A/N: For some reason, I have this habit of writing a lot of dialogue within the confines of a car. Also, as SnK draws to a close, I feel like Isayama has lit a fire under my ass to get this fic rolling towards its conclusion—hence, yet another update ;)
If you need a background track for this, take a glance at the title of the chapter.
Levi
When Carla stepped into the waiting room, clipboard and paperwork in hand, one dirty look from Mikasa told me to sit my ass right back down. Translation: I don't need a baby-sitter. She clearly didn't get enough sleep last night. Dark shadows rim her lower eyelids, and her knee has been twitching from the second we got into the car, cranked into overdrive from the three cups of coffee she gulped down before we left.
She follows Carla into the examination area, and I slump back in my seat, following the miserable wanderings of a clownfish in its gunky little tank. I wish I'd brought along my laptop to proofread a chapter or two. Hanji was through the roof when I told her the news. She already has multiple editors and publishers climbing over one another in my email inbox. Evidently, there's no need to go hunting for an agent.
I flip through an older edition of the Tribune left abandoned on a nearby coffee table. I've covered several beats as a journalist.
Fresh out of college, I trailed Chicago politics. This was a lot of shoving recording devices in the faces of local government leaders as they stepped out of cars, fighting to get my questions answered in the clamor of a press conference, and running a highlighter through pages upon pages of policy. But let's put it out there: I loathe politicians. It pained me to print their fluffy, substance-less quotes in the paper, let alone badger them on the telephone, and I felt complicit in their bullshit by giving a platform to their blather.
I hit the end of my fuse within a year, and my editor sent me into investigative projects. Investigative journalism is a slow burn, but once you hit the jackpot, it's glorious. The Chicago Police Department is a hotbed of damning stories—and with a basic working knowledge of the Freedom of Information Act, I could fish out those juicy details with a few phone calls and emails. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Don't get me started on the Catholic Church and its scourge of predatory priests.
At the same time, Erwin Smith took a flight from Heathrow to O'Hare and strolled into the offices of the Tribune in an Armani suit and a Rolex. He was one of those people who had the luxury of studying philosophy at Cambridge, and a couple of years later, he had himself a high-rise office in Manhattan, where he made sure his corporate clients could view the shiny Harvard Law School diploma hanging on his wall. But then he pinballed into a job with Reuters, which sent him hopscotching across southeast Asia. This man was a machine, churning out story after story, topics spanning from drug trafficking to modern slavery to an incident of ethnic cleansing. Somewhere along the way, he secured a Pulitzer Prize—the cherry atop top of a mountain of other reporting awards.
His unanchored optimism always rubbed me the wrong way. And his written prose veered on the side of florid and ornate, occasionally crossing into the territory of, dare I say, trauma porn. But people gobble that shit up—Isabel and Furlan included. Months after getting our master's degrees in journalism, Erwin had recruited them to help him cover the narcotics trade in Colombia.
I won't forget the day he strode into the newsroom, making his way to my cubicle.
"Levi," he said, standing before me.
I received the news a week ago. They got caught in the crossfire between the cops and the local cartel. Every night, I couldn't shake my dreams free of the image of Isabel and Furlan's bodies—studded with bullets. I pictured Isabel clutching her camera equipment as she fell to the ground, while Furlan staggered forward five paces before his knees gave out.
I wrote their obituaries. I had to interview Isabel's grandmother three times because she couldn't get any words out without breaking out into sobs. Furlan's father hardly gave me a complete thought, so I had to hit him with a volley of yes-or-no questions. He was a hotshot Wall Street consultant, and he was never on board with his son's detour into journalism.
I swiveled around in my chair to face Erwin. I wondered, if before he took the elevator, he whipped out his selfie camera and did a test run of facial expressions, tweaking his frown, wrinkling his brow, until he hit the sweet spot of sadness.
"You did them justice in their obituaries," he told me.
Was I supposed to thank him for the gracious compliment? I swiveled back to my spreadsheets. We had talked over the phone several days ago. He was still in Colombia, and he made me download WhatsApp just to get a hold of him. I only needed comment for the obituaries, so when we wrapped that part of the interview up and when he tried to express his condolences, I ended the conversation right there.
"Listen," he continued, still lurking in the doorway of my cubicle. "You can continue what they started, Levi. I've seen your work. You're a first-rate reporter, and I need you out here, on the frontlines—"
"Just stop." I spun back around in my chair, slowly. "If you think you'll whisk me away to embark on your delusions of grandeur, think again," I snarled, rising to my feet. Erwin Smith loomed almost a foot taller than me, but I was confident that I could throw him into a dumpster if the opportunity arose. "Ever heard of this fella called Icarus? You're more unhinged than he was—by threefold. He just happened to get too close to the sun. You fly right into it."
He hardly budged when I told him all this. His face was a sheet of ice, and he just stared me down, unfazed. Eventually, he reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a folded-up manila envelope. He gave it to me, told me that he was sorry for my loss, and left to speak to our editor-in-chief.
Inside were letters that Furlan never mailed, along with some photos from Isabel.
"You couldn't have given this to me when I was actually writing their fucking obits?" I yelled after Erwin, but he had already stepped into the elevator.
There was a letter for each day we were apart. Furlan used to journal every night by hand. Some nights, he'd fill pages after pages. Other nights, he'd only write a single sentence. Each of his letters reads like a conversation we'd have on the porch of our Evanston house over beers, watching the sun dip under the horizon.
Dear Levi,
My Spanish isn't great, but I'm slowly picking on phrases here and there. Did you know that Erwin's a polyglot? He can speak nearly all of the Romance languages, plus Mandarin, Russian, and Arabic...
Dear Levi,
Erwin's critical feedback hits like a needle—painstakingly exact and efficient. Nothing too overblown, surgically precise. I know you'd beg to differ, seeing that you think his writing is too flowery, but when he analyzes your writing, it's a whole 'nother story. I can already imagine your voice in my head. "What a hypocrite," you'd say.
Dear Levi,
We went to an abandoned cocaine lab today. We hiked out several miles into the rainforest, and there it was, this structure with a thatched roof. To think that this rundown place is capable of churning out so many dollars' worth of narcotics is beyond anything I can fathom.
Dear Levi,
I wish you were here. You've always hated covering the politics beat because it was too "riddled with B.S.", as you put it, and I have this sneaking suspicion that working in investigative projects has been too slow-paced for you. If I'm being honest, you should be with us right now. I know you, Levi. You'd find a calling in what we're doing.
He always signed off: Love, Furlan.
Had these letters gotten into my hands, would I have written back? When I think back upon those days, I tell myself I would. Or rather, I convince myself that I would. I would, right? Which then begs the question: When the ball's in my court, how would I sign off?
A month later, I watched the skyline of Chicago blink good-bye through an oval window as a Boeing 737 lifted me into the stratosphere, bound for Turkey. There, a "contact" would pick us up by truck and take us across the border into Syria.
In the seat beside me, Erwin Smith asked the flight attendant for a glass of Sauvignon blanc.
"Guess what?"
Something lands on my lap—a packet of papers—and I blearily open my eyes. Fish have always been hypnotic to me, and I must've dozed off watching the clownfish swim lonesome zig-zags in his tank.
I don't even need to look at the test results. Mikasa's wearing an ear-to-ear grin, standing with her arms crossed, looking like she's conquered the world. Carla's behind her, smiling as she scribbles something on a clipboard.
I stretch my arms above my head. "Wanna make a Babies R Us stop before school?"
"No, thanks," she says. "But I could use some waffles at IHOP."
She sits in the shotgun seat with her feet propped up on the glove compartment, hooking her phone up to the Bluetooth speaker to play "High and Dry." This is the most relaxed I've ever seen her—even when she's hanging out with her horse-faced boyfriend. She's texting up a storm on her phone, looking up every once in a while to laugh to herself.
"You know," I tell her. "I saw Radiohead play this song live."
"Did you really?" she asks, and I'm surprised by the genuine interest in her voice.
"Oh, you bet. It was when I was in college. They were playing at the Rockefeller Center, and I worked an ungodly amount of overtime shifts to pay for those tickets," I recall. "But I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat."
"You went to Columbia, didn't you?"
"No, I stayed to work in investigations," I say immediately, giving her a weird look.
"For college?" She peers back at me, equally confused.
"Oh, shit," I shake my head. "I thought you meant the South American country. Colombia."
"International news reporter in our midst. I forgot that the distinction actually matters for you."
"To answer your question, yes, I went to Columbia, as in the big-ass university in Morningside Heights, NYC. Still baffled why they admitted me, seeing that I applied on a whim."
"Way to humble brag," she huffs. "That's the only thing people are talking about nowadays. College tours, college apps, college essays. It's driving me up a wall."
"What do you have to worry about?" I snort. "You're literally good at everything. Spitting image of the 'well-rounded' application they keep going off about. The only place that you should really work on is your shitty taste in boys."
"I thought you liked Jean," she shoots back hotly.
"Whenever he's with you, he reminds me of one of those small dog breeds. Like, not a lap dop, per se, but something a bit bigger. I'm talking about one of those yippy pooches that'll wag its little tail and play fetch with you at any time of the day. A terrier of some sort?"
"Please spare me the analogy. What are you trying to say here?" Lately, she's invited my opinion, though she still takes it in grudgingly, gritting her teeth and avoiding eye contact. When I glance over, she's stopped her flurry of texting, and she's waiting for my answer.
"You know how I call him 'your plaything'? I'm not kidding when I say that."
"Go on." I feel bad for her cell phone. Her hands look like they're strangling it.
"I'm no love expert, but to my limited understanding of how relationships are supposed to function, your boyfriend's supposed to be the one holding your hand and patting your back during a pregnancy scare. Why did Eren play Jean's role?"
When I was a kid, my mom used to use our car as a sort of domestic interrogation chamber. There's something about driving 45 miles per hour in an enclosed space with just you and your interrogator—who has strategically shut off the music, by the way—that makes you spill. Mom worked a minimum wage job. I couldn't afford the luxury of drowning her out by plugging a pair of headphones into an iPod, so if I gave her the silent treatment, she'd fill that space with a detailed description of how she'd punish me. Revoking car privileges, no more social outings, essential house arrest. The only way to shut her up was to roll with the punches.
I used to squirm in the backseat, avoiding Mom's austere face in the rearview mirror as she pulled a confession out of me. Yes, Mom. I stole $20 out of your purse to buy comic books. And later, when I could sit in shotgun—a.k.a. the hot seat currently occupied by Mikasa—it'd be: Yes, Mom. I've been peddling marijuana to my high school classmates—but on the brightside, it's lucrative as hell, and my college loans won't be so burdensome, yeah?
Executed correctly, even the most stoic break. After all, once you twist the volume dial to zero, killing the Radiohead, it's awkward as hell—especially when you miss the exit into IHOP and head towards US-41, which will bring us straight into downtown Chicago.
Mikasa tries to change the subject. "I thought we were going to IHOP."
"Nope."
"I have school in an hour."
"We're taking a day off."
"That's called truancy. This is illegal."
"So is fucking in a car parked in a public setting, apparently. You asked for waffles, right? There's this pub that serves the shittiest fucking drinks, but the best chicken and waffles order on the face of this planet. Hanji works there."
"I have practice this aftern—"
"Not anymore. You're helping me with a reporting mission this afternoon."
Her eyes widen, and she leans forward in her seat. "Really? For the book?"
"I hope your high school newspaper class taught you how to interview properly." I pull a notepad out of my coat pocket. "I need you to get through these questions." She reaches for them, but I yank my hand away at the last minute. "But first, answer my question."
"Why do you care so much about my personal business?" she grumbles, twisting away from me to look glumly out the window.
"Think of this as a warm-up. Your source is being unreasonably non-compliant. Dodging questions. Changing the subject. Being a difficult pussy. But you gotta shoot to kill, get your goddamned answers because you're on deadline. So you egg them on. Maybe chop that question into smaller pieces, and you can patch together the piece-meal answers later. Where was Jean? Simple question."
"At home," she grits out.
"There we go, we've made a dent. The why's and how's are the toughies. Start with the where's, what's, and when's. Those will give you answers that are five words or less. Easy. Next: When did you run into Eren?"
"When I was at Walgreens."
"What was he doing there?"
"Refilling a prescription for his mom."
"What was Jean doing in the meantime?"
"He was hanging out with his friend Marco."
"Let's move onto a why. Why didn't you call Jean?"
"I don't know."
"When you interview Erwin's old colleague at Reuters this afternoon, this kind of answer is not satisfactory, you hear me? Of course you fucking know. Let's try again, rephrasing things. What made it difficult to call Jean? What stood in your way?"
"I felt awful. I didn't want him to worry, and he was busy."
"If he wasn't busy, would you have?"
"No."
"Why's that?"
"I already told you. I didn't want to inconvenience him. I could handle it on my own."
"But Eren was with you, every step of the way. What granted Eren his role in helping you? What made Jean ineligible?"
"He… happened to be at the pharmacy."
"But you easily could've shrugged him off."
"He's my best friend, Levi. It's been weird between us, but… I trust him. He knows how to make me feel better."
"By comparison, do you trust Jean as much?"
"No," she whispers.
"Is it hard for you to let others help you?"
"Yes."
"Even Eren?"
"Especially Eren."
"Why's that?"
"I don't want him to get hurt, on my behalf—like he almost did several years ago. I don't want anybody to get hurt for me, period."
This is when I shut up. Silence has an incredible way of coaxing words out of people. A glittering Lake Michigan pans into view, and we've hit the stretch of US-41 that skims along the waterfront.
"My dad was violent, Levi. Whenever he had too much to drink. He threw things at me," she says. Her index finger brushes against a scar on her cheek. "And one time, Eren was there. And he tried to intervene, and I've never been more scared in my life. So ever since then, I've never wanted anyone to be responsible for the… wake of destruction that seems to follow me. I feel like this storm cloud of bad luck always seems to be hanging over me, and I just don't want anyone else roped into it. I want to keep all that to myself."
"That makes sense, but it's okay to lean on people, you know? Think about how much worse yesterday's whole snafu would've been if he wasn't there."
"I feel grateful about that," she says. "But at the same time, I feel so guilty."
"He seemed like he wanted to be there."
"He always wants me to talk about things, Levi. That's something I've envied about him. He knows how to talk about how he's feeling. But when he asks me to do it, I don't have the words. He urges me so much to dig up things about my dad, but I just don't know how to communicate these things. I just want to move on, but Eren doesn't let me off the hook. And I hate that, Levi, I really do. But Jean doesn't ask about those things. He knows what's off-limits, and we keep it simple. We talk about movies and TV and sports and lighter things, happier things."
"So a plaything. Someone for fun."
"I hate your word choice."
"But not someone to lean on."
"That's the exact opposite of what I need."
"You know, I'd still be a deadbeat, couch-surfing, toilet-scrubbing high school janitor if it weren't for Hanji Zoe," I tell her. "And to think I thought that was bliss."
"Sorry?"
"Oh, right. I guess they never printed this, but if they did, it'd be: 'Former Pulitzer Prize finalist quits job and becomes a custodian.' Honestly, I thought that People or Entertainment Weekly would've gotten a hold of this juicy bit, but after Erwin died, I just became so disillusioned with reporting. So I pulled that stupid stunt with the doorknob. I ripped it out of my editor-in-chief's office door and chucked it in his face. It crashed through the window behind him and almost hit a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk below. Got myself fired. I thought that was more efficient than quitting."
Mikasa has picked up on my tricks. It's her turn to fall silent now, and I let the memories flow back through my mind. "I had this phrase. Whenever Hanji would drag me to dinners or gatherings, people would ask me what I did for a living, but let's face it. They knew who I was. The answer they were really looking for was an awe-inspiring story, more specifically the story of how Erwin Smith got shot up by a gang of cronies sent by the Syrian government. We had gotten some sensitive documents from a local reporter, who handed them off to her son. That kid was roughly your age, maybe a little older. Our phones were dead, so we couldn't snap images and email them to our editor, so the kid wanted to take us to a fax machine. But those cronies were dead-set on killing the story.
"Erwin told us to go ahead. Worst case scenario, if we got caught, the damning evidence would be out there. I told him he was crazy, but he was so annoyingly righteous and determined. The kid and I got the docs uploaded. Erwin stayed behind to distract them, and they put four bullets in his leg, another in his back. The fucker survived, somehow, but he wouldn't walk again. And after we hauled ass back to the States, he had complications by the month. Infections galore, which then turned into respiratory problems, which then turned into cardiac issues.
"That's the story they wanna hear at socials. And that's the story that idiot Floch wants to write," I tell Mikasa. "They wanna 'ooh' and 'aah' at Erwin Smith, cast him as this martyr who died defending the freedom of the press, the greatest patriot of our generation, blah, blah, blah, commemorate his self-sacrifice. But for his entire career, this man has been tormented by an inner devil. People don't become this great without losing a part of themselves. He's risen to the top, but take a shovel to the dirt under his feet, and what do you see? Bones. A whole summit of them."
I laugh, bitterly. "But who wants to hear this at parties? So when they ask, I shut them up with this phrase. I say that I'm in 'maintenance engineering.' It's funny. They think it's a fancy term for accountability journalism or whatever, but instead, I tell them it's a lot of prying dried gum off of the undersides of desks and chairs. They feel embarrassed on my behalf, and they leave me be after that.
"I stopped making rent, so I started subletting at Hanji's—or at least, that's what I thought I was doing. The whole time, she never let me fork out a single penny, so I was basically bumming there, scot-free. I lost purpose. I stopped following the news. I wanted nothing to do with it.
"But then, Hanji lit a fire under my ass. When your dad passed, he put me down as your legal guardian. Why? Who the fuck knows. Maybe he wanted me to tell you all these stories and inspire you or whatever. Little did he know, being a Pulitzer finalist doesn't mean shit when it comes to parenting, as you can probably tell. I'm pretty sure I'm stepping outside of the rulebook when I ask you to get me weed."
"Or when you don't yell at me for coming home from parties at two in the morning," Mikasa adds, cracking a smile.
"Valid point. Anyways, Hannes called me in, told me I got drafted into this, and I'll let you know, I turned him down at first."
"I knew it!" Mikasa exclaims. "I knew you never wanted to be here in the first place!"
"Yes and no," I reply. "So I turn Hannes down, but he still gives me all this paperwork, just in case I have a change of heart. Hanji finds it, forges my signature, and next thing you know, I'm here."
"No way," Mikasa breathes. "You were… hustled into doing this?"
"More or less. At first, I was going to get you in on this whole plan to sabotage the court proceeding that's supposed to put the official stamp of approval on our arrangement—whenever that's supposed to happen. But here's the thing." I turn to look at her, and when her dark eyes peer back at me, I'm whisked back to those dusty streets of Aleppo, Syria, following this kid into an abandoned print shop. We kick at the fax machine, yelling at it to start up, and when the screen glows, I start feeding the government records in, one by one, while the kid stands watch by the windows.
"Our best friends can really get under our skin," I sigh. "But they know when we need help—even when we try to put on a brave face. They see through that shit. They've got X-ray vision. There was one day when Hanji sat me down. 'You're self-flagellating,' she told me. 'I hate how you try to be so fiercely-independent, to the point where you're so lonely. Why are you so unreasonably tough on yourself?' She said it hurt her so see me like this.
"I needed a fire lit under my ass. Hanji knew it. And frankly, I owe it to her for calling me out on my shit. And so I'm here now, trying to figure out this whole legal guardian thing."
"Do you want to be here, though?" Mikasa asks me.
"I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but I certainly don't feel like I'm casting about anymore. And for the first time in a while, I feel like I have something that gets me out of bed in the mornings again. So, Mikasa," I tell her. "Thank you."
I hit play on the stereo again, and "High and Dry" fills the space again.
Neither of us talk for the rest of the way. When we slide into a booth at the pub, Hanji joins us and fills the airwaves with story after story about her lab experiments. We're quiet again when we drive to the interview, turning the music up loud instead of talking. Erwin's former colleague takes a liking to Mikasa, and when we pack ourselves back into the car, we've secured a tape and the promise of emails from our source.
Mikasa convinces me not to make a stop by Floch's apartment, where I was planning to ding-dong ditch him. Before long, we're making our way back up US-41, headed home.
"Levi." She turns down the tunes.
"What is it?"
Mikasa leans her head back and closes her eyes. "We should go to a Radiohead concert the next time they come to Chicago," she says, smiling.
"I wouldn't be opposed," I answer, entertaining the thought.
A/N: I am so intent on finishing this story this summer. Guys, thanks so much for the messages. You guys are the wind in the sails of this fic. As always, I love love love hearing your thoughts and suggestions because wow, they truly fire me up.