Chapter Text
The rain pours down relentlessly, allowing no sound beyond the room to penetrate except for the droplets pattering loudly against the windows. Sweat trickles down my forehead after another bloody nightmare. I can barely hear my heart beating wildly and Erwin's breathing under the roar of the storm. His weight sinks the mattress and pulls me to his side. Feeling the warmth of his body so close is comforting. Still asleep, Erwin hugs my thigh and mumbles. It says a lot about how long it's been since I've had a nightmare that he hasn't woken up upon noticing my slightest movement.
I thought I was finally rid of those fucking nightmares but I'm just an idiot. I don't know what I expected. To never see those fucking white walls again or the green cape over my lap. Not noticing the cold of steel against my skin. To be able to forget the feeling of alcohol clouding my thoughts. Or the feeling of finally returning home. Just an instant and I could feel it again. For a second everything would be all right at last.
That feeling of utter peace terrifies me.
The soft touch of the sheets under the palm of my hand reminds me that I am home. That I am already where I want to be. The smell of rain mingles with the smell of damp earth and freshly cut grass. It's a clean smell that drags me back to the hundred expeditions outside the walls. I haven't seen them in my dreams but I remember those. For a second it's like I'm there again. The line between past and present is too faint to know what is real. The touch of my wedding ring caressing my skin brings me back to the here and now. I'm in our bed, in our room; Erwin's breath warm against my fingertips.
Sooner or later it was going to happen. My shrink has told me fifty thousand times. Healing is not linear. There are good days, not-so-good days, and days that fucking suck. Right now it's like the world is crashing down around me. I'm doomed to not escape a life that isn't even mine. Like I haven't had to eat enough shit. I hate the rain. I hate it. I've always hated it, ever since I was just a kid.
The rain was also pattering against the glass of the only window in the basement where we lived the night my mother died. The leaf litter had completely covered it and water was pouring in through the poorly sealed gasket. The rains hadn't stopped all week and even the two thin blankets on the bed were no help against the dampness that seeped through the walls. My hands had been numb from the cold for so many days that I had almost forgotten what it was like to feel them. I don't think I was more than seven or eight years old. Maybe even younger, I don't know.
The basement we lived in was almost always dark. The dim light from the small lamp I had managed to salvage from the dumpster created ghostly shadows against the cement-colored walls. Next to me, my mother slept shivering in a bed too narrow for the two of us. Her wheezing breath was the only sound that broke the din of the downpour. Every autumn, fear consumed me even without understanding what was killing her. Death seemed to have settled in with us. The gloom gave a ghastly look to her angular face with sunken cheeks and deepening dark circles under her eyes. Maybe it had started as a simple cold but the whistling had only gotten worse. Even now, as I close my eyes, I can still hear the sound of her waterlogged lungs.
By then, my mother had been sick for a long time. Single with a small child, she had done everything necessary to make sure we always had a plate on the table but the street is rarely kind to the desperate. Even when she smiled, it was impossible not to see the despondency behind her eyes. I was too small to understand the weight my existence carried on her shoulders. My problems must have been too much when she herself was nothing more than an AIDS-stricken kid. The rain was still coming down hard when my mother exhaled her last breath. I don't remember how long I lay there beside her corpse, too exhausted to cry, waiting for death to take me too.
Sometimes I wonder if it's Levi Ackerman's curse that haunts me as my mother's image disappears under Kuchel's face and our old basement blurs into the lost shack somewhere in the Undercity. It' s as if history was doomed to repeat itself even though there were no leaves clogging the sewers there and no rain beyond that torrent of debris that the water washed up from the surface. Sometimes I wonder why my mother had to die, doomed just for being my mother.
There is so much death in my head. If I had crossed paths with Isabel and Furlan again in this life, would I have condemned them too? Erwin hates to hear me say I'm a cancer to everyone who loves me but what argument does he have to counter it? Kenny ended up in jail because of me. Too many days, living feels like a curse when even awake I can feel the knife biting into my flesh and the warm, sticky blood sliding down my forearm.
The first time Erwin mentioned the idea of going to a therapist it would be an understatement to say that I didn't take it very well. I had always been under the impression that I had a screw loose but did Erwin really think I was so messed up that I needed a fucking shrink? I guess he had a point. After thirty years of my life dreaming daily of my own death, not a single nightmare in five months can't be a fluke.
And suddenly everything seems to have gone down the drain.
I hardly remember the first appointment. I think Dr. Grice asked what I was there for and I don't even know what I said. All I could think about was the money the fucking session was costing Erwin and how stupid it seemed to be sitting there, talking about my problems, as if that was going to solve anything. And maybe, maybe it does solve something. That doesn't mean I hate it any less. Erwin would even find it amusing, he loves the sound of his own voice.
I can't stop thinking about the argument the other day. After two years working together, Dr. Grice knows me well enough to figure out that there's something at the core of it all that I keep refusing to talk about. The sessions seem stagnant lately. They say you have to get worse so things can get better but I've had my share of times when everything was fucking shitty. Of yelling at the wall. Or staying silent, so pissed off that if I had spoken the first thing that would have come out of my mouth would have been "go fuck yourself".
But this time it's different. The impression of not going anywhere doesn't leave me alone. The dream has only been the culmination of a shitty two weeks. And what do you want me to say? That I'm even crazier than she already thinks I am? Some days I hate her, always with her kind smile and her fucking understanding. I rather have her when she gets to be sarcastic. They're good days when she allows herself to be. On those days, she reminds me so much of Gabi. How she used to drive me up the wall, the idiot.
If I didn't tell her about my nightmares that first day, we've had time since then. It's easy to talk about the kids who died too young, with other faces and other names. Sometimes I don't believe that this time I made it to twenty-one. Thirty-four almost seems like a miracle. Before me, only Levi lived past twenty and I'm three years away from equaling that record. The story is always the same. My mother dead, her absence robbing me of the one pillar that keeps thoughts at bay and prevents the emptiness from consuming me from within. But of Levi Ackerman, of Levi we never speak.
So maybe I'm not crazy. Just sick.
The first diagnosis was PTSD. Nothing to be surprised about. Ackerman's name has long been associated with underworld mafias, drugs and prostitution. And maybe there is some of that but it' s not the only thing tangled up in that barbed wire.
Levi Ackerman was supposed to be nothing more than a fragment of my imagination. Those just had to be dreams fueled by a childhood trauma that my mind, too tender to process, had decided to bury deep inside. The man dying in my dreams as a shadow of himself wasn't real. But there are whole books about a man who shouldn't exist. Documentaries and reports in thematic magazines. The strongest of the demons on the island. The killer of titans. Even a movie I would have preferred not to know about. The evidence that he existed is there. There are even photos of his last days in Liberio.
It's my face. In these photos, it's me. My face, on a man who died over a hundred years ago.
When I turn on the lamp on the bedside table, my right eye sees nothing but white flies blurring the ghostly shadows drawn by the light on the contours of the room. I close my blind eye tightly. Small white rays form behind the darkness of the eyelid. A non-existent scar tugs at my lip. Touching the right side of my face, I barely register my fingers. My cheek and cheekbone have lost any trace of feeling but at least my toes still respond when I try to wiggle them. It would be nice if my useless eye could also remember that this is the year 965 and that this isn't the body that lost part of its sight in the battle of Earth and Heaven.
Dr. Grice thinks it's asomatognosia. The first time I heard the word I was convinced she was kidding me. The idea that the brain can forget that certain parts of the body exist almost seems like a joke. But after ending up on the floor more than once because my stupid legs have forgotten how they work it doesn't seem so funny anymore. At least the CT scan came back clean. In some extreme cases, it's a symptom of depression. My money's more on phantom limb syndrome but it's hard to argue when my legs, fingers and eye are still there.
It's late in the night when the storm finally subsides but my mind won't let me sleep. Next to me, Erwin hasn't moved an inch. The dim light from the lamp reflects on his golden hair. There is already some gray in there, but you have to know where it is to notice it. It's stupid, but I would never have believed that seeing the wrinkles around his eyes could make me so happy. Careful not to make any noise, I rescue my diary from the top drawer. It has been sitting on the bedside table for two days. When Dr. Grice suggested I start it, I thought it sounded like more of her bullshit, but it helps me. In the silence of the night, I can only hear our breaths and the rustle of the pen on the paper as I finally start to write in neat handwriting:
Levi Ackerman died in Liberio in 859. I still remember how my hands trembled the first time I saw a picture of him after the war. The empty eye, the two scars across his face and splitting his lip. And the chair. Levi hated that chair.
I hated that chair.
The words look at me from the page of the diary. They are my memories. I always laugh at him when Erwin insists we were destined to meet but maybe he's right. Maybe it all has a purpose and it was meant to lead us here. Because what was the likelihood of being born again with the same gray eyes staring back at me from the mirror every morning as I shaved? Or with the same jet color in my hair? What was the likelihood that my mother's name was Kuchel and my Uncle Kenny's? And that Erwin remembered the world behind the walls even when for me there was only the feel of steel against my flesh and those white painted walls.