Chapter Text
Umbria, Italy
2 April, Ten Years Prior
***
The evening light falls golden and heavy over the rolling hills of Umbria, the kind of light that makes everything look like it's been painted rather than grown. Cypress trees stand like dark sentinels along the winding road that leads to the villa; a modest stone house, older than anyone can properly trace, sitting at the edge of a small abandoned vineyard. There were not a lot of neighbor; which rather the point of it. The nearest neighbor house is ten minutes away, on foot.
Inside, the villa is quiet in the way that only late Sunday evenings can be. The smell of tea - oolong tea with a hint of Osmanthus flower scent - lingers from this morning. Somewhere outside, a bird calls once and then thinks better of it.
From where I stand, which is just outside a window that planted right beside his front door, Levi Ackerman sits at the long wooden table in the study. His jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, reading glasses low on his nose as he marks something in the margin of a document. A half-drunk tea sits cold at his elbow. He hasn't noticed my presence because 1) I am a silent observant and 2) he is always like that when he is deep into his documents.
He looks up only when he hears my footsteps on his front door. I haven't even get the chance to knock.
The glasses come off. He sets them on the document with the particular precision of a man who does everything with particular precision, and regards me with those grey eyes, steady and unreadable.
"You've been standing in the doorway for ten seconds," he said in English for reasons I had no idea why. He probably suspects that I'm not his neighbor who is visiting. Or that he barely had visitors at all. At his remark, I didn't say anything back and just started knocked his door once. He picks up the cold tea, takes a sip, makes no visible reaction to the temperature before he stands up and opened his door.
"Who are you?" he asked.
Outside, the vineyard sways once in a slow wind. The hills of Umbria hold their silence like they've been doing it for centuries and intend to continue.
I don't even need to ask him if he is Levi Ackerman, because he is, and although in my timeline he's long gone, I still remember him clear as a day. And he's exactly like I dreamt of for years; his dark hair and his haircut that never changed, his eyes that always seems on edge and watchful, and even his stance, the way he stands against the world. And I smiled to the thoughts of it; the certainty that I will never forget him, even once, because he had already sculpted inside my thoughts and my grieving soul.
Was it really him that I remembered, or my memories of him? Sometimes I wonder. But The Ship of Theseus is already set to sail, no matter what the answer is. This is him, standing in front of me right now.
"Indeed, I am," I said, admitting that I have been standing in his doorway, and I began the conversation with one line, one opener that I always choose after I traveled too much for too far behind, "I'm Catherine, your wife from the future."
He doesn't move. That is the first thing — he absolutely does not move. Not a flinch, not one condescending laugh, no reach for the phone to call someone. The document stays where it is. The cup of tea stays where it is.
The only thing that changes is something very small behind his eyes. A sharpening, like a door that was already closed getting locked. Or worse, a door that shuts down without him slamming it.
A long silence fills between us. The old clock on the shelf ticks through five, six, seven seconds of it.
"..."
He looks at me the way he looks at documents he suspects have been forged; methodical, unhurried, giving nothing away. Starting from my face, searching if I am some kind of prankster who makes TikTok contents for clouts, or some woman who is suffering from brain damage. His eyes moving briefly, almost imperceptibly, down and back up.
Then, flatly — "No."
A normal person would not believe if one goes to their doorstep and claimed that they are their future spouses. Levi was a normal person, so he reacted in the way normal person do; "If Erwin sent you, tell him he can go fuck himself. If this is some kind of sick joke, go before I call the police. "
Which he did, in other timelines. Couple of times, I thought. I chuckled as his response, the precise 'no' I always heard. But now I get it, that I should say something that intrigued him that he will not turn away from this one. Something that really, really, really interesting, like-
"This is not a sick joke, I can assure you," I said with a smile, "and no. Erwin already knew you have read the brief about your upcoming assignment to Yemen. He would still push you through it, though. Which you would still say no next week."
How did I knew that? Because I knew everything about him, start to finish. Unfortunately for me, the finish part is already happened in my timeline.
Now I can see something in him sets down with the quiet finality of a man making a decision about how seriously to take something. The documents on his desk are long gone, and his hands barely thinks of reaching the door knob as if they also intrigued to hear more. The Yemen detail stops him. Not visibly — nothing about Levi Ackerman is ever visible — but the quality of his stillness changes. There's a difference between a man who is still because nothing is happening and a man who is still because too much is.
He is currently the second kind.
"That brief was classified."
His voice is flat and quiet. It is not a question nor a statement, more like a stone he's placed on the table between me to see what I am going to do with it.
He widen his door for me slowly. Unhurried, the way he does everything, before he rolls his sleeve down one notch; an old, unconscious habit when something shifts from routine to requiring attention. He stepped back, and pointed to his study with his chin, his way to say come in without actually saying it. He moves to the window and glancing out at the road carefully.
His jaw moves slightly. Mental arithmetic, or something close to it. "Sit down," he says, nodding to an empty wooden chair near his desk. "I am asking you once again. Who are you, and how do you know about Yemen."
"I'm afraid my today's visit will be brief. I can't sit down because you will have a guest. Your cousin Mikasa will be visiting in-" I glanced at my wristwatch, "-fifteen minutes. Eren is driving now at full speed."
"Full speed? That brat-" He stopped himself, probably because he is holding the urge to call the husband of his closest relative a brat, or probably he knew Eren that well to know that cussing would not change anything anyway. Then he took a sharp breath. "Mikasa doesn't announce visits," he said, still facing the window. "She calls fifteen minutes before she arrives because she knows I won't tell her not to come if she's already in the car."
A long beat. "Nobody knows that pattern."
He turns to me now, and now the grey eyes are doing something different. It does not gets warmer, or softer, but attentive in a way that has weight to it.
"...How long have you been watching us." It does not sounds accusatory. To me, it is his tone when he is genuinely asking. Which, from him, means it starts to matters.
The vineyard light shifts outside, golden going slowly amber. The hills don't care either way. But the room, somehow, feels different than it did a minute ago. A second later Levi's phone rings, and it is from Mikasa, and it seems that she announced her arrival precisely at the pattern.
To give him some sense of privacy I just moved. I walk to an empty wall - no decorations, no plasterwork, no fun - with just a plain clock that tells me that now it is 16.37. I leaning my body on it, unhurried. He lets the phone ring once more before he picks it up. His eyes don't leave me for the entirety of that extra ring.
"Mikasa." A pause. Her voice on the other end is too far for me to hear the words, but the cadence of it is familiar. He turns slightly away, but only slightly. Not enough to stop watching me from the edge of his peripheral vision, just-in-case.
"I know. Fifteen minutes." Another pause. "Yes. There's someone here."
Whatever Mikasa says to that makes him pause half a beat longer than usual. He hangs up without a goodbye, which is, apparently, just how that relationship works. It worked in the past, it works for now so it will not change as long as it works anyway. The Ackermans, I learned, are not fond of excessive talking, even in my timeline.
The phone goes face-down on the table. He stays where he is, standing, regarding me against the wall with the particular expression of a man who has spent a career reading people and has just encountered a sentence he can't parse.
"My cousin is on her way with her husband," he says. It is his way of saying you're right, I guess, without actually saying it.
"I know," I say.
"How," he say. Now it sounds more like a demand now. Tell me now or else. But he had not figured out what else meant for someone like me, who showed up to tell him that I'm married to his future self. Tell me now or I'll kick you out from my house? Tell me now or I'll call the police? Tell me now or I drag you by the collar? Tell me now or-
"The brief is indeed, classified, for now. But it won't be classified anymore a year from now, and you will tell me about it two years after that," Ilet out a small smile. "And define 'watching'. I don't watch you the way I put surveillance on you. I watch you the way a wife watch her husband wake up, get dressed, get to work, and grow together. There's difference."
The wife comment lands. I knew it. He doesn't show it the way most people would show it; no colour in his face, no shift in posture. Just a very slight tension at the corner of his mouth that could mean... well, with him, almost anything. "There's a difference," he repeats slowly. Almost to himself, testing the shape of it.
He pulls the chair out — not his own, the one across the table — and sits on the edge of it. Elbows on knees. The body language of a man who has decided, against what is probably his better judgment, to engage. "Two years from now I tell you about Yemen." He says it the way he would read a report back. Checking the detail. Make sure his audience listens. "Which means two years from now you and I are—"
He stops himself. Recalibrates.
"This is madness. I refuse to believe this," he said.
Not how is that possible. Not prove it. Just his refusal, the practical rejection of it. Because if any part of what I am saying is real, that's the number that matters most, and Levi Ackerman has always known which number matters most. "It does sounds crazy, yeah," I say, admitting the madness. "Two years from now, we would meet. Somehow Erwin assign you a job to Indonesia, and you would go. That's where I came from. That's where I lived."
Something crosses his face at Indonesia. A fractional narrowing. But it's there.
"Erwin doesn't assign Indonesian postings to diplomats at my level."
A beat.
"Yet."
He says the last word like it costs him something. Like admitting the qualifier is already a concession he wasn't planning to make today. He looks down at his hands briefly — a rare thing, for a man who usually keeps his eyes on the room — and then back up. "You know a lot of things," he finally said. "You better tell me who is your source, now."
"You are my source," I answered with a teasing grin, then I looked at my wristwatch. "I should go before Mikasa sees me. Would ruin the whole magic if she does. Although at the end, we would be best friend and my parents' favorite in-laws."
I walked to the front door, ready to get out. "Oh, one more thing. Eren would bring you a can of goatmilk he claimed to be a usual dairy milk," I said, the grin sit still on my face. "Don't drink it unless you want to be pissed and itchy tomorrow. He doesn't know your dietary yet."
A beat. "But I do," I said, before opened his door.
He stands. Not quickly — Levi Ackerman doesn't do anything quickly — but he stands, and that itself means something. He says nothing about Mikasa being my best friend, and nothing about being anyone's favorite in-law. But something about the way he doesn't say it suggests it has registered in a place he hasn't decided what to do with yet.
The goat milk makes him stop entirely. He looks at me with an expression that is — for one unguarded half-second — almost offended. The specific offence of a man who has been lactose intolerant his entire life and has spent considerable energy ensuring nobody makes it their business. "Eren—" He cuts himself off. "...How does he still not know."
Less a question about Eren specifically. More a quiet, exasperated acknowledgment that yes, I knew that is exactly the kind of thing Eren Jaeger would do in any timeline, in any universe, across all of recorded history.
But I'm already outside the door and he hasn't moved to stop me, which is either because he won't, or because he's still deciding, or because something about the way I said but I do has briefly removed his ability to determine which option applies.
From across the study, quietly —
"Catherine."
My name. First time he's used it today, in this timeline, and he says it the way he reads things he intends to remember.
A beat of Umbrian silence before he told me, "...Close the door." Not a request, exactly. Not quite an order. Something that lives in the narrow space between the two, in the particular tone of a man who is already intrigued but will not admit it; or someone who wants to say something else.
Outside, wheels on gravel. Mikasa's arrived two minutes early. I heard wheels approaching, and that's the last thing I heard before I'm gone.