When I saw your face, I felt like I'd known you longer than I'd been alive.

Eren Jaeger regretted his decision the night before to leave the sound on on his phone. He was awoken at who-the-hell-knows AM by the loud and piercing noise of the preset ringtone.

"Ughhhhh," he moaned, pulling his blankets over his eyes, shielding any daylight that dared to show itself. He'd had trouble sleeping last night. Again.

It was those faceless dreams that'd shown up once again. Those dreams where he saw no images but he felt things. Love and loss and hate and anger and pain and tragedy and passion and apathy and fear and bravery and everything in between. Those dreams were swallowing, they choked the air from his lungs. But they were nothing at all, except for feelings.

He'd had them more and more frequently ever since he was ten years old. It had originally only occurred once a month or so but now, 9 years on, they happened almost every single night.

Shaking himself out of his thoughts and realising that he was actually thankful of being free of the terrors of sleep, he shoved his hand under his pillow and pulled out his vibrating phone.

Three missed calls. Five text messages. Perfect.

Eren groaned. The sender was Armin. Had he forgotten something he was supposed to do for the latter?

Another call was incoming. Eren answered without hesitation.

"Hello... Armin?" he asked, if not a little sheepishly, not to mention tiredly.

"Eren? Where are you?" came the slightly alarmed voice of his best friend. It certainly brought Eren out of his post-sleep haze.

"I just woke up."

"WHAT?" Armin nearly screeched. "Eren! You said you'd help me with my shift since Annie is off work today! It's been an hour since it started!"

Oh shit. Come to think of it, he did sort of remember promising Armin that the week before. However, since then he'd been drowning in college work and thoughts about his strange dreams.

"I'll just come now!" Eren hurriedly said, before hanging up and dragging himself out of bed. He threw on the first clothes he could find and left the house as quickly as he could.

Damn it, he thought as he jogged along in the direction of Armin's workplace—Smith's Books, a small bookshop in the centre of town. Why am I so forgetful? Armin's gonna be really pissed off.

Eren arrived, heaving and out of breath, at the bookshop ten minutes later. Armin stood outside the door, looking neither angry nor pleased to see Eren.

"Eren? Did you sleep in again?" he asked as Eren regained his breath.

"Of course I did," Eren sighed. "It was those dreams that woke me up in the night and I didn't get back to sleep until six."

Armin knew full well what those dreams were, so he didn't move to reprimand or scold Eren. "Please just set your alarm next time. I don't want my boss getting angry with me, especially since i promised that I would have someone fill in for Annie."

"I'm sorry," Eren muttered, and that was that.

Armin got back to work at the till after instructing Eren to put new books up on the bookshelves. It certainly wasn't very exciting - but working never was.

An hour passed, and Eren was still sorting books out. He was beginning to wonder why he'd agreed to this in the first place, but he could now remember how desperate Armin had sounded. He'd said that it would only be for a few hours; one of his coworkers was coming in at noon.

It was eleven now, so only an hour left. He supposed he owed his friend this much—Armin had done so much for Eren in the past.

He yawned, placing yet another book onto the shelves. He really needed to get a good night's sleep. And today was Saturday, damn it. The weekend was a time when you were supposed to sleep off all the troubles of the week.

Eren absentmindedly brought the next book out of the large box and gazed at the cover, wondering if he knew the book.

He froze and dropped the book as if it were hot coals. He hadn't even got the chance to look at the title or author, but one look at the cover image and it sent something like pain shooting through him.

It wasn't actual pain—but something along the lines of intense feeling, like he could remember it so clearly that he could almost feel it.

He stood like that, frozen, for a few minutes. Once he'd eventually calmed himself, he placed the book on the shelf without so much as a peek at it.

He didn't not want to feel those feelings ever again. They were like dreams, except worse.

The cover hadn't been very special from the brief look he's got; it'd been a wide area of grass dotted with trees and a winding river, a large, looming wall in the background. Just what about those images could have caused him to feel such a way?

"Eren, are you okay?" asked Armin, who'd just approached him.

"I'm fine," Eren replied.

"Eren," Armin said, concern lacing his words. "You're crying."

Eren left an hour later, once Armin's coworkers appeared. He'd asked Armin if he was okay with being left, and the latter had told him to go and get some sleep. There was an author coming for a book signing at 2, but Armin insisted he could handle it now the others had come.

Eren couldn't refuse a chance to get some rest. He felt like a dead man walking.

So, now he jogged through the heavy rain that had finally began to pour, after threatening all morning. It soaked though his clothes and his hair clung to his forehead, dripping water down his nose. Just his luck that it had to rain when he'd forgotten his jacket.

Damn it.

His thoughts drifted back to the book he'd seen and the feelings—painful, terrible feelings—that he'd felt.

Where were they coming from?

Eren had a theory, but he wasn't sure if it was correct.

In this world, everyone had a soulmate. Some never met them, but some did—roughly fifty percent of the population. And, when you saw the face, or, in some cases, touched them, the memories of the past life you'd shared together came back to both of you. Because, you see, soul mates were a thing that transcended the ephemerality of life. Some kind of a bond tied you together throughout however many incarnations you may have lived through.

Eren did not understand that concept, nor was he sure he would ever find his own. But, his hopes had risen when six months ago, his friend (friend was a loose term) Jean had met a boy called Marco and soon after, they had announced themselves to be in a relationship. Ever since that day, Jean had looked at Eren a little differently. He'd even begun to call Eren by the name suicidal bastard, something Eren did not understand. Although, he thought Jean must have surely remembered some kind of a past life, where maybe even Eren himself was present. Eren hadn't dared to ask, however, considering the look Jean sometimes got on his face. Something so uncharacteristic of the arrogant asshole Eren had always deemed him as.

There were said to be three ways in which you remembered, the way your remembered depending completely on chance.

The first—you remembered your entire past life and every aspect of it, from the moment you were born to the moment you died.

The second—you remembered only the life you had with your soulmate, from the moment you met to the moment you parted. Memories of others would only appear by chance.

The third—you remembered merely snapshots. Important moments, unimportant ones. It didn't seem to matter. The range could go from only a few to nearly everything.

Eren wasn't sure which one he liked best.

However, he'd heard that sometimes before you even met your soulmate, you could get a small amount of memories or maybe even just feelings you'd felt in your previous life, if you are near—not touching—your soulmate at any time.

Maybe that's what he'd felt in his dreams and when he'd seen that book. If that was so, then what had caused the book to trigger something? Did it have something to do with his past life?

Now that he thought of it, it seemed pretty plausible.

Eren, being so caught up in his thoughts, didn't notice when he bumped into someone.

"Hey! Watch where you're going, kid!" the stranger said.

"Sorr—," Eren began. But then he saw the stranger's face.

A face that he recognised and one that he didn't. He knew he'd never seen the man in front of him in his life, but he knew that face.

The man had dark hair and stormy grey eyes that were narrowed in anger—presumably because Eren had knocked him near off of his feet. However, terrifyingly, it was an expression Eren knew too well.

The stranger's face changed, expression turning into one of slight horror. "You..." he whispered. "I—"

Eren's eyes widened and he fell to his knees, not even noticing as the concrete grazed him. He saw pictures—hundreds, thousands, millions of them. He heard a familiar voice say his name. He saw his face; the man in front of him. He felt rage. An indomitable, fiery rage. But he also felt love. Painful, forbidden love. He felt soft lips touch his own, stolen kisses in the moments where nobody else was looking.

They'd sworn it was just because both of them were lonely; so lonely that they'd do anything to quell it.

They'd sworn it wasn't love.

They'd both been wrong, and everything they'd had had been taken away in an instant by the great maw of one of those things. Those damn things that ripped everything away from Eren.

He gritted his teeth.

Except, despite all the blood and the death, there were still moments. Peaceful moments where they exchanged hushed conversations in the dead of night, revealing to each other things they'd never said before.

Eren still felt it - the love, the passion, the anger towards those damned titans.

And finally, he had a name for the stranger he'd suddenly begun to love.

"Levi... Levi Heichou?"

AN: please review! :)