Work Text:
Levi still spends his afternoons playing music for Eren, and Eren still spends his afternoons listening on the sunny veranda of a balcony. The only difference is that now he does it from Levi’s balcony, a cup of tea in hand despite the warm weather, watching as Levi plays. He saves his requests, if he has any, for those moments rather than putting them slips of paper to be left in Levi’s hallway.
He finds he doesn’t miss them, or their presence in his trash, at all.
Eren requests music by that same guy from before several times, but Levi just shakes his head and plays something else. As many Ludovico Einaudi songs buzz in his fingertips, he knows better than to waste them on a whim. Another day, he tells Eren, and Eren puffs out his cheeks and crosses his arms, but leaves it at that. Almost as if he knows he’s asking for something special and is willing to wait for Levi to give it to him.
It’s still early that particular afternoon, Levi still in the kitchen making tea as Eren ambles around his apartment as he likes to do (Levi can’t fathom why—his apartment is far from anything spectacular).
He hears the ting ting ting of Eren pressing the keys on his piano, and has to manually focus on his breathing to ease the tension out of his shoulders. Levi realized rather quickly into his strange acquaintance with Eren that he likes to touch everything, especially things that are made for touching, like his piano. Levi, not used to having people in his apartment, is very not used to having people touch his private, personal piano, and had nearly torn Eren’s hands clean off in his panic.
Eren had looked so terrified that it had made something dark and shameful twist up in Levi’s stomach. He’d stammered apologies, clambered awkwardly to his legs like some sort of baby deer, and Levi had had to grab him to keep him from walking out of the apartment and, most likely, out of Levi’s life.
That’s what people did, when Levi got like that. The thought of losing Eren after everything Eren had given him, things he didn’t even know he’d given Levi—he couldn’t let it happen. He didn’t want to think too hard on the justification for it, but he knew he couldn’t.
Instead of playing the piano that afternoon, he showed Eren how to clean the keys when he was done touching, how to correctly use the pedals if he was going to attempt to use them. Eren’s body had buzzed with all the energy of someone who doesn’t have the patience to sit still, but he had. He had listened, and absorbed, and the next time his fingers tinkled across Levi’s keys, he cleaned them in between his playing and Levi’s practice.
It didn’t occur to Levi until many afternoons later how much he had asked of Eren, and how easily Eren had done it.
(He doesn’t think about that, either.)
Unlike most afternoons, when Eren just jumbles together notes because he likes the sounds each individual key makes, there’s a rhythm to today’s playing. There’s an order. When Levi walks into the living room with cups of tea in hand, he can tell by the way Eren’s fingers are moving (slowly, the tempo is uneven, he’s stumbled eight times already) that he’s playing something and not just pressing whichever random keys seem tempting that day.
“What’s that?” He asks, and Eren’s hands trip over the notes and stop completely.
“What?” Eren looks back at him, like he’s been caught doing something wrong. Levi gives him a look, and gestures with a tip of his head towards the piano.
“What you were playing. What was it?” Levi emerges from the doorway with the tea, setting the cups down on his coffee table.
Eren laughs. Levi has already learned not to question the weird times at which Eren chooses to laugh.
“You’re joking, right?” Eren’s voice is filled with mirth, and when Levi turns to look at him with one cooly arched eyebrow, the amusement disappears. Eren’s mouth forms a neat little o. “You’re not joking?”
Does this look like the face of someone who is joking? Levi doesn’t ask, because he knows that a lot of the time when he is joking, his face looks exactly the way it looks now. Better not to ‘cause confusion.
“It’s, you know. Heart and Soul. Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da?” Eren tips his head to the side, eyebrows skewed, and Levi thinks he sounds like an idiot, singing piano music when there’s a piano sitting in front of him. Levi moves towards him, and Eren starts to scramble from the piano bench when Levi closes a hand over his shoulder and stops him.
“Play it again.”
Eren shoots him a nervous look, and Levi understands it, for once. After all, it’s one thing to dick around on a piano when Levi’s out of the room. But at the end of the day, he’s a professional, something that Eren is acquainted with even if he’s still dumb to the fact that Levi is world-renowned (he’s in no hurry to let Eren in on that facet of his life just yet).
Eren swallows so heavily, Levi can feel the muscles tense and relax from where his hand is still on Eren’s shoulder.
Then, he plays again.
“It’s—” his fingers stumble, and he curses under his breath. “You know, one of the first songs they teach you when you learn to play piano.” A few more discordant notes, and Levi contemplates telling him to stop speaking while trying to play. He’s clearly not able to do it. But he figures his presence might also be the problem, so he keeps his mouth shut. “That and Chopsticks, but that one isn’t as pretty as this one.” Eren grins a bit, his fingers remembering what they’re doing, finding their confidence. His tempo is still shit, but well. He’s a grad student, not a professional pianist.
Or even a musician.
“Come on, you have to have learned them. You play things, like, 800 times more complicated.”
Levi listens to the notes, watches his fingers, knows he could sit down and play exactly what Eren is playing now that he’s heard it, but—
“No,” Levi replies, simply. “I’ve never heard this song before.”
Eren’s fingers stumble and stop again, and he turns on the piano stool to stare at Levi in disbelief.
“Really?” His mouth flaps open and closed without releasing any noise. It’s a particularly unpleasant habit that Eren has that Levi finds repulsive. Normally. He should find it repulsive.
It’s frustrating that he, for some inexplicable reason, doesn’t.
Levi doesn’t grace Eren with a response, just a tired slide of his eyes, and Eren just blinks back at him.
“You never took piano lessons?”
Levi crosses his arms and looks away.
“I didn’t say that.” He had. His foster parents had paid for the best teachers they could find. But Levi had never done all the basic shit he’s sure most piano students have to do. They taught him which notes went with which keys, how to read sheet music, things that don’t generally come naturally, but considering the first piece he’d ever played for his piano teacher had been the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” there had never been a need for him to learn the basic songs that every young child who’s been forced to touch a piano has had to endure.
It’s a cute little song, but Levi still doesn’t think he’s missing anything.
“Too good for Heart and Soul?” Eren teases, and then Levi bodily scoots him down the piano bench and sits beside him.
“It’s a duet?” Levi asks, looking at him, and Eren stares back with wide, startled eyes.
“Um—” he scratches the back of his head. “I guess, yeah, but you don’t want to play with me—”
“I can’t exactly play a duet by myself, brat,” Levi bites back, settling a hand over the keys. Eren just looks at it, and then back at Levi. He doesn’t ask how Levi knows what notes to play, or what keys to hit, just stares at him for far too long before giving a little nod and turning back to the piano.
Eren starts to play his part, but it’s staccato, like it had been before. Fast and jerky and uneven, much like Eren is, himself, and Levi hides a smile at the corner of his mouth.
“Slower,” Levi instructs, and Eren looks at him unsurely. “We’re not in a rush.” Levi shifts on the piano stool so he can reach around Eren and place his confident hand over Eren’s hesitant one. “Like this.” He guides Eren’s fingers slowly over the keys, changing up the actual chords a little bit, which must throw Eren off, because he keeps hitting the wrong one.
“This isn’t Heart and Soul,” Eren mumbles, eyebrows pinched, and Levi let’s himself smile, Eren’s attention on the keys in front of him and not on Levi’s face in the slightest.
“It’s not?” Levi asks, lifting his own hand to the keyboard and beginning to play his part. It’s slower, mostly because Levi has almost always preferred songs that stretched and glided along keys leisurely. He knows the fast songs are generally more impressive, but he’ll always love the ones that take their time. They’re the ones that remind him of how pianos sounded when he was younger, and they’re the sound he fell in love with.
“You could have played this on your own,” Eren grumbles, seeing as Levi is still guiding his hands, and Levi hums thoughtfully.
“I could have,” he admits, but doesn’t say anything else. After a few moments, the words seem to register in Eren’s brain, and his hand stops on the keys, leaving Levi’s hand resting there as the other hand finishes the song in a flourish.
“Show off,” Eren mumbles, and then turns his head, jerking back as he realizes exactly how close he and Levi are. Levi is a little surprised himself, even though he’d been the one to forego his own personal bubble. Eren stares at him, that same wide open stare, like he’s looking at so much more than what’s before him. It’s the kind of stare that makes Levi always feel a little on edge. “Levi—“
“The tea is getting cold,” Levi cuts him off, before he can say… Whatever it is he planned to say. Levi doesn’t want to know at the same time that he does, and figures ignorance is bliss and all that. Eren turns away, and Levi takes that moment to carefully extract his hand from where it’s still resting on top of Eren’s and put a respectable amount of distance between them.
“Oh, uh. Right.” Eren gives a shake of his head, and then stands to move to the couch today. The weather is starting to get a little too warm, and some days, Eren prefers the cool quiet of Levi’s living room instead. “Wait—“ he looks guiltily at the piano, and then at Levi. “I didn’t clean it.”
Levi let’s himself look taken aback for approximately two seconds, before he schools his face back into something calm.
“Did you take a shit and not wash your hands before playing?” Levi asks flatly, and Eren looks horrified by the suggestion.
“What the fu—no!”
“Then stop looking like you’ve just ‘fessed up to murder. We can clean it afterwards.” Levi looks away from him, afraid what his eyes might end up saying without his consent.
“…if you’re sure.” Eren sounds hesitant, but at Levi’s silence, he doesn’t push. Levi hears him sit more than sees it, eyes focused solely on the piano before him, and then, like most afternoons these days, Eren asks, “What are you going to play today?”
And, as he has done on every one of those afternoons, Levi simply starts playing rather than answering. The melody of Heart and Soul had stuck with him, reminded him of a song he learned to play at his foster parent’s yacht club, and while the song carries horrible memories with it, he thinks maybe it’s time to wipe those clean and replace them.
He glances at Eren quickly, and then begins to play.
It takes a few moments for Eren to recognize it, but when he does, his face lights up. “This is the song from Finding Nemo!” Eren cries, and Levi can’t help but snort, feeling old.
It’s Charles Trenet, but he suppose Eren is right, too.
“My lover stands on golden sands and watches the ships that go sailing,” Eren sings along softly, leaning on the arm of the couch, eyes closed, and Levi watches him, mouth pressed in a thin line to keep his heart from jumping out through his throat.