The Titan Queen - Levi X Reader

Chapter 10 - The Problem

"Missed me?" You breathed, the moment that you had to draw yourself back in order to get a decent breath into your lungs. Levi kissed you again before responding – a sweet, lingering kiss that made your heart ache.

It was as though this was the reason you'd given yourself up to the titans in the first place – this man beneath your fingertips, the man who had somehow seated you on his lap so that there was barely an inch between you. This man was the one thing that had gotten you through the months spent as a beast.

"Does the sea miss the sun when it no longer shines on its waves?" Levi answered, his fingers running up and down your shoulders as though he couldn't believe that you were real.

You smiled, and the ball of tension in your head eased a little. "I don't know – does it?"

"There is not a word in our language to express the things I was feeling the moment that you were taken," Levi said, his eyes almost becoming darker as he caught your gaze and held onto it. "But I assure you, Y/N, that I am so pissed at you that you can't even begin to imagine it."

"You have a lovely way of showing it," you cooed sweetly, deliberately running the very tip of your nose down the side of his neck and enjoying the effect it had on him – the shivers that coursed through his body, the goosebumps that rose on his arms. "Maybe I should piss you off more often."

Levi's hands grabbed your shoulder and nudged you away, perhaps forbidding himself from enjoying your ministrations too much. "Is that a promise?"

You winked. "If the poodle desires it."

"That is indeed just one of the things that I am extraordinarily annoyed at you about," Levi conceded, his hands going to the neck of his shirt and drawing the band of leather that had hidden underneath the collar. "The bracelet broke during a training exercise," he explained, interpreting the beginnings of a grin on your face as perhaps the markings of a grimace. "Trust me, I personally oversaw the punishment of the one who broke it."

The poodle charm was now on a thicker band of leather, gleaming at you even with the overhead canvas of the carriage covering any direct sunlight – as though he'd been polishing it. There were no hints of dirt or tarnishes on the cheap metal you'd luckily gotten your hands on in the months before everything changed. "If you found those presents, I have the right to be mad at you," you accused him, your own fingertips running down the smooth lines of the charm. "It means that you were snooping, Ackerman."

"It wasn't me who found them," Levi rolled his eyes. "And I assure you, if I'd been the one snooping, I would have been more occupied with the other items I would have found."

You hummed, ignoring the obvious innuendo pointedly. It had suddenly hit you that Eren was indeed still on the bench to the side, his breathing regular enough to inform you that he wouldn't be awaking any time soon.

His presence hurt.

"It's my fault," you whispered. "Everything is my fault." Levi growled in response, his fingers finding their way to your chin, forcing you to look at him. "Don't try and tell me that it isn't," you said, keeping your eyes on the boy across from you instead of the one almost begging you to look at him. You couldn't help but notice Eren, now – notice and wonder if this was the first decent sleep that he'd had in a long while. "He was the worst sacrifice that I had to make."

Levi said nothing in response to that – whether it was because he genuinely didn't know what to say, or if he thought he needed to give you some space to sort out your own thoughts, you didn't have a clue. But you could read him. You could see the tension being exerted from the lines of his muscles, from feeling the way that his legs were tensed underneath you. You could read his anger in the way that his jaw was tight and his eyes were a flashing grey – the kind that a sword would glean with as you swung it under the winter sun.