AN:
Well, time has passed … You may question why I'm here? Well. Corvid-19 brought me back haha. With employment suspensions I'll get a lot more free time for writing, which I've always loved to do but I rarely get time to regularly update a FF. I don't like messing people about in terms of posting a new chapter and then disappearing for another year, so hopefully this will become a regular thing. But I won't put any sort of timeline on it! Hopefully, since it's been a few years, my writing style will have matured. Though it also means the plot I had planned has completely escaped me, oopsy! Not entirely though, do not fear. Luckily, I wrote a lot of details out already, so I can follow that until I get back into a flow. I don't return to most stories for the reason I mentioned before, but this one is so special to me. It had such a positive reaction from you all and I actually enjoy writing about my original characters (and Levi, let's not forget). I had a following of people as well that regularly sent me PMs, wrote reviews and interacted with the story by picking up on hints I'd left. I really loved this story and I'm sorry to have abandoned it. Finally, the next couple of bits will be what I'd written that hadn't made it online (so it will be just as poorly written as what you're used to haha!).
Now, on with The Chemicals Keeping Us Together! (which yes, as someone mentioned in the reviews, this whole series has been based off the song by Fall Out Boy, How the Mighty Fall).
To Live the Freedom
We took the lift, despite the fact that he muttered something angrily about stairs. Levi was getting quite subdued, easy to handle. In his drunken state, he let me lead him wherever. He wouldn't lean on my shoulder, but with the amount of swaying he was doing, that's where he ended up most of the time. I was still talking to him, but the amount of replying he was doing dwindled. The lift doors shut with a soft shhik sound – now it was just us two.
"I didn't think you'd get this tipsy," I commented.
"Mmmph ... hits you when you stand up."
"You aren't doing much standing though." I adjusted my grip on his waist and I felt his hand slide up to my shoulder in an attempt to use me for support. All of a sudden, he was fumbling in his pockets.
"... call her ..."
"Call who?" I asked as he squinted at the screen in his hand. It was the wrong way up, but he didn't seem to be about to correct it. His fingers attempted to swipe it open clumsily.
"Lena. I want to call her."
"Lena?" I frowned. "You said, Lena? Lena Hertz?"
"My girlfriend …." he finally spun the screen so that it faced the right way
Lena. Fucking. Hertz. The words burned my ears. I couldn't stand her, I couldn't bear to be around her. She was loud, full of herself. She moaned and cursed about her life but did nothing to change it. She was that type of person, someone who would blame everything else for her own procrastination and incompetence. We had butted heads for years, with Kurt stuck in the middle. For a while, we were close enough to be called friends … That's around the time I began to believe the saying that it takes three years to know a person.
How had she gotten someone like Levi into her bed? There was an order in society, controversial but true. Attractive people paired with attractive people – it was the law of nature, survival of the fittest. And yet someone like her …? I couldn't believe that she was my competition.
"Why don't you call her when you're a little less drunk?" I offered and his fingers paused over the call button.
"Don't want to ... mess up." He murmured.
"Yeah, you don't want to say something wrong. Have you got your door card?"
"One of my pockets," he began fumbling around. I reached into the pocket nearest to me, but it was empty. His hand also came back empty from the other side. "Shit..."
"Don't tell me," I snorted, this was going too well, "you can't find it?"
He searched again but it was obviously not there. He didn't have many pockets to check and he had been through each more than once. "Shit." He cursed again.
"Look, it's late. Why don't you come to my room and I'll call someone downstairs to look for it?"
The offer wasn't pure. I didn't know what I was going to do, but those two shouldn't be together. As he looked up at me through bleary eyes, I knew he was gauging how much he trusted me. We hadn't had the best of starts. In the year we had shared an office, all that had passed between us was causal one-sided flirting. The approach I had tried tonight had gotten him to open-up to me a lot more, but that could have been the alcohol. I cleared my expression. What should a lone man fear walking into a woman's room?
Everything.
Even as he frowned at me, I was planning. Hopefully she'd ring him, and I'd answer, or I could ring the manager and ask him to come up – rumours were powerful things. Or even, Levi might be drunk enough to actually … I was attractive, I knew I was. I …
"Wait here," I sighed. "I'll have a look downstairs." He blinked a little and nodded, balancing himself against the wall with a sort of child-like innocence to him. He watched me walk back into the lift and once the doors had locked me back in alone, I kicked the metal side until it rang loudly.
Really, how low had I fallen?
…
"Kurt~" I whined. What time was it? Where was I? It was dark and the numbness in my legs told me I had been sat here a while. The floor was cold, carpet-less.
A voice crackled, "Are you alright, Luann?" Was I? I was drunk and that was about all I could tell.
"I did as you said," I slurred and felt a puddle of liquid under my fingers. "I didn't break them up. Happy?"
"What have you done? Lu, do you need me? Shall I come up?"
"No ..." Don't hang up on me. "Just talk to me. I want to hear your voice." I say the wrong things when you're here.
"Look, Luann. I'm sorry for snapping earlier, but there's something I need to tell you. Actually, a lot I need to tell you. And I met someone today, someone who gave me the confidence to say this. She changed my perspective a lot."
"She?" I was aware that I was whining and a part of me begged my mouth to shut, but I couldn't help the pain seeping through my voice. Don't leave me, Kurt. You're all I have. "You're all I have."
Kurt fell silent.
"I need to say this to you when you're home – preferably not drunk."
LENA
It was Wednesday, otherwise known as, Levi-comes-home-day. Not that I had been counting. I'd done a shift at the pub until late in the morning which had left me which bags under my eyes that I was currently attempting to paint over with foundation. It didn't really help; I still looked awful. I replaced the lid, stowed the foundation back in the cupboard and gave the sink one last wipe with a towel (for some reason, Levi liked his sinks dry as well as clean). I'd done my best to clean up the rest of the apartment but having a dog around was hardly making the job any easier, especially regarding the constant supply of hair there appeared to be. I was surprised the thing wasn't balding. Then again, I kept finding long, brown hairs that definitely weren't Pepsi's. Maybe I was balding, too. Speaking of (the dog, that is), I heard a clatter. I peered out from behind the bathroom door, weary of what the bastard was up to now. There was an eerie silence.
"Pepsi~?" I cooed gently. Speak too loudly and you'd awaken the beast, causing its tiny feet to bound towards you with demonic speed. I caught a pair of pointed ears prick up from behind the bin, which was toppled onto its side. "What have you done now?"
He barked innocently. I wasn't falling for the act. I tiptoed over carefully to get a better look. "What have you got?" Beady eyes perked up, then disappeared back into the contents of the binbag which had been opened like an animal carcass. "Drop!" I ordered. It had absolutely zero affect, probably because we'd only recently learned, 'sit'. Drop was a far-off command, reserved only for the responsible dog owners and their well-behaved dogs. Pepsi was not a well-behaved dog, and I was not even a dog owner. This wasn't mine. It was Levi's, and I intended to treat it as such. Exploit the love and cuddles; avoid all contact with its excretion. If Levi wasn't paying me, I was doing the bare minimum with him and that meant no training.
As I approached, Pepsi scampered off with something that I acutely recognised hanging from his mouth. "Oi, Scamp, get back here." He bowed his head to me, bum high and tail wagging furiously. In his mouth was an empty cardboard box which until yesterday had housed chocolate cake. Right up until I ate the whole thing. There were still smudges of chocolate on the plastic window that definitely were not dog-friendly. I was pretty sure that chocolate was extremely bad for dogs. Now came the hard part. Before Pepsi began licking the contents of the box clean, I had to wrangle it off him. Unfortunately, he'd probably see this as a game. How to remove a toy from a puppy?
I decided that as a superior species which had been running marathons through African desserts and gathering fruits and nuts across vast kilometres of ground, I should simply be able to outrun it around the apartment. Five minutes later, we'd knocked over a side table, pulled the remainder of the bin out and around the kitchen, dragged Levi's shoes into the living room and the blasted dog still had the box.
"Give me that fucking thing or god help me I will –"
"What the fuck?"
I froze.
I tried to stop panting as heavily as I was. Pepsi, who had hold of the other end of the box, heard Levi's voice and immediately let go, trotting happily over to welcome him back. I daren't look up to see his expression. I took a couple of seconds to stand up, pull my jeans back over my bum, do one of the buttons on my shirt back up and retie my hair. All the while, not looking at Levi (or the rest of the apartment). I heard him hang his coat on the back of the door, set down his bag and begin the slow walk in my direction.
I turned.
"You're a nightmare, do you know that?" He said. I pouted, avoiding his eyes. I could see his feet padding over, one step at a time. He was still wearing his suit trousers (and I imagined the rest of the suit, too, but you could never be sure). "Everything you do ends in calamity."
"I did clean for you …" He was close enough that his belt had come into view; I still didn't raise my eyes.
"Even the dog doesn't cause as much mess as you."
"Hey!" I began to argue, finally meeting his eyes. I had about half a second to register that his eyes were smiling, before he caught my lips mid-rant. "mmf!"
His hands dropped down to my waist, palms cupping my hips, bringing his chest closer to mine. It was warm. It was nice. I almost felt like crying after the week I'd had. Just seconds like this made me realise that all that stress, all that hassle, it was nothing. Nothing mattered anymore.
"I missed this." Levi stopped kissing me and tapped my nose with one index finger, making me squint.
"I, on the other hand," I didn't get to finish what I was saying as he kissed me again. "didn't miss you," I mumbled between gasps for air, "at all… mph."
Minutes later my lips were hot, my breath much faster than normal. I looked up at him slowly, taking the front of his shirt into my hands and pulling it gently.
"You didn't?" Levi let a smirk lift his lips, revealing one tooth like a vampire.
"If I say no…" I pulled on his shirt again.
"Guess I'll just have to go then, if that's the case!" With cruel abruptness, he separated from me and crossed the room to collect his briefcase.
"Hey!" I complained. Damnit, he'd tricked me.
From my spot on the sofa (where I had been banned whilst the clean-up of the apartment was conducted) I peered from between the cushions I'd smothered over my face, watching Levi sweep, hoover and dust with a glint of excitement in his eyes. Pepsi plopped himself onto my feet; he was also watching Levi. Like spectators at a tennis match, our eyes roamed left to right, left to right.
"Would you both stop it?" He grunted, irritated. Pepsi whined. "I can't tell if that was you or the dog."
"How was the trip?" I asked, his nose immediately crinkling in displeasure.
"My manager wouldn't stop bugging me … he's been all over me since- ah…" Since Petra's attempted suicide, and Levi's subsequent absence without leave. "Before, he used to get me into his office all the time, asking if I had any welfare concerns he needed to know about. Now he's taken the complete opposite approach. If I'm even a minute late, he's all over me like diarrhoea." I felt like questioning his use of simile; in the end, I decided to let it go. "I didn't really get anything out of the lectures either. There was one lecture from a guy, he was a little older than you, that I swear was directed at me. My manager kept checking that I was taking notes."
"What was it about?"
"Boardroom etiquette, social skills, making a good performance in a pitch etc."
"Social skills," I snorted. Levi put down the brush and stalked over, taking one of the pillows I was grasping and smothering it over my face. I yelped beneath the pillow and Pepsi began to bark excitedly. Levi removed the pillow after a couple of seconds and smirked down at me. My face was flushed, my hair had gone a little static and I hoped Levi didn't realise that there was a faint layer of foundation on his cream cushions. He pecked my nose and then continued to absorb me with his eyes. I watched as his eyes flickered from my eyes to my nose, to my cheeks, to my hair, to my ears, to my lips.
"Brat," his eyes softened. I reached up to grab his tie, unravelling it carefully. Just as I pulled the tie free and began to loosen his collar, he stopped me. "No …" he mumbled, looking confused. My face roared red.
"I wasn't going to-!"
"There's scars …" He murmured. "I don't want you to see them …" His eyes were hazy now; he looked at me, but I could tell he was staring straight through. His words were slurring now. He stood abruptly and grasped at his temple.
"Levi! What scars?" When he didn't respond, I scrambled off the sofa and faced him, grasping his shoulders tightly.
"Don't look!"
"At what? Levi, look at me!" He was beginning to scare me now. At last, his dark eyes flicked up to meet mine and his shoulders visibly sagged. He let me remove his hands from his collar and lower them to his sides.
"I …" He couldn't find the words to explain whatever was going on inside him, but I kept up my steady gaze. When I didn't say anything, he swallowed hard and tried again. "I'm fine, I just … sometimes have moments like this."
"Like what? What do you mean, scars?"
"I don't know." A ball dropped in my stomach and suddenly I was nervous. Could he?... Was this something he was hiding from me …?
"You haven't … taken anything, have you?" I asked, praying the answer was no. He looked confused for a couple of second and then the penny dropped.
"No! Nothing like that." He tried to joke, "you think my work colleagues are that bad?"
"Then what do you mean, 'moments'?" I knew that I was probably pressing too hard on this issue. It felt like stamping on fragile glass, waiting for it to shatter. But I wanted it to shatter. I wanted to get through to what was underneath.
LEVI-
It was at that moment that the door saved me. Lena gave me a look that dared me to leave this conversation; I pretended not to notice and hurried over to the door. When I opened it, I was more than moderately surprised to see our visitor.
"I managed to find your house keys," Luann said, holding out said keys in her palm. Her nails were long and pedicured into fine points. Like claws, I thought.
"Where were they?" I took them with a raised eyebrow. When I'd woken up that morning … well, I'd got out of there as soon as I could. And I didn't bother returning once I realised I didn't have my keys.
"In the bedside drawer. You must have taken them out of your pocket in the night."
"Ahh, probably. I borrowed my friend's set of spares in the end."
"Oh, good. I'm glad you didn't have any problems getting home."
"No. Anyway, thanks for these. I owe you a coffee … for erm, everything."
"No problem." Luann looked about to leave when she glanced behind me. Her face flashed an expression I couldn't read. Her calm, normal attitude completely changed – a shame, since I was getting to like this side of her, instead of the constant overt flirting. "Well, I'll text you." She smiled brightly, her bright white teeth glinting, eyes fluttering. I was about to question her, then she left.
I shut the door, applied the lock and turned back into my apartment.
Lena, stood just behind me, wore a look of absolute horror.
AN: You're probably going to have to re-read this whole fanfic, huh? Yah, me too.
