a/n: originally posted on ao3 on february 6, 2016.
It begins at the end. Years later Levi supposes it was the only way it could have ever happened.
When the walls come down life is hectic for a while, and then everything slows. Historia regains and solidifies her rule. Damage control becomes repair, surviving becomes thriving, and Hange organizations a new expedition. Moblit quietly reminds them they're not commander yet, but Erwin doesn't seem to mind. He lets them do all the talking.
The Survey Corps has a new regard. They are greeted with smiles in the streets, and recruitment numbers are twice as high as they have ever been. It makes Levi bitter sometimes. This is how it should have been all along.
When they go to the ocean for the first time Levi has to stare for the better part of an hour before it begins to feel real. The wind is dusty but Levi doesn't mind it so much. It's gritty and cold and crisp, more invigorating than unclean. The air makes him feel so far from the walls.
Erwin stays at his side for every moment as everything falls into place.
"It's loud," Levi says.
"What?" Erwin says.
Levi repeats himself, then catches the smallest twitch of a smile on Erwin's face.
"For fuck's sake," Levi mutters, and Erwin's smile grows. He's never heard Erwin joke on an expedition before, and he breathes easier.
Combined with the wind, the sea is loud, a dull roar that Hange still manages to beat by barking orders at their squad members and shouting delight over the smallest creatures in the sand. Connie splashes Jean and Sasha in between jotting notes for Hange. Eren, Mikasa, and Armin are in a world of their own, calf-deep in the waves with their arms around each other, heads bowed together. No one disturbs them.
Levi wants to move closer to Erwin so they don't have to raise their voices, but they're already close enough. He could lean against Erwin's side from where he stands, and the thought makes something ache in his chest. The titans are gone and he's tired of denying himself this, but he stands straight, still.
"Hange will be perfect," Erwin says.
Levi looks out where Hange holds a clear flask to the light, discussing water samples with Sasha. Erwin is stepping down after the expedition. He sees Hange as a more effective peacetime commander, and wants to devote his time to the lost archives recovered from the pre-wall era. He already has an apartment in Sina. It doesn't sound like retirement to Levi, but as long it gives Erwin a break he isn't going to argue.
They're quiet for a while then, and Levi knows Erwin has something to say. This silence is different, and it's all Levi can do not to rush him on.
"Levi," Erwin finally says. He's looking away, as if he's already asking too much. "After we return from this."
"Yeah?" Levi says, trying to keep eagerness out of his tone.
"You can…" Erwin rubs the back of his neck, looks like he's regretting the conversation. "That is, I have room at…if you'd like–"
"Would you spit it out?" Levi says. He wants to be sure Erwin's asking what he thinks he's asking, wants there to be a reason for the way his heart is suddenly racing. "Are you saying you want me to live with you or something?"
Erwin's mouth twists in half a smile, and he looks back at Levi.
"I don't seem to know what to do without you."
Levi inhales sharply, a sound that is quickly lost in the wind. He touches the back of his hand to the back of Erwin's, a move as tentative as Erwin's words. Erwin's hand twists to take Levi's, warm and sand-dried. It's all the answer he needs.
There are eyes all around so they don't make another move, but now Levi knows.
There are a thousand questions, a thousand things he wants. He's wanted this for so long, and Levi has to remind himself they have time now.
Levi links his fingers with Erwin's slowly, one by one. They have time.
At first not much changes.
They stay close to Sina for a while. Erwin wants to oversee the transition, and Levi helps train the new squad leaders. Some like Jean take to it naturally, and in those cases he doesn't have to try too hard. Mikasa is as unready for leadership as he once was, but she's an excellent motivator. The Corps needs her still. She has one or two more social graces than he ever possessed, and she can be a symbol going forward.
Levi and Erwin go to work, keep their distance, and on the surface everything seems the same.
But things have changed.
At first it's strange being able to occupy a space that's just theirs. Erwin is hesitant around him at first. When he first kisses Levi he actually apologizes, and Levi scoffs, pulls him in for another, and another. Levi is used to encouraging Erwin in war and he encourages him now to touch, to take what they both want.
They learn and relearn each other, with their hands and mouths and quiet words in the dark. They're tired at meetings the next day but Levi never regrets it. Sometimes they just talk for hours instead of sleeping and it's what Levi will remember when they're surrounded by higher-ups, when he meets Erwin's eyes across the table and knows his heart has gone too soft to conceal this.
They don't hide the fact that they go home in the same direction, and if there's talk Levi doesn't hear it. Everything's become simpler, and the background noise dies away.
They stay close to Sina for a while, but only for a while. When a year passes and the summer comes, wanderlust sets in. The city and the Survey Corps are surviving without them, thriving. They allow themselves to move on.
"You're done with military rations," Levi says, glaring and pointing at the packages Erwin has brought home from the capital. "You're going to start eating real food."
Erwin blinks once, barely in the door. "Hi to you, too."
Levi huffs, goes to pull Erwin inside by his lapels, kicks the door closed behind him. He nudges Erwin back against the door and kisses him slow and deep until he feels he's conveyed just how much he missed him.
"Hi," Levi says when he finally breaks away. "We're getting a garden."
They've settled into a house outside the former borders of Maria. It's close enough to the old walls that they can commute when they want, far enough away to feel like they're free.
Erwin is still working with members of Historia's cabinet on the beginnings of a linear history of their world. He brings home massive books and dusty documents that Levi helps him sort through. In the meantime Levi is teaching himself ceramics. He likes the heat it requires, finds it an easy mess to clean, and favors making tea cups. He starts selling them on his business trips into Sina, but keeps the best ones for himself.
Buyers recognize him sometimes. Levi ignores them when they call him by his old nickname, has choice words ready for those who just stand and gawk. He only finds it hard to resist when a child asks him for a war story.
"This is all your fault," Levi says to Erwin after a little girl scampers away, satisfied with tales of titans. "Making me a mushy piece of shit like this."
Erwin smiles fondly, leans close to kiss him on the temple. Levi grumbles about the public eye but puts an arm around Erwin's waist to keep him there a moment longer.
At their home in the country they don't have to worry about the public eye, and Levi runs his fingers along Erwin's arm as they sit on the porch, considering where to start their garden.
"Alright," Levi says after a time. "I've got it."
Levi makes them both wear sun hats to protect against burns, and they get to work. The dirt is warming under the beginnings of spring and Levi feels promise in the seeds they plant.
"Just think," Levi says, his fingernails caked in soil he'll spend an hour getting out later. "Real peas, real tomatoes, everyday. No more filmy garbage."
"I started scraping the film off the rations, you know," Erwin says. "Years ago, after you told me it would give me–"
"–diarrhea," they finish together.
Levi's eyes widen, and he surges across the row of upturned soil to push Erwin's hat back and give him a quick, hard kiss.
"You actually listened," he says, awed. "No one ever listened about that shit."
"Of course I did," Erwin says, bemused. "I trusted you."
Levi kisses him again, and wonders how he could have gotten so lucky.
Levi wakes with a crick in his neck from falling asleep with his head on Erwin's desk. He was only dozing really, the humid warmth of the air and the scratch of Erwin's pen making him drift off without thinking.
Erwin's hand is gentle in his hair and Levi could fall asleep again, but he can feel the tension in Erwin's wrist. Something's wrong.
Levi opens his eyes. Erwin has turned in his chair to face the window, his writing forgotten. Once the window would have provided a view of Wall Maria. Now it looks beyond, into a mellow summer afternoon and an open world. They both watch it, wordless.
"I don't deserve this," Erwin says after a while, so quietly Levi isn't sure he was meant to overhear. "There's so many who should be here."
There's an instead that goes unspoken, but Levi hears it and it makes him furious for a moment.
You deserve everything.
"Your handwriting isn't so shitty anymore," Levi says.
"What?" Erwin says, sounding like he's been pulled from a reverie.
"Look."
Levi puts a hand on Erwin's jaw, turns his face away from the window.
"Remember when you first came back to work all those years ago?" Levi asks. "You might as well have been writing in another language."
Erwin smirks, and Levi can see his eyes coming back to the present, so he continues.
"Now this here looks like something a respectable toddler might have written."
It's not really that bad and they both know it. Erwin laughs and Levi smiles at hearing it, brushes a thumb against the corner of Erwin's mouth.
"Maybe when I'm eighty I'll produce something legible," Erwin says.
When I'm eighty. Levi likes the sound of that.
"You deserve this, Erwin," he says.
Erwin nods slowly, then picks up his pen again. Levi doesn't know if Erwin believes him yet, but he'll keep telling him, as many times as it takes.
When autumn comes there is a new batch of crops from the garden, and they learn to cook with more than they ever had in the military.
"I'm going to fatten you up for the winter," Levi says, peeling potatoes at the counter. "You're getting too damn skinny with all this travel."
"And you aren't?"
"I still train more than you, so no."
"Alright, Levi," Erwin says.
Levi narrows his eyes and looks over his shoulder. Just as he suspected, Erwin isn't taking him seriously. He's sitting at the kitchen table, skimming through a book and grinning under the glasses he's had to start wearing. Erwin hated them at first, hated having something else slowing him down alongside his missing arm.
Then Levi made the mistake of telling Erwin how good he looks in them. Now, of course, Erwin hardly takes them off during the day.
"Assface," he mutters, nearly taking his own finger off with the peeler as he turns back around.
"Hm?" Erwin says. There's the scrape of a chair behind him, and Levi bites his lip against a smile.
"Assface," Levi repeats. "The face of an ass. An ass sitting on a–"
There's a hand on his waist, making its way down to his hips, and Levi eases back against him without a thought.
"Oh do go on," Erwin says, low and close.
"I thought you were hungry," Levi says, arching his neck when Erwin leans in to kiss it.
"Mm," Erwin hums. He nips at Levi's earlobe and Levi's breath catches. He turns around to meet him.
That night they settle for leftovers and settle into bed early. They talk about cutting back on work, letting the funds they've earned take care of them for a while. Levi enjoys the thought as he watches Erwin drift off to sleep, his features slowly evening along with his breath, only inches from his own.
Their bed is small, but Levi knows they'd lie just as close in something bigger.
Somewhere along the years Levi becomes comfortable. He learns to trust the idea of peace almost as much as he trusts Erwin. When his memory holds onto a moment it's not desperation or fear of loss driving him to it. Usually, it's affection.
War does not leave their minds as quickly as it left the world, but Levi can feel the shift. His worries turn to the mundane, hard winters and illness and old age.
Sometimes he checks Erwin's pulse, in the middle of too-quiet nights when Erwin's breath is muffled by pillows and Levi remembers the long years of fretting about him at every turn. On those nights he lets his fingertips rest against the slow beat of Erwin's heart and drifts back to sleep just like that.
Levi knows he won't lose Erwin to anything but time, and there's nothing even he could do about that. But if he could, he would.
There comes a point when Levi realizes he can't force an injury away with brute will. Every year it becomes harder for Levi to kneel in the garden for hours, the joints in his bad leg giving him shooting pains within minutes. Erwin offers to pick up the extra work but there are other chores that need to be done, the weeding and raking that are harder to do with one arm.
So Erwin offers to call on reinforcements instead.
They're all grown, all war heroes, but Levi still thinks of them as kids when they ride up to the house a week later. Only Armin seems to have gotten any taller. Eren is still as energetic, and Mikasa is still wearing her scarf. When Levi asks her if she ever washes it she simply narrows her eyes, and he can believe they're related.
For a few hours the three of them tend to the yard, aiming to leave it fixed up enough that Levi and Erwin don't have to worry about it for a while. Levi and Erwin themselves relax on the porch, occasionally asking them about the goings-on of the Survey Corps, mostly enjoying the good weather and letting them work.
Mostly, for the trio is still young. There is a moment when Eren holds up a rake to his face, makes an enormous mustache out of it as he launches into an impersonation of Nile Dawk, and Armin giggles so hard he drops an armful of weeds.
"That's who won us the war?" Erwin mutters, and it startles a laugh out of Levi.
The kids glance up, alarmed by the sound, and Levi scowls at them.
"Get back to work!" he says sharply, and Armin scrambles to pick up the weeds.
"I've still got it," Levi remarks to Erwin, who makes a noncommittal noise Levi decides to take for agreement. He swings his good leg up on the porch railing with minimal stiffness.
Sometimes he dreams of a past where they had more years to be together. Sometimes Levi feels they were old before they ever had a chance to grow properly old. He remembers when he first caught a glimpse of Erwin in the underground city, how hard his eyes were, how scarred the world had already left him.
Erwin is the first to remind him nothing can come of wishing to change the past. Levi knows this, has accepted it over the years. He watches Erwin's hair turn silver, and instead of fearing the passage of time Levi learns to appreciate it. Seeing Erwin grow older is a luxury he never could have dreamed of when the walls were up.
Sometimes Levi remembers his own mother, who only ever wanted him to live a good life. When he wakes to breakfast in bed and sunlight in the window and Erwin's head against his shoulder, that's when Levi thinks of her most. She would be happy for him. She would have loved Erwin.
He can't bring back the years they lost, but Levi thinks they're doing their best with what they have.
"Why aren't you asleep?" Levi asks, when Erwin's been gazing at the night-dark window over Levi's shoulder for too long.
Erwin shifts on his pillow, reaches for Levi's hand without looking. "I was thinking."
"There's a shocker," Levi says, and Erwin smiles. He links their fingers together. "Alright, I'll bite. What are you thinking now?"
"I'm thinking I'm glad I'm alive."
He meets Levi's eyes, and Levi realizes how long he's been waiting to hear that. For a moment he can't speak so he simply brings Erwin closer, lets Erwin's head rest under his chin and winds his fingers in his hair.
"I love you," he mumbles to the top of Erwin's head before kissing him there. He feels Erwin smile against his collarbone.
Levi closes his eyes and listens. There is Erwin's breathing, the drip of icicles melting off the roof, the rustle of leaves in the garden. They are small sounds, insignificant to anyone else. They don't mean anything but life going on.