all right guys...this is it...the end...

(;﹏;)

what an awesome ride it's been.

wanna thank you guys so much for reading this story-I genuinely hope that you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I love you very much 3

i'm in the middle of writing a bunch of other things that i shall soon post in this and other fandoms, so if you so desire, check it out yo.

(￣ω￣)

enjoy this final installation. I pray that, even if it's not the ending you were expecting/hoping for, it is an ending that can, in your mind, bring this story to a dramatic and emotional close.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

xoxo

34

I Drown

"I wonder when you'll get sick of hearing me tell you that I love you."

"I don't think I'll ever get sick of it."

"Then I'll keep saying it."

Levi, Erwin, Hanji, and Mike graduated in May. I went with Armin and Mikasa to watch the ceremony. I'd seen Levi look disinterested in things (the majority of the time), but I really had never seen him look so ambivalent about anything before. It was almost comical. Afterward we went to the frat house for drinks and, while Mikasa destroyed the frat boys at ping-pong and Armin explained to Erwin the steps that he took to ensure his hair remained silky smooth, I sat on the sofa with Levi in my lap. We whispered to each other in hushed tones that nobody else could hear, saying things nobody else would understand, brushing each other's cheeks with our eyelashes and letting our lips brush. It felt so natural, being in this place with these people. I wished it didn't have to end, wished they didn't have to graduate, wished that I didn't have to leave my spot on this couch or loosen my grip around my lover's waist. I kissed the back of his neck when nobody was looking and told him that I loved him.

Obviously, he and Erwin needed to stay in the city. I was doing my internship at the prosecutor's office over the summer so, understanding what we wanted without having to break the ice in bringing it up, Levi and I rented an apartment together. We moved in the very week after his graduation. Neither of us had much money so we just got the very minimal. A lot of the furniture was already there. On a hot summer's day, sweating and rolling our sleeves up and taking breaks to drink lemonade, we moved boxes and shifted furniture and threw the windows open because we were too poor to find an apartment with air conditioning. It was small, with one bedroom, a small kitchen, and a living room. But it was a mansion for us.

"Fuck it's hot," he said at one point, fanning himself with his hand.

"Sorry, want me to leave?"

"Up yours, you dork."

By the time we were finished (he insisted on cleaning the entire place, top to bottom), the place was sparkling and our fingers looked like prunes and the sun was starting finally to set. The sweat on our skin was drying up and we moved to the open window to look out at the bleeding sun descending behind the skyscrapers. He pulled out a cigarette, and as he leaned his elbows on the windowsill, I wrapped my arms around his waist and put my lips to his cheek.

"You like the place?" he asked.

"I love it."

"It's not the biggest, but it'll do."

"We could be living in a box on the streets and I wouldn't mind."

"You liar."

"Nope."

He turned his cheek into my kiss and put his hand over mine. Then he finished his cigarette and we got dressed to go out for Chinese take-out.

"If I asked you stay here, in my arms, forever, would you do it?"

"Without a second thought."

"Will you stay here? In my arms? Forever?"

That summer passed as both the happiest and darkest time of my life.

Because when you have a love like that, a passion burning with such intensity, it hurts. It brings you to your highest point and then, before you can blink, it drags you down to your lowest point. I couldn't have expected anything else from choosing to love Levi. I say 'choose', because you know what people say. Falling love happens whether you want it to or not—but staying in love is a choice. I think that's bullshit now, to be honest. I don't think I could have chosen anything else.

During the day I went to the prosecutor's office for my internship. For the first weeks it was exactly what you'd expect from an internship. Making copies and going on coffee runs. But eventually I started getting to shadow and go to court and take notes and talk to the police officers and agents that the prosecutor worked with. I wondered if one day I'd end up running into Erwin and Levi, but I should've known better. I had no doubt in my mind that the prosecutor knew about them, but I'm pretty sure it was his obligation to pretend not to know about the illegal things they were doing. It was enlightening and inspiring and when I saw the looks on victims' faces, seeing the people who hurt them being brought to justice, I knew that this was what I wanted to do.

In the evenings Levi and I made dinner. We went out. Did just about everything the city had to offer a few reckless, lovesick kids who had nothing better to do over the summer. We got used to ignoring what people said about us and we learned to focus on our own emotions, our own feelings, our own pains. I had never felt so complete, so satisfied, than I did that summer with Levi. Living together and sleeping together and cooking together and making messes and cleaning them up together. Singing to music terribly together, getting takeout together, sweating together, dancing when nobody was watching together, walking around in our underwear eating ice cream with sprinkles together. I was happy. I was so happy with him. I could come home and, if he wasn't already sitting on the couch with a cigarette or setting the table for dinner, know that he would coming walking through the same door and I could hold him in my arms and complain about how much I missed him only for him to respond, "It hasn't even been twelve hours."

We loved hard. Continued to burn bright and hot and dangerous. Pulled each other's hair and scratched each other's skin. Sometimes we were soft, letting our open lips hover and our fingers intertwine as the sheets twirled around our eager limbs.

I was happier than I'd ever been.

"Can I tell you something...kinda personal?"

"Of course."

"I've never wanted anything the way I want you."

I was more miserable than I'd ever been.

My attacks became more frequent. Some days he forced me, almost physically, to take my medication. He would throw out the newspapers and hide the radio and once he even went so far that he cut off the wifi so that I couldn't do any research on the Internet. I never felt satisfied, never felt comfortable, always felt like there was more I could be doing and there's nothing more frustrating than that feeling. Absolutely nothing.

As the intensity of our love ran its course, so did the intensity of every other emotion we felt. Frustration and anger and sadness. Some nights I went to bed with my screams still ringing in my ears. Some days we didn't speak, didn't touch. His indifference and coldness ripped me apart from the inside out, only for his gentleness and his sincerity to put me back together when the phases passed.

He and Erwin were out a lot. He still wouldn't tell me what he was doing—afraid that I was going to follow them or get involved. I found myself alone a lot of nights. The table set for two, the TV talking to itself, unbearable emptiness. I would sit on the floor of the kitchen, hugging my knees to my chest and tracing the stains on the tiles with my fingers as tears—from what? these running-too-high emotions?—slid from my eyes. I would ache for him. And then I would feel angry and abandoned and convince myself that I never wanted to see him again. So when he walked through the door at four in the morning with bruises and cuts and a nasty expression in his eyes I yelled and screamed and he spat at my feet and I took in more of his poison.

Maybe the problem was that we always came back. Reached for each other with silent apologies. Always. Every time. I would cry myself to sleep only to wake up in the middle of the night and see him smoking. Then I would wordlessly get out of bed and lean my forehead against his shoulder, wrapping my arms around him and pressing my palms to his chest. My tears would begin to slide down his bare back while he stared out at the horizon and reached up to put his fingers in my hair.

"I love you," he would whisper. The only times he ever initiated our perhaps pointless declarations.

"Do you really?"

"Yes."

"I love you, too." My voice trembling, fingers clutching. "Please come to bed."

"Okay."

"How deep into hell are we gonna drag each other?"

"Until we're completely consumed with each other."

"I'm already completely consumed with you."

I came home one Friday, exhausted and getting sick of having to wear this stupid tie, and I heard strange sounds from within the apartment. I stood outside for a few moments, loosening my tie, and then I went inside.

Levi was in the middle of the kitchen. Surrounded by everything we had in the cabinets, strewn onto the floor. Even the food. As I gazed, wide-eyed, at the rest of the room, I saw everything in disarray. Furniture overturned, what little decorations we had broken and thrown across the tile floor, the smell of something burning.

He was pulling at his disheveled hair, gritting his teeth, shaking his head and pounding it. His breathing was ragged and his clothes torn and his eyes wild. I had never seen him like this. Had never imagined him like this. Was so shocked that I was paralyzed, could do nothing but watch, as he grabbed a pot from the counter and threw it across the room at the television. As it narrowly missed, hitting the ground with a loud thud, I came to my senses. I dropped my bag and ran. He grabbed another pan but I grabbed his wrists and screamed his name and stared into his crazed, bloodshot eyes.

"Levi!"

"Let go of me!"

"What the hell are you doing? What happened?"

"I said let go."

Even as he said the words, he began to relent. As I shushed and said his name and forced him to lower his hands.

"Hey. Hey, it's okay."

Both of us shaking, I put my hands to his head and forced it down to my chest. I felt him reach up and grasp at the cloth of my shirt. We slid down to the floor together, and suddenly he was grasping me so tightly that it hurt, clutching as if afraid that I would disappear. And then he was crying against me and I was crying, too, though I wasn't sure why. I stroked his suddenly small, suddenly vulnerable back.

"I'm sick of it, I'm sick of it," he said. "I don't want this anymore. I don't want this life."

"Levi..."

"I can't stand it anymore."

"Don't lose sight of why you're doing it in the first place," I said. "Whenever I feel like shit, that's what I think about."

He was silent, falling against me as the energy left his body.

"No regrets, remember? You're doing this because it's important. Because it matters. Because you know you can."

"Maybe I'm just fucking insane."

"I don't think so."

"Well you're insane, too."

"I can't argue with you there, I guess."

"Don't let go."

"Never."

It was the only real breakdown I ever saw him have.

The summer came and the summer went. We fell harder in love and by the time the new school year was peeking around the corner, I was drowning in his poison. Drinking it in with a stinging tongue that had become addicted to it. And even then, my skin peeling off and my eyesight blurring, all I could do was look up at him and wish that I could see him fly.

"Why can't this be easy? It's always so hard."

"Nothing we deserve is ever 'easy' to get. The way of the world, I guess."

"Maybe we don't deserve it anyway."

We decided to keep the apartment, meaning I would have to commute to class every day. I didn't particularly mind. It was hard for the first few weeks getting back into the swing of college life. I couldn't get back home until much later and spent the majority of my days studying with Mikasa and Armin. Sometimes Levi picked me up so I wouldn't have to deal with the woes of public transportation. It wasn't as blissful as summer, but I was with him. So I didn't care about much else.

"I've been meaning to ask you..."

"Hmm?"

"Where do you want to fly?"

Our fingers were laced together beneath the covers, cradling each other's hearts in our palms. Our eyes were closed because looking into them would have been too overwhelming. I was hurting, and he was hurting, but we were hurting together. Cursed together. At least for now. I listened to the sound of his breathing and felt it against my lips. We might have been asleep—we weren't, but we might have been. The summer was fading and we could feel the chill from the autumn air flowing in from the window. Always open.

Just in case.

He said something, I think, and I heard it, but I don't remember what he said. I wish I did. I wish I remembered every breath, every syllable, every twitch of his skin and every beat of his heart. I remember that, somehow, he didn't smell like cigarettes. No. Like black tea, ginger, a little hint of lavender. I wondered what I smelled like to him.

What do I smell like to you? Empty promises and meaningless proclamations of a love that will surely, surely, surely last an eternity? Or maybe a bonfire, where we burn the remains of our smartphone selfies and refrigerator post-it notes and truncated text messages.

thx. cya. 3 u. sushi 4 din?

Actually, I probably smell like the poison I find myself sinking into, but I don't know what that smells like. It could be lilacs or the ocean or horse shit. I don't know.

He must have been reading my mind. He squeezed my fingers and he said, "You smell like home, Eren."

"What does home smell like?"

"I don't know. But when I breathe you in I smell home."

He kissed me and I tasted every truth and every lie that had ever made its way to his sweet, soft lips. There were insults and compliments and curse words and six o'clock in the morning veggie omelets on his tongue as it wrapped around mine. Soaked it with wet, used up cigarette butts thrown from the top of a mountain so high we could see the whole world. I suddenly wanted to learn how to drive a stick shift and wondered why I had never asked him to teach me.

I said his name and when I did, I was sobbing, because I knew.

"I love you. I love you so much it hurts. Even knowing where this leads—where it's going to take me—how far down I'm going to go. I'll never regret a single moment spent with you, you know that? My heart is yours and my mind is yours and my soul is yours, all of me. Yours. All of me. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes."

A silence, filled with blood dripping from my lips.

"You're mine. I'm yours," he said. "We can say it a thousand times. A million times. As many times as we want."

"Will the word 'love' lose its meaning if I say it a certain number of times?"

"No."

"I love you. I love you. I love you..."

"Hey. If you knew it was going to turn out this way, why did you do it?"

"I didn't have a choice, really. I was yours from the moment you first said my name."

"We always have a choice. Always."

He went to the window in the middle of the night, but he didn't smoke a cigarette. He just leaned his arms against it and stared. I could see the feathers of his wings fluttering. I saw the way that he was digging his nails into the flesh of his scarred arms. He looked like an angel. The kind that is beautiful and merciless, but so unaware of its own beauty. Frightening. Pale and lit up by the gaunt rays of the moon. And he was so still that I wondered for a moment if I were dreaming. But I saw him blink, watched his eyelashes fall and rise up again. I watched the muscles of his body as he breathed, quietly, tenderly. I reached my hand out and thought that maybe, if I try hard enough, I can reach him without him having to move even a little bit. That would be ideal, I thought. If only I could reach out and touch him from here.

If only from here.

When I fell asleep, I fell asleep knowing that Levi would be gone by sunrise.

I woke up choking, burying myself in tears, unable to breathe.

Blind. Deaf. Mute.

Lost. Shaking. Wailing.

Alone.

why didn't you stop him

why couldn't you have loved him right

but you knew it would end up this way didn't you

you stupid fucking idiot you knew it

why couldn't you do anything about it

I lost myself in my sorrow. Surrounded myself with it because I had nothing else to surround myself with. Everything was empty.

Levi was gone and I was left behind, drowning, soaking myself in the poison he had left me and wasting away in it.

"Hey, Levi."

"Yeah?"

"Would you call yourself rebellious?"

"Me? No. Not rebellious."

"What would you call yourself?"

"...Nobody."

"Then I'll be nobody with you."

Epilogue

We Are Nobodies

He didn't leave a note.

In fact, he didn't leave a single trace of the fact that he had even lived here in the first place. He had disappeared into thin air. I had absolutely no way of tracking him. Nobody knew where he had gone. Not Erwin, not Mikasa, not Hanji, not Petra.

As if he really had spread his wings and flown away.

I managed to stay in school for the rest of the year, but when the next summer rolled around I did the only thing that I could've done. My soul was no longer mine, after all. My heart, no longer mine. They belonged now to a ghost, whose silhouette at the window I still remember like a Polaroid picture in my mind. I was not my own.

I dropped out, reassuring my friends that I would be back—I just needed some time to find myself again. Search for what I had lost in every corner, every bend, anywhere a reasonable person might think of looking. I followed even though I had so little to go off. Nothing, really. A name, a face, an image, a fleeting memory.

"Let's play a game. If you had to guess where I would rather be, anywhere that's not here, where would it be?"

"I don't know. The beach?"

"Trick question! Nowhere. I wouldn't rather be anywhere than here."

You can say it now. You can tell me I'm crazy and I won't deny it. You're right. But, really, there's nothing I can do about it now. It's been two years and I'm still searching. I taught myself how to drive a stick shift and I managed to scrape up enough money to buy an old used one. Name a place in this country, and by now, I've probably been there. I haven't gotten any closer to finding him.

I don't blame him for leaving. It's something he needed, and something he deserved—I meant what I said when I told him that I believed he could fly, and that if it was something he wanted, he should do it. What were the wings for, then, if not to fly? I think the first time I realized that he was ready was when I walked in on him wreaking havoc on our apartment. When he grabbed me and said, I'm sick of this. But I know that, wherever he is, he's fighting. He's fighting for Farlan and Isabel, for the lives lost and relationships gained. He's doing what he needs to do.

After he disappeared the police went on a manhunt. I'd forgotten for a moment that he was originally a wanted criminal. They claimed that he betrayed him and, overnight, Levi again became a fugitive. I talked to Erwin about it. He told me that he was upset but didn't feel really betrayed. Levi had done what he could and it wasn't right to keep him tied down here. I agreed.

Knowing that doesn't make it hurt any less, and it doesn't make me want to find him any less. I love him in the same way that I loved him then, I want him in the same way that I wanted him then, and I am still completely his.

Armin and Mikasa told me not to. They begged me to stay in school—at least graduate—but I can't. Not after giving myself up like that.

I know Mikasa was upset, too. But she's always been much better at hiding her feelings and acting pragmatically than me.

"If I were kidnapped, would you come looking for me?"

"What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I would."

"Okay, just checking."

Here I am. Sick in love and searching for the devil I sold my soul to. Not to get it back, but to know that he still has it.

I want to know where he always used to stare. When he was at the window. I always assumed it was the sun as it rose or set, or maybe the moon. Maybe nothing at all. But I'm convinced now that he was staring—and is probably still staring—at a very specific place. I always wanted to know, even when I used to sit in bed and watch him. I didn't recognize the desire, the hunger in his eyes then, but I can see it now. There, on the horizon, is a place that Levi needs to fly to. What I don't understand, though, is why he has to do it alone. Why can't he take me with him. Why can't he keep loving me, what is so wrong about being so in love with someone that it hurts?

A load of shit coming from me, I know.

I call him every day. I never expect him to answer. For all I know, he's changed his name and his number and is in a different country where he can't receive stupid phone calls from stupid kids. But I still call him. Every day it's the same: it rings five times, and then goes to voicemail. I wish that he had recorded his voice telling people to leave a message, but Levi was never so trite, so I don't even have that to remember him. After the tone, I leave a message. Telling him about my day. About people I meet, places I go. He used to tell me how much he loved to hear my voice. How it calmed him when he felt that he was going crazy. I know, somehow, that he hears my voice and it reminds him of himself again.

"Hey, it's me. Again. I mean, who else would it be, right? Anyway, uh, wanted to say hello. And I miss you. Today I drove all day. I didn't stop to eat because I wasn't hungry. Arctic Monkeys came on the radio and I remembered that time I came to your apartment to bring you the Arctic Monkeys CD. It's always the little things that remind me of you—not that I forget about you for a single moment. Lame, I know, but it's true. I know I say this to you every day, but...I don't know. I feel like it's not that bad to hear someone tell you how much they care about you every day. Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, I hope that my voice still makes you feel the same way it used to."

I pause and crush my cigarette butt beneath the heel of my boot.

"You told me that you'd always love me, and maybe that was a lie, but...maybe it wasn't. I'd like to think it wasn't. You know how I feel by now, don't you. I'll love you every second of every minute of every day that I'm alive. You know that. I told you so many times. I don't know what to do when I'm not loving you. Anyway, I have to get back on the road. I love you, Levi. I love you so much. I'll call you tomorrow."

I get back into the car and put the keys into the ignition.

"I hope your wings are serving you well. One of these days I'll see you soar. I swear it."

I hang up and toss my phone into the passenger's seat. I light another cigarette. Then I pull out of the gas station and I drive—letting my gaze move up to the sky every few moments. Waiting to see the glistening, black feathers.

I'm comfortable with the fact that, now, we are truly nobodies together.