A/N: Writing this killed me, and editing this killed me again; I still don't know how to tie this up in a more conclusive fashion, but it is what it is and I hope it's a good enough ending. There will most definitely be an epilogue and there's a strong chance of a sequel to tie everything together so, if this isn't satisfying, then hopefully the epilogue/sequel will clear things up. But enough of me waffling; I might as well get on with the story...
Beta'd by Stately Demented
secondary edits are unbeta'd
~ Chapter Nine [Collapsing] ~
Surely, this is an illusion, Eren thought, as his incredulous eyes stared into Levi's flat ones. Have I been running so much that I've begun to hallucinate…?
Yet even then, as his desperate mind conjured up reason after reason to disprove Levi's existence, it was clear to Eren that the man before him was all too tangible to be a construct of his mind. After all, it wasn't as if his mind could magically bend his wrist backwards and—
Oh, wait, that's right. Eren internally winced when the abused joint throbbed angrily in response.
He went and broke my fucking wrist.
Before Levi could consider attacking him again (though, from the unnatural stiffness in his body, Eren highly doubted that he'd make a move anytime soon), he reached for his broken hand and grimly shoved it back into place. As another agonized scream tore through his vocal chords and echoed in the dingy alley, Eren dimly wondered whether Levi felt any sort of sympathy for his condition.
However, by the time the pain had dulled from an intolerable flood of agony to a slightly less torturous sensation, the only other things that Eren could focus on was the confusion…
…and, above all, the overwhelming betrayal that Levi's presence had brought with him.
"I thought you cared about me, Levi, so what's with the whole 'let's break his wrist and try to kill Eren' act?" Eren pointedly asked, and a part of him smirked at the way Levi seemed to stiffen up even more at his words. "Unless, of course, you're secretly into some really heavy roleplaying of the sadistic sort and you somehow managed to con the government into playing along with you…"
When no answer was forthcoming, Eren found an irritated sigh worming its way past his lips.
"You do realize that you can't fool me, don't you?" he snapped irately. "You're clearly Levi, though whether you're the Levi that I sucked off this morning is another question entirely, and you've obviously been lying to me… so don't you think it's about time you 'fessed up and explained the situation to me?"
An age seemed to pass before the muffler finally fell from Levi's face but, when his heavy frown was finally visible, Eren couldn't stop himself from feeling a slight sense of victory. If he could make Levi listen to him, there was a good chance that he could sway the demented notion that had seized his mind and get away without any further injuries. If he was especially lucky, he might even be able to extract a confession regarding the roots of Levi's sudden shift in mood, and have a stern word (or an exchange of blows) with the idiot that dared to tamper with those he cared for.
Because, clearly, Levi wasn't doing this out of his own free will.
Or, at least, he didn't think he was.
But first, he'd have to have talk to Levi and get out of here before anything adverse happened to him. Preferably before something other than his wrist got bent out of shape, perhaps.
"Talk to me, dammit!" Eren growled in annoyance, as he shook his head and took a step towards Levi. "You don't have to do this, you know! If you're being forced to attack me because someone's got leverage on you, I have friends that could help—"
"Help?" Levi echoed dryly, as a mirthless smile slithered onto his face. "Are you seriously offering to help me when you're the fucked up one here? Wow, you must be more clueless than I first thought if you really think that you could make a difference in this world."
"And what, exactly, do you mean by that?" Eren angrily hissed.
"I meant exactly what I said, you dim-witted brat," Levi retorted coldly. "You've got more screws loose than I do and, frankly speaking, I would have to be in a pretty deep pile of shit if I were to ever consider getting help from you. Or are you so stupid that you don't even know why you're being pursued by the government?"
Eren's rather empty expression suggested that the answer to his question was a resounding 'yes'. If he wasn't so sure that he'd broken down on his neighbour's shoulder mere minutes (or was it hours?) ago, he might've even thought that Levi didn't know about his confusion. But that wasn't the case, of course, so what did that mean for him…?
"You really are the stupidest brat I've ever met in my life…" Levi muttered huffily, though something akin to amusement seemed to tug insistently at his lips when Eren squawked in anger.
"But really," he continued flatly, cutting off whatever Eren had to say in response, "as fun as it would be to waste time, I have things to do and places to be. So if you'd be good enough to stop catching flies with your mouth, we have some business to get through before I'm done here."
Eren snapped his mouth shut so violently that his teeth clacked together with the force of his movement. However, before he could open it again so that he could express his anger at Levi's rude comment, he found his eyes widening considerably when they landed on the small, grainy yet recognisable picture in Levi's hands.
"So, as our first order of business, let's play a game of 'guess the person', shall we?" Levi smiled mirthlessly again as he drew a little closer and brought the photograph towards Eren's frozen figure. "Who do you think this might be, Eren?"
Even though Eren refused to meet Levi's eye, it was clear to the both of them that he recognized the blurred picture in front of him.
After all, it was only natural for a child to recognise their mother's face.
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"Carla Jaeger," Levi began, his voice flat with boredom.
"Mummy!" the little brown-haired boy would often squeal, his voice high-pitched with excitement.
"We had her listed as a librarian in the only known library in the city… how interesting," Levi mused, though Eren gave no indication that he'd heard him at all.
She always smelt of a dusty, woody scent when she came home from work. It was a nice smell, a comforting smell, and one that never failed to calm Eren down when he flew into his mum's open arms and snuggled into her warm embrace.
"But it seemed like this wasn't the only job that she did." Something seemed to pull at the corner of Levi's mouth as he recalled a forgotten thought, but the emerging mirth on his face was replaced by his emotionless mask once again. "Why, it seemed like she helped disadvantaged children as well. How noble of her to do so…"
In the depths of his hearts, Eren couldn't agree more, though he was careful to keep his thoughts in his head for the time being. After all, who knew if Levi would glean something from his words and twist them, like he'd already done with his feelings?
"There was just one problem with her work, though, wasn't there?" Levi said, before he shook his head and sighed a little. "This unregistered job brought her in contact with children that were better left alone. Wouldn't you agree, Eren?"
He wouldn't agree, of course, because siding with Levi was probably going to bite him back later on, but he couldn't help dwelling over…
…the dark-haired, dark-eyed child that had accompanied his mum home one cold winter's day.
"Mummy," Eren had warbled curiously, "who's that, Mummy?"
"Eren, this is your new sister," she had answered, while the girl had peeked out from behind his mum's skirt. "Daddy and I have decided to take care of her because her own mummy and daddy can't take care of her. Be nice to her, okay?"
"But Mummy, why can't her own mummy and daddy take care of her?" Eren had pouted, annoyed at the thought of sharing his toys and belongings with a girl he hardly knew.
That had probably been the only time that his mum had become visibly distressed and just a little agitated at him… and, thanks to his fright from his mum's unknown emotions, he had accepted the strange girl for his mum's sake and found himself with a new sister.
Not that he'd enjoyed it at the time, of course.
"…a tragic attack that ended her life." Levi had been talking without his noticing and now, when his thoughts had subsided somewhat, Eren couldn't understand what he was saying, not even when he continued mere moments later. "But it doesn't matter much anyway, since you know the details of it all… don't you, Eren?
"So let's move onto someone else a little closer to home, then," Levi added, as he tucked the grainy photograph in his pocket and extracted another, equally grainy, picture. "Does this person ring any bells, perhaps? I would assume she would, but I can never be quite sure with you."
Eren found himself faced with a face that he instantly recognised, just like he had done with his mother's bare minutes ago.
Because, this time, it was his foster sister's face that was staring stoically back at him.
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"Mikasa Jaeger… or should I say Ackerman?" Levi smirked at the barely suppressed fire in Eren's eyes that had turned dark at his rhetorical query, before he continued talking. "I'm amazed that an Ackerman still exists, to be quite honest with you; I'd thought the government had dealt with them years ago—"
"You clearly thought wrong," Eren frostily bit back, but the smirk refused to leave Levi's face.
"But it doesn't really matter, does it?" Levi continued tonelessly. "She is an Ackerman, regardless of what you and I might argue, and neither of us can ignore the brevity of its implications."
"She is an Ackerman, and we can't deny that," his mummy had said, "but that name means nothing now, because she's family."
"But why, Mummy?" Eren had asked, confusion evident in his tone. "Didn't the gov'ment say that the Ackerman people were bad?"
A sad expression had ghosted across his mummy's face as he'd finished voicing his questions, but Eren had been too small and confused to notice her uncharacteristic unhappiness. All he noticed was the odd half-smile that she gave as she ruffled his hair and took his hand in her own warm palm.
"She's family now, and all family are good," his mummy had warmly replied, and he had nodded in response. He didn't really understand what she had meant at the time but, since his mummy was always correct, he'd grasped her warm hand in his soft one and left his worries behind.
After all, he was…
"…too young to understand the ramifications of your actions." Levi shook his head and sighed almost patronizingly at Eren. "But even then, Eren, I'm surprised that you continued to protect her, even when your sense of duty kicked in. Isn't it strange that you never second-guessed yourself?"
But he had second-guessed his own thoughts, when he'd read about the government's justification for the 'Ackerman Massacre'. It wasn't hard to get articles linked to the most famous purge of his era when almost everything was at his fingertips in the local library.
It was also easy for him to find out all those little things that his mummy didn't want him to look at, but which he'd found scattered all over the room that he was never supposed to go in.
"And really, Eren, were you so sheltered that you'd never been told of what the Ackermans were?"
Nobody had ever told him of the Ackermans, apart from that one time with Mummy, until he'd heard his Daddy talking about it with his Mummy late at night, when he'd gone to the toilet, yet Eren had easily found out all the relevant facts in the newspaper clippings and reports that had been scattered across the floor of that one forbidden room. There had been a few difficult words that he didn't get, like 'jurisdiction' and 'socio-terrorism', but he had gotten the general gist of what had gone on from what he'd read.
It wasn't as if the various pictures of burnt bodies in crematoriums were ambiguous in their meaning.
It wasn't as if he didn't know that criminals against the societal order were cremated so that they could never be reached by anyone in their premature death…
"You probably know something," Levi said, and cut across Eren's tumultuous thoughts as he did so, "but you're just being the stubborn brat that you are and you're keeping things to yourself.
"Of course, there's always the possibility that you don't know things at all," Levi continued, "in which case, I suppose I'd have to admit defeat and let you go. So there's just one final thing that I need to show you before I determine your guilt and do what I must with you."
Mikasa's blurry photo disappeared into his pocket again and, without too much fuss, he extracted the third and final photo for Eren's perusal. Instead of staring intently at the picture like he'd done with his mother's and foster sister's, he immediately glanced away from the picture and stared stubbornly at his feet.
Which was odd, but not entirely befuddling on his part… since it was his deceased neighbour's face in the final image.
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"What's with the strong reaction, Eren?" Levi curiously asked, and it was obvious that his curiosity wasn't just an act on his part. "Is there something disturbing about this image?"
Broken glasses, scattered in shards, littering the red-speckled floor…
"No, nothing at all," Eren tonelessly replied.
A pool of reddish-brown resting at his feet, which could almost pass off as a murky puddle of mud…
"Are you sure?" Levi pressed insistently. "Is there nothing you remember at all?"
The mangled scars criss-crossing on the body scattered the white fragments jutting out of the skin and made it look more like a mosaic than…
"A body," Eren whispered to himself, but the sudden light in Levi's eyes indicated that he'd heard him.
"Oh, so you remember a body?" Levi's smile, though completely mirthless, was almost triumphant to Eren's eyes when he finally looked up from his feet and towards his hooded silver eyes. "Was there anything strange about this body, perhaps?"
And one of his eyes were rolled up in his head but the other one, the other one that was staring straight at him, was greyed out with the faded grey of death.
It was just like how the blood had congealed on the smaller cuts and solidified into a brown mass around his swollen tongue lolling out of his pale filth-covered head—
"No," Eren gasped, and clutched his head as more memories assaulted him.
"No…?" Levi echoed, but Eren couldn't hear him anymore.
His gaunt face made lean by stress and his sunken eyes hollowed by the same reason screamed at him of betrayal and pain which he could've prevented if he'd burst in and intervened but he'd have died along with his neighbour and who was he to throw away his life for a meaningless cause—
"Stop, please," Eren moaned, but his thoughts continued to assault his mind.
—he was just a neighbour wasn't he but of course he wasn't there was a familiarity to his features which mirrored his own but he'd never noticed them before not even when they'd appeared before him time and time again in his nightmares because he didn't want to admit that the dead man had been someone that was close to him and was connected to him and was—
"Grisha!" Eren screamed, and Levi instinctively stepped back when the half-crazed boy whipped his head towards the sliver of sky above. "You were never my father! Never, you hear me?!"
"Whoa, Eren, calm the fuck down," Levi started, but whatever he'd wanted to say afterwards was lost in the broken wail that clawed its way out of Eren's throat.
So all those needles jabbing into his arm and the people watching as 'Ackerman' and 'super soldier' and 'military research' (and later on it had been 'prototype' and 'failure' and 'useless human being') were really just memories his mind had suppressed to manifest as dreams—
—His hands shot up and seized his head in a painful grip as yet another scream tore out of him—
—and it was all Mikasa's fault for surviving and his mother's for being caring yet cruel enough to jeopardize her family and especially him by saving another's—
"…you listening to me– dammit, Eren, get a grip!" Levi shouted, but it was all just static in his ears—
—but above all it was his father's (no, Grisha's, not father's; he had never been his father and never would be) fault because he had crumbled under temptation and corruption to develop a tool of war for the preservation of his fucking happiness which never existed anyway—
"Somebody make it stop!" Eren yelled, as his fingernails dug into his skull and drew blood in the crescent-shaped imprints it left behind. "Please… somebody, anybody, I'm begging you!"
But, instead of shouting at Eren as he'd done before, Levi shut his mouth and stood rooted to his spot, frozen in the emotionlessness that had descended onto him. Eren's head abruptly snapped back down and his crazed green eyes darted around the alleyway but, even then, Levi refused to move a muscle. Instead of seizing control, like he had done countless times in the short stretch of time they'd spent in, he could only watch as those frenzied eyes fell upon his form…
…and the final shreds of Eren's lucidity snapped in his heavily abused mind.
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"How could you do this to me?" Eren screamed in fury, as his shaking finger pointed at Levi's still figure. "I was content without knowing anything and without knowing that the government would judge me for that bastard's actions! I was—"
"What, are you going to say that you were happy, brat?" Levi's voice, now deadened from apathy, swiftly cut through Eren's angered tirade. "You said that there was no such thing as that, so don't try to turn traitor on your own words now."
Levi's words would've probably been more effective on a brick wall, if the unchanging expression of rage on Eren's face was anything to go by, but his effectiveness (or lack of it) didn't seem to faze him all that much. If anything, his emotionless mask was unwaveringly firm as well.
Or, at least, it was firm enough to stay in place as Eren roared at him again.
"Yes, I was happy, you fucking asshole!" He coughed violently and spat a mixture of opaque white and red onto the ground, before he continued his aggrieved rant. "I was happy believing that I had found someone who I could pour my heart out to and who clicked with me. I was happy dreaming of a future where I could come home to a safe haven uncorrupted by this fucking government and see someone that loved me unconditionally. I didn't remember a goddamn thing before I left… I didn't give a shit for why I was here and why nothing seemed to make sense… but then you came. And I thought that you'd come to love me, just like I had loved you, but I should've known it was all a goddamn farce!"
"What can I say?" Levi flippantly replied, as if he hadn't heard Eren's confession, and his vision went hazy with the extent of his ire. "I guess you were just a shitty little brat that thought his farcical attempt at puppy love amounted to something more."
For a moment, Eren thought that the drumming noise in his eardrums was because of the heady rush of adrenalin in his system. However, when it didn't abate, he turned his head up to the sky to see if it was raining… but he didn't find much to justify the thudding up there, either. When he placed a hand to his chest, he found an arrhythmic thud that didn't quite match the one he could hear. What was that thudding?
What was—
Why's there a gun in my face?
"It's not your fault that you weren't paying attention to me," Levi frostily hissed when Eren's face contorted in confusion. "I said I was going to eliminate any threats to the city, didn't I?"
"Then what are you waiting for?!" Eren didn't realize that the words were his own until it was too late to retract them but, to his horror, he couldn't seem to make his mouth stop moving. "Shoot me then! Shoot me like the dog you and the rest of the bloody government think of me as, and 'eliminate' me already!"
For a moment, it almost seemed as if something deep in Levi's eyes had shifted at his provocation, but the moment soon passed and his face hardened into an emotionless mask. As the thudding got louder and louder, the man that he loved (in the past or in the present? He wasn't sure anymore) curled his fingers around the gun and squeezed the trigger with his hands—
"No!" a voice screamed, and Eren whipped his head to see who is was.
However, before he could gaze upon the intruder, he felt a searing sensation in his arm and a great pressure…
…as Levi shot a bullet into his left shoulder.
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As he fell, Eren blearily registered the bright red scarf that his sister always wore… though why he could see it was beyond his reasoning. He thought he also saw his best friend's distinctive golden hair and heard a broken scream tear itself out of Armin's throat, but he wasn't too sure either.
All he knew was that he had been shot and that his life was ebbing out in gushes of blood.
He felt a hard pressure on his back as he thudded onto the concrete beneath, just as his head was overcome with searing pain. But the pain was getting duller and duller with every passing second… and so was everything else that he could sense.
As his vision began to fade to black and his thoughts began to leave his mind in a flood, Eren found his eyelids sinking down with infinite slowness.
The last thing that he saw, before he sunk into the dark depths of his unconsciousness (and almost certain death) was Levi's face hovering over his own…
…and the last thing he felt was a droplet of water on his face, as if someone had just shed a tear for his passing.
But that was impossible, of course, because he was nothing at all.
Wasn't he?