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Chapter Text

He had never believed in heaven, and the premise of hell had always seemed like something that had been invented to scare kids into behaving.

No karma.

No fate.

Life was a mess of conflicting intentions and moralities and natural disasters.

An afterlife where he could expect the consistency of eternal pain didn’t scare him.

Pain had never scared him.

Hell was not the battlefield- it wasn’t narrowly avoiding the jaws of a titan or hearing the screams of the ones who were too fast, too slow, too scared, too cocky.

Hell was picking uniform patches off of bloodied corpses that looked nothing and everything like the people he’d sat down to dinner with the night before.

Hell was sitting down to dinner with new faces and wondering whose patch he’d be picking free tomorrow.

In a world like his, the forgiveness of a loving god was alien and laughable and damnation was refreshing for the reliability it promised him.

The day he died, he looked up at the circle of cloudless blue sky that remained inside his narrowing vision and thought,

‘I’m dying.’

His last breath was a whisper, and everyone who overheard it would puzzle over what it meant.

No one knew why Humanity’s Strongest’s final words hadn’t been a plea for help or the name of a lover or even one last farewell, but just a simple, contented murmur.

“Finally.”

***

A muddled jumble of non-thoughts that were more feeling than cognition.

 “Oh, look at him, thinking so hard! Isn’t he just like a little old man?”

Weak body, heavy head. Sluggish brain.

Affection. Security. Reassuring words.

 “Who’s that? Is that your daddy? Yes it is! Say hi to- Davey, where are you going?”

Finding faces. So many faces.

Finding eyes. His mother’s eyes.

“Shh, shh, sweetie. What’s wrong? Mommy’s here, shh.”

Weak body. Helplessness.

No control. Anxiety.

“Sometimes he’s so quiet it scares me and other times I just can’t get him to stop crying-”

“Dirty,” her mouth said. “No, honey, that’s dirty,” she laughed.

Like it was funny. It wasn’t. He knew dirty.

“-I don’t know what’s wrong, David, he just suddenly started screaming-”

Dirty wasn’t funny. He knew better.

 “I don’t know what to tell you, Caroline! The doctor said nothing was wrong with him-”

He didn’t like dirty. Dirty was scary.

“-maybe if you tried to act a little less like a whore and a little more like a mother-”

“No,” he wanted to say, because he knew that word, “no.”

“I miss my friends, I just thought it would be fine if- what are you doing? Please, I didn’t-”

“No,” he wanted to say, but all that came out was a wail.

“You just thought? You haven’t thought a goddamn thing in your life- aw, shit-”

He couldn’t stop the tears from coming.

“-look what you’ve done now, Carol! He’s fuckin’ crying again. Shit, would you shut him up-”

He was only three when he started to identify the things he had nightmares about as the same things his mother told him were only make-believe.

“Shh, baby, please don’t tell your daddy that there are strange naked men sometimes, he’s gonna think-”

He was five when the man she called his father laid a hand on him for the first time.

“David, no, he didn’t do anything wrong, please, you’re hurting him-”

She woke him up in the middle of the night. He asked her why she was crying.

“Shh, honey, shh, I need you to be real quiet for me, okay? We’re going to go for a drive, just us two-”

He didn’t have to ask why she was scared.

“-you’re so good, that’s right, help mommy pack your things-”

He was six and a half years old-

“Hey buddy, you wanna come home with your old man?”

-when the divorce went through.

“No.”

His mother agreed to joint custody because she thought he needed a father.

“You little bitch, you turned my own son against me-”

She didn’t understand when he told her he didn’t have one.

“-it’s my week to have him, Caroline, you won’t keep my son from me-”

He was seven when he found himself sitting across the dinner table from his other legal guardian-

“Y’know, your mother doesn’t think you’re old enough to know about this stuff.”

-just to stop him from making his mother cry again.

“You see this, bud? This is a titan.”

He was seven when he was forced to listen-

“These guys taking him down? These are real men, buddy.”

-to the man who claimed to be his father-

“None of this limp-wristed homo shit our military puts up with these days- real men. Take a good look.”

-make a mockery of everything he’d fought for-

“Do you know what they did to faggots?”

-in silence.

“They trussed  up ‘em outside the walls like little homo presents for the titans. What do you think about that?”

There were so many things he wanted to say.

“You know who you were named after, bud?”

So many things he couldn’t say.

“Humanity’s Strongest, they called him. They tell you all about the rebuilders, but the real hero was a soldier.”

He was too young to defend himself. Old enough to know better, young enough to take a beating.

“He killed titans as easily as he killed men. Never got tied down by a woman- just fucked a new one every day.”

Or worse, have her take a beating for him defending the ugly truth of the war he’d fought.

“What do you think Lewis would’ve thought of you, buddy?”

A war he’d fought for a world that couldn’t even remember his name right.

***

He was almost nine when the man who called him ‘buddy’ backhanded his mother across the face for saying she wanted to move away and take him with her.

He still wasn’t nine when he woke him up by pressing the tip of a paring knife against his balls.

He heard his breathing quicken as he realized what was happening. “Buddy? Bud, what are you-”

“Do you know what we did to people like you in the corps?”

His father’s eyes shone like mirrors where the strip of light eking in from the hallway fell across his face.

“We sent them out first.”

His father was looking at him like he’d gone insane.

He pressed the tip of his blade down further when he opened his mouth to speak.

“We sent them out first because it meant they might save a better soldier’s life by dying,” he told him calmly, “and because it meant we could tell the ones they left behind that they’d been useful without having to lie.”

The silence of the night was heavy, broken only by his father’s shaky breaths.

He lifted the knife slowly, letting his hand fall limp at his side as he regarded the man on the bed coldly.

He plucked the cigarette from over his ear and held it out. “Hurry up and fall asleep smoking. It’s faster than drinking yourself to death.”

His father stared at it.

“Lewis-”

“My name,” he hissed, “is Levi.”

***

He was ten when his father’s home went up in flames.

It wasn’t an accident. The body they found had a fresh pack of cigarettes tucked primly in his shirt pocket- the plastic of its packaging had melted into the fibres of his clothes- and half a bottle of good whiskey on the bedstead by his head- it had been purchased overseas and subsequently stolen, only to reappear unemptied in the home of a man who was known for drinking too much cheap pisswater beer and tipping poorly.

The locals joked that he went out with more taste than he’d ever lived with.

When the police showed up on his ex-wife’s doorstep to ask a few questions of the little boy with a history of making trouble, his mother looked at him, and he looked back.

Her face was tired beneath its peppering of almost-faded green and yellow bruises, but beneath her collar, her throat was painted in much fresher shades of purple and blue.

He didn’t apologize.

She didn’t ask him to.

When the police asked the little boy with a history of making trouble where he’d been the night before, his mother wrapped her arm around his shoulders and said,

“We were up all night watching The Twilight Zone together, weren’t we, Lew?”

When one of the officers crouched down in front of him with a little smile and asked if he wasn’t too young to be watching something so scary, he looked him in the eye and said,

“I’ve seen scarier.”

The man laughed. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want to see something really scary now, son?”

“No,” Levi told him quietly, “I got rid of them for you.”

***

He was going into middle school in a new town halfway across the country when his mother started dating again.

She tried to hide it from him until he asked her openly if she was going to see her boyfriend.

She cried.

A week later she sat him down at the dinner table and said,

“Lew, I just want you to know that I’m not abandoning you. If I bring a man into my life, he’s going to have to be part of both of our lives.”

“That’s really not necessary,” he told her instead of assuring her that he would almost certainly have men involved in his life in the future, however briefly.

He didn’t think that was something she wanted to hear from her eleven year old son.

“I need you to try, sweetie. They won’t be like David, I promise,” she murmured gently. He let her stroke his hair and hold him to her chest.

He went through four babysitters in six months.

The general consensus was that he was weird and a little bit creepy.

He didn’t actively intend to be.

He’d just never known how to talk to teenagers.

He was sitting in his room, building some painstakingly complicated matchstick model of a castle that looked wrong to him because it still had all its turrets when he heard the fifth babysitter speaking to his mother downstairs.

“Trust me,” that voice said too confidently, “I was the worst kid in the world growing up, I can handle anything.”

“Lewis isn’t badly behaved, Nicholas, he’s just-” He crept over, pressing his ear to the wood of his door to be sure. “He’s been through a lot and he… has trouble expressing himself. I really appreciate you doing this for me on such short notice.”

He opened his bedroom door carefully.

“It’s nothing, Miss Kovacs. You just have a good date tonight, okay?”

His mother was still stuttering out a fretful, “well, I think I should introduce you first, at least,” when she saw Levi staring down at them from the top of the stairs.

“Eren.”

He looked exactly the same, just older.

Older. He was older than Levi was.

Eren shot him an odd smile. “Uh, hi. My name is Nick, but nice guess.”

“No,” Levi refused, “it’s not.”

***

Eren was still showing up to eat all the snacks in his house and fall asleep in front of the television eight months of stubborn refusal later.

“Eren.”

“How many times do I have to tell you that my name is Nick, kid?” Eren asked him. At this point, it was just a token effort.

“No,” he responded automatically before continuing on his original line of questioning, “why is she here?”

Eren shot the girl beside him an apologetic smile. “This is my girlfriend,” he explained slowly, as though that was a concept Levi couldn’t understand.

Which it was, but not for the reasons Eren thought it was.

“I didn’t ask who she was, I asked why she’s here.”

Eren stared at him.

He stared back.

Eren sighed. “Aren’t they teaching you that stuff in school right now?”

Levi frowned at him. “You’re not having sex on my couch.”

“Lewis-”

“You’re not,” he repeated, forgoing the usual correction of his name to emphasize his seriousness, “having sex on my couch, Eren.”

Eren’s girlfriend giggled nervously. “Are you really eleven?” she asked him with a tentative smile.

He ignored her question to stare her dead in the eye and say,

“You do realize that he’s just going to break your heart when he figures out that he’s attracted to men, right?”

Eren gaped at him before flushing spectacularly.

“Go,” he seethed, “to your room.”

“No, I’m not leaving so you can fuck a girl on my couch and leave stains and shit all over the cushions.”

“Lewis-”

“Levi. Yes?”

Eren had his hands fisted in his hair and his jaw clenched.

“Nick, baby-” his girlfriend ventured.

“You should probably go home,” Levi told her frankly.

He had a moment of bizarre gratification when she absentmindedly responded with a “yes sir.”

He was twelve when Eren moved away to go to college.

***

He told his mother he was going on a road trip with friends after high school.

He didn’t have any friends.

He still didn’t know how to talk to teenagers.

He couldn’t wait to stop being one. The hormones were wreaking havoc on his stability and self-control.

He was nineteen.

The card in his pocket said he was twenty-three.                         

It had his real name on it.

The night was young but the street was filled with bars and people and he had no idea where to even start looking for Nicholas Mardin, age twenty-six.

‘Eren,’ his mind corrected insistently.

He had no idea where to find Eren.

But fuck it all if he wasn’t going to anyway.

There was a lot to be said for seeing a familiar face.

Chapter Text

He’d never been exceptionally gifted when it came to planning ahead and preparing for complications.

That had always been Erwin’s forte.

Levi was many things, but he was not a strategist.

The fact that he’d managed to hunt Eren down to a definite place of residence had come as a surprise.

The fact that Eren wasn’t been home on a warm Friday evening in late summer hadn’t, really, but he’d been hoping.

Eren was twenty-six years old, unmarried, and living alone in a city with a respectable nightlife. He’d thought that was a start.

The center of the action was a street that stretched on for blocks, and while he suspected that Eren- ever the center of the action himself, at least for as long as Levi had known him- would be drawn there, the ever-inevitable existence of those small, greasy diners and hidden dive bars that lay along the neighbouring streets nagged ominously at the back of his mind.

He told himself that even if he couldn’t find him here, he could always knock on his door in the morning.

A torn and weary part of his soul protested hungrily that it needed to see a familiar face now, not later.

He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and wondered when he’d become so weak. His feet were still walking, weaving absentmindedly in and out of tonight’s first couples and new friends while his eyes flickered over their faces appraisingly, looking for this shade of skin, that shade of hair, that nose, those eyes, that chin, those lips.

Sometimes these strangers smiled at him when his eyes caught theirs. He did not return the favour. ‘You’re not who I’m looking for,’ he frowned at them resentfully.

 Sometimes they tried to speak to him. He did not return the favour. ‘You’re not who I want to talk to,’ he thought at them sullenly.

By the time someone grabbed him by the shoulder, he was ready to break their jaw for interrupting him.

He already had his lips pulled back from his teeth and his fist raised when he heard it, when they said,

“Lewis?”

in that familiar tone of wonder, voice a little deeper and a lot throatier than he remembered it being but still the same, still a voice he knew.

He froze for a second with his fist still raised, overwhelmed.

His eyes had drifted out of proper focus at some point, straining too hard to see only this familiar feature or that familiar gesture in a sea of too many unfamiliar faces. The world had become an impressionistic blur of colours and shapes peppered here and there with spots of deceptive clarity that inevitably widened to reveal the wrong face.

The right face hit his retinas like a bright light, oversaturated with colour and almost painfully crisp in the muddied wash of unimportant scenery that surrounded it.

“Levi,” he corrected automatically, still staring.

Eren’s smile wove tiny creases into the skin beside his eyes. “Holy shit, it is you,” he exclaimed warmly, tugging Levi out of the way of a staggering pair of early drunks and closer to the wall he was leaning on. “I wouldn’t’ve even seen you if I hadn’t come out here for a smoke,” he laughed. “That’s nuts- how long has it been? You’re what, sixteen now? Seventeen?”

“Nineteen,” Levi murmured blankly, eyes transfixed by the glowing red eye of Eren’s cigarette. ‘When did you start smoking?’ The part of him that still saw Eren as his subordinate wanted to rough him up for it. ‘I didn’t say you could start smoking,’ he thought irrationally.

“Jesus Christ, has it really been that long? God, that makes me feel old.” He almost missed Eren’s frown. “Hey,” he said suddenly, elbowing Levi lightly in the arm, “you’re still not old enough to be doing anything good down here this late at night.” There was a warning edge to his voice. “What’re you up to? Who’re you here with?”

Levi just stared at him incredulously. “One,” he growled, “I don’t want to hear that shit from someone who stole vodka coolers from my mom when he was eighteen.” Eren choked mid-drag and burst into a fit of coughing. Levi watched smoke trickle out of his nose. “What, you thought I didn’t notice? And two,” he shot, “I’m here on my own, and I don’t remember needing your fucking permission for that, Eren.”

Eren’s face had gone a little pink. He flicked his cigarette onto the sidewalk with a breathless laugh. “I guess that’s fair.”

Levi frowned at the still-burning filter on the asphalt, grinding it out with the heel of his shoe and fixing Eren with a disapproving stare.

Eren squirmed gratifyingly, eyes flickering from his face to the sidewalk to the garbage can by the door of the bar to somewhere above his head. His hand paused halfway through drawing another cigarette from his pack. Levi watched him hesitate before sliding it back in. He wasn’t sure how to feel about his own sense of belligerent satisfaction.

The silence grew uncomfortable. This wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to hear Eren’s voice.

“I have a fake I.D.,” Levi confessed quietly, cautiously holding it out. He snatched it back when Eren went to take it from him.

Some of his uneasiness lifted when Eren laughed again. When he wrapped his fingers- more calloused, too, than Levi remembered them being- around his wrist and brought his hand up to bring it into the light eking through the window beside the bar door, however, he had to fight the urge to yank his wrist away. His success did not silence the nagging voice in his brain that insisted he didn’t know where Eren’s hands had been lately. ‘Or ever, in this lifetime.’ It was a depressing thought.

He struggled to focus on his face, instead, breathing shallowly through his nose. Eren scrutinized his card with an unreadable expression right up until he chuckled.

“That’s some really good work,” he admitted, absentmindedly drawing his pack of cigarettes out of his pocket with one hand, flicking it open, flicking it closed, and sliding it back in without taking anything out. “I would’ve killed for something that good when I was your age. Levi Kovacs, huh? Still kept your real last name?”

“Kovacs is my mother’s maiden name,” he muttered, biting back a comment about Levi being his real name.

“Oh, that’s right, isn’t it? You kept your dad’s name when your parents split up, didn’t you?”

“Not by choice.” He had to suppress a grimace that had more to do with recollection than the fact that Eren hadn’t released his hold on his wrist yet. “He would’ve beat the shit out of my mom if I’d changed it.” He didn’t mention the part where it hadn’t stopped him from finding other excuses.

 Eren hissed sympathetically through his teeth, finally letting go. Levi’s wrist felt cold and dirty. “Shit, I’m sorry, man. Didn’t he get killed or something, though?”

“Fell asleep smoking.”

“I thought they decided it was-”

“Fell asleep smoking,” Levi repeated shortly.

Eren eyed him uncertainly. “Yeah, uh, okay. Anyway, why didn’t you just change it after that?”

“I’m going to,” he answered, “when I change my first name, too.”

He wasn’t sure how to feel about the sudden thoughtfulness in Eren’s expression. “To Levi?”

“Of course,” he confirmed, a little confused. After knowing him for almost eight years, he wasn’t sure how Eren could question that, of all things.

“Why Levi?” Eren’s gaze roved across his face curiously. “For as long as known you, it’s always been ‘Levi, it’s Levi’, like you were so damn sure about it, but why Levi?”

“Because it’s my name,” he told him simply.

Eren just continued to look at him, eyebrows drawn together in a show of unconcealed contemplation. His attention flickered from one of Levi’s eyes to the other like he was looking for something there.

Eren suddenly looked bemused. He straightened out of his slouch and shuffled closer.

“There’s no way you’re nineteen,” he told Levi decisively.

Levi couldn’t hide his scowl. “Shut up.”

“No, I mean, I swear you’ve gotten shorter since I saw you last-”

“I stopped growing in middle school,” he snapped, resisting the urge to punch Eren in the gut for his insolence. “You just got taller, you fucking titan.”

Eren’s eyes widened fractionally. Levi almost thought he was going to cry or take a swing at him. Maybe both. He wasn’t sure.

But then Eren laughed, loudly and sharply, like he’d said the funniest thing in the world.

“You know, when I was little I used to think-” he started, and then shook his head. “Actually, never mind. What’re you doing here, Lew-” The click of Eren’s tongue against his teeth as he stopped himself made the air freeze in his lungs. “Levi?”

The cool air of the evening suddenly felt unbearably warm. His palms were sweating. His collar was sticking to his neck. The way Eren said his name sounded much too gentle, much too affectionate, and it did strange things to him.

He choked on the words lodged behind the heart in his throat.

‘What the fuck is this?’ he puzzled, a little alarmed.

“Nick?”

For a second, he didn’t understand why Eren turned in response, and then the hot, still air of the night cooled and quickened, leaving him shivering with realization.

“Babe,” Eren, legal name Nicholas ‘Nick’ Mardin, greeted affectionately. “This is Le- Levi, this is Levi, I used to babysit him back when I was a teenager, isn’t that fucking nuts?”

Something went a little sideways in his gut.

He hadn’t expected this.

 Eren’s boyfriend had a sombre face, but the weak stance he took up as he hesitated in the doorway of the bar betrayed a gentle personality. His dark, expressive eyes were filled with confusion.

He was a civilian, not a soldier, not by any stretch of the imagination. Most people had a little iron in them, a tougher something to their personalities that had been forged by the hardships of their past.

He did not.

Levi didn’t know how to look at him.

It was a small mercy he wasn’t looking back. “Oh,” he acknowledged softly, smiling lips turning down at the corners. “Nick, our- our drinks are getting warm.”

“Huh? Oh. Sorry, I lost track of time, Ton.” He could almost see the young man’s heart sinking at the brilliant smile Eren flashed in Levi’s direction. “Hey, you’ve got I.D. on you, come have a drink with us,” he invited, tacking on a belated, “oh, this is Antonio, by the way. Tonio, Levi-” a demonstrative gesture “-Levi, Tonio-” the same gesture in reverse “-and so on, you know how it goes. Anyway, come have a drink with us, Levi.”

Antonio’s mouth was smiling but his shadowed eyes and lightly furrowed eyebrows begged him to decline.

“Ere-” he started, and then swallowed down the wrongness that came with calling him anything else. “Nick,” he started again, avoiding Eren’s startled look, “that’s, uh, really not necessary. Go spend time with your friend.” The last word was weighted in a way he hadn’t wanted it to be- he’d intended his phrasing to be diplomatic, inoffensive, but it just sounded insinuative, more significant than if he’d just told Eren to fuck off and stop neglecting his man.

Tonio’s gaze was weighted with equal and opposite concern. He couldn’t fault him for that.

He had a talent for seeming guilty even when innocent, or whatever passed for innocence in his life now.

As soon as Eren’s palm came to rest on his upper back- too low to be a grab at the back of the neck, but high enough to evoke the image of being scruffed like a disobedient cat- he resigned himself to making everyone uncomfortable.

“Look, I don’t think that’s what your boyfriend had in mind,” he interjected awkwardly, trying to shrug Eren’s hand off and walk away before he could be caught in the fallout.

Abruptly, the pressure on his back shifted from flat against that gently insistent place between his shoulder blades to grabbing the back of his collar in an open effort to prevent his escape.

Eren frowned at him first, then Antonio.

“No,” he said, and his voice was so filled with genuine hurt that it made Levi flinch sympathetically, “Ton, you’re fine with Levi having a drink with us, right? Just one drink, and then we’ll get back to our night.” His eyes, both as bright as Levi remembered them being and brighter, thanks to the gloom, flicked back down. “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing in town or how long you’re staying, and- he knows I haven’t seen you in years, you don’t have to be polite about this- shit, I didn’t even know you knew how-” His pleading eyes brooked no refusal. “Have a drink with me, Levi. Tonio’s okay with it. He knows it’s just this once.”

The sudden weariness in Antonio’s smile told him that “he knows it’s just this once” was something he had heard more times than could reasonably be excused by anything but the tired resignation of loving someone who said it too often.

He sighed and wished he cared less.

“Just one drink,” he surrendered.

***

It was not just one drink.

He’d known it wouldn’t be.

Every time his empty glass touched the table, he told himself he’d leave.

Every time his fingers left it, Eren was crisscrossing new fingerprints against the ones he’d left behind and filling it back up again.

And Eren answered every attempt to excuse himself with a cheerful,

“After this drink, then,”

and every reminder that he’d only promised to have one with a wounded,

“Come on, Levi- who knows when the next time we’ll get to do this is gonna be? Live a little.”

Tonio said nothing, too conscientious and reserved a soul to be anything but a person who thought suffering in silence was preferable to risking confrontation in public.

Levi had no idea how he’d ended up with Eren.

He got the distinct impression that Eren’s manipulations were at least partially conscious- there was no doubting that he knew what he was doing when he peeled the glass from Levi’s hand a third time.

“So you’re here for work, not for school?” Tonio asked politely, eyes too forgiving for Levi to meet.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, “There’s not much to do back home.” It was a stock response and it sounded like one. Tonio’s ill-hidden look of worry deepened. Levi wanted to kick himself. “I don’t have anything lined up, I mean- I’m going to start looking for a job in the morning.”

He meant his words as a sort of clumsy comfort, a “there’s no guarantee I’ll stay” to ease this young man’s mind, and for a moment, the anxious tightness of Antonio’s jaw softened.

And then Eren spoke.

“You just got here today?” he interrupted, sliding Levi’s glass back across the table to him with a ruddy-cheeked and uninhibited smile. “Where are you staying tonight?”

The tentative friendliness in the atmosphere evaporated instantly.

He had the distinct impression that Eren was purposefully ignoring Tonio’s pointed stare.

He ran the numbers in his head as fast as he could.

‘I could lie and say I have a hotel room.’

Eren would ask which hotel. ‘Fuck, he’d probably offer to see me back to it.’

It was just kind of guy he was.

He hesitated.

Eren’s smile went from curious to concerned. “Do you not have anywhere to stay? Do you need-”

“I’m sleeping in my car,” he blurted out desperately.

Eren blinked. “In your car?” he muttered uncertainly, “No, no, you can stay with-”

“That’s really not necessary-”

Eren was pushing.

“No, I can’t let you sleep in your fucking car, Levi-”

Eren was pushing hard.

“You’re not my babysitter anymore, you pretentious shit,” he snapped, both gratified by and ashamed of the way Eren jerked back from where he’d been leaning over the table to sit up straight.

He looked at Tonio because Tonio’s sympathetic look of chagrin was better than the kicked puppy look of wounded bewilderment he knew Eren had turned on him.

Tonio seemed to take it as a plea for help.

“He’s not a little boy anymore, Nick.” Levi envied his ability to break the silence so gently. “If he says he’s fine sleeping in his car, you need to respect that.” His fingers lingered lovingly on Eren’s arm. “I know you mean well, but…”

“But?”

Levi discovered something.

A few beers made Eren’s petulance just as frank as his affection.

“But?” he prompted again, a little belligerently. “Ton, he’s nineteen.” His liquor-bright eyes flickered over to Levi. There was a look in them he was struggling to place. “I’m willing to bet you came straight from your mom’s house. Have you ever lived on your own before, Levi? Do you even know the first thing about finding an apartment?”

Something clicked.

It was condescension.

Eren was scolding him like a teacher would a student.

He was almost speechless. “I-”

“You sleep in your car tonight, you’re going to be sleeping in your car this time next month, too,” Eren rebuked sharply. “Actually, y’know- you probably parked somewhere stupid, too- this isn’t a safe city, Lewis, you’ll be lucky if you don’t find one of your windows smashed in or your tires gone or something.” He sat back in his seat, arms crossed over his chest. “You know what? No, I’m putting my fucking foot down: you’re staying with me. I’m not letting you sleep in your car.”

He saw a much younger and much more familiar Eren behind that look of stubborn conviction and had to strangle the urge to smack the shit out of him for daring to insinuate that he didn’t know how to take care of himself.

“I’d like to know how you’re going to stop me,” he murmured very quietly, making no move to take the glass Eren had slid in front of him.

Eren bristled with irritation. “I will confiscate your keys and fucking carry you home if I have to. You think you could take me?”

“Yes, I do,” he growled.

“You’re like a foot shorter than me!” Eren protested incredulously. “I don’t care how much you’ve filled out or how many goddamn kickboxing classes or whatever that you’ve taken, you’re still smaller than half the girls I know and you’re going to get your ass handed to you if you hang out on the streets with an attitude like that. Look, Lewis, I’m not-”

“My name,” he snarled furiously, “is Levi.” He was angrier than was strictly reasonable. He didn’t care.

He didn’t know when he’d stood up.

Everyone in the bar was looking at them.

He didn’t care.

Eren made no move to leave his seat, jaw clenched and arms still crossed. “If you want me to think you’re old enough to decide what I should call you, you should maybe try acting like a fucking adult.”

The urge to punch him was growing overpowering.

Despite his arrogant attitude, Eren was starting to look a little nervous. He had a feeling that the mania of his anger was starting to make him look crazy.

Erwin had told him more than once that his eyes tended to frighten people.

“Just for tonight,” Antonio broke in shakily.

Meeting his gaze was a mistake.

He looked miserable.

“Just for tonight, Levi,” Tonio repeated, eyes tired and desperate. “He’s not going to give in, no matter how much you argue. Just-” His sigh sounded exhausted. “Just sleep on it. Both of you. Okay?”

Levi unclenched his fists and shoved them in his pockets. “He’s just going to keep doing this forever if you let him,” he told Eren’s boyfriend bitterly. The young man’s wounded look didn’t hurt quite enough to make him stop. “He’ll get away with exactly as much as you let him get away with, and I get the feeling you let him get away with everything.”

Eren muttered something that sounded more confused than offended, but Levi wasn’t talking to him.

Tonio’s unhappy stare assured him that he knew exactly what Levi was telling him, and had resigned himself to his fate.

It made him feel very tired.

He eased himself back down into his chair reluctantly.

“One night,” he surrendered, resigning himself to the fact that Eren’s triumphant smile probably meant that nights were like drinks in his estimation. “Just one.”

***

He lay awake listening to them argue quietly on the other side of the wall with a sense of bitter déjà vu.

“Babe, I couldn’t just let him-”

At least nobody was throwing plates.

“It was supposed to be our night, Nick, you told me it was just going to be us this time. You promised-”

Or punches.

“What did you want me to do, just let him sleep in his fucking car? I can’t-”

The ceiling fan was cutting lazy circles in the stagnant air of the living room.

“Yes! Yes, that is what I wanted you to do- he’s an adult, he can take care of himself-”

The tired springs of the sofa bed mattress were digging into his back.

“I haven’t seen him in years, Ton, I’m not just gonna let him go without-”

He couldn’t stop thinking about how old it had to be to have worn out so thoroughly.

“You could have asked for his number! Why didn’t you contact him sooner if you missed him so much? Don’t bring him home with you and expect me to believe-”

How used it had to be.

“Sure, I was just going to call up his mom and ask if the kid I used to babysit had a cellphone yet, sure, okay. And what do you mean, ‘expect me to believe’, Ton, what are you-”

He wondered if Eren had found it on a sidewalk-

“It’s weird! It’s weird, Nick, the way you look at him, it’s like- if he wasn’t so young, I’d think you were-”

-or if he’d been the one to wear the bedsprings out.

“Wha- what the fuck? Jesus Christ, Ton, I get being jealous of old friends but this is just-”

He didn’t like how vivid the image his mind conjured up was.

“You don’t look at him like he’s a kid, Nick-”

He hated being a teenager. His hormones kicked his imagination into overdrive.

“How are you saying I do look at him, then, if I- no. Wait, babe, I thought you were upset because we didn’t-”

Even with the couple arguing through the wall-

“I am! I am, it’s just that you look at him like- I don’t even know, I’ve never seen you look at somebody like that-”

-even with the humidity and the sluggishness of the fan-

“Ton, it’s not like that, that’s just- he’s a special kid, I forgot how special he was, it’s nothing like-”

-even without knowing what stains he’d discover on the bare mattress beneath his back come morning-

“I know, I- I know, Nick. I’m sorry. I’m just stressed, you know? Let’s just go to bed.”

-his body still succumbed to an unwelcome breathlessness at the worst of times.

 “Just to bed, babe? Hey- I’m, uh, not really all that tired yet. Are you?”

He closed his eyes and swallowed, wiping his sweating palms against his pants.

“Oh, I’m- Nick, your friend is in the other room, what if he hears us?”

He hated this. He hated being a teenager. ‘I thought I grew out of this shit already.’

“He’s already asleep, babe- we just need to be quiet about it. Come on.”

He couldn’t remember his body ever being so confusing. ‘Maybe I didn’t have the time to notice back then.’

When the whispering faded into soft sighs and muted chuckles, he folded his hands over his chest and clenched his jaw.

When that faded into strangled moans and the occasional hiss of “Nick, don’t do that, you’re gonna wake him up,” after each too-loud gasp, he pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes and contemplated banging on the wall to shut them up.

When the bedframe started to creak in time with the low but too-distinctive sound of skin slapping against skin, he gave up altogether.

‘I’m going to hate myself for this tomorrow,’ he thought resentfully.

It didn’t stop him from doing it.

***

He awoke to the touch of light on his eyelids.

The sight of the sunrise turning the windows of the surrounding buildings rosy was novel until his eyes focused enough to make out the white and brown spattering of pigeon shit on the brick.

 He only meant to go into the bathroom to clean up the evidence of what he’d done the night before.

When he stepped out, he looked back at it with the uncomfortable realization that he’d almost certainly have to explain why he’d cleaned Eren’s bathroom later.

He was halfway through washing the dishes when Eren stumbled into the kitchen, shading his eyes with a hand. “What are you doing?”

Levi just looked at him. “The dishes.”

“Why are you doing my dishes?”

“They needed to be done.” He didn’t like how husky Eren’s voice sounded in the morning. It was unsettling.

Eren squinted at him. “It’s… it’s six in the morning, Levi.”

“So?” He could see Eren stretching out of the corner of his eye.

“We went to bed like… four and a half hours ago, if that,” Eren sighed, running a hand through his hair and leaning against the doorframe. “Go back to sleep.”

Levi eyed his loose sweatpants and bare torso sullenly. ‘It’s not my fault you stayed up until three fucking around,’ he thought.

Something occurred to him.

“Where’s Antonio?”

Eren grinned lazily. “Ah, he went home because he’s gotta work later at the hospital later and he doesn’t trust me to let him nap.” He shoulder popped when he rolled it. “He probably left before you woke up.”

Levi sincerely hoped he hadn’t fallen asleep with his fly open.

Their relationship was uncomfortable enough.

He watched the muscles in Eren’s back lengthen as he stretched his arms above his head and wandered away.

He was almost finished doing the dishes when Eren came back.

“Levi,” he started, sounding bemused, “did you clean my bathroom?”

***

“You said you were looking for a job, so here, c’mon, I’m going to introduce you to my boss. We’re always short on hands. Too many idiots who can’t be trusted with a rig, I guess. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, though, I think you’ll be fine.”

Levi eyed him warily. “What kind of job are you getting me into, Eren?”

His smile was wry but affectionate.

“You’re not scared of heights, are you?”

***

It wasn’t the same, but it was a hell of a lot closer than anything else this world had ever offered him.

The air was almost fresh, this high up, at least when the breeze was moving.

Even in the late hours of the afternoon, the sun was hitting his back unobstructed, warming the naked skin between his hairline and his collar.

“Not bad,” he murmured.

Eren grinned at him. “Somehow I knew you’d be a natural at this,” he laughed.

Levi ignored him. He cleared the glass in front of him of liquid methodically, minding edges and avoiding streaks.

He barely noticed when Eren started to fall behind.

“Hey,” Levi heard him shout, “when I said you were a natural, I didn’t mean you could be better than me. You’re making me look bad!”

He snorted.

“Shut up and wash your windows faster, then.”

Chapter Text

One night turned into two, and two turned into three.

Five turned into,

“Just until your first pay, Levi, if I put you out on the street now it’s the same as if I’d never given you a place to crash,”

like Eren was doing him a favour he’d asked for and not being meddlesome.

Tonio had responded to Eren’s gradually extending deadline for kicking Levi out with a weary sigh that didn’t sound particularly surprised, but he’d seemed to take heart when Levi had asked him if he could point him in the right direction of where to start looking for an apartment.

When Levi had asked Eren, his response had been vague and flippant in a way that made him wonder exactly what his intentions were.

He learned a lot about Eren and Antonio’s relationship by the time he received his first paycheque.

He also learned a lot about himself.

As it turned out, when Eren was not clambering to please someone who was both his childhood hero and his commanding officer, he was infuriatingly stubborn.

And Levi was coming to the unsettling realization that he’d relied on Eren’s admiration much more than he’d thought.

Stripped of his age, station, and legacy, it appeared that he did not actually command a great deal of authority in Eren’s mind.

Eren liked him, that much was clear, but the Eren who liked him was a very different person to the Eren who had respected him.

He was starting to suspect that Eren’s affection for him was the force motivating the worst of his childish manipulations.

The harshest blow had come when he’d realized that he couldn’t even rely on fear to revive Eren’s respect.

Eren was less afraid of him than he was of being shit on by a pigeon.

When they perched on the power lines above his head, he’d glance up and shuffle out of the way nervously.

When Levi glowered at him, he usually just smiled and asked him if he needed something.

‘You to fucking respect me.’

The thought crossed his mind every single time, but it never crossed his lips.

He kept telling himself to demonstrate his strength, and he kept finding excuses not to.

Deconstructed, they all came down to the same basic thought:

‘I don’t want him to dislike me.’

He was stuck between his own reluctance and Eren’s increasingly obvious desire to keep him around, and that became an inarguable fact the day he brought his first pay back to Eren’s apartment.

“It’s the middle of the month,” Eren protested. Levi watched Tonio close his eyes and inhale deeply behind him. “Anywhere that’ll take you right now is going to charge you for all of August- wait until September.” He saw the light of inspiration go on behind Eren’s sudden smile. “This is a college town- plenty of cheap places are going to open up come the first of September, it just makes more sense. Stay until the end of the month.”

“I think you might have that backwards,” he ventured wearily, but the general logic was sound.

He did not trust Eren not to take another surrender as further encouragement.

In the end, he still ended up agreeing to stay until the end of the month.

***

A week later, he found himself alone on the balcony with Antonio.

The city was never quiet, not completely, but Eren’s apartment was on the fifteenth floor and the distance dulled the late-night bustle of transport traffic to a subdued hum.

He stared up the light-washed city sky, a starless and cloudless expanse of indifferent gunmetal blue, and felt the silence hang between them.

“Sorry,” he muttered quietly, knowing Tonio would hear him and almost hoping he wouldn’t.

Tonio just chuckled lightly. “I’d ask for what, but I’m pretty sure I know.” He could hear the smile in his voice. “Don’t be. That’s just how Nick is.” His sigh was tired but loving in a way that reminded Levi of his mother. “My man, a modern Scheherazade.”

Levi looked over at him questioningly.

It wasn’t a word he was familiar with.

“One Thousand and One Nights,” Tonio explained, “or Arabian Nights, actually. It’s, ah, a story about a king who would marry a new woman every day and have the one he’d married the day before executed to make way for her- Scheherazade was the last woman he ever married because she’d start telling a story in the evening and then stop just before the end, saying it was time to sleep and that she’d finish telling it tomorrow.” The grin he turned on Levi was wry. “Except when tomorrow came, she’d finish it and then start a new story and do the same thing all over again. So it was always ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, just wait until tomorrow’,” he laughed.

Levi groaned, resting a cheek on his folded arms. “That sounds about right,” he agreed. “Why do you put up with it?”

Tonio just smiled knowing at him. “For the same reason the king put up with Scheherazade after she ran out of stories: love.” He rolled back on his heels, staring up into the night. “He did the same thing to me when we met, you know that?”

He grunted inquisitively to show that he was still listening.

It didn’t seem like it would have mattered if he hadn’t. Tonio’s eyes had gone distant.

“It’s not what you’d expect- we met in a bar, I took him home with me,” he murmured, “and when I woke up, he was still there.” His smile turned a bit bemused. “And when I came home from school, he was still there.”

“Creepy.”

Tonio laughed again. “Maybe,” he admitted. “But I was finishing med school and coming home to find a beautiful stranger cooking dinner for me in my apartment was… kind of cute.” He snorted suddenly. “He was cute, and that might have had something to do with it.”

Levi didn’t really want to hear this story, but he didn’t feel entitled to stop it from being told.

It felt like some sort of righteous punishment.

“He almost got fired,” Tonio marveled, shaking his head at the memory. “He did that for a week straight until I gave in and told him I’d go out with him as long as he didn’t turn into a jobless scrub.”

“Romantic,” Levi deadpanned, and Tonio blinked at him before realizing he was joking.

The hand he covered his mouth with didn’t do much to stifle his giggle, but it did make Levi wonder what he’d look like talking about someone who treated him with more care.

If he’d laugh more.

He turned his face away to hide his frown.

“Three years.”

He stiffened and said nothing.

“It’s going to be three years in November,” Tonio said quietly.

Levi didn’t like how sad his voice sounded.

It made him feel guilty for reasons he couldn’t explain.

***

On the second-last day of August, he came back from speaking to his supervisor to find the box he’d packed his things away in missing.

He just stared numbly at the spot it had sat in for a long time before drifting, ghostlike, into the kitchen.

Eren smiled at him from halfway in the fridge.

“Hey, welcome ho-”

“What did you do with my shit?”

Eren’s eyes drifted off of Levi’s, wandering along the wall beside him.

The bottles on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator door rattled as it closed.

“I thought we could talk. You want a beer?”

There was no sinking feeling in his gut. No breathless shock. No hot burst of anger.

Just numb acceptance.

A part of him had expected this.

He took the bottle he was offered automatically. “Eren,” he told him sternly, “I can’t stay here forever.”

Eren had his shoulders hunched around his ears defensively, more like the teenager he remembered than a twenty-six year old man.

“I’m not asking you to stay forever. I’m just… asking you not to go yet.” His posture was stiff, like he was expecting a blow. “Do you not want to stay with me?”

He hissed in a breath. “It’s not-” He knew that Eren was manipulating him, but the sentiment behind the manipulation was genuine.

Eren wasn’t manipulating him for the sake of control.

He genuinely didn’t want him to move out, and the sincerity behind his manipulations made everything harder.

“It’s not that I don’t,” he sighed. “Eren, you’re fucking things up with your boyfriend by keeping me here. It doesn’t matter that I’m only nineteen, you’re-” He paused, running a hand through his hair and struggling not to tug at it in frustration. “You’re working pretty hard to keep another man around and it’s making him misunderstand the situation. He’s going to make you choose.”

Eren’s expression had gone eerily flat and vacant. “If he can’t control his jealousy issues then I don’t think it’s much of a choice.”

Levi yanked out a chair and sat in it, steeling himself for the worst. He began to massage the bridge of his nose between a finger and a thumb. “That’s not how it works, and you know it,” Levi spat, throwing his beer on the table carelessly. It rattled in precarious circles but didn’t fall. “Look: people are complicated and unreasonable. You are complicated and unreasonable, your boyfriend is complicated and unreasonable, and I am complicated and unreasonable.” He regarded Eren coolly. “I know I’m complicated and unreasonable, but that isn’t going to change the fact that I am- it’s the human condition to be a selfish little shit who rationalizes their poor decision making skills to justify alienating and upsetting people. You’re an incredibly selfish little shit, Eren-” He clicked his tongue against his teeth when Eren opened his mouth to argue, jerking his chin up and glaring down his nose at him until his protest faded to a mumble. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Life is about surrounding yourself with people who are selfish in a way that works with your selfishness. Antonio puts up with a lot of shit from you.” He turned the beer bottle on the table until the label faced outwards. “I’m not saying that makes him a saint. He does it for his own selfish reasons. That’s why you work together.”

Eren was chewing at his lip indecisively. He looked torn between being offended and resigning himself to a lecture. “But-” He looked down at his hands with a heavy frown. “What am I supposed to do?”

Levi snorted.

“I can’t fucking answer that, Eren.”

Eren’s head shot up. Now he did look a little offended. “What, you made me listen to you ramble about how I’m a shitty person and you’re not even gonna give me some advice?”

“That was my advice,” Levi sighed. “You’re going to do exactly what you want to do and nothing I say is going to change that.” He stared Eren in the eye, unblinking. “I’m not going to tell you not to piss away three years just because your boyfriend finally found something he won’t put up with. You need to make your own decision knowing that if you regret it later, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself. I’m not going to tell you what to do, Eren. Do what feels right to you and deal with the consequences when they come.”

Eren looked at him in perfect silence for an uncomfortably long moment before casting his eyes downwards and smiling an odd little smile.

“There’s no way you’re nineteen,” he laughed softly. “The fuck have you been doing these past few years, man?”

Levi joined him in laughing, snorting quietly as he reached for his beer.

He swallowed down his bitterness with the first gulp.

***

He sat in the park for hours, watching the sky darken.

He could take pain and fear and horror, but he’d never been able to take tears.

And he’d seen in Eren’s eyes that there would be tears, no matter the outcome.

It was a warm evening, and the population of the park had faded along with the light- bright with families and children, rosy with couples and after-dinner romantics, dark with lonely men and hidden alcoholics.

And him.

He’d been afraid of looking like a child-snatcher to others until he remembered that he was, in many ways, a child to them.

Only his look of thoughtful assurance and general air of unapproachability had stopped the concerned looks of mothers from turning to action.

He didn’t want to be spoken to.

As the park darkened around him, it stopped being a concern.

There was no laughter here, not anymore, no sounds beyond the rustling of the wind through late summer leaves and the occasional groan of a drunk.

When it felt late enough, he stood up and started walking.

He’d driven to the park, but he took the long way back to his car, and drove the long way back to Eren’s apartment, meandering along the edges of their block until he felt obliged to stop.

He took his time coming in- he waited for another pair of apartment owners to let themselves into the building instead of buzzing up, and he took the stairs.

All fifteen flights of stairs.

He didn’t know what he was walking towards, but that wasn’t what bothered him.

What bothered him was that he didn’t know what he wanted to be walking towards.

When he opened the door, he expected the limbo of his journey to crack instantly like a plate against the wall or another visible sign of turmoil, but it took him a long moment to recognize that anything was amiss.

The apartment was silent and there was no one to be seen in the living room, but every light was on.

He could see it glowing from the kitchen, inside the hallway, out of the bathroom, from under the bedroom door.

Nothing was overturned or broken, but there were photographs missing from the walls- amusing baubles gone from the coffee table and television stand.

Little things that had defined the warmth of the apartment by way of details that Eren didn’t have the right kind of mind to want on his own.

His stomach sank.

He glanced into the kitchen and saw nothing.

He wandered down the hall, pressed his ear to the wood of Eren’s bedroom door, and heard nothing.

He considered not looking further.

It was a selfish impulse.

Stronger and more selfish still was the desire to validate Eren’s choice.

To be worth keeping around. To be guaranteed that familiar face.

Sometimes he sickened himself.

He found Eren on the balcony.

There were cigarette butts carelessly littering the ground around his feet, more than Levi wanted to bother counting. He swept them under the railing with the edge of his shoe.

Eren was smiling at him.

“Hey,” he said softly, fondly, like he’d never been so glad to see him.

His warmth made Levi’s guts churn uncomfortably.

“So you made your choice, then,” Levi asked, but it wasn’t really a question.

Eren nodded, staring out into the smattering off still-lit windows lighting up his city’s latest starless night.

“I think he was expecting it,” he murmured.

Levi sighed and leaned against the railing beside him, eying the dark shapes that flitted back and forth behind the yellow squares of light across from them. “Probably.”

He waited.

***

He didn’t have long to wait.

The first two nights, Eren was a quiet wreck, stewing in the purgatorial numbness typical to losing someone special.

By the third, something snapped inside his mind when he finally comprehended that Antonio wasn’t coming back.

“It’s for the best, I mean, we just weren’t good together,” he proclaimed magnanimously, and Levi hummed agreement.

“I’m the fucking worst, I always do this shit, Levi, I’m a fuck up and nobody can stand me for long, shit, shit,” he sobbed, and Levi hummed agreement.

“Did I make the right choice?” he asked finally, leaning on his arm with the fingers of his other hand still wrapped absentmindedly around what had to be his six or seventh beer.

Levi sighed.

“I told you: I can’t answer that for you, Eren. You made a choice and now you’re living with the consequences. All choices have consequences.”

“Why?” The question was openly petulant.

Levi snorted, nudging him with a toe and sipping at his own drink more cautiously. “Because you can’t have everything in life, you little shit. Get used to disappointment.”

Eren laughed softly and leaned closer.

“If you have to puke, I swear to god-”

Eren did not have to puke.

If he had suspected it was coming, he would have seen it coming.

Because it was not something he had considered with any seriousness- he was nineteen and he had thoughts but he was also old and screwed up and entirely too familiar with the limitations of his own dubious charm- the gentle but clumsy press of Eren’s lips against his own was entirely unexpected.

He just sat there, bewildered, until Eren pulled back, sheepish but grinning a little.

The hopefulness in his expression snapped Levi out of his daze.

“You’re drunk,” he rebuked.

Eren wrinkled his nose. “I have to be drunk to want to kiss you?”

“Yes,” Levi stated flatly. “I’m not going to be your fucking rebound, Eren, don’t even try it.”

Eren looked a little disgruntled. “I’m not- I wasn’t-”

“Right, and I’m just overdue for my last growth spurt,” he growled, running a hand through his hair and sighing with exasperation. “Eren, you were my-” ‘subordinate,’ his mouth wants to say “-babysitter. It’s not like that between us. You said so to Antonio yourself. Don’t make this something it’s not to make yourself feel better about getting dumped.”

Eren blinked slowly and then furrowed his eyebrows. “Wait, how did you know I said something like that to Tonio?”

Levi just looked at him.

Eren’s face slowly suffused with blood. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Levi repeated mockingly. “Thanks, by the way. Your walls are like paper.”

Eren buried his face in his arm. Levi couldn’t help but laugh. “Don’t freak out. People fuck. It’s a fact of life. Shit, it’s how we all got here.” He paused thoughtfully. “Well, not by fucking each other up the ass, but you get the point.”

Eren was just watching him quietly. The fact that he hadn’t laughed at Levi’s comment made him nervous.

“What?” he snapped.

“I still want to kiss you.” It was a very quiet admittance, but it cut into his brain like a knife. “I’ve always wanted to kiss you.”

Levi wrinkled his nose at him. “Even when I was-”

“No! God, no,” Eren backtracked, lifting both his hands for emphasis and almost knocking over his beer. “No, I mean, since you showed back up- since I saw you again.” He fidgeted anxiously. “I’ve always admired how… your conviction. When I was babysitting you it was just like you were this shitty little kid who kind of pissed me off because he had his shit together better than I did,” he laughed softly. “But when I saw you again back in the beginning of August, it was like…” He swallowed, fidgeting with his beer. “You still had that conviction, but suddenly you weren’t a little kid anymore. You just- you seem like you have your life under control and it makes me feel both better and worse about mine?”

Levi eyed him, astonished. “Eren, I can’t fix your life for you. And I honestly have no idea where you got the idea that my life isn’t just as fucked up as yours.”

“I know- I know. I think it’s more that I don’t feel like I have to fix yours,” Eren chuckled quietly. “No, like- even when everything’s all fucked up, you’re so collected about it. Like when you were a kid, you… I don’t know, you pretty obviously saw things differently than other people, but you didn’t let anybody call you crazy.” His eyes were half-lidded, distantly admiring. It was a disconcertingly familiar look. “And then there was me, who got put into therapy,” he laughed lightly. “I was a shithead, so convinced of things that weren’t true that I’d fight people over them.”

He knew better than to get his hopes up. He hummed inquisitively but without much interest.

Eren laughed to himself. “I used to insist all sorts of crazy shit was true- I don’t even remember most of it anymore,” he smiled. “I used to tell people I could turn into a titan, though, I remember that. Fucking insane, right?”

For a moment, he thought his heart had stopped beating.

A terrible heaviness weighed at his gut.

“Do you still have dreams about it?” he asked, dreading the answer.

Eren’s smile went a little stiff. “It’s fucking creepy when you do that, you know that, right?”

“Eren, I need you to-”

“I don’t remember anything,” he snapped.

Levi sighed. “Eren, calm down.”

Eren’s stare was one of offended betrayal. “I told you that because it was supposed to be funny, not so you could feed into delusions I’ve gotten over-”

“That sounds like something a therapist would say,” Levi remarked. His voice sounded much calmer than he felt.

Eren growled at him. “That’s because it fucking is. Look here: I know you’ve got your issues, but I’m over mine, and I don’t need you fucking with that- are you… okay?”

“Of course,” he responded immediately. Only after did he realized that he was shivering. Violently.

He looked down at his shaking hands in wonder.

“I just don’t know that I can deal with this,” he murmured, more to himself than to Eren, “I don’t know if I can handle- they can’t have broken you, you’re a stubborn little shit who would die for anything he believes in, were you-”

“Levi?” He could hear Eren’s concern, but he wasn’t listening.

‘Did they break you or were you just that eager to forget?’

It was a question he couldn’t ask, and it would torment him.

Chapter Text

He was walking on a tightrope with Eren staring up at him from underneath, and he knew it.

The realization that Eren had remembered at one point- might still remember, in some beaten-down and buried recess of his mind- had overshadowed the fact that he’d told Levi in no uncertain terms that he wanted something a little different than friendly companionship from him.

But it hadn’t changed that fact, and it certainly hadn’t made Eren forget that he’d confessed to that desire.

There had always been a tension between them, a sense of not quite knowing what to do with the other, but it had never been so perceptible or unambiguous.

If he had been someone with a character like Levi’s own, someone who dealt with problems with no obvious resolution by ignoring them until it was no longer convenient to ignore them, it wouldn’t have been a problem at all.

But Eren’s character was cast in iron from one life to the next, no matter what memories they had beaten out of him as a child.

Eren wanted to talk about it. As far as he was concerned, the fact that the issue had come up meant it should be addressed.

Levi was too old on the inside and too unsure of his own power in the youth of his new body to subscribe to such idealistic notions.

He was granted the advantage by work during the week, but when he came out of the bathroom on Friday evening, Eren was standing in the hallway with his arms crossed over his chest.

Levi stood very still and said nothing as though he could somehow escape Eren’s notice and therefore sidestep participating in any and all discussions that might pertain to such sticky and unpleasant things as feelings.

Eren sighed loudly.

“Have you eaten?” he asked stiffly.

Levi licked his lips and considered lying. He didn’t have to.

Eren sighed again. Levi found it irritating.

“Join me in the kitchen.”

It wasn’t a request. It was an order.

The young rebel and old soldier in him were unanimously offended, but Eren was already gone and experience had taught him that yelling after a retreating back looked weak.

So he followed.

Eren was already sitting, fork in hand. He shoved a plate of what looked like it could be either chili or stew in Levi’s direction. Levi wrinkled his nose at the sight of it.

“You want something different?” Eren asked without looking at him, raising a cup to his lips. He suspected it wasn’t just cola. It rarely had been since Antonio had left.

Something about the question sounded loaded, and he was loathe to answer.

The food was hot and edible. That was all. He ate without complaint, if only to provide himself an excuse for silence.

The dull hiss of glass sliding across wood caught his attention.

Dark, semi-opaque. He watched bubbles creep up the sides before bursting.

He had to glance in Eren’s direction to check if he’d mixed him another or just given Levi his own. Eren’s cup was still cradled safely in the semi-circle between his thumb and forefinger.

Eren was looking back. His expression was weary, but his eyes were tireless.

He’d always admired that determination and drive. Now he couldn’t help but resent it.

“If you won’t talk to me sober,” Eren told him quietly, “then we’ll drink. Either way, we’re going to talk, Levi.”

The noise that bubbled up the back of his throat was supposed to be a beleaguered grunt, but it came out a sort of pitiable-sounding groan instead. He winced when Eren chuckled.

“Why are you avoiding me?”

“We live together,” he rebutted shortly, picking up his glass gingerly and staring down into it.

He could feel Eren’s meaningful stare on the side of his face and wondered when it was he’d learned to reign in the worst of his tendency to respond to every little needling comment with diarrheic self-justification. It had been annoying, but he almost missed it now.

He sipped his drink and grimaced lightly. He’d never quite been able to get used to the alien burn of carbonation. “Ask me what you really want to know, Eren,” he muttered. His own face was nothing but the distorted silhouette of a gremlin in the effervescent surface of his drink.

He heard Eren swallow, and the clink of his glass against the tabletop. “You said that you didn’t want to be my rebound,” he started quietly. “What exactly does that mean, coming from you?”

“No, I said I wasn’t going to be your rebound, not that I didn’t want to be,” he grumbled, and then flinched, realizing how that could- and almost certainly did- sound. “Not that I- tch.” He caught himself- ‘now who’s the one self-justifying, you shit?’- and grunted. “I’m fucked up, Eren.  It doesn’t matter what it means.”

“I thought you said everybody’s fucked up.”

“No, I said everyone’s complicated and unreasonable,” he snapped, sipping his drink and regretting it all over again. “Fucked up isn’t necessarily complicated or unreasonable- fucked up can be very simple and very straightforward.” Another sip. Another wince. “I’m not the kind of fucked up you want to deal with.”

 “I thought you said you weren’t going to make my decisions for me.”

A vicious response was already on his lips by the time he realized that Eren was teasing him. He swallowed it down. “Well, I’m glad you were at least listening when it fucking suited you to,” he groused, and Eren laughed softly.  “What am I even talking about? You’ve made up your mind.”

He heard the scrape of a chair against the floor as Eren edged closer. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see him leaning over the table to peer at Levi’s down-turned face. “I kind of feel like you haven’t made up yours, though,” he pried. Levi turned to scowl at him.

Eren’s expression tore gashes into the tough shell of his guarded heart not because it was a calculated attempt at provoking a response from him, but because it wasn’t.

Eren looked lost and unsure and miserable, and suddenly he wore his day’s worth of fresh stubble and his big adult body like a child playing at being a grownup, like he’d put on daddy’s suit and been mistaken for an adult and was still looking for a way out.

“I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to or kick you out or anything,” Eren was telling him, voice deceptively firm for someone whose eyes were so desperately searching.

Levi was having trouble listening.

He saw something familiar in that look, and it resonated between them like a deafening, mounting scream of feedback.

‘There’s a lot to be said for seeing a familiar face,’ he thought distantly, eyes trained on the flickers of uncertainty that kept surfacing in the cracks in his expression.

“Eren.”

Eren met his eyes with a,

“Huh?”

“Shut up.”

The instant their lips met- this time, his seeking, Eren’s shocked into something awkward and unyielding- he knew he was doing something stupid.

He’d already known, of course, but the hurried way Eren’s hands came up to cup his face, the way his thumbs drew curved lines over Levi’s cheeks, the way he tilted his head and shifted the angle of his lips just so to change the kiss from a belligerent declaration to an open conflict- these were the things that made the difference between knowing and knowing.

‘He was your subordinate- even if you’re the only one who remembers, this is still irresponsible.’

He knew. He still let Eren tug him over, still let himself straddle Eren’s thighs and run his fingers through his hair. He could feel the temperature of Eren’s body rising with the contact.

‘He was also your caretaker, and people do remember that- this will reflect poorly on him to others.’

He knew. He still let Eren’s tongue flicker out against his own, experimentally. He thought about telling him to brush his teeth. He didn’t think about telling him to stop altogether.

‘He doesn’t remember- he is no longer the person you knew him as, and you are abusing that knowledge.’

He knew.

He knew.

“Shit,” he swore as Eren’s mouth found his throat, and again, more loudly, as Eren’s hands found their way under his shirt.

His body was burning.

‘Is that why? How long has it been, Levi? Do you even remember the last time?’

He didn’t.

He didn’t remember.

He groaned in frustration and dug his fingertips into Eren’s shoulders spitefully when his tongue began to trace circles over his jugular.

He didn’t even notice Eren pulling him closer until he shifted against what he thought was the lump of Eren’s wallet and felt the breath hitch in the chest under his hand.

He couldn’t help but tense.

Eren stilled and looked at him. “Is this okay?” he murmured, squeezing his waist as if to emphasize his point.

“If it wasn’t, you’d fucking know,” Levi growled, looking away.

Eren’s fingers coaxed his chin forward again. “Hey.”

“Fucking hi,” he grumbled, furrowing his eyebrows.

He was glad when Eren kissed him again, because the look of amused affection with which he responded to Levi’s discomposure struck fear into his heart.

He let himself explore Eren’s chest and shoulders through his shirt, pausing when he felt his way across a knot in the middle of his left collarbone.

There was something immensely comforting about the knowledge that in this life, Eren could break a bone and be forced to suffer through it like a normal person.

His fingers traced idly back and forth over the bump as he tried to stop thinking, tried to lose himself in the rhythm of kissing- something he was constantly surprised to discover Eren had an unexpected aptitude for- and in the restrained but curious motions of Eren’s hands smoothing over the muscles of his lower back and pinching at the curve of his waist.

Stopping the thoughts wasn’t hard.

Starting them again was proving to be. His mind and his body were beginning to feud.

He was more than content to while away the evening fully-clothed, comfortable with the idea of just touching and being touched in relatively innocent ways- he knew the true value of taking his time to make a decision when he had the time to take- but his body was growing impatient.

His body was too young, too volatile to let him waste his time mapping the contours of Eren’s collarbones with his fingers when he could be doing it with his teeth, and he hated it.

He hated being a teenager.

Eren gasped, breaking the kiss when he scraped the blunt edges of his fingernails over the back of his neck, frustrated.

Levi knew he was staring at him with a look that betrayed his urges.

Eren gently shifted him back on his thighs. Levi had no idea when he’d gotten so close, only that there was an infuriating demand for more battering at his impulses like a quickened heartbeat.

He pulled away and actually looked instead of touching.

This was not an expression or a state he had seen Eren in before- this was different from nearly catching a kid masturbating and knowing he’d been noticed creeping away awkwardly by the way he wouldn’t meet his eyes the next morning. This was something far too private, far too intimate, this look of undisguised longing in parted lips and pupils blown wide by the same forces that reddened cheeks and created vaguely erotic shapes under denim.

He didn’t even realize he’d been openly eying Eren’s erection until Eren laughed a bit uncomfortably and drew his hands from under Levi’s shirt to run them down his arms like he wasn’t quite sure what to do.

“Spit it out,” Levi told him, trying not to make it sound like order and mostly succeeding, but only because of how breathless he was.

Eren cracked a hesitant little grin. “My ass is starting to go numb,” he mumbled.

Levi snorted. “Are you saying you want to take this somewhere else?”

He watched Eren’s tongue flicker across his lips unconsciously first, Eren’s throat bob as he swallowed second. “I don’t mean- do you want to?”

There was something a little maddening about being so close without actually touching.

He leaned forward, sliding his palms down Eren’s front and deciding he didn’t actually care how stupid this was. “Do you?”

 Eren’s eyes flickered over him. “What do you think?” he chuckled, almost sounding pained.

‘Fuck it,’ he thought almost dreamily, ‘fuck it all.’ Eren made a comically strangled sound of surprise when Levi palmed his erection.

It had been a long time, but feeling that heat, that insistent firmness through the fabric of someone else’s pants and knowing he had put it there was just as gratifying as he remembered it being.

He squeezed lightly and Eren shot him a darkly contemplative look that made the corners of his lips turn up in amusement.

“I thought your ass was getting numb,” he mocked.

“You’re sitting on me.”

He shrugged. “I don’t see how that’s my problem.”

When Eren pulled him in close again, he was almost disappointed- he’d expected him to put up more of a fight.

He had to grab Eren around the neck to stop himself from falling when Eren stood up anyway.

He felt, rather than heard, the soft huff of laughter in his ear, and he certainly felt it when Eren hoisted him back up to eye level, fitting Levi’s thighs around his waist.

He could tell he wasn’t as light as Eren had expected, but he wasn’t too heavy to carry, either, and Eren seemed pleased by that fact.

He wasn’t.

It made him feel small.

He squirmed restlessly in Eren’s arms and nearly headbutted him in the nose when he went in for a kiss.

Eren just laughed.

He felt his back press up against a wall, and then Eren was kissing him, one hand looped under his ass for support, the other braced against the wall above his head.

He groaned into Eren’s mouth when he started to move his hips against Levi’s own in slow, hard, meaningful thrusts.

‘He wants to fuck me,’ he realized with a start. ‘Not get fucked by me, but fuck me.’ It shouldn’t have been a shocking realization, but their relationship had always been so defined by admiration in the past that he’d unconsciously assumed the opposite.

But there was no mistaking the way Eren was grinding him into the wall, no misunderstanding the way he was looking at him like he wanted nothing more than to already be inside him.

Levi fought for words and lost them as Eren’s hips rutted against his in another pulverizing roll.

“Can I,” Eren breathed huskily, biting at his lip, “can I bring you into my room or do you-”

He tried to say something, a jumble of half-formed but mostly-sarcastic statements tangling in his mouth, and barely managed a breathless nod and a wrecked,

“Just fucking do it.”

And Eren did.

One moment, Eren was hooking open the door with his foot, the next his back was hitting the mattress. There was a split-second where he didn’t know what happened.

“Did you just fucking throw me onto the bed?” he snapped incredulously, and Eren laughed, crawling over him.

“Sorry,” he murmured insincerely, growling playfully when Levi smacked his hand away.

Levi, not exactly thrilled with how this was going, hooked his leg over Eren’s and flipped them.

Eren landed on his back with a startled “whoa,” and lay there blinking up at him.

“I’m too fucking hot for this shit,” Levi muttered, stripping off his shirt before folding it in half and reaching over to place it on Eren’s surprisingly uncluttered dresser.

When he looked back, Eren was biting his lip again, eying him a mixture of genuine astonishment and almost despairing appreciation.

Levi hummed in enjoyment as Eren ran a warm hand up over his stomach.

“Jesus Christ, I mean, I knew that you were fit, but-” Eren started, and then went back to appreciating the sight with his fingers for a moment. “What the fuck have you been doing since I left?”

“Boxing. Judo,” he muttered absentmindedly, shoving Eren’s shirt up as far as he could and running his fingertips teasingly down Eren’s sides. “Mixed martial arts.”

Eren shivered under his hands. “You weren’t kidding when you said you could take me in a fight, were you?”

“No.” He tugged Eren’s shirt up again. “Off.”

Eren laughed and struggled out of it, tossing it on the floor before tugging Levi back down. Levi watched him bite his lip again and wondered if it was a habit that only emerged when he was aroused. “I shouldn’t find that hot, should I?” Eren joked.

“What, knowing I could beat the shit out of you without breaking a sweat makes you hard?” Levi asked him, indulging his earlier urge to graze his teeth along Eren’s collarbone. “Whatever you’re into, I guess.”

Eren groaned when Levi popped open his fly and slipped his hand into his pants to give him an experimental squeeze.

“Now might be a good time to mention that being the size of a twink does not necessarily mean I’m a twink,” he clarified, and Eren blinked owlishly at him.

“Oh? Oh. That’s- that’s okay,” he said breathlessly, though not without some disappointment. “I’m good with whatever. I just thought- never mind.”

“You just thought?” he prodded defensively, withdrawing his hand, much to Eren’s displeasure. “You thought what, that being shorter than you meant I like to take it up the ass?”

“Wha-” Eren sputtered, propping himself up on an elbow. “No, it’s- Levi, I don’t know if you somehow missed this, but you were grinding your ass on my dick pretty much the entire time we were in the kitchen,” he pointed out drily. “I don’t mind doing this either way, you’re hot as hell and I’m way too fucking horny to care, but it’s kind of hard not to assume somebody wants to ride your dick when they’re already almost riding you through your pants.”

Levi could feel his face growing hot. “I didn’t say I don’t ever like to-”

Eren’s look of frustration was rapidly fading into amusement. “You know you’ve got nothing to prove to me, right?”

Levi shot him a puzzled look.

“This is some sort of weird height thing, isn’t it?” Eren looked like he was fighting a smile. “Like, you think I’m not going to take you seriously if you bottom or something.”

If there was one thing he had not missed at all, it was Eren’s moments of uncomfortable perceptiveness.

He could feel his expression going sour with embarrassment, so he opted to look away as if he didn’t care. “I don’t have a ‘weird height thing’,” he growled.

Eren laughed lightly. “No, it’s okay- seriously, I don’t care who tops. I don’t have a problem with getting topped by you.”

Levi grimaced at him. “Now I just feel like I’d be proving your point by topping,” he snapped.

Eren threw up his hands and fell back on the bed. “Or we could not fuck, that’s cool too,” he sighed, and Levi’s dick ached in protest.

“Fine,” he mumbled begrudgingly, and Eren looked at him, eyebrows raised. “I’ll bottom, whatever, fuck.”

“If you don’t want to, it’s-”

“I said it’s fine,” he groused.

Eren quirked an eyebrow at him. “But do you want to?”

The heat that had faded from his face resurfaced with a vengeance. “Would I say it was fine if I didn’t?” Eren was still staring expectantly at him. “Fuck, yes, okay, I do, I want to, is that a problem?”

“You want to…?” Eren coaxed, and Levi had to restrain himself from punching him. Eren had evidently sensed the animosity of his mood, because he didn’t press the issue further, instead opting to drag Levi down into a kiss.

Levi felt a hand squeeze his ass experimentally and scowled. “I’m calling bullshit, you just really want to fuck me,” he complained, and Eren chuckled.

“I’m not going to lie to you, you have an incredible ass and I do really want to fuck you,” he admitted, tugging Levi on top of him. “But I’m open to seeing what you could do to mine,” he teased.

Levi rolled his ass against Eren’s flagging erection, threading his fingers through Eren’s hair and grabbing a fistful. “I’m sure you’ll find out,” he murmured.

Eren bit his lip again. Levi felt his dick twitch with interest as he started to undo his pants, and snorted, rolling fluidly off of the bed to shrug them off with his underwear. He separated them before putting them with his shirt, and peeled off his socks with a grimace.

Eren paused in the middle of squirming out of his own to rake his eyes up and down Levi’s frame appreciatively. “Damn,” he breathed, kicking his pants over the edge of the bed. Levi glanced meaningfully at his socked feet and he kicked them off, too.

Eren groaned as Levi swung his leg back over to straddle him, lower lip pinched so hard between his teeth it’d gone almost bloodless. “Who said you were allowed to be so hot?” he demanded.

Levi rolled his eyes. “Lube, condom,” he ordered, and Eren scrambled to comply.

He slapped his hand away when he reached for him, rolling off and onto his back.

“I can do it myself.”

Eren watched him as he squirted lubricant onto one hand and pulled his balls up and away primly with the other as he started to massage the area, willing himself to relax.

‘Is this the first time I’ve done this since I died?’ he wondered suddenly, and then marveled at what a surreal question it was.

“Can I blow you?”

“Hah?” he grunted.

Eren smiled at him, kissing his knee. “Can I blow you? While you- uh, you know.”

Levi just looked at him, pausing halfway through pressing a finger into himself. “Will it stop you from staring at me while I stick my fingers up my ass?” he asked rudely.

Eren laughed, kissing his thigh, his hip, and then, with a look of profound mischief, wrapping his hand around Levi’s dick and running his tongue up the underside.

“Shit,” Levi swore when Eren’s lips closed around the head and started to sink down.

He wasn’t great at it, but being great giving blowjobs had more to do with perseverance than skill, and receiving one was doing a damn good job of making the arduous process of fingering himself more bearable.

He was not notorious for his patience. He did not like dirty things. Fingering himself was only preferable to being fingered because he could be guaranteed that he, at least, would wash his hands properly afterwards.

The concept of someone touching him with a shitty lubed up hand wasn’t exactly a turn on.

He shoved Eren off with little grace when he withdrew his fingers, elbowing him away when crawled back expectantly. “Give me a second.”

Eren made a slightly inquisitive sound of impatience.

He wiggled his hand with a disgusted frown. “I need to wash this.”

Eren’s snort of bemusement followed him into the bathroom.

He tried very hard not to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror- there was something about mirrors that had a way of driving home exactly how morally ambiguous a decision could be.

‘Because you can’t deny the evidence,’ he thought vaguely. Even without looking up from his hands, he could see that his hair was damningly mussed, that there was an inconsistent patchwork of flushed skin extending from his navel to his throat- and he didn’t have to look to know exactly what his face looked like.

‘That’s still Eren,’ he thought, cleaning under his fingernails for the fourth time. ‘Lying on that bed, that’s still Eren.’

He knew.

It was part of the appeal.

He knew Eren. He trusted Eren. Even if he didn’t remember, Eren was familiar and that familiarity was comforting.

‘Not Nick.’ He dried his hands methodically, ignoring the sting. ‘Eren. Fuck Nick.’

Something inside of him recognized that his attitude towards this was not healthy, but when he walked back in to find Eren leisurely stroking himself, eyes closed and head back against the pillows, he reminded himself that he didn’t care.

This was a choice he’d made. He’d deal with any regrets he might have later.

 He knelt on the bed. Eren greeted his return with a lazy smile. “Change your mind?”

Rationally, he understood that he was asking to be safe, to give Levi an out if he needed one, but the unintended implication that he was thinking of running away stung his pride anyway.

“Have you?” he shot, and Eren grinned at him.

“Not a chance.”

He shoved him back down with a hand when he went to sit up. “My ass, my rules,” he told him, scowling when Eren laughed.

His chuckling faded into a hiss when he straddled him again. “You’re going to ride me?” he asked. Something about his tone and expression told Levi he found that surprising in a very good way.

“No, I’m going to do squats on your dick, what the fuck do you think,” he retorted, snapping his fingers and making a beckoning motion. “Give me the condom. You couldn’t at least have put it on while I was washing my hands?”

Eren lifted his hands in surrender, laughing again. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to change your mind. I didn’t want to waste one.” Levi snatched the wrapper from between his fingers, tearing it open and sliding it on methodically.

He was suddenly very glad for his high school sexual education- while it had felt like an overwhelming waste of time to him in the moment, the condoms of his new life were different than the condoms of his old, and if he hadn’t known as much already, the thinness of the latex he was rolling down would have made him nervous.

It was a peculiar thing to be proud of. He felt very old and very young simultaneously.

Eren nudged him with the bottle of lubricant. “Looking for this?”

He muttered something vaguely affirmative, more than happy to accept that as the reason for his moment of pause.

‘I should’ve done this first, too,’ he thought distastefully, surreptitiously wiping the excess lubricant on Eren’s thigh- Eren didn’t seem to appreciate it, but the fact that he wasn’t the one getting a dick in the ass rendered his opinion null and void on the matter in Levi’s mind- before shuffling forward to align himself.

Eren’s hands settled on his hips in obvious anticipation.

Levi shot him a look. “Be patient.”

“I was about to tell you to take your time,” he smiled.

It was harder than he remembered it being.

‘Shit, this really is the first time I’ve done this since I died. I’m a goddamn virgin all over again.’

It didn’t hurt- he knew too much and was far too careful to risk tearing something and getting some sort of horrible infection from his own shit- but it did take some getting used to, and he edged down, fighting a grimace.

Eren caressed his hips and thighs with a sort of well-meaning restlessness. “You okay? Fuck, are you ever tight.”

He grunted, pausing to breathe before sinking lower again. His thighs were beginning to ache with the sustained effort of holding himself in a squat.

When his ass finally met Eren’s hips, he sighed with a mixture of relief and triumph.

It had been a long time. Long enough that though his mind remembered, his body didn’t, and the sensation, while not necessarily pleasurable in and of itself, was overwhelmingly new again.

‘Overwhelming is a good word,’ he mused, balancing against Eren’s chest as he stroked himself through the worst of the unfamiliarity and began to move.

Eren’s hands settled back onto his hips, gently guiding his pace as the body beneath his began to move with them. He took a break from touching himself to shove away a forearm.

“My ass,” he growled, “my rules.”

“You’re a bossy fucking bottom,” Eren laughed, and Levi narrowed his eyes.

The pace he set was clearly faster than Eren’s ideal, and he clearly didn’t give a shit.

Eren clung to his waist as he rode him, lids heavy and breathing harsh.

“Levi, you gotta slow down, or I’m gonna-”

He didn’t, and Eren did, hands tightening convulsively and hips pistoning upwards.

Levi watched his face with some interest, idly rolling on Eren’s softening erection until he could tell the overstimulation was becoming uncomfortable.

He disentangled himself with a grunt, jerking off methodically.

Beside him, Eren made a discontented sound that he barely noticed through the haze of his own orgasm.

When he started to come down, he realized that Eren was caressing his thigh restlessly, and turned his head to fix him with a flat stare. “What?”

Eren didn’t look entirely satisfied. “I wanted to be the one who got you off,” he muttered.

Levi hummed indifferently. “I’ve never gotten a lot of satisfaction out of sex in general, to be honest with you,” he admitted, half-wondering why he was telling Eren this. “It’s hard for me to relax.”

It was. He suddenly remembered why his dalliances had been so sporadic and short-lived- ultimately, his distrustful, impatient nature and white-knuckled grip on his own self-control made it difficult to lose himself in anything but fighting. His relationship with sex was similar to his relationship with coffee: it looked good, it smelled even better, and the longer he went without the more he wondered why he wasn’t drinking it.

The first sip always reminded him that, compared to the smell, the taste of coffee was a lasting disappointment.

And thus the process began anew.

“I can see that,” Eren laughed softly. Levi wondered if he really did.

He shoved him lightly, staving off exhaustion long enough to wipe his stomach clean.

“Go to sleep, you little shit,” he ordered lazily, and promptly took his own advice.

***

He was awake the moment Eren touched him.

It was an inconvenient but inevitable truth that he still retained the bulk of his instincts from when he’d lived underground.

The lightest touch sparked the animal part of his brain into life while the human part stirred slowly into wakefulness.

The palm resting on the curve of his waist had him lying very still, eyes unopened and breathing slow and even, but his ears were listening and his body was feeling, taking stock of the situation while his thoughts untangled themselves.

Something warm and faintly wet pressed against the nape of his neck, and for a split second, he was alarmed, muscles already rippling with preparatory tension.

But then the thinking part of him thought,

‘Eren,’

in a languid, sleepy voice, and the hand on his side and the lips by his spine were suddenly welcome, a pleasant surprise to someone too accustomed to waking with the expectation of violence.

The sluggishness of his mind told him that he hadn’t been sleeping long, though. He opened heavy eyelids to a darkness filled with suggestive shapes.

Judging by the soft chuckle in his ear, his flicker of tension had not gone unnoticed.

“Did I wake you up? Sorry,” Eren murmured. His whisper seemed very loud in the quiet apartment. He also didn’t sound very sorry.

Levi grumbled inarticulately, sighing a little when Eren shifted across the bed, slotting into the gaps behind his knees and curling into the curve of his spine. His hand slid down across Levi’s stomach slowly before tucking around him and tugging him closer.

He could feel something hard pressing against his thigh. Even as tired as he was, he had no illusions about its identity.

He hummed warningly when Eren started to trail warm kisses across his shoulder.

“Fuckin’ tired,” he muttered, groaning when a hand found his own half-formed erection.

Eren’s teeth tugged playfully at the shell of his ear. “We could have lazy sex,” he suggested coyly, grinding hopefully into the cleft of his ass. “It’s only been a couple hours- we probably wouldn’t even have to prep.”

Levi took a moment to resent the way his body was stirring with interest at the sensation before grunting. “You always wake up every two hours to fuck?” he groused.

Eren laughed. “No.” The way he was being touched was tempting. He reminded himself that he’d already revisited why sex was a mediocre choice of recreation. “I woke up to piss. Going back to sleep with you-” he squeezed Levi’s growing erection lightly “-lying naked in my bed was kind of hard. You’re sexy.”

Levi grunted again, albeit a little breathlessly. “I can’t help that.”

A puff of laughter against his throat. A light, teasing bite at the skin below his ear.

A hard dick, grinding tantalizingly against him.

Another in someone else’s hand, making his breath draw short.

‘Well, I sure as fuck am awake now.’

“Eh, why the fuck not,” he mumbled, arching his back in a stretch. “Just don’t get pissed off if I fall back asleep.”

Eren made a desperately pleased noise and squeezed him once more before withdrawing his hand. Levi could hear him rummaging in a drawer.

The sound of the foil of a condom wrapper tearing followed by a hiss of air sucking into a half-empty bottle of lubricant as it was squeezed was oddly arresting without the visual accompaniment. It was almost mundane- almost innocent, like Eren had just peeled open a microwaveable dinner beside him and was putting ketchup on it.

The image made him snort.

The press of Eren’s erection against his asshole did not.

Eren moaned softly in his ear, hand creeping back down to his erection. “Just relax. You okay? You’re so fucking tight, it’s hard to tell if-”

He hissed in a breath as Eren slid into him carefully. “I’m fine.”

The feeling of being penetrated from behind- of being penetrated like this, with no visual reference and nothing to distract him- felt different. He wasn’t sure if he liked it.

Eren had a knee edged between his, but the fact that his legs were still almost closed combined with the angle of penetration made the dick pushing slowly into his ass- already a reasonable size for a grown man of Eren’s height, larger than strictly average but far from a size he couldn’t handle- feel oddly enormous.

By the time Eren had himself seated fully inside of him, he was panting softly, fighting his body’s bewildered insistence that this was too much, that he had something big and monstrous inside of him rather than the perfectly normal-sized dick he knew was.

“Too much?” Eren asked him gently, and all at once Levi realized that he knew, he knew exactly what it was going to feel like when he suggested it, and stubborn indignation bubbled in his gut.

“I’m fine,” he snapped, strangling a groan as Eren withdrew only to thrust in again, too slowly for the pace to distract him from the feeling of being fucked in a way that made his stomach muscles clench and his legs shake inexplicably.

He went to push back against Eren, frustrated and a little embarrassed by how overwhelmed he felt, but Eren’s other arm snaked under and around him and held him fast.

“Do you trust me?”

“What?” He didn’t like how he was panting. He didn’t like that he couldn’t sound like he wasn’t the one being fucked.

“Do you trust me?” Eren repeated, squeezing him around the middle.

He thought about it. “Yes.” It was a wary, begrudging admittance.

Eren kissed his jaw gently. “Then trust me, okay?”

He grumbled uncertainly, chewing the inside of his lip to distract himself as Eren shifted behind him, tilting his hips this way or nudging Levi’s legs that way between thrusts.

He was about to ask what the hell he was doing when Eren’s thrust ground into something that made his hips buck and forced a moan that sounded damningly like a yelp out of his throat.

Eren chuckled teasingly, arm tightening around him.

His thrusts were just as slow and crushingly purposeful as they had been when he’d been grinding Levi against the wall, and without the barrier of clothes, they were terribly destructive.

He scrabbled against the bedsheets, burying his face in the pillow to silence the sounds that kept leaking out of him.

‘This isn’t fucking.’ Fucking was businesslike- a person fucked to take their pleasure from their partner, and expected the same to be taken from them in return.

Eren wasn’t fucking him. Eren wasn’t just trying to get his pleasure and leave Levi to get his own- he was forgoing his own and trying to get Levi’s, trying to make him squirm and shake and break into something messy and overcome. The idea of that was peculiarly terrifying.

‘This isn’t fucking, but then- is this making love? Am I being made love to?’ he wondered suddenly, absurdly, with a feeling of intense moral panic.

He buried his face further into the pillow when Eren ground his hips even further into him and twisted his hand over his dick mid-stroke, rubbing the sensitive spot under the head with the flat of his thumb.

“Let me hear you,” he coaxed, sighing with frustration when Levi hunched his shoulders stubbornly.

There was a disconcerting moment of weightlessness between his face leaving the pillow and staring up at the darkened ceiling in which he didn’t know what was happening.

And then Eren was adjusting his hold on him, shifting Levi’s knees inside of his own to stop his legs from falling open, and pulling one of his thighs up.

He was having trouble stopping his head from falling back over Eren’s shoulder.

He made a horrible sound when Eren began to move under him again, and whipped a hand up to cover his mouth despite the fact that, aside from Eren’s grip around his waist, he felt like he could fall off at any moment.

Eren pried his hand away with a ‘tsk’, kissing the palm.

“Don’t be weird,” he chided softly. “It’s weird to be so quiet during sex. I can’t tell if I’m doing something wrong if you don’t-” Levi strangled a particularly mortifying whimper as Eren rolled up and into him again “-talk to me a little. Talk to me, Levi.”

Their position was making the blood rush to his head, and while he could only half-hear the sounds he was making, Eren’s pleased croon seemed too loud.

He was starting to lose his grip on himself, and it was frightening.

“Eren, you fucking-” He choked back something high and nasal that felt suspiciously like a whine. “Don’t-”

“Don’t?” Eren’s voice was husky in his ear.

He barely registered that they were moving again until his knees hit the sheets.

Eren’s weight was pressing his chest into the bed, but the hand that wasn’t under him, wasn't stroking him, he found snaking under his throat to cup his jaw, forcing his head back.

He groaned as Eren pushed into him again, too fixated on keeping track of and hitting that spot, too eager to win, too characteristically Eren to be anything but infuriating.

“Don’t what?” Eren goaded. “Don’t fuck you like I know how to make it feel good?” Levi could feel his face heating up. He bit down another moan as Eren twisted a slick palm up his erection again. “Don’t make you stop acting like you’re fucking-” he couldn’t restrain the mortifying little whine that escaped him when Eren thrust into him more sharply, pounding him against the mattress for a breathless moment before returning to that punishingly slow, maddening pace “-bored of my cock as soon as it’s in?”

Levi’s retort vanished into a moan that came out much too loud.

“Levi,” Eren growled, tone serious but playful, almost mischievous, “if you’re going to let me fuck you,” his teeth tugged at the shell of Levi’s ear again, tongue darting out to dance lightly along the curving edge of the cartilage, “I’m going to fuck you properly, and you’ve gotta let me hear how I’m doing, okay?”

Levi wasn’t planning to respond, but the way Eren’s hand suddenly tightened around the base of his dick made him groan.

“Okay?” Eren repeated.

“Okay,” he croaked, and then yelped when Eren began to fuck him in earnest, setting an even, almost businesslike rhythm and pumping his erection with a mixture of fast and slow strokes that wound the pull of tension that had been lingering indifferently in his groin tighter with every thrust and tug.

‘I’m going to come,’ he realized numbly, ‘he’s going to make me come while he’s fucking me- he wants to take me apart while he’s fucking me, wants me to fall apart while he’s still inside my ass, wants me to know that I’m not the one taking it, that he’s the one giving it, that he’s the one in charge of making me-‘

“Fuck,” he swore, burying his burning face in the sheets. Eren growled with audible frustration.

The hand that twisted itself in his hair and tugged his head back up almost put him over the edge.

“What did I just fucking,” Eren rumbled, “say, Levi?”

Later, he’d be ashamed to realize what did put him over the edge.

He heard himself cry out less clearly than he heard Eren groan,

“Fucking finally,”

and he couldn’t find the wits to care through the feeling of release and the feeling of being pounded more fervently by something that had never stopped feeling so disconcertingly huge and the feeling of the hand that had been flying over his dick curling around his waist for better leverage and the feeling of Eren taking his pleasure from him, nose and mouth buried into the hair behind his ear as he edged Levi’s knees forward across the sheets with his last few brutal thrusts before dropping into a much lazier rhythm, almost absentmindedly rutting his way through the tail end of his orgasm.

By the time Eren pulled out, he’d sobered up completely, and his face felt like someone had taken a match to it.

He rolled onto his side, putting his back between them.

He heard the plop of the used condom hitting the bottom of the trashcan and felt Eren’s hesitation when he didn’t immediately climb back onto the bed.

“Levi…?”

He sounded concerned.

‘Good,’ Levi thought petulantly.

He didn’t respond to Eren’s gentle touch until he reached over him to switch on the lamp on the bedside table, at which point he turned his face into the pillow defensively.

“Levi, are you okay?” Eren murmured, squeezing his shoulder. “Did I hurt you? Levi?”

He resisted Eren’s attempts to roll him over onto his back, but in the end, Eren’s persistence won out.

Levi kept his arms crossed tightly over his chest and his gaze firmly somewhere that was not Eren’s face.

“…wait, are you-”

He could hear the amusement in Eren’s voice. His face burned with mortification. “Fuck off.”

Eren laughed and intercepted his attempt to roll back onto his side. “You’re embarrassed,” he teased.

“Fuck off,” Levi told him again, scowling.

Eren chortled, kissing his cheek when he turned his face away. “Why are you embarrassed, Levi?”

“Fuck,” he growled, “off.”

Eren peppered his face and jaw with kisses. “Are you embarrassed because I made you moan?”

His humiliated twitch was apparently enough of an answer.

“I like the sounds you make,” Eren whispered in his ear. “You sound like you’re getting wrecked in the best possible way when you moan. It’s hot as hell.”

Levi threw an elbow out without looking. “Go the fuck to sleep.”

Eren just barely dodged it.

“I wonder what it would take to make you scream?” he teased.

Levi kicked him. “I said go to sleep, you shit.”

Eren did not manage to dodge.

Chapter Text

The balcony had a pretty good view.

To the left, the rising sun had turned the sprawl of apartment buildings and skyscrapers into a single, seamless black silhouette, jagged edges cut from the sky behind it by a luminous fade of orange into yellow. The way the undersides of that morning’s ponderous, low-hanging blanket of clouds reflected the rosy light made it look like the city was burning.

He thought it looked like a post card.

To the right, the sunrise washed more than just the windows of the surrounding buildings in shades of pink and orange- even the pigeon shit speckling the rooftops and window ledges seemed to change from a speckling of grey-brown and white on rain-streaked concrete bricks to a crumbling patchwork of stucco on faded adobe.

Facing forward, the waking light cast long, dark shapes down the street and across his face, burning in the corner of one eye while leaving the other in shadow.

Eren had a well-placed apartment.

It was easy to see both how ugly and how beautiful this new world could be, looking out from his balcony.

‘You are an incredible fuckup,’ he told himself serenely for what felt like the thousandth time.

He wasn’t really angry with himself. He wasn’t really much of anything, at the moment.

‘It’s actually impressive how completely you can fuck up something that should have been so simple.’

He was almost in awe of his own poor judgement. People had once entrusted their lives to him.

‘You do know he can never be allowed to remember now.’

Oh, he knew.

‘God fucking help you if you find any of the others.’

He was aware.

‘Can you even imagine?’

He could.

He could clearly visualize the slow ascension of Erwin’s eyebrows as he stared down at him. Not disgusted, like Eren’s sister would be, nor shocked. Just appraising, incredulous- and worse.

Worse, he would be thoughtful.

He would be contemplative, like he’d misjudged everything Levi was and ever had been.

Levi could picture Erwin’s eyes taking notes as the mind that lay behind them made deft and calculated changes to his opinion of him. He could picture that all too clearly.

He lounged against the railing and sipped his tea, absentmindedly staring at the building across the street for the express purpose of seeing nothing.

‘You can’t fuck up this badly by accident,’ he thought wryly, tipping his head back as he swallowed down the last of his cup. ‘Why did I do it?’

That was the question he had been asking himself since before the sun rose.

There had been no grace period of sluggish amnesia where he had questioned what had happened the night before- he remembered the first time, the conscious decision to do something idiotic, the knowing he was doing something he shouldn’t have been, the bickering negotiation with himself and with Eren, the anticipation, the tense beginning, the disappointing end.

He remembered the second time, an engagement he hadn’t sought but had still consented to, something he had involved himself in for the love of a little more self-indulgence, for a little more clumsy petting and caressing, for the sake of burying his restless mouth and the worst of his poor decision-making skills in a little more stupidity to add to the list, a little something to stave off the regrets of the coming morning a little longer.

He certainly remembered what he’d gotten instead of the not unpleasant but not entirely satisfying distraction he had been expecting.

By the time he had recognized that he was awake and thinking, he was already lying there, staring at Eren’s sleeping face, his cheeks growing hot as his memory recounted in exacting detail the feeling of being played from within and without like a living instrument.

He hadn’t felt particularly ill-used when he’d slipped from the bed to his feet and walked across the hall, but the instant he’d switched on the light in the bathroom, the mirror had proved unforgiving, and he had made mistake of looking.

His knees were raw and flushed like those of a child who’d fallen off of a bicycle.

His hair was not just mussed, but wholly awry, molded into strange shapes.

His throat and collarbones were peppered with small dark bruises, left behind on the canvas of his skin like the signature of an artist on a beloved painting.

He hadn’t understood, at first.

No one had ever dared.

He’d stood there for a long moment, trying to rub them out like spots of dirt, tracing them with his fingers like they might have scab-like edges he could find and peel free, before he’d realized what they were.

And then he’d found himself wondering indignantly how Eren had managed to place so many of them on him without his noticing.

He didn’t wonder why Eren had.

There was something in the way he looked at him- the way he’d always looked at him- that could not be misunderstood.

Eren didn’t just desire him- Eren coveted him. If his advances had made anything clear, it was that Eren wanted him in any and every way he could possibly have him- as a hero or a follower, as a master or a minion, as a lover or a friend.

He didn’t know why Eren coveted him, but he knew that he did.

He knew why Eren had done it.

‘But why did I do it?’

That he still wasn’t sure of.

Boredom seemed possible, but there were far easier and much less stupid things he could have done to alleviate stagnation.

Pity was out of the question.

Lust was a likely candidate, but he’d had the opportunity before, during the height of his adolescence, and hadn’t taken it then.

Fear was a ridiculous notion. He had nothing to fear from an Eren who stayed behind the line and everything to fear from the Eren he let cross it.

‘Loneliness,’ he thought suddenly, catching a blur of motion out of the corner of his eye and turning to watch Eren cross the living room wearing nothing but black briefs and a troubled expression.

His eyes were seeking, his eyebrows furrowed.

‘Loneliness,’ he thought again, aghast, ‘there’s a lot to be said for seeing a familiar face.’

When Eren’s eyes found him, their softening edges unknitting the worried eyebrows above them, he knew he’d always known why he’d done it.

It was difficult to accept.

Eren cracked open the door to the balcony with a little smile. “Hey,” he said shyly. “Can I come out?”

“It’s your fucking apartment, Eren,” he shot back, wishing he had more tea to swallow down his conflicted emotions with.

Eren laughed as he joined him by the railing.

Levi eyed his naked torso. He eyed the unmarked expanse of Eren’s chest and shoulders resentfully. “You should put on some clothes.”

Eren edged closer to him. “Nah. If I get cold, you can warm me up.”

Levi quirked an eyebrow, a little taken aback by his open flirtatiousness. “I meant so you don’t scare the neighbours. I’d like to see you freeze to death in September.”

“If you keep being so cold, y’know, I just might,” Eren teased, and Levi didn’t even bother to resist the urge to roll his eyes.

They lapsed into silence.

He could feel Eren looking at him, and knew he was trying to decide how to approach the situation. He wanted something.

Levi just wanted another cup of tea.

“So,” Eren said.

“So?” He assumed repetition was the desired response.

Eren was quiet for long enough that he started to wonder if it was.

“About last night,” he started, and Levi closed his eyes in resignation.

“Hm?” It wasn’t really an encouragement- more of an acknowledgement. An admission of attention given.

Eren’s fingers ghosted out to pluck at his sleeve. “Levi, look at me.”

He didn’t want to. Looking at people made things hard.

It made things personal when he just wanted them to not be.

He met Eren’s eyes very reluctantly.

Eren was looking at him with undisguised affection. He could feel his fingertips tracing lines over the curve of his bicep. “Hey.”

Levi sneered at him awkwardly. “You’re not very good at this, are you?”

Eren recoiled, eyes going wide for a second before he laughed. “Man, I swear to fucking god- you were so cute as a kid, what the hell happened?”

Levi wrinkled his nose at him incredulously. “I was exactly the same when I was younger, Eren.”

“You weren’t,” Eren insisted, smiling crookedly, “I swear- I swear to god you weren’t. You were quiet, a little weird, yeah, but you were a cute kid.”

“Eren, I told your girlfriend that you were gay and ordered her to get out my house.”

His face went smooth with momentary shock. “Oh my god, you did do that, didn’t you?”

“I also hid the money my mother left for pizza so you wouldn’t be a lazy shit and refuse to cook,” he pointed out.

Eren smiled strangely at him. “Your family wasn’t too well off, though- I mean, I can understand trying to save a bit of money. You seemed pretty close with your mom.”

Levi levelled him with a flat look. “No, we were fine. I kept telling her that you were taking me out to the Chinese place on the corner,” he drawled.

“But then- what about the-”

“I was keeping it.”

“You were stealing from your mom?” Eren accused, visibly horrified.

He couldn’t help but snort. “Eren, she left that money with the expectation that you’d keep what was left over,” he explained. “I was stealing from you.”

Eren just looked at him blankly for a long moment. “No.”

“Yeah,” Levi said firmly.

Eren looked like he wasn’t sure if he should be angry or amused. “You little- you little shithead. You’re not even a little bit sorry, are you?”

“Why would I be?” The idea was laughable.

“What does an eleven year old even need money for?” Eren demanded.

He shrugged. “Nothing. I was just saving it.”

He wasn’t sure how to feel about the narrow, inscrutable look Eren was shooting him. “I take it back. I take it all back. You’ve never been cute.” He was still smiling.

“Really? I felt pretty cute when I slipped that pair of underwear into your backpack,” he commented casually.

Eren’s smile froze. “That was you?”

He hummed affirmatively.

Eren’s fingers twitched like he was considering strangulation. “My girlfriend told everyone I was cheating on her because of that,” he hissed, cornering Levi against the rail. “Everyone. She even told my mom.”

“Oops,” he murmured, eying the finger Eren was jabbing into his chest disinterestedly. “Sorry.”

Eren glowered at him a moment before snorting in exasperation. “You were a terrible kid.”

“I really was,” Levi marvelled. “Now I’m a terrible adult. By the way, I’m really curious how you’re going to change the subject from talking about how cute you thought I was when you were my babysitter to talking about what happened last night without making yourself sound like a criminal.”

He watched Eren’s face go red and then white and then red all over again.

Eren opened his mouth. Eren closed his mouth.

Eren looked at him with a severely abused expression.

“You’re the one who found me,” he said defensively.

“I was,” Levi admitted.

Eren paused. “Wait, did you come looking for me?”

“Yes,” Levi confirmed. “Does that make you uncomfortable?’

He looked uncertain. “Wait, so… with what happened last night-” he started suspiciously.

“You started that,” Levi snapped, feeling the heat rush to his face. “I didn’t-” He snapped his mouth shut, shouldering past Eren to the door. “I’m getting some more goddamn tea.”

He heard the hiss of the door shutting behind him and Eren’s bare feet padding across the carpet.

He was pouring himself another cup when arms snaked slyly around his middle.

“I like you,” Eren murmured. There was a weight on his head that he couldn’t immediately identify as Eren’s cheek.

“You shouldn’t,” he pointed out. “I stole… let’s see, twenty dollars a week for eight months- around six hundred and forty dollars from you. That’s more than half your rent on this place.”

Eren made a pained little sound. “Most of it would’ve gone towards pizza anyway,” he mumbled into his hair. The arms around him tightened.

“I don’t even like pizza,” he commented, sipping his tea.

Soft laughter breezed along his scalp, ruffling his hair. “That’s unnatural.” Eren placed a soft kiss against his temple. “You’re fucking weird. Who doesn’t like pizza? You probably hate kittens and babies, too.”

“I like cats. Children are dirty, but I don’t hate them.” He hummed as Eren’s lips found the line of his throat, and then frowned, squirming away. He turned his scowl on Eren. “No.”

Eren looked sheepish and disappointed but not terribly surprised. “Sorry, I-” he faltered, “I was hoping things had- but it’s okay if you just wanted it to be a onetime thing-”

Levi levelled a flat stare at him. “What?” he muttered, and then rolled his eyes, yanking his shirt collar out to reveal the smattering of marks across his shoulder and collarbone. “No, this is the problem. Look at this shit, Eren. You are a grown-ass man, not a high school student skipping class to fuck around with his girlfriend behind the bleachers. Give me one good reason to let your shitty mouth near my neck again.”

Eren had his lower lip tucked between his teeth in a gesture that was starting to become familiar. His fingers grazed across Levi’s bare shoulder with an odd sort of tenderness.

Levi let the neck of his collar slip back into place, batting away Eren’s hand. “You got something you want to say to me or not?”

Eren’s eyes were disconcertingly gentle. He cocked his head when Eren leaned down, expecting a whisper, not a kiss.

The kiss was unexpected but not unpleasant.

“I like you,” Eren murmured against his lips.

“You shouldn’t,” he muttered back, but Eren just smiled.

***

He was loathe to put a name to their relationship- he liked the false pretence of freedom that came with being able to pretend that Eren didn’t have him exactly where he wanted him.

It became more and more embarrassingly obvious by the day.

“Sit still for a second,” he grumbled, burying his flaming cheek in Eren’s knee.

Eren was looking at him obvious amusement. “Take your time,” he laughed breathlessly.

Levi scowled at him.

This was not what he’d been envisioning when he’d offered to fuck Eren.

He hated being a teenager.

It had been too easy to forget that his fitness or coordination wasn’t the only thing that had been conditioned by experience and age.

His self-restraint wasn’t enough to stop his fresh, almost virginally oversensitive body from almost going over the edge too soon.

Half of this experience had been characterized by him suddenly stopping to grit his teeth in frustration while he calmed his body down, and while Eren had seemed frustrated at first, now he just seemed to find the whole thing quite funny.

“I think you might have higher aspirations than stamina,” he commented, barely containing a smile, and Levi scowled at him. “Full marks for effort, though. You’ve got some serious self-control.”

“I hate being a teenager,” he groused, and Eren laughed openly, tugging him down and rolling them over.

Levi looked up at Eren warily where he was straddling his hips, strangling a groan when Eren rolled his hips in a long, teasing movement.

“You’ll get better with practice,” Eren reassured, resting a hand on his chest to steady himself as he began to ride. “Feel good?”

Levi grunted out a confirmation, choking out a protest when Eren began to ride him with the same impatient intensity as he’d once rode Eren.

The mischief in his eyes told Levi that he knew exactly what he was doing.

Levi came too soon- far sooner than he wanted to, too soon to be anything but frustrating.

‘I hate being a teenager.’

Eren kissed him through the last of his orgasm, smiling a little at his pained hiss of overstimulation when he pulled off.

Levi watched him shift into a kneeling position as he began to stroke himself, and he frowned.

Eren seemed a little startled when Levi knocked his hand out of the way.

“What are you-”

“Shut up,” Levi told him sullenly, slipping his mouth over the tip.

It was a move motivated more by petulance than a desire to give pleasure, but the little sound of astonished pleasure Eren produced was satisfying nonetheless.

He slipped one hand around the base of Eren’s erection and the other between Eren’s legs, rolling his balls in his palm and pressing the tips of his fingers against the skin between balls and asshole.

This, at least, was something his body didn’t need to remember how to do for him to excel at it.

Eren’s hand was heavy in his hair.

“Fucking-”

He growled warningly when Eren’s hips twitched forward, shooting Eren an unimpressed look.

Eren was staring down at him, and all at once he realized that the thumb on his forehead was holding his hair out of his face.

Eren’s other hand was cupping his cheek, thumb tracing the line of Levi’s upper lip where it lay his on dick. It was kind of distracting.

‘And weird,’ he thought, a little disconcerted.

Levi closed his eyes to shut out the way Eren was staring at him and just focused on what he was doing.

A twitch inside his mouth was always a good sign. The myriad of breathless curses and encouragements Eren was spilling were another. The way Eren’s fingers kept tightening in his hair only to loosen, stroking restlessly at his crown was pretty good, too.

He opened his eyes again when Eren’s breath started to go shaky, sucking hard at the head.

“Levi,” Eren said suddenly, voice drawn, “if you’re not planning to swallow, you might want to move.”

He understood a second too late, and cringed at the bitterness that hit the back of his throat. ‘Just great.’

He milked Eren through the rest of it before leaning over the side of the bed and spitting into the garbage can. He had to suppress the urge to gag.

“Fucking disgusting,” he winced.

Eren laughed, leaning heavily against the headboard as he stroked his cheek. “I tried to warn you,” he murmured, and then narrowed his eyes. “Okay, but- where the hell did you learn to blow like that?” he demanded. “Did you get into fucking porn when I was gone, or something?”

Levi snorted.

“I sucked a couple dicks in a past life,” he said candidly, and it was funnier for him because Eren clearly thought he was joking.

Chapter Text

The new rhythm of his life with Eren became an expected routine fairly quickly.

Hang out.

Wake up.

It was no different than it had been before- except for the part where sex had replaced alcohol.

He’d expected to mind that. His past relationship with sex had been intermittent and uncomfortable, like holiday dinners with relatives he only saw twice a year and was expected to pretend to care about.

He didn’t mind it.

He was starting to become concerned about how little he minded it.

His body was beginning to react to Eren’s presence in a disconcertingly Pavlovian way- while he had no difficulty ignoring their peculiar relationship at work and in public, as soon as they were alone together, he found himself seeking contact. Seeking touch.

There was something about Eren’s touch that was worrisomely comforting and desirable. Everything about Eren was becoming worrisomely comforting and desirable- the way he looked, the way he smelled, the way he sounded when he laughed, that little lump in the middle of his left collarbone where it had broken, even the raised white scars that littered his shoulders and upper back like braille, a chronicle of past adolescence.

He didn’t want to think too much about what it all meant.

“You’re cute,” Eren had murmured one night when Levi had wrapped his arms around his waist as he cooked.

He’d just buried his nose into the space between his shoulder blades, breathing in and wondering when it was he’d stopped hating the smell of Eren’s cigarettes so much. “I thought you said I wasn’t cute,” he’d mumbled.

He had felt the vibrations of Eren’s laugh more than he had heard them. “You’re being cute now, though.”

He didn’t want to think about it.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that he couldn’t rely on nothing changing.

A fictional hell may have been consistent and reliable, but life was not. Sooner or later, something was going to happen.

He just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

Eren had left the television on. He hated when Eren did that.

This world was filled with people who were either entirely too serious about trivial things or entirely too concerned with the affairs of others. It was as though the frivolousness of Wall Sina had become endemic the world over.

Levi didn’t watch television. It just made him angry.

“-Mayoral candidate John Patrick Jackson-Brown commented to interviewers yesterday that he has his sights set on bigger things than the municipal officer has to offer, leaving us all wondering-”

Levi didn’t watch television, but he knew that face.

That strong nose. Those heavy eyebrows.

“-a President Jackson-Brown in the maybe not-so-distant future, now how about that? As always, Jackson-Brown continues to welcome public opinion, encouraging potential voters to-”

That artificial smile. It still didn’t reach his sharp blue eyes.

“Erwin,” he murmured numbly.

“-can contact Jackson-Brown’s office by calling the number below-”

“Erwin,” he repeated, and then snapped out of his numb paralysis, scrabbling for his cellphone and jamming in the numbers before they could fade from the screen.

“Four-two-six? Fuck, was it six?” he muttered to no one, mashing the call button and raising the phone to his ear. “Please don’t be a fucking wrong number.”

“This is the office of John Patrick Jackson-Brown, mayoral candidate for the city of-” a tired voice answered, and he hissed with relief.

“Oi,” he interrupted, and then stopped. ‘What if he doesn’t remember?’ he thought suddenly, feeling numbness creep back in. “Um. Look, I’m not-” He paused again, licking his lips indecisively. “Is he in right now?”

“He is, sir. Do you already have an interview scheduled with Mister Jackson-Brown?”

‘What would Erwin do?’ he asked himself, and took a deep breath. “No, I don’t. Can you tell him that Levi’s on the phone?”

The speaker crackled with poor reception and uncertain silence for a moment. “One moment, sir. Please stay on the line.”

He paced restlessly, glad that Eren wasn’t home to see the way he was acting but consumed with anxiety. ‘What if he doesn’t remember? What if he does remember? What am I even going to say?’

“Levi?”

His voice was so painfully familiar that he ran into the edge of the coffee table.

The first thing he said to Erwin with his new mouth was a curse.

“Fuck,” he yelped, almost dropping the phone before fumbling it back up to his ear. “Erwin?”

Erwin’s laugh was musical. “It’s good to hear your voice, Levi,” he said. Levi could hear him smiling.

“You son of a bitch,” he breathed, crushed by the weight of his relief. “What’s this I hear about you running for president or some other shit?”

“In the future, perhaps,” Erwin murmured confidentially. “I’m running for mayor now. It’s all press, mind you- the more television screens across the world I can reach, the better my chances of being found by others. Like you, Levi.”

“Have you found anyone else?” he asked urgently, beginning to pace again. Excitement thrummed in his veins.

He’d always known he wasn’t crazy, but now he knew he wasn’t, without the faintest shadow of a doubt.

“Just you, so far,” Erwin replied. “Have you?”

“Eren,” he reported automatically. “I found Eren Jaeger.”

The second the words left his lips, he wished he hadn’t said them.

“That’s excellent news, Levi. Is he with you? I’d like to speak to him.”

Eren didn’t know. Eren didn’t remember.

Erwin would want Eren to remember. Erwin would find a way to make Eren remember.

“Levi?”

All at once, he realized that he didn’t want him to. ‘What would he think of me if he knew who we were to each other? If he remembered what I’d done?’

He pulled his phone from his ear and looked down at it, watching the numbers rise on its screen as the phone call’s duration stretched on fruitlessly. Erwin’s concerned voice was still echoing through the speaker, calling his name, coaxing him to speak.

His thumb only faltered for a second before punching down on the end call button.

When the timer stopped counting, all of the air left his lungs in a rush.

It had felt so much longer than the few minutes it had been.

“Levi?”

His head jerked up at the unexpected sound of his name being called again. For a split second, he was convinced that Erwin had somehow managed to find him and was the one standing in the door.

Eren eyed his face with open concern, hefting bags of groceries onto the couch and pacing carefully towards him.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Levi watched his eyes flicker from his face to his phone and tossed it recklessly in the direction of the sofa, holding up his newly-empty hands as though they would prove his innocence.

“Nothing,” he said nonsensically, and then, “Yes- I mean, yes, I’m fine. I’m just-”

He could see that Eren was starting to become wary, his eyes darting back towards the phone he’d tossed away with growing suspicion.

He sighed. “I got a call from an old friend,” he said, telling himself that it wasn’t really a lie. He thought about the counter on his screen. “No, I- I called an old friend. We hadn’t talked in a long time. It’s complicated.”

Eren’s eyes were inquisitive but knowing. “Didn’t end on a good note?” he asked softly, running a hand down Levi’s arm.

Levi shot a mildly puzzled look. “It’s not that it didn’t, we were- our relationship was-” He thought long and hard about how to explain something as complicated as dying in the line of military duty and rediscovering his commanding officer was a politician in his next life. “It’s complicated.”

Eren laughed a little. “Sounds like it. You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

He really didn’t.

Eren looked like he was going to say something about that, so Levi put his lips to better use.

***

The fact that Erwin was out there- the fact that Erwin knew he was, too- plagued his thoughts over the next week.

He did everything he could to distract himself.

He called his mother.

She was surprised but pleased to hear that he was living and working with Eren. She found his familiarity and the memory of his trustworthiness comforting. Levi didn’t have the heart to tell her that their living situation was almost certainly not what she was envisioning.

He called Eren’s mother.

She responded to the revelation with a considerably more wry tone of voice. Levi suspected she had some idea about her son’s inclinations, and the few times he’d met her, she’d cocked her head and eyed him with a bright, knowing stare, like a crow examining a fallen ring.

He put in overtime.

His boss was overjoyed- the more he worked, the more Eren did, and Eren’s competitive streak had improved his performance. They were two of his best employees.

He initiated sex.

Eren was overjoyed. It wasn’t something that required explanation.

Anything and everything to stop that mix of paranoia and guilt from creeping into his thoughts.

It sometimes still did, when he woke up in Eren’s arms to find himself overheating and uncomfortable.

In those dark, still hours, Erwin’s voice whispered accusations in his ears.

“What are you doing, Levi?”

He didn’t know.

He had no idea.

He was just running, living day by day.

He knew that Eren saw that he was anxious but wasn’t sure how to approach it- his first attempt at broaching the subject had almost started a fight.

‘What does he expect me to say?’ he thought irritably, weaving through the clumps of slow-walking people littering the sidewalk. ‘I just happen to know someone who’s running for mayor in the next city and I don’t want you to meet him because he’ll say strange things about me?’

He sighed gustily, halting sharply when he turned a corner and suddenly found himself faced with a dense wall of people that seemed to go on for more than a block.

He could hear someone’s voice speaking over the din of the crowd, but it was hollow and tinny in a way that made him suspect amplification. Overhead, some sort of elaborate structure was jutting out from the side of the building they were clustered around. Squinting didn’t help him identify it.

“The hell is this?” he mumbled.

He heard the sunniness of the stranger’s smile before he turned to meet it. “It’s an informational demonstration that’s supposed to educate the public about the military history of the Survey Corps,” she beamed, shoving her hair out of her eyes and shooting him a smile. “The city puts one on at the end of every month, but honestly, just between you and me,” she added in a conspiratorial whisper, “I think a lot of the younger crowd are just here because the instructors help you into the harness if you volunteer for the interactive part. It used to be a huge problem because everybody wanted to get up on stage but nobody actually wanted to risk screwing up and looking stupid- or getting hurt, I guess,” she sighed, elbowing him lightly with a wry grin like they hadn’t just met, “but now they have this thing where if you get into the harness, you’re going up, like it or not, so everybody just crowds the barrier instead. Last year, some kid got hospitalized because of it, so now they make you sign a waiver just in case you die.”

She looked about sixteen, maybe seventeen.

He had no idea how to talk to teenagers.

He stared up at her blankly and her grin started to falter.

“Thanks,” he said finally, shifting uncomfortably.

She laughed. “No problem, man. I’m Charlie, by the way. I can’t believe you haven’t- hey, where are you going?”

She called after him as he elbowed him way through the crowd in a fit of masochistic curiosity.

‘It’s going to be garbage,’ he thought bitterly, ‘it’s going to be more self-congratulatory trash, just like the shit they teach in schools.’

By the time he made it to the front- thanks in part to his small size and in part to his disregard for common courtesy- he found himself staring up at a raised platform occupied by a handful of modelesque men and women in crisp uniforms and improbably polished maneuver gear and a single, nervous-looking youth who was fumbling the last buckle of a duller but more serviceable harness closed over his t-shirt.

The crowd roared around him as the youth raised his fist over his chest in a salute, smiling stiffly in a clear attempt to hide how terrified he felt.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Levi growled, shoving someone away and leaning an arm on the barrier.

“That’s an excellent salute, Michael,” the smiling not-soldier with the microphone said.

Beside him, a girl screamed,

“We love you, Micky!”

at the top of her lungs and Levi flinched.

The kid’s knuckles were positioned closer to his armpit than his heart.

His feet were turned in, pigeon-toed, and so close together his knees were touching.

His shoulders were hunched forward, chin tucked anxiously into his chest.

“How do we like Michael’s salute, folks?”

“What a fucking disgrace,” he muttered.

He stared balefully at Michael the would-be soldier as the people surrounding him erupted into cheers and a few cheeky wolf whistles.

The kid caught his eye and glanced from the instructor beside him and back nervously.

“Michael, are you ready to go up?”

He realized, abruptly, that the structure was a long and elaborate practice arena, complete with padded beams and a fall net.

A woman standing beside the man with the microphone was holding a clipboard and a pen, smile fixed sunnily on Michael’s face.

It was fast becoming clear that neither the sweet-face of the woman in uniform nor the smooth, reassuring tones of the announcer’s voice was going to be enough to shake the fear out of him. Levi curled his lip in disgust.

Michael shot another terrified glance in his direction.

This time, he wasn’t the only one looking.

“Uh-oh! Looks like someone doesn’t agree that Michael here has got what it takes to complete our aerial obstacle course!” His laugh sounded tinny and affected. “Someone you know, Michael? Maybe a rival in love?”

“I- I’ve never met him before,” Michael mumbled into the offered microphone before it was whisked away.

“How intriguing! Maybe a rival in love, then?” he drawled suggestively, jutting out a hip and shooting Levi a speculative gaze. “Why don’t we ask the man himself?” he rumbled. “Come on up here, son- if you think you can do better!”

He knew what was happening.

They were making a spectacle of the one thing that had stood between life and death outside of the walls, and now they were making a mockery of him.

He held the announcer’s stare for a moment before swinging himself fluidly over the barrier.

The crowd behind him closed the space he’d left behind that it’d never been there.

The climb up to the stage seemed to drag on for an eternity- with each step, the smile on the announcer’s face looked a little more fake, his eyes a little more calculating, and by the time Levi had mounted the platform proper, he realized something.

This man hated him.

This man hated all of them.

There was a bitter, petty malevolence in his posture that could not be mistaken.

“Oh,” he said with clearly feigned surprise, “you’re a little…”

His hand wavered at eye level and sank slowly towards a level equal to the top of Levi’s head as he looked out into audience with a comical expression.

The audience laughed. Levi expected it, but he still hated them for it.

“Well, it doesn’t matter! We’ve had girls shorter than you take this challenge- though not by much, I must add,” the announcer dismissed breezily, eyes narrowing mischievously as the audience rippled with laughter again. “What’s your name, son?”

He rolled back on his heels to avoid being struck in the face with the microphone as it was jabbed sharply in his direction.

He watched the face of the man holding it for a moment to ensure he wasn’t about to pull something funny. “Levi,” he murmured, hearing his voice burst from the speakers bracketing the stage in a breath of whispery baritone.

Someone whistled admiringly from beyond the barrier. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two of the instructors exchange a look of surprise.

“Levi…?” the announcer prompted, gesturing invitingly with his free hand and shoving the microphone forward again.

“Kovacs,” he obliged reluctantly.

“Let’s welcome Levi Kovacs to the stage, ladies and gentleman,” the announcer boomed, prompting a mixture of cheers, catcalls both mocking and sincere, and a smattering of booing from- he could only assume- Michael’s friends.

Michael himself looked slightly relieved to have his trial postponed.

“So why do you think you can do better than Michael here, Levi?”

He didn’t bother to stop eying the kid’s shivering form as he answered. “His salute’s wrong. Posture’s terrible.” He hummed disapprovingly. “Plus he looks like he’s about to shit his pants.”

There was a low ‘ooh’ from the crowd as the announcer yanked the microphone away.

“I must remind you, son, this is a public demonstration- you’re going to have to mind your language if you want to participate! Can you do that for me?”

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes and nodded.

“Good,” the announcer boasted, “now, with a little less, ah, flavour, mind telling us exactly what you think is wrong the figure this young man’s cutting?”

He fixed the man behind the microphone with a stare. “I’ll show you,” he told him flatly.

It was a short distance between him and the kid, but with each step, the kid looked a little more nervous.

Levi shot him a tiny, reassuring nod. The tension in his shoulders relaxed incrementally.

He shoved his foot between Michael’s without warning, but much more slowly and less forcefully than he would’ve done to his own troops. “Feet apart- they should be even with your shoulders,” he murmured to him, nudging them outwards. “And for fuck’s sakes, toes forward.”

He pulled the arm Michael had lounging by his waistband up with one hand and shoved the other between his shoulder blades. “Back straight, arm across.”

He paced around to the other side, pulling his fist up over his heart. “Fist up, chin up. Try to at least look the part, kid.”

Michael shot him a surprised glance but obliged.

 “I must admit, I must admit-” the announcer pandered, pacing across the stage towards them and making an exaggerated show of checking out Michael’s improved stance. “He might be on to something. What do you folks think?”

The audience let out a low roar of approval.

“Now the question is, Levi,” he rumbled challengingly, smile still fixed in place, “can you do better?”

He shifted automatically, feet sliding outwards, shoulders rolling back, arms snapping into position. Levi didn’t break eye contact with him until the very last moment, when he turned his face forward, eyes fixed stonily on a point across the street.

More catcalls this time. Someone yelled something he wasn’t sure he’d really heard until the announcer rushed to subdue it.

“Now, now, calm down, folks, this is a public demonstration, not a Friday night at the Mata Hari,” he laughed insincerely, “I will admit it- that is a mighty fine salute you’ve got there, Levi. I feel safer already!”

Another pulse of laughter. Levi held his salute, watching Michael’s arm drift downwards out of the corner of his eye.

“But then again, a fine salute doesn’t make you a fine soldier, now does it?” Levi turned to stare at him again. He smiled back, eyes stony and bitter. “I’m afraid to say we can only send one of you up, so there won’t be any competition today,” he purred, “but if you think you’ve got what it takes, you’re free to convince our Michael here that you should be going up in his place. What do you say?”

The kid was staring at him pleadingly.

He nodded at him and sighed when he began to fumble with his buckles.

The instructors made short work of his harness, and Levi admired that they, at least, seemed to know what they were doing.

“Thanks,” the kid whispered.

He nodded and jerked his head towards the crowd. “Get lost.”

He wasn’t even out of sight before the harness was shoved it into Levi’s hands.

He grimaced at the feel of it.

“What is this,” he muttered incredulously, “plastic?”

“Looks like we’ve got a purist with us today, folks!” the announcer answered, slinging a chummy arm over his shoulder. “Listen, son: while we all know that the harnesses used for aerial maneuvers were once made out of leather-” He shot the crowd an exaggerated grimace of pain “-modern harnesses are made out of a carefully-researched blend of artificial fibres for maximum comfort. We do have a leather harness here with us, as we always do, and you are welcome to choose it if you’d like a more authentic experience, but take warning: there’s a little more, ah,” his smile was devious, “friction with leather.”

He pulled the announcer’s arm off of his shoulders and shoved the bundle of strange-feeling straps and buckles into his palm.

One of the instructors shot him a surprisingly genuine little smile and beckoned him over, already pulling a much more familiar-looking assortment off of a hanger in a sheltered alcove off the edge of the platform.

Behind him, the man with the microphone was still talking.

“And there you have it, folks! I guess we’ll see how today’s challenger stacks up against the real deal- how do you think he’ll do?”

“Ignore him,” the instructor told him softly. “The leather might give you friction burns, even through your clothes, but it doesn’t shift as much as the new stuff. It’ll give you better control if you can handle the burn.”

He let her help him into it, grateful for the moment to be spared the wrathful gaze of the show’s host. She smiled at him again when he frowned and tightened his chest and thigh straps.

“Good luck,” she whispered.

“Well, well, well!” the announcer whistled, beckoning him back up to the front of the stage.

He came reluctantly.

“Speaking of fine figures, why don’t you give us a little turn, Levi?”

Levi stared at him.

The announcer made a little twirling motion in the air with his finger.

He turned just to get it over with.

With his back to the audience, he didn’t have to hide his disgust at their burst of howling and whistling. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the announcer gesturing to his thighs.

“There is something to be said for these straps, folks,” he joked, and Levi grimaced in distaste.

“Are you done?” he snapped.

The man behind the microphone sneered at him. “Alright, son, before you’re ready to go up, we’re just going to need you to sign this waiver- bear with us, folks.”

He heard the click of the microphone shutting off in the same moment that he was handed a pen and clipboard.

He scanned the waiver.

“You got identification?” the announcer asked him unenthusiastically, rich sonorous voice suddenly flat and uninflected. “We gotta be sure you’re over eighteen.”

Levi shoved his wallet at him without ceremony.

He snorted. “Lewis, huh?” His eyes twinkled as he flipped the wallet shut and handed it back. “I can see why you wouldn’t want to advertise that- bit of a… tall order to fill.”

Levi narrowed his eyes at him. He grinned back.

“Sign the fucking waiver so we can get this over with.”

He did.

His ascent was uneventful- they had a generator-powered elevator set up at the edge of the course and it rose slowly and evenly. One of the instructors rode with him. It wasn’t the one who’d given him his harness.

“The goal is to get to the far end and back,” she told him professionally, “There are blades up top- we can’t keep them on the stage proper for safety reasons. If you think you can cut into any of the obstacles on your way across, go for it, but remember: getting there and back is more than most people can do. Don’t overshoot. We’ll have to do a balance test first beforehand, to make sure you can keep upright in the gear, but it’s rare that someone can’t. When we’ve done that, I’ll give you a crash course in handling the gear- everything after that is up to you. Do you understand?”

He grunted acknowledgement, shifting the straps over his shoulders. They felt new, barely broken in.

He could already tell they’d drag.

The balance test went exactly as could be expected. He could still hear the muffled hollering of the crowd below filtering through the acrylic glass walls.

He barely listened to the instructor as he frowned at the dull edges of the blades she’d given him.

“Are you ready?” the muted voice of the announcer shouted. “Maybe he needs some encouragement, folks! How about we-”

He snorted and went.

For a split-second, he considered the possibility that he could have lost his touch.

After that split-second passed, long gone years of practice ascended to a level of near-instinct took over.

Adrenaline pulsed through his system like a drug.

He was flying again.

He pinballed between and off of the obstacles, tearing them open with his dull swords in devastating succession, unaware of the trail of savaged foam and fabric he was leaving behind until his feet hit the wall at the other end.

‘More,’ he thought ferociously, and launched the other way, expending gas without caring how much it took to pinwheel his entire way across the padded wall until he’d shredded the whole thing from end to end.

Only when he once again stood where he’d started, staring into the undisguised shock on his instructor’s face, did he realize that the audience below was screaming so loudly he could barely distinguish the announcer’s amplified voice from the din.

He could hear them chanting something, and he suspected he knew what it was.

“This was a mistake,” he muttered, staring down through the glass.

He began to remove his harness before the elevator even approached the stage- he was already free of it by the time it did.

The crowd was deafening, but he still heard what the announcer said when he shoved his harness at him.

“I owe you an apology.”

He turned away and let himself be ushered off the back of the stage by the instructors.

He made sure he was already gone by the time the man behind the microphone came to offer him a job.

‘That was a mistake,’ he thought again, but why, he wasn’t entirely sure.

Chapter Text

As much as he hated to admit it, the announcer had been right.

Now that the adrenaline had started to ebb, he could feel the fabric of his clothing dragging agonizingly over the blisters forming where the too-fresh straps of his harness had rested.

By the time he reached his apartment building, he was biting back a hiss with every step.

He’d forgotten that his body wasn’t calloused and toughened by windburn and friction burn and scar tissue, not anymore. When he’d died, his harness had fitted him like a second, sparser layer of skin- leather on leather, neither more giving than the other.

He had made himself hard and powerful like he remembered being- like he felt he was meant to be- but he had neglected to condition what lay over that carefully cultivated strength, and it had remained weak and unblemished.

In his new childhood and adolescence, his unfair abundance of combat experience had meant he’d always been the fastest, the fiercest in any conflict, on or off the mat- The Untouchable, they’d called him when they’d thought he wasn’t listening, both for his agility and his aversion to filth.

They’d never landed more than a grazing hit, never made a proper grab, never completed a throw, so he’d never felt the burn of sliding to a halt on anything other than his feet.

He’d forgotten, so he’d worn that unbroken leather tight and close, just the same as he always had.

He had to pause for a moment in the lobby of the apartment building, teeth gritted.

‘Soft,’ he thought angrily, ‘I’m still soft.’

As the elevator rattled slowly upwards, faltering on this floor to let someone on or that floor to let someone off, he wanted to strip everything off more and more with every passing second- the previously unremarkable texture of his shirt felt like burlap against his raw shoulders.

His jeans were sandpaper on his thighs.

When it finally stopped at his floor, he stumbled out of the elevator with a groan, limping down the hallway to his door.

Fetching his key from his front pocket was hell- he burns sent up sharp flashes of pain as his fingertips grazed them in their fumbling.

He missed the lock on his first attempt, and had just begun to lean on the door to steady himself when it opened beneath him.

Ordinarily, he’d be grateful to avoid falling to the ground.

At that moment, however, he wished Eren had let him fall.

He cut off Eren’s surprised and excited greeting with a strangled yowl of pain, shoving him off to lean against the doorframe.

Eren’s smile faltered, his eyebrows knitting together. “Levi, are you-”

Levi stripped off his shirt with a hiss, shouldering his way into the apartment.

Eren let out a sound of shock and concern behind him. “Jesus Christ, your back,” he yelped. Levi could hear the door clicking shut as he shucked off his pants and underwear, muttering curses under his breath. “What-”

“I did something stupid,” Levi gritted out, limping to the bathroom and peeling off his socks.

“I know, I saw.”

He shot Eren a puzzled glance. Eren knocked his fingers aside and turned on the cold water. He didn’t answer- he just plugged the bathtub and then squatted by it, watching the water rise.

Levi sat heavily on the toilet seat, flinching as his weight shifted from his feet to his ass. “What do you mean, you saw?”

Eren shot him an oddly bright-eyed look.

“Your airkour tricks at the demo on Third,” he said eagerly, “somebody was filming the whole thing. Jerry sent me a text about ten minutes ago or so- it’s already going viral, which isn’t really surprising, given how few good blade trick videos are around-”

“What?” he interrupted, too sore to be patient. “Airkour? Blade tricks? What the fuck are talking around, Eren?”

His confusion earned him a funny look. “Airkour, you know, like parkour… but in the air?”

He stared at Eren with narrowed eyes. “That’s stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said decisively, gingerly climbing from the toilet seat into the still-filling tub.

He hissed with shock at the chill of the water and then sighed with relief as it began to numb the burning stripes on his skin.

Eren was staring at him, lips parted like he’d forgotten what to do with them.

“Levi,” he said strangely. Levi tilted his head slightly to let him know he was listening, pushing water over the tops of his thighs to cool them while he waited for the tub to fill.

“Levi,” he started again, tone urgent and oddly excited, “how could you not know- have you never used aerial maneuvering gear before?”

He grunted and sent Eren a lazy look, sinking further into the bathtub in an attempt to submerge more of himself in the cool water. “Not in this lifetime,” he muttered flippantly. “I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as-” he grimaced “-‘airkour’.”

Eren made a weird crowing noise that made him regret saying anything.

“It’s only been a big thing for the last five years or- never mind that, Levi, do you realize what this means?”

He grunted.

“It means you’re one of them.”

He grunted again, only with slightly more enthusiasm. The water rose to the burn across his chest. His groaned with relief.

“You’re a natural- there’ve only been a couple people who’ve picked up the A.M.G. and been able to do shit like that straight off the bat,” he rambled animatedly. “One is this guy down in New Stohess- Gene or John or something- the other was the chick who started the whole movement, but she dropped off the map after someone sabotaged her canisters- they say she had to have one of legs amputated when they exploded, that’s why they made it illegal to build your own or use one without a permit.” His eyes were shining far too brightly for such a grim announcement. “Fuck! There’s no way you’ve never been up in the air before- I mean, you’ve always been a natural at the windows, I should’ve seen it. Where did you learn- where does it come from? Do you just know, somehow?”

He sighed, feeling a little strange at the return of Eren’s renewed admiration for him.

“I told you,” he mumbled, “I had a lot of experience in a past life.”

Eren chuckled at him, arms folded on the edge of the bathtub. “So you were, what, a bratty dick-sucking ace titan-killer in a past life?”

Levi huffed with laughter. “Something like that.”

Eren smiled playfully at him. “I think I would’ve paid a lot more intention in history of they’d been teaching us about you,” he teased. “My hero.”

“Does being your hero mean you’ll get me ice?”

Eren laughed and rose with a stretch. “Comin’ right up, Cap’n Levi.”

Levi watched his back until it disappeared through the door.

“Well,” he murmured to no one in particular, “that was nostalgic.”

***

His newfound fame as the star of a viral internet video changed his life in a subtle but profound way overnight.

He didn’t have much of a personal internet presence- it had been his mother who had convinced him to create an account on a popular social networking site after he once again proved himself utterly incapable of maintaining contact through email- so the real world impact of his sudden notoriety on his life was minimal. His coworkers teased him about it sometimes, but more often than not, their teasing turned on Eren for being the older, more excitable, and infinitely less impressive half of what seemed to most to be an odd but inseparable friendship.

He was very occasionally accosted on the street or in the supermarket by people who recognized him by his distinctive height and build, but they were, for the most part, too intimidated to be disrespectful and too shy to demand an unreasonable amount of his time. Despite Eren’s concerns, he was already comfortable with a certain level of infamy- he actually found himself thinking more than once that it was unexpectedly pleasant to be recognized as someone to be admired for something interesting but harmless rather than someone to be viewed with a toxic mixture of fear, disdain, resentment, and worshipful envy, which was what he’d come to expect from the public in his last life.

The genuine awe he saw in the eyes of nervous strangers and the occasional cashier did mean that he also found himself struck again and again by the insincerity of the world he was living in- it had been four days since the demonstration and every single one had heralded another handful of old acquaintances or high school classmates discovering the barren profile he’d made to appease his mother and gamely insisting on reforging a bond that, in most cases, had never been forged to begin with.

Aside from that, the online impact was something he was only made aware of secondhand- namely, by Eren’s tendency to debrief him on it throughout the day.

From the malcontented corners of the internet, there came an enormous push to claim that the video had been falsified, no matter however many variations of the video from however many different cellphone cameras cropped up to corroborate the evidence.

From the so-called airkour community, there came an explosion of detailed discussion about the physics of the act, about possibility versus ability and kinds of equipment, producing what seemed like innumerable attempts to recreate it, some of them with varying levels of success, all of them falling far short of the mark. Eren commented with apparent disdain that the golden boy of New Stohess hadn’t weighed in at all. Levi didn’t see why he cared.

All of these things meant very little to him- as far as he was concerned, the part of his life that deserved the bulk of his attention was the part he spent at home, pretending the rest of the universe and his past and current transgressions against it didn’t exist.

But life at home had changed, too.

If anyone had asked him exactly how, he would have found himself short on any real explanation.

It had just gone a little crooked, and not in the way that cops or politicians did.

His life had taken a turn for the unusual in a way that he couldn’t easily identify as being either positive or negative, and he suspected it had everything to do with how Eren had gone from looking at him like he was the most desirable thing alive to looking at him like he was the most desirable thing that had ever lived.

On one hand, if he’d ever worried that Eren would eventually get bored of the novelty of having him around, he certainly wasn’t worrying now.

On the other, if he’d ever hoped the lazy pace of their sex lives would taper off into something they did more out of hedonistic boredom than the unceasing desire to tear each other’s clothes off like a pair of hormone-fevered adolescents just discovering sex, he wasn’t especially hopeful anymore.

He was very good at saying no to things he didn’t want to do.

Eren was absolutely not a thing he didn’t want to do.

That was why he found himself pinned against a wall with his legs around Eren’s waist, simultaneously thankful that his burns had finally cooled enough to allow for it and slightly disgruntled by what was happening.

“Wait, why,” he panted, “are you the one wearing that thing?”

The concept of a cock ring wasn’t something he was unfamiliar with, though he’d never used one personally- it was a technique that had already been older than the walls when they’d still been standing.

The subject had come up when Eren’s eager kisses and hopeful questions about the state of his burns had irritated him enough to snap,

“If I could, I’d fuck you until your knees were as badly burnt as my thighs- we could fucking match,”

a declaration Eren had responded to by reminding him that with a little assistance, he probably could.

‘And yet I’m still the one with the dick up his ass,’ he thought petulantly, biting down a groan as Eren’s movements slowed.

Eren laughed against his throat, still for a moment except for the absentminded rolling of his hips. “I missed fucking you,” he murmured. It came out sounding strangely like a confession of love in Levi’s ear.

He had mixed feelings about that.

Levi shifted until he had better leverage, rocking down impatiently to offset the frustrating lack of movement he was suddenly faced with. “It’s only been four days,” he complained, “and what the hell does that have to do with tying off your dick?”

Eren tried to smile and grimace at the same time. The result was a peculiar expression of lopsided chagrin. “Ouch. ‘Tying off’ somebody’s dick sounds like fucking torture,” he commented and then leaned his forehead against Levi’s, apparently unperturbed by his squirming. “I just don’t want- I’d be in you all the time,” he admitted with a wry grin, “if I could be. I don’t want this to be over.”

Levi waited for him to finish that sentence with a,

“yet,”

or a,

“too fast,”

before realizing that what he was thinking wasn’t what Eren had meant.

He snorted, adjusting his hold on Eren’s shoulders as he kicked him in the back with his heel.

“You don’t want this to be over, what, ever?” he asked incredulously. “What, are you going to try cooking dinner while you’re fucking me? That's disgusting. And unsanitary,” he groused.

Eren just laughed and kissed him, hoisting him up from against the wall and stumbling backwards to sit on the edge of the bed. “Something like that.”

Levi grunted and adjusted his position over Eren’s lap, taking the initiative to stop talking shit and ride him. He growled when Eren’s hands flew up to his hips, forcing him into a slower rhythm. “I don’t think anybody would appreciate you showing up to work with your dick in my ass,” he snapped, and Eren smiled.

“Maybe not,” he murmured, “but I’ve always thought it’d be pretty hot to fuck you against one of those windows. Never know who might be watching.”

Levi groaned as Eren pulled his hips down and pushed up into his ass like he wished he bottoming out wasn’t the deepest he could go. “Great, you’re into people watching you having sex,” he huffed, “just fucking great.”

He felt Eren’s laugh more than he heard it, and then they were shifting again, rolling until his back hit the mattress and Eren was half-kneeling on the edge of the bed.

Eren curled his hands over Levi’s knees with a contemplative hum. “I want to try something.”

Levi propped himself up on his elbows to shoot him a dirty look. “Is it going to piss me off?”

The little grin he received as a response made him suspicious, and he narrowed his eyes.

“Probably not,” Eren chuckled. “Do you trust me?”

He did, and Eren knew it.

He let Eren pull one of his legs over his shoulder and the other straight, thigh flush against Eren’s hip, and he squirmed a little when Eren started to move.

“Okay?” Eren asked, leaning his cheek against his ankle.

He nodded. “Different.” The ‘but not bad’ was unspoken but understood.

It wasn’t the most phenomenal position Eren had ever twisted him into, but Eren’s wrecked expression and the way he could suddenly feel just exactly how rigid the cock ring was keeping his erection made him suspect that it was a very good position to be doing the fucking from.

Levi snorted breathlessly when Eren began to move his hand restlessly from his thigh to his hipbone to his stomach, too muddled to know where to put it. He knocked it aside as he began to stroke himself, taking the stimulation of penetration for what it could give him at that angle.

When he moved Eren’s hand away from its place on his abdomen, two things happened.

The first was Eren accidentally pressing his palm down on his throat instead of his chest, which was what Levi assumed he’d been aiming for.

The second was the panic and anger he felt in the split-second it took him to realize what was happening abruptly giving way to the completely unexpected realization that suddenly being unable to breathe properly had sent his heart rate skyrocketing, his adrenaline levels spiking, and his appreciation of the orgasm building between his legs firing off somewhere into the stratosphere.

He had no idea if it took Eren five seconds or fifty to realize his mistake in the absence of any complaints, but the loss of pressure was an indescribable kind of agonizing.

“Oh shit, sorry, I didn’t-”

Nothing had ever tasted sweeter or burned more exquisitely than the air he sucked into his lungs.

He wanted it gone immediately.

“No,” he interrupted, too far gone to be surprised at the hoarseness of his own voice. “No, do that again.”

For a moment he was confused, because Eren stopped everything to stare at him and he couldn’t understand why.

“Are you,” Eren croaked, sounding a little strange in a way he was entirely too messed up to recognize, “asking me to choke you?”

“What?” The word barely percolated through the fading fog in his head until he realized with some displeasure that the fog was fading, which was exactly what he didn’t want. “Yeah,” he said instead, mostly going on faith that it wasn’t something he’d feel embarrassed about later.

“Holy shit,” Eren groaned, and now he couldn’t mistake the almost despairing look he wore. “Holy shit, that’s so fucking hot, Levi, fuck.”

He was pleased to discover that he wouldn’t have time to loose the frustrated,

“So why aren’t you doing it yet?”

he was holding on his tongue when Eren curled his fingers around the front of his neck and pressed down just hard enough to make breathing a struggle but not an immediate danger.

“Tap my wrist if you need to stop,” he heard Eren say, and wondered when he’d closed his eyes. “Levi?”

He forced himself to focus long enough to nod, closing his free hand over Eren’s to hold it in place.

When Eren started to fuck him again, he only half-heard himself try to gasp around the pressure- he’d never stopped stroking himself, not completely, and the feeling of something unbelievably hard pounding into him, the sensation of hips slapping sharply against his ass with every thrust, was an overwhelming burst of stimulation he could barely distinguish from the heat building behind the friction of his palm over his dick and the burning in his lungs.

He was barely thinking.

He only knew his eyes had fluttered open again by the vaguest impression of dark hair and white ceiling.

He was vaguely aware of Eren swearing rapidly and the start of something loud and unidentifiable before everything went white behind his eyes- he half-felt his back arching off of the bed and his balls tightening and he couldn’t distinguish his hammering heartbeat from the pulse of ecstasy that seemed to go on forever until he was cognizant enough to be aware of blinking away blurriness and gasping in fresh air.

He had no idea when it was that Eren had pulled out, stripped off both cock ring and condom, and brought himself to orgasm, but Eren was already clean and wiping Levi’s stomach with the tissues from the bed stand when he came down enough to think.

Eren cracked a hesitant grin. “Are you okay?”

He tried to answer, but all that came out was a confused mess of sound, and Eren laughed.

“You’re fucking shaking,” he said, and Levi realized he was. “You came so hard you’re fucking shaking, holy shit.”

“That was insane,” Levi agreed, hoarse and increasingly exhausted. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

A smile started to play around Eren’s lips, but his strange expression didn’t fade. “I’m kind of afraid somebody’s going to call the cops. You, uh- you were screaming.”

“I don’t-”

“You screamed, Levi,” Eren said frankly, “I didn’t think you could with my hand on your neck like that, but you were. I didn’t even know you could be that loud.”

He tried to sit up and failed, shaky arms and overworked stomach muscles failing him. “I don’t scream,” he objected defensively.

Eren just shook his head. “Apparently you do when you get off so hard you don’t even remember,” he laughed. “Look, I’m not going to lie, I’m kind of glad you didn’t know that was a thing you’d do.”

Levi shot him a puzzled glance.

“That was really fucking hot, but it also kind of scared the shit out of me,” Eren told him with a crooked little grin. “Shit like that looks more like an exorcism than an orgasm when you’re not expecting it.”

Levi could feel heat rising in his face as he caught sight of the back of Eren’s hand. “Did I-”

Eren glanced down at the thin welts lacing his skin with apparent disinterest. “I don’t think you meant to.”

He was at a loss.

Eren was not.

“So,” he said conversationally, “choking, huh?”

Levi rolled over and pretended Eren had ceased to exist.

Chapter Text

“Hey, hotshot, you got a second?”

It took Levi a second to realize that he was being addressed. He looked up from his lunch with a frown.

His supervisor made a beckoning motion. “Someone’s asking for you. Downstairs, in reception. Don’t take all day.”

Levi watched him go with a blank feeling of surprise.

“This is new.” Eren chuckled at his puzzled expression. “You weren’t expecting anyone?”

He wasn’t. “It might be my mother,” he mumbled, neatly rewrapping his meal and tucking it back into its container. “Give me a minute.”

He didn’t bother checking to see that Eren had acknowledged his words before he paced first towards the elevator and then towards the stairs. He and Eren worked quickly and rarely had to stop mid-job, so it wasn’t rare for them to take lunch in the company building between places, but he’d never had a visitor before.

He trotted down the stairs with his hands tucked into his pockets, eyebrows furrowed.

‘I haven’t visited home since, what, July? It’s been three or four months,’ he mused. It made sense for it to be her- his mother had caught wind of his exploits at the demonstration a day or two prior, and they’d been forced to have a long talk about how, yes, Levi had been lying about going on a road trip with friends, but no, he hadn’t actually intended to stay here indefinitely, it had just sort of happened.

It had been a messy conversation filled with more revelations than he’d been prepared for.

His mother had taken the news of his sexuality well- she expressed feelings of concern that he was lonely in the past and was, it seemed, simply happy to hear that he was being cared for and looked after.

She hadn’t taken the news that it was his childhood babysitter quite so well, and he honestly couldn’t blame her.

His inability to provide a plausible explanation for tracking Eren down after years without contact called into question the nature of their relationship for the eight months his mother had been leaving him in Eren’s care, so he couldn’t reasonably fault her for having an unpleasant gut reaction to the discovery.

He exited into the lobby of the building with a sigh, already steeling himself for the guilt that inevitably came with being the subject of maternal concern.

When he didn’t see her, he paused, confused.

When he stopped looking for her, he saw.

The proud carriage of those broad shoulders hadn’t changed- he’d walked behind them too many times to mistake their shape or the way they curved into the slope of a powerful neck, skin fading into carefully trimmed blond hair.

He stood very still, just staring.

He considered the wisdom of just walking away.

He could go back and finish his lunch- pretend he never saw him.

“You don’t seem happy to see me,” Erwin commented lightly, shooting a glance at him over his shoulder before tucking his phone in his pocket and turning to face him.

If he’d been rooted to the spot with indecision before, now it was the hawklike, superficially affable stare Erwin had fixed him with that held him still.

“That depends,” Levi started carefully. “Why are you here?”

To his credit, Erwin looked genuinely surprised and a little hurt by that question. His mouth was still smiling inoffensively, but his eyes were frowning.

“Is it so wrong to want to see an old friend?” he asked, heavy eyebrows drawing together. “It’s been a long time, Levi.” Something odd came over his features.

Levi saw Erwin’s eyes beginning to flicker over his face and turned away, waving a dismissive hand. “Sorry.” Eren would come looking if he lingered too long. He wasn’t ready for that. “I need to tell my boss I’m taking the afternoon off.”

A glance back told him two things:

The first was that Erwin was smiling as though he was pleased by Levi’s act of accommodation.

The second was that he very clearly suspected it wasn’t done for the reasons he’d have liked it to be.

***

He’d turned off his phone to avoid complications. He knew Eren would give him hell for it later.

It wasn’t high of his list of concerns at the moment.

He’d pushed them to keep moving, to keep Erwin’s increasingly inquisitive stare from lingering too long, but he’d known from the beginning that it was inevitable that they’d find a place to settle in- locally, they were both immediately recognizable, and the jarringly different natures of their respective claims to fame made them an extremely odd pair for the public to be seeing together.

They’d barely sat down and ordered their drinks in the restaurant when Erwin tiled his head to the side, eyes sliding from the corners of his mouth to the folds of his eyelids.

“Levi,” he said companionably, “this may seem like a strange question-”

“Nineteen,” he answered wearily, and then paused. “Almost twenty, actually. Twenty in November.”

Erwin’s look of blank, unaffected shock reminded him. “I see.”

‘He hasn’t found anyone else yet. He thought I’d be older.’

He was suddenly confronted with the fact that he’d hung up on Erwin. It made him feel profoundly guilty.

“How did you find me?” he mumbled, staring into his teacup as the server set it down in front of him.

Erwin sounded surprised. “The same way you found me, I assume- through your media impact. Your name came up in a discussion of the impact on youth culture the renaissance of decommissioned military technologies as tools for entertainment is having,” he replied, steepling his fingers over his cup. “The first time this happened, I thought I’d found someone, but there was an accident. She was gone before I had a chance to contact her, and I discovered afterwards that she was older than I thought she had to be if she was who I’d thought she could be, so I stopped trying- I hadn’t heard anything about it since.”

Levi frowned. “According to-” He paused, and he saw Erwin notice. “It’s always been around,” he said stiffly. “There were still people doing it before I made the mistake of letting myself be a part of that demonstration.” He eyed him suspiciously over the rim of his cup. “You can’t have missed that. I know you.”

Erwin gave him a tired little smile. “Things are different here, Levi,” he chuckled. “It may be harder to keep anything secret now than it was before, but there’s so much happening that it’s impossible to see it all. This world is a much bigger place than ours ever was, and it’s constantly speaking. I have to prioritize what I see.” He leaned forward over the table. “Your age makes it clear to me that this is going to be a great deal more complicated than I’d originally thought.”

Levi quirked an eyebrow at him.

“With different names and the complications that necessarily come with telling anyone that you have memories of a past life, I was relying on the assumption that our births would remain consistent to their previous incarnations- maybe not to the day, but to the year, at least in relation to each other,” he admitted. “Without that, nothing remains but to wait.”

He didn’t particularly like the sound of that. “Wait for what?”

Erwin shot him an appraising look. “How old is he?”

“What?”

“Eren Jaeger,” he said again, “you said you’d found him. How old is he?”

He knew it had been coming, but his mouth still went dry with anxiety. “Twenty-six.”

Erwin hummed with amusement, eyes smiling. “That must be very strange for the both of you.”

He couldn’t even muster a smirk.

“Levi,” Erwin said softly, an odd look in his eye, “what aren’t you telling me?”

He stared down into the smudged bottom of his teacup and set his jaw. “He doesn’t remember.” He closed his eyes at Erwin’s sharp inhale. “He does, on some level, but they’ve convinced him he doesn’t. He doesn’t know who he is, let alone who I am.”

Erwin was very quiet for what felt like a very long time.

The server came to ask them if they’d like to order.

Erwin smiled and said a lot of nonsense he paid no attention to.

The server left.

Levi watched her flit around the other tables, casting them curious glances and looking away when he caught her.

“I’d assumed he’d found you,” Erwin murmured finally.

“It’s complicated,” he murmured back.

He could hear the frown. “If he doesn’t remember, how did you find him?”

“It’s,” he snapped, and then sighed, “complicated.”

Erwin gestured broadly, leaning back in his chair. “I have time.”

He sighed heavily, staring sullen holes in the table. “It was an accident. He was my-” the word churned uncomfortably on his tongue “-babysitter.”

Erwin froze in a way he remembered all too well, nostrils flaring even as his polite smile cemented into place. He could see Erwin’s jaw muscles working furiously as his eyebrows rose incrementally.

“Fucking hilarious, I know,” he snapped.

“Having an ex-subordinate unknowingly being put into a position of power over me would be awkward, to say the least. I can imagine how that turned out.”

Levi bared his teeth, feeling heat rush to his face and hating it. “No, you can’t. Our relationship to one another was never the problem- but I was eleven, Erwin, and he was eighteen. I was twelve when he went away to college, and sixteen when I found out he wasn’t coming back.” All the buried frustrations of the years began to burst out from behind the seal he’d used to bottle them up. “I was helpless- I was too young to follow him, so I tried to forget, but this world-” He was dimly aware that he was ranting. He didn’t care. “Nothing about who we were means anything here, but Eren- even if he didn’t remember, he was something familiar, and I couldn’t fucking take it knowing he was out there- the only fucking thing in my life that made me feel like anything had a point was out there while I had to sit around pretending to give a shit about grades or relationships or-” He ran his hands through his hair, suddenly aware of how fast his heart was beating in his chest. He took a deep breath to calm himself. “There’s no stakes to anything here. Everyone acts like there’s so much to lose,” he muttered, “but there’s nothing. Nothing matters. Even living in the gutters is safer than it used to be- someone goes around murdering the homeless, they call him a serial killer.”

He fixed Erwin with a bitter stare.

“When I was on the streets, you had to be killing people who mattered for anybody to get scared about it. Plenty of people went ‘hunting’ in the underground- you’d be lucky if anyone noticed. And nothing’s really changed about that.” He shoved his cup away, slouching in his chair. “It’s just entertainment- people don’t give a shit, they just want to feel something, so they print newspapers that read like fucking horror novels. We hear about more, but anybody below the elite is still faceless. We don’t matter. The only thing that meant anything before was escaping that and now it’s everywhere. Eren was the only thing left.”

Erwin’s eyes were curious, contemplative. “You found him again.”

He could tell it wasn’t a question, so he didn’t answer.

“You found him again,” Erwin repeated, “but he only knows you as the child you were.” There was something happening in the dark space behind his pupils- a slew of calculations. “But if you’re still here, that means he is, too.”

“Get to the point,” he growled.

“If he doesn’t remember, why is he keeping you?” He squinted like there was something he couldn’t quite see. “And why am I getting the impression you have no interest in helping him remember?”

He tried very hard to hold Erwin’s piercing stare, but there was an irrational part of him that feared he’d read the truth from his eyes, so he found his gaze skidding sideways, searching absently for their server like it would disguise his discomfort.

“What are you hiding?”

“I’m not hiding anything,” he lied. It sounded steady to him, but he knew Erwin could hear things in his voice he couldn’t. “Maybe I just think it’s better for him not to remember,” he tried, and noted with approval that it sounded a little stronger as far as excuses went.

Erwin hummed. “I can think of a dozen reasons why you wouldn’t want him to remember,” he said softly, “but I like to think I know you well enough to see that none of them are the cause of this.” Levi swallowed against dryness. “What are you hiding from me, Levi?”

Levi caught his stare, jaw clenched. “Why should I tell you?”

The sad look that earned him felt like a punch to the gut. “I’d say because we’ve known each other long enough to trust one another with our mistakes,” he answered, “but clearly that’s not good enough for you. More will come, Levi, and they will find you- and Eren. I can’t promise they’ll be as understanding as I can promise to be.”

He stilled. “What do you mean, ‘more will come’?”

“My political fame has only gotten me so far- I’m known in the adjacent states, but beyond that, my reach is limited,” Erwin said crisply. “Your video has gone viral on an international scale. If there are others, they will see it, and they will recognize you.” He paused, unfolding his napkin over his lap as the server set down a plate in front of him. “Anyone interested in finding others will come here looking for you.”

 The air seemed to have left the room.

He struggled to breathe.

“What are you hiding, Levi?”

***

He couldn’t make the words come out.

In the end, he did something stupid to compensate.

“So what does Eren think his name is, if he doesn’t remember?” Erwin asked him idly as they watched the floor numbers rise one by one.

He still hadn’t turned on his phone.

“Nick,” he drawled, scowling in distaste. “But I still call him Eren. He’s used to it.”

Erwin let out a puff of laughter. “I’m assuming he calls you Levi, as well. What did they call you when you were born?”

He mumbled his response.

“Pardon?”

“Lewis,” he muttered.

Erwin’s shoulders rose convulsively and Levi knew he was trying not to laugh. “Like, ah, the infamous Lewis of the Survey Corps?” he chortled.

Levi just hunched further into himself, scowling.

Erwin smothered his smile tastefully. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

The elevator shrilled as it slowed and stopped at their floor.

The walk to Eren’s apartment felt longer than the walk to Eren’s trial had.

Knowing he’d have to do something unsavoury somehow wasn’t as gruesome a prospect as facing up to what he’d already done.

He’d barely fumbled his key into the lock before the door burst inwards.

“Levi?” Eren demanded, and then sagged against the doorframe when he spotted him. “You scared the shit out of me, I thought you’d been- who the fuck are you?”

Levi cringed at his offended tone, but Erwin seemed unruffled.

“John,” he introduced with a practiced smile, “Eren, I assume?”

Eren snorted. “Nick Mardin- the only one who gets to call me that is him,” he said, jerking his head in Levi’s direction.

Levi found his defensiveness surprising. He was normally quite friendly- maybe even overwhelmingly so. “Eren, what-”

“How do you know Levi?”

Erwin shot him a curious glance. “I’m a friend,” he said affably. “May I?”

Eren’s narrow expression as he let them into the apartment sat strangely in his mind.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

***

He tried multiple times to pull Eren aside and ask him where the hell his sudden urge to be passive-aggressive had come from, but every time, Eren met his questions with a dark look and a,

“We’ll talk later.”

There was something about the combination that made him very nervous in a way he couldn’t recall being- it wasn’t an anxiety that had to do with his safety or continued wellbeing, just a low, persistent hum of nauseous apprehension that grew heavier and more sickish with each passing hour.

The closest approximate he could think of was the way his teachers had made him feel when they’d called his mother in to collect him for fighting- a fear not for himself or his future, but for the way she’d look at him.

It was only after they’d sat down to dinner with Erwin- at Eren’s insincere insistence- that the tension started to fray.

He sat between them and nearly spilt his tea on himself when Eren reached over to drag his chair closer.

“What the fuck,” he snarled, “is your problem?”

The second he said, he realized Eren wasn’t looking at him- he was looking over him, at Erwin, with a venomous expression.

When he glanced back, Erwin just had one heavy eyebrow lifted in amusement.

There was a thick silence stretching between them, and he was fast approaching being unable to cope with being caught in the center of it.

He broke it by standing and shoving his chair back, sending it across the floor with a horrible screech. “What the fuck is wrong with you tonight?” he snapped, staring down at Eren where he sat. He made a warning sound when Eren opened his mouth. “And don’t give me ‘we’ll talk later’, we’re talking now- what the hell is your issue?”

Eren’s face was starting to look stormy. “Oh, you want to do this now? Okay. My issue is that you stepped out at lunch, saying your mom had dropped by downstairs, and then I come down when we’re due to start our next job to find Henry telling me you’ve taken the rest of the afternoon off- without even shooting me a fucking text,” he growled, crossing his arms across his chest. “I figured whatever, you’re an adult, so I left you a message asking you to let me know what was going on when you got a second- and then work ended, and you were still fucking gone, not a word. I tried calling you and it went straight to voicemail- I called work to try and figure out if anyone knew where you’d taken off to, and lo and fucking behold, Georgia from reception tells me you met up with some blonde asshole-” he gestured disdainfully in Erwin’s direction “-and decided he was more important than work. And now you’ve brought him here like there’s no fucking issue.”

Levi blinked. “I don’t-”

“You couldn’t call me? Couldn’t let me know you weren’t just fucking running off? You showed up out of fucking nowhere, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if you disappeared the same way, would it?”

Levi just stared at him blankly.

“You seem very convinced that Levi might have a reason to go running off,” Erwin murmured. He flinched.

Eren’s stare was toxic.

“He’s my boyfriend, I don’t need a reason to worry about him.”

Levi closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“Oh,” Erwin said softly from behind him.

Chapter Text

As Erwin murmured,

“Well, this changes things somewhat,”

behind him and Eren growled,

“Who the fuck is he, Levi?”

in front of him, Levi felt something that was stretched taut inside of him snap somewhere along its frayed length.

It didn’t break with a sound like a gunshot, or pop like a balloon- the last threads holding it together separated silently, and whatever he’d had suspended on the other disappeared over the edge unseen with only the suggestive whisper of rope sliding over asphalt to mark its passing.

He felt a serene fury settle over him and realized what it was.

He had stopped caring.

 He was so angry and stressed and guilty over everything that had happened that the part of him that felt those things had surrendered.

He just couldn’t care about this anymore, and every thought his anxieties had been holding at bay tumbled into his mind like so many toy blocks, oddly unthreatening without the emotional impact.

“Eren,” he said calmly, eyes still closed, “this is what you do, isn’t it?”

Eren stopped snarling questions at him just long enough to utter a puzzled,

“Huh?”

Levi opened his eyes and looked at him.

Without the rosy halo of nostalgia colouring his face, Eren’s face was a mess of almost-invisible acne scars and faded freckles. He’d reached the age where years of careless sun exposure and an on-and-off relationship with cigarettes meant his skin beside his eyes had started to show the first signs of crow’s feet.

There were thin lines developing between his eyebrows. Levi could see the expression that had caused them- the way the skin puckered as Eren drew his eyebrows together and down.

Frustration, confusion, a stubborn refusal to accept when things weren`t going his way.

‘Still a child in the ways that matter,’ he thought absently.

“You’re worried about me taking off because that’s what you’d be doing in my position,” he murmured, not breaking eye contact. “That’s why Antonio was so nervous when you took me in. He told me about how you met, but he didn’t tell me you were in a relationship when you went home with him. Maybe he didn’t know for sure.”

Eren looked nonplussed. “Wha- that’s not-”

“This,” he repeated, “is what you fucking do. It’s what you’ve always done- I can’t believe I didn’t see it. It bothered me that he never seemed to blame me for the shit that was going down- he knew, right from the beginning, what was coming.” Levi stared past Eren and out the kitchen window. The city was dark. He could see a silhouette moving in a lit window across the street. “You went home with him and then stayed in his apartment for a week because the relationship you were in was falling apart,” he mused, “but you weren’t going to leave it unless you had something else lined up. You did the same thing to him with me, so he knew it was coming.”

The revelation was a bizarrely heady one. He’d never been much of a philosopher, but he could see the events unfolding in his mind unbidden.

“You don’t like being alone, but after a while they start treating you like the sun doesn’t shine out of your ass, so you stay just long enough for something new to come along and then you jump ship the second you can. Even that girl you dated- you already knew you weren’t straight. She wasn’t a cover, you just needed somebody to fall back on. The only reason you let things with Tonio end before you started shit with me was because you knew I had nowhere to go.”

He felt like he could see everything.

It was actually kind of pissing him off.

“But you’ve always been like this, haven’t you?” he muttered, half to himself. “You’ve always needed everyone to need you. That’s why you always worked so fucking hard, the real reason you never seemed too broken up by the pressure everyone was putting on you- you didn’t care that we were putting the weight of the fucking world on your shoulders, you just couldn’t stand the thought of being expendable. You needed to be important. Your trainee squad, my squad, Hanji, Erwin- you did as much as you had to make them rely on you and then you went right the fuck back to bending over backwards for me because I was the only one who wasn’t giving you what you wanted.” He looked back to Eren’s face and found it stricken with confusion. “You’ve always fucking been like this, but here, you’ve got nothing to offer except your dick, do you? You don’t give a fuck who he is-” He tilted his head back in reference. “You’re just afraid I’m pulling the same shit you always do. You’re afraid I’m leaving you alone before you’ve got something else lined up.” He laughed without really meaning to. “Christ, I can’t believe I didn’t fucking see it. I always knew you were a fucking mess, but I never bothered to think about it because it had nothing to do with me.”

“I-”

“Looks like you finally got what you always fucking wanted, doesn’t it?” he snorted. “You got me to look at you like you were the only fucking thing that mattered, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it.” He tore his gaze away and scrubbed at his scalp with his fingertips, apathy giving way to restlessness. “Fuck. Fuck.”

He was reluctant to turn around and face his former commander, but he did.

Erwin was looking at him with exactly the look he’d expected he would.

‘This is a new side of you,’ his thoughtful expression seemed to say, ‘I don’t think I’ve met this Levi before.’

“I have,” Eren said suddenly, “absolutely no idea what the fuck is even going on anymore.”

Levi shot him a narrow look. “When have you ever had any fucking idea what was going on, Jaeger?”

Erwin interrupted Eren’s protest with a polite cough. “What are your feelings on the subject of reincarnation, Nicholas?”

The annoyed look he received in response wasn’t enough to prepare Levi what came out of his mouth.

“Oh, great,” he snapped, “so that’s what this is. You been fucking encouraging him-” he jerked his head in Levi’s direction “-and now he’s pulling weird shit because you’ve been telling him you knew each other in a past life, is that right?”

The air in the room seemed to go very warm and still very quickly. His vision was narrowing, everything in his peripheries going dark like he was drowning.

“Look, Lewis is a fucked up kid, I’ve known him and his mom long enough to know that,” Eren continued, his voice trickling into Levi’s ears from what seemed like an impossible distance, “but he’s a good kid, and the shit that goes on in his head is harmless- who the fuck do you think you are to be screwing with him like this? Are you some sort of sick asshole who gets his kicks by convincing kids who have trouble dealing with reality that you’re their long-lost lover from another life, or something? Fuck off. Get out of my house.”

He could barely breathe.

“Eren,” Erwin murmured very softly, “that may have been the most unwise thing you have ever said in any lifetime.”

He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“What?” When Eren’s eyes fell on him, the faint lines forming between his eyebrows deepened. “Lev-” He paused, closing his eyes like he was pained by the act of self-correction but thought it a necessary evil. “Lewis?”

‘I want to kill you,’ Levi thought viciously.

He took a very deep breath, raised his palms as though he was surrendering- which, in a way, he was- and said, very evenly,

“I’m done.”

He could hear Eren’s frown. “Huh?”

“I’m done with this,” he said flatly. “You’re on your own.” He shoved Eren back roughly when he moved to intercept him, shooting Erwin a sharp, disinterested nod. “He’s all yours. You can have him. I’m not fucking doing this anymore.”

He could hear Eren struggling with Erwin as he grabbed his car keys from the front hall, but he didn’t look back, not even when what sounded like a punch being thrown was followed by Erwin’s soothing voice fading into a grunt mid-word.

He just kept walking.

He punched the key for the elevator and then walked down the stairs instead.

He could hear Eren’s voice echoing after him.

He knew that later, he’d probably care.

But in that moment, he didn’t, so he kept walking.

***

He spent the next fourteen days sleeping in his car and living sparingly off the cash he’d stashed under his dashboard for emergencies.

He showered at the local gym, relying on his fit body and strong presence to blend in with the regulars- as it turned out, he was recognized by most of the staff as that Levi Kovacs, and no one thought to question whether or not he was a member, even if they couldn’t recall seeing him there before.

He drove just to change the scenery- it bothered him to stay in the same place too long.

So most of the time, he didn’t.

Sometimes he wished he hadn’t left his phone in the apartment.

Most of the time, he didn’t.

He tried not to think of Eren.

And most of the time, he didn’t.

He found himself sitting in a park on the fourteenth day, counting what little money he had left and thinking about going home.

‘It’d make her happy.’

“Excuse me,” a girlish voice said loudly from far too close, and he jerked his head up in alarm, almost unable to believe she’d managed to sneak up on him. “Are you Levi Kovacs?”

***

He wasn’t in the habit of accepting charity from people.

He supposed it said something about his current mental state that he found himself sitting across a table from the girl and her friends, eating a meal he knew someone else was paying for.

Her name, he discovered, was Annie, and he took comfort in the fact that she looked nothing like the Annie he’d known in another lifetime.

Her friends, who had been hanging back when she’d approached him, were Mikaela and Quinn, but he kept forgetting which was which.

They were fans of his, but not the kind that were cowed into silence by his presence.

He supposed he looked a little too pathetic for that after they’d found him counting his change on a park bench, anyway.

“So how old are you?” Mikaela or Quinn asked him, and he sighed.

“Nineteen,” he answered woodenly, and then blinked. “Wait, what’s the date today?”

“The twelfth,” Annie told him eagerly. “Why?”

“November twelfth?” He looked down at his plate with a feeling that could’ve been something akin to dark humour if he wasn’t so numb. “Oh. I turned twenty yesterday.”

Annie’s friends crowed with delight, and Annie herself smiled, flashing neat orthodontics with a set of discreetly coloured bands, but he detected a tinge of concern in the way her eyebrows puckered together.

He didn’t like the expression. It reminded him of someone he wasn’t willing to think about.

“Happy birthday,” she grinned, and then looked thoughtful. “You were born on Veteran’s Day?”

He raised his cup to his lips to obscure how little motivation he had to disguise how blank he felt. “It was that or Christmas,” he muttered, not caring that it wouldn’t make sense to them.

They laughed anyway, and it was strange, because their laughter didn’t bother him like he thought it would.

There was something refreshingly pure about them- they weren’t soldiers. They’d never be soldiers. They laughed at frivolous things and never spent longer than they had to thinking about things that caused them distress.

He looked at them, these giggling girls who weren’t quite women yet, these almost-adults with their tasteful braces and their carefully concealed pimples and their unaffected innocence, and for the first time in his second lifetime, Levi wished he didn’t remember.

“Le-evi,” the one he thought might be Mikaela said cheerfully, drawing out his name like a little sister begging for pocket money, “how come you haven’t-”

“Lewis,” he said miserably, staring through them so they blurred into a haze of different shades of brown and black and cream. “My name is Lewis.”

They were silent for a beat, confused by the turn the conversation had taken.

Annie was the first to respond.

“What, like the war hero?” she cried, hands lifting from the table in delight. “You’re kidding. So not only are you, like, the best airkour genius ever, you were born on Veteran’s Day and your parents named you after the Captain Lewis? That’s so funny!”

“Hilarious,” he mumbled, actually mustering something close to a smile to just stop her eyebrows from furrowing together a little more.

“Annie, ‘Kaela, I gotta, y’know,” the one he’d thought was Mikaela but turned out to be Quinn interjected, fidgeting in her seat meaningfully. She shot him a worried look. “I can go alone, though, it’s not-”

“No, ‘Kaela knows where the bathrooms are here, don’t you?” Annie soothed. “I’ll stay with Lev-” She laughed, raising a hand apologetically. “Sorry, Lewis. I’ll stay with Lewis and keep an eye out for our waitress, okay? Just don’t fall in,” she laughed.

He saw her smile and the way her eyes were still worried and realized, abruptly, that this girl was already well on her way to adulthood.

She was learning to lie with her face in a way few teenagers he’d known ever had.

He watched her friends trot towards the bathrooms and looked away when they paused in their whispering to glance over their shoulders at him.

“Are you okay?”

He’d known it was coming.

A part of him wanted to tell the truth, to own up and just say,

“No, not even slightly, maybe not ever again,”

but the rest of him had never owned up to such a thing in all the years since either of his births, so all he said was,

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

She was old enough inside to see that something was wrong and hide the knowledge from her younger-hearted friends, but she was still too young yet to see that he was lying, and the crease between her eyebrows smoothed.

“Good.” He watched her hands fidget and realized something else- even tired and empty and near-broke, he was still intimidating. Without her friends behind her, her voice had turned soft and shy.

“Thank you,” was all he could think to say.

She laughed and told him it was fine, that they’d been expecting a fourth anyway, that it was nothing to buy a famous person like him lunch.

It wasn’t really what he had been thanking her for, but he didn’t correct her.

“Annabelle, where are- holy shit, is that Levi Kovacs?” someone said just as Annie opened her smiling mouth to say something else, and he was just as slow to respond as he had been when she’d shown up, following her eyes to someone standing just outside the fenced edge of the restaurant’s patio.

An older teenager, sporty, dark-haired and familiar.

“I’ve met you before,” he accused, narrowing his eyes at her.

Her grin only deepened the sense of familiarity. “Oh shit, you do remember me! Charlie, yeah?” she reminded, leaning on the fence and gesturing to herself. “We met at the demo- man, I really thought you didn’t know a goddamn thing about what was going on, too, surprised the hell out of me when you went up, you got me fucking good,” she laughed and then jolted up, eyes widening. “Oh man, oh shit, you know John-one-oh-four is putting on a demo over on the corner of Pixis and Fourth to try and get your attention, right? He’s been at it for the past couple hours- my friend said he thought he saw her, too, it’s a big fucking deal, everyone’s there, you need to come see-”

“Charlene, we’re in the middle of lunch and ‘Kaela and Quinn are still in the bathroom,” Annie complained, “you can’t just run off with him-”

He heard someone call his name from somewhere down the street and turned to look over his shoulder.

Their bickering faded into nothing more than noise in his ears when he spotted the familiar figure across the street.

Eren was grimacing, eyes flickering from him to the busy street as he pranced impatiently on the edge of the far sidewalk, waiting for an opening to dash across.

Erwin was lingering behind him, his stare fixed and unreadable over his impassive smile.

“I want to go,” he said suddenly, turning around and interrupting their argument. “Let’s go.”

He stood and swung himself over the fence in the same motion, already walking briskly ahead of Charlie the second he made out which direction she meant to go in.

She jogged up beside him, laughing. “Hell yeah, this is going to be sweet,” she grinned. “I still can’t believe you ran into my fucking sister, what are the odds-”

He grunted indifferently, glancing behind him to see if Eren had crossed yet.

He hadn’t, not really. He was trapped in the middle of the street.

Levi walked a little faster anyway. “Which way on Fourth?” he barked, startling his new companion from her idle rambling.

“What? Oh, right on Fourth, but- hey, wait up!”

He was half-running by the time he reached the corner, and he began to sprint the second he turned it.

He could see the crowd.

Crowds were good. He could lose himself in a crowd, especially if they recognized him.

He normally hated the claustrophobic crush of being inside a crowd of admirers, but these circumstances were different.

The sight of Eren’s face had dragged the exact mixture of pain and longing he’d been trying to suppress out of him.

He wanted to put as many barriers between himself and that face as possible. People would do fine.

They’d already started to spot him by the time he hit the tattered edge of the crowd. A path was starting the form.

‘Good,’ he thought desperately, barely breaking his pace as he rolled over the hood of a poorly parked car. ‘Get the fuck out of my way.’

If the adrenaline hadn’t been roaring in his veins, he may not have seen him coming.

But it was, and he did.

Jean Kirschtein fell out of the sky like an arrow, barely stumbling as he hit the ground. The crowd parted around him in a circle like his impact had made a shockwave.

“Captain!” he yelled.

Levi didn’t think he’d ever seen the kid so pleased to see him.

Just as Jean began to make his way towards him, he saw movement in the corners of both eyes.

He looked left and saw Eren battling his way through the opening in the crowd where it had begun to drift shut behind him.

He looked right and saw Mikasa Ackerman.

He only had enough time to notice the grey in her dark hair and that the casing of her prosthetic leg had been painted with the crest of the Survey Corps before he saw Mikasa Ackerman see Eren Jaeger.

She began to sprint, parting the crowd like a knife.

‘He doesn’t remember,’ he thought, and the bit of him that had simply given up and lay down to die when Eren had accused it of being delusional ached sympathetically. ‘She’s his sister, and he’s not going to remember her.’

He barely managed to intercept her before she tried to shove past him, and amidst the confused roar of the crowd and her angry cry of protest, he could barely hear himself yelling,

“He doesn’t remember, stop, he doesn’t fucking remember-”

But then, in one of those strange little moments of stillness, the kind where the whole world seemed to take a breath at once, leaving the air unnaturally silent just long enough for a single word to carry across an entire ocean, he heard Eren’s voice say,

“Mikasa?”

and he closed his eyes and wished his heart would stop.

Chapter Text

He knew Eren wouldn’t overlook Mikasa to catch him.

She was his out.

Levi took it.

He ran.

He ran until the streets were almost empty.

He ran and he cursed the fame he’d been grateful for only minutes and a burning pair of lungs before.

People needed to stop noticing him.

They needed to stop talking to him.

They all just needed to stop.

When he couldn’t run anymore, fat droplets of rain had already soaked both him and the sidewalk. He huddled under the awning of a restaurant he didn’t recognize on a street he’d never set foot on before and stared.

Down the street, there was a woman holding an umbrella over herself and the young boy she had nestled into her side.

They were the only other people he could see. Even the homeless seemed to have vanished, and when the woman and her son rounded the corner, he was alone.

The bell above the restaurant’s door jingled behind him and he whirled around, tense and wide-eyed like a stray cat.

A woman in an apron peered at him.

“Did you want to come inside? You don’t have to buy anything.”

***

It was a rainy evening on a quiet street and the only other person in the restaurant was the woman who had invited him inside.

She was fifty-something or a worn forty-nine but looked ageless when she smiled. If her bare ring finger was to be trusted, she wasn’t married. She smelled like flour and sweet basil. Her apron had once been black, but had faded to a warm grey from years of washing and wear. Someone had embroidered the establishment’s logo on the front of it, but time had yellowed the red and greyed the white. He could see where she’d lovingly mended a tear in the bottom of the right front pocket.

Her nametag told him that she was Raffaella Filomena Mancini.

Her confident posture told him that she owned the Osteria Mancini.

The way she looked at him told him that she did not recognize him.

Despite the round throatiness of her faint accent and the curling ends of her long black hair, despite the fact that she had the figure of a woman who had never had children of her own, there was something about the dignified peppering of silver-white strands he saw glinting like rare stars in the wilderness of her hair, something about how her eyes crinkled at the corners like she knew something he didn’t when she ushered him to a table.

There was something about her that made him think of his mother.

He stared into the steaming bowl she set in front of him and considered the reality that he was accepting charity from a stranger for the second time that day.

It felt different, somehow. A very tired part of him just wanted to be coddled by someone who looked at him and didn’t see a war hero or a soldier or a rock star or a lover.

She looked at him not like a mother, but like a beloved teacher or an aunt, perhaps.

He kept his hands in his lap and his eyes down.

“You really don’t need to-” he started to murmur, and she cut off his protest with a sharp hum of reproach.

“Look at me,” she said sternly, and both the child and the soldier in him obeyed automatically. She was standing with her hands on her hips, lips pursed, eyebrows arched, chin lowered. Her stare was unfaltering and sure. The posture was so evocatively maternal that he felt an immediate surge of sourceless reflexive guilt.

The feeling hit him like a rubber-band snap to the heart. He drew into himself almost without meaning to.

“Is there any good reason you shouldn’t be eating what I’ve given you?” Her tone brooked no argument. Her dark eyes challenged him to try.

It wasn’t even that he was too tired to try- he didn’t want to. More of him than he’d ordinarily be willing to admit just wanted to be told what to do.

“No, ma’am,” he mumbled.

“What was that?” she prompted.

“No, ma’am, there’s no good reason I shouldn’t be eating what you’ve given me,” he said obediently, and her eyes softened. He shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t have much money.”

He knew she knew that. It just felt as though it had to be said.

Her eyes crinkled at the corners as she gave him a tiny, pitying smile, and all at once he realized that she thought he was a runaway.

“I’m twenty,” he told her awkwardly, and the wry turn of her lips told him she didn’t believe him. He started to dig for his wallet. “I’m serious, I’m not-”

“Why is your mouth still talking when it should be eating?” she interrupted.

He stopped, still half-crouching with his forearm braced against the tablecloth and his hand jammed in his pocket.

Her eyebrows began to arch.

He withdrew his hand from his pocket and settled back into his chair meekly, reaching for the spoon she’d placed beside the bowl.

Her look softened again.

He ate dutifully and listened to her shoes tap across the tiled floor.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

He faltered with the spoon halfway to his mouth. “Lewis.”

The way she paused before responding suggested that she didn’t believe him.

“Do you have a home to go back to, Lewis?”

“No, ma’am.” The soup was good. He hadn’t realized how chilled he’d been by the rain until warmth began to trickle through his insides.

“Isn’t there anyone who’ll be missing you?”

He briefly considered the possibility that she had ill intentions and then realized that he was already eating the food she’d given him. He couldn’t bring himself to care. “No, ma’am.”

She paused again, humming suspiciously. Her tapping shoes neared again.

She set a plate beside his bowl delicately and sat down across from him, smoothing her apron over her knees.

He stared at the sandwich blankly, and then at her.

She was looking at him with a sad expression.

“Do you have anywhere to go, Lewis?”

He thought about his mother and Eren’s face rose in his mind unbidden.

He hesitated.

“No, ma’am.”

“Miss,” she said softly, smiling as he hunched deeper in his chair. “I never married.”

“No, Miss Mancini,” he rephrased, and she laughed.

“I suppose I’m not going to be able to convince you to call me Raffaella, am I?” she asked with a smile, and he shook his head.

It felt wrong on his tongue. Irreverent and strange, like calling his mother Caroline or the man who’d sired him Father.

She laughed again, but followed it with a sigh. Her look turned thoughtful.

“Can you cook at all, Lewis?”

He stared at her and thought about it. “No, Miss Mancini.” It was an honest reply. He could cook approximately as well as Eren could sing- not terribly, but with consistently mixed results.

“Can you wash dishes?”

He looked down at his soup. Nothing stared back at him but the face of a twenty-year old boy only two days out of being a teenager.

“Yes, Miss Mancini,” Lewis said quietly.

***

He worked diligently at the Osteria Mancini for less than a week before Raffaella had him waiting tables- it was a small restaurant, and the only official staff members other than Raffaella herself happened to be her seventeen year old niece a and sixteen year old nephew.

The nephew, whose name he could never remember, was an uninspired-looking mess of indifferent brown hair, sullen stares, and long-suffering sighs better suited to washing dishes than interacting with customers.

The niece, Adelina, was a sharp-eyed thing with a dark face that was more handsome than pretty and a mouth that charmed with a skillfulness that left no room for questions as far as the shrewdness of her mind was concerned.

“Aren’t you-” she’d asked him the first time they met.

“No,” he’d interrupted, “I’m Lewis.”

She’d looked at him in a way eerily reminiscent of her aunt, the skin by the outside of her eyes too full with youth to crinkle but the meaning still there.

He was sure she knew, but she said nothing, and that was all he really wanted.

Adelina had been the Osteria Mancini’s only real server since she was fifteen, but it was fast becoming clear that the Friday evenings and weekend afternoons she’d always spent carrying cups and plates to and from the kitchen at her aunt’s usually quiet restaurant were no longer the only days of the week that called for a dedicated server- one person was simply not enough to both cook and serve anymore, and that small trickle of end-of-week customers had grown to a steam that she and Raffaella often couldn’t handle alone.

His light feet and deft hands made him well-suited to slip into the gap left behind by necessity, and living upstairs in Raffaella’s apartment, sleeping in her guest bedroom and eating at her table, meant that he was an extra set of hands that weren’t holding out for a wage she couldn’t afford to pay.

When they weren’t working, he and Adelina circled around each other like new step-siblings: respectful, polite, but cautious.

When they were, they danced skillfully through the maze of tables like old lovers, fitting into each other’s puzzle-piece edges with an ease so profound that it didn’t draw remark.

Adelina was a masterful conversationalist, and when his limited knowledge of social niceties failed him, her voice slipped into the pause like he’d simply been waiting for her to interject.

He was a quick and surefooted navigator of tight spaces, and when Adelina’s adolescent clumsiness led her to stumble over an absentmindedly extended leg or, sometimes, her own feet, he slipped into the path of her fall like she’d always been trusting him to catch her.

He sometimes caught Raffaella eying them with a secretive smile, but he knew better than to ask.

***

A month and a half into his new employment, Adelina tried to kiss him in the kitchen after close.

He let her, but it was more out of guilt than willingness or shock.

Her lips were soft and sweet. All he could think was that she had been sneaking pastries from the freezer again.

When she pulled back, he could taste the disappointment in her sigh.

“I’m not-” he started uncomfortably, and then sighed with her. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she reassured him with a wry little smile that wasn’t enough to offset the hurt in her eyes, “I guess I already knew.” She laughed, tucking her hair over her ear. It was almost sincere. “But I couldn’t know for sure unless I tried, right?”

“Sorry,” he said again, at a loss for anything else to say.

“Stop apologizing,” she admonished fiercely. Her voice had begun to take on the desperate edge of someone who knew tears were coming and found themself unable to stop them. She blinked angrily. “It’s not your f-fault, I mean, you didn’t-”

They came, and he watched her cry bitterly with her hand clasped over her mouth to choke the sobs and her eyebrows furrowed furiously like the last thing she’d wanted to do was cry over him.

“Sorry,” he mumbled uselessly, because he hadn’t meant to, and he didn’t know how else to make her stop.

***

The next day, Raffaella pulled him aside with a gentle frown.

“Lewis, is this going to be a problem?” she asked him, and he squinted at her in confusion. “Working with Adelina,” she clarified delicately. “She’s worried you’ll find it strange.”

He looked across the restaurant at the girl in question. She met his eyes for less than a second before hastily looking away.

He felt a surge of helpless regret.

“No,” he lied, “we’re fine.”

Every time he caught her from that moment onwards, her eyes told him she wished he’d let her fall, and she let his silences linger unanswered.

***

On a quiet Tuesday afternoon three months into his new employment, the bell above the door rang.

“Captain,” Jean Kirschtein greeted coolly.

He glanced disinterestedly up from the table was clearing. “For one?” He gestured broadly to the empty restaurant. “Sit wherever.”

“Captain,” Jean said again, this time with all the gravity of a disappointed parent.

He sighed and turned his head to meet his stare. “I assume you’re talking to me?”

To his credit, Jean’s look of surprise was less a flicker across his features than a response to a sudden foul smell would have been. “That’s a pretty good assumption,” he said drily, crossing his arms over his chest. He made no move to sit.

The silence stretched on between them.

“You’re not seriously going to try and pretend that you’re not Captain Levi, are you?” Jean asked him exasperatedly. He gestured to his nametag in answer. “Lewis? Right.”

“Right,” he parroted, setting the last of the dirty dishes on his tray and moving to walk away. Jean groaned in unmistakable frustration and stalked after him. He could hear his boots on the tile.

When Jean made to follow him into the kitchen, he stopped to shoot him a frown. “You can’t be back here.” He jerked his head towards the sign on the door. “Employees only.”

The look Jean fixed him with was anything but understanding. “Look,” he spat, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply, “I’m not asking you to drop everything and come back. I’m not going to tell anybody you’re here. Not if you just agree to talk to me.” He raised his hands, palm forward, like he was negotiating a surrender. “All you’ve gotta do is talk to me. Okay?”

He sighed heavily.

“Get the fuck of my kitchen,” he muttered.

“But-”

“I have to put this shit in the sink,” he snapped. “It’ll only take a second.”

Jean’s eyes were hard with suspicion.

He scowled. “I’m not going to run off again, don’t worry.”

Jean looked unconvinced, but he stepped back from the door and let it swing shut between them.

He set his tray down on the counter and waited.

“Put the ‘Closed’ sign in the window,” Raffaella told him sternly, “and go talk to that boy.”

Levi sighed again.

“Yes, Miss Mancini.”

“And mind your language.”

“Yes, Miss Mancini.”

***

Jean looked like he was waiting for him to say something first.

Levi just looked at him unhelpfully until he broke.

“It would literally kill you to be even slightly normal about any of this, wouldn’t it?” Jean groaned, throwing up his hands. “Look, man, I don’t what the hell went down between you and Jaeger- god knows you can’t ask him about it without getting a punch to the fucking face- but the guy’s been acting like the world is gonna if you don’t come back,” he explained. “He goes from chain smoking and staring through us like nothing matters anymore to getting drunk and trying to fight me or Commander Smith in a second-” Jean snapped his fingers in front of his face. Levi didn’t flinch. “-and none of know which it’s gonna be or how to stop it. Even Mikasa can’t do jack shit other than wrestling him down when he starts to break shit. He’s completely out of control.”

Levi stared at him impassively. “When did he remember?”

“What?” Jean squinted at him. “After Squad Lea-” He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “After Hanji got there, or at least that’s what they told me,” he said cautiously.

“Hanji’s there?” He didn’t mean for it to sound so surprised.

“Yeah,” Jean confirmed, eyes still appraising. “They showed up a couple days after the Commander did.” His look turned cunning. “You know, you could see them if you-”

“Nice try,” he rejected. “How they’d get him to remember?”

Jean’s look of sudden interest told him more than his words did.

“Really fucking easily, actually,” he said slowly. “They mostly just made him do some stuff he did in training to try and jog his memory, and it worked.” Jean shot him a narrow look. “They weren’t lying, were they? You really didn’t try at all, did you?”

He said nothing.

“What did you do to him?” Jean muttered. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I can’t come up with a reason that would explain why he’s so hung up on you.” He laughed derisively. “I mean, it’s not like you were fucking or something-”

He’d never be sure if it was the way he stiffened or if Jean just saw something in his face that his usual veneer of disinterest couldn’t conceal, but Jean paused mid-gesture and stared at him.

When his head started to tilt inquisitively, lips parting and eyebrows furrowing, Levi closed his eyes and prayed to a god he didn’t believe in for a quick and fortuitously-timed death.

His prayers were not answered.

“It’s not like you were fucking,” Jean started again and Levi pushed away from the table with every intention of getting the hell away from the conversation as fast as he possibly could.

Jean lunged over the table unexpectedly and grabbed him by the arms.

“Get off of me,” Levi snarled, swatting at him.

Jean dodged, leaning back but not letting go. “Were you fucking Jaeger?” he demanded without ceremony, and in the face of his frank question, Levi’s mouth went dry.

He made a face as if to answer, but the words wouldn’t come.

It was answer enough.

Jean was staring at him in unabashed shock.

“You were fucking Jaeger,” he said disbelievingly, almost to himself. His look suddenly went narrow with wary alarm. “Not when we were-”

“No!” he cried. “God, no.” He stared at Jean in open horror. “He was fifteen! What the hell do you think I am?” He shook Jean’s loosening grip off angrily. “Yes, I had to kill people, and I know it fucking bothered you that I didn’t sit around and cry about it, but that doesn’t mean I had no goddamn morals- and when would I have had the fucking time? No, I was not fucking Eren Jaeger,” he repeated vehemently, “not when we were in the Corps.” He swallowed, eyes sliding away from Jean’s guiltily. “Not back then.”

The look his reluctant confession had gotten him was the sort of look regularly reserved for things so fascinating and alien that they must have been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean.

“How?” he said finally, and then blinked. “How does that even happen? How does you and Eren Jaeger happen?”

“I have no idea,” he admitted.

Jean waved him off, eyes distant. “Never mind, I know exactly how it happened,” he said suddenly, “Eren started it. He pulled some heartfelt emotional bullshit and got you alone with him,” he mused, “and then sprung it on you, ‘cause that’s what he fucking does, he’s like a dog that can’t learn more than one trick.” He narrowed his eyes suddenly like he was struggling to see something. “But it worked on you? It worked on you, see, that’s what I don’t get-”

Levi found himself staring very oddly at Jean Kirschtein.

Jean raised his hands defensively. “I’m straight. It was during training,” he protested, and Levi raised his eyebrows. “Everyone fucks around with everyone during training, come on! You put a bunch of hormonal kids in a camp together with no supervision during the night, what the hell did you people think was going to happen?” He threw Levi an ugly sneer. “You can’t tell me you didn’t, so don’t look at me like that.”

“Actually, I can,” he said wryly. “I was never in training.”

Jean dropped his hands and gave him a curious look. “What, you mean that rumour was true?”

“That depends which rumour,” he hedged.

“The one where you were a thug until Commander Smith forced you to join the Survey Corps.”

“Oh,” Levi said uncomfortably, “yeah. That rumour was true.”

Jean just looked at him uncertainly for a long moment.

“Come back with me and talk some sense into Jaeger,” he demanded. He cut off Levi’s refusal with a,

“Why not? What are you so afraid of? Do you think we’re going to judge you?”

Levi thinned his lips and said nothing.

Jean’s nose wrinkled. “Look, the idea of you and Eren fucking is honestly so weird it can’t make me nauseous because I can’t even picture it, but this is a completely different life. We’ve all changed because of it,” he confessed. “Nobody’s going to shit on you for something anybody who knows Jaeger at all is gonna know he started.”

Levi shifted from one foot to the other, jamming his hands in his pockets defensively. “It’s not what you think that I’m worried about,” he divulged reluctantly.

“Wait, you’re worried what Eren is going to think?”

“He didn’t remember anything,” Levi muttered, “I did. I remember everything. How do you think that looks to him? How do you think it looks to find out that the person you’ve been sticking your dick in for months is the same person who made sure you knew that he’d kill you without a second thought if you stepped out of line? Your direct superior.” He grimaced at the taste of the words in his mouth. “You think anyone who’s not completely out of their fucking mind is going to look at that and not have a problem with it? I fucked up.” He clenched his jaw again regret. “I fucked up and I’m not willing to face the consequences, that’s what you’re looking at here, kid.”

Jean looked at him like he’d suddenly realized he was, in fact, talking to someone with the intelligence of a sponge cake.

“One,” he said, holding up a finger, “I never needed to know that about you. Two,” he continued, raising a second finger, “are you, Captain Levi, honestly telling me that after all this time,” his eyebrows were edging upwards more incredulously with every word, “you consider Eren Jaeger to be ‘someone who is not completely out of his fucking mind’?”

He considered that.

Jean fixed him with the flat look of a furious parent trying to be patient with an especially monstrous toddler.

“I don’t mean any disrespect, Captain, but get your shit,” he said evenly, pointing towards the door, “and get in the fucking car.”

***

Raffaella was smiling sadly when he came down with his meagre bag of things. He hesitated.

She reached for a hug and he let her.

“Lewis,” she started softly, and he interrupted her.

“Levi,” he mumbled. “My name is Levi.”

Her look of surprise was more than surprise- he watched something strange blossom behind her features.

Confusion turned to recognition, recognition to relief, relief to a great and arresting serenity.

She smiled, and he didn’t think he’d ever seen anything more beautiful.

“Mina,” she said without prompting and he looked at her, perplexed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said gently, pulling her hair forward over her shoulders and gripping a piece tightly in each palm. “Your friend is waiting.”

He lingered by the kitchen door and looked back.

She made an encouraging shooing motion. “It’s been a pleasure, Levi.”

He walked through the door still puzzling over the secretive way she’d smiled when she said his name, but the answer was not forthcoming, and never would be.

Chapter Text

Jean’s car was an old two-door coupe that had been painted a surprisingly tasteful shade of gunmetal grey. The interior was unimpressive but clean- it wasn’t showroom spotless the way a new car would have been, but it was lovingly maintained in the way only an older vehicle could be.

Every scratch was carefully mended, every window free of fingerprints, every cup holder empty of debris.

The seats were pale grey and remarkably unstained.

Levi didn’t know the make or model of his own car- he’d never cared about cars beyond their usefulness, and that was precisely why it was immediately obvious to him that Jean did.

Jean had slid into the driver’s seat and smoothed his hand up the side of the steering wheel with a look normally reserved for childhood sweethearts and reunions with long-lost friends.

He didn’t talk while he drove, and Levi appreciated that.

The streets seemed as endless as they were unfamiliar- he had no idea how far he’d gotten, had never bothered to find out where he was relative to where he had been.

He found the low rumble of the engine and the feeling of the road slipping away behind him soothing, and he was more grateful for the way the drive seemed to have no destination in sight than he was perturbed by it.

He’d settled into a comfortable trance staring at the passing sidewalks when Jean pulled over to one of them and killed the engine.

Levi blinked and looked over at him.

“Where are we?” he asked, puzzled. Nothing around them looked familiar.

Jean unbuckled his seatbelt and settled back, shooting Levi a glance as he retrieved his cellphone from the cup holder by his hip. “What do you mean? Oh,” he murmured, visibly more relaxed than he had been, “yeah, I guess you wouldn’t know. Everybody’s sort of been camping out together for the last few months- I’ve been coming and going, Commander Smith had to leave a couple times back in November because of the election, and Hanji’s-” He made an odd face. “Hanji’s a special case. But yeah, there were usually too many of us around to fit in that apartment you and Jaeger were sharing, and the place seemed to be driving him off the deep end more often than not, so Commander Smith pulled a couple strings and moved us all into a sweet apartment-” He leaned over Levi and jabbed his finger at the glass. Levi followed it to a point somewhere close to the apartment building they’d pulled up beside. “-in that building there. I don’t know the details- I think he said something about family connections or whatever- but the important thing is it’s the size of a fucking house and that’s the only reason Jaeger and I haven’t killed each other yet.” He fell back into his seat and fixed Levi with a moderately insincere smile. “Questions?”

Levi looked at him.

His earlier apprehensions returned with a vengeance.

“Do I have to get out?”

That earned him a laugh. “Not yet, no- I gotta call the Commander, give everybody a heads-up,” he grinned. “I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea what Eren’s going to do when he sees you,” he admitted, and then paused. “But if he tries something fucked up, I’ve got your back, okay?”

The atmosphere abruptly felt friendlier than Levi had been expecting. It took him by surprise.

Jean spoke before he had a chance to recover himself. “So is it true you’re only like,” his mouth curled up at the corner, “nineteen this time around? You’ve always looked kinda young, so it’s hard to tell.”

“I’m twenty,” Levi sighed, and Jean barked with laughter.

“Sorry, sorry,” he apologized, “I’m not making fun of you, it’s just- it’s weird. Don’t get pissed, but Connie and Sasha and I always used to talk shit behind your back- not when Eren was around, though, you could never guess what that guy was gonna do- some days he seemed a little too eager to join in, other days he’d start fucking foaming at the mouth if anybody so much as said your name in the wrong tone of voice-” He shook his head suddenly. “I’m getting off-topic. Anyway, Connie and Sasha and I, we’d come up these crazy fucking theories about why you were so short- don’t get pissed!” Jean raised his hands defensively.

Levi just looked at him narrowly.

The hands lowered slowly. “So we’d make up these insane theories,” he continued cautiously, “and it was usually weird shit, like-” He gestured uselessly for a moment and then began to count on his fingers. “Sasha said she thought maybe you didn’t eat enough- not didn’t get enough to eat, no, that- that wouldn’t have been funny- but just that you didn’t eat because you didn’t like food- you should’ve seen her face when she said it, that girl never fucking stopped thinking about food- and, uh, Connie said he thought you might the world’s tiniest titan-”

He actually did laugh at that, and Jean looked encouraged.

“I said maybe you were secretly a girl or something- you can’t get pissed at that, nobody thinks you’re a girl and it’s sexist to get mad or something, I’m pretty sure- but Kris- Historia, Historia, she pipes up one day out of nowhere, and you know what she fucking says?” Jean’s eyes sparkled with mischief.

Levi sighed.

“What did she say?” he obliged woodenly.

“‘What if he’s twelve?’”

Levi stared at Jean blankly.

“‘What if he’s twelve?’ I kid you not: Historia, tiny little Historia, who’s never said a goddamn thing against anyone for as long as we’ve known her, just says that out of the blue, and it was one of those moments where the conversation dies for a second, so everyone- everyone, this was back before Bert and Reiner, uh-” His expression turned a little uncomfortable. He gestured vaguely. “Before they, you know, yeah, you know- but yeah, you’re off somewhere, Jaeger’s off somewhere, the rest of us are cleaning our equipment and just shooting the shit, and everyone hears Historia say this. And for a second, there’s perfect silence, and she looks she’s just regretting everything.”

Despite himself, despite the subject matter, he found himself leaning in obligingly.

There was something compelling about the animated way Jean spoke. He was starting to see why he’d been so popular amongst his peers.

“And then everyone starts fucking laughing,” Jean whispered almost conspiratorially, “and I mean laughing, like laughing so hard we’re falling over- Reiner drops his gear and then starts freaking out because he thinks he saw something go flying off, but even as he’s like ‘oh shit, oh shit, guys, I think I broke it, oh fuck, Captain Levi’s gonna kill me,’ he’s still laughing- I’m fucking just losing it, Connie’s just repeating ‘what if he’s twelve, what if he’s twelve?’ over and over again like it’s the funniest fucking thing he’s ever heard in his life, and Historia, she just looks at us with this-” Jean’s composure was cracking. Levi could tell he was trying not to laugh. “-this really serious look, like she’s kind of concerned, and she just fucking says, ‘well, we don’t know how old he is,’ and everybody just fucking stops, because we’re all thinking, ‘holy shit, is she actually serious?’”

“Was she?” Levi prompted.

Jean shrugged and turned his palms outwards with a look of utter bewilderment. “I still don’t know- she must’ve looked at us like that for a good thirty seconds- and then, out of nowhere, she just smiles,” he said incredulously, “just smiles suddenly, doesn’t say another word, and the whole thing is just so fucking weird at this point that we all start up laughing again.” He paused for a second. “For a week after that, every single time I was in the same room as you, Connie would just,” he made a little motion as if to edge closer, “sidle on up beside me and whisper, ‘what if he’s twelve?’ I thought I was going to die,” Jean finished, “I was convinced- Connie was going to make me laugh and you were going to catch me and I was going to get killed. I was gonna die, and it was all because Historia decided that the best explanation for you being so fucking short was that you were twelve,” he exclaimed.

Levi snorted and shook his head. “Is there a point to this a story, or are you just trying to remind me that I’m short?” he asked. “Because I know I’m short. It’s not something you forget.”

Jean waved his hand, making a face like he’d forgotten the most important part. “Okay, so here’s the thing,” he started, “I’m twenty-three.”

He threw Levi a meaningful look. Levi raised his eyebrows and just looked at him.

Jean rolled his eyes. “So we were fifteen when we started in the Corps, right?” he prompted, and Levi nodded. “Which means that this time around, when I was fifteen, you-” he pointed to himself and then jabbed his finger in Levi’s direction “-were twelve. When I fifteen, you were twelve! ‘What if he’s twelve?’ You were. You were literally twelve!”

He didn’t want to.

It was stupid. It was a stupid joke.

He laughed anyway, because it was just too stupid not to laugh at.

He laughed more and harder than he had since he’d left Eren’s apartment- maybe even since before he’d died.

He laughed and it was quiet but it still made his lung ache and his eyes prickle and he felt like an idiot but Jean was laughing, too, and something about the ridiculousness of the whole situation just made it a thousand times funnier, so he laughed even harder.

When their laughter subsided into the sort of slightly painful sighs and occasional hoarse snicker or snort, Jean turned to him.

“I’m gonna be honest with you here, Captain,” he said candidly, “I like you a hell of a lot better when you’re not ordering me to kill people.”

Levi’s mouth twitched up at the corners of its own accord. “Yeah, me too,” he murmured.

“Can I call you Levi? People are going to look at me funny if I keep calling you Captain. It’s weird,” he ventured, and Levi shrugged.

“Do what you want.” He stared out through the windshield and tried not to remember what was coming. He furrowed his eyebrows and turned back to look at Jean. “What do they call you here? Your parents- what’d they name you?”

If his sudden look of sheepishness was anything to go by, nothing good.

“John,” he said evasively.

Levi waited.

Jean slid down in his seat. “John Jacob Lazarus Absolom Fornes,” he admitted miserably.

Halfway through, his voice slipped into something suspiciously close to a twang.

Levi strangled a snort. Jean shot him a murderous look.

“Not a fucking word,” he threatened. “I know you take it up the ass, you know I grew up in the sort of place everyone makes fun of.” He paused for a moment. “I wish I could tell you it’s undeserved, but I have twelve siblings and one of them’s a nun.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Another’s one a stripper.”

Levi barked with laughter, unable to contain himself. “You’re fucking with me,” he accused, “I don’t believe you.”

Jean raised his eyebrows and began to tap away at the screen of his phone.

Levi was about to comment when he shoved it towards him.

He took it with a sense of guilty curiosity.

The tiny browser was open to a social networking site- the same one he had a meager profile on, he recognized- and front and certain was a picture too sweetly mundane in its surreality to be fake.

A modest-looking woman in a wimple was smiling next to another woman who was, under the makeup, fairly clearly related to her. She wasn’t wearing anything that betrayed her profession, but the tousled and blonde-streaked brown hair, oddly stilted pose, and professional smile gave him a feeling that Jean hadn’t been joking.

“Flip to the next one, it’s better,” Jean said, and he did, revealing a more candid shot.

They were laughing. It was a better shot. More natural.

He flipped to the next and almost dropped Jean’s phone.

Beside him, Jean laughed. “I told you- twelve siblings: five brothers, seven sisters.”

“This looks like a class photo,” he commented, squinting at it and adding, “seems like a nice family, though.”

Jean took his phone back with a strange little smile. “Yeah. They’re good people.”

The conversation lulled, but the silence was comfortable.

Levi broke it with a breathy snort. “You don’t want to call, either, do you?”

“Not even fucking slightly,” Jean admitted immediately. He fidgeted with his phone, sighed, and then began to punch numbers on the screen. “No matter what goes down with him, he’s always fucking weird with me,” he complained, holding the phone to his ear, “and I never know what kind of weird it’s going to be- sometimes he’s cool and he acts like he wants to be my best fucking friend, other times he just seems to want to take a fucking swing at my fa- shit. Hello?”

Levi could hear someone’s voice murmuring on the other end, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Jean grimaced. “Jaeger, give the phone to Commander Smith.” Levi watched irritation flit across his features. “I said give- no, I’m not telling you shit, Jaeger, give him- no, for the last fucking time-”

Levi could hear Eren arguing on the other end, and despite his apprehensions, he felt a tug of amusement.

“Give me the phone,” he said very quietly- so quietly, in fact, that Jean squinted at him in confusion for a moment.

He began to mouth something and then went stiff, eyes widening.

Levi heard a burst of noise from the direction of his left ear.

“How did you hear that?” Jean demanded incredulously. “He said like four fucking words, I could barely hear him- what the fuck, Jaeger, did you put your dick in his ass and pull it out with a tin can and string on the end?”

Levi actually couldn’t stop himself from laughing at that.

Jean made throat-cutting motions at him and scowled. “Oh yeah, I know all about your little escapades with the Captain, Eren, he told me himse- no, you’re not coming down here, wait in the fucking apartment. I swear to god, if I see you coming out those doors, I’m driving the fuck away and taking him to my mom’s house,” he threatened.

Levi quirked an eyebrow at him.

He shrugged back and then his face convulsed with frustration. “Yeah, I know you don’t know where my mom lives, that’s the point,” he half-yelled, and Levi was laughing again, because he knew all too clearly just how puzzling Eren’s thought process could be. “That is literally the entire point, Eren, stay in the fucking apartment and maybe we’ll come to you. Yes, maybe. Now give the Commander the-”

He pulled the phone away from his ear with an almost comical look of displeasure. “He hung up on me. He fucking hung up on me.”

Levi shrugged.

“God, I really hate that guy,” Jean vented, and then made a face. “Well, no- it’s not that I hate him, it’s just-”

Levi let him chew the words over in his mouth like cud.

“It’s just that he’s got the common sense of a goddamn doorknob when he’s emotional,” Jean explained, “which is fine, most people are like that- but Jaeger’s emotional like all of the fucking time,” he complained, and Levi huffed with quiet laughter because it was true.

The silence settled between them again, and Jean was, again, the one to reluctantly break it.

“You ready for this?” he asked.

“No,” Levi answered honestly.

Jean rolled his eyes and puffed up his chest as though he wasn’t equally uneasy.

“Get out of the fucking car, Levi.”

Chapter Text

Erwin was already waiting in the lobby when Jean coaxed him into the building.

Levi blinked, surprised to see him, and then shot Jean a curious glance.

His hands had twitched reflexively into the beginnings of a salute before he stopped himself.

Levi snorted. “Old habits?” he needled, relishing the grimace the comment earned him. He was about to address Erwin when he was interrupted.

“They’re not the only things that are hard to kill!” a child’s voice piped up.

Levi turned, very slowly, and stared.

He’d dimly noted the child clinging to Erwin’s hand as soon as he’d spotted them, but Erwin had a curiously parental presence for someone who’d not only once been tasked with the duty of sending teenagers barely out of childhood to their deaths, but of convincing them to go willingly- it somehow seemed only natural to see him with children. Levi, distracted by the coming storm and Jean’s near-palpable anxiety, hadn’t even thought to question it.

And now he stared, and continued staring, silent for long enough that Jean began to shift awkwardly beside him. Erwin was obligingly quiet.

The child stared up at him with eyes magnified by glasses far too thick for someone so young, grin both blinding and proudly gapped- they were missing a front tooth.

“Hanji?” he finally managed, unable to stop the name coming out an incredulous hiccup.

Their grin only widened. “Long time, no see,” they said cheerfully, bringing a little fist up to their chest in a leisurely salute. “Looks like you finally get to be taller than me, huh, Levi?”

Their other hand looked almost comically tiny tucked inside Erwin’s adult palm. Seen from the side, the bones of their skinny wrist looked barely wider than Erwin’s thumb.

They were just so small.

“Hanji,” he repeated again, brain stuttering on that single realization like a poorly remixed track.

Their smile grew a little wry. They pointed to themselves.

“Hanji,” they said again their puzzlingly high child-voice, tone coloured with mocking patience, and then turned their finger towards him. “Levi.” They repeated the action another time, and then another time after that. “Hanji. Levi. Hanji. Levi. Are you high?”

Levi sputtered. “You’re- what are you, ten?”

“Eight,” they responded, holding up eight fingers with a grin. “Scared I’ll outgrow you soon?”

He was about to retort when Erwin chuckled, and at that point, he could do nothing but scowl.

***

He could already hear Eren’s very vocal discontent when the elevator doors parted to reveal his sister lingering purposefully in front of the apartment door.

The only other doors in sight led to the stairwell and what seemed to be a garbage disposal. Levi dimly considered that having a hallway at all seemed pointless.

“You,” Mikasa said, quietly imperious, “come here.”

She didn’t point, but she didn’t need to. Erwin, Hanji and Jean filed out of the elevator around him and meandered politely down the hall to pretend they weren’t listening.

He briefly considered hitting the ground floor button and just running.                   

He didn’t.

He’d thought her hair was streaked with white rather than peppered, but the pepper was there, too, turning the majority of it a dark, somewhat stern-looking grey.

Her eyes, though the lids were heavier with age and years of pain had sewn uneven seams over the bridge of her nose between them, were just as he remembered them being- penetrating discs of unbroken black that seemed to stare through, rather than into.

He approached, but only very reluctantly.

“Mikasa,” he greeted quietly.

She hummed low in her throat, lifting her chin and looking down her nose at him.

The silence stretched between them like a hanging note, breathless and tense with anticipation.

He furrowed his eyebrows and frowned.

“I hope you don’t think you can manipulate me into breaking down with this,” he murmured, and for just a fraction of a second, her carefully flat mouth curled up a little at the corners.

“Of course not, Captain,” she said softly. Her voice was older, worn with age, but the inflection was just the same. “I just thought you might appreciate the silence while it lasted.”

Behind the door, he could hear Eren pacing, muffled complaints given way to heavy-footed anxiety.

He shot Mikasa a narrow look. “Since when has my comfort been your priority?” He heard Eren stop- heard him creep closer to the door, too wound-up for true stealth. In the absence of the ruckus Eren had been making, he’d been heard.

He saw Mikasa notice- her head twitched sideways and her eyelashes swept downwards as she listened.

Her tiny smile returned, this time with a look of wry fatigue. “I can’t change his mind,” she admitted, eyes flickering back towards him. “I’ve tried. But if you think you can come back into his life after all of this-”

He quirked an eyebrow at her, slightly amused. “Are you telling me to get lost?”

She stared at him in silence for long enough that his amusement faded to wariness.

“If you come back into his life now,” she repeated, “you’re not leaving it again.”

It sounded less like a threat and more like an oath. A shiver crept up his spine.

He glanced over at the group huddled halfway down the hall and found Jean grimacing sympathetically at him. The sight almost made him smile.

“I’d forgotten what a terrifying combination the two of you can be,” he murmured without bothering to look forward again.

Her silence lingered. It had always had a demanding quality.

He sighed.

“I’m not going anywhere unless he decides he’s done with this,” he muttered, and closed his eyes when he heard a pause in Eren’s shuffling.

Mikasa hummed again.

The rather dramatic action she tried to take by swinging the door open behind her without turning was ruined quite spectacularly by the fact that Eren had been standing much too close behind it.

It hit him with a painful-sounding thump, followed by a low strung of curses.

Mikasa sighed, but she didn’t look especially surprised or bothered.

“I told you not to eavesdrop, Eren,” she called over her shoulder. “Back up. Farther.” Her ankle turned oddly as she twisted- abruptly, he remembered her prosthetic leg, now hidden beneath her clothes. She caught him looking and fixed him with a stare. “It was an accident. Nobody tried to blow me up,” she said, much too casually, and then jerked her head in the direction of the open door. “Go.”

He did.

It was strange- the space and time that separated the hallway from the apartment’s front hall was miniscule, but the change in atmosphere was immediate.

He stiffened as soon as the door clicked shut behind him.

Eren was fidgeting awkwardly a few paces away, expression lost like every word he’d had lingering on his lips had evaporated the second Levi had come into sight.

His bright eyes were too bright, now, an unnaturally vibrant green against red of his bloodshot irises and the off-purple of the bruised-looking circles under them. He was unshaven, and clearly had been for at least two days, though Levi suspected it’d been longer.

He looked like he’d showered, at least.

He also looked, quite unambiguously, like shit.

“You look like shit,” Levi greeted eloquently.

Eren huffed at him with a torn, angry look like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or yell. Levi expected one of the two, one and then the other, or even a combination of both.

Levi knew him well enough to know the last was a definite possibility.

“You don’t,” Eren said instead, sounding almost shy. “Do you- d’you want something to drink?”

Levi glanced up at him in surprise, still halfway through taking off his shoes.

This wasn’t how he’d expected things to go.

He wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with this turn of events.

He tried to say ‘yes’ but what came out was,

“Uh,”

and,

“Hah?”

They just stared at each other for an uncomfortably long time. It occurred to Levi that he’d been doing a lot of that in the last hour.

“I missed you,” Eren blurted, taking a step forward.

“But you remember,” Levi accused, edging back.

Eren looked perplexed. “Yeah. So?”

The situation felt increasingly surreal. “Eren, I always remembered.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Levi hated his innocent bewilderment. “I always remembered,” he muttered, shifting back again when Eren took another step forward. “Eren, I let things become the way they did without any idea of how you’d feel if you remembered. You weren’t properly apprised of the situation. You could have hated me for it, and I knew that. I wronged you.”

Eren’s confusion was fading into something that looked more like vaguely irritated curiosity. “But I don’t hate you,” he said very slowly, like he wasn’t sure which one of them was failing to understand the other. “I don’t.”

“You could’ve.”

“But I don’t.”

“But you should,” Levi snarled, and Eren gave him an odd, tight look. “After all of this, after I took off for months like a coward to avoid dealing with exactly fucking this, all you have to say to me is ‘I missed you’?” he demanded incredulously. “I don’t need your friends to tell me you’ve been a fucking wreck- you look like one, and that’s my fault, Eren.”

Eren pressed his palms to his temples with an irritated expression. “What are we even fighting about? I mean, I thought you might be pissed because of what I said, but-”

“You didn’t know,” he seethed, voice rising, “yeah, I was pissed, but you didn’t know and I did. You’re not the one here who did something fucked up, Eren, why are you trying to-”

Eren was squinting at him. “Wait, are you pissed because you think I shouldn’t want you back? What the-”

“You shouldn’t!” he interrupted, striding forward a few paces with enough visible ferocity that Eren stumbled back in response. “You shouldn’t fucking want me back, Eren! I came into this apartment expecting a fight, not a- whatever this is-”

“Do you not want to come back?”

“What?” Levi asked sharply, startled.

Meeting Eren’s eyes was a mistake. His expression hit Levi like a sucker punch to the gut.

“Do you,” Eren asked him again, face starting to break into that same desperately searching look that had started the whole mess in the first place, “not want to come back?” His tongue flickered uncertainly over his lips. “To me?”

To say the words on his tongue and in his throat dried out would be a gross understatement- staring into that pleading expression, he felt as though the words forming in his brain were running together like eggs in a frying pan.

“I-” he fumbled, swallowing, “it’s not a matter of whether or not I want to-” He flinched at Eren’s sudden look of hope, throwing up his hands defensively. “That came out wrong,” he protested, but something inside of him was already throwing up its hands in defeat.

He’d already given him too much ground to stand on. Eren’s timidity had depended on his uncertainty, and Levi knew without looking that Eren had taken his slip-up as a fact rather than an error.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Levi warned pointlessly, because he knew perfectly damn well that Eren had gotten ahead of himself the second he’d let him.

“How is this not about whether or not you want to come back?” he demanded, and Levi groaned. “You don’t get to tell me not to want you back, Levi,” he yelled, shifting restlessly like he wanted to get closer but wasn’t sure what would happen if he did. “You’re not my fucking captain anymore! You’re not even older than me-”

“I am still older than you in the ways that count, Eren,” he snapped.

He could see Eren gearing up for an explosion when the door swung open behind him, nearly clipping his heel.

He hopped forward and whipped around.

Jean was staring through them with an exhausted expression.

“Need to use the pisser,” he interjected, cutting off Eren’s protest pre-emptively.

When he faltered in the middle of the- remarkably spacious, Levi finally noticed- living room, Levi tensed.

“You two do realize,” Jean said calmly, back still turned, “that you’re fighting about the stupidest fucking shit in the world, right?”

Eren squawked with rage and Jean whirled around, pointing at him with a look of wild aggravation that brooked no interruptions.

“You,” he gritted, “are pissed because he’s pissed off that you’re not pissed off about something he thinks you should be pissed off about. And you,” he continued, jabbing his finger in Levi’s direction, “are not only pissed off because he’s not pissed off about something you think he should be pissed off about, but because he’s pissed off that you’re pissed off that he’s not pissed off!”

Levi rocked back on his heels, startled out of his retort.

Jean’s exasperation was palpable. “I look at the two of you right now and think, ‘we entrusted the future of humanity to these people.’ The strength and hope of humanity. This,” he ranted, waving his hand in a broadly inclusive gesture, “has never been so amazing to me.” He answered their stunned silence with a tired-looking scowl. “You’re both idiots. Go fuck until you break something and come back when you’ve calmed the hell down. Jesus.”

They watched him stalk the rest of the way to the bathroom, stunned into silence.

Eren started laughing first, but the second he did, Levi couldn’t help but join him.

***

They did not, in fact, have destructive make-up sex as per Jean’s suggestion- instead, they lingered awkwardly in each other’s presence, similarly unsure how the boundaries of their relationship had changed.

Levi could see that Eren wanted to touch him- he was a tactile creature and always had been.

He just wasn’t sure how he felt about being touched, yet.

The atmosphere in Erwin’s apartment had grown oppressive the moment the others noticed that quiet had fallen and began to trickle in.

Levi could feel the history and depth of Eren’s long-running series of minor emotional implosions in the sheer weight of relief and answering embarrassment emanating off of the respective parties.

Their eyes told him without any room for doubt that a switch had flipped the instant he’d walked in that door- he was not seeing Eren at his worst, and was not especially looking forward to the day he inevitably did.

The air had grown heavier and heavier until Eren had cut into the conversation with an abrupt,

“I think I’d like to go back to my apartment.”

The chatter had faded, but no one had looked particularly surprised by the announcement. Jean had worn an open look of relief- and a flicker of pity that Levi had elected to ignore.

The drive home was more peculiar than uncomfortable.

“I’m having trouble imagining you as a waiter,” Eren commented, a grin in his voice.

Levi was glad he’d chosen to fixate on that rather than how he’d skirted around explaining the awkwardness that had cropped up between him and Adelina. He’d only divulged the story in any detail because Jean had slipped up when Eren had asked him where he’d found Levi- he might have preferred it if those memories remained his to puzzle over.

“I’m fast and I don’t drop shit,” he mumbled, and Eren chuckled.

“I just can’t picture you making conversation with customers.”

Levi’s pained expression was apparently more than enough of an answer. Eren chortled again, tone light and warm. The ease with which Eren had slipped back into comfortably pestering him kept surprising him.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Eren remarked, shooting him a sidelong glance as he turned a corner, “I’m probably not any better. I worked at a fast food place for about three weeks when I was in my second year of college.”

Levi hummed inquisitively, more curious than he was willing to admit.

Eren’s smile was sly but a little sheepish. “I got written up in my first week for yelling at a customer, but the manager had a thing for me, so I went down on her in her office and she let me stay,” he laughed, and then made a weird expression, weaving a little on the road before straightening up. “Oh, whoa, now that I think about it, that place was really fucked up. I was like… nineteen or twenty, and she was in her forties? And she knew I was gay, I didn’t exactly make a secret of it.” He scrunched his nose in visible consternation. “I never realized how fucked up that way. Anyway, I got fired like two weeks later for getting into a fist fight with the fry cook.”

“What’d you do?” Levi prompted, leaning his elbow on the door and his cheek on his fist.

Eren made an offended noise. “Why does everyone always assume I started it?” he demanded, and then shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He punched the brakes too heavily as they slowed for a red light- Levi jolted in his seat and shot him a dirty look. “He was the manager’s son,” he admitted lamely, and then coughed. “And she was married. I might’ve gotten pissed during one of our arguments and told him I went down on his mom.”

Levi stared at him. “Remind me how that’s not starting it,” he drawled. “Eren, you told him his mom was cheating on his dad was somebody his age, anyone would punch you for that.”

Eren squirmed. “Younger, actually- he was older than me by a couple of years, dropped out of college the year before and was saving up to go again. And look, she- his mom, she had this weird philosophy where if it was a gay dude doing it, it wasn’t cheating, it didn’t count,” he explained, glancing between Levi and the road. “I’m not fucking kidding, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.”

Levi squinted at him incredulously. “But you’d be shit at it. Eating a woman out is nothing like blowing a dude, it takes experience for a man to get good at. She’d have been better off getting another woman to do it.”

Eren sent him a long, contemplative look as they sat idling at the lights. “Okay, one: now I’m really curious why you sound so sure about that, and two-” he broke off with a little laugh, turning forward and pressing his foot down on the gas again as the light changed. “And two: I was dating this guy in first year- also named Nick, funny enough, we got a lot of shit for that- who was, um,” he lifted his hand from the wheel to gesture vaguely for a second, “transitioning. To a dude. On the outside. You know?”

Levi just looked at him. “I worked with Hanji for how long and you think I can’t wrap my head around something as simple as that?”

That earned him a sheepish huff. “Okay, so Nick and I- Nick and Nicky, because I didn’t mind being Nicky and he did- we dated for a while and, y’know, we fooled around a lot. He wasn’t super broken up about the state of his dick, but he was a little uncomfortable with anal- it’s not the same, not for guys like him, or so he told me- so I, um, learned to navigate my way around a different kind of blowjob.” Levi listened with interest. “We were still dating when I first started working at the fry-up, and Nick was only mid-transition, so I actually had to explain to my manager what was up so she wouldn’t call him a chick or something by accident- but by my third shift there, Nick and I broke up: it turned out Nick wasn’t as down with the relationship as I had been, and he pulled me aside after a lecture one afternoon and,” he made a wavering little motion, “bam. Done, just like that. So anyway, my manager knew I probably had some experience with that- might be why she jumped on it so fast. It’s probably just coincidence Nick and I broke up, honestly- I think she probably would’ve gone for it even if we were still together.”

Levi snorted. “She sounds like a shit person. It makes me wonder what her husband was like.”

Eren snuck him a glance. “Don’t think I forgot.”

He quirked an eyebrow.

“What’s this about you knowing so much about going down on girls?”

Levi groaned and sunk down in his seat.

Eren was quiet for a long moment. “Was it Petra?”

He wanted to call the noise he made anything but what it was, which was a sort of strangled, scandalized-sounding squawk. “What? No,” he objected, “no.” He sighed. “Look, my preference may be men, but that doesn’t mean I’m uninterested in women,” he explained a little awkwardly, starring out the passenger side window. “I’m just interested in them less often than other people. I’m interested in most people less often than other people,” he admitted.

Eren responded with nothing more than a soft,

“Huh,”

and the car grew quiet. It seemed like only moments later that he found his eyes focusing on the distinctive façade of Eren’s apartment building.

“We’re back,” he said numbly.

“We are,” Eren agreed, a smile in his voice.

As they pulled into the parking garage beneath the building, Levi spotted something else that was surprisingly familiar. “Is that my car?”

Eren chuckled. “Yeah. It got towed a couple of days after you disappeared again- you left your phone and your spare car key here, so when we got the call, Erwin talked them into releasing it to him. Or bribed them into releasing it. I don’t really know- the point is, it’s been sitting in this garage for a couple of months now.”

He could tell- the dull sheen of its already faded paint was muted by a thin layer of dust. He could see bird shit on the hood and front windshield. He grimaced.

Eren smiled as he pulled into the parking lot beside it, but he didn’t see- he was too busy stepping out to look at it to notice.

His memories of sleeping in the backseat with his knees drawn up to his chest suddenly seemed both immediate and terribly distant. He eyed a whitish streak on the window and the spattering of mud around the wheel wells and was struck, finally, with just how long it had really been.

Eren plucked, somewhat shyly, at his sleeve.

“Later,” he promised, voice much too gentle, much too affectionate. “Let’s go home, Levi.”

***

There was an odd distance that lingered between them even after they entered the apartment- a sense of almost sacred apprehension that found them speaking in quieter tones than they may have otherwise, a sense of stillness that pushed into the spaces between them like a physical barrier.

“Are you hungry?” Eren asked, and he told him he was.

He watched him cook and thought about wrapping his arms around him and burying his nose between his shoulder blades like he used to. His mind immediately conjured up the smell of Eren’s deodorant, the heat of his skin.

He thought about it, and then Eren was finished cooking, and the moment had passed.

They ate quietly, almost deferentially, each slurp or clatter of a fork against a plate jarringly loud in the silence that hung between them.

When Eren gathered their dishes and went to place them in the sink, Levi moved without thinking, interrupting him mid-turn. He found his face mashed into Eren’s left shoulder blade instead of between them.

There was a delicacy to the situation he didn’t like- an uncertainty that manifested when Eren tensed with surprise. He held tightly to his waist, unwilling to break it or lift his head and look up.

Eren relaxed in his arms, heartbeat thrumming a little faster under his skin, but not fast enough to be alarmed.

“Hey,” he said warmly.

Levi grunted awkwardly into his back and felt his ribs reverberate with suppressed laughter.

“Can I turn around?”

It was with extreme reluctance that he loosened his grip enough for Eren to twist in his grasp. He did not look up. He buried his face in Eren’s chest as soon as the opportunity presented itself, tensing and then relaxing as Eren tugged him closer, into a tighter embrace, and rested his cheek on his head.

“I missed you,” he murmured again.

“That’s because you’re stupid,” Levi muttered back, but Eren just laughed.

He could feel him nosing at his hair and knew what he wanted, but there was a stubborn sense of anxiety and embarrassment that made him want to stay exactly as he was. He lifted his face rather unenthusiastically.

Eren leaned his forehead against Levi’s own with a painfully yearning smile. “I missed you,” he whispered, like it was a secret.

“I heard you the first time,” he grumbled.

“Say you missed me, too,” Eren demanded without a single trace of shame.

Levi struggled with mortification, moving to hide in Eren’s chest again and finding himself unable to when Eren whined in protest. “Jesus, you’re such a fucking child,” he complained. “I came back, didn’t I?”

Eren’s answering grin only worsened his embarrassment. He fidgeted uncomfortably inside the arms wound tightly around him. “You missed me,” Eren insisted beatifically.

“I will hit you if you don’t stop, you little-”

“Nah, you won’t,” he refuted, nosing Levi’s cheek affectionately. “That’s an empty threat. You like me too much.”

Levi scoffed at him. “Oh, you want to test that theory, do you?”

“Yeah,” Eren breathed, and then kissed him.

He barely felt the hands coming up from around him to cup his cheeks- Eren’s jaw was prickly with stubble still too short to have grown soft yet, and he tasted like the unpleasant aftertaste of a few too many cigarettes, but he kissed like he’d never been so in love, and with a thrill of dreamy panic, Levi supposed he hadn’t, no more than Levi had himself.

He found himself threading his fingers through Eren’s hair and rising onto his toes for better access, which was something he simply didn’t do on principle.

Eren noticed. He could feel him smiling against his lips.

“God, I missed you,” he murmured into his mouth, and Levi breathed in his words like they were more than air- with a hitch, like he was choking.

Eren hummed, stroking his thumbs over his cheekbones. “I missed you,” he whispered again.

“You too, you little shit,” Levi reluctantly answered, barely audible, almost mouthing the words.

Eren smiled like the sun was rising on a world that was everything he’d ever wanted, and Levi felt his cheeks flush with heat in response.

Levi pulled him back into a kiss, but what he got was fervent, much more demanding and much less careful than before.

He hardly registered how they made it from the kitchen to the living room, just sort of found himself tripping backwards over the armrest and being pressed into the couch cushions after what seemed like an eternity of kisses and caresses and knees bumping into each other.

Eren’s weight over him was familiar in a way that awakened a craving numbness and lethargy had deadened. It was like his sense of touch had reawakened- as he felt lips press to the skin just below his jaw, as he felt teeth rake playfully over his pulse, he melted into them, dragging his fingertips down Eren’s back and thinking maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t hated being a teenager as much as he’d thought he had.

He considered the possibility that he did not hate being the very sexual age of just barely twenty so much, either.

Eren paused, huffed a breathy laugh into Levi’s throat, and rocked his hips against him teasingly.

Levi decided he probably did hate it, after all.

He didn’t like how the action made his body squirm and his breath quicken.

Eren chuckled in his ear and started to grind him hard into the too-soft cushions, an arm edging under the small of his back to keep him close.

Levi was panting, still trying to plant his feet against the armrest and the back of the couch for better leverage when Eren suddenly stopped.

He threw Eren a bewildered, slightly furious look.

Eren smiled down at him, kissing him briefly on the lips, the nose, the jaw. “I still can’t believe you let me do this to you,” he murmured mysteriously.

Levi squinted at him. “I don’t let you do it to me, I let you do it with me,” he said impatiently, a little confused as to where this interruption was stemming from. “When you say it like that, it makes it sound like I’m just tolerating you touching me.”

‘Speaking of which, why aren’t you touching me?’ he did not add, but Eren’s slow, fond smile seemed to suggest Eren had understood anyway.

Levi expected him to say something, but he did not expect what he did say, which was a very soft and genuine,

“God, I love you.”

It took him a few seconds of blank staring to comprehend what Eren had just said, and in the split-second interim between comprehension and reaction, his face went from warm in the way particular to those who have just been engaging in- and are still quite interested in engaging in- fooling around with their clothes still on to a temperature comparable to the experience of cracking open an oven door and being hit by the resulting wall of trapped heat.

“Oh,” he said intelligently.

Eren just smiled at him.

He fought the urge to roll over in an effort to hide how flustered he was.

“I hope you’re not trying to get me to say that back to you, too,” he warned, scowling to offset the flush of colour he was sure he was wearing.

Eren laughed and kissed him, slowly, gently, meaningfully.

“I mean it,” he whispered, “I really do.”

Levi kissed him back, mostly to shut him up.

They’d always undressed each other with a sort of weirdly zealous fervour, but now, there was something lazy and a little reverent about how they undid the buttons of each other’s pants or paused to pull their shirts over their heads.

Like young parents opening gifts from one another on Christmas morning before their children awoke- quietly and carefully, with meaningful glances and flirtatious grins.

Levi broke that peculiar stillness when he groaned at the feeling of Eren mouthing him boldly through his underwear.

Eren chuckled breathily. “Hey,” he called quietly, looking up and making eye contact. “Will you let me finger you if I wash my hands really well after?”

He was torn between bemusement at Eren’s request and bemusement over the way Eren was trying to bargain with him for it.

He blinked.

“Okay,” he agreed cautiously after a moment. “Yeah, as long as you’re thorough.”

Eren smiled mischievously, pulling his underwear down to his ankles and kissing his thigh affectionately. “Give me a minute.”

Levi kicked off his underwear the rest of the way and then got up to fold them and the rest of his clothes neatly on the coffee table, feeling slightly foolish.

In Eren’s absence, the thoughts rushed in.

‘What are you doing?’

Something that was probably ill-advised, the same ill-advised thing he’d started doing months ago.

‘What will this achieve? What does this change?’

What did anything achieve or change in the world, he wondered. He’d feel good.

He wouldn’t regret it.

‘Are you sure about that?’

Yeah, he was.

Eren interrupted his musing with a kiss to the shoulder and a hand snaking over his hip. “I leave for two seconds and you’re already wandering around- you’re so impatient,” he complained, but there was no malice in his words.

Levi turned around and let himself be pressed back down into the couch.

Eren hummed in consideration. “I should probably put down a towel or something,” he commented idly, and then shrugged as if to say ‘oh well, this couch has seen worse things.’

Levi grimaced. “I don’t want to know.” He didn’t explain himself.

He didn’t have to. Eren snorted and strained forward to kiss him. He settled back into the cushions, letting his knees fall open obligingly but keeping a careful eye on what Eren was doing between them.

The combination of Eren’s tongue exploring the underside of his erection and the way his finger had begun to massage the outside of his asshole in small, pleasurable circles wrestled a little gasp from him, and he clamped his jaw shut, determined to prevent it from happening again.

Eren sighed exasperatedly at him. “Are we really doing this all over again?” he asked frankly.

Levi glowered at him. “Doing what all over again?” The question came out terse, warning.

Eren seemed unaffected. “This,” he said, flicking the tip of his tongue over the bundle of nerves just under the head of Levi’s dick and gently breaching him with the tip of his finger. The action earned him a strangled grunt and a sour look. “The thing where you get weird about letting me make you feel good. I thought we were over that.”

“That was before you remembered,” Levi grumbled quietly.

Eren looked at him silently for a moment and then rolled his eyes so hard it made Levi want to punch him.

“It’s not like I don’t remember everything we did before I remembered,” he muttered, sinking his finger into Levi’s ass up to the knuckle and then thrusting it in and out at a rather leisurely pace. “Though it was kind of a lot to take in when I did, I’m not going to lie.”

“Can we not,” Levi groused, inhaling sharply when Eren began to press a second finger in, “have this conversation while you’re fingering me?”

When Eren obligingly took the head of his erection into his mouth and began to suck on it as his fingers began to stretch outwards in small, insistent motions, Levi huffed a breath of relief, assuming it was over.

Just as he was starting to lose himself in the sensation, however, Eren’s head bobbed up under the hand he’d set in his hair.

“It’s a lot different, seeing you like this when I remember our history,” he commented idly.

In his frustration and embarrassment, Levi was about to revisit the part of their history where he’d had the authority to tell Eren to shut the fuck up and do what he was told, but that was, unfortunately, also the moment Eren curled his fingers up against his prostate, cutting his scathing remark off into a weird, choked moan.

Eren’s sly expression told him that it had probably been intentional.

“You’re a piece of,” he panted, biting at his knuckles to compose himself and taking a fistful of Eren’s hair in the hand he still had resting on his head, “a piece of shit to be doing this right now-”

Eren pushed in a third finger with an impatience that suggested he wasn’t the only one getting excited, and the stretch of it forced a rather pathetic-sounding whine out from between his fingers.

He didn’t like the way Eren grinned at him in response, his fingers thrusting in more sharply, fingertips curled upwards to catch on his prostate.

When Eren’s mouth sunk down on his erection again, this time farther and with more purpose than before, he gave up and just let himself moan at the feeling, closing his eyes as his head fell back on the cushions.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even masturbated- his body responded with such immediate desperation that he suspected it had been longer than he’d realized.

He felt orgasm knotting rapidly in his pelvis and tugged on his fistful of Eren’s hair warningly. “Eren,” he gasped, “Fuck, Eren-”

His eyes flew open when Eren pulled his mouth free and tightly squeezed the base of his erection instead, still working the hand in his inside him mercilessly.

He knew that writhing in protest wasn’t an especially dignified response, but it was an automatic one. He looked at Eren with wild eyes, only half-aware that he still had a fist twisted in Eren’s hair and that was probably pulling on it a little too hard. His indignant complaint, which he’d intended to involve several words, all of them meaningful in context, instead came out a frantic and slightly pitiful,

“Why?”

Eren was looking at him with heavy-lidded eyes and his lower lip pinched between his teeth, still squeezing with one hand and thrusting with the other as he shifted forward to kiss him.

He wasn’t especially fond of the taste of his own dick, but the aftereffects of near-orgasm tension were still tight and hot in his guts, so he met the kiss with a sort of helpless fury, burying both of his hands in Eren’s hair as he twisted uselessly against his thrusting fingers.

Eren moaned into his mouth, the hand around the base of Levi’s erection releasing it to press its length against his own.

“I don’t think,” he growled low in his throat, “you have any idea how fucking good you look right now.” Levi hissed sharply in surprise as Eren nipped at the skin just below his jawline. “So fucking good,” he breathed, working his fingers hard enough again Levi’s prostate that he couldn’t bite back his broken groan, “I want to fuck you so badly, so fucking badly right now, you have no idea-”

“So fuck me,” Levi demanded, digging his nails into Eren’s shoulders out of frustration. “Stop fucking with me and just fuck me, what the hell are you-”

Eren cut him off with something too hard and feverish to accurately be called a kiss, his fingers pulling free and his erection pressing hard against the cleft of Levi’s ass for a second before unenthusiastically backing off.

“We have to go into the bedroom, I didn’t bring a condom when I grabbed the lube,” he babbled, visibly frustrated. “And I still need to go wash my hands. Fuck. Fuck.”

Levi snorted, cautiously eying the hand Eren was holding politely away from him. “I’m surprised you haven’t tried to convince me to go bareback,” he commented.

“You’d never go down on me again if we did,” Eren answered immediately. “Your blowjobs are way too fucking good for me to risk that.”

He couldn’t help it: he laughed. “You know me better than I thought.”

Eren kissed him again and then, with a look of painful reluctance, pulled away. “I’ll meet you in our room, just give me a minute to clean up,” he coaxed, eyes nervous and pleading like Levi was going to change his mind and leave him to jerk off for teasing him so brutally.

He may have considered it if he wasn’t aching to receive what Eren was aching to offer- as it was, he was just better at not looking pitifully desperate.

“We’ll see,” he said cryptically, snorting again when Eren shot him an alarmed look. “Make sure you wash your hands properly.”

And with that, he was gone, leaving Levi to totter to the bedroom already feeling distracted and a little wrecked. He only remembered to grab the lubricant halfway down the hallway, and had to turn around to get it.

He threw himself on the bed already having forgotten why they had to change locations.

“Condom,” he reminded himself after a second, furrowing his eyebrows and rolling onto his knees to yank Eren’s bedside table open and fumble around in it.

Eren made an appreciative noise when he came in. Levi looked over his shoulder at him, gold foil condom wrapper and bottle of lubricant still in hand.

“Now that,” Eren whistled, “is a nice view.”

Levi quirked an eyebrow at him. “Oh, that’s right- somehow, I managed to forget you had a thing about my ass this time around,” he drawled.

“No, I’ve always had a thing for your ass,” he admitted, and then waved off Levi’s startled stare with a laugh. “Levi, literally everyone did. It was pretty much common knowledge that you had the best ass in the Corps, men and women included. And, uh, other included, too. There’s no way you didn’t know that.”

Levi continued to stare at him, dumbfounded.

Eren shot him a curious look, lips starting to turn up in an odd smile. “Wait, did no one ever tell you?”

“No,” he said incredulously. “If I’d known you shits you were sitting around talking about my ass, I would’ve had you scraping bird shit off of the rooftops until you couldn’t lift your arms.” He wrinkled his nose, unsure how to feel. “I had no idea that was something you talked about.”

Eren disguised his chuckle with an unconvincing cough, still grinning crookedly as he crawled across the bed towards him. “Well, that’s probably why, then. Sorry,” he said insincerely, catching Levi around the waist and pressing up against his back when he went to roll over. “Hey,” he murmured, “can we stay like this? I want to try something.”

Levi hummed his consent, passing Eren the condom and lubricant and settling back down on his knees.

He only half-listened as Eren tore the wrapper and popped the cap of the bottle, reaching out to nudge the drawer in Eren’s bedside table closed again when he spotted it:

His phone.

Eren had been keeping his phone on the table beside the side of the bed he typically slept on.

He felt peculiarly touched.

He also felt Eren kiss his back adoringly, but he didn’t have time to make a snide remark about it before Eren was pushing into him, hands firmly anchored on his hips.

Levi fought the returning feeling of being overwhelmed- it had been too long, and his body had started to forget again. He panted as Eren bottomed out inside him, hands stroking his sides soothingly.

There was a brief moment where he wondered,

‘Why do I always let him fuck me, not the other way around?’

and then he was pulled upright, his back pressing against Eren’s chest, Eren’s arm wrapped firmly around his middle and Eren’s mouth buried in the crook of his throat, and he remembered.

It was a pretty good position- one that, despite the way Eren’s dick curved away from his prostate, angled his hips in a way that meant his thrust rubbed against it. He arched his back to try and increase the level of contact and Eren laughed breathlessly against his skin.

It still wasn’t natural to him- and probably never would be- to let himself be noisy and vulnerable, even in bed, but he took the sparks of pleasure Eren’s rhythmic thrusting was building in his pelvis and forgave himself his little gasps and moans, which seemed to suit Eren well enough.

He was wondering distantly what Eren had meant by something he ‘wanted to try’ when it happened.

This was not a new position for them- very few positions were, if he was embarrassingly honest with himself- so the question puzzled him right up until Eren wrapped his hand around his throat, pulling Levi’s head back against his shoulder and curving his body in a shallow arch that sent the dick in his ass deeper into him with every thrust.

Eren was pushing lightly against his spine with his free hand, encouraging the arch. Levi could hear him starting to groan in his ear.

He gasped thinly as Eren’s hand tightened and pace quickened, the thrum of heightened pleasure already shooting skyward throughout his body.

He wanted to swear at Eren for springing something so extreme on him without warning, but his brain had taken a sharp turn for the blissfully foggy and all that he could register escaping his lips was a variety of small, breathless noises he’d probably be ashamed of in any other situation.

He was drifting off into blankness when Eren loosened his grip slightly- long enough for him to take a deep breath and shiver with the shock of it- before tightening it again.

Loose, tight.

His concept of time went a little sideways- on one hand, it felt like there hadn’t been enough, would never be enough of Eren’s hand on his throat, of Eren growling praise in his ear, of Eren fucking him- on the other, it seemed like they’d been fucking for an eternity, like the sun had set and should have been coming up again as stroked himself and clung to the hand around his neck and rutted mindlessly back.

Tight.

He didn’t register the hips slapping sharply against his ass as anything but perfect, but this time, he wasn’t going white- he could feel it creeping up on him, suffocating the thoughts in his mind and setting his legs shaking with stimulation.

This time, he heard himself scream, and he heard Eren’s low moan of,

“Oh, fuck,”

in his ear.

He felt Eren’s hand loosen again, this time permanently, and he felt Eren pounding into him, felt his stomach muscles clenching against his back as he came, heard Eren’s guttural groan.

His whole body was already shaking, even as Eren rutted idly through the last of his orgasm.

Eren’s thumb was massaging his throat gently, and aside from his shaking, they were both still.

“Holy shit,” Eren said quietly.

“Yeah,” he agreed hoarsely, hissing a little as he pulled free of Eren’s softening dick and rolled onto his back. ‘I’m fucking filthy,’ he thought dreamily but could not muster the energy to express.

Eren wiped his stomach diligently. He was appreciative.

When Eren started to wander towards the door, he struggled onto his elbows, giving him a stare that was probably more bleary than anything. “Going?”

Eren shot him an odd little smile. “I’m thirsty. You coming?”

Despite his state, he tried to get up, he really did.

His shaky knees gave out immediately, sending him sitting heavily back down on the bed.

Eren was leaning against the doorway, arms crossed over his chest like he had no intention of going much of anywhere.

A sharper part of his mental faculties shook off post-coital sluggishness for long enough to grow suspicious. “On purpose,” he mumbled vaguely, already losing his train of thought. “You did that on purpose.”

Eren laughed. “God, you’re so wrecked,” he said with a grin, and then bit his lip. “You can’t even fucking walk, can you? I love that I can do that to you.”

Levi squinted at him with whatever passes for malevolence in a person too blissed-out to muster true annoyance.

“That’s pretty fucked up,” he commented, as much in regards to his current state as to Eren’s appreciation of it.

“Ah, you love me, I love you, it’s not that fucked up,” Eren objected.

Levi made a derisive noise and collapsed back onto the bed.

He heard the laughter in Eren’s tone. “Why the hell would you put up with me if you didn’t?” he teased.

He closed his eyes and snorted quietly through his nose.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled, “I guess there’s a lot to be said for seeing a familiar face.”