At this rate, nobody will remember the guy who plugged up the wall in Trost district. Right, Eren?

—Jean, Ch. 70

Bury the dead.

Do not self-pity.

Unburden the heart.

I can't, I can't, I can't . . .

The taste of brass. White explosions behind the eyes. Sleep floats down upon the world, rippling and boiling above him like the surface of the sea. Eren, flat on his back, doesn't feel the ground beneath him, sinking beneath the undertow of his consciousness. He hovers neither here nor there, swept beneath a tide of oblivion. In this deep quiet place, he wonders if they recognize who he is. This crowd surrounding him, do they know the face of Eren Jaeger? Do they know the name? Do they know he's the one who plugged up the wall?

What would happen if he disappeared?

A gargantuan man, a professional gambler of strength, is bent over Eren, hurling a fist toward his face. Eren's eyes open, and the world swims back into his consciousness. The fist is coming at him, expanding. Blurring closer. A flesh-colored whirl. Eren catches the arm, locking it in place. Amazement overtakes the man's expression. How? he seems to think; his eyes finally latch onto Eren's eyes and look, Who are you? Do I know you?

A chance to retaliate—

Fight, he had once told Mikasa.

Eren slackens his hold. The fist connects with his chin, and his cheek hits the dirt in consequence. The ground spits up dust that channels into his mouth and down his throat. His lungs convulse. His eyelids sag. Blood throbs all around him. He has sunk deep in the ocean where it's very quiet and very still.

Do they know?

There's the ring of a brass bell, hardly a murmur in Eren's deeply submerged mind where it's very quiet and very still.

"You lose, little boy." A wad of spit melts on Eren's cheek. He compresses his lips together as the warm saliva sweats down his face. He closes his eyes.

The giant man wipes his mouth, stands erect, steps over Eren. He swaggers with another victory to the referee and collects his prize. After a moment of deep peace, reluctant to leave the stillness and quiet, Eren opens his eyes. A shard of light pierces his retina, and Eren winces, letting the darkness take him under once again. He sinks, floats, disappears. He returns. The second time he opens his eyes, he braces himself for the bright slit of sunlight to open upon his eye like a wound.

Squinting, he pulls himself to a sitting position and drags his sleeve across his sweaty, bloody, spit-on face. He sits there, heaving for breath, and rises very slowly out of the high tide of oblivion, feeling it stream down his scalp and run off his elbows and hands. His mouth is filled with rust. He spits out scarlet. When he breathes, he feels the sharp edges of his rib bones and a blade of pain knifes through him. He gasps in three daggers of air and tries to stand. He stumbles. A few men laugh.

He straightens and hobbles out of the dirt ring. The winner boasts his next challenge, radiant. Proud. Eren hobbles away.

Before he makes his leave, the referee stops Eren with a firm clasp on his bicep. "You look familiar," he says. "What did you say your name was?"

"Marco."

"I thought it was Thomas."

"I could be Hannah. Or Hannes. Maybe even Carla."

"You fucking with me, kid?"

Eren claps his arm free.

"Not really. Not at all, actually." Eren is not only himself. His life is not only his life. He is the dead. He's been dead since the fall of humanity. He was dead before he'd been born.

"You should take a break and rest," the ref says. "You look like you'll drop dead."

Eren smiles. The ref grimaces.

"I'm all right. I feel great. I feel—I feel." He feels like he could open up his wrists and watch the wounds flower out of him, petal after petal, the weight and the burdened blood splashing color on the ground in ugly roses, as little by little, his weight is lightened and he is lifted. "Thank you, sir. But you don't need to worry about me."

The ref is grimacing. "All right, son."

Regenerated and pure and good as new, Eren sets off.

Bury the dead . . .

The air is crisp and biting. The sun has expired to a late afternoon languor. Crowds stream steadily past Eren as he navigates the streets. The world is a faint smear, an impression of something that used to be. A rained-on footprint. As he walks, Eren feels very still. Immobile yet walking. An eyehole of inertia as everything around him revolves in a violent turbulence that somehow does not touch him. He is hermetic. Bloodless.

Eren stops at a kiosk. Scroll paintings hang down from a wood awning. His eyes immediately find a painting of Humanity's Strongest Soldier. It's not a perfect representation. The figure in the painting stands at a taller height than that of Captain Levi in flesh and blood. It has broader shoulders, louder eyes, a braver jaw. Made unreal by idealization and fetishization. Something for the eye to consume, a product of fantasy.

"It's our best-seller," a merchant says, referring to the Captain Levi scroll. "We also have the Survey Corps' Commander Erwin." The merchant is a short, rotund man, with gray hair swept thinly across his forehead.

He extends an arm toward the line of paintings: Here's the Rogue Titan, he's our last hope, you know, I heard he roars with all the rage of humanity, I pity the other soldiers, Talk about severe hearing loss, right?: Here's Queen Historia Reiss, she killed the tyrant-turned-titan Rod Reiss, Yes, she killed her own father for the good of the people, Our very own Goddess, Aren't we fortunate?: Here's Squad Leader Hanji Zoe, maniac genius and inventor of the titan guillotines, Ruthless in anger they say, Watch your neck, Hah!: Here's Mikasa Ackerman, the second strongest soldier of our time and, if I do say so myself, the most beautiful woman alive, I got three of these in my sock drawer and take 'em out when I can't finish, Don't tell my wife.

"How much for the Captain Levi scroll?" Eren says. The merchant tells him the price, and Eren snaps open his coin pouch to count his money, though he already knows how much is inside.

"How much for Commander Erwin?"

Once Eren pays the fee, the merchant rolls up the scroll and hands it over. The canvas is grainy and earthy in his hands. He rubs the edges between his fingertips to feel its substance and sturdy material, and then tucks it away. Just as Eren turns from the kiosk, another customer approaches. They bump shoulders. Eren glances down at a man. His face is wrapped behind a black mantle, puffs of his breath misting in the chilled air. Suddenly Eren is gripped by the need to be acknowledged. He wants this person to look at him. He wants this person to see his face. He wants this person to know his name. The man doesn't look at Eren and keeps walking, the mantle eddying behind him like a swirling drop of ink. Eren submits a delayed apology and, head turned, unintentionally catches the knoblike eyes of the merchant, who's old and porcine and uses paintings of Mikasa to arouse him.

Eren says, "Have you thought that maybe you can't finish 'cause it's time to close shop?"

"Sounds like you're trying to say something to me. You're not trying to say something to me, are you, kid?"

"No, it's just—I didn't think a man of your age would have the energy. You know?"

The merchant spits. "Piss off."

The painting of Mikasa wavers in the wind. Eren goes on. Soundlessly his shoes negotiate the street.

What would happen if he disappeared?

The customer turns his head as Eren's back diminishes down the alley, the dark buoy of his hair nodding farther and farther into the distance. A sharp breeze billows the black mantle. The paintings knock against the wood awning. The man's head turns again; the merchant cannot see his face.

"Do you have one of Eren Jaeger?"

"Who?"

"The boy who controls the Rogue titan."

"A boy?"

"A brat."

Do not self-pity . . .

"Do you have that fancy black tea?" Eren says.

The shopkeeper rifles through the shelves behind her and sets a box on the countertop. "Here you go." She's a full-bosomed woman. In her thirties, probably. She has a luxurious thicket of dark curls situated on the top of her head that looks as though if she tilted her face too far in one direction, it might disturb her equilibrium and unbalance her backbone.

Eren hands her all the money he has left over from his previous purchase. She gives him a rueful look. "I'm sorry, baby. You're a little short."

"By how much?"

The woman bends forward, her hair swinging atop her head. It maintains some bounce after the rest of her has stilled. "Tell you what, I'll make you a deal. I know who you are. You're that titan boy, right? You're Eren Jaeger." He's silent. She smiles. "I recognize you from the newspaper. You look older in person. More rugged." She husks the word rugged and brings her elbows in together.

"It's all right," Eren says. "I'll pay the full amount. I just need to go back to HQ and—"

"I'm offering you a deal, Eren Jaeger, not charity. Understand? I'm not a generous person."

"I understand. As long as it's not charity."

"I will reduce the price of this tea," she says and stretches further across the counter. The top of her dress is unclasped, her elbows tucked tightly together. "In exchange for a kiss."

"A kiss?"

"A kiss." She smiles without showing her teeth. Her voice sinks, and she leers at him through her eyelashes. "And if you give me a reason to, I'll bring the price even lower. How's that? Just show me what that pretty mouth of yours can do."

"I don't know how."

"You don't know how to kiss?"

"No."

"It ain't difficult, honey. You feel your way through it and do whatever your gut tells you."

Her heavy breasts heave against the laces on her dressfront, and her gaze steadies on his. Smiling, she fits her palm over the broad of his hand, and with the delicacy of a razor's edge, like a mother coaxing an apprehensive child, she puppeteers him to reach inside her dress. Eren slips his hand between the stiff fabric with the innocent, abashed curiosity of a little boy—and then he's touching her. He's touching a woman. He's surprised to discover how soft she feels, how fine and supple. Like dough inside velvet.

His blood surges and his gut writhes in an uncomfortable agitation. The same agitation that will afflict him occasionally late at night and confuse and frustrate him and take him back to the trainee barracks where the older recruits would pant in their beds, their starched sheets flapping in the dark, safe from judgement and exposure, knowing that nobody in the room would say anything because they understood one another; they had felt what it was like to burn from a fire within their own skins, the smell of flesh heavy and full in the small barracks making them dizzy with the sound and weight of their own blood.

The same agitation that will make Eren think about the sweat that pearls at Captain Levi's temples and that one strange time in which he had felt the urge to lift away the captain's hair and lick the salt off his forehead and nearly scared himself to death by thinking the thought, and late that night he had to lie in bed, his sheets flapping secretly in the dark, to relieve that uncomfortable, unknown feeling writhing inside him, hissing to himself repeatedly and guiltily, what the fuck? what the fuck? what the fuck? until he squealed one last time in a tight, shrill voice what the fuck!

"Do you like it?" the shopkeeper says. "Do you like touching me?"

"Do you like being touched?" Eren says.

"Only when soldier boys like you touch me."

He looks at her. She has dull brown eyes and black stubby eyelashes. He doesn't know her name. He fans out his hand and settles into her powdery skin. Her face starts to shine, her eyes growing dark. He presses his hand flat, searching for it. Where is it? It should be here, right?—Why can't he find it?—There. He finds it, with the heel of his hand, between her chest bones.

"Oh?" she says.

"What?" he says.

"You're feeling my heartbeat."

"Is that abnormal?"

"Between lovers, not really."

"And between strangers?"

"It's a bit odd."

"Oh."

She looks into his eyes and must see something there because she tilts her head and her face adopts an expression of amused surprise. "You're afraid of dying, aren't you?"

"What?"

"You're terrified, shaken to the core. You poor child, a soldier in the Survey Corps who fears death." She squeezes his hand tighter to her breast. "Look at me, baby, look." Her face is so close that he can see the faint reflection of his face in her eyes as if he's looking at an apparition of himself doubled in two flat pools. "You're going to die, and I'm going to die, and that black tea will evaporate, and this tea shop will crumble, and humanity will fall. And—no no don't look away—look here—Nothing lasts, sweetheart. Absolutely nothing."

"What about art? Don't paintings last?"

She laughs without opening her mouth, a throaty humorless sound. "What, like that painting you've got shoved in your pants?" She grins. "Say it does last, who will be there to see it when nobody is left?" Eren doesn't say anything and she reaches back to undo the clip in her hair, shaking the curls so that they fall loose around her face. Behind the derision and nihilism, she's nothing but a naked body and primal instincts. "You're killing me here, making me wait like this. Hurry, now. Come behind the counter."

He doesn't move.

"Want to see me beg, that it?" He doesn't move and she tears free the laces of her dress and bends over the counter while stretching backward, her spine long and incurve, her hips poised at such an angle that Eren can see on the other side of the counter her hand sliding under her skirts, hiking the material over silk stockings and white garter belts. Eren stares, having never before seen a grown woman's underwear, thinking that it's not unlike a soldier's gear with its clasps and buckles and moving parts. She kicks up a leg, hooking her high-heeled shoe on the table's edge, and grabs his hand. "Here, feel me, feel how hot I am." He feels how hot she is, the undergarment moist and thick with musk. His hand falls away.

"You want it too, right?" she says. "Come behind the counter." He remains where he is. "This is the only thing with any meaning, Eren Jaeger. This is the only thing that lets us endure this hell. I'll tell you what's going to happen to you: You'll never see outside these walls and you're going to meet a terrible, exquisitely horrific death. Your future is hopeless and inevitable. And do you know why that is?" Her voice has quickened, and she expels a hot, hasty breath through the mouth, her lips quivering. "Because this is the kind of world we live in. People like you always lose in the end. But enough about that. The only thing that matters is what's under your clothes and what's under mine. Let me show you how to become eternal. Come behind this counter."

"All right."

He goes over the counter and she places one of his hands on her breast, the other between her legs, and surges against him so that he lies back flat across the wooden countertop, all of his body surface yielded up to her. She tells him to make a fist and he does and she grinds against his knuckles, her hair falling around their faces in dark cascading curls, and she starts to pant at him, Good boy, good boy, You're such a good boy, I'm going to mount you on this counter, You're not afraid, are you? are you? Use your fist, baby, Harder, yes oh God yes. She's taller than him, long enough to match and surpass his length and overcome him. His fist is slick and hot, the lips of her insides lapping him through the damp, white undergarment.

She pushes up his shirt, throwing opening his unbuttoned pullover, and bursts out of her dressfront, flattening to his chest. She is all soft curves and he is all hard planes, but somehow her body seems to violate his and render him impotent. She draws her knees up onto the counter, hitching her skirts over her stockinged legs. He reaches under her clothes to wrap his fingers around her fleshy unseen hip. Her lips are the shape of a bow and the color of a red heart, and they draw him in like a pull of blood. He fixes a point of reference on her red-heart lips and opens his mouth to receive her mouth. He lets his eyelids slide lower. He can feel the warm vitality on her breath, the warm sweet life.

Temporary, he thinks and then temporary, as their lips slide together; and then temporary, as their mouths stretch wider; and then temporary, as her heartbeat thunders harder and harder and harder:

temporary temporary temporary

The sound of bells startles him. He opens his eyes and pushes against her, holding her chest off of him. She hugs herself into hiding while Eren cranes his neck back. His perspective is inverted. An upside down Captain Levi stands at the door. Without looking away from Levi, Eren withdraws his hand from the woman's dress and rolls out from under her and onto his belly, the captain's image rotating into its correct orientation. A pebble of heat lingers in his palm. He closes his fingers around it. Quickly it fades. Silent and stolid and a little languid, Captain Levi approaches them and the shopkeeper scrambles to conceal her skin. Eren shrugs out of his pullover to toss it at her.

"How much?" Levi says.

"Excuse me?" There's a flush of color high in the woman's cheekbones, and she's clasping the pullover tight to her front.

"For the tea." She hugs the pullover and doesn't speak. Levi's hand disappears under his mantle and when it returns, he holds a small, copper-clasped pouch. Inside it, coins tumble together. He takes up a few and stacks them metallically on the counter. "This is sufficient, I'm sure." Stiffly she nods her head.

"Get off of there."

Eren swings his legs around, dazed, and descends, the rubber soles of his shoes meeting the floor steadily. Levi claps the tea to his chest. "We're leaving." Eren says nothing and holds the tea in his arms. Flinging a hand over the counter, Levi seizes the pullover hugged to the woman's chest. When he speaks, his voice is phlegmatic and without inflection. "This doesn't belong to you."

She glares and clutches tighter, protesting, as he coolly wrests it from her with calm, strong, nonviolent flicks of his hand, his body unmoving aside from his arm.

"Excuse me, Excuse me," she says, her head rolling in time with the calm but strong side-to-side flicks.

"Captain."

Clutching the pullover in a dead vise, she jerks viciously to the right, the article whipping away in Levi's hand. But Levi holds on, neither loosening nor tightening, nor moving with the jerk, his iron arm held away from his body.

"Why don't you let go?" she says. "He told you to let go."

"It's not yours." His hand starts to move again in those calm, strong flicks. She curses him quietly and mildly, her head rolling.

"Let go. Just let go. You bastard. You son of a bitch—"

"Captain Levi."

Levi releases it and draws the black mantle over his head. Eren follows him out the door. Once they're outside, the box of tea becomes an anchor of guilt in Eren's hand. He carries it as one carries shame and self-loathing. He walks in stride with Captain Levi, each pump of his legs overtaking the inertia and reluctance and fatigue, his body moving with a fatalistic numbness.

"You looked like you were enjoying yourself," Levi says.

"You're angry."

"I'm not. Soldiers don't accept pity handouts. And we especially don't prostitute ourselves for shitty tea. You don't have much shame, do you?"

"I wasn't . . ." But perhaps he was. Perhaps he thought if he gave her his mouth, she would touch him and he would feel her all the way through the stillness of his blood and into the stillness of his mind where she'd start a ripple, and he'd come alive once again. But instead he had felt her stillness, her deadness, an absence of feeling. They had been two corpses moments away from fucking each other.

"This is shitty tea?" Eren extends the box to Levi. "I don't like tea very much. I was getting it for you 'cause I thought it was special. I didn't know it wasn't any good."

A heartbeat of hesitation and then Levi takes the tea and puts it somewhere under the mantle.

They continue walking, though Eren feels caught in ceaseless suspension as everything around him revolves like wheel and axle, uninterrupted; his skeleton is old and weary, and ghosts have made his skin thin. Captain Levi glides soundlessly when he walks.

"You could be right," Eren says. "I might be shameless. I don't think I can afford feeling much shame anymore. Once you've been stripped down and chained up with a metal bit shoved between your teeth . . . What I'm trying to say is I don't think anyone can humiliate me any further than I've already been humiliated."

"Turn down that street," Levi says abruptly.

"Yes sir."

Unburden the heart . . .

Down the street there's a small shop that has a chimney exhausting a steady shaft of smoke. Captain Levi leads Eren to the shop. In this part of the district, the crowd is thick but mindful. Pedestrians part a path for Levi and Eren to move through, sensing their presences without conscious acknowledgment or visual discernment, swinging around Levi at the last instant, just before their shoulders can collide. Eren follows at Levi's heels, making his shoulders small and insubstantial. On either side of them, kiosks display jewelries and arts and clothing. Levi stops. Eren stumbles into him.

"Sorry," Eren says. Levi raises a hand. "What is it?" Eren ducks forward to see behind the mantle. He sees only the outline of a narrow nose and a rigid, austere mouth. "What?" Eren says again, looking over the churning heads around them.

Outside the activity and the rattle of voices, a man stands static against the wall, an enigmatic figure immobile among the stream of motion, arms crossed, wearing a clean jacket and black pants, the brim of a hat jammed over his face. Slowly, the hatted man squares his chin, an infinitesimal movement against the swift blur of faces. Rather than seeing the man move, Eren feels the sudden bearing down of interrogative eyes and knows the man is watching them, a keen cryptic stare obscured by the hat, closing in on Eren from no source at all.

There's a tug on Eren's sleeve. He looks down.

"Excuse me," a young girl says. She's wearing a dress that swims around her body, her neck and collarbones rising gauntly from a gaping hole, two knobby knees and two naked feet pillaring under her. She has wide black eyes that gleam like glass beads, and brown crusty streaks smear her legs. In her hand she has a red flower. "It's a rose," she says.

"How'd you get a rose? Aren't those rare?"

"Uh-huh, I'm selling it. Do you want to buy it?"

"I don't have any money."

Passively accepting his answer, she nods her head and turns her attention elsewhere. As she turns, the rose tumbles from out of her grasp, red and soundless, landing in the dry dust weightlessly. Eren reaches down to pick it up and recoils. Careful of the thorns, he reaches down again.

"Here." He relinquishes the rose, but before she can receive it, Levi takes it from Eren's hand and allocates a few coins in return.

The girl pockets the coins and says, "Roses symbolize passion and desire. You should give it to the person you love."

"Really?" Eren says. "A rose means all that?"

"Uh-huh," the girl says. "And when a boy gives a girl a rose, she has to do it."

"She has to do what?" Eren says. Her expression is vacuous, depthless, her black reflective eyes unblinking. She doesn't clarify. "Captain?" Eren says, snapping his head toward Levi who's lowered his mantle, his face turned in the other direction. Following Levi's sightline, Eren finds the hatted man slanted against the wall, his position and posture unchanged.

"Who told you that?" Levi says.

"What's she talking about?" Eren says. "I don't understand."

"The man who gave me that rose said so," the girl says.

"Where are your parents?"

Her mouth hardly moves when she replies, her eyes dull and glasslike. "I don't know. Dead, probably."

Levi turns his head, motionless from the neck down, to look at her. "I know someone who'd like to meet you."

"Who?"

"Queen Historia."

"You know the queen?"

"That's right."

She reaches up a hand. Levi stares at the five outstretched fingers in thoughtful unrecognition. When Levi's arm stays slack at his side, Eren clasps her small hand in his and leads her away. "You'll like the queen. But she can be a little strict sometimes."

They walk toward the shop exhausting smoke and when Eren realizes the captain isn't with them, he reverts his head and sees Levi muttering to the man in the hat. He's a thick and tall man. In juxtaposition Levi appears to be a scale model figure.

"That's the man who gave me the rose," the girl says. She kicks out one of her crusty smeared legs, tugging her skirt above her kneecap. "He told me I wouldn't let him in. That's why."

With immense reluctance and oncoming dread, the gears in Eren's mind turn and the pieces click into place. He had known when he saw her legs. He had known when the rose pricked his fingertips. He had known even when he said he didn't. He had known and denied it because the truth horrified him utterly. And now she is looking up at him with empty eyes, foisting the heavy, horrifying truth upon him unignorably. And as much as he would like to keep the veil down over his eyes; as much as he would like to believe that he is hermetic and untouchable, he can feel in his heart the iron drop with a resounding echo and he imagines his wrists coming open, unbleeding. He wants to cry.

Eren sweeps his arms under her knees and back, swooping her up from the ground. She's very light. "How old are you?" he says, distancing himself from what he knows and from the emptiness in her eyes so that he can do what needs to be done with a medical efficiency.

She raises up and puts her small sticky hands on his face. He blinks. "Put me down," she says. And without any warning, she thrusts the top of her head into his. Two red welts appear: one on her head and a matching one on Eren's. He doesn't put her down.

Very suddenly behind them there's a terrible shout, and the girl drags on Eren's neck to see over his shoulder, saying, "What's he doing? Is he coming back?" and Eren doesn't answer, spiriting her swiftly into the shop.

He finds a kindly doughy woman to help them. She says she's the chef's wife. After a vague explanation, his panic disguised as self-possessed urgency, Eren lets the woman take the child into the back of the pastry shop where nobody can disturb them. Eren sits down heavily in a wooden chair, his face in his hands. Someone takes custody of the chair next to him. Without looking up, Eren knows it's Captain Levi.

"Where did she go?" Levi says.

"That was dried blood on her legs," Eren says. "Did you know that?" Levi stares at Eren, his forehead unlined and without expression. "There was a lot of it, too." Eren hears his own voice at a distance, foreign. Hollow. Levi looks away.

"Where is she now?"

"I found a woman," Eren says, his voice alienated from himself. "The chef's wife. I figured a woman would know best how to help. She's so little. I can't tell her age, though. She could be older but underfed. Eleven, at the oldest."

"Where did they go?"

"They went that way. Through that door. She's so little. I don't know how she—and that man was—I'm not an idiot. I know it happens sometimes. I mean, Mikasa was almost—but she wasn't." There's a tremor in Eren's hands, and he feels weak and wonders if he forgot to eat this morning. He stares straight ahead, unblinking, his eyes a little wide. The distant, foreign voice goes on, hollow and steady: "I know it happens sometimes. To little boys too. But I don't understand it. I don't understand why. Why did this happen? She's so little. He could've killed her."

"What a pointless question to ask." Levi still has the rose in his possession. "It's a cruel and unfair world. But you said you already knew that." He tilts the flower at Eren, the whorl of petals curling infinitely around its epicenter. "Perhaps after these past few weeks, all quiet and cozy inside these walls, with nothing to worry about but titan experiments, you've become too comfortable. You've forgotten that this is where you come from."

"No, I could never forget that," Eren says. "But I can never get used to it, either."

When the woman returns, the child walks by her side and smiles at them with an impersonal kindliness. She pads barefooted to Levi and says, "You kept my rose. It's such a pretty color, isn't it?"

The hand not holding the rose settles upon the girl's head and brushes the hair back from her face. Eren watches, thinking, That's the captain's hand? then looks at the red rose, thinking, Why? Why? Why? Why? He balls both of his hands into fists, restraining them by his thighs, in order to keep himself from reaching over and tearing out its petals.

The chef's wife shows the girl the pastries and sweets behind the glass counter display. The girl looks in, her grimy fingers fanned out against the glass, and suggests that the scary man and the old man come look too. Eren figures himself the scary man and Levi the old man, but then thinks that maybe it's the other way around; that Levi is the scary one and Eren is the old one because having a metal bit shoved between his teeth has aged and deteriorated him. He's been dead since the fall of humanity, after all.

As Eren approaches, the thick smell of sugar begins to make him lightheaded. With each forward step, he becomes weak and anemic and loses the strength in his legs. A violent emptiness opens up inside of him and he can't think about anything other than the bottomlessness in his belly and the faintness behind his eyes and When's the last time he ate? He can hear Mikasa inside his head:

Did you eat breakfast, Eren?

I'm not hungry.

Did you eat dinner?

I think so.

You look . . . unwell.

Jean was there—

I know what you're doing.

What am I doing?

You're making Mikasa worry, is what you're doing.

I'm not hungry.

Armin was there—

Hungry or not, if you don't have enough energy, your endurance will suffer. Do you think you can harden your skin if you're weak from skipping breakfast?

You're right, Armin . . .

Spinning about-face, Eren surges out the door. He doubles over and dry heaves into the street from the nausea of prolonged not-eating and barely manages to stay on his feet by shutting his eyes and willing the dizziness away and convincing himself that he is not about to pass out, he is NOT about to pass out. He's sweating. Another wave of nausea crests at the back of his gullet and his mouth gapes open, bloodlessly, as he retches up thick saliva and hunger. He makes no sound.

Along the street, people avert their eyes and hurry past. Eren's face grows pasty and cold, and he might be leaking tears. His legs bend under him like hollow reeds in the wind. Before he can crumple to his knees, he gropes out a hand toward the wall—but finds something else. Helping him stand, two hands catch him under the armpits and hold him up. Eren spins, an arm flung out, and seizes Levi around the neck, hurling his whole dead weight at him. Levi receives and absorbs the momentum and gravity, taking Eren into his arms with a low grunt, his palms clapping to Eren's back. Eren's legs melt under him, dissolved into two limp doll legs; he cannot feel them. As he starts to slide to the ground, Levi lifts and holds Eren up from his body to pull him down against his chest and secure him there.

Eren's heart thuds tremendously into Levi's chest, and his breath comes out in shallow pants against his ear. With an arm grappled around Levi's neck, Eren gradually recovers through deep-breathing, willpower, and call of duty: He cannot be sick, he cannot despair, he's humanity's last hope. With the back of his wrist, he scrubs his mouth and eyes and stares blindly down the street, not seeing but feeling strangers watching him. Delirious, he hides his clammy face in Levi's hair.

"You look like shit," Levi says.

"Feel like it too," Eren says.

"Hold on to me." The captain pulls Eren's arm around his shoulders and lets Eren lean on him for a while longer.

From under his mantle, Levi produces his coin pouch and tosses it to the little girl who has been standing near the door, watching diligently.

"Go in there and buy a chocolate bar for me. Spend the rest on whatever you want."

The shop door opens and shuts, and Eren's cold sweat smears onto Levi's neck, his whole body wrapped around the captain limply.

"Did you kill him?" Eren says.

"Survey Corps disembowels man in public," Levi says. "That'd make an unfavorable headline, don't you think?"

"You were supposed to kill him. It's what he deserved. I would've done it."

"I know you would have. That's why you're still a kid."

When the girl returns, she has crinkled in her hand a brown paper bag, which she gives to Levi. Dimly Eren wonders how long he's been standing outside, suppressing his hunger-nausea, and how long the captain has been holding him on his feet.

What would he do if I disappeared?

Levi says, "Are you all right?"

"Yes, I'm all right," Eren says.

"I wasn't talking to you."

"Yes, I'm all right," the girl says from somewhere behind Levi's leg.

"Go back inside and buy yourself something."

Eren hears the shop door open and shut. "I feel like a pathetic weakling next to her."

"Next to her, that's exactly what you are." From out of the bag, Levi withdraws a block wrapped in parchment paper. He undoes the paper, revealing the end of something brown and hard. He snaps off a square piece and offers it to Eren.

"What is it?" Eren says.

"Chocolate."

"It doesn't look very appealing, Captain. It's brown and it's hard."

"Open your mouth."

"I don't know if I should. I'm not feeling well."

"That was an order, Eren. Not a request."

Eren opens his mouth and Levi sets the square on his tongue. "Go on, eat it."

As he chews, Eren puts a hand over his mouth. "It's good." Although his hand hides his mouth, a smile shows in his eyes. "It's really good."

He eats another square, chewing with a contemplative deliberation. The chocolate melts in his mouth and washes over his palate. When he swallows, he sucks any lasting residue from his teeth and tongue. "It tastes good, but it makes me feel good too. I don't know. I can feel it all over me, if that makes sense."

"Your energy is too low. That's why."

"Oh."

Levi breaks off another square and holds it to Eren's mouth.

"I can feed myself, Captain," he says, head turning. Levi, lightly putting his hand on Eren's cheek, turns his head like a pivoting toy. They look into one another's faces. Levi's eyes seem not to move, but somehow focus on Eren's mouth without looking away from his eyes. He spreads Eren's lips apart with the chocolate square, pushing it past Eren's teeth, sliding it deeper into his mouth until the pads of his fingertips meet the full flesh of Eren's lips. Eren closes his eyes as he chews.

"You're just like Mikasa," he says. "Mothering me like I'm helpless."

"Mothering you, huh?"

"Yes, mothering me. I'm not a child, you know. You don't have to feed me."

There's another snap of the chocolate bar and Eren opens his eyes upon Levi. He has in his fingers another piece of chocolate suspended near Eren's mouth. "I just said—"

"I'm not deaf."

Eren looks into Levi's face, and Levi looks into Eren's. Acquiescing, Eren sighs and allows himself to be handfed. Again Levi's fingertips touch his mouth. This time they push a little too hard; Eren's lips come apart on them. He tastes salt and metal and cocoa dust, and not very many people know what the captain's fingers taste like; not very many people have felt his calluses against their mouths. The captain's fingertips can become soft, and not very many people know that the captain can become soft.

Levi's hand falls away, glittering faintly. "Sorry," Eren says. Levi is looking at him.

"Why did you buy that stupid thing?"

"Which stupid thing?" Eren says.

"The scroll painting."

"I just wanted it."

"If you wanted a picture of me, I'm sure there are plenty of wanted posters still lying around. They're a little more accurate, in my opinion."

"I'd rather not remember you as a fugitive."

"I understand. You'd rather remember someone who doesn't exist."

Levi looks down the street, his arm hanging limp by his side. His hand is still glittering.