That morning, I woke up in Levi's bed.

The white sheets enclosed me as I shifted around under the weighted comforter, my nose brushing against the pillowcase laced with off-white designs. My eyes fluttered open, sunlight flooding my senses in an orange filter. Eventually, I groggily rolled onto my side, my gaze catching on a figure sitting on the edge of the bed.

Levi.

"About time." He grumbled, his hand drifting over to me. He pulled the blanket up my shoulder to cover me better.

The oak tree outside the open windowpane danced in a passing breeze, the shadows of the leaves cast by the sun flitting around Levi's skin. He looked ethereal.

"You had me convinced you were hibernating like some sort of woodland animal." Levi said in his usual ticked tone. His hand transferred from my shoulder down to my hip as if it had a mind of its own.

This sparked my memories of last night.

The memory alone made my heartbeat quicken, the blood rushing up and through my ears the way it had so many years ago when I fought titans, only this time it was in a more positive way- And not fueled by adrenaline. I sat up, letting the blanket descend down my body, my sleeve going with it in a magnetized effect and putting his handiwork on display; a series of hickeys that ran from my neck to my collarbone, dissapearing behind the thin fabric.

I leaned in, the mattress sinking under my weight.

"Kiss me." Was all I could say in response. Thats all that was on my mind. Thoughts of him infected me, putting me in overdrive. My fingers crawled up his chest, delivering him with the idea that I pined for his lips on mine yet again.

"Are you trying to seduce me?" Levi pried bluntly, leaning his bodyweight on his arm that propped him up.

"Is it working?" I interrogated, moving my leg up and pulling myself closer. Our noses touched. His drab eyes flicked down to my lips, a bored expression on his face, and yet I could see his eyes glaze over with a distant necessity for me.

"No." He let the lie slip, leaning in, his lips ghosting over mine.

"That's too bad..." I purred, closing the gap between us and locking my lips with his. His chilled palm met the nape of my neck, a shockwave of spiking temperature shooting down my spine. It thrilled me.

He kissed me again and again, his eyelids closed until he finally pulled away, drinking in a breath. His fingers played with the split-ends of my unkempt hair.

"I'm never going to hate you." He told me, pinning me back down on the bed, restraining my wrists above my head. His smooth lips followed the trail of hickeys on my neck that took him on a journey down to my collarbone. "Especially not after you took my virginity."

The words caused me to choke on a laugh, the humor zipping through me. I rose an incredulous brow up at him, stifling another chuckle.

"How's it feel to no longer be a virgin?" I queried, pecking his lips when I finished speaking.

"You'd be surprised." Levi answered, pressing into yet another smooch, both of us succumbing to the need to kiss eachother till we were full. "Never thought I'd be so happy to finally get laid."

"And I never thought I'd be so happy to be the one who got to do it with you." I said. "Didn't think I had the balls, honestly."

My index finger and thumb fiddled with his shirt. I looked at him.

"Levi." All my fingers were grasping at his grey shirt now, seriousness painting on my face.

"I'm going to say it."

I let a breath soothe my weary mind and heart, putting all the grief and hardship on the back burner. My eyelashes lifted as our eyes met, and never parted. A halo of sunlight occupied the darkness inside his pupils, obscuring all my attention from anything else in the room.

The words were being sewn together in the back of my mind by threads that connected him and I together- Threads that fed into my swelling adherence for the very man I once shunned from my life for so long. Each time the needle pierced through my heart, I could feel the string being pulled through my flesh in a line that perpetually conjoined us into one... Single... Blatant fact.

I love you.

The words bore a saccharine flavor on the back of my tongue, a candied apparition that ghosted over the sensitive tastebuds residing there. I was already growing a predilection for the syllables.

All I had to do was part my lips and let that consuming swaddle of emotions roll out of my mouth.

But they wouldn't budge. My lips wouldn't unlatch.

Levi glanced at me.

"Save it." He requested.

"I already know."

His words were simple. My mind blanked. Everything I sought to tell him declined my determination to speak, leaving me empty of an expressive method to show my endearment toward him. If he already knew, would the words ever mean anything to him? Why was it that he denied my attempts to tell him?

I guess the moment just wasn't ripe, like a fruit clinging prematurely to a branch, just waiting to fall into the palms of a famished soul seconds too early.

Still, I knew one thing for certain. I wanted him to know.

"I don't want to save it." I retorted with conviction, my words falling gingerly yet sternly from my mouth in response. My love for him transcended any physical word or apparition I could display. But I had to try.

My fingers reached out, feathering over his papery white skin as I tethered our gazes.

"No words could possibly express just how immensely you've impacted my life, Levi." I told him sincerely, cupping his cheek. The muscles imbedded in my face twitched with every subtle movement that indicated just how heartfelt my words were as they bled from my battle impaired heart. To feel such substantial benevolence whenever my eyes fell upon him was such an invigorating thing.

"I've lost my squad, the people I held dear to my heart. Anastasia, Ally, Pildo, William... They all died that day. They died when they deserved more than anyone to live and grow old... They were all just kids..." My voice wavered, shrouded with grief as the thought turned my mind over with an overgrown abundance of swarming memories.

It seemed as if every part of my mind was just a chamber that honed tormented visuals of what I'd seen and went through.

"I lost my family when I was just a young girl," I pressed on. "I let Erwin slip from my fingers and meet the same fate as numerous other soldiers that day. I know I couldn't control it, but to be one of the two surviors of something like that... It's just sickening to think about."

I shook my head.

"Loosing all those people, experiencing all those things, it absolutely tore me apart." I watched as Levi stared intently down at me from where we sat on the bed, his scar littered palms gliding over they valley of my folded arms as I held them close to my chest, hugging myself without realizing.

He was trying to soothe me with his touch, an initially, it worked. But the words stuck in my throat.

With another breathy inhale, I persevered.

The atmosphere that encompassed us thickened, the silence palpable.

"But it all pales in comparison to how it felt to loose you."

His hand paused its waltz, terminating the pacifying sentiment it induced. The look on his face was something I was certain would keep me up at night.

"[Y/n], it's not like I've already kicked the bucket. Don't you think you're being dramatic?" He inquired, his fingertips pressing into my forearms, as if to implore me to elaborate on what I was saying. I understood that my words could be interpreted erroneously, that it sounded as if I foolishly cared more for a silly blunder in my own romance than the lives of those I've lost.

But that wasn't true.

"You were alive in front of me the whole time," My voice harbored a pessimistic chime to it. "And yet I couldn't talk to you. I couldn't be near you. I couldn't even look at you."

I laced my fingers with his as his hand departed from my arms, catching it instantaneously. I poured my love into him from that simple touch, drowning us both in the waters that enveloped through my commitment to him. "To know you were alive, but I so stupidly disregarded that fact... It was the worse kind of loss imaginable." I disclosed soundly.

"I had you there, alive and breathing, and I took it for granted."

The air stilled.

Levi kept his silence for a heartbeat longer before letting it slip from his clutches with another intemperate sigh. "No matter what I tell you, you always find ways to shut yourself down." He commented on my bad habit. "You're like a parrot. Always repeating the same line for a cracker, or in this case, pity."

I was quick to voice what reaped within my thoughts. "This isn't about self-esteem. I'm not some crabby teenager who can't handle her emotions." I said, though I knew very  that the smallest hinder to my day could easily put a damper on my mood. But that wasn't the focus. "What I'm trying to get at is that I've realized my mistake. I don't want you to be lost to me when you're right at my doorstep." I spoke.

"So I'm not going to deny anything anymore. I don't want to live in ignorance."

I was expecting that to at least strike up a neutral response in him, but what I received was quite the opposite. Levi placed his palm over my mouth to muffle my voice, preventing me from rambling on and on the way I was. It was like putting a cork in a wine bottle, stifling me from spilling out what I wanted to.

"Mmph-!" I protested, trying to pry his hand off my face but ultimately failing. All I could do was give him a half-assed glare and a temperamental look that implored him to release me, but he proceeded to ignore my requesting actions, his hand cupped diligently over my mouth.

Levi gave his signature scowl another go, as if trying to convince me of something for the hundredth time.

"I can't believe I enjoy kissing your mouth when all it does is spew steamy horseshit all over the room." There he goes again with his strange comparisons.

"You're as boring as a rock sometimes, you know that, don't you? Why can't you just kiss me and smile from ear to ear like a normal person after the night we had, instead of throwing yourself all over me with your unnecessary theatrics."

My jaw fell agape.

"I was spilling my heart out to you!"

"Sounded more like you were on the pot spilling diarrhea from your mouth on my end."

"Can you stop making stupid comments?"

"Can you stop being melodramatic?"

"I'm going to be melodramatic, especially now that you're calling me boring, Levi!"

"You are boring."

"What, you want me to start braiding your hair and whispering sweet nothings in your ear every second of the damn day?"

"It'd be better than having to hear you whine like a brat about things that are in the past the minute I wake up. Say something interesting for once."

"I hate you."

"Clearly."

"I really do."

"How hearbreaking."

Sarcasm.

"I wish I had fallen for a titan instead of you."

"You're free to run off and find one."

That was my breaking point in the senseless argument.

"You absolute insensitive asshole... I hope your dick shrivels up and falls off!"

The moment the flurry of words cascaded from the confines of my lips, Levi pounced on me, pinning me to the bed and stealing my lips in an unremitting kiss, the disarranged bedsheets tousling beneath me. When our lips parted with a smack, his eyes gleamed with triumph. It was clear he had taken a liking to the words I had said.

"Atta' girl." His voice resonated from the deep pits of his chest, his sleek tufts of hair falling over to frame his face as he loomed above me. I hadn't realized that I had absentmindedly bit the bullet.

His goal was to get me to insult him, to say something interesting for once.

I grumbled under my breath.

He had me right where he wanted me.

"You play dirty." I remarked with an edge to my tone, eyes fixated on his.

"I'm not fond of dirt," Levi's head descended, his pointed nose brushing against mine. The skin to skin contact filled my heart to the brim. "I prefer to call it tact."

"I hate you..." The words coated my lips, a sweet lie that he tasted with his own once again.

He kissed me, then broke apart a breathless heartbeat later.

"Hey..." The web of branches outside the window cut the sunlight into pieces, patches of orange pasting to our bodies. We were shrouded in warmth, and to tell the truth, I was infatuated with the sight of him enwreathed in the celestial light as he loomed over me.

"Just tell the truth." Levi requested.

The truth.

It echoed.

It felt foreign on my tongue, but never in my heart. Because the truth was, from the very beginning-

I had love him.

I had loved him every blissful second, ever tear shed, every moment wasted and every smile given—I had love him.

And alas, only now was I realizing-

He had loved me too.

Irrevocably bound to eachother by an invisible yet unfrayable thread.

It was time to acknowledge it.

"I love you, Levi."

I had said.

A morning dove chirped outside, a distant melody amidst the swathe of raw, tender adoration.

Levi had waited a moment.

"I can't help but love you, too, [Y/n]."

His voice was sure.

It was certain.

We loved eachother.

Forever. Always.

... And yet, there was a feeling in my gut I couldn't discern in that moment, a scraping feeling that began to anchor itself to the shores of my soul.

A weight I couldn't abandon.

Love...

Would never be enough.

Not in this world.

That was the cold, hard fact.

It's more complex, a puzzle with pieces that don't fit.

Because in this world-

Love ends when it starts.

It never even begins.

...

Authors Note;

I'm so sorry for taking so long to get this updated! Luckily I don't have many readers so I assume I'm off the hook for now.

I've been attempting to write a new Levi fanfiction in ao3, but ultimately decided I'm too lazy to come up with a whole new story, so I'm returning to this story on wattpad!

I will try to squeeze out a few chapters! We're so close to the end, I think... Maybe not. I had a lot planned but I'm second guessing myself. I guess we can only wait and see.

Anywho, thanks for sticking around. ♡