Self-Prompts: Last word of previous prompt.
Clean.
He liked watching Petra clean.
It started out as something of a necessity. He had to make sure she was doing her job correctly.
But necessity became an excuse and then simply a matter of choice. His choice.
He liked to watch her. So he did.
And he was always careful to be discreet when he did. Period.. He couldn't really help it.
Her brows furrowed in this cute little way when she concentrated hard on it. And she always did a really good job, following his every instruction to a letter. Her little attention to details pleased him. As did glimpses of her pretty profile and the splashes of light teasing her hair and skin from the corner of his carefully spying eyes.
He could feel the hum of her soft, sweet breath a meter away from where she stood. The off kilter lilts and jingles of her perky tone killing him and ingraining itself in his head; to the point it lingered outside of her presence. In rooms he cleaned alone, and far-far away from her; the ghost of her happy tune never leaving him.
Sometimes he narrowed his shifty eyes before he checked his surroundings to make sure he was alone, and faintly hummed her ridiculous tune to himself... matching the beat to his vigorous dusting. Even so, he suspected she had begun to suspect his affinity for her special hum somehow. He acutely felt the playful heat in the recent, little smiles she threw his way when they shared cleaning space, secret and almost knowing. A tiny wave of embarrassment began to tickle his nape in her vaguely, teasing presence and the back of his neck turned an inconspicuous red.
Maybe he was just being paranoid because he had no business allowing these madwild sun-eating butterflies to shit in his rusty heart for her; but he could have sworn there was something almost telling n the bronze glint of Petra's hazel-amber gaze.
They licked the sweet bow of her singing lips and swallowed him whole, right down to his bedazzled tiptoes.
Tiptoes.
He liked how Petra would have to {he ignored the little voice that said, 'only very very, slightly'}, tip her tipsy, tippy tiptoes to kiss the top of his tickle-y, tingly brows. If she wanted to kiss it.
If she felt like it- If she was drunk enough to do it. He knew he was drunk enough to want it.
He was drunk enough to contemplate fisting his fingers around the strap of her shirt and pulling her up flush against him so she could do it.
Would she do it? – the intoxicated steel of his eyes widened as he felt the sharp, unexpected tug of her small fingers on his straps instead.
He had just enough time for the silver embers in his gaze to ignite before he felt the blaze of her mouth closing on his, rendering him speechless.
Speechless.
Levi didn't mince words. He didn't have a lot of use for words.
He rarely used words unless he felt they were necessary.
He didn't even like words. He much preferred doing the do instead of speaking the do.
So then really, it shouldn't have been that big a deal that Petra robbed him of speech once in a while.
But it was. Because Hopeless. Breathless. Speechless…
It was the stuff of young love and bright, silly daydreams; pathetic, stupid and pointless…They didn't fit his short, stoic un-fluffy and unromantic, Humanity's strongest-titan-slaying image.
They suited Petra though. Even though he could swear there was nothing pathetic or stupid or pointless about her.
Just that Petra was the type of girl who could make any sort of regular guy wistful about love, and spark bloody poetry and bright daydreams in her wake.
Hell, He was as irregular as they came and he'd still been caught in her unwitting trap.
She already had him waxing, shitty poetry about her in his head, all the fucking time before he even realized it.
Like the summer effect she had on him when breezed into his life and the winter kills she left him with when she was gone.
All the little bloody things he couldn't help noticing about her and how his brain couldn't stop picturing and filing away useless information about her for his stupid use.
When she grits her fierce little jaw and blazes her way down, spinning her small lithe frame through the battlefield; stringing along the enemy and remorselessly spilling titan's blood alongside him.
When glimpses of her often smiles streaked through him like sunlight and made him forget she was just as jaded and weary as the rest of them vehement lot.
When she looked at him with those sweet bittersweet amber-gold lights, flashing a cruel tender blue haven at him, all the hardness of a soldier and the softness of a woman in them, making him want and need, and reeling him in like the besotted fool for her he was.
Cutting him down to size. Making him feel taller than he was. And every height in between and not.
Her stormy angel hue eyes and feather-light fingertips grazing his mouth and clenched jaw, effectively shutting him up unawares.
Stunning him. And cursing him. With the incurable Awkward disease.
Shit. Fuck it to all hells and heavens! He was done for. His shitty, sappy, potty mouth and all.
The shitty sentimental way he described Petra and the indescribable ways she made him feel was proof enough.
Because Jesus, she made him dare to be wistful and hope and dream a simple life for himself again. With her.
With Her.
He thought he lost his ability to dream when he lost Farlan and Isabel.
A clean, carefree life.
No more blood. No more grime. No more hunger. No more killing. They wanted out.
A fierce, clear dream on broken wistful pieces of dirty, stained glass, piercing through their starving guts.
Craving freedom. A less ugly life outside of the Underground from the bottom of their hearts and the stench of their clenched, bloodied hands.
Within the walls at first. Then the Survey Corps. Anywhere, as long as he was with them.
He thought he wasn't going to become responsible for anybody's life.
Only Farlan and Isabel's.
Fighting through the blood and grime and hunger together. They had become his flesh and blood. His only friends. Isabel looking up to him and calling him Big Brother. Farlan thinking his way through for them. Levi leading them and shielding them the best he could. Isabel and her irrepressible exuberance and innocence. Farlan and his iridescent dedication and gentleness. Levi and his kind, brute strength. Their protector and unofficial leader. They were a team and they looked out for each other. They were a place where he belonged.
They were gone. Farlan and Isabel. But they left pieces of their empathy and dreams with him. And he found another place he could belong.
The talk about trust and humanity.
Farlan strategizing and doing everything he could to keep their plans afloat and bring them closer to their dreams. Keeping Levi from dirtying his hands, and extracting a promise from him to refrain from killing unnecessarily. Asking them to believe in him and trust him. Saying that if Levi was there, they would survive and could do anything.
Isabel musing about how it wasn't so bad to leave the walls and venture into the outside together with the Survey corps. Reflecting about them being willing to die and giving up their hearts for the sake of humanity seeming incomprehensible and yet…awkwardly saluting and not wanting to mess up the chances of their mission and survival. Adding that if they ever lived in the Capital, they would help transfer funds to the Survey Corps by hook or by crook. So they could go outside the walls and fight more and more.
Hange being all casual and buddy-buddy with them, giving them candy and asking for tips. Telling them their fighting techniques were awesome, and fired everyone up.
Flagran and Sayram judging them as irreverent, uncouth and unclean, and then changing their minds about them and counting them as part of their squad.
Erwin talking about making choices and living a life with no regrets. Asking him if he wanted to return to the darkness of the underground again. Asking him if the sacrifices that were made were going to go to waste. Asking him to lend his strength to Humanity's cause. Telling him that he was needed. Demanding that he believe he could make a difference. Demanding that he make his grief count by using his strength to save Humanity.
He remembered asking Farlan and Isabel to trust him. How he knew to the inside of his bones that going back into the underground wasn't what any of them had wanted.
And he knew what he had to do, the light washing over him, illuminating him to his core.
If they had lived, he knew Erwin would have won them over and they would have fought with the Survey Corps and gone outside the walls again and again.
And they still could have died. At any moment. Anywhere. Anytime. With or without him.
As long as the titans roamed free and they didn't know anything about them.
He learned the world outside was just as ugly as the world inside the walls and the underground city, but it was more free. And he was somebody with strength.
Strength to help break down the walls someday.
He made up his mind. He decided to follow Erwin instead of slitting his throat because he understood him.
He had nothing left to lose. He decided to trust in him.
Trust in the vision of this man. The ghost of his friends. And his own strength and culpability.
He became arbitrarily responsible for a million more lives. He wasn't free, but he was more free than he had ever been. There was still blood, and grime and dirt and killing in his world but he lived to not regret his choices. He became Humanity's strongest ally.
And he formed his own squad on command. The Special Operations Squad. And he found something to lose again.
He met Petra. And Erd, Auruo and Gunther.
Before he knew it, they became another kind of flesh and blood to him again. Fighting through blood and grime and dirt, and killing together. And he was doing it again. Becoming distinctly and solely responsible for a few special lives. It was different from back then, but still the same in many ways.
He had subordinates he cared for. Subordinates that cared for him and looked up to him.
And Petra. Who somehow became more than his subordinate. Petra, who somehow became special to him.
Oddly, achingly significant. A companion who melted into the spaces of his personal solitude and filled it. Because he let her in. In a way he didn't anybody else. In a way he hadn't since he lost Farlan and Isabel. And she became somebody whose company he began to crave. She became somebody he began to desire. In a way he never had. It was odd and unsettling, and he couldn't filter it. Though he tried to for the longest time. Because it wasn't supposed to have happened.
She wasn't supposed to have happened to somebody like him. But she had.
With her...He let himself cave.
He let himself relax and bathe in the wash of her comforting presence. He let himself breathe again and enjoy her company. And he let himself crave.
Through it all, he had never bothered to dream for himself again until Her.
Only for the world and what his strength could do for them; the living and the dead ghosts of his past.
Petra had come into his life and changed that.
She had came alive for him and nudged his steel heart to life.
She was everything he ever wanted in the past reflecting back at him. Everything he would have dreamed of if he were the dreaming kind, and more.
Mirroring him and embodying all his ideals;the ideals of his past and his present; Of trust, and humanity, and relying on each other; Everything that was precious to the beat of his heart. How could he not want her?
But there was more. Because that wasn't all she offered him. She offered more.
She was the exception and the sole anomaly in the harsh, unforgiving realities of his existence, because she didn't just stop there. She upped her stakes and drove them straight into his heart and twisted them.
She wasn't content just to look up at him with awe and adoration. She wasn't content just to rely on him and be of use to him and have him look after her in turn.
She had to dedicate herself to him.
She had to unconditionally, irrevocably, devote her everything to him and his cause, knowing it could be the end of the beat of her heart.
And she was prepared for it. She was prepared to love the hell out of him and give her life for their cause in the wake of their living, blood-curling realities.
She would do what she had to, even if it killed her. And it was something he grew to greedily absorb about her. She soothed his silently screaming guts and settled comfortably into the depths of his aches and solitude.
And he paid attention to the special little details she let slip for him.
How there was always something more in the wake of her smile and her pretty face when she gazed up at him through her long lashes.
Fierce indescribable, undefinable something; emotions he took a long time to place because he had never seen something like it before; and never felt anything like it until her either. Rare sprouts of feelings he'd never experienced. Sharp pangs of longings and buzzes of 'She's cute' and 'I can't look away even though I know I should'.
Simple, petty, hint of desires, of something almost domestic and romantic. Myriad, irresponsible, unassuming thoughts; like 'wanting to spend more hours sipping tea with her,' or 'stealing glimpses and staring at her in quiet when she wasn't looking', or ' feeling partial to the light bell of her voice washing over him', 'liking being on the receiving end of her smiles', 'awkwardly trying to curve his own back at her' , 'craving to seek out meaning in her tenderness to him, the light flush of her cheeks and the secret sweep of her gaze drinking him in when she didn't think he felt it, but he did, and it shook him like innumerable shots of whiskey burning down his gulping throat.
He couldn't put a stop to them. Petra made him want to let her in. And he did.
For the first time since forever, he let somebody in right. In the normal, regular, way everybody else did.
He let Petra in so unbearably close he could feel his breath hitch lightly in his throat when she was near. And his throat going dry and scratchy when she looked at him like he was the missing, ragged piece of her whole and the broken beat of her tripping uneven heart. Like he was Jesus and everything good and crabby in this world and she wanted all of him, and willing to devote every sacred beat of her heart and gift him the church of her soul and bind hers to his, and his sword, for endless number of eternities and beyond. And He didn't know how he could damn well discern these things unless he could feel the plague and strange range of these emotions for her himself because he had never recognized the existence of this kind of 'love' before her.
She was the scent of his dreams and the strength of his past reflecting back at him, tempting him, and crying out that she could-would make every inch of good they can scrape free in their crueluglyworld come alive and dead and vibrantly true for him again.
And he wanted to believe and trust in her. And the bittersweet, devastating hope of impossible possibilities and them.
Because she was the dignified giggle to his morose funeral.
Because she had burrowed her way into his redredheart and made it home. Signing her name on it with the ink of her blood and integrity; settling into the solemn white depths of his bruised, irrepressible soul; inescapably linking herself to him; sinking into his empty blank spaces and irrevocably filling them.
Because Petra's existence renewed his.
She made him dream again, and gave him shattered glimpses of their shuttered 'what-if's and 'could have been's' and 'them's'.
And he was grateful. Even if he never got to live them.
He would rather he had a rare, fleeting taste than not. Unquenchable sips of strange unfulfilled havens to un-break him than do without.
Because he would have been incomplete if all he'd known was a lack of them.
Them.
Despite appearances and expectations, Levi was a simple and unassuming man.
He didn't know when, but he and Petra had become a 'them'.
And once he began to see them as 'them', he saw and spake and thinked and breathed them in the 'them' way that other 'them's' did.
Even if he didn't know it, because Levi didn't know what it was like to be a 'them' until Levi and Petra became a 'them'.
And so he began to 'them' his way through them.
When he dared to dream again, he dreamed a dream for 'them'.
When he dared to hope again, he hoped a hope for 'them'.
When he glimpsed a shooting star he didn't believe in, he whispered an odd, quiet, desperate prayer for 'them'. And he willed it to truth for them too.
When he slept, his waking nightmares morphed into soothing reveries of 'them'.
When she was gone, his nightmares came back with a vengeance; viciously tearing down the visions of 'them' that still haunted him and never left him and replaced and rearranged the vision of 'them' with a new, broken 'them'.
Without her, he sipped his tea on his own, devoid of the 'them'. And the warmth of 'them' he had grown accustomed to hug in the private, cold recesses of his heart.
Without her, he gradually began to soften his unforgiving nightmares with the distant promise of 'them' in death.
Death.
Death. He was unafraid of it.
He didn't welcome it, but he viewed it as respite.
He flirted with it but he didn't have the luxury to rage at it or unduly tempt it.
He was Humanity's Strongest.
He had offered up his dead heartbeat for Humanity.
He couldn't die without serving up his cause to the fullest.
He couldn't die for the dead that had died and left him behind to embody their wishes and dying reaches.
Yet. Because he knew he would someday.
It was inevitable. And he was prepared for it.
It was written in the broken constellations of their innumerable deaths and her stars, incomplete without him.
In the autumn gong of her white church bell. The winter cold stone of her graveyard. The red warmth and silver steel of sacrifice and resolve. The gold dart of a Father's anxiety and his own hollow, inexpressible sorrow, horrifyingly tangible in the sour, gritty blankness of his non-speech; and pale, fixed, empty eyes that stared into nothing. The dark gray pangs of his silent, dreaded aches, culminating into a private, strange sort of unsated, severe longing. The constant, weary pain of lacklustre, faded mornings without her.
In the banshee wail of indeterminable titans and humans and red, clotting blood. The slow numbing blink of his gaze hovering over her broken corpse, like a lover's aching caress, bleeding over his clean, sweet flashes of her. The death knell of her lavender death foreshadowing, and quietly waiting the inevitability of his.
An inescapable truth. Because Humanity's Strongest wasn't going to be invincible forever. It was the only thing he was sure of in his shitty, uncertain reality.
And He would do his damned best; hovering between extremes; Humanity's Strongest Living Martyr evading death's clutches for as long as he could.
Determining to never go looking for death. Knowing it will eventually find him.
Because His life is gone; Only his will, his duty remained.
The only someday in his life was the inevitability of his death, and reunion with dead comrades and family and Her.
When Petra was alive, a simple terse, alive thought filled him, 'Until death do us part.'
When Petra died, a dead quiet permeated him, and every beat of his resolved, struggling heart screamed silently, whispering its broken litany to her, if she was listening, 'Until death do us unite.'
Because when Death came for her and did them cruelly part, it bound him and held ransom on his fatal life even as it set her free.
When it comes for him someday, it wouldn't be cruel but kind.
A final, sweet aching freedom, bridging his soul to hers in endless abandon of death; an unknown quantity of life after life.
Because with her, he found a rare eternity of sweet, serene certainty in a world full of ugly uncertainties.
And the certainty that Death could bring for them was something he craved in the darkest, deepest, lonely pits and crevasses of his heart.