If anyone were to ask Levi what his least favorite holiday was he would most likely reply that it was Christmas. For Levi, it was never anything against Jesus or religion he just hated the fact that his birthday had happened to land on this sickly, lovey dovey holiday that was played up by pretty much everyone. And around the holidays PDA was everywhere. Sure, he had Hanji, but honestly he was pretty sure she didn't count. They were friends, friends that lived together and occasionally cuddled during movie night, but they were still just friends. To others it may seem like more, but Hanji had never really mentioned anything about a relationship and Levi had never thought it was a very good idea to bring it up.
Of course he wanted to ask her, but he didn't want to ruin a perfectly good friendship. Being more than friends would be better but he just couldn't conjure up enough courage to ask her. Honestly, he was fine with how he stood with Hanji. She still considered Levi the most important person in her life, next to maybe her family, and they had been living together since they graduated high school.
But back to the story at hand. It was Christmas. The Christmas of their junior year of college. Well to be more precise it was the day after Christmas, the worst day of the entire year. Levi may not have liked Christmas, but he hated the day after Christmas even more. It was depressing, there were no more presents to give out and people had to return to their boring everyday activities and on top of that all of the tacky Christmas decorations, that somehow made people feel happier about their pathetic lives, had to be taken down.
Taking down the decorations was the worst part because he and Hanji would split up the job. Yes, splitting up the job had seemed like a good idea, but in reality it was a terrible, terrible idea. Hanji, being the manipulative woman she was, would take the easier side of the job, taking down the tree and all of the decorations inside and Levi was left with the chore of taking all the lights off the outside of the house. Which involved climbing up onto the roof and taking out all of the industrial staples that were holding up the dumb lights and taking each string of lights down one by one. Luckily for him, this year was a white Christmas. So on top of everything, he had to take down the lights with the added difficultly of maneuvering the roof while it was covered in a white sheet of slippery snow as more continued to flurry down from the sky.
So that lead to the current situation at hand, Levi, on the roof, in the snow, taking down lights, when suddenly he heard a dull thud. Turning around he realized just what that thud was. It was his ladder. Falling. Into the snow. He sighed to himself. Suddenly realizing the full extent of what just happened. He was trapped on the roof on the day after Christmas.
Maybe Hanji had heard the ladder fall. He shook his head, thinking to himself that she was probably dancing around inside the warm house to Christmas music while she took her sweet time taking the ornaments off the tree. She wouldn't be paying enough attention to hear the thud of the ladder.
Smiling to himself slightly he thought about Hanji, she had this careless way about her that always seemed to bring ease to Levi who always seemed to be tense and angry. He wasn't really always angry. It was just a barrier he built around himself to keep people out. A safety net. Hanji was the only one who had been able to cut her way through that net and into his heart.
He shook his head, enough the sappy metaphors. Here Levi was, stuck on a roof in the snow while his ladder was laying below him. Sighing to himself he began to brainstorm for ways to get down from the roof, but nothing was coming to mind. He was completely stuck, physically and mentally.
His eyes wandered around him, searching for a way to get down and get inside the warm house. He wasn't all that cold yet but he knew that if he didn't come up with a plan to get down pretty soon, he was going to be getting pretty cold in the near future. Still, no logical escape plan was coming to mind.
Situating himself so he was sitting on the roof a little more comfortably with a view of the street in front of him, he noted that not many people were out today. It made sense that no one was, it was cold as balls out and besides who would want to go outside when they could stay inside their warm houses and play around with all the gifts they had gotten yesterday. So there goes another possible escape route. There wasn't much of a chance that someone would walk by and he could shout down to them, asking for the ladder.
Once again he found himself caught up in his brainstorm. His mind shuffling through all of the ways he could get his ass off this freezing cold roof. At this point, the task of getting the Christmas lights down were completely forgotten and his mind was otherwise preoccupied with finding a way off the damned roof.
'Would stomping on the roof be heard from inside?' He thought to himself. 'No probably not.' But this was a moment of sheer desperation and in the moment he thought that it was a good idea to stand up on the snowy roof and he began to stomp his feet. Looking back on this, it was a very stupid thing to do because next thing he knew his left foot had slipped out from beneath him and he was falling. All he could think at this point was, 'Oh shit.'
And then he was laying in a snow drift in his front yard. But in the long run it had worked. He had gotten down from the roof and was now able to go inside. Honestly he didn't know why he hadn't just jumped down in the first place. The roof really wasn't that high and the snow was at least a foot high in most places. He just stood up, dusted some of the snow off himself and made his way up the front steps of his and Hanji's house.
Opening the door to his house he walked into the warm household. Only to be stopped by Hanji yelling at him from the living room, "Did you stomp your feet before coming in?"
Obviously he had not because he was now shaking from head to toe and also covered in snow. His main concern after his fall from the roof was to just get inside the house. So he responded with, "No Zoe I did not and if you will come help me get some of these layers off I will tell you why."
He heard a slight chuckle from the other room and then Hanji appeared in the archway that connected the entryway and the living room. Her face showed confusion once she saw that he was covered in snow, but she came over to him nonetheless and began to help him pry off his heavy winter coat and other articles of clothing.
Once they had stripped him of most of his layers, Hanji lead him into the living room and sat him down on the couch, covering him in a throw blanket. And showering him with many different variations of, "What happened?!" Honestly Hanji could easily be compared to a worried mother half the time. She always seemed to have that frazzled, scared look about her, but that was just one of the things that Levi had seemed to find so endearing about her.
Shushing her, Levi began to tell her what had happened, "Hanji, calm down, I was just taking down the Christmas lights but then my ladder fell and I-"
"Your ladder fell?!" Hanji looked at Levi with a worried expression.
"Yes Hanji now let me finish telling you what happened," he waited for some indication that she was listening so when she nodded at him, he continued, "So my ladder fell...and then I realized that I was stuck on the roof in a snowstorm so I began to brainstorm ways to get down and I thought for some reason that it was a good idea to stomp on the roof, so I stood up and began to stomp, trying to get your attention from inside. Then I slipped and fell off the roof into the snow."
"You fell off the roof?!" Hanji said once he was finished regaling her with the ever so interesting tale of everything that had just happened to him.
"Yes Zoe, that's what I said." He shook his head at her then crossed his legs under the throw blanket, but before he could say anything else, Hanji was hugging him tightly.
"You idiot," she mumbled into his shoulder, "You could have gotten really seriously hurt."
Levi smiled and said, "I know, but at least I'm not on the roof freezing my ass off."
They both laughed and Hanji pulled back from him, saying, "We can leave the lights up until the snow melts and when it does then we will get them down together."
"Sounds like a plan." Levi smiled at her. Then he looked at her, truly looked at her. She was beautiful with that worried look present on her face and the lights from the Christmas tree reflecting in her glasses, and suddenly Levi was throwing everything that he had previously thought about Hanji out the window and he leaned in toward her. She followed his lead and leaned in as well, both of their eyes locked on each other before they closed the distance between them. Their lips crashing together in a flurry of emotions that both of them had been holding in for years now.
The kiss didn't last very long but when they pulled away they were both smiling at each other. Suddenly Christmas didn't seem all the lovey dovey to Levi, because now he had someone to be with. Someone he cared so deeply about.
That night they curled up on the couch under one throw blanket and watched movies together, but this time he wasn't upset because he knew what the cuddling actually meant. He knew that Hanji liked him the way he had been liking her for years now, and he was happy.
Ever since then, Levi had a very different view about the day after Christmas, it wasn't as sad as before because for years after that, the day after Christmas wasn't spent taking down decorations, it was spent with Hanji as they celebrated their anniversary. And when they did take down the decorations, Levi didn't have to take the lights off the roof on his own. From that year on, they did it together.