The Military Police hold a dinner to celebrate something, and formality dictates that Erwin and a guest of his choosing are not only extended invitations, but are also expected to attend. Formality, however, only got them so far - they were seated at the very back of the banquet hall, in between some middling hopeful from the Merchant's Guild, and a brown-noser squandering her inheritance on a fitful climb up the social ladder. The merchant knew better than to engage them in conversation; as champagne was being poured, he stroked his beard and avoided eye-contact. The woman, on the other hand, pale-skinned, fair-haired, and really quite lovely, was doing her best to make good of a rare situation. She made a few pathetic attempts to engage Erwin in conversation before Levi promised to shove his fist so far up her ass that she'd have to shit out her mouth, and that was that.
Nile calls a toast, honours the gathered as the brightest and best that humanity could ever offer, notes that in any other world they would still shine just as bright. A salad of mixed greens with a warm butter sauce arrives after speeches and a few bottles of vine. Erwin eats from the outside in; Levi stares at his plate.
"Eat," Erwin murmurs. "It'll be thrown to the pigs, if you don't."
"That's bullshit," Levi mumbles, but does as he is told. Five years have beaten almost all the thug out of him, and he holds himself like a gentleman at the table - but Erwin knows better, what simmers beneath the surface. To anyone other than the dogs in Mitras' aboveground, so many vegetables in one place is a waste of time.
The soup course is a warm broth with potato and pickled radishes. By the end of it, Erwin is feeling bored and comfortable enough to consider striking up a conversation with the blushing lady to his left. He can tell she's a practiced courtesan, eking out meaning by knowing when to laugh and when to listen, and through the appetizer course (mushrooms with cheese on flatbreads) and meat course (sliced beef with potatoes in cream sauce) she sneaks closer and closer to him, until her hand is on his thigh.
The fish course is announced; it's tonight's special. The kitchen door opens as he's halfway through a story about his first takedown of a 15m-class, and suddenly every muscle in Erwin's body goes rigid, and he finds himself reaching on instinct towards his hips.
It's a smell you never forget - ripe flesh, sickly-sweet, slightly rank, with an acridness and a bite to it that brings tears to one's eyes. The kitchen staff are carrying plates with what appears to be fermented fish heads in a sauce. Levi has already stood up, a few heads turned towards him as he backs away from his upturned chair. There's no mistaking that stench.
Erwin wipes his mouth, excuses himself, and leaves with Levi following behind him, stiff-legged, arms tightly crossed against his chest. They find their carriage driver playing dice in the stables. She's upset to be back on duty so soon, and a little inebriated besides. Once the carriage is in motion, Erwin takes a moment to assess Levi: the corporal is sitting across from him, legs crossed, staring out the window as they pass by houses too big for their inhabitants.
The first time he'd taken Levi to a formal affair in Sina, it was a last-minute decision to amuse the bored socialites looking for a good story. They'd made it all the way through the night, up to and including the dessert course. Levi had refused all of the vine offered to him, even in cases where to do such a thing was impolite, and eaten everything placed in front of him, with uncharacteristic gusto. He had spent the last few hours of the night puking - Erwin hadn't thought of what so much food at once might do to someone raised on scrapings in the slums - and scrubbed himself raw into the dawn.
This is absolute bullshit, he'd growled, as Erwin rubbed his back. A salad of oiled vegetables, who the hell thought that was a proper way to eat food?
Something shuffles out of the human spirit in dark hours and that, Erwin supposes as they hurtle through the streets watching the coming night play out among the soldiers, is one of the few things that separates human and Titan. The Military Police are lighting cigars and sharing bottles of vine; no doubt the Scouting Legion was up to other, darker pursuits. Knowing that life was short, that death was quick and cruel, made people desperate to have something, or someone, to hold on to. The Military Police in their brothels behind Sina were always raising shit-fits about the waste of goats' bladders on male and female condoms - but, well, try to ignore a VD and see how quickly it goes away.
Sex is often about love - self-love or other-love, or both. It's about something, when the alternative is nothing.
"It's fucked up," Levi says, finally. "Top ten, my ass. Bunch of pigs feeding on Titan flesh." There's a quiver in his voice that Erwin hasn't heard in years, not since they found Isabel with her entrails leaking shit onto what was left of her body.
"They didn't know," Erwin offers, softly, but he knows that Levi knows better. It's the whole facade that they put on behind Sina, aboveground, that's getting to him - the wide-hipped women in pretty gowns, the pot-bellied men in tailored suits, the sallow-skinned folks in military uniforms talking about the grace with which they'd handled 3DMG, twenty years ago. The fancy foods served on hot plates, when everyone else is starving. The people happy to learn dances and embroidery, behind walls, where nothing stayed green for long. Balance that with the stench of a decomposing human body. Balance that with the forceful reek of Titan flesh.
The carriage pulls up to their hostel; in the morning, they'd depart for the barracks on the other side of the wall. He extends a hand for Levi, who disembarks with the same grace that murders Titans.
Something conspired to make Levi, Erwin muses, as they prepare for sleep. The hostel room offers a single double-bed and little else, but Levi still insists on washing up at the communal bath-house down the road (taking advantage of a world that produces hot water on demand), and sweeping the dust out of the corners. As they settle down into bed, he notes the sublime form of Levi's body, hard angles, ropy muscles, the multitude of scars. One hundred years of living behind walls coalesced into a human being, growth stunted by years of poor nutrition, but with the snarling, acid bite of a monster given form. You put something in a cage long enough, it's bound to figure out how to make you regret it.
"Danchou," Levi murmurs, his back to Erwin, and it's with such softness that Erwin - not for the first time - wonders what it would feel like to have sex with him. Would that hard exterior give way to softness, like Levi was prone to do, in certain dark hours? Or would he gaze down at him with narrow eyes and demand it harder, rougher, until the sex drowned out everything else? "Dok said something, at dinner. About who we'd be in another life."
"I remember," Erwin says.
It's an old myth, from before the Titans. The Sphinx turns to Superman, and asks, what happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?
"It's bullshit," Levi says. "Any other world, and I'd have been served for dinner tonight. My head in fish sauce."
And that's that. Levi knows that Erwin knows that it's a thank you, but not for saving him - heaven knows that Levi never needed to be saved. It's a recognition that a world on death's door conspired to create them and bring them together, and given any other set of circumstances Erwin would be razing a nation to the ground, and Levi would never have existed at all.
An unstoppable force, Erwin thinks. The kind of stillness with which he moved, the sharp contrast of his body against the harmony of the other soldiers, spoke to the bet he'd placed on Levi's life five years prior - that such a thing could be redirected, if not contained. Once, mankind had known about waterfalls. Levi was the closest thing to a waterfall they had left.
And that made Erwin, of course -
Superman looks to the one he loves, and then to the Sphinx, and gives the Sphinx a smile: how about this, he says. They surrender.