It's dark outside and the temperature has dropped into the crisp chill of autumn. In the parlor, there's a fire going strong in the stone hearth, throwing shadows leaping across the room and pulling sharp angles and hollows and shifting depths from out of Levi's face. His mouth is firm and unsmiling; his eyes are steady and shadowed. He's dressed in a plain button up shirt, sitting cross-legged and very still in an upholstered armchair. His cheek is put upon his knuckles. His ankles are bare and pale under the hems of his plain black pants. He seems ethereal, insubstantial, as if one were to reach out he'd vanish.

From beneath the front of his hair, he stares at the fire, listening to the bright, expressive cadence of Hanji's voice. Across from him, she inhabits the other armchair and is reading out loud a letter from Erwin. She has not remarked on—nor will she remark on—the leather book wedged discreetly between Levi's hip and the chair's side. It's bright red, the color of a fresh wound.

"Erwin and Historia are coming to see Eren in the next day or so," Hanji says. "Erwin seems particularly concerned about Eren's condition. He doesn't want Eren alone at any given moment during his recovery."

Levi does not appear to move, saying in a low, placid voice, "The squad will take turns keeping an eye on him."

Hanji folds the letter and puts it aside. "Erwin is also bringing a rare salve that may help facilitate the regeneration process."

"Hm?" In the armchair Levi remains very still, his knuckles bracing his cheekbone. The crackling of the firewood nearly overcomes his low, placid voice. "How generous of him. Always the do-gooder, that blond bastard."

"You don't want to use the salve?"

"It doesn't make a difference to me one way or another. It'll restore Eren's power more quickly, won't it? The slacker's already got too much free time on his hands."

Hanji's glasses reflect the fire's glow, hiding her eyes beneath bright, flashing light. "If you think we're pushing Eren too hard, why don't you stop with the sarcasm and say so in plain words?"

"It's the titan power we're dealing with, so fortifying the walls is Eren's responsibility. I have no say in the matter."

"You're his superior, Levi. You decide if Eren needs rest."

"Hanji." Levi hasn't moved at all in the armchair, shadows and depths shifting in the immobile, calm visage. "I can't sacrifice the time we don't have for one person. If I choose to let Eren rest, the districts that have yet to be fortified could be attacked. Who's to say that it won't happen?"

"You're right." Across from Levi, Hanji leans forward in the other armchair, balancing her elbows on her knees and folding her hands in front of her chin. Despite the repositioning, her eyes remain hidden beneath the orange flames reflecting in her glasses. "It could happen; it's a gamble—and it's also your call. Do what you think is right."

Levi closes his eyes, the light and shadow warring on his face. He looks like he could be sleeping, he's so still. Hanji doesn't move either, watching him. Then his eyes come open slowly, drowsily, his irises black and dim. "We'll facilitate the regeneration process and get him back on his feet as quickly as possible. We have to finish shoring up our defenses before we embark for Shinganshina."

"Yes," Hanji says. "I agree that's the best option."

Levi doesn't look at her, doesn't say a word. He lifts his head from his knuckles to flex his right hand. It's callused, clean, and—pulsing.

"Squad Leader Hanji. Captain Levi." A modulated, distinguishable voice carries to them, and both heads, Levi's and Hanji's, turn on their shoulders in a single corresponding motion.

At the mouth of the lightless hallway, Mikasa has arrived, emerging out of the darkness as though emerging out of nothingness itself. The shadow seems to run off her body like liquid as she strides in and crosses the room to stand in front of the fire. Her carriage is stolidly formal, her hands bent primly behind her, at the small of her back. Her shoulders are square, level. As she speaks, she seems to look at both Levi and Hanji simultaneously, commanding their attention.

"I understand that the guillotines are a breakthrough. And I'm proud to be a part of the Survey Corps in crossing this new frontier," she begins stiffly. "But do you realize, exactly, how much you've been taking from Eren without giving anything in return?"

"What are you getting at?" Levi says.

"Don't you see that you've asked him to tear off his own skin, so that you can make your weapons? He isn't an infinite resource. He is a human being. He needs rest and nourishment and care—"

Levi raises a hand for silence. "As long as Eren possesses the titan power, this is his responsibility."

"If Historia hadn't come up with an alternative, you would've offered him as a sacrifice to the Reiss family without a single scruple. You would order him to die, after he's done nothing but faithfully serve the Survey Corps."

With his pale irises catching the firelight, Levi appears to look at Mikasa through two smoldering embers, though his eyes are heatless and cold. "Yes," he says, in a voice without warmth, without emotion. "I would order him straight to Hell."

Mikasa flinches—then stares. Her eyes are wide, showing less color and more gleaming whites. When she speaks, her mouth hardly moves. "Are you even human?"

"What Levi is trying to say, Mikasa," Hanji says, before the hostility can escalate, "is that Eren is a single life weighed against many." Curved into a posture of contemplation, she has her hands folded in front of her mouth, the lenses of her glasses levelled on Mikasa. "It's the responsibility of the commanding officer to make these difficult choices. However, owing to Eren's hard work, we now have a way to drive titans from the walls. This is a victory for all of humanity."

"Yes." Mikasa's eyes are still wide, white, and gleaming, her hands bent stiffly behind her. She remains unpacified. "Except Eren."

"I suppose that's true." Hanji's hands unfold. The lenses of her glasses glare at the floor, then lift again. "But I know he'll be relieved to see what we've achieved together. He can celebrate when he's regenerated."

Mikasa's eyes narrow at that. "No, once he regenerates, you'll push him to manufacture more weapons until he's incapacitated again."

Levi leans back in the chair with a leisurely indulgence, his hands wrapping the armrests. Mikasa's face darkens as she watches the set of his shoulders comfortably sink into the padded upholstery. Her eyes are like knives.

"You lost your family at a young age and were taken in by the Jaeger family as one of their own," he says. "It's only natural that you developed a personal attachment to their son. And the nature of that attachment doesn't interest me."

Her hand flies to the muffler about her throat. She averts her eyes. Briefly Levi wonders about that dirty, ragged muffler, and the connection it has to Eren.

"Let me put it this way, then. Tell me, Mikasa." Levi's voice has become darker, lower, colder. His body, however, remains indulgently at leisure in the armchair with a kind of complacent indifference. Her eyes return, knifelike, to his face. "You would rather all of us die—including the innocent and the young—all of humanity to be consumed by titans and stuffed into their disgusting bowels until they vomit us back up in dismembered chunks like butcher's meat; and you would rather our lost comrades to have died in vain, than lose your precious friend. Is that correct?"

Her pupils have shrunk into tiny pinpricks, and she stands straight-backed and rigid. "You sound like you have your mind made up," she says. "Although it hasn't been necessary yet, if it comes to that decision, regardless of everything he's done for us, you've already assigned Eren a death sentence."

Levi's right hand unwraps from the armrest, rising. His knuckles settle against his cheekbone again. He looks coolly at her from an oblique down-tilt. "Although it hasn't been necessary yet, if it comes to that decision, regardless of what he's done for us in the past, it has already been decided that his death will be his final service to humanity."

The center of his palm starts to pulse.

It is running again.

Fast—

"He has nothing to himself, then," Mikasa says. "Not his own life. And not even his own death."

"You think he's special in that way?" Levi leans forward, looking up at her through the front of his hair. His strikingly pale eyes are slashed by black strands. "The others before him were just the same. They fought and gave up their lives, and now their memory is a source to draw from, to give those of us who still live the strength to keep fighting. Now, get this through your head, Mikasa, your boyfriend is not special."

It's running fast and hot and red and it won't stop, pouring from the middle of his hand. It gushes from the spaces between his fingers, streaming beneath the white cuff of his button up, and down his arm propped on the chair's armrest. Levi wants to cut off the blood flow, he wants to grip his wrist and stop it from bleeding out. But the stable part of his mind knows it's an illusion. It's not real. Eren isn't bleeding through a hole in Levi's palm. That's impossible.

Mikasa doesn't flinch or blush or blink, watching Levi with a mask of pure dissimulation, ignorant of Eren's blood freely pouring from the invisible wound in Levi's hand. Her fist comes to her chest in a salute. "I want you to know, Captain, that when the time comes, I will share a burial ground with Eren and Armin. We are in this together, and I will eliminate whatever or whomever tries to come between us. Goodnight, Captain. Goodnight, Squad Leader." She backs the way she came, returning to the darkness clotted in the hall. She sinks away and ultimately coalesces, vanishing from sight. They hear her footsteps going away from them.

"Hn." Levi stares into the darkness where Mikasa has retreated. His lip has bent a little over his teeth. He sinks back against the chair and can feel the muscles in his jaw set. What will happen, he wonders, if incompatible interests turn her against him? He wonders if she has the physical power to do it—to drive her blade through him and slice apart his flesh to get what she wants.

He closes his hand around the bleeding, unseen wound, and his mouth softens.

"Do you think that was a threat, Four-Eyes?" His voice is almost gentle, a shade off affectionate. "Should I discipline her?"

Hanji is curved forward, deep in thought, her hands folded at her chin. She seems not to have heard him. He waits, watching her think, waiting for her to feel his eyes. When she remains motionless and vague, impervious to his patient attention, he raises his voice, saying, "What is it?"

Hanji rearranges her glasses. The refracted flames strike momentarily brighter, flaring whitely across the lenses, until the frames settle on her nose again. She pulls up in the chair, attentive and distinguished, frowning at him in a kind of tragic disappointment.

"I thought you would've known by now, Levi. Titans don't have bowels. They're absent of digestive systems. Don't you pay any attention at all to my research?"

Without saying a word, Levi rises fluidly out of the armchair and leaves the parlor.


Levi signals his entry by rapping his knuckles, his hand back-facing, against the door. He doesn't wait for a response. He pulls it open. Inside the infirmary, Mikasa has drawn up a chair next to the bed occupied by Eren, who's insensible and unmoving, his flesh hissing faintly as it stitches itself back together. The bedsheet is folded at his waist. Mikasa has him propped up so that he's in a sitting posture, his skull face at attention, the empty sockets staring sightlessly straight ahead. His lungs swell and then depress; between them the red heart throbs. Levi pauses on the threshold to stare, disgusted but also, somehow, intrigued.

The only light in the room comes from the lamps fastened to the wall. Shadows cut in through the darkness and elongate Mikasa's face. She appears gaunt and her skin seems wax-like, as if Levi were to reach out and touch her, his fingertips would pockmark her flesh. He steps fully into the room but hovers near the door. He guides it noiselessly back into its frame. Mikasa doesn't react to his presence, staring vacantly into the empty holes in Eren's face.

"I thought the starched sheets might aggravate his injuries," she says, without looking away from Eren and without gaining any depth to her stare. "That's why I've left his upper body uncovered."

"Visiting hours are over," Levi says.

"There are no visiting hours. This isn't a municipal hospital."

"I'm here to relieve your post, then." She doesn't move. "It's bedtime for you kids, anyway."

She remains motionless, her arms limp, her hands slackly folded in her lap, and her flesh strangely wax-like. Every part of her is held still, except for her eyes, which then move, without her head turning, and steady on his face. She doesn't say anything, her expression blank and dissimulated, her irises like black glittering tar in the dimness of the room.

As Levi approaches, his footfalls noiseless on the floorboards, her eyes follow him. She watches, unblinkingly, as he deposits himself on the edge of the infirmary bed next to Eren. The mattress slants under the weight. He puts a hand on Eren's leg. Beneath the blanket he can feel the hard pillar of shin bone and a considerable knot of calf muscle. Eren's legs are long, lean, unclothed under the fabric. Levi slides his hand down, fingers shaped around the curve of shin bone, to Eren's ankle—and then further still to his foot. Lightly, he tugs on Eren's toes. The sensitive nerve endings don't respond. Levi draws his hand away.

"How can you tolerate the sound?"

"The sound?" says Mikasa.

"The sound of his heart beating."

For a moment, they listen together to the solid, regular, uninhibited thud that ceaselessly beats back the silence. "I don't mind the sound," she says. "It's evidence that he's alive."

Levi, a dark smudge silhouetted by the feeble, waning lamp behind him, turns to her. He leans his elbows on his knees. With the angle of the light high on the wall, half of his face has more depth the other, as though his bone structure were erected on an incline. "I see."

"He's in pain," she says.

"You can't know that."

"I do. I know it." Her voice is transparent like glass, made brittle by the bottled-up emotions. Her hand twitches to her muffler. Levi looks away.

"You're concerned about him, that's all," he says. "He'll be fine. His body doesn't bend to nature's rules. Yours does, however. Get some sleep."

"I'm not tired."

"Mikasa." He speaks her name in low, placatory tones. She stares at him. He looks back at her. It is different this time, their eyes locking. It lacks the heat and unforgiving animosity from before. Her face casts down, the black hair coming over her eyes like a curtain. Her fingertips dig into her kneecaps.

"I'll be the first person you alert if his condition worsens," she says.

"Hanji will be the first person I alert," he says.

The tips of her fingers blanch against her kneecaps, and her teeth show in an involuntary scowl. Then, with a practiced fluency, her face smoothly repossesses its standard inexpression, serene and untouched by him. She rises to her feet. Levi leans back off his elbows, moving as she does, watching her. His eyes have softened, and his voice has softened too.

"You will be the second," he tells her. "That's the best I can do."

Without raising her head, she glances at him under the veil of her hair. Her dark eyes are not critical, and they are not accusing. They plunge and remain there on the floor as she offers a salute of departure.

"Yes sir." She turns on her heel, tugging the red muffler tight over her mouth.

He watches her go out the door. She shuts it gently behind her, leaving Levi suddenly alone—and in the dark—with an unconscious Eren Jaeger regenerating at a pace of alarming slowness. The mattress sighs, relieved of the extra weight, as Levi relocates to the unoccupied chair. The wood holds Mikasa's body temperature, suggesting the prolonged time of her stay, here, overlooking Eren. Once Levi settles in the chair, likewise settling in his thoughts, becoming still inside and out, he puts his knuckles to his face and begins the night watch.

Silence is overcome by the sound of Eren's heartbeat, slow and regular and continuous. Levi, for a moment, confuses it for his own heart beating. Feeling the pulse in his neck beating at a different tempo than that of the one he hears, Levi stiffens and listens harder to the sound. That's Eren's heartbeat . . ., he has to remind himself. For some inexplicable reason, Levi becomes warm and flustered. How many people know what Eren's heart sounds like?

Levi blinks away the warmth and resumes watching. Watching now with a cold, medical stare. He hasn't been there long when a hard and fast arrhythmia seizes the heart muscle. Levi can hear, explicitly, the crescendo of the pulse—accelerating, filling the room with the rapid sound of turbulent blood. Eren's body arches, contorted hard at the back, as if faced with an exquisite agony. The jaw bones drop open and a billow of steam surges out.

Levi watches, a little wide-eyed, his spinal column going rigid and straight. Eren flings out a hand, reaching toward Levi. From the tips of his nails to the domes of his shoulders, Eren is incongruously whole. Half boy, half corpse.

Levi's breath is short now, fast. Eren's hand strains, his fingers spread apart, the fine hand-bones standing starkly out. The black empty sockets stare at Levi.

Levi's vision diminishes, narrowing, the two dials in his eyes turning tighter and tighter inward while Eren's two empty sockets expand, black and profound and infinite. The rest of the room seems to whirl away, and it is only Levi and those empty eyes. This is death. These are the reaper's eyes. Two cavities that hold nothing. Two vast tunnels spinning with a dead blackness, fanning out in a ubiquitous reach to consume all that it touches. Levi's skin is awash with something cold, something like fear. Beneath the shuddering reel of his own thoughts, Levi hears Eren's heart seizing at an unrestrained speed. Thud thud thud thudthudthudthud

Slowly, carefully, staving off the coldness—that thing like fear—Levi reaches out and receives Eren's outstretched hand. The instant their hands lock together, Eren sinks back against the pillows and his white bone teeth close together in a sleeping grimace. The seizing heart begins to retrograde back into its slow, regular monotony.

Levi expels a breath.

"You startled me." He hunches forward, feeling the tensed cables in his back slacken with relief. As he slows his breath and wills the beating hammer of adrenaline to abate, he closes his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he sees two vast spinning tunnels, gateways into nothingness pulling him in. When he opens his eyes again, he looks at Eren. The empty sockets are staring passively at the ceiling, the body motionless. Without separating their joined hands, Levi pulls the chair closer to the bedside.

"Eren," Levi says. His voice seems to fill up the entire room, and a sensation of claustrophobia comes over him. He waits for the pitch of his voice to fade before bending his head and putting his voice against Eren's ear, low and still and unobtrusive. "If you can hear me, Eren, squeeze my fingers."

He watches the hand in his. It remains unanimated. Corpselike, if not for the feverish temperature under the flesh. In both of his palms, Levi pulls Eren's hand forward. It has long, narrow fingers rimmed by blunt boy fingernails. Levi straightens those long, narrow, boy fingers, spreading them gently out. Then Levi's head sinks, the front of his hair falling forward.

In the very center of Eren's palm, at that place where blood runs from a gaping unseen wound in Levi's own hand, Levi puts his mouth, softened, warm, to the hard, callused skin there. Levi closes his eyes and lets Eren's fingers curl, with an unconscious idleness, to span against his cheek. He leans his head into Eren's palm and presses the lifeless hand against his face.

Eren stares sightlessly at the ceiling.


He is in a forest.

It's an ordinary forest, unpopulated, silent, and very still. Insulated by a half-light gloom, giving it a strange underwater aspect. The air is stagnant, neither hot nor cold. It's nothing at all.

He doesn't know how he ended up here, isolated, in this other world, where it's so quiet that the absence pounds against his skull. Nor does he know the reason for why he is here. The silence presses down with a deep-sea pressure into his ears, onto his thoughts. He feels suddenly amplified, grossly exaggerated, as if his pulse could shake the earth, and his breath could stir the trees. He breathes slowly, subtly. He feels his heartbeat at every part of him, throbbing.

There's a book lying in a blanket of brown, moribund leaves. He bends down, clears away the foliage, picks it up. The book has a scarlet cover that speaks of something forbidden and fatal. A warning that he ignores.

On opening the book, the inked letters appear and impart meaning instantaneously; instantaneously, not as though Levi has actively read the inked letters and has used the mental faculties he possesses to distill meaning. But instantaneously, as though the active reading and mental processes have been omitted altogether, and the inked letters impart information by simply meeting the eyeball's passive glance. The page reads:

Unbearable

On the account of love's tragic nature, the amorous subject (also known by other names: the lover, the poet, the romantic . . .) has a catastrophic character intrinsic to his existence. Despite his sufferings and certain annihilation, he waits impatiently and indefinitely for the beloved object's return.

Almost immediately, with the information promptly imparted, the book melts in Levi's hands, turning to a dark fluid that runs thick and hot through his fingers. The fluid carries the fragrance of rust. It gathers and streams profusely from his palms.

"Captain Levi."

Levi lifts his eyes to see Eren standing before him in the forest, in the pristine dress of his uniform, smiling and looking at Levi with an unfamiliar, tender appreciation. Eren has never looked at Levi like that before.

Levi's eyes drop to his own red-covered, outstretched hands. "Is this yours . . .?"

Eren comes forward then—floating almost, making no sound, gliding through the underwater ambiance of the forest—and reaches out, palms up, to take Levi's hands in his. Their hands slide with a frictionless slip into a mutual grasp. Eren's fingers close around Levi's wrists; Levi's fingers close around Eren's wrists. Their palms wrap one another. They hold onto each other like that, standing nearly toe to toe. Eren's tender smile hasn't faded. The blood on Levi's skin has transferred to Eren's skin, smearing them both in the same dark red color. It has started to evaporate with a faint hissing noise.

"What do you intend to do about me?" Eren says, finally, looking at Levi through the rising thin vapor.

Levi holds Eren's eyes. He neither tightens nor loosens his grasp on Eren's wrists. "What is there to do? One way or another, you'll leave everything behind."

"Does that scare you?" Eren says.

"I've expected this outcome since the day you so enthusiastically signed up to join the Survey Corps. Impatient to become a corpse."

Eren is smiling with closed lips. "Is that what I want, to become a corpse?"

"Aren't you the suicidal maniac?"

They watch each other's faces through the wreaths of steam floating up from their joined hands. Eren says, "What if the truth is . . . I'm terrified of dying? I tremble at the thought of it."

Levi hesitates, a little less certain. "It's already been decided. Even this blood is beginning to disappear."

"It's always disappeared in the past." Eren's smile is sealed shut like a door. Inaccessible. "Even so, you've retained its memory in the palm of your hand. What is it that you really want?"

As if he's unsure and distrustful of Levi's intent, Eren removes his fingers from Levi's wrists, one by one, and withdraws his hands slowly. Eren's eyes come down on Levi again, and beneath their weight Levi feels his flesh yielding. He becomes suddenly very aware of the scent of Eren's skin and of the artery in Eren's throat faintly jumping and of the places where Eren's clothing gathers, loosens, and stretches to accommodate the proportions underneath.

Eren comes a final half-step forward, moving beyond toe to toe, to close the few remaining inches between their bodies. Line for line, their chests press together. Eren's inhales expand against Levi's exhales. Levi looks up at Eren, his chin lifted. Heat gathers under his skin, and the scent of his own warming flesh churns thickly around them. He wonders if Eren can sense it, the pounding unrest in Levi's body; if Eren can see the flesh softening where his eyes touch. Levi's hands fall to his sides, and he grows stock-still with something like physical desire, willing without moving, for the uncovering of Eren's naked skin. As though he could remove Eren's uniform that way.

Eren raises his hands, the coat of blood sizzling away into curls of steam, and puts them on Levi's face. His eyes are heavy, hot, and Levi's own eyes roll back, without focus, in a feverish delirium. His chest expands deeply into Eren's. Exhaling hard through the nose, his eyes coming back into focus, Levi raises his hands to join and cover Eren's, pressing their hard-skinned palms firmly against his face. Under the screen of black lashes, Eren's irises appear to spin like two pinwheels, whirling fast, then faster—an impassioned momentum building inside of him. Levi finds the momentum building inside himself too. A spiraling whirlwind of ache and longing.

Eren bows his head then. His mouth is already softened and parted to match up and align to the solemn contour of Levi's lips. He puts the pad of his thumb against the arch of Levi's mouth, pushes until his lips come open just so. Eren's head is bent very close.

The most that you can hope for is a delusion . . .

The moment has an infinitely slow, explicit quality—full of indefinite waiting and of indefinite impatience as Eren moves in. Already Levi's skin is dissolved, melted into a bodily languor as the heavy smell of close, warm skin seems to come over them both in shuddering waves. And then—

Eren vanishes, leaving Levi poised with the unfulfilled touch, his head back and his skin soft, the chemical torture of physical desire writhing in his veins. Levi staggers a reversed step. His mouth feels cold, where there had just been an almost-contact. He feels the broken promise at every part of his body: his mouth, his hands, his stomach. He feels hollowed.

But Eren is not gone. He stands a few meters away now, having instantaneously jumped the distance, it seems, from just above Levi's lips into the shadows between the trees. It is then that Levi realizes this is not real. It's a dream.

As he resigns to this unreality, Eren begins to speak with a serene, unsympathetic, machinelike precision that sounds much older and much colder than the Eren of Levi's living memory.

"Do what you find necessary," he says. "I won't resent you." He turns around and Levi watches as his back ebbs into the thick, murky bowels of the forest. "Once I'm gone, I won't have the choice to resent anyone."

With each soundless step, as Eren's foot lifts from the foliage, beneath the sole of his uniform's boot, a spray of little scarlet blossoms springs up from the earth. He leaves behind him a wake of lucid red flowers.

Corpses don't feel anything at all.

I should know.

This insensible, comatose state

is a death rehearsal . . .