A/N: Apologies for the slow update; I only just recovered from my bout of the 'flu and I'm still not feeling 100%. There's a lot that I disliked about this chapter but, thanks to the sluggishness of my mind, I think I'll have to leave the heavy editing to another day, if I'm bothered to come back and edit it at all. For those who dislike smut, I've put a warning just before and just after it, so you can still skip over it and not miss out on the important plot point I'm introducing in this chapter... and that's all I have to say, I think.

Beta'd by Stately Demented
secondary edits are unbeta'd

~ Chapter Seven [Culminating] ~

The floor was still splattered with spilt tea when Eren shuffled back into his apartment. Despite the fact that his slippers quickly became soaked with the residual liquid pooling on the floorboards and his feet squelched uncomfortably with every step he took, he paid no heed to his discomfort.

Instead, he simply collapsed into his armchair and stared resolutely at a small puddle of tea until somebody jolted him from his listless reverie with a warm fragrance and grating voice.

"As much as it might be fun to watch that crap soaking into your slippers and feet, you're probably not going to feel any better if you sit there like an imbecile," Levi huffed, before he handed Eren a cup of tea that smelt rather strongly of his neighbour's special brew. "So drink up, Eren, and get something into your system before you crash and die on me, okay?"

Despite the complete lack of eloquence in Levi's words or tone, Eren managed to muster up a weak smile as he received the cup with a shaky hand. While his neighbour settled into the armchair before him and sipped at his own cup of caffeinated tea, Eren busied himself with warming his unnaturally cold hands on the hot ceramic and blowing on the steaming liquid that puffed from its surface.

However, instead of partaking from the liquid straightaway, he set the mug down on the low coffee table before him and stared at Levi until he, too, set down his cup to closely examine Eren's unmoving gaze.

"What is it, brat?" Levi asked uneasily, as Eren continued to gaze unwaveringly at him. "I swear, if you're trying to do some passive-aggressive shit and burn a hole into my face…"

"No, it's not that," Eren murmured dazedly. "I was just wondering about something."

"So spill it, you little shit, and stop staring so damn hard at my face," Levi growled, before he crossed his arms and directed a piercing glare at Eren's semi-glazed eyes. "Enlighten me before I die of old age and crumble into dust from inactivity."

Although a snort fought to erupt from his nose at the absurd thought of a Levi-sized pile of dust in his armchair, Eren hurriedly squashed down his mirth. After all, it wouldn't do for him to irritate his neighbour any more than he already had.

When a few moments had passed and it was clear that Levi was awaiting an answer, though, Eren quietly asked the question that had been weighing on his mind since his rather abrupt kiss with his neighbour. "Why didn't you kick me or yell insults at me instead of, you know…"

"Are you trying to insinuate that you're a closet masochist, Eren?" Levi huffed disapprovingly. "Well, I never knew physical or verbal abuse got you going, if you know what I mean."

Eren began to splutter and blush furiously from his neighbour's bluntness but, just as he was about to make some sort of half-arsed attempt at denying his questionable kinks, a quiet chuckle stopped him in his tracks. By the time he had finally realized that Levi had just been pulling his leg, a reluctant yet irritated grin tugged on the corner of his lips in response to the low barks of laughter from the man in front of him.

"But in all seriousness, Eren," Levi finally said, when he had composed himself again, "I did what I did because you needed it more than anything else I could offer you."

Even though it was probably not in his best interest to question the implications behind Levi's words, Eren decided to complain anyway. "What exactly do you mean by that, huh? Are you so self-confident that you thought a little kiss from you would magic away all my problems? I'm not the princess in distress and you're nowhere near a knight in shining armour. This isn't a fairy tale, Levi; there's no such thing as a happily ever after here!"

"I'm not saying that I'm going to rescue you with a wave of my magic wand, you ungrateful shit." As Levi leant in towards him and glared into his eyes, Eren couldn't help feeling an odd sense of déjà vu at their situation, but it quickly passed when his neighbour continued speaking. "What I'm trying to say is that the walls are fucking thin, okay?"

"And what's that got to do with anything?!" Eren started heatedly, but the underlying meaning behind his neighbour's words became all too evident as soon as he'd spouted out his hasty question.

"Well, I'd assume that your attempts to rival a tomato in colour would indicate your understanding," Levi dryly muttered, "so I guess I'm saved the trouble of enlightening you."

"No, you are not saved from explaining things, Levi," Eren hissed quietly, before he gestured between himself and his neighbour jerkily, "because I don't fucking understand what you and I are nowadays. At first, you were just the annoying neighbour with good food—"

"That certainly makes my heart pound," Levi muttered sarcastically, but a pointed glare stopped him from voicing his snarky thoughts.

"—As I was saying, you were just another person," Eren huffed in irritation, before he sunk back into his thoughts and his voice dropped into a contemplative tone again. "Then something upstairs went wrong, you kept on intruding into my life and now… now, I don't even know what's what anymore.

"So what are we, Levi?" When Levi jerked his head up at Eren's sad question, he almost flinched from the intensity of the dulled green eyes that stared into his own. "What… what am I?"

"Well, I can't help you with that last one, because only you can figure that out for yourself." When a hand entered Eren's vision, he almost flinched away from the appendage, but a fragile sense of calm settled over him when he noticed that it was only Levi's hand. "But I can help you with the first question."

"…Um, how are you going to do that?" Eren curiously asked.

"Tch, just take my hand, close your eyes, and let me show you," Levi growled. "And whatever happens between us stays between us. Got it?"

Even though he wasn't quite sure what Levi was planning or why his neighbour was imposing so many conditions upon him, Eren's curiosity was more overwhelming than his trepidation right now.

So, before he could back out of whatever this was… he closed his eyes and let fate sweep him along.

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please skip to the next bolded line if you do not wish to see why this is rated M
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The soft sigh his new seat made as his weight settled upon it was so distinctly airy that Eren was almost certain he was currently sitting on his bed. It didn't surprise him, really, since the distance he'd had to walk with only Levi's hand as guidance hadn't been long, but the cogs still turned contemplatively inside his head as he wondered why he had been led here, of all places. Apart from the lingering apologies he had for all his displaced photographs –Levi hadn't really been all that careful when he'd brought him down the hall to his room– his mind was curiously blank… but he didn't resent the feeling much.

At least it made a comforting change to the thoughts which had threatened to drown him for the past few days.

Levi had let go of his hand for a while now, and the only sounds he could really hear were quiet rustles that said nothing of what his neighbour was doing. Was he rifling through his wardrobe and silently sneering at the mess that had accumulated since he'd cleaned it almost a month ago? Or was he seated at his study table and scanning the unorganized disarray spread across its surface…?

"Eren," Levi's gravelly voice suddenly uttered, "you can open your eyes now."

"Are you done with… whatever you were doing?" Eren cautiously asked, and his small voice sounded foreign to his ears then.

"I told you to open them, so open them." A hint of annoyance slipped into Levi's tone, but it was nowhere to be found when Eren unconsciously flinched from his hard voice. "Look, I'm done, okay? Now stop pussyfooting around and do what I'm telling you to do, for fuck's sake."

As his eyelids opened at Levi's command, the first thing Eren noticed was the fact that he was actually sitting on his bed.

The second thing he noticed was the absence of light in his room; clearly, he had spent far longer than he'd thought he had in his abrupt oscillations between blind fury and morbid depression. That probably explained why Levi had muttered curses that had sounded a little like 'damn my shitty eyesight' or 'where's the fucking light when you need it?' in the short amount of time it'd taken to traverse the distance from his living room to his bedroom.

Then again, the light switches were located in rather obvious spots, if his opinion was anything to go by, so there shouldn't have been a problem with lighting anyway.

Eren almost choked on a suppressed snort when he finally connected the regularly displaced objects in his kitchen with Levi's inability to navigate his apartment in the early morning, but all thoughts of laughter left his mind when the light finally flickered on in his room. It was a little hard to miss Levi, especially when he was growling profanities by the door…

…but it was even harder to miss his inexplicably unclothed state.

Especially when his eyes refused to move from Levi's body.

"What, have you never seen a naked man in your life?" Levi dryly asked, and Eren felt a rather vivid blush suffuse his cheeks for the millionth time that day when he finally tore his gaze away from the impressive muscles lining his stomach. "Well, now you've seen one. Congratulations, Eren."

"I-It's not that!" Eren retorted, but the embarrassed squeak that had replaced his frustrated words caused a smirk to flit across his neighbour's face. "I was just w-wondering why you were—"

"In my birthday suit, as it were?" The smirk that stretched Levi's lips was positively infuriating, yet the only sensation Eren could feel was a distinct pooling of warmth in the one place that he didn't want to think about right now. "Well, wouldn't you love to find out the reason why…"

At this point, Eren was clobbering his mind for attempting to add some sort of meaning to Levi's words while averting his gaze from the toned expanse of his neighbour's body. It would probably be a miracle for his face to get any redder or for his cock to react even more positively to Levi's presence at this point in time.

So Eren was rather mildly surprised when neither his face nor his dick reacted any further as Levi abruptly straddled his legs and ground straight down onto his crotch. Then again, it was rather hard to feel emotions when one's dick was overly stimulated, especially when the only thing that ran through one's head was a slur of profanities.

"L-Levi, what…" Eren shakily began, when the fireworks stopped erupting his head, but whatever thought his fizzling brain had instantly died when something distinctly hard bumped against his hip.

"I did say that you'd love the reason, Eren," Levi's breathy voice huffed straight into his ear, and Eren was embarrassed to find a strangled whimper issue from his parted lips. "I also remember saying something about changing your stupid mindset with something other than words, so here we go.

"…But really," his neighbour casually added with a particularly hard grind against his impossibly hard length, "Could you stop protesting at the change of events and just go with it?"

Before Eren could attempt to correct Levi's misconceptions and express his preference for the rather pleasant change of events, the sudden lack of warmth in his lap made his mouth release a groan instead of its original retort. A rather firm tap of his hip caused them to jerk instinctively and, as soon as his body had come off the mattress, Eren found himself divested of his pants and boxers within mere seconds. When the cold air hit his throbbing cock, a groan ripped itself out of his throat, but the light breath ghosting across his face brought him back to his situation with Levi.

As his eyelids struggled open from their inexplicably closed position and found Levi's face hovering just before his own, his instincts decided to take over with a rather hearty 'fuck you' to his rationale. He found his eyes zeroing in on Levi's impressively hard length before he could stop himself and, before his mind could comment on the situation, he found his finger tentatively reaching forward and smearing the bead of pre-cum across Levi's dick.

Whoever had said that someone's height was proportionate to their girth was clearly mistaken, because the weeping cock beneath his fingertips was most definitely longer than his own. As Levi huffed out a ragged breath in response to Eren's trembling caress and his unconscious murmurs of appreciation, the movements running along his heated length became more and more steady. For a moment, as Eren glanced up at the wrecked expression on his neighbour's face, he wondered whether Levi had ever shown such a vulnerable expression to anyone else before.

However, the thought left him as soon as a rather warm palm encased his throbbing dick.

The moan that burst out of his mouth sounded far too loud to Eren's ears, but he ceased to care about the volume of his voice as soon as the warm pressure on the base of his cock began to spread up to the other, more neglected, portions of his leaking member. Soon enough, as their hands worked in tandem and their harsh pants mingled in the increasingly heated air between them, Eren began to feel his eyes glaze over from the sheer headiness of it all.

Instead of touching Levi in his dreams, he was making him come undone with his hands… and the lance of pure lust that shot down his spine and made his cock impossibly stiff was almost enough to make it spit out a spurt of pre-cum.

What Levi did next, though, really did manage to make his dick jerk wildly in response, though it did so for a completely different reason.

"Levi…" Eren raggedly panted, when he'd recovered from being shoved down onto the bed. "What—"

That was as far as he got before he registered the fact that Levi had swivelled around so that his dick was directly above his mouth…

…and the warm wetness of Levi's mouth descending upon his pulsing cock in a way that made all his hazy thoughts fly out of his mind yet again.

"Haah… Levi…!" Eren moaned deliriously, while Levi's tongue licked a wet stripe up his hard dick.

"E-Eren," Levi growled in an extremely husky tone, as soon as his mouth had left Eren's weeping head alone, "could you s-shut up and return the f-favour, you damn piece of– nngh!"

Whatever words that his neighbour had been planning to say disappeared into a heady moan as soon as Eren's soft lips came into contact with his dripping cock and his tongue had flicked almost shyly into the pre-cum dribbling out of the slit. As Eren's hand came up to stroke the parts that his curious mouth couldn't take and his head began to bob up and down his throbbing red cock, Levi abruptly dropped his head down and hollowed out his cheeks, before he began to move in time with Eren's frantic movements as well.

It didn't take long for Eren to finish, especially when Levi's lips dropped to the base of his cock and he began to hum around the overly stimulated length. The lewd pop of his mouth as he jerked his head back from Levi's dick was swallowed in the lustful cry that tore out of his lungs. When Levi followed straight after with a muffled moan and a few desperate sucks of Eren's cum-soaked tip, Eren found more cum shooting straight from his cock when Levi's load splattered straight into his mouth. Even though he was tempted to suck at Levi's lurching dick in the same manner that his neighbour was for him, the haze of his orgasmic pleasure prevented him from returning the favour.

So, instead, he pulled weakly at Levi's cock and jerked him through the remainder of his orgasm while Levi sucked him dry.

By the time he had come down from his mental blank and had forced enough oxygen in his lungs to allow his brain to function again, Eren found Levi fastidiously cleaning his face with a wet cloth which looked suspiciously like his unwashed towel.

However, before he could protest, Eren found his eyes sliding shut and his mouth forming a slurred 'thank you'…

…before he slipped into the welcome oblivion of sleep.

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...and now, we return to the plot parts of this chapter
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The glowing numbers next to his face displayed numbers that would've been better off saying 'some early fucking hour in the morning' when Eren stirred in his bed and, though he groaned tiredly and attempted to snuggle back into his pillow, sleep eluded him. It became especially hard to sleep when memories of Levi's intoxicating scent and their activities some time ago invaded his mind and, with a grumpy huff, he finally conceded defeat and flung the blanket off his body.

He wasn't sure why there he was perfectly clean in his bed or whether his delirious mind had simply dreamt up the situation out of pure frustration, to be honest. For all he knew, he could've shuffled off to bed while Mikasa and Armin had shown themselves out after his disastrous shouting match with them and promptly fell asleep… but, for some odd reason, the warm tingling throughout his body seemed too real to be a dream. Perhaps he'd ask Levi later, when he'd finally mustered up the courage to confront his neighbour.

After all, it would take a while for him to get over that wonderful dream and control himself enough to have a normal conversation with him.

As Eren yawned and shuffled out of his bedroom, the first thing he noticed was the light in his living room. Had Mikasa shooed Armin away and decided to keep a lonely vigil on his couch, perhaps? The sudden mental image of his foster sister shivering on his sofa due to his own selfishness stabbed at his heart and, before he could control himself, his feet were already rushing towards the light at the end of his hallway.

What he found on his couch wasn't Mikasa, though.

Instead, Eren's eyes nearly fell out of his head when a pair of dull silver eyes met his incredulous gaze.

"Oh, so you're finally awake," Levi muttered tonelessly, and any rising hope that Eren had at the sight of his neighbour was abruptly quashed by the flatness of his voice. "Did you sleep well?"

"What…" Eren started but, when his voice broke after the first word, he cleared his throat and tried again. "What happened?"

"Don't you remember?" Levi countered quickly. "Or did I brush your teeth so thoroughly in your sleep that you can't taste the lingering flavour of cock?"

The blush suffusing his cheeks would've normally been enough to wrangle a snarky comment that would, more often or not, have something to do with his affiliation to tomatoes, but the complete silence from his neighbour caused his blood to rush back much faster than it normally would have. If Levi had been semi-serious in his statement… and they'd actually jerked and sucked each other off…

Then why was Levi giving him the cold shoulder right now?

"I'm not," Levi curtly answered, and Eren was embarrassed to realize that he'd spoken his thoughts aloud. "I'm just…"

A tired sigh slipped out of Levi's parted lips as his words trailed off and, before Eren knew what he was doing, he found himself crawling onto his couch and snuggling into his neighbour's side as an arm casually draped itself over his shoulder. They stayed in an amicable silence for a time, as Levi toyed with a loose thread on Eren's shirt and Eren breathed in Levi's comforting scent, but the silence eventually broke when Eren mumbled something into his neighbour's collarbone.

"What was that?" Levi asked curiously, as he wriggled his unoccupied hand underneath Eren's chin and lifted it up so that their faces were fully revealed to one another. Although Eren attempted to squirm out of Levi's grasp, he quickly admitted defeat when the grip upon his chin refused to loosen.

"I was just thinking…" Eren mumbled thoughtfully. "Are we, you know… together now?"

If Levi hadn't had both his hands occupied with Eren, he might've gone and punched his face in utter disbelief. As it was, though, the withering glare that he gave him before he dived in for a pointed kiss was more than enough to answer his question.

The dazed expression on Eren's face when he next surfaced for some air almost made Levi laugh, especially when he grumbled a little and flushed beet-red again, but the moment was ruined when a particularly loud rumble emitted from Eren's stomach. Before he could apologize for his stomach's awkward interruption or attempt to warn Levi of the relative emptiness of his cupboards, he found himself alone on the couch while his neighbour –it was too awkward to refer to his as his lover just yet– rummaged around for some food.

It almost felt homey to listen to Levi curse at his lack of food and angrily manoeuvred two clean mugs out of the cupboard where he stored all his cups and plates; if he closed his eyes and used his imagination a little, he could almost pretend that they were newlyweds in their own special home. Even though homosexuality was allowed in their society, the prospect of having a same-sex marriage was still a touchy subject and, as such, it was probably unlikely for them to ever advance past the stage of a de-facto couple. Besides, he couldn't really imagine how Levi would even start responding to a marriage proposal anyway, especially when he still hadn't heard how Levi felt about him—

The abrupt crash from his kitchen nearly gave Eren a heart attack but, when he'd recovered from the unexpected noise, he found his feet rushing towards the source of the sharp sound.

One of his mugs was strewn across the floor in a myriad of broken pieces while Levi held the other in his hand and stared uncomprehendingly at the scalding tea pooling near his own feet. His face was so pale that, for a moment, Eren wondered whether Levi had actually fainted while he was standing up, but the slow motion of his eyes as they lifted from the shattered ceramic on the floor to his wide green ones confirmed his conscious state.

"What's wrong?" Eren started worriedly. "Levi, talk to me—"

'Attention all citizens,' the radio announcerabruptly uttered, 'The Government would like to ask for everyone's co-operation. If any citizens happen to see a brown-haired, green-eyed boy that is approximately 170cm tall, please do not attempt to approach or interact with this individual. The authorities would like to notify everyone of this criminal's Class-A status and their High Treason against the State, and ask that everyone stay safe.

'If anyone sees or knows of this individual, please inform the authorities immediately,' the announcer tonelessly muttered, and Eren's blood ran cold at its next words. 'As a threat to society, the authorities will immediately eliminate this individual, Eren Jaeger…'

And, in an instant, Eren's world came crashing down around him.