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Levi tosses and turns in his sleep, unbeknownst to him. His eyes flicker behind his eyelids, and occasional grunts and murmurs can be heard in the otherwise quiet room.
Levi is soaring with his ODM gear frantically. Jumping from building to building in a desperate search, for what, he doesn't know. He just knows he'll recognize it when he sees it. The buildings look eerily like the ones in the Underground, but different somehow. Warped. He looks up and the ceiling is the Underground's, with the sparkling, useless ore glowing above him.
He checks every building he lands on, his unease rapidly consuming him until he is in an almost blind panic.
Then he sees It.
Familiar coattails disappear into a doorway.
He recognizes the building, but can't remember from where exactly. Doesn't matter. He lands, silent on his feet, and follows the coattails inside.
There is a seemingly neverending staircase ahead of him. He begins his ascent, skipping every other step, catapulting himself around the landings as if he's using his ODM gear.
He gets to what appears to be the top. There is a dark gray door, eerily familiar yet strange to him. He tries the knob but it's locked. Temporarily stymied, he drop-kicks it in his frustration. It opens a crack.
Levi pushes the door in all of the way. Darkness. He wishes he had a lantern with him, but charges forth regardless. The darkness swallows him, envelopes him, but he keeps moving forward.
He hears noises, quiet mewling, whimpering. It takes a second to recognize the sounds as human. When the realization hits, his panic turns into rage. Who has done this? He looks around but still sees only darkness. Shadows dance at the corners of his vision.
Suddenly a light appears, as if at the end of a long tunnel. He moves towards the light until he sees it's another door, slightly cracked open.
He creeps to the doorway, silent as a cat. He peers through the crack and what he sees makes him sick.
Echo is chained to a wall, beaten and bloody. Her head hangs down and her limp, dirty hair covers her face. The shackles that hold her arms up have left bloodied marks on her wrists, as if she'd been fighting against them.
Levi's rage envelopes him like a stormcloud. Seeing red, he kicks the door open with all his might.
Sat before him is a desk, neatly piled with paperwork, writing utensils, a notebook, typical office stuff. Sat behind the desk is Him.
Lobo.
Lobo's dark, beady eyes, peer out at him humorously from the dirty face. A smirk is crusted on his filthy mouth, mocking Levi. His scruffy beard looks the same as the last time Levi saw him, years ago: unkempt and dirty. Dirt is smeared on one cheek and blood is smeared on the other.
Levi knows instantly, Echo's blood.
White hot rage consumes him and he flies across the desk. His hands close around Lobo's filthy neck.
Just as he raises a fist to strike, Lobo vanishes. Levi turns, confused and angry, and suddenly the room is empty.
Levi wakes with a jolt. A sheen of cold sweat coats his face. He reaches out blindly and finds the sleeping form beside him.
Echo.
He breathes a sigh of relief. She is faced away from him and he snuggles up behind her, pulling her to him. His arm goes around her waist, fingers stroking the belly that's just starting to grow, indicating the life growing inside of it.
She giggles in her sleep at his gentle tickling of her belly. He stills his hand, so as to not wake her, but presses it firmly to her stomach to reassure himself that she, and his unborn child, is there.
Levi buries his face in her neck, breathes in her sweet scent that soothes him back to sleep.
~~~~~~~~~~
Weeks later, as he's charging back from the ocean, his squad trailing behind him, he thinks of these dreams. He'd had several of them over the past few weeks and knows now, in his gut, that they were a premonition of what was to come.
He makes the three day trek to Wall Maria in 18 hours, not stopping to make camp, eat, sleep. He makes the journey to Mitras, another three day journey, in 24 hours; slowed by the lifts that have to be utilized instead of gates at Walls Maria and Rose.
Upon reaching Mitras, and so the Underground, he knows where to go. He makes a few wrong turns, his memory not being what it once was, and the dreams not being an entirely accurate map to go on.
But he is eventually standing in front of the same building he saw in those dreams. It's not exactly the same, there are windows where the dream-building had none, filthy and smudged as they are. There are also sentries posted.
Levi slices his swords through their necks before they can utter a word.
His squad catches up to him as he's entering the building, breathless and just as furious.
Floch trails behind, hesitant. He'd done his job of finding and notifying Levi of Echo's abduction, and felt too obligated to the sweet, older woman who's always shown him kindness, to walk away.
Together, Floch, Eren, Hange, and the rest, follow Levi into the building. They disarm any lackeys floating around them, not killing them as Levi does with the ones he sees. They disarm and round up, tying them together with Floch keeping watch.
There isn't an endless staircase in this building. Instead there are floors where you have to cross them to reach the next staircase. Levi kills anyone in his path, his squad gathers the rest.
Levi eventually makes it to the top floor and sees the familiar door from his dreams. He finally recognizes this building as the one Echo had stayed in when she moved out of the brothel. It was uninhabited back then, no gang had taken it over, at least. There'd been relative safety here, back then.
Rage consumes him entirely as he approaches the door and kicks it in violently. His squad scrambles behind him, swords at the ready.
Echo is not in the room, as she was in the dream. His eyes scan fruitlessly and eventually land on the man at the desk across from him.
Lobo.
Levi's voice is low, dangerous.
"Where is she?"