When Mikasa was nineteen, she brought home a boy. He came up to the tip of her ear, looked at everything with acuity and tiredness in just the right proportions, looked at Eren and his lip twitched, like he wanted to smile but didn't quite know how.
For Eren, this was once upon a time.
"His name is Levi," Mikasa tells him the next evening, her hands passing quick and nimble over the game controller, "which you would know if you'd bothered to come down for more than ten minutes."
"Are you trying to distract me?" Eren says, smashing his buttons faster. God damn it, work! Why does combo six literally never work—
"I always beat you, anyway."
"Do not! I beat you the day before yes—!" High-pitched beeps sound from the gaming system. Eren grimaces at the bold, red 'KO' plastered across the T.V. screen and drops his controller into his lap. "This doesn't count. You distracted me."
"I was telling you about my boyfriend."
"You distracted me!"
"Levi plays this much better than I do, by the way," she says serenely.
"I can tell we're going to have problems," Eren sighs. He drops his head over the back of the sofa, closes his eyes and breathes out the tingling in his fingertips. Quiet and steady. Doesn't turn away from Mikasa's fingers sliding into his hair.
"You'll be fine," she says.
"You sure?" Eren side-eyes her lazily. "Maybe it's my turn to scare away all your boyfriends."
"You'll be fine," Mikasa repeats—decisively, as if she couldn't be surer of anything else in the world. "You'll feel at ease with him. You'll see."
Seven months and fourteen days later, he's curled up with a pillow over his ear and thinking, if only I could've been so lucky. Levi is in the next room. His voice is like it always is—wet silk, a breath of ocean air, inhaling sea salt and feeling it settle in your lungs. He stays up an hour to listen to it, then two—three—Levi is gone but he can't sleep, can't stop thinking—and then he's staring up at his ceiling again, watching daylight play a familiar pattern of reds and oranges on the beige of his walls.
Seven months and fourteen days later, he's feeling the cavity of his ribcage being hollowed out bit by bit in the shape of Levi's name, and it's anything but easy.
Halfway through the eighth month, Eren breaks and tells Armin.
His childhood friend, owing to his ever-curious nature, fires a multitude of questions at him right after the initial twenty minutes of confusion and sympathy: how did it happen and when did it start and why him and Eren, what about Mikasa—and Eren is, he's—
"I don't know," the words rush out of him. "I don't know, okay, I don't—I didn't plan for this to happen, and anyway, this is—it's just me and my stupid fucking crush, nothing's coming out of it, it's not hurting anybody. Mikasa's my sister and I love her and I love how happy she is, so what if I love—" he stops. Tries to swallow, but something (bitter) is stuck in his throat. Eren is exhausted. He feels the strength being sapped out of his bones with every unsaid word playing out in his head: "—so what if you love Levi a little, too?"
Armin understands. "Oh, Eren," is all he says.
He always was the smart one.
Eren remembers being fourteen. He remembers kissing boys in locker rooms, behind bleachers, talking back to teachers and punching bullies when they came at him three at a time—being gloriously unafraid and free but also directionless.
Eren will remember being eighteen. He will remember a different kind of freedom; still standing up to those who deserve to be cut down, still occasionally clenching his fists in unbridled anger, still housing fire in his eyes—but also catching his reflection in the mirror and seeing purpose in the set of his jaw and self-assuredness in the weight of his gaze instead of just the cuts on his face.
Between them, though, there is a space. It's filled with harsh words, disapproving glances, arguments at the dinner table, inadequacy, helplessness, anger.
His father calls him to his study and pulls out a test sheet with too many red markings. He cites Mikasa's example, tells him he's not trying hard enough for medical school, and Eren tries so hard. He tries to explain that he doesn't know how to be Mikasa, tries to express how repelled he feels by the idea of medical school and how badly he wants to apply to that college of arts in Trost, tries to show him the watercolour he painted of Shiganshina's skyline. It ends in a shouting match and Eren marching out of the house.
Or trying to, anyway.
"Whoa," Levi says, standing in the main doorway as Eren throws the door open. He raises a thin eyebrow. "Where are you off to?"
"Out," Eren says curtly.
Levi looks at him, and it's that look—mouth curled down just at the edge, eyes not quite squinting but on the verge of it, lips thinned and relaxed and thinned again, as if he's not sure what to make of the boy in front of him.
"Don't you start too," Eren snaps. He's vibrating with anger, and 'angry' and 'sixteen' is always a cruel combination.
Levi doesn't snap back, though—only looks at him a little more closely, searchingly, before his countenance softens through a space Eren thought was unbreachable once. Something in him unfurls in response, visceral and helpless.
"Come with me," Levi says, and he starts.
"Where?"
"Just come." He's already turning back out the door.
"Weren't you supposed to meet up with Mikasa?" Eren stumbles down the steps after him. "Wait, Levi—!"
"I was early anyway, don't lose your shit over it."
"Still," Eren sighs, "did you at least tell her? Also, where are we even going—?"
"Why the fuck do you ask so many questions? Just shut up and follow me," Levi says, and his voice turns from silk to sandpaper in an instant. Yet, when he glances at Eren over his shoulder, his eyes are still patient.
Eren snaps his mouth close. Breathes. The night air is cold—freezing as it nips at his ears and exposed fingertips. It jolts Eren into a strange kind of awareness, brings everything into focus. The quiet of the night is thick, unyielding, and their footfalls on gravel cut through it in a way that sounds almost sacrilegious. He stares at Levi's back and thinks, what are we doing? Why am I following him? Nothing comes to him, no epiphany—except the proud set of Levi's shoulders, the way his hair melts right into the dark, the corner of his leather jacket fluttering in a way that makes Eren want to hold it lightly. His presence magnifies everything in Eren, all the glory and all the uncertainty.
They eventually reach the edge of a clearing. It doesn't look regularly tended to; the trees lining the boundary are overgrown with tangling branches, bushes have cropped up in the middle, and the grass in tall enough in some places to reach his ankle. It's wild and raw in a way that calls out to the rougher parts of him. But most importantly, further inwards—
"A lake," Eren breathes. "Holy shit, it's a lake, how did I not know there was a lake here—"
"Don't explode on me now. Come on," Levi knocks his elbow into his shoulder, "I'm not standing out here."
They sit together by the shallow part of the lake, next to a flickering street lamp. There's a space of two hands' breadth between their crossed knees, but the space is empty and harmless, and Eren can't stop smiling.
Levi doesn't say a word, but Eren can hear the are you okay now? traced in the way his eyes scan the side of his face every now and then, in the way they don't turn away even when Eren looks back.
"Dad was being an asshole," he says, finally.
"Language."
"I cannot take that seriously coming from you."
"Yeah, well, you don't want to turn out like me."
There's a lull in the conversation, then. Eren dips his fingers into the water, curls them under the surface as if to grasp for something. Says, "I don't know, you seem pretty—like you've figured yourself out. That's all I want to do."
A beat. Eren thinks he might have felt Levi shift closer by a hairbreadth. Probably my imagination.
"It takes time," Levi says quietly. "Give it time, kid."
Eren pulls up his knees to his chest and presses his mouth against them. He wonders if he wants them to muffle his words when he speaks, take away the shame just a little bit.
"I just wanted him to know that there are things I want to do. Just me," he pauses for a long moment, "I'm not Mikasa."
"Of course you're not. You're you," Levi says. "There's no one like you."
Eren whips his face towards him, but he seems completely unperturbed. He's leaning back on his arms with his eyes closed, as if he didn't just say the one thing Eren's been looking to hear all his adult life. He holds himself still, waiting for a punch line, for sarcasm, laughter, anything. Levi gives him nothing at all.
"Oh," Eren says, and relaxes. Can I hug you? he wants to ask. Can I show you my paintings? The questions jump in his throat one after the other and swallowing them down is like chewing nails. "Thanks," is all he says, in the end. If the second-long upturn of Levi's lips is any indication, it's enough.
(And maybe, just maybe—he lied to Armin. Maybe he's painstakingly aware of the whys and hows and whens. Maybe he thinks about them everyday. He wonders, sometimes, how anyone in even the shallowest of love could forget.)
In retrospect, something must have cracked between them that first time at the lake—a glass wall, some barrier of unfamiliarity, an unbreachable two hands' breadth of space—Eren doesn't know. He's never been good with words, but he feels it in the part of him that wakes him up at eight-o-clock on weekend mornings so he can glimpse at Levi in the driveway when he comes to pick Mikasa up for class.
It's an odd part, for certain—deep-seated, with strange, unchained impulses and no threads of thought behind them. It feels unquestionably integral and at the same time foreign enough to wake him up in the middle of some nights when it stirs to thoughts, voices, dreams.
It's the part that pushes him down the stairs when he knows Levi is over even though he has piles of homework waiting on his desk.
He finds Mikasa in the kitchen. She's dipping chopped vegetables in egg batter and frying them in that ancient wok their mother insisted on using ever since Eren was a baby.
"Mom not home?" he asks, digging his mug out of the bottom drawer.
"Out with Dad," she says, eyes on the stove. "You want some, too? I'm making them for me and Levi."
"Nah, can't stomach anything but coffee right now," he says, then nibbles on his lip and adds, "Where is Levi, anyway?"
"Balcony, he's gone out for a smoke."
"Ah." Mikasa hates cigarette smoke.
That's that for him. To be realistic, his present state embodies in a nutshell his grudging relationship with said Levi-centered part of him: here Eren is, frayed penguin pajamas and coffee mug in hand and all, thinking, "Eren, where the fuck are you going?" as he opens the balcony door.
Levi, in that moment, reminds him starkly of one of those magazine cover illustrations, the ones that always say making love instead of sex and use too many exclamation marks.
He's holding a cigarette between his index and middle fingers over the railing, face still as stone and eyes fixed somewhere in the distance. The skin is a little stretched around their corners, the metallic sheen of them dull and heavy with the burden of seeing something unseeable. It strikes something fierce inside of Eren, like the clang of metal on metal—a desperate sound, a look at me, a let me see what you're seeing. He shuffles his bare feet along the steel frame of the balcony door, restless, and the sound pulls Levi's gaze to him. He blinks and nods in acknowledgement.
Something in Eren settles. He clears his throat and says, "Mind if I come in?'
"If you don't mind inhaling second-hand smoke," Levi says. His voice is hoarse.
Eren hums dismissively. Pulls his sleeves over his knuckles and sits with his back against the railing.
He glances at Levi and snorts at the look of blatant disgust on his face.
"The floor is fucking filthy," he says through his twisted lip.
Eren cranes his neck to grin up at him. "Good thing you can keep standing then."
"I bet you won't even wash those pajamas properly."
"You're welcome to show me how it's done."
Levi's lips press into a thin line. He breathes out a slow, even sigh. Taps his cigarette against the railing and says, "You're such a little shit."
"Yeah, well, I didn't hear you complaining at the lake, that was pretty fucking filthy, too."
Levi blinks slowly, as if caught off-guard. It's been months, after all.
The surprise drains out of him drop by drop, a slow, languid transition, and soon he's making that face again—but it's softer, somehow. His eyes are wider, pulled more open by the hairsbreadth, and it's minuscule but he can't help but want to think it could be because Levi wants to take in more of him. His mouth is straight, too—left loose, doesn't dip down at the corner. All the intensity of his expression is a single, concentrated point in his eyes. Eren unthinkingly curls into himself.
Something in Levi shakes itself apart at that and the intensity diffuses. He tangles a hand in Eren's hair, curls it in and leaves it there. Eren holds his breath. It's rough—presses down like Levi doesn't know what to do with his strength, pulls at the front of his scalp, borderline hurts, and Eren's body feels like porcelain.
His hand doesn't move away, and he breathes out in a steady exhale.
"How'd you know?" he blurts out. "I mean—why the lake? Why did you take me to the lake?"
The grip in his hair tightens. "Drink your coffee."
"Levi."
It takes a second, two, three, but—it relaxes. Levi sighs, "Mikasa told me you liked—that you wanted to go the ocean."
Eren thinks about this. He thinks about Mikasa telling Levi about him, or Levi asking about him. He thinks about Levi tucking away that worthless tidbit of information at the back of his mind, drawing it out again when he sees Eren upset. Levi playing around with it in his head, wondering how to translate it into action. Levi thinking about him.
"Considering my lack of resources as a broke college student," he continues, "I thought I might as well take you to the next best thing."
Eren's voice is quiet and a little thick when he speaks: "Will you take me again?"
Levi doesn't take his eyes off Eren. He doesn't say, "drink your coffee." He doesn't frown or squint his eyes. He doesn't ask why Eren can't just take directions and go there himself. He only looks at him and says, "Okay."
February 10th comes and goes in flurry of glittery Happy Birthday! banners and driving around town for the right candles and homemade vanilla frosting on everyone's faces. Eren bypasses all their neighbourhood malls and finds a quaint little store nestled somewhere on the other side of Shiganshina, buys his sister a scarf to replace the one that's too small to sit right on her shoulders now. It has a geometric pattern embroidered at the bottom in silver and comes all the way up to her nose if stretched, and Mikasa is near tears when she unwraps it.
A few of her college friends whisk her off at night. Carla invites them inside for a few minutes and they bring along a literal cacophony of explosive laughter and a medley of footfalls on the carpet and sunny voices. Eren doesn't recognize a single one.
Levi is there, too. It's 11:23 p.m. when he and Mikasa stand on the doorstep with their heads bent together. Eren takes all of three seconds to drink the sight of them in, sneaks up to his room, and does not look back. The click of his bedroom door is the last sound he hears that night. The hollow place inside of him is deathly quiet. Eren carefully does not let himself wonder if he feels emptier without the scraping of ocean air and sea salt against the walls of his chest, and wills himself to sleep.
He wakes up to the sight of an opal hanging from a venetian chain around Mikasa's neck. It rests in the dip of her collarbone, softens the stern set of her features beautifully. Eren smiles and runs a careful finger along it and asks her where it's from, even though the answer is a sharp, clear burn in his throat.
"It was a gift," she murmurs. "Levi said he thought it would suit me."
There's something different in the way she says Levi's name, now.
"He's got good taste." He's dating you, after all, is what he means to say but his throat closes up.
Mikasa cradles the stone in her cupped hand, picks it up and dusts a fingertip along the surface. She stares down at it and says, "I'm happy, Eren," and the shine in her eyes is the most human he's ever seen her. He loves her so much in that moment, he wants to cry.
"Yeah," he forces his voice out. He's nothing if not stubborn. Smiles. She smiles back.
I'm getting better at this, Eren thinks distantly. There's no triumph in it.
The summer of Eren's seventeenth year, he meets Jean Kirstein.
The end of May finally welcomes Eren's taste for freedom but leaves him with a house too small and a world too large to enjoy it. Through some stroke of fate, his parents sit him and Mikasa down in mid-June and explain the importance of 'family interaction on a plane where outside distractions are limited.' He and Mikasa look at each other, then at their parents, and promptly decide to avail the opportunity and pack their bags.
They rent a charming little two-bedroom hut near the east coast, all warm air and open spaces and glass walls facing the shoreline, and Eren can't get enough of it.
The Kirsteins, as it happens, are using another hut a little further down the beach as their temporary abode for the summer. Carla thinks they're lovely, Grisha is distant but appropriately courteous, and Eren—Eren can certainly appreciate Mrs. Kistein's vivacity and Mr. Kistein's enthusiasm for all things golf, but their son is—
"Fucking twat, who does he think he is? 'I'm not saying your hair looks bad but my cat coughs up better-looking stuff'—yeah, well, you can take your fucking commentary and shove it up your two-toned—!"
"Eren, please," his mother sighs.
"What? What? Are you blaming me for this? Thanks for the love and support, Ma—"
Mikasa speaks up, "Eren, you told him his face was longer than an undertaker's tape measure."
"First of all, he had it coming, second of all—have you seen him? I was being pretty fucking generous, if you ask me—"
"Amazing," is the last thing Mikasa says.
Unfortunately for his traitorous family, their clashes only become more violent with the sweltering heat of summertime. One afternoon, though, when the high tide has daunted everyone off the beach and Eren can't resist the pull of an ocean to himself, their argument devolves into some variation of: "Suck my dick!" "Maybe I will!" And some part of Eren says, "Well, why not?" It won't be lightning on his skin or saltwater in his lungs but—Jean's hands are feverish along his sides and maybe, for now, all he needs is the feeling of being wanted.
It happens once, twice, thrice, again and again and again; sometimes, it's like seeing the world as a newborn (Jean hovering above him, his skin glowing from sweat and fluorescent lighting, and he looks down at Eren like he's a shrine he's been given divine permission to desecrate). Other times, it's smoke in his eyes (gentle touches to his hips and he's wondering, would Levi be this gentle? He's wondering, would he kiss my neck or not? He's wondering, would he smoke after sex? Before and during and after—he wonders and wonders and wonders.)
One of those nights, Jean takes one look at him and says, "You want to do something else?"
His shirt is half-unbuttoned. "What?"
A twitch of his eyebrow. "I said, you incompetent freak, do you want to—"
"I know what you said, fuckface," Eren shoots back. He grapples with his buttons, raises a hand to his collar; the air feels awkward, like their conversation is misplaced. "Just—why?"
Jean mirrors him—shuffles his feet, pulls at the hair at the nape of his neck, but he doesn't take his eyes off Eren's. "You don't," he starts, then grimaces. "Look, it's not like we have to—you just seem like you're not in the mood."
"I'm always in the mood," Eren says, a little numb.
He snarls at him, "Can you shut the hell up for a second? I just mean you're not—look, you're obviously not—" he clicks his tongue, and Eren thinks he hears him mumble, 'screw it.' When he looks at Eren again, his eyes are clear. They're straight, and unafraid, and Eren almost flinches back. "You like the ocean, right? We can sit by the ocean, watch some fish or some shit, I don't know."
Eren's shoulders are shaking with laughter when he says, "'Watch some fish or some shit'? Wow, don't steal my heart all at once or anything—"
"Shut up! Man, why do you have to be so annoying? See if I ever try to do anything nice for you again, Jesus—"
So his twenty-seventh summer night finds them on an abraded boulder by the sea, Eren with his pants rolled up and watching the ocean surface ripple like dark velvet in the night, and Jean sitting higher up with his legs crossed. It's damp and humid, a little eerie and certainly not perfect, but that nameless something in Eren unwinds every time he swirls a finger in the water and feels something (a pebble, a fish, a piece of garbage) knock into it, and it trembles and settles limp in his belly every time he jumps back and Jean laughs at him.
This is okay, maybe, he thinks.
Summer swells and then wanes into a meeker ocean against his toes, a gentler sun, a happier family. They say their goodbyes to the Kirsteins on the doorstep of their glasshouse, and Eren can't avoid a twinge of wistfulness when he looks upon the shut-and-curtained windows of his temporary room for the last time.
Jean demands his phone number with a hard, unrelenting twist to his mouth and the same brazenness with which he does everything else and an incongruously gentle hand on his wrist, and maybe it's that last bit that persuades Eren to give in.
"What, you're going to give me a booty call from the other side of town?"
Jean kicks at his ankle halfheartedly. "Like you wouldn't be asking for it."
"Your horniness knows no bounds," he shrugs, "well, I'm not complaining."
A few seconds pass in silence, and then Jean speaks: "Maybe I just want to hang out."
"Yeah, sure," Eren laughs, and thinks nothing of Jean's frown.
He should've known better than to underestimate Jean's tenacity.
He comes over once almost every week without fail, and Eren knows now that his knocks are always bold and unashamed and three staccato tap-tap-taps. They don't even have sex most of the time—just throw themselves on the sofa or on Eren's floor or sometimes the backyard, fight over video-game characters and spray each other with the garden hose, make fun of dramatic slasher flicks together and sneak into the basement once in a while.
Eren doesn't think they do anything particularly incriminating—but Mikasa takes him aside one day and asks, "Is he your boyfriend?"
"No," he says immediately. Levi's six and a half feet away, flipping through a textbook with his glasses on. He's not looking at them. "I mean, not really. We're not dating or anything."
Levi speaks up, and Eren starts. "You sure?" he says, and nothing else.
He thinks about it all day, and the day after, and the beginning of the next until Jean arrives. He's thinking about the, 'you sure?' and the way Levi said it—no raised eyebrow, not a hair out of place, just a hard voice and a mouth perfectly still.
He feels a pinch to his arm and flinches. Looks to the side and sees Jean staring at him.
"Hey," Jean says. "Pay attention," he says. Look at me, his eyes say. Eren would recognize that look anywhere. He's seen it in the mirror countless times.
So he does: he looks. He looks at Jean through the relentlessness of a stare he still hasn't averted, looks at the way he stands confident against the backdrop of Eren's kitchen, looks at his forearms covered in flour up to the elbows, looks at the stubble he shaved off because Eren said it hurt while kissing, looks at his eyes and hands and neck and mouth and it's all so familiar that Eren has to remember where he is for a moment.
Holy shit, he thinks, and the words burst out of him, "Are we dating?"
Jean pauses. He sighs and asks, "Do you want to be?"
He still hasn't looked away because he's a persistent bastard, but Eren doesn't miss the way his hands are clenching and unclenching in the dough. I know those hands, Eren realizes. They've mapped out his whole body. He thinks of Jean and then of Levi, and the comparison is jarring. This is what convinces him, finally.
Eren says sorry to that one desperate part and answers, "Yeah. Yes."
Jean knocks his shoulder into Eren's, and that's it. That's them.
The next day, he wants more than anything for Mikasa to ask him again. He doesn't care how many feet away Levi is, or if he's there at all.
He feels free for the first time in thirteen months.
"Wow, um," Eren is saying, "no wonder I trashed this game."
"Don't be a sore loser, Eren," Mikasa says without pause, tinkering with her alphabets. The scrabble board spread out between them has bits of paper missing from the edges, a clump of dust stuck so firmly near the lower left corner that they couldn't rub it off, and is altogether frail and falling apart from the center. It's at least a decade old, Eren thinks dispassionately. What was I even thinking digging it out of the basement?
"Eren," Mikasa calls. She's frowning at him, unimpressed. "It's your turn."
"Mikasa," Eren sighs. "Mikasa, dearest Mikasa," he promptly flips around his tile rack to show her his alphabets, "I got nothing."
"You're such a dork."
"I didn't think it would be this boring," he whines.
"Eren, you hate scrabble. You've always hated scrabble."
"No fucking wonder," he lies down spreadeagled on Mikasa's bedroom floor, "you can have it. Who would I play it with? Jean?" He snorts at the thought.
"He's been coming over a lot lately," Mikasa says. It's leading up to something—Eren can tell by the way her voice goes quiet and she pulls up the scarf to cover her mouth. "Are you—you're—?"
"Yeah, we—we came to an understanding, sort of."
She reaches over to the tile rack he's left upended, collecting his alphabets one by one by one and pulling them close, gentle and careful and firm in a way that's embedded in the glide of her muscles. She says, "That's good. You seem happier."
There's a lump in his throat in the shape of a question—in the shape of a name that burns a little less now. He contemplates swallowing it down purely out of instinct but—it's okay, he tells himself, it's okay now, right? I can—and for a second, he wants viciously to take back that apology to his unnamed, unforgiving part because it smolders awake from its ashes even now.
"Are you going to tell Levi?" he asks anyway.
Mikasa pauses, then resumes placing his alphabet tiles on the board. D-R-O-W-N.
"He already knows," she admits. "He knew sooner than me, I think."
"What do you mean," Eren says flatly. His throat has gone dry, the base of his tongue numb. The words taste stale and pointless in his mouth.
Mikasa shrugs and says, "I don't know—I don't know what I'm saying, to be honest. I just felt like he—I don't know why. Ignore me."
Two months ago, he would have said, 'tell me.' He would have been bursting at the seams with what did he say and did he say anything about me and why aren't you telling me and what do you mean it has nothing to do with me it has everything to do with me don't treat me like I mean nothing to h—
Now, he only says, "Sure." Tacks on a belated 'sissy' just to see Mikasa's look of faint exasperation.
"You've been in a relationship for a year now," he says absently, "you should be used to this, you know."
"Levi's not a fan of pet-names," she deadpans. If you couldn't already tell. Eren gives himself permission to smile at the thought of him, because it's small and innocuous and doesn't echo against all the paper-thin places inside him.
It takes a minute of calm for her to feel safe again, but eventually she asks him, "Do you feel like he's been stopping by less?"
"I wouldn't know, 'Kasa," he lies.
She hums in acknowledgement but not in much else. Eren looks at her—she's fiddling with the end of her scarf, looping a finger in and out of the little tassels. The rest of her is still, like her muscles are waiting to clench or twitch or shiver but don't know where to start.
She doesn't know why. Eren doesn't either, and he prays he never does.
One or two or ten years later, Eren will look back at this and think, this is where everything started to fall apart. He will sit on his old boyhood bed and hear the old springs creak and think, this is where everything started to unravel.
It's 11:23 p.m. and his curtains are drawn, his desk-lamp is unplugged, the air near his bed stands hushed and stagnant. His bedroom is a spectre of twelve o'clocks and four o'clocks and six o'clocks ticking away to sea salt voices through the walls, thoughts of waves crashing, dreams that sent him to a barren place where he could do nothing but want—and suddenly a strange sense of homesickness overcomes him, fettered dully but surely by whispers of you're not sixteen anymore, you can't go back.
His phone chimes and lights up from his bedside. It's Jean.
[23:25] Jean: yo insidious on tomorrow at 4 45. wanna go make fun of it
His toes uncurl and the homesickness dissipates through his grinning mouth. He wonders whether he should reply now or leave Jean to stew till morning.
His phone chimes again.
[23:37] Jean: jaegar i know you're awake ok
Oh, fuck you, Eren thinks without venom—if anything, it's laced with fondness. He stares at his phone without opening a text message, and soon it's vibrating in his hand with the crescendo ringtone.
Eren accepts and opens the call with, "Just couldn't stand being ignored, could you?"
"You're a fucking drama queen, you know that?" Jean says. He's scowling on the other end, Eren can tell.
"Sorry I offended your delicate sensibilities, Jeanbo," he laughs, full and bursting but soft-edged.
"Seriously, fuck you, I'll just go and make fun of the damn movie by myself."
"You're the only one who laughs at your jokes, anyway—"
It's twenty minutes into the call and—Eren doesn't even remember what they were talking about, he doesn't know what it was in his voice that reached outside the boundary of his room, but a second later he's turning and catching movement from the corner of his eye. Jean's still debating the merits of horror adaptations versus gore flicks on the other end but Eren is frozen—because Levi is half-in, half-out of his doorway and looking at him like he's never seen Eren before and Eren's not sure, but he thinks his hand on the doorknob might be trembling.
His breath hitches in his throat, but he turns it into a sigh and the sigh into a smile. Quick and fleeting. Quick and fleeting, Eren.
Maybe it was his laughter spilling into the air and disrupting its stillness, maybe he was too loud. He has half a mind to ask Levi—but Levi looks vaguely lost himself, like he didn't expect Eren to catch him here, like he didn't expect to catch himself here. He blinks, tenses and loosens, doesn't smile back.
"Eren? Hey, you there? You know this is important, right, Kubrick films are serious business—"
"Sorry," he says, not exactly startled but disoriented. He jerks his head away, eyes down to the floor. "Sorry, say that again—?"
Jean rants and raves and starts all over again, and nothing at all registers in Eren's mind except for the fact that he's gripping his phone too tightly. He hears footsteps, falling away and fading and falling away and fading and—nothing. The stillness feels like a mockery, now. He grips his phone tighter.
"Jean, listen, sorry," sorry, I'm so sorry, "but I'm going to cut off here, alright, otherwise I'll—" —otherwise I'll break my fucking phone.
There's a voice that isn't Levi's, a question he can't decipher, a dial tone—all in the space of three seconds. Fuck this, he wants to hiss at himself. I don't deserve this shit, he wants to say, but it's overshadowed by the voice in rusting chains in his head. You can't get away from this, you poor bastard, you're too—
He stamps down on it. Thinks at it violently, too what? Far gone? In love? So fucking what? What does it fucking matter?
It doesn't, because when he looks back Levi is gone.
Of course he is, Eren thinks, and it's hollow, it echoes. It's him and the voice-in-chains both.
It happens again, exactly once.
Eren is huddled in the middle of his bed like an animal hibernating, all covered and curled up and hands and legs criss-crossing. It's been fifteen days and his insides still feel a little raw when he breathes, but he is determined not to be spirited away to the landfill of his dreams anymore.
He's listening to the slow whir of his ceiling fan, willing himself to fall asleep to it, almost there when—a footfall in the hall outside, not casual, not a passer-by, but deliberate and hesitant all at once. It immediately disperses all his hard-built monotony.
Stagnant air stirs over his skin, over his eyelashes—softly, like a finger dusting under his lashline; outer corner, deeper in, then back again. Eren doesn't open his eyes.
A muted sound cuts through the cocoon of air coaxing him awake. It rings crude and indecisive on his door frame, a knock halfway abandoned. He's half-convinced it might not even be Levi, thinks about forcing his joints to unlock and his lungs to breathe for two heartbeats. He hears a sigh, then. It's steady and controlled and a little raspy. It's Levi sighing when he opened the door to Eren's fresh black eye. It's Levi's hand rubbing up and down his back when Eren's father forbade him from going to Trost's art gallery. It's Levi's footsteps on gravel, Levi breathing out cigarette smoke—
It's him, Eren thinks. He's right outside my door. He's watching me.
A sharp intake of breath—a moment, Eren's waiting, listening, don't curl up, don't you dare move, and—wait, wait—and then nothing.
And he is left, again, stripped bare and tender under his sheets.
"I think I did something to offend your sister's boyfriend."
Eren looks up from his trigonometry homework. Jean hasn't paused his Pac-Man game.
"Also, why don't you have more games on your computer?" he's saying. "I mean, Pac-Man? Really?"
"Don't diss Pac-Man," Eren says simply. "And what did you mean by 'offend'? Why would you do that?"
Jean turns away from the computer screen to stare at him and says, "It's not like I did it on purpose, are you stupid?"
"Then why would you think that?"
He pushes the notebook computer completely off his lap. "Because," he says slowly, "he glares at me whenever I'm within his immediate line of sight, Eren. Not-so-immediate, even." Jean furrows his eyebrows when Eren only stares at him blankly. "For fuck's sake, you can't tell me you haven't noticed."
"I haven't noticed."
"You've got to be the most oblivious dumbass on the planet."
"Then why're you asking me?" Eren snaps. "Look, you're probably just imagining it. I can't figure out why Levi would even give you the time of the day."
Jean scoffs, "He gives you more than that, doesn't he?"
Eren carefully, conscientiously does not think about this and only turns back to his trigonometry homework. He forces out a sigh, "Even if he did, why would that matter?" To you or to me, and least of all to him? "It has nothing to do with what you're saying."
Jean only looks at him with the same hard twist Eren loved him for months before, and says nothing.
Eren keeps his bedroom door shut from then on. Opens the windows but closes the curtains, locks the balcony door, breathes out slow and heavy through his mouth to keep the air from settling mock-quiet around him. He lets his eyelids fall shut and it's the same as when they're open. He feels the cavity of his chest throb with emptiness, ribs pressing into his skin from the inside, and it's the same as dreaming. He can almost pretend he's asleep, like this.
It's okay, he reassures himself sometimes. This is doable.
"Are you sure you're okay?" Mikasa asks him one day, and does not mention his mismatched socks, or the bags under his eyes, or the bedraggled state of his hair, or the bitterness curling on his tongue when he speaks.
"Peachy," he says. She frowns, small and private. The restless energy in her muscles from weeks before persists, transforming now into arrhythmic taps and sharp, cutting movements. He would ask her, "Is that thing with Levi still bothering you?" if something precarious inside him hadn't shifted and displaced all the air from his lungs at the thought.
For better or for worse, he trudges down the stairs the same day (mismatched pajamas and bed-head and all). The living room is empty, carpet dry-cleaned and left untouched, but he can hear the sound of running tapwater from the kitchen.
"Mikasa?" he calls out, but comes upon the sight of Levi scrubbing dishes at the sink.
"She's out with your mother," he says without turning. "There's an event at the university we were told to attend with our parents."
"Why are you—" Eren swallows, forces his feet to unfreeze. "Why didn't you go?"
"Don't really have anyone to go with," he says plainly.
"Oh."
They lapse into silence. Eren rubs together the woolen sleeves draped over his palms, wonders what to say. I'm sorry sounds trite, what happened is obtrusive in the worst way and will you tell me about them? is something Eren doesn't have the right to say, although it lingers at the forefront of his mind the longest.
He shuffles over to the kettle, fills it up and puts the water to boil. For a few muddled seconds, he thinks he's going to hear, 'don't drag your feet, it's annoying,' or, 'did you spill any of that water?' but Levi gives him nothing. This is okay, Eren tells himself again. His skin feels too tight for his bones and his bones weighed down to the marrow, but he tells himself this over and over again.
But Eren isn't sixteen and they're not on their way to some arcane-looking lake and the silence isn't sacred anymore. It's violent. It stifles Eren's throat and scratches at his skin, and suddenly foreign words are tugging at the self-imposed stitches on his mouth.
"I'd expect you to go with her," he says, "with Mikasa, I mean."
Levi is still reticent. He grunts in neither a yes nor a no, turns only to wipe his hands on a towel and then slips it back over the hook rail.
Eren gulps over the words bubbling onto his tongue, can't stop them, one atop another atop another. He says, almost desperately, "Are you avoiding her?" Are you avoiding me?
It takes three seconds and a heartbeat more for Levi to answer: "Why would I be?"
"I don't know, you tell me."
"Don't be stupid, Eren." He runs a finger along the rim of a plate he's just washed. Eren can't call it 'fiddling' because nothing Levi does is ever less than graceful—but he knows stalling when he sees it.
"Well, give me a proper answer then."
Levi faces him, then. There's no disdain in his eyes, none of that I-can't-figure-your-shit-out expression—just flat, cold steel, as if he's done all his figuring out and ended up bored with what he found. He sighs at Eren—not at his actions or behaviour, at him. He sighs like he's the one who lies still and tired in his bed from the weight on his chest and Eren is just one extra burden, and Eren—sure, he's two years past this and nearly eighteen now, but anger is and always will be his first defense against hurt.
"Why are you like this," he grits out. "Why're you always like this?"
Something in the depth of Levi's expression twitches. He purses his lips and says, "Eren, what the fuck is wrong with you?"
"You, you're what's wrong with me, okay, I just—!" I just wanted you to see me. "Why d'you have to act like the whole fucking world is on your shoulders?"
"Don't put words in my mouth, brat—"
"Yeah, well, I said act like, not said. I mean, why do you have to look like that?" Why do you have to look at me like that? "If you don't—if you can't stand my company then just tell me to fuck off!"
Levi closes his eyes. "Eren, that's not—"
He thinks, if you're going to say my name like you want to throw me out the window then don't fucking say it at all, and says, "Why can't you just ask for what you want?"
Levi flinches but Eren barely notices. He says lowly, "It's not that simple," then immediately looks as if he regrets saying anything. With every word Levi lets slip, the questions in Eren's throat burn brighter and brighter—and they distort to ashes on their way to his lips.
He thinks, why did you look like a cornered animal when you were the one who came to my room that night, and says, "You do something then turn around and say something else, how do you expect it to be simple?"
He thinks, why did you take me to that lake and push the hair out of my eyes, you had no fucking right, and says, "You're—you do things you're not supposed to do. Okay? You can't—you can't get it in a straight fucking line."
He thinks, why did you have to be like this, and says, "Why do you have to be like this?" but means something else entirely from what reflects on Levi's face. He's sealed his lips shut but he can't keep his eyes closed, and the pain in them is like a sickness. It makes Eren want to cry.
He rasps, "I can't understand you." And I want to so badly.
Levi's shoulders are stone-still and set into a clear please don't ask me. They don't move even when something in the way Levi is watching him seems to break. Eren can't name what it gives way to—all he knows is that it is fierce and terrifying and the sight he's going to wake up from in sweat and shivers.
"Eren," Levi says, and that's it, that's it. This is how his name was meant to be spoken. The ferocity and wonder and strain and vibrations in all the right places wrap around him, and Eren can feel that precarious something swoop down, down, down. His every construction crumbles apart around him and all he can do is step over them and think, I want you, I want you so much, please, please.
Levi steps closer to him. Control is in the slow stretch of his muscles. He touches the junction between Eren's neck and shoulder—first with his fingertips, then the length of his fingers, then his whole palm. Settles his hand under the collar of his nightshirt, squeezes lightly. It's lightning on his skin, and Eren wants it to stay there forever.
Unthinkingly, he lifts up a hand to clutch his wrist. He can feel his fingers digging into roughened skin, thinks he might be holding on too tightly but Levi doesn't say a thing. Don't move, don't leave, he thinks in near-panic. He gropes around in his head for that one tethered part, the one that can't shut up—shouts at it to say something, but it's gone soft-quiet. It's tame. Eren has scraped out all of his voice, it seems, and handed it to Levi on a silver platter like the rest of him. Now, when his insides are pliant and voiceless, he understands one thing.
It's always going to be him, he realizes. It sounds like a raindrop plopping into an ocean he never knew was there. His ribcage doesn't feel hollow anymore but there's a name carved along its inside that's not his own, and perhaps that absence of self-possession is worse.
Levi's mouth opens, breathes the air between them in. Before it can morph into words, however—
—The sound of keys jingling and wood creaking.
They jerk apart just in time to hear Carla's, "Eren, Levi, are you two in the kitchen?"
Eren catches Levi looking at his hand as if it's burnt; it's the last he sees of him before his mother peers through the living room and calls out, "See, there you are. Come here now, we've got lots of things to tell you."
They don't glance at each other again for the rest of the evening.
It's not enough to keep Eren from hearing waves crashing.
The next day, he breaks up with Jean. There is no shouting, no blaming, nothing at all except for a sigh and, "It's him, isn't it?" and Jean's words slipping into him like water because they've both had their hearts broken open.
Five evenings pass like this. Seconds are strung together in what feels like discontinuity, pried open into minutes and hours and days that scramble amongst each other in Eren's head. He tries to navigate through a strange sense of impatience he knows neither the source nor the expectation of. He waits without knowing what for, without asking why he should have to.
Saturday night opens with Mikasa in a leather jacket and a little black dress that hugs her curves just right and, "Levi's picking me up, we're going drinking for a bit," and Eren not asking when she's going to be back.
It dwindles to a darker, lonelier house with the same cluttered stream of tick-tock, tick-tock—disrupted five minutes or two hours later by an irregular rap at the door and Mikasa carrying in an inebriated Levi on her shoulders.
"He usually doesn't drink this much," she says, setting him down on the sofa. "I don't know what happened tonight."
Something weary and bleak in the grey of her eyes sharpens when she lies. Eren wants to call out to her, but she's already halfway up the stairs when he gathers his voice.
"Where are you going?" he says instead.
"Getting a few blankets. I don't want to dump him in his house to wake up to a killer hangover alone," she says. "Stay here for a while."
Where else would I go? he almost asks, but thinks better of it. Wonders if the bleakness in Mikasa's eyes would understand what he meant. It's a purposeless, flighty sort of curiosity, echoing a vacant echo between his sister's absence and Levi's presence on the couch. Eren is struck, then, by a wanting, suffocating sort of loneliness—a feeling of too much fullness. He listens for a voice other than his own, a text message, a crescendo ringtone—but Jean won't pick up his phone at 00:12 anymore because Eren is dogged and can never come to un-love the things he loves.
His chest tightens. Oh, fuck, he thinks distantly. Fuck, not now.
Eren blinks against the sudden dampness of his eyes, breathes in deep and ragged against the feeling of something clawing up his throat. Tries to breathe out but hears a choked whimper instead and clamps a hand over his mouth.
"Eren?"
He inhales sharply—Levi's sitting up on his elbow now, staring at him groggily. It's dark as pitch but he's looking at Eren like he can't see anything else. His voice is hoarse when he speaks: "Hey," he says. "Hey, what's wrong?"
He's reaching a hand out to touch him and Eren can't, can't, can't—
"I thought I was getting better," he chokes out. His teeth ache against his fist. He wants to look up at Levi. He wants to touch him. He presses his fist tighter against his mouth. "It doesn't get better. I don't think it's ever going to get better, Levi."
Levi doesn't quite have the presence of mind to ask, 'what is?'—or maybe he doesn't need to. His fingers twitch in mid-air—they're loose, relaxed, lacking that perpetual tone of restrained power. They're careless.
"Don't cry," he mumbles. He's supposedly drunk, but his hand is remarkably steady when it brushes away a tear from the edge of Eren's lashline.
I'm only going to cry harder if you do that, asshole, Eren wants to say, but it's lost somewhere between the salt burning in his lungs and the smoke in his throat hitching up his sobs. The tears coalesce, hover at the tips of his eyelashes, slide down. He moves away before Levi's fingers can trace their paths along his cheek and Levi looks lost at the denial, doesn't know what to touch if it's not Eren.
"I broke up with Jean," Eren tells him.
His expression goes slack for a moment, and what emerges next is a peculiar clarity, almost divine. His eyes are a wilderness, suddenly.
Slowly and carefully, Levi's hand bridges the space between them. He twists a piece of Eren's hair between his thumb and index finger.
"I'm sorry," he murmurs. It's not a you have my sympathy sorry.
It's the kind of sorry where they don't blink and don't look away from each other, where they don't move because the air they're breathing in and out from each other feels tangible, and where Levi's hand is too gentle on his hair to not be a promise.
It's an I'll do right by you this time sorry.
A calmness overtakes him. Mikasa's footfall down the stairs is distant and Levi closing his eyes and falling back on the sofa is only an interlude.
Eren waits. He's done it for so long and so many times, it doesn't feel like waiting anymore. It just feels like living.
Two days later, Mikasa sits a single handbreadth away from him on the loveseat and says, "We broke up." She looks straight at him and tells him it was mutual. Eren believes her.
Just one thing stands unfinished. There is gasoline pooling in the little, infinite spaces in his now-full ribcage and he waits for the match between Levi's cigarette-fingers.
It comes in the form of two strong, evenly-spaced knocks one late September evening. Eren quells his smile and opens the door.
Levi doesn't step in. He only asks him, "Will you come with me?"
The gravel has been cleared and replaced with brick pavement but Eren remembers this path well. Traces of daylight still linger over the horizon; he can see the broken picket fence on the other side of the road, the miniature merry-go-round under the giant eucalyptus tree, the graffiti on the wall of the alley before their last right turn. Levi's jacket flutters in the wind and Eren takes hold of it between his thumb and index and middle fingers. His back is as broad as it was two years ago—the only difference is that Eren can see it better, feel it better.
He thinks about confessing. Thinks back to his sixteen-year-old self and feels like laughing out a, "Once upon a time, you were my forever."
Night has fallen by the time they reach the lake. They sit on the dock this time, Levi with his feet up and Eren with his legs swinging. The clearing seems tamer after all this time, but its intrinsic rawness remains and reflects openly. They are bare beside each other, all wounds vulnerable to touch.
Eren thinks back to a week ago, remembers the uncompromising set of Levi's shoulders in the kitchen. But when he looks to the side, his eyes are soft and his voice is liquid as he says, "Ask me."
Eren can't recall a single question in that moment, so he just asks, "How long?"
A wry smile tugs at Levi's mouth. "A long time," he says simply.
Mikasa, Eren is about to say, but Levi reads the question in the shift of his brows before his lips can form it.
"I did love her," he says quietly, "but it was always going to be you."
It's always going to be you.
"Oh," is all Eren can say. The tail-end of his voice breaks a little, and after that he feels voiceless. He's under the surface, toes touching the seabed, and his mouth is full of water.
Levi says, "Eren," in the same way again—maybe takes a little more time with it, is more precious with the way he mouths the syllables.
Did you say Mikasa's name like that, too? Eren thinks inadvertently and instead says, "You know I can't be—" he breathes in sharply, then breathes out a shaky laugh, "you know I can only be me, right? I'm just—"
"Don't," Levi looks at him sharply, "don't do that."
Eren clicks his mouth shut and looks down at the water.
Levi sighs. He shifts closer to him (it's by more than a hairsbreadth this time).
"Look over there," he says, right by Eren's ear, and points out a spot near the edge of the lake. "You remember that spot?"
"Of course I—yeah, 'course I do," he mumbles. "It's where we sat down the first time we came here, right?"
"I told you there, before. There's no one like you." Eren's breath hitches. "Did you believe me then?"
"I d—!" his voice breaks again and—god damn it all, his vision is blurring, but he swallows hard and chafes out every last bit of his voice, even if his eyes and mouth will be left raw afterwards. "I did! Of course I d-did, I—!" —it's you, how would I not believe you?
"Then believe me now," Levi says, and stresses his next words until Eren's hearing them every time a wave crashes, "It was always you. Got it?"
He can feel his features contorting into something ugly, mouth all twisted and nose scrunched up and eyes big and round and crying seawater. Yet, he can't look anywhere except at Levi. I love you like crazy, he shouts internally—thinks he's going to be crushed if he doesn't say it aloud.
"I loved—love—!"
Hands cupping his cheeks. Levi only says, "Eren," but by god, it's gentle-slow and reverent and the warmest sound he's ever heard, and he can't believe where it's coming from.
"I'm sorry—!" he's still blubbering, still crying.
He wishes he could force himself to stop—he can't tell Levi, 'it was always you for me too,' or, 'I'm the one who didn't know what I wanted,' or just, 'I love you,' if he can't stop sobbing—but Levi only murmurs, "You're fine." Kisses all over his face—pecks his lips, then his browbone, his forehead, under his eye, then back to his lips again. "You're fine, Eren."
Eren slips his arms around his torso, grips the back of his jacket with enough force to tear if it was flimsier material. Levi doesn't bat an eye—he lowers a hand to the hollow between Eren's neck and shoulder where Eren wears his week-old handprint, if only in heat and not physically. The other hand pulls Eren close by the waist. He breathes out. He's home.
"Sweetheart," Levi murmurs against his temple. Eren almost chokes on a sob.
He can feel his wet eyelashes dragging against the material of Levi's shirt. There's a certain intimacy to it that calms him down. If he speaks now, his words will be muffled by Levi's chest. The thought gives him necessary courage.
"Tell me everything," Eren says lowly.
Levi immediately says, "I wanted to celebrate your birthday with you. I wanted to take you out. I saw you looking at me like you would break if I didn't touch you and I wanted to lay you down and kiss you all over."
Fuck. He burrows deeper into the concavity of Levi's neck and mumbles, "Never mind."
There's a smile against his forehead. It's a small, infantile thing—nothing like the unabashed blaze in Levi's eyes or the strength in his hands. It's secretive, and exactly a second long, and bares in that second all his capacity to feel.
Eren closes his eyes.
It won't be easy.
His father won't speak to him for the next four months. His mother will walk on eggshells around both of them in the same room. Mikasa's friends will never quite look at him the same.
But one day when he and Mikasa are playing Mario Kart, he will say, "I might have a boyfriend now," and she will say, "Are you trying to distract me?" and things will be alright. Armin will smile at him that particular smile of unobtrusive understanding and say, "I'm happy for you, Eren." The three of them will bundle up together in the attic of Armin's house and share hot chocolate that coming December. Levi will pick him up the next morning in his beat-up Chevrolet and they will drive to the lake they've come to call theirs. Eren will hug him and show him his paintings and sleep in his bed, and on his eighteenth birthday Levi will lay him down and kiss him all over like he promised, and not-waiting will be exalting.