Levi is suffocating in his bed. He kicks the blankets off, tugs at the sheets until they're hanging off the mattress. It's cold, but he prefers it this way. Heat or chill. Another body or alone. One extreme.
He can't take Erwin's presence, half-lost and lingering.
He turns onto his side, lips pressed into a tight line. The pillow beside his is a slightly lighter shadow than the rest of his room, teasing his eyes with its half-discernible shape. When he presses a palm into its centre the fabric is cold and plump and wrong.
This pillow had never been slept on before, and then Erwin came, with his stern eyebrows and big hands and stupid ideals …
He wishes the ghost of his presence would go away like the rest of him has.
Levi's throat closes up, and before he's aware of it, he's throwing the pillow across the room.
"It never gets easier," Erwin murmurs. Levi watches as his left hand moves in purposeful, tight lines across the page.
"I don't expect it to."
Erwin pauses in his writing, gives a long, tired sigh. The light of the oil lamp flickers across his face. "We always want it to mean something. We give our lives but we expect something in return." Erwin's hand clenches around his pen.
Levi frowns. "Erwin."
Erwin shakes his head. He continues to write. "So many names," he murmurs. They both stare at the report, gauging the long, incomplete columns.
There isn't a funeral because no one is certain Erwin's dead. He's MIA, officially. Levi's gone searching for him alone because his team is just a sad memory now and everyone else is a bunch of incompetent idiots.
He'd gone looking for Erwin's location, and then, after a couple of weeks, for his body. He found neither. Upon Levi's return Erwin was declared MIA only because Levi insisted on it.
He's not sure, now, if that was a mistake.
Levi refuses to take Captaincy, both when Erwin's status is finally changed to KIA – without proof – and when the war is finally, finally over. It's not that he doesn't care for the cause, or even that he doesn't want to take what will always be, to him, Erwin's place. He needs the confirmation. The body, laid out bare and cold in front of him, before he can fill any spot.
Hanji watches him pack up his things into a small waterproof bag. Mostly it's filled with supplies. Food, water, gas. At the last moment he tucks Erwin's pillow under his arm. It will probably get him killed, even with the Titans gone for good. He doesn't care, and Hanji doesn't comment on it, just uncrosses her arms and steps out of the way so he can leave.
It still smells like him.
Sometime in the dead quiet they're in Levi's bed, curled around each other. They're always in Levi's bed. Levi sometimes wonders if Erwin ever sleeps in his room, or if it's filled to the brim with years of service and sacrifice with no place left for himself.
Levi feels Erwin's chest expand as he takes a deep, slow breath. "Before I … found you in the Underground, had you ever …?" Erwin trails off. Levi frowns until Erwin tightens his grip around his waist.
Levi sighs. "No. Never had time. We don't have time now," Levi says, voice muffled as he presses his face into Erwin's neck.
"No," Erwin agrees. The quiet comes back and Levi shudders. Erwin shifts slightly, his lips no longer pressed to Levi's head. "I'm going to retire." Levi stiffens. "After, when things have settled down. I thought … we'd have time then. We could build a house on the coast …"
"Don't."
Levi pulls away. Erwin's expression is carefully neutral but his eyes are still and his eyebrows have that slight curl like they want to draw into his body and hide. "You can't make any promises. Don't try. Let's just … have this. Now."
Erwin's smile is small. "I'm happy with now."
"Good."
Levi dreams about a warm presence by his side and water licking at his toes.
He doesn't realise where he's heading until the water starts to separate from the sky in the horizon. The setting sun pulls Levi towards the shimmering distance and his heart follows, full and inexorable, Usagi galloping heavily underneath him. The water expands in his line of sight just in time for him to see the sun crawl along its surface, leeching the heat from the day. There is more dark than light.
Levi snaps the reins.
The sun is a shard in an unreachable distance when Levi draws up to the shoreline. Usagi refuses to walk on the sand – or what Levi assumes is sand, since it is grey and crumbly and nothing like the sand in the one book Erwin had owned, an encyclopaedia of the world before it was lost to war – so he dismounts and ties Usagi's reins to a papery tree. He takes off his shoes, too, at the prompt of a vague memory or dream, and walks along the cold, wet sand.
The sun departs. There is enough light from the full moon that Levi doesn't trip to his untimely death. He's hungry and cold but this place evokes something in him that just needs to be, for a while. Like a warm weight has settled in a part of his chest that has long been empty.
It takes him too long to realise he is walking towards a figure.
Levi stops. The figure is tall and broad, quietly watching the waves kiss the shore. Levi cautiously makes his way towards the stranger, wincing at the crunch of sand underneath his bare feet, prepared for how the figure turns to him, roused out of their reverie.
The wind blows. One arm of the figure's jacket waves emptily as the breeze sends a scent over Levi that has haunted him for the better part of his life.
He stands there, speechless, with a warm presence by his side and water licking at his toes.