Day Eleven
The room was quiet. Not the peaceful kind. The kind that clings. Like the last silence before a verdict. No machines beeped anymore—Beatrice had been removed from most of them. No nurses hovered. No birds sang through the cracked windowpane.
The only sound was breathing.
Hers.
Shallow. But steady. A sound that had once terrified Levi, because it meant she was still here. Still fighting. And that meant she could still be lost.
He hadn't moved. His jacket was a crumpled mess draped over a chair. His once-white shirt was yellowed at the collar, stained with sweat, tears, and flecks of blood. His hands were raw—scrubbed over and over until the skin cracked, because every speck of her blood on him felt like a wound he couldn't close. He hadn't eaten properly. He hadn't slept at all. But he sat beside her, spine curled forward, elbow on his knee, hand in hers.
Watching. Always watching.
As if sheer will could hold her soul inside her body. As if he could defy death if he just stared hard enough.
Her chest rose. Slow. Shaky.
Then again. And then—
Her lips parted. Dry. Cracked. Bloodied at the corner. A sound—no louder than a breath through winter leaves—
"L…evi…"
He heard it like a detonation. His head snapped up so fast his neck popped.
"Beatrice?"
His voice broke on her name.
She furrowed her brow. A slow, sluggish expression of confusion, pain, weightless struggle. Her lashes clung together, wet with dried tears. Her throat worked against silence, muscles spasming, too weak to form more.
She inhaled. Coughed. Violently. Painfully. Blood slipped from the corner of her mouth like a broken promise.
"Shit—"
Levi surged to his feet, hand slipping behind her neck, holding her up as gently as war could allow.
He reached for the water basin, panic barely held in check by the desperate calm of someone who had rehearsed this moment in his head a hundred times.
"It's okay. Breathe. Don't push."
She whimpered. A sound like a wounded animal. Her ribs spasmed. Her whole body quivered.
"Hurts…" she rasped.
"I know.", "I know."
He wiped her mouth with shaking hands, his fingers trembling against her skin. The cloth was warm. Wet. Her blood. His heart.
Her eyes opened. Barely. But they opened. She looked up—unfocused, blinking against the light, against the pain. And slowly… Agonizingly slowly… Her gaze turned. And found him.
And Levi— He looked like a man who had been holding his breath for a thousand years. Like someone who'd been standing in a battlefield alone, and just now realized he wasn't the only one left alive.
His face cracked, not with emotion. With relief. Relief so deep it nearly buckled him.
"Hey," he said quietly, lowering to his knees beside her. "You're back."
Her voice was raw.
"You… you're still here."
A broken chuckle left him. Half-laugh, half-grief.
"Told you I wasn't leaving."
A pause.
Then—faint:
"I… thought you… died."
Levi looked away.
His jaw clenched. His eyes dropped to the edge of her blanket, where his hand still held hers.
"No," he murmured. "That was you."
The silence between them wasn't empty. It was thick. Grief unspoken. Love unspoken. Survival unspoken. She tried to lift her arm. Her muscles failed her. The whimper that followed nearly destroyed him.
He caught her hand. Immediately. Carefully. His fingers wrapped around hers, not tight. Just enough.
"Don't move," he said gently. "You're barely holding together."
Her eyes blinked slowly. Then a tear rolled sideways across her temple.
"I… I tried to kill it," she whispered. "I tried—Isabel… Farlan—" Her voice collapsed on itself.
So did Levi's chest.
He gripped her hand tightly.
"Shh."
"Did I… fail?"
A question built of guilt, trauma, desperation for meaning. And Levi answered without hesitation.
"You lived." He swallowed.
"That's more than any of us deserved."
She cried, then. Not loud. Not sobbing. But the way only a survivor does. Tears with no volume. Only weight. She closed her eyes—guilt too sharp to bear.
"I'm sorry."
It was barely a whisper. But it destroyed him. He looked down, throat bobbing. His hands trembled again.
"You don't get to say that," he said, voice like gravel. "You don't get to apologize for living."
She didn't reply. She didn't have to. Because her hand in his—squeezed.
Weak. But real.
And Levi—
For the first time since that hellish mission, Let himself breathe.
Really breathe.
A long, slow exhale that felt like someone had finally let him come home. He pressed his forehead gently to the back of her hand, eyes closing as the first tear he hadn't let fall in eleven days finally slid free. He didn't wipe it away. Didn't hide. Because she was here.
Alive.
And that was enough.