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They both turn to the noise outside. It sounds like someone toppled over the drinking fountain at the end of the corridor. Armin, Hange’s assistant, looks over the clock on the computer screen. It’s two in the morning.
After a few moments of silence, they go back to work. Then someone’s retching violently right outside the door. Armin turns blue and Hange looks a little too excited about the situation.
“Ghost maybe?” she whispers loudly. Armin squeaks.
The thing outside bangs unevenly on the door. Hange rises from her seat. Then it talks. Rasps out angry.
“Hange. I can fucking smell you in there.”
This time, Hange loses color.
“Stay there,” she tells the assistant who looks ready to pass out. It might have been the four cans of Red Bull. Maybe it’s the possibility of something like a miracle. Whatever it is, Hange’s heart is beating so fast she thinks they’re going to need an ambulance.
She opens the door. And there he is, looking healthier than he’s ever been with a bright yellow body bag held around his waist for some dignity. He hasn’t changed at all except for his pitch black eyes and his mouth bleeding at the gums.
“Levi,” Hange breathes out.
He holds on to the door frame, heaving with bloody drool. Hange can tell he’s eyeing the assistant. “Levi, don’t! I just got him and he’s really good at organizing my office--stop! I have some bags, okay? Just sit down. Armin, come with me. Armin!”
Armin is rooted to the spot. “I...just cut into him an hour ago.”
Erwin runs into them in Russia in the dead of winter. It’s been another several decades.
“Someone’s looking for you,” Ymir tells him. He had attended Hange’s funeral eight years ago and had just ended his travels with Mike last week. He can’t think of any loose threads. “Demanding little guy. Didn’t give a name though.”
For a small moment, Erwin lets himself think of Chicago. Even without his face, the memory bites harder than the cold.
“He didn’t come only to us,” Historia supplies. “He’s asking around. You have a fan, it seems.”
Winter always brings something. Erwin dreads it every year as much as he looks forward to it. Something about the cold comforts him.
This time, he’s in a town in the mountains in Japan. Most people have gone to the city, leaving the few old behind. It’s quiet. People keep to themselves.
There’s a bridge at the edge of town, across a small river. It was once a bright vermillion, ravaged by age into a warm brown, built on a zigzag so the devil can’t follow as myth goes. Erwin often stands in the middle of it, hoping the magic will work against the demons of his past. But he goes home before long because he worries one particular demon won’t find him and he can’t allow that.
The moon is bright when he decides it’s time to go home. He doesn’t make it to the end of the bridge when the breeze blows cold, stirring the fresh powder snow, and brings the scent of croissants. Right in the middle of the mountains, half a world away from where he remembers it from.
“There you are.”
Erwin turns and there he is. A devil had followed him, sprinting across the bridge into his arms.
“Armin has done well. Moblit and Hange would be proud,” Erwin tells him one day.
They’re in France, in an estate that was once in Erwin’s name. It had been left to ruin when they arrived but has since then been rebuilt. There’s a cottage deep inside the estate, away from prying eyes. Levi runs a small tea house in the front. Erwin gardens in the back.
They have Ymir and Historia often. Each year they come back stronger, more grown. Curves and angles showing on their bodies and faces. Each year, the lines in Ymir’s face grow deeper as she smiles and Historia’s hair turns into spun silver. They always leave with hands held together.
Levi knows. And yet. “Could we wait, just a little longer?”
Erwin is almost four centuries old. Levi is past a hundred.
“Of course, darling.” He’s not in a hurry anymore.