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Levi doesn’t have a smoking problem.
She only smokes when she’s drunk or when Isabel gives her the first or the last cigarette of her pack, or when she comes across those cool, foreign ones with different flavors. She only smokes when she’s stressed or when she’s angry or when she’s waiting for her ride in cold weather, or when it’s the odd hours of the morning and she’s at the corner store and sees the old lady behind the register doing it; sometimes when it’s after midnight and she’s on her balcony watching the city it feels like the perfect opportunity, or when it’s the day after New Years and she wakes up hungover which isn’t even that common anyway, so it doesn’t need justification. Really, Levi only smokes when haggard women with big, sad fucking eyes offer her.
The woman says her name is Erwin. She has a low, beckoning voice; it reminds Levi of an actor she watched in an old movie the other day. Old old, like from 2000–something. She pulls out a cigarette from her pack and places it between Levi’s lips herself, then she asks Levi her name. Levi is a bit breathless as she answers her.
Erwin lights her cigarette.
Her hand is strong and battered, her nails are trimmed nicely. With any other client Levi would reach out and graze her fingertips over the knuckles or brush the inside of the wrist, but this time she just gives a brief nod of recognition. This time, she just turns her head to the side so she doesn’t huff the smoke in Erwin’s face—not because she’s that type of person, but because she has a feeling that sort of subtlety might just work in her favor tonight. The Underground receives its fair share of pathetic women, yet rarely are they ever Levi’s type looks-wise.
Some gloomy rock song is playing in the background, particles of dust dancing to the beat. Levi buries herself deeper in her leather jacket and crosses her arms over her chest, huffing a strand of loose hair away from her eyes. Erwin seems out of it, in a way; she is removed from everything going on around her, what little amount of energy she has left directed inwards so her body can perform its basic functions but barely anything else. She is tall, almost two heads taller than Levi, and her long, blonde hair shines an alien, almost radioactive green under the fluorescent lights. The shape of her body is mostly obscured by her layers of clothing, but Levi can see she isn’t thin. Maybe she’s a long haul freighter captain or something like that; Levi can easily imagine her sitting in her cockpit, watching the cold, lonely space that stretches out for as far as the human eye can see.
“What do you do, Erwin?”
“This and that. You?”
“I’m a whore.”
Erwin taps the cigarette ash into her empty glass without even so much as a flinch. Maybe she’s an engineer of sorts, then, in Levi’s experience, they are usually the hardest to get a reaction out of while simultaneously being the easiest to bed. Not a police, though she looks the part, for sure; they are not welcome in these parts of the city. She’s definitely not a whore herself.
There’s something like a postcard sticking out from her breast pocket. Levi points at it with her chin, and Erwin looks at it for a moment before taking it out. Levi lets their fingers brush momentarily as she takes it from her. Her skin is cold, but the touch itself feels electric. She turns the piece of paper around to inspect it.
It’s a photo. It’s a photo of a giant tree amidst a field of tall, golden grass, its naked branches hanging heavy like spiderwebs, its trunk so wide Levi’s fingertips wouldn’t touch each other if she wrapped her arms around it. She feels a distinct type of sizzle in her chest, a longing she knows she can’t quench. Emotional hunger, she’d heard the term from an old tv show—you can eat and eat and eat, but you won’t be satisfied.
“I’ve never seen a real tree before,” she says. Her voice comes out more vulnerable than she would’ve liked.
“It’s a willow,” Erwin explains. “They are beautiful. Especially in fall when their leaves change color and they turn yellow. This one’s dead, though. It’s sad, because willows are usually very resilient.”
Maybe Erwin’s a botanical scientist. Everyone knows there’s no bringing the forests back, but there are always fools.
“Who keeps the photo of a dead tree?”
She shrugs, changing the subject. “I’m surprised you’re talking to me.”
“Why’s that?”
“You’ve been eyeing me the whole night, but never actually made a move,” Erwin flicks the cigarette butt into her glass. “I thought you wanted to kill me or something, Levi.”
So she’s watchful. She also doesn’t look the least bit concerned about the possibility.
Levi juts her chin forward, and, as Erwin plucks the cigarette from between her lips, she puts the photo back in the woman’s pocket. “You wanna go upstairs?” She lets her hand stay where it is after she’s done, feeling the swell of Erwin’s breast under her palm. She pats the spot over the fabric, looking into Erwin’s eyes. They look unnatural, murky like an ocean after a hurricane. Not that she’s seen either.
“Yeah.”
Levi grabs her wrist and leads the way to her apartment, not giving her a chance to change her mind. She unlocks her door and kicks her boots off before going inside, fingers finding the button for the mood lights without looking. “The first door to your left,” she says to Erwin over her shoulder. “Wash your hands first.”
“Hand.”
“What?”
Erwin puts her right arm up, and the sleeve of her coat dangles uselessly between them. “Hand,” she says again.
Levi feels like a fool, but more importantly, she’s surprised she didn’t notice it until Erwin pointed it out. “Hand,” she replies. The stupidity of the word reverberates in her skull.
It was probably the dimmed lights of the bar.
She locks the front door after Erwin steps inside and washes her hands in the kitchen sink, running to check if her bedroom is tidy enough—Isabel was there last night, and she’s not particular about it, no one other than Levi is. She straightens her blanket, puffs out the pillows; Isabel’s bra is hanging from the headboard, and Levi throws it inside the dirty clothes basket. It probably won’t matter to Erwin, and everything will get messy again in a few moments anyway, but she can’t just not do it.
“Do you bring all of your clients home?”
Erwin is leaning against the doorway.
Levi straightens up, shaking her head to stop her hair from getting into her eyes. “I’m off the clock,” she says. She walks up to Erwin and brushes her cheeks with her knuckles, eyeing the small scars on her upper lip, on her chin, on her nose. Before she can get the stupid idea to press her mouth over them, she pulls her to the bed.
They shrug their clothes off, the rustle of fabric and their hushed breathings the only sounds to be heard. Levi has half a mind to reach to her nightstand and turn the recorder on, to capture the pleasant tingle that’s running down her spine and keep it within reach, but she doesn’t want to stop and explain herself to Erwin, she doesn’t want to fuck with the rhythm they got going on, and anyway, Levi doesn’t record human sounds. So she pushes her back on the bed and straddles her thick waist, leaning in for a kiss. She traces the almost invisible horizontal scars on either side of her chest and doesn’t ask why she got rid of her breasts, or why she feels the need to wear a padded bra. She goes on autopilot.
Levi has had sex with dozens of people that she couldn’t tell from one another, people she wouldn’t recognize if she saw them on the street; the act is always about the client, almost always unremarkable, and she rarely cares for it except for the one thing that makes her feel all powerful—it’s that no matter how much or how little she cares for whoever’s in her bed, once their logical brain turns off and instinct takes over, once they are past a certain point, something delicious happens to their breath. There’s life itself in there, erupting from their chest like a budding tree from the earth, and once Levi knows she’s gotten them there, she never wants to stop, even though she isn’t taking that breath herself. She wouldn’t know her clients by name but if they leaned into her ear and inhaled the way they did as she made them come, however long ago it may be since they fucked, she would know them. It’s the thing that gets to her head. Gets her drunk.
Tonight, Erwin is all distracted under her. She’s a liar, but a goddamn good one at that; she gulps and moans and writhes with Levi, and Levi sees herself mirrored in her. She’ll be damned, this isn’t how she imagined the night would progress, not at all. She finds her curiosity is roused, and it’s annoying in its excitement.
When they’re tired of pretending, Levi rolls to the side. Streetlights are casting meaningless, meandering shapes on the ceiling, her hair is stuck to her forehead. She would like to take a shower, but the heater broke a week ago and the company keeps sending her messages about how they have scheduled maintenance, and then it keeps turning out to be a lie. Out there people are traveling intergalactically, they are putting themselves to cryo-sleep to be woken up in some distant future, they are uploading their consciousness to robots to stay alive forever; here, Levi is struggling with a fucking water heater. She sighs, feeling her fingers sizzle.
Later when Erwin gets up to leave, Levi doesn’t tell her it’s too late, she doesn’t tell her she can stay until morning. She just props herself up on her forearms and watches her get dressed, and as soon as Erwin leaves for the bathroom, she leans down the side of the bed to snoop around in her jacket. She steals the photo.
By the front door, she rises to her tiptoes and kisses Erwin. “Goodbye,” she says. Then, because it stings just the tiniest bit to have stolen something clearly valuable from the woman, she adds; “I enjoyed our time together.”
“So did I,” Erwin answers, “am I allowed to see you again?”
“You know where I live.”
Levi falls asleep cradling the photo against her chest. Her last conscious thought is Erwin and how muscular she was, her shoulders, her thick thighs. Perhaps she’s a bodyguard.
⁂
Levi sometimes thinks of her mother in the waves of the ocean. The flap of a bird’s wings. The soft, sultry spray of knock-off perfume, heels click-clacking on the floor. She has all of these sounds clogging up the memory of her voice recorder and she doesn’t know where to put them on her map of sounds, doesn’t know how to delete them so she has space for others. Kuchel’s been gone for quite some time now, yet Levi doesn’t know how to move on at all.
⁂
Erwin shows up at The Underground again, and again, and then again. Each time she looks more tired than before, like she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since the uprising of 2968, and each time she spends more time battling with herself inherently for whatever reason before she gives in to Levi’s touch. She sometimes enjoys the sex, but she never lets herself go, never takes that one breath that Levi so desperately wants to hear. One night she even passes out on Levi; it happens during foreplay with Levi littering her stomach with wet-hot kisses, and her hand tangled in Levi’s hair gets looser and looser until it falls completely still, landing on the mattress with a thud—Levi wants to be mad, but it’s oddly soothing to know that Erwin feels relaxed enough next to her, and anyway, she was tired herself.
Sometimes she drops by on the nights Levi’s away, and Isabel lets her know through text messages that are getting increasingly more annoying. It starts simple like this;
Your girl is here
But then it evolves to this;
Sis your girlfriend dropped by, she looked genuinely sad when I told her you were out 😢😢😢
Puppy.
And then to this;
🫣🫣🫣🫣‼️‼️‼️
?
Girlfriend 💗💗💗😈
You have got to stop this.
Oh come ooooon!
Levi has little time for a relationship at this point in her life, and even less for friends who try to stick their noses into her business. Erwin is not her girlfriend. They would need to know each other for that, for one, and that takes a kind of energy neither of them probably possess. Besides, Levi has long stopped pretending she’s any desirable beyond surface level; she doubts Erwin would be swayed by the fact that the real reason Levi has so many chopstick holders is not because she’s a collector, but because she steals them from Mike whenever she eats at his stall, or that she spends her free time roaming around the city with a voice recorder recording the sounds of the city because it scratches an innate itch, or that her favorite pastime is to lie in bed and watch old movies she projects onto her concrete wall, smoking relaxants. She doubts Erwin would be at all interested in a lying whore. Levi has little time for false hopes at this point in her life.
⁂
It’s named Lucky Seven, which is a wordplay on Mike’s wife’s name, Nanaba, which can be shortened to Nana, which means seven in Japanese, which means that, essentially, Nanaba brings him luck. This is how Mike explains the meaning behind the name of his stall, in these exact words.
By the time Levi is done with her daily routine it’s usually well dark, and she pops into the small tent that glows a warm orange from within, one of the many on Maria Street but the only one she frequents. She sits in the far left corner at the bar and orders shoyu ramen, and Mike always adds something she hasn’t asked for—an extra egg, dumplings on the side, a shot of whatever hellish concoction he mixed earlier. The few customers are quiet and the small radio behind the counter constantly broadcasting news from other planets is quieter, the chairs are mismatched, clearly worn. The energy feels safe here; end of the world kind of safe.
“Long day?”
Levi looks up to see Mike’s big, easygoing smile. “Yeah.”
“The usual?”
She nods. She rarely has the social battery to engage in conversation after a day spent recording or whoring or sometimes doing both, but Mike never minds; it probably has to do with the fact that the first time she came here she zoned out so badly she sat curled into herself without ordering anything for half an hour, biting her lower lip to the point of drawing blood. The guy clearly pities her.
Soon there is a steaming bowl of ramen before Levi, along with pink mochi presented in an equally pink muffin cup.
“What’s that?”
“Nana made these just today. Try it.”
From the look on his face, Levi can just tell he’s crazy about it.
She takes the fragrant strawberry smell in, brows furrowed, then bites into the dessert. The dough is chewy in her mouth, the fruit perfectly ripe and juicy between mouthfuls of fluffy cream. “How the—” she makes a sound embarrassingly close to a moan— “How the fuck did she do this?”
This is the real deal, right here. This is a real strawberry, not the artificial ones that give her a stomach ache afterwards. There’s so much red flavor in that single bite that she’s overwhelmed with it, it feels like she just got punched in the mouth.
“She said this scientist guy owed him big time. So she got strawberries. For her birthday.”
“Fuck,” Levi nods, licking her fingertips. “This is the shit. Fuck.”
“That’s what I’m sayin’.”
She nods, holding back a second moan because it’s just embarrassing at this point. She starts slurping her ramen down, and she pockets the cat shaped chopstick holder when Mike turns his back.
“ … Smith was last seen over four months ago, and has since disappeared. Authorities say that as the battle of dominance over the resources of Shiganshina continues, it is of utmost importance for the commander to be found and brought back to life again…”
“Huh,” Levi’s ears perk up, “Where the hell is Shiganshina? ”
Mike shrugs. “Some planet in some distant galaxy. Been hearing the name for a month now, the government apparently lost their beloved war machine commander and is now going nuts trying to find her.”
“Poor fucker. She’s that good?”
“Fuck if I know. Gotta be, if they keep reviving her war after war.”
Levi shakes her head. She feels sorry for the woman, she does.
Outside, the snow looks no different from mud; it’s falling slowly in gray, ash-like flakes from the evening sky, almost indiscernible in the fog. Levi hangs her head low and buries her nose in her huge scarf as she makes her way through the concrete jungle, her hands fisted in her pockets. She loves this dejected, dismal air, this certain kind of silence that snow brings; she loves the crunch under her boots, loves the distinct lack of humanity. As she navigates the empty streets, her throat feels tight—she wants to tear this moment open and make a home inside it.
When Levi turns the corner at the end of the street, she sees Erwin leaving The Underground.
She stops in her tracks for almost a full minute just watching her and her pallor, the way her shoulders are caving in, hair a mess, the right sleeve of her coat tied in a careless knot—a tree without roots, stripped of its former glory. Then, she walks up to her.
Erwin seems desperately relieved for the fraction of a second before she reigns it in. “Hey,” she says, “Isabel told me you were out.”
Levi checks her phone and sees three new texts. “I was.”
“I never know when you’re here.”
“Yeah.”
Erwin points at her backpack. “You got your recording stuff in there?”
“What?” Levi would say she didn’t mean to sound so hostile, but the longer she thinks about it, the surer she grows that maybe she did.
“I have eyes, Levi.”
So Levi takes Erwin upstairs and shows her the map on her laptop. It’s nothing groundbreaking, the coding having been done almost a decade ago and left untouched since then, but Erwin doesn’t ask any stupid questions, just clicking on different streets or districts and waiting patiently for the audios to load. Levi is damn near combusting as she watches her listening to them, leaning intently toward the screen. Her heart is beating at her throat.
“This is so cool,” Erwin says after an hour. “So you just go around and record the sounds you like?” Her face is lit up cold blue and orange from the lights of the screen.
“Um,” Levi replies. “Yeah, it’s whatever.”
She points at the different colored tags under each audio file. “What are all these colors for?”
“Just tags. Certain sounds remind me of certain colors. Sometimes. They also tell me how many files are uploaded on the same street.”
Later when they climb to the bed, there’s a weird feeling in Levi’s stomach, a warmth that encompasses her entire being. It’s a bit like anxiety, but she doesn’t understand why that would be the case after having had sex with Erwin for so long now. She doesn’t understand why she terribly wants to record both of them yet again and make a mark in her map for her apartment, save them forever. That night, she falls asleep listening to the sound of Erwin’s heart beating.
⁂
Erwin brings Levi gifts.
Even though she must know Levi has stolen her photo, after Levi tells her she loves old movies and old trinkets, she brings her gifts. From antique stores, she says, a dark green bolo tie. A fountain pen. An old book on plant identification. A pure white neckerchief. Things from thousands of years ago, somehow perfectly preserved. Levi writes on the book to hear the glide of the pen on paper, she raps her nails on the smooth surface of the tie. She doesn’t record the sounds.
⁂
It’s a December night, and Levi and Erwin are lying together in her bed as they often do now, smoking.
Erwin asks, reaching for the rollie sitting between Levi’s fingers, “Did they fix your shower yet?”
Levi tsks, watching the smoke dissolve in the air. “Nah. You gotta go downstairs if you wanna take one.” She then turns her head as Erwin sits up and puts her shirt on with a disapproving shake of her head. Levi gets tangled in the sheets and almost face-plants onto the floor when she tries to get up and follow Erwin down the short hallway. Fuck. She didn’t realize she was so disoriented already.
In the hallway, Erwin is pushing and prodding at the buttons of the heater with a frown, opening the panel on its side to check the wires, reading the numbers on the valves. “Well,” she says after a while, “I guess I know the problem. Could you go on and cut off the power? From the panel outside. Also, do you happen to have a screwdriver?”
One brow up, Levi does as she’s told. After she gives her the clear, Erwin reopens the panel and leans forward, and if she’s being honest, Levi doesn’t know what she’s doing next. She doesn’t care. There’s a halfway-naked woman in her home and she has this cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, and she’s fixing something with a serious look on her face; Levi couldn’t give less of a shit.
She rests against the wall and takes the cigarette out of Erwin’s mouth, watching her face. She puts it back in place after taking a drag. “What is it?”
“Have you been using this heater for a long time?”
Levi snorts. “It came with the fuckin’ house. I’ve been living here since I was a kid.”
“Figures. These wires here are busted—look here—” Erwin points with the screwdriver and Levi leans in, pressing a kiss to her cheek on her way— “and they need replacing. If I were you, I would buy a new heater completely, though.”
“Fuck, really?”
“Yeah. Not worth the hassle in my opinion. I’m sorry.”
“Fuck.”
Erwin puts the screwdriver down and pulls Levi by her side. “I can help you install a new one.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course, Levi.”
Levi pulls the cigarette from between Erwin’s lips and gives her a gross, hot, wet kiss.
⁂
Levi steals a poster from a random man’s back pocket one day. It depicts a masculine-looking woman soldier surrounded by her comrades, their call to the army highlighted above their heads. It’s oppressive. Forceful. She doesn’t want to keep it, but she doesn’t want to let it go either; in the end, she decides to bury it inside her backpack so she can just forget its existence.
Erwin drops by night after night, and each time Levi finds the distance between them closing more and more, she feels as if they are two trees and their roots are tangling together beneath the ground. She thinks of Erwin in the breeze rolling through leaves, an ancient, shrill sound.
⁂
Erwin has heterochromia.
Levi realizes it one night when the woman is particularly drunk, face hazy and her body slipping away from Levi’s hold as if she’s boneless. She’s even more distracted than usual, falling completely unresponsive at times as Levi works her fingers inside her, barely reacting to her dirty talk that would no doubt melt any of her clients by now.
“What’s up with you?” Levi grumbles before finally giving up and moving to sit on her chest. She reaches for the pack of cigarettes sitting on the nightstand and lights one up for herself, skin damp with exertion. Levi only smokes when she’s irritated, and Erwin is irritating the hell out of her right now.
“Nothing,” Erwin mutters.
“Nothing?”
Erwin hums. She traces Levi’s collarbones with her fingers and then moves down slowly, rolling a nipple, rubbing a hip bone. “Go on. Continue.” She finds her clit and rubs it in circles. “I’m okay. Jus’ tired.”
Levi would tell her off, but she’s too wet to stop now. God, and she’s not even getting paid for this. With a sigh, she places the cigarette between Erwin’s lips and kisses her way down until she’s settled between her legs. The problem with Erwin is that she makes Levi want to eat her out even when she lies through her teeth, even when she smells of alcohol and sweat and is greasy like a rat.
Levi pushes one of her thighs aside and presses her lips on the inside of it briefly before burying her face in her cunt. She can faintly taste cheap, buttery beer on her tongue but she keeps quiet, the wet sucking noises interrupted by her own inhales and satisfied little hums. It’s pure stubbornness at this point, still, she continues—even as her jaw starts hurting, tongue delicate and teasing and hot, moving smoothly against her folds. She continues even as she feels herself getting lightheaded. Erwin has a beautiful-attractive-inviting cunt, whatever the hell that means, Levi doesn’t have the right words, it’s just pleasing to look at, to touch, to eat—it’s solid, honest. Powerful, considering it’s got Levi bending over backwards to try to make her come for the past three months now.
She parts her bush and lets her lips replace her thumb on her clit, swollen and tender on her tongue. It’s infuriating and unfortunately arousing that Erwin has no idea how alluring she is. Levi closes her eyes and takes in her scent, feeling slick drip down from between her crossed legs and onto her sheets. After this, she should sit on Erwin’s face. She should ride that stupid nose until she’s trembling. Fuck, Levi deserves that.
Erwin moans.
Levi moans back in reply, nails digging into the flesh of her thighs. Good? She asks, completely unintelligible, tongue-deep and lost as she is between the woman’s folds. She squeezes her thighs together, trying to ease the terrible, sweet ache. She’s humping the bed like a loser and she can’t even find it in herself to care. She’s going to—she might just—
“I think I’m going to kill myself,” Erwin mutters.
And just like that, the moment dies.
Levi rises to her elbows and looks at her from between her legs with unfocused eyes, breathing hard. Erwin is watching the ceiling, her cigarette dangling from between her fingers precariously, threatening to fall on the carpeted floor.
Levi sighs, wiping the slick connecting her lower lip with Erwin’s cunt with the back of her hand. She says, annoyedly, “Get up.”
“What?”
“Fucking get up, Erwin. And put that shit off before you start a fire in my house.”
She pulls Erwin to her feet, then she pushes her until they are in the bathroom. She fills the tub with hot water, and climbs inside with her.
“You lazy fuck,” she grumbles, “You’re a nasty old woman, you know that? And you stink like a distillery.” She’s also a giantess in Levi’s tiny tub and it’s somehow endearing that she’s all limbs, long legs and broad shoulders and a strong torso, but she wouldn’t say this part out loud, of course.
Erwin puts her arm on the side of the tub and rests her head on it. She gives Levi a hazy smile. “How do you keep your clients with that mouth?” She asks.
“I don’t know, how do you keep coming back?” Levi shoots back. She moves to sit on her lap.
“Am I just another client to you?”
“You aren’t even paying me.”
Erwin’s eyes are closed. She’s going to pass out in a minute or two. “Maybe I like it when you’re rude to me,” she mutters.
Levi snorts, pushing her hair back and away from her face. “Hey, don’t fall asleep here,” she says softly. Then, offended by the betrayal of her own voice, she adds, “I’m not letting you leave until you’re clean. Open your eyes.”
Erwin obeys.
One of Erwin’s eyes is blue, the other one is brown.
Levi furrows her brows, tilting her head. This wasn’t always the case—she would’ve noticed. She would’ve . She opens her mouth, but something stops her from commenting on it and so she silently reaches for the bottle of shampoo, squeezing a generous amount on her palm.
“Levi,” Erwin slurs, slipping away once again. “I might have to leave you… for a bit… just… a bit.”
“What are you saying?”
“There’s people… I—I need to avoid.”
“Erwin.” Levi lathers the shampoo.
“You—don’t need to wait for me… okay?”
“Shut up. You’re being stupid.” She’s gentle as she works on Erwin’s hair.
“Don’t wait for me.”
Levi doesn’t know why she’s trembling.
⁂
“... witnesses report that the titans are getting more and more fearless as the government—win! wher… you are… come… bac… k… hear me? do not… co… back—an evacuation plan for the regular might be on its way. Government officials are—don’t… sto… run… awa—the citizens that…”
Mike gives his radio a slap. “Man,” he asks himself, “What the hell?”
⁂
After Erwin leaves, Levi spends two nights with zero sleep. She thinks of all the dots in her mind that are refusing to connect and squirms in bed, stomach churning and cold sweat dripping down her temples. It’s the missing arm and the heterochromia, the top surgery, the sickly pallor, the depression. It’s the way she never talks about herself. The way she drinks, the way she’s constantly tired, spaced out, it’s the way she leaves. What the hell does it all mean? Levi has never felt so useless in her life.
Five days pass and she thinks about Erwin so much she forgets to pretend to enjoy fucking her clients.
Four more and she realizes she hasn’t once gone outside to record anything.
Three weeks go by without Erwin. Levi beats herself up for not asking for her number. For not convincing her to stay. Her lips tasted like tears.
Two eyes different in color, one brown and one blue, blue as the sky on a clear day, brown as the earth, invade Levi’s dreams.
One month later, Levi calls an old friend.
She has done many things in her pathetic life she isn’t proud of, but bribing someone to find the address of another is easily in the top five. Top three, maybe. Even.
Hange tells her to drop by whenever, so she drops by immediately. She gives them Erwin’s stolen phone, buzzing with anxiety. “This is all I have,” she says. “Can you find her?”
“Friend, I could lay her entire life out before you with this.”
In five minutes, Hange breaks into Erwin’s phone. In half an hour, she gives her home address to Levi. Night falls, and Levi sets out to find Erwin.
Erwin lives in a dilapidated district in a dilapidated building, one of the cheapest areas of the city. The houses lean against each other as if they are exhausted with the burden of carrying what’s inside them, the snow sits untouched atop the few cars, most of the streetlights broken. A graveyard for the living.
Levi enters the building Hange gave her in the address and climbs the stairs, dread sinking its talons harder into her skin with each step she takes. It smells stale, dust clings to every surface available. On the third floor, at the end of the dark, narrow hall, Erwin’s door is swaying loosely on its hinges. She gulps loudly. She goes in.
“Erwin?”
No answer comes.
Levi steps over bottles of alcohol and takeout boxes, one hand on the wall to support herself. She tries to turn the lights on but nothing happens. A loud bang comes from somewhere outside.
“Erwin?” She tries again.
Still nothing.
In the bathroom, the mirror is cracked, yellowing; a first aid kit is sitting on the floor with its contents all over the place, empty bottles of eye-color-changer solutions in the bathtub. The living room is made up of the smallest tv on earth, books precariously stacked in the corners, and a single couch which seems to double as a bed, and the adjacent kitchen is barren except for a few dirty plates in the sink, a piece of folded paper on the counter. Levi goes to inspect it.
It’s an old poster with faded colors, coffee stains all over it. It says, your country needs you. It says, your Commander needs you. Join her today. In the middle, a woman is looking far, far away, a woman with short, boyish hair neatly parted from the side and gelled down, a woman with striking blue eyes, a big nose and plush lips. Her uniform is crisp, her dark green bolo tie shines above her collar. It’s the same woman left to be forgotten in the depths of Levi’s backpack. Breathless, the poster slips from Levi’s hold. Her legs are like jello as she walks to check the last room left. She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe. She’s going to faint. Erwin , she says. Maybe she thinks it. Commander.
The bedroom has a bedpost without a mattress, the wardrobe next to it empty, its doors wide open. Erwin is sitting on the floor squeezed between the two, her knees pulled to her chest.
“Erwin?” Levi says, unbelieving.
Her hand is pressed against an ear, her chest is rising and falling wildly. She doesn’t seem to register Levi’s presence at all.
Levi falls to her knees before her, reaching out but hesitant to touch. She lets her hands hover in the air instead, palms damp with sweat. “Hey,” she tries again, “I’m here. It’s Levi.”
Erwin whispers something unintelligible.
“Huh?”
“They… get you…” Erwin repeats herself. Sniffles. Then, “They’re gonna get you. They’re gonna get you. They’re gonna get all of us. Hide, please.”
“No one’s getting us.”
“They’re gonna get us. They’re gonna get us they’re gonna get us they’re gonna get us.”
“Erwin, no one is getting us.” Levi grabs her wrist with one hand, putting her other hand on her cheek. “Listen to me. No one’s here but me. Okay?”
“I heard them. I heard that bang just now. Please.”
Erwin feels cold to the touch. More so than usual.
Levi pushes the bedpost and settles on the floor next to her with a sigh, pressing herself flush against her side. It’s freezing inside the house and not moving makes it worse but she sits still, just waiting it out. Erwin trembles with each little noise she hears, her muscles pulled so taut it feels as if there’s a bomb about to go off inside her.
Levi doesn’t know how to help her, so she stays. She tries to think of something clever to say, a soothing word, sweet nothings Kuchel used to whisper in her ear as a kid, but she’s drawing a complete blank, so she sits still, so absolutely still, an anchor that ties Erwin in place. By the time it’s over, she’s lost feeling in her lower body.
Her entire body is clammy, her lower back aches. A sliver of moonlight enters the room from the barely open curtains, and her eyes feel sore from having been fixated on it.
“Are they gone?”
“They are gone.”
The following silence leaves Levi breathless. It fills her ears up and makes her feel fuzzy inside her head.
Then Erwin swears. She rests her forehead against her knees. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“It’s fine,” Levi says. “I’m sorry they did that to you.”
Erwin’s body starts shaking violently, and just a moment later she’s crying out loud, small, hiccupy sounds she’s so obviously trying to hold back but can’t.
“How many times?”
“Fourteen,” she sobs, voice cracking. “Levi, I’ve been alive for a thousand years.”
“Oh, fuck, Erwin…”
Erwin’s head snaps, her gaze intense as she looks at Levi. “I—I need to run away. I don’t want to get revived anymore.”
“I know.”
“No,” she sounds frantic, she sounds afraid, she sounds fucking broken. “I need to die. I need to—die and I need to never be found again. Do you know how much it hurts to come back to life? How exhausting it is for a body to force itself into being whole when all it wants is to fall apart? Lifetime after lifetime? I can feel each one of my organs just begging me to stop and—and I know that that’s just not possible because every time I die they will just find me and they will bring me back to life. I was—this was supposed to be my last. When they revived me for the war in Shiganshina for the third time, I managed to run away. I ran and I hid and I ended up here, three fucking galaxies away, and I told myself that I would have a nice last life and I would stop feeling this ridiculous guilt and just fucking die and never come back again when the time came. But these ghosts are thousands of years old Levi, and they won’t leave me. They’re stronger than me, their blood and their vengeance and their pain. I don’t know what to do. I—I left the war, but the war won’t leave me. I don’t know how to fight back.”
Levi looks at Erwin, mouth agape. The pain rising up her throat is so thick it’s choking her. “Take me with you,” she says weakly.
“What?”
“If you are going to leave now, take me with you. I’ll watch over your grave until I die if I have to, you hear me? I’ll make sure no one gets to you.”
Erwin sniffles, pressing her shaking hand against her chest. Levi uses the sleeve of her shirt to wipe her tears and her snot, and moving to kneel before her, she takes her face in her hands. “Take me with you, Erwin,” she repeats.
Erwin nods. When her body gives out, Levi is there to catch her.
“Tell me about the trees,” she says, wanting to distract herself as much as she does Erwin. “Your trees.”
“It was…” Erwin clears her throat, sniffles. She tries again. “It was breathtaking, back in my world. The first time I was alive. There were forests, Levi. And the trees were beautiful. They were old and they were young and it was always a different scenery each day. You felt… small. So small. Not the same kind of small the city makes you feel. You felt small like a kid. I don’t know how much sense this’ll make to you, but I wanted to go and hug them when I felt that way. It’s just… I miss the trees. The forest. I miss stepping on dried leaves and hearing them crunch under my feet. I miss the air being so fresh it gave you a headache.”
“That sounds beautiful.”
“It was.”
Levi realizes she’s playing with Erwin’s fingers absentmindedly, tracing the deep line that crosses her palm horizontal-vise, rubbing in circles the calluses formed in the creases of her fingers. She thinks of how many people must’ve caressed or massaged or kissed this hand before her, hundreds of touches that must’ve felt like a lifetime as they happened but were mere fleeting moments in the grand moving of time. How many times has Erwin wrapped those hands around a knife, a blade, the grip of a gun, someone’s throat? How many times would she have pulled a trigger and how many times would she have pulled someone back to bed? It feels like such a big responsibility to know she’s the last one in line now, the woman who gets to press new memories onto old scars once and for all. Levi is a bumbling, lonely idiot stumbling her way through life; to care for another being weighs heavy on her shoulders.
“Did you take that photo?” She asks, following the line that extends around her thumb—the life line, Kuchel would’ve called it, knowledgeable in the profession of palmistry as she was. Levi doesn’t remember what it means to have such a short, frayed life line anymore, but she is somehow comforted knowing Erwin’s looks just like hers.
Erwin’s fingers jerk momentarily before stilling once again. “The one you took from me?”
“The one I took from you.” Levi feels her cheeks heating up.
“I did, yeah. It was the last tree that stood.”
Erwin pulls her hand back and pushes herself up to sit up straighter, face sour. Levi wipes the corner of her eyes to get rid of the tears. “D’you wanna go home?” She asks. She cringes a bit after the word home leaves her mouth, but it’s too late now.
“Um, okay,” Erwin nods, looking strictly down at the floor. “I’d like that.”
Levi stands up, then helps Erwin.
“Thank you, Levi,” Erwin says, grazing Levi’s cheek with her knuckles. She holds her chin softly and sniffles, still not meeting Levi’s eyes but watching her own thumb instead. “I mean it.”
Levi thinks she sees the faintest blush on her cheeks. The weight on her shoulders is a bit like a blanket, after all. “Yeah,” she mutters, “You’re welcome.”
⁂
“You told me you didn’t record human sounds,” Erwin says skeptically.
“Whatever,” Levi brushes her off. “You wanna do it or not.”
“I do, I do.” Erwin is eyeing the recording machine sitting on the nightstand like it’s a sentient being. She waits until Levi sets it up and presses play. Then, she giggles and says, “Is it on?”
“Obviously it’s on, you dingus.”
“Okay, and what do I say?”
“You don’t have to speak, we’ll just… we can just get back to doing what we were doing.”
Erwin speaks anyway. “Hi,” she says merrily, leaning over Levi’s shoulder to get closer to the machine. “This is Erwin, and uh, Levi, you say hi too. This will be an audio recording of us having sex. I think. Unless Levi is about to propose to me and this is her way of, like, being sneaky. Again, I think.”
“What are you even talking about?” Both of them being naked is making it harder for Levi to keep a straight face, but she somehow manages.
“I’m just having fun. Oh, I suddenly feel very self-conscious.”
“What? Why?”
Erwin grins. “Well, I’ve been recorded plenty of times before, just not ever while having sex.”
“They say there’s a first for everything.”
“How long can this recor—”
“Fuck, Erwin, if you had questions, why didn’t you ask them before we started? Now half the recording will just be us bickering.”
“Do you not edit your stuff?”
“Not really. Not always.”
Erwin snorts. “Okay, my bad. But it’s quirky, no? Kinda sweet? Like we’ll listen to this ten years later or whatever and be like, aw, we were super cute back then. ”
“Whatever.” Levi rubs her forehead in distress. “Whatever you say.”
Erwin kisses her. “Come,” she says, “let’s get back to it.”
Levi gladly obliges.
They fall back kissing, a tangle of arms and legs and hair, bodies pressed together so tightly Levi can’t distinguish between her and Erwin’s heartbeats. There must be something in the afternoon air, Levi thinks, the soft rain hitting against the windows, the gentle breeze, the smell of green tea brewing in the kitchen, because she can swear Erwin is acting differently than she usually does; she’s more relaxed. More pliant. More… herself. She turns them around and gets on top, putting one of Levi’s legs over her shoulder as she rides her, which, Levi quickly finds out that she likes to be thrown around by her; she pulls back and plays with Levi’s nipples until she can’t form a single coherent thought, not even get mad at her for making Levi lose control—damn it, she wants to say, we were both supposed to be a mess here, but only moans come out of her stupid mouth, red and plush with all the kissing and sucking. Fuck. Fuck! She pulls Erwin for more kisses, feeling so big, stupidly big, like she can’t be contained inside her body.
“I love you,” she blurts out suddenly. Her heart skips a beat.
Erwin smiles. “And I love you,” she replies. She’s breathless. Dripping wet between Levi’s legs, but honestly that’s probably a joint effort.
They cum together, Levi holding onto Erwin for dear life, listening to the delicious sounds she’s making. She realizes long after they are done that there was no pretending then, not on her side, and definitely not on Erwin’s, that everything was honest and scary and overwhelming, but it was also real. So real. That she’d had Erwin in that moment, but Erwin had her as well.
“I love you,” she mutters again, just to test if it’s going to feel as nice to say as it did during the first time. It does.
“And I love you,” Erwin repeats into the crook of her neck. Oh, it absolutely does.