A huge part of this story involves pining!Levi. Warning, this chapter has some angsty pining.
Insomnia
Just as the psychotic lives in fear of a compulsive madness which he has already experienced, the amorous subject lives in fear of a bereavement which has already befallen him.
—Anatomy of the Amorous Subject
In the main cafeteria, Levi is sitting, half-turned, abstracted and opaque, his right hand resting limply across the table. His left lays draped across the back of the chair. Beneath the charcoal smudge of his dark hair, his eyes are like sleepless, depthless glass. He is alone, as usual, far removed from the rest of the Survey Corps, who patter about, with the clash of dish and flatware and their austere breakfast selections afforded by the low budget of the Survey Corps. Most of their faces are still dull with sleep, and they speak in low voices among themselves. Hanji is neither dull nor speaking in low tones as she approaches Levi. Her face is bright; her voice is loud.
"As expected, Mikasa has taken first watch," Hanji says. She sets down a bowl of something hot and a pint of water and draws out the chair across from Levi. "She's with Eren now. I was just there." The chair scrapes the floor as she asserts the seat fully under her weight and sits down.
"She shouldn't skip meals," Levi says.
"She didn't. I made sure of it."
Levi's limp, resting hand glides, ghostlike, to the teacup set before him. The five fingers wrap the porcelain rim and bring the cup to his face, which hasn't moved, half-turned, in profile to Hanji. He stares through shadowed, sleepless eyes across the stone floor. His wrist bends back, straightens, and then glides away to replace the teacup on its saucer.
"It's strange how when you walk into the room, there's no sense of Eren being there at all," Hanji goes on. "Even though his body is lying right in front of you, breathing, you feel no presence of him. It's as though the part that makes Eren who he is has departed. His body has the impression of an empty vessel."
Crescents of insomnious bloodlessness hang, dark and profound, under Levi's eyes. His clothing is an ensemble of plain black. His sleeves are pushed to his elbows.
Hanji is still speaking. "I've decided to think of his state as a sort of . . . death rehearsal."
Levi's eyes, keen with attention now, turn fully on her. His face is cold, severe. "What nonsense are you going on about?"
Not looking at him, she eats her porridge. "Nothing, really. I was just saying that Eren's insensible condition is a kind of death rehearsal. It's as if he's practicing the state of being dead. And he's rather good at it."
"Good at being dead?"
"No," she says. "That would require him actually being dead. What I'm saying is that he's able to partake the role of a corpse without becoming one himself."
Levi makes a vicious, cynical sound by expelling air through his teeth. His hand glides out again and wraps the rim of the teacup, withdrawing. He speaks with the cup poised at his lips. "Don't tell him he's got talent as a corpse. He may take you seriously and make it a permanent condition."
Hanji guffaws. Her head is bent forward, and her face is rounded with food. "Eren's not one who's eager to die."
The teacup lifts. Over the porcelain, Levi's eyes watch Hanji closely, savagely. His hand moves away again. The teacup clashes to the saucer.
"He doesn't seem very concerned about his body, in any case," says Levi.
"I disagree. He doesn't care for pain. I get the feeling he wants to avoid it as much as he can, but his responsibilities often afflict him with injury. Even though it's in his nature to avoid pain, he does what needs to be done without complaint. You've trained him well."
Dust motes of memories are suddenly displaced from the floors of Levi's mind. Old images float up behind his eyes, and he sees a conference room, a chalkboard, and white, shining, blurred slits that open onto the familiar yet distorted faces of his old squad. Their images have been diluted by time, faded. The minute details that made his squad real, that made them alive, blur into the far-away distance of his memory—
Levi is the focal point of the meeting, an arc of bright, blurred faces turned toward him, as he imparts a strategy of how to extract Eren from his titan. One face among the rest stands out, untouched by time, unfaded and clear because he has remained by Levi's side, despite the several claims on his life.
Your arms and legs would be severed, Levi had told Eren, but you'd survive at least. Though you'll sustain serious injuries.
Eren had looked wide-eyed at Levi, misplaced, as if somebody had plucked him from out of pastless nonexistence and dropped him where he was, right then, right there, into a body that had the power to change into a monster. But Eren himself was a monster for other reasons. It had nothing to do with his ability.
Wait, Captain . . . Isn't there another way?
Levi had crossed his arms, and his voice had plunged into a calm, quiet, dangerous octave. Are you telling me, Eren, that you are unwilling to make any sacrifices?
There is more than one Eren. There are two. There's the one who hesitates. And then there's the one who turns a blind eye to his own fate and says, I'm just a little tired, is all . . ., as the fabric of his body unravels like thread.
Perhaps, when the day ultimately comes and Eren meets his certain end, overexposure to a fleshless undead Eren will carry over a feeling of temporariness and give everyone the impression that Eren is only "a little tired," as if he could liberate himself from being dead and bring about his own resurrection. Except this time he'll remain a corpse, restricted to the unbeating heart, and the rest of them will stand around his dead body, absurdly waiting for his return because they've grown accustomed to it. They've developed a habit of waiting around for Eren to wake up. And out of this routine, they'll continue waiting for a new beginning that will never arrive as Eren rots away in an unhallowed grave.
Hanji is speaking again, her chin in her hand. "As far as dying goes—or its practice rehearsal—you're quite awful at both, Levi. Zero talent." She smiles. "I don't think you'll ever proficiently pull off being a corpse."
"A costume of death doesn't suit me."
"No, it doesn't. I suppose that's why Erwin has entrusted you with the serum. At the very least, he can rely on you to survive. Even if the rest of us fall, against all odds, you'll be there to carry on our legacy."
Hanji is smiling. And Levi feels the weight of a thousand soldiers, a thousand lives come down on his shoulders, and with his naked hands, he lifts the world, braced beneath the heaviness of it, with a backbone made of indomitable iron and arms like steel pillars, as Eren's dead body rots away at his feet, his uniform shredded across his bare skin and his mouth slack with the suddenness of death, a deep skein of scarlet pulsing out of his wounds, and while Levi lifts this unbearable weight of legacy with a trembling strength, the corpse continues to stare profoundly into his face through two unblinking, colorless, marble eyes.
The sun has moved past noon high, and heatless autumn daylight pours in through the infirmary window, shedding across Mikasa in backlight as she sits, a chair drawn up, at Eren's bedside. She holds Eren's hand in both of hers. Her hair has pushed forward, over her eyes.
She's sitting like that, with the rigidity of a marble statue, when Levi enters. Once he sees her, he halts and folds his arms over his chest.
"This is Armin's watch," he says.
Mikasa doesn't look at him. "I've got it covered."
"You're mistaken if you think you can shirk your duties simply because your friend is taking a long nap."
"Armin said he would assume my duties for today."
"Is that right?" Levi leans back against the wall, near the door, arms still crossed, becoming perfectly still. His sleeves are rolled below the elbow, showing the hard muscle in his forearms. "And I don't imagine you feel any shame for casting your responsibilities on somebody else, then. You'll sit here while Armin, whose body is less capable than yours, struggles to lift heavy cargo supplies on his own." He's adopted a kind of black calmness, a genuine anger simmering, just below that careful, cool posturing.
Mikasa doesn't move, though the corners of her eyes spread wider. "He's not alone. Jean is helping him."
"Oh, well, that changes things, doesn't it?" Levi says this with just enough deadpan irony that Mikasa looks at him. "You can stay here, it's your choice. I can't make you do your chores yourself. It seems they'll be carried out, regardless. In my opinion, though, it should be Armin in here, and you out there. I elected you to transport cargo for a reason. And I think you know why that is."
This time Mikasa rises to her feet and releases Eren's hand, letting her palms unwillingly drag away, maintaining until the very last moment contact between their fingers. Eren's hand falls into a limp, lifeless retention of Mikasa's touch, still curled around the ghost-shape of her grip. She sweeps her hair behind her ear.
"Armin will be here soon," she says, in undertone. "I'm sure you'd prefer his company, anyway. I was being selfish, staying here."
"What makes you think he prefers Armin?" Levi says. Dressed in all black, still slanted against the wall, he looks like a shadow thrown across the room.
"In our childhood," she says, looking at Eren with soft, dark eyes, "those two were always leaving me behind. I could never quite understand their feelings. They spoke with such passion of places beyond the walls, but unlike them, I was content where I was—with my family and friends. As long as we were together, I didn't mind living in a cage. I didn't care that, inside these walls, we were no better than cattle. I didn't share their dream of reaching the outside world. The only thing I've ever wanted . . . was to stay by their sides. But I'm beginning to think my dream is an impossible one. I can't help feeling that the three of us will be separated, and I'll be left alone again."
"Yes," he says. "That's likely."
She whips her head around, fast, furious, her hair spinning out in a black blur, whipping across her eyes and then falling away again to spill like ink around her pale face. She's not so much sullen as injured. "Why would you say that?"
He stares steadily, but not unkindly, at her. "Who knows when it'll be. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen in a week. In a year. Sixty years from now. You can't know the date. But it will likely happen; that's what I think." Her face is sullen now, and sullenness rather than injury seems more natural on Mikasa. He pushes off the wall, his arms still crossed. "Are you going to live in fear of something you're unable to avoid?"
Her eyes are cold. She starts to walk toward him. "You really have a way of exacerbating the hemorrhage that's already flowing." She makes to move past him, but he sidesteps in front of her.
He holds her eyes, searching. "Hemorrhage?" His voice is low, quiet, earnest, and the imaginary wound in his palm begins to ache.
"I don't mean a physical one," she says. "I meant a bleeding wound of the heart."
"I see."
He holds her eyes longer, seeing into their dark, cryptic depths where a myriad of scars, old and new, have sunk in. Then he sidesteps away. She looks at him a moment more, as if seeing his cryptic depths too. The gash in his hand throbs, and her eyes slide to his wrist, watching his fingers close around it. Then she goes on. He listens to the diminishing sound of her going.
Rested upon the covers, Eren's hand still remains curled around the memory of Mikasa's fingers.
Levi's shoes contact the floor, in a slow, measured step, producing the soft, repetitious sound of pattering rubber. By the bedside, he stands, looking down at Eren's sleeping face. During the night, Eren's body has fleshed up and filled out. A thick thatch of brown hair caps his head again; the front lays lankly back from his forehead. There are now, running beneath his eyes, jagged sutures of titan flesh, as if he'd taken his fingernails and dragged them down his cheeks so that long shallow tears opened along his face. Even in his sleep, Eren looks like he's brooding over something. Beneath his sleeping face is a kind of dark, wild fury. His mouth is set in a black, sullen line. His eyebrows are drawn down. His jaw appears strong.
Carefully, Levi sits on the edge of the bed. He cups in his hand the knob of Eren's knee. He wonders what Eren is dreaming about—if he can dream anything at all in this deathlike state.
"You and that girl are a pain," he mutters. His hand follows the slope of Eren's leg to the ankle bone. "You should wake up soon. You're making her worry too much." His fingers slide further down, past the foot, and gather in the blanket.
In one swift flourish, the blanket comes free of where it's been neatly tucked, fluttering up in a clean white swell, and then falling back again in folds over Eren's bare foot. Levi doesn't think of anything at all—his head space is a silent, empty one—as he reaches out slowly, watching his own hand from a strange distance, foreign and disembodied, as though the hand belongs to somebody else. The hand clasps Eren's foot. The thumb pushes into the warm, pale sole and sinks into the skin. The toes curl forward. They move, not by nervous impulse, but by tendons being pulled, the way a puppet moves when its strings are pulled.
Eren is, as Hanji said, an empty vessel.
Cradling the curve of heel in his hand, Levi bends over then, not raising the leg, but lowering himself to it. His face comes down to the bridge of bone in Eren's foot. Levi's body begins to warm as he thinks about succumbing, about putting his lips to the lowliest part of Eren's body, as though to symbolically disempower himself and bow down to the accumulating weight that pulses under his clothes, within his bare skin. He thinks about all of Eren's body. He thinks about sinking into its surface, engulfed by it, as all his thoughts drain away from his head, attenuating his consciousness into nothing more than the uproar of bodily culmination. His clothing seems, suddenly, to lay very heavily on his skin.
Levi turns his face away. Eren lies very still. He appears to breathe slowly, his bare chest rising and falling in deep, cathartic regularity, as though caught in the soft, dissolving aftermath of passionate apotheosis. Levi closes his eyes. He can still hear in Eren's breathing an illusion of breathless ecstasy. Levi stays quiet, his eyes shut, though the muscles in his face start to wring among themselves into a haunted, defeated expression of anguish. His palms seem to breathe in the reverie of Eren being inside of them, warm and soft and yielding, Eren's flesh giving itself up to the cups of Levi's hands, surrendering to his touch. Levi bows his head under the burden of the fantasy, his hair coming over his eyes, and he looks, to the outside eye, like a hopeless, wretched man in mourning.
Opening his eyes again, Levi releases Eren's foot, and in another swift flourish, the fabric ballooning up in a white flutter, he sweeps the blanket back over the toes. At once, he rises to his feet.
Footsteps approach and Levi briskly re-tucks the covers around the corner of the bed. The door opens and Armin enters. He comes to a halt when he sees Levi, who's standing at the bedside, observing Eren as he sleeps. The captain has an unreadable, paper-blank expression, but there are dark, deep half-moons of restlessness under his eyes cutting into his wan, weary face.
"I've come to assume my watch, Captain."
Levi turns, and as he negotiates the room, Armin puts his fist on his chest, holding himself at attention. When he reaches Armin's side, Levi pauses and clasps his shoulder.
"You wanted to comfort your friend, and I can understand that. But from now on, you are not to carry out any chores apart from your own. Understand?"
"I understand, sir. But I think you're overestimating my character." Armin has turned his head to look at Levi. Silently Levi takes his hand away from Armin's shoulder, putting it loosely at his side. Armin continues. "Comforting a friend would be the natural thing to do. But it wasn't out of kindness that I agreed to do Mikasa's chores. She has a better track record in ensuring Eren's wellbeing than I do. If you remember, Eren almost died when he was with me. Mikasa is more capable at protecting him. She seemed to be the logical choice."
"That may be true," Levi says. "But your job isn't to protect him. It's to keep him company. Apparently Erwin thinks it'd be a shame if Eren were to feel lonely in that vegetative state. Personally, I think the brat's being spoiled."
Armin laughs a little. "He's been spoiled his whole life. By his parents, by Mikasa, and now by you and the commander."
"Not by me."
Armin smiles—it's a silent, mysterious smile—and then he moves further into the infirmary. Guarded and interrogative, Levi turns his head, watching. The daylight streaming through the window bathes Armin's hair in gold highlight. He stands beside the bed, his back to Levi, his hand placed delicately atop the mattress without touching its unconscious inhabitant.
Levi's eyes slide from the gold highlight of Armin's hair to the sleeping figure of Eren. Without his volition, Levi's memory preserves the image of Eren lying there on the bed like a naked, recumbent effigy, his head slightly propped by the pillows, his arms straight, limp, and upturned above the blanket. And through that narrow one-track lens of physical desire, Eren appears to be a secret, personal invitation tucked inside a tightly sealed envelope of heat and hard muscle.
The Beloved Body
The amorous subject observes the beloved body. He searches the body in detail, as if he wants to see what is inside, as if the cause of his desire were in the beloved body's machineries (He is like those children who disassemble a pocketwatch to apprehend the abstract concept of time). What is this excruciating longing that I am feeling?
—Anatomy of the Amorous Subject
In the parlor, Levi is awakened by a summoning touch on the shoulder. Hypnotic, lambent flames pour onto his retina, and he doesn't look away, postured in the exact position in which he had sunk into the depths of sleep, sitting with his fist to his face, stroked into a drowsy languor by the soliloquy of the fire. Almost palpably he can feel an imprint on his body where two imaginary legs had been tied in a flush, frenzied bow around his waist, and he can feel, with the same near-palpability, the warm path where sweet, ragged breath had fanned across his face; and above him, two foggy eyes had looked down on him with a loving tenderness that reduced Levi to a soft, gasping fraction of a man.
The sensations fade rapidly, leaving nothing at all, save for a hot, concentrated lump in his gut and a moral urgency to vomit up the lump and take a cold, purgative shower. He can't recall the dream. But he can feel its influence in his body. He knows it had involved Eren. He wants to vomit.
"Why don't you sleep in your bed like a normal person?" Hanji says. Her voice floats to him from behind. Her slow, quiet footfalls approach.
"I'm not a normal person." His lips move only marginally when he speaks, and his voice is a strained, guttural murmur, still under the influence of the dream.
"You do sleep, though, don't you?"
He's about to tell her that he'd wager only a person as careless as she can sleep like a child through the night. But then he doesn't, knowing that Hanji's conscience weighs as heavily as his own. He is thinking this silently, when Hanji starts to speak again.
"You were about to accuse me of sleeping like a baby, weren't you?"
"So what, you can read my mind now?"
"Some things are predictable," she says. "You've seemed heavier today."
"Are you trying to tell me I'm getting fat?"
Hanji grins, charmed momentarily by the flash of deadpan humor. She comes around to the front of the chair. She sits on the armrest. "I believe the saying goes, 'It's the beauty on the inside that counts,'" she points out.
"So . . . my intestines."
"Precisely. You wouldn't want to be relieved of those, now, would you?" She grins at the side of his face. He's looking at the fire without expression. She sobers, wrapping her hands around the armrest, her ankles lax and sprawled in front of her. Turned across her shoulder, she never removes her eyes from Levi's profile. "You're troubled about Eren. I can see how it weighs on you." She watches the side of his face. He doesn't say anything.
She goes on. "Anyway, Jean's watch is almost up; I went looking for you to tell you that. But when I saw you sleeping, I thought I might go ahead and cover your post. However, I knew you'd rather keep an eye on Eren yourself. Am I right?"
Silent, with an almost eerie fluidity, Levi pushes out of the armchair, rising. His hands slide into his pockets. From where she sits on the armrest, Hanji can't see his face, only the meticulous trim of black hair across the back of his neck.
"A monster like Eren can be eviscerated alive and continue breathing," he says in a voice placid and restrained. "Not a single scar will sink into his flesh. No matter how deep his wounds, he'll forever remain unmarked. So, tell me, why would I be troubled about him?"
"Do you want a real answer?" she says. He doesn't look at her, hands pocketed, his shoulders poised high with a cold, impassive dissimulation. She sighs. "You don't need a concrete reason to worry about Eren. Yes, his recovery is guaranteed, as far as we know. But he's your subordinate and he's injured. It's normal that you'd feel responsible. I feel responsible as well. I learned from the hardening experiments that multiple shifts can lead to severe physical trauma. If I hadn't asked him to shift consecutively. . ." Lifting a hand from the armrest, she adjusts her glasses with her thumb and forefinger. She looks at the wall now and crosses her arms.
"It's too late for regret. I pushed him to keep going, knowing the risks it raised. At any rate, Eren is recovering steadily without complication—and that's all I can ask for." The fire sputters as a log splits apart. She turns across her shoulder again to look at the trim of Levi's hair. "It's not only guilt that's been troubling you, is it?"
When he finally replies, his voice is low and still restrained. The back of his head depresses a little. "I don't really know."
She watches him quietly. His muscles seem to set into the clay mold of his present position. He doesn't move.
"I've noticed you've been consuming strange material during your pastime reading."
"It's not my book," he says.
"I didn't think it was," she says. "Whose is it?"
"Who knows? I found it in my room the other day. On my bed."
"The bed you don't use?"
"Yeah."
"And you don't know how it got there?"
"No."
"How strange—"
"Hanji."
Hanji blinks and adjusts her glasses. "Yes?"
"Does your offer still stand?"
She leans forward to stare, mystified, at the side of his face. "You want me to cover your watch?"
He's inscrutable, cold, hands pocketed, still molded in position with his head depressed a little. "If it's not too much to ask of you . . ."
"It's not too much to ask. But I figured, surely, you'd want to watch over Eren yourself."
The soliloquy of the crackling fireplace stretches on. Levi's pale irises reflect the light as they stare, distant and steady. The thought behind the two eyes drifts purposelessly on in unwaking reality. When he turns his head, his body immobile below the neck, the movement is languid, eternal, meaningless. His eyes land on her, but they don't seem to see her.
"Thank you." Rotating, the rest of his body aligns with the turned head, and without removing his hands from his pockets, Levi moves like a purposeless apparition toward the hall. His footfalls produce no sound. "Goodnight."
"Yes, goodnight, Levi," she says. "See you in the morning."
As Levi turns into the hall, the darkness wraps around him as if it were animated, swallowing him up in black tongues of absence. Midstride, he seems to vanish into nothing. His footfalls are inaudible.
From where she's sitting on the chair's armrest, Hanji removes her eyes from the hall and puts them on the crackling fireplace.
The moment Levi had looked at her, she had seen in his eyes a strange shadow of raw bereavement.
And even stranger than the sourceless mourning, when Hanji had entered the parlor and found Levi asleep, his knees had been splayed, a fist bracing his cheek, and he had looked to Hanji like a boy, no older than Eren. By closing his eyes and slipping accidentally into unconsciousness, Levi had stripped down to his most honest character. He had looked soft. The surface of his pale, open face had been bathed in the fire's glow, his mouth protruded slightly around the air passing in and out of his lungs.
But there had been something strange to Hanji about this. Heavy with sleep, his body had appeared to disclose itself, opening up to anyone in proximity, like a flower blooming to the sun. Anyone was free to look upon him, to think about him, to touch him as they willed. The soft, glowing quality of his skin had seemed to attract hands. Even Hanji had felt herself forcefully resisting, restraining her arms at her sides. She wondered who else had passed by and seen him like that, completely defenseless.
Suspended where she had been at the edge of the parlor, for a brief, bizarre moment, she had also imagined that she could see a naked, intangible figure astride him in the armchair, heavy, hungry, and inescapable on top of him. And writhing furiously in his lap, desperate with the urgency of worldly calamity, the figure had been drawing out Levi's breath, suffocating him where he slept.
Vague, stiff, uneasy, Hanji continues to stare into the fireplace from where she sits on the chair's armrest. The upholstery is still warm where Levi's skin has passed onto the fabric the temperature of his hot beating pulse. Somehow the room, even now, holds a sense of bereavement and a greater sense of erotic longing.
Standing, Hanji moves toward the fireplace. She crouches down, balancing on the balls of her feet, and uses an iron poker to stoke the fire into a brilliant, revitalized blaze. As she watches the flames feed upon themselves, she thinks, despite her solitude in the room, that she can hear against the sputtering of the fire, two breathless, indistinguishable voices drifting to her from the armchair as they rise together in a long, trembling moan.