A/N: Once again, I'm not quite happy with the title... but it'll do for now. Oh, and beware; this chapter's a bit choppy and Eren is peculiarly dense. I tried to remedy things, but I scarcely feel like I did anything to make it better. Guess that's what happens when I try to review my own work about half a year down the track...
Beta'd by AutumnCadenza and Stately Demented
secondary revisions are unbeta'd and will probably stay that way
~ Chapter Five [Understanding] ~
Three Days Prior: Eren's Apartment, Morning
"Oi, Eren," a low voice growled close to his ear, and Eren mumbled sleepily before he turned around again. However, just as he was about to go back to sleep again, a fist landed bare millimetres from his face and nearly made him fall off his bed from shock.
"You don't do much in the morning, do you?" Levi casually continued, while the badly startled boy fought to keep his heart beating in his chest. "Seriously, who the hell's still sleeping when the sun's come up?"
Eren cast an irritable (and ever so slightly bleary) glare towards his amused neighbour as his throat attempted to force coherent and suitably snappy words through his mouth. "I'm asleep, obviously, and if it wasn't for you then that would still be the case!"
"You're clearly not awake enough to be polite, that's for sure," Levi muttered thoughtfully and, for a moment, Eren was almost sure that a smirk had fleetingly appeared on his neighbour's face. "I didn't come here to have an uncivilised chat with your half-catatonic body, though, brat."
"Then why are you here? I might as well go back to sleep if you're just here to annoy me," Eren grouchily shot back, though most of his frustration was lost in the yawn that immediately followed his words.
"Funny, Eren," Levi replied flatly. "Here I was, asking you to come jogging with me out of the kindness of my heart, and all you can think about is the wonderful prospect of drooling some more on your pillow."
It took a few moments for his neighbour's words to sink in but, by the time he'd wrapped his head around the proposition, Eren found himself staring confusedly at Levi's scowling face. He knew that the man liked to go jogging in the morning –after all, he'd been kicked out of bed before because the plumbing had failed in his neighbour's apartment– and that he ran a fair distance, if the heavy sheen of sweat that coated his muscles when he returned was any indication of the matter. He was well aware of how uptight Levi was when it came to his own health… but since when did he become a stickybeakand care for his health as well?
For goodness sakes, they had only been neighbours for less than two weeks, not for their whole lives!
"As much as I'd love to live next to a sagging, decomposing corpse, I'd rather have a somewhat healthy neighbour to live next to for the next year," Levi hissed, and Eren belatedly realized that he'd been muttering his thoughts under his breath for his neighbour to hear. "So if you're done wallowing in your self-pitying ramble then I'd suggest you dress yourself before I make you run in your boxers."
Levi almost succeeded in tossing him out in accordance with his promise and Eren gained a few bruises for his failed attempts to kick his obstinate neighbour out in the minutes that ensued.
However, the college student soon found his arms and legs assaulted by chill winds as he gritted his teeth and raced his surprisingly fast neighbour around the local park. He hadn't planned to run, especially when Levi had made good of his word and accused him of being a spineless lump of blubber for denying the benefits of exercising, but what had ended up convincing him more than anything else was the memory of his neighbour's body after he'd finished running yesterday.
No matter how much he wanted to deny the innate joy that his day's exercise had brought for him…
…He couldn't help admiring Levi's lean body or the soft light in his exhausted eyes after they'd stumbled into their respective apartments for a much-needed shower.
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One Day Prior: Eren's Apartment, Evening
The steady rhythm of his wrapped fists on the punching bag sounded pleasantly throughout his flat and melded with the harsh pants that escaped from Eren's parted lips. His mind vaguely registered the fraying threads hanging off the year-old bag, which had been Mikasa's previous birthday gift to him, and the small piles of sand littering the space underneath its suspended form from a few too many heavy hits, but its scruffy condition left his mind when a few rapid taps echoed in the break he'd taken in his night's activity. Eren's lips pursed tightly into a thin line at the interruption and he stalked to the door with the half-baked thought of startling his unexpected visitor with an affronted bout of yelling, but the notion died as soon as he'd flung open the door and smashed his neighbour in the face.
An elderly man living about three doors down from Eren nearly had a heart attack when a rather loud expletive tore itself from Levi's flattened face and burst into the previously silent air, but he was spared a trip to the hospital when Eren comically poked his face out, apologized profusely and proceeded to drag his semi-conscious neighbour into his apartment. Although the old man was tempted to call the authorities and report the ill-mannered man that had been skulking around the college student's front door for the past three minutes, he quickly dismissed the troublesome thought and thought nothing more of the situation. It never crossed his mind that said skulking man was the college student's neighbour– truth be told, he was completely and utterly unaware of the fact that there was a new neighbour to begin with.
And besides, it was probably better to ignore the weird people living on his level than attempt to associate with them in any possible way.
While the elderly man shuffled back indoors and locked the door behind him, Eren busied himself with fetching an ice pack to appease Levi's growling, which was beginning to irritate his ears. How was he supposed to know that he would be unintelligent enough to stand that close to a door that was clearly hinged on his side? The irrational urge to yell at his neighbour rankled at his mind and threatened to make itself known when Levi cast an extremely filthy glare in his direction, but it subsided as soon as he spotted the trickle of blood leaking out from his squashed nose.
"Oh my goodness, Levi, I'm so sorry for hitting you in the face!" Eren exclaimed sorrowfully as he rushed forward with the improvised ice pack in his hand.
As much as he wanted to yell at Levi for interrupting his nightly routine or beg him to keep his punching bag's existence a secret –Mikasa had informed him of the difficulty she'd gone through to give him something considered a symbol of violence and counter-productivity so that he could burn off the excess energy he always had– his main priority was caring for his neighbour. Even if he was more inclined to throw him out and leave him to his own devices, there was a faint notion inside of himself that suggested caring as a better option than his baser instincts.
However, all thoughts flew out of his mind as soon as he caught his foot on a loose rug and fell towards his startled neighbour. Or, rather, when his fall was broken, a few milliseconds later.
When Eren finally felt his face connect with something soft, he'd immediately thought that he'd been fortunate enough to miss the hard edge of the coffee table and land onto his relatively softer sofa. He'd been fully prepared to get up and laugh awkwardly as Levi would, no doubt, begin spouting a few insults along the lines of how uncoordinated he was but, when no sounds seem to come from his unusually silent neighbour, he looked up from his fallen position… and realized exactly where he was.
Instead of landing on the padded cushions of the couch, as he'd imagined himself to be, he'd accidentally landed face-first into Levi's crotch.
And, from the stricken look on his neighbour's face, he didn't seem to enjoy the realization either.
By the time Eren had frantically lifted his face from its rather inappropriate position and managed to retrieve the ice pack from the floor so that he could stuff it over Levi's rapidly colouring face, his mind was in a full-fledged panic attack and his face was probably putting all tomatoes to shame. As he proceeded to throw his startled neighbour out of his apartment, along with the unfortunate ice pack, and had slammed the door behind himself, the only thing that he could think about was how large Levi's dick had felt under his cheek…
…and how, if he had been given the chance, he wouldn't have minded touching it some more.
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9 Hours Prior: College Lecture Hall, Morning
Most days, Eren found that the tutorials he attended were often far too short for his liking; there simply wasn't enough time to mull over the latest murder case or heatedly discuss the best ways to prevent such random bouts of death from occurring in the hour that all lectures were granted. It was true that there were some lectures which finished rather satisfactorily and thus didn't require any further time to discuss it (like certain cases that made half the class go green in the face) but, for the most part, he didn't see how the tutors found enough time to cram all their interests into the one lesson. If he had a choice, he would've signed up for tutorials where there was at least two hours devoted to studying his interests, but the option wasn't available and he had to make do with what he had for the time being.
However, as his psychology peers got into yet another heated debate about the rising trend of suicide in their region, Eren couldn't seem to find the heart to participate loudly, as he often did, or even pay enough attention to everyone to notice what points of the argument were being discussed.
Often, he would be the one leading the discussion and he'd be the one that would effortlessly switch from defending the choices of the mentally ill to antagonising their inability to recover from their illness to get things going. Unfortunately, all he could really focus on was the blank sheet of paper before him. No matter how much he tried to write something down for his upcoming assessment on preventing death in his city, the college student could only focus on the vague thoughts that slipped as easily from his mind as the words that were bantered around him.
He glanced down at his sheet and started writing so he'd look like he was focusing; after all, he didn't exactly want to get a low mark for participation because of his increasingly uncharacteristic urge to sit and daydream in class. However, when the current dispute had died down and his pen had stopped skittering across the page, Eren realized that he'd written down nothing of productive value. In fact, after he'd squinted at his work and deciphered the illegible squiggles scattered across his page, he was somewhat appalled to find that he had been doodling on his paper.
What stopped him in his tracks and made him turn a rather frightful shade of white wasn't the fact that he'd been doodling instead of writing, though.
What had captured his attention… was the steely grey eyes that glared back from his page.
While Eren had let his mind wander, his hand had taken the liberty of illustrating his neighbour in varying shades of grey and black, as befitted his pen ink. Although he wasn't much of an artist and his doodles were probably more suited to a ten-year-old than a man his age, it was obvious that the various images staring back at him all depicted the same person.
There was the luminosity of his narrowed eyes when a stray beam of moonlight had fallen upon them scarcely a week before, when he'd abruptly gifted him with his gloves, and the half-smile that Levi hadn't quite been able to hide after Eren had finished drinking his tea the next morning. There was the half-amused and half-aggrieved expression that he'd worn when Professor Hange had begun to prattle about one of their many experiences with Levi in a long gone time, and there was the frightful terror that had appeared on his face when a cockroach had crawled out from the bathroom drain a few days after.
All sorts of expressions and memories flooded into Eren's mind as he stared at his doodling and, for reasons unknown to him and everyone else concerned for his wellbeing in the lecture hall, a bright splash of red intruded upon his curiously pale complexion.
"Eren, is everything alright over there?" the tutor asked with a faint hint of concern in her tone, but Eren was deaf to her query and everyone else's mild confusion as he stood up and left.
Despite the curious questions that people shot his way as he exited the lecture hall and made for somewhere, anywhere, that wasn't plagued with people or his irrational thoughts, Eren could pay them no heed in the face of his own confusion. He was probably going to get chewed out by his tutor for leaving the room in the middle of class or for simply skipping the past week's tute but, as he weaved confused through the college gates and made for somewhere far away, that thought was one of the furthest from his mind.
The only thing that was currently occupying his thoughts was Levi, really, and that in itself was a thought too large to ignore.
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6 Hours Prior: Local Park, Midday
Today had been a particularly sunny day and, though Eren didn't much like the warmth of the great outdoors, he was content to sit underneath the shade of a particularly large tree and mull over the stupid thoughts plaguing his mind. He hadn't been able to stop his mind from rotating around the same old problems that had been assaulting it for the better part of the past week.
The thought of getting some sort of rest from his overuse of his mental faculties was becoming an option that was becoming more and more appealing with every minute that passed. As much as he wanted to run from the topic at hand and avoid his thoughts forever, it was becoming quite obvious that his mind was going to give him no peace until he sat down and confronted himself.
Although Eren had never been intimate with anyone in his life, he had been quite certain that he was sexually attracted to females that were around his age. A well-positioned glance at shapely legs or feminine curves was enough to make his heart race a little faster than usual and his extensive electronic porn stash did a pretty decent job of piquing his body's interest on lonely nights. Changing with other boys in junior high had done nothing for his overactive libido in his teenage years and the sight of chiselled abdominal muscles had merely made him feel jealousy, not lust.
Yet here he was, with his mind on his neighbour, and nothing could seem to explain away his confused emotions towards him.
There was nothing that really made Levi stand out from any other person in a purely positive sort of light, though there was no denying that he stood apart from other people as it was. The things that mainly spewed out of his mouth were expletives and sarcastic comments, rather than polite words and flowery language, yet Eren couldn't help feeling that his harsh words were more soothing to his ears than the gentlest of words. His actions were crude, but they were a refined and a bluntly honest sort of crude that differed from the closet smokers, drinkers and abusers in society. He was an anomaly in his perfectly happy world that was darker than his forgotten memories, yet his presence alone was more than enough to bring light into his life.
He buried his head in his hands as more conflicting thoughts swirled around his puzzled mind and attempted to concentrate on the even rise and fall of his breathing when it all became too much. The rhythmic sounds of his heart and his lungs were the only things he could hear in the park –which was odd, considering that there were normally birds twittering loudly in the trees during this time– so when Eren spied a pair of feet approaching his bench, he wasn't exactly startled by the person's curiously silent approach.
"Eren, is that you?" a familiar voice rasped, and the college student was almost sure that the world was against him at this point in time. "Aren't you supposed to be studying your arse off at college?"
"I couldn't," Eren sighed wearily, "I can't seem to concentrate on anything right now."
The scrutinizing gaze that Eren found himself looking up into when he'd removed his face from his hands lasted for barely a second before his neighbour's disinterested expression slid smoothly back into place. However, the thought that Levi had been just a little concerned about him made his heart do odd somersaults in his chest.
He had only just begun to fight the urge to suffuse his face in red again when Levi's next words caught him off guard.
"I was going to get lunch, and…" Levi huffed, before he mumbled something unintelligible.
When Eren simply replied to his neighbour with a befuddled glance and nothing more, Levi made an irritated noise, before he rephrased his words for the college student's benefit. "I asked you if you wanted to grab some lunch with me, you deaf brat, not whether you wanted to imitate a curious puppy for my half-arsed enjoyment."
Eren glanced searchingly into Levi's eyes as his mind tripped over the unexpected offer but, when he could find nothing to indicate any mockery or sarcasm in his grey depths, he merely shrugged, before he stood up from his bench and gestured for his neighbour to lead the way.
And so it was that Eren left the park with nothing resolved in his tumultuous mind and a heart that was beating far too frantically to be considered normal by anyone's standards.
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Current Time: Eren's Apartment, Evening
The past week had been almost torturous for Eren, thanks to his unwitting neighbour's influence on his overly active mind, but no matter what he tried to do to take his mind off things, Levi's distinctive features would inevitably worm its way into his mind again. Nights tended to be the worst, especially when he couldn't numb his mind with vigorous bouts of exercise for fear of disturbing others or lose himself in the bustling life of the city's daylight hours, because staring listlessly at the darkened sky did nothing to take his mind off his thoughts. Unfortunately, there were times when counting the stars in the sky was impossible, thanks to the increasingly cold days…
…and today, of all days, just happened to be one of them.
He had slogged away at his punching bag for a solid two hours –which was a feat for him when he considered the paltry half-hour he'd normally spend with it– when his stomach had settled down from lunch, but the dull ache of his hands did nothing to detract from the burning itch of unwanted thoughts in his head. He'd ran up and down the apartment stairs until he'd been kicked out by a resident complaining about the noise and he'd even gone to the trouble of immersing himself in his bathtub for a good hour, but the thoughts continued to burn a hole through his mind. Though he was tempted to brave the cold and go outside to count the stars anyway, the phantom chills that crept across his skin reminded him of the last time he'd gone outside on a frosty night and received a week-long cold for his pains.
So, with no other option in mind, he'd beaten a reluctant retreat to his bedroom to try the last thing that he'd wanted to do, but was almost guaranteed to get his mind off his thoughts.
In other words, he was going to blow his problems away with a little therapeutic yanking.
The only glaring problem in his highly flawed plan was probably the fact that the apartment's walls were excessively thin –he'd heard Levi swearing horribly on more than one occasion– and that he really, really didn't want his neighbour to hear him right now. Of course, the overriding need to force his tumultuous thoughts out of his mind was currently eclipsing the awkwardness that would most likely ensue when he'd next meet Levi. And besides, it was a natural part of a single college guy's life; there was no real reason for him to be embarrassed, because he'd done it countless times before, and it wasn't going to change because he'd suddenly seen his neighbour floating in his dreams.
There was still an obvious flush on his face as he flopped onto his bed and scrolled through his electronic porn stash, though, despite his attempts to rationalize his actions. If he was going to go through with his jerking off session, he might as well do it as quickly as he can and then wait for the blissful silence that would hopefully fog up his mind rather pleasantly for the next hour or so.
As he gingerly stuck his fingers down his pants and inched past the tight waistband separating his dick from the cold air around him, Eren couldn't help the slight wince that jolted up his spine when the cooler skin of his fingers came into contact with his semi-hard organ. He squeezed his eyes shut and began to stroke in time with the exaggeratedly lewd moans spilling out from his precariously placed earphone.
However, by the time he was fully hard, he was concentrating more on his increasingly heavier breathing and the slick sounds of pre-cum than the disjointed video playing beside him.
In fact, he was so busy fumbling for a tissue and holding the loudest of his moans back that he didn't notice the footsteps nearing his door until a loud slamming nearly sent him toppling off his bed.
"Oi, Eren, do you—" Levi's voice abruptly cut off when impassive grey sought out mortified green, but what made his eyes blow wide open was not the furious blush racing across Eren's cheeks or the rather explicit pornographic images flashing across the falling laptop…
…but the wrecked moan that slipped past Eren's lips as he abruptly reached his orgasmic high.
Eren's panting sounded harshly in the room as Levi stared in transfixed shock at the college student's glazed eyes. By the time he'd come to his senses and his eyelids were strong enough to support themselves, his neighbour was already long gone from the room, and the only things that indicated his fleeting stay in the room was his ajar bedroom door and the faint smell of green tea in the heavy musk permeating his warm room.
Although his conflicted feelings towards Levi had been resolved during his during the moment in between Levi's appearance and his sudden climax, his neighbour's mental presence refused to leave Eren's foggy mind. In fact, when he'd finally gotten over his euphoric high, the unsavoury realization that'd plagued him for the past week eventually cemented itself within his mind and refused to leave. It seemed that, this time, there was no outrunning the things he'd much rather hide.
Which meant that Eren fell asleep, after a few hours, to the realization that maybe, just maybe, he was going to tell his friends about his newfound sexual orientation in the near (or extremely far) future.