Embodiment

Chapter 1

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A cool breeze drifted in through the open window, stirring the pages of an open book, abandoned by its usually captive audience for the most recent serialization from The Stand magazine and its most gripping story to a young boy, 'The Final Problem.' That magazine lay on his chest, rising slowly with his breathing, wrinkling a few of the pages in such a way that would cause the young man great distress once he woke and realized it.

Armin Arlert's parents were adventurers, scientists, and socialites. And since Armin was a baby, he'd been taken to the theatre, World Trade Fairs, museums, and countries abroad where his parents stayed until their interests changed like the changing of the winds. But their home had always been in New York, had been since their whirl-wind courtship and marriage, and it was to New York they returned now and then to visit family or report on some wondrous find to the Society for Social Sciences. And Armin would cling to his mother and father's hands as they visited with friends over glasses of French wine and port, listening to the kind praise of 'what a beautiful child,' and 'he looks just like you,' until his parents prompted him to say hello in the few lines of Egyptian he'd learned on their last adventure, or recited a bit of the periodic table. And he'd stay up late until he was falling asleep on the biggest overstuffed chair in the drawing room and his father would carry him off to his bed, waving off the maid that had offered to do so for him. "Our guests will not feel neglected if I am gone for a few minutes," he promised.

Those were the best years of his life.

Eren stood in front of the house, scowling. He didn't like it. Decidedly didn't like it. It was OLD. How Levi (he refused to call that man 'Dad') ever picked it was beyond his comprehension. Two stories of red-brick, Victorian architecture built who the hell knew how long ago, a LONG time ago probably, with an unfinished basement, and an attic too, he was told. Flat, rectangular hedges ran down the length of the road, uniform and unfriendly, with the occasional exception of a tree in someone's front yard. Neat. Orderly. Boring. Maybe he could see why Levi bought it. Just not sure how he could afford it, in such a nice looking neighborhood like this.

Nice, neat little houses all pushed closely together from a building period long expired, full of moms and dads and their one or two kids, or gross little couples just starting out with their first home, probably rode bikes on the weekend and went to fucking Earth Day clean ups, had compost piles out back, and put those stupid My Kid is an Honor Roll Student stickers on their electric cars. Because a bumper sticker doesn't fit well on a bike.

A hand came down on his shoulder, and Eren shrugged it off annoyed.

"What do you think?"

In went his earbuds, thumbing his IPod louder, just barely managing to hear Levi sigh in irritation. Whatever. Just because Eren HAD to be here didn't mean he had to be cooperative.

Not that Levi seemed at all impressed with his attitude, and just pushed past him and unlocked the door, freshly painted green for some stupid reason, leaving it open for Eren to follow, or not follow and just stay there outside looking like an idiot. After a long, rebellious five minutes, Eren decided to go inside.

Levi was taking a white cloth to a painting hung on the wall, and pointed to his feet before he got two steps in. Eren grumbled and toed out of his shoes while he looked around. Almost immediately to his right was a staircase with a banister against a wall of the most unflattering brown and yellow wallpaper Eren had ever seen, peeling in a few corners. Next to the stairs was a short hallway, with more of the same wallpaper, and three doors. All blissfully NOT green, thank you previous owner.

"Front room," Levi said, opening the first one for Eren to look in. He ignored it. Levi ignored him.

"Dining room." The next door was opened, and Eren moved a little further into the house. It all seemed to be hardwood floors, and Eren put one foot on top of the other in distaste. Levi must love it; no more carpet to steam clean every other month. EVERY month, once Eren had moved in.

"Kitchen."

Eren's curiosity finally got the best of him and he peeked into the front room first, finding it surprisingly full of old furniture, draped in white dust cloths. "Did someone move out recently?" he asked accidently. He didn't want to seem interested in this place. He'd spend half the trip here decidedly NOT talking to Levi in protest of the move, until Levi turned on his crap music. Eren had caved, just to get him to turn it off. Which he didn't, the jerk. But he'd turned it down.

"More or less," Levi held the kitchen door open impatiently. "Hurry up. Or you're going to be unpacking the car in the dark."

Eren huffed and went to go see the kitchen, glancing in the dining room quickly as he passed it, and then leaned in past the kitchen door to give it the once over. More white-draped furniture. Just like the dining room. "Everything works, right?" he checked. "Plumbing and stuff?"

"Most of the house's internal wiring and plumbing was updated about twenty years ago." Levil closed the door hard, almost catching Eren's nose. "It's all going to sound a little creaky, but it should work fine. Any other improvements I'll do myself."

Because THAT always turned out well. Eren bet that the wallpaper was high on the list of things Levi was going to remove.

"Can I go see my room?"

Levi motioned back towards the stairs. "It's the small one, Brat. Don't get any ideas."

Eren just rolled his eyes and hurried up the stairs, taking them two at a time. His own room was the most important part of this stupid move. He didn't care what it looked like. It could be a closet under the stairs for all he cared. His own room, even if small, was better than how he'd had it in Foster Care. His own bed, his own space, his own door to slam in Levi's face.

He found the bathroom first. It was small as hell, but at least it was updated- mostly. He checked; the faucet sputtered and squirt for a moment, but then began to run. And after a minute or two, it even got hot. So maybe this place wasn't built back in the fucking Civil War or something.

The master bedroom was next, and Eren bet the $20 he didn't have that Levi would be tossing that ancient bed out due to thinking it not clean enough. Levi wouldn't even use hotel blankets and pillows; he'd brought his own with them the few nights on the road that they'd had to stop. He wouldn't let Eren drive the car either. Whatever. His permit was good! He just didn't have a lot of practice. Why Levi DIDN'T let him drive the long, empty stretches of highway boringness was still a mystery to him.

His new room was just down the hall from that, but unlike the other rooms and the one that Levi intended to use as an office further down the hall by the attic door, it was blissfully empty of all the previous owner's left behind junk. Empty, and just waiting for Eren's things, and the new furniture they'd picked up on their way over. NEW things. HIS things. Maybe it was just Levi's way of trying to get him to look on the bright side of their move, and NO it didn't made him any happier… but Eren WAS going to milk it for as much as he could. Especially if Levi was feeling generous towards his entertainment. His laptop was a hand-me-down piece of shit that some kind person had donated, after the fire. It was still running Windows Millennium for Christ's sake!

Bereft of any furniture, Eren wandered over to the window and took a seat on the sill, pushing his feet up against the side. Somewhere downstairs, Levi was probably tearing all the dust cloths over the old as dirt furniture, and making a list of what he needed and what was going to be tossed, and what kind of chores he could bully Eren into under the guise of helping out.

Eren leaned his head against the cool glass and sighed. Distantly he wondered, if he hated it enough, maybe Levi would take them back home. No matter that Levi's apartment was already rented by someone else, and Eren had slept on the couch for four months while school finished for the year, and that Levi's new job was HERE with much better hours that would mean Eren wasn't feeding himself microwaved pizza bites for dinner when Levi worked the night shift. Levi kept telling him…. Things would be better here. But Eren didn't believe him. He'd made promises he couldn't keep before.

There was a flash of movement from outside, and Eren sat up sharply, staring through the dirty glass. In the house next door, built so close that the windows would almost touch if they were both opened, a girl stared back at him with a almond shaped eyes and a somber expression.

Eren waved, offering her a little smile.

The girl blinked at him a few times, and then turned and left the window. Eren scowled, feeling like he'd done something wrong unintentionally. Were all East Coast people so unfriendly?

"Eren!"

Oh, from that tone? Clearly Levi had been calling him for awhile. "What?" Eren hollered back, and dragged himself to his feet to wander out into the hall.

"We're going to clean before we bring anything in," Levi announced, his arms crossed over his chest at the bottom of the stairs. "Get down here. Now."

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Eren speared a piece of broccoli beef with his chopstick, scowling at it like it was the source of all his problems. "So you never told me how you got this place. How can you afford it?" He and Levi were celebrating their first night in the new house over a nutritiously dubious dinner of take-out Chinese on the floor of the dining room. On the floor, because Levi hadn't finished cleaning the table and chairs yet. He had apparently decided to KEEP them, but he wasn't comfortable with sitting on them yet. The rug thrown down over the hardwood floor, however, was brand new from the furniture store they had stopped at this morning. And therefore, acceptable. The bedrooms had been their first priority to unpack, followed by getting the TV hooked up in the living room.

"A friend of mine suggested a realtor, when he heard I was moving here," Levi wiped his hands on one of the paper napkins stacked up on his right side. "Apparently this place has had a difficult time selling for awhile. Last owner intended to use it as a summer home, but then didn't occupy it in the summers. It failed to rent well, and with the housing crash, we simply arrived at the right time."

"Bullshit." Eren didn't believe it and Levi glanced at him for a moment before picking his fork up again, no other answers forthcoming. "Who did you have to kill?"

"Can't you ever accept that things can work out, at times?"

"No."

"Can't you trust anyone to not fuck you over?"

Because life had proved so eager to give him a break recently. "There's a girl next door," Eren changed the topic. It worked in distracting Levi, but it wasn't necessarily a topic Eren wanted to talk about.

"There are probably a lot of children in this neighborhood," Levi agreed with that maddening tone of his. That, I'm SO much older than you and I'M the adult here, so of COURSE I know what's best for you- tone. Eren hated that tone. It made him want to hit things. "Some you'll probably go to school with in a few months. Don't make that face, it'll stick that way."

"You're not even looking!" Eren protested, stealing a prawn from Levi's plate vindictively.

"It'll still stick that way." Levi glanced at Eren, and then back at his plate. "You could use some friends though, Eren. You didn't make any at our last place."

"YOUR place," Eren grumbled, chewing on his chopstick so hard he started leaving teeth marks in the wood. "I had plenty of friends before that. We could have moved there after your lease was up."

Levi put his fork down, sitting up straight. "Eren," he said slowly, "We've talked about this. Your grief counselor said that moving back to your old neighborhood would be a detriment to you. You can make a new start here."

"You mean forget." Eren spat the words out like poison, but Levi didn't flinch.

"If needs be," he agreed, infuriatingly calm as he resumed eating his dinner. Like it was over, case closed, no more debate. Because none of this bothered him. Nothing that EREN needed mattered. Because HE was the legal guardian and HE got to make all the decisions and who the hell cared what Eren thought, or wanted, or needed.

Eren pushed his plate away. "I'm done," he announced, climbing to his feet. "I'm going to my room." Levi didn't move, just calmly continued to eat like Eren hadn't even fucking moved. So he grabbed his plate to take with him.

"If you don't eat with the family, you don't eat at all," Levi spoke up.

"We're not a family!" The plate in Eren's hand shook, almost sending one of his cheap chopsticks clattering to the floor. "You're not my dad! Don't pretend like you are!" Levi didn't stop him this time as Eren stormed out of the dining room and ran up the stairs to his bedroom, tossing his plate on his brand new dresser and ingoing it there. He threw himself onto his bed, and hugged his pillow tight under his chest, trying to breathe slowly. He didn't cry; he hadn't cried since the fire. But he did rage. He'd punched a hole in Levi's wall, the first day he'd moved in. Which was the reason, Levi reminded him constantly, that he wasn't getting his security deposit back and why he was NOT getting Eren a new laptop as long as his currently worked, no matter how much Eren hated it, or it sounded like a dying elephant, and was chunky and heavy as hell.

But this was HIS room now. And his stuff. And if he got angry in here, he'd only be destroying his own stuff. And he didn't have a lot of it. So he tried to breathe.

Footsteps outside his room.

Eren lay still, wondering if Levi's ocd had finally made him come up and retrieve Eren's plate that yeah, he wasn't going to eat, god damn you Levi, so that it didn't go gross and rot in Eren's room.

The footsteps went back and forth by the door three times, paused, and then faded away. 'I win this one,' Eren thought with a hollow smile. A worthless victory.

'Three more years,' he reminded himself, rolling over and pulling a blanket over his head. 'Three more years, and I'm eighteen, and he's no longer responsible for me. I can go wherever I want. And no one can stop me.'

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When Eren got up in the morning, the house was silent in a still and eerie kind of way that made him hesitant to pad down the hall, past Levi's open door, and halfway down the stairs, leaning over the banister to see if Levi was around. "Levi?" he called. The stairs were freezing. Eren hurried back to his room for a pair of socks, and then started over, heading down the stairs and looking into the living room first, and then the dining room. "Levi?" he tried calling again.

He opened the front door and stepped out, wiping his hand across his forehead. Jesus Christ it was hot out already. Muggy. And it was only June! It was a lot nicer inside, where everything was still cool.

"Your house is haunted."

Eren turned sharply and saw… the girl. The girl from the other day in the window. She was standing on the other side of the hedge that separated their houses. "What?" he asked, brain still half asleep and still trying to work out the problem of where Levi had gone to fully process what she had said. Had he even heard her right?

The girl didn't seem impressed by him, one way or the other. "Its haunted," she repeated slowly, like he was dumb. "You were wondering why it was so cheap, right? It's because it's haunted."

Eren scowled. How'd SHE know that he'd been wondering about how Levi had been able to afford this place on his salary? Because they didn't look like the usual kind of people that moved into these kinds of houses? Because they didn't fit the perfect little mold of people who lived in perfect little houses with perfect little lives? "That's stupid. There's no such thing as ghosts." But if he expected her to be insulted, or yell back at him and insist, she certainly disappointed him, and just kept looking at him with those dark eyes.

"Just thought you ought to know," she said, leaning her head back to look at Eren's house. "One of them is watching you now. He's in the window."

Eren's head snapped back towards the house, scanning the windows he could see from where they stood… front window, one from the bedroom that faced the street, and…. A curtain in the attic window was moving, swaying lightly like someone had dropped it in a hurry. Or, you know, a breeze had come through the roof that was PROBABLY in need of some kind of repair and nudged the old, thin cloth. SHE had probably noticed, and said that just to get him to turn around! Eren felt his face grow warm and he scowled at the girl. "Stop teasing me! Its an attic. They're old, and drafty!"

"Its haunted," she insisted.

"Well, how do you know?" Eren asked.

"I can see them," the girl said with a small shrug of her shoulders. "Ever since my parents died. I see them."

Eren paused, and looked her over. She seemed about his age, maybe a little older. Some kind of Asian; he didn't know enough people from China or Korea or whatever to tell the difference between any of them. Her eyes seemed sad though. She'd lost her parents too. Maybe she was alone too; saddled with a guardian who didn't really want her but had taken her anyway out of some kind of sense of responsibility. Lost. Damaged. Like him. "I'm Eren," he finally offered, and smiled at her again, like he'd done the other day. "What's your name?"

And her eyes widened a little in surprise, like no one had asked her that before. "Mikasa," she said at last. "Its nice to meet you, Eren." Success! There was even a small curl of a smile on her pale lips as she looked him up and down. "Are you outside in your pajamas?"

Oh.

Eren looked down at himself, and folded his arms across his chest. "Yeah? So?"

And she laughed! A small, soft sound, her eyes closing slightly at the pleasure of it. "You should go back inside, or at LEAST change," Mikasa admonished. "You'll catch your death of cold."

"Cold?" Eren repeated, his eyes widening. COLD? "Its like 70 degrees out! It's not cold!"

"I'm always cold," Mikasa said softly, looking back at her house.

Eren stared at her for a moment and then held up his hands. "Wait one minute, okay?" He dashed back into the house, loving how it became blissfully cooler the instant he crossed the threshold, and dashed up the stairs to his room. There was a big box he'd shoved into the closet without bothering to hang up or put away, painstakingly labeled by Levi as 'Eren, Winter Clothes'. He tore open the top and began digging, tossing out long-sleeved shirts and two pairs of ugly, fuzzy mittens before holding his prize up triumphantly. He hurried back down the stairs, skidding on the hardwood floor in the hallway, and jumped down the front step, back to where Mikasa was waiting for him.

"Here!" he said, slightly out of breath as he wound a red scarf around her neck. "It was my father's," he added softly, looking at the way the red color stood out against her pale skin. "It's just about the only thing I have of his. He was a Doctor, you know. And he left it at the office. But you can have it now. It'll keep you warm."

Mikasa touched the fabric and closed her eyes. "Warm," she agreed softly. She seemed to sink into the warmth of the fabric for a moment before, abruptly, she opened her eyes again. "Your guardian left this morning." She paused and leaned her head to the side, looking a little silly with Eren's scarf wrapped partially around her face. "That is why you came outside so suddenly, isn't it?"

Eren laughed and scratched his head. "Do you have anything better to do than watch my house all day, Mikasa?" He was unable to see her expression through the scarf, but her eyes looked amused as she shrugged.

"I gotta go," inside. Real clothes. "But I'll see you later, okay?"

"Alright, Eren," Mikasa allowed, and pulled the scarf down a little so that she could speak more clearly. "Be careful."

Eren gave her a smile and hurried back inside, sneaking a look back at Mikasa through the window. But she wasn't looking at him anymore. Her head was tilted back, gazing at the attic window.

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And that's chapter 1! Also posted on Ao3 and my tumblr: putyourright-armin