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Erwin finds him seven months later at a hospital in Berlin, shivering and with track marks dotting the insides of his arms.
Erwin’s nostrils flair, but his disappointment stays silent. He packs Levi up into the car he bought in his midlife crisis, silver, sleek, and worth more than Levi’s skinny frame, and signs the necessary hospital paperwork. In his penthouse, with the sprawling windows overlooking a city Levi avoided for six—nearly seven, almost seven—months, Erwin shoves him unceremoniously into the bathroom and then, further, into the shower.
He turns on the water to hot and makes Levi step out of the baggy, hospital clothing, and finally, once Levi is sitting on the floor with his knees drawn to his chest and his eyes watching the water swirl into the drain, Erwin speaks.
“Are you done running away from your problems?” he asks as he pours shampoo into his hands and lathers Levi’s hair. His hands are gentle, tugging through knots and cowlick curls, sweat and the accumulated grime the nurses had missed in their sponge baths and that Levi hadn’t had the strength, for once in his life, to care about.
Levi sets his chin on his shoulder and meets Erwin’s eyes. “I don’t really have a choice, do I?” The bluster leaves him as quickly as it entered him; he sighs and looks back down at the drain. “You don’t need to always bail me out, you know.”
Erwin doesn’t have an answer for that. He tilts Levi’s head back in lieu of one and washes out the soap, cupping a hand over Levi’s eyes. Levi thumbs absently at the marks on his arms.
“I really fucked up this time,” he says quietly.
Erwin turns off the water. “Tell me about it.”
—
Levi had, as habit, never spent more than a year in any one place. A youth spent feeling stuck in a dead-end with his uncle had led to that; when Kenny had unexpectedly passed away, Levi had packed a small backpack full of his things and left.
He met Erwin a four-hour train ride later. Erwin, who at eighteen had more of his life figured out than Levi had ever considered, offered him a couch for the night and a shower for the morning.
Levi ended up staying for three months in total. They dabbled at a relationship that hadn’t worked out. Erwin wanted him to stay, and Levi couldn’t.
“If you ever need me,” Erwin trailed at the same train platform where they had met. He smiled a little self-deprecatingly, with the soft look of accepted heartache in his eyes, and added, “You’ve never really needed me, though.”
Levi was bad with words. He pressed onto his tiptoes and kissed Erwin’s cheek and promised postcards. Erwin sighed and took it.
Levi kept his promise; he sent postcards and letters, sometimes even called from pay stations and prepaid phones across Europe, though the calls were always slightly awkward. It kept Erwin satisfied as he worked his way through his own life.
Erwin wrote that he met someone.
Erwin wrote that they had broken up.
Levi lived off couches and odd jobs, in motel rooms that he cleaned furiously before settling in. He would find small apartments with tree-lined streets, with wide-windows that the sun set into, and he would think, with a sense of clarity and ease filling his being, that this would be the last time he ran; but like a biological clock, a year would come up and his skin would itch.
Erwin was the only constant he kept, but Erwin was a tenuous rarity who seemed to understand Levi better than Levi understood himself. He tried dating, but it wasn’t pressing and that particular desire lessened as his twenties passed.
He found himself back in Berlin by the time of his thirty-fourth birthday. He knew, vaguely, that Erwin worked in one the nice high-rises and that at some point Levi owed him a visit.
He didn’t go; instead, he sat in a bustling cafe and drank strongly-brewed tea as a kid with green eyes tried his best to hit on him.
It almost amused him, which was why Levi didn’t tell him to go away. It had been a long time—since Erwin, in fact—that anyone had tried so hard to know him.
“Just tell me your name,” the kid was saying, all elbows and eagerness at the two-person table. “And maybe your phone number.”
“I don’t have a phone,” Levi said pointedly, and the kid’s arms flailed dramatically as he leaned back in his seat, groaning.
“Are you serious?” he asked, and then answered himself, “Of course you are. I would hit on the one person in the world who doesn’t have a cellphone.”
“And who’s also twice your age,” Levi added dryly.
“Oh,” the kid blinked once before he grinned slyly, “no, I definitely have a bad habit about that.”
The kid’s name was Eren.
Levi gave his in return if only because some boldness needed to be rewarded.
—
He bought a cellphone and hung around Berlin for four more months. Eren was the only one who used his number because he was the only one who had it. Levi thought about Erwin sometimes, guiltily, but Erwin had a life that he wasn’t part of—Levi was just making his own.
It’s what he told himself, at least, and then time with Eren turned to dates with Eren turned to late movies and early mornings with Eren.
Eren was easy. Eren didn’t mind the way Levi had to pause and think about his words mid-sentence, the way he needed things to be cleaned, the way Levi sometimes just didn’t talk at all. It wasn’t that Erwin did mind those things; but Erwin was always going to be going places that Levi wasn’t.
Eren smoked stolen cigarettes on Levi’s fire-escape and said his father left when he was eight, that he grew up in a backwater, that his skin never felt like it settled on his bones in the right way. His wrists were stamped with the marks of self-harm.
He spoke a language Levi knew. He kissed Levi with smoke in his mouth, curling on his tongue, his eyes open, and asked if Levi would leave with him.
Levi couldn’t say yes in actual words but Eren understood it all the same.
The difference between Erwin and Eren ended up being simple. Erwin had promised to help Levi get better one hazy morning, everything warm and simultaneously cold after a round of sex. He promised a part-time job and support as Levi went through school or vocational training or even as Levi floundered around Berlin with nothing but dreams in his pocket.
Eren wanted to sit on Levi’s fire-escape and smoke cigarettes; it didn’t matter where, or what Levi did, or even what Eren did. Three towns, five towns, twenty towns away: there would always be a fire-escape, always be a pack of cigarettes, always parents who weren’t there for whatever reasons.
They bought train tickets and Levi stood on a familiar platform for the third time in his life except this time he wouldn’t be alone when he boarded the train.
Then, his phone buzzed with Eren’s number as the train whistled, but it wasn’t Eren’s voice he heard when he picked it up.
A woman’s voice broke over the line. “Is this Levi?” she said, and her voice was full, the way it sounded when people swallowed around tears, “I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t need to hear anymore. He tossed the phone onto the tracks and watched the train roll over it.
Levi had wandered for most of his life, but he had never been truly lost until that moment.
—
Erwin settles him on the closed toilet, wrapping a fluffy towel around his shoulders. He dries Levi carefully, but without romantic intimacy.
He tucks a lock of hair behind one of Levi’s ears and kisses Levi’s forehead. Tomorrow, they’ll visit a gravestone Levi’s avoided for nearly seven months.
Tonight, he tucks Levi into his bed and takes the couch; when Levi leaves through Erwin’s open bedroom window, Erwin lets him and pretends not to notice.
He’s back before dawn, asleep, wearing a green sweatshirt that probably isn’t his. Erwin checks its pockets for drugs as more of a precautionary measure than anything—he knows, even as he does it, that Levi doesn’t have any and that wasn’t the reason why he left. There’s a yellowed carton of cigarettes in one. Erwin sets it on the bedside table and goes to make tea and breakfast.
Levi doesn’t eat the toast and eggs, but he takes the mug of tea. It’s a step in the right direction, Erwin thinks.
“Tell me more about Eren,” he prompts over the table gently.
Levi looks at him; swallow-cheeked, pale, with dark bags under his eyes, skinnier and smaller than Erwin has ever known him to be. His cracked lips ghost at a smile though, as he begins.
“He had green eyes.”