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Chapter Text

Erwin never looks forward to his performance reviews. Not because they’re bad—they never are—but because he has to rehash the same arguments with the administration. Every year. For five years running.

“Student performance continues to improve leaps and bounds,” the principal says, flipping idly through Erwin’s file. “Perhaps this is the year we’ll finally beat out Marley High for the top AP scores, eh? Parents are happy with you. Kids are happy with you. We’d never had to employ a wait list for an AP US History course until you arrived, but here we are. Congrats, and all that.”

“Thank you.”

Zackly’s office smells like a tuna melt today; a crumpled wrapper from the deli down the street lies on his desk, leaking watery mayonnaise onto what looks like Mike’s performance review.

“Classroom observation…”

Zackly adjusts the round glasses on his nose, and Erwin folds his hands in his lap, sitting up a little straighter.

“…‘Above and Beyond’ with…caveats.”

Zackly peers over the rims of his glasses. Erwin looks back, unblinking. He thinks he saw that this was a good negotiating technique somewhere. Or maybe he saw it in a nature documentary.

The clock behind Erwin’s head ticks a few seconds, and finally, Zackly blinks first.

“So, you’re still going off-book.”

“Yes.”

“Even though we’ve had this conversation.”

“Correct.”

“And you’re satisfied with us continuing to have this conversation for as long as you continue to teach off-book?”

“It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

Zackly gives a great, phlegmy sniff, and sets Erwin’s review down.

“This is an AP class, Erwin. The content is the content.”

“And as long as their test scores remain high, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to teach them the truth along with the contents of the AP exam.”

“It’s not your job to teach them the truth; it’s your job to teach them how to pass the exam so we keep getting money from the state and don’t get turned into some…charter school.”

Erwin sneaks a glance at his wristwatch. It’s his lunch period, and he would very much like to eat.

“Last year,” Zackly rambles, reading off a Post-It note attached to Erwin’s review, “a student was docked points on the APUSH exam because he answered a question about the development of US national identity in the 19th century with the words ‘racism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation’—Is something funny, Mr. Smith?”

Erwin manages to escape with five minutes of his lunch break to spare, passing by Mike, who is hovering under the rows of pink paper hearts strung across the front office.

“Tuna melt,” Erwin mutters, clapping him on the shoulder.

Mike groans. “Goddamnit.”

***

He manages to speedwalk back to his classroom in time to take a single bite of chickpea salad sandwich before the bell rings for fourth period, and he has to forlornly shove the rest back into its Tupperware prison.

By the end of the school day, Erwin is a little feverish with hunger and a mild lingering annoyance from his performance review. He says goodbye to the handful of students who stayed behind to ask him to elaborate one more time on the difference between the Roosevelt Corollary and the Monroe Doctrine, which is part of the curriculum (he tells the Zackly in his head), and decides to get all of his grading out of the way before heading home. He could tell himself that the reason is so he doesn’t have to work over the weekend, but over the last few months Erwin has at least managed to be honest with himself that the real reason—

“You know they don’t actually give a shit about the Monroe Doctrine, right?”

Erwin looks up as the janitor pushes his cart through the open door. His heart skips a beat.

“What?”

Levi reaches for the trash can by the door, always his first stop.

“Or did you think a bunch of sixteen-year-old girls were really that interested?”

Erwin frowns. He’s taken his sandwich back out, and it’s soggy but he doesn’t even care at this point.

“Never mind.” Levi rolls his eyes, dumping the trash into his bin. “What’s that? Dinner?”

“Lunch,” Erwin says, and stuffs about a quarter of the sandwich into his mouth at once, lest it fall apart right in front of Levi.

“You skipped lunch?” Levi asks.

Erwin nods.

“Why?”

“Pfmrm rrvr.”

“…What?”

Erwin swallows a far bigger chunk than is probably safe, and rasps, “Performance review.”

He reaches for his water bottle and chugs some down to soothe the ache in his throat.

“Oh.” Levi is hooking himself up to the vacuum he has to drag around, not looking at Erwin, but he’s hiding a smile—or as close to a smile as Levi ever gets, which amounts to a slight slant to his lips. Not that Erwin has memorized the various slants to Levi’s lips or anything. “So, they finally firing you?”

“Yes.” Erwin pulls a stack of ungraded papers toward him, already feeling normal again even though he’s only eaten a quarter of his chickpea salad. “This was my last day.”

“Well, sayonara,” Levi says, deadpan. “However will the girls learn about Big Stick Ideology now?”

He flicks on his vacuum before Erwin can reply.

Erwin finishes his sandwich as he grades, and Levi cleans, and it’s comfortable. There is no reason it should not be comfortable. They are colleagues, each doing their own work. Nothing more to it than that.

Levi had started at the beginning of the school year amid the sort of whispering that was inescapable in schools as small as theirs.

“He’s supposedly part of some post-prison re-entry initiative,” Nile had said in the teacher’s lounge.

“Oh, that’s cool,” Nanaba said, dropping a few quarters into the vending machine.

“But is that safe for the kids?”

Moblit was emptying a coffee carafe into a forty-ounce tumbler. “I’m sure the administration wouldn’t put someone dangerous in a high school,” he said. “Probably a nonviolent drug charge.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, “but d’you think Zackly would really pay attention to any of that?”

But within two weeks of school starting, Levi had quickly become a favorite among the students. At first Erwin assumed it was because of his mysterious air, his prison history, and that he swore in front of them. And likely those were part of it, but then Erwin had come upon him being accosted behind the cafeteria by a group of students begging him to come to the marching band’s first show of the year, and by extension the homecoming flag football game (they weren’t a big enough school to merit a real football team), and by extension to that, the homecoming dance.

The last thing Erwin could imagine Levi wanting to do was chaperone a high school dance, but lo and behold, there he was, getting pointed over to the same refreshments table where Erwin stood.

“I did—”

“If one more person says they didn’t expect to see me here I’ll stuff their—” His eyes fell to somewhere in the middle of Erwin’s chest—“dorky tie in their mouth.”

That was more or less the first time they had interacted.

“It…” Erwin’s hand gripped his tie. “It’s part of the vibe, you know.”

“Is that the Constitution?”

Levi squinted through the pulsing dance lights, crinkling his small, pointed nose, and Erwin would rather die than say it to Levi’s face but it was so damn cute he thought his chest might cave in on itself.

“It’s supposed to look like the Constitution,” Erwin said instead, “which is how I get away with it, but it’s actually Adama’s speech from the decommissioning ceremony of the Battlestar Galactica.”

He cleared his throat.

“That’s worse, isn’t it?”

“That’s worse.”

Even with his face burning up from the inside, having Levi at the table with him made the evening go by quickly, which is not something Erwin had ever been able to say about chaperoning a high school dance.

And it wasn’t unheard of for Erwin to stay late sometimes to grade papers or adjust lesson plans just so he wouldn’t have to think about it over the weekends, but he’s found himself staying late almost every day just to spend a few minutes chatting with Levi.

It’s gotten bad, and he recognizes that it’s gotten bad, and he simply can’t bring himself to care.

Erwin never even has to wait that long before he hears the rumble of the custodial cart, which now elicits a Pavlovian th-thump of his heart, because Levi always seems to start his afternoons with Erwin’s classroom despite its position smack in the middle of the hallway. He hopes Levi doesn’t feel like it needs special attention. He’s noticed how fastidious Levi seemed with his cleaning, and has more than once overheard him chewing out Hange over the messes they leave in the science lab. Since then, Erwin has tried to pay closer attention to the state of his classroom at the end of the day.

Not like it seems to ever be good enough for Levi, because now he’s wetting a paper towel to wipe down the laminated poster of US presidents on the wall.

“You doing anything for Valentine’s Day?” he asks the portrait of Harry Truman.

Erwin marks off a point on Eren’s paper for the phrase “the benefits of Social Darwinism” and makes a mental note to spend Monday on pseudoscience and neo-fascism instead of the Spanish-American War, muttering an “Are you kidding me?” under his breath.

“What?” Levi asks.

“Oh,” Erwin says, only half concentrating on the conversation at hand. “Yes, I do.”

The squeaking of the paper towel on laminate stops.

“Yeah?”

Erwin finishes totaling Eren’s grade and pops a C minus at the top of the page.

“Yes, PBS is running all of Ken Burns’s Jazz miniseries and I’ve never seen the whole thing in order.”

A moment later, Levi snorts, throwing the paper towel underhand into the trash.

“You’re a fucking caricature, you know that?”

Erwin looks up in mock hurt. “I have an image to maintain.”

“The image of being a complete dweeb?”

“Is there another image of history teachers I’m not aware of?”

Levi grabs the handle of his cart and tugs it toward the door, and all at once Erwin’s mind catches up with the conversation:

Valentine’s Day isn’t for another two weeks. Why was Levi asking him about this now? Was he just making conversation, or—?

“See you Monday, Smith.”

Erwin should have at least asked what he was doing, too. But Levi’s already halfway out the door, and it’s been a minute, and if he says anything now it would just be weird—

“Have a nice weekend,” Erwin says.

He waits until he can no longer hear the rumble of Levi’s cart before he puts his head in his hands and mutters a “goddammit” into the stack of ungraded papers.

#

“You coming out with us, bud?”

Erwin looks up from one of his last three papers, blinking some moisture back into his dry eyes, and finds Hange and what appears to be the entire AP faculty (and Mike) standing in his doorway. It isn’t even five yet, but it’s nearly pitch dark outside. Rain spatters against the classroom windows.

“Out with you where?” Erwin asks.

“It’s the end of mid-year evaluations celebration!” says Hange. “It’s the new sensation across the nation—“

“We’re going to Nanny O’Brien’s to get drunk because none of us were fired,” Mike says. “You in?”

Erwin sighs down at his papers. He wants to say no. He wants to go home and get in sweatpants and eat the vegan chili he’d meal-prepped waiting in his fridge. But it’s also day five of vegan chili, and the thought of it suddenly makes his stomach tight.

“Sure,” he says, pushing back from his desk.

“Yay!” says Moblit.

Erwin runs to his car with his jacket clutched around him and his briefcase over his head. He really dislikes this time of year. It’s still cold, but rarely cold enough for snow, and it rains almost every day, which is depressing enough in itself, but it also turns the air into a chilly morass that seeps into his bones and doesn’t seem to leave.

His mother gave him a SAD lamp for his birthday last year, which does help a little.

As he pulls out of the faculty parking lot, he spots a small, lone figure at the bus stop. Levi is bundled in a rain jacket that looks two sizes too big, hands shoved deep in his pockets and hood drawn tight around his face. It’s at least one of those stops with a shelter, though Erwin knows from firsthand experience that the narrow roofs are practically useless.

He should stop, he thinks as he drives past. If he had an umbrella, he would at least offer it. Would Levi accept a ride home from him? Would that be weird? He would probably think it was weird. If it was Mike or even Nile, Erwin wouldn’t think twice, but it’s not like he and Levi have ever spent time together outside of school or school-related functions. He’d probably just come off as a creep, he decides, though he can’t help but glance in the rearview mirror at the shrinking silhouette in the gray.

When he gets to Nanny O’Brien’s, he squeezes into a corner booth between Mike and Hange and proceeds to need to shed his coat, vest, and tie in order to breathe. The others are clearly relieved that evaluations are over and need to blow off some steam; the energy at the table is almost frenetic.

He finally feels the chill of the weather start to melt away after the first stout, and by the second he’s almost feeling normal.

“You’re quiet tonight.” Mike elbows him in the ribs.

Erwin shrugs. “Tired.”

He reaches forward to slide Hange’s drink out of the way as they gesture widely.

“That girl over at the bar keeps looking at you,” Mike says.

Erwin tries not to grumble and roll his eyes, nor to notice Mike and Nanaba holding hands under the table.

“I’m all right,” he says.

“What about the guy next to her?”

“I think they’re on a date, Mike.”

“So? Maybe they both like your vibe.”

Erwin exaggerates a wince. He can’t get the sight of Levi in his too-large rain jacket out of his head. He feels like a heel for not stopping. Nor can he stop reliving the absolute inadequacy of his answer to Levi’s Valentine’s Day question. Mostly, he just can’t seem to get Levi out of his head, which has been a chronic condition for several months now for which he isn’t sure there is a cure.

Well, there is, but he doesn’t know enough about Levi to ask. Levi seems perfectly accepting (or at least equally annoyed by) everybody. But it’s not like the American prison system is known for is progressivism, and Erwin doesn’t want to risk that half hour or so that Levi allows him each day. Is that manipulative? Great—now he feels like a heel and a manipulator.

“Erwin, Jesus Christ.” Mike flicks his forehead, right between the eyebrows.

“Ow.”

“You’ve got your Very Serious Thinking Face On. It’s scaring the children.”

“I am thinking.” Erwin rubs at the sore spot.

“’Bout what?”

Erwin frowns into the bottom of his pint glass. “If you were waiting out in the rain, and I drove past without stopping, would you be angry at me?”

“Did you splash somebody on the way over?”

“What? No, I—I mean, I don’t think so, but—I hope not—”

“Easy, man.” Mike adjusts in the booth to face him. “Is my car broken down in this scenario? I need some more context.”

“No, say you’re waiting for the bus.”

“Oh, did you see Levi out there, too?”

Erwin freezes, deer-in-the-headlights fast. “I…”

“Relax.” Mike tosses back the last of his IPA. “He looked like an angry, wet cat, but that’s not your fault. He kind of always looks like that, anyway. It’s just his general demeanor.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Erwin blurts. He wishes suddenly that he had more stout.

Mike narrows his eyes.

“What?” Erwin asks.

Leaning forward, Mike nudges his nose almost up against Erwin’s temple, and takes a long, thorough inhale. Erwin’s known him long enough now to not be bothered by this.

Then Mike huffs a laugh and leans back.

“Oh, my God.”

“What?”

“If you want to bang him, then sure, you could’ve offered him a ride.”

Erwin recoils, horrified. “I wouldn’t—Not because of that.”

“No, I don’t mean you’d be weird about it.” Mike waves a hand aimlessly, chuckling.

“I wouldn’t…What are…What do you even smell on me? Can you smell when I’m aroused?”

“Are you aroused?”

“No! God, no.”

Erwin’s shuffled so far back on the bench that he bumps into Hange, who stops pantomiming what appears to be a beaker explosion to throw an arm around his shoulders.

“Hey, buddy!” they exclaim. “Did you hear about what we accidentally melted in Chem 2 yesterday?”

He manages to stay away from Mike, despite sitting right next to him, for the rest of the evening. That is, until they’re leaving and Erwin—stone-cold sober and wishing he wasn’t—is heading for his car. The rain has lightened to a mist, and the cold is settling under his skin again.

“Hey, Erwin.”

He stops, turns, and waits for Mike to jog up to him with the same face he puts on when his students are being particularly oppositional.

“Nervous,” Mike says, lifting his hands in a gesture of surrender.

Erwin blinks mist from his eyelashes. “What?”

“You don’t usually smell nervous. I’m sorry, I was just giving you shit.”

From across the parking lot, Nanaba waits by Mike’s truck, watching with the expectant expression of a parent watching her misbehaved child.

“Don’t worry about it,” Erwin says, shoulders unwinding a tiny bit. “Have a good weekend.”

“I meant it, though,” Mike says to Erwin’s back. “If you like the janitor, then go for it. You have my blessing. I just want you to be happy!” He raises his voice for the last few words as Erwin reaches his car and sticks the key in the driver’s side lock.

“I am happy, thank you,” he says, waving at Mike and then Nanaba before getting in, shutting the car door, and letting out a long, loud sigh.

#

Some years ago, Erwin’s beloved third generation Honda Civic, which he had driven since high school when his father gifted it to him, finally bit the dust. And in the inexorable, infinite humor of the Universe, the death of his first and only vehicle came three weeks after he’d started his first full-time teaching job.

Without the savings to move to a neighborhood with functioning public transportation, he’d subsisted for a week or two on saltine crackers with Cholula to save up for a bicycle, which worked for about a month until he was sideswiped by a pickup truck on the stretch of road without a bike lane.

Mike had picked him up from the hospital with his fractured right arm in a sling and immediately suggested suing the bastard who’d hit him. And Erwin, still high on pain meds, had given his friend an earful of the over-litigious nature of American society on the entire drive home until he reached the conclusion that he couldn’t sue the bastard because it had been a hit-and-run.

His parents sharing their middling teacher’s pensions was the only reason he hadn’t gone bankrupt with medical bills. He’d applied and been approved for student loan forgiveness once he’d put in his time, and he’s been using the savings to start paying his parents back (something they never asked for and continued to protest, yet also never outright refused).

But the accident meant that he’d needed to find another way to get to school, and quickly, and so he’d scoured the classified ads and craigslist, hitching rides with Mike and Nile on alternating days, before he found Bertha.

Bertha was an upgrade—a deep-red fourth generation Honda Civic, and a later model at that, meaning she’d been built in a different decade than his dear departed third generation—and he’d her gotten for an absurdly low price because, to quote from the listing: “MUST GO ASAP I need money sold AS-IS theres a tape stuck in the deck.”

#

Erwin pulls up to school on Monday morning with the tape running. It’s not that he even particularly enjoys the music, but he’s had it for so long that it’s become comforting. An aural security blanket.

He organizes the papers in his briefcase as he waits for the song to conclude, thinking of the ways he could might ask after Levi’s Valentine’s Day plans without it seeming like he spent the whole weekend ruminating on how to ask after Levi’s Valentine’s Day plans. Which he did, but making that obvious won’t do him any favors.

Reaching down for the cup of gas station coffee perched between his thighs—aside from the tape, Bertha’s only drawback has been her lack of cup holders—Erwin pops the lid off, which promptly rolls somewhere beneath his seat.

The song is ending. With nowhere to put the still full coffee cup, Erwin pinches the rim of the cup between his teeth so he can use both hands to tuck the mess of a hundred papers back into his briefcase. And he wonders how early Levi gets in, and whether he might catch him before class starts, just so he doesn’t have to spend the whole day distracted—

Someone raps sharply on the driver’s side window.

Erwin looks up, and shit, it’s Levi, Levi with a slight smile, and his dark hair is swinging over one eye and Erwin needs to turn this song off, immediately, so he flips the ignition as the papers start to slip out of his hand and Levi’s perfect lips shape the word, “Morning,” breath fogging a small patch of the glass.

“Good morning,” Erwin answers, and the cup falls from his open mouth.

Chapter Text

“You’re a lifesaver,” Erwin says, taking a folded stack of gym clothes.

“Yeah, well.” Levi slams a locker door shut. Erwin wonders if there’s enough room for him to squeeze in there, too. “Zacharias always keeps a spare set in here. Ask me how I know.”

They’re standing in the empty boys’ locker room not five minutes before the first bell, and the heating hasn’t kicked on yet so Erwin’s wet shirt and pants feel like they’re gradually freezing to his skin.

“How do you know?” Erwin asks, trying not to let his teeth chatter.

“Thanks for asking.” Levi crosses his arms and leans against the row of lockers. “Winter break, the kids are supposed to clean out their lockers, so end of the last day I come in and start throwing everything away because they’re disgusting pigs and they leave all their shit behind. You laugh, but you know I’m right. So I go home and later that night I get a call from my fuckin’ probation officer saying somebody up here thinks I stole some school property.”

The smile melts off Erwin’s face.

“Wait, seriously?”

Levi shifts on his feet, staring somewhere over Erwin’s right shoulder.

“I mean, it was fine, they thought it was a computer or something, and when I finally figured out what it was we had a good laugh about it. Tch—Come on, Smith, you look constipated.” He waves a thin hand aimlessly. “Clearly I didn’t go back to jail. It’s fine, we made up, now he tells me when something smells off so I can get it early, we’re good.”

“And he gave you the combination to this locker?”

Levi’s gaze slides back to him. “No.”

Erwin swallows. “Right.”

Straightening, Levi gestures down at their feet, eyes raking down the stain over Erwin’s front.

“C’mon, are you gonna change or are you gonna stand there dripping on my floor?”

Erwin looks down at the tiny puddle he’s made on the locker room floor. There’s coffee in his sock, too. Fabulous.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll take care of it—”

“No, shut up, you got three minutes before you’re late for Big Stick Day or whatever. What’re you covering today?”

“Uh,” Erwin says, beginning to wonder if he should duck behind the row of lockers or if Levi will turn around when he starts to change, “the Spanish-American War if I have time, otherwise eugenics.”

“Otherwise, eu—What?”

“It’s a whole thing.”

Erwin decides he would rather Levi think him a prude than a creep, and he retreats behind the next row of lockers with Mike’s spare gym clothes.

“A student made a worrying comment in his last paper,” he says, unbuckling his belt. “I feel like it needs to be addressed.”

“Who?”

Erwin pauses, stepping out of his shoes.

“I probably shouldn’t say.”

“Is it that Jaeger kid?”

Erwin snorts and pulls on the tracksuit bottoms.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Levi sounds like he’s smiling. Erwin wishes he could see it. It makes him smile, too. “That kid creeps me out sometimes.”

“I had his older brother my first year here,” Erwin says, draping his dress shirt on the bench beside his pants. “He might’ve been worse.”

“Christ.”

The bell chooses that exact moment to ring, bouncing off the empty room’s tile walls and tile floor and straight through Erwin’s skull.

He mutters a “shit” and pushes through the armholes of the T-shirt emblazoned with their school logo, grabbing his stained clothes off the bench. Being late for first period always starts the day off wrong—

“Did you just swear?”

His ears heat. He shoves into his shoes, rounds the corner to grab his bag, tugging the T-shirt over his head.

“Jesus,” Levi croaks.

He knows he looks ridiculous in loafers and a gym uniform, but there’s nothing to be done, and his stupid socks are still damp—

“Gimme those.” Levi snatches the clothes out of his hand. “I’ll have ’em back to you by the all-staff meeting.”

Erwin freezes mid-reach toward where his briefcase leans against the lockers.

“What? No—”

“It’s my fault for making you spill,” Levi says to the ground, rolling Erwin’s clothes up into two neat burritos.

“It is most certainly not your fault. I…” Was distracted looking at your lips. “…didn’t have enough coffee yet. Oh—” he adds, remembering. “Did you want something?”

Levi looks up, eyes wide. “What? No. What?”

“This morning, did you need something? Is that why you came by?”

Or did you just want to say hello?

“Oh,” says Levi. He tucks Erwin’s clothes under his arm. “Yeah, I was gonna…ask what was the deal with the Hello Kitty thing in your back window.”

Erwin sighs. He suddenly wishes the coffee had melted him, slipped through the crack of the car door, down onto the street, and through the grate of the storm drain in the parking lot.

“Hange. It’s a long story. They take things too seriously.”

“Figures.”

“Seriously, Levi, you don’t have to do my laundry—”

“It’s fine, Smith. It’s just treating a stain. Dish soap and vinegar.”

“Dish soap?”

“Yeah it’s the breast—the best thing for coffee stains. In case this happens again and I’m not around to save your tits.” Levi clears his throat. “Jacket, too. There’s a bit on the lapel.”

Levi holds a hand out, palm up, fingers curling to hurry him up and Erwin knows he means Hurry up, I have shit to do, but his body reads it as Something Entirely Else and his blood thunders into his face. He hands over his jacket wordlessly. His tongue feels like it weighs a metric ton.

“Thank you, Levi,” he manages.

“God, shut up.” He rubs at one of his ears, tugging a bit of dark hair over it.

“Really.” Erwin throws his bag strap over his shoulder. “You saved me a lot of trouble.”

***

By lunchtime, Erwin thinks he might have preferred the trouble.

It’s not because he has to answer the same firehose of questions at the beginning of every single period (“Are you teaching PE today, Mr. Smith?” “Is Coach Mike out sick?” “Were you working out just now?” “Are you about to go work out?” “Do you work out every day before school?” “Where do you usually change clothes?”). None of his students even seem to notice that he’s wearing loafers with a gym uniform, though he does stand behind his desk more than he usually does.

And it’s not even, really, because he’s never had issues with controlling his classroom, while today he can’t get more than thirty seconds of silence before the whispers and giggles start up again. Even the ones who aren’t being disruptive seem more disengaged, and his impromptu lesson on how Social Darwinism is bad, actually, doesn’t land as well as he’d hoped, which then sends him into a brief spiral of worry about the future of this country.

It’s because of Levi. Because of course it is. And not just that he’d wanted to arrive this morning and find some way of asking after his Valentine’s Day plans, and perhaps figure out why, exactly, Levi had asked after his, and perhaps if they were equally inclined they could make some simultaneous plans.

It’s that he’s thinking about Mike’s lukewarm reaction to Levi’s hiring back in August. About what Levi had told him about getting a call from his probation officer. About how he knows Mike doesn’t keep his phone on him during the day, so Erwin can’t even text him to tell him that it’s not the same situation as back over winter break, that it’s not Levi’s fault, not that it should even matter, because it’s a school gym uniform, for God’s sake.

And he suppose he’s unsettled by feeling like he doesn’t know his closest friend at all. And, if he really probes into his subconscious—which he probably shouldn’t because he never likes what he finds there—it’s unsettling that Levi could be taken from him at any time.

When the final stragglers from third period leave the classroom, shutting the door behind them, Erwin leans back in his chair and presses his fingertips against his eyelids. He hasn’t had a day that felt this long in a while. Teaching can be exhausting, but he doesn’t usually feel pangs of regret at the end of the day.

Now it’s barely noon, and as Erwin finally pulls out his glass container of quinoa salad he debates the risks of staying here—it’s not unheard of for some students to come by for extra help during his lunch hour, and normally he would try to be available—versus going to the teacher’s lounge for a few minutes of peace and quiet, but risking being seen by even more people.

After a few seconds, he gathers himself and stands, tucking his salad and water bottle back into his tote bag. At least in the teacher’s lounge, if anyone tries to say anything he can freely tell them to shut it.

As he steps into the empty hall, a lone figure at the opposite end appears at the same time.

Both stop in their tracks, eyeing the other warily under the fluorescent lights.

Mike squints.

“Is that my spare uniform?”

Erwin heaves the tote bag over his shoulder and asks, “Do you have a second to talk?”

Like a pair of oversized, athletic Overlook Hotel twins, they walk down to the teachers parking lot so Mike can retrieve his own lunch from the cooler in his truck (he swears he can taste everyone else’s lunch when he keeps his in the community refrigerator).

“So, uh,” Mike says as they exit the building, “you know you’re welcome to my stuff anytime, but how’d—”

“I spilled coffee all over myself right when I got in this morning.”

It’s cold outside, the day overcast and heralding rain, and Erwin is without a jacket. He crosses his arms as goosebumps rise across his skin.

“Sorry, man. It’s fine, I just…How’d you know how to get it?”

Erwin sighs. He wants to spare Levi, but he also doesn’t want to lie to Mike.

“Levi helped me out,” he says. “Which brings me to what I wanted to ask you about—You know that his release is conditional on not having any run-ins with the law, right?”

“Sure.” Mike steps onto the back bumper of his truck and tugs the cooler over. “What d’you think today—pork chop sandwich or venison meatballs?”

“They both sound terrible. Did you really report Levi because your uniform went missing? After you were supposed to clean it out anyway?”

“I should know my audience, I guess. I’m sick of venison, God, and the freezer’s still half-full.” He pulls a wrapped packet out of the ice and locks up the cooler again. “And yeah, I may have mentioned it to Zackly, but I just wanted a new one, it’s not like I filed a report or anyth—”

“Mike, he got a call from his probation officer about it. Do you think I should be sent to jail because I took your clothes without asking?”

“I never wanted him sent to jail, Erwin.” Mike jumps down onto the asphalt. “And it’s different. I know you. I’ve had Thanksgiving dinner at your parents’ house.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, I did, you’re just being pedantic.” And, well, maybe he has a point. Mike sniffs. “Anyway, I didn’t think Zackly would go all Miami Vice about it. He hates the cops almost as much as you do.”

“Zackly’s also preoccupied with looking good in front of the county—of course he’s going to report anything that might have the slightest chance of making the school look bad.”

Mike fidgets with the corner of his plastic sandwich bag. “All right. I didn’t think about that.”

“I need you to start thinking about it. That’s somebody’s life.”

“I get it. I’ll be careful. God, you can be so intense. Hey, instead of getting all up my ass about it, why aren’t you trying to get up his? Maybe it’ll make you chill out a little.”

Erwin rolls his eyes, though the effect is somewhat lessened by the wind picking up, rustling the bare branches around them and making him shiver. He rubs his hands over his bare arms.

“Are you still hung up on that?”

Chuckling, Mike leads them back toward the main building. “You are not the one to lecture on getting hung up on people, places, or things.”

“What does that mean?”

Mike tilts his head. “You really wanna know what that means? I’ve had to watch you making moon-eyes for the last six months, and you wanna ask me ‘what’s that mean, Mike’? You sure about that?”

He appreciates Mike, not just for being a solid friend since his first year as a new teacher in far over his head, but because he’s never been intimidated by Erwin’s “intensity” like so many others, or afraid to call him out.

But it can still be annoying sometimes.

Erwin pulls the doors open and is blasted in the face with a wave of heat.

Mike claps him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll be more careful in the future. You just focus on the conditions of Levi’s release.”

Erwin pauses inside as Mike heads back in the direction of the gym.

“Classy,” he calls down the hallway.

Mike waves at him over his head, still laughing through his nose.

***

The remainder of Erwin’s day is no easier than the first half, and by the final bell he can feel a headache starting to form in the backs of his eyes. As he stands with his class and starts packing away his book and notes and lesson plans, his mind inevitably wanders to Levi. 

It does this more often than he’d care to admit.

Erwin likes to think that he has good control of his mind, but there’s something about Levi that seems to render him powerless. 

It happens like this. 

First: he finds himself glancing up at the closed door every few seconds, torn between a desperate desire to be within Levi’s presence, and a desperate desire to have his normal clothes back. He’s getting dangerously close to assigning an automatic F to the next person who asks, “Were you working out?” That, or he might scream.

Second: guilt has left him feeling chewed up and spat out—over agreeing too easily to let Levi clean his clothes, over not pushing back hard enough when Levi insisted it had been his fault, over Levi’s experience at the hand of Mike (Erwin having nothing to do with that doesn’t seem to make a difference)—and so as he pulls together a stack of folders, his mind convinces him that he should find some way to thank Levi.

And then he immediately wishes he could take back the thought, but it’s too late, and his traitorous mind has taken an inch and run a mile with it.

Finally: A vision projected behind his aching eyeballs—the two of them back in the locker room, long after everyone else has gone home, tucked into the farthest corner from the doors. Levi would look up at him with those hooded eyes, silver like daggers. Although Erwin has never seen a dagger up close. And also Erwin would never do this sort of thing at school, even if it was a weekend during a snowstorm in the middle of summer vacation during an apocalypse, but this is his fantasy and he can do what he wants, and who he wants, and who he wants is Levi.

Levi, who would take Erwin’s hands and settle them at the top button of his coveralls. Would he be wearing anything underneath? And why does the idea of only a single layer of heavy-duty cotton standing between Levi’s bare skin and the air do it for him?

He imagines that Levi would smell clean—not like cleaning products, but like gentle soap, like spring rain and line-dried sheets. His mouth is hot and insistent. And once Erwin gets his coveralls down around one ankle he’d prop Levi’s other leg on the bench to spread him wide enough to—

“Hey, Sm—”

“Jesus Christ.” Erwin drops his folders onto the desk, heart leaping into his throat, and in the span of a millisecond he confirms that he’s blessedly not hard yet and also that he should strongly consider the notion of a chastity belt.

“Whoa, sorry,” Levi says, stepping in and shutting the classroom door behind him.

He holds up a stack of neatly folded clothes. Erwin’s clothes. It shouldn’t affect him like this, just seeing Levi holding his clothes. His brain vindictively shoves one more image forward: Levi in one of his shirts, and nothing else—

“I’m finished.” Levi frowns. “You’re red. Were you just working out?”

***

Dressed in his normal clothes, which smell fresher than his own washing machine has ever managed—he keeps rubbing the fabric of his vest between his fingers, and tells himself that it’s because he wants to ask Levi what he did to make it so soft and not that it feels a little like he’s touching Levi—Erwin slinks into the all-staff meeting later that afternoon, two paper cups of boiling hot tea in hand.

The gym is set up with a microphone and a folding table with chairs facing the bleachers. Most of the administrative staff is seated, scrolling their phones. Pixis looks asleep.

He finds Levi seated toward the back of the bleachers, thankfully alone. He takes a breath and approaches.

Levi turns when he sees him, raising a thin eyebrow.

“Peace offering?” Erwin says, extending one of the cups of tea.

It’s not like he’d meant to say, “Why is everyone asking me that today?!” so loudly that Nanaba came running from her classroom two doors down.

Levi glares at the cup, then takes it from him.

“I’m not mad, Smith.”

“Still—”

“Is that what you sound like when you’re mad? Voice half a notch up from usual? Help, I’m so scared. You gonna sit or what?”

Levi gestures to the empty space on the bleachers beside him, and Erwin sits, holding back the relieved sigh in his chest.

“Bad day?” Levi asks.

Erwin looks down into his tea. “They were all monsters today.”

“Yeah, they usually are.”

Erwin shakes his head. “I never have a hard time getting them to listen to me. But today was just bad.”

“Yeah, ‘cause they realized you’re a person.”

Erwin frowns. “I’ve made plenty of mistakes in front of them and it’s never caused anything like this. You remember the Cheeseburger Incident.”

“Nah, that’s not the same. ’Cause you showed up looking different, it fucks with their idea that you’re always the same person you are here. But then you show up with…arms, and shit, and it breaks their brains a little. I’m sure it’ll go back to normal tomorrow.”

Erwin looks down at his sleeves curiously. “I’m fairly certain they knew I had arms.”

Levi glances at him sidelong. “Not like that, they didn’t.”

“Not like—wait, what?”

But Zackly has trundled out and sat at the folding table, pulling the microphone close and smacking his lips into it.

“All right, let’s get this over with,” the principal says, and the gym quiets. “Keith’s hip surgery got moved up, so we need one more chaperone for the Valentine’s Day dance a week from Friday. Does anybody want to volunteer or am I going to have to volun-tell one of you?”

There is a general air of awkward shifting in the bleachers.

A slight pressure on his shoulder, and Erwin turns his head, and Levi is close, and his heart leaps into his throat.

“Hey,” Levi murmurs, holding out his still full cup of tea, “can you hold this a sec?”

Erwin reaches over to take it from him, and only a few seconds later feels the tiny bit of pressure on his elbow directing his arm just far enough into the air for Zackly to notice.

“Thank you, Erwin,” the principal says, looking down at a crumpled page of notes so that he doesn’t see Erwin shaking his head.

“Wait—”

“Now, Coach Dita is out on paternity leave, which means we’re also down a sex ed teacher…”

He turns to Levi, who is taking his tea back with the biggest smirk on his face, and hisses, “Was that payback?”

“I’m sure Ken Burns will forgive you.”

“You said it was fine!”

“That you got snippy, yeah. That was for thinking this tea was good enough to hand to me.”

“That was all they had in the break room!”

“Well, maybe you should’ve thought of—”

“—Mr. Smith and Mr. Ackerman,” Zackly booms, “I’m assuming we’re about to hear one of you is volunteering to fill in for Coach Dita during sex ed?”

“Not it,” Levi says.

Zackly glares right at Erwin. There’s still time to flee and become a salmon fisherman, he thinks.

“Not him,” Keith interrupts, uncharacteristically emphatic, and Erwin tries hard not to flinch. “They wouldn’t hear a damn word.”

“Well, hold on,” says Nile, halfway turning on his bench a few rows down. “If it’s just for the boys, I’m sure it wouldn’t be an issue—”

“Gay people exist, Nile,” says Levi.

“Well I know that,” Nile says, looking directly at Erwin, who lifts his hands in a seriously, man? gesture.

“And so do bisexual people,” Erwin pointedly tells a rapidly purpling Nile.

“I know—“

“My God, enough,” Zackly says. “Coach Mike, we’ll combine Dita’s class with yours.”

“Neat,” Mike says, flat.

Levi leans closer to mutter to him, and Erwin catches a whiff of soap and is violently yanked back into the abandoned corner of the locker room in the summer snowstorm, Levi’s overalls around his ankle and bent over—

“I’ll be there, too.”

Erwin focuses intently on the feel of the paper cup in both of his shaking hands. “Hm?”

“Chaperoning. Like hell I’m gonna let those shits ruin this floor.”

Levi isn’t looking at him, but his earlobes are red beneath his hair. Erwin has an intense urge to tuck it behind his ears.

Perhaps his Valentine’s Day wouldn’t be a total loss.

***

It’s pitch dark and pouring when they get out of the staff meeting, and there’s much groaning and opening of umbrellas around the exit to the gym. Erwin remembers seeing Levi standing in the rain for the bus the other week, but this time he doesn’t even appear to have a raincoat with him. He mutters to himself as he pulls out his phone, the screen cracked, and Erwin sees him pull up a bus schedule.

“Let me take you home,” Erwin blurts.

Levi looks up at him, squinting.

“What?”

Erwin clears his throat.

“I mean,” he says. “I can drop you off at your place, or at least close to it. It’s miserable out.”

Levi continues to squint, and Erwin begins to wonder if he’s had some quinoa stuck between his teeth since lunch.

“How’d you know I don’t have a car?”

Erwin shrugs, grateful that the dark is likely hiding his blush.

“I saw you waiting at the bus stop the other week.”

Levi rolls his eyes in acquiescence.

“Don’t worry about it, Smith, I live all the way at the east edge of town—“

“So not that far,” says Erwin, who lives on the west edge of town. Their city isn’t that big. It’ll take him forty-five minutes—an hour, tops—to cross the whole thing to get home.

Levi sighs.

“I told you you don’t owe me for today.”

“I want to,” Erwin says softly.

Levi looks at him, brows raised, and his eyes dart back and forth between Erwin’s own.

“Fine,” he says. “But only because the next bus isn’t here for thirty damn minutes.”

They cut through the darkened halls to the teacher’s parking lot. Levi is quiet and Erwin chances a glance to find him looking contemplative.

“It’s, uh,” Erwin says as they come to stand under the awning, cold rain misting his slacks, “old as sin, so I’ll go out and unlock the doors and pull it around—“

“No, Jesus Christ, Smith,” Levi says, turning up the collar of his coveralls, “I’m not gonna melt. C’mon.”

And Erwin figures he’s dug himself a deep enough grave tonight, so he doesn’t argue. He takes a breath.

“All right?” he asks.

“Yep,” Levi says, and darts out into the rain.

Erwin’s portfolio held above his head does exactly nothing to shield him, and he’s dripping by the time he jabs the key into the door lock, hand slip-sliding on the metal. He leans in right away to pull the lock on the passenger side, and Levi slides in, dark hair plastered to his forehead.

They pull their doors shut, and Erwin leans back to place his bag in the backseat.

“Damn, when you said ‘old as sin’…”

“I know,” Erwin says, turning forward again and pushing hair out of his eyes. He looks for somewhere to wipe his hands, and settles on the cloth seat. It still smells faintly of coffee.

“This thing’s twice as old as the student body.”

Erwin chuckles. “More or less.”

He turns the key in the ignition.

“So you said the east side of town, but where exactly—“

The dashboard lights up, and so do the car’s speakers.

“—NOW I’M PRAYIN’ FOR THE END OF TIME/TO HURRY UP AND ARRIVE/CAUSE IF I GOTTA—“

Erwin fumbles for the radio with both hands, possibly breaking a few fingers in his rain-wet haste to find the volume knob, and in his panic he accidentally turns the channel knob, which does nothing, and as he grabs for the volume knob like a drowning man for a life raft he slams all of the buttons he can find, switching from the cassette player to a dead radio station. Levi covers his ears against the whine of static until Erwin finds the correct button and the radio goes blessedly silent.

For a moment, Erwin just sits there, both hands on the wheel, staring at the cursed godforsaken radio, contemplating the financial cost of changing his name, dyeing his hair, and relocating to a small Alaskan fishing village to live out the rest of his days as a hermit salmon fisherman.

“Was that,” Levi says, mouth quivering as though he’s about to burst into laughter, “Meat Loaf?”

“No, listen—”

“I mean, no judgment, Mr. Ken-Burns’s-Jazz—”

“Listen, Levi, it’s stuck like that. It has been ever since I bought it.”

Levi swallows audibly, like he’s trying to control himself.

“What do you mean, ‘stuck like that’?”

Erwin sighs, letting his head fall to the steering wheel, and Levi lets out a soft guffaw that he disguises (poorly) as a cough.

“Listen,” Erwin says, lifting his head.

“I’m listening.”

“I got this car—”

“Mmhm.”

“—for five hundred dollars—”

“Oh, get me the fuck out of here,” Levi says, reaching for the door handle.

“That was five years ago, and I haven’t had a single issue—”

“You’ve been driving around—”

“No—”

“—listening to Meat Loaf for five years?”

Levi’s fingertips rest just shy of the door handle, but he’s made no move to actually get out. The slight panic in Erwin’s throat subsides.

“Well I don’t listen to it every day.”

“Uh huh,” Levi says. “Wait—is that why you looked like such a deer-in-the-headlights this morning? Cause you were trying to turn it off?”

“Listen…”

“I’ve been listening, Smith.”

“The car cost five hundred dollars because the tape was stuck in the deck, and I’ve just never gotten around to getting it fixed. Apparently it would cost more than I actually paid for the car.”

“Huh,” Levi says, as if this is actually interesting and not the final straw in Erwin’s disappearance. “Well, at least you’re the foremost expert on Mr. Loaf’s discography now.”

“It’s just got the one,” Erwin murmurs into the steering wheel.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said it’s just got the one.” He sighs. “It’s just the single release. It’s just got the one song.”

“You’ve been driving around listening to ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ for five years—?”

“I told you I don’t listen to it every day! But you know, it’s sort of become background noise. Half the time I’m not even aware it’s playing. And look—” Erwin points— “you knew what the song was after just a few lines, so don’t act like—”

“’Cause it’s a classic! Don’t try to turn this around on me!”

Erwin sighs.

“All right. You can get out and walk.”

“Oh, fuck you and drive, Smith. Start telling me about the Hello Kitty thing.”

Erwin puts Bertha in reverse and starts to back out of his spot.

“So, Hange just one day decided that Bertha needed…I think the word they used was ‘flair’—”

“Sorry. Bertha? The car?”

“The car,” Erwin says at the same time.

“Like, Grateful Dead Bertha?”

Erwin smiles toward the back window and the Hello Kitty sticker in the corner of it.

“No. And you know Nile has a young daughter, so I was—”

“Wait, wait, you can’t just say ‘no’ and then not tell me what the deal is.”

Erwin joins the line of cars pulling out of the parking lot, a smile still playing on his lips.

“No one’s ever been able to guess.”

***

Driving safely in the pouring rain requires most of his attention, and so by the time he’s pulling into Levi’s apartment complex, Erwin finds himself wishing the traffic had been worse, just to draw out their time together.

“So,” Levi says as they park in front of his building.

“So.”

Levi gestures to the dim radio.

“I can fix that.”

Erwin looks over at him. It’s mostly dark now, and the orange-yellow exterior lights on the buildings cast wavering shadows through the windshield.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I mean…not now. But I was thinking about how I’d do it. It’ll be kind of a pain in the ass, especially if it’s been in there for this long, but I can get it out. It’ll take me a couple hours, tops.”

“I d—Levi, you don’t have to.”

“Who said I had to? I don’t do shit I don’t wanna do. Unless you want to keep listening to Meat Loaf.”

“Not particularly, but I...” He does not know why this is so hard to get out. It’s not like Levi doesn’t know his salary’s low enough to barely qualify for health insurance. “I couldn’t…”

Levi seems to take pity on him.

“I wouldn’t charge you anything.”

“Oh, then I don’t—”

“Okay.” Levi unbuckles his seatbelt. “I already have all the tools and shit, it’s not that complicated, and just because some asshole was gonna gouge you to fix it doesn’t mean anything. But,” he says, holding up a hand, “it’s up to you. Offer’s on the table.”

Erwin is torn. He does want the tape out, but the guilt that he’d so successfully ignoring comes roaring back in full force. And he knows Levi wouldn’t offer to do anything for him if he didn’t want to, but the question of why makes his heart beat into his throat. 

Idly, he watches the shadow of a raindrop follow the curve of Levi’s lips.

“Smith?”

He looks away, fast. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, you’ll let me, or what?”

Erwin watches the wipers struggle. He can’t think of a good reason to refuse, aside from the guilt that sits like a stone in the center of his chest.

So he turns back to Levi, who is already looking at him with a curve to his mouth and a furrow in his brow that make him look half annoyed, half…hurt? His eyes drop to Erwin’s chin, and then away.

“Sure,” Erwin says, now kicking himself for, perhaps, insulting Levi’s skills or something, though agreeing doesn’t make the look on his face change. It digs a sharp hole into his gut.

“Okay,” Levi says, and he sounds normal, at least. “We’ll figure it out this week.” He opens the car door. “Thanks for the ride.”

Erwin wants to say something to reset—whatever has happened that he doesn’t fully understand but feels like is his fault, but once again his words fail him except for a “Good night,” and he already knows he’s going to be feeling like absolute shit tonight.

But then as Levi gets out, he turns around and pokes his head into the car once more.

“And I’m gonna figure out what the hell ‘Bertha’ means.”

Chapter Text

There’s always drama in the weeks building up to school events. It’s like the students want to stir something up to make the upcoming gatherings more interesting.

It starts on Tuesday morning, when Erwin is sitting at his desk before first period, going over lesson plans. A locker slams in the hallway, which by itself isn’t unusual—but then Eren’s voice carries through the open door.

“And she said yes? Are you serious?”

“Calm down, Eren, I—”

“I’m gonna kill that horse-faced freak!”

“So you were planning on asking her?”

“I didn’t think I’d have to! I thought it would be obvious we’d go together!”

Erwin takes a sip from his (sealed) travel mug of coffee and ponders the benefits of plugging his ears with paper towels. A few moments later, Eren storms into the classroom and dumps his books onto his usual desk. Armin follows a moment later.

“Hey, Mr. Smith,” Armin says, digging through his checkered backpack.

“Good morn—”

SCRRRREEEEEEEEEECH.

Metal and plastic scrape against the tile floor as Eren drags his desk toward the side of the classroom. Again, by itself not an unusual occurrence, since Erwin has each of his classes move their desks into Socratic circles.

Armin pulls a faded, bent, and dog-eared copy of The Unsettling of America from his backpack.

“I have this for you.”

“You finished it already?”

Armin smiles shyly. “Yeah, I really liked—”

SCRRRREEEEEEEEEECH.

The unusual thing about this morning is that Eren has—helpfully, Erwin supposes—begun dragging every other desk into a circle, as well.

“Yeah, I liked—”

SCRRRREEEEEEEEEECH.

“I liked what he had to say about mechanized farming!”

Armin clears his throat as the last word echoes back through the classroom.

The thing is, most of the students pick up their desks to move them. That, or else the noise is all over in about fifteen seconds, not…

SCRRRREEEEEEEEEECH.

…whatever this is.

And Erwin decides—partially because there is nothing he can do about the root of Eren’s problem, and partially because this will save him time at the beginning of class, as they’re behind already due to the whole Social Darwinism incident—to pretend nothing is out of the ordinary.

“What did you think about Berry’s reasoning behind why modern agribusiness took off in the US?”

“I mean,” Armin says, “obviously he’s right that it’s bad for the environment and that it stems from a lack of a sense of responsibility for stewardship of the land that stems from colonialism, but I’m just not sure—”

SCRRRREEEEEEEEEECH.

“—I’m not sure how—”

SCRRRREEEEEEEEEECH.

Armin waits, mouth pursed, until the room goes silent again. Erwin folds his hands on his desk.

“—how feasible his solutions are. I mean”—here Armin takes a breath, like a diver about to descend, and says the rest all at once as Eren reaches for another desk—“if-we-haven’t-switched-over-to-homesteading-and-renewable-energy-by-now-when-we-have-all-this-evidence-for-climate-change-then-that-means-the-incentives-to-change-aren’t-there-right?”

SCRRRREEEEEEEEEECH.

“Eren,” Erwin says, leaning across his desk, “that’s helpful of you, but unnecessary.”

“It’s fine,” the boy mutters at the ground. “I don’t mind.”

Erwin, at least, has the benefit of having a voice that carries over a loud classroom (or a screeching desk) rather easily.

“So what is the solution, do you think?” he asks Armin.

Armin gives him a self-aware grimace. “End capitalism?”

The warning bell rings, and in his own opinion, Erwin does an excellent job at keeping his face neutral as the other students begin to surge into the room.

“Just…” he says, thinking of tuna melts and disintegrating chickpea salad and You doing anything for Valentine’s Day?, “perhaps don’t say that in so many words on the AP exam.”

***

Tuesday afternoon, Erwin doesn’t have any reason to stay late. His lesson plans are updated, and for once there’s no grading to get done. But he finds himself reading ahead in the textbook—just to refresh his memory on the next unit, he could tell himself, as if that wasn’t the flimsiest excuse imaginable given that he’d written an entire section of his master’s thesis on late 19th century historiography.

Levi doesn’t come at his normal time, though, and Erwin becomes concerned that he really had said or done something to upset him last night. He replays their conversation in his car so many times he becomes certain that he’s carved every detail of it permanently into the grooves of his brain. Was it his reluctance to have Levi fix his cassette player that had come off as untrusting? Or, God forbid, judgmental?

The sound of the janitorial cart rumbling at the end of the hall elevates his heart rate in a way that’s probably not healthy. Inch by inch, it approaches. By the time it stops near his classroom, Erwin is just staring down at an open textbook, listening to the whir of a vacuum on the other side of the wall.

Eventually, he looks down at his watch. His stomach drops. He’s stayed three hours past the end of the school day.

He packs up, and decides on his way out to poke his head in the room next door and if Levi notices him, fine, and if he doesn’t, or he acts cold, then Erwin will simply go home and start looking at flights to Alaska.

Levi does notice him. Almost right away. He flicks off the vacuum and pushes the headphones Erwin’s never seen him wear before down to his neck.

“What’s up?”

And what is Erwin supposed to say to that? You missed your appointed time cleaning my classroom? I’ve memorized your schedule completely by accident because I pay far too much attention?

He forces words from his mouth like he’s digging them out with a teaspoon. “Just saying hi.”

Levi looks at him, and Erwin would quite like to be sucked into the vacuum himself.

“Hi,” Levi says.

“Hi.”

“Working late again?”

So he’s noticed. Wonderful.

“I prefer not to take work home if I can avoid it,” Erwin says. Which isn’t wrong, exactly.

Levi nods. “Smart.”

‘Smart.’ Erwin’s never acted dumber in his life.

He’s opened his mouth to say goodbye and slink away when Levi speaks again.

“Hey so,” he says, leaning the vacuum against a desk. “I was thinking. ’Bout your shitty car, you know.”

Erwin holds his breath.

“I don’t wanna invite myself over,” Levi says, “but it’d probably be better if I just fixed it at your place. If we do it at mine somebody’ll probably come up and try to steal the catalytic converter. Plus if you don’t wanna sit outside for three hours you’ll be stuck inside with my roommates, which, trust me, you do not want. That way at least you’re not gonna be breathing down my neck with nothing to do.”

What does he mean, breathing down my neck—?

Then his mind catches up with the rest of him. At your place.

“Sure,” Erwin says, all the breath leaving his body. “That’s no problem.”

Levi nods. “Okay. Gimme a day that works. A weekend. I’m not gonna work on it in the dark.”

It still gets dark at five o’clock, and Erwin understands why Levi would want to work in the daylight, but still, the idea of Levi at his house, on a weekend, is sending tingles up and down his spine.

“Saturday?” he blurts.

Levi winces.

Silently, Erwin curses himself.

“I can’t Saturday. Promised my roommate I’d go with her to this thing. Our other roommate works weekends or I’d make him do it.”

“That’s fine, of course, just—”

“What about Sunday?”

Erwin does his best not to choke on his own tongue.

“That works.”

“Cool.” Levi smooths his hair down over his ears. “What time d’you want me to come by, like nine?”

“In the morning?”

Levi blinks at him, and Erwin fights the urge to hunch his shoulders. Why does he get the impression that Levi is cracking him open and reading him like a book?

“So,” Levi says, “you hate mornings, but you decided to become a teacher because…”

Because Levi is cracking him open and reading him like a book.

“Because my decision making skills have always been questionable?”

“Tch.” Levi strips off his gloves and reaches into a pocket of his coveralls. “Okay, how about noon?”

“That’s wonderful.”

“C’mere, text me your address.”

And it’s far from the sexiest way of getting someone’s phone number, but Erwin doesn’t mind—in fact, he feels a bit like there’s nothing but air between his feet and the ground as he finally leaves, heading for the quiet hallway.

“Hey, Smith!”

His loafers squeak on the polished floor as he stops and retreats back to the classroom door.

“Feed Big Bertha.”

Erwin blinks, and in his head he runs through a handful of other things Levi might have said instead of what he thinks he heard. Flea-bit burger. Free Big Bird, the. Three bin burners.

“I’m sorry?” he says.

“The game,” says Levi. “The arcade game. Feed Big Bertha. I dunno, you seem like you were an arcade kid.”

“Oh.” Erwin smiles, glad that the awkwardness from last night seems to have passed. “No. On all counts.”

Levi narrows his eyes. “Don’t fuck with me.”

“I would never.”

Picking up his vacuum again, Levi mutters, “Bullshit.” 

There’s an amused tilt to his mouth that fills Erwin with warmth, and he saunters down the hallway toward the parking lot with a big, stupid smile on his face.

God, he needs to get himself under control.

***

He does not get himself under control.

On Wednesday Levi stops in his classroom during his lunch period—something he’s never done before—to say, “The gun. The howitzer.”

Erwin lowers his tempeh wrap away from his mouth. “Not Big Bertha, no, though that’s a popular guess.”

Levi squints at him suspiciously.

“I’m not lying to you,” Erwin says.

Levi digs his index finger into the middle of his own chest. “You got a little…sauce or something.”

He thinks things can’t get any worse for him.

But on Thursday, Sasha spills an entire container of yakisoba noodles onto the floor in front of her desk and bursts into tears, and so Erwin sends her to find paper towels and she returns with Levi. Erwin tries to reprimand her, telling her that they’re capable of cleaning up a spill like this on their own—he doesn’t want them to run to a service worker the moment they’re faced with an unpleasant task—but Levi brushes them both off, tells Erwin to get back to teaching.

Except, what he says is, “Do what you were doing, professor.” 

This elicits a smattering of giggles from the class, and the back of Erwin’s neck burns with the fire of a thousand suns.

Valiantly, he manages to lead the rest of the (off-book) discussion on the excerpts from “The Traffic in Women” while Levi is bent over right in front of him. But Erwin does forget to assign the homework, and the class has all fled by the time he remembers.

On Friday he is reminded of just how utterly, completely out of control he is.

That morning when Erwin arrives at school there’s a Post-It in the center of his desk that just says “Bertha von Suttner” in the neatest handwriting he’s ever seen.

He doesn’t know who Bertha von Suttner is, but when he looks her up he discovers that  it’s a pretty good guess, actually, but still wrong. Erwin tucks the Post-It into the top drawer of his desk like a treasured photograph.

He eats lunch at his desk again, and his wish is granted when Levi stops by. Erwin sits up straighter, setting down his fork.

“I didn’t even know—”

“So I looked up your address,” Levi says.

Erwin waits for the conclusion—perhaps Levi needs to be picked up, though there are only a few bus lines that run across town and Erwin’s house isn’t that far from one, though of course he wouldn’t mind—

“On Monday,” says Levi, crossing the room to stand beside Erwin’s desk, “you told me you lived close by me.”

Oh.

Oh shit.

Erwin deflates.

“I said ‘not far,’” he says, and recognizes how pathetic he sounds.

“You live on the opposite side of town—”

“It’s a small town.”

Levi purses his lips. “Is there anything else you’re lying to me about? Bodies in the freezer?”

He can’t help himself. “Not in the freezer. That wouldn’t be very vegan of me.”

Levi’s mouth twitches. “The backyard?”

“None in the backyard, either.”

“The attic? Shit!” Levi points at him, slamming his other palm on the desk. “Bertha, from the fuckin’…What’s that book, fuck, Izzy was just watching that movie this weekend.” Levi taps his hand on the desk. “We had to read it in high school, crazy wife…”

“Oh.” Erwin just barely resists the urge to press his hand against his heart like a Southern belle. “Not Bertha from Jane Eyre, no.”

Levi glares at him for a beat. Then he takes the rubber gloves that are tucked into his belt and smacks Erwin over the head with them.

“I give up.”

Erwin flinches from the assault, the tight coil of worry and guilt in his chest starting to unwind.

“Do you want me to tell you?”

“No.” Levi tucks the gloves away again. “And don’t fucking lie to me again.”

“I’m sorry, truly.” Erwin smooths out his hair. “I won’t do it again.”

“Good.” At the door, Levi hesitates for a split second, and it’s odd to see him move with uncertainty. But he just turns over his shoulder and says, “See you Sunday.”

***

Erwin has his brilliant idea that night.

He has put his own dinner in the oven, and his cat is winding herself in circles around his ankles while he opens a can of pureed pumpkin in his kitchen.

“Yes, you’re starving.”

“MROW,” Robespierre agrees.

“I know, I abuse you.”

He spoons a bit of pumpkin onto her wet food. It’s the only way she’ll eat it. Cats aren’t even supposed to like vegetables, but it figures that he’d find the only one that does.

That’s when he has the idea.

His thought process goes something like this:

1. His cat is weird.
2. Mike said Levi looked like an “angry wet cat.”
3. Of course his mind finds some way to tie everything back to Levi.
4. Thanking Levi.
5. Aggressively not thinking about his fantasy of thanking Levi that replays in his mind 24/7.
6. Feeling bad about bringing Levi bad break room tea.
7. Could he give Levi something that isn’t bad?
8. Not that.
9. His eggplant lasagna is done.
10. He still has a bunch of canned tomatoes left over.

And that’s what brings him to grab his phone and open it to his message history with Levi, which consists only of his address and a thumbs up emoji. He types, What’s your opinion on pizza? and hits Send before he can overthink it.

His phone dings almost the instant he sets it down, and his heart stutters in his chest. Erwin opens the message.

Napoleonic Wars on the History Channel tonight! -Dad

He does his best not to throw his phone across the room.

Instead, he very maturely lets it drop onto the countertop and goes about serving himself an extra-large piece of eggplant lasagna while Robespierre trots over, still licking pureed pumpkin off her face.

“You just ate,” Erwin tells her as he follows him to his kitchen table. “Also, this would literally kill you.”

He pushes aside a stack of grading—the kitchen table gets the best light in the house, so he works here more often than at his actual desk—and sets his plate down. Robespierre hops up on the chair across from him and leans her paws on the table.

“No.” He shoos her gently, and she retreats to the chair. He’s never met a cat who liked vegetables like Robespierre, and he can’t even take responsibility for it. It’s not like he makes his cat eat vegan, too.

She stares at him across the table as he picks up his fork.

Erwin’s phone buzzes, and he most definitely does not splash a little tomato sauce when he drops his fork to reach for it.

positive, is Levi’s reply.

As Erwin opens the text, two more appear.

because i am not a psychopath

why

Erwin sits back down to reply.

                    No reason

A whiskered face appears in his peripheral vision, hovering over his plate.

“Stop it,” he tells Robespierre, scooping her up and depositing her on the floor.

She meows dejectedly and stalks out of the kitchen, tail in the air.

Erwin finishes eating and is cleaning up when his phone buzzes again.

What’s YOUR opinion on pizza? ;)

The winky face is…odd, but Erwin decides not to mention it.

                    Also positive.

Favorite toppings? :)

Erwin is in the middle of a reply when another message pops up.

can’t leave my phone for 2 seconds without my roommate stealing it sorry

Erwin deletes everything he’s typed out and answers with, Haha it’s fine.

brb need to commit a murder real quick

for legal purposes this is a joke

                    I wasn’t going to turn you in

good bc you’re an accessory now

                    My life of crime begins

He glances over at Robespierre, blinking at him benignly from the entrance to the kitchen. 

“Shut up,” he mumbles, unable to contain a smile. 

***

Sunday afternoon finds Erwin elbow-deep in flour and olive oil while Levi is elbow-deep in his car out in the garage.

There are many benefits to having Levi over at his house—getting to talk to him every now and then is the main one, of course, though Erwin tries to stay out of his way—but another is that he doesn’t have to worry about Robespierre licking raw pizza dough while Erwin turns around to wash a steel mixing bowl; at the first sign of an unfamiliar presence she’d darted under his bed and had yet to emerge.

As Erwin reaches the sink with the mixing bowl, Levi calls for him from the garage door.

“Hey, Smith?”

“Yes?”

“D’you got any lube?”

The mixing bowl makes an almighty crash against the tile floor.

“Any what? Sorry,” Erwin says, ducking to grab the bowl, which has mercifully not spattered oil everywhere.

Levi’s voice sounds clearer, like he’s taken a few steps inside. “Lube? Like, bicycle chain lube. I saw you had a bike—”

“Oh, yes. Yeah. Hole on—hold on.” Erwin remains in a squat on his kitchen floor and lets his head thunk against the wood of a cabinet door. Maybe it’ll knock some dignity back into him. Or maybe it could serve as a sort of makeshift lobotomy. Beggars can’t be choosers.

“Yeah,” Levi says. “Take your time.”

Once he locates the chain lube for Levi, Erwin retreats back inside to roll out the dough and cover it in sauce and toppings. He’s rather pleased with himself and his idea. And because he suspects that Levi wouldn’t want it to be a big deal, he won’t make it one—he’s not making them some candlelit dinner. He’ll send Levi home with a glass to-go container that just happens to be filled with homemade pizza. No big deal. Because he doesn’t want it to be weird, doesn’t want there to be some kind of tit-for-tat, I’m-owed-something power imbalance thing between them beyond the one that societally already exists.

The pizza comes out of the oven a while later looking perfect, if he does say so himself, and Erwin sets it on top of the stove to cool. He breathes a sigh of relief. For once, it feels like he hasn’t royally screwed up.

He slips out the side door into the garage where Levi is working. The day is mild, and the garage door is rolled all the way up to let in the sun—yet another contribution to Erwin’s lifted mood.

“Still going okay?” he asks.

He can’t see Levi from where he stands, but as Erwin circles around the car Levi lunges out from behind it, palms raised.

“Okay, don’t panic.”

Erwin’s brows lift. He’s not much of a panicker—current company notwithstanding—but hearing someone say “Don’t panic” is usually a pretty good indication that one should, in fact, panic.

Still, he just says, “Oh?”

Levi steps aside so Erwin can see—something sitting on the floor of his garage.

“But it’s fine, I’m gonna put it all back together,” Levi says.

Erwin approaches, and sees what he means: there’s a sizeable hole in the center of Bertha’s console where the audio system used to be. Said audio system, he realizes, is currently broken down into its discrete parts upon a drop cloth on the floor of his garage.

Erwin does not panic.

“I had to take the whole thing out, or else I’d break it trying to get the tape,” Levi says, wiping his hands on a rag.

Erwin nods. “Makes sense.”

Levi looks at Bertha, then back at Erwin.

“Yeah? Usually when people see I’ve separated out an entire part of their car they get kinda…spooked. People get weird about their cars.”

Erwin doesn’t see why anyone would be spooked by that. Cars are assembled—it’s not like they’re born fully formed.

“I trust you.”

Levi nods. “Okay. Cool. Anyway.”

He reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a white cassette tape.

Erwin blinks. “You did it?”

“Don’t act so surprised.”

Levi gives him the tape. His fingers are dry and warm.

“You even saved it? I thought I’d be looking at three miles of tangled ribbon.”

“Yeah, the problem was with the player, not the tape. But don’t put anything back in there unless you don’t want it to come back out.” Levi holds out his hand again. There’s a bit of grease in the crease of his palm. “I can toss it for you, just wanted you to see proof.”

“No, I got it,” Erwin says, tucking the tape into his own pocket. Aside from delight at being able to listen to literally anything else besides “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” he can’t shake the feeling of throwing away an old friend. “Thank you.”

Levi shrugs, looks away, smooths some hair over his ear.

“It’s whatever. I told you it wasn’t a big deal.”

It certainly seems like a big deal to Erwin, looking at the scattered remains of Bertha’s innards on his garage floor, but what does he know?

“Are you hungry at all?” he asks, still gripping the tape in his pocket like an aural security blanket.

Levi glances at him from the corner of his eye, not without an air of suspicion. One doesn’t ask What’s your opinion on pizza without a reason.

“I could eat.”

Erwin nods. “Come inside when you have a second.”

Levi looks down at the floor. “Sure—let me put all this back first. It won’t take long now that I got that thing out.”

“Of course.” Erwin feels like he should head inside, though he can’t remember why. Still, as he turns back toward the door, Levi speaks up.

“I was fucking around before. About the breathing down my neck thing.” He squats and picks up a chunk of colorful wires that Erwin assumes is Bertha’s audio system. “You won’t bother me.”

So Erwin stays, of course. Levi even lets him hold the stereo in place while he reattaches it. Erwin likes watching him work—the sureness of his hands, the tendons behind his knuckles and in his wrists, the way they’re all at once both brutally strong and minutely careful. Erwin’s stomach is twisted into a tangle of knots by the time they’re finished and Erwin leads him inside.

“Jesus, it smells fucking good in here,” Levi says as he steps inside the house.

Erwin points him toward the bathroom where he can wash up, and then goes to the kitchen, trying to remember where he stores his pizza cutter—

“No!”

He grabs Robespierre off the counter—or rather, off the pizza, in the middle of which she’s been standing, her nose and all four of her paws stained red with sauce. His cat—his stupid, vegetable-loving cat—had licked almost half the tomato sauce off the dough. She’s already twisting in his arms when he stands at the sink, mrow-ing, and he manages to rinse one paw before she sinks her teeth into his arm and twists until he’s afraid she’ll break her back if he doesn’t let go.

She vaults away from him, leaving two long smears of red sauce across his gray sweater, and lands on the floor, where she promptly starts licking at her paws.

“Quit that.” Erwin reaches for her, and she flees out into the living room, tracking red prints.

At that moment, Levi exits the bathroom, and Robespierre freezes, then darts under the couch.

“Whoa, what’s—Erwin, what the hell?” Levi asks, his eyes falling in horror to the stains on Erwin’s sweater.

“It’s sauce.” Erwin sinks to his knees next to the couch, trying and failing to extract his damn cat from under it. “She got into the pizza and it’s basically got every ingredient that could kill her.” God damn it—this is all his fault, his fault for thinking he might succeed at something, for being too caught up in himself and his wants and his stupid, stupid crush, for—

“Okay, hey.” Levi pulls his phone from his jacket pocket. “My roommate’s in vet school. I’ll call her and ask how bad this is.”

***

The answer, of course, is that this is not certain death, but it is also very Not Good.

And so an hour later—more than half of that spent trying to scare Robespierre out of the couch and into her carrier—he and Levi are sitting upon a pair of metal chairs in the emergency vet’s waiting room.

Erwin hadn’t even asked Levi to come along. He hadn’t asked for anything at all, in fact, but it seemed like Levi had just known what to do. He’d helped strap the carrier into Bertha’s back seat and then slid into the passenger side like he belonged there.

Which he does, some half-conscious part of Erwin thinks. He promptly pushes that thought aside. God, how he’s ruined today.

“I didn’t even know you had a cat.” Levi’s voice wrenches him out of his spiraling thoughts.

Erwin squeezes his hands on his knees.

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to stay. ”

“I’m gonna. Unless you tell me to leave.”

Erwin says nothing. His chest feels like a rubber band stretched to near snapping.

Levi crosses his arms and settles back in his chair. Like he’s got nowhere else he’d rather be than here in a tiny sterile waiting room that smells of wet dog and pet food.

“I didn’t think…” Erwin doesn’t know why he’s speaking. He does this when he’s anxious. The worse it is, the more he talks. “She’d been hiding all afternoon, and I didn’t think she’d come out until you were gone for a few hours, or I would’ve just put it somewhere she couldn’t reach—”

“It’s not your fault.”

Erwin wonders if this is a bit like what it feels to be gutted.

“But it—”

“Don’t argue with me. You won’t win.”

Swallowing past the tightness in his throat, Erwin says, “You underestimate how much I like to argue.”

He lets his head fall back against the glass of the picture window behind them.

“I argue better than the classroom full of fifteen-year-olds you’re used to,” Levi says, and that, at least, makes Erwin’s lips twitch.

As he stares up at the ceiling tiles, preoccupied by the anchor tied to his heart, Levi shifts beside him. A moment later, something slips beneath his arm, and a small hand clasps onto his.

Erwin is quite certain he has stopped breathing.

His ears ring with the silence in his head. Can Levi can feel his pulse drumming through his palm?

“What’s her name?” Levi’s voice is slightly hoarse. “Or else I’m calling her Pizza Cat.”

Erwin dredges up the ability to speak.

“Robespierre.”

Levi snorts. “Wasn’t Robespierre a dude?”

“My cat doesn’t care about your gender norms.” Erwin lifts his head from the picture window. “And it’s better than the name the shelter gave her.”

“And what was that?” Levi narrows his eyes. “Bertha?”

“No.” Heat creeps up Erwin’s neck.

“So what was it? If you tell me to guess I’ll kick your ass.”

Erwin briefly closes his eyes. Alaska is probably pretty nice this time of year.

“She has a very loud purr,” Erwin explains, making intense eye contact with the poster of a dog across the room. “So they named her Bullet Vibrator.”

Levi’s shoulder, pressed against his, starts to shake. His laughs are more breath than sound, Erwin has learned. The rope tying the anchor to his heart starts to fray.

“I’m sorry, that’s a way better name than Robespierre.”

“I am not having ‘Bullet Vibrator Smith’ written on a bottle of heartworm medication, or anywhere else, for that matter.”

Levi covers his face with his free hand, and Erwin wants nothing more than to gently guide it away. He’s even lifted his other hand from his lap.

“Mr. Smith?”

Levi takes his hand back, and Erwin keenly feels the loss, not just in his palm but down to the center of his chest.

The tech brings out Robespierre in her carrier. They explain that she’s been slightly sedated and given fluids for dehydration but is otherwise fine, and they rattle off a short list of symptoms to watch out for but say the likelihood of any poisoning is small.

“Come by the front desk and we’ll settle the bill,” the tech says, smiling, and retreats into the back.

The bill. Well, he didn’t want to eat anything but beans and rice for the rest of the month, anyway. Erwin frowns down at the carrier.

“Are you worth it?” he asks, squatting down.

Robespierre pushes her face against the cage, and he reaches his fingers in to scratch her between the ears.

“So I’ll…” Levi says as Erwin stands back up. “…probably go. There’s a bus right here. But, uh, can you bring my tools and shit to school tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

The sun is setting. And it’s about that time of day when the sun angles the right way in through the big front window and lights up the entire room in orange. It bisects Levi’s face with shadow, and the sun glints so bright in his eye it reminds Erwin of the bottom of a creek, crystal clear down to the bottom.

“Thank you,” Erwin says, and it feels so insignificant compared to what’s churning inside of him.

“Don’t mention it.”

Erwin takes a breath that gets stuck in the upper part of his chest. “Will you at least let me take you out for a drink as thanks?”

“I’m…”

Erwin braces himself for the rejection.

“Yeah, for sure,” Levi says.

 Erwin holds his breath, then dives in. “What about next Saturday?”

Levi looks at him warily.

“Next Saturday is—”

“I know what next Saturday is,” Erwin says softly. “I’ve been told that ‘Ken Burns will forgive’ me.”

Levi blinks, and his lips twitch slightly.

“Okay,” he says. Finally. Quietly.

Erwin could melt into the floor.

“Okay.”

***

The week that follows is normal. 

Suspiciously normal. 

So normal that Erwin’s nearly become convinced that either he hallucinated all of last weekend or else he’s slipped into some parallel timeline where last weekend never happened at all.

When Erwin walks into the gym on Friday afternoon to help with setup for the Valentine’s dance, he finds Principal Zackly hiding what a bottle of clear liquid that is definitely not water inside one of the “Wet Floor” cones, and Moblit glowering as he tapes a torn “Happy Valentine’s Day” banner back together while Hange apologizes for mistaking it for “the kind of banner that you run through at sports games.”

So much for normal.

From there, things only go downhill.

Erwin and Mike, as the tallest members of the faculty, are tasked with hanging Moblit’s torn banner above the main doors to the gym, which goes fine until Levi decides to arrive dressed in a dark blue button-down that makes his eyes sparkle from clear across the room.

“Erwin, goddammit!”

He grabs for the corner of the banner that he dropped, but the ladder he’s standing on is uneven, and when it wobbles Erwin has to jump down so he doesn’t unbalance it and crack his skull open, which would be a humiliating way to die.

Unfortunately, that tears the banner apart again. He hears Moblit’s cry from across the gym.

Humpty Dumpty-like, they tape it back together again. But by the time the banner is hung the torn pieces have crossed over each other, so it looks like it says “Happy Xalentine’s Day.” An order of pink heart-shaped balloons arrives, emblazoned with white script that reads “It’s a Girl!”, and Erwin can’t be sure but he thinks Petra made the delivery man cry before he agreed to return to his warehouse for new balloons. Then there’s the music which, when Erwin walked in, had been playing Siouxsie and the Banshees, but now resembles something out of a Best of the ’80s hellscape. And when the lights go down and the students start filtering in and nothing changes, Erwin feels he has to speak up.

“Who picked this music?” Erwin asks the other chaperones lined up beside him.

“Figured you did,” Levi mutters, and Erwin elbows him gently in the ribs.

“Maybe it’s a theme night and everybody forgot to tell us,” says Hange.

Erwin watches the kids sway mildly on the dance floor to Dire Straits and is reminded of the dying sea anemones he once saw in a climate change documentary (that definitely did not make him cry).

“I don’t think it’s a theme night,” he says.

Hange disappears to investigate, leaving Erwin and Levi a few paces separate from the others.

The silence between them, at least to Erwin, prickles like static across his skin. He fights down the urge to discuss their plans—if said plans still even exist, and if Levi hadn’t agreed just because Erwin had blindsided him—or worse—out of pity.

Though he keeps telling himself that Levi would never have held his hand if he didn’t want to.

And God if it doesn’t take every ounce of his self-control not to reach for Levi’s hand right now and tug him into a dance, to make his ears turn that lovely shade of bright pink.

“What’re you grinning at, weirdo?”

Erwin shakes his head, not even bothered at being noticed. “Nothing.”

Levi’s eyes drop, narrowing. “Your tie’s not stupid this time.”

“Thanks, you look nice, too.”

Levi flips him off under his crossed arms, and Erwin smiles as Hange jogs back up to them.

“Okay, an update. DJ was a no-show and for some reason they couldn’t find anyone else who would DJ a high school dance the day before Valentine’s Day. Zackly’s threatened anyone who changes the music with immediate termination.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mike mutters.

“That’s illegal,” Erwin says.

“Immediately, yeah,” says Hange. “Buuuut I wouldn’t put it past him to find some way to sabotage somebody’s end-of-year performance review. The old bastard can hold a grudge.”

“If I hear anything,” Levi says, scanning the dance floor, “that even remotely sounds like the opening to ‘Take My Breath Away,’ I’m intervening. They all can thank me for sacrificing myself for the cause.”

Erwin shakes his head. “If anybody’s sacrificing themselves, it’ll be me, because Zackly won’t fire me. Not if he wants to keep looking good in front of the county.”

“I admire both of you for your willingness to sacrifice yourselves,” says Hange, “but look. He’s standing right in front of it. Like a big…furry, creepy guard dog.”

Hange’s right. As they watch, Zackly fishes a leather-encased flask from the pocket of his sport coat, unscrews the cap, and takes a sip.

“All right.” Erwin turns, bringing the rest of them in for a huddle. “At some point he’s going to have to refill that flask from the bottle I saw him put under that ‘Wet Floor’ cone.”

“He fucking what?” Levi sounds scandalized.

“So that’s when one of us moves in and changes the music,” Erwin says, while Levi mutters something that sounds like touching my shit, fucking lush.

“Who knows how long that’s gonna take?” asks Mike. “By the time he works through that thing we’ll be halfway done here.”

“Has anyone seen him refill since we’ve been here?”

“I have,” Moblit says, and hiccups. “Maybe thirty minutes ago. He gave me some.”

“So it took him at least an hour to work through the first one,” Mike says, dejected. “By the time he finishes the second one it’ll be almost over.”

“Not if one of us helps him,” says Erwin.

Hange reaches over Levi’s head to slap Erwin’s shoulder a few times. “Erwin! You devil. If we get him drunk enough maybe he won’t even notice the music’s changed. Which one of us can hold our alcohol the best? I’d guess you or Mike, since you’re the biggest.”

“He’s a lightweight, actually,” Nanaba says, patting Mike on the back.

Erwin knows from experience that this is true, even as Mike makes a mocking face in Nanaba’s direction, to which she responds by sticking out her tongue.

“Looks like it’s gonna be up to you, buddy.” Hange throws him a salute.

Their huddle breaks up, and Erwin smooths his tie and straightens his shoulders. This will be fine. He’s decent at small talk. And drinking. And Zackly, for all his bloviating about going off-book and funding, seems to like him well enough.

“We’re rooting for you,” Nanaba stage-whispers.

“Raise your hand if you need help,” says Mike.

“Just keep an eye out,” Erwin tells them. “And as soon as you see him leave, one of you go in behind me. I’ll try to block you for as long as I can.”

It’s not all that difficult, actually, to get Zackly talking. He gives Erwin a friendly shoulder punch as soon as he approaches, and as soon as Erwin brings up teaching Zackly launches into a monologue about how much he dislikes their superintendent, who seemingly has had it out for him since he took this job. It’s not five minutes before he pulls out his flask and offers it to Erwin, who decides to forgo manners and takes a massive swig.

He holds the liquor in his mouth.

It’s gin.

He hates gin.

“A gin man, eh?” Zackly says, clapping Erwin on the back and very nearly causing him to dribble everything back out onto the floor. “I always thought you and I were similar. Maybe you’re not as uptight as I thought.”

It goes on like this for another fifteen, maybe twenty minutes—time starts getting a little fuzzy—as they pass the flask back and forth, Zackly revealing his increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories concerning the school board’s apparently malicious intent to take him down. Erwin nudges him with vague questions, and soon enough Zackly’s holding the flask over his mouth and tapping the bottom.

“Didn’t peg you for much of a drinker, either,” Zackly says, slurring slightly. “I’ve got the good stuff in my office, you’ll have to come by sometime and try it.”

Fighting a heroic battle with his gag reflex, Erwin winces, then tries to turn it into a smile. Zackly, for his part, doesn’t seem to notice.

“Hol’ that thought,” the principal says, wiggling the flask in his hand as the first few notes of “Take Me Home Tonight” start to play.

The instant he turns away, Erwin looks around for backup. The pulsing lights are making the backs of his eyes hurt, but he focuses on Levi, who must have just been waiting nearby, slipping behind the speakers. Erwin turns his back and clasps his hands to block him from sight, feeling a bit like one of those lizards that puffs itself up to look bigger. Is that a mating thing? Or an aggression thing? Both?

He watches what unfolds before him with a slight sense of alarm: toward Connie and Sasha, who have jumped up on a pair of chairs to scream-sing into invisible microphones clutched in their fists; toward Zackly, who checks over both shoulders, then lifts up the ‘Wet Floor’ cone and unscrews the cap off the bottle; and toward the floor itself, which definitely was not moving half an hour ago.

“Hey,” someone whispers close behind him, and Erwin startles. Levi puts a hand on his shoulder and tugs him down. “It’s Zackly’s goddamn phone and it’s password protected, I’ve already tried all the one-one-one-one, one-two-three-four shit—What the fuck is he doing?”

Erwin feels sluggish—For a moment he’s too preoccupied with Levi’s breath on his ear to notice that Zackly is just…pouring from the bottle of gin straight into his flask, and that probably half of what leaves the bottle ends up on the floor.

“That motherf—”

“Focus.” He doesn’t know if he’s talking more to himself or to Levi.

“Yeah, fine. D’you know when his birthday is, or else I dunno what else I can do in the next twenty seconds.”

“Okay. Hold on.” His mind feels like a sieve. He digs for his phone and pulls up his email. “Last year they sent around a card for everyone to sign and I think his secretary emailed all of us about it…”

But Levi has ducked away from him, lunging for where Jean Kirstein is standing at the refreshments table and grabbing the boy by the collar. Two plastic cups of punch tumble back into the bowl.

“Mr. Levi…? What did I do?!”

As Levi marches Jean back over to them, Erwin finds the email.

“April 15th,” he says, and Levi nods, tugging Jean behind the speakers.

Erwin turns around and resumes his puffed-out lizard stance as Zackly is replacing the cone over his bottle and the puddle he’s made around it.

“TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT!” Connie and Sasha sing, while Moblit begs them to get down off the chairs.

His pleas go unheard, partially because Hange has jumped up on a third chair, invisible saxophone in hand, and is also singing along despite clearly not knowing the lyrics.

“I DON’T WANNA LET YOU GO LA LA LEE LA LA—”

Zackly comes back, holding out the flask for Erwin to take. He shakes his head.

“I have to drive home.”

The principal grunts. “Suit yourself.”

From the corner of his eye, Erwin spots Levi and Jean hovering by the speakers as though looking for an escape. The song is fading, and so is the half-hearted bobbing on the dance floor.

Erwin looks around desperately for a distraction, and finally points at a random spot on the opposite wall of the gym.

“Wouldn’t you say that’s a liability?” he asks.

“What? Where?”

Zackly turns around, and Erwin quickly twists and gestures for Levi and Jean to move.

The song ends, and a new one begins that Erwin doesn’t recognize. A cheer pulses through the gym.

“What do you mean, Erwin, what liability?” Zackly asks, turning back.

“I’m sorry, I thought I saw…Never mind. The light must be playing tricks on me. I’m going to the restroom, see you.”

Zackly hmphs. “Okay, fine, then.”

As Erwin slips toward the gym doors, Zackly takes a swig from his flask, apparently unaware of the sudden surge of energetic dancing on the gym floor.

***

Erwin downs an entire bottle of water in about ten seconds, and he still can’t get the taste of gin out of his mouth.

“Thank you,” he pants, leaning heavily against the hallway just outside the gym and bracing a hand on his knee. He closes his eyes against the buzzing fluorescent lights.

“Are you gonna hurl?” Levi asks, taking the bottle from him warily. “’Cause if you are—”

“No.”

And okay, the floor is still moving a little, and he’s flushed under his suit and his hair feels like it’s fallen loose, but it’ll pass quickly. It always does. He wipes a drip of water from his mouth with the back of his knuckles.

Levi crushes the water bottle in both hands.

“I just…” says Erwin. “I really hate gin. If I wanted to bite a tree, I’d go bite a tree.”

Snorting, Levi tosses the crushed bottle into the recycling bin.

“Glad I thought to grab Horseface out there. I realized while I was standing there that I didn’t know what music they’d want, so I picked the closest brat I could find.”

“Smart,” Erwin says, wondering if he can simply will the floor to stop moving. “You and I, we’re not cool anymore.”

“Tch. You were never cool.”

“Got me there.”

Erwin needs a mint or something. He keeps some in his desk, but crossing campus to get to his classroom right now feels…not impossible, but certainly unpleasant. Whether it would be more or less pleasant than continuing to taste gin in his mouth all night remains to be seen.

A pair of black boots slide into view, and then a cool, dry palm brushes back his hair to press against his forehead.

The fading heat under his clothes comes roaring back.

Erwin tilts his head up. Like this, he and Levi are almost eye-to-eye. Erwin’s stomach drops to somewhere around his shoes.

“Do you always get red when you drink?” Levi asks, soft. He looks legitimately worried.

It takes a moment for Erwin to get his throat to work.

“No.”

Levi takes his hand away. Erwin catches it in midair.

The temperature in the hall is suddenly scorching.

Levi’s fingertips rest on his palm, and there is a ball of heat in the center of Erwin’s chest that’s radiating adrenaline across his skin, all directed at the small spots where they are in contact. He knows it’s the alcohol that’s nudging him, but his mind feels totally clear, and when did Levi get close enough for their noses to brush, for the heat of his breath to melt Erwin’s lips apart?

A chorus of “OooooOOOOHHHs” makes them jump apart like they’ve been burned.

Though Erwin’s heart is still pounding, his blood becomes ice at the thought that they’ve been seen. But there’s no one in the hallway, no faces pressed to the narrow windows set in the gym doors.

The “oohs” repeat, louder this time, and Erwin has worked in high schools long enough to have honed a sixth sense for when something is about to happen.

He stands up, and Levi is already halfway back to the gym before Erwin catches up with him.

Levi throws open the doors, and they’re met with a thick crowd gathered around Eren and Jean, who by the cuts on their chins have clearly already exchanged at least a few blows and are now gripping each other by the front of their dress shirts.

Erwin moves without thinking—Eren is now saying something about ripping his shirt while Jean is saying he doesn’t give a damn about Eren’s shirt and God, Erwin is grateful he was never one of the cool kids—and he and Levi work to pull them apart.

But the two of them are like a pair of cats with their claws sunk into one another, or else they’re so caught up that they don’t even realize what’s happening.

Erwin blames the lingering effects of the alcohol for his slow reflexes, but when they finally yank the two boys apart, Eren’s fist flies back and smacks him right in the eye.

***

“Your mom’s here, Jaeger.”

At Mike’s words, Eren jumps to his feet like he’s just been released from prison. In reality, since Jean’s mother picked him up, Eren has just been seated in the coach’s office with Erwin, who is holding a cold soda can from the vending machine to his brow.

And Levi, who has been viciously digging through Mike’s first aid kit for going on five minutes.

Hovering on the balls of his feet like he’s forcing himself not to flee, Eren holds his arms stiff at his sides.

“I’m…Mr. Smith I’m really, really sor—”

“Shoo,” Levi snaps.

Eren makes a shrill noise and pushes past Mike at a half-run.

Levi’s concern is…It reminds him of the face Levi made on Sunday when he’d seen the smears of tomato sauce across Erwin’s torso. Of the way he’d said Erwin, not Smith like he usually does. Erwin doesn’t know what it is. He just knows it fills him to bursting with something.

“Do you not have a single butterfly bandage in this whole shitty kit?” Levi asks. “How did  burn cream and space blankets make the cut but not an ice pack or, you know, actual useful bandages?”

Mike lets the office door fall shut and ignores Levi.

“Kid looked like he wanted to piss himself,” he says with a chuckle. “Probably thought he was going to jail.”

“I think he thought I was going to flunk him,” Erwin says.

“You should.”

“I don’t think he needs my help there.”

Mike laughs through his nose. He eyes Levi, who is now just poking at the insides of the first aid kit.

“Erwin, Zackly says you can go home, assuming, quote: you don’t want to sue anybody.”

“I’m not going to sue anybody.”

Erwin can’t hear it from where he sits, but he does see Mike’s nostrils flare.

“All right, well,” Mike says, already heading through the door, “if you don’t need anything I’m gonna head back. See ya Monday!”

Mike shuts the door before either of them can reply.

Shoving the first aid kit across the paper-cluttered desk, Levi turns and waves away the soda can.

“Lemme see.”

Erwin touches the spot just below his brow where the skin had split. It’s tender, but dry. “I don’t think it’s bleeding anymore.”

“Until the next time you make a single facial expression and it reopens because the skin’s so thin there.”

Erwin exaggerates a frown. The cut tugs on his skin, but it doesn’t seem to split.

“All right.” Levi rolls his eyes. “It’s good you probably won’t have a black eye. That’d be embarrassing for you. ‘Hey Smith, what happened?’ ‘Oh, I lost a fight to a sixteen-year-old.’”

“To be fair, I don’t think it would sound any better if I said I won a fight against a sixteen-year-old, either.”

He stands. His head aches, but not terribly. Levi crosses his arms tight across his chest, and Erwin does not fail to notice the stretch of the fabric across his biceps.

“Are you sober enough to get home?”

“Oh, yes. If the water didn’t do it”—and the sudden blood rush in the hallway that kicked his metabolism into gear—“then the fist to the face did.”

Stepping outside the office, music echoes from inside the gym that suggests Zackly has wrested control back. Either that or “Bette Davis Eyes” is having a fad resurgence among high schoolers. You never know.

The floor is steady beneath Erwin’s feet. It wasn’t an accident, before. He feels steadier than he has in weeks. Months, even.

It gives him enough courage to say, “Tomorrow.”

Levi’s eyes widen a bit, fingers tightening on his arms. “Tomorrow,” he answers, voice higher up in his throat than it usually is.

“I was thinking—Assuming you’re still interested—”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m…” Levi’s voice drops back down to its normal register, languid and aloof. “Yep.”

A tight little knot of uncertainty in Erwin’s chest eases.

“Okay. Seven?”

Levi nods.

“Okay.”

“Okay. Tomorrow, then.”

There is a part of him—a very large, very insistent part of him—that wants to grab Levi and kiss him senseless right here.

Not here, says another, more sensible part of him. It’s no summer snowstorm. Somewhere better.

So Erwin pulls himself away, each step feeling like his soles are glue, and they part ways in the middle of the hall, Levi heading back toward the gym.

“Text me when you get home so I know you’re not dead,” Levi calls over his shoulder. “Don’t wanna be literal ghosted.”

“I will.”

At the doors to outside, Erwin pauses and looks back. He meets Levi’s eyes across the hallway. A corner of Levi’s mouth tugs upward.

Erwin smiles in return, and barely feels the cold.

Chapter Text

               Not dead!

               [Image]

bullet vibrator looks comfortable

               That is the last time I tell you anything

this is what you missed btw

[Video 00:32]

               Is Moblit ok???

the correct response was

“if you fall clearly i will not catch you”

yes he ’s fine

Erwin is not rereading his text exchange with Levi for the umpteenth time while lying in bed on a gray, drizzly Saturday morning, his cat’s tail swishing over his face. He’s not. It’s just that it was already pulled up when he opened his phone that morning.

Also, a video of Moblit falling flat on his ass from the chair where he’d been standing to duet “Time After Time” with Hange wasn’t not hilarious (now that Erwin knows he’s fine).

But there was the last part, too, that Erwin had sent right before getting into bed because he must have been concussed or exhausted or both.

               I ’m looking forward to tomorrow

And then the response, coming not two minutes later, which Erwin had almost ignored so he wouldn’t get his hopes up, telling himself it was probably just Dad informing him of some Napoleon biopic or another because he never quite, one hundred percent, actually understood what Erwin’s research was actually on—

same

And he’s definitely not fixated on a single word on a little screen held just past the tip of his nose because he hasn’t put his contacts in yet.

And he definitely does not drop said little screen right onto the tender spot below his eyebrow when it buzzes unexpectedly, making him swear so viciously that Robespierre stands up from her spot on his pillow looks down at him, narrow-eyed.

“What?” he asks her, checking the sore spot for blood.

Satisfied that the cut from Eren’s fist only hurts like a bitch but isn’t bleeding, he pulls up the message from Mike that had startled him in the first place.

hey man did you clean up my office last night

Erwin frowns at the screen. It was true that they’d forgotten to pack away the first aid kit before leaving, but it’s unlike Mike to be bothered over something as inconsequential as that.

               No? There was nothing wrong with your office when we left

yeah ok but did you clean up the nothing that happened in my office?

               ??

Please say you cleaned up after you and Levi

               NOTHING HAPPENED IN YOUR OFFICE

Erwin tosses his phone aside, startling Robespierre from where she’s sat on his covers. She grumbles, glares at him, and hops down from the bed.

Fine, then. He needs to figure out what he’s going to wear (goddammit). And where they’re going to go (shit). And whether he should just suck it up and wear a bandage over the cut near his eye so he doesn’t accidentally split it open and start bleeding (does he even have bandages?).

He grabs his phone again (Mike has responded with an emoji wearing a monocle) and checks the time. 8:14.

It’s going to be a long eleven hours.

***

Exactly eleven hours and his entire wardrobe later, Erwin stands in the drizzling rain in the middle of the sidewalk in their meager downtown, reading a chalk sign for the third time, as if doing so will make it make sense.

Chef ’s Special Prix Fixe* Menu for V-Day!!!

*MUST purchase to be seated! ($185/person + tax. Corkage fee $25.)

“This place fuckin’ serves blooming onions,” Levi says, hands shoved deep in his pockets. 

“They can’t mean the bar, too,” Erwin says. The rain starts to lightly sting his face. “Right?”

They do, in fact, also mean the bar, the host informs him with a haggard sigh, picking up a pair of water-warped paper menus.

“Are you interested in the Chef’s Special Prix Fixe menu?” he asks dully.

Levi takes Erwin by the elbow. “We are not.”

The all-day drizzle has firmly shifted into frozen territory as they reemerge onto the sidewalk, where patches of thin ice have started to coalesce.

“We’ve got other options,” Erwin says, going for nonchalant and missing it by a mile. He nods toward the trendy gastropub up the street.

Really, Erwin should have known. He should have known that every bar and restaurant would be booked up or packed to the brim tonight. Because it’s Valentine’s Day, and it’s a Saturday, and there are only so many options in a town this small. He’d had a whole week to agonize over what he was going to wear and what he was going to say and whether Levi was going to think of this as a date, especially after what happened last night outside the gym because there was no mistaking what it means when someone stands close enough to breathe the breath from their lungs. And yet he hadn’t for one second thought that maybe he should call around in advance to make sure they would have anywhere to sit.

The trendy gastropub won’t take them without a reservation, and so they walk up to the biergarten, which is so packed that Erwin takes one look at Levi’s face and ushers them right along.

“There’s still a couple of options.” There are two, at most. Erwin sounds desperate to his own ears.

“Let’s just go to that place.” Levi says, jerking his thumb toward Nanny O’Brien’s. “It’s big, there’ll at least be a seat or two around the bar.”

But Nanny O’Brien’s is loud, and every surface is sticky and grimy and it’s just not the kind of place he can see Levi enjoying. It’s not even the kind of place Erwin usually enjoys going to, except for the occasional after-work drink.

But all they’ve got left that’s not a white tablecloth kind of place is Nanny O’Brien’s, a Thai restaurant that doesn’t serve alcohol, and a place right across the street that calls itself a bistrot (two T’s) that’s a little fancier than Erwin would’ve liked—he doesn’t want to make it too obvious, in case Levi does not want this to be a date—but might be their best bet. Erwin knows it has a sizeable outdoor patio. Perhaps it’ll have some heaters they can hunch beside. That could be nice.

“That place,” Erwin says, pointing to the bistrot, “then Nanny O’Brien’s. Is that all right?”

Levi shrugs. “Drinks is drinks.”

As Erwin steps off the curb and onto the empty street, he wonders what that’s supposed to mean. That it doesn’t matter where they go because this is thank-you-for-fixing-my-car drinks, not you-occupy-my-every-waking-thought drinks? It probably doesn’t mean anything.

“It’s fuckin’ cold, Smith,” Levi calls over his shoulder, “why are you walking like you’ve got a stick up your ass?”

Erwin shuffles a little faster. The only boots he had that went with his shirt were a pair of chukkas with absolutely no traction, so he’s stuck half-skating across the iced-over street while a car creeps toward him from about twenty feet away.

“Ice,” he answers.

Levi turns around. “If you fall—”

“You will catch me?”

Levi's mouth quirks. “Like Hange caught Moblit, yeah, exactly. I’ll be fucking waiting. You should’ve worn better shoes, dumbass.” He looks at the approaching car, which has crept a tiny bit closer, and starts to cross back toward Erwin.

It’s Erwin's fault. Entirely. Because his entire body lists toward Levi as he reaches for him, and Erwin overcorrects, and his stupid boot goes out from under him.

He’s always thought it was a cliche that things like this happen in slow motion. Because this happens in an instant. One moment he’s standing, and the next he’s flat on his ass in the middle of the street, pain and cold radiating up from his tailbone.

And the next, Levi’s arms are wrapped around his shoulders, hauling Erwin to his feet like it’s nothing, like Erwin isn’t practically twice his size.

“You okay?”

He is absolutely going to be massively bruised tomorrow, and his wrist feels a little tweaked.

“Yeah. Perfect,” he says as Levi sets him on his feet, and really, how is this even physically possible?

“C’mon. I’m not scraping your ass off the street with a spatula.”

He tugs on Erwin’s hand, and the movement is unexpected and his tailbone really hurts, goddammit, and a second later Erwin ends up on his knees on the ice while a pair of headlights blind him.

The car honks, and he’s fairly certain Levi flips it off with one hand while he grabs Erwin’s arm with the other, and they both stumble onto the sidewalk without any further injuries.

Erwin shuffles the rest of the way to the bistrot with the ghost of the touch still on his skin, and musters the tattered remnants of his pride to approach the hostess station.

“We don’t have a reservation,” Erwin says, bracing himself.

“Oh, that’s no problem!” the hostess chirps, tapping on her iPad.

Erwin could collapse in relief.

“Really?”

“Sure! The wait’ll be about two hours. Can I have a name?”

***

This is how Erwin finds himself squeezed into a tiny corner booth at Nanny O’Brien’s, straining to hear Levi over the cheers of the crowd at the bar. There’s some basketball game playing, and every so often a drunken cheer will burst from the spectators and drown out the bland classic rock playing from the tinny speakers above their heads.

This isn’t what he wanted at all. Because he wants—

He wants Levi to know that he wants this to be a date.

But maybe Levi doesn’t want it to be a date. Maybe he’s feeling relief. Maybe that’s why he’s insisting on Nanny O’Brien’s—because it’s clearly, obviously, not a “date” spot.

Okay. Fine. Erwin can deal with disappointment. He can certainly deal with rejection. And he definitely hasn’t set up notifications on his phone for price drops on flights to Alaska.

But then Levi grabbed his wrist when they entered Nanny O’Brien’s and, sure, it’s packed in here as well and would be easy to lose each other, but men who aren’t interested in their coworkers don’t usually gently hold each other’s wrists so they don’t get separated. Right? He’s never had the urge to grab onto Mike or Nile in crowded areas. Though then again, both of them are taller than Levi, who would be much easier to lose.

There was a gentle hand on his wrist and then a strong tug on his arm, and Erwin was marched past the massive bar and nearly thrown bodily into a tiny corner booth he would never have seen, and he’d never thought he’d really be into being manhandled like this but he could already feel this new insight growing roots that are going to intertwine with every other fantasy that keeps multiplying—

“There.” Levi plopped next to him. “Somebody left their jacket.”

The table must have only been recently vacated. A pink jacket hung on the hook next to them, but Erwin ignored it, pushed a wineglass and two margarita glasses over to one side as Levi grabbed a sticky drink menu from the stand.

“See? It’s fine.”

It’s fine. Sure. Everything is fine.

After someone takes their orders, Erwin wills himself to calm down. It goes about as well as willing his brain not to require oxygen.

“What’s it been like now that Bertha’s Meat Loaf-less?” Levi’s asking, or at least that’s what Erwin thinks he’s asking. He catches maybe every third word.

Levi says something else right as the correct team scores or something and Erwin can’t hear a damn thing. Attempting to lip-read him is actually a terrible idea, and it’s only after Levi has stopped speaking for a few agonizing seconds that Erwin realizes he hasn’t been reading his lips at all.

“I’m sorry?” he asks, angling his head a little.

Levi’s mouth twitches. “I just said, does this mean I made your car vegan?” He winces. “Ugh. That’s like a joke you’d make.”

“My jokes are better than that.”

“They are absolutely not.”

“How’s Ken Burns’s Jazz going?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?”

“I can’t believe you called that ‘plans.’”

“Because it was a joke.”

“You’re so full of shit.” Levi adjusts back against the booth, and his knee brushes against Erwin’s underneath the table.

It stays there, and Erwin reminds himself to breathe. He realizes that he’s still wearing his jacket and scarf, and sheds them both quickly.

“Speaking of being full of shit, how’s Bullet Vibrator doing?” Levi asks right as the waiter arrives with their drinks.

“I’m never,” Erwin mutters across the table, shielding his burning face as the waiter makes a rapid departure, “telling you anything. Ever. Again.”

Levi smiles—legitimately smiles, or at least more so than the usual tilt of his mouth that Erwin has definitely memorized—and lifts his glass.

Then he frowns, plunks it back onto the table, and reaches into the pocket of his jeans.

“Sorry,” he says, pulling out his phone. “This better not fucking be…” He trails off as he looks at the screen, his frown deepening. “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a dick, but I gotta—”

“Of course.”

Levi swipes at the screen, the top of which reads, “Ma.”

“Are you okay?” he says by way of answering.

Erwin frowns at his beer, Levi’s worry seeping into the space between them. So does his relief, palpable in the shift of his shoulders.

“So did you just sense that Fleetwood Mac was playing in this bar right now, or what?”

Levi’s eyes flick once in his direction, drawing Erwin’s attention.

“Maybe,” he mutters. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Ma, okay?”

Erwin looks down. He should call his mother. He talks to his father almost weekly, but…He frowns and runs his thumb through the condensation on his pint glass.

“No, it—” Levi rolls his eyes, and the gesture is so utterly packed with affection that Erwin feels like a balloon is expanding in the middle of his chest, crushing his organs against his ribcage.

And he doesn’t know why—

Oh no.

Oh, yes he does. He knows exactly what this is.

Oh, this is so much worse than he’d thought.

“I am not—” Levi begins, and then he glances at Erwin again, then away, and lowers his voice— “fucking asking him that.”

“Asking me what?”

Levi shoots him a glare that would probably have killed a smaller man.

“Ask me what?” Erwin asks again, raising his voice enough to hopefully be heard through the phone, because Levi’s ears are pink as roses and he can’t help himself.

 Levi drops the phone away from his mouth, letting his head fall back against the booth. He closes his eyes in exasperation, tries to speak into the phone, is seemingly cut off, and finally turns to look at Erwin.

“When’s your birthday?”

Erwin’s eyebrows quirk. “October fourteenth.”

Levi brings the phone back to his mouth. “He’s a Libra, Ma, satisfied? Bye. No, absolutely the fuck not, bye, I’ll call you over the weekend, I love you. Bye!” He hangs up, muttering, “Christ.”

“Is she planning to get me a birthday present?”

“I fucking wish, she was trying to get me to ask what time you were born.”

“I—”

“Do not fucking tell me, she’ll find a way to get it out of me, and it’s better for you if we don’t.”

“I don’t even know,” Erwin says, and takes a sip of stout.

“Good.”

Levi takes a drink, a cheer rising from the bar. Erwin fishes out his phone from his pocket, feeling that it’s only fair.

“What’re you doing.”

“Asking my mother.”

“D—”

“For my own curiosity,” he says. “I won’t tell you.”

“No.”

Erwin doesn’t even see it happen. One moment he’s opening his messages and scrolling down for the last text from his mother—more than a month ago—and the next his hands are empty.

“Hey!”

He reaches across the table, but Levi is already tucking his phone into the inner pocket of his leather jacket.

“It’s rude to text at the table.”

Erwin sits back, defeated, dropping his hands into his lap.

And then he lunges forward, and Levi’s eyes get wide but he still blocks Erwin from getting anywhere near his jacket and Jesus, how is he this strong—

“Erwin!” someone exclaims over the din, and his stomach drops in horror.

A dark-haired woman has appeared in front of their table, two massive frozen margaritas in her hands, and Erwin is quite certain now that he was actually, traumatically concussed last night and that he is in a coma, having a very realistic nightmare.

“Did you steal our table?” She grins and sets the drinks down next to the empty ones. “My friend must’ve gone to the restroom, I dunno what she expected would happen. Anywho. It’s been too long! I didn’t expect to see you out tonight.” She grimaces, the overhead lights glimmering off her eyeshadow. “I didn’t mean—I just didn’t expect to see you! At my table! Here! How have you been?”

She leans over to give him a tight hug, and Erwin, finally managing to speak through a bone-dry mouth, croaks, “Hey, Marie.”

“We were just grabbing drinks here while we waited for our reservation time,” she says, grabbing a lime wedge from one of the margaritas. “The boys are gonna meet us there.”

“Well, we can—” Erwin begins to slide out of the booth.

“Oh, no!” Marie says, though it comes out more like “Er nerr” because she’s placed the pulp of the lime into her mouth and bitten down. He’d forgotten that quirk. She takes the lime out and drops it into her drink. “No, don’t worry, we’ll be out of your hair in just a minute. Can you believe how crowded everything is tonight?”

“No,” Erwin sighs.

Marie turns to Levi, who looks about as pissed as Erwin feels.

“I’m sorry!” she says. “I’m Marie.”

Levi picks up his drink. “Levi.”

“This is Nile’s wife,” Erwin says very clearly during a lull between songs.

She slaps his arm. “I’m more than that. Erwin knew me first,” she tells Levi, and takes a drink through her straw.

“I set them up,” Erwin explains.

“After breaking my heart!” She laughs, and Erwin would quite like to die right about now. “Wait, so are you a teacher, too, Levi?”

Levi has thrown back a substantial portion of his drink and swallows it all at once. “No.”

After a few beats, Marie nods, says, “Okay!” and leaves it at that. She turns back to Erwin. “It’s been too long since we all had dinner—”

“Heyyy! You aren’t my husband!” Another woman, bleached blonde with a wobbly line of lipstick around her mouth, has approached Levi’s side of the booth, though she’s looking right at Erwin. “Unfortunately!” She laughs, and it actually manages to drown out the cheering crowd for a moment.

Marie introduces her friend as Eileen or Irene or something, and Eileen-Irene plops heavily into the booth right beside Levi, who scoots so far over that he reaches the corner of the table and presses firmly into Erwin’s side.

All right, maybe he doesn’t entirely mind this turn of events.

“Were you boys trying to steal our table?” asks Eileen. She takes a long pull from her straw.

“You left it unattended,” Marie says, perching on the edge of Erwin’s side of the booth.

He places his jacket and scarf on his lap and shifts over—to give her more room—and now he’s pressed knee, thigh, elbow, and shoulder against Levi, who is either ripped to all hell or extremely tense.

“Well, I’m sorry, I was having a wardrobe malfunction.” Irene turns to Erwin again. “So, you teach with Nile, huh?”

“That’s right.” Erwin wishes he was much drunker than he is, which is not at all. He’s barely made a dent in his stout, and now his stomach feels like it’s going to violently reject anything he tries to put in it.

“What do you teach?”

“AP US History.”

“Eurgh.” Eileen makes a vomiting face. “Bo-ring. I was never smart enough for AP classes, anyway.”

“Shocking,” Levi mutters into his glass.

“Hmm?” asks Irene.

“Nothing.”

“Well,” Erwin says, starting to turn in the booth, “listen, we were about to leave anyway, so—”

“No, no, no you weren’t, you’ve hardly touched your drink.” Eileen reaches across the table—across Levi—to bat Erwin on the shoulder.

Levi reaches up, wraps his fingers around her forearm, and guides it away from his face.

Irene cradles her arm against her chest like it’s broken. “We’ll be gone in no time. What time’s the reservation, Marie, eight?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“Oh, okay, well, maybe you’ll have to put up with us a little longer, then! So”—Eileen turns to Levi, straw ready and waiting beside her mouth— “what do you do, Leon?”

“Levi,” Erwin says.

Eileen-Irene slurps at the bottom of her margarita glass.

“Sorry,” she says to Erwin. “Super loud in here.”

She looks back at Levi expectantly.

“I’m a janitor.”

Slurp.

“Interesting.”

Erwin doesn’t mean to—he tells himself that really, there are not that many places he can possibly put his hands at this particular moment, and that by placing them below the table—

No, he knows none of that’s true, and he should stop telling stories to himself.

He reaches for Levi’s hand—Levi’s fist—under the table and wraps it in his.

A split second passes where the entire room feels like it goes silent. And then Levi’s hand opens like a flower and his fingers lace with Erwin’s, gripping tight.

“Yeah.” Levi tells Irene. “It is interesting.”

“Is it?”

“It is.”

“It is?”

“Oh!” Marie exclaims, sudden and loud. “N—Wait, um, hey…” She looks down toward Erwin’s lap, and Levi’s fingers claw into his knuckles so hard it hurts and Jesus Christ, he’s probably going to be thinking about it for weeks.

“Erwin, is that your pocket buzzing with the reservation you were telling me about earlier?” Marie asks him, already standing. “Your reservation? For the restaurant?”

Erwin’s pocket is not buzzing at all.

“Probably.” Erwin peeks down and remembers that Levi still has his phone. “Ah, that’s them. Well, we’d better go.”

Levi pushes out from the other side of the booth so quickly that Eileen-Irene utters a surprised, “Oh, ’scuse me!” Erwin starts to dig for his wallet, wishing he just had cash to leave on the table but of course he didn’t think of that, so he’s going to have to track down their waiter—

“I got it.” Marie shoves his shoulder. “Go.”

“Oh, n—”

“Go, Erwin.”

She winks as he mouths thank you at her and follows Levi outside.

***

“So, just to make sure I got this right,” Levi says. Each word becomes a puff of white mist in the damp air. “We just ran into your ex, who is now married to Nile, on Valentine’s Day.”

“God.” Erwin might throw up. He’d managed to take two steps from Nanny O’Brien’s front door before needing to brace himself against the brick wall. The music from inside is pumped out to the street via a crackling speaker, and normally he’d welcome the Talking Heads but each drumbeat feels like it’s knocking on the inside of his skull.

“And,” Levi says, “you dumped her.”

He breathes. The cold air is helping. “Yes.”

“Okay.”

Erwin straightens slowly, willing his stout to stay put. Levi looks like he’s about to burst into laughter.

“So she,” says Levi, breathy, “settled for Nile. Fucking yikes.”

“No, I—”

“Oh, yes, she did, and that explains so much of that…” Levi gestures in front of his chest like he’s looking for the word. “…inferiority complex he’s got going on.”

Erwin shakes his head. “I don’t really think he’s got any—”

“Jesus Christ, Erwin.”

Levi saying his name is like instant lightning down his spinal cord, and he wonders if that’s normal or if, after everything, he’s just having a stroke.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” says Levi, “but…I think you are both the smartest and the dumbest person I’ve ever met.”

Erwin takes a final deep breath, expelling the last of his nausea.

“You aren’t the first to tell me that.”

Levi fishes around in his own jacket and hands Erwin’s phone back.

“C’mon, I don’t wanna be anywhere near here.”

Erwin checks his balance and begins the slow shuffle down the sidewalk, which is more than half ice. The drizzle-rain-sleet has hardened into tiny balls that gather in the folds of his jacket and in Levi’s hair. Levi has shoved his hands far into his pockets, his shoulders hunched close to his ears.

“You should’ve worn a better jacket.”

Levi rolls his eyes. “I’m fine, Sm—”

He cuts himself off as Erwin drapes his scarf around his neck. They’ve stopped in the middle of the sidewalk so suddenly that a pair behind them have to split around them like a stream around a boulder, but Erwin can’t bring himself to care.

“You don’t—Now you’re gonna be cold, dumbass.”

“I’m not,” Erwin says, “because I wore an appropriate jacket.”

Levi snorts. Their breaths mingle in midair, even though they aren’t standing all that close.

There it is again—that feeling of a balloon expanding around his ribs and gut and heart.

“My other jackets make me look like a literal child,” Levi mutters, looking toward the ground. “So at least when I freeze to death, I’ll look cool.”

“Well,” Erwin says, finally running out of excuses to keep holding the scarf. He lets it fall. “I can’t judge. My bedroom looks like a teenage girl’s right now.”

Levi looks up at him. “You mean like, full of Hello Kitty stuff, or—”

“Oh my god.”

“What’s the deal with that? You never told me.”

Erwin sighs as they begin to walk again.

“What,” Levi asks, “is it that embarrassing?”

“On the scale of embarrassing things about me, no, it’s really not. Hange put it there without me knowing because I bought Nile’s oldest daughter a gift for her birthday, and I brought it to school to give to him. It was in a Hello Kitty bag, because she likes it. Hange saw it and I made what I thought was a joke about it being cute. Two days later I get home and realize I’ve been driving around with a Hello Kitty sticker in my back window.”

Levi nods. “Yeah, that’s boring.”

“Told you.”

“I’m sorry,” Levi says, “but speaking of—‘wardrobe malfunction’? Is this 2004? People still say that?” He adjusts the scarf around his neck, tucking it closer, and Erwin feels plenty warm. “And who the fuck eats a lime like that? And why would you order a margarita at an Irish pub?”

The tip of Levi’s nose has flushed pink again.

“They’re actually pretty good margaritas,” Erwin says.

Levi rolls his eyes. His hands are in his pockets again, so Erwin nudges him gently in the side.

“You have nothing to worry about.”

“Tch. I’m not w—”

Perhaps Erwin nudged a little too hard, or Levi’s foot landed sideways on a patch of ice, but his leg goes suddenly out to the side and he grabs onto Erwin’s arm, though he manages to stay on his feet after a few desperate, clinging seconds.

“Are you ok? Because you drank that really fast—”

“Shut up, God, can you blame me?” Levi rights himself and dusts off his jacket.

“We should…It’s not exactly aimless walking weather.”

“Yeah,” Levi says, looking up and around. His face falls. “Shit.”

He grabs Erwin by the front of his coat and tugs, hard. Erwin’s heart is in his throat.

“Shitshitshitshitshit,” Levi says, dragging him into a narrow alley where everything is iced over and their legs get tangled because Erwin is trying to walk backwards and this time Erwin lands flat on his back, knocking the wind out of him. Levi catches himself on his hands before he lands on top of him.

“You okay?” Levi asks, and his voice rumbles through his chest and into Erwin’s, flush against him.

“Yeah,” Erwin tries to say, but it comes out more like, “hurrrk.”

Levi’s eyebrows draw together.

Erwin forces air into his lungs. “Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

Levi’s eyes roam over his face. He’s heavy for his size, and his hip is digging sharply into Erwin’s, and his chest is rising and falling rapidly. Erwin’s own matches it, breath for breath.

It could be seconds or hours before Levi pushes off him, then holds a hand out to help Erwin up. Despite the damp soaking into his pants, Erwin lies there for a second longer, looking up at the sky through the gap in the buildings, wondering how he got here.

He lets Levi help him up—not an easy feat given the amount of ice. Finally, Levi points around the corner.

“Look.”

Erwin peeks, and spots them after a few seconds of scanning up and down the street: Eren, Mikasa, and Armin standing under a streetlamp, and in their hands—

“Are they smoking?”

“Okay, Andy Griffith.” Levi grabs his shoulder and hauls him back into the alley. “Jesus Christ, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised to see my dead grandfather down here tonight.”

Erwin is inclined to agree.

“Okay.” Levi spins him around. “New plan. Where’d you park?”

Erwin gestures with his thumb over his shoulder, past where three of his students are standing. “In the lot by City Hall.”

“Fuck. Okay. Okay, no, it’s fine.” Levi jabs the fingers of both hands into Erwin’s chest. “This is the plan. We split up so they don’t see us together.” Levi pokes him again. “You go back to your car and wait for me there. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He jabs Erwin one more time, as if to drive home the point. “Got it?”

“Got it.”

Erwin leaves the alley first, stroll-shuffling down the sidewalk as casually as possible. The drizzle has stopped, but the wind is picking up, cutting through his jacket straight to his skin. He plans to ignore them, to just walk by as quickly as possible without falling on his ass yet again. He’s not sure his back could take it, let alone his pride.

But that, of course, would have been far too easy.

He’s almost in the clear when—

“Hey, Mr. Smith!”

A pair of voices hiss an angry, “Armin!” as Erwin stops—why hadn’t he just kept walking and pretended he hadn’t heard? The idea comes to him too late, though, and he’s already looking across the street to see Armin waving.

Erwin waves back.

And once again, he could keep walking, but—

Ugh.

He crosses the street without dying and hears additional hisses of “You did that on purpose!” “I did not!” Armin looks a bit like he’s trembling, even though he’s not even participating, as far as Erwin can tell.

Both Eren and Mikasa have their hands behind their backs. Mikasa looks like she’s holding her breath. From behind Eren there rises an obvious stream of smoke.

“Hey, Mr. Smith,” Eren says. “Is your head okay?”

“It’s fine, Eren, thank you.” He holds out his hand. “I’m not going to lecture you on something you already know, so let’s just do this quickly.”

A red-faced Mikasa coughs out a massive plume of smoke. Eren heaves a dramatic sigh, fishing a cigarette case out of his jacket pocket and placing them in Erwin’s outstretched palm. Then follows a Bic lighter, Mikasa’s e-cigarette, and—

“Armin.” Mikasa gently squeezes the boy’s shoulder. “That’s your inhaler.”

“Uh?? Oh. Right.”

Erwin shakes his hand a little until Armin realizes that he is allowed to repossess his inhaler.

“Eren,” Erwin says.

Eren frowns, then finally takes the cigarette out from behind his back—it’s mostly just a stick of ash by now, which falls to the ground as soon as he moves—and stubs it out on the cigarette pack in Erwin’s hand.

“Thank you,” Erwin says. “Have a nice evening.”

“You, too,” the three of them mutter, and Erwin crosses the street.

***

He’s not been sitting in his car for five minutes when the rain starts up again, harder than before. At least it’s real rain this time, which will probably melt the ice. He flips on Bertha’s wipers, squinting for Levi.

He wracks his brain to think of something else they can do. He supposes he could invite Levi to his house, but doesn’t want to assume that Levi will want to trek all the way out there. Maybe it’s better to just cut his losses now. Or maybe that’s what Levi’s intention was with this new plan—that it was a “just take me home” kind of plan. Yes, that’s probably it.

Erwin crosses his hands on the steering wheel and leans his forehead against them. This isn’t how he’d wanted tonight to go at all.

The passenger side door opens and Levi flops inside, rain dripping from the ends of his hair. The front of his jacket bulges out, and as Erwin watches he opens it and pulls out a six-pack of beer and two bags of chips.

“All right,” he says, setting everything on the floor between his feet. “Drive us someplace where we won’t run into everybody we’ve ever met.”

Finally, Erwin’s mind catches up with what’s going on. Levi’s jaw is tight, like he’s trying to stop his teeth from chattering.

“Take your jacket off.” Erwin turns the keys in the ignition, flips on the heat and peels off his own jacket.

Levi pauses in the middle of removing Erwin’s scarf and shaking it out.

“You don’t—”

“Just take it, Levi.”

Levi looks at him for a moment, then makes a face.

“Yessir.” He lays his leather jacket carefully on the backseat next to Erwin’s scarf.

Levi drapes Erwin’s jacket over himself and Erwin absolutely does not almost have an aneurysm on the spot at the sight of Levi in his clothing, holy shit as he reverses out of the lot, determined not to crash his car despite the reel of images that won’t stop playing at warp speed inside his head.

***

Erwin drives them to an overlook on a low hill just outside of downtown, right before a highway exit and about a half mile from one of the hiking trails. It’s not an overlook, officially, just a patch of flat land with a view of town and the surrounding hills. People use it as overflow parking for the hiking trails on the weekends, Erwin explains when Levi says he’s never been up this way before.

“Or they just come up here for the view,” he says, sweeping a hand toward the blurred lights and the blurred buildings through Bertha’s blurred windshield. He has better vision when he’s not wearing his contacts.

The rain, now completely un-frozen, has picked up heavily, melting the ice but making it a pain in the ass to drive anywhere thanks to Bertha’s rather meager windshield wiper power.

Levi pulls a small ring of keys out of his jeans pocket and uses one of them to pop open one of the bottles from the six-pack, which he hands to Erwin.

“I saw this guy in grad school open a beer with his wedding ring,” Erwin says.

Levi pops a second top off. “That’s kinda hot.”

“Yeah, it was.”

Erwin sits back in his seat and brings the bottle to his lips. Finally getting to talk to Levi after an hour and a half, and here he is, unable to think of anything worthwhile to say.

They both break the silence at the same time.

“Did you—”

“So what—”

“Sorry,” Erwin says.

“You go.”

He shakes his beer bottle a little, watching bubbles form. “I was going to ask how you learned cars.”

Levi twists his mouth, a bit like he’s tasted something sour.

“My uncle. I lived with him for a while as a kid, when my mom got sick. She’s fine now. Obviously,” he adds, muttering, and Erwin smiles. “She still gets…flare-ups, you know, but it hasn’t been bad in a long time. But yeah, he figured I should learn something useful. He owns a garage.” Levi lifts his bottle to his mouth. “And a money laundering front.”

He takes a swig, then says, “Prison runs in the family, or something.”

“Did he at least teach you how to launder money, too?”

“No, isn’t that bullshit? Could’ve taught me actual useful skills. He was always a bastard, though.”

Levi tucks his beer between his thighs and leans over to grab the chip bags.

“I didn’t know which ones you’d want, so I got options.”

Erwin tears himself away from imagining what it would be like to be a beer bottle and tries to focus on the choice at hand. He plucks the bag of barbecue chips from Levi’s hand.

“Better than astrology,” Levi mumbles, and Erwin laughs.

“Did I make the correct choice?”

“Yes, you did.” He busies himself with splitting open the salt and vinegar chips, not looking at Erwin. “Hey, thanks for…never making it a big deal. The prison thing. Some people get so fuckin’ weird about it.”

Erwin stops chewing, like too much noise will break the fragility of the moment.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Levi shrugs, and Erwin gets the sense that his nonchalance covers up something deeper.

“Whatever. It’s fine now. It was…” Levi shrugs again, jerkily this time. “Whatever. For a while there you were kind of the only one to talk to me like a human.”

“Really?”

“Well, you and Four-Eyes, I guess, but they also talk to their rats like they’re human, so.”

That breaks Erwin’s heart a little. A lot.

“Hey. Don’t look like that.”

“The kids really do adore you.”

“Yeah, ’cause I’m a sideshow to them.”

“I know they come to you with their problems. They don’t trust most people like that. They don’t come to me.”

“They still hang on every fuckin’ word you say. I heard you in your class the other day.”

“I know…” Erwin turns the bottle in his hand. “I know I don’t have the most self-awareness, but I also know why there’s a wait list to get into my class, and I know it doesn’t have much to do with my stellar teaching skills.”

Levi quirks his brows doubtfully. “You just think they wanna take your class so they can look at your stupid face and your big…eyebrows, or whatever?”

“Isn’t that what you said a few weeks ago?” Erwin laughs. “No one cares about the Monroe Doctrine?”

“I was giving you shit, Smith.”

“You?”

Levi snorts. “Fuck you. I told Kirstein that changing the music was your idea, by the way. And I’m pretty sure he told all his little friends, so be prepared to be their hero on Monday, I guess.”

Erwin blushes, and decides to guide the conversation elsewhere.

“What were you going to ask a second ago?”

Erwin smiles and rolls his eyes.

“Fuckin’ tell me what it means.”

“So, we didn’t have cable TV until I was around twelve or so.”

“Oh, I’m shocked.”

“Shut up. But what we did have were some random old VHS tapes of kids shows that I guess my dad had gathered from his classrooms over the years.” Erwin looks over, and Levi is looking at him with a bemused expression. “So one of them was this British kids show. About a machine in this factory, and every episode, the machine solves this crisis in the factory. And the machine was called—”

“Bertha,” Levi finishes.

Erwin smiles.

“Oh, what the f—Hold on. Wait.” Levi pulls out his phone. “You better not be fucking with me right now, Smith.”

“Why would I?”

“Because you’re you, that’s why.” Levi taps on the screen a few times, frowns, rolls his eyes. “…It’s, like, the second Google result for ‘Bertha.’ What the fuck, I’m so—” Levi rubs a hand over his eyes. “I’m looking up every famous historical Bertha, but I didn’t just…motherfucker.”

“And—I’m not finished—and I bought her after I was in an accident on my bike, and I was in the hospital, and the bills were piling up—”

“Wait, what the fuck? How bad was it?”

“I shattered my arm and needed physical therapy.” Erwin holds out his right arm. “It’s fine now. But I was literally borrowing money from my parents’ teacher’s pensions that I’m still paying back—”

“They’re asking you to pay them back?”

“Well, no, but I offered—”

“And they accepted?” Levi holds up his palms in surrender. “Whatever. Not my circus. Continue.”

Erwin sighs. “So I find this car that I can actually afford, right when it seemed like everything was going against me, so. She fixed a lot of my problems. Still true, by the way.”

“What’s still true?”

Erwin swallows, and decides he can’t make any more a fool of himself than he already has. “She’s still fixing my problems.”

Levi smiles, just barely—an uptick at the corner of his mouth. “Oh yeah?”

Erwin can’t help but smile, too. “Yeah.”

“What kind of problems, then?” And oh, he knows. God, he must.

Erwin blushes into his beer. “Spare me my dignity, Levi.”

They sip their drinks in a silence that stretches either seconds or hours—Erwin can’t tell.

Eventually, Levi speaks up again.

“Did you always know you wanted to teach?”

Erwin finishes his beer and leans over to replace the empty bottle with a new one. “Since I was old enough to seriously think about it, yes.”

“What about before then?”

Erwin’s mouth twitches. He holds his hand out, and Levi glances from his palm to his face.

“You wanna hold hands again, or what?”

“Your keys,” Erwin says, and bites the inside of his lip as if that’s going to help the heat creeping up his neck.

“I wanted,” he says, trying and failing a few times to wedge the teeth of one key under the bottle cap, “to be an astronaut.”

Levi snorts.

“You need help?”

The bottle cap pops off with a hiss, and Erwin hands the keys back.

“So why didn’t that happen? Scared of heights?”

Erwin points to his face. “Incredibly nearsighted.”

“I knew those were contacts.”

Erwin laughs.

“So why teaching, then?”

“My parents were teachers. But they tried to get me to…” Erwin shrugs, a familiar gap starting to eat its way through his chest. “…to do basically anything except teach.”

“Seriously? How come?”

“Yeah, they…” Erwin sighs. “I know they’re worried about me. They know what it’s like to barely scrape by, and I know they don’t want me to have to sacrifice as much as they did.”

The hole in his chest widens. He doesn’t tell people this. Even Mike doesn’t know the extent of his arguments with his parents. He tells them and everyone else that he moved three hours away so he wouldn’t overlap with his dad’s old school district and suffer comparison. But this…this, no one knows.

He suddenly remembers the therapist’s phone number that Hange gave him last year.

“I think…” he tries, and trails off.

Levi is looking at him without much emotion on his face, and that’s—that’s good, actually, because Erwin can actually take a few seconds to gather himself without feeling rushed.

“I think,” he finally says, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, “I’ve been told so many times that I wasn’t dreaming big enough, and that I was too smart for every choice I made, that I probably started devaluing everything I did. Like teaching is some halfway point on the way to something better. And I don’t think it is, but at some I must’ve started treating it like that.”

He winces. When had he gotten so spineless?

“People think that, like”—Levi jerks his wrist like he’s tossing some garbage— “it only counts as dreaming big when you’re doing it for yourself. Like you can’t dream big for other people.”

Erwin holds his breath, afraid that if he doesn’t he’ll shatter something hanging in the balance.

“I dunno,” Levi says. “That doesn’t make sense. I’m not good with words.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Erwin says softly.

Levi clears his throat. “And you know, I like to clean, so feel free to psychoanalyze every anal-retentive, need-to-control-my-environment-because-insecure-attachment whatever bullshit you want.”

Erwin snorts despite the aching pressure in his chest. “What would you do if you weren’t doing what you’re doing?”

“Dunno. Open a tea shop or something, maybe.”

Tea. They could have gone for tea somewhere, Erwin is sure. There are a few coffee shops that might be open and would certainly not be as packed as the restaurants, but he’d been so fixated on drinks—

He lets his head fall against the headrest and shuts his eyes.

“What?” Levi asks.

Erwin shakes his head, opens his eyes toward Levi.

“I’m sorry, Levi. For everything tonight.”

Levi’s brows draw together. He lowers his beer slowly. “What d’you mean?”

“I didn’t…” He sighs and tries again. “I just didn’t want to mess things up. Especially with—” he gulps— “with you. But I feel like I’ve done nothing but mess up.”

“You didn’t mess anything up. I’m a cheap date.”

“You asked me what I was doing for Valentine’s Day two weeks ago and I didn’t realize—”

“Yeah, well, you’re a dumbass.”

“The coffee debacle—”

“I got to see you shirtless. I feel like I won that one.”

“Making you go to the vet with me because of my stupid cat.”

“You didn’t make me do anything. And I still want your pizza.”

“The restaurants.”

“Literally how were you supposed to know the blooming onion place was gonna try to go Kitchen Confidential?”

“Marie.”

Levi shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah, okay, that sucked. But it wasn’t your fault. And it wasn’t even her, it was the drunk lady that sucked. Marie seemed nice. Easy-going.”

Erwin digs his thumbnail at the label of his beer.

“Bet you hated that,” Levi says.

Erwin freezes.

“You were bored, weren’t you? That why you dumped her?”

Erwin feels it like a gut punch.

“Yes,” he croaks.

“Either way,” Levi says, “I’m enjoying myself. Are you not?”

Erwin frowns at the beer in his hands. Because of course he is. Because Levi is here, with him.

“Of course I am.”

“So how come you think I’m not?”

“I don’t know.” He sighs.

“All I…” Levi gestures emptily, like he’s looking for words to pluck out of the air. “…I don’t give a shit about…restaurants, or whatever.”

“…What?”

“I mean…shit, Erwin. I mean I like your stupid little Battleship Galactica ties—”

“Battlestar.” Erwin’s mouth works on its own because there is complete silence in his head right now, because he can’t—is Levi—?

“What the fuck is a battlestar?”

He swallows. His heart pounds in his ears. “…A battleship.”

Levi rolls his eyes. He leans down and shoves his half-drunk beer back into the six-pack carton at his feet, like he needs both hands to gesture his disapproval.

“I like your stupid little ties and your Ken Burns Jazz and your suicidal cat with the stupid name, and you’re smarter than everybody else in that school but you still talk to those kids and everybody else like they’re your equals and you kinda snort a little when you laugh and also what the fuck is your workout regimen because you eat like a rabbit but Jesus fucking Christ—”

Levi pauses, seemingly to take a breath, and Erwin can’t manage to focus on anything because of all the blood rushing to his head and he thinks he might actually pass out which would just really be the icing on the cake of this evening.

Levi is shaking out his hair, smoothing it down over the tops of his ears.

And Erwin, much like how he’d wanted to do at the vet’s and like he did outside the gym last night, reaches out to catch his hand in midair. This time, though, Erwin releases it, and brushes Levi’s hair back from his face, tucking it behind his flushed ear. The touch brings him back to himself. His vision clears, and his pulse, still pounding, sinks out of his head and back into his chest.

He lets his fingertips linger on the shell of Levi’s ear and the sharp angle of his jaw. His skin is silk-soft, and the feel of it sends shivers up Erwin’s spine.

There’s a soft curve to Levi’s mouth, which Erwin can see now because they have leaned closer over the console. He can’t remember how he got here. Is he even breathing? He doesn’t think it matters.

He only realizes that he’s still staring at Levi’s mouth when it opens to speak again.

“What are you waiting for, Smith?”

Erwin drags his eyes up, past pink lips and a softly sloping nose and up to eyes that burn so bright Erwin feels singed around the edges, the kind of burn that’s so hot it looks cold in the way of blowtorches and planets. Something settles in Erwin’s chest, a question, a loose piece that’s found its home.

He leans down to place his half-empty bottle beside Levi’s.

“I don’t know,” Erwin answers, and kisses him.

There is a breath-brief moment of utter quiet: the midair hover after jumping from a tire swing over a summer lake, or the instant between striking a match and the surge of the flame. Even the rain seems to stop.

And then, the deluge.

Levi both melts against him and pushes boldly into the kiss, the tip of his tongue teasing Erwin’s bottom lip, and Erwin opens his mouth to kiss him thoroughly. He brings one hand to Levi’s cheek, curls his fingers around his ear and tilts him right—there—so they slot together like puzzle pieces, like the click of a sturdy lock. Levi kisses his mouth wider. He’s reached up to grip Erwin’s forearm, like he means to hold him there as long as he wants. Erwin wouldn’t mind. Erwin would let him.

When Levi inhales through his nose, cold air tickles Erwin’s cheek, reminding him that he does need to breathe, actually, if he wants to continue this, which he very much does. He breaks the kiss downward—unwillingly, regretfully—so he can catch his breath but also because he wants to look, because he feels like he should.

He’s loose-limbed and warm, and he rests his brow against Levi’s, takes in the glazed look in his eyes, the swollen shine of his lips. He did that. Erwin did that.

He must look a similar state himself, because Levi’s eyes drift over his face and then sharpen, and his breath quickens, and he mutters, “About fucking time,” right into Erwin’s mouth before diving back in, kissing him hard, feverish.

Erwin is touch paper to Levi’s flame. Levi digs his fingers into Erwin’s hair and Erwin brings his hand around the back of Levi’s head, tears their lips apart to lay firm kisses along the sharp cut of Levi’s jaw. He nudges his nose into the hollow beneath Levi’s ear. He smells like plain soap and clean linen. When Erwin opens his mouth against Levi’s throat, his groan vibrates back to Erwin’s molars.

The angle is wrong, Erwin thinks, though he can’t be bothered to move himself from this spot, from where his lips and tongue seek Levi’s pulse.

He doesn’t have to; the choice is made for him. Levi scrambles over the console and into Erwin’s lap with the agility of a gymnast. Or perhaps he’s just small.

Levi sits with more force than is probably necessary, grinding their hips together through layers of clothing that are suddenly too many, and Erwin has to remind himself as a moan escapes his throat that he can’t just tear Levi’s clothes off right here and now, much as he may want to.

This is good, though—better than it has any right to be, and the angle is still awkward but it’s better, and it’s Levi, so Erwin doesn’t mind. He leans back in his seat and wraps his arms as tight as they will go around Levi’s trim waist, tilts his mouth up and lets Levi fall forward against him.

Levi grabs his face and kisses hard, knocks Erwin’s lip against his own teeth—feral—and it goes straight to Erwin’s head faster than champagne bubbles. Like a blow. Like an IV straight to his veins. He leans forward even though it’s hard with Levi so close, his face angled almost straight down—but he manages to push back a little, to trap Levi’s plush lower lip between his teeth and pinch, like a brand. He imagines the twin valleys that his canines leave in flesh. When has he ever been this possessive, like the most important thing is that Levi knows is you have me, you have me.

He gets a reward in the form of a low, syrupy moan, and Levi breaks the kiss to pant against his mouth. He looks almost lost, dumbstruck.

Or maybe Erwin is projecting. He is, after all, surprised to find that they are still inside his car, the rain a cocoon around them.

Levi leans his brow against Erwin’s, and his entire chest cavity fills to the brim. To overflowing. His throat should not be tight like this after one date and one makeout session in the front seat—the front, not even the back—of his car. But still, he tightens his arms even harder and leaves a brief, soft kiss on Levi’s pointed chin.

Levi huffs. It sounds like a laugh. He loosens his grip on Erwin’s head but doesn’t let go, just runs his fingertips up and down his cheeks like he’s mapping their shape.

“You have,” Levi says, low and husky in a way that settles somewhere down near Erwin’s pelvis, “really good bone structure.”

Erwin blinks.

“What?”

Levi’s touch skims around his eyes and down to the bridge of his nose. He’s always been a little self-conscious about his nose, though the bullies always seemed to go for the eyebrows.

“I’m saying I like your face, Erwin.”

His name again, lightning down his spine. Levi must feel him shudder.

“Oh.”

Levi’s lips quirk up. The urge to have them in Erwin’s mouth is growing stronger, like the whistle of a tea kettle.

“I like your face, too.”

He leaves another peck on Levi’s chin. Then the tip of his nose, which is flushed pink. And then he slides one hand under Levi’s thigh and uses the leverage to haul him even closer, until the bulge in his jeans rubs against Erwin’s and they both exhale hard and hot into each other’s mouths.

“And I like the rest of you,” Erwin murmurs, and kisses him again.

If the first time was a deluge, and the previous was combustion, this is—it’s bliss. It’s slow and careful, like they have all the time in the world. They might as well. Erwin would be fine with living here, his mouth attached to Levi’s, until the end of time.

He feels half-liquid when he finally gets his fingertips under the hem of Levi’s shirt, but the surprised little noise Levi makes, followed by a scrape of teeth along Erwin’s lower lip, turns him back into a fully corporeal form at once. He flattens his palms against the hot skin of Levi’s waist and drags them up, up over the muscles shifting as Levi claws at his hair and tilts his head to bite at the side of his throat.

Everything about this feel so surreal—Levi in his lap, tasting of beer and vinegar, their hips rutting mindlessly together. Levi mouthing, sucking, at the skin of his neck so hard Erwin’s mind goes completely silent and surprised there aren’t sparks shooting out of the ends of his fingers. Levi snaking a hand between the press of their bodies to palm firmly over Erwin’s very insistent erection—

His hips buck, and Levi moans, “Shit,” against the hinge of Erwin’s jaw, pulling back just enough to let himself speak.

“I can’t invite you home,” Levi pants against his cheek. “Barely have a door on my room.”

“We can go back to mine.” He turns his head and briefly sucks Levi’s earlobe into his mouth. “Only if you want.”

“Across town, I—”

Levi cuts himself off, hips circling, and Erwin agrees: he does not want to wait another minute.

“Let me touch you.” He doesn’t even care how pathetic he sounds to his own ears.

“Here?”

“Here.”

“This is your car.”

“I’m aware.”

“Do you even have condoms in here?”

He—No, he does not. The white-hot buzzing in his head quietens by a single decibel. It’s good to discuss this like adults. They are not horny teenagers. Allegedly.

Erwin pulls back a bit, a breath, but the sigh Levi gives could easily be mistaken for a whine.

“No,” Erwin says. “I’m clean, but—”

“Me, too.”

“But I don’t want you to be uncomfortable—”

“I trust you.”

Erwin forces his eyes to focus. “Are you really that worried about the mess?”

Levi looks down at him, face like stone. “I’m a fucking janitor.”

Something—a hiccup—that punches into Erwin’s sternum, and then turns into a laugh. He buries his face into Levi’s clavicle and thinks he hears the breathless laughter in his chest. He smells even more strongly of soap here.

Erwin lifts his head suddenly.

“I do have a clean gym uniform in the backseat.”

Levi lifts a brow. “You’ll have to wash it again.”

“Oh, I’m never giving it back.”

Levi looks to the side, shakes his head.

“I can’t believe I’m gonna agree to this…”

“Levi, you don’t have to agree to anything.”

“Shut up—god, just shut up and touch me or I think I’m gonna die.”

Fine. Erwin can do that.

He repays Levi in kind, taking one hand away from Levi’s back to slip between them, rubbing against the length of him through his jeans. Levi moans against his mouth and seizes Erwin’s lips between his teeth. He tugs at the buttons of Erwin’s shirt, popping the first few one-two-three and shoving a hand down against where his heart is thudding against his sternum. Erwin brings both hands down to unzip Levi’s fly and thinks he does a decently fast job, considering that while one of Levi’s hands kneads at his chest, the other is back in his hair, tugging at the roots and muddling all his thoughts.

The angle is awkward this close, and to get his hand down Levi’s underwear Erwin has to shift forward a little. Levi keeps kissing him like Erwin’s his only source of air. Erwin is not sure he’s breathing at all, in fact, when he finally gets his hand around Levi’s leaking length and Levi’s lips go slack against his. Yes, there’s definitely no more oxygen left in his head.

“God—” Levi’s breath stutters as Erwin strokes him as best he can in this position, smearing precome all over his hand that he suddenly, desperately wants to put in his mouth. “Shitting fuck, Erwin.”

He catches Levi’s lips with his again, fevered. If he’d thought hearing his name out of Levi’s mouth drove him wild before, hearing it like that, trembling and needy, almost kills him.

The force of the kiss drives Levi back a few inches, and Erwin feels him hit the—

HONK.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Levi mutters, and Erwin lets out a single, breathless laugh.

Levi squints for a second like he’s figuring something out. He grips Erwin’s jaw in one hand and kisses him firmly yet sweetly, then bends down and reaches under the seat. It takes Erwin far too long to understand what’s happening, and by the time he does he’s already jerking backward a few inches in his seat, his stomach swooping after him.

“That’s it?” Levi mutters, sliding off of Erwin’s lap and onto the floor between his knees. “Fuckin’ tall people bullshit.”

“Levi, what are you—?” he begins, and the rest of his words get lost in a grating exhale as Levi tugs his fly open almost violently.

He could probably come just from the relief of being freed from his jeans alone, but then Levi puts his hand on him decisively and strokes him through his boxer briefs, Erwin’s brain short-circuits.

“Knew it,” Levi mutters, working to free Erwin with one hand while Erwin is entirely unhelpful, frozen as he is, staring at Levi who has his hand on his cock and a mildly worried look on his face.

Levi pulls his other hand out from beneath the seat, holding something white, circular and flat.

“You lose this?”

Erwin blinks at it, then takes the lid from his gas station coffee cup and tosses it into the backseat.

“I cleaned,” he manages, proud that he can still speak a technically complete sentence. Technically.

“Wouldn’t be down here if you hadn’t.”

Levi strokes him once, eyes fixed on Erwin’s cock, and Erwin again loses all power of speech.

“This okay?” Levi asks his cock.

Erwin waits for a second, realizes he needs to speak, but his tongue seems to have forgotten every word its ever known and a sound comes out of him that sounds kind of like “Hn?”

Levi’s eyes flick up to him, blue-gray and sparkling.

“I said—”

“Yes. Yes, yeah—shit, Levi!”

Levi’s mouth has closed over the head of his cock and Erwin can’t, actually, he simply Can Not, wrap his mind around what’s happening right now. It’s one thing to be squeezed up against each other with his hand down Levi’s pants. But it’s an entirely other thing to be sitting in his car in a place that’s technically public, though he hasn’t seen another car this whole time, with Levi crouched under the steering wheel stuffing as much of Erwin into his mouth as he can.

Levi hollows his cheeks, swirls his tongue, and Erwin presses himself back in the seat, toes curling in his boots. He reaches down, finds Levi’s hand where it lays on his knee, grabs it. Levi’s eyes flick up to his and hold them, and Erwin barely feels him clutch his hand in response. Then Levi folds their fingers together again, like they’d done in the bar, and the balloon of emotion in Erwin’s chest is so full it hurts.

“Levi,” he says, just because he wants to.

Dark brows draw together, and Levi wraps his other hand around the base of Erwin’s cock and squeezes. Erwin’s head thuds against the headrest.

“Shit—Levi, you feel so damn good—”

Levi draws off him slowly, and Erwin watches, disbelieving, as his tongue darts out to lap up a spot of precome from his bottom lip. Levi clears his throat.

“Dunno why I like it when you cuss so much, but I’m gonna need you to keep doing it.”

“I will,” Erwin gasps, “if you keep that up.”

Levi shrugs, the tilt of his mouth wicked. “We both win.”

And he takes Erwin back in his mouth, lips stretching around the girth of him, and shit, he’s not going to last one more minute. Levi closes his eyes and starts to bob his head in time with the pumps of his hand. Heat coils deep in Erwin’s gut, a spring ready to release, and he sees his peak rushing toward him.

“Levi,” he says again. “Levi, ohmygod, you’re incredible.”

Levi’s pace has gotten uneven and Erwin doesn’t care at all, unable to stop his hips from making tiny thrusts up into the tight, wet heat of Levi’s mouth, and Levi is moaning now and it’s reverberating all the way up his spine to his skull—

“Wait.” Erwin squeezes his hand, but Levi just looks up, not stopping, and panic grips Erwin’s insides. “Wait, I’m—Levi, I’m—”

Levi shakes his head, pins Erwin’s hand to the side of his thigh and hums encouragingly, sucking his cheeks in. Erwin stares at him, dumbfounded and definitely more turned on than he’s ever been in his life. His hips thrust upward on their own accord, and Levi winces, eyes watering, but before Erwin can pull back to check if he’s all right Levi recovers, swallows against him, eyes bright and cheeks pink. Erwin curls forward, and that flame that’s been burning him from the inside bursts forth in a blinding wave of heat.

Levi takes everything Erwin gives, swallowing, licking, dribbling only a little out of the corners of his mouth that he wipes up before Erwin can feel the rest of his body from where its levitated somewhere in the stratosphere, let alone before he can form a coherent thought.

He collapses back into his seat, half-imagines becoming one with it as Levi pulls off his cock, gasping and wiping his mouth.

“Levi,” Erwin says, because he wants to.

Levi squeezes his hand. When he speaks his voice is rough and wrecked, and it teases one more drop out of Erwin’s limp cock.

“Touch me.”

Fuck. “Please.”

He grabs Levi under the arms, hauls him back up into his lap. He’s focused, tugging Levi’s jeans over his ass so that he can pull him out of his underwear. Levi jerks at the brush of his hand against the wet circle of precome in the fabric. Erwin leans up to capture his lips, but Levi turns his head.

“Mouth—”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.”

Levi grabs Erwin’s shoulder and leans over the seats. He takes a swig from the open beer he’d returned to the six-pack carton, swishing it in his mouth for a second before swallowing.

Erwin’s cock twitches.

When Levi settles back into his lap, he lets Erwin kiss him, hard and sloppy, still uncoordinated from his orgasm. It doesn’t seem to matter—Levi’s cock pulses as Erwin takes him in hand, and he melts forward, burying his face against the side of Erwin’s neck.

“Levi, God, you’re close, aren’t you?”

There’s a muffled whine near his ear.

It’s an easy slide, with Levi leaking this much, and Erwin sets a quick pace that has Levi squirming in his lap. He brings his other hand down to squeeze at Levi’s ass, digs his fingers into the muscle, Levi mouthing at the skin of his throat, his clavicle.

“Please,” Erwin says, “come on—”

He pauses, remembers, strokes him faster, kisses his hair.

“Oh, shit, Levi,” Erwin breathes, and Levi shakes, groans, grabs at Erwin’s hair. “I haven’t told you how fucking beautiful I think you are, have I?"

“Fuck off.”

“No.”

Levi freezes, tense, breath hot and hard against Erwin’s neck.

“Erwin—” He wriggles one hand between them to tug the hem of his shirt up and out of the way, shadows sharp against the ripple of his muscles. “Erwin, shit—”

“Will you come for me, please, fuck, Levi—”

Levi muffles his cry into the crook of Erwin’s shoulder. Heat erupts over his hand, and Erwin strokes him through it all, pressing his mouth to Levi’s temple and the side of his head as he twitches and trembles.

“Jesus,” Erwin mumbles, and Levi gives a last twitch before he puts a hand on Erwin’s to stop him.

Erwin takes his hand off of Levi’s ass and wraps it around the small of his back, pulling him close. Levi turns his head, panting against Erwin’s cheek. And Erwin is content to sit here feeling Levi’s ribs expand and contract against his arm as he catches his breath, the rain still drumming on the roof and sheeting down the fogged-up windows. The lights from downtown wink at him, quivering, through the glass.

Finally, Levi braces his hands on Erwin’s seat and pushes back, gaze falling to Erwin’s lap.

“Christ,” Levi mutters. “Lemme clean up.”

The dark hairs on Levi’s stomach are slicked flat, but it’s too late to save the bottom of Erwin’s shirt from being a cum-soaked mess. Erwin reaches up and uses his clean hand to push Levi’s damp hair back from his face, tucking it behind his ear.

He kisses him, a tired press of lips, and then goes to reach for the gym uniform behind his seat. “Okay, hold on.”

“I got it.”

They clean themselves up as much as possible, Erwin scrubbing uselessly at the stain on his shirt before giving up because like hell he’s going anywhere else public tonight.

Levi covers his face with both hands and stretches his back, muttering, “Jesus fucking Christ” at the car’s roof in a way that fills Erwin’s gut with wicked heat.

Erwin twists around to find a place to deposit the soiled clothes, and when Levi leans back to give him room he braces himself against the dashboard.

Against the radio.

Which lights up like a cheery fucking Christmas tree and pours forth a cacophony of cymbals and piano.

“—on tight!/Though it’s cold and lonely in the deep dark night/I can see paradise by th—”

Erwin drops the clothes, reaches around and flicks the radio off again.

Levi’s hands land on his shoulders. Erwin looks up. Levi looks like he’s biting on the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t burst into laughter.

The rain pounds on Bertha’s roof.

“I can’t believe I let you touch my dick.”

“Listen—”

“No, I’m not listening to you anymore. Let go, asshole.”

As Levi makes to vacate his lap Erwin wraps both arms around him as far as they’ll go.

“You’ll have to fix it again,” he says into the side of Levi’s neck.

“Fuck you, Smith.” He squirms, gripping Erwin’s biceps. “There’d better be pizza this time.”

“Deal.”

“Actually, no, you deserve this. I hope you and Meat Loaf are very happy together. Christ, I don’t get you.”

“It has a good association now.”

Levi stops his half-hearted moving. He looks at Erwin, whose face is growing hotter by the second.

“Ugh,” Levi says, making a disgusted face, and grabs Erwin’s face in both hands, kissing him long and deep.

When he pulls back, Erwin is still floating a little. Levi’s hands squeeze the sides of his head a little harder, and he looks up in silent question.

“An idiot sandwich,” Levi murmurs.

Erwin snorts.

“I swear to fuck, Erwin, the number of times I thought you were rejecting me in the politest way known to man only for you to turn around and…hold my hand or some shit—”

“You started that.”

“Yes, because I have been throwing myself at you for months and did everything except drop to my knees and suck your dick in the middle of your garage, but honestly I’m not even sure that would’ve gotten through to you.”

“You could’ve tried communicating better.”

Levi’s expression darkens, and Erwin knows he’s fucked up.

“How’s this for communication?” Levi says, and reaches past Erwin’s pants, still undone, grabs him and strokes him hard a few times.

Pain and pleasure spark and meld in his gut until he’s batting at Levi’s hands, breathless again, saying, “All right, all right, I get it.”

He pulls Levi close, seizes his lips, drags his tongue against where they’re still a bit swollen. Levi opens his mouth and pinches Erwin’s lip with his teeth, dragging another small moan out of him.

When they pull back, they’re both panting.

“You think you can make it to your place?”

“Yes,” Erwin rasps. Barely.

Levi scrambles off him, buckles his seat belt, slaps the dashboard like it’s a beloved horse.

“Drive, Bertha.”

Erwin turns the ignition, flips on the lights and wipers, turns around to check for cars and shifts into reverse.

“Erwin.”

“Yes?” He eases on the gas.

“Put your dick away.”

Once they’re finally pulling away from the overlook, pants safely (if temporarily) closed, Erwin decides to take the most direct route home, straight through downtown. He’s really not in the mood to waste any more time.

He reaches over and flips on the radio.