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The overwhelming desire to collapse face-first onto your bed and curl up beneath the covers in an attempt to disappear had won you over long before even setting foot into your room. Everything feels like too much. It was all you could do to drag through the day, under the constant threat of near shut-downs. A lifetime of having to explain being sad for “no reason” only to be ridiculed and shamed has done too much damage to find the want to try it now, even here in the Devildom. Instead, you’ve found shutting down, shutting yourself away is the best way to avoid being made to feel even worse when faced with scrutiny and accusations for your inability to weather the depressive episodes.
Hopefully napping would give you enough energy to build back up the shield you need to contain the despair storming in your head.
When you open your eyes, your body feels stiff. You suppose you must’ve slept like a rock for a few hours if it aches to even stretch; picking up your phone and foolishly blinding yourself with the screen. After a few blinks, your eyes adjust, and are horrified to find so many missed texts—and to find you’d not only slept all evening and night, but according to the date, the entire next day as well. The unanswered messages and calls are easily explained away by your phone still being set to silent, and with its last sliver of battery, you thumb through the texts to check if there was any emergency, or if it was just the brothers fussing at you for shutting yourself up in your room. Before you can make any concrete determinations, the poor thing dies in your hand, once again plunging you and the room into total darkness.
You don’t bother charging it, letting it fall from your hand to clatter to the floor. It doesn’t matter right now, and if there had been something so pressing that it needed your immediate attention, a simple locked door wouldn’t have stopped seven of the most powerful demons in the Devildom from getting to you.
You want to go back to sleep. To disappear. Just sink right into the mattress and forgo playing up only exhaustion as the factor for your sudden need to hibernate.
Without realizing you’d begun nodding off again, distant shuffling disturbs you. From the tiny crack beneath the locked door, barely visible light betrays a shifting shadow. You watch it, holding your breath, not sure if there is someone there or if one of the demons is just passing by. Lucifer, you figure. If there would be anyone to patrol the halls in the dead of night, the eldest would be your first guess.
The shadow doesn’t move on. In fact, your bedroom door rattles a bit, as if pushed, but the knob doesn’t turn in the slightest. Something slides against the wood, the shadow at the bottom grows larger, almost completely blotting out what miniscule amount of light that was able to peek through. There’s a quiet sigh, and an even quieter voice grumbling to itself.
For a moment you consider just ignoring it. Consider turning over and letting it slip from your mind, but the mumbling is incessant, so you decide to see who the hell is sitting against your door of all places to talk to themselves.
“Stupid normie…” you hear as you approach silently. “Don’t you know I’m the only one who can stay shut in without worrying everyone…” There’s another sigh, followed by a soft thump, as if his head had dropped back against the door. “Do you think working me up like this is funny..? Just wait till you come outta there, I’ll—” Leviathan yelps when he suddenly falls back, lower half of his body in the hallway while his top half is laid out in your room. His mouth works overtime, but nothing coherent makes it out, just gawking dumbly up at you standing over him in the now open doorway, staring back. Even in the dimness of 3 AM, it’s easy to see the flush of color rush across his pale face.
Stepping back in tandem with Levi scrambling up to his feet, he looks about two seconds away from bolting. “What are you doing..?”
“I…I,” Every bit of him is bristled as he clenches his fists at his sides. “I was just…it was my turn to check…so…”
“What—”
“Why are you awake at this hour!?” You follow the motion of his arm as he gestures into the room, towards your bed; all but demanding you return to it. “Wh-what…what were you doing in here, anyway..?” When you look back, Levi has turned his head, staring at some distant spot into the darkness.
“Just…tired…” you say, out of reflex, out of self-preservation. You’re still too raw to come up with anything else believable enough other than the usual go-to response that keeps others a safe distance from the truth.
With your gaze dropped to study his headphones, the once over he gives you goes unnoticed. “What a LVL1 problem,” he mutters, lifting his hands to shoo you backwards, herding you back to bed. You move one step at a time till the backs of your knees touch the mattress before sitting with a bounce, but don’t otherwise move. “Don’t tell me you need me to tuck you in…”
Still staring ahead, not focusing on anything in particular, you shake your head.
“C-cool.” Levi shoves his hands into his pockets and takes his own step back, practically radiating with the urge to run away. “Just regen for now. If you’re that tired, you shouldn’t be up.”
Your head bobs with a nod, eyes absently tracing the curve of the headphone cord that follows the line of his torso till jutting out at his hip and disappears beneath his jacket. Other than that, you don’t move a muscle.
“You, uh…” Levi shifts on his feet. “You sure you’re good..?”
“Just tired…” Your voice is barely a whisper, but the crack that rattles it is quite audible.
Leviathan tenses when you sniffle, hands tightening into unseen fists inside his pockets as you move quickly to wipe at your face. Internally, he’s already panicking. Not only does he not know what the hell to do with an emotional (crying!) human, he also knows that you personally are not the type to just cry over nothing. In fact, he would probably go as far to say that you were too proud to ever let yourself look this vulnerable in front of another living creature. Levi glances back over his shoulder at the open door. It’d be so damn easy to make a mad dash for it, to save your dignity, and save him the awkwardness of just standing there with no clue what to do when you’re this upset. With no clue what about, or how to help. He knows he’s nowhere near the level Asmo—or hell, any of his brothers—when it comes to social cues, so the best thing for him to do is just…leave, right?
Lowering your head to hide your face the best you can since you know Levi has no trouble seeing in the dark, you quickly rub at your eyes, digging your palms against the sockets to try to brute-force the tears back inside. Yelling at him to get the hell out seems almost preferable than letting him see your moment of weakness. You’d much rather have Leviathan mad at you than pity you. Instead, you decide taking it out on him isn’t fair, and resolve to politely ask him to fuck off. “Sorry, but could y—”
You’re silenced when suddenly being blanketed in even more darkness. It’s immediately warm, surrounding you like a hug that, for once in your life, doesn’t make your skin crawl.
Levi stares down at the vague human-like shape you make with his jacket draped over your head. It hangs around you like a curtain, blocking your view of the world, and his view of you.
His palm then gently rests atop your head. You can feel the tremors as he hesitantly moves it, stroking your head with uncertain motions that are, honestly, bafflingly comforting. It’s because it’s him, you think. Because this is Leviathan, and he is going far beyond his own comfort zone in this moment. For you. Putting himself in an equally wretched state in his attempt to help.
“Invisibility Cloak,” you hear him mumble, “Sneak 100. N-no one’ll know anything.”
In any other moment, you would have laughed. Or at least rolled your eyes in the wake of yet another one of his analogies meant to help him bridge the gap between his self-appointed gamer-brain and ‘normie conversation.’ Right now, however, his words mean the world to you.
You slump forward, burying your face into your hands and empty your tears.
Levi’s hand still pets you in shaking intervals, his warmth eventually migrating to your side. Without a thought, you lean against him. His arm moves to brace your shoulders, holding you up, all in silence.
Neither one of you speaks. Even after you have grown quiet again. Even after you eventually pull his coat from over your head and are allowed to wrap yourself in it. Leviathan still sits in total silence, even when you roll back on the bed and curl around his jacket like it was your only lifeline.
With your back to him, and the fabric still clutched between your fingers, you hoarsely whisper, “..thank you…”
He puffs a breath, “F-for what? I didn’t do anything. Didn’t hear anything!”
“Can I…hold onto the cloak a little longer?”
“Stealth mission..?”
Despite knowing he’s facing away as well, you still nod. “Yeah. Big one.”
“Well,” Levi huffs, feigning annoyance about it, “I guess so. B-but…you better share the loot… Since it’s… Since it’s my gear, and all…”
“Promise.”
The mattress shifts with the loss of his weight on its edge. His jacket tugs up around your shoulders, covering what he can with the parts that aren’t trapped in your death grip. “Better not lose it,” he mutters.
“I’ll protect it with my life.”
“Good.” A shadow hovers over your head. In your periphery, you can make out the silhouette of his hand, poised to pet, paused and hesitating. In the end, the shape retreats.
And so too does Leviathan.