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The wind is bitter across his face, his eyes downcast against the rain. Sweat runs off the black stallion beneath him in frozen waterfalls. He can barely make out the green of the flare in the raging storm. The green that leads him forward, urges him on.
Here beyond the walls, where death is one with the land, Levi wonders if he’s awake. His nights are sleepless, any rest a stranger, but he still feels absent. Running on habit, the way his body falls into rhythm as the sun rises and falls. Commands and orders, killing and more killing. Chasing a world he doesn’t know, a dream he doesn’t understand.
The darkness of the Underground. The dead chill outside the walls. He might’ve said it was all the same. It would be the same, if it weren’t for those eyes.
His eyes.
The eyes of the one who, as Levi looked into the lifeless faces of his only friends, his family, told him to never regret. To make a choice, and never look back.
The eyes of the man who only looks forward, beyond the walls, beyond each of the lives that serve him.
When Levi meets the eyes of the commander, he comes alive. The chains straddling his heart, the covers that keep him asleep, fall away.
He’d had the choice to leave this place, galloping across endless miles of grief, blood and failure, and return to the only place he’d ever known. That, or stay with the man he’d been so driven to kill. To keep staring up into those cruel, beautiful eyes.
And as much as he hated him, Erwin Smith knew more about this world than Levi ever would. He had dreams, something to hope for. For weeks, Levi searched for a fault, for something to make him crack. But when nothing but sincere, iron resolve returned his gaze, Levi knew his decision had been right.
And so he drives his horse through the rain, towards that flare, sprinting over Erwin’s trail, and doesn’t look back.