Work Text:
First time Eren saw him, he was kind of just… standing there. In that cool anime cool-dude pose that totally doesn’t work in real life, with his hands tucked into his pockets, a cigarette dangling from his lips. His luscious locks were illuminated in the fading sunlight. Leaning back against the railing in front of the pier as Eren walked by, looking like he owned the place. He probably did, for that matter. What a hot tamale.
“Hey Eren,” he purred the name, teeth biting down on the tip of his cigarette. “Want a pretzel?”
The boy glanced up from his phone with an angry scowl etched on his face – he was currently texting a certain horseface, and that was explanation enough – and looked around at the empty street behind him quizzically.
“Yes, I’m speaking to you, fucktart. Your name’s Eren, right?”
“What?”
The man rolled his eyes, dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it decisively under his boot. “Come with me, I have something to show you,” he said with a shmexy grin on his face.
Eren balked. The man had grey eyes that reflected the moonlight, like a cat’s. No, that wasn’t poetic language; that was just creepy as fuck. “I um, don’t know you?”
“I’m Levi.”
“Still don’t know you.”
The man slipped a hand into his black trench coat and pulled out a strange, plastic-wrapped packet. “Want a pretzel?”
Eren used his best ‘what the fuck’ look. It was super ineffective. Levi simply grabbed his wrist and pulled him off down another street, not giving Eren a moment to gather himself. “Um,” Eren started eloquently, tripping over his feet. “This is nice and all but I do have to get back to my dorm and—” they were in a dubious looking alleyway now, and Eren’s voice rushed faster and faster into a nervous squeak – “I think maybe you have the wrong person because I REALLY DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE??”
“Hm.” Levi stopped, abruptly, and it occurred to Eren that the guy was actually really short. Like, shorter-than-Armin kind of short. Like, only-reaching-to-Eren’s-chin kind of short. Like, I-could-pick-you-up-princess-style-and-carry-you-to-my-bed kind of short. Wait. Where did that one even come from? (Seriously, though, short people are cool. They’re easier to hide under the covers.)
Levi contemplated him, eyes dark and tongue swiping over his lips, as if Eren were a particularly succulent piece of meat. Or, rather, a particularly well-crafted pretzel.
“Are you flexible?”
Eren blinked. “Huh?”
“Can you suck your own dick?”
“W-what?!” Eren flushed all the way to the tips of his ears, and down his chest too. Like a redhead type flush. Except, he wasn’t a redhead. That was the power of Levi’s noncommittal sass.
“Tch. I guess not.” Levi sighed melodramatically. “It would break your bones to twist you into a pretzel shape otherwise.”
Wow, Eren had had enough of this shit. Seriously. “Okay, that’s it, I’m outta here. You’re fucking insane.” He tried to brush off Levi’s hand, planning on high-tailing it out of there and fleeing to his best friend’s place, but the fingers suddenly dug into his wrist with superhuman strength, the kind of hold that made his bones feel funny. What were these, humanity’s strongest fingers or something? And that line totally didn’t give him really strange mental images.
“Don’t touch me,” Levi seethed, the whites of his eyes in the streetlight making him look possessed.
“You’re the one touching me!”
Levi smirked. “Depends on what you mean by touching.”
Christ. Someone help him. Eren tried to stomp on Levi’s foot – polished leather shit and all, he gave not a single damn – but Levi apparently anticipated this move because he danced out of the way. Yes, danced, like a motherfucking Michael Jackson moonwalk or something. Eren growled. But the minute he dropped his guard to contemplate another form of escape, Levi had stepped forward and crushed Eren’s toe under his heel as if he were a particularly unsatisfying cigarette.
“Nhaaaaooowww! What the fuck, you—”
“Oops.” Levi sent him a sweetly apologetic look while his eyes said ‘no one gets a speck of dust on my Armani or so God help them’. “Sorry. Here,” he pressed the plastic packet into Eren’s free hand with a devious smirk. “Have a pretzel.”
Eren swiped the packet out of Levi’s palm, sending the little sticks flying dramatically into the air. It felt as though the world were suddenly moving in slow motion. Eren could practically hear Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights playing ominously in the Theatre of Eren’s Mind. Levi’s pretzels – his babies – were floating away from his grasp in their unstoppable trajectory. Levi’s cat eyes widened as he came to one horrible realization; his babies were falling to their deaths. He raised his hands into the air, for salvation, trying to catch his falling children….
“JIIMMMMMMMM. DONAAALLLDD. LAQUANNDRIIAA!!”
He called their names, one by one, as they all fell pitifully to the ground. He heard the sharp, cutting screams of his children as their spines snapped, as their skulls broke, as their hearts stopped… as pretzel juice oozed from their lifeless corpses. A few of them were still alive. They heaved for breath, their gaping mouths open and dripping with thick, sticky blood. He scooped up his dying babies, carefully, but one after another they all stopped breathing in his arms. A single tear fell from his eye.
A father had lost his children.
And the killer was going to pay.
“What did you just do.” He slowly laid the pretzel corpses down on the ground, lining them up side by side and stroking their little pretzel heads. Only then did he take a step back due to the evident abject horror of Eren’s crime. Eren used his fabulous powers of mental math and estimated that his chances of turning tail and fleeing successfully right now were about… 0.2 in Levi’s favor.
“Um…”
“What did you just do.”
“I don’t like pretzels.”
Yeah, Eren had just signed his own death wish. Someone help him, indeed.
Levi dragged him away through a wooden door nearby into – well it doesn’t have to make any sense because nothing here makes any sense anymore, right? Eren didn’t even protest as he was shoved unceremoniously into an awaiting chair, fancy claw-foot ends and all like some nineteenth century bathtub, his wrists and ankles tied down; he’d just accepted that Jean must have snuck some weed into his sandwich earlier. That had actually happened before, believe it or not. Eren had ended up at the park sprawled out under a tree trying to convince some old grandma that the flowers were aliiiiive, goddammit. He hadn’t managed to save the grandma from the giant man-eating plants, but he’d had the police called on him instead.
Laugh all you want, horeseface, I’m so getting you back for this.
They were now in some kind of strange… laboratory? Underground lair? Top secret government agent hideout? … Oh no. The scenery. Eren shot horrified glances to either side of him. The furniture was comfortable, but creepily spotless, and the walls were cluttered with pictures
of
pretzels.
Yes, that’s right, pretzels. There were pretzels in baby blankets, pretzels playing with building blocks, and pretzels at their first day of school. There were a few who had even graduated, and gotten married. Levi examined the photographs, stroking each and every one of them. Stroking. He muttered something under his breath as he passed – most likely the pretzel’s names.
Then he turned around to face Eren, the murderer. The poor boy watched in horror as Levi slowly, deliberately donned a pair of latex gloves.
“Are you Batman?”
Levi glanced up, looking unimpressed. “No, I’m Mr. Clean.” He tucked a white handkerchief around his head to keep the hair out of his face and Eren just didn’t question it. Also, Levi looked kind of weirdly attractive that way. The guy turned around to fiddle with something in a drawer behind him and hot damn, had Eren not mentioned that fabulous ass before? Because yeah, it was quite fabulous indeed. Kind of peach-shaped and snugly fit into those black jeans… No, of course he wasn’t gay. That was just the drugs talking.
“Hanji, did you check his restraints?” Levi was saying. Eren glanced around nervously, half-expecting some manic glasses-wearing woman to fly out from under the floorboards and attack him, but only silence met their ears. Eren was about to remind his captor that his name was ‘Eren’ when Levi tched. “Hanji!”
Something quacked derisively from the floor by Eren’s feet and he nearly jumped a mile into the air except, as he was slightly inhibited by the ropes around his body, that was just a bit impossible. (Evidently the only impossible feat in this fic.) He looked down to see a pair of wide auburn eyes fixed creepily and unblinkingly on his own.
Levi shoved the animal away with his foot and a disgusted expression. “Ah, I forgot you were a pickle. Now go away, you’re dirty; when was the last time you even gave yourself a bath? I can’t do everything for you, shitty four eyes.” The pickle gave him a long, superior look, and proceeded to sit on a stool nearby, watching them intently.
Okay. So Levi had a pickle named Hanji who he forgot was a pickle. Fascinating.
Eren was snapped out of his musings by a very ominous crunching sound near his ear. Levi was slowly crumbling a pretzel in his fist, eyes like gay Pringle chips above the pristine handkerchief over his nose and mouth. It would have been funny had Eren not been staring wide-eyed at the fine dust now trickling to the ground that used to be a poor, poor unfortunate pretzel.
“Let’s have a little fun now then, why don’t we?”
----
Sadly for Eren, it wasn’t Jean who had snuck weed into his lunch. Well, nor was it anyone else, for that matter. Though how much of Eren’s experience was a result of hallucinogenic drugs or not, no-one will ever know for sure; by the time they found his mangled body, there would have been no traces left.
Suffice to say that Eren Jaeger’s police file was probably the strangest Commissioner Erwin had ever had to fill out. A terrible crime the likes of which Humanity had never seen before and perhaps never would see again. Something so impossible to explain it would first bring a disbelieving smile to anyone’s face, a smile that would soon morph into wretched shock. Something that could only be described as… pretzel torture. A long, arduous, face-stuffing, body-twisting, mustard-filling endeavor which left hardly anything of the poor boy still recognizable by the end of it all.
In the dirt beside the body, someone had written ‘salty, salty revenge. It tastes like pretzels.’
The murderer was, unsurprisingly, never found.
And one day, Erwin received a pickle in the mail.
