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It was the little things that kept tripping him up.
It wasn’t as though Erwin thought it would be easy. He’d had injuries before, carried scars from his battles with the titans. They all did, no one survived long in the Survey Corps before their flesh was marked and riddled with rough white tissue and surrounded bones that ached where old breaks and contusions lurked below the surface. But this was different. This threw everything off.
He’d been told, as he lay feverish and delirious in his hospital bed, how brave he’d been, how he’d insisted on taking a tourniquet around the spurting stump where his right arm had been just moment before and had continued leading the Corps against the Armored titan. There were other things they’d told him too, things said in hushed voices, by those he trusted implicitly, things that didn’t make sense and that wouldn’t fall into place in his mind. They talked about Eren directing the titans, about how he’d made them turn and attack the traitors, about how the small, feral shifter—Ymir, they’d called her—had started to leave with them, but then turned back at the desperate sounds the Armored titan had made as it had been swarmed.
He remembered those sounds. The panicked screams from the Armored titan had visited him in his restless nightmares, the screams that had sounded, for a moment, like a lost and crying child. The screams that, if he listened closely enough and let him mind wander in the depths of his fever, had sounded like a name.
He couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t think of them as human.
The haze left him, little by little. The doctors helped him sit up, and he felt oddly off-balance, like he was listing too far to one side, his center of gravity thrown off completely. The fingers of his right hand, the fingers that weren’t there any longer, tingled and prickled, sensations like burrowing insects running up and down the arm that wasn’t there, and sometimes when he was alone he clawed at the air with his remaining hand, trying to sate an itch that didn’t exist. They started bringing him reports, reluctantly, more because he wouldn’t stop asking for them than because they wanted him to get back to work. He shuffled papers clumsily with one hand, looking over lists and figures and the endless minutia that makes up a war. He looked them over until his eyes burned and the writing blurred in front of him and his body gave up, forcing him back into sleep.
It was Hange that brought him the list of lost and unaccounted for. She had crept into the room, the healing burns on her face exposed and dark. He had thought, idly, that there weren’t many soldiers who survived a direct attack by the Colossal titan and lived to tell about it, and he started to ask her about it when she’d carefully slipped the list in his hand, her face drawn and tight. He’d glanced at it, and everything changed, again, when he read the first name.
Michael Zakarius: MIA, presumed dead
He looked up at Hange, and for just a moment, he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection of her glasses. His face, lined and tight with pain, his hair greasy and uncombed, his chin and cheeks dark with blond fuzz. But it was the reflection of his eyes that made him look away, the line between his brows, the way his eyebrows had lifted in the center, and the lost, confused look in his cloudy blue eyes. He looked away, and swallowed, and tried to speak but the words got caught in his throat.
Hange filled him in, her voice soft and mournful. Told him about how Mike had gone out with his squad and the young members of the 104th, and how they’d had to separate when titans had attacked. How Mike had stayed behind to fight the titans, to give them a chance to escape. How neither he, nor his horse, had made it back to the walls.
Erwin stared at the bedsheets the whole time, the list slack in his hand. When she’d finished, he gave the list back to her and instructed her, in a voice that almost sounded like the Commander again, to put it in the growing file in his nightstand. He would look it over and deal with it later. It had only been a week, some stragglers might still find their ways back to the walls.
He didn’t meet her eyes when he said it, afraid of the pity and sadness he knew he’d see there.
~*~
They sent him home a few days later, more at his insistence than their own recommendation, and Erwin almost fumbled and dropped his keys when he unlocked his door. It was the little things, like trying to manipulate keys with a hand that had always been used for carrying things before, and not fine motor manipulation. He didn’t, though, and he was grateful that he’d been spared the small indignity of having to slowly bend down, of putting his precarious balance to the test, and that he didn’t disgrace himself by falling over.
His apartment was silent and cool, long shadows etched across the walls from the late afternoon sunshine. It was spotlessly, aggressively clean, and he knew Levi had been here before him, cleaning with that grim, relentless kind of frenzy that was uniquely his own, and for the first time in days, a faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Levi would never actually say that he cared; all Erwin had as evidence was an apartment he had left dusty and disheveled that now practically shone with cleanliness and order.
Getting his boots off on his own was more challenging than he thought it would be, and for the first time, he was glad he hadn’t insisted that the nurses strap him back into his maneuver gear. He had wanted to, had almost insisted upon it, but decided at the last moment that it wasn’t worth the difficulty of trying to explain the straps and buckles to a novice. He would have been wearing it strictly for vanity’s sake anyway, and for the strange, intimate comfort the pressure of the straps across his chest and around his legs gave him. He had worn the gear daily for twenty years, much longer than most, and it felt like a part of his soul by now.
But it was too hard to get on and off with only one hand.
The struggle with his boots made him tired, and Erwin moved to his bedroom, leaning heavily on the wall midway there, needing to pause and catch his breath. He tired so easily now, as if the loss of his arm drained something vital out of him, leaving him as fragile and delicate as blown glass.
His room was just as clean as the rest of the apartment, the bed made neatly and precisely, the top sheet and blanket turned back invitingly. Erwin saw it as something done to help the invalid, when tightly tucked in sheets were too much for someone with one hand, and he grimaced a little. Even Levi thought he was completely broken, a wreck of a once proud soldier, and while Erwin knew there was some truth in that, he wasn’t ready to give up quite yet. He might never ride a horse again, or use his gear, but he wasn’t completely broken. His greatest weapon had always been his mind, and the titans hadn’t taken that from him.
Erwin sank into his bed, not bothering with the rest of his clothing, too exhausted and, if he was honest with himself, something he made a practice not to be, too discouraged to fight the rest of them off. Tomorrow would be full of countless other small challenges, all the little things he would have to learn how to do all over again, and the battle with buttons and zippers was more than he could bear. Getting his boots off would have to be tonight’s small victory.
Someone—Levi—had opened the window besides his bed, and the curtains blew in, rippling in the air close to where Erwin’s right arm would be, if he still had one. But if he had his arm, he’d be out there with his troops, not sent to the purgatory of his apartment, and he closed his eyes with a sigh.
The prickling he felt behind them was just from the cool breeze. That’s all it was.
~*~
He woke up a few hours later, jolted out of an uneasy doze by an echoing memory of soldiers screaming. The shadows had grown longer, the room plunged into dusky twilight while he slept, and there was something on his bed.
In his half-asleep, barely conscious state, Erwin’s mind found titans where there were none, and he tried to sit upright, hands—hand—moving for maneuver gear that wasn’t there. The motion sent a vast, crippling wallop of pain shooting up the stump of his arm, and the world grayed out for a moment, swimming and dissolving in front of him. When it cleared again, he looked down frantically, trying to find the source of that extra weight, and he found a cat curled next to his leg.
For a few moments, Erwin just blinked at it woozily, trying to understand why there was a cat, of all things, in his bed. The cat stayed exactly where it was, looking up at him with huge, light green eyes that seemed wiser than they should, eyes that had seen worlds beyond this one.
“What…” His voice was raspy to his own ears, sounding wrong, sounding like an old man’s voice, and Erwin cleared his throat and tried again. “What are you doing here?”
The cat stared up at him, blinking its eyes once, and didn’t answer. Or perhaps it did, when it leaned against his leg and closed its eyes. A low, rumbling little growl, felt before heard, started to come from it, and Erwin realized it was purring. He reached across himself, his hand shaking, and stroked the cat’s head, smoothing back the gold and white fur. It purred louder, and its front paws emerged from under its body, kneading at the sheet.
The window, of course. It had come in through the open window. Erwin thought about getting up, taking it back to the window and setting it outside, to go on about its business, but the thought of getting up was a daunting one, and the cat wasn’t hurting anything. Its purring was comforting, and it would probably leave on its own when it tired of him. Erwin’s mother had had a cat, and he knew they were finicky creatures; as soon as this one decided he wasn’t warm enough to bother with any longer, it would get up and go the way it had come.
He laid back down, pulling the sheet up close to his neck, and fell back asleep. The cat would be gone by morning.
~*~
The cat was still there in the morning, warm and solid on Erwin’s chest, erupting into purrs when he reached up to push it off, and he decided that shooing it off was more trouble than it was worth.
~*~
It was a tradition in the Survey Corps to send gifts to someone with a career-ending injury, little things to remind them of all that they could enjoy now, and they started trickling in the next day. Soldiers don’t have much money, so they were mostly small things, little trinkets and odds and ends. A packs of cigarettes. A small bottle of wine. A pair of warm woolen slippers, hand-knit by someone’s mother.
“Old man’s gifts,” he told the cat as he shuffled through them. He appreciated what they were trying to do, but he wasn’t finished yet. There was still so much he had to do, so much left for the Survey Corps. He wasn’t ready to be done yet, he wasn’t ready to sink quietly into retirement. He never thought he’d retire at all, and the idea that he’ll die alone in his bed instead of on the field with his men terrified him.
Dot Pixis sent him a bottle of vintage brandy, bottled before the Walls went up, and Erwin wondered what he’d had to do to get his hands on it. Nile Dok’s gift was even more extravagant: a single cigar, lovingly preserved in a box, from a place called Cuba that didn’t exist any longer, along with a note. I have one more. Next time you’re in Central, come to my office and we’ll smoke them. Erwin smiled at that, remembering the friendship they’d once had, and wondered if perhaps they could rebuild it.
But no. He wasn’t the same person anymore, and neither was Nile. He’d given his heart to the titans, and Nile had given his to Marie and to the King. He closed the box on the cigar and tucked it away in his desk, hoping that maybe Levi would find it someday when he was clearing out Erwin’s apartment and smoke it himself.
“You’ll tell him it’s there, won’t you?” The cat brought a paw to its face to wash, and Erwin took that for consent.
~*~
The cat stayed in his apartment, following him from room to room, and Erwin began to think that cats were smarter than anyone had ever told him. The cat seemed to know when he was getting discouraged, purring and weaving its body around his ankles as he stood in front of the sink, shirtless and lathered on his chin, completely defeated by his straight razor in the wrong hand. It sat beside his feet as he looked through his closet, dreading the slow, laborious procedure of doing up buttons. It crawled into his lap and napped there as he worked his way through the growing pile of paperwork, scrawling his signature across the bottom of form after form, his writing as jagged and messy as a child’s.
He found himself talking to the cat, discussing things with it, and it would look at him with its pale green eyes and listen, sometimes opening its mouth and meowing. He told it about that last battle, about losing his arm, about the hazy, distorted ride back to the walls and how he’d collapsed immediately, thinking ‘I can die now.’ He told it about all the soldiers they’d lost pursuing the Female Titan, about Levi’s squad and how guilty he felt when they didn’t make it home, about how afraid he was that everything he’d done for the Survey Corps had been for nothing. He told it about how it had sounded like the Armored Titan had been saying someone’s name, about how all the titans had turned to attack when Eren had told them to and how, for a moment, he’d been terrified of the young soldier. He reminisced with it about his training days, about being a young man and truly believing they had a chance against the titans, and how that belief had eroded day by day until he barely knew what he was fighting for any longer.
And he told it about Mike. He told it about how Mike was his oldest friend, how they’d met in the Training Squads and watched each other’s back all through the grueling process. He told it about how Mike had always supported him during his rise to power in the Survey Corps, and how he used to confide in Mike things that he wouldn’t tell anyone else. He admitted to it that they’d grown apart once he’d been promoted to Commander, and how he’d always thought they’d have time later, when the war was won and everyone was safe, to grow close again. He hid his face in its white and gold fur and whispered how he was sorry, he was so, so sorry, and the cat purred and licked the dampness off his cheeks.
And when he finally signed the paper that declared Mike formally, officially dead, concentrating so hard that sweat dripped into his eyes, determined to sign it properly and not in some ugly chicken scratch, the cat hopped up on the desk and watched. It watched each curve and swoop of his pen, its eyes luminous, and when he was finished and lay the pen down, it moved forward, stepping on the paper to butt the top of its head against his chin. It meowed, once, and purred as it rubbed its head along the line of his jaw, but flowed away before he could touch it. It leapt to the window where it had come in, and turned back to look at Erwin one last time, and he swore that it smiled at him before it climbed out the window and disappeared into the night.
“Goodbye, Mike,” Erwin whispered after the cat, and put his face into his hand.