(A/N) This is my "modern and everything is nice and normal except everyone is still ultra-fucked because I like to make people miserable au." It features my OC along with pretty much every other AoT character I can squeeze in here. My OC, Erna, first appeared in my first fic ever "Strange Girl But Effective" which is still a WiP, but the two fics pretty much stand alone. I don't think you need to read the first one to enjoy this one. I do, however, recommend reading the first one just because. Some people seem to like it, but it's whatevs. You do you.

I think the birth of this fic only came about because I had the head canon: What if the Shiganshina trio were just like really shitty stereotypical hipsters who owned a café? This fic exists because I wanted a dumb, hipster Eren who is a barista and has to Instagram all of his latte art. So that happens. You're welcome.

As Erna bolts upright in bed, she isn't sure if she screamed just before. She knows she isn't screaming now, and what she thought was a scream before could have been only imaginary, within the confines of her nightmare that she is now waking from. Ultimately it isn't important. She knows what demons she has and she knows that screaming in nightmares is a thing that might happen to her from now on, she's made peace with this, it's unremarkable. The only concern is neighbors. Her new residence is a small apartment in a tight, thin-walled building, a relic of old New York City tenements. It isn't a sympathetic concern she feels for waking people up at – she checks her phone – almost six in the morning. It's that she values her privacy. She doesn't want anyone to hear and know that this is how she wakes up. She doesn't want anyone to know anything at all about her. Ideally she would like to come and go without being noticed at all, like an invisible girl.

As she lies back down, twisting her head to look out the window, which is there only because building code requires one and definitely not for the view of the alleyway and the brick walls on the other side, she doesn't even know if she has neighbors. She would guess so. Empty apartments in New York are rare, bordering on mythical. She doesn't really care what dark, seedy events had to happen to free up this one, which is now hers conditionally if she continues to pay rent on time, doesn't keep any pets, and doesn't smoke inside. Fucking bullshit, she thinks. Her last apartment at least had a walk-out terrace where she could smoke. Her last apartment had a lot of amenities. The building had a doorman, a functioning elevator, floor to ceiling windows, and thick walls. She broke the lease on it to pack up all of her shit and move here in the middle of the night, last night.

"Move in" feels inaccurate with all of her shit still in boxes on the floor. She reaches for the lamp next to her bed, pushes the switch, and closes her eyes until they're ready to adjust. Feet on the floor, she feels claustrophobic in a good way. The less space there is, the better she can know all of the space, and the harder it is for anything to surprise her. The selling point of this place was, for her, that it is essentially only one room. There is kitchen space, a vague suggestion of a living area, and a twin bed in the far corner, but there are no walls except for those that separate the bathroom. She can't deal with entering and exiting rooms anymore. Every corner and every doorway triggers panic in her brain no matter how illogical it might be. And so, this dingy, falling apart, one-room apartment with bars on the window in a shitty neighborhood feels safer to her fucked up brain than the three bedroom, three bath apartment on the tenth floor of the white glove building in Manhattan that she just left.

But there's no terrace, she thinks, as she looks around and wonders how long she can delay her first cigarette of the day. She looks in the oval mirror hanging next to the clothing rack against the "bedroom" wall. Her palm goes up to smooth out her bangs. She attempts to fix up and de-frizz her almost chin-length black curls with just her fingers. It's not working. Frustrated, she holds back the sudden urge to punch the mirror, tamps that impulse down into the rising bile in her stomach. She turns to go to the bathroom and stubs her toe on a box of books and she can't help her immediate, violent reaction. She has to blame the inanimate object for being there and kick it four or five times, again and again, even though it only hurts her.

Tears make her eyes itch. She refuses to let them happen. The skin of her nose itches too and she wants to scratch her face off. Still wants to punch that fucking mirror. She pushes past the anger and the powerless, hopeless feelings, refusing to acknowledge that they're there rather than to even try to deal with them. She walks to the front of the apartment where the front door leading out to the hallway and the bathroom door are perpendicular. First the bathroom door gets shoved open, just to prove to her suspicious mind that there is nothing in there. Then she checks the locks on the front door. She touches them. Even though her eyes can see that the door is locked, she needs to feel it. She needs to pull at the knob and prove to herself that it can't open unless she unlocks it. She does this a few times. Once isn't good enough to be sure.

Fifteen minutes later, when she is standing in front of the oval mirror again, this time with hair damp and setting in curlers, she is centered again. Reset until the next minor frustrating, difficult thing sets her off in an explosion of futile rage and shame.

"Fantastic," she can't help being sarcastic even with her own reflection.

While showering takes only minutes, getting dressed takes more than an hour, because she wants it that way. She makes it take a long time. It's a ritual, the motions of which are almost religious for her. She rolls on black, thigh-high stockings, clips them with a plain black garter belt, ties herself into a black and white corset, and pulls a puffy crinoline up around her waist just to start. She makes that take thirty minutes at least, picking at and adjusting every little thing as she goes so that every piece is what passes as perfect for her; everything lays the way it should, tight enough, but not so tight that it dents or rolls her skin, every bow as symmetrical as her fingers can manage. She reaches for any dress from the rack, it doesn't matter, there are no favorites. They are all essentially the same to her, aside from different fabrics being better for warmer or cooler weather. They are probably essentially the same to any outside observer as well, all of them either completely black or black with white accents, and in the same Victorian-esque gothic lolita style. She pulls one carefully over her head, avoiding snagging any curlers. She picks and pulls and arranges the a-line skirt over her crinoline, smooths out the sleeves down to the bell of ruffles that fall midway down her hands, buttons together the white pintucked chest panel with plain, polished round black buttons all the way up to her neck. She folds the rounded collar over a black ribbon that she ties in a bow, unties, and ties again until she is satisfied with it. When all of that is done she can finally take the curlers out and tie a black, ruffled cotton headband with white ribbon sewn through into her hair.

She steps back until she can see more of herself in that little mirror. She looks fake. She looks like a doll, a mechanical simulacrum of a girl in black ruffles and bows and white cotton lace trim. The day can officially begin now with this protective veneer in place. She casts a sidelong glance over at the black carton of cigarettes next to her small, coffin-shaped purse. She is an addict for sure, but she is torn between the need to smoke and the fear of going outside.

.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,..,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,..,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,

Levi wakes suddenly with that vague feeling of having heard something that broke him out of sleep, but is gone just as soon as he wakes up. Too dreamy to care about it, but now too awake to fall back to sleep. Once he wakes up that's it for him. It's hard enough to get to sleep at the end of a long day when he actually needs it, but to get back to sleep after waking up whether it's in the middle of the night or – he checks the time on his phone – at 5:53am, is impossible. This happens a lot. He likes his building because it's quiet, but he can't say the same for the outside world. Screaming sidewalk fights happen, usually between couples, at the worst times. He can also count on being woken up by the screeching, crashing sound of a shitty car riding on the rims down the street at least once a week. How anyone can find a way to get high enough that they don't notice that one or more of their tires are flat and their car is sounding like a WWII tank on its last leg is beyond him.

Humanity is fucking amazing.

He gets out of bed and as he crosses the apartment to the light switch on the wall, he cracks the bones in his neck and shoulders. When he flips the switch he covers his eyes with a hand, protecting them from the intense light of the 100watt pure white light bulbs in the ceiling fixtures. He rolls his ankles and cracks his toes while he waits for his eyes to adjust.

His apartment is stark white and bright, even without the lights on. Furniture is sparse and is all of the same aesthetic: white, cold, industrial. A friend once called it "hospital chic." There's a white drafting table, white and clear plastic drawer organizers on each side of it, full of art supplies, tattoo inks, and piercing needles all meticulously organized. The tattoo and piercing supplies don't get used often. He isn't some douchebag scratcher who got a tattooing kit off of ebay and thought he could be an artist. He did his apprenticeship and got a job in a real shop. But he likes having stuff at home when he feels like a new tattoo or piercing, or if there's a client he likes well enough to let them into his apartment he can give them a discount on a tattoo if he doesn't have to worry about the shop's cut and overhead. That rarely happens. He doesn't like most clients. In fact he kind of hates a large percentage of them for a myriad of reasons, each special snowflake being annoying in their own unique way.

When he wakes up off schedule, he draws. If he's not in the mood to draw, he cleans. Those are the only activities that take up his free time. He lives like a monk. He follows a strict routine, takes care of himself, has no indulgences or vices… unless cigarettes and black tea count, but compared to what his life used to be, those still make him feel like an ascetic. And he likes it this way. This strict routine and sense of responsibility is how he expresses himself, how he enjoys his freedom to do whatever.

Nothing needs to be cleaned, so he pulls on some sweatpants, grabs a sketch pad, and sits at the drafting table. His fingers drag a black pen in precise lines, producing some radially symmetrical designs. He switches hands, duplicates the line work again with the other hand. Being ambidextrous is an incredibly useful trait, but if he doesn't practice with it, his right hand will lose its coordination and ability to do finely detailed work without fucking up. A lot of the work he does is like this, difficult exercises in symmetry just for the sake of keeping his hands busy. He probably only sketches two or three creative drawings a week if it's only for himself and he's not working on a consultation for a client.

His eyes blur as he finishes off the design. He puts the pen back into the organizer caddy on the side of the table and leans back in the chair, lifting his arms up over his head in a long stretch, lacing his fingers together and cracking them. He's really not in the mood. He spins around once in his chair, then stands up.

He cleaned everything to death when he got home yesterday. Anything more would be a waste of cleaning supplies. He checks his phone again, revealing that he has successfully killed only fifteen minutes. He opens the drawers of organizer bins, thinking he can busy himself with an attempt at reorganizing all of his shit, but as he scrutinizes the contents of each drawer, he decides he likes the way his shit is organized. It took a long fucking time to get it this way and he's not going to fuck with it. So what to do?

He sighs and rakes his fingers through his hair, looking upward and thinking.

"Fuck it."

He takes out a sheet of transfer paper, cuts out about a five inch diameter circle, and draws the outline of a simplistic design. He draws it upside down because that's how he's going to have to do it when he puts it on himself with the gun.

It's the smallest, simplest thing – five small, flying bird silhouettes – but it's still going to take him more than ninety minutes altogether with all of the steps he takes to prep everything and then clean afterward. With one easy movement he pulls a small work table with a power source hookup for his gun over to the white rectangular table in his kitchen. He would throw a shit fit if he heard about any other artist working in their kitchen, but his is cleaner than a hospital and his tools are cleaned and maintained better than a brain surgeon's. He goes through all of the steps automatically, cleans every surface again with hospital grade cleaner for good measure. He washes his hands, snaps on a pair of white nitrile gloves, picks his favorite gun for black work, and gets everything he'll need out and puts it within reach.

He cleans the swath of his skin that he's going to work on and picks up a razor blade to run it over the skin even though there's no visible hair. He wipes the spot with some alcohol and lets it burn for a few seconds before rubbing some ultrasound gel on and waiting for it to tack up a little. It holds the stencil better than cheap petroleum jelly would. He pours out a little ink and opens up a sterile package with a new tube of needles while he gives the transferred stencil some more time to dry.

He doesn't practice on himself a lot. He has a small amount of tattoos for someone who does this for a living. The biggest one he didn't even do himself. Mike (pronounced mee-kay like a drunk Russian), his boss and the owner of the shop he works out of now did the giant tattoo of two stylized, abstract wings on his back, one black and one white. Levi had drawn the design, but he wasn't flexible enough to turn his head around Linda Blair-style and put it on his back himself. The rest of the art on his body was self-inflicted, but he's conservative with it. After this one is finished, he'll have four tattoos. There's the tree on his right calf, lots of lines and highly detailed like an old storybook illustration, each tiny leaf drawn deliberately and individually. There's a little grey striped tabby cat laying on one of the upper limbs, but with so much fine detail in the tattoo it's easy to miss. Starting on his left shoulder and going down his bicep to his elbow is an epic scene of a warrior angel free-falling out of the clouds, two swords raised above his head, about to battle a big, hideous Japanese-inspired demon creature rising out of a rocky landscape of waterfalls, hot springs, and zen Buddhist sculptures. That one took the longest. He wanted to do it in a more realistic style than the tree, so it was a lot of shading along with all of the line work. The small tattoo on his inner right forearm is the first one he did. It's an igloo set in a snowy landscape. For a minute he thought about coloring it in with white ink because that was trendy, but his skin was so pale it wouldn't make a difference. The igloo is some of the best, most clean line work he's ever done. Probably because it was his first and he was paranoid and extremely careful.

A lot of tattoo artists tat themselves up relentlessly like it's nothing. They treat their skin like it's sketch paper. Levi is a perfectionist and too critical of most of his artwork to live with it on him forever.

He's much less conservative about piercings. There is enough surgical steel in his body to upset even the least sensitive metal detector. He has posts and rings going all the way up both ears, black 3/4" gauges in both earlobes. Stainless steel ring snakebites, a barbell through the bridge of his nose, a curved barbell through his tongue web instead of the tip of his tongue (he wanted a tongue piercing, but not one that would clack around against his teeth). He only did two barbells in his right eyebrow and none in the left because he wanted some asymmetry. He pierced the nape of his neck with a curved barbell capped by flat stainless steel circles and with the help of a couple of well-placed mirrors. The nipples were the most painful. After piercing one and finding out how sensitive it was, he almost couldn't get the balls up to do the other. Definitely gave him a newfound respect for women who got them done. The surface barbells he put through his clavicle were difficult only because the first three months were a constant battle to keep his body from rejecting them. The easiest was the ladder of six frenum piercings that went up the underside of his cock and the apadravya through the head. People always assumed genital piercings were the worst, but his didn't hurt at all. It was only psychologically difficult to stick a needle through your own dick the first few times, but if he thought about it, it wasn't half as dangerous as all those times he stuck his dick in someone he just met.

He holds down the foot pedal and the needles punch into the skin over his ribcage. It hurts like a bitch, but he doesn't move a muscle. He has a good handle on his pain reactions by now. Anything close to the bone like this is enough to knock most people on their ass, but this is small and simple and over quickly. In less than five minutes he has the silhouetted birds done. He sits very still for a minute and contemplates them. He feels like they should be flying towards or away from something, like he should do more. In his head a sprawling landscape forms far below them, dotted with trees and cut through with a river. He wants to sketch it out and get it on while it's fresh in his head, but there's the time restriction. It'll take about an hour for him to clean everything up and he still needs to eat something, take a shower, make some tea, get dressed, and go to work. So the birds will have to stand alone for right now.

When he finally finishes cleaning himself and his equipment and getting everything back where it belongs he feels very justified in taking a break. It's about 9am, the time when he should have been just waking up and going downstairs for his first cigarette. So he grabs a pair of skin-tight, ripped up, tattered jeans from the dresser under his only window and changes out of his sweatpants. He takes a white wifebeater tank with a red anarchy symbol painted on it out of another drawer and slips that on carefully. He's got A&D ointment and some plastic wrap protecting the swollen skin on his ribcage, but it still hurts like hell. He goes to the door and laces up his boots, grabs his smokes and lighter off the shelf there along with his keys and hurries down the three flights of stairs to the stoop of the building.

He has his first cigarette of many at 9am every day. There's no chain smoking schedule for the rest of the day, just fitting in breaks when he can at work and smoking one out on the stoop again when he gets home. But it's important to him to start off with that first one at 9am. It's a morning ritual. And 9am is the perfect time because he's extremely unlikely to run into any of his neighbors at that time. People with 9 to 5 jobs are already gone by 8am and people who work part time aren't usually leaving until 10am or 2pm. Not that he doesn't like the other people in his building. They're alright for the most part. He just likes to be alone and not talk to anyone before he has to go to work and deal with people all day.

He has the cigarette between his lips before he opens the heavy door to the outside, flicks the lighter to life as he steps out. He pauses with the flame cupped in his hand just inches away from the tip of the cigarette as this exercise in routine muscle memory is thrown off by the presence of a girl sitting at the top of the steps. She doesn't turn around to look at him, though she must have heard the heavy as fuck door open and shut. There's a steady stream of smoke around her, spiraling from a black cigarette she's taking long, slow drags from. It reminds him of what he came down for and he touches the flame to the tip of the cigarette hanging from his lips.

He knows she doesn't live there. He knows everyone who lives in the building and it's not the kind of place where people come and go. People move in and stay forever because this is what they can afford or because this is where their rehab program set them up. And it's not like anyone has a lot of visitors. This isn't his first time seeing a random girl smoking a cigarette on his stoop, but usually they smell like vodka, and are sporting dark, rubbed off eye makeup all around their eyes and the wrinkled club clothes that they rolled in with the night before. He always feels sympathetic towards them. He hates when guys don't even have the decency to walk a one night stand to the bus stop or donate a t-shirt so they can at least be comfortably covered on their walk of shame.

This girl doesn't look like that though. She's dressed too nicely, not even for a one night stand, but just for this whole setting in general. Her inky black hair lies in perfect corkscrew curls, her face is free of any makeup, and she smells like cloves and vanilla cupcakes with caramel icing – not vodka.

Her very presence there is bizarre and unsettling. The only explanation for it is that she's lost or he is in the middle of a stroke. Would his brain be able to come up with this hallucination even in a stroke? Not like he hasn't seen gothic chicks smoking clove cigarettes before, but she isn't dressed like any gothic chick he's ever seen. She's too well put together and her dress is more like a doll's than like a slutty polyester vampire prom dress. Is there such a thing as high class goths? Or gothic chicks who don't wear a shit ton of pancaked on makeup?

He watches as she stands up, holding her cigarette in her lips, freeing both of her hands to smooth out the skirt of her dress. She then picks up the black, leather, coffin-shaped purse she has sitting next to her, plucks the cigarette from her lips after one long last drag and she tosses the butt onto the sidewalk. And Levi sees red. He doesn't fucking tolerate anyone littering around his stoop whether they're shithead drug addicts who are high past giving a fuck, or cute, weird gothic chick hallucinations.

She's walking away down the steps and he calls out, "Oi!" which makes her turn around. Her face is expressionless, deadpan, unsurprised and unworried about the pierced and tattooed punk yelling at her, and he's still not sure she isn't a figment of his imagination. He points at the butt she's left burning out on the sidewalk and tells her, "You can't just fucking leave that there."

She looks down at the butt, looks up at him, raises an eyebrow as if he's doing something curious or strange, and that's it. She turns away and walks off without a word or a gesture. Levi is in slight shock for a moment at her lack of reaction. Still he yells after her, "Asshole!" She had to have heard him, but still no reaction, not even a flinch.

He goes down the steps and, disgusted, he stamps out the cherry on her discarded butt with the toe of his boot. The clove on the ground at least is very real.

.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,..,.,

Erna rolls her eyes as she walks down the sidewalk and across the street. She's pretty sure no one's ever called her an asshole. That's a new one. "Bitch," she's gotten a lot. That seems to be most peoples' favorite descriptor for her. "Asshole" though? That's original. It's curious even. Why wouldn't he go with "bitch?"

Her face doesn't show it, but adrenaline is flooding her senses. She feels rapid pin pricks in her wrists, a reaction she can't explain. The pricking feeling in her wrists happens now whenever her brain thinks danger. But instead of screaming or running, she can only affect calmness and walk away. That's the next stage of panic that most people don't ever experience. Where there is so much adrenaline and your reaction time is so sped up that everything slows down so that you can act calmly and rationally. It's the brain's self-preservation mechanism for when everything is going to shit. Soldiers in active combat zones can get addicted to this feeling and it's a thing they struggle with when they come home and there are no more adrenaline fueled situations to trigger it. Erna's never been a soldier, but she has the post-traumatic stress of one.

She opens the bulletproof glass door to the bank across the street and stops in front of the ATM in the entryway. Automatically and with unshaking hands she swipes her card, punches buttons, puts a stack of bills into her purse, and takes her receipt. Her fingers unconsciously rip the receipt into smaller and smaller pieces as her legs take her to the brownstone turned café on the corner, conveniently situated right next to her new apartment building. Those were her two requirements when she was looking at apartments. She needed a bank and coffee on the same block. A place that sold clove cigarettes was desirable, but optional. She could order those online.

Any place that sold coffee would have been fine, even a gas station. An actual café was beyond her hopes and expectations. She walks up to the door and the roasted coffee smell emanating from inside is heavenly. It's enough to motivate her to take a deep breath and steel herself for the unpleasantness of human interaction. She is very quickly reaching her threshold for stress.

There's no bell on the door, for which she is grateful. She hates those. The whole place is quiet, not uncomfortably so, it's just peaceful. There are no customers that she can see.

The café is beautiful. More than it has a right to be. The floors are reclaimed wood, the ceiling looks like real tin panels with intricate details, lovingly restored. Every table and chair is different, but they all fit the same restored antique aesthetic. There are glass ball terrariums of different sizes hanging in the windows. It's all very interesting, but Erna won't be distracted from her very important mission. She goes straight to the barista behind the long bar at the side of the café.

"Hi. Do you know what you want?" He asks cheerfully.

"Large latte, to go. Thanks."

As he disappears behind an espresso machine, he asks, "Whole milk okay?"

Erna hums. When the machine is done hissing, she asks, "How much is that?"

"It's gonna be, um, three-fifty," he answers. He's concentrating on swirling the steamed milk while Erna pulls out her phone and pulls up the calculator. She runs some numbers and finishes her calculations by the time he sets the latte on the bar.

"Can I talk to the owner? Or your manager?"

"Oh, um," he scratches his head, "I'm one of the owners. You could talk to me." He sounds unsure and a little worried, like he's not sure if he did something wrong, which is exactly how people usually sound when you ask to speak to someone above them.

Erna raises her eyebrow and looks him up and down. He's a cute guy, tan and tall, with messy chocolate colored hair sticking out from under a beanie. Attractive New York hipster. He has striking green eyes, but he can't be more than twenty years old and he doesn't look very bright to her. She tells him very bluntly, "You don't look like you handle the financial side of the business."

His jaw drops a fraction of an inch momentarily. Erna would like to go home with her latte two minutes ago, so she doesn't wait for his response. She takes the thick stack of bills out of her purse and counts out four hundred and twenty dollars while explaining to the wide-eyed barista, "I'm going to be here for a large latte three times a day, every day, at 9am, 1pm, and 5pm, and I value very highly any chance to not speak with people. This is nothing against you, I'm sure you're a very special and unique gem of a human being, but I'd rather not go through the socially contractual obligation of ordering and paying for my coffee three times a day every day for the rest of my life, so if I give you this now to cover the cost for that many lattes for the month plus a 25% tip, can you manage to not acknowledge my existence every time I come in beyond making my coffee and setting it on the bar?"

His lower jaw hangs open. He doesn't look like he understood any of that. She gets this sometimes. It's the way she talks. She cringes and is about to try and explain a bit more slowly, but seemingly out of nowhere a pale girl in a red and black flannel shirt over a white tank top and frayed jean shorts swoops in behind the bar. She gently nudges the barista out of her way, reaches for the money and without a word she counts it out onto the counter, twice. A stray piece of black hair falling over her eyes as she does so. She, too, doesn't look more than twenty years old, but her expression is serious and stoic. She has dark, grey eyes and short straight black hair. Erna thinks she must be the decorator, because this place looks like her. Peaceful and beautiful, but not whimsical or capricious in any way.

When she's satisfied, she puts the money into the register and says simply, "No one will bother you."

This is the first time Erna has smiled all week. She takes her latte and leaves. In the short walk back to her building, the rare smile disappears again. The short, angry man is still on the stoop. She sips her latte and ignores him after he notices her and continues to yell about her littering in front of his building.

It's worse because she would agree with him. She would normally dispose of her cigarettes without throwing them on the sidewalk, but she didn't see an ash can or a dumpster around, so fuck it. The fact that he is being such a dick about it makes her want to litter the whole sidewalk with used up cigarette butts and whatever other trash she can find. She fishes her keys out of her pocket with her free hand and opens the door. She lets it slam in his face.

"Asshole," she mutters under her breath as she climbs the three flights of stairs.

When she is safely locked back inside her apartment, she sits down in the chair at the desk – one of the few pieces of furniture that came with this place – and she sips her latte, taking no time to admire the cute little swan design the barista had made with the steamed milk.

"Fucking hipsters make the best coffee," she says to herself, because it is astonishingly good. Unfortunately she can only enjoy it for two seconds before her phone buzzes and startles her, making her jump out of her chair a little. She set it to vibrate because loud noises like ringers set her off, but when she is stressed out, even the buzz of the vibration is too sudden and loud. She recognizes the number on the display. It's the only number she put in her contacts when she got this burner phone.

She has just enough patience left to answer with "What?" instead of 'fuck off.'

The voice on the other end is sing-songy. "Hey, little sister, just wanna see how you're doing."

"I'm fine." Erna deadpans. "You only just left seven hours ago. I've had time to sleep and get coffee," her tone is in direct contrast with her older sister's bright, lyrical tone.

"Did you eat breakfast?"

"Yes."

"Liar."

Deidra always knew when she was lying, but that didn't stop Erna from doing it. She sighs. "I'll get something later."

"Did you call the therapist I told you about?"

Erna's eyes itch. "Deidra, it's 9:30 in the morning and –"

"Erna, you promised."

"You know I'd say anything to get you to leave." Erna's voice is resigned, not spiteful. She knows her sister cares, and it would make her feel better if she would just try, but the truth is she's never going to seek any help, because she's addicted to her misery.

"That's no way to talk to your sister who just helped you move thirteen heavy boxes of books into a third floor walk-up and got you as off the grid as a person can be without moving to a cabin in upstate New York."

She has a point. "I'll think about calling the therapist." Erna sips her latte and then asks, "He's not some crystal healing asshole, is he?"

"No, but I wish you'd be more open to crystal energy. They're really good for getting your chakras opened up and –"

"You know how I feel about this stuff," Erna says tiredly. She doesn't fucking believe in chakras and it'll be a cold day in hell if she ever deludes herself into thinking that rocks can heal people.

Deidra lowers her voice and quickens her cadence in her best Erna impression, "New age hippie bullshit. If Jack London never wrote a short story about it, I'm not interested."

"I don't think I ever said that exactly." Erna smiles to herself. She pretends to hate it when her sister does impressions of her, but honestly they are funny. She changes the subject. "Where are you? How far have you gotten on your road trip?"

"Oh I'm already through Ohio and I'm nearing Indiana."

Erna nearly spills her coffee all over herself. "Jesus fucking christ, how fast are you driving?! That shouldn't even be possible, Deidra!"

"I'm on the highway. Don't worry about it."

Erna shakes her head. "Don't fucking die in a fiery wreck before you can sell the car." The car is an Aston Martin Vanquish and Erna knows it can do 200mph, but that doesn't mean that it should.

"Oh, on that note, I already have a friend who wants to buy it when I get back to Portland."

"A friend?" Erna is highly dubious about Deidra's friends. "How much?"

"Well he can give me five thousand dollars…"

"Fucking…" Erna is at a complete loss for curse words appropriate to this situation. "Even with the miles I've put on it, that car is worth…" she has to pause to do the math, "It's worth thirty times that, Deidra! And that's not me being sentimental. You don't sell an Aston Martin for five thousand. You just don't."

"You sold it to me for a dollar."

"That was just to transfer the title."

"And you told me to sell it and keep the money. So it's out of your hands now. I'll take that under advisement though."

"God!" Erna's hands closed into fists. "I hope one of those tiny goats contracts rabies and gores you to death with pointy little horns."

"They're vaccinated, thank you very much."

"Fantastic." Erna rubs her temples.

"And after I sell this, they're going to get a new barn."

"I'm so happy for them."

"Sarcasm aside, if I do take your advice and sell it for 150k, you're sure you don't want any of that?"

"No. Fuck it." The car was a graduation gift from their parents when Erna had finished grad school with a doctorate in English Literature from NYU. They weren't proud of her. They were quite embarrassed about it really. The extravagant gift was more for them than for her. It made them look even wealthier within their social circle. She had accepted it begrudgingly. She had an undeniable thing for fast cars. But she'd always felt weird about it. She is simultaneously happy and sad about finally being rid of it.

Erna sighs. "Just send me more hippie soap or whatever."

"Did you try the vanilla caramel body wash? I left it on your bathroom sink."

Deidra owns and runs a somewhat successful – in Oregon anyway – business that makes and sells organic fair trade all natural skin care and cosmetic products. Mostly soap, scrubs, and lotions. All of which Erna receives in monthly care packages of free samples. Deidra calls her their best critic and product tester. By now it's a pretty big operation, but a lot of the ingredients still come from Deidra's own farm in Portland where she keeps a few cows and goats, probably in the lap of luxury, knowing how she is about animals. She also keeps bees for wax and honey, and she recently constructed rows and rows of raised beds for her plants. Erna's hope was that after she sold the car she could buy up a few more acres around her and build some kind of green ecologically sound greenhouse or whatever hippies like her were into.

Their parents weren't especially proud of her either, but Deidra wasn't one to give a fuck about what they thought. They still were a little more proud of her than they were of Erna, because Deidra had at least graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School. She's a greenie, new age hippie, but she is also incredibly smart and business savvy. Their parents simply tell everyone that she owns her own business and they leave it at that.

In the early stages, when Deidra was still in business school and Erna was just starting college, Deidra would visit and bring her little tins of lip gloss or tiny bars of organic soap that she was just experimenting with and having fun making. Erna would always turn her nose up at them and call it all some variation of 'hippie bullshit,' but secretly she loved the little gifts and would subtly ask Deidra what she was up to and if she would be stopping by with anything new whenever she was down to her last sliver of soap. So the tradition persisted of Deidra gifting to Erna anything she made and Erna pretending she was unimpressed with it.

She loves the vanilla caramel body wash, but she only says, "It smells like food. Can I eat it?"

There is a beat of silence on the other end, but then she hears Deidra sigh. "Don't eat the body wash, Erna."

"I didn't see anything in the ingredients that wasn't edible," she teases.

"Please just eat real food. Don't eat any of the soaps."

"Fine." Erna sighed as if she was very much put out by this.

"So it's good?"

"Yes. Send more of it when you get home." She thinks for a second and then adds, "and more honey vanilla lip gloss."

"Alright. I'm letting you go. Don't forget you have that interview in an hour."

"I don't need a personal assistant, but thanks," Erna couldn't forget the skype interview she was going to have to do in an hour. She was dreading it.

"Get real food." Deidra reminded her in true big sister fashion.

"Don't fuck up and roll that car." It was hard for Erna to keep herself from saying 'my car.'

"Love you too." Deidra hangs up with that last word.

Erna downs the rest of her latte which is on the cold side of lukewarm by now. Annoying. Sisters are the worst and she knows because she is the youngest of five. She and her four older sisters are named in alphabetical order – Ava, Barbara, Cynthia, Deidra, and Erna – and Erna isn't sure if that was intentional, or coincidence, or if her parents have such a thing for order that they did it unconsciously. Deidra is the only sister Erna has ever cared to talk to. The rest are distant and cold, maybe because they just are that way and maybe because Erna is distant and cold towards them. It's hard to tell who started the detachment first. She shared this mutual apathy with all of her sisters, even Deidra, until she and Deidra reached the 'teenage rebellion' stage at the same time, Deidra being a late bloomer and converting to Buddhism and smoking a lot of weed around the age of sixteen and Erna being a bit early to even technically call it 'teenage rebellion' at the age of twelve when she began listening to a lot of feminist grunge bands and dressing in the babydoll-esque fashion of a typical 90's riot grrrl. Her parents could have easily overlooked the music and the fashion choices, but it was around this time that Erna's tongue kept her consistently out of her parents' good graces. She was never a screamer or one for tantrums, but she was born with a talent for quiet, sardonic wit, which was fine only until she started applying that sardonic wit at dinner parties for the purpose of casually insulting people. Deidra appreciated it though. And Erna appreciated Deidra, because at that time she liked just about anything that pissed their parents off.

Erna gets up to throw her coffee cup in the garbage can in the kitchen and it's that small, seemingly insignificant gesture that gives her nerves a twinge and drives a spike through her brain that this is real, she lives here now. As far as she's planned, this is her apartment until death and her spent coffee cup lying alone in the bottom of the garbage can makes it seem very final. She shakes her head and ignores that feeling, writes it off as existential angst. She goes back to the desk and opens her laptop to see if she can jack someone's wifi, but it becomes quickly evident that everyone is password protected. At least her neighbors aren't dumb.

"Shit."

She moves herself to the floor and starts digging through boxes looking for her tablet. She can skype with that without wifi. She dreads this job interview because she has reached her limit for talking to people for the day, but she wants the job too badly to let her preference for antisocial behavior get in the way. She's incredibly overqualified for it, so if she can just be pleasant for a 20 minute long skype interview, she can be as antisocial as she wants for maybe the rest of her life. The job isn't lucrative or prestigious in any way, but it's in editing and she'll get to work from home and no one but her boss will have her contact information and no one will ever bother her. It's perfect. She doesn't even care how much it pays as long as it protects her anonymity and keeps her set for cigarettes and lattes. Her needs are extremely simple and she has adequate savings to cover the gap.

She just needs to find that tablet.

When she packed, it was in a hurry. Not that she would have been much more organized if she'd given herself more time. She is very good at keeping other people organized, not so much herself. She unloads stacks and stacks of books from boxes. She needs to order some kind of actual bookshelf from Ikea or whatever eventually, but until then their home will just have to be the floor. It finally turns up, appropriately wedged between a hardcover of The Brothers Karamazov and stacks of old issues of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. "Sure. Why not?" she says in response to whatever her logic was in placing all of those things in the same box. Next she just has to find the charger, which of course couldn't just be in the same box as the tablet. That would be silly. It wouldn't be self-sabotage-y enough for her. She spends another fifteen minutes tearing open boxes, throwing their contents onto the floor, and getting very frustrated with herself and the world and life. Her wrists start to prickle and her eyes and nose get unbearably itchy and she gets angry at her brain and body for having this stupid reaction to something so relatively benign. The anger makes her feel more out of control and quickly sets off an unstoppable death spiral of feelings, mostly hopelessness, depression, and rage at the inability to control any of it. When it gets like this she is usually only seconds away from breaking something or crying or both and she knows this. She hates it. But just as she's ready to kick the shit out of the next box and rip it the fuck apart, she's distracted by an abrupt cacophony of noise coming from the other side of the wall.

Apparently, her new neighbor has an obnoxiously good set of speakers and a taste for very loud punk music. Fantastic. She is still irrationally angry, but at least now she has an object to project that anger onto rather than aiming it inwards and destroying herself with it. She goes over and pounds her fist against the adjoining wall hard enough to hurt herself.

The volume of the music stays the same. She is just starting to recognize it. She's pretty sure it's The Casualties. This reminds her of high school. Not in a great way. She hits the wall with her other fist and she swears the music gets slightly louder.

She doesn't pause to think about it, she doesn't hesitate, she angrily and aggressively unlocks the three locks on her door and covers the twelve feet down the hall to the door of the apartment next to hers in five seconds. It's just a terrible coincidence of momentum. The inertia of her feelings dictated that she was headed fast towards blowing the fuck up and breaking something and then this circumstance jumped in the way. All of her anger at herself is now channeled towards something else and it feels a little better to have something besides herself to be angry at.

She doesn't say anything she'll regret yet. She just pounds on the door. When nothing happens she kicks it. When that produces no results, then she starts yelling things she might regret.

"Hey fuckwit! I'm sure this atonal garbage is full of very complex political metaphor or insight into the human condition, and probably provides sentimental nostalgia for the good old days when you were just an unemployed shithead playing first person shooters and masturbating in your parents basement," she pauses slightly to take a breath, "and I don't begrudge you the right to relive the past and contemplate why your parents never fucking hugged you enough!" She starts pounding on the door with her fist to punctuate every word, "But. pound Turn it. pound The fuck. pound Down!"

Finally she hears some kind of movement behind the door. She hears a man's voice muttering in surprise and disbelief as if he's only just realized that she has been trying to beat the shit out of his apartment from the other side of walls and doors. As he is unlocking the door he says "Fucking Christ. Can't even take a shower." As the door opens, he is already angrily asking, "What?!" before he sees her.

"Oh you've got to be fucking kidding me." Erna cannot believe her luck. She's not good with faces, but the piercings in his would make him recognizable even to someone with actual neurological damage resulting in face blindness. She hates him. She hates this day. She especially hates realizing that the music didn't get turned down because he didn't hear any of her pounding on the wall because he was in the shower, evidence being that he is still wet and holding a towel around his waist. It makes her feel a bit guilty about whatever vitriolic things she just said.

"The fuck is your problem?" he asks her.

She remembers that he's still an asshole who listens to The Casualties at full volume in an apartment building with thin walls and yells at her for one stupid cigarette butt on the sidewalk and she doesn't feel so guilty. "Have some basic fucking decency and turn that shit down."

He doesn't match her anger. He doesn't raise his voice like he did outside. He asks her in a cold deadpan, "You live here?"

"You're unfortunate enough to have me as a new neighbor as of last fucking night." She leans on a hip and crosses her arms. She should have figured it would be him, because that was her fucking luck, and because of course the punky tatted up, pierced dickhead with black hair styled in an undercut listened to the fucking Casualties.

He is silent for a second. She tries to keep her eyes up. She focuses on the piercing in the bridge of his nose, so that it will look like she's making eye contact. In her peripheral vision she's checking out his torso because his skin is like flawless marble and he's toned as fuck and she doesn't care about shit like that, she is way too smart to be attracted to someone with such a disgusting personality, but it is distracting like on a biological level. She has always considered herself to be sapiosexual, which means she is attracted to brains, not bodies. Bodies are irrelevant to her. But his body is very commanding of her attention somehow, even with those stupid fucking tattoos and piercings, and that makes her angrier and more frustrated.

He says, "Invest in some noise canceling headphones," and he starts to close the door.

She kicks the door again and jams her black leather boot in the doorway, beyond the point of caring if he slams the door on her foot and breaks all of the bones. He doesn't though. She tells him with quiet rage in her lowered voice, "Listen, dipshit, I have a job interview via skype in less than an hour and if your violently loud, puerile expression of teenage angst fucks this up for me, I'm going to have all of the free time in the world to make your life a living hell on an Apocalypse Now sort of level, so I hope you like the smell of napalm in the morning, motherfucker."

He narrows his already perpetually half-lidded eyes at her. "Fuck off," is all he has to say in response as he slams the door in her face. She jumps back, moving her foot just in time to barely miss being crushed.

She is out of things to say that would adequately express how much she fucking hates him. She stands there in front of the door, mouth open in amazement at how rude some people can be. The irony of this is lost on her. And the music gets turned up louder. So loud that she wonders who is getting punished more right now, her or his eardrums?

She knows you catch more flies with honey, and she's not incapable of putting on a sweet face to get what she wants. It's not like she ever thought that screams and threats would work. It just felt better to get them out, to be justifiably angry at someone, but that comes along with feeling shitty about having made the situation much worse for herself. She makes a noise halfway between a growl and a scream and she uselessly kicks the door one more time.

There's nothing left to do but fume at the world. She's back in her apartment for only a moment, kneeling down, flipping open the top of her coffin purse, grabbing the lighter and box of cigarettes. They get crushed in her fists as she flies down the stairs.

Smoking is a self-destructive thing. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. Erna has no illusions about it. She knows that when she reaches the stoop outside, lights up her cigarette, and inhales fast and hard it's because she is punishing herself. She's angry often about a lot of things all at once, but whatever she is angry at, it's easiest to rage against herself. It's a comforting and long held habit.

There is half a minute where she is just escaping and not thinking about anything in any clear terms. She is too angry to think clearly. But the very real need to find a way to do this interview forces her to be present and deal with her shit. She has about half an hour now. She could take her laptop to the café. Cafes always have free wifi. But that would mean being around people for more than two minutes and that is the least desirable thing in the world to her. It's nice and warm outside, maybe she could take her tablet out here and act like it is a totally normal thing to interview for a job while sitting on the stoop of one's apartment building. The woman who would be her boss could just add that to the list of Erna's eccentricities along with being agoraphobic and requiring strict protection of her anonymity, which would mean no interaction with clients. Sure. That would go over well.

There's also the tiny thought, steadily growing to a more real possibility, that she could say 'fuck it,' scrap the interview, go lay in bed, masturbate, sleep, do whatever she could to keep her brain shut off until the next day and just feel really shitty about everything. She could just avoid all of this difficult stuff and slowly self-destruct in a slow blaze of anger, depression, and self-loathing. Which obviously is not a great option either, but it is more appealing to her than forcing herself to deal with people.

Her cigarette is down to the filter in five minutes, half the time it should usually take. Normally she takes her time with the slow-burning black clove cigarettes, taking a long time between drags. Not today. She stubs out the cherry on the railing she's leaning against and puts the butt back in the box to be disposed of later. She immediately plucks out a new cigarette and puts it between her lips.

.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,,.,.,.,,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,

Levi tosses the towel into his laundry basket the second the door is slammed shut. He never should have opened it in the first place. Where the fuck did she get off screaming at him like that? Like he was supposed to know some psychotic gothic doll moved into the apartment next to his in the middle of the fucking night. He isn't a total dick, he only ever listened to his music loudly because he knew he didn't have any neighbors on either side of his apartment. If she'd been halfway civil, he would have even turned it down, again because he's not a dick. Instead, he crosses the apartment, naked, back to the bed where his laptop is sitting and he turns the volume up some more. The wireless speakers mounted high up on the opposite wall blare "Get Off My Back" by The Casualties. Appropriate.

He hears the door shake, it sounds like she's kicking it with those little platform boots. He's about to go tell her to fuck off again in case she somehow missed the memo, but the banging stops. She must have given up.

The volume of the music doesn't bother him as he gets dressed. He's been to so many ridiculously loud punk shows in his life it's a wonder he can still hear at all. But if he has to do this every morning, he's probably going to be getting some wicked headaches.

He checks the time on his phone before he shoves it in his back pocket. He's running behind thanks to her. He's never been late to work and he's not about to start now, so instead of eating a real breakfast, he bolts a bowl of cereal. He fills the electric tea kettle halfway and gets a thermos out because he's not going to have time to drink his tea here, but he can't just go without it. His addiction to caffeine isn't something to be taken lightly. The withdrawal headaches are terrible if he skips his daily black tea. A couple of tea bags get thrown in the thermos and he pours the barely hot enough water over them and twists on the lid, muttering and cursing to himself. The song playing over the speakers changes, giving him an idea of how much time has passed. He can keep getting ready for one more song if he still wants to be his customary ten minutes early for work.

Every motion he goes through is more abrupt and angrier than it would normally be. He isn't a tense person normally. He just can't stand his routine being broken. It throws everything off and ruins his carefully constructed order and sense of discipline. He loads a backpack with his sketch pad and his tea, his wallet, cigarettes, and lighter. He shuts the laptop down and the blaring music stops. On the way out he grabs his keys and helmet.

He's surprised to see his new neighbor out on the stoop when he bursts through the door at the bottom of the last flight of stairs. She looks calm and collected when she is smoking and not yelling. If he had more time and more fucks to give, he would take a shot at repairing this extremely terrible first impression, because life is hard enough without hating your neighbors on top of it. But he doesn't have the time and he's still righteously pissed off.

He doesn't even pause before rushing down the steps to the sidewalk. As he goes over to where his motorcycle is parked on the street, he informs her, "Music is off. If I see any more of your butts on the ground, you're going to get punched in the tit."

He would probably never really hit her, but who knows, she is already incredibly annoying and he's only known of her existence for about an hour and a half.

.,.,.,,.,.,.,,.,.,.,,.,.,.,.,..,.,.,.,.,.,…,.,..,

Erna keeps her middle finger raised in the air as the punk asshole walks away towards his motorcycle. Of course he has a motorcycle. How perfect.

The threat to punch her in the tit is creative. She admires that to some extent. She still wonders why he doesn't just call her a bitch like a normal person.

She licks her fingers and squeezes the cherry of her half-finished cigarette out. She'll finish the cigarette after her interview. She has fifteen minutes to run upstairs, find that charger, and compose herself.

(A/N) How many words can I use to describe a short series of events that happen in a span of less than four hours? 10,296 it turns out.

More chapters and more characters coming.