ROLLING IN THE DEEP

Levi Ackerman

10 days later

Levi gagged, splashing through another puddle of shit. The putrid liquid sloshed onto his shoes and pants with a vengeance. The stains would be a nightmare to wash out, but he had other problems to worry about.

Like the men following him.

Well, chasing was a better word for it.

Darting through a crowd of people, he pushed over boxes and toppled wagons in his haste. He had to GET AWAY. They would kill him.

The people cried out, shocked. He didn't care. The cavernous ceiling of the underground hung over him like a dark cloud, closing in on him like the men behind him.

The air froze against his exposed cheeks, his neck, and collarbones. It rippled through his clothes like mist, chilling him to the bone.

He ran harder.

Without ODM gear he felt stuck. Trapped, like a bird with its wings cut off. How had he ever managed without it?

Turning down a less crowded street, he gasped for breath. His lungs were on fire. He'd been running for what seemed like hours.

His feet slammed into the dirt, one after the other. Over and over, kicking up dust in his wake. They would know where he went. He couldn't lose them like this.

He growled, glancing back.

Indeed, a flurry of dark cloaks flashed around the corner, closing in behind him. Three of four of them, eyes dark and faces unreadable, pursued him like vultures. Terrifying, death-like vultures.

His instincts absolutely screamed in his mind. He had to MOVE.

He cut sharply around another corner.

Then stopped short with a gasp.

The small alley between two short buildings dropped off abruptly to a sheer cliff. Barely a meter from the tips of Levi's shoes was nothing but open air. Open air and a one way trip to the slums below.

The Island.

No no no no no no no no…

The black hooded men appeared in the alley entrance.

Levi whipped his head to face them. He bared his teeth, growling like a cornered animal. The ground shook as the men stalked towards him.

"Levi Ackerman…" The nearest one groaned. His voice sounded like a man with burnt lungs gasping for air. "You can't escape this…you can't escape US!"

Levi's chest tightened. He scooped up a rock from the ground, hefting it in what he hoped was a threatening way.

"Who are you?" He growled, hating how his voice held a little tremor.

A second shadowy figure spoke. "We are everything you wish to avoid…"

"...Everything you HATE!" The one behind him said.

Levi reared the rock back, prepping it to throw. Maybe he could knock one of them out and in the confusion he could leap up to one of the roofs and—

"LEVI!

Levi whirled his head around at the new voice.

Historia locked eyes with him from a new scene that appeared to his left. She knelt in front of a small building, a bar from the looks of it, with her arms wrapped around a large cage. Levi swore he'd seen the place before, but his attention was pulled away by the look in the young queen's eyes. They were wild with fear, and, Levi now saw that the cage was filled with two small sobbing children.

"LEVI PLEASE!" The young queen pleaded. "YOU HAVE TO HELP US!"

No sooner than she had spoken the words, one of the hooded men appeared behind her, knife in hand. He plunged it into her, burying it up to the dirt encrusted hilt. The point of the blade protruding out of Historia's chest.

Levi's heart skipped a beat, shock rocking him in his heels.

Historia gasped, blood dripping down her pristine white dress. She turned to him, utter betrayal written across her face.

"You couldn't save us..." She whispered the words, but somehow Levi heard every syllable as if they were crashing directly into his ear drums.

A clawed hand grabbed his wrist.

He gasped, looking back in terror as another of the hooded men grabbed his other arm. He immediately twisted, pulling his arms from them, but they possessed impossible strength.

"Historia!" He screamed.

"Now you must fall…" The first one said. "Goodbye Captain Levi. Wake up in HELL!"

Before Levi could take another breath, he was forced back and pushed off the ledge. The air, something he normally felt so free in, captured him in its sticky blackness. He plummeted towards the buildings below.

You couldn't save us…

Historia's eyes permanently etched themselves into his mind. He had failed her. After he had sworn to protect her, he had failed.

He crashed into the ground with a jerk. Everything in his body broke, simultaneously. The pain was beyond indescribable, and Levi felt his consciousness being ripped away from his physical self.

Images flashed in his mind. His mother, the brothel they'd lived in. Furlan, Isobel, a thousand other faces he'd known. Kenny. Empty plates, rats, piles of corpses like garbage stacked in the streets. A bar and unknown faces, a fight.

And then everything went black.

Levi awoke with a gasp, pushing himself backwards so abruptly that the chair he'd been sitting in crashed to the ground with him in it.

He groaned, pressing a hand to his head.

He'd been dreaming.

"That's all it fucking was." He breathed. "A fucking dream." He choked back a laugh. It had felt so real.

His heart raced in his chest as he lay on his toppled chair on the floor in their room at the Riverside Inn. The dream was already starting to fade, and Levi now realized how ridiculous most of it was. But still, the image of Historia was...disturbing.

He sighed, glancing around the room.

As far as places he'd stayed in underground, this one really wasn't bad. It had a main room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms, one they'd given to Historia and one that Nile and he shared. Though, Levi preferred to sleep at the table in the main room. The rooms were plain and sparsely furnished. Cheap candle holders presented the only light therein. Levi's mother would have said they were kings if they had lived in such a place.

He sat up, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his head. He looked at his hands, sure that they would be trembling, but they seemed to hide his inner shakiness. A little more pale than normal but not bad. He was still wearing his clothes from the day before, dark trousers and cotton shirt. His shoes were even still on.

With difficulty, he pushed himself off the floor. The wood seemed to suck the heat out of his body. He turned, grabbing a match and lighting one of the candles on the table.

Dim light flooded the room, casting shadows across the walls.

Levi picked the chair up off the floor and slumped back into it.

He was exhausted. A quick glance at the clock told him he'd only been asleep for maybe two hours. He must have drifted off after Nile and Historia had turned in. The long hours they'd been toiling over the past week and a half weren't wearing him down like he wished they would. He would never admit it, but he envied his companions being able to escape this eternal nightmare and actually sleep.

He sighed again running a hand through his hair. His stomach churned like he had drunk a glass of the sewage outside with dinner, reminding him of something else he refused to admit.

He felt absolutely physically horrible in every way.

It had all started small, just a buzzing headache. No big deal. He got them all the time, and he usually slept them off. But this one had been there to greet him, like an old friend, when they entered the underground. It had stuck around like an unwanted quest ever since.

Then had come the bouts of nausea. They were bad, oh, they were so awful. He could barely stand the stench of everything. Body odor mixed with cigarette smoke and piss all thrown together with the perfume of decaying corpses. He gagged every time they stepped outside. It made his appetite a bad joke, an afterthought that vanished like smoke.

But he honestly preferred that to the panic attacks. He'd tried to keep them low key, but Nile and Historia had been catching on. It was the looks they gave him...like he was fragile. Like his knees might give out at any second.

But no, after ten days back underground, he was ready to leave it behind. All of it.

He looked at the table where he'd fallen asleep. A few papers and a map lay scattered across it. One paper had Levi's own scratchy handwriting scrawled across it. Their list of potential leads.

Every line on the list was crossed out with a jagged line.

As his stomach threatened to make him vomit, Levi wondered if reality was any less of a nightmare than his actual dreams had been.

Over the last ten days, they had trekked through every district of the city, climbed every street, looked through every tenement and makeshift orphanage and for what? They had helped no one. Not a single soul.

There were no children to be found. No orphans ran the streets, at least, not like he remembered. Sure, there were a plethora of homeless scum, even entire families out on their luck, but no children.

They'd gone undercover in gangs, trying to probe for information. They had volunteered at makeshift soup kitchens, taken part in religious charity gatherings, hung around the streets like beggars, and even tracked down several of Levi's old contacts, but they had come up empty handed.

He found it beyond frustrating. Not only was he of little to no use, but he didn't see an end in sight for the operation.

And...though he felt terrible for it, everyday he hoped—no, he was desperate for Armin to send word for him. That Erwin finally needed him back at HQ. That he could leave this hell and return to life.

But, day after day passed with no letter. No leads. No children.

He was ready to give up. Captain Levi. Completely done with this shit.

But…

Levi couldn't lie. Despite the lack of progress, he felt like they were walking right past all the answers they were looking for. Like they were close enough that it was dancing right under their noses...

Maybe one more day...he could fake being okay for another day? Couldn't he?

He jumped as the door to Historia's room creaked open.

The candle light illuminated a messy bun of blonde hair poking out, followed by the queen's young face a second later. The expression written across her eyes spoke murder, but her mouth said:

"What are you doing?"

Awake as he was, Levi could not for the life of him think of a single excuse to justify sitting alone at the table at the ungodly hour of morning. His mind sludged through reason after reason, pausing thankfully to note that while upset, Historia was very much alive and not dead like in his dream.

"Nothing." He finally said.

Neither of them said anything as they stared at each other across the room.

Historia yawned, glancing at the clock. "Shouldn't you be asleep?"

He raised his eyebrows a fraction of a millimeter.

"What?" She moved out of the doorway to cross her arms at him. She wore a plain dark nightgown which exposed most of her arms, unintentionally mocking how cold Levi felt.

"I apologize for the noise just now," Levi said, realizing he probably woke her up, "But you can go back to sleep."

"What, so you can sit out here and sulk in the dark by yourself?"

"I'm not sulking."

"Then why are you awake?"

"Why do you care?"

Historia kept staring at him.

"Are you still going with Nile tomorrow?" He sighed, anxious to change the subject. "To the outpost?"

"I already told you. I can't."

"We can come up with an excuse. We won't blow your cover."

"It's more than that…" She glanced at the door to Nile's room. His faint snoring could be heard inside. She sighed. "Look, it doesn't matter. I've decided to stay behind."

"What for?"

She shrugged, moving to the table and taking a seat across from him. "I don't care for meetings."

Levi could empathize with that. "Still, you should go. Get out of all of this shit for a day."

"And sit with Nile in all day?"

"He's just meeting with Burns about the operation."

She bit her lip. "Yeah, well maybe I don't want to talk about it."

Her eyes trailed downwards to the map, tracing across the many roads and districts they were all now very familiar with.

He suspected there was something she wasn't telling him. He was pretty good at guessing when subordinates didn't want to say something, but spending a week and a half with Historia had not made Levi any better at talking to her.

Trying to hold a normal conversation with the girl was like trying to hug a wild bear. One wrong move and it was over. Meaning that asking her something was definitely out of the question.

He looked at the map as well. The candle flickered across the gentle lines he'd drawn in himself. The map was old, maybe older than Levi. It had been pretty inaccurate, leaving out key areas and keeping others too small proportionately. He was no cartographer, but he liked to think it was better now than it had been. Not that it was doing them any good either way.

Something nagged at him from his dream, but it was just out of reach of his consciousness. Like a butterfly that kept flitting away.

"How are—"

"We should—"

He grimaced as they spoke at the same time. "Go ahead." He prompted her.

"Sorry," She grinned, "I was just going to ask how you're feeling?"

"I'm fine." He straightened in his chair to further sell the image.

"You sure? You know, you could go with Nile and rest at the outpost or—"

"I'm fine Historia." He said, shutting down her argument. He wasn't going to sit by and not do his job just because he wasn't feeling great. He was here to protect her. She didn't leave his sight.

She looked at him, unconvinced. "What were you going to say?"

"Since you're not going with Nile or back to bed, we may as well plan our day tomorrow." He said, blinking against the candle. It was starting to get a little too bright for his headache.

She cleared her throat. "Yeah we should."

He looked at the map again, unsure where to start. The list glared in the corner of his vision.

"Do you remember when we were in Coldwater the other day?" Historia voiced first.

"Yes." He mused.

Coldwater was the highest district in the underground. The area was nice, full of the richest people underground. All the fresh water from the surface cycled through the ground, naturally purifying before streaming into the underground river, which started in Coldwater. It was home to the best the underground had to offer...which was still less than the worst places above ground.

"I can't explain it, but there was something there...I just feel like we missed something, you know?" She continued.

He didn't. "I suppose…"

She sighed, "Part of me feels like we're never going to find them. That, I don't know, that we'll have to put the whole operation on hold and return to the surface. What then?" She fixed her eyes on his. "What happens when we have to go back and we couldn't save them?"

You couldn't save them…

Levi's heart skipped a beat. He sucked in a sharp breath, images of men in dark hoods swirling in his sight.

But no, they were fine. They were safe in their room at the inn. No one was out to get them.

He opened his mouth to answer when he finally remembered what was nagging at him. The bar from his dream, the one Historia had been...killed in front of.

It was a real place.

"Hang on." He frowned, sliding the map towards him.

Historia watched him as he traced his finger across the Coldwater district on the map. "What is it?"

His head throbbed. "Seth…"

"Who is Seth?"

"He—" Levi stopped. Seth was a lot of things, some of which didn't need to be brought up right now. "He owns a bar...I think."

She raised her eyebrows but didn't probe any further.

Levi's finger stopped on a corner of the Coldwater district, not too far from the military police outpost where Nile would meet with Burns the next day.

"Here." He said.

"What is it?"

"It's uh…" He trailed off. He hadn't been prepared to talk about that tonight.

Historia raised her eyebrows at him. "Yeah..?"

"It's a...uh...a bar."

He pressed a hand into his skull, willing the pain to go away. He wished he could dig a hand into his brain and dig it out.

Yes it was a bar. But it was also so much more than that. Levi didn't know how to explain it to her without delving into Furlan. Because Furlan had lived there. After his parents died and before he met Levi, Furlan had been taken in by a man who looked after street urchins.

"Captain," Historia looked skeptical. "Do you want to go to a bar tomorrow?"

"No—I, why would I want to—no! This one is special. There's someone there who might be able to help us."

"Seth?"

"Yeah, Seth."

She bit her lip, drawing her hands together. Her fingers twirled around a loose strand of her hair. There was nothing energetic about the movement. In fact, for the first time since she'd joined him, Levi noticed the bags under her eyes.

Add that to the list of things we have in common.

"It's hard to explain." He sighed. "I didn't know Seth, but a friend of mine did."

And here we go.

"It's okay Captain." She said. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

She knows you're weak. Sneered the voice in his head. She's been doubting you since the moment you walked down here.

Ah, yes. It was back. It always appeared sooner or later.

"No it's fine." Levi brushed it off. "If it helps the mission then I'll share."

Historia gave him an encouraging smile.

But where to start?

"I had a friend. Furlan was his name. He...he was a good man. One of the best. He was from the underground as well. His parents died when he was young and he lived on the streets to survive."

Levi paused. This was harder than expected.

"What happened to him?" The queen asked.

"He was lucky." Levi blinked. "He was damn lucky. An old fool took him in. He wasn't the only one either. Furlan said there were a handful of kids that the old man took care of."

"I'm guessing the old man is Seth?"

Levi nodded. The details were foggy. Furlan wasn't extremely open about his past. None of them were. The more people on the streets knew about you the more they could exploit.

"I think so. Furlan took me by the bar that the old coot owned once. It's up in Coldwater. He never did say much about Seth other than he was a good man and that he took good care of him."

Historia looked thoughtful. "He sounds like a promising lead. Do you want to check it out tomorrow?"

"I—" Levi stopped. Did he want to tease his old memories like that? He was struggling enough as it was. Old faces haunted his dreams, visions of times long since past. They'd done a good job of steering away from anything that hit too close to home, but this? The only thing worse would be waltzing into the Island!

The clock ticked in the background, joining the night's quiet chorus.

He glanced at the map, trying to cover his hesitation. "We may as well. It's on the way to the outpost for Nile. We can split paths in Coldwater."

Historia grinned. "He'll be so excited to hear we get to spend more time with him."

Levi's lips twitched into a smirk. He secretly enjoyed how the queen was picking up on his tendency to annoy other military officers. Especially Nile. The poor man was nearly at his wits end with them pushing all of his buttons all the time. "I'll let you tell him the good news."

"Hopefully he doesn't push you in the river again when he finds out!" She said laughing.

He grimaced, remembering how frustrated Nile had been that day.

"That's why you get to tell him."

They both froze as Nile snored extra loud from beyond the door.

"You should really get some sleep." Levi reasoned. She needed to be well rested for the day. Maybe once she was gone he would fix himself a cup of tea. That always made him feel better.

"Yeah, I'm going back to bed." She yawned. She stretched her arms and legs, standing from the table. "Thanks for the info about Seth."

He nodded as she padded towards her room.

"Oh, and Captain?" She blinked, blushing slightly as she turned back. "You should try to get some sleep too, okay?"

He narrowed his eyes a fraction. "Is that an order?"

"No its—well, I don't know. Does it need to be?"

He was getting really tired of this. It wasn't her fault. In fact it was his fault that she didn't know he damn well couldn't sleep.

"I'll try." He lied, looking down.

The detailing in the floor was nothing special, but it was better to look at than the worry he knew Historia's face would hold. After a moment, the sound of her door clicking shut signaled that she was gone.

He sighed, grimacing as he glanced at the clock again. His migraine throbbed in sync with the waves in his stomach.

No he wouldn't be getting any more sleep tonight.

The early morning torches were not lit on the streets as the man strode past empty doorways and dark windows. Heads turned from the shadows, watching with tired eyes at the brisk pace he traveled at.

He ignored them all.

Pushing into the large building at the end of the block, the man entered a chamber of hallways. He moved with feet that had long since memorized the route, stopping on the second floor in front of the only room with a candle flickering from the crack under the door.

He strode in, making eye contact with the only other person sitting in the room.

"Today. It has to be today."

The other man paused before answering but was unsurprised by his new companion.

"Why?"

"You've been watching them, right?"

"Everyday."

"Good." He nodded. "I've trusted from your lack of reports that nothing has gone amiss?"

His friend inclined his head. "Nothing has happened. The three of them do the same thing every day more or less. They search, come up empty handed, and they go back to that inn every night."

"Have they seen you?"

Another pause.

"Levi saw me on the first night, but he's been growing weaker."

The man frowned. "That's unusually careless of you, but what do you mean about Levi?"

"He appears to be getting sick. Might be the effects of this goddamn place getting to him." His friend shifted. "He hasn't said anything to Nile or Historia to my knowledge. They will be easy to take out."

The man allowed himself to sink into a chair across from his friend. "Good. Good, this is fantastic! And my sincerest apologies go to you. You shouldn't have to suffer down here with them"

His friend nodded, "I appreciate the sentiment, but you haven't answered my question. Why today?"

The man smiled.

"They'll be a little extra vulnerable today.

...----------------...

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