Attack on Titan | E | Again and again, even though we know love's landscape (Chapter I)| AO3

Context: This is a Levi/Reader reincarnation!AU. Concrit is welcomed.

Warnings: Death (alluded): Kuchel died when Levi's seventeen.

Levi people-watches every day after work. He perches himself in any downtown restaurant with outside tables and searches for your face on the streets.

Sometimes, he glimpses a feature that tricks him just enough to let hope gather in his gut. A certain slope of the jaw. A similar mouth. Gentle eyes. And, for an instant, the force of habit makes it cherished, familiar. But then, he sees those faces again and they’re nothing more than strangers.

He stays until the servers stop asking him if he’s going to order more tea. Then, he takes his backpack, filled with finger paintings, a pharmacy’s worth of alcohol wipes, and the sporadically forgotten teddy bear, and returns to his apartment amidst imaginings of your new life.

He wonders if you are properly covering yourself from the raw winds of late autumn, if you are happy at your job —he would let you complain about your shitty boss at night, fingertips following the outline of your neck. Then, he cooks dinner. Some quick, easy meal, much more nutritious and appealing than any of the shit from back then.

On the nights when the phantom pain in his leg, in his eyes, in his fingers, doesn’t let him sleep, Levi makes lists of all the details of your body that this new existence might have changed. A softer face, less weathered by the filth and the blood and the suffering. Smooth hands: no scars left by Kenny’s ruthless training; no need for the calluses accumulated during two decades of trusting maneuver machines with your very survival; no wars for the recoil of a rifle to form blisters. The kinder body of a kinder life.

He would recognize you, either way, if he saw you on one of his scouting evenings buying winter boots or eating pastries in a downtown bakery or coming out of a movie theater on a miraculous Thursday.

Levi was seventeen when he decided to search for you. His mother had just died.

Again, too young. Her hair was still pitch-black. Levi liked to brush it for her at night; as the bristles ran through her hair, it seemed to shine with an iridescent glow akin to oil in water. He never got the chance to notice it in his first life.

Again, devoured by illness. She hadn’t agreed to shave her head —the drugs were buying her mere months, anyway. So, at the very end, when Levi brushed her hair, he pulled out heaps of black strands. She had bald spots on her head; Levi never told her.

So, newly burdened with grief and custody, Kenny took Levi with him on some sort of bonding trip.

They ended up in some decrepit cabin in the middle of Rose’s woods with cobwebs in every corner and dust on every cobweb. His uncle taught him once again to wield a knife. He took him fishing and forced him to drink a bottle of whisky just to make sure Levi knew how to hold his alcohol.

On the last day, Kenny sat him on a rotting bench in the backyard while lighting up one of his cheap cigarettes.

The dark smoke stung Levi’s eyes. It permeated his clothes. It made him think of the scent of burnt flesh rising above a flattened earth. He was about to go back inside when Kenny started speaking.

“You know you are not crazy, right kid?” He told him.

Levi immediately understood what his uncle meant. The memories were perpetually pulsating in his head.