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Eren and Levi had been dating for a year when Eren came home to sheets warmed by someone other than him. Everything had frozen and coalesced down into that moment, and if you’d asked Eren right then if there had ever been a “before,” or an “after,” he would have told you no. But then the moment broke, shattered really, into thousands of splinters that cut Eren open and left him to bleed away his heart and his love on the cold wood floors. Levi looked vaguely horrified and somewhat guilty, but it was the expression on his companion’s face that sealed a deal that had previously not existed. Smug, unbearably so, cluing Eren in to the fact that this was certainly not the first time that such a “meeting” between his boyfriend and his boss had happened.
Eren guessed that Levi was waiting for him to explode into a fiery rage, and he didn’t blame him. Eren wasn’t known for his restraint. Instead, the brunette set the groceries he’d picked up gently down on the threshold of the bedroom. “Ingredients for lamb stew,” he sighed. “I know it’s your favorite Levi.” Levi flinched. Eren only cooked lamb on special occasions – like their anniversary. After relieving himself of the bags, which had begun to cut off circulation to his wrist, Eren turned and walked to the kitchen. He picked up his wallet and keys, making sure to slip Levi’s apartment key off the fob and leave it on the table, and proceeded to walk himself out the door.
With a touch of bitterness, Eren realized all his stuff was still in that awful place that had, up until five minutes ago, been synonymous with “home.” With a touch more bitterness, Eren decided to let Levi deal with his shit. There was nothing of true consequence there, besides things that would have reminded him too deeply of their relationship and would have thus been left behind regardless.
He heard a thump and a muted curse behind him, as the door swung open, stopped abruptly on what had to have been a foot, and then opened the rest of the way with a creak. “Eren,” Levi called. His voice, usually so deep and smooth, cracked. “Eren…I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Tell it to someone who cares, Levi,” Eren called back hollowly. The young man didn’t bother to turn and see what effect his words wrought on the man he thought he loved.
Eren kept walking. What else could he do? What other direction was there to go, besides forward?
-
That night, Eren curled up in his own bed, in his own apartment, and wept. Wept for the time wasted on a love not reciprocated, wept for effort wasted on fixing a relationship that was obviously meant to die, and wept for his undying and devoted support wasted on a man that had no use for it.
Two days later, Mikasa and Armin showed up to snap him out of the depression he was sliding into. They puttered around him, from kitchen to living room and back, with soft smiles and gentle comfort. Eren felt something deep and profound and grateful rise in him, in those first few days. They were the hardest, but he emerged on the other side of a week, ready to start the long and arduous process of rebuilding himself from the ground up – without the love of Levi pushing him to be better every step of the way.
But instead, he had the quiet and unassuming presence of his oldest friend and adoptive sister to lift him back up. And one morning, Eren woke to find himself grateful, far more grateful than he’d ever felt towards Levi, to Armin and Mikasa. For coming back to him, when he had all but abandoned them.
When he voiced this sentiment, they had both laughed and told him to stop being stupid.
That day, Eren felt the first piece of himself slot back into place. That day, he realized that he would be
okay.
-
Five months later finds Eren in a different city with a different job and a strange new apartment.
One year later finds him happier than he ever thought he could be sans Levi.
Two years later finds Eren in a bookstore, facing familiar and shocked grey eyes that stare at him over the low-standing wooden shelves that look just this side of toppling over.
“Eren?” Levi asks hoarsely. “Are – is it really you? Did I really find you?”
Eren laughs, and it isn’t a cruel sound. “No Levi,” he says, not unkindly. “You didn’t. Just as I didn’t find you. It’s coincidence; that’s all.” Levi casts his eyes down, mouth flattening into a thin line. Eren remembers a time when that expression would either drive him up a wall or straight into Levi’s arms.
“Eren, I – could I take you out to eat…not – not as a date or anything. There’s a lot I have to tell you. To apologize for. I mean, of course, it could be a date if you wanted?” Levi’s expression is so tragically hopeful – he’s putting himself out there and Eren knows he has to crush him.
“I’d love to meet up with you, Levi. But not as anything other than old acquaintances, okay? We closed that chapter on our lives.”
“Okay. Okay. Can I – can I give you my phone? So you can enter your information. I’ll call you?”
“Alright,” Eren replies warmly. He allows Levi to hand over his phone, sleek, expensive - probably an overcompensation - unlocked and already pulled up to his old contact. Eren is faintly suprised to see the smiling him of almost three years ago, looking as if he hadn't a care in the world. Just beneath his photo, the cursor blinks in the space for a mobile number, and Eren finishes tapping it out in a matter of seconds. “See you whenever, Levi.” He passes the phone back to its owner, waves, leaves, without a book to show for his travels. He turns to the door, and doesn’t see the heartbreak in Levi’s eyes as he regards the young man who’s come so far and grown so much.
-
Three days later finds two men sitting at a booth together at some quaint little coffee shop.
Eren takes his coffee unsweetened. Levi notes this, and Eren laughs. “Tastes change. People change. That’s life, I suppose.” He notices that Levi has the exact same order he has ever ordered; an Earl Grey with one half spoon of sugar. The Eren of two years ago might have sardonically taken this as telling. The Eren of two years ago was jealous, angry, and directionless, hovering on the cusp of manhood, but still far too much a teen to take the final plunge into becoming an adult. However, people change, and Eren has grown past the pettiness born of his heartbreak.
After an uncomfortable silence, Levi begins to speak. He tells Eren of childhood loneliness, of abandonment and fear and the fact drilled into his young head that he will never be good enough. He tells Eren of his deepest insecurities, and how he was determined to push away every good thing that happened to him, just so he could live with the knowledge that he had done that, and they had not simply been ripped away from him. How he realized there was really no difference between the two if it meant those good things were gone in the end. And how he realized this after Eren had walked out of his life without looking back.
“Eren,” Levi concludes, eyes serious and dark. “Eren, I’m so sorry. I know I’m a bastard and you shouldn’t want anything to do with me and…well, you’ll never know how sorry I am. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. I know I have no right – but I want to try again. Please, Eren. Please.”
Eren regards his ex-boyfriend of many years, nonplussed. Levi can see that, and he shifts, uncomfortable but riding a desperate edge of hope born of the fact that Eren was here, in this coffee shop, with him – when he didn’t have to be at all. “Levi,” Eren says tiredly, “I don’t think you ever loved me.” Levi replies with a vaguely pained noise, but Eren cuts off what he attempts to say. “No. You don’t do that to someone you love. You trust that you can let them go, and they will return. You didn’t want me to be my own person. You wanted me to be this static, unchanging thing, which you could regard with whatever it struck you to regard me with in any given moment. But you know Levi? It seems to me that you’ve become that thing instead.”
Levi sucks in a sharp breath, hands fisting on the tabletop. “I’m sorry,” Eren says sincerely. Levi believes him. Because they both know: this is a goodbye. “Find yourself Levi, and live for yourself. Heal. You deserve it, okay?” Eren gives him a gentle smile, one that Levi once told him was brighter than the sun, before getting up and tossing a few crumpled bills on the table and turning away. Severing his last tie to the pain of the past feels less melancholic and more like he's rediscovering wings he didn’t know he had.
-
Levi sits alone at the table, long after Eren has left, stewing in his own regret and guilt and self-hatred. He lost the only thing he had ever wanted for eternity, and he deserves it. Pain throbs in his chest, steady and constant.
Still, he returns home feeling somehow lighter. Eren freed him, without Levi even knowing – and so, the cycle of recovery can begin again.
-
-
-
And perhaps, long down the road, you will find two weathered, wizened men greet each other as old friends on the other side of death.
Perhaps you will see the great white wings upon those men’s backs, if you squint just so.