Prompt: Her smiles.
Levi was a fool.
He had become painfully accustomed to her.
So damn accustomed he could sense it when she so much as flicked her eyelashes at something.
He could pick apart the damn nuances in her smiles for god's sake.
Her smiles.
God, he could write a damn litany on the angles and slopes of her smiles. Erwin and Hange would give him a fucking A if he were to write an in depth report titled Petra Ral's smiles. Hange would go further and hoot unbearably at him, titling him a shitty sentimental idiot.
But damn she'd be right. For Petra, he was all the shitty sentimental things he normally wasn't.
God, he didn't know when he'd begun to know her smiles and not-smiles inside out.
Petra wasn't an overly idealistic, happy- go lucky green girl, and she didn't go around being optimistic and smiling all the fucking time but she smiled all the same. And they lodged in his throat and nearly undid him.
The mischievous dazzle in the upturn of her provocative little mouth when she wanted something. The cute, sad little furrow of her brows when she was trying to be reassuring and keep their spirits up. The delightful cleft of a dimple in her right cheek sneaking up on him when she was ecstatic and beaming brightly up at him. The quiet, silent tilt of her expressive lips when she flashed him the quick assured smile of an alert battle-hardened soldier.
The swift, nervous tilt and distracting nibble of her lips when she was conscious of herself or something. The annoyed gleam of a smile when she was simply maddeningly, irritated. The admiring lilt of her lips when she was awed and thoroughly impressed with him.
The bored, dazed smile curving the bottom half of her lips as she tried to bite it down and set a good example during uneventful missions. The sharp, moody, dramatic pull of her almost, but not quite smiling lips that told him she was displeased and unhappy about something. The light giggles escaping her, unbidden and reckless, when she found him amusing and silly.
The secret, private smile that flushed her cheeks a pretty, dusky red and came and went and peeved him to no end and drove him wild with a latent curiosity. The soft quirk of her lips above the rim of her cup before she sipped her tea when she figured him out to be something different than what was expected. The special smile that stayed beyond the gruff, childish, obsessive cleaning freak she knew him to be instead of the distant, polite, intimidating Lance Corporal he was supposed to be that endeared him to a sweet, grim madness.
The lazy, sleepy grin with indecipherable hints and teases in the stretch of her full lips that she carelessly shot at him on their days off and made him think of berries and wines and whisky and rum and a shitload of paper work and titan blood and deaths to erase it from his mind.
The simple unassuming smiles that popped up on bright, sunny days when birds chirped noisily and flowers poked through the dirty grass in shitty meadows, or glimpses of rainbows after fresh rain, or the tranquil, peaceful hum of her sweet lips curving naturally upwards following an affectionate pat of her handsome horse's head that he felt to the inside of his bones was a rare treat.
The harsh, fierce smile of pain and blazing pride that bore and shone with the responsibility of the wings of freedom etched firmly on the scorch of her heart as on the Survey Corps cloth emblem, across her breast pockets, the side of her arms and the small spine of her back. The broken, cracked smile that stretched thinly and painfully over trembling lips that tasted her metallic tears, smelled the blood of death and breathed in the rotting air of the shitty world they lived in, didn't escape him either, twisting his gut with the same ache.
And the clean, bright burn of vulnerable, fleeting smiles he couldn't stop himself from imagining, soft and warm and alive, pressing against his unsmiling lips, coaxing him into some semblance of one. Smiles that belonged to a world, free and clean, and not as ugly as theirs.
And the worst of it all, was that he could still go on and on about her damn smiles and how they made him feel so damn much. Every damn smile of hers, imagined and real, took his shitty damn breath away.
They gave him this weird, constant, uncomfortable ache in the gloomy pit of his taut stomach. They made him feel strangely light-headed and barely able to grouse at her when they happened to him.
And he realized with the force of a blade twisting his gut that her smiles saw him through…
And she wasn't there anymore. She wasn't there to smile for him.
So he relied on the ragged beat of his memory instead. And the sharp, painful glimpses he stored and locked away in the deepest recesses of his beating heart. He was hideously glad he had become so bloody accustomed to her he could record every agonizing nuance and bloody detail of her evergreen smiles and immortalized them to memory for his greedy use.
Surviving without would have been near damn callous and impossible.