ʟɪɢʜᴛ ꜱᴘᴇᴇᴅ | 𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣 𝙟𝙖𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙧

14. 𝙍𝙄𝙂𝙃𝙏 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀

014, 𝙍𝙄𝙂𝙃𝙏 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀

longggg chapter. enjoy <3

pls ignore any spelling issues i'll come back and fix them eventually <3

.⋆𐙚 🍒

THERE ARE SONGS I CAN'T LISTEN TO ANYMORE.

Not because they're bad, or overplayed, or even tied to someone specific. It's worse than that. They're tied to the quiet. To the moments I never said what I meant—when I let things rot in my throat instead of spitting them out.

They're stitches to that kind of stillness. The kind where you should've reached across the table and grabbed their hand, or answered the phone, or chased after someone who didn't even want you to stay.

But you didn't.

You sat there, pretending to be fine while your insides tried to claw their way out.

Sometimes I wonder if regret sounds different to everyone.

To me, it sounds like a song I forgot I used to love—until it finds me again, too loud, too suddenly, like it never left in the first place.

Music has this cruel way of sneaking up on you. It doesn't wait for permission. It simply shows up in all the places it isn't invited. In a café. In an elevator. Leaking from the headphones of a stranger on the subway. And when it does, it drags everything with it.

One chord. One line. One barely-there hum in the background, and suddenly I'm not in the present anymore. One melody bleeding through cheap speakers at a party, and suddenly I'm sixteen again—knees pulled to my chest on the bathroom floor, trying to breathe through a panic attack I didn't have a name for yet. Or I'm seventeen, curled up in the passenger seat of his car, windows down, screaming the lyrics to our song while the world blurred past us, not realizing it would be the last time I'd ever hear it from him.

I think people forget how deeply songs embed themselves into our existence. How a melody can burn itself into your memory the way a scent does. How lyrics become tombstones for the feelings you buried because saying them out loud would've made them real.

And maybe it's not even about the words. Maybe it never was. Maybe it's the way your heart syncs to the rhythm you haven't heard in years—and somehow, it still fits.

Maybe it's the way the bridge builds right as your throat tightens. Or how a voice catches on the same word you used to whisper in the dark, when you still believed whispering it softly enough would make them stay.

That's what makes it unbearable.

Because songs don't care how much time has passed. They don't care who you are now, or how carefully you've rebuilt yourself. They press play—and expect you to feel it all again.

Even the things you swore you'd forgotten.

Like how it felt to have someone walk away without ever saying goodbye. 

Eren Jaeger had done that to me four hours ago.

One second, we were working through the third practice set, his handwriting slowing in the margins of my notes. The next, his phone lit up. A name flashed across the screen—Levi—and his entire body tensed. 

He answered with a clipped "what," already standing. No explination. No warning. Just tension in his shoulders and a set to his jaw that didn't invite questions as he packed his things into his bag.