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Solace [Levi x Reader]
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Literature Text
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It was with a detached sort of yearning that Levi thought of you. You were a constant in his life, a constant he felt he had perhaps taken for granted all these years.
He stared solemnly down into the dark dregs circling the inside of his teacup. The taste was still in his mouth; the dull tang of black tea, with the faint aroma of bergamot. It was how you always prepared his tea, every single day. But it tasted bad now, like there was a sour bitterness that he couldn't quite place.
It seems that, too, was something he had taken for granted.
The breath that passed his lips was shallow and tired, like the last breath of a dying man who had nothing left to live for. He let the tilted china cup fall back in it's saucer with a light tink, before allowing the dull throb of silence to slowly press onto his ear drums.
Several sharp raps came from the door.
'Levi!' It was Hanji, and her godforsaken voice on the other side. 'Meeting's in ten minutes, hope you haven't forgotten!'
He didn't answer. He blinked, and glanced down at his primly crossed legs. He felt awfully strange, as though a cold, damp sort of weight had settled in his bones. He stood up, intending to head over to Erwin's office for the briefing. His movements felt slow and heavy, but he brushed it off as tiredness. It was true, to say the least. He could not remember the last time he had got a proper night's sleep.
You were always nagging him about sleeping properly. A fleeting smile crossed his lips, followed immediately by a sense of shock at his own unconscious action. It had been so long since he'd smiled, he had almost forgotten what it felt like.
Though for some reason, your smile was something he could never forget. It was like the sun: after seeing it only once, that warm glimpse of golden hope would stay in one’s mind forever, even if only as a faint, drifting memory, floating somewhere behind the faces of lost friends and sunken dreams.
Rounding the corner of a tiled hallway, he felt the tugging urge to see you again. He could, if he wanted to. He was in a military base, the means necessary were always just a hair breadth away from his fingertips. But something stopped him every time. Perhaps it was the constant call of duty, or perhaps, ironically, it was you.
Whenever you were up to your ears in expedition preparations for your squad, he would try and steal some of your time. You would scold him, and tell him to wait for the right moment, until everything that needed to be done was done.
And so, he would wait to join you, until he felt like it was finally time.
'Levi, thank you for joining us.' Levi spared the commander a nod, ignoring the flash of pity in the man's flat cerulean eyes. It was not a kind pity, but one couldn’t expect much more from the ever-stoic leader. Levi was not the first broken soldier the commander had come across, and nor would he be the last.
Hanji did not bother hiding her concern—it was all over her face like a mother's fret over her child. It made him sick. He found himself staring at a chink in the window behind Erwin's head for the duration of the meeting.
It was pointless, really, as he already knew what he had to do. Go out there. Fight. Live. Come back. And do it all over again.
He barely noticed when the meeting was over. Hanji was mumbling desperately at his shoulder as he strode back to his own office, but he let her inquiries wash over him like water over stone. He found peace once the pine door was shut in her face, cutting off the infernal sound of her concern.
All he wanted was silence. Couldn't anyone see that?
He wanted to be alone with his own mind, no matter how insane it might drive him. He wanted to sit in silence until the weight of it crushed him completely, like the paralytic density of several tonnes of water engulfing him in his entirety.
He wanted to drown in his own loneliness.
Levi got up, and walked quietly into the adjoining bedroom. He tried not to look at the bed as he undressed. Even getting into it, he faced the wall, his back to the crisply ironed white sheets.
The silence of several minutes was strained, like a taut string. He waited, waited, for the pain and memories to come, to engulf him and suffocate him in the bare, open darkness.
Fingertips trailed over his shoulders, and he stiffened. Hunching over slightly, he bit his lip as the hands cupped the firm skin, flooding his arms with a gentle warmth. It felt so achingly familiar, and all he wanted now was to turn around and bury himself in the soft, adoring warmth. After all, he could recognise your touch anywhere.
'Stop, please.' The whisper was hoarse from his lips, and the warm fingers on his back stilled. By now, he could even feel the brush of your sweet breath on the back of his neck, and hear the gentle rustle of your hair against the neighbouring pillow.
It was in the darkness when he found himself plagued by nightmares of hellish origin and the countless retelling of the deaths he had witnessed with his bare eyes.
It was your presence that brought him peace at times like those. He could never understand it. You had such a kind, humble disposition. God, you should never have been a soldier.
Somehow, you carried a little candlelight wherever you went. And when you were with him, just a small, flickering flame was all it took to push away some of the bleak, choking darkness, and keep the two of you safe within the little cocoon of soft yellow light.
Levi slowly curled in on himself, silently begging for his own little candlelight to hide with in the darkness. Something thick lurched in his throat, and he choked down a sob. Quickly raising his hand to his mouth, he sank his teeth into his fist, distracting himself with the draw of his own blood as his eyelids burned like hot coins, rims spilling unwilling droplets of salty liquid onto the cotton below.
Burying you was the second hardest thing he'd done in his life. Missing you was the first.
The morning of the expedition was like any other: lifeless and tense with the expectation of death. It was unspoken amongst the soldiers that this was a time in which everyone steeled themselves, tried to convince themselves that dying might not be so bad after all.
Levi almost smiled again. He could remember your last morning so clearly, it was painted in his mind like a pretty picture. You were on your horse before anyone else, a genuine smile on your rosy lips as you joked about being a survey corpse. He had told you to shut it, and to save the shitty jokes for when you got back.
'Onwards!' The great gate rumbled through the ground as it rose, thick spikes lifting into the air as the view of the desolate town on the other side of the wall opened up like an unfortunate gift against a misleadingly beautiful green scenery.
The parade of military horses began to move, hooves cracking against the cobblestones like hail on a tiled roof. They started at a slow trot, before pushing into a gallop, and before long the wind of the open fields was whistling in Levi's ears, the thunder of hooves lessening as the soldiers dispersed into their formation.
He saw a young man with sandy blonde hair and kind brown eyes mutter a silent prayer to the heavens, before the boy turned and followed his team to the flank. Levi wondered what he had prayed for. Himself? His friends? His family? Or perhaps simply to live another day, which would certainly satisfy all three.
Levi had never prayed before, and now it seemed more pointless than ever. Death was no longer something he was afraid of—but who isn't afraid of death, in the end?
The other side was not as daunting as it had once been now that he had seen it in his dreams: white cliffs and mystical turquoise waves crashing, sparkling like untold jewels in the high sun.
And, after all, you were waiting for him.
Good lord, he could even picture it now, at the centre of this blood and carnage-ridden world. A paradise for only him and you. In his mind, you wore a white dress. Nothing too showy, but just simple enough to bring out the smile in your eyes and the soft features of your face.
You used to talk about marriage together. He was always reluctant—with your professions, there was no telling what might happen from one day to to the next. It did not seem like it now, though, as the sun reigned down on the progression from the middle of a periwinkle sky, which was dotted with white cotton balls of clouds. It seemed a cruel joke, to have such beautiful weather now that you were gone.
More than ever he wanted to see the light glance off your eyelashes and the curve of your lip. The shadows light made on your face would always enchant him, and by the end of the day he would find himself being gently rocked to sleep by the hum of your murmuring voice and the pattern of the shadows from the fire dancing across your cheekbones like pictures in a storybook.
Only after the teeth-achingly cold realisation of your death did he he understand just how deep his love was for you. Regrets plagued him for weeks. You deserved so much more from this world, and he tortured himself every night for not having been able to give you all of it. He wanted the world for you. He wanted you to wear your white dress, and to bind yourself to him for ever.
But it was too late. It was too late, too late, and all he could do was wait for was for the sky to durn dark and for oblivion to engulf his world. With hope, he'd find himself soaring up to meet you as opposed to the bleak torment of hell beneath his feet.
He wanted peace. He wanted to find it, not in the world but within himself. He wanted to find you, and to stay with you until the end of existence.
This was the only thought running over in his head, even as the black smoke pillared off to his left. The wind had picked up now, making the coarse material of his green cloak flap sharply against his sides. A signal from the commander told him what he needed to do, and he nodded to the few members of his squad behind him. They moved into action. His horse veered left, mimicking the others, and they headed straight towards the abnormal titan, prepared to rid the world of it's presence.
Why did nothing change? It was the same pattern all over again, never changing even as he wiped the trickle of blood from his chin. His heart was on fire now, as the glints of blood in the trees caught the sun, sparkling momentarily like morbid dew in the morning. Already a small body was strewn across the damp ground, and he recognised the brown curls, in his mind matching them to that perky smile and the delivery of files in the morning. Cassey, he recalled. She, too, should never have been a soldier.
He pushed off the branch, and flung himself towards the savage titan. It's head rose to look at him with confused, dull green eyes, but Levi felt nothing. All he saw was your eyes as the life drained from them, that quick flash of wild terror before the lights of the world were brutally snatched away from you.
That was the first time he had screamed, actually screamed. His heart had been torn out of his breast, along with his raw voice as your hands had scrabbled at his chest, desperately trying to cling onto your life with him.
Click.
Suddenly, he was no longer flying, but falling. The triggers on his handles jammed, and wild fear whipped through his nerves as he wondered:
Is this how it ends?
Perhaps it was time. Yes, perhaps it was.
A part of his mind was yelling, banging fists against an invisible wall with the reminder of his duty to humanity. But the protests were numb, as if the rest of him was very, very far underwater, cut off from all sound and reasoning.
It was okay for him to give up. He had given everything for the cause. And the last thing he could possibly give was his life, wasn't it?
And so, in one last moment of desperation, he hoped to see his life flash before his eyes, to at least glance at a few of the faces he'd held so dearly only to lose them. But all he saw was the sun shining gloriously in the sky, and a fragment of your hopeful smile. So when firm jaws finally clamped over his body, the pain was no longer there. The ache in his heart was gone, as high as his soul soaring in the heavens above, leaving nothing but a solaced smile on his dying lips.
It was with a detached sort of yearning that Levi thought of you. You were a constant in his life, a constant he felt he had perhaps taken for granted all these years.
He stared solemnly down into the dark dregs circling the inside of his teacup. The taste was still in his mouth; the dull tang of black tea, with the faint aroma of bergamot. It was how you always prepared his tea, every single day. But it tasted bad now, like there was a sour bitterness that he couldn't quite place.
It seems that, too, was something he had taken for granted.
The breath that passed his lips was shallow and tired, like the last breath of a dying man who had nothing left to live for. He let the tilted china cup fall back in it's saucer with a light tink, before allowing the dull throb of silence to slowly press onto his ear drums.
Several sharp raps came from the door.
'Levi!' It was Hanji, and her godforsaken voice on the other side. 'Meeting's in ten minutes, hope you haven't forgotten!'
He didn't answer. He blinked, and glanced down at his primly crossed legs. He felt awfully strange, as though a cold, damp sort of weight had settled in his bones. He stood up, intending to head over to Erwin's office for the briefing. His movements felt slow and heavy, but he brushed it off as tiredness. It was true, to say the least. He could not remember the last time he had got a proper night's sleep.
You were always nagging him about sleeping properly. A fleeting smile crossed his lips, followed immediately by a sense of shock at his own unconscious action. It had been so long since he'd smiled, he had almost forgotten what it felt like.
Though for some reason, your smile was something he could never forget. It was like the sun: after seeing it only once, that warm glimpse of golden hope would stay in one’s mind forever, even if only as a faint, drifting memory, floating somewhere behind the faces of lost friends and sunken dreams.
Rounding the corner of a tiled hallway, he felt the tugging urge to see you again. He could, if he wanted to. He was in a military base, the means necessary were always just a hair breadth away from his fingertips. But something stopped him every time. Perhaps it was the constant call of duty, or perhaps, ironically, it was you.
Whenever you were up to your ears in expedition preparations for your squad, he would try and steal some of your time. You would scold him, and tell him to wait for the right moment, until everything that needed to be done was done.
And so, he would wait to join you, until he felt like it was finally time.
'Levi, thank you for joining us.' Levi spared the commander a nod, ignoring the flash of pity in the man's flat cerulean eyes. It was not a kind pity, but one couldn’t expect much more from the ever-stoic leader. Levi was not the first broken soldier the commander had come across, and nor would he be the last.
Hanji did not bother hiding her concern—it was all over her face like a mother's fret over her child. It made him sick. He found himself staring at a chink in the window behind Erwin's head for the duration of the meeting.
It was pointless, really, as he already knew what he had to do. Go out there. Fight. Live. Come back. And do it all over again.
He barely noticed when the meeting was over. Hanji was mumbling desperately at his shoulder as he strode back to his own office, but he let her inquiries wash over him like water over stone. He found peace once the pine door was shut in her face, cutting off the infernal sound of her concern.
All he wanted was silence. Couldn't anyone see that?
He wanted to be alone with his own mind, no matter how insane it might drive him. He wanted to sit in silence until the weight of it crushed him completely, like the paralytic density of several tonnes of water engulfing him in his entirety.
He wanted to drown in his own loneliness.
Levi got up, and walked quietly into the adjoining bedroom. He tried not to look at the bed as he undressed. Even getting into it, he faced the wall, his back to the crisply ironed white sheets.
The silence of several minutes was strained, like a taut string. He waited, waited, for the pain and memories to come, to engulf him and suffocate him in the bare, open darkness.
Fingertips trailed over his shoulders, and he stiffened. Hunching over slightly, he bit his lip as the hands cupped the firm skin, flooding his arms with a gentle warmth. It felt so achingly familiar, and all he wanted now was to turn around and bury himself in the soft, adoring warmth. After all, he could recognise your touch anywhere.
'Stop, please.' The whisper was hoarse from his lips, and the warm fingers on his back stilled. By now, he could even feel the brush of your sweet breath on the back of his neck, and hear the gentle rustle of your hair against the neighbouring pillow.
It was in the darkness when he found himself plagued by nightmares of hellish origin and the countless retelling of the deaths he had witnessed with his bare eyes.
It was your presence that brought him peace at times like those. He could never understand it. You had such a kind, humble disposition. God, you should never have been a soldier.
Somehow, you carried a little candlelight wherever you went. And when you were with him, just a small, flickering flame was all it took to push away some of the bleak, choking darkness, and keep the two of you safe within the little cocoon of soft yellow light.
Levi slowly curled in on himself, silently begging for his own little candlelight to hide with in the darkness. Something thick lurched in his throat, and he choked down a sob. Quickly raising his hand to his mouth, he sank his teeth into his fist, distracting himself with the draw of his own blood as his eyelids burned like hot coins, rims spilling unwilling droplets of salty liquid onto the cotton below.
Burying you was the second hardest thing he'd done in his life. Missing you was the first.
The morning of the expedition was like any other: lifeless and tense with the expectation of death. It was unspoken amongst the soldiers that this was a time in which everyone steeled themselves, tried to convince themselves that dying might not be so bad after all.
Levi almost smiled again. He could remember your last morning so clearly, it was painted in his mind like a pretty picture. You were on your horse before anyone else, a genuine smile on your rosy lips as you joked about being a survey corpse. He had told you to shut it, and to save the shitty jokes for when you got back.
'Onwards!' The great gate rumbled through the ground as it rose, thick spikes lifting into the air as the view of the desolate town on the other side of the wall opened up like an unfortunate gift against a misleadingly beautiful green scenery.
The parade of military horses began to move, hooves cracking against the cobblestones like hail on a tiled roof. They started at a slow trot, before pushing into a gallop, and before long the wind of the open fields was whistling in Levi's ears, the thunder of hooves lessening as the soldiers dispersed into their formation.
He saw a young man with sandy blonde hair and kind brown eyes mutter a silent prayer to the heavens, before the boy turned and followed his team to the flank. Levi wondered what he had prayed for. Himself? His friends? His family? Or perhaps simply to live another day, which would certainly satisfy all three.
Levi had never prayed before, and now it seemed more pointless than ever. Death was no longer something he was afraid of—but who isn't afraid of death, in the end?
The other side was not as daunting as it had once been now that he had seen it in his dreams: white cliffs and mystical turquoise waves crashing, sparkling like untold jewels in the high sun.
And, after all, you were waiting for him.
Good lord, he could even picture it now, at the centre of this blood and carnage-ridden world. A paradise for only him and you. In his mind, you wore a white dress. Nothing too showy, but just simple enough to bring out the smile in your eyes and the soft features of your face.
You used to talk about marriage together. He was always reluctant—with your professions, there was no telling what might happen from one day to to the next. It did not seem like it now, though, as the sun reigned down on the progression from the middle of a periwinkle sky, which was dotted with white cotton balls of clouds. It seemed a cruel joke, to have such beautiful weather now that you were gone.
More than ever he wanted to see the light glance off your eyelashes and the curve of your lip. The shadows light made on your face would always enchant him, and by the end of the day he would find himself being gently rocked to sleep by the hum of your murmuring voice and the pattern of the shadows from the fire dancing across your cheekbones like pictures in a storybook.
Only after the teeth-achingly cold realisation of your death did he he understand just how deep his love was for you. Regrets plagued him for weeks. You deserved so much more from this world, and he tortured himself every night for not having been able to give you all of it. He wanted the world for you. He wanted you to wear your white dress, and to bind yourself to him for ever.
But it was too late. It was too late, too late, and all he could do was wait for was for the sky to durn dark and for oblivion to engulf his world. With hope, he'd find himself soaring up to meet you as opposed to the bleak torment of hell beneath his feet.
He wanted peace. He wanted to find it, not in the world but within himself. He wanted to find you, and to stay with you until the end of existence.
This was the only thought running over in his head, even as the black smoke pillared off to his left. The wind had picked up now, making the coarse material of his green cloak flap sharply against his sides. A signal from the commander told him what he needed to do, and he nodded to the few members of his squad behind him. They moved into action. His horse veered left, mimicking the others, and they headed straight towards the abnormal titan, prepared to rid the world of it's presence.
Why did nothing change? It was the same pattern all over again, never changing even as he wiped the trickle of blood from his chin. His heart was on fire now, as the glints of blood in the trees caught the sun, sparkling momentarily like morbid dew in the morning. Already a small body was strewn across the damp ground, and he recognised the brown curls, in his mind matching them to that perky smile and the delivery of files in the morning. Cassey, he recalled. She, too, should never have been a soldier.
He pushed off the branch, and flung himself towards the savage titan. It's head rose to look at him with confused, dull green eyes, but Levi felt nothing. All he saw was your eyes as the life drained from them, that quick flash of wild terror before the lights of the world were brutally snatched away from you.
That was the first time he had screamed, actually screamed. His heart had been torn out of his breast, along with his raw voice as your hands had scrabbled at his chest, desperately trying to cling onto your life with him.
Click.
Suddenly, he was no longer flying, but falling. The triggers on his handles jammed, and wild fear whipped through his nerves as he wondered:
Is this how it ends?
Perhaps it was time. Yes, perhaps it was.
A part of his mind was yelling, banging fists against an invisible wall with the reminder of his duty to humanity. But the protests were numb, as if the rest of him was very, very far underwater, cut off from all sound and reasoning.
It was okay for him to give up. He had given everything for the cause. And the last thing he could possibly give was his life, wasn't it?
And so, in one last moment of desperation, he hoped to see his life flash before his eyes, to at least glance at a few of the faces he'd held so dearly only to lose them. But all he saw was the sun shining gloriously in the sky, and a fragment of your hopeful smile. So when firm jaws finally clamped over his body, the pain was no longer there. The ache in his heart was gone, as high as his soul soaring in the heavens above, leaving nothing but a solaced smile on his dying lips.
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It’s been 3 weeks. Wow. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. IB sort of slapped be in the face with a ginormous textbook.
But anywho~
Levi is not a hero. He may be humanity's strongest and seem like he has a heart of stone, but he's still human.
I know he might be ooc, but that's how I wanted him to be. I've read so many fics where Levi just stands strong and keeps fighting, but what if he doesn't? What if he just gives up? He is only human, after all.
Dedicating this to the wonderful 
, for when her account gets unsuspended; and the lovely 
These two write the most amazing, motivational comments and both of them have such inspirational writing. Thank you guys so much, I love you 
But of course this is also dedicated to my beautiful watchers—I passed 100!!
Included a song in the beginning-- I reccomend listening as you read, because this definitely isn't as 'emotional' as I normally write..
Attack on Titan (c) Hajime Isayama
Story (c) Me
Photo cred (It says on the picture who made it, but I can't read it 
)
© 2014 - 2024 ravingglory
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its beautiful :')