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He sits upon this god forsaken rooftop and his whole body is screaming in an agonizing grief. Begging his brain to go back in time and switch places. For him to be laying in a heap of broken bones, shattered by the weight of his ruined dreams, not Arlert, and especially not Erwin, especially.
The more he thinks about it the more selfish and sour the thought becomes. He has no right to earn the rest Erwin has been beating time for. Doesn’t deserve to sit back and just let it happen. He doesn’t deserve good things at all, he thinks.
Death comes fast, in fact he’s rather desensitized to the whole thing. To the living and to the dying. It’s normalcy to him, it’s all he’s known ever since he was born. In fact, both desensitized to right or wrong as well. In a world where you have to fight for your truth, the lines between moral right or wrong gets pushed aside.
Objectively there is a sense of right or wrong in all of us, but there’s no right one, but that would contradict his statement wouldn’t it? There’s no right “right or wrong” nor a wrong “right or wrong”. There just is. There’s just consequences to actions, wether justice or not was served through those consequences it doesn’t matter. No one here has a mere place to judge.
And here he stares at the direct result of his actions.
Two broken men feeling as if they’re all alone. And maybe if things had been different, maybe if he had been stronger.
He stares at Erwin’s cold stiff body. Not focusing on the others surrounding Armin. The stillness of his chest and sunken in eyes. It hurts.
He thought the choice was his, and it was, but he couldn’t let them lose their friend. He couldn’t burden them with the grief he carries. Not when they pleaded and sobbed, he couldn’t bare to hurt them. Not like this. They’d lost enough.
But hasn’t he too? He finds this position all too familiar. Deja vu bitting at his bones. The helplessness of watching someone fade away, all because of you and what you’ve done.
Hasn’t he lost enough already? Maybe not, maybe not before today. But right now, his cup is filled to the brim threatening to spill out. Yet he can’t break here, not when he’s surrounded by people who have too much high expectations for him. He can’t bare to let them down as well.
So he breaks in private, well break is a strong word, perhaps he bends or dents. He never shatters no matter how much he wants to.
He walks back alone, it’s been a bit since everything happened, although the days have been blurred together broken only by scarce intervals of despair where he feels his heart about to break through his ribs. Times where the pain wraps it’s hands around his neck and squeezes until tears threaten his eyes.
He finds the body exactly how they left it, how he had to leave it. Except the effects of death have already taken part of the body he once knew so well.
It’s purple and blue tinted, dark bruises surrounding the hollow eyes, and even darker ones painting the lower half of his body as his heart stopped running, blood unmoving and pooling inside his swollen skin.
He feels the abusing hand creeping it’s way up his spine trailing up higher and higher.
But not yet.
He removes his own cloak and gently sets it on top of Erwins dead body, covering the after effects death left on the man. The moisture in his eyes could potentially fool him, make him think the blond is perhaps only sleeping.
Eternal sleep. Something some may associate death with. But not Levi. Death is a rest, one he’s undeserving of, he thinks. Sleep and rest are different. You can sleep without resting and rest without sleeping.
You sleep when you live
And rest when you die
Jealousy settles uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach. Now, he wouldn’t go around saying he was suicidal, but if it meant he could rest with the man who died and took all the life he too once carried inside of him, he wouldn’t hesitate to step in front of the blade.
And he wouldn’t be scared to be the one holding it either.
But now is not the time. His anger curses him inside his own head, how dare he think he could simply stop. It’s selfish of him, especially when other people deserve it more even if it’s not their true time.
He bundles up the cold heap of bones in his arms and makes his way down and into a small house. He didn’t bring a shovel, this shall do for now.
Levi opens the door with a struggle and lays Erwins body down on the bed. The raven sits down on the floor next to him. The hand already wrapped itself around his throat and started squeezing.
Pushing and pushing until the tears finally came, but not the death that comes with suffocating.
He figures if he had a mirror he probably look just as purple as the dead man in the room by having kept his bubbling under. By putting sorrow in the back of his shelf, not ready to come to it just yet.
He feels like he’s dying, but then he thinks death might feel more forgiving than this.
There’s no sweet release. No moment where his dam breaks and dries out completely. It breaks, but never dries. No matter what he’ll always carry that achingly painful grief inside, like a wild horse running through his hollow bones.
He wonders how long can he play this way. He’s so tired. He’s been torn apart from inside out. Robbed of the only thing, only person, that could fill the void he so desperately had been trying to fill all those empty years.
Levi’s blank open eyes stare out, hazily and unfocused. Now this thought has always been buzzing in the back of his mind, but in this moment he’s never wished more to just die. To suck it up and leave everything behind daming everyone to bare the mess he’ll leave if he went away.
He once was rough and coarse, all calloused and cords. Where being proved wrong meant he lost somehow, god forbid he did. Yet he wonders if all those years with Erwin has mellowed him up.
There would’ve been a day where he would’ve thought he deserved better than what he got, more than what he had.
He too once thought he was owed something.