#back with farlan au

[sixpennydame]

dark side of the moon⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆ [chapter 2]

Pairing: Yakuza!Levi x F!reader

Word count: 6.2k

Newly out of prison, Levi is thrown back into life in the yakuza.

Series Content/Warnings: mafia/yakuza AU, flashbacks, slow burn, mystery, cyberpunk, sci fi, non-binary Hange Zoe, eventual smut, dark content, graphic violence and sexual content

Author's Note: A huge thank you to my beta reader @bitchymanlet - you were such a big help through this!

next chapter/masterlist/AO3

“Inmate 012025, Ackerman. It’s time.”

With a loud thud, the heavy, titanium doors slide open, and bright light fills the small cell.

”Hands against the back wall. Make it quick.”

Levi stands up and walks to the back of his cell. With a sigh he raises his hands and presses them against the wall.

Immediately a guard grabs his arms and places them behind his back, before clicking the cold cuffs around his wrists.

“Don’t give us any trouble now, Ackerman.”

As if he would do something today, of all days.

The two guards lead him down the corridor, past all the other cell doors; Levi can feel the other inmates staring out from the tiny window on their cell door. Their eyes follow him, wild and predatory.

But Levi Ackerman had never been their prey.

One of the guards presses a code into a keypad and another heavy door opens. There’s a series of offices, all behind thick-plated, forcefield glass.  The three men move toward a desk where a woman with blue hair, deep wrinkles and uninterested eyes types in the air. With a blink of her eyes, the screen before her disappears.

”Ackerman, Levi?”

Levi nods and the woman takes a device that scans his eye, confirming his identity. 

“Hold out your right hand.”

He does so, while she scans another device over his wrist. There’s a sharp sting, and then the glowing tattoo of his inmate number - 012025 - was gone.

“That takes care of the detection device implanted inside your wrist,” she informs in a monotone voice.

Levi touches the silver button behind his left ear. “What about my cerebral comm system?” 

“It’s been completely deleted. You’ll have to have someone reactivate it.”

The woman moves to a back room and returns with a large vinyl bag.

”Here are your belongings. You can change there.” She gestures to a door just outside their office cluster. 

Levi takes the items, walks to the room and closes the door. He steps out of the grey prison jumpsuit and stands there in just his underwear, looking at the stack of clothing he hasn’t seen or felt in almost five years: a black t-shirt, black combat pants, boots, socks..

He puts on each item, and wonders if he’ll feel different - if he’ll revert back to the man he used to be before he was put behind titanium bars.

But he doesn’t feel different. He doesn’t feel….anything.

When he finishes dressing, the guards walk him to the outer gate of the prison. The forcefield comes down and Levi takes his first step outside as a free man.

”You’re late. I’ve been waiting out here for over 30 minutes,” comes a voice from behind him.

Levi turns to see a tall man with sandy brown hair leaning against a cherry red vehicle. “I thought you’d done something to get another year added to your sentence.”

”Tch, as if I had any say in what time they’d release me.”

”You look like shit.”

”Takes a piece of shit to know one.” 

Both men glare at each other, then the tall one smirks. “Good to see you again, Levi.” He pats him on the shoulder.

”You too, Farlan..” Levi replies warmly.

”Come on, let’s get you out of here.” 

The car’s engine purrs as Farlan weaves in and out of traffic. Levi is enveloped by the leather seat, the glow of the neon accents inside reflecting off of Farlan’s dark suit coat.

”Looks like you’re doing well for yourself,” Levi says.

“The last few years I’ve been managing all our legit businesses, making sure they look good on paper. At least good enough that nobody will snoop around further.”

”So you’re a paper pusher,” Levi remarks. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

”Beats fixing the books for underground gambling rings,” Farlan answers defensively. “It’s the same concept though, just a different arena. I’m suited for this.”

Farlan had always been smart. He knew how to work the angles and how to get people to let down their guard.

They’d met at the orphanage they were both put in during one of Neo Tokyo’s efforts to, “alleviate the growing population of homeless children littering the city’s streets.” Farlan had convinced Levi that his calorie bar - the only thing they received for dinner - was infested with invisible larvae and that if he gave it to him he'd get another one. Finally figuring out he’d been conned, the next day he punched Farlan in the face and took his daily ration. 

They’d been friends ever since. 

During their teenage and young adult years with the Ackerman clan, everyone knew their names. They had their hands in almost every backalley operation - from gambling to fights and everything in between.

And if Farlan had been the brains of their operation, then Levi was the brawn. Farlan could shake people down through intellect, and when that didn’t work, Levi would beat them to a pulp. Together, they were feared and respected.

They had been equals. But now, after five years, Levi felt left behind.

“So where are you taking me? I need a shower.” Levi scrunches his nose at the musty smell emanating from his clothing.

”To your apartment. I made sure they didn’t touch anything. It’s all there as you left it.”

”Probably a dusty mess…but thanks for looking after the place.”

”Wasn’t that hard. Not like you had much stuff in there.”

”…and Isabel?” Levi asks tentatively, afraid to know the answer.

”Still functioning, and still entirely devoted to you. She could barely contain her excitement today.”

Levi felt a rush of relief. He never thought he’d feel any sort of affection for an android, but Isabel was different. She was a friend and comrade, and had saved his ass on more than one occasion, stitching up his cuts and gashes from a fight or standing beside him during a back alley brawl. But he was often surprised by how human she behaved sometimes, tearing up when she’d see a dead animal on the side of the road, or stealing food to give to a needy family. 

Sometimes he thought she was more human than he was. 

The buildings grew higher and higher the closer they got to the city center, their reach seeming to pierce the orange-red sky of the late afternoon. The next thing he knew, Farlan was pulling up to his apartment building, both of them entering the elevator decorated with layers upon layers of graffiti, and finally walking down the hallway and standing in front of his apartment door. 

It was finally hitting him. He was free.

”I bought you some suits, hopefully they fit. Though you do look like you’ve bulked up a bit.”

”Not much else to do in prison but exercise. I tried to train as much as I could, too. I wanna get back into the ring.” 

“After all this, you still want to fight?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“It’s just…nevermind. Take a shower, get dressed,” Farlan hesitates. “Oyabun wants to see you this evening.”

“Oyabun…” Levi repeats, the word turning sour in his mouth. “Your professionalism is getting on my nerves. You don’t have to talk to me like I’m some new recruit.” 

“That’s who he is, Levi. He deserves our respect.”

Levi grimaces. “So Kenny’s pulling my leash already, huh?”

”Levi.. I know things were…strained between the two of you before, but he kept you protected while you were in prison.”

”Bullshit.”

”Believe what you want.” Farlan waves his hand in surrender before walking towards the door. “I’ll be back this evening.”

”Don’t bother, I can drive there myself. Where’s my bike?”

“It needed some tuning up since it’s been out of commission for so long. Isabel’s getting it ready for you.” Farlan turns to grin at his friend. “So you’re stuck with being chauffeured by me just a little longer. See you in a few hours.”

The door shuts and Levi is surrounded by silence. It’s a different sound than he’s used to; even though it’s the space he lived in for years, it feels unfamiliar and new.

His eyes scan the room; it really was exactly as he left it. Always the minimalist, his small sofa nestled in a corner across from a dining table with two chairs. No pictures, no books; the only personal item was an antique ceramic teapot and two cups.

”Petra.”

Suddenly, the lights fade up in the room, as if the apartment itself was coming to life.

”Welcome back, Levi,” the female voice resonates in the space, “it’s good to have you back. I haven’t been activated in such a long time.”

”Yeah, I’ve been…away.”

”Shall I prepare you some tea?”

”That’d be great,” Levi pulls off his shirt, “but I’d like to take a bath first.”

There’s a chime of recognition and then, “The bath water is ready. Please relax, sir.”

”Thanks.”

Levi had always felt prompted to treat Petra respectfully, even though he knew she was just an apartment AI - an assistant built into almost every home in Neo Tokyo. But it was so rare for him to hear a kind word from anyone in his life, so hearing her voice made him feel like he was being reunited with an old friend.

He takes off his clothes and turns on the shower, taking a sponge to wash away the dirt and grime from his body and hoping in some small way, that it might wash away some of the memories as well. 

But those proved harder to get rid of. He knew only time could do that.

He finally sinks into the steaming bath water and a heavy sigh escapes his lips; he can feel his muscles relaxing with the heat, years of built up tension slowly melting away. The Martians of Neo Tokyo knew what an important resource water was, but now Levi felt it in his very bones. 

Stepping out of the bath, he looked at his naked body in the mirror. He was bulkier than he was five years ago, Farlan was right about that. His lean, muscular frame, useful for street fighting and cage matches, was now replaced by more defined arms and chest; it was noticeable now, even beneath the tattoos swirling on his body. 

A giant eagle, designed in the classical Japanese style, stretched across the length and width of his back; its wings outstretched and talons out, as if attacking prey. A red moon shone from his right shoulder and clouds wrapped around his torso, swirling up his abs and around his pectoral muscles. Over his left pec was the Ackerman clan crest, the Japanese character for power, 力, encased inside a circle.

That had been his first tattoo, when he was initiated into the Ackerman clan as a teenager. That felt like an eternity ago now.

His yakuza tattoos covered many of the scars Levi had received throughout his life, but there were new scars from his years of incarceration. He collected them all like badges of honor; evidence that he’d survived another day.

He found his electric shaver and erased the light stubble growing on his face, then decided to shave his undercut again, just like he’d always had it. But this time, he kept his hair slightly longer than it had been before. He slicked it back with a comb, exposing the sharp features of his face - flawless, except for one scar running through his right eyebrow, breaking it in two and barely missing his eye.

He’d forgotten how he'd received most of his scars, but that one…

…he’d never forget that night.

Wrapping a towel around his waist, he walks to his bedroom.

”Petra, I’ll take that tea now. Green jasmine.”

”Right away,” she responds. 

As Farlan had promised, there were several suits hanging in the small closet. The yakuza were old fashioned, and clan members always preferred the look of the classic, tailored suit, in contrast to the bright and bold fashions prevalent on the streets of the city. Levi scans each one and decides on a dark navy blue suit with a white shirt. In a drawer are several ties, but he decides to forgo them and instead keeps the top two buttons undone, slightly exposing his chest tattoos that start just under his collarbone.

If Kenny wants him to wear a suit then he’ll do it his way.

He rummages through another drawer and finds his gold earring stud. The hole in his ear has grown smaller but he pushes it through, wincing just a bit as it breaks through skin. He welcomes the pain, though. Pain has always made him feel alive.

“Your tea is ready, sir.”

Levi takes the tea cup from the food preparation compartment and eases into a chair that’s facing his balcony window. How long has it been since he’s had a steaming cup? Tea wasn’t the type of contraband that could be obtained in prison, no matter what an inmate had to trade. He lifts the cup to his lips and takes a sip, breathing in the aroma.

”These are imported leaves from off-planet. Where did you get them?”

Petra blinks on. “Mr. Church wanted to make sure that you had the best for your homecoming.”

Levi’s lips turn upward into a faint smirk. 

Farlan.

He guesses his old friend can afford things like this now. No more slumming it like they did when they were kids. He’d made his way in the world, and now Levi wanted to as well.

But first things first…

He finishes his tea then grabs his suit jacket. “Petra, I’ll be back later,” he says to the room, before stepping out of his apartment and into the city streets. The sun was just starting to set, creating a copper glow to the sky as it reflected off the high rise buildings and skyscrapers. Neo Tokyoites filled the sidewalks, bustling from one place to the next, but no one drifted an eye toward Levi as he walked along the city streets - just another face in the crowd. 

The city hadn’t changed much since Levi had left it, but even if it had, he could make it to his destination with his eyes closed. He takes a right, then a left, turning into a narrow alley and scaring a cat or two before arriving at an unmarked door. 

He knocks once, a pause, then two more quick knocks.

There’s commotion on the other side of the door, as if someone is scrambling towards it. Then it bolts open.

“Aniki! I knew you’d come!”

A small red-headed young woman throws her arms around Levi’s neck, practically throwing his body across the alley. 

“See? Didn’t I tell you he’d come right away?” she boasts as she pulls him through the space Levi had once used for training. His punching bag was still there, gathering cobwebs in the corner, along with his other training equipment, but the rest of the room was now littered with electronics and various tools.

And sitting in another corner was Farlan, scrolling through his comm device as he lounged in one of the only chairs in the entire space.

“Isabel knew you wouldn’t stay in your apartment for long, so I thought I might as well just wait for you here. Saves me a trip, anyway.” Farlan smirks.

Isabel can hardly contain her excitement. “The trio is back together, just like old times!”

Old times…Levi thinks as he looks around the space. Everything - and he’s sure everyone - has changed, but it’s a relief to see that Isabel is still the same. 

Levi puts his hand on the top of her head. “Glad to see that Kenny didn’t get rid of you once I was arrested.”

“What? No way! Farlan got me out of there the moment you were busted. He’s been getting me steady work ever since, working on bikes and cars, even some augments here and there.” Her face beams, “Kenny may have thought me a useless android, but I’ve been making my own way.”

That also gave Levi some relief. Throughout these past years, he’d wondered what had become of the spunky little android he’d saved from the wrecking yard. 

Levi had always had a soft spot for things that were considered broken beyond repair. 

“Isabel, I need you to reboot my cerebral comm connection.” 

“Oh yeah, yeah, not a problem.” Isabel takes his hand again and leads him to a part of the room with a computer connected to a multitude of cables. 

Levi sits on what looks almost like an examining table, leaning his face into the light above. “You’ve got quite the set up here.”

“Since I’m not a certified augmentation android, I have to stay under the radar, so most of my clients come from Farlan or from word of mouth.” 

Isabel rolls her chair over to Levi. “Just turn your head to the right for me…” One of her small hands finds the silver button behind his left ear and with one swipe of her tool, pops it out.

 “Let’s see what I can do here..”

There’s a slight sense of pressure as Isabel sticks a cable into the port, connecting Levi to her computer. She rolls back over to her station, clicking her keyboard methodically.  

“All your contacts are still here…at least they didn’t try to wipe your memory for names and information.”

“Oh they tried,” Levi remarks, “but it didn’t work. Seems my Ackerman genes are good for more than just kicking people’s asses.”

“I bet that pissed them off,” Farlan adds, still scrolling through the air with his pointer finger as images only he can see moves across his eyes.

“Almost there..” Isabel says, intensely concentrated on her computer screen.

There’s a few more clicks of her keyboard, and then Levi feels a slight jolt of electricity through his head.

“And that should be it.” Isabel rolls back over the Levi, disconnecting him and replacing the silver button. “You should be connected to your old contact list now.”

“Thanks.” Levi pats her head again and she grins from ear to ear. 

“I’ll have your bike ready for you tomorrow.” The red-head responds while Levi gets up from the examining table. Farlan gets up, giving both of them a look that says it’s time to go. As Isabel walks them to the door she puts a tentative hand on Levi’s arm.

“Aniki…once the word is out that you’ve been released, people are going to wonder when you’ll start fighting again.” 

“That’s a good question, and one I’m about to get an answer to,” he responds. 

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

The Ackerman Clan headquarters was housed in a nondescript, four-story building, just on the outskirts of the entertainment district. The only thing that made it stand out from the other business buildings was the Ackerman crest emblazoned next to the door; no other signs were needed, and inhabitants of Neo Tokyo didn’t have to be fluent in Japanese to know its meaning…

Power. The word that’s synonymous with Ackerman.

Farlan pulls up and the door to his car lifts up automatically. “Oyabun is in his office - I assume you remember where everything is.”

“You’re not coming in.”

“Nah, not this time. Kenny wanted to meet with you privately, and I have a meeting to get to, anyway. I’ll see you later this evening.”

Levi steps out of the car, straightening his suit jacket before stepping up to the door. The moment he touches the handle the door unlocks for him.

At least he knows he hasn’t been completely shut out of the organization.

There are voices coming from the second floor - new recruits, most likely, being made to clean and prepare dinner for the evening. Levi remembered the hierarchical structure well; it was something he’d also had to go through in his teenage years. But unlike the others here, he wasn’t recruited into this clan.

It was something he was born into.

The elevator takes him to the top floor, which was reserved entirely for the clan’s leader. Levi walks through the empty reception area and knocks on the office door.

“Come in,” a low, gravelly voice answers.

Behind the door is a room split in half; the front part serving as a reception area and in the back, a broad desk surrounded by pictures of past leaders. The man behind the desk grins broadly then stands up, gesturing to Levi to come in. His face shares many of the same features as Levi: a sharp profile and even sharper eyes of a stormy grey hue. He’s taller than Levi, however, and leaner, with a powerful aura that fills the entire space.  

“Look who’s back from the dead,” he says, a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

Levi scoffs at the phrase, but it’s true; the last few years in prison made him feel like a corpse, a half-life that dragged on and on. In a way, he has been resurrected.

“Kenny…” he says sharply, “you wanted to see me.”

”Of course I did! It’s not every day that I can celebrate the release of my nephew from prison.” He gives Levi a once-over. “You survived with all your limbs, that’s good. And you look strong,” he frowns, “but not any taller.”

Kenny laughs at his own joke and then offers for Levi to sit, but he refuses, standing in front of the broad desk with his arms crossed. 

“And no better sense of humor either,” Kenny deadpans before sitting on the edge of his desk. “Always so serious. But no matter…let’s get right to business.”

At that, Levi finally sits, though he’s on edge and alert, not sure where this conversation might go.

Kenny walks behind his desk where a katana sword is displayed. He picks it up and slowly removes it from the sheath.

“You know, Levi, we Ackermans have been feared for our strength for generations, even before we were yakuza. This power has shaped us into what we are today. I’ve been preparing you to take on this role someday, but you’ve been a pain in my ass from the beginning: disobedient, disorderly, and headstrong. That fire in you needed to be beaten into submission.”

Light glistens off the katana as Kenny moves about the room. “I let you do those cage matches because it gave you a purpose and kept you compliant. But when you started earning huge sums of money, and weren’t paying your dues to me and your brothers - well, that just wouldn’t do.”

Kenny stands in front of Levi now, the katana held loosely at his side. “I hope your time in prison taught you a thing or two about respect, Levi. What I say, goes. Always.”

He pauses, as if expecting to get some sort of reply from Levi, but gets none.

“You were supposed to lose that match - that was the deal we’d set - not beat the humanoid within an inch of his life. You lost me an incredible amount of money, and respect from the Reiss Agency. So you needed to be taught a lesson.”

Levi’s hands ball into fists in his lap, his nails digging into his palms. He takes a deep breath before he responds. “Consider the lesson learned. When can I start fighting again?”

“Fighting?” Kenny laughs. “You think I’m gonna put you in the ring again after that stunt you pulled? Abso-fucking-lutely not. It’s time you started preparing for a bigger leadership role.”

Levi grits his teeth. He wants to grab that katana Kenny holds and slice him right down the middle. 

He could do it - he’s strong, probably stronger than Kenny now. He could do it and finally be free. 

He takes a breath. No, this isn’t the time.

Be smart…

Kenny presses a button on his desk and a few seconds later, a tall, blonde woman enters.

“Sir,” she says in a stern, serious voice.

“Levi, you remember Caven. She’s my wakagashira now.” He grins. “The title you should have had. I suppose you’ll have to usurp her someday.” Levi can tell that it gives Kenny no greater joy than to think of the two of them fighting for the role and for his approval. 

Caven’s eyes slide towards Levi, her body on edge, as if Kenny could call for them to fight any minute. Kenny laughs. “But that’s a problem for another day. Caven, introduce Levi to the new shatei - he’ll be in charge of them now.”

At that, Levi stands up. “What? I don’t want to be in charge of some brats.”

“Oh, but you will, Levi. Because what I say goes.” Kenny’s eyes darken and his voice lowers. He walks towards Levi, looking down at him, the katana still in his hand. “Got it?”

Levi looks away, wordlessly conceding to Kenny’s demand. He turns to follow Caven out of the office.

”I guess this is when I’m supposed to welcome you back,” she says coldly.

”Don’t bother. We don’t have to pretend that we like each other.”

They both walk down the stairs to the second floor. “I’m not sure what you mean, Levi. You’re my brother. We’re all family here - or did you forget that while you were in prison?” 

Levi clicks his tongue at the statement. He always thought the yakuza’s obsession with family laughable; if this was supposed to be a family, then it was the most dysfunctional one he’d ever known. 

Not that he’d really ever known anything else.

The brief times he’d ever felt the true bonds of family was when he was with Farlan and Isabel, or as a small child, when it was just him and his mother. But those years were fading from his memory with every year he grew older.

“Speaking of which,” Caven opens the door to the second floor, where there are clattering and raised voices coming from the living area.

”I told you to clean this place up!”

”I did! Why can’t we just have androids do this?”

”There are no androids here, idiot. Oyabun is against it. Now hurry up, our brothers are gonna be here soon.”

Caven pinches the bridge of nose and gives a heavy sigh. “Connie! Jean! Get out here.”

Two young men emerge from the room: one on the smaller side, with silvery grey hair and a buzz cut; the other tall and lanky, his light brown hair growing slighting over his undercut. 

They both look at each other then at Levi, mouths slightly agape. Caven clears her throat, clearly disappointed at their sudden lack of manners.

”Connie, Jean, this is Levi. He’ll be your big brother from now on and will prepare you to be a true member of the clan.”

”Levi… Ackerman…we heard all about you,” Jean says, bowing deeply. When he sees Connie still standing there staring, he pulls him down as well. “It’s an honor, sir…uh, aniki.”

They both stay in a bow and Levi shifts uncomfortably. “What am I supposed to do with them?”

”Take them around on neighborhood patrols and payment collections. You know, standard stuff.” Caven raises an eyebrow. “Unless you’ve forgotten the basics.”

Levi gives Caven a cold look, then walks over to his new younger brothers, their bodies still at a ninety degree angle. 

“Ok, that’s enough. You don’t have to bow to me.” Levi looks around the space as they stand up. “You were cleaning?”

Jean rubs the back of his head nervously. “Yeah…then we were gonna start cooking dinner after we finish this…”

Levi’s discerning eyes continue to survey the room, seeing every hairball and clump of dirt left behind. “Oh, you are nowhere near finished.” He hangs up his suit jacket. “You. Baldy.” His finger points at Connie. “Go get the mop. Jacques – ”

“...it’s Jean, sir..” 

“-- get a rag and start wiping everything down.”

“But we just cleaned —,” Connie interjects, but when Levi glances towards him, his mouth clamps shut.

“I’ll leave you all to it, then,” Caven says, sauntering away. “Good luck, you two.”

Connie and Jean immediately start their tasks. Levi rolls up the sleeves of his dress shirt.

”I’m sure you’ve heard lots of things about me, but one thing you should know right now: I do not tolerate filth.”

”Yes, aniki!” They both answer.

”I’ll start on dinner prep. You two join me when you finish here.”

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

It’s not long until other clan members start ambling into the building for dinner. Levi hears their voices before he sees them, and the corners of his mouth curl into a slight smile.

”It smells cleaner in here! Could it be?” 

A tall man with long, blonde hair strides into the kitchen. “If it’s not the man himself! Oi! Levi’s back, everyone!”

“Pipe down, Eld, the whole damn neighborhood can hear you,” Levi chides, before shaking his hand. “Good to see you again.”

“Shit, I don’t believe my eyes. Levi!” Another man enters, patting Levi on the back generously. 

“Gunther..”

“It’s about time they let you out..” comes a lackadaisical voice from the back. Levi turns to see a third man, arms crossed, leaning against the wall, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. 

“Well you know, Oluo, I had to get back here and beat your ass back into shape.”

Eld and Gunther laugh, but Oluo frowns. “Come on, Levi, I’m a lot stronger now. You’ll see.”

Levi feels a bit uncomfortable with all this attention on him, but it’s expected; these are men he’d known since they were new recruits. He’d done jobs with them, showed them how to take a punch and even give them when needed. It’s amazing how much they’ve changed in just these few years.

He wonders what else has changed in this organization. 

“I see you’ve met the little brothers,” Eld says, grabbing Connie and putting him in a headlock.

“I’m in charge of them, actually.”

“Damn,” Oluo laughs. “Hope you two are up for it.”

“Up for what?” Jean asks.

Oluo smirks as he sits down with the others at the table. “For the daily ass beatings you’re gonna get if you don’t keep the damn place spotless.”

Everyone laughs except Connie, Jean, and Levi, who looks at his two little brothers. “They are right about that.”

Connie and Jean eat their food quietly, listening to the stories being told around the table by the others about Levi. He shifts in his chair uncomfortably; he doesn’t particularly like being talked about like he’s some history report, but he’s content enough to listen, especially as the conversation shifts to updates on the clan and its newest exploits.

Hours pass with more stories being told and alcohol being drunk, until Caven walks through the door, a serious look on her face.

“There’s been a disturbance at Club Azure. Some members of the Jaeger Clan are causing a scene and harassing the hostesses. Levi, Kenny wants you to take care of it.”

Before Levi can even respond or refuse, she’s on her way out the door, but stops, glancing at him behind her shoulder. “And take Connie and Jean with you.”

“Fucking Jaeger Clan, thinking they can mess around on our territory,” Gunther says, his hands balling into fists. “Unfortunately for them, Levi’s back.”

Without a word, Levi gets up from the table and grabs his jacket.

“Those Jaegers won’t know what hit ‘em,” Oluo adds. 

“Come on,” Levi finally says to his two brothers, who scramble away from the table and file behind him. “Let’s get this over with.”

Levi hadn’t realized how much time had gone by that evening until he stepped out into the brightly lit streets of the entertainment district. Signs flashed and holograms coaxed patrons to step inside their clubs, while drunks stumbled around them, yelling about which bar to hit up next. 

Pachinko parlors, night clubs and host and hostess bars lit up every corner of every block; and when these institutions closed in the early morning light, there was still entertainment to be found in the sex clubs and soap lands. 

And every one of them was protected by the Ackerman Clan.

“Does Hange still own Club Azure?” Levi asks as they make their way to the club, an easy walk from the clan headquarters.

“Yeah,” Jean answers, “but I’ve heard times have been tough over there.”

“Tough for a lot of the clubs these days, I heard,” Connie adds. “Members of the Jaeger Clan have been busting shit up around here recently and scaring customers away.”

Levi wants to ask more about this Jaeger Clan, but they’ve already arrived at the doors of the club. By the time the three men enter, there are raised voices amidst the smooth jazz music.

“We got ourselves a non-aug!”

Levi hears a voice say over the others. He looks over to the source of the noise and sees a man - probably no more than nineteen or twenty - being slapped by one of the hostesses.

“Don’t you touch me,” the woman says.

A few seconds later, he sees the man backhand the woman.

And that’s when something ignites in Levi.

“Stay here,” he says to Connie and Jean, wasting no time in walking toward the disturbance. The man grabs the woman’s face hard, saying something about not fucking with the Jaeger clan.

“Oi.”

From then on, Levi goes into combat mode, the rest of the world fading away as he throws the man across the room. He senses the rest of the men gathering around him; he deals with them one by one, barely breaking a sweat.

The leader reaches for a weapon in his jacket, but Levi is faster, his knife in his hand in the blink of an eye.

Even in the heat of the moment, his breathing is calm, his heartbeat is steady, and his concentration is laser focused. He feels his strength coursing through him.

The feeling of his fist against skin, his punches sending a resounding crack across the room…

This is who he is. This is what he does.

He blinks a few times when he sees them scrambling away, the room incredibly silent, until - 

“Thank you so much, um..”

You’re in front of him suddenly.

Your dress does little to hide every curve of your body, and every bit of skin that is revealed shows not a single tattoo or augmentation. He blinks a few more times to focus on your face, and it’s like time stands still. Tears have formed in the corners of your eyes, probably from the force of the blow to your cheekbone, but your eyes are still bright, undefeated. 

No longer able to hold your gaze, he gives you his name and turns away. 

Why is his heart beating so fast?

When he reaches the bar he turns around to see you being whisked off by another hostess.

“Whew! Well that was not how I wanted this evening to end.” Hange says, leaning against the bar and looking at Levi. “And when I called Caven, I had no idea you were gonna show up. I didn’t even know you were out of prison.”

“I just got out today.”

Hange laughs and pours him a drink. “I bet this wasn’t the welcome you had in mind.”

“Who’s that girl? The one that got hit.”

“That’s Luna. She just started here today. Guess you two have something in common there.”

“She’s not augmented?”

“Nope. Pure as snow. Not that I’ve ever seen snow before.” Hange pours a drink for themself and downs it in one gulp.

“Where is she from?”

“Earth… Why do you want to know so much about her?”

That breaks Levi from his concentration on you. He doesn’t answer, but instead shifts on the bar stool and takes a swig of his drink. 

“It’s natural to have those urges, Levi. You’ve been in prison for so long,” Hange’s voice has a teasing lilt.

“Fuck you, Hange.”

“Not even on a good day, Levi. But she might.” Hange gestures to the dressing room where you’ve been taken.

Wanting to get away from the conversation, Levi gulps down his drink and stands up. “I’ll take my guys and search the perimeter of the club to make sure they’ve left.”

“My hero, just like old times!” Hange yells out, as Levi and the other two walk towards the exit of the club. “Don’t be a stranger!”

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

“Hange has a new girl working at Azure.”

It’s the first thing Levi says to Farlan when he picks him up the next morning. He hasn’t been able to think about much else since last night.

”You’re not usually interested in the products.”

“She’s from Earth.”

”So what?” Farlan counters.  “There’s lots of Earth refugees here; in fact, many of them work in that sweatshop Kenny has, making fake….”

”She’s not augmented. At all. Not one mark or change.”

Farlan looks up. He knows where this is going. “That’s not a rarity for Earthlings, Levi. It’s a coincidence.”

“What if it’s not?”

”What difference would it make now? What’s done is done, Levi. You can’t change the past.”

”That’s easy for you to say.”

”Look, I know you want answers, but you’re not gonna find them in some girl from Earth. You have a chance to start things over. Don’t stir shit up.”

But it was too late. Levi’s curiosity had already been piqued. His gut told him there was more to you than what you seemed, and he wanted to know what that was.

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆

Glossary of terms:

Oyabun - title given to the leader of a yakuza group

Aniki - “older brother”, used to refer to someone who is considered a superior

Wakagashira - a lieutenant, works directly under the Oyabun

Shatei - “younger brothers”, they work under the more experienced “older brothers” (kyodai) of a yakuza clan

Pachinko Parlor - a mechanical game like pinball, used for gambling

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[m-jelly]

Hi Jelly, I love the stories you write. I also have a request. Can you write a Levi x Y/n story, where Levi first joined the scouts with Isabel and Farlan, and when Y/n, who is a lieutenant and Erwin's younger sister welcomes them to the scouts, Levi starts to have a crush on her and acts nervous around her when talking to her. Isabel and Farlan, and Hanji both noticed this and want to help them get together. Also can it be a happy ending when they are together and Farlan and Isabel doesn't die?

@kenkopanda-art <3

Lovely lieutenant

Levi x fem!reader

Canon AU, fluff, romance, falling in love, becoming a couple, Isabel and Farlan live.

When Levi joins the scouts he instantly falls for you. He worries about pursuing you because of his nerves and because you are the sister of Erwin Smith. His friends help him build up his courage and push the two of you together. When Levi returns from a mission where he almost lost his friends, he takes a big step towards making you his.

@ladycheesington @levisbrat25 @nyxiieluna @li-anne @galactict3a @youre-ackermine @thebobaprincess @2moth-anon2 @cypidity @nbinairyn @bts-spnlvr12 @darkstarlight82 @notgoodforlife @demonic-bird

A little crease formed between Levi's brows as he felt irritated. He was irritated that he had to introduce himself to so many people. If he could run away, he would. Levi was never a fan of crowds or groups of people because that meant lots of germs and filth.

It was like a lightning bolt hit him when he locked eyes with you. The world slowed down as you laughed at Erwin Smith and playfully shoved him. His heart danced in his chest as he took you in. You were pure perfection to him and he had no clue how to talk to you.

Farlan leaned over and whispered to his friend. "I have never seen you look at anyone like that before. You have a crush, right?"

Levi gulped hard. "Y-Yes. H-How do I talk t-to her?"

Isabel grinned. "Just tell her she's pretty like a flower."

Farlan hummed. "Yeah, that would do it."

Levi repeated the words around in his head. He knew exactly what to say to you. As soon as you stood before him he shouted. "Flower!"

You stared at Levi. "Flower?"

Levi slowly went red. "Y-Yes. You...you're...uh..."

Farlan threw his arm over Levi's shoulders. "I think he's saying you're pretty like a flower."

You gasped a bit before giggling. "Thank you so much. I think you're incredibly handsome. You're as stunning as a lake with tall mountains behind it dusted in snow. Breathtaking."

Levi shook a little. "Th-thank you."

You gave your name. "I'm a lieutenant."

The colour drained from his face when you mentioned your last name. "Smith?"

You let out an awkward laugh. "Yeah, Erwin is my big brother."

"Brother?"

"Yep."

Levi instantly perked up at the news. "R-right. U-Uh...d-do...do...do you like t-tea?"

You smiled sweetly. "I do. I love it."

"G-good." He smiled at you.

You felt your heart dance. "You have a cute smile." You looked over at your brother as he called for you. "I have to go." You looked back at Levi. "I have work to do. It was great to meet you, Levi. Erwin told me all about you, Farlan and Isabel." You bowed to all three. "I look forward to getting to know you."

Levi watched you run off to your brother. "I...I...I want her...my heart...it beats her name."

Farlan ruffled Levi's hair. "My best bud is in love!" He chuckled. "We'll help you, Mr Romance."

After lots of pep talks and support from his friends, he had a few ideas on how to approach you, how to romance you, how to love you and how to confess. He was ready and with an important mission coming up where he was going to be away from you, he wanted to act on his feelings.

You were alone so it was the perfect chance. He strolled up to you, each step causing his heart to hammer in his chest. The world around him disappeared and you were his only focus. Before he knew it he was standing before you.

He stammered your name and saw such a sweet smile appear on your lips, it was a smile that he had only seen on you when you looked at him. He took a deep breath. "H-Hi."

You reached over and fixed his cravat. "Hello, Levi. How can I help you?"

"T-Tea."

"You want to have tea with me?"

He nodded. "Y-Yes, b-but not as um...s-scouts."

You felt your cheeks burn. "Are you asking me on a tea date?"

"Y-Yes."

You held his hands making him flinch. "I would really like that."

He squeezed your hand tightly. "G-Good."

"Levi?"

"Y-Yes."

You moved closer to him. "There's no need to be so nervous or scared. I like you. I like you a lot. I won't use you or run away. "I want this."

He lifted your hands up to his lips and kissed them. "Me too. S-So..."

You released his hands. "I'll get the tea. We have privacy here in my office." You closed the door to your room and made some tea in your little kitchen area. "Are you going on the next mission?"

"I am. You're staying behind, right?"

You handed him the tea. "Yeah. I'm looking after the base, doing paperwork and doing some training. Erwin is always like this with me. Super protective and rarely sends me out. I don't mind it, means I can keep everything organised in the scouts." You sat down and sighed. "What I do means a lot of people can sleep at night instead of staying up to work. I'm a great killer of titans, but I'm also a killer of paperwork."

Levi chuckled. "Funny and cute."

You smiled. "Thank you." You reached over and held his hand. "I believe in you, Levi. You'll do amazing on your first mission. I'll be right here waiting for you to return."

He squeezed your hand. "G-Good."

It seemed so natural to talk together. At first, Levi was nervous but soon he relaxed, he joked with you and made you laugh a lot. The two of you swapped childhood stories. Levi felt safe with you and you never once judged him for the life he used to live in the underground. You were so understanding, it made him feel so heard and cared for.

By the end of your little tea date, he had to go to bed so he could go on the mission the next day. He was flustered when you walked him to his room. As you stood outside his room, the two of you talked and the desire to kiss you was so strong, but he never acted. The two of you parted with sweet good nights.

As Levi raced around on his mission, all he could think about were your wonderful lips. He wanted to kiss you. He stuck with his friends and didn't go after Erwin for his book because he wouldn't do that to you. He wouldn't do that to the brother of the woman he loved. He was going to be good and stick with his friends.

When the deadly titan arrived, he ripped into it before a single person was hurt or attacked. Erwin returned and was impressed with Levi's actions because if Levi hadn't been there, who knows what could have possibly happened.

Levi rode back as fast as he could to the base. He had come so close to death that he knew he shouldn't dance around anymore. As soon as he saw you waiting for everyone to come back, he jumped off his horse and sprinted up to you.

You smiled brightly. "Levi! You made it."

Levi grabbed your hips, yanked you close and crashed his lips against yours. He kissed you with all the passion and love within his heart. He bit your lip causing you to open your mouth. He pushed his tongue into your mouth and felt instant fireworks.

The two of you moved together as passion and love burned between you and Levi. The whoops and whistles from your friends were ignored because this kiss had been a long time coming. You clung to each other as little moans escaped you. You were hungry for each other.

You part from Levi first and he chased your lips. You giggled and gave him a light kiss. "That was worth the wait."

Levi blushed. "It was. I want more."

"Come to my room after briefing and we can kiss a lot more."

He kissed you again. "I can't wait."

"I can't either."

[lucysarah-c]

Do you have any plans for a LevixReader longfic that you would like to write about plot-wise (going back to seasons 1 and 4) besides Holy Ground or after you finish Holy Ground?

Hi, dear! How are you?

Oh, that's such a good question! Yes, I do! Actually, I have the first chapter written, but I will post it once I finish 'Holy Ground.' My idea is to finish writing it before even posting the first chapter. It's not going to be as long as 'HG,' no no. 'Holy Ground' is my baby; I planned that story for years, and it's long because I created a whole universe about it haha. Chapters are long, and they are already cut out of plenty of scenes before they get posted. I think that once 'HG' is done, it may be 500k, and that's a lot.

The new fic would only be five chapters; the titles and everything are already decided. Because who am I if not an obsessive controller and planner? The story will be a canon time but AU about what would have happened if Levi, Farlan, and Isabel would have succeeded in killing Erwin, and now they live in the capital city. The title will be 'Suburban Legends,' with one prologue and four chapters. Levi X reader.

I can even give you a sneak peak:

Snow crunching underfoot, cobblestones slippery, skies open and flamingo pink, the screams of newspapers and old brooms sweeping streets. Head down, dark locks dusted with snowflakes, hands in pockets, calloused, tired feet in a worn uniform. Elaborate sighs, eyes glued to the floor, shop owners opening their stores, boulevards closing. A shaking figure paces down the streets, curious eyes following its path as some recognize him.

The ferry wasn't scheduled for its first trip for at least two to three hours more. He needed to pass the time; his meeting with the higher-ups and Historia had lasted until dawn. The early mornings downtown hold a melancholy that deeply affects him. As he reaches a small plaza, his sigh rises and he admires the view. Sheena's Wall exhales an air of foreignness he can't comprehend, like visiting an ex's house - familiar yet tinged with unease and foreignness. A place once called his own, now recalled with flashbacks of bad dreams.

The overwhelming desire to be alone consumes him, perhaps hidden in a forest outside the walls where nobody could see or expect him. Unusual for him, but he feels on the verge of tears. What could be the reason? The stress of the Wall Maria retake expedition? Erwin's unwavering determination and wavering intentions? The reasons he joined the scouts now disturbed like a distorted dream? Kenny? The kids from the underground reminding him of his own and, once again, Kenny? His mother?

Desolation and doubts cloud his mind; the streets teem with strangers, and the wash of loneliness shivers his body in a way it hasn't before. He can almost believe that at 31, he wishes Kenny were around again, to guide him, to ask him questions, to show him the way. Joining the scouts seven years ago, knowing more at 24 than at 31. Pacing the streets like an abandoned dog, wondering where to return, never thinking they'd one day be left to fend for themselves in the empty fields, seeking civilization by the scent of food and the hope of love.

Thank you for passing by! I can't help but wonder what made you want to ask that question! Feel free to return haha.

Have a lovely day/night!

[caffeinateddino]

Attack on titan veterans university headcanons because i have to go back go uni in 2 days

First of all, Erwin Smith. this man would probably be a history major, following after his father. I'd think all his needs are getting payed by a scholarship, so he spends most of his time in university instead of working

but he's not only a history student, he's also president in some kind of club. I'd say a sort of club that helps underprivileged people scholarships to study? or maybe he's the head of some volunteering program. i can see Erwin being a student ambassador or someone involved in community service

and that's how we get to Levi Ackerman. since in the anime, Erwin is the reason why levi, isabel and falan joined the scouts, that would be the same here.

maybe Levi meets Erwin during some kind of event/fair/volunteering program that the university hosts underground as an outreach effort. Erwin would recognize Levi's potential despite Levi's rough background.

I think Levi would join the university with farlan and isabel just to get by in the surface world. he'd be studying general studies because it wouldn't require much of academic load (i think?), and he's not there to actually study

he's not a type of person who'd just sit around. i can see him working partime in a cafe/teashop and saving his own momey to open his own teashop after university

if you wanna feel sad, i think how levi would separate from Farlan and Isabel would be the fact that they got into university in a different country 💯

now, Hange Zoe. Definetly a chemistry major!! if I'm not wrong they were a chemistry teacher im high-school AU anywyas. Hange definetly spends most of ther time in the lab, with Moblit, of course!

also i can see hange being a total nerd! both in academic and.. non-academic? way. I think they would be into gaming, anime, manga, you name it.

Hange would be a type of person who'd read some scientific article for fun. They're a total genius, i can see them being into physics, philosophy and biology as well, especially marine biology! they're the type of person who'd get drunk and start rambling like "did you know octopuses had 3 hearts and blue blood. also male horses gives birth? female seahorse deposit their eggs into the male seahorse blah blah blah"

Miche. I'm not completely sure but since he was like extremely strong?? super strong?? i think he'd be studying Kinesiology? Sports science?

now i have to make ai roleplay bot of this for shits and giggles

[moo-blogging]

Late night thoughts #122:

Modern AU but also fights titans. You caught a bouquet at a wedding, joked that you would agree to anyone. People started asking for your contacts, you gave them gladly. Levi, feeling brave after a few drinks, asked you to be his gf. You said yes :)

Never in your wildest dreams that you would attend a wedding in the scouts' camp, but Erwin made it happened. After seeing deaths of comrades, a few scouts wanted to leave the military and get married, stealing what little peace and normalcy they could before things go wrong. Erwin allowed them to have a group wedding ceremony in the scouts' camp as a farewell and blessing to the newly weds.

Everybody helped decorating and setting up for the wedding, pooling what little money everybody had to help your soon to be ex-comrades. The brides looked so very beautiful in the white dresses while the grooms dressed in their best clothes. You had meat and beer, what you normally wouldn't have. Everybody was happy, drunk, and lived a normal life for once. You were not soldiers, but friends celebrating life together.

And then, it was the bouquet tossing session. You were pulled to the front of the hall together with other girls. Giggling and nudging each other playfully, you hid yourself in the middle of the crowd. You had no intentions to catch a bouquet. You were not even in a relationship. As the brides threw their bouquets, the girls squealed with delight and rushed forward to snatch a bouquet. You were watching, amused. Suddenly, one of the bouquets bounced off a group of girls' waving arms and landed into yours.

The girls froze for a moment before they shrilled in glee. You were hugged by different girls, shook hands and congratulated. One of the brides announced that you had caught a bouquet and urged the boys to ask for your number or ask you out. Jokingly, you promised you wouldn't say no.

You walked back to your seat next to Levi, sharing the table with Erwin, Hange, Moblit, Nanaba and Miche. Erwin and Nanaba congratulated you, you grinned with embarrasment. Levi sat very quietly next to you. He was in his best suit. His suit looked clean and new but you knew he had it for years. He got it when he first joined the scouts. He wore it to his friends, Isabelle and Farlan's funeral. He was just very good at taking care of things. And even after a few bottle of beer, he still managed to smell good. Sitting next to him, you tried your best to swallow as quietly as possible. Not just because the food was nice (it was), but also because Levi sat so close to you in such a formal event.

A few boys younger than you came to ask for your number, and you gave it to them. A few started texting you immediately, but you waved at them instead, indicating that you saw their messages. Hange was joking that you might get a boy home tonight. Levi cleared his throat. He uncrossed his arms and took a long sip of his beer. He might think this is childish, you thought.

"Y/N," Levi called to you.

Startled, you cleared your throat too. "Yes, Captain Levi?"

"You said you wouldn't say no to anyone, yes?" He looked you at with such intensity his eyes bore into yours.

Swallowing, you nodded, "y-yes. I mean-"

"Be my girlfriend."

"What?"

Levi shifted his position, sitting straight, "Be my girlfriend. I want to be your boyfriend."

Head spinning, thoughts jumbling up in a mess, you agreed. Is this even real? The Captain Levi is now your boyfriend?! You were sure you were drunk and you made it up in your head.

But the applause and cheers from the table confirmed it was real. Miche patted on Levi's back while Erwin lifted his glass as a toast to you. You felt your face burning and you bit your lower lip to hide your stupid grin. Levi was looking at his lap, unsure how to react.

"You should make it official." Erwin suggested, "like a kiss on the cheek."

Embarrassed, you quickly leaned in to peck Levi's cheek. Instead, your lips landed on his soft lips. You both pulled away immediately. You hid your face in your palms, your face burning up so much you felt that you could burn your fingers. The whole table was laughing and cheering.

Someone tapped your shoulder, "may I have your number please?"

Levi snapped, "she's taken now. No more numbers!"

The younger scout scurried away and shared the news with others. You did manage to bring a guy home tonight.

[pickalilywrites]

Levi and Petra's son arrives two weeks early, born on Valentines day. Modern AU

thanks :)

two weeks more

rivetra. modern au. 1072 words.

“I’m going in there,” Levi says for the tenth time that hour. It’s the twelfth hour, and he’s said the same thing at least ten times each hour. He must have repeated it over a hundred times by now, but he clings to it like a mantra even though he’s been barred from entering after the first time he had caused a scene. 

“You can’t go in there,” Farlan says, something he’s also repeated as many times as Levi has repeated his own words. He grips Levi’s arm with one hand, ready to restrain his friend like he’s done so many times before today. Like Levi, there are dark circles under his eyes after being up for the past twelve hours. “The doctor kicked you out after you made a fuss bringing Petra here.”   

“How does anyone expect me to sit still when there’s a whole child coming out of my wife?” Levi asks. He lurches forward, but Farlan pushes him back down against the chair. He snarls at Farlan, “Let me go!”  

“Do you want to be kicked out of the hospital?” Farlan hisses, glancing at Petra’s hospital room. A cry comes from the room and Farlan grunts as he pushes Levi back against the chair once more. “Levi, sit the fuck down! Isabel is with her. It’s going to be fine!”  

“Why is it taking so long? It shouldn’t be taking this long,” Levi protests. He tries to lunge out of his chair once more, but Farlan holds him down firmly. Levi glares at Hanji who is calmly flipping through a magazine beside him. “Hanji, help me!”  

“Help you what?” Hanji asks. They turn another page, not bothering to look up at Levi’s outraged face. They only look up every once and a while when hearing Petra’s pained cries, but otherwise they seem unbothered. “Do you really think it’ll help if you’re in there screaming at the doctor and nurses? They’re professionals, Levi. Just leave them to their jobs. It’s natural for the first labor to be the hardest.”  

“See? Listen to Hanji,” Farlan says through gritted teeth, still firmly holding Levi back against the chair because he doesn’t trust Levi not to escape at the earliest opportunity.  

“Two weeks early? The baby is two weeks early,” Levi reminds them. He’s been constantly reminding of this fact the entire time they’ve been at the hospital. He had memorized the exact date that their baby should have been born: February 28. It was a complete surprise when Petra’s contractions had started two weeks prior to the date their obstetrician had given them. They had planned to celebrate their last childless Valentine’s Day together when the contractions started late last night only a little after they had gone to bed. 

“Yes, the baby is two weeks early. We know, we know,” Hanji says with a nod. They fling an arm around Levi’s shoulders. “Shouldn’t this be, you know, the best day of your life? You’re going to be a father, you know.”  

“This is the worst fucking day I’ve ever had,” Levi replies. He turns his head so quickly at the sound of Petra’s cry that his neck nearly snaps.  

“I’d say Petra’s day is infinitely worse. She’s the one being ripped in half, after all,” Hanji comments.  

At Hanji’s words, Levi makes another attempt to escape from Farlan’s grasp but his friend tackles him back into the chair. 

“Hanji, you’re not helping,” Farlan hisses. It’s taking all of his strength to hold Levi against the chair, but he’s not sure how long he can keep holding Levi back after restraining him for several hours. 

“If you don’t let me go right now, I will kill you,” Levi growls, but Farlan continues to hold him back. Levi feels his panic rise when he hears Petra cry again behind the delivery room doors. He struggles against Farlan’s hold, trying his best to break free. It takes him a while to realize that Hanji is shushing him. 

“Do you hear that?” Hanji asks. They place a finger to their lips, finally abandoning their magazine on a side table. It’s the first time they’ve expressed any interest in what was happening in the delivery room. They lean forward, a smile on their face as they hear the sound of a baby crying replacing Petra’s earlier cries.  

Isabel bursts through the doors just then, two nurses following closely behind her. “Levi!” she says, but she hardly finishes calling his name when Levi pushes past her, unable to stand being away from his wife any longer. 

When he enters the delivery room, Petra is laying in the hospital bed exhausted. She’s damp with sweat, but she’s as radiant as ever. In her arms is a babe wrapped in a bundle of blankets, red-faced and crying even as he’s being comforted by his mother. When Petra sees Levi, she gives him a tired smile. 

“Are you okay?” she asks. 

“I should be the one asking you that,” Levi laughs weakly, unable to take his eyes off their newborn son. The baby is so small, but somehow the his presence has shifted his entire world.  

Petra shushes the baby, but it continues to fuss and cry despite her best efforts. She smiles a little sheepishly at Levi. “He was so impatient that he came two weeks early, but it seems he’s still upset even after being born.”  

Levi can only watch wordlessly as Petra comforts the babe, speaking to him lowly as he cries and cries and the nurses fuss around them. Eventually, he asks, “Can I hold him?”  

“Of course,” Petra laughs and gently hands the newborn to her husband.  

Levi cradles his son in his arms, holding him as if he were made of glass. He doesn’t even dare to breathe as he holds their son. As he takes the baby in his arms, the baby begins to quiet down, comforted by his father’s touch.  

“All this time, we were wondering why he came so early,” Petra says with a smile. She reaches out to touch their son’s forehead, stroking the little wisp of black hair. “It looks like he wanted to meet us as soon as possible.”  

“Lucky us,” Levi says as he gazes down lovingly at their son. Only a few minutes ago he had been in complete agony, but now he feels nothing but blessed as he holds his newborn with his wife beside him.  

[sparkywrites25]

Hi Sparky 🙂

I hope you're having a good day!

I just saw (& reblogged) your post about requests, so I jumped in your ask box.

If it's ok with you, why not a Modern AU Erurihan where Erwin & Hange try to seduce Levi together at a party. Of course, nothing goes according to their original plan 😉

Thank you!

Summary: Hange and Erwin set their sights on one Levi Ackerman at a party. Seducing him, however, is another matter entirely.

Pairing: Erwin Smith x Hange Zoe x Levi Ackerman

Taglist: @youre-ackermine

Notes: If you like my work and want to see more then please join my taglist. Form is pinned on my blog.

The scowl sitting on Levi’s face only deepened as the smells of beer, tobacco and marijuana hit him in the face. His stomach churned and he fought back the instinct to gag. He had to step over a drunk girl currently draped over the entryway stairs into the manor house. She was mumbling and giggling about bubbles, eyes fluttering under the weight of her intoxication. He and his friends ventured further into the den of pounding music and obnoxious laughter. Irritation greeted him instantly. 

The outline of classical beauty of the house was clear from the moment he stepped inside, but the rest was well hidden beneath the chaos raging within. Smoke wafted heavily around an expansive foyer, dimming the brightness of the white walls and veiling the paintings and portraits hanging all over them. Marble busts on pedestals were draped with jackets, decorative scarfs and sunglasses. At least one or two dripped with various liquids and spilled foods. In the heart of the room, a staircase spiraled upwards, furnished in polished wood much like the flooring which was now heavily decorated with stains and lethargic, laughing students. There must have been about a dozen people in this room alone, chatting, swaying to music or making out on the stairs. 

“Woo!!” Isabel cheered from where she was walking ahead of Levi. “Now this is a party!” Her hips swung as she bounced forwards. Several sets of eyes fell on her immediately as she passed. The black waistcoat and mini skirt didn’t leave much to the imagination so Levi was grateful for the black fishnet sleeves and tights that covered her arms and legs. Even so, he threw some extra glares around those throwing looks Isabel’s way. His fingers twitched and he fisted them, forcing himself to focus on just that and not throwing said fist into any faces. 

Of course, he paid no attention to the attention being placed on him and Farlan as they followed Isabel. Levi had offered for the minimal effort of a black t-shirt and jacket with equally dark jeans and boots while Farlan had taken the middle ground by wearing loose black slacks with a plum button-up. 

As Levi took in the lack of hygiene generally being expressed around here, he was more grateful than ever for the two bottles of hand sanitizer in his jacket pockets. 

“You must really be willing to clean, huh?” Levi scoffed as he side-stepped a suspicious puddle. 

“Huh?” Isabel called back to him, looking over her shoulder. 

“If you expect me to stay in this cesspit for a few hours then you must be really willing to clean for it,” Levi reminded her. It had taken Isabel promising to take on the bulk of the cleaning duties in their apartment for the next three weeks to convince Levi to give the party a chance. Chance meaning to stay at least three hours, according to Isabel.

He shot a side-eye at a golden haired, spaced-out guy sitting sprawled on the floor, reaching up to Isabel. The guy recoiled at the fierceness in Levi’s gaze although he still managed to flip the bird at the scowling man. 

Ignoring the silent exchange, Isabel rolled her eyes and tossed her head, leading her friends across the foyer and into a (thankfully quieter) hallway. “Yeah yeah, I’ll do whatever cleaning you want. Just stay and have some fun, bro.”

“In this dump?” Levi scoffed. “Hardly.”

“Come on, Levi,” Farlan urged. “It’ll probably be better than you think. Anyway parties get a little messy. At least we’re not going to be the ones cleaning it up.”

A huff of agreement was all he received from his friend. The two young men followed Isabel as she navigated through making out couples, chatting friends and more than a couple of groups of people throwing random things around. Levi was already imagining how quickly the mood of the place would go south when it came to clean up.

In the kitchen, they were greeted by Nifa who had rainbows painted across the left half of her face and sloshed some of her drink as she dashed over to hug Isabel one-armed. Isabel returned the hug with a happy cry and instantly started admiring the rainbows and chattering about who was at the party and who was getting up to what. 

Levi’s eyes swept the room. In one corner, sat around an island counter, Miche Zacharius, a senior and one of the resident advisors for the Stohess dorm, was drinking beers with Nanaba, Gelgar and Thomas while playing cards. Gelgar was smirking widely at Nanaba who was avoiding his smug face by staring down at her cards. In another corner, Moblit Berner and Rico Brzenska were deep in conversation as they carried their drinks out onto a terrace. Levi felt the itch to follow them and escape the noise and the smells. Preferably with a strong drink in his hand. However he wouldn’t be able to escape there just yet. Not until both Farlan and Isabel were suitably occupied. 

“How’s it going, guys?” Nifa directed her question towards Farlan and Levi with an easygoing smile. 

“It’s good,” Farlan smiled at her then jerked a thumb at Levi. “Levi had to be dragged out kicking and screaming of course,” he said, throwing Levi a side-eye and teasing grin that had the darker haired man rolling his eyes. 

Nifa’s laugh was short and her eyes were sympathetic as she looked at Levi. “Ahh well I’m sure you must have seen the foyer and wanted to go home, eh? It’s such a fucking disaster in there,” she mused. “I’m just glad that I’m not going to be the one to clean that shit up.”

Levi nodded. “I doubt they’ll clean it up properly,” he said. 

“Probably not,” Nifa agreed and gestured behind her. “Drinks are over there,” she said, “and there’s some snacks in the other room,” she gestured to the lounge area. Levi could see many people already filling the space with dancing and laughter and noise. So much noise. 

“Oki-doki,” Isabel said and dashed forward, plucking a plastic cup off the pile and going to fill it up at a beer keg. “Come on guys!” She reminded Levi off an energetic toddler as she went. Farlan chuckled and began to follow her. 

Nifa eyed Levi who had moved to grab a cup but, instead of approaching the keg, was now advancing on the table of spirits and mixers. She followed him after a moment and leaned against the counter while he poured himself a vodka with no mixer. She was smiling at him, fighting back a chuckle. “Someone’s popular as ever?” she teased. 

Levi screwed the cap on the vodka and lifted one eyebrow. When she nodded her head behind him, he looked over his shoulder and cursed. With all the people in the room, he hadn’t even felt the sensation of people watching him in particular. He didn’t like the absence of that sense.

Standing in another corner of the room, they were watching him with smiles, one of which was casual, the other one gleaming and manic. Levi felt a headache coming on just from looking at that smile… and the rainbow eyesore that accompanied it. 

Hange’s glasses were askew, their hair spiking up around a bun that reminded Levi of those drawings of the sun with flames around it. The rainbow monstrosity that was hurting his eyes was a sleeveless dress worn over orange leggings and accompanied by bright green sleeves. The whole outfit was topped off by one blue boot and one red. He blinked slowly. Yet, despite the fact that the outfit hurt his eyes, it was also unmistakably Hange. They waved energetically at Levi who did nothing in return. 

Next to Hange, Erwin cut a much calmer figure. Dressed in an open blue button up with rolled up sleeves and a white t-shirt beneath along with a pair of sandy slacks and loafers, the tall golden haired man was watching Levi with serene amusement. 

“Tch,” he grumbled, picking up his drink and turning away, “I’m not drunk enough to deal with them,” he muttered. Even so, his mind fluttered back to the way Erwin’s t-shirt stretched across his broad chest or how Hange’s rainbow outfit actually managed to suit them well. 

Nifa chuckled and watched him take his drink and, slowly, return to Farlan and Isabel’s side. 

*******************************

“Levi’s looking fine tonight.” Hange lifted their drink to their lips and swigged the last of it. “So let’s make the most of it.”

Erwin’s laughter came out in a quiet huff as he wrapped an arm around his partner. “I admire your tenacity, Hange but I don’t rate our chances of getting anywhere with him when the house is in this much of a state.”

Hange leaned into their boyfriend’s broad chest and pursed their lips thoughtfully. “That does present a problem,” they agreed. “But I’m sure you could… persuade… some people to make this place a bit more… Levi-friendly,” they suggested, raising their eyes to his and wriggling both brows. 

He lifted his own bushy brows and chuckled. “I am flattered by your confidence in me to convince people to clean during a party.”

“If anyone can do it, you can,” Hange enthused with a wink. They leaned up to kiss him on the lips and felt his hands squeeze their sides in affection. 

“That does make me wonder what exactly you’re going to get up to while I’m on this endeavour,” he remarked, raising one of his brows highly. “If we’re actually gonna make our move tonight then-”

“Oh Erwin, do you have to make everything sound like a military operation?” Hange giggled. “We’re just trying to hook up with one of the two hottest guys on campus.” Their arms looped around Erwin’s broad shoulders as they began to swing from one foot to the other. “Relaaaax into it, will you?”

Erwin’s chuckle rumbled through them both. “One of two?”

“Oh stop fishing, handsome,” Hange kissed him again. This time the kiss lingered as Erwin’s lips moved encouragingly against theirs. His strong arms lifted them off their feet for a moment and the party disappeared around them for seconds of bliss. He tasted of beer and lemon and Hange breathed in his cologne as they clung to him. 

He put them down and broke away from the kiss just enough to whisper against their mouth. “Try not to get yourself into too much trouble while I’m gone,” he urged with a knowing smile. Picking up his cup, he moved away to refill it and then disappear into the crowd. 

Hange watched him go with a smirk and played with her own empty cup. 

Among those left in the kitchen, Levi and his friends had disappeared, presumably into the lounge. Hange set off for their own refill. 

Or at least that was the plan until they saw that the shots counter full of shot liquids and empty glasses was currently unattended.

*******************************

Seduction was a science, Hange reminded themself as they poured a fourth raspberry shot into their glass. It required skill and confidence to put into place especially when it came to someone like Levi who was difficult to read when he was in a good mood let alone when he was like this - annoyed and openly disliking being here. Therefore Hange would need all the confidence they could get to play their best cards with Levi. 

He was so incredibly handsome, they mused as they leaned back against the counter. At least they knew they had good taste between him and Erwin. But other than being good-looking, the two men were so different. Erwin had that polite-lovable-giant-on-the-surface-but-actually-a-crafty-shark-underneath thing going on and that was hella sexy. Levi had something Hange had never encountered before - the whole bad boy plus clean freak combination was pretty intriguing. He looked like he might murder you but at least he would clean up after himself. That was hot.

Hange thanked the stars that they and Erwin were always entirely honest with each other. When they’d both admitted that they’d begun to admire Levi in more ways than one, it had taken just one conversation for them to decide to pursue it. However they could hardly have chosen someone more difficult to approach outside of classes. Hange didn’t think she’d ever seen Levi hanging out with anyone other than Isabel and Farlan. The three of them always just seemed to do their own thing. 

Whoever talked Levi into coming to this party had earned Hange’s undying respect. 

Downing the shot, Hange’s eyes scanned the constantly changing traffic inside the kitchen. They glanced up at the clock. Erwin had been gone about twenty minutes now and Hange was feeling pretty restless. They pushed off the counter and refilled their cup with some more beer and almost knocked into Jean Kirstein who was trying to balance several drinks at once. 

“Watch it, Hange!” he cried out, darting aside at the last second. 

Hange merely waved him off, their brown eyes seeking out a completely different undercut. They weaved through various groups, ignoring the protests as they stepped into the lounge. 

There were easily a few dozen people in the enormous space. All of the cream-white expensive-looking sofas had been pushed back against the walls allowing for a larger dance floor. Rich leather armchairs were shoved in the spaces between them. The floor was filled with crowding dancers while many onlookers - some of them without shoes - had taken refuge on the cushioned seats. Some had sprawled out at their feet on the soft pale carpet. The whole room was too white for Hange, even with the paintings hanging everywhere. The colours of coats and jackets draped over the furniture, and the brightly coloured figures currently swaying to the Macarena definitely livened the aesthetic up. 

They scrutinized the seated crowd, passing over the dancers in a second. (If anyone gets that guy to dance, I’ll eat this dress, Hange scoffed). 

Halfway across the dance floor, they recognized the bright double ponytails of Isabel energetically throwing herself into the dance with Mina, Sasha and Nifa. Across from her, Farlan had snagged a place on one of the sofas, chatting to a pair of guys that Hange recognized as Reiner and Berthold. Hange blinked slowly. No Levi? They wondered and turned to inspect the other side of the room. Maybe he ditched after all, came a thought laced with disappointment. 

Another sweep of the room revealed no further signs of the short badass. Hange huffed and ventured further into the room, towards the turning, gesturing bodies on the dance floor. 

“Oh Leeeviiiii!” they called, glasses gleaming under the rainbow lights. The shifting lights made the various colours bounce into focus and Hange found themself moving along with the music as they searched. “Levi!” they called again. “Oi, Shorty-!”

Even with Hange’s natural volume, the music easily overshadowed their attempts to call for Levi. They navigated around a couple that were making out and found themself standing in the furthest corner of the room. Five armchairs had been positioned close together but one had been turned around to face the window. It was occupied by the back of a dark head of hair. As Hange stepped closer, they recognized the undercut that appeared beneath the ear-length strands. 

A victorious smile lit up their face. “Levi!!” they cheered and practically bounced over to them. 

The face that turned towards them was heavy with irritation. Levi lowered the cup from his lips and sighed. “The fuck do you want, Four-Eyes?” 

Hange grabbed the nearest chair and swung it to face his, plopping down into it. “What does anyone come here to do? Socialize!”

“Socialize with someone else.”

“Come on, don’t be like that,” Hange planted their elbows on their knees and cupped their cheek in one hand. “You don’t mind talking to meeee.”

“In very small doses,” Levi grumped. 

“Than consider this your daily dose!” Hange declared, their arm shooting up into the air with triumph. 

Levi reached his free hand up to his eyes to rub at them. “I swear you should come with a mute button,” he quipped. Hange’s face twisted into (for now) silent protest only to falter when they saw the corner of Levi’s mouth begin the curve upward. 

“Oh come on, I make life interesting.” Hange countered. “And you look so riveted here.”

Levi held their gaze with an exceptionally uninterested expression. However Hange simply waited him out. Not that it was easy - their natural state of being was to talk and move about after all. Part of them itched to get up and groove along with the music while waiting for Levi to speak but that was only going to irritate him more. If they were going to get to know him better, to get closer to him, they had to not drive him away with annoyance. There was a delicate balance to what Levi Ackerman seemed to be able to tolerate in other people. Hange was still figuring that out from the interactions they and Erwin had had with him in class and just in general. 

“Okay, an idea,” Hange held up a finger as a brain wave hit them. “If I can make you smile in the next five minutes, we hang out. You know, we might even have a good time. If I can’t manage it, I’ll leave you to your brooding, deal?”

Levi considered their words then lifted his phone. After tapping it a dozen times, he laid it on the arm of the chair, a timer visible. “Go ahead.”

Hange’s eyes gleamed. “Excellent. Okay then.” They sat up straighter and stretched their neck around, rolling their shoulders forward. 

Levi frowned. “What the hell are you about to do?”

“You know, I should really complain to Spotify about you.”

“Why?”

“They didn’t name you as this week’s hottest single.”

Levi’s exhale was quiet and his eyelids lowered. He slow blinked irritably. 

Unfazed, Hange just grinned at him. “Tough crowd, all right-y then.” They stroked their chin then clicked their fingers at him. “If being sexy was a crime, you’d be guilty as charged!” 

This time Levi’s eyes fully closed. “Even you can do better than that one.”

“You’re right,” Hange frowned to themself, “that one was definitely beneath me.”

Levi eyed the timer on his phone briefly then leaned back in his armchair, fixing Hange with a bored, expectant look. Damn, he looked fine like that, Hange thought as they grinned at him. They brought their drink to their lips. Okay come on, get it together. You gotta wow him. 

“If you were a fruit,” they decided, “you’d be a fine-apple.”

For a few seconds, Levi blinked in surprise and then an eye-roll took over again. “Is that your plan? To keep throwing cheesy lines at me? Time’s-a-ticking, Hange.”

“Hey, I’m willing to be there’s a sense of humour buried somewhere underneath all that snark, you know.”

For a millisecond, Hange thought they saw Levi’s lip twitch but he lifted his drink to his lips and took a sip. Damn, close. 

“Wow,” they mused, “when God made you, he was seriously showing off.”

Levi lowered his drink and there was a glint of pity in his narrowed eyes. “Really, Hange? You’re going to stoop to religious ones now?”

Hange pursed their lips. He had a point. It wasn’t like they were religious and it felt out of place whenever they mentioned an almighty deity having any say over what happened here. They were a scientist and they’d spent most of their childhood arguing against the existence of God to their parents. Just the memory of it had them reaching up to rub the bridge of their nose. 

“Yeah…” they muttered, “I don’t know what I was thinking there.” They fell silent, seconds passing as their mind wandered back to a place it hadn’t been in a long time. To a place they didn’t really want to revisit and yet it was never too far from their thoughts. How could it not be after all that had happened? Images rolled through their head against their will; a suitcase being thrown into their hands, a slap around the face, snarling disowning words and the cold evening rain. Hange exhaled slowly, their eyes closing as they lost themselves in that cold, wet, terrible memory. 

“Oi.” Levi nudged their leg with his own. “You’ve got three and a half minutes left.” As Hange opened their eyes, they met Levi’s penetrating eyes. His frown deepened as he read their expression. “Come on,” he urged. 

Hange smiled, grateful for the distraction. 

Drumming their fingers against their knee, they gave their next line some serious thought. Finally after about twenty seconds, their smile turned into a smirk. “If I was a cat,” they remarked, “I’d spend all my nine lives with you.”

Levi huffed and it sounded suspiciously like muffled laughter although his lips - those beautiful lips - still didn’t curve up into a full smile. Damn him. Hange cursed. He’s hard work.

“Given what I’ve heard about you in other classes,” Levi murmured, “I can’t imagine you’d have many lives left.”

Hange’s jaw dropped. “Cheeky bastard.”

“Three minutes.”

Hange pouted. “Fine.” They planted one hand on their knee and leaned forward. “Kiss me if I’m wrong,” they declared, “but dinosaurs still exist, right?”

Levi snorted, the derision rolling out of him as a smile flickered across his face, briefly but there. “That was stupid,” he muttered. 

Hange beamed. “It worked though.”

“Barely,” he countered and then drank from his drink again. “Fine. You’re tolerable,” he admitted with a smirk. “But I’m getting another drink first,” he insisted, rising to his feet. After a second, he held out his hand for their cup. “Refill?” At their nod, he sniffed the drink and wrinkled his nose. “Of course you drink that crap,” he murmured as he stepped around the armchair. “Hold the seats,” he said before disappearing into the crowd. 

Hange grinned, gave him a salute and leaned back in their armchair, throwing their feet onto Levi’s seat while waiting.

They gazed across the dance floor which was filling up with more people as the latest hit by some boy band Hange barely recalled began to play. Girls swung their hips dramatically and many guys were pulled up into their arms to sway with them. Hange cackled a bit as they stretched out in their seat. 

“Ah to be mainstream.”

Between the pulsing, shifting multi-coloured lights doing their own dance across the people and the room in general, the rhythmic beat of the music and the comfort of the chair, Hange felt themselves zoning out especially as the alcohol from the shots began to announce itself again. Time disappeared in a spectrum of colour, light and noise. 

“Get your shitty feet off my chair,” Levi interrupted their daze and they lowered their feet with a smile, reaching up to accept their new drink. 

“You need to lighten up a bit Levi. All that tension isn’t good for you,” they told him, taking a hearty swig of the beer. 

He said nothing and took his seat. His eyes darted over to where Isabel was still dancing and where Farlan was talking animatedly with Reiner and Berthold. 

“Do you want to go join them?” Hange asked, feeling a stab of guilt that Levi might be missing the company of those who he was clearly closest to. 

Levi shook his head. “No.” He turned his head away and turned back to Hange. “Well, you wanted to hang out, right?”

Hange nodded enthusiastically. “That I did, and… I gotta know, Levi. How did someone persuade you to come out tonight? I don’t think I’ve seen you at one of these in months.”

“Isabel promised to take up considerable cleaning duties if I came out for a few hours.” Levi murmured, shrugging and glancing at Isabel. 

“Wow, so she meets your standards? Those things fucking precede you, Levi.”

He snorted quietly. “Not at all. But Farlan does and he can supervise.” Drinking from his cup, he eyed Hange with a growing frown. “Where’s Erwin? You got him cleaning up one of your messes again? Oh wait, that’s Moblit right?” A smirk tugged on his features. Hange flipped him the bird regardless of the fact that the expression looked fucking hot on him. 

“He had to go speak to some people,” Hange said, waving off the snark for now, making the most of actually getting to spend some time with Levi for now. “I’m sure he’ll be along soon.”

“Well, there’ll be no missing him, will there?”

Hange chuckled. “Nope. He and Miche aren’t hard to find in a crowd.” They eye Levi who rolls his eyes. 

“Shut up.”

“What?”

“I can see the short joke building behind those shitty glasses.”

Laughing, Hange crossed one leg over the other. “Hey, there’s gotta be some perks. No banging your head against doorways. You can disappear into a crowd.”

“Yeah.”

“Bet you’re pretty graceful about it too.”

“Well it helps not having the coordination of an intoxicated duck.”

Hange scowled. “Hey, as long as these things,” they patted their legs as they spoke, “get me where they need to go, I don’t care how they go about it.”

“Clearly.”

It was Hange’s turn to roll their eyes and they took another sip - a far larger one - of their drink which did not go unnoticed. 

“Take it easy,” Levi urged. “I’m not clearing up if you puke.”

“I’m not going to hurl,” Hange insisted. 

“That’s just as well,” Erwin announced as he stepped up behind Hange, “seeing as how I’ve just convinced some people to start clearing up. They’ll start with the foyer. Make this place look somewhat presentable at least.” He dragged one of the armchairs between Levi and Hange, nodding towards the considerably shorter man who was wearing an expression of bemusement. Erwin sank into the seat and looked towards Levi. “Levi.”

“Erwin,” Levi greeted. “I’m impressed you managed to get some of these idiots moving.”

“Well there’s quite a few people - I suspect, like yourself - who have been dragged here. This at least gives them something to do,” Erwin said as he rested one leg across his knee and leaned back in the armchair, propping up his drink on the arm. “And it’s quieter out there now cleaning is in motion. No one wants to dance around the smell of chemicals.”

“So they may get more of the quiet ones going to help.” Hange folded their arms and smirked at Erwin, “making this place less crowded. Nice job, Erwin. I’m impressed.”

Levi eyed the pair of them. “Why would you bother doing all of that? This one clearly doesn’t mind mess,” he pointed to Hange although, despite his words, there was a faint smirk on his lips. 

“I just felt it might be prudent,” Erwin shrugged. He drank from his cup. “Speaking of,” he eyed Hange briefly, “I trust you’ve been behaving yourself,” he queried with a teasing smile. His free hand moved to hold the corner of the back of their chair. “I must say I’m impressed. It’s almost 8:30 and you haven’t streaked yet.”

“Jeez!” Hange exploded. “You do that a couple of times and it gets turned into your thing!”

“From what I hear,” Levi mused, “it’s a pretty regular occurrence.”

“So I get a little free-spirited after a few drinks.”

“Yeah well, don’t get free-spirited tonight,” Levi rolled his eyes and scanned the dance floor for his friend Isabel again. 

“Oh I don’t know, Levi,” Erwin smirked, “you might enjoy the view. I certainly do.”

While Erwin was generally known for his bold declarations and self-assurance, this last comment had Levi hesitating in the midst of taking his drink. He lowered his cup and stared across at the blond with slightly parted lips. “You’d really want other people to be eyeing up your lover?”

Erwin’s smile deepened. “Depends who it was,” he admitted, running his thumb over the upholstery on Hange’s chair. “Maybe we wouldn’t mind one person taking a look.”

Levi’s brows had furrowed together so tightly, they’d merged into one long, thin line. “Huh?”

“Yeah,” Hange leaned forward in their chair, letting their gaze sweep over Levi deliberately slowly. “It might be a lot of fun if said person were to take a look.”

“Perhaps even more than a look,” Erwin’s tone had lowered. “There’s a lot of exploration to be enjoyed after all.”

“Yeah,” Hange scooted forward on their seat, “so maybe this person should kick back a little and start having some fun-oops!” As they stood up and reached over to pat Levi’s shoulder, they overbalanced and the drink in their hand immediately spilled over, right onto Levi’s t-shirt The material soaked into the material. 

“For fuck’s sake, Four-Eyes!” Levi jumped to his feet, jaw clenching as beer dripped down his top. 

Erwin dropped his face into his hand. “Hange!” he protested, his brows knotting together, watching as his efforts took a nosedive right before his eyes. 

“Shit!” Hange cursed at the same time. “Shit! Sorry, Levi! Let me get you a towel.”

“No,” Levi snapped as he brought sticky fingers away from his shirt, “A towel’s not going to do shit. It’s fucking soaked, Hange!” He shook the edge of his t-shirt and droplets of beer flew onto Hange’s clothes. “This is disgusting,” he grumbled staring down at the mess. 

“Aww no, Levi, it’s ok come on! It’s not too bad. It’s black so no one can see it.” Hange protested as their hands fastened around one of his biceps, their voice climbing in pitch. 

“I’ll feel it. Let go, Hange,” Levi grumbled, shaking his arm. “Fuck this.” “I’m not sitting in a filthy, sticky shirt all night. I’m out of here.”

“We can clean it! If you just take off your shirt, I’ll wash it for you-” 

A splutter of disbelieving laughter cut Hange off at once. Levi was looking at Hange as if they had grown six more heads. 

“You’ll clean it?” Levi actually turned away, lips stretching further into the weird, surprised smile that was taking over his expression. “Four-Eyes, you barely clean yourself,” he scoffed, “and not as often as you fucking should.”

A snicker behind Hange announced Erwin’s take on the matter and Hange rounded on him. He pursed his lips, attempting to take a neutral expression but a smile was already breaking through. “He has a point, Hange,” he told them. 

Hange planted both hands on their hips. “Hey I’m just making a suggestion. If it goes in the wash now, it can be cleaned and dried in a few hours. This place has a laundry room. I saw Ymir and Historia making out in it earlier.”

Levi brought a hand up to pinch his nose. “And that’s supposed to make me trust my shirt there?”

“They weren’t making out in the machines, Levi.”

“Fuck knows what they were doing on them,” Levi retorted. “No, I’m leaving. This place is just a fucking headache. I’d rather do my own cleaning again than sit here in this shit for a few more hours.” He shrugged his arm fully out of Hange’s grip and stepped around his chair, turning towards the dance floor and his friends. 

“Levi, wait,” Erwin suddenly raised a hand, “I may have a solution.”

“What, are you a washing machine now, Erwin?” Levi had stopped but had only half-turned towards Erwin with a frown.

“You can wear one of my shirts,” Erwin told him and pointed towards the ceiling. “And I’ll see to it that yours gets cleaned tomorrow.”

Levi held his gaze silently, his frown growing as he looked around the room. “What do you care if I stay? This shit isn’t for me, Erwin. I may as well just leave and clean it myself.”

Hange eyed the two men. “Wouldn’t one of your shirts be too big on him, Erwin? I mean you’re a freaking giant,” they pointed out, “and he’s…” they eyed Levi who was giving them a death stare right about now, “below average height.” Even with that phase, their words were still met with a scowl.

Erwin shook his head. “Nanaba accidentally put one of my shirts in the wrong wash and, basically, shrunk it.” He shrugged his shoulders a little. “I hadn’t gotten around to disposing of it yet. So Levi can have it instead if it fits.” 

Levi frowned some more. “Why didn’t you just throw it out straight away?”

“I’ve been concentrating on a particularly stressful essay so there are a few things that fell by the wayside so to speak. Regardless, do you want to use it?”

Levi considered his offer. “Doesn’t do me much good when it’s at your home.”

“Oh!” Hange snapped their fingers and pointed upward. “Erwin is staying here during the term,” they explained. “With Miche, Nanaba and Nifa.”

Erwin nodded. “I have a lock on my room - in fact we all have - so there won’t be any…” he began to smile, “incidents in there.”

“No horny students getting their rocks off on your bedsheets, huh? Smart move,” Levi quipped. 

Erwin chuckled. “It might be considered over the top but it’s paid off now, wouldn’t you agree?” He slid his hands into his pockets. “Anyway, whether you stay or go, either way, I’m sure you don’t want to be walking around in that shirt.”

Levi gave the dark material a distasteful glance. “No,” he agreed. He gave a stiff nod. “Okay. I appreciate it.”

“It’d be good if you stayed though,” Hange offered Levi some pleading eyes. “It was good to talk to you.”

Some of the irritation had left the grumpy man’s narrowed eyes and he huffed out a small breath. “It’s too fucking loud in here, Hange, even with you in the room.”

Hange’s gaze darted around the room, quickly searching for something that might give them a foothold in convincing Levi to stay at the party for longer. “Okay, yeah that’s true,” they conceded, “but there’s other rooms.” Their gaze jumped back to the windows and the lengthy terrace that stretched out behind them. “We could sit outside. That’d be quieter.”

Levi’s protest seemed to hover on his face as he looked outside. 

“That’s a good idea. It’s quite a bit warm in here,” Erwin agreed, tugging at his collar. “At the very least, it won’t be such a headache.”

“Yeah…” Levi answered and then closed his eyes for a moment. “Yeah fine. If the shirt fits I’ll stay for a bit.” 

“All right,” Erwin nodded and eyed Hange. “Hange, if you could grab us some drinks and meet us on the balcony. Levi, what are you having?”

Hange felt the dark haired man’s eyes linger on them considerably, probably doubting their ability to keep his drink intact. They braced themselves for an argument or at least a dig about their coordination having already cost him one shirt tonight. 

“Vodka,” he answered simply before making for the door. Erwin followed him and only then did Hange allow themself to grin at the fortunate save of the situation. They looked down at their hands with a thoughtful smile. 

That was pretty clumsy of me. I’ll get a water with my next drink. 

*******************************

A cup of water and ten minutes stood outside in the quiet night helped to restore some focus and clarity to Hange’s inebriated state. They took great pride from the fact that they had managed to balance a wooden tray of drinks through the still crowded kitchen and outside without spilling more than a few drops here and then. 

Guess my coordination doesn’t suck that much at all, does it Levi? They thought with a vindicated smile.

The terrace that ran alongside the back of the house was incredibly spacious. The stone balustrade stood a fair way from the windows and looked out over a magnificent garden. In the middle of the terrace, stone steps descended onto trim lawns that disappeared into the darkness. As Hange leaned over the balustrade they thought of how intriguing it would be to walk into that darkness. Maybe next time they would. For now, there were other plans to be had tonight. 

Admittedly doubt was creeping in about the likelihood of anything happening with Levi tonight. It could well be that he just wasn’t interested in anyone and that would make a lot of sense. But sense rarely went hand-in-hand with feelings and so Hange had been counting on that for a lot of tonight’s shenanigans and talk. They would hate to have to rule out any kind of possibility, not when they couldn’t stop thinking about Levi. Levi and his undercut. Levi and his sour expressions whenever someone made a mess near him. Levi shutting down any asshole’s attempt to start anything with him. Levi who always told Hange the truth, who didn’t sugarcoat things. Levi who didn’t treat them different. Levi whose snarks and put-downs really belonged on a youtube channel. A collection of utter sourness and sass. 

Drumming their fingers on the stonework, Hange didn’t pay a lot of attention when the sound of the door opening reached them. Instead, they searched the darkness ahead of them, slowly lifting their eyes to the twinkling stars. 

“I should have known,” Erwin called across the quiet space, chuckling as he did, “that you’d be here with your first love.”

Hange smiled and cast a smile at Erwin over their shoulder with twinkling eyes. “Do I detect a note of envy there, my darling Erwin?” they cooed, fighting back their own laugh. “The stars have held my heart since long before we met, my dear.”

“I can’t deny the beauty that calls your attention to them,” Erwin mused as he strolled up to Hange who turned to step into his arms as they wrapped around them. “But short of them falling to Earth and taking human form, I don’t think I have much to worry about do I?”

“Wouldn’t that just be incredible?” Hange breathed, eyes alight at the imagery that appeared in their mind. “Oh to have Moblit’s gift for art right now.” They planted their hands on Erwin’s biceps, raising their attention to their boyfriend’s face. “Or your way with words. You should make that your next short story.”

“Perhaps,” Erwin’s lips touched theirs before they could say anymore. Hange relaxed into the kiss, letting a hand slide to gently ruffle the back of Erwin’s hair, fingers caressing the soft golden strands that lay so orderly against each other. They smiled into the kiss as Erwin shifted at the touch, his kiss pressing firmer against their mouth. The heat of the touch. He tasted of beer and home and comfort. Hange’s eyes flickered shut as one of Erwin’s hands rose to their cheek and cupped it, holding her closer to him. 

It was so easy to lose the seconds like this, to forget rhyme and reason, work and woes, worries and chatter. This feeling was exhilarating and soporific all at once. Their insides were fizzy with the ecstasy of the physical touch and yet their body was consumed by the urge to melt into Erwin’s chest. His wonderful, sturdy chest. 

“Hmmm.” Hange murmured in contentment when Erwin leaned away from them. Their hands gripped his biceps harder and they were rewarded when he didn’t pull back any further. They reached up to brush their knuckles against Erwin’s cheek, smiling when he turned his lips and kissed them.

What they had with Erwin was not something they had expected to find after the popularity dive that had been coming out as non-binary in the last year of high school. Even with all of that prejudice they had faced from other students, coupled with the ignorance of the staff, it had been a relief in the end. They had realized that all of the anxiety that had bubbled away in them over the years and all of the fears of rejection, isolation and violence (fears built on horror stories of coming out to the wrong people) that had kept them awake at night had been correctly rooted in the small town with the narrow minds. 

Knowing that and accepting that had been the two biggest stepping stones to leaving that town behind and coming to Trost. Within three years, they had become surrounded by people capable of love and support and understanding. A romantic relationship was never something Hange had ever been able to entertain back in their teenagehood. Sometimes even now, it seemed incredible that Erwin could want this from them, could want them. Hange was fully aware that their personality was not the easiest to gel with. Some people looked at them with wary eyes or downright terror. Even those who didn’t look at them that way, they still didn’t look at Hange the way that their boyfriend did. With pure acceptance and appreciation. 

“This is nice,” Erwin mused, stroking Hange’s long brown locks. 

“Yeah,” Hange leaned up to kiss his lips. “Did Levi go in the end?”

“No, he’ll be down soon,” Erwin explained. “He’s just getting himself cleaned up.” He stepped up to the balustrade and folded his arms on it, leaning over to stare down into the gardens. “Perhaps on this endeavour,” he remarked, his tone edge with amusement, “you could not spill a drink on our resident clean-enthusiast.”

“Oh Erwin, always spoiling my fun,” Hange smirked. “Does he not get oh so sexy when he’s annoyed though?”

“That he does. But we are still in public, Hange. Besides, that’s rather the point of all this isn’t it?”

“Yep!” Hange took another swig from their drink.

“Hange, your cup is half-empty already.”

“It’ll be fine,” Hange assured him. They began to sway from side to side, humming “She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain,” which had Erwin smiling even more. Hange leaned into his side a little each time they moved in his direction. “So which shirt is he going to be wearing? Which one got shrunk?”

Erwin directed his attention firmly away from his partner as he lifted his cup for a sip. The sip turned into a long one as the truth of the situation and the revelation that he was about to make began to hit him. For a few moments, he kept the cup to his lips, pretending to prolong the swig even more. But eventually, when it was bordering on beyond reasonable to keep “drinking”, he lowered the cup a little. “The teal one,” he murmured against the side of the cup. 

Unfortunately for him, Hange was close enough to hear and decipher what he was saying. “The teal one?!” they hissed, planting their lips together in sound that turned into a muffled growl. 

“Indeed,” Erwin confirmed, his lips twitching. 

“The one I got you for Christmas?!”

“Yes.”

“The very expensive one that needs to be dry-cleaned only?” 

“Yes.”

Hange placed their cup down on the balustrade with exaggerated care. Their chest heaved and their eyes darted around the dark space. “The shirt that I spent ages picking out for you because you have so many shirts that are similar and I wanted to get you something more unique?”

Erwin’s smile began to falter at the corners. “Hange, I think by now we’ve established which shirt I gave to Levi. Please-”

“The shirt that filled me with such pride and joy to give to you?!” Hange whirled on him with their last question. Their mouth was shaking and Erwin actually faltered upon seeing their expression. Uncertainty shone out of his blue eyes as he eyed his lover. 

“Hange, I assure you, I didn’t intend for that shirt to be shrunk. It was just an accident in the laundry-” he reached out as he spoke, his fingers brushing their shoulder.

“You’re a genius!” Hange shrieked, extending their arms out, the gesture narrowly missing their cup on the stone railing. Erwin inched back, his brows knotting at once. He glanced towards the house. Although music was still booming from within, those in the kitchen were still within hearing distance of Hange’s yell. Erwin looked back at them with a frown.

“Excuse me?” he questioned. 

“You. Are. A. Genius.” Hange enunciated just as loudly as they had before with both hands raised, thumb and forefinger pressed together on both. 

“Hange, please keep your voice down.”

“He is going to look so good in that shirt!” they beamed and lowered their tone. “Teal is just his colour. It suits him actually. All dark and cool, like the sea. I tell ya, Erwin. That shirt’s sacrifice will not be in vain.”

Erwin began to smile again. “I’m glad you approve of my accidents, Hange.”

“Science is full of accidents that turn into discoveries,” Hange enthused. “Hopefully we’ll get some further findings later,” they winked. 

“Perhaps we shall,” Erwin mused with a thoughtful smirk. 

The door from the kitchen clicked open and a set of footsteps sounded against the stone. “Have I gone deaf or is Four-Eyes actually being quiet?” Levi commented as he stepped towards them. “What’s up, lost your voice? If so, I’m not surprised.”

The lights blazing from the windows illuminated him clearly as he walked. Erwin’s teal shirt clung to his lean, taut body well, stretching just enough across his muscles to reveal the shape of them beneath. The colour contrasted nicely with the dark jeans, Hange thought with approval as they gazed over him with delight. Too delighted to quip back at his comment, instead they fixed him with a bright grin and promptly negated his remark with an obnoxious wolf-whistle. 

“Looking good, Ackerman.” Hange told him appreciatively. 

To their astonishment, there was less annoyance radiating from Levi’s narrow grey eyes than usual. His lip was quirked in a half-smirk as he eyed Hange and stepped next to them and Erwin. Erwin stared down at him with a quiet but clear approval in his expression. 

“Hange’s right. Teal really does suit you, Levi.”

Levi lifted one brow and eyed Erwin and then Hange. “And how would you know what suited me?”

“You don’t spend that much time around Moblit without picking up on what colours suit people,” Hange dismissed the point with a wave of their hand. 

“If you say so,” Levi answered. “The colour’s not bad,” he agreed before turning his eyes on Erwin. “I was surprised to see it in your wardrobe though considering most of your shit is either blue or brown.”

The faintest touch of pink was visible in Erwin’s cheeks. “I’ve found my preferences and I see no shame in sticking to them.”

Hange cackled. “I’ve been trying to get him to branch out for years, Levi,” they explained enthusiastically as they reached for his drink and handed it over - spill-free this time. 

“Yeah but your recommendation’s like going from one extreme to the fucking other,” Levi retorted which drew a laugh out of Erwin. The dark haired man’s smirk softened just a smidge as his eyes flickered over to Erwin, for only a couple of seconds before it was replaced by a neutral look. 

“Hange doesn’t believe in baby steps,” Erwin teased. 

Hange shrugged their shoulders. “What can I say? I live in the fast lane.” They reached out to tug Levi closer by the arm. “Anyway don’t be shy, Levi, I don’t bite.”

“Tch, I’m not convinced by that.”

“Neither am I, for that matter,” Erwin agreed with a knowing smile. 

Hange half-huffed, half laughed. “I see it’s pick on Hange time is it? Well bring it on, boys.” They resumed drinking and turned to gaze out over the darkened garden once more. 

Levi stepped up between the pair of them, resting his forearms on the balustrade as his attention moved up to the stars blanketing the darkening sky. For a minute or so they stood there in silence, listening to the rhythmic beats of the music and the distorted chatter and laughter coming from within the house. 

“It’s a shame they have to ruin this with shitty music,” Levi observed after a few moments had passed. 

Erwin and Hange followed his gaze and stared up into the twinkling lights as well and then back down at the mysterious man between them who seemed so transfixed. 

“I didn’t have you down as a star-gazer, Levi,” Erwin broached the subject softly, returning his watch to the heavens. 

Levi didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t lower his gaze nor did his face show any signs that he had heard Erwin. He lifted the cup to his lips and took a slow drink. 

“Yeah, I didn’t think you’d be into something this mainstream,” Hange agreed as they leaned their cheek in their hand and turned their gaze rightward to where the moon hung in the distance. 

Another silence followed.

“Sometimes it’s better to look up than at this shitty world,” Levi finally said after more seconds had passed. “The stars aren’t tainted by any of this shit.”

Hange smiled and lowered their gaze to eye the two men next to them. “That’s actually pretty beautiful,” they declared.

Levi huffed. “No it isn’t.”

“It is, in a way,” Erwin remarked. “This world can be pretty miserable. Why wouldn’t anyone want to look at something that’s so far away, so beautiful? Stars are so much more infinite, mysterious and mesmerizing. To look at them is to know that we’re all just part of a larger universe. There’s a comfort to knowing that, really.”

“Yeah.” Hange agreed, “and they’re also constantly exploding which is just awesome!” They enthuse, elbows on the railing, their face in their hands. “They really are magnificent.”

“Of course you like that about them,” Levi commented dryly before tilting his head at his two companions. “Anyway why are you both talking like we’re the first fucking people to look at some stars?” he grumbled although there was the faintest hint of colour in his pale face.

“You’re not, Levi,” Erwin assured him. “But it’s not something we expected from you. Being someone who would appreciate the natural beauty of such things.”

“Yeah well, you don’t know me,” Levi pointed out with a huff. 

“Which is why we wanted to hang out tonight,” Hange turned to lean their back on the railing and folded their arms. “We want to get to know you.” They winked at him. “Intimately.”

Behind Levi, Erwin sighed and brought a hand up to cover his eyes, shaking his head as Levi frowned at Hange. 

“Fuck off Four-Eyes,” the shorter man grumbled, rolling his eyes as Hange laughed once again. 

“Don’t pretend you’re not having a good time, Levi. You’re out with us aren’t you?” they pointed out with a mischievous side-grin. 

“And I’m questioning my own sanity believe me,” Levi quipped, drinking from his cup again.

“Hey, sanity is overrated sometimes.” Hange argued and pointed to Erwin. “I have to tell him that too. Sometimes you just have to step away and let the universe be crazy. Just sit in the craziness for a while and look at the colours. Life’s pretty beautiful when you do that.” They turned on their heel and leaned over the railing again, staring back up at the moon and the stars. 

Erwin’s smile at Levi was a little crooked. “They do have a point. The world doesn’t end when you do something a little different now and then.” 

Levi said nothing as he watched Erwin turn his attention back towards the garden. With the music vibrating through the house behind him and the quiet garden ahead of him, Levi found that when he stepped closer to Erwin and Hange, between them and against the railing, he was stood in between two completely different worlds. Maybe that was okay. Maybe that was an interesting thing. Maybe he wanted to explore that a little more. As he lifted his eyes to the heaven and the twinkling lights there, he thought that maybe this party wasn’t a total washout after all. 

[reikoackerman]

Birthdays

Characters: Levi x Rei (me) feat. Ackerman Juniors and Mama Kuchel

Genre: Modern!au

Warnings: SFW, fluff. Also very self-indulgent as heck hehe.

Word count: 2.8k

A/N: Happy birthday to the husband, the one and only Levi Ackerman 💚 here's my second birthday fic for him!!! There are a few references to my selfship writing and one-shot, and I'll link them here in case anyone is interested in reading them hehe.

And knowing me... there's some kind of humour and suggestive content lol but it's still sfw in general hehe please enjoy!!!

Happy birthday, Levi (Levi x Rei feat. Ackerman Juniors and friends, SFW)

Food play with Levi (Levi x fem!reader, NSFW)

Dance with me (Levi x Rei, SFW with suggestive ending)

Today was Levi's birthday, and the kids, well—Renée—were so excited. Not only was it Levi's birthday, it was also Christmas, meaning that not only their Papa gets presents, they will be getting them too. 

Every year, we would host a birthday dinner at our place with Levi's friends, but this year, we decided to keep it small. With Charlotte's arrival, we just really didn't have the time and ability to host a large birthday dinner and to watch over our four children simultaneously. Levi was totally fine with the idea, happy even, when I told him we weren't asking our friends over this year. 

"Well thank fucking goodness. I never really enjoyed it much anyway," Levi complained to me one night while I was feeding Charlotte, "there's too much noise and too much food." 

"They all mean well, you know. We see Erwin and Mia pretty often, and Farlan and Isabel drop by once every few days too," I gently rubbed Charlotte's back to get her to burp before wearing my pyjamas properly, "but we literally only see Mike, Hange, Moblit, and Nanaba once a year." Walking to Charlotte's cot, I slowly coaxed her to sleep while Levi went to iron his clothes for work tomorrow. 

"I know, but really, I would definitely choose a simple dinner rather than a huge gathering," Levi paused for a short while before letting out a sigh, "remember last year's? When we did that potluck? You were three months pregnant and you had to plan and prepare so many things on top of everything else and you had to pretend you weren't carrying a baby in you and—"

"Shhh, amour," frowning when Levi started nagging, "you're going to wake our angel up." Levi stared at me and let out another sigh before continuing to iron his trousers. Once Charlotte started yawning and fell asleep, I placed her in her cot and hurried over to Levi's side. 

"We'll do a simple dinner this year. Just you and I with the kids and Maman. Okay?" Levi gave me a nod and pecked my cheek before hanging his clothes. 

"Mm. You know I'll love anything you plan and prepare, mon coeur," Levi and I went to wash up and prepare for bed, fluffing the pillows and setting our alarm for the next morning, "can't wait for that day." And with that, I started planning and preparing for Levi's birthday dinner together with my mother-in-law. 

Since Levi and I didn't have to work on Christmas, we went out to the shopping mall at noon while Maman stayed home with the kids to decorate the house and prepare some of the food. Levi and I had a nice time walking along the streets and admiring the sparkling and pretty Christmas decorations outside of the shopping malls. We went to collect the roast turkey and meat I pre-ordered from the grocery store, and we also got some wine and cheese for our cheese board too. Levi even bought jelly beans—Renée's favourite sweet treat. He also bought the boys baby biscuits too.

"You're in a good mood huh, amour," I teased Levi as he took a few bags of tortilla chips and added them into the trolley, "you never liked letting the kids eat anything sweet. You don't even like it when I'm snacking." Levi merely shrugged and walked on ahead. We got a few more things too; some blueberries and strawberries, oatmeal, milk, apples, and honey. We went to the bakery to collect Levi's birthday cakes too. Levi doesn't know yet, but this year, I got him a small dark chocolate fudge cake with 75% cacao, just the bitterness we both loved. It was for the both of us only since we both love dark chocolate. We also got another chocolate banana cake that was meant to be eaten together with the kids and Maman. Once our chores were done, we made our way home. 

Opening the door, we were greeted by the fragrant smell of mushroom soup and truffle fries. We quickly greeted Maman who was in the kitchen and we changed and helped out too. Levi was arranging and preparing the cheese board while I watched over the kids. Before we knew it, it was already 6pm and all the food was ready. I went to feed Charlotte while Levi was preparing the dinner table. As he was helping the boys into their baby seats, everyone was ready and seated by the time I was done feeding Charlotte. 

"Okay, let's eat." Levi smiled and we all started digging into the wonderful dinner prepared by my amazing mother-in-law.

"Mmm," I hummed in delight after eating the truffle fries, "Maman this is absolutely delicious! It's so much nicer than the ones Levi and I had in restaurants." Maman gave us a pleased look.

"Oh, it's nothing, ma douce, I was just testing out your air fryer and it's really good." I giggled and fed Pierre his potatoes and broccoli. He was playing with his food again and I had to stop him before he started throwing carrot sticks into the mushroom soup. Levi was having no issues with Léon who ate everything obediently. He even wanted more chicken cubes and gave us a grin when Pierre was chewing on the broccoli stalk. 

The roast turkey from the supermarket was really fragrant and tasty as well, and the cheese board was really good too. The cheese complimented our wine perfectly, and Renée wanted to be cheeky and have a sip of red wine, to which Levi vehemently denied her from doing so. The tofu salad Maman made was spicy and delicious too. We gave Renée a little bit of the salad to try, and she handled the spice surprisingly well. Levi and Maman were amazed.

"Good girl, ma chérie, you have inherited my superior genes," I laughed as I added more chilli sauce to my tofu salad, "Mama will bring you to eat tom yum with me when you're older." Renée happily laughed and started eating more potatoes. 

Once we were all done, I told Levi to clear and wash the dishes while I went to prepare the cake and candles. Renée went to change into another dress as well. She also took out a party hat from her room and opened up her piano, sitting on the bench and waited for Levi to return. Maman was standing by the light switch while I lit the candles. As soon as Maman gave the signal, she switched off the lights and Renée began playing Levi a birthday song while we sang along. Levi jumped when all he saw was darkness, but that look of confusion was soon replaced with a gentle smile once he saw me holding the cake. 

"Happy birthday, Papa!" Renée happily cheered once we were done singing Levi his birthday song. She ran towards him with the party hat. Once Levi took his seat, Maman switched on the lights and Renée put the hat on Levi's head. I quickly brought the camera over, snapping a few photos of Levi with his birthday cake before the candles melted. 

"Make a wish Papa, and then you can get your present!" Levi obliged and listened to his princess before closing his eyes, pressing his palms together for a few seconds before blowing out the candles. As the candles extinguished, Renée gave Levi her present.

"I made this during my art and craft lesson in school, Papa!" Renée chimed. They were learning about textures in kindergarten and Renée made Levi a birthday card with alphabet pasta, cotton wool, ice cream sticks, old cloth, straws, buttons and the like. Renée also sprinkled glitter over the card, making it really sparkly. Levi took the card with a huge smile on his face. 

"It's beautiful, ma chérie. Thank you."

Next, it was my mother-in-law's gift. Aunty Kuchel took out a few knitted sweaters from a large bag and handed them over to us as well as the kids. Charlotte on the other hand received a beautiful anklet with her Chinese name engraved on a little gold plate. We promised Aunty Kuchel that we would put it on Charlotte when she's a little older. Both mine and Levi's sweaters had a reindeer's face while Renée's and the twins' sweaters had little baby reindeers. 

"Cute," Levi sniggered, putting it on before Aunty Kuchel forced the sweater on him, "must've taken you a long time to finish them, Maman." Aunty Kuchel waved her hand and said it was no big deal. Levi turned around and looked at me expectantly.

"Well, I have two presents for you, but you're only getting one for now," I laughed and walked into our room, coming out with a small box in my hand. I passed it to Levi and he untied the ribbon. Opening the box, Levi looked at me and smiled. I got him a mechanical watch that he'd been eyeing for the longest time. "Like it?"

"Love it," Levi kissed me on the cheek, "you sneaky brat, you bought it without me realising?" Levi took the watch out and put it on his wrist. The colour and design fit him perfectly, and the watch really suited him. Levi took my hand and gave me a light squeeze before taking the watch out and keeping it safely inside the box again. It was time for everyone to have the chocolate banana cake. Picking out the candles, I started to slice the cake for everyone, giving Levi a huge slice. Renée and Maman had their own plate of cake while I fed the twins. Everyone marvelled at how good the cake was, even our princess who was an extremely picky eater. 

Soon, it was time for the Christmas presents. Renée was jumping excitedly, wondering what we got her this year. Levi told Renée to close her eyes. When she opened them, I had a Teddy bear wearing a pink leotard and tutu in my arms. Renée squealed with happiness as she took the stuffed bear from me, thanking us loudly. Levi and I bought Pierre and Léon a huge Shinkansen toy set with railway tracks and new storybooks as well. Then, Levi went to the kitchen and took out a paper bag and he passed it to Aunty Kuchel. She took out the contents inside and gave us a smile. Levi and I got her the Choya Gold Edition because we knew how much she liked drinking umeshu. The box was a beautiful golden yellow decorated with ume flowers, and Aunty Kuchel told us she couldn't wait to try it at home. Once the presents were all given, we all sat by the couch in the living room and finished the remainder of the cake together. 

After a long day, the boys were clean and tugged in their cots. Renée was asleep as well. Maman said she was going out to have drinks with her friends, and Levi and I had the house and time to ourselves. Levi was sitting at the bar counter. He was watching me while I made some simple chocolate fondue in the kitchen. The strawberries and marshmallows were already placed on a plate. 

"You and Maman outdid yourselves today, mon cœur," Levi smiled as I brought the melted chocolate, strawberries, and marshmallows over to the bar counter, "thank you." 

"All I did was order the food. Maman did everything this year." I chuckled as I took out the dark chocolate fudge cake from the fridge. Levi looked surprised. As I took the cake out of the box, Levi smiled seeing the words 'joyeux anniversaire mon amour' written with strawberry cream. 

"So this is my second present?" 

"Mm-hmm," taking the knife, I sliced a large piece of cake and placed it on a plate for Levi, "I ordered it the moment you told me to plan for your birthday since this cake always sells out." Using my finger, I scooped the chocolate fudge stuck on the knife and licked it off. 

"Mmm, delicious," I sliced another cake for myself and dipped a strawberry into the melted chocolate, "c'mon, amour, eat it before the fudge melts." Eating the chocolate-coated strawberry, Levi kept eyeing me with a frown instead of eating the cake. 

"Stop doing it." Levi suddenly snapped as I ate the strawberry with the cake.

"Stop what?" 

"Why do you always use the same old tricks?" 

"What?" I sounded a little more impatient as I dipped a strawberry into the chocolate and stuck it on Levi's slice of cake. Levi suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me towards him, kissing me full on the lips as he had another hand in my hair, cupping my head and bringing me even closer. Levi sucked my lower lip harshly and broke the kiss, his hand was still in my hair. 

"This. Enticing me using the same old shit, Reiko Ackerman…" Levi's voice was a tone lower than usual as he whispered, looking at my now-swollen lips, "strawberries and chocolate again? Stop seducing me like this." I gave Levi a sultry smile before breaking our eye contact. 

"Well, learn to control yourself then, Levi Ackerman," it was my turn to tease Levi as I kept the remaining cake in the fridge and walked him towards our living room. Levi gave me a confused look. "Remember your birthday seven years ago, when we just got married and moved in here?" Levi and I looked at each other as I locked my hands behind his neck while Levi's arms were around my waist. 

"Yeah, of course. We were slow dancing, just like what we're doing now." Levi rubbed his nose against mine and closed his eyes. 

"And you suddenly blurted out saying you wanted us to be parents to human babies," I laughed a little louder, "and I honestly can't believe you actually said it so bluntly, amour." Levi smiled at the memory. 

"I didn't blurt it out 'suddenly'. Everything was leading up to it nicely." Levi commented and I chuckled, pulling Levi closer to me. It seemed so long ago, yet it felt so close to our hearts as well. We looked each other in the eye, slowly dancing around in circles. Has it really been seven years since we got married? Where did all the time go?

"Look at us now, seven years later," Levi pressed a chaste kiss to my forehead, "who would have thought we would have so many kids." 

"Why, having second thoughts?" 

"Tch, 'course not, mon cœur," Levi rolled his eyes again, "I wouldn't give this up for anything. You, Renée, the boys, and Charlotte. You and our children are the best thing that happened to me." Levi gave me another smile as we swayed in synchronised steps. 

"You say the same thing every year." I laughed, recalling what Levi told me on his birthday last year.

"It's the truth." The both of us looked at each other as we stopped in our steps. After a few moments, Levi tightened his hold around me and hugged me close, resting his chin comfortably on my shoulder. We remained in each other's embrace. Suddenly, a wave of emotions started to overwhelm me as I thought about how far Levi and I had come. Damn it, Rei! This isn't the time to get sentimental. I could hear Levi sniffle his nose a little, and I knew he was thinking the same. I quickly blinked away the tears that were dotting my lashline and kissed Levi's cheek. 

"Come on now, amour, let's finish up your birthday cake," I quickly wiped my eyes and gave Levi a small smile, "and then maybe I might give you a third present later." I took Levi's hand and dragged him back into the kitchen before taking out the cake from the fridge again.

"Urgh, the fondue hardened." I complained, bringing the pot to the stove and turning it on. 

"Leave it, mon cœur, we'll just have the cake."

"I want to eat it with the strawberries, amour. Don't waste it." 

"Leave it. Or I'll do something else with the chocolate." I cocked my eyebrow and looked at Levi as he smirked. Coming closer, he switched off the stove and trapped me between his body and the kitchen counter. Levi reached a hand up to my face and slowly stroked my cheek. "So unless you want to smell like chocolate, leave it." I couldn't control my laughter anymore after hearing Levi. 

"Oh my god, amour! Control yourself, you old man," pressing a soft kiss to his lips, I chuckled as I placed my hand on top of his, "you're 35, maintain yourself. We're not having Ackerman number five." Levi rolled his eyes and pulled me towards the bar counter. 

"Which is why I said to leave the fondue and let me enjoy the cake with you, hmm?" Taking his seat, Levi made me sit on his lap and he fed me a slice of cake. I did the same for him as well, showering him with kisses every time I fed him a mouthful of cake. Needless to say, we did end up having and enjoying the chocolate fondue, and of course, the strawberries didn't go to waste. 

[worldhell-archiving]

┊ ┊⋆ ┊ . 𝐼𝒻 𝒴𝑜𝓊 𝐿𝑜𝓈𝑒, 𝒴𝑜𝓊 𝒟𝒾𝑒 ◞ 𝖒𝖊𝖒𝖊 . accepting. ˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ @naitfall ⤸ it'll get dark soon. | ( Levi and Farlan, maybe Farlan lives AU? )

Much had changed since his days in the Underground, and similarly, they were still fighting for their lives; it was ironic. Farlan takes position beside Levi, leaning against one of the many carts filled with various supplies for this excursion beyond the walls. It's funny ... how Levi had also changed, even if just in small ways. Well, Farlan always knew he had a kind heart ━━━ looks like he could finally put it to use out here, rather then let it sink in the depth of the Underground. He watches the captain silently for a few moments, before a grin twitches at his lips, and he exhales out a short laugh.

❝ Worried about the others that haven't returned yet? ❞ He wasn't too concerned; maybe, Farlan just wasn't so good hearted deep down. It's something he wondered time and time again; but, it didn't stop him from fighting, nor protecting those under his wing.

❝ They shouldn't have run into too much trouble. I don't think their dead. Besides, It'll be easier for them to avoid Titans when night finally falls. ❞ He runs a hand through his hair, ruffling the back in idly thought. ❝ Still ... our numbers aren't looking good as it is. What do you think Levi? Or rather, what do you think Erwin will do next? I can't imagine it'll do us much good to keep going at this rate. ❞ And yet, he still can't tell what that guy is thinking most of the time. Best Farlan could do is listen to his judgement; since he knows Levi won't go against it, and that meant Farlan wouldn't either.

[kobutareads1]

Elysium by Misaya

Modern AU. Eruri. 20 chapters. Recluse Levi. Writer Erwin. Farlan Church (mentioned). Mike Zacharias. So much can change in two years.

There's not much physical action (i.e. yelling, crying, fist fights, etc.) but so much happens. Most of the "action" is internal and in flashbacks. There are layers upon layers to peel back and discover in this fic. Some clues are subtle and I had to go back and reread passages to piece together what happned.

Both Erwin and Levi are recovering from broken relationships, Levi more so than Erwin. As you read, you realize how hurt Levi is, but you and Erwin are witnesses to his healing and growth. A quiet and underrated fic. Each sentence, each paragraph is beautifully constructed. Warning for physical and emotional abuse, death and implied suicide.

[sideblogformindtrash]

Ooooh could we see a drabble on what the last anon was talking about. Only if you want to of course 🥰

hehe. Heavy on dehumanization.

CW: Dehumanization; conditioned response; regressing; pet whump; multiple whumpees; unintentional triggering;

He knew he shouldn’t have left the bedroom. He was getting increasingly more nervous as he sat on the couch, because unlike the others… He knew the signs. Farlan was getting annoyed.

BB and Blue were enough of a destructive duo on their own, but Pastel had joined in tonight, as they ran around the apartment, playing pillow fight - as a proper sleepover, they had said. The first few things they knocked didn’t break, but Farlan had warned them to stop a couple of times.

And now he was close to his limit. Haru knew it because he had seem him tipping at edge many, many times before, and it always announced great pain. While he tried to meekly beg them to stop… they seemed too lost in their game to notice his attentions of gesturing, his whimpers drowned in their giggles.

His heart was on his throat and his body tense. Even if in his mind he knew he was safe, he wouldn’t be hurt, his body refused to believe that and was preparing itself for the explosion, for the damage to follow. Even his old scars seemed to ache, the favorite marks of old bruises seeming to pulsate, as he grabbed his legs, watching the little signs. The corner of his eye twitching, eyebrows slowly lowering in stress, a tonal shift each time he had to call them and the vein on his neck...

Then it finally happened all at once.

Pastel throws a pillow to try and hit Blue, and it knocks the food Farlan was making on the floor.

“PASTEL, BB, BLUE, STOP THIS FUCKING NOW. PUT THAT FUCKING PILLOW AWAY - LOOK WHAT YOU DID - I WARNED ALL OF YOU-”

“DON’T SCREAM AT THEM” Somehow, Haru’s voice towers over his, just for a second, and all the eyes turn to him, in eerie, shocked silence. Farlan opens his mouth and he expects to be screamed at. Hurt.

He talked back. He screamed at Master. He gave him an order, out of anything. And he isn’t sure if that’s his training, or his trauma, but everything on his mind fades into hot, white panic, and all he can think of is that he is a bad pet, and bad pets get punished.

He doesn’t hear the sound of BB and Pastel stepping back, or sees Blue a bit behind him, or their words… All drowned away. He is a helpless creature, a perfect pretty pet that needs to be corrected.

All there is, is Master. The Master he just offended. “Sorry” He says, remembering every one of his begging ways as he falls to his knees. He is small and scared and terrified and he needs to make Master happy because if he doesn’t he will be hurt so so badly and then left alone for days and no one will love him. He falls to his knees, his breath fails him “S-s--ssorry M-Master, -M-master f-f-forg-forgive f--forgive it, p-please it, it worthless -u-useless pet, pet, it, it-”

“Haru- Haru please you, you are not…” Master is pale, staring at Pet as it takes it’s forehead to his shoes. Haru is a word that means nothing “I won’t hurt you - I - I’m sorry I shouldn't have screamed I-”

“S-s-sorry. Mercy. Please please please Mercy” He blinks, eyes full of tears, grossly sobbing, face red and stuffed as Pet tries to scramble for any sort of clemency. There won’t be any, there never is. And oh god. It’s nails are so big - perfect plucking size. He will be hurt, will be hurt so bad. He was hurt so bad for far less “Mas-master p-please don’t.., please don’t… d-d-don’t hurt. No. P-please hurt it. C-cc-orrect your, your stupid pet. Please. Please just… J-just don-don’t leave it alone….”

Master very, very slowly, shows him some mercy, getting down to his level and entangling his hair, petting it softly.

“It’s… it’s okay. You are good. You are…. you are a good boy. That was okay, you… you are forgiven”

“G-g-g-g-ood” he whispers softly, hopeful eyes as he blinks. But it’s too good to be true. Forgiveness is never free “B-b-but…”

“It’s okay. You - I’m saying it’s okay, right? You are good”

Pet is good. It’s all he ever wanted. Be told that he was good. Be told that he was loved.

“Yeah…”

He smiles, tears dripping down his face, as he jumps on his arms, into a hug. Surprisingly, Master hugs back! Like a dream come true. On that moment, Pet is in heaven, thanking a merciful god.

[jediryssabean]

i am free whenever you’re in front of me

hi everyone!

it’s been two years! yikies! and i want you to know that i am so sorry that it has been so long. i graduated with my master’s degree, moved from florida, usa to the west coast, usa, and got a new job that has been taking a lot of my time. i moved from an apartment, to crashing at my parents, to another apartment, and into a house (yay!) so it’s been a busy, busy set of time.i appreciate you all you have left comments, even if i haven’t replied. i appreciate the fact that anyone still reads this.if you’re reading this right now, i appreciate you. thank you so much for waiting it out.

anyway, here’s wonderwall (old meme?).

-

Pairing: Eren/Levi Verse: Dead on Arrival (an urban fantasy au) Rating: T Summary: Levi’s gone in and out of superstition at different periods in his life, but generally, he likes to think of himself as entirely pragmatic. The wind through the bushes behind him is just the wind, just like the ravens cawing in the cemetery are just ravens, just like the shadows flickering against the sidewalk are only moths attracted to the funeral home’s floodlights, positioned along its facade at even intervals to keep the neighborhood from falling into complete darkness. The graveyard itself had closed at sunset, as is tradition in every cemetery he’s ever heard of. Even for those who aren’t particularly superstitious, it’s probably best not to tempt fate after dark.

Maybe it’s that atmosphere that makes Levi’s skin crawl, or maybe it’s the fact that pragmatism doesn’t hold up in the face of what he knows now, or maybe it’s the passersby who look just this side of preternatural, whose pupils have eaten the whites of their eyes, whose teeth are just a bit too sharp when they smile at one another. Though not a single person or creature or whatever is sparing him a single glance, it still doesn’t feel quite right.

Either way, something is shaking Levi’s stomach, gripping it in a tight fist, and it makes him feel jumpy.

Or you can [Read on AO3]!

-

(The bus station had smelled like all of them do—like diesel fuel and chili-cheese dogs, like bleach trying to smother the reek of urine, like alcohol and days-old laundry detergent. Beneath all of that, wriggling against the floor, had been the meeting and meshing of countless kinds of magic, identifiable only in the way it had made the hairs rise on Eren’s arms as he’d sat there, the hard plastic of the station’s bench vibrating at the coming-and-going of any number of buses.

Hannah Diamant’s seat, across the lobby, had been empty for almost two hours. She’d been heading to a destination that Ymir and Historia knew of, had picked out themselves, had guaranteed for safety ten times over. Eren hadn’t asked after the location. They hadn’t offered it.

Between his hands, his screen had been lit with an unsent text message, his thumb hovering noncommittally above the glass.

To: Doctor Levi     what do u want to do for ur birthday?

The empty space beside him had creaked as his surprise made the decision for him, the pad of his thumb tapping his phone just hard enough to send the message as a cloud of cigarette smoke scattered in the air in front of him, filtering the fluorescent light into something absolutely no less painful to look at. One of the patrons of the station, dozing against one of the cracked tile walls, had rubbed their nose against the smell.

NO SMOKING a sign had read, pinned to the tile between the restrooms.

Eren didn’t need to glance beside him to know he knew this woman from years ago, but he’d done it anyway. He’d met the eyes of the Bean Nighe and it had been impossible to know which of them had been the one of handmade glass. Smoke had been sighed from her nose, coming out only one nostril, and when she spoke, she flashed a mouth of golden teeth—except for one in the front of her mouth, the white of long-bleached bone.

“small world,” the Bean Nighe had said in pulled-taffy Welsh, the wrinkles by her mouth endlessly familiar. This time around, he’d known exactly what she was, even without her having to reach for the fabric laundry bag almost-hidden behind the bench’s legs. “of all the troublemakers to run into.”

Eren hadn’t been sure of the statistics regarding Bean Nighe in the world—how likely it was to meet the same one twice, how likely it was to run into one at all, how many were alive after the faerie-purges and witch-burnings that were scattered through history. But a weird feeling had still settled in his chest, had made the universe seem out of place, and had made the city seem louder at the back of his skull.

“i’ve always wondered,” Eren had said to her in Welsh that ran closer together, tickling the roof of his mouth with the weight of her cigarette smoke drying out his tongue, “what happens if someone throws out a shirt that you wash before they die. seems kind of impractical, don’t you think?” It hadn’t been anything close to an acknowledgement that they knew each other. The conversation was proof enough.

The Bean Nighe had laughed, dropping it to the floor in the guise of desert sand, hissing against her tonsils, her golden molars, the roof of her mouth. “are you calling my laundry fraudulent?”

“no,” Eren had replied. “i’m just wondering.”

The expression on her face had been complicated, her eyebrows white against the dark skin of her face bending beneath the weight of... something. That had always been the best term for whatever-these-things were: something. And somewhere mixed within the bowing of her brows, a sadness had tucked itself in the frown-lines in her cheeks.

“who picked up the shirt?” The Bean Nighe had said after another bus had loaded and gone. “who ended up with the shirt in their possession? who says it was even that shirt that one of us washed in the first place? there are a lot of questions in your questions, little one.” She’d breathed in another inhale from her cigarette, almost burned to the filter. “but either way, if it isn’t one person, it’s somebody else.”

Her eyes had glittered, almost in tandem. Eren had been watching her pupils, trying to figure out which one wasn’t watching him quite as much as the other.

And then she’d continued with a voice like tree branches, leafless and dry. “somebody is always dying.”

Eren’s phone had buzzed softly against his palms, pushing against the ache in his knuckles, now gone white.

“so,” he’d said, turning his phone just enough to keep the screen out of sight, keeping his eyes on the double-doors leading to the terminal itself, “what brings you to seattle?”

He’d been able to feel her gaze against his face, the way her cigarette smoke warmed the air around them, the way the whole bench leaned back just slightly as she’d shifted in her seat. The rhythm of the city had worked its way into the roots of his teeth, the hollows of his cheeks, the space behind his eyes. The terminal doors lit up as another bus pulled into view, backing slowly into the space left behind by one that had left thirty minutes before.

“what do you think?” she’d told him. “people are dying here.”)

Eren’s life has been lived in a series of fits and starts, and he guesses he shouldn’t really expect things to be any different just because he found something to spice the routine up a little.

He lives, he dies, he comes back again. He changes cities, then countries, then occupations. He dies again, comes back, keeps working. Dies again, comes back, meets Levi. Dies again, comes back, meets Levi for real. Keeps working, something happens, something changes, Levi looks at him with the Welsh sunrise catching against the stormwall of his irises—and then Eren makes a housecall. Sure, there are things that happen between all of that, but it’s all fluff, all waiting, because nothing can stay stable forever.

At this point, Eren’s pretty sure that he’d benefit from remembering that.

The streets still stink of wet dog and congealing revelry, leftovers from the winter solstice that had been celebrated two nights before. Everything had gone off without a hitch, really—outside the one-or-two disappearances that happen every year, when someone gets swept up in the Wild Hunt, their missing persons posters destined to fade out long before their bodies turn up, if ever. While always tragic, it’s normal. The whole solstice had been normal, had lifted the veil just long enough to remind mankind that they sure as shit weren’t as safe as they’d thought they’d been from the other side of things, or to remind the fae of the days when making merry in the middle of a mortal bar was worth the risk. 

It’d given Eren a headache, just like it did every year—twisted his stomach, just like it did every year. Of all the fucking holidays, it would’ve been the perfect one for mayhem. He’d expected mayhem, like—like a body, or two bodies, or too many to count, thrown in alleyways or in parks or whatever. He’d expected the other shoe to drop. 

Sure, by nature it’s impossible to predict unpredictable murders, but at this point it feels like the universe should give him something. An inch, maybe. Half-an-inch would be preferable to nothing. 

But here he is on a fucking Friday night, two days after the night when the fae run wild, jogging up the waterfront after a panicked call from a selkie. A pureblood selkie. A pureblood selkie who’d been too scared to speak above a whisper. 

A feeling had started churning in his gut that had nothing to do with the time of year and he’d barely passed a goodbye onto Connie before he’d made it out the door. 

The waterfront is quiet at this time of night. All the restaurants and tourist shops have been closed for hours—even the ferry has gone silent after its 12:50 a.m. run, leaving behind the sigh of seawater against broken pavement and the barely-audible whicker of a kelpie haunting the walk. If he breathed deep enough, Eren could probably taste seaweed on the back of his tongue. 

There’s a ringing in his ears.

The city’s Ferris wheel has gone dark by now, but its shadow is cast in some sort of amorphous shape thanks to the evenly-spaced streetlights and the half-obscured, crescent moon. It makes the atmosphere some kind of ominous, or maybe the silence does, or maybe it’s all just in Eren’s head—the draft coming off the water in an almost-moan, the pop-skitter-cough of thrown-away coffee cups.

Sleet has started to gather on every surface, holding reflected light in half-frozen puddles, and Eren’s sneakers scrape through them in a way that’s far too loud for the ambience crawling up his legs, gathering around his shoulders, pressing tight against the back of his neck. The hairs rise along Eren’s arms as he picks up his pace, running the pad of his thumb along the zip of his jacket, feeling the electric thrum of a ghostwalk enchantment stitched into the seams there. It’s a gesture meant entirely for comfort, the sensation of his own magic connecting with the tips of his fingers. As he rounds the curve of a cement sign advertising the Seattle Aquarium, it feels a lot like walking into a barfight, armed to the teeth.

What he finds isn’t entirely unsurprising, but it still makes his stomach twist. The aquarium stretches from the edge of the street to the end of the pier, and the southward side has seen the sharp end of something unpleasant, though it’s impossible to say what. Shattered glass and pieces of navy blue siding litter the sidewalk, and deep furrows in the concrete wall reach from the lowest windowpane toward the roof in wide branches.

Eren lifts his hand from his jacket to press his index finger to his nose, and half-hums under his breath, the taste of his magic rising up from the back of his throat, “fe-fie-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.”

The smell of heather, rainwater, and freshly-turned earth bursts to life in his sinuses, the pressure making his skull feel just a little too tight for two deep breaths—and then everything is writhing against his nose in a rancid mess. The wastebins that won’t be emptied until just before the sun comes up, the trash that didn’t quite make it into the bins sitting in stagnant water from this afternoon’s rain, the dead fish caught in the rocky foundation beneath the line of piers placed at irregular intervals along the waterfront—all of it is piling into his mouth and threatening to make him gag.

But beneath all of that, almost swallowed by the shitstorm that is everything else, is an odor that’s like an afterthought: seaweed and a rainsquall over open saltwater. It tastes like selkie magic, smeared along the aquarium’s façade, tucked in the fissures of the almost-busted wall.

When Eren presses his hand to the siding, he can almost feel the magic there, the perception dragging itself against the underside of his fingernails. It’s practically negligible, some leftover ward that hadn’t been reset since before the solstice, swallowed up by all the magic that had risen around it, and muffled further by the constant mist-rain-sleet. 

He breathes in again and the city sits on his tongue, presses hard—and he swallows it,  rolling it around in his mouth. Spoiled food and seawater, car exhaust and wet paper, seagull shit and wet dog, too-much magic and the metallic sting of blood—but not sharp enough to be human. 

There’s no shock of frozen wilderness hiding anywhere in this place. No dying things, buried beneath untouchable earth, no ice-chips needling at his skin. It’s like there hadn’t been anyone here at all, except the selkies and the fish and the steady murmur of the city.

A moan crawls its way out of one of the busted windows, encouraged by the coughs of wind coming from the water, and it almost smothers the sound of his phone vibrating in his pocket, sending a jolt down his thigh. He pretends a scream didn’t smack against his tonsils as he fishes it out of his pocket, and it’s not like anybody can document a flinch that no one was around to see in the first place.

From: Ymiracle     Selkie made it to the safehouse     Relocating asap     Any boogeymen?

When he snorts, it’s on a cloud of white and tastes like garbage, and he shoves his phone back in his pocket before snapping the charm away with his thumb and forefinger. It washes out his sinuses, pushes the nighttime out from between his teeth, clears his head just enough that his stomach doesn’t feel like it’s going to meet his throat just yet. Of course, the night is still young, and Eren reminds himself of that as he steps over the splintered wood of what had been a recently-painted windowpane. He can still feel the tang of it flaking against his molars.

Glass crunches beneath his feet. 

“Ahoy there!” The streetlights catch in the puddles on the floor as he makes his way through the aquarium, his hands held just far enough from his hips that he could swing them, if he’d needed to. “I heard someone had some concerns about a leak?” 

God, he hates it when he gets fucking quippy with himself. If he’s going to get low with his humor, he might as well have an audience for it. It doesn’t do any good to taunt monsters who aren’t even here. It’s just him, and the nighttime, and the fish, and the increasingly heavy odor of blood-and-saltwater. The fish tanks babble around him, gossiping with one another about all the shit they’d seen. Eren sighs out an incantation into the mumble of the aquarium, bouncing it along on a familiar rhythm, and the low light widens, turning the darkness into a softer gray, into a brighter blue, into color.

With eyes like this, it’d be impossible not to notice the body, sprawled behind one of the man-made tide pools. The selkie’s skin is still tied around its waist, as if it hadn’t even reached for it, as if escape hadn’t been an option. Instead, the air around it is peppered with the afterglow of its magic and the lingering film of its blood. The residue of whatever this fight had been tastes entirely of offensive magic, crafted of serrated edges and tucked away in the dying scent of a rusted-out ship. 

Eren doesn’t look at his sneakers, knowing that their soles are turning concrete-gray under the attention of watered down faerie blood. Levi had said it was manganese. It stings like oil against the underside of his nose.

When he crouches beside the corpse, he can feel someone’s eyes on him, right at the place where his neck sits on his shoulders. Everything about this feels like a trap, just like the rest of his job has been for the last set of months. There’s a body and darkness, and eventually there will be hands and shoulders and bodies crawling out of the shadows, flashing their pointed teeth and coming for his throat. So maybe it’s better to say that it’s a trap within a trap, or something. 

Eren supposes that he’s come to terms with the fact that he makes pretty good bait.

The pads of Eren’s fingers find torn skin at the base of the dead faerie’s throat, the edges curled inward just enough to have a cauterized texture that Eren would recognize anywhere, half-blind and just by the feel of it against his hands. Whatever had made a wound like this had been made of iron or silver, and either way it had to’ve hurt. It’s nothing at all like the bodies he’d seen before this. Everything else had been brutal, had been savage, had been executed with bare hands or ice-hemmed magic. This selkie had tangled with something else, something different, but still firmly in the same genre. Hopefully the same genre. But maybe not, right? After all, this is a pureblood fae, and everyone else had been changelings. 

And yet— 

He pulls his phone from his pocket, swiping his thumb to the left across the screen before he brings it to the side of his face, the call-waiting tone trilling against the shell of his ear. He tilts his head to get a look at the selkie’s condition, trying to find something more identifying than the basic descriptions of ‘dead’ and ‘sitting in about two inches of water.’ 

The sensation of eyes against his neck moves to the space between his shoulder blades, right between his vertebrae.

There’s still no magic here but his own and that of the dead. 

“You almost never call,” Ymir picks up on the third ring, her voice the practiced-calm of having a client in the same room. “Is everything clear?”  

“What’d the selkie tell you?” Eren tilts the head of the body to look at him, watching the metal-burnt tear stretch across the perimeter of its throat. Rigor mortis has never touched faerie corpses, so it’s almost impossible to tell how long its been sitting here, except for the blood congealing against its lips, its throat, its clothes. “The one that made it there.”

Ymir pauses, and there’s a murmur in the background—Historia and the client, maybe. He thinks he can hear crying. “Hard to decipher,” she says, her voice going low. A door opens and shuts and there’s a breeze dusting itself against the speaker, filling the space until Ymir continues, “he said something about hearing a knock against the doors after they’d closed, but no one was there. Then knocking at the windows, or something. And then there were ‘monsters.’” A swear, taken away by another knock of the breeze against her phone. “Should’ve guessed someone’d been left behind.”

“You said something about monsters.” Eren plucks at the clothes the selkie had been wearing, finding tears in the fabric that are barely-hiding the burns underneath them. Whatever had killed them had been using a knife. “Any idea what they’d looked like?”

Broken glass hisses against the floor, carried by a breeze or by something else, it’s hard to tell. “Not a whole lot of information that way either.” The tide pool above Eren’s head sloshes with another wave, covering the urchins and starfish and probably the sound of footsteps. “Might’ve had sharp teeth. Might’ve had weird eyes. Looked like a person. There wasn’t any magic, I think. Or at least the client didn’t know of any.”

Wood creaks somewhere behind him, as if something had moved aside a broken windowpane. The sound brings Eren back to standing with a half-sung incantation that leaves the feeling of guitar strings vibrating against his tongue and the haze of smoke rising into the aquarium around him. Ash starts catching against his shoelaces, and the smell of burning flesh reaches up to press itself against the tanks, the ceiling, the walls. “Thank you kindly. You’ve been a great help. Keep me updated.”

“What?” It’s not a shriek, but it is heavy, sharp enough to remind him of a metal pipe against concrete. “Isn’t that my line? What did you find?”

“A dead body.” He takes a step back, the ash-water-blood pulling at his feet like mud. “I’ll talk to you soon.” He ends the call with the same movement that shoves his phone as far into his pocket as it’ll go, pressed against his thigh and layered over in security wards. He can feel his magic humming through his jeans.

His hands run an inventory over his own clothes, feeling out the checklist like they always do for situations like this, dangerous situations like this: back pockets—empty; front-left—empty; jacket pockets—empty. His palm hovers over his stomach as he takes a breath—empty. It’s a checklist he’s been running a lot more lately, during what should be routine check-ins, coffee-stops, work. 

No identifying information. No waste hanging out in his system. It’s practically the dream set-up for a dead kid, just as much as it’s a set-up for the morgue that could get him. A surprise. A John Doe, approximately twenty-one years old, one hundred and forty-one pounds, and six feet tall. An enigma.

Levi would hate that he’d thought about that. For a second, Eren hates that he thought about it too.

(“people are dying here.”)

But if it has to be somebody on the Bean Nighe’s laundry list with this ensemble, well—it might as well be him. 

The smoke curls toward any exit it can find as Eren turns away from the burning body, and it’s blurring the edges of every fish tank and tide pool in the main display hall, making the incantation for low-light vision useless enough that he cuts it with a click of his tongue against the backs of his front teeth. The lighting goes back to grayscale, mixing with the orange-yellow-orange flicker of a dying fire and the incandescent glow of the streetlights outside. But for all that he can’t see much of anything, it means that much of anything can’t see him either.

Besides, the smoke gives the shadows pressed against the wall a more distinct shape, despite the stinging of his eyes, and it’s drawing out the lines of shoulders and hips as it gathers onto every surface, leaving flakes of cinder as it climbs out broken windows and fractured doorways. So now he knows that he was definitely being watched, and he knows that the things watching him are bipedal— 

And as the smoke is split open by the cut of an elbow and the jut of a knee coming toward him, Eren knows that it’d been Sluagh watching him, though it’s hard to tell how many with the smoke shifting around them and the sudden burst of noise associated with moving bodies in a space this close. It’s enough, that’s for sure. Enough of them to be somewhere on the spectrum of an issue and a problem. 

When he catches the Sluagh by the wrist and presses his palm against its sternum, throwing its weight behind him, he thinks he’s relieved—at least it’s just the Sluagh that are unpredictable, and not something else entirely. At least only some things in the shadows want him dead. At least he knows how to handle this, more or less. 

Eren side-steps a low kick aimed at his knees, the ash-and-saltwater mixture sucking at the soles of his shoes, the sound almost drowning out the low noise of frustration coughed against the floor. He slides around the closest tide pool, putting it between his body and the room around him, his fingertips trailing the surface of the water—and he breathes in, tasting smoke and the sting of a burning corpse, saltwater and concrete, waterfront garbage and wintertime. But underneath everything, there’s just a twinge of brine and blubber, and the weight of heather and rainwater. 

Regardless of whether he can smell their magic or not, the shadows solidify into Sluagh bodies with the smoke more-or-less gone, caught by the Sound-made breeze and pulled into the city to mix with the smell of alleyway garbage and asphalt. 

There are four Sluagh here, if he’s got nothing else to go by except a headcount, and all of them are watching him.

Eren can feel the heartbeat of the city at the back of his throat, can feel the tread of countless tires moving across his bones. He taps the rhythm against the surface of the water, his fingertips itching with electricity. His magic curls against his tongue as he says, “how often are we going to have to meet like this before it becomes boring and we all just go our separate ways?” 

Street-lighting dances over the Sluaghs’ skin, shifting across arms and chests and legs, blurring their shapes almost-enough to take them back out of sight. One of them tilts its head slightly, blood leaking from its nose. When it speaks, there’s something off—but it’s hard to identify, and harder to explain. 

“Funny question.” It’s voice is soft, as though it’s entirely ignoring the blood curling over its lips, and it’s like—it’s like—an echo in a cave, smothered by stiff, winter air. It’s less breakable, less pointed, but has more direction. Eren’s skin crawls underneath it. “You’ve got a lot of funny questions, right? That’s your schtick.” Or—it’s too nuanced. This conversation carries itself far more delicately than any of the other ones Eren has been blessed to be a part of. 

And that’s when the feeling comes to mind. The sensation of a knife being dragged along the slope of his shoulders and up the back of his neck. The tide-water is cold against the pads of his fingers. “That’s my one-note routine, yeah.” Eren curls his toes in his sneakers against the seeping cold of the water at his feet. His socks squish under his weight. “Do you have a funny answer for me?”

The lighting changes inside the aquarium as clouds move across the moon outside. Two of the Sluagh flicker out of sight and back again, their positions slightly different than before. One of them has their hands behind their back. 

“That depends.” The Sluagh who’s elected to speak for all of them rests both its hands against the edge of the pool. Its fingers are placed just outside the reach of the seawater, even as it leans forward. “How often are you going to have to die before you come back like us?”

When Eren breathes in, it feels like his throat has frozen over.

But there’s still no taste of their magic in the air. 

(It’s a question that could’ve been thrown away months ago, weeks ago, days ago—but it’s pretty alarming to think about, considering the situation and everything. 

Sluagh aren’t born in the way that most beings are—carried through a painful labor that often ends in what many people call a miracle. Sluagh are born of darker things, of angrier things, of violent things that’ve crawled their way in and out of the hearts of mankind. Of course, it doesn’t become dangerous until those things are allowed to stick around and grow.

And dangerous situations become Sluagh even less often.

A person is born and raised, and the dangerous situation grows and festers, and then something terrible happens, and then it dies, like everything does. A Sluagh is what comes after the everything. The body dies and comes back, revived by whatever magic latches onto those who have been cursed by something too old and too unknowable to name. They die human, or changeling, or something, and are born again as something pureblooded fae, doomed to roam the earth cloaked in bloodlust that’s impossible to satisfy, with no memories of the life they’d lived and lost before. 

Rumor’s always had it that it served some sort of purpose, that a faerie like that would be useful during another kind of birth—the birth of the Wild Hunt.

If things weren’t the way they are, if Eren wasn’t where he was, he’d probably find it pretty funny how things like this always manage to bite somebody in the ass eventually. It just seems to be that the one that’s always getting bitten is him.)

The moment fractures when the Sluagh who’d spoken vaults over the tide pool, feet first.  

Eren rotates on his heel, grabbing the Sluagh by its knee and calf, swinging its body toward the wall with more force than finesse. It catches itself only barely, its palms bracing against the wall to keep its face safe. It twists, trying to jam its heel toward Eren’s jaw and kick his teeth in—but he ducks, leaving the Sluagh to flail for a heartbeat as its foot catches one of its companions in the throat. It’s nothing that’ll do any lasting damage, but it gives Eren just enough time to slip across the floor and out one of the broken windows, glass crunching beneath the soles of his sneakers. 

Among the outdoor enclosures, Eren can see the way the nighttime is playing over the skin of other Sluagh, revealing the flash of teeth and the curl of fingers, somewhere between the harbor seal tanks and the railing perched above the seawater. The conflict, then, is that if he stops running, he’s got four Sluagh behind him—but if he doesn’t, there’s no way to tell how many are in front of him, not with the way the clouds keep moving against one another and changing things around.

It doesn’t really matter what decision his brain would’ve made, since he’s always let his reflexes do the thinking for him in moments like this, and he lets his momentum carry him forward, his feet almost-slipping against the bleachers, the eyes of the harbor seals following him from the shadows at the bottom of the tank. 

The nighttime opens and shuts around him, revealing another Sluagh poised at the end of Eren’s bench. It moves forward quickly, carefully, and with movements so precise that Eren almost misses the way something flips into its right hand, glinting underneath the stiff, white light of the streetlights to either side of them. Eren lets his body go loose, angling his shoulders perpendicular to the Sluagh’s body, the knife in its hand getting close enough to his face that he can feel the sting of silver against the inside of his nose when he breathes. 

The sensation is all in his head, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less alarming as he feels things clicking together behind the scenes. Something tightens in his chest as he uses the Sluagh’s inertia against it, slamming his forehead against its face hard enough that he feels its nose break against his skull. 

The silver knife clatters against the bleachers, skidding against the wet surface, as the Sluagh uses its left hand to claw at Eren’s shirt, pulling him forward to jam its knee into his gut, doubling him over around the pain. The second blow is given by the Sluagh’s left fist, knuckles catching him hard across his cheek. 

(Despite everything, Eren makes a note to himself, scribbles it in the front-most corner of his mind—the Sluagh are fighting like humans do.

If he’d been holding a pencil, it’d be shaking.)

There’s a hand placed at the back of his neck, attached to thin fingers, calloused from however long this Sluagh had been walking the earth. Its skin is cold enough to raise goosebumps under the collar of Eren’s shirt.

“Did you know,” the speaker-Sluagh says, tightening its grip around Eren’s neck as it drags him toward the glass of the harbor seals observation tank, “that it’s possible to drown in only two inches of water?” 

The Sluagh kicks the glass once, kicks it twice, kicks a third time to release a flood of treated saltwater out onto the pavilion. It’s fucking freezing, just as freezing as the Sound underneath them, and it’s soaking into the fabric of his jeans, into his skin—or maybe it’s just the implication that’s making him feel this clammy. Either way, this is hardly the ideal place for him to be, with a hand around his neck like a misbehaved cat, poised above an open tank of water. 

“I thought that was more common with kiddos,” Eren replies, letting the taste of his own magic fill his mouth as he rubs his thumb and forefinger together, trying to find the right words to get him out of this, anything to get him out of this. “I think I’ve aged out of that.” 

“That’s why we’re going to be extra cautious with you,” the Sluagh tells him, rattling like icicles that had grown too close together. “One of these days we’re going to figure you out, little monster. And when we do, we’re going to get back what you stole from us. By then, I doubt we’ll have to worry about you anymore.”

Eren watches his reflection in the water left behind in the depths of the harbor seal tank just long enough to catch his breath—and then he shuts his eyes. “‘Cause I’m Mr. Brightside!” 

A flash bursts from his palm, sharp enough to turn the backs of his eyelids orange, and he can hear the spitting of the light against the skin of the Sluagh, can once more smell the thin edges of burning flesh. But the grip on Eren’s neck only tightens, digging too-sharp nails into the muscles in the hollows underneath his jaw.

“I don’t think so,” the Sluagh tells him, its voice tight with pain as it shoves Eren’s head underwater. It’s voice is distorted when it continues, “none of that this time.” 

Eren’s hands find purchase only where they’re not supposed to—against glass, against the edge of the water, against sea-slick concrete. He can think his way out of this, he should think his way out of this, he has to think his way out of this—  

His heart is in his throat and the Sluagh’s grip only gets worse as Eren tries to bring his legs to his chest for leverage. There’s no—there’s no fucking room to struggle, here. He’s stuck. He’s stuck, and the city is white noise at the back of his head. He’s stuck, and the city is white noise, and it’s beating against his lungs. He’s stuck, and the city is white noise, and its pressing against his lungs, and he can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.

His body tries anyway.

There’s the never-distant memory of river-mud oozing between his fingers, caught underneath his nails, collecting against his tonsils as he inhales water that’s entirely different, tasting of brine and mechanised treatment, like copper, or iron, or— 

God, he’s going to die here. He’s going to die here in a harbor seal tank, choking on water, drowning, and he knows he’s going to die here because he can feel his thoughts getting cloudy, becoming shapeless, turning into nothing. He’s going to die here, and he’s going to wake up gasping, like he always does, left among the broken glass to end up in another morgue.

Eren inhales again, bubbles rising from behind his teeth. His limbs feel heavy and useless. 

(“people are dying here.”)

One of his hands curls around a shard of glass, its edges drawing blood from his fingers. Warmth is curling in his stomach, beneath the curve of his spine, in the soles of his feet, in the roots of his teeth. He can feel the bus routes tracing patterns on the underside of his skin. And he reaches for his magic out of comfort, even if he can’t turn it into anything, even if there’s nothing he can say that’ll make it useful. 

Eren can feel the life of the city rising up, pushing against his teeth—more than 652,405 pinpricks, itching from within the marrow of his bones.

(if anyone’s got to die here, it might as well be me.)

And then his body catches fire while the rest of him is swept away, wrapped up in a feeling that’s just this side of too warm. He’s being rocked, side-to-side, as he goes around the curve of—the light rail system. He’s on a train, coasting along the railway between the airport and the university. Usually, his ears pop when he takes the train anywhere. He isn’t sure why that isn’t happening now. 

There are only a few people on the train this late at night, and Eren has no idea how he knows that. But the train is way louder than it should be for this volume at this time on a weeknight. He can hear the oxygen machine whir, click, and exhale in the centermost train car. He can hear the way someone’s thumbs are tapping against the screen of their phone. He can hear the murmured conversation between the conductor and the rail system management as if it’s being spoken right into his ear. 

This sure as shit isn’t normal, and Eren sure as shit isn’t dead.

The light rail eases into the stop at Rainier Beach, the squeal of the wheels against the track tightening the muscles of his stomach— 

When Eren comes back to himself, he’s disoriented, and nauseous, and his body is definitely moving without him telling it to do that. 

He’s in the street, somehow, a Sluagh coming toward him with a silver knife exactly like the one he’d thrown aside earlier. Eren can feel it humming, from this distance, which is a new feature, or something. Or maybe that’s just—just the thing that’s pulling at his limbs, the thing that’s driving him forward, the thing that’s burning underneath his lungs.

Whatever’s moving Eren forward is taking deliberate steps, one after the other, as if it’s trying to figure out how the whole thing works—the delicate attention that’s required to move each finger, the way his legs have to move so his knees don’t lock. It’d probably be pretty interesting if Eren wasn’t a passenger in his own vehicle, but right now it’s just unsettling, and he can feel his magic scalding the back of his throat. 

The Sluagh adjusts its grip on its knife with practiced ease, and as it tosses its hair, Eren recognizes it as the Sluagh who’d done all the talking, with the soft voice and the cryptic-answer bullshit. This close, Eren can almost see the misting rain beading on its cheek, too thin to be the sleet that had settled around the aquarium.

He can feel his muscles twitching with the energy tucked away in the center of his body, and his hands come up to brace against the Sluagh, stopping it in its tracks. One of his hands is placed at its throat, just above the hollows of its collarbones. The other is pressed against the center of its chest. Whatever learning curve had kept his steps calculated before is over and done with now, having evaporated somewhere between his next step forward and the Sluagh’s strike toward his throat.

Eren’s face doesn’t feel like his when the Sluagh meets his eyes—it’s as though all the effort his pilot is putting in is going toward the rest of his body: his hands, his legs, his feet. His face is too stiff, like it’s caught in the grip of rigor mortis. But that’s a stupid thought to have, and Eren knows that as soon as it curls at the back of his brain. Rigor mortis doesn’t settle in those with faerie blood. It’s more like—it’s more like his face just isn’t giving anything away. It might be that there’s nothing to give in the first place. 

His magic tastes like somebody else’s when it pulses from his palms, and the Sluagh turns to ashes between his fingers. 

He feels like he’s going to gag against the taste of car exhaust and wastepaper, the smell of ozone between phone lines and sea-spray collecting against the piers. This magic is foreign and familiar, all at once everything and nothing like his own. 

He swallows, trying to taste his home there, the home he carries in his blood, reaching out only to find more of the same— 

This intersection is like all of the other ones in the city, just like this bus route, just like those pedestrians crossing between the closest bus stop and the gas station—an exact copy of all the other ones on all the other routes, with limited differences. Eren can feel it burning against his chest. Diesel exhaust is thick against his tongue, the bus’s engine rattling in his sinuses. Old bubblegum is stuck on the underside of almost every seat, dark splotches stuck to faded blue-white plastic. 

Eren wonders if the mint gum the bus driver is chewing will end up stuck to the center if the aisle like all the other indeterminate flavors. If it wouldn’t reek of gas fumes, maybe he’d laugh—but then again, maybe he wouldn’t.

The bus rumbles to a start again, its passengers shifting in their seats to compensate for the turn its making. A private security guard yawns, leaning their face against the back-most window, arms crossed loosely over their chest. Layers of grime sit on the outside of the window, smearing streetlights against their cheek, drawing the bags under their eyes into sharper relief. Two seats forward, a nurse sits, his badge pinned to the collar of his university sweatshirt. His eyes aren’t yet bleary, and the smell of coffee rises from the thermos between his hands. He’s heading toward a long shift, probably. The last passenger, just behind the bus driver, has earbuds tucked inside her ears, the murmur of the music bouncing around the inside of his skull. 

It’s a song he barely recognizes, all strings and piano. It sticks to the ceiling, the floor, the center aisle—exactly like the bubblegum, trampled by so many feet.

Rain spits against the bus as it rolls by North Seattle Community College, and Eren can feel it against his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, his lips. It stings, a little, as it breathes against the windows. The tires hiss against the asphalt, scattering mist in short arcs behind them. A wet newspaper is caught in the undercarriage, somewhere. Eren can feel its soggy weight pressed against his stomach. 

Eren’s body is somewhere, but he can’t place it. It’s like his brain is split between varying perceptions, split right down the middle. His limbs are like rubber, his abdomen barely anything more than a crushed soda can, leaking from all its sides—

When he inhales, his lungs bubble with seawater and the taste of something else’s magic. 

Lightning arcs from his fingertips when the thing inside his body snaps them, no musical help required, no spell of any kind at all. His skin tingles with the feeling as another Sluagh vanishes, leaving nothing but smoke and the smell of burnt meat behind. The lampost beside the closest bus stop flickers once before holding steady. Eren wonders if he’d blinked—wonders further if the thing inside his body needs to blink. He can’t tell if his eyes feel dry or not.

More Sluagh flow through the shadows around him like they’re made of fabric, and most of these still have echoes of beasts tucked at the corners of their mouths. Their teeth are bared in not-really-smiles that Eren’s familiar with. One of them has a silver knife, catching streetlight and throwing it out into the street. Another has a bat, smooth and wooden, carved haphazardly with misshapen runes for battle. Its grip is lined with electrical tape, which means it might be rubbed down with iron shavings. From here, he can’t tell. Not with this magic still congealing in his mouth. 

Metal screams from somewhere. The sound of it hits every surface like solid glass—the water, the street, the concrete of the buildings, the grass—

The grass?

The thing inside his body turns, the collar of his shirt rubbing roughly against his throat, rough with drying saltwater. He can see the shapes of the Sculpture Park from here, one of the pieces listing sharply enough to the left, a broken piece pointed skyward, as though it’s positioned to cut the clouds. The rain hasn’t made it to this part of town yet, but he can smell it, buried underneath everything else.  

Eren has no idea how he got here. 

The wind tries to shove its way through his hair, catching its fingers against the knots left there by the saltwater that’s turning his clothes into sandpaper.

His body snaps its fingers again and magic ripples up his arm, toward his shoulder, up the back of his neck. Flakes of skin peel away from his knuckles, his elbows, the tips of his ears, before smoothing over, soft and newly healed. The wounds don’t even have time to weep before they’re gone. 

Eren’s face is exactly the same as it moves toward the newer Sluagh, and his fingers snap a third time. The pads of his index finger and thumb feel callused, this time, roughened from whatever power he’s using, or this thing is using, or—or something. The magic cracks outward, the air around him popping with it, and even the skin around his eyes isn’t any tighter with the strain. 

There’s no brake fluid in this car. There’s no brake fluid in this car and the gas pedal is stuck to the floorboard. It’s careening on a path that he can only guess at, the map having been thrown out the window a long time ago. 

His left hand snaps out lightning this time, a claw spreading wide enough to knock a stop sign flat. Pigeons scatter in the darkness, unseen, disturbed from their nighttime roosts. If Eren were in his body like he ought to be, he’d gag against this feeling, this taste, this smell. It’s too harsh, too strong, too fucking different—and yet it’s familiar, maybe. He knows it from somewhere. It reminds him, a little bit, of the way his own magic had dragged itself against his bones years ago, reaching out and over his body as he’d pulled up muck from the riverbed—

Eren splits apart.  

He’d be breathless if he had the time, standing in the middle of another intersection that’s much closer to the chaos this time around, watching his body move toward him, each and every step more fluid than the last. Skin continues to flake from the line of his cheekbones, the jut of his chin. From here, Eren can see that his pupils are blown wide open, big enough to almost swallow his irises whole.

It’s a little bit haunting, looking at himself like this.

The traffic lights flash red above him, over and over and over again. He thinks that his heartbeat sounds like that, drumming between his ears—over and over and over again.  

Streetlamps cast light through Eren’s torso, hitting the crosswalk in front of him with no filter. There’s no shadow there to give him away, to tell anyone that he’s watching all of this from the outside. His body grabs a Sluagh by the throat, its fingers twitching against the hollows underneath the Sluagh’s jaw. Lightning-burns crawl up toward his elbows as the Sluagh dissolves into ashes, just like the one by the aquarium had.

When Eren swallows, his throat feels raw. 

Voices come from somewhere distant, incongruent with the scene in front of his face, made entirely of joyful screams cut off too early and the crack of magic too powerful for the hands snapping them off. Eren turns his head, keeping his body in the periphery of his vision, but looking for something else. The whispers feel like they’re getting closer. 

Eren swallows again and tastes seawater. 

The murmurs are louder but still not distinct as Eren turns his body, the flash of spells glancing off the windows of the buildings around them. The asphalt cracks under his feet, but doesn’t turn into a sinkhole. He wonders if he would’ve fallen in, as incorporeal as he is right now. But that thought is a distraction, redirected by a voice that rises in volume, the words blending together into something soupy and indiscernible, but he’d recognize it anywhere.

It’s his mother’s voice.

Her shape flickers underneath one streetlamp—and then another. Beside her, there’s a hooded figure, looking like a cross between a grim reaper and a carriage-hand. That shape, too, isn’t solid, but it’s lifting its head between one scene and the next, like the way rolled film stutters when it’s aged too much. Eren thinks that, if this had been real and not some bullshit figment of the whole mess of this whole night, the figure would be looking right at him. 

The figure breathes out a dark cloud with flecks of starlight in it, and Eren knows exactly what it is.

An Ankou—an Ankow—an Angau. A classic death omen, but not one of the first. Old, sure, but Eren’s seen older. But there’s something different about this one, something ancient. It reminds him of his mother that way. It seen things that Eren doesn’t know of, that Eren couldn’t possibly know of, and the longer its inconsistent shape looks at him, the fuzzier his head feels. 

The shape of its shoulders looks sad from here, just like his mother’s have for years and years and years. Maybe it’s his imagination. Maybe it’s not. But grief tightens his stomach anyway. 

His mother’s voice says something else that’s unintelligible, and this time something viscous rises up from his stomach, to his lungs, to the back of his throat. It’s nauseating, a thick mix between a muddy river and Puget Sound at the beginning of winter. It’s suffocating him, threatening to make him vomit, threatening to come out his nose. 

The flashing traffic lights are impossible to look at, but his heart is still beating with that steady rhythm, even if he can’t breathe all over again, just like always, just like every bad dream he’s ever had— 

“Eren?” Far away, but right next to his ear. The sound of his name shakes. It warms the shell of his ear. “Eren?” Distressed. Higher pitched. Eren can almost feel the warmth of its breath against his cheek, can feel its timbre against the line of his jaw.

He slams back into his body hard enough to see stars, the street clear of Sluagh, silent and eerie and empty except for him, these fucking traffic lights, and—

“Levi.” Jesus Christ, even his voice isn’t his anymore. It’s too loud and there are too many other voices underneath it, like hundreds of thousands of people, saying the exact same shit, and it splits his skull open like a cantaloupe, narrowing his sight into a pinprick. And so he tries again, and when he does, he doesn’t spit up blood, doesn’t speak like he’s too many people all at once, and the taste of gasoline and soggy newspaper sits on his tongue as only an afterthought. “Levi?” What comes out of his mouth this time around is raspy and almost-broken, wet denim against a gravel road, but it’s better than that other nonsense and easier to understand. It keeps his brains from leaking out his ears—but he can taste blood on his upper lip, oozing from his nose. “What are you doing here? It’s—you’re supposed to be with Farlan and Isabel. It’s—” Eren squints against the feeling behind his eyes, tries to grab for the relevant thoughts underneath all the sounds, and the smells, and the feeling of the flashing fucking lights in the intersection behind him. “Happy almost-birthday.”

“What?” Levi’s hand is cold against his cheek and his fingers are calloused. Eren thinks that there might be sweat behind his own ears. “Are you serious right now? You’re burning up. Your nose—your fucking face—what was that? Are you okay?” He pauses in the middle of it all, touching the other side of Eren’s face with his other hand, before moving it toward his forehead, underneath his hair. “What I mean is thanks. But what about you?”

Eren takes a breath and it’s cold. Colder than it’s felt all night. “Farlan and Isabel?”

Levi sighs, dropping his hands away from Eren’s face, and there’s exasperation moving across his face like clouds, touching his eyes, forehead, his mouth. There’s something tense in his jaw. 

“Farlan got called away for work and Isabel went with him,” Levi tells him, tucking his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He’s not looking at Eren’s face anymore. “Sounds like local police have been getting a shitload of calls about something happening on this side of town. Farlan wonders if it has something to do with his walking corpses.” Levi does glance at his face then, a quick thing, before looking away. But Eren can feel that glance long after, like there are thumbtacks pinning it to his face. “Does it?”

(“people are dying here.”)

Eren’s guts are losing it, rolling around under his skin. It feels as though there’s gelatin in his body, shifting under his weight when he tries to move. There’s a response that he wants to give him—something helpful, intelligible, and quick. At the corners of his vision, he thinks he can see the shadows start to melt, thinks that they’re preparing for something. Police sirens sound like they’re coming from s elsewhere deeper in the city, but for all he knows, they could be coming right towards them. All of these pieces of information belong in sentences that Eren wants to string together in the most effective way possible.

Instead, what comes out of his mouth is, “I’m going to puke.” 

When he does, it’s nothing but seawater, blending in with the puddles at his feet.

(There’d still been the lingering smell of cigarette smoke sticking to the insides of Eren’s cheeks long after he’d left the bus station. His body had felt stiff after sitting for so long, and it had seemed like the soles of his sneakers would be sticking to any type of floor for a long, long time. His skin had felt greasy, or slimy, or itchy. No—more like, it was hard to say, how, exactly, he was feeling. At some moments, it had felt like he’s been trying to live too many lives at one time, and keeps losing all of them.

He’d been rotating his phone between his hands the whole way home, reading and rereading the response that Levi had given him. 

From: Doctor Levi     i’m spending time with farlan and isabel on the 23rd, but after that, i’ve got nothing specific.     why, you wanna make plans? 

Everything with Levi had always been, naturally, a mixture of that sweet, sweet ‘yes and no’—of the fear of wanting and not having, of the fear of safety versus danger. It had always been far more complicated than it needed to be, and all of that complication had, obviously, been Eren’s responsibility. 

of course, he’d wanted to say. of course i wanna make plans with you.

He’d typed something else instead—something closer to “if you’re free, we should throw a party and celebrate with a fucking baking show.” It had been dismissive of all the other things he could have said. Fuck, he could’ve called. He probably should’ve called. The Bean Nighe had left him shaken, or maybe he’d left himself shaken, or maybe he really just needed a solid day’s sleep, from sunrise to sunset. 

Maybe he’d needed a vacation.

But like most things, Eren had placed these feelings on a backburner, and this backburner was on a different stove in a different kitchen in a completely different house than the one he’d been painstakingly trying to build since he’d died-and-come-back the first time around. There’d always be time to fret about his feelings later, about the way his sleeplessness was texturing the inside of his eyelids like the surface of a corkboard. 

The bell had chimed above his head as he’d entered his stupid store. His phone had vibrated against the skin of his left hand. He’d left the store to Connie for the second time that night, before he’d climbed the stairs, doing everything in his power to avoid all of the concerns written in the frown on Connie’s face.

And in that space of time where it was just him and the aftertaste of cigarettes, it had felt like the exact right time to do a load of laundry.)

-

(He’d hated the way Eren had decided to look at him like that, with his eyebrows bent low and his lips pressed tight enough to go pale, just like the rest of his face had been. Well, just like the rest of his face had been—except for the hollows of his cheeks, flushed deep and dark and splotchy.

“levi,” he’d hated it in the same way that he’d hated how Eren had decided to say his name like that, his voice rasping from whatever-the-fuck had been going on before Levi’d gotten before, during when he’d gotten there. It’d sounded like he’d drowned—either underwater or under the weight of all those voices that’d come out of his mouth, Levi couldn’t be sure. “i need you to run.” 

“excuse me?’ Indignation had hit him hard, like it always does. But this time around, it had left him winded, had risen up from the soles of his feet to pound against the underside of his sternum. He’d still been able to feel the sear of Eren’s skin against his palms. “eren, you look like shit, you sound like shit, and you want me to leave you here? are you fucking serious?”

“that’s the second time you’ve asked.” Something like a smile had tried to rise up and sit on Eren’s lips, but it had faltered before it had the chance to connect, falling to the ground between them. “i can absolutely promise you that i’m so serious right now. i need you to run and i need you to meet me at—uh—” Eren had glanced around them, trying to focus on the street names on either side, pushing his hair back from his face in a way that didn’t help clean up his look at all. Blood had still been oozing from his nose. “the hills of eternity cemetery.”

“a cemetery.” Levi’s mouth had gone dry. The saltwater smell from the Sound had scraped the inside of his throat. “we’re going to meet at a cemetery. in queen anne?”

Eren’s head had turned, the color on his cheeks shifting as though it was twisted through the lens of a kaleidoscope. He’d looked as though he were listening for something. 

“in this case, i don’t even need to you trust me,” he’d said, and when he’d turned back to face Levi, his eyes had been almost-glowing, despite everything. Even with blood crawling toward his chin. “i just need you to listen.”

Eren had shrugged his jacket from his shoulders, looping it around Levi’s own. His touch had been impossibly gentle, and it’d made Levi want to return Eren’s favor and throw up in the middle of the street. 

“what’s this for?” Levi had asked, even though he’d already known the answer. Beneath all that other shit—the smell of saltwater and blood, bus exhaust and wet magazines—there’d been the touch of heather and rain-soaked soil. 

“it’s enchanted.” A sigh had moved through Eren’s body. Levi had almost been sure he’d heard his bones rattle with it. “keep it on, okay?”

A pause. The wind was catching a glass bottle, somewhere out of sight, and pushing it along the sidewalk. “okay.” 

In that moment, the smile Eren had been trying so hard to manage rose to the surface, though it presented itself more as wrinkles against the bridge of his nose than a shift in the position of his mouth. But however it manifested, it had been a relief. 

“be careful,” Levi had said in the exact same tone that Eren had told him his jacket was enchanted. “i’ll come after you if you don’t.”

The color within the irises of Eren’s eyes had swirled like something liquid when he’d replied, “well now i have to be on my best behavior.” Another smile, all in the nose and the corners of his eyes, while nothing stuck to the edges of his mouth—and then he’d stepped away, slapping his own cheeks with open palms, and sang quietly under his breath, “you’ve got blood on your face, you big disgrace, waving your banner all over the place.”

Eren’s body had begun to glow, his hair shifting with a breeze that Levi couldn’t feel, and his afterimage lingered in the air between them. He’d looked like a time-lapse photo as he’d moved, leaving trails of light behind him, solid enough that the light from the streetlamps had split around them. 

Eren hadn’t glanced over his shoulder before he’d broken out into a run, stumbling only once, recovering quickly enough that if Levi had blinked, he’d’ve missed it.

But he hadn’t, and so he didn’t.

Levi then pushed his arms through the sleeves of Eren’s jacket. It was warm to the touch. He’d taken one step back, two steps, three steps— 

And he’d launched himself into a run, just the same as Eren had.

If he’d been just a little farther away, he would’ve missed the sounds of bare feet pounding against the roadway, would’ve missed the smell of ice and frozen skin, would’ve missed the sensation of both these things rolling forward into the direction that Eren had gone. 

But he wasn’t. And so he didn’t.)

It’s pretty fucking eerie, standing beside a cemetery all by himself. 

Of course, it’s even more eerie with gargoyles preening themselves on the lip of the funeral home’s roof, their stone bodies rattling as they shake themselves, their clawed feet clinging to the stonework there. Their style is just incongruent enough with the architecture around here that they had to have come from somewhere else—someone’s garden, maybe. Or a church, potentially. There are enough of them in the city for at least one to lean into gothic décor. 

Levi’s gone in and out of superstition at different periods in his life, but generally, he likes to think of himself as entirely pragmatic. The wind through the bushes behind him is just the wind, just like the ravens cawing in the cemetery are just ravens, just like the shadows flickering against the sidewalk are only moths attracted to the funeral home’s floodlights, positioned along its facade at even intervals to keep the neighborhood from falling into complete darkness. The graveyard itself had closed at sunset, as is tradition in every cemetery he’s ever heard of. Even for those who aren’t particularly superstitious, it’s probably best not to tempt fate after dark.

Maybe it’s that atmosphere that makes Levi’s skin crawl, or maybe it’s the fact that pragmatism doesn’t hold up in the face of what he knows now, or maybe it’s the passersby who look just this side of preternatural, whose pupils have eaten the whites of their eyes, whose teeth are just a bit too sharp when they smile at one another. Though not a single person or creature or whatever is sparing him a single glance, it still doesn’t feel quite right.

Either way, something is shaking Levi’s stomach, gripping it in a tight fist, and it makes him feel jumpy.

The sleet from earlier in the night has started up again, rolling against the street, the brickwork of the funeral home, the vegetation around him. The dirt around his feet is too cold to turn into mud, but Levi can almost feel the soles of his shoes sticking to the earth anyway. It’s like—it’s like he’s fixed in place, still watching the chaos of the intersection on a loop. He thinks of the way Eren had snapped his fingers, the way his skin had peeled away from his body, of the way his hair had been caught in the aftershocks of whatever magic he’d thrown forward, all without the use of wordplay that he’d said was paramount for changelings.

When Eren had spoken, it hadn’t sounded like him at all. Instead, it’d been as though there were countless people talking out of his mouth at once, a swell of noise that’d tear against whatever throat it’d come from. Something else had been speaking with Eren’s tongue—except he’d said Levi’s name, had said it twice, and an expression that had looked a lot like solace had taken shape on his face just for a second— 

Levi had felt as though he was walking across a frozen lake, and nowhere had been safe to step.

The driver’s side door or a car bursts open across the street, shattering the almost-silence around him with a shrill alarm, scattering the gargoyles from their perch with the crunch of brick and mortar, still gripped in their claws, and discontented howls. Lights come on in the windows of the houses up and down the road, revealing figures in pajamas peering out from behind the glass.

Levi takes one step forward, loosening his fingers from the fists they’d rolled into, and shifts his weight between his knees. 

A shape swings outside the car door, feet first. Sneakers hit the pavement, then knees, then palms—and Eren really does look like shit. He lifts his head and there’s blood smeared across his cheek from where he’d probably wiped his nose. There are new bruises under one eye, a split in his bottom lip. When he gasps, it’s like dried branches scraping against one another, as though it’s a struggle to  breathe right, and no matter how many breaths he takes, it doesn’t take away the gray-blue pallor of his skin. 

These things become more apparent the closer Levi gets, and there’s dread pooling at the bottom of his gut like ice-water, chilling him to the marrow of his bones. 

“Eren?” A question, covering the pop of his knees as he crouches to eye level. It might not be loud enough to be heard over the car alarm. 

Eren lifts a hand to slam the door shut behind him, swallowing once before saying, “hush little baby, don’t you cry.” Levi’s relatively certain that the tune is hiding underneath all of that, but Eren’s voice is too broken to make it distinct. Then he looks up at Levi, and something relaxes in his jaw. Or, alternatively, Levi could’ve just been seeing things. “Hi, there. Best behavior. See?”

Even when Levi rolls his eyes as he rights himself, palms pressed to his knees, it’s hard not to notice the way the sleet catches in Eren’s hair before it starts to melt there. He doesn’t mention it when he says, “I thought you didn’t drive.” He holds out his hand, palm out, in an offer.

Eren’s bones creak when he stands, using Levi’s hand for leverage. “I don’t. That car’s not mine. It’s a birthday trick.” Eren’s smile this time has a little more teeth, a little more mouth, and it cracks the dried blood on his cheek, revealing the fevered color there. “I’ll tell you all about it when we’ve got the time. But we need to keep moving.” 

Levi’s gaze follows the direction of Eren’s eyes, ignoring the shape of his eyelashes and the droop of his shoulders when he does. He’ll have time for questions later, when they’re not in the middle of all this shit. “You want us to go into the cemetery.” It’s a question and it isn’t, because while Eren talks a lot, there isn’t a lot he says that’s frivolous. Used for misdirection? Sure. Disingenuous? Yeah. But not empty. 

“I want us to go into the cemetery,” Eren confirms, the works cracking under their own weight. The movement he makes forward barely shakes at all, and if Levi had been standing further away, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the way that Eren’s legs are trembling if he stands still too long. “They’re not that far behind me. I’m not—” From behind him, Levi can hear the grimace on Eren’s face more than he can see it, but it sits between them all the same. “I’m not doing so good on juice right now.” 

“No shit,” Levi says. “Is that supposed to surprise me? What surprises me is that you’re still standing.”

Eren laughs with a sound that’s more like a wheeze, almost too soft to be heard over the rustle of the bushes as he pushes his way into the cemetery. “You could at least be like ‘wow, Eren, you know, you could look worse.’ That’d be nice. A little boost for the ego.” 

“Wow,” Levi delivers, stepping around the headstones of people he doesn’t know, stretching his words out like half-chewed gum, “Eren, you know, you could look worse.” A roost of ravens fluff their feathers in the branches of a tree, one or two of them shaking their heads and scattering water from their bodies. Like this, it almost feels as though they’re going for a walk, as though Eren’s about to break into one of his stories about the sociopolitics of a world Levi doesn’t understand. “How’s that? An improvement?”

“You could use a little more sincerity,” Eren says, and the impression that absolutely nothing is going wrong at this very second splits down the middle. He glances over his shoulder with his cheeks still flushed but the edges of his face less unsettlingly gaunt. “So, I’ll give it a four-point-five out of ten.” 

Levi’s about to say something clever, about to take this rhythm that they have and run with it—but the wind pulls at the edges of wet leaves, pressed tightly to the graveyard soil, and it carries with it the sound of laughter that cracks across the nighttime, exactly like the sound of ice, splitting over the surface of a lake. Levi thinks that he can feel thin, frozen fingers crawling up from the base of his spine, inching upward as they attempt to loop around his throat.

By the cut of Eren’s shoulders against the glare of lamp-posts strewn throughout the cemetery, Levi can tell that he’d heard it too. It becomes obvious when Eren turns around, and his jaw is set like stone.

There’s fury on his face.

“Fuck,” Eren’s voice is tight and thin. The sentiment is apparent. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. I thought I’d bought more time. Fuck.” 

The loosely kept bushes at the edge of the cemetery tremble on all sides, liquid shadows peeling out from underneath trees and headstones, forming out of nothing like noxious gas. Eyes glitter in the loose shapes of faces, and the smiles there are all teeth, mirthless and sharp enough to split glass like butter. Levi doesn’t bother to count them all. It’s not like that would do anything to ease the dread that’s building behind his eyes. 

“What did you bring us here for?” Levi asks, keeping his voice low. It curls around their feet, rigid. 

Eren’s hand is warm against the inside of Levi’s elbow, and he doesn’t bother to lower his voice at all. It’s not like it carries very far with the state it’s in. “I was going to try and make a call, but that takes a second, and I’m not sure we’ve got that. So we’re going to have to play this hard and fast.” With his other hand, he pulls a knife from a leather sheath, tucked between his hip and the waistband of his jeans. He presents it to Levi, hilt first, held between the pads of his thumb and index finger. “Take this.” 

The hilt is made of wood and etched with runes, leaving behind the sensation of sparks against his palm. “Enchanted?”

Eren’s lips twitch, his eyes following the movement of the closest Sluagh. It carries a crude spear in one hand, holding it in a loose grip over its shoulder. The blade shines a little too-brightly, all despite the cobbled nature of its make. “Absolutely. If things go too far south, pull the hilt from the blade and it’ll send you to the store.” 

Anger rises up Levi’s throat fast enough to scald, with every brand of possible protest piling up against his teeth and digging into his gums. But before he can say anything at all, Eren cuts him off and keeps talking.

“I’ll need you to tell Connie so that you can bring people back here.” His lips twitch for the second time, and another almost-smile catches fire against the furious glare still clinging to the edges of his eyes. “I’d really rather not end up in a morgue that isn’t yours.”

“I’d really rather you not end up in a morgue at all.” Levi flips the knife it his grip, shifting at Eren’s side to press his own spine against Eren’s. The Sluagh are inching in toward the center of the graveyard, murmuring to one another. Some of them move their hips to reposition their weight in a way that’s patently human, where others are almost hunched entirely over, whatever energy they’re moved by barely contained underneath their skin. 

However many of them there are, none of them seem to be looking at Levi just yet.

The Sluagh who’d laughed speaks, its voice scraping against itself like a glacier against rock. “I see that you’ve found yourself cornered again, little monster.” 

Eren stiffens, the soles of his sneakers disturbing the grass beneath them. “Last time I got cornered, your lot got fucked up.” Even when he tries to raise his voice, it doesn’t get very far—but it had reached far enough to make the Sluagh bark out laughter for the second time.

“Last time you got cornered,” the Sluagh replies, “you’d almost ended up dead.” It sounds like it’s getting closer, its counterparts at the edges of the cemetery moving forward at a slightly more lethargic pace. Step by step by step. “Before that, I think you did end up dead, if what I heard was right.”

“Seems like I just can’t stay dead.” Eren throws his rasping words outward, polishing their sharp edges enough to still manage some kind of intimidation. “You must be pretty shit at your job.”

Levi can hear the Sluagh’s bare feet against the ground, the sigh of its skin against the dead grass. The sound of its grip shifting against the body of its spear hisses somewhere inside its footsteps. The Sluagh’s shadow twists against the headstones, split into different pieces of varied shades by the lamp-posts. 

“Maybe,” the Sluagh’s words feel deliberate, the slow pop and moan of a tree close to splitting open in the dead of winter, “that’s the fun part of chasing you.” A laugh, this one softer, sharper, closer. “You can’t keep coming back forever.”

For a moment, it seems like Eren’s about to cast something. The edges of the jacket around Levi’s shoulders rustle, and he can feel something warm breathe down the back of his neck. The stillness is broken by the smell of Eren’s magic, fresh and heavy, rising up from the ground— 

But as soon as Levi can taste it, it’s gone, dropped away like wet clothes, fading out with an almost-audible cough.

“Fuck,” Eren says again, and Levi feels him move again, taking one step forward. “Goddamn it. Fuck.” Where his voice had been tight before, now it’s brittle, held together by paperclips and rubber bands. Levi can hear his knuckles crack as one of his elbows brushes against Levi’s bicep.

The shadow of the Sluagh shifts position, its spear flipping upward, its grip entirely different, and the wheeze Levi catches is gleeful. The blade is whistling, piercing against the fall of sleet, cutting against the caw of a raven from its roost and Eren’s spreading his arms in a miserable excuse for a defensive posture—but then again, the position hadn’t been for him anyway, because it’d been for Levi, who’s already twisting around him, ducking underneath Eren’s left arm, the knife held in his hand positioned perfectly for an upward thrust, right into the Sluagh’s solar plexus.

The last word from Eren’s mouth had been a serrated croak of “mom!”

From there, it’s as though the world is moving frame-by-frame.

Whisper-click. Eren’s face is ghostly in Levi’s peripheral vision, and an expression that reminds Levi of despair settles against his eyelashes to mix with the melting sleet. Whisper-click. For the first time, the Sluagh seems to notice him, and hatred is burning across its face. Whisper-click. Eren is reaching for the hood of Levi’s borrowed jacket, but his limbs are heavy with the way his night has gone.

all the time, Levi thinks to himself. eren does shit like this all the time.

Whisper-click. 

The Sluagh stops moving entirely, as though suspended underwater.

Whisper-click.

The Sluagh have scattered in the graveyard, and are just as still.

Whisper-click. 

A raven caws for the third time, and the earth begins to roll beside them, rising into a hill of gravedirt, taking the form of a person—a woman—that stands at at least a full foot taller than Eren does. The soil falls from her shoulders, revealing a cloak of bright colors, from which come wrists adorned in a number of golden bracelets, clinking together in the way that wind chimes do. Her hair is loose about her shoulders, a golden earring shaped like a serpent wrapped around the shell of her ear. A sheathed saber is belted at her waist, simple in its decoration. Ash is smeared across her eyelids, rubbed against the edges of her cheekbones, and her lips are painted a deep red.

So close, it’s impossible to mistake this person for anything less than Eren’s mother. Levi can see him in the shape of her eyebrows, the bridge of her nose, the color of her skin, the curve of her mouth. He can see where Eren got the set of his jaw and the squaring of his shoulders, can see where Eren’s penchant for aggressive intensity has come from by the way her eyes glitter in the split dim-bright distance of a city in the nighttime. 

When Levi breathes in, he catches the smell of burnt incense and charred bamboo—like a funeral pyre.

With a flick of the woman’s fingers, the Sluagh suspended in half-movement burst, scattering ashes throughout the cemetery. It falls like snow and smells like nothing. The movement doesn’t even disturb the silence much, outside of the glimmering murmur of her bracelets tapping against one another.

Very few Sluagh remain standing—remain existing?—and the ones that do are outside the boundaries of the graveyard. None of them take another step forward, choosing instead to melt back into the shadows. Even from this far away, Levi can see the way their eyes have widened into something that looks a lot like terror, can see how bloodless their lips get before they’re swallowed by the darkness against the side of the funeral home. 

Nothing else seems necessary for the woman to do, except to bend the length of her body to meet Eren’s eyes, her hands pressed gently to the sides of Eren’s face as she turns his head toward her for further inspection, her unbound hair falling over one shoulder. Christ, even her eyelashes look like Eren’s do, almost endless. 

Levi doesn’t say anything about any of that, because Eren’s mother licks her thumb and begins to wipe away the blood still caked on the side of Eren’s face, on the tip of his nose, on the Cupid’s bow of his lips. It’s a slow process and inherently parental in its tenderness. The intimacy of it makes Levi almost wish that he were somewhere else. It’s like watching a child have their tears wiped away in a department store, or something like that. Or—really, it’s not really anything like that at all. 

“Mom,” Eren draws out the word, bordering on a tone of petulance, “stop. You’re embarrassing me.”

A car rushes by in one of the side streets, catching Levi’s attention just long enough that he doesn’t know the precise moment that Eren’s mother focused her eyes on him, but when it happens, it’s as though her blunted nails are digging into his own cheeks, though she hasn’t so much as stood upright to move. The whites of her eyes are tinged with red, either in some restricted sense of anger or the presence of tears, Levi doesn’t know.

It’s uncomfortable regardless.

Eren’s mother does stand upright then, and her height is only reinforced without the threat of being impaled by a fucking spear. The wind catches its fingers in the ends of her hair, playing with them.

She asks a question in a language Levi doesn’t know or recognize—can’t even begin to guess at. Her tone is sharp, but even though her face is composed to the point of being almost too polite, it carries with it a sneer.

Eren replies in kind—same language, same sharpness—except his lips twist in his mother’s direction, and it feels like that response wasn’t meant for him.

Her eyes move over Eren’s face with practiced efficiency. When she speaks this time, Levi understands her clearly, though her words are carried on an accent that bounces gently, giving the impression of fruit, rolling against the ground. 

“What sort of trouble was that just now?” Eren’s mother asks, her gaze shifting slowly between Eren and Levi both. “It seems to be a bit above your vigilante paygrade, doesn’t it?”

Eren returns her questions with nonchalance, which is made incredibly ineffective by the fact that it sounds like he’s forcing his voice through a paper straw. “The Sluagh have been stirring shit up for a little while. I didn’t expect to end up in, uh, such dire straits. I expected that during the solstice.”

Eren’s mother tilts her head, a gesture that Levi’s seen Eren mimic once or twice. This is bizarre. What features is he supposed to have gotten from his father? “Nothing happened during the solstice?”

Eren shrugs. Levi can practically hear the way his shoulders grind in his sockets, but it’s evidenced only by the way his mouth tightens. “Nothing out of the ordinary. A little too much party, a little too much Hunt, a little too many humans took a sip here, a bite there. The problems were very, very normal.”

“And this?” Her voice thins out, stretches, like a wire pulled taut. “Is this normal?”

“Kind of.” Eren wipes at his nose, catching a remaining bit of not-quite-dry blood on his knuckles. “It’s been semi-normal since, like, August. Up until tonight, they’d been just killing changelings.” 

There’s a heartbeat where Eren blinks and something flickers across his mother’s face. It’s a pained look, filled with speculation about something, but’s gone before Eren opens his eyes again. 

“Up until tonight,” she repeats.

Eren glances at him then, brows furrowed. His pupils are enormous, and he looks exactly as he had when he’d lost a client of his and had tucked himself beside the morgue’s doors, fatigued and wan and distant. 

“They killed a pureblood selkie. They let another one go.” 

The cloak shifts over his mother’s shoulders, her eyes hardening into solid amber. “I really must insist that you come home. It doesn’t seem like calling on you is working anymore.”

The roosting ravens chirp at one another. Eren’s mother doesn’t even cast attention to their direction. At this second, she’s focused entirely on Eren and the way he’s looking at her. It’s a face that leans into rebellion, and his jaw is set exactly like hers had been when the gravedirt had fallen from the fabric of her cloak. 

“You’re not calling,” Eren tells her. Levi thinks that he really shouldn’t be here for this. “You’re sending birds. If you wanted to call, that’d be a little different, don’t you think?” Eren’s shirt is becoming almost soaked through with the sleet. His body doesn’t seem to notice—not with the fevered flush still on his face. 

“Eren,” it’s so soft, the way she says his name like that, even though her expression doesn’t change. “Please come home. This? This situation doesn’t feel normal. You call me when you need this, and this isn’t right.”

“Mom,” just as soft, but different. The hiss of rain against saturated earth. A force of nature sitting on the horizon, waiting, waiting, waiting. “Home where? The one that’s gone? With you? In some place that’s neither-here-nor-there with dead people all the time?”

Ah, there it is. The set of his mother’s jaw. “You’d be safer if you listened to me.”

“You’d be happier if you listened to me.” The response is quick, absolutely no hesitation behind it. “One of us needs to do some packing, Mom, and I really don’t think it’s me.” A pause, but not long enough to give her a chance to respond. “Maybe you should think about coming home instead.”

There’s a lot less fanfare when Eren’s mother disappears compared to when she’d arrived. Her form dissolves into a mixture of cemetery soil and crematory ash, leaving behind the smell of her magic—burning incense and scorched bamboo. The ground doesn’t even tremble at her absence.

Eren watches the space where his mother had been standing, breathing in and out slowly. One set. Two sets. Three sets. Four sets. Five— 

And Eren covers his face with both hands, sighing so deeply into his palms that it’s a wonder he doesn’t fall over, with how unstable his body looks. His knuckles are absolutely fucked, his hands all kinds of different shades of blue and purple and red. It’s difficult to tell if the blood on them is from his nose, the Sluagh, or the split skin. 

He stands there like that for moments on end, his hands pressed to his face. What little of his jaw Levi can see is tight, which means he’s probably grinding his teeth. 

Levi thinks about reaching for him—about touching the side of his face, carding his fingers through his hair, running his thumb along the edge of his cheekbone. He thinks about holding him, about pressing his fingertips against the jut of his spine, about holding their foreheads so close that Levi could probably smell nothing but his magic and dried blood.

He thinks of the way Eren had looked—even though this moment is nothing like that one, at all—haloed by a Welsh sunrise, unparalleled joy making his skin shine like there’d been countless stars underneath it.

Levi had wanted to kiss him so badly that he’d almost bit his tongue. 

Yeah—this moment isn’t anything like that moment had been, but Levi wishes it was, so that the liquid softness of his heart had somewhere else to go, so that it didn’t weigh as much as it does in this second, this heartbeat, this breath, and all the ones after. 

(For the first time in a long time, Farlan hadn’t brought up the murders at all.

“so,” he’d said, watching Levi from where he was perched on the arm of the loveseat, where Isabel stretched out along the cushions, her head propped against Farlan’s thigh, “are you going to tell us about the person you’re seeing, or are you going to keep all this information to yourself forever?”

They’d been sitting around Levi’s coffee table earlier in the evening, plucking at leftover pizza and drinking canned lemonade, with a garish birthday candle placed just a hair off center, out of the way of the pizza box. It’d reminded Levi of being in college again, years before he’d ever entered medical school, staying up too late and drinking just a hair too much. He’d wondered, in passing, what Eren’s college life had been like. He hadn’t really thought to ask, with all the other shit that Eren’s been involved in for his whole life. 

“what makes you think i’m seeing anybody?” Levi had replied, splitting pizza crusts in half, in fourths, in eighths, and into unidentifiable amounts. Farlan’s phone vibrated against the surface of the end table beside the loveseat. Levi had made an effort not to think about the silence of his own phone. 

 “you’ve been checking your phone every fifteen minutes,” Farlan supplied, pulling at the pop tab on a half-empty can of lemonade.

“and,” Isabel had continued, because they’d been having conversations like this for the better part of a decade, “you’re different. you’re out and doing stuff, you’re not always at work, you’re not as morose—”

“i was never morose.”

“you’re not as morose,” Isabel had said again, with emphasis. “you don’t have to be seeing anybody.” A shrug, awkward against the cushions. “but if you are, we’d wanna know.”

“yeah.” An agreement, practically obscured by a swallow of lemonade. “like, everything about them. who they are, what they do for a living, what they look like, what their astrological sign is, what their future goals are, if they went to school or not—”

Farlan’s had vibrated for the second time, and then a third time in quick succession. That time, Farlan had glanced at the screen of his phone, and had elected to ignore it. Whatever other things that he’d wanted to know had been placed out of sight and out of memory, lost to a distraction. Levi had been relatively grateful that he hadn’t continued.

Besides, it’s not like he was seeing anyone anyway. But if he were— 

“i’m not seeing anybody,” Levi’d told them. Farlan’s phone had vibrated again. “but i have been spending time with this guy i met.” Something absolutely identifiable had twitched in the cage of Levi’s ribs when he’d said that, its leaves reaching for the sunlight even as late in the night as it’d been. Even so, he’d avoided labeling it, choosing instead to breathe it out, tasting a reminder of frost-covered moorland.

Isabel had pushed herself upright, her eyes near to glowing. “oh? how’d you meet him?”

Levi had considered his response long in advance—sometime after Halloween, when the thing in his chest had been nothing more than a seed. “we met at work.”

“office romance?” Farlan had said, absently, checking his phone for the second time, as it had vibrated once more.

“no. more uncomfortable than that.” Levi’s lips had twitched, a little. He’d wondered what Eren would think of this story. “he’d shown up to identify a body.”

Isabel had laughed to the point where it was more-or-less a shout. “classy! really classy.”

“we didn’t exchange numbers that night.” A deadpan delivery, one of Levi’s favorites. Isabel hadn’t stopped laughing. Farlan’s phone had become a nonstop buzz in his palm, until he’d lifted it to his ear and muttered into the receiver. “we’d run into each other a couple more times. that’s just where i’d met him. you asked how we’d met.” 

Isabel had curled over one of the throw pillows in her laughter, trying to muffle it against the fabric there—at least until Farlan had reached for her shoulder, his face losing color in slow degrees, his lips going thin with the force of whatever was being spoken into his ear. 

“you know this is my night off, right?” Farlan had said. The atmosphere had shifted in a hairsbreadth of time, quick enough to give the three of them whiplash. From where he’d been sitting, Levi had been able to hear the response only in the form of an intone that had been bordering on frantic. The words had been unintelligible. “how likely do you think it is?”

Another response, whispered into Farlan’s ear. The glow of the birthday candle had seemed suddenly ominous against Isabel’s cheek. 

“okay,” Farlan replied. “i’m on my way. i have to stop home first, but i’ll be there as soon as i can.”

The call had ended, then. If the situation had been any less tense, any less unsettling, Farlan’s face would be pinched enough to make jokes about. It’d been the same face he’d made at lackluster grades, or the smell of cigarette smoke. But as it stood, it had just been unfortunate. 

“levi, i will owe you literally the best birthday party in the world,” Farlan had said, standing upright and tucking his phone into his back pocket in the same motion. “and, in return, you will owe me all of the details that you were just getting into.”

“i don’t owe you shit. but i’m busy day-of, so you’ll have to make it up to me at new year’s.” A pause. Levi and Isabel had stood up in the same motion—Isabel, adjusting the cushions on the loveseat; Levi, closing the pizza box and blowing out the candle. Smoke curled in looping wisps, disappearing before it took shape against the lights on the ceiling. “is everything okay?”

“some chaos over at the waterfront.” Farlan had grabbed his coat from the floor, tucked out of Levi’s sight. Elsewise, he’d have been scolded for it. A mess. “the city’s department headquarters has been getting calls for the last hour or so, and they think it might be related to all the other weird shit that’s been going on.” Farlan had looked at Levi, his eyebrows arching halfway up his forehead. “like the bodysnatcher.”

“this had been a new record for you,” Levi had said to hide the fact that his mouth had gone dry, that his tongue had become deadweight in his mouth. “you hadn’t talked about work all night.” 

“shut up.” Farlan had rolled his eyes, Isabel sighing loudly at his back. “i’d made a promise not to.”

“i’m sure you did.” Isabel’d had to stand on the tips of her toes to be seen over Farlan’s shoulder, and from what Levi could see of her face, it’d been flat with discontent. “come on. i’ll walk you guys out.” 

Something had been starting, somewhere. Maybe by the waterfront. Maybe somewhere else.

Wherever it was happening—whatever was beginning—Levi had been able to feel it in the roots of his teeth.)

“I’m sorry,” Eren says, dropping his hands away from his face, clearing his throat against his voice’s persistent rasping. “You got into a lot of trouble because of me. Again.” His face twists into a grimace, and Levi blinks himself back into the graveyard, hunching his shoulders against the cold. Eren’s magic still smells close enough to taste, depending on how deeply he breathes. When Eren continues speaking, it’s almost too soft to hear. “You know, I really wish you hadn’t done that—getting in the way like that.” 

“So what was I supposed to do?” Levi’s tone is sharper than he means it to be. It makes his tongue feel like iron sits there. “Let you get impaled?” 

In this half-light, Eren is leaning into his faerie blood. There isn’t quite enough warmth in his skin, yet—not outside the fever, anyway.

But Levi’s watching the way Eren’s face moves and can see the process already beginning, the shift back toward the center. He’s straightening his spine and shifting his weight between his feet. His limbs are trying to go loose, even though they’re stiff with the chill and with adrenaline. 

yeah, actually, is what Levi expects him to say. But Eren only sighs, pushes his hands through his hair, and looks at him. For a moment, pain hangs from his cheekbones. But it’s there and gone again as Eren sniffles in the sleet. “Let me walk you home for your trouble.”

Even though it’s different than what Levi had expected, it’s just nonchalant enough to mean that he was right—because what Eren is going to do is this: his smile will come easier this time, and it’ll look just spry enough to be normal. It’ll rub out the shadows underneath his eyes a little bit, blending them into the darkness in his cheeks. He’ll say something a little bit funny, redirecting the topic of conversation entirely. And then he’ll drop Levi off at his apartment, will smile again and look exactly like himself,  and he’ll go home and pretend like this never happened. He’ll show up at Levi’s doorstep on his birthday and his bruises will still be there, and his lip will still be split, and his knuckles will still look battered, but he will say nothing except happy birthday. you’ll never guess what tricks i can show you. 

Eren will call himself a terrible liar, and it might be true—but he’s a master at keeping the truth to himself.

Levi knows that, if he lets this happen, he’ll be blinded by it, and it’ll leave an awful taste in his mouth.

all the time, he reminds himself, again. eren does shit like this all the time.

There’s probably a metaphor that could go here, about how Levi wants to hold Eren down to the earth for just a second, instead of letting him keep going on this merry-go-round that never really seems to let him go. There’s maybe something he could say about how nights like this are unfair, about how this feels exactly like the moment that Levi had seen him outside the morgue, hunched over his knees. He could tell him about the roots that Levi feels in his lungs, overwhelmed with this feeling, this thing, this phenomenon with a name that’s earth-shattering in its vastness.

But there’s nothing that feels adequate to describe all the things that Levi finds himself thinking about. So instead, he says, “how about you stay at my place for the night?”  

Eren breathes out a sound that might be a laugh. “What?”

“You sound terrible, you look about as good, and what’s going to happen is, you’re going to walk me home, like always, and something just like what happened ten minutes ago could happen all over again.” Levi’s eyes never leave Eren’s face. Something flickers underneath the surface of Eren’s expression, like the skin of a fish. “Maybe I just want to keep an eye on you.”

He can see Eren grinding his teeth in a way that makes him wonder what sort of way out he’ll think up. And yet, when Eren opens his mouth, he says, “okay.” 

“Uh. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Eren nods. His hair is starting to stick to his skull. “Okay. I need to call Connie, though. He’ll think I’m dead in a ditch somewhere.” 

“Could’ve been.”

Eren looks at him, and the smile that he gets is—disorienting. It’s nothing at all like any he’s seen on his face before. “Yeah. Could’ve been.” When Eren breathes, it sounds a little like popcorn. Levi can’t tell if it’s because of all the running he’d done, or the scare he’d had, or what. “Thanks for keeping my shit together, Levi.”

That feels… cryptic. He’s not really one hundred percent sure what that means. 

“Shut up.” The thing in his chest shifts in a breeze far warmer than the air around him. “Call Connie so we can get you a hot shower so you don’t die of pneumonia or hypothermia or worse.”  

“Sir, yes sir.” Eren steps away, pulling his phone from his back pocket. Unlike his hands, or his face, or his body, the phone is entirely unscathed. There’s probably a spell on it, and that enchantment probably doesn’t translate to organic matter. 

Levi watches him go, holding his phone to his ear. He lifts his arm to rub at the back of his neck, a giveaway at feelings of embarrassment, or feelings of shame. He might be getting a lecture, or he might be having to explain himself. Whatever’s coming out of his mouth, it looks less-than-comfortable.

It’s a brief phone call, and it’s late-enough-early-enough that the city has gone quiet in its entirety, except for the distant sound of police sirens, wailing far out of sight. Eren’s footsteps against the cold-and-soggy grass is the loudest thing on the street. 

“Ready to go?” Levi asks him, arching his eyebrows at the cowed look on Eren’s face.

“Yep.” He rubs the back of his neck again, scattering water as he shakes his head. “I have been praised on my judgment to stay at your place instead of walking home. By report, I ‘sound like I crawled out of a dumpster, and Ymir and Historia sounded upset when they called more than an hour ago’, and so on, and so on.”

“Yikes,” and Eren laughs, a shadow of what it would sound like if he weren’t suffocating on the cold air. “Come on. Time to go home.”

Though they’re walking toward the edge of the cemetery, Eren isn’t looking at it. His eyes are far away when Levi says that, and they’re tracing a shape that Levi can’t see. “Yeah,” he says. “Let’s go home.” It’s an echo of what he’d told his mother, shortly before, but it sounds different, or sounds like it means something different. 

Their feet hit concrete and they keep their pace. Eren doesn’t ask which direction to go in. His head is cocked in one direction and then the other, as if he’s listening to something. His hands splash softly when he rubs them together for warmth.

“Do you want your jacket back?” Levi’s question comes out on a cloud of white. The only time he’d seen Eren’s do that was when he hadn’t been himself—when something else had been speaking from his throat.

“Nah,” Eren tells him, glancing at the way its sleeves are bunched up at Levi’s wrists. “Just in case, you know.” A pause, just long enough to glance either way before crossing a street. Levi’s shoes make more sound than Eren’s do, like he’s walking next to a ghost. Eren clears his throat into the space between one footstep and the next. “I think I scared you, earlier.”

“Earlier when? The whole graveyard thing, or the you passing me the knife thing, or the Sluagh thing, or—”

“I get it, thank you.” Eren wrinkles his nose, kicking a loose piece of pavement down the street, like a rock skipping over the surface of a pond. “I meant—I mean before I barfed. I think I scared you.”

Levi thinks about that, for a moment—feels the reminder of the way a stone had sunk to the bottom of his stomach when Eren had looked at him with eyes that weren’t quite right, had spoken to him with a choir of noise and dissonance. And he replies, “that’s not the scariest shit I’ve seen.”

Eren laughs, and it could be a perfect copy of all his other ones, if only it were louder. “I guess not.”

Levi continues, even though the conversation would be fine if it were left there, “I’m glad you recognized me though. You looked—out of sorts? Like you were a couple of crayons short of a box.”

Eren snorts, this time his breath manifesting itself in front of him. “I probably did. But I’d recognize you anywhere. Obviously. No magic tricks needed.” Eren’s gaze leaves warm thumbprints against Levi’s cheeks. “Who else would be dumb enough to walk up to some jackass in the middle of the street, at nighttime?”

“Like I would do that for just anybody,” Levi says, and this, this feels normal. This feels like all the other talks they’ve had, like all the other nights they’ve spent fucking around and drinking coffee and watching movies. This is solid ground, and Levi can’t feel any ice cracking beneath his feet. “Please.”

Eren grins at him, tilting his body just so to bump their arms together. He still looks tired, and he still looks messed up, but—he’s the same person he’s been as long as Levi’s known him. Somewhere behind them, he’d thrown away the veneer that he’d been gathering the pieces for, stitching it together with shaking hands.  

Levi feels giddy, for a second—like he’s a lot younger and a lot less grumpy than he is.

There are so many questions on his mind, hiding beneath all that giddiness. Questions about Eren’s mother, about the way they’d spoken to one another, about the way she’d looked at him and held his face like that. He has questions about the selkie he’d talked about, about the aquarium, about the way Eren had looked at him when he had-and-hadn’t been himself. There are countless questions, all varying in importance and level of need, and if Levi were to swallow them all at once, they’d choke him.

But right now, they’re good. The two of them—they’re good. There are creatures in the street, laughing with one another as they get closer to more active parts of town, and the two of them are good. 

These questions? They can wait. They can wait until this goodness is less brittle, until Eren’s fever goes down, until the sun rises and sets and everything is just a little farther away. 

But there is one question Levi chooses to ask, and he smiles when he does.

“So, how do you feel about bagels?”

His smile grows when Eren looks at him like that, when the streetlamps gather in his irses to make the green of his eyes look like a starscape. “I don’t think anyone has ever said anything so beautiful to me.”

When Levi laughs, it tastes like a mixture of things—Eren’s magic, and something with a name.

But he doesn’t name it yet.

(Dawn had been breaking when Levi had rolled out of bed, his throat sore and parched from the cold-as-shit night they’d had. The curtains had been drawn wherever a window was open, the only light coming from a plug-in nightlight in the hall bathroom, and the fluorescent light in the kitchen, just above the sink.

The bagels had sat on the kitchen counter, less than a quarter of them having been eaten. Despite Eren’s enthusiasm, he hadn’t touched a single one. He’d asked for a shower, and a towel, and standing in the middle of Levi’s living room, it’d looked like the night had been catching up with him. 

If Levi had blown air against his face, he’d probably have fallen over.

Eren had taken a spare set of Farlan’s clothes, tucked in Levi’s guest bedroom from who-knows-how-long before, and he’d showered, steam seeping out from underneath the bathroom door. 

Levi had been able to hear Eren humming to himself, but only just.

From there, he’d fallen face first onto the couch, and had fallen asleep. Levi had found himself surprised that he didn’t snore.

As far as Levi could tell, in the barely-interrupted dimness of his apartment, Eren had still been sleeping—except it was too quiet, here. Even under all the sounds of traffic, of the water still moving through the pipes, of his neighbors walking on the floor above him, it was too quiet here. 

Levi had carried his glass of water and had placed it beside the closed pizza box, still sitting on his coffee table. The smell of candle smoke had long since vanished. 

Eren’s head had been tilted to the side, his right arm draped over the side of the sofa, his left tucked under his chest. Levi had draped a blanket over his shoulders before he’d gone to bed himself, and the fabric had moved as Eren had inhaled, burying his face into a throw pillow that had to have been more-than-a-little uncomfortable. 

But in the moment where Levi had found him, the blanket had no longer been moving. 

Eren’s face had turned a deep gray-blue, his eyelashes brought into sharp relief against his cheeks. The fevered darkness that had been tucked away in their hollows had disappeared, replaced instead by the general wanness that was apparent on every other place where Levi had been able to see his skin.

Though he’d known, crouched as he was by Eren’s face, that Eren had died sometime between falling asleep and when Levi had gotten up, he’d checked away, holding his fingers in front of Eren’s nose.

Levi had felt nothing against them. From so close, Levi could see dried saltwater flaking under his nose, caked at the corners of his mouth.

Eren had drowned in his sleep.

Levi’s knees had cracked when he’d stood, and he’d felt bile rising up in his throat. It’d be embarrassing, certainly, if Eren had woken up to find him throwing up. It’d be twice as embarrassing if Eren had woken up to Levi throwing up on him. 

So Levi had swallowed, surrounded by a half-awake city, his apartment, and the corpse of someone so important that the thing growing between his lungs had shaken violently, had threatened to stop his breathing.

He’d ruffled Eren’s hair, once. It was soft underneath his fingers. 

“see you when you wake up, kid,” Levi had told him, and his voice had cracked only slightly. He’d considered it a win, at the time, dropping himself onto the loveseat across from him, turning his water glass between his hands.

He’d been unable to stab this thing, of course, had been unable to swing his body in the way of this, hadn’t even known this was coming—and he should have. He should’ve heard it in Eren’s voice, should’ve known by the fever, should’ve known by the way has skin had been unable to determine what shade it was trying to be. 

But he hadn’t.

And so, as a result, all Levi’d been able to do was sit, and worry, and wait.)

[astridthevalkyrie]

I feel that in both a modern au/canon, it takes a lot of alcohol for Levi to actually 'feel' drunk. One day, Levi is at some event/excursion with some people and blah blah blah he caved and got so drunk. For ages, Levi's been crushing on reader silently and so mf hard but he'd never act on it/say anything AT LEAST WHILST SOBER, but they're good friends nonetheless. Reader wonders where Levi is, goes to get him/takes him home; the whole way home, drunk Levi spews cute shit and confesses <3

THIS IS SO CUTE IEUHFIUEFH i love it thank you so much for this imagery

Your knuckles are intertwined with Levi's as you both walk across campus. Normally hand-holding between you two is strict business, only done when it's cold and someone just has to be warmed up (when Erwin smarmily asked why neither of you would buy gloves, you sent him a withering glare). But it's not cold today, there's just a light breeze that's not helping the light butterflies in your stomach from feeling Levi's calloused palm against yours.

"Not far to the dorms now," you hum, seeing the building coming up in view. "How're you doing, Ackerman?"

"Fantastic," Levi snarks, somehow even more rude and even more blunt when he's wasted. "Coulda walked back myself."

Bold statement from someone who's been clinging to your hand the entire time. Not that you doubt him, he's plenty capable, but at any rate, you'd gone to the party with Levi and weren't really close to anyone else there. There was no point in staying, not when you could walk your friend to his room first.

"What're you gonna have for breakfast?"

"Tea and biscuits." A longing breath escapes him, and you bite back a snort at his apparent admiration for the meal. "You gon'a come?"

"For breakfast? Farlan won't mind?"

"Farlan's not the boss of me," he mutters grouchily, and this time you do laugh, squeezing his hand. It's the first time you've seen him like this, and something about it is extremely amusing. "Plus, he keeps telling me how hot you are."

At this, you raise a brow. "He has a thing for me?"

Levi sighs, long and painful, like he's your tutor and you just don't get what he's explaining to you. "No. Farlan's an idiot."

"He's not so bad."

"He is," Levi insists. You grin.

"Alright. He is."

His brows are furrowed, staring at you in deep concentration as the two of you walk. Humoring him, you meet his eyes, but then you blink, taken aback by how sincere it is for someone who's going to have a bitch of a hangover in the morning.

"Hey," he begins, like he's seeing you for the first time in a long time, "you'll come for breakfast?"

Unable to resist teasing him, you let out a contemplative huff, leaning against his shoulder. "I dunno. Why do you want me to come?"

At first, Levi doesn't answer, and you think it's because he's either zoned off or just too sleepy to answer. But then, softly, he confesses, "Cause I'm the biscuit."

You think your eyes pop from how comically you widen them. A part of you feels bad for laughing at him, especially when he pouts, but of all the things you expected him to say, I'm the biscuit was probably at the bottom of the list.

"Stop," he whines, shoving you half-heartedly. "M'trying to tell you, and you're not even listening."

"Okay, okay." You clamp down on your bottom lip to stop from giggling. "What do you wanna tell me, Ackerman?"

"I'm the biscuit," he says again, making a motion to dip the imaginary cookie in his hand, "when—when it goes in the tea. Gets all soggy, you know?" When you nod, he nods too, satisfied that you understand (even though you really don't). "It melts. That's me."

"You're...hot?"

It's a fair question. He is.

"No. M'the biscuit in the tea when you're over. You," and he shoves a finger into your shoulder accusatorially as though you did something wrong. "You make me melt."

Suddenly, it's not as funny anymore. Not from the way your stomach pitter patters.

"What do you mean?" you attempt to ask casually, but really, how many ways are you meant to take that?

"Make me melt," is all he mutters again, even more grouchy now, "S'why I want you to come for breakfast." Then, shyly, "I like when you make me melt. So come to breakfast."

In that moment, you swear you can feel your heart squeeze. You've reached his building, but you nod tightly, hoping he doesn't see how warm your face is. Not that he'd remember it, but still. "Yeah. Yeah, of course, I'll come to breakfast, Lev."

Then you get probably the best part of the night.

A genuine smile breaks out on his face, one that reaches his eyes and lights up his face.

"See you then," he mumbles, kissing your cheek before making his way inside.

A part of you laments the fact that he's drunk, saying things without thinking.

Because even if he does forget this conversation, you don't think you ever will.

[dont-f-with-moogles]

People Will Talk

People Will Talk (AoT High School AU) Characters: Levi x Hange (Mentioned: Isabel, Petra, Miche and others) Word Count: 1309

This one’s loosely based on the AoT Junior High Manga volume where Hange and Isabel make Levi cookies for his birthday. Here, they're older and the ending is pretty different… Song suggestion: Snowman - Sia

Shingeki High’s frost-glazed grounds lay empty following the mass exodus of its students. With the anticipation of the Christmas holidays hanging upon the air, the chattering crowds had departed early from their afternoon lessons. Only a small number of boarders were left on the site, Levi and Hange among them. The pair had quietly retired to Levi’s dormitory; his rooms not quite reflecting the festive cheer which had been so violently enforced on the rest of the student body. Still, Hange had exerted her own efforts despite Levi’s strict No Tinsel Policy (“it shreds everywhere and clogs up the vacuum!”) She had managed to procure a small Christmas tree which sat beneath the window. Its branches stood bare, apart from a few titan baubles and a small string of fairy lights (stolen, of course, from the giant tree in the school’s reception).

The pair sat with their backs against the sofa and legs curled beneath a low table. Two cups of tea stood upon its surface, steam curling upwards. The television showed a sun setting over a wide plain, marked only by a lone railway track. Within a cramped, open-topped carriage, a group of older adolescents were shown seated uncomfortably next to one another. 

“Why are they all blushing?” Hange wondered aloud, “this whole scene is so awkward, I’m tempted to skip it.” She swung round to Levi, who was regarding the screen in solemn silence. With a click of the remote, the picture paused. 

“Hey, you weren’t even watching! Do I have to rewind it?”

“No…” He had lifted his mug tentatively by the rim but instead placed it back upon the table. “Hange… I need to ask you something that’s been on my mind. It’s about those Birthday Cookies you and Isabel made for me.”

Levi was staring down at his knees. The glow from the fairy lights glinted off Hange’s glasses. “Eh… you know, this is a pretty important episode, so maybe we should watch that first, then-”

“Isabel said that you only helped her to bake the cookies so that you could take half of them to sell?”  

Hange uttered a strangled laugh. She pushed her glass further up her nose, feeling her cheeks warm. 

“D-did she? Well… look, it’s a little more complicated than that…” She opened and closed her mouth as Levi watched her patiently. “The truth is… I’m totally broke, okay? I’ve got Sawney and Bean to feed. And I owe you like 2000 yen towards bills and…”

“Try 16,378 yen…”

“Yeah, like I said, 2000 yen… and besides, you don’t even like birthday presents!”

Levi sighed and leaned forward, his elbows upon his knees. His dark fringe fell into his eyes as he moved. “Right, that’s what I told her. Relax, will you?.”

“Oh… so no harm done then, right?” Hange raised the remote brightly, poised to continue the programme. 

“Yeah… she…” Levi glanced at the doorway, as though expecting Isabel herself to come storming through at any given second. “She just made this weird comment about me taking sides, that’s all.”

“Taking sides…?”

“Yeah. Your side. Said that I keep choosing you over her and Farlan.” Levi shook his head. “She’s been like this since I transferred schools. It’s not like she has a reason to be jealous. Does she?”

“No. I mean they’re your oldest friends…” Hange twirled the remote control in her hands. Levi picked up his tea again but did not drink.

“There’s nothing to be jealous of,” Levi repeated firmly. “Everyone needs to stop making things out of nothing. First Petra, then Isabel…”

“Right!” Hange chimed in, flinging the remote down and stretching back against the sofa legs. “The Petra Incident was unfortunate but then again, she did only ask you to the Summer Festival at the last minute.”

“Exactly. You and I had already made plans…” Despite the steadfastness of his tone, Levi seemed unable to meet Hange’s eye.

“It’s not worth worrying about Levi!” Hange cast out an enthusiastic arm which almost sent her own tea flying. “People will say things. Miche calls us an old married couple all the time and it simply isn’t true!”

“Hah… that’s because you’ve got more chance of marrying Bean,” Levi returned darkly.

“Besides, since when do you care about what others think?” Hange shifted around to face him, her legs tucked beneath her. There came a whistle of breath down Levi’s nose; his eyes narrowed in thought as he lowered his cup.

“People say things because you seem to be everywhere I go,” he said finally. “If you want people to stop getting the wrong idea about us then don’t hang out in my room constantly. Look-” Levi jumped up and lifted one of the giant red socks that Hange had taped onto the television cabinet. “His and hers Christmas stockings? Besides which, your stuff is everywhere-” He gestured to the floor space before his front door which was occupied by a set of biology text books and a jar of titan toenails. “And-” Levi gave a slow blink. “... are you wearing my hoodie?”

“It’s mine,” Hange snapped, pulling the material around her. “Well, I found it in the lab so… it’s probably mine.”

“Hange…” Levi pressed his palm to his forehead, his expression glazed with exasperation. “This isn’t healthy… and I don’t just mean that germ-ridden hoodie.”

“Wait… are you really saying that you want me to go?” It was Hange’s turn to stand. Her voice caught a little as she continued. “I thought we had fun hanging out together. Whoever thinks there’s more going on between us is just being crazy! Ignore them, Levi!”

Levi’s eyes were fixed to the spot of carpet before her feet. “I can’t, because… they’re not crazy at all.”

“Huh?” 

Levi’s shoulders were rigid, fists clenched at his sides. He struck himself on the leg in an effort to get the first syllable of speech to topple out.

“What I’m trying to say is… your eyesight is even more shit that I first realised. As soon as you see titans you get a blind spot for everyone else around you.” He dug his heel into the carpet and cursed softly.

Hange frowned and she weighed his words carefully. Her eyes widened with realistion. “Ah… are you talking about Moblit?” Levi ground his teeth. He made towards the two cups on the low table.

“I’m kidding!” Hange grabbed his upper arm. Levi’s body tensed. “Come on, we had a moment there. Don’t let Moblit ruin it.” 

“M-moment?” 

Hange’s hand trailed down Levi’s arm, sending pinpricks of heat through his shirt.

“…I found your hoodie in the lab because you kept coming by, even though you never enrolled in Biology Club.” Hange took Levi’s hand and squeezed his fingers reassuringly. “See? You’re not so invisible after all. Not to me.”

Levi held her cheek, the heat from his skin sending a flood of colour into Hange’s face. Her hand encircled his wrist.

“Levi-”

“Then look at me… and be sure!” Levi’s breath was on her mouth and neck. “Because I’ve seen you. I’ve listened to your non-stop rambling about titan toenails and secret money-making scams. I’ve seen you bait titans four times your size without flinching. I’ve watched you make shitty tea and decorate my dorm with stolen decorations.”

His fingers were entangled in her hair.

“I’ve seen you obsessed with stupid tv shows and caught you wearing my clothes.” His hand tightened upon her head as he brought her closer. “You’re everywhere, all the time. You never give me a moment of peace, Four Eyes. I can hardly breathe. All I can see is your temper and your recklessness. Your kindness and your beauty.”

“Levi-” 

“So, if everyone else is crazy…” He brought his mouth to her own, so that his words were muffled as they fell into the silence. “Perhaps I’m crazy too.” As he pressed his lips against hers, Levi’s racing heart drowned out the rest of the world in a roar of sound. 

[m-jelly]

hey! I'm a little new here so I'm sorry if I say something wrong. anyway, could i order a levi x reader where the two are childhood best friends? they met in the underground, where the two competed to see who had the most popularity or something, even though levi didn't care much about fame, he did it because he liked to compete. an enemies to lovers, basically. I wanted to ask for their first kiss. y/n is a person (pronouns she/they) quite sociable and outgoing, quite the opposite of levi. when she found out about her feelings for him, she started to invest. and it's not as if levi would openly reciprocate, any more than she would, but he was giving very subtle signals, unconsciously. and since y/n is a person who knows how to read others well, he soon discovered that his feelings were mutual.

anyway, their first kiss is behind the bar/cabaret where y/n lives – even though she spends more time at levi, isabel and farlan’s house – the trio had gone to visit her and they ended up drinking a little, andanyway, their first kiss is behind the bar/cabaret where y/n lives – even though she spends more time at levi, isabel and farlan’s house – the trio had gone to visit her and they ended up drinking a little, and except Levi. y/n offered him a sip of rum, just one and she would leave him alone – since the girl had been fucking insisting that he drink too – he accepted. was playing levi's favorite song, and y/n took him to the back of the bar, where he pushed him against the wall and kissed him. even if levi wasn't that experienced with it, he reciprocated fervently.

I also wanted to ask you to do the details inspired by "My only one" by Sebastian Yatra and Isabele Merced, if it's not a problem.

Anyway, this one got a little big, sorry. I was listening to the song and this whole scenario came to mind.

I eagerly await your reply! ❤️

Okay, so I got a bit confused with this ask. I've read it a few times and I know I'll get it totally wrong. I don't know the song and I have read the lyrics. Also, I won't be including the song in the fic because there were no music players in the canon world and I think, by your ask, you want it to take part in the canon universe. I'm sorry if this turns out terrible, I just got a bit confused. I also won't be adding the part where we pressure Levi to drink with us.

@kenkopanda-art

Sweet lips.

Pairing: Levi x Reader

Genre and tags: Canon AU, fluff, romance, first kiss, flirting, cute, confessions, reader and Levi drink some rum, flustered Levi.

Concept: You and Levi have known each other for a few months. At first, Levi didn't want you around because he was a criminal and you weren't, but after time he liked you so much he kept you around. You often visited him at his home, but a few nights in a row you're not there. Levi goes to the bar you live above and helps run to find you're overworking and helping your older brother run it. Levi helps you out, then at the end of the night enjoys a nice bottle of rum with you. You clean together and go out back to check on the alley, which is where you both share your first kiss.

Note: All characters are in their 20s as Levi is in his 20s in the canon world during a choice with no regrets.

Levi felt frustrated. You'd walked into his life, worried the hell out of him because you were too cute and sweet for the underground city. He kept you at arm's length, but he couldn't resist you. He wanted to protect you and look after you. He'd started catching feelings and now they were here, you'd suddenly disappeared.

He hurried through the street to the bar you lived above and helped run. He shoved the door open to see the usual drunks inside. His eyes scanned the room until they fell on you rushing around with jugs of beer. He could see you looked stressed and overworked.

He shoved his way through the bar to you. "Oi?"

You jumped. "Levi!" You cleaned your hands with a rag. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to see how you were doing. I was worried."

You blushed a little. "Oh, wow..." You hummed a laugh. "Thank you."

He looked around. "You're busy."

"Yeah, my brother's staff decided it was better to commit crimes instead of work in the bar, so now it's just me and him. I'm sorry I haven't been around."

He sighed. "Let me help."

You smiled and welled up a little. "Thank you so much." You fast walked with him to the bar and grabbed him and an apron. "Could you work behind the bar?"

"Got it."

"I really appreciate this."

Levi blushed a little. "I'm glad I could help."

You smiled softly before rushing around again and taking orders. You ran backwards and forwards with food and drink for those coming in. You avoided grabby hands by twirling away and jumping out of reach. You'd become a pro at keeping yourself safe and Levi was impressed. He was in awe of you and his feelings for you were just becoming stronger.

Your brother walked over to the front door and slammed it shut after the last drunk left. He locked it up and huffed. "Finally. Hey, Levi? Thanks for helping out. I knew you crushing on my sister would work in my favour in the end."

Levi went bright red. "Tch shut the fuck up."

You cleared your throat. "I'm going to clean the tables and then check out back. I'm going to put things in the bins and whatnot..." You slipped away and started wiping the tables down as your brother and Levi talked quietly.

You grabbed a bottle of rum and took a swig from it. You let out a long sigh and went out of the back of the bar and started drinking and cleaning up. You went to grab your bottle to find it missing. You turned to see Levi drinking it. "Help yourself."

He gasped. "Thanks."

"I was kidding."

He hummed. "I know." He offered you the bottle. "Here."

You downed more. "Thanks for giving me my rum."

He grabbed a broom. "I'll help you clean."

You frowned. "What's going on? You're usually snarky with me."

He shrugged a little. "I don't feel like it anymore."

You hummed a laugh. "You're cute."

He stopped sweeping and walked closer to you. "Do you mean it?"

You turned to him and looked him in the eyes as you blushed. "What?"

"Do you mean that?"

You blushed a little. "W-Well, yes. That okay?"

He walked closer to you. "Well, I think you're beautiful, cute, funny, sweet, smart, a pain in my ass and yet I can't help but like you. You make me a mess internally and I like it. I like you." He back you up against the wall and leaned his arm on it by your head. "I really like you."

You grabbed Levi's shirt and yanked him close. You pressed your lips against Levi's and felt him stiffen up. You hummed at him and went to pull back thinking you'd made a mistake. Levi pressed his body against yours and chased your lips. He tilted his head and cupped the side of your face. You'd both never kissed before, so this was a first but it felt so good.

Levi was shaking a little he was so nervous about fucking this up, but he wanted so badly to keep kissing you. He nipped your lip before pushing his tongue into your mouth a little. His heart skipped a beat when you parted your mouth and moved your tongue with Levi's. It was shy and unsure at first because you both didn't know what you were doing, but then it became something sweet.

You both hummed and sighed in delight. You moved with each other and squeezed each other skin. You smiled a little when Levi's hand moved up and cupped the bottom part of your breast. You moaned when he massaged you.

Levi pulled back and blushed. "I'm so sorry." He pulled back. "Ah! I umm grabbed you...I'm sorry."

You giggled and took his hands. "Don't be sorry. I liked it. I moaned."

He blushed. "A-Ah, right. S-So um...I l-like you and I ah...I'm sorry if it was a bad k-kiss. I've never...that was my first."

"Mine too."

He smiled. "Y-You were good."

"You too, but if you weren't happy you can try again."

He frowned. "Try?" It clicked. "Oh! You umm...clever."

You giggled. "I have my moments."

He leaned closer and lightly kissed you. "Yeah." He winced when your brother shouted for you. "M-maybe later?"

You nodded. "Climb in through my window."

"I-I will, yes...ummm."

You slipped away. "Just for a kiss and cuddle, nothing else."

"I-I know!"

[ackerfics]

can you do a royal au with levi&&purple rose? 🥺 if this is too much, you can ignore this! also belated happy birthday and congrats on 600 followers!!

sunshine ; the flower in the glade — levi ackerman (i)

— levi ackerman x female reader (tangled au| royal au (in a way))

— prompt: purple rose; enchantment.

— warnings: overbearing, manipulative, and possessive mother (we all know who this is dwjjwd). other than that, there's nothing else. this will be mainly fluff anyway <33

— summary: a story of an orphaned thug, a locked-up flower, and their dreams. the former is fated to have one of the most sought-out treasures inside the island's walls; while the latter will once again retake her destiny as the brightest star in the kingdom. it's safe to say that their lives begin the moment they met each other.

— word count: 7.9k

— notes: hey hey hey !!! it's been a while since i posted a fic here and every time i post one, i get nervous swjhsnwj especially this one because this will follow tangled, our comfort movie <3 for the event, if there are duplicates in some flowers, i'll still write them, dw ^^ just a little fun fact, i got this idea while watching the movie with my little sister but the flynn in my head was supposed to be eren ... however, once i saw the scene where flynn looks so broody while rapunzel skips after getting out the tower ... levi, it is hhhhdhwj sooo, without further ado, here's the tangled au everybody is so excited about !! happy reading, everyone <33

reblogs and feedback are greatly appreciated !! <3

this is part of my 600 milestone event !!

Living in the Underground City has its perks.

Hiding in the shadows, blending with the walls, walking past guards undetected — they’re doing wonders to the group of people lurking on the rooftops of the golden palace overlooking the capital. Years of surviving in the rancid expanse of caves underneath the brilliant island kingdom of Paradis prepared Levi Ackerman, the notorious leader of the gang of misfits that ruled over the Underground, for the mission that will give them their freedom. It’s not a simple feat but if someone pickpocketed a few times when they were younger, they’re bound for the greater things in the merry-go-round of life. So, when a shady noble along with his lackeys entered their headquarters in the Underground demanding for a diadem of the lost princess in the promise of their aboveground citizenship, Levi is ready to risk it all.

It’s only a royal-less crown so what could go wrong?

Levi looks back to his family, a red-haired girl and a blonde man (the former skipping in between the gilded turrets while the latter scolding the girl for being reckless), before narrowing his eyes at the two men the noble assigned to be their ‘chaperones’, who are supervising them from the ground. Irritation seeps through every fiber of the black-haired man’s body, remembering the exact words of the pompous bastard. These men will ensure that you get the job done. That diadem is worth millions and it will help me with my bankruptcy. No one will wear it in the coming years anyway. Do the job, underground rat, and your wish will be granted. As if dangling their freedom is every bit of a chivalrous charity deed.

A huff escapes Levi’s lips. He takes out an elaborate map of the castle and tries reading it under the scorching heat of the summer sun. His skin is starting to redden from the harsh sunrays and Levi wanted nothing more than to soak in a tub of ice-cold water in the inn that they’re staying, courtesy of the idiotic bastard. He skims through the passages, hallways, and ballrooms; eyes flickering every once in a while on the soft rooftops and towers. “We’re probably here right now,” he murmurs, pointing at the main ballroom of the castle. “This should be the ballroom, seeing as there are no turrets in this area. The guarded memorabilia of the princess is just a few halls down.”

“They’re serious about this, huh?” Farlan chimes in from over Levi’s shoulder. “This map is so detailed that I’m starting to think that they’re the engineers for this place. What are they going to do with the diadem? Sell it to another kingdom? That’s just outrageous.”

“Well, we’re part of this outrageous plan, Farlan,” Levi dryly replies, rolling the map and tucking it inside his satchel. “There’s no going back. Plus, after this, no one will know of the identities of the thieving rats taking the only thing left of the lost princess. We’re in the clear.”

“But still—”

“I’m so excited for us to finish this job!” Isabel vibrantly adds on, green eyes giddily taking in the scenario of the capital and the marketplace. “Just imagine all the food we can buy and the places we can travel to. No stingy replacements for stars here!”

Levi pats Isabel’s head affectionately before fixing his attention forward. “Let’s take off some of the roofs up ahead. From what the map has been telling us, the ceiling above the memorial is loose. They are tiles fitted against each other. That should be enough for one of us to enter while the other two keep watch.” He walks with silent footsteps, still aware that there are guards stationed on the balconies. “I thought this palace is one of the well-structured ones around the world, why would they design something that lousy?” Levi carefully jumps over a ledge leading to the end of the long rooftop, where the key to their freedom is sitting.

Farlan follows Levi, reaching out a hand to Isabel to help her jump down from the ledge. “It’s a part of the castle that’s only built nearly twenty years ago. Of course, it’s not going to be as grandeur as the rest of this centuries-old palace. Besides, if the architecture to the room of the diadem has the same barricade as the walls of this kingdom, we won’t even have a chance of getting in.”

“He’s got a point, you know,” Isabel chirps.

A scoff of laughter comes from Levi. “I guess. Let’s thank the idiots who made our job ten times easier, then.”

The trio reaches the roof of the memorial, with Levi testing the material with the tip of his boot. There's a hollow sound emanating from underneath them and immediately, Farlan and Levi do their job of cutting off the part of the roof. True enough, the ceiling is a tiled puzzle that created a magnificent mosaic on the other side. Once Farlan lifts a piece of the ceiling off the roof, the symbol of the kingdom acts as a beacon against the sunlight. It’s a seven-rayed sun nestling inside a purple rose that is often paraded and strung in the marketplace, even the nobles have flags flapping against the wind in their manors. In the Underground, it’s a symbol rarely brandished in the grim streets since the monarch was the sole reason why there are people there in the first place, thinking it was for the best that the refugees of the hundred-year Titan War are evacuated there, only for them to be forgotten. Whenever Levi saw just a tiny bit of that cursed sun insignia growing up, there was a certain bitterness bubbling in his stomach. It disgusts him to this day. Especially now that his little family witnessed how lavish and carefree most of the people in the aboveground are like. It’s unfair. To remind himself, the world is never fair, to begin with.

While the blond continues looking down at the chamber to count the stationed guards surrounding the gleaming memento, Isabel is making a loop at the end of the rope that will lower down Levi. The black-haired man is appointed to the task of taking away the diadem since he’s often been compared to a predator down in the Underground since he was a young boy. His face doesn’t give away any nervousness of being put behind bars, or worse, getting his head chopped in the public guillotine. There’s no room for any mistake since this might be the only chance they have of savoring the clean air of the aboveground. For them, breathing in the breeze is very much like the luxury the nobles enjoy in the higher circles. Levi takes a deep breath, shoulders slightly lifting and heart pounding for no reason before he turns to Farlan with the rope in hand. Words aren’t needed to let the others know that this heist of theirs is beginning.

“Good luck, big bro.” Isabel pats Levi’s back with bright eyes.

Farlan nods, taking the other end of the rope as if it’s his lifeline. “We’ll be here waiting for you, Levi. Now, go and set us free.”

A tiny nod is Levi’s only reply. Like the time they used to raid an enemy gang back in the Underground, Levi sets out on this little quest.

As the distance from the ground is lessened, he notes that this chamber is the most extravagant place he has ever stepped foot on. There’s a sillage of something floral spreading from behind him and he can’t help but turn around to the source, curiosity burning in his veins despite the foreboding thought of failing this mission. His eyes slightly widened at the sight of magnificent flower arrangements piling up on each other, covering the expanse of the wall behind the pedestal of the diadem. There are more flowers in this memorial than in the florist’s shop they visited the day before in the marketplace. Levi is in awe for a moment at how elaborate and well-thought-out the bouquets are, every single one complementing the other despite boasting extreme beauty. There’s no clash of colors splashed all over the place. With his gaze continuing up the wall, he comes face to face with a huge portrait of a dressed-up baby with the most stunning locks of hair that glowed even in a painting, the prized diadem sitting daintily on top of her little head.

This must be the lost princess.

Even the Underground folks know about the tale for their home was the first place the royal guards searched the morning after the princess was taken from her parents’ room. Levi remembers how chaotic the Underground was; knowing that the guards didn’t leave any place untouched. Every home was thoroughly searched, every cave had an expedition, every orphanage was questioned if they ever received a mysterious baby. Yet there was no lead. For years and years and years, the Underground was a prime suspect for the hiding place of the kidnapper; but it all stopped when the monarchy thought that their daughter was as good as dead. In the grieving Queen and King's stead, the young royal adviser, Erwin Smith, made decisions for the kingdom with a broken heart, having played with the princess when he was a toddler. The search was halted and the flying lanterns took over six years after the princess’s disappearance. Levi never saw them but stories circulate underground that they’re like yellow stars that you can reach with your fingers, weightless yet they glow like the sun with their warm light.

They’re one of the many sights that Levi wants to see. To his luck, it will happen in a few days’ time — on the princess’s birthday.

Levi blinks away from the reverie and turns around to the pedestal.

And there it is.

The diadem is an elaborate piece of art. Levi is afraid he’d soil it with his blood-tainted fingers, the perfect shade of red covering the golden flowers and star-like gems with a mere touch. As if the chamber is shrouded with the night’s gloom, Levi stalks forward soundlessly to avoid getting caught by the guards facing the entrance to the memorial. How stupid. It works to his advantage as well. He shouldn’t complain. So, with his eyes planted on the heads of the armored guards, Levi swipes the diadem from the pedestal and tucks it inside his satchel. Freedom has never tasted this sweeter. The thought of visiting tea shops and owning a nice cottage elicits a small smirk from the black-haired man. However, it dissipates right in front of his face as well. Slinking back to the dangling rope hanging from the hole in the ceiling, Levi makes a terrible mistake. Usually, when people don’t practice hygiene and proper manners in front of him, it makes his blood boil. That’s coming from someone who grew up in the Underground. And that’s exactly what he did and he might have to kiss that citizenship goodbye.

It can be avoided but he can’t help it.

Levi lets out an involuntary ‘tch’ when one of the guards releases an echoing sneeze in the memorial.

“Hey! What are you doing?!”

The onyx-haired man’s eye twitches in irritation. “Fuck this shit,” Levi murmurs, starting the chase that will determine the fate of his life in the coming days.

There’s no space in the walls for more paintings.

Your paintbrush is held tightly in your hand, your eyes skimming on the walls that are covered with an explosion of colors crafted through the years. The clock has only struck eight in the morning and you’re running out of things to do (like every day for the past nineteen years). You blow a lock of your hair that’s starting to untuck itself from your ear. Creating a swing from your hair, you land on the floor with the box of paint you value more than your life, having been the gifts you receive on your previous birthday. Feeling the budding of emptiness starting to spread throughout your body, you sit in the middle of the circumference of the tower, your dress creating a halo underneath that reflects the stream of sunrays from the opened ceiling window. A small hum of boredom accompanies the chirping of the birds outside the entrance of the tower as you slowly let yourself fall backward. You lean your head further back until you’re face to face with the giant fireplace covering the lower half of the only floor in this tower. Half-lidded eyes wonder what’s behind that huge wooden carving on top of the hearth. It can be something bare or there are hidden secrets behind it …

It can be something bare.

With an excited gasp, you stand up and start climbing the fireplace with the help of moved furniture, the box of paint under your arm. Patting away a few specks of dust from the skirts of your dress, a determined thrum travels in your veins telling you to push away the wooden carving from the wall. In front of you stands a bare wall that’s begging to be painted on. You suppress a squeal as you sit down on the platform of the fireplace and start mixing colors.

There’s a certain image in your mind that you’ve always dreamed about since you saw them out the entrance of the tower. You take some of the blue and mix it with a little bit of black to mimic the night sky that covers the memory you’re trying to bring to life. With a huge brush, you cover the wall with that shade and throw in a couple of blues that make the wall less boring. This painting garners the same exhilaration you always get when viewing the floating yellow stars every year and you will do everything to put every single ounce of your dreams into each one. Dozens of gold, orange, yellow splotches of paint rivaling the galaxy as you twirl your paintbrush, never forgetting the shine they have that’s surrounding them. You add the tree-tops that let them pass by at the bottom of the wall. With each luminary illuminating under the glow of the morning sun, you don’t realize that it has been an hour since you started. Even if this is your piece of art, your breath is still taken away by the sheer, uncanny similarity to your dream, and it leaves you in a daze of elation in front of it.

The pounding of your heart remains as you take in the unfinished painting with your star-filled irises. Oh, how you wish to see them with your eyes. The tiny wisp of warmth is making your eyes burn without you knowing, a single drop of sunlight pouring from your eyes. Just this once, you hope that Fate will be by your side to let you see the glowing stars that emerge from beyond the tree-tops. As you gaze at the painting as if it’s a long-lost lover, the yellow stars seem to glow like your hair when a certain tune is sung.

Now you know what you want for your birthday in a few days.

“Darling, let down your hair! Mother’s here!” A pause, then a sickly sweet voice. “I’m not getting younger down here, you know!”

The timing ignites an explosion of hope inside you.

Your eyes carry the yellow stars you just painted as you swing down from the top of the fireplace and to the large window serving as the entrance of the tower. “I’m right here, Mother!” you joyfully reply while slinging your hair on the hook right outside the window, a waterfall of hair cascading down the height of the building. You pull up your mother until a beautiful middle-aged woman steps on the window ledge, taking away her hood from her somewhat youthful face despite her age. Years of growing up with the woman you call Mother never brought the curiosity that she looks different than you (until you reached the age of eighteen). For one, she never looks anything like you. Her beauty is as cold as the glaciers you read in a book or the Faes that reside underground while she always says that your beauty is that of the sun, warm to the touch and healing. The woman flips her curly hair behind her shoulders and regards you with a smile. “Mother, welcome home! How’s the market?”

“Oh, [Name], how you manage to do that every single day without fail!” Mother places a gentle hand on your cheek, the jut of her bottom lip making the lines on her face more prominent. “It looks absolutely exhausting, darling.” Her fingers then lift your chin to meet her eyes, one of her hands finding a home between the locks of your hair. “And the market is absolutely horrendous again but I got some of those apples you seem to like so much.”

You laugh sheepishly, gaze following her back as she makes her way to the mirror while taking off her cape. You watch her examine her neck and the wrinkles starting to form on her face. It only takes her scowl for you to jump from where you are and place yourself beside her. “So, Mother, there’s this thing I wish for my—”

“Look at the mirror, darling,” Mother interrupts you, reaching for you with her hand. She wraps an arm around your shoulder, her face showing a glimmer of something you haven’t seen in a while. Her eyes take a sentimental haze that makes you smile a little. “You know what I see?” You feel her hand caressing your hair, the gentle touch sending you in momentary peace. “I see a strong, confident, beautiful young woman.” Your shoulders lift, your eyes reflecting the light shining down from the overhead window. Mother rarely compliments you and if she does, it doesn’t fail to make your heart warm, reminding you that she’s the only one who stayed in your life. “And there’s you!” Mother laughs and at each of her giggles, you slowly deflate with a small frown. Just wishful thinking on your part. “I’m just teasing! Stop taking things seriously, darling, or you’ll have wrinkles. Speaking of wrinkles, will you sing for me? I feel a little run-down today. That’ll lighten my mood.”

“Oh!” You’re taken out of your daze, watching Mother while she’s pressing on the sides of her eyes and the middle of her forehead. She really does look a little run-down. “Of course, Mother!” You immediately take the chair and stool, placing them in the middle of the floor, and even pushing Mother to sit comfortably. You insert the hairbrush between her hands, sitting expectantly on the stool with an innocent smile. The faster this process of her receiving comfort from the little song, the faster you can also get to ask her about your gift for your 20th birthday. Taking a deep breath, you sing in a rush, the golden tendrils running between your hair lighting up the room at every word.

“Flower, gleam, and glow. Let your power shine. Make the clock reverse—”

“Wait!” Mother shouts.

“Bring back what once was mine. Heal what has been hurt. Change the fate’s design.”

Mother hurriedly brushes your hair. “[Name]!” And as you sing the last line of the song, Mother jumps when the enchantment takes effect on her. Her hair gains the luster that was gray before she even stepped foot in the tower. The lines on her face ease into flawless skin that someone as young as you seem to possess. Mother becomes the most beautiful woman in all the lands because of a tiny song, though, it still sends a chill through your veins every time you witness how she turns young again. “Don’t rush into the spell! What if this wears off after an hour?”

“So, Mother,” you start, leaning forward in your stool to maintain eye contact with the older woman. “As I was saying, something memorable is coming up and I know I mentioned it earlier but you never really responded to it but,” you prolong the last word, “it’s going to be my birthday!”

Mother’s laugh didn’t quell the nervousness fluttering inside your stomach. “No, no, no. I distinctly remember,” she boops your nose, making you reel back, “your birthday was last year.”

You nervously laugh as you twiddle your thumbs. “That’s the thing about birthdays, you celebrate it annually, Mother.” You sigh before staring at your mother with stars in your eyes, a sad smile pulling on your lips. You look anywhere but her because if you do, all the confidence that you built since learning about the floating stars will start to dwindle. Your eyes are fixated on the carpeted floor that showcases a huge sun, admiring how the purple and golden threads tie together to create such a wide ornament for your home. “Mother, I’ll be an adult soon and I want to at least have this one chance to see my dream. It has always been what I want for my birthday and this is the perfect opportunity for me to ask you. Uhm,” you clear your throat even though your voice starts becoming tinier and tinier, “I know you’ll be angry … but ... what I really want for my birthday—or what I always want for every birthday that I have—”

“[Name].”

You stop, heart pounding in fear. Your head is still lowered, never seeing how Mother’s face sours and curls in disgust at the possibility of your request.

“You know how I feel about the mumbling, right?” Your nod is the indication that Mother takes to continue. The scowl on her face turns into a malicious grin as she softly pats your hair. “It’s very annoying, darling. And you also know how I detest annoying things.” Your silence brings forth a thrum in her body; simply by putting you in your place brings her to nirvana and she’s not even hiding it. After a few moments of you trying to calm your breathing, Mother laughs out of nowhere. It’s laced with a taunt that challenges you to argue with her but the hand she has on your cheek contrasts her intentions. “I’m just teasing, little flower!” She watches with attentive eyes how you quickly lift your head, your adorable confused face greeting her vision. “I told you to never take things seriously! Why must you be so sensitive every time I try to reprimand you, darling. Oh, I love you so much.”

Just like that, she dismisses you with a flick of her wrist and a swish of her skirts. Mother retreats to her basket to take out the apples you like to eat for breakfast, along with a few berries. All you can do is blink at nothing before taking a deep breath. Wetting your lips, you straighten your back and face Mother once again, though you never lift your eyes from the rug tickling your feet.

“Mother, I want to see the floating lights.”

“Uh-huh—what?” One of the apples drops from Mother’s slackened hand, an incredulous expression plastered on her face as she turns to you.

You stand up and step on the stool to show her your new painting. You miss the way Mother’s eyes shake at the sight of the painting. “Well, I was hoping that you’d take me to see the floating lights.”

A feigned smile replaces the grimace on Mother’s face. She resumes her task of sorting out the vegetables she bought from the market. “Oh, you mean the stars. You can watch them by the window, darling, there’s nothing special about them.”

A pretty gleam comes back in your irises. “That’s the thing, Mother!” You skip over to a part of the wall that has a painting of the tower in front of a fusion of blues and purples, with different-colored stars pinpointed at every corner. “Through the years, I’ve charted stars and they’re always in the same position in the night sky! They never come from beyond the treetops miles away from this tower. Importantly, these floating lights,” your voice gains more volume upon your excitement and Mother now loses her patience, “they appear at the same time as my birthday. I want to see them, Mother, and not just from the window, but in person. They have always been one of the sights that I want to see in my life and I want to be there when they float into the heavens. I know this is ridiculous but,” you look down with hands pressed on your chest, “it’s as if they’re calling me to see them. That tingle in my stomach became stronger this year as if I should be reaching out to catch them with my fingertips.”

Mother takes a step toward you, her smile sending chills down your spine.

“You want to go outside?” Mother laughs, taking away the dream that you’re desperately clinging to. “Are you hearing yourself right now, darling?” She stops in front of you and takes your hands in hers, twirling you around to an imaginary tune that only she can hear. “Look at you, you’re as fragile as a flower! You expect me to let you go?” Mother scoffs a loud laugh, with you flinching at the sharp sound. “[Name], you know why we stay in this tower.”

“I know, but—”

Mother walks away to keep your long hair close to her cheek, following the train of hair with golden undertones. “To keep you safe and sound, dear.” Then, she closes each window until everything is bathed in darkness, your arms now wrapping around yourself at the sudden scare. You try to blink to adjust your vision to the dark but you yelp when Mother materializes in front of you with candlelight illuminating her features. She looks like one of the monsters you read in your novels. You continue stepping back, fear of something pulsing in your chest when she drawls, “As they say, mothers know best, darling, and it’s advised that you listen to their every word.” She circles you like a predator out for prey. “The outside world is full of dangerous things. Ruffians, thugs, cannibals, snakes, the plague, large bugs, and the worst…” Mother trails a finger on your cheek. “Men. All of them have a certain intention that can endanger you, darling. With a little lamb like you loitering in the woods and the capital? They’ll be having a field day!”

Your little gasp works in her favor, the certain fear for the things she listed apparent in your eyes.

“And on your own out there? Oh, you won’t survive, darling! You’re sloppy, underdressed, immature, clumsy, gullible, naive — you’re everything those monsters in every corner of the kingdom would use to their advantage. Why would you ever have such an idea in your head, I don’t even know!” Mother then hugs you close to her, shushing you as you shake in her arms. “I know I’m just your mother, darling, and I know you’ll eventually get out of here but not now, alright?” You nod against the crook of her neck. She runs her fingers through your hair, affectionate eyes directed at your head. “Mother understands. I want to help you because that’s what I’ve always done since I had you. You, me, against the world — that’s what our story always entails. So, I have one request for you, darling.” She places her hands on your head to meet her gaze.

“Yes?”

Your breath hitches at the look on Mother’s face.

“Don’t ever ask to leave this tower again.”

Your head ducks down, your hair covering your face. “Yes, Mother.”

Mother hums, lifting your chin. “I love you very much, dear.”

You’re silent for a moment but you give her a blue smile. “I love you more, Mother.”

She takes a deep breath before kissing the crown of your head. “And I love you most.” Then, she boops your nose and pats your head. “Don’t forget it, okay, flower? Mother always knows best.”

Somebody is in the tower.

You’re in your bedroom, trying to pass the time by reading the books Mother bought from the next town a month ago. You’re about to flip through the next chapter of the novel in your hands when you hear someone opening the window and slamming the hinges close. You stop on one paragraph, your heartbeat pounding loudly in your ear. Those footsteps aren’t Mother’s. There’s a groan ringing through the tower and it definitely isn’t Mother because it sounds deeper than her voice. Your hands are shaking as you put away the book on the covers before silently going out of your room. The first thing that comes into your mind is to get a weapon because who knows what this person’s intentions are. This is also the first time someone has stepped foot inside the tower and Mother is not around to protect you. You entered the open doorway of the kitchen, your shoulders jumping when you feel the counter dig on your back.

You look around. Knives? The thought of stabbing a stranger in the abdomen doesn’t sit right with you. Rolling pin? Too weak. Your eyes then find one of the hanging frying pans above the stove. Perfect. Taking that from the hooks, you raise it in the air while slowly lessening the distance to the main room of the tower.

You knit your eyebrows at the intruder’s back. It’s a man. He’s hunching over while cursing out expletives that Mother told you to never say. His breathing is ragged and there’s a jarring shade of red spreading across his torso, seeping through his vest. He’s hurt. Your grip on the frying pan loosens but as you hear the sharp intake of breath coming from the person, you immediately tighten your hold on the handle. At each step, the hairs on your neck stand up in fright of what this man would do to you. There’s only one thing he might have picked up from the outside world, that you’re the wonder with the enchanted hair that can reverse any injury. However, the man slumps over the floor, making you gasp. Now, there are two options; throw this man out of the tower while he’s unconscious or be the naive young woman your Mother describes you as and save this dying man. You watch as the floor becomes tainted with his blood. You have no choice.

You run towards him and sit on the floor, frying pan discarded beside you.

Your hands are hovering over his figure, not knowing what to do. “Oh, God, oh, God,” you keep mumbling. You decide to turn the man over but it only takes your breath away.

You’ve never seen another person other than Mother. Maybe this feeling tickling your stomach is brought on by nervousness but the more you stare at the man, there’s a flutter of butterflies clogging your throat. He’s beautiful. Black hair flops over one of his eyes and his lips look like the peaches your Mother brings on a good day. But a shuddering breath coming from him blinks you out of your daze. Now, your focus is directed at his wound. You wonder what he’s running away from. Then, Mother’s angry shouts paint a new fear inside your chest. What the hell are you doing? You should let this man die because he’s clearly a threat but … you’re starting to doubt Mother’s words. With a determined purse of your lips, you carefully place your hair over the man’s torso, not caring that it can transfer some of the blood on your strands.

You take a deep breath and sing.

Levi just got the closet doors slammed in front of his face.

He stays quiet, waiting for the perfect time to render the person dragging his body unconscious. As he’s putting his ear against the wood, he recounts what happened while they’re running away from the palace guards.

Isabel and Farlan get captured. Even one of the lackeys the noble assigned to go with them. Then, he got shot with an arrow while entering the woods. He found an entrance that’s covered in vines. He’s inside a tower, expecting to have no one here.

Things just went to shit.

The last thing pulsing in his mind, however, is a blinding glow that feels like the sun the first time he stepped aboveground. He can bask in the warmth all day long. Along with the glow, though, is one of the most healing voices Levi has ever heard in his life. It sounded like daisies and sunflowers and the chamomile tea he drinks at three in the morning. He can sleep to the sound of that voice. Someone is whispering to Levi that he needs to see the face of the one who saved his life. But when they started to pull him to a closet after hearing the words ‘let down your hair’ from outside the tower, he pretended to be unconscious.

“I brought home some exotic spices. I’ll be making a feast later for dinner. Surprise!”

Levi narrows his eyes at the new voice.

“Well, Mother, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“Oh, [Name]—”

That’s the name of the person who saved his life.

“—You know I hate it when I leave after a fight so I figured that by cooking your favorite foods, it won’t make me a bad person even though I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong.”

Everything is wrong with the other woman. Levi continued pressing his ear against the doors of the closet.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, Mother, and…”

“I hope you’re still not talking about the stars, [Name].”

A sigh, then a chipper voice. “Floating lights, Mother, and what I’m about to say is something related to that.”

“I thought we’re past that issue, flower.”

“You’re saying that I couldn’t handle myself out there.”

Is this woman going to lie that she knocked him out?

“Because that’s the truth, darling, you couldn’t handle yourself out there no matter what you do.”

“Please, Mother—”

“[Name], we’re done talking about this.” The other woman’s voice is tight and a thud echoes soon after. Most likely she put something too hard on a table. “How many times do I have to repeat this to you, sweetheart? Don’t make me say something I might regret or else.”

She’s hurting her daughter. Levi immediately feels disgust enveloping his body, all of it directed to the older woman talking down on his savior. The realization takes away the decision of knocking out the young woman who saved him, replacing it with an unnecessary urge to defend her. Shaking his head out of that unexpected thought, Levi continues listening in.

“Trust me—”

“[Name]—”

“Please—”

A deep breath.

“Mother, just this once—”

“Enough about the lights, [Name].” There’s a clang and the sound of glass breaking. “You are not leaving this tower! Ever!” The older woman groans. “Great, now, I’m the bad guy.”

Levi hears shaky breaths as if someone is holding their tears from falling, coming from in front of the closet doors. He turns his head to face the source of the sound as if that will materialize the young woman standing in front of him. What the young woman says next pinches his heart. Curse him for being soft to someone he didn’t even see yet.

“... All I want to say is that I know what I want for my birthday now.” The young woman pauses, rustling can be heard from beyond the doors. “New paint?” Her voice is so tiny that Levi clenches his jaw. “The one made from the white shells that you brought me? Books, too. I was wondering about owning another one of Miss Ilse’s newer works.”

“[Name], that’s a long trip and Paradis isn’t a small island. What you’re requesting is miles away from the capital. It took me two days to get those books you horrendously like, add another four days for me to get to that wretched shop that’s in the southernmost territory of Paradis.”

“I just thought that it’s a better idea than … stars.”

“... Alright, then. Are you sure you’ll be alright on your own here? It will take me more than a week to be home.”

“Yes, Mother. I’m safe as long as I’m here.”

This woman doesn’t deserve to be locked inside this tower, that much Levi can conclude. It can be that she’s been here all her life without any connection to the outside world. Very much like how he lived the majority of his life. The Underground and this tower aren’t far from each other. They’re cages for people who dream too many dreams, for adventurers and pioneers who want to experience a semblance of normalcy in their lives. This young woman who did something to make a blinding glow should be out in the open, alongside friends and living a life in any part of Paradis. Levi knows that the monarchy’s lanterns are this woman’s dreams and for God knows what, her mother forces her to be in this small space instead. Mothers aren’t like that, definitely not Levi’s mother. From what he remembers, his mother wished for everything to have him experience laughing under the sunlight or have the sea tickle his toes, or even get a glimpse of those floating lanterns. Mothers shouldn’t be this overbearing or manipulative. If from that little conversation Levi overheard shows how much the older woman controls her daughter’s life, he can’t imagine the abuse the young woman underwent years before.

Creaks from the closet doors stop Levi’s train of thoughts.

Again, he pretends he’s unconscious, preventing his groan from coming out as he hits the ground with a thud. The next few minutes confuse him. Levi feels something wrapping around his body and rendering him immobile. Pretending to be unconscious isn’t going to work anymore. So, Levi opens his eyes and trails his gaze from the ropes tying him to an armchair. Wait. These aren’t ropes. It’s—

“Hair?” Levi murmurs under his breath, head turning to every corner of the tower but everything is dark except for the spotlight hitting him in the middle of the floor.

“Who are you and how did you know my location?”

Levi narrows his eyes in the direction of the mellifluous voice. He schools his face in a neutral expression that doesn’t show his curiosity or wariness. He waits for a few minutes to let the person emerge to the stream of sunlight. What Levi sees next takes his breath away. Standing in front of him is a sight to behold. The young woman is glowing as if she’s the sun itself, hair cascading and draping over anything that Levi can see. However, he never leaves his gaze off of her. She stands with her chin up despite being in the presence of a notorious thug of the Underground. There’s no speck of fear glinting in her irises, there’s only disbelief and a little bit of curiosity. Not only that, but she might have been the prettiest girl Levi has ever seen in his life. It’s safe to say that Levi is mesmerized.

For one second. Mesmerized for only a second.

“Who are you and how did you find me?”

Levi leans back on the chair with a hum, mirroring her lifted chin. The glare on her hardly gets any reaction from him.

“Who are you and how did you find me?” she repeats, pointing a frying pan at him.

“Who the fuck are you and who uses a frying pan as a threatening weapon anyway?” Levi fires back.

The girl doesn’t expect him to throw her question at him, much less ask her about her frying pan. She shakes her head and flicks her hair behind her, making her way to him with measured steps. She matches Levi’s glare and comes face to face with him. She leans forward, making Levi lift his head to match her stare, and places a hand on the back of the chair while her hair creates a curtain over the two of them. “I’m going to ask you again, mister. Who are you and how did you find me?”

Levi sighs. “To tell you the truth, sunshine—”

“[Name].”

His mouth remains open before he clenches his jaw. “Here’s the deal.” He leans forward and now there are only inches separating him from the girl. At the proximity, he detects a faint shade of embarrassment on her cheeks, brushing it off, and fixing his blank stare on her bright eyes. There’s also a question he’d like an answer to. “I was just taking a stroll in the woods with my satchel and I came across this tower. I figured, wow, this is shitty, and I climbed it without knowing there’s a person living in it. I’m not here to take or steal anything from you, an irony really.” She raises an eyebrow at that but he continues with a murderous glower. “But now that I remember, where the fuck is my satchel, sunshine?”

[Name], or so her name is, hardens her glare. “Why should I tell you?”

“Because it’s not just my life that depends on it. I won’t forgive myself if I lose it.”

A minute of silence passes by and [Name] leans back to straighten her posture. She crosses her arms over her chest and looks down on Levi. “I’ve hidden it somewhere in this tower, a place where you can’t find it even if you take away every single brick. Now, tell me, what do you want with my hair?”

“The hell?”

“My hair. Are you planning on cutting it? Sell it to the highest bidder?”

Levi furrows his brows. “Why would I want your hair when I have some on my scalp? That looks fucking heavy, by the way, who would even want that much hair on their head these days?”

[Name] blinks once. Twice. Then, she becomes quiet, eyes glazed with a contemplative sheen. “You don’t want my hair,” she murmurs to herself as if that’s an important point needed to be remembered, never noticing that Levi shoots her with a look that says ‘I already told you that’. Her hands tighten around herself as she takes a small step back. “So, you’re telling the truth about coming to this tower.” The whole time, she doesn’t meet his eyes, instead, they are trained on the rug with a familiar symbol on it. Great, this family is nationalistic of Paradis and their propaganda of whatever involving the sun. [Name] flicks her eyes back at Levi, who’s tapping his shoe on the rug while waiting to be let out of this chair. “I have a proposal.” Levi only raises an eyebrow. “Look this way.” The chair moves along her and Levi comes face to face with a painting. “Do you know what these are?” She points at the lanterns.

“Oh.”

“What do you mean ‘oh’?”

“It’s a festival aboveground where they release lanterns in honor of the lost princess.”

“Lanterns,” [Name] echoes, a smile pulling on her lips. “I knew they weren’t stars! Well,” she runs her hands over her skirt, “they’ll be in the sky a few days from now and I want you to take me to them. You will act as my guide, just escort me to these lanterns, and bring me back home safely. Then, and only then, do I return your satchel to you. This is what I propose.”

Levi keeps quiet, having an idea that the satchel is hidden in the bottom floorboard by the stairs. He heard someone struggling, alongside a panel of wood coming out of its place while he’s in the closet. For now, he doesn’t show any indication that this woman in front of him does an awful job at hiding objects. He tilts his head in faux pondering, eyes half-lidded knowing that this won’t lead to nowhere because, “No. The monarchy and I aren’t exactly on great terms starting this morning so I won’t be taking you anywhere. I think it’s best if you let me go right now. I won’t even say that I came across your tower. Plus, I have people I want to rescue from having their heads chopped off on a block. Time is of the essence, sunshine.”

The long-haired girl walks forward and pulls the chair. Levi falls towards her, only to be stopped with a firm hand placed on the back of the chair. “I know what brought you here...” Her mouth remains open at a loss for words.

“Levi.”

“Levi,” she repeats. “I know what brought you here, Levi. It might be fate or destiny—”

“If a bunch of idiotic guards and horses seem like fate to you, you need to get that checked.”

“—So I’ve made the decision to trust you.”

Levi blinks. “A horrible decision, really, but go ahead, princess.”

That remark makes [Name] stop, eyes flickering with something that Levi associates with internal conflict. At this, he raises an eyebrow. “But trust me when I tell you this.” Levi can see the golden flecks in her eyes and he asks in his head if it’s natural for people to have a hint of the sun and stars in their irises. This woman is the living proof of it. In reflex, his half-lidded eyes travel down to her peach-colored lips. She doesn’t notice him getting in a daze because of her, instead, she assumes that he’s trying not to take her seriously. “Look at me, Levi.” Levi flickers his gaze from her lips to her eyes and damn, they’re so fucking beautiful. “You said that it isn’t just your life that depends on that satchel so if you don’t bring me to where the lanterns are, you will never see another glimpse of your precious bag. Tear this tower down brick by brick but without your agreement to this proposal and my help, you will never find it.”

The two of them stare at each other while Levi’s mind runs in full circles. He can headbutt this woman to sleep, take the satchel from the floorboard, and be the free man he dreams to be. That course of action guarantees their citizenship. However, the more he stares at [Name], the more he sees himself and any dreamer in the Underground. Fuck. “Let me get this straight, sunshine. I take you to see the lanterns, bring you back here, and you’ll give me back my satchel?”

“I promise, and when I promise something, I never break that promise. Ever.”

He thinks of his family inside the palace’s prison. He thinks of their limited time in the world if he screws this up. He thinks of the extended time for the executions since the festival is coming up and public deaths aren’t exactly a picture-perfect starter for a momentous occasion. Then, he sees every sparkle in the long-haired woman’s eyes that she tries so hard to hide behind a glare. He sees the pleading and expectation for his agreement to this proposal. He sees for the first time that there are people like him aboveground who have never experienced how breathtaking the world can be. It doesn’t take him that long to say—

“... Okay. You just got yourself a deal, princess.”

tangled au taglist:

@leviskata @lynnleanist @chloe-loves-levi @midaribaby @tenaciouswritersheep @araveticazx @coyloves