Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It’s been raining, and the university’s gas lamps keep sputtering out. The result is a pockmarked trail of scattered light and pools of darkness along the pathways through campus. Erwin has splashed water into one of his shoes; he leaves a trail of wet footprints up the creaking wooden stairs to the top floor of Fritz Library.

Given what he now knows about Fritz’s basement and the security measures throughout the building, getting into the clock tower room is almost comically easy. It was Ilse’s idea to come up here. Apparently it’s a regular meeting spot for her, if the wet and crumpled box of Chesterfields on the floor is any indication.

She arrives a minute after him, arms folded over something clutched beneath her trench coat.

“I think I know what it feels like to be an international spy,” Erwin says.

Ilse narrows her eyes, and in the dark, with the sharp shadows cast by uneven lamplight she looks almost like—

“The Shadow knows,” she pronounces, and hands him a folder wrapped in a length of newspaper twine. Erwin takes it in unsteady hands, heart in his throat. “Here you go, teach. Everything we could dig up from the papers on Shadis.”

A lead weight settles in Erwin’s stomach. The folder is light, the stack of clippings within barely the width of a finger.

“Not much, then?”

Ilse doesn’t seem fazed by his frustration. She shrugs loosely, damp hair swinging by her face.

“I tried. Like I said, we only keep the last five years. Unless you have an empty warehouse you wanna donate?”

“I’m afraid I sold my last one.”

“Shame, then.”

“What about the university archives?”

Ilse tuts. “My Snickers-and-Camels contact got moved to another post for some reason. I’m gonna have to find another way in.”

Erwin frowns. The timing is suspect, but there’s no way to prove it. He’s well used to the feeling.

“Don’t worry, teach,” Ilse says with a grin. “I have my sources.”

*

“If you’d like to,” Erwin says, “you could use one of the other machines. We could go twice as fast.”

Levi huffs softly. He stands cross-armed in front of a rack of microform boxes.

“Somebody else might need it.”

Erwin glances about the windowless room. They are tucked away in a corner of Fritz Library on a Sunday afternoon. He looks back to Levi, who gazes to the side as though he can’t bear to look at Erwin. A muscle feathers under the sharp line of his jaw.

Before Erwin can state the obvious, Levi says, “I’ve never had to use these things.”

Ah. If Levi is embarrassed, he doesn’t let it show. It is a fact that he states with the same aloof nonchalance that he uses to call Erwin a son of a bitch or to say, Did they teach you that in France? It makes Erwin itch somewhere deep beneath his skin.

“Come here.” Erwin takes up one of the little boxes and begins to work it open.

Levi looks halfway to snarling at him, so Erwin adds soothingly, “I’ll show you. It’ll be easy for you.”

The paperboard is stiff with disuse, and there’s a little tear in the tongue by the time Erwin tips the roll of microfilm into his hand. He pretends not to watch unease ripple down Levi’s neck.

As Erwin pinches the end of the microfilm between his finger and thumb, Levi peels himself away from the rack. He stops almost an arm’s length away. The distance will make it more difficult to see the machine, but Erwin decides to let it lie for now.

He stretches out a length of film and threads it through the machine.

“It goes in here. There’s a tab at the end where it’s safe to touch.”

Levi shifts. “Touch what?”

Erwin is wearing his camel coat, but the air in the library seems to go impossibly more frigid.

“The film.”

Erwin stands to the side a bit, hoping that Levi will take the hint and come closer. He stays rooted to the spot, arms folded, and resolutely not looking at Erwin.

Enough.

“I apologize.”

He hopes the sincerity translates. Erwin has worn every second of Thursday night like a hair shirt, only—only instead of punishment, all he’s done is tattoo the slope of Levi’s Cupid’s bow permanently into the back of his skull. It joins the rest of the images that Erwin’s mind won’t let him forget. Levi is burned into his retinas. He follows Erwin into his dreams, relentless as a vengeful ghost.

Levi blinks at him, slow and imperious.

“For what? Do you have to go take a shit?”

A noise, part-laugh, part-surprise, catches in Erwin’s throat.

“I meant if I’d done something to upset you.”

Erwin realizes that he wants Levi to say yes. Yes, and don’t do it again would make things easier. Better to starve his imagination so it shrivels. Because what would no mean? Do it again? Do it for real this time? Erwin swallows around a dry throat.

Levi gives his head a little shake, looking away again. “Dunno what you mean.”

‘Grow up.’

Erwin’s chest still stings with the cold bite of it. He should let it go. It doesn’t matter. 

And yet, Levi’s penitent frown is digging at the wound.

Before Erwin can insist that absolution is unnecessary, Levi says, “I’m just an asshole to everyone.”

Erwin blinks, and his brows tug together.

“I don’t think you’re an asshole, Levi.”

“Then you’re dumber than you look.”

He wants to smile, but the urge dies before it reaches his lips. Levi’s seriousness troubles him. His kindness puts Erwin to shame. His love for his family feels tenable in every breath, while Erwin sits hemming and hawing like a paper doll caught in a breeze.

He is weary. He is so very weary of the heavy mask he wears, and of the emptiness it hides.

“You put the film in here,” Erwin says hollowly, and finally, Levi takes a few steps closer.

Levi watches him thread the microfilm through the machine. Erwin’s palm slips on the rotator as he turns it. Sweat prickles under his collar, and Erwin shrugs off his coat and drapes it over the back of a nearby chair.

They work in parallel, in silence. Erwin is capable of shutting off the baser parts of his mind in order to focus on the task at hand, but his self-control has been slipping as of late. He catches himself glancing across the divider between their machines under the guise of checking Levi’s proficiency. Of course, he has loaded the film perfectly and is clicking through the pages of a decades-old issue of Scientific Paradisan.

Perhaps half an hour passes as Erwin repeatedly drags his attention from the fringes of his personal space back to the desperate task at hand. If Levi haunts his dreams, the problem of Keith Shadis haunts his waking hours. It’s as if the former dean doesn’t want to be found.

Levi shifts, huffing a quiet, sharp sigh. The hair on the back of Erwin’s neck ripples.

“That day of the interview.” Levi clicks through another page of microfilm as he speaks, eyes fixed on the text. “It was a shitty day.”

Erwin keeps his eyes on his own screen, unseeing.

Click.

“Their headstones came in.” Levi speaks in a low rumble. “And then I went to look at their death certificates, ’cause I knew something wasn’t adding up.”

Click.

“Then I introduced my shoe to your cop pal’s face. My one suit got ruined, so I walk in there…” Levi hesitates, but it is Erwin who holds his breath, balancing on his toes at the edge of a precipice.

Click.

“And you’re making them laugh—”

Erwin blinks, long and slow.

“—and you’re not even in my department, and I promised…”

Levi trails off.

Click.

“Anyway,” Levi says, seeming to redirect himself. “Should’ve never took it out on you. I’m—”

“Don’t.”

It slips out of Erwin unexpectedly, and his pulse rises in panic. He senses Levi glaring out of the corner of his eye. He gets his voice under control.

“Don’t apologize.”

The silence that hangs between them is sharp as a knifepoint. Erwin’s ears are ringing.

“Tch.” Click. “Last time I ever try to be nice to you, then.”

Erwin’s thoughts tumble and roll like stones in a drum.

“I heard it, too, that day,” he says, and Levi turns his head. Erwin looks back over the divider between their machines. “That’s what you were doing, right?”

And Levi—He looks away briefly, and color pulses high on his cheeks.

“I heard it,” Erwin continues, “and I cut my presentation short so I could try to trace where it was coming from. I didn’t expect to see you right there.”

Levi’s brows turn down in an instant.

“You said I should’ve knocked—”

“And that didn’t strike you as a bit ridiculous? I said the first thing that popped in my head. I thought you would’ve seen through it immediately.”

Levi narrows his eyes. “You’re fucking with me.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

He cannot tell Levi that after everything, after so long, that the taste of honesty on his tongue is sweeter than date sugar.

Then Levi asks, “You cut your presentation short?”

The caution in his voice makes Erwin’s chest twist.

“By only a few minutes, but yes. I told them it was nerves, and also that I’d probably eaten some bad fish in the dining hall. It was a Friday, after all.”

Levi rolls his tongue in his mouth. “They were laughing because you said you were gonna shit yourself from bad fish?”

Erwin bites the inside of his cheek. “Well, not in so many words.”

Levi shakes his head. “Nah, you’re pulling my leg. You expect me to believe you couldn’t think of anything to say, so you made up something that stupid? You?”

“I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be.”

“It was quite the position you were in.”

Levi purses his lips in a pantomime of disgust, pink creeping back up into his face. Erwin can barely muster any shame. Dangerous.

“Found Shadis,” Levi says tersely. He raps the screen with the backs of his knuckles.

Erwin’s focus sharpens for the first time today. He steps closer to peer over Levi’s shoulder.

“Any co-authors?”

“Yeah, about fifteen.”

Erwin scans the authors, then the title. It’s a paper about the intricacies of blood typing on the molecular level, or something of a similar sort that goes right over Erwin’s head. Why couldn’t have his targets all been historians, or even—he shudders—lawyers?

“Does this make sense to you?”

Levi waits a beat too long, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“No. What is it you think I actually do?”

Erwin presses the pad of his forefinger onto the button to advance the film. The next page is scrawled with equations that might as well be ancient runes.

“Just because it’s got numbers on it doesn’t mean I know what’s going on, Smith. Doesn’t even mean it’s fucking math.”

“I thought I’d ask.”

He presses the button again, and once more.

“What is it exactly that you’re hoping to find?”

Click.

“Anything that might give us information on where to look for Shadis. I suppose we can start with his co-authors—”

“One of ’em’s Cramer.”

“Well, the ones who are still alive.”

“A dollar says everyone on that list is dead.”

“Including Shadis?”

“Especially Shadis.”

Erwin shifts on his feet to better see Levi’s face. “Are you certain you want to take that bet?”

Even so, Levi has to lift his chin to regard him. He is the only person Erwin has ever met who can look down on him while looking up at him.

“Why not?”

He holds Erwin’s gaze for a long, breathless moment. Erwin’s ears are plugged with cotton.

Levi turns away from him, and the noise of the library—the creak of an outer door, footsteps on the floorboards above their heads—comes rushing back.

Erwin advances the film once more.

“Hold on.”

Erwin lifts his finger. The upward light lays gentle on Levi’s face, reflecting in his eyes. His lips move minutely around shapes Erwin can’t begin to comprehend.

“Here they’re…” Levi gestures at the screen, then purses his lips. “Quit staring.”

Erwin does as he’s told with no real sense of shame, a longstanding fault in his character.

“They’re trying to model…” Levi clears his throat. “They’re trying to model blood coagulation, but it’s all off.”

“How can you tell?”

Levi points at the screen. “It says it in plain English, Smith. ‘For earlier models of agglutination in blood sera upon which this paper intends to build, see L. Schmidt in Epidemiology 1909.’”

Was immer du tun kannst oder erträumst zu können, mein Spatz, beginne es.

The world shrinks, then pieces itself together again.

“Go to the next page,” Levi tells him. “Let me see the rest.”

Erwin’s mind cranks like rusty gears, but eventually his finger presses down, mostly of its own accord.

“See?” Levi says, gesturing to a jumble of numbers and letters that of course Erwin does not see at all. “Fifteen co-authors and they couldn’t find a damn one who understood how fluids work. They just keep citing ‘See Schmidt 1909’—Wait.”

Levi reaches down for the buttons, his hand crashing into Erwin’s and knocking it swiftly out of the way. Erwin withdraws, clutching his fist at his thudding heart.

Levi presses down, and the film reels backward. With his other hand, Levi points toward the screen. Erwin crowds closer until Levi’s elbow brushes against his stomach.

“Schmidt’s not listed here, but they keep referring to him as a co-author.”

Erwin swallows.

“Go to the citations.”

The film whizzes forward again, Erwin’s pulse rising along with it.

There’s a soft snap from inside the machine, and the screen goes white. Levi presses the forward button again; the gears whir pathetically.

“The hell?”

Erwin is reaching forward before he knows what he’s doing. The film has snapped, the end of it thwapping against the reel until Erwin’s hand stops it.

“You just stick your hands into whatever moving parts you see?” Levi mutters, unimpressed.

His mind halfheartedly searches for a reply, but it’s like turning over blank flashcards. Erwin pinches the edge of the film—too far!—and tries to back off, but his clammy fingers stick to the cellulose.

“—wouldn’t last five seconds in a factory—”

“Hand me the other end.” Erwin gestures to the other half of the film that’s within Levi’s reach. He curls his fingers into his palm, but Levi is quick: he sees him tremble.

He waves Erwin’s hand out of the way.

Levi, as always, is merciful. He says nothing about Erwin’s sudden weakness, instead carefully retrieving both ends of the split film and holding them beside one another.

“Does it look degraded?”

“How’m I supposed to tell?”

Erwin leans over Levi’s shoulder. The split looks clean, as if made with scissors. A tea kettle screams between Erwin’s ears.

“It would look rotten, like an old book.”

Levi shakes his head, thumbing at one end of the film.

“There’s tape. It was taped together.”

Erwin’s tongue has turned to gauze. “Would you load them both up, please?”

Levi turns his head slightly, eyebrow cocked, regarding Erwin like he can see everything down to his marrow. It sticks Erwin’s feet in place, stops his breath in mid-chest.

“Since you asked so nice.”

Erwin waits, hardly aware of how close he is standing. How long has he been looking, and proof, finally, might lie in a thin strip of cellophane.

“There’s a page missing.”

Levi’s voice startles him, coming from so near.

Erwin opens his mouth, but no sound comes out.

“‘Schmidt 1909’ my ass. They cut out that part of the citations.”

Levi looks up at him.

“They cut off the S’s,” he says, and his voice rings like brass bells through Erwin’s blood. “Just like in the Annals. The hell are they trying to hide?”

“Who is ‘they’?” Erwin asks.

“Hell if I know. Not Shadis, ’cause they still had his portrait up.” 

Please. Please understand, please tell me I’m not crazy.

Levi’s lips part. “Schmidt?”

*

There is a light in Ilse’s dorm room window.

“She might not hear you over the rain,” Levi says as Erwin raises his fist to knock on the glass.

Water that’s pooled in the snap brim of Erwin’s hat dribbles toward the ground as he looks down. His shoulders are set tense under his coat, and Levi’s own spine hardens in response.

Erwin reels back a bit to knock harder, and that’s when Levi spots the flash of blonde hair through the glass.

“Wait.”

He grabs Erwin’s wrist before he knows what he’s doing, and the resistance there shocks him. Of course he’s strong. It shouldn’t be surprising. And it certainly shouldn’t light a match under Levi’s collar.

Levi releases him, refocuses, and moves to the side, where he points up toward the window.

Erwin looks, frowns.

Then he turns sharply, striding toward the front of the women’s dorms. Mud splashes from the grass up the hems of his pants.

“So she’s got a friend over,” Levi says, walking double-time to keep up. “We can talk with her tomorrow—”

Erwin stops on the brick path to allow a pair of men in workers’ coveralls pass, carrying a heavy-looking chunk of machinery between them. Levi recognizes a piece of the printing press that had been in Ilse’s room.

Hoarfrost blooms in Levi’s gut.

The dorm’s front doors are thrown wide open. A lanky young man appears in the threshold, collar turned up and hat pulled low, with arms spanned around the handles of a traveling trunk.

“Bertholdt.”

Erwin approaches the kid like he knows him.

“Where is Ilse?”

Bertholdt stumbles, almost dropping the trunk. Rain trickles down the back of Levi’s neck.

“S-sorry, professor. I have to get this delivered.”

“Bertholdt—”

“She…she asked that we forward it along. Pardon me.”

The kid edges around Erwin, which places him face-to-face with Levi on the opposite side of the path. He averts his gaze and shuffles away with the trunk.

She asked? So she’s not…?

“Smith!”

Erwin’s stepped inside the threshold of the dorm, a move that could very well get him expelled on any other night. Levi dashes after him. Ilse’s dorm room door is open, and a gaggle of girls are hanging out in the hallway, smoking and muttering to one another.

“What happened to Ilse?”

The girls all quit talking at once, eyeing Erwin less like a threat and more like a sideshow freak. Not a one of them deigns to answer.

“She dropped out.”

A blue-eyed girl, small and hook-nosed, emerges from Ilse’s room wearing a rain slicker and holding a suitcase fraying around the edges. She closes the door behind her.

“When?” Erwin asks.

Rainwater patters off the hems of Erwin’s coat, puddling around his shoes. Levi has the absurd urge to mop it up.

“She took the train home yesterday morning,” says the girl, voice flat. “She asked me to send the rest of her things after her.”

Ilse had mentioned graduating just days ago. What could have changed so suddenly? And the newspaper, the Titan Nightly or the Evening Titan or whatever the hell it was called—would she truly abandon it?

The blonde girl blinks up at Erwin, slow like a cat.

“You’re not supposed to be in here, professor.”

She passes Levi without looking at him, suitcase bouncing against her knee like it weighs next to nothing.

“Did she say why she left?” Erwin asks.

The girl pauses in the threshold, and her voice barely carries over the rain.

“Her mom got sick.”

*

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Erwin’s face is a wax mold: stiff, and just as lively-looking, half-lit and half in shadow. Not his normal stillness. A chill crawls down Levi’s spine.

Erwin looks away, lifting one of his Gauloises to his lips. “I’m not certain what to think.”

Or maybe Levi shivers because he’s soaked to the skin.

They stand out of the rain in an archway made of brick. The quad is dark and empty. Half of the gas lamps have gone out for some reason. Some freshmen must have opened them as a Halloween prank.

“She give you any hint?” Levi asks, though he knows the answer already.

Erwin exhales smoke that mingles with the mist of his breath in the chill air.

“No.”

“Or are you pissed because she left before she could give you any dirt on Shadis?”

Erwin smokes and looks at the rain, and he waits so long to answer that Levi figures he must not have heard him. There are tiny creases at the corners of his mouth like he’s thinking. What would it be like to be able to put Erwin’s skull through a microfilm machine? To flick through his thoughts?

Levi’s fingers itch. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a soggy cigarette box. He huffs, and crushes the whole thing in his fist.

Erwin moves smoothly and suddenly, and it sucks all the air out of the archway.

He tucks the cigarette between his lips and unbuckles the straps of his bag. He pulls out a folder and hands it to Levi.

Levi flips the folder open, and is greeted with a clipping boasting, “SHADIS SLIGHTED BY NOBEL COMMITTEE.”

“When were you gonna show me this?”

“She only gave it to me last night. I was going to wait to look through it with you.”

He was going to—?

Heat spreads along the back of Levi’s neck. Why hadn’t Erwin said anything the whole time they were in the library this afternoon? 

Maybe because you were being an ass the whole time.

“It seems more than coincidental,” Erwin mutters around his cigarette, and Levi isn’t sure he was even meant to hear it.

“Smith.” He snaps the folder shut and holds it across the space between them. “Not the Mrs. Jaeger conspiracy again.”

“And Mrs. Keith Shadis.”

Levi sighs. He shakes the folder.

“You hold onto it for now,” Erwin says.

“No, you hold onto it. This was your doing.”

Erwin’s throat bobs, he looks down, and the thought comes to Levi at once, fully formed.

He is shaken. Levi is unsure how he didn’t see it before. Unflappable Erwin, made of marble like the busts in the library. Perhaps there’s blood pumping under there after all.

Why? Does he think she was turned? That she ran into the wrong end of the library?

He realizes that he wants to reassure Erwin, to tell him that he’ll check with Lovof to see if any of the patients had gotten loose. 

“Come on.” Levi tries to temper his voice and he knows it doesn’t really work, but it at least gets Erwin to unfreeze himself and take the folder back.

“It’s not…” Levi tries. “Where does she even live? You really think this place has the resources—the competency—to send somebody out to wherever Ilse’s family lives and, what, make her mom sick? Have you ever even talked to anybody in the administration? It’s like trying to play chess with a parakeet.”

Nothing. No twitch of Erwin’s lips, no brightening of his eyes. He closes his bag without buckling the straps.

Levi huffs.

“You got any proof? Anything at all? I’m listening.”

Erwin takes the cigarette from his mouth, arm dropping to his side.

“I’m asking you to trust me.”

“I just—”

“Levi, on this one thing. Just this one thing. Please trust me.”

Levi’s stomach clenches. Smoke sticks to the back of his throat—that rubber tire smell. He yearns to clear it from himself. Wishes the rain would wash him clean, but it only clings to his skin like oil, souring the wool of his suit.

He reaches for his cigarettes again before remembering they’re wet and ruined. He clenches his teeth. This archway is beginning to feel like a prison, and Levi is claustrophobic.

Erwin holds out his hand.

There is a burning, half-smoked Gauloise pinched gently between his fingers like a baby bird. It smells like rubber tires and Levi wonders why Erwin never smells of it himself.

He takes the cigarette out of Erwin’s hand and traps it between his lips. Erwin watches him inhale.

“Disgusting,” Levi says, handing it back.

He thinks he sees Erwin’s face soften as he lifts the cigarette and wraps his lips around the end.

“All right.” Levi talks to get the taste out of his mouth, to get the feel of it off his lips. “I’ll humor you. Say this administration, which doesn’t know its ass from its elbow, sends somebody out to wherever Mrs. Langnar lives. Slips some arsenic in her cream of wheat. Boom, she’s sick.”

Erwin holds the cigarette across the space between them. Levi doesn’t want it. But now his throat is tight and it feels a little like he’s going to burst out of his skin, so he takes it back.

“Why’s Ilse got to quit school?” Levi inhales. “She could leave for a while, tend to her mom ’til she gets better, and still come back for exams.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“I’m saying it doesn’t make any sense, unless her mom’s dying. And that shit doesn’t happen overnight. I knew my mom was dying for weeks before it happened—” 

Levi pauses with the cigarette almost to his mouth, a cacophony of alarm bells sounding off in his head.

He takes a quick drag and hands it back with the smoke still held in his mouth. Tastes like he’s eating a burned-out car, but he can’t stop.

Erwin plucks the cigarette from his hand all gentle, like snuffing a candle. His fingers are warm.

“I just mean,” Levi says, too loud, face aflame, “it’s not like the school could go out there and give her mom cancer or something really shitty like that overnight. So maybe something’s been going on a while and you just didn’t know about it. Were you best friends? She tell you all her secrets?”

Erwin shakes his head. He pinches a loose piece of tobacco off his tongue and flicks it to the ground.

“Or it was something else entirely.”

“Like what?”

Erwin turns his face toward the library.

Levi’s throat itches. He’ll ask Lovof. It’s his night in the lab the day after tomorrow. He doesn't know what he’ll tell Erwin afterward, but at least he can be sure himself.

“Why would they make up that whole song-and-dance about the sick mom? Why not just let somebody find her like they did with Jaeger?”

“Because I called the police.”

Erwin hands the cigarette back. Levi takes it and holds it to his mouth.

“You sure about that?” He takes a drag. “Paper said a maintenance man found him.”

“It wouldn’t be the first falsehood published in the Daily Titan.”

Erwin has shoved both hands in his pockets, even though he must know Levi is about to hand the cigarette back—which he does, rather suddenly, forcing Erwin to reach for it.

His stories, somehow, never seem to really add up.

And yet—Erwin might still be difficult to read, but Levi isn’t stupid. He knows Erwin is still rattled by all this, and so he decides not to push it for now. Maybe Levi feels sorry for him.

“You look like you need a drink.”

Erwin exhales. Levi had spoken without thinking, and now he’s afraid Erwin will think…He’ll think he wants…

“Perhaps,” Erwin says, “but I have an early class tomorrow.”

It is early in the evening yet, but Levi recognizes a rejection when he sees one, and he’s not going to embarrass himself further. He’d just wanted—

Not that. He’s not sure. To make Erwin feel better, for some reason.

“Yeah.” Levi adjusts his bag on his shoulder. “’Course.”

Erwin hands him the cigarette again, and Levi takes it, almost second nature. It’s burned down to almost nothing. Because he’s polite, Levi takes a short drag and hands it back.

“It’s yours,” Erwin says, shaking his head once.

There are words on the tip of Levi’s tongue and he doesn’t wish to know what they are, so he places the shitty French cigarette back in his mouth and turns up the collar of his jacket.

“Levi, do you not have an umbrella?”

Levi’s brows lower in a look he hopes conveys an earnest Are you stupid? But since the answer is likely affirmative, Erwin says nothing.

“No.”

He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and hands it back to Erwin, out of spite or guilt, he isn’t sure.

For some reason, Erwin takes it.

“I have one in my dorm room.” Erwin places the cigarette in his mouth, though there’s nothing left to take from it.

“Don’t be stupid. I won’t melt.”

“You might catch cold.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“Your books.”

Levi grinds his teeth. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d run to the bus with his bag cradled under his jacket, but…

“It’s right around the corner.”

The cigarette sizzles on the damp pavement beneath Erwin’s shoe.

*

THE DAILY TITAN: Paradis University’s Student Newspaper (est. 1827)

November 7, 1934

‘TITAN NIGHTLY’ SHUTTERED; Editor Resigns; Longtime University Bugbear Seems Closed for Good

MITRAS - The ‘Titan Nightly,’ the unofficial student-run “newspaper” often accused of yellow journalism, seems to have gone out of print as its Editor-in-Chief resigned without naming a successor.

The “newspaper” was a source of constant headache for both Daily Titan and the Paradis administration. It often printed suggestive or even false stories, seemingly in an ongoing effort to discredit the Reiss administration.

Ilse Langnar, a co-ed studying journalism, left Paradis University to tend to an ill family member, sources close to the former Editor-in-Chief told the Daily Titan. Unlike her predecessors, she did not hand-select a younger journalism student to carry the torch upon her departure. Instead, Ms. Langnar requested that the printing press she kept in her dormitory, which she used to hand-print dozens of copies of the salacious paper, be dismantled.

A University maintenance man who requested to remain anonymous told this reporter that the press was destined for the scrap heap.

Annie Leonhardt reporting.

*

The lab is freezing tonight.

Levi wears a sweater underneath his lab gown, but it does nothing to keep the chill from his bones.

The other assistants shuffle around behind him, peering through microscopes and scribbling illegibly into tiny notebooks. He’s almost always with the same three, and since he still doesn’t know their names—or anything about them past their surgical attire—in his head he’s started calling them Beanpole, Tiny, and Tank.

Tank is especially fidgety tonight, pacing back and forth behind Levi to grab things from the shelving unit and take them back to his workstation. Around the twentieth or twenty-first time this happens, Levi gives him the stink-eye over his shoulder, but Tank just walks by, head down, empty beaker clutched in one meaty hand.

Levi can’t focus on partial differentials when there’s shit like this going on every two minutes, and he’s shivering, and he doesn’t know why he’s staying late and going home at midnight twice a week with nothing to show for it, and his suit stills smells of damp and Gauloise smoke even though it’s been days, and Erwin is still acting…odd. Distant. Which Levi would normally welcome, but they still have Ilse’s folder of newspaper clippings to parse through.

Something nudges the back of Levi’s shoulder and it’s a damn miracle of self-control that he doesn’t turn around and stab his pencil right through Tank’s eye.

“Watch it,” he mutters instead.

Tank doesn’t say anything, just shows his palm apologetically and lumbers toward the shelves, head down.

Levi stands, stretches. He looks down at his PDEs. What does Lovof even have him here for? Solving Navier-Stokes? Proving that yes, liquids can travel through other liquids? And all the while he’s no closer to getting Farlan and Isabel back—

He hears it first—a tiny squeak—but has no time to understand what’s happening before he’s stumbling sideways, catching himself on the edge of the table so he doesn’t fall flat on his ass like Tank, who has just shattered the empty flask he’d been carrying.

“The hell is wrong with you?”

“Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t mean…Here, let me help you.”

He reaches with both hands for Levi, who is nearly upright again, as if he’s going to help him stand, and there’s a sharp pain on the top of Levi’s hand and he jerks back.

“What’s your goddamn problem?”

The bastard had grabbed Levi while still holding the broken neck of the flask, and now there’s a thin cut quickly welling blood from his knuckles to his wrist.

“I’m sorry, that was all my fault…Let me…”

Levi jerks away as Tank reaches for him again—To do what? Clean him up?

“Back off.”

Levi clasps his palm over the wound. It’s not deep—it’ll probably stop bleeding on its own—but he suddenly very much does not want to be here anymore.

“I’ll help you get cleaned up,” Tank says.

Beanpole, who until now had just been standing there watching, clears his throat quite loudly. Levi barely hears it. Something is whirring in the back of his mind. Tank’s voice sounds…familiar.

Tank might be a foot taller than him, but Levi looks him square in the eye.

“Say that again.”

After a pause, Tank’s eyes widen. “S-say wh—?”

“Shh!” Beanpole shushes him so harshly his surgical mask billows like a balloon.

“Say it again.”

The silence hangs heavy and perilous, a boulder on the edge of a cliff, waiting for the faintest breeze to tip it over.

It’s Tiny that gives the final push. He’s gone to get a dustpan and broom, and now, with clipped steps, walks up to Tank and shoves both items into his chest. As he turns to return to his work station, Tiny pauses to give Levi a stern, blue-eyed glare.

A speaker squeals to life, and Levi’s shoulders jump toward his ears.

“What’s going on?”

The lab is still.

Well, Levi needs to ask Lovof a question, anyway. He lifts his bloodied hand toward the two-way mirror set into the upper part of the wall, where Lovof keeps watch from the observation deck.

Without waiting for an answer, Levi heads toward the elevator cage, leaving the other assistants to clean up the glass in silence.

When he pushes aside the grate on the second floor, Lovof is waiting for him.

“What happened?”

“That bastard’s been pacing around like an ox all night.” The bleeding has mostly stopped, but Levi shows his hand anyway. “He almost bowled me over.”

“Would you like to be moved to another part of the lab?”

“Yeah, I would.”

Lovof nods. “Do you need first aid?”

Levi stretches his fingers, feels the tug on his skin.

“No. Wasn’t bad.”

“Good. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yeah, I have a question.”

“I pray I have an answer.”

“Anybody been turned lately?” Lovof’s mild gaze doesn’t change. “Any more breaches?”

Lovof blinks at him. “Why do you ask?”

Levi goes to the opposite line of windows. Below him, the room full of shuffling, shambling bodies, locked away behind layers of automated grates and deadbolts that still, for some reason almost a month ago, did not keep them inside.

“This girl left school real suddenly. Ilse Langnar. You know of her?”

“I’m afraid I do not.”

Perhaps Levi should dangle a bit of bait. “Erwin thinks she didn’t really quit school.”

Lovof strolls to stand beside him. “And why does he believe that?”

Levi shrugs in a way that he hopes conveys nonchalance. His skin is crawling, and he doesn’t know why.

“Levi,” Lovof asks softly, “have you told Mr. Smith anything about your work with the lab?”

“’Course not.”

“Because I know he can be rather persuasive.”

“I ain’t said a damn thing.”

Below them, a small figure limps past, head down, as though confused.

“It isn’t the end of the world, you know. Things slip.”

“I haven’t—”

Bony. Dark hair. Freckles.

Fuck.

“That’s her.”

Levi’s pointer finger bends against the glass.

“That’s who?”

“Ilse.”

Lovof’s surgical gown rustles as he leans toward the window.

“Ah.”

“So why’d they tell us she dropped out?”

“Levi, I want you to listen to me. Unexplained disappearances cause unnecessary public panic, and, as you well know: questions. We have decided that the most responsible course of action, when such unfortunate accidents occur is to…”

Then another body materializes out of the shadows of the cavernous floor below them, Lovof’s voice fades to a murmur behind the furious hammering of Levi’s heart in his ears.

Blonde hair. Messy and matted, longer, but still recognizable. Still his. Hipbones and ribs casting shadows on bruised, pallid skin, but still—still—

“Farlan.”

“…making great strides, indeed, toward—Pardon?”

Levi’s palm is pressed against the glass, and in the back of his mind he knows he’ll leave a print but he doesn’t care.

The worst thing is the emptiness. The same void that had been in Isabel’s eyes—he sees it again.

“They’re dead.”

Realizing it a second time hurts just as bad as—perhaps worse than—the first.

“They are not dead, Levi.”

“Look at that and tell me they’re not dead.”

“They are not dead. Medically, not only are they not dead—they cannot be killed. Tell me how that is dead.”

“Medically,” Levi mutters.

He turns and heads back toward the elevator, dragging his surgical mask and cap off his head. He needs air. He needs to not be here. He needs—

“Levi, your mask!”

“I’m going home.”

“I know this is difficult.”

With one hand, Levi tugs on the ties of his surgical gown as he reaches for the elevator grate with the other.

“Trust me when I say we are making progress.”

“I don’t see it.”

Levi opens the grate and steps onto the elevator platform. As his hand closes around the lever, Lovof calls out:

“Ask Mr. Smith about his time at St. Elizabeths.”

Levi pauses. He knows it’s a trap. Still, he asks.

“What’s that?”

“They used to call it the Government Hospital for the Insane. For former soldiers who went mad during wartime. Six months during the second half of 1929.”

Levi’s mouth sours. “How do you know that?”

Lovof clasps his hands in front of his belly. This is the same man who had known about Levi’s prior arrests—who had used the threat of prison to get Levi to work for him to begin with.

Levi does not wait for an answer. He pulls the lever, and Lovof watches him ascend.

*

May 1913

A clear and cloudless afternoon in spring, and Erwin’s palm is melting the paper. His books, bound together by his father’s old belt, bounce against his leg as he takes the turn away from town.

The other children have run ahead of him, or peeled off toward their own homes, eager to show off their gifts.

“Do you have a grandmother, or an auntie?” his teacher had asked. Erwin shook his head. “Perhaps a nice old neighbor lady who gives you sweets?”

He has nothing and no one of the sort. There are a few neighbor ladies on the street, but they avoid Papa for the alcohol on his breath, and by extension, they avoid Erwin, too. One of them had said he talked too much, and so Erwin makes certain to cross the street when he sees her coming.

He reaches the old stone bridge that marks the spot where the town ends and the dirt roads begin. A pair of small brown-gray birds hop around upon it, like popping corn.

Spatzen. Like him. Mein Spatz, Papa calls him.

One of the sparrows flaps its wings fast like a moth; the other hops over and places something in its mouth. A baby, then, newly fledged.

Erwin drops his books onto the bridge, and the mother and baby flee in a thwapping flutter of wings.

They are ugly birds. Pests, Teacher said, when one had gotten trapped in the classroom once. Teacher had gone after it with a broom, but her assistant had opened a window and ushered it out.

Erwin looks over the bridge, toward the clear water below. He holds up the crepe paper flower he made in class. A carnation. Crinkled pink petals and a stem that’s permanently bent because of his sweaty hands.

He watches the flower drop toward the water, tumbling head-first like a diver. It doesn’t splash. It lays down upon the creek and accepts its fate, and is borne forward on the current until sinking, quietly, under the glimmer of sunlight.

*

Erwin locks his door.

He hangs his suit and shirt in the wardrobe and changes into a pair of pajama bottoms and a cotton undershirt. He double checks the lock on his window and pulls the curtains closed.

It is raining again.

There is an oblong package on his desk, brown paper tied with string and covered in Tangier postes avion stamps. Erwin slices the string with a pocketknife and unwraps the paper.

He sets aside the hemp pouch of frankincense resin, the postcard of a trio of snake charmers, and the package of gunpowder tea, and opens the carton of Gauloises.

He takes out all ten packs and lays them side by side. Starting with the pack on the far left, he begins opening them, one by one, and dumping their contents onto the center of his desk.

Erwin sorts through the cigarettes like a miser counting gold coins. He inspects each one—flipping them over, squinting at each end—until he finds the three marked with tiny spots of ink.

Fahima must have a lot to say this time.

He pushes the rest aside because he never has the patience to pack them all until he’s finished. With the pocketknife, he carefully slits the paper of each cigarette down its length until their leafy innards spill across wood.

He takes the rolling papers and lays them out side by side, revealing the cramped, loopy handwriting.

Christ, where are his glasses?

Piaf - J'essaie de réunir tout le monde pour une fête, mais les hnach sont particulièrement venimeux cette année et les voyages sont difficiles. Dis-moi, as-tu avancé dans ton projet de recherche ? J'étais toujours très intéressée quand tu en parlais. Écris-moi vite ! Bisous.

Erwin pushes up his glasses and rubs at his scratchy eyes. A codebreaker he is not, and Fahima always seems to find new ways to be opaque. “Hnach” isn’t in his language dictionary.

He sets his pen down and massages the cramp in his hand. If he doesn’t help it now, it’s going to get worse, going to seize up his whole arm. He can already feel the pain starting to radiate up past his wrist. Damn it.

He stands and takes the amber pill bottle from his toiletry bag, and is considering whether or not to open it when someone knocks on his door.

Erwin’s hand tightens on the bottle. He glances at the pocketknife lying open among the tobacco dust on his desk. It is all he has.

Then, from just outside the door, muttered and low:

“I can see your light on, sonofabitch.”

Relief washes over him, and then confusion, and then fear. Et tu, Brute? Erwin shakes his head.

“Coming,” he says, stuffing away his pill bottle, opening his top desk drawer and brushing everything—loose cigarettes, loose tobacco, postcard, tea, incense—inside, where he buries it beneath a pile of notes and a book he grabs off its stack for good measure.

He opens the door. It must be near midnight. Levi looks pallid, hair wet, thin eyebrows pinched. Worry settles in behind Erwin’s heart.

“Levi, what’s wrong?”

Levi looks to the side and rolls his tongue in his mouth.

“This is a mistake,” he says under his breath.

Erwin says nothing. Levi sighs, scrubs a hand over his face. The tightness across his shoulders gives a little, like a beam bowing under pressure.

“Can I come in?”

He should say no. Say it’s late. At best, offer to talk in the common room.

But one look at Levi has told him everything he needs to know.

Erwin steps aside and holds open the door.