Work Text:
9:13p.m, 13 August 2007
Eren cast a quick glance at his watch and took in the fluorescent numbers flashing on the screen. Work was almost over. He sucked in a lungful of crisp night air and drew it out slowly, the clean and invigorating taste of the late hours a reprieve from the unrelentingly suffocating heat of the kitchen. There was still a lingering scent of cedar-roasted dough and spiced marinade on the apron wrapped loosely around his frame, the supposedly "hot new special" of the menu clinging obstinately to the cheap cotton material.
A light wind raked its fingers through his already tousled hair as Eren brought the cigarette in his fingers once more to his lips, contemplating to indulge in yet another intoxicating plume of tampered air, but the tobacco threatening to smother his lungs and flood his veins made him suddenly breathless and he stopped short. The acrid aftertaste of nicotine burned his tongue, and Eren tried to mask his distaste as he spat out the remains of the clogged ash onto the bruised asphalt below. He tossed the half burnt cigarette, then crushed it brusquely under the heel of his sneaker and rested his elbows on the edge of the parapet in a resigned manner. The flicker of light dancing at the end of the stick winked out finally; the only indication of the cigarette Eren smoked was a wisp of blackened smoke curling wearily from the bud.
Shit.
It was his third time smoking, and the rush of adrenaline mixed with mild delirium from the ashen contents of the rolled-up stick still felt morbidly foreign to him; his heart pounded too hard and his head was swimming in a molten state of catatonia, the high all too surreal and insanely gratifying. He felt like he was dangling from the ledge of a skyscraper, a hair's breadth away from plunging into eternity, and he realized he really didn't like that feeling of precarious uncertainty and insecurity. He preferred to stay grounded to reality, where grey areas were nothing but idealistic opinions and textbook answers were stamped as "definitive success". The generation Eren lived in required it. He required it to survive.
"You didn't breathe in hard enough, again. And how many times do I have to tell you, the filter-"
"I don't care."
The words were scraped out through gritted teeth, more curt and dismissive than Eren intended them to be. He knew Levi would understand either way. Eren waited for the pale-skinned boy to join him beside the ledge of the pizza house balcony before fishing the cigarette pack calmly out of his jean pocket and tossing it onto the parapet. The plastic lid of the box clattered open against the concrete harshly, a few sticks spewing haphazardly out of the half-opened pack.
"I.. don't want it anymore. I quit."
His voice lost its previous cold snare and reduced itself to a meeker, more placid tone. Eren released a huge sigh and reached up to bury his palms in his hair, the unkempt, sweat-matted locks slid over his fingers in a supposedly self-soothing way; ironically enough, the action did nothing to clear the clutter of thoughts in his mind.
What ensued after that softly uttered declaration was a silence that stretched out so long between both boys that Eren had thought Levi didn't hear him at all. Eren slowly turned to face Levi, his shoe scuffing against the other in worried anticipation. The moon was round, perfectly round. Its soft, silver light drowned half of Levi's face in shadow, sharpened the angles of his features and softened his cold, grey eyes. He looked illustrious and ethereal under the curtain of silver, as if a veil of deception encompassed the slighter boy and melded his appearance into one of another dimension: milder, more decadent and unbelievably raw.
Eren struggled to compose himself and schooled his features into a mask of considerable inquisition. "Levi"?
"Eren, I'm not working anymore after today," Levi finally directed his gaze upon the taller of the two. A hint of untouched regret was buried in the sea of grey, inconspicuously fleeting but Eren registered it almost right away, like how he always did any of Levi's emotions, be they just a faint sliver or immensely unambiguous. Levi lowered his head, as if what he just blurted out was more of a guilty confession than a mere statement.
"I'm resigning, to find a job within the Niigata district where I can be closer to home." He waited a few seconds before reaching for the abandoned cigarette pack, slender fingers tentatively tracing the battered edges and smoothing over the spilled contents.
As much as the sudden information alarmed Eren, the boy didn't question why, and he also didn't try to hide the shock riding his veins. "I guess it would be uncouth for a ripe mentor such as you to remain by a disciple's side, constantly guiding him along the beaten path when he still sucks at baking pizzas after all that training," The brown-haired boy tried to lighten the situation with a joke, albeit an insipidly lackluster one at that, but he still managed to earn a breathy chuckle out of the other nonetheless.
"Well, pizzas are difficult things to make. Too many parts to make a whole, too many things on a slice, besides, the temperature has to be just right as well, if not-"
Levi abruptly broke off as he glanced at Eren; the boy was disengaged, his features so unreadable and detached that Levi completely lost his train of thought. Sometimes, he thought he knew each and every thing about Eren, the words he would use and the sounds he would make. Other times, he pondered over the countless possible things pouring through Eren's mind; the boy was so caught up in his own thoughts at times that Levi fought to seek a connection with his demeanor and yearned to understand him, even in the slightest way. A wave of sudden weariness enveloped him, making his limbs heavy and his heart sag. He didn't want to continue this conversation anymore.
"Well, anything you want to say? Work is over in a few minutes." Levi turned the pack over in his pale fingers, the tips carding absently over the gaudy print on the plastic. He needed something to keep his fingers distracted, so he wouldn't think of using them to smoke another cigarette, or skim the tips over the skin of Eren's cheeks like how he longed to so many times...
Sensing the sudden dismal turn in the conversation, Eren's heart sank and he tightened his grip on the edge of the parapet, welcoming the dull ache that began to flash up over his white-knuckled hands. He didn't know what to say, didn't want to say anything that would signal the end of their friendship, so he chose to stay quiet. His gaze flickered downward and chose to study Levi's pale fingers as they danced over the cigarette sticks, sliding them into the pack deftly, then flipping the lid shut with a resounding click. "Last words, Jaeger?"
We might not see each other again.
"No." Eren managed to force a whisper out of his cluttered throat; the space inside was suddenly filling fast with the premonition of tears, making Eren blink quickly and swallow as hard as he could. He snapped his gaze to the digital screen of his wrist-watch.
9.30p.m. Work was over.
"You can tell me anything you want, Eren," Levi mused. "Anything can be said when the moon is this round." His voice was like liquid obsidian, smooth and enticing. Eren fought to stay calm, to keep his composure and not start crying. He didn't know what to make of the words he just heard, so light and optimistic, yet there was something so ominously desolate and depressing about it, it made Eren's heart shatter into a thousand tiny pieces inside his shallow chest. He tightened his grasp on the edge of the parapet further, the pain pushing its way up his arms and the tears threatening to lose its traction and trickle down his cheeks any moment now.
Eren didn't say anything. He fought to stay silent as the minutes dragged by slowly, his heart in his mouth and the air in his lungs being eaten away by the voracious monster that is helplessness; the boy didn't know what to say or do, not when the whirlwind of emotions inside him didn't know how to settle and his mind was hopelessly blank. He did not utter a word, not while the boy next to him finally unfolded his arms from across the ledge and gathered his bearings with a repressed smile, not while he turned and cast one last long look at Eren, his searchful gaze drifting across the boy's features and thoroughly sifting through every plane and contour of his face, as if making sure to etch each lucid detail in his mind forever. Eren continued to remain silent, his lips stubbornly sewn shut on their own accord even as Levi finally pulled his gaze away from the boy he'd come to know for almost two years, and left the warmth of the balcony.
Eren steeled himself against the parapet as he heard the latter gun the engine of his motorcycle and pull away into the night. He slid down the grime of the concrete wall to rest his elbows on his knees and bury his fingers in his hair. He suddenly felt so wrung out, as if the mass of pumping flesh inside his chest had outdone itself in working double time and was starting to feel the ill effects of strenuous exertion. He felt inexplicably desperate to reach out for something, anything at all that he could get a grasp on in order to keep himself afloat the choppy waves of emotions swarming him. His vision was blurring; his cheeks suddenly felt unnaturally damp and itchy. Eren was finally crying.
This whole conversation, or rather interaction between him and Levi was admittedly nothing but a sad farewell, a poorly-written epilogue made up of everything but without a single truth. The whole exchange was threaded together by the thin, delicate intricacies of fabricated emotions, fragile and awfully formidable. It was augmented solely by the occasional riff-raffs of pointless small talk and predictable answers, of false smiles and paper-thin masks that both boys would do anything to claw off of each other. Then came the cursed, abominable silence that yawned between them, and severed the thin cord holding each to the other. They say silence could make or break, but in this predicament, in this moment of unadulterated inability to speak a single word, it came to pass that silence was both a thief of destruction and a mediator of resolution, a devil who broke both of their hearts and an angel who allowed them to unconsciously make a promise in that moment: to never obscure their hearts from the truth, ever again. Everything between them ended this way, only because both parties were too afraid to confront their feelings and be caught up in the insurmountable weight of responsibility that would come after. A foolish, thoughtless idea birthed by inexperience and societal manipulation, nothing short of a tyrannically-natured concept bearing fruition in the community, yielding the potential to taint young hearts and sully tender flesh.
Eren did not know how long he sat on the rough concrete of the balcony for, the hours seemed to forget him as they raced on, the night reducing rapidly to a noiseless, deadly darkness that seemed to obliterate any sense of time and stretch on forever. His eyelids burned with exhaustion, his legs were numb from the cold and his heart was sore. Everything was a mess; yet the pack of untouched cigarettes lay quietly on the edge of the parapet, serene and contempt and void of protest. Levi didn't take it with him to Niigata, as if he was returning it back to Eren on purpose to keep as a memento of him. Eren finally left the balcony as dawn drew near, his heart as empty as his pockets.
19 February 2008
Eren never saw Levi again after that fateful night of cold August winds and unuttered words, but right now, at 2:17am on this rainy February night in the dingy, cluttered room of his rented apartment, he realized that he missed Levi. He needed him, as much as he wished he didn't, but above that, he realized that he needed that cigarette pack now more than ever.
He needed to feel the familiar sticks of nicotine in his fingers again, indulge in the promising taste of liberty and forgetfulness, no matter how temporary, and reminisce about the day that he met a certain boy of slight stature with papery pale skin and the coldest, belligerent grey eyes he'd ever seen, yet his smile was as warm as the kitchen they worked in. He needed to drown himself in the scent of cigarette smoke that reminded him so much of Levi, of the one soul in this universe that made him want to stay alive. He mulled over how all that hearty laughter and playful banter with pizza tasting, all that carefully worded concern for each other and unsaid "I love yous" expressed through a thousand different candid actions were ruthlessly cut short on a freezing Monday night, with the chatter of the kitchen drowned out by the roar of the engine in the distance and the white noise screaming in Eren's head, the night crumbling piece by piece with an accompanying hint of melancholic finality in the air; the despondent end of a chapter, one last goodbye.
You don't have to say anything when the moon had been that round. Such a shape of absolute perfection, an obsolete, pendulous white sphere of energy that all but sucks everything into its infinite belly, was sure as hell bound to rip the words from any mouth and rob the air from tight, filled lungs, gathering the contents greedily within the tendrils of its moonlit fingers, and then devouring the syllables and consonants gratingly slowly but surely, its full and radiant form savouring every last letter; the ball of pulsing white light emanating at its brightest form from the sad, delicious poignance of it all...
A pounding ache started to well in Eren's heart, hurting so much and so suddenly that the tousled-haired boy wished there was someone he could talk to, someone he could incessantly confide in, a vessel with obliging ears and a kind heart of understanding that he could empty the contents of his brimming heart into.
But at that moment, the only sound of acknowledgement came from the dull buzz of the rusted electric fan in Eren's bedroom, accompanied by the occasional rustle of leaves against the stained glass of his window. So he leaned against the chipped wallpaper of the apartment, fingers fisted in the material of his shirt, and braced the silence, just like how he did six months ago on a certain chilly night.
"The simple, untold truth is this, Levi: I love you. That's it. Simple as that. Simple as that cold, pizza-scented night, simple as that pack of unused cigarettes that laid in front of us, simple as the idea of you and me (love). I wish we could realize how simple it was half a year ago, on the quaint little balcony of that two-storey pizza house. Love is painfully simple, but some people who are lucky enough to discover the beauty of it find it oppressive enough to want to derail it, and I was not an exception. But you see, maybe simplicity can only be realized after experiencing certain complexity, no matter what that entails. Hence for that, Levi, I thank you for loving and leaving me."
With that, Eren prayed that the words uttered so softly yet possessing sincerity of unbeatable strength, would carry themselves out of the window of the two-storey apartment, across the busy, bustling district of Shinjuku, into the canals and over the great sea, until it reaches a bumbling halt in the heart of Niigata and seeps gently into the ears of the person he loved, sweet and sorrowful and simple.