead, there’s a pair of teenagers conspicuously letting smoke blow out of their mouths. They wave their hands in the air, trying to guide it towards the ventilation windows. It smells like rainbows and shit.

You wait patiently for him to reply, fingers caressing his palm with an avid worry Levi wishes he didn’t understand.

“It’s just stiff,” he tells you, eyes on the smoke. “The cold makes it worse.”

It also did, back then. He needed the wheelchair almost every winter.

That fucking wet sock is slowly draining the heat from his body. All that is left is the numbness in the muscle and the deep ache in the bone.

“Levi, I really think we should go to-”

“It isn’t from the accident.” He’s curt. And, again, he knows he’s fucking it up.

But you don’t remember, and in all the wretchedness of his solitude, it is a blessing. How can he talk about the pieces of bodies (rotten fingers, mats of hair, severed legs) they found in the mud when the year-long tempests stopped for long enough?

He can’t talk to you about the Rumbling; he doesn’t want to.

“But still, maybe they can give you something,” you insist. “Please.”

He keeps his stare forward. A monotone voice states the name of the station. A second one repeats it, emphatic, almost cheery. Next Stop: Trost Street.  The two teenagers rush towards the door, holding hands. One of them has long straight hair. Ratty and greasy, just like Eren’s when he returned to Paradis.

“It isn’t real,” Levi says. It’s a useless thing; some sort of vague comfort he repeated to himself when he was a teenager, orphaned and alone, and his growing pains resembled more and more his injuries: the bite of heated metal; the perpetual pulsing of flesh surrounding old bones. “I’ve had it before. Since I was seven.”

You are quiet, gaze locked on his face. Levi stares at the seats in front of him, at the display panel.

Next Stop: Karanes Street.

“I get nightmares. Then the pain appears,” he continues. Your grasp on his hands becomes infinitely tender, soft. You are still cold. “It fucks everything up and then it disappears.”

Outside, it starts pissing rain again.

There’s the twisted desire to find recognition in your eyes when he turns. He finds it—some sort of memoryless kinship that tenses your jaw.  

“Nightmares?” You have to drag out every syllable.

Next Stop: Stohess Plaza.

Two stops to get off the tram. One freezing claw at a time, cold keeps creeping up his leg. A woman pushes her stroller all the way to the back of the car; water slides down the waterproof liner. There are three men, white-collared workers, loitering near the exit doors.

“It’s bullshit. But the rain makes it worse,” Levi says. “All. The pain, the nightmares. It’ll go away on its own.”

You don’t reply immediately.

You blink. Head down, you clasp your hands in your lap.

“Hey.” Levi stumbles over the little gentleness he’s ever capable of giving. “It’s fine. It’s not real. Yeah?”

“What kind of-” You choke back the question, like you did after the nightmare you had in Levi’s bed—the only one he’d witnessed— when you had to grieve for people you didn’t remember knowing. “I get nightmares, too. Sometimes.”

Levi’s hands are again all over yours, rubbing and pressing and uselessly trying to create some sort of warmth.

“Sometimes I even see you in them.” The confession comes in a whisper. “Sometimes you are hurt, bleeding in the grass. And the air is hot. It smells of explosion. And I think you are dead.”

For a second, he feels like he’s sharing that first life with you. He is relieved. And selfish for wanting you to remember. And he becomes a coward when he avoids uttering the truth.

Levi can’t explain it to you. He doesn’t want to. He replies with the same worthless recitation: “It’s not real. Not now. They are just shitty nightmares.”

Next Stop: Reiss Chapel.

“I’ll make tea when we get to your apartment,” you say, all glimpses of vulnerability wrapped in the brightness of your voice. “Getting you warm will help your leg.”

You stand up. Levi follows.

His leg is completely fucked up. He conceals it as best as he can.

Next Stop: Maria Park.

As you step out of the tram, Levi opens the umbrella. Large raindrops drum overhead as you both walk towards his apartment.

It’s early enough for the storefronts to be lit up and filled to the brim.

While he hangs the coats to dry in the bathroom, dishes clink in his kitchen. He dries his dripping wet foot and changes his socks. You are boiling water in the electric kettle. Cupboards open and close. Pans rattle. You are pulling his storage jars and then putting them back.

Levi wishes he could have convinced you to take a shower and change into warmer clothes first. But you had just stared at his limping leg and told him to go warm up—that it took two minutes, even less, to prepare a cup of tea.

He’s changing into his house-clothes when you appear in the bedroom, tin in hand.

“There’s no tea.”

You are apologetic. But it is his fucking fault: his shitty leg doesn’t let him think. He should’ve noticed.

“Shit,” he says. The sweater he just picked lies, limp, on his forearm.

“It’s still early. I can go buy some,” you offer. Under your voice, the eternal clatter of the rain goes on.

“No,” Levi replies. “It’s already dark.”

You peer through the window, empty tin swaying in your hand. The metal catches the teals, yellows and oranges of the street’s signs.  

“The supermarket at the end of the street must still be open.”

“I don’t need your shitty tea.”

You step forward. You seek his eyes and hold his stare. The movement makes the pitiful scraps in the tin rustle. 

“Levi, I’ll be fine,” you insist.

The unease he’s carried all day keeps piling up. He folds the fucking sweater, just to have something to do with his hands.

“Fine,” he says. He puts the sweater back in the closet. The wooden floors are slippery under his socked feet; he has to put more weight on his leg to walk.  “I’ll go with you.”

You don’t even try to argue.

The coats are still dripping when you put them back on. The folded umbrella leaves behind a second set of tiny puddles as you retrace your recent steps down the stairs. Levi has trouble raising his knee; he lets you lead. You turn back several times, worried. Once, you try to suggest going alone before Levi shuts it down.

The laundromat in front of his apartment glows in a shitty blue neon. The five minutes of comfort in his own home left him colder. Beside him, you are freezing.  Levi tightens his hold on your hand.

The first time it rained after the Rumbling, Levi was tied down to his cot with repurposed leather straps of his own gear—Jean and Connie apologized afterwards, once Levi could nebulously think; they had braced for a beating that Levi couldn’t give anymore. By that first rain, the pyres had been burning for weeks. They’d still have enough carrion to burn for months to come. Drops loosened the soil and a boiling heat rose back from the earth. Levi remembers having the delirious conviction that he was in hell. Pain pain pain bleeding from his leg (open, raw) to whatever was left of his body.

“We should buy take-out on the way back,” you comment. “It’s faster than cooking.”

He hums.

The sidewalk is crowded. People returning home from their cushy office jobs in the outer ring of Mitras. People braving the shitty spring weather to eat outside after cooping up for most of winter. Too many umbrellas to dodge. A wet leaflet for a new clothing store almost makes him trip.

“See? It’s open.”

The supermarket is empty. One cash register is working. The cashier is alone, elbows against the conveyor belt. There’s buzzing: the fluorescent white lights and the fridges encroaching on the room. It smells of old, wet cardboard. Emanating from the freezers, the warmth is of the pasty kind. Bland pop songs drone out of the speakers: a singer talks of heartbreak and revenge in clichéd terms.

Tea is at the back of aisle four, alongside coffee and breakfast meals.

“Same as always?” you ask him as you both pass the produce section.

Raindrops fall against the metal panels of the roofs. The noise mixes with the shitty music and the buzzing lights and the whirring of the fridges and the squeaks of wet soles against linoleum floors. There’s a leak: red buckets are fenced off with yellow plastic signs.

“Levi,” you ask him again. “Black with bergamot?”

He half-listens, the second time: “Yeah.”

There’s something wrong. And the certainty makes his skin prick up with the mere rustle of the air. Levi picks up the pace. He ignores the leg and wills it to work; he’s made for endurance, after all. He pulls you along, and you follow him with such trust Levi knows he’ll have to answer for it later.

The miasma of cigarettes envelops him first.

A sour stench that soaks into clothes and hair. Levi recognizes him by it—the tall man with greasy blond hair and a dirty beard, slouching towards some blue-branded cereal. Lying on the floor next to him is a full bottle of wine. Dark red. Green glass.

 He’s quick to turn. But, rooted to the spot, you don’t yield.

“Come.” The smell of smoke scratches his throat raw.  “Please.”

“I don’t-”