a/n: So sorry for being MIA, here's an update while I'm working on a longer chapter. Enjoy and please review?
Again and again, she dies.
Levi still remembers the first time: the explosion of red shingles, gnashed between teeth and her screams. Red, red, everywhere.
When he woke from that, he slammed a pillow into his door because that's not right, she didn't die like that, she didn't die from a Titan. And he cursed the monsters for tainting even his dreams.
The other times are blurred. He can't pin an order to the deaths—but he remembers, even combs through them once he wakes so that he can hold on to the details, being the sick masochist he is.
Because he can't bear to forget her. Not even on the rare occasion he wakes to a steady, warm breath in the crook of his neck and soft arms that stick to his skin because of the heat of their bodies. Not even when—after making sure she is asleep—he presses a kiss to Petra's forehead and holds her tighter, does he come even close to forgetting the dark-haired girl who died for him, so many years ago. Before the Titans came. Before Levi accepted death like snow that heaps all around him. Before he learned to keep moving, keep marching, so as not to give the snow a chance to become pleasant numbness, to lull him into sleep.
She was fifteen when her screams filled the underground tunnel and the fact that Levi owes his life to that makes him want to scrape at his skin and peel it away and yell and ask her was I worth it?
"Levi." The wisps of light that strain through the curtains are just enough for him to see the gold of Petra's hair in front of his eyes replaced by the dim amber of her irises. "It was just a dream."
His jaw locks. He never should have mentioned the dreams to her.
"How did you know?"
She smiles so sadly, eyes and hair disappearing as she tucks her head under his chin and slips an arm under his and presses her hand to the back of his shoulders.
"You always hold me tightest after you dream."
He's pathetic. Even as Levi smothers Petra to his chest, he knows that he never did—never will—deserve either of them. He's pathetic, and he has known it since the day he let her die for him. But if nothing else, he is not naïve. He knows this life is barely worth living for, just strings and strings of half-truths that they're all just trying to weave into something that can get them by.
He knows life is ugly—but being the sick masochist he is, he hopes Petra will keep living, for him.