Chapter Text
Levi came down the stairs a little absent-minded that morning, fingering the buttons on the cuffs of his black jacket. A thread had come loose, and he was trying to decide if it was worth repairing now; it would only take five minutes, but it meant hauling out the sewing kit and it would probably be fine until the end of the day…
The kitchen was cold and empty, and he stared at the bare table for a long moment before comprehending its significance.
“What the hell?” he said out loud, more disbelieving than outraged. Never, in all his time as Gatekeeper had such a thing occurred. “Coatrack!”
There was no reply. Levi made a frustrated noise and threw the back door open; oddly, no cold wind blew in. The air outside was still. He frowned. Automatically his hands went to the swords at his hips, the now-visible maneuver gear. But no...his right hand went to the opposite wrist, touched the wristwatch there. Its tick was reassuringly loud in the silence.
Outside the only sound was his boots crunching through the snow. No wind. No birds. Halfway down the road to the farm he found the coatrack.
It was deep golden in color, made of polished ash. When he had first come to the North he'd been overwhelmed by the grandness of everything. Erwin had plucked him from the Underground; with almost no training he'd been thrust into this role. The North had asked for him. The stained glass doors, the cold and empty front hall. The coatrack had then stood a silent observer; he'd draped his green cloak--newly minted--over one of its arms.
"You'll need servants to run the place, of course," Erwin had told him on the walk from the train station. "You can't do everything yourself. There are some--er, locals, and eventually you'll be able to form a Squad, but you'll need time to find the right candidates. People suitable for life in the North, and--"
Levi had walked silent at his side, thinking, He talks as though I've never run an organization of people before. He talks as though my best friends weren't just murdered. The people that would have come here with me...
He had not brought any servants to the house--his house now. He did most of the work himself. He felt himself existing uneasily with it; he wondered why he had been chosen. He had found the books about his family in the library. Seeing Grey House, the ancestral Ackerman home--more impressive by far than the Northern Gatehouse--had been a special kind of hell. Nothing so simple as petty jealousy or bitterness; no. This was the life his mother ought to have had, he thought paging through the hand-painted color plates. The life Kenny had from time to time ironically alluded to. The life he had never actually believed in. He put the book aside and walked the length of the library, feeling an unaccustomed melancholy.
He had been the child of a prostitute, brought up by a killer. A thug. A gangster. An important person in the Underground; a self-made man. Respected for his ruthlessness as much as for his peculiar code of honor. A loyal friend...
And now, last scion of a dying (or was it dead?) once-noble house. Friend to no one he could name. He had spent the last twenty years on the path that Kenny had--unintentionally or not--set him upon. Yet somehow he had ended up here.
"Oh...thank you," he had said, looking up in surprise when someone had tapped him on the shoulder. The coatrack from the front hall--a handsome piece of furniture, solidly built along the elegant lines of another era--had come in with a pot of tea. It poured out the cup for him with a measured grace, while he watched in bemusement. Had he brought it to life without realizing? Had the North sensed his need, as well as his reluctance? Or had the coatrack just been lying dormant until he had awoken it? He still didn't know. But since his first arrival in the North it had served him faithfully.
It was frozen mid-stride, empty basket hanging off its arm at a jaunty angle. Looking up he saw two birds in the air, fixed in place as though he were looking up at a painting. He picked up the coatrack under one arm and turned to carry it back to the house. Then he went to find Eren.
Eren woke up to Levi standing over him, stern and grim. "Uh," he said, in a blind panic of oh-god-what-did-I-do.
“Get up,” he said. “Don’t take your watch off.”
Eren looked down at the watch on his wrist, then back up at Levi in confusion. “Uh,” he said again. “Sorry. I overslept? The coatrack usually comes to wake me up…”
Levi grimaced. “I know. Put these on. Come downstairs when you’re dressed. And bring your skis and a set of maneuver gear.” He dropped some clothes on top of the comforter, and turned and left the room. Eren breathed out.
“Never a dull moment,” he muttered, shaking out the things Levi had brought him.
Layers of clothes; two pairs of socks, thin wool undergarments, a sweater, a blue and white snowsuit he’d never seen before. He put it all on, but he left the snowsuit unzipped to his waist. He didn’t put the maneuver gear on yet. He had yet to master Levi’s trick of wearing it so that it stayed hidden and out of the way when not in use; it would be too bulky to wear under the heavy winter clothes. He carried it down, along with his skis and boots and swords. One was still the boring standard-issue military sword, but the other was the (maybe) Sol Soldere, which Levi had taught him how to sharpen and polish. It glittered even in the weak winter sunlight, and Eren let himself admire it for a moment before slipping it back in the scabbard.
They still hadn’t found any reference to it in the annals, so Eren had started calling it ‘Zora’; it meant ‘dawn.’
“Should I wear the maneuver gear?” Eren yelled down from the landing as he dragged his things along behind him.
“No,” Levi called back from the kitchen. “You won’t need it until the end.”
“Then end of what? Hey--” he’d just stepped into the kitchen, and spotted the coatrack standing still and awkward in the middle of the room. It looked disturbingly unanimated. “What’s wrong with--”
“Yes,” Levi said, broody. He was making sandwiches at the kitchen table. “It’s a good thing you slept with your watch on.”
Eren looked baffled, from the coatrack and back to Levi. “Why? What’s going on now?”
“Time’s frozen,” Levi said. “We’ve got to go and unfreeze it.”