#normal people are able to change their posters around one day and then buzz bleach and dye their hair the next day without crying because

[milo-is-rambling]

Sometimes I think I might be faking having chronic pain (yknow, anxiety) and then I remember that normal people do not hurt every single day and I get jealous

[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?).

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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]!

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(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.)