A/N: And here I am, more than a month later, with the last chapter that is not really a solid chapter but a bunch of supposed-to-be-connected drabbles, some of which are hopelessly senseless and ridiculous to the point of not being funny anymore. FYI, the first one refers to that thing Eren mentioned to his mom in chapter 2, so i guess it'll clear up any possible confusion. Levi comes into play in some (please don't attempt to assassinate for the surname), and there's that bit of Rivetra that I didn't quite manage to reign in - shame on me. And it's Levi, so he cusses without any inhibition - just a warning, because it might or might not quite go under the T rating. The musical terminology - nothing's pressing you to look it up, it's not that crucial, but I'd suggest you do, Wikipedia will do a much better job at explaining than me any day.

And yes, I changed the title, because frankly, I not good with those on short notice, and there'd been a chapter by the same title, and that didn't seem very nice. And yay, we've got a cover pic! Not the best out there, but better than nothing, I suppose.

As always, I hope you enjoy the read.

~ Andantino ~ Mid-November, graduation year, on tour ~

"Ah, shit."

There was no vocal reaction from the short man standing next to Eren, but he wasn't counting on one, not yet.

"Should we wave to them, sir?" he questioned the concertmaster and received an actual response this time around: an exasperated scoff. "I guess we won't."

The purr of the engine steadily grew duller and quieter as the acidic yellow coach that was supposed to take the musicians to their lodge at the end of the day vanished in the late evening traffic down the street, the unhealthy golden-orange hue of the lamp posts' lights making the pitch-black darkness under the bellies of the cars parked nearby seem way deeper than it had any right to be; the two men stood out in the blend of passersby and theatre-goers getting out of the concert hall, grace of the gig bags dangling on their shoulders, and people whispered among each other and pointed at them in a show of a bystander's insolence, letting their excited squeals and sighs reach the musicians' ears.

Levi didn't quite sigh, but released an aggravated puff of air nonetheless, traces of his breath lingering like the wisps of a fleeing ghost.

"D'you have your cell on you?"

"Yeah- But it died some hours ago, but I'll see if it can still..." However, to his chagrin, not a speck of life graced the screen of the device with its presence, and the phone was dejectedly lowered back into the pocket. "Maybe we can catch a taxi." Eren was trying to look at their predicament with optimism, but as it only seemed to grow grimmer, he was failing and falling further with every straw grasped and proven rotten.

"Only if you've got your wallet, Jaeger," the older man bit out and buttoned up the last of his coat, glaring at the chilly world before him with unrivaled vehemence, "'cause I sure as fuck don't have a single bill."

Eren felt a notch colder when his fingers raked through the emptiness of one of the inner pockets, and a bitter chill settled in his gut like a stinking snake waiting to make a nest when he recalled and realized the extent of panic he was supposed to be in. "Damn, must've left it with Mikasa."

The man next to him made a sound eerily reminiscent of a mocking jeer and a devastated grunt at the same time. A bus rolled past then, it's engine's roar deafening, and it was a few seconds until vocal communication became possible once more.

"So, what do we do now, sir?"

"First of all, we walk," Levi grumbled, not at all pleased to be taking the lead and stomping off, hands buried deep into his pockets. "And stop calling me 'sir' already, makes me feel like I'm some old corporal from the military scaring the shit out of newbies."

"Ah, all right, sir - I mean - ugh... I'm sorry, what was your surname, again?"

The violinist stopped for a second and then shot off at an exceedingly brisk pace that Eren had difficulty keeping up with, only catching up to the other at the traffic lights.

"You're gonna laugh," he growled finally, looking as dark as a thunder cloud, and Eren resolved at that moment that for the sake of keeping his head and other body parts intact, he wouldn't so much as snicker.

"Not at all, sir."

The light blinked from red to green and they shot off, though at a calmer speed now that the shorter male seemed to have resigned himself to whatever humiliation he was sure he was going to go through.

"...Strauss."

Eren blinked twice.

"As in..."

"Yeah, as in the fucker who invented the pants you're wearing," he was making up for the slower pace by quickening his speech in something akin to old irritation, spewing out words like a snake would venom. "Apparently, my parents found it funny, fucking hilarious," he spat out the last word like it was mud. "And for your information, the majority of our guys know, and they have the intelligence to keep quiet about it."

"...Erm... I actually thought of the composer first..."

Levi made no audible response, and Eren couldn't quite see around his head from where he was trailing behind, teetering between walking and jogging. For a person so short, his superior sure could power-walk better than the national walking champion.

"By the way, sir- sorry, Mr. Strauss, - how do you know where to go?" The downtown had surprisingly rapidly deteriorated into something resembling an industrial district, and though on closer inspection the buildings showed a touch of something exquisite, the men's current path skirted a crudely painted concrete wall the likes of which usually surrounded construction sites.

"I've been here before."

"On tour?"

"Yes, now stop the blabbing and walk."

Eren lasted until the next turn.

"Um, sir? Can I ask you a slightly personal question?"

The shorter man held a short, slightly annoyed pause; he seemed to be doing that a lot that night, and Eren belatedly noticed his yet another failure at using the other's name.

"Shoot."

"Why St. Maria? I mean, with your skill, even those royal orchestra guys would be at each other's throats to..." he trailed off, his senior's silence and lack of any kind of reaction adding to the hesitation.

"Eren," and the addressed snapped to attention, "Why d'you think they dumped you lot on our shoulders, and not theirs?"

Some time before, Levi had been taunted into asking a similar kind of question - one that seemed to require an answer, and yet did not seem to have an obvious one. That time, the replying party had admitted to its ignorance; the result had been far from pretty. Deciding to be wise for the moment, Eren kept his mouth tightly shut.

"The Royals have no interest in performing varying stuff. Difficult stuff. They play the same three-odd pieces in the two goddamned concerts they give in a season and get paid damn well for that," Levi seemed to be ranting, displaying the well-known in certain circles inter-band antagonism that at times, given a feasible opportunity, aggraded to a bloody feud. "They could afford undergrad trainees no problem, but then those shitheads would lose their oh-so-special elite status, and of course they can't let that, pff. Shows fucking well just how fake those guys' reputation is, for all that 'royal' crap. And we," he angled his head to shoot Eren an unfriendly and somewhat pissed look from the corner of his eye, daring the younger to object, "we wring you through hellfire and boiling water and rusty pipes, but we give some actual experience, the sort that those smartass professors from your university have too much pride to admit having."

Eren's self-preservation instincts very loudly insisted that he stayed silent; not that he would've been able to come up with a similarly grand response right then and there anyway. The circumstances, however, begged to differ.

"Sir, look," he brightened up for no reason obvious to the other; it might have had something to do with the part of the street that was not in Levi's sight. "Isn't that our bus?"

The repeatedly cursed eye-burningly yellow vehicle rolled past their conveniently lit spot in full steam, engine roaring almost indecently loudly for that hour, and Eren pulled all of his willpower together so as not to break out in a mad victory dance; he settled for impersonating a windmill, in hopes of attracting attention.

"They've noticed us," he all but squeaked when the coach pulled over a little ways afar on the other side of the road, and there was no helping the wild grin that made his cheeks ache.

"Great for them. Another minute out here, and I would've made them all..." his senior grumbled, breezing past him and, as he noticed for the first time, slightly shivering; the promising purr of the engine drowned out the rest of the words.

Much later, when he, warm and safe, had been smothered by Mikasa and chewed out by a number of various authorities, he heard, driven by curiosity, that his young, easily swayed mind was better off not knowing what exactly the concertmaster 'would've made them all'; by that time, he'd already learned to expect that much.

~ Scherzo ~ Sometime in high school, late spring ~

Armin was tired. No, exhausted. Wrung out. Done in, as Eren would've put it. Actually, his whole vocabulary didn't seem to hold an appropriate word for the state of his body and mind. In a few minutes, the last class of an excruciatingly long school day would begin – a day that, to his worst luck, happened to land him in two hours of gym, with a hay fever that the pills were doing admittedly little to alleviate, which was a clear example of quality not living up to the cost; the recent music theory class had had him not only modulating his own, expanded share of score, but also trying to get Eren to understand how to do his so that the boy had some hope of passing the finals which were drawing closer and closer at an alarming rate; the electrical surges of animosity bouncing back and forth between said boy and Jean and never quite bursting had kept him tense all day in apprehension of the brewing brawl, and saying that this kind of environment was taxing would be an understatement of the year; later on he had a practice class, which would have him straining his poor lungs even more – why hadn't he opted for the piano instead, again? Ah, right, a piano had been, and still was, way out of their price range, - and it just had to be this exact day for them to run out of milk, which was what Armin's grandfather was trying to explain to his grandson at the moment: he'd already assured the old man that 'yes, he would drop by the convenience store and buy some' no less than five times by then, and as he wearily leaned on a windowsill outside the classroom, uncaring of the pollen making its way into his respiratory system because his case was a lost one anyway, his patience was running thin.

When nearby, in one of the classrooms down the hall, he presumed, something heavy suddenly decided to get acquainted with the floor loudly enough to make him jump and nearly lose hold of his mobile, for a moment, he got a worryingly strong urge to kick a kitten.

'Seems like Eren finally snapped. Or Jean, maybe,' Armin thought languidly as he hung up and caught familiar voices drifting from what seemed to be the same room that the noise had originated in. Without his grandpa's croaky voice in his ear, though, another interesting thing that reached his hearing was the sound of footsteps coming from the stairway: something which sounded suspiciously like their homeroom teacher. That militaristic pattern could always be recognized with startling ease.

Is seemed like Eren, whose head was now cautiously sticking into the hallway, caught up on it too, if the sheer terror written on his face and the way his adversary frantically pushed him out of the door was any indication. They had every reason to be terrified, after all: one, Keith Shardis had some fine hearing, and two, the target classroom was all the way down the hall.

The boys' lavatory was right across.

Armin didn't stay to witness the mad dash from door to door where limbs came into painful contact with handles and thresholds and doorposts, opting to return to the classroom and do a quick head count as the bell went off, his responsibilities as the class representative having never seemed more bothersome; Keith strode in not a minute later, fuming - as usual - and eager to behead an unlucky scapegoat – nothing new here. Knowing his luck for the day, Armin could almost take an educated guess.

Keith never bothered with the register, finding it easier to hold the class rep responsible for any unaccounted divergence in the number of students in a room, and later, when he already knew the names, being easily able to pinpoint the missing ones. That didn't mean that the responsibility was off, though, and so, when Keith's count turned out short of two, the first one to withstand the pissed glare could not be anyone else but Armin.

"Where the hell is Jaeger?"

Armin was tired and sick. His brain, though dependable in normal condition, was shutting off. He just couldn't bear to spend more than half a second making up a believable bail-out; besides, a slightly longer pause before an answer often signaled lying.

"I'm afraid he's constipated, sir," he reported with a straight face that came to him surprisingly easy, given what kind of nonsense he was spewing.

"Hm. And Kirstein?"

He could practically feel his brain short-circuit.

"Moral support."

Somebody snorted.

He could tell that Keith didn't believe a word, but that would be Eren's problem.

~ Minuet ~

The night is dark, the lake is still, and it is hard to tell the sky from the water, the thick rim of the forest along the shore nothing but a batch of black. The gravel under his feet shifts together with him, and he watches her stalk the edges of his vision, sometimes bending over to scrutinize something in the poor lighting, looking for something he has. The chill is biting his cheeks; her mumbling is as loud in his ears as if she was standing within an arm's reach.

"The scarf… Where is the scarf?"

The soil crunches with his steps as he teeters on the brink of two elements, and they meet in the middle of awareness as if it were a physical thing, their own limitless stage with a backdrop lacking so much detail it isn't worth paying attention to. She contemplates him with those eyes of hers that catch the water and the sky and the powder of stardust and the rising moon, and then her hand reaches towards the fabric woven around his neck, slim fingers skimming over the rough wool.

"If you want that, you'll have to stay with me," he hears himself say, and she smiles for reasons unknown. The night fast-forwards the moon up like a bubble rising to the surface, and he is tugging her by the wrist then, luring her into the circle painted with a luminant pale yellow over the sprinkle-dots of stars, and their feet send countless intercrossing ripples across the picture. It doesn't matter if the water isn't a perfect mirror anymore: they don't need one to see each other, and the illusion of threading upon the skies never quite goes away. They flit between splotches of bottomless dark to the solitary spot of marble-white light that quivers with their approach like a shaky note; and then it begins, the awkward dance upon the moon trembling in the tremolo of their steps and twirls. He doesn't know why they are dancing, but the moon overhead is a faded limelight, the moon under their feet a glow almost eerie, throwing intricate patterns born from their movements upon her skin and paper-thin dress; the accompaniment is vague, barely discernible, and yet he feels with the tips of his fingers that brush along her pulse the fragile violin, the steady brass and the fleeting flute, weaving a symphony – no, a suite – all of their own – their own, flowing over the deep tone of the contrabass that sets the key to the whole piece. Maybe he'll ask Armin to put it down later: he's good at that kind of thing.

"What about Armin?"

He pried his eyes open, though the lids still felt heavy, to the brightness and sunlight of a late morning – he'd pin his guess at somewhere about nine or ten – and the upper part of a very familiar body hovering way above his head for a few seconds before its lower part settled on the edge of the bed.

"You're up early again," he muttered, faintly irked at her forfeiting a few hours of much-lacked sleep and leaving him to wake up to an empty bed – not that he'd ever admit that out loud.

But then she smiles at him, a smile that would've gone unnoticed if not for years of practice in catching it, and with a lone, slightly amused "Breakfast," leaves him to collect the scattered remains of a queer dream he'll forget come evening.

~ Ritenuto ~

She didn't like snow. Or rather, when it piled. Eren found out as soon as he tried to get her into a snowball fight and hadn't managed to so much as haul her out of the door into the knee-deep whiteness. She'd put on the shoes, the coat, and then froze solid once presented with the picture of the world outside. That time, she'd dug her heels in until his grip on her hand relented and allowed her to discard the boots and burrow under the blankets, curling in on herself, and no amount of coaxing on his side could get her out. His dad explained later that evening that it was a natural reaction after losing one's parents to the snow, and he was especially ordered to be careful, just how his parents were trying to be: any and all errands that had to do with going outside were diligently avoided, lifts were regularly given, any contact with snow cropped down to a bare minimum. At his 9 years, he hardly understood their unwillingness to have any potential symptoms of PTSD surfacing in a child that wasn't their own – hadn't been one until very recently, at least, - or that a doctor didn't equal a psychologist. He didn't even understand who she was and what label should be put on her; he never really took the adults' words to heart and only knew that she was Mikasa, the girl who unwittingly woke him up in the middle of the night with sobs and hiccups and proceeded to ask him to let her sleep with him, whom he gave the last pancake on the table, who followed him like a tail and hid behind his back when people tried talking to her – it took her a week to get used to Armin, - who would leave the safety of her bed despite the snowstorm raging outside only to cross the room and peek over his shoulder into the book he was reading.

Unsurprisingly, when she suddenly announced her decision to take up music classes, nobody had really protested, the adults in hopes of keeping up a sense of normalcy, Eren in sheer bewilderment, and it wasn't long after that that the three-year gap in their skill all but vanished, the teachers couldn't stop gushing with praise, and somehow, along the lines, Eren's back was no longer an impenetrable wall; she didn't need one anymore. She faced people head-on, making it clear without words that you didn't mess with her friends and get away with it; her wariness around most of the adults had receded to an almost acceptable level. By summer, she was 'much better', as his father had put it.

Yet, next winter, snowy days still found her cooped up indoors, and Eren fell into a comfortably familiar routine. Sure, Armin fumed, as much as he was capable of (which was, to say, not a lot), but came over anyways, bringing with him all sorts of interesting things, books mostly. It was a world of their own, lurking between their huddled bodies and the pages of the books that always seemed much more interesting than what they gave at school. Mikasa was clinging to Eren once again, and the world was back on the right axis.

It came tumbling down when he found her outside one evening. Making a snowman. Calm as steel, or seeming so. At his reluctant, puzzled call, she looked him straight in the eye, and that must've been the first attempt at wordless communication – at least the first one he remembered.

"Nothing will change if I keep running away. If I don't fight."

His own words echoed in his memory, and for the life of him, he couldn't figure out why some part of him was so frustrated at hearing it from her mouth, at realizing that she wasn't a porcelain doll his parents made her out to be.

"Need help?"

It's easier to roll huge balls of snow around if there are four hands at the task, after all.

~ Affettuoso ~ On tour ~

The disgusting sticky sensation of sweat-drenched silk clinging to his back, arms, stomach, shoulders and whatever else – it would be easier to list where it wasn't – was at the moment stubbornly fighting the deadpan stare Levi was giving the hysterical audience, their clamor not helping in the least as every next second of mass clapping was driving him that much closer to a headache and a nasty scowl (and that was a big no-no, not in front of people who paid decent money for an hour of his time – he might as well have been selling his body, if put into figurative terms). He'd been called back on stage for the fourth time now, and every time, he had to put his water back down and go and give that jittery biomass another bow, dreading the moment when he wouldn't be able to rise back up anymore and just collapsed right there; the strain on his back was all but wringing his willpower dry. Those damn people never knew when to quit. And yet – and he would only ever admit it to himself – he couldn't help feeling a bit smug at the admiration they kept showering him with, but what sane human being wouldn't? Not that Erwin would take that point into consideration when having a field day at his expense.

"Just play for them already," the blond bastard muttered from the conductor's perch, that patronizing little smirk tugging on his lips like he could fucking read people's minds – which he probably sort of could, given the years of experience behind his back. Levi couldn't even find it in himself to come up with a decent retort, settling for an exasperated half-snort, half-sigh, not that he saw any other way out without upsetting those who, in a way, put food on his table; better keep the source of income satisfied.

He threw his head back, taking a long, much-needed breath and then casting a sideways glance to his right, where Petra was observing him with drooping eyes – she was tired too, he could see, but smiling despite it all, despite how her back and neck and fingers must be giving her hell, smiling at him – for him, if he dare guess – and just like that, he knows what to play for the encore (he doesn't like repeating old pieces for the public). That one. The one he'd dredged up in some library or another, in the 'Unattributed' section; the one he'd secretly dubbed 'Petra's song', if only for the sake of distinction from all the other random pieces in his collection. Yes, that would go nicely.

The violin was heavy as he settled it on his shoulder, but the bow in his other hand felt feather-light, and he was startled to find himself hoping that the four strings and a bunch of horse hairs could produce a tune befitting the warmth and light she continuously shed all around her; he paid no heed to the silence that had enveloped the hall in its clutches, and he made a point to make that smile of hers the last thing he saw before the melody came flowing forth.

It wasn't the faceless audience that he was playing for.

~ A tempo al fine ~

At 20:23 on a Tuesday evening, some weeks away from the finals, Eren was ready to declare kinks in the back the bane of humanity. The after-performance fatigue never really kicked in until he was finished, but typing up an essay that was due tomorrow while hunched over cross-legged on one's own bed would give playing a run for its money, and win by a landslide if he couldn't sleep it off. The number of joints popping as he stretched would've made him cringe had he been in a mood to care, but as it was, he mirrored his laptop by freezing and staring at the ceiling for a time, tracing tiny cracks in the paint with his eyes and pondering the option of falling back. The chance of promptly falling asleep was too high for him to indulge in such carelessness before he was done with the damned assignment. As to why he wasn't using the desk… By the most optimistic prognosis, clearing up that mess of textbooks, packs of note sheets, piles of academic and music notebooks, not to mention the wide array of mugs stuck in the most peculiar positions, would take him the better part of the night.

The feeble hum of the processor was joined by the barely discernible thumps of stocking-feet somewhere behind him, overcoming the charger cord hanging a little ways over the floor, and he bent over backwards until his head was upside down to shoot Mikasa a short curious look before recoiling back: she was balancing a book in one hand and another mug to add to his tabletop collection in the other, and the shift of the mattress told him of her seating arrangements. Her back came to rest against his then as she wiggled in search of a comfortable position, and he could only hope that she was managing to keep the beverage where it was supposed to be.

"Not done yet?" she queried without a trace of reproach, but he mentally growled anyway at being reminded of the work waiting for him and the small fact that she had long since finished her own.

"Just a bit more," he sighed and hit a few keys, testing if the annoying gadget had decided to grace the unworthy mortals with a response and diving back into the sentences as it had apparently revived; not that he could keep up that infuriatingly boring activity for long. He turned his head, fighting an urge to twist a bit, put his chin on her shoulder and just stay that way for however long it took his brain to recuperate from the forcibly sophisticated wording he kept squeezing out of it. "What'cha reading?"

"Contemporary music history for tomorrow's class," and the back of his head came to rest on top of hers, because it was way too much for a single person to tackle.

"Tell me the short version later, 'kay?" He didn't even try to keep the exhaustion from his voice and couldn't care less about the amused huff that left her lungs; her hum of consent reverberating through his chest was all that mattered.

"Eren?"

"Hm?"

"Don't go dropping out on me a month before graduation, okay?" Leave it to Mikasa to worry about his grades before her own. "Because I'd be leaving too then."

"…We've been through this, haven't we?" They had, and more than once, and in truth, he was a bit tired of saying the same thing over and over; it was growing old, his brain chided and was determinedly ignored. His hand left the overheated keyboard, slid down to the side to cover hers, which was resting on the blanket. "We're in this together, until the end. Right?" he added, more to prove his point rather than seeking actual reassurance.

"Right," a smile seeped into her tone, and her palm turned around, fingers slipping between his.

They would go through it all together, until the end. Al fine.

A/N2: Well, this is it. A huge thank you to those who reviewed, faved, followed and just stalked: you guys make the 'hellfire and boiling water and rusty pipes' a bit more bearable *smiles* I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this.

A piece of shameless self-promotion: I have a few chapters of another EreMika AU in stock, and if, by a stroke of luck, I get half the fic done by mid-February, what with all the free time I have and the 4-something-thousand words I dish out per week, then I'll get to uploading, I guess. It's a silly high school AU with a supernatural twist, if anyone's wondering - don't look at me like that, I like writing silly and light-hearted stuff, even though it doesn't always turn out that way. Okay, that's enough advertising for one day *laughs*

Again, I'don't bite, so drop a review if you haven't yet *smiles*

Yours,

Chartis