Your lie (Levi • Reader)

First times are the toughest

You entered the HQ with Eren. Your dark mien was still shaped in an obscure, rather unreadable frown, far from choosing to change its state. Your hand held his bony wrist tightly, while the boy, who had already long become a man, appeared to his peers, as if he was being dragged up by you for a proper scold. Tall and elevated staircases reached up towards the buildings top, stopping at a certain point where pillars and rounded ceiling met.

A long hallway opened up, before you were met with the view of the anti-vivid library, the place you knew spend calmness despite any calamity outside of it. It seemed to represent a good place for discussing necessary deeds, especially now, because plenty of the regular visitors weren't present, due to the fiasco that had occurred outside. Even the librarian Kenami seemed missing, until you spotted her at the very end of the storey, peeking out her glasses through the glass of the window with their withered, wizened, wooden sills in hopes of spotting anything interesting she could later share with her friend Hange. Despite the librarian not being labelled as one, she turned out to be a pretty menacing gossip merchant.

Upon arrival you pulled Eren to a stoney, cold corner, shadowed by a couple of shingly-carved dragon-figures, that graced an abandoned wall on one side. Your eyes darted to him. No one but him could hear you. Your heart-rate calmed down serenely, just in contrast to Eren's, that didn't manage to rest from beginning to end.

He had been convinced something would happen to you. The sight of your bloody chest and hand made an ache cover the area of his own heart, almost as if he had been the one that endured the pain himself.
Even though you had chosen your clean hand to hold his wrist, he felt its dense and thick consistency all over him, as if it spread over his clothes, skin, face and whatnot. His worried eyes met yours with the intention to peruse your being, but it was difficult, seemingly impossible, just like most of the time. He wanted to be able to tell what you were thinking of, behind your intense orbs and that grave, prettily-painted expression of frustration and almost unshakeable equanimity that he barely dared to talk back at sometimes.

When had you learned to use that expression as regularly as to enable shots of cool to travel down his back?
He wondered, still in question of where your light-heartedness, which you used to carry with the frequency of the shining sun on a willowy field, had gone lost to.

With Levi hurting you again it seemed as if he received his answer. The times seemed to become meaningless to count too, because it became a regular basis, enough to make his blood boil. Eren felt the anger that he knew you should possess.

But instead of your wrath growing large and dark over heels and heads the way he wanted it to, he heard your voice and realised you were calming yourself down. To his utter bafflement to mention.

"I'm sorry for stealing your training time now. I'll repay you later.", you spoke, as if that wasn't the last thing on his mind at the time. His look seemed urgent, as if trying to catch you before you went away. Eren had feared Levi would've gone too far once more, but that you would too by engaging so ruthlessly in the fight, made his acceptance to each new situation falter. How often did you have to have problems in your strange relationship to Levi for you to give it up? In the end it seemed to Eren as if you were the only one, that suffered the consequences of those arguments.

"Don't worry, I didn't want to train anyways.", Eren replied quietly, as if he was out of breath.
"(Y/N), I-"

"Is it because the teams got switched up?", you asked blankly.

He stared back at you. You aimed right at the target and still missed, how did you manage to achieve that? Eren wanted to get through to you, his voice emitting a relative of despair. "He hurt you, that's why you're bleeding. Shouldn't that be your first concern?"