A tail for an eye - Eren x Levi

Chapter 24

'Something Different'

Levi couldn't face the contents of the room, all the corpses and victims littered about as prize possessions upon the walls went from being an interest to Levi to sickening him. It held the most depressing atmosphere he'd ever viewed. Now he could pinpoint the fear in their eyes if stuffed to be open, he could feel the screams radiating off of the skeletons. It sent chills all over him, the hairs on him standing up in an instant.

"Your eyes," the old man began, "they're different."

Levi furrowed his eyebrows, keeping all of his attention on him as to refrain from looking about the room in sadness, "What?"

"Well I assume both of them are, not just one, but I wouldn't know." He smirked a little, but playfully to show he meant no malicious intent, "you've seen something that's changed you."

"I failed the mission," Levi said, getting back on track, "I lost my crew and my ship to a kraken."

"So, the legend it true about the kraken?" The man grinned, taking a nosy around his own room as though looking for a place to put it, but Levi knew he'd have no chance. His eyes lingered over the empty case next to the mermaid's skeleton, "so, no merman I assume?"

"No."

He hummed, "Bet it's hard for you to be here. You've lost a lot more than I have in one job."

His response took Levi back at the calmness of it. No outburst or even a sign of hidden anger, as though the old man expected the missions to fail. Each time it fell silent, it managed to deafen Levi due to the heaviness of the air. Not physically, yet he couldn't understand why it felt quite like that. Sure, his new perspective allowed him to feel sympathy for the lost creatures of the sea in this room, but that didn't make the air dense it made it depressing. Something about the old man didn't sit right with him. He didn't seem particularly evil, just a collector for a hobby. Perhaps he didn't have the knowledge Levi had on mer-people. After all, Levi had been in a similar position to the old man not that long ago. 

"But that's not what's changed in your eyes," the old man continued, giving all his gaze into Levi's visible right eye, "something happened out there. And something also tells me that you're not going to be a pirate anymore."

"No, I'm not," Levi agreed to that point.

"Still, you've accomplished more than any pirate put together in history," the old man praised with a gentler grin that before, "nobody's ever survived a kraken."

"I saw a merman. Two, actually." The words fell from Levi's mouth without rhyme or reason, but he felt it necessary to say deep inside. The old man focused on the words, listening in as though the most interesting thing in the world, "Why do you crave such a big collection?"

"I don't know. Everyone had their own little thing and this is mine. Perhaps not ethical, but I don't know."

The answer unsettled Levi for some reason. It implied the old man knew it to be a bad hobby but didn't quite know why it was bad. The education provided out at sea differed for every ship, but usually all made relative sense and correlated in one way or another. However, it appeared as though nobody ever met a mer-person and actually interacted with them like an equal, because. nobody saw them as an equal. He began to wonder if the old man knew anything about mer-people's emotions and behaviour at a human level. Perhaps a small bit of educating would solve certain issues like this.

"Do you think mer-people are capable of feeling exactly like humans do?" Levi questioned.

The old man lowered his chin with raised eyebrows, "I wouldn't know. Do you?"