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This is how they fuck.
With her eyes closed and his face burrowed into the crook of her neck. With another's name on their lips. Her limps are numb and her heart is beating too fast and the words she wants to say are dry. They gasp for air that doesn't come easily enough. It isn't the weight of him on top of her that presses against her bones and makes her feel like she can't breathe, but the weight of them.
Levi tastes of medicine. Sweet and bitter at the same time. It's fitting, Mikasa thinks. She licks at his lips. His taste doesn't betray him. Doesn't contradict the man she tried to hate, wanted to hate. But couldn't.
Unlike her soft scent and her clean skin and her slow smile that makes him light up a conversation. Her outsides don't reflect her insides.
Levi talks shit with the prettiest lips. His vocabulary is coarse (but her name is safe in his mouth.) There is vileness on his tongue and blood under his nails, but that is an article of clothing that falls to the floor when he's with her. They've never fucked. They've only ever made love.
Mikasa doesn't hide her pleasure from him. Her hips meet his thrusts as she bites her lip. Her face is swallowed in the black sea of her hair and her body is lost in the sheets, but his name on her tongue is for him.
He presses kisses to the insides of her thighs. He has intimate conversations with the pale of her skin – skin that has never seen the sun, skin that has never been touched by anyone but him.
It isn't the sex that she loves most not that the sex isn't great. It is. It's better than great. His hands know her body and his lips always find their way back to hers. It's the silence after when she doesn't know whether to pick up her things and go or stay and then he looks at her like she's the only thing that matters.
She always stays.
He never says goodnight. Goodnight is just another way of saying goodbye and he's said too many of those. He doesn't want to lose her. Not even to sleep.
This is how they sleep.
When they share the same bed they sleep with their backs to each other. Sometimes he rolls over to watch her sleep. He listens to her breath. Smiles, almost, at how innocent she looks. That's how he falls asleep, by watching her dream.
When they're alone in their beds they don't sleep. Not really. He takes shape in her mind and doesn't fade. Lazily he draws himself in the banks of her memory. Black and white and every shade of grey at first until bleeding into colour. So real she can almost feel him.
They don't scream her name like they do his. She isn't a savior. Not like him. They'll erect statues in his honor.
She won't die for them. She'll die for herself. There was a time she would have died for him. But he was always a better ghost than a lover. He haunted her bones long before he died.
His name is a murmur in the dark on her lips, sacred like the blood on their hands, they can't wash it away.
Mikasa stopped saying his name when Levi slammed his mouth into hers. Told her to stop crying the only way he knew how. He kissed her eyelids and gripped her hands until the pain she felt was imprinted on her skin.
Levi knows her silences. Her small contributions to whatever he's saying before the long descent into her own thoughts. She tugs at the scarf around her neck. She wrings the weary red fabric.
She's absent even when she's in his arms.
This is how they die.
"Together…"
They promise, both not looking each other in the eye, because they know better not to make promises.
Mikasa rests her head on his chest. She listens to his heartbeat. It is a sound she hopes never ends, but she knows it will as all things do. She has grown too fond of him breathing beside her. Too content in his arms, his arms – all scars and sinew – are made to kill and not to hold her too close to a place that doesn't exist in either of them.
Levi looks to her with a thousand words breaking his teeth and cutting his lips. He can't open his mouth without blood coming out so he kisses her. But it isn't a kiss. It's a goodbye.
When he breathes his last breaths his hair is grizzled and he's forgotten the smell of her. She's been gone a long time. He doesn't know if she's alive or dead. No, he does. He'd know if she was dead. She was gone, even when she was with him – even when her body was pressed close to his she was gone – but not dead. He'd know if she was dead. He'd feel it. And at that he can die smiling.