Chagara - Chaos in the Darkness (Levi x OC Fanfic / AttackOnTitan)

78. "Can I borrow a book?"

Sweat ran down Levi's forehead as he tried to catch up with his boy. When he finally saw him, his heart stopped. "NAOKI! NO!," shouted Levi, white as a sheet.

Astonished, his son turned around. He was standing on the edge of a cliff.

"This brat isn't seriously going to jump now, is he?," Levi thought, breathing heavily, and approached his son.

Cautiously, Levi looked over the edge. Below them, the waves were crashing against the rocks. Out of sheer fear, he would have liked to slap him. But his son might lose his balance and fall off.

"Step away from the edge," Levi said quietly, holding out the clothes to Naoki.

Silently, Naoki slipped into his trousers and pulled up his braces while his father slowly sat down on the floor and put his trembling hands in his lap. With his shirt open, Naoki sat down next to his father.

"You weren't seriously going to jump now, were you?," Levi asked as they both stared out at the sea.

"Yes, I wanted," was Naoki's brief reply. "We often jump from up here," he explained, seeing the panic in his father's eyes. "It's not dangerous for us."

"Do you like being by the water?," asked Levi, noticing that his breathing was getting calmer.

Naoki shrugged his shoulders. "It's where I grew up." He watched his father massage his right leg. "Haven't you ever been in the water?"

Levi liked the curious tone in Naoki's voice. Even if he didn't look at him, he knew his son was studying his face and comparing it in his mind to his own. Just like when they had breakfast together. "No. And you dive too?"

"Mh. It's probably like flying used to be for you," Naoki said.

Levi frowned. "What do you mean?"

"When you flew through the air with your equipment, you surely felt free," Naoki replied. "It's the same with diving. You can forget everything around you."

Levi's hands squeezed his stick. "We weren't free," he began sadly. "When we were flying. We had to fly to kill. And if you had bad luck, you got killed. Many had bad luck."

"Were you afraid? That you would die?," asked Naoki, flicking a pebble off the cliff.

"Not until I started a relationship with your mother. Then the thoughts came. What if she gets pregnant and yet one day I die in a battle. What will happen to her and the child then?"

"Then why didn't you just leave with Mama?"

"This has something to do with responsibility and respect," Levi said, pulling out his handkerchief. "When you have people around you that you care about, you want them to be okay. And to just give up like that is unfair to everyone else who had already lost their lives to achieve the common goal. They would have died in vain otherwise." He wiped the sand from his hands. "That we are free now is thanks to many people. Only most of them are no longer alive."

Naoki saw his father's sad smile. "Did you lose many?"

"Almost all of them," Levi replied barely audibly, ruffling his son's hair. It felt like Ayumi's.

"Papa?"

"Mh?"

Naoki pointed at the slowly sinking sun. "Can we sleep at the beach tonight?"

"What?," asked Levi, frowning. "In the sand?"

"Natsuki and I have a little hiding place on the beach. That's where our blankets are. I can catch us fish too. And I can make fire too."