Chapter Text
He remembered the last time he had gone to visit his father’s grave with such clarity that he could close his eyes and feel the weight of the air just as it had been on that long ago morning. The sun had not fully risen yet and though the sky was a bright colorless field the graveyard lay in shadow. Each and every blade of grass and clover leaf was weighed down with dew. Water had even collected on his father’s tomb stone, pooling at the bottom of each neatly cut letter until it overflowed and ran down the face of the stone. He remembered being struck by the thought that the stone itself was weeping.
Spilling the tears he himself could not shed, though he wanted to. He could feel the grief pressing on his lungs and on his heart. But it was tangled with a sense of purpose. The very reason he stood in that misty graveyard that morning. It was the day that he left to join the training corps. Still he felt a strange detachment in that moment, reading the name on the stone, reading the dates.
No one had allowed him to see his father's body. There had only been the rough pine coffin which had gone quickly into the ground. At the time he hadn’t even thought about it, he was a child, freshly orphaned. He was all distress and fear it hadn’t occurred to him that he didn’t know if anyone had washed the body or dressed it properly. It hadn’t occurred to him that the rest of the village didn’t come to their house and sit in the front room. They didn’t lay his father out and toast to his memory. No one covered the mirrors and no women wept in the kitchen.
Just a pine box already nailed shut. A hasty prayer said in the rain and the coffin lowered into the ground. As far as Erwin knew, his father’s remains might not even rest beneath the stone bearing his name. The coffin could be full of stones and he would never know.
He didn’t know when the coffin had been closed. Undoubtedly he had been kept away in some well meaning attempt to protect him. He had been so young after all. But it wasn’t as though he had never been to a wake. He had seen many elderly people buried. People dead from illness or accident, and even another boy his own age. Always he and his father would go and pay their respects, and Erwin would make his way to the front of the room and look down at the bodies in their smart clothes and freshly washed hair and wonder at the no longer aliveness of them.
In later years he came to surmise that the military police had done truly heinous work on his father. And that they had returned the already sealed coffin so that no one would see the extent of the result of their attentions. Or perhaps some well meaning member of the community had seen and decided that a boy so young should not have to see his own father in such condition.
Whatever the reason and whoever the perpetrator Erwin was still left with the mystery and the ache of knowing that he could never know if his father’s remains had been properly cared for.
It was one of the all consuming ideas that shuffled into his mind alongside his other major preoccupations. Yet another way he managed to betray his father, yet another of his many deficiencies.
An image that haunted him was that of his father being dumped unceremoniously into the coffin, blood and the marks of the military police’s torturers still crusted on his skin, his eyes half open to the darkness that descended when they laid the lid over him and began hammering the nails home.
This image could come upon him with no warning. In full daylight while he was occupied with vital work, robbing him of all productivity and will for a short span of time before he could shake it off and continue on with his day.
At night it was capable of keeping him awake until dawn. With nothing else to distract him he could dwell on that idea and recount all of his failings to himself. For years Erwin endured this alone, often reduced to silent tears.
But then there was Levi. Levi who knew pain though he never spoke the names of his demons. Just as he never asked the names of Erwin’s.