Chapter Text
After the Independence Day fireworks burn to ash, Springfield lapses into its stubborn, rhythmic hum. Out on Levi’s acreage, the last thickets of rogue brush—neglected for too long—lie hacked to the dirt, and the barn’s weeping roof stands patched. The urgent chores have dried up, the sowing season remains a distant thought, and Levi suddenly finds himself with more time than he knows what to do with.
But come nightfall, the violent hiss of semi-truck air brakes on the distant interstate still spikes his pulse. He bolts upright in the dark, instantly stepping into the cold air to grip the chambered rifle leaning against the bed frame. He knows the clinical names for these neurological symptoms, yet he possesses no language to explain them to this peaceful soil.
It is a small town; faces repeat until they stick. People recognize him as the man who bought the farm, giving him a curt nod, a passing *"Nice weather we’re having,"* or *"How’s the clearing coming along?"* But the dialogue always dies there. Levi discovers that away from the service, the routines of civilian life—the small talk, the gossip, the complaints about crops—feels like a dialect he has forgotten how to speak. His silence never quite fits into the town's easy rhythm.
He recalls the words of the woman at the county courthouse: the Veterans Service Center might be the place to dull the edges of the trauma, a bridge to graft himself onto Springfield.
So, on a Tuesday afternoon, he rinses the garden dirt off his hands, buttons up a fresh shirt, and heads out for the veterans' meeting.
---
Calling it a gathering is a generous stretch; it is merely a dozen folding chairs arranged in a jagged circle in the center of the room. Mostly men, a few women, dressed in the standard local uniform of flannel and denim, though their frames carry a thicker density than the rest of the town—broad shoulders, heavy forearms, back muscles that bunch thick beneath the collar.
The veterans are still looked after here. A pristine, commercial espresso machine sits on a long table against the wall, flanked by ceramic mugs. A mini-fridge reveals neat rows of aluminum cans, and a basket overflows with wrapped nuts and cookies.
An elder veteran acts as the moderator, steering the casual chatter toward personal updates:
“...The doc says the new script has fewer side effects. Tried it, and I finally caught a full night’s sleep. Only headache is the insurance outfit denying the claim. I’m currently wrestling with them over it.”
“I adopted a dog recently. A mixed-breed mastiff, older than dirt but sweet,” another voice rumbles from across the circle. “He sleeps pressed against my side. If I twitch at night, he wakes up and nudges my hand with his snout.”
Levi sits by the door, listening to the fragments of their lives, attempting to anchor their full names in his memory. Some accounts tether back to active duty; others are just mundane pieces of a civilian existence. The circle completes itself, and the room falls quiet. Before the moderator can step in the silence, Levi’s gaze drops to his own right forearm. A jagged, centipede-like scar tracks across the skin—the permanent receipt of his first deployment with that Chief Warrant Officer.
---
**Effective immediately, Colonel Smith assumed unified command of the First, Fifth, and Seventh Detachments. The aforementioned units were dissolved from their original structures and integrated into a provisional joint task force.**
**Operational Objective: Ridge D7.**
**Mission Parameters: Execute a sweeping reconnaissance of the sector, targeting the enemy stronghold designated 'The Barn.' Intelligence indicates a critical data node is housed within the structure.**
**Enemy Strength: Quantifiably unknown.**
**Rules of Engagement: Left to the tactical discretion of Lieutenant Colonel Ackerman on-site.**
---
The forward staging area resembled a metallic boneyard whipped by dust storms. Colonel Erwin Smith stood beside the comms vehicle, scanning the freshly printed orders. His eyes drifted over the paper, settling on the mismatched assembly of the joint task force—soldiers from three distinct units stood paces apart, going through their pre-flight checks.
Appointed as the ground commander for the combined arms elements, Lieutenant Colonel Levi Ackerman unpeeled the faded patch of his old Fifth Detachment from his sleeve and stood before the assembly.
His voice carried easily over the roar of engines. “Listen up. I am Levi Ackerman, your direct commanding officer. My mandate is to execute Colonel Smith’s tactical objective, and that mandate does not include guaranteeing your safe return. We move on speed. Every man carries a standard combat load, water, and basic medical kits. Any non-essential gear stays.”
A ripple of low grumbling stirred the ranks, but the men fell to work, digging through rucksacks and tactical vests, pulling out the excess—unauthorized multi-tools, dog-eared paperbacks, old unit insignia—and dropping them into the crates at their boots.
A different cadence of footsteps approached. Another detail pushed a string of wheeled aluminum cases across the sand, led by Chief Warrant Officer Hange Zoe, with her deputy, Moblit, trailing closely with a tablet.
“Lieutenant Colonel, these tracking arrays need to be embedded with the infantry,” Hange said, halting in front of Levi and unlatching one of the metal lids. Molded foam cavities held a neat sequence of black modules and cabling.
Oruo, who had been kneeling to inspect his harness, stood up and squinted at Hange's Seventh Detachment crest and warrant rank, then at the cargo. “Chief, you expect us to hump these bricks up the ridge?”
Hange pulled a palm-sized device from the case, shaped like a thick deck of cards. “Low-frequency seismic sensor arrays. The weight is negligible, but it will tell you if a slope is about to shear or if heavy armor is maneuvering three clicks out.” She shifted her gaze directly to Levi. “The telemetry offers foresight.”
“Foresight requires arriving on time,” Levi said, his brow furrowing as he weighed the extra crates with his eyes. “Superfluous weight kills momentum.”
“Vital weight keeps your people alive, Colonel,” Hange countered, her posture locking.
Erwin’s voice broke the deadlock as the wind whipped the hem of his combat jacket. “Lieutenant Colonel Ackerman,” he began, his gaze pivoting from Levi to the technician. “Chief Warrant Officer Zoe.”
“Chief Zoe of the Seventh is the premier technical asset available to this command,” Erwin told Levi, his tone discarding any room for debate. “Her calculations regarding equipment thresholds and safety parameters are paramount to this operation. While tactical execution rests with you on the ground, Lieutenant Colonel, I expect you to integrate her counsel fully.”
From the ranks of the First Detachment, a towering figure with a rough beard stepped forward. Major Mike Zacharias, the infantry commander, carried an immediate gravity—most men present knew his record from the blitz at the Eastern Ridge. He skipped the formalities, lifting a bundle of the cabling to gauge its heft. Straightening, he gave Erwin a brief nod, then turned to Levi. “The gear is solid. In broken terrain, you know what a three-minute heads-up means.” Without waiting for a reply, he melted back into his platoon.
Mike’s endorsement carried the weight of surviving meat-grinder operations. Levi’s eyes drifted from the equipment cases to the waiting ranks.
“Reconfigure the load,” Levi commanded. “Shift extra water rations to the vehicles to offset the weight. Oruo, you handle the distribution and rigging of these sensors.” The modules made their way down the line and disappeared into rucksacks.
---
That night, the squad tent choked with the heat of Levi’s original Fifth Detachment guys.
Oruo knelt on the dirt, cursing softly as he yanked at the nylon straps of a rucksack thrown out of balance by the technical gear.
“Major Zacharias gave it the green light, though,” Petra said from her cot, her thumb snapping 7.62 rounds into a fresh magazine.
“That old scout just loves his electronic toys,” Oruo muttered, not breaking his rhythm.
“His approval usually means the contraption buys you a few extra seconds from the reaper,” Eld added, carefully sliding his night-vision optics into their padded pouch. “If these arrays give us a head start...”
Gunther sat in the corner, dragging an oily rag down the rail of his rifle. “Assuming they don't lock up when the shooting starts, or scream bloody murder over nothing.”
“The Colonel cleared it, which means we carry it,” Petra said, slapping the magazine into her vest. “Our only job is to make sure they stay secured to our backs.”
Oruo finally cinched the last buckle with a sharp snap. “Fine. We follow the Colonel’s lead.” He stood, rolling his shoulders against the weight. “Either way, this deployment won't be boring.”
The tent went dark as Gunther cut the final field lantern. Their obedience to Levi was a reflex, an instinct forged from every time he had dragged them out of a slaughter; but as for the unknown technical warrant and her delicate instruments, suspicion remained, settling heavily into the corners of the tent like the midnight cold.
---
The friction of the mixed unit intensified during the approach toward The Barn, becoming a grinding tax on their focus.
Soldiers instinctively drifted into their old unit formations during the march. Radio discipline frayed with conflicting jargon from their respective branches, followed by sharp corrections and longer, tense silences.
Erwin monitored the discord from the command post via the tactical net. He required a seamless scalpel of a task force, but currently, the three detachments resembled a poorly spliced hawser, the original strands threatening to unravel under tension.
Inside a churning Cougar MRAP, Levi, Hange, and Mike shared the cramped command cabin. Moblit, Oruo, and several other sergeants jammed into the remaining space, shoulders bumping with every lurch of the chassis. No one spoke; the cabin held only the roar of the diesel engine and the metallic clatter of loose gear.
Hange broke the silence, her tablet balanced on her knees. “Colonel Ackerman, last October at the Katile Junction—your platoon didn't get pinned down because of enemy anti-armor capabilities.”
Levi looked up from the tactical map. The cabin went silent, the old hands of the Fifth suddenly tuning in; that ambush remained a bitter scar in their collective memory.
“My after-action report states their positioning was superior.”
“It wasn't their positioning,” Hange said, shaking her head. Her fingers tapped the panel, pulling up a terrain cross-section overlaid with historical armor tracks. “Your field of fire was flawed.”
The screen illustrated the tanks entering the valley in a standard column, main guns oriented dead ahead.
“The valley walls created an elevation dead-zone of fifteen to twenty degrees,” her voice remained level, clinical. “Your armor profile handed them your top decks on a platter.”
She paused, ensuring he was following.
“They bypassed your frontal glacis. They waited until your tracks were fighting the incline—when your engine torque peaked—to strike the hatches and sever the links.”
Levi leaned in, his face inches from the display. “We needed velocity.”
“I understand that,” Hange conceded, her tone analytical rather than adversarial. “But if your lead element had halted here—”
She marked a spot just outside the valley mouth.
“Traversing the turret to suppress the high-angle slope instead of rushing the defile. The second vehicle pushes through the creek bed but holds an offset staggered formation, breaking the bottleneck.”
“That kills our speed.”
“Yes, by thirty seconds minimum,” Hange said flatly. “But those thirty seconds strip away their primary engagement window. More importantly, your tracks aren't exposed at maximum strain.”
Levi stared at the digital simulation for several long seconds.
“What if they anticipate the shift and execute a secondary ambush?” Mike asked from the corner.
“Then they have to reposition,” Hange countered instantly. “Repositioning means thermal signatures, acoustic shifts, or radio chatter.”
She raised her eyes, meeting Levi’s. “At that point, you aren't pinned down. You're just waiting for the targets to show themselves.”
“Good note,” Levi said finally.
Mike’s mouth twitched into a subtle smirk of approval.
Levi pulled the tablet toward himself, switching to the current mission map, his finger tracing a similar ridge line ahead. “The next depression we hit, armor takes the flank first, establishing a support-by-fire position on the slope. Infantry holds back, covering the armor's blind spots during the advance.” He drew a revised axis of movement on the screen, then looked at Hange. “You designate the specific halt-point for the lead vehicle this time.”
“Copy that,” Hange said.
The MRAP slammed over a boulder, throwing everyone forward. Hange caught her tablet, and Levi immediately returned to the map. Oruo settled back into his seat, exchanging a quiet glance with Petra.
Over the command channel, Colonel Erwin’s voice clipped through the static: "It seems the technical integration is yielding returns. Keep that tempo."
Mike watched the two officers, holding back a grin at the sudden shift in the cabin's gravity.
---
The actual crisis materialized when a Humvee seeking a lateral observation point drifted off the main track. Without warning, its right rear tire sheared through the hard crust, dropping into a hidden pocket of silt. The chassis listed violently.
“Left flank, vehicle immobilized! Coordinates marked!” the radio barked. The terrain offered zero concealment; every minute spent exposed multiplied their visibility to enemy spotters.
The driver gunned the engine, but the tires merely churned the silt, burying the axle deeper into the sand.
Hange cleared the MRAP before it had fully settled. “You, you, and you—hand over your sensor modules. Moblit, link the terminal.”
The soldiers hesitated for a fraction of a second before ripping open their packs. Hange dropped to her knees, snatching the devices, slamming them into a unified baseplate, and running the diagnostic lead. The sequence took under ten seconds. She pressed the array into the sand, the screen blooming with jagged spikes. “It’s not an isolated pothole,” she called out. “Subsurface cavern beneath the crust. It’s a massive pocket. A straight tow will swallow the vehicle whole.”
Mike advised scuttling the asset, stripping the radios, and abandoning the frame.
But Hange was already on her feet, her eyes calculating the lean of the Humvee. “The weight has shifted forward and to the left. We need a dual-point recovery. The primary wrecker hooks up from the hard ground at less than twenty-five degrees; run the auxiliary winch to a deadman anchor at the right rear. Simultaneously, we need manual counterweight on the front left, and the loose shale behind the rear right tire needs to be cleared immediately.”
Levi translated her assessment into hard execution without taking a breath. “First squad, get on that front left bumper for counterweight. Second squad, bring two wreckers up—set the angles exactly where the chief specified. Move!”
There was no room for hesitation. Boots tore up the sand as the teams scrambled. Oruo led a detail lugging heavy spare tread plates, throwing their body weight onto the front corner of the sinking vehicle to stabilize the frame, while another group shoveled furiously behind the stuck tire.
“Counterweight holding!”
“Wreckers, ease the tension! Staggered pull!”
The engines groaned, steel cables screaming under the load. Amidst the swirling dust, following Hange's hand signals, the Humvee gave a sudden, violent shudder and broke free from the silt trap, its tires catching solid rock.
The recovery detail stood drenched in sweat and grit. Hange remained on her knees by the wheel, tracking her flashlight across the suspension and undercarriage to check for structural failure.
Levi walked over, dropping his remaining canteen into the sand beside her hand with a dull thud.
“Don't pass out on my line, Chief.” he muttered before turning on his heel.
Hange stared at the canteen, startled, then unthreaded the cap and took a long pull under the blistering sun. The corner of her mouth twitched, though it might have just been the sand tightening against her skin.
---
The Barn emerged from the shadows of the valley just as dusk bled into the horizon. It was a low, reinforced concrete bunker, its facade weathered to match the surrounding stone.
The initial breach went off with uncanny precision. Petra and Oruo’s marksmen neutralized the exterior sentries, the breaching team blew the reinforced side door, and Mike’s infantry swept through the corridors. The interior resistance evaporated quickly. Yet, the sheer ease of the takeover left a foul taste in the air.
Levi was establishing the perimeter when the comms tech intercepted a flash message:
“Command confirms node presence on-site. Order: Secure physical media and retrograde. Hold-time on objective is capped; do not occupy.”
Levi shifted the pieces instantly. “Gunther, Eld, lock down the egress points. Prepare for a counter-push. Oruo, Petra, take the high ground north.” He looked at Hange. “How long to locate and extract the hardware?”
“Moblit,” she called, motioning him in, “get the scanner online.”
Moblit rattled through the interface, his breath coming in shallow hitches. “High-density shielding in the lower levels detected... the blueprints don't align with the thermal layout. Locating the core server room and running a basic sweep... thirty minutes minimum.”
“My boys confirmed no signs of life down there,” Mike noted.
“We don't have thirty minutes,” Levi said, checking his watch. “They'll either raze the site remotely or throw a quick-reaction force at us. Fifteen minutes. Skip the safety sweep. Chief, Moblit, and I go down. Mike, hold the throat of the tunnel. If anything smells off, blow the horn.”
The sub-levels were tight, bodies littering the stairs, concrete debris turning every step into a tripping hazard. Levi cleared the angles with his M16 rifle, Hange and Moblit tracking behind him with service pistols drawn.
The server vault door was unmistakable—a heavy, steel blast door sitting ajar, revealing rows of humming mainframes. The lights were dead, but the internal status LEDs flickered in the dark.
“They left in a panic,” Moblit said, clearing a corpse from the terminal console and wiping the blood from his palms before tapping the keys. “The wipe sequence didn't finish... I can extract the modules directly.”
Hange swept her tactical light across the secondary machinery, inspecting the wiring. Levi anchored himself at the threshold, his rifle trained on the dark corridor.
The minutes passed away. The distant rattle of gunfire drifted down from the surface—Mike reporting that Oruo’s team was trading shots with an arriving enemy element.
“Drives secured!” Moblit called out, sliding the modules into an anti-static bag.
“Move.” Levi ordered.
The team began their egress. Moblit and Hange cleared the doorway first, Levi stepping backward to cover their six, his rifle light tracking the frame and ceiling out of muscle memory.
Just as Moblit’s boot cleared the threshold—
Levi’s beam froze.
The beam caught a length of low-vis tripwire. It extended from a ventilation grate, under full tension, its opposite end anchored deep inside a microscopic seam in the door frame. Moblit’s radio antenna was less than eight inches from snagging the line.
There was no time for a warning.
“Down! Get behind the steel!” Levi’s voice shattered the concrete vault. He lunged from the interior of the room, throwing his entire weight against the heavy blast door to slam it shut.
Hange’s reflexes matched his velocity. The instant Levi’s shout hit the air, her hand snared the shoulder strap of Moblit’s vest, ripping him off his feet and throwing him flat against the floorboards.
*BOOM—!*
The detonation inside the server room was a muffled, concussive snap. A fragmentation grenade.
Levi’s body was braced flush against the outer steel, fighting the pressure wave. The kinetic blast traveled through the solid metal door without an inch of dampening.
His right forearm was locked hard against the handle.
A sharp, distinct snap echoed from his arm, instantly swallowed by the rumble of falling masonry. Levi knew immediately that the bone had shattered, but his nervous system overrode the pain; his left shoulder and torso were already pinning the door shut against the escaping fire.
Acrid smoke billowed through the seams.
---
At the top of the stairwell, Mike’s head snapped up the moment the blast hit. He caught the pressure drop and the sudden puff of pulverized dust escaping the lower vents. He hit his radio line. “Detonation detected in the sub-level. Unknown casualties. Out.” Before the transmission cleared, Mike was already sliding down the service ladder into the dark.
The corridor was a choked fog of dust. Mike rounded the corner to find the steel blast door warped out of its frame. Hange stood with her pistol raised, shielding a dazed Moblit with her torso. Levi was leaning against the wall, using his teeth and his left hand to bind a combat knife to his useless, swelling right arm as an improvised splint.
Mike looked at the shattered forearm, the fresh dents in the steel door, and the spiderweb fractures radiating across the concrete frame. He shook his head.
“Status?” Levi rasped.
“Green.”
“Clear...”
“Clear.”
“Egress,” Levi ordered, jerking his left hand forward. “Mike, take point. Chief, keep your package moving.”
The four broke into a rapid jog through the smoky dark. Hange matched Levi’s pace, watching the knife splint slip against his sleeve with every stride. Her jaw set. She holstered her weapon and reached out, grabbing the handguard of the M16 in his left hand. “Colonel, let me take the long gun. Secure your arm before it sever a nerve.”
Levi’s grip clamped hard on the weapon for a split second, then released, letting her take the weight. Hange spun smoothly into the rearguard slot, keeping her muzzle trained on their backtrail.
Moblit checked the storage bag on the run, verifying the casing—no structural cracking. “The modules are physically intact!” he panted. Mike maintained a brutal pace at the front, clearing their entry route, bypassing the bodies and shadows to ensure their exit line remained open.
Emerging into the twilight, amidst the chaotic roar of the firefight, Levi grabbed the comms line with his left hand. “Operation Barn complete. Assets secured and verified. Break contact and fall back.”
---
To the brass, the mission was recorded as a textbook success. The encryption keys crippled the enemy's logistical network within forty-eight hours, earning the entire command a citation. The experimental integration of technical and combat arms was validated, ensuring permanent status and a formal regimental designation.
But inside Colonel Erwin Smith’s tent, the atmosphere held a different temperature. Only Erwin, Levi, and Hange stood within the canvas walls. The desk held the mission logs, a commendation from intelligence, and Levi’s medical chart, which read: *Closed comminuted fracture of the right radius and ulna, extensive joint trauma, surgical intervention required.*
“Zero fatalities, core objective achieved, negligible material loss,” Erwin read, his voice devoid of warmth or malice. “On paper, it’s a masterclass.”
He pointed a finger at the heavy plaster encasing Levi’s right arm. “Except for this.”
“The objective was booby-trapped; we failed to anticipate the secondary device,” Hange spoke up first. “The risk assessment was my responsibility, and my team misjudged the structural variables. The failure lies with me.”
“Chief provided the technical data; I authorized the entry,” Levi cut in, his eyes fixed ahead. “There is no shared responsibility for a ground commander’s decision.”
Erwin leaned back into his leather chair, his gaze drifting slowly between the two. “If my best field commander and my chief technical officer end up bleeding in a concrete basement, the encryption keys don't matter. It becomes a catastrophic failure for this command. Who takes the blame wouldn't even make the report.”
The air inside the tent felt below freezing.
“Hange, your grasp of mechanical systems is exceptional, but your information security analysis relies too heavily on delegation. That is a vulnerability.” He tapped the desk twice. “During the operational stand-down, you will report to the Signals Intelligence branch. You start from the baseline up. That is an order.”
“Understood, Colonel!”
He then turned his eyes to Levi. “Levi, your mandate is not merely the destruction of the target. It is returning your assets—including yourself—intact. This time, you accomplished the mission and nearly got yourself killed doing it.” His tone hardened. “Until that bone knits, you are on mandatory medical leave. Suspension of field pay applies. Use the time to understand the difference between managing a crisis and letting it manage you.”
“Sir.”
Erwin’s posture softened slightly. “This provisional structure is becoming a permanent fixture. That means the two of you, and your respective elements, will be tethered for the foreseeable future.” His eyes locked onto both of them. “Learn to move together, so you can return together. I don't want to sign off on anything worse than a broken arm next time.”
The tent fell dead silent. Levi’s face was like stone as the dull, heavy throb of the bone pulsed beneath the plaster cast. Hange kept her spine locked straight, her eyes shifting behind her lenses, pointedly avoiding Erwin’s steady scrutiny.
“Right then,” Erwin sighed, pulling two folders from his desk drawer. “Levi, your Purple Heart paperwork. I expect that left hand of yours can still manage a signature on the after-action report. Hange, yours for the Bronze Star. The hardware you secured bought you both the recognition you earned.”
He slid the files across the laminate surface. “Dismissed.”
---
Hange slipped through the tent flap past midnight, bringing a gust of cold desert air with her. Levi was folding a utilities shirt with his left hand, his fingers instantly twitching toward the sidearm on his desk at the sound. He scowled when he recognized her, his shoulders dropping a fraction. “Stop skulking around like a ghost.”
Hange grinned, moving toward the desk as if to sit, her boots caked in yellow dust.
“Hold it,” Levi stopped her, nodding at her feet. “The rug.”
Hange looked down at the grime on her leather boots, then at the faded but meticulously swept military blanket covering the floorboards.
“Right,” she muttered, stepping back to kick off the heavy footwear, stepping onto the fabric in thick wool socks. She dropped into the swivel chair, pulling two tin cans of preserved peaches from her field jacket. She popped the lid on one, propping a plastic fork inside before sliding it across to him. “Heading out for medical leave tomorrow?”
Levi took the tin, looking at the fruit. It was sickeningly sweet, but in a staging area like this, it was luxury. He swallowed a piece slowly. “It’s just physical therapy in a different ZIP code.”
“Must be nice to see green grass again. See your folks.”
“No family left to check on.”
The lantern light caught the glare of her glasses. “Oh,” she murmured, letting the topic die. She picked up her own fork and stabbed a peach slice. After a silence, she spoke up. “So... can I just call you Levi? Since we're stuck as a pair from here on out.”
“Do what you want.”
“Levi,” Hange’s voice dropped its manic edge, her expression turning deliberate. “About The Barn... if it had been just Moblit and me, our reaction times wouldn't have beaten that tripwire. You absorbed the blast that would have taken my team. I owe you for that.”
He set his fork down. “It was my directive. Without those sensors you insisted on dragging up the ridge, the infantry would have taken casualties before we even hit the wire. The debt is square, Hange.” He used her name naturally, without thinking.
“I’ve been wondering,” Levi continued, leaning his good shoulder against the tent pole. “Your scores out of the academy were top-tier. With your aptitude, why hide in a technical branch? You’d make a decent line officer.”
“I’ve always been obsessed with the machinery,” she said, her eyes drifting toward the tent ceiling. “Tanks, mostly. From the old British Mark IVs to the Shermans and T-34s... the armor thickness, the transmission setups, the boring engineering schematics. I could stare at blueprints for days.”
She paused, tipping the tin back to swallow the remaining heavy syrup.
“But once you get into the theater, you realize a main gun has human lives at both ends of the barrel. If I wanted to keep people breathing, the only logical place for me was behind the grease and the tech specs, not pulling the trigger.”
Levi finished his peaches, setting the empty tin on the metal desk. “And you think that works?”
“It’s the most logical path I’ve found so far,” she corrected.
“I suppose I’ll have to get used to your logic then.”
Hange nodded, skipping the sentimentality as she crushed the two empty tins together with a dry, metallic crinkle. “Too much sugar. Back home, there’s this little bakery that does a dark brownie with rum-soaked raisins. Absolute perfection. ” She tossed the flattened metal into the wastebin. “Maybe after... I’ll get a taste of it again.”
Levi watched the crushed tins settle. “Sounds passable. Maybe I’ll try a piece if we make it out.”
“When the deployment contracts run out,” Hange said, leaning back and stretching her arms behind her head, her voice losing its military starch. “I’ll probably stick to civilian grease. Open a repair shop back in my old county. Nothing fancy—just keeping old farm trucks running until the frames give out.” A small, rare softness entered her smile.
Levi remained silent for a beat. “Once the obligations are met,” he said quietly, “sleeping in a bed that doesn't move, walking down a street without checking the rooftops—that’s the whole list.”
The word *obligations* hung in the air, detached from notions of patriotism or glory. It was a private vow. Erwin Smith had pulled him from the absolute gutter of the city slums, handing him a life that resembled something honorable within the ranks; he would see Erwin’s vision through to the end.
“That sounds cheaper to come by than the brownies,” Hange said, standing up and retrieving her boots by the door. “Don't let the paperwork kill you before the arm heals.”
“Yeah.”
She laced her boots, pulling the tent flap open, then paused, looking back through the gap. “Levi, make sure that bone knits clean.” She smirked. “See you in a month. The new armored carrier specs will be waiting for your squad to field-test.”
“Understood, Chief. Now you can get out.”
Hange let out a dry huff of a laugh. She yanked the tent flap open and slipped through, her silhouette vanishing instantly into the desert night.
Then, Levi leaned down, using his single hand to gather his discarded uniform shirt, folding it precisely before packing it away.
---
“...”
“Levi?”
The moderator’s voice dragged him back into the circle of folding chairs. “Care to share anything? How’s the new ground treating you?”
Levi looked down at his right arm, where the scar pulled tight against the skin. Beneath the flesh, the metal pins from that long-ago surgery still sat cold against the bone.
“Nothing new on my end. Still just settling in, but I appreciate it.” he said.
---
The sun was dropping below the tree line when he left the center. He drove his truck down the quiet streets of Springfield, his eyes automatically tracking right as he approached the southern exit of the town. The corrugated security door of Rustless Auto was already pulled down, the exterior security bulb drawing a frantic cloud of summer insects.
Hange had likely gone home for the evening.
The road unrolled before his headlights, splitting through the high wall of cornfields. He had once been willing to trade everything for an 'after' exactly like this—solid timber roofs, streets clear of snipers. Now it sat right in front of him.
At the other end of this blacktop, in that garage she had once idly described, old engines were being brought back to life under her hands, just as she had once kept the machinery of war running.
The pickup truck didn't slow down, rolling past her driveway. In the rearview mirror, the faded blue sign shrank until the darkness swallowed it whole.
The last time they had parted under orders, the promise was a month. But between the bloodbath of their final deployment and the day he packed his life into a truck to move to Springfield, five years had evaporated.
Five years under a peaceful sky felt longer than a decade in the sandbox. And when he finally saw her again, Levi understood that the distance between them could no longer be measured in time. The brilliant, manic technical Chief who had commanded the staging areas had been left behind on a coast an ocean away. The woman turning wrenches under the Midwest sun possessed a quiet life.
Yet the metal pins remained anchored in his marrow, the dull ache during weather shifts serving as a constant reminder that some things cannot be unstitched from the body.
Forgetting had always been a luxury he couldn't afford.
For him, it was a reunion; for her, it was merely an introduction to a new neighbor.
Levi had to admit, the absence of her voice left an ache that went deep into his teeth. But the memory of the 4th of July fireworks—the raw panic and terror that had flashed across her face at the sound of the concussive booms—had been a bucket of ice water over his head.
He had grown terrified of his own face, terrified of the faint scent of cordite that soap could never fully scrub from his skin—afraid it would pry open the floodgates of her memory. If he pushed his way into her orbit, he wouldn’t be bringing a healing reunion; he would be grinding her hard-won peace into the dirt, tearing down the walls she had built against the ghosts.
Some memories were meant to rust out, to rot in the soil so something green could grow over the top.
Let it stay there.
No more manufactured encounters at the hardware store, no more convenient detours past her shop. He would tend his own fences, keeping his distance, watching the lights of *Rustless Auto* flicker on every morning from the edge of the ridge.
He killed the engine in his driveway, the quiet country dark and the steady drone of cicadas filling the cab. Levi didn't move from the bench seat, his eyes lifting to the three dark windows of the second floor. He had once entertained a vague, foolish notion of what those rooms might be for; now, the thought was useless. Maybe he’d turn them into storage, or simply leave the doors closed.