[Writing Sideblog] 28 (Still no money. Still no prospects. Still frightened. I have a cat now, though.). She/Her. Currently writing for Levi Ackerman and Erwin Smith. Trying to become a more regular updater. AO3
Again and again, even though we know love's landscape [Masterlist]
Levi Ackerman/ Reader | Reincarnation!AU | Explicit | Multi-chapter
AO3
SUMMARY:
Levi remembered on his seventh birthday: a lifetime of grime, corpses, and titans —a lifetime by your side.
He chokes on yearning and grief as he searches for you.
On his twenty-seventh birthday, Levi finds you. You don’t remember.
CONTENTS:
Afab!Reader – Reincarnation!AU – Modern!AU – Canon Compliant– Emotional Hurt/Comfort – Angst with a Happy Ending – Fluff – Smut – Christmas – Birthdays – Flashbacks – Soft Levi Ackerman – Childhood Friend Levi Ackerman
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
This was written for LeviWeek24’s day one (Prompt is “Happy Birthday Levi”). It was originally supposed to be a one shot, but it got out of control. So out of control that this ended up being a 6-chapter fic. I didn’t even get to write the fics I had outlined for the other days — they might become extremely late entries, depending on how hard the new year hits me.
Anyway, this is a Reincarnation!AU that alternates between the reencounter of Levi and the reader (written in present tense) and the birthdays Levi spent with the reader on their first life (written in past tense). Hope you enjoy it!
As always, all comments (thoughtful analysis, keysmashes, concrit, emojis) are welcomed <3
INDEX:
Chapter I: If your eyes looked up and met mine one more time (6.5k words) | AO3
Levi people-watches every day after work. He perches himself in any downtown restaurant with outside tables and searches for your face on the streets.
Chapter II: And I felt the taste of you bubble up inside me (5.5k words) | AO3
There’s a blatant hope for his appreciation in your questions. Levi doesn’t know how to explain to you that he’s spent his last ten birthdays hoping to see this exact curve of your neck as you lean towards the table and lay your cheek on the back of your hand.
Chapter III: And we've both done it all a hundred times before (7.2k words) | AO3
Glimpses of a past life appear in your mind with little flourish. In those moments, you speak with the same tone you use to speak about Levi’s kids, or about your imbecile of a boss, or about the shitty hard chairs you sit on while waiting for Levi to finish therapy.
Chapter IV: Let's step into the dark; once we're in, I'll know my way around | AO3
He wanted you so much back then. And he fucking wants you now. He wants you undone and radiant under him during rainy mornings. And he wants your sighed moans against his skin. And your folded clothes in his hamper, and his shampoo on your hair. He wants you curled next to him on the slow afternoons after work when he’s assessing the fingerpainted damage on his backpack.
Chapter V: I can still smell the fire, though I know it's long died out | AO3
Levi’s been dreaming of scorched, trampled earth. He doesn’t know how to explain it to you; he doesn’t want to.
Again and again, even though we know love's landscape [Chapter V]
Chapter V: I can still smell the fire, though I know it's long died out
Levi Ackerman/ Reader | Reincarnation!AU| 8.2k words
Masterlist | AO3 | | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
CHAPTER SUMMARY: Levi’s been dreaming of scorched, trampled earth. He doesn’t know how to explain it to you; he doesn’t want to.
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-”
“Levi!” The voice is acetic. It reminds him of titan blood, vaporous and fetid. “Leaving already?”
@sire-levi I don't know what I did to deserve so much kindness 🥹🥹🥹
And agreed soft!Levi is the best. We need more people writing him in fandom, so never even think of dropping writing. Can't wait to read something you write
Again and again, even though we know love's landscape [Chapter IV]
Chapter IV: Let's step into the dark; once we're in, I'll know my way around
Levi Ackerman/ Reader | Reincarnation!AU| 7.1k words
Masterlist | AO3 | | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
CHAPTER SUMMARY: He wanted you so much back then. And he fucking wants you now. He wants you undone and radiant under him during rainy mornings. And he wants your sighed moans against his skin. And your folded clothes in his hamper, and his shampoo on your hair. He wants you curled next to him on the slow afternoons after work when he’s assessing the fingerpainted damage on his backpack.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Hello~
You must already know the drill:
I’m sorry it took me so long; I’m slow and busy.
Thank you for reading and commenting. I appreciate each one of your comments. Also, never believe your comments are “too much” or that I’m annoyed; if it ever takes me more than usual to answer, you can guarantee that’s the fault of my job. But I promise I’ll always reply and that I love knowing your opinions, your feelings about the chapter, etc.
Anyways, I really enjoyed writing this chapter. Levi’s voice is always fun to write. The mix of grief, yearning and sarcasm is so compelling, and I have found my calling is finding increasingly complex ways to derogatorily mention piss.
Let me know what you think <3
Content warnings [Spoilers]: Mandatory work party. Levi’s Squad (the first). Midnight phone call. Smoke as PTSD trigger. Domestic Fluff. Protective Levi. Second First Time. Oral sex. Fingering. Penis-in-vagina sex. Crying during sex. Detailed warnings on AO3.
Year 848. Thirty.
The squad had begged him to go to the Yule celebration.
Long after he’d sent them to the showers, Ral knocked on his door, all her courage gathered in her fists, and asked him why he never went to the pitiful party brimming with piss-poor beer and piss-drunk soldiers smearing their snot on the tables while singing creepy carols about the purity of the snow and the merriment of the season. She’d said she hoped all the squad would go.
The cheers of Jinn, Bozado and Schultz echoed in the hallway when he dismissed her.
It was an opportunity to build rapport with his team—whatever Erwin meant by that. But after shoving four boxes of Mitras’ tea at him and hastily wishing him a happy birthday, they’d all straightened their backs and stared at their plates: wiry-looking poultry that Erwin had ransomed out of Ehrmich nobles, greasy sauce, the sempiternal potatoes—the Survey Corps’ cooks had them roasted and spiced, but they were the same nauseating thing the regiment had been eating for two years in a row. Rose’s fields grew barely anything else.
It made him think of riding across the golden fields of Maria’s flatlands for hours. Windmills like gentle giants bordering the river. No survivors had been found in the expeditions to the wheat-growing towns.
The idleness of winter made him sick. He wanted to go back to his room.
Other squads were in the midst of their successful rapport-building: there was not enough milk for Shiganshina’s rice pudding, or Ehrmich’s Yule bread, or Orvud’s baked apples, or Yarckel’s vanilla custard. And, apparently, what was Yule without all that shit?
“Just a while. Enough for them to know you better. Yes?” The cacophony of fifty identical wails about their grandmas’ unique Yule recipes forever gone with Maria’s new feral cow hordes almost drowned you out.
“Since when do we care so much about cow tits?” Levi muttered.
The corners of your eyes crinkled, your fingers splayed over your lips to catch the chuckle. It was almost enough to ignore the new member of Zacharias’ squad flailing in front of the band. The rest of his own squad made a poor job of pretending they didn’t hear him. Ral’s ears turned red, Bozado bit his tongue, Schultz choked on his beer.
“Eat the goose.”
“Might be chicken,” you replied, too amused with his bullshit attempts at captaincy. There was a cup of mulled wine in your hand.
None of the other members of his squad seemed to be enthused about the pathetic salvaged pieces of a Yule meal.
Levi chewed one bite of the hardened chicken before he spoke: “You seem disappointed. Is the food too shitty?”
The “No, sir” was immediate. He was harsher than he’d intended to be.
Loud enough to be heard above the slurred singing, the clanking of cutlery rose from the table.
You smiled again. You might have been laughing at their fear or at his coarseness. Either way, he could almost touch the tautness of your skin, the warmth in your cheeks.
Bozado took advantage of the silence at the table to tell some inflated fable about his kills during the last expedition, as if he hadn’t pissed himself when the first titan approached the left flank. Petra scoffed—she had seen him piss himself—but she didn’t intervene, because she’d pissed herself, too. Levi supposed that they didn’t know that he knew, but you’d mentioned it as some sort of endearing detail after suggesting them for the squad.
After the mythical fifth kill, Jinn finally interrupted him with some funny anecdote about a soldier who choked on a King Fritz figurine during last year’s Yule.
The soldier was dead, of course. A titan had bitten him in half during the 41st Expedition. Levi hadn’t seen it; Erwin had placed you and him at the center of the vanguard.
More than six months ago, when the Survey Corps had just stirred from their yearly hibernation, the regiment was sent to retrieve an ore crusher from one of the mining cities to the east of Krolva.
Bodies, still rotting, piled up inside the tunnels. For the first time in three years, most of them were whole. But deeper inside, there were only scattered bones. Smaller, like those of children or women. Grooves made by knives. Scorches. The townspeople hid themselves in the mines after Maria fell. Titans couldn’t go underground.
Hange had hypothesized about how long they’d managed to survive (six months, if they were methodical enough). They went for the children and the women first, but soon enough the living bodies didn’t have enough flesh to make it worth it. And Levi kept thinking about how Mitras had only mentioned the town’s name because the nobles wanted more gold.
You’d managed to hold your vomit until the town’s outskirts—a restrained glimpse of sacredness for an outdoor boneyard. Levi had stroked your back while muttering some bullshit about keeping your boots clean. You’d never puked before, not outside the walls. The Underground is nothing but a mine, you’d said while Levi wiped the vomit out of the corners of your lips with his handkerchief.
When the regiment returned to Krolva, Erwin asked you both to assemble a special operations team (Levi could only focus on the decay sticking to his nails, the putrid air of the tunnels, the weight of another stone vault). A small, elite squad that could carry on missions with relative discretion; some way to act without having to beg for scraps from the assholes of the upper crust.
His team’s first expedition would be next spring, right when hooves stuck in the drenched earth and the air carried the bitterness of flowers. They might die.
Bozado and Petra were dangerously serving themselves a third cup of mulled wine. They turned their eyes down every time they realized he was watching.
You were laughing at Jinn’s story. The muscles in your throat moved up and down. Glistening skin, sweat was forming. This year, the cold had been harsh, but the canteen was brimming with body heat. If you stayed longer, sweat would bead in the hollow of your throat. And, once you returned to his quarters, Levi would nuzzle your neck and overplay his complaints, even if he intended to lap the salt and the musk off your skin, because it would convince you to take a bath in the dead of a winter night.
“My mom adored that cake,” Petra said, a wistful grin quickly hidden behind her palm. “We had this porcelain crown, and the one that got it didn’t have to help with the dishes from Yule dinner. I think she marked the slice she placed it in.”
“In the orphanage, the winner had to recite a prayer for the Walls in front of the other kids. Fun, right?” said Jinn.
At intervals, Jinn looked at something behind Levi. He saw him comb his beard with his fingers, adjust his uniform, and wink.
“That’s sad.” Schultz laughed. “I won only once; got a bigger piece of cake than my sisters.”
“What did the winner of the King Cake get at your house?” Petra asked you.
“We-” Your eyes sought his. Quick: a slight raise of his brow; the short wrinkling of your eyes. Then, you took another sip of wine. “I never had Yule cake as a child.”
The mysterious poultry lay untouched on your plate; it had to be cold now. Stashed in his desk drawers he had tea and a box of butter biscuits he’d bought for you during the morning trip to the village. And he could imagine you munching on them half-naked on his bed, hair disheveled and hand extended to catch any crumbs, as if he weren’t going to change the sheets.
“I’m so sorry, I thought-” Kind as she was, Petra was quick to apologize.
“Don’t worry. It doesn’t really matter,” you replied.
Once, when you both were still little enough to chase the sham of a jolly old man with a bagful of gifts reserved for those good enough, you straightened out the crumbled, year-old Yule advertisements you’d found on the streets and hung them around the plank. King Fritz never comes because we don’t put up decorations; he thinks we don’t believe in him, you’d concluded during that Yule when his mom’s skin was already bruising blue (and purple and yellow) over her jutting bones. There was one engraving you especially liked: a white rabbit with an enormous bow around its fluffy neck. Rabbits were white, that’s what his mom had said; they became white to hide in the snow. You had deduced the ribbon had to be red, because in Yule carols, the children were always opening gifts wrapped in crimson. You’d hung it above Kuchel’s bed, because your one and only wish had been for Levi’s mom to get better. She’d died in the spring.
“What about you, captain?” Schultz asked.
“I don’t like Yule.”
“But captain, it’s the best time of the year. The carols, the snow, the gifts and the food!” Schultz tried to tick the list of boons off his hands; sloppy fingers seemed to stick together.
“There’s only snow in the north, you idiot.” Bozado’s scoff was spurious and inflated. “Yule’s overrated anyway.” He managed to choke with his own spit halfway through it. No one around him seemed keen on patting him on the back as he attempted to hide his coughs.
Levi looked at you from the corner of his eye. You were pouring water into Bozado’s empty cup. Your grasp was not as firm as it usually was. You were gingerly swaying to the melody a new recruit was butchering on the accordion. Soft, pliant.
He’d let you sleep until late tomorrow. Most of the regiment would still be half-drunk in the morning, anyway; there wouldn’t be any morning drills. Force of routine would jolt you awake just when the sunrays were turning the sky orange. Levi would be staring at you, fingers pinching the fabric of your nightshirt. The room would be cold; the fire would have dimmed. And he’d try to get up just to rekindle it. But you’d ask him to stay in bed. You’d tuck your head against his shoulder, and your warm breath would brush his neck. And you’d draw circles on his chest—the touch would feel sharper, since your fingertips were callused now— slower and slower until sleep coaxed you back.
“You are just saying that because the captain doesn’t like it!” Petra exclaimed as she stood up. She stared at the man as if he had just shat in the middle of the canteen. Her cheeks, a deep pink. The color deepened as the embarrassment sank in. She sat back down in one quick jerk downward. The table shook. Levi held your cup by the bottom, so it didn’t spill. It was filled to the rim.
“Yule was always wretched in the orphanage. I suppose it’s worse for the kids now.” Jinn commented, once again striving to save the squad’s dignity. Then, he gazed again at something behind Levi and fucking winked. “And anyway, the captain does not have to celebrate Yule. He’s probably too busy celebrating his birthday.”
“Happy birthday, captain!” Bozado was eternally eager to please.
“I hope you’ll like the tea we got you, captain,” Schultz slurred.
“Yes! We didn’t know which one you liked, so we had some help!” Petra flashed you a grateful smile.
“The captain is very consistent with his likes,” you said. The glint in your eyes shone just enough for him to notice the playfulness in the statement.
You pushed the four boxes his way. He’d placed them on the edge of the table, between his seat and yours—amidst drunk soldiers, there were always beer spills; he wanted his presents safe. They were wrapped in green fabric and tied with white ribbons. The work was simple, neat.
“Who wrapped this?”
“Gunther did, captain,” Jinn said. “Petra and Oluo got the handkerchiefs for the wrappings.”
“And what did you do?”
“I found the only fine tea merchant in Trost, sir.”
“Good job.”
They all preened.
Jinn excused himself sometime in the evening. He was exhausted from Levi’s drill and too drunk to stay, he lied. He fixed his uniform once more as he stood up. Behind him, Levi could hear the disappointed uproar of some soldiers. Someone yelled “It’s too early yet!”
Bozado and Ral snickered when they thought Levi wasn’t watching. As if he hadn’t been in the Survey Corps for five years.
“With whom?”
“One of the new recruits. Erwin said she came from the Karanes’ Training Corps, I think.” There was a slight drag in your syllables.
Schultz was too wasted to keep his neck straight. He was resting his forehead against the table with his mouth half-open; a puddle of slobber formed under him. Bozado and Ral had withdrawn into a nonsensical back-and-forth—some sort of angry flirting.
You were staring at him with the giddiest, dopiest expression on your face. Lips quirked, eyes too bright.
“You are all shitfaced.” He threw the plain truth into the air.
“Hange spiked the wine with some potato concoction,” you replied anyway, grin somehow bigger. “But you can’t get drunk.”
Then, you finally touched him: a fumbling stroke across his cheek that almost took his eye out. Your hand was sweaty, palm sticking to his skin, and you tilted so far forward that he feared you might fall.
Levi held your wrist, grip strong enough to keep you stable, and let you do it. Everyone else was too shitfaced to notice anything.
“Fuck potatoes…”
“And fuck Yule.” You emphasized the fuck, giggled. And Levi remembered a night eleven years ago and smiled.
“We are leaving.” Levi stood up, and you followed instantly. “Ral, Bozado, Schultz, you too.”
Two inebriated “Yes, sir” followed. Schultz was too plastered to even answer. You were swaying next to him—the music had long stopped; the recruit had been heckled into silence.
Levi had to think about how to get his men safely back to their bunks.
“Bozado, take Ral back to her barracks and go directly to your own sleeping arrangements.”
Petra feebly protested that she was capable enough to go on her own, but she complied. The pair staggered away from the canteen in a tender simultaneity they’d deny tomorrow.
Levi was about to throw Schultz over his shoulder when you stopped him just to wipe the drool off the soldier’s mouth with a napkin.
“Just for your peace of mind.”
“This place is dirty as fuck. My peace of mind is already fucked,” Levi grumbled, but the gratefulness seeped into a tender stare. “Come on, take the tea.”
After he tucked his piss-drunk subordinate into bed, Levi could finally return with you to his room.
It’d snowed in the morning. It was miserably freezing, but the sky was clear and a million shiny speckles illuminated the way to the officer’s quarters. The sight made him think of the reddest of hairs and the clearest of blue eyes.
“The sky is like that night when we were still together, the four of us,” you said, voice full of sweetness. “Isabel would’ve adored Petra.”
“Isabel already adored you.”
At the threshold of the building, you grabbed his hand. He let you. No one was there to see. They were all drunk or asleep or dead. You leaned in and the heat of the mulled wine seeped through his coat.
“Petra is sweeter, louder. Isabel would’ve loved that,” you went on. “And Furlan would have liked the wine. I don’t know why he liked Yule so much.”
“You talk such bullshit when you get drunk.”
And Levi gazed at you, and the relief of your presence was enough.
The shadows of the hallway elongated your eyelashes, fluttering things of velvet that somehow made your eyes look brighter. One had fallen to your cheek; the thick layer of sweat made it stick to your skin. Levi brushed it away with his thumb. You stole a kiss from his palm as he did. Hot lips.
“I never get drunk.” You gifted him another of those wineful smiles. “Just today. To help you build the rapport.”
“At least they weren’t still shitting themselves with fear.”
“They saw you were thankful for the tea.”
You stumbled at the stair landing. Boots snagged on the last step with a dull thump. You were too unstable to brace yourself.
Levi had time to utter a quick shit before he held your waist and guided your graceless ass down to the floor.
The giggle was immediate; to stifle it, you pressed your mouth to his chest. Wet, warm air left a damp spot on his shirt. Your body shook with each snicker. The joy was contagious, and he found himself chuckling despite the impulse to scrub the party out of both your bodies in his tub.
“Get up. Let’s go,” he urged you. Levi pulled you back up. You clung to him all the way back to his quarters. The dense fabric of your military coat scratched his hand. But his room would be warm, when he kindled the fire. And Levi would see you without that fuck-ass uniform. “Why are you so happy anyway?”
In front of the door, stray fingers grazed the sides of his eyes, his forehead.
“You have wrinkles now, you know.” You leaned closer to his face, squinted your eyes. Your breath smelled of cloves and anise. “You managed to get old.”
“Yeah. We did.”
His mother had been almost a child when she gave birth to him. She played tea party, and she hugged him like children—lucky children, true children— were supposed to do with their stuffed dolls. Sometimes, he wondered at what exact age he’d outlived his mother.
Levi had outlived most of the people he’d ever crossed. He’d outlived Furlan and Isabel and countless recruits who arrived at the Survey Corps writing to their own mothers about bravery and the nobleness of sacrifice. But, at least, he hadn’t outlived you.
You stumbled into his room with inebriated giddiness. With every turn of the oil-lamp’s knob, your smile became more and more imbued with childish glee.
“You never asked me what I got you for your birthday,” you all but sang.
You didn’t wait for him to answer. You crouched down with unstable excitement and rummaged through the drawer in his dresser he’d assigned you. Levi heard the chime of porcelain before he saw it.
“The tea set! I finally got the whole tea set!”
You rushed to him with your hands full.
His phone rings.
It’s dark, quiet, too early, and for an instant he’s just returned from an expedition—the 35th or 36th, when all the Survey Corps could do was pile up the rotten shreds of humans and set them alight; slogging months of soldiers wailing or retching or bellowing at the stars as they recognized the torn limbs burning at the pyre.
But he doesn’t feel the leather straps squeezing his flesh open. His room doesn’t smell of smoke. He’s on a bed far kinder than the straw mattresses that, back then, were reserved for the safer nights inside the walls.
It’s you. He knows it before he even reads his phone’s screen.
“What’s wrong?”
“Levi?” Behind your muffled voice, he can hear that modern, soulless drone upscale bars tend to pass as music.
“Where are you?” His voice is still rough. His body is still sluggish, and, as he stumbles into a pair of pants, he resents it.
“Downtown Mitras.” People laugh. You press the phone closer to your face. Your voice comes out distorted.
“What’s wrong?” he repeats, sweater pulled on and hands blindly rummaging through his shoe rack.
“Nothing.” You are walking, he hears it in the scratched breaths caught by the microphone. “They started smoking and I think-” Heavy fabric rustles. The shitty music fades until the lilting thud of your shoes on the sidewalk replaces it completely. “I don’t like it. I think I want to leave.”
“I’ll get there.”
Levi thinks about Zeke and the perpetual stench that clung to everything he touched—a dense acrid smell that made Levi want to scratch the back of his throat raw. Marleyan cigarettes were virulent, sticky; in comparison, the smuggled tobacco Kenny used to roll on sheer white papers and smoke inside the plank seemed fucking airy.
The beast titan oozed that same stench and, once Levi had fucked it all up and laid on the damp grass, a husk of blood and shrapnel, he could smell it on his own skin.
“It’s fine,” you reply. But Levi’s already out of his apartment, letting the chilly late-winter air drag needles across his cheeks. “I can go alone. But-” The clacketing of your shoes stops; the roaring of one, two, three cars carries through the phone. “I’m sorry. I want to see you.”
“Are you drunk?” he asks. The next tram is fifteen minutes away; he wills himself to sit on the concrete ledge just to let the cold fend off the rush of anxiety.
“No,” you answer. “I’m just so unbearably sad. It’s the smell.”
The cigarettes lingered, even when the dust finally settled around him and Levi found himself alone, sitting amid the trampled aftermath of his last battle. Zeke’s stench stuck until it became scorched earth and compressed carrion.
The clatter of your steps returns. You walk past a club. Some song with a reverberating bass swells and wanes.
“I hate mandatory work parties,” you complain. The discomfort in your voice is heavier than it had been when you first told him, earlier in the week.
The yellow numbers in the tram countdown timer blink and change.
“Who the fuck makes that shit mandatory?”
It is derisory, compared with the occupational hazards of your previous lifetime. Still, Levi gives himself the chance to seethe at your boss and his shitty ideas of team-building.
“I’m close to the tram station,” you say.
The noise of Mitras’ nightlife slowly disappears.
“Don’t hang up.”
“You worry too much,” you say, but you stay on the line.
Levi used to fear the men who lined up every night at his mother’s door. They arrived with days’ worth of sweat and shit and grime reeking up the room. From the little cupboard his mother ordered him to hide in, the sneering voices seemed monstrous, fit for the grotesque giants of his mother’s tales. Levi never saw them; by the time he was too big for the cupboard, his mother was a layer of soot on the Underground’s ceiling and the room had been pillaged.
Those men walked around on the streets, bought stale bread in the markets, drank piss whisky in the tavern. They were only recognizable in the women they touched—gaunt, bones grinding against bones. But they and their disgusting money abounded while food was scarce. That fear hung over Levi in the depths of winter, when you chewed on the last scrap of stale bread.
“Men are vile, disgusting.”
Five minutes for the next tram.
“Nothing is going to happen. You are on the phone,” you reply.
A tram arrives at your station. Few people get off. Levi doesn’t hear the buzz of human masses moving across the platform.
“It’s warmer today. Winter’s almost done.” Your voice is wistful, soft. “Does it worry you?”
“I’m fucking tired of the cold.”
There’s laughter in the background of your call. Drunk women stumble onto the platform.
“But it is easier to die in the summer, isn’t it?”
“What?”
The Rumbling had stretched over those exotic places where the seasons inverted, but the news only reached Levi through Armin’s letters. They had it good; bodies kept well in the cold. In Marley, the heat imposed the presence of the dead: they rose in rotten fumes that summoned all the scavengers lucky enough to survive the razing of the world. Land was too compacted to cover the corpses. Survivors had to tear them away from the earth limb by limb and burn them. Levi hadn’t helped; he was but a howling wound. But he had stood in front of the first fire with the same feeling of orphanhood he’d felt in front of his mother’s pyre.
He doesn’t want to think about it.
“Are you drunk?” he asks.
Levi looks at the countdown board. He looks at both sides of the tramline.
“No. I don’t think so…” You sigh. The phone deforms the breath into something sharp. “It’s the smoke.”
The tram announces its arrival with a ringing bell. It is almost empty. There’s just a pair of hammered teenagers snickering in the back of the car.
“I’ll get to the station soon. Wait there.”
“Okay.”
You don’t speak anymore, but Levi can hear your hums as he fills the time with the tale of his conversation with a particularly negligent mother. Her boy shouldn’t have to wear a coat in winter, it seems.
The stations pass one after the other. One of the teenagers falls after trying to stand on a seat and Levi has to sit them down. The kids got like that the few times Levi let them drink; you and Levi, assisted by a stumbling Armin, had to shepherd them back to their cots.
“Is everything okay?” you ask when you hear the slurred complaints of Levi’s fellow passengers.
“I’m almost there.”
No one else descends at the station. Levi sees you, a cloud of white leaving your mouth as the blue light of some soap advertisement glows against your skin. As soon as you see him, you run to him. The wool coat and the green scarf flutter behind you.
You hug him with a tight grip—hands curled into his back, chin pressed against his shoulder. The force of the impact almost makes him step back.
“Thank you,” you say.
Your hair smells of smoke.
Morning seeps around the edges of the curtains in opaque light—grey clouds are filtering the sun. He can almost hear the shrapnel of droplets crashing against his window.
Levi can’t sleep when it rains; the scent of wet earth and blood and tears rises to his nose and the ghostliest of pressures starts building up in his leg, in his eye, in his fingers. But you are still asleep, body curled up under his blankets, hair spread on his pillow, forehead pressed against his shoulder. He buries his nose in your hair to cast the scent away.
You smell of him. It’s his fucking shampoo. You insisted on washing away the traces of smoke when you arrived last night. You spoke of keeping his pillows pristine and of the sticky reek of cigarettes and Levi couldn’t hide his glee—even if it meant vehemently insisting on drying your hair because sleeping like that might get you sick, and then risking his neighbor’s anger when he turned on the blow dryer.
You shift. He makes sure you are properly tucked under the blanket.
Your clothes are neatly folded in the laundry basket, waiting for him to wash them. The coat won’t dry on time if he doesn’t do it now. But the chances to sprawl under the blankets next to you, like some bratty noble or a terribly loyal lapdog, have always been few.
“Sleep more,” Levi says when you open your eyes. “It’s too early.”
“But you’re awake.” Your accusation is thick with sleep.
“Yeah.”
Your eyelids flutter, lashes tangling in the fabric of his t-shirt. One has fallen on your cheek; Levi’s cautious when he brushes it away with his thumb. You draw your legs into a tighter curl, knees on his thigh. Warm and smooth and so delicate. The sheets, faintly crisp from the last laundry day, rustle.
You’re silent, but Levi knows you are awake by the idle paths your fingers follow on his shoulder. He closes his eyes and inhales, deep. He basks in the warmth of the room and in the subtle wafts of detergent his sheets release at the smallest of movements. He imagines falling back asleep and waking up at noon, all leisure; but there’s still the peremptory buzz in his limbs that anticipates the rain.
“I’m sorry. I woke you up yesterday.” Your voice is meek. Levi’s eyes are back on you. “It wasn’t-” You draw your hand away from him, tuck it under your body. “I know you don’t sleep much and yet-”
“Don’t.” He’s too curt. It’s the same shit he always ends up spurting. He winds his arm around your back, presses hard enough to bring you close again. He tries to be gentle as he strokes your back. “I slept more than I usually do, anyway.”
“Thank you,” you whisper.
The morning has advanced enough for a sliver of light to seep under his blackout curtains. It outlines his nightstand and the slope of your nose, the length of your eyelashes and the deep furrows a wrinkle in his t-shirt has left on your cheek. You are intensely staring at his face.
“What?”
Too focused, you startle at his voice.
“Sometimes, when you are in front of me, you don’t seem real,” you say. You let your fingers follow the line of his eyebrows and the ridge of his nose and the hollow of his neck. “Just some sort of wish I dreamed up into delusion...” Your touch slides down his throat, weightless, almost liquid, before your whole palm presses lightly against the crook of his neck.
His thumb follows your spine. Up, up. Your skin’s warm against his hand. The T-shirt he lent you rides up under the blanket. Down, down. You’re still languidly searching for words, eyes unbearably soft. And Levi waits.
“As if I had seen you this way a thousand times,” you say. “It terrifies me sometimes.”
And Levi takes the confession half-elated, half-terrified.
After the Rumbling, the air thickened. The unbearable heat. The fog of dust. The vaporous trail of blood—the boiled remains of too many people that stuck to his very lungs. Back then, he used to wonder if it had been the same in Paradis; if whiffs of the world’s misery arrived at that rotten jail he had once defended as the last bastion of humanity. He never went back to see.
But Levi doesn’t tell you—there’s selfishness in that; cowardice.
“Maybe you have,” he says instead.
Your legs tangle with his. Your knees dig into his thigh. The soft flesh of your calves grazes his shin. The mattress stirs. Your hand lingers on his throat; his blood pulsates beneath. You lean in, eyes closed. Your palm warms his cheek.
The kiss is unhurried. Levi gets to taste your breath every time you lean back.
His hands shake. And Levi finds himself pressing harder. Down, down, down your spine until he can convince himself of the solidity of your bones. Then, he’s content enough to let his fingers brush past your hips and caress your waist.
You sigh. It’s quiet, almost impossible to hear among the rustling of the sheets.
His fucking shirt is in the way, so Levi tries to pull it off. It gets tangled around your head for just enough seconds that when he sees you again you have this little grin plastered on your face. But then you hook your thumbs under the collar of his t-shirt, and he sees you are also shaking.
Alongside all those little trinkets you both reluctantly accumulated during the years on the surface of that wretched island, Levi lost the tea set you gifted him. White teacups with painted swallows all circling the rim and a tall teapot with an elongated spout. It was destroyed during the Rumbling or maybe found and trashed by his replacement—some piss-soaked brat of a captain, eager to play soldiers for a Paradis that, titans gone, had resorted to eating itself.
He’d thought about the tea set the first morning he spent in the house the Global Alliance laid him to rest. Gabi had poured his tea into one of those smooth, functional cups they used in Marley. Levi’s hand shook too much. His grasp was too weak: he was two fingers short.
“You never tell me what you are truly thinking about,” you say.
“I’m thinking of you.”
Under the rays of morning light that escape from his curtains, Levi sees your body bare. Familiar, soft, less worn. And he touches. His thumb traces the curves of your breast, your navel, the tender flesh of your thighs. And the skin tenses under his touch—just enough for him to find pride in it.
Then, his lips roam: your ankle, and the back of your knee, and your inner thigh, right where the skin is thin and warm and pulsating.
Your fingers play with his undercut—featherlight caresses that were routine, once. He can almost hear you joke that he needs a haircut. Back then, you’d comment on it and laugh while Levi’s lips pressed harder to fight the smirk. And, at the end of those nights, when he was spent and lovesick and pliable, you’d fetch the razor and the scissors yourself. You’d make him sit butt-naked in his quarters’ washroom just to fix it.
So, Levi nestles himself into your inner thigh and delights in your touch. Your nails tickle his nape.
You are wet. Slick has slid down your legs. Your skin is sticky against his cheek.
Levi’s slow. A slight pressing of his lips against your clit. A languid trace of his tongue. It makes you gasp. Your fingers stiffen, then they search to grab, then they tangle in his hair.
Levi laps and licks and buries his nose in your folds and he feels your hips squirm under his palms.
You arch your back; his hands know its curve by heart. You say his name: a sigh threaded with fear and pining, and the sound locks itself in his chest—warm, festering recognition that strains against his entrails.
His cock rubs against the mattress. A wet spot of precum is already seeping through the fabric. Your arousal coats his lips. It slides down his chin. He circles your clit with his tongue; you moan again. And for a second Levi thinks of telling you that you should be quieter, that the shitty walls of the Officers’ quarters let noise through.
He thrusts his groin harder against the mattress.
Your thighs tremble, your hands release his hair. You caress his forehead and grab the sheets.
And Levi’s hand drags down your hipbone until he can feel you throbbing at his fingertips.
Levi slides two fingers into you. Hot and unbearably wet. He stops lapping you up just to watch your eyes squeezed shut, those dearly loved parted lips, the deep rise and fall of your chest. Then he curls his fingers inside you. He feels you squeeze.
He licks, kisses, moans. Your hips tense; your thighs strain. And you sigh. It’s drawn-out and deep and unsteady.
It transforms into a moan. And your slick slides down Levi’s wrist. And Levi grinds against the mattress with such force he hears the bed creak.
You come—body snaps taut.
Levi stops unhurriedly. He laps one, two, three times, slowly, as he enjoys the throbbing of your walls against his fingers. Your hands let go of the sheets. They hover over his head. You brush his hair away from his face. Strands stick to your sweaty palm. Your knuckles caress his temples. The movement is clumsy, trembling.
As you grow slack, Levi does as well. His cock is still engorged. Precum smears on the sheets. But he rests his head on your lap and listens to your steadying breath, eyes closed. Now and then, he presses a kiss on your hipbone.
Heavy raindrops batter against the window pane.
And he thinks of the shine in your eyes, that first time a lifetime ago. He remembers the roundness of your face—the last traces of baby fat clung stubbornly to your cheeks, even in the midst of the fucking brutality of the Underground. He remembers the unyielding certainty of your hands as you gripped his shoulders. And he remembers his own panic, poorly hidden behind frantic gentleness. It was during those years when the expanse of the world still amounted to surviving together on scraps. He hadn’t yet inhaled the cupric remains of a dead titan; no war had yet mangled his body. You had suggested it, eyes downturned. Levi had accepted it because he didn’t know what else to do with the unbearable flutter in his stomach.
It was awkward. All you both had were the misteachings of his mother’s old friends and teenage eagerness. Levi remembers the heat when he first entered you, so, so deep and all-encompassing. He remembers your scent: waxy soap and the smoke from the ever-burning torches of the Underground. He remembers lying on the same pillow afterwards and letting his knuckles trace the soft features of your face. In all his eagerness, he had still been a shitty lay; you hadn’t come. It turned out the advice of whores was difficult to actually execute.
“Levi,” he hears you say, voice honeyed with that gentle worry of yours. “You’re crying.”
There’s a droplet tickling its way down his cheek. He wipes it away with his palm and rises just enough to see your face.
You are crying as well. Trails of tears glimmer in the opaque light of the morning. A particularly slow rivulet drags down your cheek.
He doesn’t mention it—wipes it with his tongue, instead. Your cheek is searing hot.
You grab his hand in both of yours and kiss the base of his thumb and flick your tongue over his skin.
You will taste the salt of his tear. The gentleness of the gesture tugs at him until the years of longing lay bare. He’s wanted you for many nights, when the loneliness settled on the bed before sleep and he had to conjure up memories of your body to find some sort of comfort. He’s wanted you for many mornings, when he drank the bitterest tea in an empty kitchen.
Levi kisses you again—clashing teeth and feverish lips. You moan and laugh, restless and real and alive under his body. You kiss him back with the same artless intensity.
Your thumb traces a straight line down his back. Weightless, sharp.
His cock is twitching, smeared with precum. And, as your fingers brush its head, he moans. His muscles stir. He feels nerves coil around his guts.
There’s a certain neatness, precision, in the way you stroke him. There’s ease in the way you guide him to your entrance.
Your eyes are already scrunched closed, expectant.
Your moan is breathy when he pushes in. And you are hot, hot and engulfing him. Pleasure bolts through his spine.
At first, his thrusts are shallow. A slow rocking. The sheets rustle and you sigh and it’s almost enough to drown out the downpour outside.
“It’s fine?” he asks. It’s useless. He doesn’t think he can hurt you as he could before: he’s weaker now, more human. But the monstrous strength he once had still weighs his muscles down, and the question comes to him automatically.
You don’t open your eyes to answer him, but you laugh—lips curled upward and all teeth.
“Yes, Levi. Thank you.”
You lock your fingers with his; slippery hands press above your head against the mattress. Your breasts flush against his chest. He can feel you breathe: the swells of your ribcage against his. And he can feel his heart hammering—so loud and heavy that you must feel it, too.
Little by little, his thrusts deepen.
Your breath fans against his lips every time you moan. Sweat makes his fingers slip. Your grasp on his hand tightens. The mattress slightly sinks beneath his knees.
You wrap your legs around his waist.
The knot of nerves in his navel tightens. He catches your mouth in a kiss.
There are still traces of smoke. It’s but the ghost of a scent: something buried under the salt of your sweat and the synthetic sandalwood of his shampoo.
It clamps onto his throat—the grief is as familiar as the yearning. He remembers crawling into bed one late morning, leg pulsing with pain, wishing for the comfort of your weight. He wanted you so much back then. And he fucking wants you. He wants you undone and radiant under him during rainy mornings. And he wants your sighed moans against his skin. And your folded clothes in his hamper, and his shampoo on your hair. He wants you curled next to him on the slow afternoons after work when he’s assessing the fingerpainted damage on his backpack.
“It’s okay,” you say. Your lips are wet against his cheek. It’s from his tears.
His thrusts become sloppier, urgent.
You come first. You dig your nails into the meat of his palms. You grow stiff and then you shiver. He feels you clench around him. Your back arches. There are no more moans, just a long gasp. And you look at him. Glassy eyes boring into his.
Limbs limp, you release his hands. And Levi brings them to your face. He caresses your cheek, and brushes the wet strands of hair away from your forehead.
And he’s clumsy now. Hands brace at the sides of your head. Deep unsteady thrusts.
And Levi can’t hear anything but your heavy breathing. And his nerves coil tighter and tighter until he’s nothing but pure tension.
You are soft under him, still warm, still shaking. And the coil snaps.
His vision blurs and he grips the sheets, because he cannot slip, not with you under him. And he moans—something wounded that vibrates in his whole chest. And he spills inside you. And he’s still damaged enough to think he has to get you clean now before a bolt of pleasure mollifies his brain.
You’re kind enough to draw circles on his back as he rests his head once again against your body. Ear on your chest, the world seems to drown under the cavernous sound of your heartbeat.
Outside, the rain continues to drive pellets of water against his windows. Sweat is cooling. It makes skin sticky.
Levi stays there until the urge to wash his filth off you overwhelms anything else.
Mandatory once in every three month post saying I'm alive, my life is too busy, I have a backed-up list of works I've read and will comment on, and I'm still working on Again and Again.
I loved @ic3que3n’s comment over on Bluesky that the drawing reminded him of this scene, so I just had to mirror it and post it together with the gifs. 😭
