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Hange's room is bright when Levi opens the door. There is a small part of him that hates the pink-gold filtering of sunlight through the single window, but the rest of him is glad for it. Hange has always been the dawn: beginnings and the enthusiasm of a new day, a clean slate free of mistakes.
He starts with her desk, shuffles her paperwork into the high-backed wooden chair and pulls a kerchief over his hair and around his mouth. The room isn't especially dusty, but it's habit, now, and he washes the pitted wooden surface efficiently as always.
When the top of the desk is clean, he pulls her drawers out, empties the contents by placing them in careful stacks on the floor, and washes the inside of them out before replacing everything exactly as he found it: ink bottles on the left of the middle drawer, quills on the right; reports in the bottom left drawer and a bottle of vine behind it all to keep it hidden.
He pulls her books down from the shelves, dusts them, and puts them back in much the same way as the contents of her desk: exactly as he found them, in an order only Hange will ever understand.
By the time he makes it to her bedside table, the sun warms the room a little; he opens the window to air it out; the recent rainstorms have made the air inside stale, and the stupid part of him that worries about stupid things is concerned about what stale, damp air might do to her precious books.
The table by her bed is the same as always: a candle sits half-burned in its holder; her glasses are folded and resting on top of a closed book. He removes these things and cleans underneath them, and then cleans them, one at a time: first the candle holder, then the book, and finally her glasses. The lenses are dusty and he spends a long time making them look presentable again before he places them back where they belong, on top of that boring book about plants that she keeps by her bed in case she can't sleep.
The drawers of the table don't hold much: scraps of paper, personal notes and letters from her family, a little bit of money—coins that clink when he pulls them out and sets them on the floor beside him while he washes out the dust that has gathered inside.
Then he makes up her bed, shakes out the blankets and sheets and puts them back again neatly, trying not to think too much about how they smell like her: slow, salty summer mornings and a little bit of soap.
The closet is small. Her shirts and pants are hung; there are books mixed in on the right-hand side shelves with her underthings and socks. He removes everything and cleans and then puts it all back—again, just as he found it.
Washing the window over her desk is a simple process; he thinks about her messy hair pulled back in something that he's sure is supposed to pass for a ponytail, about the candlelight flickering in the lenses of her glasses, of that stupid frustrated sound she makes when she's so close to a breakthrough but she's missing something vital.
The first time he cleans Hange's room is the first time he's in it. "This is fucking disgusting," he says, and stares pointedly at the pile of clothes in the corner.
"I used to room with Lynne," she says. "This is nothing."
He tries not to think about what kind of a mess two slobs might be able to make together, and instead concentrates on the fingerprint smudges on her bookshelves. There are way too many bookshelves; they fill every empty space on the wall, and are overflowing with books.
Hange's laugh catches his attention. "What is it?" she asks.
"Why do you have so many books?"
"Because I like them."
He sighs, frustrated.
"Is that not the answer you were looking for?" She takes a seat at her desk and pulls on leg up so that she can rest her chin on it. "I used my salary to bring in the shelves, of course."
"Books aren't cheap," he says, flatly. "Your family must have money."
She looks almost startled for a moment, but shifts her face so that she can look at him, her cheek resting against her knee, now. "Something like that, I guess."
How else could she afford so many books? The possible scenarios play through his head even as he approaches the shelves to read the titles: if she uses her own money to buy books, it means she's not sending her salary to her family, which means either she hates her family or they don't need the money. Alternatively, he supposes someone could have died and left her the books in a will, but they would have had to have a lot of money to be able to afford so many books in the first place.
"See anything you like?" she asks after a while.
"You're disorganized."
"I know where everything is."
"Except the cleaning supplies," Levi says and stares at the places where Hange's hands have touched the shelves and left marks in the dust. "These shelves are fucking gross."
She laughs, and the sound is lighter than he expected it to be. "I heard you cleaned the barracks on your first day. Feel free to clean in here, too."
"Hell no," he says, but while they discuss what they met in her room to discuss—something boring about Erwin and his plans for the next expedition outside the walls—he has a hard time standing still. There are too many stupid things in her personal quarters that annoy him: the candle on the bedside table has melted to the wick and needs thrown out, her shelves are disgustingly dusty, and the clothes on the floor make his fingers twitch with the urge to wash them for her.
It's absolutely ridiculous, but he does pry free what's left of the candle and throws it away while she's busy talking. And then he dumps her clothes into the basket he's sure is there for that purpose, trying not to look at what he's touching.
Every time he's in her room, he cleans something. He dusts her shelves or brings a broom to sweep the floor; he pushes her over to the bed so that he can clean her desk or her window or even her chair.
"You're strange," she tells him one day, sitting cross-legged on her bed with that dumb plant book while he scrubs the floor under her desk.
"I'm not the one who spills coffee on the floor and leaves it there for three days," he tells her.
"I guess we're both a little strange, then," she laughs, and turns the page of her book. "Did I ever tell you about this plant called wolfsbane? Supposedly it can paralyze you if you touch it. I wonder if it would work on titans…"
"Don't be ridiculous," he tells her, but she ignores him and continues to talk, and he doesn't really mind.
Months pass this way, with him coming to see her on occasion and it ending with Hange's room looking a little nicer.
He's not sure when it happens, but he starts to enjoy her company. Levi isn't the philosophical type, so he doesn't question it; it just is, and he is okay with that. He doesn't need to know the details.
He just likes her; the dopey look on her face when she's overly excited about something, her habit of talking for hours about one thing; he even finds that he's grown almost fond of her messy hair and the way she doesn't notice when her glasses slip down her nose when she's reading something she finds especially interesting.
"You need to get some goddamned sleep, stupid," he tells her one day when he's putting her books back on her shelf.
She waves a hand at him. "You'd better be putting those books back the way you found them."
"Or what? What will you do if I don't?"
"I'll get confused and have no idea where anything is."
He puts them back the right way and continues dusting her shelf; when he's close enough to see her better, his nose crinkles. "If you don't take a bath soon," he says, "I'm going to have to clean you, myself."
Her only reply is a disinterested sort of sound, but then she suddenly looks up, eyes wide. "What?"
He stares at her, notices the dark circles under her eyes and the way her hair is sticking to her face from the summer heat. "You look like shit."
"I feel like it, too," she mutters.
"Take a bath. You'll feel better."
"Mm…maybe."
"I'll draw it, and then I'll drag you into the washroom and dump you in it," he says as if he really thinks he'll do it. The idea is tempting—almost funny, even—but he both of them know he won't actually do it.
"If you draw it, I'll take one. It's such a hassle to heat that much water."
He smirks. "I get to use it first, though, if I'm going to all that trouble."
"Okay."
Hange doesn't mind. There are a lot of things she doesn't mind about him, like his terrible manners and his serious expression. He's never had to try and impress her; she likes everyone exactly as they are. He wonders how someone who came from money could view other people with such an open mind, but he never asks; the details aren't important.
"And you're going to bed early. Your eyes are so dark I almost mistook you for Keith."
She snorts, but gives him a wide smile. "Just this once," she says. "Since you asked so nicely."
The first time they kiss is on Hange's floor when it's still wet from a cleaning. She's gone at an all-day meeting with Erwin, and Levi, with nothing better to do—and his own quarters already spotless—decides to clean Hange's room thoroughly.
He's on his knees scrubbing her floor when she returns, looking tired.
She stops in the doorway, says, "Wow, Levi! Wow! It looks like a completely different room!"
And the next thing he knows, her folder has been tossed onto her bed and she's on her knees in front of him, lips pressing against his just as he opens his mouth with a sarcastic response at the ready.
So he saves the floor for last.
He has a million memories of Hange, but their first kiss on the floor of her room is his favorite.
He remembers her glasses getting in the way, and his fingers stiff from scrubbing and pruned from the water; he remembers her drooping ponytail and that stupid fucking snort-laugh she did when she accidentally landed half in his bucket of dirty water.
It's all he thinks about as he sits on his hands and knees with a rag and washes the floor, scrubs it spotless as the sun starts to fall in the sky and a light breezes rustles the papers on Hange's desk.
An hour passes, maybe two; the door opens, slowly, and Levi knows who it is. He keeps scrubbing, and scrubbing, and a long time passes before there is a polite cough from the doorway.
He stops only long enough to look up, only long enough to make sure it's Erwin standing there. "What?" he asks, and resumes his scrubbing.
"Levi…" Erwin's voice is calm, but there's an edge of pity in it that Levi hates.
"I just want her room to be clean," he says.
Erwin stays silent for another moment, shifts a little, adjusts his bolo tie. "You can't keep doing this forever."
"Are you telling me to clear this room out?" He manages to sound unaffected when he says it, but it still hurts, the thought of moving all of Hange's stuff out; it reminds him of things he'd rather not think about, like her right arm, the only part of her they managed to recover.
("Are you sure that's her?" Erwin asked, sounding pained.
Levi knew it was Hange's; when he ignored the blood and let his fingers slip between hers, they fit just as they always had. "Yeah." His voice was even, but he felt sick inside.)
"No," Erwin tells him. "I'm not saying that."
"Then what are you saying?"
Levi knows what it is Erwin is saying. He's worried; worried for Levi the stupid man who made a mistake and grew attached to someone, worried for humanity's strongest soldier, who suddenly seems very human and not strong at all, kneeling in dirty water as he scrubs the personal quarters of a woman who has been dead for months, now.
"I'm sorry," is all Erwin can manage to say before he leaves.
But that's all anyone can say; nothing will bring the dead back.
When he misses her too much, he comes to her room and cleans it again, top to bottom, almost as if he thinks she'll walk in the door and make a shitty attempt to kiss him again.
He knows she won't. He knows she's dead. But it's comforting in its own way, him sitting in her room with all of her stupid things.
When the floor is done, he closes the window and stands in the doorway to look at his handiwork. It looks nice.
He doesn't say anything to her, because he knows she can't hear him, but he thinks of her sitting at her desk, or lying in her bed with the blankets pulled up—a silent invitation for him to join her. He misses the sound of her voice reading her boring plant-book to him and wonders how long it'll take him to forget it, and the exact color of her eyes, and the slant of her nose and all those stupid things he spent so much time learning about her.
Hange's room is fading to shadows when Levi closes the door.