Work Text:
Levi doesn’t tell people he loves them.
It’s a rule. A principle, even. Because an “I love you” is permenant. It’s irreversible. You say it once and there’s no room for a “just kidding,” not if you fancy yourself a decent person. I love you is a promise. There’s no backing out of I love you. And that is a terrifying thought.
Levi doesn’t tell people he loves them becasue there is no room for love in this world. Love gets you killed. Love gets you scars that don’t heal. Love is an exercise in fultility that will crumble even the strongest soldier.
And yet Erwin Smith does not seem to fear “I love you”. He bears no uncertainty when he spills the three little words into the meager silence between them, filling the space with their weight.
Levi sucks in a breath that he doesn’t let go of - he can’t. The ‘I love you’ sits too heavy in his lungs, supplanting his air and coiling around his throat and cutting into his heart like the scalpel of a trained surgeon. They aim to hurt, to slice straight to the certner of Levi Ackerman. The center he’s spent so long building walls around.
Everyone in this world builds walls, be them towering and made of solid stone or invisible walls around the softest, most sensitive parts of the heart.
Erwin doesn’t care about Levi’s walls.
Blue blue eyes search Levi’s face, but not for an answer nor response. They bear no semblance of insecurity, there is no desire to run away etched into their opalescent rings the color of the sky. Instead, he just stares, and he waits with that ineffable, inexplicable patience that Erwin Smith seems to carry with ease.
Levi doesn’t know how he does it. He doesn’t know why he does it. Because why would he say this? Why would he say this knowing there is no hope for them? Why would he say this? Doesn’t he know how much it hurts?
Levi grouses as much.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“Why?” Levi is nauseous with the burn that begins behind his eyes, sick with the engulfing sting, the threat of tears. They haven’t fallen yet but he knows they will and he can’t stop them. He can’t do anything.
He can’t stop Erwin from riding to Shiganshina tomorrow. He can’t stop time from ticking, the sun from peeking over the horizon. He can’t stop Erwin from loving him.
“Why do you love me?”
“Are you asking for a list?”
“You don’t love me.”
“I do.”
The room smells like roses and it’s suffocating. Because Erwin loves roses. He keeps a crystal bowl of fading rose petals on his bedside table becasue he says there is room for beauty in hopelessness. Because he says they could die tomorrow, and why not fall asleep to the smell of roses.
Levi snaps his watch around his wrist and stares at the time. They only have hours left. Hours that can be counted on one hand. Hours that are slipping away.
And as he stares at the ever moving seconds hand that snarls, smirks, sneers in the face of Levi’s blurred vision, he realizes with frightening clarity that he is angry.
He’s beyond angry, he’s furious.
So he spits with all the venom in his poisoned heart, “Why would you tell me this?”
He doesn’t dare look up at Erwin. They both know the answer.
Erwin is silent, and that silence spreads and grows and shapes itself to fit into every corner of the room. That silence curls around Levi’s throat like a boa constrictor squeezing the life from its prey, settles into his bones like sand at the bottom of the ocean, chains him to where he stands, a prison.
Erwin is telling him becasue this is his last chance. It’s his final sentiment. His grand exit.
He won’t get another and they both know it.
Erwin doesn’t expect to come back tomorrow. Maybe he doesn’t even want to.
Levi hates him.
Levi hates him and he doesn’t love him and he doesn’t even like him, he hates Erwin Smith.
He hates him so much that his tears stop teasing him and just simply fall, dripping down his cheeks, ugly, wet, disgusting and pathetic. He can’t even see the time anymore. All he can see is the hardwood beneath his feet and the glow of the lamp on the bedside table Erwin, standing front and center all golden golden golden like a fallen god.
But he’s not a god, he’s a man.
He’s a man and men fade, men die.
“Lee…” a large, warm, weathered palm cups his cheek. A callused thumb brushes his tears away. And Levi explodes, a black hole collapsing in on itself until there is nothing left to consume and it bursts.
“Don’t you get how fucking selfish you’re being!?” His hand shoots out, heel of his palm digging into Erwin’s sternum, and the conmander stumbles back.
The bedside table scuffs against the floor as he braces against it for support - it’s a horrible squeaking sound, shrill and splitting and Levi latches onto it. Something, anything to distract.
Levi can’t look at him nor can he handle the concern that he knows is written across Erwin’s face.
“Don’t you get it you self-centered bastard?! All you care about is- I can’t-“ Levi’s voice gets caught in his throat but the burning in his chest pushes it through, scraping his esophagus raw. “You don’t get to say that to me! Not now I-…”
His fury fades when he sees them - glittering, barely there tear tracks down sun-tanned cheeks. They are thin, but they shimmer all the same, radiance in their clarity, in the way they paint themselves down, down, soft at the hands of gravity. In his chest, Levi’s heart begins to flake.
It doesn’t break nor shatter, it simply begins to fall apart in small pieces.
Erwin is beautiful when he cries. A melancholy yet truthful observation. Bile rises in his throat at the thought, burning in his stomach.
He needs to get out. He just needs to be able to breathe but he can’t breathe because Erwin loves him and he’s crying and the room smells like roses and-
And in the blink of an eye it is raining. A droplet falls into the collar of his coat, shivers down his neck, pressing into his skin.
The suffocating warmth of Erwin’s quarters are gone, replaced with a cemetery. Rows upon rows headstones sit, the last remnants of forgotten sacrifices, an army of fodder.
Levi looks up at the sky and finds himself bored by the monotony of silver gray. It stretches on for miles, a colorless backdrop, and from it, tears spring, a steady pattering that burgeons into a downpour.
Levi forgot his umbrella. He doesn’t care.
Erwin died on a sunny day two weeks ago. A day so opposite from this it’s almost comical. Levi doesn’t even smile.
His body isn’t even here.
Only a gravestone remembers him. A gravestone and Levi.
The rest of the world has moved on because that’s what the world does. It doesn’t stop turning, not even for tragedy. Even when a light that shines brighter than the sun or stars gets extinguished, snuffed out by battle, time trudges on and people turn away. What else are they to do?
A ceremony was held, an obligatory honor for a high ranking man, a good soldier. But then he was forgotten.
And Levi thinks, he really thinks, that if they knew Erwin Smith, really knew Erwin Smith, they would mourn until there was no more sorrow to be spared, that maybe the very ground itself would crumble at his loss. But no one knew Erwin Smith. Not really. Not like Levi knew him.
They didn’t know his hands or the way he could name every species of bird. They didn’t know his doting smile from his fake smile from his wry, teasing smirk. They didn’t know his boisterous, rumbling laughter and they didn’t know how even after losing an arm he could still hold Levi so safely, and they didn’t know how he hated black tea or how he liked to collect fancy pens. They didn’t know that he liked to read books about reincarnation because he liked to think that maybe, maybe there was a life after this. A life where they could be free.
They didn’t know how insanely, batshit, absolutely off the rails crazy hopeful he was.
And so, only fourteen days after he’s gone Levi stands here alone in the rain.
‘Erwin Smith’ it says. It says his name and the day he was born and the day he died and his title. And it doesn’t say how he was compassionate beyond belief, or how he was a friend, or how he was Levi’s hope.
Levi wants to break it. He wants to watch it shatter. Because how can Erwin Smith be nothing more than a rock in the ground when he was everything to Levi.
“You left before I could tell you…” he says ruefully to the wilted flowers he’d left only three days ago. “You told me you loved me. But you never gave me the chance to say it back.”
He tsks and kicks at the stone. It stays steady, planted stubbornly in the earth.
“What kind of asshole does that.”
He stares at the stone. He stares and he waits for it to disintegrate, for a large, warm palm to clasp his shoulder and tell him it was all a twisted dream, for a low, soft voice to whisper in his hear that ‘I’m here’ and ‘everything is okay’. He stands and stares at the stone, repeating this routing for the fourteenth time.
Nothing ever comes of it. And eventually his eyes get too tired to keep looking at Erwin’s name etched in granite, and his body begins to shiver.
So, for one last moment in the abandoned cemetery, Levi closes his eyes and breathes in.
He breathes in and the air smells like burning and death and the stink of dying hope. It smells like blood soaked clothes, stains that will never wash out and wounds that will never close, that will fester and bleed until sepsis sets in and it’s all too late.
It smells like soldiers who will never come home and promises that will never be fulfilled.
When Levi opens his eyes again the sky is clear.
The sun is out. Above him, blue blue blue stretches, curving around the earth. A bird flies overhead, unaware of the black smoke that curls into the air behind it. It simply carries on.
Erwin would have known what kind of bird that is.
“He’s dead,” Hange’s face is hidden by her bangs as she presses a palm over Erwin’s eyes. And Levi’s mind comes to a grinding halt.
Oh.
Erwin is dead.
Oh.
He’s never coming back.
Levi looks at his mangled body, covered in blood, his peaceful face and golden-skin slowly losing its luster, becoming cold as the ice that floods Levi’s veins. He looks like Erwin. But he’s not Erwin. Levi looks at the commanders still chest, and Hange’s assessment makes sense.
Erwin Smith is dead.
But…
But what about ‘I love you’? His mind asks in a small, wilted voice. It pleads.
I love you is a promise. And Erwin promised.
“I see,” he says but he doesn’t. And he doesn’t understand.
Because I love you is a promise.
And Erwin promised.
Erwin promised him love. And ‘I love you’ is permenant. There’s no backing out of I love you.
Tell me again, Levi’s heart begs, words jumping to his throat. Just one more time so I can answer properly this time. Please just tell me again and I’ll say it back.
I won’t call you selfish.
I won’t push you away.
Just tell me again. I’ll do it right this time.
Please.
“Lee.”
Levi jolts awake with a start.
His heart pulses in his ears, cold sweat beading at his hairline and drenching his bare chest. Tears, hot tears that make him feel sick and vomitous and restless pool in his eyes and spill over without preamble, blurring the world around him into blotches of darkness.
He takes in a rasping breath. Then another and another until breathing turns into sobbing and sobbing gives way to-
“Levi.”
For a moment it all stops. For a moment, the memories stop tearing at his heart, pulling chunks of flesh away, ripping at his lungs. It all stops, and a large, warm palm clasps over his shoulder. And a low, soft voice whispers,
“I’m here. It’s okay.”
Levi’s body seeks out the voice, curling into a warm embrace - two solid arms fold around him, a strong, resonating heartbeat reverbeates against his chest, and golden-tanned skin is warm beneath his fingertips, full of life.
And it’s like finding an oaisis in a sea of sand, the first sign of land in an endless ocean. He breathes in relief and the scent of camomile - Erwin loves camomile. In scent and taste. It’s his favorite. It’s a delight to the senses, somehow soothing and sweet at once. Just like Erwin.
Levi allows himself to stay like that a moment, wrapped in silence. Because this time it’s warm and forgiving and it drowns out his pathetic sniffling and weak hiccups.
He stays like that because it’s safe, because what if he moves and the scene changes again? What if he closes his eyes again and he wakes up in his room, in his sweat soaked sheets, in his lonely bed. In his hopeless world.
So he clings tight to a broad chest and cries, cries, cries.
“Levi, my love,” that voice is unmistakable, and yet levi staves off his hope, pushing it to the back of his mind. Just in case.
Just in case just time is just like every other time before. Just in case the fatal pattern repeats itself.
“Levi,” gentle hands pull him away, pushing him back just enough so he comes face to face with blue blue eyes.
Levi’s chest hurts.
Erwin is there. His shoulders are broad, shifting with every breath. His hands are strong, rubbing soft circles into Levi’s back. And his eyes are blue. Blue and full of life, glowing under the devotion of moonlight.
He doesn’t realize that thin tears are taking his cheeks by storm until Erwin thumbs at his tear tracks and the cold metal of his ring brushes against Levi’s skin.
“I’m here,” he whispers - but the words barely leave his tongue before Levi is kissing him, pressing all his desperation between their lips.
He’s kissed these plush lips more times than he cares to count and yet they still taste like home, like all things warm and safe. And most days, he knows, he takes them for granted, has managed to fall into this cycle to assuming the promise of tomorrow. He’s forgotten all about the days when promising anything at all was taboo.
Days when there was no assurance of anything, really.
So he clings now, to this reality and this life, even if it is bound to end and another take it’s place, even if it is a dream he’s soon to wake up from.
He tangles his hands in sleep mussed golden locks, kisses Erwin like the the air he needs to breathe. And miraculously, wonderfully, Erwin kisses back, holding Levi against him, tender yet firm. His heart settles from panicked race to a steady thump thump thump in his chest, and his tears don’t stop but now they flow soft, tracing the line of his neck all the way down to his collarbone.
He finds home once again in Erwin Smith.
And when Erwin pulls away for a much needed breath of air, Levi chases him, disregarding the burning of lungs because oxygen seems such a pointless thing without Erwin’s lips against his.
But his husband stops him with a trick so simple as turning his head - he pecks Levi on the cheek, a childish deception that makes Levi’s lips twitch up into the smallest of smiles despite himself.
Another moment of heavy silence passes with Levi pressing his weight into his husband’s embrace, breathing him in and soaking up the comfort that ebbs from him. His heart strings go taut when memories few and far between slip through the guard of his walls, but he builds them back up brick by brick, shutting away unwanted souvenirs of a past life.
Eventually, Erwin presses the ghost of a kiss against his hairline.
“I’ll make us some tea.” He says without judgement.
Levi’s heart does a doubletake, tripping over itself - Erwin doesn’t need to be told how sleep eludes Levi on nights like these. Nights when the past grabs him by the shoulders and throws him into restless sleep-adjacent thing, like a ship lost among the swelling tides of the sea.
He knows Levi will lie awake, thinking and regretting and hurting, even if Erwin wraps him in strong arms and holds him against his chest. It’s not simply enough to know everything is okay. He needs to live it.
Which is why he leaves the warmth of their bed and trails after Erwin like a lost puppy dog as they make their way toward the kitchen in their apartment.
It’s open floor plan, which is nice when you’re prone to two-am misadventures and an abundance of doors would be more a hindrance than anything else. And more than that, it’s nice to see the warmth of the kitchen lights flood the whole space, chasing the shadows to lonely corners.
Levi sticks close to Erwin’s side like a barnacle to the haul of a ship, following every movement of his bare, muscled torso as he sets about making their tea - gerbil green tea with extra honey for Levi, plain camomile for him.
Levi loves watching him make tea. For he goes through the same process every time, the same delicate motions despite his large hands. He’s never clumsy, always handling the tea bags and glasses alike with the utmost care.
Erwin Smith, despite his large frame and even larger presence, is nothing but a teddy bear deep down, and he doesn’t know how to do anything without a most careful element of gentleness. He is simply a wonder in Levi’s eyes - Levi who has not lived a day in this life without tripping over a crack in the sidewalk or breaking one of their numerous mugs.
(When replacing all their sets had become too expensive, they’d turned to thrifting. Now their collection is about as un-set-like as it gets.)
The tea steeps in four minutes time - four minutes that Levi monopolizes by drawing his husband into a slow kiss, one that gives him the leeway to coil his legs around Erwin’s waist and explore his mouth aimlessly. But ever the punctual man, Erwin breaks them apart when their panda timer, Mike, releases a shrill ring.
“You wouldn’t want the tea to get bitter, love,” Erwin placates in response to Levi’s nonsensical protesting.
And so turns back to his ministrations, his tea-making routine - Levi watches with rapt attention, adoring the way Erwin’s handsome face relaxes. He always finds pleasure in the simplest things. Levi loves that about him.
“Be careful,” the blond murmurs, nudging Levi’s green tea toward him with the back of his knuckles. “It’s hot.”
Levi nods but, always a slave to his own bullheadedness, reachers for it anyway.
However, when he moves to pick up the stout, handle-less mug - they’d found it at small mom and pop ceramics shop in Paris - his fingers tremble with unexpected fervor, threatening to spill the scalding, fragrant drink all over both of them.
As always, Erwin catches him before he falls, encasing his freezing hands in broad, warm palms. The steady that washes over him roots deep from the tips of his fingers to the base of his heels, and he lets a sigh of raw relief escape between his lips.
A moment of soft silence ensues in which Levi stares mindlessly into the pale green surface of the tea, watching his reflection dance and wobble with the shaking of his hands before Erwin whispers,
“What did you dream of, my love?”
A frown digs into the corners of his lips, Erwin’s mangled body and rain-slick gravestone flashing through his mind and sticking to the front of his consciousness. Not dreams. Not even nightmares. Something far worse entirely.
He closes his eyes to shut them out but the images pervade, growing in the darkness, feeding on it.
So he keeps his dry eyes open. He burns them away by focusing on Eriwn’s hands eclipsing his own.
They’re soft these days, not a callus to speak of. There are no scars littering their sun-tanned surface, no souvenirs of war slashed into his knuckles, dug out of his palms. His nails are neatly trimmed, and his thick fingers are strong, healthy, trophies of a life well lived. Levi adores these hands.
They no longer hold him in an unsteady vice grip, bruising in its desperation, because they no longer need to.
They hold him soft, they hold him tender, they hold him knowing there will be a tomorrow after today, and a tomorrow after tomorrow as well.
At the thought, his heart begins to calm, raging waves flattening to a gentle tide that laps against the shore of his tired mind.
“They weren’t dreams they were…” Levi sighs again, leaning forward to press his head to Erwin’s neck, feeling the pulse of his head against the bridge of his nose.
“Nightmares?”
“Memories.”
Erwin hums in understanding.
Their past has hit Erwin just as hard, he knows. He knows because there are nights when the blond holds him a little too tight to be comfortable and days when he may be doing something as mundane as washing the laundry when he suddenly falls to his knees, some kind of panic caught deep in his chest.
The difference is that Erwin doesn’t speak his pain. Levi wishes he wouldn’t, but he keeps it all trapped inside. He doesn’t awake in the middle of the night with tears tracking down his cheeks or his voice screaming and rubbed raw. His broken mind has none of the penchant for dramatics that Levi’s does.
But Levi sees it. Written in the crease of his brow, in the way he takes deeper breaths than he needs to sometimes. He sees when the weight becomes too much to bear because Erwin Smith, for all his professionalism, is not good at hiding things.
“Any one in particular?”
Levi knows he’s being careful, just in case another breakdown is on the horizon, just in case Levi can’t hold in the flood.
But he wants Erwin to know.
It wasn’t easy for Levi to jump into this life. It wasn’t easy for him to learn how to love Erwin without keeping a distance between them just in case, just in case he was bound to be taken from Levi again. But he’s not going to make the same mistakes this time around.
“You told me you loved me,” he admits.
Much to his surprise, he receives a low chuckle in return - it seems they do not see that memory in the same light. Or, at the very least, Erwin does not regret having it.
“I remember that,” he muses lightly. “I seem to remember we quite disagreed on it back then.”
And oh how the tears fall this time, ugly and mangled and brutalizing Levi’s marble mask of indifference. They tear it from his face and expose what’s beneath - pain and heartbreak, a broken man who cannot be repaired.
He can do nothing but allow them to infect his voice, turning it rough around the edges.
“I never said it back,” he warbles against Erwin’s skin.
This time he feels the breath Erwin takes rather than hearing it, feels it against his palm where it’s pressed to his husband’s heart.
“Lee…” Gentle fingers thread through his hair. “It’s okay-“
“I never said it back Erwin,” he needs to get it out, the words that sit like hot coles in his chest, burning holes in his lungs. “And I never got to say it back because I was fucking scared that you would leave and I would lose everything all over again and I did.”
Erwin is silent, and Levi is thankful for it. He doesn’t think he could handle being told it’s okay, that whatever decision he made was right. It wasn’t.
Maybe if he’d just told Erwin. Maybe if he’d just said it, even once, maybe he could’ve lived the life without regret Erwin always told him to live.
“You always told me not to regret shit,” but my entire life was just a series of regrets, one that began and ended with you. “But I did regret it. I regretted not telling you every day for my entire fucking life. And I regretted not bringing you back. Which I know is shitty becasue Armin was a good kid but I-…”
The sting of admission is sharp like a slap to the face.
Another deep breath fills Erwin’s chest. In a voice that carries the weight of an ocean but the characteristic conviction he always seems to have in his back pocket, he says,
“We were the right people at the wrong time. When you said I was being selfish…you were right,” tender fingers massage at his nape. “I wanted you to know because I knew I wouldn’t get another chance to tell you. I didn’t think about how you would carry it with you and that…”
Erwin manhandles him under the warm glow of the kitchen lights, pulling Levi from the crook of his neck so that his tear-stained face is forced into view.
They say the eyes are the window to the soul and for Erwin Smith it really is true - his eyes are the saddest shade of pale blue when he looks at Levi. Sad in a way that ebbs acceptance.
“That was my biggest regret.”
Such a simple admission tears up his heart, leaving it bleeding and wounded in his chest. Only this time the ache is good.
And Levi lets a lifetime’s worth of unshed tears drip down his cheeks with an undecorous sniffle as he leans his face into Erwin’s open palm.
Levi never says “I love you.” Becasue I love you is permanent. It’s a promise. There’s no backing out of I love you and that is a terrifying thought.
To love and to lose is more painful than any death. And for so much of his past life and this one too, at his heart, Levi was still a scared little boy alone in the Underground.
But Erwin makes him strong, spins that fear into bravery like straw into gold, and brings Levi peace with those broad hands and broader heart.
So he’s not scared anymore when he says, “I love you, Erwin Smith.”
And any lingering doubt vanishes from his mind when Erwin kisses him soft and mutters against his lips,
“I love you too, Lee.”