Nov 28, 2021
What if... they never made it out of the forest
LEVIHANWEEN DAY 5 - MORBID/SHIVER
seen from China
seen from France
seen from France
seen from Japan
seen from Kazakhstan
seen from France
seen from Türkiye
seen from France
seen from China
seen from Russia
seen from France
seen from South Korea
seen from China
seen from France
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
What if... they never made it out of the forest
LEVIHANWEEN DAY 5 - MORBID/SHIVER
Levihanween Day 2. Disguise/Costume.
Cosplay time!
I've wanted to do this for a long time, Dr Olivia Octavius is definitely Hanji and no one can convince me otherwise 😎
(@dontatmethanks can confirm 🍻)
Just look at them:
@levihan-drabbles
Levihanween 2021 - Day 2: Disguise/Costume
Baby levihan beans as a pumpkin and a squash 😭
Día 4: Fantasmas 👻
"Levi, hay alguien detrás de tí"
Dibujo que hice para colaborar en el libro de wattpad "Horror y gloria" de mi querido @LevihanSquad (twitter) 🎃🖤🧡
[click on the image for a surprise!]
levihanween 2021 day 3: spell/witchcraft @levihan-drabbles
coraline inspired au in which levi moves into a new house for his new job in town but he ends up having to deal with a witch who wants to sew buttons on his eyes and eat his soul. rip levi haha just kidding they fall in love and eat souls together for the rest of eternity. levi most likely had a tumblr blog in his twenties and is a certified monsterfucker
LEVIHANWEEN - The Levihan Drabble Week pt. 2 (Halloween Special)
Hello, Levihan stans! The admins are back with another installment of the Levihan drabble week (the first event we ever held ;)) this time, we are going with the Halloween theme and are excited to celebrate Levihanween with the fandom!
Starting right off, I want to mention that the drabble week is open to all kinds of content creators and not just writers. We just stick with the name of drabble week because that was what we started with.
The Levihanween will run from October 25th to 31st 2021. This time, we'll give the prompts beforehand and introduce two new features, that is the prompt path and paired-up projects. Read on to know more about how we make the drabble week unique!
⊕ prompt paths
One of our main goals for the drabble week is to make it as customizable as we can! and that is why we give an option of two types of prompts the participants can receive. we have Levi's list and Hange's notebook, and you can use any of the above two depending on the kind of writer, or artist you are!
We'll also give an option to receive NSFW prompts for each day. Just make sure you tag your work properly!
In addition, you can also alternate between Levi's list and Hange's notebook for different days. For example, you can use the specified prompt from Levi's list for Monday while you use something from Hange's notebook for Tuesday!
Now, we are very excited to reveal the prompts we chose for this drabble week. We had a lot of fun choosing them and we hope you will like them too!
LEVIHANWEEN PROMPTS - Levi's list
Levi's list is a collection of very vague, one-word prompts for creators who prefer more freedom on what they would like to create. here's our list for the second drabble week, the Levihanween version 2021 October!
Monday 25th October - Candy/sweet - tooth
Tuesday 26th October - Disguise/Costume
Wednesday 27th October - Spell/Witchcraft
Thursday 28th October - Hunt/Run
Friday 29th October - Morbid/Shiver
Saturday 30th October - Bite/Teeth
Sunday 31st October - free spot or paired-up project (will be explained at the end)
LEVIHANWEEN PROMPTS - Hange's Notebook
Hange's notebook is a collection of more specific, detailed, and challenging prompts! Go with these if you find them fun/interesting and don't want to think too hard about coming up with a plot! We have 6 for each day (3 of them are NSFW) you are to choose any 1 out of the 6!
(Note: we use they/them for Hange in these prompts just to stay universal but you can use any pronouns you prefer!)
Monday 25th October - Candy/sweet-tooth
1. "You look too grumpy to be the owner of such a bright candy shop," Hange leaned, a teasing smile at their lips. "Shut it, four eyes." Levi drawled, eyes narrowing into annoyed slits.
2. "Maybe it wasn't a good idea to eat that many sweets.." Hange groaned from the toilet. "That's the smartest thing you've said all night," Levi called out from the doorway.
3. "Let's take the bikes. If we start early, we can reach the houses with the big candy bars before it gets too dark."
NSFW
4. "Someone is stealing my candy." "I thought you didn't like sweet things." "Shut up, let me smell your breath."
5. "Levi, I challenge you to a candy collecting competition. Whoever collects most candies wins...
Tuesday 26th October - Disguise/Costume
1. "That's a great grim reaper costume." "It isn't a costume." "Today is Halloween, right?"
"No," Levi narrows his eyes, "You are dying."
2. "Levi, please you gotta help me with this. Miche bailed out at the last moment and I need a partner or I'm screwed." Levi glared at the pink bunny suit that Hange was trying to hand over to him. "Like hell, four-eyes."
3 ."Hey guys, welcome back to my channel where today I'll be trying on sexy Halloween costumes in front of my partner." Hange proceeds to walk out into the living room, vlog camera in hand, wearing a sexy Bigfoot costume. "Four eyes, what the fuck?"
NSFW
4. "Stop moving and let me take your measurements." Levi griped, nudging Hange's thighs apart.
"It tickles-" Hange snickered.
5. Levi had a temporary lapse of judgment when agreeing to participate in that stupid bet Hange came up with. Now here he was, squeezed into a sexy nurse outfit. "This is stupid.." "I don't know Levi...I think I may be coming down with something." Hange teased while fanning their face.
6. There's a monster hiding under Hange's bed.... but it's not as bad as you think.
Wednesday 27th October - Spell/Witchcraft
1. "Turn me back, shitty four-eyes!" Levi hissed, fur sticking up on end as he glared murderously up at them. Hange tried their best to keep a straight face, "Oh Levi... you make such a cute cat!"
2. "I am going to put an end to that spell." "Don't be stupid, you could die!" "If I don't, you will. And I sure as hell am not having that."
3. There is a mouse chewing at Levi's shoes. It's Hange.
NSFW
4. Hange accidentally drank the love portion she was trying to experiment on and now Levi has to deal with her for the whole night
5. "There's-There's something wrong with the Captain," Moblit panted as he approached Erwin and Hange. "He has been acting very odd."
"Since when did this happen?" Erwin asked.
"Since the morning tea time."
"Wait, did he drink some of the concoction of herbs brewing in the kitchen?"
"...Wasn't that tea?"
"Erwin, Moblit... I think I know what's happening here."
6. "Magic." "Magic?" Levi questioned, breath hitching as Hange dragged a hand up his bare arm. "Yes, magic." They replied, lips dragging up into a sultry smirk. "Let me change your life, short stuff."
Thursday 28th October - Hunt/Run
1. Levi’s a werewolf with a bounty on his head and Hange’s a charming supernatural bounty hunter on a mission to catch him.
2. Hange walked ahead of him, taking time with each step while waving the flashlight around the dark space around them. Something creaked behind them and Hange turned the light over Levi’s shoulder.“Levi…” Hange mumbled, eyes widening.
“What?”
“Run.”
3. Hange is a scientist who wants to research centaurs and captures Levi (who is a centaur) but her rival scientist Zeke has something up his sleeve.
4. Levi angled the blade closer to Hange's neck. "I've spent years trying to hunt you down, and do you think I'll let you go so easily?"
NSFW
5. Levi and Hange panted in the dark, trying to catch their breath. Now that they were safe, Levi couldn't help but notice their close proximity, and the fact that he could feel the heat radiating from her skin.
6. Hange hid in Levi's bathroom, a place where he would never expect her to be. Because if Levi found her, she was so screwed.
Friday 29th October - Morbid/Shiver
1. Strange things usually did happen during the night of hallows eve, what Hange didn’t expect was there to be a killer in the loose. The only thing they worried about was finding Levi and getting somewhere safe.
2. When he wakes, it’s cold. White puffs condensed in the air around him with every breath. He was wet too, and vaguely remembered the ache in his lungs when he drowned.
“Are you dead too?”
Levi whirled around to meet the gaze of another child around his age, doe brown eyes twinkling slightly at the prospect of making a new friend.
“I’m Hange.”
3. Our goddess/God was kind, benevolent, and perfect in every way. They protected us.” The priest looks to Levi who stands before him, holding a weapon stained with divine blood. Then he asks, “Why did you kill them?”
NSFW
4. When Hange dies, they wake up in a fiery place. It is hell. It doesn’t make sense, they have been good their whole life. When they ask the demon why, he sounds annoyed, “You are not being punished, four eyes.”
“You are the punishment.”
5. “Ack! Levi no, that’s gross!” Hange shrieked, kicking the heel of their foot against his shoulder. Levi leaned back a bit and continued to lick his fingers clean. “You’re the one in bed with a corpse.” He taunted in return.
6. Levi was positive that he was the only one in the room. So why did he feel a finger stroke his spine?
Saturday 30th October - Bite/Teeth
1. As Levi and Hange stood near the railing of the port, looking at the ships entering Marley, Hange extended their ice cream to him. "Wanna take a bite?"
2. Levi’s throat visibly worked at the sight of Hange’s exposed neck. Their skin held a tanned, olive complexion, taunting him. His dry, cracked lips parted, tongue swiping over one of his pointed fangs.
Then Hange turned their head to blink at him with oblivious eyes and flashed him a grin.
3. “Ow! It bit me.” Hange cried out, pulling their hand back with a pout.
“I told you, four eyes.” Levi scolded as he to their hand to observe the blood that began to bead on their finger.
Without thinking, he stuck their finger into his mouth and sucked on it. Hange jumped, gaping at him.
When he noticed their expression, he quickly pulled their finger out with an audible pop, leaving Hange a flushed, stammering mess.
NSFW
1. Hange loses a dare and now they have to convince the Levi Ackerman to give them a hickey.
2. Hange fixed their piercing brown eyes on him. "Do you ever find something so impossibly cute that you just want to... I don't know, bite it?"
3. Hange takes a bite of the wrong dessert.
---
FAQ
1. Do I have to stick to either Levi's list or Hange's notebook for the entire week?
Ans. No, you don't! You can alternate between the two, choosing prompts from each section for different days, depending on your mood. If you feel like writing something spicy, go for nsfw! It all depends on you!
2. Is there any word limit? Do I have to write only drabbles for this week?
Ans. Nope! There is no word limit! Everything from a 200-word drabble to a 15k one-shot is welcome!
3. Do I have to tag your account when I post my work?
Ans. Yes, please do so! When you post your work, please mention the prompt you have chosen and tag our account (@levihan-drabbles) or use the hashtag #levihanween2021 so we can find it and reblog it! We also have a year-end project where we compile all the works we ever received in the drabble weeks in a portfolio!
4. What if I can't post something each day?
Ans. That's completely fine! We want you to have fun, not feel pressured. You can post your work at your own pace, and take more days if you wish to. Just make sure to mention the prompt in your work so we can organize it accordingly!
If you have any other questions, please feel free to send them in our ask box or message us privately! We will reach you asap!
⊕ Sunday - free spot/paired up project
On 31st October, Sunday, we give a free spot, so write whatever speaks to you! However, we also have another project planned for the day and I am very excited to talk about it!
On our discord, we started a program called 'creative partners' and it received a lot of positive feedback and therefore, we will be implementing a part of it in the drabble week. Note that this is completely optional and you will have to fill out a form to participate in this.
Basically, writers, artists, and all participants get randomly paired up and have to collaborate with their partners to produce something together! It's all about teamwork and making new friends!
You can be partnered with a writer or an artist, and have to work with them together on any topic you both choose!
To participate in this event, (and if you don't want to, that's okay!) please fill this form. Take note that this form closes on the 22nd and your partner will be announced on the same day the form closes so you can reach out to them before.
And that's all! We are super excited about this event and we hope you have fun with it too 😄
If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask! we will be looking forward to your participation! Much love.
Happy Levihanween! Poster by @jumpinguptothesky Organizers of Levihanween- Levihan drabble week #2 - @glassesandswords @dontatmethanks and @pinkweirdsunsets
Levihanween day 5 - morbid/shiver: Watching scary movies @levihan-drabbles
Title: Babel’s Curse
Summary:
"At night, Levi spoke another tongue. At night he was thinking things he never thought before.
In the mornings, he would need more than a few more minutes to reconnect to reality, a few more minutes after that to get comfortable with his own skin, to open his mouth, say a few syllables, then few words, then wonder why the hell he felt like he had forgotten to speak."
Levi and Hange meet in the next life but they don't share a common language.
Link: AO3
Notes: Written for the @levihan-drabbles Halloween event for the "Free Spot" in collaboration with Jill @jumpinguptothesky
Nights used to be silent. Nights used to be intimate. Nights used to act as some brief respite from his studies and the stressful thing called life. .
Then something about it changed.
Levi never found out when he had first become aware of the small changes. Suddenly, nights seemed to leave something foreign in his tongue. Instead of indulging him, sleep started to pull him out of his comforts, pushing him to think, imagine, create and learn.
At night, Levi spoke another language. At night he was thinking things he never thought before. In the mornings, he would need more than a few more minutes to reconnect to reality, a few more minutes after that to get comfortable with his own skin, to open his mouth, say a few syllables, then few words, then wonder why the hell he felt like he had forgotten to speak.
The tip of his tongue feeling like grainy saw dust, Levi quickly woke up and sat up in bed. Then he willed himself to get his bearings. He traced the pockmarks of the wood of his side table. He fingered the edges of his blanket, then he whispered syllable after syllable, word after word, he felt himself once again forgetting what the hell he had dreamt about in the first place.
When he planted his feet on the ground, pulled himself up, he started to see the dream of last night, not as a slew of pictures, sounds and sensations. It was— it had become nothing, nothing worth a second glance or a second thought.
When Levi closed his eyes, and did try his best to make sense of a creepy nagging feeling, he felt it. For one reason or another, Levi was looking for something, at the least trying to make sense of it.
But he didn’t know what the hell it was.
“Good morning!” his mother, Kuchel sang. That was the final pull Levi needed to be reminded, dreams were useless and impractical things.
He had school to think about. He had his everyday life to make sense of. And he had that part time job after school to make ends meet.
He settled on the small round dining table, just by the kitchen, studied the breakfast food, only getting enough to fill himself.
He would have to bike to school, like every other day before… Then he’d slave through classes...
Even before he started eating, Levi had already pictured the whole day ahead of him. It wasn’t like anything changed in their small village.
When his mother wasn’t cooking, cleaning or doing laundry, she busied herself reorganizing cupboards, cleaning up all the pots and pans and she used the idle time for a few minutes worth of a conversation or to exchange typical pleasantries.
That day was just a little different. Kuchel placed her own plate in front of him and gave Levi a long expectant stare.
High School Entrance Exams. There were only too many things his soft spoken mother would force a conversation over.
“Did you decide which high school to apply for?” Kuchel asked.
“Where else?” Levi still had a month to decide which tests to take but their town was too small, too far from the city, too underfunded that not many choose to venture beyond the fields or the mountains that surrounded such a small village.
Levi wasn’t even one of the best students in his class.
But still.
Levi didn’t let out that nagging thought immediately. He chewed the bread for a few more seconds, eyed the condiments, then his mothers hands as she grabbed the shakers and poured them judiciously over her rice.
“If there’s something you want to do… I don’t want you to worry about money, resources or whatever opportunities this small town offers. Take what you want.”
The response came abruptly and how Kuchel had sensed it, Levi never figured it out.
His life was comprised of lazy days at school, lazy days back home, the occasional visit to the capital and the occasional days just helping out at his mother’s shop.
He had been conditioned from a young age.
Go to school. Go home. Do that enough times, until you finish school. Then, find a job or maybe help out his mother. “Why are you talking about this now?” Levi asked.
“You’ve been studying more. Is there something in particular you want to do?” Kuchel was straight to the point.
“What else?” Levi challenged.
Kuchel cocked her head. “Well, I noticed… but I might be wrong,” she spoke slowly and for a second, she seemed to be making shapes with her rice toppings. “You’ve stopped hanging around the kitchen or the living room. You go straight to your room after school so I thought---”
“I’d be studying?” Levi added.
Kuchel nodded. “You must have been studying for a reason… Maybe there’s something you want to do…” She mentioned something else after that, a few schools from the next town over which seemed to offer more opportunities for people like him.
But Levi Ackerman had never been remarkable. Maybe, he would never be. And unremarkable people never left the comforts of their small comfortable town in the middle of nowhere.
There was never any money, any resources, or any reason to branch farther than that. There never would be an opportunity for someone from a small remote village where most kids were conditioned to think the same thing.
Levi put down the bread, and he revealed the book he had been skimming through underneath the table, a math textbook. “I have a quiz today.”
“You’ve only started reading during meals recently, just this year,” Kuchel noted. “Did something happen in school… which made you want to study more?”
Levi shrugged and continued to review the math formulas.
Curiosity, Inquisitiveness. Those were all fickle things. Motivation came, sometimes it didn’t. And it would have taken more brain cells to figure out for himself why he was suddenly acting like he had always been a straight A student, which he had never had been and probably never will be.
He didn’t bother with it, instead focusing on mathematical formulas, problems and the most efficient processes when taking the test. It was only during that brief respite, when Levi was biking to school, did an answer to his question suddenly dawn on him.
It wasn’t a brief answer. He couldn’t so easily simplify it into something his mother would have understood.
For a split second, a brief moment, he saw bright hazel eyes, curly hair and white chalk on a chalkboard. Algebraic equations, formulas, scribbled on the board, some of them Levi probably could have made sense of if he tried.
But he didn’t. He had a road to navigate, a math test to think about and so he spared it one passing thought.
Maybe those were from my dreams? One question he may have said allowed but brushed away before he could even muster the motivation to answer it.
He didn’t need to answer it anyway. After all, dreams were useless and impractical things.
***
Levi had never been remarkable and he was sure he never would be.
It didn’t stop him from copying the math problem on the board as the teacher wrote it out. It didn’t stop him either from challenging himself to answer it while others next to him waited, slept or used their phones under the table.
Maybe a year ago, Levi would have done similarly to what the other students were doing. Maybe he would have used that extra time to doze off, to stare at the sky. And for a second, he did stare at the sky from his seat right next to the window.
He counted the shades of blue, then the shades of green on the tree at the corner of his vision. A few seconds later, he found himself looking farther up as a small glimmer in the clear sky caught his eye.
Silver, white, black, then it was every color at once, and it seemed to hover past him, a small object only inches away but when Levi made sense of everything, he found it was much bigger, and it was miles away from him.
An airplane. Levi explained it for himself a second later. How that distant object, unnoticed by many could have hypnotized him for just a second, he never understood.
It did more than hypnotize him though. Levi could have sworn he had seen that in a dream. Or maybe it had all been utter coincidence.
Suddenly, the sample problem on the board that seemed to have left everyone speechless was second nature. Suddenly, Levi was answering it quickly, mindlessly. The paper seemed to fill with almost unintelligible equations almost automatically.
No, I understand this. Levi reminded himself a second later. How the hell, he had figured it out, he couldn’t really tell. Some things were just second nature to others, some things were just easier picked up by others.
“Anyone want to try this out?” the teacher at the front called out.
No one raised their hand, others exchanged glances.
“Anyone?” the teacher repeated. Soon, he was offering extra points.
If there’s something you don’t understand, learn to understand it. A strange voice spoke up, a strange voice that Levi soon realized was warm and intimate, yet at the same time demanded respect. If there’s a problem you don’t understand, solve it for yourself.
I know the answer to the problem. Levi argued, but he had kept it at barely a whisper, or maybe much quieter than that. When he started to read over his solutions, he started to wonder how much of the writing was his own brain child.
It was very much his own writing, it was very much his own notebook and who else would have answered it?
“Should I give the answer?” The teacher seemed disappointed, the expression on his face almost unreadable but Levi had been accustomed to those types of teachers for a while already.
“I can try it out…” Levi raised one hand and he started to feel the eyes on him. He started to hear the whispers and pick out some of the words.
Levi… Since when has he been good at Math?
Levi had never been remarkable. He had never been notable. But when he started to write on the board, when the seemingly complex process of solving such a problem had snuck on him in between writing equations, Levi started to muse about it.
Really… Since when did I know how to do this? A musing Levi allowed himself to entertain as he made the final touches on his solution, ending with one final answer boxed at the bottom.
“Ackerman… You really have a way with numbers huh?”
Levi could only shrug in his response. Somehow, he couldn’t even bring himself to accept a compliment, he felt nothing at it either. The experience was too surreal, too disconnected from his own reality for him to even count it as a success.
“You may sit down.”
Levi quietly complied, ignoring the whispers, willing himself not to make sense of them. And he found, it was easy enough. When he took stock of his surroundings, he could easily pretend he was walking alone.
When he blinked for a little longer than a split second, when he felt the air from the cooler brush his ear for just a second, he could have sworn someone had been whispering right at his ear.
If there’s something I don’t understand, I wanna go out and understand it. One confident whisper, one voice that seemed to hold a melody in a whisper.
It wasn’t a gentle suggestion. It was an order, a tempting suggestion. Soon, Levi was convinced, he wanted to go out and see what he didn’t understand too.
***
There were language classes.
English. A word foreign to his tongue yet somehow very intimate. But he knew the introductions and the descriptions like the back of his hand.
It was a universal language. Everyone needed to know the basics. And Levi could have sworn they had been teaching them the basics since his first year of middle school.
Grammatical rules. Basic speaking classes. And just some teacher at the front of the room explaining some rule about gerunds while listing out vocabulary words to the side of the board.
“Do you get it?”
There were murmurs, half hearted yes-es then there were a few groans as the teacher distributed a questionnaire and an answer sheet.
To each student in the room, languages were merely a subject, and that’s all they were. And Levi was no exception.
He read through the list of vocabulary words, then the sample sentences. He foraged through his muscle memory, his long term memory for enough knowledge to at least translate some of the more complicated words. He wrote them on top of each word, a note for himself which the teachers never seemed to mind.
Then, he was answering quickly, matching each word to a sentence, writing the conjugations of verbs in past tense which seemed to have no rules.
Cut. Caught.
Buy. Bought.
Dig. Dug.
Hide. Hid.
All his classmates were probably feeling the same thing. For a language that had never been spoken beyond the classroom, it was nothing but just another means of passing, another requirement to get out of the way.
It was never a question of learning language. It was always a question of duty and requirement.
That was all classes were. Cold, professional, boring. That was what all assignments were for. Do what was asked, do the bare minimum it would take to graduate.
Then the school bell rang. The teacher only said one greeting in English before rattling off a list of assignments in a language everyone else would have understood. Then all the students strode out of the classroom, parts of them in crowds, others in straight lines.
When Levi fell back on the back rest of his chair, dropping his English textbook into his bag, he felt a small, temporary but still very much strange pang of guilt.
The vocabulary words, the verbs, the conjugations, irregular and regular, were all intimate. He could have sworn that beyond the cold professional didactics, it was very much intimate.
Levi thought back to his dreams, he thought back to the brunette, then the pang of guilt seemed to cut deeper.
Calm down Levi. He whispered to himself. His rumbling stomach wasn’t too much of a distraction. Being alone in the classroom seemed more like a reprieve and Levi found himself sitting back again, feeling like an idiot as he pulled the English textbook from his bag right after squeezing it in.
For some reason, he ended up reviewing irregular verbs that day.
***
“Levi Ackerman.” The teacher was just reading out a name from a list. When he looked up at Levi though, his eyes seemed a little wider, his eyebrows raised, and the grin on his face seemed genuine.
Levi was more than welcome to enter the room.
Individual Consultations. And for other students, it was free time. Some students were home, others were waiting in the library and every student would be advised by the teacher on which high school to apply for.
Levi had braced himself for the familiar name of the high school just a stone's throw away from their middle school. Most students never ventured farther than that.
The teacher had said something else though and Levi had noticed the subtle movement in his teacher’s lips in between smiles before he made sense of it himself.
“Isn’t that too far?” Levi asked. Too competitive? Too unrealistic?
“There are dorms, subsidies…” the teacher continued speaking. He mentioned student support programs, some names Levi recognized, most he didn’t. Then he mentioned something about talent that shouldn’t be wasted and a genius that only came once in a decade.
Language text books were fully answered, math exams and answer sheets filled to the brim with formulas and solutions, most Levi couldn’t even remember deriving.
If there’s something you don’t understand, learn to understand it. The voice echoed again.
And whatever that something was, he probably wouldn’t get it in his small town.
***
The few hour long train ride to the largest city in their region had a view to behold.
Levi never thought too much about it the few times he had been there. It was only on that fateful day, when he had saved the money, when he had prepared his exam pass and had received the blessing from his mother and his teachers, did he comfortably make the first trek back to the city, the first one what felt like almost a decade.
An hour long bus ride to the train station and on the train to the city, Levi was in a deep trance, the trance he usually allowed himself hours before exams. That day, compared to the few other times he had gone there when he was younger, he was strangely hypnotized.
Hypnotized not by the usual daydream, but by something very specific.
The view from the train window opened up to a large lake that on that clear day, emitted a steady shade of light blue. The blue of a wide body of water was a unique type of blue, unique enough that Levi was sure that he had seen that same light blue a few times before, a few times when his mom had taken him to the city.
And Levi was attempting to make sense of it.
Peace? Tranquility? Gentleness? Was it the color of gentleness? It could be, if he remembered his mothers hand caressing his, the strong grip as she pulled him close as the train swayed.
But it seemed like more than that. The blue spread out, the steady blue caressed him and somehow, the bout of emotion that seemed to possess him, was a sad one. There was a prickle at his eyes for a split second, before he blinked once, before the sky blue gave way to the deep green of the land, spotted with red heralding the coming of fall and the looming winter.
He never saw large bodies of water often. When he gathered himself, looked out the other side to see, the small houses that dotted the passing green landscape, he mused for a bit longer then he reminded himself.
He had never seen the ocean in his life. He had never seen tall mountains. And if he wanted to see something, he had to go out and figure it out for himself.
“That’s what you’re telling me, right?” Levi whispered, to no one in particular. He looked around him at the other students, their eyes all trained on their own mobile devices. No one had seemed to hear him, and just as quickly as it came, his self consciousness left him.
He willed himself to put down his phone. He willed himself to take deep controlled breaths.
His future would be decided by a thick questionnaire, a two page answer sheet and his ability to keep focus.
Whether he passed or failed, he was sure that the view of the brunette opening her own exam booklet may have something to do with it.
***
Levi could actually pick out the moment when he had decided for himself that he should be drawing.
Although, he didn’t notice it immediately. He noticed it when he had conveniently stopped by the only convenience store, the whole few kilometer trek to his house. He only noticed it for himself when he noticed the school supplies on the display at the counter.
Right, there was that point, that first night after entrance exams, where the scene started to become a little more vivid.
A convenient series of events started with Levi buying a packet of pens, a pack of pastel colors and ended with a convenient drawing of an endless dark blue and a clear sky blue above, painted over a clear white canvas.
He wasn’t the best artist but when he allowed himself a few minutes of a reprieve to just stare, Levi soon figured, somehow, an endless deep blue was hypnotizing. The deep blue he had immersed himself in on the train ride to the nearest city was endless but out there, there existed a blue more endless than the one he had witnessed.
A wide and deep blue that even a train couldn’t transect.
The ocean. The nearest beach was thousands of miles away from his hometown. It would be a two days ride or maybe even a three days ride, an hour or so by plane and just lots and lots of unnecessary transportation costs.
It was a pipe dream but a very inspiring one. Levi allowed himself, hour after hour of just daydreaming, then mixing colors, putting colors side by side, closing his eyes, etching the drawing in the dark blue of his vision, then opening his eyes again.
Then he was painting.
First, he drew an ocean, painfully aware that he had never seen one in his life. He had only ever been fortunate enough to see the lake on the way to the city. Regardless, why did the view of a rising sun, why did the view of the sun peaking out of the horizon, bathing an endless blue with more colors to count, why did a view like that seem to call out to it, just to wring his heart?
Why was Levi engaging with the discomforts, the palpable sadness that came with carving such a view into memory?
It wasn’t efficient, it wasn’t productive. He had ten other textbooks he could have been reading, three exams he could have been preparing for.
But somehow, in such an unproductive activity like painting a view, indulging in every emotion it evoked, Levi found some direction.
So he continued, he drew the sun just a little wider, just a little brighter.
He was strangely very certain wasn’t a sunrise, it was a sunset. Then he was drawing buildings just below, then shadows.
Then with the shadows alone he was already feeling it, giants approaching in troughs, rumbling earth and fear and sadness that seemed to swirl across one another before settling in the air.
Levi was starting on another drawing, giant shadows illuminated by a setting sun.
Then another drawing, looming walls that closed landscapes from one other. There were forests with giant trees, underground cities only ever illuminated by artificial light.
Before he knew it, he was setting aside time to draw, academics almost forgotten. To hell with language arts and literature, there were sceneries words could never express, pastel colors could only almost express.
One day, watching a view of a port, illuminated by the setting sun, positioned so strategically, that the buildings came up more black, and there was something beyond the shadows…
Rumbling. Giant Footsteps. Then the ground started to shake, sending a painful shiver that seemed to catch at his throat. Levi leaned back on his chair, partially out of laziness, but as he breathed in and out for a second, he knew there was some unexplainable fear, clipped into such a strange and impulsive decision.
“Levi… why the hell are you drawing?” He whispered to himself. What the hell are you drawing?
Sceneries. As simple as that. It wasn’t the most productive thing to do at that moment, but it wasn’t supposed to be leaving him at all guilty, or even contemplating that it could have been a waste of time.
There was one knock on the door, then two knocks. Levi didn’t move. There were only so many people who could have been knocking and Levi knew his mother enough to know, knocks were only there for formalities, she would barge in anyway.
And she did. The door must have swung further inward than usual, hitting the wall with a slam. Instinctively, Levi looked back.
Kuchel’s eyes were wide in surprise, her lips folded into a flat line. She shook her head, opened her eyes again and looked away.
“Are you okay?” Levi only realized, when it came out of his mouth, it came out as barely a whisper.
Kuchel couldn't stare and that flatline in her lips, danced for a second, morphing into a lopsided grin. “You really applied for a high school outside of our area huh?”
Right, he never did tell his mom about that. It had been a risky application, a risky choice but when Kuchel’s smile settled into something warm, Levi sensed the relief and the utter joy with the same expression.
“You think you’ll be fine… on your own?” Kuchel asked.
Levi nodded. “I’ll be fine.” The words came automatically and it was only when it was out at the tip of his tongue, did he even doubt the amount of truth in that statement. He didn’t know much of what he meant. In fact, he probably would never know until he figured it out for himself.
“It’s a big world out there,” Kuchel said. Her footsteps sounded in the quiet room and only a few seconds later, she was right next to him, her eyes fixed on the paper on the table.
“It is,” Levi said. He could hear the tremble of his mother’s voice as she spoke and in the air, he made out the tension so thick it could be cut with a knife. “But I’ll make the most of it…”
The outside world was chock full of incomprehensible concepts. For someone who never bought a ticket for anything more than a one hour ride, the outside was a conglomeration of unknowns, a web full of mysteries and Levi for one reason or the other, was convinced that what they had learned before about oceans, hills, eternal summers were all real.
Then he thought of her, the way her hair seemed to glimmer under the hot son, the way it seemed to fly in the warm air.
“I’ll be fine…” Levi repeated once again. That second time, he meant it, even at least just a bit.
***
Levi took a part time job.
It was something to pass the time outside school hours and it was just something else to focus on when his mind tended to spread to many directions at once.
School wasn’t difficult. The harder part had been getting in. Staying in seemed almost routine.
Accept the assignments, do it and submit them.
And sometimes, just entertain that little voice in his head, that little apparition that seemed to channel him with a convenient burst of energy during the most dire of circumstances.
But really, how dire can circumstances actually be?
In fact, Levi had found it just a little more difficult to bus tables and wait tables than to actually submit assignments and take exams.
Maybe because she wasn’t there. Maybe because there just seemed to be something more difficult in putting together strings of vocabulary words and applying grammatical rules into something almost practical.
In short, there were tourists. And Levi by god’s curse or the other, could not make sense of what the hell they were saying.
They said something to him, a few more words. There could have been the word ‘fish’ somewhere there. Levi looked at the menu in front of them, then at his notepad. He attempted to read lips, only giving up when he noticed the knitted brows of the middle aged woman, then the face she made as she looked at another waiter taking orders on the table, then she looked at Levi.
The expression could have only meant one thing. Does anyone here speak English?
He could have sworn he had memorized vocabulary words by the dozen. He could have sworn he had done a dozen roleplays all for a grade in his fucking class. And he could have sworn the entrance exam to high school had enough questions on the English language that he should have been able to make out what the foreign couple in table six were saying.
Words actually spoken for the sake of being said seemed to mix, then they seemed to garble and the whole exchange had ended with Levi calling one of the waiters who actually spoke English to handle the customers.
After waiting a dozen more tables after that, Levi waited out the rest of his shift in the staff room. He cracked open his English textbook, read through a formulaic conversation, pronouncing clusters words by the line.
He imagined just a few more conversations, a few more encounters then he found himself imagining that mystery person again. He then found himself feeling a little disappointed that he couldn’t connect with her any more deeply.
***
“Levi, tell me, what course do you plan on applying to?”
His years in high school past by in a wink of an eye. Or at least that was what it felt like. Time was a funny thing, taking tests made three hours seem like years. Back to back exams made days feel like they lasted an eternity.
When the teacher had called him in for an individual consultation, then when the teacher had licked his lips as opened Levi’s transcript of records, Levi became painfully aware that his high school life had passed by him in a split second.
And Levi had never even given himself the time of day to even prepare a list of four courses, or a list of colleges to apply for. He gave his mouth free reign for just a second. “Languages.”
“Languages?” HIs advisor asked, wide eyed. “After taking the science track?”
Levi closed his eyes again. “Engineering,” he corrected. He bit his tongue, a light scold for that slip of the tongue.
Languages. Art. Literature. Science. Everything had piqued his interest one way or another, and whatever his mind had been hyperfocused on, would have been the answer.
He imagined the way the rays of sunlight had licked the large buildings in his dreams. He imagined himself painting every scenery with the brunette again.
The brunette would say her goodbye in some language Levi couldn’t understand. And Levi was always finding the best words to say and that mystery person loved plants, she loved animals, she loved those monsters that seemed to inhabit his dreams.
Every small pursuit of knowledge seemed to be guiding him straight to her. And maybe any road could have been a good place though.
In reality though, he had prepared for engineering. Levi had gone for the science and math track. By his last year of high school, his choices had narrowed down to pure sciences.
Engineering had been a cold collected choice. It guaranteed a job, it guaranteed some money. At the same time, architecture and building would just feed Levi’s drive to see those new sceneries, wherever they were.
And it only made sense of the visions of her under the sun, slaving over some roofing, then under the moonlight slaving over some wagon.
The room was silent save for the rustle of papers as the teacher brought out brochures, college rankings and cross checking it with his own transcript of records.
And Levi chose that moment to think for a little longer. It wasn’t too late to go to the arts, or maybe go into the languages. When he wasn’t racking his brain for the right choice, Levi was racking his brain for the easiest way to find her.
His mom said he could take anything. And everything seemed to be leading right to her. She was an abundance of ideas, a blackhole of knowledge and she could be anywhere in the world.
“Have you decided which college to apply for?” his teacher asked.
Then he wondered why the hell he was making her decide in the first place. Coming from a family barely making ends meet, coming from a humble background, having chosen the science track early on, there were only so many ‘good idea.’
“What are the best universities for engineering?”
***
Levi couldn’t breathe.
Having grown up in such a small town, suddenly thrust into the center of one of the busiest cities in his country, Levi realized he was a fish out of water, a fish who would probably never learn to walk.
He took another part time job waiting tables. He continued to leave the foreigners to waiters who actually spoke their language.
He was already in the big city. He would have a million chances to find her yet somehow, in the hustle and bustle, he had started to feel more alone than ever.
The city turned out ot be a place where too many people were too out of touch with themselves, too in touch with the money, success and duty.
He needed to keep in touch with himself. He willed himself to keep for himself an hour a night just drawing, then thirty minutes at a time, playing around with a language learning application, wondering why the hell he couldn’t speak the language when he had spent his whole few years, revising vocabulary word after vocabulary word, grammatical pattern after grammatical pattern.
Levi had started a new project, and he could have sworn it had just been for himself.
He attributed the first year maths and physics lessons with too many applications of planes. He attributed it to the ridiculous amount of homework and the tests which seemed to happen every few weeks with little to no space for in betweens.
Towards the end of his first year of college, Levi started to draw planes.
***
“Tell me why you picked your course?”
“I want to be an engineer, I wanna build things, buildings, beautiful sceneries.” Over time, his hyperfixation over familiar sceneries he had never seen before, had created the most natural answer for him.
“And why are you interested in applying to this program?” the club officer continued.
Levi sighed. That wasn’t the part he was completely comfortable answering either. Why the hell would someone who had spent more than half his college life opening books suddenly wanna become a buddy to a foreign exchange student?
“I wanna improve my English,” Levi said.
“We cannot guarantee that they would be a native English speaker but most countries usually have students take tests before they study abroad… “
And most foreigners never bothered to study Levi’s native language either. Either way, he had more than a decade of formal English instruction under his belt. He had five levels on that stupid language learning application and an almost one thousand day streak to boot.
The officer spoke for a while longer than that. Then he asked another question.
“Why… What else?”
How would he explain to the person that he had just felt it? He had had a dream where the brunette had filled out an application, encircling the name of his hometown. How would he explain that she had carried with her a survival level language book to their country?
How could explain it all, when he couldn’t even believe it himself that it was merely a pipe dream and he could just easily have been paired with anyone else.
An experience is still an experience. Levi reminded himself.
It turned out, whatever excuse he came up with, had worked to convince them.
***
It all started with a partner program. It all started with a name on paper. Then Levi was memorizing her name, reading it out loud and attempting to pronounce it. Those all happened in slow motion.
Everything after that seemed to happen in fast forward.
Hange lived life fast forward. He wondered how he had gotten that, just by the quick exchange in the International House in the university.
As if he had known it his whole life. Levi braced for it.
He at least expected htat he wouldn't understand anything she said when she prattled on english. He gave a nod when Hange first spoke up, the only thing he had understood was the basics of the profile they had sent over a month before she came.
Hange Zoe, 20 years old. Engineering major with a minor in literature. A semester long stay.
It was enough for Levi at least to muster a nod, even when he didn't know what Hange had said after that. A nod of understanding, more specifically, a facade.
And it was only when Hange had raised her eyebrow and cocked her head to one side then Levi realized it was a very shabby facade.
Body language was a universal language and with mere facial expression alone, Levi seemed to get his own confusion across. In return, he received understanding, a lopsided grin, and a laugh she seemed to be holding back and she was doing a bad job at doing it.
"Nice to meet you," Levi said. He was sure he had kept the tones together, he had emphasized syllabus where they needed to be emphasized. His accent was thick, the foreign words burned at his throat. And he brushed it away while raising one hand up in greeting.
"Nice to meet you too," Hange said with more ease. She put her own hand up in greeting. "Levi Ackerman," she added. There was a drawl, a rumble in her voice and a sense of nostalgia in the way she had narrowed her eyes on him.
Her diction, her accent told another story. Somehow, with one glance, Levi couldn't help but think, although the moment seemed intimate. The way she spoke, the way she introduced herself and the circumstances between them, only solidified another fact.
The intimacy he had felt was a sham, the strange feeling that seemed to push the edges of his mouth into a rare smile was probably nothing but an overcompensation of something, a quirk or bit of crazy that Levi reminded himself everyone must have.
He reminded himself, he and Hange came from different backgrounds, different backstories, and they were both different people. The most glaring sign just being the fact that they spoke different languages.
And when Levi pulled out a translator and Hange pulled out a guide book of beginner phrases, they would never completely understand each other, even if they have known each other for years, or even decades.
He could have been daydreaming or he could have just been reading her mind. But Levi let the feeling run free, linger, then settle, pacify the awkward tension that seemed to bubble like a steeped kettle.
There's a reason you decided to read every night. There's a reason you decided to do this partner bullshit in the first place.
Really, there could have been many other explanations for it, a life beyond studies, a padded resume...
Hange spoke first. Her eyes scanned over her book of survival phrases, she said a few words Levi couldn't register.
Levi cocked his head to one side almost instinctively.
Hange repeated it once, then twice before giving up and saying it english. "Would you like to go out for dinner?"
With some reference, Levi eventually figured it out. Hange',s Rs, didn't come out as expected, she didn't have that natural glottal stop and the wrong syllables had been emphasised.
"Sure. There's a good one a few minute walk from here," Levi said.
Hange nodded her head, a wide smile on your face. I got half of that. Her expression seemed to say.
Levi let out a deep sigh, googled the name of the restaurant on his phone and showed the pictures of the food to Hange.
Her grin only widened and she seemed invested. Just the small gesture was enough to amuse even Levi.
"Let's go?" Levi asked.
Hange nodded. "Let's go!"
They were some the whole way there and Levi really wondered, how the hell did he even expected anything to work. There were small businesses clustered around the college town, and every cluster had one or two tea shops, managed by a few retirees.
The university was in a small town, a comfortable train ride away from a big city. Yet somehow, despite the bustling skyline which could be made out from the highest spots in town, the small university town kept its rustic scenery, the quaint air and a comfortable hush.
Students in particular liked to escape the main streets, and sneak out into clusters of tea shops with a tablet or a textbook in hand. Levi didn’t think too much of it then, his own dormitory room was enough of a reprieve.
That was until Hange brought it up, in between small talk, a mix of his language, a mix of English and just a little too much body expression for it to have been natural.
Hange put her thumb and her pointer finger together, raising her one pinky up.
“Coffee?” Levi asked. Coffee was a universal concept. Having had his own dependency phase a while back, in between college entrance exams and sleepless nights, Levi was familiar with that word in more languages than he could count.
“Tea…. Or coffee,” Hange said. She had her laptop bag on one hand, her phone on the other. And Hange seemed to lug it around with some difficulty and Levi wouldn't have been surprised if a few books had been stuffed in that bag too.
Hange always seemed to have a lot of books.
“Okay.” There was nothing much else to say, no reason to deny such a simple invitation. Despite their limited ability to speak, Hange seemed to evoke some level of curiosity, some familiarity and a bout of nostalgia which seemed to tickle at his lips, goading him to smile just a little more.
Hange was a few inches taller, and Levi had to quicken his cadence just to follow behind. But over time Hange had started to adjust for him.
Her strides were smaller, and she seemed to look back a little more. And Levi wondered why the hell he had been noticing everything else. But when he couldn’t find the right words to say anything, there wasn’t much to say.
At the same time, his brain seemed to be working on overdrive.
What tea does Hange like? What tea did he like?
Hange pulled him into the small shop, and the wind chimes seemed to ring with a clatter, right at his ear. Levi closed his eyes and the smell of brewing tea leaves tickled his nostrils.
“What do you… want?” Hange asked. It was an easy question and Hange struggled to enunciate it. And in that split second, it didn’t feel like Hange.
How was Hange supposed to feel like? He barely even knew her. But he couldn’t help but notice, when Hange attempted to speak another language, her personality changed. Hell, Levi had seemed to notice it with many of the other students who spoke English much better than he did. It could have easily been attributed to just a struggle to express one’s self or just a symptom of self consciousness over her own accent, her own diction.
A little game for example, Levi spoke up. “Speak English.”
“Oh…” Hange took a deep breath and looked away. “You didn’t understand me?”
No. I understood you perfectly. How the hell was he supposed to say that to Hange in a manner that she would understand? It had never been an issue of language, or expression, it had just been an issue of finding the right way to explain whatever he felt, within the boundaries of reason and objectivity.
Levi shook his head. “What do you want?”
“The red tea,” Hange said. That time, she spoke in English, then she said other things Levi didn’t understand.
Levi only nodded in response. A second later, they were seated side by side on the bench just outside the shop, two cups of red tea in hand. Levi took one sip, he tasted nostalgia, he tasted late nights in an office, he tasted a momentary reprieve after hours of war and strategy meetings.
But how could he explain all of that to Hange? Hange took one sip, took a deep breath and she turned to him, a questioning look on her face.
“Delicious. Very delicious.” Levi said
Hange liked tea and Levi realized he liked it too. And for one reason or the other, it had become routine.
Levi noticed, over time, there was a variety of tea. For some reason it was easier to memorize the names of each tea leaf, each mix, from Darjeeling to Chamomile to Hibiscus to Mint than to memorize every single way to describe it with words Hange would understand.
Chamomile tasted like long nights. Hibiscus tasted like a good nights sleep few and far in between. And mint tasted like those nights when he had just been a little more enamored by her than usual.
“Sweet…” Hibiscus tasted sweet, even without the sugar but it had a sour tangy aftertaste. “Sour…” Levi added.
Hange would nod and smile every time Levi would resort to just the simple senses. There was this frustration that boiled inside him, and he wondered if that could have easily been expressed by one simple word. “How is your tea?” Levi asked.
Hange hummed for a second, said something Levi couldn’t make sense of. She then pulled out her phone typed in one word and slipped it to Levi.
Nostalgic? “Nostalgic…” And right under it where a few sample sentences. Feels like home? Old days? Why? Levi had never said that last question out loud. Even if Hange would have responded, said it out loud, attempted to explain it, would he have understood?
Feels like home? Old days? Was ‘nostalgia’ supposed to be painful?
Levi decided, he felt comfortable letting Hange decide how he was supposed to feel, even if he didn’t truly comprehend it himself. “It’s nostalgic for me too,” Levi said with a nod.
That night, he decided, he could spend a few more minutes reviewing the different tastes in the English language, and maybe he could start learning a bit of Hange’s own language.
***
Hange was filthy rich. She was crazy smart. And maybe she was completely aware of it. Or maybe, it was just part of her personality to explore, to ask questions, to live life in fast forward while turning every frame into something to learn from.
Another day at the coffee shop, Hange was asking questions. “I studied this before,” she said as she pushed herself closer to Levi, so close that her warm breath caressed his neck, a comfortable contrast to the autumn chill.
No actually, it was very comfortable. It was probably his own expectations, his own understanding of how relationships were supposed to develop which was stopping him from enjoying it. He pulled away. “Really?” He kept his voice gentle as he mustered those words, feeling a little guilty at that almost instinctive recoil.
Hange seemed too excited at the prospect of explaining math, she didn’t even notice the brief recoil that had plagued Levi since a second ago. She spoke up excitedly, mustering in her own language then she spoke in English, words that jumbled together as one in Levi’s brain.
Numbers… She said the word numbers and Levi had hyper fixated for too long on it that he never was able to decipher what she had said next.
“Could you repeat that?” Levi asked. He was tempted to bring out a translator, or ask Hange to just type it in. Hange had spoken enthusiastically, like suddenly his math homework was the most interesting thing in the world.
In some form of a response, Hange bent over and started to write out the solution to one of the harder problems towards the end of the book.
“I didn’t understand,” Levi said.
“I know.” Hange seemed apologetic. She looked at him, an almost doleful smile on her face. She slipped him a page chalked full of solutions.
A simple bridge diagram, a hastily scrawled formula right next to it, that same formula which made sense of bridge angles, angles of suspension, and the weight the contraption would be able to carry.
And Hange was looking at him, her eyes wide and expectant, apparent even behind the frames of her glasses.
“Look,” Hange had switched to Levi’s own language. “Look closely at this.” She spoke it with an almost flawless accent and for Levi, he could have sworn, if he had closed his eyes, maybe he could have even sworn there was no foreign accent to pick out.
He didn’t have time though to point it out. Hange continued on English, and she was speaking slower that time, she was using words Levi had understood.
Numbers… Languages… Rules…
He allowed himself to whisper those words to himself, mimicking the up and down of her town. It was merely an unintelligible mumble. But he had a few more tools under his belt. He had Hange’s expectant and excited look. He had her hastily scrawled solutions. And he had a lot of other ideas, memories, or just daydreams to pick from.
He drew the bridge a little more beautiful, a little more detailed. He wrote the equation right under, wrote a few more formulas from memory and he started to derive.
The click and clack of Hange’s phone keyboard then the scratch of Levi’s pen on paper filled the silence, for a few seconds they were in rhythm, for another few seconds they fell out of it.
And soon, it ended with Hange’s phone right next to him, a message typed in English and Levi didn’t need any translator to make it all out, all simple words he had learned before.
Math is the language of science. It’s the language that is supposed to help us make sense of the world and I just find it amazing that even if we all speak different languages, make sense of the world with our own mother tongue, there’s just some cold and technical language which explains everything for us, and which a lot of us understand, even if we’re from totally different backgrounds.
But soon, he realized, even with every word he had understand, somehow, it had taken a second longer to make sense of the words. He highlighted the words, then clicked the translate button, then selected his own language from a list of others.
Clarity came soon after that, in visions of one Hange Zoe in what could have been military uniform, kneeling on a scaffolding, a wad of documents on one hand, a blueprint spread out right in front of her.
He had knelt right next to her. She had asked him a question. He knew the answer and he had answered so easily and so naturally.
What language are we speaking? Levi attempted to answer, stifling a smile as he did. Math?
“You okay?” Hange asked.
“I want to ask…” Levi started. Self consciousness at past participles, perfective and imperfective tenses had the question lodging at his throat before reaching his tongue. He wrote down the question on the translator of his phone and pushed it to her, not even bothering to check the correct translation.
Electronic translators weren’t completely reliable anyway.
“How long have I been building buildings, you mean? ” Hange asked. “Have I ever built buildings?”
Building buildings? The question had two of the same words right after the other? But Levi had felt self conscious, it didn’t sound right… Levi was scolding himself for that moment of stupidity.
He fucking hated being monolingual.
Hange laughed in response, a friendly chuckle. She started to type in her own phone, and just like him, she had run through it with a translator.
I’ve never built buildings. I’m just a college student. But you know, I’d like to one day, do a lot of research, build and develop and invent a lot of amazing things.
“Like what?” Levi asked.
Airplanes, railroads, buildings... That’s why I’m taking engineering.
“Really?” Levi couldn’t understand at that moment, why the hell he was challenging Hange. But that’s not it. That’s not the only thing she wants to do.
Hange sighed. She mumbled something to herself and Levi picked out the word secret.
If I could have decided what to do… Maybe I would have also liked to travel the world, study plants, study animals.
Why didn’t you? Levi typed on his end.
Family responsibility. Picking the practical choice. But in exchange, my parents allowed me to go all the way out here for a six month exchange program. A country all the way in the other side of the world.
Why did you decide to go here? For all Levi knew, his country was a hellhole, not anyone’s top destination for anything, especially not for people as bright as Hange.
Hange looked up, seeming deep in thought. She shook her head. She said some other things after that, but it didn’t seem like an answer. And with not much grasp of conversation, Levi had let the conversation change, unknowingly let Hange digress, and soon after that, they were going through Levi’s homework together.
***
Fall soon became winter and one thing Levi couldn’t help but appreciate was how the seasons seemed to have a special magic, turning each area into almost a ‘somewhere else,’ with every season that passed.
Hange seemed to enjoy the cold. She would breathe a little harder and at first, Levi thought she was sick.
A closer look at Hange then at the way the big smile on her face seemed to accentuate the red at the tip of her chicks, he found, those exhales weren’t wheezes, they weren’t attempts at getting air into her lungs.
Hange had been doing them on purpose. She had been watching the mist that seemed to fill the air with every breath, the mist which seemed to get a little more visible, the harder exhale.
Or that was Levi’s theory at least. “What are you doing?” What the hell are you doing?
Hange wrapped the scarf tighter around her neck then she held her arms closer to herself. She muttered a few things. Levi recognized the words ‘never’ and ‘home.’
Levi had context on his side. You never get this back at home? “There’s a rink.” Levi pointed ahead. “You have at home?”
Hange nodded.
“You wanna go?” Levi’s university town was a city that seemed to get blanketed with snow for a few days a year. And Levi always knew that the time was drawing near, when the common space by the park was turned into an ice rink.
“Now?”
“Yes. Now.”
“Don’t… you have to study?” Hange asked. There was a flicker of longing in her eyes, masked with some layer of guilt.
“I study later. Let’s go. It’s very near,” Levi was careful not to tell her, but he had never been skating in his life. There was just no one to go with. There was no money to buy rental skates with.
With a little more pocket money in tow and an all too adventurous companion, Levi may have changed just a little bit. He pulled her and Hange complied. Soon, she was the one pulling him, as soon as the rink appeared in their line of vision.
A few minutes later, with how quickly Hange had pulled on her skating boots, with how empty the rink was on a weekday, they were gliding precariously on the rink.
And it was fucking slippery.
Levi didn’t trust the blades underneath him to carry him. He didn’t trust any thrust forward to be something he could easily stop or even just keep his balance through.
Hange had adapted easily. By the first round around the rink, her penguin march had evolved into an awkward glide. Then her hands were lower on her side as if she had found the balance for herself in just her skates.
Levi on the other hand, was still clinging onto the rails for dear life.
Soon, Hange was skating towards the middle.
“Hange! Wait!” Levi couldn’t tell what language he was speaking at that moment. But it was enough for Hange to stop and look back at him, her mouth agape.
Take me with you. Come back here. Would Hange understand it if he screamed it? Would his voice be loud enough to reach her? He looked around him, noticing how the rink had crowded just a little.
Levi held one hand in front of him. Although body language was a universal language, a lot of things could have been misunderstood. With how quickly everything after that happened, Levi couldn’t so easily correct Hange.
No, he didn’t want her to put her hands on his shoulders nor did he want her to pull him towards the middle of the rink.
But Hange spoke a different language. In fact, at that moment, she seemed like she was in a different world. Her hair was whipping her from every direction. She was screaming, cheering and maybe among all of it, she could have been singing too.
Who was he to kill the fun? Who was he to tell Hange to stop, when she was in her natural habitat?
As he continued to stare, he noticed, Hange was smiling, wider than ever before. The world started to spin and Hange was guiding him, spinning right along with him.
Look at me. Levi, look right at me.
What language was Hange speaking? A passing thought Levi never bothered to get to the bottom of.
Besides, he didn’t need too many words to understand why Hange said what she did. Levi didn’t get dizzy when he was looking at just one thing. Spinning on metal death traps wasn’t too much of an unpleasant experience especially when he had such a pleasant view in front of him, a very much pleasant view of someone he completely trusted.
A few revolutions later, they were flying and Hange could have been suspended in the air. They could have been transported to some forest with trees, a hundred or maybe even a thousand times larger than they were.
Once again, Hange was speaking a language he understood perfectly. And he was scolding her, in a not-so-eloquent yet a very natural and fluid response.
Something about titans?
There was a liberation in speaking in a manner, in something Levi was completely used to. There was liberation in being able to say what he wanted to say, to be able to use the right words and know that they were the right words and somehow, that was enough for Levi to wish he could stay in that forest of giant trees for a little longer.
Besides, they were flying.
On instinct, he gripped Hange’s shoulders tighter and rode with the spinning, keeping his eyes trained on hers. It was no feat, Hange after all, had her eyes right on him too.
The dream lasted a beautiful long while, broken by something as small as a cold kiss on his nose.
Not from Hange, from a snowflake. A split second later, one landed on the red of Hange’s cheek. Hange wasn’t looking at him anymore.
She slowed down, then naturally he followed.
Hange was looking up at the sky, her brown hair spotted with snowflakes, clusters of snowflakes, some had landed on her lashes.
Her long lashes. Why did he only notice then, Hange’s eye lashes at that moment were the longest he’d ever seen.
“Snow… It’s snowing!” Hange repeated the word again, that time in Levi’s own language. Over time, Levi realized he liked the attempts of Hange to speak. In fact, those few and far in between moments where she seemed to sound so familiar, Levi couldn’t help but feel this soft warmth in his chest.
But Levi hated the snow, and a paranoid part of himself was wondering whether he might even end up tripping on the drops of snow as he skated. So he stayed still and watched as Hange skated around for a while longer, but not for too long.
The snow grew from a tamed patter to a strong bluster that blanketed their surroundings. Then Soon the rink was empty, save the both of them. Then the rink owner was advising them to get out as well.
How long did they get to skate? Not too long. And maybe Hange was disappointed.
Hange insisted they walk home and possibly to quell that silent disappointment. In solidarity, Levi went along with it and quietly as she was took her time, even as the snow fell on her scarf and through the folds in between, then until they covered her glasses and Hange had to take them off.
But Hange was unperturbed. She continued to look up at the sky, then at the trees that started to dot with white. He noticed then, her hands were bare.
Where the fuck are your mittens? Did you really remove one of your mittens just to feel the snow? You’re gonna get frostbite. Levi didn’t know the word for ‘fuck’ nor did he know the word for ‘remove,’ nor did he know the word for ‘frostbite.’
Then Hange was walking faster, her hands were wide open as if there was a particular snowflake she wanted to catch.
The streets get slippery. Levi knew the word for streets but he didn’t know the word for slippery.
“Be careful,” Levi mustered in English. Then he said it in his own language.
Hange continued to stare at the sky, then at the trees again, the roofings of the houses, as the snow that piled high, seemed to take up the shapes of the ridges on the roof.
Did Hange hear him? Or maybe she didn’t understand him? There was one way he could get her attention in the most efficient and the clearest way. Levi sped up and when he was close enough, he grabbed her one bare hand and gripped it hard in between his two mittened ones.
If she slipped or tripped, he’d pull her up. Or he’d fall right with her.
Hange looked at him, wide eyes and a toothy grin that didn’t seem to carry a single worry. The snowflakes falling then scattering over her cheeks. Beyond the white landscape, the grey dim air around them, Hange’s cheeks were a bright red, a little fuller than a second
Her hand gripped back. Levi found himself, putting his one hand up, feeling the red on her cheeks, as red as the warm on her hands.
What the fuck, why would you touch someone’s face? As quickly as he did it, Levi was moving to pull his hand away, but Hange pressed his hand on her check, closing her eyes.
What were they doing in the middle of the road? Why were they suddenly okay with a little touching? Was Hange okay with it? Did anyone think they were a bunch of weirdos?
There were too many things Levi could have asked at that moment, too many things he didn’t understand just yet. One thing was for sure, he was sure he could have done it again and if he relied merely on gut feel, polished through years of daydreams.
Levi could easily convince himself, Hange had enjoyed it too.
They walked back to the dorm in silence after that, his hands not letting go off her barehand. . To conserve warmth. Levi justified.
Hange stayed outside for a while after that, promising to put that last mitten on. And Levi couldn’t bring himself to call it a night until Hange went back inside with him.
It was like Hange didn’t find it cold. It didn’t look like she was tired of seeing snowflakes fall.
Shapes… snowflakes…. Snowflakes come in unique shapes? And now that he did think about it, it was a very Hange thing to be obsessed with how snowflakes came in an infinite amount of shapes.
It was amazing. But when the weather was dropping to lower negatives, it could be dangerous.
“Go inside,” Levi said. He wished he had his dictionary. He wished he could come up with a million other things to say. He had considered taking his phone for a second, only to be cruelly reminded, if he brought his phone out in the biting cold, it would turn off within seconds.
So he sat next to her, settling on the porch of their dorm only armed with a snow coat, a scarf and mittens. He gathered his words and Hange didn’t seem at all uncomfortable in that silence.
“What’s… what’s snow in your… language?” Levi asked. He wondered if the pauses were enough to destroy whatever comprehension Hange could have taken from one sentence.
Hange spoke up confidently and clearly albeit slowly and softly. “None.”
“What?”
“There’s no snow…’ Hange said. Then, she looked up again, her grin only getting wider by the second. She didn’t have to explain further. The answer was in her reaction, her utter refusal to go in, even when the cold was strong enough to bite.
Levi was sure, he would probably do the same thing, if he ever got to see the ocean.
“I’ll stay here,” Levi said. It was a simple sentence and with the hard work Hange had put into learning his language, she seemed to have understood.
“Two more weeks of school,” Hange said.
“And then?” Levi asked.
“I go home,” Hange answered.
Levi bit back the surprise. His response came instinctively. “You can’t stay any longer?” A second later, Levi realized it was a stupid question. Hange was a short term exchange student. She had one semester with them and she was gone.
But Hange seemed to accept it. “I have work to do.”
Levi lived in a region blanketed in snow all winter, a white tapestry, a dirty white landscape with little to no reprieves in between. He couldn’t help but think that when the snow melts, when the trees start to sprout with leaves then flowers, Hange wouldn’t be there to see it with him.
As quickly as it came, winter became a season of goodbyes.
***
Levi rarely bought books. He didn't expect at all, that the display at the front of a window shop would have caught his eye. Yet, something must have changed in him, something to have him observing bookstores and actually visiting them.
A few days before Hange was due to leave, Levi bought himself a book and he perused the book from end to end.
English phrases to use when confessing to someone.
It was a useful book. Levi realized his tongue was tied, and every time he wanted to bring it up, he realized there was no opening. Why say something so out of the blue, when he couldn’t even explain it himself, let alone say it aloud.
He took Hange to the airport. He helped her drop it on the check in counter. And as Hange checked in, picked her seat, Levi was thinking too many things at once.
I was wondering if you would go out with me?/ if you could go steady with me?
A stupid thing to ask when Hange was about to leave. Mentally, he turned the pages to the next chapter.
I'm crazy about you.
And Levi was thinking too many things at once. Was it appropriate to apply that he had gone crazy over Hange, just in a few months. Was it at all okay to imply that he had gone a little loose with his emotions just meeting someone?
He muttered it to himself slowly, mostly to himself just to see how it would have sounded like to himself. He muttered it to himself as he watched Hange position her luggage before it fell into the conveyor belt just behind him.
“Hm? Are you okay?” Hange asked.
“I’m fine,” Levi said.
A simple exchange in English. Levi couldn’t manage anything more than that. His mind was elsewhere.
To me, you are perfect.
Hange wasn’t perfect. Hange liked to learn, she liked to grow. Was it okay to call her by such a word that implied masterfy, like perfect?
“There’s a bookstore there. I think I’ll stock up for the long plane ride.”
Levi didn’t have to follow behind, Hange was already pulling him, her hand thumb caressing the bottom of his palm, her own palm was warm yet dry, the product of the cruel winter. Her lips were chapped.
She wasn’t perfect, but she was perfect to him. And that’s what it means, right?
“Hange, you’re perfect to me,” Levi said, too softly that all he had gotten in return was a light ‘hm?’ Did he enunciate it properly? Maybe he should have checked a few audio clips before he even tried.
BUt Hange seemed busy. She was looking through books, then back to Levi. “Look, it’s a travel guide book….” She showed it to Levi. “But I can’t understand... Can you read it to me?”
Levi read the title. He flipped through pages of a port city, a port which seemed to make up a good percentage of the city, so big that most residents in the tall buildings could make it out from even some of the more inland residences.
A bright endless blue. A product of camera editing or just a product of the beauty of just a city, the sky and the sea, were both endless but both exuded stunning shades of blue.
“I live in a port city.” Hange pointed at the word ‘port.’
Wow, she understood it. Port wasn’t usually the first word anyone learned.
“Right next to a wide ocean.” It was easier to read as Hange pointed to the deep blue of the ocean, tracing it from the inland scenery of the city. “Have you ever seen it?”
Have you ever seen the ocean? Levi was on that question for a few seconds longer. The ocean, the stunning blue seem to evoke some sense of nostalgic familiarity, and intimacy Levi couldn’t explain.
It was a dirty, smelly place with too many dangerous critters but how could Levi even feel so strongly about something… something he could have sworn he had never seen before.
Hange had pulled out a guide book of his own country, then his own city. “There’s no sea… no oceans… no ports…”
There were lakes, but no oceans. “The beach is different. A salt water port is different.” Hange encircled the word port with her fingers, then the word ‘saltwater’ with another.
Levi was starting to understand. Having grown up in such a small town, then plunged into a small university town and a university city in the middle of the country with little to no natural surrounding bodies of water, he remembered, he had never seen a port, he had never seen stunning deep blue with his own eyes.
And apparently, it was incomparable to a lake. Maybe, it was in the fishy smell. Maybe it was in the way it never froze over, even in the coldest winters. Maybe it was in the way it left your skin, tangy and sticky after a few hours.
Or maybe it was in the way, the sand stuck to his boots, snuck over his shoes. Then with the help of the consistency of the water, it tended to stick.
Wild guesses but guesses, Levi was certain, could be almost right.
He turned to Hange. She was tracing the coastline on the pictures of her port city, her smile lopsided and when she looked at Levi, her eyes narrowed to something doleful. “I’ll take you there someday.”
You wouldn’t know what an ocean is until you see it for yourself. Hange could have said something like that. Or maybe that message was something Levi conjured for himself, just to push himself to think up a hundred or even a thousand years to take an almost twenty hour flight with at least two layovers just to see her again.
Even when he had never been on a plane himself.
They were in the bookstore for a few minutes after that. Hange had bought in total four books, one of them, the guidebook in a language she couldn’t read too much of.
“You’ll continue learning?” Levi asked.
“Of course,” Hange said, with a nod of her head. She was suddenly walking faster, and right in front of the line of immigration, she gave him a hug, a long one.
The hug lasted a few seconds, the strong grip on his hand could have lasted a minute.
“I’ll visit,” Levi said. At that point, Levi didn’t bother expressing it in something as cold and calculated as English. There were only so many emotions he could express in a language he barely knew.
Hange replied. “I’ll show you around.” In a language she didn’t completely speak, Hange was less talkative. Like every other time before, she spoke with body language, one wide smile that seemed to crinkled her eyes. One tear fell one side.
Her eyes were just watery. Then she gripped his hand, one tight grip and she let go and turned her back with one wave as she entered the immigration section.
And Levi watched for a few minutes longer, enough to see Hange off. He waited for her to reach deep enough into the line, deep enough to exchange one longing glance before she disappeared into the crowd. Then he noticed things, some very small details that made the goodbyes twist his gut a little tighter.
Hange wasn’t wearing her boots or her bubble coat anymore. Hange had switched to a lighter sweater for the plane, and pants to fell a little past her knees, attire. She was preparing for a world he wasn’t part of, almost a day's journey away from his, the cost of some average man’s wages of a few months.
Hange would be almost unreachable. And why did it fucking hurt, when Hange had never been his anyway? Was it stupid, was it completely crazy to convince himself that there was a time, a point in their lives or maybe the last where they worked closely, where they spoke the same language?
For a while, as Levi left the airport building, he was tempted to stay a little longer, and watch as the planes took off from just outside the fence. But seeing a plane up in the air, brought him back to days drawing planes, port cities.
It wrung his heart again, much tighter than the other times.
Looking up at a plane evoked something in him, something magical. Levi never cried but in the moment as he focused on the plane just above him, he had cried hard enough to leave noticeable tear tracks on his face, one he couldn’t even blame the weather or just the blustery day for her.
I love you.
That had been one of the suggestions for confessing, but Levi had easily scanned through that one. That phrase was overused, over-known by every other culture out there, too simple and an overused three words that Hange had thrown out too often, that Levi couldn’t even bring himself to use that to explain his emotions, without backhandedly insulting them.
He opened his survival book and took a deep breath. There was a more accurate one just under.
You have bewitched me body and soul.
How did he explain meeting someone who just made him imagine an ocean, he’d never seen before? How did he explain meeting someone who just had him crying over airplanes, over a simple goodbye? How did he explain ever meeting someone who had him frequenting tea shops and bookstores, looking for a million ways, in a million different languages to explain his feeling?
In the end, he realized, he didn’t wanna call Hange a witch either but he had to admit, Hange had left with something, countless experiences, countless reflections and countless other dreams.
Whether Hange had intended to or not, whether it had been a trick of magic or just how psychology worked, it was undeniable, she had a tight enough grip of his heart.
***
You have bewitched me body and soul. A corny statement from a book on flirting in a foreign language.
A few google searches later, a few very detailed commentaries on what the hell bewitched could mean and Levi decided, as corny as it sounded to many native speakers, it was still the word Levi would have used.
Hange had some magical grip over him and consequently, she continued to bewitch him over dreams, over video calls and over the long ass emails she would send on weekly basis.
The weekly video calls were silent save for a few easy exchanges, some in English, some in his language, some in hers and the rest of the time was spent in silence. Overtime, Levi realized, he preferred writing, he preferred drawing, he preferred poring over each word, each sentence, each outline and each contour.
The video calls stayed, but through them, Levi was writing, sometimes, he was asking questions.
There were only so many ways to say ‘I love you.’ There were only so many ways to say ‘you bewitched me body and soul.” Hange had been magical enough of an experience, magical enough of a dream that he picked up everything quickly after Hange and she was picking up things quickly herself.
They were exchanging letters, Hange in Levi’s language, Levi in English and soon he had evolved into writing sentences in her native language, mixing them with some shabby English. His dorm room and soon, his own home started to fill with grammar books, phrase books, novels and simple picture books.
Levi liked to pull sentences out from a romance novel, questions and adjectives from grammar books and scroll through debates over what words like bewitched, nostalgia, serendipity, soulmates and otherworldly could mean
The drawings continued. In those moments when Levi couldn't find any word, in any language to explain anything, he continued to draw. Over time, his ability to draw only improved, and he was cleaning up his sketches of port cities, a sunset, and these giants—titans, appearing over the horizon.
Then he drew a plane, just above it.
See you later, Hange.
He was drawing the details of the wings for just a second too long, when he felt something wet on his cheek. Instinctively, Levi turned to the cup of water right next to him. He looked at the clock on the mantle.
Why were his eyes watery? He put one hand over the teardrop, only smearing it. And soon, some others followed.
Was he alone? Was he lonely? No, he was back in his hometown, his mother was just downstairs and if he focused, he could hear the faint sound of the TV, the clacking of plates as his mother reorganized the cupboard.
He reached for his phone. “Hange,” he whispered, suddenly self conscious of how he struggled to pronounce the “ji” sound. Should he call? He looked at her latest email.
A long letter, one written in his own language. Hange had gotten better but he couldn’t help but notice, she kept it simple, she was talking about her daily routine, her exciting day, her thesis proposal, her presentations and the buildings she hoped to design one day, interviews to work on a project at one of the largest ports in their city.
Clear, concise, exciting and refreshing. It was all of that.
But Hange had always been chaotic, discombobulating and a puzzle to solve but when she had attempted something clear, concise, professional and simple, it was just too easy to understand.
And it just didn’t seem to like Hange.
Levi looked at his own emails, one in English, and the few sentences in between where he had switched to her native language.
With each time Hange had attempted to speak in something he understood, was he really seeing who Hange was. With each attempt he spoke to her in a way she understood, was she really seeing the message he hoped she did.
Was he translating himself properly? Was she translating herself clearly too? He felt it as an ache in his chest.
Sometimes, people change their personalities when they speak in a language that isn’t theirs. And Levi for some reason or the other, looked out the window, counted stairs for a second and just wished, wished something he didn’t understand.
He wished she understood? He wished that body language, expressions and actions spoke louder and more clearly than every letter he had sent her way. He let out a few exhales, took a few tissues from his desk, wiped his face and went down for a glass of water.
Kuchel had still been downstairs, sitting by the TV. “Hey, you’re okay there?”
Was his gait weird? “Yep, just thirsty.” Levi could have sworn his voice had been clear/
“Is anything bothering you?” Kuchel pressed. “Exams? Job hunting?”
Levi was silent in contemplation and reflection for a few seconds long enough to realize, silently he had been just a little bitter, why couldn’t he speak Hange’s language? Why didn’t he ever tried harder to speak, so she wouldn’t have to adjust.
“I was thinking, I grew up with just language…”
“That’s bothering you?” Kuchel furrowed her brows. “Is there anything wrong with that? You learn English in school.”
It didn’t feel intimate. Levi memorized a hundred ways to write a business letter and had been very much trained enough to translate and make sense of most academic papers. But speaking the language just enough to understand Hange? To express everything?
Levi cleared his throat. “What about talking to people?”
“You speak just fine. You wouldn't have gone to college if you didn’t. You wouldn’t have taken those extra engineering classes in English.”
He had only taken those classes recently, just an attempt to understand Hange just a little more. “But… it doesn’t feel warm,” Levi said. “It doesn’t feel like this… language.” There was peace, tranquility and intimacy clipped into a native language, a language someone spoke with their family.
Kuchel laughed. “Then keep practicing, keep reading and I think, maybe you’re just missing…” She paused for a second, she looked at the TV and switched the channels to a romantic movie in English with subtitles in their language. “Experience.”
Experience. That had been enough to pique Levi’s interest. A cold glass of water in hand, Levi walked nimbly and plopped himself on the sofa, right next to her.
Two lovers on a lighthouse, screaming ‘I love you’s’ , the most generic term, the most popular English sentence, translated into something almost like an ‘I like you.’ in their language.
“I love you,” Levi repeated it in English, a ghost of a laugh right after.
English speakers liked to overuse ‘I love you,” and Levi remembered fondly how a lot of the exchange students who attempted to speak their language seemed to throw it around, as something almost similar to ‘Thank you,’ to the chagrin of Levi and the other local students.
He and the other local students knew that an ‘I love you,’ in their own native language was something that carried more meaning, ‘I can spend the rest of my life with you,’ ‘I’m wholeheartedly committed to you through thick and thin,’ or even something as magical as a ‘you bewitched me body and soul.’
Loving was an action. When one said ‘I love you,’ it was supposed to imply an ‘I love you, for the years to come, forever and and ‘I will try my best to continue to love you.’
And he couldn't bring himself to say it, not in her language, nor in his, not when he couldn’t even figure out for himself how she’d take it. And he wondered, if he had said it in her language, would it have sent the same message.
“You’ve been studying English a lot more have you?” Kuchel asked.
“I have,” Levi answered with a nod of his head. “I plan on applying abroad?”
“Where?”
That port city. The one on the guide books with a deep blue ocean and clear skies and ports and coasts that seemed to make up the whole character of Hange’s city.
Kuchel’s eyes widened. “That’s all the way on the other side of the world.”
“But the best jobs are there. I’m hoping to work in a port…”
Kuchel shook her head and smiled. “That’s a big dream. In my almost fifty years, I’ve never seen the ocean.”
“You know I haven't either.” Levi took a sip of water. “And I wanna see it for myself, and one day, we can see it together.”
“You’ve worked hard,” Kuchel said. “Whatever you choose, I won’t stop you.”
A quick nod of her head, a little hum and just a short blessing and somehow, those had been enough to bolster Levi’s confidence. One more semester of class, a few more English textbooks and a few more messages from Hange and maybe he’d be out in a year or so.
***
English was a professional language.
The advantage had always been, there were always a million tried and tested ways to open up a meeting, an interview and to write a business letter.
“Why do you want this job?”
Levi had practiced that same in front of the mirror, on a video call with Hange, he had run the paragraph over a dozen translators and he was fairly confident when it came up. “I want to create things. I want to design safe buildings for people to live in, to work in… I wanna create beautiful sceneries, skylines.”
Beautiful skyline. For sure, there were a million other ways to say it.
Skylines brushed by the rays of a beautiful sunset, a picture perfect skyline in a port city, and all we’re missing is a good airplane on the side.
“I want to make plans for cities… while preserving the greens of the countryside.
For a moment, Levi closed his eyes, he saw the paintings, the drawings he had shared with Hange, the trees as big as titans, then he saw the airplane up in the sky, that seemed to fly into the clouds, yet at the same time softly caressing before hiding behind them, disappearing only temporarily.
He said more, some of it was definitely scripted, but others were maybe a little too personal intimate, that for a second, maybe he had lost track of himself.
“Excuse me Mr. Ackerman, could you repeat that last part in English?” the interview asked, an amused grin on his face.
Levi took a deep breath, said an apology and continued on from there.
At the least, he had tried to put his heart into it.
***
Levi was tracing the coastlines then he was tracing the skylines with his eyes, even from a hundred feet up in the air.
He had never been on a plane, he had never been so high up in the air and he had never seen how deep the blue, yet how so influenced and so bendable the shades of blue were to the whims of natural light and to the whims of city lights.
The ocean was the deepest body of water in the world after all, of course it would seem just a little different.
But Levi couldn’t help but think, just watching the view from a hundred feet away, he was cheated by life and by fate, hindrered from seeing such beautiful and mind boggling patterns of light.
And as the view drew nearer slowly, Levi couldn’t help but draw in a breath as the buildings evolved from tiny boxes to actual buildings and soon he was able to make out people if he squinted. And as quickly as that, they were three dimensional figures, three dimensional architecture which held people inside them.
The plane landed with a jolt but even that along with his legs stiff from an almost fifteen hour flight weren’t enough to deter him from taking in the view just outside the window, the sky was clear.
The pilot called out the temperature, something just enough for a comfortable turtle neck for Levi but a lot of the others were in thermals, had snow coats slung over the shoulders, others had winter coats slung over one arm.
Levi slung his duffel bag over one shoulder and he was amazed at his own patience as he watched the others shuffle to the front of the plane.
Immigration, Customs and the luggage carousel had all taken ages and it seemed to be taking longer and longer with every message from Hange. She had left an address to a cafe by the port, the most bustling part of the city on weekends but almost dead quiet on weekdays.
Something for just the two of us.
Sometimes he wondered if they should have waited a week before meeting, was it creepy at all that they had planned something as she arrived?
But Levi couldn’t wait. He had practiced a hundred different ways to tell Hange how he felt, a hundred different ways to plan and just discuss. And maybe in his dreams, he had practiced and he had learned a million different ways Hange was his soulmate.
But really, it could have all been just one fevered dream.
Hange though, had seemed as eager to meet him. In fact, it had been Levi who insisted he took a train to the city, just to figure out for himself the transportation system.
The train took almost an hour, it had taken two switches of lines, but in the last line, it seemed to run parallel to the coast.
At that moment, his eyes fixed on the blue, Levi started to fully understand for himself, a more precise definition of the word endless. There was a more familiar view as a kid, as they crossed the wide lake to get to the city. Long before, that had been his ‘endless.’
Once again hypnotized by the view, almost breathless and still raring to exit the train and meet Hange at the cafe, endless felt like it had taken another meaning.
Endless had lasted a mere thirty seconds but the ocean, the ports had stretched for farther than that. But Levi had a clear cut destination. He bolted out of the station, suitcase and duffel bag in toe, he weaved through alleys and main streets and maybe he looked like a total idiot.
But he was a foreigner, a tourist, a total idiot in a sea of locals and for once, he thought it fine to look like an idiot.
He was a vulnerable idiot. A few hundred meters of navigation later, someone pulled at his duffel bag and Levi was convinced he had been mugged. He spun around, ready to throw a punch, only stopping a few inches from the nose of the brunette.
“You piece of horse cunt, Hange.”
“Watch your mouth Levi. I know what that means.” Hange’s accent had faltered just a little bit, but in between laughs, Hange speaking in his language had been warm and comforting. “Are you hungry?” She grabbed the duffel bag. “We can leave this in a car and get something to eat.”
In fact, Levi had eaten already. Out of nervousness, he had eaten everything in the fucking plane from the pack of peanuts to the desserts that tasted more like than plastic than preservatives.
“We can get something on the way back to your place,” Levi said.
“We can do that…” Hange said. She pulled at his luggage and Levi followed behind. “First things first, we can bring the luggages to my car.”
A minute passed in silence, save for the rolling of the wheels, the clack of footsteps.
Then another minute.
Then another one…
“Levi, you wanna see the beach?”
Levi jumped and met Hange’s amused gaze. “We can do it another day.”
“Really?” Hange asked. “You’ve been staring at the sea the past few minutes.”
“No, if we need to do anything else…”
“We have a lot of free time. Besides the port and the city… They’re only a ten minute walk from the parking lot.”
Suddenly Hange was walking faster, her strides much wider. For once, Levi didn’t find it so much, even if he had to switch to a quick jog just to follow behind, even when he had carried his sketchbook pressed to his side.
And it turned out, the ocean was worth it. No sketchbook, no guide and no dream could have ever done justice to the real thing. He was sure Hange had tried to explain it, in between sending pictures of the view near her apartment.
There was no way to do justice or wax poetic in a way that could have described everything in the moment.
The crunch of the sand right under his feet. The million different shapes the waves made when they washed up on shore and the different shades of grey and orange the sand turned when the water crashed on them, had their way with them.
The ocean was endless, it was powerful. It danced. It sang and it emited a smell that was both a fragrance and an odor, a sour sticky sensation that seemed to settle on his skin.
And Levi found it almost believable how some believed that the ocean was another world.
To top it all off, Hange had kicked off her shoes to the side, she grabbed him by the hand. “Put the sketchbook down, let’s go down to the water.” Hange was speaking in English, in fact, they have been speaking English since a while ago.
Levi seen that same scene in his dream. Her hand pulling his and Levi hobbling just deep enough to cover his ankles.
Hange, that might be poisonous, don’t touch it. They were speaking another language then. Levi had spoken to Hange almost naturally and fluently and he was certain Hange had understood him perfectly.
But in his dream… he had never gone deep enough to humor her.
That was a dream. This is reality.
He walked into the water slowly, focusing on how deeply his feet dug into the grimy sand.
Of course, the ocean, the sea, the beach, despite their natural beauty was a conglomerate of poison, piss and a very dangerous chaotic mystery.
It turned out, there was sense in his hesitation.
“Hey don’t go in… There are…. Now…” Someone had cried out in English.
“There’s what?” Levi asked.
Hange gave him a wry smile. She walked back out of the water, and picked her shoes up from the side of the beach.
“Wait, what did the guy say? The sea has what?” Levi pressed.
Hange thought for a second. She then grabbed her phone out from her pocket and typed out a few words into his translator.
Jellyfish. It’s jellyfish season.
***
On the bright side, there was a boat rental just walking distance.
Hange suggested they rented a boat and rowed instead to a calmer part of the, just a few feet from the beach but still far enough that it was just the two of them, and the tame waves keeping them some company.
It was a risk to take his sketchbook with him. Having never seen the ocean in his life though, he thought it a risk worth taking.
Hange was speaking. She was looking down, as if counting the shades of blue in the ocean, then she was looking at the port.
And Levi soon realized what had been so beautiful about it. The sun was setting and the ocean was starting to look a little more purple and red than blue. The longer he stared, he started to realize even in deep colors, there were lines, there were white spots.
Sea foam, contours, strokes brought about by the tamed weaving of waves. The lakes back home had their own charm, their own strokes but there was something about the peaks of the oceans, dotted in white, like miniature mountains with never ending winters at their summits.
It wasn’t new. It was familiar and when Levi attempted to draw it again in his sketchbook, he remembered, he was there for another reason, to explain another familiar feeling.
He looked at Hange who was staring intently at him. And how long had she been staring intently at him?
He was counting in lines, in words and just how many stars in her eyes. He was whispering rhythms, pausing right after acciaccaturas.
Right, he had something to tell her, he had a million things to her, a countless storyboards worth of dreams, hundreds of thousands or maybe a million words, some of them he knew he might never pronounce but was sure existed.
I love you. It was more complicated than that. Even a simple I love you in any language, English, his own, her own, they might not even capture the moment, every emotion that seemed to run through his mind, down to the tips of his fingers, and seemed to rock him along with the boat.
Serendipity. Soulmates. Fate. Love. Otherworldly.
Even something as simple as ‘I have been dreaming of someone like you,’ could sound creepy or even corny.
Hange could have said something. She had opened her mouth, she had said something but frozen in his seat, Levi couldn’t be too sure what she had said. Almost instinctively, somewhat desperately, Levi opened his sketchbook.
He had drawn different sceneries. He had refined his craft, making sense of a thousand different dreams.
Have you been having dreams? Do you remember?
In his dreams, Levi had been speaking a lot. His dreams had said a million things in response, but at the same time, they had said nothing at all, leaving him with only enough to draw.
Hange flipped the first drawing to one in the forest. Her eyes widened, then brightened for a second.
She brushed her pointer finger over the empty glade in the middle.
A campfire. Two figures right next to them and a tent. That’s what he was missing. Levi knew what he would be drawing next.
Let’s live here together, why don’t we?
Then he flipped to the next drawing. A view of the port city from a warehouse. And Hange had put her thumb over a gap, large enough a group of people and two familiar figures.
It looks like your love for the titans is still unrequited huh?
We’ll get along soon enough.
Levi had drawn different angles of the port, one of them had been along a mainroad, and in the back had been shadows, larger than life figures that seemed to be enough to send a jolt of anger through Levi.
And Hange clenched her fist over the sketch book in such an intimately familiar way before raising it in front of him, inches away from his chest. She didn't say anything.
But still, Levi had heard something, maybe an order to guide her fist right on his chest. So he did just that, in slow gentle movements.
Dedicate your heart.
The waves that rocked the boat like it was cradle was what pulled him back. Levi was suddenly hyper aware of the silence. They hadn’t been talking at all.
Despite that, there wasn’t a dearth of clarity either.
How the hell are we talking ? Levi opened up his mouth to ask her.
It was only halfway open when Hange stood up on the boat, rocking it. Look there’s a plane. But she wasn’t speaking. She was pointing at his sketchbook, right at an empty place in the corner sky, dwarfed by the large sun that was starting to set beneath the horizon.
A view from high up in the air, even the ports were a few beneath her. Whoever’s view that was. They saw it from high above.
Hange’s view from up there.
She looked at Levi knowingly. She drew a circle with her finger, but when Levi looked more closely, he realized it wasn't a circle. Hange was tracing the silhouette of a plane.
In the silence, he heard another voice. His own voice? See you later Hange.
His breath started to falter. His hands started to shake and Levi was looking high up at the airplane again.
So what happened after? Levi didn’t have to say anything and he didn’t think he had to. Hange didn’t speak either. But Levi could have sworn they were exchanging stories, exchanging dreams in a moment of utter silence.
He didn’t need three languages nor did he need rehearsed speeches in any of them. He didn’t need full mastery of any of them tiether to understand Hange. And she didn’t need it either.
In the silence, in their dreams and in every reflection, they were speaking a language, a language Levi could never break down into survival phrases, a conglomerate of cases, tenses, grammatical rules, accents, tones,and silences that seemed so precisely placed.
Hange had always seemed eloquent but even though she had found beauty, she found conciseness in the silence.
And maybe silence was the right choice.
There was another language that hovered in the silence, something Levi had only noticed when it had just been them, a familiar scenery and a look of utter understanding.
In their dreams, they spoke another language, a language he was certain they both understood perfectly, a language buried by centuries of war maybe, or just buried by the lifetimes that came after that.
Something otherworldly. Something nostalgic. Something completely and utterly explainable.
Levi reached out for Hange’s free hand, he put the pencil on one hand. He flipped the page again, back to the forest.
How did it look from where you sat?
And Hange seemed to have understood. She draw one figure lying down, then one next to him. She drew a campfire, then a tent. Then without even a prompt from Levi, she flipped to the next page.
To the picture of the port. She drew five figures, then she drew two more, right as the focus of the drawing.
Even if your love for the titans was unrequited… Did you ever figure out that there was another love, one which wasn’t unrequited?
Yes I did.
Soon, Hange was flipping to the next page, to the last view of the sunset, to the plane.
How did it look from up there?
Hange started with a sketch of the plane, then soon there were details and Levi could only be surprised Hange had ever been capable of putting that much detail into a single drawing.
You sat here right? She pointed her pencil to one area. I heard you. I heard you perfectly.
One wistful smile from Hange and Levi closed the sketchbook. She pressed her cold hand over his face, then her thumb was right under his eye.
Are you crying again? What the fuck. Levi wanted to shake her hand away, or slap it out. But by god, did he need it.
Hange opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out.
Either way, Levi heard it loud and clear. It’s ‘later’ already Levi. I’m home.
Although, he couldn’t for the life of him, tell what language they were speaking.