This is My Last War (Attack on Titan // LeviHan) - Part 3

A Long Dream

Marley, Liberio. The Year 854

The passage of time is a relentless force, indifferent to our hopes and fears, and sometimes, we can't help but wonder if we're just passengers on this swiftly moving journey, hurtling toward an unknown destination. It feels like just yesterday we were filled with youthful vigor, embarking on our journey to make the world a worthwhile place to live. We wanted to survive and we wanted to be free!

Now, the years have slipped through our fingers like grains of sand. What remains?

###

Levi was not a man of many words, so why speak? He was a man of swift and forceful action, which was more than fine with Zoë. The more time they spent in bed together the more exhausted she became. The more exhausted, the easier it was to pretend that they weren't on borrowed time, that she didn't count the days, the hours, the minutes that they had left together.

But she did.

She counted days, hours, minutes, and felt them slipping away faster and faster. Not speaking became a burden that weighed down her soul but all that desperate, glorious sex flooded her with a mind-numbing sluggishness.

Whenever the bodily high waned, she felt like crying hysterically. What was the point of cramming as much closeness as humanly possible into a few last days? It did not change anything about the fact that the end was inevitable.

Of course, all ends were. To still be alive after all they had been through was already a gift. She should be grateful, shouldn't she?

Grateful to have found someone like Levi, only to lose him much too soon? She watched his tranquil face when he was asleep - that alone seemed like some kind of miracle, Levi sleeping! For more than two hours! - and felt a choking tenderness constrict her chest. How dear he was to her.

It was so unfair.

Zoë didn't tell Levi how she felt. He was a man of few words because he saw more value in action and she wanted to accept his decision. If he thought he had to go, if he thought his time had come, she had to let him go.

Apparently, it wouldn't matter for long. She was going to forget everything about the Titans and the Eldian race and therefore, she wouldn't remember anything about the Ackermans either. It couldn't be done any other way, Eren had said. No, he could not leave her with any memories.

Zoë wrote things down. It was cheating and she would probably not be able to see it for what it was afterwards: The truth about a doomed life they had lived. Probably, after the Exit of the Founder and the Ackermans, she would read it as a fictional story. If she would read it at all.

"Hey," Levi opened his good eye and squinted at her. "You look like you need some distraction."

"You are lucky I am so strong," Zoë grinned at him, battling tears again. "Any other woman would long have fled your bed by now."

"Yes, I am lucky," Levi lifted his maimed hand, deftly tugging the shirt from her shoulders.

###

Marley, Liberio. The Year 854

I watch as the days turn into weeks, and the weeks into months, our last days together slipping through our grasp like water flowing through clenched fists. The weight of inevitability hangs in the air, heavy and inescapable. The moments we cherished, the laughter, the camaraderie, they all seem like ever-distant memories, vanishing into the horizon of time.

The sadness is a shared sentiment, though we say nothing. We both feel the ache of time's passage, knowing that our last moments together are dwindling. We wish we could slow it down, savor every second, but time, as it always does, moves on, leaving us with memories and the bittersweet taste of farewell.