No way. No goddamn way. The bloodied, mangled body of that bird that entered his apartment window- or at least one that looked like it- was laid out before Levi in the box held by Ramon He almost stumbled for an answer.
"Yes. There was a bird. How do you damn know that?" How much did those brats gossip with each other and their families? He eyed Gabi and Falco, still in an embrace. They cast their eyes down. Falco's face twisted, and he blabbered a breathy explanation.
"I.. I don't know if it's that bird that flew in your window, but it was attacking me too! I didn't mean to kill it! It just landed in my window and wouldn't stop looking at me! I tried to make it go away but then he flew in my face! I grabbed it and smashed it against the window sill!" He showed his hand covered in red markings. "Why the hell is this happening?" Tears were streaming down his face. Gabi held him and led him to the couch where more than enough grief was released earlier in the day. His fists were clenched tightly as he slumped down. "I can't believe… I killed a bird. A damn bird. Because I'm a devil."
"Oi, get him some tea," Levi ordered Karina as Ramon and Cecilia moved to console their uncharacteristically dejected son who was snuggled close to Gabi. Ramon placed the bird's box on the side table. Theo peered up and sniffed at the carcass before Levi whacked him to move away. The mutt whimpered and trotted into the hallway. Viola faintly cried from a bedroom down the hall.
Falco wiped a tear from his eye. "Why hasn't anything gotten better?"
"Falco," Cecilia started.
"Now they're going to all die on that stupid island. All because I became a stupid Titan. A stupid bird. Porco wouldn't have let this happen if he let me-"
Gabi took his hand. "I want to go to the island and kill some Jaegerists so badly." Great. Now Levi would need another pillow with a book to throw at her.
Karina urgently stepped from the kitchen with fresh tea. Falco refused to take it. Levi motioned for it for himself. He wasn't going to let it go to waste with the amount of groaning and moaning he suffered through that day. And now there was a brat with survivor's guilt or whatever the doctors called it on one of his visits to the hospital. Maybe it was similar to what Karina had.
Karina leaned in to Falco and gently held his face. "Don't hate yourself, Falco. We know that my Reiner and the others are hidden away safely. Just don't say anything to your friends about what Onyonkopon said, and they will return." Falco shifted, rejecting her consolations. He rubbed his hand. He snorted through his light sobs.
"Don't hate yourself? Ms. Karina, you didn't kill your own brother!" He glared. "How would you be talking if Reiner had given his Titan to Gabi if the curse didn't end? You'd just kill your son and your niece while living in a nice tight internment zone apartment with a different colored armband than everybody else!"
Karina gasped and backed up. Everybody else flinched. Tina, confused by the commotion of another surprise guest, made her way out of her bedroom with a fussing Viola, and Sigrid, Martino, and Mateo followed upon hearing the commotion.
"Falco!" Cecilia and Ramon shouted. Ramon, in an uncharacteristic rage, slapped him upside the head. The Grice parents had never done such a thing to their boy before. But Falco just scowled. His amber eyes filled with fresh tears.
"What, Mom and Dad? You were trying to do the same to me and Colt! And it only took me as a Titan to get rid of your first son. But oh, what would happen after the thirteen years when Colt died and I didn't become a Warrior and Gabi did? How well off would we be then? Would you like us to be stripped of Marley's pension and make me become a mine worker and get my limbs blown off like cousin Antonio?"
Gabi's eyes likewise brimmed with tears. The adults could do nothing but gape at Falco's rage. And here Levi was, stuck in the drama and heartache of two families from an almost different but also similar version of humanity once more. He took notice of Karina, pale as a ghost and her aging hands trembling in shock. He stood as steady as he could and offered her his chair. She just nodded slightly and didn't look up as she sat herself. Viola was wailing even louder now as her mother tried to hold back her own emotions.
"Falco… please…. stop. I don't want to kill any Jaegerists anymore," Gabi's voice cracked. "Please, just forget about this. We'll trust Armin and Queen Historia. They've survived worse." she pleaded. She saw her own mother and sister. "Mom, don't cry. He didn't mean it. He's sorry." Cecilia put a free hand on Falco's shoulder. He was openly sobbing now.
"Who started this? Just who? Uncle Luccello when he became a restorationist? Eren? Ymir? What's the point?" Ramon and Cecilia could only look down.
"He's been like this at school lately," Ramon spoke up. "He can't concentrate on anything."
Levi remembered back from a few days ago. The truth was, helping those brats with their schoolwork was a rather good aid for him to learn more about the world outside of Paradis than when he and Hange had first interacted with the Volunteers. He'd never received formal schooling as a child in the Underground cesspool of a city and really only learned to read from Kenny in regards to how to read letters from strange men who wanted Kenny to kill for them. It was only survival from then on. Gabi was still eager to be the best, so she was always studious. Falco had usually done just fine too even if he wasn't a top student, but even a few days ago, his somber attitude got in the way of answering some basic questions about world geography pre-Rumbling.
"Is this what this is about, Falco?" Levi asked.
"Had he been acting like this on his after school visits lately? I'm sorry if he has been angry or sad all the time." Ramon apologized. What the hell? Had Falco said or acted as distressed as he was ever before? He had been sad about Colt the other night, but nothing like this, at least in front of him.
"No, it's not that. Brat never yells at me for anything. It's just that I'm getting rather sick of the daily ritual of bitching and moaning about the state of the world myself and not being able to lift a finger to change anything." Now that startled everybody in the room. Tina covered Viola's ears. Levi clenched his left hand tightly around his walking stick as he leaned against the wall for support. "I've been told some of us may or may not have something called melancholia, and we're all traumatized in our own shitty ways." Karina flinched. Levi laid his mangled right hand by her shoulder on the cushion of the chair.
"On Paradis, we didn't have the choice to see doctors that would shock your brains to shit to make you not feel anything. Most cadets became sobbing piles of flesh and licked guns like many of your soldiers did if they couldn't handle what they'd seen. And our confined version of humanity... we couldn't do anything about it or prevent it."
Falco wiped away some tears from his red, puffy eyes. "Mr. Levi, are you saying… I would have killed myself if I grew up on Paradis and became a soldier there?" Cecilia embraced him. He struggled at first but eventually gave in. He looked like the young, terrified brat from Liberio the day of the raid again.
"You may as well have, but I don't damn know. You weren't born behind a wall there." Levi looked at Ramon and Cecilia. "Why haven't you taken your brat to a hospital?"
The Grice's sighed. "We thought… we would be fine. Not everybody outside the Internment Zone hated us. We always knew that even if Marley pushed guilt onto us. But our neighbors or somebody… they left a message in red on our front door one day while we were away. It wasn't paint… it was animal blood. It looked like one of the church rituals here to the Creator to ward off evil spirits on holy days." Ramon explained. "We contacted the police, and they took note of everything. But the lead told us to not say anything or they'd drop the case. They questioned if we had been the ones to steal a dog in the same neighborhood a few weeks ago and framed ourselves to seek attention."
Cecilia chimed in, "We don't even understand the ancient language that the church uses here. One of the police investigators told us that it means, "Evil spirits, the Creator casts you to the chasm of the earth until time reaches its end'. We'd never do that."
"Not even Marley killed animals to sacrifice on our doors," Falco muttered miserably, sounding more like the adults here today than a fifteen year old schoolboy.
"Why didn't you say anything to us?" Karina exclaimed.
"It was just an animal. Nothing happened to us after that," Cecilia continued defensively. "We hoped it was just a bunch of school children playing jokes. But I guess… we have been too scared to face the truth…. Falco is correct. We would have used him after Colt had he become a Warrior, all for the sake of Luccello's mistake and for a decade or so more of Marleyan citizenship before having to face hard labor to even get another meal on the table."
"Mrs. Grice…," Gabi started but stopped. Tina held Viola close to her chest, rocking her back to sleep. Her eyes were puffy. Only one Eldian child in here was never going to have to know the tyranny of Marley, but now who damn knew what else?
"We're worried that the doctors won't take us seriously. This isn't Marley. They knew that they couldn't lose a valuable Warrior or Warrior Candidate to trauma or melancholia or risk losing the Titan to another Eldian baby in the devil's paradise- the island. Paradis. But here… no Warriors, no assurance of completed treatment."
"Just like what Pieck's father told us earlier. He said a nurse tried to give him the wrong medicine even though he had a medallion... just because he's an Eldian." Gabi tucked her head between her knees. "Mom, you can tell Dad he was right tomorrow."
The next while was dedicated to repeating Dolph's story from his visit to the hospital earlier. And yet again, nobody else had anything to add to the conversation that they'd probably had too many times before. As the evening turned into full darkness, Gabi and Falco became increasingly tired and eventually fell asleep next to each other. If everybody weren't so moody, they'd probably look like an adorable pair. It took Falco's parents an effort to wake their distressed child up and assure him that things were going to be okay. They would even keep him from school tomorrow.
Gabi begged to stay with Falco through the night, and a compromise was reached. She was allowed to stay overnight with him at his home, but she would not be allowed to see him outside of school the rest of the week. With a packed bag with her homework and school clothes, she was out the door with her hand in his to the car.
Ramon and Cecilia embraced Karina and Cecilia, the only others who could really empathize with them before turning to Levi and only giving some modest thank yous for his brash words of all things. Not that I deserve it. They promised that they would speak to Onyonkopon to see if he could help any with finding a hospital that would not discriminate against Eldians. And they also took it up to speak to him about what happened with Dolph.
Tina, Sigrid, Martino, Mateo, and Viola, craddled in her mother's arms, turned back to their own rooms. Levi and Karina were left alone with Theo asleep on the floor, for once quiet and not damn stealing Levi's walking stick. Outside, a light rain was falling and misting the streets under the streetlights. Perfect for the atmosphere between the families. And it was also fitting for the one matter that nobody had given a damn about even if it was the reason the Grice family visited unexpectedly: the bird. Levi did a cursory inspection of it as he sat in his chair again. He hadn't done much hunting after his days as a thief in the Underground City where a stray animal would sometimes have to become dinner to feed Isabel if they couldn't sneak anything off one of those greasy merchants. He'd never been great at identifying the wildlife inside and outside the Walls. Was he even sure if it was the exact same bird that attacked him? It was the same color and size, but any bird around here looked the same as the next.
Karina had fixed herself some tea. It was exactly what he had been invited for before the pipes in the apartment building just had to burst and before this whole political shitshow on Paradis began and before he had to deal with two broken children from two brokenhearted families without any idea how to live their lives with freedom because all these walls still had to exist. Just some afternoon tea. Or evening tea.
The difference in judgment between you and me originates from different rules derived from past experience. Tch. He hoped he hadn't been too harsh on a brat about suicide.
Karina sat opposite of him on the sofa. "Tina told you about me, didn't she? Melancholia? The same illness my Reiner had too?"
Shit. Levi recalled his speech. "Tch, yeah, she did."
"I thought so. She doesn't have to be so embarrassed for me to keep it a secret. We're all getting older and sicker all the time." She sipped her tea. "But I thought Cecilia and Ramon were better than this. Cecilia always told me to not worry about the past with Timothy and my Reiner. Poor Falco."
"They'll have to deal with it. I shouldn't have to be calling the shots to get their brat to a doctor if seeing birds causes him to go into a damn frenzy." Levi lifted the box. "And now for the feathery bastard. We can't exactly pluck him for dinner tomorrow. Get your nephew or Giuseppe to bury it somewhere in the yard." Tch. Theo wasn't going to be playing hunter anytime soon.
Karina chuckled. "You don't miss having to have the kids scour the land and hunt like our ancestors did for wild fowl when we were in internment, do you?" Much of the land three years back had been heavily soaked with crimson. It made camouflage much less effective for different species that had managed to survive the Rumbling. Whenever rain fell, the landscape became a butcher's shop, a lake of blood. Sometimes even bits of bone fragments resurfaced, bone fragments that belonged to human beings that they had effectively killed by their own sins and choices.
Levi shuddered slightly, quickly changing the topic. "Not sure how much hunting the Ackerman clan did. They were more of subsistence farmers who lived off what they could grow before the royal family screwed up their bodies and brains." Just how much of their brains had been screwed up? Armin and Jean had attempted to explain some of Eren's erratic actions before he activated the Rumbling to Levi at one point while he recovered in the medical base. He never understood how or why Jaeger would come up with such a shitty lie to hurt Mikasa. Had Mikasa forgotten what happened in Shiganshina years ago with Erwin?
And why did he decide to talk about his clan history now?
"Well, I see that Gabi and Falco's pleading did pay off in one way with that book when we don't know who or what to believe anymore when it comes to the true story of our people." Karina sighed. "I can remember parts of my grandparents' stories from the time of the Great Titan War. My grandfather was a cadet providing support for the holder of the Beast Titan at the time."
Beast Titan. Things just had to keep damn circling back to Levi, didn't they? On the other hand, this week had already brought up lots of painful memories, so he couldn't do anything else but listen as Karina pondered aloud.
"Oh, who was it? Levka, I think it was him. When Helos, they said, had defeated the Devil… My grandfather deserted his post and made his way back home before things got worse. He was ready to take a beating for his crimes, but the Internment Zone would make up for it for several generations for Marley's sake."
"They didn't recognize him?"
"No. He cut his hair and dyed it, and he also disfigured his face with a knife. He was at least with his family, he said, which was more important. But he and my grandmother had left everything behind in their village. My grandmother came from a family dedicated to the worship of Ymir. They were keepers of the temple and the relics of prior Shifters, only to have Marley strip it of their possession. All worship of Ymir had become illegal, and undercover worshippers in the Internment Zone would be severely punished and sent to the devils' paradise if caught. There was an entire cult captured and turned one year, and nobody dared speak of it among themselves or risk being sent away too."
"I remember that from the journals recovered in the Wall Maria operation. Do the brats or Reiner know about your grandparents' religious involvement?"
"No. It would open too many painful wounds for us. My brothers almost let it slip one day when playing petty games with some boys at school. I was always a tattler, and I told my mother in such fright that Mateo and Giuseppe got lashes with our father's leather belts and an entire lesson about why worshipping Ymir only caused the world to suffer for our sins. From that day, our parents and grandparents never told us any good stories about our family." Karina placed her steaming tea cup down. "I can't say I remember all of them now."
And what did he have left of the Ackerman clan? Only memories of a dark brothel and a dying Kenny. Not even the last possession of his mother. Karina didn't need any more chagrin that night though.
"May as well tell them soon. Give them something to think about other than their friends being shot down or bombed on Paradis."
She cocked her head. "You are rather talkative tonight. Feeling the same as the rest of us?"
"Tch. Can't let my former squad go out like this. Longest lived one yet. The rest have ended up crushed or puked up by Titans." He crossed his good leg over his bad leg, much to the surge of pain. "They've lived to see freedom outside those walls. They're all still too naive to understand it all."
"Us too?" She raised her eyebrow coyly.
Maybe she was more aware of herself than he realized. She was certainly onto him, damn it.
Levi rolled his good eye. "Yes. Us too. And I'm not the man I was years ago." He lifted his right hand. "In several ways. I don't miss being burdened by being stronger than everybody on the battlefield, but now… in honesty, if Historia and Hizuru can't sort this shit out, the Alliance is fucked over. They may as well have their guts and brains splattered in Sina by firing squad soon. Don't think I'm skipping with glee about not crying over them if Gabi says anything. Because I can't do anything, and I know it. You all know it."
Karina nodded. "Of course."
Oh, by the Walls. He was getting old. Forget working in some old lady's tea shop cleaning tables and counters. He could be writing soppy poetry with the sentiments he was spewing to some near middle-age woman with no husband or anything better to do than invite the wounded war veteran over for tea. And he was being brutally honest about his feelings too.
Theo stretched awake to wander off to the kitchen to get a drink of water, probably confused about why two humans were still up at this hour after shouting and crying all day.
"Levi," Karina spoke up again. For some reason, Levi felt a strange sense of near repulsion for being called by his name again tonight and not his rank. He hadn't seen any group of people so impressed by his words since he had to lecture his new squad about the survival of humanity no matter how pretentious he thought his speech tonight was. He only grunted and urged her on. "Nobody thinks of you here as a burden."
His heart fluttered a bit. "When did I say that?"
"You said you couldn't do anything."
"About the Alliance."
"Remember what Onyonkopon said to us?"
Levi sighed, exasperated. "Yeah." The clock chimed half past ten at night. "Best to get to bed. We can turn that noise maker on in the morning to see if anything's changed unless Onyonkopon comes knocking." He lifted himself up slowly. Then, pain surged through his left leg around his knee. He inhaled sharply and fell back into the chair and dropped his walking stick.
Karina was on her feet instantly. "Oh dear, are you-"
"Used- used to it." He grimaced.
Karina picked up his walking stick. She frowned. "Best to get that seen soon. We're not going to have you back home alone to live like this."
"Maybe the brats will get their way and get to keep me. They can leave out a water dish and take me on walks, and hopefully they won't get bored of me when I get too old and boring."
She snorted. "Oh, not like that…. Here." Karina gave him some support as he stood with more success. Most women were already taller than Levi, but that night, he felt smaller than usual next to her.
"Thanks." With a curt nod, Levi made his way to his room, his mind full and his heart heavier with emotion than usual or what he cared to admit.