Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

(“You’re shitting me.” It had felt like the inside of Levi’s body had been freezing over. He had almost been able to hear the ice crystallizing in his chest, cracking and hissing as it spread to the rest of him, all the way to the tips of his fingers and the soles of his feet. It’d been the kind of cold he hadn’t thought existed within him anymore, the kind that could only be felt beneath the earth, born of a world where the sun’s touch couldn’t hope to reach.

He’d taken to leaning against the wall for this meeting, arms folded, over sitting in one of the uncomfortable-as-fuck secondhand chairs in front of Erwin’s desk, but he didn’t think he could’ve moved to sit down now even if he wanted to, muscles glaciated.

Erwin had continued as if Levi hadn’t spoken at all. “You’ll set out at dawn.” It had been late enough that it had just been the two of them, and the nighttime murmurs of the castle. “Unfortunately, there’s no getting around the travel time without wearing down the horses or yourselves, but the operation itself it expected to be resolved within a day, two at most.”

Levi’s tongue had been frostbitten when he’d replied, “The Commander-in-Chief has that much faith in me, does he? I’m tickled.”

Erwin hadn’t responded to that, but Levi knew him well enough not to expect him to. He had let the silence sit between them instead, because he knew Levi well enough, too. Well enough to know that sarcasm and general assholery were usually just the precursor to what he really wanted to say.

It's not like he hadn’t known what he’d been signing up for that day, when he decided to follow Erwin, to join the Survey Corps without any pretenses. Levi knew what the government higher-ups thought of him; a dog on a leash, a weapon in Erwin’s hands, but he’d always understood this role, and the political nature of it. He didn’t give a fuck about being used as a tool for propaganda—let Erwin sing his praises to the military brass and the city newspapers print articles calling him Humanity’s Strongest and making people believe they could stand toe-to-toe with monsters because it meant he was allowed to use the only skills he possessed for something worthwhile. That he could keep fighting for a future where humanity didn’t meet their end inside the stinking, foul mouth of a Titan.

This was different. This felt too reminiscent of the days when he’d still been climbing his way to the top of the garbage heap, a runt bowing at the feet of scum, picking up any scrap they would throw him. It made his skin itch. Made it feel like the sludge of that place was still sitting at the bottom of his lungs.

He’d be a tool in the service of humanity—not for a pig like Zackley and the goddamn Royal Council seat he wanted to keep.

There’d been a clump of dried mud on the hardwood floor, dragged in on the bottom of a soldier’s boot sometime before Erwin had called him to his office, and Levi scowled at it. “Why did you agree to this, Erwin? The Military Police shit the bed. So what? Since when is it our job to clean up after them?”

“The council is reportedly hearing whispers of unrest,” Erwin had said. He’d sounded entirely unaffected by the serrated edge of Levi’s words, as usual, practiced in brushing them aside as if they were as soft as a feather. “The people of Wall Sina are beginning to question the Military Police’s ability to keep them safe.” Erwin had paused then, and Levi knew it was because he was finally getting to the actual point. All the double-speak and long-winded explanations and delicate circumvention of whatever the fuck needed to be said gave him a fucking headache. “And if the people lose their faith, they’ll stop being so generous in their support.”

Levi had snorted. Right. So Zackley and the rest of the council didn’t want the nobles and merchants who lined the brigade’s pockets to know they were shit at their jobs.

“Our purpose is to simply lend a hand,” Erwin had continued after a moment, dedicated to ignoring him, apparently. “We’re not cleaning up after anyone.”

Yeah, and the Wall Cultists weren’t completely batshit.

Levi’s muscles still felt stiff with ice. He scowled harder at the mud clump. “Did you forget about the expedition in two weeks? I know you’re getting up there in age. It happens.”

“Not at all,” Erwin had replied. His tone held the same polished pleasantness he used to discuss the weather with fawning women on the street, or with heckling vendors at the old Shiganshina market stalls. “My memory is in perfect working order, though your concern is noted.”

Levi had looked up from the hardwood then. “What are we getting out of this, Erwin?” There had to be a benefit to the Survey Corps. Erwin wouldn’t waste their manpower otherwise.

“This is an opportunity, Levi.” The shadow cast over Erwin’s face by the glowing sconces on the wall behind him had done nothing to dull the piercing nature of his gaze. “To show both the council and the public the competence and reliability of the Survey Corps.”

Levi could’ve argued. He could’ve said didn’t they prove their competence and reliability when they’d driven off the fucking Armored Titan in Trost a year ago? When they’d lost a quarter of their soldiers defending the city while the Garrison worked to seal the gate? When they’d spent days clearing out the stragglers?

He could call bullshit on the brass until the sun came up, and it wouldn’t change a thing.

The Survey Corps were the reason Wall Rose hadn’t come down, and yet Erwin still had to negotiate for every last copper coin of their funding, still had to accept shit like this to stay in the council’s good graces. Levi had a role to play, but Erwin had one of his own.

So instead of wasting his breath, Levi had pushed himself away from the wall with a concise, “Fuck your politics.” He trusted in Erwin, in his judgement, in his vision for the future, so he’d keep falling in line like a good soldier. But that didn’t mean he had to like it, and he wouldn’t pretend to. “And clean your fucking floor.”

Erwin might’ve been amused in that moment, but Levi hadn’t cared enough to look for the proof of it on his face, already striding for the door.)

Six years later, the Underground feels exactly the same and entirely different all at once.

It’s dark, and dull, a dreary color palette of dirt-browns and pale sandstone. Shadows lurk like living beings in street alcoves and close alleyways, where the light sconces are too weak to reach from their places fixed to the exterior of the higher buildings. The stench of damp rot hangs in the air like summer humidity, a presence all its own, foul enough to sting Levi’s sinuses when he breathes in.

It’s a place he knows, intimately, in the marrow of his bones, in the fabric of his being, but he’s become so estranged from it that he can no longer belong. Not like before.

The old city doesn’t seem to mind. It simply settles around the new shape of him, more comfortably than it has any right to, doing its best to remind him of a past life with each step he takes, to unearth every memory from this burial ground.

“Anything?” Mike’s voice comes from behind him, gruffer than usual, and so low it touches nothing but the damp earth beneath their feet. It speaks, maybe, to his discomfort, or maybe it’s irritability, brought on by exhaustion, by two days spent on horseback with little sleep and a diet of field rations.

Whatever the case, it effectively drags Levi’s mind back to the present. The Underground has made every effort to haunt him. It’ll only succeed if he lets it.

So he lets the memories pass over him, as harmlessly as misting rainwater might, lets them slide off his skin and seep back into the dirt where he’d laid them to rest six years before, and says, “No.”

Someone on the second-story balcony of a house they walk by erupts into a coughing fit, the sound scattering into the air like pebbles, catching in the crevices of the aging stonework of the surrounding buildings rather than bouncing off it, and Levi almost misses it when Mike grunts out, “Me either.”

Nothing Levi hadn’t been aware of already. He thinks he would’ve managed some surprise had they been able to catch the scent. This had been expected, especially when one considers the circumstances. The man—alpha—they’d been dumped with finding had three days worth of a headstart on them. The city has long eaten away at any scent trail they might’ve been able to follow.

A rat darts across the dirt-packed thoroughfare, from one dark alley to another, and Levi stops just short of the thing scurrying over the toes of his boots. He eyes the shadows it disappears into; he can’t quite make out any shapes, but the smell that reaches his nose is familiar enough.

(Levi has to wonder, not for the first time since this operation was put in motion, if this really is some kind of wild fucking goose chase, a creative new way for those Royal Council assholes to obstruct the Survey Corps own operations by delaying prep for their next expedition. But…

Erwin would’ve sniffed out the barest whiff of deception like a bloodhound.)

He hears Mike gag. “Goddess above,” he says, voice struggling in his throat. “This place always reminds me there’s more than one kind of hell.”

Levi huffs, but otherwise does him the courtesy of moving on, occupying himself by watching their surroundings instead. “We won’t get anywhere tracking him by scent.” Effectively speaking, the roofs and balconies provide the best vantage points for scoping out potential targets, but they can be difficult for the average person to navigate. Certain equipment can help, but the black market down here all but died after Wall Maria fell, the Underground sealed up tight. Most people can barely walk, let alone scale buildings.

An attack is most likely to come from the ground level. It can be harder to assess a headcount and goods, without risk of getting too close, but it’s far easier to move between shadows, easier to disappear within them.

He thinks he sees a curtain move in a nearby house, thinks he might hear distant footsteps trying to go undetected, but he’s not particulary worried. Military personnel have never made easy targets. Other than weapons, they don’t normally carry anything of much value, most of them smart enough not to bring personal belongings, making it more trouble than it’s worth.

At the corner of his eye, what he can see past the hood of his cloak, there might be movement, a shape shifting in the dark.

He isn’t worried, but it never hurts to be careful, either.

“What now?”

He turns around to face Mike. His nose is wrinkled, and he has one hand pressed to the base of his throat, while the other holds onto an MP-issued rifle down by his side.

Joining forces with the Military Police Brigade had meant foregoing any chance of approaching this operation with even the smallest notion of inconspicuousness. Despite being dressed in full uniform, Survey Corps cloak and all, Levi still prefers his blades and the knives hidden away on his person as his weapons of choice.

(How does that saying go again? You can take a rat out of the gutter?) 

“I know where we can get information,” Levi says.

There’s a pause where Mike looks at him like he’s considering that statement, turning it over in his mind. Maybe he can see the way the shadows take to him so easily, how the dirt clings, the Underground trying to grow itself over him like ivy. 

Levi can’t say it matters much to him, whatever Mike might be thinking.

You get used to judgement when it follows you everywhere. Whispers hidden behind hands on the street, rumors dragging behind his every step through headquarters, speculations traded between soldiers over a meal in the mess hall.

As long as it doesn’t get in the way of him doing his job, he doesn’t care one way or another. He’s made his peace with what he is, and the things that stain his soul.

“All right,” Mike says, taking the rifle into both hands. “I’m following your lead down here.”

Levi doesn’t respond, just makes to pivot once more and keep walking, and it’s then that he notices how far the rest of their group has strayed behind them, steps slow as they look around at every little thing like they’ve never seen dirt and buildings before.

This is exactly the kind of odd, one-off mission Levi’s Special Operations Squad was created for, but like hell was he pulling all of them from training two weeks out from an expedition for this bullshit.

Erwin had already taken it upon himself to recruit Mike for his sense of smell and base knowledge of the Underground. From his own squad, Levi had decided to take only Ymir, who is generally phased by nothing, and had been the most likely to keep her shit together. He didn’t really get a choice in the three MPs—a squad leader and two recruits—they’d been saddled with to “escort” them.

“Oi.” Ymir is the only one of them that doesn’t flinch at the sound of his voice, and he watches blandly as their attention falls on him all at once. “Keep up, or you’ll end up like some lost little kids.” The last thing he needs is more fucking people to go searching for. “We’re not here to sightsee.”

Ymir waits to snort until she’s close enough for Levi to hear it. She’s a little shit like that. “Sorry, Captain. I’m just impressed by how much of a shithole this place is,” she says, eyeing the earth-ceiling stretching above them, the rocky pillars hanging from it like icicles. “Like, a literal hole full of shit. Makes the Wall slums look like paradise.”

She’s doing that thing, where she’s obnoxious on purpose. Levi’s too used to it by now to take it seriously, and it makes the MP recruits look less like they’re about to burst something when they get moving again as a group, so he won’t call her out on it this time.

The MP squad leader must think he’s being discreet when he drifts near Levi, not quite next to him, purposely out of his line of sight, but still close enough within the boundary of Levi’s peripheral awareness to be sensed. His scent bleeds intent like a hemorrhaging wound, and yet the man doesn’t speak for so long that Levi thinks he’s lost whatever nerve he came over with. 

Then, eventually, “Is it true you’re from here?” That’s it? Levi turns his head to cast the MP a brief glance. He’s white-haired, a man older than Levi and Erwin both, lines on his forehead and around the edges of his eyes. There’s a ruggedness to his demeanor, uncharacteristic of MP officers, that makes Levi suspect he’d transferred from a Garrison branch. “The rumors—”

“Yeah,” Levi answers, says it as plainly as anything else, but it hits the ground like something weighted anyway. His criminal history might have been wiped from Military Police record after he’d been sworn into the Survey Corps, but it’s no secret where he comes from, and he’s never tried to hide it, either. Most people just don’t ask. 

He knows the stories that get told about the Underground in the Interior Cities, stories about monsters and killers, stories used to scare children and threaten criminals, so he waits for whatever inane question will be asked next.

But one doesn’t come. Even Ymir seems to have nothing to say.

They walk on in silence.

The bar is in worse shape than the last time Levi had seen it, but the same could be said for most of the places he remembers.

The name sign is missing. The rusted chains that once held it now hang without purpose from where they attach to the slanted roof. The small set of stairs leading up to the porch are half-collapsed, and a shattered window on the first floor has been covered with wooden planks.

His attention remains, for a moment, on the holes riddled across the aged face of the building, clustered mostly on the lower half. His fingers trace the shape and size, familiar beneath his touch, the brickwork rough against his skin. An acrid smell, so muted it’s almost negligible, lingers in the texture.

“Gunpowder,” Mike says, picking up on the faint scent even from where he stands farther away.

To say the early years after Wall Maria’s fall had been a shit show would be an understatement. Refugee overflow and food shortages. Raised taxes and farming villages bled dry every harvest season. Higher crime rates.

The gangs in the Underground had rioted, flooding out through the mostly unguarded passageways, wreaking havoc in the Interior wherever they could. Merchant storehouses and noble homes were looted, civilians robbed and Military Police slaughtered in the street.

It had only gone on for a few days, all the military force at the Royal Government’s disposal chasing them back down into the dark, hunting them even then. A majority of the entrances into the Underground had been sealed after, and the ones left were guarded round the clock by Military Police.

“From the riots,” the MP squad leader states the obvious. “I was still a newbie to the brigade back then, so I wasn’t permitted to go below ground, but I heard there were a lot of places that hid people.”

“And old King Rod’s solution was to gun everyone down,” Ymir says. “What a guy. It’s a miracle someone didn’t off him sooner.”

Levi can tell she’s being genuine—isn’t just trying to get a rise out of the MPs, but the look on their faces is still a bit amusing.

“Ymir,” Mike grunts, in what’s meant to be a reprimand, but there’s not near enough conviction behind his tone to pull it off. 

It’s Levi’s job anyway—he just doesn’t care enough to do it. They say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Rod Reiss deserves more than just tongue lashings.

“Stay here,” Levi orders. No one protests.

Weeds that have filled the cracks in the cement porch bend beneath the soles of his boots as he approaches the door. Levi has always wondered how that works—how anything with its roots in filth can grow, how it can stand to live without ever tasting the sun.

Maybe someday he’ll be feeling bored and stupid enough to ask Hanji.

The inside of the bar smells like the rest of the Underground—the sour tang of rot is still overwhelming in its presence, writhing against his nose, even diluted as it is by liquor and cigars and oil-fried food. An old wood-burning furnace blazes bright on the far side of the room, but even the balmy warmth can’t seem to shake the wet chill that’s draped itself across Levi’s shoulders like soggy cloth.

He can feel the shift in the air as soon as he’s over the threshold, the way the gravity of the room rearranges itself around him, the animosity suspended within it.

He ignores the stab of eyes and instincts alike, heading for the bar itself.

The alpha behind the counter is a beast of a man, with wide shoulders and thick arms. The mug he’s cleaning looks comically small in his hands. “Yer lot sure have some nerve showing yer faces around here.” He speaks with a roughness, a slur to his syllables that Levi has mostly smoothed out of his own voice. It’s jarring, a little, to hear it again after so long, to be reminded how removed he is from it—this. Here. “Whatever it is ya want,” the man continues, “ya ain’t getting it here.”

His scent is all spice and fire, an oppressive heat that’s brightly colored in its threat, and it makes an entertaining attempt to scorch Levi’s forest. The intimidation probably sends weaker alphas scampering off with a tail between their legs. The most it does to Levi is tingle his nose and wear his patience a little thinner.

The mug is returned to its place somewhere behind the bar. Another is picked from a cluster set off slightly to the side of the man, and the process of cleaning begins again. Levi doesn’t move, and the alpha looks like he doesn’t know whether to be confused or angry about it.

“I’m looking for Alis. Seen her?”

“Are ya a deaf bastard or jus’ a stupid one? I said—”

The bartender’s face meets the countertop with enough force to break his nose. Blood is already pouring down his lips and chin when his head rears back.

“You little bitch—” he enunciates his words perfectly this time, however ruined the effect is by how nasally they are, and makes a clumsy grab for Levi that he evades with minimum effort.

Levi catches his arm by the wrist before it can retreat, and he twists until the man has to bend his body to accommodate the unnatural rotation, elbow coming down on the counter. “How’re you—” He tries to pull free, but Levi’s grip is unyielding.

“Where can I find Alis?”

The tension in the room presses on Levi from all sides. There’s the sound of weight shifting in chairs and disgruntled vocalizations, but everyone seems to have enough sense to stay put.

The bartender bares bloody teeth at him. “I’m gonna kill you.”

Before Levi can dislocate the stupid shit’s shoulder, the door behind the far end of the counter opens.

“Oh.” The person standing there isn’t Alis, but a young man. Probably a beta, going by his lack of scent. “Wondered what all the commotion was.” His dark eyes glance over the bartender’s position, survey the room, and then come to a rest on Levi. “Old habits die hard, huh, Levi?” The way he fidgets with his fingers contradicts the nonchalance in his tone. “Or should I say Captain Levi?”

The bartender stops squirming in his hold. “L-Levi?”

The beta folds his arms, just as quick to note Levi’s observation, it seems. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t break my bar, or my employees. Good help is hard to come by these days.”

“Your bar?”

The man hums. “You won’t find Alis here, or anywhere,” he says. “She’s dead.”

The young man’s name is Soren. “I wouldn’t expect you to remember me.” He leaves his bartender in the hands of their patrons, and leads Levi through the door he’d come out of, through the back room that seems to function as both a kitchen and a storage space. “I was a scrawny teenager the last time you were here.”

Levi scrutinizes his features as they walk out the service door and into the trash-lined alley on the side of the building.

The almost shoulder-length platinum hair, the images inked on his arms, the shape of his face. For all that it’s vague, something he’d perceived in passing, the impression of Soren is there. He’s shorter in Levi’s memory. His hair had been buzzed, gangly limbs clean of tattoos, but he remembers— “You cleaned tables.”

Soren’s mouth quirks. “Yeah.” He crosses the small width of the alley and leans back against the building on the other side, tucking his hands behind him. “And whatever else Alis asked. She probably could’ve found someone better than some stupid kid to work for her, but…she let me stay. Took care of me, and a lot of other people.”

Levi had found her bar by happenstance, in the months after Kenny had left him. He’d fallen deep into his first rut post-presentation, and he’d just been trying to stay the fuck away from other people when Alis spotted him in the street.

She’d been so stubbornly maternal, her scent less something you could smell and more something you felt, touching the sharp edges of his instincts as if they wouldn’t cut. She’d given him a room upstairs, had made sure he was hydrated and fed, kept safe from others. Others kept safe from him.

Levi doesn’t ask how she died.

“Anyway,” Soren speaks again. “I’m sure you and your entourage out front didn’t come down here to reminisce.”

Levi explains the situation in short order.

“That’s a job for the Survey Corps now?” Soren says when he’s finished, eyebrows arching in an expression that borders on amused.

“We’re lending a hand,” Levi repeats Erwin’s words in his most dry delivery.

Soren definitely looks amused now, even if he doesn’t understand the jab Levi is making at his commanding officer.

“Well, there was some trouble at Marie’s last night,” he says. “Some topside alpha got violent with one of the girls, and he trashed the place before they kicked his ass out.” Which isn’t unusual, but there’s nowhere near as much traffic from the surface as there once was. “Inventory’s been going missing over in the smuggling territories, too, by the Crawford stairs. That’s been happening for a little while now, so it might not be your guy, but it’s the same area. Could be connected.”

Levi will take whatever leads he can get. “We’ll check it out. Thanks.”

That should be the end of it, but Soren asks, “Have any plans for the night, if you don’t find him?” It’s a normal enough question in the circumstances, and Soren doesn’t sound any different when asks, no shift in the inflection of his voice.

It’s his demeanor that gives Levi pause. He’s looking away from Levi now, bottom lip caught between his teeth, shy—no…coy—mannerisms that hadn’t been present at any point in their conversation beforehand.

When he meets Levi’s eyes again, he manages to do so through his lashes, despite being a fair amount taller. “We have empty rooms upstairs.” His head tilts, silver hair brushing across a cheekbone, and Levi recognizes the gesture for what it is. Soren is practiced, it seems, much more subtle than what he’s used to, but Levi knows a proposition when he sees one. “I could make it worth your while, Captain Levi.” 

Levi stays where he is, watches like a hawk as the beta steadily comes closer, and responds with, “For everything on my person, I assume?”

“For you,” he sinks to his knees in front of Levi without ceremony, holding his eyes, “it’s on the house.”

Fingertips touch his thighs, graze over the straps of his harness, so gentle he barely feels it. His right leg twitches at the contact anyway. The muscles there draw tight, but Levi can anticipate that reflex by now, has learned to keep himself still, because he can’t exactly just kick the shit out of anyone who gets too close in the Survey Corps, as much as he might want to sometimes.

Soren hadn’t crowded him, had purposely put himself in a vulnerable position. He’s not a threat, just a stray dog pissing on the wrong damn tree. 

Levi’s lack of a negative reaction gives him the confidence to continue, hands resting on Levi fully for a moment before they slide up to hold his hips. He leans even closer, bending so his lips nearly brush the waistband of Levi’s pants when he murmurs, “I’ve been told I look great with a cock in my mouth.”

Levi is sure he has, with those full lips and delicate features of his. Not bad looking by any stretch of the imagination—the beta could probably keep an entire whorehouse in business by himself—but if Levi had a type, he thinks it would be someone who looked a little meaner. Not that it even matters. He would fail to feel anything, either way. No hum of instincts, no spark of interest, not even the smallest temptation, nothing, nothing, nothing. 

His sex drive is nonexistent on most days, and the last of his priorities on any other. His ruts are irregular, but also scarce, and they’re just this side of fucking excruciating. Their regiment doctor suspects it’s because of the Underground—the lack of sunlight, lack of proper food, lack of safety, the general stress of living in an environment like that. As if he couldn’t have figured that one out for himself. 

“We’re not staying.” The world above had already been dark for several hours when they’d come down here. If they don’t find this bastard by the next nightfall, the MPs are shit out of luck. He’ll shove his foot up Zackley’s ass before he camps out in this decaying hole in the ground. 

Soren flinches at the rejection. He removes his hands, sighing as he sits back on his heels. “Sorry.” His expression smooths into something genuinely bashful, not the manufactured version he’d put on earlier. “You’ve—kind of been a fantasy of mine,” he tells Levi’s boots. “I guess it makes sense though, that an alpha like you couldn’t get off to a beta.”

Levi comes very close to snorting. Because it’s funny. Because he can’t get off to anything. This place has his physiology so fucked that there’d been a stretch of years down here where he didn’t have ruts at all. His libido is in chains; he can’t get it up without actively trying, and even then it’s a chore. 

Levi is living proof that the odds of the greater universe really are in Erwin Smith’s favor. From the sewers underneath the capital city, it had dropped the perfect soldier into his hands. A hyper-dominant alpha from a rare bloodline, capable of killing Titans by the hordes, whose dick couldn’t get in the way of duty.

It’s absolutely fucking hilarious.

Soren stands up, and instead of acknowledging anything he’d said moments ago, Levi holds out a gold coin from the inside pocket of his cloak. “For the information.”

Soren blinks at it, and then his cheeks warm. “I would’ve given it for free, you know.” He takes it from Levi regardless, fidgeting it between his fingers. “People like to talk shit, call you a traitor and all that, but you were still one of us.” He closes the coin in his hand. “They just resent that you made it out.”

When Levi meets back up with the others in front of the bar, he says, “Got a lead. We’re going this way,” and starts walking.

They’re headed away from the center-most area of the city now. The architecture separates from itself the further out they go, buildings sitting in random arrangements instead of interconnected and stacked on top of one another by bridges and staircases, the afterthoughts of a cohesive design that hadn’t left room for them.

The outer regions are less populated by nature, but it feels as if they’re the only people around. Levi catches only pockets of life: linens put out to dry on a clothesline, someone smoking on a porch here, another slumped against a building there, the occasional rustle of something, somewhere.

Levi’s intention had been to start asking questions at Marie’s, but the smell of blood changes their course. The mildew works to smother it, but the freshness makes it distinct, sharp in his sinuses. 

They follow the path the blood charts for them. In an area closer to the smuggling territories than Marie’s brothel, it takes them onto a backstreet.

There’s less lighting off the main thoroughfare, and the debris of what looks like a small market are strewn everywhere, but even so, a body is a hard thing to miss.

“Oh. Shit,” Ymir says, sounding like someone who had planned to go outside and found it raining, instead of someone looking at a corpse. 

The MP cadets are the only ones who are visibly disturbed by the sight. Levi supposes the rest of them have seen enough people like this not to be affected.  

The dead man they’ve found lies on his back, eyes open and unseeing. Someone has shoved a shard of glass in his neck, leaving him a mess of blood. It’s all over the neck itself, soaked into his shirt, and seeping into a pool around him. There are three angry red lines on the left side of his face, cheek to chin.

The MP squad leader steps forward, pulling a folded piece of parchment out of his uniform jacket’s breast pocket. It crinkles when he opens it, a sketch created with details given by a witness. Sketches like these are hardly a perfect match, but the key features of this man’s face are there. “It’s him.”

Mike crouches next to the body, sitting his rifle in his lap so he can touch the man’s wrist. “Still warm.”

Levi gets some distance from the rest of them, idly scoping the area. The likelihood that the perpetrator stuck around is exceedingly low, but…

Something’s nagging at him.

While the others discuss what to do next, he wanders a little farther. Finds more blood.

Red droplets form a trail in a scarce pattern, obviously not from their dead guy.

“Got something?” The MP squad leader comes up on his side. He tramples through a portion of the blood before he takes notice of it. “We should see where it goes. Maybe we’ll find some answers.”

Levi doesn’t see the point. They found the man—no one said he had to be alive.

Violence and death are not things that often answer to reason. Sometimes there is no why. You either accept that fact or be crushed by the weight of it.

As it is, Levi can’t be assed to object. He lags behind this time, watching their backs as they follow more blood like it’s some kind of bastardized mapping system.

That feeling comes again, a tug on the smallest thread of his instincts. His nose twitches at the faintest smell of…rain?

A shudder spasms up the length of his spine before he can even fully register the scent, electrifying every single nerve ending on his body and leaving him momentarily breathless. What the fuck is—

It stands to reason that he’s rightfully fucking distracted when the group stops—he would’ve walked into someone’s back if he were anyone else. 

They’re standing at the mouth of an alley. This one is a dead end. It doesn’t lead to another backstreet, closed off on the other side by a building instead. A single light fixture affords them sight; the twin to it is broken and probably has been for some time. 

Nearly hidden by the shadows, slumped in the corner where two of the buildings meet, is a boy. His teeth are bared in a snarl, eyes shining like an animal in the dark.

He’s an omega. A male omega.

Pheromones that smell like smoke from a burning forest choke the oxygen from the air, consuming the narrow space of the alley in thick plumes. It stings Levi’s eyes, itches in his throat when he breathes.

Anything else is almost impossible to detect beneath it, even the musty blend of mold and damp that permeates everything down here has been devoured by it. Aggression acts as his mask, most likely unable to control what his scent will give away in the state he’s in, protecting his vulnerabilities before strangers. Alphas.

It’s effective—Levi will give the kid that, but presentation instincts exist beyond a person’s five senses. He might not be able to smell it now, but that scent from earlier—it’s his, this kid. There’s a part of Levi, something entwined in his genes, that just knows.

The MP cadet to his right recoils. “What,” the word is nearly swallowed by a cough, “the hell—?” He brings an arm up to his face, tucking his nose and mouth into the crook of his elbow.

General knowledge of biology says omegas shouldn’t be capable of producing pheromones like this. Strong enough to take up space, potent enough to incite a physical reaction, especially in alphas. Their nature doesn’t allow for it—the hormones required are at a much lower level in their bodies. 

So either this kid is a freak of nature, or he’s creating pheromones of this efficacy with sheer willpower. Levi thinks there’s probably a case to be made for both options as he watches the boy brace a hand against the wall of the brick building beside him and shift his body until he has one leg underneath himself. That leg shakes when he leans his weight on it and pushes up to his feet, still glaring with a heat that could put the sun to shame.

The kid looks like shit. He’s hunched in on himself, and his chest moves noticeably with his labored breathing. One hand clutches a bleeding wound on the bicep of his opposite arm—three deep lacerations that reach below the elbow, distinctly recognizable in their width and jagged shape.

Mud is drying on his cheek, his temple, the ends of his hair, as if someone had shoved the side of his face into the ground. There’s a split in his lip; a tear in the collar of the tattered shirt he’s wearing, revealing three more bloody marks on his skin.

The kid looks like shit.

And yet he’s easing into a fighting stance, one worn-out shoe sliding slightly further back in the dirt than the other, his body positioned at an angle to put momentum into a strike. There’s give at his knees, keeping his joints loose and center of gravity low, almost disguised by the pained nature of his posture.

He makes a familiar image.

“Guess we know who killed that alpha bastard,” Ymir mutters.

“Leave him be,” Levi says, already turning away. By the looks of him, this kid’s been put through enough, and it’s time for them to get out of this shithole. “He’s no threat to us. We need to report back.”

“The omega comes with us,” the MP squad leader says. He meets Levi’s blank stare with a clenched jaw and rigid shoulders. 

“We’re arresting him?” Levi drawls. “For killing a serial murderer?”

“It’s against the law.”

Levi pushes a derisive breath through his nose.

The government has never wanted anything to do with the Underground—would rather ignore its existence entirely. The people have been scorned for decades, used for pleasure and made into monsters for the world above’s amusement. Then when Wall Maria fell, Rod Reiss ordered them put down like rabid dogs and left the rest caged in the dark to starve.

Now this bootlicking asswipe of an MP wants to impose topside laws on the most vulnerable candidate he could find. Snapping one of this guy’s bones will not improve the situation—in fact, it would certainly make it worse. Levi decides he’ll accept the consequences, just as someone else speaks up.

“Look at him, Emory-san.” It’s the other MP cadet—the girl who hasn’t said a word the entire time they’ve been here. “He was obviously protecting himself.”

“Or maybe it was the other way around.”

Levi blinks. “Are you willfully stupid?”

“We don’t know what happened,” Emory insists, even as his scent snaps close to his body like shutters over a window when he glances at Levi. “A-And it’s better than going back empty-handed.”

“It wasn’t an act committed on topside soil,” the girl says. 

“It was against a topside citizen.”

“You don’t know that,” Ymir cuts in, kicking his words back at him as if they were rocks. “He was targeting nobles and MPs.”

“So he could’ve been from the slums,” Emory says. “It’s not our job to debate. The brass will handle further investigation. If they deem the omega guilty, they’ll probably toss him back down here, anyway.”

“I don’t think he’ll come willingly, Squad Leader,” the other MP cadet says.

They all look back at the kid. Some of the energy seems to have drained out of him—the harsh pheromones have retreated, and he’s no longer snarling, but he still looks ready to either fight or bolt. The scowl on his face has lost none of its ferocity, and he’s watching their group with bright eyes.

“We’ll tranq him if we have to,” Emory says.

(Levi thinks of the one time he’s ever been forced to his knees. He thinks of the way his hands had been bound behind his back, and the way Erwin had stood above him, looking down his nose at him. Thinks of his face shoved into stagnant water, made to submit.

The humiliation still aches between his teeth.)

“Move.” Levi shoulders through the MPs when they don’t get out of his way fast enough. “I’ll take care of it.”

The last thing this kid needs is more alphas manhandling him.

Levi takes a step closer. Set apart from the rest, he draws the boy’s attention in all of its intensity. 

Their eyes meet, and two things happen at once.

First, Levi’s senses whiteout, as if someone had fired off an acoustic round and then shined a bright light in his face. He’s blind to the world for an entire, nauseating minute—a second—he can’t tell, and his surroundings seep back to him with a syrupy tangibility.

Second, the boy’s knees hit the dirt in an apt imitation of a puppet that’s just had its strings cut.

“Levi?” someone says—he thinks it’s Mike. He brings a hand to his forehead, the heel of his palm pressed over the ridge of his eyebrow, fingers in his hair.

It has to be the kid’s pheromones making him like this. When aggression didn’t work, he hit Levi with something to make him docile instead. You don’t get much exposure to omegas in the Survey Corps, but had his instincts really become so susceptible to them?

His alpha rumbles, present in a way he hasn’t felt in years, and it’s startling enough to snap Levi back to himself. Fuck.

He drops his hand away from his face. “I’m fine.” His voice is hoarse, and though his head is clear, his nervous system is still reeling from how rapidly his body had cycled through reactions. He doesn’t know who he’s saying it to—it could’ve been minutes since Mike spoke.

“The omega submitted to you,” Emory says from wherever he is. There’s bafflement in his voice, edged with something wary. “You didn’t even touch him.”

Levi forces his attention to focus on the kid. He’s bent himself over onto his elbows, the top of his head touching the ground in a blatant display of submission. It’s an antiquated form that uses the entire body, only seen in modern times by omegas under the employ of the Crown.

It’s the exact opposite of what Levi had wanted.

Ymir does a theatrical whistle. “That’s the power of an Ackerman alpha for you.”

He ignores her, as he always does when she attempts to rib him, and approaches the boy.

“Hey.” Levi nudges his forearm with the toe of his boot. “Get up.”

The kid obediently straightens, sitting back on his heels. He gives Levi a languid blink, and this close, he can see that he’d been wrong, before. His eyes glow, but not like a predator in the nighttime. It’s more like—like what feeble light there is here is drawn to them, gathers in his irises on its own, the color holding onto the illumination the way a puddle of rainwater holds fresh sunlight after a storm. Or something like that.

Looking away, Levi starts to walk a lazy circle around the kid. “There’s an alpha rotting in the street not far from here,” he says. “Has a piece of broken glass shoved in his neck. Impressive handiwork for a scrawny little mutt.” He’s not quite skin-and-bones, but there’s no muscle definition on him, his collarbones are pronounced, and Levi can see the knobs of his spine where the shaggy ends of his hair come to rest.

The boy doesn’t speak, but he seems a little more present when Levi comes around on his side. He won’t meet Levi’s eyes now, jaw set stubbornly, and Levi knows his gut reaction had been right. Intimidation isn’t the way with this one. He has to switch tactics.

Levi crouches down to the kid’s level, one knee sinking into the cold, moist of the ground, his elbow resting on his propped-up leg. He leans in closer to try and catch the kid’s eye that sticks steadfast to the dirt beneath them.

“I get it.” Emory had made the situation sound complicated, and Levi doesn’t know if it’s for his own ends or if he simply is that ignorant, but Levi’s seen this play out hundreds of times in the Underground. “He hurt you.” He glances at the injured arm that the kid’s gone back to holding. “To tell you the truth,” he continues after a moment. “I don’t really care that you killed him, but you need to come with us, and I don’t want to force you.”

Levi should’ve seen it coming. He should have, but he’s caught by surprise when the kid pounces. Had he let his guard down that much? 

It doesn’t matter; his reflexes are faster than his mind. He can move, can stop him. Except he doesn’t. His body doesn’t seem at all interested in reacting as the little shit folds his arms around his neck and—nudges the material of his cloak’s hood out of the way to hide his face there, the bridge of his nose cold where he presses it to Levi’s skin, right above his scent gland.

His brain hisses and sputters in his head as uselessly as maneuver gear that’s run out of gas, struggling against his instincts, and it takes Levi a second to process that he’s not being attacked. He thought the kid was going to try and bite his face off or something. This isn’t—he doesn’t know what to do with this.  

The kid is warm, and he smells like blood and grime, and he’s probably making Levi just as filthy—but the reek of fear and shame stings the inside of Levi’s nose, and he can feel the kid tremble against him, and he can’t bring himself to push him off.

“Sorry,” is little more than a breath, barely there. The kid clings closer, his hair surprisingly soft where it touches the edge of Levi’s jaw. “I’m sorry.”

Levi raises his own arms, bringing his hands to rest lightly on the kid’s shoulder blades. “It’s alright.” In the Underground, comfort is a stranger. When it comes knocking at your door, you regard it with suspicion. If you decide to let it in, you ask what it wants in return. As it stands, Levi is sorely out of his element. “What’s your name, kid?”

Instinct pushes to take over where he’s inadequate, and Levi thinks he can allow it just this once. A person only gets a muted impression of what they smell like to everyone else, but he can still tell when his scent rises up around them, a canopy of tall trees closing overhead, a dense forest keeping them safe.

Though small trembles still wrack through him, the kid’s breathing slows to an almost-normal rate. “Eren,” he murmurs to the inside of Levi’s throat. “What’s yours?”

“Levi.” He slides one of his hands down the length of Eren’s spine, lingering at the curve of his lower back for moment before drawing it back up to his shoulder.

There’s a memory tucked away somewhere, the sensation of someone doing the same thing to him, a motion that’s meant to calm. Maybe it had been Alis, during one of the many ruts he can’t remember, or maybe it had been his own mother.

He does it again, if a bit mechanically. Eren’s next exhale shakes. “Military Police?” he asks.

“No,” Levi says. “I’m with the Survey Corps, but there are MPs with me.” He doesn’t stop the movement of his hand on Eren’s back. “Eren.” It’s all soft syllables on his tongue, and the kid shudders in his hands. “Tell me what happened.”

There’s a thundercloud in Eren’s voice when he says, “I killed him.” He pauses there, leaving room for a reaction that Levi doesn’t give. “Bastard attacked me, tried to—” he breaks off, choked. Levi can hear him swallow before he speaks again, “like some rabid animal. So I killed him.”

He’d known it as soon as he’d seen Eren’s injuries, a story he’s heard too many times. It never gets any easier to stomach.

He may be a Scout now, but Levi had learned the monstrous ways of humans before he ever knew of the Titans outside the Walls.

Eren takes a steadying breath, chest expanding against Levi’s. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“I don’t know,” Levi tells him the truth. He could make a few guesses, but the current situation is unique, as far as he knows, and—it’s out of his hands, regardless. “You’ll make a report, and the higher-ups will decide what happens from there.”

“Right,” Eren mutters. He pulls back from Levi slowly, hands coming to rest on his shoulders. He’s looking past Levi, distrust sitting on every angle of his face, and Sina, his eyes. That color is just ridiculous. “I’m sure they’ll be really impartial about it.”  

Under different circumstances, Levi might’ve found himself amused by Eren’s quiet sarcasm. His gaze finds the torn collar of Eren’s shirt, crusted with now-dried blood. He withdraws entirely and rises to his feet. “Time to go.”

Eren starts a little, at his movement, and he stands with a carefulness that has Levi’s fingers twitching. He’s pale in the face and shivering by the time he’s upright.

Levi reaches to undo the button on his cloak and slide it off in a practiced motion. He steps close to Eren and wraps it around him, paying no mind to the weighted stares on his back. “From the looks of it, you’ve lost a decent amount of blood.” He fastens the button once more—the cloak predictably falls short on Eren, but it hangs loose at his shoulders where Levi is broad. “Can you walk back to the center?”

A heartbeat passes as Eren blinks at him, his eyelashes clumped together with mud and blood. His good arm comes up so he can clutch at the collar of the cloak, and whatever little warmth might still exist in his body migrates to his cheeks in a flush of color. “I—yes. Yes.”

Levi gives him an assessing once-over. The kid’s a goddamn mess, looks as if a strong wind gust could knock him on his ass, but Levi’s inclined to take him at his word. He can always carry him, if it comes to it. “Good.”

He turns away to face their audience of soldiers. Mike’s expression is what he’d expect from an experienced Scout who’s seen all kinds of oddities—a trained neutral, awaiting the next course of action. Ymir, for some reason that’s likely in her best interest to keep to herself, is smirking. The one MP—the girl—is watching him with something soft around her eyes, while the other two look like they no longer know what to make of him, like they can’t make sense of his actions toward some gutter mutt like Eren.

“We’re moving out.” He wields his voice like a blade, the sharp edge inviting no protest. He stares until they shuffle to start walking.

“Wait—”

Levi pauses mid-step. He glances over his shoulder at Eren, who bites down on his lip as if he regrets speaking. His gaze wavers. “Um.”

Turning around completely, Levi asks with more patience than he thought he had left, “What is it?”

Eren hesitates for a second more before saying, “I’m—”

Levi doesn’t hear the rest. The feeling of threat tears down his spine and has him dodging out of the way of the dagger that comes flying at him. It zips through the empty space where he’d just been and buries itself so forcefully in the ground that only a short portion of the silver hilt sticks out.

Eren ducks to the side a whole thirty seconds later than Levi had, and they end up on opposite sides of the alley.

For fuck’s sake. He believes what Eren told him. Those injuries are real, and the kid would be an idiot to instigate something with a healthy alpha from the surface, but it’s entirely possible he’d manipulated Levi’s instincts to his advantage, leaning into his distress to stall for time—until his pack could rescue him.

He hears the whistle of another dagger splitting air and uses one foot to hop backward as it lands in front of his boots. His leg bumps a wooden crate that splinters to pieces when he kicks through it.

Levi slams blades onto his gear grips and glares at Eren. “How many are with you?” He puts his back against the wall—his reaction time is fast enough that he’s not all that concerned about getting hit, but he’s not going to make it easier by being in wide open space. Further back, the others have taken up similar positions, rifles ready in their hands.

Eren’s eyes are wide. “I was trying to tell you—” He shakes his head. “It’s not what you think, I swear.”

And that doesn’t answer Levi’s question. “How many?”

Buildings close the alley in on three sides, and the knives are coming from high ground. He surveys the rooftops, doesn’t detect movement. His attention snags on the second story window of the building he’s pressed against. It has limited sight compared to the roof, but more cover. There’s at least one alpha near enough to smell. If they were using that window, their scent should be much stronger.

“One, just one,” Eren says quickly. “She’s—”

A girl leaps from the window. Someone shoots, but she’s already tucking her body into a roll, deftly avoiding the shot and meeting the ground an instant later, the gunfire cracking into the brick behind her. She lets the momentum carry her to her feet—slips another dagger from her boot—and launches herself at Levi where he’s moved back to the center of the alley to intercept her.

“Wait—!” Eren shouts.

Steel sings as the sharp edge of her dagger is caught between his two blades, crisscrossed in front of him. There’s mud smeared on both sides of her neck—that explains why he could barely smell her.

She yanks the knife back with a snarl before bringing it down again. It swishes through air as Levi angles himself out of the way of her swing. Most people would stumble, overbalance with their own force, but she keeps her body in control, and Levi swivels out of reach, light on his feet, when she lashes out again with an angry cry. She stalks after him, not letting him create distance, slicing this way and that.

“Mikasa!”

He’s not going to kill her, even though she’s certainly trying to kill him. Once, the only way a fight would end was with a death. Levi doesn’t have to choose that anymore.

There’s no technique to the way the girl moves, nothing to suggest training of any kind, despite her speed and control. She comes at him with a single-mindedness that leaves no thought to her own defense. Levi would guess she’s probably used to relying on brute strength to take down her opponents before they have a chance to hit back. Unlucky day for her.

He flips to his reverse grip and meets her next slash with an upward swing of his blade. The dagger goes spinning into the air. Levi pays no mind to where it lands as he sweeps her legs out from under her. She hits the ground with a grunt.

Levi’s either going to have to knock her out or restrain her. She’s not going to stop trying to fight until she’s physically unable to do so.

Emory seems to be on the same wavelength. She’s winded, too slow to react when he shoves a needle in her neck. She latches onto his wrist with a snarl, but the drug works fast, making her fall limp before she can do anything more.

“That’ll keep her down for a while.” Emory frowns, rubbing where she’d grabbed him, and Mike steps in to bind her hands. “We need to get back above ground.”

“What did you do to her?” Eren storms up on Levi’s side, all dark clouds and rumbling thunder, fixing Emory with a scowl. 

Emory sneers at him, and Levi answers before something disdainful can come out of the other’s mouth and make Levi reconsider not breaking bones earlier. Really, he’s doing the man a favor. “She’s fine.” He gives the MP a look that hopefully communicates to take a fucking hike, and Levi waits until he does to turn his attention back on Eren. “She’s just sedated.”

Eren’s features pinch, not quite a grimace, but a distant relative all the same. Something aggravated tightens the skin around his eyes and mouth. “I’m sorry about—that. Her.” Contrary to the look on his face, he almost sounds embarrassed. “She’s—” His expression draws in on itself even further, “protective.”

“She your alpha?” There’s no bite on Eren’s neck, and he’s obviously bothered by her behavior, but it would explain it—if she felt like she had claim to him.

Transactional bonds had been common things in the Underground in Levi’s time. An omega agreeing to bear the mark of an alpha, to fulfill their needs, in exchange for the protection and means of living an alpha can provide.

The perfect slope of Eren’s nose wrinkles, and his eyebrows scrunch, caught somewhere between indignation and disgust. “No.” It’s a little funny, what Eren’s face is doing. He’s starting to look almost nauseous, but Levi supposes that could be the blood loss. “She—no. Mikasa’s family.”

Moving his gaze forward again, Levi hms his acknowledgement, even as more questions take shape in his mouth and bump up against his teeth. He doesn’t need to know any more about Eren. It doesn’t matter. After turning him over to the Military Police, Levi will never see him again.

The sky has softened to a deep blue by the time they make it back to the surface, the crescent shape of the moon already beginning to fade. They’d only been below ground for a few hours, but Levi still squints into the fresh daylight as they leave the stairway tunnel.

At this hour, the Interior is quiet. The two Military Police carriages that had brought them here sit nearby, and the horses manage to be the noisiest thing in the nascent morning, nickering and scuffing their hooves on the cobblestone. Down the street, a lamplighter is in the process of extinguishing the standing lantern posts. 

The MPs standing guard at the Underground gate are different than the ones who’d been on duty when they went in, and Levi ignores the looks they give him as he turns back to wait for Eren, who has stopped a few stairs short of the tunnel entrance.

Levi watches him climb the rest of the way, watches his eyes adjust as he steps out of the dark, watches him look up at the lightening sky. The expression that works its way across Eren’s face just then is like a sunrise itself—the way it builds slowly, all the tension and exhaustion smoothed away to reveal the awe glowing at the crests of his cheekbones. 

A breeze takes advantage of the sleeping city capital, playing in the streets uninterrupted. Eren lets his eyes fall shut, and Levi can see his chest move when he breathes in.

(For a moment, nonsensical and impossible, Levi has a vision of what Eren might look like outside the Walls. Skin bronzed by the summer sun, painted in the dappled light of the Forest of Giant Trees, wild wind turning his hair a mess as he rides through the southern grassy plains. Would Eren notice? The difference in the air out there?)

A carriage door slams shut. Levi glances over at where they’re parked and sees Mike is the last one still standing outside. Right. Shit to be done, and all that.

As much as he’d like to let Eren enjoy the surface, that was never going to be an option.

Unlike the city that it lives in, the Central Branch HQ is already coming awake with trained efficiency. The Military Police posted on either side of the ornate front gate clear their carriages to enter without the usual fuss of questions or checking their identification books, and the door is opened from the outside as soon as they come to a stop in the courtyard.

The grounds beyond are bustling with personnel—groups of patrol units assembling before their commanding officers, wagons of supplies being moved from one place to another, soldiers on their way to the mess hall for their morning meal, or maybe training.

Across from him, Eren’s out of it. The adrenaline crash had seemed to hit him all at once the moment he’d dropped himself down onto the cushioned seat of the carriage, leaving enough room for exhaustion to finally sink its fingers in. Somewhere between the Underground entrance and here, the kid has ended up slumped against the window, eyes at half-mast as if he could pass out at any moment. His skin is ashen, and Levi can see the sheen of perspiration at his hairline.

The carriage creaks around them when Ymir stands and moves to lean halfway out of the open door, bracing her hands on the inside walls for balance. “Oi!” Multiple heads whip in their direction. “We could use some help over here!”

Eren’s dark-haired companion (what had he called her?) is still unconscious, her upper body lying sideways across the vacated space of cushion where Ymir had been sitting. With some careful maneuvering, Levi and Mike get her out of the carriage and into the hands of the soldiers who’d brought out medical carriers.

Mike exits after and pauses by the door, but Levi waves him on ahead. It’ll be easier to handle Eren by himself.

Over time, Levi has learned there are advantages to being a smaller man. It makes people underestimate him, for one thing, and in the Underground, he could fit easily into places that larger men couldn’t, for another. Eren, however, is all fucking limb.

He doesn’t react when Levi bends down and puts him over his shoulder like a sack of flour, the easiest way to carry him without bumping against everything. He keeps one arm around Eren’s back and uses the other to steady himself as he steps down out of the carriage.

The medical staff buzz around him like insects. “I’ve got him,” he says, sharper than he’d meant to be, when one of them gets close and reaches for Eren.

He walks over to the medical carrier, putting both of his arms around Eren now to sit him down and shift his body to lay back. Kid’s completely out.

One of the soldiers approaches his side hesitantly, tilting her head into his line of sight. “Do you intend to mate him?” she asks in the guileless way a child might, her eyes glancing expectantly from him to Eren. Levi stares at her, wondering where the fuck she got that idea from. 

“Linnea,” another of the medical staff hisses, taking hold of the handles on the other side of Eren’s carrier. He grimaces apologetically at Levi.

Whatever Levi’s face is doing makes the girl start in place, squeaking out a flustered ah sound. “F-Forgive me, Captain Levi. That was intrusive, wasn’t it? You just—” she catches the wide-eyed look her colleague is giving her and ducks her head. “Never mind.” 

“Apologies, Captain,” the man says in the following moment. “We’ll take it from here.”

Levi doesn’t realize his own fingers are curled in the handles of the medical carrier until the two of them try to push it and are held in place by his grip. He lets go in an instant—and feels all the more fucking ridiculous for it.

The med soldiers look at each other and then at him. “Captain?” The girl questions, brows furrowed.

“Go on,” Levi says, terse. He can’t explain the roil of discomfort in his chest as he watches them wheel Eren inside, leaving him to stare at the architecture in front of him. 

The Central Branch Headquarters is the seat of Zackley’s administration, and acts as a base for the First Squad of MPs who take orders directly from the Crown. The place is as proud as anything else in this part of the Wall, the spires of the main building reaching into the rose-flushed sky, gold glinting off the tall, elegant windows.

“Captain Levi,” a woman’s voice says from behind him, and he presses his lips tighter together at the sigh that wants to escape as he turns to find the owner of it standing beside their carriage.

She approaches at his attention, hands folded in front of her. “Welcome back to HQ.” Her hair is a deep red color, glossy and long, tucked neatly behind her ears at the front, and her eyes are a dark enough blue that they almost look purple. She’s dressed in her formalwear, the insignia of a shield adorning the breast pocket of her green longcoat. “Cornelia Frei. Central Command aide.”

Despite technically being of higher rank by nature of being part of Zackley’s command, she still bows slightly at the waist. 

Etiquette and proprietary are standard around here, but Levi has no use for pleasantries at this current moment. “Is Erwin here?”

“Commander Erwin is enroute. He’s expected to arrive by nightfall, according to the last courier we received,” she answers. “In the meantime, please report to the meeting hall with your squad for debriefing, Captain. The Commander-in-Chief is eager to hear your reports.”

Annoyance twitches between his brows. “I’m not doing anything until I’ve been shown to a bath. Apologize to Zackley for me.” His voice is frigid enough that his breath must come out white. For two days straight he’s been washing his ass with creek water cold enough to shrivel his balls and a bar of soap he’s kept stored in wax paper. Nothing short of that Colossal shit stain kicking in the Wall is going to keep him from bathing. “Unless you want to sit in a room with a guy that stinks of the rot beneath the ground we’re standing on.”

Cornelia’s eyelashes do a rapid sort of flutter. “O-Of course, Captain. I should’ve—I apologize for my oversight.” She lifts her chin a bit and smooths a hand over one of the lapels on her coat that’s already lying perfectly flat. “I’ll have someone show you to your accommodations right away.” Looking past him, she promptly raises an arm to snap her fingers. “Clemens!”

Given where he is, there’s not much to be done for it, but Levi’s damn tired of MPs. Clemens trots over from god knows where like a good little dog who’s been called by its owner. Anxiety turns his herbal scent into something stale as he leads Levi inside. They stop in the reception area for a key before continuing further into the building, and Levi pretends not to notice the nervous glances the cadet sneaks at him for both their sakes.

The room he’s taken to isn’t really a room at all, but an officer’s suite on the third floor, tucked away in its own hallway. Clemens unlocks the door for him, fingers fumbling a little with the key, before he turns to Levi and holds it out to him by the leather loop. 

Levi takes it with an inflectionless, “Thanks.”

“Captain.” Clemens salutes him. The rattle of his blade boxes echoes between the walls as he walks back down the hallway.  

The door to the suite has weight to it, made from quality wood, and the hinges make no sound of protest when Levi pushes it open to reveal the parlor. He’d expected the dark mahogany furnishings of Trost and Stohess, but this room is the opposite, all soft colors and natural light brought in by the long windows on the opposite wall.

There are sitting areas on either side of the room. To the left, a sofa and chaise arranged in front of an ornate marble fireplace that’s tucked between two wide bookcases. To the right, a glass-top table and silver chairs set up beside a kitchenette.

Years ago, he would’ve had to go great lengths to get into a place like this—sneaking up to the surface, scaling buildings and crawling through vents, slipping into a servant entrance, a left-open window.

Now he’s being escorted to the seat of luxury and handed the keys. He lets himself take some amusement in the irony as he sheds his uniform jacket, hooking it over one of the curling arms of the coat rack beside the door.

He takes off his boots too, and his steps are soundless against the thick carpet as heads for the bedroom door. The color scheme matches the parlor, and the canopy bed dominates the room itself, adorned with a plush duvet and piled in pillows.

Levi admittedly doesn’t pay attention to much else. He has a singular goal in mind.

He detaches his blade boxes and gas cannisters, placing them down on the tufted storage bench at the end of the bed. He works through the buckles of his harness next, quick and precise, and gets out of the straps in record time, leaving them in a heap next to the rest of his gear.

He opens the bathroom door and stops.

It’s as big as the two other rooms, bigger than one person could possibly know what to do with really, but Levi’s in no state to complain. Everything is white—the wall tiles, the bathtub, the countertop, the floor—and every surface either shines or sparkles. It smells like the vase of fresh-cut flowers sitting on the counter between two sinks, and beneath that, the unmistakable citrus of cleaning solution.

Behind the shower curtain resides the most unnecessarily tuned-up bathtub he will likely ever see in his life. It’s made up of an excessive amount of shiny brass pipes and faucets, and Levi experiments with the different taps until there’s warm water filling the basin.

There’s an assortment of small glass tubes of different colored liquids on the counter, organized neatly in a wooden holder alongside the vase of flowers. Levi picks one at random and dumps it into the water before raiding the cabinets and closet for washing supplies. 

He strips out of his uniform, dropping the pieces of it into the basket beside the door before climbing into the tub. The noise he makes upon sinking into the aroma-scented water has not even a shred of dignity in it.

He’s never bought into all the shit the Wall Cultists are always spouting, but if there is a heaven beyond this shitty world, Levi doesn’t know how it could be better than this.

After he’s soaked most of the stiffness from his muscles and scrubbed himself pink, he rummages through the bedroom wardrobe for clean clothes. The gray button-up and black trousers he dresses in are a little long, but they’ll have to do. He puts his gear back on but doesn’t bother with his jacket, leaving it on the coat rack.

He figures he’s let dear old Zackley stew enough. 

Cornelia is waiting in the hallway when he steps out of the suite. She’s standing beside the door, her posture just as straight as it had been in the courtyard earlier.

“Captain Levi,” she greets. Her scent is cloying here, tart like a berry, a nuisance in the same way her presence is. His alpha rumbles its discontent; Levi shuts it up with a metaphorical boot to the neck. Even for something so small, he won’t give it an inch. “Please allow me to escort you to the debriefing.” 

His eyes narrow. 

Hallways like this one had been designed with its suite occupant’s privacy in mind, so there are no windows, and the wall sconces offer only the dimmest of glows. The shadows they leave feel as if they’re shaping themselves around Levi when he speaks. “Was it Zackley, or Nile,” he says, mouth full of Underground rot, “that asked you to keep tabs on me?”

Cornelia’s scent flinches and withdraws, but her features maintain their calm professionalism, an improvement from their previous interaction. Levi supposes she wouldn’t be in her position if she were so easy to trip up; if he hadn’t known Erwin for so long, he’d find her unblinking composure fucking creepy.

“With all due respect, I’m afraid you have the wrong impression here, Captain Levi.” He begs to differ. “It simply wouldn’t be proper etiquette if such a decorated officer were made to find their own way, even if they are perfectly capable of doing so.”  

She speaks the language of politics fluently, using so many words without actually saying shit.

Levi can’t fucking stand it, but he swallows the acid bubbling on his tongue for Erwin’s sake—conscious of the fact that this is not a squad leader or recruit he’s dealing with—and follows Cornelia to the meeting hall.

The debriefing takes hours, and every minute of it is utterly tedious. Zackley’s not present, and Levi didn’t expect him to be. Levi’s hope is that he got tired of waiting. But even in the absence of the Commander-in-Chief, the Central Branch soldiers are thorough, and squeeze him, Ymir, Mike, and the three MPs for every last detail of the operation.

When it concludes, Levi walks up to the long table of Zackley’s minions at the front of the room. “How is Eren?” he asks one of them, and ignores Cornelia watching him from her seat. The soldier he’d spoken to looks at Levi blanky in response, and he can feel his own expression darken when he has to elaborate. “The omega we found.”

“Oh.” He’s younger than the others, had been taking the meeting notes, and Levi takes a little vindictive satisfaction in the embarrassed flush on his face. “He hasn’t woken up yet, Captain. The infirmary will notify us when he’s well enough to make a statement.”

Levi will probably be gone by the time that happens. 

Pushing any thoughts of seeing the kid to the back of his mind, he grabs dinner with Mike and Ymir. The dining hall is as needlessly decorated as the rest of the headquarters, from the richly colored wood floor to the fancy light fixtures and candle holders on the walls and ceiling. Velvet-like covers are laid over the tables, and banners displaying the emblem of a shield are hung up everywhere.

They’re served roasted chicken and fresh vegetables and thick, grainy bread, a meal most people inside the Walls—and underneath them—will never see in their lifetime. It’s a privilege he tries to savor, but it tastes like ash on his tongue, anyway.

It’s late into the nighttime when Erwin finally makes his appearance.

Levi takes to sleeping about as well as a cat to water, so he’s still awake. He’s lounging on the sofa in front of the fire, paging through a book to keep himself entertained, when the sharp knock and muffled call of his name comes.

He swings his feet onto the floor and abandons the book on the cushions to all but yank the door off its hinges. “About time.” He’s willing to admit he’s going a little stir crazy—he never imagined it’d be possible to feel so suffocated in a place so fucking big. He steps aside to let Erwin enter. “Make a stop at a bath house or something?”

Erwin takes his sweet time answering as he examines the suite parlor. Levi puts a hand on his hip and experiences the strangest urge to tap his foot. The foot stays still. He does not fidget.

“I had to meet with Zackley concerning our remunerations,” Erwin finally says, turning to face Levi once his curiosity’s been sated, “and the omega you brought back with you.”

The way Erwin says the omega is distinctly different than how the MPs have said it. There’s nothing demeaning attached to it, nothing condescending.

The muscles in Levi’s jaw tighten, anyway. “Eren,” he says, low and pointed. Because it’s one thing for jackass interior officials to continuously disregard Eren’s personhood—like hell is he about to let Erwin do it, too.

Levi had grown up in a place where omegas are treated not as human beings, but like things. Commodities to be sold and traded, passed around and used, only protected in relation to what they could give in return. Eren’s run-in with that alpha is probably just a fraction of the horrors he’s had to deal with.

No matter how progressive the surface has become in recent years, there are still smallminded people that hold to archaic beliefs, that see omegas as less than. Erwin’s supposed to be better than that.

A master at reading the room—and Levi—Erwin understands his misstep immediately. “Yes—Eren,” he says agreeably, an unspoken apology. His expression shifts, just slightly, and he watches Levi’s face with keen attention. “I meant no offense.”

Levi folds his arms and moves the conversation along. “What’s the verdict?”

Erwin doesn’t speak for a moment, eyes still watchful—watching for Levi’s reactions, he realizes, as micro as they are, but why—

“Eren Jaeger has been pardoned,” Erwin says. Jaeger sticks in Levi’s brain, familiar. “By Her Majesty Queen Frieda Reiss.” Fucking sure. Pardoned by the Queen—why the hell not? He’s heard crazier things. Erwin continues when Levi says nothing. “Eren is a citizen.” He produces a rolled document from the inside of his cloak and holds it out to Levi. “He is therefore protected by Historia’s Law.”

(The face of Historia Reiss had once been on the front page of every newspaper in every District City. It’d been a royal scandal like none other—an illegitimate omega daughter, born of a king’s affair with a servant, sold to a brothel after her mother had been murdered to cover it up years and years before—and the final nail in Rod Reiss’s coffin.

The King had been assassinated shortly after Historia had been recognized as a royal family member. Despite the killer being caught, there are still some that speculate it was carried out by the illegitimate princess herself.

After Frieda’s coronation, knowing the way her youngest sister had been forced to live, the first thing she’d done was pass Historia’s Law as a way to protect omegas who commit certain acts under duress.)

Levi takes the document. He sets the twine cord down on the small entry table, sized exactly to fit a vase of pale lilies, and unrolls the parchment. It’s discolored with age, and the edges are frayed, curling inward, but the faded ink is still legible.

Even so, it takes him a moment to understand what he’s looking at. It’s a certificate of birth.

THE CAPITAL CITY OF MITRAS is written in fancy, bold-lettered script across the top. Eren’s name is listed, the clinic he’d apparently been born at, and his date of birth: 30 March 835. Making Eren sixteen, as of roughly a month ago. Younger than Levi thought, but still older than most omegas live to see in the Underground.

The certificate is stamped and signed by a member of the city registrar. The name Carla Rosenblum sits in elegant penmanship on the line for the mother. The same signature occupies both the father and the practitioner line. “Grisha Jaeger,” he reads aloud. Jaeger… “He’s the doctor who cured that plague in Shiganshina.”

“Indeed,” Erwin says. “Zackley’s men tracked down the registrar that signed it—according to him, Eren’s mother gave birth at Grisha’s private clinic here in the capital, but there’s no record of a Carla Rosenblum anywhere above ground.”

“Just because he signed his name doesn’t mean he’s Eren’s father.”

“No,” Erwin agrees. “However, Grisha Jaeger is a highly respected name in the medical field and in the Interior Cities—both the nobility and the common folk herald him as a miracle-worker. To smuggle a woman up from the Underground and illegally deliver her baby at his own clinic would’ve been a death sentence had anyone found out the truth. Even if Grisha had a heart of gold, I hardly believe he’d risk his life for a baby that wasn’t his, and a woman he didn’t love.” 

He sees Eren in his memory, pale and bloody and shaking, feels the phantom touch of the kid in his arms, pressed against him for comfort. The anger Levi feels is a cold, old thing. “He left them.” Grisha Jaeger is fortunate he’s already a dead man.

“Carla isn’t a citizen, Levi,” Erwin says, ever tempered, perpetually rational, and it grates on Levi in a way it normally doesn’t. “Even if he could’ve hidden them, all secrets are revealed in due time, and they all would’ve faced punishment.”

Leaving them in the Underground is the same as a death sentence. Grisha abandoned his family to rot and called it protection.

He finds himself wondering if Eren’s mother had worked in a brothel. She must have. There aren’t many ways for an Underground woman to meet a high society doctor like Grisha.

“The girl with him is named Mikasa Ackerman,” Erwin says into the frostbitten silence Levi had left, and Levi’s eyes snap to him. Ackerman. Ackerman. Huh. That actually explains a few things. “She was also born on the surface, and her family lived in Wall Maria. It’s unclear how they ended up below ground, but I suspect it’s due to the old regime’s persecution.” Erwin’s brow raises. “Do you know your relation to her?”

From what he understands of Kenny’s stories, back in the time of the First King of the Walls, the Ackerman Clan had been abundant and far-reaching, a special warrior breed said to have been created by the King’s power, dutybound to protect the royal bloodline. 

It’s highly likely Levi and that girl come from completely separate branching families, and he doesn’t care to know anything more. She’s the very least of his concerns right now.

“It’s not a close one,” he answers. If it was, he would’ve recognized the connection instantly. He rolls Eren’s birth certificate back up and grabs the twine to tie it in place. “How did you find this?”

“I didn’t.” Erwin accepts both the certificate and the subject change, returning the former to the inside of his cloak. “The Queen’s spymaster is the one who recovered it. It seems Her Majesty is keeping her ear to the ground.”

Rumor says the Queen’s spymaster—not an official title, at the time—is how she’d found Historia Reiss.

Levi thinks of that redheaded aide that’s been up his ass. He knew she was full of shit. Zackley’s been keeping an eye on him, likely Ymir and Mike too, just as Frieda Reiss has her intelligence officer watching Zackley himself.

It’s the job of the Commander-in-Chief to report military affairs to the Queen. Does she not trust him? Or is her spymaster meant to watch the streets, and the military just got caught up in it?

Erwin doesn’t seem concerned, or at least he isn’t voicing it yet. “Now, for tonight’s next order of business,” he says. “I need to speak with Eren Jaeger. I’m glad it seems I won’t have to convince you to join me.”

The infirmary block smells the same as every other one Levi’s ever been in—a nauseating fusion of chemical disinfectant and sour pheromones. There’s no one in the lantern-lit waiting room aside from the young man organizing paperwork behind the counter when he and Erwin walk in, but Levi has doubts that the late hour is to blame.

The clerk pauses in his movements when he notices them, pushing his glasses back into place from where they’d slid down the bridge of his nose. “Good evening, sirs.” The glow of the oil lamp sitting on the counter creates a slight glare on the lenses, making it hard to see his eyes. “How can I help you?”

The jacket he wears is the standard military-issue, but the insignia on his left breast pocket is a snake entwined around a winged pole, designating him as medically trained.

No identifiable scent reaches Levi’s nose, but it’s commonplace for medical staff to take blockers or wear patches—both ridiculously costly if not provided by the government. 

“Evening,” Erwin responds pleasantly. “We’re here to see Eren Jaeger.”

The office door behind the counter opens from the inside before the clerk has a chance to respond, and a woman wearing a long white coat steps out. Her ash-blond hair is woven through with glinting threads of silver, pulled back and away from angled cheekbones.

“Commander Erwin. Captain Levi.” Her voice is as stern as her features. “I’m Doctor Helena Hartvigsen. Nile told me you’d be coming.” The clerk resumes his work, and Helena comes out from behind the counter. “Please, follow me.”

(“What if the kid says no?” Levi had asked minutes prior when they’d been cutting across the grounds. “What’s the alternative?” 

Erwin had nodded to a patrolling soldier passing by before replying. “He’ll become a ward of the government until he proves he can not only integrate with society, but also meaningfully contribute to it.”

“He can’t join the Garrison?” 

“The brass feels the Survey Corps will be the best place for him,” Erwin says. “The Garrison has more soldiers than they know what to do with, and we need as many bodies as we can get. After two years he’ll be permitted to transfer regiments just like any other soldier.” 

Most Survey Corps recruits don’t last more than a few months, let alone two years.)

Helena leads them down a long hallway of doors set between glowing sconces. “Jaeger was moved out of urgent care in short order this morning after he was treated. He’s quite the resilient one, but we’ll need to monitor him for the next couple of days. It’ll be a miracle if he doesn’t get an infection.”

“What of Mikasa Ackerman?” Erwin asks.

The force of the indignant noise the doc makes bounces itself down the length of the hall and back. “That demon of a girl should thank her lucky stars she’s not in a holding cell after the fuss she put up,” she says. “She tried to run the moment she was lucid—nearly took out the eye of my best nurse. We had to sedate her again, with double the dosage, her body adapted that quickly.”

Definitely an awakened Ackerman, but Levi had already known that in hindsight from fighting her. He’s slightly bitter about the fact that he’s in no place to judge her feral beast act—he’d been like that once, too.

Helena stops outside a door on the lefthand side. “This is the one.” She already has the doorknob in one hand when she gives a short knock with the other, bringing her ear close to the wood. “Eren? It’s the doctor. I’m coming in.”

She pushes open the door, and Levi isn’t prepared for the way the scent inside the room hits him like a precision strike to the ribs.

It’s spring bursting in his senses, tastes like rainwater and fresh blossoms on his tongue, rose and cherry and apple and dozens of others all at once. His body reacts in the same way it had when Eren had latched onto him in the Underground, his motor movement stalled and his brain feeling like damp tinder that won’t catch a spark.

It occurs to him belatedly, stupidly, that this is Eren’s scent.

Before, when he’d been covered in mud and blood and any manner of Underground filth, stinking of distress, there’d been no room for his true scent to breathe.

Fucking hell.

“Eren Jaeger, do you know the meaning of bedrest?” Helena’s voice reaches him through the slowly dissipating fog inside his skull. “It’s the middle of the night.”

She’s blocking his view of Eren where she’s stopped just inside the doorway, hands on her hips, so Levi can only hear his response. “I’ve been sleeping all day. I feel fine, Hartvigsen-sensei.” His voice sounds lighter, unexpectedly polite for a sewer kid.

“That is because you’ve been pumped full of morphine, young man.”

Levi sends a sideways glance at Erwin. His face wears the same composed expression as always, so he’s either unaffected by Eren’s scent or he’s hiding it. With Erwin’s disposition, Levi will never be able to say with certainty which one it is.

“You have visitors,” Helena says next, and steps to the side to let him and Erwin enter the room.

It’s what you’d expect from an infirmary—small and plain and minimally furnished. There’s a bed with rumpled covers in the corner of the room, an accompanying nightstand, and a wardrobe on the opposite wall, probably filled with supplies for the staff to use rather than clothing.

Eren’s sitting at the room’s bay window, surrounded by thick throw pillows. He has one long leg pulled up on the cushioned seat and the other hanging off it, socked foot barely brushing the hardwood floor.

“Levi,” he says, his entire demeanor brightening in the space of a second, and then, a little softer, “it is you.” He’d likely caught Levi’s scent the second the door opened, familiar enough with how he smells after spending however long with his face pressed to the gland on Levi’s neck.

He’s dressed in new clothes similar to the ones Levi’s wearing, a simple white button-up and dark pants that he doesn’t quite fill out the way he should. The left sleeve of the shirt has been rolled up for easy access to his injured arm, now wrapped in bandages. Both the scrape on his cheek and the ripped-open skin at his collarbone are also covered with a small bandage. 

Levi walks closer, Erwin following behind. He concentrates on his breathing, on inhaling and exhaling in even measure—Eren’s scent is so heady.

Once the entire width of the room is no longer between them, he settles his weight to one side and rests a hand on his hip, ignoring the pink on Eren’s cheeks in favor of looking him over. “How are you feeling?”

The glow of the wall-mounted candles gives Eren’s skin a warmer tone than Levi knows it to have, and it gleams gold along the length of his eyelashes each time he blinks. “I’m better, thanks.” A smile tries to lift one side of Eren’s mouth, but it falls just as soon, just as his gaze does. “I’m sorry about—before.”

The end of the long bandage wound around his arm has come loose and lifted a little at the wrist, and Eren watches his own fingers fiddle with it, and Levi watches him, trying to parse from his face what the hell he thinks he has to be sorry for. “Before?” he prompts, when no answer makes itself apparent.

“Um, underground.” The color on Eren’s cheeks deepens to a proper red, and he dips his chin further as if he can feel it happening, and Levi is still no closer to understanding what he’s trying to say. “When I—it was selfish. You shouldn’t’ve had to—” the blooming spring of his scent wilts to something dry and stale, and it seems to curl up around him in embarrassment when he says, “soothe me. You don’t even know me.” 

Levi doesn’t need Erwin to be in his line of sight to picture the way his brows are raising in a rare form of surprise, however mild it may be.

“Don’t be stupid.”

Eren continues to talk like it had been some kind of burden on Levi’s part. “I’m not usually like—” his expression pinches, “that.” 

“Eren.” Levi lowers himself to one knee—a gesture of deference that probably has their predecessors rolling in their bug-infested graves as they speak—and it’s enough to startle Eren into meeting his eyes. Well, Levi thinks as he drinks in Eren’s wide-eyed look, something close to awe softening his initial surprise, they can kiss his ass. “There’s nothing wrong with the way you were, and I didn’t mind giving you what you needed. What happened down there was because of someone else’s shitty behavior, and that isn’t yours to carry. So get over it.”

Eren stares at him, and his eyes really are fucking ridiculous, you know? They’re luminous in the candlelight, a color Levi can’t name—doesn’t have a point of reference for. Any kind of woodland or foliage is too dull to even compare. Green just doesn’t feel like enough.

His scent opens back up around him like flower petals, unfurling beneath the coax of the spring sun’s gentle fingers, and Levi feels the caress of it on his cheek like a physical touch. Eren’s face has gone even softer, somehow, and it’s—it’s…

Levi doesn’t fucking have words for what it is.

The anger Eren had worn in that alley in the Underground had shaped every part of his face in its image. It had pulled his brow into a furrow deep enough to darken his eyes, had pulled the skin of his cheeks tight across the bone, had dragged his mouth into a snarl. A kid who can pull off the expression of a feral street mutt has no business looking like this, looking at Levi like he’s some kind of—of wonder, or something as equally ill-fitting. No business at fucking all.

Eren is—he’s impossibly pretty, impossible not to notice. Especially like this, with his dark hair messy from sleep and his eyes glowing like they are and the candlelight on his skin, but even before, in the Underground, Levi had noticed and strangled the thought into silence.

He doesn’t know why acknowledging it unsettles him like it does.

(“Me and you, runt,” Kenny had said to him once, just a few days after he’d presented, “we’re not like other alphas.” They’d been sitting at their usual table, at the usual bar Kenny took him to for meals, one of the many places neither of them had known would someday be left empty and forgotten by humanity.

Kenny had been using the sharpest point of his curved knife to pick bits of food from between his teeth. He’d pause every now and then to hold it out in front of him and turn it to see his own face reflected in the shiny metal before continuing. Levi had still been in the process of adjusting to his newly heightened senses at the time, struggling with a near-constant headache from the sheer amount of sensory input firing along his neurons, and his gums had been sore where his canines had become longer and sharper during his rut.

The noise from the bar hadn’t been any help.

“The stuff we’re made of,” Kenny had went on, “it makes us stronger. Meaner. Faster. Gives us more control over what we are, more resistant to our…baser nature. All the shit you’re feeling right now will pass soon enough.”

He’d turned his head to look at Levi then, and the grin he’d worn had been like a slash across his face, “We’re the kind of alphas that could make a king bow.”)

The stuff we’re made of. Levi hadn’t known what Kenny had meant by that at the time—it wouldn’t be until later that he’d tell Levi about the Ackerman Clan history. Not that it matters. His uncle and his ancestors are full of shit anyway.

It’s the truth that he’s stronger, his senses sharper, his alpha more dominant, but when it comes to mating cycles, he’d been just like any other. The weakest he’d ever felt had been during his ruts. What’s the point of strength if he has no control?

Levi has always kept his instincts on a tight leash, but around Eren, it feels like it’s slipping out of his grasp.

He swallows around the dryness in his throat. 

When Eren finally speaks, it’s like the world comes back into focus, expanding the scope of it beyond him. Levi concentrates on the feeling of the hardwood digging into his knee, the winter chill of Erwin’s scent in his nose, tempering the fragrance of Eren’s spring. “Okay,” is what Eren says, quiet and careful, like he’s placing something precious into Levi’s hands.

Unaware of anything currently happening inside Levi’s body, Eren moves on to say next, “You’re a…captain?” Even as his tongue hesitates over the word, there’s an amused curve to Eren’s lips, a little lilt to his voice. “The soldiers you were with called you that, in the Underground.”

“Mm,” is all the sound Levi can force through his windpipe. By all rights, it’s pathetic. Kenny would be wheezing with laughter if the bastard could see him now.

“I couldn’t really see it, you know—at first. The way you fight and—you didn’t seem nervous at all, being down there.” For a second, he thinks Eren’s figured it out. “But when you talk like that, I get it.” Mirth shimmers over him like misting rain. Not quite, then. Maybe he just thinks Levi’s from an Interior slum.

“Fuck off,” comes out automatically once Levi’s processed what Eren said, and it manages to kickstart some brain capacity, because that is the response cheeky little shits deserve, but it’s far too mild to do anything but flutter harmlessly to the floor between them.

Eren laughs. Levi’s stomach turns over on itself. 

He’s turned his body toward Levi now, both legs hanging off the seat, the heels of his hands braced on the cushion as he leans forward. He tilts his head, strands of brown hair falling across his forehead, the remnants of his laughter lingering at the corners of his mouth. He is irritatingly pretty. “Are military captains allowed to use that kind of language?”

“It certainly isn’t encouraged.” Eren’s expression flinches at the sound of Erwin’s voice, any trace of humor drying up and crumbling right off his face as his attention shifts away from Levi for the first time. “But Captain Levi is quite unique.”

Erwin doesn’t have the same innate sense of presence that Kenny and Levi both possess, the kind that could change the atmosphere of a room just by walking into it, but the way he carries himself creates a similar effect.

Eren seems to fold in on himself, his entire disposition shrinking, and Levi knows it’s time to create distance when he has to clench his jaw around a sound that he has no right to make. He rises to stand beside Erwin, crossing his arms. 

“Hello, Eren.” To the untrained ear, the warmth in Erwin’s voice could pass for genuine, but Levi’s heard it enough not to be fooled. The practiced nature of it doesn’t make it any less effective however, because Eren’s shoulders lower a little from where they’d been creeping up to his ears. “I’m Erwin Smith, Commander of the Survey Corps, and I see you’re already acquainted with Captain Levi, here.” Eren’s eyes dart between them. “We’ve come to ask about your intentions.”

Eren looks bewildered, eyebrows dipping. “My—intentions?”

“I take it no one’s informed you of the situation you’re in.”

“No,” Eren says, “no one’s told me anything.” His tone is one Levi hasn’t heard him use yet. The bounce he’d spoken to Levi with has dropped into something flat. Not cold, but—guarded. “I really have been sleeping all day.”

Erwin hums. The expression on his face makes it look like he’s contemplating where to start, but once again, Levi knows better. Erwin doesn’t have conversations, he orchestrates them. “Did you know the Underground isn’t your true birthplace?”

Amusingly enough, the kid regards Erwin like he’s not right in the head. “What?”

Erwin tells him everything. About his mother, about Grisha Jaeger, about his choice between joining the Survey Corps or letting the government provide him with a means of living. Watching Eren’s expression is like watching cloud cover move to block the sun.

He’s scowling by the time Erwin’s done talking. “Why would you even want me?” His eyes are narrowed at the floor. “I’m no soldier, Commander.” Despite how his word choice should sound, there’s nothing self-deprecating about the way Eren says them. Instead, it’s a statement dripping with distaste so thick Levi can almost see it drop to the hardwood in globs.

Erwin ignores it. He’s convinced more powerful people than Eren of their worth, after all. “The Survey Corps is always looking for brave and talented people to join the fight against the Titans, and the ones who do decide to dedicate their hearts often come from all kinds of backgrounds. Entry can be a bit more unconventional than other branches, in that respect, so don’t worry. All you’ll need is some proper training. You should know, however, that half of new recruits don’t make it back from their first expedition outside the Walls. But those who do return go on to become superior soldiers with a high survival rate.” 

Eren’s knuckles are white where he’s still gripping onto the edge of the window seat. “And what about the ones who don’t come back?” he says, his voice low. “Like all those people who were forced outside the Walls a few years ago.” When he looks up, his eyes are bright, burning from the inside. “Are those the words of empty praise you used to comfort them?”

Even though Eren doesn’t direct it at Levi, the accusation jabs at something he hadn’t even known was as vulnerable as it is.

Erwin’s face is as unmoved as stone, but he doesn’t say anything for a long enough moment that Levi knows he’d been taken off guard, too. “That was a tragic day of great loss,” he says. “But more people would’ve died without their sacrifice. It was a great service to the remainder of humanity, and it won’t be forgotten. The beginning of our end has already started. Wall Maria’s been breached. The Colossal Titan kicked in the gate at Trost District just last year. Our enemies will keep trying, keeping driving us further inward until eventually there’s nothing left.”

“Humanity?” Eren sneers. Spring is in flames, forest and earth and wildflowers scorched in the heat of his emotion. “Your humanity has sentenced me and my mother and hundreds of other people to die, all because of where we were born.”

His face now is almost a replica of the one he’d been wearing in the Underground. Almost—but not quite. Because this isn’t the frenzied anger of a cornered, wounded animal. This is the quiet intensity of a different kind of anger, the kind that builds over a lifetime of injustice and suffered cruelties. The kind that’s left to fester and boil silently in the body because there’s nowhere else for it to go.

Well, it seems Eren’s found a place for it now.

“The nobles and the merchants and those crazy Wall worshippers and the stupid fucking Crown and all the other selfish bastards up here only thinking of themselves—they only care about what benefits them! They’re the reason completely innocent people were led out to the Titans like cattle to the slaughter. They’re the reason my mother is dead, the reason Mikasa’s parents are dead. I won’t do them a favor by throwing my life away for your fucking cause.” There’s enough venom in Eren’s voice to poison them with his words alone. “Eaten by monsters? For what they’ve done? Sounds like too kind of a fate to me.”

Erwin seems stunned into silence by the enormity of Eren’s rage. Levi can’t feel anything beyond grim understanding.

In the thick silence, the flicker-huff of the wall-mounted candles sounds loud. Eren’s chest is heaving, blazing stare fixed on Erwin. Tears glitter at the corner of his eyes.

“I understand.” Erwin places his words carefully at Eren’s feet, as if he’s the one who’d just given a verbal lashing to someone far above his station. “I’ll inform the Military Police Commander of your decision.” He turns without another word, cloak sweeping as he makes a succinct exit.

Levi is slow to follow, his feet and body beginning to turn away while his eyes refuse, but Eren won’t look at him. They can’t afford to waste any more time here.

So he gives Eren his back and forces his legs to move. There’s a pull, somewhere—inside of him, outside of him, gravity itself working against him. He can feel the individual movement of his legs, the weight of each step he takes across the space of the room, as if there are heavy chains wrapped around his ankles. He pauses at the threshold only long enough to feel stupid about it before crossing into the hallway at last.

The doctor closes the door after him. Levi had forgotten she was even there.

“Your dedication to your regiment is admirable, Commander,” she says. “But a boy who looks like that would be wasted as a soldier.”

“Perhaps,” Erwin says. They start back down the hallway. “But he’s spirited, and strong-willed. We could use more soldiers like that.”

Helena hums noncommittally. “I met Grisha Jaeger once, you know,” she says. “That child looks nothing like him. If I hadn’t performed the blood test myself, I wouldn’t’ve believed Eren is his son. His mother must’ve been stunning. The Central Branch stands to make a fortune off him—there’ll be wealthy alphas lining up outside headquarters for his hand.” Levi can’t help the way he bristles. Through all the politically correct speak Erwin had used, he’d known this was Eren’s future, but to hear it stated so plainly, without shame, triggers a violent instinct. “He’ll be well taken care of.”

They reach the waiting room, and the doctor bids them farewell before returning to her office behind the counter. The clerk’s goodnight follows them out the door.

“You’re upset,” Erwin says after several minutes of walking in silence, as if they’d brought it with them from that moment in Eren’s room.

Astute fucking observation. “Being made an accomplice to omega trafficking will do that.”

“Levi,” Erwin sounds caught between a reprimand and indulgence. “Eren is a ward of the government—”

“Hoh? My bad. Government sanctioned omega trafficking.”

“The options presented to him were more than reasonable, considering the circumstances. Eren is a citizen by technicality—he was raised in the Underground, and he’s killed a man,” Erwin says. “Queen Frieda’s pardoning of him has already caused waves among the aristocracy, no matter the legality of it. The public sees him as something dangerous and unknown; if he were released on his own devices, no one could say what the consequences may be.”

Valid reasoning, if Levi gave a fuck. 

“He’s being paid for, Erwin.” His lip curls enough that he can feel the night air brush against one of his sharp teeth. “He’s being forced to mate the highest bidder in exchange for something that should already be his by right, and I’m the reason he’s in this position.” 

“You did your duty and followed orders, Levi. His circumstances weren’t caused by you, alone,” Erwin says. “This is the hand that’s been dealt, and Eren made his choice.” The sympathy that eases the stern line of his brow feels hollow. “There’s nothing else for us to do.” 

(This is what will always rankle about Erwin: the value of any one person is determined only by how useful they can be. Levi had been deemed something worth fighting for. Eren had not.

There are dozens of reasons why Levi can’t let it go. Maybe it’s guilt. Maybe looking at Eren feels too much like looking at a past life. Maybe he just cares too much, is just as soft as Kenny always thought he was.

Maybe those are all just excuses.)

“You soothed him?” Erwin’s shift in topic has Levi glancing over at him. That same look from before is back, the analytical sharpness behind his eyes.

If Levi had the capacity to flush, he’s certain he would’ve. It’s not—fuck, it’s not like soothing is an act only reserved for lovers or bonded mates, or even something inherently intimate in general, but it is not something usually done between complete fucking strangers, and not something Levi does at all. Ever. Not even for Isabel, an omega who’d been family. Farlan had always been a natural at that kind of thing, anyway.

Levi knows what it looks like compounded with how he’s been acting. From Erwin’s perspective, the fact that he’d soothed Eren is something to be suspicious of, and he feels the need to say, “It’s not like that.” Not a lie, but only just. Because it doesn’t feel like the truth, either. Levi doesn’t know what it’s like.

Erwin stops to face him outside the double-doored entrance of the main building. “It wasn’t my intention to imply anything, Levi. I was more so thinking that’s probably why you feel so…attached.” He chooses that last word with care, and delivers it just as delicately. “You provided comfort to a young omega when he was vulnerable. It’s natural that you feel protective of him, or even responsible for his wellbeing. The impulses will wear off.”

The most obvious explanation, the kind of basic shit they teach in the Training Corps, and Levi had been too caught up in his own hang-ups to realize it. 

Instincts. That’s all it is.

“It’s late,” Erwin says, “and you’ve had a long day. You should get some rest.”

It’s a courtesy, really. Not making Levi say anything else.

It had been a long day, by all rights, and a long night before that, but sleep still doesn’t find him. He lies awake in the massive bed of his suite, body sunk firmly into the layers of blankets and various pillows, staring at the sheer drape of the curtains over the frame above him, he made his choice bouncing around inside his skull, resonant in his ears like the toll of a bell.

(When he’d found Isabel on the outskirts of the Underground, she’d been half-dead, left alone to starve. Months later, after filling a space in their lives they hadn’t even known was vacant, Farlan would ask her, “Why didn’t you go to an alpha? I mean, I know it’s a lot—to make a commitment like that, but at least you’d have food and a place to stay. Protection.”

The three of them had been sitting around the small table in the main room of the house. Farlan and Isabel had been playing a game with a deck of cards that Isabel had swiped off a patrolling MP a few days prior, while Levi had been cleaning his knives.

“I don’t wanna survive like that.” Isabel had shaken her head, bangs and pigtails swishing with the motion, just as animated as the rest of her. “Letting some alpha put his teeth in me and treat me like property for a meal or a bed.” Her cheerfulness made it easy to forget she’d been through things just like the two of them, but it was times like these that they were reminded. “I’d rather die, knowin’ the choice was mine, than live with someone else’s leash around my neck.” She looked up from the cards in her hand. “That’s not really living, you know?”

And they did. They did know.)

Levi’s always believed in making the best choice you can with the information you have, but Eren doesn’t have enough of it.

The Royal Government praises the people who live in the District Cities as heroes, and Zackley’s men had done the same when they’d sent civilians out into Wall Maria. Erwin should’ve known an echo of that rhetoric wouldn’t work on Eren, who’d seen people die around him for no reason and learned that there is value to be found in simple human existence, just as Levi had.

Eren thinks being above ground means his freedom. He can’t see the Walls are just another cage.

Dawn sees Levi stride into Erwin’s temporary office on the second floor of the Central Branch HQ without so much as a knock, dressed in his freshly cleaned uniform. He ignores the chairs placed in front of the desk and stands there, arms folded. “I’m taking the kid out.”

Outside the windows behind Erwin, the sun hasn’t risen properly yet, but the clouds are tinged pink against a translucent blue sky.

Erwin finishes whatever he’s writing before he responds. “Where?”

“Trost.”

“Interesting place for an excursion—and far.” He sets down his ink pen and folds his hands on the desk, giving Levi his full attention. “We’re leaving tonight, Levi.”

“If Eren agrees to join the Survey Corps, I’ll bring him with me back to headquarters,” he says. “If he doesn’t, I’ll send him back here on his own. It’ll be a one-way trip for me, either way.” He rolls his shoulders in a shrug. “Reine’s in the west stables. Look after her on your way back.” 

“Of course.” Erwin sighs like someone who knows they’d been in a losing battle from the start. “If the Military Police don’t stop you, I have no objections. I trust your judgement.”

With that, Levi takes his leave.

Approximately ten minutes later, Levi is tapping the back of two knuckles against the door of Eren’s room in the infirmary block. He has the small burlap bag he’d brought of his belongings—the wax paper wrapped bar of soap, a washcloth, a water flask, and some field rations—slung over his shoulder.

“Come in,” Eren’s voice answers him from the other side of the wood, and he pushes the door open.

Breathing in Eren’s scent in such a confined space isn’t any easier the second time. It still feels a lot like being sucker punched in the gut, a feeling Levi has no desire to get acquainted with.

“Levi.” Eren stares at him in open surprise from where he’s sitting by the bay window. The sun’s beginning to crest the capital city’s inner Wall beyond the glass, gilding Eren’s edges in honey-colored light. If he weren’t wearing a change of clothes—a faded yellow drawstring shirt and brown pants—Levi would’ve suspected he hadn’t moved from that spot at all. “I…I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

Levi leans his shoulder against the doorframe. The words Eren had said last night linger in the air between them, exposed in the morning. Eren has fixed his gaze on the floor, bottom lip drawn into his mouth, shoulders hunched. The brat clearly feels guilty, but not enough to take it back, and Levi doesn’t want him to. He won’t fault Eren for thinking for himself and having the spine to say it.

So he’s not going to address any of it. “Mm. I’ve been told I’m like a roach that way.” He’d heard it enough from the old vets, at least, in his early days with the Survey Corps, wondering in their grief why gutter scum like him got to keep coming back from expeditions, got to keep living, when their friends didn’t.

Eren gets the message that there are no hard feelings. When he smiles, it’s tentative, but relieved. “Sounds like a compliment to me.” Because surviving in a life where all the odds are trying to make sure that you don’t is something to be proud of. Something they both understand. 

“Get your things,” Levi says after a moment. “We’re going out.”

He hadn’t stopped at the counter out front to ask if he could see Eren. He hadn’t asked the MPs for permission to take him off property, either, and he has no plans of doing so. Let them stop him if they want. He’d like to see them try.

“We—?” Eren blinks at him, and even from this distance, Levi can see the fluttering movement of his eyelashes. “Okay.” He’d expected a little more resistance, but maybe he should just stop trying to form ideas of someone whose entire existence seems to be outside of any one mold.

The only thing Eren brings with him is a small pack that he probably got from the staff here. He makes the bed before they leave the room, and Levi refuses to feel anything about it while he watches. (Knows proper manners and knows how to tuck a sheet in properly…Eren really is one weird sewer kid.)

“Hey.” Levi has a sudden thought as they pass through the waiting room. There’s a different clerk on duty at the front desk for the morning shift, and Eren sends a confused little glance between her and Levi when he ignores the call of his name. “What happened to my cloak?” 

“Uh.” Eren’s guilt is pathetically obvious, and Levi wonders how the hell he managed to survive in the Underground for so long when all of his emotions insist on showing up on his face the way they do. “There was blood on everything I was wearing, so the nurses threw it all out. Something about contamination.” He winces. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Levi says. “I gave it to you.” He’ll have to remember to put in a request for a new one.

“Where are we going, anyway?” 

“Trost,” Levi says over the rattle of wooden wheels on cobblestone. “It’s one of the District Cities in Wall Rose.”

“What’s in Trost?”

“Perspective.”

Frustration puts this little furrow between Eren’s brows that shouldn’t be as amusing as it is.

And sure, yeah, Levi will never deny that sometimes he just likes being an asshole, but he’s not being vague for the sake of it. If Eren sees the city with any preconceived notions, that would defeat the purpose of taking him there. He wants to give Eren the freedom to form his own opinions without any outside influence.

Eren puffs his cheeks out when he huffs, looking ready to say something else, but Levi will never know what it is, because in the next instant something outside the carriage window catches his attention.

Levi gives a casual glance, but there’s not much to see in the city at this hour other than the occasional lamplighter putting out lanterns, and shop owners getting ready for the day, flipping closed signs to open and sweeping the walkway in front of their doors.

By the time they leave the capital gates behind them, Eren’s nose is nearly pressed to the glass. The rise and fall of the rolling hills that define Wall Sina’s countryside stretch to either side of them, the landscape dotted by the occasional grove of trees. In the distance, gold light radiates from the edge of the mountain range where the sun is making its morning crest.

This far inland from the Wall, it’s easy to fall into the illusion that they don’t exist at all.

Trost had once been a thriving merchant city. Despite its classification as a Border Town, its southern location on Wall Rose had made it an ideal place for trade, the perfect meeting point between Maria’s abundant farmlands and Sina’s rare goods, drawing visitors from all over the Walls.

Losing Wall Maria to the Titans had caused the merchant market that had generated Trost’s wealth to collapse, destabilizing the economy of the entire city. The way of life for thousands of people flipped on its head, turned unrecognizable from what it once had been.  

The low-hanging, late afternoon sun peers at the city from the curving edge of Wall Rose to the west, draping long shadows over cobblestone streets and homes with holes gouged out of them, creeping vines climbing up the masonry in the absence of someone to attend to them. Levi has the thought that it’s probably a little hard to give a fuck about weeds when you’re starving to death—and then his mind presents him with an image of the immaculately kept buildings at the Central Branch HQ. He thinks of its well-fed soldiers and empty infirmary and suites big enough to house a family. Thinks, and is reminded of Eren’s anger from the day before. Yes, Levi assures it. I see you. 

“What…happened here?” Eren’s voice, rough from sleep, pulls Levi’s wandering attention back inside the carriage. His own efforts to rest had gone unrewarded, but Eren had no trouble dozing off just before they’d reached Ermich.

“Titans,” Levi says, bland. “This is what happens when the Wall is breached.”

There’d been a time when the market streets had been filled with color and the noise of life, bustling with people of all kinds—the only place within the Walls you’d be able to see a noble and a craftsman exchanging conversation by a stall of fruit. But now, each one their carriage passes through is more rundown than the next.

Most of the stalls stand abandoned. Some have been turned on their sides, some are nothing more than piles of wood where they’d been trampled beneath a Titan’s foot—or maybe it’d been a hand, grabbing for someone using it as a hiding spot. Others have been crushed completely by the fallen debris of the buildings around them. The ones that are left have torn awnings and barely enough stock to fill half of their displays. Crates and barrels and pieces of newspaper lay everywhere. Hollow-cheeked residents litter the streets in tattered and stained clothing.

Levi looks at Eren’s stricken profile, and for a moment, wonders if it’s cruel to expose him to this. Maybe he would’ve been better off living in ignorant luxury in the Interior, but the preservation of ignorance is why they’d lost Wall Maria. Why Trost is a graveyard haunted by ghosts that don’t know they’ve already died.

It’s easy to tell when they’re close to the outer gate. The nearest buildings have been turned to rubble down to their foundations, and the cobblestone has been torn up by cannons that had missed their targets, preventing the carriage from going any further. After sitting on his ass for hours at a time the past few days, Levi could use the walk, anyway.

When he gets out, he finds what looks like a small village of gray service-issue tents ahead of him, stretching all the way to the edge of the Wall, clustered in small groups around giant iron cooking pots and basins of water.

He hears the carriage creak as Eren climbs out behind him. 

“Refugees from Wall Maria, I’d reckon,” their driver comments. He’s probably as old as Pixis, and he watches the people in front of them with a solemn face.

“What’s left of them,” Levi says, and then, “We won’t be gone long.”

Most of the camp’s residents shy away from him, in particular, as he and Eren make their way through. They duck out of sight, keep their heads down, stumble to get out of his way long before he even gets close. It makes him wonder what their experience with soldiers has been like over the past few years.

There’s a small company of Garrison soldiers milling around the outer gate itself. Some are tending to horses where they’re tied to posts underneath canopies, some are doing inventory counts, but it seems the majority are working on reinforcing the Wall fortifications, specifically the haphazard fencing of stone and wood keeping the entrance of the gate sealed off.

Most of them are too absorbed in their duties to notice Levi, and it isn’t until they reach the ammunition lifts that a soldier loading one up with supplies recognizes him. 

“Captain Levi.” He sets down the wooden crate in his arms on top of the growing pile in the lift and hurries to give a salute. “What brings you here?” 

“Day trip,” Levi says.

His eyes slide behind Levi for just a moment. “Oh, you’re recruiting.” He smirks like they’re in on a shared secret. “I get it.”

“Mm.” Levi will let him think what he wants. “I need to borrow a lift.”

“Of course, sir.” He seems to be cut from the same strange cloth as Hanji, taking Levi’s curtness in stride. “I’ll crank it for you.”

They step into one of the free lifts, and the Garrison soldier secures the doors for them before going to pull the lever to start the chains. Levi leans against the waist-high barricade at his back and crosses his arms as they ascend the face of the Wall. Would’ve been a hell of a lot faster to use his gear, but he figures this is likely the more comfortable way for Eren.

The kid stays close to the front, resting his hands on the edge of the lift wall, watching the world below get smaller and smaller. The wind puts up a fuss around them both, billowing Eren’s shirt and messing with his hair as it pleases.

Levi is not unaware of the fact that he hasn’t said a thing since they left the carriage.

“Not afraid of heights, are you?” he says to the back of Eren’s neck, attention caught on the flutter of his hair there.

The line of Eren’s shoulders relaxes a fraction. “No.” His light response carries easily on an amused current of air, which contents Levi for now.

“Good.”

And while there are relatively high buildings in the Underground, Levi can say with certainty that the kid’s never been anywhere of this particular height before.

Eren’s first steps onto Wall Rose quiver at the knee like a damn fawn. The setting sun has lit the sky a brilliant orange, and the breeze that plays with his hair now is cool in the last light of day. Levi can feel his own flit around his face in the sighing wind as he watches Eren beam, wide and bright, at the painted horizon.

He has fucking dimples.

“Holy shit,” Eren breathes, once his legs are seemingly steady enough to carry him across the cannon rails to stand at Levi’s side near the edge. Honeyed sunlight spills over mountain valleys and farming fields, turning the rivers into shimmering ribbons. “Holy shit, Levi. This is amazing.”

“Sure,” Levi says, shifting his weight to rest a hand on his hip. “If you ignore the audience.”

Eren’s starstruck expression dims. “Huh?”

Levi inclines his head. “Down there.”

Face wary, Eren takes a careful step closer to the very edge of the Wall, peering down to the base, where a small horde of Titans have gathered, clambering for the opportunity to stick something in their useless gullets.

Levi watches horror creep over Eren’s face. His eyes widen to the point that the whites of them show all the way around his iris, and his skin looks as if it’s pulled too tight across his colorless cheeks. “Those are…Titans?”

“It doesn’t matter if you’re above ground or below it, we’re all trapped inside these walls as long as those ugly bastards are roaming around,” Levi says. “Before the attack on Shiganshina, most people didn’t have to worry about where they were getting their next meal from. Wall Maria is known for its farms—crops, cattle, orchards. Now the Titans do nothing but shit all over it. Those refugees we saw survived the worst hell imaginable just to starve to death with the rest of the city.”

They’re too high up to make out the details of the Titans below, but Levi can picture their grotesque faces, the glassy, vacant eyes, with perfect clarity. “The Survey Corps looks that hell in the eye of our own choosing, so maybe a day will come where all of humanity won’t have to.”

“Of course,” he goes on, “there are those who want to get in our way—the Royal Council, the nobles, the Wall Cultists and their followers, just to name a few. They’d see the rest of us served into a Titan’s mouth on a platter if it meant they got to keep living comfortably in the Interior. You hate them, but you’ll be just like them.”

Eren takes two slow steps back from the edge. His eyes are still frozen wide, his pupils the size of pinpricks in the lush green summer of them.

“What will you do, Eren? Will you close your eyes and hide in the Interior until the last of the Walls come down? Or will you fight with me?” Levi asks. “It’s your choice.”