Work Text:
“What is it, Corporal?”
There is danger in her eyes and cunning in each click of her boots against the hardwood floor as she slowly approaches his desk. “I was hoping to review the plans for tomorrow’s expedition, Commander,” she says, her usual no-nonsense tone laced with something cajoling as she takes a seat beside him. So very like her, he thinks, so very like how she’s always been, as she climbed the ranks, fought alongside him, worked as his right-hand woman over the years.
Jean cocks a brow as he continues to look down at his papers, one hand absently reaching to finger the fringe of her scarf. “That so? I’m sure you were paying attention during yesterday morning’s meeting. You were scribbling notes the whole time.” Without looking, he reaches to flick the brim of her dark red beret, stifling a laugh as it nearly topples off her head.
“I was writing down what needed to be revised,” she shoots back, nudging his papers aside to replace them with her own; in the process, her fingers ghost across his, and he senses every intention in her touch. When he looks to her, she is the perfect picture of a tempestuous queen, aura drenched in blood and molten steel as she sits with one leg crossed over the other, her hat tilted at an angle that dictates authority without egotism. “Do you even understand how many lives you could be risking with an experiment like this? We already know how to kill them. What good will it do to just cut their heads open? Do we know that severing the brain itself will slow their movements?”
“What’s the matter?” Jean turns to her, winds the soft fabric of her scarf around his fingers and tilts her head upward. “It’s funny. Every time we go outside the walls, you always come to me and question my plans. It’s almost like you think you should be commander instead of me.”
“I’m doing what any good second-in-command does,” she whispers back, leaning forward in her seat and pulling her chair closer to his. “I’m confirming that this is the safest plan for everyone, sir.”
The word bites at his core, but he speaks in honeyed tones all the same, eyes falling half-shut as he fixes her with a sly smile. “Don’t you trust me, Mikasa?” he asks.
Mikasa only narrows her eyes at him, and all his triumph lies in her inability to tell him he’s wrong. Their nightly candlelight discussions, her silent admiration when he soars across the battlefield and commands with a fist of iron and gold, the way she coaxes him into corners and closets and empty rooms for the drag of his hands along her torso, it all speaks against her. How easy for them to dance around each other like this, close and apart, trading plans and minds and tongues, utterly tangled in all the right places.
“Listen to me.” His words hover above a whisper, pulsing in the space between them. “Tomorrow, we are going outside. We will follow the formation we discussed yesterday. We are going to find three samples.” With each pause, he gives her scarf a gentle tug, watching her tremble out of the corner of his eye as she balances just above her chair and supports herself on his armrest, not quite his and yet not quite her own. “And Armin will experiment on them at night, give this”--he reaches up to drag a single finger down the middle of her head until it prods and traces light circles at the nape of her neck, a smirk tugging at his lips when her breath hitches--“corpus callosum theory a try.” Silently, he revels in the gradual change in her breath, more erratic by the second, and the shuffle of her boots, no longer dangerous or commanding, against the floor. “If it works, then we’ve got more information for him to work with. And if it doesn’t”--he gives a particularly hard tug, coaxing her into his lap and tilting his head to watch the heat crawl across her cheeks--“then we send you in to keep them under control.”
Mikasa doesn’t say a word, only watches the movement of his lips through half-lidded eyes and breathes as though it’s the only thing she can bring herself to do in the limited space between them. She swallows his plan one piece at a time, close enough to him that his lips brush against hers when he speaks, his words thick and heady and low in his throat. “Are we clear, Corporal?”
She blinks once, twice, hands finding purchase on the armrests of his chair; her hair just barely brushes his chin, and if it tickles, he doesn’t say so. “Crystal,” she whispers, her voice suddenly as painfully sweet as his own, and he wonders what kind of deal they’ve closed as she slithers to her feet and backs away from him, assuming an air somewhere between austere and coquettish as she mentions something about working with the newest batch of cadets.
“On whose orders?” Jean asks, chin resting on steepled fingers; it takes him a moment to cut through the haze of their exchange, and another to realize she’s left her papers in front of him.
She gives him the smile of the victor as her fingers dance along the doorknob. “Yours, sir,” she says, and in an instant she is gone, leaving him to will himself back into top form and tell himself he must not watch her at work.
In spite of himself, he opens the window just a crack--for some fresh air, he tries to convince himself--and as he scans the far-from-haphazard notes she’s left for him, he hears her shout pointed commands, a string of words that lulls him deep into his chair. Where others might wince at how she punctuates her words, he relishes it, loves each second she builds herself up into something more than herself and holds herself steady throughout. In the back of his mind he can see her lean in with narrowed eyes, speak steely questions to particularly unruly cadets, and he smiles, because no one in their right mind would ever dare challenge Corporal Mikasa Ackerman. None but him, of course--but then, he supposes no one knows how to play and be played by her quite like he does. He’s always known, for as long as he’s known her.
He throws himself into his papers, her commands melting into the background as he scratches out counterclaims to her notes where he can, giving a soft laugh every so often at how their words at once clash and complement each other. He tosses a glance out the window only once, swelling with pride at how she takes slow, careful steps that bend the gravel to her will. When she turns on her heel, she meets his eyes, unsmiling, an eerie reflection of her predecessor, and gives a single nod, as if to tell him she'll deal with him later.
He accepts it with a nod of his own and shuts the window, shuts her out. If he closes his eyes, he can imagine her there again, perched upon the crumbling pedestal he's built for her over the years and sighing out what she really thinks of him as her fingers tangle in the lapels of his jacket. In one breath she would question every command down to the letter; in the next she would let him take the lead, standing at the front and lingering at his sides in turns. He lets out a half-laugh at the thought, throwing his pen down, because she works him so well that he would welcome it all.
He doesn’t look up for hours, and when he finally sits back in his chair, the sun has long since set, and Mikasa is leaning against his doorway with her arms folded across her chest. “You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”
Pushing his papers aside and tilting his head, he counters, “Not sure what you mean.”
“Your plans, of course.” She strides toward him with all the confidence she possesses, hopping up onto his desk and plucking a sheet of her notes from the top of the pile. “They need work,” she tells him with sugar-laced words, one foot coming to rest upon the space between his legs. “Don’t you have the time to discuss them right now?”
She’s smiling all the while, even as she sets the paper aside, even as he gets to his feet and coaxes her to look up at him, hands planted firmly on either side of her. “You’ll have to make it quick, Ackerman,” he whispers, and he swears he can hear his blood pulsing under his skin to a rhythm she’s molded and called her own. “I don’t have much time.”
“Hm.” Mikasa clicks her tongue, and each click matches the beat of his heart, precise and to-the-point and utterly doing him in. “That’s a shame,” she hums. “I was hoping to go through every detail.”
“You know I don’t have the time for that.” He must stand his ground, he must challenge her. He’s the commander, for God’s sake. Who is he to let another string him around? “Either you get to the point, or we drop this altogether.”
But she raises an eyebrow and lets her palm drag along his waist, his stomach, his chest, and his own breath betrays him. “That’s not like you, Commander,” she purrs, fingers snarling in the cord of his bolo tie and yanking him down to breathe against her. “You’re the one who always talks about how important it is to double check.”
“Fuck, Mikasa…”
“First-name basis?” She laughs softly, the kind that only escapes her when he yanks her head back and licks at her throat when no one is there to see. “Is it already that time of night?”
Papers crumple in his grip, and his mind is a haze all over again, and he must not give in, he must lead, he must win this--
Her free hand curls around his belt, tugging him closer so that she can wrap her legs around him. “About those plans?” she breathes.
This time, Jean is the one to swallow her words. “They could use some revisions,” he grunts, and somehow it is worth it to watch her bask in the light of victory.
She gives him the smile of a woman of the highest tier, nails catching on the fabric of his jacket as she watches the heat crawl under his skin. “I’m glad we can finally see eye-to-eye, commander,” she murmurs, her breath hot against his mouth, and when she persuades him into a languid kiss, he crumbles in the flames and groans. Because she wins, every time, and it cuts him with the sweetest blade.