Eruri stories(Erwin x Levi)

Oneshot's 27

A:N This is completely self-indulgent; I hope you will enjoy it nonetheless. This was totally written while listening to "A Dimly Lit Room" by Morricone.

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The stars were sharp and pointed and very bright in the clear sky as he threw his head back.

Why must you mock me this way, he thought convulsively, and he felt his strength fail him. Back in time, another tragedy had come upon him from clear blue heavens; his father had disappeared under a bright summer sun and a crystalline sky.

"Why must you mock me this way," he said weakly to the indifferent stars, before they were blotted out by the garish light of a torch, and the night was full of voices shouting his name. He felt strong arms preventing him from falling to the ground, and he went under.

He was floating then, and there was pain—but not real pain, only something like an idea of pain that coalesced in the same point of time and space that his being occupied by what seemed a mere coincidence. He knew his body was suffering; yet all he felt was a sedate and detached calm.

He was floating just below the surface, and he knew that if he broke through it, he would die.

He could not see, but he could smell the strong smell of alcohol and of burnt flesh. He could hear frantic voices and the shuffling sound of people moving about, but could not make out what they were saying.

Then he heard his own voice scream and moan horribly, and a cold terror came over him. But a clear voice spoke very close to him—a soothing, very familiar voice.

The voice said, "Easy there, we've got you—we've got you, I've got you—easy now."

He knew the voice, but could not put a name to it. He wanted to go to the voice, but he was too close to the surface. He was too close to the surface, and knew that if he broke through it, he would die—and something resembling a deeply ingrained instinct told him that dying would be a bad thing. So he let himself sink down to the safe depths.

When he resurfaced, he did not die.

He woke up in a single bed, in an empty and very quiet room. It was night time, and there was darkness in the room, except for the softest glow that came through the windows. One of the panes of a window had been left open, and a warm, lonely wind came in; the quiet stirring of the light curtain was the only movement in the room.

He had come over the surface of consciousness, but some part of his mind was still lingering below, and it was as if a thin veil of wonder had been laid upon him. In that fragment of time that to him felt timeless, he did not know himself as a man with a name; the events that had brought him where he was were lost on him, and if his own father, entering from the door on the wall opposite from the bed where he was lying, had come into the room then, he would not have known him.

He felt quite clearly that he was a human being, and that he was alive; he rejoiced in that, and his joy was warm and melancholic. He smiled in the secrecy of darkness; he felt sharply and deliciously lonely.

He breathed slowly, mirroring the breeze. The bed was comfortable. He felt like sleeping again. He moved to better nestle himself into the soft pillows, and that was when a sudden and stabbing pain shot through his right shoulder and down the arm. Confused, he tried to clench his fist, but felt nothing but a crawling, dull itch that was heavy on his arm like something dead. He peeked below the sheets and saw that his right arm was gone.

As the pain of the flesh had pierced his body, the ache of memory bore through his mind; the dark and cruel shape of the battlefield came to him from a long distance and as if through a fog, and where the graceful and simple gladness of being alive of the unthinking creature had been, now a nameless sorrow arose.