Disclaimer: I don't own SnK
Warnings: OOCs (I'll explain them), Fail (with a capital F), some slash (the obvious ones…), weird Armin, supernatural, bad grammar (b/c who the hell still edits), it was supposed to be in English, but what the hell… just being more wordy is good enough for me.
Another Millennium
Life could make a person soulless with time, day after day, incidents hack away at the beautiful to fill in the holes with void. It is simply a matter of which was faster, erosion versus creation.
He was bereaved of both parents at a young age, and bereft of all hope to die as an orphan in the middle of the forest. The coldest night, was also the same one that he had learned the most of the world, that it wasn't cruel, or merciless, but relied on luck and coincidences. Things were already written, and if you were written on the side of the balance that ate off the other, then good for you.
Levi was sure that he was obviously born on the other side, death was almost welcoming coming to the frozen loneliness in the pit of his stomach. The ground felt moist from the rain, and the mud stuck to the side of his cheek while bits of snow fell upon him. Looking soft as cotton and tainted white, it brushed along his skin, no longer bothering to melt, for there was no heat on the skin that was warmed a light pink only the morning before. They say people wished to live on their brink to death- Levi simply wanted to sleep.
"Your mother," A gentle, feminine voice danced away in the dark, irritating thoughts in Levi's mind for a moment, and he turned his numb body to it, seeking warmth, "bequeathed you to me."
From what Levi could tell, she had smooth, ivory pale, translucent skin and ebony dark hair that reached her hips, it flowed with the leaves and branches in the wind.
Her most startling feature, though, was probably her astonishing ruby eyes, the colour of fresh blood. She was beautiful. Eerily beautiful in this moment where Levi knew nothing but pain and paralysis.
"I am Mikasa, and you should come with me, I would recommend. Though I wouldn't force." Beset by doubts only briefly, Levi climbed numbly to his feet and wobbled to stand in front of her, eyes unwavering other than the small fraction of fear that fazed his otherwise calm grey eyes.
They next thing he knew, it was morning and he was surrounded by softness and warmth.
"Good morning." A voice greeted him.
Besotted by sleep and the bless of surrealism, Levi was caught between slipping away from the bit of happiness and straying.
Rationality got the better of him, so he stumbled to sit across from the woman sitting in the table in a corner of the small room, whose hand traced a piece of parchment flamboyantly with a feathered quill in hand.
"Good morning." He croaked, voice thick from sleep and lack of water.
A pair of benevolent ice grey eyes smiled up at him, and Levi jolted, wondering if he had hallucinated the scarlet that felt so disturbingly real.
"How do you feel?" She asked, her demeanor shifting to polite aloofness.
Levi looked down at his hands, to find that they were bandaged and numb.
"Well enough, thanks to you."
Her hand movement increased for a short moment, swinging her elbow out and tilting a bare, ivory neck before setting her quill down silently and leaving the parchment to dry.
Lifting her full attention to Levi, and walking towards him, she raised a curious index finger to run across Levi's cheek. And the boy could only stare; frozen by the pair of blue-grey orbs boring unblinkingly into his own. Her finger was just as soft as he imagined it to be. Soft and cold as ice.
That year, he was ten.
(*)
"Anything you want from town?"
"No thanks, you under-grown twat."
Levi tightened his lips into a thin line, "I beseech you," He drawled, "to at least act as though you are older than me."
The woman turned, amusement dripping from the way she looked at him, and he knew why.
At age twenty, Levi looked older than his age due to his usually tired looking eyes revealing an old soul. Mikasa though, looked no different from the porcelain dolls travellers brought from time to time for prices much higher than anyone in the town could afford.
"Why don't you go outside and do the shopping yourself?" He asked without really expecting an answer.
His companion slipped to the more shadowy part of the room and smiled thinly, which was more of a twitch of her pink lips, only adding to the ice in her eyes. The boy/man rolled his eyes and left without another word.
They lived in the forest. Fairly close to everything else, and Levi had wondered as a young kid why a young woman like Mikasa would choose to live by herself in the shallow of the woods without so much a neighbour.
The house they lived in was old and had two levels, composed of red bricks and wood, suited for a family of four and a bit.
Despite living in a convenient place, the young woman rarely left to town, nor did she keep a job that Levi was informed of. Instead, she slept too much during the day due to her intolerance of sunlight and took care about business in the dead of the night. The only other correspondent she had seemed to live in town, and was every bit as eccentric as she. Occasionally, she would leave very early in the morning to see the aforementioned correspondent with the novel-like roll of parchment in hand and return after moon hung in the horizons.
Levi never pressured his housemate into anything, allowing her odd manner of a lifestyle as long as the house was still fairly clean when he woke up, and enough food on the kitchen counter for him to survive yet another day. The time they actually interacted with each other was limited. Early mornings, if Levi woke up early, and late at night if his eyes refused to shut behind their curtains.
Levi, even after ten years of living with Mikasa, did not see her as a guardian… or ever a friend. He liked to think that they shared some sort of comradeship or another. They rarely spoke, and Mikasa's little home was always cold due to the lack of conscious bodies (but Levi always blamed Mikasa's strange body temperature for that). Nonetheless, Levi still found the young woman's blunt company better than the cordial girl whose parents ran a bakery. He also knew, though, in his mind that the time for him to leave the little haven, perhaps becoming a butler at a mansion to a nice family, and maybe travel to the heartland and start a living, was soon. They were in effervescence, and he wanted it to last longer, and he was in no hurry to become a butler or a businessman or anything like that. Mikasa had stated once that it would be nice if he ever did choose those professions, and it wasn't that she had refused it, but both knew that Levi held his passion and ground in the art of hunting.
He wondered if that was enough.
(*)
At age ten, Levi was bright and blunt; it was difficult to tell if he was intelligent or painfully not so.
He had a tall mother with a face much like his own and a happy-go-lucky father who was a good three heads shorter than the wife. His little sister had inherited their father's trademark grin and a jocular nature.
One day though, gathering wood to repair their slightly run-down house, Levi found his parents lying on the forest ground.
They weren't breathing.
He was smart enough to know they were most likely dead, and shred enough to notice the obvious bite marks on the side of their necks. Yet for reasons he could not recall to this day… why he had fallen to his knees and refused to run in terror at the town's head, or even a shopkeeper remains a mystery.
Instead, he chose to crumble to the weakness in his legs and his parents' soulless eyes. Staring endlessly into them for who knows how long.
Maybe if he ran, the ear-piercing scream that dislodged any last hopes and disbeliefs would never have resounded so clearly against his eardrum.
His sister died. And he could've saved her. And he didn't.
It was a week later that a strange woman adopted him.
Out of pity?
He didn't think so.
They ten year old Levi refused to speak for days, weeks, months after the incident. Sometimes, he would wake up in the middle of the night, getting up for the cup of water his mother had placed on his bedside table to find the sinking feeling in his stomach reminding him, constantly, refusing him a moment of peace.
"Your parents and sister, Levi. It's the day they were murdered." Levi frowned at the obtuse way she phrased it, a jabbing point near his heart. There was no need to bowdlerize, but he would have appreciated it if the young woman had been even a little more delicate.
She wasn't, though.
"They think they were killed by vampires." She continued in that same nonchalant manner of hers, picking up a piece of vegetable with two wooden sticks.
Levi clenched his own fork a little tighter and forced himself to chew.
His saliva felt thick.
"They didn't dare take the bodies. So they're probably food for some beast now."
Levi exhaled sharply and lowered his head further, a shaking hand placed on his stomach, which was boiling for him to run, his eye frames containing the few drops of liquid only by sheer will-power.
He wished she would just shut up.
"Vampires will be quiet if they had their stomachs filled. Don't feel too bad about it." She looked down at the quiet boy, in her ice quiet grey eyes, there contained no provocation, no sense of regret or guilt. They were void. Void as the day his parents stared back at him over the cold, frozen forest ground.
The boy looked away from her forbidding gaze, anger overpowered by a sob bubbling from the back of his throat.
"Better nameless citizens than someone important."
Now, to anyone other than an eleven-year-old emotional boy, these would sound like sharp verbal jabs, but Levi had enough. For he jumped up and flipped the table on the young woman, splattering her with food as she caught a plate aimed at her face with excellent reflexes.
"Don't you dare… dare say that they were nameless!" he roared, rising to his full height after throwing his chair aside, where it collided against the wall. His chest heaved up and down in pure rage, pointing at the young woman who looked almost bored as she slid a finger across her should to pat off a piece of bread.
His voice was hoarse from lack of use in the past year; he had forgotten what his lightly accented voice sounded like.
"Don't you dare… you witch..." The pool of tears ate away at his conviction, corroding it to a silent ripple in his chest.
Only a moment ago, he had wanted to hurt her, to sink his nails into that pale, cool skin, to twist into that calm countenance until it showed fear. Now, with shaking knees and impaired vision, he sunk to her feet, absolutely exhausted.
He didn't care anymore; he still wished he had died along side with them. The pain and guilt of being the survivor was impossible to exorcize. He was done with thinking of what could have made those calm eyes of his mother fill with terror, what fear his sister had driven his sister into that heart wrenching scream, that single tear which slid a trial across his father's face, the face that said men did not cry.
It wasn't fair. They were warm, and kind, and beautiful, and they were all he had in the world. They didn't deserve it.
He bawled harder, shook more violently, his stomach weighed heavier, his head pounded bigger, and he wished as he had everyday this past year that he was dead.
God would be kinder to allow him death.
A cold, soft hand grazed the side of his burning face, he didn't even have the power to shake it off.
The hand slid down his cheek and shoulder until it reached Levi's arm, feeling the callouses and scars of attempts abandoned halfway.
"You cannot die," She murmured, voice barely audible beneath Levi's frozen thoughts, "because if you died, there will be no one left to remember them."
He wasn't quite sure when he had finished crying and falling asleep, but when the eleven year old woke up, he felt empty, and at the same type lighter, but at the same time more burdened than he had ever felt in his life.
(*)
"How old are you?"
"Sleeping." Was the lazy reply. Levi shook his fifteen year-old head in disapproval; it was a timeless question he has been pondering for the good part of ten years. If he assumed the girl had been young when he first met her… so… eighteen? A time for marriage for most, and now she would have to be at least twenty-five. Strangely, and almost frighteningly, she didn't look a day over eighteen.
Town was pretty interesting. Full of little stores and superstitious people huddled together talking about witches…
Levi chose to avoid those little groups and dodged into a bookstore. The floor creaked and groaned beneath him, the door was only slightly better off.
He looked around at the large, leather bound volumes, rolls of parchment, sealed with wax, and rows of battered, falling apart monument diaries and journals of the dead and forgotten.
Levi creeped up to the little blonde sleeping behind a pile of books and tapped the blonde's hair gently.
He jolted violently, and rubbed his eyes.
"Bloody hell Levi, just call my name, wouldn't you? Poppet?"
With little jealousy, he peered into the youthful face and let set down a small roll of parchment.
"You only told me not to do that last time." He complained with an irritated glance at the parchment, as though it was entirely the poor parchment's fault.
" Ah… yes, it is Mikasa's birthday. Wish her great health from me, wouldn't you, love?"
Levi genuinely liked Armin. He was warm and quiet-mannered, had the face of a ten year old and the language of an ancient man. He also slept most of the time. Another thing that interested Levi about Armin was how well he knew Mikasa, it was uncanny and "it unsettled Levi, but only just.
"Tea?" he offered, and Levi grunted, picking up a stool to sit on across from Armin, and like everything else in the bookstore, it was old and battered. Armin, bright and smiling, set down a pair of heavy looking cups to pour steaming hot tea for Levi.
"How old is Mikasa?"
He listened to the sound of flowing liquid and the clinking of expensive looking China, so out of place with the rest of the environment. It always befuddled Levi on why the two both had the characteristic of living in run-down, derelict places while owning enviable things.
"You'd be surprised, pet." The blonde said wryly, lips twisting into a small, fond grin.
Levi frowned and edged away from the man.
Armin Arlert is Mikasa's childhood friend. When he was young, outspoken and with an inferiority complex, it was Mikasa who stood by his side. Though one eventually will eventually grow out of that particular mindset, it is still a glorious feeling, to be freed from such repressive thoughts. One learns to become more interactive, more communicative, and more sociable in that same reserved way. That of part of Armin, at least, will never change.
"Change of topic then." He muttered begrudgingly through gritted teeth.
The blonde propped his elbows on the battered old table and gestured Levi to go on, a small smile playing on the corner of his lips.
Levi didn't hesitate, "Does she have family?"
At this, Armin's eyebrow twitched, as though remembering something unpleasant.
"She does. But perhaps, mate, that you would do better to enquire her of the subject yourself. I am not in a position to give you information, however much I may have to spare, I'm afraid. With all due pleasure, it is quite the fascinating tale – I am only ashamed that I may not do it justice."
His companion turned away, eyes rolling into the back of his head.
"If it's a no, then say 'no'. Damn git." He muttered under his breath, annoyed at the amount the Englishmen had to spin out before reaching his point. His French origin always taught to be beautiful, but concise. Levi usually had the concise part. Beautiful? Not so much.
The little Englishman grinned, choosing not to retort, and instead fell down onto his arms and slowed sleep to carry him away once more.
True to his word, Levi did, in fact wait for the woman to wake that night.
"What do you want?" Were the first sleep-marred words from her mouth as she regarded him from the wooden stairway.
"To talk." He replied, and watched as she glided down to seat herself across from him. She looked so graceful, floating rather than walking. He wondered how a human being could make walking look like a form of art.
"What a strange request from you, irksome shortie. You usually just throw nasty comments at me." She said, amusement hanging thinly in the air.
"I…" He took a sip of tea, "not really." He felt like a child next to her, he always did revert back to his eleven-year-old self, screaming uncalled insults at her while bawling into her soft clothes, and she would hold him, gentle and strong and cold.
"I just want to know more about you." He said bluntly, tired eyes boring into her ice grey ones, hoping she would take her with some seriousness.
"You called me just to talk about that?" She asked, tone skeptical, "you know me better than most."
But not all. A small voice murmured resentfully in his head.
"What is it then?" She continued, eyes definitely softer.
He reorganized his thoughts, "I was wondering about you family. Where do they live? Why don't you live with them…" he trailed off, shrugging and staring intently into her eyes in search of an emotion, anger, bewildered… but as usual, they were void. Levi blamed his teenage lack of tact at phrasing a question. He almost envied Armin's roundabout way of talking.
She broke off their contact with a ruthful twitch of the lips.
"I lived in Heartland, a long time ago." She said, and Levi was thankful for her lack of mockery.
"My mother was… some of the last of my clan, an anomaly compared to most women… no, people in general. My father was British. They were killed when I was young."
Levi cringed; the similarity they shared attacked him to urge her on more.
"I was rescued, though, and adopted into a new family. My new family was wonderful." At this, her stiff tone softened, and Levi could sense the nostalgia, happiness and sorrow within her ashen eyes. He only knew that look too well.
"I loved my new brother." She looked away, the surface of her orbs glazed over, and Levi knew she was away in a different era. They way her fingers intertwined together a little tighter and how her mouth, usually pushed into a slight pout, slackened. It was absolutely genuine.
"He had a temper," there was a dry chuckle, "indeed, he did."
"And he wanted to be a hunter. A vampire hunter." She paused there, eyes meeting Levi's wryly, "I tried to stop him. But when he wanted something, there's something within him that shines a light for him to overcome any barrier. The fear of death… pain of losing comrades… it all molds into his determination, and he sees absolutely nothing else. Even though I begged him."
"So, when our parents were murdered by vampires, there was nothing left to stop him, and all the more to fuel him."
Levi wasn't quite sure how to react to the information thrown at him, even though he had wished for the knowledge only moments ago.
"He had been exorbitant on himself, reasonably so, for he possessed not an ounce of talent."
At this, a rueful grin twitched on her ever statue-like face, it made Levi crack a bit of a dry grin too.
"That, I think, is why he died so quickly." Mikasa swung her gaze slowly towards Levi, and the man felt the temperature drop.
Suddenly, he felt fearful under her ice-grey eyes.
(*)
"A vampire hunter?" Levi asked.
Armin yawned, hiding his mouth behind pale hand, "Aye, he was horrible." He laughed, a light jingle compared to Levi's low bass.
"Eren was quite the character! Not a soul would say they didn't know Eren Jäger's sister!"
"Sister?"
"Why yes. The one that pulled Eren out of the all the trouble he made. A prodigy unknown and unsought of before her time. One known and feared by even the most gruesome of vampires… Mikasa Ackerman! Of course!"
Levi's heart fluttered.
A/N:
I thought I should justify the OOCs.
Armin: First of all… he is unusually British in this fic, thus the long sentences and… all sorts of endearments. I think one would eventually overcome any shy barriers once you have been… well, spoiler so I'll just stop there.
Well… that didn't explain much…
Tell me your thoughts?