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p-eppermintea · 4 years

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Absence

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Pairing: Erwin Smith / Levi Ackerman (Eruri) Characters: Erwin Smith, Levi Ackerman Rating: Teen and Up Audiences Warnings: N/A Word Count: 1650 Tags: Hurt/Comfort-ish, Levi dotes on Erwin a bit, Canon Compliant, One-Armed Erwin Smith, Erwin feels sorry for himself, Caretaking, A little bit of flirting, also they argue Excerpt / Summary:

After losing his arm, Erwin seems absent.

He spends more time than not staring into space. He hardly bathes, he neglects to shave, and he spends all day in bed. Between filling out the paperwork only he can fill out, not eating as many meals as he should be, and sleeping for far too long each day, he doesn’t really do much. A few people even swear that they’ve seen him cry a little bit.

It’s incredibly unlike him.

It’s incredibly unlike Levi to give a shit, and yet… He can’t help but fuss over Erwin a little bit; or as much as he can without getting on his own nerves, never mind Erwin’s. He hates seeing him like this. It’s only been a week since his injury, and Levi is already losing his mind.

It starts with Levi asking him if he’s okay every now and then. Erwin either just sits in silence, says a simple, “yes,” or tells him outright to leave him alone. It takes far too much willpower than Levi would like to admit to actually leave. Eventually, he takes to sitting on a chair outside Erwin’s chambers. Just in case he needs him. And if anyone finds him asleep in that chair a few times, they’re smart enough to not mention it.

He starts bringing Erwin tea. Just whenever he was having some himself. At least, that’s what he tells himself. It’s not like he’s ever needed an excuse to see him. These days, he drinks more tea than he usually does.

It escalates to Levi just hanging around in Erwin’s chambers. He’s run out of excuses to stay, so he just does it anyway. It starts off as Levi going in there to clean the place until it’s absolutely spotless. He scrubs the floors for hours at a time. He dusts each one of the books and their shelves, and then reorders them. Twice to be sure. Eventually, the whole room is clean enough to be able to eat off of any surface – not that he would, anyway.

He really can’t stand how filthy things have become recently.

It takes a lot of convincing, but he finally coaxes Erwin out of bed in order to bathe him. He’s incredibly thorough even when it comes to cleaning Erwin, much to the other man’s dismay. Levi doesn’t mind it too much, though. He’s already resigned himself to it; after all, he’s had to bathe Hanji more times than he would like to admit.

Erwin just sits there as Levi drags the sponge across his back in slow circles. His throat feels tight as Erwin lets him move him back and forth every now and then to clean different parts of him. The empty space where his arm once was is unavoidable. He thinks about what Erwin must’ve been thinking whilst his arm was being torn off. He must’ve been in agonizing pain, and yet they still completed the mission under his command. Looking at the man in front of him now, it’s hard for Levi to believe that they’re the same person.

Levi builds up a lather of shaving soap on Erwin’s jaw. He shaves Erwin’s face slowly and carefully, focusing mostly on the satisfying scratch of the incredibly sharp razor against his facial hair. It’s the kind of casual intimacy that he sometimes finds himself craving more and more the older he gets.

He gets half-way through when Erwin pulls back and smacks his hand away. The razor slips out of Levi’s hands and clatters onto the floor with a distinctly metallic clang. “Get me a mirror,” Erwin grumbles, “and I’ll do it myself.”

It’s a small improvement, but it’s an improvement, nonetheless. Levi does as he’s told.

So, yes. Maybe Levi cares about Erwin.

He worries sometimes that he cares maybe a little too much; and Erwin seems to have noticed that there’s something different. The longer he’s in there, the more Levi fusses, and the more Levi fusses, the more irritable Erwin gets.

He understands why. When Levi hurt his leg after fighting the Female Titan, he would’ve killed anyone who even so much as tried to dote on him. The only people he allowed any sort of leeway were Hanji and Erwin; and even then, his patience wore thin.

Maybe they’re not so different from each other after all.

It’s not until later in the evening, after Erwin’s bath, that he seems to snap.

Levi carefully hands him a cup of tea, stands quietly next to his bed, and drinks his own tea in silence. He watches Erwin, while Erwin himself looks anywhere but in Levi’s general direction.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he tries.

In one clumsy motion, Erwin throws the teacup across the room, barely missing Levi’s head with it. “I don’t need your fucking sympathy!” he shouts. The ceramic cup smashes into thousands of pieces against the wall, and hot tea drips down onto the floor in a dark puddle.

Levi whirls around and looks at the broken pieces on the floor. After all the cleaning he did earlier that day, too. He turns back to Erwin with fire in his eyes. They look just about as mad as each other. “Okay, asshole,” he hisses. He very nearly throws his own teacup right back at him, but he sets it down on top of a book sitting on the bedside table. “What the fuck do you want, then? To just stay in bed for the rest of your life, feeling sorry for yourself?”

“I want you to stop treating me like I’m a child.”

“Then stop acting like one,” Levi shouts right back. He yanks the cravat off from around his neck and throws it at Erwin out of pure frustration. It hits him in the face and lands limply on his lap. “You lost an arm, not your fucking mind. Get over it.”

Erwin stares, somewhat shocked, at the cloth on his lap with his mouth slightly agape. His face is hidden to Levi, and his mood is completely unreadable until his shoulders start shaking.

Fuck, is he crying?

Levi steps forwards, reaching a tentative hand out towards him. Perhaps that was too far. “Erwin…”

Suddenly, Erwin throws his head back and barks out a hearty laugh. He doubles over and laughs into his hand as his shoulders heave uncontrollably.

For some reason, it just makes Levi even angrier. “What are you laughing at?!”

This just makes Erwin laugh even more, and he clutches his side. He seems to calm down, wiping at the tears in his eyes. “Nothing,” he says. “It’s just good to see you acting like you normally do.”

Levi crosses his arms and aims a swift kick at Erwin’s mattress. He sits down heavily on his seat next to Erwin’s bed. “Fucking freak,” he mutters. It’s good to see him smiling, though, and he almost smiles himself. Almost.

He snatches his cravat back from Erwin’s lap and carefully ties it back around his neck. He can sense Erwin watching him in silence as he takes his time tying it meticulously. When he looks up, Erwin is looking right at him. He looks at him right back. Erwin may be a little gaunt, with dark circles under his eyes and missing a part of himself, but he’s still there. That’s still his commander.

Finally, he says, “You may be right. There’s still a lot to do. I can’t sit idly by, even when I’m like this.”

Levi scoffs. “Of course I’m right,” he mumbles. “We can’t both be dumbasses.”

Erwin laughs again, soft this time.

Levi picks up his tea and passes Erwin the book that’s sitting on the bedside table. “Quit staring and do something useful with your time.”

Erwin opens up the book and sets it down on his lap, using his hand to hold it open. It’s a book of poems – one of his favourites from his adolescence. He starts to read out loud, filling the quiet room with his voice. It’s soft and gravelly from far too long of not using it.

Levi just sits and listens while Erwin reads. He holds his teacup in his hands for a long time after finishing his drink, too engrossed to move and interrupt. Erwin reading to him is soothing, and his eyes eventually start to droop. It’s been a long time since he’s gotten any amount of sleep.

He doesn’t realise that his eyes are closed, and that Erwin has stopped reading, until he feels a hand on his knee. When he opens his eyes, Erwin is leaning towards him with furrowed brows. “Maybe it’s time for you to go back to your own chambers. Get some sleep.”

Levi is almost tempted to keep up his stubbornness and stay put. He decides to leave Erwin to it, though. He seems okay right now. He can leave for just a little bit. He stands up and stretches his arms above his head while Erwin folds over a page in his book and sets it down on the bedside table. “Erwin,” he says.

“Yes, Levi?”

“If you need anything, tell me,” Levi says firmly. “I’ll do anything you need me to do.”

“Would you?” Erwin asks. Flirtation lies heavy behind his bright blue eyes. It’s an extra step back to normality.

Levi pauses for a second. He looks up at Erwin from underneath his lashes. “Anything,” he confirms.

Erwin smiles. Levi smiles back, just barely. “I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Levi turns on his heel and heads out of the room. He feels bad for going, but he figures he’ll grant Erwin a bit of solitude, just this once. Just before he closes the door behind him, he hears Erwin moving in his bed, and the soft thump of his feet hitting the floor.

Two small steps in the right direction.

#eruri #attack on tittan #shingeki no kyojin #erwin smith #levi ackerman #fanfiction #eruri fanfic

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