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With a title like Humanity’s Strongest Soldier, it turns out that women have expectations of him.
“Oh,” murmurs a lover in the cooling aftermath one day. “That was unexpected.”
At the look on his face, she rushes to reassure him, “Not in a bad way! I liked it….really liked how your mouth and fingers were so....clever. I’ve never had anyone so attentive.”
She blushes, playing a maiden once more, and then confesses, “It’s just that....I thought you’d be rougher.”
She’s not the only one. Steadily, he begins to notice that those he takes to bed share similar presumptions. With every passing year in the Survey Corps, the consequences of living life on a tightrope accumulate on his body. To his initial surprise, it doesn’t repulse his partners. Women trace over his scars, bite down on their lips with something akin to anticipation, and lie back expecting to be ravaged as if he were some beast providing illicit pleasure that other men cannot.
Levi doesn’t do it that way.
He’s never liked accommodating people’s expectations, and that doesn’t change when it comes to sex.
He takes his pleasure slowly, draws it out from their bodies, whether they be underneath or on top, until their coupled thighs are anointed and greased with the fluids of lust. His lovers sink to their knees and look up coyly underneath their lashes, believing that he will force their heads down to drink from him. He lays them down instead, lowers his breath to the secret pink betwixt soft quivering loins, and laps with tongue until they sob for release.
There are many who approach him for a repeat.
He rarely says yes. Having a bedmate more than once breeds attachment, a luxury no one in the Survey Corps can afford.
And so when Mikasa comes to him, no longer bearing the grudge she’d held so fiercely at fifteen but often still a maddening puzzle of a girl, Levi does not expect it to go any differently at the outset.
He’s intrigued by her offer, but not convinced. “Why proposition me, Ackerman?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she says, manifesting one of her rare upsurges of humor. “Did I misinterpret what I felt beneath me when I landed you on your ass yesterday?”
“Heat of the moment,” he answers, remembering how he’d rolled her off quickly but apparently not quickly enough. The girl still looks determined, but it’s all too clear that she’s never swam in such waters before. The thought makes his groin tighten.
“Maybe in a few years,” he tells her. Mikasa is no child; her childhood ended early, abruptly, and violently at the hands of human avarice of the worst kind. That doesn’t change how he views her as too young at not yet nineteen. He doesn’t think that she harbors romantic fantasies like some youths do, at least not towards him, but he’s always carefully picked women who have a clearer idea of what they’re getting into. “Try Kirschstein. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to oblige you. Perhaps, it’ll even stop his habit of crash landing on the maneuver course whenever you swing by.”
They’re standing alone in a corridor, but from around the corner comes the familiar sound of booted heels clipping on the stone floor. Mikasa doesn’t do skittish, but she says, very hastily and quietly, “I would rather….not be worshipped.”
Huh, he thinks. So that’s a no to fantasies of the romantic sort but her implication recalls to mind what others have sought from him before her. He shakes his head. The inherent but underlying force and intensity of his hands is reserved for the maneuvering of blades, for cutting into flesh to deal out death; he prefers it that way.
“Alright, if you’re not interested.” Mikasa tucks her chin and lower lip under the upward pull of her scarf and turns away.
The thing is, he’s very interested.
He’s just not sure if he trusts himself to treat her like the others.
Levi has toiled hard at cultivating neutral, stable ground between them so that they can coordinate and not kill each other over mutual goals: protecting Eren, slaying Titans….
It’s a short list, but their lives don’t leave much room for free time and other pursuits. With the continuous pruning of their particular military branch after every expedition, Mikasa, with her natural talent, moves up the ranks rather swiftly. What that translates to in Levi’s world is this: she moves closer to learning from and working with him, a constant in his orbit now.
He commits himself to transferring his skills through demonstration and interaction and to keeping his gaze clinically objective when watching her re-execute his motions.
“Enjoying your new protégé?” Erwin teasingly asks one day, and Levi coughs just a little around a mouthful of tea.
The Corporal doesn’t reply, his mind more consumed with the weight of the term in spite of how casually it was tossed in. Protégé. It had been Kenny’s favored method of mocking him after a completed crime or heist or murder of the night.
Mikasa Ackerman as his protégé. It’s a responsibility that ripples through him daily now, reminding him whenever he corrects her stances to keep his touch brief and professional. He counts in his head and maintains a quota: one touch to the outside of her wrist, one to her elbow, one to the cap of her knee. He’s more than well-acquainted with the varying sensitivities of flesh, knows which zones are sensitive and which are not. Knows that these hard, bony points are safe for him to touch.
He’s only human though, and occasionally, he slips into indulgence. Pins the girl down on the dust of the sparring yard and feels himself distracted not by the dirt, but by how she twists underneath him. The first few times, she’d looked up at him, a rare sheen of fear in her eyes, and he’d broken away quickly as if he too sported the same wounds of the past. As of late though, Mikasa doesn’t look at him with fear at all. Oh, she still twists under his body, but sometimes, it’s followed by the slide of her leg between his, or even harder to ignore, the buck of her hips daringly suggestive where he can’t help but respond.
Mikasa doesn’t play the coquette quite like others have, like civilian women tend to. She’s too much of a soldier to do so, but how she looks at him, a little unsure but unwilling to back down and all the while challenging him to find out more, is alluring enough.
In domains outside of sparring, she turns up frustratingly close as well, whether by intention or by accident he doesn’t know. Levi doesn’t want to presume the former and wonders about fate’s ever increasing sense of sadism if it’s the latter. But on expeditions, Mikasa ends up on the same flank and column in formation, and Levi has to remind himself that he is not Jean Kirschstein upon realizing how often he checks to make sure she is still there at the corner of his vision. She’s at his table in the mess hall during dinner hours, suddenly as interested as Eren is in listening to narrations of missions gone by. She’s the one accompanying him on trips to the interior capital because Erwin’s decided that the combination of humanity’s strongest and the girl worth a hundred soldiers garners more public interest in the Legion’s funding. Additionally, because her pretty face is a more compelling reason than Levi’s disdainful one for the upper nobility to open their purses. Mikasa is the one dropping by his door, leaving fresh-brewed tea on occasion and delivering messages from Hange when the brunette squad leader can’t be bothered to leave her experiments.
“Aren’t you a little too important now to be running around as a messenger boy?” Levi demands one day. “This isn’t part of your duties.”
“You’re right. It’s not.” She leans against his desk, looking so at ease in his space that it makes him almost feel like a bad host neglecting a personal guest. Crossing her arms, Mikasa glances down at him. “I’m coming here of my own free will and time. That should tell you something, shouldn’t it?”
He’s sitting, and she’s standing, dressed without gear in pants and a simple white button-down that he thinks she might have recently outgrown. Not quite at level with his mouth but at a diagonal from it is the curve of her hip, and when her shirt lifts a little, an oblique triangle of pale skin. Mikasa nudges his thigh with her knee. The bony part. She’s half-smiling as he looks up. Her pink lips purse and part, a hint of teeth between them. She moves to leave, but not before saying over her shoulder, “A few years right?”
What echoes in the wake of her departing footsteps: “Are you sure you can wait that long?”
Levi thinks the thread of his patience may be wearing thin.
When it finally happens, a month later, he almost pushes her away again because neither of them are in the right mindset to be starting something with so much disruptive potential.
It’s not even a full day post-expedition, not even twenty-four hours after Mikasa has had to watch two people in her squad brutally eviscerated in addition to Jaeger forcing himself through the regeneration of several limbs.
She comes to him, moves through his door and presses her mouth to his before he can even think of why they shouldn’t. Along the seam of her lips, he tastes the salt of dried tears and even dryer liquor. It’s a girlish, chaste attempt at a kiss, and Levi decides that this is a move he will have to personally teach her as well. He coaxes her mouth open and then thinks to himself that it’s an improvement already with her tasting just like herself and not bitter like sorrow.
He doesn’t mind the salt of her skin though as they work at straps and buttons and as his mouth roves further down.
What interrupts his path early on: the scarf she doesn’t take off.
He ignores it at first, focuses on the gentle mound of her breasts, the tender nipples at their peak, tasting, tasting, hungry for all the softness he can find in this hardened girl.
When his hand again tries to unravel that stretch of red wool, she bats it away, distracting him with open-mouthed imitations of the kiss he taught her against his own neck. “Just leave it,” she breathes into his ear. “And no more teasing. I want you. Not later, not in a few years. Now.”
Levi hesitates, not sure if she’s ready despite how wet she feels against his hand. That’s all the opportunity Mikasa needs to pull him down onto the bed, and okay, he’s more than willing, but she’s strong even in her vulnerability, forceful enough to overcome his usual awareness of pace and taking his time.
He wants to though, wants to savor every second as his eyes traverse her sleek curves and planes, a dewy landscape that he doubts anyone else has ever seen. She’s not fully nude. Her shirt’s unbuttoned but not shed, her pants and underwear pushed to right above her knees, but it’s almost more enticing to see her only partially revealed. Briefly, Levi imagines seeing her again like this, encountering her in one of the many dark corners of headquarters and loosening only the barriers of clothing necessary. He wants to memorize all of her in addition to all that he’s been allowed to see.
She lifts her hips urgently, changing his mind yet again.
At the insistence of her long legs wrapping around him, Levi sheathes himself, slow, careful, and mindful of being the first.
“Why are you going so slowly?” Mikasa demands, and there’s a bit of pain in her expression but a look of need bordering on desperation overrides it.
“I was trying to be considerate,” Levi grits out as the girl clenches around him. It’s an enflaming sort of torture, being half inside her while the other baser half wants to fuck into her so deeply she’ll feel him for days.
Mikasa props herself slightly up on the elbows. The tone of her voice returns to what she sounded like at fifteen, equal parts antagonism and provocation.
“Do you think I came to you for gentleness?”
She squeezes around him again. And then, with his eyes unable to stop watching, she trails one hand down the sweat-slicked valley of her breasts, down the groove of her defined abdomen, and invitingly slow over where their bodies are joined. She touches herself with just one finger there, running a calloused pad around her opening and onto the base of his shaft still feeding into her.
Perhaps, Levi thinks, his whole body thrumming. I’ve underestimated her.
“Now, are you going to fuck me, or what?”
He does, hard.
He gives into her bait and drives into her with a rhythm he hasn’t used in years. Locks her half-naked thigh against his hip and succumbs to the maddening sight of thrusting into her again and again, his cock sliding out thickly and coated with wetness every time.
Not that he doesn’t appreciate the view above their waists either.
Her head tilted back and her eyes closed, Mikasa looks as free of tension as he’s ever seen her. None of the discomfort he’d expected her to show. No haunted flashes of remembrance about what happened in the forest on their most recent mission.
Instead, her body is all invitation for him to keep moving, to keep fucking her like she asked him to, and for some reason he can't be bothered to examine, he wants to give her every inch of himself that he couldn't relinquish to others. Wants this to go on and on and on until he loses himself in her, and there are many reasons to lose himself. Mikasa's kiss-swollen lips succulent and gasping softly for breath in the humid vacuum between them. Her breasts meeting his torso at increasingly irregular junctions. Her hand rubbing at her own slick folds, skimming his hardness whenever she happens to encounter it.
She comes apart when his thrusts lose all semblance of finesse, entering her with just battering force, his hips driven by a climbing, mounting need to be satiated. His mind overtaken by how tightly she spasms around him, he follows a few moments afterward. Gradually, his fingers loosen from their dig into her hips where they leave transient white imprints on flushed skin. Tomorrow, Levi imagines that they’ll darken to bruises.
On his bed, Mikasa is panting and beautiful, stained with cum and looking every bit the ravaged creature other women wanted to be underneath him. The sight of her, ruined at his hands, makes him want to brush to the side that obstinate lock of hair sticking to the bridge of her nose and draw up a bath for them both to sink into.
He can’t quite bring himself to feel pride at how satisfied she looks.
Especially when she tidies herself up to appear borderline decent, thanks him a little breathlessly, and skirts back out through his door.
It continues, despite how much the more rational part of Levi’s mind would like to smack common sense back into him. They repeat their meetings at deeply late hours of the night, in his room more frequently than hers because she’s been deemed still too volatile to be promoted to squad leader and have a room of her own.
There are some variations: the amount of foreplay she allows him, the layers of clothing between them, the positions that range from creative to animalistic.
But it’s never slow. Never as gentle as he’d like for it to be.
From one perspective, their relationship, as fucked up as it is, has progressed. From another angle, it’s one step forward and a great leap backwards. Levi curses himself for feeling nostalgic and remembering how one month ago, he’d anticipated the hours of the day when she came to train with him or pass along one of Hange’s chicken-scratch notes, those interactions limited to innocent touches.
He doesn’t want to go all the way back though, and he isn’t sure of how to move them forward, how to point out to her that she’s the only one he’s taken to bed repeatedly in a long, long time.
So he continues to fuck her, as hard and often as she asks.
Aligning his cock to her backside and pushing into her from behind. Twining that rich black hair, so admired by others, around his fist to yank her into his thrusts. Forcing her to orgasm three times in almost painful succession with his fingers and cock and a punishingly fast pace. When he isn't going rough enough for her, she looks at him like she's fifteen again and taunts, "Humanity's strongest huh?"
It teaches Levi to permit himself only fragments of tenderness: kisses along the arching slope of her back, one for each ridge of her upper spine. Just the bony parts, where he doubts she even feels them.
On nights when he manages to exhaust her, he discovers that Mikasa can be tired out enough to stay, warm and nuzzling into him. As she rests, he brushes his lips over the scattered constellation of bruises he’s left on her and presses to her mouth the same chaste kiss she’d used to initiate this mess.
If she’s ever fully conscious when he does this, she gives no sign.
They’re at different tables, separated by almost the entire span of the mess hall, when Hange announces to the whole of the Survey Corps, “Damn it Levi, we’re going to celebrate your birthday for once, and not just because I’ve managed to convince Erwin to spend some of the budget on alcohol.”
The whole room noisily bursts into cheers that hurt his eardrums, and he wants to yank Hange down to stop this madness, but Erwin whispers, surprisingly mellow for once, “I’ve learned to just let her do as she pleases every now and then. It’ll turn out worse if you make her store up all that enthusiasm.”
With a frustrated growl, Levi leans back in his chair. His attention, seeking for diversion, flickers to the corner of the room where most of the 104th squad sit. Sasha Braus is cheerfully distributing some tankards brimming with froth, Eren is toasting Arlert while spilling half of both drinks on Kirschstein, and Mikasa is staring right at him, her dark eyes unreadable.
Deciding that he can do whatever the hell he likes on his birthday, Levi retires early, social etiquette be damned.
Mikasa comes to him half an hour later, methodical as always as she knocks thrice on his door before slipping into his room. The first thing he notices is that she’s not wearing her scarf. The second is that she’s holding a plate with a slice of yellow cake, probably rich with sugar and eggs and other ingredients that the Survey Corps usually doesn’t have to spare or doesn’t have at all.
“You missed the cake Hange managed to procure,” she tells him, setting it on his desk.
“I don’t really care for sweets,” he replies, as curt and rude as when he first became acquainted with her.
“Oh, well, I guess I should get back then.” She turns, and her back is a familiar sight to him now but no less of a trigger to an ache he immediately suppresses.
Mikasa doesn’t walk to the door though. Instead, she faces him again and says softly, “I didn’t know it was your birthday.”
“Probably because I try very hard to never celebrate it,” Levi says dryly, feeling incredibly old in contrast to the youthful smoothness of the girl's solemn face.
“Yes,” she says and then more slowly, “But I realized I don’t know a lot of things about you. How you don’t like sweet things...I’ve never been fond of them either.”
Levi squints at her, mentally wondering if he’s fallen asleep and this is some kind of dream of Mikasa actually trying to make small talk with him, of time reverting back to how their interactions had gone before they had developed something far more sordid.
“A few months ago, I wanted to find out some of those things,” she continues, not quite looking at him anymore. “But then….I guess I got distracted.”
He’s used to her looking at him with visceral emotion, ranging from fury to lust, but when her eyes rise to meet his, there’s a tinge of something he hasn’t seen before. He wonders if this is what Eren and Armin see regularly in her eyes.
She sits down on the edge of the bed, and normally, he knows where this would begin leading to, but what spills from her lips startles him.
“I want to learn something about you tonight. Take what you want from me. Whatever you want.”
Nervousness creeps into her expression when Levi doesn't answer at first, but she doesn’t look at all surprised when he says finally, “Take off your clothes.”
She obeys, moving efficiently with practiced hands and laying her clothes neatly in a pile beside the bed. He undresses too before sinking onto the mattress with her, and she waits for his next instruction with a bitten down lip. Levi pulls her down, the delicate graze of her breasts against his bare chest inducing a shiver in both their bodies, but that’s as far as it goes, as far as he wants it to go tonight.
Mikasa opens her mouth, a question clearly on the horizon, but he shakes his head and says, “Just lay here with me. Just for tonight.”
Her lashes flutter over confused dark eyes, but she nods, adjusting her head on the not-entirely-soft military issue pillow and bringing her body a little closer to his within the embrace of his arms.
The night is one of rare dreamless sleep for both of them, and the sun is just a sliver of red on a still dark sky when Levi awakens a few minutes before she does. Beside him, Mikasa is languid, her limbs relaxed and pliant from slumber, and it feels noticeably different from how she usually is in his bed, not as much a fuse demanding to be ignited. She watches, sleepy eyes widening, as Levi places himself between her thighs and lowers his head until she feels his bangs brushing along her lower stomach, his warm breath washing over her mound.
“So I’m going to have to ask, can you pretend it’s still my birthday?”
Silently, Mikasa considers him for a moment before shifting her legs farther apart so that he fits between them more comfortably. “Yes. Yes, take whatever you want.”
She’s drank from him before, sucked around his cock until he would have done anything she asked him to, and usually, all she asked him for was a good hard fucking, but she’s never allowed him to indulge in his own preferences. He feels a vague sense of accomplishment as he kisses her at the top of her slit and then further down and then parts the moist folds of her sex to lick inside, tasting her as he’s always, always wanted to do.
As Mikasa cries out like she never has before, he thinks fleetingly of the cake left uneaten on his desk, a little smug in having found something so much sweeter.
Spring is the season for young lovers.
Eren finally kisses her one day, seizes her in the high-spirited aftermath of an expedition finally gone right, and it happens in front of everyone. Levi observes, three yards away from the foster siblings who don’t quite fit anyone’s neat definition of family, and then walks away, the hoots of other squad members echoing in his ears.
After all, Levi knows what Mikasa has always wanted. Why she wears a scarf even into the months of summer. Why she cut her hair without regret. Why she’s even in the Survey Corps at all.
Whatever happened between us, Levi tells himself, was the product of accident and opportunity. A young girl looking misguidedly for comfort where she should not have, and a man who convinced himself that she was searching for something more.
Except Mikasa is waiting outside his room yet again that night, scarf-less and not looking as extremely happy as he expects her to look.
He’s not inclined to let her in, but she ducks under the low stretch of his arm blocking the door and doesn’t appear at all sorry when he turns around to face her.
“That arm was me telling you to not come in,” Levi says with an edge to his voice, keeping as much distance as possible between them. Part of him wants to reprimand her as a brat with no respect for a superior officer’s privacy. Part of him wants to sound irritated as if he’s had enough and is finished with her.
He doesn’t fully remember how to sound like that though, isn’t sure if he ever knew how in the first place.
“Well, for humanity’s strongest,” she says. “That wasn’t much of a resistance.”
Dancing around her with words feels like a sure path to an oncoming headache, seeing her in his room brings more than just a hint of pain, and the thread of his patience feels like it has all been finally used up.
“I’m surprised,” Levi admits. “I didn’t think you’d be coming to me tonight.”
A blush, pretty as the petals one could spot only in the wild, grows in her cheeks, and he braces himself to receive some humiliating teenage consolation.
Mikasa steps towards him though, takes a second and a third step. He stops counting as she brings herself so close to him that they nearly share the same breath. She nudges her knee against his thigh. Just the bony part.
“And yet here I am,” she says. “In your room. With you."
That should tell you something, shouldn’t it?