Work Text:
The bike is an old clunker with three kinds of sweat in its cracking seat, cooling in the evening against Levi’s weight. The shop he wheels it out of is parched and copper like everything else in Santa Fe, its people struggling wearily through the heat’s high tide; his mouth rubs, cracks painfully in the wind as he rides to the extraction point, body dipping with the hills on the edge of sunset. The budget would cover a less shitty car, yet there is something grounding about rubbing his boots into the dirt of every crossroads. They are collectively amorphous - indeed, the little operation still lacks a name; Levi takes these bits of gravity where he finds them, keeps himself from riding into the sky.
A hot shower waits on the other side of the country. Erwin breaks radio silence exactly on time; Levi can picture him bent over his desk, harness scars crawling up his back. The man hasn’t changed at all with the centuries, still that deep-chest rumble that made his body so heavy to carry off that roof.
That knowledge grates between the teeth: is the reason they run so sparsely. Not just Erwin’s past but everyone’s - tears spilled, offers refused. Levi and Hanji, really, are the last people that should believe - not with the skepticism he wears like a shroud, not with Hanji losing sleep over explanations that don’t exist. But they are, and most don’t. Sasha owns a restaurant; Connie’s her chef. Jean knows, Levi’s heard secondhand, but he still isn’t sure what the kid does these days. Moblit drinks. Nanaba fucks. Mikasa believes, though how much of that is belief and how much is disgusting Ackerman need to belong somewhere Levi’s never been certain. A better question: how much is the recognition that he’d watched settle into her shoulders when she moved in with boys she’d known for two days. He’s still unsure who’s in love with who there, but the three of them do good work and that’s all to care about.
Petra does ballet, and bluntly tells him that until she can lie beneath a tree without the shakes she has no business in their line of work. It makes her, Levi thinks, better than the rest of them.
Certainly better than him - and better than Hanji, who is successful but late returning from a mission near the Arizona border. No one on the dusty street is too hot to mind their own business, the scanning eyes from the watering hole across the street telling him that getting a drink would be several days’ worth of bad idea. He reports to Erwin blankly, scrolls his phone, feels nausea at the moisture trailing his sweaty thumb. A pickup - swerving dangerously - rumbles in the distance, kicking up a cloud of cloying dust. The doctor’s still all leg, med bag slung over her shoulder, lopes from the truck to thank the driver with broken Spanish dragging down her throat.
She looks annoyingly relaxed in the unbearable heat, auburn hair at home in the baked landscape - finds Levi and beams, eyes glinting in the sun - and this is why he volunteered to spend two months faking Rico’s husband in France just to dodge the problem of her stupid smiles. Of a joy that was a different kind of inevitability than being swallowed, than being the last one alive at the edge of the ocean.
Erwin knows how he feels, of course. Mike knows - the two blondes tangled up in a way the 13th Commander would have never allowed - and that’s yet more annoying, because old death makes it more difficult to tell the man to fuck off. Levi’s sure sometimes that more time in the grave’s given Mike some sense the rest lack, makes him able to let his soul off the leash. The land runs out of those hazel eyes, follows Levi from miles apart, and it’s honestly creepier than the fucking sniffing. He can feel that chill on his neck as Hanji throws her arms around him - feels it squeeze, like taking a cat by the scruff, until he returns her embrace. Feels her still briefly in his arms before she starts up with loud, pleased noises that earn a soft tch.
She is different now, in a way not easily described - although needy has connotations that belong nowhere near her. Perhaps less sure of their old telepathy than she once was, which always reminds him of the most useful thing anyone has ever said to him in this lifetime. From Mike, predictably, the only time he’d deigned to speak to Levi in the first rough months of reunion: you don’t have the excuse of being the best to be a dick anymore. So he tries: calls her shitty less often, returns her hugs with reluctance that he doesn’t truly feel and hates a little how low her bar has always been for him. Wants to see her want more, of him, than this.
There is no escape for the next twelve-odd hours. She pulls back to look at him, strong thumbs on his cheekbones, and he aches a little under her. “You look good, short stuff,” she crows, and he scoffs, and Levi has at least learned to ride the edge of her affection like the shudder of his bike.
“You’re late, four-eyes,” he bites as they duck into the shadow of an old mill. His cigarettes are a vice barely used and so cheap he sometimes wonders if the doctor is insulted - if he was going to give himself cancer it should be with something nice - but she merely rummages in his jacket to flick her finger on the lighter wheel and lets Levi cup his palms against the dry breeze. They lean close, watch the flame struggling through the dark.
“I took a couple detours,” was the shameless reply. “Stopped in Georgia to help Nifa with a murder. Kind of. Did you know corpses disappear quickly in the desert because vultures and wild dogs tear them apart and ants chip the bones?” Her expression steels, makes his gaze shift to her. “Her husband deserved it, anyway. I gave her Erwin’s card.”
He remembers the brown smear of Nifa’s face, feels his teeth grind. Hanji’s bony hip bumps his in reassurance. He watches her eye the bike. “Are you taking that on the plane?”
He shouldn’t. It’s beyond shitty. “Yes,” he hears himself say anyway. Hanji huffs in amusement. “Mikasa’s going to give me shit.”
“I’ll give you shit if you don’t let me ride it,” is the casual promise, not looking at him and he inhales, holds the smoke until it burns. Her thumb still worries the lighter wheel, something satisfied in her expression: she likes touching things, he knows, textures.
“Not by yourself,” Levi replies, overcome suddenly with the need to make that clear. She grins. Earth swirls and parts as the transport descends a ways off; both ignore it.
“Well,” she says brightly, starts walking, “we’ll joyride together when you slow down enough for me, how’s that?” And it’s not his job to parse out meanings, to read six layers into things - that was Erwin, and that was Hanji after he’d died, and then that was no one at all, but she steps into the whipping dust as though crossing a line, tips her glasses in half-challenge. Levi loves her a little for having the last word, watches her green coat lap the wind as if eager to go home.