Chapter Text
Come evening, you settle back in the armchair. You steal one of Levi’s pillows and a blanket.
When Levi comes out of the bathroom and sees you curled up in the chair, he sighs in clear irritation. He walks up to you and extends his hand.
“Come.”
“No.”
“You’ll hurt your back if you keep sleeping there.”
“Do I look like I care, Levi?” you ask sullenly, wary eyes looking at him like he’s vermin.
Levi doesn’t pull his hand back. He’s far too stubborn to.
“Come.”
“I already said no.”
“It wasn’t a request.”
He grabs your wrist and pulls you up. This son of a bitch. Immediately, you try to jam your elbow as deep into his infuriating mug as you can.
He grabs it with his free hand, annoyingly easily so.
“Behave,” he warns. His hair is still damp, droplets of water falling over his white cotton shirt.
You fleetingly think he smells nice but disregard it. You pucker your lips.
“Spit at me again and you’ll pay for it,” Levi grunts a warning. You kick at him, and to your surprise the kick lands in his stomach.
He topples back, but only a little bit. His eyes flash in annoyance and he grabs you, just to throw you over his shoulder.
Ignoring your protests and the way your fists slam against his back with the kind of veracity any child throwing a temper tantrum would look at in absolute awe at, he walks to the bed and throws you on it.
His hands slam on each side of your head. You glare up at him. He’s hovering above you, eyes narrowed in quiet irritation.
“Why are you being so damn difficult?” he asks with a low hiss.
“Give me one good reason to not be,” you shoot back with a frown.
“You’ll make life harder for yourself.”
“I wanted to forgo my life, Levi. Why the fuck would I care?”
“Language,” he grunts. You give him a cold laugh.
“You really are aching to return to the days when I was a naïve wee maiden starstruck by you. Why is that? Did you enjoy my inexperience? The way I was so easy to control?”
Levi’s eyes flash with an emotion you can’t quite place. Inside his mind, Levi quietly questions himself. Why is it indeed? Is that truly what he was so drawn to? And if he was, what does that say about him?
Or maybe, the status quo is just so unbearable to him he longs for when you were warm and full with your feelings for each other.
“I-” Levi starts, but he’s cut off when you suddenly break out coughing. He frowns. It’s a deep cough, coming from young lungs.
You watch, puzzled, as Levi’s eyes turn from irritated to worried.
It really doesn’t suit him.
“Go to sleep, Tilda,” he then says.
“I am not sharing a bed with you,” you reply, steadfast. You won’t budge on this. Levi groans. You capricious being, driving him up the wall.
He’s crazy about you.
“Then you sleep here. I’ll take the armchair,” Levi finally decides. He gets off you and hops on his feet. He points at you.
“Stay in bed.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” you snap back at him, but the lulling warmth and softness of the bed make your eyes lid almost instantly.
You’re exhausted.
“Fine. But sneak in my bed while I’m sleeping and I’ll smack you,” you threaten him. Levi doesn’t respond. He instead walks to the armchair and slumps down on it.
You give him one more glare and then bundle up under the blanket. You cough again.
Maybe you’re coming down with something.
The tension between you keeps brewing, to no apparent catharsis.
-
The hours tick away so fucking slowly.
Levi’s sitting in the armchair, his eyes calm and contemplative in the darkness. What possessed him to give you the bed?
Now he can’t sleep, his body thinks he’s in an unknown place and refuses to wind down.
It’s been hours at this point. You’re curled up on the bed, as far away from Levi as possible. He can hear your breathing and he has to admit, after having all those nightmares about losing you, being able to physically hear you being safe and sound is an immense relief.
It’s hard for him. Resisting that urge to just put a collar and chain on you to keep you here, where it’s safe, where Levi can see you.
And each day he spends in your presence, it gets harder to keep himself in check.
He wants you still. He wants to grab you, handle you, tame you, own you.
He wants those wide, adoring eyes. He wants that beautiful neck. He wants your holes. He wants to use them until they’re raw and sensitive, then worship them with his mouth until you’re quivering from head to toe.
Levi’s never been this crazy over anyone. He must have lost his mind. Taking in a civilian from the enemy and keeping them as a chamber pet.
As if aware of that, you suddenly shift in your sleep. A soft moan echoes in the room. Levi’s stormy eyes snap to the silhouette of your body.
Why are you tempting him?
“Jean.”
Levi freezes. He hears the name loud and clear, and the sultry moan leaves no doubts on what you’re dreaming of.
And before Levi’s even had the chance to pause and think what to do or say, he’s sprung to his feet. He crosses over to you, grabs your shoulder and yanks you over to your back.
You jolt awake. For a second, you’re filled with instinctual panic, your heart goes nuts in your chest, but when you see Levi above you, that soon shifts to different kind of excitement.
You reach your hand and turn the oil lamp on the bedside table on. You look up, just to see Levi’s eyes, narrow and filled with rage.
“What?” you ask. Despite your voice being hoarse from sleep still, the sassy tone is already back.
“Did you sleep with him?”
“What on Earth are you blabbering about?”
Levi grasps your throat. Not hard enough to hurt, but you feel the touch.
“Jean Kirstein. Did you spread your legs to him?”
You don’t recall the dream you just had, but the sensation between your legs you feel when you shift yourself a little gives it away.
So that’s what it’s about. You settle on a nonchalant expression.
“I’m engaged to him, Levi. Of course I slept with him.”
Levi’s hold tightens.
“You were engaged to him.”
“I never broke it off with him.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“And why is that?” you ask dryly.
“You’re here now.”
“That doesn’t change anything.”
“That changes everything,” Levi grunts as he leans in. Eyes filled with that scary possessiveness you witnessed all those years ago.
You see it loud and clear: if Levi ever gets his hands on Jean, he’ll kill him.
“And why is that?” you finally ask. Your pulse hammers against your ear drums, your pussy is already wet from the dream but it now gets more aroused.
Your breathing becomes faint.
When Levi’s this close, you can’t pretend like you don’t want him.
“You’re under my guardianship. I own you, Tilda. Until I let you go, you belong to me.”
At that, you scoff.
“Really? You certainly don’t act that way, Levi.”
You push your leg up. Your thigh comes in contact with Levi’s groin. He’s achingly hard.
“Here you are, yapping on and on about how you own me,” you tell him, voice light, almost conversational. “Yet too scared to do anything about it. You’re hard as a rock but too scared to put your hands on me.”
“I promised I wouldn’t,” Levi breathes. His eyes flutter just the tiniest bit at the touch.
You lean in. Your voice is low and quiet, and your eyes smoulder with both hatred and hurt.
“Since when have you given a shit about your promises, Levi? You certainly didn’t when you left me in that cell.”
“I had to-”
“Excuses,” you hiss. “Those are excuses. You didn’t care about you promises then, don’t sit there all high and mighty pretending to be an honourable man. You’re rotten, Levi. Act like it.”
“Shut up.” He grits his teeth. You press tighter against his cock.
“Fuck you.”
Levi’s hand tightens on your throat. His lips crash down on yours, and you don’t fight it. You grab his hair and yank it, thigh pressing up against his clothed cock.
You bite his lower lip, pull at it with your front teeth, hands already pushing down the collar of his shirt to scratch his back.
His hand never moves from your throat, the other already shoved under your nightgown to hike up your inner thigh.
He roughly pushes your legs apart, hand closing over your clothed pussy. He rubs, with full authority, relishing in the choked moan you release against his lips.
His voice is so low it’s almost a growl when he speaks up and you can immediately tell he’s not joking around.
“If there’s ever a warning you’re willing to take from me, Tilda, let it be this one: spread your legs to another man and I will kill him.”
“You already did,” you breathe, and for a second, there’s vulnerability in your voice before you push it aside. Don’t think now. It’ll just hurt, and you’ve felt enough of that.
At your words, Levi freezes. He has the decency to feel a pang of guilt. He may not have pulled the trigger personally, but Jean is most likely dead by his countrymen’s hands.
Yet alongside the guilt is the ruthless joy at the fact. Because it means Levi will not have to worry about sharing you again.
But his triumph is short lived. As you lean in to steal his lips again, fire burning in your eyes, the moment is interrupted by you suddenly turning to your side. You cough, so deeply he can almost hear your lungs resonate with each hack.
His anger-simmered arousal turns into concern. His hand places on your forehead, and when he feels it burning under his palm, he immediately retreats.
“You have a fever,” he says. You turn to glare at him, your lungs satiated for now. The force of your coughs made you tear up.
“Since when have you cared? Just do what you were going to,” you demand. You don’t appreciate the way Levi pulled away. Your mind is too full of blue thoughts right now.
You want to forget, and both hating and desiring Levi offers you that escape.
Levi doesn’t obey you, God knows he never does. Instead, he gets on his feet, eyes filled with that infuriating worry that makes it so much harder to loathe him.
“Fuck me,” you demand with a hiss. Levi frowns.
“Are you out of your mind? Why are you thinking about that now? Get some fucking rest.”
He grabs the blanket and when you sit up with the full intention of launching a verbal attack of grandiose proportions at him, he wrestles you down and covers you up to your chin.
“Sleep.”
“Fuck you,” you spit back. Levi’s eyes darken with annoyance, but he lets it slide. He watches how despite your venomous words, your eyelids grow heavy.
-
The next morning, Levi wakes up to the sound of disturbingly anguished coughing. His eyes snap open and he springs on his feet from the armchair.
It’s still dark outside. He doubts he snoozed for more than a couple of hours.
Levi lights the lamp on the bedside table
You’re only half-coherent. Your face is covered in sweat and you’re coughing and writhing on the bed. Levi’s eyes widen.
He strides to the door and yanks it open. He comes face to face with Porco, who was on his way to the bedroom to light the fireplace so Levi can start his morning warm and toasty.
“Sir,” he says, taken aback. It’s dark in the hallway, but he can make out the deeply unsettled look on Levi’s face.
“Get a doctor. Now.”
“Doctor? Are you ill?” Porco asks.
“Just obey. And bring some cool water and towels,” Levi barks, impatient. He then strides back to the bedroom and slams the door shut. Porco blinks, confused, before placing down the pile of firewood he was carrying and hurrying to obey.
The doctor comes in. He checks you thoroughly and proclaims the long cold march from your home country to here caused you to get pneumonia.
There’s not much he can do. He gives you some oral medicine and tells Levi to make sure your fever stays low and that you get adequate rest.
As the doctor excuses himself, leaving behind some cough medicine and pills to help alleviate your fever, Levi remains. His eyes are piercing as he stares at you.
Porco and Pieck enter moments later. Porco is holding the pile of firewood. Levi points at the fireplace and the man hurries to get it started.
Pieck places a basin on water down by the bed and wets a towel. She places it on your forehead.
Levi’s eyes harden. Pieck wipes off some sweat, her face neutral. Whereas Porco gives the bed openly unhappy looks, Pieck seems to have opted to stay as neutral as possible.
She wants none of this mess.
“Get out,” Levi tells his servants once they have done what they can to ease your discomfort. Pieck is out of the door in less than two seconds. Porco lingers, but only for a moment.
As Levi’s left alone with you, his piercing eyes slowly soften into a look of uneasy tenderness.
He’s a ruthless man. He doesn’t know how to care for another person.
“You had better pull through. That’s an order,” he tells your delirious form, to no answer. He swallows, then grabs a chair from his desk. He drags it next to the bed and sits down. He places his elbows on his knees and leans his head into his hands.
He turns off the lamp, leaving you only in the light of the fireplace. He looks at you quietly, the early morning so quiet around him it feels suffocating.
His thoughts have rarely been this loud.
“I’m sorry.”
His words are faint and wholly impulsive, leaping out of his mouth as if seeing their chance now that you can’t fully register them.
You’re awake, but just barely. The room is spinning around you. You’re so hot, but also have chills all over your body. You want to cough but your body is too weak to muster the strength to.
But despite that, your mouth opens the moment you hear Levi’s words. They could be a dream for all you know, but right now they’re the only thing bringing you comfort.
“Did you ever regret it?”
Levi flinches. He didn’t expect a reply. He looks at you, equal parts wary and hopeful.
Your eyes are delirious as they land on the dark silhouette, crouched where it’s sitting next to the bed. You see two dark eyes, and it’s hard to tell in the night but you could swear they glisten, just the tiniest bit.
Levi leans forward. His forehead presses against his joined hands.
“Always,” Levi quietly replies. In the safety of the dim light and your incoherent breaths, it’s easier to be raw.
“Why did you do it? I was head over heels for you, I would have done anything for you,” you confess, the fever loosening your tongue.
“I was a prisoner of war being starved in a cellar. I had to use whatever I could to leave.”
“You could have asked me to let you go.”
“Would you have?” Levi asks quietly, and your silence tells him enough. Maybe you would have, but you also might not.
Levi sighs. He looks at your sweaty hand and gets the unbearable urge to hold it. To reach out to that part of you that was shed and left behind that morning you woke up in the cell without him.
“I couldn’t risk it. If you said no and stopped coming, that would have been the end for me.”
“You could have just overpowered me and taken the key by force the moment I was inside. Why did you take my virginity? Why did you keep up the facade until the very end?” you ask tiredly. “It would have been so much easier if you didn’t feed me the delusions that I meant something to you.”
Levi wants to say you did, but he knows it would be cruel of him to say now. It wouldn’t change anything. His actions already shifted who you are, maybe irreversibly so.
“I… Desired you,” Levi finally says. It’s not a lie, but that’s not all there is.
“Enough to not care about ruining me?” you ask with laboured breaths. Levi jolts a bit, not expecting this kind of vulnerability, even in your weakened state.
“I ruined you?” he asks with a quiet voice. He asked before, but even then when you denied it, he felt like it was at least a half-lie.
“Yes, Levi. It ruined me,” you murmur. “I waited like a fool, you know. Weeks upon weeks, I stayed up every night waiting for you to come to me. I knew the truth, but I also held onto the naïve hope that you’d return to take me with you.”
“Then what about Jean Kirstein?” Levi asks quietly. You chuckle tiredly.
“I ended up spilling the beans to him the night before he was due to return to duty. I needed to get it off my chest and I expected him to reject me in disgust. A noblewoman marked by an enemy officer, what a fucking pathetic thing.”
You let out a joyless laugh that quickly turns into a coughing fit. Levi hurries to grab water from the bedside table. He helps you drink a few sips.
You take a few deep breaths, your cough eventually settling back down. You stare at the ceiling, sweaty hands clutching your blanket.
“But to my surprise, he didn’t push me away. He… Told me it’s not my fault. That you manipulated me and used me knowing I was young and inexperienced.”
Levi has the decency to avert his gaze then. Jean hit the nail on the head. Even if at the bottom of it all, Levi genuinely desired you and harboured romantic interest.
“You were young, curious and easy to control,” Levi admits. Your eyes shift from calm to sombre, as if Levi’s confirming what you already knew, but the words hurt nonetheless.
“That night, I got engaged to Jean. I asked him to lay with me, just so I don’t have to live with your lingering touch.”
Despite knowing he has no standing whatsoever, that ugly jealousy still rears its head in Levi. His instincts scream you’re his, his eyes grow dark and dangerous, but he holds himself back.
He understands why you chose to do it. Hell, he knows he has no stakes to declare his ownership of you. Yet still, the most primal part of him demands it.
“Don’t give me that look, Levi,” you chuckle tiredly, half-open eyes examining the way he’s clearly gripping onto his self-control to not lash out. “I’m sure you had escapades with many a woman after you left-”
“I haven’t,” Levi cuts in. He swallows, taken aback by his own words. This wasn’t something he was going to divulge to you. Yet now that he did, he feels like he has to elaborate. “I did not have sex with anyone after I left.”
“It’s been years,” you point out, puzzled. You hate the way how in your spinning head, you feel a small glimmer of something resembling hope. As if after all these years, you still hold onto the naïve wish of meaning something to this man.
“Yeah,” Levi replies.
“Why didn’t you?”
Levi grits his teeth. The truth threatens to spill out. He’s holding it back with all he can, but before he knows it, his hand has already moved on its own.
He leans over and cups your cheek. His eyes are stormy mixture of anger, possessiveness and self-loathing, yet also tenderness, vulnerability and affection.
“Because even after all these years, I’m still crazy about you, Tilda,” he admits. He spits the words out, clearly hating himself for them, yet when he leans down, his lips are tender.