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The rushing waves Eren had once painted slick sanguine breathe in time to his sick heartbeat, an eb and flood that the moon pulls. Tides swoop in his own stomach as he looks down at Levi’s eyes; silvery grey moonlight. Eren lines himself up between his legs. He enters raw, groaning as tight heat swallows him. He grits his teeth.
He doesn’t deserve this.
A cabin by the sea in a barren world, with survivors that aren’t even half of Paradis’s population and this is the only time he doesn’t have to think about it. The shelter Levi built for him, the sheer white curtains billowing softly and the shadows protecting them. Levi curls up to kiss Eren, the tenderness a palpable weight in his chest, and he might break, shatter into a thousand pieces and scatter on the floor in sharp shards.
“Eren.”
He has been still for too long. He looks down at Levi through the slanted strands of his hair, paralyzed, and he wonders why Levi puts up with his sudden fits when Levi’s hands reach up to cradle his face and wipe translucent pearls Eren hadn’t noticed dotting the corners of his eyes.
“Move,” Levi whispers against Eren’s lips, and like the turning tide answering to a celestial wax and wane, he follows the order. When Eren swims out too far, when he sinks too deep, Levi anchors him.
Their kiss softens from urgent heat to resemble the slow roll of Eren’s hips, building up the way he knows his former captain enjoys. This is all he has to give now that he can’t give up his life.
“Good boy. So good for me.”
And Eren’s brows furrow deeply, saltwater rising in his throat as he struggles to breathe through the obstruction over his lungs. His body yearns to believe the words, his muscles unspooling from their tension to wrap around his lover. This is the only time Eren is good, useful and worthwhile. When he is pleasuring Levi, he is being good.
“You’re so kind. So beautiful and gentle.”
Levi was never a liar, but he tells the words to a mass murderer, the very phrase an oxymoron that negates physical state and reality. Though Eren only gives into the words when he buries himself between Levi’s legs, for Levi the truth lies in how his ribs expand to the beat in his heart.
Levi never thought he’d find beauty in self-destruction, but then he met Eren, and his eyes told tales with perilous beginnings and astray endings, every pulsing page a colorful gradient of blue-green, as restless as the waves that sing for them. Beautiful as can be, and dangerous as can be. Recognizing the fragile axis their world turned on, Eren’s wrath broke out in new and unpredictable ways. His anger never changed.
The will to bring on an apocalypse, burn himself and everyone in his path to ashes for freedom flourished even greater, when they realized the ‘survivors’ outside the walls were their true oppressors. Levi had seen his own wrath reflected in Eren. Prideful of it once, for a second he was scared of what lengths Eren would go to. In what new ways he’d break himself. Roaring high to the sky as the manifestation of humanity’s fury, shaking the earth beneath Levi’s feet and his thumping pulse, Eren resembled a god of death from high above as he flattened the earth with his army of titans.
Eren’s open-mouthed sigh, pinched expression and full-body tremble alert Levi to the torment that task left. He might fall apart in Levi’s arms right this second.
Levi locks his ankles around the small of Eren’s back, leading him closer, chasing after his warmth and giving his all in turn. Shaking him from the shackles of his own mind where Eren has been locked for decades over his own lifetime. Unable to let go. To say goodbye to his demons. How could he, when countless innocents lie in their graves because of him? And how could Levi touch him so tenderly, and feel so much for him despite the fact?
Well, the truth is…this is the way it has always been with them; Levi giving Eren everything, time and time again, and Eren taking all he can. Gorgeously greedy, he drained Levi dry in refreshing ways.
He does so now, too. When he looks at Levi with wide, hesitant eyes and lips pressed reverently to the hollow of his neck. And Levi lets him. He combs his fingers through soft hair and lets him suck and bite on his skin, tilting his head back to expose his throat, until shades of violet and blue bloom like a distant constellation, textured with the gentle pink marks of Eren’s teeth. Levi can’t take his eyes from Eren, and Eren won’t take his eyes from the blossoming bruise. So hesitant, so unsure if he deserves this, and yet it shines clear in those big, cloudy eyes that he wants it. He wants it like nothing else, to know Levi is his too. And Levi will offer himself again and again until Eren has taken everything.
No matter how taxing, no matter how much Levi had to withstand to ensure Eren’s safety; slaying titans, starting wars in Eren’s name, standing by and watching him massacre entire continents until all that remained was fattened flies and carrion for the vultures, Levi would do it.
No sacrifice too great. Never for Eren.
Perhaps because Levi had never dedicated his heart to a personal dream, save for the naive teashop idea he never got to fulfill. As a soldier, his comrades fought and bled for each other’s lives, and so did he, but Eren is the first person Levi wanted to be an unshakable pillar for on his own. Not saddled with the burden of a title he didn’t ask for and must abide by, but because Levi wanted to be strong for Eren. Eren needed someone to be strong for him, and Levi had spent his whole life carrying other people’s burdens.
For the first time, he was doing it because he wanted to, not because he had to. For Eren, in a heartbeat, he would protect him from anyone and anything, even Eren himself. And just as quickly, when he is ready to receive his devotion in full swing again, Levi will do it all over. Give every piece of himself to Eren, because Eren wouldn’t settle for less. An uncompromising youth, and his raging emotion demanded real, gritty honesty. Levi finds it near laughable that he ever thought Mikasa would replace that desire. Would compete with him.
Someone like Eren couldn’t give into the sparkly luster of innocent childhood love when he knows that he is broken beyond repair. Such is the burden of someone who once made it his duty to take false hope, and make it real, to make himself a symbol, and if someone will touch him, it will be someone who sees him for who he is. It will be Levi; too sullied by the life he lived before for Eren to ruin him.
They were both born to destroy, feeding on war and fights and nourishing themselves on battlefields, and where they collided, they created a love that tasted of heartache and honey.
As Levi adoringly cups Eren’s cheek, stroking over the once plump flesh carved into defined bone, Eren tilts his head into his affection, nuzzling Levi’s spread palm like he is starving for his touch despite being inside of him. Levi’s thumb continues its venture past the sensitive inner crease of Eren’s mouth, massaging circles into his lip. Eren opens up for him and Levi passes the column of Eren’s teeth to his tongue. Eren inhales sharply. Doe-eyed, he sucks. Salt, if Levi had to guess. And lavender from the soaps he’d saved from Marley before.
Eren moans low around the offering, choked up and whimpery. Levi smears the pooling saliva on Eren’s cheek, making a pretty mess of him. Their lips connect and their teeth click. Infusing the kiss with sore longing and aching adoration. A strong, spicy sweetness sits on Eren’s tongue; cinnamon sticks that Levi grows and he chews for the migraines that leave him ghostly and distracted.
And how do you grieve something that is still alive? How do you love someone whose fate met with death at every turn? Intensely and irrevocably.
Levi watched Eren grow long after he should have perished; eaten alive, bitten raw, stabbed in the chest, ripped at the seams, and kidnapped more than once. He shouldn’t have survived, but he did. Spitting in the face of death every single time. Crawling out from his grave like a mermaid of the soil to stake his claim on his birthright.
Levi watered the seeds, guiding Eren as well as he could. Eren matured too fast. Being the titular child soldier fighting in a losing war compelled him to. For a time, despite his brutal circumstances, he managed to bloom into a wise young man. Empathetic and decent and good right up until the moment he ruined himself. At once horrifying and gorgeous. Beauty and demolition. Innocence and sin. Life and death. A walking contradiction longing for warmth and human connection but selfishly ruthless in his quest for freedom. As if a devil and divine being joined as one into an unholy, stunning amalgamation; a monster. A fallen angel that razed down the world when it fell, with torched wings that spanned the horizon and sharp, curved claws to match Levi’s razor teeth and serrated knives.
He puts them to good use now. Trailing his nails along the delicate flesh on Eren’s thigh and making him yelp and shiver, swallowing all his responsive little sounds. Eren’s hips stutter, his cock twitching inside Levi. Red lines weave down his thigh, one of the many marks Levi aims to paint him with.
Neither of them are gentle men, really. Eren is all smooth skin and mental anguish and nuclear flares, and every part of Levi’s body is etched with ridged scars, and when they kiss it is like metamorphosis. The falling chrysalis of a caterpillar, the way their flesh interacts and yields and bruises, the way Eren opens his mouth for Levi’s tongue, the way he lets Levi’s jagged edges slice him with low hisses of ardor and a speeding, rocking rhythm. Together, they create something better -- gentler, softer, sweeter -- than the sum of their parts.
Their fingers lace on either side of Levi as Eren presses their foreheads together and shuts his eyes. His rhythm picks up and pulls little whimpers out of him, searing Levi’s insides with his determination to please. A painstakingly intimate drag back and forth winds Levi tighter, closer, hotter. Drawing out until only the tip grazes Levi’s loosened ring of muscle before plunging back in with a high gasp, Eren fills him perfectly in a heady trance that wraps them in a potent scent, intoxicating sensations urging their bodies. One shivering unit, attuned to each other’s needs. Levi follows Eren like waves crashing over each other, thigh over thigh, arms slinking and hips clinging together at the points. All raw intensity and instinct, breathing hard and fast, heartbeats faster.
Is it all they’ve ever been? Two hurt people, fingers tangling, sleeping close to ward off nightmares? Arms taut, teaching each other to stand still in face of the flood rising up to their knees as they hold each other close. Going around in the circles of a watery spiral, they narrowly avoided drowning each time. The storm never ended. Even now. Eren was once unflinching in his desire to be loved. He showed all of his hidden contents, spilling over aggressively and violently and earnestly.
Levi couldn’t understand. Because he had fought monsters and killed people, but Eren could show every ugly cracked part of himself, everywhere he could scar except his own flawless skin, and he wore his heart on his sleeve. An open book, an open wound -- a beautiful, bleeding, beating heart. That was Eren Jaeger. Shifting eyes, prone to the whimsy of sunlight and mood, and a radiant smile that put the sun to shame...how could Levi not fall madly, fiercely, helplessly in love with him?
Levi will bring that light back, for he loves the haunting beauty over him no less than the ripened with life, vibrant boy he fell in love with first. He will weather every storm, breathe colour back into Eren’s pale skin, and swim the sea of Eren’s tears for even a hint of his old self. Levi has stored enough of Eren’s summer glow within his bones to last him through the howling winds and lashing downpour of his grief. To go around in circles forever if need be, if that will turn their ship around and lead them to shore.
It doesn’t matter how much time they have or how much time it would take. Levi wants to make Eren happy. He wants to be Eren’s salvation.
Eren burned the world down. He suffered for it. Levi isn’t a good man, so he will help heal the effect of Eren’s crimes on his psyche. He doesn’t fucking care what that makes him, when Eren curls over him like a wreath and whimpers his name. Over and over. A cry for help Levi will always answer.
Levi arches up, meeting Eren in their suspended pleasure as he lowers his head to the hollow beside Eren’s shoulder, allowing Eren a better angle to stroke his cock along Levi’s inner walls.
Levi clenches around him, jaw bunched tight as he presses his lips together to contain himself despite the imploring plea in Eren’s eyes. Instead, Levi bites down on Eren’s collarbone, sucking with his teeth, marking his blue-tinted skin a deep maroon glistening with saliva.
When he is done, Eren touches the discoloured skin. Relishing the bruise and how it doesn’t fade in a puff of steam. A gift.
“Faster,” Levi urges hoarsely. “Fuck me, Eren.”
Eren groans and moves his hips faster, obedient to Levi’s every beck and call and command. The harmony settles Levi into the pillows behind him as his stomach knots pleasantly and the molten lava writhing beneath his navel bubbles up, close to eruption.
The bed they’re in is proof that even when Eren crumbled cityscapes to dust, Levi would never hurt him. Their fates intertwined as soundly as their bodies, Levi at once Eren’s guardian and executioner, should he ever lose control.
The prenominion of the absent act -- and Eren, Eren who has time and time again refused to die, accepting and unyielding if Levi will be his reaper -- hangs over them. Levi not killing him, incapable of truly ending Eren’s life. The unwritten crimson staining Levi’s calloused palms with all the lives Eren took, and all those that were laid down for his survival from experienced veterans to fresh-faced recruits. All for their shining savior, no soul as valuable as Humanity’s Hope. Humanity’s Despair.
To Levi, it became just Eren, all Eren he would let anyone die for. Would die for himself. Would kill for. And now, they are all bare skin, the gaps between what should have been history crowding their kisses with unspoken words.
I should have killed you. I couldn’t do it.
That unfulfilled promise fills every inch they aren’t touching but that only makes them hold each other tighter. Pull each other closer. Bite deeper. Hooked into Levi’s skin, Eren sinks further in their joined ecstasy as Levi licks into his gasping lips, his tongue tickling the roof of Eren’s mouth and tasting cinnamon air again.
Muscle memory serves Levi well, when his arms slide around Eren’s neck, when he traces his cool lips up the lines of Eren’s throat. And those eyes; innocence and joy and determination and wonder and hope and rage and rage and rage. So alive. They look at him, so much sorrow hidden in their swirling depths, so much overlapping pain and trauma. Only nineteen, and holding the despair of centuries. Millenia. Generations. Levi would hold firm for his boy when no one else would. He would hold him when the whole world crumbled. He would keep him from splintering.
In this moment, as Levi gathers Eren in his arms, chest to chest -- Eren is not the history he bellies, nor the powers that still live within him, nor the voices that screech in his head. He is Eren, and Eren is Levi’s, and that is all he needs to be.
There is something ashamed about the slumped set of his shoulders as he thrusts in and out of Levi, creating a litany of grunts and moans between them. A faint fire crackles in him; a strange kind of music, hollowed out like the metaphorical tree where he kept the skeletons of all the other lovers he leveled with the ground.
Eren eyes the deep purple mark on Levi’s neck fleetingly, as if lingering too long is an offense. His throat ripples painfully and he looks away instead.
His nails dig into Levi’s shoulders, but don’t scratch. His teeth prick his neck behind his tongue, but don’t bite again. His mouth envelops his skin, but doesn’t suck. Like broken promises, he never follows through. It isn’t like his Eren to hold back. Or hide, the way he hides a buttercup-yellow shyness and midnight-blue, dripping sadness in the crook of Levi’s neck. Not after he fought Levi every day of his early teenage years for this.
“Eren.” Levi holds Eren’s face in his hand to bring their eyes together, wiping away the tears. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
Perhaps permission is all Eren needed. His fingertips skim over Levi’s lips, outlining the shapes the words fill as he whimpers first for the praise, and then, “I love you.”
And he is beautiful. Storm-shaken and drenched in salt, he is beautiful. The way sweat beads on his forehead, his mouth letting out puffs of air and delicious moans as if Levi were fucking him and not the other way around. The velvet twig-twine of his long hair falling into his face that Levi gently rakes his fingers through to uncoil. His rose-flushed cheeks and swollen lips and the woven clutch of his fingers anchored to Levi’s shoulder.
Levi’s brows still raise to hear the words. All he ever wanted, never told enough in Eren’s voice. In secret, Levi loved him. Quietly, between the dark shadows Eren’s heart cast, the confines of his own soul, and the stills of the river of their bond, until he opens his mouth.
“I love you too.”
And Eren breaks. The hitch in his breath turns from sharp and needy to aggrieved and disbelieving as he hangs his head and sobs.
Unable to make sense of Levi’s devotion to such an evil creature. It was Eren’s thing to be drawn to corruption and Levi deserves clean. Eren is anything but clean. Eren is dirt and chaos and rot and grit and wounds. Like a vessel of tar, blackened by the poison within him, and somehow Levi still loves him. Still isn’t hopelessly disappointed in him. It is like being handed a treasure, being handed the moon, and what could a person like Eren possibly do with the moon?
Thighs twitching, Levi waits for him. Patiently guides him with steady hands on his hips till Eren is more groaning than whimpering, and Eren will never understand why Levi would choose a war criminal who breaks down on him in the middle of sex but he will be damned if he lets go.
To Levi, Eren is worth it. Everything is worth the way his face contorts when he is on his brink, and lets out one last cry of Levi’s name. In that spectacular second observing how Eren comes, Levi knows hell is just another place he’d go to keep him warm and the ocean echoing inside Eren’s ribcage is somewhere he’d gladly drown to the bottom of.
When Eren’s shrapnel cuts into him and his soft lips connect with Levi’s again, the next sand-soaking rumble muffles his own moan as he warms all over and reaches his high with a shiver.
And it is romantic; as devastatingly romantic as the apocalypse Eren wrought. Because romance isn’t sugary or light. Its brightness blinds, its darkness consumes. A meld of equal parts beauty and destruction; the furor of passion, the blackness of the bottom of the sea, and the ever-changing visage of the moon. Dark and tormented and wonderful. Forest green and ocean blue. Molasses and blood. The smell of earth after rain and the soft fabric of the mattress beneath and star-gazing through the window and the stillness after Eren and Levi have had each other.
When Eren turns his head to look into Levi’s eyes, still nestled safely inside of him, it brings back some of his brave-hearted, laughter loving and loud thundering light.
Suddenly Levi doesn’t mind the cooling mess between them.
“Thank you,” Eren whispers.
First, Levi arches a severe brow against Eren’s gratitude. Thanking each other isn’t their style, but his face softens for the subtle smile Eren gives him; a violet in winter. As rare as it is precious.
And Levi squeezes him into his embrace, his ‘always’ unsaid but as clear as the gentling roar of the waves that will eventually be their lullaby.
For now, Levi holds Eren close, and Eren holds on, as they wait for their next flood to rush in.
…