"I don't understand."
"You passed out."
"I—"
"Farlan caught you. It was actually quite impressive."
Isabel blinked several times, pupils dilating as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. "I...don't understand," she repeated slowly.
"Did you hit your head on the way down or do you just like repeating yourself?"
She felt small in his arms. Her smallness made something in him stir and Levi found himself torn between revulsion and fascination, disgusted by her fragility and...curious, maybe, or confused because it was confusing, how was she able to make him feel protective...as though he, of all people, would be the one to protect someone.
"I saw you, Ani," Isabel said dazedly. Her eyes were unfocused.
"Isabel...what are you talking about?" Levi's tone was more even than his pulse.
"I saw you," she repeated, more insistently. "That day...you jumped from the West Tower."
Levi blinked for a moment before the event in question sprung to mind; he almost snorted with laughter in his sudden relief. It seemed so long ago.
"You must have fallen a hundred feet before you caught a wire..." Isabel persisted, enunciating each word with a clarity that made the tension in Levi's neck and shoulders ease. "You didn't pass out."
Levi felt the corner of his mouth twitch. "Falling doesn't make you faint."
It had been in the early days of their ODM gear experimentation—days that Levi and Farlan had spent fighting the grayness that encroached on the edges of their vision and taking turns vomiting over rooftop edges. After accruing a lifetime of injuries over the course of a few months, they graduated onto what Farlan referred to in mixed company as 'the great game'. The law just called it theft.
The pair of them had found themselves separated within minutes the very first time—things seemed to happen faster so far above the ground. Levi could still vividly recall the rush of being pursued straight into the shadow of the clock tower; the memory of the chase still made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He had just smashed through the remaining panes of a broken window when he saw, in his peripheral vision, his gear's gas needle dip precariously low. He listened; the acoustics of the empty stone room were atrocious but yes—there was still at least one person following him. The whir of the ODM gear grew louder and louder: at least one and maybe more—
He had jumped from the twelfth story. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—freefall certainly had a way of covering ground. He wasn't very far above the sidewalk when he managed to catch a line and avoid breaking every bone in his body. It was a damn good thing that it had happened, too—because not even Levi Ackerman, for all of his peculiarity, could have survived that.
—because he was peculiar. It was hard to ignore, really; he had for some time suspected that there was something special about him—some physical attribute or a trick of the senses that he hadn't yet learned the name of or been able to explain. It was something primitive and unsettling and, if he was honest with himself (really honest, like with the kind of honesty that got more noble men killed), it was thrilling. He would be lying through his teeth if he told anybody that he could imagine a smuggler's life without it—but Isabel didn't have to know about the drugs.
"Falling doesn't make you faint," Levi repeated. The sound of his voice and his footfalls on the pavement grounded him among the lengthening shadows once more. "You can drop a hundred feet—five hundred feet, probably—over and over again without losing consciousness. It's not the fall that made you pass out—it was the fear."
"I wasn't afraid," Isabel snapped back, bristling.
"You were," Levi jibed. He almost smiled when he saw the sullen defiance coloring Isabel's expression, but he resisted the urge. "Look, being afraid isn't necessarily a bad thing. It helps us to not be idiots...keeps us alive."
"Somehow, I don't think that falling fifty feet is going to keep me alive." Isabel's voice was laced with skepticism.
Levi couldn't hold the snort in any longer: she was a funny girl. "You didn't spontaneously faint because of a fear of heights or any shit like that. Something happened and you started to fall because of that...then you passed out. I've heard that the head will sometimes stop people from being conscious to experience things that it'd be healthier for to not remember—like falling."
"Oh..." Isabel leaned into his shoulder. He could feel her breath through the worn places on his shirt sleeve—Christ, she was small. "Does it happen to you, then?"
"I suppose that it could."
It was a tricky subject.
x
It was evening. The streets were dark and quiet and still. Isabel's eyes were drifting closed with increasing frequency and Levi gave her arm a squeeze as he turned down an alleyway at the bottom of a sloping, narrow lane. The lighting changed here and while Levi had seen darker nights, the long shadows made it easy for him retreat to the hazy, dusky corners of his mind—the place where doubt lurked.
Levi hadn't wanted to tell them. Farlan had figured it out, of course—Farlan, for his flaws, could untangle just about anything once he worked up the nerve to try. Levi had expected that—perhaps not as quickly, but it hadn't been a surprise.
Isabel was another matter. She wasn't clever in the way that Farlan was—couldn't problem-solve if her life depended on it. She was loud and brash and there were small animals scurrying through the gutters with a longer attention span. With that said, Levi found her to be a determined student if not a particularly prodigious one: she learned half as quickly as he wanted her to but tried three times as hard. She was as gentle as she was fierce, too—that kindness was the great enigma. It frustrated him: it was so unfair that of all of the people in the world, above and below the ground, he was the one entrusted with safeguarding someone so rare and precious—someone that looked at him as a brother.
Levi could still feel her breath on his skin."Uh...how do you feel?"
"My mouth feels awful," Isabel replied groggily.
"You vomited while you were out. It happens. Don't worry about it."
"Okay...ugh, that's pretty gross."
"You're telling me."
Isabel craned her neck to study the deserted lane that sprawled ahead of them. "Hey, Ani...where's Farlan?"
"He went on ahead with your gear," Levi answered. He'd somehow known what her next question would be before it escaped her lips: maybe that was what being someone's brother was about.
"Is it okay? Is he okay?"
"It's all fine. I told you—he caught you."
"...right," Isabel said, but her tone relayed that she had no recollection of such information.
"It's fine if you don't remember...I told you earlier."
"I really don't remember at all...where are we now?"
Levi screwed up his eyes against the gathering darkness. He had been traveling on instinct more than sight and it took him a minute to orient himself before replying, "Bryan Avenue—we'll be back soon."
The place where doubt lurked was shadowed, but substantial; Levi felt Isabel's breath on his shoulder again and the smallness of her everything and the crushing weight of a responsibility that he had never signed up for and frankly did not deserve.
"Look," Levi said, his tone even. "I have to ask. What happened?"
Isabel looked up at him, green eyes glassy with either fatigue, guilt, or a combination of both. "I just...I was so tired."
I thought so.
What looked like uninhibited freedom to the untrained eye was in actuality a study in balance, of course—the gear was no toy or hobby. Its use was a tremendous gamble at even the most elementary level. It was easy to forget what other people were like—the limits of what their bodies could do.
"You have to be strong if you're going to be able to use the gear for even short periods of time," Levi said. "It's not like playing at gymnastics or dancing or whatever other hobbies that you may think of. It's very physical—very difficult. You need to be stronger and that's going to take work. It's going to hurt. You're going to hate it."
"Are you mad?" She was looking up at him, eyes shadowed with what was definitely more guilt than exhaustion, he realized.
"You're damn lucky to be alive," Levi muttered, looking away, but a corner of Isabel's mouth twitched somewhere on the edge of his vision.
A gas lamp burned low at the corner of Bryan Avenue and Bryan Station. Levi halted in the roadway and watched his shadow mimic him, sprawling across the cobblestone with too-long limbs. "We're basically home," he said, eyes narrowing against what loomed beyond the circle of light. "Do you want to walk?"
"I'd love to," Isabel answered, so Levi let her down gently. She swayed on the spot for a moment with her arms slightly extended from her sides, palms facing downward.
"Are you able?" Levi reached for her shoulder, but Isabel shrugged away.
"I'm fine, really—I'm just so tired and I have a lot on my mind."
"What are you thinking about?"
"Well...why were they ready for us?"
Isabel had taken a few tentative steps forward but she had stopped again and was looking back over her shoulder at him; Levi could feel the heat of her frustration from where he stood.
"They weren't ready for us," Levi responded. "They were just less stupid than usual."
"I don't know," Isabel said suspiciously. "It just felt like an ambush. I wouldn't put it past some of our neighbors to work alongside the military if it meant our heads on the chopping block."
"If it was an ambush courtesy of the Underground, you wouldn't still be alive to muse on it. No, the military was just fortunate this time...used up all of that good fortune for next time, probably. We can't win all of them. Neither can they."
"It is really a shame that we lost that package—I didn't even know what was in it."
"That's not important," Levi responded, possibly too quickly, but Isabel didn't seem to notice.
"I hate it when we don't deliver," Isabel spat, kicking at a chipped flagstone and tripping over it a bit in her dizziness. "It makes us look so bad. We failed."
"Eh...we didn't."
It had been smart of Farlan to announce his presence before showing himself; regardless, Levi still felt ready to leap out of his own skin, despite the familiarity of the voice, as their companion dissolved out of an alleyway off to the right-hand side of the road.
"I collected the package from you along with your gear and went on a little bit of a road trip," said Farlan, smoothing his visibly-windswept hair. "I've been waiting here for some time—don't think that anyone bothered to follow."
"How sure are you?" Levi pressed, staring into the darkness. In the gloom, every irregularity of shadow looked like an armed man in a crouch.
"Well, if they made themselves obvious this game would be a lot less challenging, wouldn't it?" Farlan snorted. "All said, I'm bushed. I really did look and now I'd like a good sit-down."
"We were just getting to that," Isabel chirped. "How nice of you to join u—"
"Watch her," Levi interjected. "She probably hit her head on something. Don't let her fall on her ass."
"I can probably do that," Farlan replied with a wink. "Let's go, princess."
"I'm quite fine on my own!" Isabel insisted, swaying a bit as she ducked Farlan's outstretched hand, and Farlan snorted audibly as he and Levi followed her crooked course into the gathering night.
x
The layout of the city flat was simple and open: the trio entered into a broad front room that played a variety of roles with a utilitarian simplicity. Exposed rafters intersected overhead—instead of a second floor, the space was open and would have been airy and bright if not for the shuttered windows. The windows were always shuttered, though—that was their way.
Isabel was kicking off her left boot in the doorway; the right one had bounced across the floor. Levi picked it up and tossed it back towards her, a reprimand on his lips, but Isabel had already moved on blithely: the slight skip was returning to her step and she was now hovering over Farlan's shoulder. He was seated at the table where only a few hours before they had been illustrating their intentions with assorted kitchenware.
"What happens now?" Isabel asked, watching Farlan stack plates and match silverware into sets.
"I'm going to take a look at your gear," Farlan replied without looking up from the messy table. "I don't think that you hit anything on the way down...minus your head...but it could hardly hurt to take a look. It would be better to find a problem while sitting at the dinner table than forty feet above the ground."
"Ooh, show me—"
"Before anything else happens—" Levi interjected. "I think that Isabel should have the opportunity to lie down."
"I don't want to," Isabel huffed.
"Rest."
"I'm hungry!"
"Rest," Levi repeated as he fell into a kitchen chair beside Farlan, his tired eyes immediately threatening to close. "Then, we'll eat."
x
Isabel and Farlan spent the majority of dinner roundly abusing the Military Police while Levi alternated between picking at a half-loaf of bread and the dirt under his nails. The atmosphere was familial and familiar and warm: the food was less than fascinating, but there was enough.
It was easy to forget, especially in times like this, that they were not a family sitting down to a normal dinner—that there was not even a notion of normality from their collective past for them to latch onto and maintain. They lived on edge...in a constant state of low-key neurosis...in the gap that stretched between right and wrong.
Maybe that expanse didn't exist at all and they simply lived with a foot in each world.
Farlan was talking, loudly, and both he and Isabel missed the sound of a knock on the door behind a particularly well-enunciated expression of 'son of a bitch'. Levi did not, however, and he raised a hand along with one thin brow. Farlan fell silent immediately, eyes widening slightly.
"There's someone at the door."
"I didn't hear anything," Isabel said, voice uncharacteristically low. "Are you sure?"
"One way to find out..."
"We made a scene earlier," Levi muttered. "I'm sure that some charmer wants us to either adopt them, work for them, or give ourselves up to them...and frankly, though all options suck ass, I'd almost prefer the latter."
"Guess it's a good thing that that's the most likely..."
"What are we going to do?" Isabel whispered. Her freckles stood out strikingly on her pale skin.
Levi nodded to Farlan. "Don't get shot."
"Ah, yes...it is rude to keep a guest waiting," said Farlan, rising. "Are you armed?"
"Do you have a pulse?"
"No need to be clever, Levi...mind yourselves, now," Farlan replied airily, creeping towards the doorway and stepping over Isabel's discarded shoes en route.
Isabel's knuckles turned white on the table's edge, Levi's hand went to his boot and, with a waggish grin over the shoulder, Farlan opened the door.