A/N: Rivetra + requisite old and tired but still wonderfully angsty time loop plotline + scumbag Puella Magi Madoka Magica scenario + A POEM OF ABSOLUTE DEATH = death death death. (Title and epigraph culled from aforementioned poem of absolute death.)

And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

- "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem," Bob Hicok

He is never quite enough to save her.

In most worlds, he sees the flash, hears the thundering cry from deep in the forest, comes too late upon the broken remains of his squad, so uncharacteristically still they are nearly shadows. He cuts Gunther down, turns Auruo upright, closes Erd's mouth and eyes. His back when he salutes their bodies is so straight that it's like a rod of steel has been shoved through it, and he wonders how it can be that, for all his strength and all his supposed brilliance, for all the glowing praises and nicknames and titles the common people pile at his feet like flowers, this is all that he can give them. This is how he has always led them, even if in every dimension he knows as surely as he knows anything that they deserve better.

She's always the last one he finds. He's never ready to see the unreal angle at which her back is bent against the tree, look down into those fierce eyes and find them empty and fogged up as old glass. He spends a minute or so staring, never quite seeing, before he drops down to unbend her, lifts her up with a gentleness that is reserved exclusively for this. Each time he does it, the very second he feels her body fall back into his arms without an ounce of resistance, he knows—as surely as he knows anything—that that isn't her anymore. She is nowhere in there; instead he can imagine her laughter ringing through the forest like birdsong. He thinks of how much she loved the fresh air, the play of sunlight on leaves, how she was the only one who could say the world beyond the wall was beautiful and make him believe, and every cell in his body screams.

Sometimes they are fighting side by side, but in these worlds he is never fast enough. Everything slows to a crawl and he can see it all up close as if he was right beside her—her twisted spine, her blood blooming against the dark wood, the way Auruo's face distorts shouting her name, Eren's mouth open in a long, keening wail that is all beast and no boy. He thinks he's weakest in the worlds where he has to watch her die like this, because the chance to follow her is right before his eyes.

Once she is not quite dead by the time he reaches her, and he has exactly one minute to pull her from the tree and hold her, wiping her face with the corner of his cloak, cradling every broken bone close to his chest. The look she gives him in this last minute is urgent, almost panicked, full of tears. Her mouth moves, as though she desperately wants to say something—maybe Thank you or I'm so sorry for bleeding on your shirt or Did we make you proud, captain?—but sixty seconds slip by them too fast and he never finds out what it was.

Another time he only reaches her in time to push her out of the way, so that he's the one who shatters his body against the tree. He feels the pain burst through every one of his bones like a hot, blinding star; it's nothing compared to the sight of her eyes, blown huge and terrified over the titan's sinewy arm. It's the closest to success he's ever come, so far, but he hates it more than all the other failures because he never knows for sure if she made it. All he's certain of as the world disappears around him is that he's leaving her all by herself.

There is the rare world in which they never even really meet. Some faces are familiar—stony Erwin is always there, Hanji always a lunatic, that brat Eren Jaeger always with a big mouth and the fire of three suns—but different people fight at his back in the Special Operations Squad, salute him, call him their captain. In all of these worlds, he is knife-quick and exacting—he needs every doorpost and windowsill polished until they sparkle, every titan kill clean and precise and executed with minimal risk, every reconnaissance task completed faster and more efficiently than the last. He needs his subordinates to fear him because none of his many, many selves have ever been ready to carry their love.

In some of these worlds, though, they end up loving him anyway, for reasons as mysterious as the sea he's never seen. Enough to assure him endlessly that they're willing to die for him, and he tries not to feel the imaginary blade that twists in his gut when they do. In at least one, he has no squad at all—he staunchly turns down the position when Erwin offers it to him, tells him, "I'll only work with you." He doesn't know what poisons there are in the air they're breathing in this world because this Erwin actually doesn't bother to argue him down. He is free to operate alone and when the time comes he dies wresting his commanding officer from the mouth of a titan, and that's all that passes for happiness for him in any life.

But those four, they find him in small ways, almost as if their souls are threaded so tightly together it's impossible for them not to pass each other at least once. Gunther could be a builder in the Garrison, Erd a trainer of horses, Auruo a prince, and they drift in and out of his life with banter and easy smiles and firm handshakes. If they feel a vague sense of unease about the lauded Captain Levi, like he's different from how the stories make him out to be, shorter, less handsome, harder and angrier—or like, for some reason, they know that he's different, even if none of them can figure out how they know—they are at least good enough not to let him see it.

She is always farthest from him here, sometimes the third or fourth cadet in her graduating class, sometimes nowhere in the top ten and a blessedly ordinary member of the rank and file. Sometimes the others get to her before he can—he is there on the day when Erwin names her to his personal guard, and there again to see Hanji grin and present her with a lab coat, assure her her presence will make the research process so much smoother—and he is almost thankful in those instances that she's been stolen right out from under him. Maybe this is the last time; maybe she will be happy. Certainly he's not the only one who thinks that she's exceptional, and he can content himself with sneaking glances at the way the light moves through her hair, with watching those wonderfully fluid leaps and spins and slashes from out of the corner of his eye, half a mile away. He is almost thankful, until he glimpses her lying crumpled in the wagon with the wounded, sees the name "Petra Ral" scrawled in the ever-lengthening ledgers of the Survey Corps' dead.

She's not delicate. It's exactly 350 lives before he learns this for himself; 350 57th Expeditions with the words he wants most of all to say to her burning, straining at the back of his throat, before something terrifying and beautiful inside of him finally lets go. They are standing at the door of her quarters, and he's just walked her there from the common room out of courtesy, as they only have one lantern. She's wearing a smile for him as always, but he can see how the edges are frayed and tired and he lets go, and when she bows her head and says good night to him the only thing he can say back is, "I love you."

Her head snaps up so quickly he almost winces on her behalf from the whiplash, but she doesn't answer. The silence yawns between them like a chasm, suffocating.

Her voice when it finally comes out is nothing more than a thread of air. "Did you mean that?"

"I didn't mean to say that." The lantern in his hand flickers and falls on her in shards—the ends of her hair, her perfectly starched white collar, her lips. "That doesn't mean it isn't true."

It has been 350 lives and probably several thousand battles, but he's absolutely certain he's never felt his heart speed up the way it has in the last minute or so. He can feel it clattering around inside his chest, imagines the shrill, abrasive metal sound. "But I won't touch you unless you ask me to."

Don't ask, he wants to beg her, except all his speech has dried up. He knows that if she does, it will devastate them both. Go into your room and lock the door. This is an order from your captain.

She doesn't ask. Instead, she reaches for him. When her hands fist in the fabric of his shirt and all but drag him through the doorway, the lantern clattering to the floor at their feet and guttering out, all the blood in his body roars to his head and he is completely lost.

She isn't at all delicate; on the contrary, her body is lithe and strong and wound tight as a wire. They fall clumsily over one another into her bed and suddenly there is nothing in the way of both their mouths and her nails are scoring his back hard enough to bruise. There is something about this that feels exactly like battle. It's how he knows to stop fumbling around for words entirely and press his lips to every single pulse point, how he makes sense of all the different ways that she breathes—deep, quick, harsh, hollow, alive.

They lie tangled up in each other long after they're spent. Her hands have come up more gently now, fingers sifting lightly through his hair, and he has to swallow hard against the temptation to kiss her again.

He knows for certain that this is the warmest he's ever felt, that he could very well fall asleep here if they had time. He also knows they'll never belong to each other this way again. All he can do about it is swear not to repeat this mistake. They don't have time.

The thought is enough to make his eyes burn, so he buries his face deeper into the groove between her neck and shoulder, right up against the soft spot where her heart beats.

Sometimes they grow up together, though the worlds in which they do so are so starkly different each time that trying to account for them all makes his head throb with memory. They spend one life running through the serpentine, twisting alleys in the underground city, and he snatches loaves of bread from behind the hawkers' backs to feed them both, always takes just a bite or two and shoves the rest into her tiny, grubby hands. In another there are two small houses across the street from each other in Trost, and their mothers gossip cheerfully with each other as they hang the laundry out to dry, go to market together. He teaches her how to skip stones across the river that runs through the center of town. She sees to the cuts and bruises he inevitably incurs from brawling with other boys over stupid things—a bad joke about how his only friend is a girl, a fistful of mud thrown at her skirt.

Sometimes they are so close in age that they enter the Training Corps at the same time. It's easier then for her to take care of him, though he always tells her not to bother. She is the only one who will save him a seat in the mess hall or sneak into the boys' dorm to tuck an extra blanket around him on frosty nights, and she cheers for him louder than anyone when he inevitably graduates at the top of their class. In turn, he has so many chances to protect her—from bullies or wandering eyes or the low-hanging limbs of trees that she might not see on a particularly steep dive—that he can almost forget about the only chance that matters, looming so far ahead of them it may as well not exist yet.

Sometimes they are far apart in age and she spends her whole life admiring him from her bedroom window, blushing when he looks across the way at her and catches her staring. She jokingly calls him her big brother, and though they'll never be as close in these lifetimes—he's a man grown long before she stops being a girl—she is always just a few steps behind, tailing him like a shadow into boot camp, the Survey Corps, the world beyond the walls.

Always he climbs the ranks faster than she does, but it really doesn't mean anything. He's had many lives' worth of practice, after all, and anyway none of them will ever prepare him for the sight of her in action—bright blades arcing through the air, wires propelling her so high she looks like a winged thing. Always he chooses to ask for her service, even if he's told himself time and time again that he needs to stop. He knows full well what it will mean for her, but he can't help wanting, no, needing her in close quarters all the same, for however long they both have.

He takes care each time to emphasize, glowering down into her face and hoping against hope that this time she'll finally, finally understand, "I'm not ordering you to throw your life away for me. Take some time to think about it." Only she never needs time, and the ready brightness of her smile when she says, "Of course I will," is so breathtaking to behold that it cuts him.

These are the worlds in which they have a little more time, but in none of them does he tell her he loves her again. There are rare moments–when they pass each other in the hallway at night, when she brings her horse up by his on the way home from a scouting mission so they're riding knee to knee, when it is early in the morning and they are the only two alone in the common room, standing silently over a pot of coffee–that she looks at him for a few beats too many, and something that looks too much like longing rises in her eyes, as though she might say it.

In these moments he can feel the fear, reaching toward him with spindly fingers and closing so tight around his throat his vision starts to blacken. Never mind that she can't possibly remember loving him in any lifetime, any place, ever. He is the only one who ever remembers.

He abandons her exactly once.

They are riding back to the wall—this must be, by his count, their 1007th failure on this particular expedition—and the titans are at their heels, the horses so tired they're foaming at the mouth, the carts weighed down with too many dead. He's injured, his leading leg cracked and useless, and it's all he can do to spur his horse down to one of the carts so he can shout orders to the rank and file.

"Unload the dead."

For a moment the two green boys in the cart can only stare at him, their mouths hanging so stupidly open he wants to scream.

"Unload the dead," he says again. He knows that they can hear him, even if the gigantic footfalls pounding at their backs are shaking the very earth, making it quake and groan. "Do you know how many bodies we've failed to bring back all these years? They aren't special."

He isn't being entirely truthful. They are special, possibly. They could be, because his four are among them, because she is—but those that remain are running for their lives and he feels like the scum of the earth for being so selfish. He doesn't even know which of the corpses is hers. All he knows is that even if the body under one of those shrouds wears her face, the real her is long gone, probably already erupting into being somewhere else. She isn't in there anymore. "Consider it their last service to the cause."

He watches them fall out of the cart one by one, hit the ground and either roll out of sight or disappear under the titans' feet. His eyes are dispassionate, but then a stray gust of wind lifts the shroud away to reveal the unmistakable gleam of her hair, shot through with the sun's fire even in death. It nearly blinds him, and yet he can't tear himself away, craning his head back over his shoulder so far his neck aches, trusting his horse's feet to carry them all the way home.

This is, far and away, the most heinous crime he's ever committed, service to humanity or no. He'll hate himself for it until the day he finally dies for real, take it with him straight down into hell.

He can feel himself grow stronger with each life that ends and begins again. He has been fawned and fussed over, called humanity's strongest soldier for at least a hundred of them, but the praises and the gratitude ring so disgustingly hollow when he thinks of all the times he has failed her. At this point he has probably killed enough titans to build a castle with all of their bones. The irony is not lost on him that, though there are many thousands of lives he imagines he has preserved with each kill—or at least the many Erwins he's ever met have all told him so—he can never count her among them.

There must be, in all the millions of worlds, at least one in which he finally saves her. Maybe there's even one in which she doesn't need saving at all. He's never believed in or prayed to any particular gods, but he is keenly aware that it must be some kind of cosmic joke that humanity's strongest soldier is destined to fail so spectacularly, over and over again.

Still, whatever made him must have made her too. He is nothing if not precise, so he counts the number of times she has ever looked him in the eye and smiled, the cups of tea she's made for him without him having to ask, the hours she's spent wiping tables and sweeping floors and slicing titan throats to earn a few short words of approval. Somehow it's enough to keep him breathing, one day at a time.

This new world is unlike any he has ever seen because it has no walls, but by this time he doesn't even know which life it is—he's stopped counting, too tired to summon up the numbers.

In this world he lives on a farm just outside a small town in the south, and there is so much green, rolling plain unfolding from every side when he steps out of his front door. The real soldiers are tall young men with guns on their shoulders that they've probably never fired, and when they ride around town it is on mounts that are less muscled, slower, hardy and sweet-natured horses with longer manes and softer eyes. On a good day they laugh and joke with the townspeople, carry little boys and girls on their shoulders; on a bad day there is a petty theft in the marketplace, a scuffle in the tavern that needs to be broken up. There are no titans, no war, but he holds himself like a different sort of soldier anyway—leaping back from shadows, spending long hours gazing fretfully up at the too-blue sky. He dreams at night of other lives, other befores, and wakes up on the floor, blankets tangled and nearly suffocating him where he's twisted them too tightly.

His mother—he has a mother, sometimes he still can't believe it—runs into his room every night without fail, tries to gather him up and soothe him, ply him with questions about his nightmares. He's always torn between clinging to her with all the unnatural, bone-crushing strength in those spindly arms of his, and pushing her as far away from him as he can manage, because after all this time he still doesn't know what it means to be touched like that.

Eventually he remembers, starts to teach himself to be more like the him that existed in all the other worlds before this one. He stares at himself in the only mirror they have in the house and sees the terror flatten out, his old face come back—the eyes hard, the mouth thin, the face cold and expressionless as the polished surface of the mirror itself. In another life he may have had no shortage of intricate battle plans and biting remarks, but in this one he barely speaks unless he's spoken to.

He never loses the memories; sometimes they attack him so suddenly and so vividly that he almost falls over, all the breath knocked out of his body. The titans, the walls being thrown up around all that remains of the world. A forest somewhere even further south from their town, where the trees are so tall they claw at the sky, so dense that its floor is full of shadows. A name, the shape of one unmistakable smile, eyes a curious color between golden and brown that he hasn't ever seen on anyone else.

The years pass without incident. His mother puts him to work in her vineyard, and the workers refer to him affectionately as "Kuchel's young man" to the people who come from town to buy their grapes. Their customers are chatty and quick to laugh—they clap him on the shoulder, remark (somewhat falsely, he thinks) on how tall he's getting, how handsome, how adept at filling their baskets with the best fruit. He shrugs away from them, but without force, dropping his gaze to the ground because he has no idea what to do with so much kindness, even as the hunger for it opens up inside of him.

He discovers he has a good head for taking care of the vines. He knows, somehow, in his gut—the composition of the soil, how much compost they need, when the rain will come, how to tell when they are sweet as love and ready for picking. He spends days out walking among the plants so he can see them thriving and alive and gaze in awe at the proof that his hands have finally managed not to destroy something. All around him blooms this strange, bright world where few things are more certain than the next sunrise. She would be right at home in it. Every one of his bones is aching to see her, wonders when it will be.

The first sign is an order in the record book: Amett Ral. The man makes wine, his mother says, when he raises an eyebrow in silent question. Newly moved here from Stohess with a wife and a daughter.

They always find each other—he's been telling himself as much for years, content to watch and wait and let fate or God or the universe direct their steps, but that patience crumbles the second he finds out she is here, so near he can run out their front door and down the road into town. It will take him all of two seconds to find her house, and when he finally sees her he will grab her by the shoulders and ask her where the hell she's been, he's been looking all over for her—probably the most words he's spoken at once in this lifetime, undoubtedly the loudest.

The impulse to run, to shout, to do something stupid is so powerful it shocks him. He has to see her now and it's a hunger and a need; he's not even certain it's really her but it doesn't matter. He remembers what it feels like not to have enough time, never to have enough time, and he can almost see all the colors in the world running and bleeding through his fingertips but he checks himself, reels himself back from the edge and channels it all into one statement:

"Let me take care of the delivery, Mama."

The statement becomes a plan. His plans are always watertight, every variable accounted for, every possibility anticipated. He takes the biggest basket they have out to the front of the house and fills it with their farm's best yield—the fruit dark and wet from yesterday's rain, heavy with promise, likely the sweetest he's ever held in his hands. But he has spent several thousand lives fighting to pin her down and it makes absolutely no sense that he still hasn't learned how to fail. He can never, ever take it for granted that he knows how things will transpire for her, for them both.

"Captain?"

He hasn't heard that voice in more than twenty years, and it freezes him all the way through. He stops, half-hunched over the basket, eyes wide like he's been struck, and when he finally raises his head to look at her he can feel every tendon, every muscle in his neck and shoulders screeching with the effort.

His first thought is that she finally belongs here, in this world, with all its light and color and inexplicable softness; it was made for her. She is so like everything he remembers but also so unlike—long skirt, cotton blouse, shoulders bare and warmed through by the sun. And her hair. He does a quick search through all the timelines he holds in his head and he can't ever remember her having hair like that, tumbling to her waist in a thick fall of copper, curling wild and straining against the ribbons she's tied it back with.

Such hair has no place on a soldier's head. It's too long, too dangerous, too beautiful. It would get all tangled up in the wires.

It's only when she speaks again that he realizes he's been staring, her eyes wide and surprised. "I'm, I'm sorry—I don't know why I said that." One hand reaches out a little, as though she means to catch him should he topple over. "Are you okay? I'm being stupid; you're not a soldier at all, are you?"

No, he's not. And neither is she. For once, he is only a young man, and she is only a young woman, and they aren't duty-bound to die for this world, or for one another when they've never even touched—this far, no further.

He straightens up, reaches out a hand to meet the one she's offering. His voice sounds small and far away when he opens his mouth and starts to say, "My name's—"

"Levi." She's trying to smile, but she hears what she's just said and instead her brow knits, mouth making a small o of surprise as their hands touch. "Right? But, hey, that's odd; I didn't realize I already knew your name… Is that your name, even?"

It's like someone has lit a fire under his skin. This is the first time she's remembered his name—probably the first time she's used it, ever, even if she's known it for what feels like centuries. He is intensely thankful for the fact that his face has slipped back into its cool mask, that his hand around hers betrays nothing but a gentle, firm pressure.

"Levi Ackerman." His head spins a little, cycles through a series of perfectly logical explanations, anything to push that frown off her face, but all he wants to do is echo her name back to her. "You're Petra Ral, the winemaker's daughter?"

He can see the questions in her eyes and follows it up with, "I know we've never been introduced or anything, but it's not a big town, and my mother likes getting to know her partners." He's still holding her hand and thinks he should probably release his grip soon, otherwise he never will. "These grapes are yours, actually—your old man's, anyway. I was just about to take them to your house."

He doesn't think he's ever said so many words before, but it's worth it to see her face soften when he comes slightly breathlessly to the end. He lets go of her, suddenly shy.

"I know," she says, fiddling with the end of her braid as though she now doesn't quite know what to do with her hands. "My dad told me you'd deliver, but I don't know why, I just thought I should come." Those smooth shoulders rise and drop in a little shrug and he wonders, achingly, if her skin feels any different in this life. "Strange, isn't it?"

"Not so strange." His mouth moves upward, the muscles pulling into a shape he doesn't recognize, rearranging his face into an expression he's not sure he's ever worn before. It is strange to realize he only minds a little bit. "We'll be doing good business, I hope."

She's been beautiful in every life, in more ways than there are stars in the universe, but never in the way that she is now—so soft and fair and at ease. They've never talked like this either, never had a conversation in which he imagined it would be possible, at last, to tell her as much.

"I hope so," she says, and though the sun is setting slowly behind his house, the smile that bursts across her face is golden as the dawn.