Chapter Text
[ Eren ]
I spent days, nights, countless hours decoding. What was normal, neat script turned into scribbles and pen markings, strike-throughs and misspellings. Patterns I didn't think I'd recognize in Levi's rough drafts, but I guess the more you read something written by someone you love, you can see their marks all over the place. What fit and what didn't, and a lot of what he wrote did not fit.
Armin helped for a little while, and I'll forever be grateful to him, but after a day or two I decided to tackle it on my own. It felt personal — not just reading someone else's work, but reading something that felt like he left it, he wrote it, for me.
Qu'ai-je fait
No matter the cost, the time it took, the sleepless nights and dreary days, I sat and read through Levi's twenty pages so many times I could recite it by memory, like an actor with a script. I don’t remember it, but at one point I made copies of it. Five, ten, fifteen copies, just so I could figure out how to string the words together, how to find if there was something, anything, that could lead me back to him.
Took me about two months before I could make sense of whatever scraps I gathered. The details are long and the amount of frustration and anger spent on it felt like a slap in the face once I wrote it down, but it was something. My hands were moving in flashes of black and red ink, and all I came up with were three words, if they can be called that.
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
Once I wrote them down, I wrote them again and again. Over each of the copies I made, over napkins, over Levi’s notes, everything. I wrote it on every surface I could write on, because maybe the more I wrote it the more it would make sense. But I couldn’t make it make sense. The angrier I got, the more incomprehensible the words became. They blurred and shifted into something unrecognizable. Like when you say something out loud, a color, a phrase, a name, so many times over and over that it starts to lose it’s meaning. Just winds up sounding like noise instead of language.
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
“Lis, thirteen, STL.”
I wrote it thousands of times, and lost it’s meaning. If it had any to begin with. I broke pens. Pencils. Keyboards. Anything he wrote with, anything that could produce language. I broke it and yelled until I lost my voice, and yelled even then. Levi’s apartment floor was littered with these three meaningless nothings.
I stepped over it, crunching paper and tissues beneath bare feet, and slept for twelve hours.
“Eren are you sure this is all you got from it?”
Armin sat cross-legged on the floor, piecing Levi’s pages back together in their numbered order. All of the napkins and post-its and scraps of paper in repetition were thrown out; leave it to Armin to always clean up my mess. At least some things never change.
I hopped up on the kitchen counter and looked down at him. “I promise you, I sat in that spot for weeks trying to get everything I could out of it. There’s nothing else.”
“But this doesn’t make any sense,” Armin muttered, gingerly tracing his fingers over the indentations on the paper my heavy hand had left. “Are they coordinates? Memories? I don’t understand.”
“If you can’t piece it together, than it’s hopeless,” I sighed, hopping off the counter. “Let’s go for a walk before I wreck this place any further.”
Armin huffed and stacked the pages on the table, careful to not ruin their order. “Don’t talk like that, you’ve done great. You managed to get something out of his writing; that’s pretty impressive in its own right.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
We grabbed our jackets and left the apartment, careful to lock it behind us.
I’ve never been a good reader. Don’t have the attention span for it, don’t have the patience, don’t have the interest. I’d rather watch a movie or a TV show or go out and do something. Feels more productive, like I’m actually getting something out of it. Books are just words you have to give imagination to. It’s exhausting.
Needless to say, I have never been fond of libraries. But if I was ever going to figure out what those cryptic-ass fucking clues meant, I had to start somewhere.
I checked out every book that had to do with the number thirteen: its superstitions, its history, its associations. Anything about it I could find, I took back to Levi’s apartment. That, and books on abbreviations, geography, numerology. Whatever I found that might lead me back to him came back with me.
And I hated it.
Levi’s apartment wasn’t huge by any means; it was comfortable for one or two people. Not too big, not too cramped. But holy shit, with all those books spread out you would think there wasn’t enough room in the world to contain them. Should’ve probably invested stock in Staples with how many supplies I bought from them. Books covered the kitchen table, the floors, the bed, stacked in corners. Everything that had a surface that wasn’t needed was covered. I had post-its on every page I thought was relevant. Pads of notes with meaningless scribbles and questions that led to more questions stuck out of all the pages. I sat there for hours and hours and hours just reading and I hated it. Bruises formed on my knees from kneeling on the floor too long. Every time I stood up all my joints would crack and ache from staying in the same position for longer than anyone should have. My eyes hurt from focusing too much. The apartment became a disaster zone, claustrophobic, my thoughts and fears and speculations written down on all the pages trying to find some meaning out of anything.
It was one long spiral of page-turning, note-taking, exhaustion-inducing research that I didn’t even know would make a difference. But I kept going. By sheer determination mixed in with a lot of stubbornness, I kept going.
Until I found something. One, small, little something in a dictionary. Wasn’t even one of the books I checked out from the library, just a small travel-sized French dictionary hidden in Levi’s nightstand. I opened the top drawer when I put his manuscript back. The bottom of the drawer collapsed from too much weight, and the book tumbled onto the floor with it. I didn’t notice it before, but when I picked it up and opened it, the inside page had Levi’s name written in the top right corner in his handwriting.
It was an accident. An absent-minded flip through the foxed pages of a well-loved French dictionary.
And then I flipped to the “L” section.
Lire
Lire en diagnole
Lire l’avenir dans le marc de café
Lire qch à qn
Lire un livre en entier
And just when I was about to close the book, a word circled in red ink:
Lis.
noun: lily
Lily.
My heart dropped into my stomach and my hands dropped the dictionary. Lily. But didn’t he use tulips before? What do lillies have to do with anything? And why all the fucking flowers.
I ran back to the kitchen floor, searching for the page I wrote the three words on. I found it, written in thick black marker so I could spot it among all the other words and books, and wrote “Lily” under lis. I had one, but not the others. I spent so long reading about the number thirteen that night that I fell asleep with my face creasing the pages. Will never tell Armin.
I spent the next week only with that number. My phone rang but I never answered it. It died eventually, so I was left with some quiet to think. Eventually my head became too crowded and I started speaking out loud, trying to make sense of whatever I was getting my hands on. I didn’t get much done with it, mostly because I couldn’t stop thinking about lilies.
I didn’t know much about them besides the fact that they were always used in funeral parlors and smelled like death. They were pretty, but didn’t exactly have a good image when thinking about them. But Levi left it for me to find, so it must’ve been important. I took my keys and a protein bar and took myself to a flower shop to find out.
The cashier apologized to me. Not because they didn’t have any lilies, but because he was sorry for my loss. See? Death flower.
Not wanting to explain my entire life story to a stranger, I said thank you, bought two lilies, and went back to the apartment.
The smell was nauseating. I thought by having them in front of me it would trigger some kind of memory of Levi talking about them or mentioning them somehow, but really all they did was stink up the place and wilt in a few days’ time. I threw them in the garbage, opened all the windows for some fresh air, and turned on my laptop. Spent a little while looking up flower meanings and symbolism, looked at pictures of all their different colors; nothing. I had nothing. On a whim, I typed in “lis” instead of lily. Google spat at me computer abbreviations, linear algebra, low-income subsidies, a bunch of useless crap that had nothing to do with finding Levi. A link popped up to the Miriam-Webster Dictionary page in English. I clicked it, trying to figure out what words start with those three letters, when it took to me to:
Lis (noun)
\ lés \
plural lis or lisses
See also: fleur-de-lis
Of course.
Of course.
This was never Levi’s hometown. He never grew up here or went to school here or anything. How could I have forgotten such an important detail about a person I loved? Heat rose up my neck, across my jaw all the way up to my ears in shame. I didn’t put it together. I wasted so much time trying to find meaning in pages I hated reading that I didn’t even stop to think about the person I was trying to find. I clicked the link to it.
Fleur-de-lis (noun)
\ flər-də-ˈlē , fllu̇r- \
variants, or less commonly fleur-de-lys
“a conventionalized iris in artistic design and heraldry.”
It probably looked hilarious how fast I went to search images of the fleur-de-lis. It’s one of those things that you don’t know the name of, but when you see it, you’re familiar. Hundreds of images flooded the screen of designs for this lily; all different colors, shapes, sizes, styles. Looking at it led me to reading about it, how many countries use it on their flags, how old it was. I would never have looked for this on my own, but if it led me to Levi, I would keep reading. So I did. I grabbed a new pad of paper and wrote down every country that had ever flown its symbol, every ship that ever used its name, every drink or tattoo or anything I could find of it down. I crossed off places and things I knew had no connection and saved the ones that did.
I may have found the lily, but I didn’t know what it meant for the other two clues, and I kept asking myself the same questions. Is this a place? What do they have to do with each other? What the hell does STL even stand for and what does it have to do with lilies and unlucky numbers?
Will Levi be at the end of it?
I didn’t know, but what I did know was that I wasn’t giving up, not that I finally had something to go on.
So I kept searching.