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Levi has a hard time learning new things, and he thinks it might be because he can only understand how to do something the right way by doing it wrong, first.
What’s the saying? You have to fall before you learn to fly?
Something like that.
He’s young, nineteen, and living in Trost when Kenny Ackerman offers to give him the high of a lifetime. He’s young, nineteen—he’s stupid, it’s not his fault. Ackerman is tall and confident and acts like he owns the streets, even if his gang only owns a sliver of the Underground turf. Levi looks at him like he’s Christ resurrected, runs Booster poison through his veins like it’s sweet ambrosia, and by the time he’s hooked he’s in so deep that he doesn’t even care when Ackerman starts giving him hit lists and loaded guns.
The first people he kills are simple take-downs. Old middlemen who’ve sold Ackerman out, ex-members gone turncoat. It doesn’t really bother him, not even when he can’t get the blood off his hands or out of his clothes, and that must be unnatural, right? It shouldn’t come this easy, right?
Ackerman laughs when he asks about it. Says not to worry, it’ll come back around to haunt him later.
“You’ll make amends,” he says. “One day, kid, you will.”
———
And then he’s handed a hit list that’s different than any of the others he’s received.
The Legion accepts about twenty to thirty new entries every year, and then weans out the good ones in extensive training—in the field or in the lab, whichever their recruits are best suited for. Last year’s recruits were damn good—too good, according to Ackerman—and there’s one, in particular, that leads his fellow rookies: pushes them, inspires with goddamn pep talks and perfect scores and a smile like pure fucking honey. They’ve already made him a Lieutenant.
“Erwin,” Levi says, “Erwin Smith,” sounding it out, reading his name out loud with his feet up on Ackerman’s table, a habit he’s picked up from the old man himself. He traces the name with a finger, flicks the printed face to match that name.
The job is planned with more precision, this time. Fake ID, fake background, he’s going in as one of the Legion’s own and he’ll get close. Win his trust.
Carve his heart out and let him bleed out on the floor.
“He looks like a regular fucking prude,” Levi says. “The Legion’s very own coverboy. You want it done clean or messy?”
“I don’t care,” Ackerman says, picking at the skin around his fingernails absentmindedly. “Poison would be quick and simple. Bullet to the brain isn’t too bad either. Just be careful with him. He’s not a guy to underestimate, not according to the intel that’s come our way.”
“Intel?” Levi asks scathingly. “Or rumors?”
“Be careful,” Ackerman says again.
But he’s young, twenty-one—still stupid, two years later. And it’s not his fault, not really.
Not the part where he falls in love, anyway.
———
The Legion’s recruitment office is hot, humid. There are a bunch of suits murmuring, passing each other papers, hurrying around clacking away at keyboards, and nobody’s bothered to crack the windows an inch, despite the fact that it’s sweltering.
“Doesn’t anyone have a goddamn fan?” Levi snarls, startling the suits out of their mindless rush. “It’s ninety fucking degrees in here,” he says, even louder, and of course that’s the moment that Erwin Smith chooses to walk in, tall and blond and brow creased as he looks Levi over.
“Are you the new applicant?” he asks, and then, rubbing the back of his neck rather sheepishly, “I’ve been trying to fix the air conditioning for weeks now, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a mechanic.”
“Coulda guessed that,” Levi mutters. “Ever gotten your hands dirty, sir?”
“I’ve been known to,” Erwin replies, amused, and then he smiles, soft and gentle, like pure fucking honey, and something in Levi’s chest stirs, yawns, blinks, and wakes up.
And it sees Erwin Smith, and despite everything, it decides, yes.
Despite everything, it decides, him.
“I’m Erwin,” says the Lieutenant, stretching a hand out. His grip is warm and strong when Levi reaches to take it.
“Rivaille,” Levi lies, even as his heart thuds hollow. “I’m Rivaille.”
———
Honestly, Levi’s not even surprised.
Because Erwin enraptures everyone the same way, with his gold-spun hair and blue opal eyes, and his sweet smile, the one that makes Levi feel empty, angry, because—
Because it’s soft. It’s warm. It’s like the first ray of sunshine he’s ever seen. Anger and jealousy spark hot and fiery in his belly when it’s directed at other people, he hisses Erwin’s name until the other man’s attention is fixed back on him; he wants Erwin to himself and he hates the lovesick fool that Erwin is turning him into, what Erwin makes him want—
Because this isn’t what he’s here for, he’s—
He’s Levi. Booster addict, gangbanger, he’s here to kill him, for god’s sake, he’s here to put an end to that smile and those eyes, here to make his soft skin go corpse-gray, here to put blood in that golden hair.
In his dreams that smile is for him alone, those eyes are locked on his; in his reveries it’s his fingers in Erwin’s hair, not blood, and he pulls until Erwin gasps.
And kisses him until he moans.
He’s never wanted to leave the gang, never wanted to get out of the life, not before this. It’s all he can think about, now, wildly out of his element with the way Erwin makes him ache, but what’s the saying?
Love is a tyrant that spares no one?
———
They start taking Levi’s squad out into the city, each recruit paired with one senior officer. And because, Levi assumes, the world hates him, he is paired with Erwin.
They’re on patrol together, Erwin showing him the ropes: the streets to take, the streets to avoid, where it’s best to leave the squad car and go on foot. Sina is still being purged of the kinds of criminals that Trost is crammed with—the kind of criminals Levi has grown up living next door to.
“Quiet tonight,” Erwin remarks casually. The sky above the car is ink black, the soft haze of the streetlamps gliding silently over the roof of their car and bathing Erwin’s face in warm light. The Lieutenant’s hands are calm and steady on the steering wheel but Levi’s twitch in his lap and he replies with a grunt— his mind is elsewhere, distracted, decidedly not thinking about anything to do with the man next to him or those steady hands on the wheel.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Erwin adds, glancing over at him.
Levi scowls. “Well, forgive me for not giving a damn about small talk.”
“I’m sorry,” Erwin replies, slightly taken aback. “I thought conversation would be a nice diversion, you looked so…” His gaze flickers back and forth between Levi and the road.
The pause drags on and it makes Levi want to grind his teeth, rattle it out of him. “What.”
“You looked sad,” Erwin finishes gently. “I thought I’d try—”
“Oh, shut up,” Levi snaps, “shut up, I’m—” His hands twitch again. “I’m fine.”
The more unrequited it is, he decides, staring pointedly out the window, the better.
Unrequited he can deal with. Unrequited will make him tough again, cold again. Unrequited means he can still finish the job.
“Don’t know why they stuck me with you anyway,” he mutters, but then there’s a stretch of silence so weighty he can feel it, the same way he feels Erwin’s eyes on him. Hackles raised, he looks back at Erwin— and finds the Lieutenant biting back a smile.
“What,” he snaps, “what—“
“I asked to be paired with you,” Erwin says, looking at him with a little grin and soft doe eyes and Levi figures, with a sinking feeling in his gut, that he has been doomed from the fucking start.
And once the full weight of that hits him, he just unravels.
Erwin is pretty, gentle, so damn kind. Too kind, Levi thinks, with too much pity, and that must be the reason—the only reason—that Erwin can’t keep it one-sided.
He catches Levi’s arm one day on the way to a conditioning run, pulls him into an empty broom closet and cradles Levi’s jaw in the palms of his hands—pretty, gentle, warm— but he waits for Levi to kiss him first, and his hesitance is when Levi learns what it’s like to want someone so badly that it burns.
And after that he learns how Erwin likes to be kissed. He learns the heat of Erwin’s skin. What Erwin’s voice sounds like when his body arches up, what his eyes look like fluttering closed, what his gasps sound like, mouth parted and words catching in the back of his throat. They stumble back to Erwin’s private office and first against the desk and then again on the cot in the corner he learns what it’s like to make love, not just have sex— he is twenty-one and stupid, and he never could have guessed that there was a difference.
Lying in Erwin’s arms afterward, skin on skin, heat to heat, the closest he’s ever been to anyone, he considers confessing, coming clean, letting it all pour out. I’m a liar, he’ll say, I’m not a recruit, I’m a goddamn liar. I’m Levi, not Rivaille, and I want you, all of you, so fucking much, even if I was supposed to put poison in your food and a bullet in your brain—
But Levi has always had a hard time learning new things.
The only way he’ll understand something the right way, after all, is by doing it wrong, first.
———
And what’s the saying?
You have to fall before you learn to fly?
Love is a tyrant that spares no one?
No, Levi thinks, it’s neither.
You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone—
It's a fucking cliché.
———
He has been with Erwin for two months and one week when he runs out of Boosters.
He’d packed enough to last him until the end of the job but even after he’d given up the mission he had still taken them out of habit. They’d helped with training, after all; the effects of small doses weren’t physically noticeable and so he’d eased his way through the exercises that the other trainees had struggled with. He’d impressed instructors— he’d impressed Erwin, and he hadn’t given it much thought when his supply had begun to dry out.
But now they’re gone, he’s bone-dry, and he feels like he’s got razor blades in his stomach and a metal fucking rod through his forehead.
Vomit splatters the bottom of the bucket that Erwin has brought him, watery, reeking. He groans, skin clammy and acid spittle oozing out of the corner of his mouth, and beside him Erwin crouches down, one hand splayed over his back, the other stroking back his hair. “Take it easy,” Erwin says gently.
“Damn it,” he mutters, trying to swat Erwin away and slamming the bucket down, “this is ridiculous, there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s your shitty Chinese take-out, that’s all— food poisoning, oh, don’t look at me like—”
Nausea strangles him again and he chokes, reels back toward the bucket.
“Easy,” Erwin soothes, fingers circling gently at the tense muscles in his shoulders. “Easy, Rivaille, take it easy—”
But when Levi cracks his eyes open in between heaves, he goes ice-cold with fear.
The inside of the bucket is splattered with chunks of red—
“Oh—god,” he gasps, stammers, panic blinding him, mind whirling because there’s blood coming up now there’s blood it’s his blood, “fucking Christ, Erwin, there’s blood, I don’t, what the, what the fuck is happening to me—”
“Just—” Erwin says immediately, voice still as slow and steady as always but Levi can see his hands trembling when he stands— “Just wait here, I’ll get a doctor—“
“Don’t—” Levi wheezes, seizing Erwin’s ankle in a death grip before he can move away. “Don’t, I’ll be fine, I just—”
“You need medical attention,” Erwin replies sharply. “Please, at least see the medic here at the station—”
“I said no,” he gasps, words winded but sharp in between hacking out blood and mucus— “I’m—fucking hell, I’m fine, I—”
He heaves again, cries out, helplessly; his whole body is shaking—
“Stay here,” Erwin says; there’s a tremor in his voice now and Levi realizes he’s never seen Erwin scared before. “Stay here, do you understand me, I’m pulling the car up front and coming back to get you, we’re driving to the hospital—”
His body is racked with shudders and his throat is raw and the bucket is bloody and all he can think is that they will ask for his name, they will ask for his information, they will want insurance, and if, somehow, they put the pieces together—
Erwin can’t know.
But Levi can’t make him stay.
So he does the only thing he can think of, and he drags himself, retching and sweating, back into the Underground.
———
He never recalls passing out.
He does recall floating on black waves. He recalls them towering over him, slamming into him, drowning him; he recalls pain and cold fire and choking on black tar. He recalls screaming until his throat is sore, lashing out at a lean figure above him who brandishes a needle like a sword and says gimme your arm and calm the fuck down and stay still, you piece of shit.
He recalls waking.
“Levi,” comes someone’s voice, rough and sharp, but it has been so long since he has heard his real name that his eyes crack open with a frantic eagerness and a starved hope.
“Erwin?” he mumbles.
Then his eyesight adjusts, and his mouth goes dry.
“Ackerman,” he rasps, and bolts upright— a terrible idea; his arms wobble violently and give out, sending him collapsing back onto the thin mattress that his old mentor has laid him out on. “How did—”
“—I find you?” Ackerman snorts, words brittle. “You found me, kid. Passed out on my doorstep. Surprised me, to be completely honest with ya. Don’t understand why you’d come back to me, with the shit you just pulled on us up in Sina.”
He’s pacing at the foot of the bed. Levi watches him, paralyzed with uncertainty.
“Last week we’d given up on you,” Ackerman says at last, eyes narrowed. “Marked you down as dead and gone. Thought maybe they’d really outwitted you. But that’s not what happened, is it?”
Levi wonders if he can talk his way out of this. He’s always been good at lying. “Listen,” he says, but that’s as far as he gets, because Ackerman cracks out a bitter laugh, eyes flashing.
“Oh, no,” he says. “Oh, no, no, you know better than to try something with me, Levi— now, you listen to me. You take orders from me. Not some blond Legion prick who’s up on a high horse of doing what he thinks is good. Doin' what's justified. You know how many people we’ve lost to those patrols? How many they’ve put in coffins, courts, stuck behind bars? You know how much blood is on your precious Lieutenant’s hands? You know how much blood is on your hands?”
Levi says nothing.
“They killed Farlan,” Ackerman adds, off-handedly, and Levi’s eyes widen. “Remember him? You convinced him to join, right? Always looked up to you, that one. Pretty boy’s Legion swung down here for a battle with some small-timers, he got caught up in the crossfire.”
“Ackerman,” Levi gasps, weakly. He doesn’t want to hear—
“Isabel, too,” he continues. “They shot her outside of some nightclub and claimed self-defense— she was high and fucking crazy, but she wasn’t armed. You’d think that one bullet woulda done it. They put fifteen in her.”
God, god, fucking hell— it’s too much. His hands are pressed into his forehead, he’s reeling, too much, he says nothing but it’s so goddamn hard to breathe, to swallow.
“Now, Levi,” Ackerman says, quietly. “How d’ya figure you’re gonna pay for all that blood?”
Farlan, Isabel, god, “I’m sorry,” he pleads, voice cracking, “I’m fucking sorry, I’ll—”
“What?” Ackerman cuts over him. “I’ll never do it again, pretty fucking late for that, doncha think?”
Levi stares up at him. “You…are you gonna kill me?” he rasps.
“I don’t want to,” the leader says, and something in his eyes flickers. “You’re family, kid. Y’know? So we’re gonna try this one more time, and see how it goes.”
He leans close, acrid tobacco peppering the corners of his lips, the whites of his eyes stained a faded red.
“If you would prefer to keep on breathin’,” he says, “then you are gonna go back up to your boyscout, and you’re gonna be real sweet to him— and then you’re gonna put a bomb in his squad car, and you are gonna watch him burn.”
And if not—?
Ackerman smiles.
“Funny,” he says, “what livin’ without Boosters can do to an addict.”
———
He’s back in Sina by the end of the week.
It’s late. Nearly midnight. He knocks on the door of Erwin’s office because of course Erwin is still working, still going through reports, still signing off on transfers and requests.
When he opens the door Levi yanks him forward and kisses him, hard, fingers on the back of his neck; Erwin, body going tense in surprise, makes a muffled sound that is halfway between bewilderment and something like relief.
“Whe—“ he manages when they break apart, but Levi kisses him again. Erwin puts his hands on Levi’s shoulders, guides him backward. “Rivaille,” he says, eyes searching his face. “Where did you go?”
“Does it matter?” Levi’s voice is rougher than he means for it to be. Less talking, no more talking, he needs Erwin’s hands on him so he can forget, he needs to forget, just for a few hours—
“You didn’t leave an explanation,” Erwin says. “Or—there—there was no note, I—” Levi has never seen him search for words the way that he is now, stumbling over phrases, cutting himself off halfway through words, “or—anything, I—when I couldn’t find you I had a patrol out looking for your body—“
“My body?” Levi repeats.
Erwin looks away, voice soft. “I thought—that maybe you—“
“Erwin,” Levi says, crumbling, “Erwin—”
There are more questions Erwin wants to ask and Levi can see them trembling on the tip of his tongue, in his wide glass-blue eyes, all the things he doesn’t understand. But Levi kisses him instead of answering, kisses him sweet, and breathless, and walks him back inside and lays him down, slow.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers against his skin, rocking against him, wrapped up in his heat, “I’m sorry I’m so, so sorry,” and Erwin tells him that it’s all right, that it’s already forgotten, that he’s here now and—
“I love you,” Erwin whispers; Levi buries his face into the crook of Erwin’s neck to hide the burning behind his eyelids and knows that he can’t do it.
Won’t do it.
He’ll go back to Ackerman in the morning. He’ll spit in his face, dare him to touch either of them, he’ll tell Erwin everything and Erwin will forgive him because Erwin—
Erwin Smith loves him.
Nothing else matters.
———
But in the end, Levi is young, and twenty-one, and stupid.
And he’s not careful.
He kisses Erwin in the morning and tells him to trust him. He descends into Trost with the confidence of a hero. He meets Ackerman with slitted eyes and a raised chin, tells him to go fuck himself.
“No one leaves the life,” says Ackerman absentmindedly. “You’ll be back, kid.”
“I won’t,” Levi replies. “I’m done.”
Ackerman laughs, and that’s Warning Number One.
On his way back to the subway he passes by old friends, comrades, people he has lived in the shadow of Sina with all of his life, and they look at him like he is devil spawn, less than human but they do not stop him. And that’s Warning Number Two.
Warning Number Three—
It’s a feeling.
It’s a creeping nausea that gnaws at the bottom of his gut, rises into his throat. It’s an uneasy undertone that makes him start checking over his shoulder every other minute. It’s Ackerman’s laugh stuck on repeat in his head, and the ghosts of words mocking him; “you are gonna watch him burn—”
“You’ll be back,” Ackerman had leered; Warning Number Three is paranoia and the realization that he has just made Erwin Smith the biggest target in Sina.
He steps off the subway running.
“You are gonna watch him burn, watch him burn, watch him burn—”
Ackerman already knew that Levi would never hurt Erwin.
All he was doing was keeping him distracted, long enough to—
“—put a bomb in his squad car, you’re gonna watch him burn—”
He is three blocks away from the Legion and his lungs are burning as he tears through the streets, fighting through the busy day crowd furiously, terror crackling through his mind like lightning and the fear spurring him on as he nears the parking structure of the Legion headquarters—
There!
He hears his voice before he sees him, hears the smile in his words, hears him laugh. He’s saying something to an officer in passing, stepping toward his car, sliding into the driver’s seat, pulling out his keys—
“Erwin!” Levi screams. “Erwin no, don’t—”
Erwin looks up.
And he will always remember that. That he looked up. That he at least made it in time for Erwin to hear him, to raise his head.
Maybe it’s just the panic but Levi thinks, in the heat of the moment, that he can see it in Erwin’s eyes: the realization, the regret, that he understood the horror in Levi’s face and the plea in the two syllables of his name.
But Levi is one second too late, and Erwin turns the key in the ignition.
The explosion rips through the block.
There’s fire, orange and red and then black smoke, and the sound rolls over him like thunder, panic melting into blind grief; the smoke is thick and heavy and suffocates him, blearing his vision as the ground shakes and he loses his footing, crashing to the pavement hard, wrapping his arms around himself as shrapnel embeds itself deep into the concrete next to him not him, not him, not like this, please—
There are a few seconds of silence, broken only by the crackle of the flames still licking at the squad car’s metal frame.
Then shouts of confusion. The thud of footsteps past him. Someone screams, high and shrill, and it jolts him out of his numb shock; smoke is still pouring from the car but the minute he regains his footing he’s lurching toward the wreckage, ears ringing, broken, choked, wordless cries issuing from his mouth.
Someone’s already phoned an ambulance and he can hear it wailing toward them as he watches officers swarm the car, cutting the door off of its hinges, pulling what must be Erwin’s body out— “Get back!” one of them snarls at him but he pushes forward all the same, he wants to see him he needs to see him—
“Please,” he says, his voice sounding too small, his heart beating hard in his throat and echoing in his skull, “please, I know him, I know him—”
They part slightly for him, then, and when he sees him his knees almost give out and he totters, dizzy and faint and Erwin, Erwin, Erwin, god forgive me please forgive me all my fault Erwin no please god I love you, I love you, Erwin—
He is gasping the words against the pavement, his hands scrabbling against the cement like some kind of wild caged animal, when the ambulance screeches up onto the sidewalk and then Erwin is out of sight, hidden by white uniforms and the soft count of chest compressions. One of the EMTs pulls him away and takes him in her arms but he can’t seem to melt the shock he can’t, can’t stop seeing him in his head, head lolling back and clothes soaked red and missing so much—
He can’t.
He should say goodbye—
He doesn’t.
It’s his fault.
He does not go back to Kenny Ackerman.
But he does go back to Trost.
What’s the saying? You have to fall before you learn to fly?
Maybe, Levi thinks, falling was ever his only option.