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The stars were sharp and pointed and very bright in the clear sky as he threw his head back.
Why must you mock me this way, he thought convulsively, and he felt his strength fail him. Back in time, another tragedy had come upon him from clear blue heavens; his father had disappeared under a bright summer sun and a crystalline sky.
“Why must you mock me this way,” he said weakly to the indifferent stars, before they were blotted out by the garish light of a torch, and the night was full of voices shouting his name. He felt strong arms preventing him from falling to the ground, and he went under.
He was floating then, and there was pain—but not real pain, only something like an idea of pain that coalesced in the same point of time and space that his being occupied by what seemed a mere coincidence. He knew his body was suffering; yet all he felt was a sedate and detached calm.
He was floating just below the surface, and he knew that if he broke through it, he would die.
He could not see, but he could smell the strong smell of alcohol and of burnt flesh. He could hear frantic voices and the shuffling sound of people moving about, but could not make out what they were saying.
Then he heard his own voice scream and moan horribly, and a cold terror came over him. But a clear voice spoke very close to him—a soothing, very familiar voice.
The voice said, “Easy there, we’ve got you—we’ve got you, I’ve got you—easy now.”
He knew the voice, but could not put a name to it. He wanted to go to the voice, but he was too close to the surface. He was too close to the surface, and knew that if he broke through it, he would die—and something resembling a deeply ingrained instinct told him that dying would be a bad thing. So he let himself sink down to the safe depths.
When he resurfaced, he did not die.
He woke up in a single bed, in an empty and very quiet room. It was night time, and there was darkness in the room, except for the softest glow that came through the windows. One of the panes of a window had been left open, and a warm, lonely wind came in; the quiet stirring of the light curtain was the only movement in the room.
He had come over the surface of consciousness, but some part of his mind was still lingering below, and it was as if a thin veil of wonder had been laid upon him. In that fragment of time that to him felt timeless, he did not know himself as a man with a name; the events that had brought him where he was were lost on him, and if his own father, entering from the door on the wall opposite from the bed where he was lying, had come into the room then, he would not have known him.
He felt quite clearly that he was a human being, and that he was alive; he rejoiced in that, and his joy was warm and melancholic. He smiled in the secrecy of darkness; he felt sharply and deliciously lonely.
He breathed slowly, mirroring the breeze. The bed was comfortable. He felt like sleeping again. He moved to better nestle himself into the soft pillows, and that was when a sudden and stabbing pain shot through his right shoulder and down the arm. Confused, he tried to clench his fist, but felt nothing but a crawling, dull itch that was heavy on his arm like something dead. He peeked below the sheets and saw that his right arm was gone.
As the pain of the flesh had pierced his body, the ache of memory bore through his mind; the dark and cruel shape of the battlefield came to him from a long distance and as if through a fog, and where the graceful and simple gladness of being alive of the unthinking creature had been, now a nameless sorrow arose.
His mind had come to him at once, and with it the knowledge of his state; all the signals from his body suddenly registered and he felt hot all over and feverish; his brain was frying in his skull, and he thought he could be delirious with fever, for he looked at the foot of the bed and saw, sitting there on the mattress, Mike, who he knew was dead.
Mike was looking at him silently, with a tender and remote expression on his face. After a moment, he stood up and went to the window, looking out.
Suddenly, a soft noise was heard outside the room, and his eyes went to the door just in time to see the doorknob being turned. When he looked back to the window, Mike was gone.
A nurse, carrying a candle, had peered into the room. In the darkness, she saw that he was awake because the light reflected into his pupils and two bright pinpricks were visible to her from the door. He saw that she was expecting him to be asleep, for she hesitated a moment on the threshold before she straightened herself and came striding into the room, all business.
In a moment, she was at his side. She bent over him and looked into his eyes; his pupils followed her every movement. As if prompted by this, she lit with her candle the one that stood on the bedside table; placed over it, there was a bowl of cool water, where a cloth had been left to soak. She took the cloth, wrung it, and with it she wiped his brow and his face to give him some relief from the fever. While doing so, she addressed him:
“Good evening, Commander,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
He looked at her. In the dimness, he could not see her hair, for it was tied back and covered with a kerchief; her eyes were looking at him and he saw that they were very dark and gentle.
He said, “I am doing fine, thank you very much,” but it came out from his parched throat as a rasping whistle which was barely audible.
She stopped her soothing touches and he almost gave a keening sound. She put the cloth back to soak and walked promptly to a small table on the far end of the room on which a jug of water stood with a glass beside it. She came back at the other side of the bed carrying the glass full of water and propped him up carefully.
“Now, sir,” she said, “I know that you are very thirsty, but you must take very small sips, or you’ll be sick.”
She pressed the glass to his lips and tipped his head back encouragingly. His thirst was such that he felt he could have drained a lake, but he did as she had told him, and after a few sips, he felt he could not take any more.
She took the glass back to the table, and he sensed with a pang of terrible loss that she was going to leave; the solitude that only shortly before had been so sweet, now felt dreadful. Not bearing that she would leave him, he called: “Would you please come here a moment?”
She paused in her moving about, and then was back to him.
“What do you need, sir?” she said.
“Can I—,” he said softly, “can I hold your hand for a while?”
She hesitated; then she said, “You can, sir. But only for this little while.”
She gave him her hand, and his sorrow hung gravely over him as he took it.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Sophie, sir.”
“Please,” he said as he held her hand, “please, call me Erwin.”
“I am afraid that is not possible, sir,” she said.
“Why not? Why not, I’m giving you permission.”
“Sir, you shouldn’t be talking. You must rest. And I should be calling the doctor,” she said, but she did not take her hand away from his.
They were silent. He was looking at her with that surprised look that sick people often have in their eyes and which gives something childish to their gaze. He looked at her and said nothing.
She wasn’t tall but had a strong build; her eyes and her mouth were set and stern; one could see that she had been shaped by her job, both externally and internally. Moving unconscious or dead bodies around had given her strong shoulders and corded arms; her solicitude had been stripped of any trace of softness that could harm her patients more than it would help them: they were soldiers and their fight was not over yet; she could not give them the privilege of rest, which too often confines with surrender. Instead, she refracted the weakness of her patients and gave back an image of strength. Yet, one could still guess a former smallness about her, and a deep and honest kindness; her hands were very gentle.
He had lost memory of the last time he had touched the hand of a woman.
“You are pretty,” he said softly, feeling very silly. “I wish you would stay. I wish you would call me Erwin,” and it wasn’t him who spoke, but an echo of his loneliness.
“Sir, your wound needs cleaning and a change of bandages. I must call the doctor to tell her you have regained consciousness. And the captain will want to know that you are awake, too.”
“The captain?”
“Captain Levi, sir.”
“Oh, yes, the captain.”
“Yes, sir. He has . . . invited us to notice him as soon as you woke up.”
“Will you not stay, then?”
“I will give you some more water to drink and then I will be going, sir.”
“Very well, then,” he said, letting her hand go.
His eye remained fixed on the spot at the foot of the bed where Mike had been sitting while she went to fill the glass. He thought about Levi and felt something stir inside of him; he wished to see him . . . and he wished not.
As the nurse had promised, she went as soon as he had drunk another sip of water. He asked her to leave the candles lit, and she allowed it.
When he was alone again, he tried to imagine how Levi would look upon seeing him; somehow, he couldn’t. And he never knew, for his exchange with the nurse had exhausted him, and only a few minutes passed before darkness claimed him again.
The fever was very high and the medics were afraid he would not survive it. His body was caught in the painful and delicate process of recovering from the monstrous shock that was losing a limb in the worst way imaginable: having it ripped off by tremendous jaws.
When the gates of Wall Rose had closed behind him, Erwin had crashed to the ground and his conscience had plummeted even lower.
His wound had been promptly cauterized to stop the bleeding, and it was kept clean and checked to remove dead tissue and help the body fight the infection. But for days he fought between life and death.
Soon, all efforts were put into trying to lower the temperature of his body, to no great avail; it was as if a huge beast made of fire and poison were raging through his body: everyone thought, without saying it aloud, that it would kill him in the end.
Along with fever, delirium came. In those moments of waking unconsciousness, he would lie still, staring with his open eyes fixed and unseeing, or he would speak unintelligible words with the loquacity of fever, between pitiful groans of pain.
Only a whole week after he had been carried to the infirmary did he regain consciousness―and that was when the nurse had found him awake; but soon after, the clutches of delirium seized him again.
When he woke up to consciousness once more, almost forty-eight hours had passed since that night, but to him it was as if he had only slept through the night; he had closed his eyes to darkness and opened them to the light of early morning, which came into the room and rested on a figure sitting in a chair beside his bed.
He saw that it was Levi and that he was asleep. The morning light fell directly upon him, surrounding him in a radiant halo and presenting him like a vision.
Levi slept with his arms crossed and his head bent over his chest; his dark hair fell on his closed eyelids and his breathing was so soft that Erwin could not hear it.
Erwin discovered within himself a simple yet profound happiness to see him; he did not remember the reluctance he had felt the last time, so sly and insinuating, at the prospect of seeing him, and the feeling felt natural and welcome.
It occurred to him, with a clarity that is sharper in those moments when it is most threatened, that he had never had the chance to watch him so closely and in such a private way. In any other moment he would have felt embarrassment and would have turned his eyes away; but weakness made him bold: with the simplicity and innocence of a child, Erwin took the chance and delighted in the sight.
He saw that Levi was not handsome. His face was gaunt and drawn, even in his sleep, and his features were bony and sharp; his lips were straight and thin and his nose was small and pointed; his upper lip stuck out a little in the slackness of sleep. He had a high forehead which seemed higher because his brows were so low and thin, furrowed over sunken eyes that were lined with worry. If one had never seen his eyes open, Erwin thought, one would expect them to be dull and empty—but Erwin knew that, despite the permanent scowl, Levi’s eyes were sharp and intense.
The suffused glow of dawn rested on his face, and Erwin saw new lines there and recognised the signs left by the ploughshare of worry. His heart clenched a little, and it hurt that much more because it was so full.
He saw confusedly what he had done to Levi and wanted to make it right to him. He wanted to touch him, to wake him up, to see those eyes open and to see that they were not dull and empty but sharp and intense; he wanted to tell him—and thus to himself—that it was all right. But he had no arm anymore, and he could not reach out to touch him.
And just when Levi had started to slip away, further and further into the cold and cruel darkness that crept at the edges of Erwin’s mind, he opened his eyes. Levi’s head raised slowly, and he looked at Erwin.
He said nothing. Erwin lay very still.
Levi held him nailed under his reproachful eye, in which burned the flames of anger and scorn, fuelled by concern. There are small people who have a gigantic stare; Levi was one of them. Erwin, who was twice his size, was weak and helpless, and felt himself quake and shiver under that gaze.
Levi sat there, looking at him, unmoving, for a time. Then, something seemed to occur to him, and his eyes glided from Erwin’s face to his bedside table.
He said, “Do you need to drink?”
Erwin shook his head. He could not speak.
Levi stood up. He was wearing his civilian clothes and even from that distance Erwin could smell soap about him—he smelled fresh and clean. Levi took the chair and brought it closer to the bed; Erwin saw that he still had a little limp, but it was barely noticeable and surely invisible to anybody who didn’t know to look for it.
Levi took the cloth from its bowl, that had been left there, and started to cool Erwin’s brow with it. His eyes where now detached, as if they were looking into a faraway dimension from an invisible window. Still, Erwin did not dare to let himself drift as he had done with the nurse.
After a while, Levi spoke.
“You made me worry,” he said, quiet and stern. His eyes did not change.
Erwin said nothing and looked at him with a look that said: I’m sorry. Levi kept cooling his brow.
He said, “This is the last time you go out without me, do you hear? I don’t care if you are the one who decides and orders people around. This is the last time you left me here.” His steely eyes focused on Erwin and they were terrifying. “Look at you, Commander; you can’t even look after your fucking self.”
Erwin tried to think, to remember; it was extremely difficult with his mind so muddled by the fever and the threat of sleep. A string of half formed thoughts came to him: two soldiers — Colossal and Armoured Titan — Eren — rescue.
“It was necessary—,” he said feebly, “it was necessary to go at once. You were injured. We could not wait for—”
“I know damn well it was necessary,” Levi cut in and he stopped wiping the sweat from Erwin’s face. “I didn’t mean that. You will never hear me ask to delay an emergency expedition, not for any reason. What the hell, Erwin; I’m not one of those suckers in Sina, you know. What I meant was that you’ll never order me to stay behind, ever again, even if it means losing a goddamn foot, I don’t care. And if you do, you’ll see where you can stick your orders,” he said, and he slapped the cloth back into the bowl, the water almost spilling out, and sat back angrily into his chair.
They remained like that for a while, both unspeaking—Erwin nestled in his sickbed, where he would remain for a little while longer, Levi sitting beside him, his eyes flinty and his lips pressed thin. Sometimes he took the cloth back, wrung it, and pressed it against Erwin’s feverish skin with a gentleness that clashed oddly with the look on his face, or he gave him some water to drink. Erwin, very thirsty but remembering the nurse’s words, only took very small sips from the glass offered to him.
His wits and memories were coming back to him slowly but steadily, like the tide.
It occurred to him that nobody was coming. The usual medical routine was bound to start later, as it was quite early in the morning. Still, when Levi was let in the room—and everything suggested that he had spent the night beside his bed—he must have been asked to call for someone in case he woke up. Levi didn’t; to Erwin, it only meant that he wanted them to be alone and to make it last as long as it took to—whatever it was they were doing.
Erwin looked at his captain with softness in his eyes. Levi’s own eyes seemed even and calm, but there was something behind them which troubled them, like ripples running over the still surface of a lake that belie the perilous undercurrent below. Erwin frowned, sensing that the same thought was hanging over them, unspoken; he sometimes saw Levi’s lips move silently and thought he could read over them the same question that was running around in his own mind: how would he be able to command them, now that it was largely unlikely that he would be able to fight on the field again? What would happen now?
Erwin didn’t know, but somehow the thought did not scare him as much as it seemed it was gnawing at Levi.
But knowing him, there was also something else on Levi’s mind—and Erwin thought he knew just what it was.
Breaking the silence, Erwin said, “I was giving orders when it happened,” he said, and Levi raised his eyes on him. “I was directing the squads and I had my arm outstretched, when this Three Meters comes out of the trees. It was one of those crawlers—it came out of nowhere. It bit my arm and wrenched me off my horse and I got carried away. The other men were busy, people were dying—we were surrounded by Titans, nobody could cut it down, so that bastard would not stop running around. I had to cut off what was left of my arm in the end to free myself.”
Erwin twisted some in his bed, wincing at the stab of pain in his shoulder, and stretched out with his left arm and touched Levi lightly on his wrist. “You see—it was so sudden,” he said. “You wouldn’t have been able to prevent it. So stop thinking about it, Levi.”
Levi’s expression did not yield—though Erwin thought he saw some relief in his eyes—as he took Erwin’s hand into both of his. “Was it cut down?” he asked.
“I—don’t know, actually.”
Levi’s gaze was fiery and soft at the same time as he said, “I would have killed that one. For you.”
Erwin smiled a weak and grateful smile and settled back onto his pillow, looking deep into Levi’s eyes and giving a long sigh. He looked up at the ceiling and lay there, feeling the nearness of Levi. A few minutes passed, in which none of them spoke.
Then, Erwin started to cry.
It surprised him; he didn’t know why he was crying, for he was not thinking about himself at all. He was thinking of the sun stealing slowly up in the sky and of the birds chirping outside the windows; he was thinking of the silent and lonely hills that made up the vast world, and of Levi sitting there, beside him.
He made no sound and Levi did not realize what was happening, not until he moved to take the cloth again. Erwin lay there, tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks as his eyes moved slowly to rest upon Levi.
Levi only stared at him. Then, without uttering a single word, he took off the jacket he was wearing and hung it neatly over the back of his chair, took off his shoes and stood up; he padded around the bed and crawled onto it over left side. He pressed closely against Erwin’s side and took his face in his palms.
Levi did not say anything as he stared right into Erwin’s wet, leaking eyes; he pressed his forehead against Erwin’s clammy one, and tried to wipe his tears with his thumbs. He searched his face with his fingertips as if he were a blind man trying to learn Erwin by touch alone. Levi shook his head silently against Erwin’s, and his cheek came to rest over his temple.
“What have they done to you—look what they have done to you,” Levi said very softly against his temple.
Erwin closed his eyes. There was an ebb and flow inside of him, an undertow of some unspeakable feeling that was rising and falling inside him, and he felt like a castaway but of a shipwreck that was sweet. He wept silently, without making a sound, and Levi wiped the tears from his cheeks with his fingers and his lips.
One time, and it was just that one time, Levi kissed the corner of his mouth, and Erwin tried to catch his retreating lips with his own, but Levi pulled back sharply.
“You smell awfully,” he said. Erwin looked at him dumbly with swollen, wide eyes and didn’t attempt anything no more.
“We can’t wash you up properly until your wound stops leaking blood and other disgusting stuff every time we move you,” Levi said. “You should get some sleep now,” he added in a low voice, seeing that Erwin had regained control over himself, at last.
He got up and went back to his chair, where he put his shoes back on. Erwin followed his every movement and noticed how he looked charmingly dishevelled; his hair was a little ruffled, with some silken strands sticking out, and his shirt was creased and rumpled.
“Try to rest a bit before the doctors come to check on you,” Levi said. “I’ll get something to eat myself. I’m starving.”
Erwin nodded at him. His thoughts had started to feel long and disjointed and a couple of hours of sleep sounded appealing to him just then.
Before he went, Levi paused in the middle of the room and looked back at him.
“I’ll be back later today,” he said.
Erwin smiled at him. “Alright,” he said, and before Levi left, he thought he heard him say—in a murmur so low it was barely audible and that was probably not meant to be heard at all: “I can wash you, if you’ll let me.”
As the door clicked shut behind Levi, Erwin closed his eyes and he dozed off almost immediately.
His fever broke that very evening, and thus his convalescence began.
⸺
A couple of days later, when he was thinking back to all this, Erwin found himself wondering whether it had all been a fever-induced hallucination or if it was an actual memory; he had been fairly sure it was the latter, but the recent events had made him reconsider.
It wasn’t that his recollections of that morning—when he had woken up to find Levi sitting beside his bed—were muddled or confused, not at all. He could still summon in his mind a crystal clear image of Levi—soothing him with the wet cloth, taking off his shoes, climbing onto the bed next to him, holding his face in his hands, murmuring low.
It was what Levi had said only a few minutes earlier, and how he had said it that was now making him doubt, and doubt had made all other memories shrink to the back of his skull.
Levi was sitting in the same chair where Erwin had seen him upon waking up, and Pixis was on Erwin’s left side, looking half-drunk already but alert through his wrinkled, half-closed eyelids, when Hange had come in along with the Springer boy, standing at the foot of the bed, to report the shocking news about Ragako Village and what it meant for them all if what Hange thought was proven to be true.
It was then that Levi had raised up his steady eyes, fixed them right into Erwin’s and said: “You disgust me.”
Erwin could not see how it could be possible for the same lips that had dried his tears and kissed him better to utter such a cruel remark—one that had twisted in Erwin’s guts like a rusty blade; and if one of the two Levi had to perish, it must be the lover.
Now he sat in his bed, his back straight and supported by pillows, and he looked at the door without seeing it. His expression was set and guarded almost into a scowl, and he was already going over his next move in that mind of his that was always several steps ahead of all others, while his soldier’s heart kept on beating in his chest, and it was just a little bit lonelier.