Broken Hearts, Severed Limbs (Levi x OC x Erwin)

|91| Winter On Paradis

The next two weeks passed and Nathalie didn’t step foot in the labs. Levi didn’t want her to, and he wasn’t letting her. He wasn’t letting her out of his sight at all. Wherever she was, he was always with her. Things had started to get back to how it was. He was overwhelmingly overprotective and possessive of her, but she couldn’t blame him. There had been too many close calls on her life and he wasn’t about to allow any more. She just needs rest he kept telling himself, and he made sure that she rested. He didn’t let her wash their clothes. He didn’t let her clean up their quarters. He’d do it all on his own and she would always whine about him being exhausted.

Alas, nothing exhausted him but the thought of having this happening again. That look in her eyes as she stared at him as if she was staring at a stranger. He’d never be able to get that look off his mind. He’d never be able to forget her voice as she stared at him and she asked.

“Who are you?”

Me? Him. The man that she had spent her whole life with. The man who loved her more than life itself. Who are you? He didn’t know why it had bothered him so much. Maybe the reason was that for a moment he thought she was gone. Because he had held her, and she had tried so hard to push him away from her. That night lingered in the back of his mind, and he was terrified that if he let her, it was going to happen again, and this time it would be for good.

It terrified him.

So, he kept her away from it. As much as he could, he kept her with him where he knew she wasn’t going to try it. She wasn’t going to recall any of that god-forsaken knowledge and she was going to be okay. Erwin did not disagree. He encouraged Levi to keep an eye on her. To keep her safe and away from the labs for at least a month.

Hange and Moblit held onto Nathalie’s notebooks and studied them all day, all night long. All that knowledge was so damn difficult to understand. Only Nathalie could understand such advanced biology because she was a Burgess, and the Burgesses were probably the ones who had discovered these through the generations. And Nathalie had missed her job.

She had missed the lab. She had missed Hange and Moblit -heck, she hadn’t seen those two at all in those two weeks and she knew she couldn’t blame them. Levi didn’t really let her leave his office, or their quarters, and when she had to because either Erwin had called for her for mission planning, or she had to check up on their brats, Levi would always be with her. He’d abandon it all and just take her wherever she needed to go.

It was getting out of hand again and Nathalie couldn’t object. She’d part her lips to talk to him about this. Just talk. But then she’d purse her lips back again and turn her attention back to the books that she had picked from that library in the catacombs of the royal palace. She’d just let herself drown into the contents of their pages and she’d forget it all. Her frustration. Her need to talk to him. She’d just ignore it all. Once again, she was running away from her problems. She wasn’t so brave and strong after all.

Nathalie bit her tongue once more. As she took her attention off the book that she had read three times already, and she turned at Levi. He was sitting in his desk, gently dipping his pen into the pitch-black ink and putting on his signature where needed. He had that focused expression on his face. He had untied his ascot from around his neck. The white, smooth fabric rested on his desk beside him. A couple of buttons were open on chest. The silky, pitch-black hair fell messily on his forehead. It was night. He had nowhere else to report to, and nothing else to do.

He seemed too absorbed into it. Alas, he was more than aware she was staring at him, and she had that look in her eyes. The nervous one. The one she’d get before she’d ask him for a favour. She thought that the distance between them was enough for him not to notice her. She was sitting on the green couch of his office. She had a book resting in her lap, on top of the brown skirt that she was wearing. She had thrown a warm, lighter brown shawl around her shoulders atop her white shirt. She had sewn it herself those last two weeks along with two more. The boredom was killing her so sewing something sounded like a productive way to spend time.