Chapter Text
He thinks, not for the first time, that the produce aisle of a supermarket is not where he thought he'd watch the world end.
Truthfully, the world has been ending for months - sickness, blackouts, sickness, rioting, sickness - but this feels like a turning point. More than anything else.
The storm rumbles deeper than thunder should, cracks the linoleum floor just once, all the way through.
The sky is purple. Not sunset purple, or pollution purple, but the deep, sick purple of a bruise. Levi settles against the wall and digs his fingers into the skin of a mango only half gone bad, looking out the doors at the bruised sky.
This will be it. He knows this in his bones, somehow. The storm will be the thing that pitches the world into that dead, silent, apocalyptic sort of bullshit he had always hated to watch on TV.
He snorts now, cross legged on the floor of the produce section, surrounded by empty orange carts and half-rotten food.
When the storm finally empties onto the city, Levi hears screaming - or perhaps it is simply the hissing of metal, crumbling under the chemicals in the rain. He gets up, finds a plastic packing bin - impervious to most acids, he remembers - and crawls under it like a hermit crab. He falls asleep to the sound of the rain eating away at the supermarket roof.
When Levi wakes, it is to utter silence.
The roof of the supermarket is gone; whether eaten away by the acid rain hurricane or torn off by the wind, Levi does not know.
It is frightening, how quiet it is. Levi looks for food and water, but nothing has been left untouched by the storm. Cans of precious non-perishables are melted twists of nothing. Even the floor is pockmarked and uneven, full of craters and exposed asphalt.
Levi has no possessions except his clothes and the knife in his pocket, so he leaves, stepping carefully through broken front windows. He takes a deep breath and finds that the air smells better than it has in weeks, in months - as if the Earth has finally managed to break a fever.
Levi steps over the body of something he isn't sure was ever alive and thinks, Some fever.
He walks.
He walks for days, for weeks. He walks longer.
He's used to being hungry, and finds a surprising amount of edible food hidden away in various caches on his way. A starving childhood has prepared him so well for this environment it's almost uncanny.
The spot where the storm stopped is a clear line in both directions, black, half-eaten rock giving way to actual grass and Levi is so shocked to see such an expanse of green that he stops dead in his tracks, just staring. When he reaches it, he takes off his shoes and sets his bare feet against the soft grass and cries, just this once. It is the only noise he has made in months.
He walks through ruined cities, finds corpses in piles, and waits to be taken by a plague no one ever bothered to name, but nothing happens. It is as if the earth has forgotten him, the last of a virus it nearly destroyed itself eradicating.
The Earth is in recovery. The air is sharp and clear, the sky a brilliant, unblemished blue, and when Levi finally crosses into the endless expanse of a national park, he thinks he has never seen anything so alive.
He sleeps under a sky so full of stars it seems impossible, as if the black void of space couldn't possibly contain so much light, and thinks almost traitorously that - perhaps this is better. Perhaps humanity was a virus.
He has lost his voice.
After six months, he sees a family of deer crossing what used to be an interstate and sets off in the same direction they're going. It rains, and Levi shivers in fear just once before the rain is on him. He waits for the flesh to peel off his shoulders, his face, but nothing happens. The water is cool and clean and it smells better than Levi can remember anything ever smelling. He lays in the grass on his back and lets the rain pool in his upturned palms, the hollow of his throat, the dip of his navel. It warms when it touches his skin. For the first time in what feels like years, Levi lets out a breath. His chest eases.
After nearly a year, Levi sees something.
A glint of glass in the distance, off the top of a rusted, overturned water tower. Levi doesn't realize he's running until later, when he's already there. He climbs with numb, freezing hands, and the metal creaks under his weight. When his eyes fall on the man - living, breathing - he nearly loses his grip and falls off the tower.
The man's name is Erwin, and his eyes on Levi are preternaturally observant - Levi isn't sure if he shifts under the weight of it because of this, or because he hasn't laid eyes on a living person in a year. His voice is in the same sad disrepair as Levi's, and they go long stretches without speaking. Levi's fingers are wrapped so tightly around the knife in his pocket that they're going numb.
He starts setting traps and bringing food to the water tower without really registering it, and the two of them are sharing a camp before Levi realizes what he's done.
Finally, after three days of near-silence, Erwin builds a fire and gestures to it. Levi sits. They cook two rabbits; Levi's catch.
The night creeps up on them, spreads cool and indigo from one tree line to the other, and the fire is warm and safe and bigger than Levi usually builds his. The heat it gives off feels so good Levi has to fight the urge to hide the expression on his face.
Erwin wipes his hands on his pants after he eats and says in a cracked, rumbling voice, "So."
Levi looks up.
"You never told me your name."
Levi looks back down. The meat is charred on one side, and he takes a bite of it so he doesn't have to answer.
Erwin looks at him across the fire and it's frightening, the intensity of his gaze. He seems to let the question go, and for a while nothing passes between them but the fire.
"What did you do before this?" Erwin suddenly asks, as if he can't help himself.
Levi tears out the rabbit's seared throat with his teeth. "Doesn't matter," he says, and his voice is so disused it hardly sounds human.
"He speaks," Erwin mutters under his breath, watching sparks float off the fire and into the air.
"Fuck off."
One corner of Erwin's mouth lifts briefly, then fades away into a look of sheer amazement, as if he cannot believe he's just smiled.
Speaking leaves Levi's throat scraped raw, like he's swallowed crushed glass. Still, he asks, "How are you alive?"
Erwin picks the last of the rabbit out of his teeth. "I was going to ask you the same thing."
Levi shrugs. Erwin's eyes in the light from the fire look translucent, like if Levi leaned closer he'd see right through them. He does lean forward, almost subconsciously, and only the searing heat when he leans too close to the fire pulls him up short.
"I don't know how," Erwin says, looking into the fire with an expression so blank Levi wants to recoil in fear. "I was camping, under a tarp. The rain just rolled off of it."
The Storm is not what Levi means. But Erwin’s expression stops him from pressing it.
Something snaps behind Levi and he whips around, on his feet before the sound has even faded. He squints into the dark, eyes seeing nothing but the ghost of the fire in blue.
"Raccoon," Erwin says, and Levi looks at him over his shoulder. Erwin points.
The animal has a deformity on the whole left half of its body that looks like rot, as if it only half escaped the Storm but survived anyway, and Levi feels a sharp stab of pity before he sits again.
"I don't know where you sleep," Erwin starts, voice hesitant, "but you should sleep here." He doesn't add the with me that rings between them.
Levi considers it. Erwin looks away, looks at his hands - huge, filthy and a little bloody, with long capable fingers Levi feels certain he will dream about - as if to give Levi a chance to decide without the weight of that gaze on him.
Finally, Levi gets up and walks away. Leaves Erwin next to the fire watching him silently, with a sad, resigned sort of look on his face. He finds his camp - the moon is nearly full, and so bright Levi has no trouble - and gathers the tarp he's been sleeping on.
When he shows up at the fire again with the tarp in his hands, the expression on Erwin's face is so unabashedly delighted that Levi has to look away. He spreads the tarp on the ground and settles onto it, back facing the fire.
The ground is hard and cold, but the fire is warm and the air smells invariably of pine needles and rain, and the steady sound of Erwin's breathing is the most welcome thing Levi has heard in recent memory.
Right before he falls asleep, Levi says, "Levi."
There is a long, still silence. Levi feels strangely vulnerable, as if sharing his name has stripped him completely bare. He thinks he will hardly be able to stand hearing Erwin speak it. He cannot see Erwin, but the tone of his voice when he speaks is soft.
"Hello, Levi."
Levi says nothing. He ignores the shiver that slides down his shoulders, squeezes his eyes shut and ignores the way his toes curl.
He dreams of things he hasn't thought of in a year, and wakes sweating and shaking and so hard it hurts, curling into himself. The sky is still dark, so he settles back down and tries to sleep. It's nearly impossible - he can't stop remembering the dream. Erwin's voice, cracking. His fingers. The dip of his throat, the searing expression in his eyes. The way they were both consumed by fire.
Levi turns toward the fire, which has faded to warm, glowing coals. Over the coals he can see Erwin's back, the steady rise and fall of it while he sleeps.
Levi drifts off with the dream still haunting him.
The days stretch into weeks, and Levi and Erwin become Levi and Erwin without meaning to, without discussing it.
The water tower turns into a base camp, and Levi feels himself becoming something - shifting, from nomadic to sedentary. He thinks, This is how the virus of humanity started. He watches Erwin plant the seeds of edible plants he's gathered in a clearing next to the water tower and thinks of the agricultural revolution.
He waits for the Earth to sense this, the cultivation, the life they seem to be building almost as an afterthought. He waits to be wiped off the map.
Nothing happens. Weeks pass. Erwin talks. He tells Levi what he used to do before - Special Forces, and Levi is the least surprised he's ever been about that - while they cook together. His voice evens out over time, stops cracking, and Levi realizes it thunders when he speaks. Levi's bones shake with it.
Still, after all the talking and the cooking and the planting - Levi's grip on his knife does not loosen. He waits, every night, for Erwin to sleep first. And every night he considers killing him before Erwin gets the chance to do the same.
Two months pass at the water tower. Levi can count the times he's spoken on one hand, and yet Erwin seems to just know things: he never approaches Levi without announcing himself, and never from behind. He never so much as makes a move to touch him. He doesn't mention Levi's scars, which he surely noticed, or press him for information, and he always goes to sleep first.
So after weeks, Levi finally feels his grip on the knife in his pocket loosen. He sits across from Erwin in front of the fire while the sun sinks quiet and purple under the trees. Erwin is sharpening a knife on a stone, the sound repetitive and peaceful.
"Before," he says, and Erwin pauses in his motion for a second but doesn't look up, "I, uh."
Erwin starts again with the knife, and the sound lulls Levi into a sort of trance.
"I was a thief," Levi says. "A good one."
Erwin seems to understand - he always seems to understand - that speaking now may break the spell, so he just glances up at Levi's face and then back down at the knife.
"I had, uh." Levi's voice sticks in his throat. He clears it without much success. "I had family. They helped."
Erwin looks openly at him now, and Levi feels his grip on the knife loosen so much that it slips from his fingers. He holds both hands in front of the fire, empty, naked, warming them. Erwin's gaze drops to his empty hands and it shocks Levi down to his core, the intimacy of it.
He very nearly shoves his hands back in his pockets, but the fire is warm on his palms and there's something almost electric in the way Erwin is looking at them. His toes curl viciously inside his boots.
"This, uh, this brat called - called Isabel," Levi says softly, eyes on the fire, "She was our getaway driver." He huffs a soft laugh without realizing it. "She called me big brother, the fuckin' idiot."
Erwin is utterly silent now, all pretense of work abandoned. His eyes are sharp and almost painful on Levi's face. The crickets and bullfrogs are deafening in the face of Erwin's silence, the snap of the fire like a gunshot.
Levi says, "And Farlan -" but his voice cracks and he stops.
Levi looks up and sees an endless expanse of stars, watches a bat hunt insects fleeing the smoke of the fire, and wonders how something so utterly devastating as the Storm and sickness that ended humanity could have brought so much life.
"We can't be the only people who survived," Erwin says, voice quiet, almost a question. Levi is immeasurably grateful that he does not question him about his past.
"Dunno," Levi says. What he means is, No, we cannot. "Maybe not." What he means is, Sooner or later, something will come for us.
Erwin nods.
That night, he dreams of a forest.
Nothing like the one he is in – the kind that is so thick it looks like night at the bottom, the kind that strangles the life out of everything under it.
Something is moving under the ground. There is no explanation for how he knows this, but he does. The ground is alive in a way that is foreign to him – so are the trees, so is the air. It feels dangerous, insidious and invasive, to take a breath. The floor of the forest smells sweet and clean and he thinks of a Venus fly trap.
Levi stands at the base of a tree, huge and black with roots bigger than he is, and when he takes his pocketknife to the black bark at the side of the tree it bleeds.
The blood is slow and sticky, and it’s so dark that at first Levi thinks it is sap. But he reaches out a hand as if in a trance and touches it and the deep red of it, the smell of it, is unmistakable. Levi knows what blood smells like. He touches the tip of one finger to the tree again and then it’s on his fingers, and then it’s crawling up his hand, his arm, and then there’s blood all over him, he’s covered in it, he can feel it inside his mouth –
"Levi, Levi, wake up-"
Levi is kneeling over someone. He can still feel the blood sliding up his skin of its own accord, like it had a mind, crawling slickly up his neck and into his mouth, and he's kneeling over someone with -
A knife, his knife, his knife is cutting the thin pale skin of Erwin's throat.
Erwin is utterly still, speaking very softly and gently, "Levi, wake up, it's just me, it's just me."
Levi freezes, then moves the knife away too fast, and a bright scarlet drop of blood wells up under Erwin's perfect jaw.
"Fuck," he says, and he's panting and sweating. His heart is hammering from the dream and from the fear and from the fact that he nearly ended the only life he may ever encounter again. "Fuck."
Erwin holds his hands up, still flat on his back. Levi is still kneeling on top of him, one knee on either side of his torso.
Erwin says, "You alright?"
Levi scoffs, hands shaking. "Am I alright?"
"That's what I said."
"I just almost fucking killed you."
Erwin reaches up and touches the cut at his throat and looks at the blood on his fingers. Neither of them have moved; Levi can feel the heat of Erwin's body through his clothes. He's still so close to him.
"I've had worse," Erwin tells him, with what Levi thinks is meant to be a reassuring smile. But it is not a reassuring smile - they're too close, they are breathing too fast, the sky is pitch black and the warm, warm glow of the coals lights up the side of Erwin's face so that the smile becomes -
Intimate, draws too much attention to Erwin's mouth, and then he makes the mistake of meeting his eyes.
The smile drops off, and Levi is still straddling Erwin's chest. The air is cold, and the difference between the chill at his back and the searing heat of Erwin's body along the insides of his thighs raises the hair at the back of Levi's neck.
Erwin looks at him a long time, silent.
"Levi," he says finally, and his voice is lower than Levi has ever heard it.
It's not a question, then. Erwin understands, too, what is happening between them. He understands and still, he looks. Still he says Levi’s name in that voice.
Suddenly and without any warning whatsoever, Levi feels a surge of pure fear for the easy way Erwin looks straight to the heart of him. His insides freeze with it.
Abruptly, Levi stands and puts the knife back in his pocket, taking several steps away from the fire and standing with his back to Erwin, trying to control his heartbeat.
He sleeps poorly for the rest of the night, until he dreams again.
It’s Erwin, of course it is.
Levi has one hand over his mouth and the other digging vicious, bloody marks into the warm skin of Erwin’s back and he can’t stop making noise –
They’re in a desert. Levi has never set foot in a desert in his life, so his mind does a poor job of creating one. He curls his toes and Erwin fucks him into the cracked, scorched white earth until Levi is gasping for air, until the sun overhead becomes inescapable and he can hardly breathe with the heat of it, until sweat pools in the hollow of Levi’s throat and slips in warm, wet tracks down his back and onto the arid ground.
The sweat evaporates with a hiss immediately, like water in a sizzling pan. The image of Erwin in front of him is hazy with heat, and Levi can still hardly breathe.
Erwin says his name so quietly Levi wonders if it’s only in his mind, then digs his fingers into Levi’s hips bruisingly hard and Levi comes, right then and there, feels the dry air of the desert sucking every bit of the life out of him as he does. Feels himself dying.
When he wakes, it is slowly and easily, with a steady heartbeat and a lazy roll of his shoulders. No lingering fear, no shaking hands. He doesn’t remember the dream.
He sits up and immediately looks for Erwin, who he sees at the top of the overturned water tower. The sun is still low, and the mist of the morning has yet to dissipate, so that Erwin looks like scarcely a ghost - small and far away.
Something seizes Levi's chest and he calls out, "Erwin."
Erwin's head turns. It is silent in the morning air, so Levi's voice carries without him having to raise it. Erwin raises a hand and makes a motion for Levi to join him, and without thinking about it Levi obeys.
His shoes leave prints in the dew of the grass, and some of it kicks up onto the backs of his legs when he walks. The woods are so quiet Levi wonders how they can look so alive - but the leaves on the trees tremble with tiny droplets of water, bright green and soft and sweet-smelling, and the chorus of birds starts up once the sun gets high enough to wake them.
Again, Levi marvels at the sincerity of it. The silence. How beautiful the Earth is in her annihilation of the human race.
He reaches the top of the tower around the same time as the sun to find Erwin sprawled out on his stomach, hair a wild blonde tangle and feet clad only in his wool socks.
Erwin grins at Levi when he steps onto the top of the tower. Levi remembers the feel of him in his dream, the solid presence of him, the safe, warm smell of his skin, and scowls at him.
"Did you sleep at all last night?"
Erwin shakes his head, and Levi feels a stab of guilt - was he afraid I would kill him if he did - before he realizes Erwin is still grinning.
"I had an idea."
Levi raises an eyebrow and resists the urge to rub the sleep from his eyes. The sun is still a soft, early morning orange, and it's doing things to the little hairs sticking out of the top of Erwin's head. Levi finds that the sight of it makes his heart ache.
"An idea?" He asks. Erwin nods again and his eyes are wild with the joy of discovery. They look bluer than Levi has ever seen them.
"To fix this," he says, gesturing to the shell of what was once a radio. The inside of his bag is filled with salvaged parts.
A radio.
Erwin says, "We can't be all there is," and some dangerous mix of hope and disappointment leaps in Levi's chest.
“You think there are more survivors.”
Erwin nods, fiddling with some small mess of wires and batteries. “And we’re going to find them.”