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“Tell me what the city looks like now.”
Erwin’s voice is heavy, and for the first time in his life, he sounds old—propped up in bed with his remaining hand clasped loosely around a bundle of letters to which he’s been intending to respond. He hasn’t reviewed his personal correspondence in a week, much to his obvious chagrin. He hates being useless.
“You want me to tell you a fairytale?” Levi’s smile is bittersweet and barely there from where he stands in the corner, arms crossed over his chest as he studies Erwin intently.
The blue eyes are still sharp, though, and Levi is sure he will never fail to feel that glacier that melts straight from the center of his heart when Erwin looks at him.
“No,” Erwin replies curtly, turning his eyes back down to the papers in front of him. “Tell me what it looks like now. I haven’t been out in a month.”
Levi just looks at him for a moment, but then decides to humor this man by whose side he’s been fighting and whose bed he’s been sharing for over a decade.
Acquiescing to the request, he pulls a chair toward the bedside. It scrapes against the rough-hewn wood floor—Erwin was never overtly fond of excessive luxury—and sits down.
“I’ll tell you what my mother first told me about Sina as a child,” he offers, looking Erwin in the eye.
The reference to his mother earns a raised blond eyebrow, but Erwin remains quiet, his attention now riveted on Levi.
“There’s a grand circle within a circle.” Levi snorts a little, but keeps going. “And in the center, everyone wears fine clothes, even whores.”
Erwin clears his throat and straightens his shoulders, setting the letters aside.
“You don’t think she said ‘whore?’” Levi guesses.
“She called herself a whore?” Erwin asks, immediately fascinated by this piece of information.
Levi leans back in his chair, crossing his legs and straightening his pristine white shirt thoughtfully. “No,” he says after gathering some bits of memory that he usually doesn’t turn to, “not herself. She called herself a ‘companion,’ but back then, they were interchangeable for people not in the trade.”
“The first term seems to also be in vogue now,” Erwin remarks dryly. “Either way, I hear the benefits are rather decent these days.”
Levi shrugs a little; he’s heard the same, but he’s gotten a little too tired to follow politics the same way he used to.
Erwin suddenly blinks heavily, his eyes going a little glassy, and Levi fights to keep his face neutral.
More to the point: he’s attended to only necessary affairs since Erwin has been bedridden.
“Well,” Levi continues, searching Erwin’s face for lucidity, “companions are now openly earning their trade in the city, fine clothes or not. Also, there are new roads.”
“Where do they lead?” Erwin asks, his voice suddenly dreamlike.
“I don’t know,” Levi admits with a slight shrug. “I haven’t been down all of them yet.” He wracks his brain to try to think of something interesting about Sina to say that Erwin doesn’t already know, and then it occurs to him.
“There’s a man with a cart,” he says, shaking his head disdainfully, “who’s been selling these shitty souvenirs with your face on one side, and the old crest on the other.”
That earns a loud bark of a laugh, and Erwin’s eyes are focused again. “Does it really look like me?”
Levi gives a short puff of air and stands with a slight shrug, reaching out his hand. “You’ll have to come with me to get one and see.”
Erwin says he will, but it’s much in the way that he’s determined to answer his mail, and open the curtains each day—all things that, right now, he isn’t able to get around to.
But still, Levi heeds his requests to describe the city. Really, it should be Armin Arlert doing it if anyone could provide actual expertise, but he wants Levi.
The truth is that Sina never existed in any of the descriptions his mother provided—it was always a city destined to be a saccharine fairytale to rot if left in the wrong hands, but Erwin has never been one for fantasies.
“Levi,” Erwin asks again, his voice surprisingly strong, “tell me what the city looks like now.”
And so Levi sits and describes every moment of his twenty minute walk over to Erwin’s apartments that morning—what the newly laid cobblestones look like at dawn and how ugly the souvenir vendor is—until dusk has settled.
Erwin manages to eat all of his dinner, and Levi is able to sleep that night.