Bite Me.

22.

The remainder of Sunday was uneventful, until around the hours of 9pm when Eren finally received a phone call from his recently estranged mother. He would have been a little more eager to pick it up had he not been sat on Levi's bed, and he hadn't just bitten into his wrist.
'Want me to get it?' Levi pulled his head away, trying to gauge Eren's reaction to reality coming knocking at such an inopportune moment. Unfortunately, he was now high.
'Hi,' he picked up the phone and despite being a little off his head, he still sounded cautious.
'Eren, where are you?' Carla didn't even sound worried, just inconvenienced.
'I'm at a friend's,' he didn't specify further than this. She hadn't bothered to call before this point, so she clearly wasn't too worried.
'I've called all your friends and you're not with any of them. They all said they've not seen you this weekend and that they assumed you were at home. And Mikasa told me you've been hanging around with that boy Levi.'
So she was snooping around instead of coming straight to him, and she didn't like what she'd found. Go figure.
'Yeah. Is that an issue?'
'You always complained about him. You said he was a drug dealer or something. Eren, if you're doing drugs, that's not a suitable environment for your sister.'
Levi was trying to cover up the fact that he was laughing. It was a combination of Eren having assumed he was a drug dealer and his mum assuming that he was selling drugs to her son. He was doing far worse than that. If she knew what was going on, she'd wish it was drugs.
'I'm not doing drugs... Why does everyone think I'm doing drugs? Look, all you need to know is that we're safe and we're safe until he's gone.' No prizes for guessing who 'he' was. 'I guess since you only called to check on May that we won't be returning any time soon.'
'He's my brother...'
Eren was about to give her a lecture on how being related didn't change anything when he thought of a better idea.
'Blood relations doesn't decide who your family is,' he told her, keeping his voice as steady as he could. 'You know that as well as I do. It's the people who stick by you from the start and always act in your best interests who are your family.'
'I don't want to listen to this,' she sighed. 'Goodbye, Eren. I'll text you when he's gone.'
'That's a little impersonal. You're supposed to be my mother.'
'Goodbye.'
He growled in frustration and hung up. Why couldn't she just understand that every moment she was in his presence she was just endangering herself further? And the only reason she stayed was to stop him getting upset. It was then that he realised he was being the biggest hypocrite. He was pretty much doing the same as her. His anger seemed to have burnt the venom out of his system and he was thinking clearly once more.
'Everything okay?' Levi asked innocently, although having heard the entire conversation using his superhuman hearing.
'Not really,' Eren admitted, brushing his hair from out of his eyes. 'My uncle's still at home. And my mum thinks I'm doing drugs too, which doesn't help my cause when she's now angry at me for going near you.'
'You don't have to stay if it upsets you when people are afraid of my reputation,' there was something caustic in Levi's tone.
'It's- it's not that... I just can't stand it that everybody just kind of judges you before they know you. Doesn't it annoy you, too?'
'You assumed- very wrongly- that I was a drug dealer,' he pointed out, crossing one leg in front of the other. Did he really not understand what kind of message doing things like that while only wearing jeans and black leather boots sent out? He was 220 years old, he probably knew full well how ostentatiously flirtatious he was being. What a pretentious jerk.
'For the record, I wasn't the one who came up with that. I think it was Jean.'
'Remind me to try and sell him some oregano. Gullible twat. And no, it doesn't bother me because I'd rather they were satisfied with lies than found out the truth.'
'So you care about what people think of you?'
'Oh good god, no. Why should I care about that? No, I just want to keep the whole vampire thing secret as that's pretty much the one law we all obey. Don't make it common knowledge what you are.'
'Then how come you pretend not to care about anything? You make sure nobody can love you. You don't want people to think too highly of you.'
'Because I'll let them down,' Levi shrugged. 'I'm not a good guy. And I'm not the attractive kind of bad guy.'
'I think you are,' Eren apparently hadn't quite lost the effects of the venom just yet, because it had loosened his brain-to-mouth filter. Levi simply laughed and patted him on the back, standing up and smiling down at him.
'You're a good kid,' he told him. Because that wasn't patronising at all. Wasn't he only a year older? Oh, no- he was over 200 years older. Well, that made for a substantial difference. Being called a kid by Levi made him incredibly uncomfortable because it reminded him that actually, he was no angsty teenager who could be told what to do by anybody. He had more life experience than anybody else on the planet, bar his brother. He had seen more than Eren could ever dream of witnessing. And that was possibly the reason he had inadvertently forgiven him for the things he had done; to put it simply, he'd had so much time to make mistakes. Who was to say that if you had more than one lifetime's worth of time, you wouldn't make more mistakes than the average person?
'Hey, you still hungry?' He tried not to look too hopeful.
'You're so needy,' Levi rolled his eyes and sat down next to him. He moved his lips close to his neck, and Eren felt his heart racing. He hadn't fed from his neck in what felt like forever... Too long, anyway. Then Levi moved his face up so that their eyes were level. They barely breathed, just their hearts hammering and intoxicated by their proxemics. Eren wasn't sure what to do- should he kiss him? No, he didn't want that. Well, he wanted it more than anything, but he didn't want to fall for this boy. That would be the worst decision of his entire life.
'Embrasse-moi,' Levi whispered, his eyes searching his face for any signs of unwilling. He often found himself lapsing into his mother tongue when he was flustered like this. But then Eren wrapped his arms round him, and he started to laugh. He couldn't speak a word of French, clearly. Embrasse... Embrace... They sounded the same, but meant completely different things. He pushed the boy away and tried in vain to mask his face as the tears started leaking from the sides of his eyes.
'I'm sorry,' he chuckled. 'I- I don't think I can do this right now!'
'What did I do wrong?' Eren's face fell.
'Nothing, nothing. Don't you do French at school?'
'No. I dropped it years ago. But I know enough to know you said hug me. It sounds exactly like English.'
'Not exactly... I'm sorry. Come back later when I've composed myself a little.'
He pouted and mooched off to find Archer, determined to get to the bottom of this.

Archer was surprised to say the least when Eren knocked on his door late Sunday evening.
'Come in,' he called from where he was sat at his desk, composing a letter. He placed his pen on the paper and turned around, folding his arms across his chest.
'Can I... Ask you a question?' He shuffled in, looking rather on edge.
'Of course,' Archer's curiosity was piqued. They'd never really spent much time together or held a normal conversation.
'It's just some French homework,' he didn't want to risk the blond-haired boy finding out that Levi had possibly said something inappropriate to him. 'I need you to translate something for me.'
'What is it?'
'Umm... I think it was embr- shit, I forgot. Hang on, I think it was like embrace moi?'
Archer snorted and grinned.
'Embrasse-moi?' He smirked. 'Who's been saying that to you? You can't convince me that was homework...'
'What does it mean?'
'It means kiss me.'
From the way that he turned red, Archer could tell that it wasn't just anybody who had said this. And how many people did he know who spoke French? And it must have been recently if he could still remember what they'd said, plus he had never mentioned it before. He hadn't even left the house that day. Well, Levi was sure to be winding him up a little too much. Or was it possible that it hadn't been a joke? He'd always been aware of his brother's leaning towards the other sex, but he'd never seen him really pursue anyone before. Of course, they'd been around a long time, so he'd had flings and all, but only as a game when he was bored. Eren didn't seem the type of boy he usually went after, and certainly not the kind of guy who was interested in just a fling. This was something he was most definitely going to have to look into.