Chapter Text
He had never believed in heaven, and the premise of hell had always seemed like something that had been invented to scare kids into behaving.
No karma.
No fate.
Life was a mess of conflicting intentions and moralities and natural disasters.
An afterlife where he could expect the consistency of eternal pain didn’t scare him.
Pain had never scared him.
Hell was not the battlefield- it wasn’t narrowly avoiding the jaws of a titan or hearing the screams of the ones who were too fast, too slow, too scared, too cocky.
Hell was picking uniform patches off of bloodied corpses that looked nothing and everything like the people he’d sat down to dinner with the night before.
Hell was sitting down to dinner with new faces and wondering whose patch he’d be picking free tomorrow.
In a world like his, the forgiveness of a loving god was alien and laughable and damnation was refreshing for the reliability it promised him.
The day he died, he looked up at the circle of cloudless blue sky that remained inside his narrowing vision and thought,
‘I’m dying.’
His last breath was a whisper, and everyone who overheard it would puzzle over what it meant.
No one knew why Humanity’s Strongest’s final words hadn’t been a plea for help or the name of a lover or even one last farewell, but just a simple, contented murmur.
“Finally.”
***
A muddled jumble of non-thoughts that were more feeling than cognition.
“Oh, look at him, thinking so hard! Isn’t he just like a little old man?”
Weak body, heavy head. Sluggish brain.
Affection. Security. Reassuring words.
“Who’s that? Is that your daddy? Yes it is! Say hi to- Davey, where are you going?”
Finding faces. So many faces.
Finding eyes. His mother’s eyes.
“Shh, shh, sweetie. What’s wrong? Mommy’s here, shh.”
Weak body. Helplessness.
No control. Anxiety.
“Sometimes he’s so quiet it scares me and other times I just can’t get him to stop crying-”
“Dirty,” her mouth said. “No, honey, that’s dirty,” she laughed.
Like it was funny. It wasn’t. He knew dirty.
“-I don’t know what’s wrong, David, he just suddenly started screaming-”
Dirty wasn’t funny. He knew better.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Caroline! The doctor said nothing was wrong with him-”
He didn’t like dirty. Dirty was scary.
“-maybe if you tried to act a little less like a whore and a little more like a mother-”
“No,” he wanted to say, because he knew that word, “no.”
“I miss my friends, I just thought it would be fine if- what are you doing? Please, I didn’t-”
“No,” he wanted to say, but all that came out was a wail.
“You just thought? You haven’t thought a goddamn thing in your life- aw, shit-”
He couldn’t stop the tears from coming.
“-look what you’ve done now, Carol! He’s fuckin’ crying again. Shit, would you shut him up-”
He was only three when he started to identify the things he had nightmares about as the same things his mother told him were only make-believe.
“Shh, baby, please don’t tell your daddy that there are strange naked men sometimes, he’s gonna think-”
He was five when the man she called his father laid a hand on him for the first time.
“David, no, he didn’t do anything wrong, please, you’re hurting him-”
She woke him up in the middle of the night. He asked her why she was crying.
“Shh, honey, shh, I need you to be real quiet for me, okay? We’re going to go for a drive, just us two-”
He didn’t have to ask why she was scared.
“-you’re so good, that’s right, help mommy pack your things-”
He was six and a half years old-
“Hey buddy, you wanna come home with your old man?”
-when the divorce went through.
“No.”
His mother agreed to joint custody because she thought he needed a father.
“You little bitch, you turned my own son against me-”
She didn’t understand when he told her he didn’t have one.
“-it’s my week to have him, Caroline, you won’t keep my son from me-”
He was seven when he found himself sitting across the dinner table from his other legal guardian-
“Y’know, your mother doesn’t think you’re old enough to know about this stuff.”
-just to stop him from making his mother cry again.
“You see this, bud? This is a titan.”
He was seven when he was forced to listen-
“These guys taking him down? These are real men, buddy.”
-to the man who claimed to be his father-
“None of this limp-wristed homo shit our military puts up with these days- real men. Take a good look.”
-make a mockery of everything he’d fought for-
“Do you know what they did to faggots?”
-in silence.
“They trussed up ‘em outside the walls like little homo presents for the titans. What do you think about that?”
There were so many things he wanted to say.
“You know who you were named after, bud?”
So many things he couldn’t say.
“Humanity’s Strongest, they called him. They tell you all about the rebuilders, but the real hero was a soldier.”
He was too young to defend himself. Old enough to know better, young enough to take a beating.
“He killed titans as easily as he killed men. Never got tied down by a woman- just fucked a new one every day.”
Or worse, have her take a beating for him defending the ugly truth of the war he’d fought.
“What do you think Lewis would’ve thought of you, buddy?”
A war he’d fought for a world that couldn’t even remember his name right.
***
He was almost nine when the man who called him ‘buddy’ backhanded his mother across the face for saying she wanted to move away and take him with her.
He still wasn’t nine when he woke him up by pressing the tip of a paring knife against his balls.
He heard his breathing quicken as he realized what was happening. “Buddy? Bud, what are you-”
“Do you know what we did to people like you in the corps?”
His father’s eyes shone like mirrors where the strip of light eking in from the hallway fell across his face.
“We sent them out first.”
His father was looking at him like he’d gone insane.
He pressed the tip of his blade down further when he opened his mouth to speak.
“We sent them out first because it meant they might save a better soldier’s life by dying,” he told him calmly, “and because it meant we could tell the ones they left behind that they’d been useful without having to lie.”
The silence of the night was heavy, broken only by his father’s shaky breaths.
He lifted the knife slowly, letting his hand fall limp at his side as he regarded the man on the bed coldly.
He plucked the cigarette from over his ear and held it out. “Hurry up and fall asleep smoking. It’s faster than drinking yourself to death.”
His father stared at it.
“Lewis-”
“My name,” he hissed, “is Levi.”
***
He was ten when his father’s home went up in flames.
It wasn’t an accident. The body they found had a fresh pack of cigarettes tucked primly in his shirt pocket- the plastic of its packaging had melted into the fibres of his clothes- and half a bottle of good whiskey on the bedstead by his head- it had been purchased overseas and subsequently stolen, only to reappear unemptied in the home of a man who was known for drinking too much cheap pisswater beer and tipping poorly.
The locals joked that he went out with more taste than he’d ever lived with.
When the police showed up on his ex-wife’s doorstep to ask a few questions of the little boy with a history of making trouble, his mother looked at him, and he looked back.
Her face was tired beneath its peppering of almost-faded green and yellow bruises, but beneath her collar, her throat was painted in much fresher shades of purple and blue.
He didn’t apologize.
She didn’t ask him to.
When the police asked the little boy with a history of making trouble where he’d been the night before, his mother wrapped her arm around his shoulders and said,
“We were up all night watching The Twilight Zone together, weren’t we, Lew?”
When one of the officers crouched down in front of him with a little smile and asked if he wasn’t too young to be watching something so scary, he looked him in the eye and said,
“I’ve seen scarier.”
The man laughed. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want to see something really scary now, son?”
“No,” Levi told him quietly, “I got rid of them for you.”
***
He was going into middle school in a new town halfway across the country when his mother started dating again.
She tried to hide it from him until he asked her openly if she was going to see her boyfriend.
She cried.
A week later she sat him down at the dinner table and said,
“Lew, I just want you to know that I’m not abandoning you. If I bring a man into my life, he’s going to have to be part of both of our lives.”
“That’s really not necessary,” he told her instead of assuring her that he would almost certainly have men involved in his life in the future, however briefly.
He didn’t think that was something she wanted to hear from her eleven year old son.
“I need you to try, sweetie. They won’t be like David, I promise,” she murmured gently. He let her stroke his hair and hold him to her chest.
He went through four babysitters in six months.
The general consensus was that he was weird and a little bit creepy.
He didn’t actively intend to be.
He’d just never known how to talk to teenagers.
He was sitting in his room, building some painstakingly complicated matchstick model of a castle that looked wrong to him because it still had all its turrets when he heard the fifth babysitter speaking to his mother downstairs.
“Trust me,” that voice said too confidently, “I was the worst kid in the world growing up, I can handle anything.”
“Lewis isn’t badly behaved, Nicholas, he’s just-” He crept over, pressing his ear to the wood of his door to be sure. “He’s been through a lot and he… has trouble expressing himself. I really appreciate you doing this for me on such short notice.”
He opened his bedroom door carefully.
“It’s nothing, Miss Kovacs. You just have a good date tonight, okay?”
His mother was still stuttering out a fretful, “well, I think I should introduce you first, at least,” when she saw Levi staring down at them from the top of the stairs.
“Eren.”
He looked exactly the same, just older.
Older. He was older than Levi was.
Eren shot him an odd smile. “Uh, hi. My name is Nick, but nice guess.”
“No,” Levi refused, “it’s not.”
***
Eren was still showing up to eat all the snacks in his house and fall asleep in front of the television eight months of stubborn refusal later.
“Eren.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that my name is Nick, kid?” Eren asked him. At this point, it was just a token effort.
“No,” he responded automatically before continuing on his original line of questioning, “why is she here?”
Eren shot the girl beside him an apologetic smile. “This is my girlfriend,” he explained slowly, as though that was a concept Levi couldn’t understand.
Which it was, but not for the reasons Eren thought it was.
“I didn’t ask who she was, I asked why she’s here.”
Eren stared at him.
He stared back.
Eren sighed. “Aren’t they teaching you that stuff in school right now?”
Levi frowned at him. “You’re not having sex on my couch.”
“Lewis-”
“You’re not,” he repeated, forgoing the usual correction of his name to emphasize his seriousness, “having sex on my couch, Eren.”
Eren’s girlfriend giggled nervously. “Are you really eleven?” she asked him with a tentative smile.
He ignored her question to stare her dead in the eye and say,
“You do realize that he’s just going to break your heart when he figures out that he’s attracted to men, right?”
Eren gaped at him before flushing spectacularly.
“Go,” he seethed, “to your room.”
“No, I’m not leaving so you can fuck a girl on my couch and leave stains and shit all over the cushions.”
“Lewis-”
“Levi. Yes?”
Eren had his hands fisted in his hair and his jaw clenched.
“Nick, baby-” his girlfriend ventured.
“You should probably go home,” Levi told her frankly.
He had a moment of bizarre gratification when she absentmindedly responded with a “yes sir.”
He was twelve when Eren moved away to go to college.
***
He told his mother he was going on a road trip with friends after high school.
He didn’t have any friends.
He still didn’t know how to talk to teenagers.
He couldn’t wait to stop being one. The hormones were wreaking havoc on his stability and self-control.
He was nineteen.
The card in his pocket said he was twenty-three.
It had his real name on it.
The night was young but the street was filled with bars and people and he had no idea where to even start looking for Nicholas Mardin, age twenty-six.
‘Eren,’ his mind corrected insistently.
He had no idea where to find Eren.
But fuck it all if he wasn’t going to anyway.
There was a lot to be said for seeing a familiar face.