☙ ''Do you have no regard for human life?''
''In this position, I can't.''
The world is crumbling and with it, is their relationship. War is coming and with it comes another tale of lost love- and found. ☙
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Levi and Erwin had been in the same position for days. Each evening, at six o'clock sharp, they sat opposite each other, the couches beginning to wear under their weight.
Staring at Erwin, Levi lit up the cigarette- a present from Mike for his birthday, one he hadn't dared use until now. He hadn't smoked in a long time. Years, even. Now, though, was the right time to start again.
Erwin's head was reeling. The power of his words plagued him. He was too good with words, too good with strategies, too good at looking to the future where the world was so different to what it was now. He lived in the future, not the present.
Levi didn't. Levi was a man that relied on the present. Plagued by his past, he refused to do anything but the here and now.
It had worked.
Until Erwin.
'People are dying, Erwin. How can you not feel a thing?' Erwin looked up, his hands still clasped in his lap, his back hunched over uncomfortably.
'What do you think happens if I do feel it? We are the only people fighting against what is wrong and if I feel every single death that is under my command then I would have broken long ago. I can't afford to break, Levi, not now.' Levi clenched his teeth, baring them at the man that was supposed to be his friend, his confidant and his lover.
Levi was living in Erwin's shadow, somewhere along the road he had become second to everything else. They were no longer equals, not to Levi. Erwin could not see the problem. For all his strategic excellence, he couldn't see the obvious. He couldn't see pain- he had long since blind sighted himself to it.
'If we carry on like this, one of us is going to die.'
'That was always going to happen.' Erwin's face was solemn, his eyes darting between Levi and himself. Erwin loved Levi, he did, but they had agreed from the beginning that humanity came first.
Levi had just never expected to come last.
'For once, can you just think this through? Our lives are what you order them to be. We're living in the currents that you made and people are dying because of it. We're willing to, for the sake of humanity, that's what this shittiness is all for, isn't it? But that isn't an excuse to throw all our lives away!' Levi sighed, his mind tiring quickly; he could barely speak anymore, talking to Erwin was always mentally taxing. Often in a good way. In times like this, it wasn't.
Levi brought the cigarette to his lips again and breathed in the smoke, letting it billow out slowly until the room started to turn into a hazy cloud. He could barely make out Erwin's face anymore. Without any of the windows open and the cluttered mess of the room, the smoke quickly became the wall between them. Levi continued, not willing to look Erwin in the eyes.
In times like these, Levi wondered whether Erwin had any humanity left at all.
'Without the lives we lose, we will not win this war.' Erwin, through the grey haze, grimaced. Excuses, always excuses. Levi couldn't stand it. Scrap that, he couldn't believe his ears.
