Chapter Text
They said that the war would be a short one, and his own deployment would be short.
They said that their particular mission would be a short one. In and out and be back for dinner.
Soldiers had barely gotten in when they were besieged. It was a short mission, that much was true. Almost no one got out alive.
They said a lot of things, and that day he realized that none of those things were true.
The dead ones are the lucky ones.
The first time he saw Levi again, after That Day, it was during a bright fall day. Every fall color bursting outside of the window, the bluest imaginable sky, the fluffiest white clouds.
He stood there, just inside the door, dumbstruck. Words and intelligence abandoned him at the impossible sight. But truth was truth and here was Levi--thinner, desolate, shattered, but alive.
Erwin quietly, patiently, waited for an invitation to enter that never came. Levi just stared at a point across where his bed was, right on the juncture between the wall and the ceiling. He doubted Levi even knew he was in the room.
The hospice had put Levi in a room at the end of the corridor, with a pretty view outside the window. White stark room with freshly painted walls, new mattress and brand new sheets, fresh-painted bedframe unblemished without a chip in sight.
Clean. Antiseptic in appearance and in smell. Just the way Levi liked it. Only he doubted Levi realized any of it.
The world went by, as usual; the sky turned and steel grey clouds roiled.
The nurse came and told him that visiting hours was over.
At home, he realized he hadn't even greeted the other man. He'd do it tomorrow, he thought, and went to make his dinner.
*****************
The next time he visited, Levi was asleep. He lingered around just inside the door but didn't dare to step closer. Then he loitered in the corridor for awhile, took a peek and decided to come back another day.
The next seven days were the same. Then he wondered whether Levi was genuinely asleep or was faking it. He didn't know what to ask, so he stayed quiet.
He still hadn't said anything to Levi. He wanted to say at least 'hello'.
*****************
The guard at the gate checked him in and told him that maybe he should apply for a visitor passcard, if he were going to be regular here. The guard knew about Levi--who doesn't?--and everyone knew that it would be a long time before Levi could leave the hospice.
He told the guard he would think about it.
The guard gave him a visitor parking slip, saluted him and lifted the barrier gate.
Erwin added the slip to a growing pile on his empty passenger seat. He didn't have to count to know. There were twelve, today made thirteen.
He didn't go to Levi that day. Hospice Guest Relations gave him the administrative runaround, made him slog through so much paperwork it reminded him of when he still held rank. It was the end of the day when they finally took his photo and slapped a plastic ID card on scarred marble table. He looked nothing like himself in his photograph, he thought.
When someone finally broke the silence, it was Levi, who had just returned from physical therapy. Tired and pale, sweating all over. So tired that he didn't even ask for a wash or a change of clothes, climbing straight out of the wheelchair into the bed.
Levi didn't say hello, didn't offer a how are you, so Erwin didn't too.
The first word Levi said was 'sorry'. And the words that followed were apologies. It was as if he had rehearsed it a million times in his head, and perhaps he did.
He apologized for being late--more than a year that was almost two years. He apologized for fucking up Erwin's plans and Mike's future. He apologized because he couldn't bring Mike home, not even Mike's dogtags, or Mike's engagement ring--the same ring that Levi had helped Erwin buy that one summer morning because Erwin got an epiphany, the same ring whose twin lay quiet in a box under Erwin's bed.
He apologized for not saving Mike for Erwin. He apologized that he was alive when Mike was not.
Levi's voice remained low throughout, his eyes stayed empty and dry. Levi had his hands in his lap, fingers wrung tightly they turned white. His head was tilted awkwardly, angled on a stack of pillows so he could look at the neon light on the ceiling. He continued his apology like a litany of prayers. He used the words sorry and regret like punctuation marks, but never asked if Erwin could forgive him.
Erwin stood helplessly, just inside the door, trying to his find his voice so he could say words like it's okay, or don't worry, or even I forgive you. But every time he opened his mouth, a memory of Mike came to his mind's eye and it stilled his voice. Mike smiling, Mike laughing. He could feel the ghost of Mike's hands on his shoulders, Mike's fingers entwined with his. Mike who still lived in his heart, but whom he hadn't thought about so often anymore. Until now. He let out a strangled sob. Now all he could think of was Mike.
The world went by, quietly and calmly. Levi had stopped talking, now merely staring at the leafless tree outside his window.
The nurse came in right at that moment, as if she had been standing outside the door all this time, and perhaps she had. She led him out of the room and made him sit down on a hard chair in the corridor, perhaps with more force than necessary, then disappeared back into Levi's room.
When Erwin was in his car again--the car he bought together with Mike a few weeks before That Day--he caught a sight of himself in the rear mirror and couldn't recognize the red-eyed disheveled man in it.
He still hadn't said anything to Levi. Now he doubted he ever would.
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He didn't leave his house for the next one week. He ate out of ramen cups and tuna cans, and drank out of a beer cans. He online-shopped more ramen and more beer, when he ran out of them. When he wasn't holed up in a room that had been his and Mike's, with memories scattered around him on the floor in a very untidy way. In a way that would inspire snide remarks from Levi.
Levi who was alive--broken but alive--when Mike was dead.
When he ran out of beer in the middle of the night, he started on the scotch--two bottles that he had given to Mike for his last two birthdays. The first empty bottle went into the recycling box, barely. The second, he threw against the wall. He now had a dent in the wall, but the bottle didn't shatter. It fell with a dull thud on thick carpeting--Mike hated the carpet's garish pattern, swore to replace it, but now would never do.
He slept where he fell then woke up with a pickax in his head, the sun in his eyes, and a realization that he actually resented Levi for coming back when Mike did not.
He resented the fact so much that it made him see white, then black, then red.
He destroyed everything in his living room and only stopped when he broke the side table that Hange had given him as a housewarming gift.
The same Hange who listened to his confession patiently, but then cursed him out, cutting and clear, through the crappy connection of his video call. Who looked like an angry avenging angel on the cracked screen of his cell phone. Who told him to set up an appointment with a psychologist or a psychiatrist or both. Who told him not to show his face around the hospice anymore, at least until he got himself sorted out.
The same Hange who thanked god that Erwin didn't die of blood loss, alcohol poisoning or MSG overdose, before hanging up.
******************
Veteran Services assigned him a counselor, and State Med-Insure paid for his psychologist.
They gave him several appointment dates to start with, and he circled out his calendar accordingly--it was a gag gift from some kids at the Academy where he helped with PT once in a while. It had been Mike's gig, which he filled when Mike's not around.
He never missed an appointment, because he's dutiful like that. Even when he didn't say anything the first few meetings, because he didn't even know himself.
His counselor was very old. If she were a sequoia, she would be the tallest, but as it was, she had a nasty stoop. His psychologist was kind, but he supposed all psychologists were the same. Nobody he had to meet wore white coats, only tasteful fashionable clothing with enough color and texture to make them conversation pieces.
He video-called Hange once in a while. Short calls where they talked about little things, skirting around the subject of his mental health in favor of the weather outside his window. Sometimes they talked about the pretty chef on the cooking channel he had on mute, praising the pretty plate of food that came into view on his cracked television screen--the television that he had moved from his bachelor apartment in the city that he never stayed in but paid for anyway. He still had it, still paid for it. He wondered why he did.
He went to the gym sometimes; self-medicated before bed all the time.
He had gone through all the bottles of wine that had been given to him and Mike at one time or another. Now he was chummy with the corner-store clerk, who told him to ease up on his drinking, even though Erwin's purchases could easily put her son through college. She sent him home with food sometimes, leftovers from the diner where her husband worked. To soak up all those alcohol, she thankfully didn't say, though her bright concerned gaze followed him out of the door.
The day his psychologist urged him to consider joining Alcoholic Anonymous, the first snow fell.