Levi was nineteen years old when the first news of the titanium disease was reported. It was a small article about a family in France found dead, their bodies deformed and rock hard. Somehow their bodies had grown big, almost twice their sizes in some cases, before crystallizing. A few months after that the titanium disease spread over the news like wild fire.
In the beginning the government simply placed boxes with hand sanitizer in public buildings, recommending that people should be careful with what they touched and that they should wash their clothes more often. Right before Levis twentieth birthday the people realized that simply washing more often wouldn't save them.
The titanium disease hit the earth like a modern plague, the governments and hospitals couldn't keep up with how quickly it was spreading and the larger cities lost their footing. Levi could for once be happy that he lived in the suburbs where they had had to manage on their own long before the disease took the people of administration and power.
Evacuation, isolation and shady vaccination programs where words that seemed to permanently have found their place on the newspapers. The few radio stations still running were talking about the doom of humanity and they tried to use as many dramatic and fear-inducing words as possible. Levi was almost twenty-two when the titanium disease hit it's peak. A quarter of the worlds population lost and more suffering of the disease.
Then it stopped.
Humanity was left to carefully open their windows, peek out and take trembling steps out their doors. Levi celebrated his birthday all by himself, his friends buried months ago, on the same day that a radio announcement was made. They didn't have a cure but they had control. They could slow down the spread in the victims bodies and after several tests they where sure that the disease didn't spread from person to person, it was finally safe to go outside again.
When Levi left his tiny apartment the streets were more crowded than he had thought they would be. They had fear in their eyes, but that fear was mixed with curiosity and hope. Were they really safe now?
Levi saw friends reuniting, families greet each other with careful hugs and small tears. He had no one to meet again so he continued walking, following the street down to the centre of the suburbs. There what remained of a government where distributing food rations and medicine to those that needed it. At a podium there were a group holding speeches about the strength of the survivors, what the government was doing to fix the broken society and what the survivors could do to help.
Levi had never really liked the people of authority, and at first he refused to help. He got his food rations and returned to his apartment, not even looking outside. Holed himself up with old newspapers and books he had read several times. Before the disease hit the earth, Levi had almost been illiterate. Now he could read as well as anyone his age. The articles he knew by heart, but he read them anyways. Trying to distract himself from the mix of joy and sadness outside his window.
After a week of sitting alone, listening to the radio that now spurted news of the whole worlds recovery, Levi raised himself up from both the sofa and all of his confused emotions. He walked outside, took a bike that no one owned anymore and decided to find out what the world was all about now. What was working, what still existed… he wanted to know what situation he would be dealing with now that humanity was struggling in the remains.
Levi found Eren that day. He had biked his way to the richer part of the suburbs, stopping at the doctors house. Doctor Jaeger had once treated one of Levis many bruises from street fights for free. Levi just wanted to see if he was still alive.
The house was awfully silent.
It was one of the prettier houses, with a nice white-painted balcony and a garden on the backyard. Levi let the bike fall to the pavement and he walked up to the house. Knocked at the door and hoped that no one would answer because he had no idea what he would say to them, of course he really hoped they would answer too, he didn't want them dead.
After a few minutes Levi tried the door handle, the door was locked. He thought about giving up, they were probably both dead, the doctor and his wife. Maybe he should just get on his bike and be on his way? He sighed, wanted to be sure before he left them.
Levi wasn't as agile in his movement as he had been two years ago. When he jumped over the fence to the backyard the landing was less than graceful and he scraped his knee bloody. Luckily the back door was open and Levi knocked again before stepping in.
"Hello?" he asked, almost surprised at how hoarse his voice had gotten from hardly talking in a long time. He noticed how alive the house looked. A coffee cup on a table still had some liquid inside it and the radio was buzzing, sometimes piping up with news. But other than that, the house was silent and Levi furrowed his eyebrows. "Hello?" he tried again but there was no answer.
Then he heard a small whimper from upstairs.
Levi quickly checked the other rooms, he found the doctor dead in his study with his body deformed and swollen. Parts of him rotting away. Levi had to shut the door almost immediately after seeing the body, the room reeked. The doctor had probably done everything in his power to find a cure, dying at his desk with fingers that couldn't even hold the vials he was working with.
There was nothing more on the first floor so Levi went up the stairs. There were three doors, one slightly ajar. He opened it and stepped inside. The couple had both died, but there was someone alive in the house. A little boy still in his mothers arms, his eyes were red and puffy from crying and when he saw Levi he reached out for him with the most displeased look Levi had ever seen on a baby. By the looks of it the mother probably had died only a few days ago. A sting of guilt hit Levis chest when he recalled the week he had ignored the world outside, sitting alone in his apartment.
The baby started hitting around himself when Levi wasn't coming to his aid quickly enough, when his tiny fist hit the mothers crystallized body he whimpered. Levi tried to calculate how long the boy had been alone, he looked so hungry and upset it had probably been one or two days at least.
Levi was about to go pick the boy up when he stopped in his steps. He hesitated. If he did pick up the boy he would have to take care of him. There was no putting him back in his dead mothers lap when he had fed the boy and changed his dirty clothes. Could Levi really deal with the responsibility of taking care of a baby?
Of course he could just take the baby to the government people, let them deal with it as he went on with his life. The only responsibility Levi would have to deal with was getting the boy to the centre of the suburbs. Levi nodded to himself, trying to reassure him of this before he picked up a blanket that he lifted the boy up with.
"Do you have a name, kid?" he asked, trying to calm the boy down with his voice. He looked at the mother, hoped that she would see that her baby boy would be safe now . She could go to heaven or wherever they went when they died now.
The other doors led to a toilet and a nursery. Normally Levi would have had someone else do the dirty work but there was no one else to help him. Also, after seeing his friends bodies grow deformed and helping them when they no longer had control over their inner organs, he wasn't that much of a clean freak anymore.
It wouldn't nearly be enough with just changing the baby's clothes and cleaning him up a bit. He was in desperate need of a bath but Levi couldn't find water for that so he decided the government people would have to take care of it.
When Levi had changed the boy's clothing and given him a bottle of powdered milk, there hadn't been enough water in the tank for a whole bottle, he looked around the room for supplies he should bring with the boy. He saw an embroidery, framed and neatly placed on a shelf, with a name and a time of birth. "Eren, huh?" Levi looked at the baby, Eren, and put the embroidery in a baby bag. Might be good if they had some info on him.
Levi didn't actually know when he decided to raise the boy himself. Probably when he noticed that he had walked past the centre, continuing home with Eren. He had stopped and looked back at the centre but he didn't turn around. Instead he walked home and gave the boy a much needed bath. When the government wanted the survivors registered, Levi wrote his name as Levi Jaeger, Levi didn't have a surname of his own so why not make it simple? He didn't write Eren as his son, couldn't dream of stealing that spot, but he wrote himself as his caretaker. When the government wanted the survivors to move to the big blocks of flats in the main city to make it simple with water and electricity Levi was quick to find them an apartment as close to the ground as possible. The disease didn't spread from person to person but Levi had heard it could pass on to children. He wanted to make sure that Eren wouldn't have to climb to many stairs if he suffered titanium like his parents.
Humanity slowly recovered, rebuild and started over. Soon schools, work places and shops were working again. Levi found himself a job at the police station now that they didn't have his criminal record. Eren was diagnosed with titanium but the doctors could slow it down with medicine.
The struggle of survival was over.
The struggle of growing up with a disease everyone feared was only beginning.