Past doesn't matter (Levi x OC x Erwin) AU/modern +18

Chapter 37: What shall we do? Pt. 2

"She is stable now. If you want you can go to her now. Right aisle, the last room on the left. But please be quiet and try not to excite her. She is very weak. "

I jumped up from my seat like a spring. The nurse's words hit my heart like a kick in the stomach. A deep, dark fear seized me, laced my throat. What would I expect if I entered her room?

Together with Mikasa, we made our way to the room the nurse had given us. Less than a minute later we were standing in front of it and I was the first to pull the door handle. I slowly opened the door and pushed it open.

A dim light burned inside, like a bedside lamp. But there was no sound.

Mikasa and I looked at each other for a moment and I heard her take a deep breath, just like me.

She entered first and I followed and closed the door behind us.

When we entered the room, the whole picture of misery was revealed to us.

I wanted to gasp, wanted to express my deep shock somehow, but no air went in or out of me. The gasp I wanted to inhale so desperately, died halfway down my throat. It broke my heart to see my love like that.

Mikasa immediately went to her bedside, tenderly took her hand, but it seemed as if Nina was sleeping.

Mikasa sighed and then went to take her medical records to study it while I was still rooted in the doorway.

I slowly awoke from my lethargy and took a step closer to the free side of her bed, but the closer I got, the more my heart broke, the more I was shocked, and the more I was filled with regret and guilt.

In the dim light of the bedside lamp, she almost looked as if she's dead. The only thing that could be concluded that she was still alive was the barely visible raising and lowering of the duvet while she was breathing, a nasal mask inside her nostrils while she's attached to a respirator.

Without even registering what I was doing, I grabbed the next best chair and took my place by her side, picked up her ice-cold hand with mine, and held it in both hands, hoping that my warmth would show her the way back to me.

I was still in a state of shock as I looked at my loved one as she lay here on the bed, so weak, so cold, so lifeless. Her otherwise bright pink skin was now pale and dull, she had deep and dark circles under her eyes as if she hadn't slept for days, with an IV stuck to her right arm, from which she was nurtured and supplied with medication, and although it wasn't that long ago when I saw her the last time she looks a bit emaciated to me.

I sighed loudly and pressed my forehead against her hand, which I still clutched tightly between mine.

If I had only been with her, if I had only supported and comforted her, this would certainly not have happened.

Nina's strong, emotional connection to Levi had finally turned out to be a curse. I did not see it as a weakness to be so emotional, it was an important, and above all, the quality that I valued most about her, but now it is precisely this emotionality that brought her to the hospital.

I knew I had a saying in her condition, it was partly my fault that she lays in this bed, but I couldn't help but blame Levi as well. I needed to have a culprit, I needed to hate someone other than myself because I couldn't possibly loathe myself more.

It didn't matter why or for what reasons Levi parted from Nina, all I was interested in was that my love was currently in the hospital, completely exhausted, seriously ill, and maybe even close to death, and I WANTED it to be Levi's guilt!