Title: The Walls (chapter 1.2)
Fandom: Shingeki no Kyojin
Pairing: *updating*
Rating: Safe
Warning: Alternative Universe, Origin!Fic (sort of), It doesn't follow the canon nor the spinoff
Wordcount: 2675
Summary: Welcome to The Walls.
It’s a world in itself. A world where you live. A world where you die, and all you have to do it’s doing your best, because you have nothing to lose anymore.
Or do you?
Since he had found out how beautiful Hermina was from above, he had started to spend a lot of time running on the roofs. It was so much easier than it should have been, and he enjoyed it so much that he was becoming reluctant to get back on the streets to work.
He just couldn't get enough of the sensation of freedom he felt up there.
Eventually he crossed roads with Jenn all the time. She had snickered openly at him, the first time she caught him attempting to balance on a particularly narrow edge, but he managed to buy her silence sharing his lunch.
Since then it had become a habit of sorts; they would sit on a roof, and share whatever food they could steal that day, chatting and looking down at the people in the streets.
"Have you ever tried to climb the Wall?" asked Levi. He took a loaf of bread from his bag, he broke it in half and passed it to Jenn, waiting for her answer.
"The wall, you say?" asked the girl absently, searching her bag. She took out two small parcels, and tossed one to Levi. He almost let it drop, caught off guard.
"I can climb any wall. Well, most of them. You know the big white building, the one behind the Temple? That one is pretty difficult, because it's slippery. Can't get a real grip on it. Last time I tried I got caught by the Temple guys too, they tried to shoot me a new hole, but I slipped and the hole went into the wall," she blabbered, unwrapping the parcel and revealing a small piece of cheese.
Levi's mouth watered. Big loot that day.
"I'll keep that in mind," he muttered, unwrapping quickly his own piece of cheese and cutting up some bread. He grimaced briefly at the dull blade of his old penknife. He was in need of a new one. "Wall Sina must be a piece of cake,for you, then."
Jenn almost choked on her first bit of lunch. " What."
"Yeah, " he continued, gesturing to the Wall itself in the distance. "I mean, it's quite high but I don't think it would be difficult. It's really old, isn't it? Old walls have many grooves you can hold on to, you just gotta be-"
"No, holy Walls, are you out of your mind? You don't climb Wall Sina!"
Levi turned to watch her: she was white as a sheet and she was gripping her bread so tightly that the cheese almost fell out. The look on her face was one of disbelief and bewilderment.
He blinked slowly. "I didn't take you for a Cultist."
"I'm not," she exclaimed, defensively. "Cultism is for small children and people who have too much to lose. But I mean, she's Wall Sina, she's old as fuck and she's always been there and she's probably going to be forever, she's Gran Sina, you can't actually go and just climb her like that. It'd be kind of. Disrespectful?"
"Disrespectful," Levi repeated, deadpan.
"I mean." Jenn's ears were getting increasingly red. "I mean, she's the one that protects us from the outside world. Even if you don't believe in the Goddesses, I think it's ok being nice to Sina. I know, there are Rose and Maria as well, but if those were to fall, we would be safe inside Wall Sina. Also, shut up."
She angrily took a bite out her sandwich, clearly upset. Levi let it drop, going back to his own food in silence. The cheese was creamy and half melted because of the warmth, and Levi couldn't remember the last time something had tasted so delicious.
"If you get too close to the Wall you die, by the way," Jenny added out of nowhere, as if an afterthought. "And I'm not talking about some magical religious superstition, I mean bullets. Cultists don't fuck around about this shit, y'know." She was speaking calmly, but she still had two spots of pink high on her cheeks from before. Levi snorted.
"Whatever," he chuckled, shaking the crumbs off his shirt. "It's not like I was planning to climb her or anything."
"You were totally planning to climb her, you shit eating liar," she mumbled angrily, spitting crumbs all over the place and hitting him hard on the shoulder.
"Ok, maybe I was," he admitted, a small smile tugging at his lips. "But not today. Today I got shit to do."
That caught her attention, but she pretended to not care. "Like what," asked, faking a casual attitude.
"Not telling."
"Aw, come on!" she cried out, stuffing the last of her bread into her mouth and sucking on her fingers before pushing him again. "Do tell, bird boy."
Levi cocked an eyebrow at the nickname. Bird folks climbed the roofs, but it was the first time that Levi was called one. It had been less than two weeks since he had jumped on his first housetop, afterall.
"What if I didn't want to, bird girl?" he teased, getting up.
She kicked lightly at his ankle, almost making him lose balance. Her face was completely blank, as if she wasn't worried that he could have slipped off the roof and broke his neck. But she did call him "bird boy". She probably trusted him not to fall.
"Do tell, bird boy," she repeated, like a refrain.
"Today's Garrison's pay day."
"I know. Got a nice loot out of that, too. So what?"
"I'm going to rob the Garrison's dorms."
Jenn's eyes widened. "You motherfucker. Wall Shina. There's no watch on the Garrison's dorms' northern wall because it faces her, so they cannot put men there," she murmured, easily catching up with his plan. Levi was almost disappointed that she had figured out so quickly, but Jenn knew her walls like the back of her hand.
"Yeah. Nobody's got the guts to stay so close to the Wall, so..."
"Nobody except you, goddessless bird boy," she commented. She sounded deadpan, but Levi could see in her eyes that she was impressed.
"Nobody except me," he conceded, smug.
"You little shit."
Levi laughed.
***
The Garrison's dorms used to be an outpost, but then they soon realized that an outpost near the inner wall would have been completely useless for titan watching in case Rose was breached, so they ended up moving it to a non-descript ex-civilian building. The old outpost was turned into a storage and accommodation facility for the members of the Stationary Guard.
Before getting there, Levi used what little money he had left from his last theft to buy a shoulder bag from some smugglers. He didn't know exactly where the windows on the northern wall were going to get him, and he didn't want to be unprepared: if he couldn't get his hands on money, he wanted to be able to bring back at least some food, or some clothes.
He walked calmly along the canal, watching the people that had started gathering on the streets to go home. He walked until he reached the very end of it, where the river flowed through the Wall, and then turned left, following the last row of houses before the large gap that separated the buildings and Inner Sina itself, casually walking among the other people.
When he got to the Garrison's dorms, the shadow cast by Sina was long and dark, and the sun had almost disappeared completely behind it.
The Dorms were an ugly building with a couple of men guarding the main entrance. He easily avoided their eyes slipping into the shadows, and walked around the corner to push himself against the northern wall.
It was so quiet and eerily desert. Nobody dared to stay so close to the Wall, not even the Stationary Guard. Before him, Inner Sina was majestic and undeniably, irremediably ancient: so up close Levi could see where Time had taken his toll, tearing off pieces of plaster and chipping the stone. He also realized that the Wall had fought back, viciously, still standing after who knew how many centuries.
He waited until he was sure that nobody was going to shoot at him or something, and then he started groping the dorms' wall, looking for a good place to start. He found it almost immediately: it was an old wall, crumbly, easy. In no time he had reached the first floor, but the window he found there was closed and he had no way to open it. He didn't want to break the glass, because it could have attracted attention, so he had no choice but keep climbing.
On the second floor, the window was open on an empty corridor. He entered it, landing on the wooden floor as quietly as he could. He looked around: two doors, and stairs, one flight going up and the other going down. He had no way to determine where the heck he was.
Levi started panicking. He hadn't thought so much further than breaking in and grab whatever he could. He thought that the first window he met on his path was going to bring him directly the soldiers' lodgings, he didn't think he would have to explore the place to get somewhere.
He stayed froze in place, wondering what to do, when he heard footsteps coming down the stairs. He took a leap of faith and shoved himself into the first door at his right, before he could get caught.
The room was thankfully empty; it was spacious, with many shelves along the walls, and the air was filled with thin, misty steam. From behind the textured glass door placed on the wall to his left came laughter and chattering, and more steam seeped from under it.
Levi almost cried in relief when he realized that it was a changing room. It meant people who emptied their pockets. It meant money. It meant soap and clean shirts.
It also meant that he hadn't much time, so he had to be quick. He grabbed the smallest shirts he could find, plucked three coins from each purse and a couple of other useful things, like a handkerchief, a pair of boots that almost fit him, a bar of soap and even a small chocolate wrapped in tin foil. It tasted so good that he hadn't even minded the screams and the curses that followed him while he ran out of the room and the corridor from the same window he came in.
***
He ate with his bag on his knees, because he knew that an unwatched baggage was an easy target for robbers.
The stew he had picked was the cheapest thing on the menu, but it was pretty good, thick and creamy and warm, with chunks of potatoes and bits of stringy meat. It had been ages since he had tasted meat, and he was hungry as fuck, so he soon found himself scraping the bottom of the plate with the side of the spoon. He grimaced. He wished it had lasted longer.
As a rule he avoided inns, if he could. The last time he had been in one it was because he was indulging Cutter's mother-hen's instincts, on the night that Stayn turned up dead. The older boy had been so worried about him sleeping on the streets, so he had walked him personally to the closest inn, and made him promise that he would have spent the night.
He didn't mind sleeping in a warm bed once in a while, but cheap inns where usually all he could afford, and he wasn't a fan of sharing the room, or the bed, even, with strangers.
After the robbery though he had felt so cold that he hadn't been able to shake it off. It was as if something had seeped in his bones, freezing the muscles around them. On his way back he had started shivering so hard that he couldn't keep his steps steady.
He had been afraid he was getting sick. Sickness meant death.
So he had entered the first inn he had found, pushing his long hair around so people couldn't see him in the face, and ordered some stew, hoping that with some food in his belly he would have felt stronger and warmer, and he wouldn't have felt the need to stay for the night as well, even if he had the money to afford it.
The stew was gone, but Levi didn't feel any better. He didn't feel cold now, but he felt exhausted and he dreaded the moment he had to get up.
"Quite the appetite, you had," a voice commented, breaking him out of his thoughts.
Levi looked up. A young man stood behind the counter, drying a glass cup with a towel that looked like it had been white, once. He had a smirk playing on his lips, teasing. Was he making fun of him? He stared, wary and suspicious, as he got closer.
"And a pretty face, too," the guy added, picking up Levi's plate and putting it under the counter. His eyes didn't leave Levi's.
Levi cocked an eyebrow, taken aback. Was he flirting? Did he thought him a girl? His hair had gotten pretty long, and he was unfortunately short enough to be mistaken for a girl, but it was the first time that someone had tried to hit on him like that. He didn't know how to feel about that. He felt his ears growing hotter and he struggled to keep the embarrassment off his face.
"Do you tell the same thing to every girl sitting at this counter?" he heard himself answer, soft enough that the guy had to come closer to hear him. What the fuck am I doing.
"Well," the guy started, putting both elbows on the counter and leaning towards Levi, dirty glass and plate completely forgotten, and apparently completely oblivious to the fact that he was trying to pick up a man. "Only the pretties ones," he whispered back with a conspiratorial smile, as if revealing a secret.
Levi almost laughed in his face.
"Well," Levi mimicked him, lowering his voice and leaning closer too. "Too bad I'm not a girl, then," he finished, his voice back to a normal volume, and unmistakably male.
A beat. The bartender stared at him, the same smile from before frozen on his lips. Levi stared back, blinking calmly. He expected the guy to sink back behind the counter, willing the awkward situation to disappear from existence as if never happened, but the bartender's grin actually widened nervously with a reply:
"I didn't say the prettiest girls, did I?" he said. His voice sounded a little squeaky, though.
"You didn't," Levi conceded with a little smirk, pushing his hair out of his face.
"I did say you're pretty though, and to the pretty ones I usually offer a drink," he went on, straightening his back, "especially if I make a fool of myself in front of them. I am terribly sorry, I didn't mean to come on you like that," he concluded with a nervous laugh, scratching the back of his neck awkwardly.
You totally meant to come on me like that, you just thought I didn't have a dick, Levi thought viciously.
"Thank you for the offer, but I don't drink," he said instead. "You could use me a favor and get me a single bed for tonight, though, for half the price. How's that for an apology?"
The bartender spluttered something about not being able to do that, and how hard his ass would have been kicked if he had been found doing shit like that, and how one day his big mouth was going to get him fired, but he produced a key and gave it to Levi, when he threatened to tell his boss that he had been molested by one of his depraved employees.
"Be careful not getting caught because I'm not explaining why the money don't sum up," the bartender told him, in a hushed tone.
"Don't worry," Levi replied, getting up and pulling the strap of his bag over his shoulder. "I'll be very quiet."
For some reason the bartender flushed at that. "Just get in the fucking room and out of my face."