"Is your mind blown yet?"
The question, cloaked in an accusing tone, was thrown over roughly at him. It lingered for a brief moment, like another friend on the stone slabs of steps between us, before being beaten away by the rowdy ambience of busy pedestrians. People who shifted in packs, their shadows brushed over us, spilling over the old entrance steps of a cathedral. And baking under the stare of congested traffic that line up this small pot-holed alleyway of restaurants.
I looked over at Levi expectedly.
This is when you're supposed to respond, you dumb shit.
Those little beads, a broth of blue, darted up promptly at me as his teeth remain burrowed in a cutlet. His face was awash with ... my best guess is awe? Along with a faint rosy glow from an obnoxiously flashy street sign. My eyes trailed after a string of sauce that dripped from the prey in his mouth.
"You know the sauce is the best bit, right?"
"..."
I was surely competing with his food for his attention.
"Shit." He muttered. And that cutlet in his hands had already disappeared. "Shit."
"I know, right? Unless that was a bad 'shit', like I'm-having-an-allergic-reaction 'shit'."
"That was," He eyed his grease-coated hands, then at the plastic box lounging lazily by my legs, with a conflicted alliance between disgust and wonder, "That was really something."
"That was just Levi's cryptic way of saying it was amazing." I offered my commentary coolly. A passer-by eyed me as they strolled towards the intersection that held back flocks of people from spilling into street gutters as if I was talking to them.
"It's literally restaurant leftovers on discount. And a stale baguette from the corner store."
"Whoa whoa whoa," I pointed at his ride, parked intrusively at the bottom dust-bitten brick steps two feet away. It whimpered at my unwelcomed attention. Or it could have been that it's so shit, it was a sentence away from collapsing on itself. I wouldn't be surprised if no one bothered trying to steal the clusterfuck. And I waited for it to come crashing, just to prove my point.
"We could have had the full restaurant experience if it weren't for that precious child of yours that you couldn't find a legal parking spot for."
"Bitch, leave my bike out of this."
"I will if you let me have the rest of the box."
He slapped my hand away and handled the container protectively, "Oh no, you don't."
"You know they commercially claim products as being better than sex, right?"
"Are you fucking serious?"
"When am I ever not?" My finger pointed at the discounted delicacy flaunting its grease seductively, "Now the chef can commercially claim this chicken better than sex. Unless they got sued for copyright or something."
"Not that you would know anything about sex, alright?"
"Well, do you?"
"Do you really want the answer to that?"
His smirk grew to the scrunching of my nose. One of those mischievous eyes narrowed. A beckoning gaze was sharpened as he peered over his shoulder, exposing a humble patch of crusty blood, to the cold timber of the locked cathedral doors looming grandly behind, "Or are you worried about a higher being listening in?"
I could feel a fissure in the teasing aura emitted from the boy as I reached over towards his nape. Waves of movement swelled under his shirt. A bob of his Adam's Apple. Yet, he hadn't recoiled to the brush of my thumb against the cracked cake of gore wedged in his pale skin.
"Yours?" It crumbled underneath my fingers. Almost like dirt.
It's not like I'm a vampire or anything, but I could almost taste the metallic undertones at the back of my throat. It reeked of grievance, strife. Just another life cut short.
Another bob of the Adam Apple. "No."
His dodgy-looking bike greeted me when I glanced over. Its head was tilted in anticipation, warping into confusion, and dread, watching me remove the traces of life from my fingertips. What else did it witness?
I wanted to inquire where this earthy smear came about, but did I really want the answer to that?
Fascinating how easily blood was spilled. Almost like milk.
"Good."
--------------------------------------
The wind whipped through my hair, running a cold scrawly hand through the tangles crusted up by the last remnants of apple cider. It bit at my skin, it pinched at the goose bumps littering my arms, my legs, the little sliver on the back of my neck. Trying to thrust me back from the steel railings before I plunged into the pond of ink below.
Did mother nature always have to intrude?
The traffic whirled past behind us as we peered over the golden-stained bridge under a yellowing spotlight from a nearby, barely-upright streetlamp. Every erect streetlight felt the need to splash a circular lawn of illumination along the passage, like another Broadway for commoners like us. A stencil of the city glow pencilled in over the burnt sky which churned like smoke, colluding with the river to bury all traces of pollution in its depths.
And I looked over at the male next to me, who rested his protruding elbows on the railing with his inky curls beating by his face. His eyes held the city in those tiny beads. They mirrored the world in two little capsules with a hint of gloss varnishing on top. Periodically shifting back and forth. Between the nightscape disentangled before us and my stupid face struggling behind the bush I call hair. But I leaned in closer to his face just to colour correct my vision.
Hadn't I always thought that Levi had dark, tiny eyes? Something like the tinted windows of a car. I swear to God they used to look like voids of a black hole. So deep, and dark, and corrupted ... like a burnt pizza base every time I attempted a cooking session. But now, or at least at one point, of every single tint in this spectrum unrolled before us, they were the only thing that stood out.
They look unmistakenly blue.
Like two tiny generic Viagra pills blue.
They were so blue they might as well swallow the entire sky whole.
When did this change?
He was a crude, short little fuck who loitered corners like a predator. And gives unfiltered opinions when no one asked for them. And jumping out of fucking nowhere, quite literally, getting his nose into your business and stalking you with elusive questions and cheap cigarettes. Typical. Cliché.
But it was a boy who stood before me. Someone who was perpetually, everlastingly hungry. Someone who was so socially-unfit, and rude, and violent, but stripped of all this territorial bullshit. Someone who had a mother he would occasionally bring up in the dark next to you to keep the silence out.
And he had blue eyes.
Clear Angelite gems.
Hiding behind that stupid haircut that I suspect he gives himself.
My eyes languidly repositioned on a distant glowing toothpick of a building in the distant. It used to be just black or white. Right or wrong. Let those turtles drown or scoop them up. Now all the lines are blurring and new colours are surfacing. More complex. They danced around like the city's reflection on the canvas of water. I frowned at how nothing could be pinned into place. My head hurt.
Maybe I need glasses.
Maybe I've just been colourblind my entire life.
"Adler, you're staring at my face like a fucking idiot."
"You have blue eyes." When had I began to notice?
"You don't say." His eyebrows meet in a crumpled frown when he caught my lethargic gaze, " You look tired. You alright?"
"Yeah, I'm just thinking."
"Well, that's a change."
I broke out of a trance and stepped on his foot in defence. "You just confirmed my theory of how much of an annoying bastard you are."
"Seriously, you better not be thinking about that stupid party." He winced, "It's not worth the time."
"You know, I was pretty close to smashing her face in." I held a fist, a knuckle slightly grazing my nose, an eye closed like I was aiming for a spire anointing one of the grand buildings, "I realise, maybe I would have done so a few months ago, probably around the time I met you. When I was less of a wuss. And more of a flipping badass like Wonder Woman. "
It took all the fibres in my body to fight against the urge to dab ironically.
"If you mean how you were a mindless buffoon back then, then sure." He rested his chin on a palm, his eyes locked on something in the distance behind half-drawn lids, "But being less juvenile isn't the same as being a wuss."
"Less juvenile?"
"Less stupid. Does that sound better? I think you're less stupid. It's not a bad thing." He corrected his unusually considerate tone with a cough.
"Geez ... What happened to all the swearing, Ackerman? Are you trying to become the next Plato?" I poked his forearm on the railing, breaking his gaze from the city to eye me, "Why do you sound like you're 30 years old or something?"
He clicked his tongue in annoyance. "I take that back. You're still a buffoon. But it's better than being a pig. Everyone else is a pig."
"Aww, that's so sweet." I clutched my heart mockingly, "I love being insulted. It makes me feel validated."
"Okay, Fuckface."
"Levi, that wasn't my point."
"Shit stick."
The edge of his lips waited a moment after my look of exasperation to his last abuse, lifting a tad, "Pig p-"
"Do you want to get thrown over this bridge, Midget Batman? Your stupid bike can go with you to hell."
"Come on then. I dare you."
I kicked dust at him to warm up the ground for what was about to take place before he leapt over. The boy detached himself off the metal fences and grabbed my arm, hoisting me over his shoulder as he strolled casually along the railings. "That does it."
"Come on, I was joking, put me down!"
I counted the number of mustard circles baking on the pavement we strolled past. The traffic on the main road was a rushing cloud of indifference. Then I witnessed the introduction of greenery as his footsteps no longer crunched against a road, but made way for an offside park. Little radiant panels, lattices of windows on distant crystal buildings standing erect enough to graze the skies, were overwritten by dark leaves as the boy ambled on.
"Come on, this looks like an abduction!" I reasoned over his shoulder, which simply landed on the wet trimmed lawn and soaked up by the earth.
"If you get abducted, they'll just bring you right back because you're so annoying."
"Then that's what you're supposed to do!"
I straightened my back and craned my neck enough so I could see the pathetic puff of crow feathers on his head. My fingers stroked through his hair, chilled from the blasting wind, dancing over his forehead and eyelashes. He spat my hand back off his face and loosened his grip, letting me slide off to face him. We were conveniently left to wilt in the shadows under a Magnolia tree shying away from the industrial world. I couldn't even see his face in front of me.
"We'll go back." He breathed, "Just promise me you won't make a big deal out of this."
He reached into his pocket and lifted what seemed to be an age-tainted key to my face, "Here, hold onto this."
"What?" My fingers wrapped around its blunted end. I scraped my thumb along its side, etched with use, confirming its identity, "Is this for your secret meth lab in the basement?"
"It's to my place, you idiot. I'm not Hanji."
"You realise this makes me look like a prostitute, right? With the key cards to hotel rooms? Have you not seen those movies?"
He sighed and rested a hand over his forehead to my comment. "No, oh my God. It's just, shit."
"Levi?"
"I was just thinking, no, I saw how it was," His eyes were two glistening tapioca pearls nailed to the key, he couldn't even look at me as he stumbled, "How hard it was ... at home for you. So maybe if you needed, I thought, if you needed a place to stay, you can take the extra key to my place. Given that you clean."
I looked at him, a silhouette in the dark with eyes that glistened momentarily before he blinked away. I shifted my attention to the smudged sky above us, and the nondistinctive claw marks of light leftover from skyscrapers beyond the trees. The bridge with its bronze tinges hunched over not too far away, guarding Levi's motorbike, yet melting into the dark.
But it was those same eyes my attention crawled back to. My mind seemed to colour the intensity of his hue into irises I could barely make out in the shadow. That trademark cerulean hint cannot unsift itself from my vision. They stood out from everything. Selective saturation in action, everybody.
It was a marvel how there was so much warmth in a place so cold.
Blue was a cool colour, after all. That's what I was told, anyway.
So, tell me, how are you capable of so much warmth?
That, in itself, is a natural wonder.
"I don't think I can take that, Levi."
"Brat, put it this way then. Eviction threats come in the day you happened to be over." He encased his hand over mine, his balminess eating into me to reach an equilibrium, keeping my fingers curled up around its awkward edges, "Then the rent issue gets swept under a rug. And the slimy guy at the desk who handles the clients mysteriously left the country. I wonder what happened there."
"I dunno how to tell you." I looked down at the humble grass, "I guess miracles exist."
"I guess they do." His voice was faint, mellow, kind. I wondered what his expression looked like. Was that supposed to be sarcastic? Heart-warming even? Was the guy even capable of expression? But I guess the darkness made exceptions for no one, not even your self-proclaimed protagonist. Fair enough, I suppose.
Suddenly, a flare of light streaked across the dark and graced the side of his profile. Traces of Levi's supposed smile melted away and seared itself to the back of my eyelids as an extravagant ray of light burned through the leaves.
"Who's there?"
"Don't you know it's past curfew already?" An authoritative voice yelled at us.
Footsteps crushed weeds.
A fountain gurgled in horror.
"Levi Ackerman? Boy, is that you?"
I peered through a narrowed eye, another one still well protected behind the back of my hand where my latest gift was hidden from the rest of the world. Spectrums of hard blues and reds swept through the lawn, demanding for their recognition because Levi's faint orbs were hoarding way too much of my attention.
"Well, Levi, aren't you Mr. Popular." I muttered, raising my hands high above my head to the barrel of a pistol pointed at us three feet away, "Even the cops know you."
-----------------------------
[a/n]
I love blue. And so do you (LOL do it for the rhyme)
damn check out that back-to-back update. This was such a long chapter but LOL I DON'T CARE I DON'T WANT TO CUT IT SO YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO SUFFER GOMENASAI
I used to think his eyes were dots. Then I looked closer and was like "WTF". Bad research on my behalf haha.
Can I even call this a romance anymore when half their "banter" are just insults?
And Levi, mate, if you're gonna ask a girl to move in with you, can you at least ask her out first on a date first? Just saying *shrugs and preps for a kick in the face*
New year is around the corner. So I thought I should break out of my mysterious little hermit shell to wish you all a happy 2019. You guys rock. If 2018 was sucky, maybe 2019 will be the year. Hang in there.
AttackOnFeels out for the year.