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They didn’t think much of their daughter’s odd sleeping habits.
They often find her sleeping in the strangest of places, curled up among wooden building blocks on the bedroom floor or out in the garden, her mother’s books crumpled and stained under her little body. Levi would brush off the incidents as coincidences, blaming his daughter’s lethargy on regular childish tiredness, her curiosity draining her energy as she ran around the house for the next thing that piqued her interest. Hange questions it, scouring through the volumes of parenting books she had collected through their pregnancy, looking for some kind of explanation before Levi would calm their worries.
It’s only when Madelyna all but collapses in front of them, the sharp edge of the living room table sinking into the soft skin of her temple as she falls, that they realize it isn’t normal.
The two of them almost panic when they hear her head crash against the wood of the table, their worry making them jump into action. Levi scoops her up, ignoring the red stain forming on the faded carpet - he almost scrubs a hole into the fabric when he tries to wash it out later – scrambling onto his horse with her body still in his arms. Hange canters in front of them, Levi trotting slowly behind, struggling to hold the figure in his arms as his horse bounces underneath him over the uneven soil.
They’re halfway to the nearest doctor when Madelyna looks up at him through squinted eyes, yawning as if she has just woken up from a nap, tiny fists gripping the front of his jacket.
“Papa, where are we going?” Her question catches him off guard, making him stop, Hange circling back to meet him.
The pain in her head catches up to her as they continue to make their way to the doctor, her face twisting in pain as she groans, one hand pressing against the bruise slowly blooming black on her temple. They sit her on the physician’s table, Hange holding one hand to Madelyna’s back, tenderly brushing the hair away from her forehead in comfort. When the doctor asks them what happens, they glance at each other, uncertain of how to explain the incident.
“She just collapsed,” Hange says. Madelyna places her head against their shoulder, eyes fluttering shut, and Hange has to shake her awake. “It was as if she had fallen asleep in the middle of the living room.”
The doctor looks at her incredulously, brow furrowed as his pen scribbles across his notepad, the letters to jumbled to make out from where Levi sits beside him.
They leave within twenty minutes of arriving, a plaster over the gash in Madelyna’s temple and a diagnosis for a mild concussion. She falls asleep on the way home.
They watch her closely over the next few days, staying by her side as she ventures into every nook of the house, crawling onto their bellies when she ducks into the depths of the vegetable garden. The dirt stains on the front of Levi’s shirts are a small price to pay to ensure his daughter’s safety.
Sometimes she’ll collapse suddenly, and one of them will have to catch her, a hand under her head before it strikes the ground. Other times, she’ll lie down, curled up like a baby in her favourite blanket, falling into unconsciousness. Hange notes every collapse, every moment she slips into sleep almost instantly, a desperate attempt at finding some sort of pattern to it.
They become more frequent, the inside of Hange’s notebooks covered in their messy scrawl of ink, times and dates sorted into crooked charts across the pages. Levi finds himself carrying Madelyna more than he sees her walking, her head lolled against his shoulder as he brings her to the nearest place to sleep inside the house.
“You’d think with both of our sleeping habits,” Levi mutters one day, walking into the house with his snoozing daughter limp in his arms, plaid blanket tucked around her tiny body, “we would have a child that never slept. Turns out she is the exact opposite.”
It’s a desperate attempt to lighten the mood, one that he knows fails when he see Hange slumped in a chair, their shoulders hunched dejectedly. They don’t smile, only holding out their arms for their daughter. She doesn’t shift when Levi places her in Hange’s arms.
Hange places their chin on the top of her head, staring absentmindedly at the wooden panels on the opposite wall of the kitchen, a hand running through the brown curls of their daughter’s hair. They’re the spitting image of each other, every curve and dip in both their faces almost identical, as if Madelyna were a cookie cutter mold of Hange in their youth.
“Hey,” Levi says, trying to get Hange’s attention. Their silence is unnerving, making anxiety bubble in the pit of his stomach. He knows their silence means something bad. “I don’t like it when you’re quiet.”
“The other day you called my voice annoying,” Hange replies, their mouth twitching up slightly in the smallest of grins.
“Your silence is more annoying,” he says. The words slip out of his mouth stuttered, stiff. He decides to give up his shitty attempt at verbal comfort, moving behind the chair to place his forehead on their shoulder. He feels their shoulders shake in a small laugh, turning their head to give him a sad smile that quickly fades.
“This isn’t right,” they murmur, their mouth pressed against the top of Madelyna’s head. “I’ve read through every book, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on. This isn’t normal for someone her age.”
“We’re not exactly normal people, Hange.”
“It’s not healthy, Levi,” they press on. Wrinkles line their face, crumpling with worry. They lift one hand to rub their eyes from under their glasses. “I don’t know what this is. I don’t even think the doctor knows what this is. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”
They bury their face in into their daughter’s hair, brown locks mingling together. Levi places a kiss to their neck, his hands kneading into the muscles of their shoulders.
“Don’t stress yourself out,” Levi murmurs into their ear, placing a comforting kiss on their temple. His lips linger there, one hand moving forward to cradle the back of his daughter’s head. “We’ll figure something out. We always have.”
The weeks go by in an anxious haze, uncertainty hanging heavily in the house’s atmosphere. The longer they watch their daughter, the more they find her asleep.
“I swear to god it’s getting worse,” Hange stutters one night. They pace their office frantically, their teeth clacking against the nail of their thumb, already bitten short and rough from the previous days. There is a certain hint of fear in their eyes, the flickering flame from the bedside candle casting eerie shadows across their face. They almost look like a ghoul, a shadow of their old self, only a hollow shell of worry left of them.
“You need to calm the fuck down,” Levi says. He tries to approach them, hands tentatively winding around their waist. They flinch, jumping out of his grasp. His hands fall to his sides, fists clenching. “She’s fine.”
“She is not fine,” Hange snaps. They start to rant, words speeding from their lips, almost incoherent in their paranoia. “It isn’t normal. It isn’t healthy. It’s going to affect her badly. What if we can’t take care of this? What if it just keeps getting worse?”
“It’s not getting worse,” Levi says, his voice firm. He takes hold of Hange’s wrist, turning them to look at him. “It only looks like it is because we’re just aware of it now.”
Hange sighs. “What are we going to do?”
There’s a tremor in their voice, like the sound of the beginnings of an earthquake, of creaking metal pipes before they burst under pressure and water floods out, drowning everyone in the room. They slump into their desk chair, elbows resting on the tabletop. They keep their eyes closed, a hand rubbing at their forehead warily.
“You can’t let this get to you,” Levi says. He moves behind her, his hands kneading the knots in their muscles. He feels a tremor in their body, nothing but the slightest shiver.
Their desk is covered in books, pages scattered haphazardly across the desk. He can’t read half the words, let alone understand them, but he can tell from their lengthy and impossible dictions that they must mean something important, something serious, something only a doctor could say without stuttering, it’s complicatedness sending their patients into a state of confusion and worry. Sickness and disease come to mind, the images of sickly children and the ailing and suffering elderly of the underground flooding his memory.
He knows Hange can understand them, though. A part of him wishes that they couldn’t, saving them from the torture of looking through each and every long, frivolous word, their meanings bringing more harm yet never bringing them satisfaction of understanding and the peace of mind they constantly crave.
Levi leans forward, his hands moving over Hange’s shoulder, reaching for each heavy volume. He dog-ears each open page before closing them, knowing Hange’s anger when he shuts one of their books without a mark. Each book spine closes with a satisfying crunch, the binding crackling, plumes of dust puffing out from the old, yellowing pages.
“Go to bed,” he tells them, one hand yanking them from their seat by the armpit. Hange follows without a fight, exhaustion claiming them, yawning as he leads them from the room.
With a small puff of breath, he blows out the candle. Light still filters through the room, early morning light drifting in from the dusty windowsill.
Hange’s obsession with their books grows in the passing days. Wherever they go, there seems to be another enormous volume in their arms. Levi finds them in the most unexpected places while cleaning; tucked away in the kitchen cupboards, under the small loveseat in the tiny, bare living room, poking out from stacks of garden pots in their shed. Every time they leave for work, they come back with another one or two encyclopedias tucked under their armpit.
“At this rate, you’re going to empty out Erwin’s library by next week,” Levi comments, watching them flip through another book while sitting at the table. They barely pay attention to the food going cold in front of them, almost missing their mouth the few times they actually raise their fork. Hange doesn’t reply, only gives a slight groan.
Madelyna starts to participate in Hange’s search, peeking over the edge of their desk as they flit through the pages, curious eyes scanning over the jumbled letters in a failing attempt to gain their meaning. Levi often finds the two of them together, Hange sometimes reading snippets out loud, even sounding out words for Maddie to follow along.
At least they’re doing stuff together, Levi thinks. Madelyna’s presence also seems to take some of the edge off the situation. Hange seems more composed with their daughter around, the simple presence of her, asleep or not, keeping Hange from breaking down in a sleep-deprived, desperate heap every other night.
It only bothers him when he finds the two of them asleep together, and he has to bring both of them to bed.
There’s only so much his arms can lift.
It takes almost a month of tension, a month of anxious searching and worried watching before there is even a glimmer of hope, a snippet of something that is able to give them the answers they all frantically need.
Hange runs into their bedroom, tripping over the threshold excitedly with another massive text in their hands. Levi looks up from his position on the bed, putting aside the forms he’s reading to see what caused them to burst into the room so suddenly. He flinches when Hange flings the open book onto his legs, hard enough that the weight of the pages and the stiffness of the cover threaten to snap his legs like toothpicks – and despite his height, he is anything but a toothpick – and make a string of curses fly out of his mouth.
He forces himself to shut up when he sees their expression, a wide smile plastered over their face, ecstatic despite the look of exhaustion on their face. It’s as if he’s looking at the sun, bright and radiant, peeking out from behind storm clouds after a nasty spell of rain, and he feels a glimmer of joy in his sternum because he thinks – he knows - it’s finally over, the uncertainty and paranoia is finally about to end.
“I found something,” Hange breathes out, a slight laugh bubbling out of them. Tears glisten in their eyes, laughing to themselves as they flip through the pages of the book in front of them. “I think I found out what it is.”
The words are sorted like a dictionary across the pages, words in bold followed by paragraphs of explanation in columns that run down the parchment. Hange points to one of the squares of text, the tip of her finger outlining the condition in question.
“Narcolepsy,” it takes a few times for Levi to pronounce it correctly, the syllables sticking in his mouth. He peers up at them, one eyebrow cocked in confusion. Hange smiles back, nodding her head giddily.
“It’s a lack of control in one’s sleeping cycle,” they explain, and Levi sits back, preparing for one of their longwinded explanations, something he’s grown fond of over the years. “It’s characterized by random episodes of sleep during the day, loss of muscle tone and control, full body collapse, the symptoms she’s shown are all in here.”
“And?” Levi looks at them expectantly, but they stop short, the two of them finding themselves in an awkward silence.
“And what?”
“What do we do about it?” Levi asks. He leans over the book, his eyes flitting over the words. They’re small and smudged, some of them too long to comprehend. Hange seems to deflate at his words, sinking their hands into the mattress.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Hange sighs. “It talks about diet changes and some sort of treatments but I doubt any would completely work.”
“So what next?” Levi asks. He feels irritation bubble in his gut, mixed with the gut wrenching feeling of helplessness. “How are we going to stop it?”
“We don’t,” Hange says. The smile starts to fade from their face. “We just need to cope with it.”
“That’s it?” Levi says, his voice rising. “We don’t do anything? We just let it continue like nothing’s wrong?”
“Levi, this is good news,” Hange persists. “She’s not sick, she’s not dying, she’s fine. Can’t we just be happy knowing that she’s fine? Is that not enough?”
“She can’t live like this for the rest of her life, Hange.” He feels the storm start to roll back in, frustration setting in. It twists in his gut, thrashing about like a wild animal, and it takes all his willpower not to follow its lead.
Hange seems to deflate, the smile on their face gone, the bright light at the end of the tunnel extinguished in their sorrow. They sigh under their breath, lifting the book off his lap. They slip off the mattress, Levi shifting at the change of weight, their feet dragging across the floor as they shuffle out of the room.
“Hange,” Levi murmurs. He starts to lift himself up from the bed, wondering whether he should follow them.
“We’ll talk to the doctor about it,” Hange says, flashing him a sorrowful smile before slipping over the threshold.
The doctor offers them no help.
It takes all of Levi’s strength not to get up from the stiff examination room chair and sink his clenched knuckles into the soft flesh of the doctor’s cheek as he listens to him bicker with Hange. He spends the entire visit rigid in his seat, his arms crossed over his chest like a shield, his foot bouncing on the squeaky wooden floorboards of the small doctor’s office.
Hange ends up having to show him the excerpt from the massive encyclopedia themselves, tracing out the symptoms with excruciating detail while the doctor nods to himself, scratching his greying beard.
“I can’t think of anything else but doing what the book says,” he finally says, scribbling down notes from the book. “Otherwise there is nothing I can do.”
They make their way home dejectedly, Levi grinding his teeth, his hands clutching the leather of the horse’s reins tight enough that his knuckles go white.
Madelyna takes the news of her condition better than the two of them combined.
Her and Hange have a sit down on the living room couch, the book sprawled open over their laps, Hange’s words quiet, simple and slow. Luisa looks down at the tiny, inked letters pensively, nodding with a thumb in her mouth as Hange talks.
“Do you understand?” Hange asks quietly after their explanation, watching Luisa take in all the information. Luisa is silent for a beat, and Hange places a hand on her shoulder, their brow furrowing in concern until their daughter finally speaks.
“Yep,” she says simply, slipping from beneath the book’s leather binding, pulling along her blanket, running back to her toys as if nothing had happened.
The next few days remind Levi of the weeks during Hange’s pregnancy, a reminder of his days frantically baby proofing the house. He spends his evenings checking the furniture in each room, shaving down the corners of wooden tables into smooth curves, buying new carpets to cushion the hard wood of the floor. He digs up old sheets from the dusty linen closet, ripping them to shreds down the seams with his hands, tying them into soft bundles to cover the sharp corners of the kitchen counter. He doesn’t want a repeat of Madelyna’s first collapse.
Hange sets up new rules for her to follow, guiding her through it as they follow her around the house. Hange shows Madelyna how to lay the blanket beneath her before playing out in the garden, how to shift any rocks out of the way so her head doesn’t crack against them if she collapses suddenly, answering her call when she wants to go up the stairs because Madelyna promised to never ever climb stairs without someone’s help.
It’s a small ruffle in their daily lives, usually nothing but a mere inconvenience, but it hits a nerve in Levi’s gut. He doesn’t want to have his daughter have to worry about her health, her safety, at such a young age. He wanted her to be able to grow up carefree and safe, the privilege of it something he had been robbed of as a child himself.
He can’t help but be impressed with Madelyna’s nonchalance regarding her condition as she goes about the house, surprised at how easy it is for her to care for herself better than a normal five year old could. The fact that she can still smile, that she is still happy with her life, is a small relief.
He can’t help but feel the tiniest glimmer of relief, knowing he’s able to give her the privilege of a happy childhood, despite everything that was happening.
“Are you upset about me sleeping so much?”
The question comes almost a year later. The words are drawled out in a yawn as Levi tucks her into bed, her head nuzzled against his arm as he reads one of Hange’s old storybooks to her. It catches Levi off guard, makes his words stutter to a halt, his hand going slack around the yellowing pages of the book. He lets it fall onto the bed sheets with a thump, slowly turning towards Madelyna.
“What would make you think that?”
She looks up at him with half lidded eyes, one fist rubbing at them. “You just seem sad about it. I don’t know why.”
Levi sighs, looking down at the overlap of the threads on the sheets. He fiddles with a loose string, trying to find the right words, his daughter looking at him expectantly the entire time.
“We’re just worried,” Levi says slowly, his words coming out as stiff sighs, “that you might get hurt. And sometimes we need to be extra careful about what you do so that you can be safe.”
“I am safe,” she says quietly. “Is there anything I can’t do?”
“No,” Levi says, “of course not. You can do whatever you want. We just have to be careful.”
“Then why are you guys upset?”
Levi sighs, a hand moving to rub at his eyes. He pinches the bridge of his nose, willing the proper words to come out of his mouth, but the only things in his thoughts translated verbally are the soft, tired sighs that escape him. He looks at her, big brown eyes staring up at him from the sheets.
He doesn’t know why he’s upset.
He realizes that there is no real need to be this upset.
“I think it’s time you go to bed,” he says, tucking the blankets around her chin. He gets up from the small mattress, making his way to the doorway. He’s about to blow her candle about before she speaks again.
“Is there something wrong with me?” Madelyna asks innocently. The words are a crushing blow, slamming into his chest, a lump forming in his throat.
He moves back to the bed, his hand reaching out to brush her bangs back. He places a kiss to her forehead, his hands moving under her chin. Their eyes meet.
“Absolutely not.” Levi says with quiet confidence, his daughter giving him a tentative smile before yawning, her body settling into the sheets. “You’re perfect.”
“Alright,” she says sleepily. “That’s nice to know.”
Levi smirks to himself, making his way back to the door, extinguishing the candle on her dresser before clicking the door shut.
They cope.
At first, they cope because it’s the only thing they can do.
The changes they make shift from a struggle to daily routine, wiggling their way into their regular life. Soon every edge in the house is covered in cloth, a pillow or carpet in every room, their cupboards filled with the few home remedies that Hange was able to make correctly, ones that can only provide little relief.
It continues over the years, the fatigue and episodes of collapses changing in frequency but never fully gone away. The panic Levi feels when he hears a thud from another room soon fades into simple concern, usually nothing but a simple stubbed toe, sometimes just a small collapse. He finds Madelyna smiling weakly after most episodes, energy seeming to buzz around her despite her almost constant state of sleepiness. It amazes and baffles her parents, encouraging Hange in her confidence every time she finds some new treatment, making the knot in Levi’s stomach grow less tight as the months and years go by.
Madelyna’s happiness is what helps them cope.
Soon, they’re coping because it’s the easiest thing they can do, something that is no longer a struggle for the three of them.
They cope because they want to.