Disclaimer: I do not own SnK, neither the manga nor the anime. Any parts you recognize belong to their creator. All original content is my own.

TW: Levi has a dream in this chapter that has allusions to necrophilia in one single sentence.

Chapter Twelve: Longing

A few years prior, the year 844…

Maia is walking towards the training forest with Castor, Sairam, and the final member of their squad, a tan skinned man named Delros. He has eyes the color of a robin's egg and the brightest smile in all of the Survey Corps. Though his blade skills are exemplary, his real talent is in map reading and formation planning. Maia's squad can often find him with Squad Leader Erwin. The two of them huddle over maps and parchment, scribbling furiously about a new technique they are tirelessly planning. Every night over the evening meal Delros tells his squad about their newest improvements to the plans. He is probably as excited as Erwin, maybe even more.

"I'm telling you," he is saying as the group makes their way to a copse of tall trees, "it's going to change the game for us. We're hoping to cut casualties by at least half."

"Half?" Sairam looks unconvinced and a little shocked. "There's no way. I don't see how lines on a paper and theories can stop Titans from bounding in and picking us off one by one, or, honestly, all at once. They're unpredictable sometimes, you know."

Castor rolls his eyes. Big, powerful forearms cross over his chest as he regards his squad-mate, "Sai, you are such a downer. This could be really big."

"Could be," Sairam repeats and then mumbles, "or a huge disaster."

This time it is Maia who rolls her eyes, albeit good-naturedly. She smiles and adds, "Well, I am excited for you, Delros. This sounds really promising. It could be the break we've been looking for!"

"See!" Delros extends his tanned arms outwards and gestures towards Maia, "someone believes in me!"

"To be fair," Castor claps Delros on the back and nearly sends him flying forward, "Maia believes in everybody."

"Hey, you four," Squad Leader Flagon's rough voice calls back to them. He is walking a ways ahead; he never walks with his squad. "Quit shooting the shit and get up here. The criminals are joining us today."

Maia sighs, "They're our teammates now, Flagon," she says warily. She is quickly tiring of reminding Flagon of that fact. However, it is a bold move on her part to continually speak to him this way.

As if on cue, he cuts his eyes over towards her in a glare. Sairam, Castor, and Delros all take a collective breath in. Flagon is famous for his biting words and harsh tones, but it is never more unsettling than when he uses them towards Maia, the woman with a heart of gold and hair to match. Even Sairam, a no-nonsense man who is almost painfully serious, treats Maia with a gentler tone. And it isn't that Flagon is inept or a terrible leader - quite the opposite, actually - he is just simply foul tempered and mean.

"Watch it, vet," he practically seethes. "Don't think I haven't noticed you becoming chummy with those delinquents. I won't have a member of my squad become tainted by their filthy existence. And do I need to remind you that you're just a veterinarian? I'm the squad leader here."

"No, sir," Maia hangs her head, "no need to remind me." She knows he doesn't really mean that, but it stings nonetheless.

"Good. Now, go set up the dummies. The last squad fucked them all up."

Maia walks off towards the well-worn path between the trees. Castor shoots Flagon a disappointed sort of look before trotting off after her. The two are walking towards the giant wooden practice dummies when Levi, Furlan, and Isabel stride up to them. They managed to catch the end of the exchange between Flagon Turret and Maia. Though he doesn't show it on his face, has arranged his features into a carefully constructed mask of disinterest, inside Levi is furious.

Just another reason to loathe Flagon Turret's existence.

"Yer not very nice to yer own squad," Isabel points out with a frown.

"Why don't you leave the leading to me, okay?" Flagon replies, totally over the situation entirely. He doesn't have time to be training these three sewer rats. He is still not convinced that taking them outside the Walls won't be the biggest mistake the corps will make to date. Out there they could do anything. He frowns deeper. He'd have to keep a closer eye on these three, to his extreme chagrin.

The Wings of Freedom are starting to feel like chains around Flagon Turret's neck when these three are around.

"You're doing such an exemplary job already." Levi's tone is bored, a disinterested sort of aloofness dripping from his words, but his insult is still biting. He looks around as if idly surveying the area, but in reality he is searching every inch of the training grounds for anything unsavory, anything that could attack them, well, besides Squad Leader Turret.

The man being pointedly ignored by Levi's cool grey eyes has a simmering look across his face, a face that would be quite handsome if it weren't for the perpetual scowl he wears on it.

"Watch it, scum," he warns, though the threat does nothing to Levi or the duo flanking his sides. "Let's just get this training over with so I can tell Erwin and Commander Shadis that you three don't belong here."

"Pfft," Isabel blows a puff of air from between her lips, shooting a few stray pieces of hair upwards as she does so, "like that'll happen. You know we're friggen amazin'. Hey!" Her face immediately changes to a lighter, happier expression, "Maia! Over here! Now there's a friendly face!"

Maia and Castor are returning from resetting the Titan dummies and wooden figures in the woods along the training course. Castor looms behind her like a powerful shadow, a bodyguard made of pure muscle and size, but Isabel pays him no mind. She wildly waves at the veterinarian who is making her way towards them. Today Maia's hair is plaited on either side of her head, the twin braids running along her temples and over her ears until they join together at the base of her neck. In an intricate weave they twist around each other like two, thick, interwoven streams of gold. She has tied the golden tail off at the end with a brown leather strip. The strand swings with her movements, gliding lazily across her lower back.

The soft and subtle way Maia moves, like liquid grace, is not missed by Levi. He tries to scowl, to show any sort of cold and closed off expression on his face, but after their meeting in the mess hall a few nights ago, Levi finds it harder and harder to keep his stony, iced over demeanor when he is around her.

He doesn't like this effect she has on him.

But he doesn't hate it either.

Instead, he looks away. If he can't see her light, perhaps he will not become lost in it. Though he can feel her warmth against his side, even with her relative distance as she stands a few feet from him, he does his best to avoid her gaze. He looks up to the trees instead, to the beginning of the course.

"Good morning, Isabel," Maia's voice greets and Levi forces his eyes to squint harder at the course entrance as Isabel returns the salutation.

"Good morning, Furlan." Furlan is distracted today, for good reason, but he waves and mumbles a hello despite his thoughts being on a certain locked door of a certain Squad Leader's quarters.

"Good morning to you too, Levi."

Her voice jolts his insides, makes him squeeze his fingers into tight fists at his sides. The way she says his name, so soft and gentle and full of warmth, moves him in a way that is wholly unfamiliar to him. He knows the tone goes unnoticed by everyone but himself, knows that no one is as hyper aware of everything Maia does the way that he is. Ever since the hill, that grassy little knoll, where the rising sun turned her hair into golden fire and lit her eyes up like liquid amber, where her face became alight with a gaze so heated and pure that he had felt an intense shift inside him unlike anything he had ever known...everything had been different.

And yet, his plans, his plans of treachery and deceit and, ultimately, of murder, remain the same.

But still, he feels changed. Resilient and unmoving in his resolve to follow through with his and Isabel's and Furlan's plan, but flooded with a new sense of...is it regret?

No, not regret. He has no regrets in life, something he tells himself often. He can not change his past, can't escape it either, so regretting something so permanent has no use for him.

But something that hasn't happened yet...something that won't happen because of his past…

Is it longing? This feeling? Longing for something he knows he can never have. Like wanting to look directly at the sun but knowing that to be impossible.

He feels his insides roiling again and something ignites deep in his stomach, something alive and flaming as he foolishly cuts his eyes over to her.

"I'm not your exception."

"Yes, Levi, you are."

Flagon Turret decides he does not like the way the Underground urchin is looking at Beckett, at his veterinarian. There is a charge of energy between the two that the squad leader absolutely will not allow to grow any stronger. He will be damned if he allows those three to infect his squad with their squalid, miasmic slime.

"Beckett," he grounds out her name, "You're up first. Blades out. Now."

She is about to tell him that Castor always goes first, but of course Flagon knows that. There is something else at play here, something that has Maia rolling her eyes when she is turned away from her superior. With a flourish, she brandishes her blades and shoots out her grappling wires, soaring through the sky and into the course with a practiced ease and flexibility that she prides herself over because it took her longer than others to perfect.

Isabel woops! and hollers as Maia careens through the trees and out of view. Flagon takes off after her to track her time and her movements - and maybe something else? Castor and Delros exchange a worried look as they too take off, but on the opposite side of Flagon. They are going under the guise of support for Maia, but really they want to see what their squad leader is up to and why a strange possessive glint could be seen in his eyes.

Levi watches them all zip off into the forest, his eyes trained on Maia as she slashes the necks of the few wooden Titan figures that are visible from the beginning of the course. Her movements are fluid, like a dance, but it's obvious to him that her comfort zone is not in the air but rather on a horse. When he trains on Gilbert (that goddamn horse that he has come to see as a companion) and she on her horse Iris, it is clear that her greatest skills are displayed on the back of those tamed and loyal beasts of hers. She holds her own in the air, shooting this way and that with precision and well-timed pivots, but ODM gear is a pale comparison for a saddle and the absolute weapon she can become while riding in one.

"Levi," Furlan whispers from his side, "I'm going to see if I can get into Erwin's quarters. Cover for me if that shithead asks where I am?"

"Oh, believe me," Isabel cuts in with obvious mirth in her sparkling eyes, "Squad Leader turd face is much more interested in big bro over here than you, Furlan. I think Flagon's got a thing fer Maia. What do you guys think, huh?"

Levi keeps his face neutral but allows a "tch" to escape his thinned lips.

"Probably," Furlan nods, backing away so he can make a break for it back to the barracks compound, "but who cares who he has a hard on for? Once I get those documents and we kill that sonofabitch we're as good as gone. Right, Levi?"

Levi nods stiffly, his eyes on the forest still.

"Yeah," his voice is deep but seemingly unfeeling, "who gives a shit."

Furlan's presence retreats away but Isabel takes this moment to scoot closer to Levi, her eyes narrowed. She pokes the side of his cheek, the only person in existence who can get away with such an action.

"Hmm," she pokes him again, this time in the forehead, "I think you give a shit, big bro. Yer brick face don't fool me."

"Aren't you the one who always wants to talk about that fucking horse with her?"

Isabel shrugs and the motion draws Levi's gaze away from the course. She gives him a knowing look. "Who doesn't want to talk to her? She's the nicest person I've ever met! Way nicer than that Sairam guy, blech," she sticks out her tongue in distaste, "he never laughs at my jokes."

"That's because your jokes are shit."

"Yer jokes are shit!"

"I don't tell jokes."

"And that's why they're shit!" Isabel huffs and crosses her arms across her chest, but a smile is painted across her lips. Isabel never stays angry at Levi or Furlan. How can she? They're her favorite people, her family.

Soon, Turret's squad is back. He is yelling something about timing and sloppiness that everyone in the area knows isn't true, while Maia pretends to listen attentively. In reality, she is gazing over towards Levi and Isabel. Levi tells himself it isn't because her stomach has bloomed with searing heat like his has, though a small part of him wonders if maybe that is also true. He knows her main focus is on the fact that Furlan isn't with them because her amber eyes shift from Isabel to Levi to the empty space near them. If she suspects anything, she makes no move to indicate her suspicions to Turret or anyone else for that matter.

"You," Flagon has a blade extended towards Levi, "you're next. Ready your blades."

With a glare and a long pause that is intentionally done to make Flagon's blood boil, Levi presses the metal auxiliary switches of his pommels and slides two fresh blades into place. He flips his hands and swings the blades until they are pointed behind him.

"You punk," Flagon glares at him, puffs out his chest in anger and a show of masculinity that stretches his tanned shirt and flexes his chest muscles against the leather strap of his ODM gear.

"What do you think you're doing, holding it like that? They weren't designed to be held like that! You wanna die the second you step out of the walls? Well? Psh, this is enough to get you kicked off my squad. It has to be," he mumbles the last bit to himself, but Levi hears him.

"You might end up that way…" Levi bites back at him, notices Maia and her teammates shifting their weight uneasily from behind Turret's back.

Flagon's eyebrows draw together in disbelief, "What did you just say to me?"

Levi looks back at him, his eyebrows straight lines, the deep shadows under his eyes pronounced as he all but glares at his supposed squad leader. "All that matters is slicing through the back of the Titan's neck, right? Let me do that however I want."

With speed that surprises everyone in the training area, Levi takes off. Flagon growls a low and menacing sort of sound and orders Sairam to follow after him. He does as he's told, slicing and hacking at Titan necks along the way in an attempt to cut Levi off. Flagon lunges off the ground and into the trees as well. Maia, Castor, Isabel, and Delros stand together, unsure and worried. Briefly, Maia glances around for Furlan again and narrows her eyes when she concludes that he is indeed missing.

When they return, Sairam is looking starstruck and like he has come down with a case of whiplash. His normally serious facade is contorted into wonder as he mumbles something about speed and 'never seen something so fast' as if he is in a daze. Flagon, on the other hand, has a deep set scowl on his face. Levi trails him, barely a sweat drop broken onto his cooled features.

"Training is over," Flagon grumbles. "I need to speak with Squad Leader Erwin. Report to the training yard for hand-to-hand practice." As he stalks off, fists balled at his sides so tightly that his knuckles are a stark white, he mutters something about 'the wings of revolution my asshole' to himself, clomping his way across the grassy fields and off towards the Survey Corps' base.

Castor and Delros collectively sigh, roll their eyes, and head off to the training grounds together. Delros begins talking about how Flagon will probably be cutting into his planning time with Erwin, lamenting over this fact because he has several new improvements to the formations they are creating. He proceeds to relay some of these to Castor, who looks anything but interested.

Isabel hurries to catch up to Sairam, her favorite person to annoy, and almost immediately the two begin to bicker. Isabel is in her element; one of her favorite pastimes is vexing the stoic man. She even pokes his sides to try to get a rise out of him, cackling madly when he reaches out to swat at her. If steam could erupt from his ears, Maia thinks he would be screaming like a boiling kettle right about now.

She turns around to look at the only member of the morning session left. Levi has his back to her, turned towards the training course still. Slowly, with some reservation, she strides over to him instead of heading off with her squad. As she approaches, she takes a moment to observe him, feels a heaviness settle in her stomach, a shock current run through her veins.

His shoulders are squared off, strong and lean. They give way to the wide plane of his back, the standard issue cargo jacket pulled taut over the sharp blades and lateral muscles there. She allows her eyes to slowly trail their way down to his tapered waist where his ODM gear sits snugly like an extension of his body. Powerful legs wrapped in leather straps, athletic thighs, hard and strong, flexed underneath the clasps. Levi stands with his legs slightly wide, his weight shifted to the side he favors, his left. Maia watches his body rise and fall with his breaths. Expand and contract. He is like a flickering shade against a candle's flame.

So many small details she now notices about a man she hardly knew, thought was as inaccessible as attempting to touch a shadow, a few months ago. So many feelings that war inside of her now, dormant for her entire life until him. Feelings she had never thought of until now.

She thinks of the way he looked at her before training began. The dark look in his eyes, but not ominous or deadly - no, it was something different. She felt a shift when Flagon ordered her around, when he pinned her small form underneath his self-righteous gaze and talked to her as if she were inept and useless, though she knew Flagon thought rather highly of her. Her heart had beat faster then, her breathing had quickened, much like it is doing as she gazes at Levi's back.

Is this feeling...is this what it feels like to...want?

Their early morning hilltop moment flashes through her mind. How he looked, wrapped in shadow and staring at her like she was something rare and special, something more than she knew herself to be, or at least thought herself to be. Her abdomen had heated then, looking at him, watching the rising sun illuminate his beauty, his sharp lines, all of his sculpted angles. Low and deep like a searing flash, pulsating across her, a wave had struck her core, reaching places she had never paid much attention to before him. It was in that moment that she knew: he truly was her exception.

"Levi," she says his name without meaning to and it comes out softly, a whisper in her breath.

His shoulders tense and she thinks it is out of frustration that he hadn't been left alone, but in reality it is because a shiver had slithered up his body and squeezed his muscles out of his control.

"I," she swallows, tries to get a grip on herself, on her emotions, because really, why would he want some woman falling all over herself to be anywhere near him? And why would she allow herself to act in such an uncontrolled and wanton way? She was stronger than that, bigger than that. She changes what she wants to say. "Flagon is...a lot, to handle, I mean. He is...traditional and biased and entirely too distrustful for his own good. I'm sorry he - I'm sorry people here think…"

She sighs and then apologies finally, "I'm sorry they don't know you."

It is like a rope breaks in Levi - one that has held him in place all this time. Levi whips around then and finds Maia is closer to him than he anticipated. He, for once, is taller than someone, as he looks down his nose at her. She is inches away from him, so much closer than she has ever been before. He feels her closeness, the warmth of her body and her proximity to his own. His skin prickles underneath his tan corps shirt and although there is a breeze rushing through the trees, he begins to feel almost unbearably hot. From this distance, this almost unfathomable nearness, Levi can see the myriad of colors in her eyes. Amber mixed with light golds and flecks of red like resin reflecting in sunlight. Hues that resemble a bottled sunrise.

The rope that snapped is slack now. The force of it has ebbed away. His sudden movement loses its power.

"And you think you know me?" and damn him if his voice didn't come out softer than he wanted it to.

There is a gentle pressure on his equipment. He knows this because he is acutely aware of everything around him, even more so when she is near him. He wants to hate it, wants to hate that ever since he met this woman, this veterinarian who understands horses and humans better than he thinks he ever could, his world has shifted. His plans - his plans to betray these suicidal Titan hunters and kill a man whom she reveres, stealing documents that will buy them their freedom - feel different now, weightier, loaded with something else.

It isn't regret.

He closes his eyes tightly.

It is longing.

His hands are still resting on the controller grips of his ODM gear when he feels the change in weight. Long and nimble, his fingers are still curled around the duel triggers, resting against the solid metal that encases the small switches. His digits contract once, twice, pulsating and twitching, wanting to shoot out his grappling hooks and disappear.

Because her small hands are resting on the controller grips too.

She is not touching him, but it is enough. Enough to send his insides into a spiral of thick, twisting desire.

It is longing.

"I'm not your exception."

"Yeah, Levi, you are."

He has not longed for something in many years. Once, long ago, when another woman whom he cared about had wasted away to nothing in front of his young, impressionable eyes, he had longed for something. Longed for help, a different life, someone to save him. Then he realized that longing was useless, a pointless feeling that didn't do jack shit for anyone. Longing didn't get you help, didn't create a different life for you or give you someone that would swoop in and save you. All longing did was make a person desperate, soft, incapable of fending for themselves or taking their own situation by the balls and dragging themselves up from the very pits of where longing had put them.

Levi hadn't longed for something until the day that he saw the sun become a woman.

How easy it would be to pull her to him right here and right now, away from everyone. To sate his need, the nearly painful ache that spasmed in his gut when he caught sight of those streaming beams of sunlight that flowed down her shoulders, or heard the velvety soft timbre of her voice. How easy it would be to have this moment, one he had never had before, had no experience with but somehow longed for anyway, to have this memory to keep close to him for when he and Isabel and Furlan -

No.

Because a moment like that, he knows, feels with every fiber, ever part of him, could never be just one moment.

Looking at her - down at her - staring up at him with eyes that view him unlike anyone else, view him like he isn't grime that needs to be scraped off the bottom of a boot or muck that needs to be dredged from a pool or refuse to be shoveled away. How could he give her only one moment?

How could he not give her every moment?

"I think I know you better than they do," her voice is honey, sweet and silky. "But, no, I don't think I know all of you."

A sudden spark of boldness flares up inside her, and she dares to move her fingers just a hair's breadth closer to his own. She feels the change in pressure as his fingers give a small twitch, a subtle jump.

He tries to make his voice deep and menacing, but she sees through it and it leaves him wondering if she really does know him better than any of these other self-destructive idiots here.

"You don't want to know all of me," his chin clenches and she can see the muscles there flex, "believe me."

Maia watches him try to summon that darkness around him again. To steel his face, lock his expressions deep within him. She feels him try, infinitesimally, to pull away from her, to slide his controller grips from her fingers. She would let him. If he pulled enough, she would let him. Would never dream of holding him somewhere, trapping him. But he barely manages to tug them at all. It is a weak attempt to distance himself from her and for the life of him (and her, for that matter) he cannot figure out why he can't pull away, why he won't.

"Are you afraid I will run?" Maia wonders, tries to figure him out, rearrange the puzzle pieces that are Levi Ackerman until she can form a perfect picture of who he is.

He pauses for a moment and when he lets out a shallow breath through his mouth she can feel it against her cheeks.

"I'm afraid you won't."

Maia lifts her hand. Levi watches as she raises her delicate fingers to hover in front of his face. He knows those fingers hold a quiet strength, a taming power that few others possess. Slender and dainty they may appear, but he knows them to be calloused, powerful. He has felt them sometimes when her fingers had brushed his during their training on horseback. When she had carelessly allowed him to feel her touch against his own chilled, pale skin. Carelessly given him a feeling for which he has now become greedy. She had repositioned his hands time and time again to master the reins and the saddle, ignorant to what she was doing to him on the inside.

Her fingers stretch out towards his face, slowly, haltingly. Maia curls them inward, towards her palm, so that when Levi feels a feather light touch against his cheek, up his jawline, her knuckles are what leave a hot trail of fire in their wake. He is alight with sensation, though her skin barely touches his, and is overwhelmed, completely and utterly taken. Her breathing is uneven - she cannot figure out from where she has pulled such bravery, such tenacity, but here she is, her hand outstretched and her fingers brushing along his jaw, caressing, gently, reverently, his face.

She treats him with a touch so weightless, so delicate, as if she is afraid he will disappear at any moment. That he might mold himself into the shadows and vanish before her very eyes. Maia is not entirely sure he won't. She has seen the way Levi moves, effortlessly the way darkness creeps slowly behind a sunrise, overtaking everything in its path, bleeding across a once vivid and bright canvass.

"Levi," she breathes, afraid she might scare him off, afraid she might lose her own nerve.

Levi closes his eyes. Why can't he move? Why can't he run? He has ODM gear at the ready and his fingers still clutch at the gear grips. He could shoot out his hooks and escape so quickly that neither one could ever truly know if he had really been there. So why doesn't he? Why won't he?

Her skin is warm and her voice is sweet and she is there in front of him shining brighter than anything he has ever known. His shadow is pressed under the force of her light. He is motionless, trapped by her beams and drawn to her warmth like a moth to a flame.

"Levi," Maia says his name again and Levi thinks that if she says it one more time he will be done for. But then she asks him a question that ignites acid in his stomach, forces bile up his throat.

"Will you allow me to know you?"

His skin pales and a cold feeling washes over him. He is doused in an icy bath of reality that leaves him breathless, almost panting. He feels like he cannot breathe. The chill steals the air from his lungs and makes his heart seize. Levi feels them, one, two, three sharp pains that rap against his ribcage and nearly cause him to double over.

Maia feels him grab her wrist in an iron-tight grip. Her knuckles pull away from his face. All at once the warmth leaves him as he thrusts her hand away from him. It hangs suspended between them as she eyes him with wide, golden eyes, full of concern and uncertainty and...fuck him, is that hurt?

He feels his jaw tremble. The weight of everything crushes him. The plan. Their freedom. Isabel. Furlan. His mother wasting away to nothing in the darkness where he was raised and bred into the cold shell of a human being he is now. Watching her, the woman who gave birth to him, allow her body to be used and abused time and time again to feed some empty part of her and to feed his empty stomach. Men in droves coming into the apartment, that run down filthy little room that light never touched, to spend themselves inside the only woman to ever give a damn about him while he covered his eyes and wept underneath a dirty blanket. Kenny pounding ever inch of compassion and love and warmth out of him because that is how you survived in a world that didn't give a shit about you. And now. The crippling longing that tries to swallow him every time he looks at her goddamn hair like spun gold and her fucking eyes that look at him and see him for who he is and who he could be.

She is better than he deserves. She is better than anyone deserves.

He backs up. One step. Then two. A third.

Maia watches him. Her hand comes back to her side. His eyes never leave her but he puts distance between them that seems impossibly wide now, although merely a few feet. There is a chasm, deep and dangerous, that divides them and it is full of ice.

Finally, he turns from her and the wind blows his bangs across his forehead. Out of her view, he squeezes his eyes shut, feels himself retreat further into himself. He presses down the longing, the want. He stamps out the flames that had erupted inside of him, feels a part of himself snap off like the charred embers of a dying fire.

Levi turns his head to the side so that she can see half of his face, the half she had only moments ago felt against her skin.

"You do not want to know me."

He walks away then, doesn't turn to look back at her though it pains him to not have one final glance back. He knows what he would see, and he knows it would break his resolve.

When he is gone, vanished like the shadow she feared he would become, Maia wraps her arms around herself and looks up at the sky. A cloud overhead passes in front of the sun. She feels the warmth of its rays disappear. Fitting.

"You don't know what I want," she whispers to no one.

Levi doesn't like to sleep. Avoids it at all costs if he can. Until his body pulls him down into the throes of fatigue, he stays awake. He watches, he waits, he thinks. But tonight, he wishes he could sleep. Wishes he could close his eyes and not slip into nightmares because watching, waiting, thinking? He is driven nearly mad.

Furlan had found nothing in Erwin's office after he picked the lock and snuck in. The trio spent their time after the evening meal discussing what to do, how to move forward, and the entire time Levi felt his stomach turning acrid.

What if their plan can't be completed? What if they are forced to stay here, in this godforsaken regiment, until they are picked off one by one by giant, man-eating monsters?

What if he had just ruined the one shred of hope in his life...when he walked away from her?

After Isabel stealthily slipped out of their bunkhouse, Furlan had quickly fallen asleep, sullen but determined to think up a new tactic once he had gotten a few hours of shut eye.

Levi sits awake, glaring at nothing in particular. Shreds of moonlight filter in through the windows, slicing into the shadows of the barracks. He thinks of their spot in the Underground where the stars were visible on good nights when the shitty surface dwellers hadn't fucked up the air during the day. The stars gleamed and twinkled and glittered in the night sky. Isabel always pointed out shapes and patterns that neither Levi nor Furlan could ever fucking see but they indulged her anyway because everything was so bad down there that Isabel deserved something shining and new every now and again. The images she saw in the sky changed every night, and that seemed to be enough for her.

But the stars are nothing to Levi now. Not when he has seen something brighter, something more brilliant than every single light that surrounds the moon and dots across the deep blue sheet that wraps the world every night.

Not when he has seen the sun and felt it on his face.

Against his will, his chin dips towards his chest. His eyelids sink down, down, down until they sheath his grey eyes. Darkness edges in from the corners of his mind and he is taken to a place he avoids, a place he hates with a gut-rending passion.

Against his will, Levi dreams.

The apartment in the Underground is different this time. The paint is no longer chipping, the curtains no longer dirty and full of tiny holes from mites. The counter space of the tiny kitchenette is no longer littered with assorted glasses filled with foul liquor and used tobacco chew and cigarette butt steeped water. The bed and couch are no longer tattered and covered in bodily fluid from nameless men.

There are flowers in a vase on the table. Sunflowers.

Light streams in through the windows.

Light? In the Underground?

Levi takes shaky steps into the apartment. This is not how his nightmares normally go. He does not see his small, malnourished, pathetic form in the corner, with dirt under his fingernails and gaunt eyes that stare into nothingness, his skeletal face covered with thinly stretched, grey skin. There is no dying child in the corner, no dead mother on the bed. Throngs of men are not trickling in and using his mother's lifeless body still, emptying their sin into her hollow form.

What he does see takes his breath away in the best and worst way.

She is looking out the window, out at rolling green pastures and endless wide, open space. The sunbeams that sweep across the room bathe her in a golden glow that makes her body appear ethereal. An angel that has come to earth. Her dress hugs her curves, clings to her hips. The material, a startlingly crisp blue, spills down her like water.

"Maia," her name slips out of his mouth without his permission.

When she turns, her dress swirls around her like a whirlpool, and in his heart he feels as if he is being pulled by a current, a dizzying riptide, that forces his feet forward. He is hit with a smile from her that knocks the air from his lungs. Wild and free and radiant, her lips, her teeth, her mouth beam at him.

"Levi!"

Does he live here? With her? In the apartment where he was born twice, once as an infant and once when he was reborn into the darkest creature the Underground had ever spit out before?

Impossible. He doesn't deserve her; he never deserved her.

But Maia is heading towards him, her arms outstretched. She means to wrap him in those arms, curl those limbs around him and let him bury himself in her, in her warmth, in everything that she is.

This is not how his nightmares usually go.

Like a fool he extends his arms. Like a careless, fucking idiot he allows himself to think that for one second he might have something he wants more than he can even put into words.

A rumble sounds right as her fingertips brush his.

This is how his nightmares usually go.

An eye, giant and bloodshot, covers the window behind her. The walls crash on either side, wood splinters off this way and that; it sprays everywhere. A hand, gnarled and veiny, grabs Maia around her middle, around her tiny waist, the bright blue of her dress crinkling as colossal fingers squeeze her small body into a vise grip.

She screams, pained, like a choked animal. The sound cuts through Levi and causes his knees to slam against the upheaved floorboards. He cannot move.

"LEVI!"

Her eyes are leaking, tears and blood, as her life is squeezed out. The giant Titan rips the wall of the apartment away and Levi sees the verdant landscape crawling with grotesque humanoid creatures, all with people, screaming people, in their mouths, their hands. Blood stains the grass, crimson gore splatters everywhere.

"LE-"

Teeth that drip with clotted skin and cruor rip into her, tear her at the shoulder. Levi watches a ribbon of red shoot out from her neck, feels the hot spray on his face even in this hellish dreamscape. She sputters his name, gargling in her throat, but all that comes out is coagulated foam the color of death.

Levi feels himself dry heave onto the ruined floor. He tries in vain to get up, to get his legs to move and chase after the beast with the sun in his mouth, but he can't. He is motionless.

It is the worst nightmare he has ever had.

Her body is half in the Titan's jaws now, sickening cracks sounding out as it chews on her limbs. Her eyes, lifeless and dull, stare back at him like a doused fire.

"I don't know you at all."

Her voice, ghostly and haunting, is the last thing he hears before the floor gives way and he finds himself falling into a dark abyss.

The void swallows his screams.

Levi shoots upright in his bunk, his heart in his stomach. From his crunched position, half leaned against the wall in the corner of his bed where he foolishly fell asleep, he presses his face into the wood, feels the grains scratch against his cheek. He breathes heavily for a few solemn moments, eyes squeezed tightly shut. The bags underneath his eyes, he knows, are purpled and deep. He can feel their weight pulling, ripples of pain every time he blinks.

He has to move. His legs spring to life, shaking but strong.

Soundlessly, like the wind, he slips out of bed and the barracks themselves, wordlessly making his way to the rooftop.

Unbeknownst to him, Maia is already there.

And seeing her there will change everything.

A/N: I hope everyone is staying healthy, safe, and as positive as can be in such uncertain and terrifying times. Before I comment on this update, I want to say that my PMs are always open not only for story chats, but also chats of any kind. I know times like these can be lonely, but please know that just because you are by yourself, you aren't really alone. We may not know each other physically, but virtually, I am here for each and every one of you.

That being said: hooooooo boy, Levi and Maia, am I right? My Levi is probably, as you may have already guessed, different from how he is typically portrayed, and that is on purpose. I try not to make him out of character, which is why a lot of the detail rests in his inner feelings while his outer mask is still in place. I do think that even though he is particularly cruel and hard in his early days of the Survey Corps with his foul mouth and biting glares (and still, honestly, kind of is during Eren's time) there are many sides to him, warring emotions that threaten to incapacitate him. I see him as emotional, not emotionless - he merely pushes them all away and locks them down. And as one reviewer said that made me actually laugh out loud, we do like them boys damaged.

This chapter had to be split up into two; it was so goddamn long, y'all. I have FIVE chapters prewritten already since ya girl has a lot of time on her hands currently. I'm teaching from home and have nowhere to go, so the chapters are churning out. Writing is a nice escape, even if it is to a world with man eating Titans. Action is coming up (with that heated angst as always) and a slight divergence from the canon events. You'll see what I mean.

*The* rooftop scene mentioned in the last chapter is up next for Chapter Fourteen (the next time we will be in the past). There is a reason this story is M, and though a true scene of that nature isn't coming for many chapters, I hope I do this one justice. Also: a little easter egg to Levi's favorite color mentioned in the chapter "Dark & Light" appears in this one. He sees Maia in a blue dress, and although it is a hellish nightmare that ends in pure agony, my Levi begins his affinity for the color through that scene. It will become more relevant in later chapters.

Let me know what you think? Your reviews, support, words of encouragement, and favorites truly, honestly, and fully mean so much to me. I am humbled, warmed, and fueled by such kindness and love.

Stay tuned and be well. xx