Tag: irvin smith

Levi had expected it to happen sooner or later, but he still wasn’t prepared in the least. They had come back with eight soldiers less. They had all carried their eyes low, even the horses had been quiet, shaking from fear and tiredness. Erwin had done everything as usual – cleaning his horse, feeding it, changing into a fresh uniform inside his office with Levi silently doing the same by his side. 

And then, there had been a soft thump, and Erwin had slid down against the wall with his face buried in dirty hands, a dark, horrible noise rising from his chest. Levi had watched, helpless, frozen in place like a useless child that had gotten slapped for the first time. What – this – this wasn’t real. This couldn’t happen. 

Levi bit his mouth and dropped the leather straps of his gear. Erwin still sat there, shaking, but when Levi knelt down and pulled his hands away oh so gently, there weren’t any tears. All he could see was the roaring pain in Erwin’s eyes, his mouth open, speechless around words he couldn’t form. And Levi understood. He leaned forward and held him. He embraced Erwin, tight and warm, nails digging into his back and Levi’s nose burying into his hair. 

They didn’t speak. Minutes passed by, maybe an hour. Erwin’s body fell against Levi’s, and Levi felt him take a deep breath, warm air shivering against his neck. Then, he wrapped his arms around Levi and pulled him down, and whispered a wordless “thank you” against the crown of his sweaty hair. 

Levi thinks love is stupid and useless. He doesn’t understand it, doesn’t attempt to. Kisses are unnecessary, a hassle, a distraction. Sex is disgusting and filthy and people generally smell bad, and intimacy means making himself vulnerable. He’s not weak, will never be broken again. 

Then, Erwin kisses him after that one mission that robs him of part of his body, soul, heart, an arm gone and light vanished from his eyes – and Levi crumbles apart, walls coming down as he finds the only skin and lips he ever wants to touch in his life. 

Immortal.

Back in the underground, Levi would have sold every spark of his soul for immortality. Feelings, emotions, and even love – all those things Levi didn’t need, he would’ve given them for a small, bloody bite of freedom. Anything to be invincible. 

Then a man led him into war, and Levi drank more blood and tears to barely survive than he would have paid for immortality. Yet, when the morning sun painted golden peace on the man’s face, sleep still caught in the wrinkles around his eyes and the gray shadow of his hair, Levi didn’t wish to never die again. 

He just wished to die by his side, listening to the last beats of their battle-scarred hearts. Erwin opened his eyes, blinking at him in surprise as a smile flashed over his thin lips. ‘Yes,’ Levi though as he leaned down to kiss him, curling himself around the man’s body as they hid away from the world in their tiny cottage, surrounded by trees that were just The Forest now – ‘yes,’ Levi thought. One day their hearts would stop beating together. 

But until then, they had many mornings of golden light ahead. 

After a year in the Scouting Legion, Levi doesn’t know how he ever lived a day without the soft touch of Erwin’s hand against his neck every morning, every evening and in between when he feels like the world comes crashing down. 

A few years later, and Levi learns all over again what it means to be without the only man who takes his wrath and pain and raw, wild desperation as if they’re presents, the man who bares his own throat just to kiss his lips. 

Levi doesn’t cry when he jolts awake at night, from dreams filled with their dead eyes staring at him and pale hands reaching for his throat. Sometimes, they rip out his heart. Sometimes they eat him alive, teeth white like ivory and caked in crimson blood. Levi never says a word when Erwin wraps an arm around him and pulls him close. He offered to set up graves for them, their names carved into dark stone like they were honourable soldiers. 
Levi doesn’t need graves. The nightmares always return. He knows that they’ll haunt him till the day he stops breathing. 

But there’s a warm hand on his stomach and soft, quiet breath flooding over his neck, and Levi thinks that he can put up with the past and its roaring demons if Erwin only holds him like this every night, and maybe they’ll fly away one day and somewhere, somehow, two white birds will build a nest in a new place that Levi will call: home. 

Bloom. || Part I

It’s not that Levi hates sex. But sex means people, and it means a stranger’s breath on his skin, hands grabbing his hips too tightly or not hard enough, and it means men who try and try so hard to make him feel good; men who all give up in the end. They always do, even those who loved him.

“Why don’t you kiss?” – “Relax. It’s just sex.” – “What, can’t come for me?” – “Baby, what are you hiding from me? Did someone hurt you?”

He doesn’t have sex anymore. He doesn’t kiss, doesn’t flirt. Evenings are a cup of tea and his favourite blanket, freshly washed, some movie on the tv. He falls asleep with his eyes clenched shut, curled into himself to feel a spark of warmth.

Sometimes, Levi wishes for tattoos. Little inked scars on the spots where he wants to be kissed.

A sun rising on his throat, its beams showing a path of gold to his neck. A silver mermaid swimming around his hipbone, delicate fingers resting on his thigh, a fin curled around his waist. Eagle’s wings, white and hazel, spreading on his back, and a thin emerald snake coiling along his spine like a protector of Eve’s apple, its tail reaching around to his stomach, lower. 

He wants black lines that scream “please, touch me. Here, and here, kiss me, love me, fuck my living soul out, but pleaseplease let the sun rise on my neck and make my heart fly”. He already has one tattoo, a pair of crossed wings above his heart. There’s nobody to ask for its meaning. One half is drowning in dark blue ink.

He’s been singing since he can remember, and he’s been searching just as long. The world can’t be that empty, without something that has his heart burst into stars just as much as the first tunes of a symphony. It can’t be the only thing. It just – whenever he thinks he found something, it ends in tears and snow falling on his heart.

He should’ve been more careful with his wishes and the ink dripping off his silent lips.

Levi meets him in one of his music classes. Nice singing voice, deep and rich. That’s all he thinks at first, nothing special – until the man chooses a song. The docent makes Levi join in, half an octave higher, yes please accompany him.

“Demons” by Imagine Dragons, arrangement for two voices and a choir. The other people wait for the new one to start. 

It takes a single line. Levi’s lips part, eyes widen. The sun on his throat blooms.

It’s the first time they melt into each other.

At some point, everyone else falls quiet, their voices a mere susurring of ocean waves. The man’s voice rises like a storm, it roars and whispers and promises darkness, rich, sweet heat that tingles all the way up Levi’s spine and into his skull. The echo is loud and quiet and it’s the first time that his voice shakes during singing.

The man looks at him the whole time, sun reflecting in his eyes, lips moving around words and tunes and pure music.

The snake along Levi’s spine moves, lazily dragging its fangs across his skin. He leaves the music room with crimson in his cheeks and a hurricane swirling through his blood.

The man’s name is Erwin.

Levi doesn’t care. He walks home in delusion, people passing by, none of their shitty words reaching him. Levi hears music, and the music carries blue eyes and velvety flames and a music that burns under his cold, lonely skin.

He’s ashamed to abuse the memory, but that voice is all it takes for him to slide under his covers later and wrap a hand around his cock, the other sliding to press into his tight heat, sobbing as he comes with hips bucking up.

When the days are cold
And the cards all fold
And the saints we see
Are all made of gold

Reincarnation. What a strange word. Levi had found it in an old book in the library, next to esoteric shit about spirit travel and everlasting love. Fairy tales, children’s stories. He only took this one book and never brought it back. The habit of keeping what had once become his sat deep inside his soul. That way, he found Erwin, too.

Or did Erwin find him – yes, that was it. Waiting in front of the library, eyes calm, body shorter and hair silver already, and Levi stopped sharp. The book dropped. Bodies aged and wrinkled, but souls didn’t. Souls grew wide and magnificent and Levi’s fingers clung to Erwin’s coat as he flew, crashed into his arms. How long, his voice asked, cracking, breaking into shatters of sky and hope.

Too many, Erwin said quietly, his lips kissing Levi’s cheeks bleeding from tears. Centuries. Eras for you, an eternity. Souls didn’t age.
But they could melt. They could coalesce.

Eruri Week Day 4: Little Things / Eruri Insiders

It’s the little things.

Erwin indulges in the soft red colour tinting Levi’s ears whenever their fingers brush. The meetings of the Corps can be boring and straining, but their hands lace up under the table and Levi’s other hand around the tea cup shivers the tiniest bit. It’s the little things – when he returns from a mission, both of them covered in blood and filth, clothes torn where titan’s teeth almost tore them apart. When Levi comes out of the showers, naked, skin red where he scrubbed it clean, he presses his body into Erwin’s arms and buries his face against the chest where a heart beats just for him.

It’s the little things – Erwin’s hand brushing the small of his back before a mission, up to his neck, tightening around it, and Levi’s head rolling back into the touch as if he’s been born to fit against Erwin, as if heaven and hell themselves carved both of them from a single block of marble and tore them apart with whispered words of “go, find him in another life for he is all you wanted, all you need, and the little things that will stop the bleeding of your soul”.

Eruri Week Day 3: Home / Domestic

“I don’t care how long it takes. I won’t take my daughter home to a bedroom that’s painted like a rabid dog threw up all over the fucking walls.”

Erwin massaged the bridge of his nose. He set the paintbrush down and took a deep, long breath. Levi had his arms crossed, glaring at him from below with eyes that said “I will get my way or you will sleep on the couch tonight”. It was about their baby girl and Levi was acting like a mother hen trying to make the nest for her child the most comfortable in all existence of eggs and chickens.

“Fine,” Erwin finally said and Levi’s face lightened up. “We’ll repaint it. You happy now? It’s not like I’m covered in green paint already, but whatever.”

“I love you,” Levi quietly said and tiptoed to kiss Erwin’s nose, smearing more green from his cheek across his lover’s face. Then he jumped back, grinning widely and Erwin could only growl “oh no you won’t – !” before a paintbrush slashed across his already dirtied shirt and left a bright minty streak across green. They had chosen fresh colours for their girl’s room, and Levi (as the artist he was) had begun to paint the ceiling as a sky and the walls like a deep forest full of hiding animals and beautiful flowers.

Erwin had been allowed to paint the grass, and even there Levi had to correct him and correct some of his badly drawn shadows. He was covered in all possible colours, dots of red on the butt of his old outworn jeans, legs sprinkled with pink from the roses Levi had painted.

“You shouldn’t have done that.” His voice had lowered to a dangerous snarl, and Levi squeaked adorably when Erwin snatched him around the waist and rubbed his colourful face all over his lover’s neck and cheeks.

“Ew, you are such a dumbass, fuckin’ stop that!” Levi struggled and kicked in his hug and finally dropped against Erwin’s chest like a stone, nose nuzzling into his dirty shirt. A strip of sky blue was on his forehead, and Erwin pressed his thumb next to it, leaving a sunny yellow spot.

“I hope she’ll like us.” Levi breathed against his chest, hair ruffled into a mob of darkness with pink and orange tips where paint had fount its way into it. Erwin sat down on the floor where they had put the plastic foil, pulling Levi on his lap. Their foreheads pushed together, resting gently as Erwin cupped his face and brushed his nose against Levi’s.

“She’ll love us. Who wouldn’t love to have a father like you? You painted a world for her, Levi. A world.” Levi’s smile was a rare thing, shy and insecure like a deer hiding in the forest that bloomed around them.

“You’re right. She’ll be ours, and we’ll always be hers. Our little girl.”