For all intents and purposes of this fic, Levi's age has been changed a bit. Since Isayama hasn't released anything older than thirty, I can't really say how much so, but I always headcanon him at just over twenty, maybe twenty two. Eren's age has also changed, considering a fifteen/sixteen year old in college (unless it was Armin that is) would be a little interesting, especially in Eren's department. Adjust the other ages appropriately to fit if you would. I see Eren as about twenty in this fic and Levi at around twenty-six. Thank you, and please enjoy.

No seriously. Please. Enjoy.

Eren loved to be up high. It was the only place where no one focused on him. They focused on trying to stay alive. Innate human instinct was to try to keep their feet on solid ground, where they could control their surroundings. In the air, there were no guarantees. It was part of the reason that the university had trouble keeping patrols and their buildings intact. They were always fixing gashes, that appeared mysteriously in strange parts of the outside of the building. The Physics department had been questioned, and the art department, even come through Eren's engineering department. But Eren's secret hadn't been revealed. His creation, the creation that gave him his wings at night, hadn't been found, and Eren was not being incarcerated.

"Eren!"

Eren glanced up to see Armin standing there, and he put down the Tig welder to greet his Department Head. Armin was the same age, but he'd worked harder than Eren at the studying parts, and had made his way out of high school with a degree, making his way to Department Head in their sophomore year of University. Eren just studied for the applications, so he could stay up high. Armin stopped in front of him, smiling.

"Hey, Armin." He answered. "'What's up?"

"How are they going?" Armin asked. "The wings?"

Eren rolled his eyes. "I don't call them wings, Armin. That's your name for them. And they're coming. The second pair is being a bitch though, so it's not my fault. The size difference means that I have to tweak the engine so that it doesn't jerk you off of your feet. So it gets louder, and it can't be loud, or we'll both get caught." He explained, looking around before quieting himself. "The abandoned room at the end of the photography hall that was supposed to be a dark room is exactly the space I needed. I've got my pair hidden in my room under my bed, but yours is in there for now."

Armin nodded. "I've never liked flying, so maybe you'll be able to change my mind with these things. The way you talk about them... They make you happier than I've heard you in a while." He explained.

Eren looked at the watch on his wrist. "I'm sure they do. I've gotta go." He answered, pulling on his brown jacket and pulling his satchel on over it. "Talk to you later?"

Armin nodded, looking a bit sad. "You don't be a stranger, okay? You've been distant since we've been here. We never talk anymore. You only obssess over these things and even Mikasa has barely seen you." He answered.

Eren just kept walking. "Yeah, okay." He answered, walking out into the hallway.

He knew what Armin meant. He hadn't been the same since he'd lost his mother. The last bit of his family he'd had. His father had died earlier for whatever reason, some illness or trauma, his mother never said, and then she'd died when the house had burned down. Eren had been out with Armin when he was supposed to be in bed. Mikasa had been with her family, of which Eren had never met, and she'd come straight there when Eren had called on his cell phone. They'd treated Eren for smoke inhalation and third degree burns that he hid like the plague. He didn't sleep with his jacket off. He couldn't face those burns. What if his mother was there when he looked?

Eren went up to his dorm, in need of tweaking the so-called wings to calm himself, and settled his head against the wall of the elevator as it hoisted him up. He sighed. It was a long anniversary day.

When he got off on his floor, it was quiet as per usual. This was mostly a philosophy and literature hall, so the few people that were here weren't the loud, rowdy frat guys that plagued the rest of the school, or crazy sorority chicks. When the college had moved him and a few other science department guys into the dorms, a few people had been ejected due to crazy complaints on both sides, and settled elsewhere. But Eren's roommate had moved out after their mid term graduation, and he'd never been saddled with a new one. School was near drawing to a close, and the summer dorm dwellers were mostly his dorm, and would have run of the school. He'd need a new place to fly.

Approaching his door, he noticed something odd. His door was cracked open, not like it had been bashed in, but still. He reached into his satchel and grabbed his switchblade, then moved to the door quietly.

He nearly screamed. There wasn't a ransacked, tiraded room. That would almost have been better. The room had instead been made tidy and clean, the polished desk where he usually left a scattered amalgom of parts to make Armin's smaller scale set of gear was perfectly clear, almost shining, and there was a clear bin sitting on the top with two more inside that were labeled 'junk' in big bold letters. The computer was clear of the model he'd had up on it for forever, and even had been shut down. The clothes he'd had laid out purposefully on the floor were in a bin, and his clean swimming gear was in the same bin, where it had been laid under the other clothes. He glanced to the bedside table and it was clean of all of the gels and creams that he'd ripped the labels off of. They were in the trash can.

Forget nearly. Eren screamed at the short shit standing in his room with a spray bottle and a rag cleaning the window tint off the damned thing.

"No!" He screamed. "No, no, no!" He tried to frantically open the computer back up and bring the unfinished model back up again. "No! What the hell! Who are you?" Eren shouted.

The intruder stopped, blinking, and turned to Eren's panic very stoically. "I'm Levi. I just transferred here from the Forensics department hall. It was overcrowded." He answered. "Who are you?"

"I'm Eren, the guy who lives in this room! What the hell!" Eren pulled his hair in frustration. "It's all gone! That model took me three months to get that far! I don't have backups! Gah!" He dove for the bin and the glass jar that had leaked into it. "Do you know how much this costs? This was supposed to last all week, and that was the only time I would have money to get the new stuff." He yanked his swimming gear out of the clothes bin and tossed them onto his bed. "Wait, where are my sheets? What the hell- stop! Just stop!" Levi had turned to put the still dripping glass back into the can, but he stopped, staring at the dripping, expensive pain gel that was pooling on the table. "You have not explained why the hell you are here destroying my system with your OCD, because that prototype took longer than the model to get where it had been and many healing bones and wounds to make."

Levi lifted a brow. "I didn't say anything because you were too busy panicking about empty tubes of nameless gels and a mechanical Frankenstein. And I can't tell whether I mean the computer or the...whatever that amalgom is that I put, very much as they were found, in the plastic containers I had extra." He said.

Eren felt his eyes blow wide in rage, and he almost stepped out of his body for a moment before he was snatching every single tube out of the can. There was more than enough that he would need until the end of the week in each, but that wasn't the point. He lifted them out of the bin and laid them in a neat line like zombie soldiers along the edge of the bedside table in the order he used them, and stated what they were and why he needed each of them, and their prices.

When he got to the glass bottle, being conscientious of the dripping gel with a cupped hand under them, he lifted it to inspect the cracks in the glass. It wasn't anything he couldn't fix, but he'd need his mig welder, which was in that plastic bin with the 'amalgom'. "I can fix this and save what little is left, but I need to get to the welder in that bin, if you really did put it in there. But this is a numbing gel that I need at night to calm the pain in my arms. It's about fifty dollars and ounce. This is sixteen do the math." He suggested.

Levi stepped over to the plastic bin and popped the top off of it. He removed the plastic boxes inside that made Eren's heart ease just a little with each one he looked at, then looked in before selecting the two welders he had, the normal welder, and the mig in his right hand. "Which one of these is the welder?" He asked.

"The one I need is in your right hand. The one on the left is a smaller version of the one you see in movies, and you fucked up a little disconnecting it from the gas tank. After you plug that in, open the window you were scrubbing the tint off of. Which, by the way, I will also have to replace, as they came standard but I had to replace on my own after my last roommate moved out with a bang." Eren explained.

Levi prepared the mig welder nearly perfectly, replacing the normal welder back into the plastic box it had come from. He opened the window, and then came over again with a cup so Eren could place the leaking glass inside, and handed him a clean rag. Eren sighed, wiping his hands on it and moving to shut off the gas valve.

"In summary, the mess that it looked like to you had purpose. We need to work something out if this is going to work." Eren said. "I haven't laid a complaint on anyone so far as I have been here, and I have never been on the recieving end of one either. I would like to keep it that way."

Levi was trying to air out the room a bit faster with a sheet. "I get it. I hate mess, is all. I wasn't told I had an obsessive tinker as a roommate, and I came in and saw your quote unquote system, and I went a little nutty." He explained.

Eren sighed. He would have to explain his "system" to get this guy to leave it alone. He stood up and stretched. "I lay the clothes on the floor because in the morning my ams are weak, and I can't handle the weight of the drawers. Lifting them is a chore, so I can't use the closet either. The swimming gear was clean, and I laid those out anticipating being worn the fuck out when I came in today even though I have time set up at the pool." He answered. "The computer still has some tweaking to be done before it's perfectly reliable, but if I leave it on and don't try to save anything, it works just fine. That's why it's mostly fans actually. It needs lots of cooling."

Levi didn't change his expression while Eren set up the mig welder and set it off a few times. He merely watched Eren, ignoring the mess on the table to watch what he did. "How will that fix the dripping glass?" Levi asked.

Eren smiled a little. After the initial shock of being absolutely pissed off at his new clean freak of a roommate, the guy was actually relatively nice seeming. "Empty the bottle into that cup, and clean it off. This thing should be ready by then." He answered.

Levi nodded, taking the cup into the bathroom. Eren watched him use what looked like a miniature squeegee to clean the outside of the glass and slide the gel on the outside carefully into the cup again before he poured what was left in the bottle with the rest of it's contents and rinsed the inside out. He brought it back out and handed it carefully to Eren, leaning against the wall and watching.

"If I were in the shop they'd be yelling at me to put on a welding helmet, but since this one doesn't send sparks, I'll just not." Eren told the other guy.

He pressed the tip to the crack in the glass and held it there for a moment, starting the process, and slowly, carefully heating the glass to melting process. Levi watched it, all silently, and when it was finished, reached out to touch it. Eren warded his hand away. He dug through the boxes for the welding tongs he had, thick heavy duty metal that could withstand it for what time it takes to carry the cargo to the sink. He turned on blazing hot water, testing it with his hand before slowly adding cold to the mix and then turning the warm off so that the glass was slowly cooled and smoothed at the same time.

He pulled it out and there came a perfectly smooth bottle. Levi took it from his hands then. "That's amazing." He declared. "I thought it only worked with metal."

Eren shook his head. "A tig welder would have been better for it, but the tig is back in the engineering hall labs." He explained. It wasn't a total lie. The Engineering department's tig welder was in the engineering hall. His was in the old abandoned darkroom where his stuff was.

After the fluid-like gel was put back into the newly fixed bottle, Eren set it onto his side table, not shocked to see the old mess had been cleaned up without so much as a swirl in the polish of the wood to show it was there.

"So, now that my system has been explained, let's try this again since you know the basics of my routine and I know about your OCD." Eren said, extending his hand. "I'm Eren Jaeger, I'm an Engineering major with very little sense in his head."

Levi smirked, taking his hand. It was a nice expression to see on his seemingly unexpressive face. He didn't make many expressions if the lack of lines in his face were any indication. That would be interesting for him to try to figure this guy out. He'd make a good interrogator, but for some reason that brought to mind him standing nonchalantly against a wall with a partner beside him at the interrogation in a dungeon, some kid across the way with crazy eyes staring him down. And that made him uncomfortable for some reason.

"I'm Levi Ackerman. Forensics major and cleanfreak. Which I suppose you kind of knew." He answered.

Eren's eyebrows shot up. "Ackerman? You related to Mikasa Ackerman?" He asked.

Levi gave nothing away in his face. "I'm her older brother." He answered. "You're that Eren Jaeger?"

Eren blinked. "What Eren Jaeger, what did she say about me?" He asked.

His face softened somehow. "For starters, after she went AWOL for two days, she came back home and told us all that you lost your mother in the fire." He answered softly.

Eren released Levi's hand and pulled his own back to his side. He had to itch his arm before he shoved his hands into his pockets. "People die. It happens." He went and snatched his swim clothes out of the bin. "Do me a favor and don't touch my bed again please." He blinked. "Wait, where are you sleeping? There's only that bed."

Levi watched him walking out. "I sleep in a chair." He answered.

Ah. Eren just turned and walked out.