I'm not even sure how long it's been between updates this time around. I do know, though, that I am determined to get this chapter posted ON the date that I promised myself I would. So... here it is.
Mild warning about this chapter: Neither of my betas were able to give me much commentary on this chapter, mostly because it was TOO FUCKING SAD for them to say anything. Which makes sense. Not sure why I felt the need to point that out. If you started reading this story without knowing what kind of emotional roller coaster you were getting into, I am sincerely sorry.
On a lighter note, listen to The Mountain Goats. I did while I was editing this chapter. They will help you process all the feelings that this is probably going to dig up for you. I probably should have told my betas that.
If you care, you can follow me on tumblr at the-angstiest-author and post about this story under the tags "fic: tmiu" and "fic: the monsters inside us." Please do, I am a filthy attention whore who is hopelessly addicted to the approval of others.
Now enough about me. More about sad gay cancer boys.
Story time.
It goes pretty much without saying that I wasn't all that surprised when Bertolt didn't show up at the next support group meeting.
It was on the first day of December, two in the afternoon on a Saturday. Marco had volunteered his house as the meeting place. Mikasa was with me, and my dad dropped us off. It was nice, having my super-busy parent take some time out of his day so I could meet up with friends in a place that had good memories bonded to it. It would alleviate at least some of the damage that would be done to all of us that day.
Well, except for Reiner, whose damage had already been done.
Julia (since Mrs. Bodt let us call her that) greeted us at the door. She was smiling, as usual.
"Eren! Mikasa, hi there! Great to see you guys."
I was coaxed into returning the smile. "Great to see you too, Julia."
"Everyone's in the living room. I've got artichoke dip in the kitchen that's almost finished heating up, if you two are interested."
"Sounds fantastic," Mikasa said politely before pushing me past the doorway. We went on ahead into the living room. Only a few members of the group had shown up so far- Jean, Marco, Hanji and Annie- and I took it as a hint that we had shown up early. There were a few bowls of chips on the coffee table, which were left untouched in anticipation of fresh artichoke dip. Or maybe just because Sasha hadn't arrived to destroy them yet.
As soon as I walked into the room, I made a beeline for the loveseat where Annie had sprawled herself. She had her legs slung over the arm, her body lying on the cushions, her shortish ponytail spread over the upholstery in a disorderly spray of blonde. She had her phone hovering over her face, engaging her in some smartphone game that I couldn't identify. Her small frame left just enough space on the couch for some exceptionally skinny person to sit comfortably without trapping her hair under their ass. So I went ahead and took the invitation that I wasn't given.
"Hey, Annie," I said a second before I sat down.
She briefly dragged her focus away from her phone to flick her eyes at me, then pulled herself into a new position once she saw what my intentions were. I settled down next to the arm opposite the one that she had her legs over, keeping as far away from her as the furniture would let me. She seemed to have the same thing in mind, since she scrunched herself up in the corner with her phone in front of her face, seeming almost to melt into her giant grey sweatshirt. It didn't make her seem small in the way that it normally did. She seemed to be shrinking back into it, and I was sure that it had nothing to do with the fact that I had just decided to sit next to her. The way she stared at her phone was hollow and glassy-eyed, like a doll who was only in motion because someone else was pulling the strings to keep her going. She was out of it, or at least as out of it as someone who was never into it to begin with could be.
"I talked to Armin a while ago," I said, not sure that she was listening. She wasn't, so I added, "About you."
For the second time, her eyes flitted over to me. I didn't keep her interest for long, and in a second she was focused back on her phone. The conversation with Armin that I'd had almost a month earlier replayed on high speed in my head. I kept my eyes on her, but she continually ignored my existence and tapped away at her phone. I was about ready to give up. After five months of consciously deciding to dislike each other, it was pretty unlikely that her opinion of me would be turned around so quickly.
Then she turned her phone around and showed me the screen. Her notepad app was open, and there was something written there for me to read.
What did he say?
"Oh. Um..." I said dumbly. "Good things, mostly."
She took the phone back, backspaced and typed in something new. Like what?
"He told me about lot about stuff you're into. The photography and anime, things like that. It all sounds pretty interesting."
What else?
"Not much. I was sort of wondering... I've never really been into anime. He said you were going to introduce him, and I was wondering which ones you had in mind."
A smirk twitched at one corner of Annie's mouth, and she turned her phone back towards herself and began typing. After the longest interval between comments that I had seen so far, she showed me the screen. There was a massive list of random words in front of my face that I could only assume were the names of the animes that she was going to be sharing with my best friend. Half of them didn't even make sense. I couldn't even guess what the hell Kuroshitsuji, Ao No Exorcist or Shingeki No Kyojin were supposed to mean.
"So... uh... what are they about?"
Annie sighed through her nose and took her phone back. She didn't start typing again. It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that I had asked the wrong question.
"He, er... Armin also mentioned that you're into the same kind of music as we are," I said, desperately trying to save the conversation. "He plays guitar. He's actually pretty good. Have you heard him?"
Yeah. Once or twice.
"Okay," I mused. The conversation was going nowhere at terminal velocity. I figured it was best to get out what I had to before it crash-landed and died. "Listen, I... I just want to say that I'm sorry about..." I wasn't really sure how to put it. But my words seemed to have caught Annie's elusive attention. "Everything, I guess. I'm not all that great at making friends, and I sort of assumed things when I shouldn't have, and... you know."
Even though she probably didn't know, she shrugged it off and allotted me a soft, non-aggressive look, which in Annie's terms was the equivalent of a friendly smile. Then she was back to her phone. Everyone else who would be coming to that meeting had shown up by then and I knew I had done all I could.
Reiner was the last person to arrive.
I was kind of surprised by his presentation. Reiner wasn't the type of guy who was dressed impeccably at all times. But that day, he looked a lot less put-together than usual. His clothes and hair were a mess, and he seemed tired, like he had been cramming for an exam or something and he hadn't slept in days because of it. Still he smiled when the rest of the group saw him walk in and started handing out hugs to everyone in sight.
I leaned over to whisper to Mikasa. "Does he seem a little..." I prompted.
Mikasa, who by then was avoiding Jean and sitting next to me on the main couch, gave me a slight nod. "Yeah."
I hadn't told a single soul what I had seen or heard at the last meeting, but the memory of that snatch of whispered conversation, the tears streaming over Bertolt's face and the way Reiner seemed to break in those few short moments still scratched at the back of my mind like a persistent cat. "What do you think..."
"Don't know," Armin pitched in. "Annie knows him better than I do, and according to her he's been going through a lot lately. She won't tell me what's going on, though. I wouldn't get into it. Let him tell the rest of us whenever he feels ready."
It was only another few minutes before Julia came in to deposit the artichoke dip and Hanji called all of our attentions to herself. "Alright, guys. Before we start this meeting, I've got an announcement to make."
The low hum of conversation that had been swarming the room fell silent. Levi picked up the explanation where Hanji had left off. "As you all have probably noticed, Krista hasn't been showing up to meetings for a pretty long time now. And after what happened back in September, this could either be not surprising to you guys at all or an absolute shock, depending on your interpretation."
Of course, Hanji had to leave it to him to make announcements like this.
"Krista has officially left the Youth Cancer Support Group."
As soon as the news was out, no one in the room seemed willing to comment. Marco was the only one brave enough to break the silence. "Did she tell you why?"
Hanji spoke up again, the news now safely out of the way. "You all know that she had already been missing from the group for a long time," she explained. "Then a little bit after the last meeting, she called me to tell me that she wanted out of the group. She was still having a really hard time coping with losing Ymir-"
"So why would she leave?" Connie cut in. "We could have helped her. What the hell do we call ourselves a support group for?"
"She said that the meetings were a trigger to her," Hanji plowed onward, trying to continue as if Connie had never cut her off. "Every time she was here, she started thinking about Ymir and it was causing a lot of problems for her. She said that she reached the age limitation a while back anyway, and it was about time she severed her ties to the group."
"But doesn't she need help?" Sasha asked.
"She's getting it from other places," Levi replied. "You know how Krista is. She has friends outside the group, ready and willing to let her to cry on their shoulders. As far as we're able to tell, she's going to be okay."
That answer managed to sufficiently shut everyone up, and the meeting continued as usual. Mikasa coaxed me into talking about my almost-three-week-long hospital stay. (Minus, obviously, the episode at the pool with Levi, who was looking at me from across the room the entire time as if he expected me to bring it up.) Once that was over, Marco talked a little bit about the hospitalization he'd had towards the end of mine, then Jean started up a discussion about how Marco's struggles had affected everyone else. The whole group professed their support for their universal freckled best friend, and then Mikasa somehow managed to twist that into a mention of her breakup with Jean. She never revealed how it had happened, though, and when the hour ran out and the discussion period finally came to a close, Connie and Sasha flocked over to Jean to ask.
Once the circle had dissolved, a gravitational force began pulling me towards Levi. I tried my hardest to ignore it and stuck by Armin and Mikasa. I did my best to stay focused on the conversation that they were having, but for some reason my attention kept getting sidetracked.
Levi was standing with Marco and Hanji just a few feet away from us. There was some kind of conversation going on, and two out of three people seemed to be enjoying it. Eventually I got tired and decided to let my focus wander over to where that annoying little bit of me with no self control had been pulling it for ages. Fine, brain. I'll eavesdrop on them, if you want it so fucking badly.
I couldn't hear them over the dialogue going on right in front of me, but that didn't stop me from trying. A moment passed with me straining to figure out what they were talking about, then I spotted Reiner approaching their group on the loveseat that Annie had abandoned. He joined in, Marco walked off to aid Jean in his desperate struggle against wannabe stoner and potato junkie, and then something about the entire situation changed. Maybe it was the stony look on Reiner's face when he opened his mouth, or the way Hanji's smile dropped almost the very second he did. Levi, as usual, remained unchanged, but I saw him place a hand on Reiner's lumpy shoulder and his lips form words that I intuitively knew were soft and consoling.
Once again, the conversation I'd spied on at the last meeting stabbed me in the back. A flashback exploded in my head; the new vial of radioactivity that was about to shatter and put another subject in Schroedinger's support group out of commission.
The last time they checked, everything was clear, but there might have been something that they missed, or the mutations just spontaneously started over again...
I didn't want to think about what those words meant. So I pretended I'd never heard them and acted surprised when Hanji stood back and called the group's attention to herself for the second time.
"Guys! Newsflash! We have another announcement!"
Even for all the enthusiasm she put into her words, I could still sense the heaviness in them, the undeniable feeling that something was wrong. It got even worse when Reiner stepped forward to stand next to her.
"Hey. Um... as you guys have probably noticed, Bertolt isn't here today."
He was hesitating. This wasn't him. This wasn't right.
"And the reason for that is... Well, he had a chemo appointment scheduled for today." Reiner stopped, as if he'd forgotten where his speech had been going. He had to take a deep breath before he started again. "Bertolt had a reoccurrence. He had one almost two weeks ago, actually. That was when his doctors first started suspecting something. You see, after all the bone replacements he's had, they thought there was nothing left, but... you never really know, I guess. And last week, they gave him a scan, and... and there it was." He smiled weakly, as if this were supposed to be some kind of joke, but the crack in his voice let everyone know that it wasn't.
"Anyway, he's started undergoing treatment again, and that's where he is right now. So, if you could, just... send your support his way, alright?"
And with that, Reiner walked out of the spotlight and a moment of stunned silence later, the group returned to its former buzz. Annie had gotten up from her spot on the couch and quickly followed the group's big brother to his empty corner. After a second's hesitation, I went after her. Armin followed, and Mikasa, probably out of habit, came along as well.
"Reiner, I am so sorry," was the first thing out of Armin's mouth when he approached.
Reiner looked away from Annie and towards us, seeming a little surprised that anyone else had bothered to come after him. "There's no need to be sorry," he said, struggling to smile warmly at us in the way that had earned him his title. "There was nothing anyone could have done."
"But still, that... That really sucks. I mean... he'd been in remission for almost two years. He was fine, and then he just... It's so unfair." It seemed almost like Armin was more upset about Reiner's boyfriend than Reiner was himself.
"I know it feels that way, but let's face it. Life is unfair," Reiner said dismissively. "If it weren't, then none of us would be here in the first place."
"I just hope everything turns out okay," Mikasa said softly. "You said they just found it two weeks ago, right? And they started treatment right after?"
"Yeah, they did. Doesn't mean that it was only growing there for two weeks, though." All of a sudden, Reiner's demeanor had started to break. "No one knows how long it's been growing. They hadn't screened him for new cells in over a year. When the last transplant was done, everyone thought that it was gone, that he was cured, but then he started feeling pain in his joints again, in all new places where he'd never felt it before, and then the scan results came back..."
"How bad was it?" I asked, stupidly, before I had even thought about what those words would force him to say. The answer took him ten seconds. Ten seconds of painful silence, ten seconds of hearing his breaths start to shake, ten seconds until he took a breath deep enough to get the words past the lump in his throat.
"H-he was lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree," he finally managed to choke out. Then he dropped his gaze to the floor. A hand came up to rub nervously at the back of his neck, and when it came back down his broad shoulders were starting to shudder. "I... I just don't understand. Th-that cancer... for people who've had it for five years or less... has a seventy percent survival rate." He stopped, inhaled, and I saw tears glinting in the corners of his eyes. "Seventy percent. And he has to be part of the fucking thirty that doesn't make it!"
A tear slipped loose and slid over his face, then all of a sudden everyone had converged on him. Annie and Armin were first, I'm guessing because their shared blondeness gave them some kind of metaphysical connection that hadn't reached me and Mikasa just yet. But it was only a second's difference. I overlapped Armin in the group hug, and my fingers pressed into Reiner's deformed melanoma skin as they always did. But this time, he was in too much pain for me to bother thinking about it. I didn't share the telepathic connection that he apparently had with the other blondes in the support group, but I still found myself thinking the same words over and over again while I pulled myself close to him and leaned over Armin to press my face into his shoulder.
I heard what you said in the library. I knew what was happening. I'm so sorry you had to say it yourself.
When all of us finally let go, a little bit of warmth was back in Reiner's eyes. He wiped a tear roughly away from his cheek and glanced at me for a second.
It's okay.
I don't know if that was what he was really thinking then, but I sincerely hoped that it was.
I have no idea what the hell possessed Bertolt to show up to the next support group meeting.
It was probably the fact that Reiner had offered to host again. His house was more comfortable and definitely more accessible than any public place would have been. Besides, there he was surrounded by his friends and other people he loved, not to mention Reiner's comfy, broken-in living room furniture.
Also it would lessen the chances that he would have to go out in public looking the way he did.
He had already been at Reiner's house for a while by the time anyone from the YCSG showed up. That included me.
I climbed out of the backseat of the Arlert Accord, taking care to thank Armin's grandpa before I stepped onto the pavement. Mikasa climbed out of the opposite side, then Armin from the passenger seat, letting his grandpa know that he would text as soon as the meeting ended (which was now necessary, since they rarely followed the old one-hour time constraint anymore).
"I don't know about you guys," Mikasa said, "but I'm kind of glad we're going to be seeing Bertolt again."
"I am too," Armin replied hesitantly. "A little, anyway. I'm kind of worried about the condition he's in."
"Well..." I started, struggling to find a way to look on the bright side. I had been trying not to think about the condition he's in for days. "Going to visit his boyfriend probably isn't too much of a strain for him. I mean, he doesn't have to go out or walk around too much, he's in a comfortable place, and... um..."
Armin stared down at the frosty grass and nodded. "Yeah, I guess you're right. Doesn't make a difference as to how sick he is, though."
I sighed through my nose and went ahead of them to ring the doorbell. You're not helping, Armin, I thought.
My best friend and best sister caught up with me just as I pressed the plastic button and heard the muffled noise of metallic chimes echo on the other side of the door. A second later it swung open and Mindy was standing in the doorway. Her curious, vibrant fox eyes turned up to look at us. "Hi, guys!" she chirped. "We're in the living room."
"Thanks, Mindy," Armin said cordially. The little girl beamed at him and turned to scamper off into the house. We followed not too far behind, not at all sure what kind of scene we would be walking into.
Reiner's living room was the same as it had always been, save for one thing. Bertolt was collapsed on the loveseat, looking just different enough from the last time that we had seen him for it to make me uncomfortable. His skin, which up to even a week earlier had retained a minor tan, had started to take on that pale, chemo-sickened color that I had seen far too many times before. Every time he moved, it seemed to pain him a little. Still he smiled at us when we walked in, and Reiner got up briefly to crush each of us with a deadly bear hug before he rushed back to his boyfriend's side. I glanced cautiously around, searching for a place to sit, then a light tap on my shoulder and the subconscious feeling that Mikasa and Armin had both left me on my own distracted me from my sweep of the room. I glanced behind me and pretended I didn't feel my heart shudder when I saw Levi standing behind me.
"Hey, brat," he said, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly upward. "Nice to see your lungs are still working properly."
"Well, you weren't the one who fixed them, but thanks anyway." I quickly smiled at him to make up for my unintentional rudeness that I was way too slow to detect. "You want to go sit down?"
"Sure. Nothing like broken couches to fix my broken spine." He led me over to the largest couch in the room and scooted himself into the corner. I sat down next to him, taking care to leave a few inches of space between us.
"How the hell did you break your spine?" I asked like the idiot I truly am.
"I didn't actually break it," he replied. "It's just the way I describe the nagging feeling that I'm giving myself kyphosis from studying for so much." He locked his arms behind his back, and I heard a series of loud, satisfactory clicks issue from his vertebrae. "There isn't much I can do about it, though."
"So... classes are going well, then?"
"Yeah. They're okay. I have to work myself to half to death to keep up, but my grades are still staying where they should be."
"What about Hanji?"
"Shitty glasses is fine, as far as I can tell. She still pops up every so often to piss me off on campus." He glanced across the room to where the alluded part-time nurse was walking in with a box of Munchkins clutched in one hand and a few packets of paper in the other. "I don't see her around Trost anymore, though. It's a little quiet, but there's nothing wrong with that. Makes it easier to focus, you know?"
"Yeah." I shifted a little on the cushions. Things were starting to get uncomfortable, and my skin was hyperaware of Levi's closeness. I was never good at small talk. My brain searched for more conversation starters while I silently begged the rest of the group to get their shit together and start the meeting already.
"How's homeschool?"
"Fine," I replied shortly. Why is he asking about me? I thought despairingly. Nothing ever happens in my life. I have nothing to say. There's nothing to talk about. I risked a glance over at him to find that his piercing eyes were waiting for me to meet them. Please don't ask me something personal, please don't ask something personal...
"How have you been holding up lately?" he asked. "You know... emotionally."
Oh, for fuck's sake.
"I've been managing," I said, being as honest with him as I would let myself be. "I-I've been okay."
"You sure?" The ice in his eyes melted a little and I caught a twinge of concern in his expression. "You remember what happened last time."
The words What happened last time? crossed my mind before I realized that we were both fully aware of what last time he was talking about.
"I-I know, I remember," I unsteadily responded. "I'm going to... I'll do my best not to let it happen again."
"Good. You'd better not." He casually bumped his knee into the side of my leg. "Because if you fall off the face of the Earth again and I have to run over to your place for another emergency session, I'll be pissed."
I let out a slow, angsty sigh in order to cut down on my illogical urge to laugh. "You didn't seem too upset about it last time."
"It was my first time doing anything like that, and it went better than I expected. And can you blame me for wanting the kids in this godforsaken support group to be happy?"
"So would you be pissed off with me because I'd be taking up your time, or because I would be upset?"
"Both, probably. You just seem so prone to disappearing sometimes that I've worried about it happening again. As an admin, I just want the people in this group to live lives that aren't nearly as bad as they could be."
"Well, I'm sorry I have such a propensity for shitting on your dreams, Levi."
Levi's hand flew up to his mouth and covered up an extremely attractive snort before Hanji shouted at everybody and called for the meeting to start.
The discussion went around the circle the way it usually did. There was always something to say with the Youth Cancer Support Group. But, oddly enough, none of those somethings had anything to do with the wilting boy sinking into the couch next to Reiner.
I had never felt the need to use the phrase elephant in the room before, despite all the times I probably could have. It was so obvious, staring us all in the face, and yet everyone chose to ignore it. Over the constant buzz of my nerves reacting to Levi's presence (yet another thing that went as unacknowledged as possible), there was the urge to open up and point out that no one was talking about what probably most needed to be mentioned. Everything grew worse when, a few minutes after the discussion started, Mindy rushed in to bother all of us. She leaped for her favorite spot between her big brother and his boyfriend, and I saw the stifled look of pain cross Bertolt's face when the little girl's body crash-landed almost on top of his. Reiner had to pull her away from him and into his own lap instead of letting her take up the space she had loved to sit in so much.
I was sure everyone was feeling it just as strongly as I was. Still, no one said anything. The thought made me sick, and I could hardly think about anything else.
The next meeting at the Beans wasn't all that much better. If anything, it was worse. It seems selfish of me to be talking about what was happening as if the problem were mine, because there couldn't be anything further from the truth. Everything was happening to him, the disease and the side effects and everything else. I was just watching it.
That day, four days after the meeting at Reiner's house, Bertolt seemed like he was having a hard time moving at all. The slight limp that he'd had all the time that I had known him had turned into a pronounced and constant attribute to the way he moved. Nearly every time he stood up or walked, he was leaning on Reiner for support.
Even when he was falling to pieces, he still came to the Shiganshina Library for the next meeting. And the meeting after that, for which Marco had kindly volunteered his house again.
Every time I saw Bertolt, I could see him getting progressively worse. He was losing weight, then he was loping around on crutches. I didn't know exactly how much of his body had to be infected to warrant a "Christmas tree" PET scan, and no one ever learned the gory details but those who absolutely had to know. In my mind I figured there was hardly anything left of him that didn't have something wrong with it. He was going downhill fast, like a skier who hit a patch of ice, uncontrollable and destined to crash into something before they reach the bottom.
At the last meeting, ten days after Reiner made his announcement, Bertolt was so broken down that he had to covertly ask his boyfriend to bring him home before the first hour of the meeting had even ended.
He was failing. I could see it. I could sense it. I had watched it happen to my mom, and now it was happening to him. Unless some miracle happened, he wouldn't last much longer.
Then, one day, he just stopped showing up.
It was pretty difficult to get any information about what was happening to Bertolt Hoover after that. At meetings (when he was still coming to them), he had never spoken in a lot of detail about what was going on. Whether he wanted it that way or he was simply too tired to make himself do it was up for debate. Reiner kept pretty quiet about everything as well, probably to respect his boyfriend's wishes (if there were any). Then he stopped coming to meetings at around the same time that Bertolt did. After that, there was only so much I knew about what was happening to him.
My only reliable source was Armin.
"It's gotten bad," he said when he came over my house to decorate for Christmas. Because, even though I hadn't acknowledged it much, it was halfway through December. The holiday season was already upon us.
"How bad?" I asked as I scooted a big plastic box out of a closest. "You've gotta be more specific than that." We were in my basement, ferrying things back and forth on the staircase. Or, more accurately, Mikasa and my dad were doing the ferrying while Armin carried small stuff and I did... something productive.
"How specific do you want me to get? It's already a little debatable as to how much they would want me to share." He peeled back the lid of one of the boxes to reveal that it was full of plastic pine tree pieces and shoved it to the side, huffing a little from the effort. I glanced sideways at him. I knew he had gone to visit Reiner once or twice while Bertolt was absent from the support group, and on the last occasion his boyfriend happened to be around. He had to know at least a little about the extent of the condition that Bertolt was in.
"Well, if Reiner was willing to let you visit, then he must have expected that you would say something to someone else."
"Maybe he didn't. He's not all that intuitive."
"Well, how bad could it be if you told me? I'm only one person. It's not like there are a lot of people I could tell. I just haven't heard anything about it, and-
"Hey, guys! Have you found the tree branches yet? Dad and I are almost done putting the stand together!" Mikasa shouted at us from upstairs.
Armin looked back at the box he had just taken out. "That must be what these things are." He turned to the stairs and shouted back, "Yeah, we did! They'll be up in a minute!" Then he fixed his fingers under the carrying ledges of the box and whined a little as he painstakingly lifted it up from the ground.
I quickly left the closet and grabbed the other side. "You need some help with that."
"N-no, it's fine," Armin said through his teeth. "It's not as heavy as it looks."
"Armin, you look like your arms are going to break off."
"As if you could lift it any better."
Then my dad came down the stairs, picked up the box himself and saved us from arguing any further. "You could come upstairs and help out, if you're tired of picking through the boxes," he said.
"It's fine," I replied. "We've only got a few more to find. We'll be up there in a few minutes."
He nodded, offered me an acquiescent "Alright." and made his way back up the stairs with the box of fake branches in his arms. I stared up after him for a moment before Armin distracted me again.
"It's been a while since he was home to decorate with you guys, hasn't it?"
I turned back to him and glowered in his direction. "Bertolt," I said shortly.
My friend sucked in a deep breath and sighed through his nose. "Fine. Do you really want to know that badly?"
"I do. It sucks being kept out of the loop."
"I know. But I'm still not sure that Bertolt would want the group to know about..." he paused a second and reconsidered his words. "He probably hasn't said anything because he doesn't want them to worry."
"They already know he's relapsed. I don't know that there's much more for them to worry about."
"Right." Armin sighed again and sat down among the boxes on the floor. "It's bad," he said, repeating the words he'd used before. "Really, really bad."
I wasn't going to ask How bad? again. I wasn't in the mood for any more repetition. Instead I decided to go for something simpler, which I was pretty sure would prompt him to keep talking.
"And?"
"He was being given chemotherapy every other day for a while," he said. "He hasn't gotten any better, and from what I've heard, he and his family are thinking of stopping it soon. He's lost maybe twenty pounds since he was re-diagnosed. And... oh god, he's in so much pain. He can't walk anymore."
"Bertolt can't walk?" It didn't make sense to me. I had thought he didn't have any real bone matter left in his legs.
"It's his spine. The cancer attacked his vertebrae, and he can't take the pressure that standing puts on his back. He needs crutches to hold himself up. At this point it's painful for him to do a lot of things."
"Do they know how far it's spread?"
"I'm not sure," Armin said, staring at the floor and giving his head a slow shake. "I think he's still got some of his vital organs intact, but that's all just guesswork. I haven't heard anything from Reiner, Annie or anyone else. No one talks about it."
I stared at Armin, unable to find any kind of response. There was nothing that I could say to that. I couldn't even make a joke about Annie, despite the glaring opportunity. So I decided to go the generic route and said, "I feel so sorry for him."
"What are you telling me for?" Armin asked.
"I don't know," I blurted out, as if that would fix the conversation. "I seriously don't. It just happened. It's reflexive."
"Hm." Just like that, he had gone back to digging through the boxes, as if he were trying to forget the conversation we'd just had. "It's such a weird convention. Saying sorry whenever something bad happens to someone. It doesn't make any sense."
"I know. I've always hated it. You shouldn't be apologizing unless whatever happened was your fault. If it isn't, then there's no point in saying you're sorry."
"It's probably meant as an expression of regret, but you're right. The wording doesn't make much sense. Besides, you just said it."
"And you just said it's a social convention. I didn't even think about it. It just came out. There you go."
Armin rolled his eyes at me and went back to rifling through my decorations. After a few minutes, the exact same amount of time I had told my dad we would take, we found that there wasn't any more to be dug out of storage and grabbed the few remaining decorations that we hadn't handed off to my dad and sister. The rest were stuffed back into their corresponding boxes and pushed back into the closet. Then we rushed upstairs to take part in setting up my Christmas tree and forget the conversation we'd just had.
The tree looked fantastic, once we finally decided we were finished screwing around with it. It looked even more fantastic when I thought about the fact that I had a friend close enough to decorate it with me.
The lights were off in the living room, the window outside already dark after the sun had set unreasonably early. The multicolored glow of the tree lights added a splash of color to the dim room and the flickering blue-white luminescence of the TV screen.
I don't know whose brilliant idea it was to watch Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, but that was what we were doing.
My dad had made the suggestion of watching a movie after we had sufficiently scraped our hands up on the stiff, dusty plastic needles of the Christmas tree, then we threw together a few bowls of popcorn and Mikasa made us all her "customized" hot chocolate, meaning she used packaged mix and added some random mystery ingredient to it (which happened to be chili powder this time around). No one felt like going all the way to the second floor to get their computer to connect to Netflix, so we picked through the DVD collection until early-2000s Disney reared its fake-blonde, way-too-colorful head. It must have been either the nostalgia value or the prospect of dredging up Mikasa's embarrassing 6-year-old teenie bopper phase that convinced us to actually play it.
I was curled up on the couch between Mikasa and Armin, hands wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate and sharing two blankets among the three of us. My dad was off to the side in a god-knows-how-old armchair with a mug and blanket to himself. I found myself making a snide comment in every single scene, trying to prove that I wasn't enjoying the movie as much as everyone else in the room knew I sort of was.
It was after Lola realized that she had lost her ticket money that my dad finally decided to point out what was glaringly obvious to all of us.
"What is with this movie? It's like everything that can possibly go wrong is going wrong."
"Hell if I know," I replied. "I think that's supposed to make it funny."
"It's not," he said. "Can you imagine going all that way only to realize you can't even do something that you have put a ridiculous amount of work and planning into? That's not funny, that's just depressing."
"Life is depressing, Dad," I deadpanned.
"Well, aren't you just a little ray of sunshine."
popcorn bowl in a death grip before my dad finally cut in and said, "Hey. Don't make me separate you three."
With each of us in possession of two-thirds of a blanket, none left in the living room and the thermostat slightly lower than what was comfortable, separating wasn't such an easy thing to execute, so the threat kept us (relatively) still for the rest of the movie. Once the credits started rolling, Mikasa jumped off the couch to take it out of the DVD player as quickly as possible while my dad flicked the lights on and noticed Armin's big black guitar case leaned up against the wall next to where he'd left his shoes. He asked what Armin had brought his guitar for, Armin said that there was no specific reason, and the entire conversation progressed into another impromptu performance from my secretly talented best friend who was slightly less terrified about performing this time around.
He had learned a few new songs since he'd last played at my house in August. If I hadn't been so floored by his abilities the first time I had seen them, I might have had enough judgement to say that he had improved. He went through his own shy, shaky rendition of The Plain White Ts' Hey There, Delilah. Mikasa asked if he could play a few songs that he shyly claimed he didn't know how yet, I sat there and listened to him like the idiot fan that he had turned me into. And my dad...
He didn't do much, actually. I was waiting for him to say something, maybe ask Armin a few questions or offer criticism of some kind. He never did. He just sat in the adjacent corner, facing my friend and his guitar on an angle, quietly appreciating the show. My dad happened to be very skilled in the arts of quiet appreciation.
When the second song (something called Breezeblocks that I had never heard before) finally reached its end and Armin's fingers stilled the strings, he finally said, "That was fantastic, Armin. You're really talented."
Armin took a deep breath to make up for what he'd lost while singing. "Th-thanks, Mr. Jaeger."
Armin wasn't feeling up to playing any more, so my dad decided it was a good time to order us some pizza and leave us to our own devices while he got some work done. Even though he would be gone the next morning, he had still agreed to let Armin spend the night at our house. He knew us well enough to be sure that nothing hazardous would come to pass while he wasn't there. At least not while Mikasa was there to watch us.
Over pizza and in the absence of my dad, the conversation wandered over to the same topic that I had taken up with Armin in the basement hours beforehand. It was all Mikasa's fault.
"How's Bertolt doing? I've been wondering about him lately," she asked.
Armin balked for a second at the sudden inquiry, but after a moment's hesitation he gave her exactly the same message that he had given me in the basement: Bertolt's cancer was everywhere, he was in horrible pain, the whole shebang.
"Oh my god," was all Mikasa offered in response, her face pallid.
Armin shrugged and took the point off the end of his slice of pizza. "You wanted to know."
"Maybe I did, but I didn't think that was what I would end up hearing. I didn't know it would progress that fast," she said.
"Apparently it wasn't fast at all," I pointed out. "It was just undetected."
"But back in October, he was..." My sister trailed off and stared pensively down at the pizza box in front of her.
"I talked to him a while back. He told me he'd been feeling it for a while, but it hadn't gotten serious until last month. By the time he finally got screened, it was already all over his skeleton and had started spreading into the surrounding tissues-"
"Jesus Christ, Armin, we don't need his medical record," I quipped, thankfully cutting him short.
"I-I know. I'm sorry," he said. I sighed internally. Even after being friends for almost six months, he was still apologizing to me at every single opportunity. "I just... I don't know how else to deal with it. I don't want to keep it all bottled up."
Mikasa spoke up again. "But nobody who's seen Bertolt lately talks about the kind of condition he's in. They probably don't want word about it getting out."
"That's probably why I haven't been invited to visit them much lately," Armin admitted.
"So no one mentions it?"
"No. Not even Annie. She texts me all the time about how it makes her feel, but she never talks about what's actually going on," he replied. "Eren, don't you fucking dare," he added, glaring in my direction.
"Wasn't even thinking about it, I swear," I said. It was a total lie. I definitely was.
"That doesn't sound right," Mikasa said, turning her attention back to her pizza. "What are they trying to do, get the group to pretend it isn't happening? Do they think that's going to make it any better?"
"Yeah, they think that ignoring the existence of a terminal disease is going to magically cure it. Obviously that's what they're trying to do," Armin snipped. He shook his head and dropped his gaze to the carpet. "If anything, I think they're trying to keep the group from stressing out too much over it."
"Then I don't think they realize what kind of dynamic the Youth Cancer Support Group has."
Armin considered my sister's words for a minute, then nodded and went back to pushing pizza into his mouth to forget the taste of cancer talk. I wanted to do the same, but the sudden resurrection of the subject had made me feel sick. I was barely able to finish off the crust of my last slice. Whatever was going on with Bertolt, I was tired of hearing about it.
Maybe that was why he and the rest of his friends were keeping so quiet. If it hurts to think about, you don't want to waste your life dredging it up over and over. You want to forget. And if you can't, at least you can make those around you do what you are unable to. Then, by the time the impact finally comes, the pain explodes all at once, and it can pass away peacefully, like a ghost. They can all suffer through it once you're no longer around to see how much pain they're in.
After the pizza was depleted, we all piled into Mikasa's room, gathered around her laptop and buried the remains of the conversation under as many episodes of Orphan Black as we could stay awake through. My dad poked his head in to check on us once or twice, but the sight was always the same: the three of us, huddled under blankets and propped up on pillows with the bluish laptop glow cast across our faces. Eventually he stopped, and over the dialogue I heard his bedroom door swing shut.
Some time after one in the morning, I was the first person to drop off to sleep.
Three days later, my phone started ringing.
It was some time in the evening that I was too preoccupied to be sure of. I was scrunched over in front of my laptop, trying to complete an algebra two practice sheet while reading and re-reading the notes from my homeschool teacher a thousand times over. Even after having his voice explain it in my head so many times I had stopped bothering to count, I still didn't understand. A break was more than welcome. I dragged myself across my room to answer it.
The generic grey stick figure silhouette of a picture-less contact lit up the screen of my phone, and the name Levi was spelled across the image in stark white letters. After briefly wondering what the hell I had done wrong to make him call me, I picked up. "Hello?"
"Hey, brat. Are you busy?"
I glanced over at the mess of notepaper on my bed. "No."
"Okay." A second's pause, then, "What are you doing right now?"
"Now much," I replied. "I'm just at home. You know, like I always am."
Another few seconds of silence. And then...
"Would you mind if I came over for a while?"
My heart pulsed so hard that it crashed into my ribs and nearly made me drop my phone. "W-what?"
"Can I come over?" He repeated the question delicately in my ear. "Not for long. Maybe just an hour or two."
"I-I..." I spluttered as if I had forgotten how words were supposed to work. I glanced at the clock. It was a few minutes past seven. "Right now?"
"What is it? You home alone or something? We could meet somewhere, if that would be better."
"I-I can't," I finally managed to reply. "I'm kind of landlocked right now." It wasn't the whole truth. There was a small possibility that I could get out of the house. I sensed the faint presence of my dad hanging around somewhere in the house, probably running some lab data through his computer. Despite his tendency towards being neutral about just about everything, I wasn't sure that he would be too fond of the idea of me leaving the house on a spur-of-the-moment decision to go and hang out with another guy who I might wind up getting with someday. At least he thought I might get with him someday. I, on the other hand, knew his prediction would never come true.
"I could drive you. It's really no big deal."
I could barely hear Levi over the sound of the conflicted maelstrom in my head. "Why are you asking me right now?"
"No reason, really. Classes are over, I don't have much work tonight, Hanji was busy, and the support group's been kind of dead lately... wait. Shitty word choice. There I go again."
"It's okay," I said senselessly.
I heard a soft exhale on the other end that sounded almost like a laugh. "Okay. So is that a yes, or..."
"Hold on a second. I'll be right back." I put the phone down and left the room without waiting for a response from him. There was only one solution to this dilemma, no matter how awkward it might be.
I approached my dad's room, found the door ajar and pushed it open. "Dad, Levi wants to stop by. He said he won't be here long. Is that okay?"
My dad turned around in the swivel chair in front of his desk and looked at me with the startled eyes of someone who had been suddenly distracted while thoroughly immersed in their work. His laptop sat open on the desk, some charts and spreadsheets scattered across the screen.
"Huh?" he muttered bewilderedly.
"Levi wants to come over."
"Oh." He took a breath and ran a hand over his longish, messy hair. "Why is he asking?"
"He has some time tonight and wants to stop by."
"Wait, wait, he wants to come over tonight? As in right now?"
"Yes, that's what I just said."
"Why now?"
"Because he has time. Circumstances, Dad."
"He could have said something in advance. Maybe yesterday, at the very least."
What he was saying made a measure of sense. But when I reconsidered it, I found a few excuses to make for my ex-nurse. He didn't seem like the kind of person who did a lot of things on impulse, and I guessed that my dad thought of him the same way. But judging by the state of his life, spare time was probably a rare commodity.
"I know, it's kind of sudden," I said. "He said he won't be here long. He just wants to stop by for an hour or two."
My dad mulled it over for a second and glanced at the clock reading in the corner of his laptop screen. "Well... I suppose he could, if it's only for a little while," he concluded.
An excited smile lit up on my face. "Thanks, Dad."
"Why does he want to visit all of a sudden, anyway?" he inquired. I couldn't have missed the suggestive tone in his voice if I tried.
It was then that I finally saw the one abnormality of the situation. Other than the fact that Levi had just asked me if he could make a casual, non-requested visit, of course. He had never mentioned anything about his reasons for wanting to do so in the first place. Meaning that he had no motives. No premeditated purpose.
In that moment, it was entirely possible to me that Levi wanted to come and visit for the sole purpose of seeing me.
"It's support group stuff," I blurted out, giving my dad the first excuse that I could throw together. "If Mikasa hasn't told you, we've kind of got a tragedy in the works. I guess he's just making sure the kids are all handling it well."
"I know, I know," he assured me. Then, as soon as my respect for him had rebuilt itself, he felt the need to add, "Are you sure that's all this is about?"
It was about two steps away from him saying If you're going to fuck him, make sure you use protection.
"Yes," I asserted. "Don't be gross, Dad."
I raced back to my room and tapped the screen of my phone, then was momentarily crippled by gratitude when I saw that Levi hadn't hung up while I was gone. I wasted no time pressing the phone back to my ear. "Hey. I'm back."
"Where were you?"
"So he's home tonight?" Levi sounded almost as suspicious of the fact than I would have been a few months earlier. In all the times we had talked together, I had mentioned my dad's tendency to be absent far more than once.
"Yeah. It must be Christmas or something."
I heard a noise on the other end that might have been a low, half-hearted snicker. "What did he say?"
"He said it's fine." Along with a lot of other things.
"Okay. I'll be there in about twenty."
Short time, I thought. Then a thought struck me. "Where are you?" I suddenly felt the need to ask.
"Driving. I got out of Sina a while back, and I'm about halfway through Trost."
"Where are you going?"
"Your place, obviously."
"I know that. But if you weren't, where would you be going?"
"Back home," he said shortly. "Listen, I really shouldn't be on the phone right now. Twenty minutes, okay?"
"Okay," I said. Then a soft click and silence in my ear signified that Levi had left the conversation.
If he weren't going to see me, he would be going home. The fact had me thinking more than it probably should have. What did it mean? Levi wouldn't have gone out of his way if he weren't sure that I would be available. He wasn't that kind of person. Wherever home happened to be, he must have been on his way there as it was.
Before I dragged the thought out much farther, I jammed my hand behind the dresser and pulled my notebook out of its hiding place. I laid it flat on the dresser, flicked to the next clean page, and jotted down my thoughts as quickly as I could.
What if the one thing you wanted more than anything was closer than you could have imagined, but you had simply never seen it before?
Once the words were out of my head and down on paper, I stuffed the notebook back into its usual place and it was back to algebra for the time being.
Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rang. Levi was at my door, just like he had promised.
I leaped off of my bed, stopped halfway to the door to check myself in the mirror on the inside of my closet,then, once I was sure I looked not-atrocious, I scampered the rest of the way down to the front entryway.
I pulled the door open and was greeted by a blast of frosty air to the face. Little flurries drifted down in the breeze, barely visible in the dusk outside. Levi was standing there in the middle of it, his back to me, standing on my doorstep and staring off into the distance on the other side of the street. Goosebumps rose on my arms, and I had to take a tentative breath before I was able to speak.
Before I said a word, he turned around. "Eren," he said quietly, as if I had surprised him. His eyes fixed on mine and sent a shiver through my bones.
"Hi," I replied nervously.
"Can I come in?"
"O-of course." I stepped back and pulled the door open wider in order to let him through. Levi dashed inside, and I pushed the door closed behind him as quickly as I could. When I turned around, he had already shed his coat and draped it over one of the hooks on the wall. "I was kind of wondering what was with the sudden decision to come over here," I started, too curious to hold back. "You've never come over here before, and I was just thinking it was a little odd. I don't know if Hanji usually does this, or-"
"Sometimes," Levi said. "If we think we need to. It's a tactic reserved for special cases only, really." He had kicked off his sneakers and was coming close to me again. He stood in front of me, his eyes expectant, as if he were waiting for me to lead him somewhere.
"Do you... you want a drink or something? Anything I can get you?"
"No, you don't have to," he said, a little too quickly.
"Alright," I murmured, not sure how to proceed. "I guess... can we move this into the kitchen, maybe?"
"Sure. Anywhere is fine."
"Right." I nodded and started towards the room in question. He followed behind me, then leaned up against the counter while I pulled the fridge open and took out a can of Sprite. I glanced over my shoulder in the middle of it, saw him standing there, waiting, and rethought my course of action. I took a second can out and held it out to him. He shrugged and took it from me, and I finally felt safe closing the refrigerator.
"So... I'm still kind of confused," I said as I popped the tab on my can. "Why did you decide to come over tonight?" I crossed the kitchen to sit down at the table, and I guess Levi finally felt safe enough to pull out a chair and do the same.
"Just keeping up with support group stuff. Nothing exceptional," Levi replied. "How have you been doing lately?"
"Me?" As if there was anybody else in the room he could have been asking. "I've been fine."
"Have you?"
"Yeah." Something about the way he said Have you? made it sound like he didn't believe me. "It's all been pretty average. You know, homeschooling, Mikasa, Armin... that sort of thing."
Levi hummed pensively and took a slow sip of Sprite. "That's good, I guess."
"It really never goes any other way."
"Don't you ever get bored?"
Alright, that was a surprising question to be hearing from Levi. "N-not really," I said unsteadily. "I guess I'm just really good at entertaining myself." A weak laugh slipped out along with the words.
"I find it a little hard to believe that there isn't anything you do that you haven't told me about yet," Levi remarked. "There's gotta be something. Is that seriously it?"
I shrugged and my face twitched reflexively into an awkward smile. "What am I supposed to say? I've told you before, I'm not an interesting person." The two of us laughed a little, and the tension in the room started to loosen. "What about you? Is there anything you do that I don't know about?"
Levi blinked, and when his eyes opened again they were a fraction of an inch wider and staring at me in what might have been surprise. The look only existed for a second, and in that very same one it disappeared. "No," he said calmly. "I always keep busy. Probably more so than is good for me. But it keeps me out of trouble, so I suppose it can't be that bad."
He paused and some shameless part of me wanted to ask What kind of trouble?, but he started speaking again before I could open my mouth and let that shred of stupidity escape.
"Listen, Eren, there was something that I've been meaning to ask you this whole time."
My heart skipped at the sound of the words. A dreadful, exhilaratingly cold feeling began pooling in my insides. I realized all of a sudden that he hadn't used my pet name once during this entire exchange. Whatever he was here for, it was serious. Exactly what kind of serious remained to be seen, but there was only one way I could find out.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I want to know if you're still okay," Levi asked gently. "Emotionally, I mean."
His voice sounded the same way it had all the times he had pulled confessions out of me before. I tightened my grip on my Sprite can to get rid of the tremble in my fingers. "Why are you asking something like that?"
"Because I'm concerned about you," he said. "We both remember what happened last time we lost a member of the group."
"And you want to make sure it doesn't happen again?"
Levi nodded. "It was Hanji's idea, really. She loves getting personal with the group, and she thought, since we apparently know each other so well..." He trailed off and sighed. "She didn't make me come here tonight, if that's what you're thinking. I had the time, so I did."
"Well, it was nice of you, but I'm doing fine. You really didn't have to."
Okay, that sounded a lot more standoffish than it had in my head.
"No offense, brat, but you've got a few issues with coping with things like this."
Ah, there it was.
"I know, but I'm getting better about it. I think I learned my lesson last time."
"I'm not asking you to learn a lesson. I'm making sure you're okay so that you don't have another breakdown."
"Well, breaking news. I'm not going to."
"Don't make promises you aren't sure you can keep, brat."
"Who says I can't?"
"Please don't argue this point with me."
"Why shouldn't I? Since you apparently know so much about me, then you should know that I don't like being treated like a head case. You started all of this anyway. It wasn't like anyone told you to come here."
My own words were starting to make me sick. I had no idea what I was saying, but I kept talking anyway.
"Eren, the way you were dealing with Ymir's death wasn't healthy," Levi said flatly. His gaze remained steadily locked with mine. I didn't know how he was staying so calm, because I sure as hell wasn't.
"I know that. And I already told you, it's not going to happen again."
"Did you tell anyone the truth about why it upset you so much? Because you never told me."
"It was too personal! Christ, Levi, do you have to know everything?"
"You don't have to get defensive about it."
"And what the hell should I do?" I shot back, borderline shouting the words. My chair scraped gratingly against the tiles as I reflexively stood up.
"Not this," Levi said. "Eren, you need to calm down."
There were a million things he wanted to say behind those few words. I could hear it in his voice. All the same, I found myself taking a step back and dropping my gaze to the floor.
"I-I'm sorry," I murmured. "I didn't mean to... I just need a second, okay?" I backed away from the table and leaned against the counter. My heart was beating too fast. Something was wrong, even if I couldn't put a name to it. Fear, hesitation, my own egocentric self-righteousness, a stupid crush that just wouldn't die no matter how many times I tried to kill it. It could have been anything, but all I knew was that it was driving me insane.
I raked my fingers through my bangs and took a deep breath with my palm pressed to my forehead. I heard Levi's chair scraping back, and before I knew it he was standing beside me again. I pulled my hand away from my face to find his eyes on mine again.
"Why do you keep putting up with me?" I asked for no reason.
"Because I care about you, you little shit."
He might as well have shoved me to the floor and kicked me square in the face. It probably would have shocked me less than putting those words all together in the same sentence.
Minus the you little shit bit, maybe, but that didn't change what he meant.
"Let's go back to the living room," he suggested after realizing that I wasn't going to respond to him anytime soon. "Kitchen table feels a little too formal, I think."
I couldn't do much other than agree. We grabbed the cans of Sprite that we had taken out and left for a more comfortable setting. Things calmed down pretty quickly after that. We sat side by side on the couch, talking about recent events, how they made us feel, things like that. I did most of the talking when it came to feelings. It only made sense, since Levi had come with the intention of asking about them.
Talking to him didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. As it turned out, some of the nonsense I had been spitting at Levi in the kitchen turned out to be true. I was doing better. Not so much better that he wasn't concerned anymore, but better.
"You have a nice Christmas tree," Levi pointed out all of a sudden.
"Thanks," I said, a little bewilderedly. "Armin came over to help us put it up."
"Really?" He studied the plastic foliage and messy distribution of rainbow lights that were still a little tangled after being pulled out of the box they were shoved haphazardly into the year before. "That's nice."
"Have you started decorating your place yet?" There was no real reason for me to be asking the question. It just felt natural. Maybe I thought that since my family had finally gotten into the holiday spirit, everyone else in the world had, too.
"No," he said. I started a little at his reply. The answer had come out so easily. Before I could ask why, he added, "It's late. I should really get going."
I choked back the question I'd had in mind and replied with a soft "Okay."
Neither of us said very much as I led Levi back to the front door that was about fifteen feet away and he returned his shoes and jacket to their rightful places. I pulled the door open for him and saw that there was an inch of snow piled up on the ground. Levi's feet forged a clear path through the icy white dust when he stepped outside. He stopped and turned around to face me. I stared at him for a second before I saw that he was standing with his arms opened and reaching slightly toward me.
"Do you want to..." he started to ask.
A smile broke out on my face and I stepped outside to accept his offer. My arms wound around his shoulders and waist and I pulled him close to my chest. Warmth flared up in my core, a sharp contrast to the snow and frozen patio stones beneath my bare feet. I held on for a few seconds before I was willing to let him go.
"I'll see you later, okay?" he said.
"Okay," I murmured in reply. He turned away, and I reluctantly closed the door behind him. After leaning against the door long enough to berate myself for melting so easily in his hands, I regained the good sense to look at a clock. The time reading on the cable box said it was nine fifty-something, just short of ten.
He had stayed for an hour and a half. Not one or two, like he had said over the phone, but falling directly in the middle. Strangely enough, I felt like that was exactly as long as I had needed him to be there.
I went back upstairs after locking up and turning the lights off in all of the rooms Levi and I had moved through. I stopped by my Dad's room to say goodnight, and he wanted to know if anything had happened, since he thought he heard fighting downstairs. I told him it was no big deal, and I could only assume that his suspicions that I had confessed my undying... like for Levi were proven still untrue. I spent a few habitual minutes cleaning myself up for the night, then dropped into bed in my boxers. It wasn't worth the effort to put on pajamas anymore. I was too exhausted.
As I fell asleep, all I could think about was the visit. I remembered Levi's face, the concern written into it. I remembered his voice. It was soft, coaxing, commanding in the gentle way that only he could be. More than anything, I remembered his words. I care about you, you little shit.
That was the night that I finally gave up.
Levi Ackerman had caught me, and I would never escape.
Four AM. I don't know why my phone was on. It was running out of battery life before I had gone to bed. I had been too lazy to plug it in, and similarly too lazy to get out of bed to turn the volume down to silent. I had simply left it to sit on my dresser for the night, resolving to plug it in as soon as I woke up the next morning.
As it turned out, my phone was the first one to wake up. I did the same a few seconds later, then wasted a few more rubbing my eyes and groping for the obnoxiously ringing thing wherever I happened to have left it. I dragged it over to my bed and shined the blinding screen light directly onto my face. I saw the time reading, groaned and pressed the answer button without bothering with the caller ID. "Hngello?" I grumbled.
"Eren?"
I blinked. It was Armin. "Armin, what are you doing awake at four in the morning?" I asked blearily. "Are you okay?"
"Y-yeah, I think so," he said. Something sounded wrong with his voice. "Annie just texted me."
I was too out of it to even make a joke. "What did she say?"
"Bertolt's dead."
And that was it.
The world stopped spinning for a second. Time slowed down, the earth's crust shivered, and my bed dropped out from under me. Then all of a sudden everything was back in motion, and realism broke through my bedroom window like a wayward baseball and hit me in the face.
"What?"
I hadn't needed to ask. I had heard him the first time.
"It happened about an hour ago," Armin explained. He knew that I already understood. "There were too many mets for the chemo to do anything. His body just couldn't take it anymore. Annie was at the hospital with Reiner when it happened."
A few seconds that felt like an eternity passed by between his words and the next ones that came out of my mouth. I hadn't missed the dangerous waver in his voice when he told me what had happened. "Did she tell you anything else?" I asked.
"No," Armin breathed. The word registered on my end and I could envision his face. It was crumpled, streaked with saltwater, his wide blue eyes spilling over with tears, lips trembling as he spoke to me.
"Oh." I hoped he could hear the sadness in the few words I said. "Listen, I... we should probably both be getting back to sleep. If you can't... you can call me again, if you need to. Tell Annie that I'm thinking of her and Reiner. Bertolt, too," I added. "Especially him, alright?"
"I will," he listlessly agreed.
"Think you can try to get some sleep?"
"I'll try."
"Remember, I'm here if you can't."
"Okay."
His voice broke, and I whispered goodnight to him before letting my thumb fall limply onto the screen and end the conversation. Guilt stabbed and twisted my insides, and I wished that I could have stayed on the phone longer, maybe could have been a better friend for him. I knew I couldn't. Instead I had to collapse back onto my mattress, clutch a pillow to my chest and eke out an slow, agonized sigh.
It was coming, I told myself. You knew it was coming all along.
Bertolt was dead. He was gone. He'd faced down the monsters taking over his body and he had been lost in the battle. He would never come back to another meeting, never drape his arms over any of our shoulders again, never show off his surgery scars again, never make out with Reiner and not care who the hell was watching...
Reiner. I couldn't even begin to imagine how he must have felt.
I clutched the pillow tighter. A shudder ran through my ribs.
Armin never called me again that night. And he didn't really need to.
Bertolt was dead.
Schrodinger's support group had completed yet another successful experiment. Too bad that success had to be so fucking devastating.
I didn't go to Bertolt's funeral.
It took place a week after the announcement was made. On December sixteenth, One month and eight days after the first signs of his reoccurrence were discovered, Bertolt Hoover lost his four-year battle with osteosarcoma. The eulogy went something like that. I read it on the e-vite that his family had sent out to all his friends and the distant family that hadn't heard the news already.
I never bothered responding to the email. I've always hated funerals. I understood that they were meant to commemorate the deceased, to celebrate the memory of their life or some sentimental bullshit like that. I only ever saw them as reminders of what was coming next for all of us.
Funerals did nothing for the dead. They only existed so the living could feel better about the fact that a person once present in their lives would never be seen again outside of their photographs.
It was another situation that I relied on Armin to give me the details on. He held nothing back when he filled me in, not even the tears that I had to help him clean up afterwards. Reiner had brought his whole family, brother and sister included. They had all given his boyfriend a fond farewell like one of their own. Bertolt also had a cancer-free sister who I had never heard of named Amy. She had gone to everyone during the funeral asking about what they remembered about her brother, then after the service and before the burial she had gone off to another floor of the funeral home with Reiner and Annie to collapse and sob their sorrows out together. Armin had stood at the end of a chain with the three of them while they lowered Bertolt's casket into the ground, Annie clinging to his hand so hard that her nails left marks in his skin. The rest of the kids in the group had showed up for the burial, and once the ceremony was over, they all gathered at the cemetery gate and cried out whatever grief hadn't been squeezed out of them already.
I felt bad for keeping my distance when Armin told me the story. But if I had gone, I wasn't sure that I would have made the whole experience any better. After all, death is death, and a funeral is a funeral.
The December schedule hadn't been made with the anticipation of the Youth Cancer Support Group losing another member over the course of the month. A meeting at Beans fell directly on the twenty-second, the day after Bertolt's bittersweet Festival of Tears. It left next to no time for anyone to recuperate.
I forced myself to show up, but it wasn't that surprising when I walked in and found barely anyone there.
Gathered at a table in the back of the cafe were Levi, Hanji, and only a small fraction of the most resolute (or codependent, either one) members of the group. Marco sat Jean-less next to Armin, both of them with their hands wrapped around a cup of gingerbread hot chocolate. Mikasa happened to be free to come with me, and I instinctively grabbed her sleeve to find some kind of stability.
"Where is everyone?" I asked, even though I knew well enough where the rest of the group was.
"Most of them weren't ready to face another meeting, I guess," she murmured to me. We approached the table, and she offered everyone a sympathetic smile. "Hey, guys."
"Hi," Hanji said. She looked up at us and tried to respond with her usual liveliness, but her enthusiasm had been shot down for the time being.
"Small group today, huh?" For some reason I thought that there was nothing better to do than state the obvious.
Levi glanced at me, looking almost disappointed. "Yeah. Keen observation, brat."
Even a comment as deadpan as that one felt a little comforting, coming from him.
Mikasa left to order a drink for the both of us, since it seemed that everyone else in the group had gotten one. I sat patiently and waited for a conversation to start. But nothing did, not even after Mikasa came back with a pair of gingerbread mochas and set one in front of me.
We sat together in silence for an indeterminate amount of time, no one willing to do much more than take a sip of their drink every now and again.
Eventually Levi spoke up. "You know, one of us is going to have to come out and say it sometime."
"Say what?" Hanji said innocently, sounding uncharacteristically tired. When no one else was willing to answer, Armin decided to chime in.
"Bertolt is gone. We're never going to see him again."
"I know," Marco said quietly. "I don't like thinking about it, but that's the way it is. It's probably best to just face it realistically."
"Probably," Mikasa agreed.
I felt the torch was being passed to me, so I let slip the first thing that came to mind. "I know it's sad, but when you think about it, it's the way things end for all of us, isn't it? And if some of us get it out of the way earlier than others-"
"Eren, can you please not?" Armin cut in. I looked over at him, and a hot feeling of humiliation crawled up the back of my neck.
"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "It just hurts too much to think about it any other way."
Marco slid his hand across the table and rested it on mine. "It's okay," he said, offering me a soft smile. I switched focus to him and noticed how sad and empty his eyes were. I couldn't shake the familiarity. I had seen the expression before, but never on him. He had the face of someone who thought of death on a daily basis. It didn't seem right for Marco, but there it was.
"Thanks," I mumbled. I flipped my hand over to give his a quick squeeze and drew it back to my side of the table. I'd recently developed a bit of a reservation about hand-holding.
The circle opened up a little more after that, but not much. Conversation was sporadic, and after the drinks were all empty, no one wanted to stay any longer. Marco was the first to leave, and Armin offered to bring Mikasa and me home. We accepted, left the table for the space by the front door, and a few minutes later, my best friend and best sister had started up a distracting discussion with Hanji.
Levi and I were left alone, as had been happening a lot lately. Neither of us said much. Instead he kept his hands stuck in his coat pockets, studying the people in the cafe while I stood nearby and studied his face. If there was anything behind his usual mask, I couldn't figure out what it was. Something hinted to me that he was handling the whole situation in relatively the same way that I was.
"Is that how you really think of it, Eren?" he asked all of a sudden.
"Think of what?" I replied as if we had been talking about this all along.
"Do you think that's all death is?" he elaborated. "That it's just an ending? It happens, then the world moves on and that's it?"
"Not always." It sounded so much colder when he phrased it like that. "I know it's not really like that. I just think of it that way to make myself feel better."
"Denying the fact that there are reactions and repercussions is comfortable to you?"
"Only as long as the reactions aren't mine," I said definitively.
Levi didn't meet my eyes for a single second of the conversation. He stared off into the distance, looking intensely meditative before slowly nodding his head. "Alright. If that's what makes you feel better," he said. "Just remember one thing, okay, brat?"
"What is it?"
"You can't live that way forever. Eventually it's going to come back and bite you. Just keep that in mind next time something like this happens."
I'd never heard him say anything that made any less sense. "How is that supposed to help me?"
"Not sure," he admitted. "It helped me, though. When it had to." He straightened up from leaning against the shop window and finally allowed me the privilege of looking into his eyes.
"You know why everyone was missing today?" I asked.
"Because they're just like you, brat," he said. "When reality gets brutal, they don't want to face it."
The conversation was cut short when Armin announced that he saw his grandpa's Accord sitting outside. I had to hug Hanji before I left, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to live with myself until I saw her again. Levi caught my attention one last time before I walked out the door. "I'll see you soon, okay?" I called back to him.
"Okay," he responded.
His last okay rang in my ears as I walked out and climbed into the Arlert Accord. It was the only thing that made me feel like I had done enough to let myself leave.
Levi was right. I didn't like to face reality. That was the reason why I was still letting myself fall for him, hard and fast.