Your Wings - Reader X Levi Ackerman

Chapter 1: In the Underground

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The sound is a slow torture...an iron needle tapping the skull...until even silence feels loud. A rhythm that counts down the days you've wasted surviving. Days without purpose. It's enough to drive anyone mad.

It's always cold. Always dark. A lifeless womb carved into the bones of the earth, where light is just a made up story and warmth is like a childhood memory. Here, you are buried alive.

Wind whistles through the cracks in the stone above. It carries a sound like whispers from the dead. Like the breath of forgotten souls slipping between the fissures of a world that left them behind. It weeps through the cavern like a mournful lullaby, haunting the empty alleyways and crumbling rooftops.

This place was built for shelter—some kind of bunker, once. Long before you were born. Concrete structures loom like rotting skeletons of a city that never lived. Whatever purpose it was meant to serve has long since been erased.

Now it's a graveyard. A prison.

They call it the Underground. And it is. Below everything. Below the sun. Below the laws. Below humanity itself. Buildings stand like dried husks, walls flaking, roofs caved, stairwells that lead nowhere.

A place where the surface discards its unwanted—criminals, beggars, orphans, the poor. The diseased.

Hope doesn't live here. People trade warmth for bread, pride for bandages, time for one more morning. Most don't get it. Most become stories that nobody tells.

The air smells of mildew and iron. The water that drips from the ceilings tastes like rust. Mold grows in the corners of broken homes, where families rot in silence, or disappear in the night. The ground is always damp. The sickness always spreads.

Joy is a rumor. Childhood is a short story. And dreams? Dreams are for fools.

Beneath the stone ceiling, laughter is a memory no one shares. The kind of sound that would echo too loudly here... would stand out too much against the quiet suffering that hangs over every breath.

This is a city where nothing grows, and everything dies slowly.

But this is your home. It's all you've ever known.

A strange thought. How can a child grow in a place like this?
But somehow, your family made it work. At least... until they disappeared.

Since then, it's just been you.
Scavenging scraps, sifting through garbage, drinking from oily puddles that collect in the cracks of the stone. But you survived.

You got older.
You got stronger.
You adapted.
You learned.

Down here, survival means thinking only of yourself.
No one cares about anyone else—so why should you?

No one cared about the orphaned child in rags limping barefoot through the alleys.
No one stopped to offer food.
No one reached out when you begged.
No one looked twice when you cried.

So you stopped crying.

If you're starving, you steal. Even if the person you're stealing from is starving too.
You hate it.
Because deep down, you know they're just like you—desperate.
But pity gets you killed.

This place hardens people.
It's crushed any innocence you might have had, ground it into the dirt like everything else down here.

Trust doesn't exist.
Friendship is a luxury.
And love... love feels like a fairytale from a world that forgot about you.

Still, you crave it.
You crave warmth, kindness, something more than just getting by.
But Dreams are a death sentence.
And longing is a weakness you can't afford.