Daisy | Levi Ackerman

Chapter 22 - Back To Me

[Naomi]

Levi and I sat there in the area behind the large wooden boxes, sharing the afterglow of the moment I woke up. As the bliss somehow faded down a little, I sat up, with him assisting me, while he sat there where he did since earlier. He had only been filling me up on what happened before I got there with the Special Operations Squad.

"He talked about you, you know." I said, the fear of that fateful night still fresh in my memory. I had just learned I'd already been unconscious for a day when they found me. This would have been my third day if I hadn't woken up. "He mentioned your name, and before I passed out- he told me didn't want another Ackerman. So does that mean he's an Ackerman, too?"

Levi didn't answer yet, just silent and receiving my firsthand accounts of Kenny's assault. Kenny was his name, I had just then learned. And Levi seemed to have been angry at him long before he tried to murder me, now only ignited again by this nerve-wracking incident.

"Levi, you know my life because you've always been there." I said softly, trying to convince him to talk to me. "I missed seventeen years of yours. I need to know who you were before I met you."

He sighed, and looked at me with stone-cold eyes that screamed how pained he was to be proven it was Kenny himself who attacked me, but why?

"Where do I start?" He asked. "There's not much I could say."

"Telling me who that man was to you would be a good one." I suggested.

He looked down, his arms crossed on the side of my bed. His eyebrows furrowed to wherever spot in my white sheets he was glaring into at the moment. "Kenny was the man who raised me."

I expected to be shocked- but not to the point of utter confusion. If Kenny Ackerman was the man who raised Levi, then why would they try to kill each other? What was the purpose?

"As you know, my mother died when I was very young. If he didn't come around to take me, I would have died with her. He taught me everything I needed to know to survive on my own and then he just left." He spat out bitterly, and I could tell that recalling the memory now in his mind hurt him in a way a stitched-up wound does when you cut it again.

I put a hand over his, enclosing him in what warmth I could offer, and he was subtly surprised for a moment, looking down at my gesture. It made me realize how much he was so unfamiliar to emotional support.

Nonetheless, he held my hand, twining his fingers with mine. "This was the very first time I met him again, and I can't believe he comes back and does this. He'll die for it, Naomi. I swear he will, even if it's on my own two hands."

"Let him die on his own terms," I answered, making him look at me in cold surprise. I gazed back into his steely eyes. "He's still the person who taught you how to fend for yourself."

"That's how easy it is for you to forgive him?" He asked me, his tone taking an angry escalation. "Do you not realize what he's done to you?"

"I do. I know what he did to you, too. I have not forgiven him. I just think that nature is going to give him the most satisfying payback for it, Levi." I told him. "You shouldn't go out of your way to make it happen lest you risk your life whilst doing so. Do you want to leave me like this?"

Levi eased down, taking my last sentence into careful consideration. Slowly, his eyes looked down onto my hand, enclosed in two of his, and sighed deeply.

"No, of course not; I don't." He replied silently, inching closer as he held out his hand and touched my hair again, feeling the temperature of my forehead. In a sudden, our warm silence was shattered by a dear friend of mine's reporting voice.