Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Liberio at dawn looked like a throat cut open. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the factories coughed up light in orange and black, each chimney a wound steaming against the pale sky.

The office they’d been brought into smelled of leather, coal dust, and the peculiar sourness of paper left too long in damp. A map of Paradis was spread across the table—ridiculous in its incompleteness, like trying to draw a face with half the bones missing.

The officer in charge tapped a gloved finger on the edge of it. “The Survey Corps commander. That’s your target.”

Reiner’s back was straight, his broad shoulders carrying the posture of someone who would obey orders even when the orders meant carving out his own ribs. Annie leaned against the wall with her arms folded, eyes hooded.

Levi sat in the chair nearest the door, legs crossed, one boot tapping once against the floor before going silent. He hadn’t asked for the chair. He didn’t need to. He had learned long ago that no one ever stopped him from taking the most dangerous position in the room.

The officer turned the page of the file with distaste. “Erwin Smith. Age thirty-seven. Commander of the Survey Corps. Brilliant tactician, ruthless operator. If Paradis has a spine, he is it.”

Reiner’s jaw tightened. “We’re already embedded. Why add another?”

The officer gave him a flat look. “Because the last two years have proven you’re not enough.”

Annie’s mouth twitched. Levi thought she might laugh. She didn’t.

The officer’s gaze shifted to Levi. “You’ll enter as one of theirs. You have the look. With your blood, you’ll pass. History of crime, makes you plausible. You’ll say the MPs drove you out. Say you’d rather kill titans than rot in a cell. They’ll believe it. The Survey Corps will take anything desperate enough to bleed for them.”

Levi didn’t respond.

“Once inside, you’ll observe. Report to us. Watch for Erwin’s strategies. Watch for any contact with the Founding Titan. If you get the chance to cut the commander down—” The officer hesitated, then pressed his lips thin. “Do it.”

Reiner shifted. “You’re trusting him with assassination?”

The officer ignored him. “Any questions?”

Levi leaned back. The chair creaked. “What if I don’t feel like it?”

The room went very still.

The officer’s mouth opened, but Reiner spoke first, a low warning growl: “Ackerman—”

Levi’s eyes cut to him. “Relax, Braun. I’ll do it. Just wanted to hear how long it’d take someone to threaten me.”

The officer exhaled, thin and sharp. “If you fail—”

“I don’t fail,” Levi said, and stood.

---

They walked back through the yard in silence. The soldiers drilling on the packed dirt paused to watch them: three Eldians marked and unmarked, walking with the weight of expectation on their shoulders.

Annie kept her pace deliberate, steady. “You’re enjoying this,” she said quietly to Levi, not looking at him.

“I enjoy watching idiots squirm,” Levi said.

“You’ll like the Corps, then,” she said.

Reiner scowled. “This is not a game. If he makes one wrong move—”

Levi stopped walking. Reiner almost walked past him before he caught it. Annie didn’t pause at all.

Levi turned his head slowly, gray eyes steady as the edge of a knife. “You think I’m going to ruin your nice little cover story?”

“I think you don’t care about the mission.”

Levi’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. A grimace dressed up as one. “You’re right. I don’t. But I care about surviving. And the fastest way to survive is to do this better than you ever could. Don’t worry about me, Braun. Worry about yourself.”

Annie glanced back once, her gaze unreadable.

Levi started walking again. His bootsteps were soundless, the way they always were.

---

That night, in the cramped barracks assigned to them, Levi lay on his back staring at the rafters. Reiner had already fallen asleep, heavy and noisy, the kind of sleep that came to men too tired of thinking. Annie sat on her bunk, methodically sharpening her blade, as if the scrape of steel against stone could wear down the air itself.

“You don’t plan on killing him,” she said finally.

Levi didn’t move. “Maybe I do.”

“You don’t talk like it.”

Levi turned his head. Her face was lit by the dim lantern, pale and sharp as glass. “What do I talk like?”

“Like someone who wants to see what he looks like up close.”

Levi closed his eyes. “Then maybe that’s what I’ll do.”

---

The dossier had a photograph, grainy and stiff, Erwin Smith in uniform. His hair was bright even in black and white. His eyes were pale and impossible to read.

Levi looked at it longer than he should have.

“Commander,” he murmured under his breath, and let the word taste bitter in his mouth.

Tomorrow, he’d be one of Erwin’s men.

Tomorrow, the infiltration began.

Chapter Text

The gate at Trost had been rebuilt too many times to remember its first shape. You could see it in the way the new stone refused to weather like the old, seams showing, a face with poorly matched grafts. Levi presented himself at dawn with a forged pass, a pack on his back, and the kind of expression that made men step aside before they explained why.

The Military Police officer at the checkpoint looked at the paper, looked at Levi, tried to square the handwriting with the eyes, and failed. “You’re here for the Survey,” he said, as if surprised anyone ever was.

“If I wanted to be paid for standing still,” Levi said, “I’d be dead already.”

The officer made a noise like sweeping ash. He stamped the pass. “Headquarters is through, third yard on the right. Try not to get yourself killed before they sign the form.”

The yard was a mess of activity that moved with purpose even when it looked like chaos—ropes coiled, horses shod, gear checked, men arguing about details you only argued about if you planned to survive them. Levi took the measure of it in one sweep: two squads had just returned; three were getting ready to leave; somewhere a quartermaster was going to make a speech about the sacred duty of returning form A-19 with all fields completed.

He walked into the main hall and found the desk with a bell and a small sign that read “RECRUITS / DESPERATE PEOPLE.” Before he could reach for the bell, a voice said, brightly, “New blood? Or new plague?”

Levi turned.

The person attached to the voice had hair tied back in a reckless knot, glasses perched precariously on a nose that had inspected a great many things at close range and decided to keep looking. Their coat was half-buttoned. Their smile did not trust itself.

“Hange Zoë,” they said, as if the introduction might be weapon, apology, and invitation all at once. “You’ve got the look of someone who can climb a wall just to complain about the view.”

“Levi,” he said. He didn’t offer a last name. “I’m here for the Survey.”

“Brilliant. We were just running low on people with acute survival instincts and questionable motives.” Hange pivoted without waiting to see if he followed. He did. “Paperwork, then a demonstration, then a generous amount of shouting from someone whose uniform fits too well. Don’t worry, none of it means anything until Erwin says so.”

“Erwin,” Levi repeated, mild as dust.

Hange glanced sideways over a shoulder. “Commander Erwin, if you’re being obedient. Erwin if you aren’t. You don’t look very obedient.”

They led him through a corridor of maps and chalkboards to a courtyard where a line had formed for what looked like an audition for the role of ‘person likely to die expensively.’ The first pair took off on the Vertical Maneuvering Gear, swung once, twice, lost the angle, and crashed into the straw bales with a noise like promises ending.

“Next,” Hange called cheerfully, and then, to Levi: “We do like to pretend we’re choosy.”

Levi stepped up when told. The gear they handed him had been maintained by someone who cared. The gas canister wasn’t full, which told him more about supply than it did about the quartermaster. He checked the release, felt the give in the trigger, adjusted the straps with movements small enough to look like habit rather than competence. Eyes were on him the way people watch for a lightning strike.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Hange said. The grin had an edge in it.

Levi didn’t answer. He crossed the yard and put his back to the wall like a man testing a knife. His first shot took a line into stone at the angle he wanted; his second caught the wooden spar overhead. He moved without flourish—no wide arcs, no show—just clean geometry, body turned into a proof. He took the pivot tight and let his momentum die exactly where he’d planned, boots on the parapet, breath steady, hands quiet. When he dropped, it was vertical, and the landing barely scuffed. The set of his mouth did not change.

Hange exhaled. “Well, you’re hired.”

Someone else—an officer with a tidy collar and the brittle confidence of a man who measured his power in centimeters of starch—sniffed. “We still require references.”

Levi looked at him. “MPs threw me out. I prefer killing titans to polishing chairs. I can keep gear clean and men alive.”

“That’s not a reference,” the man said stiffly.

“It’s better,” Levi said. “It’s a reason.”

Hange’s laugh cracked open the air. “We’ll start with that.” They tipped their head toward the far end of the yard. “You can meet him now, if you like. He makes his own coffee when he’s thinking, which is a terrible habit and a moral failing, but it means you’ll catch him alone. Try not to start a war in the hallway.”

Levi followed the line of their chin.

Erwin Smith leaned over a table set with a map weighted by ink bottles. The morning light came through a high window and made his hair look like a decision. He poured coffee into a tin cup with the attention of a man for whom even small rituals required exactitude. He didn’t look up when Levi stopped across from him. He didn’t need to; the room had already told him he wasn’t alone.

“Captain Zoë?” he asked without raising his gaze. “Please tell me you’ve found a way to make leather grow on trees.”

“I’m not Zoë,” Levi said.

Erwin’s eyes lifted.

There were men whose eyes catalogued and men whose eyes hunted and men whose eyes begged the world to be kinder than it was. Erwin’s did none of those things. They took in. He looked at Levi the way you look at a weather front: in terms of pressure, distance, and what it was going to do to your day.

“Then you must be the reason they were laughing in the yard,” Erwin said, voice even. “Levi, is it?”

“For now.”

A corner of Erwin’s mouth moved. “You don’t like last names?”

“I don’t like pretending they matter.”

“You’re not wrong.” Erwin gestured at the other cup. “Coffee? It’s terrible, but it’s honest.”

Levi didn’t touch it. “I came to kill giants, not my taste buds.”

“An idealist,” Erwin said, as if that label were not a kind he collected and kept alive in jars. “Where did you learn to move like that?”

“The ground taught me,” Levi said.

Erwin hummed. “We have a lot of students of the ground. Few graduates.” He tilted his head toward the map; it looked like a city mid-deconstruction. “What did the MPs accuse you of?”

“Not clapping.”

The smallest laugh, almost private. “And why the Survey?”

“Because you spend people honestly,” Levi said, and watched the words hit. “If I’m going to be currency, I want to know the math.”

For a moment, something unguarded passed over Erwin’s face—not surprise, not pleasure. Recognition. Then it was gone. He set his cup down with the sound of decisions putting themselves away. “Report to Zoë for gear inspection at noon. I’ll see you at evening review.”

Levi did not salute. He inclined his head just enough to acknowledge rank without endorsing it. “Commander.”

“Levi,” Erwin returned, and the word turned into a placeholder for a system he intended to understand.

Levi left first. He didn’t look back. He felt the weight of Erwin’s attention between his shoulder blades like a hand he would not yet allow.

Hange intercepted him two corners later, almost vibrating. “So?”

“He asked about leather.”

Hange groaned. “We are not made of budget.” Then they peered. “What did you think?”

Levi adjusted the strap on his pack. “He doesn’t waste breath. Or lies.”

Hange’s smile sharpened, satisfied. “Then you’ll get along. Or you’ll kill each other. Either way, I’d better be there.”

Integration was a series of small humiliations disguised as tests. The gear he’d used in the yard was swapped for one with quirks: a sticky trigger, a hose that wanted to kink when pressured, a belt clasp that had been mended with stubbornness rather than skill. He fixed all of it in half an hour with a file, three curses, and a length of wire. When he brought the gear back to the rack, Hange whistled low.

“I love a man who regards entropy as a personal offense.”

“Clean gear saves lives,” Levi said.

“Clean rooms too?” Hange’s tone was a test.

“Dirty rooms are a choice.”

“We are going to be very good friends,” Hange announced, delighted. “Or mortal enemies. Do you like tea? No, don’t answer, you like tea.”

Levi endured the tour: barracks, mess, infirmary, a stable that smelled of patience and damp hay. Names accreted: Miche, Nanaba, a kid with fiercely hopeful eyes named Armin, another with a grin too brave for his bones named Eren. Petra smiled like she’d learned how to practice kindness without letting it be a permission. Oluo showed off and nearly ate a wall. Eld made a note of Levi’s silence like it mattered.

Reiner and Annie were not here yet—they had different paths, different covers. For a moment, Levi missed the simplicity of their grudges. It passed.

At evening review, the Corps gathered in a hall that had once been a factory floor. Erwin stood at the front with the patience of a man who knew a room would quiet if you let it. When he spoke, he didn’t raise his voice. Rooms leaned for him.

“We have three expeditions planned over the next two weeks,” he said. “The first will be small. The second will be smaller. The third will be the one we care about.”

Hange’s mouth twitched. Miche scratched his jaw and nodded. The murmur through the ranks was the sound of people who had decided to be alive tomorrow and were letting themselves pretend they would.

Erwin’s gaze passed over faces and landed on Levi for a fraction too long. Not a challenge. More like: there you are.

After, as the hall broke into knots of talk, Erwin crossed to him with the same lack of hurry he applied to everything else. “You’ll be attached to Hange’s unit,” he said, “for now.”

“For now,” Levi agreed.

“The MPs say you’re violent,” Erwin continued conversationally, as if mentioning the weather.

“They’re not wrong.”

Erwin met that head-on. “Direct it.”

“I do.”

“Good.” He paused, the space of one breath. “I know you’re not here to follow. Not at first.”

Levi didn’t blink. “Is that a problem?”

Erwin’s mouth shifted—the ghost of a smile, or its adversary. “It’s a reality. I don’t waste realities.”

It would have been easy, too easy, to call it hubris. It wasn’t. It was a man naming a tool and promising to use it for what it was shaped like.

Hange called for Levi, and Erwin let him go with a nod. Not dismissal—release.

The first night in the barracks, Levi lay awake and listened to men breathing. He catalogued the coughs, the teeth grinding, the flutters of nightmare. He had learned to sleep in rooms like this, but not easily. He rolled to his side and stared at the sliver of moon the window allowed.

Footsteps in the corridor. Not patrol. A pace too regular to be fatigue. He recognized it before he knew it: Erwin’s.

Levi slid out of bed without a noise. The corridor was dim. Erwin walked past without looking, turned into the small office adjacent to the map room. Levi followed until the doorway and stopped where the light drew a hard line across the floor.

Erwin set a ledger down and stood with his back to Levi, looking at a wall that had once been painted an optimistic green. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, like the room had told him.

“Don’t like people,” Levi said.

“You joined the wrong outfit.”

Levi leaned a shoulder into the doorframe. “You too.”

Erwin turned. In the near-dark, his face was all structure, edges admitting no softness unless you knew where to look. For a long moment they watched each other like men testing the worth of a bridge without stepping on it.

“You’re not going to salute me, are you,” Erwin said mildly.

“Not if you make me regret it.”

Erwin’s eyes warmed by half a degree. “Fair enough.”

He moved closer, not enough to crowd, enough to put the conversation into a smaller room. Up close, Levi could see the line the day had left at Erwin’s mouth, could smell coffee and paper and the metal of ink. He felt the pull to file away a hundred unnecessary details—pulse at the throat, slight tension in the left shoulder, the way the right hand never quite relaxed—and kept them, because information was the only indulgence he allowed himself.

“You don’t trust me,” Levi said.

“I don’t trust anyone until I know what they’re for.”

“And what am I for?”

Erwin’s gaze dipped to Levi’s mouth and back up, quickly enough to be deniable. “We’ll find out.”

Levi’s mouth twitched. “You always this optimistic?”

“No.” The honesty landed between them like a stone that had been carried for too long. “Usually I’m practical.”

“And now?”

“Now I am tired,” Erwin said, and the fatigue wrapped the sentence without entering his eyes. “And I am making a choice to put you somewhere you can do less damage if you decide to do it.”

Levi stepped in one inch. It wasn’t threatening. It wasn’t friendly. It was the way two blades touch to see if they ring. “Maybe I’m here to help.”

“Maybe.” Erwin’s mouth did that not-smile again. “Would you tell me if you weren’t?”

“No.”

“Good night, Levi.”

“Commander.”

Levi left first. He did not look back.

In his bunk, he stared at the darkness and let the shape of Erwin stand in his head like a piece of furniture he kept walking into. He imagined a hand at his throat and checked automatically for the angle he’d break it. He imagined the same hand at his jaw and told himself not to.

Across the room, someone snored. The moon did not change its mind.

Levi slept when the clock said he was a fool not to.

In the morning, he woke early to scrub the communal table. It was easier to kill things if you’d made a place for them to die cleanly. When Hange stumbled in and nearly slipped in their own happiness, they saw the gleam and gasped.

“You are a gift.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Levi said.

Hange did anyway.

By noon, word had spread: the new one moved like necessary violence and had a mouth that filed edges to fit its purposes. By dusk, the gossip had done what gossip always did—decided it knew him. It didn’t.

He went to the yard to be alone and found Erwin there, sleeves rolled, reading a list someone had written like a confession. The light was blue. The air tasted of iron.

“You’re early,” Erwin said without looking up.

“For what?”

“For whatever comes next.”

Levi considered the line. He couldn’t argue with it without admitting too much. “You going to keep me close?”

“Yes.”

“So you can watch me.”

“So I can use you,” Erwin said, and finally looked up. “If you’re for anything.”

Levi had meant to dislike him. He had meant to measure him, file him, and turn in a report made of angles.

Instead, he stood under the blue light and thought: astolat would make a meal of this. He didn’t know who that was. It didn’t matter.

“Try me,” Levi said.

Erwin nodded once, and the meeting ended on a word that wasn’t a promise so much as an opening where one could be put if anyone dared.

Levi went inside and wrote nothing down for Marley to read. He would send a message anyway.

There were some truths you only delivered after you figured out who they would hurt the most.

Chapter Text

The first week taught Levi the rhythms of the building. Dawn: kettles, boots, the soft swearing of men who’d misplaced one glove. Midday: the rise and fall of Hange’s voice, a whole weather system. Dusk: the low thrum of briefing, the room holding its breath while Erwin arranged sentences like scaffolding. Night: the hours when the floorboards remembered who’d walked them.

He learned where the maps were kept and what dust settled on which shelf. He learned whose handwriting tightened when they were lying to themselves (Miche), who wrote as if apologizing to the page (Armin), and who only ever signed their name with pressure (Erwin). He fixed a squeaking hinge on the south stair because the sound offended him, and because you listened better when the building shut up.

Hange tried to catch him in conversation the way people tried to catch birds: with interest and too much motion. They took him out to the back lot where a stripped-down gear rig was lashed to a practice frame and announced they’d “modified the exhaust valve to reclaim micro-losses.”

Levi picked up the rig, weighed it twice, and pointed at the relief port. “You’ll choke it under surge.”

Hange’s delight cracked like ice. “Excellent! Fix it.”

He did, and when he was done, Hange leaned against the frame, peering. “Erwin says you don’t waste words,” they said lightly. “He approves.”

“Of the words or the wasting?”

“Of not lying to the air just to hear himself talk,” Hange said, and shoved their hair off their forehead. “You’re making people nervous.”

“Good.”

“Not always good.” They tipped their head. “Reiner—Braun—is requesting transfer into your training slot. He says you ‘push the cadence.’”

Levi’s mouth tugged. “He doesn’t like someone else counting.”

“You know him?”

“Barely.” Levi tightened a bolt. “He’s the sort of man who wants credit for standing still.”

“And Annie?”

Levi paused. “She’s the sort who knows when to get out of the street when the carts start fighting.”

Hange made a pleased little noise. “You watch people the way I watch machines.”

“Machines don’t lie,” Levi said.

“They do when you’ve convinced yourself they can’t.” Hange’s smile carried its own edge. “Erwin says you should take a squad on the next short-range sweep.”

“Erwin says a lot of things.”

“He does,” Hange agreed cheerfully. “People mistake the volume for consensus. It’s actually restraint.”

Levi set the gear down. “Fine.”

“Fine you’ll lead, or fine you’ll behave badly in front of the children?”

“Yes,” Levi said.

The sweep was nothing, and it was everything—two hours beyond the gate, a tidy arc along the treeline, a chance to calibrate who leaned into the gear and who let the gear drag them. Petra kept formation like she’d built the idea of a line and wanted credit; Oluo’s mouth wrote checks his lines couldn’t cash; Eld had the energy of a man listing what to do if he died and what to do if he didn’t. Gunther said very little and put his body where it needed to be. They were good. Not perfect. Perfect gets people killed.

A small titan stumbled out of the trees and looked surprised by its own hunger. Levi took it alone, because practice is practice. Petra swore softly and tracked him like a guardian angel with a clipboard. When he dropped the carcass against the grass and wiped his blade on a scrap of canvas he kept for the purpose, the squad watched him with a look that wasn’t worship and wasn’t fear. It was relief.

“You move like you planned the trees,” Petra said, breath even.

“I didn’t,” Levi said.

“Maybe don’t tell them that,” Eld murmured.

Back in the yard, Reiner cornered him with the plausible affability of a man who had decided to be teammates and hoped to make it true by narration. “Hearing you flew like a demon,” he said, and clapped Levi’s shoulder with a pressure calibrated to register on the chart.

Levi peeled the hand off. “You hearing a lot, Braun?”

Reiner laughed like the way you laugh at a dog that might bite you and you want to pretend you’re not worried.

Annie found him later under the eave where the rain leaked in a narrow veil. She had her hands in her pockets and her face turned a degree away, as if speaking to someone else walking a pace beside him.

“You’re too clean,” she said.

Levi looked at his hands. They were not clean. “And you’re too obvious.”

She almost smiled. “Reiner thinks the problem is you.”

“Reiner thinks a lot of things.” Levi narrowed his eyes. “You’ll keep your distance. You’ll make me look like someone who doesn’t know you.”

“I can do that,” Annie said. “I’m good at it.”

“You’re good at many things that won’t save you,” Levi said.

She looked at him properly then, and for a moment two separate missions remembered they were cousins. “You as well,” she said, and left.

Erwin called him into the map room without preamble. Hange was there, and Miche, and a smell of chalk and tin and rain. On the table: grid coordinates, annotations with arrows sharp enough to draw blood.

“Sit,” Erwin said. Levi didn’t. It didn’t change anything; the word had been courtesy.

“We’ve had four sightings along the south line,” Miche said. He tapped the map. His fingers were scarred and neat. “Different heights, same gait. Not wanderers. Something’s…lifting them.”

“Luring,” Erwin corrected.

Hange dropped into a chair with a sprawl that could have been exhaustion or strategy. “We’re being stupid in a way that feels new.”

Levi’s gaze flicked between their faces. “You’re telling me there’s a plan and no plan.”

Erwin’s mouth warmed a fraction. “We’ve decided to go and to be prepared for the part where we don’t know why.”

Levi stepped closer to the map, the way a man steps to a door to see if it’s locked. “Where do you want me?”

“Left unit,” Erwin said. “Close support. I want your measure on a man.”

“Which man.”

Erwin looked at him and did not pretend it was accidental. “Braun.”

Levi kept his face clean. Hange’s foot nudged the leg of the table, a tiny impatient rhythm. Miche watched Levi the way you smell the air before a storm.

“Fine,” Levi said. “I’ll count him.”

“Count him,” Erwin said, “but don’t try to decide his moral shape during a fight. I need you to be a blade, Levi. We can be mirrors later.”

“You think that’s what I am.”

“I think that’s what you’re for,” Erwin said, and something in his voice made the room tilt. Not admiration. Recognition—the kind you give a weight before you lift it.

Levi didn’t look away. “I’m not your weapon.”

“Not yet,” Erwin said, steady. “But you’re not theirs either.”

Silence. Hange’s breathing, the tick of rain against glass. Levi remembered the way cuffs felt, even when they weren’t there.

“Dismissed,” Erwin said, and it wasn’t.

Levi turned to go. Erwin said, almost conversational, “And Levi—clean the south stair hinge again. It squeaked at dawn.”

Levi didn’t smile. “I already did.”

“I know,” Erwin said.

The march out felt like every march: the jangle of bits, the murmurs that get smaller when the trees get taller. Levi took rear-left as ordered. Reiner held the inner line with the stiffness of a man who’d learned discipline from a poster. Annie, slotted in a different column, didn’t look at either of them.

The first titan lurched from behind a sycamore with its arms out like a child at a reunion. Levi’s anchors hit bark and bone, his movement clean enough to be invisible until it ended. Reiner responded a beat late and a beat heavy, biting too deep, needing two corrections and a third that cost him gas.

“Cadence,” Levi said, flat over the line.

“Work on your own,” Reiner snapped.

“Working on you is my job,” Levi said.

“Since when—”

“Since the man with the maps said so.”

Something like embarrassment or rage warped Reiner’s next swing. He recovered. Annie’s unit took the second titan as if they’d practiced that exact angle—a crisp, two-stroke kill. Levi caught her eye for a fraction. She looked past him like he were a column of air.

At the third sighting, things shifted. The titan didn’t come at them; it held back as if listening for instruction. The forest murmured uneasily. Hange shouted something about wind direction and pheromones that nobody could use right now. Miche’s voice cut through with a vector correction. Levi moved. Reiner hesitated, then committed, and the hesitation made it wrong. He overextended; his right anchor bit into rot and tore free. For one nauseous second he dangled like a broken promise.

Levi was already there. Not dramatic. Not heroic. Just geometry again. He redirected a line, cut a tendon, made space where there hadn’t been any. Reiner slammed into a trunk and swore, and the word was gratitude packaged as anger.

“Cadence,” Levi said again, and didn’t look at him.

They returned with three kills and one bad sprain and a note in Erwin’s ledger that said something like adjust the left unit’s expectation of the man with the right shoulder in a script so neat it looked gentle. The mess cheered the kills because men needed to eat something with their soup.

Levi ate alone. He didn’t mind. Men tried to orbit him and gave up, or tried harder and learned they were bad at wanting things that didn’t want them back.

Erwin sat across from him without asking. It wasn’t a power play. He had a tray and nowhere else to put it that didn’t involve conversation he didn’t have time to manage.

“Hange says your fixes saved six minutes on the line,” Erwin said, as if reading from the weather report.

“Fixing obvious mistakes is not worth praise,” Levi said.

“It is when the obvious keeps killing people,” Erwin said mildly. “You counted Braun.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Levi turned his spoon once in the soup. “He wants to be something he can’t be.”

“What does that make him?”

“Dangerous,” Levi said. “And loyal. To a version of the story where he isn’t the problem.”

Erwin’s mouth acknowledged the shape of the answer. “And Leonhart?”

“She pretends to be the version of herself that wouldn’t survive if we asked her to.”

Erwin considered that, then changed directions with violence only in the idea. “What about you.”

“What about me,” Levi repeated.

“What story are you loyal to?”

Levi met his eyes with the clean, unkind steadiness he reserved for mirrors. “The one where I can go to ground faster than the people chasing me.”

Erwin didn’t look away. He never did. “And what if the ground is higher than you thought?”

Levi set the spoon down. “Then I cut handholds.”

Erwin nodded once, pushed his tray back, and left his cup half full. Levi took it and drank it because economy is ethics when nothing else is. The coffee was terrible and honest.

At night, letters went out under cover of inventory. The Corps wrote home; the Corps wrote to itself. Levi wrote to no one. He had a dead drop that would get the message where it needed to go, if he needed. He did not need—yet. Watching was a message.

Reiner sent something. Annie didn’t. Levi saw the curve of her shoulder under the lamplight and thought of knives in their sheaths.

He cleaned the south stair again because it squeaked at the wrong times. When he finished, Erwin’s shadow was in the hall, thrown long by a lamp.

“You’re very domestic,” Erwin said.

“Clean hinge,” Levi said. “Quick death.”

Erwin’s mouth moved, that flicker again. “I’ll remember that the next time I have to choose between a speech and a door.”

“Choose the door.”

Erwin stepped closer, not enough to threaten, enough to conduct. “I want to ask you something,” he said, and the pitch of it pulled a line tight between them.

Levi raised a brow.

“Do you think you’re more dangerous to us when you’re lying,” Erwin asked softly, “or when you’re telling the truth?”

The question landed like a hand closing on the back of Levi’s neck. Not painful. Not gentle.

He waited three breaths. The corridor waited with him. “Danger is situational.”

“Not always.” Erwin’s gaze dipped, catalogued, returned. “Sometimes it’s a person.”

“And sometimes it’s the person who thinks he can put a leash on it,” Levi said, just as soft.

Erwin looked very briefly like a man who’d been reminded he had a pulse. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”

They stood there with the clean hinge and the turned-down lamp and the good clothes and the bad history and didn’t move closer because moving closer is the most conspicuous decision two men like them could make.

“You want me where, next time,” Levi said, at last.

“At my shoulder,” Erwin said. “So I can see what you see before you decide who you are.”

Levi’s mouth twitched. “You don’t get to decide that.”

“I know.” Erwin stepped back one inch and made a concession look like command. “I do get to ask.”

Levi left him with the lamp and the questions and went back to the room where men muttered in their sleep. He lay on his side and let the weight of his own life settle on him like a thin blanket—insufficient, familiar. He thought of Annie’s hands in her pockets, of Reiner’s rage wearing gratitude as a mask, of Hange’s joy burning like a fuse, of Erwin’s sentences clicking into place.

When he slept, he dreamed of a hinge that did not squeak and a door that opened onto air.

In the morning, the building remembered another day, and Levi remembered who he had to be to get through it.

He sharpened his blade and didn’t send a letter.

Chapter Text

It began with a hinge that didn’t squeak.

Evening left the windows black, lampglass throwing small circles of light like islands on a map drawn by a cautious hand. The hall outside the map room was empty; patrol had passed; Hange was still shouting cheerfully at a valve in the yard. Levi stood at the corner long enough to be certain there were only two heartbeats in the building section that mattered.

Erwin’s door opened without complaint. Of course it did—Levi had oiled it the night before, telling himself it was for speed and not for this.

Erwin didn’t look surprised. He stood behind the desk with his sleeves rolled and the ledger open, as if the habit might protect him. The lamp made the bones of his face more declarative than usual. He looked up like a man acknowledging weather.

“Levi.”

“Commander.”

“Close it,” Erwin said, and Levi did. He remained with his back to the door, hands loose at his sides, as if that might fool impulse into thinking it had not been invited.

Erwin watched him with that ordinary patience that made people label it calm. Levi had learned the difference. Calm is an absence; patience is a stance.

“You weren’t followed,” Erwin said, not a question.

“No.”

“Good.” Erwin’s gaze flicked to the ledger and back, as if reminding himself that numbers were a language he still spoke. “I owe you a question.”

Levi’s mouth tilted. “Only one?”

“For tonight.” Erwin rested his hands on the desk—one palm on ink, one on wood. “Are you here to kill me?”

Levi did not smile. It would have been vulgar. “If I were, you’d be dead.”

Erwin inclined his head a fraction. “That is both reassuring and not.”

“Get used to it.”

They let the lamp hum. In the quiet, Levi could hear the building think: roof settling, glass cooling, distant pipes arguing in their throats. He had grown used to this vocabulary; there were nights it spoke kinder than people.

“Then I’ll ask the second,” Erwin said. “Are you here to betray me?”

The word should have landed hard. It didn’t. It found a place already cleared and sat down.

Levi crossed the room. Two steps, then one more. He stopped on the other side of the desk; they were almost the same height like this, Erwin on the far side of a piece of furniture chosen for distance. “Define betray.”

Erwin’s mouth almost smiled. “To choose a truth that kills more of us than it saves. To choose a story that lets you keep yourself and loses everyone else.”

“Efficient,” Levi said. “Wrong, sometimes.”

“Almost always,” Erwin said, and gave back nothing of himself but the angle of his attention. “Your turn.”

Levi lowered his chin, eyes steady. “Why did you let me this close.”

“Because you’re dangerous,” Erwin said. “And danger is easier to count when it shares your light.”

“Or because you wanted to see how I’d look,” Levi said.

Erwin’s eyes dipped to Levi’s mouth and returned, so brief it could have been a blink. “That as well.”

Levi leaned his knuckles into the desk. “I could ruin you.”

“You could,” Erwin agreed, quiet. “But you won’t.”

“Confidence.”

“Arithmetic,” Erwin said. “You have three choices: deliver me to the story that owns you; refuse the story and run; or stand where you are and become the dangerous fact on which a better story turns. One and two end with bodies I can name. Three ends with bodies I can also name, but fewer, and you living with yourself like a man who has stopped pretending he doesn’t have a self.”

Levi let that pass through him. It hurt in the way massage hurts—clean pain, the kind that proves there’s muscle left.

“Do you think you know me.” It wasn’t a question. It was inventory.

“I think you know yourself and hate it,” Erwin said. “And I think you prefer clean rooms because you like the floor to be visible when the blood hits it.”

Levi’s fingers flexed once on the wood. “You talk like you’ve practiced this speech on ghosts.”

“I have,” Erwin said.

“Did they listen.”

“Sometimes.”

“And me?”

Erwin took his hands from the desk. He came around it slowly, as if approaching a nervous horse or an honest god. He stopped a half arm’s length away: close enough to feel, not close enough to mistake.

“You’re listening,” he said. “You haven’t left.”

Levi looked at the thin white mark on Erwin’s wrist—a scar from a rope, old, well-kept. He looked up. “Ask me something that costs.”

Erwin did not rush. He did not go easy either. “Who are you reporting to.”

“Men who think maps are laws.”

“Specific men.”

Levi let the names come without ceremony. “Magath. Calvi’s shadow. A clerk who writes like he’s afraid of verbs.”

Erwin nodded as if Levi had said: rain. “And what have you given them.”

Levi’s throat worked. He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth until the desire to lie for elegance passed. “Cadence. Names you already know. The shape of your rooms. How you don’t lie unless it serves the truth longer.”

Erwin’s breath changed very slightly. “And me.”

Levi said nothing. He let the silence fill in its own answer, then said the thing that mattered instead. “I haven’t given them you. Not the you that matters.”

“What does that mean.”

“It means I’m no longer sure the story I belong to deserves your body,” Levi said, flat. “It means I know what you cost, and I don’t want to spend you badly.”

He expected anger. He would have respected it. Erwin’s mouth changed—the ghost of relief, or its twin. “Good,” Erwin said. “We can work with that.”

Levi huffed something that might have been a laugh if you squinted at it. “You think everything is a lever.”

“Not everything,” Erwin said softly. “But most things are fulcrums in search of a purpose.”

Levi took the last half step because there are distances that, if you do not cross them when the line is taut, become borders. Up close, Erwin was warm and tired and very alive. His eyes did not soften; they clarified.

“This is a bad idea,” Levi said.

“Yes,” Erwin said. “But not the worst one.”

“Tell me the worst.”

“Lying about it later,” Erwin said. “Pretending the wanting wasn’t part of the math.”

Levi put his hand at Erwin’s jaw. Not tender. Not cruel. A placement, the way you touch an instrument before you play it to see if it’s in tune. Erwin didn’t flinch. He didn’t lean in. He let Levi measure and be measured.

“Say it,” Levi said, because some ladders ask for a rung.

“I want you,” Erwin said, low and clean, “in this room and on the wall and in the line where danger lives, because wanting isn’t a leash unless we pretend it is. I want you where I can see you break and not, and where you can see me do the same.”

Levi’s mouth twitched once. “Astolat would applaud.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Erwin said.

“Good,” Levi said, and kissed him.

It wasn’t a soft thing. Soft was a luxury they did not afford even to their beds. It was a cut with the edge turned in: careful enough not to bleed, deep enough to mark. Erwin’s hand came up to Levi’s wrist, not to pull away, not to drag closer—just there, a weight, a promise not to disguise the touch as anything other than what it was.

Levi opened his mouth enough to make the point and then closed it again, refusing to make fiction of need. Erwin met him with the precision of a man who had always hated waste. They didn’t move otherwise; they didn’t press; they didn’t let the desk become a symbol. They kissed like men who had spent a decade telling truth to maps and finally decided to tell one to a mouth.

When they broke, it was tidy. Erwin’s breath ghosted Levi’s lips. He didn’t chase it. He didn’t speak first.

Levi stepped back a fraction. His body had learned to catalog after momentary defeat. He filed: heat at the mouth, coffee at the tongue, the click of a distant pipe that would demand attention in the morning. He let his hand fall.

“You’ll use me,” he said.

“Yes,” Erwin said.

“I’ll use you.”

“Yes,” Erwin said again, and did not dress it as romance.

Levi nodded once. “Good.”

They stood for another breath. In another story, someone would knock; Hange would intrude with a valve; the lamp would gutter theatrically. The building kept its counsel. The hinge did not squeak.

“Terms,” Erwin said, because he was who he was. “You will not feed me to the story you fled, not even to save yourself. I will not spend you as currency to buy beautiful deaths. If one of us fails, the other ends it cleanly.”

Levi’s mouth curved, a sharp thing approving another sharp thing. “Say it plain.”

“If you betray this,” Erwin said, voice even, “I’ll put the cuffs on myself and hand you the key.”

“If you betray this,” Levi returned, calm, “I’ll walk you to your rope and cut you down before you break.”

Erwin closed his eyes once; when he opened them, the fatigue had sharpened into something like peace. “Done.”

Levi looked at the ledger on the desk. He turned it and wrote two words at the bottom of the page in a hand that never shook.

No waste.

Erwin’s gaze flicked to the line and back. “We’ll break it sometimes.”

“Then we clean it,” Levi said.

The corner of Erwin’s mouth turned, the smallest private concession. “Where will you be tomorrow.”

“Where you put me.”

“Left of me,” Erwin said. “Close enough to name what you see.”

Levi nodded. He turned for the door.

“Levi.”

He paused.

Erwin didn’t soften the name. “You asked me to ask you something that costs,” he said. “Here it is. When it breaks—and it will, because everything does—do not let it turn you into a man who prefers the floor dirty.”

Levi’s hand touched the knob. “I won’t.”

“Good night,” Erwin said.

“Commander.”

Levi opened the door and closed it behind him. The hall felt colder, which was simply the truth reminding him it still existed. He walked the length of the building and stood at the south stair. The hinge didn’t speak. He touched it anyway, the way men touch the door of a house they never admit they live in.

In his bunk, the room breathed. Reiner muttered a name that didn’t belong to this place. Annie slept like someone who had made peace with waking. Hange, somewhere outside, coaxed a valve into obedience and crowed softly as if the metal had told a joke.

Levi lay on his back and held still until stillness learned his weight. He tasted coffee and a mouth that had said want without asking permission. He thought of cuffs and keys and the honest arithmetic of a ledger that could admit no waste and still look him in the eye later.

He slept like a man who had stepped onto a bridge he could not name and decided to keep walking.

At dawn, the hinge still held. The building remembered them kindly. The world did not, but that was never its job.

Levi was left of Erwin by first light. Close enough to name what he saw. Close enough to cost.

Chapter Text

It began with Annie’s scream.
Not hers—never hers. The scream of the titan she wore, caught in the noose of Erwin’s traps. Horses panicked, men swore, the sky itself seemed to split around the sound.

Reiner broke first. He always would. His cover peeled away in a heartbeat, muscle swelling, skin tearing, the Armored Titan where a man had been. He crashed through the outer line of scouts, and the shock in their eyes was the betrayal he’d feared and manufactured all at once.

Levi felt Marley’s order in his pocket like a stone: When it breaks, finish Smith.

He didn’t. He cut down a titan instead, fluid geometry, the movement that had earned him a place here. He killed because killing was easier than choosing.

But Erwin’s gaze found him through the chaos, sharp, asking a question Levi had no words for: Whose side are you on?

Later, after the dust, after Annie’s capture, after Reiner’s wild, wounded flight, they held Levi in the barracks under suspicion. Hange argued for him; Miche reserved judgment. Erwin said nothing at all, which was worse.

Levi sat on the cot with his hands cuffed—not the first time, not the last. His wrists had learned the shape of iron. He watched Erwin across the room as the others left, the way you watch the one man whose answer still matters.

“Tell me,” Erwin said. Not accusation, not mercy. A request, bare as the scar at his jaw.

Levi didn’t lie. “I was theirs. I was sent to kill you.”

The air thinned. Erwin didn’t move. “And?”

Levi looked down at his hands. The cuffs rattled like cheap punctuation. “And I didn’t.”

Silence. Then: “Why.”

Levi lifted his head. “Because I wanted to see what you looked like alive.”

It was pathetic, and true. He hated himself for both.

Erwin came closer, until the shadow of his shoulders drowned the lamplight. “Do you want me to forgive you?”

“No.” Levi’s mouth twisted. “You’re not good at that.”

“Do you want me to use you?”

Levi almost laughed. “You already did.”

The quiet stretched until it snapped. Erwin bent, pressed his hand to Levi’s jaw, and kissed him once—hard, unadorned, like a man putting a seal on a confession. When he pulled back, his mouth was grim. “If you stay, they’ll hang you. If you run, Marley will gut you. If you fight with us, you’ll die faster than either. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Levi said, and let the cuffs cut deeper.

The end came a week later, at dawn. A titan raid—a deliberate, clumsy distraction from Marley’s stragglers. The Corps fought with exhaustion in their teeth. Erwin rode like a man already counted by death.

Levi was at his side, as promised.

He moved fast, too fast, slicing through tendon and muscle, clearing a path that wasn’t quite enough. A smaller titan lunged—laughable, beneath his notice—and he pivoted cleanly to kill it.

But his gear caught. A belt buckle, bent from too many fixes, snagged on stone. The wire twisted. His angle collapsed. His blade missed.

The titan’s hand closed around him like a parody of intimacy. He cut, once, twice, but the angle was wrong. The teeth closed.

No heroic last strike, no elegant defiance. Just the wet sound of being broken in half. A death as pathetic as slipping on soap.

From the wall, Erwin watched it—watched the one man he’d let inside torn down by chance, by shoddy metal, by the same graceless mechanics that killed all men eventually.

The scouts screamed his name. Erwin didn’t. He held still. He made himself memorize the sound.

After, in the silence of the map room, Erwin wrote it in his ledger.
Levi Ackerman: useful. Dangerous. Loyal in the end to nothing but proximity. Dead by error. No waste.

He sat with the words until the ink dried. Then he crossed them out, once, with a line neat as a scar.

Because some things couldn’t be catalogued.

Because pathetic or not, Levi’s death was the arithmetic Erwin had chosen, and now had to spend.