The Ereri Project!

Ceiling

The thing about ceilings is, Levi knows for a fact he thinks about them entirely too often.

As a kid, he'd stared up at the one is his bedroom constantly expecting it to cave in. He remembers clearly what it was like being bounced between foster homes until his parents finally took him in for good.

Dozens of different ceilings hung above dozens of different beds. Some with cracks, some with fans, some with color, some dusty, some fuzzy with tears in his memory. He was a lonely child.

A ceiling over a bed was sometimes the only thing that felt constant enough to feel stable.

He remembers a time when he thought he'd never want to live under a ceiling again. The free air offered a more tangible sense of freedom than the security of real walls around him. He did, for a time, not live anywhere.

However, the ceiling inside his car was even more depressing than the one in his bedroom back home.

When he finally moved into his own apartment, the ceiling in his bedroom was white. He thought for days about how clean the ceiling looked.

Clean and not suffocating. But it didn't really feel free either, even though he was on his own and had the freedom to do practically anything he wanted.

The morning he woke up with Eren beside for the first time, he stared at the ceiling and laughed. When Eren stirred he'd quieted himself down and closed his eyes.

That was the first time he realized it wasn't freedom he was looking for in the ceilings.

He didn't know what yet, but that wasn't it.

After they got Petra and moved into their own house, it started to come together.

The ceiling in their bedroom is cream colored. It is sloped slightly halfway through the room where the roof slopes and there is a dark brown wooden fan hanging above where they decided to put the bed.

It is an ordinary ceiling by all accounts, Levi thinks staring at it in the light cast by the late afternoon sun. It isn't suffocating but it doesn't feel like freedom either. And that is okay.

Levi stretches as he gets off the bed. He pulls the blankets up over Eren and Petra so they can nap a little longer.

Levi smiles privately as he thinks again about the ceiling.

All he really wanted was a ceiling that felt like home.