"You are beautiful," Eren says one night, his soft-spoken words cutting sharply through the quiet darkness surrounding them and making Levi blink open his eyes to meet a pair of shining eyes that regard him intently.
A contradictory frowns forms on his brow, disagreeing and puzzled. Levi isn't vain, but he knows his body is too small for a grown man. It's forged by a life on the streets that only taught him how to survive, leaving behind nothing but broad muscles on too feminine limbs, and a too translucent skin paled by an ongoing lack of sunlight and proper nutrition. His movements are sharp and directed, efficient and precise. Not round and smooth like Eren's.
His face isn't pretty either. With the droopy eyes that are too small and colourless, half-lidded, shadowed, and bruised by too many restless nights and cruel days. By sorrows and grief and loss, with his pitch black hair that stands too much in contrast to his bloodless skin. His cheekbones are too prominent, his lips thin and chapped. His beard, if he could grow a decent one, would be patchy and just as odd-looking as he is himself. Something that should have been more than it is.
His hands are petite and calloused. His feet cicatrised after years and years of being tied to the straps. His back is marked by them as well, his neck too thin and aching from the weight on his shoulders.
Words don't come easy to him, and when they do they are harsh and curt and vulgar, and too often not what he really wants to say. His personality is jagged and his spirit jaded, his core blackened by blood and broken beyond repair.
A life in the darkness has made his body strong at least, battered and branded, but powerful and chiseled as well. It's making him capable of dealing with whatever is thrown their way, able to do his best to protect. He's a weapon, edged and deathly and violent.
Beautiful, however…no.
Still, he can see it in Eren's eyes that he meant every word. Their green and blue is paled by the silvery light of the moon and the lingering traces of sleep. Yet their intensity is just the same as always, conveying nothing but serious honesty and openness.
Levi swallows. He reaches out with a rustle of the bed sheets to brush over a prominent, brown eyebrow, a stubbled cheek, a soft bottom lip that wraps around his fingertips to catch them in a kiss.
Eren, Levi knows, isn't really what others would call a raving beauty either. His hair is mouse brown and mussy all the time—a wild beast like its owner, always vivid and fighting against an invisible force. Stubbornly defying anyone's will in untidy strands that beg to be touched and caressed and ruffled—or combed—, but also daring to try. His skin is tanned by spending his whole life under the merciless sun. The fading stripes around his neck and wrists dividing the parts where the heat kisses him every day from the part that's always hidden under his clothing.
Despite all of Eren's hardship, there is no single scar on his body, making it into something that shouldn't really exist. Something dangerous and surreal, something barbarous and threatening. Something contradictory.
Then there are his eyes. Not quite as big as they once used to be, but still as expressive. Two shiny, burning flames of neither green nor blue and somehow both, that haven't lost their feral fire over the years. They oddly stand out in that still boyish face that should be much more tarnished than it is. They are just as unnatural as the rest of him.
Eren is perilous and an oxymoron simply by existing, by still living and breathing. He's abnormal.
And yet, to Levi, this man is beautiful. Gorgeous even. And then some.
Eren's pulse is speeding up under Levi's touch, making him think silly things and dream against all odds. Eren's body is pristine and warm, teaching Levi that time heals all wounds—at least the ones one can see—and that there is hope. The fury that has once dominated Eren's features has abated. It's cooled down into a dangerous, unstable simmer that will never leave completely, and yet every time he holds Levi, Eren's hands are gentle and kind. Even when the hunger between them boils over into a rough, all-consuming need.
They trace Levi's ugly scars as if they were saying hello to a dear, old friend, and when they come to rest against the nape of Levi's neck the fingers begin to play with the stubbles of his undercut in caressing circles. Like it is everything they ever wanted to do.
When Eren looks at him, his eyes are like a pair of gems that seem to have a direct link to Levi's soul. Unyielding, endearing, and enticing, gazing at Levi and laying him bare as if he was the answer to all of Eren's hopes and dreams. The remedy for all his sorrows and tears, a guiding light through the darkest of times. Levi looks back and Eren holds him there, steady and unwavering, until Levi can feel the blush rising on his chest, his arms, his neck, his cheeks, and ears until the cool night begins to sting on his skin.
"Bastard," he whispers, and Eren chuckles. Pokes Levi's nose. Snuggles closer. Smiles. Fills the world with colours and ease.
His laugh is like the sun glistening on the ocean's surface on that early spring day. It's fickle and warming, dancing and cheering, lively and vast, lifting and grounding at the same time. Like listening to the water caressing the shore in affectionate waves and to the breeze whispering through the marram grass nearby, whilst feeling the sand under his naked feet. It's like seeing the open planes and birds for the first time, stunningly green and too much, yet never enough all at once.
Levi has seen a lot of strange things in his life, but the one laying right next to him in their bed must be the strangest of them all. A miracle, and he understands.
Beauty isn't really something you see, or that you can measure like tea leaves for the perfect cup.
It's something that can only be experienced in its entity. It's something so simple as blinking against the overpowering daylight after nothing but darkness, and something so complicated as trying to count the stars up in the sky after being enclosed by clay and dirt for a whole lifetime.
He still doesn't know what it is that makes Eren look at him like he does. Yet when Eren pulls him into his arms to hold him against his beating heart, and kiss the top of his head, their legs intertwining and their bodies sharing that wonderful heat close-close-closer, Levi knows it's Eren's right to see more than the eyes let on. Just as it is his own. He won't question it, just as Eren doesn't in return.
Eren isn't one to make false promises. Everything he is and does screams blatant honesty and commitment, and yet Levi expects with every passing day that Eren will change his mind eventually.
This is Eren though. The world will cease to exists when he stops loving like he does, with everything he's got. As long as he's let he'll press his velvety smile against Levi's frown, and pass a silent promise with sweet brushing of lips, meeting of tongues, and connection of something Levi hasn't found a name for yet.
He seizes it nonetheless and wraps it around his heart, makes it his armour and his shield.
Although he doesn't know how long it will last, he at least has this and the knowledge that once someone chose him, thinking him perfect in all his flaws.
So Levi looks into these too sparkling eyes and smiles, letting himself fall as they begin to count the stars.