Chapter Text
What makes a father?
There were several answers to that particular question, Levi felt, a recipe that varied from person to person, a pinch of love here, a dash of athleticism, a penchant for Monday night football ensconced carefully in a squashy armchair in front of the big-screen television, with a bowl of tortilla chips and a bottle of beer clutched firmly in one hand.
Nobody could agree on what exactly made the perfect father. For some it was the educated professor-types, pushing up rectangular glasses higher up on the bridges of angular noses, fiddling with the knots of Windsor-style neckties and encased in a shell of academia, of mountains of hastily scribbled notes and old onion-skin textbooks and argyle sweaters. There were two kinds of this type of father. There were the ones who were elementary school teachers, or perhaps elementary school teachers and PhD students trying to write a thesis on some child psychology research or the like. The second were usually older, more grandfatherly than directly paternal, and they had already achieved tenure and were free to let their hair go salt-and-pepper and their bellies hang out over their belts, were able to afford a small family, and maybe a mistress in Manhattan on the side, if they were professors at a private institution and made a relatively decent salary from whatever scholarly papers they'd published in.
There were the athletic fathers. The ones who could rattle off long lists of numbers that would have brought even the finest statistician to tears. The ones whose diets in college had consisted of probably seven grilled chickens a day and breakfasts of protein shakes. Their kids were enrolled in at least three different sports teams in school, and had no less than three scrapes on their bodies at any given time.
The dorky fathers, fluent in Python and C++ and Java, who more often than not had their arms bound in flexible casts, victims of carpal tunnel. A basement filled with technological equipment, a pale complexion from staying up late into the wee hours of the morning and staring at LCD screens, their blood at least 33% caffeinated products.
And that was only a short list. Fathers came in all shapes and sizes and colours. Fathers came from all sorts of backgrounds, because once upon a time they had also been kids, as hard as that was to imagine.
There were good fathers. There were bad ones. Present ones, absent ones.
But ultimately, they were all donors of seed, swift, wriggling molecules swimming desperately upstream to propagate genes rooted deep inside their membranes, trying to pass on a father's green eyes, or his love for fantasy football, or implant the suggestion of the gratification of finding salvation in the bottom of a bottle. A whisper, nothing more, but whispers can sometimes be the loudest things when you're lying awake at night and wondering where your life is going.
Levi still woke up some mornings and found it horrifyingly difficult to believe that he, too, was a father. He lay awake in the soft silence of the one-bedroom apartment, staring up at the cracked ceiling, listening to the sounds of the city starting to wake up outside, pinched himself hard on the thigh to remind himself that, yes, he really was a father, there was a bassinet standing in the corner right there to prove it, and all manner of baby paraphernalia scattered around the flat.
At this point, he would rouse himself from bed, tossing off the sheets frantically from their position, tangled around his legs and elbows, smothering, still smelling freshly of nightmares, and he would rush over to the bassinet, eyes searching frantically through the rumpled sheets until he located his son's face. He would stare very hard, eventually holding the back of a finger up near his son's tiny nose, holding his breath until he was absolutely one hundred percent sure that the child was breathing.
He would relax then, folding his arms across his chest, his thumb absentmindedly worrying at a hole in his undershirt, and would make a mental list of the things he had to get done that day, exactly how much rent he was on backlog for, when he might be able to scrape up enough money to get a new jacket for his son, the one he currently had was being outgrown at a pace that Levi could hardly keep track of.
And sons. What were they made of? Levi wasn't sure of that answer, either.
His son, in this case, had no genetic tie to him, he would never open charcoal-gray eyes mirroring Levi's own, would never inherit Levi's passion for cleaning, he could already tell from the way he squirmed away in distaste whenever Levi tried to wipe his mouth after dinner and how he sobbed like his heart was breaking whenever Levi carted him to the bathroom for his nightly bath.
His son's name was Eren, an orphan of orphans. Displaced. Mislaid. Forgotten.
Those things, but not abandoned. Levi had promised not to abandon him, and he was nothing of not a man of his word.
Eren would wake up, turquoise eyes blinking open wide and rolling around until they fell upon Levi, who would be jolted rudely out of his mental calculations by a stream of babbling that began the instant Eren woke up and didn't abate until he fell asleep. Levi would pick him up, change him, stuffing tiny limbs into impossibly tiny clothes that, he would note with dismay, seemed to be getting thinner and more ragged by the day, before carting him into the kitchen on his hip to have a breakfast of oatmeal, thinned with water because the milk had to last.
He would deposit Eren at a daycare center run by one of his acquaintances from university, who gave him a generous discount on the minding fees, and then he would head to work, trying to ignore the hole currently being worn through the sole of his left shoe.
He would pick Eren up, almost always the last child at the daycare center when he arrived, trying to ignore the reproachful looks the sitters and aides gave him as he scooped Eren into tired arms and walked him home. His hands moved mechanically by then, mashing food for Eren into manageable little spoonfuls, and would try to keep his eyes propped open while Eren giggled and smeared carrot all over his chin and the stack of bills on the battered Formica table, and for a few moments Levi could pretend the bills didn't have scars of red streaked all over them.
A bath. Levi barely mustered the energy each night to force Eren into a bath. More stuffing of tiny limbs into tiny pajamas, setting Eren down into his bassinet immediately after and smiling tiredly as he grabbed a battered plush toy and promptly stuffed it into his mouth.
A goodnight kiss. Always a goodnight kiss.
Eren would smile up at him, and no matter how many times it happened, Levi was still shot through with pain, because he looked so much like her.
"Goodnight, Eren," he would murmur. Some nights it was hard to keep the choked note out of his voice.
"Nie!" Eren would chirp back, and would promptly roll onto his side and fall asleep, snoring energetically with tiny whistles.
Levi would lie down, stare at the car lights spinning across the cracked ceiling, and for a few moments could pretend that this was all a dream, a nightmare that would be gone by the time he opened his eyes.