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intrinsic-reggae · 2 years

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the mortal price of crossing twice levi ackerman/grim reaper!reader (attack on titan) CROSSPOSTED TO AO3 word count: 8k tags: 18+ MINORS DO NOT INTERACT, grim reaper reader, soulmates, levi literally flirting with death, canon-typical violence, blood mention, knifeplay, smut, implied loss of virginity, angst with a happy(?) ending a/n: i wrote this one night and woke up and forgot i wrote it and then spent 10 months translating it into something vaguely readable--hope it was worth it!

The room is silent and still, the air stagnant and reeking of mildew and decay when you arrive.

The place is an absolute hovel.

To call it anything else would be an injustice to the squalor.

It’s damp, dim, and windowless—after all, there’s little use for windows in a place that sees no sun. The paint on the crumbling walls is cracking and peeling from the yellowing surface in large, unsightly clumps, with piles of plaster and paint collecting on the warped, jagged floorboards underfoot.

The only light comes from the sad stub of a misshapen candle, lit on a rickety table on one side of the room. It’s burned so low that the flame seems sure to flicker out at any moment.

Much like the occupant of this place.

If anything, you’re glad that this woman won't have to stay here any longer.

She lays in the wooden bed, thin and grey and hardly alive at all—you’re certain that to any human eye, they’d think she was already dead.

But your eyes are not human, and you watch impassively as she draws her final, shuddering breaths.

Her soul, you can’t help but notice as it becomes more and more visible to your trained eyes, is a lovely shade of periwinkle blue.

“Who are you?”

The voice surprises you, unaware that there was anyone else in the dingy, musty place that reeks of death that has not yet come to it. You cast a fleeting glance in the direction of the noise–it’s not as if they were talking to you, but it’s more instinct than anything to look towards the sound.

A pitiful creature sits curled in the corner upon itself, withered away to practically nothing—made up of sharp lines of sinew and bone under paper thin, pallid skin that has taken on a sallow tone.

A child, you think to yourself, though given how emaciated and sickly they are, you can tell neither their age nor their gender.

But what shocks you is their eyes.

Wide, glistening with life in spite of the decay of their flesh, and fixed firmly to you.

Can they… see you?

You raise a finger, pointing it at yourself.

“Are you talking to me?”

The child keeps their gaze on you, hesitating for a moment, and then nods slowly.

You pause as you process the realization.

It’s not entirely unheard of for mortals who are close to death to be able to see your kind.

The reapers.

Those charged to ferry the souls of the dead on, either to reincarnation or to The Void—to the promise of new life or an eternity of endless darkness.

It’s your responsibility—your duty—to uphold the balance between the living and the dead. No new soul can enter until another has been reaped, a law of equivalence to maintain a careful stasis all existence must operate within.

You do not adjudicate; you play no part in judgement, your role is merely to shepherd. The ruling of any soul comes down to you from a higher power, and it is you who is tasked to see it through to completion once the verdict has been decided.

But this child has not been ruled upon. Their fate not yet pronounced.

Their soul is not yours to take.

And yet here they are: so pitifully close to death yet still just beyond its grasp. With the equinox only a matter of days away—the time when the veil between the mortal world and your own domain is at its thinnest—this child could see you.

What terrible misfortune this wretched soul must have.

“What’s your name?” Your voice is quiet when you speak again, slow to form the question that sits awkwardly on your tongue. You’ve never spoken to a living soul before—at least not in a lifetime that you can remember.

The child appraises you warily for a moment.

“Levi.”

A wisp of periwinkle in the corner of your eye tears your attention away from the boy—at least you think he’s a boy, after having been given his name. You look back to the woman laying in the bed, and the soul that lingers over her: its final earthly tethers severed, ready to be guided on.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” the child asks, and you glance back towards him.

“Yes.” There’s no reason for you to lie. You look at him, at the way the light in his eyes dims. “Was she your mother?”

“Yes.” The response is weak, breaking in the wake of your use of past tense.

But his next words sound even more pained.

He looks up at you, fear creeping into his sunken stare.

“Am I going to die too?”

“No,” you respond immediately, “you’ll live."

You have no authority in the matter, and you can’t consult the stars so far below the surface. You know only that you’ve not been burdened with the weight of his crossing—his fate is too far for you to see from the depths of the skyless underground—but you can’t help but tell the boy what he needs to hear.

“Promise?” the emaciated boy rasps.

“I promise,” you say, something twingeing deep in your gut as you force out the words. A feeling, painful and foreign, chokes you.

But you aren’t supposed to feel.

Not pain.

Not pity.

To feel—in all it’s agony and ecstasy—is a privilege reserved for the living.

You depart from that place without saying anything else, leaving the little boy in the dank, dingy room as the candle on the table finally flickers out.

The periwinkle soul is dealt with, and all too soon you find yourself again in Limbo.

You like Limbo.

Neither the world of the living, nor the world of the dead—but rather somewhere situated halfway between the two.

Much like yourself.

You choose to spend your unaccounted for time in this flux, unlike the reapers who prefer to flitter unseen in the land of the living or those with more morose inclinations who linger on the periphery of The Void. You prefer Limbo and it’s constant stasis of non-being.

Forever passes faster here. At least until another job comes through.

And it always does. And always will. Because as long as people live, people will die. There will always be a soul to steer through to the other side—to escort to a perpetuity of nothingness, or guide to a new beginning.

“What do we have here?” a voice cajoles from the other end of the bridge you often find yourself loitering on between jobs—built of silvery rope and white birch boards, it stretches across an unmoving river as black as ink and as fathomless as the depths of the sea.

You don’t need to look up to know who the voice belongs to.

Zola is like you, only worse. For all the eternity you’ve been indentured as a reaper, Zola has been here for double that. For every woebegone moment you’ve spent in the liminal space between jobs, she’s had countless more.

The fact that she can still smile so carelessly, carry herself so weightlessly, might amaze you were you not so numb—but the numbness is the only thing that keeps you from grappling with the fact that eventually you’ll be just like her.

Zola joins you at the centre of the bridge, skipping along to sidle up beside you. She leans over the roped edged to survey your face curiously as you look out at the still water of the unflowing river. You hold your gaze there, not daring to look up at the stars overhead.

You don’t want to know what they might show you if you do.

“Oh,” Zola draws out the mono-syllabic word far longer than is necessary. “You’re even more brooding and sullen than usual. What did you do this time? Don’t tell me little miss perfect messed up a job?”

“I didn’t do anything,” your words are curt, cool, and dismissive as you respond.

Even if they are a lie.

Zola rolls her eyes, flicking her long hair over her shoulder as she turns and begins to saunter away. She pauses, but doesn’t bother to look back as she calls one last taunt flippantly over her shoulder.

“Lie to me all you want, but you can’t lie to the boss!”

There’s always a moment of adjustment when you return to the mortal world from Limbo.

You have to take pause to come to terms with where you are—when you are—and it’s an uncomfortable sensation. You always find yourself a little disoriented as you meet the ground, but before long you find your footing and you’re off again.

Time in Limbo feels brief—in a tolerable, pacificatory way—and each time you make the journey back to the mortal world time has slipped by quickly, like grains of sand racing through an hourglass and collecting in the bottom. But so much can reshape itself—can grow and shift and change—during your time away, to the point that the same streets can be almost unrecognizable from one visit to the next.

It’s why you like Limbo. Things there stay constant.

Still, you can’t help but feel drawn back to the mortal world.

More so all the time.

Specifically to a grimy city under the surface, that sings with souls to be reaped—those who have died of famine and disease, while others have been ripped from their earthly bodies by violence and bloodshed.

After all, no one in the Underground dies a peaceful death.

But you aren’t here for them.

You’re here for a boy—he must be 12 or 13-years-old now, though his sickly childhood felt contradictorily as though it had only been moments prior but also a century ago. So many jobs have passed since that night near the equinox, and yet you still think of him all the time.

You size him up appraisingly as you perch atop a tattered awning that hangs above a boarded up window, your legs swinging as you kick them idly below you.

Levi is less scrawny now, though still quite small by most standards for a boy of his age.

And yet here he is, getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of him by a grown man twice his size.

You watch impassively as the man towering over him lands a hard kick to the left of Levi’s ribs. Levi drops to the ground and rolls, dirt clinging to him as he pushes himself up unsteadily to his feet again, though you can tell the effort pains him. As he squares himself to face his adversary once more, you catch sight of his eyes.

And that’s when you know he really is no longer the same boy you’d once met.

The light in his slate-grey eyes has dulled to a spiteful glint.

Levi swings, quick but stumbling over his own feet, and a flash of silver catches your eye.

The knife clutched in Levi’s hand pierces the mans throat, blood spattering obscenely against the grimy brick wall of the alleyway. Scarlet drips slow as the assailant drops to his knees, falling prone into the filth of the street.

A fitting end for a foul man.

Another reaper, one you’ve never met before, appears. The two of you share a brief look before he wisps the ugly, rust coloured soul away and disappears through the veil.

To The Void, you’re certain.

If the fellow reaper had wondered why you were there, he hadn't bothered to ask.

Your eyes watch as Levi collapses to the ground in a battered, broken slump.

You drop soundlessly to your feet and approach him.

He’s in bad shape: bones fractured and face bloodied as he fights to remain conscious, pupils dilating and contracting as his vision comes in and out of focus. He has a large slash down his right arm from the knife the man he’d slain had been wielding, blood staining the tattered material of his shirt as it seeps from the wound steadily. You watch the crimson stain grow with every passing beat of his racing heart, but his pulse weakens as he loses his grip on his consciousness.

He could die. You sense it in the way his soul is squirming inside of him, loosening its moor to the vessel in which it resides.

But it’s not his time yet.

His eyes meet yours briefly before they go unfocused and glassy, and then he passes out completely.

“Look at the state of you,” a voice tuts from the other end of the alley, and your head turns to see a man with long hair slicked back and tucked under a hat sauntering up the unevenly cobbled street. You watch as he kicks the corpse of the man whose soul has just been reaped onto his back, scrutinizing his vacant eyes and gaping jaw for a moment.

He crouches down towards the corpse, a hand snaking under the edge of the bloodstained jacket to steal the pouch of coins from the pocket of the dead man’s yellowed shirt. He tuts reproachfully as he tips the meagre lot into his hand, but he pockets them all the same.

“Nice one, kid,” the man chuckles a little to himself, leaning over Levi’s unconscious form and scooping him up into his arms.

You can’t help but follow the two back to a little apartment you’ve come to recognize. It’s as dilapidated as any in the Underground, though marginally better kept than most. You hover near the home’s solitary window and watch as the man cleans and patches Levi’s wound with a tenderness his gruff exterior doesn’t betray.

He changes him into another tattered shirt once his injuries have been seen to, and then places the boy atop a lumpy mattress pushed into one corner of the room, pulling a threadbare blanket up overtop of him. He pauses just for a moment, watching the sleeping boy’s face with the same rapt attention that you pay to his.

He leaves long before the boy wakes, and you return to Limbo, to languish in the emptiness that stretches between jobs.

But you know you’ll be back soon.

Perhaps not for him, but for you.

Before you know it the little boy that once was is a man—and it happens so fast it feels like you’ve only blinked.

It’s the equinox again. Twenty mortal years have passed since that first night you’d laid your eyes on him—but a short eternity has passed for you, countess jobs completed in between.

You find yourself in the subterranean city once more, drawn there like a moth to flame, something treacherous fluttering in your stomach.

There’s no breeze in the Underground—no current to circulate the air that’s heavy with the scent of filth and rot that clings to every corner of the place. It’s cold, and for the first time you can feel the chill on your skin as you travel the streets. Can feel eyes following you as you go from shadowy corners and windows without panes.

The equinox is a funny beast: an occasion, twice a year, where the day and the night are the exact same length.

A perfect balance.

On the night of the equinox, the reapers can return to the mortal world, granted an earthly body but only until the sun crests.

Some reapers see it as a celebration of the hard work they carry out—an opportunity to let loose and indulge in merited hedonism—while others regard it only with bitterness. A taste of mortality they’ve abandoned that slips fleetingly through their soul-reaping fingers twice a year—a reminder of what they once made the choice to eschew.

It’s the first equinox since all those years ago you’ve found yourself without a job and with any desire to leave Limbo. But unlike your fellow reapers who are above the ground in taverns and brothels or wherever else they may be finding their precious vices, you muster your nerve to step back upon those familiar squalid streets.

There’s no point in lying and saying you aren't looking for Levi. You’d not once made a trip below the surface—left the enduring sanctuary of Limbo—for any reason other than to reap a soul or to find him.

You walk and walk—ignoring the disconcerting din of the buried city and focusing instead on the sound your footsteps make on the streets littered with gaping holes, cracks, and puddles of murky water—until you find him leaning against a lamp post, the dim gaslight flickering overhead.

His flat grey eyes peer right into your face as you pause, only a few paces between you.

You feel something kindle in the depths of your chest as he appraises you. He holds you firmly in his unimpressed gaze, and you revel in the experience of being seen.

You stand there longer than is natural, or warranted, but you aren’t sure what else to do.

“Not safe to be out alone at this time of night,” Levi gruffs derisively, nodding you on as he twirls a pristinely cleaned blade between nimble fingers. He’s not wrong to say so, but you’re no more a stranger to the violence and brutality of the place you find yourself than he is.

“It’s always night here,” you find your tongue to reply, even-toned but not unfriendly. “And never safe.”

You’re on a corner three streets north of his apartment. The one he shares with his sandy haired friend and the little pig-tailed stray they’d taken in. You’d known, of course, that this is where he’d be.

Levi huffs a little—and you might have even thought it was a laugh if you weren’t so familiar with his temperament—but he doesn’t disagree.

“Have we met? You look… familiar.”

You bite back a smile. “I don’t believe so.”

His stare narrows, like he detects you’re hiding something from him.

“You look lost,” he says, pushing himself off of the street post and stalking a step closer to you, “and I’m not about to walk you home like some damsel in distress.”

No, you know he won’t do that. But you also know that when he lets you leave he’ll do a thorough search of the immediate area for any signs of danger, and then perch on a rooftop until he sees you get to where you're going—the very same thing he’s done for dozens of other women in his lifetime. That you’d seen him do with your own two eyes though he hadn’t been able to see you with his.

“I’m not lost or going home—and I’m certainly not in distress.”

“Well, where are you going?” he demands, still staunch in his skepticism and evident distrust of you and your motives. The knife between his fingers twitches in irritation.

“Hmm, not sure,” you remark, lips pursing in consideration. You settle on something half-way to a truth. “I thought I’d just… wander for the night.”

He makes that sound he always does: a hiss of air behind his teeth that sounds neither like a tut nor a click of his tongue, but rather a combination of the two. There’s a tick of strain in his jaw.

“Did you break outta somewhere? Because if you have a boss that’s coming looking for you, you’re moving at an awfully slow pace.”

Your brows lift.

“I’m not running from anyone, and I don’t have a boss.”

Well, that last part is a bit of a lie—but he has no need to know that.

He looks like he doesn’t believe you.

“What?” you ask him, noticing the look on his handsome face.

Levi’d grown into his looks beyond anything you could have imagined from the gaunt little boy he’d once been.

“There aren’t many people in this shithole who look like you do and don’t have someone who’s taking care of them—and it’s rarely charitable.” He tacks the last part on pointedly—sharp in its implication.

“Look like I do?” You quirk a brow inquisitively. “And whatever do you mean by that?”

Levi’s lips part, and then close again—if it wasn't so dim in the Underground, and if your eyes weren’t so damn human at the moment, you might believe you see him flush.

“You look… healthy,” he settles on the word after long pause for deliberation.

“Be careful, sir—I’m a lady, after all.”

His eyes flicker up to you the minute you say the word sir. Something shifts behind the silver of his eyes, and suddenly he looks every bit as dangerous as you know him to be.

You keep walking at a leisurely pace, and the sound of his boots on the street behind you tell you that he’s following.

“What’s your game?” he asks, jaw clenched as he falls into step beside you.

“I have no idea what you mean. I’m just a healthy girl out for an evening stroll,” you flick your skirt a little as you walk, like you’re frolicking through a garden and not a filthy underground street.

“You must have a death wish to wander around like this all night,” he snaps at you. Your eyes search for his, wondering why he cares.

You stop.

Something flutters in the pit of your stomach—rippling like a pebble dropped in a still pond, and radiating outwards as it grows inside of you. For a moment you appreciate how deliciously foreign it feels to feel at all, but the reflection is swallowed rapidly by something more desperate. Something more esurient.

“Then why don’t you take me home with you,” you say the words quietly, breathy and exhilarated, as your fingers grip the material of your skirt, “if you’re so concerned about me?”

Levi narrows his eyes in disgust, recoiling from you slightly but not stepping away.

“I don’t pay for sex.”

That’s because you don’t get any, you want to add but don’t.

“I don’t remember asking you to pay me,” you quip instead, inching forward until your noses are practically brushing, wetting your lips with the tip of your tongue.

“You either want me to pay you outright, or you’ll steal my coin purse before you leave,” Levi tries to put bite behind his words, but his eyes follow the gentle sweep of your tongue across your lips too raptly for them to sting. “Maybe both.”

“I don’t have any interest in your money,” you breathe, reaching up towards his face. Just before your fingers can graze the smooth skin of his cheek, you feel a hand around your windpipe, and the press of brick against your back.

Levi has you pressed against the wall faster than you see it coming, his blade poised to your throat.

A thrill runs down your spine.

You don’t feel fear—how could you? It’s not like you can die. Fear is just another honour bestowed upon the living.

No, as the cool metal presses against the hot skin of your neck, you feel only excitement. It’s as clear an indicator as any that Levi’s careful composure is starting to crack.

You didn’t think it would be this easy. Didn’t think that after only a few words he’d be so affected—and you can’t help but wonder if he feels it too. That draw. That magnetism that has you constantly coming back to find him in this damp, dark streets so very far from the light of day.

“You’ve lost your mind,” Levi breathes, eyes scanning your face. You can see the fascination in his eyes, the way he can’t understand why even with your life in his hands you don’t cower or shy away from him. The frustration as he works through why he likes it so much.

You press closer, and without thinking he lifts the pressure of the knife so you don’t hurt yourself.

“I suspect you may be right,” you reply airily.

Your eyes flicker up, and you realize that you’ve come to the staircase of his residence. There are no lights on inside. No one is home.

“You didn’t answer my question you know,” you murmur, eyes watching the way his lips part carefully—like you don’t want to miss a moment of the sight. “Are you going to take me home, sir?”

The words deliver the final killing blow to his restraint, a hand grasping the back of your neck to pull you close enough that your mouths can meet.

It’s all so mortal. So biological. From the pulse pounding in your ears and the warmth that swirls through you. It’s a symphony of sensations, the likes of which you have no memory of ever feeling. You wonder if the euphoria that washes over you is something you’ve experienced before, in a lifetime that no longer lives in your memory.

You wonder how any force on heaven or earth could have ever made you forget it.

Levi’s hands are steady as they cup your cheeks, but he seems reserved, his initial fervour softening into something more delicate as your lips part against his. He’s very tender for a man who’d had a knife on your jugular only a moment prior.

He guides you up the stairs to his apartment—unlocking the door without having to separate from you for too long, pressing you against the wall just inside once the two of you are safely across the threshold.

“Levi,” you whimper as his body—his solid, sturdy body—presses into yours.

He draws back, his stare dark as he meets your gaze.

“How do you know my name?”

“Everyone around here knows your name,” you lie, your throat tight, and hope he accepts it.

If he doesn’t, he still continues on.

He’s unpracticed, but earnest. You see it in the way his eyes aren’t sure where they want to look as you slip out of your dress, the material pooling on the uneven floorboards at your feet in his bedroom. You feel it when his hands drift—hip to sternum, back to breast—like he can’t decide where he wants to touch you as more and more of your skin is exposed.

The cold nips at you, but not for long. Not with Levi’s body joining yours atop the rough weave of his bedsheets.

Levi kisses you like he’s been starved of it.

You feel the same.

It’s messy and desperate—nipping and licking and sucking between your greedy, spit slick lips—a give and take between whoever wants it more. Needs it more.

You take Levi’s hand in your own, delighting in the weight of it—the feel of his skin against yours. You guide it down to the dripping wet heat between your legs. Your fingers press his where you need them, you show him how to stoke the flames consuming you.

Your head pushes back into the thin pillow it rests upon as two fingers slip themselves inside of you, curling experimentally.

“Yes, yes,” you babble, and your encouragement bolsters him, his confidence building with every word of praise that passes through your swollen lips.

But there’s no time to waste. Every precious second is one you cannot bear to squander.

You reach for him, changing your positions and pressing him down into the mattress as you straddle his waist. Your hand strokes him languidly, thumbing at the sensitive ridge underneath the blushing tip of his cock.

“You’re good at this,” Levi says mistrustfully, squirming under your attention—the motions of your gentle hands almost too much for him to bear.

“It’s because I want you,” you sigh the words out, airy and yet somehow so heavy—anchored down with longing.

You rise to your knees atop him, and his hands settle at your hips.

His fingers tremble as he holds you.

You sink down onto him.

You both moan—yours drawn out and beatific, his quiet and restrained.

You lean down, his grip holding you still as he’s sheathed inside of you, adjusting to the heat and pressure wrapped around him. You slot your mouth to his once more, and delight in the way his lips part so willingly for you when you ease your tongue between them.

You wait a moment, and when you’re sure he’s ready you begin to move, dragging yourself up his length before pressing back down again, your walls clinging desperately every ridge and curve of his cock along the way.

Both your breaths are laboured, the quiet room in his empty apartment filled with the sound of panting, the rustling of bedsheets, the slap of skin on skin.

It’s all so much. You feel so much. So good, so warm, so blissfully full of him. You revel in the way you see perspiration beading on your skin, the slick of his arousal and yours dripping down your thighs, the heartbeat that thunders in your chest.

You feel alive.

Your fingers find the swell of your clit, running them over it in ungraceful swipes as the two of you both race headlong towards your ends.

“What are you doing?” Levi asks, watching the way you touch yourself from beneath half-lidded eyes.

“Feels good,” you keen, your fingers moving faster after hearing the ragged, rough tone of his voice.

Levi pushes your hand away and takes up the task.

A few more careful rolls of your hips, and the press of his thumb against your clit has you tumbling over a precipice to your undoing. You crumple forward into him, your nails digging into the skin of his chest, and he flips the two of you over as he chases his own release.

Levi’s hips jerk against yours, pressing your willing, pliant body down into the sheets as he fucks you once, twice, three times more, and then he’s spilling himself inside of you with a groan so uncharacteristically vocal it makes you keen.

The two of you collapse side-by-side in his narrow bed.

You’re exhausted, achy, and thoroughly spent.

It’s unbearable and exquisite all at once.

It’s warm beside Levi in such confined quarters, but comfortable. The thought of leaving pains you, so you make no move to depart. Your shared breaths even out, a precious, fragile peace settling over the room.

Levi fights the weight of his eyelids for as long as he can, but soon, against his will, he slips away to the call of slumber.

In the quiet of his little room, you can’t help but watch him while he sleeps. You commit the lines of his face to your memory as best you can make them out in the dark, along with the feeling of his body curled around yours.

You can hardly believe he fell asleep—the same young man who’d been so mistrustful such a short time prior. You suspect, now more than ever, that he must feel it too—a knot no power could unbind, that could be forced to separate but would never truly be apart—that tethers the two of you together.

You lay beside him and count out the heartbeats that pass as you feel yourself growing colder, less tangible, as the seconds and the pulse count ticks on. You know that many miles above, on the surface, the sun must be preparing to break the horizon and spill into a new day.

When Levi wakes, he thinks you’re gone, though you’re still there.

He smiles at his coin purse that you’ve left beside him on the pillow where your head once rested. He picks it up, wrapping it tightly in his hand.

“I never got your name,” he says quietly into the room that’s not as empty as he thinks it is.

He looks for you on the same street corner every night for a month, but never finds you there again.

You’re ripped out of Limbo through no conscious effort of your own. One second you’re dangling your legs off the side of your favourite bridge, and the next you’re knee deep in mud that runs scarlet.

A job?

In the corner of your eye you see that last wisps of two souls, a deep, cobalt blue, and a beautiful shade of purple.

Furlan.

Isabel.

You pass their reapers as you race to find him, but spare them no semblance of recognition.

Your eyes alternate between scanning the sky for his fate and searching for him across the trodden, blood soaked earth: even through the clouds of steam and drizzling rain, you can see the distant stars.

They’ve shifted, and you feel nauseated by what you see. Something chokes you.

For the first time in all your memory, you know the iron grip of fear.

Fate, in spite of what some may think, is fluid. It ebbs and flows like a tide. Changes course like a river that grows stronger after heavy rain, or dries up to little more than a stream in a withering summer. Fate can be changed by force of will, or when someone’s will abandons them.

The choice to give up can shift the stars.

You find Levi alone.

Physically unharmed, but his will broken.

His eyes are a flat, lifeless grey, even though his heart is still hammering in his chest.

“Move, damn it,” you hiss, desperate to grab him by the shoulders and shake him into action. He’s still in danger. He needs to move. But you can’t touch him, and even if you could it would already be too late—the cruel reality being that the only time he’d be able to see you would mean that his fate had already been sealed.

He looks crushed. Defeated.

Wholly resigned to his own demise.

A titan is approaching—the soulless vessel lumbering towards where the two of you stand. A body without a soul, where you are a soul without a body. It can touch him where you can’t. It can harm him where you cannot save him.

Panic swells in you like a fire. It’s not his time. You’ve seen the stars, you’ve followed the lines of his path more times than you can count as you lay in Limbo—you know it better than you know anything, could trace it even with your eyes closed.

You know that he has more life ahead of him if only he chooses to take it.

“Levi, move.”

His eyes lift as if he hears you, staring at you from across the battle ground that has stolen the souls of the two people most precious to him.

There’s an intensity burning in his gaze that almost knocks you off your feet, and you stumble back, landing flat on your ass.

Lush grass tickles your palm.

The clouds and the rain are gone.

Above you there are only stars that blaze angrily down at you.

The stars, and Zola.

She’d dragged you back into Limbo with her bare hands.

“This is bad,” she says gently down to you, her glassy vacant eyes glimmering with something you’ve never seen before.

“I know.”

“You’re bound,” she says again, though she really need not.

It’s a truth you’ve long come to accept.

“I know,” you repeat the same words again. “I… made him a promise. When he was a child. I think that’s what did it.”

“You made a mortal a promise? He saw you?” she asks, incredulity seeping into her usually placid tone.

You nod.

“This isn’t going to end well, you know,” she says, and for the first time in all of the forever that you’ve known her, there’s something close to worry in her tone. “For either of you.”

She says it as though you haven’t already come to the realization that she’s grappling with, as though you don’t understand the weight of what has happened to your soul—the one that was supposed to be unfettered to anything, not to life, nor to death. To no earthly body. To no other soul.

You’d lived once. Been human once. Had a fate that had been written in the pin-prick lights of the stars, and a soul that had come up for judgement.

You’d been offered a choice, so very long ago. Become a reaper, or face the tribunal of adjudicators to have the worth of your soul ruled upon.

You don’t know why the adjudicators had chosen you, why they had offered you this path. There’s so much about reaping that’s shrouded in mystery, with no threads to pull and unravel into truth. It was a reality that you had never taken issue with, accepted for what it was and never questioned, never searched for why.

But it’s different now.

You’ve heard whispers—speculation—that reapers are the unlucky souls who merited neither reincarnation nor The Void. Not good nor bad, but the grey area in between. And so the choice to become indentured in the guidance of souls is almost like penance—paying into a fund of atonement that will never amount to enough to buy your freedom.

You have no memories of your mortal life, however many you may have lived, but you remember what you’d thought then—before the panel of adjudicators who shone so brightly you could not rest your eyes upon them. A fate you knew was better than one uncertain. An eternity of reaping favourable to the terrifying possibility of The Void.

And it was fine. You were fine.

Until Levi.

Soulmates are rare. You’ve only reaped a true pair in all your eternity of servitude—two souls of the same hue, bound so tightly you were forced to pry them apart with the force of your own two hands.

But you’ve also heard of reapers finding their soulmates in the living. Of those, like you, who find themselves shackled to another mortal soul, never able to join them the way every fibre of their being—the very essence of what and who they are—begs them to. And, eventually, they’re left to reap the soul to which they’re bound.

That’s the fate they’re forced to bear.

It’s a story circulated among your kind that’s more like folklore than fact—a tale to frighten and to fascinate, but with uncertain origin or basis.

But you’ve always wondered, somewhere in the fathomless recesses of your mind when you’ve had all eternity to do nothing but ponder, if there was truth to it. And, if so, what happens to those reapers, the ones who were forced to follow the soul to which they were bound through countless lifetimes. To have but never to hold.

And now you wonder if maybe those reapers who linger by The Void between new jobs may not be so different from you after all.

Eld’s soul is a sunny yellow, Gunther’s a deep burgundy, Oluo’s a cool crisp lavender, and Petra’s a sparkling copper.

Kenny’s soul is silver, but it looks more blue in the sunlight—almost periwinkle if the rays catch it in just the right way. Like his eyes. Like Levi’s.

Erwin’s is a deep, strong green—like the cape Levi wraps around him after he makes the difficult choice to let him rest. Your eyes watch the stars as he makes his decision, but truly you know all along what he will choose—the lights overhead hardly quiver as he considers his options.

It amazes you.

The way every soul he meets sings for him. Adores him.

Dies for him.

You reap them all.

The years continue to pass.

Levi stands upon a bridge, white birch boards underfoot, and a stygian river with no current below that.

You stand before him, a few planks width between you both.

“It’s you,” he says, blinking curiously like he can’t quite believe his eyes.

“Hm?” you tilt your head to one side, playing coy.

“Years ago,” he breathes, reflecting back upon the memory. “The working girl from the Underground.”

You scoff, but you’re smiling. “You didn’t pay me for my services, and I didn’t rob you.”

“I thought maybe you were just bad at it.”

You laugh.

People think a white soul is desirable, that it’s pure. You don’t deny they have their own beauty, but you’ve always found them boring to look at, and easy to reap.

Levi’s is every colour. An amalgamation of each soul who’s touched his life. Periwinkle, deep blue, amethyst, silver, emerald. You see every hue in him.

He’s beautiful.

“Why are you here?” he asks you quietly, a pensive furrow in his brow.

His face looks younger here. Less burdened. The weight of the world left behind.

He should be asking why he’s here. Or where here even is. But his attention is only on you.

You keep your eyes on him, though you know the stars are blazing overhead. Shifting into something you do not wish to see.

“I came to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye? What the hell are you talking about?” he asks gruffly. You smile again, but this time it’s rueful.

There’s a moment of quiet.

It’s so, so still in Limbo. You’ve never noticed that before.

“Where are you going?” when Levi speaks again, his tone is almost sheepish—hesitant and shy. The pretence of his bravado has melted, his gruffness gone in place of a more sincere expression.

You sigh. “I guess I got fired.”

Levi’s lips part. “What did you do?”

“It’s something I didn’t do,” you explain as you take a small step towards him that he matches, both of you tired of resisting the pull you feel to the other. “Something I refused to do, really—”

You and Levi stand toe to toe, so very close together.

Your eyes scan his face: the soft slope of his nose, the gentle curve of his lips, the angular shape of his eyes.

You know him so well.

You wish you knew him more.

“—And I’m the only one who can. So I quit technically, I think. Not actually quite sure how it works.”

“You don’t make any sense,” he mutters, reaching up towards your cheek. When he first touches you, he draws his hand back slightly, like he’s not expecting you to feel so solid underneath his fingertips.

“I know,” you say, a laugh weaving its way through your words despite the ache in your chest. You lean into his touch and he lets you.

“This is a dream, right?” Levi asks as he drags his thumb along the apple of your cheek, brushing back towards your temple. His touch is soft and warm.

“Do you dream of me often?” you dare to ask.

He looks at you strangely, but makes no effort to deny it.

“Well, if this is a dream, what will you do?” you ask him.

Levi’s brow furrows.

“Don’t say fly.”

“I wasn’t going to say fucking fl-“ you lean so close to him he falters without completing the thought.

“Levi, can I ask something of you?”

He hesitates in the wake of your unexpected request, and then slowly bobs his head in a nod.

“Will you kiss me goodbye?”

The meeting of your lips is sweet and soft and slow. You want more of it and nothing else. You wish that it could last.

“What’s your name?” Levi pulls away and whispers, his breath fanning against your lips—he’s not far enough to be considered wholly separate from you, but distant enough to miss the taste of him. “I always ask but you never tell me.”

You smile, tracing your finger through the soft strands of his hair, and you tell him.

He repeats it, tests it out as though getting used to the feeling of it on his tongue.

You kiss him again, one last time.

“Thank you,” you tell him as you take a step back that requires more effort than you’ve ever had to expend.

“For what?” he asks, blinking through a heavy lidded gaze.

You smile, a heat pricking at the back of your eyes.

“For seeing me.”

“Please.” Levi seems to sense what’s coming before it arrives, choking on the plea as it rises in his throat. “Don’t g-“

You press two hands against his chest, and push him onto his back.

Levi groans.

The river beside you rushes past relentlessly.

He can’t open one eye, a gruesome wound ripped across his face, and the other is mostly shut as he fights to stay conscious.

There’s so much blood.

But his heart is beating.

“You looked better when you were dead,” your words are soft as you crouch over him.

You smile, pressing a kiss to his forehead that you know he cannot feel.

“Hi Zo,” you say, looking up and seeing Zola standing above you.

“You really went and did it, huh?”

Levi murmurs your name.

A soul for a soul.

A balance to keep.

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

You look up towards the stars, but see only clouds hanging in the sky overhead. His fate is out of your sight now.

Zola holds out her hand to you, a grim, almost watery smile on her face.

You take her hand, and let her reap you.

You don’t like it underground.

It’s dark, and cold, and there’s always something about being so far below the surface that makes you feel unsettled—though you can’t quite put your finger on why.

Your palm curls into an empty fist, tucked into your pocket.

Shit.

You’ve forgotten your rail pass, and the time on the screen of your cellphone tells you that your train is about to pull into the station. It’s late, and it's the last train of the night that will get you home.

Your head whips around, scanning the empty underground station. There’s no one around, so you hop the barrier without paying.

An angry shout from a passing security guard calls out for you, and it sends you running—giggling a little as your pulse pounds in your throat. You make it to your platform and slip onto the last train just in time, stumbling through the closing door, triumph rising in your chest.

Your celebration is short-lived as you crash face fist into something soft, tumbling to the ground of the train as it pulls away from the station.

The lights race past in a blur as the train travels through the tunnels, shadow and light alternating before your eyes.

“Are you insane?” an angry voice snaps, and you pick your head up from where it rests—only to meet a narrowed grey gaze that belongs to the man whose body you find your own sprawled atop.

“Maybe” you say with a laugh, pushing yourself up and dusting yourself off.

The train is empty this time of night—it really was terrible luck that this poor guy happened to be on the other side of the door as you’d barrelled your way through it.

“Sorry about that,” you say, extending your hand towards your unwitting crash-pad to help him up as well.

He eyes it skeptically before he takes it. He feels warm.

He rises to his feet.

“I… I’m Levi.”

His hand is still in yours.

You tell him your name, he repeats it back to you.

“Have we met? You look… familiar.”

You tilt your head, watching the glimmer in his silver eyes as the lights outside the train windows flicker past.

“No,” you say, warmth in your words and your cheeks. “I don’t think we have.”

#LEVI LEVI LEVI #this is so good #absolutely beautiful #i am weeping #i am screaming

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intrinsic-reggae · 2 years

Note

Hello!!! Merry Crisis , hope you're feeling good!

Could I request a drabble or HC with Levi (of course) and reader (f or gn) who is a scientist/medic for the scouts, similar to Hange but less chaotic?

HELLO happy crisis hope u had the best day bub!!

the lucky ones levi ackerman/reader (attack on titan) warning: mentions of injury and blood a/n: kind of a follow up to this drabble I wrote a few weeks ago! but can also be read as a stand alone

You'd never been a deep sleeper.

Maybe when you were a little younger -- a child without worry. A time whose memories seemed like another lifetime entirely now.

A lifetime before the constant thrum of anxiety under your skin, before expeditions beyond the walls, before tending to wounds, before signing the death certificates of your comrades who were beyond your help -- arriving to your medical tent having already passed the halfway mark to death, where the only help you could offer them was a gentle touch or word to see them over.

Your sleep was inked with those memories. Those faces. So you drifted always on the periphery of slumber and wakefulness, never letting sleep grip you too tightly in fear of what you might be forced to see.

But there were times where this was useful, too.

A soft knock at the door of your quarters roused you from sleep, eyes blinking slow as you sat straight up, gaze focused in the general direction of your door, though you couldn't see it too clearly. You paused, wondering if the sound was real, or something your half-conscious mind had fabricated.

A moment later you heard the gentle sound again.

That had you up properly. You quickly lit the lamp on your bedside table, kicking your legs over the edge of your bed and rushing towards the door.

You knew the soldiers would be arriving back from their latest expedition the next day, you knew the casualties were many, you knew that it would be your job to patch up the ones who were lucky enough to make it back.

Lucky.

It felt wrong to call it that.

There was one face in particular you were anxious to see file through the gates of the survey corps base. A pair of slate eyes on a pale complexion, a narrowed gaze that softened slightly when it looked at you.

You hadn't heard anything about whether or not he'd been one of the so-called lucky ones.

You crossed the cold stone floor of your room, pulling on a knit sweater over your thin cotton pyjamas as you went to protect you against the midnight chill. You had no idea what the hour was, but it was pitch black outside your window, no hint of sunlight cresting on the distant horizon, and it was so cold you were surprised you couldn't see your breath in front of your face.

You pulled open the door.

"Levi."

You might have sounded more relieved to see the man you'd spent the past week worrying about since you'd watched him leave with the rest of the troops, heading towards the wall for another damned expedition, if not for the way he was slumped against your doorframe.

He looked up at you, weary grey eyes set on a face that looked even more exhausted than he usually did. He was clutching his side, a pallor to his skin that was unmistakable even in the dim lighting.

"What are you doing here?" you asked quietly, careful not to wake any of the soldiers whose quarters were in the same corridor, ushering him into your room. He stepped through the door hesitantly, almost cautiously so.

"We got back earlier than anticipated," Levi finally spoke as you shut the door behind him. "We lost a third of the troops."

"I heard," you said quietly, eyes raking over his frame.

A quiet moment passed, the light of the lamp beside your still sleep-warmed bed flickering against you both, casting shadows in your tiny room.

"Why are you here, Levi?" you posed the question quietly, but in a way he couldn't evade this time.

His jaw set a little firmer.

"Some newbie stitched me up after we got back to the wall. Fucking butchered me. I need to re-do them," he muttered. His gaze flickered up to you.

You softened.

He was asking for your help.

He had come directly to you to patch him up.

"Where are you hurt?" you asked him, hands reaching to help him out of his cape. You unclasped it from around his neck, gently easing it off his shoulders.

"Ribs on my right side," he said hissing a little as you moved to work his jacket down his arms, the stitches clearly pulling.

"Lay down," you said, nodding towards your bed as you folded his jacket and cape over your arm.

"That's alright I'll stan-"

"Lay down, Captain." The firmness in your tone left no room for debate.

You draped Levi' discarded garments over the back of the chair at your tiny desk, grabbing the small medical bag you kept with you at all times from atop it. Supplies had been running low lately -- when weren't they, though? -- and you hoped you had everything you needed to tend to him.

You watched from across the room as Levi pulled up your rumpled bedsheets, smoothing his hands across them to neatly press them down before gingerly sitting atop them.

"Flat, please," you said, gesturing for him to lay back as you approached him with your kit.

"I'll get blood on your blankets," Levi argued, but it was weak.

"I've gotten pretty good at getting blood out of fabric over the past few years," you quipped dryly, and maybe if the lighting was better or the pain he was in wasn't so severe Levi may have laughed at that.

Slowly, Levi moved to lay back.

"Wait," you said, and he paused. "Your shirt."

He hesitated for a moment, and it didn't really make sense. Being a soldier strips you of your modesty, desensitizes you to the concept of shame. But the way Levi began slowly unbuttoning his white shirt was almost... shy.

You stepped forward, setting your medical bag by the edge of the bed, helping him slip off the creased shirt. You folded it in half, setting it at the foot of the bed while he laid back.

It wasn't hard to spot the wound he'd come to you about.

The stitches were rough, the broken skin pinched together tighter in some places than others, the lines of the thread jagged and uneven. Whoever had done them was either extremely new to the job, or so utterly overwhelmed that it was the best they'd been able to do.

"Oh," you said softly, a wince at the end of the word.

Levi let his head loll over to look up at you.

"Gruesome, huh?" he asked dryly.

"Roll onto your side," you directed him, crouching down to gather the supplies you would need. He heeded your directive, rolling onto his side so his back -- broad, with silvery scars of other wounds long-healed -- was facing you.

It wasn't easy work, or pleasant. You moved quickly to remove the sloppy sutures, cleaning the wound as best you were able with the limited supplies you had on hand before methodically sewing it shut once more.

Hange had once told you that you had the steadiest hands in all of the survey corps, but as you worked you wondered if that was true. Sure, every stitch was careful and even, but as your eyes traced the lines of Levi's body in your bed, you felt something ripple through you that threatened to quiver in your fingertips.

You finished the job, snipping off the loose end of medical thread after tying a knot to secure it, smearing a thin layer of antiseptic over the wound. Your let your hand rest on Levi's side, at the slight dip where his ribcage met his waist, for a moment longer than you probably needed to.

"Done."

Your quiet words were the first that had been spoken since you began your work. Even as you ripped Levi open and put him back together again, the only sound that had come from him were his steady, even breaths.

Levi didn't move.

You paused, rising from your bedside where you'd been kneeling while you worked, peering over Levi's shoulder at his face.

His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted, his nose burrowed into the pillow that not long prior your own head had been resting upon.

Something pulled taut in your chest.

He was asleep.

You quietly tended to the mess from patching him up, grabbing a blanket from the bottom of your wardrobe and carefully draping it over him to protect him from the chill in the air.

You were just moving towards the chair of your desk, planning to let your head rest on the worn wooden surface and hopefully get a few more hours of sleep yourself.

"Stay."

Your heart stuttered in your chest as the croaky word tumbled from his lips.

You stepped up to the bed again, and this time as you peered over his shoulder you saw his eyes were open -- just a bit, the exhaustion still weighing his eyelids down.

He looked at you out of the corner of his eye.

Slowly, he lifted the corner of the blanket you'd placed over him.

An invitation.

You crawled in from the foot of the bed, careful not to jostle him too much as you went. You settled down, head resting on your crooked arm, facing him. He let the blanket drop to cover you both, his warmth surrounding you.

Somedays you felt like your uncomfortable military-issued bed was barely large enough just for you -- but somehow it fit both of your bodies perfectly.

You peered at Levi as he lay across from you, his eyes blinking languidly -- the time between each slow flutter of his eyelids growing longer.

"Thanks... for patching me up," he rasped out, his tongue peeking out to moisten his pink lips.

"Thanks for not doing it on your own," you replied, equally softly.

You knew that this was strange. That if anyone saw Levi leaving your quarters in the morning that there would be talk. But you didn't care.

All you cared about was that Levi had made it back.

That he was one of the lucky ones.

"Welcome home, Levi," you breathed.

Levi's eyes fluttered closed, and the corner of his mouth curled upwards -- slight enough that you might have missed it were you not so very close to him.

You couldn't help but think that maybe you were one of the lucky ones too.

#LEVI LEVI LEVI #i am indeed one of the lucky ones #who got to read this amazing fic #i am screaming #i am dead #soft levi

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